NEW YORK, November 15 — At one o’clock this morning, a thousand cops made a mockery of capitalist “freedoms” by raiding the Occupy Wall Street encampment here in Zuccotti Park. The lower Manhattan raid was apparently coordinated with those in more than a dozen other cities, as the bosses used their state power to attempt to squash the Occupy movement nationwide. As Oakland Mayor Jean Quan told the BBC, “I was recently on a conference call with 18 cities across the country who had the same situation.”
The NYC fascist cops arrested more than 220 protesters, forcibly evicted the rest, and confiscated or destroyed their belongings. Six reporters were also arrested, and other media and legal observers were barred from witnessing the attack. The cops then staged their own occupation of the park, forcing protesters onto the sidewalks around it.
Hours after the cop invasion, the New York State Supreme Court ruled that protesters must obey the “park rules,” even if those rules were concocted after the protests began. This shows how the bosses use the cops and courts to crush any opposition. This is their “democracy,” a dictatorship of the capitalists where the “1%” (the bosses) do whatever they like, while the “99%” (the working class) face police brutality and arrests if they resist. Meanwhile, the hypocritical capitalist media painted the protesters as hooligans who were abusing their “first amendment rights” — a stark contrast to their fawning treatment of the Arab Spring, when the U.S. bosses sought to maintain control of Middle East oil by forging ties with the new rulers there.
The New York bosses’ aggression, however, has failed to break the fighting spirit of the OWS activists, mostly young workers and students. Hours after their forced eviction, they were back in Zuccotti Park (though without sleeping gear, which was barred by billionaire Mayor Bloomberg), renewing their protest against Wall Street.
The weakness of the Occupy movement is that its leaders—many of them beholden to the Democratic Party — stand for electoral and legislative reform of capitalism. This thinking plays into the hands of the rulers, who need to funnel workers’ anger into a vote for one capitalist politician or another.
Several PL’ers joined today’s struggle, distributing CHALLENGE and calling for the overthrow of this rotten system that makes the 1% rich by exploiting the 99%. Our call for communism, a society where the working class rules, was met with much interest, with many rank-and-file protesters open to new ideas about how to combat the racist inequalities of capitalism.