Recently on Twitter a Paulista rhetorically asked what happened to all
the liberals who were outraged about illegal war and warrantless
wiretaps under Bush. She got a response from a Democrat who asked “How
dare you try to turn us against our President?” and accused her of
“sowing seeds of dissension.”

Your argument that because a majority in the Mayor’s office, PD and local
corporate mgt are black, structural racism is no longer relevant,
strikes me at best as a stretch. The fact of an increasingly
multi-racial ruling class and enforcement apparatus surely increases the
importance of class considerations relative to race, but it
doesn’t mean that even a multiracial police apparatus can’t still treat
black and white populations differently for structural reasons.

“To be clear… we are NOT against transitional demands. But we do believe that such demands – even where we ask the existing order to grant some things – must enhance the struggle for greater autonomy of ordinary people and not be merely illusions.
When people struggle for transitional demands, instead of lobby for them by relying on electoral politics… the demands should clarify what social classes leads the mass democratic struggle. Transitional demands must be economic gains but also an expansion of the power to directly govern of the working people, mothers, the wageless and unemployed.
“…it is crucial to distinguish between participatory democracy grafted on to a republic…and direct democracy where no professional governing classes have claims to legitimacy and are abolished. But their abolition will only be real if ordinary people in their councils and assemblies not merely protest but conduct themselves as if they have perspectives and proposals of their own and are prepared to carry them out (we might call this an enlarged concept of citizenship).
“…As we begin to formulate transitional demands that underscore disproportionate unemployment, police brutality and incarceration of people of color – and make these demands on Mayor Kasim Reed’s government – we should also do something else.
An excellent transitional demand should be to call on the NAACP, SCLC, and Rainbow Push and its leadership to divest from Big Business sponsorship – if we want to get Big Business out of politics, why not prioritize getting Big Business out of freedom movement politics?
…When is OA going to tap into the true Black radical tradition in Atlanta?…
An Occupy Atlanta movement that is not bogged down by white guilt, and the opportunistic Black middle class it serves, will make transitional proposals, that recognized African Americans as having the dominant role from above and below, in Atlanta city politics. A Direct Democratic United Front in Atlanta cannot include both Black capitalists and Black workers (just as it cannot include both the masters and servants of any people).”

a) the need for an alternative program

and

b) the racial question

Regarding a), I liked this:

“They don’t understand that you don’t get the loyalty of the masses by telling them what they already know at their most conservative. The OA spokespeople never made a press statement asking people in their workplaces and neighborhoods to take matters into their own hands where they labored and lived.”

Regarding b), this was a particularly succinct statement:

“The Oakland events, especially the turn to the Port and dockworkers (however few as a result of containerization) we think pointed the way forward. But what we are fighting in Atlanta is not fear of Jim Crow police but the inability to confront soundly the Black police and Black corporate political establishment. ”

This brings a) and b) together:

“Neither group condemned the President or Mayor who were people of color Democrats. No local demands were made on the Black led city government.”

The alternative program that you describe is kind of vague – worker/community self-management through councils. This program would seem to circumvent the whole aspect of politics that engages the status quo, and instead focus exclusively on creating dual power. Yet the quote above about local demands suggests that you may be open to certain reforms as a legitimate component of the overall strategy.

In my personal opinion, we need the right mix of both challenging the establishment for the right reforms AND (mainly) building the bases that evolve into true dual power institutions. Its hard to do both without falling off some kind of slippery slope, but I think this is the challenge at hand.

Towards the beginning of this piece, you state:

“The goal of the 99% Declaration is to have a national convention of delegates which passes a program of transitional demands palatable to, but slightly to the left of, Obama, such as healthcare by a single payer system and restoration of Glass-Steagall—laws which assume the capitalist state can regulate Big Business.”

Are you critical of the idea of transitional demands in general, or just these particular demands (which don’t seem to fit in the category of “transitional” to me, but maybe thats a semantic misunderstanding).

What are the demands you elude to that might be made on these governments? How would these be different from the “transitional” demands you criticized at the top of your article?

Thank you for a very concise, honest, and hard-hitting piece.

Solidarity from Oakland!