Last night was a dramatic an emotional GA. I stumbled in kind of late, was greeted by my comrades and took my place outside of the circle as I consider that my place. I heard some talk of some flyer someone wanted endorsed and calmly disassociated. There were some procedural matters regarding weather or not the vote was valid because of the number of people abstaining. I heard an emotional narrative from a woman who was having survival issues, and one of my dearest comrades went into empathetic overload. I felt I had to speak, I did and now I want to present a bit more of an organized statement on some underlying sociological factors which I feel are killing the potential of occupy.

I made some leaps of logic because I didn’t expect people to really get what I was talking about. And the reason why I did that, and held that viewpoint was because I consider many of the people in occupy to be insane. This insanity takes many forms; inability to communicate, inability to empathize, but most of all an inability for all of us to get outside ourselves and stop doing the same thing over and over again while expecting a different result. I am not pointing any fingers in this essay; I am stating that we as a collective must each individually learn to introspect, become self aware, develop consciousness, and most of all develop identity, beyond what our parents and society told us. What that looks like is unpacking both our privilege and our oppression because those backgrounds are the building blocks of the identities that society has placed on us.

I jumped to white privilege because I feel that is a big factor in the collective neurosis of occupy. Let me get a little personal and tell you why this is such an important issue for me. When I was a man, and especially a very white, Anglo privileged man; I carried a gun, chewed my tobacco, even rode a horse sometimes and utterly hated myself. I carried a societal expectation to be a rugged individualist, an expert, a leader and an oppressor. I was violent, I was mean, I was macho, I dominated space, and was dismissive of women and people of color. I hated myself because no one wants to be like that, and it wasn’t me at all. It was an identity that society had placed on me and not one I had created through my own autonomy. It was an identity hammered into my being through violence, drugs, television, education, rape and western psychiatry.

When I became female identified it was an intense shock. My teachers stopped calling on me in class, I no longer was accoladed for my intelligence, people touched me non consensually in a casual manner and men in suits would push me out of the way on the sidewalk.

Through my transition I have realized over and over again, that every facet of our society is designed to oppress minorities, women, and anyone else who does not fit in and empower those who are white, rich or otherwise conformist. It permeates every part of our society, every tiny subtle detail, and those who benefit from it are the least likely to see it. And that is why a need for a total overthrow of all existing social conditions is a much needed public mental health issue.

I brought up the issue of mental health last night because most mental health issues are not innate to the individual but rather are by products of us living in a repressive society that punishes those that do not fit in. Again this is something that those who do fit in, or are privileged are almost incapable of realizing because their reality is built around there being ‘normal’.

I am not trying to paint a perfect picture of the situation in occupy, I am striving to point out a dynamic that illustrates how our revolution is impeded by a collective-individual inability to leave our baggage at the door. In pointing out the binary of oppression vs. privilege in people’s backgrounds, I am not tying to convey a polarity in our individual tendencies, but rather a spectrum between those polarities. We have privileged people of color that dominate GA and we have oppressed white people, and all kinds of other sorts of incredible beautiful people in between or individuals not even in that spectrum. But we do have privileged old white men, who talk a lot in GA and don’t listen in return, who tell our homeless comrades that all out revolt is a bridge too far, who dismiss the black bloc while telling us how awesome Gandhi was. We also have oppressed people who are socially conditioned not to speak up, and who struggle with their own survival and are thus impeded from political participation within occupy.

Occupy needs shock therapy. It’s going to take a few different forms. We all need to fundamentally challenge ourselves, and ask ourselves if what we are saying and doing is a matter of who we have been told we are, vs. who we want to be. It is only through that collective-individual process that we all can tear down the subtle hierarchy within occupy and truly start building a horizontal society.

We need to get out into the streets and start occupying spaces again, do it quite forcibly and with incredible gusto. It is because the convention center is not a people’s space, and we cannot take care of each other when guards usher us out the doors every night. It is also far easier for us to act collectively and as comrades in challenging ourselves in our viewpoints.

We need to be honest with ourselves and each other in our communication, our needs, and our ideas. Passive aggression and drama has pushed many people away from occupy and creates a climate of fear which proliferates the subtle hierarchy within occupy and that ultimately impedes the revolution. The way we avoid that passive aggression and its ensuing power games is through committing to an ethic of direct communication, honoring each others needs, and respecting each others autonomy.

Finally we need diversity of tactics, direct action, massive self-radicalization and recognize that revolution is indeed scary. We need these things because we live in the most revolution proof police state in human history. Everything within Amerika is designed from the top down to keep everyone in order, be passive and helpless as possible. Only intelligent use of a true diversity of tactics is capable of causing the beginning cracks in the system that will allow our revolution to succeed. Squabling over who does what and how only causes us to waste energy policing ourselves. If we want to be victories, we must allow our comrades liberty to pursue whatever aims they feel are best in their own minds. We need to be aggressive and assault the system in as many different ways as possible simultauneusly. We must implore our more cautious comrades to wake up and self radicalize for the exact same reasons, and because our participation in this plutocratic dystopia amounts continually to the blood of millions on our hands. Part of that self-radicalization is recognizing that these are indeed scary times, and none of us are alone in that fear. We can console ourselves in the fact that the risks we take are indeed worthwhile compared to the nightmarish future we all face if we stand silently by and do nothing. We can take comfort in the fact that not every risk we take has to result in a sacrifice, that we can protect ourselves and each other with our solidarity and our comradeship.

Athens, the birthplace of western civilization is burning. It is time for us to stop abstaining and start truly participating. Now is the perfect moment for worldwide decolonization. It is the year of the dragon; the planets are gaining perfect alignment. Let our battle cry not be an empty one, ‘everything for everyone, the revolution has begun’.

Athens, Oakland, Homs, Solidarity.

Our friends and us have organized 2 fundraising events coming up this weekend. We hope you can support, at least one of them! You can join the events on Facebook here and here

If you would like to support us but are unable to attend the events, please email us here!

Below is a clip from the film we are showing on Sunday, Idaho’s Forgotten War

A film about Indigenous people in Idaho fighting back against the US government

Sunday Feb 12th
4pm – 7pm

University of Washington, Gould 435
See map here
Requested Donation: $ 5- 10
Snacks are available for sale!

Join event here:

See you!

Now our friends are facing arbitrary firing, which looks like retaliation for speaking up back then.  One of them has already been fired, and they are trying to fire someone else right now.  Let’s show solidarity as they take action to try to stop this retaliation!

Here is the call to action from rank and file custodians and shop stewards:

There will be two rallies: one at 11 AM and the other at 1 PM. Both Monday, Feb 6 in Red Square!

We are fed up with management firing custodians and worrying about the reason later.
Based on manufactured evidence they are lowering the axe once again. This upcoming termination is based on unreliable evidence of a single instance of a custodian taking a break at the wrong time. This charge is not true, but even if it was, it is not grounds for termination. All his co-workers call him a hard worker. Management is going after him because he is one of the custodians who had the nerve to stand up and challenge their injustices in the past. Taking advantage of the climate of fear created by the recession, they have fired at least 7 UW Custodial Stewards and Activists over the past 2 years.

IT’S TIME TO STOP!

This is ad hoc, not an official Union Action. We are hoping for another rally, officially sanctioned in the near future. Please come out! spread the word!
Please come out! spread the word!
Contacts:
DougNielson@gmail.com
Paula Lukazek plumbp@earthlink.net

Please spread the word, and come out for the picket if you can.  We are building support for this within Decolonize/ Occupy Seattle and on the UW campus.  Please invite your friends on facebook.
Here is old footage from the rallies that kicked off the campus struggle. Don’t let the UW management silence folks in retaliation!

In addition, this totally destroys the myth of outside agitators putting passive immigrant workers at risk. Never doubt the power of immigrant workers! As the article puts it:

“If the drivers’ collective action sent shockwaves throughout the shipping and trucking industry, then their demonstration equally uprooted a commonly held societal belief. During the Occupy Wall Street port shutdowns, activists and well-intentioned sympathizers debated whether the blockades would siphon wages from port workers – arguably one of the greatest symbols of the 99% — or if it would suck profits from the 1%, such as the Seattle-based global terminal operator, Goldman Sachs’ SSA Marine, and its West Coast trucking outfit, Shipper’s Transport Express.

What their protest proves is that port drivers, as inside agitators, are very much willing to lose pay as a means to powerfully reveal the crushing economic forces that literally put their lives and livelihoods at risk. Even, and especially amidst a severe economic downturn. Their historical ability to self organize, unite, and seize opportunities to improve their working conditions, is unfolding before our eyes. Hundreds more drivers have since joined the safety work stoppage, and some companies remain shut with too few workers to move the cargo.”

http://cleanandsafeports.org/blog/2012/02/01/breaking-america%E2%80%99s-truck-drivers-shut-down-port-of-seattle-to-expose-dangers-of-the-job/

My comrades and I had a lot of heated discussions about the surprisingly persistent figure of the “male anarchist hero” and the often outraging paradox of patriarchal behavior in anti-oppression working groups.

I recently interviewed the Brooklyn based collective Support New York about this question.  In this conversation, the volunteers Kat and Milo analyzed harmful patterns of behavior in radical communities and talked about their methods to transform these patterns.

Support New York is dedicated to heal the effects of sexual assault and abuse within the radical community. The collective focuses on meeting the needs of the survivor, and holding accountable those who have perpetrated harm. The volunteers also strive for a larger dialog within the community about consent, mutual aid, and challenging the society’s narrow definition of abuse.

Even though Support New York operates within a narrow local radius, it can serve as an inspiring case study of community empowerment and transformative justice.

Listen to the interview here.

This piece is written by the Black Orchid Collective in Seattle, with contributions from members of Advance the Struggle in the Bay area, members of Hella 503 in Portland, as well as friends in various cities.  We have all been deeply involved in Decolonize/ Occupy Seattle, Occupy Portland, Occupy Oakland, and Occupy Wall St., including the Dec. 12th West Coast Port Shutdown. We have worked to build solidarity between the Occupy movement and the rank and file workers of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU). This piece presents our critical reflections on these struggles so far. We welcome criticism and discussion.

Table of Contents:

I) Longview and Occupy: a warm autumn on the West Coast

II) Birth of the hip hop picket line: the Dec 12th West Coast Port Shutdown and the precarious proletariat.

III) From Dec 12th to Jan 6th: attempts at coastal solidarity, and divisions in Seattle

IV) Our response to Socialist Worker newspaper’s article

V) Workers’ Committees : a stronger fightback under capitalism, pointing toward revolution

VI) Solidarity is a Two Way Street

VII) Critiques of existing union structures

a) Question of Bureaucracy

b) Partial worker self-management under Capitalism, or Territorialism?

c) Labor Law as a Broken Truce

VIII) The Solidarity we actually need

***

I) Longview and Occupy: a warm autumn on the West Coast

In Longview, Washington, multinational corporation EGT is attempting to operate a new grain export terminal by using non-ILWU (scab) labor.   In September, workers faced police in riot gear in order to stop scab grain from being delivered to EGT’s terminal.  Workers and their families have used their bodies to block trains bringing grain shipments to the terminal. When police beat them back, hundreds of longshore workers came back the next day and dumped the grain all over the tracks. Since then, Longview ILWU members have faced fines, injunctions on picketing, and ongoing police harassment and repression.

The Occupy movements in our cities have also blockaded the flow of capital with picket lines and barricades.  Both the Occupy movement and longshore workers have challenged what is considered common sense and legitimate under capitalism, opening up new possibilities for creative class struggle against the corporations who are destroying our lives. But attempts to bring these struggles together have been filled with tension.

Some members of the ILWU, including the international leadership, do not want the ILWU to work with Occcupy, while rank and file members and other leaders have reached out to us.  We have no desire to be caught in these debates among union members anymore than we unfortunately already are. Our intention is only to build broad solidarity with rank and file ILWU members who have asked for our support.

II) Birth of the hip hop picket line: the Dec 12th West Coast Port Shutdown and the precarious proletariat

On December 12th (D12), Decolonize/Occupy Seattle organized the port shutdown alongside other West Coast Occupies, in support of the Longview struggle. However, our goals did not end there. The port shut down was an organized retaliation against police attacks on our communities and  the Occupy movement. It was also a response to the austerity budget cuts coming down again in Washington State, as well as solidarity with port truck drivers, who are mostly immigrant workers of color. Our  efforts to build actions that unite the struggles of longshore workers and that of unemployed, and/or non-union workers, was faced with much resistance.

At a community potluck before the port shutdown, an ILWU  Local 19 member came to tell Occupy Seattle folks not to proceed with the action because the ILWU International leadership did not support it. In response, a member of Decolonize/Occupy Seattle stated Occupy’s independent reasons for organizing the port shutdown. He added, “I grew up in the ‘hood and the union was never there doing anything to support us; the least you can do is to honor our picket line.”  Another radical longshore worker responded by saying that ILWU Local 10 in Oakland had done a work stoppage to support the struggle against police brutality when Oscar Grant was murdered. Another person responded with, “That’s great, but that’s in California. This is Seattle.”

Our friends’ remarks reveal real tensions in the relationship between organized labor and the 89% of the proletariat [1] that are not in unions.  By proletariat we mean both the exploited working class and the unemployed;  we think the term “working class” is too restrictive since it leaves out those of us who do not or cannot work for a wage.  The proletariat includes workers and everyone else who is dispossessed, with nothing to loose but our chains.  For too long, we have not gotten each others’ backs as the corporations attack and divide us.   For too long, union bureaucracies have forsaken the interests of the 89% who include many people of color, immigrants and women, by cutting deals with capital and the Democratic Party. Good, well paying jobs are often preserved for predominantly white workers, through seniority systems and other tiers in pay structures.  We recognize that there are many people of color and women in unions, but these particular unions have been less able to maintain higher wages and benefits than the ILWU.  The labor movement as a whole has failed to overcome these divides.

To be clear, at this potluck our friends were not saying that unemployed, precarious, non-union workers of color should have more authority than the ILWU to decide tactics in the Longview struggle.  Instead, they were pointing out that the D12 port shutdown was not just about solidarity with the ILWU so it was not up to them to decide whether or not it should happen.  In Seattle, it was about the proletariat showing our collective power by breaking the norms of capitalist legitimacy and legality. For one day, we were able to exhibit our power to blockade the flow of capital with a barricade at the port, cutting capitalist profits at the point of distribution. It wasn’t an attempt to co-opt the ILWU; it was an action done autonomously from the ILWU as well as in solidarity with port workers’ struggles.

It is in light of constant attacks on the legitimacy of non-union workers and unemployed people to conduct such a direct action, that we began to define ourselves as one big union of the 89% and unemployed, in unity with rank and file union members. We want to express explicitly that we, too, have a stake in class struggle. By using the label “89%,” we do not mean to suggest that the 11% of union workers are our enemy.  We are not comparing them to the 1% or the capitalists.  Instead, we wish to point out two things. First, that union leaderships who claim to speak for the 11% of union workers, cannot, and do not, speak for the rest of us. In fact, many times they do not even speak for the members of their unions. Second, we use the language of the “89%” to convey that labor struggles in this country must go beyond efforts  to preserve existing unions. Those defensive struggles are important, but for those of us who are not unionized, our class struggles in our authoritarian casualized workplaces, communities and neighborhood, need to be recognized as such: class struggle, even when they are not “sanctioned” by unions that are officially recognized by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB).

This perspective allowed us to build support for the ILWU struggle when we flyered at welfare offices, day labor sites, high schools, and bus stops across the city.  When we initially approached people with flyers saying “support the Longshore union,” most people stared blankly at us.  The ILWU has not supported their struggles so why would they care about Longview?  So we changed it up and said, “If the capitalists cut us through budget cuts, we’ll cut their profits. Occupy Wall St. on the waterfront”.  At that point, people got very interested. By presenting the port action as a collective struggle against the capitalists who screw us all, we were able to open up conversations where we could actually talk about the importance of the ILWU union struggle to people who otherwise would not have seen how it relates to their own lives.

Initially, some of us in Seattle were skeptical about Oakland’s call for an urgent coast-wide port shutdown. Its rapid nature did not give us enough time to reach out to rank and file Seattle longshore workers (we flyered at the union hall and held mass meetings nearby, but this was not enough).  However, once the call went out, it created an explosion of class struggle energy in Seattle.  People we had never met before kept calling us asking for flyers to distribute – we printed thousands and kept running out.  This self-mobilization was evident the day of.  Consider this video made by high school youth: 700-1000 proletarians, including a large number of youth and people of color came out with militant energy ready to shut it down.  Terminal 18 was shut down with a street barricade and Terminal  5 closed because of a hip hop picket line: road flares, barricades, a traditional circular picket, and in the middle a freestyle hip hop cipher session.  This is what the future looks like. For an excellent reflection on this moment by one of the high school students who participated, check out this comment in the discussion that follows the piece.

Since then, we have been organizing to expand this new rupture of proletarian energy. Alongside others,we have converged around a strategy to build the Occupy movement as a vehicle for forging two-way solidarity between militant rank and file union struggles and militant organizing of the 89%. Concretely, this means building solidarity with the ILWU struggle in Longview and at the same time organizing solidarity actions with immigrant farmworkers in Eastern Washington who face repression as they try to organize on the job.  At the Jan 27th farmworker solidarity march, we chanted “From the ports to the farms, fight together arm in arm.” A rank and file member of the Seattle ILWU spoke about unity between the unionized and non-unionized working class. We aim to build alliances among all who are resisting capitalist attacks, regardless of job category, nationalities, NLRB status, and employment. It also means laying the groundwork for long term workplace, community, and neighborhood direct action organizing and occupations in Seattle.

