• 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.

Original headline about Operation Spectrum.

On May 21, 1987, 16 Singaporeans were arrested and detained in a crackdown called Operation Spectrum. About a month later, four of the original 16 were released, and another six arrested. They were branded as Marxist conspirators out to “subvert Singapore’s political and social order using communist united front tactics” and detained without trial. Most of the detainees were lawyers, community workers or entrepreneurs. As the 25th anniversary of the crackdown approaches, activists are using the opportunity to raise questions anew about the repression of dissent in the country.

In Singapore, the Internal Security Act (ISA) allows the government to arrest and preventively detain individuals deemed to be threats to national security. A person can be detained for up to 30 days, after which a detention order must be issued. Although the ISA’s original purpose was for the protection of Singapore’s security, the government has long been criticized for using it as a tool to stifle activism and political opposition.

Unable to defend themselves in a court of law, those arrested in Operation Spectrum were made to appear on national television to give apparent confessions, admitting to plots to overthrow the government and establish a classless society. When nine of the detainees published a press statement upon their release recanting their confessions and accusing the government of ill treatment, they were swiftly re-arrested. Francis Seow, a former solicitor general, stepped in to represent one of the detainees. He, too, was arrested upon arrival at the detention center and held for over two months.

No public evidence – apart from the confessions – was ever produced to prove that any of the detainees were really threats to national security.

A similar spate of arrests and detentions — codenamed Operation Coldstore – occurred about two decades before Spectrum. Both events are rarely covered in Singapore’s primary and secondary school syllabi. But as Singaporeans begin to seek out alternative sources of information to the traditional media, ex-detainees are finding new platforms on which to tell their side of the story, raising awareness of the darker moments in Singapore’s history.

Several books have been written on the events of Operation Coldstore and Operation Spectrum, such as a collection of accounts published in 2009 under the title That We May Dream Again and Teo Soh Lung’s memoirs, Beyond The Blue Gate. When Ms. Teo stood as a candidate in the 2011 general election, fellow ex-detainee Vincent Cheng spoke in support of her at rallies and gave an account of his time in custody.

Whereas Singaporeans once only had access to the perspective of the government in the media — regarding Operation Spectrum, the national broadsheet The Straits Times simply carried the press release from the Ministry of Home Affairs — the stories coming from the detainees have revealed troubling abuses of power. Now, more and more Singaporeans support the abolishment of the ISA.

Calls for abolishment were further strengthened when Malaysian Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak announced last fall that he would repeal Malaysia’s ISA. Since Singapore’s Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong had said in 1991 (when he was deputy prime minister) that Singapore would consider abolishing the ISA should Malaysia do so, many Singaporeans looked forward to the continued existence of the ISA being debated both in public and in the parliament.

However, a day after Malaysia’s announcement, the Ministry of Home Affairs put out a press release stating that “the ISA continues to be relevant and crucial as a measure of last resort for the preservation of our national security.” With that, the government signaled that there would be no talk of abolishing the ISA in Singapore.

Still, the campaign to abolish the ISA continues to press forward, hoping to slowly chip away at its public support until the government is left with no choice but to act. Emphasis is now being placed on educating Singaporeans and filling in the gaps left by schoolchildren’s history textbooks.

With the 25th anniversary of Operation Spectrum coming up, the anti-ISA initiative Function 8 and the human rights NGO Maruah are jointly organizing an event called “That We May Dream Again: Remembering the 1987 ‘Marxist Conspiracy’” on May 19. It will be held at Speakers’ Corner — the only outdoor place in Singapore were cause-related activities can be held without a permit — and will feature exhibitions, performances, speeches and testimonies from ex-detainees.

In a statement released by the organizing committee, four main objectives were identified:

1. Raise awareness on the misuse of the ISA in the past;
2. raise awareness of the danger of the continued existence of the ISA which may lead to complacency of the authorities in dealing with real security threats to our country;
3. work towards the abolition of the ISA; and
4. press the government to welcome the return of those who have been forced into exile because of the ISA, such a move being the first step towards national reconciliation and healing for all parties.

As of right now, the campaign against the ISA progresses in fits and starts — the topic comes up from time to time, events are organized and then the issue once again fades to the background. To have a greater, lasting impact on Singaporean society, the campaign requires much more participation, but is often confined to the same group of passionately supportive activists. This group of people usually finds it difficult to sustain the campaign as they are more often than not also involved in other causes such as the death penalty, migrant workers’ rights, LGBT rights and more.

Perhaps the ISA itself makes other Singaporeans hesitate to join the struggle; one only needs to speak to the ex-detainees to be reminded of the price activists in Singapore have had to pay.

