World Social Struggles Newswire Archive

1 'protester' dead of heart stoppage, a syndicalist (PAME-KKE stalinist) builder from Athens. He was guarding the parliament building to try to stop people attacking it! He died of heart failure. No signs of physical injury, unlike many others who attacked and were attacked in attempts to attack, and to defend, the parliament building. Still the stalinist KKE was determined to let the troika vote, and their actions were and will continue to be bloody.

In Vienna, one day before the global day of action 15th of October, people started occupying a huge building. It has been opened as a social center named Epizentrum, for the neighborhood and the whole city, and it is right now in a humming process of being built up.

The Fray Bartolomé de Las Casas Human Rights Centre and the Movement for Justice in El Barrio, The Other Campaign, New York, have written the following declaration with the goal of collecting signatures of support.

An update on the Dale farm situation, including information on increased police repression and hostility towards residents and activists, and calls for further supplies to aid the resistance.

Photo from Occupy London, live stream at  http://livestream.com/occupyLSX

The show this week looks at the ideas of 'law' and 'rights'. As George Carlin says, if the government can take it away, it isn't a right, it's a privilege. A disturbing but important thought in these days in which governments worldwide are becoming more open about their subservience to expediency. We hear from a range of speakers, and our material ranges from the comic to the deadly serious.

This week we introduce a new author, Jacques Lusseyran. As a teenager, although completely blind, he organised some of the most effective French resistance to the Nazi occupation. We begin with a reading of Steve Talbott's Can Technology Make The Handicapped Whole? about techno-fixing human beings, which focuses on Lusseyran. Next, we read one of Lusseyran's essays, The Blind in Society. Finally, an interview with Laura Fogg, author of "Travelling Blind -- life lessons from unexpected places", on her experience of helping the blind to navigate.

In my opinion, it is very likely that the historians of the future will look upon tomorrow as the day a truly global anti-capitalist movement was born. Following the example of Occupy Wall Street, Los Angeles, Boston, and hundreds of US towns and cities, a huge number of small and large occupations will begin on every continent except Antarctica (see Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe, North America, South America).

Join us for a meeting with like-minded people to share ideas and strategise to stop the government’s attacks on welfare.

Occupy the London Stock Exchange
15th October
12pm
St Paul’s Cathedral

A quote well-known among activists, variously attributed to Gandhi or US labor leader Nicholas Klein, says that “first they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.” In the space of just the past several weeks, it’s possible to discern the first three steps of this progression in the response of the US political, economic, and media elite to the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement. This fact should be a great source of encouragement for all those brave and dedicated individuals who have helped build this movement.

The Occupy Wall Street movement and subsequent protests that are continuing across the United States have drawn world-wide attention. Our correspondent, a college freshman, participates in the first demonstration of his life. Here is his point-of-view of Occupy Wall Street.

Before I went to Occupy Wall Street, I did some research to see what I was protesting. I went to Occupywallst.org which told me the time and location of the occupation, but not much more. “The one thing we all have in common is that We Are The 99% that will no longer tolerate the greed and corruption of the 1%,” claimed the site. I felt like I could buy into this cause, so I got a couple of people from my college dorm just outside New York City to come with me to Manhattan to be stereotypical protesting college students. We were going to go down in history, just like the kids from the UC Berkeley Free Speech Movement, the Paris spring of 1968, and Tiananmen Square. Hopefully not just like Tiananmen Square.

Transcripts
Part One: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eu9BWlcRwPQ

…2008 financial crash more hard earned private property was destroyed than if all of us here were to be destroying it night and day for weeks. They tell you we are dreamers. The true dreamers are those who think things can go on indefinitely the way they are. We are not dreamers. We are awakening from a dream which is tuning into a nightmare. We are not destroying anything. We are only witnessing how the system is destroying itself. We all know the classic scenes from cartoons. The cart reaches a precipice. But it goes on walking. Ignoring the fact that there is nothing beneath. Only when it looks down and notices it, it falls down. This is what we are doing here. We are telling the guys there on Wall Street – Hey, look down! (cheering).

PLEASE NOTE - WITNESSES STILL NEEDED!!

 http://london.indymedia.org/articles/10374

We just got back from the opening march for Occupy Portland, and were even more disappointed by how liberal, reformist, and nonthreatening it was than we had expected. The website for Occupy Portland had promised that "proper actions" would be taken against "instigators" of any "illegal activity (property destruction etc.)," which we can only interpret as a threat to snitch to the cops, so we went with low expectations, but this was by all means a massive disappointment even taking into account our pessimism from the get-go.

We attended the opening march for Occupy Portland because we are some angry-ass proles who really hate capitalism. Although Occupy Wall Street (and the various off-shoot occupations) have few official defined goals or positions, there is a general opposition to "corporate greed" and "corrupt politics". As anarchists, we seek to expose and destroy the roots of these problems - as long as capitalism and the state exist, there will be greedy corporations and corrupt politicians. Capitalism and the state cannot be reformed into something kinder, gentler, or more humane, it is exploitative by nature. We wished to push the discourse at Occupy Portland in a more radical, explicitly anti-capitalist and anti-state direction. So we attended the Occupy Portland opening march in full team colors with a big banner that read "NEVER GONNA GIVE YOU UP (A) NEVER GONNA LET YOU DOWN." Hey, we do have a sense of humor.

One notable feature of Occupy Wall Street is its participants’ lack of hesitation in using the term ‘revolution’. Here comes the revolution! This is the first step of the revolution! Get up, get down, the revolution is in this town! You won’t stop our revolution! etcetera, etcetera. Distinguishing from these assertions of a revolution that has arrived, what does it really mean to envisage a revolution? And why should revolutionaries fear to act as well as talk, camp, and march?

Starting with the occupation of a park next to Wall Street on September 17, a new movement is spreading across the country in which people gather in public spaces in protest against social inequalities. We’ll present a full analysis of this phenomenon here shortly; in the meantime, here’s an open letter to the occupation movement, engaging with some of the issues that have arisen thus far. Please forward this widely and print out versions to distribute at the “Occupy” events!

Dear Occupiers [online viewing version]

Dear Occupiers [print version]: A two-sided flier intended to be folded down the middle, longways.

OccupyLA Day Seven. The encampment at City Hall continues to grow. The camp now numbers close to 100 tents with at least two occupants per tent. Rain on Wednesday failed to discourage the occupiers, and the encampment is now larger and more organized than ever. Tomorrow the camp will have completed its first full week. It has been an action packed week and has drawn much media attention even competing with the Jackson murder trial just down the street.

Syrian Kurdish activist and opposition leader Mishaal Tamo was gunned down in the largely Kurdish city of Qamishli on Friday.

 http://www.rudaw.net/english/news/syria/4040.html

While the slant of corporate media coverage of the Wall Street Occupation has focused on the general motivations behind the movement, often missed are the variety of personal perspectives, backgrounds and desires that brought this protest-city together. Here are some of the many voices that have combined their efforts to bring New York City the Wall Street live-in protest.