Olympia Commune Demands.

        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.
       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.

Full article HERE:

      They now have come up with some demands that might be worth other anarchist groups adopting.

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

You're An Anarchist At Heart.

       I have always maintained that we are all anarchists at heart, we don't like to be ordered around, we want to be a partner in what we do, and more and more we see people by-passing institutions of power and attempting to sort things out for themselves, without most of them having considered anarchism in any shape or form. There has been an increase in people moving to stop fracking, gentrification, evictions etc. and they have not been waving an anarchist flag or wearing an anarchist badge. It is just a realisation that if they want something done, then they will have to do it themselves, they no longer see the institutions as being on their side. The more it happens, the more empowered they feel, the more it will grow. Anarchism from the heart, not from the book.

This from Dissent:

       These newer movements are looking to one another for power, and creating it, horizontally and through self-organization. The state is increasingly rejected as the site from which to change society. Distinct from people who identify as anarchists, most members of newer movements reject the state out of experience and based on their observations from recent history. Foreclosures and evictions continue, water is being shut off in cities and towns from Palestine to Detroit, cuts to public spending and austerity measures are increasing, and land is being plundered by fracking and mining, with no respite in sight.

      After all, why should people turn to the institutions that are responsible for their problems for solutions? Instead, everywhere we see people taking matters into their own hands: affected people have themselves blocked mining companies in Greece and Argentina, and prevented pipes from being laid for fracking across the Americas. In Argentina the Malvinas Assembly stopped Monsanto from constructing what would have been the world’s largest genetically modified seed processing plant. Foreclosures in Spain, Chicago, and San Francisco have been prevented by neighbors coming together and blocking the eviction and auction of homes, and neighbors have also prevented high-end buyers from surveying apartments in working-class neighborhoods, such as Kreuzberg in Berlin. This is not a politics of demanding that others stop exploitation, but stopping it themselves through collective direct action. Distinct from traditional social movements, these are self-organized communities that see the process of the struggle and its goal as interconnected. Again, one can see the anarchist touch here—the spirit of non-hierarchy, horizontalism, and anti-statism—even if people in these movements do not identify themselves as such.

Read the full article HERE:
 
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