BILLIONAIRE MAYOR Michael Bloomberg says the NYPD's raid on the Occupy Wall Street encampment in New York City was merely to ensure security and public health, without limiting the right to free speech--and his words were parroted by mayors and the media around the U.S. to justify other assaults.

But then Police Lt. John Pike showed the world what's really going on.

A cop at the University of California Davis, Pike carried out the sadistic pepper-spraying of students during a peaceful November 18 sit-in--capturing in an indelible image the vengeful and violent crackdown on the Occupy movement that has been ordered by the wealthy and powerful across the U.S.

The raids, the arrests and the police violence are about trying to silence a movement that is giving voice to the accumulated discontent of the working-class majority in U.S. society. They're also about showing who's the boss--the political and business establishment.

As for free speech and democracy, the real attitude of the 1 percent was on full display in a November 21 Wall Street Journal editorial that reeked of contempt for ordinary people and hatred of anyone who dares to take a stand for justice:

In New York City and elsewhere, the occupiers reacted to being cleared out of their aromatic tent-towns this week by breaking the law and disrupting the lives and work of people trying to earn a living.

The logic--perhaps not the right word--of these protests seems to be that by inconveniencing millions of people the protesters will inspire a political revolt of the exploited masses. More likely, they will inspire the masses to be revolted by this vanguard of the college-educated proletariat.

America's elite think they've put our movement in its proper place--intimidated by the police powers of the U.S. state and pessimistic that any real change can be achieved.

But they're wrong. The Occupy movement has already changed the way millions of people think about their lives, the world they live in, and their political beliefs--and that isn't going away, whatever form the struggle takes now.

In just two months of existence, the movement has shifted the national debate by casting a spotlight on the question of corporate greed and economic inequality--no small achievement given the stiflingly narrow discussion permitted in the corporate media. Occupiers have shown that it's possible to win wide support for some powerful left-wing arguments--tax the rich, create jobs, end the wars, hold political leaders accountable.

And the struggle has brought together many thousands of people who want to do something about all this--and do it now. Whether they could maintain permanent encampments or not, local Occupy movements have been a political gathering place for both veterans of labor and grassroots organizing and people completely new to activism to find each other and make common cause.

Many Occupy actions have been about the outrageous attacks on the right to free speech and peaceable assembly--that is, about defending our right to protest at all. But the movement has also been deepened by linking up with working people's struggles of all kinds, from resisting budget cuts and school closures to supporting strikes and efforts to block evictions from foreclosed homes.

If the movement isn't yet capable of the kind of mass civil disobedience that can defend the camps everywhere, it has nevertheless created new networks of activists who now have the practical experience of mutual solidarity to put to use in the struggles ahead.

From the general strike call in Oakland, Calif., that shut down the city's port November 2 to the pickets in support of locked-out workers at Sotheby's in New York and uncounted anti-eviction protests in many cities in between, Occupy has shown the potential to build a mass, activist left in the U.S. for the first time in decades.

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THE QUESTION for activists in many cities now is whether and how to rebuild encampments that have been wrecked--with their former sites turned into "free speech-free" zones by police and local authorities (almost all of those authorities Democrats, by the way).

Some voices on the left are advising the Occupy movement to shrug off the loss of the camps. According to this argument, activists can now change focus from the narrow question of defending their right to occupy public space against the forces of the state to the broader issues that the struggle has connected to in the past few months.

But while these broader issues are certainly very important, those who want to move on are missing some crucial points.

First of all, the national security state, engorged by hundreds of billions in spending since the September 11 attacks, is now being used against those who simply wish to critique a society in which 1 percent of the population controls nearly 40 percent of the wealth--and question a system of laws that says corporations are people and therefore have the right to purchase both political parties, lock, stock and barrel.

That encroachment on basic democratic rights has to be challenged. Activists should keep up the heat on politicians like Michael Bloomberg or Chicago's Mayor Rahm Emanuel--who tailor their interpretation of First Amendment rights to cater to the interests of the 1 percent.

The importance of such struggles over the right to protest and against police violence were clear from the massive rally and General Assembly November 21 at UC Davis in response to the pepper-spraying of demonstrators. Around a quarter of the entire student population--and maybe more--attended, according to estimates.

