Call for May Day Offensive Reveals Communist Direction of Occupy Wall Street Movement

William F. Jasper | Apr 4th 2012 | Occupy Everywhere

The New American

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.”... Finish reading @Source