5/26 – 4 officers fired for murdering George Floyd

5/28 Univ of Minn cancels contract with police

5/28 3rd precinct police station neutralized by protestors

5/28 ATU Local 1005 refuses to bring police officers to protests, or transport arrested protesters

5/29 Activists commander hotel to provide shelter to homeless

5/29 Officer Chauvin who killed Floyd arrested

5/29 Louisville Mayor suspends “no-knock” warrants in response to polices 3/12

5/30 US Embassies across Africa condemn police murder of Floyd

5/30 MN AG Ellison takes over prosecution of the murdering officer

5/30 TWU Local 100 bus operators refuse to transport arrests protestors

5/31 2 abusive officers fired for pulling a couple out of car and tasing them

6/1 Minn public schools end contract with police

6/1 Confederate Monument removed – Birmingham, AL

6/1 CA prosecutors launch campaign to stop DA’s from accepting police union money

6/1 Tulsa Mayor Bynum agrees to not renew Live PD contract

6/1 Louisville police chief fired after shooting of David McAtee at BBQ joint

6/1 Dems and reps begin push to shut down a Pentagon program that transfers military weaponry to cancels contract with police

6/2 Minn AFL-CIO calls for the resignation of Bob Kroll, the president of the Minn police union (Bob Kroll is a vocal white supremest)

6/2 ATU Local 85 announces refusal to transport police officers or arrest protestors

6/2 Racist Ex-Mayor Rizzo statue removed

6/2 6 abusive officers charged for violence against residents and protestors – Atlanta, GA

6/2 Confederate soldier statue removed – Alexandire, VA

6/2 Robert Lee statue removed

6/2 Civil Rights investigation of Minn Police Dept launched

6/2 Resolution to prevent law enforcement from hiring officers with history of misconduct announced by San Fran DA Boudin and Supervisor Walton

6/2 Survey indicating 64% of polled sympathetic to protestors, and 47% disapprove of police handling + 54% think burning down of precinct fully or partially justified

6/2 NJ AG announces policing reforms

6/2 Minn City Council members publicly call for disbanding the police and replace safety and outreach capacity

6/3 1 officer fired for tweets promoting violence against protestors – Denver, Co

6/3 Minn Institute of Art, First Avenue, Walker Art Center end use of MPD for events

6/3 Officer Chauvin charged and taken into custody

6/3 Officer Chauvin charges upgraded to 2nd Murder, ad remaining 3 officers also charged and taken into custody

6/3 VA Gov announces removal of Robert E Lee statue

6/3 Richmond VA Mayor Stoney announces RPD reform measures: establish “Marcus” alert for folks experiencing mental health crisis, establish independent Citizen Review Board, an ordinance to remove Confederate monuments, and implement racial equity study

6/3 County commissioners deny proposal for $23 million expansion of Fulton County jail

6/3 Minn Parks and Rec cut ties with the Minn Police Dep.

6/3 US Army tells soldiers to disobey any orders to attack peaceful protestors – nationwide

6/3 LA Announces $100-150 million cut from LAPD budget, Reinvested into communities, moratorium on gang database, sharper discipline against abusive cops, in effect immediately

6/3 Seattle changes mind and withdraws request to end federal oversight/consent decree of police department

6/4 Breonna Taylor case reopened?

6/4 Portland schools superintendent ‘discontinues’ presence of armed police officers in schools

6/4 MBTA (Metro Boston) board orders that buses wont transport police to protests, or protestors to police

6/4 King County Labor Federation issue ultimatum to police unions, to admit to and address racism in Seattle PD, or be removed

6/5 NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell of the NFL admits that “we were wrong for not listening to NFL players earlier and encourage all to speak out and peacefully protest.”

AND THE FIGHT GOES ON!

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Ferguson, Missouri, erupts in violence after grand jury verdict not to charge Darren Wilson for shooting dead unarmed black teenager Michael Brown – follow live updates

VOID NETWORK expresses solidarity for the uncompromised struggle of people all over Amerikkka against the police brutality and the totalitarian “justice” regime that offers to any policeman the right to kill people in the streets with “no-charges” for centuries now! This has to end NOW, the state can not shoot us anymore and no one cares…WE CARE!
DEATH TO THE TYRANNES! FIGHT FOR FREEDOM



13.30 It’s now 7.30am in Ferguson.

• Darren Wilson, the policeman who was cleared last night of charges relating to the shooting of Michael Brown, has still not been seen.

• Police confirm that 61 people were arrested, 150 gunshots were fired, and a dozen buildings burnt.

• Following the verdict, at around 8pm in Missouri, protests were staged in New York, Chicago, California and Seattle.

