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Occupy Oakland is Dead. Long Live the Oakland Commune.
May 1, decomposition and the coming antagonisms
THE COMMUNE
For those of us in Oakland, “Occupy Wall Street” was always a strange fit. While much of the country sat eerily quiet in the years before the Hot Fall of 2011, a unique rebelliousness that regularly erupted in militant antagonisms with the police was already taking root in the streets of the Bay. From numerous anti-police riots triggered by the execution of Oscar Grant on New Year’s Day 2009, to the wave of anti-austerity student occupations in late 2009 and early 2010, to the native protest encampment at Glen Cove in 2011, to the the sequence of Anonymous BART disruptions in the month before Occupy Wall Street kicked off, our greater metropolitan area re-emerged in recent years as a primary hub of struggle in this country. The intersection at 14th and Broadway in downtown Oakland was, more often than not, “ground zero” for these conflicts.
If we had chosen to follow the specific trajectory prescribed by Adbusters and the Zucotti-based organizers of Occupy Wall Street, we would have staked out our local Occupy camp somewhere in the heart of the capitol of West Coast capital, as a beachhead in the enemy territory of San Francisco’s financial district. Some did this early on, following in the footsteps of the growing list of other encampments scattered across the country like a colorful but confused archipelago of anti-financial indignation. According to this logic, it would make no sense for the epicenter of the movement to emerge in a medium sized, proletarian city on the other side of the bay.
We intentionally chose a different path based on a longer trajectory and rooted in a set of shared experiences that emerged directly from recent struggles. Vague populist slogans about the 99%, savvy use of social networking, shady figures running around in Guy Fawkes masks, none of this played any kind of significant role in bringing us to the forefront of the Occupy movement. In the rebel town of Oakland, we built a camp that was not so much the emergence of a new social movement, but the unprecedented convergence of preexisting local movements and antagonistic tendencies all looking for a fight with capital and the state while learning to take care of each other and our city in the most radical ways possible. (more…)
Escalating Identity
Who Is Oakland: Anti-Oppression Activism, the Politics of Safety, and State Co-optation
by CROATOAN
Read the full pamphlet here (10k words). Synopsis below:
This pamphlet – written by a group of people of color, women, and queers – is offered in deep solidarity with anyone committed to ending oppression and exploitation materially. It is a critique of dominant forms of identity-based activism in the Bay Area and beyond, from privilege theory to contemporary interpretations of the legacy of decolonization and national liberation struggles. The pamphlet addresses the institutional struggle over the meaning of antiracist politics, and in particular the impact of nonprofit organizations on shaping the rhetoric and priorities of social justice activism. We argue that prevailing discourses of personal privilege and political representation in fact minimize and misrepresent the severity and structural character of the violence and material deprivation marginalized demographics face. White supremacy, according to this politics, is primarily a psychological attitude which individuals can simply choose to discard instead of a material infrastructure which reproduces race at key sites across society – from racially segmented labor markets to the militarization of the southern border.
Time and again in the Bay Area we have seen how any attempt by interracial coalitions to disrupt the functioning of these sites where race, gender, and sexuality are reproduced has often been deemed racist, sexist, ableist, or heteronormative because it places vulnerable marginalized communities in danger – communities which require the protection of the state, or the benevolence of the more powerful and privileged. Instead, what we call a politics of safety prefers rituals of cultural affirmation, reaffirms stereotypes of deserving victimhood, and stages spectacles of conversion where and varieties of individual privilege are acknowledged and disavowed. This pamphlet argues that this politics has proven time and again to be materially ineffective at best and at worst an apology for state and institutional power.
Demanding increased cultural sensitivity or recognition from the very institutions which govern us, and the individuals and groups who are politically committed to viewing us as fundamentally inhuman, has utterly failed to stop a rising tide of bigotry and violence in an age of deep austerity. The pamphlet argues that our power lies instead in more effective practical tactics to disrupt, delegitimize, and dismantle these systems of domination.
The same underlying political logic behind the demand for increased “representation” in state/government/economic hierarchies is invoked by these institutions in order to justify managing dissent through force or coercion. Violent gendered and racist attacks on people are both concealed and enabled by a liberal anti-sexist and antiracist discourse of political representation promoted by state, nonprofit, and philanthropic institutions. The limits of dominant forms of anti-oppression activism are nowhere more clearly on display than in the persistent misrepresentations of a space which brought many of us together: Occupy Oakland.
