In the Streets—Occupy Oakland and Something Like a General Strike

Thousand of Occupy Oakland demonstrators fill an overpass bridge on their march to the Port of Oakland to shut it down.  The Longshore Workers union instructed their members that they could honor the Occupy picket line.  The ILWU has a long history of militancy and has several time shut down the port for handling weapons or cargo to oppressive regimes.  It may be the most militant local union in the U.S.

Note—Today is Election Day in the U.S.  It goes without saying if you haven’t voted yet, get your ass to the polls.  Then we will all wait on pins and needles for perhaps days or weeks to see what the official results might be and we might possibly endure domestic turmoil that could look a lot like civil war.  But today I want to take note of the largest and possibly most important action that grew out of the Occupy Movement nine years ago: a virtual—and I don’t mean on Zoom—General Strike in Oakland.  It may inform us of what we might need to do again in the face of a Trumpist post-election coup.

I have written before about a double strategy for progressives, working people, minorities, and the generally oppressed.

First, playing defense to protect ourselves and our rights from right wing and fascist assaults.  That has meant voting, and specifically voting Democratic, as a defense against further depredations and to reverse some of the more onerous actions taken against us, our planet, and our future.  And I know that Democrats are far from perfect, often have their own compromised relationships with the oligarchs behind much of the Randist and Trumpist agenda, and do not go far enough in willingness to fundamentally change a broken system.  But they are what we have and marching off in a dozen ideologically pure directions will increase the likelihood of our mortal enemies remaining in power.

Occupy Wall Street sparked a nation-wide movement that may have reached its pinnacle in Oakland.

But the second strategy is going on the offence in the streets and in our communities to demand systematic change, no matter who is in power, even the Democratic “protectors” we have just elected.  One of the most notable examples of this was the Occupy Movement which began as a radically egalitarian protest to Wall Street and the One Percent of the population that seizes and hoards the vast majority of the wealth of the country. It was an organic movement without traditional leadership and unaffiliated with existing organs like political parties, labor unions, ideological sects, and even traditional protest movement.  It spread rapidly across the country and eventually involved hundreds of cities and communities of every size across the country.  Encampments in civic centers, marches, rallies, and creative actions were directed by peoples' assemblies meeting each day.  Tens of thousands, probably hundreds of thousands were engaged.

The action in Oakland which will be described below was probably the high point of the movement and undoubtedly threw a scare into the establishment.  Subsequently Barak Obama’s Department of Justice and security agencies semi-secretly co-operated with local authorities to find ways to smash the Occupations one by one, often using violent force to do so.  By spring of 2012 virtually all of the Occupations had been removed and squelched.

But a whole generation of newly minted activists, who were unafraid of the old scare words like socialism, did not just disappear.  They redirected their efforts in many ways.  Many flocked to the Bernie Sanders campaign in 2016 and went on to engage in progressive electoral action at every level.  They lent their support and bodies to other movements including the student led anti-gun violence campaigns and more recently the Black Lives Matter protests energized by the murder of George Floyd and others.  Many are ready now to face the backlash of White nationalism and emboldened fascism.  How many of the rest of us of whatever age will be ready to stand with them.

Here is what I posted nine years ago.  It captured the moment so I have not revised it in hindsight.  I will let you draw your own conclusions.

Yesterday the NBC Nightly News seemed much more interested in Herman Cain’s sexual harassment scandal—they spent the first 10 minutes of the broadcast examining it in exquisite detail with a lot of footage of the Republican candidate wandering through throngs of reporters declining to comment.

After the 15 minute mark, Brian Williams finally got down to what he called the widening protests in Oakland.  I strained, but am not sure he uttered the words General Strike.  Even trying to downplay the events, however, it was apparent that something major was happening on the West Coast.

