Countrywide assembly of all open assemblies of The Netherlands

When: Sunday, 2nd of October from 14'00 to 17'00.
Where: Social Center “De Valreep”. Polderweg 620, Amsterdam (http://valreep.wordpress.com/)

The last 3 years, no matter where we live, our lives are strongly influenced by the crisis. This crisis broke out in 2008 and transformed itself to a sovereign-debt crisis particularly in the EU-periphery. This crisis was not created by the people. The bankers and the financial institutions with the support of the governments are responsible for it.

Today the people are asked to pay this crisis by European-wide austerity measures. This recipe has been implemented repeatedly in the past by the IMF and always resulted in increasing the inequalities, the unemployment and the poverty among the people.

In this background, in the last 5 months, an alternative movement in the squares of many countries has emerged. This movement was the genuine reaction of the people against the way that the governments have chosen to deal with the crisis. People have started to gather in public spaces and occupy the squares to protest against the policies of the governments. The most optimistic element of this movement was that people stopped being passive and began to discuss about their lives and their problems making efforts to define a better society. This better society can only materialize with the collective struggle of the people. The ‘Take the Square’ movement that was based on the principles of real democracy, contributed at this.

Particularly in the Netherlands, since last May, open assemblies are taking place in several cities. These assemblies, are part of the ‘Take the Square’ movement and have organized actions of various scale with a twofold aim: firstly, the aim is to show their solidarity to the Spanish and Greek people that initiated this movement in Europe but are also the primary victims of austerity measures that are coordinated by the EU. Secondly, the aim is to react against the unjustified budget cuts that are implemented in the Netherlands that is a rich country that has been mildly affected by the crisis.

Since the beginning of the assemblies in the Netherlands, the necessity of coordination and communications among the assemblies in the Netherlands was more than obvious. Following the worldwide or pan-European actions for occupying the squares every Sunday is clearly not enough. A deeper and permanent coordination is necessary in order to increase the political awareness of the movement in the Netherlands and to achieve our goals.
For all these reasons we call for a countrywide assembly of all the local assemblies in the Netherlands on October 2nd in Amsterdam. It will be the first general and countrywide assembly and as such, we think that this is a very important event. The presence of all of us, the ‘everyday’ man and woman who participated in the ‘Take the Square’ movement, is more than necessary! For this reason, we invite everybody to join and participate in the ‘Assembly of Assemblies’.

Safeguarding the rule that the “agenda” of this assembly is open to be completed with topics that every participant may suggest, we propose some initial issues that we would like discuss and decide upon in this assembly:

1. Review and evaluation of local assemblies.
2. Ways of improving the coordination of our struggle mainly at the country level.
3. Organizing the protest in 15th October in Brussels
4. Other future actions and events.
5. Creating a new pan-Dutch countrywide website of all the open assemblies.

We invite you all in Amsterdam, 2nd of October 2011, 14.00, at the newly created social center “De Valreep” for the “Assembly of the Open Assemblies”