Call to action: #OCCUPYWALLSTREET 3

Encounters With Occupy Wall Street (and vid)

http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2011/10/02/encounters-with-occupy-wall...

"There is a very strong possibility that over the next five years or so the mass movement that is taking shape today might take on epic proportions and mount a serious challenge to the powers that be. It will be absolutely incumbent upon Marxists to figure out a way to relate to that movement not as learned professors chiding it from above but as dedicated participants whose loyalties are to the movement rather than their own group.

If they can meet that challenge, the movement will be all the more powerful as a result. If they function in a narrow and self-interested manner, they will have nothing to offer..."

Class War in Manchester and Manhattan

http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2011/10/485618.html

"As argued in recent posts, the Anti-Cuts movement will succeed if it pursues strategies that expose war-mongering capitalists as the real extremists, that defend truly democratic principles, and that make our movement genuinely inclusive.

The movement will fail if it is perceived to be attacking democracy and if we're the ones the system's able to smear as extremists. This post is not arguing that people should roll over and beg if they're attcked by the police, or arguing that people should limit their activism to signing petitions. This post is arguing that activists should think strategically.

If our movement succeeds, the long term rewards for domestic radicalism will be immense. It it fails the consequences will be disastrous."

NDPP wrote:

Encounters With Occupy Wall Street (and vid)

http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2011/10/02/encounters-with-occupy-wall...

"It will be absolutely incumbent upon Marxists to figure out a way to relate to that movement not as learned professors chiding it from above but as dedicated participants whose loyalties are to the movement rather than their own group.

If they can meet that challenge, the movement will be all the more powerful as a result. If they function in a narrow and self-interested manner, they will have nothing to offer..."

"Back in 1968, when I was about the age of the people occupying Liberty Park, the May-June events in France were midwifed by the American antiwar movement and eventually served as a model for the movement for a “red university” in Yugoslavia."

The battles of anti-imperialism in 68 grew out of the Civil Rights struggle of a few years prior. In turn those who cut their teeth organizing against the imperialist slaughter in Viet Nam were the ones to found the next wave of feminist struggles, gay rights struggles, environmental struggles a couple of years thereafter. Like flowers blooming under the canopy of a tree, one movement nurtures the next. And all those seeds were planted by MLK as surely as Gandhi planted him.

No mention, whatsoever, of another movement touched off that year: the Prague Spring, crushed by imperialist Russian tanks. To not mention this in any discussion of people's struggles in 68 is not a sin of omission, its a sin of commission.

I've decided Mr. Proyect has nothing to offer. Fuck him.

One does not negate the other.

Quote:

At the present time there still exist many doctrines which choose to leave in the shadow certain troubling aspects of a too complex situation. But their attempt to lie to us is in vain. Cowardice doesn’t pay. Those reasonable metaphysics, those consoling ethics with which they would like to entice us only accentuate the disorder from which we suffer. Men of today seem to feel more acutely than ever the paradox of their condition. They know themselves to be the supreme end to which all action should be subordinated, but the exigencies of action force them to treat one another as instruments or obstacles, as means. The more widespread their mastery of the world, the more they find themselves crushed by uncontrollable forces. Though they are masters of the atomic bomb, yet it is created only to destroy them. Each one has the incomparable taste in his mouth of his own life, and yet each feels himself more insignificant than an insect within the immense collectivity whose limits are one with the earth’s. Perhaps in no other age have they manifested their grandeur more brilliantly, and in no other age has this grandeur been so horribly flouted. In spite of so many stubborn lies, at every moment, at every opportunity, the truth comes to light, the truth of life and death, of my solitude and my bond with the world, of my freedom and my servitude, of the insignificance and the sovereign importance of each man and all men. There was Stalingrad and there was Buchenwald, and neither of the two wipes out the other. Since we do not succeed in fleeing it, let us therefore try to look the truth in the face. Let us try to assume our fundamental ambiguity. It is in the knowledge of the genuine conditions of our life that we must draw our strength to live and our reason for acting.

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/ethics/de-beauvoir/ambiguity/c...

So real it hurts: Notes on Occupy Wall Street.

