The following is a press release from the West Coast Port Shut Down committee of Occupy Oakland

On Monday December 12, the Oakland Occupy movement effectively shut down the Port of Oakland for 24 hours as part of a coordinated West Coast Port Shutdown. The action was a resounding success, demonstrating the power of the occupy movement and the widespread support it has, not only on the US coast but inland—and even as far as Canada–where allied occupy movement took direct action.

Beginning at 5am at the Oakland Port this morning, a crowd of well over 1,000 picketed  two main terminals where ships were scheduled to unload, as well another terminal where yard work was occurring. Police were summoned but retreated without incident. There were few  attempts to cross the lines. By 11 am, the arbitrator ruled that there was a Health and safety issue, and cancelled the shift.

Later, a lively crowd of many thousands gathered at Oscar Grant Plaza at 4pm and marched to the port for the evening shift. The march was led  by Scott Olsen and a contingent of Iraq Veterans Against the War and  members of the Teamsters union, followed by the “feminist block”.

Another contingent  marched from West Oakland Bart station to join the crowd gathered at the Hanjin terminal. The total number was somewhere between 5 and 10,000.  At that point there was an announcement that the evening shift at the port had been cancelled, and that other Occupies had been attacked by police (such as Seattle where protesters were tear gassed).  Following through on the agreement within the occupation movement to continue the blockade in the event of police repression in any of the port shutdown protests, a crowd of several hundred stayed on and picketed five gates–two at APL and three at the Matson Terminal–to prevent the 3 am shift from taking place. Picket lines remained solid  until it was clear that the shift had been cancelled.

Taking on the empire

Monday’s shut down of the Port was yet another confirmation that Occupy Oakland isn’t going anywhere.

The first march from West Oakland BART station at 5:30am was larger than expected, with around 500-1000 people. This action, which at various times we debated whether it was even worth doing, turned out to be wildly successful. After a couple of hours at the Port, it was announced that the ILWU workers had been sent home and the Occupiers left.

This happened despite the fact that Jean Quan had sent out a letter to city agencies stating that, “The Oakland Police Department has a strategy in place to prevent the interruption of Port operations. Traffic in downtown and West Oakland may be intermittently displaced as the marches and rallies are facilitated; however, OPD’s goal is to prevent the interruption of Port operations.”

But once again, the plan in place seemed to involve the police showing up for a while, looking around and letting Occupy Oakland do basically whatever it wanted. There were a few near scuffles when we initially reached berths 55 & 56 shortly after 6am, with about a dozen riot cops marching through our picket line to block us from entering the gate. Once we realized what they were doing–keeping everybody out–things cooled down as we had no intention of allowing anybody to enter in the first place. Had they communicated with us they might have done better to avoid the near riot that was just barely averted. There were also several dozen riot cops who arrived at the other berths later in the morning, seemingly ready to shut us down before they marched away in futility. At least Oscar Grant Plaza, now referred to as “Quan Memorial Lake,” has been flooded by sprinklers to discourage camping by less violent–and more creative–means than the city’s previous efforts. At the Port, it was hard to tell if they were even trying.

Around noon, Mayor Quan, Police Chief Jordan and others held a press conference where they refused to use the term “shut down” and instead opted for “disruptions” and “impacts,” insisting that the  Port was operating at all gates. The media repeated this claim uncritically, mostly due to misunderstanding the fact that our goal was never to halt traffic but to create an atmosphere that would cause an independent arbitrator to declare it a health and safety risk and force the Port to send the ILWU workers home due to a clause in the union contract. Having accomplished that, Occupiers left and allowed the trucks to drive freely through the gates where nobody was there to load them. Quan later denounced our action as “economic violence,” failing to recognize the irony that it was the city that orchestrated physical violence against Occupy Oakland. In the end, Quan appeared to be an increasingly irrelevant figure who is likely now wishing that we would all just go back to our tents on Oscar Grant Plaza.

This easy, early victory spoke well of our prospects for the next action, a 4pm march to  shut down the 6pm shift at the Port. The resulting action–which began with a speak-out including Scott Olsen–gave lie to the idea that Occupy Oakland is finished. Yes, many people have had their feelings hurt and have disagreed with some of our actions. In fact, most Occupiers would feel that way as well. But the declining attendance of the General Assembly has more to do with the weather and the lack of focus for the discussions in the absence of a camp than some mass turn in sentiment against us. After quickly halting this evening shift, we stuck around until 3am, the third shift in 24 hours. By then, the police were nowhere to be found and the ILWU workers were sent home by their bosses without even waiting for the arbitrator, a resounding victory for both our efforts and our increasingly heavy eyelids.

We would not have been out there so long had it not been for repression at the ports in  Seattle, Houston and elsewhere. From the very beginning, Occupy Oakland insisted that we would extend the blockade in these circumstances, though we nervously realized that we might actually have to do so over the weekend. There was an ill-fated General Assembly on Monday night at berths 55 & 56 to discuss whether we should in fact continue the blockade before it was unceremoniously shut down. Feelings were hurt due to the seemingly undemocratic nature of the GA but the real issue is that we should have never gotten so close to voting on whether to stay in the first place. The earlier GA that unanimously decided to blockade the Port stated that we would extend in case there was repression–had we voted now to change our minds we would have looked like hypocrites. Instead, we stuck around and marched away in triumphant exhaustion at 4am.

* * * * *

Banner seen when exiting the Port Monday night

December 12 seems to have finally made clear a situation which has been developing for months. It was not that long ago that us Oaklanders schlepped ourselves to San Francisco on a regular basis to participate in mass marches several times a year. Taking BART across the Bay to the city that many of us wish we lived in but could not afford, we have grown accustomed over the years to marching down Market Street–or up, depending on which direction we marched previously–in symbolic protests of tens of thousands. Those days are over.

There was nothing wrong with those marches at the time, in spite of some of the naysaying, and there will be no shortage of important “symbolic” protests on Market Street  in the future. But we now know that not only is this not our only option, it is not even necessarily our best option.

There was an abundance of naysaying after the marches against the Iraq War in 2003, when it became a common refrain that “marches don’t accomplish anything.” The dirty little secret about this refrain was that behind it was the idea that what we really need to do is go out and vote for John Kerry, who promised to “hunt down and kill the terrorists.” The problem was, if you were going to support a guy like Kerry, who stood firmly against the anti-war movement on the single issue we were protesting, it was hard to get motivated to do anything, symbolically or otherwise.

It is now clear that any time we can organize a rally of a few thousand people, we can shut down the Port of Oakland and there is nothing that the approximately 700 Oakland police officers can do to stop us. We don’t even need a General Strike to make it happen. This does not mean that we should aim to do this on a weekly or monthly basis. We need to use this power responsibly and effectively and not put the unions at the Port in an unnecessarily precarious position, or force truckers to lose a day’s pay for no good reason. Which, of course, is not to say that this action was some wild act of irresponsibility–in spite of the hype, we actually had a substantial amount of union support on our side.

So, while there is no point in shutting down the Port next week just because we can, the next time an unarmed African-American man like Oscar Grant is murdered by the police we should consider making capital accept the consequences. Footlocker and the Men’s Warehouse on 14th and Broadway will rest easy knowing that we are taking our anger elsewhere.

The era of symbolic protests in San Francisco are over. After shutting down the Port of Oakland for three consecutive shifts over 24 hours, we now know how much power we really have as a movement.

All we need now is to figure out what to do with it.

Business as usual