Photo: Rick Barry (demotix.com)

III) From Dec 12th to Jan 6th: attempts at coastal solidarity, and divisions in Seattle

Since both Occupy Longview and the Cowlitz-Wahkiakum counties labor council  have called for broad public support to prevent the scab-loaded grain from being loaded onto the first grain ship at the EGT, the Occupy movement coast-wide has been coordinating efforts to bring people out to Longview.  We’ve been helping to set up phone trees and caravans from Seattle to Longview to help people get out there.

On January 6th 2012, as part of a coast-wide speaking tour to build support for this Longview convergence, participants in the Occupy movement and rank and file members of ILWU from Oakland, Portland, and Longview  arrived in Seattle. The event began with a successful planning meeting, followed by a panel discussion.  Rank and file ILWU members spoke about the Longview struggle and the history of solidarity between the ILWU and the community.  Daniel B, from Hip Hop Occupies, spoke about his experiences as a barista trying to organize on the job. He expressed solidarity with ILWU members and also emphasized that solidarity is a two way street, and that the ILWU should support struggles of workers without unions who are trying to fight back.

The panel was disrupted by an organized grouping of ILWU leaders who demanded to read a letter from the ILWU International. When told that they could read the letter after the panel, the grouping of drunk white men with alcohol on the breath physically attacked several audience members. They also said several sexist slurs. Here are a few accounts of what took place that day. One is by a former Local 19, Seattle longshore worker. The second is by a comrade, Ryan W, a member of Seattle Solidarity Network. The third is an account by some members of Occupy Seattle who organized the event, including some BOC members. The video footage of the day itself are also included here, in 4 parts.  Part 4 shows the disruption.  Here is Part 1:

IV) Our response to Socialist Worker newspaper’s article

In response to the conflict at this event, members of the Seattle branch of the International Socialist Organization (ISO) published a piece in Socialist Worker arguing that “a minority of Occupy activists are putting this potential unity [between Labor and Occupy] in jeopardy through attitudes and tactics that are hostile to the ILWU and organized labor.” The piece does not take a firm stance against the bully tactics of the ILWU leaders. Rather than blaming the thugs who came and disrupted the meeting, silencing a panel of rank and file longshoremen from Seattle and Longview,  this piece blames those who stood up to their bullying.   Beyond its political flaws, the logic of the ISO’s statement is built on a number of factual distortions.

The Seattle ISO authors write, “Allowing ILWU members to read the letter immediately may or may not have prevented the conflict from escalating. But this much is certain: There was no good reason not to allow it to be read.”  These statement are completely decontextualized from the events of the day. It would have been one thing if the individuals had shown up early and asked to have the letter read beforehand. It is hard to understand how bowing down to the demands of aggressive heckling and shouting in the middle of an inspiring forum which included the ILWU rank and file, helps to foster the “unity between the two struggles.” In reality, the ISO authors avoid the fact that the demand to read the letter was more of an excuse, than a reason, by the ILWU disruptors to break up the forum.  They also ignore the fact that we told them to wait for the question and answer session to read the letter because we refused to let them silence our comrade Maria Guillen who was slated to speak next about building solidarity between port workers, immigrant farmworkers in Eastern Washington, and Decolonize/ Occupy Seattle.

The ISO’s claimed that no one from the Seattle ILWU was invited to speak.  In fact, two members of the Seattle ILWU were present on stage – Gabriel Prawl from Seattle Local 52 and member of the Million Worker March Committee emceed the event and Desert Rat from Local 19 presented us with a musical performance and analysis about the Longview struggle (same song performed at another event).

The ISO piece blames the conflict on Black Orchid Collective (BOC). It seems to suggest that the way to build unity in the movement is for the ISO to denounce the Black Orchid Collective to ILWU leaders.  In reality, the Jan 6th event was not organized by BOC alone.  The entire Occupy campaign in solidarity with port workers has been an effort of a significantly larger and open,  nonsectarian, multi-tendency group of radicals and rank and file workers who have built an incredibly positive community together in struggle. Together, we have been consistently radicalizing the political content of Decolonize/ Occupy Seattle.  In the past few months in Seattle, our collaboration has included attempts to stop Democratic Party co-optation, to organize for the December 12th West coast port shut down and to build solidarity with farmworkers most currently.  This open alliance of radicals has never claimed to speak for all of Occupy Seattle. We, the Black Orchid Collective also do not claim to speak for all of the radicals who — despite our differences — work together. Clearly something exciting is happening here on the  West Coast, and the ISO piece overlooks this by focusing so narrowly on BOC. In fact, they unduly give us credit for the organizing that many other comrades did as well.

In fact, only one BOC member was a part of the committee that organized the Jan 6th event.  The Seattle ISO members should know this because two ISO members attended the meeting and participated on the email planning threads of this event for which they claim no responsibility in their piece.  We are open to the suggestion they make in their article to invite a member of Local 19 with an opposing view beforehand to join the panel. We wish they had raised it themselves in planning meetings before the event instead of over the internet two weeks later.  We urge them to take responsibility for their own role in this event instead of throwing us under the bus.

The Socialist Worker piece further claims that Occupy Seattle participants alienated and angered ILWU Local 19 by putting out flyers at the ILWU union hall and communiques online stating that “the Occupy movement has become a new type of movement of unemployed, low-waged, and casualized workers, both in the workplace and outside of it. We are the 89 percent of the U.S. working class that is not unionized.” The ISO members argue that these are “anti-union politics” that exclude or ignore union workers who have been participating in the Occupy movement.

This is highly selective misquoting.  What the Socialist Worker leaves out is that these flyers also said that Occupy is a new workers’ movement of rank and file union members who come together across industrial lines:  “Some of us are also rank and file union members who realize that we need to expand beyond the limits of traditional labor struggle if we want to stop the attacks we are facing.”

The Socialist Worker article argues that these perspectives indicate Occupy Seattle is trying to exert “greater authority than the ILWU to determine how the Longview struggle should be conducted.”  However, we are a new workers’ movement precisely because we believe as an Occupy movement that the ILWU rank and file, not its International, should decide democratically how their struggle is conducted. It is up to them whether they want to work within the ILWU structure, transform it, or join with other proletarians in Occupy to build a larger movement or organizational framework to wage the class struggle. It is not up to their leaders and it is not up to us.

We recognize that their battle requires direct action on the job, something that only the union members themselves can do.  There never would have been a broader Occupy mobilization around this struggle if union members themselves had not taken the lead this fall in going beyond legalistic forms of labor struggle and dumping out that grain.  Like many of us, they are actually fighting the capitalists by any means necessary. This is what inspires us to build solidarity with them.  All we are saying is that for these battles to succeed they also require that other workers and unemployed folks take similar actions, and we are trying to make that happen by organizing and mobilizing the 89%.

V) Workers’ Committees : a stronger fightback under capitalism, pointing toward revolution

The problem that the ISO’s piece glosses over here is that there are few rank and file class struggle committees in the ILWU that are linked up with the unemployed and other sectors of the working class; there are only individual rank and filers who have admirably reached out, often against serious opposition.  If such committees were built, they could take leading roles in the historic struggles of the proletariat as a whole,  laying the groundwork for one-big-union of the proletariat as a whole –  class struggle unionism instead of industrial unionism.  In their absence, the ‘authority’ in the union often falls to small groups of bureaucrats who work to prevent class-wide organizing.

Some of us are members of trade unions who are trying to build these kind of committees in our own workplaces. Doing this will hopefully allow us to link our own rank-and-file struggles to the struggles of farmworkers, unemployed folks, prisoners, and the rest of the proletariat.

This kind of organizing, like the early Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), combines struggles for survival under capitalism with long-term struggles to overthrow capitalism.  Rank and file committees create more effective ways to fight the bosses now. They also lay the groundwork for future workers’ councils and assemblies that could replace the capitalist state [See the Workplace Papers for a longer discussion].  Both the immediate struggle and the long-term revolutionary one require expanding rank and file power.  Numerous historical examples of working class struggle have been sold out by the highest levels of the trade union bureaucracy as they approach revolution. Unless something different is built, history will likely repeat itself. We definitely do not claim that this kind of a class-for-itself organization already exists, or that we are the embodiment of it. Rather, our organizing is aimed towards fostering its development.

Likewise, committees need to built among the non-unionized proletariat.   The ISO article states that “The Occupy movement is far from an organization of unrepresented workers at this point.”  We agree that it hasn’t gone far enough, but the Nov 2nd strike in Oakland and the Dec. 12th blockade up an down the coast showed Occupy starting to function like a union for the unorganized.  We are trying to build off of this energy by organizing in our own workplaces, schools, and neighborhoods.  We do think that those of us in Seattle need to do more of the kind of organizing that our comrade Ryan W. from Seattle Solidarity Network (Seasol) calls for in this piece. Seasol, East Baysol and the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) offer workplace and community organizing models we can learn from and expand upon. Comrades in Advance the Struggle have been actively building East Baysol and connecting it with Occupy Oakland. Seasol comrades here in Seattle are also working to make these connections.

For those of us without unions, Occupy is all we’ve got and it’s a good start.  We are not trying to replace the unions with ourselves. As discussed above,  we simply assert that  we are every bit as much a part of the proletariat as union members are, and we aim to unite with them.  We  welcome individual rank and file members of the ILWU to continue to join the Occupy movement where we can bring rank and file workers and the 89% together to wage larger battles that affect all of us. This includes struggles against austerity measures, police repression, racism and sexism, and the overall battle against the dictatorship of the capitalist economy over our lives. Our frequent outreach outside the union hall was aimed toward this. The McCarthyist resolution by Local 19 that prevents our Longshore friends from building with us damages these potentials.

Of course, the goal of coming together as a fighting class is much larger than Occupy and its current limitations. We see Occupy as the beginning, not the end, of broader efforts to build new forms of class struggle that can fight back against the economic massacres the proletariat is facing.  This is a global struggle, with the proletariat inventing new forms of struggle – and reinventing old ones – from Tahrir Square to Longview.

Photo: Rick Barry (demotix.com)

VI) Solidarity is a Two Way Street

In the US today, the percentage of workers who are non-unionized has steadily increased. According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, union membership among the employed proletariat stands at 11.9% in 2010, down from 12.3 percent a year earlier. This means a total of 12.2 million workers. Among these members, 36.2% belong in the public sector, while only a mere 6.9% belong in private sector.With increasing attacks on public sector unions, this number is likely to decrease, or be rendered meaningless as healthcare benefits are cut and collective bargaining eroded, as in Wisconsin.

The US unemployment rate has been fluctuating, from 10% to a current 8.5%.  While official unemployment has gone down, deeper analysis shows that we are still reeling from the recession.  When people who have stopped looking for work are included, the rate is 11%.  If underemployment is added then the rate is 20%.  Youth unemployment is above 19% — 31% for Black youth and 20% for Latinos.

Recognizing that ongoing attacks on unions are steadily eroding the livelihoods of many union workers, the conditions that workers face are a steady race to the bottom — toward that of the least organized, most oppressed layers of the proletariat. Union members should see that the conditions of these most oppressed layers represent the future that capitalists have in store for them.

It is this race to the bottom that is the current reality of the ruling class’s attack. This is the reality that unions in this country, with few exceptions, have been unable to respond to. National Labor Relations Board (NLRB)-recognized unions cannot be the only measure of mass class struggle organizations.  They have insufficiently addressed these realities because none of them has been able to initiate mass, anti-capitalist, from-below campaigns to organize the unorganized, precarious working poor, that is also independent from the Democratic Party. We are open to critiques of our term “the 89%”. But it arises as an attempt to address this absence, at a time when it is sorely needed in moments of upsurge like Occupy. If comrades don’t like how we are addressing it, they should do it better – but it needs to be done.

In the deepening of the economic crisis, it is hard to tell poor, unemployed, undocumented, immigrants, people of color, that we too, have a stake in the struggles of union workers, especially relatively privileged workers.  This is an unpopular reality that many revolutionaries and leftists do not want to confront. But really, what materially is in the struggle to defend union workers in Madison and Longview? What’s in it for the unemployed? What is the connection between Madison and the streets of Milwaukee? What is the connection between Longview and the fields of Eastern Washington?  Those of us from the 89% might be impressed with how militantly union workers are fighting back, and we cheer them on when they confront the cops who we hate, but where is our entry point to participate?

When revolutionaries act as if legitimate class struggle only happens through NLRB-recognized unions, they ignore the very real and material divisions between union and non-union workers, many of whom see unionized workers as remote and unrelated to their lives at best and as privileged workers who do not understand the realities of the proletariat at worst.  If we do not understand this sentiment by the majority of the proletariat, then we cede this ground to the right wing, who will gladly use it to mobilize anti-union attacks on a populist basis. It’s ironic that the ISO accuses us of supporting right wing anti-union politics when that is precisely what our 89% rhetoric and organizing aim to challenge.

This is in no way meant to question the solidarity we need to have with ILWU workers and other union members. As the Longview struggle shows, ILWU members risk losing their privilege. As they lose it, they’re fighting like the rest of us do, or like we want to.  We are asking: what way forward for the proletariat as a whole?

The disenchantment of many proletarians toward unions are also addressed in the fact that unions have not been present in the struggles that proletarians, including their members, have faced outside the workplace.  With few a exceptions, unions stayed quiet during hurricane Katrina, Black America’s 9/11. Notably, one of those exceptions was the efforts of rank and file local 19 activists with the Million Worker March, who have also tried to build an ILWU-Occupy alliance today.  Where were unions during the prison strikes in Georgia and California, some of the largest, most courageous, and most militant mass strikes in recent US history? Where have unions been during the colonization of Iraq and Afghanistan?  The ILWU is one of the few to act to stop it, and their 2008 anti-war work stoppage was initiated by the rank and file.   There is a social crisis facing the global proletariat and most of the unions do not have a plan or strategy to deal with it.

If non-union workers are going to support union struggles, the unions need to respond to these crises, which face all of us. At the very least, non-union workers should not be told to leave our own “agenda” or “issues” at home when we come out to support union struggles, especially when this agenda is simply the survival of our communities, something that the unions should be fighting for anyway if they claim to represent the proletariat.

The non-union proletariat, including the unemployed, are not simply warm bodies to be called out to protest at the beck and call of unions.  Nor are we shock troops who will do the illegal actions that unions want to take but can’t without risking fines. We will face arrest shoulder to shoulder with rank and file workers but we will also shout about our own struggles as we do so.   It is important for union workers to support non-union workers in our struggles, as we too, form unions and engage in workplace struggles, under the banner of “solidarity is a two way street.”

By not confining investment in class struggle to the realm of those in formal unions, we make openings for a conception of “Occupy class struggle” to exist within the movement. We are able to affirm, support, and encourage the self-activity of everyday workers in the various aspects of our lives, from workplace to community and schools.  As anti-capitalist revolutionaries, we can offer an understanding of how the looting of the surplus value we provide to the capitalists through our labor  goes hand in hand with the looting that takes place in the rest of our lives as we struggle to reproduce ourselves and the next generation of the proletariat as future workers.

VII) Critiques of existing union structures

As we try to build this proletarian movement, we need to develop a critical analysis of the existing union structures.  Our goal is not to take sides in inner-union debates or to attack individual union leaders, it is to understand how aspects of the structures of existing unions have limited rank-and-file power and proletarian unity so that all of us – especially those of us in unions- can figure out how to overcome this.

a) Question of Bureaucracy

When fighting for liberation, oppressed people have and will utilize varying forms of organization to succeed. Unions have been and continue to be one of those forms. NLRB-unions have a dual nature under capitalism. They at once ensure that union workers have the ability to negotiate with bosses about wages and benefits by way of collective might. However, they also adhere to laws which hinder the potential of this collective might and it’s ability to end a situation in which a majority has to negotiate for its survival. Our critique of the bureaucracy lies in the fact that regardless of how progressive individual labor leaders may be, their positions rests in some manner on their ability to adhere to the contract which they have negotiated with the capitalists.  They end up helping management and the courts enforce this contract even when it goes against the interests of the workers.  In other words, they play a role in maintaining labor power as a commodity and in ensuring some level of discipline at the workplace .

At times rank and file workers use the union structure to fight back against the bosses and secure gains; at times they go beyond this structure and create new forms of struggle.  In either case, our solidarity should be with the workers themselves, not the union structure.

Some have suggested that our critique of the union bureaucracy does not take into account the specific features of the ILWU as a union, such as the fact that many elected leaders stay on the job, and many decisions are made by democratically  stop-work meetings of union members.  They have pointed out that the ILWU is not a top-down dictatorship like the SEIU under Andy Stern.  They say we should be more cautious of demonizing elected local leaders who participated in the disruption of the Jan 6th event as “bureaucrats.”  They think we are using the term “bureaucrat” as a personal insult against ILWU leaders we happen to dislike.

Our problem is not with individual “bureaucrats”, it is with bureaucracy as such.  For example, we have no ability or desire to psychoanalyze the leadership of Local 19 to figure out what their personal motivations were for organizing a group of people to act like thugs shutting down fellow union members and fellow proletarians from the Occupy movement.  Our criticism is simply of their actions.