13.02 An update on the arrests overnight.

St Louis County Police spokesman Brian Schellman said there were 61 arrests in Ferguson overnight, many for burglary and trespassing.

Francis Slay, the mayor of St Louis, said there were 21 arrests in his city, where some protesters broke business windows.

(…)

11.28 Jon Belmar, St Louis County police chief, has just been speaking about the damage overnight.

He said that at least a dozen buildings were torched and that he counted about 150 gunshots during a night of looting, vandalism, arson and clashes between demonstrators and police that resulted in at least 29 arrests.

Flights over the area were restricted and police struggled to contain protesters who took to the streets of Ferguson, a suburb of St Louis, smashing shop windows and torching cars and businesses despite President Barack Obama’s calls for restraint.

Although no serious injuries were reported, Mr Belmar said the rioting on Monday night and early Tuesday morning was “much worse” than disturbances which erupted in the immediate aftermath of the shooting of 18-year-old Michael Brown by police officer Darren Wilson on Aug 9.




REPORT by Raf Sanchez, Ferguson for Telegraph.uk


 For a few brief moments, the crowd outside the Ferguson police headquarters fell silent.
The cries of “hands up, don’t shoot” were hushed as hundreds of demonstrators – many concealing their faces behind balaclavas and Guy Fawkes masks – strained to hear the news coming over the car radio.
They listened as the St Louis County prosecutor announced what to many was a foregone conclusion: the white police officer who killed Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager, would not face criminal charges.

And then the crowd was silent no more.

The streets of Ferguson erupted in fury once again after a grand jury decided not to charge Officer Darren Wilson with any crime for the August shooting. 
 Demonstrators vented months of pent-up anger on the streets outside the police department where Mr Wilson once worked, looting and burning shops, setting fire to police cars and hurling bricks at the lines of riot police who challenged them.

In a grim replay of the violence that wracked this Missouri city over the summer, heavily-armed police responded to the sound of gunshots with tear gas and rolled through the streets in armoured vehicles.

Police reported hearing “heavy automatic gunfire” in Ferguson while fires broke out in neighbouring Dellwood and looting was reported in St Louis. A police officer in University City, a few miles south, was shot but it was unclear if the incident was related to the protests in Ferguson.

The clashes began shortly after 8pm, when Robert McCulloch, the St Louis County prosecuting attorney, announced that the 12 jurors – nine white and three black – had decided not to bring charges.

“They determined that no probable cause exists to file any charge against Officer Wilson,” he said.
 Mr Brown’s parents immediately released a statement saying they were “profoundly disappointed that the killer of our child will not face the consequences of his actions”.

But Michael Brown Senior and Lesley McSpadden, who have taken their campaign for justice for their son as far as the United Nations in Geneva, also appealed for calm, asking the protesters to “channel your frustration in ways that will make a positive change”.

Their plea was echoed by President Barack Obama, who made a late-night appearance at the White House to remind demonstrators that the US was “a nation built on the rule of law”.

But by the time Mr Obama appeared, the television networks were already splitting their screens between the White House briefing room and the violence on South Florissant Road in Ferguson.

Rioters began by smashing the windows of sandwich shops
directly next door to the police headquarters, ignoring the festive letters spelling out “Seasons Greetings” between two telephone poles.
But they moved quickly from breaking windows to setting fire to unprotected police cars. One young black man, who would not give his name, looked on approvingly as a squad car burned, the ammunition stored inside it crackling in the heat.
“These cops can go around and kill our people and absolutely nothing happens to them,” the young man said. “We can’t get justice in the courts so we need to take it for ourselves.”
Police had initially maintained a light presence, with only a handful of officers visible and none in riot gear.
But as the crowd’s anger mounted, a phalanx of police surged into view, carrying shields and batons and forming a line beneath the American flag outside their headquarters. 






 Soon a column of armoured vehicles began to roll north from the direction of the motorway. An oddly-nasal voice rang out over vehicle speakers and into the freezing night: “You must stop throwing projectiles at police. You are unlawfully assembled. You must disperse.”

When words proved insufficient the teargas followed. Canisters rattled at the feet of the demonstrators and painful smoke billowed out, filling throats and leaving eyes watering in pain.

The violence came in fits and starts and at times the demonstrators were happy to stand before the row of police shields and hurl abuse at the officers behind them.

The largely-black crowd saved their angriest taunts for the African-American police officers. “Traitors!” shouted one man as a black officer watch impassively from behind a visor. “If that was your son, you wouldn’t be standing there.”





