What a Rally in Support of Oscar Grant in Oakland Could have Been

The rally in downtown Oakland last Thursday in response to the Mehserle verdict was a peaceful affair. About 1000 people attended the rally. This is quite remarkable given the anger that exists and the verdict itself, Mehserle was found guilty of “Involuntary Manslaughter” and will most likely serve no more than a year or so in prison for shooting an unarmed man in the back.

The news coverage later in the evening focused overwhelmingly on looting and the smashing of store windows here and there that all agreed was the responsibility of a small minority at best. What working people have to ask here is why is that the dominant issue of discussion?  Why is it the smashing of a store window and some looting the main focus of the media? And broken store front windows can in no way be compared to the shooting of an unarmed black man in the back or the violence state forces commit against working people every day.

The working class in Oakland, those that live predominantly in the flatlands below the hills, are overwhelmingly people of color.  You would be hard pressed to talk to a black youth from Oakland that is not cognizant of the role of the police, who have not been badgered, harassed or victims of brutality at the hands of the Oakland police.

This is not a central theme in the media.  Nor is the terrorizing of tenants on a daily basis by the slumlords of Oakland.  I lived in East Oakland for 20 years or more and am still politically active in the area and witnessed both the terrorizing of youth by the police and the terrorizing of tenants on a daily basis by the slumlords of Oakland. As a tenant’s rights activist, I can assure you the main victims of the slumlords are the most vulnerable in our society, women, children and immigrants.  This occurs day in day out and the same media that brings us image after image of the looting of a shoe store or of broken windows and smashed up cars, is nowhere to be found.

When the slumlords or their banker friends can’t suck any more money out of a tenant (or a mortgage payer) they have the same police that were in downtown Oakland Thursday come over and physically throw the victims out on the street.  The news media doesn’t spend too much effort exposing these daily occurrences; there are no headlines condemning the violence of the bankers, landlords or the police here.

The reason the mass media focuses on what working people would see as “negative” actions of a crowd is obvious really.  The images of people committing violence or destroying property  in uncontrollable anger or self-indulgent violence and vandalism, keeps workers away, it helps to prevent the unity of the working class and therefore the rise of a mass movement. This is also why the state has agent provocateurs in such events to foster such activities; history is full of examples.

As soon as the verdict was announced, many downtown businesses told their workers to go home early.  Whole office buildings were emptied as workers were sent home in an anticipation of violence. In other words, workers that should have been at a rally of this nature that was taking place within four blocks of their workplaces, were kept from it.  This ensures that the anger that exists in US society at the job losses, pay cuts, the savaging of public services such as education and transportation, that these issues and the issue of police brutality never came together in a unified and organized expression of anger towards the government and the politicians responsible.

And while the attendance was fair, lets look at what it could have been.  The Alameda Central Labor Council is headquartered in Oakland.  This body is the county arm of the AFL-CIO, the national Trade Union Organization.  The CLC has some 100,000 workers affiliated to it, many of them in Oakland.  San Francisco also has an AFL-CIO Labor Council as does Contra Costa County to the East.

The heads of the organizations that make up these bodies have tremendous resources at their disposal and access to hundreds of thousands of workers and millions of dollars.  What did the leadership of these bodies do to contribute to the gathering?

I know what they didn’t do.  They never sent their armies of staffers in to the workplaces and Union halls to mobilize their members to come to a rally in support of the black working class youth.  They never assisted stewards on the job to do this and to link up police violence, racism and youth unemployment to the attacks on wages, jobs, working conditions, foreclosures, etc?  The same goes for the powerful churches in Oakland.  Not just the black churches that have considerable influence and numbers, but other churches. A new Catholic church has just been built on prime property on Lake Merritt in the center of the city at a cost of millions of dollars; where were these forces?

The fact is they do nothing. The Labor leaders are a disgrace in this regard as they leave the youth to face the state alone.  So instead of a hundred thousand marching together in unity and in opposition to the assault all workers and youth are facing, including the cops’ license to kill (lets not forget history, they’ve shot plenty of strikers too), we have 1000 people.

If the Labor leaders alone mobilized, workers would not have been sent home by the boss they would have walked a few blocks to join the protests feeling safe knowing through our organizations that we were active participants in the organizing and planning of it. We could have thousands of workers marching with thousands of youth and the police would then have a different set of circumstances to deal with. Oakland had a general Strike in 1946 that shut the city down, focused as they were on the real enemy in society, crime declined. This is what is needed to drive back this offensive of capital,  not just in Oakland, but throughout the country, .

Militant tactics are needed as opposed to business as usual like writing our congressperson or sending them an email. Candlelight vigils don’t move them either.  Militant action is not smashing a few windows or spray-painting a car.  Militant action is shutting the system down, stopping business as usual which means them making profits.  This is what will win.

But there is another aspect of it.  Do we want militant action by 100 people or a small group of people, or do we want militant action by 100,000 or millions of people?  Obviously the latter is preferable and is what will lead to gains.  The forces we are up against know it too which is why their media focuses on what it does, actions of indiscriminate violence or self-indulgent acts of vandalism by a tiny minority.  Our actions and demands should be guided by one principle; do they advance the interests of the working  class?  Do they draw the working class in to the movement or turn the class away from it? I am not talking about self defense here.  I agree with Malcolm X when he said in response to a question by a reporter on the use of violence that "I believe in being non violent with people who are non violent with me." But we can inflict the most damage on them through class unity and through the power of numbers, we outnumber them and we have a special place in the process of production.  We make the system work. 

Through their absence, the heads of the workers’ organizations and the churches abandon the youth to face the forces of repression alone and allow their media to give a small minority using false methods more media coverage than they warrant.  The best way to ensure peaceful but powerful protest is to have hundreds of thousands of workers actively participating in the movement to take control of our own lives both in and out of the workplace; to change the system itself.

"Capitalism teaches the people the moral conceptions of cannibalism are the strong devouring the weak; its theory of the world of men and women is that of a glorified pig-trough where the biggest swine gets the most swill." -James Connolly 1910.