From September 1-4, St. Paul, Minnesota was home to the Republican National Convention – and four days of protests and police repression.

Though the Republican Party has controlled the presidency for the past eight years and pursued a ferocious pro-corporate agenda, they attempted to use St. Paul as a staging ground to remake themselves as a party of change. At the convention, the Republicans sought to distance themselves from Bush, whose approval rating is the lowest of any president in U.S. history and who did not even attend the convention.

John McCain, the party’s nominee told the convention, “Let me just offer an advance warning to the old, big-spending, do-nothing, me-first-country-second crowd: Change is coming!” The party also rolled out its vice-presidential nominee, 42-year old Alaska governor Sarah Palin, who is being cast as a Washington outsider and anti-establishment figure. She is, in reality, a right-wing social and religious conservative who defends corporate interests in Alaska by supporting expansion of oil drilling there, as well as a global warming denier who has attempted attempting to keep polar bears off the endangered species list.

Tens of thousands saw through the GOP’s charade and took to the streets of St. Paul during these four days to protest the Republican agenda of ongoing war, tax cuts for the wealthy, corporate globalization, and the expansion of corporate power at the expense of the environment and workers’ rights.

Socialist Alternative played an active role in mobilizing for the protests against the RNC. In particular we worked with Youth Against War and Racism for a student walkout on September 4 mainly aimed at high school youth (see our report, “Defying Police Threats, Students Walk Out Against the RNC,” at http://socialistalternative.org/news/article13.php?id=921).

Four days of protest
Despite massive police intimidation (including lengthy battles to secure permits to march), on Monday around 10,000 demonstrators marched to the Xcel Energy Center, the site of the RNC, to demand an immediate end to the war in Iraq. Socialist Alternative members helped lead the spirited Youth Against War and Racism contingent, energetically chanting non-stop throughout the entire march such chants as: “Hell no, we won’t go! We won’t fight for Texaco!”, “It’s bullshit! Get off it! This war is for profit!” and “Ya! You betcha! Warmakers we’re gonna getcha!” When we arrived in the so-called “Free Speech Zone” – in reality a giant jail-like cage in front of the convention site – we chanted “Where’s your anger? Where’s your rage? Bush belongs in this cage!”

Unfortunately, as usual, the U.S. corporate media focused almost entirely on a tiny minority of demonstrators who smashed the windows of a Macy’s and knocked out the windows of a cop car, as well as throwing newspaper stands and concrete bus benches into the streets in an attempt to blockade buses of delegates from getting to the convention. The media ignored the message of the main demonstration and instead focused on this tiny minority who they labeled “hooligans,” who they claimed were set on destroying property or even injuring delegates, thus driving a wedge between the many working people in the U.S. who are fed up with the war, and the anti-war movement.

Protests continued throughout the week. They included the Poor People’s March on Tuesday, which joined with several thousand angry concert-goers who were denied an opportunity to see a free show by Rage Against the Machine, as well as the student walkout on Thursday and an effort to protest during McCain’s acceptance speech on Thursday night.

For this last demonstration, police refused to grant organizers a permit to march after 5pm, effectively turning the streets around the Xcel into a “No protest zone” in the hours before McCain’s speech. The police and city officials, in denying a permit, rendered the First Amendment null and void Thursday night in St. Paul. Of those who turned out to protest, nearly 400 were arrested after cops used snow plows, dumpsters, and more to block them from crossing bridges and getting anywhere near the convention site. The arrests included nearly 20 members of the media, among them 2 Associated Press reporters.

Nader speaks
While St. Paul was being turned into a “No Free Speech” zone, in Minneapolis, left-wing independent presidential candidate Ralph Nader held an “Open the Debates” rally that drew 1500 people.

While Socialist Alternative was active in the demonstrations against the Republican National Convention, we made clear that the Democrats are just as much to blame for the unjust policies of war, attacks on civil liberties, and corporate globalization, having aided and abetted the Bush administration every step of the way. Throughout the week of protests we distributed our newspaper Justice, which urges a break with the two parties of big business and a vote for Nader in November.

In this election, Nader’s campaign is the clearest vehicle to concretely pose the issue of breaking from the two-party corporate dictatorship over the political system, and of building independent, mass movements to confront corporate power. By challenging the two-party system, Nader’s campaign helps lay the political basis for new left and working class parties to develop in the future. Building a mass party of, by, and for ordinary working people will be absolutely crucial to mounting an effective challenge to corporate rule.

The Nader campaign is demanding that he be included in the presidential debates, as nearly half of all Americans polled would like to see. Nader is polling as high as 6% in several major national polls, but the two parties will do everything in their power to exclude him from the debates. Despite the impressive rally Thursday night, and their coverage of numerous smaller events, the corporate media completely blacked out Nader’s presence in Minnesota.

