#PLAYJAZZ

Tactical Briefing #28.

From Adbusters Blog

Hey you nimble dreamers, wild cats and horizontals out there,

Our Spring offensive is building toward a climactic May uprising… time to come out of winter hibernation and play jazz like we’ve never played it before.

May 1 we leap into the new world with a mighty multinational General Strike. Wherever you are, No Work; No School; No Shopping. No illusions. No apologies. No business as usual. Into The Streets!

May 12, we intensify with three days of global action. Jammers in London, Lisbon, Paris, Marseilles, Helsinki, Cuzco, Barcelona, Quebec are already on board with more on the way. We’ll hold our assemblies, hash out our demands and start building a parallel society that can sustain autonomous, horizontal, revolutionary communities outside of corpo-consumerism … we stop begging and we start creating … we begin the change we want to see.

We scared the G8 away from Chicago and now some occupiers are planning #OCCUPYCAMPDAVID – a cacophonous carnival of tree-sits, lockdowns and nomadic encampments in the woods and nearby Thurmont. Bon Voyage! Others are upping the ante with #OCCUPYCHICAGO – a mobilization of anarchic swarms to shutdown the NATO summit.

#LAUGHRIOT

And then one of the softer aesthetic moments of our Spring offensive could well be the #LAUGHRIOT on May 18, the day the G8 leaders meet in Camp David. There is something totally ludicrous, absurd, even insane about the eight most powerful people in the world deciding to do the people’s business people behind closed doors and razor wire fences. This veneer of legitimacy is our tragedy turned to farce.

As Aristotle observed, to laugh is uniquely human… Imagine the scene: first a few hundred of us, then a few thousand, then millions of people across the world — each in their own way, some individually, some collectively in flash mobs, offices, parks, encampments — all breaking out in uproarious laughter on May 18. This could be a delicious defining moment – the day when the people of the world have a good laugh together and, from that point on, start thinking differently about how the world should be governed.

Then we get ready for our next big challenge: How to Occupy the U.S. Presidential Election on November 6.

Time to play wild, spontaneous jazz as Miles Davis intended,

for the wild,
Culture Jammers HQ

OccupyWallStreet.org / Tactical Briefing #25, #26 and #27 / OccupyWallst.org / G8Protest.org / OccupyChi.org / CANG8.org / Takethesquare.net / OccupyMay1st.org / MayDayNYC.org / May12.net / Facebook / Twitter / Reddit

Jammers Swarm NATO HQ

Indignados abroad prepare for #OCCUPYCHICAGO.

From Adbusters Blog

Yesterday, several hundred indignados, culture jammers and occupiers from across Europe swarmed the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) headquarters in Brussels in a bold attempt to shut it down.

Organizers explained that the action was a prelude to #OCCUPYCHICAGO and an early preview of the anarchic swarms that will disrupt May’s NATO summit. “Where peace is at stake, nonviolent intervention is necessary,” a press release said.

According to the AFP, occupiers ran across fields and climbed fences leading to the NATO compound chanting “NATO Game Over” and “We want peace now.” They were blocked by a “large police presence” and 483 nonviolent occupiers were arrested.

See here pictures and video of the action.

Surviving An Existential Winter


See video

Al Jazeera follows Occupy through the winter as the movement continues to build after violent evictions across the country.

The History of OWS

What does our past tell us about our future?

From Adbusters Blog

The Occupy movement “has created a space in the American political consciousness about a different type of power: one controlled by people, not corporations,” explains this Al Jazeera documentary about the first phase of Occupy Wall Street.

As we head towards the May Day General Strike, May 12-15 global days of action, #OCCUPYCHICAGO, and the #LAUGHRIOT, what lessons can we learn from phase one of the movement?

URL: http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/faultlines/2012/03/20123191525164973…

Paul Mason

The “cancelled future” generation has gone from apathetic despair to inspired action.

From Adbusters Blog

The “cancelled future” generation has undergone a radical shift from apathetic despair to inspired action, says journalist Paul Mason.

URL: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/video/2012/jan/23/paul-mason-rev…

Globalizing Dissent


See video

The Occupy movement has taken much of its inspiration from Spain’s “Outraged” movement. What lessons does Spain have for Occupy now?

Via The Real News. Transcript of the interview available here.

OWS Now What?

Insight from Spain’s Indignados.

