• 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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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• 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.

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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.

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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.

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