• Russian riot police broke up an Occupy-style protest against President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday, forcing dozens of people out of a central Moscow park where they had staged a week-long sit-in and detaining about 20 people. Protesters then moved to Kudrinskaya Square in Moscow, where they remain encamped.

• In Chile, a crowd estimated at more than 100,000 marched through the streets of Santiago on Wednesday to support the demands of the nation’s students.

• Thousands of student protesters flooded the streets in Montreal on Wednesday evening after Quebec Premier Jean Charest announced a proposal for a new ‘emergency law’ in a bid to end the ongoing 14-week-old student uprising and strike.

• About 2,900 Moroccan judges began a week-long strike to protest against judicial corruption and interference by the executive branch that they say undermines their independence.

• Two Greenpeace activists were arrested after being pried from a giant iPod in front of Apple’s headquarters Tuesday during a protest against using dirty energy to power data centers.

• Dozens of Spaniards lined up outside a bank in Madrid on Monday to close their accounts to protest the unfair seizures of homes.

• Israeli and Palestinian officials announced Monday that more than 1,600 Palestinian prisoners had agreed to end a nearly month-long hunger strike in exchange for concessions by Israel, including a modification to its practice of detention without charge or trial.

• A three-week-long protest on UC Berkeley agricultural research land in Albany came to a quiet close early Monday when police arrested nine protesters who had set up an urban farming camp.

In arguably the most radical political climate north of the Rio Grande, a strike by university students in Quebec has led to the biggest upsurge in civil resistance Canada has seen in decades. There’s energy and uncertainty in the streets of Montreal, the province’s largest city. The symbol of the movement: the little red felt square (“squarely in the red,” as in, broke), is ubiquitous, pinned on the jackets and backpacks of students and supporters. Protest banners hang from university buildings and posters plaster signposts. Students are everywhere, as are the police, who dart around the city in vans, frequently deploying in full riot gear.

The Quebec government of Premier Jean Charest has proposed a 30 percent increase in tuition fees, or $1,625, over five years. The measure would raise the cost of tuition in Quebec from its current rate of $2,168 to $3,793 by the 2016–17 school year. In response, approximately 170,000 students, nearly half of those enrolled in Quebec’s post secondary institutions, with the number swelling to as many as 300,000 on key days of protest, have refused to attend classes since early February. Instead they have taken to the streets, holding daily general assemblies at campuses to determine strategy, and are engaged in a diverse range of actions — from mass marches to blockades of bridges and the Montreal Stock Exchange. On April 24, students at three Montreal-area high schools voted to begin a three-day strike of their own, in solidarity with their older peers.

The police have become increasingly prevalent. While they have intervened less in the largest marches — an April 22 demonstration on Earth Day drew 250,000 participants — sit-ins, other forms of civil disobedience and smaller actions have drawn a more aggressive response. For example, a peaceful march on April 18 of a few hundred students in Gatineau near Ottawa was surrounded by police, and 160 were arrested.

Conservative media have emphasized the vandalism committed by small groups of students at the provincial minister of education’s constituency office and a convention center where Charest was speaking on April 20, to argue for a heavier police response. In fact, mass arrests and police deployment of tear gas and pepper spray have become routine, particularly on the campuses in Montreal. For their part, the student assemblies pledged on April 22 to oppose “physical violence against individuals,” while affirming their continued use of civil disobedience strategies, including building occupations and road blockades.

Student representatives elected by the CLASSE (Association for Solidarity Among Student Unions) and two smaller student federations have negotiated with the province. The government’s latest offer to spread the tuition increase over seven years instead of five was roundly rejected Sunday morning by general assemblies of CLASSE as insufficient. Participating students voted to continue the boycott of classes. The government walked away from further negotiations.

Quebec’s Radical Tradition

The student strike grips the mass media in Quebec and has evoked substantial public sympathy. However to the extent that it is covered in the English-language media, awareness and support of the student’s demands in the rest of Canada remain low. Commentators frequently point out that even with a $1,625 increase, Quebec fees are still far below average undergraduate tuition rates in the rest of Canada, which range from $5,000 to $6,000.

Quebec students answer that their relatively affordable system exists thanks to a decades-long history of strong student mobilization. The concept of a student strike — effectively shutting down university campuses for weeks — would be extraordinary in the rest of Canada or the United States, where far worse austerity measures have been enacted. Student unions in Ontario are known for administering their members’ health plans and organizing regular beer keggers — both laudable activities — but political organizing is largely limited to a ritualized demonstration every February at the provincial legislature. Not so in Quebec. Province-wide student strikes in 1986, 1996 and 2005 have previously frozen tuition for several years at a time.

It helps that, since the “Quiet Revolution” of the late sixties, the province has been generally the most progressive in Canada, with the most comprehensive public programs, lowest rate of inequality and the highest level of unionization. Now, Quebec’s student strikers are attempting to go on the offensive. They refuse to accept that cuts in government funding for education are unavoidable. They reject the neoliberal premise of inevitable austerity, pointing out that the Canadian government is preparing to purchase 65 F-35 stealth fighters for a total cost of $25–29 billion. CLASSE argues the price of one plane — at $482 million — would more than cover increases in revenue gained by raising university tuition, and could in fact finance lowering fees. The association holds free tuition, as it currently exists in Scandinavia, France and Mexico, among other countries, as its ultimate goal.

Broadening the Movement

While the movement is confined to Quebec, supporters in Toronto have held rallies and occupied government offices in solidarity. Secondary school teachers in Ontario engaged in difficult contract negotiations with their own provincial government, Air Canada workers prevented from striking legally by the federal government and numerous university students across Canada have pinned on the red squares in solidarity. Within Quebec, the student strikers made common cause with 780 locked out workers of the Rio Tinto Aluminum smelter, joining their picket lines in Alma and marching together in Montreal.

Reaching the end of the school year with no deal in sight, some students are calling on Quebec unions to make good on their pledges of support, with calls for a one-day, province-wide general strike. While joining rallies and providing financial resources, the labor movement has so far been reluctant to take this step, though it would substantially increase the degree of pressure on the provincial government. Activists in several unions are circulating petitions in support of a one-day “social strike.”

Meanwhile, the government appears bolstered in its determination to avoid appearing conciliatory in the run-up to the 2013 provincial election, which Charest’s Liberal Party is currently projected to lose. With high political stakes in the coming summer months, the Quebec student movement — despite its proud tradition of resistance and its impressive ability to sustain its mobilization — will face significant challenges in successfully turning back this latest example of neoliberal austerity.

Occupy Wall Street activists built an impressive coalition of organized labor, immigrant-rights groups and others for a general strike and “day of economic non-cooperation” on May Day. On Tax Day, a broad spectrum of organizations helped protestors spotlight corporate tax loopholes. Assemblies from around New York City gathered in Central Park on April 14 to celebrate, share ideas and talk about campaigns. This month has also seen debate about whether the “99% Spring” week of trainings was an attempt by the institutional left to co-opt Occupy, or whether Occupy is actually co-opting and radicalizing non-profits and unions that were uninterested in direct action before the movement began.

Occupy’s spring resurgence, however colorful, still has not answered certain questions. How is Occupy Wall Street going to consult with organizations? How can this movement draw larger numbers of people into assemblies, committees and participatory structures that can serve their needs, while still connecting the dots between local ills and corporate power?

Relevant here is the story of a small group of predominantly white university students in South Africa in the early 1970s who helped to organize African workers and had a significant impact on the anti-apartheid movement.

It was not easy to do labor organizing in the early 1970s. Africans had been denied collective bargaining rights since the 1920s. The state’s security apparatus was becoming more labyrinthine. Nelson Mandela and others were serving life-sentences for plotting sabotage attacks. In the mid-1960s, the militant South African Congress of Trade Unions had been crushed. By the next decade, there were just a few unions in which African workers were active in parallel wings. Only when black intellectuals and underground members in liberation groups teamed up with white students in Natal and began agitation work amongst workers around the demand for wages above the poverty line did the tide begin to turn.

