The fight for the eight-hour workday began in earnest in the United States, over a century ago, when the American Federation of Labor adopted an historic resolution asserting that "eight hours shall constitute a legal day's labor from and after May 1st, 1886." Up until that time, working people were routinely required to work 10 to 16 hours a day, 6 days a week! In the months prior to May 1st, 1886, American workers in the hundreds of thousands were drawn into the struggle for the shorter day. Skilled and unskilled, black and white, men and women, native-born and immigrant - all became involved.In Chicago alone 400,000 were out on strike for the shorter workday. A newspaper of that city reported that "…no smoke curled up from the tall chimneys of the factories and mills, and things had assumed a Sabbath-like appearance." On May 3, 1886, peaceful public demonstrations by the strikers precipitated violent police retaliation, resulting in the death of at least one striker, and serious injury to many more.The next day in Haymarket Square a public meeting was held to protest the brutal assaults on the demonstrating strikers. The crowd was orderly, and Chicago mayor Carter Harrison advised the police captain to send home the large contingent of police reservists who were waiting at the stationhouse in case they were needed for crowd control.By ten o'clock that rainy evening the meeting was winding down and only about 200 of the demonstrators remained in the Square. Suddenly, a police column of 180 men, led by the police captain, moved in and ordered the people to disperse immediately. At that moment, the peaceful assembly became violent - a bomb was thrown into the police ranks, killing one policeman outright, fatally wounding six more, and seriously injuring about seventy. The police opened fire into the crowd; the number of wounded and killed has never been ascertained.A reign of terror swept over Chicago. The press and the pulpit called for revenge, insisting the bomb was the work of socialists and anarchists. Meeting halls, union offices, printing works, and private homes were raided, and known socialists and anarchists were rounded up. Even many individuals who had no connections at all to the socialists or anarchists were arrested and tortured. "Make the raids first and look up the law afterwards," was the public statement of Julius Grinnell, the state's attorney.
ABOUT US The ‘DEN PLIRONO’ movement is born from the current social needs and constitutes a political movement of disobedience and resistance. It is flesh from the flesh of all exploited social layers and fights for two years, vindicating the social character of public goods. Fundamental political place and axis of action of our movement constitutes freeing of charge and access to all people, in all social goods that are essential for his decent existence.
We fightingly claim free of charge education, health, streets, public spaces, Means of Public Transport, Water, Electricity, all natural goods (eg beaches, forests, air), and each good of social character for each person, Greek or immigrant.
The unprecedented crisis of the last years tosses radically the capitalistic system. Rulers in their effort to fortify their political, economical and ideological regime and to subjugate people, they form new, disguised juntas.
The economic fortification of (global and national) financial system requires direct transport of wealth from the households to the banks. Such a ‘grab’ is attempted with the curtailment of wage and pensions, the dissolution of public health and education, the selling out of public property and with the continuous anti-social taxes.
The question that enters henceforth in the population is the following: How long for will we bend our heads obeying to a bunch bullies exploiters who want to steal our life? When at last will we rise up and take back our lives?
The first signs of collective workers’ class struggle has already initiated. The ‘DEN PLIRONO’ movement committees, the neighborhood assemblies, the strikes in the factories (eg Steelworks) and in Means of Mass Media (ERT, ALTER, etc.) they are certainly some of the luminous examples of disobedience and resistance.
We call all exploited individuals, to choose the way of collective fight by actively participating in the open committees of the ‘DEN PLIRONO’ movement. We invite you all to unite our voices and our punches in order to take back our stolen lives.
WE DO NOT PAY THEIR CRISIS
WE ORGANISE COLLECTIVELY THE REFUSAL OF PAYMENTS TO ALL NEIGHBORHOODS
WE FIGHT AGAINST ALL THOSE WHO STEAL OUR LIVES UNTIL THE FINAL VICTORY
www.kinimadenplirono.gr
www.oxidiodia.gr
It really pisses me off when I hear some punk kid or anarchist claim they are boycotting Nike (or whichever other giant corporation). Not because I think they should be supporting Nike, but simply because it shows a lack of any understanding of what a boycott is. And if we desire to be effective, we need to have a clear understanding of what different tactics and strategies actually are.Boycotting is a non-violent consumer tactic which is based on withdrawing support (usually financial) as a way to force ones enemy/oppressor into a compromised position in which they must negotiate with you or meet your terms in order to regain your support. So simply not participating is not the same as actively boycotting. Thus going Vegan is not a boycott of the meat and dairy industry for example.There are many problems with the idea of some patched up crusty claiming to be engaging in boycott tactics against major corporations. The first of which is that in order to take part in a boycott, you must first have support to withdraw, meaning you need to be a client or customer of the target company who financially contributes to them. Even further, you need to be open to reinvesting that financial support one the target has complied with your demands. This differs greatly from the DIY punk ethos of making our own shit rather than giving them our money, which is actually more about creating an alternative economy, or perhaps an alternative to economy.