We hear endless nostalgic appeals to civil disobedience, deescalation, and police-enforced pacifism, often from 1960s-era activists who have been seamlessly absorbed into positions of power within municipal, state, federal, academic, and nonprofit institutions. Free speech is “allowed” or “facilitated” by the state and used to justify continued beatings, surveillance, and paramilitary raids of protests across the country. Our pamphlet argues that the history and legacy of struggles teaches us that, in stark contrast to the rhetoric used by many social justice nonprofits and activists in the Bay Area today, struggle cannot but put us in danger and increase our vulnerability to violent repression. The moment our struggle is even slightly effective, we are in danger. The choice is not between danger and safety, but between the uncertain dangers of revolt and the certainty of continued violence, deprivation, and death. There is no middle ground.
Some of Occupy Oakland’s “White Anarchist Outside Agitators” (more…)
Free CeCe McDonald. Vengeance for Brandy Martell. Fuck the Police
A Reportback From Friday’s Solidarity Street Party in Oakland
On April 28th, Brandy Martell was shot to death on the corner of 13th and Franklin. Brandy was a black transwoman – the murderer, a transphobic man. A member of the Oakland Commune who was nearby rushed to Brandi’s assistance. Using training received form the People’s Community Medics, he provided emergency first aid for Brandy, holding her bullet wounds and administering CPR. The police didn’t show up for 25 minutes, emergency services for 45. For 45 minutes, our comrade tried to keep Brandy alive while the police stood by, offering no assistance. The police inaction should come as no surprise to anyone who has interacted with the racist, homophobic, murderous OPD.
On Tuesday evening, supporters of CeCe McDonald gathered underneath the window of her jail cell. CeCe is a black transwoman from Minneapolis who was violently attacked by Neo-Nazis last year. In her fight to survive she stabbed one of her attackers (Dean Schmitz) in the heart, killing him. CeCe was convicted of 2nd degree manslaughter and will be formerly sentenced on June 4th. Under her cell, supporters played Rihanna’s Only Girl and sang as loud as possible so CeCe would be able to hear. She did hear their music. In fact, she sang along and described the experience as “very emotional.”
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From Passive to Active Spectacle: Afterimages of the LA Riots
[written to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the LA riots, one of the most significant events in recent US history – r&d]
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LOS ANGELES, March 3, 1991 – On the shoulder of the freeway, police are beating a man. Because we are in the US, and because the man is black, we will know that this is a routine event, an ordinary brutality, part of the very fabric of everyday life for non-whites. But something is exceptional this time. There is an observer, as there often is, but the observer holds in his hands an inhuman witness, a little device for producing images which are accepted as identical with the real. The images – grainy, shaking with the traces of the body behind them – enframe this event, defamiliarize it, make it appear in all its awfulness as both unimaginable singularity and example of a broader category of everyday violence. The recorded beating of Rodney King marks, as many have noted, the beginning of one of the most significant episodes of US history. But few have examined this event in terms of the transformative effects it exerted upon contemporary spectacle and its would-be enemies. By spectacle, we mean here those social relations and activities which are mediated directly by the representations, whether visual or verbal, which capital has subsumed (that is, remade according to its own imperatives).
J28: The Battle of Oak Street
A letter from some friends in Oakland regarding the Jan. 28th events
 Let us start by apologizing; that our words may be incoherent, our thoughts scattered and our tone overly emotional. Forgive us, because the ringing in our ear continues to interrupt our thinking, because our eyes are bleary and we’re weighed upon by the anxiety and trauma of ourinjuries and the imprisonment of the ones we love. As most of you are well-aware: after a full day and night of street battles in Oakland, we were defeated in our efforts to occupy a large building for the purposes of establishing an social center. We’re writing, in part, to correct the inaccuracies and mystifications spewed by the scum Media. But more so as to convey the intensity and the urgency of the situation in Oakland to comrades abroad. To an extent, this is an impossible task. Video footage and mere words must inevitably fail at conveying the ineffable collective experiences of the past twenty-four hours. But as always, here goes.
