Forum Post: WSWS: OWS March to Washington: Will it expose the two-party system?

World Socialist Web Site: Occupy New York contingent sets off on march to Washington

A group of protesters from Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan have begun a two-week march to Washington. They hope to cover the 230 miles at a rate about 20 miles a day, picking up supporters in cities and towns along the way.

“We wanted to connect the occupations,” an organizer of the march, Michael Glazer, a young unemployed actor from Chicago, told the Daily News. “We are going to let the politicians know we are watching them. This isn’t business as usual any more.”

The march will go through Trenton, Philadelphia, Wilmington and Baltimore, as well as smaller cities.

Glazer has been part of the Occupy Wall Street encampment in New York for the past month. His comments are consistent with the militancy and determination that is characteristic of many of the young and unemployed protesters who have camped out in Manhattan and dozens of cities across the US as well as Canada, but they also highlight the growing need for a programmatic alternative to capitalist “business as usual.” Lobbying the big business politicians in Washington, if that is what is envisioned, will be worse than useless, sowing illusions in the two-party system instead of exposing it.

At the Zuccotti Park encampment, where the anti-Wall Street protests began almost two months ago, there are definite signs of growing pressures being brought to bear against the protesters by the media and capitalist politicians. New York Mayor Bloomberg has kept up a steady drumbeat of attacks, this week claiming that the protest is making life miserable for the residents of the surrounding area, and arguing that economic and social problems are not the responsibility of the bankers.

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2011/nov2011/nycp-n10.shtml