Undercover Oakland Cops Caught on Camera

Anti-Police Demo in Oakland

OAKLAND, California – Several hundred demonstrators began marching through Oakland at around 8:15pm on Saturday, wearing all black to mourn for Oscar Grant and all victims of police brutality. Police wore gas masks, even from the beginning of the march.

UPDATE

8:50pm – Police blocking demonstrators from getting to OPD headquarters.

8:55pm – Around 500-1000 demonstrators amassed in front of a few thin lines of police standing between them and OPD headquarters. The police won’t let them pass Clay st.

9:05pm – They’re on the move again, up 8th, but police are blocking them from getting any close to OPD headquarters, jail, and the county buildings.

9:10pm – Marching (east) up Broadway.

9:26pm – On 17th and Broadway chanting, “New York is Oakland. Oakland is New York. Egypt is Oakland. Oakland is Egypt. Denver is Oakland. Oakland is Denver. Greece is Oakland. Oakland is Greece. Chile is Oakland. Oakland is Chile. Africa is Oakland. Oakland is Africa.”

9:30pm – Chanting, “We’re Scott Olsen.”

9:40pm – Marching down West Grand.

9:50pm – “We are all Oscar Grant.”

(via OaklandNorth)

10:20pm – A brief, but intense confrontation with the police on Brush st. as several squad cars pulled up and a dozen or so riot police forced the crowd away — presumably from the highway. The crowd moved on, back towards downtown.

10:30pm – 14th and Broadway, in front of Oscar Grant Plaza. Moments ago, police recruiting station window smashed.

From Tahrir

(via boingboing)

Why not The Autumn of the Communes?

from PrimaPorta:

This piece responds to a couple Jacobin-related things pretty directly, so let’s put them out there straight away:

First, Malcolm Harris’ observation in “Baby, We’re All Anarchists Now” that “the left has finally broken into the national consciousness by adopting the tactics, strategy, and slogans of a group of left-communist insurrectionaries at the Universities of California.”

Second, the Jacobin-sponsored debate at Bluestockings—which I’ll let readers watch for themselves: http://jacobinmag.com/blog/?p=1937

And then a caveat: I should probably find it shameful to admit that I’m writing this from afar—from France, to be exact, where the wave of global occupations hasn’t yet broken. So granted: these views don’t come from within the Occupy movement, or even from an Occupied city, though I wish they did. But since it’s become so difficult to claim any geographic distance from the occupations, I hope my separateness will be useful somehow. Distance can distort, but it can also clarify.

I first heard the slogan “Occupy Everything” in 2009 during the anti-privatization protests—so yes, to a certain extent the University of California, where I’ve been a grad student since 2007, was instrumental in generating the tactics and rhetoric currently in use at Zuccotti and elsewhere. During the first weeks of that fall semester, that slogan gradually came to mean something specific, something razor-sharp, in a way that, as Harris rightly notes, has been diluted at OWS. Back then, to occupy meant to forcibly lock down buildings with bike locks and barricades without any provision of demands or benchmarks for de-escalation. It was, you can guess, a contentious tactic both inside and outside the organizing coalition, especially since the point wasn’t to force a negotiation with the administration, but only to block business as usual—and also, ideally, to wrench a parcel of space and time free from the capitalist order. This last point proved to be an Achilles heel for the UC occupations, since the occupiers became mired in the structures and temporalities of student protest. What they wanted was a commune—to communize, more specifically—but this proved late in coming.

As I’m sure Harris knows, this “first wave” of occupations didn’t begin at the UC as reported, nor even at the New School, another site of protest marked by takeovers and barricades. As far as I’m aware—please correct me if I’m wrong—the occupations started in France during the 2006 anti-CPE protests, when a contingent of students occupied the Sorbonne without demands in defiance of the university’s orders. (The administration preemptively blocked access to the campus in order to prevent it from being occupied, as it had been in May 1968—a decision that, ironically, prompted the students to occupy). The French roots of the occupation movement go deeper still, and they’re worth dredging up, especially in light of the dispute that emerged at Bluestockings the other night. In fact, there’s about a decade’s worth of para-academic French Marxism woven into the tactics and ideas of the first-wave occupiers—not only the widely-read The Coming Insurrection, but also writings by the less well-known (and equally shadowy) collective, Théorie Communiste, who’ve been arguing against the familiar forms of leftist agitation—trade unionism above all—as possible fixes for the present crisis. One could name other progenitors as well; the list is long and internecine, but I only want to emphasize that the original occupations—certainly those at the UC schools—were undergirded at least in part by a specifically Marxist set of ideas about capitalism and class struggle, and of deeply pessimistic bent (I would hesitate to call it ultra-left or Left Communist). These ideas seem to have vanished from the present dispute over demands, hierarchy, and horizontalism—to our loss, I’d argue.

Back in 2009, the tactic of refusing demands had nothing to do with democratic process or knee-jerk horizontalism, and everything to do with the present stakes of class struggle. Rejecting demands marked, or was meant to betoken, a refusal to collaborate any more with the capitalism order, including the labor movement; it registered a vote of no-confidence in the wage system, because there are no jobs anyway—we’re grad students, remember—and those jobs that do exist really and truly suck. Above all, the tactic was understood to signal, for some instinctually, for others intellectually, that the present-day horizons of struggle were emphatically not those of ancestral socialism. There was no longer any possibility of going back to the arcadia of the workers’ state; now it was a matter of piecing together the apparatus of redistribution on the outside, in the cold of the commons, without wages or benefits. If the refusal of labor was once the endpoint of autonomist struggle, today the stakes have been reversed: the rebels are not the workers but the jobless, those who’ve been refused employment both inside and outside the capitalist heartland. The Arab Spring had everything to do with this logic, and only the fatally tone-deaf would mistake OWS as a workingman’s movement—quite the opposite. From this point-of-view, the argument that’s been playing out in and around Jacobin—about structures of organizing and, implicitly or otherwise, vanguardism—fails to hit economic bedrock. The argument we ought to be having concerns the future of capitalism: where it’s been, where it’s headed, and with what consequences in the present tense. I assume that someone out there in the Occupied world has been talking about those things, but it doesn’t seem to have trickled upstream.

At the Bluestockings discussion, the traditional-Left side of the table endorsed the idea that OWS ought eventually to endorse a list of demands. Soon thereafter, the Demands Working Group released their proposal for “a massive public works and public service program with direct government employment at prevailing (union) wages, paid for by taxing the rich and corporations, by immediately ending all of America’s wars, and by ending all aid to authoritarian regimes to create 25 million new jobs.” While these are all fine things, they have as their premise the wrong assumption that some version of the welfare state represents a Platonic form of the political good. But the welfare state was only ever invented to serve a partisan set of interests—those of capitalists—and could not have been built save during a bygone moment of capitalism’s global development, when the costs of welfare and high employment were capable of being offset by the profitability of modernizing production. Yes, the labor movement did force capitalists to internalize many of the costs of workers’ social reproduction, but it did this in an era of spectacular growth—nothing could be further from the present-day scenario. Bear in mind that the greatest expansion of the welfare state took place during capitalism’s golden age in the 1950s-60s. The point of it was never to build a good, equal, or just society; the point was to draw workers further into the system of production, extending that system to encompass nearly every aspect of lived experience. Remember too that the success of the welfare state was dogged by a mass rejection of its meaninglessness, and also its exclusivity. If the 20th century was the proletariat’s utopia, it was also its hell.

