I cite

Police arrest more than 200 in Los Angeles and 50 in Philadelphia as Occupy camps dismantled - The Washington Post

LOS ANGELES ― More than 1,400 police officers, some in riot gear, cleared the Occupy Los Angeles camp early Wednesday, driving protesters from a park around City Hall and arresting more than 200 who defied orders to leave. Similar raids in Philadelphia led to 52 arrests, but the scene in both cities was relatively peaceful.

Police in Los Angeles and Philadelphia moved in on Occupy Wall Street encampments under darkness in an effort to clear out some of the longest-lasting protest sites since crackdowns ended similar occupations across the country.

...

Officers flooded down the steps of City Hall just after midnight and started dismantling the two-month-old camp two days after a deadline passed for campers to leave the park. Officers in helmets and wielding batons and guns with rubber bullets converged on the park from all directions with military precision and began making arrests after several orders were given to leave.

There were no injuries and no drugs or weapons were found during a search of the emptied camp, which was strewn with trash after the raid. City workers put up concrete barriers to wall off the park while it is restored. As of 5:10 a.m. PST, the park was clear of protesters, said LAPD officer Cleon Joseph.

The raid in Los Angeles came after demonstrators with the movement in Philadelphia marched through the streets after being evicted from their site. Over 40 protesters were arrested after refusing to clear a street several blocks northeast of City Hall, said Philadelphia Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey. They were lined up in cuffs and loaded on to buses by officers. Six others were arrested earlier after remaining on a street that police tried to clear.

“The police officers who were involved in this operation were hand-picked for this assignment,” Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter said. “They’re highly trained and disciplined and showed a tremendous amount of restraint and professionalism in carrying out this morning’s operation.”

 

via www.washingtonpost.com

Global rebellion: The coming chaos? - Opinion - Al Jazeera English

First, this crisis shares a number of aspects with earlier structural crises of the 1930s and the 1970s, but there are also several features unique to the present:

The system is fast reaching the ecological limits of its reproduction. We face the real spectre of resource depletion and environmental catastrophes that threaten a system collapse.

 - The magnitude of the means of violence and social control is unprecedented. Computerised wars, drones, bunker-buster bombs, star wars, and so forth, have changed the face of warfare. Warfare has become normalised and sanitised for those not directly at the receiving end of armed aggression. Also unprecedented is the concentration of control over the mass media, the production of symbols, images and messages in the hands of transnational capital. We have arrived at the society of panoptical surveillance and Orwellian thought control.

 - We are reaching the limits to the extensive expansion of capitalism, in the sense that there are no longer any new territories of significance that can be integrated into world capitalism. De-ruralisation is now well-advanced, and the commodification of the countryside and of pre- and non-capitalist spaces has intensified, that is, converted in hot-house fashion into spaces of capital, so that intensive expansion is reaching depths never before seen. Like riding a bicycle, the capitalist system needs to continuously expand or else it collapses. Where can the system now expand?

 - There is the rise of a vast surplus population inhabiting a planet of slums, alienated from the productive economy, thrown into the margins, and subject to sophisticated systems of social control and to crises of survival - to a mortal cycle of dispossession-exploitation-exclusion. This raises in new ways the dangers of a 21st-century fascism and new episodes of genocide to contain the mass of surplus humanity and their real or potential rebellion.

 - There is a disjuncture between a globalising economy and a nation-state based system of political authority. Transnational state apparatuses are incipient and have not been able to play the role of what social scientists refer to as a "hegemon", or a leading nation-state that has enough power and authority to organise and stabilise the system. Nation-states cannot control the howling gales of a runaway global economy; states face expanding crises of political legitimacy.

Second, global elites are unable to come up with solutions. They appear to be politically bankrupt and impotent to steer the course of events unfolding before them. They have exhibited bickering and division at the G-8, G-20 and other forums, seemingly paralysed, and certainly unwilling to challenge the power and prerogative of transnational finance capital, the hegemonic fraction of capital on a world scale, and the most rapacious and destabilising fraction. While national and transnational state apparatuses fail to intervene to impose regulations on global finance capital, they have intervened to impose the costs of the crisis on labour. The budgetary and fiscal crises that supposedly justify spending cuts and austerity are contrived. They are a consequence of the unwillingness or inability of states to challenge capital and their disposition to transfer the burden of the crisis to working and popular classes.

