To go one step beyond!

Occupy Wall Street is a people-powered movement that began on September 17 with an encampment in the financial district of New York City and inspired by the Arab Spring and the Spanish acampadas. Men and women began to organise in a non-violent protest to protest against corporate greed on Wall Street. 'Occupy Wall Street' is a leaderless resistance movement which began as a call to action from Adbusters, a Canadian-based anti-consumerist organisation. The protests have now spread. They're also now backed by the labor unions. Meantime, the police have embarked on a crackdown on protesters, arresting hundreds of them amid the media's sparse coverage of the protests.

From the website:
“We are unions, students, teachers, veterans, first responders, families, the unemployed and underemployed. We are all races, sexes and creeds. We are the majority. We are the 99 percent. And we will no longer be silent.”
“The beauty of this new formula, and what makes this novel tactic exciting, is its pragmatic simplicity: we talk to each other in various physical gatherings and virtual people's assemblies …we zero in on what our one demand will be, a demand that awakens the imagination and, if achieved, would propel us toward the radical democracy of the future …and then we go out and seize a square of singular symbolic significance and put our asses on the line to make it happen.”

Protester Brendan Burke insists he and the others are fighting for more than 99 percent of the American population."Everyone has this problem," he said, "White, black. Rich or poor. Where you live. Everyone has a financial inequity oppressing them."

As members of the World Socialist Movement, we are glad to see the emergence of peoples attacking capitalism as a system rather than merely its particular evils.

Protester Catharine Revland explained. "Every demonstration starts with being ignored," she said. "Then sneered at. Then hated. Then finally: they get the message." Her words are surprising similar in sentiment to our own companion blog's Socialist Courier's header "Have you not heard how it has gone with many a cause before now: First, few men heed it; Next, most men condemn it; Lastly, all men accept it - and the cause is won."

If this a radical shift, in radical politics, from single issue campaigns within capitalism to attacks on capitalism as a system Occupy Wall St is to be commended. There are no nice capitalists. We have nothing to say to our rulers on how to run capitalism, we should not be drawn into fighting their battles, and we should certainly not be drawn into rolling history back instead of forwards. Our fight should not be a campaign for "real" capitalism i.e. manufacturing/industrial capitalism against the finance and speculator interests. It should be calling for the abolition of capitalism rather than its "fair" administration and regulation.

As many in the Occupy Wall St movement realise the use of violence is counterproductive. The state is strongest in its use of force, and weakest in its legitimisation of that force. Virtually all of the state's forces of co-ercion are working class, from working class homes, and only function within mass organisations of repression because the state explains their actions to them as being in society's interests. Occupy Wall St reflected this fact in declaring their common interest with the NYPD when it said:
"We condemn the actions of unprofessional police who used excessive force in subduing a peaceful march. But we are foremost here to oppose the growing power of the ruling class. Let us also be clear that, when approached as individuals, members of the NYPD have expressed solidarity with our cause. It has been inspiring to receive this support. Over these thirteen days, we have learned that no one supports corporations’ disproportionate influence in the political sphere. We have learned that no one is in favor of evicting struggling families to the street while banks continue to profit. No one, that is, except the corporations and banks. We urge members of the NYPD to remain in solidarity with our cause. These men and women could lose their pensions and benefits during the next round of budget cuts."
Revolutionary action lies in effectively communicating that message to each other. Once legitimacy falls, the state falls. This is precisely why these forces provoke violence, with snatch squads and pepper sprays so that we will respond with violence and justify their repression.

Socialists can only hope that Occupy Wall St develops further, by shedding particular campaigns for the improvement of capitalism, into a general and radical attack on capitalism itself. These are people who are actually looking for answers as to why the world is in such a mess and SOYMB think we need to be there with truck-loads of leaflets and having a dialogue with anyone prepared to listen to counter-act those with a reformist agenda of a "tamed capitalism" to push. Once again we welcome the fact that some people are moving towards identifying capitalism as the cause of problems they had previously sought to deal with on a single-issue basis, and now we urge them to take the next step and join us in the struggle for socialism as the only practicable alternative to capitalism.

Recognising ones class position as many have done on at Liberty Plaza, that they are the 99% and the capitalists the 1%, is the first step, yet an indispensable step, towards socialist consciousness, and the easier it must be for us to put our case across. So how can we as socialists not welcome the emergence of Occupy Wall St? Where else, if not amongst such people, are we to find those we are trying to win over to the socialist case. It can only be hoped that they will come to realise that a real alternative is up for grabs. Socialists are not in the business of protesting for a larger slice of the cake that the workers bake, but for control of the whole bakery plus the grain fields. We argue that we should only settle for free and equal access to all that we produce and all the services we, the working class, provide.