This is a letter that I sent to the public NY Solidarity and Friends mailing list today. It includes the information included in the short item I submitted here right after participating, along with some aspects of a broader assessment of the role of OWS in our present situation.
I estimated there were about 30,000 people (maybe more) participating. The whole time I was at the gathering point by the Foley Square courthouse, people were continually pouring in from Chambers St. and Park Row.
Unions' role There was a modest trade union participation, although the TWU had called the action and others sponsored it. The turnout was overwhelmingly, but far from exclusively young.
We should keep in mind about this that trade unionists are unfortunately at this time only the 7 percent or less. The working people who make up this movement and respond to it are largely in the 92 percent who are not organized today. That's a general point, though, and doesn't let the officials off the hook for their unwillingness or hesitation to bring out the ranks to a demonstration with such a strong anti-establishment character.
By the way, in the whole course of my time with OWS and supporters, I never ran into a single person I knew except for a lone Militant salesperson, -although I knew quite a few of them had to be around. (Certainly, Solidarity and ISO people at least.) To me, that was a sign of a real mass demonstration going vastly beyond the usual suspects, who include ourselves, of course.
I left Foley Square (I did not participate in the march) in search of Zuccotti Park and the OWS center. It was easy to find, to my surprise as I am an expert at getting lost (people consult me about how to get lost) - straight down Brpadwau, past Cortlandt St. to Liberty St. The park is right there.
Zuccoti Park I think there were about a thousand people "hanging around" as part of the action. I had been prepared for a somewhat "hippy-looking" crowd (whatever that really means) but I didn't see it. Looked pretty much like regular peope, overwhelmingly young, and appearing and acting the way young people do. Long hair was not predominant among the men, nor super-short hair among the women, and whatever.
Of course, they may have been urged to rein it in by the very competent leaders, organizers, guides, or whatever, to be on best behavior because lots of supportive folks were coming in that day. Frankly, they looked to be a lot of regular folks.
I checked out the library which they maintain to help the participants. (In any new environment, the first thing I check out is the library, and since these people had one, I did so.) It was full of good stuff to pass the time with. But the only item that could be designated Marxist that I saw was Jack Barnes "Capitalism's Growing World Disorder." I saw no anarchist literature --- no Emma Goldman, Murray Bookchin, Prince Kropotkin, or other names I am used to seeing when those folks are about.
Bob Avakian's Revolutionary Communist Party seems to maintain a not-well supplied book table at the park. There was no other such direct propaganda intervention by left groups at the park (noone selling newspapers and so forth)..
They had a lot of water and coffee available - I availed myself of the coffee, which was a needed waker-upper. There was a medical area that I clumsily stumbled through, and a food area.\
The leadership spent a lot of time preparing people for the arrival of the vast numbers of supporters. A young woman helped orient people about the need to make room for the people who were coming. Then she oriented us on the people's mike, in which people in front shout out whatever a speaker is saying to people behind them, who do likewise for the people behind them. Of course, when the crowd arrived, many layers of this process were needed. She estimated it at 20,000, which seemed right to me, but I could see as I headed home that thousands of people had not even made it into the park, which was packed
I enjoyed the people's mike a lot and participated to the best of my limited ability. It reminded me a lot of the 0ld Original Saturday Night Live which had a regular routine called "News for the Deaf," in which a reporter just screamed at the audience. Having moderate to severe hearing loss myself, I would not have been able to hear clearly almost anything that was said in the platform area (just a raised part of the park on the Broadway side.
Role of union officials I have read a number of items that refer to the desire of the trade union officials who spoke to the rally to "coopt" the demonstrators.
Its hard to imagine that they could conceive of doing anything else. I mean what else are they capable of doing today.
At the same time, I think they were inspired on a certain level. OWS is the first development (I don't think Wisconsin quite pulled it off due to the DP weight) since Obama's election (which was a false dawn, of course) to seize the initiative from the far right wing, and they are screaming in agony about it (as is -Bloomberg and many other right-thinking citizens.
I think the officialdom feels isolated and vulnerable tirhgt now
Despite the radical character of this protest and its confrontation with the whole range of powers and principalities, I think they see this as a force that they can use use to save the Democratic Party from simply becoming a pure and simple party of finance capital, and conceiving of going a little to the left now and them - giving them a little something they can boast about having won, say at least once every four years.
