Occupy to End Capitalism

The Black Orchid Collective has liberated the text of its new brochure for posting on People Of Color Organize. Many thanks!

What are some people saying is causing the crisis faced by the 99%?

Overpopulation: are there too many people on the planet?
Corporate greed: do bank managers and corporate executives just need to be more generous or responsible?

China: is the problem that Chinese workers took “our” jobs or that China owns too much US debt?

Lack of jobs creation: do we need another stimulus package?

Regressive taxes: would taxing the rich get rid of our problems?

A weak Democratic Party: does Obama just need a stronger backbone?

These are all easy answers, and none of them really explain our problem.

Some of them actually encourage divisions between working class people — divisions that the 1% use to keep us from uniting. It’s easier to blame Chinese workers or immigrants than it is to face reality.

And keep in mind that this 1% includes governments ranging from “socialist” to conservative: everywhere they are slashing basic services and infrastructure. A stronger Democratic Party would just use that strength to impose attacks on the working class, like the socialist government of Greece is doing now.

The real problem is fundamental to the capitalist system as a whole. Capitalism is the system we live under, where the rich (capitalist) get their money by taking advantage of the labor of working class people. When we work, we produce goods and services to sell for profit, not to meet each others’ needs and desires. Right now this capitalist system is in crisis because its profit margins are falling. Banks won’t invest in the economy unless their profit is high enough, but the crisis keeps that from happening — the only way they can keep up their profit is through government bailouts. After giving trillions in bailouts and tax cuts for the wealthiest 1%, the government has no money and has to do budget cuts that make it harder and harder for the working class to live. And despite all those bailouts, the banks are still not investing at a rate necessary to lessen unemployment.

Put another way, the only way that capitalists can keep their profits high enough to keep investing is if they plunder the working class and the environment. The system can only survive through class warfare of the capitalists against the working class and against nature – the capitalists need to seize and redistribute massive amounts of wealth from us to them; only this keeps them investing to maintain the economy. It’s not just a matter of them being greedy. They are greedy for sure, but even if they weren’t they would HAVE to attack us in order to keep capitalism running. They do this all the time, especially in the third world, but right now they’re doing it so much that the working class — whose labor makes those profits in the first place — is in many places unable to even get by, even here in the heart of global empire.

But because our labor is the source of profit, this just makes the crisis worse! The more of us who are pushed out of a job, the less profits they make. This is called the “crisis of reproduction”, because the drive for profit, which is fundamental to capitalism, makes it unable to “reproduce” the working class, the very source of that profit. Capitalism can’t even keep us fed, medicated, and educated with the skills necessary to come through the door the next day to work and produce their profits. Budget cuts, unemployment, and shrinking wages make it more and more difficult to raise our children to be healthy and trained in the skills necessary to work for them in the future. We have to choose between raising our kids and working that second or third job to provide health-care for them. In our sexist society, much of this burden falls on women, who are exploited more ruthlessly by sexist bosses in the workplace, while working a second or third shift trying to hold their families together after work despite impossible odds.

This crisis is happening despite the advances in technology and agriculture that could easily feed, clothe, and shelter every human being, on a shorter work-week no less:

The know-how and resources are there for every inhabitant of this planet to live a decent life but that would not be profitable. Abundance has become possible but capitalism can’t handle abundance. It needs scarcity. Abundance in capitalism means overproduction, crisis, misery. This is insane. It must stop.

- Internationalist Perspective

Unity of the 99% of society against the top 1% is a GOAL, not a current reality:

The crisis of social reproduction is not new for many of us. Working class people of color have been subjected to this for decades, if not centuries. When white folks start facing a recession it usually means that workers of color have already been in a state of depression for a while, because workers of color are the last ones hired and first ones fired. Instead of investing in raising a new generation of Black workers, the capitalists are warehousing Black youth in prisons, in schools that function like prisons, and in crumbling neighborhoods and post-industrial cities like Detroit and New Orleans. Instead of paying all workers enough to raise a new generation of workers, the system is destroying the livelihood of farmers and workers throughout the Third World, creating a “Planet of slums” where billions of unemployed and underemployed workers live on starvation wages. This has created a wave of economic refugees who migrate here to find work, only to find that the pay is still so low here that they also can’t afford to raise children in healthy conditions. The old American dream of immigrants moving up the economic ladder each generation is dead.

