Occupy In A Transitional Period

[This article was written by a young 'rade of mine who has been involved in Occupy Boston since its inception for the folks at the Norwegian magazine Rødt, published by the Red Party there. At a time when there is still real unclarity about how to proceed among many Occupy! activists and supporters, it draws some deep lessons from the movement's first phase last fall. It addresses some of the same questions I talked about in this FotM piece last month.]

by Evan Sarmiento

Shortly before 5am on December 10, 2011 Occupy Boston was evicted from the encampment at Dewey Square, a short walk to our main busing and transit hub South Station in Downtown Boston. The raid came after Boston judge Judge Frances A. McIntyre lifted a temporary restraining order prohibiting the police from taking action against Occupy Boston. The terms 'encampment', 'protest' and 'civil disobedience' are protected under the U.S. Constitution. The state of Massachusetts, in it's official judgement, however, considered the term occupation a deliberate seizure of private property.

Ironically, the Massachusetts judiciary understood the occupation better than many of the occupants itself, who considered our encampment at Dewey Square as more of a rallying cry for the 99% than a permanent form. But, perhaps most interesting was that the state of Massachusetts considered Occupy Boston to be ineligible as plaintiffs, as each court witness claimed not to represent Occupy Boston. Occupy Boston, following upon the general rules adhered to by the entire Occupy Movement, practiced horizontalism and consensus in it's operation and therefore, individuals participating could only represent themselves.

 

Post-eviction, I spoke at a panel at Harvard University entitled "What is the Occupy Movement?" Emmanuel Telez, a young, voracious legal assistant, co-facilitated the panel. Afterward, we discussed this very strange contradiction. Occupy Boston, in itself, was so heterogeneous to the state and its judiciary that, in legal terms, it could not even exist. To the state, Occupy Boston was an invisible, traumatic element which confronted the State as a non-entity enacting and surpassing bourgeois rights. Some would say, "using bourgeois rights in a non-bourgeois way."

What we lost in our eviction wasn't so much the often chanted "We are unstoppable, another world is possible" but an understanding of our heterogeneity versus the State. In Dewey Square, we stood, unprecedented, reclaiming private space and transforming it into a political carnival, a meeting space and a center for all social-movements. In Dewey Square, we objectively served the people. Our food and shelter committee fed and clothed homeless families, who constituted a sizable bloc of occupiers, rendering around $200,000 in vital services the City of Boston slashed or eliminated all together. But, perhaps understandably, many Occupiers saw the encampment as nothing more than a propaganda stunt, an immature activity antecedent to the production of a "real movement." They, too, were perplexed in defining our own accomplishments, unable to consider the extent of our ideological and political victories during our nearly three months at Dewey Square. 

Read more!

The Music of OWS! DJ D vs. Detroit Red

With May Day upon us and the semi-official Occupy! Spring Offensive starting. the two of us--Detroit Red and DJ D--have teamed up to crank out this overview of the music of OWS! Occupy! has no single anthem, no “We Shall Overcome”, no defining musical voice of the movement. Instead there has been a flowering of DIY music videos, Joe Hill-esque re-writing of pop songs, spontaneous rap battles in the encampments, and a parade of established musicians showing up at protests unannounced to lend their songs and support. Hell, even Miley Cyrus made a music video for Occupy Wall Street!

The two of us are stone revolutionaries--and deep-fried music geeks. We are both longtime activists, though from different generations— DJ D is 62, Detroit Red 34. Both of us have been totally jazzed by the transformation that the eruption of Occupy Wall Street! has already wrought in the political life of this country and in the tired, aging US left. Each of us took five songs (with a bit of dickering to avoid duplication) from among scores of worthy possibilities, five which we found particularly deserving of attention and comment. Then we wrote a short introduction and made some comment on each.

[Note: for those unfamiliar with current musical culture, that "versus" in DJ D vs. Detroit Red doesn’t mean we are enemies—it is used to label collaborative projects and mash-ups as well as musical throw-downs.]

[Now crossposted at Solidarity and Daily Kos.]

DJ D drops his five

One of the things that has most pissed me off about the movement against the war in Iraq and Afghanistan was all the folks, admittedly mainly ‘60s types like myself, always grousing about where are the anti-war songs. Damn, Neil Young started a page on his website which now has well over 3400 posted! (At, let's call it 4 minutes per song, that’s more’n two weeks of listening 24/7, just to hear ‘em all once.) 

At least anyone with the faintest actual acquaintance with Occupy Wall Street! and the Occupy! movement isn’t about to make that complaint! Even leaving aside the notorious drum circles, OWS! has been awash in music, with visits from famous artists and all kinds of playing and singing, planned and impromptu, at every encampment I know about. 

A few days before Crispness, I went to fenced-in, rent-a-cop-ridden Zucotti Park in the middle of the night to show the flag, and of the dozen or so people there holding the fort, one was a guy--Jim, I think his name was--strumming a guitar and working out the lyrics to a song about the struggle. It was he who first inspired me to do a little writing about the music of the occupations. 

With that, here are my five. 

Rhiannon Giddins—"The Bottom 99" 


A remarkable a capella performance by Giddins, who is part of the stellar Carolina Chocolate Drops, a key force in the ongoing revival of the nearly lost tradition of the Black string band. This, however, is based directly on a tune credited to the late Ewan MacColl, and it clearly derives from the old Scots/English folk tradition which constitutes the taproot of country music. 