The question is, was it really a General Strike?  Maybe yes.  Maybe no.  Depends on your definition.  American labor unions have been prohibited by law—the Taft-Hartley Act—from engaging in sympathy strikes of all kinds, including General Strikes.  So although most major unions in Oakland and even a state labor body endorsed the “aims of the Occupy Oakland movement and protest” they could not officially call their members out on strike.  They did encourage members who “are able” to participate in the demonstrations.  Plausible deniability was the rule of the day.  The International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) made a point of issuing a statement that its members should report to their scheduled shifts—but that they might choose not to cross picket lines.

NBC carried footage of the president of the Service Employees (SEIU) festooned in his purple union shirt and standing by an official union table.  The City of Oakland, desperately trying to make amends for the fiasco police raid [on an Occupy encampment] that nearly killed an Iraq War vet, had given permission for its employees, many of who are represented by the SEIU, to take off work for the protests.  The local president was at pains to say that the union was not describing the event as a General Strike.

A significant percentage of Teachers Union members stayed away from the classroom but called in sick or used personal days.  The same was true of a large contingent of Nurses.

How many people, unionized or not, actually walked off the job or who were affected by numerous “voluntary” closures of down town businesses is impossible to gage.  What we do know is that thousands took the streets for a day and night of marches, picketing, and protests that effectively ground business as usual to a halt.

Things got underway in the morning with a large rally where the principle speaker, at least according to the press, was veteran activist Angela Davis.  By all account she gave a rip-roaring speech that got the crowd fired up.  Of course as a well-documented and public former member of the Communist Party of United States (CPUSA) her prominent role will undoubtedly be the big news in right wing attacks on the movement.

After the rally the crowd divided into several smaller marches crisscrossing the city to different targets.

Teachers and parents marched on the School Board issuing them a symbolic eviction notice for failing to protect the interests and education of children against budget cuts.  A Children’s March kept in the vicinity of the Occupy Oakland base at Oscar Grant Plaza carrying chanting “Play nice and share.”

Large groups of marchers headed to the downtown locations of major banks, moving from one to another.  The banks locked their doors and announced that they were closing “for the safety of our customers and staff.”  At one location “black clad, masked” individuals pushed forward and shattered a window.  The vandals may have been the determined anarchist street fighters who seek to make every demonstration violent, agents provocateurs, or in all likelihood both. Other protestors intervened to stop the damage as the crowd chanted “no violence, no violence.”  But there were reported fist fights between the “militants” and other protestors trying to restrain them.  In the end, except for a few isolated incidents during the daytime hours, the marches and pickets were remarkably peaceful.

 

In 1946 Oakland was the scene of the last General Strike in America.

Oakland police virtually abandoned the streets—just as they did in 1946 [a post the day before described the Oakland General Strike].  Demonstrators policed themselves with some considerable discipline.  They also directed traffic away from and around areas where they were in the streets and occasionally cleared the way for emergency vehicles.

Despite the fact that a march to close down the Port of Oakland was not scheduled until early evening, ILWU members were refusing to off load ships or handle cargo.  By mid-morning observers said the port was effectively closed.

Around 5 pm the major march to the Port took off with thousands of participants.  Crowd estimates varied widely, but images from helicopter news cameras clearly show thousands completely filling a long bridge to the port.  Demonstrators arrived in time to put up mass pickets to “dissuade” second shift workers to enter the port.  ILWU members asked folks from Occupy Oakland to extend their picket for a full 24 hours and a request went out for more volunteers to return to the port at shift change this morning.

The encampment at Oscar Grant Plaza was the home base of Occupy Oakland.

It was a reportedly jubilant crowd.  After most left the Port many went home, including a lot of exhausted Occupy Oakland regulars who returned to their tents in Oscar Gant Plaza for rest.  Several smaller groups continued to march in the city center.

