Solidarity Texts with January 28th Occuparty

At 10pm on January 28th an empty condominium was seized in Brooklyn to contest the hegemony of private property and power-relations, to live and celebrate, communally, anarchically. By 10:45 the cops arrived, assaulted partygoers and emptied the building, provoking a march in the street. By 11:15 four were in police custody, charged with inciting a riot, assaulting a police officer, and an arbitrary amalgam of other misdemeanors. The event was widely, and uniformly covered by local media, none of whom contested the PD's account, none of whom comprehended the action, including the media apparatus at Occupy Wall Street. Solidarity Texts with January 28th Occuparty

At 10pm on January 28th an empty condominium was seized in Brooklyn to contest the hegemony of private property and power-relations, to live and celebrate, communally, anarchically. By 10:45 the cops arrived, assaulted partygoers and emptied the building, provoking a march in the street. By 11:15 four were in police custody, charged with inciting a riot, assaulting a police officer, and an arbitrary amalgam of other misdemeanors. The event was widely, and uniformly covered by local media, none of whom contested the PD's account, none of whom comprehended the action, including the media apparatus at Occupy Wall Street. As a result these comrades were left without legal or monetary support, on pathetic accusations of 'violence' and 'apoliticality', the same rhetoric we saw in London last August; that is, at the rare moments politics emerge, directly, outside of representation.

The following texts were written in support of the four arrestees, as well as the spread of autonomous and clandestine occupations all over.

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An occupation means opening a space.
A space of possibilities.
Not producing an event for coverage, nor building myth.
Not establishing a group or organization.
Same as an assembly.
To gather, experiment, elaborate, and to practice.
To conjugate.
What occurs in an open space escapes coding, credit,
and cannot be criminal.
We will not allow our interpellation as such.
It is the police who create crime:
not the other way around.
"But what about the extortionists, rapists, drug dealers, racists, and murderers?"
They are them.
Officers Michael Daragjati, Monty Green, Franklin Mata, Kenneth Moreno, Robert McGee, Anthony Bologna, Stephen Anderson, Sean Johnson, Paul Browne, etcetera are merely 2011's fall guys for the founding practices of the Kelly-Bloomberg Empire,
symptoms which are in no way aberrant,
for a regime which has never been anything but corrupt.
"And the terrorists?" There is simply no such thing.
Yet they have told so many stories,
territorialized on so many semiotics,
we seem to lack the space to articulate ourselves.
As soon as we begin, they intervene, beat us, and demand confession, in terms they can comprehend.
"Are you pleading guilty because you are in fact guilty?"
NO.
WE ARE ALL, CATEGORICALLY, NEVER GUILTY.
This is why we go inside.
To speak, act, and touch one another differently;
"To reinvent each gesture anew."
And again -- to practice.
Because this will continue,
because it implicates everyone,
because there are so many empty buildings.
Because the possibilities are infinite.

Because there will be a General Strike on May 1st,
and because this General Strike will never end.

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We Anarchists, having participated in the occupation of 205 N. 8th Street on Saturday January 28th, denounce the police and the journalists as interchangeable puppets of a permanent state of exception and its violent machinations: the shameless celebration of isolation, cultivation of exploitation, and hyperinflation of profit.
Today, when society becomes the enemy of capitalism and its political allies whose only aim is to sustain themselves by any means necessary, is the moment for society to decide either to tolerate or to fight.
We say fight, and as such we are in solidarity with any occupation, any affinity group, any individual that raises its voice and stands its ground against the state, authority, and any form of oppression.
No more tolerance -- no more apathy -- and no more mediation.
We want everything for everyone. We are not asking. We will continue to take what is already ours.

