The SCAF have used the army, the police, and gangs of thugs to attack, torture, and kill protestors who have demanded an end to the army regime. Over 12,000 people have been tried in military courts for a range of crimes, which include “insulting the army” and “breaking curfew.” Torture and beatings by security forces remain commonplace, and demonstrations are regularly greeted with volleys of tear gas and rocks from the state security forces. Women who have been detained faced invasive and brutal “virginity tests” until popular outrage forced courts to declare them illegal in December.

Last October, when extremists burned down a Coptic Christian church, protests against the act of oppression were met with terrifying state violence, which left 28 dead. What’s more, the SCAF used their control of the media to claim that the Christians had attacked them, and they urged Egyptian Muslims to defend the soldiers, which helped fuel further attacks on the minority Copts.

The past weeks have seen the protests increase once again. On January 25th (the one-year anniversary of the revolution), millions demonstrated across the country, many calling for “bread, freedom, and dignity” and a “second revolution.” Though the Muslim Brotherhood refused to endorse officially the anti-Mubarak protests of a year ago, it took part in the “celebrations” of the anniversary and tried to convince people not to oppose the regime or push for further reforms.

When protestors decided to continue demonstrating in the square after the anniversary was over, the Brotherhood condemned them, leading several of their members to be ejected from Tahrir.

These protests have been bolstered after the violence at a football game in Port Said on February 1st. Supporters of the Al-Ahly football club have taken an active part in the revolution, from the initial clashes with Mubarak’s thugs to today. In recent weeks, they used matches as an opportunity to sing anti-SCAF chants, fly flags, and hang banners calling for justice for the victims of state violence. Many have claimed that al-Masry fans were allowed to smuggle in knives and that the exit gates at the Al-Ahly stands were locked so people could not escape.

When al-Masry fans (or state thugs pretending to be fans, according to some) rushed the pitch and the opposition stands, hundreds of police officers just stood back and allowed the violence to continue. By the end of the night 74 fans were dead, sparking larger mobilizations against state violence across the country. Thousands have demonstrated around the Ministry of the Interior building, and police stations have also been targeted. Security forces have responded with live ammunition and shotgun pellets and by tear-gassing residential areas.

The military rulers have shown their contempt for democracy in the recent arrest of 43 activists, including 19 Americans, for pro-democracy activism they claim is “illegal.” Only a few weeks ago the regime felt confident enough to relax the security laws of the country, but these recent demonstrations have shown the unpopularity of the military regime.

In June, the SCAF is meant to handover formally power to the parliament, which is firmly under the control of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party (FJP) who occupy around half the seats. However, the Islamists have been working closely with SCAF since the revolution began, and FJP higher-ups have promised that the military will still play an important role in Egyptian politics after the handover. The SCAF itself has announced that it intends to hold onto the power to block laws from passing, to dismiss parliaments, to set budgets, and to sign deals with other countries.

In recent days, the extent to which the Muslim Brotherhood and the military rulers support each other was made obvious when protestors calling for an end to SCAF rule and for greater political representation for women were blocked from reaching parliament by a crowd of Brotherhood members.

This relationship could also be seen in the recent elections which the FJP won, where the SCAF blocked observers from monitoring and preventing corruption, vote-rigging, and political threats. Many Leftists refused to take part in such obviously fraudulent elections, and have looked beyond parliament to strikes, demonstrations, and occupations to get their voices heard.

Demands for democracy are not the only issue fueling the “second revolution,” as Egyptian workers, peasants, and youth struggle to earn a living. The working class is one of the worst paid in the region, with over 40% of the country living below the poverty line and a huge number of people surviving on around $2 a day. FJP leaders have promised to continue working with US imperialism to exploit their people and have met with representatives of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to get a loan for Egypt, despite the fact that IMF loans come with strings attached, which forces countries to allow multinational corporations to dominate their economies.

Huge numbers of Egyptians are sick of being forced to live in poverty by a corrupt and bigoted regime that has allowed the murder of revolutionaries to go unpunished. Violent crackdowns on protests, blatant corruption, and continued inequality have helped to create this latest wave of resistance. Many people are aware that the SCAF’s puppet democracy will not achieve the revolution’s goals, so now is the time to build a revolutionary alternative to the sham parliament.

