The Fight for a Life Worth Living: A Statement on Seattle’s 2012 May Day Events from Organizers

From Occupy Seattle

Note: The following statement is being released on behalf of a group of organizers of Occupy/Decolonize Seattle’s May Day events who have chosen to speak as a group regarding May 1st and the controversies in the media narrative since.

We are organizers and participants involved in this year’s May Day events. Many of us also participate in Occupy/Decolonize Seattle. We conceived the events of the May Day General Strike as a celebration of life in solidarity with the global uprising against economic oppression and the 1%. May Day is a day of pride for migrants and workers everywhere. It is a day of remembrance for the anarchists executed in show trials after the world’s first May Day in 1886, fighting for the 8-hour work day. Most powerfully, it is a day of struggle—of celebrating freedom and striking out against what hurts us.

Reports that May 1st was “hijacked by anarchists” are inaccurate and insulting. May Day was an inspiration to us all. The crowd was multiracial and multigenerational, and included many working class students who walked out from multiple high schools and colleges. Over 40 local artists took the stage during the day of music and community Hip Hop Occupies to Decolonize planned at Westlake Park. Organizers also scheduled three marches over a month in advance: a No Borders March, to join the May 1st Coalition march to the Wells Fargo Building; an Honor the Dead, Fight for the Living March, in honor of Trayvon Martin and all those killed by police and by white supremacist culture; and an Anti-Capitalist March. Thousands took the streets during these actions and disrupted commerce in downtown Seattle.

During the Anti-Capitalist March, participants in a black bloc smashed windows and damaged businesses and cars. Among the businesses targeted were a Wells Fargo branch, a Niketown, an American Apparel, and a Bank of America. There is tremendous anger worldwide directed at these institutions. Each of the corporations and banks that own the damaged stores inflict real economic and social violence on the planet and on poor people everywhere. Wells Fargo, for one, is complicit in enormous direct and structural violence through its 3.5 million shares in GEO Group, the nation’s second-largest operator of private prisons. The same corporation lobbied aggressively for SB1070, Arizona’s racist anti-immigrant legislation, to profit from the “enhanced opportunities” the law provides for immigrants’ incarceration. The rage expressed during the Anti-Capitalist March extends beyond the black bloc. No one should be surprised that people are angry enough to destroy the property of the 1%. Regardless of differences in practice, we share that anger.

Economic refugees and people of color everywhere are treated as exploitable labor. Media depictions support this exploitation. The media selects representatives from immigrant rights organizations to speak for all migrants and economic refugees, and silences the migrant workers marching in the Anti-Capitalist March and those of us organizers who are people of color, economic refugees, and indigenous people. Similarly, accusations that undocumented workers were put at risk on May Day conceal the truth: the only danger to participants in May Day activities came from the police themselves.

Mayor McGinn, the SPD, and the Seattle media have tried to split May Day participants between “good protesters” and “violent anarchists.” As organizers and participants, however, we reject all attempts to divide us, and stand together in defining our own message. We value people above property. The corporations attacked, and these institutions that protect them, are not on the side of the working class or the 99%. The lives these businesses destroy are more important than their windows. We remain in solidarity with those everywhere who fight for a life worth living.

From Oakland: The Sorrow of Repetition (On the Murder of Alan Blueford)

Nostalgia

The spectacle, like modern society, is at once unified and divided. Like society, it builds its unity on the disjunction. But the contradiction, when it emerges in the spectacle, is in turn contradicted by a reversal of its meaning, so that the demonstrated division is unitary, while the demonstrated unity is divided.

-Guy Debord

It’s been a decade since I walked down that particular stretch of MacArthur, along the foothills, near the Eastmont Mall. The only major change I could see happened years ago when the police station was installed where the old Mervyns used to be. The mall imploded because no one with any money came there anymore and all the big stores pulled out, leaving behind a lifeless shell, a testament to the inevitable failure of capitalism. It is now largely a social services hub, created as an afterthought once the money disappeared.

