The blockade of the port of Olympia started spontaneously about a year ago, November, 2016, it is still there. An extract from short article on how it sprang up:
It started out simply enough. Someone ran in front of the tracks and stopped a train. The grain cars attached to the engine were going to be filled with proppants for oil fracking and shipped off to North Dakota. It wasn’t difficult to stop the engine, but there was no one else around, just two workers from the train company guiding the engine into the Port of Olympia. It was the afternoon of November 7, 2016.Read the full article HERE:
Where they are now:
It is worthwhile to consider the desired goals of the blockade, in order to give some clarity and direction to our activity at the camp. Is the goal to stop fracking and military equipment from moving through the port? Is the goal to clog an artery of a global regime of resource extraction and exploitation? Is the goal to create an autonomous power base, to enable us to seize control over our own lives and communities? For those interested in truly stopping the world that needs fracking, the answer is: all of the above and more. And as the Earth is being murdered in the name of profit, nothing short of a fundamental transformation in how society is organized is worthy of being taken seriously.They now have come up with some demands that might be worth other anarchist groups adopting.
And so how do we grow the blockade into a model for how we want to live, how we want to treat each other, and how we want society to be organized? To a large extent this work has already begun in the camp. In order to build our collective power to resist the exploitation and ecocide of this world, we have to build the alternatives to sustain us. This is why the blockade has largely been recognized to have taken on the form and function of a commune. It is the natural structure that arises from a zone of collective care, which departs from the laws and logic of capitalism and the state. If the commune is the form that our transformative social organizations take, then we should ask ourselves in earnest: how do we expand the commune?
The question of sustaining and expanding the commune inevitably leads us to the issue of dealing with those who would crush this project before it begins.
Dear City of Olympia,
some of us at the Olympia Commune have come to the understanding that “no demands” is an incoherent strategy which does not lend itself to “”progress”” or “”results”” with this bright, new understanding, we have investigated our desires and come up with some ideas about what we really want the result of this blockade to be
our demands are innumerable; here are just a few:
1. make the port a beach again
2. blow up the sun
3. the complete destruction of time itself
4. a brick for every window
5. a wrecking ball
6. that, while science still exists, one of us be endowed with an Adamantium laced skeleton
7. a swift and brutal end to the exploitation commonly referred to as “science”
8. the destruction of all dams, and the return of the salmon
9. no motor boats ever again
10. that fascists and politicians spontaneously combust
11. compost the police
12. release of all prisoners and the Total Destruction of prison, in all of its forms
13. cessation of all space exploration
14. the return of the Tasmanian wolf, the aurochs, the dodo bird, the coral reefs, and all other creatures and habitats that have ceased to be
15. the wilderness
16. total freedom
17.
18. the liquidation of Pacific Union’s assets, to be equally distributed among all children
19. mandatory clown uniforms for all Olympia parking employees
20. that steve hall fight a bear