Around 9 o’clock a group stormed and occupied a vacant building hanging a banner from a lit second story window.  The building was reportedly the former location of the Travelers’ Aid which ran programs for the homeless there until budget cuts ended their funding and they lost the building to foreclosure.  Ranks of heavily armed and armored police made their first appearance of the day and ordered the building vacated.  Most demonstrators removed themselves from the immediate area while a couple of hundred militants rallied to the defense of the building. Violence erupted.  Police once again used teargas, pepper spray, flash bombs, and those “non-lethal” projectile weapons that caused such injury on Monday.  TV news crews made much of a makes shift barricade in the street and footage of dumpster fires. Windows in surrounding buildings were broken.  A sign by one such window proclaimed that the violence was not condoned by the Occupy Oakland Steering Committee.

There was at least one other clash between police and protestors at another intersection before things quieted down.  Many reports of these clashes from reliable participants indicate a wide spread belief that they were caused by police infiltrators.  Indeed police infiltrators had been photographed and identified earlier.

The night after the march to the Port of Oakland, Occupy demonstrators were attacked by tear gas, pepper spray, and "non-lethal" projectiles at a building occupation, in smaller street clashes, and on an exceptionally violent raid on the Oscar Grant Plaza encampment.

But the violence was not over for the night.  After midnight phalanxes of police surrounded Oscar Gant Plaza where most residents were asleep in their tents.  Loudspeakers announced that the Plaza would be cleared.  Warnings of the use of chemical weapons were issued.  Gas was thrown and flash bombs, but most residents refused to leave.  Several times they were given five minutes to disperse and police advanced menacingly to the edge of the encampment.  But they never entered the Plaza.  At the end of the confrontation, protestors held their ground.

There were several reported arrests in these night time confrontations and several injuries.  But I have so far seen no exact reports from either authorities or protestors.  Early in the evening a man and a woman were injured when an elderly man drove his Mercedes into a crowd blocking a street.  Both were taken away in ambulances.  Rumors swept the streets, later shown to be unfounded, than one of them had died.  Demonstrators surrounded the car police arrived and rescued the driver who was allowed to leave with no charges being filed on the scene.

It seems likely that another outbreak of police over-reaction will only increase the determination of Occupy Oakland participants and undoubtedly lead to more protests.

The actions yesterday and last night, whether or not they represented a true General Strike in the most technical use of the term, must be rung up as a great success for the movement.  The objectives of the day were achieved—shutting down business as usual in the city and in the Port of Oakland in particular.  A general commitment to militant non-violence was maintained through most of the day.  The clashes at night, in my opinion as a distant observer gleaning information from various sources, will probably be shown to be mostly the work of plants and provocateurs with the possible assistance of that minority of mindless street fighters who, whatever their intentions, so often do the bosses’ work. 

Most of all the Occupy Oakland General Strike may become a template for actions in other cities.  May it be so.

  

Labor’s Somber Month—In November We Remember

This 2015 cover of the Industrial Worker was in the continuing tradition "In November We Remember" issues.

For many of us November is a melancholy month.  Often slate gray skies silhouette naked trees in a chilling wind.  Death seems at hand.  But so is its handmaiden—remembrance.  After all, the month begins with All Souls/Day of the Dead when the memories of ancestors and loved ones are honored.  

English school children still chant “Remember, Remember the Fifth of November,”  now a harmless nursery rhyme about Guy Fawkes and the Gunpowder Plot but was once an annual call to riot and mayhem against Catholics not only in Britain but in pre-Revolutionary War New England.  Here in the American Midwest we are often reminded of the Edmund Fitzgerald, the Great Lakes iron ore freighter that sank with all hands in a gale on Lake Superior on November 10, 1975 and is commemorated in Gordon Lightfoot’s haunting ballad.  On November 11 Americans celebrate Veterans Day on the anniversary of the armistice that ended the First World War.  But in Britain and most Commonwealth nations it is a somber Remembrance Day, more akin to our Memorial Day in honoring war dead.

Ralph Chaplin, then the editor of the Industrial Worker wrote this poem, later set to music.  Pictured is Frank Little, the tough IWW hard rock miners organizer who was lynched in Butte, Montana in 1917.

