I would like to welcome everybody on behalf of the Foundation Democracy and Media, Democracy
and Media.
I would like to welcome you all, the audience and especially our foreign guests, the activists,
the scholars, the journalists, the filmmakers, many of whom will be speakers in the coming
days in the workshops and in the panels.
My name is Marie-Anne Sucks.
I am one of the board members of the Foundation Democracy and Media.
And I would like to tell you very short what our foundation is about and why and how we
organize this conference.
First of all, about our foundation.
I need to go back in history.
The beginning of our foundation goes back to World War II, in which in 1941, the first
printed illegal newspaper appeared, het parole, the watchword, het parole, free and fearless.
In the following years, this illegal newspaper reached editions of 100,000 copies.
And this was not an easy thing to do because journalists, printers, and the people who
did the illegal deliveries lived under a constant threat of arrest by the Germans.
Many people who worked for het parole during the war have been incarcerated and many paid
with their lives for the resistance work that they did.
After the liberation in 1945, het parole continued as a legal newspaper.
And the ownership was placed in a non-profit foundation to prevent commercial interest
to influence the content of the newspaper.
And it is this foundation that, after some changes in the course of the years, which
is now the foundation democracy and media.
I'm telling you this old history to emphasize that the foundation democracy and media has
its roots in the resistance and in the struggle for freedom and independence, which are values
which we also stimulate and stand for in the present.
I'm very proud to welcome Wim van Noorden and his wife, who is sitting here in France
lonely because all the other places are still empty, and who is one of the founders of het
parole, and who was also his director in the 60s, and who is now the honorary chair of
our foundation.
Very welcome, Wim.
So what does the foundation do?
We support and we invest and we develop, as is in our name, activities about media and
democracy.
We stimulate quality media, old and new, and quality journalism.
And on the democracy side, we support other papers, we support initiatives for an innovative
and vibrant democracy.
We do that with grants, with investments, and our own activities like this conference.
Now why did we organize this conference?
Also in the Netherlands, as in other countries in Europe, we are confronted with a conservative
backlash with nationalist and fundamentalist elements.
And also in the Netherlands, the alienation and mistrust of people is felt with the established
democratic institutions because people don't feel represented by the existing political
structures.
But unlike in other countries, little public debate or public revolt has been happening
here.
The Occupy movement had only, and other recent uprisings have only had a very weak echo in
this country.
The protest movements and revolutions of young people, the millennium generation, that's
you, a new generation of activists who think global, who develop collective leadership,
who use the new media, who make concrete demands and who have no trust in the existing political
structures that has not really taken off here in the Netherlands.
And in the Dutch media, there is very little attention for what is happening in this respect
in the rest of the world.
The reactions to the global economic crisis actually are only reported on when there is
a violent outburst or when there are 10,000 people somewhere gathered on a square.
And what's happening in neighborhoods, what's happening in the movement, what's happening
in factories gets very little attention.
That is why we from Democracy and Media thought we wanted to do something to stimulate, also
in the Netherlands, the public debate and learn about what is happening in other parts
of the world.
So I contacted Marjana Mecklenbeer, who you will see in a little while, and who many of
you have been emailing with, who is an expert at the University of Leiden in globalization
and social movements, and I asked her, what can we as a foundation do?
And after some months, she came back with the idea of this conference, to enable activists
and scholars and journalists to meet and to exchange ideas and to use some time together
to really stimulate each other's ideas and thoughts.
Marjana, together with Brandon Jordan, the filmmaker, have worked tireless to contact
the people they know, to ask their ideas and to make a program for this conference.
And the Bali has done a lot of the logistics and very flexible and very at the last moment,
so we're very grateful for that.
And now it is up to you, my friends, to make it happen.
I wish us all an inspiring, interesting and also fun event.
Thank you.
Now, you can keep going, I mean, that was a very nice, warm welcome, and we're definitely
grateful for all the help that we've gotten on this, and we're really happy that everybody
came.
And there is another component of organizing this event that I'd like to talk about really
briefly, and that's the fact that a lot of people sort of did a lot of self-organization
and inviting a lot of other people.
We just looked at our friends and our contacts in different places, and they invited other
friends and other contacts.
I'm not actually going to talk a whole bunch tonight.
I just want to talk a little bit about our project, which is the, some of you may be
familiar with, we make films.
