The post SEEKING MAPS AT THE END OF THE WORLD appeared first on Void Network.

The first one is that equality is not a goal to be reached. It is not a common level, an equivalent amount of riches or an identity of living conditions that must be reached as the consequence of historic evolution and strategic action. Instead it is a point of departure. This first principle immediately ties up with a second one: equality is not a common measure between individuals, it is a capacity through which individuals act as the holders of a common power, a power belonging to anyone. This capacity itself is not a given whose possession can be checked. It must be presupposed as a principle of action but it is only verified by action itself. The verification does not consist in the fact that my action produces equality as a result. It enacts equality as a process. I act, we act as if all human beings had an equal intellectual capacity. Emancipation first means the endorsement of the presupposition: I am able, we are able to think and act without masters. But we are able to the extent that we think that all other human beings are endowed with the same capacity. Second, emancipation means the process through which we verify this presupposition. Equality is not given, it is processual. And it is not quantitative, it is qualitative.

The idea of emancipation dismisses the opposition made by the so-called “liberal” tradition between freedom thought of as the inner autonomous power and dignity of the individual and equality thought of as the constraint of the collective over individuals. “Free” is just like “equal”: it does not designate a property of individuals. It designates the form of their action and of their relation to other individuals. The presupposition of equal capacity is a principle of shared freedom opposed to the presupposition that the human beings can only act rationally as individuals and cooperate rationally in a community according to a principle of subordination. “Autonomy” has been a key concept in modern emancipatory politics. But it must be understood correctly. It does not mean the autonomous power of a subject as opposed to external forces: it means a form of thinking, practice and organization free from the presupposition of inequality, free from the hierarchical constraint and the hierarchical belief. It means the opposition of two kinds of commonsense and two common worlds, one based on the process of verification of inequality and the other based on the process of verification of equality. This is what is entailed in the concept of disagreement that I proposed to conceptualize the political conflict. Disagreement is not a conflict of forces, nor even a conflicts of ideas and values. It is a conflict between two common worlds or two common senses. This is what is meant by the scenario of secession of the Roman plebeians on the Aventine that I put at the center of my analysis of what “disagreement” means. In the commonsense which grounds the domination of the patricians, there can be no discussion between the patricians and the plebeians because the plebeians do not speak. They just make noise. The presupposition of inequality is not a simple idea, it is embodied in the concrete reality of a sensory world so that the plebeians must not simply argue that they are speaking beings too but also invent a whole dramaturgy to create the sensory world where the heretofore unthinkable- and even imperceptible- fact that they speak is made perceptible.

This idea of emancipation makes us think of politics in terms of conflict of worlds in contrast to the dominant idea that assimilates it to a conflict of forces. It is a conflict of common worlds. Social emancipation is not the choice of community against individualism. The very opposition of community to individualism is pointless. A form of community is always a form of individuality at the same time. The point is not about the presence or absence of social links, it is about their nature. Capitalism is not the reign of individuality: it organizes a common world of its own, a common world based on inequality and constantly reproducing it, so that it appears as the world – the real existing world in which we live, move, feel, think and act. It is the already existing world with its mechanisms and its institutions. In front of its sensible evidence the world of equality appears as an always tentative world that must be perpetually re-drawn, reconfigured by a multiplicity of singular inventions of acts, relations and networks which have their proper forms of temporality and their proper modes of efficiency. That’s why the secession of the plebeians on the Aventine is paradigmatic: the world of equality is a “world in the making”, a world born of specific breaches in the dominant commonsense, of interruptions of the “normal” way of the world. It implies the occupation of specific spaces, the invention of specific moments when the very landscape of the perceptible, the thinkable and the doable is radically reframed. The conflict of worlds is dissymmetrical in its principle.

But the fact is that this dissymmetry has long been obscured by the evidence of a middle term that seemed to be common to the world of equality and the world of inequality and also to designate at the same time a world and a force. That term was work- with its twin, named labour. On the one hand, work was the name of the force that capitalism gathered and organized for its own benefit and the reality of the condition of those who were exploited by capitalism. But, on the other hand, it was the force that could be re-assembled against that capitalist power, reassembled both as a force of struggle in the present and the form of life of the future. In such a way the world of labour appeared to be both the product of inequality and the producer of equality. The two processes were made one single process. The Marxist tradition set up this conjunction within the “progressive” scenario according to which inequality is a means, a historical stage to go through, in order to produce equality. Capitalism was said to produce not only the material conditions of a world of equal sharing of the common riches but also the class that would   overthrow it and organize the common world to come. To play this role, the workers’ organisation had to take up and internalize, first in the present of struggle, next in the future of collective production the virtue that had been instilled into them by capitalism, the virtue of factory discipline.

The anarchist tradition opposed to that view of inequality producing equality another view emphasizing the constitution of free collectives of workers anticipating the community to come through both egalitarian forms of organization and the constitution in the present of forms of cooperative work and other forms of life. But this counter-position still rested on the idea of the “middle term”: the idea of work as being at once a form of life, a collective force of struggle and the matrix of a world to come. It is clear that work can no more be posited to-day as the identity of a force and a world, the identity of a form of struggle in the present and a form of life of the future. Much has been said about either the end of work or its becoming immaterial. But capitalism did not become immaterial even if part of its production is knowledge, communication, information and so on. Material production did not disappear from the common world that it organizes. Instead it was relocated, far from its ancient locations in Old Europe, in new places where the work force was cheaper and more used to obeying. And immaterial production also implies both classic forms of extraction of plus-value from underpaid workers and forms of unpaid labour provided by the consumers themselves. Work did not disappear. Instead it was fragmented, torn out and dispersed in several places and several forms of existence separated from one another so as to constitute no more a common world.

Along with this economic disruption came the legislative reforms adopted all over the world to make work again a private affair. Those reforms  did not simply remove  the rights and the social benefits acquired by the workers’ struggles of the past, they tended to turn work, wages, job contracts and pensions into a mere individual affair, concerning workers taken one by one and no more a collective. Work has not disappeared but it has been stripped of the power that made it the materially existing principle of a new world, embodied in a given community. This means that we are now obliged to think of the process of emancipation, the process of equality creating its own world as a specific process, disconnected from the transformations of the global economic process. We are also facing the difficulty of dealing with this situation. I think that this new situation and the difficulty to deal with it are perfectly expressed by the slogans that have resonated in several languages during the recent movements: “democracia real ya”, “Nuit debout”, “occupy everything” or “Na min zisoume san douli”. All of them take their efficiency in an ambiguous interface between the logic of the conflict of forces and a logic of opposition of worlds.

“Occupy” and “occupation” are the most telling examples of this ambiguity.  They come from the historical tradition of working class struggle. The “sit-in strikes” of the past strikes when workers occupied the workplace, made a conflict of forces identical with a demonstration of equality. Not only did the strikers block the mechanism of exploitation but also  they affirmed a collective possession of the workplace and the instruments of work and they turned the place dedicated to work and obedience into a place for free social life. The new “occupation” takes up the principle of transforming the function of a space. But this space is no more an inside space, a space defined within the distribution of economic and social activities. It is no more a space of concrete fight between Capital and Labour. As Capital has increasingly become a force of dislocation which destroys the places where the conflict could be staged, occupation now takes place in the spaces that are available: those buildings that the contingencies of the real estate market has left empty or the streets which are normally destined to the circulation of the individuals and the commodities – and sometimes to the demonstrations of the protesters. The occupying process transforms those spaces destined to the circulation of persons, goods and value into places where people stay and affirm by the very fact of staying their opposition to the capitalist powers of circulation and dislocation.

