View images tagged “Missing the Point” … 7:38 am / 27 October 2012 by Rad Geek, at Rad Geek People's Daily
(Via @notjessewalker, who actually is Jesse Walker.)
Also.
Categories: Politics, Smash the State
Posts tagged occupy
Does the European Union Deserve the Nobel Peace Prize??! A Discussion with Jan Oberg — 15 October 2012 Mindenki Joga 98FM 11:59 pm / 14 October 2012 by redjade, at redjade blogja
Topics for 15 October 2012
Episode 79:
• Small Court Victory for Hungarians Occupying Library, involved in Occupy London
• #globalNOISE Budapest / Zajong a világ! — Interviews from the Budapest Bank Centre
• EU Receives the Nobel Peace Prize??!! Discussion with Jan Oberg, Transnational Foundation for Peace and Future Research
• Uranium Mining on Navajo Nation American Indian Land, and more
‘Real Democracy’ a report from Spain — 08 October 2012 Mindenki Joga 98FM 1:31 am / 08 October 2012 by redjade, at redjade blogja
Topics for 08 October 2012
Episode 78:
• Duncan reports from Barcelona about the recent protests and police violence in Spain and historical meanings of the demands for 'Real Democracy'
• Freedom from Guantánamo, Extradition to the US for Julian Assange? and Italian convictions against CIA agents involved in Rendition flights within the EU.
• The 2,000th US soldier killed in Afghanistan, and other news
THE DYING ILLUSION OF DEMOCRACY. 1:38 am / 07 October 2012 by ann arky, at annarky's blog.
Next month sees the culmination of the carnival of rich liars, otherwise known as the American Presidential elections. Millions will turn up and make their mark in favour of tweedle-dee or teedle-dum and things will roll on as usual. The rich will bask in the sun, in a lush cherry orchard surrounded by a fine wine lake, while the rest of the public will grind out a living as best they can as the pampered parsites continue to plunder the public purse. It is a process that has gone on for hundreds of years and rich get richer and the poor get poorer, but still the system is accepted by those same poor. Though I do believe that this latest world wide savage attack on the living standards of the ordinary people, is causing more and more to wake up to the fact that they are being conned. More and more people are looking for an alternative way of structuring our society, away from the parasite millionaire elitism that dominates and bleeds us dry.
THERE WILL COME A TIME.
There will come a time when the hordes remember,
who bound our grand-parents to the yoke of oppression,
who sentenced our parents to deprivation,
who bid poverty sink its teeth into our heart,
who teach our children, greed is a noble art.
Who sent our sons through the gates of hell
to a litany of cambist brawls,
crammed coffers with blood-stained gold
while laughing in Ares' halls.
"Who does these terrible things to us?" they will ask,
and when they remember,
they'll bring an energy that is endless
to drive a fist that is fearless.
Then this merciless market-driven world will crumble
under an insurrection of integrity,
the poor will emerge from the dark husk of capitalism
to live in the light of social justice.
There will come a time when the hordes remember.
The following is from America but equally applies to any country, as the stench of putrid capitalism chokes the lungs of freedom across the planet. Let's hope that this time they take their occupation to the next step and occupy everything and taking control of their communities and their lives.
WHY:
WHEN: Starts at 5 PM Saturday, October 13th (the first anniversary of Occupy Chapel Hill) WHERE: Peace and Justice Plaza, Chapel Hill, NC
WHO:
Anyone who wants to change their world directly, instead of through the narrow choices and occasional elections of democracy
Anyone who doesn't trust another batch of politicians to fix the mess that the last batch of politicians started
Anyone let down by Obama's false hope
Anyone sick of choosing a "lesser" evil
Anyone who knows politicians just serve the rich
The November election is coming. It doesn't matter. The amount of issues Obama and Romney differ on is nothing compared to what they agree on: unparalleled military domination; a growing prison system, the largest in the world, whose racist policies maintain the white supremacy this country was founded on; earth destroying resource extraction; a capitalist economy that rewards ruthless competition without concern for human cost. Under Bush, the nascent Obama generation could imagine that a new personality in the White House could change the problems the last politician piloted us into. And a new politician realized the shifting calculus, promising us false hope and false change. But after the failure of that experiment, we can be sure that the problem isn't personal, it is systemic. No matter who comes along, voting will never get us out from under our rulers.