There will be no half-way house for Egypt: a stable, democratic, capitalist state cannot exist there because of its relationship with the major imperialist countries. So long as these countries keep sucking the money and resources out of Egypt and impoverishing the population, the people will fight back until they either beat or are beaten by the state.

The workers, the poor, and the oppressed of Egypt need to take control of the economy and society by establishing their own democratic assemblies and organs of power, by organizing their defense, and by preparing to take down the government, the SCAF, and Brotherhood leaders who seek to recreate Mubarak’s regime without Mubarak.

The breach apparently occurred at the US end, the latest in a long list of security lapses.

The attacks come in the wake of the FBI’s offensive against the Megaupload website, shutting it down and issuing arrest warrants for 4 of its owners.

Despite the withdrawal of two internet censorship bills from the US congress, the struggle for freedom of the internet is continuing.

From Bradley Manning, locked up naked in solitary confinement for months, to the persecution of teenage hackers, the security services are determined to crackdown on hackers and other “cyber- criminals.”

As domestic attacks on the internet are increasing so are our governments’ undeclared wars against other countries’ internet infrastructure. Iran, China, and the US are increasingly caught up in skirmishes, probing each others’ internet security.

During the August Riots in Great Britain, the Tories called for Twitter to be shut down, and Twitter itself has just announced that it can censor tweets by country.

During the Arab Spring, Mubarak and Gadaffi tried to shut down the internet. In Syria, Assad has used it to gather information on the opposition.

The internet is a powerful weapon for whomever controls it. We oppose censorship and will fight against any attempts to restrict access or information online.

The general strike is supported by all 11 of India’s trade unions. They are striking for the minimum wage to cover the whole population and for temporary workers to get the same rights as those on permanent contracts. They are also demanding pension cover for all workers, including the private sector, an end to corruption, and for limits on price rises.

The government has refused to negotiate for more than 2 years, using the courts and police to attack the trade-union movement. All the while, India’s rich are growing richer, leaving 400 million in absolute poverty.

The last few years have seen a dramatic rise in the number off millionaires and billionaires; the 55 richest Indians own 1/6th of all the country’s wealth. This dramatic increase in wealth has been achieved through cutting jobs, pay, and pension rights.

The strike highlights that workers are realizing that the system they live and work under is only benefiting the wealthy and bosses, and they are willing to fight back against this.

This is shown by the increase in struggles for trade-union recognition in the car industry, wildcat strikes by Air India workers, and walkouts by Telecom and mining workers against privatization plans.

As tension rises in the run-up to this epic confrontation, a clash between workers and police outside a ceramics factory ended in the brutal murder of a local union leader while in police custody.

Workers had been in dispute with their employers over the use of temporary workers on worse pay and conditions and for the reinstatement of colleagues who have been suspended during the dispute.

There have been daily protests outside the factory, but on Saturday police used sticks to beat protesters and then opened fire.

As well as killing union leader Murali Mohan, nine protesters were left with critical injuries. In retaliation, hundreds of workers stormed the house of a company boss, killing him, before going on to set fire to the factory, and attacking workers scabbing on the strike.

This episode shows the level of state-backed violence, which is routinely used to intimidate the Indian working-class movement.

With just 4 weeks until the general strike, the Indian ruling class is doing its best to scare people into silence. The uprising by Egyptian workers in January 2011 showed that the existing rulers are only safe as long as there is no organized challenge to their power.

February 28^th promises to be an opportunity to demonstrate the power of ordinary people when they organize against low pay, poor housing, and no future.

It will expose the parasitic role of the capitalists and demonstrate that the courts, police, and government exist only to defend the “right” of a few bosses to exploit hundreds of millions of people.

The resistance of Indian workers to privatization and cost-cutting is the same struggle we are facing in the United States: defending our jobs and living conditions against a ruling class determined to make us pay for their crisis.

Solidarity with Indian workers on February 28^th!

Looking to expand its global business, Twitter is developing ways in which it can ensure that its information-sharing model doesn’t stand in the way of securing operating rights in countries whose governments exercise tight censorship laws.

Twitter is willing to accept limits on its operations, in return for access to an even wider user-base. Making a principled stand in defense of internet freedom is not part of this equation. Twitter CEO Dick Costolo explicitly made this point when he said that Wikipedia’s 24-hour blackout over the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) was “bad for business.”