Many of the young African-American men were equally disdainful of Mr Obama and his appeals for calm from hundreds of miles away.
“The President is not even one of us, I would say that to his face,” said a man who identified himself as “Faze”. He pointed to the fact Mr Obama’s father was a Kenyan immigrant, rather than the descendant of slaves. “He doesn’t get it, he doesn’t know what’s happening here.”
Darren Wilson, the police officer whose bullets ripped through the facade of what some call “post-racial” America, has been in hiding since August and did not appear after being cleared by the grand jury.
His lawyers released a statement saying that “law enforcement personnel must frequently make split-second and difficult decisions. Officer Wilson followed his training and followed the law.”

 Five hours after the grand jury announcement, a dozen buildings were reported to have been consumed by flame, along with a number of cars that were set alight.

But not all the demonstrators who appeared to protest the jury’s decision turned to violence. One large group remained outside the police station, banging drums and chanting: “This is what community looks like.”

At the corner of South Florissant Road and Suburban Avenue, Shala Jones stood holding her three year-old daughter, Lonnie.

“I’m here tonight because this is her future,” said Ms Jones, as she tucked a blanket closer around her child. “Young black children need to know they can be safe in America.” 

SOURCE: The Telegraph.uk

The post Black Lives Matters! Ferguson is burning after grand jury decision of no-charges for police officer who killed Michael Brown LIVE REPORT appeared first on Void Network.

This event, occurring on the tail end of the Occupy movement, also quickly became the post-facto excuse for extensive federal, state and municipal investigation, surveillance and ongoing repression of political dissent. Several anarchists in the Pacific Northwest were put in prison without charge in the fall of that year, only to be released months later, still with no charges filed. Houses were raided in search of anarchist literature and black hoodies. Up to a year later, people were still being followed.

I was one of the five people originally charged for crimes on May Day 2012[ii]. I’ve since pled guilty to slightly lesser charges, in order to avoid going to trial on two felonies[iii]. I pled in the fall of 2013 and completed the bulk of the sentence in the winter, spending three months in King County’s Work-Education Release (WER) Unit. Technically an “alternative to confinement,” living in WER effectively means that you are imprisoned at all times that you are not allowed out for work, school or treatment (for mental health or drug offenses).

This puts me in a unique position. Since I am one of the few people who has pled guilty to certain crimes from May 1st, 2012, including Riot, I do not necessarily face the same risks in talking about—and defending—the riot as a tactic or the impulses behind it. This by no means makes what I say below an exhaustive or fully representative account of why others may have engaged in that same riot. They mostly got away—a good thing in and of itself, though federal charges may still be pending for one window that was smashed in an empty courthouse. But this also means that they cannot speak of or defend their participation without risking repression.

To be clear: I’m not speaking on behalf of any groups who wound up engaged in the riot that occurred on May Day 2012. To my knowledge, the riot was by no means planned ahead of time, and the anti-capitalist march that the riot grew out of, technically an Occupy Seattle event, was itself planned in public meetings. I’m not even speaking on behalf of this specific riot, but instead on behalf of rioting as such, in the abstract. The question “Why Riot” is not simply: why did you engage in this riot, but, instead, why riot at all? And the perspective given here is that of a rioter.

So I’m writing here for simple reasons: to defend the riot as a general tactic and to explain why one might engage in a riot. By this I mean to defend and explain not just the window breaking, not just “non-injurious violence,” and certainly not just the media spectacle it generates, but the riot itself—that dangerous, ugly word that sounds so basically criminal and which often takes (as in London in 2011) a form so fundamentally unpalatable for civil society that it can only be understood as purely irrational, without any logic, and without possible defense.

I aim, nonetheless, to defend and explain the riot, because we live in a new era of riots. Riots have been increasing in absolute number globally for the past thirty years. They are our immediate future, and this future will spare Seattle no less than Athens or London, Guangzhou or Cairo.

Who am I?

I am a member of the poorest generation since those who came of age during the Great Depression. Born to the “end of history,” we watched the ecstatic growth of the Clinton years morph seamlessly into the New Normal of Bush and Obama.

We have no hope of doing better than our parents did, by almost any measure. We have inherited an economy in secular stagnation, a ruined environment on the verge of collapse, a political system created by and for the wealthy, skyrocketing inequality, and an emotionally devastating, hyper-atomized culture of pyrrhic consumption.

The most recent economic collapse has hit us the hardest. According to a study by the Pew Research Center, the median net worth of people under 35 fell 55 percent between 2005 and 2009, while those over 65 lost only a fraction as much, around 6 percent[iv]. The result is that if you calculate debt alongside income, wealth inequality is today increasingly generational. Those over 65 hold a median net worth of $170,494, an increase from 1984 of 42 percent. Meanwhile, the median net worth of those under 35 has fallen 68 percent over the same period, leaving young people today with a median worth of only $3,662[v].

