Category Archives: Occupy Wall Street

M&G: Why are some ‘occupiers’ more equal than others?

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http://mg.co.za/article/2011-10-28-why-are-some-occupiers-more-equal-than-others

Why are some ‘occupiers’ more equal than others?

Jared Sacks

About 200 Cape Town residents participated in the call for a “World Revolution Day” on October 15, inspired by the growing worldwide Occupy movement. We arrived at the Company Gardens next to Parliament in typical Capetonian fashion: mostly late, disjointed, and with a huge array of goals and personal agendas for the first day.

In fact, the majority of “occupiers” arrived so late for the revolution that the clean-shaven undercover security operative (sporting an earpiece and touristy camera) had already deemed the protest to be non-threatening and was long gone. The police barely noticed the relaxed picnic atmosphere that was apparent once the crowd grew to more than 70.

Despite the tame beginnings of #OccupyCapeTown, did the day did have #OccupyWallSt potential? Cape Town is one of the most unequal, segregated and racist cities in the world, with hundreds of thousands of angry (though demoralised) youth waiting for real change. The townships are a ticking time bomb anticipating the intersection between screams of Sekwanele! and sparks of hope that a mass-based social movement could provide.

Would the 99% actually show up? In the end, those who arrived, with the exception of an entourage from Communities for Social Change, were predominantly from the upper reaches of the 99.

There was potential in this space of mostly white privileged activists. Some were acutely aware of how their privilege posed problems for the bottom 80%. Seeking to engage directly with issues of white supremacy, class and patriarchy within the 99%, they tried to create a space of solidarity with poor communities without speaking for them or co-opting their struggles. To these few activists, Occupy Cape Town was an exciting experiment in building radical equality that is actively asserted, not merely assumed.

As the day progressed, however, many of us were disheartened by the most vocal of the 19%. Our four general assemblies seemed to be dominated by well-read internet activists who came with all the answers. Paraphrased crudely:

  • The solution is for the poor to buy solar panels for their houses.
  • We must all just stop buying things so the system falls apart.
  • We should start an internet café for the poor to participate in our internet revolution.
  • We must recycle!
  • There’s another way to occupy, it’s by our actions … Eat baked beans on toast and close bank accounts.
  • Machines should take the place of human labour to end wage slavery.

    Yet when participants critically reflected on the racial make-up of the meeting, there were demands from a barrage of “colour-blind” activists to stop “making this about race”. When class was brought up in the assembly, it was countered with calls not to divide the movement. “We are the 99%!” they cheered. When women spoke (and few did speak in this male-dominated space), it seemed that their points were often ignored. So how did the ideals of an occupation for the immediate assertion of equality get perverted so quickly?

    The American radical Malcolm X once said: “If you stick a knife nine inches into my back and pull it out three inches, that is not progress.” Many say that the post-1994 era was just that: the knife of white supremacy is still present and oppression is now couched in terms of the ideals of a liberal non-racial democracy. Radical groups such as Blackwash use much more direct language: “Fuck the rainbow nation. Coz 1994 changed fokol!”

    Abahlali baseMjondolo says that, although there are no more pass laws or legal racism, poor and black people (especially black women) are still oppressed — by essentially the same system that gave birth to apartheid. And if “oppression”, as John Holloway puts it, “always implies the invisibility of the oppressed”, one can begin to understand that a theoretical gulf exists between the lived experience of those whose voices are unheard and the liberal white activists who proclaim that we are all, in fact, the same.

    General Debate

    The most telling experience of the day was the general debate before Occupy Cape Town marched up Long Street to the offices of e.tv. Someone expressed their concern that a placard proclaiming “FUCK the Rich” would be used against us when filmed by e.tv. Others agreed, saying that it was a violent statement, released negative energy, and was not in line with the peaceful purpose of the “occupation”.

    Trying to use democratic procedures, several white liberal activists said there should be consensus on the slogans used on our placards and banners; nothing seemingly violent or racist was acceptable. The group of poor black protesters from Mannenberg who had written the placard reluctantly agreed to leave it behind. Yet this decision was resisted by an independently minded group member and that very placard eventually found its way on to TV.

    If, as radical feminist bell hooks says, “patriarchy rewards men for being out of touch with their feelings”, a corollary could be that, in a white-supremacist, patriarchal, capitalist society, white men are not only out of touch with their own feelings and those of others but they are also unaware of the modes by which they belittle and oppress others. This is no less true of a radically democratic “occupation” than within the oppressive institutions of society itself.

