This is Comandante Narsha (aka Berendine Doh Rn) of Brown Eyed Girls with Communiqué #12 to the Wall Street Commune and all comrades engaged in the struggle. I have spoken about the Wall Street Commune here and here and need to say a few words on its current situation. The brutal police repression illustrates the fear of the powers-that-be of organized action that calls into question existing economic and social relationships and attempts to wrestle from them the reigns of economic and political power. As usual the bosses do everything in their power to suppress, derail and crush the collective actions of radical workers and then point to the failure of worker control and hence the “natural” need for bosses. It is a game they have been playing for a long time. We are of the mind that even though the Wall Street Commune pulls together all sorts of groups, in the final analysis, the Wall Street Commune must be anti-capitalist or not at all! As the capitalist class and its media puppets ridiculed the Commune for its lack of “demands”, workers realized that the Wall Street Commune presented something much more radical than “demands”. It was out in the open for all to see: the concrete experience of worker self-management and autonomy. Day after day as the Wall Street Commune created and organized key areas of - what was for all intents and purposes - a small, autonomous city, it became clear that this radically egalitarian process of doing things could easily spill over into factories, offices, schools or any institution of everyday life and nothing would be the same. The Wall Street Commune’s General Assembly (and other forms of direct action and participation) with its non-hierarchical and autonomous structure, however fragile, gave people a glimpse into what worker self-management might look like. A glimpse into how quickly a crisis can develop into a revolutionary situation. The Wall Street Commune out of necessity constitutes an integral critique of society — a critique which should refuse to compromise with any form of established power and which is directed against every aspect of alienated social life. As the Wall Street Commune struggles with class society, the weapons are nothing less than the essence of the antagonists themselves: the Commune cannot allow the conditions of division and hierarchy that obtain in the dominant society to be reproduced within itself. And the Wall Street Commune desires to spread to all aspects of life. That is its demand! Even when the Commune reproduced the divisions and hierarchy of the dominant society, it became a kind of lighting rod attracting those who disagreed. As the Commune responded to these progressive critiques and adapted, it became more threatening to the established social and economic order. Capitalists quickly understood what the Commune signified and attempted to crush it by calling out those who “Serve and Protect”. Hence its brutal dismantling that required no excuses. The question now is what is to be done? The Wall Street Commune is dead, long live the Wall Street Commune! All Power to détournement! Long live the Paris Commune and the Homestead strikers! Take over all the places! Anyone who speaks of the Wall Street Commune without seeing its revolutionary possibilities has a corpse in his mouth!
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