No amount of wishful thinking will bring back the days of heaven and hell, though. Now there is only hell, bleak and disastrous, but no longer quite so meaningless or exclusive. Capitalism has been failing since the late 1960s, when its previous temporary fix—the rapid modernization of production in advanced economies, coupled with reasonably generous social welfare—stopped doing the trick. If the welfare state beckons on the horizons of Zuccotti Park, it can only be a mirage, a trick of the light playing on the shields of the riot police. I’m not arguing that the occupiers pack up and go home, though—far from it. For if anything about OWS is encouraging, it’s that in the first days of the present wave of occupations, veritable communes were set up in literally dozens of American cities, distributing food, shelter, and first aid freely and to all comers. Whatever else the second-wave occupiers believe about their movement, they’ve already begun to do what we at the UC couldn’t quite pull off, at least not until now—creating living breathing communism in some of the least communal places imaginable. A movement that began as a political response to economic injustice has become an economic response to capitalism. To the extent that OWS has a future qua class struggle, it will be as communes or as nothing. Forget your demands, in other words—welcome to the autumn of the communes.

Critics will say that while these small acts of communism are well and good, they will never be able to provide for the millions who depend on capitalism for daily bread (Doug Henwood said something to that effect on last week’s Behind the News). Two months ago, though, these same critics would have said that organizing even a single commune was an impossibility, that communes inherently fracture and fail, and would in any event be too geographically isolated to matter. Clearly the mayors and police departments of the occupied cities see things differently. In any event, the communes exist and can’t be wished away. They’ve already begun to attract the jobless and homeless and underemployed and will continue to do so for as long as the occupations keep going. And this, after all, is the economic function of communes relative to capitalism: not to liberate people in the abstract, but to lay the groundwork for a retreat from the wage system. It has always been a desideratum of capitalism that such refuges should be destroyed, whether to flush people into the labor market (primitive accumulation) or to prevent alternatives to the wage system from materializing. It should come as no surprise that the first groups to join the occupations have been those who are at present excluded from the system—the homeless, the wageless, the debt-stricken and the underemployed—and that the police force called on to oppress them are well-paid suburbanites. As the movement of the communes pushes forward, these divisions, between the waged and wageless, the self-policing professionals and the communards, will only widen. This split must not be construed as external or opposed to the movement; it is the movement’s clearest form of expression.

As for the practical tasks of the communes, I defer to Théorie Communiste’s account of what’s to be done and how: Communization is, to begin with, “the destruction of exchange: this means the workers attacking the banks which hold their accounts and those of other workers, thus making it necessary to manage without; this means the workers communicating their ‘products’ to themselves and the community directly and without market; this means the homeless occupying homes, thus ‘obliging’ construction workers to produce freely, the construction workers taking from the shops at liberty, obliging the whole class to organise to seek food in the sectors to be collectivized, etc. Let’s be clear about this. There is no measure which, in itself, taken separately, is ‘communism.’ To distribute goods, to directly circulate means of production and raw materials, to use violence against the existing state: fractions of capital can achieve some of these things in certain circumstances. That which is communist is not ‘violence’ in itself, nor ‘distribution’ of the shit that we inherit from class society, nor ‘collectivization’ of surplus-value sucking machines: it is the nature of the movement which connects these actions and underlies them, renders them the moments of a process which can only communize even further, or be crushed.” I would only add that the point of communization is not simply to destory capitalism, but also to reappropriate—directly and immediately—the means of social reproduction. One need have no particular scruples about how this should be done; for example, it’s immaterial whether one pays for, steals, or buys on credit what’s needed to keep the commune going, so long as one enables the group to live without wages—and not only to live, but to grow, to spread, to incorporate more capital, like phagocytes in the economic bloodstream. Nor does it matter whether or not the commune has these means from the get-go; the point is to acquire them, after all, and that takes time. While it’s no doubt important what spatial form the communes take, perhaps the centralized model of OWS will in turn give way to more dispersed territorial arrangements. Time will tell. Make no mistake, though: these experiments have begun, and they will spread; they make sense, and much more sense than the usual business of demanding, politicking, and wound-licking. The era of the Party is over; long live the communes.

On the Previous Few Days, and What is to Come

from BayofRage:

Oakland Takes Out The Trash.
Tuesday, 3am – 7am

On Monday, October 24th the second weekend of #OccupyOakland had come and gone; charisma from Saturday’s march [link] had passed and a police raid was imminent. Beyond popular speculation that the city and the police were planning the destruction of Oscar Grant Plaza, there were a few obvious clues that Monday night would be the night. For one, the city had issued letters to select businesses around the plaza suggesting that there would be police activities sometime in the coming day. In addition, the city seems to have forced the Fire Marshall to come to the occupation to “remove” the propane tanks (and thus restricting us from cooking on site).

Before the rubber bullets and concussion grenades, the hundred or so arrests and unrelenting spider mobs that saturated downtown Oakland, there was joyous, eager barricading. It was trash night. The already desolate streets surrounding Oscar Grant Plaza were quickly cleared of whatever debris could act (symbolically and/or effectively) as an impediment to the police. Locked in an alley of City Hall were nearly one hundred metal police barricades. They were quickly liberated from their cage and placed strategically around the encampment. Reports trickled in slowly: several police units, from many agencies all the way out to Vacaville, were mobilizing and traveling to the plaza via motorcade or BART. Arguments broke out at the occupation – some called for a united strategy of defense, while many continued building barricades, spray painting and hammering away at the cobblestone floor. Eventually, around 4am, the distant sirens quickly turned into dozens of police units in formation, giving dispersal orders before attacking the encampment.

There was hopeful but little supposition that these people and barricades could deter the police, let alone defend the camp. When the spotlights from police helicopters began indiscriminately scanning the plaza, a panic fevered the already frantic people. It took only moments to realize that to stay inside the plaza was hopeless. Those intent on posturing and symbolically “standing their ground”, were subject to projectiles, batons and ultimately arrest. The scene was panicked, oppressive and defeating. For now, the fight for the plaza had been lost and most everyone inside dispersed.

Outside police lines, many looked to reconvene, others arrived responding to the emergency text messages and phone calls they’d received from others – they found each other at 14th and Franklin, one block east of the plaza. To the police it was clear that this massing crowd would not be reduced to impotent spectators. Moving away from the sidewalks into the street, what was now the morning traffic detour route, the intersection filled with hateful slogans directed at the police. There was a startling impatience and lust for revenge. It had grown to nearly 200 people when a police motorcade was ordered to intimidate and disperse the crowd. Shape shifting and turning over trash cans, the group headed in the opposite direction. Shouts of excitement, more seething remarks toward the police and a medley of thudding and crashing filled the streets. The police came prepared to assault the plaza, not to be met with the consequences of doing so.  From 5am to 6am the streets east of the plaza held a familiarity to some and an unprecedented emotion for others.

