Organized Labor

An earnest young man came along the line of us seated on cold pavers. Every few steps he repeated that we should soak our dust masks in white vinegar and, in the event of a tear gas attack, dab a little milk of magnesia in our eyes.

I told my wife and sons I was leaving immediately to join Tim. With luck, I would see them some time the next day. I expected to be arrested.

This is how I was at Justin Herman Plaza listening to instructions on coping with tear gas.

So was Mike Casey, Hotel Workers leader and president of the Labor Council. So were other union members, including from the Trades. Five members of the Board of Supervisors had come, not to be arrested but to try to dissuade the police from moving against the camp. Four candidates for mayor were there for the same purpose, including one of our endorsed candidates, Leland Yee.

We learned that the police were forming up on Treasure Island. At about three in the morning we received word they were moving. I watched the Bay Bridge and saw buses: One, two, three, four, five. Three policemen sat in the darkened window of a vacant office across the street. One watched us through binoculars.

Then the buses never came.

Sometime after four, the policemen across the street left the window.

Next day, the official line was that the police had held a training exercise on Treasure Island, and positioned themselves also to help if a mutual aid call came from Oakland police.

More likely, San Francisco officials saw Supervisors, mayoral candidates and union members and did not want headlines about arrests so close to an election.

And so as of this writing Occupy SF survives. Whether it does or not by the time this is published will depend on Mayor Ed Lee, now confirmed in his power and with nothing to fear from an imminent election.

It will also depend on us.

Every evening at six, Occupy SF holds a General Assembly at which issues of the camp – management, dealings with City authorities and with others, plans of action – are debated at length and decided. There is an element in this of the New England town meetings that were held up to some of us in the classrooms of our childhood as exemplars of direct democracy, democracy in its purest form. In this sense, Occupy SF is as American as can be.

The history of direct democracy, alas, is not good. In its origins in Athens, direct democracy executed the philosopher Socrates through forced suicide. It listened too much to demagogues, leaders who stoked the biases of the people to achieve power for themselves. It started wars, exiled valuable leaders, crushed weaker city-states just to show its power and brought its own end through a disastrous attempt to conquer Sicily.

Our Founding Fathers knew this history. Trying to counter the faults of direct democracy, they gave us a constitutional republic in which decisions are removed from the people and given to elected representatives.

But this representational democracy has veered often toward oligarchy, rule by wealth and the wealthy. It has itself launched wars to gain or protect wealth. It has exploited prejudices and preconceptions to divide the people and maintain the rule of wealth. It has sometimes executed the good and the innocent.

At root, the demand of the Occupy movement, however lacking it may seem in specifics, is that the rule of wealth be curtailed, and the rule of the people advanced.

The direct democracy of Occupy SF might easily go wrong. The destructive elements that have plagued Oakland might cross the bay. The conflicts that so often divide working people and the labor movement might wedge themselves into Occupy SF. I have already heard advocacy – not by campers but by others in their assemblies – for action against the ParkMerced and California Pacific Medical Center projects and the America’s Cup. If Occupy SF opposes these, it loses us, because we need these for work.

Fortunately, as wide as Occupy SF has spread decision making, it does have individuals who lead, and all of those I have met are serious and thoughtful. I have heard these leaders capably turn discussions from those specific causes to the broader cause we in the Trades share with Occupy SF – the need to rebalance this country so that it serves us, and not we the wealthy.

This gives me hope for Occupy SF.

This makes it worthy of our defense.