This country is obsessed with voting to an unhealthy degree. Most people don't even vote, but it seems to be the only way anyone can think of changing their world. But voting is not an expression of our power; it only demonstrates our powerlessness: it is an admission that we can only approach the resources and capabilities of our own society through the mediation of an elite, ruling class. When we let candidates prefabricate options for us, we relinquish control of our world and abdicate our agency in shaping it. Real power can never be delegated, nor lived through anyone else. Real power means individual and collective self-determination--our ability to decide for ourselves how we're going to live every day of our lives--not settling between two unsatisfying and irrelevant choices every four years.
On the one year anniversary of Occupy Chapel Hill, come demonstrate that people power will always be in conflict with with the interests of the ruling class, be they elected or not.
Categories: Anarchism
Occupy Theory releases “Tidal” #3: Occupy Year Two. 12:08 am / 31 August 2012 by robertaugman, at Occupy the Crisis
Tidal 3: Occupy Theory, Occupy Strategy: Year II.
Table of Contents:
Communiqué #3
What is to be Done? GAYATRI CHAKRAVORTY SPIVAK
The Revolution Will Not Have a Bottom Line. SUZAHN EBRAHIMIAN
“Strike Debt!” FOLKS FROM STRIKE DEBT
Stop and Frisk and Other Racist Capitalist Bullshit. JOSÉ MARTÍN
The Power of the Powerless. JEREMY BRECHER
S17: Occupy Wall Street Anniversary
Notes
The War on Dissent, the War on Communities. JEN WALLER AND TOM HINTZE
On Political Repression, Jail Support, and Radical Care. MUTANT LEGAL WORKING GROUP
On the Transformative Potential of Race and Difference in Post-Left Movements. PAMELA BRIDGEWATER
On Transparency, Leadership, and Participation
Where Are We? Who Are We? Occupy, Space, and Community. NINA NEHTA
Letter to the Well-Meaning 1%. THE 99%
Mutual Aid in the Face of the Storm. CHRISTOPHER KEY
Beyond Climate, Beyond Capitalism. VANYA S, TALIB AGAPE FUEGOVERDE, V. C. VITALE
After the Jubilee. DAVID GRAEBER
On Debt and Privilege. WINTER
On Living. NAZIM HIKMET
First Communiqué: Invisible Army
Jodi Dean on OWS, Debt, and Collective Responses to the Crisis 2:08 am / 16 August 2012 by robertaugman, at Occupy the Crisis
As debt emerges as the central issue for Occupy in the coming year, Jodi Dean argues that the issue locks the movement into an individualist framework, beneficial to the pro-austerity Right, rather than positing a social orientation geared towards the commons. See: Is debt the connective thread for OWS?
TO ALL OUR NEEDS. 1:07 pm / 27 July 2012 by ann arky, at annarky's blog.
Protests, occupations, assemblies, then what? Negotiations with our exploiters, our over lords, our masters? Is that worth all the effort? Are we to fight for a little bit more cake but leave the banquet to the masters? Or, is the needs of all the only objective?
