USuncutMN says: Tax the corporations! Tax the rich! Stop the cuts, fight for social justice for all. Standing in solidarity with http://www.usuncut.org/ and other Uncutters worldwide. FIGHT for a Foreclosure Moratorium! Foreclosure = homelessness. Resist the American Legislative Exchange Council, Grover Norquist and Citizen's United. #Austerity for the wheeler dealers, NOT the people.
USuncutMN supports #occupyWallStreet, #occupyDC, the XL Pipeline resistance Yes, We, the People, are going to put democracy in all its forms up front and center. Open mic, diversity, nonviolent tactics .. Social media, economic democracy, repeal Citizen's United, single-payer healthcare, State Bank, Operation Feed the Homeless, anti-racism, homophobia, sexISM, war budgetting, lack of transparency, et al. Once we identify who we are and what we've lost, We can move forward.
By Nick Shillingford South Minneapolis Homeowner and member of the Canvassing Sub-Committee of Occupy Homes
The call for an immediate moratorium (government imposed suspension
of activity) on all foreclosures is not a new idea. In fact a moratorium
was put in place by the Minnesota legislature to halt foreclosure
proceedings in 1933 during the Great Depression. In the mid-west this
movement was lead by radical farmers in the Farmers Holiday Association.
But ultimately a total of 27 states would enact some form of
foreclosure moratorium by the middle of 1934 for both urban and rural
home owners. (Wheelock 2008)
In 1932 it became clear that “sharply falling incomes made it
increasingly difficult for farmers to pay the interest and principal on
their outstanding debts, but falling property values made it less likely
that farmers could sell their properties for more than the outstanding
balance on their mortgages. The result was a sharp increase in
farm mortgage delinquencies and foreclosures.” (Wheelock 2008)
Similar to the 1930’s today many families have seen their incomes
shrink while dropping property values have put their homes actual market
worth well below what they still owe the banks on their mortgage.
Unemployment, wage pressures and market pressures are now squeezing
families across the country.
In Minnesota, Iowa, and Wisconsin the Farmers Holiday Association,
which was made up of farmer radicals played a leading role in activating
the wider community and pressuring the legislature to act. According to
a paper by Kim Neilsen presented to the Minnesota Historical society
“In the fall of 1933, Konrad K. Solberg, Minnesota’s
lieutenant governor, told frustrated Douglas County farmers, ‘If you
haven’t got 50 [cents] for the [Farm Holiday] membership, steal one of
your mortgaged pigs and sell it!’” (Neilsen 1988) In addition to calling
on farmers to join the Farmers Holiday Association he was also telling
them to committee an act of non-violent civil disobedience in stealing
a mortgaged pig back from the bank.
Years of movement building accompanied by other direct action had
been crucial in bringing about the situation in 1933 that ultimately
resulted in the passage of the moratorium bill of that year. One popular
direct-action technique that was widespread was the penny auction. “The
concept was simple. Farm families gathered in large numbers at
a foreclosure sale and quietly but confidently informed any prospective
buyers that they were not to bid…When items came up on the auction
block, only designated bidders were allowed to speak. Cars, tractors,
and livestock were purchased for sums ranging from about 10 cents to 50
cents. At the end of the auction, all the goods were returned to the
original owner.” Just the threat of this tactic in some cases was enough
to convince the banks to renegotiate with the farm families before the
date of the auction came. (Neilsen 1988)
All the while the Farmers Holiday Association and other farm member
organizations were also drafting and publicly speaking about legislation
to halt foreclosures all together. It was the pressure on the banks
that won gains for individual families but ultimately national public
pressure on the politicians that brought about a moratorium in many
states. Just days before the Minnesota moratorium was passed in November
of 1933 Milo Reno, the original organizer of the Farmers Holiday
Association, said “We have been patient and long suffering. We have been
made a political football for jingo politicians, who are controlled by
the money-lords of Wall Street.” (Neilsen 1988)
Once again many Americans are now becoming aware of the stranglehold
Wall Street and big banks have on our communities. We must seize this
opportunity to call for a moratorium on all foreclosures while also
making it difficult, if not impossible, for banks and the police to
forcefully take us and our neighbors from our homes.
HELP!! TIP CUP PLEA - Our ride to Philly fell through. I am BEGGING
for donations to take a plane there. THERE IS A PAYPAL slot on this www.USuncutMN.blogspot.com
site.
I need $100 by tomorrow. Someone from Occupy Mpls/Mn needs to
BE THERE, collecting info and getting people on The Page about how we
are being "picked off" and criminalized. I have the foreclosure
moratorium/prevent homelessness presentation to do. Please. Nickels
and dimes add up. I need $100 by tomorrow and then I can fly there ...
I
so wish Ziggy Vouraun could come too. So be generous, we would do a GREAT JOB between live streaming, videoing and putting this all in writing .......
Help me get support to prevent homelessness via the foreclosure moratorium, speak about the need for the Financial Transaction Tax/Robin Hood tax anduse the media to exposure this cynical ploy by RT Rybeck!! Minnesota pioneered the foreclosure moratorium movement back in the Depression; we can so do it again.
008RNC Redux! http://www.occupyhomesmn.org/nonviolent-cruz-family-supporters-targeted-with-riot-charges-weeks-after-arrests/ three arrestees at Cruz house charged with third degree Riot gross misdemeanor. 3rd degree riot (gross misdemeanor)
/ Obstructing legal process / Disorderly conduct / Presence At An
Unlawful Assembly / Trespassing. Bankster criminal ops continue
unhindered with state, local & federal protection from bullies
wearing nice clothes ....
Minneapolis
Police Chief Tim Dolan steps on peaceful protesters outside the Cruz
home May 30. Fourteen were arrested that night, and so far at least
three have received riot charges.
Yesterday, several activists with Occupy Homes MN discovered that the
City Attorney has decided to escalate charges following their arrests defending the Cruz family
home. Prosecutors at the City Attorney’s office originally charged the
group of Cruz family supporters with trespassing, and have now moved to
significantly more serious charges including 3rd degree riot–a gross
misdemeanor which carries a sentence of up to one year in prison and a
$3,000 fine.
These charges are a clear and disgraceful attempt to suppress the
Occupy Homes movement and ‘make an example’ of anti-foreclosure
organizers who were arrested while non-violently protesting an unjust eviction.
City Attorney Susan Segal, appointed by Mayor RT Rybak, has also made
it a point to aggressively prosecute other political defendants,
including a group arrested while protesting US Bank’s foreclosure
practices last fall.
As of now at least three arrestees (though likely more) are charged with the following:
3rd degree riot (gross misdemeanor)
Obstructing legal process
Disorderly conduct
Presence At An Unlawful Assembly
Trespassing
Instead of prosecuting the criminal fraud of the bankers that crashed
our economy, or working to give relief to families devastated by the
foreclosure crisis, our tax dollars
are being spent to evict families at the banks’ behest, and to
intimidate and prosecute neighbors fighting to keep more vacant homes
out of their communities.
This attempt to silence and stifle anti-foreclosure organizing will
not deter us from fighting for our homes, our families, our neighbors,
and our futures.