The new tools, strongly criticized by Twitter users and Reporters without Borders as “opening the floodgates” to internet censorship, has been justified as a “clarification” of Twitter’s response to legal requirements.

Twitter feels that its brand image was soiled during the Arab Spring, when the media routinely reported the role that Twitter played in helping to organize protests. Rather than protest against repressive regimes, they chose to accept censorship rules.

For all the talk of how revolutionary social media can be, it is gradually integrating itself into the business model of “old” media – compromising with the established power structures if its profit margins are threatened.

While Google and Wikipedia crowed about the success of their blackout protest, the FBI leaned on the government of New Zealand to arrest four founders of the Megaupload website, which allowed people to view copyrighted material for free.

Kim Dotcom has been denied bail and is awaiting extradition to the US on charges of sharing copyrighted material without permission.

Megaupload claimed 1 billion users and 4% of all internet traffic. The struggle over internet freedom shows how capitalism is acting as a brake on the full development of humanity’s productive and creative forces.

In theory, knowledge, culture, and information is tied to private owners, available only to those who can afford it. In reality, the internet represents the sharpest challenge to this control, allowing billions of people to access information and ideas previously available only to a privileged minority.

Internet freedom challenges capitalist ideas over intellectual-property rights. The growing movement to defend freedom of the internet is a reaction against the monopoly control of broadcast and print media, against the growing interference of government censors under the guise of “national security,” “official secrets,” and “anti-terrorism” laws.

The power of the capitalist system is that it is based on private-property rights, allowing a tiny number of people to own the natural, technological, and intellectual wealth of the planet.

Inevitably, they exploit the reproduction and distribution of these resources for their own benefit, not the benefit of the people who extract, package, and consume them.

We need to support the movement in defense of internet freedom and give it a perspective of challenging the fundamental pillars of the capitalist system – if we are opposed to the 1% profiteering off our entertainment, then we must even more oppose the “right” of these few billionaires to profit from their monopoly control over the planet’s human and natural wealth that rightly belongs to all of us.

We want to put these resources under the democratic control of the majority who rely on and produce them, whose democratic organization is the only possible means of challenging and replacing capitalist exploitation with a better, socialist society.

Yet from the US Civil-Rights movement, to Liberation Theology, to the Arab Spring we see that religious movements can play a leading role in progressive struggles.

This is mainly down to two factors: in semi-colonial (third-world) countries, religious forces are the largest and most powerful organizations outside of government; and in imperialist countries, religious practice is highest among those suffering oppression based on their race or religious beliefs.

So during the Egyptian Revolution, the formerly-illegal Muslim Brotherhood eventually joined the protests to overthrow Mubarak. But after months of rule by a military junta, a new uprising has been condemned by the Muslim Brotherhood. They hope to rise to state power off the backs of those who made the revolution on the streets.

REVOLUTION calls for a separation between church and state. We are in favor of the freedom to worship and the freedom not to worship. We are for an end to religious laws.

We say:

• For complete separation of Church and State. No to all religious law-making or laws based on religious practice.

• For an end to religious schools, courts, and state institutions.

• Complete freedom of worship.

• No discrimination based on religion: for the freedom to wear religious clothes and symbols and the freedom not to.

• For an end to forced marriages; for the right to divorce without repercussions.

• For an end to all discriminatory practices outside and inside religious institutions: full equality for all races, sexes, and sexualities.

• For socialist revolution against religious regimes

The strike wave was so strong that it threatened to bring the country’s oil sector to a standstill. The people won a partial victory as the cost was reduced from N141 to N97 per liter, although it had been only N65 before the subsidies were removed.

The recent week-long nationwide protests in which millions of Nigerians rose up in revolt, saw ten people die and hundreds injured. The army was called out onto the streets, and a general strike paralyzed the economy. Many protesters were concerned that savings made by removing the subsidies wouldn’t be put back into infrastructure as promised.

Boko Hama is seeking to undermine the success of working-class mobilization by exploiting religious tensions between the country’s Muslim and Christian population. The attacks are an effort to intimidate those who have championed the need for a united resistance based on collective action rather than sectarian divides.

We condemn the bombing and call on the millions involved in the recent mobilizations to carry on reinforcing the links forged between different communities involved in a shared struggle.