Many immigrants from Europe had moved up that ladder in past generations, becoming white, and reaping the relative benefits of white skin privilege, such as preferential access to housing and college education. The system never treated them well, they were still overworked, poor, and unfree. But the system provided these benefits to prevent them from uniting with workers of color against their bosses; white privilege was a form of divide and conquer that ultimately kept everyone in the working class oppressed, some more than others. But the system could afford to buy folks off like that because capitalism was expanding back then, and it made sense for the bosses to invest in the reproduction, expansion, stratification, and education of the American working class. The system is increasingly unable to fund white privilege today, just like it is unable to fund all the other ways it tried to buy workers off (through union contracts, welfare, financial aid, and pension funds). For many working class white people today, the golden handcuffs of relative privilege are starting to wear thin. The economic crisis is hitting Black and Latino workers harder than it’s hitting white workers, but it’s still hitting white workers hard, and for perhaps the first time, white youth are growing up expecting to do worse than their parents’ generation. This is causing many of them to hit the streets to protest with a level of militancy that has not bee seen in a long time.

For months, we have been watching the occupations and strikes in Egypt, Chile, Greece, China, France, etc. We’ve all been asking “why isn’t this happening in the US yet? Is it because this country is more divided by racism?” The presence of large numbers of white workers, includ poor white workers in the Occupation movement is a signal that white supremacy cannot completely contain class struggle here te U.S.

However, it’s way too premature to conclude that race is a thing of the past; it’s way too premature to say that we are all unified in the 99% and race no longer matters. Abolishing white supremacy is GOAL we need to fight for militantly, it is not something that will happen automatically as the system crumbles. The 1%, the politicians, and their supporters among the bureaucrats and cops could still try to divide and conquer this movement along racial lines, giving out deals that benefit white folks at the expense of people of color. Working class white people in this movement need to realize that their only future lies in principled anti-racist solidarity with working class people of color who make up the majority of the global 99%.

We need to unite around militant anti-racist demands such as ending Wall Street investments in private prisons and immigrant detention centers, or ending foreclosures that are displacing working class Black families from neighborhoods like the Central District. We need to take bold direct action that will show our communities we are not afraid. We also need to take a firm stance against any attempt to blame workers of color in other countries. They are not stealing or jobs. If they were, why is there so much unemployment in places like Mexico and China? If they really had it better than us, why are they also occupying and striking? The reality is, our jobs AND their jobs are disappearing because the system is replacing us our labor with machines. This could allow us to all work less for higher pay, but that would not be profitable, so instead we have unemployment or underemployment for many, and overwork for others.

Since workers of color are the majority internationally, folks must take power to speak and act front and center in all aspects of the global Occupation movement, from Seattle to Cairo. This is not meant to exclude white workers, and ultimately the working class unity it fosters will benefit them too. We have seen some of this unity emerge at Occupy Seattle when working class youth, including many homeless youth, formed multi-racial crews and resisted the cops when they tried to take down our tents. There is certainly racism inside the occupation that still needs to be overcome, but actions like that are a start.

A common class background made it a little easier for working class youth – employed and unemployed, housed and homeless – to come together across the color line. This unity is complicated by the dominance of petty bourgeois folks in these occupations. The petty bourgeoisie are small shop owners, as well as professionals who serve in a managerial capacity, such as cops, judges, bosses, transit security, etc. Many of them are losing their jobs, houses, and businesses, and are being thrown into the ranks of the working class, so they are joining this movement. They are part of the 99%, but they have had very different experiences than the groups we have discussed so far, and this shapes their political outlook. Many higher paid workers are not petty bourgeois, but they still share petty bourgeois outlooks and ideas, especially the illusion that they are part of the “middle class”.

We could call these folks the “Dumpies” – “downwardly mobile urban professionals”. They were promised upward mobility by the system, but when the system started shaking it dumped them into our midst. Unlike upwardly mobile urban professionals (yuppies), they have made it clear they are on our side, but they still have illusions that they should run everything because of their professional skills, and this can end up alienating the rest of the 99%. In general assemblies and working groups they prioritize outreach to other “middle class” professionals, and insist that nothing can be done that might alienate these folks. For this reason, they tend to reject proposals for actions and outreach materials that are more likely to reach and inspire the more oppressed layers of the working class such a homeless youth, people of color from the ‘hood, working class LGBTQ folks, or immigrant workers. The talk about needing to reach “everyone,” not specific oppressed groups. They don’t realize that their “everyone” is actually the small minority of the 99% that shares their experiences, and by insisting that their cultural norms dominate they actually prevent the movement from growing. If we want it to grow, we need to prioritize reaching out to the rest of the vast majority of society, the precarious global working class.