An offensive decision by the city and its allies brought opportunity to those subject to their increasingly irrelevant authority. Tuesday morning, the city took to actively discouraging people from going to work in the downtown area. Despite this official suggestion, one could overhear security guards, baristas and other service workers phoning into work announcing their absence on their own initiative. Someone initiated a campaign to eject Jean Quan from her position as mayor. Tweets and texts exploded with announcements to rally at the downtown Oakland Library at 4pm. The Alameda County Labor Council among other local unions had publicly denounced the actions of the police and the city.

Yet to take shape as either a spectacle or rebellion, The Town, once again, opened itself to the freedoms found in possibilities.

Library. Riot. Continued.
Tuesday, 4pm – Midnight

12 hours later, the contingency plan approved by the GA in case of a raid, was put into place. At 4pm, close to 1000 people gathered at the main Oakland Library to listen to inspirational speeches and condemnations against the police. One could not avoid the general feeling of animosity towards those responsible for what happened last night. Something spectacular was going to happen tonight.

After the speeches, people marched to the Downtown jail to show support for those arrested the previous night. Along the way, the march passed through two separate lines of police, but on the third one, as the march was a block away from the jail, the police pushed back. They grabbed two people from the front of the march and threw them to the ground. Seeing this, the crowd immediately surrounded the cops yelling at them, trying to grab the comrades and free them. People pushed and paint was thrown. As the tension continued to escalate, the police knew they were fighting a losing battle, so they brought in reinforcements with tear gas and flash grenades to disperse the crowd. Those being arrested initially, amongst the chaos, were secured by the pigs and loaded into a van. One of the arrestees was fucked with while in jail, called racist slurs and physically harassed. How could we not hate the police?

Throughout the arrests of Occupy Oakland’s resistance, we demonstrate solidarity with the state’s hostages in a multitude of ways, emotionally and physically. The march regrouped and proceeded past the jail making noise and letting those inside – every single one of them – aware that the march was here for them in total solidarity. A comrade who has been released from jail, arrested the previous night, said that it was one of the most beautiful and powerful things they have ever seen. To hear and see 1000 people outside making noise, making their solidarity known to those on the inside. Solidarity means attack.

The march returned to Oscar Grant Plaza where the group proceeded to try and retake the plaza. After 20 minutes of confronting the police at 14th and Broadway, rounds of tear gas and flash grenades were used once again (there would be somewhere around seven different instances of the police using tear gas and flash grenades in an attempt to disperse the crowd. The crowd did not deteriorate this time nor any other).

This was only the beginning…

This first major tear gassing was also the incident were a veteran was hit in the head with a tear gas canister and either knocking him out or causing his system to go in shock – he was on the ground in front of the police with eyes open, not moving and not responding to anything. People immediately ran up to him and tried to get him out of the way, which is when the police throw another flash grenade directly on top of him and near those who responded in aid. This bears repeating: the police throw a flash grenade directly on someone that was lying motionless on the ground, dispersing the crowd that was trying to take him out of the warzone. The injured protester was eventually removed and taken to the hospital with a skull fracture and is currently in critical condition and undergoing surgery. Many were injured. Not everyone has reported their injuries for obvious reasons.

By this point, the march had doubled to more than 2000 people. The group marched to Snow Park to gather, but it wasn’t long until people marched back on the plaza again. In what became the standard of the night, the march confronted the militarized area formerly known as Oscar Grant Plaza and was met with tear gas and flash grenades causing people to faint and throw up. But this didn’t stop anyone; it only galvanized the crowd and incited many at home to head downtown and join the resistance.

The march started at 5 and lasted until late into the night with over 6 hours of snake marches and almost constant confrontation with the police throughout downtown.

Towards the end of the night, people began to worry about being kettled, so some people took it upon themselves to set up barricades around the surrounding intersections. This action would allow people to respond before being trapped, by either getting away or fighting back. The barricades included the city’s own barricades that were established throughout the area, dumpsters and trash cans (some of these were set aflame to relieve the lingering tear gas present throughout all of the downtown and to cause more trouble for the police if they dared to intimidate or assault crowd).

As the night went on, the group slowly dissipated, confident that this fight was not close to over.

The Retaking of Oscar Grant Plaza.
Wednesday, 6pm – Midnight

It was obvious to everyone the previous night that people were heading back to Oscar Grant Plaza. By this time, police were nowhere to be seen around the plaza. The only thing that was there was a metal fence erected around the spot of the occupation. Well, it only lasted a little while. Before the General Assembly even started, people spontaneously began to tear down the fence. Initially, some “peace police,” spouting something about non-violence were trying to get them to stop – that was of course to no avail as the fence quickly was torn down.

The GA that happened that night was the largest one yet for #OccupyOakland, with over 2000 people participating. Since it was such a large GA, everything took more time, but the one proposal that was passed was worth it all. Following announcements that various occupations around the US were participating in solidarity marches, and that people in Cairo are going to march on Tahrir square this Friday saying that “Cairo and Oakland are one hand,” the proposal to call for a General Strike this Wednesday, November 2nd was passed with overwhelming majority (97%). Get ready Oakland, shits about to get real….

Following the GA, people announced that OccupySF was under threat of eviction. People made a call out for people to go to San Francisco and make their solidarity physical. But this wouldn’t happen. Before people could even make it into BART, the station was closed. Pissed, the small group that was heading to SF instead took to the streets in Oakland where the rest of the GA, who was still around, joined them. The march immediately headed towards the jail to show solidarity with those still inside. Everyone could see the inmates hands on the windows and the flickering of their cell lights, letting us know that they see us.

Over the next couple of hours, the group marched around downtown Oakland with no police interference. There were reports of police staging close by, but they never made themselves visible more than a few cars in front and back. After the previous night, they realized how badly they fucked up. Tonight, we controlled the streets. It finally ended in Oscar Grant Plaza, with people just chilling, standing and sitting in the middle of 14th and Broadway (the main downtown intersection), with no attempt by the cops to disperse the crowd.

As the proposed General Strike is just but a week away, there is a lot of work that needs to be done and a lot of connections to be established and strengthened. Some people began to set up camp again at Oscar Grant Plaza, but others are merely taking this time to rest, to regroup, to gather themselves for what is to come.

Get some rest comrade. We have yet to see what’s around the corner…

#OccupyOakland Ratifies General Strike for Nov. 2

OAKLAND, California – The recently renewed #OccupyOakland General Assembly has ratified a city-wide General Strike for November 2nd. Read the statement on #OccupyOakland.

