#occupywallstreet

Posted Oct. 25, 2011, 2:39 p.m. EST by OccupyWallSt

To all those in the United States currently occupying parks, squares and other spaces, your comrades in Cairo are watching you in solidarity. Having received so much advice from you about transitioning to democracy, we thought it’s our turn to pass on some advice.

Indeed, we are now in many ways involved in the same struggle. What most pundits call “The Arab Spring” has its roots in the demonstrations, riots, strikes and occupations taking place all around the world, its foundations lie in years-long struggles by people and popular movements. The moment that we find ourselves in is nothing new, as we in Egypt and others have been fighting against systems of repression, disenfranchisement and the unchecked ravages of global capitalism (yes, we said it, capitalism): a System that has made a world that is dangerous and cruel to its inhabitants. As the interests of government increasingly cater to the interests and comforts of private, transnational capital, our cities and homes have become progressively more abstract and violent places, subject to the casual ravages of the next economic development or urban renewal scheme.

An entire generation across the globe has grown up realizing, rationally and emotionally, that we have no future in the current order of things. Living under structural adjustment policies and the supposed expertise of international organizations like the World Bank and IMF, we watched as our resources, industries and public services were sold off and dismantled as the “free market” pushed an addiction to foreign goods, to foreign food even. The profits and benefits of those freed markets went elsewhere, while Egypt and other countries in the South found their immiseration reinforced by a massive increase in police repression and torture.

The current crisis in America and Western Europe has begun to bring this reality home to you as well: that as things stand we will all work ourselves raw, our backs broken by personal debt and public austerity. Not content with carving out the remnants of the public sphere and the welfare state, capitalism and the austerity-state now even attack the private realm and people’s right to decent dwelling as thousands of foreclosed-upon homeowners find themselves both homeless and indebted to the banks who have forced them on to the streets.

So we stand with you not just in your attempts to bring down the old but to experiment with the new. We are not protesting. Who is there to protest to? What could we ask them for that they could grant? We are occupying. We are reclaiming those same spaces of public practice that have been commodified, privatized and locked into the hands of faceless bureaucracy , real estate portfolios, and police ‘protection’. Hold on to these spaces, nurture them, and let the boundaries of your occupations grow. After all, who built these parks, these plazas, these buildings? Whose labor made them real and livable? Why should it seem so natural that they should be withheld from us, policed and disciplined? Reclaiming these spaces and managing them justly and collectively is proof enough of our legitimacy.

In our own occupations of Tahrir, we encountered people entering the Square every day in tears because it was the first time they had walked through those streets and spaces without being harassed by police; it is not just the ideas that are important, these spaces are fundamental to the possibility of a new world. These are public spaces. Spaces forgathering, leisure, meeting, and interacting – these spaces should be the reason we live in cities. Where the state and the interests of owners have made them inaccessible, exclusive or dangerous, it is up to us to make sure that they are safe, inclusive and just. We have and must continue to open them to anyone that wants to build a better world, particularly for the marginalized, excluded and for those groups who have suffered the worst .

What you do in these spaces is neither as grandiose and abstract nor as quotidian as “real democracy”; the nascent forms of praxis and social engagement being made in the occupations avoid the empty ideals and stale parliamentarianism that the term democracy has come to represent. And so the occupations must continue, because there is no one left to ask for reform. They must continue because we are creating what we can no longer wait for.

But the ideologies of property and propriety will manifest themselves again. Whether through the overt opposition of property owners or municipalities to your encampments or the more subtle attempts to control space through traffic regulations, anti-camping laws or health and safety rules. There is a direct conflict between what we seek to make of our cities and our spaces and what the law and the systems of policing standing behind it would have us do.

We faced such direct and indirect violence , and continue to face it . Those who said that the Egyptian revolution was peaceful did not see the horrors that police visited upon us, nor did they see the resistance and even force that revolutionaries used against the police to defend their tentative occupations and spaces: by the government’s own admission; 99 police stations were put to the torch, thousands of police cars were destroyed, and all of the ruling party’s offices around Egypt were burned down. Barricades were erected, officers were beaten back and pelted with rocks even as they fired tear gas and live ammunition on us. But at the end of the day on the 28 th of January they retreated, and we had won our cities.

It is not our desire to participate in violence, but it is even less our desire to lose. If we do not resist, actively, when they come to take what we have won back, then we will surely lose. Do not confuse the tactics that we used when we shouted “peaceful” with fetishizing nonviolence; if the state had given up immediately we would have been overjoyed, but as they sought to abuse us, beat us, kill us, we knew that there was no other option than to fight back. Had we laid down and allowed ourselves to be arrested, tortured, and martyred to “make a point”, we would be no less bloodied, beaten and dead. Be prepared to defend these things you have occupied, that you are building, because, after everything else has been taken from us, these reclaimed spaces are so very precious.

