CHICAGO, November 1 — While the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement continues to grow worldwide, Occupy Chicago has moved in that same direction. Progressive Labor Party has been there since the beginning, selling CHALLENGE and trying to channel the movement towards communism. For the past month students, workers (employed and unemployed), doctors, nurses, teachers and others have built Occupy Chicago from a few angry people into a lot of angry workers. PL applauds this effort, but without communist revolution we’ll continue to be at the bosses’ mercy.
There’s a lot we communists can learn from this movement and there’s also a lot we can teach those in it. One is that non-violence doesn’t work when the bosses’ main tool is violence. On Occupy Chicago’s main website, they list their “Declaration of Nonviolence” which reads: “Occupy Chicago reassures its members and the public that we are a social movement dedicated to nonviolent action.”
We’ve struggled with OWS to see that non-violence is useless when the ruling class is committing genocide against the working class on a daily basis, whether it’s on the streets of Chicago, Oakland, New York, Rome, London or Rwanda; whether at Cook County Board meetings where they close hospitals, or in the schools or the jails. As long as capitalism exists, there can be no peace anywhere.
That lesson was taught the hard way to this movement. Over the past three weekends, the Chicago kkkops have arrested hundreds of the occupiers. On October 24, they arrested 130 people just for being in Grant Park after hours. The cops say they’re “protecting the peace.” But when a concert or a football game at nearby Soldier Field ends late and people are just hanging out in the park, there’s not a cop to be found.
One student protester who was there that night told us: “We were just sitting in the park peacefully. We made our tents and were prepared to stay for the night. The cops told us to leave at 11 PM. Some did but the majority said no, we’re not moving. At 12:30 AM, two big spotlights went on and about 200 cops in riot gear came out of nowhere and started arresting and beating people. They cut up tents and destroyed people’s stuff and just took people to jail. It was surreal.”
Also arrested were two nurses, there to make sure that protesters received proper medical treatment. Funny, the bosses say they have no money to keep open Oak Forest Hospital, from where 243 long-term patients have since been moved and have died. But they somehow have money to pay killer cops to arrest non-violent protesters. That’s capitalism!
We relayed that fact to the student protester who described that night. We gave her a copy of CHALLENGE and she gave us her contact info to stay in touch.
Another point that we raised to the Occupy movement is its lack of black and Latino workers, on whom capitalism’s hammer comes down first and hardest. They’re the ones who know the hard fact that racism and capitalism go hand in glove.
Without racism, the bosses could not keep the working class divided. The Occupy movement knows this because PL’ers keep raising it. Now they’re reaching out to the Occupy Gary and Occupy the Hood movements. As long as the working class continues to be pushed into the bosses’ elections and reforms, we’ll continue to be prey to the dead end of capitalism. We need communist revolution.J