The name “occupation” is still the same and it still about perverting the normal use of a space but the occupying process is no more a conflict of forces to take over a strategic place in the process of economic and social reproduction. It has become a conflict of worlds, a form of symbolic secession that is both materialized and symbolised in a place aside. Occupy Wall Street took place in a park situated besides the center of this financial power that has destroyed the factories that previously were the site of occupation movements. The Spanish movement of the Indignados created, during an electoral campaign, assemblies presenting themselves as the seat of “real democracy now”. Real democracy was pitted against the self-reproduction of the representative caste. But “real democracy” also was, in the Marxist tradition, the future of material equality opposed to bourgeois “formal democracy”. It was a future promised as a consequence of the takeover of the State power and the organisation of collective production. Now it designates a form of relation between human beings that must be practiced in the present both against and besides the hierarchical system of representation. Real democracy in a sense became more formal than the “formal democracy” stigmatized by the Marxist tradition. Not only did it equate the enactment of equality with the form of the assembly where all individuals have an equal right but it imposed a number of rules such as the equality of time allowed to all speakers and the power for individuals to block the decision of the majority.

Occupation has become the name of a secession. But that secession is no more the action of a specific community claiming their rights. Instead it appears to be the materialization of an aspiration to the common, as if the common were something lost, something that had to be reconstructed through the specific act of the assembling of a multitude of anonymous individuals publicly performing their being equal as the same as their being-in-common. That’s why that secession, that being-aside, was expressed in paradoxical terms, and notably by the strange slogan adopted by many assemblies as the affirmation of real democracy: ”Consensus instead of leaders”. It seems paradoxical to posit consensus as the specific virtue of the dissensual assembly gathered in occupied spaces. It can be objected that the dissensus precisely consists in the constitution of another form of community based on horizontality and participation. But the problem of democracy is not so much about the number of people that can agree on the same point as it is about the capacity to invent new forms of collective enactment of the capacity of anybody.

By underlining this paradox, I am not willing to disparage those movements. Some people have pitted against the pacifism of the consensual assemblies the necessity of violent action directly confronting the enemy. But the “confrontation with the enemy itself” can be thought of and practiced in different ways and most of the forms of direct action opposed to the pacific assemblies – for instance destructions of bank automats, shop windows or public offices – had the same character as them: they were also symbolic expressions of an opposition of worlds rather than strategic actions in a struggle for power.  Other people have precisely criticized this lack of strategy; they said that those movements could change nothing to Capitalist domination and they made new calls for the edification of avant-garde organizations aimed at taking over the power. But such an answer is unable to solve the paradoxes of emancipation. The strategic world view that sustains it is a view of inequality producing equality. That strategy has been enacted by the communist parties and the socialist states of the XXth century and we all know their results. Inequality only produces inequality and it does it ceaselessly. Moreover this strategic world view has lost the basis on which it rested, namely the reality of work/labour as a common world.

We are now facing again the dissymmetry between the process of equality and the process of inequality. Equality does not make worlds in the same way as inequality. It works, as it were, in the intervals of the dominant world, in superimposition to the “normal” – meaning the dominant – hierarchical – way of world making. And one of the main aspects of the dissymmetry is precisely the fact that the process of equality dismisses the very separation of the ends and the means on which the strategy of inequality producing equality is predicated. This is what freedom means ultimately .Freedom is not a matter of choice made by individuals. It is a way of doing.  A free action or a free relation is an action or a relation that finds its achievement in itself, in the verification of a capacity and no more in an external outcome. In the hierarchical societies of the past it was the privilege of a small category of human beings, called the “active men” in contrast to all those who were subjected to the reign of necessity.  In modern times, freedom was democratized first in the aesthetic domain with the Kantian and Schillerian category of free play as an end in itself and a potentiality belonging to everyone. Then the young Marx did more as he made it the very definition of communism that he equated with the end of the labour division: communism, he said in the Paris Manuscripts means the humanisation of the human senses; it is the state of things in which this capacity of humanisation is deployed in itself instead of being used as a simple means for earning one’s living. And he illustrated it with the case of these communist workers in Paris who gathered at a first level to discuss their common interests but did it more deeply to enjoy their new social capacity as such.

True enough Marx’s analysis relied on the identification of work as the essential human capacity. When work can no more play this role, the task of creating a world where the ends of the action are no more distinct from their means may seem to become paradoxical in itself. The free and equal community is something that can no more rely on a given empirical substratum. It must be created as an object of will. But, on the other hand, this will can no more be posited in the terms of the means and ends relation. That’s why it tends to become a global desire for another form of human relations. This turn was best illustrated in the Occupy Wall Street movement by the multiple extensions of the use of the verb “occupy” that made it the signifier of a global conversion to another way of inhabiting the world: “occupy language”, “occupy imagination”, “occupy love”, and eventually “Occupy everything” which seems to mean: change your way of dealing with everything and with all existing forms of social relationships. Perhaps this enigmatic slogan finds its best translation in the Greek slogan “Na min zisoume can douli” (“Don’t live any more like slaves”). This sentence did not only invite to rebel against the intensification of the capitalist rule. It invited to invent here and now modes of action, ways of thinking and forms of life opposed to those which are perpetually produced and reproduced by the logic of inequality, the logic of capitalist and state domination.

I think that this request found a response in the invention of this form called “free social space” – a form that took on a particular cogency in the social movements of this country. What makes this notion significant in my view is that it calls into question the traditional oppositions between the necessities of the present and the utopias of the future or between harsh economic and social reality and the “luxury” of “formal “democracy. Those who opened such spaces made it clear that they did not only wanted to respond to situations of need, dispossession and distress created by the intensification of the capitalist rule. They did not want only to give shelter, food, health care, education or art to those who were deprives of those goods but to create new ways of being, thinking and acting in common. We can draw from this a wider definition of this form: a free social space is a space where the very separation of spheres of activity – material production, economic exchange, social care, intellectual production and exchange, artistic performance, political action, etc. – is thrown into question. It is a space where assemblies can practice forms of direct democracy intended no simply to give an equal right of speech to everybody but to make collective decisions on concrete matters. In such a way a form of political action tends to be at the same time the cell of another form of life. It is no more a tool for preparing a future emancipation but a process of invention of forms of life and modes of thinking in which equality furthers equality.

What this sentence asks us to do is to change all the forms of organization of life and the modes of thinking that are determined by the logic of inequality, the logic of capitalist and state domination.

Of course we know that these cells of a new social life are constantly subjected to internal problems and external threats. This “already present future” is always at once a precarious present. But it is pointless, I think, to see there the proof that all is vain as long as a global revolution has not “taken” the power and destroyed the Capitalist fortress. This kind of judgement is a way of putting the fortress in our heads, of instituting a circle of impossibility by proclaiming that nothing can be changed before everything has been changed. Emancipation has always been a way of inventing, amidst the “normal” course of time another time, another manner of inhabiting the sensible world in common. It has always been a way of living in the present in another world instead of deferring its possibility. Emancipation only prepares a future to the extent that it hollows in the present gaps which are also grooves. It does so by intensifying the experience of other ways of being, living, doing and thinking. The free social spaces created by the recent movements inherit the world forms – cooperatives of production and forms of popular education – created by the workers’ movements of the past and notably by anarchist movements. But our present can no more share the belief that sustained the forms of self-organization of the past. It can no more rely on the presupposition that  Capitalism produces the conditions of its own destruction and that work constitutes an organic world of the future already in gestation  in the belly of the old world. More than ever the world of equality appears to be the always provisory product of specific inventions. Our present urges us to rediscover that the history of equality is an autonomous history. It is not the development of strategies predicated on the technological and economic transformations. It is a constellation of moments- some days, some weeks, some years which create specific temporal dynamics, endowed with more or less intensity and duration. The past left us no lessons, only moments that we must extend and prolong as far as we can.