But the month carries special meaning to the American labor movement.  Beginning in the early 1920’s the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) began annually commemorating a string of radical and union martyrs under the heading In November We Remember!  Aside from articles in the union press—the Industrial Pioneer and the Industrial Worker and often local programs and memorials, the month was used to raise funds for the General Defense Committee for the legal defense of persecuted unionists and aid for class war prisoners.

Most often cited in annual observances were the following cases, each with a unique and tragic story.  In each case I will link to a blog post with full story.

The execution of the Haymarket Martyrs in 1887.

The Haymarket Martyrs—On November 11, 1887 four of the original eight anarchists and unionists charged with murder after a bomb exploded killing several attacking police at a protest rally at Haymarket Square in Chicago on May 4, 1886.  Albert Parsons, August Spies, Adolph Fischer, and George Engel were hung at Cook County Jail.  A fifth defendant, Louis Ling, had committed suicide in jail to deprive the state from executing him.  Their death galvanized the international labor movement and led directly to the establishment of May Day as International Labor Day.

The Everett Massacre--The IWW lost at least 5 dead and 27 injured when Sheriff's deputies and timber industry gun thugs opened fire on the Verona and another boat bringing Seattle Wobblies to Everett, Washington for a free speech fight on November 5, 1916.  About half a dozen other Wobs were missing and presumed drowned after jumping from the ambushed boat to evade the lethal cross fire from shore.  

Wobblies raised money for a new headstone for Wesley Everett in Centralia.  The backside tells the story.

The Centralia Massacre—See my Armistice/Veterans Day post.  November 1l was also the centennial of the Centralia Massacre.  Westley Everest, an IWW member and veteran in uniform, was lynched following an attack on the IWW hall in Centralia, Washington by members of a lumbermen’s Citizen Committee and American Legionaries.

The post-mortem photo of Joe Hill's body show four firing squad bullets that killed him/

Joe Hill—Legendary IWW songwriter and footloose agitator Joe Hill (a/k/a Joel Haglund and Joseph Hillstrom) was executed by firing squad in Utah for a murder he could not have committed on this date in 1915.  Many of his songs continue to be printed in new editions of the IWW’s Little Red Song Book and he help establish a tradition of labor music inherited by Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Utah Phillips, and Si Kahn and others.  He may be best known to the public for I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill Last Night, a song by Alfred Hayes and Earl Robinson famously recorded by Paul Robeson and Joan Baez.

Mother Jones celebrated her birthday on May 1, 1930 a few month before she died.

Mother Jones—Although not a martyr and directly related to the IWW only through her attendance at its 1905 founding convention, Mary Harris Jones, the miners’ angel, is often included in later versions of this litany.  She died on November 30, 1930 well into her 90’s after more than forty years of tireless activism and hell raising.

Both the IWW and the labor movement also use this month to remember the countless others who have given their lives during the years of more or less open class warfare in the United States and down to this day.

For instance D.J. Alperovitz as part of his massive IWW archive project at the University of Washington has documented the deaths of more than 170 individual associated with the union from its founding to the 1970’s in the file IWW Members Killed Year by Year.  The list includes some bystanders killed when police, militia, or gun thugs shot at strikers and picketers, the unborn babies of women who miscarried due to violence, members who died in jail often after abuse, and some who were killed in fights or while allegedly committing crimes that may or may not have been related to their membership.

Among the earliest listed are several members killed in the IWW’s 1909 Press Steel Car Strike in McKees Rocks, Pennsylvania.  Seven members were gunned down and murdered in the Columbine Massacre in 1924 in Colorado when the state Militia opened fire with machine guns on a camp of coal strikers and their families.  Several other strikes had multiple fatalities.  The list also includes Wobs who died in the Baja Rebellion of 1913, Mexican Revolution, in the Soviet Union during and after the Russian Civil War, and while fighting as volunteers in the Spanish Civil War.  The last two listed were Frank Terrugi, a student, journalist, IWW member killed in the 1973 Chilean Coup whose story was an inspiration for the film   Missing with Jack Lemon and Sissy Spacek and journalist Frank Gould who disappeared in 1974 while covering the Moro Rebellion in the Philippines. 