The unaccompanied vocals are reminiscent of Appalachian singers like Almeda Riddle, and the lyrics are sharp as a tack. YouTube also has a video of Giddins doing one called "We Are The 99” in Zucotti Park via the People’s Megaphone, which is well suited to the unaccompanied voice, of course. Still I find this to be richer and easier to follow—and that voice! Note the early date, October 13. She composed and was performing this within weeks of the initial occupation there. 

Jasiri X—"Occupy (We The 99)"


Hip Hop has been an integral part of the Occupy! movement from the start. Lupe Fiasco donated fifty tents during the first week and wrote a poem "Hey Moneyman" about his visits to the encampment before it seized national attention. Immortal Technique, too, came down to Zucotti Park early on and denounced police attacks on the occupiers. Mayor Bloomberg, IT pointed out, "is closer to Wall Street than America is to Israel." Boots Riley from The Coup has been a day-to-day leader in the militant Occupy Oakland movement (though my bud Mirk notes that media attention on him has tended to eclipse the central role of other (female) core activists in the struggle there). 

I picked this cut by a less well-known conscious rapper, Jasiri X, because he is based in Pittsburgh and has been an active supporter of Occupy Pittsburgh!, because he has stood up to efforts to censor this song out of his paid performances, and because it has a nice anthemic quality to it, with an eminently chantable tagline/chorus. Plus which, his video is one of the best of the collage-of-video-clips style that’s so prevalent here, with a sharp focus on police brutality and the national and global breadth of the Occupy! eruption. 

Garfunkel And Oates—"Save The Rich" 


This comedy duo has one of the best band names evah and their rip on Pat Robertson--"Sex With Ducks," in case you missed it--may never be topped. A sense of humor is a vital part of any real social movement. Some of the best-known protest songs of the Vietnam era were saturated in this kind of mirthful irony. Phil Ochs’ "Draft Dodger Rag" and Tom Paxton’s "Lyndon Johnson Told The Nation" leap to mind (and that’s not counting the unintentional humor in, say, "Eve Of Destruction.") 

And don’t dismiss this tune and its nifty new video as merely an obvious joke. In two short minutes, Kate "Oates" Miucci and Riki "Garfunkel" Lindhome savage the greed of the 1%, mock their self-identification as 'job creators,' vent some genuine anger at their crimes and close by reminding us what the Occupy movement broke with:

Save the rich 
By doing nothing at all 
Deny all sense and logic 
And just think really small 
You should think really small 
Or just don't think at all 
And save the rich 

Dave Lipmann—"Occupation Is On"

Sorry, the live and unplugged at Zuccotti Park version of this seems to have vanished from YouTube, but click right here and a nice folk-rock version’ll play for you. This is in many ways a typical—better, archetypal—OWS! song. 

First I’ll deal with the typical part. The legal ban on amplification at Zuccotti Park (and elsewhere) combined with what has long been the cultural norm for protest movements in the US, means that folk-type songs like this, performed on guitar and perhaps other acoustic instruments make up, along with hip hop, the majority of OWS!-related music. 

That said, this, like the Rhiannon Giddins number above, is a reworking of an older song. Fittingly, Dave climbs under the hood of an obscure but brilliant Depression-era tune, "The Panic Is On" by Hezekiah Jenkins ("All the landlords done raised the rents/ Folks that ain't broke is badly bent") to do his tinkering. In keeping with the more optimistic theme, he hits the beat a little harder and a little faster. The folk process at work, 70 years after Woody retooled "Wildwood Flower" into "The Sinking Of The Reuben James."

Besides its great rhythm and easy-to-yell-when-it-comes-along tag line, "Doggone, occupation is on," a striking thing about this one is its good humor. Some of this may derive from Jenkins’ amusing record, but it also reflects Dave’s professional role as an lefty singing entertainer—he currently performs his parodies and originals in the character of bankster Wild Bill Bailout. Lastly, the lyrics are both witty and broad in scope:

We communed in Paris in '68 
Teamsters and turtles had a fine blind date 
Now the bankers are trying to grab it all 
After the Arab Spring comes the American Fall 
Doggone, autumn is on 

Chloe Cornelius—"I’ll Occupy" 


This is my own personal favorite Occupy! song. This week, anyhow. Chloe Cornelius is a young woman who has recorded her own songs and song parodies and posted them on YouTube over the last year or so, something untold hundreds of thousands around the world have done, Like most of them, her following has been, shall we say, modest, despite a voice which is as good as those of a number of current pop stars I could name. 

This number, which she bills as a "recruitment song" for the movement, has grabbed her widest audience by orders of magnitude, and deservedly so. Cornelius’s master stroke was to rework Gloria Gaynor’s disco era smash "I Will Survive," which rapidly became a feminist anthem upon its 1978 release. Its attitude of gritty determination transfers perfectly into the OWS! setting.

In place of the historical context offered by, say, Dave Lipmann, Cornelius is plugged right into the cultural moment, and thus the features which distinguish OWS! from any movement that’s gone before, as when she defies the po-po:

You think that your batons are going to get us to go home 
Go on and hit me, I'll just upload it from my phone.

In fact, right in the lyrics she’s singing, Cornelius appeals to her listeners/viewers, "and it wouldn’t hurt to take/ a minute to repost this song." Damn skippy, I say. Get with the meta, listen and spread it! 

Detroit Red rocks his picks

Many folks my age or younger (I'm 34) have barely even heard of unions or seen a protest on the streets of their town. I'm probably not alone when I turn on the TV, see images of general strikes and bubbling class anger from Athens to Seoul, and think, "I wish I lived in a real country."