*The present text is the speech of Jacques Rancière at B-FEST (International Antiauthoritarian Festival of Babylonia Journal) that was held on 27/05/17 in Athens with the title “Democracy, Equality, Emancipation in a Changing World”. The Greek translation can be found here.

source: http://www.babylonia.gr/2017/06/11/jacques-ranciere-democracy-equality-emancipation-changing-world/

The post Jacques Rancière: Democracy, Equality, Emancipation in a Changing World- talk at Bfest 2017 appeared first on Void Network.

Around 50 Occupy protesters stormed a derelict court building in London today after driving there in a tank on a mission to bring ‘those responsible’ for the economic crisis to justice.

They have vowed to hold mock trials at Old Street Magistrates’ Court for alleged corrupt politicians and greedy bankers using real solicitors before a retired judge.

The group also includes a new offshoot comprising ex-servicemen who call themselves ‘Occupy veterans’.

• Claiming squatters’ rights after getting into Old Street Magistrates’ Court
• Vow to try ‘the one per cent’ they blame for economic crisis
• Will use real solicitors as prosecution before a retired judge
• Protester: ‘Government failed to bring those responsible to justice, so we felt the people should do it instead.’

The protesters have already unfurled a giant ‘Occupy Everywhere’ banner along the roof of the courthouse, although legal notices put on doors establishing their ‘rights’ as squatters had been ripped down by noon.

They scribbled the names of bankers and politicians on chalkboards outside the court’s cells.

Occupy member Adam Fitzmaurice, a 28-year-old music industry management student, said: ‘We are going to use the courthouse to put some people on trial.

‘The government has failed to bring those responsible to justice, so we felt the people should do it instead. We’ve got a retired judge and real solicitors.’

But asked whether they expected their ‘defendants’ to attend, fellow Occupy protester Ronan McNern admitted: ‘We might have to try them in absentia.’

He added: ‘We are targeting the people we feel have been let off or not been brought to justice – it could be bankers, politicians or companies.

‘These are not mock trials. These are trials with qualified solicitors. It’s not about staging anything. The accused will be invited to attend.’

Mr McNern denied the building was a glorified squat, saying: ‘This building has been empty since 1996, which is a travesty given what is currently going on.

‘This is about inviting the public in, just as we did with the ‘bank of ideas’ in the disused UBS building.’

A statement posted on the group’s website said: ‘As Occupy London Stock Exchange occupation prepares to present its case at the High Court today, members of Occupy London have liberated a disused court house – Old Street Magistrates’ Court – in London’s East End alongside a group of military veterans, Occupy Veterans.

‘The opening of Occupy London’s fourth occupation, will see the movement conducting ‘trials of the one per cent’ in the abandoned magistrates’ court building which has lain empty since 1996 despite its prime location and Grade II listing.’

A Met Police spokesperson said: ‘Officers were called to a disused building on Old Street this morning following a report of squatters in place.

‘Officers from Hackney attended the scene. No arrests have been made.’

The results of a poll published today shows that nearly two-thirds of Christians surveyed (63 per cent) thought the Church of England should do more to speak out against the financial sector.

This compared to just one in five (22 per cent) respondents who disagreed.

Peter Kerridge, CEO of Premier Christian Media Trust, which commissioned the survey, said: ‘The Church of England found themselves in a difficult position when taken by surprise by the protesters encampment.

‘However the Bishop of London’s intervention did make a positive difference to what could have become a truly disastrous situation.

‘The results clearly show that Christians believe the Church could have responded better to the protesters as well as doing more to combat corruption within some parts of the financial sector.

‘Even David Cameron, recently acknowledged that the absence of a Christian moral code allowed some bankers and politicians to behave immorally to the detriment of British society.

‘The Prime Minister’s speech has now given the Church of England the perfect opportunity to take a stand against this corruption on behalf of the Christian community and beyond.’

article source: Daily Mail (U.K.)

The post Occupy protesters take over disused London courthouse to hold ‘mock trials’… after arriving by TANK! appeared first on Void Network.

SOLIDARITY FROM VOID NETWORK FOR ALL COMRADES IN GERMANY AND HAMBURG THAT FIGHT AGAINST GERMAN STATE IN DEFENSE OF ROTE FLORA AND ALL OCCUPIED SOCIAL CENTERS OF EUROPE! WE WILL NEVER SURRENDER! 
VOID NETWORK
(ATHENS,LONDON,NEW YORK, RIO DE JANEIRO)


November 23rd

On Saturday, nearly 6,000 protesters marched in the city centre of Berlin during the annual demo in remembrance of comrade Silvio Meier, who was killed by neo-Nazis in 1992. However, on the same day, approximately 150 thugs from the neo-Nazi scene held a rally in one of their strongholds, Schöneweide, against asylum seekers and a recent attack on a prominent Nazi (Björn Wild, who was beaten up by antifas on the street). The fascists waved Greek and Golden Dawn flags next to other nationalist emblems. The antifascist counter-demo on location was rather small in numbers.

Housing instead of concentration camps…

November 24th

In Berlin, the refugee camp at Oranienplatz has been in imminent danger of eviction already since late November 2013. Refugees and people in solidarity are determined to keep the square as the basis of their struggle against the German asylum policy. However, Kreuzberg mayor Monika Herrmann of the Green Party (Bündnis 90/Die Grünen) asked the cops to prepare a raid on the entire camp. She also stated that leftist radicals try to take advantage of the situation… Following these developments, heavy police violence was unleashed at Orienplatz, however activists counterattacked on many occasions.

The refugee camp at Oranienplatz exists for over a year now, and is a point of exchange between residents of Kreuzberg and refugees. There were several political attempts to end this square occupation, with subsequent police attacks. In summer of 2013, there was even a racist knife attack on a participant in the protest camp. The camp began after people in isolation camps, trapped by the restrictive German residency laws, broke out in order to march to Berlin. Refugees have made the camp both a living space and a site of struggle, and have also occupied a nearby school building (that was previously unused), in order to have an inside space during the winter. Both the camp and the occupied school building had been given official “tolerance” by the supposedly pro-refugee Green Party government of the district, in the face of large-scale support. After a disused building in Wedding was offered as winter housing to the refugees by a charity group, the Greens took the opportunity to claim that both the camp and the school should be evicted. The eviction threat comes despite the fact that the building offered only has space for 80 people from the camp, not everyone, and that the residents of the camp made it clear that they have no desire to leave the central and visible location in Oranienplatz to be put away in a house located on the northern edges of the city. However the State is using the rhetoric of democracy and charity to make it seem as if they are helping the protesting refugees, even as they call the police to evict them.