And we've done about 20 films on the kind of uprisings that have happened over the last
two or three years, which is all online at globaluprisings.org.
When a democracy and media contacted us and had us organize this, they had us to put together
20 or 30 minutes, basically real of the things that we've covered the last few years.
So instead of doing some elaborate speech, which I'm not feeling like is necessary at
all, we'd like to show this, and then we're going to bring up Paul Mason.
But just want to thank everybody for coming, and, Mayan, do you have anything you want
to say?
Just thank you really to everyone who came and who helped organize the program.
Mayan gave us the credit for that, but we also really drew from a lot of the ideas of
the people who are here today to give shape to that and to the ideas and inspiration that
we've had over the past three years of going around the world, or going to at least a few
of the countries where the uprisings have been, and really seeing what motivates people,
inspires people, and so thank you to all of you for that.
And just one other thing, this space right here is only one part of this event.
We also try to contact other people who are in social centers and squats here because
we also want to bring some attention to issues going on in the Netherlands.
A lot of times people look abroad, and they think about problems abroad, and they think
about movements abroad, but they don't.
It's easier to do that than to actually do stuff around your own city.
So of course there's going to be parties at the Frank Prize, there's going to be other
events, other spaces, D4, and everything.
There's an extended program that you'll find in the foyer, so be sure to check that out
and realize there's a lot of stuff going on, and we're going to try to have a good time,
and also a productive time.
So thanks.
So working?
Okay, so now we have the pleasure to invite and welcome...
We have the pleasure to welcome Paul Mason.
Today's political climate is characterized by widespread political upheaval.
Streets and squares across the world have become the site of massive demonstrations,
strikes, occupations, riots, rebellions, and revolutions.
It's not just happening in Spain, it's not just happening in London, it's not just
happening in France, or the United States, or Latin America, but it's happening everywhere.
From the Arab Spring to the movement of the squares in Southern Europe, and from there
to the global occupy movement and the uprisings in Turkey and Brazil, people everywhere have
been challenging the power of governments and economic elites.
We have a political system that doesn't really give many viable, realistic, effective options
for people to take real change into their lives.
In the aftermath of the financial crisis that swept across the world in 2008, the social
and political consequences of economic structures have become severely visible.
You're dealing with what people have been right to describe as a financial nuclear bomb.
The economic crisis exposed to millions of people worldwide, the priorities of most
politicians.
From the point of view of economics, an economy is a mechanism for allocating resources to
produce goods to meet consumption needs.
Capitalism is not actually a mechanism for allocating resources to produce goods to meet
consumption needs.
Capitalism is a system for producing profits for the owners of capital, and money will
be invested in production if and only if it is sufficiently profitable.
A policy of deregulation of financial systems allowed financial markets to become increasingly
important to national and global economic output.
New forms of mortgages were created so that they could be packaged and sold as financial
instruments.
There was an enormous amount of speculation in housing that mortgages were sold to people
who clearly not going to be able to pay for them, that these mortgages were then packaged
and represented in various ways and sold to various other people and resold and became
very imbrogated in the global financial system.
And as soon as a sufficiently large number of people began to be unable to pay their
mortgages, that financial house of cards began to fall apart, and that produced a financial
crisis which then led to a general economic downturn.
So that's more or less the official story.
This official story is clearly inadequate.
This is really an episode in a very old story.
Some experience its first major, you could even say first global economic crisis in
the 1820s.
This has been a regular occurrence since that period.
So for 150 years we have had an alternation of periods of prosperity and periods of depression.
What is unusual is that there hasn't been a serious crisis of this depth since the 1930s,
although it seemed as though there was going to be one in the mid-1970s.
So people, you could say, have forgotten that capitalism once was characterized by a regular
recurrence of depressions, and for that reason people seem to be very surprised.
And just as they did in the early 19th century, people try to explain this particular event
in terms of immediate occurrences of the present rather than in terms of this long-term pattern.
In a funny way, what we're experiencing now is the deep depression which might have come
in the 1970s, but which was averted and kept at bay by the constant expansion of debt,
government-private corporate.
And this process of debt creation reached a point beyond which it seemingly was impossible
to keep it going, which explains why all over the world now, in the face of continuing
depression conditions, governments are trying to cut back on their spending, to cut back
on their borrowing, that the new mantra of every government is to reduce deficits, to
pay off their loans, and so forth, which I think in fact they might be able to do.