Steve Biko had recently led students classified as “non-Europeans” in forming breakaway student groups focused on inner resistance, self-empowerment and black consciousness (as well as collective action and self-help). “The strongest weapon of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed,” he said in 1972. White student activists discovered that blacks students did not want to work with them, however well-intentioned they might be.

At this time, young people were absorbing a potent mix of ideas from abroad. A philosopher named Richard Turner returned to South Africa after studying at the Sorbonne and writing a dissertation on Sartre. He published a pamphlet on participatory democracy in 1972. In Durban, he urged students to see themselves as a revolutionary force, to “humanize” themselves and to reject materialism. Turner was friendly with Biko and the two collaborated on a community development project. With liberation leaders across the continent simultaneously promoting neo-traditional communalism and African unity, a cluster of white students formed a Student Wages Commission to draw media attention to the problem of poverty wages for African workers and to try to “redirect the flow of information” out of white institutions and into the streets.

The students circulated mimeographed pamphlets among workers at factory gates and bus stops. In isiZulu, workers read about the huge gulf separating their wages from what experts said about measurable minimum needs — specifically the “poverty datum line.” In Durban and Cape Town, dockworkers went with students to meetings of the Department of Labor’s Wage Board and used these statistics to demand higher pay, together with a coalition of church and other community organizations. In this way, these students did something similar to what we see happening today; they popularized inequality statistics and made them an idiom of political dissent.

Importantly, these young activists did not spurn help from experienced allies, despite real differences of viewpoint. They learned from established labor leaders. David Hemson and other students initiated a link with Harriet Bolton, the general secretary of a predominantly Indian union. Bolton convinced the students to help her set up an intermediary organization — a funeral benefit savings fund. African workers were still reluctant to form unions after the reprisals of the 1960s, so they could not simply be called out to join a movement.

In an interview with me, one former student organizer spoke of his initial skepticism. Yet this innocuous sounding mutual-aid society would have a surprisingly big impact. It attracted only a few members in 1972. But things changed dramatically in January 1973, when African workers in Durban launched a major and unexpected strike.

Durban newspapers reported that columns of striking workers were marching in toyi toyi step, carrying sticks and chanting, “Filumunti ufilusadikiza!”(Man is dead but his spirit lives). Brick factory workers were the first to walk off the job. Municipal workers and dockworkers followed. Business in the city center slowed for a week. Ships lay idle in the usually busy harbor. And white workers were photographed collecting trash — a newsworthy event in apartheid South Africa. The strike was peaceful and workers refused to identify or send out leaders, lest they be arrested.

One union leader who participated in the strike recalled the electric atmosphere. This former protestor described to me how he felt compelled to stay awake one night in his workplace writing an alternative history of Dutch colonization and apartheid in chalk on the side of a factory trolley.

The 1973 Durban Strikes did not simply occur spontaneously. Dockworkers had agitated for higher pay in 1972; a few months prior to that, contract workers in neighboring Namibia organized a major strike. Some government officials in South Africa had warned that the black-white wage gap needed to be reduced or industrial unrest would result. During the general strike, workers also demanded minimum wages very close to poverty datum line, suggesting that the students’ pamphlets also played a part.

In light of the questions mentioned above — questions about how Occupy can work with existing organizations and also develop ways of consulting with their members — what seems most significant about this story is the aftermath of this general strike.  After workers acted collectively and voiced their anger, members of the Student Wages Commission found a way to seize the moment by building something constructive.

After the strike, which punctured nearly a decade of black labor inactivity, workers felt emboldened. People’s fears about attending public meetings receded. African laborers came to Bolton’s union hall in substantial numbers. When they did, the students helped to enroll them in the funeral benefit fund. It functioned as a cloud-like interregnum between a situation in which African workers were loosely affiliated to local networks but intimidated to do more, and a new phase in which shop stewards were able to organize workers to become active participants in member-led organizations.

In 1974, the benefit fund’s members split into four new proto-unions, which made up the Trade Union Advisory and Coordinating Council. Amid ongoing debate about how these unions should be structured, that organization blossomed into the Federation of South African Trade Unions in 1979. In 1985, it became the Congress of South African Trade Unions — South Africa’s current umbrella union and part of a three-part alliance with the African National Congress and the South African Communist Party.

In the early 1980s, these unions supported the United Democratic Front. Together, with help from the outside, they created a crisis for the regime by holding massive demonstrations, supporting boycotts, and partnering with civic organizations, youth, street committees and other grassroots groups that fell under the capacious umbrella of the United Democratic Front — an essential coalition in the ending of apartheid. In 1987, the trade union organizations and the UDF collectively organized the largest May Day general strike in South African history.

What’s the lesson here for Occupy? Focus on the aftermath.

Bolton’s low-risk intermediary body was stitched together with the help of a small group of young people who had carved out their own ideological space and developed an appreciation for participatory methods. It grew into organizations with the capacity to turn out huge numbers of people and to be held accountable to the rank-and-file. Already, the group in OWS that planned for May Day has begun preparing to carry the momentum forward into a series of anti-austerity actions being planned in the city for mid-May. This is a promising sign that OWS organizers are thinking about next steps.

After a general strike — after people have lost their fear and begun gathering and speaking out — it is essential for a successful civil resistance campaign to turn deliberately and intentionally to consultation and patient outreach with an eye toward long-term movement-building, even if that means working with existing organizations and meeting people where they are.

Since September 17, 2011, strong networks of activists have formed. Even stronger and more diverse parallel structures are needed, though, if Occupy is going to partner with extant groups and gather the forces needed to fight corruption, put people over profits and spread participatory democracy.

Poster and image by Paul Morgan.

The editors of Waging Nonviolence are on strike today in solidarity with calls for a general strike across the United States. We withdraw our participation from an online media industry that exploits the labor of content creators and rewards the production of narratives that glorify violence as entertainment and legitimate the use of military force by corporations and states. Instead of working, we will take to the streets, participating in and documenting the May Day actions happening across New York City. Follow us @wagingnv and @howistrike.

How are you going on strike? Tell us.

A general strike can be one of the most potent noncooperation methods in the repertoire of nonviolent resistance. It is a widespread cessation of labor in an effort to bring all economic activity to a total standstill. Although it is easy to broadcast the call for a general strike, it is exceedingly difficult to implement for the maximal impact that it potentially exerts. What’s more, a general strike must be called prudently, because it loses its effectiveness if weakly executed.

The Occupy movement’s calls for a general strike in the United States on May 1 make me think of an instance in which a general strike was brilliantly carried out and with great effect, in Czechoslovakia in 1989 — for only two hours.

For years beforehand, the sharing of subversive literature, drama and ideas against the communist regime had been occurring in Czechoslovakia, virtually unseen. In fact, historian Theodore Ziółkowski reminds us that “almost from the moment when the Soviet empire, after Yalta, swallowed up the nations of Eastern Europe, the fight against Communism began.” Thousands of clandestine samizdat (Russian for self-published) publications had been manually typed on onion skin with carbon paper, read, passed from hand to hand and circulated sub rosa. Incarcerated authors and dramatists worked intensively in contemplation and planning from their prison cells. While building strong networks among these civil society organizations in formation, Czechoslovaks considered how to withdraw their cooperation from the communist party-state, and thereby bend it to the popular will.

