By David Gespass
A friend I visited in Chicago, whose husband had been served with a subpoena from the grand jury there investigating Palestinian and Colombian solidarity activists greeted me with “Thank god for the National Lawyers Guild.” The next week, after the Occupy Birmingham General Assembly, three people wanted to have their pictures taken with me or, more precisely, with the NLG member who was there. The Occupy Movement has given us a lot more prominence recently, but progressives and revolutionaries around the world have always known. One of my predecessors, Michael Avery, reported that when he attended the World Social Forum in Brazil, someone told him (if memory serves), “You guys are awesome.”
And, while the work we have been doing in defense of Occupy has taken up much of our energy and resources recently – and, not incidentally, built up our membership – it is only a part of what we do. All the other work done by our committees and chapters has continued as well, across the country and internationally. I will not cite individual examples, for fear of slighting all those I do not mention and may not be aware of. But it bears repeating that the range of work we do organizationally is synergistic.
No other legal organization combines the range of work and the political perspective we bring to it and that political perspective is, in turn, informed by the range of work we do. Those who focus only on one thing like AILA and NACDL, great work but cannot fully understand how the abuses they confront relate to all the other evils in our society. Much less can they recognize the fundamental structural and systemic bases of those evils.
The Occupy Movement, on the other hand, has done a pretty good job of drawing such lessons, although it has been criticized for not having an affirmative program. However, the Declaration and Manifesto of Occupy Wall Street focuses on a long train of abuses and usurpations. I do not know of any historian who has criticized Thomas Jefferson and the signers of the Declaration of Independence for not having an affirmative program other than independence from Great Britain. Occupiers want independence from the rule of money, which is not so different.
But I was not really planning to defend the Occupy Movement to our members, who have manifested their support for it as clearly as possible. Rather, I wanted to hearken back to our constitution. The most often quoted part holds that “human rights shall be regarded as more sacred than property interests,” but immediately before that, we pledge that we will act “in the service of the people.” Across the country, we are fulfilling that mandate in cities large and small, and these are times that call on us to concentrate on such service.
Those who work in our field are, by nature and training, contentious and the Guild members have, over the years, spent a lot of time and energy contending with each other. Indeed, if we are to be true to our constitutional call for “basic change in the structure of our political and economic system,” we need to deepen our analysis of both the fundamental flaws in that system and the solutions to them. In particular, part of our service to the people is providing a critical analysis of the legal system. Developing that analysis necessarily involves disagreement and contention and there are certainly times when such contention is necessary.
This is not one of those times. The ferment that has overtaken the country in the last several months demands something else of us. It demands that we put aside our internal struggles in the interest of the people we say we serve. The book of Ecclesiastes said – and Pete Seeger popularized – that to everything there is a season. This is the season to support the growing resistance to the rule of monopoly capital. It is not for us to decide the form that resistance should take, nor to dictate the direction it will go. Our obligation is to give that resistance as much room to breathe, expand and grow as possible. That means putting aside for another day whatever disagreements we may have in favor of united and determined support for the Occupation, wherever it is.
With this exhortation, I would be remiss if I did not mention that we are called upon not just to offer our time and talents in defense of the people, but to build our own organization. Our national office has been understaffed for years for lack of funds. In the last few months, the four people there have, in addition to their regular duties, provided support and assistance, great and small, to members and chapters across the country who have been defending the Occupiers. We owe them a debt, moral and financial. This expression of gratitude for all they due is a down payment on the moral debt. Let us all redouble our efforts to repay the financial one as well.