Posted by John on 17.10.11 8:25 pm
Consider the following impassioned plea against Wall Street and corporations:
Capitalism in the United States has developed in such a way that the industries are owned and controlled through great corporations. Through interlocking directorates these corporations are bound together. The result is that a relatively small group of capitalists with headquarters in Wall Street today are the masters of the industries of the Unites States.
Or as we now know them, the 1%. Only this wasn’t written by any Occupy Wall Street demand committee. This is from a pamphlet produced by the Workers’ Party of America in 1923. Haven’t heard of the WPA? They weren’t around for very long. As Wikipedia explains, the WPA was “the name of the legal party organization used by the Communist Party USA from the last days of 1921 until the middle of 1929.” Here’s the cover of the pamphlet which is titled “Why Every Worker Should be a Communist.” Tell me this image wouldn’t fit in at any OWS gathering on a sign or T-shirt:
The pamphlet ends with a box outlining the “Goals of the Struggle”:
1. Enter into the immediate struggles of the workers for better wages and working conditions and to give its aid to the winning of these struggles.
2. To carry on a campaign for more effective organization of the worker through industrial unions and a farmer-labor party.
3. To build up the mass power of the workers to wrest from the capitalists control of the governmental power and to establish a Workers and Farmers Republic based upon the Soviet Form of Government.
4. To use the power of the Soviet Government to take from the capitalists the ownership and control of industry establishing in its place social ownership and democratic management of all the means of production and distribution.
5. Thus to transform the existing capitalist system into a Communist Society in which all forms of exploitation and oppression will be abolished.
Points 1-3 sound like the occupation movement itself. A mass campaign against capitalist control, i.e. against Wall Street.
Points 4-5 are a bit dated since there’s no longer a Soviet Union to rely upon. But “social ownership and democratic management of the means of production” and the end of “all exploitation and oppression” sound like something that could come out of Occupy Wall Street any day now.
As a matter of fact, yesterday’s New York Times had an article on the OWS’ attempts to create a list of demands. After four weeks they’ve narrowed it down to two categories, “jobs for all and civil rights.” That’s not the same as social ownership of the means of production and an end to exploitation and oppression, but it’s getting there.
A surprisingly large contingent of the OWS folks seem to be struggling to catch up with the Communist Party of 1923. I guess this proves once again that there’s nothing new under the sun.
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