On the night of the eviction attempt the camp at Oranienplatz released the following statement:

“Today 24/11 in the early evening the refugee camp was almost evacuated by the police. The district mayor – Monika Herrmann of the Greens – has ended the official tolerance of the protest camp and has asked the police for help with the eviction. Through a massive mobilization and a large crowd in solidarity at Oranienplatz, an eviction was able to be prevented for the moment. The district government and the police say that the eviction will take place neither tonight, nor tomorrow 25/11 in the early morning. But we cannot rely on that! It is clear that the camp is not protected anymore by the district and that the mayor is ready to destroy it. It is also clear that the camp is a disturbance to the government of Berlin. Even if the district government will not evict it, the mayor of Berlin might do it instead. Mrs. Herrmann was at the camp this afternoon and talked to refugees and supporters. She received the following information: The house that has been offered to some people of the camp as a replacement is only large enough for 80 people. At least 30 refugees returned to the camp because there was no room for them in that shelter. Additionally, some refugees have made clear since the beginning of the negotiations for a ‘replacement object’ that a replacement is not an option for them. Rather, they want to stay and protest at Oranienplatz until their demands (abolish restricted residency requirements, shut down isolation camps, and stop all deportations) are met. Even though the mayor already knew that a larger number of people want to, or have to, continue living at Oranienplatz, she called for a police action. The Green Party, which claims to act for the rights of refugees, has trampled on them in this case. Since the beginning of the negotiations, we have viewed the limited access to a replacement house as an attempt to separate us. Those who are responsible have been informed that it is not an option for some people to leave Oranienplatz. Mrs. Herrmann reacted with the accusation that the struggle of refugees in Berlin has been taken over by left-wing radicals and is being instrumentalized by them. Therefore she has denied the refugees the ability to act politically and in a self-determined manner, even though they have directed their criticism and their demands directly to her. She has also launched a media campaign to de-legitimize the protest. It is an often used procedure: divide and conquer – integrate those who are satisfiable with an emergency shelter for the winter, and deny and suppress those who attempt to change the system; those who fight for equal rights for everyone; those who have demonstrated for more than one year at Oranienplatz. (…) Mrs. Herrmann and all politicians should understand that it is the strength of the protest that refugees and supporters can come together. The protest camp breaks isolation. The demands for open borders and the right to asylum are not those of a small minority. They are unevictable, solidary, and international! (…) Viva la revolución! Viva el Orienplatz! Freedom of Movement for Everybody!”

When the word of the eviction spread, hundreds of supporters spontaneously mobilized to defend the camp and began arriving at Oranienplatz. The police backed down from the eviction, but those who had showed up to defend the camp launched a spontaneous demonstration through Kreuzberg. Between 500 and 600 people marched through the area and broke through police lines several times when the police attempted to stop the demonstration. As during the last several spontaneous demonstrations in Berlin, barricades were constructed as the demo passed through the neighbourhood. Eventually the cops, overwhelmed and facing kicks and punches from the crowd, used pepper spray heavily and at least 5 comrades were arrested and many injured. That night the nearby office of the Green Party was attacked with paint.

The same day, a solidarity demonstration took place in Frankfurt am Main with 80 participants, and in Leipzig a solidarity demo of more than 150 people took place.

November 25th

Another, more pacified, demonstration of several hundred people took place in Berlin after the refugees gave a press conference declaring their intent to stay at Oranienplatz until their demands have been met: closing all isolation camps, stopping all deportations, the right to work in Germoney, and the abolition of restrictive residency laws. (Related announcement, from 29/11, here.)

Further solidarity actions took place in Frankfurt, where a demonstration of 100 marched to the local offices of the Green Party and the SPD (Social Democratic Party).

November 30th

Over 250 people participated in an antiracist demonstration in Bochum. The march went through the inner city, where lots of people who were shopping on the Christmas market received flyers and listened to the speeches. In one speech, a refugee from Africa talked about the current situation in the camp in Heiligenhaus where she has to live. She thanked everybody for their support and invited people to come to the camp, take a look at her situation and to talk about how to organize the struggle in the future.

Red banner reads: “Borderless solidarity instead of narrowed nationalism”; white banner reads: “Our welfare is based on exploitation – Economic refugees welcome” (in response to a racist ‘argument’ claiming that most of the migrants are only seeking state welfare benefits, and naming them ‘economic refugees’). More pictures here.

The weekly demonstration of the group “Lampedusa in Hamburg” became an Advent Demo on Saturdays (before the holiday season, refugees and people in solidarity took to the streets every Wednesday in the city).

On 30/11, nearly 1,000 people participated in that march. Later on, some 50 people demonstrated spontaneously for about ten minutes on the route of the Christmas parade, on the main shopping street. They unfurled banners and shouted slogans for the rights of refugees to stay. No detentions were reported.

December 1st

An antiracist unauthorized demonstration was stopped by cops at the Altona Christmas market.

December 7th

The second advent demo of Lampedusa refugees took place in Hamburg, counting with the participation of 700 people.

About 50 people carried out a spontaneous demo in the afternoon through the inner-city streets of Mönckebergstraße and Jungfernstieg. They carried a banner reading “Fire and flames to the Hamburg’s Senate!” The demo was soon kettled by the police, and participants ended their action.

December 11th

An unauthorized demonstration of about 50 people walked through the Christmas market of Bielefeld. The participants handed out leaflets regarding the German State’s key role in exploitation and war that are forcing people to seek refuge in other places. Police did not notice the action at all.

December 12th

Nearly 3,500 school students in Hamburg took to the streets during school strike, and demonstrated their solidarity with refugees. They went in front of the headquarters of Hamburg’s SPD and shouted combative slogans at them…

A spontaneous demonstration was held later that evening in the Schanze district in defense of the Rote Flora project.

December 14th

The third advent demo of the Lampedusa refugee group in Hamburg was bullied by a heavy police force with dog units. The robocops used also pepper spray. Protesters dropped a big banner from a building, reading: “We Love the Right to Stay!”

More footage from the streets of Hamburg shows a spontaneous demonstration of a few people trying to get to the main shopping street and into a mall. Second part of this video by utopieTV covers the police response the next evening—hundreds of cops protecting the Christmas parade from any kind of protest, and people being detained for disturbing the peace:

December 15th

In a lively protest march in Berlin, around 1,500 people moved from the camp on Oranienplatz to the offices of interior senator Henkel, member of the major party CDU (Christian Democratic Union), in Mitte. The refugee camp on Oranienplatz was set for eviction between the 15th and 16th of December, but apparently Henkel has scheduled the eviction for mid January 2014.

In Hamburg, all residents of the Esso houses in St. Pauli were evicted and forced to move to hotels or relatives, of course getting no help from the Senate.

December 17th

A refugee lady (not so enthusiastic with activists…) pleads for help from the occupied school in Berlin, in response to yet another police raid:

December 18th

From Freiburg’s prison, long-term prisoner Thomas Meyer-Falk addressed a message of solidarity in view of the demonstration on December 21st in the city of Hamburg.

December 20th

One day before the big demonstration on December 21st, investor Gert Baer and owner Klausmartin Kretschmer demanded the eviction of the Rote Flora squat. Even though it would take them months to get a judicial decision on such an eviction, their ultimatum was a direct provocation.

Late in the evening, the Davidwache cop station at the Reeperbahn was effectively attacked by more than 200 people (see videos here: i, ii).

December 21st

The main demo was scheduled for 2pm, starting at the Rote Flora squat, located on Schulterblatt street in the Schanze district, but there were a couple more calls for street protest before and after this one.

More than 7,000 participated in Saturday’s protest (others estimate a total of 10,000 people) against attempted eviction of the Rote Flora squat, a building occupied for over 24 years, threatened to be sold by owner Klausmartin Kretschmer. Additionally, the mobilization referred to the right to stay for refugees and the Esso houses at the Reeperbahn, but was also directed against gentrification, daily surveillance, and repression within the “danger zones” (authorities are calling parts of Hamburg danger zones, like the area where the Rote Flora squat is located). Meanwhile, in the early hours of Sunday, December 15th, the Esso houses were evacuated by police and municipal authorities on the pretext of danger of collapse.