Our criticisms of union bureaucracies in general are not a criticism of specific leaders.  They are a criticism of the structure of the unions which are shaped by and bound by anti-labor laws in this country.  Of course, we recognize some leaders are better than others, and that structures differ from union to union.  In particular we recognize that the ILWU has its own particular structure due to its specific history of communist leadership.  It has also broken labor laws repeatedly which is a major reason why it’s strong. But this militancy alone does not mean that the ILWU has no bureaucracy. It is still an AFL-CIO, state-sanctioned, NLRB-recognized union in the US, which means its bound by all the same constraints as other unions of this type.

The ISO are part of the Trotskyist tradition, and they claim to adhere to Leon Trotsky’s transitional program, a strategy for building socialism.  In that program, Trotsky argued that the crisis of the working class is a crisis of leadership. In their interpretation of this program, the ISO sees the main problem to be that the union leaders have sold out. Their goal is to replace the leaders they think have sold out with new leaders who they think will lead the union to struggle more effectively. Many other Trotskyists would argue that the ISO betrays their tradition when it fails to challenge current union leaders concretely, directly, in practice.  It appears there is also debate about this within the ISO; Dana Blanchard wrote a reply to the Socialist Worker piece, arguing that “The article is not critical enough of what the ILWU International is doing right now with regards to the struggle in Longview.”

We agree with this critique of the Seattle ISO piece and are happy to see that its authors do not represent the entire organization. However, both the original Seattle ISO piece and Blanchard’s response focus too much on the individual bureaucrats and their politics.  The problem is not just with the current  leaders. Replacing them with new leaders through organizing inner-union reform caucuses will  not solve the problem. At best, it will help prevent an even worse outcome or could create temporary openings for the rank and file to organize which will soon close.  At worst it will be a waste of time or will suck the best rank and file organizers into the constant work that goes into maintaining the union structure instead of advancing the class struggle beyond the limitations of the union structure.

These structrues are limited by labor law, divided up by industry, and confined to the national borders of the U.S. Today, automation, deindustrialization, unemployment and prisons are competing with industrial workplaces as the reality and experiences of proletarian life. The need for global solidarity to win against global corporations is even more apparent. Limitations on union structures prevent adaptations to these current conditions for enhancing class struggle.

Pointing this out does not make us anti-union.  We recognize that rank and file workers in the current unions have the power to transform these union structures.   This can only be resolved through massive rank and file organizing and self-mobilization, not from better leaders.  It also cannot come from Occupy or anyone else helping from the outside. We think that rank and file workers also have the power to team up with the 89% of workers who are not yet in unions to  build larger, new types of class struggle organizations across industrial and national borderlines.    We are trying to build solidarity with the ILWU because we recognize that many ILWU workers are trying to work through these kinds of transformations, and as workers who are at a key point in the international economy they have the power to help the entire working class make these transformations.

b) Partial Workers’ Self Management under Capitalism, or Territorialism?

Some have argued that Occupy is violating the democratic processes of the union by taking actions at the port without the rank and file voting on them through the official union structures.  The idea is that, since the docks are longshore workers’  workplace, they have final say over any action that happens there. Besides the obvious fact that predominantly immigrant port truckers also share the same workplace and have asked for Occupy’s solidarity, this territorialism limits longshore workers’ own power to win the struggles they are facing.

There are positive dimensions to this territorialism, but it is a double-edged sword. It seems to have come from the ILWU’s  history of partial self-management that was won through the militant strikes in the 30s. Back then, the union took control over the process of who would be hired. They prevented the notorious corruption, racism, and divide-and-conquer favoritism that occurred when the maritime companies had control of hiring through the “shape up” system.  Any attempt workers take to gain more control of the work process is positive because it helps build up our confidence as a class to eventually occupy our workplaces and run them without bosses.

The downside of this, however, is that we can end up self-managing our own exploitation by capital and we self-manage the divisions among the working class that make it possible.  This is a problem for many of us who work. We cling to the job category that capitalism assigns us until it becomes our identity.  When we get a tiny little bit of control of our job we end up treating it like our property. We end up  embracing our own exploitation with pride, saying “I’m a longshoreman, get off my waterfront,” or “I’m a teacher, I’m a professional, listen to me,” or “At least I have a job, what are you unemployed bums doing with your lives?”  All of this creates divisions within the working class that allow the bosses to play us against each other. It also limits the horizons of what we can become as human beings.  When revolutionaries fall into this it is particularly tragic – they forget Marx’s point that the the proletariat must abolish itself as a class through revolution, so that all of us can become humans instead of alienated workers. In the new society we will have no jobs or  job titles; our “work” will be collective creativity, done out of care for each other.

In the case of the ILWU, winning partial union control of the hiring process put the union in the role of partially determining who stays out of the industry as well,  which has the danger of creating a sense of hostility toward the rest of the working class.   Demands for the hiring of more women, more people of color, etc. have at times challenged current workers’ efforts to make sure their own family members make it onto the job. Some members from the Black community in Seattle have questioned such practices.

We’re not saying every Local 19 member is a white male chauvinist who only cares about his own family; many workers support fair hiring practices even when it challenges their personal interests because they know it strengthens solidarity, or just because it’s the right thing to do.  However, there is a real contradiction between the union and more oppressed layers of the working class, especially during this economic crisis where jobs are increasingly scarce. In many cases, when we’ve tried to build solidarity with Longview we’ve faced skepticism from some folks who feel the union’s hiring discriminates against folks in our communities.  We need to encourage our communities to mobilize in solidarity with the ILWU in Longview, but to do this effectively we need to be able to show them that solidarity is a two way street and that ILWU members will also get our backs when we struggle.   That’s why we appealed to the ILWU to respect our picket line on the 12th as we mentioned above.

Finally, this sense of ILWU controlling its turf is positive if it means that they refuse to be told what to do by middle class activists who try to come in as condescending saviors claiming to know how to run their struggle better than the workers themselves.  We can understand that sentiment; we are also proletarians and we don’t want anyone telling us what to do either.   We can also understand if some union members or leaders thought at first that Occupy was a bunch of liberal middle class kids coming in from the outside trying to coopt them, especially since some of the liberals in Occupy often do come off as patronizing to working class people.

But these liberals in Occupy Seattle do not speak for all of us just like the conservatives or sexists  in the ILWU do not speak for every member of the union.   In fact, over the past 3 months, working class people in the Occupy movement have shaken up the liberal, middle class politics that are prevalent in many Occupies and made the movement locally much more proletarian.  Specifically, those of us who organized the action on the 12th are clearly a proletarian wing of the movement.

This sense of  the ILWU controlling its turf becomes problematic when it involves Local 19 telling Occupy activists that we cannot mobilize at the port for our own interest, in solidarity with truckers who also work there, or in solidarity with Local 21’s, Occupy Longview’s, and the Cowlitz-Wahkiakum Counties Labor Council’s call for support.  None of these mobilizations involved us telling Local 19 or anyone else what to do; we have simply been trying to organize our own community in solidarity with ILWU members and port truckers who have explicitly called for our support.  The Local 19 leadership was breaking this solidarity with immigrant port truckers when they opposed the Dec 12th port shutdown. They also broke the solidarity with their own members in Longview when they shut down the Jan 6th Solidarity meeting.

The struggle in Longview is against a vast multi-national corporation. As such, it requires a vast multi-national working class response.  Bunge, which owns EGT, controls a quarter of the world’s grain.  Local 21 is essentially fighting Wall St. on the waterfront, not just a local company.   The ILWU’s attempt to control their own turf does not account for the fact that globalization began on the waterfront with the rise of the containerized cargo system, whose greater efficiency allowed factory production to be moved around the world, creating a global assembly line that could produce parts in one place, ship them elsewhere for finishing, and sell them in a third place.  What that means is that the ILWU’s “turf” is now interwoven economically with everyone else’s workplace, farm, city, and country all over the world.  Their enemy is everywhere, and all of our enemies congregate on their turf. Given that,  it is in their interests make friends and comrades everywhere.  To do this they should definitely maintain their sense of “don’t mess with us and don’t tell us what to do on our job”.  But we hope they can untie that sense of autonomy from the sense that they own the docks.

As we argue below, some ports have pushed toward full automation, where computerized cranes replace longshore workers.  If this were to be adopted on the West Coast, it would of course be a major threat to the ILWU.  It would also be a victory for corporate globalization and a major obstacle to international proletarian solidarity.  Goods could be shipped from one highly exploited segment of the working class to be consumed by another, with less of a threat of dockworkers shutting down the port in solidarity with, say, the farmers who produce the food under toxic, near-slavery conditions, or the unemployed rebels who will be exterminated by the military hardware that ships through the ports.  (And now some of that military hardware is being used against the ILWU itself in Longview as the Coast Guard turns the Columbia river into a military zone.) We all have a vested interest in building solidarity with Longshore workers to make sure they gain control of these new technologies instead of getting displaced by them.

An article by Oakland’s Bay of Rage about the port shutdown suggested that because of deindustrialization, the proletariat is no longer concentrated in industries that can be shut down through strikes; so to fight global capital, all we can do is blockade its flow from the outside like we did on the 12th.  Automation of the ports would be one more phase of deindustrialization and would deepen this shift.  However, we don’t think the situation is quite that extreme yet; even automated industries still have some workers, and the ports here are not yet fully automated.   There are still port workers with a pulse, backbone, and guts who stand between us and Bay of Rage’s scenario.  The ILWU rank and file is still in a unique position to rise up on behalf of all of us- and themselves- and put an end to this nightmare before it’s too late.  But Bay of Rage is right that the rest of us shouldn’t wait around for them to save us, and we didn’t on Dec 12th.  From that day onward we’ve been recognizing  that our own power as dispossessed, precarious proletarians is also valid even if we’re not working in key strategic industries like the longshore workers are.  Dec 12th is not the last time we will meet each other on the barricades.  How can we expand this militant energy, while welcoming more rank and file workers to join us, so that eventually barricades and strikes can reinforce each other like they do in other parts of the world, like Cairo, Greece, and Chile?

Some of us are the product of the massacres union workers have faced in the class war- there are numerous unemployed teachers, auto-workers, and longshoremen among us on that barricade.  We are those who serve the longshore workers coffee, clean the buildings they utilize, and take care of their elderly grandparents in nursing homes. We want to work with them, side by side as equals, to help connect their struggles with the struggles of those of us who produce, transport, and sell the goods they unload from those ships.

We hope for a future where the proletariat as a whole, including longshore workers, can control the docks so we can occupy everything and redistribute everything for everyone.  This is why we chanted on D12, “Whose ports? Everyone’s” and “Everything for everyone, the revolution has begun”.

c) Labor law as a broken truce

These slogans are echoes of great union struggles like the IWW during which immediate struggles for survival opened the way for revolutionary class warfare.   However, today in the United States, as in many other states, we find ourselves in a historical moment where the state has used a legalistic judo (using your opponents’ momentum against them) to turn the official structure of the trade unions into structures that stifle and negate the revolutionary process, rather than facilitating it.

When the IWW made demands for the 8 hour day, better working conditions, etc. these were tied to an explicitly revolutionary program of trying to unify the proletariat to gain increasing control over production, taking this control away from the capitalist class through strikes and upheavals.  Some of these traditions were carried over into the early Congress of Industrial Organization (CIO) movement in the 1930s which gave birth to most of today’s unions including the ILWU.  The Toledo auto-lite strike united employed and unemployed workers. It was a strike in one industry that became a city-wide insurrection when the unemployed councils reinforced the picket lines. We wonder if Occupy is a possible reincarnation of these unemployed councils?  The Flint sit-down strike was a factory occupation which temporarily took the plant away from the capitalist owners.

The state responded by driving a wedge between the CIO’s immediate reform demands and the revolutionary goals of many of the CIO workers. This is how they coopted the unions.  Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Democratic Party passed the National Labor Relations Act, legalizing unions and setting up the process of collective bargaining which would encourage unions to settle grievances through contract negotiations backed up by the courts and the new National Labor Relations Board. Unions would become legal, and the state would try to mediate between unions and the corporations so that epic battles would be settled in the boardroom instead of in the streets or the shop floor.  This allowed the CIO unions to make immediate reform gains for some sectors of the working class – higher wages, pensions, benefits, and new legislation around health and safety.  However, in return they were required to give up their attempts to gain more control over their workplaces and over the production process.  Most of the contracts negotiated under the new NLRA processes involved no-strike clauses which took away the workers’ most powerful weapon.

The Taft Hartley act deepened this co-optation.  Passed just after a strike wave of 8 million US workers shut down the whole coal, railroad, maritime, and communications industries, Taft Hartley made it illegal for unions to engage in hot cargo agreements, solidarity strikes, and secondary boycotts. It forced union officials to take anti-communist loyalty oaths among many other things. While hundreds of thousands of workers immediately defied Taft Hartley in the shipyards and coal fields, over the decades the law’s provisions were more stringently enforced.

The National Labor Relations Act and Taft Hartley were essentially a truce between workers and the capitalists where each side got a little bit of what they wanted in order to establish labor peace. These labor laws became so complex that they require that unions develop bureaucracies and hire lawyers to navigate this whole system. Union leaders are forced to submit to rules that set them up to lose in order to ensure legal protection of the gains that were won before those rules were created. It also made labor law increasingly, and deliberately inaccessible for the regular rank and filer.

Notably, this truce specifically left out domestic workers and farmworkers, majority Latino and Black folks, solidifying and deepening white supremacist divisions within the proletariat.  Millions of European immigrants who used to face racial discrimination now became white and upwardly mobile as they built unions like the United Auto Workers (UAW) and the ILWU.  Meanwhile, Black and Brown workers continued to face the most extreme forms of exploitation.  Some of them made it into the unions, but most did not, and those who made it in were constrained by the labor truce which prioritized collective bargaining around wages and benefits instead of direct action on the job against racist and sexist treatment.

Through all of this, the divisions between the whitest, most privileged layers of the 11% and the most oppressed layers of the 89% are solidified, weakening both.  We would love to say “We are the 99%” or “We are the proletariat,” as if it were a current reality. Unfortunately in America, with its legacy of colonial settler brutality and slavery, it is not that simple.  Unity is a goal, not a reality, and it needs to be forged through militant struggles and transformations.

This unequal truce is the why the farmworkers at Ruby Ridge Dairy in Pasco, WA today are threatened with guns when they try to organize on the job.  The same laws that fail to protect the farmworkers also prevent longshoremen from legally striking in solidarity with them or, in many cases, with fellow longshoremen in other cities facing local struggles.

Those of us who are union members need to remember that people in the early 1900s fought under even more repressive conditions to build the unions.  If they faced open warfare, the least we can do is face fines or possible jailtime.  While breaking these laws involve real consequences that should not be taken lightly, the alternative is even worse: the bosses have made it clear they are willing to destroy the living conditions of the global working class and unionized U.S. workers will not be spared forever.   The question is: are  the current U.S. unions going to fight or not?  If not, the proletariat may end up voting with its feet and building new types of (probably illegal) international class struggle organizations, reviving the class struggle unionism traditions of the IWW and the early CIO.

While we are not anti-union, we do not see the current U.S. unions as a path to the emancipation of the oppressed from wage slavery. But someone might still ask: if these unions stopped being ways to advance  revolutionary struggles, aren’t they still effective ways of securing immediate reform demands?   In the short term this may be true, but these reforms will likely be selective concessions aiming to divide the class by buying off one group of workers at the expense of others.  And that weakens the class’s ability to fight for collective short term survival, let alone revolution.  When the unions laid down their strike, sit-down, sabotage, and occupation weapons in order to pursue collective bargaining, they gained higher wages but they lost their ability to stop the bosses from speeding up the work process.  They also lost their ability to stop the bosses from closing the workplace and moving it somewhere else in pursuit of cheaper labor, or replacing workers with machines.  So in the end, even those higher wages and benefits are disappearing.

In his piece, “The Remaking of the American Working Class”, Loren Goldner suggests that this will continue to happen because capitalism is in crisis. In order to keep up their profits the capitalist class needs to drive down the American working class’s standard of living to the point  where the working class cannot even reproduce itself.

It is clear that bosses are boldly breaking their end of the truce by attacking union workers.  Yet they expect us to hold to our end of the truce by following labor laws and our contracts with them.

The ability of capitalism to co-opt proletarian struggles and to continue to exploit our labor requires that we too, dynamically respond for our own liberation. Unions like the IWW and the early CIO could play a militant anti-capitalist role in the past because they found themselves faced with an expanding capitalist system hell bent on bringing more and more labor into its satanic mills.  As Marx put it, the capitalists were focused on extracting absolute surplus value by the lengthening of the working day across the board.  Workers worked 12 hour days or more.  Insurgent unions fought this with great heroism, but this ended up pushing the capitalists to change up their strategies and adapt.  The capitalists made their truce, and granted the 8 hour work day to some layers of the proletariat (not farmworkers and not most proletarians in colonized countries).  But this did not mean that things were all good for the unionized workers in core U.S. industries.  Capitalism figured out other ways to extract profit from them, by speeding up the work process and introducing new technologies that would make their labor more efficient, even if this meant pushing many of them out of the workforce into unemployment.  Marx called it a  phase of accumulation centered on relative surplus value.  The unions facilitated this shift by enforcing the truce and suppressing  the agency of workers.

