Club Jacobin

selucha:

tierracita:

Occupy Oakland may have been “at it for months,” but the group’s naive attempt at supporting the struggles of our most vulnerable communities fell flat on May 1.

May Day marches in the past, typically led by the immigrant rights group Oakland Sin Fronteras - OSF - served to highlight the fight for immigrant rights. But this year, it was Occupy Oakland and the Black Bloc that made global May Day headlines.

The Dignity and Resistance group (led primarily by Occupy Oakland organizers) had its banner leading the march, but it was the trust of OSF that brought the majority of Latino migrants to the protest. Ultimately, OSF seemed to be treated merely as a “contingent.”

~~~

It was noon and the mood downtown had grown tense. A haze of smoke from flash-bang grenades filled the air as nearly 100 protesters, led by the Black Bloc and their shields, advanced towards at least 30 riot police. Still more deterrents were launched and the pandemonium continued.

Meanwhile, at the Fruitvale Plaza, the May Day rally had begun. Scores of families were gathering and the familiar, cheery bells of popsicle vendor carts filled the air. The mood was pleasant and the sun was out. It was a good day for immigrant rights.

For the past six years, the city of Oakland has given permits to OSF to organize and take to the streets on May Day. This year was no different. Yet, despite permits, stakes are high for undocumented migrants who brave leaving the shadows of invisibility to make their voices heard. In my opinion, they are far braver then the most aggressive, shield-wielding “Occupier” could ever hope to be.

Arrest for an undocumented immigrant does not just mean a few hours in jail, only to be bailed out. Rather, its deportation from the United States and, often, permanent separation from their families.

News of the violence downtown had reached the Fruitvale rally and there was a tense feeling among Latino organizers. Their contingents trusted them to execute a safe march with minimal police presence. One leader admonished her high schoolers saying, “If you see an Occupier, engage them, ask them to chant with you. Be inclusive!”

~~~

The Fruitvale event began with its traditional, vibrant gusto. Copal smoke filled the air as Azteca dancers sanctified the event with indigenous ritual. And then they were off, first stop: San Antonio Park.

Rally cries of “¡El pueblo unido, jamás sera vencido!” (“The people united, will never be defeated”) rang out as Latino youth took the megaphone and led the 2,000-plus marchers through Fruitvale.

But suddenly, the procession came to a halt as it crested the hill to San Antonio Park.

Up ahead were seven vans of riot police and hundreds of Black Bloc protesters casually standing about as if waiting for the Fruitvale march to arrive. They seemed blind to the implications of their presence. Undocumented attendants would be forced to either abort the march or pass scores of police, some of whom were filming.

In fact, a few vulnerable contingents immediately abandoned the procession. The undocumented high schoolers who, just minutes earlier had been leading the march with their spoken-word poems and cries for justice, were now headed for Madison Park where they would remain until they returned home. Many other groups followed suit.

Meanwhile, Fruitvale organizers approached the occupiers pleading with them to “please stand aside so we can march through.” And, indeed, the Black Bloc did make way for the march. In fact, in a show of solidarity, the occupiers raised their fists in the air and cried with the marchers, “¡El Pueblo, unido, jamás será vencido!”

