A good friend of mine asked me this earlier this week. She has had major health and family challenges present themselves recently, and has been away from the news.

I responded:

Glad you’re following recent events! There’s so much going on, it can be difficult to keep up with.

We’re trying to maintain the most comprehensive record of the anti-Wall Street protests internationally. You can see the archive here if you like: http://wsws.org/category/wallst.shtml

I think the protest movement has shown itself to be a nascent, spontaneous, first sign of mass opposition to capitalism, and that really comes out when one compares Occupy to the other protest movements in the recent period—anti-war, anti-globalization, anti-consumerist protest movements.

Those protests did not have a fairly explicit and international class character. This does. Over 1000 cities had Occupy protests this past weekend, some of the European gatherings were enormous in numbers—in the tens of thousands in cities, 300,000 on Saturday in Spain. “We are the 99%” appeared on the placards of Europeans, in English.

It’s an important development that people are coming out to oppose rule of the banks, as the bailouts and austerities are impoverishing them. That’s got to terrify the political establishment, as they have no response—there’s no public works programs, no real jobs program, no mortgage relief, but more wars, record profits and increasing repression.

The assassination of an American citizen overseas recently should be taken very seriously. The G.W. Obama administration’s not-so-secret assassination committee isn’t primarily concerned with some remote threat from Yemen. The threat to the interests they represent is here, and it’s sporadically homeless, jobless and has kids to feed.

Occupy has to be defined and understood by its own politics and by its context. To the former, there’s a lot to to be said about its political source in anarchism and its horizontal leadership form, and those things currently stand as impediments to its development. It can only go so far in its current form. It has to take an explicitly socialist political perspective to effectively oppose the rule of the banks.

The many so-called “leftists”—union leaders, academic activists, various Democrats, MoveOn.org, and the contributors to the Nation Magazine—who’ve expressed support for the movement are political operators who have a lot to lose if there’s mass opposition to the Democrats: their reputation as the Official Left, which has become fatally politically compromised by its fawning support of the Obama administration, and their own pro-war and pro-trade war positions in
defense of American capitalism. They will be identified with those policies once the truth is exposed and the Tea Party and religious right are no longer effective distractions from their own support for austerity, war and occupation.

Without real revolutionary politics, all of this protest will be shoved quietly into the gaping cash-hole of Obama’s re-election campaign. The trade unions have intervened powerfully here in Chicago, and in New York, to accomplish exactly that.

To the latter issue—the context in which Occupy arises—it looks like there’s a pre-revolutionary situation developing. There are no humane policy options available to the ruling parties here that also preserve the dominance of American capitalism (to which no serious competitor has emerged).

On one hand, the rulers cannot rule in the old way—they’ve repudiated the rule of law and torn up the short-lived peace treaty between labor and capital in order to continue to carry out their aims. On the other hand, the people cannot live in the old way—their jobs and homes are not safe, our generation and those younger have no hope for decent jobs or an income enough to raise a family in the near future, and the bailouts which require further cuts to services don’t resolve the underlying global economic instability.

So, I’m inclined to think Occupy is the first major protest in a series of major political experiences we’re about to have.

Occupy Workplaces.