Today, the capitalists are trying to generate more relative surplus value through automation. The EGT Grain Terminal in Longview is an example of this. What used to take human labor to transport, is now achieved for through machinery for much less. The ports in Hamburg and Rotterdam suggest a possible future for West Coast ports:

“there are docks that operate with no visible human presence. Once a container is moved off a ship, it is picked up by an automated crane, which puts it on an automated guided vehicle, which transfers it to the yard, where two automatic rail-mounted gantry cranes, or ARMGs, stack and retrieve containers.”

Edna Bonacich “Pulling the Plug: Labor and the Global Supply Chain,” New Labor Forum (2007)

The drive toward automation exposes the contradictions of capital. Capital measures the value of a commodity based on the amount of average labor time that goes into producing it. At the same time, capitalism drives technological change that constantly lowers the amount of labor time needed to produce and reproduce all the commodities necessary to reproduce capitalist society each generation.

Automation also exposes the contradictions within trade unions. Under capitalist society, existing unions are trapped in the framework of having to defend the sale of labor power. Certain conditions of technological change force them into situations where they choose to defend the sale of labor power on favorable conditions for only a few, at the expense of many. Often, this selection is racialized and gendered.

This is exactly why the proletariat may need to look beyond trade unionism toward a vision of one big union for the whole class, with no one left behind. Such organizations could fight to gain control of these technologies to reduce toil and drudgery for everyone. Some of this technology would need to be destroyed to re-establish ecological health and human freedom, but some of it can be rearranged and transformed to build an ecologically-based society without drudgery . Technologies could be used to reduce the amount of time necessary to reproduce society, so we could spend our time caring for each other, creating art, and organizing our communities without a state dictating our affairs.

VIII) The Solidarity We Actually Need

New forms of workers organization could emerge to confront the phase of capitalism we now face.  Struggles like the ILWU fight in Longview, the farm worker struggles in Eastern Washington, and the Occupy movement all contain seeds of potential proletarian organizations of the 89%, the unemployed, and the union rank and file united.

One of the greatest challenges that faces new forms of workers organization is how workers often entrust the ability to wage their struggle to some other entity besides ourselves. We need to challenge the belief that the union leadership, Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), the NLRB, or a group of labor lawyers has the ability to win lasting victories. Each of these entities operates in a terrain where the proletariat has very little power, as opposed to the globalized workplace where the proletariat can shut down or blockade industry and the flow of international capital. Everyday workers recognizing our own responsibility to strategize, theorize, and actualize winning struggles squarely on our own shoulders is a challenge.

Pointing to examples where workers have done this successfully helps show that it is more realistic than depending on the NLRB. In Buenos Aires, Argentina, subway workers were able to win a 40% increase in payroll after they led a militant strike wave. They organized the strike without the help of the official union leadership, directly electing their own delegates and holding mass assemblies at the different train barns to decide how to proceed. In the final week, services were interrupted three hours per day, then four, five, and finally twenty-four hours. After negotiations broke down, and a 48 hour shutdown was announced, the company and the government signed a backroom deal with the official union leadership. Although the deal outlined a 44% increase in payroll, the delegates and assemblies went ahead with the 48 hour shutdown until each local had voted on the agreement.

This is one successful model of struggle that depends on the militancy of the rank and file, instead of institutions like state labor boards or union officials that don’t have the power to shut down the means of production. Inspired by such victories, we see class struggle workers’ committees that do clandestine agitation, produce literature, and study revoluionary  texts, in combination with mass assemblies directing the goals and tactics of struggle, as one viable path forward amidst the contradictions of contemporary US trade unions.

Members of the IWW have also been developing new ways to think about workplace organizing that focus on direct action on the job as a way to develop the confidence, leadership and experiences of the proletariat as a whole. The goal of direct unionism “will not be union recognition from a single boss. Instead, the goal of the actions is to build up leadership and consciousness amongst other workers.” The piece lays out strategies and suggestions for workplace organizing that avoid the pitfalls of contractualism and bureaucracies.

These kinds of methods could be what build new insurgent, class struggle unions among the 89%.  In the upcoming months we hope to generalize them among participants in the Occupy movement who are interested in organizing on the job.

Occupy has been a powerful force for the partially-employed, unemployed, and students who are in school racking up debt with no future employment in sight.  Those of us in these situations have had the time and sense of urgency necessary to advance the struggle.  We should not have to wait for the majority of wage workers to rise up in order to take action.  We hope Occupy continues to function like an unemployed council or commune, occupying and redistributing resources that we need to survive.  However, we also want to expand this activity into more of the employed workforce, unionized and non-unionized, who still make up the majority of the U.S proletariat.   It has been hard for those of us who work long hours to participate in the majority of GAs or street demonstration.  But what if we built Occupy committees in our workplaces and neighborhoods, committees that functioned like direct unions or solidarity networks, connecting with the IWW and Seasol who are already doing this work?  In this way we can participate and can reach more employed wage workers to expand the struggle.  All of this could continue laying the groundwork for new types of class struggle, proletarian, direct unionism that unites the employed and unemployed of the 89%.

These types of struggle are also options for the rank and file of current unions, especially if these unions continue to loose legal protections.   Unions in Wisconsin have likely lost collective bargaining rights – it was important and inspiring that folks fought to protect these rights, but it appears that that fight was unsuccessful and now new forms of struggle  become necessary.  What if union members relied on forms of struggle that don’t rely on collective bargaining?  What if they took up direct action strategies such as work slowdown and strikes to directly resolve grievances around the job, the community, and politics?  These types of actions could build real confidence among the proletariat and develop authentic solidarity across borders and industries.  That is the kind of solidarity we need to win immediate fights and to ultimately bring down capitalism.

We need to learn how to work with one another to make this happen-  employed and unemployed,  unionized and non-unionized.  This is what we’ve been trying to do the past few months.  We hope these reflections offer a small grain of sand that could contribute to the broader strategizing going on throughout the proletariat from Longview to Oakland, from Madison to Milwuakee, from Seattle to Cairo and Buenos Aires.   We eagerly welcome criticism, feedback, and suggestions as we grow and move forward together.

He says: “Go to pudget sound anarchist… and the Black Orchid page… The names and pictures of the people in the orange vest security team have been posted. A lot of Anarchist are angry at them.”

He further allegedly names those Peace and Safety members, and claims that they have been banned from OS rallies:

” I’m not venting. I care about the safety of the Orange Vest Security group. I don’t want to see anyone from that group hit in the face with a brick for trying to interfere with the blacbloc. To avoid any violence they were told that their group is now banned from any Occupy Rally.”

The above is completely unfounded and untrue. We do not know him, and neither is he a member of our organization. In the future, please let us know when such references are made. Such actions divide the movement and create unnecessary mistrust and suspicion.

Please refer to our House Rules.

The entire Insurgent Notes issue and Hella Occupy zine are worth reading; they both include reports and analysis from revolutionaries active in the Occupy movement across the country.

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The Radicalization of Decolonize/ Occupy Seattle

The Occupy movement took the country by storm, growing faster than the most optimistic revolutionaries could have predicted. For months we watched as strike waves, occupations, and insurrections swept the rest of the globe, turning the economic crisis into a political crisis from Greece to Egypt to Chile. For months, we wondered why the US proletariat was so passive in the face of the class war the 1 percent waged against us through budget cuts, crumbling social infrastructure, and layoffs that leave more of us unemployed while the rest work harder than ever in more and more dangerous and stressful conditions. What is wrong with us? If the rest of the global proletariat can rise up and fight back, why can’t we?

The Occupy movement has shown that we can. We are now part of a global class struggle that shows no signs of stopping. This struggle manifests itself in different forms and at different paces in different times and places. Even if the occupation movement splinters or dies out, it will likely resurge again in new ways because the global economic and political crisis shows no sign of stopping, and the movement has only just begun to give us a taste of what we are capable of when we come together and act boldly.

There is a whole army of Democratic Party operatives, liberal journalists, professors, union bureaucrats, and nonprofit leaders who criticize the vagueness of this movement because they wish to insert their ready-made political platforms into the mix, to hijack the movement and make it a battering ram to push through agendas they had already planned long before we started occupying. They are waiting for us to get frustrated with our own lack of goals and lack of strategy so they can show up and install theirs at a moment of fatigue and crisis when we doubt our own capacities and feel we need to be saved by the experts. Radicals in Seattle have defined these folks as formidable enemies that need to be opposed at every step. We try to differentiate them from less experienced occupiers who are new to politics and who cling to liberal ideas because it’s all they’ve been exposed to so far. We disrupt the former and we work with the latter.

A radical tendency has been steadily growing within Occupy Seattle, and this tendency is set on preventing the left wing of the Democratic Party from hijacking and controlling the movement. This radical tendency is very dynamic, and is not simply the “professional activists” from various Leftist sects. People who considered themselves a-political 2 months ago are now starting to ask each other whether we need a revolution in this country. People who tried to smile at cops 2 months ago hoping this would keep them safe are now wearing masks to demonstrations knowing the police are a threat to everyone’s safety. People who thought we needed professional, bureaucratic leaders 2 months ago now vehemently insist that the direct democracy we practice in the occupations must be defended by any means necessary against the bureaucrats who continuously try to undermine it.

If you scan the corporate Seattle media you will see repeated laments from liberal establishment mouthpieces, arguing that Occupy Seattle has gone off course, that it has become more radical than the rest of the Occupy Wall Street movement, that anarchists and communists have way too much influence here. They are generally right about these points; of course, they think it’s a bad thing and we think it’s a good thing. But how is it that Occupy Seattle got so radicalized?

Before Occupy Seattle broke out, there was already a growing radical political milieu in Seattle, which formed through the struggle against police brutality last year, and through creative organizing initiatives such as the Seattle Solidarity Network. Widespread non-sectarian cooperation between radicals from various political tendencies has allowed us to start developing highly public and accessible revolutionary perspectives, strategies, and actions. The non-sectarian and friendly vibe between our circles has made it easier for new people to work with us without having to penetrate through cliquish or arrogant borders. This is probably the biggest reason for our successes.

One reason for this non-sectarian vibe could be that most of the tendencies in this radical milieu are new, and base our priorities on the needs of the current moment, not on the fault lines formed by debates 10–20 years ago. The radical tendency in Occupy Seattle now includes Hip Hop Occupies, Black Orchid Collective, insurrectionary anarchists around the Tides of Flame publication, anarcho-syndicalists, members of the People of Color Caucus, Red Spark/Kasama, the anti-fascist /self-defense working group (see below), and a large number of newly radicalized activists who are still defining their politics. This radical tendency is much more proletarian and much more multi-racial than the liberal faction. There are also individuals from socialist groups who participate from time to time, though the socialists in general have been less connected to these emerging milieus.

Here I will outline some broad approaches this radical tendency has taken. Not everyone in the tendency would agree with these points, but they are an emerging general strategy that is a product of many discussions. Our approach has been to very publicly present revolutionary perspectives, demands, and strategies, to create a revolutionary tendency within Occupy Seattle that also expands beyond Occupy Seattle and is not confined by its framework or borders. We don’t insist that the entire moment adopt our political perspectives, and instead we agree to disagree and to keep debating it out. But we also don’t abstain from Occupy, simply attempt to recruit from it into separate projects, or confine ourselves to enclosed “radical caucus” or identity based caucuses, as important as these are. We are everywhere in the occupation, building it and openly demonstrating revolutionary ideas, practices, and culture. We fight capitalism, white supremacy, patriarchy, heterosexism, colonialism, and able-ism in every aspect of our activity. We also do not push for absolute unity within our own radical circles; we work with anyone who is a revolutionary against capitalism and the state, who is active in the struggle, and who is trustworthy. This means there is lively debate and discussion when we hang out together.

In terms of demands, we have several complementary approaches. One, we put forward very practical, winnable demands, but link them to the need for broader revolutionary change (for example, when the daycare at Seattle Central Community College was set to lose its funding our anarchists allies made a great flyer titled “Save the daycare, destroy capitalism”). The goal of fighting for winnable demands is to build working class confidence, but these alone can be reformist if not linked to a broader vision. Second, we put forward far-reaching but concrete and practical demands, and are very clear and up front that they would require revolution to achieve. For example, in response to transit cuts we demand free transit, no cops on the trains and busses, and a transit system run by workers and riders. Third, we link this to the concrete act of occupying key useful resources, taking them back from the system and administering them democratically. We do this by occupying busses and refusing to pay, or by occupying an abandoned house and putting banners out front saying “occupy everything—no bosses, no landlords.”

What we have avoided is demands that require us to take up the burden of articulating ways the system can reform itself. For example, demands like “tax the rich” immediately prompt questions like “how are you going to get that passed in the legislature, which politicians support it, can you get it on the ballot, etc.” Our approach is more along the lines of: “we want to occupy, strike, and blockade the flow of capital to resist austerity measures and budget cuts, and when we do the 1 percent will either get scared enough that they will hire their own staff to figure out how to pay for health care, education, jobs etc., or they will try to repress us because the system itself can’t keep running without imposing austerity, which is just one more reason why we need a revolution.” One critique we have received recently is that we should be doing more to inoculate against possible reforms or concessions that might be given to buy off these struggles. The system is in crisis and over the long run does not have anything to offer the working class, but in the short run it does still have the capacity to dish out selective concessions. We need to work on clear arguments anticipating future forms of co-optation, preparing ourselves and others to reject these and to keep building toward revolution. We chant “cops, bankers we don’t need them, all we want is total freedom.” But the system will not collapse automatically, and the working class will need to become highly conscious of the obstacles that it will face along the way toward total freedom.

What is most dynamic about the Occupy movement is its balance between

1. taking back the useful products of our labor (occupying spaces and resources without asking permission), and
2. engaging in mass direct action around broader political struggles such as fighting budget cuts, opposing banks, etc.

Without the first part, this just becomes another ineffective protest movement constantly opposing things but never building an alternate and rarely winning anything immediately useful to working people. Without the later, it becomes an isolated subculture intent on perfecting social relations within our occupation, camp, or squat, losing sight of the fact that this is not yet direct democratic communism, that the food we share is still grown under exploitative conditions, that our ability to participate is marred by the labor we do or do not do for exploitative bosses, etc., and this won’t change until millions of people come together to bring down the system—we can’t simply secede from it and ignore the rest of society. Radicals have consistently defended and maintained this balance, which explains why we are growing in strength. We have avoided the twin pitfalls of pressure politics (too much protest, not enough occupation) and lifestyle politics (too much navel gazing, not enough mass direct action).

Some of the middle class people who started the movement may have seen the very tactic of occupation as a form of pressure politics, though they quickly attracted large layers of people who are disillusioned with electoral politics and wanted to start building new forms of direct democracy, and are attracted to the forms of organization used to govern the occupied spaces (General Assemblies, workgroups, etc.).

Radicals here in Seattle recognized that the content is equally important as the form. You can have a perfectly developed facilitation process in General Assembly, with “progressive stack” methods to ensure that women, people of color, and other oppressed groups are heard equally. However, the occupation still exists in a capitalist division of labor where some of us have been trained in certain skills that others don’t have… some of us have been trained to argue and administer well, and others to cook and do caring labor. This division of labor is patriarchal and white-supremacist, and it won’t go away until we stop treating labor as a commodity to be divided up and sold. Also, the movement needs to be about concretely taking back, sharing, and eventually (if we occupy land and workplaces), producing, useful things for each other; it can’t just be about democratic decision making out in the cold rain. The chant “everything for everyone, the revolution has begun” has become very popular in Seattle, and we think it gets at this point.

Many of the first people to organize Occupy Seattle were downwardly mobile urban professionals (dumpies) who the economic crisis had dumped into the middle of the proletariat. The majority of these folks in Seattle are white, but not all. We wrote a piece summarizing the early limitations of the movement, emphasizing that the dumpies can join but they should not be allowed to use their managerial background to dominate, and other layers of the working class, especially workers of color, should be in the lead. Over time, the emphasis on sharing useful resources communistically and democratically attracted layers of homeless people who found direct benefits from being in the camp. Some have said this is a problem because these folks are not “political” or are not “active in marches,” etc. First of all, this is simply not true. In Seattle, homeless folks have been on the front lines, including in major clashes with the police. Jennifer Fox, a homeless, pregnant 17-year-old woman, was struck in the stomach by the cops, after which she miscarried. Moreover, this line of thought betrays an overemphasis on politics as protest, as pressure politics, instead of as attempts to directly take back use values and share them through occupation, which itself is political, especially if it helps the working class develop organizational forms to meet its own needs. Of course the danger is we could become a social service agency that provides material goods as the state does less and less of that—that’s why we need to take resources from the 1 percent, not just donate them, and we need to also fight cuts to social services while we occupy.

At first, Occupy Seattle occupied Westlake Park, ground zero for the WTO uprising in 1999, and a common spot for protests in the city. This gave us visibility. It gave us a way to challenge the gentrification that has occurred in Seattle the past 20 years as the rise of Microsoft, Amazon, Starbucks, and the biotech industry lured global capital to this formerly blue collar town.

However, occupying one of the corporate hubs of the entire West Coast proved difficult in the face of police harassment. At first the police’s response was passive aggressive. This is the post-WTO police force and they learned from their mistakes. They were careful not to use tear gas, baton rounds, or pepper spray which might prompt a backlash or might radicalize people by showing them what the servants of the 1 percent are willing to do to maintain capitalist power. Instead, they shined light in our eyes, made us stay up all night, and hoped we’d get so sleep deprived we’d turn on each other. These are prison guard tactics adapted for use in a public park. We made two attempts to occupy the park with tents, and each time the police tore them down with raids.