Continue READING:A couple of months ago, I discussed one of the most difficult challenges facing Occupy, the willingness of middle class progressives to rationalize the abuses of the police because they place a greater priority upon the preservation of social order by law enforcement. Such progressives want to square the political circle by seeking a transformation of American society without conflict. They are most perfectly represented by Chris Hedges, a man who seems to find the verbal abuse of the police at protests more disturbing than police assaults and finds himself incapable of deciding whether protesters should throw tear gas canisters back at the cops who fired them.But what is it that these progressives believe requires the protection of the police, even at the cost of the violent suppression of Occupy protesters? Upon reflection, the answer is obvious: private property and the hierarchical social relations inscribed by it. Of course, Occupy participants are not all anarchists or communists, far from it, but they have adopted direct action tactics that have frightened progressives with the ghost of expropriation. Initially, occupiers set up encampments in public spaces as a means of highlighting enormous income inequality and corruption. They sought to prefigure an alternative, much more egalitarian, social order that stood in marked contrast to the existing one. If we were living back in the 1960s or 1970s, the government would have responded with a program of increased public assistance, a program that would have drained away support for Occupy by providing housing, jobs, student aid and medical care, but that would have threatened to reverse the neoliberal process of the marketization of all aspects of our lives, and, hence, was never seriously considered.Instead, with the federal government guiding them behind the scenes, cities, starting with Oakland in October of last year, cleared out the encampments with force. There was an initial broad based criticism of these police attacks, but, as it became apparent that Occupy had evolved into a loose coalition of anti-authoritarians, people of color, the homeless and other marginalized people, such criticism dissipated. Meanwhile, particularly on the West Coast, occupiers organized more confrontational actions in response, such as the November 2nd general strike in Oakland, the December 12th port shutdown, the January 20th Occupy Wall Street West protests and the attempted seizure of the Kaiser Auditorium on January 28th. The failure of Occupy to extract any meaningful political response to the distress of millions of impoverished Americans and the interrelated corruption of the financial and political systems was pushing its participants towards more and more radical approaches. Within occupations, this resulted in increasingly acrimonious personal conflicts, as most publicly displayed in Oakland, while the progressives that should have been allies became hostile.
Why March on May Day in the name of Anti-Capitalism?
Because Capitalism is the Dominant Moment of the existing system of Global Domination. Because Global Capital strives for institutional domination, ideological domination, domination of the social imaginary, and domination of the practice of everyday life. Because Global Capital utilizes the hollow rhetoric of "limited government," even as it employs monstrous coercive force to impose economic oligarchy on humanity, and as it strives toward a totalitarian order of technological surveillance and control. Because Global Capital poses itself as the putative end of history, as even Stalinoid STATE capitalism mutates finally into state CAPITALISM. Because Global Capital mumbles pious platitudes about "free markets," even as it generates neo-feudalism on an immense scale and creates more literal slaves than those who toiled under classic slave economies. Because Global Capital creates massive planetary climate disruption and biodioversity loss that have culminated in the Sixth Great Mass Extinction of Life on Earth. In short, because Global Capitalism is the Universal Culture of Death: the culture of genocide, of ecocide, and of the degradation and destruction of the human spirit. It is because of all this, and out of love for Humanity and the Earth, and a passion to defend both Humanity and the Earth, that on May 1 some of us abandon the Everyday March of the Undead and join instead a March for Life and Liberation.
In our modern world, poverty is not natural, but the result of institutions that are set up to benefit a few at the expense of the many. Relief efforts are currently failing because they do not address the root causes of poverty. These causes are not mystical or hard to identify, as the most important ones are global property law, international debt, unfair trade, top-down privatization programs, corporate tax shelters, the those problems are social and political. Furthermore, there is a history to these problems, and poverty will not be addressed until this history is reversed.The colonial conquest of the New World, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia, by European powers set up the structure of our current economic system.History books have done a good job depicting the brutality of this period. In many places, Europeans wiped out 99% of the native populations. In places where the natives did survive, many of them were captured and made to do hard labor. In Potosi, Bolivia, for instance, native Bolivians were forced to work silver mines that snaked deep into the earth. So many miners died, that a popular saying goes “enough silver was taken from the mine in Potosi to build a bridge to Madrid, Spain, and if the bones of the dead miners were pulled from the bowels of the mine, one could build a bridge all the way back.”
