Click on the headline to link to the Occupy Boston General Assembly Minutes website. Occupy Boston started at 6:00 PM, September 30, 2011.
Markin comment:
I will post any updates from that site if there are any serious discussions of the way forward for the Occupy movement or, more importantly, any analysis of the now atrophied and dysfunctional General Assembly concept. In the meantime I will continue with the “Lessons From History “ series started in the Fall of 2011 with Karl Marx’s The Civil War In France-1871 (The defense of the Paris Commune). Right now this series is focused on the European socialist movement before the Revolutions of 1848.
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An Injury To One Is An Injury To All!-Defend The Occupy Movement And All Occupiers! Drop All Charges Against All Occupy Protesters Everywhere!
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Fight-Don’t Starve-We Created The Wealth, Let's Take It Back! Labor And The Oppressed Must Rule!
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A Five-Point Program As Talking Points
*Jobs For All Now!-“30 For 40”- A historic demand of the labor movement. Thirty hours work for forty hours pay to spread the available work around. Organize the unorganized- Organize the South- Organize Wal-Mart- Defend the right for public and private workers to unionize.
* Defend the working classes! No union dues for Democratic (or the stray Republican) candidates. Spent the dough instead on organizing the unorganized and on other labor-specific causes (good example, the November, 2011 anti-union recall referendum in Ohio, bad example the Wisconsin gubernatorial recall race in June 2012).
*End the endless wars!- Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./Allied Troops (And Mercenaries) From Afghanistan! Hands Off Pakistan! Hands Off Iran! U.S. Hands Off The World!
*Fight for a social agenda for working people!. Quality Healthcare For All! Nationalize the colleges and universities under student-teacher-campus worker control! Forgive student debt! Stop housing foreclosures!
*We created the wealth, let’s take it back. Take the struggle for our daily bread off the historic agenda. Build a workers party that fights for a workers government to unite all the oppressed.
Emblazon on our red banner-Labor and the oppressed must rule!
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Auguste Blanqui 1834-First issue of “Le Libérateur”
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Source: Oeuvres, texts rassemblés et presentés par Dominique de Luz. Nancy, Presses Universitaires de Nancy, 1993;
Translated: for marxists.org by Mitchell Abidor
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Goal of the newspaper
Of all the exclusions that weigh on the citizen without a fortune, the most painful and the one most bitterly felt is that which prohibits him from publishing his thoughts. One can be consoled for not participating in the election of a deputy or a municipal functionary. But we are profoundly wounded by the evil designs of a legislation that restricts thought when that thought doesn’t have the insolent pass handed out by wealth. Those men devoted to defending the principle of equality will never forgive the ministers whose popular names served as a cloak for that law of security deposits and franking that makes the press a slave to the opulent classes, for it is they who bear the responsibility for that irreparable fault. And when, carried away by the boiling up of indignation against triumphant iniquity they raise their voices, an iron glove smashes the words on their lips. They are forbidden to take in hand the interests of the oppressed: they don’t have the right to that. It’s a right that only belongs to the rich; one must be rich in order to better identify with the poor, and riches alone gives the guts to feel and express their sufferings.
This newspaper is a protest against force’s insulting derision. A lone citizen, without money, without a sou put away, undertakes to brave the prohibition imposed by the aristocracy of the ecu against the poor man who dares to think. With his health destroyed, barely out of the prison where a verdict had him expiate the cries he raised up in favor of exploited workers, his hands still marked by the imprint of handcuffs, he today again takes up arms. And he will write, having ceaselessly before his eyes the unfortunate brothers that he left behind in those sad tombs. He is not one of those men who, in the midst of a society torn apart by passions, claims to feel no passion; who in order not to displease selfish dominators protects himself against all convictions as if they were evil things, and affects to maintain a cowardly impartiality between those who suffer and those who cause suffering. The only role appropriate for an honest man is that of loudly avowing his affections and his hatreds. One should feel sorry for those who boast of the fact that they neither love nor hate anyone, for if they are telling the truth they have nothing in their breasts. And if they lie, what authority remains to their words?
Those of Le Liberateur will be frank, with neither reticence nor hesitations. On one hand it will make an effort to expose in simple, clear, and precise terms why the people are unhappy and how they can cease to be so. It will explain the nature of the relationships that exist today between the master and the worker, the social question that virtually on its own constitutes all of political economy, and about which professors say barely a word. And at the same time, addressing itself to men whose profound meditations turn them from the hustle and bustle of the moment in order to embrace from on high all of humanity in its past and its future, it will submit to them its critical views on the current organization, or rather, disorganization, as well as ideas on the principles that should preside over the re-composition of the social order.
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