Equally, we condemn the corrupt Nigerian government, whose sole concern is guaranteeing the flow of oil through Shell pipelines, with the proceeds flooding into the Swiss bank accounts of government officials.

Although the immediate cause of the strikes and protests was fuel prices, protesters said the underlying anger was more about years of frustration at corruption and mismanagement of the country’s huge oil wealth.

The government’s partial retreat shows that collective action gets the goods, but this struggle is far from won. Although Nigeria is one of Africa’s most oil-rich countries, the ruling class collaborates with Western energy companies to ensure that the country’s vast oil wealth lines the pockets of those living far from the polluted, militia-ridden river deltas. As a result, Nigerians have suffered decades of violence and decreasing living standards.

Central to Nigeria’s problems is the part played by religious extremists on both sides. As we see, the working-class movement engages in a struggle that transcends the abstract divisions of religious scripture, Boko Haram resorts to terrorizing ordinary people. That others will imitate and retaliate is certain.

While Nigeria’s protest wave hit headlines in the West, similar protests can be seen across the semi-colonial world. Declining profit rates in the imperialist heartlands force companies to drive down labor costs, take risks, and cut corners – and the biggest payoffs for this are in the countries least able to resist these measures.

Nigerians have shown that resistance is possible, while their trade-union leaders have shown that bureaucracies fear the independent initiative of rank-and-file workers and will attempt to limit it there, just as our own domestic labor-bureaucrats are doing here.

We stand in solidarity with Nigerians rising up against corruption and poverty. We oppose any role for terrorists who attack the working-class movement. Such actions will only strengthen the government, who will attempt to use the bombings as a pretext to restore order – disbanding local-action committees, strengthening police powers, imposing curfews, and all the other methods of repression available to the determined capitalist state.

This article will look at why the rise of mental illness during periods of economic crisis shows us that class society, founded on artificial economic and social inequalities, promotes and is strengthened by an “out of sight, out of mind” attitude to Depression and suicide.

Diagnosis

If you tell someone you’re ill, their natural impulse is to define it by your physical symptoms.
But what if your illness has no external symptoms? What if, like millions of people, your illness is not understood by your friends, your family, and, least of all, your boss?

Depression is one of the most misunderstood of all mental illnesses. More than Schizophrenia, Autism, and related disorders, Depression remains shrouded in popular misconceptions about its causes, effects, and treatments.

It is well known that traumatic events such as having a baby or losing your job can trigger Depression, but such events are not a precondition. Depression can affect people over short or long periods, can be recurring or isolated episodes, and is not necessarily provoked by an obvious catalyst.

Any definition of Depression is complicated by the individual circumstances. Different people have different symptoms. The complex social pressures surrounding such illnesses complicates the task of separating cause from effect. Depression affects men and women differently, with a myriad of social institutions reinforcing the view that women are more prone to expressing their emotions, while men prefer to bottle them up.

Whatever the personal circumstances, general symptoms are often shared. These range from trouble sleeping and concentrating, through feelings of guilt and self-hatred, to repeated thoughts of death and suicide.

Social Attitudes

The idea that Depression is something people “snap out of” is common, partly because it is so varied, and partly due to its sheer extent throughout society.

1 in 3 of us will suffer from Depression at some point in our lives and will find it hard to talk to family, friends, and work colleagues about it. This is because of the stigma attached to mental illness – the notion that “if you can’t see it, it’s not real.”

These attitudes form a huge obstacle in the path of those for whom diagnosis is a vital and necessary first step. They mean that acceptance of a problem, let alone treatment, is very often suppressed under the weight of social pressures.

This means that entering treatment for Depression carries with it a new weight of worries. Just as nobody asks why they’ve got Flu, the questions from friends and family of sufferers are questions that the sufferer will often not be able to answer themselves.

The consequence is feelings of embarrassment or guilt, particularly if there are no obvious provoking factors. Such feelings serve to raise a further barrier between the sufferer and his or her family and friends, increasing the isolation and despair associated with Depression.

The combination of few resources and discrimination against the ill and disabled means sufferers are pressured into internalizing their illness – convincing themselves that it’s an overreaction and that they are as “normal” as everyone else. Inevitably, many sufferers will lie about feeling depressed to those closest to them.

This is only encouraged by the likes of Jeremy Clarkson who described people who jump in front of trains as “selfish.” Appropriate material for a tragic, middle-aged caricature like Clarkson, since it does no more than fall in with the establishment line that “you’re not really ill, until you’re too ill to work for someone.”