By way of concluding then, our only real advice to you is to continue, keep going and do not stop. Occupy more, find each other, build larger and larger networks and keep discovering new ways to experiment with social life, consensus, and democracy. Discover new ways to use these spaces, discover new ways to hold on to them and never givethem up again. Resist fiercely when you are under attack, but otherwise take pleasure in what you are doing, let it be easy, fun even. We are all watching one another now, and from Cairo we want to say that we are in solidarity with you, and we love you all for what you are doing.

Comrades from Cairo.
24th of October, 2011.

theamericanbear:

This article is a bummer. I’ve extracted some of the main sources of agitation:

The SEC announced yesterday that Citigroup agreed to pay $285 million to settle charges that it misled (synonyms for that word include deceived; lied to; tricked and defrauded) investors in a mortgage securities deal, telling them it was a good investment when it knew otherwise and was secretly betting it would fail.

That’s not just slimy. As the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commissionfound in other instances, that kind of behavior is also illegal. […]

[Once] again, bank criminals were allowed to walk without admitting anything! Common sense tells us nobody would agree to pay more than a quarter of a billion dollars unless did they’d done something very, very wrong. Yet once again the SEC has negotiated a settlement in which the perpetrator “neither admitted nor denied wrongdoing.”

“Neither admitted nor denied”? Citigroup has danced this dance before:

When it was forced to buy back $7.3 billion in bonds in 2008 after deceiving investors into thinking these high-risk investments were low-risk, Citigroup “neither admitted nor denied wrongdoing.”

When it was forced to pay $1.66 billion in 2008 over its Enron misdeeds Citigroup “neither admitted nor denied wrongdoing.”

When Citigroup agreed to pay $2.6 billion over its “improper relationship” with the CEO of WorldCom during the scandals there, it “neither admitted nor denied wrongdoing.”

When it was fined $275,000 in 2004 for recommending high-risk securities without fully disclosing that risk, it “neither admitted nor denied wrongdoing.”

That’s nearly $12 billion that Citi’s agreed to fork over without ever admitting wrongdoing! If this bank’s not doing very bad things its executives should be fired, because that means they’re the worst negotiators in human history.

Citi’s not the only one. Take JPMorgan Chase, which just took Citi’s crown as “biggest bank in America”:

When JPMorgan Chase paid $153 million in 2011 for deceiving investors it “neither admitted nor denied wrongdoing.”

When Chase paid $25 million in 2010 over the sale of illegal unregistered securities in Florida, it “neither admitted nor denied wrongdoing.”

When Chase agreed to pay $55 million in 2009 after banks “allegedly” misled investors into pouring money into a venture that had already failed, it “neither admitted nor denied wrongdoing.”

Even when JPMorgan Chase agreed to a settlement worth nearly three quarters of a billion (that’s “billion,” with a “b”) over somegood old-fashioned, down-and-dirty bribery and corruption charges in Alabama it “neither admitted nor denied wrongdoing.

All the big boys have been allowed to walk away without apologizing, confessing, or doing time: Wells Fargo. Morgan Stanley. Credit Suisse. UBS. Goldman Sachs … and many, many more. A rogue’s gallery of bank crooks paid billions in settlements - “without admitting or denying wrongdoing.” [+]

Occupation is the only option at this point. The financial sector is awash in “moral hazard” and neither the president nor the congress nor the regulators in charge of protecting the citizenry from what can only be called “grand theft livelihood” are willing to disobey their corporate masters (or, for that matter, impose meaningful deterrents to ensure that financial crime is actually a disincentive rather than operating procedure).

unitetheleft:

Are you inspired by Occupy Wall Street? Did you join the struggle for Troy Davis? Are you part of protests about the housing crisis in your city? Were you in the streets for SlutWalk to say “Enough is enough”?

Millions of people have come to the understanding that capitalism is no longer working. And millions of people around the world—from Cairo to Athens to New York City—are fighting back.

Marxism provides a revolutionary understanding of society and a strategy for getting rid of exploitation and oppression once and for all. The International Socialist Organization is organizing regional conferences in cities around the country in October and November to discuss what Marxists say about race, class and revolution—and the fight for a better world.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Meetings and courses include:

Why Marx was right

Why the working class can change society
— No power greater: Marxism and the centrality of class
— The 1934 Minneapolis Teamsters strike: A case study in working-class power
— The changing working class and the future of the labor movement

Black liberation
— Where does racism come from?
— The Black freedom struggle: From Martin Luther King to the Black Panthers
— Black liberation and socialism

Marxism and oppression
— The roots of racial oppression
— Theories of women’s oppression
— Can the working class liberate the oppressed?

Marxism, crisis and class struggle
— How capitalism works: What makes capitalism tick?
— How capitalism fails: The Marxist theory of crisis
— Crisis, exploitation and class struggle

Follow the link to find the conference near you!

socialismartnature:

It is really, really problematic that I’ve already come across certain leading male activists in the Occupy movement (including Occupy Boston), who are defending this video against the criticisms of other female activists.

As I wrote elsewhere: “The video takes women who are earnestly participating in an important social and political action, and strips of them all seriousness and respect by turning them into just another set of body parts on display in the catalog of sexism known as American society.”

