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.
Julian
Arthur
Zuveyda
Bell
Tracy
Andrew
Julian: “I’m from Oregon. Saw it on the internet, decided to come out here and bought a one-way ticket. I’ve been here two days. In the past I’ve done some forest-related activism in Oregon, but I was so excited about this because it was out here, on Wall Street, to identify and call out the injustices. I love the consensus-based system for us to develop a vision of where we want to take society, for us to interact with each other and identify the problems. I see us as a part of the larger global movement. Capitalism is in crisis, both here and abroad.”
Arthur: “I’ve been here four days and it’s getting increasingly organized each day. There’s a lot of quality people and diversity here. I think you’ll see a lot of people with diverse opinions, political orientations, dispositions, even apolitical. I think they achieve what they do not through unity, but through a similar shared process, the General Assembly, which is how most of the stuff around here is done. It’s a general, decentralized way to enact direct democracy. It’s about facilitation and the discussion of ideas.”
Zuveyda: “So far I’ve spent one night here. I came here because I was laid off two weeks ago. I found out there was basically nothing better I could be doing with my time. I spent a lot of time looking for a new job, and there was nothing I could find. I only have an associate’s degree, which may not be much but I thought it would get me further than a mediocre minimum-wage job.”
Bell: “I’m from south Germany. I was just passing through New York and I heard about the protest. The negative impact of this crazy system is an ever-growing problem — it’s not just the United States. We have these same problems in Germany. We have a single bank that has been propped up by $720 billion while we face cuts to our education system. The whole German education system — school, books, everything — could be entirely revamped with what we gave to just one bank.”
Tracy: “I tried to get a lot of friends to come out here, and I’m here alone. A lot of people don’t want to stand up for stuff they talk about all the time or address problems they see all the time, so I wanted to be here. Despite everything it’s been a fun atmosphere, chilled, relaxed. But I also do really like marching around and going to Wall Street to tell them how much I don’t like them.”
Andrew: “After five days we finally started really getting organized. We haven’t really clarified a message, in my opinion — and I’m a mainstreamer, I prefer a foot in the door to a door in the face — because a lot of people, even those who believe in non-dominance, have a tendency to believe that in a democracy the loudest voice is the best one to hear. I’ve encountered other loud voices besides mine and it’s been a challenge. To me the problem is that people think their possessions and clothing are their existence. Those people have the clout to stop buying those products and deny money to those companies. It’s all a work in progress, so I’m grateful for the purists who have checked me and challenged me, even from a devil’s advocate point of view.”
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Lessons from the Paris Commune!!
07.10.2011 18:49
To elect women equally is now a main task of the international trade unions throughout the world. That would require doubling democracy at all levels in present day America.
Thus the French Bourgeois Army fought against the workers of Paris in 1871, and defeated their social programs for the liberation of France to the majority of workers. When reviewing the lessons of the commune, Marx commented that while in power they only stood outside the Bank of France, and did not go in and take the money for the social programs of the commune.
They stood in awe of the enslaving, feudal, and bourgeois exploiting classes, and their theft of the workers money, which they later used to destroy the social programs of the workers themselves. Marx says that is a big mistake, that the commune ought to have taken the money, and used it to improve the living and working conditions of the whole working class of France.
Further on in-the matter-in-motion, we the workers found that he is correct, because in the materialism ot the revolution, it is not fully possible to free the peoples until the scrapping of the Imperial war machine and its manufactury takes place fully, because the war machine does not produce it destroys, and to exist it has to take from those classes that do produce, and that fact is exploitation.
As the commune is for ending all exploitation as ruling, it can be understood now that genuine freedom and democracy as collective agree depends on setting liberation as ending aggressive war as any nations foreign policy, and making future advances by using collective agree as democracy to settle disputes between nations. That is the anti-fascist side which codifies such necessity in the anti-fascist covenants.
By the way the French Bourgeoisie took 36,000 surrendered worker-soldiers outside in Paris and shot them dead against a wall, of which the holes in the wall from the bullets can still be seen today.
That is they resorted to fascism not democracy to maintain their rule. This movement, occupy Wall Street, is to attain the wealth the workers produced from work out of the banks and Wall Street Stock Markets, is fully correct and a revolutionary act, because the 99% have been left out of the finances and financial classes, they have been marginalized out of ownership and control of the very society they created with their socially necessary labour. Worse yet, they have been left out of ownership and control of the main means of production, they produced by the process of theft called ' Privatization'. Organic food, clothing and shelter is not an option for life, but a material necessity of life.
Viva socialist liberation. Solidarity to the Occupy Wall Street!! End pollution wars, not endless wars for more and more pollution. Workers of the world, unite!!
Union Jack