But the limit of debt expansion has been reached, and so we have once again a return to the
sort of depression conditions which actually have been our common recurrent feature of
the whole history of capitalism.
In the capitalist society, we live in a continuous crisis, and if not in a continuous crisis,
it's a totally unpredictable situation.
It's a system based on articulation, on putting all the common wealth, and all the public wealth
in private benefit.
In order to keep national budget deficits down, many governments chose to cut spending on
social services, pensions, and education, and to raise the retirement age.
When we talk about the cuts, what it means, the cuts in poverty, the cuts in health,
the increase in the retirement age to 67 years, they are all extremely violent social measures
against most of the population, which are rarely applied to those who are making those
decisions.
They are cutting back on everything.
There is no right to it.
There is no right to it.
There is no right to it.
There is no right to it.
There is no right to it.
There is no right to it.
There is no right to it.
When the governments aligned themselves with financial interests, a broader crisis of legitimacy
that had been building for a long time took hold, and the outrage many felt erupted onto
the streets.
We've been here saying that the markets we've decided for Greece, for Spain, for Italy,
who the fuck is the markets?
All the politicians agree that we owe billions of pounds to the bankers, and therefore we've
got to pay to losing our pensions and jobs.
We owe the bankers nothing, we don't owe them one penny.
People are so fed up.
Our economics is not working, our politics is not working, our unions is not working,
as our legal system is not working.
There's nothing for the states to promise now.
What?
Better education, better wages, better life, nothing, they cannot promise anything.
In the immediate aftermath of the economic crisis, protests proliferated around the world.
In the U.S., people organized to rescue families facing eviction from their homes.
Workers occupied republic windows and doors factory in Chicago, and students occupied
their universities.
In Europe, angry protests and riots swept across the continent.
In Greece, riots engulfed the streets for three consecutive weeks in the aftermath of the
police shooting of Alexandros Grigoropoulos.
In Iceland, the protests led to the ousting of the conservative government.
In 2010, general strikes took place across Europe, with major strikes in Greece, France,
Spain, and the first general strike in over 22 years in Portugal.
In the UK, spectacular student protests took headlines across the world, when students
stormed the conservative party's headquarters in London.
None of the eruptions in Europe or the U.S., however, would compare to the explosion of
popular revolt in North Africa and the Middle East.
The uprisings that began in Tunisia in December 2010, when Mohamed Boazizi set himself on
fire, quickly grew as public outrage over the incident spread.
The protests eventually led to the fall of the Ben Ali regime that had ruled Tunisia
since 1987.
On January 25, 2011, the anger spread to Egypt, where diverse movements of demonstrations,
marches, occupations, riots, civil resistance, and labor strikes took down the dictator Hosni
Mubarak in just 18 days.
In Tunisia and Egypt, the ruling governments embarked on decades of economic liberalization
from the 1970s onwards.
We cannot understand what is the data ship and the kind of repression we lived on in
Egypt without realizing this is part of an economic system.
I think the economic factors were incredibly important in getting people to the point where
they really risked everything and went to the streets.
Following what's happening in Egypt in the last 30 years, but especially in the last
15 years, there was a very aggressive movement towards what we call economic reform, which
is basically more privatization, less worker rights, less workplace rights, and opening
up the market more and more.
Policy of the Egyptian government was to attract as much business as possible.
It didn't matter to them how labor was treated, it didn't matter to them what kind of environmental
effects these kind of projects were having.
Although the policies of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund often went
uncriticized, the structural adjustment programs that these institutions forced onto Tunisia
and Egypt were contributing factors in the economic and social crises that culminated
in the Arab Spring.
The Arab Spring continued to spread to Libya, Syria, Bahrain, Yemen, and even further.
The emancipatory message of the Arab Spring quickly spread and became a source of inspiration
for protesters around the world.
What few commentators predicted was that the anti-authoritarianism embodied in the Arab
Spring would resonate in Europe and the U.S., where despite the official presence of democracy,
people felt disenfranchised and powerless to determine even the most basic aspects of
their lives.
In mid-February 2011, workers, students, and teachers occupied the capital building in
Madison, Wisconsin to protest the introduction of budget cuts and the erosion of collective
bargaining rights.
On February 23, 2011, following a massive general strike, people in Greece attempted
to occupy Sintagma Square in front of Parliament.
