ZAPAGRINGO

Columbus Go Home!

2009-11-17T19:56:00.005-05:00

HILARIOUS (and, unfortunately, NECESSARY)... Much love to this guy for bringing some historical memory to an anti-immigrant rally!

I found this video at The Unapologetic Mexican and am excited to be joining Nezua for a week-and-a-half of hard labor at the 2010 School of Authentic Journalism. Check out the other 30 students, and almost 50 faculty, and please kick in some cash to build this people-power institution. We will be working hard not only to build skills and learn together, but also to deliver original reporting AND share the curriculum on-line through viral video. So make that tax-deductible donation at The Fund for Authentic Journalism and let's make history together!

Speaking of people power, check out the Western Cape Anti-Eviction Campaign's US Housing and Human Rights Tour (full schedule). The AEC has joined with Abahlali baseMjondolo (see this blog's recent report) and others to form the Poor People's Alliance in South Africa. In their own words:

As coordinators of the anti-eviction campaign, we are not leaders in the traditional authoritarian sense. Instead, we are like a set of cutlery. We are the tools that are there to be used by poor communities fighting against the cruel and oppressive conditions of South African society. Power to the poor people!

If you are in NYC, I know that the AEC event at the Brecht Forum, "The Post Apartheid Moment: An Evening of Solidarity with the Western Cape Anti-Eviction Campaign," will be the place to be on Thursday night - hope to see you there!

MJB Victory Against Dawnay, Day Group

2009-10-20T20:37:00.005-04:00

Here is the press release from Movement for Justice in El Barrio announcing final confirmation that Dawnay, Day Group is leaving East Harlem as well as the victory they've just won against them in court. Below that is an article en español from yesterday's El Diario...

For Immediate Release
Contact Juan Haro, (212) 561-0555

Most Powerful Landlord in East Harlem, Multi-National Dawnay, Day Group, Comes Crashing Down

October 14, 2009—In a battle of David and Goliath proportions, tenants and members of Movement for Justice in El Barrio fought back against the attempts of the multi-billion dollar London-based corporation Dawnay, Day Group to push low-income families from their homes.

Thousands of East Harlem tenants have just been notified that the 47 buildings they reside in have been seized, due to Dawnay, Day’s failure to pay its massive outstanding debts, and are now under receivership, completing the demise of this multi-national company, a powerful threat to the community of El Barrio.

The multinational corporation that had scooped up 47 buildings in East Harlem, controlling one of the largest private property collections in Manhattan and by far the largest in East Harlem, is going down. Worldwide, Dawnay, Day has fallen victim to its own greed and is selling off its properties to cover its debt.

The East Harlem community has outlasted the giant through a multi-pronged strategy of resistance. This news comes close on the heels of a ground breaking legal victory in a case filed by Movement for Justice in El Barrio concerning thousands of dollars in false charges that were tormenting low-income tenants. Through this case, Movement for Justice in El Barrio partnered with Manhattan Legal Services and NEDAP to employ the innovative use of consumer protection laws for the first time in the housing arena with great success. Members of Movement for Justice in El Barrio just signed a settlement that will benefit thousands of tenants by putting an end to the practice of charging tenants thousands of dollars in false and illegal charges, instituting a new 3% cap on late fees for all tenants, and the plaintiffs receiving monetary damages, among other victories.

When Dawnay, Day became the most powerful landlord in East Harlem with their immense purchase, they announced in an interview with the Times of London their plan to take advantage of lax tenant protection laws in NYC to raise rents by "tenfold", a massive rent hike that would only be possible by evicting the current low-income and immigrant families from their homes. Again, they made their intentions explicit when they launched their “Buy-back Program” and began pushing tenants to abandon their apartments for a lump sum of $10,000. They coupled what amounts to measly and misleading offers in today’s NYC rental market with severe harassment in the form of dangerous negligence to the physical conditions of the buildings and apartments and illegal efforts to collect fictitious debts. Movement for Justice in El Barrio fought back against their efforts by:

- Filing a groundbreaking legal suit and recently winning a major victory that challenged Dawnay, Day Group, for charging thousands of dollars in false fees to its tenants.

- Launching the “International Campaign in Defense of El Barrio” and traveling to London to organize action to take them on at their headquarters.

- Fighting back building by building to demand decent living conditions and halt illegal evictions and maintaining a sustained media campaign exposing Dawnay, Day’s harassment.

Movement for Justice in El Barrio will continue the struggle for dignity and against displacement with more strength and energy than ever before.

Dawnay Day tenants will be available to conduct media interviews.

To arrange interviews call Movement for Justice in El Barrio at 212-561-0555.

------------------

Casero negligente pierde viviendas
2009-10-19
El Diario NY

NUEVA YORK — Después de más de dos años de luchar contra el desalojo de sus viviendas contra la corporación londinense Dawnay, Day Group, dueña de 47 edificios en El Barrio los inquilinos recibieron recientemente una noticia que los alegró: por problemas financieros, este grupo dejó de pagar su hipoteca y los inmuebles han quedado bajo el control de la Corte Suprema de Nueva York.

Harvey Fishbein, designado por la Corte como Administrador legal de los edificios, informó a los inquilinos el 29 de septiembre pasado que Dawnay, Day Group no ha estado pagando su hipoteca, y los prestamistas—el Banco de Nueva York Mellon Trust y National Association— han comenzado un procedimiento legal para ejecutar la hipoteca. “He sido designado por la Corte no sólo para colectar el alquiler, sino también para ciertas responsabilidades de mantenimiento”, comunicó Fishbein.

De acuerdo con Juan Haro, del Movimiento por Justicia del Barrio, la noticia fue recibida con alegría por los inquilinos de Dawnay, Day Group, porque desde que esta corporación tomó posesión de los inmuebles, “empezó un plan bien agresivo para desalojar a los inquilinos, cobrándoles cargos falsos”.

Esta lucha, según Haro, llegó a los inquilinos a unirse, protestar e incluso demandar al casero en corte.

La noticia de la salida de El Barrio de Dawnay, Day Group se produce pocos días después de que los inquilinos ganaran una demanda contra el grupo por miles de dólares en cargos falsos a los inquilinos. Fue presentada por el Movimiento por Justicia del Barrio, en asociación con los Servicios Jurídicos de Manhattan, NEDAP, pero no bajo las leyes de Vivienda, sino bajo las leyes de Protección al Consumidor.

Los inquilinos denunciaron cargos en el alquiler por gastos en mantenimiento responsabilidad del casero. “Los inquilinos recibieron compensación monetaria al ganar la demanda y, entre otros beneficios, se estableció un tope de 3% de cargos por pagos atrasados en el alquiler”, dijo Haro.

Paula Serrano, quien reside con sus dos hijos pequeños en el 328 East de la calle 106, dijo que desde que Dawnay, Day Group tomó el edificio, empezó a recibir cargos falsos de $300 y $400 por supuestas reparaciones, y su balance llegó a $2,000. “Estoy muy contenta de que se haya ido Dawnay, Day Group, porque el plan de ellos era sacarnos de aquí”, dijo.

Los inquilinos esperan que los nuevos dueños se ajusten a la ley.

Llamadas a Dawnay, Day Group no fueron contestadas al cierre.

Homeland Hip Hop II

2009-10-14T00:01:00.000-04:00

We're breaking down borders from Native California to Detroit,
from Iraq to Brooklyn... to Palestine.

If you are in or around NYC -or at least will be next week!- make sure to come out on Wednesday (October 21st) and Thursday (October 22nd) for two powerful events --> see full details below... but first, a Multiple Choice Question:

The first ever Indigenous Youth Delegation to Palestine is back and gearing up to:

a) produce a documentary about the delegation

b) release a hip hop track that was recorded during the music workshops in Palestine

c) publish the next issue of SNAG Magazine in Arabic, English, and Spanish... with the writing and photos from the indigenous and Palestinian youth this summer

d) create a section on thinkpalestineact.org focused completely on education and organizing tools for folks working on Boycott Divest Sanctions (BDS) campaigns within indigenous communities in North America.

e) develop and organize multimedia delegation reportbacks in the different communities, schools, and organizations that the delegates come from.

What's the answer? These kids are on the grind -> it's ALL OF THE ABOVE! Now here are those two events (in reverse chronological order):

#1) HOMELAND HIP HOP II
if you made it to the first concert than you already know... and if you didn't, than make sure to get yourself to the sequel!

Thursday, Oct 22
doors at 8pm, show at 9pm
advance tickets $12, $15 at the door
@ Public Assembly (70 N. 6th St, Williamsburg, Brooklyn)

Featuring....

Invincible --> Detroit's finest... if you need convincing, check out those hot music videos at the Emergence Travel Agency.

Audiopharmacy - This is the band of one of the indigenous delegates to Palestine, Ras K'dee of SNAG Magazine.

The Narcicyst - PLEASE tell me you've seen the P.H.A.T.W.A. music video already.

PEP Youth Performers - These Brooklyn kids go hard for Palestine... it'll warm your heart :-)

Hosted by Remi Kanazi
...and DJ Oja on the 1's & 2's

Purchase tickets: publicassemblynyc.com

Proceeds from this show will go to support the hip hop group DAM in Palestine, the Palestine Education Project's work with youth in Brooklyn, and our indigenous partners throughout the U.S.

#2 Indigenous Delegation to Palestine: NYC Reportback

Wed, Oct 21

6:30pm- Reception with light food & drink
7:00pm- Reportback- live music, photos, and stories shared by Ras K'dee,
SNAG Magazine delegate visiting from San Francisco

@ the American Indian Community House (AICH)
11 Broadway in the Financial District (Take the 4,5 trains to Bowling Green). AICH is on the 2nd Floor.

From El Barrio to Durban

2009-10-01T19:04:00.009-04:00

Eyewitness video from the recent attacks on the Kennedy Road Settlement and Abahlali baseMjondolo

UPDATE October 13 '09: Here's Picture the Homeless' reportback from Friday's consulate protest here in NYC.

UPDATE October 8 '09: Protest at the South African Consulate in NYC this Friday (tomorrow) from Noon to 1:30p at 333 E 38th St btwn 1st & 2nd Aves --> organized by Picture the Homeless, the Poverty Initiative, and Domestic Workers United.

UPDATE October 6 '09: Press Statement by the Kennedy Road Development Committee, Abahlali baseMjondolo and the Poor People’s Alliance

Before we get to Movement for Justice in El Barrio's message to Abahlali baseMjondolo (AbM) in Durban, please take these actions in support of their South African shack dwellers' movement at this critical moment:

1) Circulate eyewitness video coverage of the attack on the shack dwellers, which can be found at http://www.abahlali.org
2) Sign the petition at http://www.thepetitionsite.com/petition/274924944
3) Alert any press connections and send them to http://www.abahlali.org
4) Send emergency resources (even as little as $10):

Tax-exempt donations can be made by check. Please make checks payable to "South Africa Development Fund" which has promised to forward 100% to AbM and mark them for Abahlali baseMjondolo and mail to:

South Africa Development Fund
555 Amory Street
Boston, MA 02130

OR

transfer directly to Abahlali baseMjondolo Bank account with the following details:

Abahlali baseMjondolo Movement
Bank: First National Bank
Acc no: 62218884577
Branch: Umgeni Junction
Branch Code: 00200913
Swift Code: firnzajj759

Please mark payments for Abahlali baseMjondolo.

Thank you! Now here's the word from Movimiento...

Statement of Support to the Shack Dwellers Movement of South Africa
From Movement for Justice in El Barrio in New York City

To our sisters and brothers in Abahlali baseMjondolo [AbM] (Shack Dwellers Movement), the Kennedy Road Settlement in Durban, South Africa:

Greetings in solidarity on behalf of Movement for Justice in El Barrio. We want you to know that we, the simple and humble people of East Harlem, New York, are filled with rage for everything that is happening to you, our sisters and brothers, in your country of South Africa. It pains us to hear that 3 members of your community have been pronounced dead and there may be more, many are missing, and even more are seriously injured. This repression that began on the evening of Saturday September 26th, and has yet to cease, in the form of invasion and violent raids in your community are a blatant attack on democracy and the movement for the power of poor people.

It is obvious that not only are the local police behind what is happening in the Kennedy Road shack settlement, but local politicians, that are members of the state party, the ANC, as well. We know that when the Sydenham police were called, they did not respond, and that police dressed in plain clothes that were present during the attacks did nothing to stop the destruction. In addition, we know that of the arrests that have been made so far, none of the people who are part of the militia that launched this completely unprovoked attack on Saturday evening have been arrested, and that most of the Kennedy Road Democratic Committee (KRDC) is behind bars at the Sydenham Police station (including those that were not even present during the attacks because they were attending a public event nearby!).

It is obvious that the police knew about these attacks and that they support this militia that clearly wants to destroy everything the Kennedy Road shack settlement has created and stands for. And, of course, the police can do this because they know they can get away with it as they have the support of powerful local politicians who want to destroy the Abahlali baseMjondolo (Shack Dwellers Movement) and KRDC because they are in the way of their political and economic control.

As we stated to you when you visited us, we stand with you sisters and brothers because we too are fighting the same system that uses vicious and aggressive strategies of displacement to remove us from our homes, only we are in different places. But no matter, we know that in all parts of the world the capitalist system and its political class from above impose these practices against the simple & humble people.

Which is why we are sharing these words from across the oceans and continents to let you know, from here in East Harlem, New York, that we are going to support you and we will do everything necessary so that this ends in favor of the South African community, so that one day in the future we all will be able to achieve our liberation.

Sisters and brothers you are not alone, we are with you and unite in one cry of dignified rebellion and rage.

Long live the dignified struggle of the Abahlali baseMjondolo!

Sincerely,
Movement for Justice in El Barrio

Introduction to Abahlali baseMjondolo:

The Abahlali baseMjondolo (Shack Dwellers Movement) began in Durban, South Africa, in early 2005. Although it is overwhelmingly located in and around the large port city of Durban it is, in terms of the numbers of people mobilized, the largest organization of the militant poor in post-apartheid South Africa. Its originary event was a road blockade organized from the Kennedy Road settlement in protest at the sale, to a local industrialist, of a piece of nearby land long promised by the local municipal councilor to shack dwellers for housing.

The movement that began with the Kennedy Road blockade grew quickly and now includes tens of thousands of people from more than 30 settlements. In the last year and a half the movement has suffered more than a hundred arrests, regular police assault and ongoing death threats and other forms of intimidation from local party goons. It has developed a sustained voice for shack dwellers in subaltern and elite publics and occupied and marched on the offices of local councilors, police stations, municipal offices, newspaper offices and the City Hall in actions that have put thousands of people on the streets. The movement also organized a highly contentious but very successful boycott of the March 2006 local government elections under the slogan ‘No Land, No House, No Vote’. Amongst other victories the Abahlali have democratized the governance of many settlements, stopped evictions in a number of settlements, won access to schools, stopped the industrial development of the land promised to Kennedy Road, forced numerous government officials, offices and projects to ‘come down to the people’ and mounted vigorous challenges to the uncritical assumption of a right to lead the local struggles of the poor in the name of a privileged access to the 'global' (i.e. Northern donors, academics and NGOs) that remains typical of most of the NGO based left.

The movement’s key demand is for ‘Land & Housing in the City’ but it has also successfully politicized and fought for an end to forced removals and for access to education and the provision of water, electricity, sanitation, health care and refuse removal as well as bottom up popular democracy.

The AbM office is in a community center on Kennedy Road, located in the Kennedy Road informal settlement, and is also home of the AbM meeting hall and a childcare center. The office is the location of most AbM General Meetings as well as the meeting place for the Kennedy Road Development Committee (KRDC). The KRDC is just one of many autonomous political organizations that function within each settlement; these organizations, often called Development Committees, constitute AbM.

Background information on the attack

1. On Saturday night members of the Kennedy Road Development Committee were subject to a surprise attack by a group of about 40 armed men chanting anti Mpondo slogans. The police failed to intervene. People were killed. Later on that night all key AbM leaders were subject to attack. Everyone's houses (and businesses in two cases where people had shops) were destroyed. This mob (now known as 'the Zulu mob' in the settlement) has direct connections to the local ANC who had promised, two weeks ago, to turn the AbM office into an ANC office.

2. The police arrived in the morning and arrested 8 people all (as far as we know - we'll only be sure who has been arrested when they appear in court this morning) are members of the KRDC – the same people who were attacked. Among the arrested are people who were performing a dance at a public event elsewhere in the city on Saturday night. Attacks and threats continued unimpeded in the presence of the police. Calls for help were ignored.

3. Thousands have fled the settlement and some individuals, all key AbM activists, are in hiding as they have been told that they will be killed. Some Xhosa and Pondo people organized themselves against 'the Zulu mob' - this was independent of AbM or the KRDC, which are multi-ethnic organizations. There may well have been counter violence from this quarter. If so it may well be accurate to characterize it as defensive.

4. On Monday morning a huge police presence descended on the settlement as the local ANC councilor and the provincial MEC for Safety and Security arrived (proving that it is easy to get the police there when the state wants them there). They spoke in the hall and offered a clear endorsement of the fact that AbM has been driven out of the settlement. Some of their statements have been recorded. They began, bizarrely, to claim that the KRDC had launched the attacks - this is a total fabrication that they will not be able to sustain, as there were many witnesses on the scene - including some who are independent of local politics. They have also denied the ethnic character of the first attack.

5. After the politicians left so did the police. The settlement was left in the hands of groups of armed men - many not know to the residents. They trashed the AbM office and banned, on the pain of death, all AbM activists and supporters as well as media from entering the settlement.

Study Groups Roundtable

2009-09-30T00:01:00.003-04:00

Issue #8 of Upping the Anti

Our NYC-based study group, Another Politics is Possible, participated in a virtual roundtable discussion with three other US-based radical/revolutionary study groups at the beginning of this year. The results were published in Issue #8 of Upping the Anti. Also participating in the roundtable are the LA Crew, The New York Study Group, and the (Bay Area-based) Activist Study Circles. Posting this piece now feels timely as some organizers of the latter two groups will be launching a new website, "Organizing Upgrade," tomorrow.

Thank yous are due to Dan Berger and Chris Dixon for pulling this roundtable together and to Upping the Anti for allowing us to publish it for the first time online here at zapagringo. And by the way, that fine Canadian "journal of theory and action" has been doing some crucial work in supporting the development of fresh, radical political thought here on Turtle Island for over four years now (Enter the Intergalactic was featured back in Issue #3!) and deserves our support.

Navigating the Crisis: A Study Groups Roundtable
by Dan Berger and Chris Dixon

Our moment is marked by both crisis and possibility. Economies are plunging worldwide, and ecosystems are in undeniable danger. State repression is expanding, and the US, Canada, and Israel continue to wage wars of occupation. In this context, the recent US presidential election tapped into a reservoir of popular energy for change. However, mass movements in North America continue to be relatively demobilized. The left itself is in crisis and lacks clearly defined visions and strategies. Although progressive sympathies now run high, progressive options – let alone radical ones – are few.

Radicals thus face urgent questions: How do we understand the current conditions and develop a revolutionary politics appropriate to them? How do we foster mass movements that can exceed “politics as usual” and burst into new fields of action? How do we create strategies that can activate popular sentiments? And how do we build organizations capable of advancing movements and consolidating gains?

One way that activists and organizers wrestle with these issues is through study groups – intentional spaces for critical and collective reflection. Study groups are a hallmark of the left. Previous periods of crisis, like the 1930s and 1970s, compelled radicals to jointly investigate theoretical and practical models of revolutionary struggle. Often, these investigations led to new organizations or campaigns. Similarly, the current crises have generated several formations that intentionally use study to advance political priorities and explore organizational forms. The following roundtable brings together four such groups in the United States:

Another Politics is Possible (APP) is a group of organizers and activists in New York City. Their core values include collective leadership, democratic self-determination, challenging all systems of oppression, and centering the experiences of people most targeted by these intersecting systems.

The Activist Study Circles (ASC) is a multi-tendency socialist study group in the Bay Area. It brings together Marxists, anarchists, and revolutionary nationalists committed to a racial, economic, social, and gender justice anti-imperialist politics and to building power in oppressed and working class communities.

LA Crew (LAC) is a collective that was brought together by a shared commitment to learn lessons from all of the rich traditions of liberatory resistance, and to engage others with their analysis and principles. The LAC studies, analyzes, experiments, and creates community through collectively agreed upon political work and shared principles.

The New York Study Group (NYSG) is a network of activists and organizers, mostly people of color, based in diverse communities and organizations in New York City. Since 2005, NYSG has been studying left organizational forms – mainly revolutionary parties and united fronts – and strategy.

These groups represent different, if overlapping, political strands. The tensions between their approaches, in turn, point to key unresolved questions concerning leadership, organization, and politics. Regarding leadership: Are leaders elected, established, or developed? Is leadership about exercising authority, manifesting group decisions, or about developing collective power? Regarding organization: Should we be oriented toward a revolutionary party or set of parties, or should we discard the party model altogether? Can the party model co-exist with other models of revolutionary organization? Is a revolutionary organization committed to seizing power, redefining it, or something else entirely? And regarding politics: Are there important issues that we neglect by attempting to bridge multiple left tendencies, or do our political differences obscure common ground? These questions are not resolved here. Responses to these questions, meanwhile, expose differences not just of definition but of emphasis. Each group believes in building revolutionary organization(s), developing inter-left unity, and popularizing radical politics, yet they prioritize them differently.

The groups participating in this roundtable attempt to engage the perennial question – what is to be done? – by drawing upon an eclectic set of politics. The commitment to such politics varies: the NYSG draws explicitly from Marxist-Leninist history, APP looks to anti-authoritarian social movements like the Zapatistas, and the ASC and the LAC each work in their own way to bridge the divide. Despite these differences, all four draw from a range of tendencies on the revolutionary left, recognizing that whatever we build must both learn from and be different than what has come before. They suggest that, in responding to today’s conditions, we must try to avoid the mistakes that revolutionaries of all stripes – Marxist and anarchist, revolutionary nationalist and identity-based – made in the past.

At their best, these study groups offer lodestars – orienting concepts rooted in practices – that we can use as we grapple with the pressing questions of our time. This roundtable thus sets a foundation for the kind of non-sectarian and principled debate we so urgently need.

Tell us about the origins of your study group.

APP: Another Politics is Possible first came together at the end of 2006 as a New York City-based study group of 15 organizers, activists, educators, dreamers, and revolutionaries committed to a collective process of self-education and political articulation.

We came together because of a shared practice. Many of us were already working in organizing projects and collectives to implement some aspects of the core principles that brought us together as APP. We were doing work on gendered violence, education, queer and youth organizing, childcare and community building primarily as members of immigrant and women of color organizations.

One of our primary intentions was to articulate a practice – a way of doing politics – that values collective leadership, seeks democratic self-determination for all people, and centers the experiences of people most targeted by the intersecting systems of patriarchy, capitalism, and white supremacy and their multiple permutations.

Building on this commitment, we align ourselves with those who argue that engaging state power is not enough. Drawing from the lived experience of decolonized states and from women of color feminist critique, we’ve seen that it’s not just a question of who holds power but also what form that power takes. We’ve learned from history that when seizing state power is the primary strategy, it often ends by confirming Audre Lorde’s sage wisdom that “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” We must work to reclaim, reimagine, and rebuild our own home. Creating liberatory forms of social organization beyond the state is a necessity. Attempts to model the society we envision transform our cultures and relationships, and create a guide for our politics and organizing. This prefigurative sensibility, popular in many of today’s movements, has deep historical roots worldwide. These include forms of resistance that are often overlooked by traditional left analysis and range from communities of care to the transformative role of culture and spirituality in larger scale organized movements.

Some of the political questions we believe are fundamental to exploring different possibilities for revolutionary organization are: How do we both transform our interpersonal relationships and build broader cultures of liberation? What does collective leadership and democratic self-determination look like? How do we make sense of the many strategies to engage with the state as we seek liberation? How do we understand the process and significance of rebuilding community? How do we really build a movement that addresses the intersectionality of oppressions?

ASC: In the late 1990s, many longtime Bay Area organizing efforts were coming to fruition. They brought a broad range of people together around radical left politics and practice. September 11 changed the context of our struggle. Over the next few years, many of us brought our organizations and communities into the streets as part of the anti-war movement. During that period, leaders from different parts of the Bay Area left began conversations on building a broader socialist unity drawing from multiple traditions. This included communists developing new approaches to democratic organizing, grassroots power, and strategy, and anarchists developing new approaches to leadership, revolutionary politics, and anti-authoritarian organizing. In late 2003, a group of 30 of us from 20 organizations came together to think about what the Bay Area movement lacked and what we thought was needed. Out of that discussion a committee formed to plan a project called Movement Generation that brought together leaders in community-based organizations from different political traditions (Marxist, revolutionary nationalist, feminist, and anarchist) to engage in a nine-month study to develop strategy and guide our struggles. Through this process evolved a multi-trend movement building approach.

From this experience, a group of us decided in 2005 that we needed a study group to foster relationships and political unity in order to build left organization. Our planning committee met for about two years. We developed trust between us and trust in our ability to play a meaningful role in building a dynamic left. We then invited more than 100 people to participate and 80 of these went on to form the ASC program. We meet once a month in large groups, and then once a month in smaller groups to delve deeper into subject matter. We have continued as a group of about 40. The study group began as, and continues to be, majority people of color, majority women, and a large percentage queer. To help create an intergenerational movement, we invited some older-generation comrades to participate. Most of us are in our late twenties to early 40s, with the majority in our 30s. We are multi-trend socialists (anarchists, Marxists, feminists, revolutionary nationalists, etc.) with demonstrated unity on key issues like anti-racism/anti-imperialism, the need for grassroots peoples’ organizations to build powerful democratic movements, the need for a synthesis of left politics, and a desire to develop new politics and forms of organization.

LAC: Those of us who first began studying together had come to the conclusion that no single political trend had found the answer to creating the change we are fighting for. We concluded that every trend had lessons for us, both in their victories and in their failures. We came together to look at these trends and to determine what principles and strategies felt useful for leftists today.

The question of leadership has been central to our growth. Drawing from anarchist and horizontalist models, we hold each other accountable to the principle of non-hierarchy by “throwing power back.” When we “throw power back,” we commit to being “leaders” that inspire others to see themselves as agents capable of making social change, and to see their most important role as developing others to participate in making that change. We believe that everyone has the ability to learn from history and to participate in creating collective visions for the future.

Like Ella Baker said, “strong people don’t need strong leaders.” We see our group as a location to build strong people so they can in turn develop others to do the same. People have different levels of experience when it comes to reading, engaging with political ideas, and organizing. Because we want to create a space that’s not dominated by the most “experienced” people, we aim for an equitable distribution and rotation of tasks and responsibilities. We encourage each other to take on roles that challenge us to grow in areas where we don't have much experience, and have a buddy system for supporting each other’s development outside of meetings. We consciously challenge all the societal messages that tell us that “someone else is the leader.”

NYSG: After a March 2006 discussion at the Brecht Forum on the need for a left party, five young activists and organizers from New York City came together to initiate a study group around the question of left organization. That first year of study brought together about 20 or 30 folks from diverse sectors of the social justice movement. Most of us were people of color in our 30s, politically active for more than a decade in a range of community-based organizations, and not ideologically fixed – some influenced by Marxism, some by anarchism, many agnostic or still figuring it out.

We started by studying the theories of the “united front” and the “revolutionary party,” and by looking at the history of struggles in South Africa and the United States, and at new organizational models in Mexico and Brazil. During this first round, we found that we had some significant differences about the “revolutionary party” model. These tended to arise between autonomists, who wanted to discuss alternative organizational forms, and people from a range of ideological positions (Marxist, revolutionary nationalist, and “agnostic”) who believed that revolutionary parties were necessary.

The participants who were compelled by the idea of a revolutionary party decided to initiate a second round of study. About 30 people came together to explore different historical models of revolutionary parties, learn from their contributions, and engage with their historical errors without abandoning them. This round of study was guided by two questions. First, what is our vision for a left organization/party that will help build a successful liberation movement in the United States? Second, how do we most effectively advance movement-building and left-building: by joining an existing left organization, initiating a new one, or something else?

At the end of this round of study, no individual from our study group chose to join an existing socialist organization, and no one argued for starting a new party. However, we all agreed that it was important to continue working with existing left organizations and invest in transitional projects that would lay a stronger groundwork for the re-emergence of a more relevant left organization in New York City.

In framing the objectives of our study, we skipped over a crucial step. We found that we couldn’t figure out what kind of left organization we needed or how we might build one without a clear assessment of our political conditions and a strategic vision for the development of a successful revolutionary movement. We realized that we needed to re-open our study process and engage questions of strategy. That is the focus of our studies and dialogues over the next year.

What texts and movements have been instrumental to your study group?

APP: When we came together, we sought to locate our group in a historical and theoretical trajectory. Given what was happening in the world, we also sought to articulate what form our politics would take at a mass level.

Some of the texts we’ve read have focused on movements like the Adivasi of India, the Unemployed Workers Movement in Argentina, the Movimento Sem Terra in Brazil, the Zapatistas in Mexico, and the Black Freedom Movement in the United States. The critique of the not-for-profit industrial complex promoted by INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence provided an important lens through which to think about the weakened state of social justice movements in the US.

We have prioritized politics that are prefigurative, horizontal, autonomous, and based on the development of new social relations. Each of the movements we studied has also addressed the non-material dimensions of oppression, which include the ways it impacts our individual and collective emotional lives and the damage we inflict on each other and on ourselves. Frantz Fanon, Paulo Freire, and Audre Lorde have reflected extensively upon the ways that the oppressor’s tactics permeate our interpersonal relationships and psyches. They have thus served as important examples of the need to integrate healing and self-care within a collective framework into our broader movement work.

ASC: Initially, the planning committee studied Martha Harnecker’s essay “Forging a Union of the Party Left and the Social Left.” Harnecker convincingly describes the need for anti-capitalists from the Party Left and social movements to come together and develop a new socialist politics together. For us, the Party Left includes traditional Left Party organizations as well as cadre organizations of various political stripes, like the Love and Rage Revolutionary Anarchist Federation, Standing Together to Organize a Revolutionary Movement (STORM), and the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement. Most of us come from the grassroots organizations, campaigns, and struggles of the social movement left.

We developed our study by voting on various case studies and themes. As a multi-trend group, it was important to us to select a set of case studies and readings that would help us to learn what we could take from each tradition. We began with an examination of the current moment. Studying the state of US imperialism, we took stock of our role as first-world leftists and discussed our visions of socialist politics for this century. From that grounding, we began looking at case studies of revolutionary organizations in various historic periods. We studied Guinea-Bissuea’s national liberation struggle, which was very important to revolutionaries of previous generations but not so well known to radicals of our generation. We studied the Zapatistas’ historical development and their contributions to current movements. This launched a larger discussion about Zapatismo and its applicability to the US. We explored the complex organizing strategies of the Communist Party in the US South during the Great Depression and the roles of the left in united fronts.

Our final case study focused on STORM in the Bay Area and the national Love and Rage Revolutionary Anarchist Federation. This allowed us to look at organizations from the 1990s in which some of us had been involved and brought us to a rich discussion on the role of contemporary third-world Marxist and anti-authoritarian/anarchist organizations. Through all of these studies, we’ve tried to highlight both the successes and shortcomings of social movements in order to draw lessons for today.

LAC: We want to understand the whole diverse history of revolutionary movements – not just to develop our own theoretical foundation but to understand what other folks are drawing from and to develop our own critiques of different political trends. As the history of the 20th century shows, we don’t think that any one trend “got it right.” Nevertheless, many have something to contribute to a revolutionary politics for the 21st century. In our study, we try to grapple with the tension between useful insights, and limitations, obstacles, and contradictions. Within that framework, we study texts from the classical marxist tradition (Marx, Engels, Lenin, Luxemburg, Trotsky, Gramsci, etc.), third world marxism and revolutionary nationalism, Maoism, and the New Communist Movement, anarchist and autonomista movements, US people of color liberation movements, feminist and queer liberation movements, the Earth liberation movement, and others.

We also try to look at everything through the lens of what we call “unbreakapartability.” Because oppressions are intersectional and affect all of us in complex and overlapping ways, the many forms of struggle for human liberation cannot be broken apart. An unbreakapartable approach aims to reveal that, as whole people, our struggles must reflect our whole selves. As well, unbreakapartability calls on us to learn from the vision and organizational forms of multiple struggles so we can build a truly integrated liberation movement.

NYSG: We studied the “classics” of Marxist thinking on the revolutionary party and united front (Lenin’s What is to be Done?, Gramsci’s political writings, and Mao’s speeches on the United Front), looking to draw out the often-ignored dynamism and democratic thinking underlying these texts. We felt that Lenin and Gramsci demonstrated the important role of parties, the need to root those parties in popular struggles, and the possibility for a deeply democratic orientation.

Among the contemporary analytical pieces that we read, Harnecker’s “Forging a Union of the Party Left and the Social Left” stands out. Harnecker distinguishes between the “party left,” who are organized into explicitly socialist left organizations and parties, and the “social left” (which we have re-termed the “social movement left”), who are rooted in mass movements rather than socialist parties or organizations. She points out that both “lefts” have their own assets and challenges. She argues that we will only be able to build an effective left rooted in powerful social movements if we forge a “union” of these two “lefts.” This approach helped us to identify the central role of building vibrant social movements that can help to reinvigorate the “party left” in the United States.

In our studies, reading history was just as important as theory. We found the history of the U.S. Communist Party in the 1930s to be particularly helpful. The mass scale and revolutionary orientation of the CPUSA during that period inspired us to think bigger. We saw that revolutionaries need to be deeply rooted in mass struggle and guided by a clear strategy. We learned that revolutionary parties played an instrumental role in almost every serious revolutionary movement over the past century and that many of those parties made serious anti-democratic errors. We saw that revolutionaries needed to be deeply rooted in working class communities of color but that we also needed to build functional unity with broader social forces in order to contend for real power. Finally, we learned that cross-class and multi-racial alliances encounter serious pitfalls.

Has your group worked together politically beyond study? How has your study process affected your political practice?

APP: In the summer of 2007, we organized a delegation called “Another Politics is Possible: Living the Vision from Below and to the Left” to travel from NYC to Atlanta to attend the first US Social Forum (USSF). This delegation was the first time we worked together on a larger scale. We sought to embody the politics we had been articulating together through the journey itself. Instead of choosing a few individuals to travel by plane and renting hotel rooms for them alone, we raised funds for so that more than 70 women of color, mothers, children, youth, and childcare volunteers could attend the USSF. Ground transportation enabled more participants to attend, particularly immigrants and families with children.

We also used the USSF to collaborate with groups from around the country that had been exploring similar politics. Together, we created a 25-session track of workshops addressing topics like collective and non-hierarchical approaches to organizing, addressing violence against women of color through transformative justice, alternatives to institutional schooling, solidarity work, and community-generated visions and practices of autonomy. Several of the people we worked with on this track were beginning to form or were already participating in local study groups. Since the USSF, APP has teamed up with these study groups to engage in continued collaboration and dialogue.

ASC: Although we have moved away from the goal of forming an organization, we remain focused on building relationships and shared understandings to build the left. We put organization building on the back burner because of the need to bring together a large group of people engaged in many different areas of work. While we have unity on the political principles of the group, the level of experience working together varies widely.

We want to create space for discussions about larger questions of strategy and left organization. For example, many of us believe in the need to both build new forms of liberatory power and win existing power. However, what that means for organizational strategy is a question we want to explore. We are looking at various organizational forms because we believe there is much to be learned from both the Zapatista fight against neo-liberalism and the Communist Party campaigns during the Great Depression.

The ASC is not currently designed to take collective action. However, as individuals involved in other struggles, we have come together though long-term alliances, new campaigns, electoral work, fundraisers and cultural events, and new friendships. We hope the ASC will continue to foster a healthy left culture and allow us to find creative and meaningful ways to share common vision, analysis, and strategy so that we can move more effectively together.

LAC: After studying together for a few years, we formed a new collective, instead of joining an existing one. This was because we didn’t see an organization that was drawing on multiple movements and deeply incorporating lessons from different trends. Our priority is building grassroots movements that can give masses of people the skills and vision required to transform the world. It is critical for us to find others who are committed to long-term movement building so that we can deepen our consciousness together. We believe in doing this within collective organization, where we can practice accountability and cross-sector coordination. Ultimately, this coordination should happen nationally and internationally as we have begun to see with the emergence of collectives that demonstrate how “another politics is possible” in the 21st century.

