The General Strike in Oakland Will Be a Test for the Occupy Wall Street Movement and the City

Now comes the return fire. The City of Oakland is bracing for Wednesday's general strike called by Occupy Oakland, a strike that may well shut down the Port of Oakland. [1]

In case you haven't noticed, things are starting to get serious. It was the city's government that threw down the gauntlet last week, bringing tear gas, flash bang grenades, and bean bag rounds to bear on the protesters, in a textbook example of playing into the hands of your opponents. Alas, Scott Olsen, a marine and Iraq War veteran, received a critical injury in accordance with the grim irony that Providence often provides.

The world has been watching, and the side allied with barbarity has become all too clear to that world. As always, it is the side that seeks to monopolize resources to the detriment of the rest of humanity, which is itself an act of barbarism, however well-cloaked by the artifice of social myth-making.
There are two things to watch for on Wednesday. The first will be the success of the strike. If workers from longshore workers to teachers do indeed walk off their jobs, and if the Port of Oakland is shut down, the Occupy Wall Street movement will have demonstrated to a certainty that it is a movement with teeth and not to be trifled with.

The second will be the reaction of the city. If the strike is successful, and the city responds with more police violence, then that violence will be leveled directly at the working people of Oakland who will be participating. This will be impossible for the city to justify. It is easy, albeit inaccurate, to characterize the protesters as bathless incarnates of nihilism. It will be more difficult to so characterize a host of public school teachers.

But can the city avoid the use of violence? To the extent that the City of Oakland stands as proxy for the nation's wealthy interests, violence is its only option. The hoarding of wealth is itself violence, and can only be defended with violence. As resistance to that hoarding grows, that violence becomes open, direct, and progressively more brutal.

The city may, on the other hand, disdain to repeat its recent mistake, and permit the general strike to flourish. If that happens, then the Occupy Wall Street movement will have won a significant victory. It will have effected its will against power, and, thereafter, will itself be recognized as a power.

Note that the movement wins either way. In the first scenario, the government will convict itself in the courts of history and world opinion. In the second scenario, the movement will have established itself as a social power to be reckoned with. Thus, a case example of how the good and right always triumphs in the end.