The Occupy Wall Street demonstrators may have lost some of their headline cachet over the past few months, but they are aiming to reclaim the limelight with a revitalized “Occupy Spring” campaign, with special emphasis on a major May Day offensive on May 1 that includes calls for a “general strike” nationwide.
A “May Day 2012” print and Internet flyer (pictured at left) put out by May Day New York City (MayDayNYC) declares:
MAY DAY 2012
OCCUPY WALL STREET STANDS IN SOLIDARITY
WITH THE CALLS FOR A DAY WITHOUT THE 99%
WHEREEVER YOU ARE
NO WORK
NO SCHOOL
NO HOUSEWORK
NO SHOPPING
“ON MAY 1, 2012,” the flyer goes on to state, “Millions of people throughout the world — workers, students, immigrants, professionals, houseworkers — employed and unemployed alike — will take to the streets to unite in a General Strike against a system that does not work for us. Don't go to work. Don't go to school. Don't shop. Take the streets!”
New York’s leftwing Village Voice notes that “Occupy Wall Street's May Day organizers [are] … working with the May Day Coalition, whose massive 2006 Day Without Immigrants rally effectively revived the observation of May Day in New York.”
The “May Day Coalition” the Voice refers to is actually the MayDayNYC group that put out the above-mentioned general strike flyer. And MayDayNYC is just another name for the May 1st Coalition for Worker and Immigrant Rights, which is headquartered at 55 West 17th Street, #5C, New York, NY 10011. Which just happens to be the same address as the International Action Center (IAC) — and the same address as the Workers World Party (WWP), a revolutionary communist party with its own peculiar Marxist-Leninist-Trotskyist ideology and party line. Not only do all the above-mentioned groups occupy the same address, but all are run pretty much by the same Workers World Party staff. Which is another way of saying that the organizations are merely fronts for the WWP.
As we explained in our May, 2006 article, “Pawns in a Losing Game”, the massive nationwide May Day demonstrations of that year were organized and coordinated by the WWP and their Marxist-Leninist comrades in the Communist Party USA, Revolutionary Communist Party, Socialist Workers Party, Progressive Labor Party, and the Committees of Correspondence. Their objectives in that case were to organize, mobilize, and radicalize millions of illegal aliens and Hispanic Americans, and at the same time demonize and marginalize opponents of an amnesty as racist bigots. In 2003, the same communist network organized their May Day events around the anti-war theme.
It was no accident that the comrades chose May 1st for their Marxist extravaganza; our May 2006 companion article, “History of May Day” provides a brief survey of the significance of May Day in communist circles over the past century.
The May Day events being planned for this year are being centered on the Occupy movement and our nation’s deepening economic crisis. As noted in previous articles in The New American, much of the top leadership of the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement has been drawn from veteran cadres of the Marxist-Leninist camp, including the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP), the Communist Party USA (CPUSA), Socialist Workers Party (SWP), Workers World Party (WWP), Progressive Labor Party (PLP), the Black Panther Party (BPP), Institute for Policy Studies (IPS), the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), and the Weather Underground (WU) terrorists. (See here, here, and here.)
Many of the Marxist-Leninist activists from these organizations, who led violent demonstrations and riots in the 1960s and '70s, are now professors at our colleges and universities and are carrying on “the revolution” from within the walls of academia. Bill Ayers, Angela Davis, Todd Gitlin, Bettina Aptheker, Frances Fox Piven, Barbara Ehrenreich, Mark Rudd, Marcus Raskin, Arthur Waskow, Stanley Aronowitz, Bill Fletcher, Jr., and Saul Landau are but a small sampling of the radical professoriate providing strategic, tactical, and inspirational leadership to the OWS movement.
In addition to the WWP, as we mentioned above, the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP), a hardline Maoist party, is very much involved in the Occupy movement and organizing the May Day demonstrations.
The RCP influence is plainly evident in the text of the MayDayNYC home page, which declares:
When we come together, we recognize the common struggles we face and the common interests we have. With this collective power we can begin to build the world we want to see. Another world is possible! [Emphasis in original.]