Within the LA Crew, we organize in education, healthcare, immigration, and the garment industry. We discuss our individual work collectively and look for opportunities to work across sectors. We are guided by six core principles: unbreakapartability, non-hierarchy, self-determination, experimentation, acknowledgement of our whole humanity – what we call “mind/body/spirit” – and dual power. This last concept flows from the history of popular movements creating alternative institutions that pose a revolutionary challenge to the system and lay the groundwork for a new society.

Our commitment to these principles shapes what we study and what we study shapes our practice. Our interest in dual power led us to study the Zapatista movement, which sparked questions about state power and the limits and benefits of dual power institutions. This impacted our thinking on the healthcare sector. Is it better to create small, model institutions or make demands on the state to provide universal access? How do we encourage people to think about the healthcare system they want while also taking advantage of opportunities to make system-wide changes?

NYSG: At the end of our second round of study, we were invited to help plan the Revolutionary Work in Our Times Summer School. Co-sponsored by Solidarity, Freedom Road Socialist Organization, the League of Revolutionaries for a New America, the LA Crew, and the NYSG, this four-day gathering brought together almost 200 revolutionaries and radicals from across the U.S. (along with small delegations from Puerto Rico and Canada) in August 2008.

Helping plan the summer school reflected our conclusion that we need to overcome the history of sectarianism on the left and build unity among those committed to radical transformation of society. Based on the assessment that the “social movement left” has an important role to play in building a stronger left, we worked hard to recruit our comrades from social movement organizations to be participants and presenters. We hope the relationships people built through the school will provide a groundwork for developing the broad-based, movement-rooted, and ideologically diverse left organization we need today.

How has your group changed based on the challenges you've encountered while studying together?

APP: The successes, challenges, and limitations of our delegation to the USSF have greatly informed our second cycle of study and the ways we organize ourselves today. The experience of large-scale participatory democracy allowed us to engage our principles in practice. Our commitment to praxis left us with a series of new questions. Central themes that emerged included coordination, leadership, structure, organization, and transformative community building.

At the level of coordination, we’ve found it necessary to clarify that non-hierarchical-organizing doesn’t mean a free-for-all or a disavowal of power dynamics. On the contrary, horizontal organizing requires intentional structure and coordination to directly address the different experiences and knowledge that people bring with them. While many of us have addressed these issues in our own collectives, we realized the need to develop a tighter and more transparent structure for APP.

Coming together for our initial round of study, many of us shared critiques concerning the patriarchal nature of the “charismatic” and individualized styles of leadership that have dominated many traditional forms of left organizing. As we grew, the need for a pro-active definition of leadership became increasingly clear. One of our current goals is to articulate an alternative leadership that emphasizes deep listening, actively nurturing a culture of participation in which everyone feels that their voice is valuable, and being cognizant of how power dynamics impact participation and emotional well-being.

ASC: It’s difficult to create a space where our different socialisms can grow like flowers instead of like weeds choking the life out of each other. However, through the years of practice in our various organizations, through Movement Generation, and now through the ASC, we are developing left culture and practice that draws from our different strengths. As the ASC, we changed our goals on organization building as many of us had little experience collaborating with one another. We quickly learned that there was much to be done in terms of building our theoretical foundation and our capacity for political study. Despite these challenges, our primary goals of relationship building and bringing together larger segments of the left continued.

We struggle to simultaneously comprehend what we are studying and to draw meaningful lessons. While trying to see shortcomings in past experiences, it’s important that we understand the conditions that impacted the decisions made in order to avoid sloppy and simplistic conclusions. We need to develop methods to understand our own conditions and possibilities. We need to remain humble and grounded when learning from the past and assessing political work today.

At times, people have critiqued the material we’ve read as being from one tradition or another. This has led the planning committee to ongoing solicitation of input from the membership. We’ve also struggled to maintain momentum and participation. In particular, while the ASC remained majority people of color, most of the people dropping off were people of color. Many have said that it was due to time pressures with their other work. We were also told that more follow up and reminder calls would help. The challenge remains creating participatory democratic processes when so many have so little time to participate. The planning committee of five recently expanded to eleven. We did this to build more leadership and increase participation, as we work to find a good balance between the planning committee moving the group forward and the larger group providing direction and focus.

How we work together is a critical part of the learning process. It’s where we can experiment with the kinds of leadership and organization we need.

LAC: One challenge we’ve faced is getting people to feel comfortable reading and understanding difficult, primary source material – reading Lenin as opposed to reading a book about Lenin. People are sometimes challenged by the language and the references to people, groups, and events they don’t know about. We also face the challenge of making such study accessible to non-English speakers, people with children, and people not accustomed to study and reading as a form of learning.

We’ve tried addressing these challenges by reading “easier,” newer things first, by creating activities that encourage drawing as a way of exploring ideas, and by using visuals for the material we cover. We also check in with people one-on-one as they are reading, before the group actually meets, to offer support and an opportunity to ask questions. Within the study group sessions, we use smaller break out groups to give people a chance to ask questions and “warm up” before large group discussion.

We’ve also found it important to incorporate our principle of mind/body/spirit into the study group process. This has meant giving people an opportunity to hear each other’s stories, and creating a space where feelings have as much value as intellect. This seems to allow people to feel more comfortable. They take more risks in the statements they make and the questions they ask.

NYSG: We’ve struggled with the fact that our participants come with very different degrees of theoretical and historical knowledge. This is somewhat, though not absolutely, related to differences in educational background and pre-existing familiarity with explicitly left theory. It was difficult to find methods that would ensure that people were clear on the fundamentals and also challenge everyone to go deeper. We’ve worked hard to make our group accessible by combining training on fundamentals with critical engagement using both popular education and presentation-discussion formats. We’ve also invited people from different socialist organizations to help us unpack certain histories and theories. We’ve encouraged all participants to help plan at least one session, and have shared childcare costs.

Our study group has struggled with the tension between our ambition to build a stronger left and the fact that the many demands we face keep our level of capacity low. We also struggle to ensure that our study remains connected with the organizing work of our members. To deal with these tensions, we are currently working to develop a new structure that will alternate between smaller study groups (or “grupitos”) based in our members’ mass work and large group studies.

In light of the deepening economic crisis and the election of Barack Obama, how is your study group thinking about the organizational and strategic demands of the current moment?

APP: In other regions of the world, we are able to identify truly transformative movements coordinated across issues, sectors, and communities. In Latin America, we take inspiration from the Zapatista-initiated Other Campaign, the powerful movements transforming Bolivia with and beyond the Morales government, and the Landless Workers’ Movement of Brazil as it moves toward creating alliances with urban movements in response to the neoliberal policies of the Lula administration.

As of yet, there is no radical movement with such broad and deep roots here in the US that is either positing or building viable alternatives in the face of a worsening world-economic crisis. This is what we want to create. Today, there are more possibilities for democracy, justice, economic equality, and ecological sustainability than ever before. The deepening economic crisis has led to a generalized understanding that we need a new system. The Obama administration’s response to some early mobilizations against the crisis suggests that more concessions can be won. The risk of cooptation, on the other hand, is much higher now than it was under the previous administration. The problems we face are global, however, and it is at this scale that we must ultimately be able to coordinate ourselves, both to fight back and to create new social relations.

ASC: We need a new kind of politics. This involves learning from the past but also looking at the moment in which we live. Socialisms of various sorts are in power again in Latin America. Anarchism and horizontalism is alive and well from occupied factories in Argentina to collectivized workplaces to Zapatista struggles. It’s important to take direction from many quarters – from Freedom Road Socialist Organization, to community-based organizing in the Right to the City Alliance, to the Zapatistas – and try to draw together important lessons and insights that are relevant to our struggles.

Through our experience, we’ve come to face the question of how can we build a left that deserves to lead – a left that provides space for people to grow, study, heal, and get trained to build healthy self-governing communities that can transform society. This is happening throughout the country in thousands of organizations and projects. However, there is a tremendous need to create formal spaces to push to the next level. Many of us lack tools to make sense of the world around us. Many of us lack historical knowledge of our movements. We are struggling to move beyond comfortable left positions and place our revolutionary goals in the conditions we face. Our goal is not to be a marginal radical pole but to radically transform society.

As we begin our second round of study, we are focusing on national politics and strategy in this period of economic crisis and an Obama presidency. We are focusing on struggles for health care, immigrant rights, ecological sustainability, peace, and economic justice with the following questions: What is our vision and what are our transitional demands toward socialism? What should we be fighting for in this period? And what should left strategy be to both win immediate demands and build the power of working class and oppressed peoples? We are excited to step up to the challenges and opportunities before us, and the ASC is one space to help us do that.

LAC: We need to be flexible and encourage organizing and experimentation in many different spaces. The work we do today is like planting chamise, a brush plant native to California. When exposed to open flame, the chamise releases combustible gasses that accelerate the spread of wildfires. We can’t predict exactly when and where these fires will start, but history shows us that people do rise up. Whether these uprisings can become movements powerful enough to transform society has a lot to do with the ideas that have been put out there and the organizing that has been done ahead of time.

The widespread energy created by Obama’s election has ignited hope and inspired many people to believe in the possibility for change. We see this as an opportunity to encourage folks to engage in collective action to achieve broader changes instead of waiting for it to come from ‘above’. The radical left’s weak response to the economic crisis also teaches us that we need to break with old paradigms and experiment with new strategies for change.

Although we don’t think it’s particularly useful at this stage to develop a rigid view of which communities or sectors will be “in the lead” of future movements, our principles do guide how we prioritize where to work. Specifically, we try to make connections between different struggles. In our education organizing, we push for a vision in which the experiences and demands of teachers, students, and parents are seen as unbreakapartable. As we prepare for this year’s May 1st actions, we are emphasizing cross-sector demands that point toward a broad popular response to the economic crisis. This means moving beyond a narrow focus on immigrant rights to include demands for housing, healthcare, education, access to food, and dismantling the security state.

NYSG: We find hope in several developments on the social movement left. In the last couple of years, social movements have consolidated into national formations such as Grassroots Global Justice, the Right to the City Alliance, and the National Domestic Workers’ Alliance, and – in a different vein – the US Social Forum. But while the social movement left is the site of some of the most dynamic struggles, it remains limited by its relatively small scale and lack of strategic vision. We are also limited by the weakness of the explicitly socialist left and the disunity between left organizations. We find hope, however, in the unity built through the Revolutionary Work in Our Times Summer School.

We need strong revolutionary organizations that can bring together the social movement left with the membership of already existing left organizations. In order to lay the groundwork for that level of revolutionary organization, we identified four priorities: First, community-based organizing work in oppressed communities is the most important work that revolutionaries can be doing today. More revolutionaries need to be engaged in the work to build the power of oppressed people. Second, we have to promote the broadest possible development of revolutionary leadership rooted in oppressed communities, particularly in working class communities of color. Third, we need to continuously develop and refine a systematic understanding of the world we live in and what it will take to bring about the revolutionary transformation of society. We need spaces to develop and debate revolutionary theory and strategy, and forums to coordinate their implementation. Fourth, the constitution of a revolutionary left organization for the 21st century depends on the unification of the emergent left forces from social movements with socialist organizations (which need to build a higher level of inter-group unity in order to overcome past divisions).

We recently launched a new phase of study focused on developing left strategies to address the challenges and opportunities of the economic crisis and the “Obama era.” This new focus has produced an overwhelming response and brought together more than 150 activists and organizers from around the city. We are combining both historical reflections on the high tide of resistance in New York during the Great Depression and assessments of our current conditions. This is a unique historical moment, and we hope these strategic dialogues will help us to develop the clarity we need to step up to the historic plate. We believe that if we can get more coordinated and strategic, our movements will look radically different ten years from now.

'08-'09 Year in Review

2009-08-31T23:53:00.006-04:00

Zapagringo began three years ago following a trip I took to cover the beginnings of the Other Campaign from Oaxaca. Inspired by the zapatistas' Sixth Declaration of the Lacandon Jungle (the Sexta), most of the Oaxacan organizers I met remarked that this Other Campaign they were building would "take at least ten years." And here we are three-and-a-half years since Subcomandante Marcos left the zapatista communities to tour Mexico, and four years since the release of the Sexta.

In 2006, Mexico was shaken by the Other Campaign, the Oaxaca Commune and another stolen election. In these few years that have followed, the regional, national and global organizing related to these Mexican initiatives have continued to simmer, build and transform. Some of this you'll be able to find documented here (check out the '06-'07 and '07-'08 years in review).

For zapagringo's 3rd season, I slowed to keeping a pace of one post a month to make room for all the work and changes that have taken place in my political and personal work. We started off this round with the 3rd Anniversary of the Other Campaign last September, wherein the zapatistas reaffirmed their commitment to struggle for the freedom of the political prisoners of Atenco and convoked the first World Festival of Dignified Rage.

The World Festival of Dignified Rage was held in Mexico City, the zapatista Caracol of Oventic and San Cristobal de las Casas, Chiapas over the last week of 2008 and the first of 2009. Here you'll find reports of activities and analysis generated in the lead up to, during and following that gathering 1,2,3,4.

It was also during this same time that Israel launched a brutal military offensive against the people of Gaza; messages and actions of solidarity rang out from Chiapas, Oaxaca, NYC and so many corners of the world. Thinking more long term and along the lines of the kind of direct connections between communities-in-struggle that is proposed in the Sexta, an initiative to link indigenous youth on Turtle Island to youth in Palestine literally took flight this year -> here's a post from a cross-struggle, solidarity-building fundraiser for the Indigenous Youth Delegation to Palestine, as well as a link to that delegation's blog.

Some powerful zapatista-inspired thinking/practice has come out of the US as well in this past year. There's Kolya Abramsky's piece written in the days before the first World Festival of Dignified Rage. Grace Lee Boggs and crew at the Boggs Center continue to develop a powerful analysis from their home in Detroit as do the compas building El Kilombo Intergaláctico in Durham, North Carolina 1,2. There was some exploration of "science fiction from below" and, in response to the crises of the moment, the international Midnight Notes Collective put out some excellent analysis.

Moving closer to (my) home, Movement for Justice in El Barrio (MJB) continue their organizing against displacement in East Harlem and beyond 1,2. Especially important to their participation in the Other Campaign has been their persistence in organizing for Freedom and Justice for Atenco. Amongst other actions, they held a special International Women's Day event, shut down the Mexican Consulate in NYC, and held a live cross-border press conference at this year's Allied Media Conference to raise awareness and seek freedom for Atenco's political prisoners. MJB recently published a report from this press conference, which can be found (in Spanish) here. To learn more about the people of Atenco, in their own words, check out this letter from the People's Front in Defense of the Land to the zapatistas.

Looking forward to the year ahead, we may just see the ongoing struggles in Mexico burst forth once more as rebels seize on the 200th anniversary of Mexican Independence (1810) and the 100th anniversary of the Mexican Revolution (1910) to take the initiative in transforming their country. For my own part, I'm hoping to finally find some space to write again after a tumultuous past year. Perhaps a good English-language piece on all that has been going on around Atenco and the Other Campaign? Maybe some collectively written pieces from my work with Regeneración Childcare NYC, the Challenging Male Supremacy Project and Another Politics is Possible... or perhaps I'll be publishing a piece by you, dear zapagringo reader?

Although the frequency may change from time to time, this is still your channel for zapatista-inspired struggle on Turtle Island and throughout the galaxy - hasta pronto, compas!

The Arts of Living in Common

2009-07-01T16:00:00.002-04:00

This talk by El Kilombo was given as part of an event at El Kilombo social center in Durham, NC, titled "Art and Revolution," held on Februrary 19, 2009 with guest speakers Fred Moten and Robin D.G. Kelley. The event was part of El Kilombo's spring 2009 speaker series: "Things Unseen: Building Autonomy in a Time of Crisis."

The Arts of Living in Common
by El Kilombo Intergaláctico

I want to expand on the presentation that was given by Kilombo at our last event by briefly proposing an additional four points which we feel directly relate to tonight’s topic and which we hope will resonate with what Robyn Kelly and Fred Moten have already said. I will make sure to be brief so that everyone has an opportunity to participate in the Q&A that will immediately follow:

1) The Way of Viewing Change From Above: Exceptionality and Appear(ing) in the Given Field of the Visible.

I wanted to start giving some context to the points below by mentioning that Kilombo lives in this neighborhood that you find yourself in tonight, a neighborhood that in Spanish is known as “El Hoyo,” which I think we can translate as “the hole in the ground.” In the process of starting to learn to live in this hole in the ground Kilombo has begun to see things upside down. That is from the bottom up. But in order to better explain this I will start from the top down. Given our starting point we have begun to delineate that in the world out there, in the world up there, there is a way of viewing the issue of change, even of revolution, that we feel expresses itself simultaneously in art and politics. This vision begins with a simple premise; all movements for change should be directed outward and upward—the goal of movements for change should be to grow beyond themselves so as to eventually have the strength to “take power” and occupy the existing political and cultural institutions of our society. Power is up there and we must somehow get at it. As a consequence of this obsession with that which exists above, this vision of change has two defining characteristics; the first is that an overwhelming amount of energy is placed on appearing in the given field of the visible. Thus, the activist, the artist, the academic, and the politician all share a thirst for the various mediums of appearance; the bright lights of the media, the walls of the hip gallery, the pages of that sexy journal publication, and the microphones of the next electoral process. The goal is to organize that one protest, that one opening, to write that one article or that one special speech, that will allow you to be seen and heard by those who have not seen and heard you, believing that through the expression of opposition to existing policy there can be a change in the correlations of forces that will eventually allow you entry into those institutions up above. As a correlate, this vision of change has a second characteristic; in order to believe that it is you or your group that should be seen and heard, you must also believe that you have something to show and say that others do not. In other words, the desire to appear is always accompanied by an implicit belief that you are exceptional; unlike everyone else whose words, semblance, or images might appear, the appearance of your words, semblance or images is “different.” Your appearance, unlike all the other appearances that have come before and that will follow you in those very mediums, will produce change. In sum, for this vision from above, power is up there, and only by being led by those with the exceptional skills to appear, what we used to call the vanguard or the avant-garde, can we get there, can we get to power and use it for change.

2) The Creative Class, As Our Local Vanguard

From this hole in the ground we see our neighborhood under assault. An assault that takes various forms; one obvious form is the constant harassment of Black, Latino and poor white residents by all types of police forces, a second more subtle but yet equally effective form of assault on the life of Durham's neighborhoods has been the deployment of the discourse of art and creativity to relegate the poor residents of our neighborhood and of the city of Durham as a whole to the realm of the unproductive, to the living dead. That is, before we were sold the idea that Durham was being "revitalized" (that it was being given an injection of life) it was necessary to convince us all that somewhere along the way it had died. Part and parcel of this project has been the discourse of the "creative class" as a vanguard of sorts, a discourse that insists that our neighborhoods become interesting only when an exceptional class of artists, students, academics, and high-tech knowledge workers more generally move into the area and place their images and semblances up for display. Of course these neighborhoods weren't suffering from a lack of creativity but from the processes of white flight and suburbanization that led to an enormous disinvestment from urban neighborhoods across the country. In order to further obscure this fact, the "revitalization" of Durham has been intimately tied not only to attempts to attract "the creative class," but also to portray Durham as a city friendly to the arts more generally. Our neighborhood and the surrounding neighborhoods have in particular been selected as the site for an "arts corridor," a series of arts galleries, and a newly constructed Center for the arts, all sponsored by the very people who through their investment practices force the removal of Durham's Black, Latino, and poor white populations. A fact that in itself makes one wonder whether this influx of the “creative class,” wasn’t in fact the influx of a “new middle class” intended to make Durham safe, not for creativity, but for real estate speculation.

3) The Way of Viewing Change from Below: Life in Common and The Reorganization of the Sensible.

This narrative from above that has been built around the “creative class” as the agent of change in Durham has to be seen as a rather obvious attempt to invert reality. Composed primarily of a population running from those cemeteries known as suburbs, the new residents of the city are attracted to the neighborhoods that they settle in exactly because of the forms of life nurtured by their poor Black, Latino and White neighbors. The very people portrayed in the narrative of the “creative class” as unproductive. That is, anyone who has spent time in this neighborhood knows that it is teaming with life. On any given day one can walk through this hole in the ground and find: a daily pick up soccer game in the park, a tamales sale, merchandise day on Trinity Ave. with the accompanying food and music, parking lot festivals, enormous block wide barbecues, what seems to be an infinite number of apartment complex wide quinceañeras and baptisms, outdoor movie nights, neighbors planting their own stock of corn and beans in their front yard, full fledged impromptu parades up and down Geer St., and of course the endless circulation of chisme (gossip) that takes place around the Paleta cart. The point I want to emphasize here is not that these neighborhoods are entertaining, but rather, that these outward signs of conviviality are under-girded by an invisible and yet immense network of social cooperation that is simply unimaginable in other parts of the city. The very condition of exclusion from the benefits—the property and the income, although not the process, of socialized production, forces these communities into a struggle for survival. In this struggle, and having limited access to outside goods and services, these neighborhoods begin to collectively produce goods and services for themselves, and to establish rules that guarantee the equitable distribution of those items (Sudhir Venkatesh and Mike Davis). That is, in sharp contrast to the vision of change up above that places such value on exceptionality, here below it is understood that an improvement in social conditions can take place only to the extent that one accepts that one’s condition is common. Quoting Eduardo, who played for us earlier tonight, the situation down here forces us to acknowledge that in order for conditions to change in this neighborhood “we have to build a life in common and understand that within that life each of us is common.” Thus, these invisible practices of cooperation become seeds that grow inward and downward, the very seeds that today comprise Kilombo. That is, they do not seek some future point where they might appear in the given field of the visible. Rather, the logic of these seeds, of these practices, of these exercises of power, is to reinforce themselves, to intensify the experience of the new social relations that are built within them so as to enact a reorganization of the senses, so as to produce new subjects with a radically different field of vision. That is, these seeds are not content to act merely in the given, rather they tend to reach beyond and directly work on the parameters of possibility. Yet, if one has doubts of the extent or capacity of these invisible forces to intervene in the real, ask yourself, who up above was not caught by total surprise at the enormity of the events of May 1, 2006? (The day that Kilombo first opened its doors)

4) The Art of Revolution Today

Today, in the world up above, there is endless chatter about a “financial crisis,” a crisis that has no doubt bruised the new middle class, and devastated poor Black and Latino communities. Up there we’re bombarded with questions of whether we should bailout the financial sector, nationalize the banks, or reconstruct “the real economy?” In short, in the world up above, the discussion remains limited to asking what forms of knowledge will help us to rebuild the corporate and institutional ladders that have just crumbled out from underneath our feet; to rebuild the system in which artists, academics, politicians...etc. can continue aspiring to heights of visibility and exceptionality. Down here where capitalism has never been experienced as anything but a crisis, talk of the “crisis of capitalism” hardly helps to clarify the situation. Rather, down here the persistence of things unseen demands a rather different discussion, one that directly raises the question of belief. Do we believe in this world? Do we believe that this world is always and forever giving birth to another? Do we still believe in the power of the invisible? If so, and if we’re ready to act on our belief then another option begins to take shape…we must turn the world upside down, and make those invisible forms of cooperation already in motion down here the very basis for a new life, a life where there will no longer be a down here and an up there. From our perspective, from this hole in the ground, it is only these practices that open to that which is beyond the given that will allow us as artists, activists, and academics to introduce collective action and innovation back into the very heart of art and politics. In other words, for Kilombo this inversion is the art of revolution today. Anything else will be more of the same.

Reports from the 2nd NYC Anti-Displacement Encuentro

2009-06-14T00:01:00.006-04:00

photo by Karen Yi

UPDATE July 2 '09: Check out Voices of the Other New York on ZNET.

UPDATE June 15 '09: The Indypendent just posted a slideshow of the Encuentro.

Below is the report from Movement for Justice in El Barrio on their Second Encuentro for Humanity and Against Displacement. I'll link to more reports on the Encuentro at this post as they come out...

(en español abajo)

To our sisters and brothers of The People’s Front in Defense of the Land:
To our Zapatista sisters and brothers:
To our compañer@s, adherents of the Other Campaign in Mexico:
To our compañer@s adherents of the Zezta Internazional:
To our compañer@s adherents of the International Campaign in Defense of El Barrio and our allies from all over the world:

From the Other New York and zapatista East Harlem, which is not for sale and does not forget the prisoners of Atenco, receive a greeting from the women, men, and children, those socially marginalized and globally excluded, who belong to The Other Campaign New York, Movement for Justice in El Barrio:

We are writing to share with you that this past Sunday, June 7th, 2009, we held here, in zapatista East Harlem known as El Barrio, the Second New York City Encuentro for Dignity and Against Displacement, with the participation of 38 organizations representing the resistance against neoliberalism in New York, Connecticut, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts. This second encuentro, just as the first one – held two years ago -, was inspired by the encuentros of the Zapatistas in Mexico from below and to the left, in order to get know each other and recognize one another in our struggles for a world where many worlds fit and against neoliberal exclusion.

As The People’s Front in Defense of the Land expressed in their message sent to us from Atenco for our Second Encuentro: “One fight unites us, the fight against capitalism. It does not matter where we find ourselves, in Harlem, Bombay, Buenos Aires, Zaragoza, Sidney, Cochabamba, Paris, Manchester, the fight against all forms of domination are one and the same.” This is what we confirmed in this encuentro, where in addition to exchanging experiences and informing each other about our forms of struggle, we had the opportunity to go into depth about who we are, where we are, the conditions we face, our forms of struggle, who is our enemy, and what is our dream. We arrived at the conclusion that, just as we did in the First Encuentro, the enemy of the organizations fighting displacement is the capitalist system of global exclusion, including the fact that this system has allies who operate at a local level as tools of the system.

As our compañero Filiberto expressed, representing Movement for Justice in El Barrio:

Eviction and displacement are happening all over the world. Which is why we have to organize so that united we can destroy this corrupt system in its entirety. Here in El Barrio we have realized that the Mayor Mike Bloomberg and the city council members: Melissa Mark-Viverito, Robert Jackson, and Inez Dickens do not represent the community and on the contrary support and implement aggressive plans for displacement. These politicians have approved projects that directly affect the entire community, they make the people think that they are for the development and progress of the community, but they do not publicize the bad side of their proposals… By keeping themselves in a position to fill their pockets with money, these politicians are capable of buying the people, as in the case of one of our compañeros whom Melissa Mark-Viverito offered money to in exchange for abandoning Movement and working with her, but he refused and did not sell out. But we know that certain organizations and groups do sell out and receive money from politicians and do not represent the community, also they do fake publicity stunts and promote themselves as being against displacement when everything is the contrary.

The distinct groups from New York that participated in our round table discussion echoed this reflection. Representatives from the Thomas Jefferson Houses Tenants Association, Coalition to Preserve Community, Harlem Tenants Council, Sunset Park Alliance of Neighbors, and the combative group CAAAV from Chinatown were there, amongst others, including the group Make the Road New York that presented us with a skit about their struggle, with songs that spoke about the deplorable housing conditions they face and the useless or false response from the landlords and politicians.

Through this exchange CAAAV informed us that, in Chinatown, urban rezoning plans in the last year have accelerated to the point that people must remove all of their belongings and evacuate their homes within three hours. Meanwhile, in Harlem, the criminalization of being young and African American is a tactic of war against the community in order to expel them, not just from Harlem but from the entire system, since the young people who are arrested and marked with criminal records will no loner have access to basic services, such as housing, and to essential human rights, such as education. “Our young people are being killed in our streets by the police, for the single fact of being youth,” expressed our compañeros.

With respect to the subject of education, which should be free, and the repression of youth, we want to share with our fellow student and youth members of The Other Campaign the reflections concerning the rezoning plans in the surrounding area of Columbia University, which is a private university. “They tell us that the university is good, that it cooperates with the community, and that the reurbanization plans for its surrounding areas are good for the community because they will bring a safe environment. But how? As soon as neighborhoods become residential zones, along with evicting the original community members through violent means, police arrive, sieges arrive, armed detectives arrive,” expressed our compañero from the Coalition to Preserve Community in the surrounding area of Columbia University, pointing out that this has to do with a system of global exclusion. Referring to a university that promotes excluding rebellious and informed students and educating only the elites of the United States, he stated, “It is not just the elites of this country but the elites of the whole world, so it will be those who are privileged who will be displacing poor people from communities.”

For their part, the representatives of that community told us the history of Central and West Harlem and of the streets that are beginning to change due to Mayor Bloomberg’s plans to rezone the area. A fundamental part of our dialogue referred to those allies of the system: elected public officials that, in their district, try to bribe the people, and the “community boards” that first tried to fool the people into believing that the displacement will only happen with their opinion. “Meanwhile, the contracts with the big construction companies were already signed a long time ago; the government officials and the members of these community boards already know the pact is made since before: they don’t fool us,” expressed the representing organizations.

Likewise, one of the aspects of our struggle in our very own community, El Barrio, consists of dealing with cosmetic organizations that, paid for by the local government, try to confuse the community by organizing activities that don’t represent the local community, with merely theatrical effects, without any social or economic repercussions, even falsely imitating symbols of the social struggle. While they do this, they promote the political agenda of public officials that approve and impose, from above, their plans of displacement. Nonetheless, we were pleased to see that, at this second encuentro, in addition to the organizations in favor of our same cause and that were with us two years ago, many more organizations joined us as well.

In the segment of our program that followed, we showed the New York City premiere of the video that we received about the struggle in New Orleans against neoliberal displacement. As very few know, at the end of last year, the City Council of New Orleans, made up by mostly white people, not only allowed an attack, but they themselves ridiculed in front of the cameras, the protesters, members of the African American community, victims of Hurricane Katrina whose homes were demolished in order to build luxury condos. They were reprimanded, beaten, sprayed with tear gas and arrested.

We expressed our solidarity with the people of New Orleans in resistance and we reiterated our struggle is not only local, but also national. And worldwide...

It extends from New York to New Orleans and from here to Atenco, Mexico. With great excitement we read the message from our sisters and brothers from Atenco and we concluded this dialogue by showing a video about the repression in Atenco. In the video we also showed the different protests that happened in distinct parts of the world during the day of solidarity with Atenco, including the takeover of the consulate in New York on May 4th by the members of Movement for Justice in El Barrio, who succeeded in entering the consulate, unfolding their signs once inside, marching, chanting loudly, demanding the liberation of the 12 political prisoners and handing out to the people in line copies of videos of the struggle of Atenco, which made the authorities shut down the Consulate.

The pain was shared, but also the solidarity and the joy of recognizing one another: of knowing that we are not alone. In closing, once again, we asked the children to break the neoliberal piñata. They broke it with force and, by doing so, found candy, just like candy are the fruits we hope to find in the end of this struggle for a world where many worlds fit, for peace and justice, dignified housing, health, and education for all, and for the liberty of political prisoners in Atenco, in Mexico, and throughout the world. Our heart is with all of you.

We are all Atenco!
Liberty for political prisoners!
Long live the Other Campaign!
And long live the Zapatista Army for National Liberation!
Fraternally:
Movement for Justice in El Barrio.The Other Campaign New York

---

A nuestr@s hermanas y hermanos del Frente de Pueblos en Defensa de la Tierra:
A nuestr@s hermanas y hermanos zapatistas:
A nuestr@s compañer@s, adherentes de La Otra Campaña en México.
A nuestr@s companer@s de la Zezta Internazional:
A nuestr@s companer@s adherentes a la Campaña Internacional en Defensa de El Barrio y nuestros aliados de todo el mundo:

Desde la Otra Nueva York y el Este del Harlem zapatista que no se vende y que no olvida a los presos de Atenco, reciban un saludo de las mujeres, hombres y niñ@s, los marginados sociales y excluidos globalmente, pertenecientes a La Otra Campaña Nueva York, Movimiento por Justicia del Barrio:

Les escribimos para compartir con ustedes que este domingo 7 de junio de 2009, realizamos aquí, en el Este del Harlem zapatista conocido como El Barrio, el Segundo Encuentro Nueva York por la Dignidad y Contra el Desplazamiento, con la participación de 38 organizaciones sociales representativas de la resistencia contra el neoliberalismo en Nueva York, Connecticut, Nueva Jersey, Pensilvania y Massachusetts. Este segundo encuentro, al igual que el primero -realizado hace dos años-, se inspiró en los encuentros realizados por l@s zapatistas en el México de abajo y a la izquierda, para conocernos y reconocernos en nuestras luchas por un mundo donde quepan muchos mundos y contra la exclusión neoliberal.

Como nos manifestó el Frente de Pueblos en Defensa de la Tierra en su mensaje enviado desde Atenco para nuestro Segundo Encuentro: “Una lucha nos une, la lucha contra el capitalismo. No importa desde donde nos encontremos, en Harlem, Bombay, Buenos Aires, Zaragoza, Sídney, Cochabamba, Paris, Manchester, la lucha contra las formas de dominación son las mismas”. Eso fue lo que corroboramos en este encuentro donde, además de intercambiar experiencias e informarnos sobre nuestras formas de lucha, tuvimos la oportunidad de profundizar sobre quiénes somos, dónde estamos, qué condiciones enfrentamos, cuáles son nuestras formas de lucha, quién es nuestro enemigo, y cuál es nuestro sueño. Llegamos a la conclusión de que, si bien tal como nos habíamos planteado en nuestro Primer Encuentro, el “enemigo” de las agrupaciones que luchan contra el desplazamiento es un sistema capitalista de exclusión global, también es verdad que ese sistema tiene aliados que operan a nivel local como herramientas de ese sistema.

Tal como expresó nuestro compañero Filiberto, en representación de Movimiento por Justicia del Barrio:

...El desalojo y el desplazamiento está pasando en todo el mundo. Es por ello que nos tenemos que organizar para que unidos podamos derrotar a todo este sistema corrupto: aquí, en El Barrio, nos hemos dado cuenta que el alcalde Mike Bloomberg y los concejales Melissa Mark-Viverito, Robert Jackson e Inez Dickens, no representan a la comunidad, y por el contrario, ellos respaldan e implementan planes agresivos de desalojo. Han aprobado proyectos que afectan de manera directa a toda la comunidad en general; ellos hacen pensar al pueblo que todo esto lo hacen para el desarrollo y progreso del pueblo, pero no anuncian el lado malo de sus propuestas... Ellos, por mantenerse en el puesto llenándose los bolsillos de dinero, son capaces de tratar de comprar al pueblo, como en el caso de uno de nuestros compañeros, al cual la concejal Melissa Mark-Viverito le ofreció dinero a cambio de que abandonara Movimiento y para que trabajara con ella, pero él se negó y no se vendió... Pero sabemos que ciertas organizaciones y grupos sí se venden y reciben dinero por parte de los funcionarios, y no representan a la comunidad; además, se hacen propaganda falsa y se promueven que están en contra del desalojo cuando es todo lo contrario.

Hicieron eco de esta reflexión las distintas agrupaciones de Nueva York que participaron en nuestra mesa redonda. Compartieron sus luchas representantes de la Asociación Inquilinaria Thomas Jefferson, de la Coalición para Preservar a la Comunidad, del Consejo de Inquilinos de Harlem, de la Alianza de Vecinos Sunset Park, y del combativo grupo CAAAV del Barrio Chino, entre otros, además de que el grupo Se Hace Camino en Nueva York nos presentó una obra de teatro sobre su lucha, con canciones que hablaban sobre las deplorables condiciones de vivienda que enfrentan y la nula o falsa respuesta de los propietarios y politicos.

Mediante este intercambio nos informamos de que, en Chinatown (Barrio Chino), los planes de rezonificación urbana en el último año se han acelerado a tal grado que a la gente se le obliga a sacar todas sus pertenencias y evacuar sus casas en un plazo de tres horas. Mientras tanto, en Harlem, la criminalización por el hecho de ser joven y afroestadounidense es una táctica de guerra contra la comunidad para expulsarla, no sólo de Harlem sino del sistema entero, pues los jóvenes a los se les arresta y se les marca con antecedentes penales después ya no tendrán acceso a los servicios básicos, como es la vivienda, y a los derechos humanos elementales, como lo es el de la educación. “Nuestros jóvenes están siendo asesinados en nuestras calles por la policía, por el sólo hecho de ser jóvenes”, expresaron nuestros compañeros participantes.