Yesterday was one of the most intense days of our lives. We say this without hyperbole or bravado. The terror in the streets of Miami or St. Paul, the power in the streets of Pittsburgh or Oakland’s autumn; yesterday’s affect met or superseded each of these. The events of yesterday confronted us as a series of intensely beautiful and yet terrible moments. |
An abbreviated sequence:
Beautiful words are delivered at Oscar Grant Plaza, urging us to cultivate our hatred for capitalism. Hundreds leave the plaza and quickly become thousands. The police attempt to seize the sound truck, but it is rescued by the swarming crowd. We turn towards our destination and are blocked. We turn another way and are blocked once more. We flood through the Laney campus and emerge to find that we’ve been headed off again. We make the next logical move and somehow the police don’t anticipate it. We’re closer to the building, now surrounded by fences and armed swine. We tear at the fences, downing them in some spots. The police begin their first barrage of gas and smoke. The initial fright passes. Calmly, we approach from another angle. (more…)
Fuck the Police, Long Live the Commune
An enormous banner reading “Occupy Oakland — Fuck the Police” was unfurled at the corner of 14th and Broadway, in preparation for the first of a weekly series of marches against the police and their repression against the Oakland Commune. From the hours of 7 to 9 pm on Saturday, January 7th, the crowd kept growing – notably different than many of the largely white, activist groups that have become so predominant in the Occupy movement. This had a completely different character: a rowdy, largely young group of people pissed off about the recent police repression. The police were taking this night more seriously than other demos – whether it was because the night was the 3rd anniversary of the Oscar Grant Rebellion or simply because they knew that the pigs’ current campaign of harassment and arrests was fostering a culture of resistance and anger against them. All evening there were unmarked SUVs full of Oakland police cruising around the downtown area, as well as sheriffs and motorcycle pigs hanging around the periphery of 14th and Broadway. (more…)
Saturday, Jan 7 @ 8pm: FUCK OPD. be there.
The City of Oakland is a war zone. The politicians, chamber of commerce, large scale property owners and Oakland Police Department daily work together to make our lives a living hell. Between the inflated rents, unemployment and consistent indiscriminate police violence there is not a day where the social forces that surround us do not attack the very foundations of our lives. Recently over the past weeks those who have actively participated in Occupy Oakland have been the targets of the OPD. At the vigil in Oscar Grant Plaza as well as in new occupations across the city, the OPD has coordinated a brutal campaign of repression and intimidation using counterinsurgency tactics such as targeted hit and run snatch squads. This is clearly an attempt to undermine the resurgence of the Oakland Commune in the new year. Dozens have been arrested these past weeks and many of them are still sitting in Santa Rita facing daily harassment and brutality at the hands of the Alameda Sheriffs.
This is a direct assault on comrades trying to change this hell we live in. This is a direct attack on people self organizing to take our city back into our own hands. This is coordinated police activity to destroy the Oakland Commune.
This is war.
This Saturday January 7th a 8pm meet at Oscar Grant Plaza at 14th and Broadway. We will march on the police and show them that we are capable of defending the commune and that we will not rest until all our comrades are once again running with us in the streets.
FREE ALL OCCUPY OAKLAND POLITICAL PRISONERS!
LONG LIVE THE OAKLAND COMMUNE!
FUCK THE OPD.
NYE Prison Noise Demo & Party with the Oakland Commune
The New Years Eve noise demo and dance party was a well overdue event for Oakland. Following the arrest of dozens in previous days, the Oakland Commune family sought vengeance upon the police and total solidarity to extended family members behind bars.
Over 200 hundred people gathered on the North steps of Oscar Grant Plaza at 9pm. 14th and Broadway was held until the sound system was functional and then we headed South on Broadway toward the Glenn Dyer Detention Facility.
The police remained at bay. They dared not even escort the march. They pathetically massed inside their station in riot gear, safe behind the massive glass panes of the station’s entrances, for show. On the other side of the glass their opponents taunted and harassed them. The Oakland Commune was nothing to fuck with tonight.
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2011 in Photos: from the Front Lines of the Bay
Over the past few years, a skeptical optimism began to emerge among those in this country who had defined themselves in open antagonism towards capital and the state. It seemed possible that maybe, just maybe, the terrain of struggle was finally shifting and the balance of forces would slowly tip in our favor. 2011 was the year that this desire for a generalization of social struggle and hostility towards authority blossomed in cities across the world, confirming to even the skeptics that times have indeed changed. The radical imagination has been liberated and what seemed impossible only a few months ago has now come to be. In particular, this explosion of resistance found some of its most fertile ground in the Bay Area during 2011. What follows is a chronological story of some of the important moments. These photos only scratch the surface of the many interweaving stories that combined to make this year unforgettable and set the stage for what promises to be a very interesting 2012.
February 5: Thousands take to the streets around San Francisco’s Civic Center during a solidarity demonstration with the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt
March 4: Rally in front of Oakland’s city hall against proposed new gang injunctions in the Fruitvale District
April 19: Day 6 of the encampment and spiritual vigil to protect the Sogorea Te sacred site at Glen Cove in Vallejo from development and desecration (more…)