Please donate to our legal fund here to help cover the costs of this attack on our movement.
Thanks for your support,
Occupy Homes MN
Foreclosure Moratorium Flyer Please sign and SHARE
Sitting on millions of dollars while people are being
evicted is unacceptable. Be transparent with the National Mortgage
Settlement and put a moratorium on foreclosures &
evictions until the process is up, running, and proven to be working
for at least one month.
There has been at
least $280 million available but on hold for over 6 months. This money was obtained to keep people in
their homes and as relief for victims of corrupt banking practices by Bank of
America, JP Morgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Citibank, and GMAC/Ally Financial.
Saint Paul, Minnesota By now, most are aware that the banks made enormous profits
selling junk mortgages. Inside Job won
the Best Documentary award for exposing how the citizens were “played” by the
banks and how the executives involved just did not hold themselves
accountable for the consequences of their massive fraud.
Matt Taibbei of Rolling Stone magazine, made powerful comment at Occupy Wall Street on February 23rd in a teach-in as to why we in the United States MUST fight back and demand accountability. The crisis is far from over. This chart explains why it will take a full four years for the effects to "settle": It takes time for the entire process to finalize into homelessness! Let's prevent some trauma!
Because of activist pressure, a mortgage fraud settlement
was obtained. The Bank$ter$ were convicted in The Court of Public Opinion. Obama was forced to act -- because of We the People. Try to remember that.
I write this in hopes you can learn from our Minnesota
experience and grow a viable movement in your own communities. Only through activism, through public pressure will we get justice. With just a little work, we can get foreclosure moratoriums in all our states if we work together.
What is, Why is and
Who are Occupy Homes?
Journalist/activist Dan Feidt writes from a "think global,
act local" vantage point:
What is Occupy Homes?
Firstly, banks use bookkeeping magic
to electronically create money which they lend out to the public &
government at compound interest. They don't actually have all that money - only
a small fraction. This is called fractional reserve
banking. It's intrinsically unstable because the economy can never grow
exponentially along with the debt.
Over the last 15 years the Federal Reserve under
Greenspan suppressed the prime interest rate, causing an enormous bubble in
home prices. Criminal 'control fraud' organizations such as Freddie Mac committed
various crimes such as fraudulent inducement, securities fraud, fraudulent
conveyance, etc., to bundle mortgages which were likely to collapse as AAA
securities. They got fat bonuses and Freddie Mac used its government backing to
basically create insurance for bondholders in the event of default, then resold
these securities again. In Nov 2011 FreddieMac was forced to pay the federal
govt tens of millions $$ for orchestrating staggering securities fraud at the
executive level (bundling Alt-A mortgages as AAA etc)
In order to create these fraudulent securities, the
banks set up a go-between shell organization called MERS, Mortgage Electronic
Registration System, which unlawfully poses as the legal entity with authority
to foreclose on people for basically any reason, though it usually doesn't have
the mortgage note in a valid chain of title. MERS was used to obfuscate any
path to ameliorate housing issues, i.e. you could never even reach the
responsible party on the phone, if you could determine who they even were.
Housing prices across the US finally started to crash around 2007-2008. The whole
system had been predicated on rising prices which only occurred because the
money was magically created thru fractional reserve at suppressed interest
rates. As prices fell, thousands of homes had mortgages where the principal
demanded exceeded the value of the home - these went 'underwater' as homeowners
entered negative equity despite making years of payments. If they quit paying
they entered foreclosure, further depressing local prices, a vicious spiral.
Today the banks possess millions of empty homes and keep them off the market in
order to create the illusion that market prices have stabilized, but in fact
price discovery has been halted and 'fake prices' rule the day.
Don’t say the “F” word or else!
In the political system 'regulatory capture' has
taken over most levels wherein no official with any kind of power, i.e. Sheriff
Stanek, Mayor Rybak, are willing to even say the word 'fraud' and defend the
public welfare from organizations that orchestrate these crimes & no
decisions are taken in favor of the Little People. The housing court in MN does
not offer any redress for fraud or in the case of the Cruz house, bank errors
wherein the bank demands an unachievable amount of money for their own mistake.
Therefore a broad network of people have undertaken
a direct action campaign to resist the political functions occurring under the
regulatory capture such as sheriffs sales and evictions. Through demonstrations
and occupying the homes directly, the figures who have the arbitrary power,
such as the bookkeeping-magic powered banking industry & the feckless
politicians who collect political contributions from the compound interest
machine, are forced to let people retain their homes and reduce the principal
due on the underwater mortgages, which was never necessary in any sense and was
only a lever to consolidate wealth into an ever-smaller group of people.
That's
the theory anyway -- the authorities are willing to carry out extreme levels of
state violence to maintain momentum in the regulatory capture & control
fraud system which prevails today.
People who care are forced to join Occupy Homes
because:
The US
federal government sent the Banksters $13T, the entities which created this
mess.
What did the Banksters’ do with their welfare? It didn’t direct money to solve title
problems, it gambled the trillions on more toxic debt around the world.
Experts such as Ellen Brown urged full redress. She and others suggested a massive settlement that left the banks feeling the sting -- along with the restructuring of banking itself. Too Big To Fail meant Too Big To Manage. The FRAUD was seen as systemic. Robosigning/liar loans and the scourge of adjustable rate mortgages were to be abolished - whether by regulation or the imposition of State banks.
Instead, the AGs in the US accepted a bandaid rather than rehab to the heavily-bleeding victims, the taxpayers and shareholders.
.
Hopefully - in the name of fairness - local registrar of deeds and local judges will
slap Banksters hard, because elected officials - many owned by Banksters and who
could conceivably slap them - haven’t: and logic dictates, won’t.
And in the urge for fairness, it would seem that banks that participated in
fraud should not be collecting interest on the monies paid out for VICTIMS. But
they are; that’s how State banking "regulation" is not working these days. Make a fraudulent attack on the public: Get paid for it.
So we say that each state should
demand a foreclosure moratorium until the allocated money is allocated, and the programs for relief have been proven to work.
San Francisco
set up a precedent. What We say is that this should go through each state,
where the money is, through the Attorney Generals' offices. So far that has been done only at the local level and to continue that as a strategy would take years.
To see for yourself who that was done, here is some excellent video on the San
Francisco experience provided by Carol Harvey. A video is worth 1000 words; share her videos with people that care.
Learn and then maybe we can get mortgage foreclosure moratoriums in each state, and as we suggest, working through our Attorney Generals.
Some of us get arrested occupying foreclosured homes, because we think the actions over the last four years are just plain shameful. I am one of those cases - and I wanted to stand in solidarity with other occupiers. So I am "guilty" of trespass - with an explanation! Below is an "explanation" of what I am doing while I await a hearing.
Here are action steps
ACTivists can take.
Take this idea and this article to your next Coffee Party
gathering. (We have another one here in Saint
Paul on July 7th.) Take this to moveon.org and your #ows General Assemblies. Take it to your church. Take it to your union local. Take it wherever people w/social justice
concerns gather. Some won't hear you, but keep working it. No one said life doesn't have its struggles. You may need to remind yourself of that often, but the good responses on a daily basis will keep you buoyed. We are rocking boats, talking, trusting and building a truly caring movement.