When I was a kid, the mall was a place to wander pointlessly and stare at the cheap commodities I couldn’t buy. Sometimes people got beat up or shot outside the mall and I knew I had to be very careful whenever I was outside. One summer, a drug lab burnt down at the top of 73rd and sent large plumes of black smoke into the sky over the mall. Back then, I knew an old Pakistani man who went on short walks with a large wooden dowel. He did this to protect himself after some kids mugged him one evening. Nearby where he got mugged, people got high on the hill above Buena Ventura Avenue and looked down and out towards the cemetery, the grid of East Oakland, and the Coliseum. This is the same neighborhood where I first saw the police kill someone and where Lovelle Mixon had his shootout with the police.

I walked down MacArthur and noticed that nothing much had changed. There was a new skatepark by the school and a healthy food court for the students. Otherwise everything was exactly as I remembered it. While I’ve seen West Oakland and downtown change dramatically, filling with money and condos, this particular corner of East Oakland didn’t feel any different. Eastmont is too far from the bridge, too far from BART, and has too large a history of rebellion, drugs, and violence for any potential investors. The economic colonization took place elsewhere, leaving the neighborhood as it was. The only difference, as I said, was the police station, standing nearly two stories above the surrounding houses, looking like a military outpost in the ungovernable edge of Oakland.

Read the rest here.

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“The Rose of Fire Has Returned!”: The Struggle for the Streets of Barcelona

The following article was written a few months ago after a huge, incendiary general strike in Spain on March 29. We post it here now, after May Day in Seattle, to show what kinds of things are actually possible elsewhere in the world… Think of it as inspiration.

In May 2011, tens of thousands occupied plazas throughout Spain in a protest movement that prefigured similar occupations around the world, including the Occupy movement in the United States. On March 29, 2012, a nationwide general strike erupted into massive street-fighting in Barcelona, as participants wrested control of the streets from riot police. How did this come to pass, and what can it tell us about what will follow the occupation movements outside Spain?

Here, [Crimethinc's] Barcelona correspondent provides extensive background on the riots of March 29, tracing the trajectory from the plaza occupations to the general strike, and explores the questions that have arisen as anarchists face new opportunities and challenges.

Read the rest here.

Autonomous Self-Organization and Anarchist Intervention: A Tension in Practice

by Wolfi Landstreicher

Introduction: a few definitions and explanations
Any potentially liberatory struggle among the exploited and dispossessed must be based on autonomous self-organization. As anarchists, who are also usually among the exploited, we have every reason to participate in and encourage these struggles. But since we have specific ideas of how we want to go about our struggles and a specifically revolutionary aim, our participation takes the form of an intervention seeking to move the struggles in a specific direction. Having no desire to be any sort of vanguard or leadership or to be caught up in the joyless game of politicking, we find ourselves in a tension of trying to live our conception of struggle and freedom within the context of an unfree reality, of trying to confront the real daily problems we face with our own refusal to play by the rules of this world. Thus, the question of autonomous self-organization and anarchist intervention is an ongoing problem with which to grapple, refusing to fall into easy answers and faith in organizational panaceas. To begin exploring this question let’s start with a few definitions and explanations.

Autonomous self-organization
When I speak of autonomous self-organization, I am speaking of a specific phenomenon that tends to arise whenever people, angered by their conditions and having lost faith in those delegated to act for them, decide to act for themselves. Autonomous self-organization therefore never manifests in the form of a political party, a union or any other sort of representative organization. All of these forms of organization claim to represent the people in struggle, to act in their name. And what defines autonomous self-organization is precisely the rejection of all representation. Parties, unions and other representative organizations tend to interact with autonomous organization only in the form of recuperators of the struggle, striving to take over leadership and impose themselves as spokespeople of the struggle — usually with the aim of negotiating with the rulers. Thus, they can only be viewed as potential usurpers wherever real self-organized revolt is occurring.

