Thoughts on the past and future of OWS

Occupy Wall Street started as a call to action by a little know Canadian anti-consumerist magazine, Ad Busters. I first saw it a couple months before, and figured it would not go anywhere. Now, months after it started, it has evolved into a world wide movement with international media attention.

One of the most frequent criticisms I have heard about OWS is that it has no demands, and therefore can not win. In fact, not having any demands has been critical in this stage of OWS. It has allowed the movement to draw in a wide range of people and ideas, not limiting people grouping around one issue.

More importantly, the lack of specific demands has not given those opposed to the movement a chance to move the debate to their terms. If OWS had come out with concrete demands in the beginning, the least popular would have been picked up by those wanting to stop the movement, and that would be the only thing talked about in relation to the movement. Even if there was not an unpopular demand, it would be trivial to spin one to be something completely different.

Instead, this has confounded the established powers. They don't know how to respond to something like this. They have resorted almost exclusively to ad-hominem attacks, calling the protesters a bunch of hippies and anarchists. This change has been both undaunting to those whom the movement aims to recruit and easily proved false.

Not only were the demands kept general, but the protests were too. They were against the 1, or banks in general. While specific banks were targeted on specific days, the message was clear. All of them are bad.

These strategies worked great in the beginning. Now that the movement has a great deal of momentum and energy it's time to think about what to do with it. Continuing to protest at banks and at Wall Street is still getting media attention, but that won't last. The country will get bored and move on. Winter is coming and this will almost certainly have an effect on the numbers in Zucotti Square park.

Furthermore, if OWS wants to keep the momentum it has, it is going to have to start winning more than just the right to stay in the park. Up until now, it has not actually changed anything that directly effects people outside of the protest.

Occupy Wall Street needs something that will get attention, sustain energy and mobilization, and directly help people. When looking for this, it helps to turn to NYC in the 1930s. The situation was much the same. There were few jobs, people were struggling to stay alive, and there was a movement of ordinary people that was fighting back. Instead of OWS, it was the Communist Party.

Harlem was hit especially hard by the great depression. It was predominately black, and many black families, lifted from poverty by the economic boom of the 20's, had just bought their first house. They were still paying back the loans from the bank. Other were still renting from mostly white landlords. When the depression hit, many of them stopped being able to pay their rent. Many people were evicted.

Mark Naison, professor of history at Fordham University, writes on tenant.net:

"By the fall of 1930, Communist-led Unemployed Councils had begun to experiment with two tactics that had a direct impact on the housing market ... The first of these, eviction resistance, proved to be one of the most effective weapons in the Party's arsenal. Coming upon instances where tenants had been forcibly evicted, Communist organizers would move the furniture back from the street to the apartment, while appealing to neighbors and passersby to resist marshals and police if the eviction were repeated ... Through the fall of 1930 and the spring and summer of 1931, Communists employed this tactic in almost every city neighborhood where they were active, although the bulk seem to have occurred in poor communities where the depression hit early and hard -- Harlem, the Lower East Side, Hell's Kitchen, the South Bronx, Brownsville, and Coney Island ... Hundreds, possibly thousands, of such incidents occurred during the early depression years; some of them led to confrontations with police in which hundreds of people participated, but most of them led to some peaceful resolution, be it retention of the apartment by the tenants or a delay in their departure. 'The practice of moving evicted families back into their homes has become frequent of late on the Lower East Side,' declared the New York Times in describing the arrest of a group of eviction protesters, 'but this was the first time that the police had arrived in time to seize any of the participants in such demonstrations.'"

These type of actions led to the Communist Party growing to it's largest size ever during the Great Depression. It received massive popular support from helping ordinary citizens with problems facing millions. Had they concentrated on getting legislation passed which allowed tenants to stay in the houses, it is doubtful they would have succeeded and certainly would not have grown as powerful among the working class.

This tactic could also help OWS. While it does not get to the root of the problem, it calls attention to it. It also shows an alternative to the current situation: what could be if not for our government and the banks.

If Occupy Wall Street can learn from and emulate this type of action it will be able to retain it's existing activists and grow its base with the working class.