Obama's latest news conference shows his deep resistance to any such shift, whether or not it results in his electoral defeat. He is the man of the banker rulers over US and much of world industry. He's happy there and does not intend to play any Rooseveltian games. And most of the Democratic senators and reps seem similarly at home with the status quo. So this is a pretty uphill battle for the union officialdom.
Anarchist leadership? I have been told, and it seems logical that it might be true, that this whole thing was initiated by anarchists. If that is true, I want to stress that the leadership (and yes, Virginia, there is a leadership) they are intelligent, responsive both to the ranks and also to those outside the ranks). They are not adventurist, which does not mean that they cannot smell openings to expand the narrowing freedom which has been available to protesters in NYC and elsewhere. They do not stand before the masses as dictators and masters, but as leaders of the oppressed and exploited working people to find their way. But frankly, that does not mean to me that these people are not leaders. They just don't seem to be assholes.
Of course, it has also been shown that they can be set up by the cops in the totally engineered coming wit (which does not mean that the cops cannot trick them into things like the engineered confrontation on the Brooklyn Bridge, which a comrade on the Marxism List (totally sympathetic to these new forces) noted that the late Fred Halstead, a revolutionary who was an important leader of the anti-Vietnam war movement, would have known how to avoid despite the cops
This is inexperience. And in the long run, the only cure to inexperience that can be counted on to stick is experience. (The Marxmail contributor offered the same conclusion.)
If this is anarchism (and I don't deny it - I just don't KNOW it), it is a different kind than we have confronted for a long time. This would be anarchism attempting to function as a guiding current in the actual struggles of working people - related to the IWW and the revolutionary syndicalist trend in the international workers movement which was very influential before ANY of us were born.
This is not the anarchism of the Black Bloc types who basically try to raise again the fallen banner of \Weatherman.
No demands? No problem. The lack of demands is basically very positive. This is a deeply rooted (though not super-massive revolt against the whole attack on working people) expression of until now largely unexpressed outrage at the whole range of attacks on the working people. This is an assault on Wall Street brpadly defined - Wall Street as the governing power of the USA, financial capitalists who represent the ever-deeper merger of financial and industrial capital on a world scale. This is not just financial spetzes. This is the ruling class.
In fact, the rulers know exactly what OWS represents and what it demands. It is opposed to their course against working people - the slashing of Social Security, medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, housing, heating, water, and, of course, human rights on every level. These are also the makers of today's permanent war, whether it is the war in Iraq or the Liberation Bombing of Libya.
So I agree with OWS that adopting specific demands would be a mistake under present circumstances. It would trivialize, not deepen, their impact.
And especially if the demands were for "tax the rich," as a number of friendly critics of the protest have suggested. At this point, I think tax the rich demands would be as big a trap for OWS politically as being hustled onto the auto lanes on the Brooklyn Bridge by the cops was on the immediate physical level.
A "tax the rich" axis is a trap today Today, it points toward the propaganda of Shared Sacrifice, even though no tax proposal is going to threaten the rulers' old age security, medical care, food, housing, and so on as the attacks on working peole do.
We should remember that Obama (in his more left posture, after it turned out that his eagerness to throw the elderly and the sick iinto the meat grinder to produce more wealth for big capital was destroying his chances of re-election and possibly the Democratic Party as well) insisted that he would support slashing social security and all the rest only if there was some modest new tax imposed on the rich so they would pay their "share." Some of the union officials who spoke at Zuccotti Park sought to sell the myth that taxes are the central issue that faces us today. By no means. The defense of working people of all kinds against this brutal, life-destroying assault.
Personally, I don't think anybody who is not rich should pay any taxes at all. This is their society, not ours. It is their deficit, nours. If anyone has to tighten their belts, well, a lot of them could afford to lose weight. But I will not fall for covering slashes in basic human needs by little or even medium-sized tax increases on the rich.
OWS is the deepest mass-based or mass-responding mobilization against the whole assault on working people. They don't need to get tangled in developing their own tax plan, or picking one up from the liberals who advise them.
OWS as inspiration for other struggles OWS in Zuccotti Park or elsewhere in the country is not the "final conflict," assuming there will ever be one. (I have no clue.) One of the most important aspects is the capacity of OWS to inspire and legitimize other struggles in workplaces and on the streets or schools or wherever. In the long run, this may be its biggest and most important impact. It is really not important whether OWS leads directly to the "final conflict.." I rather doubt it. But its impact will live on.
Meanwhile we should support and spread OWS wherever we are. This is our fight. Perhaps more importantly in this case, this is US, finding our half-strangled voices at last. Fred Feldman