Thrown out of Their Camps, Can the Occupiers Return Stronger?

From Manhattan, to Nashville, to St. Louis, to Portland, Ore., to Oakland, Calif., the police this week moved in to clear out the Occupy Wall Street protesters from the various downtown plazas or squares where they’d established their peaceable camps. Mayor of Oakland, Jean Quan, had earlier acknowledged a conference call between 18 mayors across the U.S. discussing strategy, and the mode elected was clear enough. Get them out, by any means necessary.

These marching orders were taken most seriously in the birthplace of the Free Speech Movement in 1964, at Sproul Plaza, entryway into the University of California at Berkeley. Jack Weinberg’s arrest for soliciting money for the civil rights movement prompted FSMs birth. He was put into a police car, but a spontaneous sit-down trapped it. Eventually, the roof of the vehicle was used as a FSM platform.

A week ago, hundreds of students came out to Sproul Plaza to protest proposed fee hikes of 81 percent that would bring UC tuition from $13,000 to over $22,000. The students’ argument was simple: the banks caused the financial crisis, the financial crisis caused the budget crisis and therefore the banks, not the students, should pay for it. The students drew inspiration from the Occupy Movement and set up their own small encampment on the lawn outside Sproul Hall.

An eyewitness, Michael Levien, described what happened at around 9.30 p.m. this past Monday night: “A phalanx of police in riot gear turned the corner of Sproul Hall and rapidly charged, thrusting their batons with violent force into the crowd. Chanting ‘non-violent protest’ and ‘stop beating students,’ student after student took fierce baton thrusts to their chests and limbs.

“Then the police started swinging, brutally beating people’s chests, arms, knees and backs. They were swinging to hurt. With the crowd behind and the police in front there was no way for people to leave, even if they wanted to. A few people tried to escape in the narrow gap between the students and police. They were savagely beaten. Throughout what can only be described as a terrifying physical attack that has left many with serious injuries, the students stayed entirely non-violent.”

In an email to the campus, Chancellor Birgeneau, who often likes to reminisce about his Freedom Rider days, defended the administration’s response, saying that it was necessary to remove the encampment for “practical” considerations of “hygiene, safety, space and conflict issues.” He remarked: “It is unfortunate that some protesters chose to obstruct the police by linking arms and forming a human chain to prevent the police from gaining access to the tents. This is not non-violent civil disobedience.”

So chapter one of the Occupy Movement draws to a close. Maybe the concerted onslaught by uniformed goons actually did the movement a favor — scant comfort to those battered to the ground — by leaving the occupiers with a positive bank balance, in terms of imagery, at the moment of their enforced departures. Some of the campsites were getting pretty funky, mustering spots for homeless people, older folk with perhaps less than idealistic motives and so forth.

What next? Thus far the OWS movement has mostly been evoked by its participants in terms of self-education and consciousness-raising about the nature of America’s political economy. There’s been a lot of talk about a brave new world being born. One fellow chided me for not writing more about the movement that he hailed as “the most militant upsurge from the Left since the Vietnam War, the most frontal assault on the worst features of capitalism since the Great Depression.” This is a vast overstatement.

In terms of substantive achievements, OWS has a long way to go, which is scarcely a reason for reproof since it only began in September. “The most frontal assault on the worst features of capitalism since the Great Depression?” Scarcely. 

The early 1960s Civil Rights Movement prompted the Civil Rights Act and Medicare, the latter being effectively socialized medicine for the over-65s. Pushed by the popular movements, President Johnson and a Democratic Congress passed a flood of laws.

As the historian Alan Nasser recently pointed out on CounterPunch, “In less than four years, Congress enacted the Truth In Lending Act, the Fair Packaging and Labeling Act, the National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act, the National Gas Pipeline Safety Act, the Federal Hazardous Substances Act, the Flammable Fabrics Act, the federal Meat Inspection Act and the Child Protection Act.

“Business-government relations had never before seen such an avalanche of legislation limiting the freedom of capital in the interests of working people. Between 1964 and 1968, Congress passed 226 of 252 worker-friendly bills into law. Federal funds transferred to the poor increased from $9.9 billion in 1960 to $30 billion in 1968. One million workers received job training from these bills and 2 million children were enrolled in pre-school Head Start programs by 1968.”

Resistance to the war in Indochina was fierce. In Vietnam, the troops mutinied. Units shot their officers in the back or threw grenades into their tents. In 1971, the Pentagon counted 503,926 “incidents of desertion” since 1966 and reckoned that more than half of U.S. ground forces in Vietnam openly opposed the war. During Christmas 1971, Vietnam Vets Against the War seized the Statue of Liberty for 48 hours and draped it with a banner demanding, “Bring our Brothers Home.”

On the home front, people fought the draft or simply fled it. Major American cities were torn by riots. The anti-war movement, coming on the heels of the Civil Rights Movement, transformed a generation. In the end, Congress simply denied Nixon the money for the war in Indochina.

To evoke those stormy times is to underline that American corporate capitalism is infinitely better protected than it was in the late 1960s, when America was at the peak of its economic power and those worker-friendly laws shot through Congress. Today, however, Moody’s warns the world that U.S. T-bills are a risky investment.

These days, corporate lobbies own the President, Congress and the regulatory agencies. Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, the banks’ errand boy, lays down national economic policy. He took over from Hank Paulson, another errand boy. If Obama is not re-elected in 2012, another one will be waiting in the wings.

In the 1930s, Roosevelt developed his New Deal program in part to head off mass movements to his left. In the 1960s, Kennedy and Johnson similarly responded to the challenge of mass movements. Today, the OWSers have registered a presence and won considerable public support, which should not be surprising since America is in poor shape, the very rich unpopular and politicians despised. But, as yet, there is no sign of any political consequence deriving from this popularity.

Four years ago, a candidacy was gathering momentum, declaring that the time had come in America for a moral awakening, for a change in national consciousness, a rising above self-interest and partisanship. Young people rallied to the call. Obama swept into the White House and promptly stuck a “Business As Usual” sign on the door of the Oval Office.

In some ways, OWS can be seen as a re-run of the idealistic hopes of those Obama zealots of 2008, minus illusions about crusading candidacies. But in the end, a political movement has to produce something tangible in the way of change and improvement in material conditions. Or at least, it should show that it’s working hard to evolve a strategy in that direction. The OWSers are resourceful and inventive. Let’s hope they come up with something soon.