Mark Rudd on OWS

Cross-posted from Mark Rudd's facebook page. This is a very elequent show of support for OWS that I thought should have legs beyond fb. On that note, it is a great thing that radicals who helped end the war in Vietnam and fought for a better society are still around because young people need support and guidance from people who actually got up and did something about injustice. Unfortunately, our situation bears more similarity to the Great Depression than the 1960s, so today's activists will need to supplement these ideas with techniques of the Labor Movement as well. Then there is the uniqueness of the current situation where sit-down strikes, picket lines and so on will not be as effective either. So Mark's advice is a starting point, but history is dynamic and new ideas of resistance will have to be found as well. I don't know what they will be but I have a bad feeling that violence will play a part in some form. Anyway, just doing my part to try and keep the momentum going.

I've been thinking a lot about mass movements, radical and otherwise, more or less continually since 1965, when, as an 18 year-old freshman at Columbia, I got swept up into the anti-Vietnam War and radical movements. The young people already educating themselves on the war and protesting it were the coolest kids around and I wanted to be one of them. What made them so attractive was not only their intelligence, but that they were on fire with moral outrage.
That's exactly the same feeling I get from Occupy Wall Street. Your moral commitment unmistakably shines out. Bravo! Many of us old people had almost given up hope because it seemed that our whole society had become completely deadened to the hideous immoralities we live with--poverty, greed, racial injustice, militarism, mass incarceration. Yet finally and out of the blue somebody's standing up and saying Enough! That in itself is close to miraculous. Thank you for allowing yourselves to become morally engaged and for having the courage to act.
On top of that, your actions and words have been brilliant at communicating what you're about. "We are the 99%" is a crystal clear metaphor exposing the elite we're fighting. Even the Albuquerque Journal, my local daily newspaper not exactly dedicated to exposing the truth, regularly reports Occupy demonstrations as being (in their words) "against corporate greed." You've pulled off another miracle.
There's even more: you've been able to draw out in support of the movement against the corporate elite thousands of union workers and other progressives, not only in New York City and around the country, but around the world. You may have shifted conventional politics to the left, as both Republicans and Democrats fear or welcome, respectively, the rise of a populist progressive movement analogous to the influential (but illogical and ridiculous) Tea Party on the right. That's a lot to have accomplished by a few people in a short time.
That's it for unmitigated praise. Now a few "issues" that occur to me. I hope this may be helpful to you.
In general, all the Occupy actions, the encampments and the demonstrations, have been admirably nonviolent and disciplined. Despite being attacked by police numerous times, most people have kept their cool, understanding that any show of violence on our part will be used as justification for more attacks and will isolate the movement. But there are plenty of people--perhaps they're not very intelligent or perhaps they're police agents--who advocate fighting the police as surrogates for the corporate and banking elites they're protecting. Big Mistake! The Vietnam anti-war movement split and weakened over this phony issue of militancy; my own faction of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the Weathermen, mistakenly raised fighting cops and then guerilla warfare to the level of strategy. Indeed, it was a disastrous strategy, doomed to failure. We thought that our acting on our beliefs would show our seriousness and attract people to the revolutionary movement. It did the opposite. Please don't fall into the same error.
One thing about nonviolence as a strategy is that it has to be total. A drop of violence, even so far as calling cops "pigs," can taint the whole movement as being violent. So far you've been pretty cool about all this, but watch out for stupid people (mostly young men) and for cops who infiltrate in order to wreck the movement. "Diversity of tactics" (property damage or even violence in self-defense) inherently sabotages nonviolence. It's the tyranny of the few against the many.
How do movements grow? So far the two tactics of physical occupation of space and of demonstrations have attracted a certain number. But what part of the 99% have joined the movement? Here in Albuquerque, a city of half a million, a few dozen are occupying a city park next to the university, while a few hundreds from time to time join in demonstrations. Occasionally some students passing by are drawn to daily teach-ins. But for the most part, few people understand what's going on; what they see of the occupiers is the predictable bunch of street people, old rads with gray hair and pot-bellies, and homeless people. I hope I'm not hurting anybody's feelings too badly, but most of my neighbors are terrified to interact with this bunch. They're way too marginal and "normal people" don't think that they have anything in common.
