unPoliceYrMind

SQUAT Minneapolis J28 - Watch this AWESOME VIDEO of an anti-capitalist march, building occupation, killer banners, and dance party!  For the abolition of private property!  Here’s a recap of the action:

On January 28th over 50 people met at Stevens Square Park in Minneapolis and marched to an abandoned historic building for a dance party and foodshare. This event coincided with a similar event in Oakland, and other solidarity actions around the country.

People blocked 3 lanes of traffic en route to the downtown Minneapolis building where they dismantled the plywood from the front doors, before seizing the government-repossessed church. Having stood vacant for a decade, the neglected building was cleaned and redecorated for the purpose of this day.

This action was temporary as it was a capacity-building action to grow the possibility of a squatting movement in Minneapolis as well as to inform the public of neglected buildings that the government has left to rot.  As their movement gains strength, occupiers plan to indefinitely hold a building in the future and turn it into a social center/community space.

For more info, follow @spaceliberation on Twitter

Check out this rad video of Minneapolis occupiers liberating an empty building, in solidarity with OccupyOakland and others on the national day of action — revolt, reclaim, resist!

I especially love the banner slogans in this…  “The Crisis is Capitalism”… “STRIKE B(A)CK”… “For Squat”…

Here’s a speech that was read at the beginning of the action:

We have but one life to live!

In Athens, Cairo, New York, Oakland, Madrid, Moscow, London, Duluth, Minneapolis and countless other places, resistance to the exploitation and expropriation of our labor, our bodies and our environment, and the  daily existence that is forced on us by capitalism is building. We refuse to choose from the stark options that are offered to us: work, jail, or death. Instead, we  — like so many others— choose to fight for a life worth living – a life in solidarity and mutual care for and with our community, a life that affirms creativity, learning, love, struggle and rejects the structural violence in which capitalism implicates us as both subject and object. We take this action for a more meaningful and more joyful existence.

This building is owned by Hennepin County, and it has been left to rot. In light of that negligence, today we no longer respect that ownership, just as we do not respect any municipality whose allegiances are to the same regimes of private property that have led directly to urban blight and abandoned communities. Instead, for today, this building is all of ours — the people who would occupy it, redeem it from its state of idle decay, and use it for the common good and common enjoyment. as a site on which to build a community of rebels.

Those authorities that would tell us that what we are doing is wrong or bad speak with the same voice that tells us that work will set us free. They are the enemies of freedom. and their police have proven again and again that they are paid to protect the sanctity of private property at any cost, even when that property is left fallow, even when its only use is to fuel the machines of accumulation and feed the vanity of those who own it, even when there are starving people who could live on what is wasted, and homeless people who could live in what is neglected.

Those forces will come out and tell us that we cannot do what we want to do: patiently, carefully and openly work together to fix this building up, make it beautiful again, and let it become a community resource. And we, who are meeting one another in the streets and learning to resist together do not yet have the capacity in this city to call their bluff and do it anyway. But we have been building that capacity with each new fight, and there is no alternative but for us to continue to do so until we can throw the doors open to all of the unused and wasted buildings and fill up their empty rooms with the richness of our lives.

We must be careful, though, that our energies are not co-opted and redirected towards reforming processes of exploitation – lending owing, renting, owning – under the assumption that we are living in a broken system that can be repaired. Capitalism is not in crisis. Capitalism IS the crisis.  This action has no such demands of a system that is unreformable, uncorrectable. Instead we take this action so that we may learn to resist together and build an alternative life in common. – not just in their decrepit churches, but in their factories, and in their palaces!

For updates on the movement in Minneapolis, follow @SpaceLiberation on Twitter