Each video is about 10 minutes. I learned a lot from all three interviews, and I’m sure you will too.  Enjoy!

Malalai Joya is an Afghan activist, author, and former politician. She served as an elected member of the 2003 Loya Jirga and was a parliamentary member of the National Assembly of Afghanistan, until she was expelled for denouncing other members as warlords and war criminals.

She has been a vocal critic of both the US/NATO occupation and the Karzai government, as well as the Taliban and Islamic fundamentalists. After surviving four assassination attempts she currently lives underground in Afghanistan, continuing her work from safe houses. After the release of her memoir, A Woman Among Warlords, she recently concluded a US speaking tour. She sat down for an interview with David Zlutnick while in San Francisco on April 9, 2011.

Charles Bowden is an author and journalist whose work has largely focused on the US/Mexico Border region. His writing has especially centered on the Mexican Drug War and Ciudad Juárez, the border city known as the epicenter of Mexican drug violence. His critically acclaimed book, Murder City: Ciudad Juárez and the Global Economy’s New Killing Fields, was published in 2010 by Nation Books. His latest work, edited along with Molly Molloy, is El Sicario: The Autobiography of a Mexican Assassin and was just released, also by Nation Books.

On June 30, 2011 Bowden sat down for a video interview with David Zlutnick while in San Francisco for a speaking engagement. In his responses he argues the extreme violence seen in Mexico is a sign of a deeper societal disintegration resulting from governmental corruption, failed economic policies, and the War on Drugs.

George Katsiaficas is a professor, sociologist, author, and activist. He teaches at the Wentworth Institute of Technology and specializes in social movements, Asian politics, U.S. foreign policy, and comparative and historical studies. He has written extensively on popular social uprisings in various regions and historical moments.

In these selections from an interview with David Zlutnick filmed on on March 27, 2011 in Berkeley, CA, he discusses the recent wave of demonstrations and rebellions throughout the Middle East and North Africa, placing them in a greater context of social transformation.

As the following interview of Ben Dangl highlights, leftist states such as Venezuela are not by themselves particularly revolutionary, and in fact often play a counter-revolutionary role. Democratic, participatory, grassroots social movements have always been the real engine of change. Political leaders can choose to follow those movements (“lead by obeying” in Zapatista language), or they can choose to be largely a facade for neoliberalism and reaction.  The question is not the quality of the leader, but the quality of the movement holding that leader’s feet to the fire.

This is the reason President Obama has been largely a flop.  As FDR said to labor organizers in 1932, “I agree with you, I want to do it, now make me do it.”  Real leadership comes from below.

Let’s hope we can follow the examples of Bolivia, Egypt, and Madison, WI and continue to work towards a global movement for justice. [alex]

Dancing with Dynamite in Latin America

by Nikolas Kozloff
Originally published by Huffington Post.
February 11, 2011.

Recently, I sat down with Benjamin Dangl, author of the recently released Dancing with Dynamite: Social Movements and States in Latin America, for an interview.

NK: You’ve written an extremely ambitious book which takes the reader all across South America. One of the most impressive things about the work is that it is largely based on your own personal interviews with political participants at the grassroots as opposed to mere secondary research. How long did it take to research and what was the most fascinating country that you worked in?

BD: The book is the result of over eight years of research, traveling and interviewing across Latin America. This period of time coincided with the rise to power of most of the region’s current leftist leaders, and so the interviews I draw from in the book reflect a lot of the initial hope and subsequent disappointment among many social movements. The most interesting place I’ve worked in is definitely Bolivia, where the power of the grassroots movements is the strongest, and the impressive relationship between these movements and the government of Evo Morales is constantly changing.

NK: It can be tough in many ways to conduct research in South America. What prompted your interest in the subject matter and what were some of the obstacles that you encountered along the way?

BD: The main things that drew me to writing about politics and social issues in Latin America were the impact US foreign policy and corporate activity had on the region, and the hopeful and relatively under-reported social struggles going on. On the one hand, the connection to the US in the so-called war on drugs, and the corporate looting of natural resources, were all issues I thought more readers of English-based media in the US should know about. And the sophisticated organizing tactics, grassroots strategies and victories of social movements in the region were stories I wanted to help amplify and spread in the US, for the sake of awareness, solidarity and lessons to be learned. The main obstacle in doing this research is the actual cost of the traveling. I’ve worked all kinds of odd jobs over the years, in construction, farming, and various kinds of manual labor, to pay for the plane tickets to get to Latin America in order to conduct research and writing on the ground.

NK: Here in the U.S., many on the left idealize Chávez and the like, yet you suggest that many ostensibly leftist regimes may sap the energy of today’s social movements. How has this happened, and could one say, therefore, that “Pink Tide” regimes may ultimately exert a counter-productive or even pernicious effect upon local politics in their respective countries?

BD: The way this relationship has played out is different in each country. Some Latin American presidents, upon taking power, have been more willing and able than others to collaborate with the social movements that help bring them into office. The relationships in Venezuela and Bolivia are probably the healthiest in this sense. In other countries, such as Brazil with President Lula and the Landless Farmers Movements, the Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa and the indigenous movements there, the relationship has been more difficult, with the governments repressing, criminalizing and demobilizing movements when possible. Dancing with Dynamite looks at how this relationship, this dance, has played out in seven different countries. It tells a story beyond what the presidents and major politicians have been doing or saying, and focuses more on the history of the past decade from the perspective of the grassroots. And this view from below is something I think more people in the US left would benefit from focusing on, if anything to understand the full picture of what’s been driving these momentous changes over the past ten years.

NK: Of all the South American countries you describe, Bolivia seems to have the most revolutionary potential. Why is this so, and what new radical developments can we expect from Bolivia in the coming years?

BD: I think this potential comes in part from the legacy and strength of indigenous movements in the country. Over 60% of Bolivians self-identify themselves as indigenous, and this identity has manifested itself in powerful ways in key mobilizations over access to natural resources and making politics in the country more participatory and accessible. The rich history of labor, student, farmer and other activist movements have also contributed to today’s grassroots dynamics. Many people in Bolivia, which is the poorest country in South America, also have to turn to political activism and social organizing to survive; in many communities fighting for access to water, ousting a corrupt mayor, defending rights to grow coca crops, these are parts of everyday life. This capacity to mobilize translates into a diversity of movements that are ready to take action when necessary, whether it’s to hold Evo Morales’ feet to the flames, or mobilize against the right and foreign corporations. Because of this dynamic and often-changing landscape, it is difficult to say what will happen in the coming years.