UPDATE 5/17/12: 

On May 17, 2012, Function 8 and Maruah posted a note on Facebook saying that their May 19 event had been postponed. They had been informed by the police that due to a by-election being held in one of Singapore’s constituencies, Hougang, “the exemption granted under the Public Entertainments and Meetings Act to Speakers’ Corner, Hong Lim Park has been revoked with effect from 16 May to 26 May 2012.” This means that anyone who wants to hold an event at Speakers’ Corner in that period will be required to apply for a police permit. In their statement, the organizers wrote:

Owing to the short notice and uncertainties in obtaining a police permit, as well as the prospect of inconvenience to our guests and contractors should the permit be refused, we are sorry that our event at Speakers’ Corner, Hong Lim Park, has to be postponed. We deeply regret that a by-election in the single-member constituency of Hougang, has disrupted and inconvenienced Singaporeans from enjoying activities at Hong Lim Park which is not part of Hougang.

That We May Dream Again: Remembering the 1987 ‘Marxist Conspiracy will now be held on 2 June 2012.

Image from "Advice for avoiding Stop and Frisk" blog post at Raid My Words.

On Saturday, May 12, several hundred people rallied in front of the New York City Police Department headquarters to protest the NYPD’s “Stop and Frisk” program, considered by many to be a prime example of modern-day, institutional racism. But with approximately 40,000 officers and a nearly $5 billion annual budget, the NYPD is the largest police force in the U.S. and, some say, the most powerful on earth. So how does one try to change an ongoing policy enforced by such an entrenched institution? According to some activists at the rally, the way to begin is twofold: by educating people about their rights during police searches and by mounting a community effort to do surveillance on the NYPD.

The “Stop and Frisk” program instructs officers to stop and question people at random — resulting in apparent racial profiling throughout the largest city in the U.S. According to the NYPD’s own statistics, out of 684,330 people stopped and frisked in 2011, 90 percent of them were black or Latino. The New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU) found that mostly-black neighborhoods were heavily targeted by police, such as East New York in Brooklyn (50 percent black and 3 percent white), which had the highest number of stops last year with 27, 672. In contrast, Brooklyn’s Greenpoint neighborhood (57 percent white and 3 percent black) had the fewest stops, with 1,843.

However, Mayor Michael Bloomberg insists that the Stop and Frisk is making the city safer. “[The] stops are a deterrent,” he has said. “They prevent people from carrying guns in the first place. If you think you may be stopped on the street, you are a lot less likely to carry a gun. It’s that simple.”

But Bloomberg’s simple reasoning simply doesn’t add up. Despite the NYPD having its highest number of stops last year since the program officially began, 2011 saw a nearly 3 percent of shootings, according to The New York Times. An analysis by Forbes magazine shows that murder rates during the past decade of Stop and Frisk remained much the same as the previous decade. And although Bloomberg insists gun confiscation is the goal, the NYCLU report found that whites were more likely to be found with a weapon, even though 90 percent of people the NYPD stops are not white.

The harmful and wasteful program also preys on the public’s lack of knowledge regarding their rights, and that is how activists hope to start enacting change. Alfredo Carrasquillo of Vocal-NY — a group that helps people affected by HIV-AIDS, drug use and mass incarceration — and José Lasalle of Stop Stop and Frisk are both helping people in NYPD-targeted communities to learn what rights they have when dealing with police officers in order to fight back with the law.

Police have been accused of tricking people into allowing searches and even incriminating themselves. For example, having under 25 grams of marijuana is not a criminal act — as long as it is not “in public view.” However, the law is broken once a person carrying marijuana takes it out of their pocket and it is “in view.” Therefore, if a police officer stops somebody and forces them to empty their pockets and he or she takes out a joint, that person is now guilty of a misdemeanor — even though they did not legally have to empty their pockets and were not breaking the law by possessing a small amount of marijuana. The tactic takes advantage of the fact that people are intimidated by police power and do not know that they have a choice.

While growing up, Carrasquillo thought police stops were something one had to comply with. “I thought you had no authority to say police can’t search you,” he told me on the phone a day before the rally.

Working with everybody from churches to local high schools, Carrasquillo leads know-your-rights trainings to educate those especially affected by the Stop and Frisk policy: young black and Latino teenagers, as well as adults aged 18 to 25 — the NYPD’s primary profile of discrimination. It’s sometimes a challenge to convince people in those areas that they have recourse under the law. “A good portion of the communities feel they’re not even part of the American dream,” Carrasquillo said.

He has found, however, that education like this leads to further empowerment. “Kids take that new knowledge and they’re able to advocate in their communities,” he added.

At the May 12 rally, José Lasalle of Stop Stop and Frisk told me that he is frustrated with how the NYPD’s program has spun out of control.

“I’ve been a victim of Stop and Frisk all my life,” Lasalle said, referring to the longstanding history of police targeting low-income neighborhoods for drug searches before it became an official NYPD policy. “And then seeing it happen to my son, and then seeing it happen to my nephew, and then seeing it happen to the kids around my neighborhood, little 10-year-old kids getting thrown against the wall — it makes no sense. It’s got to stop.”

Lasalle has helped start new Stop Stop and Frisk chapters in Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx and Harlem that offer know-your-rights education as well as cop-watching programs in which people can learn how to observe, document and report police activity in their communities.

