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The occupation movement's greatest challenge will be overcoming the deep
distrust of white liberals by the poor and the working class, especially
people of color. Marginalized people of color have been organizing,
protesting and suffering for years with little help or even acknowledgment
from the white liberal class. With some justification, those who live in
these marginalized communities often view this movement as one dominated by
white sons and daughters of the middle class who began to decry police abuse
and the lack of economic opportunities only after they and their families
were affected. This distrust is not the fault of the movement, which has
instituted measures within its decision-making process to make sure
marginalized voices are heard before white males.
It is the fault of a bankrupt liberal class that for decades has abandoned
the core issue of economic justice for the poor and the working class and
busied itself with the vain and self-referential pursuits of
multiculturalism and identity politics. The civil rights movement, after
all, achieved a legal victory, not an economic one. And for the bottom
two-thirds of African-Americans, life is worse today than it was when Martin
Luther King marched in Selma in 1965. King, like Malcolm X, understood that
racial equality was impossible without economic justice. The steady
impoverishment of those in these marginal communities, part of the Faustian
deal worked out between the Democratic Party and its corporate sponsors, has
been accompanied by draconian forms of police control, from stop-and-frisk
to militarized police raids to the establishment of our vast complex of
prison gulags. More African-American men, as Michelle Alexander has pointed
out, are in prison or jail or on probation or parole than were enslaved in
1850, before the Civil War began.
The corporate state keeps some two-thirds of poor people of color in the
United States trapped in internal colonies - either in the impoverished
inner city or behind bars. And the abject failure on the part of the white
liberal establishment to stand up for the rights of the poor, as well as its
decision to throw its support behind Democratic politicians such as Bill
Clinton and Barack Obama, who abet this institutionalized and economic
racism, has left many in these marginal communities disdainful of protesters
from the newly dispossessed white middle class. "The black community and the
community of color have been dealing with these issues for decades," the
Rev. Raymond Blanchette, an African-American preacher from Queens, said in
Zuccotti Park in Manhattan one day last week as we closed our jackets
against a chilly wind whipping down the canyons of the financial district.
"Now the white community around the country is beginning to see it and
experience it firsthand. It's pretty shocking to them.
The African-American community and other communities of color are saying,
'Welcome to the world I live in.' That's why you don't see that many of
those [nonwhite] faces here. It's like, OK, now you decided you are going to
speak up because now you're the one that's affected by it. One of the
reasons I'm here is because I see the viability of this movement. I want to
bring those communities together." The power elite have desperately tried to
tar the movement with a series of calumnies, branding protesters as hippies,
anti-Semites, drug addicts, leftists, anarchists and communists. They have
so far been unable to blunt the fundamental truth the movement imparts: We
have undergone a corporate coup. It has to be reversed. But this truth has
yet to resonate among those who for decades have been betrayed and ignored
by white liberals.
The decision by protesters from Occupy Wall Street to join Cornel West in
Harlem last Saturday to protest the New York City Police Department's
stop-and-frisk policy was an important step in taking the message of the
occupy movement to our impoverished internal colonies. West, who led the
protest outside the 28th Precinct at West 123rd Street and Frederick
Douglass Boulevard and who was arrested along with about 30 others, was part
of a crowd that chanted: "Stop-and-frisk don't stop the crime.
Stop-and-frisk is the crime."
The power elite are frantically searching for the ideological weapon that
will discredit the movement. But the clarity of the protests, the painful
personal stories of dislocation that are the heart of its message, and, most
important, the self-discipline, despite police provocation, which has kept
these protests nonviolent have advanced the movement and discredited the
forces of control. The power elite, held together by the glue of force and
fraud, are seeking ways to communicate in the only language they know they
can master - unrestrained force. And as we enter the second month of
demonstrations, the power elite fear that the core message and the calls for
resistance, which resonate with a majority of Americans, will lead to a
direct confrontation with the corporate state. If the movement starts to
pull hundreds of thousands of people together, if it leaps across class
lines, as I saw during the peaceful revolutions in East Germany and
Czechoslovakia, then the corporate state is probably finished. Our corporate
overlords know this. And they are doing everything in their power to make
sure this does not come to pass.
