Industrial Workers of the World

Flash mobs as a form of struggle The obedient shopper subverts their role to disrupt the circulation of commodities... flash mobs enter the terrain of class conflict.

"A flash mob ... is a large group of people who assemble suddenly in a public place, perform an unusual action for a brief time, then quickly disperse." (Wikipedia.)

Beginning in 2003, flash mobs were a form of activity organised via mobile phones and internet; bringing contacts together in public spaces to act out various bizarre acts of collective non-conformity such as pillow fights, water pistol battles, silent discos (where earphoned individuals dance to their personal stereos/mp3 players) etc. Like short pieces of performance art, briefly changing the normal usage of public space and providing a safe thrill of 'non-corformity' expressed as a crowd all doing the same pre-defined activity.

But now a trade union - not organisations normally noted for their innovation or imagination - has begun to use flash mobbing as an effective tactic during strikes. The German trade union Verdi, with a membership of nearly two and a half million employees in the retail and public sectors, organized around 150 men and women to visit a shopping center in Aschersleben in the state of Saxony-Anhalt last week; Quote: The flash mob entered the shopping center and proceeded to load up shopping carts with an assortment of goods before simply leaving them standing in store aisles.

Instead of paying for the goods, the flash mob passed over cards with slogans like "Fair Wages" and "Fair Means More." Business came to a stand still for about an hour and staff told reporters that it would take them all day to put the goods back on the shelves. The protest had been organized as a result of disagreements over pay and conditions between Verdi and retail sector bosses in the states of Saxony-Anhalt, Thuringia and Saxony.

"With this new form of strike we wanted to draw attention to our problems. But we also wanted to let our colleagues in other sales areas know about our problems," union secretary Doris Finke told local newspaper Mitteldeutsche Zeitung. http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,652867,00.html

Video here; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nCJ6ZTSh19Y&feature=player_embedded

Flash mobs have also recently been used by climate change activists. It will be interesting to see if this spreads more widely - it's a tactic that could easily be applied to struggles and workers' disputes in various retail outlets; such as self-service food restaurants, 'Homebase'-type DIY supplies warehouses, electrical goods etc.

BOYCOTT In the past eg anti-apartheid South African international solidarity struggle in the 1980s South African goods were taken off shelves by activists and taken to Managers & cash-registers and statement made that these goods are boycotted.

MEET THE NEW BOSS SAME AS THE OLD BOSS. Change in khaki: a very Socialist repression looms in Greece

Continuing waves of mass police operations in down town Athens set the pace for new era of repression in Greece Everyone thought it was just a show of power - but it proved to be the Socialist government's plan for "change" after 5 years of brutal right wing rule.

http://libcom.org/news/change-khaki-very-socialist-repression-looms-greece-09102009

The police invasion of Exarcheia, the Athens alternative-radical hub, on the early hours of Friday 9 October was evaluated by most journalists, activists and veteran politicians as a power-show of the new government, in response to a limited solidarity attack against banks in the area just out of Exarcheia earlier the same day.

Minister of Public Order Mr Chrisochoidis, the notorious anti-terrorist mastermind of the last Pasok administration, appeared to many as just typically determined to show who is the new boss. But the continuing waves of police invasion (3 by Friday 19:00 pm) into an area which is commonly acknowledged as the most vibrant intellectual, student and political hub of the country, with hundreds of people stopped and checked, many manifold times in the same day, shops stormed, and locals humiliated by being made to kneel on the pavement and body-searched, has come to prove the new government's self-professed "antiauthoritarianism" a bitter joke.

Pasok, the Panhellenic Socialist Movement, now in power has a long record of police brutality. In its first 8 years of rule, the "democratisation of the police" was revealed as a sham with the execution of 15 year old anarchist Michalis Kaltezas in November 17 1985 during the usual protest marches commemorating the 1973 Polytechnic uprising. The identification of Pasok with police rule at the time was reflected in a popular slogan about the chief of the Athens police: "Change cannot happen without Arkoudeas; he is not a man, he is an idea!".

In the second round of Pasok rule from 1993 to 2004, the Socialists gave away any remaining scruples by ordering the evacuation of the Polytechnic on November 17 1995, breaking for the first time the academic asylumtime since the student massacre of 1973, with 500 people arrested. Also under the 1990s Pasok administration the Golden Dawn, the infamous neo-nazi organisation of thugs, was allowed to form a paramilitary unit and participate in the Serbian sacking of Srebrenica, and the consequent massacre of thousands of muslims.

The new Pasok administration under Papandreou the third (son of Andreas Papandreou, founder of Pasok, and grandson of George Papandreou, the PM who led the British tanks against the people of Athens in December 1944) has assumed an antiauthoritarian gloss of postmodern proportions. The PM has called his government "antiauthoritarians in power" whereas Mr Chrisochoidis has gone public today saying that he is good friend with many anarchists and agrees on many things with them - pointing out that he is against vandals not political groups.

Mr Chrisochoidis also claimed that from now on no police violence will be tolerated and any cop who brutalises citizens or has connections with the Golden Dawn will be immediately sacked. These official announcements have received great media coverage but also the scorn of people whose memory is not too short to remember Mr Chrisochoidis's 2002 chemical torture of Savas Xiros, the first arrested member of the urban guerrilla group November 17.

Until now there have been 111 people detained and 8 people arrested during the operations. NOTE: The first time that the asylum broke, in 1985, it was the government of PASOK that broke the asylum... (a few days after the murder of Kaltezas) in the School of Chemistry... So, PASOK broke the asylum twice! (1985 and 1995)...

On Saturday afternoon locals formed a protest march against the police occupation, but were prevented from proceeding to the headquarters of PaSoK by overwhelming police forces. The occupation continued on Sunday too.