The relative passiveness of the police gave ammunition to the liberals who wanted to argue that police are part of the 99 percent, and that we should welcome them and try to win them over. We would not be surprised if their tactics were calculated to help shore up this tendency and encapsulate the movement. However, their strategy backfired to some extent, largely because Westlake is home to many homeless youth who joined the camp early on and took the lead in organizing militant resistance to police tactics. Radicals and homeless youth quickly formed a block together, shouting at police, and several times even pushing them out of the park.

This was the first emergence of a strategy which would become more refined over time—the radicals in the crowd would avoid police provocations to riot, but would engage in mass refusal to obey police orders, refusal to move, and open hostility to the police aimed at making them unwelcome in our space. These tactics seemed to build political confidence among occupiers. They avoided the dangers of a riot situation we and our supporters are not prepared for, but also tapped into folks’ sense of dignity, defiance, and frustration with the often scripted and passive forms of civil disobedience promoted by liberals (“okay, everyone who wants to get arrested come over here, we’ve told the police what we are about to do, they’ll ask you to move, just say no and go peacefully and silently when they take you”).

This approach lessens the division between those “risking arrest” and those not risking. It maximizes participation for folks who are willing to risk but would prefer to avoid arrest, which tends to be a large group. We are mindful that some folks cannot risk arrest because of immigration status, parole, etc., and we prioritize ways they can also participate without taking the risk, but for those who can risk, we have chosen tactics that encourage mass defiance and disobedience.

Each time these tactics were used early in the movement, it would spark open air debates of hundreds of people about the role of the police, which ended up raising all sorts of crucial political questions about class, the state, and how capitalism functions. Over time more and more people became critical of the police, culminating in a joint Occupy Seattle/Oct 22nd anti–police brutality march. Many of the folks who mobilized last year against the murder of Native woodcarver John T. Williams came back out. The crowd was more multi-racial than most Occupy events, and there was a spontaneous standoff at the precinct, several arrests, youth of color openly advocating armed self defense vs. the police. The liberals flipped out about this and kept saying we were “diverting” the movement away from the core issue of fighting the banks by making it about police too. Our response was: it’s about both—police are tools of the 1 percent.

The people of color caucus, anarchists, us, and other radicals united to pass this “decolonize” resolution in the General Assembly. It emphasizes this is stolen native land, we’re not trying to continue that colonial occupation, we’re trying to end it. When we say “occupy Seattle” we mean it in the tradition of militant workers who have occupied their factories from Argentina to S. Korea. A related motion to change the name of the movement to Decolonize/Occupy Seattle failed after vigorous debate. Most radicals use this new name regardless. When we shut down the port on Dec. 12th, the march was lead by a huge grafitti banner with the words “arise and decolonize.”

The radical tendency also successfully passed a GA resolution saying no occupiers should call the cops on other occupiers. This was an attempt to block the dumpies from calling the cops on homeless youth for simple things like drinking which could be addressed among us. It was a direct challenge to their class chauvinism. It was not meant to be an absolute prohibition; for example, we are not about telling survivors of sexual assault that they have no right to contact the state—that is up to them, though of course for many women, especially women of color, calling the state is also unsafe and an alternative needs to be built.

After constant police raids that kept shutting down our camp, we moved from Westlake plaza to Seattle Central Community college. This involved the radicals uniting in a faction fight against liberals who were undemocratically negotiating with the mayor to move to City Hall, behind the back of the General Assembly. The faculty union at Central supported the camp. It’s at a working class campus with many students of color, in a gentrified historically queer neighborhood.

This camp had its problems, but it did function as a base of operations to plan dozens of very dynamic, unscripted direct actions. There was a series of direct actions October 2nd against Chase CEO Jamie Dimon when he came to town, including an occupation of a Chase bank in solidarity with the Oakland strike that happened the same day. This was a major turning point in the movement, and a culmination of the kinds of street tactics mentioned above. Outside the bank we did a lot of anti-capitalist agitation—speeches and chants like “workers of the world unite, join, join the general strike,” and “hey hey, ho ho, capitalism’s got to go”. People locked down to do a hard blockade inside. After the police sawed off the pvc piping around the activists’ arms and dragged them out, people in the crowd lay down and blocked the paddy wagons so they couldn’t move. The cops responded by beating people with clubs and bikes and pepper spraying. This completely changed the crowd dynamics. The liberal neo-Gandhians didn’t know what to do, and the more radical layers of the crowd responded by holding their ground, refusing to move, and in some cases folks started fighting back, jumping on cop cars, etc., and pushing the cops down the street. This was not a black block action and it was not initiated by long-term revolutionaries though many were present at the front lines. It was led by people who had started largely as liberals but have become radicalized the past 2 months through previous confrontations. The cops and media are saying it’s the most confrontational demonstration here since the WTO.

Later that evening, a union-initiated rally against Dimon turned into a blockade of the Sheraton hotel, where the 1 percent was having a dinner party on the balcony overlooking the rainy cold streets filled with proletarians. It was like something out of the French Revolution. This demonstration ended with more arrests and pepper spray, and debates with liberals about whether or not to do the blockades.

One goal of the Seattle Central Camp was to spark a movement on campus against budget cuts. Efforts were made to hold student-worker assemblies, but not enough outreach was done along these lines, partly because so many of the organizers got caught up with other responsibilities, including dealing with drama inside the camp.

The very first night we were there, some Neo-Nazis came into the camp with “hail hitler” tattoos on their chin, doing Nazi salutes. They left bleeding. Neo-Gandhian liberals laid hands on anti-fascist militants to try to stop them from intervening. This put people at risk by immobilizing them so the Nazis could have attacked them, so some of the anti-fascist activists threw them to the ground. Some of the liberals chanted “om,” hoping the Nazis would go away. After this, a multi-tendency antifascist working group formed that patrols the camp every night. This event has lead to ongoing debates about nonviolence vs. diversity of tactics, and some liberal static about defending Nazis’ free speech rights.

There was ongoing tension in the camp, including lots of misogyny and rape culture, as well as drug abuse and constant fights. The liberals were incompetent at handling this and many of them acted as enablers by refusing to use the necessary force to remove people from the camp whose behavior had become a clear threat to other people. They blocked radicals most times that we tried to intervene forcefully to defend ourselves, especially when we tried to intervene to confront misogynistic behavior. Eventually, a few of the liberals from the official “Peace and Safety” committee started working with us because they saw how destructive and ineffective their policies were.

Many of these security problems were blamed on homeless people. The reality is they are coming from homeless and housed folks alike. The problem is with violent, oppressive behavior, not with poor people. We have been especially adamant about this when we have heard anti-homeless rhetoric from union staff people who come down to the camp. We emphasize that these Occupy camps are new form of the ’30s Unemployed Councils; they are organizations that provide immediate needs while fighting militantly against the system. Workers and unemployed folks need to unite. If workers want to win any workplace struggles, they should be working with homeless folks to build flying squad pickets to back up their own job actions, and they should also be fighting for unemployed folks’ own demands and needs, not just theirs. Let’s make it like the Toledo Auto-Lite strike in the ’30s.

At least now, dumpies are not the only class layer defining the primary public face of the movement. Now we need to focus on how to reach more employed proletarians from deeper layers of the class, and unemployed but housed folks from the neighborhoods. House occupations and anti-eviction campaigns could be the next step.

The Seattle Central Community College administration over-exaggerated these problems in the camp in order to justify kicking Decolonize/Occupy Seattle off campus, which happened in early November. A professor refuted their claims in a recent article. Many people got tired of the drama in the camp, or sick becuase of the cold, and stopped staying there. Instead of focusing on defending the camp, militants have been focused on occupying buildings. An abandoned house was occupied in the Central District, a historically Black neighborhood. It was a combined effort of anarchists, Black organizers from the neighborhood, and homeless youth. The message of this occupation was an attempt to fight gentrification in the neighborhood, and an expression of the contradiction between the use value of housing and its exchange value under capitalism. Their simple media statement, scrawled in marker on the wall reads: “There are abandoned houses. There are homeless people. This makes no sense.”

Several hundred folks from Decolonize/Occupy Seattle also attempted to take over an abandoned warehouse in Capitol Hill. Immediately upon occupying the space, folks began cleaning it up, painting the walls with beautiful murals, holding some of the most civil and thoughtful General Assemblies so far, barricading doors, etc. Notably, radicals initiated this action, but liberals supported and actively helped build it. In the early morning hours, a SWAT team raided the place through the roof and kicked everyone out, leading to a number of arrests.

Finally, Occupy Seattle voted unanimously to support and build the West Coast Port Shutdown action on Dec. 12th. This was a coordinated response to the coordinated police repression against the movement, and an attempt to shut down Wall Street on the waterfront as retaliation for the austerity measures that the capitalists have been pushing. It was also a labor solidarity action with port truck drivers who face racism, poverty wages, and unsafe conditions, as well as ILWU members who sabotaged grain shipments in Longview, WA, after multinational conglomerate EGT attempted to run a grain terminal there without their labor.

Our messaging and reasons for shutting down the port can be found here. Locally, we linked this action to the struggle against Democratic Governor Christine Gregoire’s devastating proposed cuts to social services, education, and health care. Here is a selection from the document cited above, explaining why we shut down the port:

1. We will shut down the port to resist the budget cuts that target working class people. The 1 percent are confident they can cut our health care, education, food aid, and social services because they think we won’t fight back. They are wrong. If they cut our safety net to pieces, we will cut their profits. The port is a major source of profits for the 1 percent, especially during the holiday season when they ship goods produced by Asian workers under horrible labor conditions to American malls where increasingly broke workers buy holiday presents on credit, worried about whether we will lose our jobs, food stamps, or health care. We are tired of worrying, so now we are fighting back. A port shutdown will hit the 1 percent directly in their wallets. Happy Holidays you scrooges.
2. We will shut down the port to bypass the corporate-controlled politicians and confront the 1 percent who really call the shots. In December, some members of Occupy Seattle will be occupying the Capitol building; the rest of us here in Seattle will occupy capital: the port facilities of transnational corporations. Together, we fight against the same cuts. Capital means the machines, trucks, ships, stores, cafes, hospitals, etc.—all the things the corporations own, which we work on to make their profits. One of their biggest pieces of capital is the port of Seattle. We know the 1 percent controls the politicians who are cutting the working class’s standard of living. So instead of begging politicians to stop cutting us, we’ll do what our friends did when they occupied Wall Street and go straight to the source of the problem: the capitalists. The ports are Wall Street on the waterfront—without them running, Wall Street makes no profits. If they cut our livelihoods, we will cut their profits.

A very solid team of organizers came together to do outreach at schools, welfare offices, bus stops, university campuses, etc. We leafleted regularly to port truckers and to rank and file long-shore workers, asking them to honor our picket line in solidarity. The action really helped solidify and expand the radical tendency that has been growing in Seattle all fall.

There is some confusion out there about our relationship with the ILWU. There is too much to comment on to really do it justice in this piece. We are working on a critical reflection piece analyzing the Dec. 12th action; this will be published shortly here.

To summarize, the action was independent from the ILWU but we did seek advice from friends who are rank and file long-shore workers. This may have not been clear to the rest of the country, but we were asking the rank and file long-shore workers to honor our independent picket line which we were putting up for our own reasons—the action was not primarily an ILWU solidarity action. We certainly expressed solidarity with rank and file workers in Longview, but this was not the only reason to shut it down. We were also doing it directly in solidarity with immigrant truck drivers, who showed a lot of support during the action by honking their horns, throwing up peace signs, etc. We made it clear we had our own reasons for doing this action, which we were expecting ILWU rank and file workers to respect:

By building this solidarity, Occupy Seattle will show that we also are part of the workers’ movement. Because the 1 percent uses repressive labor laws and union busting firms to disrupt organizing efforts, only 11 percent of US workers are organized into labor unions. On December 12th, Occupy Seattle will take a stand to defend our right to organize on the job. We also recognize that the U.S. working class is starting to get organized in the Occupy movement, which makes us part of the workers’ movement. Many who are involved in the Occupy movement are members of unions. Many of us also make up the remaining 89 percent of U.S. workers who are not in unions, as well as the large sections of the U.S. working class who are unemployed, underemployed, students, and homeless. Our picket lines might not have the same legal standing as official union picket lines, but when the unions first started picketing back in the day they were also considered illegitimate. Occupy Seattle’s picket lines are still picket lines organized by working class people, in solidarity with fellow workers. December 12th is the first of many actions that Occupy will take as a new wing of the workers’ movement.

Here is an article written by several friends from Decolonize/Occupy Seattle who were closely involved with organizing for the December 12th West Coast Port Shut Down describing what happened here on the 12th:

SEATTLE, Wash—Monday, December 12th, Occupy protesters and allies shut down several major ports along the West Coast. In Seattle, we stopped all evening work at Terminals 18 and 5, causing millions in profit loss to major corporations Stevedoring Services of America, American President Line, and Eagle Marine Services.

Yesterday’s actions drew a wide swath of the 99 percent. Protesters of all ages demonstrated, and people of color turned out in large numbers. The protests included a coordinated city-wide high school walkout, a rally emceed by Hip Hop Occupies, and a three mile march to the ports. The shutdown was organized by members of Occupy Seattle in solidarity with Occupy Oakland and with the struggles of LA, Oakland, and Seattle port truckers and Longview long-shore workers. Occupy Seattle’s People of Color caucus produced need-to-know guides for the action.

The shutdown was solidly an Occupy action, funded by the heartfelt donations of occupiers and their supporters, and a hefty donation from Occupy Oakland. We received absolutely no material support from any union. This was a direct action in the truest sense of the term: it was rapid-fire, organized on a shoestring budget, bypassed stalling bureaucracy, and mobilized the energy of an inspired community united against economic injustice.

The actions were planned with special attention to the long tradition of democracy and direct action within the ILWU. We picketed Terminals 18 and 5 in light of the longstanding ILWU principle of respecting other pickets. Union policy dictates that if arbitrators rule that picket lines are too dangerous to cross, ILWU workers will be compensated for the work they missed. The protests were wildly successful. Truck drivers and port workers repeatedly expressed support for the protesters, waving and honking as they passed.

Terminal 18—the Port of Seattle’s largest and busiest terminal—was the first to be shut down. Protesters took the main intersection, swiftly forming a blockade of roadside debris to stop the incoming shift, while redirecting outgoing traffic onto one lane. This effectively blocked three gates, while the fourth had been shut down by the port in anticipation of the action. The Seattle Police Department, not protesters, temporarily stopped workers and truckers from leaving the port by forming a bike chain as protesters yelled at them to “let the trucks through.”

Under pressure from protesters, police backed away, but later stopped traffic once again, stating that they were trying to clear the road for police convoys to enter. In solidarity with the protesters, the truckers honked their horns loudly and persistently, and the frustrated calls of the crowd forced the cops back off the road. Occupiers then continued to direct traffic out of the port, delivering flyers of Scott Olsen’s statement to drivers as they passed (see below).

At 5 PM reports came that ILWU workers were not being called in to work at Terminal 18 and that no long-shore work would be done on Harbor Island that shift. The terminal was shut down for the evening.

Protesters then proceeded to Terminal 5, the location of the Port’s only other ship that day, chanting “Whose Ports / Our Ports.” Approximately one hundred protesters formed a human barricade and moving picket line at the terminal gate, while another hundred stood by in support.

Some protesters who remained at Terminal 18 were herded onto the sidewalk. When they tried to maintain the blockade, conflict escalated. The police used pepper spray and flash grenades to disperse protesters, in one case forcibly pulling back the head of a protester to spray him in the face. A few protesters flung road flares and a bag of paint at the police in retaliation. In the resulting chaos, a number of protesters were arrested.

The crowd of Terminal 18 dissipated and joined Terminal 5. After two hours of picketing, the union arbitrator once again ruled in favor of protesters, calling off work at the terminal.

The Occupy Movement Strikes Back

Many of us showed up to this action having learned from the experiences we’ve had in the short months since we began assembling together. Having previous engagements with the police, we knew to protect ourselves. Legal observers and medics were interspersed through the crowd, and the majority brought bandannas and scarves to cover their noses against flash bombs and other chemical weapons utilized by the police. Some of us sported the goggles that we learned to use after pepper spray incapacitated activists during the march on Chase Bank.

Occupy Seattle’s action was one of the last in the day, following successful port shutdowns in Longview, Portland, Oakland, and other places. A hundred of our friends in Bellingham continued to break the flow of capital by protesting on the railroads, some locking themselves to the tracks in defiance. Solidarity was extended to us even from Japan, where the International Labor Solidarity Committee of Doro-Chiba made a statement of support. We send our sincere thanks to Oakland and Portland for extending their protests in response to the police aggression in Seattle that left several of our friends with stinging eyes, bruised faces, and ringing ears. We extend our support and love to Houston and San Diego, where the police have used similarly aggressive tactics.

Today, we stand in solidarity with the unemployed, the underemployed, the incarcerated, and the 89 percent of the working class who don’t belong to unions. We stand in solidarity with students protesting education cutbacks and rising debts, with low-wage workers protesting union-busting, with those facing foreclosure, and with the unemployed. We believe that a workers’ movement does not merely belong to the unionized, nor does it recognize imposed political borders. This is the building of a new movement. We rise from our roots in the labor movement, the civil rights movement, and anti-colonial struggles across the world.”