That was before 2011. That was before Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker—backed to the hilt by billionaire financiers—tried to liquidate Wisconsin public workers’ right to bargain collectively and in doing so filled Wisconsin's capitol city—and the State Capitol building itself!--with union members, students and their teachers, farmers with picket signs on their tractors, and thousands of supporters from across the Midwest. Labor and its friends occupied Wisconsin. 

Come Fall, we occupied Wall Street. 

No one saw it coming. Not even your most ear-to-the-ground, deep-in-the-movements, finger-on-the-pulse lefty activist friends thought that a vague-sounding, open-ended protest in a tiny park, initiated mostly by internet institutions was going to spark a prairie fire against “the 1%”. But the dry brush was all in place—three years of the Great Recession, record profits reaped by bailed-out “job creators” while unemployment stayed sky high, public outrage against the racist state murder of Troy Davis after years of struggle to free him, and no "hope" or "change" in sight. 

Before the media set out to discredit Occupy Wall Street!, it tried to ignore it. But the idea of The 99% versus The 1% traveled across the U.S. faster than a Youtube video of cute cats. However rough and problematic, this meme is class consciousness for beginners, in soundbite form. And thanks to the slogan's elegant simplicity it can be easily gasped and reshaped: homemade signs, pop songs, viral videos, dancing flash mobs. "99%" has made class consciousness culturally contagious. 

Here are my 5 favorite Occupy Wall Street songs, although frankly the sound of hundreds of thousands of people voicing their anger at the 1% is in itself music to my ears. 

Ry Cooder--"The Wall Street Part of Town"

Divide and rule, that's always been their plan
We're in trouble again, but this time we got friends 

Ry Cooder has been a widely respected guitar wunderkind and pan-roots music alchemist since the 1960's. In recent decades his progressive, pro-working class politics have increasingly come to the fore. He bought his guitar magic and production skills to Mavis Staples' reworking on Civil Rights Movement songs on her LP We'll Never Turn Back (2007), recorded a concept record about the demolishing of a Chicano neighborhood in LA in the 1950's (Chavez Ravine, 2006), and wrote a song cycle from the point of view of a house cat who is also a union organizer (My Name Is Buddy, 2007). So it should surprise no one that Ry Cooder sides with the 99%. 

Recorded at the height of the occupation of Zuccotti Park in NYC, "The Wall Street Part of Town" absolutely brims with optimism and resolve. The songs narrative brings to mind sun breaking through a rain storm, with rays of solidarity and defiance warming your face. You've been waiting you whole life to stand up to the banksters and CEOs, you've been waiting your whole life to link arms with people in the same sinking boat as you, and now--finally!-- if you can just navigate the canyons of New York's financial district--you'll get your chance. The act of walking to Wall Street with butterflies in your stomach and your fists clenched is both literal and a fitting metaphor. 

Cooder sounds relieved and energized. Relieved that corporate rule is finally being challenged in the streets and energized because, well, taking over the streets with the 99% feels pretty good. And of course the song has a loose, country-fried groove with a subtle but infectious guitar riff...because that's what Ry Cooder does. 

Ten Ton Shoes--"One Percent" 


When it comes to protest songs these days we have come to expect folk and hip hop to lead the pack. Folk music because it's easy to play and is already associated with social change, based on the role it played in the radicalizations of the 1930's and 1960's, hip hop because it is the lingua franca of working class youth and of course has a political tradition all its own. But Occupy Wall Street! has produced such a flowering of protest songs that nearly all genres are represented. 

So it is with great delight that I discovered this alt.country/rockabilly screed against the 1%. In the spirit of Mojo Nixon, Dead Kennedys' twangy side, and psychobilly, Ten Ton Shoes gives us a snarling, jacked-up, countrified take on class rage circa 2011. They've watched the rich get richer while their neighbors lost their homes and jobs and, frankly, they're sick of it. So pissed they can barely sing, in fact the vocals here sound more like a laid off worker loosing his cool at a shareholders meeting than those of a Country singer. "Some say tax the rich, I say jail the rich," all sung to a scuzzy rockabilly guitar line that would make The Meteors proud. If you ever wondered what it would sound like if caustic comedian Bill Hicks fronted 1980's cowpunk pioneers Jason & The Scorchers, this song comes wonderfully close.

Rebel Diaz--"We Are The 99%" 

For the people, for the teachers, for the students 
If we knew that just 1% of these dudes own 2/3rds of the US of A 
American way, they lock our youth away 
Practice the same crimes, tell the rest to eat cake 
In France they burn cars, in London they set it off 
Well over here it's time we start building a mass consensus 
Your daddy lost his pension, your daughter's school needs fixin, your brother's back in prison 
The message here ain't "Kumbaya," like overnight the change gonna come, nah 
But what they got?? We got 99, they got 1...problem, and it's us 
If we wake up that number makes more sense to us all 
Some small group of bankers whose wealth goes back ages 
Stage one is enslave us, divide and contain us, 
Make us strangers with anger, divide us against our neighbors 
But in the face of hatred we're showin' love to change things 
The 99, the 99, the 99% 
We're here, we've arrived, and we came to represent 
For the 99, the 99, the 99% 

This song is the perfect snapshot of the energy and spirit of resistance that pulsed through the Occupy Wall Street! encampment and through the dozens of spin-off mobilizations that rocked New York last fall. Rebel Diaz are an incendiary activist hip hop group from the Bronx. The entire reason they formed as a group was to use music to energize and organize radical social justice movements. This is what they live for. So you can expect to see them down at Zucotti Park, in the mix with everyone from unemployed youth to union militants, doing impromptu performances of topical songs that are so new they probably wrote them on the train ride downtown. 