On November 17, 1989, in Czechoslovakia’s capital, Prague, police brutally interrupted a student demonstration. In response, the Czechoslovak people undertook what came to be known as the Ten Days, as I have recounted in more detail elsewhere. Events seemed to unfold instantaneously, but anyone who has studied nonviolent struggles knows otherwise. Aided by Radio Free Europe and labor unions, Prague’s theatrical circles would become catalytic in organizing a massive national resistance, including major demonstrations against the procedures of the regime. Citizens were emboldened by listening to Radio Free Europe and reading samizdat, and were thus aware of the popular national nonviolent mobilizations already underway in Poland, Hungary and East Germany. The Czechoslovaks also benefited from a more enlightened Soviet policy than during the crushing of the Prague Spring in 1968. These relative advantages, and the caliber of leadership emanating from the playwrights and thinkers in theatrical circles, meant that the Czechoslovaks would be able to bring about their 1989 Velvet Revolution with astounding haste and effectiveness, a key element of which was the breadth of participation in a general strike.

Overnight on November 17 — Day One — and into November 18, students became determined to go on strike. They spread word to Prague’s Charles University and other colleges and universities. Although students were the first to call for strikes, by Saturday afternoon the denizens of Prague’s famous theaters had declared their support and were proposing a national general strike for November 27. The students straight away endorsed the proposed general strike and for six weeks would persist in striking on their own, to a great extent backed up by similar noncooperation measures by actors and dramatists. As the students published releases announcing their strikes, the theatrical managers and actors circulated theirs, while Radio Free Europe broadcast texts transmitted by telephone. Official media, having long toed the government line, condemned the officials’ violence of November 17. Employees at television stations denounced biased coverage and disputed untruthful news reports. Broadcasts of the first photographic images of the Prague demonstrations proved to be critical because they disclosed to thousands what was happening in their own country.

On Day Three — Sunday, November 19 — a crowd of 200,000 gathered in Prague for a demonstration to protest the police brutality against the students. That night a citizens’ pro-democracy organization called the Civic Forum (Občanské Fórum) emerged, many of whose members had been persistent critics of the party-state. Over the following three days, throngs occupied Prague. Tens of thousands of young people and students took over Wenceslas Square, carrying flags and chanting slogans: “Freedom,” “Resign,” “Now’s the Time” and “This Is It.”

With playwright Václav Havel as the guiding light, Prague’s Magic Lantern Theater became the nerve center of the Civic Forum, in part because of its proximity to Wenceslas Square. Its wardrobes and changing rooms were assigned to committees, and Havel became the author and mediator for the Civic Forum’s statements and positions. Throughout the Velvet Revolution, the forum would act as the speaker for the Czechoslovak people, while coordinating the collective nonviolent actions of the broad opposition. The Civic Forum encompassed most perspectives and sentiments of opposition, and included some reform-minded communists. A Slovak group, Public Against Violence, acted as partner to the forum.

Prague’s theaters were perfect for hearty political debate. Instead of the curtain rising on productions, the actors would lead audiences in discussions of the situation. Signs instantly appeared in theaters across the country reading “We Strike” or “On Strike,” rousing unity because of the popular esteem for the dramatic arts. Theaters in Bratislava, Brno and Ostrava went on strike the next day. Wherever actors and dramatists gathered, they joined the noncooperation.

On Tuesday, November 21 — Day Five — the Civic Forum and student representatives met officially with Prime Minister Ladislav Adamec, who guaranteed that no violence would be administered against Czechoslovak citizens. The government announced that “socialism was not up for discussion,” but no one missed the meaning of such a meeting in the midst of mounting popular defiance. In Wenceslas Square in Prague and in Hviedoslav Square in Bratislava, mass demonstrations ratified calls for a general strike on November 27. Václav Havel addressed the multitude as the exemplar of the Civic Forum, his speech blunter and less courtly than usual. When he and the respected banned priest Václav Malý spoke, the crowd could hear every word, because rock groups had lent huge amplifiers. A message from the Roman Catholic František Cardinal Tomášek declared, “We cannot wait any more,” stressing that Czechoslovakia was surrounded by countries that “had broken the back of totalitarianism,” referring to Poland, Hungary, and East Germany. Bells rang. One journalist reported 200,000 sets of key rings unforgettably jangling. Throngs chanted “Today Prague, tomorrow the whole country!” and “Time’s up!” Striking students held sit-ins at institutions of higher learning throughout Prague.

On Wednesday, November 22 — Day Six — the Civic Forum formally announced a two-hour general strike for Monday, November 27. The forum and its partner, Public Against Violence, sought an incapacitating general strike with the participation of virtually every citizen to exert sufficient pressure on the government to accelerate a rapid, nonviolent transition of power. A general strike could reduce the threat of reprisals among large numbers of participants, yet many were ambivalent about hurting an already stagnating economy. By limiting the strike to two hours, the effect of a general strike would be wielded while minimizing harm to the economy.

Coal miners in northern Bohemia announced that they would join the work stoppage, but no one knew to what extent laborers in the country’s smokestack industries would join the growing noncooperation action. By Thursday, November 23 — Day Seven — Wenceslas Square saw more than 300,000 marching. The party-state started to split and divide. The ministry of defense that day announced that the Czechoslovak military forces would not be deployed against Czech and Slovak peoples. The Civic Forum issued a statement renewing commitment to a Czechoslovak tradition: “We are against violence and do not seek revenge.”

Striking students insistent on free elections and a change in government then sent hundreds of their numbers into the countryside to visit industrial plants and talk with workers, enlisting their involvement in the general strike. The government raised calamitous warnings of economic breakdown and tried in other ways to frighten the workforce not to join the general strike. Reporters who traveled to machinery works encountered busloads of communist militia members blocking the students from contacting the laborers and sharing handouts. The Reverend Václav Malý, now a spokesperson for the Civic Forum, proclaimed that workers at more than 500 enterprises had pledged to strike.

On Saturday, November 25 — Day Nine — the Civic Forum pronounced the upcoming national general strike as a “referendum” on communist rule. In Prague, 800,000 marched; in Bratislava 100,000 demonstrated. On national television, with Havel announcing that the planned November 27 national general strike would proceed, the forum had become the rudder for the nationwide preparations for the two-hour strike action. The forum encompassed virtually the entire Czechoslovak opposition to the party-state, served as the representative for the Czechoslovak public, coordinated the opposition’s civil resistance and had become a national voice. Comporting itself in a sensible, ethical and deliberately open manner — if a slightly chaotic one — the Civic Forum called its program “What We Want” and concentrated on civil and human rights, a free and independent judiciary, multiparty electoral democracy and political pluralism, economic and free-market reforms, and alterations to the nation’s environmental and foreign policies.

Roughly 6,000 strike committees were at work preparing to bring all economic activity to a halt. As midday approached on Monday, November 27, the population stopped functioning as church bells rang. Minutes before noon, a television broadcaster stated that he was joining the strike and would go off the air. Taxi drivers aligned themselves so as to block Prague’s ring road with a two-mile succession of cabs. This elegantly executed national noncooperation action lasted from noon until two o’clock — during lunchtime, so as not to endanger jobs. The colossal industrial strike reflected no divisions between classes, as laborers, workers of all skills, intellectuals, academicians, students, artist and theatrical personnel together orchestrated the nationwide general strike.

This countrywide, successful act of noncooperation brought the Civic Forum and the government into discussions that would soon lead to a peaceful democratic transition of power. The party-state began to yield. The Civic Forum and the government began discussions. The “leading role” of the communist party, protected in a constitutional clause, was formally rescinded. On December 29, 1989, the Federal Assembly, the communist-dominated national legislature, unanimously elected Havel as president.

The artists, playwrights, academicians, priests and activist intellectuals wanted genuinely revolutionary change that would transform Czechoslovakia permanently and construct a resilient democracy. Years of prudently building the strength of civil society had culminated in the ability to mount a memorable and effective national general strike. With the united voices of the Civic Forum and Public Against Violence, the people had brought about an expeditious transition of power. Czech educator Jan Urban explains the logic of those who were coordinating Czechoslovakia’s Velvet Revolution: “[F]rom the first moment, we wanted to be aggressively nonviolent in our stance — to make a power of our lack of weapons.” He summarized, “In the course of one week, in November 1989, Winter blossomed into Spring in Czechoslovakia. A nonviolent mass movement … triumphed … in transition from the negation of the old to the building of the new.”

