The 1% will always rule, declares the prevailing assumption of mainstream political wisdom, while the rest of the us are manipulated to keep our mouths quiet, stay politically inactive, and work without complaint for our employers. Capitalism has only structural inequality, permanent war, and economic instability to offer the majority of the people. It is a system that offers no future to humanity; well, at least, not a peaceful, prosperous and just future.
The message of the Occupy Movement protests of 2011 rejected the competitiveness, greed, and inequality of modern capitalism, asserting a vision of a society based on human solidarity, equality, and an end to violence and war. And, the Occupy voices dared to declare, we believe this vision is realistic and possible. Life should be so much more than just a grubby, competitive rat race, they declared, one in which privileged elites feed at the trough of their own unending sense of entitlement, while so many more struggle just to get by.
The Workers’ Occupy Movement
A variant of the syndicalist general strike is the factory occupation. Daniel DeLeon was constantly agitating for the workers not to walk out of the plant on strike but rather to take the plant over for themselves as the actual producers and lock out the employers. Not the general strike, but the general lock-out was his slogan as showing the road to power. The occupiers must create committees for food, for sleeping accommodations, for sanitation, for negotiations, etc., all must be alive with activity. The men now eat, sleep and dream union and the strike. The strike becomes the essence of their lives. It prepares them for much higher struggles in the future; it trains them for the revolution There is no longer the problem of renting halls, of getting all the strikers down to the meetings, of establishing food stations, of going to the homes of scabs, of organizing strong picket lines, etc. A far closer communication among all the workers is brought about than ever before. It is an ominous warning by the workers to the capitalists, that a revolutionary situation is brewing that workers are not to be trifled with and that they were preparing themselves for the occupation of the factories permanently. The workers were declaring in their own way that they understood full well that they had created these factories and that the factories should belong to them. By staying inside the plant the workers prevent the capitalists from closing the plant down and shifting all their production to some other plant. This often necessitates the removal of certain parts from the plant and it is just this removal that is prevented.
Workers are beginning to get an inkling of the idea that the forces of production belong to the producers and not to the parasitic capitalists on Wall St who legally own them. In this sense, such industrial action are on a higher political plane than previous walk-out strikes rather than sit-in strikes, since they challenge the existing set-up of property rights which the old-style strike never did. There is no question that factory occupations are a disruption of the old pattern of property relations. Previously, the property of the boss was always considered sacrosanct. No one conceived of taking over the factory-plant, of locking the gates against the owners. The picket lines were carefully and legally kept outside of the property lines of the capitalists. But now the factories are becoming more and more considered as social property.
In the ordinary type of strike the passive worker need not appear on the picket line thus, often picket line and strike activity was left to merely the militant workers of the organization. Now, no one can desert. It becomes a shame and disgrace to leave the source of one’s wages and job and to quit the factory before the eyes of all one’s brothers in order to get home. Everything being open and before eyes of all, the situation can lead only to mutual encouragement and the heightening of the morale of the strikers, and all the sinister forces of capitalism that lead to capitulation and break-down of spirit of this or that section of the strikers, may vanish. Occupations not only keep all the workers together day and night and make it very difficult for the employer to break their ranks. The besieged awaken sympathy and support for their heroic actions from the whole neighborhood. The factory becomes the center of attention. Families and the community cluster around the factory. No longer can workers be urged to scab and go back to work, since the workers have never left their work and mean to stick to their jobs to the finish.
Scabs are kept out and there is now no opportunity for strike-breakers to march into the plant. The doors are locked and barricaded; the plant is occupied by the strikers. Should the strike-breakers charge the plant, it would mean that the property of the employer would be destroyed or damaged, any attempt to drive out those in the plant could only lead to smashing of the machinery. To drive out the workers in a big plant would be a very costly process to the owners. The plant would be wrecked. The attack would have to be made, often, in a most hostile environment. The plant, is therefore so to speak, kept as hostage by its work-force.
Workers hold on to the factory because they fear the unemployed will seize the jobs from them. If the workers can keep open by force, plants that would otherwise close, it is not a far step for them to consider the necessity of opening the factories to those locked out of those factories closed by the recession. They may partially realise the slogan: "Open the Factories to the Unemployed", which in turn is a step towards achieving workers control over production.
They are also partly inspired by the fact that the workers have nowhere else to go. There are no jobs elsewhere. The skilled workers have no longer the opportunity to wander away to the plant of some competitor and get a job there. All must stick to the plant and stay there if they wish to continue working. The “sit-down” strike is a sign that the doors are shut to those who would like to escape from their work, from their locality, from their trade. They realize this themselves, when they shut the doors of the plant—and stay inside.
Taking control of the work-place puts an end to the traditional trade union divisions and enforces industrial unionism in practice. Rival union officials would force one set of men to scab on others and to continue working while picket lines were walking outside. Now all must stop work. Moreover, the factory occupation greatly diminishes the role of the professional union official with their demand that all union/management talks take place under the eyes of all the workers in the plant.
Here are the reasons why the lock-out by the workers can never be so effective until after the workers have taken political power. Workers may feel that to occupy is a infallible weapon in their hands but they will soon be disillusioned about its potency. The Achilles Heel of this particular form of strike struggle is that it would be far easier to starve them out than use force. Also to be acknowledged is the fact is that while the those within that particular plant are united as never before, they are isolated from other work-places. And even if other factories in the same city or elsewhere were to strike in sympathy with them, each one of them would be isolated. Workers can also be pressured to come out of the plants if a reign of terror is launched against their homes, their wives and children. If bloody violence breaks out in the workers neighborhoods then it would be foolish for the workers to stay in the factory while their family and friends were being hunted down and thrown out of their homes.
AJJ
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