OCCUPY WALL STREET - LIVE FEED

Watch live streaming video from globalrevolution at livestream.com

OCCUPY LOS ANGELES - LIVE FEED

Watch live streaming video from owslosangeles at livestream.com

October 11, 2011

Portland Pisses off Anarchists trying to incite violence

Excerts from the Occupy Seattle Forums:

We just got back from the opening march for Occupy Portland, and were even more disappointed by how liberal, reformist, and nonthreatening it was than we had expected. The website for Occupy Portland had promised that "proper actions" would be taken against "instigators" of any "illegal activity (property destruction etc.)," which we can only interpret as a threat to snitch to the cops, so we went with low expectations, but this was by all means a massive disappointment even taking into account our pessimism from the get-go.


We attended the opening march for Occupy Portland because we are some angry-ass proles who really hate capitalism. Although Occupy Wall Street (and the various off-shoot occupations) have few official defined goals or positions, there is a general opposition to "corporate greed" and "corrupt politics". As anarchists, we seek to expose and destroy the roots of these problems - as long as capitalism and the state exist, there will be greedy corporations and corrupt politicians. Capitalism and the state cannot be reformed into something kinder, gentler, or more humane, it is exploitative by nature. We wished to push the discourse at Occupy Portland in a more radical, explicitly anti-capitalist and anti-state direction.

Why are these guys always trying to take over while complaining about how no one should be in charge in the same breath? Dont you just love cognitive dissonance?

Although Occupy Wall Street and the offshoot occupations are supposed to be leaderless movements, we found that there were most definitely leaders who managed everything, from the route to the chants to who was allowed to be at the front of the march to who was allowed up on the microphone at the rally at the end of the march. To be clear, this was a hierarchical, authoritarian event. These leaders/organizers, especially the wannabe-cops wearing blue "peacekeeper" armbands, are not our comrades in any way, shape, or form. When the march stopped at Pioneer Courthouse Square, the "peacekeepers" (whose role it was to de-escalate any conflict should it arise) chanted to the bike cops something along the lines of "Thank you cops, we love you!" It should be self-evident to anyone who doesn't have their head stuck up their ass that the police are not our allies. The police protect property over people and enact violence daily along lines of oppression. The police exist to protect and serve capital. The police uphold the very institutions that the Occupy movement is supposedly fighting. When we brought out the usual anti-cop chants ("All cops are bastards, ACAB" and "No justice, no peace! Fuck the police!") we were shouted over and told to calm down. One of the peacekeepers called out on the megaphone, "we need volunteers to block the anarchists because they're being negative and this is a positive event!" We were repeatedly told that "cops are the 99% too!", which made us very sad that so few people have any understanding of how class society functions. Cops are class traitors and the enemy.

The person who spoke on the microphone before us said something along the lines of "this is a revolution that started in Egypt and is now sweeping the globe!" The Occupy Portland organizers conveniently forget that in Egypt, they actually fought the cops. Again and again, past movements are rewritten as nonviolent and nonconfrontational, and anyone who dares to draw clear lines in the sand with the cops on the other side is silenced and branded divisive and a threat to the movement.

Obviously these cats think they can rail road the movement to obey their twisted demands to go against all civilized actions straight to murder, arson, and depraved chaos. But as you can see Seattle organizers dealt with the situation properly.

http://forum.occupyseattle.org/viewtopic.php?f=28&t=36

1 comment:

  1. There are some anarchists in Seattle that feel your frustrations as well. We should meet up sometime.

    ReplyDelete