Respecto al tema de la educación, que debería de ser gratuita, y de la represión a los jóvenes, queremos compartir con nuestros compañeros adherentes de La Otra Campaña jóvenes y estudiantes las reflexiones respecto a los planes de rezonificación en los alrededores de la Universidad de Columbia, que es una universidad privada. “Se nos dice que la universidad es buena, que coopera con la comunidad, y que los planes de reurbanización de sus alrededores son buenos para la comunidad porque van a traer un ambiente seguro. ¿Pero cuál? En cuanto los barrios se convierten en zonas residenciales, además de desalojar a los antiguos pobladores con métodos violentos, llegan los policías, llegan los cercos, llegan los detectives armados”, nos manifestó el compañero representante de la Coalición para Preservar a la Comunidad en los alrededores de la universidad de Columbia, señalando que se trata de un sistema de exclusion mundial. Al referirse a una universidad que se propone excluir a sus estudiantes rebeldes e informados y educar sólo a las élites de Estados Unidos, señaló: “No sólo son las élites del país sino las élites de todo el mundo, entonces serán los privilegiados quienes estarán desplazando a la gente pobre de los barrios”.

Por su parte, los compañeros representantes de ese pueblo nos contaron de la historia del Centro y Oeste de Harlem y de las calles que están empezando a cambiar debido a los planes del alcalde Bloomberg de rezonificarlo. Una parte fundamental de nuestro debate se refirió a los aliados del sistema: los funcionarios públicos electos que, en su localidad, tratan de sobornar a los pobladores, y las “juntas comunitarias municipales” que incluso en un principio engañaron a la gente haciéndole creer que el desalojo se hará pidiéndole su
opinión.

“Mientras tanto, los contratos con las grandes constructoras ya están firmados desde hace mucho; los gobernantes y los miembros de las juntas ya saben que el pacto está hecho desde antes: no nos engañemos”, expresaron los representantes.

Asimismo, uno de los aspectos de nuestra lucha en nuestra propia comunidad de El Barrio consiste en enfrentar agrupaciones cosméticas que, pagadas por el gobierno local, tratan de confundir a la población realizando actos que no tienen una representatividad de la comunidad local, con efectos meramente teatrales, sin ninguna repercusión social ni económica e incluso, imitando falsamente los emblemas de la lucha social. Mientras hacen esto, ellos promueven la agenda politica de los funcionarios publicos que aprueban y imponen, desde arriba, sus planes de desplazamiento.

Sin embargo, nos dio gusto ver que, a este segundo encuentro, además de la mayoría de las organizaciones partidarias de nuestra misma causa y que estuvieron con nosotros hace dos años, se sumaron otras muchas también independientes.

En el siguiente segmento de nuestro programa, proyectamos el estreno en Nueva York del video que recibimos sobre la lucha en Nueva Orleáns contra el desplazamiento neoliberal. Como muy pocos saben, a finales del año pasado, el Concejo Municipal de Nueva Orleáns, formado en su gran mayoria por gente blanca, no sólo permitió un ataque, sino que se burló ante las cámaras, de los manifestantes, pobladores de raza negra, damnificados del huracán Katrina a quienes ahora les demolieron sus viviendas para construir zonas de lujo. Éstos fueron reprimidos, golpeados, rociados con gases lacrimógenos y arrestados. Expresamos nuestra solidaridad para el pueblo de Nueva Orleáns en resistencia y reiteramos que nuestra lucha no sólo es local, sino nacional. Y mundial...

Se extiende de Nueva York a Nueva Orleáns y desde aquí a Atenco, México. Con gran emoción leímos el mensaje de nuestros hermanos de Atenco y concluimos ese debate con la proyección de un video sobre la represión en Atenco. En él, mostramos también las diferentes protestas que ocurrieron en distintas partes del mundo durante la jornada de solidaridad con Atenco, incluyendo la toma del consulado de México en Nueva York efectuada el 4 de Mayo por los compañeros de Movimiento por Justicia del Barrio, quienes lograron entrar al consulado, desdoblar sus pancartas una vez dentro, marchar, gritar consignas, exigir la liberacion de los 12 presos politicos y repartir a la gente formada copias de los videos de la lucha de Atenco, lo que hizo que las autoridades cerraran el Consulado.

Se compartió el dolor, pero también la solidaridad y la alegría de reconocernos: de saber que no estamos solos. Para concluir, una vez más pedimos a los niños asistentes que rompieran la piñata del neoliberalismo. La rompieron con fuerza y, al hacerlo, encontraron dulces, como dulces son los frutos que esperamos encontrar al final de esta lucha por un mundo donde quepan muchos mundos, por la paz con justicia, vivienda digna, salud y educación para todos, y por la libertad a los presos políticos de Atenco, de México y del mundo. Nuestro corazón está con ustedes.

¡Todos somos Atenco!
¡Libertad a los presos políticos!
¡Viva La Otra Campaña!
¡Y que viva el Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional!
Fraternalmente:
Movimiento por Justicia del Barrio. La Otra Campaña Nueva York

Invite to 2nd NYC Anti-Displacement Encuentro

2009-05-20T11:49:00.002-04:00

Español abajo

The rebels search each other out. They walk towards one another, breaking down fences, they find each other. The rebels begin to recognize themselves, to know themselves to be equal and different. They continue walking as it is now necessary to walk, that is to say, resisting....--words of the Zapatistas at the First Intercontinental Encuentro for Humanity and Against Neoliberalism

An invitation to: Members and families of organizations fighting against displacement in their communities across NYC

From: Movement for Justice in El Barrio

Second NYC Encuentro for Dignity and Against Displacement

An Encuentro is a space for people to come together, it is a gathering. An Encuentro is not a meeting, a panel or a conference, it is a way of sharing developed by the Zapatistas as another form of doing politics: from below and to the left. It is a place where we can all speak, we will all listen, and we can all learn. It is a place where we can share the many different struggles that make us one.

EL BARRIO, NYC

SUNDAY, JUNE 7th, 4:30 PM

On Sunday, June 7th, Movement for Justice in El Barrio invites members and families of organizations fighting against neoliberal displacement for an evening of sharing, dialogue and food to learn from one another’s resistance throughout the city.

In our first Encuentro, the voices of groups resisting neoliberal displacement across the city echoed together as we learned from each other’s rage and each other’s dreams.

In this Encuentro, we would like to hear once again from people impacted by the devastating effects of displacement who are fighting back in their own communities, people who will not be bought by and are not dependent on politicians, political parties, or government agencies but look to the power of the people for strength to resist.

Please RSVP by Tuesday, May 26th

We are Movement for Justice in El Barrio. We are a group of humble and simple people who fight for justice and for humanity. Movement for Justice in El Barrio is fighting against gentrification in El Barrio, a process that is better understood by we who are affected by it as the displacement of families from their homes for being poor, immigrants and people of color. We are part of the Zapatista initiated transnational movement called “The Other Campaign.”

For Movement for Justice in El Barrio, the struggle for justice means fighting for the liberation of women, immigrants, lesbians, people of color, gays and the transgender community. We all share a common enemy and its called neoliberalism. Neoliberalism wishes to divide us and keep us from combining our forces. We will defeat this by continuing to unite all of our communities until we achieve true liberation for all.

Movement for Justice in El Barrio fights against capitalists and against bad governments and their neoliberal agendas. The landlords and the government belong to a culture of capitalism that uses the power of money to take control of that which belongs to the community. They want to displace poor families to renovate their buildings and rent the apartments to rich people, to white people with money. With the excuse of “developing the community,” they want to change the look of our neighborhood.

They want to remove from the street the street vendors, who earn an honorable and dignified living, the families that have their small restaurants, small clothing stores, and the small bodegas on the corners in our neighborhood. They want to displace us to bring in their luxury restaurants, their large expensive clothing stores, their supermarket chains. They want to change our neighborhood. They want to change our culture. They want to change that which makes us Latin@, African-American, Asian or Indigenous. They want to change everything that makes us El Barrio.

Together, we make our dignity resistance and we fight back against the actions of capitalist landlords and multinational corporations who are displacing poor families from El Barrio. We fight back locally and across borders. We fight back against the government institutions that help the landlords fulfill their goals. We fight back against Mayor Bloomberg and a city council that is pushing a neoliberal agenda across our neighborhoods and our city. We know that this is happening all over the city and around the world and that we do not stand alone in our resistance.

Here in Harlem, the three council members that represent East, Central and West Harlem, Melissa Mark-Viverito, Inez Dickens and Robert Jackson have time and again joined billionaire Mayor Bloomberg to plan, promote, and approve plans that displace our communities. We, as the community in El Barrio, and our sisters and brothers in West and Central Harlem have had the experience of seeing the members of the city council come to agreements amongst themselves to approve their neoliberal gentrification projects that betray the communities that they claim they represent. We have stood together to reject these plans and will continue to fight back and demand respect for our long histories and rich cultures

From Chinatown to Chiapas, from Sunset Park to South Africa to Salford, from Harlem to Morocco to San Salvador Atenco and in all of the places in between, we know that there are humble and simple people like ourselves rising up in dignified rage and fighting back against neoliberal displacement to keep their homes and save their communities.

As we struggle here we do not forget our brothers and sisters resisting in the far corners of the world. Nor do we forget where we come from and that many of us have already experienced displacement from our homelands. We join the humble and simple people across the world in their resistance as we stand up and join the fight against a global capitalist system that has pushed us to this dignified rage.

We fight so that:

The oceans and mountains will belong to those that live in and take care of them.

The rivers and deserts will belong to those that live in and take care of them.

The valleys and ravines will belong to those that live in and take care of them.

Homes and cities will belong to those who live in and take care of them.

No one will own more land than they can cultivate.

No one will own more homes than they can live in.

We hope people will share their struggle in whatever form of expression they choose, whether it be verbally, through song, poetry or rhyme, through a video, through artwork or however people can best express their struggle.

P.S. Children are especially invited to come break open the “Neoliberal” Piñata!

We will provide dinner, childcare and Spanish/English translation.

PLEASE RSVP BY TUESDAY MAY 26th!!

Due to our limited resources as a grassroots organization, please limit your group or organization’s participation to 3 community members plus children.

Please RSVP by May 26th with the number of members and children that will be attending, their names and an address at which you would like to receive your tickets.

Once you have RSVP’d you will receive your tickets and more details on the Encuentro.

For more info or to RSVP please contact us at (212) 561-0555 or movementforjusticeinelbarrio@yahoo.com

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Los rebeldes se buscan entre sí. Se caminan unos hacia los otros. Se encuentran y, juntos, rompen otros cercos…los rebeldes empiezan a reconocerse, a saberse iguales y diferentes. Caminan como hay que caminar ahora, es decir, luchando... --palabras zapatistas en el “Primer Encuentro Intercontinental por la Humanidad y contra el Neoliberalismo”

UNA INVITACIÓN PARA: Familias y personas que forman parte de organizaciones que luchan contra el desplazamiento neoliberal en la ciudad de Nueva York.

De parte de: Movimiento por Justicia del Barrio

Segundo Encuentro Nueva York por Dignidad y Contra el Desplazamiento

Un Encuentro es un espacio de intercambio humano y de reflexión. Un Encuentro no es una conferencia con discursos o con un panel de oradores, sino un momento de intercambio que los Zapatistas han diseñado como otra forma de hacer política: de abajo y a la izquierda. Es un lugar donde todos podemos hablar, donde todos vamos a escuchar a los demás, y donde todos podemos aprender. Es un lugar donde podemos compartir las muchas luchas diferentes que hacen de nosotros uno solo.

EL BARRIO, NUEVA YORK

DOMINGO, 7 DE JUNIO, 4:30 PM

El Domingo, 7 de Junio, Movimiento por Justicia del Barrio invita a las familias y personas integrantes de las organizaciones que luchan contra el desplazamiento a una noche de intercambio de experiencias, dialogo, y buena comida para que conozcamos las luchas de cada uno de nosotros por toda la ciudad.

En nuestro primer encuentro, las voces de grupos resistiendo el desplazamiento neoliberal en muchas partes de la ciudad hicieron eco todos juntos mientras aprendimos de la rabia y los sueños de cada una de nosotr@s.

En este Encuentro, quisiéramos escuchar una vez mas de la gente directamente afectada por los efectos devastadores del desplazamiento neoliberal que están luchando en sus propias comunidades; gente que no se vende ni depende de los politicos, ni de los partidos politicos, ni de las agencias gubernamentales, sino que busca el poder del pueblo como una fuerza para resistir.

POR FAVOR, CONFIRMEN SU ASISTENCIA ANTES DEL MARTES, 26 de MAYO!!

Somos Movimiento por Justicia del Barrio. Somos una organización de gente humilde y sencilla que lucha por justicia y por la humanidad. Movimiento por Justicia del Barrio lucha contra los capitalistas y contra los malos gobiernos y sus agendas neoliberales. Movimiento por Justicia del Barrio está luchando contra el desplazamiento neoliberal en nuestro vecindario. Es un proceso que nosotros los afectados entendemos como un desplazamiento de las familias para sacarlas de su vivienda por ser personas de bajos ingresos, inmigrantes y gente de color. Somos parte del movimiento transnacional iniciado por los zapatistas, llamado "La Otra Campaña".

Para Movimiento por Justicia del Barrio, la lucha por justicia significa luchar por la liberación de las mujeres, inmigrantes, lesbianas, la gente de color (latinoamericanos, africano americanos, asiáticos e indígenas), homosexuales y de la comunidad transgenero. Todos tenemos un enemigo en común que se llama neoliberalismo. El neoliberalismo desea dividirnos y evitar que nosotros combinemos nuestras fuerzas. Nosotros vamos a derrotarlo al continuar unificando a toda nuestra comunidad hasta que logremos la liberación de tod@s.

Juntos, hacemos de nuestra dignidad una resistencia y luchamos contra las acciones de los propietarios capitalistas y de las grandes empresas transnacionales que están desalojando a las familias pobres de nuestro vecindario. Luchamos a nivel local y más allá de las fronteras. Luchamos contra las instituciones del gobierno que ayudan a los propietarios a lograr sus objetivos. Luchamos contra el Alcalde Bloomberg y el Consejo Municipal de la ciudad quienes están imponiendo un plan neoliberal en todos nuestros barrios y en toda nuestra ciudad.

Nosotros sabemos que esto está ocurriendo por toda la ciudad y por todo el mundo y que no estamos solos en nuestra resistencia.

Aqui en Harlem, los tres Concejales del gobierno municipal que dicen representar el Este, Centro y Oeste de Harlem, Melissa Mark-Viverito, Inez Dickens y Robert Jackson, una y otra vez se han unido con el billionario Alcalde Bloomberg para planear, promover, y aprobar planes que desplazan a nuestras comunidades. Nosotr@s, la comunidad de El Barrio, y nuestr@s hermanas y hermanos en el Oeste y Centro de Harlem, hemos tenido la experiencia de ver los concejales colaborar para aprobar proyectos de desplazamiento neoliberal cuales traicionan al pueblo que ellos supuestamente representan. Nosotr@s nos hemos unido para rechazar a estos proyectos y vamos a seguir luchando y demandando el respeto para nuestras largas historias y ricas culturas.

Desde Chinatown a Chiapas, de Sunset Park a Sur Africa a Salford, de Harlem a Marruecos a San Salvador Atenco y todos los lugares en medio, nosotr@s sabemos que hay gente humilde y sencilla como nosotr@s levantandose en su digna rabia y luchando en contra del desplazamiento neoliberal para salvar sus hogares y sus comunidades.

Mientras estamos luchando aquí, nosotros no nos olvidamos de nuestros hermanas y hermanos resistiendo en cada esquina del mundo. Ni nos olvidamos de donde vinimos y que much@s de nosotr@s ya hemos experimentado el desplazamiento de nuestras tierras. Nosotr@s nos unimos con la gente humilde y sencilla en todo el mundo en su resistencia mientras nos unimos a la lucha en contra del sistema global capitalista que nos ha empujado hacia esta digna rabia.

Luchamos para que los mares y las montañas serán de quienes los habitan y los cuidan.

Los ríos y los desiertos serán de quienes los habitan y los cuidan.

Los valles y las quebradas serán de quienes los habitan y los cuidan.

Las viviendas y las ciudades serán de quienes en ellas viven y las cuidan.

Nadie será dueño de mas tierra de la que pueda cultivar.

Nadie será dueño de mas casas de la que pueda habitar.

Esperamos que la gente comparta su lucha en la forma que quieran, ya sea platicando, o a través de una canción, un poema, unas coplas, a través de un video, una pintura, carteles o de la manera como la gente mejor pueda expresar su lucha.

P.D. ¡Los niños están especialmente invitados a venir y a romper la "Piñata Neoliberal"!

Habrá cena, cuidado para sus niños chiquitos y traducción en español y en inglés.

POR FAVOR, CONFIRMEN SU ASISTENCIA ANTES DEL MARTES, 26 de MAYO!!

Como nuestros recursos como organización de base son escasos, le pedimos que limite la participación de su organización a 3 compas más aparte sus niños.

Es necesario confirmar su participación no mas tardar que el Martes, 26 de Mayo avisándonos cuántos compas y cuántos niños asistirán, sus nombres, y dándonos una dirección a la que quisiera recibir sus boletos.

Después de confirmar su participación recibirá sus boletos y más detalles sobre el Encuentro.

Para más información o para confirmarnos su asistencia, por favor llámenos: (212) 561-0555 o escríbanos a: movementforjusticeinelbarrio@yahoo.com

Favorite Piece on the Crisis

2009-05-19T11:45:00.000-04:00

"Promissory Notes: From Crisis to Commons"
by Midnight Notes and Friends

After five hundred years of existence, capitalists are once again announcing to us that their system is in crisis. They are urging everyone to make sacrifices to save its life. We are told that if we do not make these sacrifices, we together face the prospect of a mutual shipwreck. Such threats should be taken seriously. Already in every part of the planet, workers are paying the price of the crisis in retrenchment, mass unemployment, lost pensions, foreclosures, and death.

To make the threats more biting, there are daily reminders that we are in an era when our rights are everywhere under attack and the world’s masters will spare no atrocity if the demanded sacrifices are refused. The bombs dropped on the defenseless population of Gaza have been exemplary in this regard. They fall on all of us, as they lower the bar of what is held to be a legitimate response in the face of resistance. They amplify a thousand-fold the murderous intent behind the Athenian policeman’s fatal bullet fired into the body of Alexis Grigoropoulos in early December of 2008.

On all sides there is a sense that we are living in apocalyptic times. How did this “end-of-times” crisis develop, and what does it signify for anti-capitalist/social justice movements seeking to understand possible paths out of capitalism? This pamphlet is a contribution to the debate on these questions that is growing ever more intense as the crisis deepens and the revolutionary possibilities of our time open up. We write it in an attempt to penetrate the smokescreen now surrounding this crisis that makes it very difficult to devise responses and to anticipate the next moves capital will make. All too often, even within the Left, explanations of the crisis take us to the rarified stratosphere of financial circuits and dealings, or the tangled, intricate knots of hedge-funds/derivatives operations—that is, they take us to a world that is incomprehensible to most of us, detached from any struggles people are making, so that it becomes impossible to even conceptualize any forms of resistance to it.

Our pamphlet has a different story to tell about the crisis because it starts with the struggles billions have made across the planet against capital’s exploitation and its environmental degradation of their lives.

You can purchase copies of the 16-page pamphlet, saddlestitched from Autonomedia here or can download the PDF here

Science Fiction From Below

2009-05-18T10:39:00.010-04:00

a still from Alex Rivera's Sleep Dealer

It would seem that the role of speculative fiction is more important than ever as the technologies and cultures we produce and engage shift at an increasingly rapid pace. With Octavia Butler's passing in 2006, we lost a pathbreaking s/hero of what we might call "science fiction from below." Or perhaps, as recent activity might suggest, many more amongst the living have now found her. Butler proved that this genre, so often dominated by the concerns and colonial fantasies of white men, could be a powerful tool for the oppressed to undertake exploration and self-expression.

While at the 2008 Sundance Festival as part of the Slingshot Hip Hop crew, I was fortunate to meet Alex Rivera -> the Director, Writer and Editor of a tremendous film called Sleep Dealer. Rivera definitely carries a strong dose of zapatismo in his heart along with the torch that Butler had to pass off all too soon...

Science Fiction From Below
Alex Rivera, director of the new film Sleep Dealer, imagines the future of the Global South
By Mark Engler

Tapping into a long tradition of politicized science fiction, the young, New-York-based filmmaker Alex Rivera has brought to theaters a movie that reflects in news ways on the disquieting realities of the global economy. Sleep Dealer, his first feature film, has opened in New York and Los Angeles, and will show in 25 cities throughout the country this spring.

Set largely on the U.S.-Mexico border, Sleep Dealer depicts a world in which borders are closed but high-tech factories allow migrant workers to plug their bodies into the network to provide virtual labor to the North. The drama that unfolds in this dystopian setting delves deeps into issues of immigration, labor, water rights, and the nature of sustainable development.

Rivera's film drew attention by winning two awards at Sundance--the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award and the Alfred P. Sloan Prize for the best film focusing on science and technology. Los Angeles Times film critic Kenneth Turan wrote of the movie, "Adventurous, ambitious and ingeniously futuristic, Sleep Dealer... combines visually arresting science fiction done on a budget with a strong sense of social commentary in a way that few films attempt, let alone achieve."

Rivera spoke with Foreign Policy In Focus senior analyst Mark Engler by phone from Los Angeles, where the director was attending the local premier of his movie.

M.E.: How do you describe your film?

A.R.: Sleep Dealer is a science fiction thriller that takes a look at the future from a perspective that we've never seen before in science fiction. We've seen the future of Los Angeles, in Blade Runner. We've seen the future of Washington, D.C., in Steven Spielberg's Minority Report. We've seen London and Chicago. But we've never seen the places where the great majority of humanity actually lives. Those are in the global South. We've never seen Mexico; we've never seen Brazil; we've never seen India. We've never seen that future on film before.

M.E.: Your main character, Memo Cruz, is from rural Mexico, from Oaxaca. In many ways, the village that we see on film is very similar to many poor, remote communities today. It doesn't necessarily look like how we think about the future at all. What was your conception of how economic globalization would affect communities like these?

A.R.: One of the things that fascinates me about the genre is that, explicitly or not, science fiction is always partly about development theory. So when Spielberg shows us Washington, DC with 15-lane traffic flowing all around the city, he's putting forward a certain vision of development.

Sleep Dealer starts in Oaxaca, and to think about the future of Oaxaca, you have to think about how so-called "development" has been happening there and where might it go. And it's not superhighways and skyscrapers. That would be ridiculous. So, in the vision I put forward, most of the landscape remains the same. The buildings look older. Most of the streets still aren't paved. And yet there are these tendrils of technology that have infiltrated the environment. So instead of an old-fashioned TV, there is a high-definition TV. Instead of a calling booth like they have today in Mexican villages, where people call their relatives who are far away, in this future there is a video-calling booth. There's the presence of a North American corporation that has privatized the water and that uses technology to control the water supply. There are remote cameras with guns mounted on them and drones that do surveillance over the area.

The vision of Oaxaca in the future and of the South in the future is a kind of collage, where there are still elements that look ancient, there is still infrastructure that looks older even than it does today, and yet there are little capillaries of high technology that pulse through the environment.

ME: How far into the future did you set the film?

A.R.: I started working on the ideas in Sleep Dealer ten years ago, and at that point I thought I was writing about a future that was forty or fifty years away, or maybe a future that might not ever happen. Over this past decade, though, the world has rapidly caught up with a lot of the fantasy nightmares in the film. That's been an interesting process.

But, you know, a lot of times we use the word "futuristic" to describe things that are kind of explosions of capital, like skyscrapers or futuristic cities. We do not think of a cornfield as futuristic, even though that has as much to do with the future as does the shimmering skyscraper.

M.E.: In what sense?

A.R.: In the sense that we all need to eat. In the sense that the ancient cornfields in Oaxaca are the places that replenish the genetic supply of corn that feeds the world. Those fields are the future of the food supply.

For every futuristic skyscraper, there's a mine someplace where the ore used to build that structure was taken out of the ground. That mine is just as futuristic as the skyscraper. So, I think Sleep Dealer puts forward this vision of the future that connects the dots, a vision that says that the wealth of the North comes from somewhere. It tries to look at development and futurism from this split point of view--to look at the fact that these fantasies of what the future will be in the North must always be creating a second, nightmare reality somewhere in the South. That these things are tied together.

M.E.: It's interesting that at the recent Summit of the Americas, Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez gave President Obama a copy of Eduardo Galeano's Open Veins of Latin America. This is a book that was written over 30 years ago, but that really emphasizes the same point that you are making now, that underdevelopment is not an earlier stage of development, but rather is the product of development. That development and underdevelopment go hand in hand.

A.R.: Exactly. And I think that you can also add immigration into that mix. Because the history that Open Veins lays out is a lot about resource exploitation and transfer from South to North. And today, of course, one of the main entities that places like Mexico export is workers.

M.E.: There's a quote from the film that says a lot. Memo's boss, who runs this sort of high-tech Mexican sweatshop, says, "We give the United States what it's always wanted. All the work without the workers." Can you describe this concept of the "cybracero" that you have been developing?

A.R.: The central idea for this film occurred to me about ten years ago when I was reading an article in Wired magazine about telecommuting. The article was making all of these fantastic predictions that, in the future, there won't be any traffic jams anymore, and no one will have to ride the subway, because everyone will work from home. Well, I come from a family that's mostly immigrant, a family in which my cousins are still arriving and working in landscaping and construction. I tried to put them into this fantasy of working from home--when their home is Peru, 3000 miles away, and their work is construction.

And so I came up with this idea of the telecommuting immigrant, where in the future the borders are sealed, workers stay in the South, and they connect themselves to a network through which they control machines that perform their labor in the North.

The end result is an American economy that receives the labor of these workers but doesn't ever have to care for them, and doesn't have to fear that their children will be born here, and doesn't ever have to let them vote.

When I started this project, the idea of a remote worker was political satire. About eight years ago, it became a reality in the call centers of India and in the idea of off-shoring information-processing jobs that could be done in real time by people on the other side of the planet.

My movie goes further by putting forward a vision of remote manual laborers. What if somebody in India could drive a taxi in New York or bus dishes in a restaurant in Los Angeles? I wonder, do we live in a world where it would be acceptable to have someone in Jakarta laying the bricks for a building that's being built next door to us?

I think under the rules of the economy that we live with, if that were technically possible, it would be considered morally acceptable. It's just another stage of globalization. Yet it seems so surreal, and it makes me wonder: What kind of social order would that produce? What kind of communities would that produce?

M.E.: At the same time, I think in the film you suggest that this new technology also has the possibility to connect people across great distances. I wonder how you weigh the alienating effects of technology with some of its redemptive potential?

A.R.: To me, Sleep Dealer is a parable, a myth. There are three characters: One is a remote worker. The second is a remote soldier--a person who is in the United States but flies a drone that patrols the South. And the third character is a kind of writer, a blogger, who connects her body to the network and uploads, not words that she is typing, but rather her memories. And by sharing her memories she is able to let people see these far-away realities that maybe they're not supposed to. She's able to use technology to erase borders for a moment.

And to me, that is the tension of the moment we're living in. We live in a moment when the military is using technology to wage remote war. Corporations are using technology to move extraordinarily quickly around the globe to take advantage of weak environmental standards and weak labor standards.

And yet, we're living in the moment of the social forums, which are organized over the network. We're living in the age of the Zapatistas, who in 1994 sent messages by horseback, messages written on paper, to Internet cafes where they could be sent out as press releases and could be used to build a global network of solidarity. We're living in a time when I'm starting to hear tremors from the labor movement about creating cross-border unions, which will also be built over the network.

So I think we're in this moment when we don't know who will be more empowered by this connectivity and by new technology. And that's the battle in Sleep Dealer. It's over the future of this connected planet and what kind of globalization we'll be living in.

M.E.: Beyond immigration politics, the commodification and privatization of water is a major theme in the film. How did you choose water as an issue you would focus on?

A.R.: When I look at dramas of immigration, one of the things that I find unsatisfying is that they always focus on an internal dream, a dream that someone has of going to America and making his or her life better. And, instead, what I wanted Sleep Dealer to start with was this idea that immigrants from Latin America, in the places where they're born, are usually living somehow in the shadow of U.S. intervention, that immigrants come here because we--the United States--are already there.

In my film I wanted to have a presence of U.S. power in my character's village. And so I put in a dam. The dam controls the local water supply, and it makes traditional subsistence life much more difficult. In reality, in Latin America, it's been banana plantations controlled by paramilitaries. It's been gold mines and copper mines and silver mines. It's been oil fields. It's any number of situations that have made it hard for the people there to survive.

I chose water because it also has a symbolic and spiritual dimension to it. When my characters have their first kiss, they are by a little river. When they make love, they go down by the ocean. It would have been a lot harder to do that with petroleum.

M.E.: But, of course, struggles over the control of water are not purely metaphorical.

A.R.: When you talk to people about this, the idea that an evil corporation would go in and take the water from the people sounds so bombastic, so bizarre, that it feels like science fiction. And yet it's absolutely happening today.

A lot of people are familiar with the story of Cochabamba, Bolivia, where an American company, Bechtel, privatized the water, and there literally was a water war. All of this stuff can sound like a bad Kevin Costner movie--the idea of a water war--and yet it's one of those realities that, if you were to graph it, is only going to trend upwards in terms of its intensity in the future.

M.E.: The characters in the film are moved to take action about water privatization. Yet this takes the form of a highly individualized type of action--they don't join a social movement. I wondered about the absence of more collective resistance in the movie.

A.R.: Well, I think you've hit on the Achilles' heel of political narrative film. Narrative film is driven by psychology and by identifying with a character. And I think that's why there are so few truly transcendent political films. In narrative cinema we're used to identifying with one person, and so even if the story is anti-imperial or anti-racist or anti-misogynist, it's usually one character's journey in overcoming those things.

In Sleep Dealer there are three characters that represent three vast segments of our society. Those characters are in conflict at first, and then they come together. And their story is meant to have larger resonance than just the three individuals.

But I think that devising a narrative where political hope and political power doesn't belong to one actor, but is somehow made collective, that is very, very challenging. I look at The Battle of Algiers as an incredible model, where there is a single character--Ali la Pointe--who we meet, but then his subjectivity sort of bleeds away from him and is given to a social movement by the end of the film.

That film is a masterpiece; I am but a learner. When we were writing Sleep Dealer we were trying to think about what the future of what a radically networked social movement would look like, but we couldn't get there. Instead, I think the contribution of Sleep Dealer is in being a parable, a myth, that thinks through some of the impulses of globalization.

M.E.: How did you first come to this type of work?

A.R.: I grew up in upstate New York, and when I was 15 years old I met Pete Seeger. Without knowing who he was, I ended up doing volunteer work for one of his organizations. After meeting him I learned about his life using music and song as a part of social movements. When I went to college, that's what I went to study--music and social movements.

M.E.: So you had taken up the claw-hammer banjo?

A.R.: I did learn how to play the five-string banjo, actually! I can still do it. But at a certain moment I decided that the banjo wasn't the future of social movements. And I decided that through film and video you could express much more complicated and subtle arguments about the world than you can through song.

M.E.: I think you're pissing off all of the political songwriters out there.

A.R.: With song I think you have an access to the spirit, access to the heart. But with film we have two hours with people trapped in a dark room. You can refer back to something that happened 60 minutes earlier in the film, and you can play with what your viewers remember, and you can build really intimate relationships with characters. You can lay out both an emotional journey and an intellectual argument. I don't think there's anybody who will say that you can do all of that in a song.

M.E.: Are you concerned with being pigeonholed as a political filmmaker or having the movie labeled as a "political" film?

A.R.: I'd be happy to be pigeonholed as a political filmmaker. For me, making a film is so difficult and so challenging that I only want to make films that are relevant to the world we live in.

M.E.: Do you see a trend toward politics, or maybe away from politics, in science fiction filmmaking today?

A.R.: Science fiction has always had a radical history, all the way from Fritz Lang's Metropolis to Terry Gilliam's Brazil, which is a comedic portrait of fascism, up to Gattaca, which looks at the way that DNA profiling could be used by the government, to Children of Men, to Michael Winterbottom's Code 46.

Science fiction has always been a space for radical critique on one hand, and, on the other, for selling Happy Meals. I do think that science fiction today is at risk of being completely co-opted by superhero movies, big franchises, and xenophobic fantasies about space aliens. It has that face as well. But I think the long history, going back almost a hundred years, is of science fiction as a place for forward-thinking, radical thought.

M.E.: Perhaps unique among these movies you've mentioned, Sleep Dealer is a bi-lingual film, with the vast majority of the dialogue in Spanish. How did you think about language in the film?

A.R.: We need to know in our guts that we are going into a future that will be multi-cultural. I think we are seeing in the news right now that America might not be the only world power in the future, that English might not be the international language of choice. So, for me, doing a science fiction set in the South and doing it in a language that was not English was fundamental. I'd love to do a science fiction in Nahuatl, or in Tagalog, or in Pashto. The language is just part of a gesture that says, the future belongs to all of us.

I think the situation we're in is very striking. It is as if you met somebody and you asked them, "What do you want to have in your future?" And they said, "I don't know. I've never thought about it." In the cinema, that's what we have for the entire global South. We don't have any cinema that reflects on the future of the so-called Third World. There's zero.

Why is it that we've seen comedies from the South, we've seen romances from the South, we've seen action movies from the South? We've seen everything but reflections on the future. To me, the first step to getting to the future that you want to live in is to imagine it.

— Mark Engler, a writer based in New York City, is a senior analyst with Foreign Policy in Focus and author of How to Rule the World: The Coming Battle Over the Global Economy (Nation Books, April 2008). He can be reached via the web site www.DemocracyUprising.com.

Letter from Atenco to the Zapatistas

2009-05-08T00:28:00.006-04:00

The People's Front in Defense of the Land-Atenco

There is a long-running relationship of support and solidarity between these two groups. Do consider joining the National and International Campaign "Freedom and Justice for Atenco"! Many thanks to my compa Lopex for this excellent translation...

LETTER FROM THE PEOPLE’S FRONT IN DEFENSE OF THE LAND-ATENCO
TO THE ZAPATISTA ARMY OF NATIONAL LIBERATION (EZLN)

San Salvador Atenco, May 3, 2009.

TO THE CCRI-CG OF THE EZLN.
TO THE SIXTH COMMISSION.
TO THE GOOD GOVERNMENT COUNCILS.
TO THE SUPPORT BASES.
TO ALL ZAPATISMO.

SISTERS AND BROTHERS.

When it all began for us, many people told us: “You cannot beat the government.” Back then in 2001, when they condemned us to extermination and to the loss of our history and identity in order to build an airport, we knew that it must not be so, that we had to fight to defeat the idea that things are that way and nobody can change them.

At that time, we looked all around, we looked for others that, like us, were also fighting, we wanted to follow that path to walk it together, because we knew we were not the only ones. We must tell you that you could be seen in all places, there was a great trail full of dignity and hope that announced your presence, there was no need to ask who you were, we always found the brilliant eyes and the soft hands of resistance, of the small women and men that showed us the path built by justice and freedom. In their wake they also sheltered us in their brotherly embrace of solidarity. This is how we met, on the same path, side by side, with your happy and rebellious smile that, reflected on our machete, would light our way. Since you had come from afar and we found you as you walked, we did not hesitate, we decided to follow your steps and open other paths for those who would follow.

We want to tell you that we have learnt the meaning of life from you: To fight and to resist. From your strong shout we learned the message that we owe life: Rebellious dignity. From its heart, which moves the world, we took the only true reason for struggle: Love. This is how we, like many others, took from your hidden face the identity of the hidden, those who refuse to be invisible because they assume their role in history, those who become the motors of humanity’s march. This is how we recognized ourselves in your humble word and in your skin bathed in earth. In Atenco we know that your word is now part of the history of the universe and that your struggle already lives in our hearts. In this time people will call you zapatistas; we do not only call you that, we also call you and recognize you as our brothers and sisters.

You must know that after several months of direct confrontation with bad governments in 2001 and 2002, we achieved what we knew was possible, we defended our land, we blessed it with our struggle and prevented Fox and Montiel from despoiling us of the most sacred: Our mother earth. This is how we brought down the most important project of the Fox administration, the International Airport of Mexico City. It was then that we understood our role in history, we understood that things are not this way because someone decides, but that we too can decide what to do when faced with a decision from the powerful. When we prevailed in July and August of 2002 we confirmed what we already knew: “The government can be beaten.” From then until now, nothing can stop us, no matter how dark and stormy the path, since that time we know that victory lies at the end of our path.