On December 21st, the police attacked a large contingent of protesters shortly after the beginning of the noon demo in the Schanze district, to prevent people from continuing the protest. The Hamburg police announced that the demonstration “started too early” and was therefore stopped; later they claimed that first they were attacked, and then unleashed a crackdown. Truth is the demo was halted at circa 20 meters from the Rote Flora squat, when the cops used water cannons, baton charges and pepper spray against protesters. Despite the repression blows, many demonstrators fought back, and it came to strong clashes. Police forces were pelted with stones, bottles, fireworks, smoke-bombs, and other objects. In addition, construction barriers and other materials were used for street barricades. The situation went out of control, and cops were massively attacked. Amid street battles, two cops reportedly drew their weapons at people (a rumor regarding a warning shot has not been confirmed), and repression forces kettled almost the whole of Schanze. Many protesters were heavily injured by cops, while anti-riot squads attempted to detain demonstrators en masse, but mostly to split blocs and chase people away.

The Hamburg police announced that 19 people were taken into custody, investigated for ‘committing a breach of the peace’. The legal aid team (Ermittlungsausschuss Hamburg) counted approximately 260 arrests/detentions, and more than 500 injured protesters. One of the arrestees, who did not have German documents, was kept in custody.

Hamburg’s free radio FSK transmitted live reports from the streets all day.
More videos here: i, ii, iii. More photos here.

Later that evening, protesters tried to carry out further rallies and spontaneous actions in the inner city, and some skirmishes broke out. Spontaneous gathering and barricading took place in front of the Esso houses, too. Around the St. Pauli district, some of the actions included attacks on the Empire Riverside Hotel, stores, cars (smashed windows), the Hamburger Sparkasse (Haspa) and other bank branches. Surprise demonstrations and direct actions took place the whole night. At the same time, solidarity actions were called in other parts of Germoney.

Solidarity to the Oranienplatz protest camp, the Rote Flora squat, the Esso houses initiative, and all combative refugees and migrants!


SOURCE: http://en.contrainfo.espiv.net/2013/12/23/germany-updates-from-the-streets-of-berlin-hamburg-and-a-few-other-places/

The post Germany: Updates from the streets of Berlin, Hamburg and a few other places appeared first on Void Network.

This is a youtube channel with videos from revolted Turkey
Download them, share them, see them before the censorship delete them from internet!

The social uprising in Turkey continues and our friends and comrades in Turkey need the help from all of us.
Share the authentic news from underground media sources, express your solidarity with all possible ways,
help the message of revolted Turkish people to travel as further as possible    

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aGjPubr5L5c&list=PLtMSwy96r2CaQstcSN2eJl13w9mnR3aTE
suggested videos: 5 7 14 18 25 27 31*

The post Video Channel from insurrected Turkey. Spread the News / Never Trust Mass Media! appeared first on Void Network.

In the first of a two part correspondence, John Holloway and Michael Hardt discuss some common themes that have emerged from their most recent books “Crack Capitalism” and “CommonWealth” and touch of the topics of organisation, democracy and institutionalism. The second part of the exchange will be published in Issue 15 of Shift magazine. July 2010

Dear John,
One of the things I love about ‘Crack Capitalism’, which it shares with ‘Change the World Without Taking Power’, is that its argument traces the genealogy of revolt. In other words, you start with the indignation, rage, and anger that people feel but you don’t stop there. Your argument leads revolt toward both creative practice and theoretical investigation.
On the one hand, although refusal is essential, perhaps even primary in your argument, especially the break with or exodus from capitalist social forms, every destructive force has to be accompanied by a creative one, every effort to tear down the world around us has to be aimed also toward the creation of a new one. Moreover these two processes, the destructive and the constructive, are not separable but completely embedded or entwined with each other. That is why, as you say, it makes no sense to defer creating a new society until after the complete collapse or demolition of capitalist society. Instead we must struggle now to create a new society in the shell of the old or, rather, in its cracks, its interstices.
On the other hand, you demonstrate how revolt must lead not only to practical but also to theoretical innovation. Although your book starts with an affective state and instances of practical resistance, the central argument involves a conceptual investigation, most importantly, it seems to me, about the role and potential of our productive capacities in capitalist society. I don’t mean to pose a separation here between practice and theory. In fact, your argument requires that they too are completely embedded or entwined. In order to change the world we need not only to act differently but also to think differently, which requires that we work on concepts and sometimes invent new concepts.
The core argument of the book, which distinguishes doing from labor and identifies abstraction as a primary power of capitalist domination, seems to me profoundly Marxist. It might seem paradoxical to say that because you carefully contrast your argument to orthodox Marxist traditions, situating your point instead in relation to Marx’s own writings, sometimes elucidating what he actually says and demonstrating how it goes against the orthodox Marxist tradition and at other times going beyond Marx. Although your argument stands indeed against the orthodox Marxist tradition, reading Marx against Marxism in this way and going beyond Marx puts you solidly in line (or, perhaps better, in dialogue) with a strong current of what was once called heterodox Marxist traditions that have been active since the 1960s. This is clearly apparent, for instance, in the claim, central to your argument in this book, that the course of our project for freedom lies not in the liberation of work, as is championed by Marxist orthodoxies and Soviet ideology, but the liberation from work. I see this as an essential slogan or principle of this heterodox tradition.
One thing that occurs to me is that whereas in the 1970s orthodox Marxism was indeed dominant, bolstered by the ideologues of various official communist parties, today that line of interpretation is virtually completely discredited. Instead Marxist theory today is primary characterized, in my view, by what used to be the heterodox line, which you helped develop together with your colleagues in the Conference of Socialist Economists and in collaboration with similar tendencies in Italy, Germany, and France. That’s a good thing and makes Marxist theory today more interesting and relevant.
I don’t mean by this to rein you back in within Marxism. Like you, I care little about whether my work is called Marxist or not. I often find that Marxists accuse me of being not Marxist enough and non-Marxists fault me for being too Marxist. None of that matters to me. What is important, though, is how useful I find it to read Marx’s work and it strikes me how useful it is for you too in this book.
One profound and important resonance your argument in this book shares with Marx’s writings resides in the identification of labor (or human productive capacity) as the site of both our exploitation and our power. You designate this duality by distinguishing labor (which you identify as production within a regime of capitalist abstraction) from doing (which strikes me as very similar to Marx’s notion of ‘living labor’). On the one hand, capital needs our productive capacities and could not exist and reproduce without them. Capital, in other words, does not just oppress or dominate us but exploits us, meaning that it must constantly seek to domesticate and command our productive powers within the limited frame of its social system. In your argument this is accomplished primarily by processes of abstraction. On the other hand, our productive capacities always exceed and are potentially autonomous from capital. That dissymmetry is crucial: whereas capital cannot survive without our labor, our productive capacities can potentially exist and thrive without capitalist organization. Indeed, as you demonstrate, there are always already innumerable instances of our productive autonomy that exist within the cracks or interstices of capitalist society. These are extremely important but not enough. Your project is to create alternative social networks of autonomous productive cooperation that can, as I said earlier, build a society of freedom from within capitalist society.
As I read ‘Crack Capitalism’, then, it seems to me that, whereas ‘Change the World’ adopted and extended the project for the abolition of the state, even its abolition within our own minds and practices, this book works through the project of the refusal of work — with the understanding that every rebellion against the capitalist labor regime is also, necessarily, a development of our own autonomous capacities for doing, that the destruction of the work society is coupled with the creation of a new society based on an alternative notion of production and productivity.
That brings me to a first, initial question. We know that the capitalist labor regime has extraordinarily well developed systems of social organization and cooperation, which function through discipline and control. You analyze these primarily through the lens of abstraction. The mainstream workers movements and, primarily the industrial trade unions, have also developed forms of organization and discipline into a sort of counter-power, but, according to your analysis, this too, like the capitalist regime, is dedicated to the organization of abstract labor. I think I understand this critique and agree with it in large part, with the caveat, as you say, citing the excellent book by Karl Heinz Roth published in the 1970s, that there has always also been an ‘other’ workers movement. My question, then, how can our autonomous productive practices, our doing, be organized and sustained as alternative social forms? I think you would agree that the schemes of cooperation and coordination among our practices of doing are not spontaneous but need to be organized. I would add that we need to create institutions of social cooperation, and you might agree with this too as long as I explain that by institution here I do not mean a bureaucratic structure but rather, as anthropologists use the term, a repeated social practice, a habit, that structures social relations. What institutions do we already have that fulfill this role and what kinds can we develop? And, more specifically, what relation can this have to the syndicalist traditions? The point here, of course, is not to reject entirely the traditional organizations of workers movements but, in some respects, extend and transform them. Here I would want to explore the innovations within contemporary labor organizing that point in the direction of your argument. Can we imagine instead of a traditional labor movement an association or syndicate of doers or, better, a social institution of doing? What would be its mechanisms of social cooperation and structures of organization? I’m not sure you have the answers to these questions, and I don’t pretend to myself, but I think you have some ways of thinking about how we can develop the structures and institutions of a society of doing and that is where I would first like to direct our exchange.
Best, Michael