New York, February 1st 2012
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"To police and to urbanize is the same thing."
"The architect has no control over me."
-M. Foucault

On the night of January 28th, Brooklyn was witness to a quiver of insubordination in its model neighborhood, where civilization has triumphed least contested. A milieu where a building can sit alone, unprotected and open, untouched, invested by warmongers, divested of contradiction and politically: this is the provocation. Not a broken window, a few injured pigs or defiant truth-telling; but the simple fact that there is a space there, an opening, and no reaction. We cannot hesitate. "It is enough to know that there is a curtain there. Let us lift it up!" Over and over and over again.
When this space opens that does not produce determinable behaviors and dulled affects, when what is happening there cannot be easily understood according to social, media tic or precinct logic: there is backlash from every element still colonized by the ideals of citizenry, the degree of their brutality expressing the acuity of their terror. Yet the ensuing legal threats, individuation by imprisonment, petty narrativization and incentivization of informant culture can do nothing to deter the momentum of what is now occurring, not simply here but everywhere. We are near; the next building is already open.
We stand in unconditional solidarity with all those arrested in New York and Oakland, in courtrooms and in the street.

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Resorting to an automatism characteristic of their class, the gentry of Williamsburg summoned their militia to dissolve the siege being laid to a conspicuously empty palace of banality, newly erected in the heart of their spectacular playground. The vandalists had recognized the inhospitability to life of this sarcophagus for the young professional class, and did not shy from the conclusion that it lent itself only to defilement. The object of their critique was not limited to the class for whose consumption the condominiums that cover Williamsburg are produced, but included the extreme boredom that the proliferation of these kinds of spaces induce. The prevalence of the condominium is a symptom of the spreading homotopia that is the Metropolis -- the endless repetition of the same forever.
The vandalists will not reconcile themselves to merely appropriating these habitats -- designed for gradual atrophy, optimized for the most comfortable postponement of death. Rather, they want to see them recycled in the urban biosphere; turned into manure from which unforeseen species might emerge.
It will not only be the police, the rich, and the reactionary press that will slam the vandalists -- activists will likely join in as well, decrying the occupation as not being social enough, not populist enough. Why did it have to be a party, with booze, hip-hop music, and NO RULES? Why not an attempted squat? Why was the media not called? Why was the action not 'condensed' upon in some public group? No one will understand the vandalists because they are not of either world; they seek neither professionalist capitalism nor professionalist activism. Perhaps if squatting a social center were still sometimes tolerated this desperate mayhem would not have occurred, just as if there were anything to be gained from joining Organized Labor or Revolutionary Parties perhaps we would not see the global masses chaotically rising against singular abstractions of all authority (Wall Street, Mubarak, the IMF, Money etc.)
Activists call protests: the vandalists call potlucks. Potlucks of destruction.
We can expect more Occu-parties and bad citizenry from these vandalists leading up to an ultimate act of desecration, an intelligibility strike, on May 1st.
-The Geiseric Tendency

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Friends of Occupy (FWG) are writing in response to reporting concerning the events of Saturday, January 28th on the “Occu-Party” in Williamsburg Brooklyn.
We received an invitation to attend a party in Williamsburg hosted by
a local group loosely affiliated with the Occupy movement, an event which we attended. Based on what we witnessed, we are writing in response to what we feel is a grievous misrepresentation by the media of the events that night.
It was our understanding that this “Occu-Party” was primarily intended to draw attention to the increasing number of empty luxury condominiums in northwest Brooklyn. During the 35 minute occupation within the building, and along with general good-natured camaraderie, there was also much discussion among attendees about the deleterious effects of bank policy. Among topics discussed included bank-funded luxury developments and gentrification. These activities often
displace current residents and create a vacuum in the community, leaving large swaths of the population homeless, foreclosed, or priced- out by these predatory bank practices.
After the NYPD arrived, we spontaneously joined to what seemed to be a street march that then headed toward Bedford Avenue. Besides some obvious lack of organization among the marchers, this march has been erroneously characterized in press accounts as either inciting a riot
or rife with illegal activity.
Contrary to the reported accounts, it was our impression that the reported violence was both exaggerated and exercised primarily by a surprising number of uniformed and plain clothes officers. The alleged injuries to the officers may have been a result of their over- response to suppress the actions of free speech and public assembly that night.
We are writing in support of the diverse groups struggling against the injustices of the current system. Every one of us, and everyone we know are preparing for the General Strike on May 1st.
We hope this point of view is acknowledged in any further reporting of Saturday’s “Occu-Party”.
- Friends of Occupy (FWG)

