Industrial Workers of the World

December 24, 2008 ATHENS [MENL] -- Greece, amid the worst unrest in decades, has acquired an advanced security system from the United States. A leading U.S. firm has delivered a command, control, communications, coordination and integration system to Greek authorities. Science Applications International Corp. said the C4I system would coordinate police, coast guard, fire and ambulance services. http://www.menewsline.com/article-1150,2332-Amid-Riots-Greece-Acquires-C-I-S.aspx

"If something scares us, it is the return to normality. For in the destroyed and pillaged streets of our cities of light we see not only the obvious results of our rage, but the possibility of starting to live. We no longer have anything to do, other than to install ourselves in this possibility and transform it into a living experience: by grounding on the field of everyday life, our creativity, our power to materialize our desires, our power not to contemplate but to construct the real. This is our vital space. All the rest is death." On December 24th, the Athens Polytechnic Occupation announced it would leave the school in order to help spread the rebellion into the neighborhoods.

http://amoryresistencia.blogspot.com/

“Normality” (read: their normality; the capitalist norm of exploitation, misery, repression and death) is what we are standing up against. This is what we do now, what we have always done, yet in these past days it is something that has become clearer than ever (like writen elsewhere: “sometimes, tear gas can make you see better”). There were so many of us now that normality faced a new fear: a fear that it might soon be a normality no more. This is when the normal panicked and called the exceptional to its defense.

The assassination was called “an exception” or even, as the assassin’s lawyer claimed, “a misunderstanding”. But the people only got more enraged by their lies. So they brought in “exceptional measures”: Thousands of the occupation army of murderers and torturers (aka, the greek police) flood the streets while the threat of an army intervention, a state of exception or the lifting of the academic asylum was hanging over our heads. And yet it wouldn’t be that easy for them, not this time round.

What we had was an army of the frantic, of the desparate, of all those who wanted to shatter and smash the frame in which normality wouldn’t let them fit. “The first stone is for Alexandros, the rest are for us”. Things were getting way too serious, way out of control. Another exception is now called in: They tell us these days are special, they are “holy”, they call for social peace, consumerism and truce. This year there is, indeed, something to celebrate: not the remains of some obscure pagan feast, but a fabulous uprising that is worrying them, and rightly so. Let normality sink in its crisis and we’ll be sure to bring it some more fear.

http://www.occupiedlondon.org/blog/

More: http://anarchiststrategy.blogspot.com/

http://www.crimethinc.com/blog/2008/12/25/how-to-organize-an-insurrection/

http://nomediakings.org/vidz/time_management_for_anarchists_the_movie.html

'Slogans are not solutions' but can make us laugh on the road to freedom:

"Fuck May 1968 fight now" ( Do hold in mind that Greece has no historical memory of May 1968 as such; at the time when France was looking under the paving stones, Greece was entering military rule.)

"Christmas is off this year, the Virgin had an abortion," read a slogan painted on a central Athens wall.

Chanting "Priests, thieves, pedophiles," protesters sprayed slogans on metal boardings outside Athens Cathedral, painted anarchist logos on the 19th century building's marble columns and tore down a Greek flag. Cathedral officials said they were canceling a scheduled Christmas Eve service after the vandalism.

HIGH/LOW PRESSURE

The U.S. is increasingly divided into two economic zones: one "high-pressure", the other "low-pressure." What the fuck does that mean? Basically, globalization has meant the end of the U.S. manufacturing economy and the rise of a service-based international finance economy that has radically reshaped the landscape of the entire world, including the former manufacturing areas in the U.S. Former manufacturing cities and towns now comprise a huge swath of rapidly declining real estate called the "Rust Belt", a vast, non-contiguous part of the country that has been forcibly unhinged from its blue collar economic mooring and consequently has entered a phase of steady decline (e.g. Detroit loses 10,000 people a year.)

What, then, are "high-pressure" zones?"

They are the parts of the country that have become nodes in the global economy, mostly large cities like New York, San Francisco, Atlanta, Miami, Los Angeles, etc., places that host a rapidly growing population of young service workers ("service work" by our definition ranges from working at a coffeeshop to stockbrokering, since these workers create value by performing a service rather than creating a new product; also note that in both cases workers deal with products of a globalized economy.)

These cities have seen exploding real estate values, the emergence of Gilded Age-style consumer economies, and rapid population booms. Low pressure zones offer cheap and abundant space, which can be used for squatting, urban farming, infrastructure projects, etc. There's always a space crunch with projects since they're usually underfunded, so locating space intensive projects in a low pressure zone can make a lot of sense. High pressure zones, as critical nodes in the global economy, present abundant opportunities to, ahem, challenge capitalism where it is most active. To be effective, this requires a lot of guts, imagination, and risk, but we feel it is too late for finesse tactics.

There's an interesting element to the whole high-pressure/low-pressure situation: displacement. Think about it literally. What happens when a high-pressure zone comes up against a low-pressure zone?

Well, whatever is occupying the high-pressure zone (gas particles in the case of air, people in the case of demographics) gets sucked into the low-pressure zone. This helps explain a phenomenon that can be confusing when trying to determine whether a particular area is high-pressure or low-pressure.

Portland is a good example. The industrial economy in Portland has declined a great deal, but the city is actually gentrifying. How is this happening? Well, lots of young, middle class people are leaving high-pressure cities due to rising prices and low quality of life (traffic, overcrowding, pollution, etc.) and moving to low-pressure areas that offer lower prices, higher quality of life, and lots of hip young people.

Some cities are experiencing both phenomena at the same time, like Pittsburgh, where the population is in seemingly perpetual decline due to the collapse of the U.S. steel industry, but hip young people are increasingly moving there for the low home prices, among other things. Now, this phenomenon is taking on a whole new dimension as older, upper-middle class people are moving from high-pressure cities to low-pressure rural areas, which is made possible by the decentralized nature of many service jobs in the global economy (jobs that can be done via e-mail or fax, for instance.) This isn't just nerdy trivia.

Familiarize with these changes in order to create effective strategies for confronting the new global economic order. Whether that means taking on gentrification, moving a project, starting a new one, or planning for the years to come, having an understanding of the forces that are shaping the U.S. landscape is critical t

o our future success.

BIZARRO WORLD OF BOXING Part 457

"My power is discombobulatingly devastating. I could feel his muscle tissues collapse under my force. It’s ludicrous these mortals even attempt to enter my realm.”--Mike Tyson