Despite cultural narratives of laziness and entitlement, this differential is not due to lack of effort or education (my generation is the most educated, as well, and works some of the longest hours for the least pay). The same Pew Study notes that older white Americans have simply been the beneficiaries of good timing. They were raised in an era of cheap housing and education, massive state welfare and unprecedented economic ascent following the creative destruction of two world wars and a depression—wars and crises that they themselves didn’t have to live through.

And the jobs that older Americans hold are not being passed down to us, though their debt is. When they retire, the few remaining secure, living wage and often unionized positions will be eliminated, their components dispersed into three or four different unskilled functions performed by part-time service workers. The entirety of the job growth that has come since the “recovery” began has been in low-wage, temporary or highly precarious jobs, which exist alongside a permanently heightened unemployment rate.

In the long term, this means that, after having been roundly robbed in almost every respect by our parents’ generation, our own future holds nothing more than the hope that we might be employed in two or three separate part-time, no-promotion positions in the few growth sectors, such as healthcare, where we can have the privilege of being paid minimum wage to wipe the asses of the generation that robbed us.
It is no coincidence, then, that every time we hear a fucking baby boomer explain how we’re so entitled, and how they worked summers to pay for college, we contemplate whether or not disemboweling them and selling their organs on the booming black market might be the only way to pay back our student loans.

Where did I come from?

Meanwhile, this economic overhaul has led not only to a global reordering of where things are made, and by whom, but also to a spatial concentration of economic activity in the US.[vi] Those metropolitan regions that were capable of becoming network hubs for global logistics systems fared best, with their amalgamation of hi-tech industries and producer services. These became the urban palaces, with concentrations of “cultural capital” and redesigned downtown cores (lightly cleansed of “undesirable” populations) built to appeal to tourists and foreign dignitaries.
Beyond this, large swaths of the country were simply abandoned as wastelands, where resource extraction was either hyper-mechanized or too expensive, agricultural goods were produced under heavy government subsidy, and small urban centers were forced to compete for the most undesirable jobs in industrial farming, food processing, waste management, warehousing or the growing private prison industry. In many areas, the informal economy expanded enormously—consistent with global trends, most visible in the worldwide growth of slums.

I am from one of these wastelands where the majority of work is informal, the majority of formal industries are dirty or miserable, and where rates of poverty, unemployment, chronic disease, illiteracy, and mental illness are often two to three times the national average. Raised in a trailer several miles off a reservation in one of the poorest counties on the west coast, all of the structural shifts mentioned above were for me not academic abstractions, but living reality. I come from that part of America—the majority of it—where weed is the biggest cash crop, where kids eat Special K like it’s cereal, and where the only “revitalization” we’ve ever seen is when the abandoned factory down the street was converted into a meth lab.
And I was, due mostly to dumb luck, one of the few who was able to earn enough to pay the exit fee. Upon arrival in Seattle, despite having a degree I was fed into the lowest tiers of the labor market. Rather than being some “out-of-town” suburban youth using Seattle as a “playground,” as commentators would claim of the rioters, I was, in fact, one of the multitude of invisible workers that the city depended on—whether hauling goods to and from the port, working in the south county warehouses, cleaning downtown’s sprawling office towers, or, as in my case, working behind the kitchen door.
At the time of the riot, I was working for ten cents more than minimum wage in a wholesale kitchen in South Seattle, where we produced tens of thousands of pre-packaged sandwiches and salads for consumption in upscale city cafés and office buildings. It is not an exaggeration to say that my full-time work schedule (for the duration of Occupy Seattle, which I attended every day after morning shifts at work) amounted to me feeding hundreds of thousands of Seattleites over the several months that Occupy was a present force in the city. It’s likely, then, that those hysteric KIRO-TV commentators claiming that I was part of some “outsider” gang come from the heart of chaos (or Portland, maybe?) to fuck up Seattle have themselves regularly eaten the food that I was paid poverty wages to make.
Despite the language of post-industrial, guilt-free success common to many wealthy Seattleites’ image of themselves, the fact is that Seattle, like any other global city, relies on what is called a dual labor market[vii]. Higher tiers of skilled labor, cultural production, finance and producer services exist atop a secondary tier of less skilled, minimally compensated work in high-turnover jobs with little chance of promotion.
This creates a fundamental spatial problem within capitalism: despite the outsourcing of the dirtiest, most dangerous jobs in manufacturing and resource extraction, the rich can never entirely get away from the poor. The extension of surveillance, incarceration and deportation, the militarization of the police, and the softer counter-insurgency of philanthropy foundations[viii], social justice NGOs, conservative unions and various other poverty pimps are all methods to manage different dimensions of this problem. The riot is what happens when all these mediations fail. And in an era of crisis and austerity, such mediation becomes more and more difficult to maintain.
So in all the media’s talk of “outsiders,” “anarchists” and other terms meant to make the rioting subject opaque to those not immediately engaged in the riot, the one fact that was consistently distorted was the simplest: the thieves in the palace were, in fact, the servants.
I, the terrifying, irrational rioter, am you.

