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In the Streets

The tactics of occupation: Becoming cockroach
Nelli Kambouri and Pavlos Hatzopoulos

The global occupy protest movement is proliferating by “contagion, epidemics, battlefields, and catastrophes”.[1] Furthermore, it materialises and disperses in multiple ephemeral processes of transformation that construct a common for the multitude of protestors. The common produced by the global occupy movement is not a mutually shared opposition to the capitalist crisis, nor a collective identity (of the “indignados” or of the 99%), nor a consensual political project (for real, authentic democracy). The common does not even embody an identical strategy of occupying public space, but rather to a series of becomings that question established categorizations and taxonomies that normalize the production of subjectivities and the organisation of life.

More so, the common is not produced in a genealogical, linear fashion, evolving from past forms of mobilisation and protest but rather it emerges directly out of the exceptional material circumstances of crisis contagion and catastrophe that spread like an epidemic in different territorialisations.

In order to perform this argument, we will attempt to trace forms of becoming cockroach in the context of the global occupy movement.

November 22, 2011 - 12:16pm -- stevphen
Analysis & Polemic
In the Streets

Phase Two: Occupy Wall Street on November 17
Jason Read

Even if it were to disappear tomorrow, Occupy Wall Street would have already scored a massive victory. It has fundamentally altered one of the dominant narratives that underlies the majority political and economic thought in this country: that as much as Americans might be dissatisfied with politicians, they have no real complaint with inequality, or the economic system that makes it possible and perpetuates it – namely capitalism. Occupy Wall Street ruptured this narrative through the occupations and massive popular support. Before September the sentence, “Americans are dissatisfied with social inequality” would have been debatable to say the least, pertaining only to a small faction of leftists and academics. Now it can be stated as fact, a fact that the existing forces and powers do not know what to say about.

November 20, 2011 - 11:12am -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
In the Streets

Poet-Bashing Police
Robert Hass

Life, I found myself thinking as a line of Alameda County deputy sheriffs in Darth Vader riot gear formed a cordon in front of me on a recent night on the campus of the University of California, Berkeley, is full of strange contingencies. The deputy sheriffs, all white men, except for one young woman, perhaps Filipino, who was trying to look severe but looked terrified, had black truncheons in their gloved hands that reporters later called batons and that were known, in the movies of my childhood, as billy clubs.

November 16, 2011 - 1:40pm -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
In the Streets

Occupy and Anarchism's Gift of Democracy
David Graeber

The US imagines itself a great democracy, yet most Americans despise its
politics. Which is why direct democracy inspires them.

As the history of past movements all make clear, nothing terrifies those
running America more than the danger of true democracy breaking out. As
we see in Chicago, Portland, Oakland, and right now in New York City,
the immediate response to even a modest spark of democratically
organised civil disobedience is a panicked combination of concessions
and brutality. Our rulers, anyway, seem to labor under a lingering fear
that if any significant number of Americans do find out what anarchism
really is, they may well decide that rulers of any sort are unnecessary.

November 15, 2011 - 10:42am -- jim
News
In the Streets

Court Orders Stay of Zuccotti Park Eviction
MSNBC

Hundreds of police officers, some in riot gear, descended on Zuccotti
Park overnight in a surprise sweep of the Occupy Wall Street
headquarters that Mayor Bloomberg said had become an "intolerable
situation."

Hours later, a judge granted a temporary restraining order prohibiting
the city from enforcing rules of the plaza that she said were
published "after the occupation began." Bloomberg said at a City Hall
briefing that the city had planned to let people back into the park at
8 a.m. but decided to keep it closed while officials evaluated the
order.

Both sides were due in court at 11:30 a.m. See the order here.

November 14, 2011 - 9:11am -- jim
News
In the Streets

Occupy Wall Street Takes a New Direction
Daniel Massey

Twenty-year-old East Harlem native George Machado initially assumed Occupy Wall Street was “just some well-meaning liberal arts college kids with money—same old, same old.”

But he attended a march and started showing up at Zuccotti Park. Now the college dropout who had never been an activist is at the fore of a group planning a series of militant protests Thursday that could signal a new, disruptive direction for the movement.

The actions, to mark two months since Occupy Wall Street began, will start with an early-morning attempt to shut down Wall Street and prevent the New York Stock Exchange opening bell from ringing. They will conclude with an evening march over the Brooklyn Bridge with union members and community groups.

November 11, 2011 - 8:54am -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
In the Streets

Inside Occupy Wall Street
How a Bunch of Anarchists and Radicals With Nothing But Sleeping Bags
Launched a Nationwide Movement
Jeff Sharlet

It started with a Tweet – "Dear Americans, this July 4th, dream of
insurrection against corporate rule" – and a hashtag: #occupywallstreet.
It showed up again as a headline posted online on July 13th by
Adbusters, a sleek, satirical Canadian magazine known for its mockery of
consumer culture. Beneath it was a date, September 17th, along with a
hard-to-say slogan that never took off, "Democracy, not corporatocracy,"
and some advice that did: "Bring tent."

November 9, 2011 - 11:14am -- stevphen
Announcements
In the Streets

Belgrade Philosophical Faculty Occupation – call for international support!
Student Liberation League

Students of the Philological Faculty of Belgrade occupied their faculty building on Monday, 17th October with demands for lowering of tuition fees. Soon afterwards their colleagues from the Philosophical Faculty joined their struggle and occupied their building on 20th October as well.

The occupations are run through direct, democratically structured student assemblies which are in charge of organizing security, educational and cultural programmes during the blockades. They are also organized on non-violent basis.

October 31, 2011 - 10:14am -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
In the Streets

Enacting the Impossible
(On Consensus Decision Making)
David Graeber

On August 2, 2011 at the very first meeting of what was to become Occupy Wall Street, about a dozen people sat in a circle in Bowling Green. The self-appointed “process committee” for a social movement we merely hoped would someday exist, contemplated a momentous decision. Our dream was to create a New York General Assembly: the model for democratic assemblies we hoped to see spring up across America. But how would those assemblies actually operate?

The anarchists in the circle made what seemed, at the time, an insanely ambitious proposal. Why not let them operate exactly like this committee: by consensus.

October 29, 2011 - 1:26pm -- jim
News
In the Streets

"Occupy Oakland Reports to Occupied London"
Anonymous Comrades

[This dispatch was composed by J. and read out at the General Assembly of Occupy London in front of St Paul's Cathedral at 7:30, Thursday 27th October. Appended to it are two messages that came in from S. and D. later in the evening, and which have been passed on to the Occupied Times of London. IB]

"To our sisters and brothers at Occupy London, from Oakland, California, greetings.

On Tuesday there were about 2000 of us on the streets in Oakland. There were some scuffles and gas attacks by the police during a march which wound its way during the evening to the Plaza where the eviction had taken place early in the morning.

The march arrived at 14th and Broadway about 7.30 p.m. Cops from throughout California had blocked all entrances to the park, which was no simple matter as it has about six approaches. Cops were also stationed at all the freeway entrances, recalling a demo last year that managed to block the 880 freeway during rush hour.

So within the space of 12 hours we had a diabolical inversion whereby the police were occupying Oscar Grant Plaza while we, the 99%, occupied the streets.

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