Second, the encampments at Zuccotti Park and other public spaces were more than symbols of the movement. Occupy camps and the structures that have arisen in conjunction with them provide a space for people to connect to the struggle--where they can raise their own grievances, learn about the issues and hear discussions about what we're trying to achieve and how.

In cities where the camps have been broken up--as well as those, like Chicago, where a permanent encampment was never established--activists have to consider how to maintain this open interplay.

Another important question for the movement is its attitude toward the mainstream political system. On the one hand, unions such as the Service Employees International Union SEIU and liberal organizations like MoveOn.org, want to use Occupy as a brand for their multimillion-dollar electoral efforts--starting with an "Occupy Congress" tent city in Washington that's intended to put heat on House Republicans, but not Barack Obama and the Democrats.

One of the great strengths of the movement in its first months has been the willingness to critique the Washington political system as a whole, not just one wing of it. In fact, most of the activists who came to Occupy are looking for ways to build a lasting movement in their own communities, while forging ties with like-minded people in other localities.

For them, it's important to consider what Occupy has achieved so far. It has validated the feelings of tens of millions of working people who are furious at the way the people who run the banks and big corporations have continued to thrive despite the economic crisis, even as working people keep losing ground--if they're not forced into desperation through debt and the loss of their homes and jobs.

Keeping that spirit at the center of the struggle is the key to the future.

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THE SUSTAINED offensive against the Occupy movement isn't just about police repression. There's an ideological component--and some of the most prominent figures carrying out this campaign claim to support the ideals of the struggle.

The next time you hear a supposed liberal like the chancellor of the University of California-Berkeley justify a police crackdown by declaring that Occupy tactics of nonviolent direct action have nothing to do with the 1960s civil rights movement, consider these words from Martin Luther King Jr.. They come from a speech in 1967, the last year of King's life, just before he called for a Poor Peoples Movement to establish---yes, an encampment--in Washington, D.C.:

The movement must address itself to the question of restructuring the whole of American society. There are forty million poor people here. And one day we must ask the question, "Why are there forty million poor people in America?" And when you begin to ask that question, you are raising questions about the economic system, about a broader distribution of wealth. When you ask that question, you begin to question the capitalistic economy. And I'm simply saying that more and more, we've got to begin to ask questions about the whole society.

We are called upon to help the discouraged beggars in life's market place. But one day, we must come to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. It means that questions must be raised. You see, my friends, when you deal with this, you begin to ask the question, "Who owns the oil?" You begin to ask the question, "Who owns the iron ore?" You begin to ask the question, "Why is it that people have to pay water bills in a world that is two thirds water?" These are questions that must be asked.

Those questions have gone unanswered for more than 40 years, even as politicians annually use the holiday in King's name to assure us of their commitment to equality.

Now, Occupy has raised King's questions again. Yet while King was focused primarily on the struggles of African Americans and the poor locked out of the American Dream amid a booming economy, today, the entire U.S. working class faces a deep and permanent cut in their living standards through wage cuts, joblessness and sweeping reductions in what remains of the social safety net.

In King's day, politicians promised African Americans, women and others struggling for change that if they were patient, they'd see results...someday. Today, however, Democratic and Republican politicians are marching in lockstep to impose austerity, austerity and more austerity.

Our future, they tell us, is going to get worse--and we'd better get used to it. The only debate is over how much more to cut, rather than creating jobs and devoting resources to those in urgent need.

Now, the Occupy movement has followed King's advice and begun "to ask questions about the whole society." And activists have gotten an answer from authorities--in the form of a near-lethal police tear gas canister fired at the head of Iraq war veteran Scott Olsen, pepper spray down the throats of Davis campus protesters, the trashing of the library at Occupy Wall Street and military-style police sweeps of Occupy encampments across the U.S., coordinated in a conference call of double-talking Democratic mayors.

But Occupy isn't defeated. On the contrary, activists are debating how to take up new challenges--from helping the International Longshore and Warehouse Union activists take on union-busting by the grain giant EGT to preparing for big labor contract showdowns for transit workers in Chicago and New York.

Many other smaller struggles are newly infused with people and energy as activists who stood up to the political lies and police nightsticks join the fight. Occupy, after all, has the support of the working class--and to move forward, it has to involve itself in workers' struggle wherever possible.