Why don’t I engage in more productive forms of protest?

The other common theme was, of course, the morality play between the “good protestor” and the “bad protestor.” The rioters somehow “infiltrated” the march. They distracted from the “real” issues. They turned “normal” people away from the day’s events, ultimately hurting attempts at reform that were already underway.
There is in this an implicit assumption that there exist “better” forms of protest, and that we rioters do not also do these things. This produces a few small ironies, as when the local alt-weekly, The Stranger, contrasted the negotiated arrest of fast food protestors, who showed their courage by standing their ground and “demanding arrest,” with the May Day rioters, who did nothing but “hide behind bandanas while hurling rocks.” The irony here was that I was myself one of those rioters and one of those fast food workers—having been involved in the fast food campaign from its inauguration, leading a walkout at my workplace in the first strike, planning segments of the intermediate actions (including the wage theft protest, though my pending riot case prevented me from being arrested there), and then briefly taking a paid position with Working Washington for two weeks leading up to the second strike.
Beyond the irony, though, there is the troublesome presumption that this highly negotiated, thoroughly controlled and largely non-threatening activism is somehow more productive in the long term. When I did engage in the fast food strikes, I did so initially as a fast food worker, and the short-term goal there was to build power among food workers in the city. Despite this, no amount of organizing for (often much-needed) reforms can get over the basic problems of reform itself, which is today equivalent to trying to take a step uphill during an avalanche—you may well complete that step, but the ground itself is moving the opposite direction.
What would have been easily achievable, relatively minor reforms in the boom era of fifty or sixty years ago, such as raising the minimum wage to match inflation, enforcing laws against wage theft, and coming up with an equitable tax system, today require herculean effort and mass mobilization, even when ninety percent of the original demand is usually sacrificed simply to show “good faith” at the negotiating table.

Why don’t I like capitalism?

There is plenty more to talk about here—which you can explore if you please. But the basic problem, cut to the size of a tweet, is that the economy is the name for a hostage situation in which the vast majority of the population is made dependent on a small minority through implicit threat of violence.
If we challenge the system’s capacity to infinitely accumulate more at a compounding rate, it goes into crisis—this is basic definition of crisis: when profitable growth slows, stops, or, god forbid, reverses. Whenever this accumulation is challenged, whether by contingent factors such as poor location, or intentional ones, such as a resistant populace, those who hold the power (the wealthy) will start killing hostages.
This is precisely what has been happening over the last fifty years of economic restructuring. Any regions that show significant resistance to the lowering of wages, the dismantling of social services, the export or mechanization of jobs, or the privatization of public property can easily be sacrificed. The American landscape, circa 2014, is littered with just such dead hostages: Detroit and Flint, MI, Camden, NJ, Athens, OH, Jackson, MS, the mining towns of West Virginia or northern Nevada.
The handful of cities (such as New York and Seattle) that were able to escape this fate today pride themselves on being such good hostages. The only reason they were able to survive this rigged game of neoliberal roulette was because of a mixture of sheer geographic luck (often as port cities or pre-existing financial centers) and their absolute openness to do whatever the rich wanted. Public goods were sold off at bargain basement prices, downtown cores were redesigned according to the whims of a few large interests in retail, finance and real estate, and tax money, paired with future tax exemptions, was simply handed out as bribes to big players like Nordstrom and Boeing.[ix]
If we then zoom out to the global scale, it is abundantly obvious that the currently existing economic system—which we call capitalism—is a failed one. If it ever had any grudging utility in raising general livelihoods after its mass sacrifices in war and colonization, that time has unequivocally passed. Aside from the numerous examples cited above, there are a few especially appalling illustrations. Slavery is growing worldwide at a rate higher than at any other time in recent history. Mechanization is set to push massive swaths of workers out of the production process entirely, even while the gains of this increase in productivity are themselves concentrated almost exclusively in the hands of the wealthy. The central role of finance and speculation in the global economy has resulted in massive spikes in global food prices, causing famines and food riots, as well as a situation in which the majority of grain in the world, to take one example, is controlled by just four companies.