The cop-watching programs that Stop Stop and Frisk have started are not intended to simply document police officer wrongdoing and put videos online. They are also intended to protect residents from inexperienced police officers. According to Lasalle, many of the neighborhoods that the NYPD targets for Stop and Frisk tactics are considered “impact zone areas,” which is where many inexperienced cops are placed. (See AllThingsHarlem.com for several videos of officers “practicing” on Harlem residents.)

“In the impact zone areas, the NYPD sends rookie police officers who don’t know how to deal with the community,” Lasalle said. “So we are there, making sure that they carry out their duties with professionalism and respect. We observe them and we document the things that they do. [The police officers] see us observing and documenting them and they relax and don’t get out of hand when they stop somebody.”

Much like Carrasquillo of Vocal-NY, Lasalle has found that fear of police can be a hindrance to mobilizing people and encouraging them to challenge police authority. But legal organizations such as the National Lawyers Guild have helped quell some of those fears by providing legal help and jail support in case cop-watchers are arrested.

People like Carrasquillo and Lasalle have helped push the NYPD’s Stop and Frisk tactics to the forefront of political debate in New York City, bringing national attention to the department’s policy. While Mayor Bloomberg and the NYPD insist that the policy saves lives despite the lack of statistics that prove their claims, activists insist that the bullying, harassment and overzealous actions of police officers are a greater threat.

“That’s what we’re trying to do, too,” Lasalle said. “We’re trying to save lives.”

Have the Haymarket Martyrs gotten their due?

May Day has now come and gone. The big marches and the spontaneous protests and the insurrections of “Real Labor Day” are more than a week old now. But that does not mean that the struggles of working people are over… not in the least.

What began as a day to remember an American tragedy and travesty morphed into an international day of action largely ignored in the United States. Until recently, May Day was marked mostly by old Marxists. Latino immigrant rights groups took it up in recent years, turning May Day into a rallying day for the Dream Act, an end to repression and deportations, equal treatment under the law, labor rights and recognition, and other causes. This year, Latinos were joined by the Occupy movement and organized labor in a major way around the country. It looks like May Day is back in a real and powerful way.

During my first year at Hampshire College, Professor Eqbal Ahmad told his story of coming from Pakistan to the United States as a young man and searching all over Chicago for the memorial to the people killed at Haymarket Square in 1886.

As activist-historian Lawrence Wittner describes what happened in May of that year: “Protests erupted all across the United States, with some 340,000 workers taking part. An estimated 190,000 went out on strike.” The issue was the eight-hour work day, or as the workers sang, “Eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, eight hours for what we will!”

In Chicago 80,000 workers stayed off the job, joining massive (and peaceful) marches that wound their way through the Windy City. But, a few days later, with thousands of Chicagoans still on strike and still in pen revolt, locked out workers at the McCormick Harvester plant were fired on by police and workers were killed. Another protest was called for the next day — May 4 — at Haymarket Square. Three thousand people gathered, and into their midst someone threw a bomb. The police blamed anarchists. The protesters pointed at agents provocateur. To this day, the culprit is not known. What is known is what happened next: Into the middle of this chaos, terror and throng, the police opened fire. Police and protesters alike were killed and wounded.

When the smoke cleared, prominent radical labor activists were arrested for the killings. Most were not even at the rally. Four were eventually executed.

Until my Pakistani professor told me, I had never heard of any of this. My parents were activists, but not labor activists. In fact, they were both happily, radically, revolutionarily under-employed throughout my lifetime. They admired Mother Jones, Eugene Debs and Emma Goldman, and they knew their labor history, but somehow I missed the rocking-chair lectures on Haymarket and the eight-hour day. Professor Ahmad had not. He grew up going to massive May Day marches and demonstrations in his native Lahore and wanted to see the monument to the workers who died in the bombing, to those framed and unjustly executed. He wandered all over Chicago with a bouquet of flowers, looking for the monument, only to eventually find a bronze statue of a Chicago policeman erected in the middle of Haymarket Square in 1889 by the Union League of Chicago.

Eqbal Ahmad told this story at a 1968 demonstration in Chicago. A few days later, he was questioned by the FBI on his own doorstep. The Weathermen had blown up the statue.

Since then, new monuments to the workers have been erected, but it is emblematic of how little labor history is taught in U.S. public schools that I first learned of this sad and shameful episode in American history from a Pakistani college professor, not my sixth grade history teacher.

This just reminds me how ignorant we often are of the struggles of working people in different parts of the globe, even parts of the globe where our country is intimately involved. War Resisters League organizer Ali Issa, for instance, has published a groundbreaking interview with one of the most prominent union organizers in Iraq, Hashmeya Muhsin al–Saadawi. She is the president of the Electrical Utility Workers Union in Iraq, and the first woman vice-president of the General Federation of Iraqi Workers in Basra. The interview offers us an all-too-rare opportunity to hear an Iraqi voice speaking on the impact of U.S. war and occupation and now (partial) withdrawal on Iraqi culture, society and politics.