NK: From a political and economic perspective, Brazil dwarfs all other South American countries. Recently, Dilma Rousseff, Lula’s protégé in the Workers’ Party, won Brazil’s presidential election. That is good news for Correa, Morales and Chávez since Rousseff is unlikely to harass leftist regimes in wider South America. Yet, as you point out Brazil has become an agribusiness juggernaut, displacing poor peasants both within and outside its borders through its soybean industry. How can the more radical bloc of Bolivia, Venezuela and Ecuador seek to contest Brazilian geopolitical hegemony in the region?

BD: The sad reality is that destructive agribusinesses, particularly soy, which displace poor farmers, destroy the environment and use toxic pesticides, are rapidly expanding across Latin America. Brazil is one part of this expansion. Soy crops are all over many parts of Paraguay, Bolivia, Uruguay and Argentina. There has not been a lot of political will on the part of the region’s left of center leaders to confront this trend. As far as Brazil’s power in the region, I think Lula helped pave the way for many progressive regional initiatives and diplomatic approaches. I think that Rousseff will likely continue in this tradition. If Bolivia, Venezuela and Ecuador seek to contest Brazil’s power, they will likely do so together, cooperatively against Brazil, rather than on their own against this imperial neighbor.

NK: Social movements in South America have not invested a great deal of energy in pushing for a more revolutionary foreign policy, preferring instead to concentrate on bread and butter issues at home. Should they advocate more loudly for a different sort of foreign policy, and if so what should it look like?

BD: Well, I think social movements have pushed for more revolutionary foreign policy. The grassroots, continent-wide push against Bush’s Free Trade Area of the Americas was historic. The anti-imperialist stance of many of the region’s new and recent presidents is largely a response to grassroots pressure against US-militarization of the war on drugs, against US military bases, against meddling from Washington, against foreign domination of natural resources and the economy. If there has been any lack of mobilizing for a more progressive foreign policy, I think it’s because many movements are relatively content with the policies of their presidents in this respect. The landless movement in Brazil, for example, applauded Lula’s foreign relations, but criticized his weak land reform. One of the most progressive aspects of Correa’s administration in Ecuador has been his foreign policy. That said, I think a further strengthening of regional independence from the US will remain a key goal of social movements in the region.

NK: As you point out, some leftist leaders have conducted anti-environmental policies. In their adherence to resource nationalism, they’re harking back to a rather outdated twentieth century model of development, one which has been contested as of late by the region’s rising environmental parties. In Brazil, Marina Silva of the Green Party netted a whopping 19% of the vote in the nation’s first round of presidential voting. What kind of a political impact do you expect green politics will have on the wider region, and how can social movements take advantage of growing environmental consciousness to bring about revolutionary change?

BD: Many social movements have been critical of the environmentally destructive extractive industries pushed by leftist governments, particularly in mining, gas and oil industries. While this will likely remain an area of contention between socialistic governments and the movements effected by these industries, there is a growing trend among leaders to address the causes of climate change and environmental devastation across the globe. The Evo Morales’ government demonstrated this in its participation in climate change talks and conferences. Sustainable policies based on the concept of Buen Vivir (Living Well) advocated by the region’s indigenous provides a fitting model for all nations and people to follow

NK: You seem to be particularly speaking to and addressing U.S. activists in your book, and one of your more intriguing chapters discusses the connections between South American and U.S. social movements. You cite the case of Chicago workers who were influenced by their Argentine counterparts as they took over a factory in 2008. Yet, you yourself concede that applying the South American experience to the U.S. may not work as both societies have very different histories and political cultures. If that’s true, then what can the U.S. left learn, concretely, from radical politics south of the border?

BD: I think a lot of activists in the US can learn from movements based in Latin America. As I discuss in the book, there a few key movements and actions in the US that drew from tactics and strategies of the landless movement in Brazil and water rights activists in Bolivia, for example. One major tactic is not allowing a fear of empowering the right dictate all actions as activists. I think that is particularly useful to people in the US right now. In Brazil, the landless movement continues to support the lesser of two evils in elections while also occupying unused land and working it for survival, regardless of the slow pace of land reform pushed by the government. Social movements in Bolivia have been able to both defend the progressive policies of the Morales government while radicalizing his policies by pressuring him from below. Translating these tactics, which I outline in the book, in the US, will be different for each community. The past ten years in Latin America have seen a historic shift to the left in the halls of government power and the streets, so it makes sense that people in the US need to learn from these examples if we are to break out of the stranglehold of our stagnant political culture.

NK: Thanks very much for your time!

BD: Thank you!

The following exchange between Michael Carriere and Alex Knight occurred via email, July 2010. Alex Knight was questioned about the End of Capitalism Theory, which states that the global capitalist system is breaking down due to ecological and social limits to growth and that a paradigm shift toward a non-capitalist future is underway.

This is the final part of a four-part interview. Scroll to the bottom for links to the other sections.

Part 3. Life After Capitalism

MC: Moving forward, how would you ideally envision a post-capitalist world? And if capitalism manages to survive (as it has in the past), is there still room for real change?

AK: First let me repeat that even if my theory is right that capitalism is breaking down, it doesn’t suggest that we’ll automatically find ourselves living in a utopia soon. This crisis is an opportunity for us progressives but it is also an opportunity for right-wing forces. If the right seizes the initiative, I fear they could give rise to neo-fascism – a system in which freedoms are enclosed and violated for the purpose of restoring a mythical idea of national glory.

I think this threat is especially credible here in the United States, where in recent years we’ve seen the USA PATRIOT Act, the Supreme Court’s decision that corporations are “persons,” and the stripping of constitutional rights from those labeled “terrorists,” “enemy combatants”, as well as “illegals.” Arizona’s attempt to institute a racial profiling law and turn every police officer into an immigration official may be the face of fascism in America today. Angry whites joining together with the repressive forces of the state to terrorize a marginalized community, Latino immigrants. While we have a black president now, white supremacist sentiment remains widespread in this country, and doesn’t appear to be going away anytime soon. So as we struggle for a better world we may also have to contend with increasing authoritarianism.

I should also state up front that I have no interest in “writing recipes for the cooks of the future.” I can’t prescribe the ideal post-capitalist world and I wouldn’t try. People will create solutions to the crises they face according to what makes most sense in their circumstances. In fact they’re already doing this. Yet, I would like to see your question addressed towards the public at large, and discussed in schools, workplaces, and communities. If we have an open conversation about what a better world would look like, this is where the best solutions will come from. Plus, the practice of imagination will give people a stronger investment in wanting the future to turn out better. So I’ll put forward some of my ideas for life beyond capitalism, in the hope that it spurs others to articulate their visions and initiate conversation on the world we want.