From StrikeEverywhere.net's "Efforts of the General Strike Public Redecoration Committee."

“So are we in solidarity with each other, or are we united?”

This question came up yet again on Monday night, at the final coalition meeting for May Day that included people from organized labor, immigrants’ groups and Occupy Wall Street. It came in the midst of a debate about whether or not we should designate separate zones for various coalition partners during our joint evening march. Trying to mash everyone into one giant group might create a sense of unity, but then the groups’ individual needs might not be met. Occupiers whispered to each other about how the lack of a defined OWS zone would mean the unions would end up marshalling our contingent. In the end, everyone agreed that separate zones were most appropriate; true solidarity with one another meant recognizing our diverse methods of organizing and tactics for resistance.

Achieving apparent unity is easy; whoever shouts the loudest or lobbies the hardest typically wins over the group. It is solidarity — respecting each other’s particular methods and skill sets — that is truly revolutionary. Trying to impose unity over the entire action would leave no one satisfied, and it would actually serve to divide us. This solidarity-versus-unity struggle has been playing out inside OWS as a whole for a while now, as well as in our May Day planning meetings. After months of trying to impose decisions upon each other, which was serving only to divide us, the May Day planning committee has quietly moved away from unity and towards solidarity. It’s about time.

The call to help organize a national general strike on May Day had no lack of interested parties in New York City from a diverse cross-section of activists. The first call to meet as an “exploratory committee” brought together around 75 people back in January, including radicals from Occupy Wall Street and across New York City, alongside seasoned labor organizers and others. This diversity has persisted throughout the planning process, resulting in some incredible breakthroughs and synergy, as well as deep reflection and sometimes painful challenges.

Anarchists like myself are accustomed to striving to create “safer spaces” where we do our best to check our privileges of every kind at the door. This compels us to develop particular strategies to raise up marginalized voices by adhering to consensus process and respecting each other’s autonomy to make our own tactical and strategic choices. Becoming accustomed to these ways of interacting with one another can make it difficult for anti-authoritarians to organize in other types of spaces, where people are more used to organizing hierarchically. The first few OWS May Day meetings were well-populated with radical feminists, queer anarchists, insurrectionists and others from the New York anarchist community. As has been happening in OWS as a whole, many of these people began feeling uncomfortable and marginalized in those meetings and, by and large, stopped attending. But many of us did remain in the project and continued working with an ever-growing coalition of OWS folks, labor and immigrant worker justice groups. This coalition, in itself, is historic.

Our coalition partners wanted to set up a “4×4” steering committee with four representatives from each of the four groups: organized labor, the May 1st Coalition for Worker and Immigrant Rights, community-based organizations and Occupy Wall Street. But since the Occupy movement tends to operate on the core anarchist principles of horizontality and consensus, having formal representatives of any kind at the 4×4 wouldn’t work for us. We informed our partners that we would feel more comfortable using a spokescouncil at these meetings. This would mean that as many OWS folks as wished to attend would be welcome, and the four people empowered to speak at a given time would act as non-autonomous spokes, reflecting to our partners the will of the group seated behind them. For large decisions, we would need to take a brief break and come to consensus as a group before reporting back to the coalition.

Our partners were very receptive to us operating in this manner, and it even seemed like a bit of our horizontally rubbed off on them. When it was time to open up the process and call large meetings to plan the details of the solidarity march, they at first suggested that each group should get only one vote — total. OWS balked at this, and an agreement was reached to use a two-thirds-majority, modified-consensus system. This means that, first, we check for full consensus from the group, and if there are people opposed, we hear them voice their concerns before moving to a vote. Whether these processes will have a long-term effect on our partners remains to be seen, but it is something of which I am very excited and proud to have been a part.

Many of the radicals who stopped attending the early meetings moved on to work with Strike Everywhere, an autonomous group of anti-authoritarians who were agitating for a general strike in New York, outside of OWS. This model of working with exclusively like-minded folks was appealing to many of the anarchists in the OWS group, many of whom had started to feel similarly disenfranchised. A lot of the remaining anarchist organizers began working almost exclusively in clusters that featured a distinctly anti-authoritarian bent, with names like Action, Mutual Aid or Strike. Over time, as the character of each became more well-defined, all the various clusters in the project began to respect each other’s autonomy, unique skills and interests. Once we stopped constantly trying to make decisions for each other, our meetings became much more cohesive, and coordination went much more smoothly.

Meanwhile, both of the main decision-making bodies in OWS — the Spokes Council and the General Assembly — gradually became non-functional and were disbanded. Movement-wide projects are now being organized in more decentralized ways, with various groups simply coordinating with one another rather than trying to make decisions together. While some see this as a failure of process, I think it’s really one more stop in the movement’s ongoing experimentation toward a directly-democratic society. Trying to impose “unity” over the movement with the GA and Spokes led to infighting and marginalization. Being in solidarity with one another allows different groups with different backgrounds to work together effectively without trying to control one another.

Despite the struggles and the experimentation, the successes of the May Day planning group and the larger coalition are undeniable. A broad coalition of labor, immigrant worker justice groups, community organizations, Occupy assemblies and students has been forged. Through a decentralized action model, there will be dozens of simultaneous direct actions across the city, creating time and space between ones that are family-friendly and others that are more aggressive. Thousands of people will be sharing resources and skills, practicing and learning about mutual aid in Bryant Park and Union Square. Students will be walking out of their schools and opening a free university. Workers will be occupying their workplaces, kicking out exploitative bosses and managing the businesses for themselves. A call for a general strike was made, and endorsed by the largest labor organization in New Jersey, the Industrial Labor Council. Ways have been found for other labor groups to participate without breaking laws against striking, by calling for a “99 Pickets” action that will aim to shut down the flow of finance capital in Midtown on the morning of May Day.

I’m proud to have worked beside hundreds of others on this project, and I am confident that the effects of May Day will bellow out across the globe. But I can’t help but wonder how much more we could have accomplished if it hadn’t taken us three long months to realize that we needed to act in solidarity with each other, not in some kind of unity. Regardless, I count this gradual discovery among the many successes of anarchist organizing models in the brief history of this movement.

• Tens of thousands of Czechs staged one of the biggest protests since the fall of Communism on Saturday, marching in Prague against spending cuts, tax rises and corruption, and calling for the end of a center-right government already close to collapse.

• On Sunday, 150 Palestinian prisoners joined with 1,200 others being held in Israeli jails who started an open-ended hunger strike on Tuesday to protest the conditions in which they are being held.

• In Montreal, 89 people were arrested Saturday after trying to disrupt the second day of a conference on the development of northern Quebec.

• Tens of thousands of Egyptians demanded on Friday that their military rulers stick to a pledge to hand over power by mid-year after a row over who can run in the presidential election raised doubts about the army’s commitment to democracy.

• In Bahrain, tens of thousands people marched along a motorway from Budaiya, an area to the west of the capital, Manama, on Friday to demand an end to the crackdown on dissent, ahead of the Formula 1 Grand Prix on Sunday.

• Thousands demonstrated in the Rome on Friday to protest government plans to introduce legislation that will make it easier for companies to sack employees.

• Less than 24 hours after their release, University of Texas students arrested after staging a sit-in at President Powers’ office gathered with supporters Thursday on the steps of the UT Tower to continue in their campaign against sweatshop labor.

• Tens of thousands of teachers, doctors, police officers and other public workers went on strike on Wednesday in Slovenia over proposed pay cuts under austerity measures to rein in the euro-zone member’s budget deficit.