Third, there will be no quick outcome of the mounting global chaos. We are in for a period of major conflicts and great upheavals. As I mentioned above, one danger is a neo-fascist response to contain the crisis. We are facing a war of capital against all. Three sectors of transnational capital in particular stand out as the most aggressive and prone to seek neo-fascist political arrangements to force forward accumulation as this crisis continues: speculative financial capital, the military-industrial-security complex, and the extractive and energy sector. Capital accumulation in the military-industrial-security complex depends on endless conflicts and war, including the so-called wars on terrorism and on drugs, as well as on the militarisation of social control. Transnational finance capital depends on taking control of state finances and imposing debt and austerity on the masses, which in turn can only be achieved through escalating repression. And extractive industries depend on new rounds of violent dispossession and environmental degradation around the world.

Fourth, popular forces worldwide have moved quicker than anyone could imagine from the defensive to the offensive. The initiative clearly passed this year, 2011, from the transnational elite to popular forces from below. The juggernaut of capitalist globalisation in the 1980s and 1990s had reverted the correlation of social and class forces worldwide in favour of transnational capital. Although resistance continued around the world, popular forces from below found themselves disoriented and fragmented in those decades, pushed on to the defensive in the heyday of neo-liberalism. Then the events of September 11, 2001, allowed the transnational elite, under the leadership of the US state, to sustain its offensive by militarising world politics and extending systems of repressive social control in the name of "combating terrorism".

Now all this has changed. The global revolt underway has shifted the whole political landscape and the terms of the discourse. Global elites are confused, reactive, and sinking into the quagmire of their own making. It is noteworthy that those struggling around the world have been shown a strong sense of solidarity and are in communications across whole continents. Just as the Egyptian uprising inspired the US Occupy movement, the latter has been an inspiration for a new round of mass struggle in Egypt. What remains is to extend transnational coordination and move towards transnationally-coordinated programmes. On the other hand, the "empire of global capital" is definitely not a "paper tiger". As global elites regroup and assess the new conjuncture and the threat of mass global revolution, they will - and have already begun to - organise coordinated mass repression, new wars and interventions, and mechanisms and projects of co-optation in their efforts to restore hegemony.

In my view, the only viable solution to the crisis of global capitalism is a massive redistribution of wealth and power downward towards the poor majority of humanity along the lines of a 21st-century democratic socialism in which humanity is no longer at war with itself and with nature.

 

via www.aljazeera.com

Running Chicken: Occupation and Revolution

The Occupy Wall Street protest movement has succeeded in capturing a significant amount of our collective attention over the past month or two. Personally, I find its premises to be very compelling.

I’ve taught Marx for many years and it’s not at all difficult to explain his ideas about justice and economic inequality to my students or to find examples from our daily lives that highlight points raised in, for example, the Communist Manifesto. I’m very sympathetic to those who want to shrink the gap between rich and poor, reduce the influence of corporations on democratic politics, and limit the ability of those at the top to generally run roughshod over everyone else. In short, the Marxist diagnosis of conditions in an unregulated capitalist society should rally people to the Occupy Wall Street banner.

Or, that diagnosis should rally people if the Occupy movement could separate Marxist premises from Marxist conclusions. This is difficult, though, because of the revolutionary spirit of some of the organizers of the OWS movement. While not all of the organizers are Marxists ― and while most of the protesters don’t have revolution as their motivation at all ― it seems fairly clear that a number of key organizers have in mind some sort of revolution as an ultimate end goal of the movement.[1]

A recent lecture by political theorist Jodi Dean made clear the relationship between OWS and Marxism. Her lecture was well-attended, including by a fair number of the protesters who have set up their tents on the Lincoln Mall.

Mostly, Dean was interested in discussing the Occupy movement and what she understood to be its philosophical underpinnings, which was also what the audience really wanted to hear about. Along the way, she repeatedly referenced the work of Hardt and Negri, Lenin, and ?i?ek, the theorists whose work she clearly believes is speaking to the concerns of OWS.