From Adbusters Blog

In his famous speech at Occupy Wall Street, Slavoj Žižek offered the people in attendance (and curious internet users around the world) an important warning in the form of friendly advice. “Don’t fall in love with yourselves. We’re having a nice time here. But remember, carnivals come cheap. What matters is the day after, when we will have to return to normal lives. Will there be any changes then?” For the indignados of the 15-M movement in Spain, the general election results of November 20th marked the start of the metaphorical day after.

That the right-wing Partido Popular would take an absolute majority of the government with only a minor increase in votes due to the spectacular disintegration of popular support for the outgoing Partido Socialista was no surprise to anyone, especially the indignados. What may have surprised some, however, is the relatively low intensity of mobilizations since the right wing took office and, slowly but steadily, announced that they would implement the same neoliberal policies and violent austerity imposed by technocratic regimes in Greece and Italy. As Amador Fernández-Savater recently put it, the questions on a lot of peoples’ minds seem to be, “Where are all those people who occupied the plazas and neighbourhood assemblies during the spring? Have they become disenchanted with the movement? Are they incapable of making lasting compromises? Are they resigned to their fates?“

Fernández-Savater doesn’t think so. “With no study in hand and generalizing simply based on the people I know personally and my own observations of myself, I think that, in general, people have gone on with their lives… But saying that they’ve gone on with their lives is a bad expression. For once you’ve gone through the plazas, you don’t leave the same, nor do you go back to the same life. Paradoxically, you come back to a new life: touched, crossed, affected by 15-M.“ And as he so eloquently puts it, 15-M is no mere social organization, but “a new social climate“. But how does a social climate organize itself? What new possibilities have revealed themselves after months of self-management, cooperative civil disobedience and massive mobilization, and what remains to be done?

Over time, the wave of mobilizations that first hit the shores of the Mediterranean and extended outwards over the course of 2011 has overcome its initial, expressive phase. This phase managed to substitute the dominant narrative with our own. We now know that the problem is not some mysterious technical failure we call a crisis but the intentional crimes of a cleptocracy. This distinction is crucial: while the first suggests a management dilemma that opposes left- and right-wing approaches to the crisis, the second draws a line between the 1% who abuse power in order to steal from the people and those who refuse to consent and choose to resist in the name of the other 99%.

Having reached this point, the obvious question becomes, “Now what?“ Of course we should continue to protest together, especially if we choose to do so intermittently and massively, favouring a general critique of the system over particular causes. And at the smaller scale, that those specific struggles continue to take the streets is also desirable. However, it is fundamentally important that these struggles are not overly disconnected from one another or the more general movement; that they unfold beyond their own spaces (hospitals, schools, factories, offices and so on) and into the broader metropolitan spaces of cleptocratic dominance. These processes serve to keep the questions that guide the movement alive and, therefore, adapting to the always changing situations in which they operate. Yet the question of what alternatives we can provide remains.

The conquest of political power, particularly in liberal democracies, is not the most important task of social change. Political change tends to occur once social changes have already taken place. Thus, if what we desire is to change existing social relations and inequalities, it makes little sense to prioritize a change of political power with the hope that social change will be installed from above. Instead, the first challenge, as John Holloway once put it, is to “change the world without taking power“, to build and strengthen the alternative institutions of the commons.

By institutions, of course, we are not referring to the institutions of a political regime such as parliaments, executives and the like. Nor are we referring to those which may lie between the regime and the movement, such as political parties, unions or other organizations. We are referring to institutions which provide a foundation for the movement and are defined by their own autonomy: social centres, activist collectives, alternative media, credit unions and co-operatives. Institutions like these constitute no more and no less than material spaces in which we can articulate the values, social practices and lifestyles underlying the social climate change taking place all over the world.

In many places, these alternative institutions are already under construction. In Catalonia, the Cooperativa Integral Catalana, which serves to integrate various work and consumption co-ops in the region through shared spaces, education, stores, legal services, and meetings, already has 850 members, thousands of users and has inspired more “integral co-ops“ all over Spain. Meanwhile, in the United States, 130 million Americans now participate in the ownership of co-operatives and credit unions, and 13 million Americans have become worker-owners of more than 11,000 employee-owned companies, six million more than belong to private-sector unions. Over the coming weeks and months, we hope to explore some of these alternative institutions and the possibilities they open up for the 99%.

