By: Trevor Loudon
New Zeal
You may think the Occupy Wall Street movement is fading away. You may think that colder weather and tougher local authorities will see “Occupy” crumble into nothingness. You may think it was all much ado about nothing.
Well you may possibly be right, but the communist forces who have increasingly infiltrated the movement have a very different view.
To them “Occupy” signifies the beginning of the end of capitalism. “Occupy” is a sign to Leninists the world over that we are entering revolutionary times and nothing will ever be the same again.
Larry Holmes
The following excerpts are from opening remarks by Larry Holmes, First Secretary of the pro-Cuba/North Korea Workers World Party, to the WWP national leadership meeting Dec. 17 in New York City.
We are in the opening stages of a wholly new epoch.
This epoch in all likelihood will be protracted and long. It will be uneven, it will be explosive, it will be fraught with dangers — all of it necessary to that which we have been waiting so long for: the awakening of our global proletariat, and especially the awakening of that section of the proletariat whose development we are responsible for — the working class of the U.S.
The epoch I am referring to is the beginning of the end of capitalism. The epoch will end with the destruction of capitalism and the expropriation of the capitalist class…
To Holmes, capitalism has come to the end of the road. It is the responsibility of Marxist-Leninists to hasten an inevitable process through organization and international solidarity.
The important point is that anti-capitalist consciousness is growing on a global basis. It is actually surging. Some of it is incipient, not well articulated; some of it is better articulated; some of it is articulated by those who are not real revolutionaries and who have another agenda with whom we have differences. All of that will be part of the terrain that we are developing and fighting.
The Party and the revolutionary movement and all who are moving in a revolutionary direction should not underestimate the depth of the radicalization of sections of the working class, especially the youth but not only the youth. Because radicalization, especially when it abets the struggle, becomes contagious.
And so, if the Party is ultimately going to play its role in helping our class to move toward what is sometimes called the maximum program — socialist revolution — it will be necessary for us to be very conscious, very meticulous and serious in how we go about it.
There are sections of the world capitalist class that are more aware than even the most militant sections of the working-class movement of the reality that this capitalist crisis is no “garden variety” crisis; but rather something infinitely more profound than all previous crises and more importantly, a crisis from which there is no way out.
This is no small matter because our class and its organizations cannot fight that which it does not fully understand. It goes without saying that we communists must assist the working class and the oppressed in defending all the gains, be they significant or meager gains, that are under relentless attack. However, let there be no illusions — the epochal class struggle that is in the making on a global level will not be resolved on the basis of concessions or reforms, or a return to some semblance of “capitalist stability.” Those days are over.
It is important, henceforth, for us to see the possibility of socialist revolution — no not tomorrow — but neither as merely some idea that has no relevance to the class struggle today. To truly understand how unprecedented and irreversible the present world capitalist crisis is, is to understand that the question of the need for world socialist revolution is not something that can be postponed.
Whatever other work the Party undertakes in the day-to-day class struggle, we will not be of help to our class and only cause more confusion, if we fail to illuminate the road to the socialist revolution.
Holmes sees Occupy Wall Street as an a re-energization of the revolutionary movement – young people not jaded by the sordid past failures of socialism, leading the way into a new and final revolutionary upsurge. Holmes admits that revolutionaries of his generation need to catch the new red tide or be left behind.
OWS has sharpened the crisis for the revolutionary movement. It is a crisis for us and our friends and allies. Why? Because even though we are ideologically ahead and can teach the best elements in the Occupy movement things they need to learn about imperialism, about the national question, about the woman question and on and on — in some ways they are ahead of us….
The Occupy Wall Street movement should serve as a wake up call to all who remain committed to a revolutionary Marxist-Leninist direction. The collapse of the Soviet Union, and the developments that led up to it, are easier to understand today as we can more fully appreciate the devastating toll of more than 30 years of worldwide counterrevolution.
Part of that devastating toll has been the degeneration and weakening of the revolutionary socialist orientation.
Degeneration does not happen all at once, overnight, but rather incrementally, almost unconsciously, over an extended period of time and under the pressure of disappointments and frustrations, the causes for which in large part can be traced to stagnation in the working-class movement, demoralization, contraction and fragmentation in the revolutionary movement, and the seemingly endless prevalence of bourgeois triumphalism — a prevalence that has clearly now come to an end.
In some ways, the young, inexperienced and ideologically eclectic makers of the Occupy movement, precisely because they are not burdened by the baggage of past defeats, understand the gravity of the global capitalist crisis and the revolutionary potential that it has opened better than many of us seasoned veteran revolutionary Marxists.
We will not be able to help the OWS movement advance until and unless we catch up to it.
New York WWP conference, November 2011
In my opinion, the spring and summer of 2012 will see a big upsurge in revolutionary movements all over Europe and North America.
Occupy Wall Street will be a big part of that movement. The Workers World Party and several other Marxist organizations involved will not allow it to die. They see the world on the verge of huge revolutionary change. The anarchists and malcontents who started the movement will remain, but leadership will increasingly fall into the hands of labor unions and highly organized and disciplined Marxist-Leninist elements.