Woman at a 15M movement protest at the French consulate in Valencia, Spain. By Marc Sardon, via Flickr.

The 15M movement in Spain has faced repression from the very beginning: 24 young people were arrested and beaten by police in the demonstrations organized by Democracia Real Ya on May 15 last year, which is a large part of why several dozen people decided to camp that night in Sol square, turning the demonstration into an encampment. That first night, the Legal Committee of Sol was created by lawyers and laypeople; similar groups emerged in other camps around the country in order to give legal support to the movement. This has never been an easy job, but it has only been getting harder.

Since May 15, the Legal Committee of Sol has given support to more than a hundred arrestees. There have been another hundred arrested in Barcelona and many more in the rest of the country. Activists have been charged with undermining authority (facing one to three years in jail), disobedience and resistance (six months to one year), and disorderly conduct (six months to three years). Most of all, though, 15M protesters are being punished though economic means. There are nearly 70 people with fines in Madrid, according to the Legal Committee of Sol, and in Barcelona, there have been more than 200 people fined, together amounting to more than €40,000.

The repression is getting more and more excessive. Last month in Málaga, five people were charged with electoral offenses for carrying banners with the phrase “Banks always win” in an electoral college during the regional election of Andalucía. Just before that, in late February, nine young people were arrested in a protest against the reform of the labor law and were interrogated by hooded police — a common practice in Spain with terrorists and abertzales (members of the Basque independence movement). But Barcelona is the place where the 15M movement has been most under threat. Two weeks after the violent eviction of Catalunya square, the camp of Barcelona protested in the regional parliament, where the regional budget cuts had been debated. Some activists blocked the entrance of the building and threw paint bombs at members of the parliament. Twenty people are now facing three to five years in jail for their actions that day.

In recent months, repression has been focused on actions related to housing rights. “There is an increased emphasis in pursuing squatting,” says a member of the Legal Committee of Sol, who explains that in Madrid, police are striving to make a census of squatters and have already identified 150 activists. Actions by the Platform of People Affected by Mortgage (PAH) have resulted in five arrests in Madrid, including Chema Ruiz, one of the most active members of PAH in the city. Although the protocol of the platform has always been the same — nonviolent resistance by sitting on the floor — Ruiz testified in February while under allegations of attacking eight riot policemen. “But how could someone as skinny as me beat eight riot policemen?” Ruiz asked. Although the court has opened a criminal case against him, not even he knows what crime he is ultimately being charged with.

Beginning in its first weeks, the 15M movement has been taking basic security measures. Before demonstrations and actions, activists write on their arms or legs the telephone number of the committee of legal support for their neighborhoods or city assemblies, and they memorize the name of the lawyers on duty that day. The legal committees have also organized workshops about demonstrators’ rights and prepared leaflets with basic steps activists should take if arrested: to testify before the judge, not police, and to watch their things to prevent police from putting incriminating objects among them. The leaflets explain, also, what to do if one sees a fellow activist being arrested: ensure that the person knows the name of an 15M lawyer, find out where they will be taken by police, and tell the person’s lawyer and affinity group about the detention. Online tools are another weapon on the side of the movement. In Barcelona, Madrid and elsewhere, media groups are teaching activists how to use their cell phones to shoot and upload videos of police abuse. Twitter and other social networks have also been used to alert fellow activists of police attacks; in Barcelona, for instance, people used the Twitter hashtags #alerta29m and #copwatch during the March 29 general strike.

The cornerstone of the security strategy for 15M activists remains the affinity group. Small groups of close comrades know better than anyone else how to take care of one another. In some sectors of the movement, as in an assembly in a squatted building in Madrid, the first thing people always do is a round of introductions with the goal of avoiding infiltrators: everyone present says who they are and the others who know them raise their hands to express confidence that they can be trusted.

Now, following the general strike on March 29, the repression against 15M and other social movements in Spain appears to be getting tougher than ever. The government announced days before the strike that it has prepared an enormous police force “in anticipation of the picket lines organized by the movement,” and it kept its word. There were nearly 200 arrests that day, half of them in Cataluña, where police used tear gas against demonstrators, as well as rubber bullets, which caused two people to lose an eye. The same day, after a football match, rubber bullets killed a young person. Nevertheless, the image of the strike in the mainstream Spanish media was of a few dumpsters and bank offices burning.

The government has also announced new rules that increase the punishment for disorderly conduct to between two and four years in jail, as well as to punish nonviolent resistance as criminally undermining authority. Dark times are coming to Spain, but people in the 15M movement don’t seem to be afraid. As some of them say, “If protesting becomes a crime, then we will be criminals.”

The manager of a Hot and Crusty bakery on New York’s Upper East Side watched through the window as a handful of workers speaking broken English passed out fliers to customers inside. Across the street, a private detective in a shiny black SUV surveyed the scene as potential customers and well-dressed women scanned the quarter-sheets detailing the chain restaurant’s abuses: below-minimum-wage paychecks, threats of cutting hours, refusal to negotiate with the workers for safer conditions. (Other violations were left off, including multiple accounts of sexual harassment.) One of the workers exiting the restaurant flashed those flyering a discrete thumbs-up.

The workers were from another branch of the chain bakery 20 blocks south, where they launched a successful organizing campaign with the help of the Laundry Workers Center. Now, as they continued to push for negotiations, the team was expanding to other restaurants to put pressure on the owners.

A coalition including Occupy Wall Street, unions and community groups have called for “a day without the 99%” on May 1. One of the greatest challenges in preparation for that has been organizing precarious workers — those in non-unionized sectors like restaurants, domestic care, retail and freelancing, where jobs turn over fast and some lack U.S. work permits. Yet the Laundry Workers Center, which is part of the May Day coalition, is organizing worker-led campaigns capable of escalating to actions such as walkouts and facility takeovers if wages and conditions don’t improve. Even within unionized sectors, these types of workplace actions are rare in the United States. Yet this is just the kind of radical, unsanctioned organizing that the Occupy movement is trying to help spread through the call for a general strike that many assemblies have issued for May Day.

The Laundry Workers Center (LWC) formed last year to fill the gap between unions and charitable service providers, which help provide workers with additional skills or U.S. work permits but little more. The mission was to organize laundromats — a sector that has never been organized in New York City on a mass scale — and the group plans to launch a 15-laundromat campaign later this year.

Workers from Hot and Crusty approached the young LWC in the fall, after being turned away by a handful of other organizations. Following an eight-week crash course in political consciousness and race and gender equality, the 14 workers launched their first action on January 21, the coldest day of the winter.

Amid the falling snow and bitter temperatures, a crowd of 50 workers, family members and Occupy Wall Street activists gathered a few blocks north of the restaurant at 63rd Street and 2nd Avenue, stamping their feet and blowing hot air into cupped hands. The week before, LWC organizer Virgilio Aran had laid out his honest expectations: it was almost a certainty that the workers would all be fired. The group marched toward the restaurant chanting “Jefes, escucha, el pueblo esta de lucha!” (Bosses, listen, the people are in the fight!) Inside the building, the remaining workers walked off their stations and, together, they presented the manager with the list of their demands: improved workplace conditions and wage increases.

“You don’t know what you just did,” the manager hissed at one of the workers. Yet within months, instead of being fired, the workers had been offered keys to the store by corporate higher-ups, the branch manager asked to join the campaign and Aran won the right to organize in the restaurant — an unprecedented victory for a non-unionized workplace. Yet, behind the scenes, management is building its resistance, hiring an anti-union lawyer and threatening every worker and organizer with a lawsuit.

As the campaign builds, the stakes of repression are getting higher, with organizers warning of conspiracy charges and managers using the police and immigration offices to intimidate the workers. At one of the last actions, for example, a manager tried to disperse the protest by calling the cops. Yet the workers stayed put, even ridiculing their boss when the police couldn’t prevent illegal flyering.