"We Are The 99%" was captured live on the street in the financial district. The song itself ties together so many of the themes of Occupy! and the bridges Occupy! could potentially build: class disparity, unemployment, bank bailouts, incarceration of youth of color, and beyond. The song also connects an analysis of white supremacy to the Occupy! message better than Occupy! ever has. It mentions Troy Davis, whose execution generated immense popular disgust and despair, the still-living rebel spirit of Malcolm X, the recent rebellion against police abuse and austerity in Britain, and the urgent need to "de-colonize." The song is fresh as hell, in both uses of the word. You can feel the excitement of a movement being born. 

Talib Kweli--“Distractions” 


Brooklyn's Talib Kweli was been a political voice in Hip Hop since the mid-1990's. His group with Mos Def, Black Star, helped kick off "conscious" rap. His song for Occupy Wall Street! takes aim at the plethora of ways that our corporate rulers keep us distracted. Celebrity gossip, fashion, status, pop music---anything to keep us from seeing that the 1% are robbing us blind. The aspect of Occupy! that seems to inspire Kweli the most is its ability to tear through the facade of the media and pop culture and present a more true picture of what's actually happening in our society: wars fought for the rich, poor people in prison, opulence for those at the top while the 'hood crumbles. That's what's really happening. All this talk about which sunglasses are hot and what Kim Kardashian is up to is designed to keep you blind and immobile. Distractions. 

Like many of the artists profiled here, Kweli shot a video for his song at Zuccotti Park. As he breaks down capitalism's elaborate smoke-and-mirrors tricknology, we see footage of thousands of everyday people with homemade signs that offer proof that the 99% is waking up. Not only is the music video captivating, but readers should search Youtube for amateur footage of Talib Kweli's live performances at Occupy's General Assembly. 

Makana--"We Are The Many" 


Poor One Percenters. They just couldn't get a break in 2011. When heads of state and CEOs gathered in Hawaii for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation confab in November they were likely expecting a nice weekend of discussing the exploitation of the working class with their fellow kleptocrats. There was even a gala banquet planned with all the fixings, including a Hawaiian folk musician hired to give this thieves' ball a touch of local color. 

But that musician had something else in mind. When he took the stage to sing and play his guitar he unbuttoned his shirt to reveal a message. "Occupy Honolulu" it read, but his statement has just begun. Instead of softly singing a Hawaiian folk song, Makana sang a song he had written specifically for the Occupy Wall Street movement, "We Are The Many." Like every other artist on this list Makana took the basic concept of the inherent antagonism between the 99% and the 1% and put it in a song. "We Are The Many" is simple, powerful song about the needs of the many being sacrificed for the needs of the few. 

The time has come for us to voice our rage
Against the one who trapped us in a cage
To steal from us the value of our wage.  

His voice has a sweet timbre, the guitar riff is airy, but his message is as stark as a clenched fist. Don't let Makana's smooth, acoustic aesthetic fool you. This song is more Rage Against the Machine than it is James Taylor. Like so many of the best protest songs, "We Are The Many" contains both a seething contempt for oppression as well as a steadfast insistence that justice is on it's way. 

In a sense, Makana used music to pull a political stunt that made Obama & Co. cringe in their seats. But his real audience was the 99%. With his guitar, his homemade t-shirt, and his unassuming self-penned song, Makana mic-checked the 1%. And if you think that the songs message might have been lost over the clamor of corporate palm-greasing, arm-twisting, and back-slapping, you'd be wrong. Makana sang the song over and over and over, for 45 minutes.

Read more!

Working Class Music: The US and the UK

When I published my liner notes here for the sampler CD I prepared for a session of Mark Naison’s class on the American Working Class at Fordham University a couple of weeks ago, I got several comments suggesting other tunes I ought to have included. All were good ideas.

At least two, though--John Lennon’s “Working Class Hero” and the Clash, “London Calling”--are pretty explicitly not American. Yeah, yeah, I know that the proletariat is an international class and all that, but it does have national particularities. And the difference between how class is perceived and acknowledged--and lived--is very different in the UK than it is here.

In fact, I'm gonna post two songs here with similar titles and let them give a give a pocket seminar. “Living In The Love Of The Common People” is a song first recorded by the slick, pre-rock-style vocal quartet the Four Preps, but is most associated with Waylon Jennings, who cut it in 1968.



 I like it. For all of its sentimentality, it gives give a sharp depiction of how bad poverty can be in this country, and even starts with a nod to food stamps. But when it gets to the common people, it can only summon up family love and solidarity as defenses against poverty. Nor is there even a hint that another class exists, let alone that the singer’s poverty is a function of their existence. And, in true American style, there’s a hint of better things to come: “Daddy’s gonna give you a dream to cling to.” 

An attractive young English fella name of Paul Young took the song higher into the charts in the UK--#2 in 1983--than Waylon Jennings or anybody else ever managed here. That may be where another guy, Jarvis Cocker, got the catch phrase “common people,” not a conventional English usage, His band Pulp had a breakthrough album in 1995. Its very title, Different Class, suggests the distinction I am carrying on about here. 



The song starts with a slumming young heiress propositioning the singer and telling him she wants to “live like common people.” Note two things in particular: 1. How aware the singer is about the class privilege inherent in this kind of slumming. 2. There’s no warm fuzzy assurance that we’ll “get by” or praise of dreams. 