Brutal police repression
The repressive actions by the police on the final day of the convention were typical for the police behavior during the RNC. Over these four days, the Twin Cities almost felt more like a police state. In the run-up to the RNC, the federal government provided $50 million to the St. Paul Police Department (and $50 million to Denver for the DNC). This money was used to install security cameras throughout St. Paul, which will remain in place long after the RNC is gone, as well as provide every St. Paul police officer with a taser.

During the RNC, the streets of St. Paul were covered with 3,700 riot-gear clad police who were armed to the teeth with pepper spray, rubber bullets, tear gas, and concussion grenades which they routinely used. Over 800 arrests were made over the course of the week, mainly of peaceful demonstrators (as well as 30 journalists!). We routinely ran into people who were arrested because they happened to be in wrong place at wrong time – even dozens who were just trying to go to a concert on Monday.

On Wednesday night, after a Rage Against the Machine performance at the Target Center in Minneapolis, riot cops lined the streets to prevent any demonstrations. Before the show, an activist with the Nader for President campaign was arrested and bloodied by the cops as he tried to hand out leaflets for the Thursday rally. Afterwards, the police arrested over 100 people, including several Iraq veterans, who were engaged in a peaceful march in the streets following the show. James Gilligan, a member of Iraq Veterans Against the War, told the Pioneer Press, “The level of intensity I’ve seen from police officers, it’s not even on this planet… These guys are treating civilians like you would Iraqis.”

The cops also showed no respect for journalists covering the demonstrations. On September 1st, Amy Goodman, the host of the popular independent, left-wing program “Democracy Now,” was arrested along with two of her producers, who were ridiculously charged with “suspicion of felony riot.” Producer Sharif Abdel Kouddous described his arrest to the media, “…Two or three police officers tackled me. They threw me violently against a wall. Then they threw me to the ground. I was kicked in the chest several times. A police officer ground his knee into my back…I was also, the entire time, telling them, ‘I’m media. I’m press….,’ but…that didn’t seem to matter at all.”

Tom Morello testifies
On Tuesday evening, the cops prevented Rage Against the Machine from playing a free show in front of thousands at the State Capitol that had been announced on radio stations across the Twin Cities just hours before.

However, taking a bullhorn, guitarist Tom Morello told the crowd, “Now I suspect that some of the police might even be fans of Rage Against the Machine. I suspect that some of the police come from working class and middle class backgrounds like we do and like you do. I suspect that the cops here today have much more in common with this band, with you people, than the people at the RNC. So, before this week is over, they may turn their batons and their tear gas and their rubber bullets against us, but it’s my hope that they realize that we all have something in common, and one day very soon they turn those batons and tear gas and rubber bullets against those jackasses over at the RNC.”

The cops claimed that Rage Against the Machine couldn’t play because they weren’t on the original permit (they were making a surprise appearance). It’s clear that their real reason was their fear that the band’s radical political message would fire up demonstrators against the Republicans, as happened during the DNC in Denver the previous week when members of Rage and Iraq Veterans Against the War led a march of 7,000+ to the Pepsi Center to demand an immediate withdrawal from Iraq. As lead singer Zach de la Rocha told the crowd, “Are they afraid of us? No – they’re not afraid of four musicians. They’re afraid of you!”

When they were denied the right to play plugged in, Rage instead led an a capella sing-along of “Bulls on Parade” (see footage at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CYwzW2QFnwo). Rage then helped lead a march of several thousand, mainly youth, that joined up with the Poor People’s March for Economic and Human Rights and went to the Xcel Center. After the march, those who hung around downtown St. Paul were dispersed by flash grenades and tear gas from riot police who gave little warning before unloading on demonstrators.

Activists charged as “terrorists”
The police repression began even before the demonstrations did, as police and FBI agents raided several homes in the Twin Cities, including using a battering ram to enter an activist convergence space where people were quietly watching a movie and eating dinner. The FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force had sought in the year before the RNC to recruit informants to infiltrate various protest groups.

Police repression was particularly focused against the anarchist-led RNC Welcoming Committee, which was seen as the hub of the tactic of blockades attempting to shut down the convention. Perhaps most disturbingly, the police are now charging eight leaders of the Welcoming Committee, arrested in the pre-convention raids, with “Conspiracy to Riot in Furtherance of Terrorism.” These trumped-up charges are based on testimony from paid FBI and police informants who infiltrated various protest groups, a notoriously unreliable source of information.

The “RNC 8” are the first people to be charged under the Minnesota version of the Patriot Act, passed in 2002, showing how the so-called anti-terror laws passed with the support of both the Democrats and Republicans will be used to target activists. As Bruce Nestor, president of the Minnesota National Lawyers Guild, writes, “These charges wrongly turn stated public plans to blockade traffic and disrupt the RNC into acts of terrorism. The charges represent an abuse of the criminal justice system and seek to intimidate any person organizing large-scale public demonstrations potentially involving civil disobedience. It is likely that the expressed ‘anarchist’ political views of the defendants will be a major issue in any future legal proceedings. The last time such charges were brought in Minnesota was in 1918, against labor union organizers charged with “criminal syndicalism.”