It is important to remember, that at each step, you need to
reach out to more and more people to gather enough people to get a foreclosure
moratorium. If people around you don’t
understand what you are doing, just keep doing each step. Trust me; we're after a winnable action.
More people will begin to support this idea as you go along. Precedent has been set already! ; )
And then devise an action plan that includes the following:
Plan a screening
of the following two – Inside Job is available on Dvd, and the Matt Taibbei video is easily accessible
on youtube . (See links above.) Even a couple of people
watching this together can began to have a massive effect on how things go in
your state after solidifying their commitment. There are good homelessness videos coming out now, too. Tip: Start a video/youtube collection right away - in early days. Get some good photos of homeless persons together too. You may need them later. Or be bold - go and make a video of your local foreclosure victims and homeless people and then post it on facebook. Suggest this as a "group activity" for your initial contacts .. Look for and build a community spirit. Sometimes media committees get a bit ruthless. Cooperation is key to success and this is the time to aim for that. Include everyone who wants to be included in media efforts.
Go towww.propublica.com and find out how much
money your state has been allocated for foreclosure relief.
Get an appointment
with your Attorney General – and find out the amount the office says is on their books
and has not been distributed. Be prompt and
cheerful and loaded with facts and an attitude of compassion for foreclosure
victims and homeless people when you go in. Know that
public policy can be changed by YOU – you can make a difference, a very big
difference. It's not a tea party nor an action. It is an information session at which YOU make a sensible request that will save time, money, social havoc and heartache.
Ask for them for a foreclosure moratorium! until the money IS released and the program has
been proven to work. Offer to petition citizens showing that the
population is on their side if they do that.
Going city to city would take a very long time.
Write a petition. You can use moveon’s site, change.org,care2.org's petition site
-- or any other that you’ve already linked up.
You can even post on all available lists. Be sure to mention the amount and give references to it as well as the
propublica site. Include a person’s
email to return the names of signatories.
You don’t need addresses, or phone numbers from signatories on many of
these, which will expand the base of those who will sign. But be sure to get email addresses. Tip: About out-of-state signatories. Go for it! This is grassroots organizing at its finest and friends who will back you and your group up, get them on board! Show that this is truly an international issue. Just aim for a higher number of signatures than you think you will need so that if their names are "disqualified" you have plenty. Let this snowball by spreading it around. I am so chuffed by my readers who have signed, that it makes my eyes tear over. They do care ...
Create a FB “cause”
– click it around a bit to your friends and good Occupy sites on the web. Go to Occupy Homes and other sites and post it around. We call that clicktavism.
Write an action alert, a 3-paragraph inspirational piece to send out to your occupy websites. Just be sure to include the petition link, a place to contact and perhaps a reference or two to show you do kinow what you are "speaking" about.
Make hard copies
and
Start asking for signatures at food coops, your social justice actions, in
ordinary conversation. Forward your link
to all your FB and twitter friends. Ask
them to get involved and figure out ways you can work together. I’ll be outside our homelessness show here in
Saint Paul this Tuesday, clipboard
in hand with plenty of pens and maybe a small sign saying “You can help end
homelessness. Please sign my petition.” You can put flyers up on coffeehouse and coop bulletin boards - just be sure to pick them up or give a place to forward them to - maybe the Attorney General's office directly.
Think up talking
points in advance: Writing a blurb for your petition to hand out
to those that sign will help you focus your thoughts. Points such as this are
incredibly helpful:
3. Homelessness hurts.
You might mention that for every homeless person, there are 24 empty
houses now (Yikes!) One in seven people is homeless. Here in MN, the average of a homeless person is .. wait for it! .. six years old! One in four homeless persons is a veteran. BREAK those stereotypes! Most of the homeless are children. People who are
homeless are not easy to “deal with”. They are wounded and hurt - and often desperately poor. Sometimes, things get so bad, you really cannot predict what an ill homeless person will do and they become scary. That doesn’t
mean that we, as humane persons don’t do everything we can possibly do to help
them. Remember we are asking for monies and programs for people who were victims of FRAUD. The kids didn't sign .. The best way to stop homelessness is to prevent it. That is what we are doing w/this foreclosure moratorium campaign; trying to prevent it.
4. You might also mention that those of us who fight back
and try to get the media to write about the outrage get arrested, but the
fraudulent bank$ter$ do not. In fact,
the media and policos lionize bank$ter$ – turning them into rock star status. Here we see Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase wearing Presidential cufflinks. After four long years, we are seeing precious
little accountability for banksters' FRAUD. Here is the article about the foreclosure victims arrests.
5. Our media and
CONgress are not acting in the public’s interest, but this is a preliminary
step in gaining accountability and helping victims for now .. you get the idea. Only our pressure can change public policy.
This is why the settlement was achieved. Public pressure.
6. Have people go to www.propublica.com
for information if you are asked for verification. That’s so easy!
7. Stay current on issues so you have plenty to talk about. Obviously, the foreclosure moratorium is just
a bit of the solution to our corrupt and highly unregulated banking
system. The articles abound and it can
be very difficult to know which to read, which to omit – but struggle on
nevertheless. Find a good author in “the
know” and subscribe! You can run a
google alert and get regular, fresh information by the buckets. Just put in “foreclosure”, “activism” or
whatever strikes your fancy, and it will lead you to good, fresh and in-depth
articles. www.webofdebt.com and www.dandelionsalad.wordpress.com
are two of my very favorite websites with economics about foreclosure. So is www.nakedcapitalism.com. There is also
econtv.com for those who want punchy videos.
Give a donation –
food, money, office help, your bodily presence – to a foreclosure occupation. Talk to the people,
attend the barbeques, speak to your minister about hosting a teach-in on
homelessness, the foreclosure crisis, about ACTivism. Go visit a homeless shelter; see first hand
how demoralizing the environments are that your tax dollars are paying
for. Get angry that homeless children
are fed bad food, denied educational opportunities most take for granted and
wonder where they will sleep that night. Thank those who volunteer their time
in the most needed activity: helping the homeless. The best "gift" you ever give anyone is your time as you can never get it back.
Understand me – I am on the side of COMPASSION. No one should be made homeless. Housing IS a human right; so is our personal property. So is the right to expect our governments to take our concerns seriously. Rhode Island has a Homeless Bill of Rights now.. An era of #austerity is being proposed. We need to work to ensure we don't have more unhoused, demoralized people.
Remember: this is a
political struggle.
Over the months I have been fighting foreclosure, I have
seen a most disturbing criminalization of dissent.
– an overmilitarization of police
and private security forces Say FRAUD loud and clearly.
This is not a handout. This was a
decision made to quell opposition that was getting loud as President Obama and the other politicos tried to sweep our legitimate anger under the rug. Banks got bailed out; we got sold out - to the tune of $17 trillion dollars. We are not criminals; we are people striving for justice.
Our foreclosure fighters at occupations are beaten and sexually abused, denied medications, fed
drugs by police (the DRE program), their belongings
tossed into dumpsters (illegal!) - and the bail amounts continue to
escalate.