Meanwhile, the bulk of the globe’s basic goods production is increasingly concentrated—both in the producer services of high-GDP metropoles like London, New York and Tokyo and in the “world’s factory” of South and Southeast Asia. The production of these goods is not only dominated by vast, low-wage retailers like Wal-Mart and Amazon, but also increasingly dictated by massive contract manufacturers like Foxconn or Yue Yuen, which concentrate their production in factory cities where the lives of migrant workers are surveilled and managed in a quasi-military fashion.
The concentration of the production process coincides with the concentration of the wealth generated by that process. Even within the old “first world,” poverty and unemployment have been on the rise since long before the most recent crisis. Greece and Spain are only the most visible signs of this trend. In the US, especially, the trend splits along racial lines. Cities and schools are resegregating, though the patterns of segregation are more complex than the redlining of the Jim Crow era. One dimension of this resegregation has been the growth of the US prison system into one of the largest the world has ever seen. Even if calculated as a percentage of population, rather than absolute number, the US today imprisons roughly the same fraction of its population as the USSR did at the height of the gulag system—and our prison population is still on the rise.
Curable diseases are returning en masse, while new viruses are being developed at record rates in the evolutionary pressure-cooker of industrial agriculture. Each economic crisis is larger than the one preceding it, and these crises are not just “business cycles.” Or, more accurately: the so-called business cycle is simply a sine wave oscillating around a trajectory of absolute decline. And this decline, like the last major ones in the global economic system, will only be reversible through an unimaginably massive bout of creative destruction.
In the face of a collapsing environment, a hyper-volatile economic system and skyrocketing global inequality, it is simply utopian to believe that the present system can be perpetuated indefinitely without great violence. Opposition to capitalism has become an eminently practical endeavor.

But… Why riot?

Despite all of this, the riot itself may still seem an enigma. On the surface, riots appear to produce little in terms of concrete results and, when you add up the numbers, often do less actual economic damage to large business interests than, for example, blockading the port. They produce a certain spectacle, but so does Jay-Z.
In one sense, there is often a practical side to many riots, which can be far better at winning demands than negotiated attempts at reform. Despite the fact that reform itself is designed to treat symptoms rather than the disease, it’s also evident that riots are a useful tool even in reform efforts. Riots, accompanying illegal blockades, occupations and wildcat strikes, have proliferated in China’s Pearl River Delta over the past several years, and the result has been that workers there have seen an unprecedented rise in manufacturing wages, which more than doubled between 2004 and 2009. Some scholars have called the phenomenon “collective bargaining by riot.”
Similarly, more and more historical work has been emerging showing that riots and other forms of armed organizing were very much the meat of movements like the civil rights struggle in the US, despite the common perception that these things were somehow “non-violent.” It is, in fact, difficult to find any example of a successful, significant sequence of reforms that did not utilize the riot at one point or another. As Paul Gilje, the pre-eminent historian of the US riot, has argued: “Riots have been important mechanisms for change,” and, in fact, “the United States of America was born amid a wave of rioting.” The tactic, then, should by no means be seen as in and of itself exceptional.
And it’s also not a sufficient tactic unto itself. The function of the riot is less about a religious or petulant obsession with the act of breaking shit and also not entirely about winning any given demand. This was apparent in examples like Occupy, which had no coherent, agreed-upon demands, aside from a general rejection of those in power. This demandlessness was a feature not only of Occupy, however, but of nearly every one of the mass movements that began in 2011, starting with the Arab Spring. In each instance, the only thing that was agreed upon was that the system was fundamentally fucked, and it was this aspect alone that transformed the riots from mere attempts at reform into truly historical procedures.
My generation was not only born into the ecstatic “end of history” of the 1990s, but is also the global generation—of slum-dwelling youth and “graduates with no future”—who are inducing the first pangs of history’s rebirth. And this rebirth has taken the figure of the hooded rioter, as has been evidenced by the increasingly frequent transformation of mass riots into occupations of public squares, which themselves evolved into new forms of rioting and, ultimately, the first major insurrection of the 21^st century—which took place in Egypt and has since been largely crushed by the Supreme Council of Armed Forces.
The riot is most important, then, not in its traditional ability to win demands that progressives can only drool over, but instead when it takes on a demandless character. This absence of demands in the riot and occupation implies two things: First, it implies a rejection of existing mediations. We do not intend to vote for fundamentally corrupt political parties or play the rigged game of activism. Though it may be important in particular instances to fight for and win certain demands, such as the demand for $15 an hour, these reforms in and of themselves contribute nothing to the ultimate goal of winning a better world. They can contribute to this project only in very particular contexts, and only when superseded by forms adequate to that true project, as when the growing spate of strikes in Egypt in the years leading up to 2011 was suddenly superseded by a mass insurrection.
Second, it implies the question of power. The riot affirms our power in a profoundly direct way. By “our” power I mean, first, the power of those who have been and are continually fucked-over by the world as it presently is, though these groups by no means all experience this in the same way and to the same degree—the low-wage service workers, the prisoners, the migrant laborers, the indebted, unemployed graduates, the suicidal paper-pushers, the 农民工on the assembly line, the child slaves of Nestle cocoa plantations, my childhood friends who never got out of the trailer or off the rez. But I also mean the power of our generation: the millenials, a label that already implies the apocalyptic ambiance of our era. Or, more colloquially: Generation Fucked, because, well, obviously.
The question of power, though, isn’t simply a question of the devolution of power to the majority of people, though this is the ultimate goal. At the immediate level it is a struggle over power between shrinking fractions of the population dedicated to maintaining the complete shit-show that is the status quo, and growing fractions of the population dedicated to destroying that shit-show as thoroughly as humanly possible, while in the process collectively constructing a system in which poverty becomes impossible, no one is illegal, power itself is not concentrated in the hands of a minority of the population, our metabolism with the natural world bears less and less resemblance to the metabolism of a meth-head scouring the medicine cabinet, and the collective material wealth and accumulated intelligence of the human species is made freely accessible to all members of that species, rather than being reserved as party-swag for half-naked Russian oligarchs.
Pretending that power does not exist directly serves those who presently hold it. And the riot overturns such pretense by exerting our own power against theirs. It is a mechanism whereby we both scare the rich and attract people to a project that goes far beyond the reform of a collapsing world. In this particular instance, it has worked. Many of the fast food workers with whom I organized in the year following the riot understood its portent perfectly well. By May Day 2013, the riot had taken on a life of its own.
The riot, then, is not a hindrance to “real” struggle or a well-intentioned accident where people’s “understandable” anger gets “out of control.” Getting out of control is the point, which is precisely why the riot is the foundation from which any future worth the name must be built.
And we will be the ones to build it. Our generation: the millenials, generation fucked, or, as we’ve taken to calling it: Generation Zero. Zero because we’ve got nothing left except debt—but also nothing to lose. And zero because, like the riot, it all starts here.
In the end, then, you can lose the economics, you can lose the spectacle and the moralizing and the god-awful appeals to cute and fuzzy “social/racial/environmental justice.” Throw all of this in the alembic of the riot, and it boils down to the simplest of propositions:
Our future’s already been looted. It’s time to loot back.

