In response to the recent article about Occupy Atlanta co-written by Theo Tegemea and myself, a friend from Oakland, who offers his solidarity, makes a good point regarding transitional demands. There is a need to project both a provisional government of workplace councils and neighborhood assemblies that stands outside electoral politics and the State while at the same time also proposing transitional demands of a quasi-reformist nature. Our friend makes the point that these strategies must necessarily overlap and can be difficult to justify as philosophically consistent. (These comments can be seen at the end of our article from Loren Goldner's Insurgent Notes here)

As we interpret what the authors of the GFDD statement are trying to say, Tegemea and I were also never fond of Barrack Obama. But GFDD’s call to reach out to those who sincerely believed in “change we can believe in,” to work with others to finish the job ourselves, is the type of bridging the gap that a discourse of transitional demands in a mass movement necessitates as people overcome past mistaken impressions and go beyond the obstacles, electoral politics and representative government, they partially placed in their own path.

To be clear, since our Oakland friend asked, we are NOT against transitional demands. But we do believe that such demands – even where we ask the existing order to grant some things – must enhance the struggle for greater autonomy of ordinary people and not be merely illusions.

When people struggle for transitional demands, instead of lobby for them by relying on electoral politics, whether they are granted or not from above; the demands should clarify what social classes leads the mass democratic struggle. Transitional demands must be economic gains but also an expansion of the power to directly govern of the working people, mothers, the wageless and unemployed.

It goes without saying that these categories include disproportionately people of color and immigrants in Atlanta and other post-civil rights cities. It is remarkable how charlatans and fools will speak of condemnation of a people of color led government and hierarchical officials in workplaces and among police as “suspect.” They will talk about disproportionate unemployment and police brutality and incarceration of people of color in Atlanta and then not seek to confront or make demands on the people of color managerial regime that facilitates it.

It is our contention that anti-racism in the post-civil rights era not seek to further diversify the managerial and professional classes (whose salaries and privileges are to be abolished or structurally adjusted). All racist and sexist discrimination should be opposed.

But we don’t rally around the President, Mayor and Police Chief because aspects of the white working class and white politicians are racist. We are for direct action against fascist attacks and overthrow of all states and ruling classes. When Obama and Kasim Reed and their social class are overthrown, we would not support anyone “calling them out of their name.”

Crucially, they do not represent Black identity, culture and community autonomy. When they maintain institutional racism and capitalist inequality, they are not “embarrassing the race” or revealing that people of color cannot govern themselves. People of color, the democratic toiling majority, already run Atlanta in their workplaces and neighborhoods – they merely must break the separation of economic production (wage earning and the division of labor) and politics.

In cities such as Los Angeles, Detroit, Atlanta, New Orleans, Chicago, New York – the multi racial working people must rise at the expense of the multi-racial hierarchy of officials. The personal histories and past service of politicians and bureaucrats who were labor and civil rights leaders decades ago need to be mercilessly pushed to the side.

We believe when transitional reforms are granted, or the welfare state expands, it is because the popular self-organization of ordinary people in their workplaces and neighborhoods pose a greater threat and a break with the old order.
 
Thus the dual power and transitional demands must grow together and the latter must be precise.

In our article, we did not directly quote from the GFDD pamphlet (though it was linked).

In summary, GFDD advocated the following:

“In order to break the direct connection between government and capital in the short term we propose that no state, city, county government leader or administrator (or their spouse) can be associated in any significant way with any for profit enterprise. This means they cannot hold shares or be on the board of any privately held for profit company. They shall not have received two or more salaries, live by the rent of others, ten years before or after taking office. Those who cannot meet this standard must step down immediately.”

“The Banks will be charged with immediately granting erasure of credit card debtors of all residents of the Nation-State-City for $10,000 or less. They will issue amnesty for all foreclosed home mortgages with a remaining $50,000 debt.”

“In workplaces, schools, and neighborhoods all administrative and management positions are to be elected by the rank and file. Those ‘leaders,’ we shall call them facilitators of our will, are to be compensated on an equal basis as the rank and file, subject to instant recall and term limits.”

“As the separation of mental and manual labor, the division of labor, is elitist and the basis of top down regimes. All manual and mental laborers will be compensated the same.”