It is easy to stay wound up and lose focus. This is not an effort to “get arrested” nor
rant about “state power” the entire time. We need a
good, firm CENTER, a mass of support to win even basic justice. Civil disobedience is a personal choice.
But a petition drive – backed up by phone calls, oped
letters, national actions - can help us drive up the necessary numbers to build
a movement to stop foreclosure once and for all.
Write opeds, post
comments – even to the teensiest of local papers. Educate, agitate,
ORGANIZE. Offer your email address as a
contact point. People will show interest, but they need direction.
We are getting precious little Good Press. Try to find a media outlet that will explain
WHY Occupy Homes exists. Therefore: When a paper posts articles, post comments. Say clearly - "This has all been about fraud and we must not blame the victims nor their
supporters."
Notes about the
foreclosures and homelessness – TRAUMA and our priorities
Many of us foreclosure activists are homeless. For me, this time, it was huge overdraft charges on an
account for which I had never signed for an overdraft. I’ve been homeless nine
months. But TCF Bank got $100’s in overdraft charges on a $1.88 overdraft because I had direct deposit on my
disability check. They ruined my credit
–and after nine months, have never even sent me a bank statement saying
how much they CLAIM I still owe.
I was a holder of a
mortgage in Ontario and lost my
house way back in 2006, They wouldn’t pay up when my husband got ill, even
though I had insurance. I had paid
$46,000+ in CASH, and didn’t even get eight
months of residency. I lost $25,000 on
the sale of the house besides. I was framed.
Now I have moved more times than I care to remember. It just never seems to stop.
I am 63, disabled, widowed and orphaned. This homelessness hurts! In these nine months, not one of three
counties have helped me. The indignities
I suffer would make for an entire book. Too
many places to stay has made me even more traumatized; the doctor(s) say so. I stay sane by … you guessed it! … fighting back.
Articulation of our pain should be taken seriously - particularly the pain of homeless children. We must speak up for those who are inarticulate, invisible, disabled, too young to speak for themselves. Advocacy is a talent and a gift when it comes to these issues, particularly right now as right-wingers point fingers at victims. One more time: the bulk of the homeless are children. We are speaking for them.
Many frontline poverty workers are not helping out in ways that work, although they see the consequences of destroyed urban areas – and increasingly
the devastation growing in the suburbs. Make sure you see that
empowerment of ourselves is paramount.
Suffering needs to be listened to and then acted upon. Don’t further victimize the homeless. Listen with three ears open. And _just _stay _active _yourself.
Don’t join the chorus
that’s been set in motion: Victims are
NOT to blame
Homeless people are deeply
traumatized. And foreclosure victims’
wounds are close to the surface. They are grieving people. Each day is a trial. Try to help them; not judge. You wouldn’t want to be walking in their
shoes.
Yet they are more traumatized as their efforts to empower
themselves are met with scorn, derision, brutality, and harassment on the part of City Councils, cops and media. I could give a hundred more links of this part of the "story.". Cops are not
living in foreclosed communities in the cities. City Council members are taking
money from banks and corporations to win elections; many are not standing with the tax-paying
citizens who are fed up. Don't allow the coverup!
Meanwhile, the foreclosure relief money continues to sit in accounts, not being used, unless We make something about public policy
change. Public policy should not be made
in backrooms, bars and restaurants by bank$ter$ and politicians sharing drinks
and lobster. Our mayor actually locked
his door, but continues to meet with those who want to subsidize a nearly $1
billion stadium! But, doubtless our din gets on his nerves and we continue to say: We will be back!
We can win this! We can
“like” it. We can “tweet” it. We can “share” it. We will win with your
own particular, special help involved. You cannot stop the power of a
Great Idea.
I can be reached at USuncutMN@gmail.com. Tell me how your Action Plan proceeds.
Our Minnesota
petition can be found here: Please! Sign
it! Use it as a template for your State. Many blessings as you help prevent more homelessness - and stand w/the afflicted.
Bill talks to RoseAnn DeMoro, who heads the largest registered nurses union in the country, and will lead a Chicago march protesting economic inequality on May 18. DeMoro is championing the Robin Hood Tax, a small government levy the financial sector would pay on commercial transactions like stocks and bonds. The money generated, which some estimate could be as much as $350 billion annually, could be used for social programs and job creation — ultimately to people who, without a doubt, need it more than the banks do.
DeMoro and her organization, National Nurses United, have an inspiring history of defeating some of the toughest opponents in government and politics.
[The National Nurses United protest fires up Daley Plaza. — Zbigniew Bzdak, Chicago Tribune, May 18, 2012]
The first of two major NATO weekend rallies in Chicago is getting under way Friday, May 18 at Daley Plaza as a crowd gather in support of a plan to make Wall Street provide more money for health, education and social service programs.
National Nurses United organizers have said that they expect about 2,000 people to attend the rally, where they will call for a so-called Robin Hood tax in financial institutions' transactions in order to offset cuts in health care and social services. City officials estimate the crowds including Occupy Chicago could swell to nearly three times that group's projected turnout, in part because of a performance by former Rage Against the Machine guitarist Tom Morello, an Occupy activist who has been at the movement's forefront.
The meaning and necessity of revolution in the 21st century
By Jerome Roos On May 11, 2012
The global day of action on May 12 will mark the resurgence of our resistance. But what is the way forward for our movement in these times of crisis?
This is the transcript of a presentation given at the OVNI 2012 festival in theCentre de Cultura Contemporà nia de Barcelona on May 11, 2012.
It’s amazing to be here in Barcelona – home to one of the most inspiringrevolutionary episodes in European history and today once again a hotbed of popular resistance against market fundamentalism and a false democracy. Before I start, I would like to thank the OVNI organization and Carlos Delclós — a lecturer at Pompeu Fabra, an active member of the movement here in Barcelona, and a contributor to ROARMAG.org — for giving me the opportunity to speak to you today, on the eve of the global day of action of May 12.
On the Edge of History
We are living through historic times. While the future may look bleak and uncertain, we are – in our own particular way – blessed to live through an era in which the very word ‘revolution’ is no longer just the abstract obsession of some fringe romantics inside the Old Left. We are living through a time in which the word capitalism no longer invokes hard work and ample reward, but the lack of work and opportunity for a growing number of people around the world. This is a time in which the very existence of revolutionary theory and practice is no longer considered just an academic or activist privilege, but a pressing global necessity and – increasingly – a factual reality on the ground.
We are living through a time in which the illusory sense of growth and progress that underpinned the cultural hegemony of neoliberalism – and its belief that representative democracy and the self-regulating market will bring freedom and prosperity to all – is dying a slow and painful death. The deceptive ideological mirror of the End of History has been shattered, and in come tumbling a whole new range of alternative futures. With the uprisings that started in the Arab world last year, history appears to have started anew. After a brief interlude that began with the end of the Cold War, the ongoing global financial crisis has radically shaken the foundations of the neoliberal world order. The endless struggle has recommenced, and in the process, the horizon of the possible is rapidly shifting. And the most incredible thing is that we’re watching all of it happen right in front of our very eyes.
