“There have been numerous historical epochs where something massive and “new” sweeps the globe, moments such as the revolutions and revolts of the mid 1800s, the massive working class struggles of the early 1900s, and the massive political and cultural shifts and anticolonial struggles of the 1960s, to name only three. We believe we are in another significant historic epoch. This one is marked by an ever increasing global rejection of representative democracy, and simultaneously a massive coming together of people, not previously organized, using directly democratic forms to begin to reinvent ways of being together...”
— Marina Sitrin and Dario Azzellini
Occupied Media Pamphlet Series
"It was September 19, 2011, a group of twenty participants in Occupy Wall Street were standing in a circle in Liberty Plaza (formerly known as Zuccotti Park, named after John Zuccotti, CEO of the park’s owners Brookfield Office Properties, in 2006), discussing what it means to facilitate an assembly, and what the role of facilitators is and can be. At one point it was suggested that, “our role is to help create the most horizontal space possible.” In response, a young woman asked, “what does that mean; horizontal?” Another young woman responded, “you know, what they did in Argentina,” and then another asked what that was.
Later, in a university setting in New York City, a discussion was taking place with regard to the Occupy movements, then just two months underway, with assemblies organized in more than 1,500 towns, cities and villages in the U.S. alone. A young participant in the Occupy movements spoke of how the assemblies are horizontal, using horizontalism. A well-known academic responded that it was amazing how the creation of horizontalism in Occupy Wall Street had spread so quickly around the world. Over the days, weeks and months in the plaza, and now throughout the country, so many conversations and relationships being developed were and are reminiscent for us of the past twenty years of autonomous creation within movements in Argentina, Mexico, Bolivia and Venezuela, as well as the U.S./European Global Justice Movement.
In Spain and Greece, where we have recently traveled to meet with people in the movements, we also found that people are both speaking and organizing in ways that are so similar to what we have seen in Latin America, yet it is often without any knowledge or reference to those movements. At one point we began to wonder if there was a way to share some of these experiences and stories from Latin America so as to put them in dialogue with the movements in the US and Europe. And then Dario and Marina met with Greg, and decided to create a book in an attempt to do just that. This pamphlet is an introduction to the book – with a particular focus on May Day.
Happy May Day!"
For further information on this pamphlet and others like it please visit: www.zuccottiparkpress.com
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