The loss of the encampments is a blow, but not a fatal one. In France, after May 1968, a popular poster put it this way: "Beginning of a prolonged struggle."

Occupy may not have reached the level of the French events of '68, but it's clear that we're at the start of something, with bigger battles to come. The time to prepare for those battles is now.

WHAT WAS the size and political character of the Friday protest on November 25?

THE DEMONSTRATION on Friday was quite large. There were about 1 million people in Tahrir. A number of demonstrations came from different working-class neighborhoods--one of them was as big as 10,000 people. This is a new thing in Tahrir. We have feeder marches that come from different working-class neighborhoods.

The turnout was massive, as expected. The square was really roaring with chants against SCAF and against its head, Field Marshal Mohamed Hussein Tantawi, and there was a general sentiment that the military council must return to the barracks. The consensus in the square was that a presidential council or a salvation cabinet must take power--and that it should be made up of independent people who have absolutely nothing to do with Mubarak and the National Democratic Party that ruled under Mubarak's regime.

The most important thing here is that whatever form such a government would take, it would be accountable to the people, not to the SCAF.

THE MUSLIM Brotherhood, however, remained opposed to the demonstrations.

THE BROTHERHOOD opposed the demonstration on Friday and boycotted it. Most of the Salafists--a more conservative Islamist current--boycotted it, too, with very few exceptions. But all the liberal and left parties and revolutionary youth groups--about 70--supported the demonstrations.

This demonstration put pressure on a few liberal figures to put themselves forward as being ready to form a national unity government or national salvation cabinet. Mohamed ElBaradei, a key liberal figure, agreed to cancel his presidential bid if he is asked to form a national unity government that would include liberals, Nasserists and moderate Islamists.

That's generally what happened out of the big demonstration in Tahrir. But there were other demonstrations in other parts of the country on the same day. The new development is that there are also demonstrations in Upper Egypt [the more rural, southern part of the country], which is more backward, less industrialized. It wasn't fully a part of the January uprising. So this is a new development. It is slowly catching up with the revolution.

ARE WORKING-class and economic demands coming to the fore in these demonstrations, or are they focused more on getting the military out of politics?

THE POLITICAL and the economic are completely intertwined. There is a general unifying demand among the million people in Tahrir that the SCAF must go. But the underlying reason is that the economic situation has deteriorated in the last 10 months.

Many people tell reporters that life is getting harder, that unemployment is unbearable, and that the previous government failed to improve their lives. The SCAF has failed miserably on this. So the anger over economic hardship and the yearning for political freedom are connected.

The independent unions had a contingent in the rallies, but it wasn't that big--a few hundred people. They are still in a process of building and have just gone through a number of setbacks. There isn't a working class movement that could have an influence on the mass demonstration on Friday.

HOW WERE the marches from working-class neighborhoods organized?

THESE DEMONSTRATIONS are organized by groups formed to oppose the military trials of civilians, by popular committees to defend the revolution, by the Revolutionary Socialists and hundreds of independent activists mobilizing in their neighborhoods. They march to Tahrir, distributing thousands of leaflets along the way to explain what's going on. It's an attempt to build a local, ongoing presence in the neighborhoods.

IS THE political sentiment in Tahrir ahead of the rest of the country? How will that affect the elections?

YES, THE political sentiment in Tahrir is ahead of the country. You can think of it as the revolutionary vanguard in society among students and workers and youth--but it is much larger than in January. Political consciousness has developed tremendously.

These are people who understand that the SCAF is the continuation of the Mubarak regime. They are beginning to understand the connection between political and economic issues. They are beginning to grapple with the role of police in society. And they are the ones who understand that the ruling class played a trick on them by using Mubarak as a scapegoat in order to save the rest of the political system.

So you have a minority in society--symbolized by Tahrir--which has advanced politically and in terms of its consciousness. And it's ahead of the rest of the country in that sense. Back in January, a majority of people in the country wanted Mubarak to go, so they supported Tahrir. At this moment, that isn't the case regarding the SCAF.

The revolutionary vanguard is much, much larger. Its willingness to fight is unbelievable--it fought five days against the police. But the majority of the workers and poor people have not yet concluded that the SCAF must immediately return to its barracks. Or they don't think we have the power yet to push the SCAF to return the barracks.