The crisis, in short, has brought class struggle back to the fore. Suddenly, there is no longer such a thing as a safe and secure middle class. The politics of austerity have revealed the real cleavages in our globalized world economy. The battle-lines are drawn: this is a struggle between the 1% — politicians, financial capitalists, CEOs and military elites – and the rest of the world population. For the past 30 years, the 1% have been waging a silent war upon the 99%, but it took a financial crisis of historic proportions to bring this reality to light. So yes, even though we have chosen to struggle strictly with non-violent means, we find ourselves in a state of war nonetheless. And as Tolstoy so beautifully depicted in his War & Peace, those participating in the battle often find themselves in a ‘fog of war’ – a period of protracted uncertainty about the strength of the opposing force, about one’s own strength, and about the future of our world in general.
Reflections on a Revolution
The main thing we have tried to do at ROAR over the past year – and the main thing I will try to do in this intervention as well – is to alleviate some of this uncertainty through what one of our contributors has called ‘The Art of Information Activism’. One of our key objectives at ROAR has been to provide some perspective. To take a step back and understand the events of the past year in their spatial and temporal context – that is to say, to always highlight the global and historical dimension to what is happening today. In the process, we hope to not only amplify the voice of our generation, but also to distill some sense and order from the clamorous cacophony of our rapidly changing world.
Rosa Luxemburg once wrote that “the most revolutionary thing one can do is always to proclaim loudly what is happening.” But as we face an overload of informational stimuli, it seems at least equally important to try and connect the dots between all the seemingly disconnected events that present themselves to our consciousness on a daily basis. What connects the global financial crisis of 2008-’09 with the dramatic decision of Mohamed Bouazizi to set himself on fire in Tunisia in late 2010, thereby sparking the Arab Spring? What connects the spectacularly televised Egyptian revolution of 2011 to the real democracy movements in Spain and Greece? How is the fate of millions of smallholder farmers in Africa related to the predatory speculation of a small group of investment bankers on Wall Street? And what can the Occupy movement do to change any of this?
These are some of the questions I will try to touch upon in this intervention. Throughout my presentation, as I connect the dots between the crisis of global capitalism, the Arab Spring, and the movements in Europe, North America and elsewhere, I will try to address one overarching theme: the meaning of the word ‘revolution’ in the 21st century. What does it mean to be a revolutionary today? Did the events that took place in Egypt last year really constitute a ‘revolution’? When Puerta del Sol was occupied almost a year ago, and people carried around banners reading ‘nobody expects the Spanish revolution’, were they naively expressing a millennial sense of romanticism for times past, or is there an important moment of truth to be found in the revolutionary longing of our generation today?
Revolution as a Co-Creative Process
Whatever the answers may be, one thing that has become abundantly clear over the course of the past year, is that the idea of revolution cannot be condensed into a singular event – like the overthrow of a tyrant or the seizure of state power. Revolutions are processes by their very nature. They take place over a time-span of years – if not decades – and arise out of a complex web of historical currents and global interconnections. They have external manifestations – in the streets and squares – and internal motivations, in the hearts and minds of all those individual people constituting the masses. In other words, a real revolution does not occur –it unfolds. It unfolds both mentally and materially; both individually and collectively.
While images of the multitude amassing in the square to overthrow the tyrant may carry crucial elements of political and emotional symbolism, our struggle cannot just presume to lead towards a single cathartic explosion of popular dissent, or the capture of existing institutions. It must first of all take placeinside of each and every single one of us, radicalizing our worldview and propelling us to take action. From there, it must spread into the collective consciousness and the very social fabric that we are trying to revolutionize.
Our challenge, in other words, is much greater than overthrowing a dictator or an austerity memorandum. For the root causes of our current predicament are not to be found in the symptoms of the system – but at its very core. It is precisely the internal contradiction of a world system consisting of a globally integrated marketplace on the one hand, and a scattered array of competing nation states on the other, that conspires to keep reproducing the patterns of oppression and exclusion that we are trying to fight. As the glaring failure of almost any form of Really Existing Socialism has displayed, the capture of state power will not suffice to keep the global market in check. A revolution in one country is doomed to fail. To bring about a genuine revolution, we will have to work together across borders and unite for global change. But most importantly, to bring about a genuine revolution, we will have to replace the institutions of the old world – including the nation state, parliamentary democracy and a privately-controlled money supply – with our own.
This requires building a new world from the grassroots up to the global level. In order to achieve such a seemingly impossible feat, we must be daring. We must be patient. We must be creative. We must cooperate. But most of all, we must persevere. Persevere in the face of external repression. Persevere in the face of internal conflict. And above all, persevere in the face of the enormity of the challenge that lies ahead of us. In the short term, there will be no easy gains to reap. Sadly, we may not even see any tangible results until many years from now. But that does not mean that our ultimate goals are not worth the struggle. In fact, we have a responsibility to keep up the good fight – and fight it till the bitter end. This movement is only the beginning of our revolutionary process.
To be a revolutionary today is to take a plunge; a plunge into the deep, for we do not know what’s on the other side. But to be a revolutionary also means to make a vow; a vow to persevere until we finally reach the other side and prove once and for all that another world is possible.
The Crisis of Global Capitalism
But before we talk about the global revolutionary wave that began in Tunisia last year, let’s first take a step back and understand the origins of this so-called crisis and the deep sources of today’s indignation. As I said before, to be able to gauge our strength vis-Ã -vis our adversary, we first need to understand the global and historical context from which our struggle arose to begin with.
The simple truth is that the crises and uprisings of today, even though they may appear to some as disconnected events, are in reality symptoms of a much bigger and much more serious problem: a structural failure – or rather, the surfacing of a long-running and deep-seated disease – at the very core of the global capitalist system. This is not just a crisis of public finances or financial markets; neither is it just a crisis of neoliberal globalization. No, we are facing an existential crisis of global capitalism, only the third such crisis in the history of the modern world. In 2008, the global financial system veered on the brink of collapse. Few people realize it, but surrounding the collapse of Lehman Brothers, we were literally just days or hours away from a situation in which money would cease to come out of ATMs. We have to realize that we have already lived through the most serious financial crash and economic downturn since the Great Depression — and we are nowhere near its end.
By now, the financial crisis has given rise to a sovereign debt crisis. The weak link in today’s global economy is no longer just the United States, but Europe. With the eurozone on the verge of disintegration, the debt crisis has in turn given rise to a massive social crisis. Across the continent, neoliberal elites – working in the name of their masters in the financial sector – are rabidly cutting away at social provisions and the welfare state. This, in turn, has given rise to a political crisis of representation and a full-blown legitimation crisis of representative democracy. We saw it in the Greek elections last Sunday. For the first time since the fall of the dictatorship, a neo-Nazi party has made its way into Parliament. In slightly better news, a coalition of radical Left parties, Syriza, came second in the polls, and earlier this week trying to form a leftist government to overthrow the austerity memorandum.