Ms. Al-Saadawi describes the rule of Saddam Hussein as a “repressive, all-encompassing” dictatorship that went on for three decades bringing “great suffering to Iraq and the entire region.” She continues, “We wanted to get rid of this regime, but not through war and occupation. Because all the occupation did was bring new pain.”

Few people in the United States know that before the 1987 imposition of harsh anti-union laws, Iraq had a vibrant and powerful organized labor movement. That labor movement is now rebuilding and reasserting itself in Iraq as it tries to put decades of war and occupation behind it.

Ms. Al-Saadawi relates in the interview how the union suffered under Saddam and under U.S. occupation. “After [the Saddam Hussein] regime fell,” she says, “the workers quickly put together unions in the public sector, worked very hard, but faced many agendas the U.S. occupation brought with it. The occupation launched several consecutive attacks against the union movement.” Not only were union headquarters destroyed by U.S. bombs, but the “occupied” parliament froze union bank accounts and declared that anyone organizing in the public sector could be charged under anti-terrorism laws. Not exactly the so oft and loftily promised Western-style democracy.

In the wake of the withdrawal of most combat forces, the Iraqi labor movement is churning ahead. “The General Federation of Trade Unions in Iraq launched a campaign to pass a labor law that is fair for workers and that matches work standards and international agreements,” says Ms. Al-Saadawi. “Most recently, the electrical worker unions in Basra launched a campaign called ‘Social Security is the Right of Every Iraqi’ relying on constitutional rights, which is supported by some international friends, the Federation of Unions in Holland being one of them.”

The interview goes on from there, and I highly recommend a close reading of it.

In the meantime, let us all consider how we can live in deeper and more meaningful solidarity across national borders, language barriers, religious divisions, class caste systems and the other things that keep us from working together for fundamental rights. And let us sing, as the workers in Chicago sang 126 years ago:

We mean to make things over; we’re tired of toil for naught. 
But bare enough to live on: never an hour for thought. 
We want to feel the sunshine; we want to smell the flowers; 
We’re sure that God has willed it, and we mean to have eight hours. 
We’re summoning our forces from shipyard, shop and mill; 
Eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, eight hours for what we will!

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.

May Day flowchart by Rachel Schragis. Click for larger, legible version.

On May Day, Occupy Wall Street is supporting calls for a general strike. This in itself involves a lot of no’s: no work, no school, no housework, no banking, no shopping. To participate in the strike means withdrawing our consent from an oppressive system by refusing to make our individual contributions to economic production and weakening the dominance of capitalist exploitation. But what do we say “yes” to on May Day? What is the alternative to obtaining our basic needs for life — such as food, clothing, shelter, health, education and fun — if we no longer wish to rely on institutions like Monsanto, Pfizer, Harvard University, LiveNation and the U.S. government to provide them?

Enter: mutual aid.

Mutual aid is the voluntary exchange of goods and services in a way that is mutually beneficial. Generally, these exchanges do not include money. Mutual aid is an economy based on cooperation and support, not competition and manipulation. Capitalism has manufactured a sense of false scarcity; scarcity for food, jobs, college-admission spots and housing. The reality is that a small number of individuals — ahem, the 1 percent — horde wealth, power and access, while everyone else is left to compete over the scraps. This dynamic results in poor-on-poor crimes, self-blame, and extreme individualism. And while charity may provide immediate aid to people in need, it is disempowering for those on the receiving end, and it does not confront the root issues of inequality.

Mutual aid has been utilized by many societies throughout human history. Because it was understood in these cultures that the survival and health of the group was integral to that of every individual, unchecked greed and unawareness of suffering were less prevalent. Survival used to be tied to the land, not to a minimum wage. It wasn’t until the privatization of land and production that people became forced to pay, and often to go into debt, just to have the means to support themselves. It does not have remain this way. Practicing mutual aid allows us to break away from our society’s fatally skewed conception of what is valuable, prioritizing instead strong relationships, healthy living and direct democracy.

Since January, the Mutual Aid Cluster in Occupy Wall Street’s May Day planning committee has been preparing for and coordinating mutual aid for those participating on May 1. Much as in occupied Liberty Square, we will be creating a vibrant space for people to share their knowledge, resources and services. While our comrades are shutting down Midtown and blockading arteries into New York City that day, our direct action will be coordinating mutual aid in Bryant Park and Union Square. In Bryant Park, we’ll be supporting those taking part in the morning and afternoon actions with food and art, along with medical and legal support. We will also be hosting skill shares and workshops. In Union Square, we will be doing all of the above, in addition to a Really, Really Free Market (RRFM), which is a community event where people can bring reusable goods that they no longer need and take what they do need. In this way, clothes, books, toys, skills, tools and small furniture are shared, along with entertainment that is free to anyone who wishes to join in the celebration of a gift economy. Really, Really Free Markets have been organized all across the country and are easy to set up in your neighborhood; just pick a place and time and get the word out.

