The Occupy movement with a Red Block

 

The occupy movement has shook the country as has never happened since the 1960s. There have been other windows of opportunity, such as the Great Depression, but I don’t think we should brush this off and just another rebellion. What ever it is, we need to take full advantage of it and not worry so much about “What if we don’t get what we want.”

Chances are there has been a slow smouldering descent going on since the Reagan Revolution of the 1980s. Ironically changes going on today where not thought up by the people who occupy Wall Street, although they may have thought them up unconsciously, but it is our own enemy, the US and CIA that came up with these tactics. They were first used to bring down Eastern Europe. They were also used to bring about the Soviet Revolution, but that was at the beginning of the 20^th century while this Occupy is happening in the 21^st Century.

What works for one totalitarian society will work for another and the US government and its supporters are only fooling themselves when they say that this is an open society in which democracy allows people to express their discontent.

It is probable that many of the early uprisings, such as the one in Tunisia and Egypt were not expected by the US. They did hope to bring down Muammar Qaddafi/مُعَمَّر القَذَّافِي and now Syria, once it started, but they never expected that the US would experience they same type of uprising. They didn’t expect and still don’t know how to deal with it.

The raw brutality we see shows this. The US has studied terrorism and how to stop it ever since 9/11. But they never realized the same conditions that led to the uprising in East Europe would work here. They relied heavily on the use of the internet for sending information in countries that controlled the press and all information about the world. But didn’t realize they can’t control what people here see and read as well.

Many people on the left focussed on Central America and its revolutions in the 1980s. It was assumed that countries such as Nicaragua would show people in the US that they can have a democratic form of socialism. The Sandinistas lost the  elections of  1990 (it is possible that the CIA somehow rigged the elections since polls showed the Sandinistas would win by 20 percent and the Reagan administration seemed certain the Sandinistas would lose). A year later the Soviet Union collapsed and even governments that claimed to be independent of them, such as the Sandinistas, had to form new alliances just to survive. Most of the new African countries, with the exception of Zimbabwe, turned to the European Socialist Parties, which by now were no different than the Democrats in the US.

Today we have seen a resurgence of Maoist parties and their insurgencies in parts of Asia. There are also some in South America. There is nothing wrong with supporting these new Maoist groups, but we can’t help them survive economically without doing something here to prevent the imperialist US Army from continuing its Risk Game like attacks in the Middle-east. That means not just stopping the war, as was the issue in Vietnam and Central America, it means we must also attack imperialism and bring it down.

The Kasama project has run several articles on how to approach the Occupy movement and whether to form a red block. In some countries, such as Italy, they are way ahead of us and already have formed red blocks, although there is some factionalism between the largest groups.

There is no reason we should not have a red block here. There is already an anarchist black block. We should support the Occupy movement in everyway we can. We should also educate people about capitalism and how it works and why it is so hard to overthrow. We also need to avoid “capturing ourselves,” in other words trying to take the movement over until those who originally started it pull out because of a sense they lost their own organization. We also don’t want to make the mistake of the Communist Party of France when they refused to support the student uprising, in 1968, because THEY could not control it.

We have to remember we have a common enemy and we need to be united around the overthrow and destruction of that common enemy-capitalism and imperialism. This is no time to complain about who has the “correct line.” The correct line is the one that wins.  -សតិវអតុ