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On Thursday night I showed up at Occupy Wall Street with a bunch of other South Asians coming from a South Asians for Justice meeting. Sonny joked that he should have brought his dhol so we could enter like it was a baarat. When we got there they were passing around and reading a sheet of paper that had the Declaration of the Occupation of Wall Street on it. I had heard the "Declaration of the Occupation" read at the General Assembly the night before but I didn't realize that it was going to be finalized as THE declaration of the movement right then and there. When I heard it the night before with Sonny we had looked at each other and noted that the line about "being one race, the human race, formally divided by race, class..." was a weird line, one that hit me in the stomach with its naivety and the way it made me feel alienated. But Sonny and I had shrugged it off as the ramblings of one of the many working groups at Occupy Wall Street.

....

And that night I was with people who also couldn't walk away. Our amazing, impromptu, radical South Asian contingency, a contingency which stood out in that crowd for sure, did not back down. We did not back down when we were told the first time that Hena spoke that our concerns could be emailed and didn't need to be dealt with then, we didn't back down when we were told that again a second time and we didn't back down when we were told that to "block" the declaration from going forward was a serious serious thing to do. When we threatened that this might mean leaving the movement, being willing to walk away. I knew it was a serious action to take, we all knew it was a serious action to take, and that is why we did it.

...

And so when we finally got everyone's attention I carefully said what we felt was the problem: that we wanted a small change in language but that this change represented a larger ethical concern of ours. That to erase a history of oppression in this document was not something that we would be able to let happen. That we knew they had been working on this document for a week, that we appreciated the process and that it was in respect to this process that we wouldn't be silenced. That we demanded a change in the language. And they accepted our change and we withdrew our block as long as the document was published with our change and they said "find us after and we will go through it" and then it was over and everyone was looking somewhere else. I stepped down from the ledge I was standing on and Sonny looked me in the eye and said "you did good" and I've never needed to hear that so much as then.

Which is how after the meeting ended we ended up finding the man who had written the document and telling him that he needed to take out the part about us all being "one race, the human race." But its "scientifically true" he told us. He thought that maybe we were advocating for there being different races? No we needed to tell him about privilege and racism and oppression and how these things still existed, both in the world and someplace like Occupy Wall Street.

Let me tell you what it feels like to stand in front of a white man and explain privilege to him. It hurts. It makes you tired. Sometimes it makes you want to cry. Sometimes it is exhilarating. Every single time it is hard. Every single time I get angry that I have to do this, that this is my job, that this shouldn't be my job. Every single time I am proud of myself that I've been able to say these things because I used to not be able to and because some days I just don't want to.8

This all has been said by many many strong women of color before me but every time, every single time these levels of power are confronted it I think it needs to be written about, talked about, gone through over and over again.1

And this is the thing: that there in that circle, on that street-corner we did a crash course on racism, white privilege, structural racism, oppression. We did a course on history and the declaration of independence and colonialism and slavery. It was hard. It was real. It hurt. But people listened. We had to fight for it. I'm going to say that again: we had to fight for it. But it felt worth it. It felt worth it to sit down on the on a street corner in the Financial District at 11:30 pm on a Thursday night, after working all day long and argue for the changing of the first line of Occupy Wall Street's official Declaration of the Occupation of New York City.

Quote:

Nooooo, Canada!

Don't you DARE turn these bright rainbows of limitless possibility into another dreary downpour of boring grey raindrops on Bay Street on October 15th! Keep your cheerless sniffs and sneers, your cringe-inducing and silencing accusations to yourselves. Wipe those dour smirks of smugness off your faces. Save the sanctimonious nitpicking for later. Take your pet issue and shove it. Talk to someone other than your circle of like-minded cronies and allies. Let's carpe fucking diem on this one, eh? The way this world is going, many of us may not get another chance.

Professional activists, radical Eeyores and oppression olympians: I hear your muttering and I call you out. Hands off these newer movements for social justice sprouting in the streets of North American cities! Give them some air. Let them grow. The protesters in New York and elsewhere might lack analysis and their politics might need critique. They might not come up with goals or tactics that make sense to you. They might not look like you, talk like you or agree with you. There are exclusions, to be sure, and privilege always rears its ugly head. There are also, from what I've seen so far, honest, compassionate and collective attempts to remedy the inevitable political and logistical problems that come with getting hugely disparate groups of people together and trying to make change. Occupy Wall Street isn't an organization. It's a living, breathing process, a big old improvised street performance, a series of creative acts. It might be flawed. So what? Didn't we learn from the last century that purity in politics is for the fanatical few? Don't we still have much to learn from each other, no matter where we're at?