A major focus of May Day will be the Free University, which has been coordinated by college students throughout the city. They will be standing in solidarity with students from around the country and the world who are struggling for free or lower-cost education. Education is a human right, but more and more colleges and universities are raising tuition, closing off access and slashing workers’ jobs. The students in New York have been organizing for massive student walk-outs on May Day that will converge in Madison Square Park for an afternoon of free classes provided by college professors, which anyone can join.

You might not know it, but mutual aid is already part of your everyday life. Family members — both chosen and biological — take care of each other when one is sick, watch each other’s children and pets, and help with household projects. Friends share food and favorite books. Couch-surfers allow strangers to stay on their couches when they travel and then go off to adventure themselves, knowing that they will have a place to rest and a new friend at their next destination. Hitchhiking gets people to from state to state in exchange for stories and songs. Neighbors share recipes and tools. And let’s not forget that good consensual sex can be a form of mutual aid, too!

Although it is impossible to operate fully outside of globalized capitalism today, communities can prefigure a new world by building liberating alternatives through new and existing  relationships and support networks. Many of our most organically formed communities — like neighborhoods and workplaces — have been broken down due to the isolation that capitalism fosters. The Internet, advertisements, television, drugs and other forms of diversion keep us consuming and not questioning. As long as we are unable recognize the solution in the people around us, we will be afraid to recognize these diversions for what they are and begin to resist.

Resistance is the name of the game on May Day and beyond, and it has two equally necessary components: disrupting the existing exploitative institutions and building up cooperative, creative alternatives. If all you do is disrupt the status quo, what arises afterward may be no better than what came before. Our occupation in Liberty Square was an imperfect model of both disruption and rebuilding that introduced thousands of people to the potential of mutual aid. There, we helped to meet each other’s needs while confronting an oppressive system that no longer has a place for us. On May Day, once again, we will reject the false solutions presented by those who think they are in charge and point the way to real solutions in the process.

Colman McCarthy, the former Washington Post columnist who established a second career teaching nonviolence in high schools and colleges, once published this pithy gem: “I had a student at the University of Maryland who wrote a 13-word paper that has stayed with me: ‘Question: Why are we violent but not illiterate? Answer: Because we are taught to read.’”

There was a time when only the 1 percent learned to read, but in the 19th century a movement for universal literacy took hold. Though this global effort is still a work in progress (even today illiteracy is enforced culturally, religiously, politically and economically in many contexts) it has dramatically changed the world. This transformation has not been easy or magical. Like every movement, this far-reaching campaign challenged the injustice and debilitating inertia of the existing order. It resisted the systems that benefited from the literacy monopoly and slowly established the right to read as the default.

As McCarthy’s student infers, we are as much in need of nonviolence education today as we were of literacy training a century ago. To extend this analogy a bit further, systematic nonviolence literacy — teaching the principles and practices of nonviolent power — offers options beyond passivity, on the one hand, or more violence, on the other.

Most of those who have participated in the nonviolence trainings I’ve been part of over the years have been in their late teens and on up. “Training” in this context is a slight misnomer. By the time we hit our teen years we’ve already been trained deeply in the ways of violence. From then on, our violence training is often reinforced by virtually daily refresher courses, which tend to undermine our potential for nonviolent alternatives and to feed a belief that nonviolent change is impossible. Nonviolence education is thus less a form of “training” than of “re-training”: deconstructing and reframing deeply ingrained patterns, attitudes and behaviors.

Is it possible, though, to start this kind of peace education early enough to provide children with a durable foundation not in violence but in nonviolence? That is, for nonviolence to begin as the default?

This is a thorny issue for many reasons, including the tenacious nature/nurture debate, which has sparked a recent cottage industry of research on topics like empathy and forgiveness. For my purposes here, I will sidestep wading into this thicket, just as I will give no more than a passing glance to the growing proliferation of K-12 peace studies curricula and programming. Instead my attention here is drawn to what one could call “toddler” nonviolence training. Even before kindergarten — in fact, even before pre-school — there seems to be a quiet peace-building movement afoot.

How do I know? I’d like to say that I’ve done copious, systematic research in which I compiled an extensive database of cases and curricula and then devised clever instruments for evaluating them. This, though, isn’t the case. Instead, my expertise in this arena rests entirely on the fact that virtually every weekday morning I take my two-year-old daughter, Leah, to toddler classes.

Chicago, our hometown, is studded with hundreds of parks with hundred-year-old field houses that, no matter the weather, are crowded every morning with innumerable toddlers and their parents. While the sessions are called classes, “the pedagogy” steers toward creativity, self-expression, adventure and fun. There’s structure (free play, music, art project, snack), but just enough to allow great helpings of spontaneity. There’s alone-time — what seems a kind of freeing and freewheeling self-possession — and group activity.