So after the strike itself, there was a call by some people and some people even spontaneously
decided to stay at the main square, which is the outside Parliament, inspired by the
revolts in Egypt and in the rest of the North African countries, and to hold the square
for as much as it could.
We had the slogan that we will go to the Constitution Square and we will remain in
the Constitution Square.
On March 26, 2011, hundreds of thousands of people in the U.K. took to the streets in
the second largest demonstration in London's history.
At the end of the march, the protesters attempted to occupy and hold Trafalica Square.
I think often there is sort of the perception that we are supposed to teach people something
in the Middle East, but I think we have really been learning that, you know, summing up two
politicians to governments and going out on the streets can make a difference.
But it wasn't until May 15, 2011, that the tactic of occupying a public square and holding
it was successful on a large scale in Europe.
Occupations of people across Spain occupied their public squares, held massive general
assemblies, and voiced their growing anger against the government.
The movement of the squares quickly spread across Europe.
On May 25, people in Greece were finally able to take and hold Sintagma Square.
They set up camp and refused to move.
The occupation of public squares rose again on September 17, 2011, this time in the United
States, when people in New York City organized a mass mobilization to occupy Wall Street.
They moved to nearby Zucati Park, set up tents, and renamed the park Liberty Square.
The protesters' anger at the financial system and the politicians who were responsible for
the crisis resonated with people across the U.S. and the occupation spread quickly.
On October 15, 2011, as part of an international day of action, people all over the world took
to the streets with nearly 1,000 different actions in over 82 different countries.
The day of action was called the Day of Rage, an homage to the Egyptian Revolution.
Well, I mean, what's really exciting is, you know, usually when you have these world
revolutionary moments, whether it's 1789, whether it's 1848, 1917, either it happens
everywhere or it happens in a country a little bit peripheral to the capital of Sampter.
But now it's actually hitting the Sampter, and this is very exciting.
Ordinarily, this doesn't happen.
Each occupation was shaped by its own specific history.
In Oakland, where there was a long history of police repression and radical struggle,
the protests were characterized by a more militant tone, fueled by the recent Oscar
Grant riots in 2009 and the university occupations throughout 2009 and 2010.
The New Year's Eve killing in 2009 of Oscar Grant by white police officers in front of
tons of cell phone cameras sparked off some of the biggest rioting that California has
seen since the Rodney King riots.
What it did is that it brought to light the actual injustice by the law enforcement agencies.
When the police first raided the Oakland commune, the attacks resulted in a rock wall veteran
Scott Olson being hospitalized with a severe head injury after being shot in the head with
a tear gas canister.
Occupy Oakland responded by calling for a general strike which culminated in the shutting
down of the fifth largest port in the United States.
As part of the Oakland general strike, we will march on the port of Oakland and shut
it down.
We are doing this in order to blockade the flow of capital on the day of the general
strike as well as to show our commitment to solidarity with the longshore workers in
their struggle against EGT.
In March 2012, rebellion also took hold in Canada when students in Montreal launched
a student strike that quickly transformed into a popular movement with hundreds of thousands
of people in the street.
Meanwhile in Europe, on March 29, 2012, independent Basque unions in Spain called for a general
strike.
The independent unions and the network of neighborhood assemblies that grew out of the
15 May movement joined the call, filling the pressure from below several major unions
endorsed the strike.
The strike brought major cities across Spain to a standstill with an estimated 77% work
stoppage.
Due to the involvement of neighborhood assemblies and a large unemployed population, there was
also a call for a widespread consumption strike.
Stores that attempted to open for business were met with crowds of protesters organizing
pickets or blockades.
On the 29th of March, in addition to the labor union strikes, pickets in different workplaces
and all of this, and in different neighborhoods, you started to see, well, neighborhood assemblies
of different types of non-union workers contributing and doing sort of informative pickets where
they inform folks of why they shouldn't go to work that day or why they shouldn't open
those stores that day.
We could easily reach consumers and individuals that are not organized or they don't feel
represented by unions and asking them and explaining them that not only to stop working
today, there's much more if you don't have to spend any money on this 29th of March.
On November 14th, 2012, the CGTP trade union in Portugal called for the first European-wide
general strike.
In Lisbon, the strike became one of the largest and most militant general strikes since the
fall of the dictatorship.
The main thing about the latest demonstrations probably is that there were slightly bigger
than we were used to, which means that people are waking up finally and realizing that if
they don't do anything, things will just get worse every time.
