{youtube}kWJvas8Oz24{/youtube}

STRIKE STATEMENT (released May 5, 2012)

The Jail Support Group is Going on STRIKE!

The Jail Support Group is going on strike now that the jail support process is completed for May Day.
We have no demands. We are autonomous. Expect us.

Providing jail support shows solidarity and care for the people in our movement. Outside of OWS, jail support is included as a key part in planning an action. When you plan a lecture, the event isn't over until the chairs are stacked, floor swept, and lights turned off. It is problematic to assume someone else will clean up after your event. Isn't jail support similar?

Add a comment Add a comment

Read more: Jail Support

{youtube}ED46wcwozSg{/youtube}

Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty                                                              -Henry David Thoreau

What is capitalism?  Where is capitalism?  Who and what sustains it?  How can we starve its roots, which feed off our relations to one another to the detriment of humanity? What alternatives can we create together? These are a few of the questions we will explore in OWS Summer Disobedience School (OWSDS),  a twelve-week training program that will empower us to map, target, and disrupt sites of capitalist injustice across the city with a wide range of creative tactics accessible to people will all levels of experience.

Add a comment Add a comment

Read more: Occupy Wall Street Summer Disobedience School Curriculum

For quite a long time now, we precariously situated students and faculty in CUNY have been practicing the art of what Kenyan writer Ngugi wa Thiong’o calls “poor theory”— “maximizing the possibilities inherent in the minimum… being extremely creative and experimental in order to survive.” Unable to isolate ourselves within the velvety quicksand of armchairs and seminar table solipsism, we have instead pursued a kind of crowd scholarship that jettisons “interest” for “involvement.” Discussions among crowds of people—in and out of assemblies, street marches, virtual forums, shared meals, space-transformations, and yes, even jail stints—have assembled critical lessons and experiences not yet valued by scholastic frameworks of singularly rendered knowledge. Thousands have co-authored this document itself.

Add a comment Add a comment

Read more: On the City as University: Occupy and the Future of Public Education

Origins of an unlimited general strike (“grève générale illimitée”)

Students in Quebec are marking their 100th day of an unlimited general strike on Tuesday, May 22nd, the culmination of the most stunning mass protest movements of recent months and North America’s largest student movement in years. In fact, the mobilizations in Quebec might just be Canada’s Arab Spring.

Students have been organizing against tuition hikes for nearly one and a half years, when the Quebec government first proposed to raise tuition fees by 75% over five years (amended to 82% over seven years by the government at the end of April). Before the general strike began in February, protests, demos, trainings, letter writing campaigns and attempts to negotiate in good faith with the government were consistently met with obstinate silence from the Charest administration. For the students there has been a growing sense of urgency and a shared recognition that increased tuition means a heavier student debt burden, hundreds of more hours a year spent working instead of studying, less access for working class and lower class students, and a shift in university culture toward the market, the commodification of education, the financialization of student life, and the privatization of the university.

Add a comment Add a comment

Read more: “We didn’t know it was impossible, so we did it!” The Quebec Student Strike celebrates its 100th day

Legalize! Organize! Unionize!

We want to be heard! We need to be heard! We will be heard!

We are here to celebrate May Day. We are here to celebrate our power as people who have found unity of purpose. Today we assert our power as working people. We declare our solidarity with all people of the world. We affirm our rights to economic security, to meaningful work, to health care, to public services, to safe and healthy communities, to free, quality public education from pre-K to college, and to civil liberties. Today, we stand in solidarity with all who take popular action to secure such rights, as we begin to form genuine alliances that challenge a system that breeds inequality.

We are here to decry the rampant growth of social, political and economic inequality. We seek an end to an era wherein a handful of political and economic elites govern in the name of democracy. We want an end to assaults on our human rights. We want an end to tax breaks for the rich. We want an end to the attacks on our right to organize. We want an end to the mass incarceration of people of color. We want an end to all wars and an end to the militarization of our foreign policy. We want an end to our current political system that is bought and paid for by 1%- ers. We want legalization, equal rights, civil rights, and a path to citizenship for immigrant working families. And we want citizenship to mean, as it should, that all people are to be treated justly and equally by their government.

Add a comment Add a comment

Read more: May Day Declaration of Solidarity

Ever since this occupy “movement” began, it has surprised me. Like a package I didn’t order appearing on my doorstep, gifting me some sweet little zines written by a near stranger I met long ago. And just when this occupy thing seems to stall or become tired—or as Take Back the Land’s Max Rameau put it so well recently, begins to feel like the film Groundhog Day—it surprises me yet again. Another package unexpectedly arrives, this time with hand-screened political posters from some anonymous friend.

May Day was one of those surprises.

Truth be told, though, the day itself was underwhelming.

Add a comment Add a comment

Read more: May Day Matters