PDF: GeneralStrikeOakland2

#OccupyOakland Returns to Oscar Grant Plaza

OAKLAND, California – On Tuesday, the City of Oakland befouled both occupations thriving in downtown. At 4:30am, Oakland police along side other police from all over Alameda County and beyond, in excess of 500 officers, ransacked the occupations at Oscar Grant Plaza, followed by Snowpark. Yesterday at 4pm, occupiers gathered themselves and reconvened in front of one of Oakland’s public libraries, also suffering from austerity, to respond to the show of force earlier that day which resulted in over 100 arrests. They vowed to return the next day, and every day at 6pm until the occupations were reborn. Through the rest of the evening several thousand joined the marchers as they sought to restore their encampment. However, police still swarmed the area and refused the occupiers of a return to Oscar Grant Plaza. As the night wore on, police continued to show their brutality, launching dozens of attacks on peaceful marchers with rubber bullets, tear gas, and the blunt edge of the billy club. Many were hurt, a few needed serious medical attention. A little past midnight, the dwindling number of marchers decided to save their energy to reconnoiter for the afternoon.

Today, as the occupiers promised, they’ve returned. Chain linked fences have replaced the bulk of the police force present yesterday, blocking the plaza from anyone’s entry. All that remains of the last few weeks of occupation are a mosaic of fading patches of grass and thousands of folks ready to rebuild. More to follow.

Updates:

6:20pm – As #OccupyOakland holds a general assembly, #OccupyWallStreet have descended to the streets in solidarity. Rumors are also spreading that #OWS is donating $20,000 to aid the folks in Oakland.

#OccupyWallStreet Solidarity Demonstration, around 9pm EST

Oakland, a little past 6pm.

6:30pm – Word is coming in that at least one demonstrator at the #OWS solidarity demonstration with Oakland has been arrested.

6:36pm – Some movement police are stopping folks from tearing down the chain link fence.

6:38pm – GA speaker confirms that #OWS is donating money to Oakland.

6:50pm – Correction, actual GA will begin in a few moments. Right now a few folks are on stack to speak. It looks like over 2000 people in attendance. Human mic in effect.

7:00pm – Fence is coming down!

7:15pm – Oakland Commune banner has been raised again.

Oakland GA continues. Fencing remains around the amphitheater only

7:30pm – Constant honking in solidarity from passing cars. Rumors are flying that #OccupySF may be raided by the police tonight (around 3am).

7:38pm – Oakland GA proposing city-wide General Strike for as early as Nov. 2.

7:40pm – Crowd estimate at around 3000.

A march to #occupySF began earlier, only to be disrupted by the shuttering of BART. However, marchers have decided to take a tour of the city instead. Also, Egyptian protesters will stand in solidarity tomorrow with #occupyOakland in Tahrir Square.

Against Outrage

from ThirdCoastConspiracy:

The news didn’t come in the middle of the night as we expected, but in the morning, at a reasonable hour EST. Hundreds of riot cops had raided the encampment at Oscar Grant Plaza, wildly swinging their batons and firing tear gas and beanbag rounds into a crowd made up of our friends, comrades, and allies who had for the last two weeks taken over and transformed dead space into the Oakland commune.

Our initial reaction was outrage, an intense hatred of the police and all those who look away, who justify their actions, who volunteer platitudes like, “They’re just doing their job.” Anger rose up inside of us. How could they—we growled indignantly, clenching our teeth—shoot teargas at innocent protesters?  What could possibly justify this show of militarized force? Is this really what democracy looks like?

And then we took a step back and started to think about outrage.

To feel outrage, we must hold that there are appropriate channels through which social conflict can be mediated and resolved. We must see the state as accountable to our needs and desires, effective and efficient in its provision of necessary services. We must forget that we are privileged, that in our privilege we are just like everyone else. That those who experience state terror at the hands of the police somehow deserve it. To feel outrage, we must believe that violence is the exception.

But it isn’t. Accountability is nothing more than a gilded myth: as the “Occupy” movement has recognized, the 1 percent has so taken hold of the political system that politics as such can no longer be said to exist. We are living under the rule of austerity capital. There will be no more necessary services, just as there is no more accountability. In Detroit, we know there’s no going back to that golden age of the welfare state, of union jobs, of a “comfortable” middle class life. Those jobs, and their conditions of possibility, are long gone. And even if we could, would we really want to return to a system that depended on the institutionalization of war, sexism, and racism to reproduce itself? These days, in any case, Michigan is cutting off welfare payments to those who’ve been unable to find work for four years and canceling programs that help poor families pay their heating bills in the winter. And winter, forecasted to be one of the coldest on record, is fast approaching.

To feel outrage is to give ourselves away. For those who face the brutality of the police every day of their lives, those who are stopped and frisked on the street, those who are arrested for inhabiting the wrong neighborhoods and the wrong skin color, those whose family members have been stolen by the prison-industrial complex, understand that the police are the foot soldiers of capital. To serve and protect—the 1 percent.

So. We have to smother our outrage, train ourselves to recognize the police for what they are, both rationally and affectively. It is only when we no longer feel outrage that we will be able to move beyond a reactive politics which traps us in endless cycles of legal battles, jail support, and internal investigations that never lead anywhere worthwhile. We must expect them. What Boston, New York, Atlanta, and especially Oakland have taught us is what we should have already known—that the cops are coming for us. All we can do is learn to defend ourselves, to move quickly. And to attack first.

* * *

At the march on Bank of America last week, which started from the occupation at Grand Circus Park and moved through downtown Detroit on a bright crisp fall day, we found ourselves astonished. Not at the 500 plus persons filling the normally deserted streets, not at the palpable joy in the air (the joy of realizing that we were no longer alone in trials and fears in this age of austerity, and the joy of finding a long-longed for family, filled with true care and love). Rather it was one moment, brief, and in the context of the brilliant and massive amount of organizational work that has occurred in the last two weeks perhaps easily overlooked: at one point in the march the police decided to intervene, to test us, and tried to force the march onto the sidewalk. They shouted threateningly, their cars darted at marchers, they revved their engines menacingly, but at the front of the march a man, holding his young infant daughter faced the police and refused to leave the street. He refused. He would not be moved. And in the face of his resolve the police relented, and the march followed him, shouting, singing, laughing in the streets.

His eloquent gesture said two things: this space is occupied and it is ours. If our movement is to become worthy of the name, we will have to learn two lessons. First, to be against outrage and the exceptionalism that it entails. From the state and the cops, we expect nothing but what they have already shown us: tear gas, rubber bullets, armored vehicles, all the technologies of foreign wars come home. And second, that occupy means to take and to hold space; that first we take a park, then the street, then the schools, then the banks, until what was built by all of us truly belongs to all, no gods, no masters.

Solidarity with Occupy Oakland!

Yrs in struggle,

Some communizers occupying Detroit

After the Attack on the Oakland Commune

LETTER FROM AN ANONYMOUS FRIEND
AFTER THE ATTACK ON THE OAKLAND COMMUNE

We knew that it would happen.

If you live with others in a public space in a city, if you set up shelters in which people can live without owning or renting property, if you set up an outdoor kitchen with which to feed anyone who wants food, if you establish a free school at which anyone can read and learn, if you set up bathroom facilities provided by organizations supporting your activities, if you show solidarity with struggles against police killings and police violence against people of color, against the poor, against women, against queers and transpeople, if you state your determination to defend the space you have created against the threat of eviction, in short—if you work toward organizing ways of living and relating to one another that might challenge those mandated by capitalism, your efforts will eventually be crushed by the police.

