Keep moving / Let’s meet in Frankfurt/M ! October 25th to 27th

[dropcap]A[/dropcap]gainst the European austerity regime, against the rule of the EU-Troika, for the Europeanisation of our resistance and for real democracy: Blockupy 2013 – they were intense and powerful days of collective action and resistance.

Our many disobedient actions highlighted the ways in which the politics of crisis and impoverishment affect our lives and the lives of millions of people around the world. The police’s planned assault on our international demonstration aimed to negate those victories and to split the coalition that achieved them. Those who bear the political responsibility for the attack could not allow a huge international demonstration to walk right past the ECB, in the very country whose government is so centrally involved in pushing a politics of impoverishment in Europe.

They meant to demoralize and split the movement, but we stand strong in our solidarity and our unity: an attack by the police on one part of our demonstration is an attack on us all. It was our unity that turned the police’s attack on our movement into a political disaster for the representatives of an authoritarian crisis politics. Repression and police brutality should have been a demonstration of strength, but in reality they only reveal how nervous those who seek to further deepen the cycle of impoverishment and exclusion in Europe, a cycle that can no longer be democratically legitimated, and which therefore has to be imposed with ever more authoritarian means.

We are determined to go ahead and prepare further actions in Frankfurt and at the  European Central Bank – this exposed nerve of the European crisis regime, where protest obviously hurts and is thereforeundesirable. The continuous, strong and diverse protests on squares in Europe and beyond clearly show that the resistance against the social effects of the crisis politics, against the impoverishment and hopelessness to which they condemn millions of people cannot be separated from the resistance against the curtailing of democratic rights – they are necessarily linked.

They want capitalism without democracy, we want democracy without capitalism. This, then, is our promise: that ‘normality’ will not be returning to the heart of the European crisis regime, not in Germany, or, more precisely, in Frankfurt. Blockupy will return in 2014. We will be there, in the city, for the opening of the ECB’s new headquarters, with days of action and many other initiatives that we want to discuss and plan together.

The Blockupy 2013 days of action were one step on the path towards becoming part of a huge, common European and global movement. We want to continue walking this path together with you: we want to talk about our respective struggles, want to have a strategic debate about whether Blockupy 2014 can be a common point of crystallisation, how we can develop our collective strength, how to intervene into the situation, how to create practical opportunities.

To discuss all this, to make it happen together with our friends, colleagues and comrades from all over Europe, we therefore invite you a European Action Conference in Frankfurt on the weekend October 25th to 27th. We want to have lively discussions about strategies and approaches, want to kick off an international and participatory European preparatory process for the Blockupy mobilisation and against the planned opening of the new ECB in 2014.

Over the course of the summer we’ll send some more detailed thoughts, about the structure and location of the action conference – but do save the date, and tell others who haven’t been involved before about it. Let’s come together! We look forward to this process, to your ideas and your energy, the Blockupy coordination.

(Frankfurt/M., July 18th 2013)

From blockupy-frankfurt.org