DemocracyNow.org
In New York City's Madison Square Park, hundreds of people attended a "Free University" hosted by Occupy Wall Street, where professors gave free classes to May Day protesters. Activists said the event marked an alternative means of sharing knowledge outside the capitalist system. "This movement is all about building community and sharing and coming up with alternatives to the economic system that is so pervasive in our lives and in everything that we do," said Amin Husain, a key facilitator for the Occupy movement, who attended the event. "These are cracks in capitalism where we can actually give and take on our terms," he added. Ruthie Wilson Gilmore, a professor and co-founder of the prison abolitionist group Critical Resistance, brought her class from the City University of New York to the action. "May Day is a day in which we rise up and say, 'We should be free,' which means we should control the means of production so that we can have all the say possible in how we reproduce ourselves," said Gilmore. "Studying policing and studying capitalism and studying racism is a way toward figuring out how to change the future." Democracy Now! also spoke with poet Eileen Myles and professor and labor activist Jackie DiSalvo.