However, as you well know, on the path of The Other Campaign, when we rode along with you back in 2005 and 2006, we had to once again confront the powerful. On May 3 and 4 of 2006 they undertook a violent State action, murdered two of our brothers, raped our sisters, detained 207 people, searched our homes, tortured and occupied our communities. They brought out all of their contained rage, charged at us with all their strength, once more they tried to exterminate us, they wanted to finish off the People’s Front in Defense of the Land and strike at the Mexican social movement. Throughout that period you were in our struggle, taking on as yours a fight that had in its wake a victory and an affront to the powerful. However –as you know well- in 2006 Atenco was only one more instance of violence in the Mexican State, the repression in Sicartsa had take place before, then came Oaxaca and electoral fraud. 2006 marked the Right’s offensive against the social movements that today sees its resurgence as the army leaves its barracks to carry out public safety functions, in a war disguised as one against so-called “organized crime.” Throughout this period you, brothers and sisters, have been with us, from here we received all the calls for solidarity from our imprisoned and persecuted brothers; from Atenco we know that in the zapatista heart there will always be a small place for those who are equal, that there will always be the serious and committed promise of its rebellious fight.

But we also know that you are still fighting a low-intensity war against bad government. That the situation in which you find yourselves is a war less hidden each day, of confrontations with diverse forces, of attrition and constant blows. That on both fronts they are trying to undermine resistance, wanting to put an end to one of the most important social processes in Mexico and in the world. This explains the aggression suffered these days by our indigenous brothers of the San Sebastian Bachajon cooperative, in the Chilón municipality, when they were detained and tortured by Juan Sabines’ government, being accused of robbery and drug-trafficking; likewise, the recent armed aggression suffered by the compañeros of the Caracol IV Good Government Council, in Morelia, who were in charge of the El Salvador resort, suffered at the hands of the paramilitary Organization For The Defense Of Indigenous People And Peasants (Opddic). We know that aggression against the EZLN is always latent, because you have built a counterpower able to confront the State, that your process is a very important effort to build democracy from below and that a blow against you would be a victory for the political and economic powers of not only Mexico, but of the world. Because of that, we say to you that we are with you, that the zapatista struggle is our struggle and, as much as possible, as much as we are able, we are with you, brothers and sisters.

We also reaffirm our fight for the freedom of 12 compañeros and 2 others who are fugitives; 9 of them are Alejandro Pilón Zacate, Jorge Alberto Ordóñez Romero, Román Adán Ordóñez Romero, Juan Carlos Estrada Cruces, Julio César Espinosa Ramos, Inés Rodolfo Cuellar Rivera, Edgar Eduardo Morales, Oscar Hernández Pacheco y Narciso Arellano Hernández, who are in the Molino de Flores Prison, Texcoco, Mexico State, sentenced to 31 years, 10 months and 15 days of imprisonment; Felipe Álvarez, Héctor Galindo and Ignacio Del Valle (Nacho) are imprisoned in the maximum security prison of El Altiplano, in Almoloya de Juárez, Mexico State, the first two sentenced to 67 and a half years, while Nacho is sentenced to 112 and a half years; on top of this, they have another three arrest warrants pending; in the same way, Adán Espinosa Rojas and América Del Valle are declared fugitives facing arrest warrants. To gain their freedom we constituted the Promoting Committee of the National and International Campaign “Freedom and Justice for Atenco,” made up among many by Don Samuel Ruíz, Don Raúl Vera, Manu Chao, Ofelia Medina, Julieta Egurrola, Luis Villoro, Ricardo Rocha, Bruno Bichir, Demián Bichir, Alejandro Bichir, Odiseo Bichir, Diego Luna, Luís Hernández Navarro, Paco Ignacio Taibo II, Daniel Giménez Cacho, Adolfo Gilly, Alejandro Toledo, Miguel Ángel Granados Chapa, Carlos Montemayor, Miguel Concha, Rocco, Rubén Albarran, Los de Abajo, Asian Dub Foundation, Las Reinas Chulas, Ana Francis Mor, Jorge Zarate and other compañeros who are joining up. With them we intend that their voice will raise the demand for freedom and justice for our movement, because their voice reaches other sectors that we have not reached and also because we want it to be a voice that will make a deep impression in our country’s and the world’s collective memory.

As our elder grandfather Nezahualcóyotl, whose lot in life was for a long time persecution and repression from Tezozomoc, king of Azcapotzalco, we have decided that we do not want to live in that condition, but will instead learn from the Triple Alliance that gave the Poet King his victory, to defeat the tyrant and achieve the Acolhua-chichimeca Kingdom’s splendor.

It is because of this that they have not beaten us thus far, that despite the hardening of Felipe Calderón and Enrique Peña Nieto, the Front of Peoples in Defense of The Earth is not defeated, and we know that the more our enemy’s profile grows, the bigger our victory will be, because they will not last 112 years in power.

Brothers and sisters, we will keep struggling until we gain freedom for our political prisoners and fugitives, but what we are really fighting for is for the liberation of our peoples, because we are aware that the powerful can be defeated and we will do so.

We send our combative and brotherly regards to the whole Zapatista Army of National Liberation.

FREE THE POLITICAL PRISONERS!
(¡PRESOS POLÍTICOS LIBERTAD!)

SHOULDER TO SHOULDER, ELBOW TO ELBOW, THE EZLN IS ALL OF US!
(¡HOMBRO CON HOMBRO, CODO CON CODO, EL EZLN SOMOS TODOS!)

WHEN THE PEOPLE RISE UP FOR BREAD, FREEDOM AND LAND, THE POWERFUL WILL TREMBLE FROM THE COAST TO THE MOUNTAINS!
(¡CUANDO EL PUEBLO SE LEVANTE POR PAN, LIBERTAD Y TIERRA, TEMBLARAN LOS PODEROSOS DE LA COSTA HASTA LA SIERRA!)

People’s Front in Defense of the Land - Atenco.

Translation to English by Lopex

Mexican Consulate in NYC Shut Down for Atenco!

2009-05-06T01:33:00.010-04:00

MEXICAN CONSULATE SHUTS DOWN IN FACE OF PROTEST FROM THE OTHER CAMPAIGN NEW YORK DEMANDING FREEDOM FOR POLITICAL PRISONERS OF ATENCO

On the third anniversary of state repression against the people of Atenco, the Mexican Consulate in New York was “taken over” by the pro-zapatista group Movement for Justice in El Barrio.

Authorities decided to close down the Consulate for the entire day.

During a press conference the Consul, who was very angry, denounced and blamed the members of The Other Campaign New York.

PRESS RELEASE FROM THE OTHER CAMPAIGN NEW YORK

MOVEMENT FOR JUSTICE IN EL BARRIO

To our sisters and brothers from the People’s Front in Defense of the Land:

To our Zapatista sisters and brothers:

To our compañer@s of the Other Campaign:

To our compañer@s from the Zezta Internazional:

To our compañer@s who are adherents of the International Campaign in Defense of El Barrio and our allies from all over the world:

Receive this greeting in solidarity from the women, men, and children, those marginalized in society who belong to the Other Campaign New York, Movement for Justice in El Barrio, in Zapatista East Harlem.

Today, May 4, 2009, the Other Campaign New York took over the Mexican Consulate in New York to demand the liberation of the 12 political prisoners who have been brutally repressed for resisting neoliberal urbanization projects that are destructive to human life and culture, specifically the construction of an airport in Atenco, and for protecting displaced flower vendors in Texcoco.

Today, on this third anniversary of the repression, the arrests, the violations, the torture, and the breaking and entering made by the military police in Atenco, a delegation of members of Movement for Justice in El Barrio succeeded in entering the offices of the Consulate of Mexico in New York despite the fact that these offices have been under strict and tightened security since precisely 3 years ago when Mexicans of The Other Campaign New York with real heart and memory, demanded the liberation of the political prisoners of Atenco. We succeeded in entering the offices to hold a non-violent protest demanding the immediate release of the prisoners of Atenco.

Once inside, the compañer@s of the Other Campaign New York, amongst the clamor of: “Freedom for political prisoners (Presos politicos, libertad)!, Liberty, liberty, to those prisoners for fighting (Libertad, libertad, a los presos por luchar)!, We are all Atenco (Todos Somos Atenco)!”, along with other chants, and with our signs, some with prison bars to look like a cell, and also with bandanas, gave out to our fellow country men and women at the Consulate DVD’s of the video "Breaking the Siege", about the repression in Atenco, and informational flyers where we explain our main demands.

Later, we demanded to speak with the consul Ruben Beltran in order to give him a letter of demands. First, they told us that he was not there because he was in Mexico, but we knew that this was a lie, since the day before the consul was in El Barrio at an event proselytizing for PAN during the imposed Cinco de Mayo celebration.

After a while, the authorities of the Consulate told us that the Consul was in New York but that he could not be found in the Consulate, and they closed consular services to the public, asking all of their clients to abandon the offices. By the end of our action, the consul arrived. We gave him a giant size letter on a poster-board with the following demands:

1. Liberty for the political prisoners in Atenco.

2. Cancel the arrest warrants for those 2 who are being persecuted.

3. Revoke and appeal the sentences.

4. Complete respect for the human rights of the detained and the persecuted.

5. Punishment for those responsible for the violations of human rights.

The consul, Rubén Beltrán, first told us that he was open to engage in dialogue with all Mexican people in New York and listen to all opinions, but then blamed us – and our cause, the liberation of the prisoners in Atenco – for having closed the services of the Consulate and for having left so many people & unattended.

We consider that the consul’s reaction is an act of great injustice and cynicism, since ifthe Mexican government would not torture, kill, rape and unjustly incarcerate its people for resisting its doing business with huge transnational companies that turn everything even water into merchandise, these things would not have to happen.

Nonetheless, we are satisfied for having done this successful protest for the liberation of the martyrs of Atenco, and now we know that many Mexicans in New York will be able to inform themselves through alternative media like the DVD "Breaking the Siege".

Afterwards, in the afternoon of this same day, the press was convened to gather at the Consulate for another event, and the consul took advantage to denounce us, and say that because of us the Consulate had to close for the entire workday. In this early evening event, the consul showed the press photographs of us from distinct angles. In this respect it was clear that our demonstration was peaceful. If he had retaliated against us for having exercised our right to freedom of expression in Mexican territory (as is in whatever representation of the Mexican government in other countries), this means that the Consulate’s authorities would have been violating our rights, just as they don’t respect the rights of the people of Atenco.

It brings us much pain that dignified fighters for social justice, the real defenders of our land and our country, remain in prison. We will not rest until they are liberated. Human beings are not merchandise. They can’t move us & place us anywhere they wish so that they can build airports and hotels, not in Atenco, nor in Agua Azul, nor in our Barrio in East Harlem.

From the Other Campaign New York, fraternally:

¡WE ARE ALL ATENCO!

¡FREEDOM FOR POLITICAL PRISONERS OF ATENCO!

Movement for Justice in El Barrio, New York, May 4, 2009

The Emerging Commonism

2009-04-22T00:01:00.000-04:00

The talk below was given as part of an event at El Kilombo social center in Durham, NC, titled "The End of an Era: The New Unrest and the Emerging Commonism," held on March 3, 2009 with guest speaker Gustavo Esteva. The event was part of El Kilombo's spring 2009 speaker series: "Things Unseen: Building Autonomy in a Time of Crisis."

The Emerging Commonism
by El Kilombo Intergaláctico

I want to start by saying that we have invited Gustavo here tonight because he and his work and his life have played an important role in ours and in the development of this space and this project, El Kilombo. When we began thinking about how to do something in our own surroundings that would have an effect on our own lives and the lives around us, something that was neither a campaign slogan, nor a charity effort, nor an isolated corner in which to either wallow or relish in our discontent, there were not exactly booming echoes of support and understanding around us. Nor did we immediately attract the masses or become a vanguard for progressive action in the area. Glory and recognition both in this society in general and in leftist circles in particular belongs to highly visible activity with highly visible results—be they massive momentary protests or widely published pieces or entry into the inner circle of analysts, activists, and academics huddled inside, and often guarding the doors, of the “progressive” community.

What we did become

What we did become was another kind of community, not big, not loud, not univocally coherent in any of the traditional senses of the term, and far from politically united on anything resembling the kind of platform political organizations are supposed to have. Rather, we began to be, and continue to become, a place in common. We mean this both in the sense of creating a place where people who ordinarily would not cross paths meet—students, migrants, communities of color, workers of various rank—as well as creating a project in which it becomes possible to assume collective control of our lives: our survival, yes—food, housing, health; but also our desire to grow and transform ourselves—our relationships, our daily reality, the energy to desire something and the capacity to create it. This is not a finished project or a guaranteed achievement. We know that we have to do it again and do it a little better every day.

A recent study said that in polls carried out before 1980, 10% of the US population said they had no one they would call a close friend and no one they could confide in; in 2008, 25% agreed with that statement (no close friend, no confidant). Current statistics vary widely citing the use of anti-depressants or mood-stabilizers as anywhere from 10% to 45%, and I site this with no judgment on their use or effectiveness, with an additional 13% on stress-related drugs; to which we must add self-medicating tendencies which include some of the 20% of the population using illicit substances and between 7% and 16% reporting very heavy alcohol use. The excess in these numbers reflect not a sick population so much as a sad one. Making a community, or creating a common, out of that context is no small task and no small triumph.

Current Context

I didn’t know if Gustavo would give US-based data. So here are a few facts about our current conjuncture:

Unemployment at 7.6%; 30% rise from 2007; 2 million jobs lost in 2008, with the job cut rate increasing at the record-setting rate in 2009; blacks have highest unemployment rate, followed by latinos, trailed by whites
In addition salary cuts for those who manage to keep jobs
Since the peak of the housing bubble in mid-2006, prices have fallen 20% and are expected to fall up to 50-60% before the plummet slows. They are not decreasing gradually but are rather in free fall
Foreclosure rate rising steadily. In 2008 they had jumped 57% in a year: at that point one in every 538 houses undergoing foreclosure; now one in every 433. 2 million more expected to lose their homes in the next two years; affecting families of color at disproportional rates
Sixteen banks have already failed this year compared with twenty-five in all of 2008. 250 more slated to fail.
Americans have supplmented what was already a real wage decline with their credit cards, currently amounting to nearly 100 billion in collective credit card debt; this bubble is probably nearing its explosion point also as people lose jobs and houses and will be unable to make payments.

For a social fabric that is already thin, instability, uncertainty, and what will in many cases become desperation makes for a volatile situation. Even the evaluation “from above” recognizes the stakes: Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair told Congress last week that the economic crisis had become a greater security concern than terrorism.

In this context, most people do not have much hope for, or much reason to believe, in change or liberation as an event or a point at which we will arrive in some moment. It is clear that this is nothing that charity or service-oriented organizations can handle. It should be increasingly clear to many people at this point that government, willing or not, has almost no capacity to actually resolve the current situation and limited capacity manage it. And in any case we should be clear by now that do not want to be the needy and dependent clients of either of these institutions, over which we have either no democratic control (NGOs and philanthropy) or only an artificial or simulated control (representative government). We can’t here fully explore the options for acting on this situation, but I want to make a few broad strokes helping us to bridge our situation to the necessity of what Gustavo has talked to us about, taking lessons from movements such as the Zapatistas that have fought the economic and social destitution of neoliberalism and the dangerous vacuum of power created in its crises.

Too many times, so much time, has been spent arguing over candidates and parties and approaches to the state before discovering that power evacuated the state long ago and we have been left uselessly holding our campaign paraphernalia and political texts, left, that is, on the streets not in a protest march but rather laid-off and foreclosed or evicted and unemployable. Neither does a dogmatic and self-isolating anti-electoralism serve any productive purpose here—both because such a position ignores the historical use of electoral strategies to specific situations, none of which we happen to be in now, and because at this stage of crisis it is not helpful to be or claim to be the lonely voice that was right. It is helpful to be organized and together. And so what we do have hope for is liberation as a collective habit-forming practice. We identify that collective habit-forming practice as the common.

Liberation, why and how

We use collectivity not as an ideological item or political platform. There are certainly many good arguments promoting cooperative rather than competitive designs for economic and social systems, and I don’t feel it necessary to rehearse them here. Rather, we understand collectivity as both the reality we exist within—we share the city, we share the roads, we use libraries and parks and sidewalks and stoplights, we breath each other’s air—as well as an absolute necessity for acting upon our current context. Why an absolute necessity?

First, if we have understood, as we have studied many years in this space, as Gustavo has pointed out many times, as many movements all over the world have declared, that capital is not a thing but a social relation, and that neoliberalism is not an economic system but a social one that requires the fragmentation, isolation, in fact creation, of ‘individuals,’ then we must conclude that fighting capital, or better yet, creating something other than capital, must require different social relations, different social units, different subjects. And one certainly cannot create different social relations by oneself.

Second, what is generically called “change” is often made difficult, as one of our speakers in the last event in this series points out, by the inability to see anything other than the urgent present which requires a great deal of putting out fires, responding to emergencies, and finding temporary measures of survival or pleasure (Kelley). No one can be unfamiliar with the endless parade of information and issues necessary to maintain a grasp on even one’s most basic life and well-being—work and work security, bills, functioning utilities, mortgage/rent obligations, childcare, health concerns—and doing these things household by household, individual by individual, is an often not just time-consuming but life-consuming task. And so we think that daily life must be the place where we act out the most basic and most important changes we see necessary, not, again, because we herald “daily life” as the virtuous, and now quite popular in academic texts on social change, platform for political discourse. But rather because to some extent, daily life must be the project or daily life will always get in the way; it must become the place of liberation or it will always be its obstacle. That is, to say it one more time, that infinite parade of things to attend to as well as the daily routines we build up to make such a parade sustainable, either erases the possibility for revolution or it becomes the revolution itself. Kelley called this “lessening the contradiction between everyday life and our wildest dreams.”

Third, I want to situate this call for a habit-forming and daily collective liberation firmly in the framework in which we have built this speaker’s series, which is in turn based firmly in the place and reality in which we live. Our first event was on Gentrification and the City. There we named gentrification not as an isolated phenomenon but as the territorialized manifestation of dominant power relations in society, global society, as a whole. The same way that suburban flight segregated and de-serviced populations and organized capital investments accordingly, gentrification reorganizes that urban space once again, proposing “progressive” investments—the so-called walkable community of gallery and boutique with its charter schools and “free-range” children—that by necessity exclude some populations. These are usually, nearly always, those very populations that have inhabited that de-serviced space and through pure social cooperation and innovation created an alternative lifestyle to both ghetto and suburbia—and here we mean alternative in terms of social organization, not of consumption. Our second event was on Art and Revolution, in which we differentiated between the “arts corridor” which is slated to run through our neighborhood courtesy of a coalition between developers and what is now referred to as the “creative class,” and the activities of the people who have inhabited these blocks to use creativity—social, technical, and artistic—to survive and design their lives everyday. We are not romanticizing the hazards of poor communities or glorifying our own. We are, to cite that event’s presentation, claiming the right and the space to develop those activities that may not produce fame for any one artist but which produce a daily reorganization of the senses, in common, and a constant renovation of the common.

The freedom to “remake city and self” as proposed in the first event, and as proposed in the second, to make the common forms already in motion “down here” not new sites of visibility “up there” but new organizations and intensifications of life in common, depends upon an understanding of the great wealth that we do have—the wealth of difference.

The Zapatista Initiative

Many years ago already the EZLN (Zapatista Army for National Liberation) warned us that if could not achieve some kind of mutual articulation among those below, those who both sustain and suffer capital through their individual labor and collective production, the current economic instability, the discontent created by neoliberal policies, and the weakness, incompetence, and desperation of a flailing government, would lead to violent outbreaks and great destruction. That destruction, social and environmental, was already happening and would increase, they insisted, but unless there was some kind of organized alternative, the poor would suffer most, and suffer brutally, its effects.

They called for the organization of a national network of struggle. Without dogmatic formulas for mobilizing the masses or sentimental appeals to a false unity, they called for people to join them in organizing the life they shared, both to confront the coming crisis and to dignify their daily existence. Their experience gives us several lessons to draw from.

One. That the great wealth of the poor, or the great richness of those below, came from the great range and abundance of difference that existed there. Any cooperative endeavor would have to maintain and promote those differences, and to create rather than assume commonality. There could be no unity in which differences would submit in the struggle to a pragmatic necessity for sameness for the purposes of an end goal. “The only thing that makes us the same,” the Zapatistas said, “is that we are all different.”

Two. That there is a difference between differences. That is, there is the kind of difference that is a difference between how people interpret orders and either follow or reject rules imposed on them from above or from outside. This creates hugely conflictive and contradictory relations and is a very difficult place from which to “reconcile” anything or from which to create something new. There is another kind of difference however that is a difference of experience, perspective, background, viewpoint, a difference that is essentially singularity. This difference provides many more possibilities for productive discussion and self-mobilization; it is not necessarily harmonious, but neither is it necessarily contradictory; it does not inhibit the creation of the common but rather is the very material, the necessary components of dynamism and diversity, that make possible that common. Maybe this difference can be thought of as autonomy, because it an issue of how the people themselves, singularly and collectively, will decide how they encounter each other and where they will go together, rather than how they will obey or respond to decisions and actions made in a place above or outside of them.

Three. New historical conjunctures require experimentation with new practices, new practices both require and create new subjects who are in turn capable of entirely new ideas and inventions. Such practices are useful only to the extent that they remain “living” or changeable and we are able to resist the temptation to congeal them into new dogmas or movement idols. Let me give just one example:

Horizontalism. The Zapatistas could probably be given credit for the emergence and sudden swelling of popularity of the term, thought it doesn’t matter that they usually aren’t. Their horizontalism was essentially the creation of a new common: a common form for organization in which self-government was a turn-taking activity maintained, upheld, and self-run by and for the same communities corresponding to the territory covered by that government. The democratizing effects and sociality created from this system cannot be understated for the lives of its participants and as an example to people all over the world searching for alternative organizing mechanisms.
The accompanying risk, which here as many times results from the appropriation of an idea as ideology instead of as a contextually-based practice, was that in the earnest attempt to be “horizontal,” many groups or collectives just ended up flat.

We need to be able to make the distinction: flat has no internal energy; it is unable to use its diverse elements to make collective decisions about structures that enable action, and so often it either remains paralyzed and unable to act, or its structures arise covertly leaving its acts without a democratic base to support them. It is unable to utilize its differences (of self, capability, of training, of perspective) as wealth and instead resorts to suppressing them for the purpose of remaining “horizontal.” In effect, it flattens its very possibilities to be horizontal. Horizontal in its dynamic sense, however, has energies running back and forth all over it; it magnifies and multiplies its differences (the unique being and offering that each person or group brings) in ways that enable a greater development and proliferation of more difference, which is in turn reinvested in the common. The possibilities created in this kind of production of the common are infinite, exciting, and necessary.

Finally, and to close, one of the key points that the Zapatistas have insisted on in their initiative to create a common beyond their communities, and another lesson for us, has been the issue of “espejismo,” literally mirrorism. The EZLN has said over and over to groups struggling internally and between themselves with personal and political conflicts: stop looking in the mirror! Espejismo is the disease of separation and self-obsession, a depoliticization of society and a disintegration of the collective political subjects possible. The struggle against global capitalism and the reality of the current crises does not allow us these rewardless, self-indulgent but self-alienating detours that are inevitably dead-ends. Mirrorism, seeing or recognizing a reflection of ourselves, may be helpful but is not sufficient, because what we already are is not enough. We will have to become something else. EZLN Major Ana Maria said at a gathering of Zapatista supporters over a decade ago, if we have been a mirror for you, for your movements, then now let that mirror shatter and become an open window into another world, into becoming something else. Creating the common, or becoming common, as a collective, habit-forming, everyday endeavor will require many windows, or perhaps doors, or better yet bridges, in the art of living together. And that is what we see as our task today.

Homeland Hip Hop!

2009-04-02T00:58:00.005-04:00

Big ups to the Palestine Education Project for pulling this together!

Is this not the hip hop show of the year?! And not only that, it's also a fundraiser for an indigenous youth delegation to Palestine -> this is the real deal: SNAG Magazine, Huaxtec and Haskell Indian Nations University are headed to Palestine this August and you can help them get there while enjoying the show of the year... it sold out last year so get your tix ahead of time here.

And if you don't know...

DAM is Palestine's premier hip hop crew
-> an early, and great track - with an action/video a la Public Enemy's Fight the Power- represents for their hometown of Lyd - check out Born Here. And they're also featured in a little film called Slingshot Hip Hop :p

Invincible & Finale are Detroit's finest
-> Here's their Docu-Music-Video, Locusts, breaking down gentrification in the D. Also make sure to listen to Emperor's New Clothes, Invincible's emergency response to the bombing of Gaza.

Rebel Diaz are an inspiration hailing from many, many places. With Chilean and Afro-Taino roots, Rebel Diaz are Chicago transplants holding it down here in the South Bronx...
-> They regularly rep their many homes and loyalties on songs such as Which Side Are You On?, and are also no strangers to the timely response - check out A Trillion - that's 12 zeros :-)

And last but definitely not least is Brooklyn's own DJ Oja on the 1s and 2s
-> and his band/movement, Earthdriver, just dropped an album.

...now you know.

Movements, Bearers of the New World

2009-03-27T00:01:00.004-04:00

A panel at the World Festival of Dignified Rage -> I'm pretty sure this is Adolfo Gilly, a zapatista rep (duh), zapatista compañera Everilda moderating, Mónica Baltodano, and Oscar Olivera

There have been way too few English-language reportbacks from the first World Festival of Dignified Rage, which took place for 11 days in three locations in Mexico over New Years. Here's one from a compa in Cali and the new issue of Left Turn Magazine provides a few snippets from speeches at the Festival as well.

Below is one such speech by the wonderful Raúl Zibechi whose work is still woefully under-available in English (check out his bio at the bottom of the piece). This is our second collaboration with the Boston Interpreters Collective and is a translation of a partial transcript of Zibechi's speech. To listen to the complete audio of the speech (in Spanish) go here. It's well worth it as you'll also get a chance to hear his powerful denunciation of South America's left governments' participation in the occupation of Haiti as well as an incredibly extensive list of the movements he so articulately and concisely describes below - Enjoy!

The Movements, Bearers of the New World
by Raúl Zibechi*
(Short version of the text read at the Festival of Digna Rabia, Mexico, January 3 - translated by Frances Miriam Kreimer of the Boston Interpreters Collective)

Some four decades ago, there emerged a new generation of movements, very different from what had been hegemonic in Latin America until that moment. This set of movements, born in the early 1970s and during the 1980s and very active in the 1990s, challenged neoliberalism and occupied the place left vacant by the leftist parties, which became supporters of the neoliberal models, and unions, which did more or less the same (with a few honorable exceptions).

These movements changed the face of the continent; delegitimizing the neoliberal model, or at least the most blatant problematic elements of the model, installed a new balance of power and changed the political map. Despite their differences, they have some features in common.

They turned the struggle for land (rural and urban) into the fight for territories or areas where people (indigenous people, peasants, urban popular sectors) live their daily lives and transform survival initiatives into modes and forms of resistance to the system.

They proclaim themselves independent from political parties, churches, trade unions and the state. But such autonomy embodied in physical territory goes hand in hand with the creation of new ways of living and of exercising power, that is, of self-governance.

These are community-based movements in the broad sense of the term. Unlike previous movements, membership is not individual but familial, and the social base of these movements involves the collective organization of the community structure.

These are not strictly social movements; they are political movements, or political-social, if you will. The division between the social and the political set up by the social sciences and the traditional left is not useful for understanding this new generation of movements.

It is not possible to understand these movements from the outside, or with a focus on the visible structures, those that capture the attention of the media, academia, and the institutional left. Rather, it takes an inside perspective, capable of capturing the underground and invisible processes, which can only be done in a long process of engagement with the movements, not only with their leaders. The concept of "field work" is limited, since it does not consider either living or affective attachment with the oppressed.

They are bearers of the new world because both families and communities establish their lives based on relations of reciprocity and mutual aid -- not to accumulate capital or power, but rather to grow and strengthen themselves as communities and movements. In this respect, I believe that in the movements’ territories, non-capitalist relations predominate, certainly not in a pure and uncontaminated form, but rather in a permanent struggle against the state and the capital that seek to destroy them. In other words, the material and symbolic production of values of use has taken the place of the production of values of exchange, not forever, not absolutely, but with steady progress.

We can see this in many initiatives, from those begun in cities such as El Alto and Plan 3000 in Santa Cruz, Bolivia, to the Piquetero neighborhoods of Buenos Aires, where people built houses, public facilities, streets, water, health and education. Thousands of gardens, in urban as well as rural areas, thousands of productive enterprises, hundreds of restored factories -- we are talking not only about rural areas but also in peripheral urban areas there is an enormous capacity to produce without bosses, without supervisors, and without a hierarchical division of labor.

In these worlds different kinds of thoughts arise. No longer are the academies and the system’s parties thinking about the oppressed, but rather we, ourselves, are doing the thinking. Not in order to produce a theory or a thesis, but in order to strengthen the movement, in order to defend it better, in order to expand it and share it with others. So no theory is produced, but simply ideas and strength to keep going.

This other world cannot be represented in the formal world of State and capital. Moreover, it cannot be represented because only that which is absent can be represented. I also believe that participating in the state weakens and diverts them from their main task, which is "to strengthen that which is ours." However, there are many movements that are still combative and fighting for real changes that maintain relations with states. This is a debate that will be with us for a long time and we have no alternative but to face it in the most united way possible, that it should always be a debate “among ourselves”.

Finally, in these areas in resistance, there exist worlds that are different than the world of capital and the state. Of course, they have their forms of power, with greater or lesser degrees of development. The assembly is the common form of collective decision. A world without power does not seem possible. But the facts show that there can be non-state powers, i.e., non-hierarchial and decentralized powers; rotating shifts, so that everyone can learn to give orders collectively and obey collectively. In each place and in each country people adopt different approaches, but these worlds exist, they have life, and they have not become involved with the State as the unions have.

How does it triumph, this world of values of use, this world that is feminist, communitarian, self-focused and self-directed, able to produce and reproduce life? We do not know. What we see is that it grows by expansion, extension, diffusion, contagion, radiation, resonance It does not grow alone, nor in a form symmetrical to capital and the State -- killing, destroying, imposing, digesting and directing. We cannot impose this other world because we would be negating it, but we may breathe life into it, acting as a ferment and yeast, in the belief that the movements and the other worlds are the only thing that can save us from the catastrophe that the upper classes are preparing.

* Raúl Zibechi is an international analyst for Brecha of Montevideo, Uruguay, lecturer and researcher on social movements at the Multiversidad Franciscana de América Latina, and adviser to several social movements. He writes the monthly "Zibechi Report" for the Americas Program.

Freedom & Justice for Atenco!

2009-03-07T21:28:00.006-05:00

Please join the campaign and get the word out about this incredibly important initiative launched by the Peoples' Front in Defense of the Land (FPDT)... for those who are new to the FPDT, check out this extensive coverage of their heroic resistance to displacement in 2002 and the government attack on their community in 2006.

A big thank you to Frances Miriam Kreimer of the Boston Interpreters Collective for translating this very important announcement --> hopefully the first of many collaborations between the BIC and zapagringo.com!

National and international campaign
FREEDOM AND JUSTICE FOR ATENCO

The People's Front in Defense of the Land-ATENCO

PRESS RELEASE
México, Distrito Federal, February 17, 2009.

Today, the 17th of February, we begin the national and international campaign "Liberty and Justice for Atenco," with the participation of our brothers and sisters -- artists and intellectuals, as well as several civic organizations that make up the Committee that will strive to achieve freedom for our colleagues: Pedro Reyes Flores, Alejandro Pilón Zacate, Jorge Alberto Romero Ordóñez, Adán Ordóñez Romero Román, Juan Carlos Estrada Cruces, Julio Cesar Espinosa Ramos, Inés Rodolfo Cuellar Rivera, Edgar Eduardo Morales Reyes, Oscar Hernández Pacheco, Narciso Arellano Hernandez incarcerated in the Molino de Flores prison, in Texcoco, sentenced to 31 years, 10 months and 15 days of imprisonment; Felipe Álvarez, Héctor Galindo, and Ignacio Del Valle Medina incarcerated in the El Altiplano prison in Almoloya de Juarez, sentenced to 67 and a half years and 112 and a half years in prison; our three persecuted compañeros, America Del Valle, Bernardino Cruz and Adán Espinosa; and for justice in Atenco.

In the repression ordered by Enrique Peña Nieto and Vicente Fox on May 3 and 4, 2006 in Atenco and Texcoco, our human rights were violated by the incursion of the federal police and the police of the State of Mexico, who had orders to subdue our communities through a comprehensive action called "population control", whose purpose was to exterminate the social movement of Atenco, to make an example out of Atenco, and to teach a lesson against any social protest. The action consisted of raids without search warrants, arbitrary arrests, physical and psychological torture, rape of our female comrades, and the murders of Javier Cortés and Alexis Benhumea, in addition to a tortuous legal process fraught with violations of legal protections, due process, personal freedom and access to justice.

Since then we have appealed to all levels of administration and enforcement of justice in our country, and we have always received a negative answer to our demands for freedom for our comrades, unjustly accused by the same people who gave orders for the violence of the Mexican State. The decision last February 12, in which SCJN dealt a blow to the people of Mexico, exonerating Enrique Peña Nieto, Eduardo Medina Mora, and Miguel Angel Yunes, among others, also represented an act of cowardice of the Federal Judiciary, as its ministers did not dare to implicate the interests of the ruling class, but acted as accessories to authoritarianism and repression in our country. With this, it is engraved in the collective memory of the public and in history that not only were we victims of repression by governments but now we are victims of the SCJN, who has denied us the right to justice.

Having navigated the institutional labyrinths and almost exhausted all legal remedies, as the People's Front in Defense of the Land we appeal to national and international solidarity, taking intellectuals and artists up on their promise to collaborate with the Committee for Freedom and Justice Atenco. We deeply appreciate their support. We believe that, through their art, writing and singing, their voice will be heard by other large sectors of the society that suffer the political, economic and social consequences of bad governments, raising consciousness about our demand, and opening a new door of hope for our 13 imprisoned comrades, 3 politically persecuted comrades, and all our people who dream of liberty and justice for Mexico.

From this day on, our people, our persecuted and imprisoned brothers, our families and our hearts are no longer alone. Justice has another face for us, universal and very human, with creative hands that work together to construct a fraternal and unprejudiced support, that which we call the solidarity of brothers and sisters. Starting today, the intention is born to walk together, the People's Front and the Committee, until we achieve the desired freedom for the last prisoner and the last persecuted person of Atenco.

International Women's Day & More

2009-02-19T13:23:00.004-05:00

NYC's Movement for Justice in El Barrio premieres their latest video "From Across the Border: Our Resistance Against Global Displacement" at the First World Festival of Dignified Rage in Mexico (photo: Kate Cardona)

International Women's Day 2009 is coming up (March 8th ya'll) and the zapatista communities are cooking up "MAMÁ CORRAL: A POLITICAL, SPORTING, CULTURAL AND ARTISTIC EVENT" -> this is a women's event named after Doña Concepción García de Corral, a recently deceased member of the Mothers of the Disappeared of Chihuahua and an adherent to the Other Campaign. Check out the whole announcement here and a story for Mamá Corral from Subcomandante Marcos here. The gathering is specifically honoring MAMAS IN THE STRUGGLE(!) and looks to be a great follow-up to the First Encounter of the Zapatista Women and the Women of the World, which was named after Comandanta Ramona and took place just a little over a year ago.

Here in NYC, Movement for Justice in El Barrio is doing its part this March 8th (SAVE THE DATE!) as well with the NYC premiere of their new video, "From Across the Border: Our Resistance Against Global Displacement"... details below and updates coming soon.

In other news, Atenco's Frente de Pueblos en Defensa de la Tierra (Peoples' Front in Defense of the Land) has launched a National and International Campaign for the Freedom of Atenco's Prisoners (translation coming soon). In case you don't remember, the FPDT was the organization that led a successful movement in 2002 to protect Atenco (on the outskirts of Mexico City) from being taken over by the Mexican Government and converted into an airport. In 2006, this town in rebellion joined the Other Campaign and were soon brutally attacked. They struggle now to free the thirteen people who remain imprisoned as a result of this repression.

Also wanna give a shout out to fellow Regeneración Childcare NYC member, Elliott Liu, who has just published a piece, "Everybody Wants a New Old Left," in response to several Left proposals for organization in the US released in the past year. Liu draws upon the zapatistas, amongst many other movements, as an example of a left social-political movement that has successfully integrated, applied and innovated on lessons learned over the past few decades of anti-capitalist struggle and reflection.

-------------------------------------------

SAVE THE DATE!!!
More info to come…

Sunday, March 8th at 7:00 PM

LaGuardia Memorial House
307 E. 116th St. Btw. 1st and 2nd Ave
Take 6 train to 116th St.

Join us for International Women’s Day!