What Dean wants ― what she deeply believes will happen ― is for capitalism to be brought to its knees by this protest movement; she intimated that we will thereafter live in a Marxist-Leninist paradise. To that end, she specifically discussed her opposition to the idea that the OWS movement should put forward goals or demands. Indeed, as a member of the committee tasked with creating just such a list, she was particularly pleased to convey to the audience that she opposed the idea of demanding job creation until the proposed number of jobs was set at 25,000,000. She liked this number, she said, because it was impossible to achieve.

The problem for Dean ― and other revolutionaries who see the OWS movement as their vehicle ― is that the 99% they claim to represent don’t share their revolutionary fervor.

via kohenari.net

Public-sector workers begin strike in UK - Europe - Al Jazeera English

Nearly two million British public-sector workers opposed to government pension cuts, are set to embark on a 24-hour general strike.

Wednesday's strike will involve immigration officers, teachers, garbage collectors, firefighters and other public-sector workers spanning 30 union groups, and will be the largest since 1979's Winter of Discontent.

Angry over pension overhaul, which they say will require them to work longer before receiving a pension and contribute higher amounts each month to the account, as many as two million people could stay away from work on Wednesday.

Some within the Confederation of Trade Unions, the group organizing the strike, predict the walkouts could be the largest since 1926's General Strike.

Austerity measures are also one of the catalysts of this strike. Downing Street extended on Tuesday a cap on public-sector pay raises through to 2014.

Reporting from London's Heathrow airport, Al Jazeera's Andrew Simmons said many people will be taking strike action for the first time in their lives. For a head teachers' union, it will be the first strike in their 100-year history.

Monica Hirst, a nursing educator and single mother, told Al Jazeera's Laurence Lee in London that government cuts have left the people with no other option than to walk out.

"I don't want to be losing a day's pay...but we have no choice we've been backed into a corner," she said.

David Cameron's government, however, does not see the walkouts as the solution to the challenges ahead for the UK economy.

via www.aljazeera.com

Ray Kachel’s Journey from Seattle to Zuccotti Park (excerpt here read the whole piece at The New Yorker )

Kachel had four hundred and fifty dollars from the sale of his copy of Final Cut Pro. For two hundred and fifty, you could travel to New York City on a Greyhound bus. He had never been farther east than Dallas, but New York City was so dense and diverse, and so full of ideas and ways to make money, that if he could learn to exist there he could surely find a place to exist. On the last night of September, he went to bed telling himself, “Oh, this is just absolutely nuts, you can’t do that.” He woke up in the morning with a clear thought: This is exactly what I’m going to do.

Kachel didn’t tell his few friends about his plan. But on the night of October 3rd, on a Wordpress blog that he had set up, he wrote, “About to board a bus to NYC. Not sure if I’ll ever come back to Seattle. . . . I have had some moments of panic, asking myself if I’ve completely lost my mind. That’s entirely possible. But those moments pass quickly and my sense of adventure takes over and I’m ready to hit the road all the more.” He had abandoned most of his remaining possessions; he was travelling with only a small duffel and a daypack, and they contained not much more than a few changes of clothes, a portable hard drive with some of his movies, and a “relatively stupid” cell phone with enough memory to send and download tweets. The bus left at midnight. At five in the morning on October 6th, Kachel arrived at the Port Authority bus terminal, in Manhattan. By 10 A.M., he had made his way downtown to the occupation.

via www.newyorker.com

The Occupy London movement at the crossroads

In the Occupy London movement, the proscription against “hierarchical” ideologies that might otherwise “pollute” the movement serves as a means for various professional “activists”, academics, trade union flunkeys and other like-minded individuals to conceal their own political agendas―from the “social theorist” Manuel Castells, Labour MP John McDonnell to advocates of a “Green New Deal” and “Tax Justice”.

The result is that Occupy’s original “anti-capitalist” message is being increasingly replaced with one of “social responsibility”, as its spokespersons stress the need to bring “divergent views together in a spirit of open discussion, with the intention of reaching consensus.”

The central thrust of such policies was best summed up by Tanya Paton, Occupy London’s interfaith co-ordinator in the round-table discussion hosted by the Guardian, “Is capitalism broken and what is the world going to do to fix it?”

