The Occupy Oakland attempt at a general strike on November 2nd of 2011 had many inspiring moments demonstrating what average working people, the unemployed, homeless people, and students— the 99%— can achieve when we work together. One of the most powerful events of the day was the shutdown of the Port of Oakland. The workers of the ILWU (International Longshore and Warehouse Union) have a history of honoring community pickets and refusing to cross them, resulting in a history of people in Oakland gathering at the port, forming a picket line, and shutting down the port. On November 2nd, Occupy Oakland planned to shutdown the third largest port on the West Coast of the US, which is both a critical entry point for goods and the location where many of the crops grown in California's Central Valley are loaded onto ships and sent around the world. The port is a major bottleneck in the circulation of goods— and thus critical to the 1% who make their living off the hard work of the 99%.
We went to the port in two marches which left at 4 and 5 pm, and totaled tens of thousands of people, not including the people who went directly from the West Oakland BART Station to the Port of Oakland. Reasonable estimates for the total number of people who were at the port aim as high as 50,000.
The author marched at 5 pm to the port as part of the feminist block. The march to the port was the first time we saw the cops, who serve to maintain the power of the 1%, although the largest gathering of police we saw were nine California Highway Patrol officers on motorcycles, not interfering with the thousands of people marching past them. This demonstrates that a large enough group of people can motivate the cops to step back. Outreach and organizing ourselves to show our power together was crucial to this outcome—had a much smaller group marched on the port it's likely the police would have tried to stop us.
While there had been an excited, party-like atmosphere at Oscar Grant Plaza during the day, we arrived at the port to an atmosphere even more festive—with a sea of people that, like every other event that day, was as diverse as Oakland. The Oakland port complex was literally full of people, which, for anyone who knows how big a port Oakland is, is very impressive. The number of people who had been motivated to march on the port in itself was inspiring.
At the port, people ran into friends, coworkers, classmates, and neighbors. It was not the typical activist scene, but rather a massive outpouring
of all different sorts of people. All around the port, people were friendly and eager to talk. Friends and neighbors checked in with each other, and people made new friends, just by talking to the person dancing, walking, or sitting next to them. Some of the borders that politics, professions, neighborhoods, age, race, immigration status, gender, and sexuality put up to try and stopus from working together started to crumble as new friendships were made and people who might have otherwise never met came together and started talking about how we can improve all of our lives. Thus, the shutdown of the port I was not just a major blow against how the
1% would profit off of us that day, it also helped form a solid
foundation for future actions against the 1%.
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