For example, the “Dumpies” are content to call the cops to handle conflicts inside the occupation because they still think that the police protect and serve them. Some have even told the cops that they love them, thinking this will change the cops’ minds about following their orders to disrupt our movement. They have tried to convince police to join the protest even while the police are violently tearing down our tents or even when they were about to taze a man of color walking nearby on the street for no reason. They lecture working class youth when we chant “fuck the police” or “cops, pigs, murderers”. They don’t understand that we face police brutality all the time, and we’ve been struggling against it for a long time. Unlike us, these folks (used to) own property , and are used to the police protecting it. They have not yet learned that being part of the working class means owning nothing of significance, it means being dispossessed, and that means getting pushed around by the police who function as enforcers of the rule of the 1%. The police exist to make sure we don’t steal the luxury cars of the wealthy- or occupy the factories that make those cars.

The dominance of these “dumpies” complicates efforts to build multi-racial unity. The dumpies are predominantly white and they tend to dominate and represent white folks at the protest, overshadowing more working class white folk like white homeless youth who live at Westlake. Their politics understandably alienate working class people of color, including many of us, and we have been consistently organizing to challenge their dominance. We support efforts such as progressive stack facilitation and people of color caucuses that can try to deal with these problems. However, we need to make sure that this doesn’t pave the way for petty bourgeois people of color to take over. Many movements in the past have been co-opted by a multi-racial “Rainbow Coalition” of ethnocrats, selfappointed community leaders who are nonprofit or labor bureaucrats, or functionaries the Democratic Party. When a racist system starts to really get shaken up, it often sends out leaders of color to try and cool down the movement. We need to make sure that this doesn’t happen to our movement.

We need to reach out to everyday people in our communities, those of us who are people of color, who are unemployed, who are mothers working more than 1 job to care for our children, who are workers and students. We do not need self-appointed leaders, more interested in their bureaucratic positions, and politicking, than in our collective liberation from white supremacy, police brutality, patriarchy and capitalism.

It is difficult to speculate about where this movement is headed. It could crumble because of the internal class and race divisions mentioned above, or it could be coopted by the left wing of the Democratic Party, just like the Republicans coopted the Tea Party – this could become “re-elect Obama to tax the rich” instead “occupy everything, everything for everyone.” In fact, some high-ranking Democratic Party leaders are already exploring this strategy. The movement has a higher approval rating than Congress – or the Tea Party – so that might be tempting for the Democrats. If so, it would kill the spirit of the movement, and would alienate us from the vast numbers of people who are completely disillusioned with electoral politics. However, if the big business interests that run the Democratic party feel we are too hostile toward them, or too dangerous to coopt, they might leave us alone or try to repress us. If they do this, the struggle will be decided by how well we organize ourselves to resist and defend ourselves.

Finally, there is a chance that he movement might accelerate and spread, especially if there is another financial meltdown, like many of the capitalists are fearing. If Greece defaults on its debt the European Union might go into crisis, which might bring down some of the large Wall Street banks, sending the American economy back into crisis. If this happens the government might try to do a round of austerity measures to pay off its debt, or it might make budget cuts to finance a new round of bailouts for American or European banks. This could be the signal for millions of workers to join the occupation, because, despite its limitations, it is the largest and most visible protest movement against the system right now. We should not be apocalyptic about it, but we do need to start thinking about how to prepare for this possibility.

Occupy the Squares, Workplaces, Schools and Neighborhoods

We need to strike capitalism at its core. The workplaces that produce auto and airplane parts, the ports that ship billions of dollars worth of goods, the buses that bring people to work every day to help the capitalists rake in a new round of profits, the service stores that keep the circulation of goods and money flowing in and out of the banks – - We need to occupy not just the squares, but also the places which produce the profit for the ruling class.

We need strikes, supported by community members, who can defend and hold down a workplace, the same way we pull in our resources to defend the public squares. Within the stress and difficulty, are also glimpses of a new society, where each gives according to ability and disability, and each takes according to need.

For those of us who have been present and been a part of the Occupation movement, we have seen people share expertise, resources, skills. Right now, we are only able to do it at a low level as we juggle our work, schools and family responsibilities. However, a new society we struggle for, could be built on that basis, of sharing, community building and skills shares. Rather than working hard for our labor to be exploited, we can, in struggle, produce for one another to sustain our resistance.

Share your thoughts with us!
Black Orchid Collective
blackorchidcollective@gmail.com

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