“[T]he problem,” she said, “is the people who are failing to address it [the economic crisis] are the very people who are keeping the system as a 1% and a 99%. And unless those people come into the dialogue, openly, transparently, and really take on board what we in the Occupy movements around this world are saying, there is going to be a revolution, a social revolution that is going to bring down everything.”

To make clear that the “consensus” is one aimed against social revolution, Occupy London announced on Cif the establishment of an economics working group (EWG) to “write a statement on economics”.

The EWB “comprises an ideologically broad tent―socialists rub shoulders with free marketeers and libertarians”.

“We are all here because we believe our economic system is broken, that it is not serving the 99% and we need to fix it―we just all have very different ideas about how to achieve this. We accept and welcome the differences between us as we stand united against corruption and corporate greed.”

This is absurd on its face. The “differences” between socialists and free-marketeers regarding capitalism and the profit principle are unbridgeable since, if the terms are to have any meaningful content, the first stand for their abolition and the latter for their extension.

The problem has been resolved, however, by removing any genuinely anti-capitalist measures from the terms of debate. The “five points for exploration” set out by the EWG deal solely with how to make the banks “accountable”, credible alternatives to the current austerity measures, and how the economic system can be made “sustainable” by tax reform and “independent and effective regulation”.

The main focus of the Occupy London campaign has become its appeal for the City of London Corporation to “make itself accountable” under the Freedom of Information Act and be “more open” about its lobbying activities, combined with support for the Trades Union Congress’s November 30 “Day of Action” over cuts in public sector pensions. These demands echo the call made by Labour Party adviser Maurice Glasman, author of the “Blue Labour” policy document, which has been endorsed by Miliband. “Blue Labour” blends together anti-immigrant chauvinism and “anti-statism”―by which is meant the welfare state―with calls to regulate finance capital and establish a greater role for the trade unions, so as to achieve “civic renewal”.

via www.wsws.org

Former Seattle Police Chief Norm Stamper on Paramilitary Policing From WTO to Occupy Wall Street

NORM STAMPER: Well, I have great respect for Chuck, and I do believe that since 1999 and the Battle in Seattle there have been many changes. My concern is, many of those changes have been for the worse. The officers, for example, in Oakland were dressed as my police officers were in Seattle, which is, in effect, for full―in full battle gear. We were using military tactics. I authorized the use of chemical agents on nonviolent offenders. I thought I had good justification at that time. I did not. The police officer in me was thinking about emergency vehicles, fire trucks, aid cars being able to get through a key intersection. The police chief in me should have said, "This is wrong," and vetoed that decision. I will regret that decision for the rest of my life. We took a military response to a situation that was fundamentally nonviolent, in which Americans were expressing their views and their values, and used tear gas on them. And that was just plain wrong.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, Chuck Wexler, I’d like to ask you about that, not only about this issue of the increased militarization, also that there have been other cities where law enforcement has taken a very different approach. In Philadelphia and Albany, the district attorney is refusing to―declining to prosecute cases of arrests of people who are being arrested for being in a park. But also, the way that the―some of the police forces are dealing with the press, and of the―because the press are supposed to be there to be able to be the eyes and ears of the public in these events, but increasingly you’re getting reporters arrested, removed, not allowed to be at the biggest flash points or to be able to take photos or to take camera shots of them.

CHUCK WEXLER: Yeah. No, I mean, you know, it’s―the police response is going to vary from city to city. But let me just kind of back up a little bit and respond to what Norm said. You know, we―you know, I have a lot of respect for Norm Stamper, too. We learned a lot. He’s very forthcoming with what went right and what went wrong with the Battle for Seattle, if you will. But, you know, in fairness, you know, you were faced, Norm, in a very difficult situation, and in fact, there really hadn’t been many demonstrations up 'til Seattle. I mean, prior to the Vietnam era, there was a big lag time. But what was―what does happen in some of these events is you can have 90 percent of the people are there peacefully, and you have this small contingent―and I think, Norm, what you had in Seattle is you had this group of anarchists that somehow was able to cause such disturbances that it forced a reaction, that perhaps was an overreaction, but I don't think the police were prepared for it. And today, you know, the police struggle between these two extremes, between people who go to exercise their First Amendment rights and then people who are there to cause, you know, damage and destruction.

