In 25 short days, the Occupy Wall Street movement has grown from a gathering of a few disgruntled New Yorkers to a national phenomenon.
On Thursday, the Guardian estimated the number of protesters in New York at 15,000. Demonstrators have gained the backing of both radical and mainstream labor unions and are supported by a network of solidarity groups across the country.
So far, New York demonstrators have done a remarkable job of remaining nonviolent despite being beaten, pepper sprayed and otherwise harassed by police. This violence is not the result of a few over-enthusiastic cops; the New York Police Department administration has continuously defended the excesses of its officers. In an interview with the New York Times, NYPD chief spokesman Paul J. Browne said police had behaved appropriately in pepper spraying a group of protesters standing behind a net. The violent suppression of anti-corporate demonstrations is now effectively a matter of policy.
But these attempts to crush the protests have not deterred the movement.
“Anyone with eyes open knows that the gangsterism of Wall Street ... has caused severe damage to the people of the United States,” anarchist intellectual Noam Chomsky wrote in a message to demonstrators. “The courageous and honorable protests underway in Wall Street should serve to bring this calamity to public attention, and to lead to dedicated efforts to overcome it and set the society on a more healthy course.”
The resiliency and contagiousness of the protests have dismayed reactionaries. On Oct. 4, Republican presidential frontrunner Mitt Romney described the demonstrations as “dangerous ... class warfare,” according to the New York Times.
In the eyes of politicians like Romney, it was not class warfare when capitalists fought to dismantle U.S. labor unions. It was not class warfare when decreased wages and benefits put one in seven Americans below the poverty line, according to the 2009 census. Nor was it class warfare when the ruling class has repeatedly blocked the establishment of universal health care, the lack of which Harvard Medical School research links to 45,000 deaths per year. According to Romney and other reactionaries, it is not until workers begin to object that class warfare is constituted.
Unfortunately, many people take Romney’s claims seriously. According to a Rasmussen Reports poll conducted last week, 27 percent of Americans hold an unfavorable view of the Occupy Wall Street movement.
That tens of millions of Americans are willing to side with their own exploiters and against fellow workers shows the ruling class has done an extraordinary job of inoculating the public against revolutionary ideas. This has been accomplished over decades by the conflation of anti-capitalism with Stalinist authoritarianism by the downplaying of workers’ struggles in history curricula and by the drawing of an artificial distinction between the lower-paid working class and higher-paid “middle class” workers.
As Cold War historian Richard Fried observed, “America has a fabled radical tradition, but its anti-radical tradition runs at least as deep.”
The deprivation of political and historical knowledge inflicted by the ruling class is far more dangerous to the movement than are the batons of the NYPD. Unless protesters are familiar with previous successful and unsuccessful revolutionary movements, they will be left unprepared for the inevitable attempts to co-opt or otherwise sabotage their efforts. If Occupy Wall Street participants are under the illusion that altering tax rates or electing a new politician will fundamentally alter current conditions of inequality, then the ruling class will be able to pacify them without loosening its grip in the slightest.
It is significant that the Occupy Wall Street protests have spread so rapidly throughout a society that has been systematically purged of class consciousness. Even now, Americans who have never had the opportunity to read a pamphlet on class struggle are independently deducing the principles that have guided working-class activists for decades. The ideas that give the Occupy Wall Street movement its strength cannot be permanently suppressed. These ideas are irrepressible because they are true.
Zac Smith is a journalism junior.
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ozzyo 7 months, 2 weeks ago
Blah, blah, blah. Be sure and spout that crap when you go to a job fair. You'll pay more attention where your money goes when you start paying taxes. These protesters are kept from a job by their work ethic and drug screening.