Marv Gandall <marvgand at gmail.com> wrote:
>(I was impressed by the following incisive, patient, commentary on OWS by Fred Feldman, a former SWP leader, on Lou Proyect's Marxism list.)
>
>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
>___________________________________
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