Recently anarchist collectives in the Occupy movement in Oakland and the Pacific Northwest have put forward a new slogan, "We are the 89%."  

This is a subtle way of divorcing organized labor from the popular movement, since it is based on an explicit claim that the struggles of organized labor are not merely no longer central, but that the interests of organized labor should no longer be a focus of activist support.

I have personally seen use of this slogan to divide people in Occupy Portland and Occupy Eugene.  I have read detailed accounts of similar divisions in Occupy Oakland and Occupy Seattle.  And I am convinced that we must challenge both the theory and practice from which this arises as vigorously as possible

One of the most striking explanations of the theory which underlies this anarchist attack on organized labor can be seen in a blog posted by the Oakland Commune.

Other elaborations of this basic idea have appeared elsewhere, but it is significant that the Oakland Commune has been prominent in promoting and rationalizing Black Bloc direct action tactics which have alienated organized labor and working people in general.

The origins of this new turn can be found in conflicts between the leadership and activists of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union and Occupy activists surrounding demonstrations aimed at closing Pacific coast ports.  Lenin's observation that "Anarchism was not infrequently a kind of penalty for the opportunist sins of the working class movement"# seems particularly apt here since the new anarchist attack on organized labor arises from their conflict with the more limited, economist objectives of the ILWU leadership.  

The anarchists appear to have seen organized labor as tinder ready to blaze into revolutionary struggle with the slightest spark, and their expectations were seriously disappointed.  Again, Lenin is pertinent.  One of Lenin's most fundamental insights into revolutionary organizing was the realization that

The history of all countries shows that the working class, exclusively by its own efforts, is able to develop only trade union consciousness, i.e., the conviction that it is necessary to combine in unions, fight the employers, and strive to compel the government to pass necessary labour legislation, etc.#

It is a sign of the intellectual bankruptcy of the Proudhonist-Bakuninist# tradition in the United States that these anarchists do not simply agree with Lenin that a vanguard party is needed for the vital task of educating organized workers to a more general class consciousness, but see the failure of organized labor to immediately form up behind the Black Bloc as an indication that organized labor should be demonized and dismissed in favor of a mix of the unemployed, the underemployed, lumpenproletarians, and the homeless who form the new revolutionary hope.


The Oakland Commune dresses this reactionary assessment of organized labor in a supposedly new discovery about the nature of capital production and circulation.  The discovery is little more than taking notice of a fundamental characteristic of commodity production under imperialism: transportation centers take on crucial importance for the export of commodities from the neocolonial periphery to the core.  Globalisation has exported many production jobs from the American core to the Third World periphery as part of the export of capital which Lenin predicted in Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism.  

However, the Oakland Commune seizes on this characteristic of imperialism to claim that in America the working class has been supplanted by a new "proletarian class" - the unemployed, the underemployed, petty bourgeois students, lumpenproletarians, and the homeless. Let us examine their arguments:

This is why the general strike on Nov. 2 appeared as it did, not as the voluntary withdrawal of labor from large factories and the like (where so few of us work), but rather as masses of people who work in unorganized workplaces, who are unemployed or underemployed or precarious in one way or another, converging on the chokepoints of capital flow. Where workers in large workplaces -the ports, for instance- did withdraw their labor, this occurred after the fact of an intervention by an extrinsic proletariat....

We find it helpful here to distinguish between the working class and the proletariat. Though many of us are both members of the working class and proletarians, these terms do not necessarily mean the same thing.  The working class is defined by work, by the fact that it works. It is defined by the wage, on the one hand, and its capacity to produce value on the other.   But the proletariat is defined by propertylessness....

Worker's struggles these days tend to have few objects besides the preservation of jobs or the preservation of union contracts... The power of the Occupy movement so far - despite the weakness of its discourse - is that it points in the direction of a proletarian struggle in which, instead of vainly petitioning the assorted rulers of the world, people begin to directly take the things they need to survive. Rather than an attempt to readjust the balance between the 99% and the 1%, such a struggle might be about people directly providing for themselves at a time when capital and the state can no longer provide for them.

What the Oakland Commune has done is taken the way an artifact of cyclical crises in capitalism has been exacerbated by the shift from manufacturing to service sector jobs occasioned by globalization and used it to turn class analysis on it head.  

