May Day 2012 - discussion and updates

"Lynching" is the unlawful removal of a prisoner from law enforcement custody. Its popular use as a synonym for torturing, maiming, or murdering offenders of ethnic domination by racist mobs is not correct legal terminology.

Though the legal terminology has its origins in state and police responses to lynching. Those laws were initially written to use in response to mobs taking people (almost always African Americans) from jails to torture and murder them.

Pretty big police presence in Minneapolis. At the park the Occupy May 1st stuff started at, there were 7-8 squad cars with 2-4 police in each, equipped with gas masks and wooden batons, which I don't think anyone has seen here since the Republican National Convention protests of 2008. There was also a column of police horses circulating the park, and camera towers run on generators placed throughout.

The first march of the day was an unpermitted Occupy Homes one on U.S. Bank building downtown. This was right before noon and around 200 or so people. Some U.S. Bank manager came out and started screaming at protesters, and then was promptly glitterbombed by someone.

The larger immigration rights march I wasn't at or even saw, but I believe was 500-800.

After that march arrived at its destination, the IWW's Food and Retail Workers United march left from there with a massive Wobmobile truck sound system. This was also an unpermitted march, in which teams of people flyered restaurant workers while the loud march went down the street.

I was mostly at the park which was the meeting point for Occupy related May Day activities, so I missed all the marches.

Also, one of the SEIU locals was originally part of the Occupy activities. They were gonna take people up to a picket in the suburbs, but the threat of doing this to the employer made the employer cave in.

Later it started raining, there was supposed to be a noise demo outside the jail, but not sure what happened with that.

http://thenewinquiry.com/features/may-day-2012/

has lots of reports from hot spots around the world.

http://www.nytexaminer.com/2012/05/the-new-york-times-may-2nd-the-day-after/

a report from a comrade who was in nyc

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2012/may/02/mayday-alert-occupy-movement

Naomi Klein has a report

YES! Cheap Shot on cop was fucking awesome! Just looking at the posture and expression on the kid, you could tell he was up to trouble, hahaha!

How is that awesome? You enjoy watching larger people whacking smaller people over the head with blunt instruments (useewutididthere)?

He could have started some serious shit at what looks like a fairly peaceful protest.

Read the comments on that youtube video. He's a cunt, so by association everyone around him is a cunt. Great message.

How does that look like a peaceful protest? I see cops running in an intimidating the crowd. Fuck them and anyone that defends them.

I'm sorry, you must have came onto the wrong website. Why don't I direct you to the right place:

http://moveon.org/

To be serious now, seeing a kid (that looks no older than 18) attacking a hostile pig (a working class betrayer and henchman of the capitalist social order) in riot gear is fucking awesome. I tip my hat to him for that.

Can you please explain your last three sentences? They are very confusing.

Are you saying that because of his attack on the police officer, people on YouTube are mistakenly associating everyone around the kid with his action? Therefore, what he did was wrong because they are characterizing the whole protest as being a "lets all be cunts and hit tiny female riot pigs in the back of the helmet" rather than [insert liberal reformist message about policy change here]?

Because that's what it sounds like when you say, "He's a cunt, so by association everyone around him is a cunt. Great message."

The message that I got by the way, was, I'M PISSED OFF AND I'M NOT GOING TO TAKE SHIT FROM A LITTLE PIGGY IN STORM TROOPER ARMOR.

Noami Wolf actually

more pictures: http://communismeouvrier.wordpress.com/2012/05/02/deuxieme-serie-de-photos-du-1er-mai-a-travers-le-monde/

How is it liberal posturing to say that I don't find people bashing each other over the head entertaining or awesome?

This wasn't useful violence, this was just a stupid kid who saw a tiny (female) police officer and sucker drummed her. Which could easily have lead to an escalation of violence, police brutality, arrests, and for what?

You're saying you'd do the same in that situation?

It was fucking juvenile behaviour and not something I would ever applaud, whoever had the bruises the next day. Let's all go get lead by the nose by FBI informants and talk about blowing up bridges too. It achieves sweet FA and is simply mind-numbingly stupid, with repercussions for everyone who enjoys the old A>B.

