See you on October 5
If Occupy Wall Street has taught us anything, it’s that it’s time to dream big.
October 4, 2011
REMINDER: In Conjunction with the large mobilization of Unions and other organizations to Wall Street, There has been a Statewide walkout called by New York Students Rising, a statewide student network between SUNY and CUNY campuses. More than 10 different SUNY and CUNY campuses are planning a Walk out/Speak out Wednesday. At CUNY Hunter College, there is going to be a Speak Out outside of Hunter West at 1pm. Come protest the lack of student services, our crumbling infrastructure, our overcrowded classrooms, and the fact that the Board of Trustees are going to continue raising our tuition for the next 5 years by 35%. Show Solidarity with our Professors and Adjuncts who face a continued assault on their teaching autonomy, union benefits, layoffs and “non-rehires” of Adjuncts. RSVP on the Facebook event here: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=204417199613843
IF THE NYPD–likely on the orders of New York City’s richest man, Mayor Michael Bloomberg–was trying to promote the occupy movement by violently attacking it, it succeeded magnificently.
originally posted here
Sherry Wolf is the author of Sexuality and Socialism: History, Politics and Theory of LGBT Liberation and an associate editor of the International Socialist Review. Her writing has also appeared in the Nation, CounterPunch and New Politics. She was on the executive committee of the 2009 National Equality March.
The brutal police crackdowns on peaceful protesters on two successive Saturdays have managed to help amplify at least one message of the movement: the system is profoundly fucked up and must be changed.
Thousands of ordinary working people have gone down to the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) Liberty Plaza encampment in the last week to show solidarity with this diverse movement, find out more about it or just imbibe the spirit of resistance.
In a nation that has been crassly homogenized with box stores and strip malls that have obliterated most community spaces, the spreading occupy movement has provided the first commons most of us have experienced in decades, if not ever. That alone seems part of the appeal.
Dozens of teachers showed up at the square on Sunday to stage a grade-in. What a creative idea for a group of demonized workers under constant assault to literally work together within the encampment and share what they do and think with each other and the thousands who streamed past yesterday.
If my own white-collar workplace of several hundred cubicle-dwelling Dilberts in Manhattan is any indication, OWS is gaining ground–and not just among self-identified leftists and trade unionists.
As an organized socialist with comrades who have participated in the occupation since the planning stages, I was aware that during the occupation’s first days it went largely ignored by my coworkers. Most of them are under 35 and scrambling to hold onto their precarious employment, as am I, at 46. Even coworkers active on Facebook and Twitter, were largely out of the loop.
But after the initial police attack on September 24, captured on video and broadcast on YouTube around the world, the shift at work was palpable. The chatter in the elevators, hallways and coffee stations was about the senseless brutality of the police toward young people just trying to get a hearing. Coming just a few days after the state of Georgia lynched Troy Davis on September 21, few could avoid making the easy connection between a state that ignored the pleas of an innocent man and the police pepper-spraying, slamming and arresting innocent marchers.
The empire’s foreign policy of killing and brutalizing to secure its markets abroad is domesticating its tactics to–quite literally in this case–protect its markets at home.
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WHAT WAS a vague but widespread sympathy for OWS protesters is now coming into focus. Coworkers are starting to filter downtown to the occupation and join the free-market of ideas on offer at Liberty Plaza. I came back from an early morning spent at OWS last Thursday and reported to a huddled group of coworkers on my debate there with, of all people, hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons. You know you’re in NYC when…
He and I and an older Black woman community organizer, Queenie, agreed that we need to press for some concrete demands to push things forward. Some occupiers are resistant to any demands. Simmons is for electoral reforms, whereas Queenie and I argued for demands that we feel could help galvanize and channel the discontent, such as a moratorium on all foreclosures and a genuine mass jobs program, using the trillions the banks are sitting on.
I also suggested putting a figure on the hugely popular tax-the-rich sentiment. Given the recent pop culture romanticism with the early 1960s, how about returning to the Camelot-era tax rate for the highest earners: 91 percent. Simmons, whose reported wealth is $350 million, sort of stared back at me, wondering if I was serious. The anti-demands occupier nodded in approval.
Why not? If you’ve ever haggled at a flea market or a souk, you know that you stake your claim at the extremes of possibility. If we’re going to fight, let’s demand what we really want. If OWS has forced one thing to the fore, it’s the sentiment that it’s time to dream big.
This week poses a new possibility. Trade unionists are getting on board, and not just the unions with leftish credentials. The United Federation of Teachers, Service Employees International Union Local 32BJ, the health care workers’ union 1199SEIU, Workers United, Transport Workers Union Local 100 and others are mobilizing for this Wednesday’s mass march, gathering at 4:30 p.m. at City Hall, and marching to OWS at Liberty Plaza.
This will bring the organized working class onto the stage in a very concrete way–with the power to nationalize a debate on a level impossible to dismiss and with the forces to back up a demand. Their sheer involvement, and the unanimous endorsement they have given already, raises the stakes and opens the way to new possibilities in this movement.
I aim to encourage as many of my coworkers as possible to join me down there. We are among the nearly 90 percent of American workers who are not (yet) in unions. And life is getting much, much grimmer inside what Fortune once nicknamed “the Fidel Castro of office furniture”–though, in all truth, Fidel has had greater longevity than the cubicle, which was invented nearly a decade after he came to power in 1959.
We Dilberts must join our unionized, unemployed, student and retired brothers and sisters on Wednesday, October 5. We may inhabit three-walled cells by day, but marching in solidarity with thousands to the square will make for a liberating evening. Let’s go Dilberts!
First published at SherryTalksBack.
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