All of this, you might say, is what one expects of two year-olds. But what has struck me, being immersed in this space over and over again for the last year-and-a-half, is the lack of chaos and conflict. Most of the children, it seems, have not been schooled in the mechanics of group conflict yet. When conflict happens (someone takes another child’s toy or one child pushes another) there’s a kind of awkwardness to the vignette, as if the script of conflict is unpracticed, tentative, uncertain.

Most of the time, though, conflict isn’t what transpires. Instead the environment is hyperactivity personified, but a hyperactivity that has an unexpected lack of anxious tension and pre-loaded expectations of conflict or violence.

If my reading of this is right, the toddler nonviolence formation program I detect here is built largely by the children themselves, with just enough guidance and cues from the teacher (Ms. Margaret, Ms. Laura, Mr. Tim or Ms. Valentina, as the case may be) to give them space to make this super-charged serenity a reality.

After being there a few months, I began to notice the posters on the walls. The one that got me thinking was named “Getting Along” with a colorful spray of sayings:

Be kind
Use polite words
Listen carefully
Think first
Respect everyone
Take turns
Be honest
Help others
Do your best

From Benjamin Franklin’s Poor Richard’s Almanac to Steven Covey’s Seven Habits of Effective People (not to mention the ethical prescriptions of many of the world’s religions before and since), we have been presented with lists of suggested action for right living. This poster sports a stellar set that, I have no doubt, would have left Gandhi beaming.

At another field house there was another set of guidelines:

Follow directions
Clean up after yourself
Share with others
Say please and thank you
Listen quietly to others
Take turns

While there was some overlap with the first list, this set seemed a bit more focused on maintaining order (directions and cleanliness), while still highlighting interpersonal peace (sharing, listening, cordial speech, and, like the first poster, taking turns).

What moved me most, though, was the Take Ten poster, which was hung near one emblazoned with the words, “Violence Free Zone”:

Take Ten!
Talk it out!
Walk it out!
Wait it out!

Take TEN…
…Deep Breaths (before you say something that hurts)
…Steps Back (before getting involved in a fight)
…Seconds (before using something as a weapon)
Violence has had its turn… and it isn’t working. Take Ten… it’s time!
Take Ten is an action plan for non-violence! (created by Anne Parry)

What? The field houses of Chicago are promoting an action plan for nonviolence that critiques violence — because it doesn’t work — and then gets specific about tactics? Breathe deep (center oneself), step back (create spaciousness and see the bigger picture), and count to ten (not simply to lower your blood pressure but to give you time to think before reaching for that trusty weapon). After encountering this latest specimen, I began to ask, “Who is the intended audience?” After all, even the most precocious kids here aren’t reading yet. So maybe it’s for some of the older kids who use the building at other times of the day? Maybe it’s for the parents, or even some of the employees?

In the end, I came to this: These tactics and prescriptions amount to a vision woven into this space. They comprise an intention, a blessing, a wager. To those who can read, they are meant literally. To those who cannot, they are a promise that the rest of us can deliver, so that the peaceableness that is still percolating in these two-year-olds can be nourished and deepened. Each of these spaces is a house of peace where toddlers practice peace in their inmost being, while those who have passed this stage can perhaps reconnect with this spirit and build on it in a world of violence and injustice.

So what can this say to the rest of us?  Some years ago Robert Fulghum published a bestseller entitled All I Really Need To Know I Learned In Kindergarten, which also offers some of the wisdom I have encountered in Chicago’s field houses. What my small-sample, anecdotally-based study suggests is that this learning starts at least two years earlier.

The question is what we do with this when we enter what we claim is the real world. These are the potential building blocks for a culture where everyone matters. We are thus called to build movements that put these guidelines into practice and even try to recreate the atmosphere I have discovered in the Chicago field houses: creative, expressive, adventurous, and — dare I say it? — fun.

Nonviolence literacy may start at two years old, but it will flourish only if we read the world in a new and transformative way.

• 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.

• 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.

• Tens of thousands of students protested on Thursday against a 75 percent tuition hike at universities in Canada’s mostly French-speaking Quebec province, bringing downtown Montreal to a standstill. Since mid-February, nearly 300,000 students have boycotted classes, blocked bridges and held smaller protests around the province.

• More than 1,000 indigenous protesters reached Ecuador’s capital Thursday after a two-week march from the Amazon to oppose plans for large-scale mining on their lands. The protesters were joined by thousands of anti-government protesters in Quito.

• Hundreds of farmers gathered in the Vietnamese capital on Thursday to demand the return of rice fields they say were confiscated by heavily armed police just days after receiving an eviction notice.

• More than 1,000 people gathered in a downtown Brattleboro park on Thursday to call for the closure of the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant. It was the first day of the plant’s operation after the expiration of its 40-year license. Over 130 protesters were arrested for unlawful trespass as part of a civil disobedience action.

• More than a thousand people rallied in New York City’s Union Square on Wednesday evening with the parents of Trayvon Martin, an unarmed teenager who was shot dead in Florida in late February.