Read the rest here…

Mayor McGinn

May Day Statement From Tides of Flame

I:

 
I don’t like seeing the city destroyed. This is not at all within the spirit of May Day celebrations.

 
-Seattle City Council Member Bruce Harrell, May 1^st 2012

Here we are again. For us, not much has changed. However, the cities around us have grown, strengthened, become more adaptable, resilient, and overwhelming in their ability to absorb all of our energy. The contemporary metropolis is a machine designed to extract capital from humans and to keep them pacified while doing so. Those who reject pacification are demonized, marginalized, imprisoned, or murdered.

On May 1^st, 1886, hundreds of thousands of workers did not go to work and took the streets in a General Strike, determined to show the capitalists that they would only work eight hour days from then on. In Chicago, the city where the movement for the eight hour day was the strongest, striking workers were locked out of a machine plant. On May 3^rd, they held a large rally in front of the plant, and when the striking workers confronted the scabs, the police opened fire on the crowd and killed several of the strikers. In response to these murders, a rally was called for May 4^th in Haymarket Square.

It was here that three thousand people listened to speeches while being watched by dozens of Chicago police officers. And it was here that someone, filled with hatred and anger at the continuing murders of poor workers, decided to throw a bomb into the crowd of police. Six cops died and several workers were killed when the police opened fire after the blast. The square emptied. Everyone left. And then, over the next few days, eight anarchists were rounded up by the authorities and thrown in jail. One killed himself in jail. Four were hung. Four were were eventually released. The anarchist who killed himself in prison, Louis Lingg, said the words to the court before he was sentenced: I say to you: I despise you. I despise your order, your laws, your force-propped authority. Hang me for it!

These are the people who died so that workers might work eight hour days rather than fourteen hour days. These are the anarchists that are remembered on May 1^st.

Throughout the world and for over a hundred years, people have celebrated May Day by actively revolting against capitalist and state institutions. A cursory internet search reveals a wealth of evidence supporting this statement. May Day is in no way a day reserved for exclusively peaceful demonstrations—and it never has been. The city, the police, the Democratic recuperators, the banks, and the business and property owners would prefer if May Day was peaceful, for this would perfectly serve their interests.

For those of you who still don’t understand, we will make it simple: anarchists fight for total freedom. And on the way, we are consistently disparaged, misquoted, attacked, imprisoned, and murdered. So now we’re here, one hundred and twenty six years later, about to say the same things we have said again and again. Pay attention this time, huh? Ready? Ok. Here we go.

II:

Seattle police are investigating after vandals threw rocks through windows at the home of Mayor Mike McGinn following violent May Day protests. McGinn spokesman Aaron Pickus confirmed Wednesday that the rocks sailed through his dining room and living room windows around midnight. McGinn and his wife were home but were not injured. According to a police report, the mayor’s wife saw two people outside the home after the rocks were thrown. One waved and then both suspects walked away. A police search of the area failed to locate them.

-Komo News, May 2^nd, 2012

On May Day, the mayor declared a state of emergency that allowed the police to confiscate any large sticks they saw people carrying in the crowds of protesters. This state of emergency ultimately allowed roving bands of police to dive into crowds and attack people carrying signs and banners. The justification for these emergency laws was the massive ‘violence’ inflicted downtown by the anarchists. Mayor McGinn and Chief Diaz busied themselves with hyping the fear and terror through the mainstream media in order to build support for their one-day, micro police-state.

Let’s look at reality for a second before proceeding. All that actually happened downtown was the smashing and vandalizing of several widely-loathed corporate shops, banks, and stores. In addition, a half dozen vehicles had their tires slashed, bodies painted, and windows smashed. The US Courthouse was paint-bombed and smashed. A few right-wing citizens and mainstream journalists were physically assaulted. Needless to say, the majority of the vandalism was directed against capital. The destructive period lasted no more than an hour, and probably closer to 40 minutes.