In their seminal work Empire, political theorists Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri examine the way in which a cleptocratic Empire controls people through what Michel Foucault called biopower: “a situation in which what is directly at stake in power is the production and reproduction of life itself“. In many ways, this is the force we are defeating when our experiences together in the streets, the plazas and the assemblies inform our daily lives and our decisions in the long run. The spectacular moments we share are an exhilarating, fundamental source of energy for the movement all over the world. They are also fodder for a sensationalist mainstream media which devours events to leave us with the superficial scraps of headlines, sound-bites and riot porn. But the revolution is not being televised precisely because it is happening inside and between us. We are moving too slowly for their sound-bites because we are going far, wide and deep. And, if we play our cards right, we will be in control of our time, our work and our lives before they know it.

Revolutionary Reflections

One hour of homework for all of us.

From Adbusters Blog

Hey all you activists out there!

So another year has gone by. You’re back at work. The tasks are piling up. The goodwill and cheer of the holiday season are a distant memory, but the resolve in your spirit from the excitement of recent revolutionary months is higher than ever. 2011 was a year of global uprisings … We found hope in Tunisia, inspiration in Egypt and a voice in Occupy. We’ve had a taste of revolution and we want more. Check out Democracy Now’s one hour piece on the first ‘year of revolutions’ in the 21st century and be poised for the corporate state rapture to come.

URL: http://www.democracynow.org/2012/1/2/year_of_global_uprisings_from_the

Do not pass go


See video

A year and a half after Toronto’s G20 protests, 6 organizers face sentences of up to 2 years in jail. Here’s a message from those still on trial by the Canadian government.

Read the full statement at conspiretoresist.wordpress.com and show your support!

Signs of Revolutionary Spring in Europe

Will the people’s rebellion go continental?

by
Micah M. White

From Adbusters #94: Post Normal

The energy is in Europe now
Gareth Fuller / AP Images

You are missing some Flash content that should appear here! Perhaps your browser cannot display it, or maybe it did not initialize correctly.

Audio version read by George Atherton – Right-click to download

In the United Kingdom, an increasingly lenient judiciary is emboldening climate change protesters. Two recent cases have shown that judges are now receptive to the “lawful excuse,” also known as the “necessity defense” in the US, the legal argument that it is not a crime to act illegally if it is done to prevent a larger harm such as global warming. At a recent sentencing, one judge even praised protesters who had intended to shut down a coal power plant as “decent men and women with a genuine concern for others” and said, “I have no doubt that each of you acted with the highest possible motives.” Activists are now planning even bolder actions.

In France, the last few years have seen the publication of major anticapitalist works. Alain Badiou, in his The Communist Hypothesis, argues that the only path forward is to reembrace the principle of radical egalitarianism underlying the abstract concept of communism. Also worth mentioning is Badiou’s ongoing intellectual collaboration with Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek, whose most recent books, First as Tragedy, Then as Farce and Living in the End Times, represent a compelling outline for radical politics based on an “eschatological apocalyptism” that strives to “interrupt” the contemporary course of history. Then there is the anonymously authored The Coming Insurrection, an anarchist manifesto that calls for the formation of autonomous communes from which to launch sabotage campaigns: “Jam everything – this will be the first reflex of all those who rebel against the present order … to block circulation is to block production as well.” Stéphane Hessel’s Indignez-vous! (Cry out!) is the most recent barometer of popular rage. In it Hessel, a 93-year-old veteran of the World War II Resistance against Nazism, exhorts today’s youth to wage a war of resistance against capitalism in the same way clandestine networks fought the fascists. The pamphlet has sold 600,000 copies so far.

And the entire continent has seen a cascade of passionate protests. In October, the prime minister of Iceland was pelted with eggs; a man drove a cement truck into the gates of the Irish Parliament to protest bank bailouts; and three million people in France participated in eight days of rebellion, blockading oil refineries and fuel depots until gas stations ran dry. In the following months, students in London smashed up the headquarters of Britain’s Conservative Party, and Greece was shut down by its seventh general strike of the year as protesters carried signs that read, “Let us not live as slaves!”

Now, inspired by the Arab people’s revolutionary spring, there are signs that the European continent is set to erupt. On May 15, tens of thousands of precarious workers, students and the unemployed marched in fifty cities in Spain before occupying Puerta del Sol, the central square in Madrid. The lesson of Tahrir was clearly on the minds of protestors. One organizer promised that if police try to “remove us we will sit down, everything will be peaceful, and if we are eventually dispersed we will come back tomorrow.”

—Micah White