 Instead, the upper class tourist is told: 

You'll never live like common people, 
You'll never do what common people do, 
You'll never fail like common people, 
You'll never watch your life slide out of view, 
And dance and drink and screw, 
Because there's nothing else to do. 

This is Pulp’s signature song. The video above shows tens of thousands of English kids pulsing to it at the first large festival the band ever played, Glastonbury in 1995. Today, more than a decade and a half later, they still get tens of thousands singing every word along with the band. 

 (In passing, let me note that what might be called "revenge hypergamy" (hypergamy being fucking someone higher on the class ladder) is not an uncommon theme in British pop. Check the early Stones, “Play With Fire.” In the US, you’re more likely to get the likes of the 1962 Dickey Lee weeper “Patches” in which the middle class protagonist falls for a poor girl and is forbidden to see her by his pops, who later tells him she has drowned herself.)

Read more!

OWS & the Hollis 99% Club Link Up To Rock Queens

[Just a few days ago I posted a piece here on the impact the eviction of Occupy Wall Street! from Zuccotti Park (and the attacks on other encampments around the country) has had on the Occupy movement. Here is another angle--long time Bronx activist Professor Mark Naison talks about Queens and some of the most exciting post-Zuccotti OWS! organizing in NYC.]

 

How Occupy Wall Street Has Revitalized Neighborhood Based Protest--The Hollis Example 

 by Mark Naison 

 In the Hollis Section of Queens, NY, a working class and lower middle class African American community, two blocks of apartment buildings owned by a multi-millionaire real estate operator named Rita Stark have sat vacant for more than 16 years on the community’s major commercial strip. Ugly and decayed, occasionally used by neighborhood drug dealers as a safe haven, they sit across the street from a junior high school and two churches. The local development corporation, elected officials, and ordinary citizens have tried to get these buildings fixed up for years by writing letters, filing petitions, organizing meetings with the owner, all to no avail--but now, all of a sudden, there is hope of action. Why? Because of the Occupy Movement and the example it has set.

 Let me explain. During January of 2012, education scholar and activist Ira Shor and I decided to try to create a support group for Occupy Wall Street at a predominantly African American Church in Queens where a dear friend and colleague, Rev. Dr. Mark Chapman was the pastor. The idea was to create an organization for people who supported the general goals of Occupy Wall Street, but felt uncomfortable sleeping in a park or risking arrest on a regular basis. The congregation of Hollis Presbyterian Church, consisting largely of senior citizens who had been civil rights activists, and remained active in community affairs, seemed ideal for this purpose, so with Rev. Chapman’s help, we set up a first meeting. More than 25 people showed up, indicating how much Occupy Wall Street had captured the imagination of people in this Southeast Queens community, and after agreeing a club should be formed, the 99% Club, they began debating what local issues they should take up. After a short discussion, the group decided to take up the cause of the 2 blocks of abandoned buildings on Hollis Avenue whose wealthy landlord had stubbornly defied community pressure to sell them or fix them up.  

What gave these long time neighborhood activists hope that they could now finally make headway in solving a festering neighborhood problem was the prospect of bringing the young activists from Occupy Wall Street into the community to shake up the landlord and local elected officials. They saw Occupy Wall Street as a new and welcome force, that could strike fear in the hearts of the wealthy, not only through a language that held them responsible for monopolizing the nation’s resources at the expense of the majority of the nation’s people (the 99 percent), but because of its capacity to mobilize hundreds, sometimes thousands of young people to take to the streets in support of economic justice. 

They decided on a step by step strategy to build support for a major protest, beginning with research on the abandoned properties, complaints to the department of buildings to insure violations on the properties were up to date, and the filming of a short video explaining why neighborhood residents were determined to get the buildings fixed up. All of these actions were undertaken, but it was the last one which had the most effect. Someone from Occupy Queens saw the video on Facebook and immediately asked Rev Chapman if they could come to the next 99% Club meeting to support the initiative.

When Rev. Chapman said yes, 15 activists from Occupy Queens came to the meeting, The chemistry between the two groups was extraordinary. Though the Hollis group was mostly senior citizens and almost all Black, and the Occupy Queens groups was mostly young and middle aged, and majority white, they possessed a shared understanding that working class and middle class people were suffering terribly in the current economic crisis and something had to be done about it. When Occupy Queens described how they were blocking foreclosures in the local courts by “singing in the courts”(!) people from the Hollis Group saw an immediate connection to what was happening in their neighborhood, where many homes were foreclosed, as well as the sign of the re-emergence of an energy and courage and tactical flexibility that had marked the civil rights movement in its glory days. 

The two groups decided to create a coalition centered on the transformation of the Rita Stark buildings into community space, building up to an April 21 demonstration at the buildings which was aimed to attract Occupy activists from around the city as well as Hollis Residents. The April 21 event will begin with a Forum at Hollis Presbyterian Church, sponsored by Occupy Queens, where speakers will discuss local and national initiatives to transform foreclosed homes and abandoned commercial and residential spaces into housing for the homeless, and to defend tenants and homeowners from evictions by landlords and banks. The participants in the Forum will then join Hollis residents for a six block march to the Rita Stark properties where a rally and demonstration will take place which includes an “open mic” for members of the community to say how they think the properties should be developed. This protest, expected to attract several hundred people, will be the first of many actions taken till the issue has a positive resolution. 

What is occurring Saturday is an example of how Occupy Wall street has not only changed the conversation about economic inequality in the United States, but given people around the nation hope that they can do something about it! It has done that not only by popularizing a language that puts the onus for the nation’s economic difficulties squarely on the wealthy and the powerful, but by showing that innovative protests that link new groups of activists to existing ones can win victories large and small, in neighborhoods as well as states, and municipalities, and eventually in the entire nation.