“When he saw that, the boss was so nervous,” says one of the workers.

The Hot and Crusty workers are prepared to escalate as well, through walkouts, lock-ins and a possible occupation of the workplace itself — all tactics that might be expected in Buenos Aires a decade ago, but hardly in today’s mid-Manhattan. Today, the workers and their supporters plan to occupy restaurant chain owner Mark Samson’s Park Avenue office.

The workers’ fearlessness in the face of harsh consequences suggests that the campaign has become about much more than negotiating for these particular jobs at this particular chain store. Rather, it’s the beginning of a renewed struggle for precarious workers everywhere to gain power and control in their own workplaces, on their own terms.

Watch a video of a discussion about immigrant worker justice at an Occupy Wall Street planning meeting for May Day:

Poster by Nina Montenegro, via Occuprint.

An Occupy Wall Street organizer I know — one of the original ones, from the planning meetings before the occupation began last September 17 — has a striking banner atop his Facebook Timeline. It’s from the History Channel series Life After People, an artist’s rendition of a cityscape after which all the humans in it somehow disappear. It’s quiet, and still, with trees growing out from the sides of crumbling towers.

To say that this image has anything to do with the movement’s plans for May 1, which the person who posted it is involved in making, might cause both paranoid-style right-wing radio hosts and the most anarcho- of primitivists to froth a bit at the mouth. And so they should. Ever since the idea of working toward May Day started catching on in Occupy Wall Street last January, it has been infused with the impulse of creating the vision of a radically different kind of city.

The visionary impulse, however, has also mixed with things more mundane. Over the course of the May Day planning process in New York, in at least two meetings each week, OWS organizers have been patiently patching together an historic joint rally and march with labor unions, immigrants’ rights groups and community organizations, many of which were invited to participate in the planning process since the beginning.

The members of this tenuous coalition, however, have refused to demand the impossible together — which is to say, a general strike. Instead, the coalition speaks of “a day without the 99%” and the slogan, “Legalize, Unionize, Organize.” But at just about every other opportunity, people from OWS have been echoing the call for a general strike on May Day, which originated from Occupy Los Angeles’ General Assembly in December. During the April 4 press conference announcing the New York coalition’s plans, the OWS representative avoided saying those words, but after his speech he stripped down to an undershirt with “general strike” scrawled on it in red.

Meanwhile, a group called Strike Everywhere, consisting of “anarchists, anti-capitalists and autonomists,” has made a general strike its unapologetic mission, and it is busy covering the city and the Internet with propaganda, both beautiful and obscene, to agitate for revolt. Some of its members have even constituted a tantalizing Central Park Exploratory Committee, which has yet to disclose its intentions to the public.

Such calls for a general strike raise challenging questions about what a strike could even look like in a society with the lowest rates of union membership in generations. Employment is often episodic, inadequate and undemocratic, yet people seem to lack any inkling that things could be otherwise. Unlike more traditional union-based strikes, also, OWS offers no provisions for long-term support for strikers who suffer retaliation from bosses. What, then, could feasible striking mean? What new forms of workplace organizing could there be, besides unions that have their hands tied in contracts and repressive laws?

A strike, if it actually happens on May 1 or thereafter, may not look like one ever has before. Strike Everywhere, for instance, has been holding assemblies for “precarious and service workers” as a way to create new solidarity networks, and numerous social media accounts are trying to do the same online. Tumblrs have appeared  collecting people’s various ideas for how and why they plan to strike. For those who can’t skip work or school, OWS recommends at least a consumer boycott: no housework, no shopping, no banking. And, of course, “TAKE THE STREETS!!!!!” Much like the Adbusters call that resulted in Occupy Wall Street itself, the logic of May Day has been to start with the impossible and figure out the possible from there.

The plan for the day, insofar as there is any single plan, starts at 8 a.m. in Bryant Park, in Midtown. From there, Occupiers and allied organizations will break off into pickets and other kinds of groupings, each targeting one or several of the many corporations with offices in the surrounding skyscrapers. Meanwhile, in the park, there will be a bazaar of “mutual aid,” with food, trainings, medical care, teach-ins, radio transmitters, massages, bike repair, free stores and more. Over the course of the afternoon, the theater of action will shift (likely by way of a ruckus march) down toward Union Square, where the unions and immigrants’ rights groups will by rallying. From there, at around 5:30, there will be a safe, taxi-led, permitted march further down, through Foley Square and into the Financial District. The general consensus seems to be that the bulk of arrests will be saved for after that — for whatever the night will hold.

When the subset of Occupiers preparing for May Day aren’t planning, or wheatpasting posters, or viral-video making, or negotiating, or tweeting, they’re studying history — the Haymarket Massacre, Rosa Luxemburg, and so on — through old films, teach-ins, zines and the movement-made magazine Tidal. They’re also warming up in the streets.

Every Friday, there are “Spring Training” marches to greet the closing bell of the Stock Exchange, and at each Occupiers test out a new creative tactic, like “civilian,” in which they revert to non-protester status so as to evade police blockades, or “melt,” in which they collapse into a disarming die-in or cuddle-puddle. Spring Training culminates in the “people’s gong,” replacing the NYSE’s bell with the voices of Occupiers standing in concentric circles and crying, “Ding!”

On April 17, too, Occupiers will be testing their synergy in the streets for Tax Day actions with many of the institutional allies who will come out in much greater force on May 1. This comes at the end of a nationwide effort called the 99% Spring, in which 100,000 Americans are supposed to be receiving training in nonviolent action, and it will be the first test of a newly-trained populace, just in time for May Day.

After the big day itself, though, nobody knows what will happen. There is a suspicious, almost apocalyptic silence about this among organizers. They call for a general strike on May 1, but is the idea to go back to work on May 2? They talk about building power for the 99 percent, but for what? Some, at least, have been murmuring about the international days of action called for in Europe on May 12 and 15. The 12th, in New York, is also the anniversary of a major march on Wall Street last year. A few Occupiers here are planning to go to Chicago to protest the NATO summit on May 20 and 21. But above all there’s the feeling that if May Day goes well — as, for the movement not to suffer a crushing disappointment, it must — then what follows will unfold organically from there, in a city somehow not quite like the present one and which, from this side of May 1, we cannot really imagine.

• On Saturday, thousands of students in Quebec were joined by residents young and old for a protest against planned tuition hikes that coincided with the anniversary marking Premier Jean Charest’s taking power nine years ago.

• In Pakistan, a crippling strike paralyzed life in the provincial capital of Quetta on Sunday as people protested Saturday’s target killings of nine people, including eight Hazaras, and the government’s failure to improve the law and order situation.

• About 30 members of Afghan Young Women for Change staged a protest march in Afghanistan’s capital Kabul Saturday, denouncing violence against women.

• On Saturday, up to 4,000 opposition supporters marched through the southern Russian city of Astrakhan in support of a hunger-striking local politician who says he was robbed of an election victory by vote rigging.

• Police arrested about two dozen people who barricaded themselves inside the Woodlawn Mental Health Clinic on Chicago’s South Side on Friday to protest its planned closing.

• Ten Cuban former political prisoners protesting their “total abandonment” in Spain launched a hunger strike on Friday to press their demands for government assistance.

This Saturday, April 14, Occupy Wall Street groups and assemblies from neighborhoods around New York City will join with allies in labor unions and community-based organizations for a “Spring Awakening.” Discussions about this citywide assembly began in December. Now, it is being billed as the kickoff for upcoming actions — especially May Day — and an opportunity for collaboration between Occupiers, older organizations and the public.

“We hope to pull new people in,” says Colby Hopkins, one of the organizers, “by creating a welcoming environment for families and interested people who have not yet taken up activism as a lifestyle.” The second half of the day, Hopkins adds, will be a facilitated assembly that helps organizers and activists “foster and strengthen networks.”