—Phil A. Neel

[i] Note that left-wing political riots primarily target property and, secondarily, engage in defensive violence against the protectors of that property, namely police, security officers, or vigilantes. This has been referred to as “non-injurious” violence, since there is an implicit agreement that rioters not cause harm to innocent bystanders, and since persons are not the primary target of the violence. By contrast, right-wing riots exhibit an opposite aspect, where persons, and particularly the least powerful in a situation, are generally the primary target of the violence, with property destruction being the ancillary. This is a well-documented phenomenon. See, for example: Gilje, Paul A. Rioting in America, Indiana University Press, 1996.
[ii] Of these five cases, one has been dropped after significant expense on the part of the city achieved only a hung jury. Out of all five, there have been only two guilty pleas, mine included.
[iii] It’s worth noting here that striking a police officer in the United States is a felony—which also means that, if you hit a cop and are found guilty of the crime, you lose the right to vote (usually for the duration of your multi-year probation, though in some states, such as Kentucky, you are disenfranchised for the rest of your life).
[iv] Ages 35-44 lost 49%, 45-54 lost 28% and 55-64 lost 14%.
[v] If you calculate the same data for Generation X and the younger Baby Boomers, with the same age brackets used in 1984, you see ages 35-44 losing 44% of their median income, though still holding roughly ten times the wealth ($39,601) as millenials. Ages 45-54 losing 10%, holding a median of $101,651, and ages 55-64 gaining 10%, growing to $162,065. Similarly, since 1967, poverty among the 35-and-under age group has increased from 12% to 22%, while, for those 65 and older, it has actually dropped from 33% to 11%.
[vi] For a more detailed academic account of this process, see Saskia Sassen, The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo. Princeton University Press, 1991.
[vii] See Michael Piore, Birds of Passage: Migrant Labor and Industrial Societies. Cambridge University Press, 1979
[viii] The philanthropic endeavors of the wealthy are similar to the actions of a burglar who, after robbing a neighborhood, returns to that neighborhood to return half of one percent of the loot as gifts—or, in the case of much international philanthropy, in the form of gift cards that you can only use at the burglar’s own department store, as when the Gates family gives loans earmarked to be used only for the purchase of pharmaceuticals from companies in which the Gates family owns a significant share.
[ix] For a detailed account of this process in Seattle, see: Timothy A. Gibson, Securing the Spectacular City: The Politics of Revitalization and Homelessness in Downtown Seattle. Lexington Books, 2003.

source: http://www.ultra-com.org/project/why-riot/

The post WHY RIOT? — by Phil A. Neel / Ultra magazine appeared first on Void Network.