From a certain perspective, this point of view is logical, since your ability to survive under capitalism ultimately comes down to your ability to exchange your labor-power for wages or live off that of someone else’s.

Since only a small number of countries are rich enough to provide a welfare state, the majority of people suffering from mental issues are forced to cope in any way they can.

Without a safety net, the capitalist laws of the labor-market are unimpeded – if you are too ill to work, you are too poor to eat.

In countries with a developed health-care system, the ruling class maintains a constant barrage of propaganda promoting the idea that, short of a crippling physical handicap, everyone is equally capable of pulling themselves to the top of the greasy pole by their bootstraps.

Alienation

If we want to understand why so many of us will suffer from Depression, which goes beyond simply having a “bad day,” we need to understand the social context of the majority of people in the world.

Our conception of society and our relationship with illness is defined by the way we live our lives. We live in a world where the majority of people are forced to exist on the bare minimum, while the value of their labor-power is accumulated in unimaginable amounts by the capitalists.

This state of affairs, where almost every aspect of our lives is totally beyond our control or understanding, leads to what Marxists call “alienation.”

Under capitalism, humanity is alienated from itself and the world around it, because we live in a society where we have no real contact with the process of making the things we rely on to survive.

The majority of us get a job, get paid a wage, then go to the shops and spend the money we earn, but we have no idea how it gets there, who made it, or how much they got paid. The operation of the theories of surplus-value, labor-power, and capitalist accumulation, which are fundamental to the functioning of every society, seem as obscure as particle physics.

In addition to this, we’re alienated from each other because the capitalist system doesn’t teach us to value each other or treat each other as equals. We cannot understand what other people do in their lives, because we are not part of them; we are atomized in the workplace and in the home.

This shows us that we cannot separate illness of any kind from the social structures which incubate and exacerbate those illnesses.

Family

In a world in which we are divorced from the basic knowledge underlying so many processes inherent to our lives, it is no surprise that when confronted with the challenges of mental illness, many people look to the apparent stability and security of the family.

Yet in the majority of the world, where there is little-to-no access to support services, the pressure of coping with Depression places an intolerable strain on the atomized individual and family-unit.

In capitalist society, the economic necessity underpinning the social basis of the nuclear family is the fact that it forces women to carry out all the necessary tasks of maintaining a home: cooking, cleaning, and caring – for free.

That this is both oppressive and inefficient is a secondary concern. Its value lies in the fact that it also ensures that the majority of humanity is divided into hundreds of millions of tiny family groupings limited to defending their own interests.

This arrangement is integral to class society. Firstly, it allows the dominant ideas within society – i.e., the ideas of the ruling class, the owners of the means of distributing information – to be reproduced with each generation. Secondly, it ensures that it is the private family which must find the means for caring for sick relatives rather than the State. Finally, it ensures that the experience of living with mental illness is not shared; it becomes the private burden of each family, trapped by convention and shame within the walls of the family home.

Cuts aren’t the cure!

As unemployment and home repossessions rise, the prices of everyday goods soar and benefit cuts drive people into poverty, it is little surprise that divorce, Depression, and suicide rates jump during economic crises.

Existing services for mental health are put under severe pressure as cuts to “red tape” and “efficiency savings” result in the closure of dozens of day-centers and reduced coverage for those who need it most.

If young people’s problems aren’t identified quickly then they are not just going to vanish, they will simply get worse; intervention and support amongst young people in education and work is key to reversing the tide of lives blighted by Depression.

With nothing motivating them beyond a naked desire to put healthcare under the control of millionaire profiteers, these cuts will leave thousands of young people suffering decades of severe illness.

Making cuts in mental health is seen as a “soft cut” as those who use the services are not or do not feel able to speak up about it. More than others, they are “invisible.”

Since cutting funding for mental-health support does not involve closing hospital wards, it is not as immediate, yet there is no benefit or savings in the long term for sufferers and their families.

Capitalism’s recurring crises are periods of massive turmoil and stress for the millions of people who have nothing to live on except their job. We need to be fighting to defend the services that do exist and arguing for more spending on priorities like our health and less on wars, occupations, and bailouts for the rich.