“Another world is possible” is a signature slogan of the RCP and its chairman-in-exile, Bob Avakian. It is ubiquitous in RCP literature and on its website, posters, flyers, and blog posts. It appears in the second sentence of the RCP’s online “A Call for May Day 2012.”
It appears as the subtitle on the home page of Occupy Congress, an OWS adjunct.
Stephen Lerner, an International Executive Board member of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), slips in the RCP slogan in the opening sentence of his OWS essay for the current issue of The Nation magazine, writing: “Occupy has cracked open the door that lets us imagine that another world is possible.”
But beyond the specific rhetorical connections, there are many top RCP activists leading and organizing many of the OWS and May Day activities.
Then there is the National Lawyers Guild (NLG), cited as “the foremost legal bulwark of the Communist Party” by the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1950. Since the NLG’s founding in the 1930s, its attorneys have ever been ready, able, and willing to come to the aid of spies, terrorists, subversives, and rioters. The NLG’s website lists dozens of cities across the country where it has legal teams that will come to assist Occupy demonstrators who get arrested.
A laudatory March 21 article for In These Times, “National Lawyers Guild Fights for the Right to Occupy,” notes that in New York City alone, the NLG has 44 attorneys tasked to deal with OWS arrests. (In These Times, it should be noted, includes among the radical coterie listed as its “Board of Editors” Bill Ayers, the infamous Weather Underground terrorist, who still describes himself as “a small ‘c’ communist.” Professor Ayers can be seen in a video below advising the younger OWS demonstrators on the finer points of street revolutionary tactics.)
Of course, the “c” word is never mentioned in news coverage of the Occupy events, even when the leading organizers and spokesmen are well-known officials of communist parties and organizations and are identified as such in event literature. Ditto for “Marxist,” “Marxist-Leninist,” and “socialist.” Even though these are labels that many of the OWS leaders and activists use to identify themselves, their allies in the OWS-friendly corporate “mainstream media” have, apparently, decided to market them to America as “progressives,” which sounds more benign.
In addition to the generally sympathetic coverage from the major corporate media, the OWS activists can count on actual advocacy and promotion from the leftist “alternative media,” such as The Nation, In These Times, Mother Jones, The Progressive, The Village Voice, The Huffington Post, and dozens of others.
The Nation, one of the oldest leftist, pro-communist magazines still in publication, has 11 articles in its April 2 print edition “Occupy Spring” series, by ultra-leftist authors Frances Fox Piven, Todd Gitlin, Richard Kim, Stephen Lerner, Michael Moore, Bill Fletcher, Jr., Arun Gupta, and others. The April 16 issue of The Nation features a cover story by communist revolutionary Tom (“Mr. Jane Fonda” and “We are all Vietcong”) Hayden entitled, “Participatory Democracy/ From the Port Huron Statement to Occupy Wall Street,” celebrating the 50th anniversary of the founding of the SDS — and the SDS legacy that lives on in the OWS movement. Like other SDSers who engaged in treason, riots, and revolution in their youth and now revel in their roles as “elder statesmen” to a new generation of revolutionaries, Hayden sees a host of new possibilities in the Occupy movement. He also pats himself on the back, noting that, “The SDS call for a participatory democracy echoes today in student-led democracy movements around the world, even appearing as the first principle of the Occupy Wall Street September 17 declaration.”
Regardless of whether or not the Occupy May Day turns out to be the massive event Hayden, Ayers, and their Marxist-Leninist comrades intend it to be, we can be sure that they will attempt to parlay it into another step in their Long March to revolutionize and transform America.
Related articles:
Occupy Wall Street: Lawlessness & Communist Revolution
Occupy Wall Street: Meet the Professors Behind It
Wall St. Protesters Push “Robin Hood” Tax
Unions, Socialists Join Forces to “Occupy Wall Street”
Big Soros Money Linked to Occupy Wall Street