On a different level, you can think of it this way: It was much easier for the ruling class to get rid of Mubarak. Getting rid of the SCAF, or pushing it back to the barracks, is a much harder task. Many people outside of Tahrir also want the SCAF to go back to its barracks, but they don't think there is the organization on the ground to win something like that.

HOW WILL all this play out in the parliamentary elections?

THE TURNOUT in elections will likely be quite high. A majority of people believe that elections will be the way to establish a civilian government and to get the army out of political life. There is a majority consensus on this, other than a crazy right-wing minority that wants the SCAF to stay in power.

The majority of the country wants a democratic system. They want a civilian government. They want to be able to vote and to exercise political control over their lives. And they believe this is the way to get the army out of their lives for the first time in 60 years.

So even among people who are fighting in Tahrir and those who support them, some of them will vote, because they don't want to leave the political scene to the SCAF, the Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafists. Yet the majority of the people in Tahrir are more advanced than the rest of the country, and want to actually boycott the election.

So you have a bizarre situation. The fact that people will vote in the elections doesn't mean they want the SCAF to stay. They actually want the SCAF out. They just think that voting will be the quickest way to do it. But the majority of those who support the revolution are not necessarily against Tahrir. There is just not enough organization or confidence to push the SCAF out now.

The SCAF wants this election to gain legitimacy on the ground. The military is very weak right now, and it is determined that the election will take place no matter what. They want to use this to bolster their credentials as people who said they would bring about democracy--they want something to show they've kept their word in order to use that to attack the growing revolutionary vanguard.

That's what the people in Tahrir are saying--that this election will not advance democracy, and it will allow the SCAF to gather the forces of counterrevolution on the ground.

However, it's complicated. The SCAF has just come up with a new prime minister--Kamel el-Ganzoury--a founder of the National Democratic Party and an architect of privatization. Though he was ultimately pushed out by Mubarak, this is someone who is on a no-fly list for leaving the country, because he is implicated in a number of corruption cases in privatization schemes.

Even on that level, people are divided. A majority will go vote, but half the people think that because this man was pushed out by Mubarak, we might want to give him a chance, and the other half are beginning to learn that Tantawi and the SCAF are bringing back the old guard of the NDP, not just the second generation. Ganzoury, who is 77, is an architect of everything Mubarak did over the last 30 years.

By appointing Ganzoury, the SCAF is sending a message that it will not relinquish power. It has said that the new constitution won't change the role of the SCAF by an inch. The SCAF will always have veto power over anything that has to do with the army.

So on the one hand, the military is using the election to bolster its democratic credentials. On the other hand, it is digging in. The members of the SCAF are saying: "We are not going to relinquish power. No constitution, no parliament and no mass movement is going to force us out of power."

Some 25 percent of Egypt's gross domestic product is directly under the control of the SCAF. There was a handmade sign at the protest on Friday listing the crimes of the SCAF. One of them was that its members supported Mubarak for 30 years. Another was that it turned the army into a big business to exploit poor people. Companies owned by the army make macaroni, washing machines, refrigerators and furniture--they build luxury resorts and a lot more. They own a big chunk of agriculture, too, including hundreds of cattle ranches, and they grow all kinds of vegetables and fruit.

That's why pushing the military back into the barracks and having a constitution and parliament to make them accountable is much harder to achieve than making them sacrifice a Mubarak. They have so much more at stake economically and politically.

Then there is the international dimension. The West abandoned Mubarak, but the West will never abandon the SCAF until the very last minute. The U.S. will not abandon the army.

DESPITE THE protests against the SCAF, the Muslim Brotherhood has supported it, despite some tensions over the status of Islam in the proposed constitution. Will that alliance continue?

THE GENERAL feeling in Tahrir is that the SCAF has cut a deal not only with the Brotherhood and the Salafists, but also with the liberals and a section of the left, a coalition called the Revolution Continues. They are going to divide the seats in the new parliament among themselves.

So the Brotherhood opposed the demonstrations in Tahrir, and on Friday, it actually sent many of its members to the square to try to talk people into participating in the elections. They were chased out in many cases. But the Brotherhood is still campaigning.