We know this because we know that the question is not whether the police are “part of the 99%,” on the basis of their salary. What is called the 99% is ruptured by many divisions. Among these is the dividing line that runs between those who want to change the world and those who uphold the status quo, between those who work to undermine the brutal order of property and those who work to enforce it. For those who transform the world by challenging capitalist economic and social relations, working to displace and overturn them, the police are one among many enemies. We know it is their job to destroy what we create, and it is no surprise when they do that.

At 4:30 am on October 25, Occupy Oakland was raided by more than 500 police from multiple counties. From a comrade who was there:

“At the time of this writing I am filled with rage. Occupy Oakland, on its second week, was raided by an overwhelming force of approximately 800 police in riot gear. I was there, ready to defend when police from all entrances to Oscar Grant Plaza rushed in with sticks and began beating people. Their tactics were simple but effective: rush in with overwhelming numbers and push out those that intended to stay for a fight, slowly crush resilience of those who took up the tactic of civil disobedience by linking arms and protecting the camp. They beat people with sticks, shot people with rubber bullets, obliterated ear-drums with flash-bang grenades, and choked them with tear gas.”

What wrenches on these mornings (so many, for so many of us), what presses out on our temples, constricts our chests, fills our throats so that it can’t be properly spoken is a contradiction: we knew that this would happen; we can’t accept that it has happened. We know, insofar as we struggle, that our struggle will be repressed. But no amount of knowing can fortify against the sickness that we feel every time an army of cops rolls in to brutalize and arrest our friends and comrades.

All the tents are down, pots are strewn everywhere, the library scattered, the garden stomped, the Commune is in ruins. “Though it fed thousands for free and welcomed the city’s desperately poor homeless population, this public park can hopefully now return to its natural state of being completely empty.” Dozens of smug assholes and their batons surround the emptiness they prefer to the fragile possibilities that were created, getting paid overtime to chat across their barricades with idiots who think the cops are on the same side as those they just attacked and threw in jail, while others hurl insults against dead ears.

The Oakland Commune matters not because it could have lasted any longer than it did and not because of how many cops it took to tear it down. It matters because for as long as it was there it was evidence that the impossible resides in the heart of our cities, amongst those who already live together on the streets, amongst those willing to live with them. It isn’t that this is “Round One” of a longer fight. It isn’t that those who lived and worked there all day and all night “will be back.” It isn’t that this is “just the beginning.” It isn’t just the beginning because it’s been going on for a long time, because the history of struggle is the history of capitalism. Because the history of capitalism, in its unfolding, in the movement of its contradiction with itself, is the coming into being of communism . If we won’t be back in Oscar Grant Plaza, if the Oakland Commune won’t be there as it was for two weeks, that is because we are everywhere, and the substance of history articulates itself unceasingly across the movement of what it creates. That is not an abstraction; it’s a letter of solidarity from Cairo, arriving the afternoon before the tents are torn down: “An entire generation across the globe has grown up realizing, rationally and emotionally, that we have no future in the current order of things….So we stand with you not just in your attempts to bring down the old but to experiment with the new.” Our true loves are everywhere, a friend replies. We won’t be back because we’re not going anywhere.

For a long time we have dreamed the end of capitalism. The twenty-first century is the time in which that dream will come true. We are waking up, and we are learning again, among one another, how to use our tired bodies. This is what it feels like to wake in a tent on the grass of Oscar Grant Plaza. Comrades in Baltimore write, “this occupation is inevitable, but me have to make it.” Nothing of that dialectic can be displaced by the police.

“The revolution” does not exist. It is not a horizon to be struggled toward, and no movement in the history of struggles has “failed.” The real movement is the movement of bodies, working on what exists. If the occupation is inevitable, it is because it is what is happening everywhere, now. If we have to make it, it is because our bodies are the material collective that it is. If it is repressed, its inevitablility remains. The twenty-first century is the time of that inevitability, because the limit it surges against, repression, is also the dynamic of its movement: in its death throes, the openly repressive forces of capital are the manifestation of its own weakness, returning people to the destitution from which they revolt. “This occupation is inevitable, but we have to make it,” because in a time of mass deb t, of mass foreclosures, of ruthless austerity, of sprawling slums, there will be no alternative to the material necessity of taking what we need and using it amongst ourselves.

None of this makes a difference this morning, while the enemy guards its ruins and our comrades are in jail. But if we knew this morning would come, we also know that the clocks have already stopped, that the real movement continues, and that time is on our side.

Letter from Cairo

A bit delayed due to the #OccupyOakland raid, here is a letter we received from some folks in Cairo, Egypt:

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 econo mic 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 for gathering, 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 28th 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 give them 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.

#OccupyOakland Responds to Morning Raid

OAKLAND, California – This morning, Tuesday October 25, at 4:30am more than 500 police officers arrested approximately 105 occupiers from the Oscar Grant Plaza (formerly Frank Ogawa Plaza) and the Snowpark occupation under order from the City of Oakland. Those arrested this morning are being charged with, remaining in the scene of a riot, at least. Occupiers immediately sent out a call for an emergency convergence to respond to the raid for 4pm at from the Oakland public library on 14th and Madison.

Oakland North reports that this image captures only a third of the crowd size (5pm)

Updates

~4:45pm – Around 300+ folks are rallied at the library [corrected]

5:04pm – Demonstrators vow to meet at 6pm on 14th and Broadway everyday, whatever happens tonight.

5:15pm – Demonstrators marching to Oscar Grant Plaza

5:25pm – Chanting, “the system has got to die. Hella hella occupy.”

5:40pm – On Broadway. Crowd is around 1000, possibly more.

5:45pm – Detouring passed the police dept.

6:00pm – Tear gas being deployed in front of county jail (see below).

6:05pm – Palo Alto police have been brought in. Rubber bullet rounds being used to keep demonstrators away from police headquarters and Oscar Grant Plaza. At least a few arrested so far; at least one woman was beat with a baton by police.

Palo Alto police rolling in.

6:17pm – numbers are growing, around 2000. Police have been hit with paint balls.

6:25pm – Police give a dispersal order to leave in 5min at [14th] and Broadway.

6:38pm – Protesters divided into different areas, including 19th & Broadway (in front of Fox Theater) and 14th and Broadway.

6:43pm – Mainstream news reporting “no clashes” have occurred which is patently false.

6:45pm – One crowd now approaching 20th and Franklin

6:51pm – Stopped at the 20th and Franklin intersection, but appears to be on the move again.

Boots Riley addresses crowd, 20th and Franklin

6:54pm – Crowd estimates between 3000 and 5000 now.

6:56pm – Mixed reports saying either thousands appear to be marching towards OPD HQ or towards Snow Park.

7:03pm – Folks in Snow Park. Holding a GA.

7:10pm – Marchers leaving snow park.

7:15pm – Marchers heading back toward Oscar Grant Plaza. Whilst, folks already there are facing down police.