There were also major strikes and protests in Spain, Greece, Italy, Belgium and Germany.
Well, the fact that the general strike was called first in Portugal on the 14th of November
by trade unions and then other trade unions joined was important in European level.
If you can go more and more towards this kind of international mobilization and dimension
maybe then the soft nationalism that kind of comes up in most of the demonstrations against
austerity will do some of its ground and we'll be able to create this strong idea that we're
in this international situation, international problems and that we need to organize our
struggles in an international way.
Despite widespread protests by populations worldwide, the gap between government policy
and people's needs continues to grow.
There's a real crisis of governance and I don't think it's just limited to Egypt.
It's quite a global crisis and that's what I think connects what's happening in Egypt
to places like Greece, to places like Portugal, places like Ireland, even to the Occupy movement
in the US.
In many places, leaders have been overthrown or voted out of office, but the political and
economic system has remained unchanged.
People's almost have this magical sense to them, but when it comes down to it there's
actually very little value in that process because it's not allowing for change.
It's not actually at all empowering the people to have their voice heard.
We see people in Europe, in Western Europe and in the US taking the streets and living
in the streets actually occupying spaces because apparently democratic process doesn't bring
much to them.
The only way people will make their voice heard is by going to the streets.
In the summer of 2013, protests once again erupted around the world.
This time the uprisings were not taking place in a context of economic crisis, but in countries
such as Turkey and Brazil that were still experiencing economic growth.
Despite this economic growth, inequality and alienation were on the rise.
All the Turkish economy at the moment is based on infrastructure, construction and that means
work for the people, but that's totally Tehran's work.
And there's this great inequality as well, nobody would be okay to live in such a system.
So what we see here is also an uprising against this economical violence that the people
are facing.
In late May 2013, protesters attempted to stop the development of Istanbul's Gezi Park
in Taksim Square.
The response of the police was to heavily attack the protesters.
As the images of police violence spread across Turkey and the world, people came out en masse
into the streets and the uprising spread to over 72 cities in Turkey.
This was a protest against the demolishing of the park, but it suddenly immediately changed
its face and it became a protest against the state terrorism and police brutality.
The protest didn't become only something bigger, but it became something different.
It has become a medium of the expression of the accumulated anger over years.
People feel it, they feel this overall regression in the democratic rights and freedoms.
If we don't stand our ground now, we lose all our freedoms, all our rights, and you
see there's a point, there's no turning back, we can only go forward, it was one of those
points.
In June 2013, as the streets of Turkey were still awash in tear gas, a large-scale protest
movement emerged in Brazil.
The protests were initially against an increase in public transport costs, but quickly transformed
into a movement against persistent economic inequality and political exclusion.
At the same time, protests erupted in other places around the world, including Bulgaria,
Bosnia, and Indonesia.
On June 30, 2013, once again, millions of people flooded the streets of Egypt to demand
the resignation of democratically elected President Mohammed Morsi.
The military hijacked the popular uprising and pushed Morsi out of power.
The violence that ensued has cloaked Egypt's future and the potential for revolutionary change
in a blanket of uncertainty.
While upheavals and uprisings are now a daily reality internationally, neither the state
nor capital have diminished in strength.
As movements continue to emerge and are growing increasingly networked across national borders,
many people say that the way forward is not to make demands of leaders but to build solutions
from the bottom up in our everyday lives so that we can meet our own needs and the needs
of others.
What we're discovering together is new ways of organizing that are horizontal, that are
empowering to communities, that actually people take their lives into their own hands.
We're not making demands of power, we're not asking for change, we're making the change
ourselves, we're building resilient communities that can take care of ourselves, that can
feed ourselves, that can house ourselves, and that can resist capitalism and the failures
of representative democracy.
There's no matter how much we struggle here, and no matter how much we manage to win, if
we are winning, we would never be able to do it on our own.
This is an international movement, it's an international struggle, and we need to have
victories and we need to have struggle everywhere if we're going to have any chance of succeeding.
Apparently right now we're not coordinated, but I think and I think that there will be
a moment when we all realize that the struggle is the same.
It's not a work issue, it's not a social issue, it's not an economic issue, it's
the survival of the planet and of the human being, what they're fighting for.
We'll realize and what we need is a day and an hour that the whole planet will put
us together.