This massive display of police force revealed the true nature of the state under capitalism. The primary function of the police (and National Guard, who were also deployed against demonstrators) was revealed. Rather than protecting ordinary people, their primary role is to serve as “special armed bodies of men” to defend the power and privilege of a tiny, super-rich corporate and political elite. In this case, their role was to protect a party whose leading representatives have headed one of the most criminal administrations in U.S. history.

While much of this expansion of police and state power has occurred since 9/11, under the guise of the “war on terrorism,” it in fact has more to do with suppressing any left-wing challenge to the political establishment. In particular, the U.S. government wants to avoid a repeat of its humiliation during the World Trade Organization protests in Seattle in 1999, when tens of thousands of demonstrators prevented this undemocratic corporate cabal from meeting for a day, helping to spark an international movement against corporate globalization.

It is clear that the U.S. government uses these big political conventions as a means to beef up the armed forces of the state to protect corporate rule in this country. This is in anticipation of any social movements that may be on the horizon, given the mass anger that is building up in U.S. society at the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the growing polarization of wealth between the super-rich and the working class majority, etc.

The massive police presence on the streets of St. Paul was meant to cow us into fear, telling us that it’s not possible to resist the police or attempt to change society, because these are the odds we’re up against – thousands of riot cops armed to the teeth with rubber bullets, tear gas, flash grenades, pepper spray, mace, tasers, batons, firehoses, guns, etc. This is also the lesson the cops seek to impart into African-American and Latino communities on a daily basis via their occupations of the inner cities and terrorization of these communities.

Lessons on tactics
While Socialist Alternative completely opposes the police repression against them, we do not agree with the politics and methods used by the Welcoming Committee. Rather than focusing on bringing fresh layers of workers and youth into political action, virtually all the mobilizing material produced by the Welcoming Committee was aimed at a very narrow layer of already convinced anarchists and anti-capitalists. They put forward the perspective that this narrow activist layer was a sufficient social base to organize mass blockades to shut down the RNC. However, the blockades tactic appears to have attracted relatively small numbers and caused only minor disruptions for RNC delegates.

The Welcoming Committee’s approach is in contrast to the broad coalition that came together to shut down the World Trade Organization in Seattle in 1999, a protest many anarchists nonetheless see as a successful model. One crucial element to the success of the Seattle protests was the successful mass education campaign that was waged in the city and nationally in the run-up to the protests, which resulted in large parts of the city’s working class population sympathizing with the demand to shut the WTO down. In this context, the fierce police repression against the human blockades of the WTO met with public outrage. Unfortunately, the public material and outreach efforts of the Welcoming Committee was not at all geared toward trying to educated wider, fresh sections of workers and youth.

For socialists, tactics like human blockades can be useful and necessary at times, especially when the targeted gathering is widely seen as illegitimate and without the right to proceed. Socialists support tactics that raise the self-confidence of working people in their collective ability to change society. This means using tactics that can inspire wider numbers into collective action, rather than tactics which rely on small groups of pre-existing activists, or that relegate less active layers of workers and youth into the role of spectators to their own struggle.

While the Republicans are immensely unpopular, at this stage only a tiny minority of working people would be prepared to support a call to shut their convention down, unless such a call came from a broad national coalition of social movement organizations. In this context, the Welcoming Committee made a mistake in trying to physically stop the convention from proceeding. This tactic allowed the corporate media and police to drive a deeper wedge of separation and suspicion between activists and the wider working class and youth, which will be an obstacle to future community organizing.

While there are thousands of activists, particularly among the youth, who understand the illegitimacy of the RNC – and of the entire capitalist system for that matter – socialists must argue against moods of impatience. We will not be able to successfully take on and defeat the capitalist system and its state forces until the majority of the working class supports this effort, and is organized to carry it forward. For anti-capitalist activists today, our main task is not to substitute ourselves for the lack of sufficient forces, nor is it to try and artificially “spark” wider layers into action.

Our main task is to energetically build up our organizations, and the wider social movements, and within these movements to systematically educate those we can reach about the need for a socialist transformation of society. Big events like the growing economic crisis, alongside the continuing occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, will themselves play a huge role in radicalizing millions of working people, pushing them to question capitalism. For Socialist Alternative, these are the strategic calculations that guided our efforts in the run-up to and during the RNC.

The RNC protests were an important demonstration against the outgoing Bush administration and the continuing policies of war and corporate domination. Thousands in the Twin Cities have learned the real role of the media and police under capitalism and seen firsthand the expansion of police power that has occurred over the past decade. This is also a reflection of the growing fear in the U.S. ruling class that the anger building up beneath the surface at unjust wars, economic crisis, racism, and other issues will detonate explosive movements in the near future.