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CALL OUT TO PEOPLE OF COLOR from the #OWS POC Working Group

To those who want to support the Occupation of Wall Street, who want to struggle for a more just and equitable society, but who feel excluded from the campaign, this is a message for you.

To those who do not feel as though their voices are being heard, who have felt unable or uncomfortable participating in the campaign, or who feel as though they have been silenced, this is a message for you.

To those who haven't thought about #OccupyWallStreet but know that radical social change is needed, and to those who have thought about joining the protest but do not know where or how to begin, this is a message for you.

You are not alone. The individuals who make up the People of Color Working Group have come together because we share precisely these feelings and believe that the opportunity for consciousness-raising presented by #OccupyWallStreet is one that cannot be missed. It is time to push for the expansion and diversification of #OccupyWallStreet. If this is truly to be a movement of the 99%, it will need the rest of the city and the rest of the country.

Let's be real. The economic crisis did not begin with the collapse of the Lehman Brothers in 2008. Indeed, people of color and poor people have been in a state of crisis since the founding of this country, and for indigenous communities, since before the founding of the nation. We have long known that capitalism serves only the interests of a tiny, mostly white, minority.

Black and brown folks have long known that whenever economic troubles ‘necessitate' austerity measures and the people are asked to tighten their belts, we are the first to lose our jobs, our children's schools are the first to lose funding, and our bodies are the first to be brutalized and caged. Only we can speak this truth to power. We must not miss the chance to put the needs of people of color-upon whose backs this country was built-at the forefront of this struggle.

The People of Color Working Group was formed to build a racially conscious and inclusive movement. We are reaching out to communities of color, including immigrant, undocumented, and low-wage workers, prisoners, LGTBQ people of color, marginalized religious communities such as Muslims, and indigenous peoples, for whom this occupation ironically comes on top of another one and therefore must be decolonized. We know that many individuals have responsibilities that do not allow them to participate in the occupation and that the heavy police presence at Liberty Park undoubtedly deters many. We know because we are some of these individuals. But this movement is not confined to Liberty Park: with your help, the movement will be made accessible to all.

If it is not made so, it will not succeed. By ignoring the dynamics of power and privilege, this monumental social movement risks replicating the very structures of injustice it seeks to eliminate. And so we are actively working to unite the diverse voices of all communities, in order to understand exactly what is at stake, and to demand that a movement to end economic injustice must have at its core an honest struggle to end racism.

The People of Color working group is not meant to divide, but to unite, all peoples. Our hope is that we, the 99%, can move forward together, with a critical understanding of how the greed, corruption, and inequality inherent to capitalism threatens the lives of all peoples and the Earth.

The People of Color working group was launched on October 1, 2011. We can be reached by email at [email protected]. We can also be found online here. We meet Sundays @ 3 PM and Wednesdays @ 6:30 PM under the large red structure in Liberty Square.

Pepper-Sprayed For Peace  -  by David Swanson

http://warisacrime.org/pepper

"...We've got demands as clear as a blue sky:

Occupy Wall Street

Occupy K Street

Occupy Everything

And Never Give It Back!"

This awesome. As some people know, Friday night to sundown tonight was Yom Kippur, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar. Down at Wall Street, they organized a grassroots service that attracted up to a thousand worshippers out there in the streets. Rabbis from Chabad (a Hasidic group) brought tents and stayed over so that they could help lead the service, a local synagogue brought down prayer books for them to use.

You can see pics and videos here: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/joe-winkler/yom-kippur-occupy-wall-street_...

And here: http://972mag.com/over-1000-jews-gather-at-wall-st-for-occupyyomkippur-k...

Chabad has stated publicaly that their participation at the Occupy Wall Street event was not to either support or oppose the protests but simply to recognize that there were many Jews in attendance who might not otherwise be able to observe Yom Kippur and that they wanted to be there to support them as Jews and provide for their spiritual needs. Chabad is quite well-known for this sort of thing and have centers all around the world and do things like prison outreach, etc.

As to the paragraph you quoted above, it's fairly meaningless. Yeah, they "defend Israel's right to exist" just as they defend Canada's right to exist and America's right to exist and Japan's right to exist. And, yes, I'm sure many Chabad adherents in Israel serve in the IDF because Israel has mandatory military service for most citizens. Though, I'd wager that Chabad's participation in the IDF is less than that of the population as a whole.

Boom Boom wrote:

I love it when humour is used to get a point across.

 

We need more "occupations" of mass media programs like this.