Far from just a day in the park, planners hope to plant the seeds of something new — a democratic mechanism through which disparate organizations can come together to strategize about how to combine their campaigns to attack the root causes of shared problems, including corruption and the unchecked political influence of the 1 percent.

In preparation for this event, Occupiers are also thinking about how to grow the grassroots. At the request of Spring Awakening organizer and eviction-defense activist Michael Premo, on March 27 and April 3, Paul Getsos led two trainings on “how to build a participatory, base-building and effective work group/organizing committee.” About 60 people attended the first training, and about 40 attended the second.

Getsos joined Occupy Wall Street last fall. He is a veteran of ACT UP and the gay rights movement, and a co-founder of Community Voices Heard, which is primarily made up of women on welfare. In the trainings, Getsos praised Occupy for changing the national narrative. Quickly and cheaply, it did something that unions and community organizations have failed to do for decades. However, since the fall, Getsos has been pressing his younger, less-experienced colleagues to answer some tough questions.

How will Occupy be able to get 100,000 people in the streets and shut down the New York Stock Exchange? How will it become an outward-looking movement that draws in new people, instead of one with ever-shrinking numbers? How can it build transparent accountability structures and organize people to meet their own needs?

Premo says that he asked Getsos to lead the trainings because “so many people in Occupy have talked about the need to create structures that can do movement work.” Community Voices Heard has able to grow and serve its base by constantly bringing in new people. As one of its documents explains:

An organization or a campaign builds a large base in order to have enough power to win. Numbers matter! The more people we can mobilize to show our power, the more people we will have to make policy changes to improve our members’ lives.

Even if OWS is not exactly an organization or a single campaign, it too must draw more people into its orbit and enable them reach meaningful goals if it is to continue to shape public conversation, deliver policy changes and compellingly model alternative cultures.

It’s difficult to know if Gestos’ trainings (or the Spring Awakening) will affect the direction of the movement. Yet, in the midst of the one-on-one exercises and other tool-sharing sessions, several participants reflected on Occupy meetings and expressed frustration. Some talked about the need for new kinds of structures. Many seemed enthusiastic about the idea getting “directly affected” people into campaigns with “intentionality.” And everyone appreciated the importance of interlinking the efforts of different groups — in theory, at least.

If there were, say, 20 committees with a committed core of 50 organizers each, and if these could mobilize thousands for campaigns, perhaps these committees could get 100,000 people into the streets for one shared action. Moreover, under the banner of the 99 percent, these committees could do base-building — be it by neighborhood or by issue — in a way that would enable the committees to be simultaneously local and global, focusing their attention on the ways in which key issues, like housing, relate to corporate power.

It also remains unclear what the movement’s current capacity is for mobilizing in the first place. The overriding focus right now is May Day — which includes calls for both a general strike and a more modest “day without the 99%” — and that will be an important test of OWS’ strength and its ability to support those who join with it in turn. If the base isn’t strong enough, however, a major call to action like May Day could also present serious dangers.

One of the most significant general strikes in South Africa, for instance, suggests that protests organized by people who are not accountable to one another — people who have not planned their campaign together or agreed in advance about goals and tactics — can leave participants vulnerable to the unexpected and the ugly.

When approximately 2,000 coal miners struck in northern Natal, a prominent Indian politician rushed to the scene and convinced the men to use civil disobedience by marching across the Transvaal border and breaking their contracts. The government would then have to arrest them all or negotiate. In the meantime, indentured sugar workers on southern Natal plantations spontaneously stopped working as well. Railway workers, domestic servants and hotel staff joined the strike — making it “general,” at least among Indians.

The strike’s leader, M. K. Gandhi, was blamed for the violence that occurred during the weeks-long action. According to Joseph Lelyveld’s biography, Durban newspapers frothed about “coolies run amuck” and mobs of men brandishing sticks, wielding cane knives and urging fellow indentured workers to join them. Cane fields were set on fire. One murderously angry planter said he wanted to “teach the whole tribe a lesson.” Workers were sentenced to hard labor without pay for six months. Mine owners imprisoned workers underground. Protesters were whipped. Indians won relief from a tax on ex-indentured workers who wanted to remain in the country (as well as legal recognition of traditional marriages), but the indentured workers won nothing.

When Gandhi’s 20-year sojourn in South Africa ended, he did not forget these experiences. In fact, he would later call off some satyagraha campaigns after months of hard work out of fear of similar disruptions.

One must be exceedingly careful when comparing the United States in 2012 to South Africa in 1911. Some basic points can be made, however. In order to avoid a situation in which OWS organizers find themselves at the helm of actions that turn into a lot of mayhem with little rewards, they need to focus not just on calling people to protests, but on organizing structures through which people can work toward self-interested goals — structures that can withstand disruptions and provocations and give the protesters lasting power.

Events in French West Africa offer a related lesson about base-building. African leaders took advantage of new opportunities to reframe their relationship with France and their employers after the Second World War. Ex-servicemen spoke of “equal sacrifices, equal rights.” African unions, which had been repressed under Vichy rule, resurfaced and found ways to transcend tactics used in the past. They remembered one poorly-planned strike by temporary railway workers in 1938 that led to violent confrontations, eight deaths and few gains.

African unions grew after a general strike in the port city of Dakar in late 1945. Dockworkers shut down the port for 12 days and were joined by civil servants, literate clerks and market sellers. Railway workers did not join the protest in hopes of being rewarded for their loyalty (which they were not).

The Dakar general strike showed that workers were willing to band together as “workers,” despite French attempts to divorce a few relatively wealthy “citizens” from millions of “subjects.” Unskilled workers won large pay raises and civil servants won family allowances, although the protesters did not secure equality with the French. But the commonplace colonial argument, heard in South Africa as well, that African families were too traditional (and too large) for men to receive European-style breadwinner wages had to be scrapped.

The Dakar port shutdown was followed by a much larger strike two years later. During the 1947–48 railway workers’ strike from Dakar to Bamako, 20,000 train workers participated. The action lasted five months in some areas and relied on longstanding relationships and trans-regional networks. The movement’s leader, Ibrahim Sarr, had ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. According to interviews, Muslim leaders supported the strikers in private, as did women, who provided food, composed songs praising the union and made life difficult for strike-breakers.

The strikers were able to hold out for so long, ultimately, because they weren’t isolated. Rather, the railway men had networks that enabled them to grow their own food or return to rural villages.

After two years of negotiations, the railway workers won the right to unionize and to strike, along with a universal labor code complete with family allowances. They were not transported into a new world of freedom, however. Paradoxically, their victory brought them deeper into French legal structures and the politics of nationalism by allowing a few of the union’s supporters to become successful politicians. The protesters built a movement based on rural-urban, trans-class and trans-cultural networks of solidarity, but soon found themselves vulnerable to being divided once again, now by nationalist politicians oriented towards their own short-term goals.

It doesn’t just matter that there is an organized base, therefore, but what kind of organization, and what kind of leadership structures, unites that base.

The lessons here are simple. First, protests organized by people who are not in two-way relationships, and are not accountable to each other, are protests with a high degree of uncertainty. Who knows who’s coming? Who knows what they will do? This is a problem that many Occupiers know well.

Second, campaigns that pursue only short-term goals can be easily exploited by opportunistic politicians in the long term. This is why the base must have its own forms of decision making.

Third, organizing that does not look at the roots of problems is particularly brittle. Once an immediate solution to an urgent problem is won, the thread between the present and the possible can get cut. Solidarity only for the sake of a short-term goal can leave people vulnerable to co-option and unable to see how immediate problems are part of larger systems.

How can Occupy win recognizable victories against foreclosure, debt, crony-capitalism, militarism, mass incarceration and climate change while also drawing people into transparent structures that serve their interests and enable them to amass lasting power? How can the movement increase and strengthen its base? As Occupiers look toward May Day and a busy summer, they have an opportunity before them now to answer these questions for themselves, in their own ways. The Spring Awakening and Paul Gestos’ trainings are signs that people in some sectors of the movement are already thinking very much in these terms.