In the new constitution, the Brotherhood says it will not implement Sharia law. But its version of Sharia is different from the Salafists, who have a very reactionary view--against women and Coptic Christians, and for carrying out the most brutal punishment for poor who break the law. The Muslim Brotherhood's views are a lot closer to their Turkish counterparts. They are for censorship of art and culture, and changes in some educational programs. The Salafists are right wing and anticommunist.

So there are divisions between Salafists and the Muslim Brotherhood. A very popular Salafist presidential candidate, Hazem Salah Abu Ismail, has a following of millions, and he is all out against the SCAF. So a group of Salafists are attempting to outflank the Muslim Brotherhood, and these people were supporting the demonstration on Friday.

The Salafists believe the Muslim Brotherhood is cutting a deal that would make it harder for them to implement Sharia. So they want the SCAF out faster. That creates confusion on the ground, because while they want the SCAF out, their ultimate goal is to destroy the whole revolution.

 WHAT WAS the trigger for this latest crisis in Egypt?

THE IMMEDIATE trigger was an incident last Saturday, November 19, when the police went to break up a sit-in of no more than 100 people on the center traffic island of Tahrir Square. Most of them had been injured in the January 25 uprising that led to the overthrow of Mubarak.

The sit-in followed a big march the day before that was dominated by the Islamists, demanding that the Supreme Council hand over power to a civilian administration by the end of April 2012. The day went just fine. But one Islamist leader, a conservative Salafist, called off his plan for a sit-in and left with his supporters, so just 100 people were there overnight. Police came the following morning and began brutalizing them, and ejected them from the square.

But thousands responded to this repression by coming to the square to reclaim it. By the next day, there were tens of thousands of people in Tahrir Square again, and they kicked the police out. This is what started the showdown in the immediate sense.

The second factor is that there have been a number of protests against military rule and military trials of civilians taking place steadily over course of the last three weeks. They weren't massive--2,000 to 5,000 people at each point. But they were picking up steam, indicative that something bigger might happen.

In recent weeks, there has been a growing sense of confidence among families of those in military jails and activists who have been fighting military trials. You can look back on it and see that there was a readiness to go into the square--to fight the police and reclaim Tahrir Square.

The underlying reason is that the government and the SCAF have failed miserably in bringing about any economic or social reform that would improve people's lives in the last nine months. They failed to raise the minimum wage, as they promised in March, and they failed to institute any system of price controls over basic foodstuffs.

In fact, for the last five months, the SCAF has decided that not only will it refuse to make serious economic concessions, but it would slowly bring back the entire repressive machine of Mubarak. Its leaders have been attempting to rebuild the confidence of the police for months. The Central Security Forces, the main repressive part of the police, have been let loose on strikers, people sitting in, etc.

So instead of carrying out any meaningful reforms, the SCAF decided that it would crack down on protests, demonstrations and strikes. And while it promised that it wouldn't allow Mubarak's NDP to run in the elections as a party, NDP members formed eight new parties. In other words, the SCAF was re-engineering the political scene with all the old NDP people, who were going to make it back into parliament.

WHAT WAS the popular reaction to all this?

A MAJORITY of those in streets today probably supported the SCAF in February and believed that it would take side of the people and dismantle the Mubarak regime. It has taken nine months of disappointments in the regime's economic policies and increasing repression to change that. A lot of young people and a lot of workers who believed in the SCAF have undergone a process of a change in consciousness since February.

There is another reason for popular anger, which is that the liberal and Islamist parties seemed to be looking for ways to share power with the NDP and SCAF through parliament and the presidential elections.

So consciousness was changing under the surface, but people lacked the confidence to fight back. But all of a sudden, unexpectedly, waves and waves of people have come out of months of silence. Demoralization has suddenly turned into its opposite.

WHAT IS the attitude of the Islamist parties toward the government and the SCAF? How have they responded to the mobilization?

ISLAMIST GROUPS have supported the SCAF and said effectively that they won't criticize the army and the military council. The Muslim Brotherhood in particular has intervened in many social struggles to contain them--and in strikes, to break them. The Brotherhood tried to break two doctors' strikes over the spring and summer. It has been 100 percent behind the military council.

But then the military announced that it would control the process of writing a new constitution, have veto power over any legislation that has to do with the army, and its budget would remain secret. The debate over this lasted a whole month, creating a fissure between the army and the Islamists.