The guilt by association thing isn't my opinion - I know that not everyone in that crowd is a childish cunt. But if this gets picked up by media or on social networks, that few seconds of video might be the only thing anyone outside of the leftist clique will see of recent events. Not the organisation, the banners, the marches, the solidarity - but some dickhead with a drum bashing a small female copper. This wasn't heroic or brave - he wasn't dearresting someone, or stopping someone getting the shit kicked out of them, or standing up to someone twice his size. He just sucker punched someone smaller than him from behind then scarpered. That along with the Cleveland thing makes it easy to classify it all from the outside as a terrorist or thuggish cabal of cunts and cowards.

White knightism don't work when they're offline. Tiny (female) cop but with armour the size of a large bloke and a fuck off truncheon.

Also anytime I can say I suckerdrummed someone, I'd totally do it.

I'm uncomfortable applauding mindless, juvenile violence on what is a good thread (that donut pic is awesome) likely to get a lot of hits from interested outsiders.

FWIW, if he'd posted a vid of a copper hitting a smaller person and said it was awesome I'd call him out on it too.

Jesus fuck, what a stupid and pointless thing to say.

I'm sorry and maybe I live a different experience, but the people we want in the movement are the working class youths who are generally de-politicised but have an inherent hatred of the cops.

Instead of worrying about CNN demonising the movement (as if they'd do anything else) we should be

(1) defending ourselves against the cops (as someone's already pointed out, that cop was hit by a protester in the context of cops charging protesters!)

(2) appealing to the anti-cop sympathies of the dispossessed working class youth.

Fuck up cops and post that shit on YouTube any time you can!

yeah the officer was just holding that baton up for lots of peaceful fun....

And another thing!...

I work in a really rough area. If the kids from the local estates thought that protests were their opportunity to fuck up the cops and not some "peaceful", patronising, and boring A>B shit organised by bureacrats that doesn't relate to their lives, I have no doubt they'd be there. And then we'd be talking to them about politics.

Finally, fights with the cops do more to politicise people then a million well-written leaflets or public meetings. Here in the UK, we went through a massive student movement in late 2010. The students who became most politicised/radicalised are the one who were beat on by pigs. It's tough to be a liberal if you've fought the cops over an issue that affects your life materially.

Fighting the cops is good for the movement. FACT.

----

EDITED for clarity.

i did not know that.

further on soapy's second post in the thread:

https://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/03/nyregion/warrant-squads-spied-on-wall-st-protesters-suspects-say.html?_r=1&ref=nyregion

Perhaps I'm wrong, and the gentleman in the clip was expressing his well-rounded political views with a reasonable and justifiable outburst of violence against the tyranny of authority, rather than just some dumb twat with a drum hitting someone smaller than him in the back of the head and then legging it.

As for political engagement, I don't think you'd be talking to anyone about politics if most of them are just looking for a fight.

Reaching out to marginalised youths with the lure of violence and a 'lets fuck shit up lol' message does not seem a reliable basis for a movement.

Anyway, maybe I'm just too squeamish for this anarky malarkey.

Yes, because that's what I said in my post

Jesus, how many times do people have to spell this out for you:

It was protesters defending themselves from a police charge and one guy took a cheap shot at the closest pig to him. Good on 'im.

Those working class youths experience the tyranny of the police as a regular aspect of their lives. It's not about the 'lure of violence' of 'fucking shit up'. It's about giving people an opportunity to fight back against the forces that oppress, and not fucking moralizing or trying to appeal to the media.

I disagree, and I'll moralise all I please, thanks. I'll bow out though as this is a thread for May Day updates, not the ethics or glamourisation of violence.

What Chilli has said. It's been the dispossessed youth that has given the student and anti cuts movement a well needed kick up the arse and a ruck with the cops can be the gateway to something far more.

Report from London now up on SF site: http://solfed.org.uk/?q=south-london/london-solfed-on-mayday-you-say-workfare-we-say-warfare

http://front.moveon.org/

If only we had a REAL superhero to save this poor girl from the wretched of the earth. If only.

http://www.anarkhos.org/violence.html

That website is the biggest pile of shit I've ever seen in my entire life.

I mean what the fuck is this?!

http://www.anarkhos.org/flawedclassbasedreasoning.html

The whole site reads like some individualist, "anarchism is all about ethics, man", moralizing bullshit that from the best I can tell divorces the very idea of government from capitalism and class society.

This website if a fucking gold mine.

From "Advice to the unemployed":

Comparing the ramblings of one person to what purports to be a grassroots effort to swing the Democratic Party back toward the left edge of its center is one of the most ludicrous attempts at moral equivalence I've seen in a long time.