One fire dies out because it extinguishes its own fuel source. The other because it can find no fuel, no oxygen. In both cases, what is missing is a concrete movement toward the satisfaction of needs outside of wage and market, money and compulsion. The assembly becomes real, loses its merely theatrical character, once its discourse turns to the satisfaction of needs, once it moves to taking over homes and buildings, expropriating goods and equipment. In the same way, the riot finds that truly destroying the commodity and the state means creating a ground entirely inhospitable to such things, entirely inhospitable to work and domination. We do this by facilitating a situation in which there is, quite simply, enough of what we need, in which there is no call for “rationing” or “measure,” no requirement to commensurate what one person takes and what another contributes. This is the only way that an insurrection can survive, and ward off the reimposition of market, capital and state (or some other economic mode based upon class society and domination). The moment we prove ourselves incapable of meeting the needs of everyone – the young and the old, the healthy and infirm, the committed and the uncommitted– we create a situation where it is only a matter of time before people will accept the return of the old dominations. The task is quite simple, and it is monstrously difficult: in a moment of crisis and breakdown, we must institute ways of meeting our needs and desires that depend neither on wages nor money, neither compulsory labor nor administrative decision, and we must do this while defending ourselves against all who stand in our way.
Categories: Anarchism
ASTURIAS MINERS STRIKE. 3:29 am / 23 June 2012 by ann arky, at annarky's blog.
This week, over 1,000 trade unionists representing 50 million workers in manufacturing and mining founded a new global union federation: IndustriALL.
IndustriALL's first online campaign -- hosted by LabourStart -- aims to pressure the Spanish government to negotiate with coal miners who have been on strike, and occupying their mines, for several weeks now.
IndustriALL's first online campaign -- hosted by LabourStart -- aims to pressure the Spanish government to negotiate with coal miners who have been on strike, and occupying their mines, for several weeks now.
Please take a moment to learn more and show your support for the miners:
http://www.labourstartcampaigns.net/show_campaign.cgi?c=1441
Thanks very much!
Eric Lee
Categories: Anarchism
Occupy’s relationship to capitalism 6:04 am / 21 June 2012 by robertaugman, at Occupy the Crisis
In a recent interview in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Mark Greif, participant in the New York City Occupy movement, editor of the magazine n+1, and literatur professor at The New School, commented about the movement’s view of capitalism:
The central figures of the movement want a radical transformation [of society]. For them, capitalism is the enemy. They want, like the sociologist [sic] David Graeber who established the “99 percent” statement, a non-violent anarchism. There is also the group of part-time protesters, for whom they, like myself, come on particular days, after work for example. They have a completely different attitude. I saw a woman speaking to the business people in front of the stock exchange: “I am not against capitalism,” she said. “I believe in the idea of hard work, but I have so much healthcare debt, that it doesn’t matter how much I work, I will never be able to pay it back.” For her, capitalism is not the problem. On the contrary — she wants to be part of the system. The problem is a kind of capitalism that makes it impossible for those people who play by its rules to lead an orderly middle-class existence.”
While Greif is right to identify this distinction within Occupy, the movement’s initial success rested on its capacity to turn this question around. Instead of answering on ideological grounds about its desired social, political or economic alternative to capitalism, it challenged U.S. capitalism to face its own failures.
Slavoj Zizek demonstrated this from atop a soap box in Zuccotti Park when he said: “They tell you we are dreamers [ie. that we are ideological or utopian]. The true dreamers are those who think things can go on indefinitely the way they are. We are not dreamers. We are the awakening from a dream that is turning into a nightmare.”
It doesn’t seem to me that the initial success of the Occupy movement rested on its opposition to capitalism on the ideological level. Rather, it challenged neoliberal capitalism to face up to the material reality it had created, hence the thousands of testimonies on the wearethe99percent.tumblr.com blog attesting to the material deprivations caused by three decades of neoliberal restructuring, the current crisis and recession: lack of access to healthcare, homelessness, overwork, unemployment, insurmountable debt, skipped meals, exploitation, and so forth. The apparent political difference between the anarchists (or socialists or communists for that matter) on the one hand, and those who supposedly “just want to be part of the system” on the other hand, is not significant. All are “waking up on the wrong side of capitalism.”
What drives the movement forward is its most simple demand, that the societal configuration ought to respond to the material needs of the population, and not the other way around. (What some refer to as “economic democracy”, in the widest sense of the term). The question the movement implicitly poses through its actions, is whether the current configuration is up to that task or not.