THE OTHER CAMPAIGN NEW YORK
Movement for Justice in El Barrio

Presents the NYC premiere of:

FROM ACROSS THE BORDER:
OUR RESISTANCE AGAINST GLOBAL DISPLACEMENT

We shared our struggle across borders when we held our international premiere in Chiapas at:

THE ZAPATISTA'S WORLD WIDE FESTIVAL OF DIGNIFIED RAGE

We will share some of our experiences at the festival and present a special video message from the community of San Salvador Atenco three years after they suffered brutal state repression and are still fighting for the liberation of their political prisoners.

Solidarity with Gaza (Mexico & NYC)

2009-01-15T14:30:00.004-05:00

March in Support of Palestine (Chiapas, Mexico)

On December 27th, one day after the opening of the First World Festival of Dignified Rage in Mexico City, Israel began the full-scale massacre in Gaza that continues to this day. The thousands of Festival attendees from Mexico, the Americas, Europe and Asia quickly issued a statement condemning the attacks and in solidarity with the Palestinian struggle. This was soon followed by a march on the US consulate in Oaxaca City by members of the Popular Assembly of the Peoples of Oaxaca (APPO). The protesters were met with tear gas and nineteen APPO members were arrested. Subcomandante Marcos, spokesperson for the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN), spoke out on Gaza the following day at the Festival (the transcript of his speech is below)... and the video above of a solidarity march in Chiapas featuring his words just dropped yesterday.

And things are heating up here in the North as well... check out the brand spanking new Think-Palestine-Act site in the days and weeks ahead for resources "to learn, teach, organize, and act with Palestine" and if you are in NYC this weekend, please come out to the "Hands Off Gaza/I *Heart* Gaza" double header event on Sunday night featuring M1 (of Dead Prez), Immortal Technique, the A-Alikes, Rebel Diaz, DJ Johnny Juice (from Public Enemy) and (Slingshot Hip Hop's very own) Sabreena Da Witch, amongst others.

And now for some words from El Sup...

Of sowing and harvests
Subcomandante Marcos' speech on Gaza at the First World Festival of Dignified Rage

Two days ago, the same day we discussed violence, the ineffable Condoleezza Rice, a US official, declared that what was happening in Gaza was the Palestinians' fault, due to their violent nature.

The underground rivers that crisscross the world can change their geography, but they sing the same song.

And the one we hear now is one of war and pain.

Not far from here, in a place called Gaza, in Palestine, in the Middle East, right here next to us, the Israeli government's heavily trained and armed military continues its march of death and destruction.

The steps it has taken are those of a classic military war of conquest: first an intense mass bombing in order to destroy "strategic" military points (that's how the military manuals put it) and to "soften" the resistance's reinforcements; next a fierce control over information: everything that is heard and seen "in the outside world," that is, outside the theater of operations, must be selected with military criteria; now intense artillery fire against the enemy infantry to protect the advance of troop to new positions; then there will be a siege to weaken the enemy garrison; then the assault that conquers the position and annihilates the enemy, then the "cleaning out" of the probable "nests of resistance."

The military manual of modern war, with a few variations and additions, is being followed step-by-step by the invading military forces.

We don't know a lot about this, and there are surely specialists in the so-called "conflict in the Middle East," but from this corner we have something to say:

According to the news photos, the "strategic" points destroyed by the Israeli government's air force are houses, shacks, civilian buildings. We haven't seen a single bunker, nor a barracks, nor a military airport, nor cannons, amongst the rubble. So--and please excuse our ignorance--we think that either the planes' guns have bad aim, or in Gaza such "strategic" military points don't exist.

We have never had the honor of visiting Palestine, but we suppose that people, men, women, children, and the elderly--not soldiers--lived in those houses, shacks, and buildings.

We also haven't seen the resistance's reinforcements, just rubble.

We have seen, however, the futile efforts of the information siege, and the world governments trying to decide between ignoring or applauding the invasion, and the UN, which has been useless for quite some time, sending out tepid press releases.

But wait. It just occurred to us that perhaps to the Israeli government those men, women, children, and elderly people are enemy soldiers, and as such, the shacks, houses, and buildings that they inhabited are barracks that need to be destroyed.

So surely the hail of bullets that fell on Gaza this morning were in order to protect the Israeli infantry's advance from those men, women, children, and elderly people.

And the enemy garrison that they want to weaken with the siege that is spread out all over Gaza is the Palestinian population that lives there. And the assault will seek to annihilate that population. And whichever man, woman, child, or elderly person that manages to escape or hide from the predictably bloody assault will later be "hunted" so that the cleansing is complete and the commanders in charge of the operation can report to their superiors: "We've completed the mission."

Again, pardon our ignorance, maybe what we're saying is beside the point. And instead of condemning the ongoing crime, being the indigenous and warriors that we are, we should be discussing and taking a position in the discussion about if it's "zionism" or "antisemitism," or if Hamas' bombs started it.

Maybe our thinking is very simple, and we're lacking the nuances and annotations that are always so necessary in analyses, but to the Zapatistas it looks like there's a professional army murdering a defenseless population.

Who from below and to the left can remain silent?

Is it useful to say something? Do our cries stop even one bomb? Does our word save the life of even one Palestinian?

We think that yes, it is useful. Maybe we don't stop a bomb and our word won't turn into an armored shield so that that 5.56 mm or 9 mm caliber bullet with the letters "IMI" or "Israeli Military Industry" etched into the base of the cartridge won't hit the chest of a girl or boy, but perhaps our word can manage to join forces with others in Mexico and the world and perhaps first it's heard as a murmur, then out loud, and then a scream that they hear in Gaza.

We don't know about you, but we Zapatistas from the EZLN, we know how important it is, in the middle of destruction and death, to hear some words of encouragement.

I don't know how to explain it, but it turns out that yes, words from afar might not stop a bomb, but it's as if a crack were opened in the black room of death and a tiny ray of light slips in.

As for everything else, what will happen will happen. The Israeli government will declare that it dealt a severe blow to terrorism, it will hide the magnitude of the massacre from its people, the large weapons manufacturers will have obtained economic support to face the crisis, and "the global public opinion," that malleable entity that is always in fashion, will turn away.

But that's not all. The Palestinian people will also resist and survive and continue struggling and will continue to have sympathy from below for their cause.

And perhaps a boy or girl from Gaza will survive, too. Perhaps they'll grow, and with them, their nerve, indignation, and rage. Perhaps they'll become soldiers or militiamen for one of the groups that struggle in Palestine. Perhaps they'll find themselves in combat with Israel. Perhaps they'll do it firing a gun. Perhaps sacrificing themselves with a belt of dynamite around their waists.

And then, from up there above, they will write about the Palestinians' violent nature and they'll make declarations condemning that violence and they'll get back to discussing if it's zionism or anti-semitism.

And no one will ask who planted that which is being harvested.

For the men, women, children, and elderly of the Zapatista National Liberation Army,

Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos
Mexico, January 4, 2009.

Gathering Our Dignified Rage

2008-12-22T18:01:00.007-05:00

This is visionary stuff --> both a primer on the organizing that has taken place over the past three and a half years since the Zapatistas released their Sixth Declaration of the Lacandon Jungle and a proposal on where we need to head in the context of our global crises... a rewrite of an earlier piece updated for the current context and in preparation for the First Global Festival of Dignified Rage, which begins in Mexico City at the end of this week. Enjoy!

Gathering Our Dignified Rage
Building New Autonomous Global Relations of Production, Livelihood and Exchange
by Kolya Abramsky

Up there, they intend to repeat their history.

They once again want to impose on us their calendar of death, their geography of destruction.

Down here we are being left with nothing.

Except rage.

And dignity.

There is no ear for our pain, except that of the people like us.

We are no one.

We are alone, and just with our dignity and our rage.

Rage and dignity are our bridges, our languages.

Let us listen to each other then, let us know each other.

Let our rage grow and become hope.

Let our dignity take root again and breed another world.

If this world doesn’t have a place for us, then another world must be made.

With no other tool than our rage, no other material than our dignity

- Communique announcing the World’s First Festival for Dignified Rage, 15th/16th September 2008

It has been three and a half years since the Zapatistas(1) issued their 6th Declaration of the Lacandon Jungle(2). The declaration, issued through collective discussion in the Zapatista communities in the summer of 2005, calls for a Third Intergalactica to take place, “from below and to the left”. Since the declaration was issued, much has happened. The developments of both global capitalism and global resistance described so eloquently and humourously in the call have come into clearer definition. Dynamics have accelerated, and the stakes have increased. And, now, with the capitalist world-economy seemingly unravelling before our eyes, the Zapatistas are seeking to usher in the next stage in the process. People in struggle throughout the world have been invited to Mexico to participate in the World’s First Festival of Dignified Rage, which will take place at the end of 2008(3). Let us dare to seize this glimmer of hope that has been so generously and boldly offered, in order to come together in such a way as to collectively shape the world which emerges from the current crisis, ensuring that it is centred around respect and nourishment of human life, and not destruction, suffering and despair. Time is ticking fast. The abyss is near, and the moment is ripe for action, for hope and for long term strategic visions.

******

The call for a Third Intergalactica followed two previous Zapatista Intergalacticas, self-organized international gatherings of several thousand people aimed at weaving a global network of grassroots struggles. The invitations to participate in these meetings were humorously extended to participants throughout the galaxy, hence the name. The first took place in 1996 in Chiapas, and the second in the Spanish state the following year. The first two Intergalacticas had a profound effect on inspiring, galvanizing and even giving some organizational form to a major new circulation of global struggles, which we have witnessed in the last decade. There are many good reasons to believe that the new process of global convergence and resistance called for by the 6th Declaration could have a similarly important inspirational and catalytic effect in creating a space in which the next stages of global resistance can take shape and collectively organize themselves.

The call came at a moment in which it was urgently needed, and highly suited to the moment. In a nutshell, it came at a moment when existing global processes of struggle were beginning to run up against their own limitations. After a rapid and far-reaching success, they were starting to get stuck in the difficult process of collectively defining and moving into the next phase of resistance.

Let us first briefly describe these global processes and recap on their stunning success. The 10 years preceding the call had seen a marked rise in the global networking of struggles. A number of highly active, imaginative, visible and above all effective, organizational processes came into existence. In particular, the following organizational processes stand out: Peoples’ Global Action, the World Social Forum, the Via Campesina and Indymedia, though these are merely the tip of the organizational iceberg. These initiatives had a very rapid and far reaching two-fold success. On the one hand, they played an enormous role in strengthening communication and the process of building common political perspectives between large numbers of different and fragmented social struggles in many different countries. There has been a great flourishing of self organized efforts to question and resist power structures, frequently based on a confrontational approach to capitalism, rather than lobbying. Importantly, great attention is paid to principles of autonomy, diversity and non-hierarchical organizing. At times, global networks have worked extraordinarily well. In a remarkably short time period these networks have become excellent at organizing large global meetings, conferences, global days of action on common themes, calling for emergency solidarity actions in support of particular local struggles, as well as translating and circulating up-to-date and accurate information and news throughout the world in a short space of time. Indeed, these communication flows, which simply did not exist fifteen years ago, have become so regular that they are frequently taken for granted, and hardly noticed.

And, on the other hand, these global networks did the seemingly impossible. In the midst of a triumphalist, post-Cold War capitalist rhetoric, they dared to denounce capitalism, and were so successful, that they rapidly plunged the system and its major global institutions into a legitimacy crisis. Institutions such as the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organization, World Economic Forum, or G8 are increasingly unable to hold their summits without facing major protests and riots, immense security costs, and harsh media critique. Similarly, with summits relating to multilateral and bilateral free-trade agreements. These institutions are not just facing a crisis of legitimacy, but also deep existential crises. Frequently negotiations are stalled (most notably the World Trade Organization and Free Trade Area of the Americas), as conflicts of interest have shifted from the protests in the streets into the negotiating corridors themselves. And, the World Bank and International Monetary Fund are increasingly unable to meet their budgetary requirements, nor to maintain their clients. And, when the USA launched its War on Terror, the global networks were able to respond in such a way as to plunge the US state and its military apparatus in legitimacy crisis too, both beyond and within the US itself. And, while nation states still retain considerable legitimacy, there has nonetheless been a profound questioning of states, their electoral systems and political parties. Many of these developments were, seemingly, unthinkable just 15 years before. Global movements had become incredibly strong.

And yet, this global convergence process between different struggles also had major limitations and had reached an impasse that was making it very difficult to move forwards. Let us consider this now. Despite their immense success in certain areas (namely denunciation, delegitimation and building communication channels between struggles), they were seemingly incapable of actually slowing and reversing the rapid lurch towards an authoritarian global politics based on fear, coercion, militarism, racism and religious fundamentalism. And, perhaps even more worrying, such political developments cannot be attributed simply to the whims of maniacal leaders the world over, but rather to their undeniable mass appeal to large numbers of people. Importantly, such mass politics is at the expense of and in direct competition with the mass appeal of the more emancipatory visions of social change based on autonomy, diversity and self-organization that global resistance networks are based on. And, faced with this, it seems as if a form of at least temporary paralysis, and also routinization have set in with the existing global processes, mentioned above, which had until then been important. This was true both in terms of immediate visible activities at the global level, and also in terms of being able to open up wider long-term strategic approaches.

It was on the lips of many, but few dared to say it explicitly. Movements seem to have reached an impasse, and were unable to build on their success in order to deepen and expand existing networks so as to make them functional enough to be able to create alternative social relations rather than just denouncing existing relations of power. The 6th Declaration implicitly recognised the potential of these struggles, but also of their extreme impasse and dared to seek to offer a potential way out, or at least an invitation for people to collectively explore and chart new paths in this direction.

******

For years the brutality of the global financial regime has been apparent to all who bore its brunt, and for the rest who cared to look. And now, surprisingly or not, depending on how you may view these things, its sheer fragility has also been revealed in no uncertain terms to people throughout the world. It is no longer possible to label the critics as doomsayers, since now it is major banks, markets and car companies themselves who are hurtling into the void. Governments around the world have responded as headless chickens before a crisis of their own making. Now, the very policy makers who led the world to the abyss are claiming to be its saviours in the making. With bail outs galore, governments have been quick to attempt to rescue failing financial infrastructures and also industrial sectors. They have produced vast quantities of money seemingly out of nowhere, perhaps pulling it from out of their arses, in a move that literally mortgages the futures of several generations of waged and unwaged workers throughout the world. Yet, the bailouts are far from “working”, even in their own terms. Markets stabilize for some days, then plunge again. And, while there is much talk of “all pulling together”, “unity in the face of crisis”, “common sacrifice” and above all of “bi-partisan” solutions, it is crystal clear that infact important interstate tensions are emerging, especially between the EU, China and USA, and also within the EU itself, as economic and political forces pull Germany in one direction and Britain, France and Italy in another. The US political system has been heavily divided internally, first over the large bail out of the banks and more recently (and ongoing as this article is being written), over the bail out of the historic Detroit car industry.

And, on the other hand, in a state of confused semi-incredulity at the demand that they and their as yet unborn children should shoulder the burden of crisis, people throughout the world are slowly but surely breaking out from the constraints imposed by the appeals to trust the world’s leaders in sailing a bi-partisan-ship to the distant shores of salvation.

In the USA, there is a slowly reawakening resistance on foreclosures, ranging from political lobbying, to collectively negotiating rescheduling of bank loans, to direct action and community based resistance to eviction, to squatting of buildings. While nowhere near the scale of anti-eviction resistance during the 1930s Great Depression, there are nonetheless encouraging signs underway(4). And, of great significance, is the grassroots, predominantly Latin@ worker occupation of the Republic Windows & Doors factory in Chicago over the issue of receiving severance pay and other benefits owed to them by Bank of America in the face of being laid off due to the factory suddenly being closed down. The occupation took place under the leadership of Local 1110 of UE (the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America), a union with a history of important struggles including being one of 11 trade unions which during the early days of the Cold War were persecuted and thrown out of the major US labor federation at the time, the Congress of Industrial Organizations, for their unwillingness to persecute radicals within these unions. The factory occupation, which lasted six days, was supported by solidarity actions in numerous cities throughout the US and around the world, and ultimately was victorious. An important victory in the US, showing once again people’s determination and creativity in times of crisis. A week of action calling for a “People’s Bailout” has been called by Jobs With Justice, for December.

People in Europe have responded particularly strongly and fast to the crisis, especially in its Southern peripheries, Italy, Spain and Greece. In Italy repeated waves of strikes, tending towards general strikes, have mobilized literally millions of workers throughout the country. In Spain, a country where the speculative housing and construction boom is rapidly unraveling causing great social dislocation, there was a major day of protest in many places throughout the country on November 15th in response to the G20 meeting which took place in Washington with the aim of shoring up the international financial system. Bank workers have also staged an occupation of the main branch of the BBVA Bank. And, within days of Lehman Brothers going under, “Robin-Bank” announced that he had stolen close to half a million euros from 38 Spanish Banks in order to give the money to emancipatory social movements. In Greece, mass riots and protests were triggered by the police murder of a teenager, but also coincided with a strike that had been called previously by two major unions, and has turned into a many day major social uprising, in a country where youth unemployment is as high as 70% in some places, even prior to the effects of the world-economic crisis being felt. Importantly, in all three of these countries, a common slogan has emerged in a very short space of time: “We will not pay for your crisis”.

On the other hand, processes of globally coordinated resistance in the face of crisis have been slow to emerge. Nonetheless, a number of interesting, if entirely embryonic, initiatives are underway. A wide-ranging statement combining demands and a program of action for a “transitional programme for radical economic transformation” to a radical economy was issued by participants in an international meeting of social movements which took place at the Asia-Europe People's Forum in Beijing in October 2008. There were some attempts to have globally coordinated protests during the November 15th G20 meeting, including a meeting of the Latin American Continental Social Alliance which took place in Ecuador, though this emergency G20 meeting was held so swiftly that it was impossible for any major global coordination of protests to occur. One interesting feature, was a statement put out by ALBA countries saying that the G20 was not the appropriate space to resolve the crisis. It is expected that preparation for protests during the next G20 meeting which will take place in April in London might be more impacting. And an international NGO meeting to discuss the crisis and responses has been called for to take place in Paris in January 2009. On the level of direct action, groups in Spain and in the USA have come together to call for a global debtors strike and boycott of banks. As a side note, it is also worth mentioning two other global processes of resistance, neither of which are explicitly connected to the financial crisis itself, but are none the less intimately related. The first are the food and fuel riots which rocked more than 30 countries earlier this year, a rapid and spontaneous reaction to food and fuel inflation. These took place even before the banking crisis became fully developed. The bailouts are likely to generate a period of major inflation, thus making such protests and riots increasingly common occurrences. The second important process is the international mobilizations which are underway to protest the Copenhagen UNFCCC climate change talks which will take place in December 2009, exactly 10 years to the day since the WTO was routed in Seattle in 1999.

Yet, while offering some hope, all of these responses are still very much embryonic, and there is a long way to go before we will be collectively strong enough to change the course through which the crisis is to be resolved.

And so, in the face of crisis, an extension of the permanent crises which many throughout the world have already been living through for centuries, it perhaps is becoming increasingly clear which tasks are lying ahead of us. And, also increasingly daunting. Furthermore, if we are to avoid further great human suffering and barbarities, we are faced with a paradox. While we need to take the time to do it right, we also need to speed up and do it right all at the same time, since doing it wrong, or doing it slow is not an option either. And, while, now is a time for discussing it is not a time for empty chit-chat, but for discussion through which we can collectively transform ourselves and our ability to create something new together. Yes, let’s take the time for taking a deep, and celebratory, breath at the fact that the George Bush Presidency is in its last days, and to celebrate the first African-American to enter the White House, proudly acknowledging within minutes of his victory that “Native American, gay, straight, disabled and not disabled” had contributed to his win. And, while voting for Obama may or may not have been the answer, history alone can judge, his victory surely represents more than a victory of one particular politician, but rather reflects a deep-mass based process that is deeply yearning and searching for a profound change of direction in the face of deep crisis. Again, another point to celebrate. And for sure, it is hard not to be happy on hearing Obama speak out in favour of the Chicago factory occupiers. Yet, despite all this, are we really to believe that Obama represents more than a concerted effort to shore up capitalism in its disastrous entry into the twenty-first century, the West’s belated answer to Mikhail Gorbachev who history bestowed with a correspondingly unfortunate task of shoring up a failing state communist model in its moment of terminal crisis? And, is there not a certain ironic ring to the rallying call "Let's turn Obama into the West's Gorbachev!"?
Above all, now is not a moment for complacency, but one for seizing in order to win strong reforms in the immediate term, avoiding cooptation, and preparing seriously for revolution in the medium term... It is a moment for gathering the combined powers of our Dignified Rage.

******

Dignified and Undignified Ways Out of a Crisis: Negotiating the Space Between Repression, Divisions and Cooptation

Not to be outsmarted or left behind by global dynamics in the financial sphere, the same day that Lehman Brothers, one of the world’s largest investment banks, went under, the Zapatistas issued their invitation to the wonderfully named “World’s First Festival of Dignified Rage”. The timing may or may not have been coincidence, it does not matter in the slightest. The current moment is both a time of great urgency, and also one of great possibility and openness to major changes in social relations. It is vitally important that the potential of this moment is not lost. And, above all is crucial that we keep at the forefront of our minds the importance of the prescience of the call’s emphasis on Dignified Rage. For, the dangers which almost certainly lie ahead should we follow a path of each-to-their-own Undignified rage, as demonstrated in the recent horrendous multiple attacks in Bombay, are almost unimaginable. The Nazi holocaust is a clear reminder of the extents of horror which can be unleashed by undignified rage in the face of a world-wide financial crisis.

The current situation is likely to open up all kinds of calls for financial and monetary reform, some new, some rehashes of old schemes. The Tobin Tax, designed as an international mechanism to simultaneously curb financial flows and also raise revenue for desirable purposes is one such example. Already much of the mainline press in the USA and western Europe are quick to condemn “greedy finance capital” and call for its regulation, while simultaneously celebrating and attempting to prop up the “good industrial capitalism”. Noble “Main Street” is pitted against heinous “Wall Street.” However, the debate about monetary and financial reform, and the extent to which it is either possible or desirable, is not a new debate. It is one that has surfaced repeatedly, with more or less energy, at different moments of financial crisis. The debate was central to the development of the 1848 European (and elsewhere) revolutions which followed close on the heels of a major financial crisis in 1847, forming the central component of Marx’s critique of different proposed “alternatives”, famously debated with the French anarchist, Proudhon in The Poverty of Philosophy. More recently, the attempt to curb “finance capitalism” while shoring up “industrial productive capitalism” was closely related to the rise of corporatism, fascism and Hitler in the Great Depression of the 1930s. On the other hand, in 2001, when Argentina’s banks went under, a twin process of factory occupation and the creation of local alternative currencies which for a period sustained literally millions of people who simply could not affort to use the existing official currency.

Yet, an oversimplistic focus on reforming the monetary and financial system in isolation presents an enormous threat to current emancipatory struggles. On the one hand it is likely to be largely ineffective, while on the other it may open up a very big space for scapegoating and also ensuring the conditions for a renewed round of capitalist accumulation. Such a focus attempts to solve problems on one level, namely the financial and monetary, while in fact these problems originate in another level, namely at the level of the existing world-wide relations of production and reproduction. As such, the World’s First Festival of Dignified Rage is one more step towards creating a global process of resistance and construction of alternative relations that is called for in the 6th Declaration in 2005, and which the proposed Intergalactica would seek to contribute to. It remains unclear what form the Intergalactica will take, should it indeed occur, and whether it will be a one off international event or an ongoing long term process of constructing alternatives. And, for that matter, it also remains an open question whether what emerges is actually called the Intergalactica, as was proposed in the 6th Declaration, or whether it goes by another name. However, for the moment, and for the purposes of this text, I will assume that something called an “Intergalactica” is still on the agenda. If in the end a global process emerges which does not actually go under the name Intergalactica, but under some other name, well, the name itself is not the most important thing.

What is important is that the process of resistance and transformation which emerges is based on a broad and meaningful participation from many different struggles from around the world, with a clear view towards building on the big successes of globally networked struggles in order to overcome their limits and effectively move into a higher phase of struggle. Despite certain very important successes, these global processes are still very limited, and it is important to acknowledge and confront these limitations head on. It is one thing to bring activists from many different countries and struggles together for a face-to-face meeting or protest that takes place over a very short and specific time period, normally lasting a few days only. However, it is quite another thing to actually build long term deep social relations between struggles at the global level, relations that create fundamentally different relations of production, reproduction of livelihoods and exchange and that go beyond the nation state and market as forms of organizing social relations. Until now, most global relations between struggles in different parts of the world have been quite ephemeral and highly superficial, often relying on small numbers of specific individuals rather than being appropriated by larger numbers in the respective movements. At this stage in the young networks, this state of affairs is not especially surprising, due to many different barriers including access to resources for travel and regular computer based communication, foreign language skills, detailed knowledge of the world-economy, the ability to take time away from local struggles and immediate day-to-day concerns, etc. And, while these limitations have not presented a major barrier to networking, protest and denunciation, they do seem to present a major bottleneck to the far bigger task of collectively creating lasting new social relations based on diversity, autonomy and decentralization.

This bottleneck, though not often acknowledged openly and collectively, has meant that global networking processes are not nearly decentralized enough, especially in relation to their own rhetoric of extreme decentralization; nor are they deep enough in terms of their ability to sustain meaningful exchange and mutual support processes, especially between movements in Southern countries. Furthermore, their reliance on small numbers of individuals makes them extremely vulnerable, both to the inactivity of specific individuals and to cooptation and repression (individuals are easier to kill, imprison and buy off than broader collective processes). Above all, global movements are still a very long way from constructing social relations that go beyond both the nation state and world- market, and in many cases (especially in the imperialist countries with a strong social-welfare state), there is still great dependency on state structures, and as the current crisis has shown clearly, financial structures such as the banking and pension systems.

While the construction of alternative relations of production, reproduction of livelihoods and exchange are frequently at the centre of specific local struggles (especially land related struggles in Southern countries), these relations almost never extend to the regional or global level, and where they do (such as direct exchange coffee or the occasional solidarity project related to building infrastructure such as health clinics or renewable energy installations) they still have a very small reach and are limited to specific products (often artesanal). In general, global resistance networks are still far better at spreading news and coordinating protests in different parts of the world than they are at spreading products, people, skills, financial and technical support. (Though these latter set of activities do occur frequently, for the most part it occurs within the context of fairly paternalistic NGO activity that is based around the premise of reform and integration into existing power relations rather than in a horizontal politics based on autonomy, solidarity, diversity and a confrontational approach to power). At the level of “resisting states” there have been important regional integration processes in Latin America, most notably the ALBA (Bolivarian Alternative of the Americas) which has been spearheaded by Chavez, or the Hemispheric Integration of the Peoples, spearheaded by Evo Morales. These states have been able to embark on more extensive and long term cooperation processes, such as in health, energy, communication and finance. However, for the most part, such cooperation has taken place within the framework of nation states, rather than building direct movement-movement relationships. Overcoming these bottlenecks in global networking processes would take horizontal autonomous self-organization to new levels in terms of their collective ability to build far-reaching and lasting global alternatives that go beyond both the nation state and the market. There is an urgent need for movements to tackle these difficult tasks. If these bottlenecks are not overcome very rapidly, enabling a serious and accelerated world-wide process of constructing alternative relations, there is a danger that everything that has been built up in the last years will be lost.

It is in this context that the Zapatista call for another Intergalactica must be understood. For the Intergalactica to contribute to a long term process of building new social relations at the global level, it will be important that it is a participatory process, driven forward by struggles across the world, constructed through a process of dialogue and exchange. The Zapatistas have set the ball rolling, with a directed invitation. This invitation is based on the Zapatistas’ own awareness that they themselves have fought a long social struggle that has spent many years in the laborious and painstaking process of constructing long term autonomous social relations. This process has been based on collectively taking over land, one of the fundamental means of production and reproduction of people’s livelihoods. However, the Intergalactica is not just the responsibility of the Zapatistas but of all those who identify with it throughout the world. Active rather than passive participation from these different struggles will be what gives the process real depth and meaning. This includes the need for a collective global discussion process, based in decentralization and autonomous self-organization, to define what kind of a process the Intergalactica should be. What are its goals, contents and methods, who will participate in it, through what kind of process and which forms of participation? And, if it is to involve particular large international meetings or encuentros along the way, where would they take place and when? However, before discussing possible ways forward for creating such a global process, let us first take a look more closely at the undignified way of resolving crisis.

Undignified Paths in the Face of Resistance

Historically, capital and state power have responded to popular resistance through the combined use of 3 major strategies: dividing struggles, integrating them through partial reforms, and repression. These three strategies have not been employed in isolation from one another, but in careful combination. They have been implemented with varying degrees of success (from the point of view of capital and state power), and never permanently. In the current context of global resistance we are already in the whirlwind of these three responses. Having slowly brewed over the last several years, these dynamics are likely to be greatly intensified and accelerated by the current economic crisis and the Obama election. The degree to which we are able to anticipate, prepare for and confront this three-pronged response will greatly determine how successful movements are in defining the terms of debate and terrain of struggle in order to expand the space from which to go about building viable long term emancipatory social relations and moving beyond their current impasse. It will also be crucially important not to lose sight of history. Let us look at the three prongs – division, integration, and repression – one by one.

The continued existence of the capitalist world-economy has relied on its ability to divide populations from one another, both within countries and between countries, in order to prevent unity of struggle within the world-wide division of labour. Especially important has been capital’s ability to prevent global circulation of struggles by maintaining a world-system divided into nation states. The world-wide division of labor has been hierarchically structured, based on imposed (and continually reimposed) divisions based around (especially, but not exclusively) race, ethnicity and gender hierarchies, as well as those between waged and unwaged labor. When considering the global division of labor, certain (minority) sections of the world’s population have been implicated in the exploitation and discrimination of certain other (majority) sections of the world’s population, due to gaining direct or indirect material rewards from their position in the hierarchy. In particular, the imperial expansion of the late 19th Century (“Scramble for Africa”, etc), and the consequent subjugation of workers in the colonies, enabled often quite substantial partial reforms to be granted in response to the growing strength of workers’ struggles in capitals core, Europe and the USA. Another crucial divide throughout history has been the citizen/non-citizen divide, or, taken to its worst racist extremes, the “human”/”non-human” divide, as epitomized in the 20th Century by the genocidal social deal offered to “pure German” workers in Germany in the Hitler period. And, last but not least, let us not forget the so-called post-World War II “welfare state” model which has provided large sections of the populations in the capitalist center (especially, but not exclusively, white male unionized workers) with greatly improved material standards of living and political freedoms at the expense of the great majority in peripheral countries, as well as people of color and unwaged (especially women) workers within the core countries themselves.

The second major strategy employed in response to social struggle has been cooptation that has integrated struggles, by partially giving in to certain demands for social, economic and political reforms while not substantially challenging private ownership and profit relations, political decision making, and labor control mechanisms that have defined capitalist (and imperialist, patriarchal, racist…) social relations. In the first half of the twentieth century, the Keynesian welfare state was widely introduced in core capitalist countries, in response to the fear of the Russian Revolution inspiring and supporting similar processes throughout the world. In the second half of the century, in response to the 1949 triumph of the Chinese Revolution, developmentalism combined with formal political independence was introduced into the colonies. The Keynesian deal which linked productivity to high wages was so ingenious that not only was it able to buy off social struggle, but also to actually harness it to such an extent that, safely channeled, demands for higher wages actually contributed to economic growth.

Last, but not least, has been state repression. Those resistances which could not easily be integrated or bought off with reform have simply been crushed and intimidated out of existence, involving mass imprisonments, torture, and political murder, as well as war. Of crucial importance in terms of developments in the 20th Century was the repression of the revolutionary wave which circulated much of the world in the wake of World War One and the Russian Revolution, the fascist destruction of movements in Europe, Stalin’s repression on worker resistance in both the USSR and satellite states, repression by the US and its allies in third world countries, such as Vietnam or Indonesia, and the fierce repression of African American struggles in the USA, especially in the late 60s and 70s, amongst many other examples.

World-wide Unity Against Division: an Indispensable Basis for a Dignified Way Out of the Crisis

Bearing this in mind, perhaps one of the most important tasks facing emancipatory struggles in the coming years will be to maintain and deepen the levels of internationalism and inclusivity of global networks across the hierarchies, old and new, which divide people from one another. The inclusive nature of the term “Intergalactic” (fortunately, broad enough to include “aliens”…) is vital. Unity is understood here to be a decentralized unity based on a diversity of autonomous forms of self-organization from which different struggles within the world-wide division of labour can communicate and cooperate with each other in their particular struggles to break free from the domination of capital over their lives, but at the same time are able to struggle amongst themselves to break down hierarchies and divisions which exist within the division of labour itself. In order for the Intergalactica to really move in this direction, it is of central importance that relevant movements and struggles are aware of the Intergalactica process and are actively participating in giving it shape.

A key question that needs to be addressed before addressing any other question is who will take part in the process of building the Intergalactica and on what basis. For a long-term and transformatory global process such as the Intergalactica to come to fruition, it is especially important that people from as many countries and as many different struggles of exploited, oppressed and marginal social groupings as possible are able to participate in its construction. Yet, beyond such general and vague niceties, is the particular need of overcoming divisions that are currently being fostered within the world-economy itself, as well as of course transcending hierarchies and divisions which have been built up over centuries of colonial history. Unless intentionally addressed by emancipatory struggles these divisions are likely to be reproduced within global networks themselves. In particular 4 types of “global” divisions currently stand out, divisions which are likely to become much deeper and more damaging in the near the future:

The so-called “Clash of Civilizations” is a process which could turn out to have similar divisive effects on global struggle as the Cold War did, in which (on a greatly uneven and hierarchical basis) people from “the west” and “the Arab world” are trained to fear, distrust and hate one another, divided by ignorance and encouraged to align themselves to one or the other side of absolute religious and cultural divides based around “good” and “evil”. The recent horrific terror attacks in Bombay, together with Obama’s insistence on maintaining and strengthening a hardline-approach to the war in Afghanistan (despite using an obviously calmer and less hysterical rhetoric than Bush uses), do not bode well for easing this situation in the near future. Crucially, until now, “the Arab world” has hardly been involved in the (contemporary) secular global networks of anti-capitalist struggles mentioned above. Furthermore, these global networks still remain largely ignorant of and isolated from struggles in the Arab world, though the situation in Palestine, Iraq and Afghanistan is changing this slowly and some interesting links between movements have been made, such as the International Solidarity Movement in relation to Palestine, and links made with migrant worker struggles in the USA and UK with Iraqi oil workers unions. Most recently is the amazingly successful and hope-inspiring efforts of the Free Gaza Movement to break the Israeli siege of Gaza by entering the territory in ships. Especially as energy and climate change becomes increasingly central to world political and economic debates, there is great need for global movements to be wide enough to include on their own terms the important struggles of oil workers in Arab countries. As people sitting on some of the most important energy reserves in the world, they surely have an invaluable contribution to make in the imagining and building of a new world.

Africa has been exploited and marginalized at the lowest levels of the hierarchical world-economy. Unfortunately, sometimes in global anti-capitalist networking processes, these processes of marginalization have also been reproduced. And, as the world-economy becomes increasingly multipolar, a process surely greatly advanced by the current crisis, Africa will almost certainly have even less of a share of the global surplus than it had in the last years. Food and energy inflation are likely to have a particularly strong impact on Africa, especially hitting women, young and elderly particularly hard. It is not unlikely that Zimbabwe, a country with seemingly limitless skyrocketing inflation and fierce internal political struggle and repression, presents a foreboding warning of things to come. It is also becoming increasingly apparent that struggles over control of Africa’s oil are going to have major global impact. The fact that the last two World Social Forums have taken place in Africa (Nairobi and Bamako, the latter as part of the 2006 Polycentric Forum) and that the Forum for Food Sovereignty also took place in Mali last year has perhaps slightly improved this situation. However, African struggles are still highly marginalized within many global anti-capitalist networking processes. The multiple wars in Africa have had very little prominence within global networks, a discussion of reparations for slavery for Africans and their Diaspora is still very low on the agenda of most global networks, and most discussion around debt is still based in the language of pleading for “debt forgiveness” rather than demanding non-payment of illegitimate debts. These discussions, especially in relation to reparations, need to be central in any global debate on resistance in the face of crisis.