7:20pm – Marchers a few blocks away.

7:26pm – Marchers arrive at Oscar Grant Plaza, only to be met by the same riot police (see image above).

7:34pm – Police threatening tear gas.

Back at 14th and Broadway.

7:42pm – A trash can is on fire.

7:44pm – Tear gas and flash bangs thrown at demonstrators at 14th and Broadway. 10-20 tear gas canisters fired.

7:48pm – At least some of the crowd is regrouping at 14th and Webster.

7:53pm – Some demonstrators returning to 14th and Broadway.

7:55pm – Unconfirmed reports of people with wounds, specifically one with a head injury on 15th.

Flash bangs and tear gas being released:

7:58pm – Through coughing and crying due to tear gas, demonstrators shouting, “we’re still here”.

8:05pm – Head injury confirmed.

8:12pm – LRAD is being brought out. Folks are moving towards San Pablo.

8:30pm – Demonstrators have returned to 14th and Broadway, around 500+

8:40pm – Demonstrators shouting, “Let’s go Oakland!” It appears at least one unattended police car is smashed up.

8:49pm – Demonstrators throwing things at police.

9:07pm – A car is on fire. However, it was put out by movement police.

9:09pm – An “eerie” calm has overtaken the crowd.

9:27pm – Large quantities of tear gas and flash grenades deployed.

9:34pm – Groups of people seem to have reconnoitered in different areas.

9:43pm – More tear gas, this time on Telegraph and 15th.

10:16pm – The standoff continues. Also earlier, a woman was hit after the tear gas canisters flew into the crowd. She was seen bleeding profusely, but appears to be doing okay now.

10:40pm – Bottles thrown at police, and much more tear gas is released. Also this person (below) was injured by rubber bullets.

Another round of teargas was released at around 11:15pm. Around 12:30am, demonstrators agreed to disperse and return the next day at 6pm at 14th and Broadway, like it was discussed earlier in the evening.

Read more at: Oakland North, Indybay.

 

#OccupyOakland Sieged and Mass Arrested

OAKLAND, California – Much like dozens of other cities now, the city of Oakland has sent police to dismantle one of the #Occupations in Oakland. Occupiers have been at Frank Ogawa Plaza, renamed Oscar Grant Plaza, for two weeks now, but were given several dispersal letters over the passed several days demanding they vacate.

Police dragging and arresting an occupier

Around a 100yd line of arrestees (from zunguzungu)

Police arrived Tuesday morning at around 4:30am, in numbers that at least one officer reported to the media was, “Largest police operation I’ve seen.” Witnesses put the police count at around 500 (similar numbers to July 8, 2010 Oscar Grant protest). Occupiers prepared themselves by barricading the encampment using whatever materials were at hand, but police were able to break through and detain people. Police claim that protesters used tear gas against them, while witnesses claim otherwise, stating that police donned gas masks before any gas was released. Police also allegedly used rubber bullets, flash grenades, and an LRAD, a pain inducing sound cannon. So far, around 75 appear to be arrested. Tents have been removed.

Police at Snow Park occupation.

Oscar Grant Plaza post-raid

Watch on livestream. Read more on Indybay. Live on mainstream news. More photos

Updates

Organizers are asking folks to reconvene now at 14th and Franklin as of around 5:30am.

5:56am – Police filing back down 14th street.

6:00am – 12st BART station has been shutdown.

6:05am – REPOST: “Occupy Oakland emergency reconvergence plan activated. Reconverge 4pm at Oakland public library main branch 14th & Madison. TELL EVERYONE. Mayor Jean Quan’s Office # 510-238-3141 CALL NOW let her know what you think of the raid. BART shuts down Oakland City Center stop to prevent people from coming to Occupy Oakland to protest police eviction.”

6:17am – Around 150 Police officers are raiding the other Oakland occupation at Snow Park.

10:45am – a few folks tried to set up tents at snow park again, but police forced them to take it down

The Occupation Movement: On Greed, Unity & Violence

from Bay of Rage:

Corporate Greed is the Wrong Target

Being “greedy” is what good corporations and businesses are supposed to do in capitalism. In this system, individuals can only get ahead by acting greedy, in their own self-interest. So while many recent city occupations in the USA have built themselves against  “corporate greed”, “big business,” and “financiers on Wall Street”, we cannot forget that the most greedy corporations also donate the most to charity, that small business is just as much part of the system as big business, that productive industry cannot exist without finance. We must challenge the entire system. If we are really against “corporate greed” then we are against capitalism itself.

The 99%?

Yes, the 1% have been screwing us, for a long ass time. The 99% are reduced to working, serving and maintaining a system that makes us miserable and prevents us from realizing our potential. A growing number of us have been completely expelled from ‘society’ altogether—through homelessness, joblessness, an inability to get adequate healthcare, lack of access to education and other miserable conditions.

But the idea that there is something called society that we should all work together to defend is an illusion. Society is rife with divisions, conflicts and wars. Some of these wars are manufactured and waged by the 1%. Other wars, such as the wars conducted by indigenous peoples and people of color against racist colonization and the war conducted by women and trans people against patriarchal gender violence, are hidden and suppressed in the false name of society. Every year for these last decades, the casualties of society have piled up as the revolutionaries have been killed or jailed.

In recent years, many of the 99% have appeared to follow the rules. Many of us have been caught in the cycle of working and borrowing in order to continue working and borrowing, we have been terrified of speaking out against daily injustices and humiliations for fear of losing the tiny foothold we hope to protect, or for fear of getting jailed or beaten by the cops, or getting ostracized and criminalized by the obeyers (even though they know the rules are unjust). Many people who have recently lost their social standing are figuring out that the promises capitalism holds out to them are hollow. What the 99% faces, at best, is a life of debt, chained to shitty jobs and to shitty commodities.

The Occupy Movement is awakening to the fact that if we continue to follow their rules, they, the 1%, will win. The Occupy movement is a wake-up call to disobey their rules and to create new ways of living together.

But the call for unity of the 99% is empty. There is no unity between those who seek to uphold the system of domination and those of us who seek to destroy it as we create a new world. What section of the 99% will join us, and what part will seek to defend the powers that exist, playing on fear of chaos or disruption? What part of that 99% will work with us to expropriate, destroy and transform what the 1% controls? Most immediately: the cops may well be part of that 99%, but they are directly in opposition to us as long as they continue to do their job as cops. (The Tea Party minions, the rapists, racists, gay bashers and sexual abusers are all part of the 99%, but they are definitely not with us).

Violence is not something we can choose or not choose

The Occupy Movement quickly comes up against the pepper spray and baton blows of the cops. What is violence? Ask the friends and family of all those who have been killed or sexually assaulted by cops or shot in the back for not paying a transit fare. Ask the prisoners who are on hunger strike across California, the homeless who try to find a place to sleep or a place to pee, the thousands who have gotten beaten up for protesting injustices, the young people of color who are constantly harassed and attacked by anti-gang task forces, the sex workers abused and exploited by the cops.