The inability of certain male activists to understand or even respect the concerns of women in the Occupy movement regarding the sexism behind this video just goes to show that the movement would stand to gain tremendously from an influx of anti-sexist politics, not to mention anti-racist, anti-xenophobic, etc.

As a side note, I’ll just include the following link for those who are ‘undecided’ on this question, which shows that the asshole behind this video is really quite misogynistic at core, even going so far as to make jokes about rape (http://www.womenactionmedia.org/2011/10/21/steven-greenstreet-isn%E2%80%99t-sexist-he-just-loves-hot-chicks/).

===

Steven Greenstreet was almost certainly out for publicity with his video “Hot Chicks of OWS.” After the controversy around the film was mentioned on CNBC, Greenstreet’s response was a tweet to reporter John Carney: “Thanks for the mention on CNBC for “Hot Chicks”! But maybe correct the spelling of my last name?” Female critics, on the other hand, he’s asked out for coffee.

The video is certainly an attention-getter. To the strains of “Fast, Cheap and Out of Control,” Greenstreet interviews women at Occupy Wall Street about the issues and their activism. The women are uniformly articulate and bright — but the camera loves to linger on their hair, on their lips, on tattoos peeking through bare skin. Greenstreet, on his blog, calls it “the sexy side of protesting corruption.” To others,  it reduces women activists to sex objects.

A group claiming to be affiliated with the General Assembly of Liberty Square and #ows has been speaking to the media on behalf of our movement.

This group is not empowered by the NYC General Assembly.

This group is not open-source and does not act by consensus.

This group only represents themselves.

While we encourage the participation of autonomous working groups, no single person or group has the authority to make demands on behalf of general assemblies around the world.

We are our demands. This #ows movement is about empowering communities to form their own general assemblies, to fight back against the tyranny of the 1%. Our collective struggles cannot be co-opted.

A Moral Focus for Occupy Wall Street

I think it is a good thing that the occupation movement is not making specific policy demands. If it did, the movement would become about those demands. If the demands were not met, the movement would be seen as having failed. […]

Publicize the Public

Tell the truth about The Public, that nobody makes it purely on their own without The Public, that is, without public infrastructure, the justice system, health, education, scientific research, protections of all sorts, public lands, transportation, resources, art and culture, trade policies, safety nets, That is a truth to be told day after day. It is an idea that must take hold in public discourse. It must go beyond what I and others have written about it and beyond what Elizabeth Warren has said in her famous video. The Public is not opposed to The Private. The Public is what makes The Private possible. And it is what makes freedom possible. Wall Street exists only through public support. It has a moral obligation to direct itself to public needs.

All OWS approaches to policy follow from such a moral focus. Here are a handful examples. […]

A Warning

This movement could be destroyed by negativity, by calls for revenge, by chaos, or by having nothing positive to say. Be positive about all things and state the moral basis of all suggestions. Positive and moral in calling for debt relief. Positive and moral in upholding laws, as they apply to finances. Positive and moral in calling for fairness in acquiring needed revenue. Positive and moral in calling for clean elections. To be effective, your movement must be seen by all of the 99% as positive and moral. To get positive press, you must stress the positive and the moral.

Remember: The Tea Party sees itself as stressing only individual responsibility. The Occupation Movement is stressing both individual and social responsibility.

cultureofresistance:

Chris Scully, my DGR MA friend’s brother, said it best:

Dear Democrats in Congress,

You wish this was about left vs. right. You wish you could point across the aisle and say “See, the people are with us, not you!” But before you point and lie, please kindly turn that finger on yourselves, and then stick it up your asses. You are half of a bought congress. You are the other side of a counterfeit coin. You are half of the problem. You have pretended to speak for the voices of people who have a shred of goodwill for the world for too long. You have lost your privilege to be that voice. You are completely incapable of bringing about the drastic and profound changes we need in this country. You have failed. And don’t you dare try to associate your actions and trajectory with the intentions of a revolutionary society that is rejecting you. Your endorsement of a movement trying to oust you is pathetic at best. Please resign and play sudoku and solitaire on your own time. In short - fuck off.

The memory of struggles from before the global economic crash has allowed people to move beyond a simple kneejerk response to the present crisis and instead formulate a deeper critique of the system responsible for their woes. In practice, this has meant a popular shift from complaints about specific laws or specific features of the banking system that might serve as scapegoats for the crisis, to a radical critique of government and capitalism. While the movement is heterogeneous and by no means consistent, on multiple occasions it has popularly defined itself as anticapitalist, thus drawing on a strong tradition of struggle that goes back more than a century throughout Europe.

The United States is also a country with inspiring histories of popular struggle. But it is a country with a case of social amnesia like no other. It seems that to a certain extent, the Occupy Wall Street actions exist more as a trend than anything else. The slight extent to which they draw on, or even make reference to, earlier struggles, even struggles from the past twenty years, is worrying.  The fact that a present awareness of US history would shatter certain cornerstones of the new movement’s identity, for example this idea of the 99% that includes everyone but the bankers in one big, happy family, is not a sufficient excuse to avoid this task. The historical amnesia of American society must be overcome for a struggle to gain the perspective it needs.