My personal vision has been shaped by my outrage over the two fundamental crises that capitalism has perpetrated: the ecological crisis and the social crisis. I see capitalism as a system of abuse. The system grows by exploiting people and the planet as means to extract profit, and by refusing to be responsible for the ecological and social trauma caused by its abuse. Therefore I believe any real solutions to our problems must be aligned to both ecological justice and social justice. If we privilege one over the other, we will only cause more harm. The planet must be healed, and our communities must be healed as well. I would propose these two goals as a starting point to the discussion.

How do we heal? What does healing look like? Let me expand from there.

Five Guideposts to a New World

I mentioned in response to the first question that I view freedom, democracy, justice, sustainability and love as guideposts that point towards a new world. This follows from what I call a common sense radical approach, because it is not about pulling vision for the future from some ideological playbook or dogma, but from lived experience. Rather than taking pre-formed ideas and trying to make reality fit that conceptual blueprint, ideas should spring from what makes sense on the ground. The five guideposts come from our common values. It doesn’t take an expert to understand them or put them into practice.

In the first section I described how freedom at its core is about self-determination. I said that defined this way it presents a radical challenge to capitalist society because it highlights the lack of power we have under capitalism. We do not have self-determination, and we cannot as long as huge corporations and corrupt politicians control our destinies.

I’ll add that access to land is fundamental to a meaningful definition of freedom. The group Take Back the Land has highlighted this through their work to move homeless and foreclosed families directly into vacant homes in Miami. Everyone needs access to land for the basic security of housing, but also for the ability to feed themselves. Without “food sovereignty,” or the power to provide for one’s own family, community or nation with healthy, culturally and ecologically appropriate food, freedom cannot exist. The best way to ensure that communities have food sovereignty is to ensure they have access to land.

Ella Baker championed the idea of participatory democracy

Similarly, a deeper interpretation of democracy would emphasize participation by an individual or community in the decisions that affect them. For this definition I follow in the footsteps of Ella Baker, the mighty civil rights organizer who championed the idea of participatory democracy. With a lifelong focus on empowering ordinary people to solve their own problems, Ella Baker is known for saying “Strong people don’t need strong leaders.” This was the philosophy of the black students who sat-in at lunch counters in the South to win their right to public accommodations. They didn’t wait for the law to change, or for adults to tell them to do it. The students recognized that society was wrong, and practiced non-violent civil disobedience [video], becoming empowered by their actions. Then with Ms. Baker’s support they formed the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and organized poor blacks in Mississippi to demand their right to vote, passing on the torch of empowerment.

We need to be empowered to manage our own affairs on a large scale. In a participatory democracy, “we, the people” would run the show, not representatives who depend on corporate funding to get elected. “By the people, for the people, of the people” are great words. What if we actually put those words into action in the government, the economy, the media, and all the institutions that affect our lives? Institutions should obey the will of the people, rather than the people obeying the will of institutions. It can happen, but only through organization and active participation of the people as a whole. We must empower ourselves, not wait for someone else to do it.

Justice is supposed to protect the weak and oppressed from the strong and powerful, but in capitalist society it too often plays out as the reverse. As I write this, the Oakland police officer who shot Oscar Grant in the back and killed him was just handed a verdict of “not guilty” for murder, and found “guilty” of the lesser charge of “involuntary manslaughter.” How can it be “involuntary” if he was caught on video putting a gun in Oscar’s back and pulling the trigger? Is it because the police officer is white and Oscar Grant was black? What would the verdict have been if the roles were reversed and the police officer had been shot in the back? This isn’t justice, it’s injustice.

So to reach an ideal future, we would need to eliminate systems of oppression that benefit one group, like whites, at the expense of another group, like people of color. Racial justice aims to overturn this disparity. Of course we also have to put an end to patriarchy, the domination of society by men. Women have been organizing for centuries to gain equal rights, and to live without fear of violence or silencing. Theirs is a struggle for justice, too. Queer and trans justice mean that everyone should have the basic right to express their sexual preferences or gender identity however they so choose. Finally, I don’t think we can speak of justice as long as society is divided into rich and poor. A just society would ensure that everyone has access to resources to meet their basic needs, like food, housing, education, health care, transportation, clean water and air, and everything necessary for a decent livelihood.

The concept of intersectionality is also crucial. It means we must appreciate the complex ways that different forms of oppression intersect with one another. A simple example is that the injustice experienced by a black woman is different than for a white woman or a black man. These are not new concepts of justice, but I advocate them proudly.

Sustainability is such a buzzword these days, with corporations adopting sustainability statements and selling us “green” products, that it’s close to becoming meaningless propaganda. In a deeper sense, sustainability means human economy existing in harmony with the rest of the planet’s ecology, rather than as an alien force outside it and exploiting it. I draw inspiration for this definition from the work of the late, great social ecologist Murray Bookchin.

Bookchin also theorized that “the domination of nature by man stems from the domination of human by human.” In his book The Ecology of Freedom he points out that humans lived for 95% of our history as interconnected members of the web of life, and that it was the rise of class society about 10,000 years ago that first divided humans into rich and poor, and alienated us from the Earth’s natural balance. Class societies are committed to exploiting the land, air and sea for all they can provide. The ruling class sees their human subjects and the environment as things to use for enriching themselves and gaining power over other class societies. If they fail to do this, they themselves risk being conquered by more powerful neighbors. Class hierarchy therefore can never be sustainable.

Jared Diamond and others have written in detail how the Babylonian, Mayan, Roman and many other empires have collapsed because they abused their ecosystems faster than those ecosystems could restore themselves. This is why the “Fertile Crescent” of the Middle East, where class society originated, is now largely desert. In a sense, capitalism learned from these prior empires to spread its damage over the entire planet. But what it couldn’t learn was that exploiting the Earth and humanity to enrich the powerful few is always unsustainable in the long run.

Now that this global class society appears headed towards its own collapse, I would expect continents, nations, and regions to go their own directions. This makes it hard to envision exactly how sustainability will develop in the future. What works in the cities might not work in the country, and the same could be said about drylands and wetlands, North and South, etc. One point that seems clear is that technology must be appropriate to its surroundings, because you can’t use wind turbines where there’s no wind, or solar panels where there’s not enough sun. Appropriate technology means that it must serve human need, while also respecting the needs of the ecosystem on which it depends. Permaculture is an example of an appropriate technology for growing food – the idea is that gardening should actually restore the soil and nourish the ecology. I’ll add that the movement towards a sustainable future must be global, pursuing all of humanity’s shared long-term benefit. Instead of competing, we must work together, learning from each other’s successes and failures.

