POST DAMTP ANNOUNCEMENT: ON DALE FARM AND OCCUPATION MOVEMENTS

POST DAMTP ANNOUNCEMENT: ON DALE FARM AND OCCUPATION MOVEMENTS

Written by DAMTP

Today the activists and residents have been removed by riot police and bailiffs at Dale Farm – the largest travellers site in Europe. This year has seen mass deportations and arrests of travellers across Europe and it is no surprise that the 10 year dispute over Dale Farm was to be resolved by the use of illegal weapons by the police yesterday on the first day of the attack. While the fight over the last 2 days was futile we feel the activists and of course the travellers themselves who have resisted their eviction and oppression by the state have made a heroic stand for workers everywhere. At the same time, Occupation protests continue across Europe, USA and Australia. These began at the weekend in solidarity to the Tahrir Square occupation and Spanish camps earlier this year as well as the ongoing Wall Street occupation – and we welcome this. However it is useful to identify some of the differences between these two protests: One is the organisation and solidarity shown to a section of the underclass with a very specific aim – to defend people’s homes at the site of those homes. The other is a protest by an ambiguous and “anonymous” “99%” done at the site of power, but with no specific or declared aims. The responses by the state have been heavier against the underclass, despite both the Travellers and the Occupations both having no consensus on the use of NVDA. Another difference is the amount of media coverage given to Dale Farm – which has been international and in the form of live video and written reports in newspapers and websites – and that given to the occupations, which has been very minimal, if not nothing at all. While some have commented that the states suppression of resistance (either by the police or by the media) is a return of Fascism, we must stress here that the Society of the Spectacle is a more directly developed form of Fascism. It is not just individual spectacles that create the image of reality but more importantly, the physical and psychic projection of the images through space, time and meaning that create this society. In this society protest is never fully supressed but is encouraged in some trimension – be it seen and not heard or felt and tasted but not seen – in order to create the image of participation in bourgeois democracy. Protest is commodified and its elements consumed as part of the choices available under a free market. As such, it is protest too that must be resisted. Like the IWW, who we split with after they proved incapable of supporting a psychic workers industrial union, the Global Day of Occupation were and are concentrated on certain areas around the globe – namely, those where capital has concentrated power – not just the centres of the cities but also the nations, namely the EU and USA, ie NATO countries. So despite the claim that the occupations are global and the claim to represent the 99% of workers, the activists involved have clearly been unable to go fully from letter, name, nation or industry and towards class consciousness, despite their efforts to do so. At the same time we must criticise the anonymity of the occupation actions and the idea that those issuing the call are “us”. We see it imperative to organise on a working class basis that begins with our situation: to consciously organise to overthrow our own industrial and national situation and work towards creating international class consciousness. In rejecting both activism and artism, we seek to unite with the mass of workers who are separated from us through nation and industry. The social centres, really free schools, occupied, autonomous and self organised universities all show how these problems have manifest in continuous projects. The control of resources has rarely left the hands of a privileged few and instead there has been the spectacle of participation fuelled by the declared aims of freedom and false universalism. This naturally precludes a specific class consciousness of the psychic workers, their situation in space time and class as psychic workers – therefore going beyond their individual name, nation and industry – and avoiding the triple pitfall of sexism, racism and bourgeois bias. This is how these important struggles will continue – as both the land (both where capital lives and where labour lives) and capital (both the machinery of power and the psychic capital of money and media) are overcome by a new form of society which is under the control of the living labour of the workers of the world. Recent events such as the attacking of police stations in London and around England and Scotland this summer in response to another extra judicial killing in Tottenham – as well as both Dale Farm and the Occupations prepare the ground for the world wide general strike in 2012. It is telling that the General Strike which has started in Greece this week has not spread into Europe – it is due to the institutional racism and anti-working class bias of activists in Europe. The national and international trade and industrial unions and syndicates have also proved incapable of extending the General Strike which has started in Greece this week. It is only by developing our own organised forms as workers, that we can do so – extending solidarity across all human time, space and meaning. We call on all artists and activists to unionise as psychic workers – involved in the production of meaning – to join us or to create their own – 1 person – or more person – unions.   Psychic Occupation Strike 2012 Taskforce - DAta Miners Travailleurs Psychique (POST DAMTP), 20 October 2011

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