We see this action as a success, and as a first step in building a class struggle that can go beyond the limits of 20th century trade unionism. We are organizing now to follow up and expand on these struggles. There are other points that need to be celebrated, and several self-criticisms we’d like to raise about this action, but those will have to wait for our upcoming analytical piece.

Come through! See Facebook invite here

In the meantime, please read about the organizing process from another perspective.

****

“Be it Resolved: that this Council call out to friends of labor and the ’99%’ everywhere to come to the aid of ILWU Local 21, and to support them in any way possible in their fight against multi national conglomerate EGT. And,

Be it further Resolved: that this Council request that anyone willing to participate in a community and labor protest in Longview, Washington of the first EGT grain ship, do sowhen called upon by this body…”

- Resolution from Cowlitz-Wahkiakum Counties Central Labor Council Executive Board, 1/1/12

[Disclaimer: These are just my thoughts, and while I may not have a website on which I regularly post I figure they might be of some interest considering whatever special proximity I may have at the moment to some of these events and considerations, not to mention the general people involved. Insofar as the following is thought to be representative of anything, I only post it as representative of my sense for this situation]

For those that aren’t in the know already (after slogging through mountainous quantities of emails) there is a rather dense (albeit largely inane) history to this relatively brief trial run of large scale organizing in Seattle that I think bears a bit of clarification. Certainly as we set our sites on the incoming EGT ship loaded with plans to evacuate the scab grain that’s been stockpiled against ILWU local 21′s jurisdiction it’s worth being as inoculated as possible with respect to what will be the messy history of a momentous exercise of power, successful or otherwise.

The Lead

First off this whole thing was initially called for by Occupy Longview. Shortly thereafter both Occupy Oakland and more importantly the Cowlitz County Labor Council (CCLC) repeated the call to action. I say more importantly because everything I’ve read, heard, or seen leads me to believe the resolution put out by the CCLC in this case represents the voice of the local rank-and-file of ILWU Local 21, in practice if not formally.

Multinational grain distributor EGT, a subsidiary of an even larger multinational Bunge, has accumulated a good deal of grain at their terminal in Longview. They were given the land for this terminal by the city of Longview in exchange for an assurance that Local 21′s jurisdiction would be respected and that the construction of this terminal would be done through the local laborers union. In fact neither the construction nor the dock work has come through as promised. The construction was outsourced to inexpensive labor, and the dock work has been run primarily by scabs from IUOE Local 701.

Rather than good jobs in a community that needed them, the 225 workers that comprise ILWU Local 21 have racked up 200 arrests, hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines, house visits from the police at dawn, and general brutality in the fight for better working conditions. We should admire their commitment and the bravery of these longshoremen.

Our basic goal with this action is to halt (or at least impede) the arrival of the ship set for the port of Longview and it subsequent loading/departure. The ship’s goal is to load all of the grain that’s been stockpiled since September when EGT, with the police in its pocket (and now the coast guard!) began its open war on the working people of Longview. For most of us what we can reasonably hope to accomplish is deflecting any would-be scabs from loading that ship by blocking the entryway to work.

So far the people working toward this goal in Seattle (outside of the ILWU) have been organizers from a swathe of local Seattle groups, in no way restricted to people who came up under the Occupy banner, although most are active within Occupy at least to some minimal degree. In particular the groups represented (by cross membership, not necessarily in any other fashion) have been the Black Orchid Collective, the Freedom Socialist Party, the International Socialist Organization, and the Seattle Solidarity Network. ‘Occupy/Decolonize Seattle’ is involved as an entity only in terms of cross membership if I’m not mistaken.

The Wind Up

Around the new year this group received an alert that it needed to arrange for a bit of a speaking tour. In Seattle the date was given as Friday, January 6th. We were asked to prepare a space and advertise a public meeting wherein various ILWU illuminaries, various coastal occupy folks, and a few local people would speak to what’s been going on in Longview, what’s at stake, and what’s being asked. This was meant to lead to a discussion between all assembled so that we could work with better information toward greater success. In addition to that we had set an earlier meeting in the same space for Seattle folks that wanted to participate in the planning of solidarity actions up here (for those that can’t pick up and leave for Longview when the ship comes in) and caravans to Longview.

There are many accounts that have been written about that night which I believe, on the whole, do well enough at clarifying what happened. The short story is a small group of fifteen to twenty pacific northwest longshoremen, primarily the executives of the Tacoma, Seattle, and Portland locals showed up to the speaking part of the meeting after (in most of their cases) having had enough to drink that people nearby could smell it on them, and midway through Jack Heyman’s speech began shouting, climbing on chairs, and attempting to derail the meeting.

This had been attempted the night before in Portland and in each case happened on the order of the international, at least as far as any of the intruding longshoremen would admit that night when asked directly why they were doing what they were doing. “Just following orders” was said by a few of the younger (non-officer) men outside after the fact. In Seattle, for many reasons, they were successful in their effort, albeit managing the most shameful display of goonish cowardice I’ve ever seen in the process, including attempts to rush the stage, virulent sexism, and a general disdain for whatever anyone else had to say, including but not limited to the people of Local 21.

The Punch Line

Since that night the people that have been involved from the ISO recently have tried to pose themselves as possessing keen insight into why the event went the way it did, their grand speculation being that the flier being distributed for three days in advance of the event on Friday was saturated with anti-union rhetoric. The rhetoric which they’re so concerned with can be boiled down to ‘while we are solidly in support of the ILWU and we will be there to struggle with them there is much more that goes on for the 89% of the working class that is not unionized and we are trying to bridge the gap so that this sort of activity reinforces all our efforts, defensive and expansive’. A more concise version was delivered by a young fellow named Dan in a speech on Jan 6th when he stated plainly that, “…solidarity is a two way street.”

While the flier in question (not to mention the Black Orchid Collective more generally) certainly comes off as implicitly critical of unions, it is a long stretch from criticism to condemnation. And where, one might ask, is the ISO’s evidence of the truth of its accusation, that this flier led to a deep rift between occupy and the ILWU? I have to guess that if pressed the ISO folks that’ve been involved will point to an incident between Richard Eisner (self-described VP of the Labor Relations Council for Local 19) and a few people handing out fliers in the parking lot of Local 19′s hall. Having been one of the three people there I take a special pleasure in clarifying that we were yelled at for two things.

As far as the language of our flier was concerned we were yelled at for its content, but strictly for the presence of the words “ILWU” and “EGT” in the same piece of paper. No matter what language we might have picked we would have definitely had all the same incendiary points as far as good old Dick was concerned. Otherwise we were yelled at for the composition of the speakers’ board. In particular we got to the point where we informed him that Dan Coffman (president of Local 21 who was not actually there Jan 6th as the international had threatened to pull support entirely for Local 21′s ongoing picket if he appeared) and Clarence Thomas (organizer with Local 10 in the Oakland area and instrumental in the 2008 shut down of the west coast ports in opposition to the Iraq war) would be speaking before he went ballistic, shouting his disparaging opinions of those two ILWU leaders in our faces as we tried to talk to him.

Contrast that one encounter with many others that were had that night with A-men, B-men, Unidentified Casuals, and Identified Casuals as they arrived for the shift change. Many were thankful, the rest were by and in large disinterested. What was on our flier had no negative impact whatsoever on these people. In many cases the men and women I talked to were either excited or had thoughtful suggestions about the ways in which their union could improve its mobilization, one longshoremen suggesting a text bloc would be effective.

In short we were either neutrally or well received by nearly all the longshoremen minus this one officer. Of course this makes sense because what matters when you’re handing out fliers is what you’re talking about with the humans on the other end of the hand off, not the notes for where when and why they’re walking off with. In our case we were talking about Longview, about wanting to help, about fighting back, you know, real shit.

And while it’s true that we could have followed that advice to a greater extent, tried to go visit door to door, really sit down and talk with folks, we certainly weren’t completely silent with local 19, nor were we antagonistic with the people we were fliering. In fact all of us tried quite hard to be friendly, as awkward as it can feel in that particular parking lot.

Otherwise as far as the ISO is concerned the belligerent local 19 (and generally the pacific northwest) leadership should have gotten their way as soon as they threw a fit. That is to say their pretense for disruption, and you should understand that it was without question a pretense, that they be allowed to read a letter from Rob McEllrath (president of the ILWU international) should’ve been allowed without question. As if this would be a meaningful gesture of inclusion, not a spineless capitulation to bullies.

Mind you I personally believe the same thing, but only so that the portion of the room which was confused about where they should come down in the ongoing mess that made up the last thirty minutes of that meeting would be able to see clearly and without complication that these were brute disruptors, dispatched by a central office to interfere with Local 21′s effort to build effective community support. Then we could have simply surrounded them and forced them out of the room, with full support from all involved. If every one of us had without hesitation told them to leave, again and again until they did, we might have been able to salvage the end of that meeting, respectfully allowing the remaining occupy and Longview folks their time to speak with us, not to mention our own time to speak with one another.

The Union and the Critical Industry in a State of Class War

The presence of a militant organized working class in critical industries is a cultural treasure that at different times has aided and been aided by the community at large. To the extent that the Union is an organized body of workers it has every right to fight for good (capable of providing comfortably for the workers) and democratic (self organized, without favoritism, without oppression/exploitation) working conditions. That sort of activity should be supported at every turn by those seeking to dismantle capitalism. Meanwhile the extent to which the more conservative factions within such a union control the union is the extent to which both the union and the working class have been betrayed.

When an industry serves as an artery of global capitalism the greater population has an obligation to strike at their ability to operate profitably to further our efforts to reclaim popular control of the material centerpieces of our society. The union has no right (nor should it have interest) in deterring such a struggle, and instead should recognize the privilege of being on the front lines of it. If the current populace will not there are plenty who would waiting in the wings.

That said outreach and incorporation of the union into the popular front should be carried out vigorously and thoroughly for it is the rank-and-file of the union that actually know best how to carry on that particular industrial struggle in physical, practical terms. They are the raw materials from which the industry draws its blood, its breath, without them the life of the industry ceases.

This does not mean humbly begging for inclusion or sanction from the local leadership, it means going door to door to talk to the longshoremen themselves. It means taking the time to build actual relationships with actual humans that are in the union so that they’re no longer insulated from those of us trying to organize by their (at least locally) conservative leadership.

More simply as functional radicals it means abandoning the point of view that sees in the union something monolithic, instead recognizing the diversity of the union, and making a point to reach out to those groups who are interested in advancing the class struggle for all, who would like to act in solidarity with all. It is worth recognizing that there were people from the ILWU on both sides of the room that night. Ultimately in Longview we’ve been asked by an organized group of workers, whatever their affiliation with any other more centralized apparatus may be, to fight shoulder to shoulder against a multinational company that has visited house raids, arrests, brutality, and broken promises upon these people, their families, and their community. I for one will be there.

The Struggle Goes On

Since January 6th people have continued to organize with Longview because the longshoremen that have asked us for help, Local 21, are really just another body of workers trying to struggle against the system of global capitalism and it’s endless appeal to profits over people, wealth over health. The fact that factionalism exists within the ILWU, that apparently the more conservative elements of the union abound in Seattle’s leadership is irrelevant. What is relevant are those that wish to fight, not those happy with where they’re at or those content to advise continued faith in the brokers of the modern police state.

We can no longer afford to submit to the dinosaurs claiming we must compartmentalize the struggle of the working class, at best they’re fuel to our fire. Fight back, fight together, and fight to win.

AN OPEN LETTER TO LOCAL 10 LONGSHOREMEN:

Help Stop Repression in Local 19 Seattle!

January 18th, 2012

Brothers and Sister of Local 10:

My name is Brian Wiles, and I’m a deregistered longshoreman from ILWU Local 19, Seattle. My ILWU-PMA registration number is #57663. I was deregistered at the behest of Local 19 union officials in 2007, in retaliation for opposing their racist efforts to ethnically cleanse the Seattle waterfront of Black workers. Almost five years later, I still haven’t been given any due process or afforded the benefit of an arbitration over my unfair deregistration.

But this Open Letter ain’t only or even primarily about my personal situation. I’m concerned about the future of the union I still believe in, the ILWU, to which I’ve given a quarter of my life.

I’ve created a YouTube channel at YouTube.com/Deregistered19. There you’ll find some videos that will blow your mind. Officers of Local 19 and three other Longshore Division locals, in a violent mob action, physically broke up a public meeting called to build solidarity for Local 21 Longview’s fight against EGT/Bunge Ltd. union busting. You probably think this sounds far-fetched, and you’ll probably have to see it to believe it. Please take the time to watch these videos, and see for yourself.

I’m trying to sound an alarm to progressive ILWU members up and down the West Coast. Y’all need to understand how longshore locals in the Pacific Northwest ports, and especially Seattle Local 19, have been taken over by repressive, racist right wingers bent on destroying the democratic rights of their own union members, and purging Black and leftwing workers from the waterfront, so they can continue to gerrymander the union membership in a rightwing direction by means of racist hiring practices, intimidation of existing members, and sending goon squads to violently bust up democratically organized labor solidarity meetings.

I’ve been trying to explain how bad things have become on the Seattle waterfront, particularly to Local 10 members, for seven years. I hope Sisters and Brothers will now give this the serious attention it deserves. Now it’s a matter of public record, and with your own eyes you can see a glimpse of what goes on behind closed doors at the Local 19 hall every day, so I hope you’ll do something decisive to put a stop to this problem. Videos don’t lie, even if corrupt rightwing union officers do.

The despicable events at the Seattle AFL-CIO Labor Temple January 6th stand as an indictment of the Pacific Northwest locals of the ILWU, whose officers exposed themselves to be on approximately the same level of human dignity as Nazi stormtroopers or a lynch mob. They must be held accountable for their actions.

At YouTube.com/Deregistered19 you will find four unedited videos, shot at the Labor Temple event and graciously provided to me by a sister from the Seattle branch of the Freedom Socialist Party. Please take the time to watch Part 4 (at http://youtu.be/vS6kt8eJURI) carefully.

A labor solidarity event to build support for ILWU Local 21, Longview, organized by Occupy Seattle jointly with the Million Worker March Movement, is in progress. Local 52 member and African American Longshore Coalition Co-Chair Gabriel Prawl is MC’ing, and ILWU members Mike Fuqua of Local 21, Jack Mulcahy of Local 8, Clarence Thomas and Jack Heyman (retired) of Local 10, are the featured speakers.

After the other three brothers had spoken, Brother Heyman takes the stage and tries to educate the gathering about the role of socialist, leftwing workers in the founding and development of the ILWU. He dedicates his speech to the late Seattle Local 19 president Shaun Maloney, and explains that before he was an ILWU member he was a participant in the 1934 Minneapolis General Strike led by a militant socialist-led local of the Teamsters union. He goes on to explain ILWU founding president Harry Bridges’ early ties to the IWW and his development into a Marxist.

Halfway through Brother Heyman’s presentation, a goon squad of liquored-up ILWU officials arrives to physically bust up the public meeting. This all-white, all-male crew of rightwing hit men included Local 19 Seattle’s President Cam Williams, Vice President Rich Austin Jr., Port Labor Relations Committeeman Rudy Finney, and Executive Board members Chris Peeler and John Persak; Local 52, Seattle Clerks Business Agent Dave Black; President Scotty Mason of Local 23, Tacoma; President Jeff Smith of Local 8, Portland; and Pacific Coast Pensioners Association President and former ILWU International Vice President Rich Austin, Sr.

As anyone watching this (or any of the other videos shot from various angles appearing all over the internet, such as the full length version available at: http://www.livestream.com/owsoccupyseattle/video?clipId=pla_1853b7d2-338e-4b0f-a866-cac43e1ff636) can plainly see, these union bureaucrats storm into the Labor Temple auditorium intentionally to smash up the event.

At one point Scotty Mason attempts to lead his faction to storm the stage, but is prevented by audience members who stand together to defend the stage and the speakers. Later on, the goons shamelessly escalate the situation and provoke a riotous physical altercation by allegedly assaulting a female Occupy activist.

For a well-written, politically-sophisticated account by Occupy Seattle of this organized, violent disruption of the Local 21 solidarity event, see: http://www.occupyseattle.org/blog/2012-01-11/jan-6th-2012-unity-vs-union-bureaucracy

Since the Labor Temple event, Local 19’s January 12th Stop Work Meeting passed a “Resolution Regarding Occupy Seattle”, a blatantly dishonest and slanderous attack against the Occupy movement, an act of sabotage against Local 21’s efforts to conduct outreach for the EGT struggle, and a repressive McCarthy-style measure to curtail the political freedoms of Local 19 members. It begins with a list of outrageously false accusations, including the allegation that Occupy “initiated physical violence against our members” in Seattle, where multiple videos clearly show that the opposite is actually true.

It then goes on to order that “all ILWU Local 19 members withhold all support for ‘Occupy’, formally or informally”. Here is the resolution’s real purpose: To create the conditions for a witch hunt against Local 19 members who participate in or support this new working class movement. This resolution directly violates the First Amendment, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Section 7 of the National Labor Relations Act, and the so-called Union Members Bill of Rights of the Labor-Management Reporting and Disclosure (Landrum-Griffin) Act; it is also illegal under Article III of the ILWU International Constitution, Point #3 of the Ten Guiding Principles of the ILWU, and Section 13.1 of the Pacific Coast Longshore Contract Document, which forbids the parties from discriminating against workers on the basis of, among other protected categories, “political beliefs” and “political affiliation”.