One sustainability success story is the organic revolution in Cuba. Around 1990, the collapse of the Soviet Union led to the loss of cheap oil for the island nation of Cuba. Cuba had entirely depended on that oil for their food production, as they maintained an industrialized agriculture system heavy on machinery and petrochemicals. I should add that this industrial food model is the same model the IMF and World Bank have pushed on most of the world. In neoliberal language, this was called the “Green Revolution.” But without oil, this industrial model cannot produce food.

The Cubans recognized this in the most visceral sense – facing an economic collapse that literally threatened starvation. They had no choice but to rapidly transition all food production over to an organic model. Petrochemical fertilizers and pesticides were abandoned, in favor of “biofertilizers” and “biopesticides,” natural solutions that mimicked the work of ecology. At the same time, tractors were replaced with human and animal effort, and the entire population had to relearn the farming skills of their ancestors. Gardens suddenly appeared on rooftops, in backyards and vacant lots, and the government raised farmers’ pay above that of engineers.

Farmers at the Organiponico de Alamar, a neighborhood agriculture project in downtown Havana (Photo by John Morgan)

Amazingly, despite being enclosed within a persistent US embargo, this genuine Green Revolution succeeded. No Cuban starved, though everyone lost 20 pounds. Today about half of Havana’s produce is grown within the city limits. As the global oil and energy shortage deepen, the entire world will need examples like that of Cuba. It is not just that the economy must use less resources than it does now. We have to face the equally important question of how to distribute the resources that exist. Transitioning to a sustainable path means prioritizing necessary economic functions like food production over wasteful and irresponsible expenditures on things like weapons or luxury items. For this reason, the transition away from a highly industrialized, capitalist model need not bring poverty and stress. If we use this opportunity to re-prioritize our economy towards meeting human and ecological needs, downscaling can actually improve quality of life and community self-reliance.

Last on the list of guideposts, but certainly not least, love is the force that ties everything together. I don’t speak of the sappy, saccharine love that comes in the form of millions of throwaway Valentine’s cards and gifts every year. What we need is a guide towards respect for life and all creatures, and a spirit of support and cooperation with our fellow human beings. This force, I believe is deep, genuine love. The kind of transformative love that writer bell hooks talks about when she writes, “Love will always move us away from domination in all its forms. Love will always challenge and change us.”

If capitalism is a system of abuse, the task ahead of us is fundamentally one of healing. In any abusive relationship, where one asserts control over another through physical, emotional, psychological, or sexual violence, the only path to healing is to end the abuse. For this reason, we must continue to speak up and challenge the violence capitalism perpetrates daily against the planet and all of humanity. However, we must also understand that the survivor, or the recipient of the abuse, may not recognize their partner’s behavior as abusive, and will typically internalize some amount of shame and guilt, feeling that they brought the treatment on themselves. They may justify the abuse by believing that they deserve it as punishment for real or imagined wrongs.

Even if the survivor names the abuse, they may stick with the relationship and futilely try to “change” or “reform” their abuser. Perhaps they will lower their expectations by reasoning that they cannot “do any better” than this relationship, and so will resign themselves to the abuse. Meanwhile the abuser is likely to attempt to isolate the survivor from friends, family, or other potential sources of support. As time goes on, the survivor is likely to feel increasingly trapped and powerless. The situation is not going to get any better until they end the relationship and rediscover their independence as a self-reliant entity.

I believe this analogy helps clarify why the population living under capitalism often does not appear eager to rebel against the injustices of the system. We have come to internalize our abuse, feeling powerless to escape it, and not recognizing that there are other ways to live. Every one of us has experienced abuse in this system. It comes in many forms, including (but not limited to): poverty, racism, repression of sexuality, pollution and environmental injustice, violence in our communities and schools, police brutality, sexism, ableism, neglect from parents or loved ones, isolation, sexual violence, imprisonment/punishment, and the private hell of domestic abuse. Without the support to be able to name this abuse, and go through the process of healing our wounds, too often we hide our scars and hope the pain will go away. When it doesn’t, we are left with anxiety, depression, addiction and mental illness.

Love can set us free. We must commit to loving ourselves in a deeper sense than many of us ever have. Capitalism uses propaganda, distractions, and boredom to numb us to the violence and enclosures it perpetrates, and often it is easier to remain numb than to deal with our emotional trauma. We have tuned out. We ignore the pain and anguish our bodies are communicating to us, and remain silent. Loving ourselves is really about committing to a process of healing: healing our bodies, healing our minds and our spirits, healing our communities, and healing the planet. I believe in our capacity to heal.

First we must name the abuse – the social and ecological crises we are experiencing, and move past the shame of victimhood. We may have participated in capitalist society and truly believed it was right, but we did not deserve to be treated this way. Next, we must end the relationship with capitalism that is responsible for the harm. When we take this step, the future will open up and we will see immense opportunity in every direction. We will experience a sense of liberation, finally grasping the independence and self-empowerment that we have always been capable of.

A Society That Values Life

If we follow the five guideposts of freedom, democracy, justice, sustainability and love, I believe the path will lead towards a society that values life. Capitalism is clear that it values money – profit – and not much else. With this single-minded focus, it leaves the well-being of humanity and the well-being of the planet too far down on the list of priorities. Those should be the top priorities. What is more important than life? This imbalance is the root of our troubles. It’s the reason our era is an era of war, poverty and unemployment, consumerism, drug addiction, corrupt politicians, and ecological catastrophe. We live in a society that straight-up doesn’t care about us. Capitalism cares about an individual if they can make a profit, but if not, it doesn’t care if they’re lying facedown in the gutter. Perhaps we’ve come to accept it, but this is totally backwards logic. It flies in the face of every system of morality, every major religion, and simple common sense.

What if we reversed the priorities and created a society that valued life more than it valued numbers on a spreadsheet? What would that look like? Conflicts resolved through dialogue and reconciliation rather than violence? Sharing when we’ve got enough and our neighbors don’t? Asking for help when we need it, and actually receiving it? Listening to our elders and our youth, and I mean really listening? Working meaningful jobs that make a difference in the world? Spending more time in our gardens, volunteering in the community, or playing with our children? Overcoming addiction and mental illness? Doing what’s in our hearts, and not just what will make the most money?