So some thought has to be given to how to "organize" the rest of the 99%. By organize I mean how to grow the movement. The best place to learn about organizing is to look at successful movements. There have been a lot of them in the twentieth century--labor, civil rights, peace, gay rights, women's, disabled people's, environmental and anti-nuclear. All of these have used organizing models that involve building relationships with people, talking, learning each other's stories, developing people's capabilities and leadership. For the last few years I've been studying the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee's (SNCC) work in Mississippi from 1961 to 1964 to learn what good organizing is. These young black people went into one of the most terrifying and violent places in the South, the Mississippi Delta region, and in three years were able to organize a victorious mass voting rights movement. How did they do it? The answer is complicated, but at its core was an organizing method that was horizontal and democratic. It's exactly the same "Participatory Democracy" that you've been trying to build via your General Assemblies. In fact the term Participatory Democracy was originated by SNCC and later came to white kids via SDS.
Movements don't happen spontaneously as people see others acting and then decide to join in. That's what's happened so far, but you've probably reached a limit. It's time to start figuring out how to organize. You've been operating on self-expression, but now there's got to be strategy beyond self-expression.
Part of strategy has got to be coalition-building. Here's a problem: many of the OWS people are completely opposed to the current system of money and politics. They rightly condemn both the Republican and Democratic Parties. All cool. But many of your supporters, such as myself, believe that there's a chance worth taking in devoting our energies to reforming the Demo Party, in trying to move it toward the left. We believe that the main reason President Obama has been such a disappointment is that there are just not enough progressive votes in Congress and that there's no mass movement on the left to elect a new Congress. Here in Albuquerque there's a congressional seat opening up in 2012. The two main candidates for the Democratic nomination are a mainstream center-right sold-out ex-city mayor and a young progressive state senator. I'm working for the young guy. He has a chance of winning, but only if enough people come out and work for him, if enough people get fired up. I support Unoccupy Albuquerque (the new name), but can Unoccupy Albuquerque support my electoral efforts? What's a coalition? Here diversity of tactics make perfect sense--direct action combined with electoral work.
Unless ideological factionalism rears its ugly head, as has happened so many times before on the left. My anarchist ideas are right and your belief in reforming the Democratic Party is bullshit. I'm smart and you're not. Change isn't possible through elections, but only through organizing general assemblies in which people practice direct democracy. Your ideas are immature and utopian and won't work in the real world. Grow up. I used to believe in revolution but I've learned it's not going to happen. Capitalism is about to fall. Capitalism will be around a long time. Blah blah blah. No wonder a leftist firing squad is often characterized as being a circle. It's a wonder we ever ended the war in Vietnam the way we used to fight among ourselves. Nobody has a monopoly on truth, get over it.
The old New Left, which more or less devolved into single issue politics in the seventies and eighties then expired in the nineties, never really considered the problem of power. Meanwhile, the old New Right, led by crackpots like Karl Rove, actually attained power starting with Reagan in 1981. They did it by a savvy strategic linkup of ideological conservatives with a Christian fundamentalist base. What will be your strategy to rise to power? (My generation will probably be long gone). Ignore the question at your own risk. I assure you the other side is not.
One last point: 85% of all black voters support President Obama. Meanwhile many or most white progressives spend a lot of their time attacking him as a stooge of Wall Street. Many OWS people feel the same way. Does that mean that white OWS people are smarter than black people? Or vice versa? Or is it merely a problem of point of view?
I'm supporting Obama for re-election and at the same time working for progressive candidates for Congress. And supporting the rise of a smart direct action movement, OWS. It's not a contradiction, it's a coalition.
Good luck. I'll be watching to see how it goes.
Love,
Mark
#OWS #occupywallstreet #99percent #solidarity @hotleadenema @JasonLeopold @OccupyWallStNYC