A little story about repression and why I've never treated arrests as something anyone should do: for those of you who don't remember, Occupy Wall Street was a massive movement that was centered around encampments that popped up in city centers across the US (and Canada and UK) from Sept to Nov 2011 - ThreadSky

vickyacab.bsky.social • 17 hours ago

A little story about repression and why I've never treated arrests as something anyone should do: for those of you who don't remember, Occupy Wall Street was a massive movement that was centered around encampments that popped up in city centers across the US (and Canada and UK) from Sept to Nov 2011

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anarresproject.bsky.social•17 hours ago

Smart. Thank you for laying this out

vickyacab.bsky.social•17 hours ago

But the movement was so massive, so distributed, and so connected to a global year of struggle (Arab Spring, London Riots, Movement of Squares in Spain and Greece) and the first big autonomous street movement in many of our life times, we didn't really think it was over when the camps got evicted.

vickyacab.bsky.social•17 hours ago

So for the entire winter of 2011/12 we continued to march, hold protests, meetings, discussions, projects, coordinate networks, and all of it was building toward a general strike that we had called for May 1, 2012. This was not going to work, but it wasn't totally fantastical:

vickyacab.bsky.social•17 hours ago

In NYC, there had been significant coordination between OWS and the labor movement on a couple large demonstrations. More importantly, on the West Coast Occupiers had teamed up with port workers and actually shut down most of the West Coast container ports for a whole day. It was genuinely massive

vickyacab.bsky.social•17 hours ago

So anyway, we thought, "fuck it, maybe we can call a general strike and everybody will show up". We did what we could, a contingent of anarchists and autonomists in NYC were among the most active in planning and propagandizing for May Day. The day before, April 30, we got worried calls from friends

vickyacab.bsky.social•17 hours ago

FBI snatch squads had been kicking in doors of occupiers. We freaked out, and I remember me and four of my friends slept on the floor of a fifth person, so that we would at least be all together and reduce the risk/not be at home if they came knocking at our addresses.

vickyacab.bsky.social•17 hours ago

MayDay flopped, but when the dust settled, we found out who had been hit by the snatch squads: All anarchists from the previous generation of activists, from WTO/alter-glob era. Most of them had NOTHING to do with OWS for either energy/capacity or in some cases actively hostile ideological reasons.

starrceline.bsky.social•16 hours ago

whoah.

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