Does this sound unrealistic? Then remember the figure I quoted in response to the second question: $17 Trillion [PDF]. That’s how much money the US government has given to the banks since this crisis began, according to Nomi Prins. It’s such a huge number that it’s hard to fathom what that means. Let’s put it in perspective. On May 30, the cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan hit a total of $1 trillion. So the bailouts have cost about 17 “wars on terror,” in just a year and a half.

The group Rethink Afghanistan made a Facebook application that suggests alternative ways we could have spent that 1 trillion dollars wasted on war. On the list: $12 billion to “hire every worker in Afghanistan for a year,” $930 million to clean up the BP oil spill, $23 billion for “health care for 1 million children for one year,” and the list goes on. The website Global Issues also estimates the following costs for universal access in all the world’s poor countries: $9 billion to provide clean drinking water and sanitation, $12 billion for reproductive health for all women, and $13 billion for basic health and nutrition. Even if these figures are underestimated, it seems clear that we could eradicate global poverty and eliminate the conditions that breed terrorists for just a fraction of the cost of occupying the Middle East with US soldiers and keeping capitalism on life support.

What would you do with $18 trillion? I trust the reader could come up with all kinds of good ideas! For myself I want to see every community self-sufficient with electricity and heat, coming from clean and renewable energy sources. Let’s make solar panels, wind turbines, geothermal, passive solar, and most importantly, energy efficiency, available to everyone regardless of income.

We have the resources. We have the technology. All we need is the power to change these priorities. Every day, people all over the world work towards gaining this power.  Impoverished communities, youth and students, people of color, disabled folks, women and trans folks, workers, lesbian, gay and queer folks, religious and ethnic minorities, indigenous communities, and allies are organizing daily to end the trauma of capitalism and move towards a society that values life. This struggle is as old as time. As long as oppression has existed in the world, people have been organizing to undo it.

If the End of Capitalism Theory is correct, then right now we find ourselves at a historic crossroads, where the old order of oppression is breaking down under the strain of ecological and social limits. Will it be replaced by a new form of oppression, perhaps even more violent and authoritarian, or will we begin to heal and put an end to oppression once and for all? It’s a question that only we can answer through our actions.

Many people across the US and the world are trying to answer this question. We are getting smarter at creating approaches that integrate both ecological justice and social justice. More and more people are beginning to see that economic growth is not the goal. The capitalist economy is large but poor – it does not meet the needs of the majority of humanity or the needs of the planet. We can create an economy that is smaller but richer. Some examples of people who developing and spreading this knowledge are the de-growth movement which is getting stronger in Europe, and the Post-Carbon Institute in the United States. Yes! Magazine and Democracy Now! are two media outlets that regularly highlight the solutions we need.

Detroit, more than any other city, displays the hope springing from the cracks in capitalist crisis. Detroit was once the home of the automobile industry, the example of technologic progress in America. That industry has fled and left tremendous disinvestment and poverty in its wake. But solutions are coming from the community. Poor black people are turning vacant lots into urban gardens and organic farms, so that now Detroit has more urban agriculture than any city in the US. Detroit City of Hope, an effort connected with 95-year-old long-time activist Grace Lee Boggs, is helping to coordinate efforts between community organizations re-imagining sustainable development in what used to be the “motor city.” Like a phoenix rising from the ashes, Detroit shows us that by joining together in a spirit of mutual aid and healing from trauma, regular people can begin to create a new world, now.

What If Capitalism Survives

As you point out, the End of Capitalism Theory could be wrong. So what if capitalism survives this crisis as it did the others? In that case, I see two possible outcomes.

Option 1 is that the world literally comes to an end, either because of catastrophic climate change or nuclear warfare. The planet fries, the seas boil, and all life ceases, including humanity. This possibility is too horrific for me to imagine. I also happen to think it’s less likely than the second.

Option 2 is that either through renewed enclosures on the planet and the poor, pure dumb luck, or some combination of the two, President Obama and the world leaders manage to get the global economy back on a trajectory of growth, for another few decades. Perhaps they push through “cap and trade” and sell the atmosphere to polluters, opening up a new market for speculation. Or similarly they could force into existence a climate deal that includes REDD agreements that privatize pristine forests and displace the indigenous communities that have lived in them for thousands of years. Maybe they pump enough oil out of the tar sands, known as “the most destructive project on Earth,” and waste a lot of money on more nuclear reactors and ethanol plants in desperate attempts to mitigate some of the effects of peak oil. Slavery could be reinstated, perhaps along with debtors’ prisons to house the millions of Americans unable to pay back their student loans, credit cards, and mortgages. Or the ruling class could fall back on the tried-and-true strategy of escaping economic crisis by launching another war. They might enlist non-profits, academics, and even some “leftists” to promote the project by calling it neo-Keynesianism, or a Green New Deal, or some other snazzy title.

It sounds plausible. The problem with this option is that these are all, at best, temporary fixes. The fundamental contradiction of a system that requires endless growth on a finite planet would remain in place like the force of gravity on an airborne vehicle. It’s not the kind of thing that can be delayed forever. Once the fuel runs out, that sucker’s going down. Capitalism has stayed in the air through a lot of crises in the past, but it has only managed to buy more time until the next storm hits and throws the system into jeopardy even more starkly.

Sooner or later, capitalism will lose its forward momentum and there will be no technological fix, no new miracle energy source, no new round of enclosures that can pull it from its nosedive. The End of Capitalism Theory says this day will probably come sooner rather than later, and in that sense it’s a hopeful theory. But I think if we study the evidence of the ecological limits, like how soon peak oil is hitting, and the social limits, like the turmoil in China, we’ll see the system is either sputtering and about to go down, or has already entered freefall. If capitalism is already hurtling towards the rocks, then I believe the severity of the current crisis – which everyone agrees is rivaled only by the Great Depression, and this time is a much more global crash – begins to make sense. That’s what theories are good for, after all, helping us make sense of our experiences.

Thanks for the wonderful questions!
Alex Knight
July 2010

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Alex Knight is a proponent of the End of Capitalism Theory, which states that the global capitalist system is breaking down due to ecological and social limits to growth and that a paradigm shift toward a non-capitalist future is underway. He is working on a book titled “The End of Capitalism” and seeks a publisher. Since 2007 he has edited the website endofcapitalism.com. He has a degree in electrical engineering and a Master’s in political science, both from Lehigh University. He lives in Philadelphia, where he is a teacher and organizer. He can be reached at alex@endofcapitalism.com

Michael Carriere is an assistant professor at the Milwaukee School of Engineering, where he teaches courses on American history, public policy, political science, and urban design. He is currently working on a book, with David Schalliol, titled “The Death and (After) Life of Great American Cities: Twenty-First Century Urbanism and the Culture of Crisis.” He holds a Ph.D. in American history from the University of Chicago.