AMY GOODMAN: So, Norm Stamper, respond to that issue, why you still think you were wrong, that you’re taking issue with Chuck Wexler here, that given the situation in 1999 you now say you did the absolutely wrong thing.

NORM STAMPER: Well, for five years after I retired, I remember being on book tour and having people come up to me and say, "I was on the streets, and I’ve got to tell you, I was shocked at the behavior of the police." And I asked them about what was particularly shocking about the behavior, and it all came back to me. It came back to my authorization of the use of chemical agents, a euphemism for tear gas or pepper spray, and the effect that that had from that moment on and throughout the week.

There is no question about what anarchists, by definition, or for that matter, even recreational rioters, who are simply sitting in a bar and see the action and get attracted to the downtown area―we had some of that―can help distract attention away from the cause itself and create major public safety issues for the police. Here’s my point: if the police and the community in a democratic society are really working hard―and it is hard work―to forge authentic partnerships rather than this unilateral, paramilitary response to these demonstrations, that the relationship itself serves as a shock absorber. Picture police officers helping to protect the demonstrators. Picture demonstrators saying, "We see people on the fringes, for example, who are essentially undemocratic in their tactics. And so, we need to work together to resolve that issue." These resolutions are clearly not easy. One of the things that complicates the picture enormously is when a woman like Ms. Rainey is pepper-sprayed. When innocent people who are there to protest what I consider to be very legitimate grievances against corporate America, against a government that has, in many respects, been bought off by corporations, the police have a responsibility to be neutral. It should be apparent that I’m not neutral, but I’m no longer a cop. And police officers on the streets really do need to be neutral referees, and they need the help of their civilian, if I may use that term, partners.

via www.democracynow.org

From the archives: the small business myth ? LBO News from Doug Henwood

I said at the beginning of this piece that small business often serves an ideological purpose. On the right, it’s deployed to resist any political impulses to regulate business or push up wages. That implicitly concedes that smaller firms are nastier to work for, but it’s also a bit devious, since McDonald’s probably would suffer at least as much from a minimum wage increase as Mom’s Burger Shack would. Here, small business becomes a virtuous stand-in for business as a whole, since small business probably has a better public image than the big, no matter how ill-deserved. Even if this is a devious move, it’s not much of a surprise.

What I find more surprising, and disturbing, is the tendency of some folks on the left to embrace small business with some passion. This is particularly true in the unfortunately named anti-globalization movement―as if internationalization itself were the problem rather than the way it’s carried out. Their anti-globalism is connected to a desire to “relocalize” economies, and with them to reorient production on a much smaller scale. These aims seem more motivated by nostalgia―and, in many cases, by a nostalgia for something that never existed―than any serious analysis.

Larger firms are also far more productive than smaller ones. Small-is-beautiful advocates rarely tell us how tiny enterprises would produce locomotives, computers or telephones; maybe they’d prefer to do away with these things and revive a hunter?gatherer society. But if that’s what they intend to do they should tell us.

And people who presumably care about workers should also rethink their passion for tininess: the experience of actually existing small businesses show that they’re not great employers, with poor pay, cheesier benefits and more dangerous workplaces. Bigger firms are easier to regulate, more open to public scrutiny, friendlier to affirmative action programs and more vulnerable to union organizing.

A progressive case for bigness is rare and unpopular these days, but somebody has to make it.

via lbo-news.com

PERF Statement on "Occupy" Protests

Over the last few days, the Police Executive Research Forum has been the subject of several false articles and blog postings alleging that we have been coordinating police crackdowns on Occupy protests. This is not true. PERF conducted two conference calls for the sole purpose of allowing police chiefs to compare notes about their experiences with “Occupy” protests. The last conference call was held on November 4―more than two weeks ago.

PERF urges everyone who wishes to obtain an accurate view of PERF’s work to read a report that we released in July 2011 called “Managing Major Events: Best Practices from the Field.” This report, which is available on our website at http://www.policeforum.org/dotAsset/1491727.pdf, summarizes the views of police leaders who participated in a PERF conference in November 2010 to discuss issues related to major events such as large-scale protests. See especially the following:

--Chapter 2, titled “A ‘Softer’ Approach to Crowd Management: The Vancouver Model,” offers this advice: “Be proactive by reaching out to the public or influential community groups beforehand to inform them of your planned activities during an event…. Use the ‘meet and greet’ strategy. Engage the crowd in a friendly, non-confrontational manner….Most protesters are peaceful; don’t allow a small group of instigators to provoke an aggressive response from officers.”