    It was perhaps to be expected that Occupy Cape Town would be dominated by liberal whites who mostly desired the tweaking of capitalism, or the creation of idealistic utopias by withdrawing from the system (rather than overthrowing it), and who would attempt to build some sort of ideological hegemony based on their own privileged Western orientation.

    If some occupiers are more equal than others, it is about time that white male activists who sincerely want to dismantle oppression begin to take seriously the voices of the oppressed from within the 99%.

    • CounterPunch: From Wall Street to South Africa

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    http://www.counterpunch.org/2011/10/14/the-rebellion-of-the-poor/

    From Wall Street to South Africa

    by RICHARD PITHOUSE

    In The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck’s novel about the Great Depression, Tom Joad, the novel’s central character, a man who has been made poor and who is on the run from the law, tells his mother in the climactic scene that: “I been thinking about us, too, about our people living like pigs and good rich land layin’ fallow. Or maybe one guy with a million acres and a hundred thousand farmers starvin’. And I been wonderin’ if all our folks got together….”

    That wondering is a red thread woven through American history with the promise of a way out of what Martin Luther King called “life as a long and desolate corridor with no exit sign”. In recent years a lot of Americans who have not been born to life in that desolate corridor have been forced in to it. The time when each generation could expect to live better than their parents has passed. Poverty is rushing into the suburbs. Young people live with their parents into their thirties. Most can not afford university. Most of the rest leave it with an intolerable debt burden. It’s the same in Spain, Greece and Ireland. England is looking pretty grim too. The borders that surround the enclaves of global privilege are shrinking in from the nation state to surround private wealth.

    If the problem was that there just wasn’t enough money to go around, people would have to accept the situation. But when there is plenty of money, when there is, in fact, an incredible abundance of money but its being held by a tiny minority, its perfectly logical to start wondering along Tom Joad’s lines.

    The financial elite who had, for so long, successfully presented themselves as the high priests of the arcane arts of economic divination on whom our collective well being was dependent caused the financial crisis of 2008. The problem was not a miscalculation in some algorithm. It was the greed of a caste that had been allowed to set itself up above everyone else. As a character in a Bruce Springsteen song about the deindustrialisation of America observes “Them big boys did what Hitler couldn’t do”. This caste has developed so much power over the media and politicians that it has been allowed to dictate the resolution of the crisis. Their plan, of course, comes down to the proposal that they should continue to profit while the shortfall is recovered from society. That means more people losing their homes, no longer able to afford health care or child care, dropping out of university, sliding deeper into debt and working two or three crappy jobs just to keep going.

    There was resistance from the start. But for a long time it looked like right wing populism would be the dominant popular response in America. But with the occupation of Wall Street inciting occupations and planned occupations in cities throughout the United States, and as far away as Hong Kong and South Africa, it seems that a response that targets the real source of the problem is gaining more traction.

    The choice of Wall Street as the target for the occupation is, in itself, a perfectly eloquent statement. And slogans like “We’re young; we’re poor; we’re not going to take it any more” are incisive enough. But if the occupation of sites of symbolic power in cities across North America is to win concrete rather than moral victories, and to make a decisive intervention against the hold that finance capital has taken over so much of political and social life, it will have to do two things. It will need, without giving up its autonomy, to build links with organisations, like churches, trade unions and students groups, that are rooted in everyday life and can support this struggle over the long haul. It will also need to find ways to build its own power and to exercise it with sufficient impact to force real change.

    Wall Street is usually a world away from Main Street and bringing it under control is no easy task. But its encouraging that what links Tahrir Square to Liberty Plaza, the protests in Athens and Madrid and the movements that have emerged in the shack settlements of Port-au-Prince, La Plaz, Caracas and Durban, is a concern with democracy. In Tahrir Square the primary point was to unseat a dictatorship but elsewhere there is a global sense that the standard model of parliamentary democracy is just not democratic enough. This is a crucial realisation because, in many countries, America being one of them, you just can’t vote for an alternative to the subordination of society to capital. But a serious commitment to dispersing power by sustained organising from below can shift power relations. It is the only realistic route to achieving any sort of meaningful subordination of capital to society.

