A NOTE ON THE OCCUPY MOVEMENT

Is the Occupy Movement indeed devoid of political leaning? How is the Central Intelligence Agency involve with the movement's backbone?

By Prof. Jose Maria Sison

Chairperson
International League of Peoples’ Struggle
12 April 2012

The initiators of the Occupy Wall Street Movement have proclaimed themselves as anarchists since the beginning. They espouse the direct action of small groups to ignite the masses, the so-called leaderless movement and the supposed revolution that does not aim to replace the incumbent oppressive state with a new democratic or socialist state.

They draw inspiration currently from the writings of Prof. Gene Sharp of the Albert Einstein Institute. He is the author of From Dictatorship to Democracy, which is being used by anarchists as a kind of manual for non-violent resistance. The book conceives of dictatorship as merely the authoritarianism of an individual or a ruling clique and ignores the bourgeois state as a class dictatorship.

The most notorious purveyors of the notions of Gene Sharp are trainees of the Serbia-based Centre for Applied Non-Violent Action and Strategies (CANVAS), a consulting and training firm funded by the U.S. New Endowment for Democracy. It was set up in 2003 by OTPOR (Resistance), a CIA-funded Serbian organization which opposed Slovodan Milosevic and helped cause his downfall consequent to the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999. The OTPOR logo with a white fist on a black circle as background is conspicuous in group actions of the Occupy movement.

The International League of Peoples’ Struggle has endorsed the Occupy Wall Street Movement and its subsequent spread to many U.S. cities insofar as they use the political tactic of occupying public places for indefinite periods and denouncing the imperialist system and its policies. The ILPS is appreciative of the Occupy Movement for having occupied the park in Wall Street to denounce the finance oligarchy and the imperialist system. It has flexibly initiated or joined in several cities mass actions acclaimed as part of the Occupy Movement.

But the ILPS has never endorsed the comprehensive anarchist ideas, outlook and method of struggle of the initiators of the Occupy Wall Street movement. Up to a certain point, the actions of the anarchists can be positively imaginative and can help to arouse the people to rebel but cannot be sustained until the overthrow of the bourgeois state. The anarchists are ultimately reactionary because they allow the bourgeois state to remain intact, notwithstanding the anti-statist and individualist or anarchist propositions.

The researchers of the ILPS and Michel Chossudovsky of Global Research have closely studied the shady character and activities of the Occupy initiators and their exaggerated claims of having masterminded the so-called color revolutions of Eastern Europe in the recent past and the so-called Arab spring. Of course, the U.S. avails of special agents like those in CANVAS but it relies in the first place on its main line operatives and collaborators.

Bringing Back the State to the Revolution by Salud Sakdal and Benedicto Algabre critiques the Occupy Movement at the historical, philosophical and political planes comprehensively and profoundly. It takes up the question of state as a real unavoidable factor on both sides of revolution and counterrevolution. The article is excellent in dealing with its main point that the revolutionary process must overthrow the bourgeois state and install the new democratic or socialist state, notwithstanding the anti-Stalinist scare kicked up by the anarchists and Trotskyites.

It is gratifying that the article gives high appreciation for Amado Guerrero’s Philippine Society and Revolution and generously compares it with the Communist Manifesto with regard to the essence and requirements of the revolution led by the proletariat.###

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