The Citizen/non-citizen divide, despite sparking a vast amount of self-organized struggles throughout the world, especially in North America and Western Europe, makes it incredibly difficult if not impossible for undocumented migrants to travel to international meetings, gatherings, and protests and to make any form of direct exchanges with movements in other countries. Any form of contact with struggles in other countries must, by necessity, always be indirect, either through web, texts, videos, radio etc, or through intermediary (documented) supporters, who may or may not be mandated by the undocumented people concerned. This reliance on indirect and mediated communication presents profound challenges to self-organization and unmediated self-representation. Movements will have to think of creative ways to overcome this division itself.

Rival power/imperialist blocs. Rivalries between regional power blocs have increased in recent years, and are likely to continue doing so in the future, especially along the lines of tensions between USA, China and EU countries, but also other countries including India, Brazil, Russia, Japan and the Koreas and the alignments that these latter countries’ governments and their capitals choose in relation to the former countries. Currently it is still fairly easily for information and people to circulate between these regions, however, regional and national protectionisms (as well as military tensions) could emerge which make such contact more difficult in the future. Importantly, until now, Chinese struggles, which are accelerating rapidly in parallel to China’s growth as an economic power, have been more or less entirely absent from global anti-capitalist networking process. However, in recent years there have been some intentional contact making processes outreaching towards Chinese struggles driven by people active in a range of different global networks, the most prominently the World Social Forum, and most recently the Asia-Europe People's Forum in Beijing in October 2008. The fact that the last major WTO summit took place in Hong Kong also provided an important moment for connections to be made between different struggles, but there is still a great deal of work to be done in this area. The world-economic crisis makes this task even more urgent. The US bailout effectively mortgages generations of workers, and in particular, Chinese workers, since the Chinese economy is the only real guarantee of these loans. In other words, the bail out is based on the highly spurious assumption that workers in China will actually be prepared to shoulder the burden of propping up the world-economy. The crisis is hitting Chinese export factories particularly hard, especially migrant workers, and it remains to be seen what type of responses emerge. There is great danger that interstate competition, rivalry and conflict can increase as different powerful states seek to find “national” solutions to the crisis through offering protections to workers in these countries. And, while history does not repeat itself, the responses to the breakdown of the world-market which preceded World War Two nonetheless serve as an ugly historical reminder of what undignified “solutions” look like.

Global resistance efforts, such as the Intergalactica, or whatever global process emerges from the international process kickstarted by the Zapastistas, will have to acknowledge, anticipate and overcome these divisions to the extent that is possible in order to strengthen global unity of emancipatory struggles. The attempts from capital and state power to divide the global circulations of struggles and the people involved in them is almost certain to intensify in the coming years. However, high levels of participation in the Intergalactica from these regions, countries and sectors are very unlikely to happen spontaneously, and may in fact require an intentional and targeted preparation process that seeks out contacts and collaboration with struggles in these parts of the world, not just relying on existing contacts but rather trying to build new relationships where none currently exist. There are many obstacles that will have to be overcome in this process, not least of all language and access to funds.
Building the Intergalactica Slowly but Surely: A Review of Events from the 6th Declaration to the World’s First Festival of Dignified Rage

Until now, the global process outlined in the 6th Declaration has got off to a seemingly solid start. Since 2005, the Zapatistas have convened three large scale international gatherings, or encuentros, a continental meeting (convened together with other organizations), and an international caravan. A fourth international gathering, the World’s First Festival of Dignified Rage, is about to take place as this article is being written. So far, the process has been predominantly driven forward by the Zapatistas, with a strong response coming from different groups around the world. The fact that the Intergalactica itself has been slow to take shape (and in fact has scarcely been mentioned in Zapatista communiqués since the 6th Declaration was issued) does not detract from the fact than an important international process is slowly getting underway. Arguably, given that it will be desirable to build a deep long term process rather than simply a superficial one off glitzy meeting, the slow pace of building the Intergalactica itself is in fact a wise move, and is hopefully laying a sound basis for accelerating the process in the near future.

To date, the process outlined in the 6th Declaration has passed through a number of stages(5). The Other Campaign within Mexico itself, an initiative aimed at building a strong country-wide non-electoral political process from below and to the left, has gone through various phases(6); the first and second Encuentros of the Zapatista Peoples with the Peoples of the World (December 2006/January 2007 and July 2007), paralleled by a period of consultation in which struggles around the world were able to make proposals for the Intergalactica. In October 2007 an Encuentro of the Indigenous Peoples of the Americas was convened by eight indigenous organizations, including the Zapatistas, in Sonora, Mexico. In December 2007/January 2008, there was an international women’s Encuentro, dedicated to Comandanta Ramona who died in 2006. In response to the ongoing escalation of repression directed against the Zapatistas, an international Observation and Solidarity Caravan took place in Zapatista territories, Chiapas, in the summer of 2008. All of these events have been important events in their own right. However, none of them are the Intergalactica proposed in the 6th Declaration. Rather, they can all be understood as steps along the way to building an ongoing and long term global process, one that may take the name Intergalactica, or perhaps some other name. And now, the Zapatistas are marking their 25th anniversary by holding the next stop along the way, the World’s First Festival for Dignified Rage(7).

Let us briefly review the international aspects of this process. Narconews, one of the main English language website following developments since the Sixth Declaration was issued, has links to Other Campaign related materials in 8 languages, interestingly, including Farsi. Already, before the first Encuentro of the Zapatista Peoples with the Peoples of the World took place in Chiapas last December/January, a decentralized process of preparatory meetings and other activities had taken shape throughout much of Europe, South, Central and North America in response to the Zapatista call. Between July 2005 and July 2006 (the period of consultation), 19 different activities were reported in 16 cities from 9 countries. Importantly, this included several within the USA, involving close overlap with those involved in the powerful migrant struggles that are erupting there. Many of them are Chican@s (Mexican Americans) and Mexican migrants involved in the Other Campaign from within the USA, what has been dubbed “the Other Campaign on the Other Side”. Whilst most of these meeting and initiatives have been fairly conventional processes of one-way solidarity to what is occurring in Mexico, some of them have gone further, employing the language and perspectives of the Other Campaign to engage in activities relating to local issues. Three important examples of this have been the local struggles organized by an immigrant organization Movement for Justice in El Barrio, in Spanish Harlem, New York and two different border camps against the US and Mexican border, as well as the complementary, although not explicitly linked, “Another Politics is Possible” track, which took place at the US Social Forum in Atlanta. From these meetings and activities, a number of proposals have emerged for how the future Intergalactic Encuentro should be organized and what its contents should be, which will be addressed later in this article. Although not without its limitations, which will be addressed later in this article, it is clear that there is a strong international process emerging around the Intergalactica.

The two Encuentros Between the Zapatista Peoples and the Peoples of the World drew several thousand people to the autonomous Zapatista Caracoles(8) in Chiapas, about half from Mexico and the other half from close to fifty countries from around the world. The first meeting was held in one of the Caracoles, Oventic, over four days, and the second held in 3 Caracoles (Oventic, La Morelia and La Realidad) over nine days. The two meetings were opportunities for the Zapatistas to present their grassroots achievements of autonomy and self-government to people in struggle from different parts of the world, as well as for the Zapatistas to learn about struggles in other countries.

In the first Encuentro, members of the Juntas de Buen Gobierno (Good Government Councils) presented Zapatista experiences in the following areas: autonomy and other forms of government; the other education; the other health; women; communication, art, culture and the other commerce; and land and territory. The final session of the first Encuentro was devoted to hearing proposals from around the world as to how, when and where to build the Intergalactic Encuentro, proposals which had emerged from the period of international consultation opened by the Zapatistas. Interestingly, the strongest participation from outside Mexico probably came from the USA and Canada, including a large number of Indigenous and First Nations organizations from these countries, as well as organizations active in the Other Campaign on the Other Side.

The second Encuentro built on the first Encuentro, going into greater depth about the nuts and bolts of autonomous organizing, with presentations by promoters and other community activists from each municipality around the themes of autonomy, collective work, health, education, and women. A very impressive delegation of Via Campesina representatives from major peasant organizations worldwide participated in this Encuentro, from: Brazil, Bolivia, Honduras, Dominican Republic, USA, Canada, Quebec, Basque Country, India, Thailand, Korea, and Indonesia. Unfortunately the one African representative, from Madagascar, was denied a visa. One day was devoted to speeches from most of the Via Campesina delegates. The second Encuentro did not have a session devoted to the Intergalactica, and in fact there was almost no mention of the Intergalactica, clearly a deliberate decision on the part of the Zapatistas. On the other hand, there was an important unofficial, and self-organized, side meeting which involved around 50 people living in the US, and one of the major themes of the discussion in this meeting was the need to have a similar process to the Other Campaign within the USA itself, which rather than focusing on supporting and participating in the process within Mexico (itself a very important task), would aim to start a long term process to building a form of grassroots political process that goes beyond electoral politics within the USA itself. Mexicans and non-Mexicans alike were proposing this.

In a number of ways the second Encuentro built on the first, slowly deepening the global process that these Encuentros aim to be constructing. In addition to a more in depth presentation of how the Zapatistas have organized over the last years, the second Encuentro was a space for greater participation from different Zapatista communities, with people from each municipality presenting, and in three different Caracoles instead of only one. This was an important space to give large numbers of Zapatistas direct experience with international meetings, with the many different forms of participation that this involved, from speaking on a panel before thousands of people, to preparing cultural events, to organizing the logistical side of large international gatherings, to international “baile popular” (popular dance). Perhaps the most important deepening of the process could be seen in the Via Campesina participation, giving the Encuentro the international scope and presence of mass-based grass roots organizations that the first Encuentro had lacked to a degree (in the first Encuentro there were few, if any, participants from Asia and none from Africa). This process of building specific sectoral alliances along the road to the Intergalactica had been building over time, with Via Campesina having distributed Zapatista corn at the World Forum on Food Sovereignty which took place in Mali earlier this year. The decision to hold the indigenous peoples Encuentro and a women’s Encuentro later in the same year was a further step to building important sectoral links, taking the time necessary to ensure that the process being built is firmly anchored in real struggles before moving on to the Intergalactica itself.

The Third Encounter for the Zapatista Peoples With the Peoples of the World took place from December 28th 2007 to January 1st 08. It was a women’s encounter, of Zapatista Women, with Women of the World. Why a women's encounter? ¨Because it was time,¨ repeated the Zapatista voices, Zapatistas who had implemented the Revolutionary Law for Women in the very early stages of the Zapatista uprising. Over 3,000 people came together to listen, observe, celebrate, and build stronger resistances with these rebellious Tzetzal, Tzotzil, Chol, and Tojolabal Zapatista women. The days were filled with talk of the concrete measures Zapatista women and girls have taken to organize for self-determination, liberty, democracy and justice in their own communities. Through a long process of struggle, Zapatista women have gained many advances in their communities, ranging from the outlawing of alcohol and drugs to curb domestic violence, to taking ever more positions of representation and responsibility, as education and health promoters, in the Good Government Councils, as comandantas of the EZLN, and in artisan cooperatives, to choosing their own partners. And, for the days of the encuentro , men were given a secondary role. They were not allowed to represent or translate, nor sit inside the auditorium. Signs had been hung around the Caracol reading "In this gathering, men cannot participate as note-takers, translators, presenters, spokesmen, or representatives [of an organization]. Men can only work making food, sweeping and cleaning the Caracol and the latrines, taking care of the children, and carrying firewood." By having a women's encuentro, women’s voices were heard directly and not spoken over or marginalized, while at the same time, they emphasized that the movement included their brothers, husbands, children, elders... everyone in the community.

The First American Indigenous Peoples’ Encuentro was held in Yaqui tribal territory from the 11-12 October, 2007, in Vicam, Sonora, Mexico. The gathering brought together indigenous groups from all over the continent, communities in resistance for 515 years, to tell their stories of “pain and dignified rebellion” and to share “experience and wisdom” in order for “the continent to recover its voice.” In particular there was strong participation from the settler countries known throughout the world as “Canada” and “United States”, including from the Kanion’ke:haka/Mohawk, the Mik’maq, the Denen nations, the Hawdenaw swee nation, and the Anishanabe. A number of years ago, the CIA issued a report saying its greatest fear was that the continents indigenous people could form an alliance of resistance. Well… it seems that this is indeed happening.

And now, the latest event in this marathon process of globally orientated resistance is the World’s First Festival of Dignified Rage, which will take place at the end of December 2008. The Zapatistas are hosting this festival on the basis of their listening and reading of the different proposals and discussions generated in the course of the events described above which have occurred in the three years since the 6th Declaration was issued, both within Mexico and globally. The festival will consist of different thematic exhibitions and discussions in which invited organizations, collectives and individuals will present themselves in their own terms. After a strong process in which the Zapatistas have used the international gatherings to present in great detail their experiences at transforming social relations in Chiapas to people from around, the Festival now offers a space for people from around the world to learn from one another. Importantly, the list of participating organizations includes workers organizations from Iran.

An important feature of this whole process has been the progressive deepening of the revolutionary discourse and how this is markedly different from most other international networking processes. In the first Encuentro the speeches repeatedly stressed the need for resistance to find ways of self organizing in order to come together in common struggle. An emphasis was on the need to organize resistance which is already occurring throughout the world. The second Encuentro started with a pre-Encuentro event the night before the Encuentro itself at the indigenous training center, University of the Land in Chiapas in San Cristobal, which in no uncertain terms laid out the terms of struggle, setting the scene for the main Encuentro. The Zapatistas recognize that there are three main ways of embarking on anti-capitalist struggle: establishing alternative consumption patterns, establishing alternative trade patterns or establishing alternative production relations. They have decided to go for establishing alternative production relations, namely collectively taking over the means of production. Having taken over the land, they stressed the importance of rural and urban unity in struggle, so that in addition to taking over land, it will become possible to take over factories in the future. Whilst respectful of the other methods of trying to create non-capitalist relations, taking over the means of production is, in their opinion, the most direct way of struggling against capitalism and creating alternative social relations. Related to this, is their experience of basing autonomy on a process of disengaging from reliance on the state, creating their own self-managed systems in replace of the very limited and distorted state health, education and other state support systems and mechanisms. For an Intergalactica coming “from below and to the left”, such a shift in rhetoric is a very important challenge to global movements who seem very timid around discussing (and above all acting on) the question of means of production. It is an especially challenging discourse for struggles in the capitalist core countries, where that idea was largely abandoned years ago in favor of some form of social-democratic welfarism. Another important challenge that has been thrown out, if not explicitly, then at least through the language used by the Zapatistas, is the need to fundamentally challenge the concept of expanded citizenship as an emancipatory route. Neither the 6th Declaration nor the spoken Zapatista word at the Encuentros themselves have contained any trace of lobbying about them, nor of defining people in relation to the state. The word “citizen” is refreshingly completely absent. Citizens have always existed throughout history only in relation to non-citizens, people defined to be of unequal status to those defined as citizens. The concept of citizenship is intimately bound up with the concept of the nation state, and the struggle for alternatives that go beyond the nation state also point to a conception of the human being that goes beyond citizens and citizenship.
No Time to Lose! – Accelerating the Construction of New Autonomous Global Relations of Production, Livelihoods and Exchange

And, so, what are the long term strategic and short term organizational concerns that lie ahead? In a nutshell, there is a need for a global process that seeks to both expand and deepen global networks, on the one hand to include geographical (as well as sectoral) areas that are scarcely part of global networks and avoid “national” solutions to the crisis, and on the other hand increasing the functional strength of existing networks, so that they can move beyond exchange of information and coordination of protest towards an accelerated process of building long term autonomous and decentralized livelihoods based on collective relations of production, exchange and consumption that are based on dignified livelihoods.

Expanding the geographical and sectoral reach of global networks will entail a particular effort to reach out to struggles in Arab countries, China and Africa, so that these struggles can participate actively in defining the global process of struggle that develops in the future. This is likely to require going beyond existing contacts, making special efforts at both linguistic and political/cultural translation. It will also be important to continue developing creative ways that allow for as unmediated and direct a participation as possible of migrant struggles, many of who lack the legal (let alone financial) possibility to travel internationally, making it very difficult, if not impossible, for them to participate directly in international meetings, protests and exchanges. Crucially, this is not just about expanding networks for the hell of it, but to keep struggles internationalist and not nationalist in orientation, to ensure that our struggles do not inadvertently result in one section of the world’s population winning reforms that can only be offered on the backs of another section of the world’s population, as was the case with the nationally orientated reforms offered by Keynesianism. This is especially crucial when it comes to maintaining and expanding the western welfares states. Particularly challenging in this regard is how to meet the demands of refugee and migrant populations in these countries in such a way that avoids integrating them as new privileged layers into an already highly unequal and hierarchically organized world-wide division of labour, whilst simultaneously maintaining and, in all probability, actually exacerbating that hierarchy. It will be important to find ways of meeting these demands while simultaneously undermining the global hierarchy.

Deepening the functionality of global networks will entail strengthening the capacity of direct exchanges between movements (especially South-South), so that they are really able to learn from each other and to dialogue with one another in order to build common analyses, perspectives and above all common agendas for creative and constructive actions, both short and long term. In particular, this might include exchange of experience on how to avoid, prepare for and respond to repression; exchange of experiences on how to avoid cooptation – especially new forms of protectionism and racist deals, dangers of regional integration, reforms that grant reforms but do not challenge global market, etc; exchange of experience about differing approaches to the state in order to avoid falling into dogmatic approaches towards taking state power or not, but about a discussion process about what actually works, how organizations make decisions in terms of how to approach the state, factors to take into account, compromises to make, etc. It could also include very practical exchanges on all the concrete skills and knowledges necessary for autonomous self-management, such as language training, exchanges on agricultural techniques, renewable energies, self managed health, to name but a very few examples. Importantly, it would be important to build up such a participatory process on the basis of the delegates mandated from organizations and movements, not just individuals, and it would need a financial basis to make these expensive processes viable.

These are all some short term activities that could provide a basis for long term strategies that seek to fundamentally change the global social relations which currently exist. The financial crisis reveals the urgently necessarily, but enormously difficult, task of massively reducing people's dependence on the money economy and financial institutions, so that we can collectively disengage from them and leave them behind. This is an especially difficult task in the core capitalist countries, where people’s daily lives are so intertwined with this world. It will only be possible to break our dependence if we are able to build major capacity in the non-commercial and mutual support-based provision for key areas of satisfying our basic needs (e.g. food, shelter, energy, health, education pensions, etc.), in order to reduce our dependency on waged labour. It will be necessary to reach a far greater capacity than currently exists. Paradoxically, for this to happen movements will have to be able to access larges sums of money, infrastructure, skills and knowledge, as well as many other sources of wealth, again on a far greater scale than movements are currently able to muster. It will require a concerted world-wide effort to acquire key means of generating wealth and sustaining life.

Faced with a worsening world-economic crisis, a twin-pronged approach is called for. On the one hand, there is the need to demand vast sums of money from the state, in the form of public funds and an increasing share of public wealth, access to interest free and unconditional loans which could enable movements to buy collectively controlled and non-commercial sources of wealth generation such as those described above. It will be necessary to create levels of mobilization and pressure on national governments and international institutions so they are unable to avoid making these concessions, especially in relation to the new Obama government, while at the same time maintaining autonomy and avoiding cooptation.

And, on the other hand, it will be necessary to once again place the seizure without compensation of the key means of production (and reproduction) at the heart of revolutionary strategies. Again, this is a monumental task, one that will not occur without strong social mobilization and struggle, but it is a process made much more possible and realistic to imagine by the massive bankruptcies and devaluation of capital that the crisis entails, leaving a trail of abandoned buildings, companies and other pools of social wealth that are deemed “non-competitive” and hence useless. And, crucially, if they are not taken over and collectivized, they will be bought up on the cheap and will fuel a new round of socially and ecologically disastrous capital accumulation. Entire regions or even countries are simply waiting to be taken over and collectivized and defended for common use outside of the realm of profit, not least General Motors, Ford and the USA itself!

And so, the Zapatistas have invited people throughout the world:

Let our dignity take root again and breed another world.

If this world doesn’t have a place for us, then another world must be made.

With no other tool than our rage, no other material than our dignity

----------------------------
1 It is important to stress that that this article deals with the global resistance process the Zapatistas have launched with their 6th Declaration. However, it is not a discussion about the Zapatistas themselves, nor is it an attempt at analyzing the internal political developments within Chiapas or Mexico. On the one hand, this is not the purpose of the article, and on the other, I am in no way qualified to write such an article.

2 For a detailed discussion of the global dimensions of the Zapatistas’ 6th Declaration of the Lacandon Jungle, and for a comprehensive reference to related links etc, see : Kolya Abramsky, August 2008 [April 2007] – ‘The Bamako Appeal and the Zapatista 6th Declaration - From Reorganizing the Existing World to Creating New Ones’. CE1 in the Critical Engagement series from CACIM. Available also at www.cacim.net.

3 The invitation to the World’s First Festival of Dignified Rage, together with information about participants and programme, can be found at http://enlacezapatista.ezln.org.mx

4 An interesting organization to have emerged in this respect is Take Back the Land.

5 Information and footage from these events and processes can be found at http://zeztainternazional.ezln.org.mx and also http://enlacezapatista.ezln.org.mx

6 A discussion about The Other Campaign is beyond the scope of this article, and, in any case, the author is in no-way qualified to write such a piece.

7 The author attended the First and Second Encuentros of the Zapatista Peoples with the Peoples of the World. The observations which follow about these gatherings are based on this direct experience. However, the descriptions of the other events, which he did not attend, are based on second hand readings, from the Zapatista websites, other related sites and personal conversations with people who did attend, and consequently may be slightly less accurate, updated and detailed.

8 Caracol is the most important organ of self-governance in the Zapatista construction of autonomy. It literal translation in English is “snail”, though the word “conch” is also frequently used.

World Festival Updates

2008-12-02T00:37:00.003-05:00

UPDATE Dec 10: Informational Bulletin on the First World Festival of Dignified Rage

(NOTE: If any additional updates on this festival are released between now and when it begins on December 26th, I'll link to them at THIS post... also stay tuned for a future post with links to images, text, video and audio from the festival itself -along with some zapagringo commentary- coming in late Dec/early Jan --> and please be in touch if you are going as I would love to get your thoughts, reportbacks, etc.)

COMMUNIQUÉ FROM THE INDIGENOUS REVOLUTIONARY CLANDESTINE COMMITTEE—GENERAL COMMAND OF THE ZAPATISTA ARMY FOR NATIONAL LIBERATION

MEXICO.
Sixth Commission and Intergalactic Commission of the EZLN
26th of November 2008.

To the adherents to the Sixth Declaration from the Lacandona Jungle in Mexico and in the world:
To the guests of the First World Festival of the "Digna Rabia":
To the people of Mexico:
To the peoples of the world:

COMPAÑERAS AND COMPAÑEROS:
BROTHERS AND SISTERS:

ON THIS OCASSION WE TELL YOU OUR WORD ON THE ADVANCES FOR THE CELEBRATION OF THE FIRST WORLD FESTIVAL OF THE DIGNA RABIA.

FIRST. - UP UNTIL TODAY, WE HAVE THE CONFIRMATION OF ATTENDANCE FROM PEOPLE, GROUPS, COLLECTIVES AND ORGANIZATIONS, ASIDE FROM MEXICO, FROM THE FOLLOWING COUNTRIES:

IRAN.
ARGENTINA.
ITALY.
FRANCE.
UNITED STATES.
BRAZIL.
SWEDEN.
COSTA RICA.
SPANISH STATE.
SWITZERLAND.
BASQUE COUNTRY.
CUBA.
CHILE.
ENGLAND.
AUSTRIA.
VENEZUELA.
BELGIUM.
GERMANY.
NORWAY.
GREECE.

SECOND. - FROM OUR COUNTRY, MEXICO, COMPAÑERAS AND COMPAÑEROS FROM THE OTHER CAMPAIGN, FROM WITHIN THE DIFFERENT STATES OF THE REPUBLIC WHICH WORK ON ALTERNATIVE COMMUNICATION MEDIA, HUMAN RIGHTS DEFENSE, IN SCHOOLS AND UNIVERSITIES, AGAINST REPRESSION, FOR THE PRESENTATION OF THE DISAPPEARED, FOR THE LIBERATION OF THE POLITICAL PRISONERS, IN SOCIAL AND POLITICAL ORGANIZATIONS, IN ART AND CULTURE, IN UNIONS, IN WOMEN’S STRUGGLE, WITH THE MAQUILA WORKERS, IN THE CORNERS OF THE NORTHERN MEXICO, IN THE ENVIRONMENTAL STRUGGLE, IN SEXUAL DIVERSITY, IN THE TEACHER’S MOVEMENT, IN THE COUNTRYSIDE, WITH THE SEX WORKERS, AND THE OUTSTANDING STRUGGLE OF THE NATIONAL INDIGENOUS MOVEMENT WILL BE ATTENDING.

THIRD. - DURING THE DAYS IN WHICH THE FESTIVAL WILL BE HELD IN MEXICO CITY (26th, 27th, 28th AND 29th OF DECEMBER) SOME OF THE PROGRAMMED ACTIVITIES ARE:

26th of December 2008.

1000 hrs. INAUGURATION.

1100 hrs. The Four Wheels of Capitalism: EXPLOITATION. Open forum with the participation of maquila workers from Baja California and Tamaulipas, the National Confederation of Workers (CGT from the Spanish State), workers from Solano (Argentina) and workers from the Middle East (Iran), as well as those workers who wish to participate and who let us know in advance.
Moderator: Multidisciplinary Analysis Centre (CAM, UNAM, Mexico).

1700 hrs. The Other Paths: ANOTHER CITY. Open forum with the participation of the National Union of Popular Organizations from the Independent Left (UNOPII Mexico), the Workers and Socialist Unity (UNÍOS Mexico), young people from anarchist, punk, and libertarian collectives (Mexico). Street Brigade (Brigada Callejera Mexico), as well as those who struggle in the cities who wish to participate and who let us know in advance.
Moderator: UNOPII (Mexico).

27th of December 2008.

1100 hrs. The Four Wheels of Capitalism: PLUNDER. Open forum with the participation of the National Indigenous Congress (CNI Mexico), dwellers of Lomas de Poleo (Ciudad Juárez) (Mexico), Indigenous Cabildos Association from the North of the Cauca (Colombia), as well as those who have a say on capitalist plunder who wish to participate and who let us know in advance.
Moderator: Bárbara Zamora (Mexico).

1700 hrs. The Other Paths: OTHER SOCIAL MOVEMENTS. Open forum with the CNUC -Tlaxcala (Mexico), Indigenous Chinanteca Force (Fuerza Indígena Chinanteca Mexico), People’s Front (Frente del Pueblo Mexico), Blanca Navidad Neighbourhood of Nuevo Laredo (Mexico), Independent Francisco Villa Popular Front (FPFVI Mexico), CACTO-Oaxaca (Mexico).
Moderator: CNI (Mexico).

28th of December 2008

1100 hrs. The Four Wheels of Capitalism: REPRESSION. Open forum with the Doñas of Sinaloa and Chihuahua (Mexico), message from the Atenco political prisoners (Mexico), recorded message from Gloria Arenas, political prisoner (Mexico), We are all prisoners collective (Tod@s somos Pres@s (Mexico), National Network against Repression and for Solidarity (Red Nacional contra la Represión y por la Solidaridad (Mexico), and Bárbara Zamora (Mexico).
Moderator: UNÍOS (Mexico).

1700 hrs. The Other Paths: ANOTHER HISTORY, OTHER POLITICS. Roundtable with the participation of John Holloway, Felipe Echenique (Mexico), Francisco Pineda (Mexico), Raúl Zibechi (Uruguay), Olivier Besacenot (France), Mónica Baltodano (Nicaragua), Sergio Rodríguez Lascano (Mexico).
Moderator: Revista Rebeldía (Mexico).

29th of December 2008.

1100 hrs. The Four Wheels of Capitalism: CONTEMPT. Open forum with the Anarcho-Punk Collective La KURVA (Mexico), National Indigenous Congress (Mexico), Braceros National Assembly (Mexico), Mercedes Oliveira (Mexico).
Moderator: CNI (Mexico).

FOURTH. - FOR THE SERIES OF MAGISTRAL CONFERENCES WHICH WILL BE CELEBRATED IN SAN CRISTOBAL DE LAS CASAS, CHIAPAS, FROM THE 2nd TO THE 5th OF JANUARY 2009, THE FOLLOWING PEOPLE HAVE CONFIRMED THEIR PARTICIPATION:

Adolfo Gilly (Mexico)
Pablo Gonzalez Casanova (Mexico)
Monica Baltodano (Nicaragua)
Luis Villoro (Mexico)
Oscar Olivera (Bolivia)
Michael Hardt (USA)
Walter Mignolo (Argentina)
Pier Luigi Sullo (Italy)
Sylvia Marcos (Mexico)
Jotxe Iriarte (Basque Country)
Paulina Fernandez (Mexico)
Marcos Roitman (Chile-Spanish State)
Gustavo Esteva (Mexico)
Jean Robert (Switzerland)
Arundhati Roy (India) (who will send her participation)
Barbara Zamora (Mexico)
Carlos Aguirre Rojas (Mexico)
Raul Zibechi (Uruguay)
Carlos Gonzalez –CNI- (Mexico)
Juan Chavez –CNI- (Mexico)
John Berger (England) (who will send his participation)
Olivier Bensacenot (France)
Jaime Pastor (Spanish State)
Landless workers movement-MST (Brazil)
Sergio Rodriguez Lazcano (Mexico)
Via Campesina (International).

FIFTH. - ON BEHALF OF THE EZLN, THE FOLLOWING COMPAÑEROS HAVE CONFIRMED THEIR PARTICIPATION AS MODERATORS OR PARTICIPANTS (or just to be a pain -if you know who I mean-) AT THE CONFERENCES IN CHIAPAS:

COMANDANTA SUSANA.
COMANDANTA MIRIAM.
COMANDANTA HORTENSIA.
COMANDANTA FLORENCIA.
COMANDANTA EVERILDA.
COMANDANTE DAVID.
COMANDANTE ZEBEDEO.
COMANDANTE TACHO.
COMANDANTE GUILLERMO
TENIENTE CORONEL INSURGENTE MOISÉS.
CAPITANA INSURGENTE ELENA.
NIÑA LUPITA.
NIÑA TOÑITA.

SIXTH. - FOR THE INVITATIONS WE HAVE PROCEEDED WITH THE DATA WE HAVE FROM THE ADHERENTS TO THE SIXTH DECLARATION, THE CONTACTS MADE DURING THE OTHER CAMPAIGN TOUR AND THE DIRECTORIES OF ATTENDANCE TO THE DIFFERENT EZLN’S PUBLIC ACTIVITIES. IF ANY PERSON, GROUP, COLLECTIVE OR ORGANIZATION, FROM MEXICO OR THE WORLD, HAS NOT BEEN INVITED, IT IS SURELY BECAUSE WE DO NOT HAVE THEIR DATA. SO WE RESPECTUFULY ASK THAT YOU EXCUSE THIS INABILITY OF OURS AND THAT YOU MAKE CONTACT WITH THE ENLACE ZAPATISTA WEB PAGE AT THE CORRESPONDING FESTIVAL-MUNDIAL-DE-LA-DIGNA-RABIA SECTION.

SEVENTH. - WE CLARIFY THAT THE INVITATIONS ARE TO PARTICIPATE AS EXPOSITORS. THE ENTRY TO ALL THE ACTIVITIES OF THE FESTIVAL ARE FREE AND OPEN FOR ANY PERSON WHO WISHES TO ATTEND AND GET TO KNOW THE DIGNA RABIA THAT ORGANIZES ITSELF IN MEXICO AND IN THE WORLD.

SOME TECHNICAL AND PROCEDURAL DETAILS WILL BE MADE KNOWN BY THE FESTIVAL’S ORGANIZATIVE SUPPORT TEAM, AT THE ENLACE ZAPATISTA WEB PAGE AT THE CORRESPONDING FESTIVAL-MUNDIAL-DE-LA-DIGNA-RABIA SECTION.

THAT IS ALL FOR NOW, WE WILL KEEP YOU INFORMED.

¡FREEDOM AND JUSTICE FOR ATENCO!

From the Mexican South-eastern Mountains.

Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos.
EZLN’s Sixth Commission

Teniente Coronel Insurgente Moisés.
EZLN’s Intergalactic Commission

Mexico, November 2008.

Revolution & Evolution in the 21st Century

2008-11-30T08:45:00.001-05:00

Grace Lee Boggs

I really hope that you find some way to to read the piece below, Grace Lee Boggs' new introduction to "Revolution and Evolution in the Twentieth Century" penned by her and the late James Boggs in the late 1970s. Sit here and read it, or cut and paste and print it out... whichever you choose, please consider ordering the 2008 re-print, which has been re-titled "Revolution and Evolution in the Twenty First Century", at the Boggs Center to Nurture Community Leadership's on-line bookstore here. That might be the most convenient way to read this intro - and certainly the one that most supports those whose labor has created this powerful work :-)

Over the past 2+ plus years, zapagringo has become a place to not only further circulate my own zapatista-inspired thoughts, articles, interviews, etc but also a place to bring for the first time on-line (and sometimes for the first time anywhere) some really groundbreaking, similarly inspired political writing by other authors... from Kazembe Balagun's biography of Kuwasi Balagoon and the Matrix Magazine's interviews with Estación Libre members Karl Jagbandhansingh and Ashanti Alston to Kolya Abramsky's analyses of the Zezta Internazional (1,2) as well as the collective reflection of Rethinking Solidarity and -of course- Paula X. Rojas' meditations on movement building and the non-profit industrial complex.

Laying in bed last weekend reading the piece included here below, I was moved to tears by this movement elder's reflections on her life and growth -and that of those she's lived and grown with- over the past 90+ years. The level of resonance I felt with her ongoing discovery was moving, inspiring, and even surprising to me given that I had already read some of her work and heard her speak before... I hope that in providing this piece an on-line home it will find an even wider resonance and touch the hearts of all those who it deserves to reach. Thank you to the author and everyone at the Boggs Center who helped make this writing possible and who have given us permission to share it here - and a special thanks to Allied Media Project's Mike Medow for making that communication between us possible.

Again, please do consider picking up the 2008 edition of "Revolution and Evolution in the Twentieth (21st!) Century" at their on-line bookstore. On this weekend following one of this country's most dubious national holidays, let's engage with this elder intellectual from the Other USA...

Introduction to New Printing of Revolution and Evolution in the Twentieth Century
by Grace Lee Boggs
(zapagringo's note: footnotes make up about a 3rd of the text and are indicated by bold roman numerals - please find a way to jump down to the footnote and back to get the full weight of this work)

I feel blessed that at ninety-three I am still around to tell a new generation of movement activists the story of why James and I wrote Revolution and Evolution in the Twentieth Century (RETC) in the early 1970s, and why I welcome its present republication by Monthly Review Press with its original contents and a new title: Revolution and Evolution in the Twenty-first Century.

James died in July 1993. We had been partners in struggle for forty years. He and his way of looking at the world are still very much with me. But the world and I have changed a lot in the last fifteen years as I have continued our struggle to change the world. i

RETC (as I will refer to the 1974 publication) is an example of the critical role that continuing reflection on practice and practice based on reflection need to play in the lives of movement activists.

In the late 1960s, in the wake of the urban rebellions and the explosive growth of the Black Panther Party, both before and after Dr. King’s assassination, Jimmy and I decided that after our intense involvement in the Black Power movement, we and the American movement needed a period of reflection. This would enable us to figure out where we were and where we needed to go in order to transform the United States into the kind of country that every American, regardless of race, class, ethnicity, or national origin, would be proud to call our own.

So in June 1968 we got together with our old comrades, Lyman and Freddy Paine, on a little island in Maine to begin the annual conversations that continue to this day. ii

The first outcome of these conversations was our recognition that the ongoing rebellions were not a revolution, as they were being called by many in the black community and by radicals and liberals. Nor were they only a breakdown in law and order or a riot, as they were labeled in the mainstream media. A rebellion, we decided, is an important stage in the development of revolution because it represents the massive uprising and protest of the oppressed. Therefore it not only begets reforms but also throws into question the legitimacy and supposed permanence of existing institutions.

However, a rebellion usually lasts only a few days. After it ends, the rebels are elated. But they then begin to view themselves mainly as victims and expect those in power to assume responsibility for changing the system. By contrast, a revolution requires that a people go beyond struggling against oppressive institutions and beyond victim thinking. A revolution involves making an evolutionary/revolutionary leap towards becoming more socially responsible and more self-critical human beings. In order to transform the world, we must transform ourselves.

Thus, unlike rebellions, which are here today and gone tomorrow, revolutions require a patient and protracted process that transforms and empowers us as individuals as we struggle to change the world around us. Going beyond rejections to projections, revolutions advance our continuing evolution as human beings because we are practicing new, more socially responsible and loving relationships to one another and to the earth.