    The idea of an occupation as a way to force an exit from the long and desolate corridor to which more and more Americans are being condemned is not new. Martin Luther King dedicated the last years of his life to the Poor People’s Campaign. In 1968 he travelled the country aiming to assemble “a multiracial army of the poor”, “a new and unsettling force” that would occupy Washington until Congress enacted a poor people’s bill of rights providing decent housing and work or a guaranteed income for all. Reader’s Digest warned of an “insurrection”. King was assassinated on the 4th of April 1968 but the march went ahead on the 12th of May 1968. Up to 50 000 people marched on Washington and occupied Capitol Hill. Thousands built a shanty town known as Resurrection City and held it for six weeks, in which it seemed to rain incessantly, before it was bulldozed.

    In that same year there was mass protest, sometimes verging on insurrection, from Prague to Berlin, Paris and Mexico City. Much of it was inspired by the war in Vietnam and much of it took the form, against both the state and the authoritarian left, of direct democracy and collective self-organisation. In 1968 armed third world peasants became the most compelling image of a revolt that, while not global, was certainly international. With the defeat of these struggles the human rights industry was able to recast the third world poor as passive victims requiring charity and guidance from the North.

    Debt, often mediated through dictatorship, became a key instrument through which the domination of the North was reasserted over the South. Debtors don’t just have to wring every cent that they can from life. They are also without autonomy. But the servitude of the debtor is increasingly also the condition of home-owners, students and others in the North who are paying for much of the financial crisis.

    When some people are living like pigs and others have land lying fallow its easy enough to see what must be done. But when some people are stuck in a desolate corridor with no exit signs and others have billions in hedge funds, derivatives and all the rest it can seem a lot more complicated. And of course it is more complicated in the sense that you can’t occupy a hedge fund in the same way that you can occupy the fallow land of a billionaire.

    But the point about finance capital is that it is the collective wealth of humanity. The money controlled by Wall Street was not generated by the unique brilliance, commitment to labour and willingness to assume risk on the part of the financial elite. It was generated by the wars in the Congo and Iraq. It comes from the mines in Johannesburg, the long labour of the men who worked those mines and the equally long labour of the women that kept the homes of the miners in the villages of the Eastern Cape. It comes from the dispossession, exploitation, work and creativity of people around the world. That wealth, which has been captured and made private, needs to be made public. Appropriated or properly taxed under democratic authority it could fund things like housing, health care, education, a guaranteed income and productive investment.

    When a new politics, a new willingness to resist, emerges from the chrysalis of obedience, it will, blinking in the sun, confront the world with no guarantees. But we need to get together and commit what we can to try and ensure that 2011 turns out differently to 1968 or, for that matter, 1989. Here in South Africa the immediate task for the young people inspired by the occupations that have spread from Cairo to New York via Madrid and Athens is to make common cause with the rebellion of the poor.

    Daily Dispatch: Tunisia, Egypt, Libya. Grahamstown?

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    15 Oct 2011
    Daily Dispatch
    By TRISTAN GEVERS

    Tunisia, Egypt, Libya. Grahamstown?

    TODAY – October 15 – has been declared World Revolution Day and various
    groups have organised “occupation” in many cities around the world,
    including in South Africa.

    According to the Occupy South Africa webpage, “occupation” will occur from
    about 8am on World Revolution Day, and there will be “movements” in
    Johannesburg, Cape Town, Durban, Grahamstown and East London.

    Under the name “Operation Ubuntu”, those involved argue “like our brothers
    and sisters at Wall Street and in Egypt, Greece, Spain, and Iceland, we plan
    to restore freedom in South Africa”.

    These “movements” are grassroots movements, with no visibly identifiable
    leaders. These are the voices of the people, and they join many others from
    around the world in raising a united voice against the elites who have been
    overtaken by greed and corruption, and who use force to silence the voices
    of those who resist.

    Unquestionably, this year has been a year of upheavals and social protests –
    and it does not seem as if this is about to end.

    Since it all began in North Africa, the world has seen uprising after
    uprising, such as the riots in England, the unrest in Greece, and recently,
    even the “Slutwalk” protests that occurred in many areas of the world.

    Graffiti found in Greece during their period of unrest said: “I was born in
    Tunisia, I grew up in Egypt, I fought in Yemen, now I’m sacrificing myself
    in Libya, with hopes of victory – my name is freedom”.

    Although these movements appear to be spreading like wildfire and are
    appearing in different forms around the world, like the graffiti, they have
    common goals: less corruption, less greed, more say by the individual in the
    running of their own lives. More freedom.

    What is perhaps most striking about these movements is, as social media
    marketing guru Walter Pike says in “What Slutwalk, Occupy Wall Street and
    the Tottenham Riots really mean” is that all appear to be spontaneous
    grassroots movements, and all have shown that social media can be used as a
    base of coordination.