--Chapter 7, titled “Preparing for Protesters at Major Events,” includes this recommendation: “When dealing with law-breaking protesters, don’t forget that thousands of nonviolent protesters are merely exercising their First Amendment rights. So the police must differentiate the lawbreaking protesters from those who are peaceful.”

We also invite everyone to review our many other reports on our website (http://policeforum.org), which can be found in the “Free Doc Library” and “Critical Issues Series” sections. We believe that these documents will provide an accurate view of PERF’s history of promoting community policing and police strategies that ensure that everyone’s Constitutional rights, including First Amendment free speech rights, are protected.

via www.policeforum.org

Occupy has the power to effect change | Peter Hallward

The millions of us who are fighting one way or another to cross this threshold will prevail if we can succeed in doing two related things. We will need, first of all, to convert the polemical clarity of the new slogan ? "we are the 99%" ? into a commanding political standpoint, one that confines the opposing standpoint to the marginality it deserves. As Anindya Bhattacharyya points out, "the slogan doesn't so much describe a state of affairs as prescribe a course of action", one that may eventually unite the people against our enemies. We need to take full account of the fact that we are forced to live and work in a system designed to benefit those few who exclude themselves from our "we".

Karl Marx was right to argue that the logic of capitalist exploitation will tend over time, unevenly but inexorably, to polarise humanity into two and only two classes of people: exploiter and exploited. Competition among exploiters will tend to concentrate their numbers towards the isolation (and hence vulnerability) of the 1%; at the same time, aggressive erosion of the difference between the exploited and the unemployed or excluded will tend to unite, slowly but surely, "the immense majority of the people". As Gy?rgy Luk?cs recognised with particular clarity in the wake of Russia's revolution, Marx was also right to argue that the exploited majority will only acquire the power needed to change this system when we are prepared consciously and deliberately to make and to take this power, in full awareness of what this implies.

Our second task, then, is to develop forms of collective action that exceed the repressive mechanisms set up to contain them. Rallies, protests and the occupation of symbolic spaces can change the balance of power, but they do not exhaust our range of strategic options. Nine months ago, the people who won the battle to defend Tahrir Square demonstrated the scale and kind of action required to hold a public space against direct assault, but so long as an occupation or a protest remains small enough for it to be surrounded or "kettled", so long as politicians are prepared to issue eviction orders (and so long as their police are prepared to carry them out) then the limits of these actions are clear enough. The demands that are beginning to emerge out of the global Occupy movement ? demands that will help to end patterns of exploitation and start to reverse the consequences of neoliberal assault ? will only prevail if they are made through forms of collective action that cannot be kettled or cleared. If they are to endure, occupations need to spread and escalate, and be complemented by other forms of action.

Our struggle will prevail once we begin not only to deplore or condemn but also to interrupt the mechanisms that exploit the labour and resources of the immense majority. When workers withhold their labour or take control of their workplace, when the unemployed refuse the exclusion to which they are condemned, when students refuse to pay their fees and debts, when immigrants rebel against discrimination, when householders defend their homes against foreclosure ? when c

ivil disobedience and noncompliance acquires a depth and scale that no police operation can break ? then the fundamental isolation of the tendential 1% will be exposed for all to see.

In addition to the example set in northern Africa earlier this year, at this juncture we might do well to remember some of the tactics developed at the other pole of that continent in an earlier assertion of "people power": the mix of strikes, blockades, sit-ins, boycotts and "stayaways" organised in the mid-1980s by South Africa's UDF and other grassroots organisations as part of a struggle to render their country "ungovernable". Situations vary, but a collective determination to interrupt work or school, to blockade an institution or a university, to withhold payment of rents and debts, can take all kinds of forms in all kinds of places. Stayaways can concentrate around a particular site, or spread through emulation towards a mass strike. There are few logistical limits on participation in a stayaway, and as participants invent the forms of organisation required to sustain them their duration can range from a symbolic interruption of work or class to an indefinite boycott, walk-out or shut-down.

via www.guardian.co.uk