Of course we should remember the labor dead beyond the IWW.  A far from comprehensive list would include those killed in the Great Railway Strike of 1877, decades of mine wars in Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Kentucky, Illinois, and Colorado including the Battle of Blair Mountain, the 1919 Steel Strike, and the 1937 Memorial Day Massacre in Chicago.

So much to remember….

When Labor Awoke—Wisconsin Governor’s Overreach Set off a Firestorm

Note—Two years ago this week in the opening gambit of what turned out to be a tsunami of attacks on working people, labor, and democracy itself, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker also triggered a new people’s movement.  That movement would spread to other states—Ohio, Michigan, Indiana among others. 

A few months later the Occupy Movement would spread a people’s movement in the streets across the country.  Together these actions and these events dramatically changed the political and social conversation in the nation that had been almost completely dominated by the radical right and its Tea Party sock puppets.  The national media entranced by that shiny bauble, was slow to understand what was happening.  But in less than two years it was clear that the American people had rejected austerity, punishing the poor and working class, unrestrained looting by the wealthy and powerful, stripping government of every authority save that of closely regulating women’s bodies and life choices.  Barack Obama owes his re-election as much to this sea change as his vaunted organization or the disarray of the Right.

 Everything is not well.  Walker and the other Republican governors in the Rust Belt states backed by heavy majorities in their gerrymander legislatures generally were able to pass most of their draconian legislation over sustained protests.  Often the courts have blocked the worst of the provisions.  In fact the avalanche of horrible legislation was brought on by the Right’s realization that they might have only a short time to set their “reforms” in concrete before they are swept away.  That’s all that the paymaster behind them wanted anyway.

The left has hardly understood what has happened.  Many in the Occupy Movement seem perplexed and disappointed that their demands for radical and fundamental change seems to have translated into votes for Democrats who they find cowardly and hardly less creatures of the oligarchy than the Republicans.  And that is true as far as it goes.  But it was the people rising up and using the weapon of defense—the vote and using it in defiance of every plot and scheme to prevent them from exercising it.

Much more needs to be done.  Defense must shift to offense.  The battles must be fought on our terms, as the Chicago Teachers’ Strike last fall show.  We will need to take again to the streets.  And most importantly we will have to forge new organs, new organizations, new alliances that employ fresh ideas and tactics suitable for the age of Twitter and Facebook.

But history is will look back to what happened in the snows of Madison two years ago as the tipping point. 

What follows is my blog post exactly two years ago today, written as events were unfolding.  Let’s refresh our memories.

Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker is a hero in his own mind.  He sees himself as a swashbuckling avenger taking down the “sacred cow” of public employee unionism.  Elected along with rabid Republican majorities in both houses of the state Legislature in the Tea Party Tsunami last November he believed he had a mandate for revolutionary change in a state with a long and proud Progressive tradition and a healthy Labor Movement.

Wisconsin, like many states, was undergoing a fiscal crisis as the Recession-that-will-not-die-no-matter-what-the-economists-say simultaneously sapped tax revenues and placed new demands on human services and safety net programs.  The crisis would have to be addressed.  Tax increases, like those just adopted in neighboring Illinois, were off the table, not even to be considered by tax allergic Republicans.  Every one knew big budget cuts were coming.  The question was who would get hit, and how bad.

Typically, Walker and the Republicans focused on social services and “entitlements”, seeing an opportunity to shrink government.  But Walker dared go further—he declared war on the state’s own employees and did it with strutting bravado.  His base eats that sort of thing up.  He may have even imagined that his actions could catapult him overnight from a nationally obscure freshman governor to a new hero of the Right.  Maybe he could leap over New Jersey Governor Chris Christie the darling get-tough executive, Sara Palin, or Michele Bachman to the top of red meat and hair-on-fire ranks.

