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The Police might be blue-collar or part of the “99%,” but they enforce the laws that keep the divide between the rich and the poor intact. The police are the protectors of the 1%. The police are the ones firing tear gas and rubber bullets whenever a demonstration gets out of hand. They are the ones who stand between every hungry person and the corporate grocery shelves stocked with food, between every homeless person and the buildings standing empty, between every immigrant and her family. The police are the ones who beat Occupy Wall St. protestors, who gunned down Sean Bell and Oscar Grant, and who murdered Fred Hampton in his bed. They are the ones who once enforced segregation in the United States and who back the bosses and the 1% in every labor strike.
The Police are an institution, that is an extension of the 1%, and are fundamentally and very concretely in the way of what we really want-the end of a society based on class divisions. The downtown police officers might be the nicest people in the world, but they will still be the ones evicting us from the park. They are still part of that same extension.
This means they’re not to be trusted by any of us involved in the occupation.
"A good article. Here’s another good section:
“Dogmatic
Nonviolence
Tunisia and Egypt are commonly cited as one of the main inspirations for the Occupy movement. Indeed these revolutions were inspiring to many around the world. However they have been mystifyingly portrayed as “nonviolent” revolutions. This could not be further from the truth. A quick survey of news reports show that while protestors for the most part remained unarmed (as in guns), these were far from nonviolent revolutions. These revolutions utilized a wide range of tactics including many peaceful occupations and marches. But, when necessary, people regularly defended themselves from police and pro-government thugs with burning barricades, rocks, and clubs. Police stations were burned, government offices were ransacked, cop cars overturned. These actions were taken out of a combination of rage at a corrupt system as well as a necessity to defend oneself, and in the end it worked.
So why do we bring this up? With little debate the Occupy movement has adopted a stance of nonviolence while at the same time holding up two, oftentimes violent, revolutions as its main inspiration. On the surface this is simply hypocritical, but it also brings up an important question. Is dogmatic adherence to nonviolence in our best interest as a movement?
We are not interested in perpetuating the violence/nonviolence dichotomy. Nonviolent tactics and more militant ones both have their strengths and weaknesses. We should choose our tactics based on effectiveness, not religious adherence to nonviolence nor fetishization of violence. Just as the people of Egypt at times had to resort to self defense and property destruction to achieve there goals, there may be a time in which the Occupy movement finds it to be strategic to use these tactics as well. And we should be ready to support them. It might be that some people have been beaten down so many times, their rage bottled up for so long that they topple a police barricade, or fight back when the police try to tear down our tents, or break out the windows at a bank. And we should support them, for their rage is real and just. That day might be a month from now, a year from now, or it might be this very moment.
The Occupy movement should wholeheartedly embrace a diversity of tactics from peaceful sit-ins to self defense against police attacks and economic sabotage. That does not mean that we use all of those tactics or that everyone has to agree with them, but at the very least we should be willing to not denounce each other in the media or cooperate with the police over differences in tactics.”
(via workandentropy)
(via mytongueisforked)