Destroying and expropriating the property of the 1% is not violence. Violence is the shooting of Oscar Grant, of Charles Hill, of Kenneth Harding, and countless others. Violence is more than 1/3 of women who suffer sexual assault. In fact, violence is a normal, constant condition of capitalism. For the occupation movement, the first clear violence will come from the cops and resistance to these agents of repression is absolutely necessary. As someone said in Tahrir Square, “when the cops come to take your shit, you have to try to stop them.”

The square occupations in North Africa unleashed revolutions that toppled dictators and those in Europe brought global stock markets to the brink of collapse. The difference here is obviously in the numbers; 50,000+ in Tahrir Square, 20,000 in Syntagma. Yet there was also something more.The strength of these occupations lied in their refusal to be removed, their commitment to physically resist any attempts to evict them from their liberated spaces. Remember the barricades around Tahrir? Non-violence made no sense during those long nights of fighting to protect the revolution. Here in the usa, we will also need to resist, in our own ways. By limiting the scope of that resistance right from the start, we undermine our potential strength and we let the state decide when we will be removed, when this explosion of resistance has gone too far and needs to be extinguished.

We need tens of thousands to take to the streets and build this movement into something greater. But if the past weeks have taught us anything it is that clashes with the state do not scare people away. In fact it is the opposite. The numbers on Wall Street have clearly grown after each round of escalation and scuffles with police.

The potential of this movement. What do we really want?

We don’t want shitty jobs. We don’t want to vote for politicians who promise to change things. We don’t want to waste our energies trying to change the constitution. We don’t want a few new rules for Wall Street.  We don’t believe we can “affect the system” by just “being together.”

The 1% controls the wealth of the society. We need to take it back, and remake it in the process. But what comes after occupying the city squares? City Hall? Foreclosed homes? Supermarkets? And then—Liberating public transit? Free health clinics? Free education? Collective food production?

Everything is possible.

Postscript: Occupy Oakland  

As we write this, we have no way of knowing whether the city-controlled Frank Ogawa Plaza will become occupied Oscar Grant Plaza, with all of the possibilities that entails. But we do know that if this occupation is to last and continue to grow beyond the first night, and if this movement is to bring any fundamental change in the quality of our lives, it must be drastically different than any of the other Occupations around the country.

Oakland is currently under occupation by the police. The form of this occupation varies; the situation is much different in Temescal than in deep East Oakland. We live in a militarized space. Whether it’s police executions of Black youth, police harassment of sex workers along International Boulevard, or the city council’s racist legislation in the form of anti-loitering laws, gang injunctions or the suggested youth curfew, this paramilitary occupation is a project of local government to pacify and contain the city so capitalism can go about it’s business uninterrupted.

But Oakland doesn’t just have a violent, repressive contemporary situation; we have a vibrant history of struggle and resistance. From the 1946 General Strike to the formation of the Black Panther party in 1966 to the anti-police rebellion following the execution of Oscar Grant in 2009, Oakland has long been a city full of people that refuse to sit down and shut up. Despite every attempt by the state to kill that spirit, it lives on and will be out in full force over the coming days.

Plaza – Riot – Commune

We are the generation of the abandoned, the betrayed. Tossed up on the shores of the present by 150 years of failed insurrection, by the shipwreck of the workers’ movement, the failure of a hundred political projects. But it is not only our once-upon-a-time friends who have departed. Today, even our enemies flee from us, even capital abandons us: no more its minimum promises, the right to be exploited, the right to sell one’s labor power. Abandoned, we greet the world with utter abandon. There is no longer any possible adequacy of means and ends, no way of subordinating our actions to the rational or the practical. The present age of austerity means that even the most meager of demands require the social democrats to pick up bricks. Betrayed by democracy, betrayed by the technocrats of socialism, betrayed by the dumb idealism of anarchy, betrayed by the stolid fatalism of the communist ultraleft.  We are not the 99%. We are not a fucking percentage at all. We do not count. If we have any power at all, it is because we are the enemies of all majority, enemies of “the people.” As the old song goes, we are nothing and must become everything.

Though it is a key characteristic of capitalism that each generation of its victims has, in its way, considered its persistence beyond a few decades unlikely if not preposterous, the difference between us and them is that in our case it just happens to be true. Now, not even capital’s footservants can paint a convincing portrait of a future based upon markets and wages – all the sci-fi dystopias of flying cars and robot servants seem truly ridiculous. No, the future only presents as ruin, apocalypse, burning metal in the desert.  It is easier to imagine the end of life on earth than our own old age.

This is why anxieties over the implicit statism of anti-austerity struggles are baseless. With the exception of a few benighted activists and media ideologues, everyone understands quite well that the Keynesian card was played long ago, blown on wars and bailouts, the victim of its own monstrous success. There will be no rebirth of the welfare state, no “reindustrialization” of society. This much is obvious: if there is an expansion of the state, it will be a proto-fascist austerity state. Nor is there any longer a “Left” in any meaningful sense, as a force that desires to manage the existing world on different terms, in the name of the workers or the people. Those radicals who, tired of the weakness of the loyal opposition, imagine themselves called upon to “destroy the left” find that their very existence is predicated upon this old, vanished enemy. There is no Left left: only the great dispirited mass of the center, some wild and misdirected antagonism at the fringes.

The hopelessness of deflecting the state from its current course; the realization that even a slight reform of the system would require collective violence of a near revolutionary intensity; the attendant awareness that we would be idiots to go that distance and yet stop short of revolution –all of this gives many anti-austerity struggles a strange desperation and intensity. Our hope is to be found in this very hopelessness, in the fact that, in the current cycle of struggles, means have entirely dissociated from ends. Tactics no longer match with their stated objectives. In France, in response to a proposed change in the retirement age, high school students barricade their schools; roving blockades confuse the police; rioting fills city center after city center. In Britain and Italy, university struggles recruit tens of thousands of youth who have no hope of attending the university, nor any interest in doing so for that matter. There is no longer any possibility of a political calculus that matches ideas with tactics, thinking with doing. Do we suppose that French children are really concerned about what will happen to them once they are ready to retire? Does any young person expect the current social order to last that long? No, they are here to hasten things forward, hasten things toward collapse. Because it is easier to imagine the end of the world than retirement. Because anything is better than this.

*

For the neo-Leninist philosophes who build their cults in the shells of the dying universities, such an impossibility of lining up means with ends is nothing but a barrier or block. Where is the revolutionary program in the Egyptian revolution, they ask, where is the program in the streets of Britain or Greece? Who will discipline these bodies for their final assault on the palaces and citadels?  For such thinkers, only an idea can guarantee the efficacy of these bodies.  Only an idea – the idea of communism, as some say – can make of these bodies a proper linkage between means and ends. But communism is not an idea nor an idealism – it means freeing bodies from their subordination to abstractions. Thankfully, we are skittish, faithless and flighty people. We have trouble listening. For us, communism will be material or it will be nothing. It will be a set of immediate practices, immediate satisfactions, or nothing. If we find discipline and organization, it will come from what we do, not what we think.