—–

Click the links below for more of the interview:

1. The current financial crisis is clearly a moment of peril for both individuals and the broader system of capitalism. But would it also make sense to see it as a moment of opportunity?
Part 1. Crisis and Opportunity

2. Capitalism has faced many moments of crisis over time. Is there something different about the present crisis? What makes the end of capitalism a possibility now?
Part 2A. Capitalism and Ecological Limits
Part 2B. Social Limits and the Crisis

3. Moving forward, how would you ideally envision a post-capitalist world? And if capitalism manages to survive (as it has in the past), is there still room for real change?
Part 3. Life After Capitalism

The following exchange between Michael Carriere and Alex Knight occurred via email, July 2010. Alex Knight was questioned about the End of Capitalism Theory, which states that the global capitalist system is breaking down due to ecological and social limits to growth and that a paradigm shift toward a non-capitalist future is underway.

This is the third part of a four-part interview. This part is a continuation of Alex’s response to the second question. Click here for Part 2A. Scroll to the bottom for links to the other sections.

Part 2B. Social Limits and the Crisis

MC: Capitalism has faced many moments of crisis over time. Is there something different about the present crisis? What makes the end of capitalism a possibility now?

AK: As I described in the last section, the current crisis can be understood as resulting from a massive collision between capitalism’s relentless need for growth and the world’s limits in capacity to sustain that growth. These limits to growth are both ecological and social. In this section I’ll discuss the concept of social limits to growth.

The Extraordinary Power of Social Movements

Social limits to growth function alongside the ecological limits but are drawn from a different source. By social limits we mean the inability, or unwillingness, of human communities, and humankind as a whole, to support the expansion of capitalism. This broadly includes all forms of resistance to capitalism, a resistance that has arguably been increasing around the world through innumerable forms of alternative lifestyles, refusal to cooperate, protest, and outright rebellion.

As a disclaimer it’s important to recognize that not all resistance is progressive. There are right-wing, fundamentalist, and undemocratic forces that also resist capitalism, for example the Taliban, or North Korea. These are not our allies. They do not share progressive values, we cannot condone their attacks on women, or on freedom more generally, and I don’t see anything to be gained by working with them. However it is important to recognize how these forces are aligned against capitalism and U.S. imperialism, in addition to being aware of the danger they present to our own hopes and dreams.

Progressive resistance, on the other hand, has always taken its strength from grassroots social movements. Silvia Federici writes about the immense and varied peasant movements in medieval Europe that fought for religious and sexual freedom, challenging both feudal lords and emerging capitalist elites. I like to think of these rebels as my European ancestors – they were just commoners but they rose up to fight for a better world. This is the nature of social movements. Ordinary folks, daring to pursue their deepest aspirations, interests and dreams, join together with others who share those desires, and thereby create something extraordinary. The magic exists in the joining-together. Isolated individuals lack the power to accomplish what a group can achieve.

We can appreciate this extraordinary power if we look at how social movements have transformed our lives. A century ago, millions of American workers joined the labor movement and won the 8-hour day, Social Security, and workplace safety. Regular folks carried forward the Civil Rights Movement and broke Southern segregation. The feminist and LGBT movements have transformed the way gender and sexuality are viewed all over the world. It’s hard to overstate how dramatically these and other social movements have improved society. While capitalism has invented ways to co-opt social movements and redirect them into outlets that do not challenge the system on a deep level (like the “non-profit industrial complex”), movements have remained alive and vibrant by empowering people to reach towards a different world.

Have social movements limited capitalist oppression recently? To answer this we need to learn the story of the Global Justice Movement.

Demonstrators tear down a section of security fence in the Mexican resort city of Cancun to confront the World Trade Organization’s Fifth Ministerial summit on Sept. 10, 2003.

The Global Justice Movement

David Graeber, anarchist anthropologist, wrote a remarkable essay called “The Shock of Victory” in which he looks at this movement that suddenly flared up at the turn of the millennium and seemed to disappear just as quickly. Although most Americans may not remember the Global Justice Movement, and those who participated in it may feel demoralized by the fact that capitalism still exists, Graeber points out that many of the movement’s ambitious goals were accomplished.

A decade ago, capitalism was pursuing a strategy to transform the entire world into a single marketplace. It claimed this “globalization” would benefit everyone because everyone would get to share in the spoils of growth. What it really wanted was to extract maximum profit from the cheap labor of the “Global South,” by moving industry and jobs out of high-wage areas like the US, while imposing privatization and debt on the poor countries of the world. This strategy was called “neoliberalism,” because it aimed to eliminate all barriers to trade, such as worker protections or environmental regulations. Multinational corporations would have a bonanza. Like previous rounds of enclosure, the damage these policies would have on poor communities and on the planet was disregarded.

Starting from directly affected communities in places like Mexico, Brazil, India, South Korea and Africa, an enormous network of farmers, workers and educators connected with progressives and anti-capitalists in North America and Europe. They didn’t have a single leader or organization, but they came together as a Global Justice Movement to coordinate efforts and stop the spread of neoliberalism. The movement became visible to the world when it manifested at the 1999 World Trade Organization (WTO) protests in Seattle, where steelworkers, indigenous people, environmentalists, and students literally shut down the trade negotiations with creative civil disobedience.

Along with the WTO, the other main institutions responsible for pushing global neoliberalism were the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank. The GJM moved to confront all three. “Free trade” agreements such as the hemisphere-wide Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) were also challenged. Through creative protest and non-violent direct action, the movement called into question the dominant story around “free trade” and pointed towards a new world of global cooperation. And to their own surprise, they were incredibly successful.

According to David Graeber, Global South governments (like India and Brazil) were emboldened by the worldwide protest and refused to compromise on the North’s (European and American) unfair agricultural subsidies. As a result the WTO’s negotiations have totally broken down. The FTAA never came into existence at all. It was stopped in its tracks. The IMF and World Bank saw their reputations tarnished after their policies led to the meltdown of the Argentinean economy in 2002, and they are no longer welcome in some parts of the world. This is especially true in Latin America, where the political landscape has completely turned around in the last 10-15 years.