What this indicates is that the crisis has made the people realize what is really at stake here. The irresistible politics of austerity have not only run up against the unmovable object of popular resistance – but they have also laid bare the allegiances of our political elites. Whether they are socialists or conservatives, all of them seem to unquestioningly carry out the diktat of financial markets and the technocrats in Brussels. In the process, democratic principles have been put on halt or done away with altogether. A permanent state of emergency has made itself master of the continent, with unelected banker governments installed in Greece and Italy, and politicians of the core countries mingling directly into the domestic affairs of the debt-stricken periphery. Not since the days of WWII has European democracy been faced with such an existential threat.
But of course, to those familiar with the history of neoliberalism and capitalism more generally, this is nothing new. The current crisis is merely the latest and most blatant manifestation of a protracted assault on hard-working people around the world. Real wages have remained stagnant for the past 30 years. In response, households have had to pile up unsustainable levels of debt in order to retain their purchasing power in a rapidly changing and globalizing economy. Sitting on top of a massive capital surplus extracted from the 99%, the banks smelled their opportunity. While politicians willingly looked the other way, the banks built up a global Ponzi scheme of unprecedented proportions. To complete their relentless assault on society, neoliberal elites unleashed a historic crackdown on labor unions and collective bargaining. The world was remade along the dystopian neoliberal vision of a globally-integrated financial kleptocracy.
It is not surprising, then, that the past thirty years have been the most tumultuous to date in terms of financial crises. When Mexico experienced the first sovereign debt crisis of the neoliberal era in 1982, wages across the country fell by an average of 25 to 30 percent. In South-East Asia, some 60 million jobs were lost between 1997 and 1999, and it took Thailand and Indonesia seven and eight years, respectively, to regain their average income levels of 1996. At the peak of the Argentine crisis in 2002, more than half the country’s population was thrown into poverty. Similarly, in Spain today, you know very well that more than half the population under 25 is now unemployed, while two years of harsh austerity in Greece have led to a situation where every week more than 1,200 Greeks lose their jobs. In Greece and Italy, suicide rates have spiked. It is no wonder, then, that all of these countries have experienced widespread popular protest and social unrest as a result.
But the historic roots of capitalist crisis and the assault on democracy go back much further than the past 30 years alone. In Das Kapital, Karl Marx already wrote that “the national debt gives rise to stock exchange gambling and the modern bankocracy.” Bankocracy is exactly the political system in which we find ourselves today. A small oligopoly of bankers, who control most of the wealth of the nations and are responsible for the creation of around 97% of the entire global money supply, have maneuvered themselves into a position of vast structural power.
The world economy and national governments alike now dance to the tune of finance capital. Such a situation was possible to sustain for 30 years only because cheap credit maintained the illusion of progress; the illusion that the ‘middle class’ still shared in the benefits of economic globalization. It is only now that the global Ponzi scheme has come undone, people are losing their jobs and getting kicked out of their homes, that the implicit consensus that undergirded the debt-based economy has begun to unravel. Finally, people have started to ask questions. And clearly those in power do not like that.
In the wake of the so-called Mexican Tequila Crisis of 1995, Subcomandante Marcos, spokesman for the Zapatista Army of National Liberation, observed that “in the cabaret of globalization, the state appears as a stripper – it strips off all its characteristics, until only the bare essential remains: repressive force.” Not surprisingly, it was the repressive force of a single municipal official in a small town in Tunisia that would prove to be the trigger unleashing a tidal wave of popular insurrections from North Africa to North America.
The Global Revolutionary Wave
As you know, it all began when Mohamed Bouazizi was robbed off his vending cart in Sidi Bouzid on December 17, 2010. The 26-year old Mohamed had never been a very politicized man. But his economic deprivation and social exclusion slowly drove him to the brink of despair. When a municipal officer finally confiscated his wares and – allegedly – humiliated and dishonored him by slapping him in the face and spitting at him, he snapped. He walked up to the local governor’s office, demanded to speak to the governor himself, and after he was turned down, drenched himself in petrol and lit the flame that would spark the Arab Spring and thereby unleash the Global Revolutionary Wave of 2011.
Of course the West was extremely slow to respond. In another sign of where the allegiances of our leaders truly lie, a French government minister even sent her parents on holiday to Tunis in the middle of the uprising and offered President Ben Ali her assistance in the crackdown. But when Ben Ali was toppled and the fire spread to Egypt, Western leaders finally began to realize that they could not turn the tide of popular indignation in the region. Quickly, a new narrative was established that portrayed the uprisings as a liberal call for freedom and democracy. If you read the New York Times or watched CNN in those days – something I personally tried to avoid – you would mostly find comparisons with the Eastern European uprisings against the Soviet regime. For the neoliberal West, the Arab Spring was the perfect confirmation of Fukuyama’s thesis of the End of History. “They”, the Arabs, “simply want what we have: a functional liberal democracy and integration into a global free market.”
But of course, to anyone willing to take a look at what the Arab revolutionaries were really saying, the uprisings were as much a rebellion against Western imperialism and unchecked economic liberalization, as they were a rebellion against the violent and unaccountable dictators of the region. I now want to show you a short video that illustrates the deep sources of indignation in Tunisia very well. This incendiary rap song by the 21-year old Tunisian rapper Hamada Ben Amor, known as El General, came out around the same time as Bouazizi’s fateful self-immolation. It immediately spread like a wildfire on Facebook, andEl General became known as the ‘Voice of the Revolution’. As the uprising gathered pace, Hamadawas arrested and disappeared for several days. The lyrics may give you an idea of how important economic grievances were for sparking the revolt. The song is called ‘Head of State’, and the boy you see being addressed by Ben Ali at the beginning is the young Hamada himself.
Just like in Tunisia, the uprising in Egypt was preceded by 30 years of far-reaching neoliberal reforms. Between 1982 and 1990, Egypt – just like Southern Europe today – faced a crippling sovereign debt crisis. When it was forced to go to international creditors to restructure its debt, the International Monetary Fund imposed a structural adjustment program as a condition for the disbursement of ‘emergency’ credit. As the Monthly Review reported, “the IMF conditions forced the government to cut spending on social services, relax price controls, cut subsidies, deregulate and privatize industries, target inflation, and liberalize capital flows.” All of this led to a deepening of inequality, increased labor precarity, and a massive rise in youth unemployment.
It was no surprise, then, that the early stirrings of resistance against the Mubarak regime were launched not by supporters of liberal democracy and free-market capitalism, but by a group of activists primarily concerned about the rising social injustice in the country. While the Western media reported on the Egyptian revolution as if it started simply on January 25, the first day of protests, the truth is that the process of organized resistance goes back at least as far as a planned strike in the industrial town of El-Mahalla El-Kubra, on April 6, 2008. This strike gave rise to the so-called April 6 Youth Movement – a loose coalition of revolutionary socialists and anarchists – who would later play a key role in the leaderless insurrection that toppled Mubarak.
The Egyptian uprising is therefore the best confirmation we have of the fact that a revolution is never just a singular telegenic event, but by its very definition a protracted process. The revolutionary process in Egypt continues in the streets and squares today. In last week’s clashes in front of the Ministry of Defense, the main chant of the protesters was once again “the people demand the fall of the regime.” By February of this year, precisely a year after the fall of Mubarak, the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (or SCAF), had already imprisoned and tried over 12.000 Egyptians in military tribunals. Hundreds have died in clashes with military police over the past year. The next video I will show you is a song by an Egyptian hip hop collective. It’s called Kazeboon – liars. ‘Nothing has changed,’ they sing, and Egyptians will have to rise up again to fulfill their revolution. The revolution, in other words, is still an ongoing process.