By “idea” the philosophes mean something like “the Party.” They intend to make themselves and their ideas mean, as structure and social form. They intend to cement the old pact between the intelligentsia and the workers’ movement. But there is no intelligentsia anymore and there certainly is no workers’ movement to speak of. The entire structure of duty and obligation – Christian in origin – upon which the classical programmatic parties were built no longer exists, because capital no longer needs morality for helpmeet. There is acting for ourselves; there is acting with others; but there is no sustained acting for another, out of obligation.

*

Our indiscipline means that among political ideas only the one idea which is, by its very nature, determined to remain an idea, an ideal, can gain any purchase here: democracy. From Tunisia to Egypt, from Spain to Greece, from Madison to Wall Street, again and again, the “movement of the squares” buckles under the dead weight of this shibboleth. Democracy, the name for the enchantment of the people by its own image, by its potential for endless deferral. Democracy, a decision-making process become political ontology, such that the form itself, the form of the decision, becomes its own content. We democratically decide to be democratic! The people chooses itself!

In the present era – the era of the austerity state and the unemployment economy – radical democracy finds its ideal locus in the metropolitan plaza or square. The plaza is the material embodiment of its ideals – a blank place for a blank form. Through the plaza, radical democracy hearkens back to its origin myth, the agora, the assembly-places of ancient Greece which also served as marketplaces (such that the phrase “I shop” and “I speak in public” were nearly identical).  These plazas are not, however, the buzzing markets filled with economic and social transaction, but clean-swept spaces, vast pours of concrete and nothingness, perhaps with a few fountains here or there. These are spaces set aside by the separation of the “political” from the economy, the market. Nowhere is this more clear than in the most recent episode of  the “movement of squares” – Occupy Wall Street – which attempted, meekly and rather insincerely, to occupy the real agora, the real space of exchange, but ended up pushed into a small, decorative park on the outskirts of Wall Street, penned by police. This is what building the new world in the shell of the old means today – an assembly ringed by cops.

If there is hope in these manifestations, it lies in the forms of mutual aid that exist there, the experimentation people undertake in providing for their own needs. Already, we see how the occupations are forced against their self-imposed limits, brought into conflict with the police, despite the avowed pacificism of the participants. The plaza occupations – with all their contradictions – are one face of the present dissociation of means from ends. Or rather, they present a situation in which means are not so much expelled as sublimated, present as the object of a vague symbolization, such that the gatherings come to pre-enact  or symbolize or prefigure some future moment of insurrection. At their worst, they are vast machines of deferral. At their best, they force their participants toward actually seizing what they believe they are entitled to merely want.

How far we are from Egypt, the putative start of the sequence. There, the initial assembly was an act of symbolic violence, decidedly so, which everyone knew would open onto an encounter with the state and its force. And yet, even there, the separation from the economy – from the ways in which our needs are satisfied – remained inscribed into the revolution from the start. In other words, the Egyptian insurrection was not deflected  to the sphere of the political but started there to begin with. And all of the other episodes in the so-called “movement of squares” repeat this primary dislocation, whether they remain hamstrung by pacifism and democratism, as in Spain, or press their demands in material form, as in Greece.

This brings the plaza occupations into relation not only with the entire development of orthodox Marxism, from Lenin through Mao, which places the conquest of state power front and center, but also its apparent opposite in this historical moment: the riots of Athens and London and Oakland, which, bearing the names of Oscar Grant, Alexis Grigoropoulos, or Mark Duggan, treat the police and state power as both cause and effect, provocation and object of rage. Though the looting which always accompanies such eruptions points the way to a more thorough expropriation, these riots, even though they seem the most immediate of antagonistic actions, are also bound by a kind of symbolization, the symbolization of the negative, which says what it wants through a long litany, in letters of fire and broken glass, of what it does not want: not this, not that. We’ve seen their limits already, in Greece –even burning all of the banks and police stations was not enough. Even then, they came into a clearing, a plaza, swept clean by their own relentless negations, where negation itself was a limit. What then? What will we do then? How do we continue?

Between the plaza and the riot, between the most saccharine affirmation and the blackest negation – this is where we find ourselves. Two paths open for us: each one, in its way, a deflection from the burning heart of matter. On the one hand, the endless process of deliberation that must finally, in its narrowing down to a common denominator, arrive at the only single demand possible: a demand for what already is, a demand for the status quo. On the other hand, the desire that has no object, that finds nothing in the world which answers its cry of annihilation.

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 labor, and we must do this while defending ourselves against all who stand in our way.

Research & Destroy, 2011

#Occupy Digest

In the wake of the recent #Occupy movement, we wanted to create a running digest of some helpful resources for information and critiques. (None of the following are endorsements. This list is not comprehensive.)

#Occupy Critiques/Analysis:

• “The Occupation Movement: On Greed, Unity & Violence” – Bay of Rage (10.Oct – Article)
• “Why the Struggle Needs to Go Beyond Occupations” – Libcom (7.Oct – Article)
• “To Occupy and Unoccupy” – vagabond (7.Oct – Article)
• “Dear Occupiers: A Letter from Anarchists” – Crimethinc (7.Oct – Article)
• “Night of the Barricades” – Bay of Rage (6.Oct – Article)
• “A Warning: Rise to the Defense of the Revolutionary” – Kasama (6.Oct – Article)
• Anti-State STL (blog)
• “Are We an Occupation or Just a Gathering?” – AntiStateSTL (4.Oct – Article)
• “Call Out to People of Color” – (4.Oct – Article)
• “So Real It Hurts” – LeftTurn (4.Oct – Article)
• DisOccupy (blog)
• AnarchistNews – there are several critiques here (blog)
• “Anarchist Reportback and Critique from Occupy Portland” (7.Oct – Article)
• “Brief Analysis of the LA and Seattle Occupations” – Anarchist International (3.Oct – Article)
• “Open Letter to Occupy Chicago” (3.Oct – Article)
• More on “Discuss“
• unpermittedLA (blog)
• “General Assembly & Grassroots Democracy” (3.Oct – Article)
• “Read with Caution: This is Not an Attack” (29.Sept – Article)
• “#OWS: Some Tactical Thoughts” – Jacobin Mag (27.Sept – Article)

#Occupy News Sources:

• Indybay – has a lot of news on whats going on particularly in California; for general independent news check out Indymedia.
• OccupyTogether – from here you can navigate to most of the #Occupy city websites
• YourAnonNews (blog)
• #OccupySF
• #OccupyLosAngeles
• #OccupySantaCruz
• #OccupyOakland
• #OccupySanJose
• #OccupySacramento
• #OccupySanDiego
• #OccupyHumboldt

#Occupy on Twitter:

Using twitter to find out what’s going on is sometimes your best bet. Go to the search page on twitter and type in “#Occupy” and then the city name all in one word, eg. #OccupySF (note, it’s not case-sensitive). #OccupyWallStreet is also shortened to #OWS. FYI, the hashtags are twitter users’ way of categorizing tweets. Here’s a short list of some users who frequently post news:

• OccupyTheHood
• AnonyOps
• YourAnonNews

See Also:

• This statement from #OccupyBoston about supporting a diversity of tactics.