December 2010
Dear Michael,
Thank you very much for your comments and for their tone which seems to me just right: a strong sense of shared concern and direction and a desire to move forward through exploring our differences. This reflects very much what I felt while I was reading ‘Commonwealth’: a sense of the very close touching of your preoccupations with mine, a feeling of walking arm in arm, at times too close, at times tugging in different directions, producing a sequence of bumps of admiration, enthusiasm and exasperation.
The question you raise at the end of your letter is exactly right because it hits directly on one of my main concerns while reading ‘Commonwealth’: the issue of institutions, which you and Toni emphasise a lot and which you develop especially in the last part of the book.
Our preoccupation, I think, is the same, but the answer we give is rather different. Our shared concern is: how do we go on after the explosions of rage, the jacqueries as you call them? The argentinazo of almost ten years ago, when the people in the streets of Argentina toppled one president after another to the resounding cry of ‘que se vayan todos’ (out with the lot of them); the alterglobalisation movement and the great anti-summit protests in Seattle, Cancún, Genoa, Gleneagles, Rostock and so on; the explosions of rage in the last year in Greece, France, Italy, Britain, Ireland and now, as I write, Tunisia, Egypt, Algeria. Great. We applaud, jump up and down with excitement. But then what? How do we go on? We both agree that rage is not enough, that there must be a positive moment. We both agree that the answer is not to build the party and win the next election or seize control of the state. But, if not that, then what? The answer you offer is ‘Insititutionalise. Create institutions to give duration to the achievements of the surge of revolt’. And I want to say ‘no, no, no, that is not the way to go, that is a dangerous proposal’.
Certainly I do not want to caricature what you are saying, for there is a great deal of care and subtlety in your argument. In your letter you say ‘I would add that we need to create institutions of social cooperation, and you might agree with this too as long as I explain that by institution here I do not mean a bureaucratic structure but rather, as anthropologists use the term, a repeated social practice, a habit, that structures social relations.’ But no, I do not agree with that, even taking into account your broad understanding of institutions.
Why do I not agree? Firstly, because although you argue for an extended understanding of institutionalisation, you open a door in which the distinction between the two meanings will become blurred. The repeated social practice slips easily into a bureaucratic structure and unless you create a very sharp distinction between the two (by using different words, for example), there is a danger that you legitimate this slippage. In the book, the distinction is clear at times, but at times it seems to evaporate, as in the surprising and perplexing suggestion on p.380 that UN agencies might provide a global guaranteed income (the mind boggles). Institutionalisation leads easily into a state-centred politics – how else could you even imagine achieving such a UN guarantee?
Secondly, I disagree because institutionalisation always means projecting the present on the future. Even in the soft sense of a repeated social practice, it creates an expectation that the young should behave as their parents (or older sisters and brothers) did. But no, they should not. ‘That’s not the way to do it, this is what you should do’, said the veterans of 1968 to the students in the great UNAM strike in 2000, but fortunately (or not) the students paid no attention. Institutionalisation is always a consecration of tradition, is it not? And what did Toni write years ago about tradition being the enemy of class struggle? I don’t remember exactly what or where, but I do remember thinking it was wonderful.
Thirdly, institutionalisation does not work, or not in the way that it is intended to. There is a flow of struggle, a social flow of rebellion (as my friend Sergio Tischler puts it) that cannot be controlled and that repeatedly sweeps aside institutions devised to channel it in a certain direction. My feeling is that you give too much weight to institutions in your understanding of society. Can love be institutionalised? I agree completely with your daring understanding of the revolutionary force of love, but then you must ask, can love be institutionalised? Surely not. Even if we say that we are not talking of a contract of marriage, but simply “a repeated social practice, a habit”, then probably the experience of all of us is that love constantly clashes with habit. Love may well survive in a context of repeated social practice, but only if it moves constantly in-against-and-beyond it.
Think of the World Social Forum, the prime institution to have emerged from the alterglobalisation movement. I am not particularly opposed to it and I think it can provide a useful and enjoyable meeting place, but, contrary to the intentions of most participants, it tends to promote a bureaucratization of the movement and it certainly is not the key to revolution.
Institutionalisation (broad or narrow) means trying to set life on railway tracks or highways, whereas rebellion is the constant attempt to break from that, to invent new ways of doing things. The proposal to create institutions, as I see it, says that the old roads to revolution no longer work and we must create new roads for those who follow us to walk along. But surely not: revolution is always a process of making our own paths. ‘Se hace el camino al andar’ (we make the road by walking – eds’ translation) is an integral part of the revolutionary process. I see the very idea of institutionalisation as an aspect of the organisation of human activity as abstract labour, just what we are fighting against.
‘Too easy’, you may say and of course you would be right. Does there not have to be some form of social organization? Certainly, but our forms of organisation, the forms of organisation that point towards a different society, cannot be thought of as being fixed. We have ideas and principles and experiences and directions that are more or less common to the movements against capitalism, but given that we ourselves, our practices and ideas are so marked by the society we are struggling against, the forms of organisation can only be experimental, a process of moving by trial and error and reflection.
But does there not have to be a coming together of the cracks? Yes, and I think this is an issue that is not sufficiently explored in my book. I would like to develop further at some point the question of the confluence of the cracks, both in terms of the inspirational lighting of prairie fires and the practical organisation of cooperation. But two things. I feel that institutional thinking is probably an obstacle to seeing the practice and potential of such confluence. And secondly it is important to think of the confluence as an always experimental moving from the particular, not a charting of the future that moves from the totality, as I think is the tendency in your book. We are in the cracks and pushing from there. Our problem is to break and move beyond, not to erect an alternative system of governance. We can try to follow the practices of existing movements, criticise them and see how the confluence is or is not being achieved, but we cannot establish a model for the future.
Dignity is a fleet-footed dance, I suggest in the book. But the doubt that arises is that perhaps we are not capable of such agility. Perhaps we are capable only of moving more slowly. Maybe we need institutions as crutches, so that we can consolidate each step we make. Conceivably so, but even then learning to walk is a throwing away of the crutches. We betray ourselves if we do not couple subversion with institutionalisation. If we must institutionalise, then we should subvert our own institutions in the same breath. This is akin to the question of identification. In ‘Change the World’, I accept that it may sometimes be important to affirm our identity, but only if we subvert it or go beyond it in the same breath, and what you and Toni say in your discussion of identity is similar. Institutionalise-and-subvert, then, is a formulation that I would find more attractive, but even then I do not like it. Institutionalisation may be inevitable at times, but in the tension between institutionalisation and subversion we have already taken sides. Thought is subversion. To think is to move beyond, as Ernst Bloch says – Ernst Bloch, whom you cite several times in the book, but whom Toni elsewhere unforgivably, unforgivenly characterises as a bourgeois philosopher (Antonio Negri, ‘Time for Revolution’, 2003, p. 109).
Publication, of course, is a form of institutionalisation and I do participate actively in this. In publishing my arguments, I give them a fixity. But perhaps this interchange of letters is an attempt by both of us to subvert that institutionality: the purpose is not to defend positions taken but to provoke each other to move beyond what we have already written.
And then an unavoidable theme if we are talking of institutions: what can I say of the title of your last chapter – ‘Governing the Revolution’? A horrifying oxymoron? A fiercely audacious provocation? Or is it a serious suggestion? To the extent that it seems to be a serious suggestion, it certainly provokes and horrifies me. What upsets me is that the phrase suggests a separation between governing and revolution whereas for me revolution is the abolition of this separation. Governing the revolution immediately makes me ask who, who is going to govern it? Just as your statement on p.377 that ‘humans are trainable’ also scares me, for who is to do the training? Who would govern your revolution, who would train the humans? If you say we are talking of self-governance, then fine, but why not talk then of the organisational forms of self-determination, understanding that self-determination means a process of self-education, self-transformation? But if we rephrase the question like that, then we immediately have to say that the organisational forms of self-determination are self-determining and therefore cannot be institutionalised.
Let me open a second front of concern. Democracy. You centre the discussion of revolution on the struggle for democracy. The abolition of capitalism takes a back seat, as it were, and that confuses me. You formulate the argument in chapter 5.3 in terms of a programme to save capital and then say that it is not that you are abandoning the idea of revolution, but just working with a different notion of transition. I am not clear what you mean by this different notion of transition. It sounds almost like a programme of transitional demands, a concept of achieving anti-capitalist revolution by fighting for a democracy that we know (but do not say openly) is incompatible with capitalism. The danger is that the more you talk about democracy and the less about capitalism, the more the whole question of revolution fades into the background. It seems to me much simpler to start the other way around, by saying: capitalism is a catastrophe, how do we get rid of it?
This letter is unreasonably long. Your fault, of course, for writing such a stimulating book. I look forward to your replies.
Best wishes,
John