For their part, the Islamists were afraid that the army would prevent them from placing religious clauses in the constitution allowing for Islamist jurisprudence--sharia law. That was the reason for the protest on Friday, November 19--it was the Muslim Brotherhood's attempt to pressure the SCAF into allowing sharia into the constitution.

On Friday, the Islamists demanded that the SCAF hand over power to a civilian administration by April. By Tuesday, the chant in Tahrir Square was, "The people want the field marshals out immediately." Plus, there is anger at the leaders of the Islamist movement. One of them--a presidential candidate--was beaten up in the square. Another, the number two figure in the Muslim Brotherhood, was chased out of Tahrir.

So what we have is a new mass movement--and it all happened within 72 hours. It's really driving a wedge between thousands of young Muslim Brotherhood supporters and the leadership of the organization. Many young supporters have joined the protests against the orders and the wishes of their leadership.

So there are liberals, independents, leftists and Islamists in the square. This is creating divisions within the Islamist bloc. Their poorer and working-class members feel they must come down to defend Tahrir Square against police brutality. There were up to a million people on the streets on Tuesday, November 22, and tens of thousands more across the country, all on less than 48 hours' notice.

WHAT HAS been the role of the U.S. in this crisis?

U.S. OFFICIALS have said that they have been in constant contact and negotiations with the Muslim Brotherhood. They've said they were preparing for a coalition government of the Muslim Brotherhood, former members of the NDP and some liberals. The elections were seemingly set up to bring in a parliament almost identical to Mubarak's last one. The U.S. and the SCAF seemed confident that they had been able to stabilize the situation--that they had pulled the rug from beneath the revolutionary movement.

That's why police cracked down on the Saturday sit-in--just as they had done with many previous ones. Break some heads, break some bones, and that would be it--that was the thinking. They didn't expect the flood of anger and a willingness to fight.

It looked like the Islamists were ready to form a government with the agreement of the SCAF. But now the whole balance of forces has changed. It took 48 hours for the movement to win one demand that has gone unmet for nine months--a ban on NDP members from participating in parliament for five years, even though many of them are candidates for the election to be held in less than a week.

More significantly, the SCAF said it would stop investigating crimes committed by the military police and instead refer all accusations to civilian prosecutors. This has been a key demand since October 9, when military police massacred civilian police during a protest by Coptic Christians.

HOW HAVE the demonstrators been able to occupy Tahrir Square despite the repression?

AS WE speak on Tuesday, November 22, there are a million people in Tahrir Square in a peaceful demonstration. But the side streets have witnessed a round-the-clock battle for 72 hours.

One street off of Tahrir Square near the old American University campus looks like a battlefield from the First World War. Thousands of police are trying to defend the Interior Ministry's headquarters. They have fired teargas into the crowd every five minutes for four days straight, thanks to an endless supply from the U.S. They're also firing rubber bullets.

But this isn't the usual police brutality. After the first police attack on Saturday morning, they came again on Sunday at 5 p.m., when there were 30,000 or 40,000 people in Tahrir. But this time, they came with military police, and that's when the massacre began. People were killed by rubber bullets and live ammunition. This was the result of a shoot-to-kill policy by snipers and the Central Security Forces--doctors said injuries were concentrated around the neck and head.

After people were killed, the police lined up their bodies on the sidewalk. They dragged one of the bodies a dozen yards and dumped it into a big garbage can. At another point, they were hitting bodies on the head with clubs to make sure they were dead--people say this is worse than the days of Mubarak.

The military's behavior shifted public opinion--it shocked people who believed that the worst days of Mubarak were behind them. They might not have liked the SCAF, but they thought at least it wasn't as bad as Mubarak. Now people say, "We don't have one Mubarak, we have 16 Mubaraks"--a reference to the number of people on the military council.

WHAT IS the social composition of the protesters in Tahrir Square?

IT IS very similar to what it was in January and February, but less middle class and more working class. Most people who died at the hands of police are poor, young working-class people who have come from the shantytowns--young people who have no hope after years of neglect.

One of those killed was helping a young woman who was breaking stones to throw at police. He said to her, "I'm uneducated, I have no future. The police will kill me someday anyway. I will die here--you go. You are educated, you will help the movement."