The Local 19 resolution is available as a video here: http://youtu.be/niaF2PkMMoc

That the resolution’s author is none other than Local 19 Executive Board member John Persak—formerly a radical and leader of the Seattle IWW, who for a decade raged against the “repressive ILWU bureaucracy”—makes it doubly hypocritical.

I also note with disgust that Local 19 has never passed a resolution forbidding members from joining, supporting or associating with rightwing or racist groupings such as the Tea Party, the KKK or Aryan Nations; but since McCarthyism seems to be in full swing inside the union now, I hereby volunteer to provide a list of Local 19 members I personally know to be affiliated with such noxious political/racial organizations to anyone who might take steps to do something about it.

This McCarthyite attack against the democratic rights of Seattle longshoremen must be overturned immediately.

The ILWU local officers who led this violent, undemocratic attack against the Occupy Seattle/Million Worker March/Local 21 public community meeting in the hallowed halls of Seattle labor—in the very room in which a real working-class hero Brother Shaun Maloney’s wake was held in 2000—must be taken out of office immediately. Enough is enough. This disgraceful display is just beyond the pale of civilized humanity.

And since this reprehensible assault by drunken thugs appears to have been coordinated jointly between the leaderships of ALL the major Pacific NW longshore locals, it would be interesting to find out just how high up the ladder the planning actually went.

I hope the rank and file of the Longshore Division will find a way to launch an investigation into this matter and hold accountable whoever might have ordered the violent suppression of a community solidarity meeting to assist Local 21’s fight for its life against transnational capital.

An emergency Coast Longshore Caucus—OUR democratic, rank-and-file longshoremen’s “general assembly”—must be called into session immediately, so that the rank and file can discuss and vote about both the appropriate action strategy that needs to be pursued to stop EGT/Bunge Limited’s union busting against ILWU Local 21 and the ILWU’s proper relationship/alliance with the Occupy Movement.

In Solidarity,

Brian Wiles #57663

On January 27, Occupy Seattle will join a United Farm Workers (UFW) march on Darigold headquarters. Beautiful promotional posters are available for download in Spanish and English — feel free to download, print, and distribute these.

Contact:
UFWsolidarity@gmail.com
(206) 745-0164

On January 27, 2012Decolonize/Occupy Seattle will demonstrate their continued solidarity with laborers world-wide as we join with the United Farm Workers (UFW) in their long standing campaign for justice for the farm workers at Ruby Ridge Dairy, whose labor supplies the Darigold corporation with its dairy products.

Workers at Ruby Ridge work long days without breaks, when they ask for water they are told to drink from where the cows drink and are threatened with guns when attempting to organize; many have experienced wage theft. Farmworkers are not included in the National Labor Relations Act and already one third of the organizers have been fired for trying to form a union.”We want the community to join our struggle so that Darigold can hear the call for justice. We are workers, we make Darigold strong and rich, and we demand justice,” says farmworker Margarito Morales.

Actions have already been taken to hold Darigold accountable for the injustice at Ruby Ridge, yet nothing has changed. Like many large corporations, Darigold continues to turn a blind eye to the abuses being suffered by the workers who labor to produce their milk and their profits. Farm workers and UFW supporters found themselves greeted by security guards when they traveled to Darigold’s headquarters to discuss a remedy to the abuses.

In response, the United Farm Workers started a petition (http://action.ufw.org/page/s/darigoldpetitionkids) and on January 27, 2012, with support from Decolonize/Occupy Seattle and the greater Seattle community, will deliver these petitions to the Darigold Headquarters.

We call on all people to join with the United Farm Workers and Decolonize/Occupy Seattle to demand justice for Farm workers.On January 27, 2012 we will meet at Westlake at 2pm and march to the Darigold Headquarters at1130 Rainier Ave. South. There we will rally at 3pm to call on Darigold to take immediate action to resolve the issues facing workers at Ruby Ridge. Transportation will be provided for those who need it.

The farm worker’s fight is the same fight against corporate greed that has led to the occupy movement. They are part of the 99%! JOIN THOUSANDS to demand that Darigold use its influence over its dairies to stop the abuses. Tell them they cannot ignore farm workers!!

Longview rank and file member addresses Occupy Seattle here

Disruption by Local 19, Seattle ILWU Branch at the Jan 6th event here (This video does not do justice to the thuggish behavior the union officers exhibited. But till we find better footage, this is what we have)

ILWU Local 19 passes a reactionary resolution with FALSE accusations here

Also  see: West Coast port shutdown announcement video (from Occupy Oakland) and This Week In Occupy: December 12th West Coast Port Shutdown

We write as some of the main organizers of the Seattle D12 port action. We are the womyn and genderqueer organizers who worked behind the scenes to make this day happen. The majority of us are people of color. The majority of us are the 89%: non-unionized workers in care work, food work, and the service sector. We are a group that has organized together, faced many of the same struggles, and discovered common stories others need to hear. As POC, Womyn and Genderqueer, we navigate multiple identities and bring this understanding to our organizing. We also have varied experiences even as we share some affinities and commonalities — differing immigration status and records, educational levels and access, as well as employment statuses. We emphasize our common experiences but do not want to dishonestly erase our varied experiences under this system of capitalist exploitation, white supremacy and heteropatriarchy.

We affirm that the D12 Port Shutdown was a multi-issue action in a multi-issue movement. The face of this action has been dominated by white cis-males, primarily due to the racist media bias, as well as reasons we discuss below. Thus people do not see that our organizing was predominantly womyn and genderqueer led.  In reality, we organized as equals with comrades who are white, cis and male. D12 was possible because of us and our communities. We write to let that be known. We write to ensure it is not forgotten.

How we organized

Womyn, genderqueer, and POC organizers were central to this action from the beginning — among the first to rally to the call from Occupy Oakland. When we began organizing for this action we focused on building an organizing space that was bottom up, unlike bureaucratic unions who use rank and file as warm bodies only when a lobby day is scheduled or a contract is due to be re-negotiated. We did this by calling community meetings and inviting those who came to the meetings and showed interest to be part of the organizing structure. In these core organizing spaces, womyn, genderqueer, and POC organizers predominated and guided much of the process.

Our structure on the day of was simple but effective. We chose public faces or “emcees” who were responsible for communicating with the crowd, making sure the bullhorn was in use and being shared with the crowd, and acting as point people when folks had questions about the action. We also chose “Responsibles” whose role it was to understand the layout of the port, communicate with each other about police presence, get updates from the longshore dispatch hot line, and decide the best course of action based on our read of the crowd and the information we received about port activity. These two positions — the emcee and the “responsible” — were partnered at all the picket team sites in the port (gates, intersections, and safety zones).

After careful thought and discussion, we decided to choose mainly male-bodied people, both white men and men of color, to be the emcees. Some of those amongst us had vulnerable immigration status and records which made us targets of the police for our political involvement. Others amongst us had our own reasons for not wanting to be public emcees based on personal capacity and previous experiences with the police. Regardless, our refusal to be the public emcees on that day was not indicative of our fear of the state, but simply a calculated decision based upon weighing personal risk and capacity. We know of the media’s fascination and obsession with white cismen as spokespeople of the movement. We know clearly also that the Seattle Port Shut Down was not carried out by white cis-men only, but rather a wide range of people with varying identities, political tendencies, and safety concerns.

Behind the scenes: outreach, multi-state conference calls and preparation

The two and a half weeks prior to D12 were a coordinated blanketing of our city with community specific flyers for high school students, college students, port truckers, longshore workers, and a general flyer for Spanish and English speaking community members. We and many others spent hours every day handing leaflets out one by one and posting flyers at Community Service Offices, Labor Ready and Work Source Centers, and a Latin@ day worker center. Bus stops on busy, working class thoroughfares and in our neighborhoods were all flyered. Local Spanish radio stations made daily announcements. Organizers were invited to speak in public high school classrooms and to student clubs, such as the Black Student Union. Several working class organizations in Seattle, such as the Seattle Solidarity Network and the Industrial Workers of the World, mobilized their networks through phonebanking and mass texting. We made a consistent and concerted effort to outreach to our working communities of color and immigrant communities.
Specific attention was also given towards reaching out to port workers. Groups went multiple mornings a week at 6:30am to hand flyers to receptive truckers waiting in line to load containers, several of whom openly shared the impossibility in making ends meet and the reality that “something’s gotta change.” On two different occasions the port police were called on us by security people. We put flyers on truckers’ parked cars near the port and also went to Georgetown and SODO to flyer all the parked trucks in allies and quiet roads amidst the industrial warehouses. The same effort went into flyering outside the union hall before swing shift dispatch. While acknowledging the sensitive legal position the local was bound by, we did not hesitate in greeting each rank-and-file member we encountered as an individual with their own opinion on the D12 action and broader Occupy movement.
The regular West Coast conference calls were invaluable in buoying our morale in Seattle knowing that dozens if not hundreds were doing similar work up and down the West coast and into the mainland. Hearing about other organizers facing the common brick wall built by union leaders calmed our nerves and solidified our resolve. We initiated a conference call specific to the Pacific Northwest region which we hope will allow for further future collaboration around the ports and beyond.

Relationship with Occupy Working Groups

We had some very positive experiences with some of the working groups in Decolonize/Occupy Seattle.  In particular, the livestream and internet communications team maintained excellent communication with organizers and broadcasted information leading up to and during the action.  The arts and entertainment team contributed an array of well-messaged banners and picket signs. We thank them for their part in making the action a success.

However, a few of the other teams did not work with us well. We raise our critiques constructively, with the intentions and hopes that we all be reminded, that the various working groups in Decolonize/Occupy Seattle should respect the decisions taken by the General Assembly and allocate resources accordingly. The General Assembly had unanimously voted for the port action. However,whether intentional or not, we faced a lack of support and accountability from some working groups.

In particular, we faced difficulties with acquiring Occupy Seattle funds for the port action. The accessibility of the port action for people with disabilities was a major priority of ours. This required the rental of a wheelchair accessible van and bus to bring people from Westlake Park to the action.  Our requests for funding for this need, as well as requests for support in fundraising, were met with skepticism and resistance, at times culminating in personalized attacks. We were fortunate that Occupy Oakland was able to come through with financial support, making it possible for us to provide accessible transportation. Individual organizers also ended up paying out of pocket for much needed amenities such as porta potties for the action (for which our fundraising efforts were later able to reimburse). The bureaucracy and resistance we encountered from members in Occupy Seattle, the lack of solidarity for organizing in two weeks one of the largest coordinated action along the West Coast since the May 2006 General Strike, was shocking.

In the lead up to D12 we experienced push back, skepticism, and questioning of the action on the part of the intergroup, an aspiring representative council of all working groups and a group made up almost entirely by white men. Among a few individuals in this council, we sensed a distrust of us as organizers, as well as a sense of having to convince them of the action’s legitimacy. We wonder if this is directly connected to the organizers being mostly womyn and genderqueer people of color. Since the organizing was not happening in their networks and channels, they withheld support , talked behind our backs and also assumed the worst of us. It is all the more shocking because many of us have been very active in Decolonize/Occupy Seattle since the beginning and were not new or unknown people to the movement.

As organizers, we too learn from this action. We do not wish to absolve ourselves of any shortcomings by displacing them on the other members of our movement. Communication during intense stressful moments, especially relating to scarce resources such as finances, are expectedly difficult. However, we do find it difficult to separate the pattern of racist and sexist behavior of some individual members from the expected difficulties that arise from organizing a port shutdown in two weeks.

Other members of Occupy seemed to fear the militancy of the port action, with some even calling it “violence.”  They feared we would alienate unions (typically meaning union officials, not rank and file members) and that we’d alienate people watching mainstream news coverage of the event.  We in fact did reach out to the ILWU leadership more than once and were conscious of the impact on working class people’s lives. For example, we tactically decided against shutting down the West Seattle Bridge.  We found that many individuals who expressed those reservations chose to abstain from helping to organize rather than do the work that’s needed to deal with those issues.

On a more fundamental level those fears express the middle class/bourgeois mentality that some Occupy members are still bringing to our organizing.  When we reached out to working class people, predominantly people of color in White Center or to port truckers, the general response was not that this action was too radical or militant and therefore alienating.  We overwhelmingly heard from other working class people of color — most of whom have no union at all — that militant action is exactly the kind of thing we need to do in response to the cuts that are hitting us hard.

Art & culture: The Revolution Will be Visualized

The Decolonize/Occupy movement first begun to make national headlines in social media networks and throughout the world when individuals created autonomous messages, signs, posters to connect an individual “narrative” to a collective struggle. Revolutionary art is vital to the imagination of the movement. As we decolonize, we create a way of living with each other.

We surrounded ourselves with our culture throughout the day of action. Hip-Hop Occupies played a crucial role in organizing both the action and the rally. Hip-hop is a powerful instrument of decolonization and autonomous/collective messaging with a radical legacy of revolutionary organizing that transcends physical, mental, and imaginary borders.  Collaboration between the Arts and Entertainment working group and Food not Bombs also produced banners focused on decolonization, food justice, and ending all forms of oppression.

    Within the euro-centric, hetero-patriarchal educational system that denies youth, people of color, Indigenous peoples, economic refugees, womyn/muxeres, trans/non-gender conforming folk, and other communities access to our legacies and collective narratives, we reconstructed and redefined community learning through creating banners at the POCCUPY/Decolonize: Rise and Decolonize Giant Banner Making Party and throughout the week leading up to the port action. As cultural carriers, our identities are interlinked with cultural knowledge that manifests in the creative arts.  Our self-determination and autonomy as a collective was visualized in a giant Rise and Decolonize banner that led the march towards the port. We made this decision to send a clear message to the global elites that not only do we recognize the historical legacies of colonialism and imperialism but we reaffirm our voices in a global struggle.

When the education system fails students through budget cuts and standardized testing, the arts are often not seen as a valid form of education and building community. As radical organizers, we recognized music and arts as forms of education central to our identities, in particular in creating a space for youth to collectively and autonomously participate in organizing. Artists are educators and often our knowledge and creative resistance is taken for granted both within the education system and movements.  We demonstrated a commitment to decolonization and resilience in the form of collective knowledge and liberation.

The Revolution will not be catered: Food Not Bombs holds it down

On D12 we shared 1,000 burritos! These burritos were made from donated small-farm organic vegetables, organic rice and beans and the tortillas purchased direct from a local family-owned factory. Many different people came together for fun work parties involving music, art and conversation. When we prepare and share food we align our values with action. We kept our communities in mind in every effort regarding food for the Port Shutdown, preparation, serving, ingredients, accessibility.

Additionally, we called attention to Food Justice and the specific connections to the Port of Seattle, Bunge Corporation and Export Grain Terminal. As we continue to engage in the process of decolonization we work to deconstruct hierarchies and oppressions as related to food and land. As we deconstruct we need to create alternatives to sustain us and the Earth, to allow us to envision a future in which all our needs are met.

D12 though our eyes

We got small glimpses of what our collective liberation will look like all day on D12.  After an energetic rally at Westlake, several hundred occupiers marched the four miles plus to the port.  The crowd came from a broad spectrum of Seattle’s working class, including unemployed folks, youth of color, service workers, and students.  With our beautiful “Rise and Decolonize” banner up front, we marched energetically, chanting “Shut down the West Coast/Hit ‘em where it hurts the most”.  Many cars and trucks that passed us on the way honked their support.  As we approached the waterfront, virtually every port trucker honked, waved, and held up peace signs.

The People of Color Caucus produced and distributed an English and Spanish pamphlet with information on dealing with cops and what to expect that day, chants, and a port map.  For security reasons, we couldn’t lay out the plan, but we specified different color-coded “zones.”  We explained that, while we couldn’t guarantee what the cops would do, arrests and police terrorism would be less likely in the “green zone” and much more likely in the yellow and red zones.  Day of, we tried to communicate what these zones were though that was made more difficult by lack of sound system.

Once we reached Terminal 18, the primary target for the day, we shouted to the growing crowd the locations of the zones.  We explained on the megaphone that crossing into the Terminal puts you on Homeland Security territory, and for people to make sure and not do that.  There was definitely some confusion and slow moving for a bit, but many of us who knew the plan shouted information and instructions to help guide people on where to go according to comfort level and ability/willingness to face arrest.

With new people arriving all the time, we blocked all of the entrances to Terminal 18 for about an hour and a half before receiving word that owner, SSA, the same owner who is screwing over port truckers in Oakland and LA, had shut down the port for the night.  Our success in shutting down the busiest terminal at the port well before longshoremen arrived for evening shift meant there was still time to block the other smaller terminal that had work that day, Terminal 5.

At this point there was definitely some confusion and problems with communication.   Not all of the organizers had received and trusted the news that the terminal was shut down.  Some organizers advocated for staying until we knew for sure, while others, more confident in the information, wanted to head to Terminal 5 right away.  We didn’t have the numbers to split the group and hold both terminals.

Eventually, though, most of the crowd made it over to Terminal 5.  Some people stayed behind at the road blockade at 18, where a hard barricade blocked all but one lane of traffic (and where the police blocked the last lane despite occupiers shouting for them to leave it open so that workers could leave and ambulances could get through in case of an accident on the terminal).  Police took advantage of the smaller numbers by unleashing an assault on the remaining occupiers.  They threw flash grenades and possibly tear gas into the crowd and began beating and arresting people.