In the process of arriving at this evolutionary humanist concept of revolution, it became clear to us that Marx’s revolutionary scenario (which so many generations of radicals, including ourselves, had embraced) represented the end of an historical epoch, not the beginning of a new one. Writing over one hundred years ago, in the springtime of the industrial revolution and an epoch of scarcity, Marx viewed the rapid development of the productive forces and the more just and equal distribution of material abundance as the main purpose of revolution. In a period when industrial workers were growing in numbers, it was natural for him to view the working class, which was being disciplined, organized, and socialized by the process of capitalist production, as the social force that would make this revolution.

Since then, however, under the impact of the technological revolution, especially in the United States, the working class has been shrinking rather than growing. At the same time the material abundance produced by rapid economic development has turned the American people, including workers, into mindless and irresponsible consumers, unable to distinguish between our needs and our wants. Moreover, we, the American people, have been profoundly damaged by a culture that for over two hundred years has systematically pursued economic development at the expense of communities, and of millions of people at home and abroad. Our challenge is to continue the evolution of human race by grappling with the contradiction between our technological and economic overdevelopment and our human and political underdevelopment. iii

Armed with this new, evolutionary humanist concept of revolution, we presented the Manifesto for a Black Revolutionary Party at the National Black Economic Development Conference meeting in Detroit in 1969, urging Black Power activists to recognize that blacks have been in the forefront of revolutionary struggles in the United States down through the years because their struggles have not been for economic development but for more human relationships between people.

The next year we gave a series of lectures “On Revolution” at the University Center for Adult Education in Detroit. We began by pointing out that, although Lenin and the Bolsheviks had been able to seize state power in 1917, they were unable, in power, to involve the workers and peasants in governing the Soviet Union because their “revolution” had been an insurrection or event rather than a protracted process involving empowerment and transformation. Fortunately, however, the leaders of subsequent revolutions in China, Vietnam and Guinea Bissau learned from the Russian experience, and struggled valiantly to make transformation, serving the people and self-criticism an integral part of the struggle for power, in the process enriching the concept of revolution.

Thus the historical development of revolutions during the twentieth century has been a dialectical process in the course of which revolutionary leaders have been constantly challenged by the contradictions created by earlier revolutions to keep deepening the theory and practice of revolution.

Our challenge as American revolutionaries is to carry on this legacy, always bearing in mind that, unlike Russia in the early twentieth century and China, Vietnam and Guinea-Bissau in later decades, our country has already undergone a century of rapid industrialization and is in the midst of a technological revolution whose political and cultural implications are as far-reaching as those of the transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture eleven thousand years ago and from agriculture to industry three hundred years ago. Our challenge, as we say at the end of the chapter on “Dialectics and Revolution” in RETC, is to recognize that the crises facing our economically overdeveloped society can only be resolved by a tremendous transformation of ourselves and our relationships to each other and to the rest of the world.

Only a few dozen people participated in the ”On Revolution” series. But the process was so inspiring that we decided to use the materials as the basis for forming revolutionary study groups. So in Detroit and a few other cities we began to bring together black activists with whom we had worked during the 1960s. At the same time we arranged with Monthly Review Press to publish the series as Revolution and Evolution in the Twentieth Century. iv

By the time RETC came off the press in 1974 we had formed revolutionary study groups of black activists in Detroit, Philadelphia, New York City and Muskegon, Michigan, some of whom went on to form local organizations. These groups were small because most blacks were taking advantage of the mushrooming opportunities for upward mobility that had been created by the rebellions. v Thousands of people bought copies of the Manifesto for a Black Revolutionary Party and carried them around conspicuously in their dashiki pockets. But only a handful were willing to commit the time and energy necessary to begin thinking about revolution in a more evolutionary way. vi

In the early 1970s these study groups did not include whites because our focus was on developing black leadership for the American revolution. However, after blacks joined the coalition that elected Jimmy Carter president in 1976, we decided that, like labor and women, blacks had become a self-interest group. Therefore the period in which an American revolution might have been made under black revolutionary leadership had come to an end. The time had come to develop members of the many ethnic groups who make up our country so that together we could give leadership in the protracted and many-sided struggles needed to revolutionize the United States. vii

By the 1980s, through a carefully thought-out program for what we called national expansion, new, mostly white, locals had been founded in Milwaukee, Seattle, Portland, Oregon, Syracuse, Boston and the Bay Area, and had joined with the mostly black locals in Detroit, Philadelphia, New York, Muskegon, Newark, New Jersey, and Lexington, Kentucky, to form the National Organization for an American Revolution (NOAR). Each new local created its own founding document from a study of the city for which it was assuming responsibility.

Except for Detroit and Philadelphia, most locals consisted of only a half-dozen or even fewer members. But our output was prodigious, mainly because of the sense of empowerment that had come from the study of RETC. Each member felt called upon to go beyond protest and rebelling, and embrace and inspire in others the conviction that we have the power within us to create ourselves and the world anew.

To demystify leadership, we decentralized responsibility for writing and publishing pamphlets that explored the new concepts and institutions needed for our rapidly changing reality.

Thus Philadelphia assumed responsibility for publishing five printings of the Manifesto for a Black Revolutionary Party. Detroiter Kenny Snodgrass, barely out of his teens, wrote the introduction to The Awesome Responsibilities of Revolutionary Leadership. The tiny Muskegon local wrote and published two pamphlets, one entitled A New Outlook on Health and the other, Women and the New World. The New York local wrote and published Beyond Welfare. Syracuse produced Going Fishing, a statement on the local environment. Seattle published A Crisis of Values and A Way of Faith, A Time for Courage, based on a talk on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. by Rosemary and Vincent Harding. Detroit produced Crime Among Our People (five printings). Education to Govern (three printings). But What About the Workers? What Value Shall We Place on Ourselves? Women and the Movement to Build a New America. Towards a New Concept of Citizenship. Manifesto for an American Revolutionary Party (English and Spanish). Look! A Nation is Coming! Native Americans and the Second American Revolution.

In our internal development programs we studied American history and gained an appreciation and love for our country as a work in progress, constantly challenged by those excluded from its promise and by the contradictions of capitalism to keep deepening the concept of citizenship and what it means to be an American. While most radicals rejected this approach as “American exceptionalism,” we welcomed the uniqueness of our history as the key to the American revolution. viii

We explored what it means to think dialectically and to go beyond the scientific rationalism of Descartes. In propaganda workshops we analyzed the significance of the spoken and written word, and practiced writing preambles for community organizations, using the Preamble to the U. S. Constitution as a model.

We tried to create an alternative to charismatic leadership and a balance between activism and reflection. At annual conventions every member participated equally in evaluating the previous year’s work and in deciding the direction and structures for the next year. Our continuing conversations in Maine and in Detroit provided opportunities for the reflection necessary to give deeper meaning to our activism. ix

We were proud of our self-reliance. With no paid staff we had no need for grants or outside funding. Instead each local sustained itself by membership dues and literature sales.

Meanwhile, profound changes were taking place in the United States and the world because of new developments in transportation and communications. The fragmentation of the production process into a host of component operations was making it easy for corporations to abandon U.S. plants and cities and move to other parts of the country or the world where they could make greater profits with cheaper labor and fewer social or environmental regulations. Corporations were abandoning cities, and blackmailing city governments by demanding tax abatements and other concessions, making it increasingly difficult for municipalities to supply normal services.

To understand these developments and the changes they required in our thinking and our practice, in 1982 we published the Manifesto for an American Revolutionary Party in which we warned that capitalism had entered a new stage, the stage of multinational capitalism, which was even more destructive than finance and monopoly capitalism because it threatened our communities and our cities:

Up to now, most Americans have been able to evade facing the destructiveness of capitalist expansion because it was primarily other peoples, other cultures which were being destroyed.... But now the chickens have come home to roost. While we were collaborating with capitalism by accepting its dehumanizing values, capitalism itself was moving to a new stage, the stage of multinational capitalism.... Multinational corporations have no loyalty to the United States or to any American community. They have no commitment to the reforms that Americans have won through hard struggle.... Whole cities have been turned into wastelands by corporate takeovers and runaway corporations....

That is why as a people and as a nation, we must now make a second American revolution to rid ourselves of the capitalist values and institutions which have brought us to this state of powerlessness - or suffer the same mutilation, the same destruction of our families and our communities, the same loss of national independence as over the years we have visited upon other peoples and cultures.

To move towards this goal we need a new vision of a self-governing America based on local self-government, strong families and communities, and decentralized economies. Therefore revolutionary leadership will:

project and assist in the organization of all types of community committees: Committees for Crime Prevention that will establish and enforce elementary standards of conduct, such as mutual compacts not to buy ‘hot goods,’ Committees to Take Over Abandoned Houses for the use of community residents who will maintain them in accordance with standards set by the community; Committees of Family Circles to strengthen and support parents in the raising of children; Committees to Take Over Neighborhood Schools that are failing to educate our children or to take over closed down schools so as to provide continuing education for our children; Committees to Resist Utility Cutoffs by companies which, under the guise of public service, are in reality private corporations seeking higher profits to pay higher dividends to their stockholders; Committees to Take over Closed Plants for the production of necessary goods and services and for the training and employment of young people in the community; Anti-Violence Committees to counter-act the growing resort to violence in our daily relationships; Committees to Ban All Nuclear Weapons that will rally Americans against the nuclear arms race as the anti-war movement rallied Americans against the Vietnam war in the early 1970s.

These grassroots organizations can become a force to confront the capitalist enemy only if those involved in their creation are also encouraged and assisted by the American revolutionary party to struggle against the capitalist values which have made us enemies to one another. For example, in order to isolate the criminals in our communities, we must also confront the individualism and self-centredness which permits us to look the other way when a neighbor's house is being robbed.

The publication of the Manifesto for an American Revolutionary Party energized the organization. Talking about our country and our communities, working together to develop ideas and programs for building communities, listening to the stories of everyone's lives and hopes, comrades discovered a new patriotism, a deeper rootedness and sense of place both in their communities and in the nation.

This enlarged sense of ourselves was unmistakable at the second NOAR convention in 1982. It came across especially in the poem "We Are the Children of Martin and Malcolm," written by Polish American John Gruchala, African American Ilaseo Lewis, and myself for the June 1982 Great Peace March in New York, and read by John and Ilaseo at the convention:

We are the children of Martin and Malcolm
Black, brown, red and white
And so we cannot be silent
As our youth stand on street corners
and the promises of the 20th century pass them by.

We are the children of Martin and Malcolm
Our ancestors.
Proud and Brave
Defied the storms and power of masters and madmen.

We are the children of Martin and Malcolm.
So when money-eyed men remove the earth beneath our feet and bulldoze communities,
And Pentagon generals assemble weapons to blister our souls and incinerate our planet, We cannot be silent.

We are the children of Martin and Malcolm.
Our birthright is to be creators of history,
Our glory is to struggle,
You shall know our names as you know theirs,
Sojourner and Douglass, John Brown and Garrison.

We are the children of Martin and Malcolm,
Black, brown, red and white,
Our Right, our Duty
To shake the world with a new dream.

It was a very moving convention. We felt that together, African American, European American, Asian American, female and male, gay and straight, we were beginning to create a more perfect union and carrying on the American revolutionary tradition of Sojourner and Douglass, John Brown and Garrison, Martin and Malcolm.

Inspired by the ideas in the Manifesto for an American Revolutionary Party, members of the Detroit local began organizing in the community. Some members organized the Michigan Committee to Organize the Unemployed (MCOU) and began a struggle to obtain continuing health insurance for laid-off workers. Others organized Committees to Resist Utility Cutoffs. After MCOU failed to rally laid-off workers, comrades began helping residents in the Marlborough neighborhood, where MCOU had been holding street corner meetings, to close down crack houses.

After Reagan and Bush won the 1980 election, we called on all Americans to "Love America enough to change it.“ “Our Communities and our Country are now up to us!" During Jesse Jackson’s presidential campaign in 1984 we distributed leaflets challenging both white and black Americans to seize the opportunity to create a new movement. “We can't leave it all to Jesse!”

In 1984 we also joined the "cheese line," which during the Reagan years provided millions of Americans with basic commodities. On the “cheese line” in Detroit we discovered that the elderly and disabled were being trampled on by the young and able-bodied. So we organized them into a group calling itself Detroiters for Dignity and waged a successful campaign for an extra distribution day for elders. Detroiters for Dignity brought an elders’ conscience to the struggle in our city. We wrote letters to the editor, organized and attended community meetings, hosted meetings against the military involvement in Central America, and in 1985 drove to Big Mountain in Arizona to support the resistance of the Dineh (Navajo) people to their forced relocation.

Then, suddenly, despite or perhaps because of all this external activity, NOAR began falling apart. Differences that had been viewed as enriching became sources of tensions. Members began resigning, citing personal concerns (family, jobs) that demanded their time and energy. But political questions, even if unspoken, were also at issue. For one thing, members had committed themselves to build an organization with people who shared their views. Going out into the community to try to build a movement from scratch required a different kind of commitment and preparation. Also, despite our efforts to decentralize and demystify leadership, we had not deconstructed Marxist-Leninist concepts of democratic centralism and the vanguard party. Organizations in the black community especially need to accept this challenge because it is too easy for them to adopt the topdown and male leadership patterns of the black church.

Another troubling undercurrent was the decision the organization had made to go beyond projecting black leadership of the American revolution. Theoretically it was clear that the black movement as a movement was dead, but for black comrades the concept of black leadership for the American revolution had been a very heady one and giving it up felt a lot like betrayal.

We never formally dissolved NOAR. Between 1985 and 1987 it just faded away as members resigned or became so much involved in community activities that they had no time for our meetings. Our total membership was never more than seventy-five to a hundred. But between 1970, when we first began organizing on the basis of the ideas in the Manifesto for a Black Revolutionary Party, and 1985, when NOAR ran out of steam, these few comrades were incredibly creative.

The audacity of Jimmy's challenge to blacks to stop thinking like a minority and assume leadership for an American revolution had lifted black comrades beyond victim or minority thinking (Jimmy called it “thinking like an underling”) and empowered them to use their anger in a positive way, uncovering talents and energies that otherwise might have been wasted.

Our emphasis on the contradiction between economic and technological overdevelopment and political and human underdevelopment enabled us to explore a wide range of social, political, cultural, and artistic questions and to tackle questions of crime and welfare with proposals and positive programs for building social responsibility, community and citizenship. As a result, we attracted people with imagination and artistic sensibilities from all walks of life. Between 1974 and 1984 few joined us as members, but thousands read our literature and hundreds attended our meetings.

Overall anyone who was a NOAR comrade or was exposed to its ideas felt that our humanity had been enlarged by the challenge to go beyond rebellion to revolution, beyond victim thinking, and beyond our personal grievances and identity struggles to assuming responsibility for a new concept of citizenship and of a self-governing America. Almost everyone has continued some form of activism.

In retrospect, I think that the main reason for NOAR's demise is that it had outlived its usefulness and the time had come to let it go out of existence. That is one of the many important lessons I learned from the experience. Even though we went through various stages with different names, we had essentially come out of the rebellions of the late 1960s. Our goal had been to do what the Black Panther Party had been unable to do: develop evolutionary/revolutionary ideas and a new kind of leadership for the exploding black movement. When that movement came to an end, we kept trying to adapt ourselves to the changing situation. It is no accident that our internal development programs and our publications, which boldly explored visionary solutions for our rapidly changing reality, were our major achievements. x By contrast, our organization had been founded to correct the shortcomings of a movement that was already on the decline. A new kind of leadership would have to come out of a new movement whose hopes and dreams were still undefined.

****

In Detroit we did not have to wait long for the opportunity to begin creating a new movement. It came in 1988 when Coleman Young, Detroit’s first black mayor, began grasping at straws in his efforts to stop the violence that was escalating among black youth in the wake of de-industrialization.

Coleman Young was a tough and charismatic politician who had been a Tuskegee airman during World War II and a leader of the National Negro Labor Council and a state senator in the post-war years. He was elected Mayor in 1973 not only because the black community wanted a black mayor but because the massive rebellion in July 1967 had warned the power structure that a white mayor could no longer maintain law and order.

As the city’s new CEO, Young acted quickly to eliminate the most egregious examples of racism in the police and fire departments and at city hall. But he was helpless against the relentless de-industrializing of the city and the widespread violence resulting from the drug economy that jobless blacks had created in the inner city. By the mid-1980s the school system was in deep trouble because Detroit teenagers were asking themselves “Why stay in school hoping that some day you’ll get a good job when you can make a lot of money rollin’ right now?” In the summer of 1986 47 young Detroiters were killed and 365 wounded, among them sixteen-year-old Derick Barfield and fourteen-year-old Roger Barfield. Their mother, Clementine Barfield, responded by founding Save Our Sons and Daughters (SOSAD) which received widespread local and national attention. I edited the SOSAD newsletter and Jimmy contributed a column: “What can we be that our children can see?”

For three years from 1989 to 1992, through the heat of summer and the sleet of winter, we participated in the weekly anti-crackhouse marches of WE PROS (We the People Reclaim Our Streets), chanting “Up with hope, Down with dope!“ “Drug Dealers, Drug Dealers, you better run and hide, ‘cause people are uniting on the other side!” In a few neighborhoods, especially Dorothy Garner’s near the Linwood exit of the Lodge Freeway, we were successful in reducing crime and violence. But our marches did not attract young people, and we recognized that any program to rebuild and respirit Detroit had to be built around a youth core.

Meanwhile, Young had been trying in vain to keep or bring manufacturing plants in the city. xi Near the end of his fourth term, in 1988, he decided that casino gambling was the solution. Gaming, he said, was an industry that would create fifty thousand jobs. To defeat Young’s proposal, we joined Detroiters Uniting, a coalition of community groups, blue collar, white collar and cultural workers, clergy, political leaders and professionals, led by two preachers, United Methodist pastor William Quick and Baptist pastor Eddie Cobbin, one white and one black. I was the vice-president. Our concern," we said, "is with how our city has been disintegrating socially, economically, politically, morally and ethically.... We are convinced that we cannot depend upon one industry or one large corporation to provide us with jobs. It is now up to us - the citizens of Detroit - to put our hearts, our imaginations, our minds, and our hands together to create a vision and project concrete programs for developing the kinds of local enterprises that will provide meaningful jobs and income for all citizens."

During the struggle Young denounced us as “naysayers.” “What is your alternative?” he demanded. Responding to Young’s challenge, Jimmy made a speech in which he projected an alternative to casino gambling: the vision of a new kind of city whose foundation would be people living in communities and citizens who take responsibility for decisions about their city instead of leaving these to politicians or to the marketplace, and who also create small enterprises that emphasize the preservation of skills and produce goods and services for the local community. xii

To introduce this vision, in November 1991 we organized a Peoples Festival of community organizations, describing it as "A multigenerational, multicultural celebration of Detroiters, putting our hearts, minds, hands and imagination together to redefine and recreate a city of Community, Compassion, Cooperation, Participation and Enterprise in harmony with the Earth."

A few months later, harking back to Mississippi Freedom Summer and drawing on our connections in the city and with nationally emerging environmental groups, we founded Detroit Summer, with a long list of endorsers, as a “Multicultural, Intergenerational Youth Program/Movement to Rebuild, Redefine and Respirit Detroit from the ground up.“ Detroit Summer youth volunteers began working on community gardens with African American southern-born elders (they called themselves Gardening Angels) who were already appropriating vacant lots to plant these gardens, not only to produce healthier food for themselves and their neighbors, but to instill respect for nature and a sense of process in city youth. Detroit Summer youth also rehabbed houses, painted public murals in the community, cleaned up neighborhood parks, and engaged in both intergenerational and youth-only dialogues.

There was something magical about Detroit Summer as there had been about Mississippi Freedom Summer. In a city that had once been the national and international example of the miracles of the industrial epoch but had now become a sea of vacant lots and abandoned houses, people were moved by the sight of young people and elders reconnecting with one another and with the earth. Their community gardens created a new image of vacant lots, not as blight but as a treasure-house of health-giving food. Their murals established a positive youth presence in the community. Students from universities all over the country who participated in or heard of Detroit Summer began to see their own futures, the future of cities and the environmental movement in a new light.

The result since 1992 has been an escalating urban agricultural movement in Detroit: neighborhood gardens, youth gardens, church gardens, school gardens, hospital gardens, senior independence gardens, teaching gardens, wellness gardens, Hope Takes Root gardens, Kwanzaa gardens.

A few blocks from the Boggs Center, Capuchin monks have created Earthworks, a program which uses gardening to educate Detroit school children in the science, nutrition and biodiversity of organic agriculture and also provides fresh produce for WIC and the Capuchin Soup Kitchen's daily meals.

At the Catherine Ferguson Academy, a public high school for pregnant teens and teenage mothers, students raise vegetables and fruit trees. They also built a barn to house a horse, donkey, and small animals that provide eggs, meat, milk and cheese for the school community. xiii

Architectural students at University of Detroit Mercy produced a documentary called Adamah (“of the earth” in Hebrew), envisioning how a two and one-half acre square mile area not far from downtown Detroit could be developed into a self-reliant community with a vegetable farm to produce food, a tree farm and sawmill to produce lumber, schools that include community-building as part of the curriculum, and co-housing as well as individual housing. xiv

The National Black Farmers Union, whose mantra is “We can’t free ourselves until we feed ourselves,” brought its annual convention to Detroit.

Inspired by Jimmy’s speech, Jackie Victor and Ann Perrault worked in a bakery to learn the trade and then opened their own organic bakery in midtown Detroit as an example of the kind of small business that our cities need instead of big box and chain stores. xv

Every August the Detroit Agricultural Network conducts a tour of community gardens. In 2007 six big buses were not enough for the hundreds of people of all ethnic groups attracted by Detroit’s mushrooming urban agricultural movement. After the tour, a retired city planner told me that it gave her a sense of how important community gardens are to a city. “They reduce neighborhood blight, build self-esteem among young people, provide them with structured activities from which they can see results, build leadership skills, provide healthy food and a community base for economic development. I see it as the ‘Quiet Revolution.’ It is a revolution for self-determination taking place quietly in Detroit.” xvi

This quiet revolution has been preparing Detroiters to meet today’s growing crises of global warming and spiraling food prices. Instead of paying prices we can’t afford for produce grown on factory farms and imported from Florida and California in gas-guzzling, carbon monoxide-releasing trucks, we can grow our own food and not only achieve food security but grow our souls because we are creating a new balance between necessity and freedom. xvii

This revolution was also deepening our sense of the connections between our own locally based work and the new urban agriculture movement weaving a new future both in our own country and around the earth. From our growing conviction that something new was emerging, we began to look again at larger philosophical questions.

****

During the 1960s Jimmy and I had paid little attention to the speeches and writings of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Like other members of the Detroit black community, made up largely of former Alabamians, we rejoiced at the victories the civil rights movement was winning in the south. xviii But as activists struggling for black power in Detroit, we identified much more with Malcolm X than with Martin. In fact, we tended to view King’s call for nonviolence and for the beloved community as somewhat naíve and sentimental.

Jimmy and I were also not involved in the fifteen-year campaign that Detroit Congressman John Conyers Jr. launched in 1968 to declare King’s birthday on January 15 a national holiday. I recall holding back because I was concerned that a King holiday would obscure the role of grassroots activists and reinforce the tendency to rely on charismatic leaders.

Meanwhile I was troubled by the way that black militants kept quoting Malcolm’s “by all means necessary,” ignoring the profound changes that Malcolm was undergoing in the year following his split with the Nation of Islam. After his pilgrimage to Mecca, Malcolm was seriously rethinking black nationalism, and in December 1964 he had gone to Selma, Alabama, to explore working with Martin Luther King Jr. xix

As violence in Detroit and other cities escalated in the wake of the urban rebellions, I began to wonder whether events might have taken a different course if we had found a way to blend Malcolm’s militancy with King’s nonviolence and vision of the beloved community.

During this period my interest in King was also piqued by the little pamphlet A Way of Faith, A Time for Courage published in 1984 by the Seattle NOAR local. In this pamphlet our old friends, Vincent and Rosemary Harding, who had worked closely with MLK in the 1960s, explain that “Martin wasn’t assassinated for simply wanting black and white children to hold hands, but because he said that there must be fundamental changes in this country and that black people must take the lead in bringing them.... Put simply, these problems are Racism, Materialism, Militarism, and Anti-Communism.” xx

Meanwhile, in 1982, Reagan signed into law the decision to observe King’s birthday as a national holiday, and scholars were beginning to re-evaluate his work and life. xxi In 1992, at the opening ceremony of Detroit Summer, I had noted the similarity between our vision and King’s projections for direct youth action “in our dying cities.” In the spring of 1998, when I was asked what I thought about the Black Radical Congress, I replied that in order to create a new movement, we must first understand the old. For radicals in this period this means grappling with the significance of the Black Panther Party, Malcolm X and King. xxii

As a result of all these developments, I began studying King’s life and work from the perspective of RETC and our work in Detroit. To my delight I discovered that Hegel had been King’s favorite philosopher. This reminded me of the influence that Hegel has had on my own life ever since I read his Phenomenology in my early twenties and learned that the process of constantly overcoming contradictions, or what Hegel called the “suffering, the patience, and the labour of the negative,” is the key to the continuing evolution of humanity. xxiii

I also discovered that in the last three years of his life King had viewed the American preoccupation with rapid economic advancement as the source of our deepening crises both at home and in our relationships with the rest of the world.

As King’s life and ideas became more meaningful to me, I began speaking about him at MLK holiday celebrations and on other occasions. For example, at the University of Michigan 2003 MLK Symposium, my speech was entitled “We must be the change.” At Union Theological Seminary in September 2006, I spoke on “Catching Up with Martin.” At Eastern Michigan University in January 2007, I emphasized the need to “Recapture MLK’s Radical Revolutionary Spirit/Create Cities and Communities Of Hope.” At the Brecht Forum in May 2007, my speech was entitled “Let’s talk about Malcolm and Martin.” xxiv

The more I talked about King, the more I felt the need for each of us to grow our own souls in order to overcome the new and more challenging contradictions of constantly changing realities.

The 1955-56 Montgomery Bus Boycott, I realized, was the first struggle by an oppressed people in western society based on the concept of two-sided transformation, both of ourselves and of our institutions. Inspired by the twenty-six-year-old King, a people who had been treated as less than human had struggled for more than a year against their dehumanization, not as angry protesters or as workers in the plant, but as members of the Montgomery community, new men and women representing a more human society in evolution. Using methods including creating their own system of transportation that transformed themselves and increased the good rather than the evil in the world, exercising their spiritual power and always bearing in mind that their goal was not only desegregating buses but building the beloved community, they had inspired the human identity, anti-war and ecological movements that during the last decade of the twentieth century were giving birth to a new civil society in the United States.

The more I studied King’s life and ideas, especially in the last three years before his assassination, the more I recognized the similarity between our struggles in Detroit after the 1967 rebellion and King’s after the 1965 Watts uprising.

On August 6, 1965, nearly a decade after the Montgomery Bus Boycott, King was among the black and white leaders who joined President Johnson in celebrating the signing of the Voting Rights Act, the result of the march from Selma to Montgomery.

Less than a week later, on August 11, black youth in Watts, California, protesting the police killing of a speeding driver, exploded in an uprising in which thirty-five people died and thousands were arrested. When King flew to Watts on August 15, he discovered to his surprise that few black youth in Watts had even heard of him or his strategy of non-violence and that, despite the loss of lives, they were claiming victory because their violence had forced the authorities to acknowledge their existence.

The Watts uprising forced King to recognize how little attention he himself had paid to black youth in the cities. So in early 1966 he rented an apartment in the Chicago ghetto and was able to get a sense of how the anger that exploded in Watts was rooted in the powerlessness and uselessness that is the daily experience of black youth made expendable by technology. He also discovered the futility of trying to involve these dispossessed young people in the kinds of nonviolent mass marches that had worked in the South. And they gave him a lot to think about when they demanded to know why they should be nonviolent in Chicago when the U.S. government was employing such massive violence against poor peasants in Vietnam.

Thus, King’s “A Time to Break Silence” speech against the war in Vietnam was the result of his wrestling not only with the Vietnam War but with the questions raised by these young people in what he called “our dying cities.”

“The war in Vietnam,” he recognized, ”is but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit. We are on the wrong side of a world revolution because we refuse to give up the privileges and the pleasures that come from the immense profits of overseas investment.

“We have come to value things more than people. Our technological development has outrun our spiritual development. We have lost our sense of community, of interconnection and participation.”

In order to regain our humanity, he said, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values against the giant triplets of racism, materialism and militarism. Projecting a new vision of global citizenship, he called on every nation to “develop an over-riding loyalty to mankind as a whole in order to preserve the best in their individual societies.” xxv

By drawing on the transformational ideas of Hegel, Gandhi and Jesus Christ, all of which had become more meaningful to him since the Montgomery Bus Boycott, King began to connect the despair and violence in the urban ghettos with the alienation which young people experience in today’s world.

This generation is engaged in a cold war with the earlier generation. It is not the familiar and normal hostility of the young groping for independence. It has a new quality of bitter antagonism and confused anger which suggests basic values are being contested.

The source of this alienation is that our society has made material growth and technological advance an end in itself, robbing people of participation, so human beings become smaller while their works become bigger. xxvi

The way to overcome this alienation, King said, is by changing our priorities. Instead of pursuing economic productivity, we need to expand our uniquely human powers, especially our capacity for agape, which is the love that is ready to go to any length to restore community.

This love, King insisted, is not some sentimental weakness but somehow the key to ultimate reality. xxvii

In practice, taking this statement seriously requires a radical change or paradigm shift in our approach to organizing and to citizenship, which is the practice of politics. Instead of pursuing rapid economic development and hoping that it will eventually create community, we can only create community if we do the opposite, i.e., begin with the needs of the community and with creating loving relationships with one another and with the earth.

It also requires a paradigm shift in how we address the three main questions of philosophy: What does it mean to be a human being? How do we know? How shall we live? It means rejecting the scientific rationalism (based on the Cartesian body-mind dichotomy), which recognizes as real only that which can be measured and therefore excludes the knowledge which comes from the heart or from the relationships between people. It means that we must be willing to see with our hearts and not only with our eyes. xxviii

King believed that we could achieve the beloved community because he saw with his heart and not only with his eyes. We can learn the practical meaning of love, he said, “from the young people who joined the civil rights movement, putting on overalls to work in the isolated rural South because they felt the need for more direct ways of learning that would strengthen both society and themselves.”

What we need now in our dying cities, he said, are ways to provide young people with similar opportunities to engage in self-transforming and structure-transforming direct action. xxix

King was assassinated before he could begin to develop strategies to implement this revolutionary/evolutionary perspective for our young people, our cities, and our country. After his death his closest associates were too busy taking advantage of the new opportunities for advancement within the system to keep his vision and his praxis alive.

****

Meanwhile, as we continued our struggle to rebuild, redefine and respirit Detroit from the ground up, I was keeping up with the new thinking taking place on a scale unparalleled since the Enlightenment which preceded the French revolution more then two hundred years ago. xxx

I was also very conscious of the new revolutionary and counter-revolutionary forces that had been emerging since King’s assassination.

In the wake of the civil rights, black power and anti-war movements of the 1960s, women, Chicanos, Native Americans, Asian Americans, gays, lesbians, and the disabled were creating their own movements for recognition and social change. The vitality and creativity of these movements reminds us that our country has not been and never will be just black and white.

Out of their experiences of sexism in the civil rights and anti-Vietnam war movements, women were carrying on a many-sided philosophical and practical struggle against all forms of patriarchy. Activist intellectuals like Starhawk were exposing the sixteenth and seventeenth century witch hunts as the means by which the British power structure expropriated the land of the villagers and replaced the immanent knowledge of women with the scientific rationalism of the intellectual elite. Indian physicist and activist Vandana Shiva and German sociologist Maria Mies were explaining how the labor of western societies “colonizes” women, nature and the Third World. By a deeper appreciation of the work of women, peasants and artists, they suggested, we can get an idea of what work will be like in a new non-capitalist society: difficult and time-consuming but rewarding and joyful because it nurtures life. xxxi

Also, having discovered that the personal is political, women activists were abandoning the charismatic male, vertical, and vanguard party leadership patterns of the 1960s and creating more participatory, more empowering, more horizontal kinds of leadership. Instead of modeling their organizing on the lives of men outside the home, e.g. in the plant or in the political arena, they were beginning to model it on the love, caring, healing and patience which are an organic part of the everyday lives of women. These, along with an appreciation of diversity and of strengths and weaknesses, go into the raising of a family. xxxii

Transnational corporations were growing by leaps and bounds. By the 1980s factory jobs were declining as more and more capital was exported overseas to countries where more profit could be made with cheaper labor. National and local legislation establishing minimum social and environmental standards were being overruled by organizations like the World Trade Organization (WTO). Global corporations were reducing the power of nation-states, turning people all over the world into consumers, and changing the relationships between people and with the earth into commodity relationships.

In response to this commodification and dehumanization, tens of thousands of individuals and groups, representing very diverse sections of society, including steelworkers and anarchists, mobilized to close down the WTO meeting in Seattle in November 1999. During the ”Battle of Seattle” Starhawk and other activists created affinity groups to decide their own tactics democratically. At subsequent mobilizations, e.g. against Free Trade Areas of the Americas (FTAA) in Quebec and Miami, these affinity groups also set up their own communal kitchens, street medic teams, and media centers. Out of these experiences local activists began to see the possibilities for new forms of year-round, more democratic kinds of organizing in their communities.

Following mass mobilizations against corporate globalization in Seattle, Quebec, and Miami, thousands of individuals and groups from around the world gathered at annual World Social Forums and National Social Forums to declare that “Another World is Possible.”

In response to corporate globalization, people in communities all over the world began to create new ways of living at the local level to reconnect themselves with the earth and with one another. xxxiii

The best known of these are the Zapatistas, the indigenous peoples of Chiapas who took over Mexican cities on January 1, 1994, the day that the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) legalized the power of transnational corporations over local economies and government. The goal of the Zapatistas is to create a participatory economy and a participatory democracy from the ground up by a patient process of democratic discussions and nonviolence. Since 1994 Chiapas has become the Mecca and model for revolutionaries all over the world. xxxiv

In the last four years, as a member of the Beloved Communities Initiative, I have been impressed with the diversity of the groups which are in the process of creating new kinds of communities in the United States. xxxv

These include Detroit-City of Hope; the Beloved Community Center and Truth and Reconciliation Commission in Greensboro, North Carolina; an annual fall gathering in New Mexico where Tewawa women share the wisdom of indigenous cultures with people of many different backgrounds; Growing Power in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, a two and one-half acre farm with five greenhouses which is not only growing food for two thousand families but new multiethnic community relations; Access, a Center for Independent Living in Chicago, where the prideful struggle of individuals with disabilities is deepening our understanding of what it means to be a human being; Cookman United Methodist Church in North Philadelphia, where neighborhood residents are creating a loving, caring environment for young people to complete their schooling and also develop leadership skills; Great Leap in Los Angeles, where individuals from different faith backgrounds are expanding their individual identities through spiritual and physical rituals and exercises.

Since 1968 a counterrevolutionary movement has also been developing in the United States. It began with the election of Richard Nixon as president in reaction to the turmoil of the 1960s, e.g. the urban uprisings, the assassinations of MLK and Robert Kennedy, the police riot at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago. In the 1980s, as the export of jobs created unemployment and insecurity among factory workers and with families also in disarray, a growing number of Americans began to blame the anti-Vietnam war movements and blacks, feminists, gays, liberals and radicals for turning the American Dream into a nightmare. xxxvi

Around the same time a group of conservatives in the power structure with close ties to the arms and energy industries, including Dick Cheney, who was President Gerald Ford’s chief of staff in the 1970s, and Donald Rumsfeld, who was Ford’s secretary of defense, began developing a long-range program to restore U.S. hegemony. Their aim was to increase an already enormous military budget at the expense of domestic social programs, topple regimes resistant to U.S. corporate interests, and replace the UN’s role of preserving and extending international order with U.S. military bases. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, these neoconservatives felt that the main obstacle to unilateral U.S. actions had been removed, and in 1997 they founded the Project for the New American Century. xxxvii

The attacks of September 11, 2001, gave them the opportunity to launch the war in Afghanistan in 2001 and the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

How do we overcome this shameful and shameless counterrevolution which has cost the lives of so many American servicemen and women in Iraq and Afghanistan, killed more than a million Iraqis, made refugees of other millions, used security as an excuse to destroy rights guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution, and violated international law and dishonored our country by torturing detainees at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo? Because it is a movement, it cannot be defeated in the ordinary course of electoral politics. For the same reason, it cannot be eliminated by a seizure of power or insurrection like the Russian revolution in 1917. xxxviii It can only be overcome by a new kind of evolutionary humanist revolution.

