Today is the birthday of the uprising called Occupy Wall Street. Occupy is a Virgo in the truest sense. Grounded in the hard work of movement and loyal to the cause of breaking and ending the capitalist system, the activists who sprung out of the cacophony in NYC’s Liberty Square/Freedom Plaza, Occupy Atlanta, Occupy Oakland, and others are part of moving our reality into a time of repair. Can’t you feel the possibility in the air? While lived reality is getting harder by the day, from transphobic violence and cruelty to those migrating towards a better life to abortion bans leaving pregnant people bleeding out in their parked cars, we see breaks. We see hope. The movement is thirteen years old. If we were speaking of a child and not a movement, that child would be stirring and growing and painfully navigating through hormonal changes, extreme emotions, and the general hardships of metamorphosis.
Action is the antidote to despair. We saw this in a big way back when Occupy Wall Street took off like wildfire… but since then we’ve fallen back into a corpo-consumerist spell of cynicism and myopia.
— Adbusters (@Adbusters) September 16, 2024
This Tuesday, on the anniversary of #OWS, drop everything, take the day off…
In the past year, the uprisings in the United States, in support of Palestine's needed absolute freedom, have transformed political possibilities. The demand for universities to divest from Israel calls back to the days when the apartheid system of South Africa was broken in the same way. Consent is now harder to manufacture. The kids are alright. Even after a childhood spent running from gunfire in the classroom and shielding those around them from the fires, flooding, and storms of the climate crisis, they see a more gentle world as possible, and they are fighting for it on the quad, openly, without fear.
The police are defunding us in every municipality in the United States as the institution murders our comrades, friends, and families in the streets and in our homes, sometimes even in our bedrooms and kitchens. The ‘imperial boomerang’ it is called when the violence used to establish and maintain colony returns to the residents of the colony government. Genocide and repression are profitable to the war economy.
Some say, “Occupy never changed anything,” or “the occupiers had too many demands.” That shallow review of 2011's efforts has been disproved. We saw the rise of movements and radical efforts enabled by the strong ties forged in the Occupy encampments across the United States and the international community. From Occupy Sandy, transforming disaster relief efforts with activist networks, to Black Lives Matter, cementing racial justice into the forefront of every organizing effort to the present, to the most recent student encampments coordinating in demand of both a ceasefire and a Free Palestine, we are seeing our lived reality changing and growing closer to the world we want to see. We grow closer because every day, more and more people, like you are ready to stop playing the game as it has been rigged for too long.
The uncommitted movement has shifted how voters in the United States engage with the electoral process, and they will not go back. Entrenched power knows the winds are shifting, so, in the face of the pandemic in 2020, financial assistance was released to the people of the United States, debt repayment was stalled, and evictions were halted. Resources have always been available to distribute to the people, but those in power have held them to uphold the war machine, the heartbeat of the capitalist empire.
An empire with no plans to leave, only to try and sedate the masses with as few resources as possible while militarized control of our everyday reality is increased as quickly as our demands are uniting. As we said in the park, all our grievances are connected.
I don't think y'all understand the new level of techno-imperial warfare we're entering, the dangerous new precedent. They're hacking phones and making everyone's devices into a bomb. If you think you're safe from this, you're wrong, empire will bring this to all of our doorsteps.
— George Abraham (they/he) 🍉 جورج إبراهيم (@IntifadaBatata) September 17, 2024
The construction of Cop Cities, the funding of the genocide in Gaza, the millions of people trapped in the cages and enslavement of prisons and jails, the criminalization of being without a home, the enforced debt tied to education starting in primary school with school lunch debt to the astronomical fees strapped to university education, unrelenting gun violence in schools and public life, pandemic precautions for the few but not the many, the list goes on. But in as many ways in which power is transforming to bring harm to the people for profit, we are fighting back. A $2 Billion jail project was halted in Atlanta, Georgia, Bangor, Maine is divesting from Israel, $10 million in student debt from Morehouse College was dropped, prisons in New York State are closing, hope is present, and we need to grab onto it to have the collective strength to keep fighting, living, and dreaming.
Stay strong, comrades. We believe that we will win.