• Portuguese workers halted trains, shut ports and paralyzed most public transport in the capital Lisbon on Thursday to protest austerity measures and labor reforms imposed as a condition of a 78-billion-euro ($103 billion) bailout.

• Three Tibetans who have been on hunger strike outside the UN headquarters for the past month ended their protest Thursday after the UN said investigators would look into events in Tibet.

• Several people were arrested on Tuesday after a rally in a Phoenix intersection to protest immigration policies of Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio.

• Several hundred Tibetans have protested against Chinese rule in the western province of Qinghai since a monk there set himself on fire earlier this week. The advocacy group Free Tibet has posted what it calls “unprecedented footage” of this highly restricted and restive part of western China.

• Between 5,000 and 7,000 Chilean high school students marched down Santiago’s main avenue on Thursday to demand free quality education and protest the expulsion of about 100 students who joined last year’s protests. Police broke up the march with water canons after a few hundred students crossed a police barrier and tried to march to the education ministry.

• Thousands of union workers gathered across Illinois on Thursday to protest Gov. Pat Quinn’s proposed budget cuts that include mass layoffs and the closure and consolidation of several state facilities, including prisons.

• Hundreds of people gathered in the Rotunda of the Utah State Capitol in Salt Lake City on Thursday to urge Gov. Gary Herbert to veto a bill that would forbid school districts to teach use of contraceptives.

• Russian opposition activist Sergei Udaltsov started a hunger strike on Thursday after being sentenced to 10 days in jail for disobeying the police following a rally against Russian leader Vladimir Putin.

• Afghans took to the streets on Thursday to demand a U.S. soldier accused of killing 16 civilians be prosecuted in Afghanistan as word spread that the American military moved him out of the country.

• A group of about 75 demonstrators assembled at LOVE Park on Wednesday to support immigrant rights. Two college students were arrested after blocking traffic with banners and refusing to move

• Hundreds of thousands of people in 60 cities across Spain took part Sunday in demonstrations called by the country’s main trade unions to protest the government’s tough new labor reforms and cutbacks.

• Hundreds of students in eastern Afghanistan on Tuesday protested against the U.S. and the American soldier who killed 16 Afghan civilians in a shooting spree on Sunday.

• Tens of thousands of people joined an opposition rally in Bangladesh’s capital on Monday to demand that a nonpartisan caretaker government oversee the next general election.

• Tens of thousands of people rallied near Japan’s crippled Fukushima plant Sunday demanding an end to nuclear power as the nation marked the first anniversary of a disastrous quake and tsunami.

• Thousands of students at an all-female university in Saudi Arabia boycotted classes on Saturday, protesting against poor services in a rare display of dissent from women in the conservative Islamic kingdom.

• Tens of thousands of pro-union demonstrators descended on the Wisconsin Capitol on  Saturday to voice their anger at Gov. Scott Walker and his conservative agenda, using the anniversary of the passage of his signature collective bargaining law  to rally support for efforts to remove him and five other Republicans from  office.

• Tens of thousands of Bahrainis demonstrated outside the capital Manama on Friday to demand political reforms, a year after the Gulf Arab state crushed an uprising.

• More than 50,000 workers in Italy participated in demonstrations and a nationwide strike on Friday, calling for democracy in the workplace and accusing the government of acting in the interests of the banks and industrial groups.

Across the country, March 1 was as a day of action for defending public education. One of the major themes of the day was fighting the privatization of this public good.

For years, Chicago has served as an incubator for privatization schemes such as unelected school boards, mayoral control and charter schools. But Chicago also boasts some of the best-organized resistance to those policies. Watch this report to hear from some of the organizers leading that fight.

For more, hear my coverage of a recent anti-privatization protest in Brooklyn for Free Speech Radio News, as well as another FSRN report about ongoing actions in California against tuition hikes and budget cuts.

Women working in a solar engineering lab at Barefoot College. Photo by Miki Kashtan.

One of the challenges that nonviolent campaigns face is how to engage those in power. Whether it be the British officials, as in Gandhi’s case, or the 1 percent, as for the Occupy movement—seeing and appealing to the humanity of those whose actions we oppose is central to practicing nonviolence.

While I have known this for years, it wasn’t until a recent trip to India, where I visited an unusual school created for the poor called Barefoot College, that I learned in full just how far this principle goes and began to wonder how we might practice it in a place like North America.

Based in the rural desert area of Rajasthan, one of the poorest parts of India, Barefoot College aims “to work with marginalized, exploited and impoverished rural poor, living on less than $1 a day, and lift them over the poverty line with dignity and self respect.” The bulk of what Barefoot College does is direct empowerment of communities through training these poor, rural people in critical skills that contribute immeasurably to their lives and reduce the massive conversion of self-reliant rural people into unskilled urban laborers. Barefoot College has a collection of programs and projects that include training in solar engineering; running night schools staffed by “barefoot teachers” for poor children who need to support their families during the day; making medical lab services available at a fraction of the cost of anywhere else; and perhaps a dozen others. Rural communities evaluate the relevance and applicability of projects to their specific conditions, participate in design, provide labor and skills, and form community management teams for all projects.

