Below is a link to Laura Flanders' interview with Arun Gupta and Marina Sitrin on Occupy's Anniversary. It covers virtually all the questions that came up during the Zuccati Park occupation. Gupta is a freelance journalist and activist who visited dozens of occupations around the country. Sitrin was a lawyer for Z park during last year's occupation.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SIYdkCRbsuw
One of the reasons that Trotsky's History of the Russian Revolution was so stunning to me, was how closely it resembled an ever changing sea of issues, groups, demands, resolutions and direct democracy, then and now. The Soviets were essentially an occupation movement of worker groups also horizontally distributed through the collapsing Russian economy and the meaninglessness of WWI which was slaughtering hundreds of thousands of Russian conscripts. The desertions were bleeding the armies. The Russian monarchy and its aristocratic constituents along with the capitalist class were running the war for their own benefit and profit against the will of most of the people.
The Russian example was where we are only multiplied by some large variable, sure. But it was not an exponiental. That is to say, a very similar constellation of social, economic, political, and historical `forces' are in place here and now. The scale variable drops significantly when you begin to follow Tunisia and Egypt. The Egyptian case is even closer. The Egyptian military elite depend on US money and materiale, and they know if they put troops against the masses, their conscript mass will bleed out and their power will collapse. Hence a stalemate.
What Trotsky did was make me see a way out through direct democracy. It's hard for me to explain in concrete and rational terms what this insight did except to say, I had a brief look at the path to profound change. I had in the distant past seen the potential for a mass to shutdown a small city and an important state institution. It only lasted for a month or so here and a month or so there. When Reagan had Berkeley occupied by the California National Guard and took over political control the demonstrations got bigger and bigger the longer the military occupation dragged on. A military can not run a civilian government for long without facing revolt and or collapse which can only be answered by vast increases in brutal oppression.
He finally wised up and withdrew the troops and returned political control to local government. The only other answer was using bayonets and live amunition as had been done in Detroit, Watts, and Mexico City. There were deeper reasons. The guards were beginng the breakdown path. Many did not want to be there. It was all the local police officials could to manage the troops through the officer corp. It was the beginning of a civilian v. military confrontation that would end with military breakdown. That was only after a few days. That was greatly aided because men in the National Guard were there to stay out of Vietnam.
It is not possible to expect Trotsky's History will become a best seller. But what is possible to hope for is an intellectually inclined and articulate group of people read this work and My Life and with or without reference reconceptualize the ideas within, and refame those ideas for the US.
The open ended, rather shapeless occupy movements are not a new experience in the history of struggle. Actually they seem typical in retrospect. I can understand now an answer to my thoughts for structure and leadership---precisely because the white side of the 60s lacked such a configuration. It took a lot of crisis, struggle, and a lot of luck for these organized components to grow organically from the conditions and situations in Russia of the distant past.
What you find in the History, is Lenin and Trotsky spent a lot of time studying the French Revolution and the pan-European revolutions of 1848. They don't say so directly as I remember. Rather, they were so familiar with key names and events that I had to endlessly check wiki to keep up with their references. Those kinds of references and understanding only come from extended study. This path is also precisely what Marx did---that's where Lenin and Trotsky learn it.
It amazed me. That's what it takes to get from here to there?
I want to turn to different faces or aspects.
Consider that Trotsky created a lot of the political newspapers which he then turned around and wrote for and invited his political comrades to do the same. Those papers sometimes only lasted a few weeks. Now remember how many temporary news sheets came and went with the occupy movements. I have no idea how many such temporary media came and went in Egypt.
Consider how Mubarak was hounded out by mass demonstrations. That was exactly how the Czar was forced to abdicate. At the very last minute Nicholas tried to make a deal so that his brother took power. His brother was smart enough to reject the offer. Mubarak choose Suliman(?) who quickly faded after mass denouncement.
In Russia liberals came in for awhile and nothing changed, so they and Duma were ignored and social democrats formed ad hoc power under Kerensky and still the war went on, nothing changed, and in fact conditions got worse.
Why these foolish moves? Because the Russian Monarchy, Liberals, and Social Democrats had made deals with the English and French who in quid pro quo loaned the Russian governments money to keep their economy from collapse, etc, etc so they would remain in the war. The strategy was to keep the German eastern front active enough to make a possible western front victory. The western powers would make deals with anybody, except the Bolsheviks. This should sound very familiar to current minds today.
I don't want to overstate the parallels and I have glossed many details. The most significant difference was the near collapse of the Russian armies and naval forces and the revolt of the soldiers and sailors. I saw the beginning process in the tiny microscope of my past. It starts by fraternizing with the National Guard---because most of them were our age.