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After waiting patiently to claim, possess, even enjoy the action on Saturday January 28th in Williamsburg, Occupy Wall Street has 'officially' disowned the occupation at 205 North 8th Street. Not that it is asking to be owned, far from it -- but it demands that we stop using this language of capital, this language of advertising, this language of organization. It demands unconditional solidarity with all against the police, regardless of political difference, whose multiplicity it encourages, against the simplified pathos of a nonexistent 99%.
Despite being announced in the GA, comprised of many formative tendencies to the NYC GA and mass demonstrations both before and after September 17th, the implicit Central Committee has denounced both the planned and spontaneous proceedings last weekend, jeopardizing the chance for legal representation of four individuals by the NLG, withholding bail money, and consenting to the incarceration of one comrade on Riker's Island, besides sowing distrust and fragmentation amid the field of future occupations.
We see this appropriation at work constantly, with the Brooklyn Bridge as the most egregious example -- with the silent, activist vanguard stomping its feet and screaming to get back on the footpath (which it would go on to do so tamely on November 17th, insisting on their archaic class strategies), while a swarm of black sheep took their fateful steps, refusing their 'march leaders', pacekeepers and de-escalators, moving unwittingly towards another public sacrifice, a discursive slaughter as 'provocateurs', while the world celebrated an act of 'peaceful resistance' by 'the people', signed 'Occupy' with a self-congratulating flourish.
When things begin to take off on a revolutionary tack, countercultural dabblers and their reformist pals become struck with doubt, reterritorializing on their familial, national, and economic complexes. When we shed metaphor and street theater: when struggle becomes real, and physical. This is what so many still fail to understand: occupation is a matter of physics, of space. Of movement and bodies.
When more police are in the hospital than comrades in jail, when they line up, terrorized, to protect their precinct from occupation, when a multimillion dollar building is really, truly open; the leftist climate of defeatism must dissipate, and it is in times such as these that we can learn something.
-- When someone stands up in court, elucidates its obscenity and is arrested for it --
-- When a reporter tells us he works in order to pay his federal taxes, when he screams, "It's called Democracy! It's called Capitalism!" and calls for an officer to come to his assistance when the camera is turned on him --
-- When a member of the Finance Committee responds that someone deserves to go to jail for entering a building he didn't pay for, without consensus, for ostensibly assaulting an officer, and property destruction in the vicinity --
We begin to understand. And don't think we are blind enough to think this one speaks for all; then our belief in representation would be as bad as OWS, despite avowed 'direct democracy', and public claims of 'anarchist organizing tactics. For when we see a General Assembly start to categorically define itself as this or that, we must recall its original purpose, and chart how it has transformed, how it has ossified. When these few protectors of an $100,000 account can withhold the petty sum determining someone's freedom or imprisonment; when involvement is disavowed by a select few determining the stance of all the others, on the egoistic grounds that we didn't meet the quota of 'official' OWS participants; because we refuse to drop names; because we couldn't sleep in Zuccotti Park due to its 'openness' to detectives with our pictures; and because we had a brief glimpse of an open future, for all, something that couldn't be bottled, stamped and sold by some 'revolutionary organization', much less one with non-profit status, by some self-heroizing identity politic of 'Occupiers', qualified by one's superficial attendance record in corporate atriums, holding signs on sidewalks, speechifying and moralizing while others are being beaten, arrested, harassed and dominated by the enemy; we are being punished, we are shown full-face a 'people's' apparatus that still believes in punishment.
This is when we need to understand, all of us, what an occupation is.
This is when we need to say, not what 'our' politics are, but what politics are.

Occupy should not constitute a group, but a space, a fabric of occupations, a Khora.
Occupy should not signify a lifestyle of protest, but build a constant culture of resistance.
Occupy should not want merely to change the conversation, but to change the world.