John Holloway is a Professor in the Instituto de Ciencias Sociales y Humanidades of the Benemerita Universidad Autonoma de Puebla in Mexico.

Michael Hardt is professor of Literature at Duke University in the USA and has published several books, including ‘Empire’ and ‘Commonwealth’, with Antonio Negri.

source: Shift magazine # 14 http://shiftmag.co.uk/?p=596

The post Creating Common Wealth and Cracking Capitalism: A cross-reading by John Holloway’s, Michael Hardt / Tony Negri’s books appeared first on Void Network.

Hi comrades!

We write you to spread a Spanish´ (Mallorca) iniciative called “take the town” (tomalaciudad). It´s about take empty places (private or statal properties) and make them squares, communitary gardens, places to meet each other and work together (Exarchia´s way).

It is a political action based in assamblies, a critic of urban design, building a common space for the people.

Sorry my english is not enough to describe but this is the video with english subtitles and this is the manifest

Hope you like it. We ask you to make diffusion.

The post TAKE THE CITY! (What´s new in Spanish Revolution) appeared first on Void Network.

featuring

CROWD MANAGEMENT AND CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE GUIDELINES

• 
  
• 35 pages
• March 2003

Penal Code Section 13514.5 requires the Commission on Peace Officer Standards and Training to establish guidelines and training for law enforcement’s response to crowd management and civil disobedience.
These guidelines contain information for law enforcement agencies to consider when addressing the broad range of issues related to crowd management and civil disobedience. The guidelines do not constitute a policy, nor are they intended to establish a standard for any agency. The Commission is sensitive to the needs for agencies to have individualized policies that reflect concern for local issues. The Commission intends these guidelines to be a resource for law enforcement executives that will provide maximum discretion and flexibility in the development of individual agency policies.
…
In the United States all people have the right of free speech and assembly guaranteed by the First Amendment of the Federal Constitution and California State Constitution. Law enforcement recognizes the right of free speech and actively protects people exercising that right.
The rights all people have to march, demonstrate, protest, rally, or perform other First Amendment activities comes with the responsibility to not abuse or violate the civil and property rights of others. The responsibility of law enforcement is to protect the lives and property of all people. Law enforcement should not be biased by the opinions being expressed nor by the race, gender, sexual orientation, physical disabilities, appearances, or affiliation of anyone exercising his/her lawful First Amendment rights. Law enforcement personnel must have the integrity to keep personal, political or religious views from affecting their actions.
When it becomes necessary to control the actions of a crowd that constitutes an unlawful assembly, the commitment and responsibility of law enforcement is to control lawfully, efficiently, and with minimal impact upon the community. A variety of techniques and tactics may be necessary to resolve a civil disobedience incident. Only that force which is objectively reasonable may be used to arrest violators and restore order.
All agencies should familiarize themselves with the terms, definitions, and guidelines set forth in this document. These are the generally accepted principles by which agencies respond to lawful and unlawful assemblies. The material in this document is designed to assist law enforcement executives in addressing the broad range of issues surrounding civil disobedience.
…
Guideline #9: Use of Force: Force Options
Agencies should develop use of force policies, procedures, and training for managing crowds and civil disobedience.
Discussion:
When dealing with crowds and civil disobedience situations, law enforcement must be a disciplined and well-organized control force. The decisions to use force and the force options that may be applied in response to these incidents range from law enforcement presence to deadly force. Peace officers need not use the least intrusive force option, but only that force which is objectively reasonable under the totality of the circumstances (Scott v. Henrich, 39 F. 3d 912, 9th Cir. 1994, and Forrester v. City of San Diego, 25 F. 3d 804 9th Cir. 1994). Graham v. Connor, 490 U.S. 386, 109 S. Ct. 1865, 104 L. Ed. 2d 443 (1989). The reasonableness of the force used to affect a particular seizure is analyzed under the Fourth Amendment and determined by balancing the nature and quality of the intrusion on the individual’s Fourth Amendment interests against the governmental interests at stake.
Prior to an event, agencies should continually review their use of force alternatives in response to potential actions by protesters. Training should reflect reasonable use of force alternatives in order that officers are prepared to consider the tactics/force options available. Chew v. Gates, 27 F. 3d 1432, 1443 (9th Cir. 1994).
* A Sampling of Use of Force Considerations:

• Determine compliance or non-compliance of crowd
• Physically moving non-compliant offenders
• Anticipate possible actions of demonstrators
• Identify criminal violations involved
• Develop arrest protocol
• Develop use of pain compliance protocol
• Plan for disabled, elderly, and children demonstrators
• Determine availability of personnel
• Evaluate availability of other public safety resources
• Include protection devices for involved personnel
• Plan for the safety of bystanders
• Evaluate mobility of suspects/protestors
• Determine avenues of controlled departure
• Anticipate potential for medical resources
• Establish protocols for less lethal munitions

* A Sampling of Force Options:

• Law enforcement presence
• Verbalization
• Firm grip
• Compliance techniques
• Control devices
• Nonlethal chemical agents
• Electrical control devices
• Impact weapons/batons
• Less lethal (i.e., sting balls, grenades, bean bags)
• Deadly force

 you can read more Police and State methodologies here:

you can read more info from Public Intelligence here:
http://publicintelligence.net/

The post California Police Peace Officer Standards, Training Crowd Management and Civil Disobedience Guidelines / CROWD MANAGEMENT AND CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE GUIDELINES: shared by publicintelligence.net appeared first on Void Network.