If this mobilization continues, you can expect more young Muslim Brotherhood supporters and Salafists to join in. Most of the doctors who are treating the wounded are Muslim Brotherhood supporters who say that they have come on their own because of their conscience.

SOME HAVE raised the possibility of a general strike as the next step in the struggle. Are we close to that?

IN SEPTEMBER, we came close to a general strike situation when there was a national strike of teachers (the first since 1951), a strike of bus drivers in Cairo for almost 20 days and two big national strikes by government doctors. At least three-quarters of a million workers in key sectors of the economy were on strike at some point in September. A lot of people on the left thought a general strike could happen then.

Those strikes didn't lose, but they didn't win, either. That was demoralizing for a lot of people. Workers are not well enough organized to deal with the SCAF. Today, if you strike, it isn't the police, but the army who comes in to break or contain your strike.

Today, there aren't any massive strikes, but there are a lot of strikes all the time. And there is no doubt that the last 72 hours will give people confidence to take on the SCAF. The number of independent unions has jumped from about 90 in the early summer to 250 today. But while there are lots of unions, there is no political organization for workers in the country.

WHAT'S NEXT? Can the elections be held as planned?

THE LAST five months have been a period of ebb in the revolutionary momentum, despite the strikes and the near-general strike in September. The SCAF had the upper hand, and there was mass demoralization. But all of a sudden, the situation has changed.

Can they hold an election in five days? The battle is still going on. But it is already a big victory that the government of Essam Sharaf has fallen. Sharaf promised to be the prime minister of Tahrir Square, but he brought people from Mubarak's NDP into all but three or four positions.

Right now, the demand of the movement is for a unity government with no NDP people. The negotiations are for a new government that will have Islamists, liberals and maybe even people from the left.

This new government will take over in very different conditions. People are saying that when we put in the Sharaf government in March, we gave them a blank check, and they stole the revolution. This time, we will hold them accountable.

This isn't just a demonstration against the SCAF. All this is taking place with a much higher level of consciousness.

http://socialistworker.org/2011/11/23/egypts-revolution-returns

New York occupiers and supporters march on a mass day of action on November 17

THE OCCUPY movement's November 17 day of action, which followed a week in which protest camps were attacked in nationally coordinated police raids, marked the two-month anniversary of Occupy Wall Street (OWS). The day of action protests across the country made it clear that police repression will not silence our movement.

But repression has a subtler cousin named co-optation, who also made an unfortunate appearance that day. It's an early sign of what will surely be an increasing trend as we enter an election year, something that I've only rarely heard talked about at Occupy events--but read about incessantly in media reports about them.

New York City activists from OWS spent weeks planning the November 17 day of action alongside organizers from unions and community organizations, including the Service Employees International Union (SEIU). But when the Occupiers showed up for the day's culminating rally and march over the Brooklyn Bridge, they found a completely different event from the one they had planned.

Instead of a series of platforms for coordinated "people's mics" that had been agreed to at planning meetings, there was a blaring sound system, an emcee and a series of people pre-selected to tell their stories.

Instead of the plan for a "lightly marshaled event" in which protesters would be led to the pedestrian path of the bridge, but free to go wherever they wanted, there were hundreds of marshals working alongside riot cops to keep the streets clear. Like the sound system and the emcee, these marshals were provided by the SEIU. (Don't be too hard on the marshals, by the way--many of whom are hard-working union organizers who may well have hated their assignment that night.)

According to one OWS activist, a lot of the people running the rally with their headsets and two-way radios tried hard to ignore the gazes of organizers with whom they had spent countless meeting hours not mentioning any of these plans for what actually took place.

For most protesters, the SEIU takeover of the event probably only registered as a series of oddities. Why were people shouting "Mic check!" over a deafening sound system? Why were marshals chanting, "Whose streets? Our streets!" as they worked with police to keep us on the sidewalks?

The effect was like a clueless dad trying to use his daughter's new slang. But the organizers from OWS knew what was taking place.

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WHY DID the SEIU take over the march? Let's back up first to consider the context.

It's true, as the OWS website declared after the raid on Zuccotti Park a few days before, that "you can't evict an idea." But you can steal it. You can empty it of its content until all that's left is a slogan that used to mean something.