While what we are about to say is simple, we will write it in a bold font so the point is not lost: the state of emergency declared by the mayor was an effort to protect capital and nothing else. While he may continue to cloak his actions under the guise of liberal-humanism, the mayor revealed himself yesterday as being a reactionary guardian of capitalist order and harmony.

The purpose of the anti-capitalist march that began at noon and proceeded to trash the exteriors and facades of the previously listed institutions was to attack capitalism. The anarchists who were present were very clear in their messaging, even if they were a bit blunt in their expression of it. And it was not only the anarchists who attacked capital in the early afternoon. Dozens of random people were swept up in the lightning assault while a crowd of hundreds cheered. The black bloc did not infiltrate any march or movement.

The sentiment of the marchers was largely anti-capitalist and the vandals were opposed by only a handful of individuals, a couple of whom are the self-appointed super-heroes of Seattle. These idiots decided to act like the police and indiscriminately pepper sprayed the crowd around the US Courthouse. The crowd responded by beating them with sticks, rocks, spit, and curses. The super-heroes were left behind to ponder their betrayal of the people they pretend to protect.

III:

Capital is dead labor, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks. The time during which the laborer works, is the time during which the capitalist consumes the labor-power he has purchased of him. If the laborer consumes his disposable time for himself, he robs the capitalist.

-Karl Marx, Das Kapital, Volume 1, 1867

That evening, as fear of an evening assault spread, bosses and property owners sent workers scrambling to board up their precious windows. The plywood screamed “GUILTY CONSCIENCE” onto empty city streets. Why would Forever 21 think it needed to protect itself against the anarchist menace? It’s not really very hard to figure it out. “Destroy what destroys you,” said one of the May Day promo posters. “Revolt for a life worth living!” said others.

Downtown has by now returned to normal. Cars and buses move freely through the streets as people numbly trudge from home to work to store and back again. Shoppers and shop-lifters pass each other on shining escalators, surrounded by millions of dollars worth of disposable, sweat-shop produced crap. Teens and middle-aged women crane their heads around to examine their asses in dressing room mirrors, frowning with anxiety. Workers slack and pilfer a little at a time, hoping the boss won’t notice. Dead-time reigns.

Not everyone is as satisfied with a return to business as usual as Mayor McGinn. Not everyone is as “troubled” and “saddened” by a few smashed windows as the pancake-faced newscasters. And it isn’t just you and it isn’t just me. This is what terrifies those who profit from us. Their worst nightmare is the reality of hundreds of people actively applauding, encouraging, participating in, and growing ecstatic at the sight of capital being attacked. They want to obscure this reality however possible, to prevent the contagion from spreading even further. Beyond this, they also want to pit different political tendencies and groupings against each other, fearing a unification of the dispossessed. While tactics may differ, our goals are the same, and the authorities wish to prevent us from understanding each other and the beauty of our differences.

The tactics displayed on May 1^st not only demonstrate an ability to attack these seemingly invincible structures, they also encourage and promote agency amongst people who rarely get the chance to strike back at the institutions that they despise. The authorities do not want a populace that asserts itself outside the legal framework. They want to preserve the system that has brought us all to the dead end we now face. There is no legal route out of the current impasse. There is only rebellion, illegality, experimentation, mutation, and abandon. Our goal is and will remain to encourage people to disregard the laws that allow this death-culture to grind on and on and on. This does not only mean destruction—for there is so much to create–but it is undeniable that destruction is central to this project of snatching our lives and the earth back from those who have stolen them.

We hope these words find you well and definitively severed from the narrative of the police and the government. May all of our stories intermingle, collide, and develop away from the suicidal master-story we were all brought up to believe. Thank to everyone who came out for May Day and good luck in all of your future efforts.

May 1st, Santiago, Chile

May 1st, Berlin, Germany

May 1st, Jakarta, Indonesia

May 1st, New York City, USA

May 1st, Seattle, USA