To plant to the seed of people-power, organizers need to look honestly at the obstacles before them, including the challenges involved in building a base of support. The words of one historian and war-theorist seem pertinent here. Said Thucydides, “The bravest are surely those who have the clearest vision of what is before them, glory and danger alike, and yet not withstanding, go out to meet it.”

• Trayvon Martin protesters on Monday blocked the front doors of the Sanford Police Department in Florida for nearly five hours but walked away peacefully after convincing city officials to hold a community forum.

• In Tunisia, police fired tear gas Monday to disperse a rally of hundreds on a central Tunis avenue where demonstrations are banned.

• Pilots for Spanish airline Iberia, part of International Airlines Group, went on strike on Monday, grounding 150 flights in the first of 30 one-day strikes to protest against the start-up of low-cost carrier Iberia Express.

• Egyptian train drivers staged a sit-in in Cairo’s Ramses Train Station on Monday, bringing rail traffic across the country to a halt for more than seven hours, to demand an additional allowance for working on Saturdays, bonus increases and risk allowances.

• Opposition supporters wearing white ribbons walked in a circle during a Red Square protest against the rule of Vladimir Putin in Moscow on Sunday. At least three activists were arrested after pitching a tent near Lenin’s Mausoleum.

• Thousands of Shiite Muslims from Islamabad and Rawalpindi on Sunday participated in a sit-in outside the parliament to protest the killings of Shiite Muslims in Pakistan and government crackdown against the innocent people of Gilgit City.

• Bahraini security forces fired tear gas and water cannons at thousands of protesters marching Friday in support of a jailed human rights activist whose nearly two-month hunger strike has become a powerful rallying point for the tiny nation’s Shiite-led uprising against the Sunni monarchy.

• On Friday, police in India dispersed protesters who staged a sit-in protest against the gang-rape of a woman.

• In a march themed with fanciful allusions to Little Red Riding Hood, thousands of protesters swarmed Hong Kong’s streets on Sunday in the first large display of protest since the city’s elite tapped a Beijing ally to become the Chinese territory’s next leader.

• In the Dakotas, members of the proud Lakota Nation began a 48-hour hunger strike on Sunday in opposition to the Keystone XL pipeline — and all tar sands pipelines — they say will destroy precious water resources and ancestral lands in the U.S and in Canada.

• Jordanian authorities arrested more than two dozen political activists during protests Saturday critical of King Abdullah II that called for a change of government.

• An estimated 800,000 homeowners in Ireland joined a tax boycott by refusing to pay a new flat-rate $133 property tax by Saturday’s deadline.

• On Saturday, nearly 100 people wore hoodies in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania to protest the killing of Trayvon Martin.

• Thousands of Palestinians protested on Friday against Israeli policies of land seizure and control of Jerusalem, leading to clashes with Israeli troops in which a 20-year-old was killed and scores of others were injured.

• Three protesters were arrested Thursday at the UC Board of Regents meeting, when a few dozen activists, some stripped down to swimsuits, called for more transparency in state funding talks and an end to tuition hikes.

• On Thursday, hundreds of Bahrainis staged a sit-in outside the offices of the United Nations in Manama demanding action over the “excessive” use by police of tear gas against protesters.

• Some 50 students at the all-boys Frederick Douglass Academy in Detroit were suspended Thursday after walking out of classes in protest of absent teachers, inconsistent classroom instruction and other issues.

A march in Madrid during the general strike, via the FotogrAccion collective.

Last Thursday, people across Spain made a show of force in a general strike, at a scale ranging from the government estimate of 800,000 to the 4 million claimed by the unions. It was timed to challenge new reforms that are expected to make it easier for employers to fire workers, dealing a blow to organized labor.

The 15M movement, which began with occupations in the central squares of cities around the country last year, played an important role in the strike’s success. Despite ongoing conflicts between the largest unions and 15M, several weeks ago the movement’s key organizations — including neighborhood assemblies, Democracia Real Ya, Yo No Pago and the Platform of People Affected by the Mortgage (PAH) — announced their support for the general strike and started working to make it a success.

Early on, there appeared an anonymous blog called 29M sin Miedo (M29 without Fear). It invited workers to speak out against intimidation from their companies about the prospect of the strike, such as threats of dismissal or demands for signed statements about whether they intended to strike or not. The blog, which collected as many as 250 complaints, achieved a double objective: it made these abusive practices visible, and it provided a list of companies to picket on the day of the strike.

The 15M movement’s collectives followed suit with their own initiatives, including leafleting, public meetings about the overhaul of labor rules, caceroladas (the banging of pots and pans) and bicycle pickets. In Barcelona, these were organized through the Acampada BCN website and, in Madrid, through Toma la Huelga (Take the Strike). On Toma la Huelga, too, an independent media team covered the general strike, documenting the movement’s actions minute by minute. This became one of the movement’s major victories that day; Toma la Huelga received more than 150,000 visits, finally prompting RTVE, the Spanish public TV channel, to turn to those working on the site for information.

A bicycle picket in Madrid, via the FotogrAccion collective.

Although the main Spanish newspapers tended to credit the large unions alone, people from 15M played an important role throughout the strike. The night before, in fact, various neighborhood assemblies began picket lines at night spots and transportation centers. By 8 a.m., the picketers were out again and moved through Spain’s main cities all day long, often blocking street traffic.

In most cities, the 15M movement organized their own demonstrations or joined the calls of the smaller unions. In Madrid, at 4:30 in the afternoon, people from the neighborhood assemblies went to centrally-located Cibeles Square and practiced a favorite Spanish pastime: the siesta. Nearly 500 people spent the evening there, enjoying the good weather and causing the area to be closed to traffic for hours. Afterward, several thousand marched to Sol square, followed by the demonstration of the main unions. In this strike, as in other protests before it, 15M and the unions are both in the streets, but it doesn’t mean they get along.

Siesta in Madrid during the general strike, via the FotogrAccion collective.

The day was generally peaceful, but there were some episodes of violence, especially as police cracked down on 15M actions. Before the strike, the government announced that it had prepared a large police force “in anticipation of the picket lines organized by the movement.” In the end, 176 people were arrested, along with more than a hundred injuries. Police repression started the night before, when the 15M picket lines in Madrid arrived at Santa Ana, a square in the city center where foreigners go for the nightlife. The first police charge was there at about 1:30 a.m., with five arrested and several injuries.

Violence was especially notable in Barcelona, where police used rubber bullets and tear gas against thousands of demonstrators in Plaza Catalunya, the same place where Barcelona’s encampment was evicted at the end of May, leaving hundreds injured in one of the most violent episodes of the 15M movement. By evening, some demonstrators responded to the police violence by burning containers, tires, bank offices and Starbucks stores. In Paseo de Gracia, one of the main streets in Barcelona, several hundred demonstrators tried to drive the police away. This fed a media portrayal of the movement as violent and has become an excuse for the government of Catalonia to announce an “anti-guerrilla” plan that would further limit the rights of demonstrators — though the details of it are not yet clear. The use of tear gas against protests is not common in Spain, for instance, but this may change; last December, the Spanish government purchased a $2 million supply of it.

Despite a large turnout for the general strike, the government has already made clear that the proposed labor reforms will go forward. This doesn’t come as a surprise to the 15M movement, which saw value in showing discontent in the streets but didn’t expect the government to alter course. The movement still sees its main objective for now as working locally in neighborhoods to create a system outside the system.

Meanwhile, the main unions have said that they will give the government a month to change its posture. If it does not change, they have threatened a new mobilization in May — a month that will already be full of actions organized by the 15M movement. Once again, these two factions may run into each other in the streets.