Walker’s plan was nothing if not sweeping and radical.  He did not even bother to offer to meet with public employee unions.  He declared, there will be no negotiations.  Instead he advanced a plan that would slash or virtually eliminate public employee pensions and shift almost all of the cost of health insurance onto employees.  This was necessary, he said, to balance the budget without massive layoffs.  Because “rationalizing” the state’s work force would naturally reduce the number of workers needed any way, Walker decided to skip the hassle of negotiating changes in job descriptions, work loads, and conditions by stripping public employee unions of the right to bargain over any issues other than base salary.  He would also gut grievance procedures giving him and agency heads carte-blanche to ride roughshod over individual employees. The public employees were not just state employees either--they included county, municipal, school, and other local government workers.

The Governor sensed that his might not go over too well with government workers.  He attempted to split them by exempting local police and fire employees and State Patrolmen from the harshest provisions.  Some of those unions had actually foolishly supported his candidacy.  Besides, he had the feeling he might need that police protection.

In retrospect, I wonder if Gov. Walker wishes he had picked a better moment to announce his plan.  He picked the very day Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak was being toppled by Cairo street demonstrators.  Maybe he thought it would get lost in the shuffle.  But he boldly stepped up to microphones and announced his sweeping plan.  He also declared that Republican majorities in both houses were sure to rapidly adopt the necessary legislation with out as much as disturbing a comma of his proposals.  Oh, and by the way, he said, if public employees dared protest or “cause disruptions” he was fully prepared to mobilize the National Guard.  In fact, he said, he had already consulted with Guard commanders about the possibility of deployment.

Threatening military action against his own employees before the fact may just have pushed the envelope a bit too far.  Word of the threat spread like wildfire.  The words were hardly out of his mouth before he was being compared to Mubarak and workers were planning their own demonstrations.

These days with Facebook, Twitter, and blogs it does not take long to organize a response.  Even before top labor leaders could call outraged news conferences, public workers were making their own plans to descend on the Capitol.

Yesterday, tens of thousands did just that surrounding the public spaces around the Capital and jamming the corridors inside.  Chants compared Walker to Mubarak and called for his ouster.  Many carried homemade signs say “I’m Not Afraid of the Guard.”  Hundreds of firefighters marched to join the demonstrators lending their support despite the preferential treatment that their union had received.  In Milwaukee thousands protested outside the Governor’s home and teachers walked off the job to join the protest causing some schools to close.  In Madison and elsewhere high school students walked out in support of their teachers.  Unionized private employer workers joined the fight as well.

Last night hundreds, led mostly by university teaching assistants and other staff, occupied the capital building over night demanding to be heard in public hearings being held.  Hundreds who signed up to speak at the hearing refused to leave until they were heard.  Shortly after 2 AM Republican legislators conducting the hearing left the Capitol by a side door to avoid being seen by the crowds.  Democrats kept the committee hearings in session all night as angry testimony continued.

Today the throngs around the Capitol have only grown.  Madison schools were officially closed due to a massive teacher sick-in.  Students from the nearby University of Wisconsin campus have been joined by high school and even middle school students supporting the workers.  Progressive, liberal, and radical organizations of all stripes and their members have joined a united stand against this naked power grab. 

Reports on the scene indicate that the mood of the crowds is buoyant and determined.  Everyone declares a willingness to stay “as long as necessary.”

The governor has been lying low, but issuing defiant statements.  So far he has called for no police action nor alerted the Guard.  Perhaps he realizes if he does so the powder keg might literally explode.

The nation is just now becoming dimly aware of what is happening.  The major media, as always barely aware of developments in “flyover” country have been slow to pick up the story.  That is beginning to change.  Workers in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Minnesota—all states with huge blue collar communities—are keeping a close eye on developments as their own governors have been making noises similar to Walker.  This could spread rapidly if they make good on those noises.

It you are in Wisconsin today, or can get there, I urge you, drop what you are doing and find a protest to join.