To close below is another link for Arun Gupta, Is This What Democracy Looks Like:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HqAw53fRe5k&feature=related
Note his title, Co-founder of The Indypendent and The Occuped Wall Street Journal. These are two media outlets, I never heard of. These are no doubt much like the endless variety of newspapers Trotsky and friends founded, wrote for, and distributed for as long as they could last, just ahead of getting shutdown by authorities in Russia, Germany, and Switzerland or just running out money.
The nature or `structure' of these papers were esentially similar to our own fly-by-night conferences, speeches, internet media and real or concrete group meetings with a single speaker or a panel that say Doug Henwood and others attend and speak.
This is the group of people who should read and study Trotsky's work---Marx and Lenin too of course. The point isn't their own political development (which usually exceeds mine) but the study of prior movements in history that took shape and have highly similar contours.
Trotsky was a journalist, newspaperman, and author by trade as are many of the members of our groups today. Their day jobs are usually freelance journalist and author struggling for some money to continue. Run down the list in your mind: N. Klein, B. Ehrenreich, Henwood, Gupta, Hedges, Moore, etc, etc. Others have academic jobs like Wolff, Chomsky or others like Moore or Moyers are in other media. You can find similar figures with slightly different political profiles all through many of the AJE interviews, panels, documentaries for the Middle East. Indeed AJE and RT run similar interviews with some of the same people. These are the international intelligencia and we (me) are their audience.
I was in the working class in a minor mechanical trade by day and wanna-be intellectual at night reading, writing, and thinking. Anytime I showed my other self to my workmates I met a deep resistance. But it was not a resistance to the ideas and themes they knew I was carrying around in my mind. It was the resistance of a simple fear, fear for their jobs if they ever mentioned union or shared wage stubs and saw with their own eyes how they themselves were divided and conquered.
In my view the way to incorporate the working class is to break the fear barrier through building collective identity and collective action---thin gruel I know but that's as far as I've got. The method is actually illustrated by Gupta's travels around the country. It starts with a big city that already has numerous active groups like NYC. Trotsky did the same thing in Petersburg among ad hoc unions, worker meetings, district or neighborhood councils, i.e. the Soviets. There was quite a diversity of political views that emerged, just as today. Gupta's travels this year revealed a similar diversity. Others like Klein, Hedges and so forth are doing the same travel usually to hawk their latest books. As long as these folks break out of bookshow circuit and connect with local groups and simply speak for local thoughts and conditions, that's the meat of it. The talk videos are for us beyond who don't know what other communities say and think.
In the grand view, the collective We are having an effect. These effects may not show up too explicitly in statistics, but just listen to and watch the profound panic of the ruling elites around the world. Their so-called policies and statements are outright lies and theoretically and practically absurd. There certainly is a growing collective awareness in Europe and a rising awareness in the US. There are too many groups to know or name who are struggling against the European and Western elites. The latter can not form a united front against the intense pressure of great masses of people in Greece, Spain, Italy, France, not to mention all across the Middle East. The answer is for those who can to visit these places and these movements, and to invite those who can over there to come here. This is precisely what Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, et al. did in the past. They developed their concept of an international working class directly from these travels. That was not just a theory.
I'll close with this quote from Gupta, ``We know liberals do not provide any oppositional force'' (0:11:00-18). This is nearly identical to the conclusions that Trotshy revisited over and over, precisely because Trotsky started down his path to radicalism from a classic liberal position as a student---which strongly resembled a 60s small group collective that emphasized study and gardining! He was first sent to Siberia for his efforts. He thanked exile-prison time for its opportunity to study. There he found Marx and others who also started out as liberals and became disillusioned with the endless promises of liberal liberies and stated policies that never came to fruition and proactively stalled concrete reform movements.
There is a last thought that came to mind this week as I watched demo after demo in Muslim countries. Islam is not a monolith. On the other hand all the variants share a certain quality with nationalism which is a mass identification with a transcendental conceptual-world realm, an ideology. The power elites of these seas of humanity can use Islam to evoke something very akin to nationalism (another transcendent realm), very much like our power elite and rightwings use Christianity. The conflations in the propaganda wars follows the trajectory, we are Christians, we are a Christian civilization, we share values, we share American values. We are Americans.
That's what I think is going on. While maybe or maybe not well understood, that's what the elites across the globe have discovered works to shatter what should be an evolving international working class front. I was reminded that over the course of the early Iraq war, I saw men who were backyard mechanics who could probably fix just about anything. The Afghans have been making guns and bombs since gun powder and are another bunch of backyard mechanics.
In the absurd struggles between China and Japan, the Chinese elites are stiring up Chinese nationalism in a much more explicit way, just are the Japanese.
CG