And so the Arab Spring was not isolated from the broader crisis of capitalism. Youth unemployment in the region was staggering. Food and petrol prices had reached a historic high. The mainstream media, with its typical lack of long-term memory, simply forgot to mention that during the food crisis of 2007-’08, Egypt had already experienced widespread bread riots. The revolutionary wave that swept across North Africa and the Middle East, and that continues today, was at least in part fueled by the same global economic dynamics that saw the people of Spain and Greece take to the streets in May 2011.
And so it went. On May 15, the wave of indignation crossed the Mediterranean and finally reached the restive shores of Europe. After a massive march organized by a coalition of activists, artists and intellectuals, united under the banner Democracia Real YA, a small group of protesters decided to occupy Puerta del Sol. What followed, as they say, is history. I won’t dwell too long on the specifics of the 15-M movement here in Spain, for I assume that most of you are more familiar with the details than I am. But for the moment, suffice it to say that the struggle that emerged here in Spain – and that rapidly spread to Greece and later to New York and the rest of the world – is not an isolated event. It is part of a global wave of indignation that connects oppressed Arabs with unemployed Europeans; Chilean students with Nigerian fishermen; American occupiers with Chinese villagers. While each group has its own particular local grievances, these grievances ultimately emanate from the same universal source: the structural crisis of global capitalism.
One of the places where the anxiety and despair of economic collapse is most closely felt is undoubtedly in Greece. After 3 years of draconian austerity measures, the country has already lost 20 percent of its total GDP and has seen unemployment rise to a record 22 percent. Nowhere in Europe is the assault on human dignity, social solidarity and democratic legitimacy more painfully felt than in Greece. In order to be able to continue extracting full repayment from the Greek people, the EU and IMF even went as far as suspending the country’s democracy by imposing a technocratic government under the leadership of a former Vice-President of the European Central Bank. A remarkable detail is that Prime Minister Papademos was in charge of the Greek Central Bank when the country conspired with the Wall Street investment bank Goldman Sachs to mask its massive public debt through a quasi-legal financial transaction.
On May 25 last year, the Greeks followed in the footsteps of the Spanishindignados and occupied Syntagma Square in central Athens, demanding an end to the austerity memorandum, the ouster of the so-called Troika of foreign lenders, and the institution of direct democracy. Ever since, the images of police repression that have emerged out of Greece are of a truly different order. Last month, I was in Greece with my friend and fellow ROAR contributor Leonidas to make a short documentary on the crisis and the movement. One thing almost everyone told us is that they consider it a miracle that no one has died in the police crackdown so far. The next video was made by our friends in the multimedia team at Syntagma Square. It is a powerful illustration of how democratic values are being undermined in order to keep in place a fundamentally-flawed economic arrangement.
A few months later, the revolutionary fire spread from the global periphery to the very core of the global capitalist system. In the summer of 2011, our friends at Adbusters called for the occupation of Wall Street on September 17. On that day, as part of a global day of action against the power of the banks, thousands swarmed into Lower Manhattan and set up an occupation in Zuccotti Park, in what has become the biggest social movement in the United States since the end of the Vietnam War. In the space of just a few weeks, the Occupy movement transformed the political discourse in the United States. Where previously the media had been talking about the budget deficit and US credit rating, the Occupy movement suddenly propelled rising inequality and the power of Wall Street into the public debate.
But the revolutionary wave of 2011 did not culminate until October 15, when a global day of action called for by the Spanish indignados led to one of the largest transnational protests in world history. Sure, we had the demonstrations against the Iraq war in the early 2000s, but that was a single-issue protest that ended as soon as the invasion began. October 15 saw, for the first time in history, millions of people taking to the streets in 1,000+ cities in 82 countries demanding not just a change in policy, but a change in the very structure of the world system. Under the banner ‘United for Global Change’, there were no demands upon those in power, only a powerful message: we have become a force to reckon with. What #15O showed us, is that our struggle truly is a global one.
But while the mainstream media has tended to explain these protests as a direct response to the global financial crisis, we can’t afford to lose perspective here. One very simple slogan of the indignados that I like very much is “no es una crisi – es el sistema”. In other words, we are not protesting the financial crisis; we are protesting the very system that gave rise to it in the first place. And as I highlighted before, the financial crisis is but the latest manifestation of a much deeper crisis that sees the destruction of our environment, the depletion of natural resources, the catastrophic destabilization of our climate, the unprecedented manmade extinction of millions of species, the sustained growth of inequality, the emergence of gated communities and shanty-towns, the precarity of labor, the commodification of education, culture and the arts, the growing sense of alienation, depression and despair, and so on – the list is endless. These tragedies are taking place not just in the crisis-stricken periphery of the eurozone; they are everywhere. There’s no greater illustration of this fact than the protests that rocked emerging economies like Chile, Israel, China and Nigeria over the course of the past year.
Chile, for instance, has long been the fastest growing economy in Latin America. Nominally, its GDP per capita is the highest in the region. As you may know, Chile was the very laboratory of neoliberal ideology in the late 1970s. After the democratically-elected communist President Salvador Allende was overthrown by the bloody CIA-assisted coup of Augusto Pinochet, a group of US-trained neoliberal economists, known the Chicago Boys, swooped in to advise the juntaon radical free-market reforms that would later be replicated across the globe. The measures were eventually condensed into the so-called Washington Consensus, which was enforced by the IMF and World Bank with devastating consequences across the Global South. Today, these structural reforms are being imposed once again – in more or less the same form – on the debt-stricken European periphery.
Starting in May last year, Chile witnessed the outbreak ofthe biggest protests since the fall of the military dictatorship of Pinochet. Hundreds of thousands of students and sympathizers took to the streets and clashed with police to demand free and high-quality public education. Earlier this year, I was in Rome and had the opportunity to meet Camila Vallejo, one of the leaders of the Chilean student movement. And while I do not entirely share the 20th century symbolism and hierarchical organization of her Communist Party, hearing Camila speak was a very clear confirmation of the fact that the struggle of Chilean students – even though their country is not formally in ‘crisis’ – is ultimately about the same type of issues that are driving our struggles here in Europe and the US.
With the inhumane logic of the market pervading every single sphere of Chilean society, the privatization of university education has pushed tuition fees to such high levels that most families are either being forced to take on massive debt to send their children to university – or they are prized out of higher education altogether. But the issues go far beyond education alone. Chile is now the most unequal member of the OECD, something that is affecting lower and middle class households across the board. The next video I will show is a song by the Chilean rapper Ana Tijoux, whose Leftist parents escaped Chile to flee the Pinochet regime. The song – about the neoliberal shock doctrine that has been imposed upon the country – has become one of the anthems of the student movement.