In the 1990s, most of the continent was still under the heel of military dictatorships and authoritarian states, but since then a wave of leftist governments has been swept into power by unprecedented social movements opposed to neoliberalism and U.S. imperialism. For example, in 2005 Bolivia elected their first-ever indigenous president, Evo Morales, who came directly out of the social movement that successfully stopped water privatization in Bolivia. Morales has become a spokesperson for many:

“If you want to save planet Earth, to save life and humanity, we have a duty to put an end to the capitalist system. If we do not put an end to the capitalist system, it’s impossible to imagine that there will be equality and justice on this planet Earth. This is why I believe that it is important to put an end to the exploitation of human beings, and to put an end to the pillage of natural resources; to put an end to destructive wars for raw materials and the market; to the plundering of energy, especially fossil fuels; excessive consumption of goods and the accumulation of waste.”

We can’t ignore the many difficulties facing Latin America or the Global South as a whole. The situation is still extremely dire, with over a billion people living on the brink of starvation and without access to clean water, and with the U.S. expanding military bases in places like Colombia. And of course leftist governments have their own problems and need to be held accountable just as rightist ones. Regardless, the Global Justice Movement demonstrated that by joining together across borders, opposing injustice and working towards a new world, victories can be achieved. Even victories as dramatic as discrediting the major institutions promoting neoliberal capitalism and the political transformation of an entire continent.

The GJM vanished almost as quickly as it appeared, but as David Graeber points out, this was partially because it met many of its goals so rapidly. With the widespread repudiation of the neoliberal doctrine, the Global Justice Movement provides an inspiring lesson that social movements can and do place limits on capitalism.

Social Limits and the Crisis

Social movements in many countries have been amplified by the economic crisis. Greece has seen massive rebellions in the past 2 years to stop the government from imposing austerity measures like cutting social services. In Iceland, a country not known for its political radicalism, huge protests in response to the country’s bankruptcy brought the government down and led to the election of the world’s first openly lesbian prime minister. In Nigeria there is an armed rebellion aimed at stopping oil companies from destroying the ecosystem and exporting their profits from the region. Off the coast of Somalia, pirates have plagued international shipping, and grabbed headlines last November when they hijacked an oil tanker headed for the US.

It’s clear that anger is building towards a capitalist system that is failing to meet people’s needs. But let’s dig deeper and ask: What role did social limits play in causing the economic crisis?

Perhaps the most instructive case is that of China and its rising labor movement. Supposedly a “communist” country, China has become a capitalist haven producing an absurd quantity of goods for the global market due to its very low (sweatshop) wages. The profit extracted from Chinese workers has done wonders to sustain capitalism over the last two decades. For this reason, the organization and rebellion of Chinese workers threatens not just the Chinese government, but the global capitalist system as a whole.

This explanation may require a bit of historical context. During the 1960s-early ‘70s, the capitalist order was challenged by a high tide of protest and rebellion – from Africa shaking off its colonial masters, to the end of Southern segregation in the US, to the struggle against the US genocide in Vietnam, to the new upsurges of the feminist, queer and ecology movements. This movement activity was pronounced a problem of an “excess of democracy” by the Trilateral Commission, a ruling class institution composed of bankers and corporate elites from the US, Europe and Japan. One of the strategies used to escape this “excess of democracy” (along with increased repression and co-optation of social movements), was to relocate industrial production out of places like the US, where wages were seen as too high, to places like China, where wages were minimal.

Obviously this cheap labor generated more profit in production. But it also created a problem in terms of consumption, because US wages began to decline as all those unionized industrial jobs left the country. As explained by Professor Richard Wolff in his video “Capitalism Hits the Fan,” in order to make up for this income difference and keep consumption growing, starting in the 1970s US workers were given access to an immense pool of credit, in the form of credit cards, home mortgages and financial schemes like 401(k)s. Cheap available credit allowed the US to consume more and more junk, even as wages declined. It kept its position as the world’s strip mall.

Meanwhile, China became the world’s factory, pumping out cheap products for the global market, especially for the United States. As Americans flocked to Wal-Marts for their low prices, the Chinese government was flooded with trillions of US dollars. So far, they have dutifully recycled those dollars back into US Treasury bonds, thus keeping the American economy afloat. If they didn’t invest in the US, their main trading partner would be crippled by its trade debt, which grows daily.

The US-China relationship became core to the global economy. Each behemoth kept the other afloat – one producing like crazy by exploiting its workers near exhaustion, the other consuming like crazy by sailing on a sea of cheap credit. The damage to the planet’s ecosystem was atrocious, but immense profits were made and by the 1990s the market was soaring and “the end of history” was proclaimed. It seemed all opposition to capitalism had been vanquished.

There are numerous weak points in this international division of labor. One that has not been fully appreciated is the severe turmoil in China due to the growing strength of a new militant labor movement. This movement aims to put an end to sweatshop conditions where many toil for 12+ hours a day in dangerous, polluted factories. Organizing outside the Communist Party’s official unions, Chinese workers have initiated a series of crippling strikes that repeatedly shut down factories, among other forms of rebellion. The government has been forced to accept workers’ demands for wage increases, so the Chinese average real wage has risen by 300% between 1990 and 2005 [PDF], with half of that increase between 2000 and 2005.

Workers in green uniforms stage a sit-in protest at the main entrance of the Mitsumi Electric Co factory in Tianjin on Thursday, July 1, 2010. China Daily

Although the Chinese economy continues to grow, increased wages mean a falling rate of profit for companies operating in China, whether American, Japanese, European or otherwise. Wage increases also mean increased consumption within China, and therefore less cheap exports. When Chinese workers can afford the cars and electronics they’re producing, Americans can’t demand the same low prices.

Can we draw a direct connection between Chinese wage gains and the drying up of cheap credit in the US market of 2007-8? I humbly submit this question to the reader, as I haven’t done enough research on the relationship between the two trends. But I’ll say this about the big picture: If Chinese workers continue to break free from totalitarian control and win dignity in their jobs, the loss of China as the sweatshop of the world imperils trade arrangements that have carried global capitalist growth for decades.

If we study any country in the world, we’ll find people resisting capitalism any way they can. In the fields & factories, slums & schools, homes and prisons, the desire to be free cannot be extinguished, only held back and diverted. As humanity gains awareness of its own power and begins to act for its own interest rather than the interest of profit, the system’s tenuous grip on the world can easily falter, and a new world appears just over the horizon.

With the ecological limits encroaching on one side, and the social limits looming on the other, economic growth is under increasing strain in between. It’s as if the system cannot breathe. Like the sorcerer’s apprentice, it’s too busy putting out the fires of multiplying crises, which continue to spawn and grow. The policy makers, market gurus and technocratic apologists scramble to regain control, but they are disoriented in a new arena. Circumstances have changed. They cannot come to agreement on what to do, and instead quarrel amongst themselves over diverging interests. As social and ecological forces combine and put new stresses on the system, capitalism is smothered and chokes.