(…) For weeks, the riots filled our screens with their void. What did we see? Fires in the night, enigmatic, faceless youths who disappeared seamlessly into darkness or behind smoke-screens, according to vanishing recipes we know nothing about. Something that refuses to be grasped but traps us in a fascinating anxiety. A possession. Like every magic ritual, a riot is a fleeting moment of perception of the invisible. It corresponds to an instant of intensification, to a charge. Suddenly our perception level increases and we see, as if looming up out of nowhere, another social space with its own connivances, a moment when everything that has been produced in secret is aggregated, illicit witchlike practices whose mode of transmission – like in every ritual – is first and foremost part of a practice, a performance. It is necessary to commit one’s body to receive this unspoken knowledge. By staying outside, one literally understands nothing. It is thinking through experience. Just as a vaudoo rite at nightfall reveals the incredible heartbeat of another world that is hidden during the day, a riot is not a rupture but, as we will try to imagine here, a secret community that briefly reveals itself before returning to its anonymity. The ghostly body of these hooded youths is that abnormal body which warns us that another world exists, beyond the visible. (…)

__________________

Like others, i long sought to name what seemed—and still seems—distinctive about the riots that rocked France’s working-class neighbourhoods in october and november 2005. at the time, the deaths of two youths in Clichy-sous-Bois, just outside paris, provoked unprecedented unrest in the suburbs of several large cities. the event made headlines throughout France and around the world. although the tragic circumstances of the deaths of these adolescents chased by the police reinforced a sadly recur- rent theme in the contemporary history of riots, i found it necessary to linger a little over the particular nature of this event and study its dynamics, its own vocabulary and maybe—and this is the hypothesis that runs through this sketch—its place in an unnameable history.

______________________

Void Network invites you to print and read this pamphlet that you will find here in pdf format:
https://olivier-marboeuf.com/2020/09/08/lemeutier-et-la-sorciere-the-rioter-and-the-witch/

The post “The Rioter and the Witch” by Olivier Marboeuf 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.

 Thousands marched yesterday in Spain near the parliament building, demanding the resignation of Mariano Rajoy’s government as well as the rewrite of constitution. The police have fired rubber bullets and baton-charged protesters. Spanish media reported that at least 32 people were detained and more than a dozen injured. The protesters dispersed after MPs left the building. A demonstrator, Montse Puigdavall spoke at BBC:

I’m here because of all the social cuts and rights that we have lost, that took a lot of hard work to achieve – we are here because we’re determined not to lose them

ROARMAG’s writer Carlos Delclos appeared live on RT during today’s clashes in front of Congress, explaining how Spain’s democracy has been kidnapped.

What you are seeing out here right now is the Spanish — and by extension the European — citizenry reacting against austerity. Austerity right now is at a level where it’s affecting people’s daily lives. It’s affecting whether or not people can get medical attention. It’s affecting whether or not people can advance socially through education and social progress.
What you’re seeing now is a country where an entire generation is being relegated to a class of emigrants. People that have been invested in with public money, to be educated, are now going to move out and generate wealth in other countries. That’s not a project for a country. Meanwhile, child poverty in Spain has increased exponentially.
I think the first thing the government can do is call for a referendum on paying back the debt, and on the constitutional amendment that they made. It’s no mistake that these people are gathered here today to talk about the constitution of Spain; a constitution that has been around since the transition from the Francoist government, and it was always said that it couldn’t be touched, that it was the basis for what Spain is today.
But they did change it without a referendum or even consulting the citizenry or submitting it to public debate, to pay back an illegitimate debt taken on by the private sector.

A bar owner in Madrid protects the protestors in his store

The post “Democracy kidnapped” in Spain appeared first on Void Network.

SEE THE VIDEO HERE

These are short fragments 
from the History of 21st century

The post Witness: Children of the Riots. (Words, Images & Moments from the streets of Athens) appeared first on Void Network.

The post General Strike-Riots / Greece 15 December 2010 appeared first on Void Network.

Void Network and Void Mirror international blog offers here analysis and review from Crimethic Ex Workers Collective about the riots took place in Pittsburgh-U.S.A. during the conference of G-20 there… As long as the “world leaders” and the financial elite will gather to organize the exploitation of human beings and the destruction of Earth, they will be allways sensitive and consciouss human beings to confront their power…

Never Felt More Alive

http://www.crimethinc.com/texts/recentfeatures/g20.php

The post Fight Against G-20 in Pittsburgh…What Happened There? appeared first on Void Network.