In a speech entitled “The Next American Revolution,” which I gave on March 16, 2008, at the closing plenary of the Left Forum in New York City, I explained how this revolution would differ from all previous revolutions. xxxix

I began by quoting from the chapter on “Dialectics and Revolution” in RETC, where, nearly 30 years before 9/11, Jimmy wrote:

The revolution to be made in the United States will be the first revolution in history to require the masses to make material sacrifices rather than to acquire more material things. We must give up many of the things which this country has enjoyed at the expense of damning over one-third of the world into a state of underdevelopment, ignorance, disease and early death. Until the revolutionary forces come to power here, this country will not be safe for the world and revolutionary warfare on an international scale against the United States will remain the wave of the present – unless all of humanity goes up in one big puff.

It is obviously going to take a tremendous transformation to prepare the people of the United States for these new social goals. But potential revolutionaries can only become true revolutionaries if they take the side of those who believe that humanity can be transformed.

Thus the American revolution at this stage in our history, and in the evolution of technology and of the human race, is not about jobs or universal health insurance or fighting inequality or making it possible for more people to realize the American Dream of upward mobility. It is about creating a new American Dream whose goal is a higher humanity instead of the higher standard of living that is dependent upon empire. It is about acknowledging that we Americans have enjoyed upward mobility and middle class comforts and conveniences at the expense of other peoples all over the world. It is about living the kind of lives that will end the galloping inequality both inside this country and between the global North and South, and also slow down global warming. About practicing a new, more active, global and participatory concept of citizenship. About becoming the change we want to see in the world.

This means that it is not enough to organize mobilizations that call on Congress and the President to end the war in Iraq. We must also challenge the American people to examine why 9/11 happened and why so many people around the world who, although they do not support the terrorists, understand that terrorism feeds on the anger that millions feel about U.S. support of the Israel occupation of Palestine and Middle East dictatorships, and the way that we treat whole countries, the peoples of the world, and nature only as resources enabling us to maintain our middle class way of life.

We have to help the American people find the moral strength to recognize that, although no amount of money can compensate for the countless deaths and indescribable suffering that our criminal invasion and occupation have caused the Iraqi people, we have a responsibility to make the material sacrifices that will enable them to begin rebuilding their infrastructure. We have to help the American people grow our souls enough to recognize that, since we have been consuming 25 percent of the planet’s resources even though we are only 4 percent of the world’s population, we are the ones who must take the first big steps to reduce greenhouse emissions. We are the ones who must begin to live more simply so that others can simply live.

Thus, the next American revolution is about challenging the American people and ourselves to “form a more perfect union” by carrying on the revolutionary legacy of William Lloyd Garrison, John Brown, Sojourner Truth, Rosa Parks, Ella Baker, Fannie Lou Hamer, Audre Lorde, and Malcolm and Martin. It is about claiming this legacy openly and proudly, reminding ourselves and every American that our country was born in revolution. Therefore we are the real Americans while the un-Americans are the neocons, the homophobes, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, and the anti-immigrant crusaders who, like yesterday’s slaveowners, General Custers, imperialists, and White Citizens Councils, are subverting what is best in the American tradition.

The courage, commitment, conviction and visionary strategies required for this kind revolution are very different from those required to storm the Kremlin or the White House. We can no longer view the American people as masses or warm bodies to be mobilized in increasingly aggressive and more massive struggles for higher wages, better jobs, or guaranteed health care. Instead we must challenge them and ourselves to engage in activities at the grassroots level that build a new and better world by improving the physical, psychological, political and spiritual health of ourselves, our families, our communities, our cities, and our planet.

To my surprise and delight the two thousand or more people gathered in the Great Hall of Cooper Union responded to my speech with a standing ovation. It was, I believe, a sign that a new generation of Americans is ready to recognize that the next American revolution is not about reconstituting the welfare state but about making the radical revolution in values that Martin Luther King Jr. advocated. From the calamity of the Vietnam and Iraq wars they have learned that power does not come out of the barrel of a gun or from taking over the White House. Only right makes might. xl

I also believe that, in much the same way and for many of the same reasons that Detroiters have been forced by the devastation of de-industrialization to begin rebuilding, redefining and respiriting our city from the ground up, the American people are being forced by the interconnected crises of the Iraq war, global warming, floods, job insecurity, and a sinking economy to begin making a radical revolution in their way of life.

For example, a lot of Americans are furious these days because gas prices are soaring. But one hundred years from now our posterity may bless this period when high gas prices finally forced Americans to bike or take public transportation to work, to dream of neighborhood stores within walking distance, and to start building cities that are friendlier to children and pedestrians than to cars. xli

Likewise, as food prices skyrocket, hunger riots erupt, and obesity, diabetes, and other health problems caused by our industrialized food production system reach epidemic levels, the urban agricultural movement is the fastest growing movement in the United States. Americans are beginning to recognize that our health and the health of our communities and our planet require that we grow our own food closer to where we live.

This is how necessity and freedom have come together in Detroit, and how I see them coming together in other cities in the days ahead. It was not an abstract idealism but the real and deteriorating conditions of life in a de-industrialized Detroit that moved us to found Detroit Summer in 1992, so that young people could begin taking responsibility for rebuilding, redefining and respiriting our city from the ground up.

****

2007 was the fortieth anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Break the Silence” speech and also of the July 1967 Detroit rebellion. To commemorate these historic events, the Boggs Center convened two meetings: one in April “To Transform Grief into Hope” and one in July to involve Detroiters in a conversation on “Where Do We Go from Here?”

At the July meeting people told so many inspiring stories of grassroots activities and projects that Detroiters are creating or want to create that we decided to launch a Detroit-City of Hope campaign to identify, encourage and promote these as a new infrastructure for our city. Among these activities and projects (which recall those in the Manifesto for an American Revolutionary Party in 1982 and in “Rebuilding Detroit: An Alternative to Casino Gambling” in 1988) are:

expanding urban agriculture and small businesses to create a sustainable local economy.
re-inventing work so that it is not just a job done for a paycheck but to develop people and build community.
re-inventing education to include children in activities that transform both themselves and their environment.
creating co-ops to produce local goods for local needs.
developing peace zones to transform our relationships with one another in our homes and on our streets.
replacing punitive justice with restorative justice programs to keep nonviolent offenders in our communities and out of prisons that not only misspend billions much needed for roads and schools but turn minor offenders into hardened criminals. xlii

Over thirty years ago in RETC we projected a vision of two-sided transformation of ourselves and our institutions as the key to the next American revolution. In the last three years of his life, in response to the Vietnam war and youth despair in our dying cities, this is the kind of American revolution that MLK was also projecting in his call for a radical revolution of values.

I believe that twenty-first century revolutions will be huge steps forward in the continuing evolution of the human race. But I also believe that, more often than not, these huge steps will be the accumulation and culmination of small steps, like planting community gardens and creating community peace zones. xliii

We are all works in progress, always in the process of being and becoming. Periodically there come times like the present when the crisis is so profound and the contradictions so interconnected that if we are willing to see with our hearts and not only with our eyes, we can accelerate the continuing evolution of the human race towards becoming more socially responsible, more self-conscious, more self-critical human beings.

Our country is also a work in progress. This is our time to reject the old American Dream of a higher standard of living based upon empire, and embrace a new American Dream of a higher standard of humanity that preserves the best in our revolutionary legacy. We can become the leaders we are looking for.

Towards that end we need to keep combining practice with reflection and urgency with patience. That is what I have learned after nearly seven decades of struggle for radical social change.

----------------------------------------------------
i After Jimmy’s death, friends and comrades founded the James and Grace Lee Boggs Center to Nurture Community Leadership to continue our legacy of combining practice with reflection, and local groundedness with visionary strategizing. Some of Jimmy’s most memorable speeches (Think Dialectically, Not Biologically; The Next Development in Education; Rebuilding Detroit: An Alternative to Casino Gambling) are posted on the Center’s website at http://www.boggscenter.org

The naturalness and ease with which Jimmy thought dialectically never ceased to amaze me. It was rooted in his sense of himself as a black American, born and raised in the deep agricultural South, who then became a Chrysler worker for twenty-eight years, and was now wondering about the far-reaching cultural changes that the new informational technology was bringing.

Almost everyone who talked with him for only a few minutes realized that they had come into contact with an “organic intellectual,” even if they had never heard of Gramsci. It was obvious that Jimmy’s ideas came not out of books but out of continuing reflection on his own life and the lives of working people like himself.

Long before we met, he had decided that he was an American revolutionist who loved this country enough to change it. He was very conscious that the blood and sweat of his ancestors was in this country’s soil and had already embarked on the struggle to ensure that his people would be among those deciding its economic and political future. That is why he was able to write paragraphs like the following that end chapter 6 on “Dialectics and Revolution” in RETC:

Technological man/woman developed because human beings had to discover how to keep warm, how to make fire, how to grow food, how to build dams, how to dig wells. Therefore human beings were compelled to manifest their humanity in their technological capacity, to discover the power within them to invent tools and technologies which would extend their material powers. We have concentrated our powers on making things to the point that we have intensified our greed for more things and lost the understanding of why this productivity was originally pursued. The result is that the mind of man/woman is now totally out of balance, totally out of proportion.

That is what production for the sake of production has done to modern man/woman. That is the basic contradiction confronting everyone who has lived and developed inside the United States. That is the contradiction which neither the U.S. government nor any social force in the United States up to now has been willing to face, because the underlying philosophy of this country, from top to bottom, remains the philosophy that economic development can and will resolve all political and social problems.

ii The four of us, from very different backgrounds, had been members of the Johnson-Forest Tendency led by West Indian Marxist C.L.R. James and Russian-born Marxist Raya Dunayevskaya. One Alabama-born African American, one New England Yankee, one Jewish American and one Chinese American, we reflected the American experience.

To learn more about Lyman and Freddy and these conversations, see Conversations in Maine: Exploring our Nation’s Future, South End Press, 1978; and my autobiography, Living for Change, University of Minnesota Press, 1998, pp. 146-157. Lyman died in 1978 and Freddy in 1999. Richard Feldman wrote the introduction to Conversations in Maine. Shea Howell has continued to host the conversations in Maine since Freddy’s death. Both Rich and Shea reviewed this introduction and made helpful suggestions.

iii Decades before writing Das Kapital in the British Museum, a twenty-nine-year-old Karl Marx had anticipated this contradiction when he wrote in the Communist Manifesto that as a result of the “constant revolutionizing of production... all that is sacred is profaned, all that is solid melts into air, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his conditions of life and his relations with his kind.”

iv Harry Braverman, whose classic Labor and Monopoly Capital was also published in 1974, represented Monthly Review Press in these arrangements. Monthly Review had already published two books by Jimmy, The American Revolution: Pages from a Negro Worker’s Notebook, in 1963 (brought to the attention of Leo Huberman and Paul Sweezy by W.H. “Ping” Ferry); and Racism and the Class Struggle: Further Pages from a Black Worker’s Notebook, in 1970. In The American Revolution, Jimmy had challenged the validity of Marx’s nineteenthcentury analysis for a technologically-advanced society like the United States in the midtwentieth century, and had also warned that to make a revolution in our country, all Americans, including workers, blacks, and the most oppressed, would have to make political and ethical choices. Soon after its publication, The American Revolution was translated and published in five other languages (Japanese, French, Italian, Portuguese and Catalan. Racism and the Class Struggle, a compilation of Jimmy’s speeches during the 1970s, has been widely read in Black Studies classes. At a twentieth anniversary celebration of The American Revolution in 1983, Ruby Dee and Ossie Davis linked RETC to Jimmy’s earlier books by performing a LOVER-LOVE/REVOL-EVOL skit.

v For example, before the 1967 rebellion, there were only a few black foremen in the auto industry and few, if any, black tellers in Detroit banks or black managers in supermarkets. In 1965 we tried, unsuccessfully, to get a few blacks elected to the Detroit City Council by organizing a plunking (“four and no more”) campaign. In 1966 Detroit high school students went on strike to demand Black History classes and black principals. After the rebellion, the white power structure was so fearful of a recurrence that it rushed to promote blacks to highly visible positions.

vi Shea Howell used to joke that an elephant could be born in the time it took to complete one of our study groups. Living for Change, p. 163.

vii This decision was explained in the new introduction to the fifth printing of the Manifesto for a Black Revolutionary Party, published in April 1976.

viii Over the years it has been difficult for traditional radicals to develop a vision and praxis for an American revolution because any appreciation of the uniqueness of American history was shunned as “American exceptionalism.” As a result, historical agency was displaced onto subjects in other countries, especially in the Third World. Jimmy began thinking about his first book The American Revolution when he saw how radicals in the plant would fumble around for an answer when workers asked “What is socialism and why should the people struggle for it?” The American Revolution: Pages from a Negro Workers Notebook, Monthly Review Press, 1963, p. 43. See the little 1976 pamphlet Towards a New Concept of Citizenship by James Boggs.

ix GM worker Jim Hocker, who co-authored But What About the Workers? with Jimmy in 1974, stopped by regularly after work for conversations in our kitchen. In 1982 NOAR published these conversations as These Are the Times that Try Our Souls: Conversations in Detroit, with an introduction by Rich Feldman who worked at the Ford truck plant.

x These publications can be ordered from the James & Grace Lee Boggs Center to Nurture Community Leadership at http://www.boggscenter.org.

xi In 1980 Coleman Young,

joined with General Motors to announce that the city was demolishing an entire neighborhood, bulldozing 1,500 houses, 144 businesses, sixteen churches, two schools, and a hospital in Poletown so that GM could build a Cadillac plant, with Detroit assuming the costs of land clearance and preparation. The endangered community, an integrated neighborhood of Poles and blacks, carried on a heroic struggle to save their homes and their community, but the UAW supported Young and GM because they promised that the new plant would employ six thousand workers. Ralph Nader sent in a team of five members to work with the Poletown protesters for six months. But in vain. All the homes, businesses, churches, schools, and the hospital were leveled. After the demolition I could not bear to drive around the site that was not far from our house. It was like a moonscape, so desolate that I could not tell east from west or north from south.

When the new Poletown plant finally opened in 1984, it was so automated that it only employed 2,500 workers, and it has never employed more than 4,000 - this despite the fact that the two older Cadillac plants that the Poletown plant replaced had employed 15,000 people as recently as 1979. Living for Change, p. 179.

xii James Boggs: “Rebuilding Detroit: an Alternative to Casino Gambling.” http://www.boggscenter.org.

xiii “The Emerald City” by Michele Owens, Oprah Magazine, April 2008.

xiv See “Down a green path: An alternative vision for a section of east Detroit takes shape” by Curt Guyette, Metro Times, October 31, 2001.

xv “On a roll: Avalon International Breads isn't just about making dough” by Lisa M. Collins, Metro Times, October 4, 2002.

xvi “Detroiters point way for twenty-first century cities” by Grace Lee Boggs, Michigan Citizen, November 25-December 1, 2007. Eight years ago I began writing weekly columns in the Michigan Citizen. The hundreds of columns I have written are posted on the Boggs Center website at http://www.boggscenter.org.

xvii “... it is unfair, or at least deeply ironic, that black people in Detroit are being forced to undertake an experiment in utopian post-urbanism that appears to be uncomfortably similar to the sharecropping past their parents and grandparents sought to escape. There is no moral reason why they should do and be better than the rest of us – but there is a practical one. They have to. Detroit is where change is most urgent and therefore most viable. The rest of us will get there later, when necessity drives us too, and by that time Detroit may be the shining example we can look to, the post-industrial green city that was once the steel-gray capital of Fordist manufacturing.” Rebecca Solnit: “Detroit Arcadia: Exploring the post-American landscape.” Harper’s Magazine, July 2007.

xviii In June 1963, Dr. King, arm-in-arm with Detroit black power leaders and labor leader Walter Reuther, led a huge march down Woodward Avenue in Detroit. I was one of the organizers of the march. For the story of how and why it came about, see Living for Change, p. 124.

xix In the spring of 1964, together with Max Stanford of Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM); Baltimore Afro-American reporter William Worthy, and Patricia Robinson of Third World Press, Jimmy and I met with Malcolm in a Harlem luncheonette to discuss our proposal that he come to Detroit to help build the Organization for Black Power. Malcolm’s response was that we should go ahead while he served the movement as an “evangelist.” However, after Malcolm discovered during his pilgrimage to Mecca that revolutionaries come in all races, he realized that he had to go back to square one to do the hard theoretical work necessary to develop a new body of ideas. As he told Jan Carew in a conversation in London:

I’m a Muslim and a revolutionary, and I’m learning more and more about political theories as the months go by. The only Marxist group in America that offered me a platform was the Socialist Workers Party. I respect them and they respect me. The Communists have nixed me, gone out of the way to attack me, that is, with the exception of the Cuban Communists. If a mixture of nationalism and Marxism makes the Cubans fight the way they do and make the Vietnamese stand up so resolutely to the might of America and its European and other lapdogs, then there must be something to it. But my Organization of African American Unity is based in Harlem and we’ve got to creep before we walk and walk before we run.... But the chances are that they will get me the way they got Lumumba before he reached the running stage.

Jan Carew Ghosts in our Blood: With Malcolm X in Africa, England, and the Caribbean, p. 36. Lawrence Hill Books 1994.

This kind of introspection, questioning and transformation, which were so characteristic of Malcolm, has been mostly ignored by black nationalists and Black Power militants.

xx Vincent wrote the first draft of MLK’s April 4, 1967 historic anti-Vietnam war speech, “Time to Break the Silence.” Years later, the ideas in the 1984 pamphlet were expanded and published by him in Martin Luther King: The Inconvenient Hero: Orbis, 1996; revised 2007.

xxi For example, We Shall Overcome: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Black Freedom Movement, ed. Peter J. Albert and Ronald Hoffman, DaCapo Press, 1993, is a compilation of papers presented by an impressive group of scholars and activists at an October 1986 symposium convened in Washington, D.C. to reflect on King’s life and work following the decision to make King’s birthday an annual holiday.

xxii See my “Thoughts on the Black Radical Congress,” Michigan Citizen, May 10-16, 1998. Bob Lucas, to whom my letter is addressed, led the 1966 march into Cicero, Illinois.

xxiii The Phenomenology of Mind by G.W.F. Hegel, translated with an Introduction and Notes by J. B. Baillie, p.81. London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd. 1931.

xxiv See http://www.boggscenter.org for these and other speeches by me.

xxv “A Time to Break Silence,” reprinted in A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr. ed. James M. Washington, p. 231. Harper Collins, 1991.

xxvi The Trumpet of Conscience, reprinted in A Testament of Hope, ibid. p. 641.

xxvii King’s concept of love recalls Che Guevara’s: "Let me say, with the risk of appearing ridiculous, that the true revolutionary is guided by strong feelings of love.” Exploring King’s concept can help us understand why Che’s statement has been so puzzling to traditional radicals and why Che lives on in the hearts of young revolutionaries.

For example, in a thought-provoking article, “King, the Constitution and the Courts,” theologians and lawyers Barbara A. Holmes and Susan Winfield Holmes challenge us to think more expansively about King’s concept of love. King’s,

agape love is a foundational principle for social change.... For King, love is synonymous with ethics. It is a moral principle that provides context, norms, rules of engagement, and a vision of moral flourishing.... The strength of King’s belief in the law, his abiding faith in love as praxis, and the force of his performative acts forged crosscultural alliances and inspired even the courts to interpret the laws in a manner that for a time changed the face of the nation,,,,

King’s higher-law values also challenge the theory articulated by W.E.B. DuBois that double consciousness separated the public and private lives of black people.... One cannot claim to be operating with higher-law values unless a constant self-critique is part of the process.... King knew that love crucified, but not broken, was the only model that could redeem the dignity of those who sought freedom and those who conspired to deny it....

When we are confronted by the infrastructures of malignant social systems, love seems frail at best and irrelevant at worst. Yet, the lessons of history teach just the opposite. In defiance of our logic, love has sustained whole communities. With nothing more than love, besieged people confront radical evil, endure losses, bury their dead, and console each other during and after the bereavement.... King believed that the future is love....He also believed that peaceful demonstrations were, in fact, love speaking to the nation....Using love’s untapped potential, he awakened a nation to its shortcomings and African Americans to the fullness of their humanity.

The Legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr.: The Boundaries of Law, Politics, and Religion. Edited by Lewis V. Baldwin. Rufus Burrow, Jr., Barbara A. Holmes, and Susan Holmes Winfield, contributors. University of Notre Dame Press, 2002.

Jimmy Boggs talked about loving America enough to change it. “I love this country,” he used to say, “not only because my ancestors’ blood is in the soil but because of what I believe it can become.” “ Jimmy taught me,” Shea Howell recalls,

that revolutions are made out of love for people and for place. Love isn’t just something you feel. It’s something you do every day when you go out and pick up the papers and bottles scattered the night before on the corner, when you stop and talk to a neighbor, when you argue passionately for what you believe with whomever will listen, when you call a friend to see how they’re doing, when you write a letter to the newspaper, when you give a speech and give ‘em hell, when you never stop believing that we can all be more than we are. And he taught me that love isn’t about what we did yesterday; it’s about what we do today and tomorrow and tomorrow.

In All about Love, bell hooks refers readers to self-help psychiatrist M. Scott Peck who defines love as ‘the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth.” New Visions, 2000. See Mitchel Cohen: “Revolution Guided by Feelings of Great Love, Learning from Che Guevara,” CounterPunch, January 3 / 4; also Michael Hardt on Love, http://www.boggsblog.org.

xxviii See “Seeing Detroit with your heart” by Grace Lee Boggs, Michigan Citizen, June 15-21. 2008.

xxix The Trumpet of Conscience, p. 645, see note xxv.

xxx The historian I have found to be most insightful about the rethinking of radical strategies mandated by the movements of the 1960s is Immanuel Wallerstein, author of The Modern World System: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World Economy in the Sixteenth Century. Academic Press, 1974.

The movements of the 1960s culminated in what Wallerstein calls “the world revolution of 1968. ” Since that world revolution, he says, six premises that were accepted as axiomatic by revolutionaries since the French revolution have become questionable. The two-step strategy (first take state power, then transform society) is no longer self-evidently correct. We can no longer assume that political activity is most effective if channeled through one party. The labor-capital conflict is not the only fundamental conflict in capitalism; there is also gender, race, ethnicity, and sexuality. Democracy is not a bourgeois concept but a profoundly revolutionary, anti-capitalist idea. An increase in productivity is not an essential goal of socialism. We need to consider its ecological and human consequences, including consumerism and the commodification of everything. We also need to reassess our faith in science in favor of a ‘willingness to think in terms of a more complex relationship between determinism and free will, order and chaos.’ After Liberalism, The New Press, 1995, chapter 11.

Next, in his little 1998 book, Utopistics: The Historical Choices of the Twenty-first Century, Wallerstein explains how 1968 dethroned both the Leninists and the Social Democrats, the two anti-systemic movements that had emerged from and prevailed since the French Revolution. After 1968, people the world over, including Africa and Asia, no longer believed in the ability of state structures to improve the commonweal. This “resulted in a kind of widespread and amorphous antistatism of a kind totally unknown in the long period between 1789 and 1968. It was debilitating and aroused fear as well as uncertainty.” The New Press. 1998, p. 29-32.

The next year, in The End of the World As We Know It: Social Science for the Twenty-First Century, Wallerstein assured us that uncertainty rather than certainty about the future provides the basis for hope. University of Minnesota Press, 1999. Also see Ilya Prigogine: The End of Certainty: Time, Chaos and the New Laws of Nature. The Free Press, 1996.

In 2001, I had an interesting discussion with Wallerstein at Binghamton University. When I turned ninety in 2005, he emailed me that he was coming to Detroit for my hundredth birthday.

xxxi Starhawk: “The Burning Times: Notes on a Critical Period in History," Dreaming the Dark: Magic, Sex and Politics. Beacon 1982. Eco-Feminism by Vandana Shiva and Maria Mies, Zed 1993. The Subsistence Alternative by Veronika Bennholdt-Thomsen and Maria Mies, Zed 2000, includes a section on Detroit Summer. Working Inside Out by Margo Adair, who was a member of the Bay Area NOAR local, provides both historical background and practical advice for bringing our hearts and minds together. Sourcebooks 2003.

See also The Re-Invention of Work, A New Vision of Livelihood for Our Time by Matthew Fox, Harper San Francisco, 1994. Fox has also written “95 Theses” that begin with the statements that “God is both Mother and Father,” and, “At this time in history, God is more Mother than Father because the feminine is most missing and it is important to bring gender balance back.” YES! Magazine, Winter 2006.

xxxii I caught a glimpse of this new kind of organizing at the Allied Media Conference (AMC08), which met in Detroit over the weekend of June 20-22, 2008. The theme was “Evolution Beyond Survival.” For three days, seven hundred activists from all over the U.S. and Canada, representing twenty-two youth organizations as well as intergenerational ones, consisting mostly of women and people of color, shared experiences and strategies and laughed, danced and sang together. The evolutionary/revolutionary energy of this gathering, I recognized, came primarily from the way that most of these young people are actively engaged in rebuilding local communities, nurturing each other, patiently transforming themselves and their communities from the ground up. Unlike our gatherings in the 1960s, they are led mostly by women and are not primarily adversarial or focused on power. One of the most moving AMC08 presentations was by the SistaiiSista collective of “working-class young and adult Black and Latina women building together to model a society based on liberation and love.” See http://www.sistaiisista.org.

See also my column on “Another Amazing Allied Media Conference,” Michigan Citizen, June 29-July 5, 2008, and my closing remarks at the conference. http://www.boggscenter.org.

xxxiii In Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Movement in the World Came into Being and Why No One Saw it Coming, Viking 2007, environmentalist Paul Hawken estimates that there may be more than a million of these self-healing civic groups in every country around the world, most of them small and barely visible but together creating the largest movement the world has ever known. This movement has no central leadership and is not bound together by any “ism.” Its very diverse and widely scattered individuals and groups are connected mainly by the Internet and other information technologies. But they are joined at the heart by their commitment to social justice, to caring for each other and for the earth, and to creating new forms of more democratic governance; and by their indomitable faith in our ability to create the world anew.

In two widely-read books on globalization (Empire and Multitude), Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri emphasize the historical uniqueness of these groups. These “singularities” do not fuse into some unity like “the people” or “the workers of the world.” They are not connected in centralized organizations like the Second or Third Internationals, as in the Marxist-Leninist era. Instead they connect through networks. What they have in common is that they are each imagining and creating new social identities and new political subjects that will take the place of the cogs and consumers to which global capitalism is seeking to reduce us. Therefore they have “the potential to create a new, alternative society.“ p. 159, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire, Penguin 2005.

Organizational consultant Margaret Wheatley explains the impact of these small groups in the light of modern science:

In a web the potential impact of local actions bears no relationship to their size. When we choose to act locally, we may be wanting to influence the entire system. But we work where we are, with the system that we know, the one we can get our arms around. From a Newtonian perspective, our efforts often seem too small, and we doubt that our actions will contribute incrementally to large-scale change. Step by step, system by system we aspire to develop enough mass or force to alter the larger system.

But a quantum view explains the success of small efforts quite differently. Acting locally allows us to be inside the movement and flow of the system, participating in all those complex events occurring simultaneously. We are more likely to be sensitive to the dynamics of this system, and thus more effective. However, changes in small places also affect the global system, not through incrementalism, but because every small system participates in an unbroken wholeness. Activities in one part of the whole create effects that appear in distant places. Because of these unseen connections, there is potential value in working anywhere in the system. We never know how our small activities will affect others through the invisible fabric of our connectedness. I have learned that in this exquisitely connected world, it’s never a question of ‘critical mass.’ It’s always about critical connections.

Leadership and the New Science, Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 1999, pp. 44-5.

xxxiv See Rebecca Solnit: “Revolution of the Snails: Encounters with the Zapatistas,” Z Magazine, January 16, 2008. This kind of transformational revolution obviously requires enormous patience. In The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World, Vijay Prashad tells the story of how Tanzania President Julius Nyerere began with a policy of “transformation” but resorted to “commandism” and bureaucracy because, like other Third World leaders, he was under pressure to develop the economy and in “too much of a hurry.” The Free Press, 2007, p.196.

xxxv The Beloved Communities Initiative was inspired by a panel discussion on the significance of the last three years of MLK’s life during a Spirituality and Activists Retreat at the Fetzer Institute in Kalamazoo, Michigan, in October 2004. Besides myself, the panelists were John Maguire, a friend of MLK’s since they roomed together as students in the 1950s, and my old friend Vincent Harding. Vincent and John both helped craft MLK’s historic April 4, 1967 speech. See Judgment Days: Lyndon Baines Johnson, Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Laws that changed America by Nick Kotz, Houghton Mifflin Company 2005. p. 373. Also “These are the times to grow our souls/ Call to the Beloved Community,” http://www.belovedcommunitiesnet.org.

xxxvi From Racism to Counter-Revolution, NOAR statement, January 1981.

xxxvii The collapse of the Soviet Union also provided an opportunity for fresh thinking about the Soviet dictatorship. Instead of viewing this dictatorship as the result of communist ideology or of the personalities of Lenin, Trotsky or Stalin, it can be viewed dialectically as the contradiction that emerges when revolutionaries seize state power without having previously transformed the people. This means that instead of making a priority of the assault on power structures, as Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin had done, revolutionaries need to shift our focus to constructing power from below by empowering the people and creating dual power structures.

Michael Hardt has written a fascinating little book (Michael Hardt presents Thomas Jefferson the Declaration of Independence, Verso 2007), in which he establishes a link between Lenin, the much vilified Bolshevik, and Thomas Jefferson, the icon of American democracy. Both saw selfrule (Lenin's "every cook can govern") as the goal of revolution and human evolution. Both were convinced that the means towards that goal was practice in self-rule. Both believed that "humanity can and must be transformed" through practice in self-rule after the event of rebellion, which lasts only a few days, and the historical process of transformation, requiring many decades and generations. (Lenin's Workers and Peasants Inspection, Jefferson's "wards" or "little republics "). That’s why Lenin opposed anarchism and Jefferson was so interested in education.

xxxviii One of the reasons Lenin gave for the Bolsheviks seizing power in the fall of 1917 was the need to forestall another counterrevolutionary attempt by General Kornilov to overthrow the Menshevik government because it was wavering in the war against Germany.

xxxix Published in the Michigan Citizen, March 23-28. 2008. The speech has also been broadcast on the KPFA program, Against the Grain.

xl It was in the Great Hall of Cooper Union that Abraham Lincoln concluded his February 1860 speech with these words that anticipate MLK: “Let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith, let us, to the end, dare to do our duty as we understand it.”

xli As I write this introduction, it is the Fourth of July weekend, and I have written the following for my next column in the Michigan Citizen:

...decades from now, if the human race survives, this year’s Fourth of July may be remembered as the one when holiday celebrations went beyond beer and barbecuing to include stories of the steps that we and others are taking and can take to change the way we are living to stop global warming; the year we realized that we are the masters of our fate and the captains of our souls. Instead of viewing ourselves as subjects who can’t stop driving SUVs, we began viewing ourselves as citizens with the right and responsibility to care for our planet and our posterity.

Decades from now, as our grandchildren and great grandchildren gather in backyards with friends, families and neighbors to celebrate their Fourth of July, I can imagine them toasting each other as Sons and Daughters of the Second American Revolution. Once upon a time, they’ll be boasting, it was our grandparents and great-grandparents who began biking or taking the bus to work. It was our grandparents and great-grandparents who urged others to do the same instead of just griping. It was our grandparents and great-grandparents who brought about a historic decline in the number of floods, hurricanes, droughts and wildfires by changing their own gas-guzzling way of life. It was our grandparents and great-grandparents who organized the demonstrations which persuaded city governments to create one or two carfree days every month and provide completely free public transportation to discourage people from driving cars.

I have little patience with the prophets of Doom and Gloom. I know as well as they do that our whole climate is changing, that water shortages, crop failures, increasing damages from extreme weather events, etc. threaten a breakdown in infrastructures and democratic processes.

But doomsayers breed and deepen despair. They apparently believe that the only way to avoid total collapse is by changing the whole system with one stroke - as if human beings were like a school of fish who all change direction at the same time or as if changing the whole system was as simple as rubbing out some misspelled words on a blackboard.

“Independence day, 2008,” Michigan Citizen, July 13-19, 2008.

xlii http://www.detroit-city-of-hope.org.

xliii See “Revolution as a New Beginning,” interview with Grace Lee Boggs, Upping the Anti,” no. 1 & 2, Project of the Autonomy & Solidarity Network, at http://auto_sol.tao.ca.

NYC's Dignified Rage

2008-10-24T15:38:00.011-04:00

Teach-in & Concert in solidarity with the EZLN's upcoming Global Festival of Dignified Rage

Just because you haven't seen much here doesn't mean that nothing's happening... So much is going down in fact that it's hard to make the time to write it up and get it out -> There's some "dignified rage," as the zapatistas say, flowing through New York City:

Right now the Friends of Brad Will are staging a dry hunger strike outside Senator Hillary Clinton's Midtown Manhattan office. They are demanding the arrest of Brad Will's actual murderers, that the Oaxacan activists recently arrested and charged with his murder be released with all charges dropped, and an end to the capitalist trade agreements (NAFTA, CAFTA), development plans (Mesoamerica Project), and security programs (Merida Initiative) that his murder and the current repression protect.

Saturday evening (Oct 25) Mahina Movement, the Brecht Forum, Casa Atabex Aché, and Mothers on the Move are hosting "AMOR & REBELDIA," a teach-in and state of emergency concert in response to the current economic crisis and in solidarity with the EZLN's upcoming Global Festival of Dignified Rage.

Sunday evening (Oct 26) Movement for Justice in El Barrio (MJB) -fresh from there victory against london-based multinational corporation Dawnay, Day!- will be screening four short films and participating in a panel as part of the Maysles Cinema's "Rent Control: East Harlem" series this weekend. MJB has done a lot of work this year to build ties of solidarity with their neighbors struggling against gentrification throughout Harlem (East, Central, and West) and it shows. They are joined Sunday by Iris Morales' "Palante Siempre Palante!" - chronicling the Young Lords of El Barrio's past. "Rent Control: East Harlem" is part of the Maysles Cinema's October-long Harlem commemoration.

-just announced- Sunday and Monday (Oct 26 & 27)
Remember Brad Will & All Those Killed & Disappeared in Oaxaca
- Sunday at 6:00 pm
  Gathering
  La Plaza Garden
  9th Street Between B and C
  (Rain Location St. Mark's Church Parish Hall)
- Monday at 12 Noon
  Protest & Press Conference
  Mexican Consulate
  27 East 39 Street Between Madison & Park Ave.
Actions and events are planned in New York City, Minneapolis, MN, Tucson, AZ, Eugene, OR, Santa Cruz, CA, and Oaxaca, Mexico. Check out the National Call to Action from members of Solidarity Without Borders, Friends and Family of Sali, and Friends of Brad Will.

Movement for Justice in El Barrio has received an invitation to present at the aforementioned "Global Festival of Dignified Rage" taking place at th end of this year and beginning of next in Mexico City and in Chiapas in the zapatista Caracol of Oventic and its neighboring city of San Cristobal de las Casas. A review of MJB's work this year, as well as a request for financial support as they prepare for this journey, and some thoughts on the Festival itself are all in the works here at Zapagringo - please stay casually tuned in :-)

3rd Anniversary of the Other Campaign

2008-09-16T09:51:00.010-04:00

UPDATE Oct 30 '08: find additional information on the itinerary of the First Global Festival of Dignified Rage and how to participate here.

Three years ago today, the first plenary session of the Other Campaign was held in the zapatista Caracol of La Garrucha in Chiapas, Mexico. Following six weekends of gatherings -approximately 106 hours of listening- the Other Campaign was launched to transform Mexico "from Below and to the Left." Amongst the initial adherents were 55 political organizations of the left, 103 indigenous organizations and Mexican Indian peoples, 162 social organizations and movements, 453 non-governmental or collective groups and organizations, and 1624 people who came as individuals or representing their family, neighborhood, or community...

Perhaps this is the new normal for zapagringo - a post a month? Two communiques from the EZLN have just been released... there will be much more to say about these in the coming months... here are links to their English versions:

#1: EZLN Communique on Political Prisoners
#2: EZLN Announces "First Global Festival of Dignified Rage"