But the divide was evident.

~~~

After a brief rest at the park, the Dignity and Resistance march (or what remained of it) moved on to Frank Ogawa Plaza. They dispersed soon after arrival, amidst the palpable tension between OO and the police.

Yet, for the Black Bloc, the night had just begun. Occupiers invoked their privilege to First Amendment Rights as they protested and engaged police, sometimes with beer bottles and paint bombs. Meanwhile the OPD fired back, rushing the crowd and beating people almost indiscriminately. In all, 25 individuals were arrested.

The arrival of the Immigrant Rights march to Frank Ogawa Plaza was expected to be “a ‘peak time’ when people who don’t know about Occupy Oakland, can learn about us and choose to join this radical movement,” said Lauren Smith, of Occupy Oakland, a few days prior.

Though I do not doubt Smith’s sincerity, after the events on May 1, the comment seemed more like a mean joke. Based on OO’s May Day performance, its unlikely that Fruitvale’s 99% will be joining their “radical movement” anytime soon.

^^THIS THIS THIS

Ugh… Okay, some thoughts off the cuff from a chicano and former resident of the Bay. Given my non-presence at this march, take my arguments with a grain of salt.

1. May Day is not “Immigrants’ Rights Day.” It is International Workers’ Day. This includes (and should highlight) undocumented workers, who are the most dispossessed and exploited throughout this country (as well as many other countries in Western Europe and the Gulf emirates). But simply because the last few years have seen May Day marches which were primarily immigrant in character does not change the fact that M1 is broader than their struggles alone. Immigrant rights NGOs do not have a monopoly on the day and have no right to tell other people/groups what they are and are not allowed to do. Occupy Oakland worked hard for months to build up a May Day that reflected the advancements in peoples’ political consciousness over the past year, and NGOs don’t get to dismiss that and do their routine march (with the same chants, same signs, and same demands as every other year) in the name of tradition.
2. I’m tired of NGO “radicals” that reduce every demonstration of militancy to one of privilege. Seriously. It’s a nonsense argument—in fact it is a non-argument—by people who are bought and sold by the nonprofit industrial complex. These are the same folks that act like they are radical but facilitate and encourage complete political docility among immigrants (and people of color generally). They peddle in illusions about how the system works. They promote American Dream propaganda. They don’t question the imperialism inherent in the DREAM Act (i.e. encouraging our people to go kill the opponents of the empire in order to get citizenship). They will tell you “the people aren’t ready” for revolution while doing everything possible to make sure the people never are. In Seattle, the immigrant march ended with organizers speaking in front of a sign that said “We the People” in the font of the Declaration of Independence. Que asco! I understand that some immigrants may believe in that stuff and we shouldn’t condemn them for it, but organizers should not encourage these tonterias either. 
3. A few thousand immigrants marching on May 1st every year is not going to change anything. Do you call that resistance? Organizers should not pat themselves on the back for leading a march for one afternoon, in a completely non-threatening way, with no plans to ramp up militancy if their demands aren’t met. Yet this is precisely the strategy of the last few years for the immigrant rights movement: have a quiet demonstration, go home, promote politics acceptable to the Democratic Party, repeat. Is everything it does bad? No, of course not, and there is diversity among the NGOs that monopolize this work, and some of the workplace organizing these groups do is beneficial to protecting undocumented folks from their employers. I give respect where respect is due. But these organizations intentionally keep the movement trapped in a framework that poses no threat to the power structure at all, yet frame it in radical terminology like “creating a mass movement” or “base building,” while deriding more radical folks as “privileged” or “outside agitators.”

That’s all I have to say for now.

First picture: the privileged indigenous people of Cochabamba, Bolivia building barricades in the 2000 Water Wars. They won, by the way.

Second picture: the outside agitators known as the Brown Berets pose with a compa holding a rifle in the background.

Wow, this article is really rustling some jimmies today. I reached San Antonio park after the two marches had already met up so I can’t testify as to what happened there. But this article matches what I heard from many folks who were there, and  out of all the people who are upset about the article I don’t really hear anyone contesting the claims about what actually happened.

Folks, in the spirit of telling no lies, I think we have to acknowledge a real solidarity fuck-up that happened here. That’s what the original article (for all its faults) got right, and what the response above (even though almost every point made in it is 100% right on) misses.

Let’s just stipulate that all of the following things are true:

• May Day is a day for all workers and even the working class more broadly, not just immigrant workers or any other section*;
• Immigrant marches in the thousands are not enough;
• There are NGOs which want to redirect the energy and militancy of Occupy and other revolutionaries in our movements into channels that are safe for the status quo;
• And police and politicians will use every opportunity to divide our movements and thwart any really challenging aspects within them.

All of that is true but the reality is that Occupy still fucked up by how they handled this interaction. May Day should be part of building a larger revolutionary movement, which will have more and less radical currents as well as groups within it which have more and less freedom to take militant action in the current conditions.

In Oakland we had a great chance to put that into practice here. Occupy Oakland (OO) had a militant gathering at Oscar Grant Plaza. The Dignity and Resistance (D&R) march from Fruitvale had a march and rally permit and was relatively tame — partly because of reformist NGOs involved; partly because this was necessary to actually get certain vulnerable sections of the working class to participate. (For example take the workers of Pacific Steel, who are great revolutionaries but are mostly undocumented and therefore vulnerable to deportation — they were out in front of the D&R march.)

The original plan was for OO to welcome the (tame, permitted) D&R march into Oscar Grant / Frank Ogawa Plaza. That would have been to the benefit of both groups; OO would not have endangered its own militancy by a united front kind of action together with D&R. Instead, Occupy chose to march towards D&R trailing cops behind them.** That caused many people to leave the march before the main rallies took place either because of the changed character of the joint march or just because working out the new march plan stalled everything by about two hours. In a nutshell, marching into the D&R march without working it out with them in advance was a tactical blunder with a real negative impact.

Anyway, I don’t want to make too much of it. Most of the D&R marchers did continue on to Grant/Ogawa Plaza, and the day was very positive overall. But it’s worth digging into some of this stuff because this does get to some really core issues for revolutionaries.

tl;dr: We’ve gotta be honest about Occupy Oakland’s tactical mistakes on May Day.

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* Although, immigrant workers have recently revived the tradition in a crucial way. We need to be careful not to abandon an actual organic revolutionary tradition in favor of our preferred revolutionary sectarian version.

** This was prompted by police giving a dispersal order at the plaza, but there was no necessity to march into the D&R march.

(Source: oaklandlocal.com)