The divisions between the poor and the working class on the one hand and the
white, liberal middle class on the other reach back to the Vietnam anti-war
movement. The New Left in the 1960s was infused with the same deadly doses
of hedonism that corrupted earlier 20th century counterculture movements
such as the bohemians and the beats. The antagonism between the New Left
during the Vietnam War and the working class and the poor, whose sons were
shipped to Vietnam while the sons of the white middle class were usually
handed college deferments, was never bridged. Working-class high schools,
including many high schools with large numbers of African-Americans, sent 20
to 30 percent of their graduates to Vietnam every year while college
graduates made up only 2 percent of all troops sent to Vietnam in 1965 and
1966. Anti-war activists were seen by those locked out of the white middle
class as spoiled children of the rich who advocated free love, drug use,
communism and social anarchy.
The unions and the white working class remained virulently anti-communist.
They spoke in the language of militarism and the Cold War and were
unsympathetic to the anti-war movement as well as the civil rights movement.
When student activists protested at the AFL-CIO's 1965 convention, chanting
"Get out of Vietnam!" the delegates taunted them by shouting "Get a
haircut." AFL-CIO leader George Meany ordered the security to "clear the
Kookies out of the gallery." United Automobile Workers President Walter
Reuther, once the protesters were escorted out, announced that "protesters
should be demonstrating against Hanoi and Peking Š [who] are responsible for
the war." The convention passed a resolution that read: "The labor movement
proclaim[s] to the world that the nation's working men and women do support
the Johnson administration in Vietnam."
Those that constituted the hard-core New Left, groups like Students for a
Democratic Society, found their inspiration in the liberation struggles in
Vietnam and the Third World and figures such as Mao and Leon Trotsky rather
than the labor movement, which they considered bought off by capitalism.
They saw the working class as part of the problem. Many came to embrace the
cult of violence. The Black Panthers, the Nation of Islam and the Weather
Underground Organization became as poisoned by this lust for blood, quest
for ideological purity, crippling paranoia and internal repression as the
state system they defied. The bulk of the white protesters in the 1960s
found their ideological roots not in the moral imperatives of King or
Malcolm X but the disengagement championed earlier by beats such by Jack
Kerouac, Allen Ginsburg and William Burroughs.
It was a movement that, while it incorporated a healthy dose of disrespect
for authority, focused on self-indulgent schemes for inner peace and
fulfillment. The use of hallucinogenic drugs, advocated by Timothy Leary in
books such as "The Politics of Ecstasy," and the rise of occultism that
popularized transcendental meditation, Theosophy, Hare Krishna, Zen and the
I-Ching were trends that would have dismayed older radical movements such as
the Wobblies and the Communist Party. The counterculture of the 1960s, like
the commodity culture, lured adherents inward. It set up the self as the
primary center of concern. It offered affirmative, therapeutic remedies to
social problems and embraced vague, undefined and utopian campaigns to
remake society. There was no real political vision. Hermann Hesse's novel
"Siddhartha" became emblematic of the moral hollowness of the New Left.
These movements and the celebrities who led them, such as the Yippie leader
Abbie Hoffman, catered to the stage set for them by television cameras.
Protests and court trials became street theater. Dissent became another
media spectacle. Anti-war protesters in Berkeley switched from singing
"Solidarity Forever" to "We All Live in a Yellow Submarine."
The power of the Occupy Wall Street movement is that it has not replicated
the beliefs of the New Left. Rather, it is rooted in the moral imperatives
of justice and self-sacrifice, what Dwight Macdonald called nonhistorical
values, values closer to King than Abbie Hoffman. It seeks to rebuild the
bridges to labor, the poor and the working class. The movement eschews the
hedonism of the New Left; indeed it does not permit drugs or alcohol in
Zuccotti Park. It denounces the consumer culture and every evening shares
its food with the homeless, who also often sleep in the park. But, most
important, it eschews, through a nonhierarchical system of self-governance,
the deadly leadership cults that plagued and ultimately destroyed the
movements of the 1960s. The political and moral void within the New Left
meant that, like the counterculture of the beats or the bohemians, it was
seamlessly integrated into the commercial culture.
