Beyond Occupy: liberating ourselves from debt slavery

Last year we occupied the streets; the time has come to liberate them. The only way forward for our movement is to devise new forms of autonomous action.

A little over a year ago, my friend Pedro and I were sitting behind our laptops in the makeshift multimedia center at Syntagma Square in Athens. As volunteers in the Take The Square (http://takethesquare.net/) collective (the international brigades of the Spanish indignados), we had already been involved for several months in the transnational effort to build bridges between the various movements throughout Europe, putting key organizers in touch with one another, mobilizing an army of translators, reporting on important news and events, helping to coordinate international actions, and translating strategic documents of the 15-M movement into dozens of languages and disseminating them across Europe.

We were already actively in touch with movements in Spain, Greece, Portugal, France, Italy, Germany, the UK, Belgium and the Netherlands, when suddenly we received an email from the United States. It was Micah White, co-editor of the widely-disseminated Canadian anti-consumerist magazine Adbusters (http://www.adbusters.org/). Something big was about to happen, Micah told us:

Adbusters was about to launch the call for a Tahrir-style occupation of Wall Street and was looking for documents, information and experiences that could help with the complex promotion and organization of such a radical direct action.

 As we were just in the process of launching http://howtooccupy.org/, Take The Square was in a unique position to share some of the key experiences of the Spanish and Greek movements with the aspiring occupiers of New York — and beyond. —-> more