“All workers in every field who do not already make $50,000 a year will have their salaries raised to that standard. All those that earn more will be reduced to that standard. All will be guaranteed a cost of living raise each year.”

“Wages for housework will be implemented from a slashing of the military budget for all women, and male primary care givers, for all households with children. This will be regardless of whether one or both parents/caregivers work outside the home or not. The new economy will be based on caring not killing.

"Direct payments to women, and a society which counts their caring work, will break the back of patriarchy. It will go further than any other initiative, to insure women’s sexual and relationship autonomy, equal pay for equal work, defend their reproductive freedom, minimize the demeaning of their bodies, and enhance the possibilities of more intimate and respectful human relations, whether heterosexual or same sex relations.

"Sympathy to women’s plight and their demeaned status, while still maintaining fear of fostering a sense of “entitlement,” has come to an end. Popular committees of single mothers and single fathers will convene to determine who are the few deadbeat parents and judge and rehabilitate the few who are ”deadbeats” and abuse our mutual aid. Meanwhile this initiative in women’s autonomy and working class economic empowerment will move forward at the expense of adjusting corporate welfare and their sense of entitlement.”

“Unemployed Workers Councils will inspect the practices of the Banks and Department of Labor, in their practice of home foreclosures and facilitation of relief. They will take over the degrading mandatory re-education classes, which emphasize nonsensical psychology and self-esteem talk in exchange, for our relief. They will join with permanent welfare recipients in juries to decide who is worthy of permanent relief on their own authority without social workers. They will inspect the budgets of corporations and the existing hierarchal government, by demanding they open their accounting books, and will take the lead in finding their own jobs. “

“Every human being, regardless of national origins or how many years they have been present, must be subject to one uniform law code.”

“ICE, all immigration authorities, and all surveillance records are to be abolished. Public discourse in schools and governance should be bilingual and multilingual as official policy.”

“We demand popular committees, on a voluntary and rotational basis, to inspect the prison conditions, officials and corrections officers – the committee must be multi-racial and made up of equally of citizens with clean records and those who previously had been incarcerated for a major felony. Let the ordinary people inspect the claims of the professional prison administrators and see what can be reformed and what cannot.”

So, the GFDD document does appear to suggest laws to be legislated or abolished, and an expansion of the welfare state. It also argues for working people, mothers, the unemployed and convicted felons to take away some of the power to govern from the capitalist politicians, inspecting their claims to be ethical and accountable and remarkably their peers as well. GFDD also seems to imply there will be a moment of crisis where aspects of dual power may either be resisted or permitted. The ruling class may then strive to reconfigure itself to maintain its hold on power. We may disagree with how GFDD crunched the numbers in their document. But it was presented as a discussion document on the first day of the Occupy Atlanta movement. It was open to amendment and editing and reorganization. The authors ought to be commended for preparing to engage the promise of a popular assembly. Their notion of “provisional government” was not vanguardist, as some critics in OA claimed but by its very transitional nature argued they could not embody everyone’s sovereignty – the claims of these councils and assemblies would have to be institutionalized at a later date with a popular mandate. At no time was their a vote taken at the Popular Assembly for Tim Franzen to be OA spokesperson to the media. It appears it is valid, and is instructive, for any faction of OA to have a press conference in the movement's name.

One dilemma in a transitional moment of reforms and dual power, is the fact that when the State is in crisis it WILL begin, in unforeseen ways, to welcome ordinary people's participation in government.

It will even accept that working people can have an official role in inspecting the claims of the capitalist government. Some may believe at that moment such a government is a “socialist” government – since it will appear to govern in the interests of working people.

This is why it is crucial to distinguish between participatory democracy grafted on to a republic (a minority rule regime) and direct democracy where no professional governing classes have claims to legitimacy and are abolished. But their abolition will only be real if ordinary people in their councils and assemblies not merely protest but conduct themselves as if they have perspectives and proposals of their own and are prepared to carry them out (we might call this an enlarged concept of citizenship).

During the Age of the CIO Labor Movement (or the New Deal) (1933-1955) and the Age of Black Liberation (Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon) (1955-1972), the nation-state-local governments reconfigured themselves.