In the meantime, a number of other so-called ‘emerging markets’ have been rocked by protests as well. Israel, for instance, has been recording steady growth levels even throughout the global economic downturn. Nevertheless, two decades of neoliberal reforms have pushed the country’s wealth into the hands of a tiny oligarchy of corrupt political, corporate and military elites, while the country was left with one of the highest poverty rates in the developed world. Israel now ranks just behind Chile and the United States as one of the most unequal countries in the OECD. As a result, in June last year, the country witnessed the outbreak of massive protests against the unaffordable cost of living – housing in particular – culminating into the single biggest demonstration in Israeli history: nearly half a million people took to the streets, and a leading commentator for Haaretz wrote of “a revolt by the middle class against the last three decades of extreme economic neoliberalism.”
Similar events have taken place in countries as far apart – both geographically and culturally – as China in Nigeria. In China, a peasant uprising in the village of Wukan saw local Party officials ousted from their offices by an angry mob after local officials conspired with real estate agencies to divvy up communal farm land for a handsome profit – a typical phenomenon in early capitalist development that Karl Marx called ‘primitive accumulation’. The Wukan uprising was remarkable only in the degree of success of the villagers, who managed to drive out party officials and temporarily establish a self-governing commune. But it is far from an isolated event. According to a study by two scholars from Nankai University, China experienced almost 90,000 such incidents in 2009 alone.
Earlier this year, Nigeria also experienced the emergence of a massive protest movement – quickly dubbed Occupy Nigeria – against corruption and the abolition of fuel subsidies. As a key oil and gas exporter, Nigeria is at the very crux of global capitalist development. Companies like Shell have a dark history of bribing local officials, hiring paramilitary death squads and causing massive oil leakages in the Niger Delta. In the meantime, Nigeria’s own oil is exported abroad for refinement and then imported back into the country for a much higher price. With Wall Street speculators driving up the price of commodities even further, fuel has become unaffordable for the average Nigerian – who has not benefited from the country’s spectacular growth levels at all. With the majority of the population living on less than $2 per day, it was a matter of time before people would take to the streets. This video, by the German-Nigerian singer Nneka, illustrates some of the deeper concerns over corruption and neo-colonialism that lie at the root of the Nigerian protests.
Utopia Dawning on the Horizon
On the eve of WWII, with the dark forces of fascism on the rise across the continent, the Italian philosopher and revolutionary Antonio Gramsci, locked up in one of Mussolini’s prisons, penned down a powerful observation. “The old world is dying,” he wrote, “and the new struggles to be born. Now is the time of monsters.” From Cairo to Oakland, from Athens to Santiago de Chile, and even here in Barcelona, where the police crackdown has been particularly hard-handed, these words once again ring true today. All of us hold our breath for tomorrow – and the future beyond it. No one knows what the attempted re-occupation of Plaza Catalunya and Puerta del Sol will bring. No one knows what this global spring of resistance will bring; let alone the years and decades that lie ahead. But one thing we know for sure: what happened in the squares and parks of the world last year has given us a glimpse into the world that awaits us. That is, if we are willing to fight for it.
The occupations at Sol, Syntagma and Zuccotti Park were like a globally interconnected web of tiny little Utopias. They were a whisper from the future; a reflection of the society we wish to create. A society without parties or leaders – where decisions affecting the community are taken collectively and on the basis of consensus. A society with neither wage slavery nor unemployment – where people choose their own type of work and are rewarded on the basis of need, not greed. A self-organized society based on horizontally-networked federation, without hierarchical structures of power or political representation. A society that does not atomize individuals, but that cherishes the idea of community, providing a sense of belonging and fulfillment while leaving individuals perfectly free to develop themselves physically, mentally and spiritually; to actualize their greatest potential and achieve a sense of internal peace and harmony. A society that cherishes culture and creativity, selflessness and solidarity. That is the world that was born in Sol, Syntagma and Plaza Catalunya – that is the vision that gives us hope.
Some may call us dreamers for pursuing such an idealized vision of society, but we know better. As the Greek resistance hero and anti-austerity campaigner Manolis Glezos told us in Athens last month, “the boat, before it was first built, was a Utopia; the airplane, before it was invented, was a Utopia; the satellite, before the first one was shot into space, was a Utopia. No one believed these Utopias were possible – until necessity made them reality.” Or, as Eduardo Galeano, the Uruguayan writer so poetically put it, “Utopia is on the horizon. Every step I take towards her, she takes a step back and the horizon runs ten steps further away. So what purpose does Utopia serve, then? Well, it serves the purpose of making us move forward.”
Ever since we were young, they told us there was no alternative; that the world was flat and a rising tide would lift all boats. But the rising tide was a deluge of debt, and the lifeboats have long since been replaced with the cold logic of the marketplace. As we stare into this ocean of despair, the endless struggle has become our only hope for a genuine alternative. When the system pushes ordinary people to become revolutionaries, you know you are no longer at the End of History – you are at the very edge of it.
Tonight, on the eve of a global day of action that will once again make the indignant roar of the people resonate across the globe, we must realize that our movement is part of this unique historic process. The occupations were only just the beginning. Even if we manage to re-occupy the squares tomorrow, these camps are bound to fade with time. Another thing Manolis Glezos told us in Athens last month, is that the police crackdown on Syntagma Square was actually a good thing, for it forced the people back into their neighborhoods. What we saw in Syntagma, he said, was not direct democracy – it was a lesson in direct democracy. The end of the occupation allowed the people to return to their homes and start applying these lessons in their everyday lives. Or in the poetic words of another activist, Konstantinos, “imagine a tree; it was cut down right when it was blossoming, and as it fell down, the cool summer breeze took the seeds and planted them in all the squares and villages of Greece. Syntagma never died – it spread.”
To sustain our endless struggle, it is important to keep this global and historical perspective in mind. When the merchants and bankers of Venice, Florence and Genova started to defy the church and the aristocracy in the early 15th century, they had no idea that they were at the very edge of a historical process that – five centuries later – would culminate into the emergence of a globally-interconnected capitalist economy. Yet they completely revolutionized society and helped shape the system that we are trying to replace today. If we are to arise out of Tolstoy’s ‘fog of war’, we will have to learn from our adversaries and how their system came into existence to begin with. We can start by creating our own institutions and applying the lessons of direct democracy, horizontal decision-making, self-organization and mutual aid in our daily lives.
At times, we may lose this perspective and be overcome with self-doubt. We may be carried away with excitement and expect the world to change tomorrow – or we may become overly pessimistic in expecting it to never change at all. But even when the times may seem bleak; when it seems that our efforts may lead nowhere; when it seems that the repressive forces of capital and the state squash us underneath their boots; that internal divisions will tear us apart; and that the challenge of creating a better world is simply too Utopian and quixotic to begin with; even when we are about to lose all hope and give up this good fight, we have to realize that each and every single one of us has his or her role to play.
In this global revolution, we all have our place. None of us will triumph alone. Some of us may not even live to see the impact of our actions. But as long as we keep struggling, all of us can return to bed at night knowing that today we did everything we possibly could to make this world a better place. And then, when we rise in the morning to start it all over anew, each and every single one of us can look into the mirror and be proud of being part of the unique historical moment that we are living through. For “hope,” as the 19-year old Niki from Athens told us in an interview last month, “is last to die.”