The biological and hereditary roots of mental-health problems are well documented, if not necessarily conclusive. As with other illnesses, a fixation on treatment over prevention reflects the power of private, profit-motivated interests against the common interests of those who produce, consume, and distribute the medicines.

This is even more true with an illness like Depression. After all, dishing out happy pills to treat the symptoms is easier and more profitable than laying bare the selfish, alienating, and antagonistic fabric of capitalist society.

In a world divided between a minority of haves and billions of have-nots, the pressure of constant competition for basic human needs is shouldered by the individual and the family, instead of being socialized – planned, organized, and shared by society as a whole.

The horrendous toll from military testing, poisonous chemicals, and disasters like Bhopal, bear emotive and tragic witness to the dangers of a system which sets the self-interest of a minority against the lives of the masses. Less visible, yet no less destructive, is the impact of an oppressive and exploitative society on our mental health.

The struggle for diagnosis, treatment, and cures for illnesses like Depression must go hand in hand with the struggle to abolish the social order which sentences millions to a lifetime of financial, social, and intellectual poverty.

As socialists we organize everywhere we can to defend the gains of the working class – our healthcare, our education, and our pensions, to extend those rights to those denied them.

Through the struggles to defend what we have, and fight for what we’re owed, we campaign for socialists to build an international, working-class struggle against the capitalist system.

Only the common ownership and democratic management of the world’s resources can enable us to lay the basis for achieving a permanent improvement in social relations and mental health.

Wikipedia’s homepage was blacked out and features this message:” For over a decade, we have spent millions of hours building the largest encyclopedia in human history. Right now, the US Congress is considering legislation that could fatally damage the free and open internet. For 24 hours, to raise awareness, we are blacking out Wikipedia.

Google has blacked out its logo and links to a petition against SOPA.

If passed, the law would give content owners and the government the power to seek court orders forcing search engines to block content associated with “piracy.”

Critics claim, however, that the bills are so vague and broad that they present a real danger to freedom on the Internet. While the government criticizes China on a regular basis for its extensive internet censorship, it is currently debating laws which would remove any foreign websites infringing US copyright law.

Predictably, the bills have their supporters, like Rupert Murdoch and his fellow media barons with their legions of lobbyists.

Other sites, including Twitter, refused to join the protest. Twitter boss Dick Costolo tweeted, “Closing a global business in reaction to single-issue national politics is foolish.”

Blunt, but perhaps more honest than Google’s hypocrisy – the search engine involved in today’s “blackout” has been criticized for cooperating with the Chinese government’s efforts to censor online search results.

This just about sums up the protest. Certainly the SOPA and PIPA laws are yet another infringement on the rights to freedom of speech but equally they do no more than extend the already existing copyright laws to the online realm.

Information is always by someone, for someone. The monopoly control of the majority of the world’s information outlets is one of the single most important factors in shaping our ideas about the world we live in.

This isn’t a clear-cut case of new, pro-freedom businesses against the old establishment. The case of Google and Twitter’s “business as usual” demonstrates that they are businesses like any other. As such, we must not see them as reliable allies in the struggle to extend freedom of speech and information.

We should oppose any further power for these interests in the physical or online information industries. But equally we should not fall into the trap of uncritically supporting those for whom economic convenience means they temporarily find themselves defending free access to information.

We support today’s protest against the SOPA and PIPA bills, but they are not democratic. We would not support shipyards closing if governments raised the minimum wage. So we must stay vigilant and remember that companies like Google have a huge influence over our lives, with virtually zero accountability to the millions who rely on it.

What took place and existed on the streets of New York and eventually re-christened Liberty Square in early September and carried over almost to the end of 2011 was a great example of a microcosm, a manifestation of the frustration of the masses of youth, students, workers, and the socially oppressed of the USA and world against austerity, exploitation, poverty, misery, and indignation at governments for their measured, meticulous “assistance” to those responsible for the situation (the big banks) and their outright punishment of the remaining 99%.

Yet what began seemingly as “just another demonstration” soon evolved into an occupation, an action that embodied the unwillingness of protesters to give in to any compromise, any reconciliation, any attempt at at forceful dispersion by the state.

