The Brooklyn Bridge has been shut down in one direction after protesters camped out near Wall Street spilled onto the roadway. Police have made hundreds of arrests and were continuing to stop people from crossing the Brooklyn Bridge going to Brooklyn Park Saturday evening.
The protesters are railing against corporate greed, global warming and social inequality. The group has been camped near Manhattan's downtown financial district for two weeks and has clashed with police on earlier occasions.
From Video Report below protestors were going to Brooklyn Park but police split protestors on the Brooklyn Bridge and arrested them.
There was clearly an NYPD plan to arrest protestors before they arrived at the Brooklyn Bridge - The Brooklyn Bridge crossing provided cover for them to arrest protestors.
Democracy and Class Struggle appeals to spread the resistance - repression builds resistance use flexible tactics to overcome the brutality of the State and the NYPD known wordlwide for its brutality.
VISIT : WE ARE THE 99% HERE:
http://wearethe99percent.tumblr.com/
READ IGNITE REVOLUTION A New York based blog here is an interesting article called the Objectivity of the Streets.
http://ignite-revolution.org/
The Objectivity of the Streets
October 2, 2011 by igrevolution
The arrest of comrades last week during the Troy Davis demonstration and march, and the following days of arrests in relationship to #OccupyWallSt. the days after his execution provokes us to comment about what we call the “objectivity of the streets.” At this point hundreds have been arrested in relationship to Troy Davis
As is known by many in New York City but perhaps not so widely known outside of it, the Troy Davis march stormed the city. It moved through the streets and took them in resistance against the NYPD. Its direction was to Wall St. to meet to draw strenght in unity, force in our numbers against the police state which had just put brother Davis to death. Since then things have moved rapidly in this city, and this country. Truly if anyone is to be real about this, the spirit of Troy Davis infused itself to a movement of people which was unfortunately teetering with one failed action after another. It is in this light, in the spirit of Troy Davis, that we must sum up for all brothers and sisters the truth we know very well as consistent young militants. The truth derived from the actual conditions arising from our experience and the scientific analysis of the things as they are abstracted from that experience in relationship to the totality of a system. It is a truth so simple but so hard for many to swallow, a pig is a pig.
Pigs and the State (in the Abstract)
To know a pig is a pig is to know ourselves and to know our enemies. To know why a pig is a pig can be very simple, it comes quite directly each day in the stories of oppressed nationality youth of this city, of all proletarian people’s who will tell you who when they dare to escape the grinding violence of this system (through political action, criminality, or any other trangressions) meet a goon who imposes upon them force to eliminate their activity. A comrade is pepper-sprayed after being caught like a fish in some mobile netting, a brother is taken to Rikers for five days for selling a swipe on his MTA for $2.25, a sister is tricked to reveal the devil weed, marijuana, in her pockets to be arrested. A pig is a pig in those simple experiences which only passed last weekend.
These are all narratives we ourselves can bring the fullest light to bear upon, for each is of their own and we can’t speak the voice of the mulitiplicity that constitutes the manifold experience of each subjectivity. However we can comment that it bears to question for all of us how there develops an intersubjective narrative, of collective identities, which share common experience with itself to the NYPD. That where these common shared experiences exist reveal the concreteness of our oppression by the state, of what kind does it appear in.
It is however not simply in the identity of these subjectivities that the fundamental reason for this shared experience. We must connect the particular to the universal, to abstract ourselves in relation to the equation to know its form. We refer to a universal simply because on inspection there seems very similar forms of this type that exist beyond our particular relationship to our particular goons. Every checkpoint in Palestine resembles the NYPD activities in East Brooklyn; every Mexican peasant dispossesed of their land familiarizes ourselves with the dispossesion of our own homes and its process. There is something fundamental in these relations which are at work, and this is a society developed upon commodity production and exchange.
A historical process of growth and development of humanity based upon principles of commodity production and exchange has brought us to this point and gives fundamental character to all this in its actuality. This development of course didn’t occur abstractly and blindly on some even plain, but in a world which featured different systems and modes of production, social formations which had little relation to each other. This we generally regard, as for at least now, a pre-given truth. In this respect we can only speak of the development of the State alongside the development of society as a whole. Just as the world capitalist system did not develop abstractly without reference to particular social formations, that the Robinson Cursoe figure is a myth, so can we say that the State developed in relationship to this particular history, to this reality and was not developed along some social contract.
The State is an instrument of class rule. It is a complex fortress for blocs of capital in relationship to each other and within its body politic. Its complexity in its development only maps the growth and contradictions of capital itself and between capital and the proletarian masses as well as others in the middle stratum. The State is broken down to its components - its administrative, its governmental, its ideological apparatuses. It however is fundamentally inoperative without its repressive apparatus – its jails, its courts, an (in the US) the 3 million people it employs to enforce the will of the ruling class.