    We, in South Africa, have not been exempt. We have our fair share of social
    movements – like the Unemployed People’s Movement in Grahamstown, the
    Abahlali baseMjondolo (Shack Dwellers) Movement in Durban, the Landless
    People’s Movement in Gauteng, the service delivery protest formations
    throughout the country, as well as the “Slutwalk” protests and now, the
    “Occupy” movement.

    Joseph Heath, in his Ideology, Irrationality and Collectively Self-Defeating Behavior
    argues that before acting, individuals will weigh up the risks and the benefits
    and will only engage in action if the benefits outweigh the risks.

    It seems obvious that if someone, standing alone, believes that raising
    their voice will result in state repression, they will most likely not raise
    their voice because they fear the risk is too high. However, what if they
    are not standing alone? What if they are joined by many that feel the same
    way in their own local area? What if they find they are not alone, even in
    the international arena?

    When an individual begins to feel that others will stand with him/her, that
    they will not shoulder the risks alone, then the benefits begin to outweigh
    the risks.

    What social media has created is what Benedict Anderson calls an “imagined
    community”. Individuals no longer feel isolated. Those that wish to raise
    their voices can – free from the dictates of a political party – and they
    can anticipate that others will stand with them. As they join others in
    raising their voices, the individual fear that at first overcame them
    subsides. They become more than just a collection of individuals. They
    become a movement with common goals. As the “Occupy” movement’s motto says:
    “We are the 99% that will no longer tolerate the greed and corruption of the
    1%”.

    In addition, this “community” knows no borders. Much like the ongoing
    results of the protests that were dubbed the “Battle of Seattle” in 1999,
    people around the world are beginning to see the possibility of a united
    front. These people, the “wretched” of the earth, are beginning to develop
    the methods to unite on a global scale, and they are beginning to use them.

    There has been a crescendo of voices around the world. It is a crescendo
    free of hierarchical direction, the voices of the masses; the sleeping giant
    now awakens.

    These are the nameless individuals who do not wish to sit idly by while they
    are exploited. They do not wish to keep quiet on corruption. They cry out
    for a say in running their own lives.

    To borrow from the analogy used in the speech by British Prime Minister
    Harold Macmillan to the parliament in South Africa in 1960, the winds of
    change are beginning to blow. The masses will not be muzzled, they will
    speak, and the world shall listen.

    M&G: Occupy Wall Street uprising could be ‘explosive’

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    http://mg.co.za/article/2011-10-14-occupy-wall-street-uprising-could-be-explosive

    Occupy Wall Street uprising could be ‘explosive’

    Niren Tolsi

    Occupy New York’s Wall Street. Occupy Cape Town’s Company Gardens. Occupy mailboxes of senators and congressmen. Occupy your mind …

    The millions of unemployed around the world can, finally, find an occupation these days, it seems, as momentum from the camped protest at New York’s Zuccotti Park near Wall Street continues to spread to other cities in the United States and beyond American borders to Australia, the Czech Republic and South Africa.

    October 15 has been earmarked as an international day of action and, according to the occupywallstreet.com website, activists in 650 cities worldwide have confirmed participation.

    South African organisers said this week that occupations were being planned in Durban and East London’s city halls, the JSE’s Exchange Square in Johannesburg, Cape Town’s Company Gardens and Grahamstown’s High Street.

    Local mobilisation is happening under the broad umbrella of a recently formed movement called Operation Ubuntu. Its Facebook contact goes by the pseudonym “Joe Hani”.

    Hani told the Mail & Guardian that “no country is more worthy of an uprising against capitalism than South Africa” because of the high unemployment rate, “the second widest class divide in the world” and the “legal robbery of [natural] resources” by corporations like Anglo-American.

    Hani said protests would raise the issue of “social ills”, such as South Africa’s high murder rate. If the gripes appear broad, they mirror the still flowering politics of the original protesters in New York.

    Slovenian political philosopher Slavoj Zizek, who addressed the New York crowd last Sunday, urged them to guard against a mere “harmless, moral protest”, arguing that “we are allowed to think about alternatives” to capitalism.

    Zizek said: “We know what we don’t want. But what do we want? What social organisation can replace capitalism. What type of leaders do we want?”

    The Facebook mobilisation appears largely driven by concerned citizens who are white and middle class and have an affinity for the global anticapitalist narrative.

    An academic in Durban, who chose to remain anonymous, said: “The protest here is being organised totally arse-backwards.”

