Letter to a comrade on OWS

Where do you think the OWS is heading? Do you think it has peaked or is still growing?

D:

I think the sentiment is there, and the nationwide coordinated assault on OWS encampments has been very educational for all of us. The callous and casual brutality of the cops with their chemical sprays and jackboot brutality [all of which is meed out in communities of oppressed nationalities on a slower scale daily] against these young people are a concrete demonstration of class power. OWSers were shown that this is not the power of the misguided or illogical state, or the Fed, but of a ruling/exploiting class and its armed forces.

I think in most cities OWS encampments might be over because the Democrats may feel like they no longer need them as a sounding board; and because many OWS encampments and populations have been a persistent and growing independent force that the Democrats have not been able to absorb the way the Republicans consumed the Tea Partiers. OWS in two months has gone from one park to a hundred in the US, and spread to reinforce the same elements in places like London like wildfire.

But the powerful idea of "occupation" will not go away. Like the lesson of the sit down strikes in the 1930s, it is something new and marvelous that overcomes what has [to me] seemed like years and years of coalition>demo>regroup>election hiatus>call a demo>demo and so forth. Want to keep your jobs or benefits? Occupy!

Here in Cleveland - and this is just my own thought, which I would not have the temerity to share with the Cleveland OWSers - is that they need to occupy viable, empty homes; invite the willing in the community to live in and learn to democratically run them as a series of bases in one strategic geographical area so they can be defended and have defensible logistics. And occupy any utilities who will not give them heat and water and power. I'm sure they must be thinking along these lines anyway. If I were in OWS, that would be my proposal for a "Winter Action Program."

In the spring we will have the election barrages, which will suck a lot of the oxygen out of social layers in the OWS, which gets pulled in many directions, as any petty bourgeois political force does in a capitalist country.

Comradely,
Jay
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