Words and Steel

One of the things that will determine how fully representative the Occupy movement is of the 99% is how seriously the participants grapple with questions of race, class and gender within the movement. The fact that the movement has started out mainly white and middle class is, as mentioned, an understandable phenomenon, but it’s also contradictory.

In situations such as this people who are new to political struggle effectively go through a crash course in the politics of race, class and gender, based on a combination of their own first-hand experience in the movement and the political line put out by more experienced organizers. This phenomenon happened on a large scale back when the global justice movement was jumping off, and it’s happening again now within the Occupy movement. There will of course be unevenness; some will cling to a middle-class liberal outlook, but most will to a greater or lesser extent start to develop an understanding of class stratification within the movement and the structural racial exclusion that a movement starting in the middle class presents us with.

These issues are going to manifest in different ways. For example, in response to challenges put forward by indigenous people and others around the very concept of occupation, in a country with the history of stolen land that the US has, the movement in Albuquerque and other places has in some cases renamed their local effort to (un)Occupy. Additionally, local movements have put forward discussion about this history and what it means in terms of the responsibilities of activists today. The experiences in different locales will not be identical, but taking these struggles seriously is uniformly essential.

On the question of gender, it needs to be said clearly that male supremacy and violence against women is as real a problem here as anywhere else in society. Gender privilege operates right at the basic level of who has the ability to safely sleep in a public park without worry. There has already been at least one case of alleged rape, in Cleveland, OH, when the leaders of the occupation there made a woman share her tent with a man she didn’t know. We have to be steadfast in struggling against male domination in all the forms in which it appears, especially against outright violence. We need to make the spaces we create as safe as we can for women, gender non-conforming people and queer people. Otherwise we are complicit in driving out, holding back, and harming valuable comrades in the struggle.

When we put forward the slogan “We are the 99 percent!” the movement needs to accompany it with discussion of the race, class and gender stratification among the 99%. Otherwise we’re perpetuating the sidelining of the more oppressed in favor of the outlook of the middle-class people who started the movement. Revolutionaries must lead the way in helping the movement grapple with these challenges.

Freedom Road Socialist Organization | Organización Socialista del Camino para la Libertad, “The Occupy Movement, Lessons for Revolutionaries” (via lowendtheory)

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    Don’t hold your breath (¬_¬) The major difference with the “global justice movement” is that it wasn’t started by white...

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