Women constructing parabolic solar cookers. Photo by Miki Kashtan.

As people become empowered, many learn about their legal rights. They are supported and encouraged by Barefoot College staff or alumni to persuade the government, as individuals or as groups, to ensure that laws are actually applied. The results are at times astounding, from installing new water pumps in poor villages to changing how minimum wage laws are applied. And even while Barefoot activists putting enormous pressure on the local and sometimes the national government to uphold laws, the state of Rajasthan provides a significant portion of the college’s budget.

The similarity with Gandhi’s commitment to and remarkable success at maintaining good relationships with the British despite vehement opposition to their practices and even to the Raj itself became immediately apparent.

Gandhi often spoke of the significance of the intimate knowledge of British culture he acquired while living in London. Knowing the British meant, in part, understanding their values and modes of operating. This made the appeal to their humanity much more tangible. Not knowing the British culture as well as Gandhi did, I can only guess what those were: a gentlemanly attitude, being civilized and reasonable, being seen as decent. By both being treated with dignity and being recognized as caring about dignity, the British were pushed into a moral corner in relation to their own values and invited into living in integrity with such values.

Barefoot College’s struggles also call upon a government’s moral legitimacy—in its own eyes as well as the citizens’—especially its claims to beneficence and to supporting the rule of law. As I understand it, India has many laws on its books that, if enforced, would create immense benefit for ordinary people. In a manner similar to Gandhi’s approach with the British, Barefoot College inspires and supports people to push the government or its agents into a moral corner in relation to practicing their own laws.

How might this approach be applied to current conditions in North America? We live in a place where the laws don’t seem to be serving the people, and where a professed commitment to support poor and marginalized people paints us in suspect political colors. We cannot create a moral corner for those in power by appealing to the values of care, generosity or interdependence, since these are not among their primary professed values. The entire practice relies on the fundamental assumption that everyone would want to act in integrity with their own professed values.

What are the values that are deeply rooted in U.S. culture that would be recognized as such by the so-called 1 percent? If we only see those in power through the lens of greed and desire for control, we lose our ability to have power with them to create change, and we fall back into the win-lose, either-or paradigm. When we call powerful people to their own deep values, however, we offer them a gift in return for their giving up significant elements of their power: the gift of their own full humanity in the form of their own ethical and spiritual consistency.

In attempting to create a moral corner for the 1 percent, I feel compelled to understand, deeply, their full humanity. What are the values that are core to their way of being in the world, values that they could be called on in order to act according to their own sense of integrity? The candidates which come to my mind immediately are independence, the freedom to act, self-responsibility and fairness. What other values can be added to this list? I’d like to believe that our movements for change could become that much more powerful if we strategize together about how to mobilize our resources to create a moral corner for the U.S. power elites around precisely those kinds of values.

Barefoot College has created a modern version of Gandhi’s spinning wheel, empowering village economies by training women (and some men) to be solar engineers who then built and installed solar units in 10,000 households in 574 villages. It has also updated Gandhi’s policies towards the British Raj by holding Indian governments to their own stated purposes. If we look to their example, we may learn how to adapt and translate Gandhi’s principles and practices to our own very different conditions.

For one thing, we can learn to use the moral language shared by the people in power, not just that of our own constituencies. Then, when we engage in nonviolent resistance campaigns, we can be in dialogue with the people in power about what practices, institutions, social structures and overall social arrangements can truly align with their core values as well as ours—for everyone’s benefit.

• About 20,000 Russians angry over an election campaign slanted in Putin’s favor and reports of widespread violations in Sunday’s voting rallied in Moscow on Monday. Riot police quickly moved in, dispersing the crowd and detaining hundreds of demonstrators.

• Lakotas on Pine Ridge Indian land in South Dakota were arrested as they blockaded tar sands pipeline trucks from entering their territory on Monday.

• Thousands of students and activists marched on the California State Capitol in Sacramento Monday to protest cuts in higher education in an action dubbed “Occupy the Capitol.”

• As U.S. President Barack Obama met with visiting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Washington Monday, over 100 protesters converged at a park in front the White House, urging the United States not to support a potential Israeli military strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities.

• A dozen female environmental activists in Ecuador were detained inside the Chinese embassy Monday for protesting Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa’s decision to sign a deal with a Chinese firm to open a massive copper mine in the Amazon.

• On Saturday, over 100 Bulgarian environmentalist staged a protest rally against looming amendments to the Forestry Act.

• On Friday, thousands of Bahrainis launched what they said would be a week of daily sit-in protests in a Shiite village to commemorate an uprising crushed a year ago.

• On Friday, over twenty-five hundred students protested the possible deportation of 18-year-old student and valedictorian Daniela Pelaez at the North Miami Senior High School.

• Several hundred public school students rallied in support of teachers at the offices of Premier Christy Clark at the World Trade Center in Vancouver on Friday.