Read more!

What We Lost Five Months Ago

Five months ago yesterday, I awoke for some reason in the wee hours of the morning and checked my email—a police raid was underway at Zuccotti Park! Flinging myself onto the A train, I arrived to find the Park blockaded. Arrests, beatings and the police trashing of the Occupy Wall Street! encampment were well underway. Occupiers and supporters tried to regroup nearby.

What I remember most vividly, though, is not that chaotic night (and morning, and afternoon), but my visit to Zuccotti Park the day before. For me, it puts in bold relief just how much we lost when Bloomberg unleashed the NYPD on Occupy Wall Street! We lost a beacon, a base camp, a school of struggle, an experiment in social change and, perhaps most important, a huge intake valve for a broad new social movement.

The Last Day At Zuccotti Park

I showed up on November 14 late to a noon-hour talk my friend Professor Mike Zweig was giving. He spoke to dozens in the northeast corner of the park using the mic check method in explaining how class works in the US, He then delivered advance copies of his book, The Working Class Majority, to the professional and amateur librarians operating the library, 5237 volumes and counting, now in its own tent. The information, food serving and medical operations were all better housed and organized than they had been even a week before, and a Zuccotti Park Fire Department had popped up, staffed by volunteers with real firefighting experience.


Hundreds of people milled around talking or working on some project with a purpose--hard-core occupiers, frequent visitors like myself, folks there for the first time. An unofficial stencil and spray can operation put slogans on shirts on one side of the park and on the other, a full scale silkscreen operation was turning out free t-shirts, raising from donations the money the General Assembly had voted to front to buy shirts and supplies. On line to get one, I chatted with a retired Black clerical worker, 75 years old, making her third visit to the park from New Jersey. She agreed with me that right after actual tents had gone up in the park about a month ago, some of the openness and welcome of the encampment had been lost, and that it was now back.

Before I left, I chatted with a hard-hatted IBEW member and a dude from the Labor Outreach Committee. The three of us talking in our union jackets attracted several others who wanted to discuss potential labor participation on an upcoming November 17 action. We joked about the tour buses which kept driving by, having now added Zucotti Park to their lower Manhattan circuit. On my way out, I paused to join in on “16 Tons” and “For What It’s Worth” with four or five folks around a guy with a guitar. Occupy Wall Street! was in full flower.

That night, the hammer came down


Beacon

One big loss OWS! suffered is obvious: visibility. Once the initial mainstream whiteout of the movement had been broken by the pervasive reach of the Internet and social media (and by the ham-handed early attacks of the NYPD), Zucotti Park and the scores of sister occupations it sparked around the country were all over the news.

Partly it was that the message resonated so clearly with millions across the US (and around the world). As the economic meltdown took a bigger and bigger toll on working people, the banks got bailed out and the rich got richer. Ordinary people told their stories of losing their homes, of being laid off and unable to find work, of being impoverished by medical conditions, of being burdened by massive student debt they have no prospect of repaying. They spoke to--and for—countless others in the same sinking boat.

Partly it was that the scene was so mediagenic. The visual contrast between suited, buttoned down Wall Street brokers and lively young folks had complimentary soundbites—“Get a job, loser!” versus “Ya wanna look at these copies of the 217 job applications I have submitted since I graduated college in the Spring? Not a bite so far.” Drum circles and bemused tourists from rural Finland, anti-capitalist occu-dogs and the busy library, crocheting classes and visiting celebs showing support—there were loads of human interest stories.

And, of course, producers at news shows could always hope that the cops would brain out again and pepper spray some more female undergrads or beat another city council member bloody. Zuccotti Park was on the news every day. The word spread, and interest grew. While the Occupy! memes—the 1% vs the 99% and the concept Occupy [fill in the blank]! survived the shutdown, media interest quickly petered out without the occupations as a focal point.

Base Camp

The principal target of OWS! was clear: the Wall Street banksters who had trashed the financial system and gone on to pocket obscene salaries and bonuses for their efforts, and the political system which did their bidding, most notably providing a government rescue because they were “too big to fail.” Still, there were plenty of other issues that folks there were incensed about. Many of us had histories of activism, going back decades in the case of some of the elders.

What we had a Zuccotti Park was a kind of base camp, in the military sense, located within easy striking distance of our enemy. It was a concentrated pool of hundreds of activists of varying backgrounds who could also be mobilized to support struggles by sections of the 99% around the city. In the early weeks, OWS! protesters headed out from the park to swell postal union rallies defending post offices in poor neighborhoods and to help infiltrate and disrupt ritzy sales of high end art in defense of locked out members of the Teamsters working for Sotheby’s auction house. These actions in turn helped sway the leadership of many NYC and even national unions to throw their support to OWS!

Other important struggles that drew serious support from Zuccotti Park-based fighters were the struggle against racist police violence, including the NYPD’s notorious “stop and frisk” policies, the fight against tuition hikes in the City College system and numerous tenant struggles and anti-eviction fights. Short term mini-occupations of banks, government offices and other targets started becoming common.

And like any base camp, it had a logistical operation, to keep the forces fed, healthy and supplied. It provided reinforcements in the form of medics to tend those injured in clashes with the police and lawyers to make sure nobody stayed in the hoosegow a minute longer than necessary.

School

Another thing any guerilla army worth its salt does is train and educate its combatants. OWS! did this in any number of ways. The library was just the best known. There were non-violence, first aid and legal know-your-rights trainings. There were classes and guest speakers.