After the raid on Zuccotti Park early this morning [ http://www.nycga.net/ ], what remains of Occupy Wall Street? The library was destroyed and thrown in the garbage; the kitchen and commune that fed and housed hundreds now gone. But what about the general assembly?

The police violence demonstrates that the relevance of Occupy Wall Street as a political situation is by no means in its attempts, failures and very real successes at direct democracy. It is instead a question: what is beyond democracy in the spirit of Occupy Wall Street?

This is not some terrible, reactionary deconstruction of the importance of consensus, discussion, and the camaraderie of equals; I merely mean to pinpoint tactics of affinity that force platforms of sharing and leveling to occur in the first place. As Rosa Luxemburg [ http://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1918/russian-revolution/ch06.htm ] said,“freedom is always and exclusively freedom for the one who thinks differently” – to not discuss this, and bring it forthwith, is to say only endless opinions matter.

Why should mere “opinions” be interesting? Why should anything like Occupy Wall Street be supposed to be a monolith of practices and ideas? Even if it were, why should it continue as it is? The power of Occupy Wall Street is in its multiplicity of democratic forms, not endless rote assemblies. The recent raids on Oakland, Portland and New York (most likely coordinated) are forcing Occupy Wall Street to radicalize its formations – autonomous affinities are necessary to propel the “movement,” but in order to do this, they cannot be wholly identified with it.

At 5PM on Saturday, October 22, a group of activists, artists and others occupied Artists Space [ http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/25/nyregion/occupy-wall-street-splinter-group-occupies-art-gallery.html ], a project of the New York State Council on the Arts which had the goal of assisting young and emerging artists. Deemed “Occupy 38” (for 38 Greene Street, Soho), over the course of the next 28 hours they drew dismissive comments, if not outright venom, from every would-be analyst of Occupy Wall Street. Village Voice feigned confusion. Anonymous decried it with “this ‘occupation’ sucks !!!” On Twitter, the hashtag #occupy38 was bizarrely filled with vitriol against the action, with numerous New York bloggers and journalists claiming understanding and sympathy with Occupy Wall Street at Zuccotti Park and the movement as a whole, but eager to denounce “Take Artists Space” as “immature” and “stupid.” Despite holding open general assemblies, Occupy 38 was quickly construed as “elitist.” Though they did not try to promote exclusivity, it is true that their goal was to circumvent the General Assembly – with its undercover cops, wet blanket liberals, and bleating obsessions with process – in order to advance the movement.

Trees for the Forest

Of course, those behind Take Artists Space were well aware of their actions – the committees and process of Zuccotti were becoming overwrought and stifling, and it was a necessity to take indoor space, especially before the cold weather began, to renew the radicality of OWS’s initial gestures. In other words, to continue a serial composition of what occupation is, not defensively and hysterically crying out “quid juris?” [ http://conservapedia.com/Questio_quid_juris ]
Occupying a more community-oriented art gallery was a calculation to avoid an immediate crackdown – Artists Space failed in this regard, eventually snitching on the occupiers, because by all anecdotal reports, they were, in summary, mean.

Why does any of this matter? The obvious response was included on the Take Artists Space tumblr [ http://artistsspaceoccupation.tumblr.com/ ]. They found themselves “amidst accusations of moral deficiency and political immaturity, the same accusations wielded by the owners of Zuccotti Park at the start of its occupation.” But this critique was unfortunately lost on the liberals of the blogosphere.

The liberals felt that Take Artists Space drew attention away from the main struggle of Occupy Wall Street and its Zuccotti Park origin story, implying that if the talisman of that place were to be taken away, the “movement” would somehow cease to grow. As though the power of the general assemblies were in their unity, and not their multiple elements! The occupations symbolically uphold their occupied spaces, but any aberration is deemed “poorly organized” adventurism by people who insist on symbols alone. The “friendly,” “radical” media relished in calling out the perceived turpitude and audacity of Take Artists Space, and effectively did the work of the police’s PR department.

But never mind that. Given the real arc of affairs supplying the backdrop to the drama that is OWS – the breakdown of global capitalism as a world system – why not support emancipatory revolt in all its forms? Given the very realistic long-term consequences of today’s events, why stunt the transformative potential of everything that emerges from capitalism’s structural contradictions?

The mistake today is to look at Greece, Spain, London, Chile, and elsewhere, and hold them in relief as parts of a whole, a single phenomenon. Actually, this is what a single phenemenon looks like as it is being ripped apart. We should participate in its coming apart – it’s not as if we could do anything to prevent it! Are there some people – even those who claim support for Occupy Wall Street – who still believe a return to the status quo is possible, but with maybe a little more democracy and jobs thrown in?

The general assemblies, while exciting and resonant, are not sacred cows. The general assemblies sustain a refusal of today’s dismal situation not only inasmuch they do just that – sustain the refusal. They must meet at the intersection of revolutionary sequence and insurrectionary act: where they are a process, they should also be an act of transgression, and where they are transgressive, they should also move toward a real goal. When they are neither, they should be scrapped for something else. They do not represent anyone, and do not speak for the movement, strictly because there is not a movement, but thousands of movements, in full floral bloom.

Still Not Getting It

Simply put, there isn’t any stopping what is under way – what is important is to foster the creation of groups, agitate and educate in and out of the workplace, and splinter whatever unity the present possesses into many other factions and affinities. Forcing encounters – those moments when business does not go as usual – is the prerogative for new assemblies and methods. Global capital preserves a situation in which there are no encounters, because business must always go as planned, and nothing exists but business. Take Artists Space was an attempt at creating an encounter – to draw out the consequences of haste and audacity, and adhering not to schisms in general, but to generating schism and playing it out until the music stops. If experimentation rubs people the wrong way when its happening, this is the symptom that something new is occurring.

The last communiqué from Occupy 38, or Take Artists Space [ http://artistsspaceoccupation.tumblr.com/post/11857646857/the-occupation-at-38-greene-street-ended-at-8pm-on ] , affirmatively reads,

We battle with saboteurs, camouflaged socialists, intellectual skepticism; and we say: Let’s occupy something else. Now we know who we can invite. The ones that don’t wish only for progress to our movement, but the efforts of our bodies to expose and threaten, to break structures and clichés which are not bound only in the arena of a bureaucratic village. In this process we are educated about tactics of friend and enemy.

It is Pollyannaish to continue to assume that everyone will be Occupy Wall Street’s friend, just as it is obtuse to believe there are enemies around every corner. We must continue to discover who our friends really are.

The first sequence of the Occupy movement, as events in Oakland and Chapel Hill attest, is over. On Take Artists Space tumblr log, the key to the action was in the language used: “Take That Which is Already Yours.” It’s impossible to “occupy” something that is already yours – but it must be taken back, indefinitely. Zuccotti Park and Oscar Grant Plaza must not be just “reoccupied” in response to this recent wave of state repression. They must be taken permanently. Now the real work begins. We must change the political situation. “Occupy Everything” is literal, and because of that, stop saying “Occupy.”




text first appeared in November 15, 2011 at ViewPoint Magazine

The post “All Power to the General Assemblies? Or, the Strange Case of Take Artists Space” by Trevor Owen Jones from ViewPoint Magazine appeared first on Void Network.