    The Facebook campaign, the Occupy Durban City Hall page, has 126 people confirmed to attend the protest. It was being run “by white kids who are not ­usually plugged into social activism or to activist networks. I think it will be a massive fizzle-out, but I’m still going.”

    Jared Sacks, a leftist activist from the Western Cape also had ­reservations about the Cape Town protests being a “privileged white thing”.

    However, he remained optimistic, saying that at a planning meeting in Salt River, “the white Facebook-types” were completely surprised by the activist communities on the ground ­- this may be a good conscientising lesson for the middle class”.

    Several social movements claiming to represent the marginalised have yet to join.

    Anti-Eviction Campaign Western Cape chairperson Mncedisi Twalo said the movement was still meeting to discuss the protest and “get clarity on its agenda” before the movement could take a collective decision on whether to participate. The shack-dwellers’ movement, Abahlali baseMjondolo, held the same position.

    But the Unemployed Peoples’ Movement has joined the protest. Chairperson Ayanda Kota said it has “printed 100 T-shirts and has been going into the Grahamstown townships conscientising people about the issues and mobilising them for October 15”.

    She said: “We, the poor, suffer whenever companies fix the price of bread or when there are more job losses while chief executives get rich. But our protest is also localised, in the sense that we are protesting about the R19-million that is unaccounted for by the Makana municipality, the R240 000 spent by local government on bogus soccer development clinics and the privatisation of our struggle by the ANC.”

    Richard Pithouse, a Rhodes University political scientist, said the Grahamstown occupation protest could stand out as an example to other cities. It had been preceded by months of careful political work involving the Unemployed Peoples’ Movement and the Students for Social Justice. This had culminated in “a negotiated solidarity based on equality” between disillusioned middle-class youth and grassroots communities, which had “explosive political potential”, said Pithouse.

    *******

    Protest moves from Wall Street to world

    New York’s “Occupy Wall Street” protest began with a call to Americans by Canadian anti-consumerist publication Adbusters in mid-July to occupy the area, considered the world’s financial hub and the pre-eminent symbol of capitalism, on September 17.

    Initially a few hundred gathered, but the numbers soon began to swell. The Guardian newspaper estimated this week that there were about 15 000 protesters congregated in Zuccotti Park, near the city’s stock exchange.

    There have been reports and online footage of tough police action against the demonstrators, including peaceful female protesters being pepper-sprayed and the mass arrests of about 700 people who tried to occupy the city’s landmark Brooklyn Bridge.

    Those gathered in New York include ideologically motivated anarchists and other activists, but also teachers, artisans, students and the unemployed. They appear to cut across class, age and race.

    Grievances include unhappiness with the global economic system and the perception that while American taxpayers funded the bailout of United States financial institutions after the 2008 economic crisis, they suffered the consequences of the meltdown in the form of unemployment, the loss of homes and pension funds and continued personal debt.

    Other grievances highlighted by the protesters include concern about insufficiently transparent government, a corrupt political campaign financing system in need of reform, genetically modified food and factory farming.

    Demonstrators have also called for a return to a more utopian, grassroots democracy.

    Such democracy is articulated in the day-to-day organisation of the occupation. Protesters meet twice a day at a general assembly where all decisions — from running the pop-up communal kitchen that feeds protesters to deciding when to stage a march — are debated and voted on.

    According to reports in the New York Times and the Guardian, among other publications, the atmosphere is peaceful and festive. Expressions of solidarity with the occupiers have come from across the world.

    The protesters are being fed by supplies donated from sympathetic organisations and individuals, including markets, farmers, individuals at home and restaurants.

    People around the US and the world have called on restaurants in the Wall Street area to support the occupation and have ordered take-aways for delivery to the protesters.

    From this tiny germ, says the protesters’ website, occupywallstreet.com, the occupation has spread to 650 cities across the world.

    Occupy Grahamstown! Recapitalise the Poor!

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    13 October 2011
    Unemployed People’s Movement Press Statement

    Occupy Grahamstown!
    Recapitalise the Poor!

    As a movement of the poor we have taken great inspiration from the rebellion that has spread from Tahrir Square in Cairo to Syntagma Square in Athens, the Puerta del Sol in Madrid and now Liberty Plaza in New York. Our comrades in Students for Social Justice have been just as inspired by the growing spirit of rebellion that is jumping, like a fire, from country to country.