First, during the first phase, the New Deal welfare state was expanded and an increasing national culture of diversity was promoted. American Communists affiliated with Moscow promoted this early multi-culturalism while getting out the vote for the capitalists (FDR). Certain Marxists ideas may be threatening, and this at first may seem counter-intuitive, not because they promise insurrection as McCarthy style red-baiting suggests. Instead, they promise patriotic collaboration with the capitalists and their state – young activists are starting to learn this by their own organizing experiences.

In economic terms a white middle class was created. Largely through trade unions which increased the standard of living of labor in return for suppressing labor’s political autonomy. People of color workers were largely left behind, in an uneven and thin resistance to Jim Crow culture.

Second, during the Black and Third World liberation era, white supremacy and empire took devastating blows. The government responded by recognizing people of color wanted “a piece of the action.” So minority business loans, minority college and dissertation scholarships, affirmative action and quotas in employment and school admissions and multi-cultural education was advanced. 

However, these reforms and reconfigurations should in fact be seen as a counter-revolution which seeks to legitimize oppressive power structures under the pretext that political, social, and economic hierarchy is now an "equal opportunity" enterprise. We have had over forty years of this in Atlanta with multiple people of color mayors and police chiefs (including women of color).

Yet the Quakers/AFSC are fighting “a white power structure” while the Black president’s children attend their schools. The Teamsters are fighting “a white power structure” while they have been the number one financial donor to John Lewis over his congressional career to the tune of over a half million dollars. Real estate developers and corporate healthcare interests are also huge donors to Lewis. Why do these organizations fight to allow the Black Bourgeoisie to be heard in their quest to get Big Business out of politics?

The Teamster/Jobs with Justice folks to their credit do principally protest the labor conditions at Home Depot, Wal-Mart, and Verizon. Yet, Joseph Lowery’s SCLC counts these specific capitalists (and others) as their organization’s corporate sponsors. Notably, Lowery’s SCLC, like Obama and Hillary Clinton in their political campaigns, received money from both Wal-Mart and SEIU (the major leader of Jobs with Justice in most cities).

Lowery and Jesse Jackson have received large sums of money from both Coca Cola and Budweiser/Anhauser-Busch. Franzen publicly consulted with Lowery and Jackson about how Occupy Atlanta should be organized. Did Franzen ask about the Coca Cola and Budweiser bottling plants that fell into the hands of Jackson [, his friends, and family] to quiet protest of workers discrimination there in the 1980s? Did he ask about the conditions of people of color labor under Black corporate leadership? The lack of desire to make transitional demands that highlight these race and class struggles reveal the OA leadership to be a loyal opposition to Big Business and the capitalist state in Atlanta.

As we begin to formulate transitional demands that underscore disproportionate unemployment, police brutality and incarceration of people of color – and make these demands on Mayor Kasim Reed’s government – we should also do something else.

An excellent transitional demand should be to call on the NAACP, SCLC, and Rainbow Push and its leadership to divest from Big Business sponsorship – if we want to get Big Business out of politics, why not prioritize getting Big Business out of freedom movement politics?

The Atlanta African Liberation Support Committee made this same challenge to SCLC’s Ralph Abernathy and Andrew Young who took money from Oil corporations that supported colonialism in Africa in the early 1970s. When is OA going to tap into the true Black radical tradition in Atlanta?

An Occupy Atlanta movement that is not bogged down by white guilt, and the opportunistic Black middle class it serves, will make transitional proposals, that recognized African Americans as having the dominant role from above and below, in Atlanta city politics. A Direct Democratic United Front in Atlanta cannot include both Black capitalists and Black workers (just as it cannot include both the masters and servants of any people).

All this does not make OA presume to speak for “people of color” any more than it presumes to speak for “the workers.” Rather, it would make it clear what OA’s perspective is on the self-emancipation of the entire city which presumes the people can directly speak for themselves and directly govern themselves. Instead the OA “leaders” still stand with their aspiring hierarchical representatives.

A press conference on behalf of OA must humbly clarify its position:

“It seems the Black civil rights establishment collaborates with the Democratic Party led government and Big Business at the expense of the Black workers and unemployed. What should be done about that?”

It would, like no other statement, place the prospect of direct democracy in the workplace and neighborhoods of Atlanta. Transitional demands flowing out of that awareness and dialogue would make Kasim Reed’s government and his friends in the Big Business community go to pieces in the great debate about what is democracy and anti-racism. 

-Theo Tegemea & Z.A. Mrefu