But more than anything else, education came in the ongoing discussions that were at the heart of the OWS! experience. Folks talked and argued—one-on-one, in small clumps, in organized.working groups or at the General Assembly--about immediate issues facing the encampment and larger questions of direction and the goals of the movement. And, through this collective process they learned.

A case in point is the question of the police.

Many, many Occupy! newbies, caught up in the 99% concept, were convinced that the cops were our natural allies. The thousands and thousands of hours young occupiers wasted earnestly explaining to individual officers in the detail surrounding Zucotti Park why they should side with us are enough to make a stone weep. But the tide shifted—police attacks on the occupation probably played the largest role. Direct experience will do that.

Then there was the presence of Black and Latino high school students who were gravitating to the park and explained the facts of life to the naïve. So did the news that JP Morgan Chase just donated $4.6 million to the NYPD, a move they assured everyone had nothing to do with OWS! Nobody was paying to poll occupiers but I‘ll bet a shiny new quarter that understanding of the real social role played by the po-po was far deeper by November 14 than it had been only two weeks earlier. And it took another big jump that night.

Petri Dish

Not only did occupiers, full time and sometime, learn by doing, they learned by doing new things. The creation of a living community and all its institutions, from scratch, by people who not only didn’t know, but often had, at least on the surface, little in common with, each other was an amazing process to experience.

The General Assemblies with their democratic debate and near-consensus decision-making took place very night. Anyone could come, anyone could speak. This gave participants an enormous investment in the project. Yet the social pressure of the collective—and the ban on amplification and the resulting development of mic checking—meant that folks from some outfit with a name like the Proletarian League for the Immediate Reconstitution of the Fourth International (Bolshevik Fraction) couldn’t derail the proceedings with a lengthy explanation of how OWS! should concentrate planning the insurrection.

And the practical problems we faced were, some of them, very deep and involved conflicting interests among the people, like individual power-tripping, factionalism, drug abuse in the encampment and the harassment of women occupiers. The last two were severely exacerbated by the police and shelter personnel, who directed homeless folks and people just released from prison to the Zuccotti Park. I can’t claim these problems were handled impeccably, but for the most part we did a better job than the larger society whose laws and norms we were challenging with our practice.

Some dynamics seemed built in, and in our two month stay in Zuccotti Park were never perceived as grave enough to demand the full focus of the group. One was the question of white privilege: whose upbringing, assigned role in society and assumptions about how the world works, and should work, made it relatively easy to take part. Another was the fact that longtime, fulltime occupiers saw themselves as the movement and, on the other hand, even frequent visitors would talk about OWS! in terms of “they” and not “we.’

Could all this daunting stuff have been worked through? I don’t know, but in the effort a great deal would have been learned—about how to build a different society, where other values than greed and commodity fetishism reign.

Strange Attractor

The most important thing that the encampments did was to provide a steady influx of new people into the Occupy! movement, many of whom had never even thought of engaging in active protest before. Zuccotti Park during the daytime and evening hours was always full of visitors. Sure, some folks came to scoff and a few, the sorry souls, in the hopes of seeing a real live female nipple. Most arrived supportive or genuinely curious, and left apparently little changed. But every single day, folks came for whom their visit was a transformative experience. I know because I spoke with them. Some became full time or sometime occupiers in the shadow of the Wall Street towers, others went home to other cities to get involved there.

Zuccotti Park and the other encampments around the country became a port of entry, the Ellis Island for a New Left in the United States. The constant influx of new folks kept the movement yeasty and vital. They came because they felt that here was an alternative to living in the old way, an alternative they were welcomed to, an alternative they could have a hand in building. They identified with the Occupy movement because it held the promise of a better world,

The constant inflow of new people, frequently very naive and often with odd ideas about the nature and the source of the real problems in this society, also kept the movement inoculated against a very real problem. This is core cadrification—the tendency for leading elements in a social movement, especially in times of high conflict and rapid change, to outstrip their base and jell into a small group with more advanced analysis and more militant tactics. This can easily result in the phenomenon of “slamming the door behind you”—scorning as hopelessly backward folks who hold the same views people in the core may themselves have held not so long ago.

Tactics And Strategy And The Big Question Now

The attack on Zuccotti Park and the nationally coordinated attacks around the same time on other Occupy! encampments in city after city were more than an effort to reinstitute the social order, business as usual. They targeted the encampments precisely to disrupt the effects just discussed.

When you don’t have a strategy, your tactics become your strategy. And Occupy Wall Street! was from the outset a tactic—admittedly the most successful tactic in recent memory. It was simple: occupy a public or semi-public space in a well-traveled area close to the centers of financial and political power and create an alternative center there where ordinary people can gather to challenge the powers that be.

Now Zuccotti Park and most of the other centers have been taken from us. And as various recent efforts to rebuild—Union Square in NYC, the abandoned warehouse in San Francisco—show, the enemy will not make it easy to repeat the tactical triumphs of last fall.

So where do we go from here? I don’t pretend to know, but I suggest that one yardstick by which to evaluate any of the possible futures being discussed and debated for the Occupy! movement is to what extent they can perform some of the functions that the Zuccotti Park encampment and its sisters coast to coast did.

Read more!

Working Class Music: Playlist Supplement

A few days back I posted the liner notes of the CD I burned as homework for Professor Mark Naison’s Fordham University course on the American working class, when he invited me to take a session and reflect the course in music. Here’s an addendum, four cuts I hadn’t given the students in advance, but showed instead, projected on the classroom’s large video screen.