At Terminal 5, a growing crowd blocked the ILWU foot entrance as the evening shift arrival time neared.  Several hundred of us stood in front of the gate, marched in a circle, and milled around the vehicle gates to keep an eye on police activity.  We chanted, freestyled, beatboxed, and sang while most longshore workers waited at the union hall to see if the arbitrator would rule that they didn’t have to cross our picket line for health and safety reasons.

Eventually the arbitrator ruled that longshoremen didn’t have to cross our picket line.  However, in violation of contract, Terminal 5 declared that they wouldn’t pay longshore workers for the day!  This was a clear attempt to turn longshore workers against us.  However, many folks came out the next morning and picketed in solidarity with longshore workers,  a move that helped strengthen the solidarity between them and people who blocked the port, most of whom are non-unionized service industry workers or unemployed.

New approach to organizing labor

The coordinated West Coast port shutdown marks the emergence of a new phase of Occupy. We are taking ourselves seriously as a workers’ movement. We shut down the ports in solidarity with immigrant truckers, and longshore workers in Longview. We also shut down the ports because we, the working class, have been hit hard by the budget cuts, by austerity. We, the 89% of the workforce that is non-unionized, came together to assert our demands. We showed ourselves to be a serious legitimate force in the workers’ movement. Inspired by our call, many rank and file union members came out to join us, despite the disapproval and hostility from their union bureaucracies and leaders.

The Occupy-led West Coast port shutdowns have also highlighted the backwardness of the labor laws that govern unions in this country. We are reminded that the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) from 1935 was created by the 1% of this country at a time of mass labor unrest. The NLRA prevents unions from practising class solidarity. It removed the workers’ strike as a weapon of resistance by workers by enacting No Strike clauses in contracts. The purpose of the NLRA, like any arbitrary law created by the 1%, is aimed at preventing class unity and isolating our struggles..

We showed on D12, that these laws that bind union bureaucracies, are no longer relevant to us, the masses of workers. While the union leaders, stuck in their old ways of thinking and obeying the rules of the 1%, are unable to support the activity of large numbers of non-unionized workers, we, as the Occupy movement, has shown that we carry none of that legalistic baggage. We are the new phase of the workers movement.

This is also an international workers’ movement. Seattle media outlets decided to highlight photos of occupiers with nationalistic, anti-China signs. But we know we have much more in common with exploited Chinese workers than any American capitalist. The Japanese railroad workers who did job actions on D12 showed us that international class solidarity is not a story of the past found only in obscure labor history. It is an emerging current reality. We are building a workers’ movement that has no top-down leadership, one that builds across the working class, one that brings labor back to its origins: an injury to one is an injury to all. Occupy is the union of the 99%. The union leaves no one behind. We will learn skills to organize on our own jobs, our own low-waged measly paying workplaces. Just as we occupied the port truckers’ and longshore workplaces to be in solidarity with their struggles, we will occupy our own workplaces for an end to austerity measures that are placed on our backs.

Elections

We feel the rumbling approach of national elections as we watch the circus show of “debates.” The corporate fueled message of complacency “just vote for a politician who’s gonna screw you over less” rings hollow when we feel our power in taking direct action. Some in the Occupy movement have called for creating a third, independent political party or to “occupy congress.” Others have called for electoral reforms, boiling our problems down to capping campaign donations by the wealthy or strategizing on how to lobby near the ear of the 1%.

But it was upon our backs that this system was built and we remember why we first came out. The movement’s fierce independence away from political parties, the openness to new visions of possibility, the warmth of being with others, and the collective shifts in thinking about our histories of colonization, waged and coerced labor, gender binaries, and white supremacy.  Neither politicians nor a political party could ever create this for us.

We know no one can represent our interests or ideas except ourselves. They tell us to go home, go back to work, go back to believing that voting for a golden tongued politician will take care of our families and communities. But we won’t go back. Our struggles continue together.

General Strike!

There is currently discussion of a General Strike which will take place on May 1st. We hope to make strides toward this goal in the next few months and will use the lessons we learned on D12 to inform our work. This team will be be back in the streets together in the future – this is not the last time we will make history together.

SEATTLE, Wash — Monday, December 12th, Occupy protesters and allies shut down several major ports along the West Coast. In Seattle, we stopped all evening work at Terminals 18 and 5, causing millions in profit loss to major corporations Stevedoring Services of America, American President Line, and Eagle Marine Services.

Yesterday’s actions drew a wide swath of the 99%. Protesters of all ages demonstrated, and people of color turned out in large numbers. The protests included a coordinated city-wide high school walkout, a rally emceed by Hip Hop Occupies, and a three mile march to the ports. The shutdown was organized by members of Occupy Seattle in solidarity with Occupy Oakland and with the struggles of LA, Oakland, and Seattle port truckers and Longview longshore workers. Occupy Seattle’s People of Color caucus produced need-to-know guides for the action.

The shutdown was solidly an Occupy action, funded by the heartfelt donations of occupiers and their supporters, and a hefty donation from Occupy Oakland. We received absolutely no material support from any union. This was a direct action in the truest sense of the term: it was rapid-fire, organized on a shoestring budget, bypassed stalling bureaucracy, and mobilized the energy of an inspired community united against economic injustice.

The actions were planned with special attention to the long tradition of democracy and direct action within the ILWU. We picketed Terminals 18 and 5 in light of the longstanding ILWU principle of respecting other pickets. Union policy dictates that if arbitrators rule that picket lines are too dangerous to cross, ILWU workers will be compensated for the work they missed.

The protests were wildly successful. Truck drivers and port workers repeatedly expressed support for the protesters, waving and honking as they passed.

Terminal 18–the Port of Seattle’s largest and busiest terminal–was the first to be shut down. Protesters took the main intersection, swiftly forming a blockade of roadside debris to stop the incoming shift, while redirecting outgoing traffic onto one lane. This effectively blocked three gates, while the fourth had been shut down by the port in anticipation of the action. The Seattle Police Department, not protesters, temporarily stopped workers and truckers from leaving the port by forming a bike chain as protesters yelled at them to “let the trucks through.”

Under pressure from protesters, police backed away, but later stopped traffic once again, stating that they were trying to clear the road for police convoys to enter. In solidarity with the protesters, the truckers honked their horns loudly and persistently, and the frustrated calls of the crowd forced the cops back off the road. Occupiers then continued to direct traffic out of the port, delivering flyers of Scott Olsen’s statement to drivers as they passed (see below).

At 5 PM reports came that ILWU workers were not being called in to work at Terminal 18 and that no longshore work would be done on Harbor Island that shift.  The terminal was shut down for the evening.

Protesters then proceeded to Terminal 5, the location of the Port’s only other ship that day, chanting “Whose Ports / Our Ports.” Approximately one hundred protesters formed a human barricade and moving picket line at the terminal gate, while another hundred stood by in support.

Some protesters who remained at Terminal 18 were herded onto the sidewalk. When they tried to maintain the blockade, conflict escalated. The police used pepper spray and flash grenades to disperse protesters, in one case forcibly pulling back the head of a protester to spray him in the face. A few protesters flung road flares and a bag of paint at the police in retaliation. In the resulting chaos, a number of protesters were arrested.

The crowd of Terminal 18 dissipated and joined Terminal 5. After two hours of picketing, the union arbitrator once again ruled in favor of protesters, calling off work at the terminal.

The Occupy Movement Strikes Back

Many of us showed up to this action having learned from the experiences we’ve had in the short months since we began assembling together. Having previous engagements with the police, we knew to protect ourselves. Legal observers and medics were interspersed through the crowd, and the majority brought bandannas and scarves to cover their noses against flash bombs and other chemical weapons utilized by the police. Some of us sported the goggles that we learned to use after pepper spray incapacitated activists during the march on Chase Bank.

Occupy Seattle’s action was one of the last in the day, following successful port shutdowns in Longview, Portland, Oakland, and other places. A hundred of our friends in Bellingham continued to break the flow of capital by protesting on the railroads, some locking themselves to the tracks in defiance. Solidarity was extended to us even from Japan, where the International Labor Solidarity Committee of Doro-Chiba made a statement of support.

We send our sincere thanks to Oakland and Portland for extending their protests in response to the police aggression in Seattle that left several of our friends with stinging eyes, bruised faces, and ringing ears. We extend our support and love to Houston and San Diego, where the police have used similarly aggressive tactics.

Today, we stand in solidarity with the unemployed, the underemployed, the incarcerated, and the 89% of the working class who don’t belong to unions. We stand in solidarity with students protesting education cutbacks and rising debts, with low-wage workers protesting union-busting, with those facing foreclosure, and with the unemployed. We believe that a workers’ movement does not merely belong to the unionized, nor does it recognize imposed political borders. This is the building of a new movement. We rise from our roots in the labor movement, the civil rights movement, and anticolonial struggles across the world.

For ongoing updates on the West Coast Port Shut Down action: www.westcastportshutdown.org

Truck Drivers Statement: http://riseanddecolonize.wordpress.com/2011/12/12/an-open-letter-from-americas-port-truck-drivers-on-occupy-the-ports/

More information on Stevedoring Services of America (SSA) and Goldman Sachs: http://www.alternet.org/economy/153393/how_goldman_sachs_and_other_companies_exploit_port_truck_drivers_%E2%80%94_occupy_protesters_plan_to_shut_down_west_coast_ports_in_protest/

ILWU Guiding Principles (See in particular #4 regarding community picket lines): http://www.ilwu-local13.org/history-guiding-principles.html

Appeal from Scott Olsen to Longshore Workers: https://docs.google.com/open?id=1bt_ZhyioBUcmOXXMGrrv1p6BdcXM2V1-IgvsCy0HEQfzjKu1KgophSB_8qKk

Dan Kaufman, president of Longview Local 19 in solidarity with Occupy Oakland’s shut down of the port on Nov 2nd in solidarity with Longview port workers fighting against union busting.

In Seattle December 12, we are organizing to shut down the port as part of a West Coast port shutdown. This is the statement that members of Decolonize/Occupy Seattle wrote to express the reasons why we do this. It can also be reached here.

Why shut down the port?

 1) We will shut down the port to resist the budget cuts that target working class people.

The 1% are confident they can cut our health care, education, food aid, and social services because they think we won’t fight back.  They are wrong.  If they cut our safety net to pieces, we will cut their profits. The port is a major source of profits for the 1%, especially during the holiday season when they ship goods produced by Asian workers under horrible labor conditions to American malls where increasingly broke workers buy holiday presents on credit, worried about whether we will lose our jobs, food stamps, or health care.  We are tired of worrying, so now we are fighting back.  A port shutdown will hit the 1% directly in their wallets.  Happy Holidays you scrooges.

2) We will shut down the port to bypass the corporate-controlled politicians and confront the 1% who really call the shots.

In December, some members of Occupy Seattle will be occupying the Capitol building; the rest of us here in Seattle will occupy capital: the port facilities of transnational corporations. Together, we fight against the same cuts.

Capital means the machines, trucks, ships, stores, cafes, hospitals, etc. – all the things  the corporations own, which we work on to make their profits.  One of their biggest pieces of capital is the port of Seattle.  We know the 1% controls the politicians who are cutting the working class’s standard of living.  So instead of begging politicians to stop cutting us, we’ll do what our friends did when they occupied Wall Street and go straight to the source of the problem: the capitalists. The ports are Wall Street on the waterfront – without them running, Wall Street makes no profits.  If they cut our livelihoods, we will cut their profits.

3) We will shut down the port to defend workers’ right to organize.

We assert that the Occupy movement is part of the workers’ movement.

Goldman Sachs is the 1% of the 1%.  They control a majority share of Stevedore Services of America (SSA), a major player in the port of Seattle.   SSA is repressing immigrant port truckers who are trying to organize in their workplace in the port of LA, which is why Occupy LA put out the call for solidarity picket lines at ports up and down the West Coast on December 12th.  Port truckers in Seattle are also face low pay, discrimination, unpaid time wasted at entry gates, etc., and we are in solidarity with them.

By building this solidarity, Occupy Seattle will show that we also are part of the workers’ movement.  Because the 1% uses repressive labor laws and union busting firms to disrupt organizing efforts, only 11% of US workers are organized into labor unions. On December 12th, Occupy Seattle will take a stand to defend our right to organize on the job. We also recognize that the U.S. working class is starting to get organized in the Occupy movement, which makes us part of the workers’ movement.  Many who are involved in the Occupy movement are members of unions. Many of us also make up the remaining 89% of U.S. workers who are not in unions, as well as the large sections of the U.S. working class who are unemployed, underemployed, students, and homeless. Our picket lines might not have the same legal standing as official union picket lines, but when the unions first started picketing back in the day they were also considered illegitimate. Occupy Seattle’s picket lines are still picket lines organized by working class people, in solidarity with fellow workers. December 12th is the first of many actions that Occupy will take as a new wing of the workers’ movement.

4) We will shut down the port in response to the police violence and harassment the Occupy movement has faced worldwide.

The 1% uses union busting tactics to shut down our organizing on the job and their cops use pepper spray, batons, and handcuffs to repress our organizing in the streets and plazas.  We know that if the 1% wanted to, they could tell the police to stop all this repression.  But they are apparently not embarrassed when global media broadcasts images of veteran Scott Olson with his head smashed in, or 84-year-old Dorli Rainey with her face full of pepper spray.  They didn’t care when their cops kicked Jennifer Fox in the stomach, after which she miscarried.  They didn’t care when their cops and security guards murdered Oscar Grant, John T. Williams, Jesus Mejia or Aiyana Jones. And in Egypt, the US-backed military regime has killed dozens of revolutionaries
and injured thousands since November 19 alone. They have called on the American Occupy movement to stand with them in solidarity.

The global 1% does not care about this state violence as long as their goods get shipped and their profits flow.  On Nov 2nd, Occupy Oakland shut down the port of Oakland in response to the police violence they faced.  On Dec. 12th we will do the same up and down the coast.   Let’s show the forces of repression that when they stomp the flames of freedom they just spread the embers.

5) We will send a warning to EGT, the multinational conglomerate that is trying to bust the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU).

EGT Development is refusing to honor the ILWU’s contract in Longview, WA, and we wish to stand in solidarity with the ILWU in their struggle against this union busting.   Our action is independent from the ILWU; we are in no way attempting to co-opt or control their struggle and they are not controlling us.   However, we are inspired by Longshore workers’ direct actions against  EGT, and we are angered by the repression they are facing by the cops and courts, which is similar to the repression we are facing. We know that if the 1% busts the ILWU they will try to drive down all of our wages and working conditions next.  We hope our action on the 12th will show EGT that we are capable of disrupting business.  They should honor the ILWU’s contract because next time it could be their business.

Our decision to picket/ blockade the port is not deterred by the recent memo written by International ILWU President, Robert McEllrath, and quoted by the Longshore and Shipping News. We agree with the statement that the Occupy Oakland Port Blockade working group put out regarding our movement’s relations with the ILWU: http://westcoastportshutdown.org/content/clarification-nature-call-west-coast-port-blockade

In particular, we’d like to highlight that ILWU Local 21, Longview, Washington, was strongly heartened and encouraged by the overwhelming support shown for them by the historic November 2 port shutdown in Oakland. Their local president spoke at Oakland Occupy’s rally last Saturday, thanking us for our support. He and other ILWU rank and file members marched with us that day.” In particular, local 21 president Dan Kaufman said:

”When Nov 2nd happened, and it was against EGT in respect to the ILWU and Local 21, you cannot believe what you people did for the inspiration of my union members who have been on the picket line for six months now!”

For video footage of this, see: ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FtdQCZSQ99I )

We’d also like to highlight that: “The ILWU rank and file have historically honored community picket lines in the port — for example they refused to cross community picket lines to unload cargo from apartheid South Africa.”  They honored the community picket line set up by Occupy Oakland on Nov 2^nd, and the ILWU Coast Committee cautioned its members that if a similar situation develops on Dec. 12, longshoremen should “stand in a safe area and await a decision by employers to call for an arbitrator.” This is similar to past situations where ILWU members have honored community picket lines. It allows the ILWU a legal out, not to cross the lines, if the picket lines are large enough to pose a threat to their safety, as interpreted by the arbitrator.

We aim to build trust and open communication between the Occupy movement and port workers.

6) We will shut down the port as part of the second phase of our movement

With this Dec. 12th action, the Occupy movement is undertaking a transformation.  When we started occupying Seattle Central Community College, many people told us, “don’t disrupt life for the 99%, go disrupt it for the 1%.”  They said the same thing when we joined labor unions to occupy a bridge on Nov 17th.  These criticisms missed the fact that our camps have enhanced life for the 99% by providing educational opportunities, food, and shelter, and have stood as a visible reminder of the need for deeper social change. We agree though that we should be disrupting the 1% more. That’s why we’re occupying the port, as well as abandoned buildings owned by banks, wealthy developers, etc.

We will occupy everything.

We believe everyone deserves the rights to housing, education, food and safety.

We believe our lives are worth more than our labor power.

We believe our community members should not die under the harsh rule of the 1%. We are simply laying claim to what has always been ours.

Everything for everyone.

For more info, and to give suggestions, please contact:  seattleportsolidarity@gmail.com