The objection to this frame of looking at the State historically often arises from the enlightened liberal who raises the objection of the democratic nature of the state, rather than being an instrument of class rule it has become progressively overtime the terrain of polity of the whole of the people. That it is the concilator of contradictions amongst the people via the means of the representative democratic processes. ,The state however is only democratic in so much as the ability of the bourgeoisie to retain the democratic consensus on the principles of bourgeois right, that the seeming universality of it is historically conditional. What seems like a linear progression of democracy, for some, across the globe is nothing more than the zig zags of the bourgeoisie in the course of class struggle on the global stage that require its legitimation to be reconstituted in new ways. All these rights it grants us in its polity are temporal in so much as they can keep peace around their consensus. The bourgeoisie wishes of course for business to run smoothly as possible, for contradictions to not erupt into antagonism, but how long does this often stand even in the most stable of countries?
We here must return to what led us to put forward this understanding of the state, whether or not a pig is a pig – whether or not a boy in blue is simply a deluded friend we can win over or an enemy of all us in struggle. The truth lays before us in a materialist examination of any particular social relations; when it comes down to armed organizations of any state this is never simply clear cut. It depends on the character of that state, the means in which it brings forward a section of the people to be its arm, the contradictions of that section with other sections of the people, the ideology reproduced amongst that force as well as amongst the rest of the masses. These are main questions to examine the particularity of each and every force.
To begin at the general level of them we must know in what class relation do they stand to the rest of society – even the wisdom of the ancients, particularly Plato, had long judged their position in relationship to productive labor - that is the the “soldier class” produces nothing, there is no actual work. Any section of the people which produces nothing however receives a wage is in fact dependent on the surplus accumulation of the whole people, which in this context takes place in the imperialist capitalist world system. They’re therefore, because of this context, parasitical to the broad working people. One can say their labor is as civil servants, that their labor is reproductive for the means of production. This in fact makes sense, but for ourselves we must point out what kind of “reproductive” work is this? Its reproductive labor which is in fact violent maintenance of the the conditions of production – whereas the sanitation worker clears the snow after the blizzard, whereas the teacher prepares (or perhaps not) the new generation to become the army of the labor, the police breaks strikes, they arrest and house labor, they murder us when commanded. In this respect their actual interests are not the same as the broad working masses and at least at this moment completely divergent from ourselves.
This here seems sufficient to catalogue the men in blue, the soldiers of u.s. empire in this country and in others, as servants of the capitalist structure. They’re running dogs, lackies, not in an indirect way, but very directly. They’re employed exactly by them to use the most violent means of maintenance of the system. The fact they’re employed also is quite important – they’re not drafted, they’re not forced in a position to take up a gun, they’re in fact bringing themselves into the arms of the state for payment.
Pigs, Imperialism, and National Oppression
We begin moving from the general to the particular, but moving there we write to you very clearly about a certain modality in which the State operates concretely to u.s. Empire. It was written above that while the fundamental contradiction lies in the abstract relations of the mode of production, of the contradictions embodied in commodity production and exchange, this has a history which is very real to specific social formations. Often psuedo-Marxists will speak only in the abstract, they disconnect their politics from the concrete history of the people and therefore arrive to what is worse than a left-populism, they put forward a revisionism which ultimately tails a privileged section of labor or even outright the petty-bourgeoisie. We have no intention to follow that road.
This country for centuries developed as a white-settler colonial project. It murdered and dispossed the First Nations people from the land, repopulated it with labor it could attempt to more easily control and put to us for its means – second tier aristocracy, craftsmen, and plenty of indentured Europeans. It also kidnapped people from the continent of Africa and brought them here as slave labor. Its development continued along these lines, further wars and ethnic cleansing of the land, the creation of the institution of chattel slavery and the cotton trade, and resettlement of the land with Europeans. It took a vast section of Mexico in a war even its own generals disgraceful and imperialistic (Ulysses S. Grant). Throughout this process it armed its white settler population and put it on the frontlines of the suppression of the oppressed nationality people, they were the frontlines of centuries of this process. The class contradictions between them and the bourgeoisie, though at points in particular localities had grown antagonistic, simply was resolved through further primitive accumulation on the basis of national oppression and imperialist exploitation.