Inspired by such a bold and daring action, thousands across the US declared open solidarity with #OccupyWallStreet (OWS) and set up their own local occupations to protest skyrocketing austerity, crisis, and mounting social inequality. Those hundreds quickly turned into tens of thousands, and within a month #Occupy was established in cities around the globe. From New York to LA, London to Berlin, Warsaw to Istanbul, Cairo to Lahore, US-inspired #Occupy has been met with solidarity and imitation worldwide.

For months we Occupiers have learned the ropes of resistance, all the while withstanding police brutality and intimidation in the forms of bullets, citations, handcuffs, and grenades. The legend of #Occupy and the struggle between the 99% and 1% grew as did its size and influence. Mass demonstrations and strikes and self-defense lines responded, in turn, to increasing attack from state forces, ever enhancing the radical prestige of the movement in the eyes of those by participating and those considering joining the fight.

But now that the majority of #Occupy camps have been torn down and participants evicted by police offensives, we face key issues of evaluating our recently past efforts and methods of struggle and drawing practical conclusions for how to surmount the difficulties we faced that served ultimately to restrain our movement from achieving its full potential.

Yet the movement is not about to embark on the traversing of this new, crucial transitional phase unprepared but rather armed with a wealth of experiences that, if recognized and its lessons assimilated, can help guide the movement in its efforts to increase the magnitude of its victories as the struggle against the 1% continues and which serves to revive the tenacity, vitality, and militancy that characterized it

If there was one realization that was brought on in the most shocking and breathtaking manner, it was no doubt the the nature and role played by the police. Those who were originally skeptical or unsure of which side the police were on were shown through experience in a most unfortunate (and ultimately despicable) manner.

Through bullets, grenades, and beatings, the #Occupy protesters of Oakland learned that the police protect and serve only the 1%: their paymasters. After this experience those at Occupy Oakland heeded agitation for the formation of self-defense and began deploying their veteran soldier comrades to organize defense lines. This was most definitely a maturing moment in the struggle against the 1% as we learned not only the position of one of the most powerful repressive forces in society but also the importance of independent, democratic associations for organization: self-defense groups, committees, bodies, etc.

Success for the future of the movement will center around answering questions on how best to neutralize and disarm ultimately the “bourgeois cops” of the 1% as the conflict grows more acute and intense.

Alongside the revelation regarding the purpose and class character of the police, also has the need for reevaluation and alteration of organizational practice. On the positive side, the General Assemblies, the working groups, the spokes-council system have enabled and offered the ability and opportunity for masses of people to voice their indignation and frustration at the system, propose policy, and shape the course of the movement’s direction: in short, it opened up tremendous space at the most grassroots of levels for democratic self-expression and decision-making. Nevertheless, there were undoubtedly hang-ups, unquestionably nightmarishly convoluted procedural processes that made reaching decisions for actions on crucial questions at a time of pressing urgency quite vexing and very difficult if not impossible.

The trials and tribulations of OWS with regard to complex organizational/financial relationships between autonomous and semi-autonomous working groups and the NYC General Assembly have been documented:

“The reality of OWS is that the “horizontal” modified consensus method, the GA, and the spokescouncil are all highly dysfunctional but not fatally so (at least at this stage). Prior to the eviction, many OWS working groups began secretly hoarding street donations they received from the GA’s official finance working group (FWG) because they put lots of money into the general fund but faced serious hurdles in getting any money out of it for badly needed items due to OWS’s protracted, bureaucratic decision-making process. Also, because FWG administers over $500,000 in internet donations, many working groups saw no need to contribute to a fund flush with cash and resented what amounted to a one-way cashflow.

The money hoarding was part of a divide that emerged between full-time occupiers who felt disenfranchised and eventually boycotted the GA on the one hand and movement types (many of whom did not sleep in Liberty Park) who believed that the modified consensus process was the single most important element of the uprising on the other. This divide manifested itself geographically with the emergence of a “ghetto” and a “gentrified” area that was captured in a DailyShowsegment.” (Occupy and the Tasks of Socialists, Pham Binh)

Perhaps it is something of an inevitability that problems like these should emerge in a movement so young and so novel, but that does not mean we can or should attempt to ignore them, to fail to achieve their positive resolution. And that is a key task that confronts us.

This is only one example of the limits and the associated complications of the tendency for the movement to fetishize “ultra-individualist-participatory” forms and methods of organization (i.e., mass assemblies without formal representation and autonomous or semi-autonomous working bodies) and the attendant decision-making process known as “modified-consensus.”