At its core the New Left shared the same hedonism, entrancement with mass
entertainment, love of spectacle and preoccupation with the self. And the
degeneration of the New Left is personified by politicians such as Clinton,
who mouthed the usual platitudes about the poor and working men and women
while he and both major political parties, awash in corporate dollars,
betrayed and impoverished them. Murray Bookchin wrote: "Radical politics in
our time has come to mean the numbing quietude of the polling booth, the
deadening platitudes of petition campaigns, carbumper sloganeering, the
contradictory rhetoric of manipulative politicians, the spectator sports of
public rallies and finally, the knee-bent, humble plea for small reforms -
in short, the mere shadows of the direct action, embattled commitment,
insurgent conflicts, and social idealism that marked every revolutionary
project in history. Š What is most terrifying about present-day 'radicalism'
is that the piercing cry for 'audacity' - 'L'audace! L'auduce! Encore
l'auduce!' - that Danton voiced in 1793 on the high tide of the French
revolution would simply be puzzling to the self-styled radicals who demurely
carry attaché cases of memoranda and grant requests into their conference
rooms Š and bull horns to their rallies."
Macdonald argued that those who wanted change had to base all actions on the
nonhistorical and more esoteric values of truth, justice and love. They had
to retain Danton's call for audacity. Once any class bows to the practical
dictates required by effective statecraft and legislation, as well as the
call to protect the nation, it loses its moral authority and its voice. The
naive belief in human progress through science, technology and mass
production, which this movement understands is a lie, erodes these
nonhistorical values by placing faith in state power and fantasy. The choice
is between serving human beings or serving history, between thinking
ethically or thinking strategically. Macdonald excoriated Marxists for the
same reason he excoriated the liberal class: They subordinated ethics to
another goal. They believed the ends justified the means. The liberal class,
like the Marxists, by serving history and power capitulated to the state in
the end. This capitulation by the liberal class, as Irving Howe noted,
"bleached out all political tendencies." Liberalism, he wrote, "becomes a
loose shelter, a poncho rather than a program; to call oneself a liberal one
doesn't really have to believe in anything."
In line with the occupy movement, we must not extol the power of the state
as an agent of change or define progress by increased comfort, wealth,
imperial expansion or consumption. The trust in the beneficence of the state
- which led most liberal reformers to back the wars in Vietnam and Iraq at
their inceptions, as well as place faith in electoral politics long after
electoral politics had been hijacked by corporate power - ceded uncontested
power to the corporate state. Liberals and liberal groups, such as MoveOn,
which urge us to appeal to formal structures of power that no longer concern
themselves with the needs or rights of citizens have become forces of
disempowerment.
The only effective tool for change will come through movements such as those
that stand in direct opposition to state power and seek through the sheer
force of numbers and civil disobedience to discredit and weaken the
corporate state. The corporate state cannot be the repository of our hopes
and dreams. And the liberal establishment has, by making concession after
concession, merged itself into the corporate apparatus and has nothing left
to say to us. It is part of the elaborate and hollow political theater that
has replaced genuine political participation. The dismantling of our radical
social and political movements in the early and even middle part of the 20th
century in the name of anti-communism left the liberal class, as well as the
wider society, without a repository of new ideas.
The utopian fantasies of globalism and naive acceptance that the dictates of
the marketplace should be permitted to determine human behavior became not
just the creed of the corporatists but finally the creed of liberal
apologists such as Thomas Friedman and most professors in university
economic departments. And the strength of the new movements is that they
have exposed this lie. What we are witnessing in parks and squares across
the United States is not simply widespread revulsion over the greed and
cruelty of corporate capitalism, but the articulation of a new and potent
radicalism. This radicalism challenges the right of corporations to poison
our ecosystem and turn greed and self-promotion into the highest good at the
expense of human life. If this movement can cross class lines, if it can
articulate its vision to those in marginalized communities, especially poor
people of color, it can tap into a force and power that was never part of
the New Left. It can make possible the shaking of the foundations and, let
us hope, the toppling of the corporate state.
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