First I have to say that, though fun, it was pretty daunting, packing the history of the US proletariat in music from the 1929 Crash to the present into an hour and a quarter presentation, especially since the CD was about that long.

I opened by doing a little categorization, saying that the songs I had picked fell into four categories, rough and over-broad, perhaps, but useful.

Work songs—songs that are sung as part of the labor process itself

Songs about working—songs that are about the labor process itself and/or the social relations in a particular job, often about its hazards

Songs about working class life—this can get pretty broad; I mean, technically, “Maybelline” is a song about working class life and so is “Rockaway Beach.”

Songs about working class struggle—Mark had already spun ‘em some Woody Guthrie, and I didn’t lean too heavy on these

So where I had included a recording of work songs by menhaden fishermen from the Virginia/Carolina coastal waters, I showed this nifty short clip of railroad gandy dancers. The men who heaved the hugely heavy rails onto the crossties and positioned them used songs to enable them to coordinate their collective efforts and avoid any excess in the killing exertion they were putting out.


Later in the talk, I used another visual to underline the point about women making up more and more of the workforce. This trend I introduced on the CD with the wartime “Milkman, Keep Those Bottles Quiet” about the everyday Rosie the Riveters and later followed up with Lorettta Lynn’s “The Pill”—showing how improved (and now threatened) birth control technology permitted fuller participation in paid work.

To cap that point off, I showed the video to an ‘80s disco hit where the heavy duty production doesn’t undercut but rather reinforces the humanistic and feminist message.



Another aspect of the changing face of the working class in this country is the huge influx of immigrants who have taken their places at the bottom of the “pyramid scheme of dirty jobs,” as this song succinctly points out.



I could have done some union song to wind up, but instead I picked this final tune, with its short true-life introduction. It is the story of a ship, a coastal freighter called the Mary Ellen Carter, which sinks. When her owners claim the insurance and abandon her, the crew scheme to raise her and salvage her to sail once more. Stan Rogers’ inspirational song reflects the determination and creative power of the working class and our ability to overcome our exploiters:

And you, to whom adversity has dealt the final blow
With smiling bastards lying to you everywhere you go
Turn to, and put out all your strength of arm and heart and brain
And like the Mary Ellen Carter, rise again.

(P.S. Yeah, I know Stan Rogers is a Canadian. Sue me.)

Read more!

Success on Many Fronts: POP's People's Daily Campaign for Jobs & Justice shows how to carry out multiple struggles

A massive turnout from labor and the community made the April 4th march a significant remembrance of Dr. King on the 44th anniversary of his assassination

On Wednesday, April 4, 2012, the People's Daily Campaign for Jobs, Equality, Peace & Justice honored the 44th anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s murder in Memphis, TN. But our general demand for 'justice' was specified slightly to highlight the singular example of the murder of Trayvon Martin in Sanford, FL.

"Justice for Trayvon Martin" formed the particular of the justice demand on our Peace, Jobs, & Justice march on April 4, as well as the at special Justice for Trayvon march POP sponsored days before on a rain-soaked Saturday

Last July, shortly after the Daily Campaign for Jobs and Justice began, this blog hailed POP's organizational maturity as we carried out the recently launched daily campaign and successfully held our annual event remembering the victims of police violence during the 1967 Newark Rebellion without interrupting the picket lines that day, the previous day and the day after (see Playing the Piano… People's Organization for Progress ups the ante of struggle in NJ). But during the week of April 4 this years POP proved that we possess true organizational maturity! Not only did the daily campaign continue without missing a beat, we held two large mobilizations of more than 200 activists as part of this campaign, led a campaign that stopped an eviction, and travelled to Raleigh, NC for the Black Workers for Justice's 29th Annual MLK Support for Labor Dinner where POP statewide chair Lawrence Hamm was keynote speaker.

Larry Hamm energized the participants at the Black Workers for Justice banquet

"This march honors the two Martins, Martin Luther King and Trayvon Martin," Larry Hamm, chairman of the People's Organization for Progress noted at the Wednesday demonstration and rally. "Our general demand for justice becomes much more specific in the wake of young Mr. Martin's murder, even as we recall the murder 44 years ago of Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr."

Despite the weather, Saturday's march was invigorated by the youthful energy of the Shabazz high School marching band

"Dr. King did not die in bed, in his sleep, he was protesting in the streets, as we are doing today. He was supporting striking sanitation workers in Memphis, TN, planning to go to DC for the Poor People's Campaign. His plan was to build a tent-city of 1 million poor people on the lawn of the US capital, to expand his campaign for labor rights, against the War in Vietnam, and for economic justice at the time of his murder! This is why we remember him today," Hamm concluded on Wednesday, April 4, 2012.

Elders of the people's struggle in Newark, Amina and Amiri Baraka also spoke at the rally after the March 4 march

People's Organization for Progress members who traveled to North Carolina for the Black Workers for Justice banquet were pleased to learn about that similar organization of 30 years, even as we spread the word about POP's nearly three decades struggle.

Ajamu Dillahunt of BWFJ addresses the dinner

This week of activism was also highlighted by the POP Coalition to Save Our Homes ability to turn back the Essex County Sheriff's department in Wells Fargo Bank's attempt to evict Susie Johnson, a 77-year old Orange, NJ woman (see People power stops unjust eviction in Orange, NJ for more information and photos).  

To view additional photos from these events, click Justice for Trayvon Martin, April 31 in Newark, April 4 Daily Demonstration for Jobs & Justice, and BWFJ Annual Awards Dinner 2012.

Read more!