Marx identified the role of the reserve army of labor in the first volume of Capital:

The condemnation of one part of the working class to enforced idleness by the overwork of the other part, and the converse, becomes a means of enriching the individual capitalists, and accelerates at the same time the production of the industrial reserve army on a scale corresponding with the advance of social accumulation.... The industrial reserve army, during the periods of stagnation and average prosperity, weighs down the active labour- army; during the periods of over-production and paroxysm, it holds its pretensions in check. Relative surplus population is therefore the pivot upon which the law of demand and supply of labour works. It confines the field of action of this law within the limits absolutely convenient to the activity of exploitation and to the domination of capital.#

This reserve army of labor - those members of the working class held in reserve by unemployment and underemployment - grows and diminishes with the course of a capitalist crisis.  In the current recession it is considerably increased, but it has also been increased by dislocations brought on by the effects of imperialism on the core American economy. None of this changes the class character of the unemployed and underemployed: they remain wage-laborers, but wage-laborers uncalled to labor by the particular circumstances of capital.  They are no new proletarian class to be combined with lumpenproletarians and petty bourgeois students.  They have interests which are coherently part of the interests of the working class as a whole and one of the major responsibilities of a vanguard party is to create unity between the employed, the unemployed, and the under employed on the basis of those underlying class interests.  Trade unionists may not instinctively see the unemployed and the underemployed as immediate allies in struggle, but it is the responsibility of party organizing precisely to educate employed workers and workers in the reserve army of labor into what Marx terms the class-in-and-for-itself.

Rather than face up to that responsibility to build genuine class consciousness, the Oaklsand Commune rolls out anarchist platitudes:

• "...initiative here has come from a motley band of people who work in non-unionized workplaces, or (for good reason) hate their unions, or work part-time or have no jobs at all."

• "...that the insertion of state-sanctioned forms of mediation and arbitration into the class struggle, the domestication of the class struggle by a vast legal apparatus, is the chief mechanism by which unions have been made into the helpmeet of capital, their monopoly over labor power an ideal partner for capital's monopoly over the means of production."

• "The coming intensification of struggles both inside and outside the workplace will find no success in attempting to revitalize the moribund unions. Workers will need to participate in the same kinds of direct actions - occupations, blockades, sabotage - that have proven the highlights of the Occupy movement in the Bay Area."

The initiative comes from people who hate their unions.  Unions are the helpmeet of capital.  Unions are moribund.  Workers need to abandon their unions and do direct action like the Occupy movement.  These attitudes threaten to destroy any possibility of alliance between the Occupy movement and organized labor.

But there is something more dangerous still afoot here.  One of the principal campaigns of the American ultraright has been to bust unions where they exist and prevent them from organizing.  It is the single most important objective of the ultraright.  

By trivializing the struggles of organized labor, by demonizing organized labor as the enemy of progressive elements in Occupy, by telling activists that union struggles are lost already and that they need to do something else the ultraleft anarchist presence in the Occupy movement has become an open collaborator with the ultraright.

This has to be rejected in the strongest possible terms.

A decisive defeat of the ultra right is not going to be led by anarchists, lumpenproletarians and the homeless, much less will socialism come to America in a revolution of anarchists, lumpenproletarians, and the homeless.

Socialism can only be won and built by the working class - all of the working class: organized labor, unorganized labor, the unemployed and underemployed reserve army of labor.  If the Occupy movement is to have a significant role in this struggle, it has to build tight alliances with all the working class.

It is important to emphasize that the anarchists about which we are talking here aren't the idealistic young people in the Occupy movement who call themselves "anarchists" because they think it means to be opposed to capitalism.

Many of these young opponents of capitalism have come to appreciate and encourage unity of action with organized labor and other contingents of the working class.

From among these strata, valuable new members have joined the Communist Party.


The problematic anarchists are the dedicated ultraleftist adherents of Proudhonist and Bakuninist tendencies in American anarchism who embrace a theory of revolution which wants to make the lumpenproletariat and the homeless the new revolutionary class.  

They are the same people who embrace Black Bloc tactics and put other Occupy activists in danger with irresponsible direct action tactics.  It is these elements that the Occupy movement must call out and repudiate.  

Working class unity in the 99% -- that should be our rallying cry.  With that kind of focus victory becomes attainable.