For example: "We need a leader willing to fight for the needs of the 99 percent." That's SEIU President Mary Kay Henry announcing the union's early endorsement of a presidential candidate in 2012: Barack Obama, the largest recipient of Wall Street campaign contributions in the history of the world.

A few days later, the SEIU announced plans for a rally in Washington, D.C., because "congressional supporters of the 1 percent blocked President Obama's latest job proposals." I support more rallies for jobs, of course, but you know that the SEIU will not be issuing any criticisms of Obama's job proposals as too little and much too late.

And the name of this early campaign rally in D.C.? "Occupy Congress." Glenn Greenwald, America's bullshit detector laureate, wrote:

Having SEIU officials...shape, fund, dictate and decree an anti-GOP, pro-Obama march is about as antithetical as one can imagine to what the Occupy movement has been. And pretending that the ongoing protests are grounded in the belief that the GOP is the party of the rich while the Democrats are the party of the working class is likely to fool just about nobody other than those fooled by that already.

It's not going to be easy for the Democratic Party to take in a movement that was born in response to watching Barack Obama sell his soul to the One Percent. Add to that the difficulty of maintaining support from all the people who defend the Occupy movement even as Democratic (big D, not little d) mayors repress the tens of thousands who are actually occupying.

Portland Mayor Sam Adams went so far as to refer to the police raid he ordered as a chance for Occupy Portland to "evolve in order to reach its full potential"--which conjured up images of a future martial law episode of Portlandia with "fair trade" rubber bullets and organic pepper spray.

With spokespeople of this caliber, it might seem like the Democrats wouldn't have a prayer with the Occupy movement. But there's more than one way to co-opt a movement.

Which brings us back to what the SEIU was doing on the night of November 17.

No matter how disappointing the Democrats have been in defending working people from the budget-cutters and social reactionaries--much less promoting positive measures to make unions stronger--organized labor will be devoted to electing Democrats in 2012. Union leaders may be happy to see the mass mobilizations of the Occupy movement, but they don't want them to get too militant--and they want the movement's enthusiasm benefit their drive to elect Democrats next year.

Thus, the SEIU's marshalling operation to make sure Occupy demonstrators didn't take the streets on November 17 is connected to the union leadership's devoted support of Obama and the Democrats.

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WE HAVE reached a new phase of Occupy Wall Street. The movement is no longer skipping from one success to another. The One Percent has regained its footing and carried out a well-designed plan to break up many of our encampments with paramilitary raids in the dead of night, accompanied by media hype about dangerous and unsanitary conditions.

And now we can see that the Democratic Party is fielding its most experienced forces, whose aim is to steer the movement toward the safe terrain of electoral politics.

In the face of these and other challenges, what do we have? Only the most dynamic American protest movement in generations--one that has in the past several months spread across the country and connected with dozens of existing struggles. We can confront the threat of co-optation as surely as we can challenge repression.

The solution is not to turn away from organized labor, whose participation in OWS in New York City has been one of the movement's biggest strengths.

From the beginning, Occupy gave an infusion of energy to various union struggles around New York City. And in turn, the Occupy encampment in Zuccotti Park and its meetings and protests were infused with increasing numbers of union members who have been waiting years for this movement.

In the process, people who had never come in contact with the labor movement have built up activist relationships with unionists that aren't going away--and union members from different unions formed new networks that can be put to use in the battles ahead, whether they have to do with labor or the right to free speech or any other issue. These relationships built in the struggle will be important in maintaining the vibrancy of the Occupy movement, even if union leaders hope that they can control it and channel it toward the voting booth.

Yes, unions are complicated. Their members have a power to shut down vast chunks of Corporate America--but their leaders are insulated from the class war by their stake in the status quo and their relationship to one of the two major political parties of the One Percent, the Democrats.

What we do know is that OWS has breathed new life into a labor movement that has been in retreat for decades. At the rank-and-file level, the Occupy movement was a lightning rod for many people who have been looking for a way to take action. And even moderate union leaders gave important support to Occupy--for example, the overnight mobilization in October when Mayor Michael Bloomberg first tried to break up the OWS encampment.

Continuing that engagement with labor will be important for the future of the Occupy movement. And within unions, it will serve as a counter-weight against officials who want labor to go back to mobilizing only for the polls--rather than for the protests that have galvanized people around the country in a long overdue struggle against the One Percent.