    On Saturday we will occupy Grahamstown. The students will march into town from the Botanical Gardens. We will march into town from the township and the squatter camps. We will meet on the square at the Cathedral. We will turn that square into a people’s university, a people’s kitchen and a space of people’s power. Our aim is to bring the rebellion of the poor, the rebellion that has put thousands and thousands on the streets of South Africa in recent years, into dialogue with this global rebellion. The alliance between organised students and the organised unemployed is strong in Grahamstown. Together we can build strong foundations for the struggles to come.

    We have been inspired by this global rebellion because the comrades in Tahrir Square showed the world the strength of a united and determined people. We have been inspired by this rebellion because it has clearly told the bankers that their time of ruling the world is over. We have been inspired by this rebellion because it has clearly told the politicians that from Cairo to New York people are determined to rule themselves and to build their own power from the ground up.

    We will occupy Grahamstown in the name of freedom. We insist that all people have the right to organise themselves according to their own free choices. We denounce the ANC for the murder of Andries Tatane and all the others. We denounce the ANC for the repression of the Abahlali baseMjondolo, the Landless People’s Movement, the Anti-Eviction Campaign and all the others. We denounce the ANC for their attempts to censor the media. We denounce the ANC for continuing to claim that the movements of the poor are a Third Force. The ANC insult us by making us live like pigs and excluding us from all decision making and then, when we rebel, they insult us again by saying that it must be a white academic that is making us rebel. The ANC is incapable of understanding that poor black people can, like all other people, think for ourselves. The ANC is incapable of understanding that they do not and have never had a monopoly on struggle. The ANC is incapable of understanding that they are the real counter-revolutionaries.

    We will occupy Grahamstown in the name of real democracy. We join the people of the world in showing our anger at the way that the capitalists have bought the politicians and the whole system. We will join the people of the world in insisting that democracy will have to be rebuilt from the ground up. Democracy is something that you do. It is not something that you watch on TV. Democracy is something that everyone can do. It is not something that experts like politicians or NGOs must do for the people.

    We will occupy Grahamstown in the name of justice. We join the people of the world in insisting that we will not pay for the crisis caused by the bankers. Their wealth must be expropriated and returned to the people. South Africa is the most unequal society in the world. The predatory elite are publicly gorging themselves while the poor are starving, desperate and frightened. Last week Transnet advertised for 30 jobs – 30 boring and badly paid jobs. Ten thousand people came to apply. Forty people were injured when the gates were opened. The contempt with which the poor are treated in this country is incredible.

    It is not just the ANC that treats the poor with such gross contempt. Business is just as bad. We have not forgotten how the big companies colluded, in the midst of mass unemployment, to fix the price of bread. When we are strong enough we will fix the price of bread from below. We will take the struggle for bread that was started in Durban forward. Imagine one day when people around the country enter the supermarkets and begin eating the bread without paying. That will be the last day on which the capitalists fix the price of bread.

    We are not asking for higher taxes to increase funding for the state. Our municipality is a notorious kleptocracy. The ANC is corrupt from top to bottom. We do not want to struggle to buy Blade Nzimande a new car or more houses, cars, watches and sushi parties for Julius Malema and his friends. We do not want to struggle to finance Kebbelism. What is the point of the ANC getting more money to build houses when the houses that they build are unfit for human habitation, fall down in the first wind and are only given to ANC members?

    We are not anti-state. But our state is rotten to the core. Until we can build enough people’s power to be able to discipline the state from below we will have to treat it as what it is, a vehicle from the predatory elite to feed off society.

    The capitalists in Europe are saying that the people must pay for the banks to be recapitalised. We say that it is time to stop all public subsidies for the rich. We say that it is time for the banks to recapitalise the people. Abahlali baseMjondolo has correctly insisted that the poor were made poor by the same economic system that made the rich rich. Therefore it is only logical that the billions and billions held in the banks on Wall Street must be used to recapitalise the poor. We are calling for a universal guaranteed income. It must be at least R2000 per month and it must be paid to all people without going through local councillors or party structures.

    Some of the comrades that were amongst the ten thousand in Bloemfontein are coming to Grahamstowm to learn from our struggle. Ayanda Kota was recently in Durban to be at the Abahlali baseMjondolo AGM. We are, day by day, building a national movement of the poor, by the poor and for the poor from the ground up. Every day our struggles and our movements are drawing closer.

    Sekwanele!
    Genoeg!
    Enough!

    Liziwe Gqotolo 073 440 5536
    Siyanda Centwa 078 571 5507
    Ayanda Kota 078 625 6462