The conflict raging across our country has spread beyond all preceding expectations. As we type, streets are being barricaded and the political system is being challenged from New York to LA and a hundred cities in-between. The explosion of civil disobedience has not been seen for decades and we may be experiencing one of the most democratic struggles in the history of Western social movements. With the great popular power we now hold, the government is revealing the unwritten rules that govern our society, freedom is the rule of thumb, that is, freedom exists in our context up until we hit the boundaries of passive protesting and begin to intervene in the every day avenues of commercial life. And then, off with the velvet gloves and our with the iron fist. Hence, the hundreds of arrests filling the jails across America, not for anti-social behavior that we’ve come to expect in our society, but for deviant political behavior which truly threatens the rich.

At the forefront of all social movements is the push to break the social code and create new possibilities. When we march through the streets, or occupy the factories, we take a lifeless piece of our cities and transform it into a revolutionary space. As workers cannot commute to work, and the factories cannot produce, the profits of the upper class come grinding to a halt. Even in a democratic country this is true deviance, because above our right of assembly and our right to protest is the pinnacle right in our economy: the right of the rich to make money at our expense.

So when we take back the streets, factories and office towers, the unwritten rule of free speech within economic viability is gone, and who do we meet when we threaten the profits of the rich? The domestic military wing of our democracy: the police. Every major police department in the United States from New York to LA and a hundred cities in-between, has been militarized in the last 4 decades for the inevitable urban conflicts to come. Whether political, like a popular uprising by the working class or simply anti-social, like the constant violence we encounter in every ghetto of America by mainly young unemployed working class people, the state has armed itself to the teeth with police forces that are trained in military techniques and are prepared to retake the streets and return life back to normal. In the economic jungle of capitalism, how can we expect anything but anti-social outbreaks by people with nothing left to lose?

The history of resistance in our country is one of the most fruitful in the world. We hardly learn in school about the massive labor unrest of the early 20th century that nearly put this country through another revolution. About the thousands of radical labor activists deported to Russia for trying to build social movements like the ones we are only beginning to see again today. At the barricades, general strikes, and occupations the police have always been there, not representing the underclass fighting for justice, but representing the status quo, the rich, and the economic system we seek to challenge.

Our occupy movements “99 to 1” dynamic is indeed romantic but overly simplistic, because in every revolution, in all America’s great revolts, there have been reactionaries who have bought into the propaganda that we are to blame for our poverty, that we are to blame for questioning the government, or that we are to blame for risking today’s security for tomorrow’s possibilities. These people might come from our neighborhoods, from our workplaces, but when we go out at night to march through the streets, they turn on the nightly news and start to believe the sad sad story of the Wall Street Bankers. As Malcom X said, “If you're not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.” Let’s not forget there will be working people who’ll side against us in our struggle first and foremost the defenders of law and order, the police.

The police may sympathize with us, they might even join us, but we can never forget that it is not the working class man behind the riot shield, but the role he plays when he puts on the uniform and attacks our occupations. Whenever we begin to resist the rich and powerful to a breaking point, the police are called out to defend that system that keeps the rich rich and all of us poor.

Let’s not embrace the naïve position that either a. the police are poor people like us just trying to do their jobs nor b. they are the lap dogs of the rich. They are both, but we have to confront the reality that when we are attacked we have to be prepared to defend ourselves and our movement. The role of the police in society is to enforce the law. In the early 1900’s the law criminalized striking workers and they broke our strikes; in the 1960’s the law defended segregation and they gassed and jailed us for demanding civil rights; and today the law is that we must pay for the rich man’s crisis and when we fight back against that system, we can expect to meet the police head on as they defend the economic inequality of our current system.

No dialogue with our oppressors.
No division between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ protestors.
Stand Together, Occupy Together, Resist Together!