What does this history matter in relationship to the police and other armed bodies of the State? This must be drawn out very clearly to be understood. First we recognize that the development of the repressive state apparatus is informed and carried forward by the whole history, the political policy of the settler-expansionism, the legacy of chattel slavery, colonial occupations, and imperialist exploitation of the u.s. Empire. That with this more thorough-going exploitation of whole peoples, white settler people of all classes were purchased off or compromised through the super-profits provided by imperialism and national/racial oppression at home. One section of labor bought off through employment as the thugs of the State. For more than a century oppressed nationality people have known both the paramilitary and military/police oppression of the State. The collaboration of the two forms have had consistent coordination with each other – settlers and calvary to KKK and sheriffs. Even in midst of civil rights struggle, its local and state levels joined white reaction in murdering leaders, in repressing the people. This is the relationship of white supremacy, of white Amerika, with the Stateand the police in particular.
Have any of these relationships been transformed? Between white Amerika and the State? Between oppressed nationality people and the State? Between oppressed nationalities and white Amerika? Of course, but it hasn’t transformed in simple progressive terms. There is in fact still holdover practices throughout the system -the continued incarceration of political prisoners, the retention of the death penalty, the collaboration of white supremacist vigilantes and local authorities (Minutemen). It has more truthfully transmutated to new shapes of the same essential relationship. The mass incarceration of black and latino men (and growing number of women as well) through the drug war has created a prison economy which amounts to nothing more than the reintroduction of chattel slavery; a prison economy where prisons are being privatized, where the organization of slave labor for commodity production is a new model of a sustained housing of a section of labor, oppressed nationality proletarian people, for super-exploitation.
Incarceration carries forward implications of an actual dispossion of political rights of the people. It further economically deprives much of the oppressed nationality people with stability in their community; families are broken up through mass incarceration, people are now virtually unemployable. Everyday is the experience of an occupation, everyday is the experience of an open air prison as the people are harrassed by the pigs.
The relationship of white Amerika to this? Very simply there is a segement of people with concrete interests in it, prison economy now supports whole communities throughout this country. There is a dependency of a community upon the oppression and criminalization of others – the police, the correction officers, the communities around a prison, etc. Just like a munitions worker dependence on war economy, just like an oil rigger dependence on the continue use of fossil fuels. This is a straight forward contradiction between one section of the people and another, how do we resolve this contradiction that gives liberation and self-determination of the most oppressed?
Pigs and the State (in the Concrete)
What struggle for liberation would leave the NYPD in tact? How could we? NYPD is a mobilized force that is an oppressive instrument of the State, they are part of the state, they are a parasitical body that conspires with ruling class to suppress the people. A cop’s productivity is assessed by their round-ups, by their harrasment of the people, by their anti-people activities. A cop is trained in a goon culture, steeped in white supremacist racism, in jocular machismo, in cultural reactionaryism altogether. A cop is told in the Bronx there are no pussy cops, they’re encouraged to be rough and violent against the lowest and deepest section of the working class and the declassed in economically depressed communities like East New York, the South Bronx, etc.
At its federal level, COINTELPRO carried forward a campaign of murder against leadership of the most militant sections of the movement and harrasment of numerous others. COINTELPRO often employed local level police, employed them in the muder of militant leaders, as informants, etc. It is always the case the police are brought into direct conflict with revolutionaries.
There are no number of flowers that will change their hearts. It is only the fear of the masses, their condemnation by the people, the power of the people forwardly facing the State that will have at least segments of them thinking twice. Each cop is our enemy, they’re an organized force of reaction which has now arrested us in the hundreds. We must strategically scorn the enemy not praise them. Lets not legitimize their practice by reference to their masters’ control - put the running dog down, place moral culpability on them. For us building a culture of resistance to the police means knowing a pig is a pig, they’re never our friends as long as they wear that blue. The State is an enemy of revolutionary transformation because we precisely threaten it as the State. Each Pig is themselves in jeapordy.
Four hundred, probably more, were arrested yesterday (Oct. 1) alone on the Brooklyn Bridge with probable police provocation. In the mass arrest on Sept. 24th nearly 90 people were arrested with a mobile netting capturing people like fish, with women and people being maced by the cops. The day of the Troy Davis demo (a day which your author was arrested), the cops drew their batons and beat the crowd. There is just simply here a pattern of a strenghtening of the repression.
What struggle for liberation would leave the NYPD in tact? Or any other police force? How could we? There are of course particularity to each police force, there maybe scattered “well intentioned” individuals in its body (as there are ”well intentioned” individuals amongst financial capital itself, or any other section of the ruling class). NYPD is a mobilized force that is more or less an occupying army in the hood, it is the backbone of finance capital, it is our jailers, it is our violent attackers. If we truly want to face the enemy we must recognize who our enemies our. #OccupyWallSt. has loosely put forward that our enemy is the “1%” in relation to the “99%” – we say essentially that at the very least the formulation be reformulated as the 98% against 2%, finance capital and their running dogs in the NYPD. Liberation means the end of the police!
SMASH THE BOURGEOIS STATE!
SPIT AT A PIG, SHOW NO RESPECT!
-Neftali
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