The realities of autonomous or even semi-autonomous bodies operating independently without formal instruction and even, possibly, in contradiction to one another, of waiting potentially for General Assemblies to convene to decide exigent issues, of requiring 9/10s of those in attendance to agree on a specific course of action, of an “official”aversion to democratically elected leadership bodies responsible to the assemblies and participants as a whole, were brought to bear with reference to events in Oakland, the physical dismantlement of the occupied spaces by state forces, and the inability (thus far) to determine what we want and how we intend to get it.

Had there been a leadership elected that won its status on the basis of providing the most robust and far-sighted democratic direction and ideas for how to resist effectively the police breakup of the camps, then they might still exist today.

Similarly, one of the main obstructions to developing #Occupy into a mass force capable of raising the struggle against the 1% to a whole new level of intervention and activism was the difficulties modified consensus created and reinforced by being unable to bring into struggle those millions who were unable to attend the camps on a consistent basis – for a variety of reasons. Without representative democracy, committees and councils of democratically elected, city-wide bodies, millions more could not bring their voices, their demands, or share their plights, bringing them out into the light of day.

Even more frustratingly, without representation and elected bodies, there was no substantial way to link all the #Occupies together in common action. Coordinated police action to tear down campsites coast to coast demonstrated why it was so crucial to have a more nationally-coordinated leadership.

The whole debate on the importance of political demand or whether they were necessary at all was a rather drawn up and complicated ordeal. Positively speaking, the principal slogan of the movement, “Occupy everything; demand nothing,” helped rally multifarious tendencies and political traditions beyond the typically encountered parameters of struggle we’ve seen dominate the landscape for the better part of a decade: single-issue campaigns.

It helped open up the floodgates to a powerful outpouring of distress and anger against the 1%, the government that serves its needs, and the capitalist system that makes possible their power and privilege.

Yet, at the same time, it fostered a lengthy “interregnum” between the initial construction of the campsites and the eventual breakdown whereby no clear-cut positions, not even a basic demand for full-employment was approved successfully.

Demands were brought to the table for discussion and voting, but they could not surmount the onerous threshold of 90% approval. As a consequence, the camping continued, but there was solid political foundation on which many tents and canopies were erected. The initial strength of the slogan eventually engendered and reinforced contradictorily a structural weakness.

Reviving the movement from its present lull and strengthening it will mean drawing practical conclusions from these experiences, preserving the fundamental infrastructure and organizational forms we have developed, and making them even more effective, functional, and inclusive.

A good start would be to begin the process whereby we develop a nationally-coordinated, democratically-elected body, committee, council, or whatever you might like to call it, to link the movement together, to coordinate its activities in tandem between cities and towns.

Next, judging by the difficulties witnessed between assemblies, working-bodies, spokes-councils, the problems that occurred over tactical questions and their execution, the debilitating inability to solidify even a basic set of demands or proposals, it seems necessary that we take steps to begin the process whereby we “modify” the model of modified-consensus. This could mean simply reducing the threshold (say to three-fourths, three-fifths, or 50% plus one) it would be necessary to pass proposals and resolutions at assemblies.

Organizationally speaking, individual participation will continue to be the bedrock of the movement; but we need even more people to get involved and see the value in supporting #Occupy. Successfully doing so means developing representative structures by which those without the time or resources to attend meetings, committees, or working groups, can make their voices heard. This will, of consequence, require a relaxation of the overriding convention of “no leadership.”

Magnifying the power of occupations necessitates extending them to more spheres of society than we’ve seen thus far: workplaces, schools, any place or setting in which the forces of the 99% has a presence and can flex its muscles.

Most importantly we need to establish a more durable, permanently existing political mechanism that can rally the 99% independently of the Democrats and Republicans – the parties of the 1% – and combat their austerity and anti-working-class policies both on the streets, in the schools, and the workplaces, as well as in the electoral arena as a way of registering mass support for such a resistance and build momentum towards a complete alteration in social relations and the balance of power between the 99% and the 1% in the form of a revolution – one that would bring the working millions to direct power. For we need power to make another world possible.

By taking stock of the momentous achievements we made thus far as well as acknowledging our shortcoming and attempting to overcome them, our movement against the 1% and for social equality can not only be restored to its previous height but made stronger in turn.