Considering the ecological limits and social limits to growth side-by-side, the only conclusion I can make is that the end of capitalism is not only a possibility, but an inevitability. Neither the planet nor the world’s population appear able to support this system much longer, and something’s got to give. It may be years or even a couple decades before we can look back and say for sure that a paradigm shift has occurred and that we are living in a different, non-capitalist era. But the End of Capitalism Theory dares us to question how long a system that lives on economic growth can continue to function in a world of such profound and permanent limits.

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Alex Knight is a proponent of the End of Capitalism Theory, which states that the global capitalist system is breaking down due to ecological and social limits to growth and that a paradigm shift toward a non-capitalist future is underway. He is working on a book titled “The End of Capitalism” and seeks a publisher. Since 2007 he has edited the website endofcapitalism.com. He has a degree in electrical engineering and a Master’s in political science, both from Lehigh University. He lives in Philadelphia, where he is a teacher and organizer. He can be reached at alex@endofcapitalism.com

Michael Carriere is an assistant professor at the Milwaukee School of Engineering, where he teaches courses on American history, public policy, political science, and urban design. He is currently working on a book, with David Schalliol, titled “The Death and (After) Life of Great American Cities: Twenty-First Century Urbanism and the Culture of Crisis.” He holds a Ph.D. in American history from the University of Chicago.

—–

Click the links below for more of the interview:

1. The current financial crisis is clearly a moment of peril for both individuals and the broader system of capitalism. But would it also make sense to see it as a moment of opportunity?
Part 1. Crisis and Opportunity

2. Capitalism has faced many moments of crisis over time. Is there something different about the present crisis? What makes the end of capitalism a possibility now?
Part 2A. Capitalism and Ecological Limits
Part 2B. Social Limits and the Crisis

3. Moving forward, how would you ideally envision a post-capitalist world? And if capitalism manages to survive (as it has in the past), is there still room for real change?
Part 3. Life After Capitalism

The Grapes of Wrath
by John Steinbeck
published 1939 during the last Great Depression.
Alex Knight, endofcapitalism.com, May 25, 2010

Also posted on The Rag Blog and TowardFreedom.

Arizona SB1070, signed into law by Governor Jan Brewer on April 23, requires Arizona’s local and state law enforcement to demand the immigration status of anyone they suspect of being in the country illegally, and arrest them if they lack documents proving citizenship or legal residency. Effectively making racial profiling into state policy, this law is the latest in a series of attacks on Latin American immigrants, as well as the entire Latino community, who must live with the fear of being interrogated by police for their brown skin. Then on May 11, Arizona went one step further, outlawing the teaching of ethnic studies classes, or any classes that “are designed primarily for students of a particular ethnic group or advocate ethnic solidarity”. This same law also states that schools must fire English teachers who speak with a “heavy accent.”

Perhaps these new laws make sense if we imagine that undocumented immigrants are merely “aliens”, a danger to the good, mostly white citizens of this great country. But suppose we look at the problem of immigration from the perspective of the immigrants? Why are they risking life and limb to come to a foreign land, far from their home and families? Why aren’t they deterred from making this trip no matter how many walls we put up, no matter how many police collaborate with ICE, no matter how many angry armed “Minutemen” vigilantes are conscripted to guard the border?

John Steinbeck’s classic novel The Grapes of Wrath, following the Joad family as they migrate to California during the “Dust Bowl” of the 1930s, sheds light on these questions in a way that perhaps every American can relate to. One of the most popular and well-written American books of all time, The Grapes of Wrath provides a very human perspective on the harsh lives of migrants, personified by the Joads – a family of poor sharecroppers from Oklahoma. Evicted from their family farm, just as the millions of Mexicans who have suffered enclosure from their land and become homeless and jobless because of NAFTA, the Joads travel to California in a desperate search of work, only to encounter the harassment of authorities and the hatred of the local population.

There are important differences between the “Okies” who traveled to the Southwest in the 1930s and Latino migrantes of the 2000s. The Joads, of course, were white, and did not cross a national border when they made their exodus. But at its core the story of the Joads is the story of the migrant workers, their troubles, their fears, but also their humanity, and their hope. It is a story that can inspire us to recognize the historic nature of the moment in which we live, understand why these enormous transformations are occurring, and recognize that justice for the immigrants is justice for everyone, regardless of color or citizenship status.

Enclosure

In order to understand the migrantes we first have to understand the story of their displacement, or the enclosure of their land, which has left them homeless and with no other options than to leave their homeland in search of a wage. What can The Grapes of Wrath tell us about this reality?

People usually do not resort to risky and desperate moves unless they have nothing left to lose. Steinbeck begins the Joads’ story with the loss of everything they had: the small farm on which they had sustained their family for generations by growing cotton. Young Tom Joad, fresh out of prison, returns to his home to find it deserted. “The Reverend Casy and young Tom stood on the hill and looked down on the Joad place… Where the dooryard had been pounded hard by the bare feet of children and by stamping horses’ hooves and by the broad wagon wheels, it was cultivated now, and the dark green, dusty cotton grew… ‘Jesus!’ he said at last. ‘Hell musta popped here. There ain’t nobody livin’ there.’” (51).

Mexican farmer with corn / image courtesy of "© Juan_de" on flickr

Whether as tenants or small landholders, either for subsistence or for markets, the vast majority of the poor migrantes now coming to this country are fleeing the loss of their farms and their livelihoods, just as the Joads. Perhaps for generations, maybe hundreds or even thousands of years, they had lived in connection with the land and had been able to depend on it for the survival of their families and culture. The loss of this land is devastating to those cultures, but larger forces stand to gain by driving these people into homelessness.

The phenomenal book Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation (Autonomedia 2004) details the violent origins of capitalism in 15th-17th century Europe. In it, author Silvia Federici defines the “enclosures” that were necessary for giving birth to capitalism by divorcing the European peasantry from their traditional lands and leaving them with no other choice but to sell their labor for a wage in the emerging industrial economy.

She goes on, revealing that this enclosure process remains a core element of the capitalist economy we live in:

Enclosure is precisely the part of the story we never hear about in the mainstream immigration debate in America. It is never questioned why hundreds of thousands of workers are scrambling to come to the U.S., other than for “our freedom” or to “take our jobs.” But Steinbeck boldly begins The Grapes of Wrath by highlighting the enclosure process as it operated in rural America during the Great Depression.

This famous photograph shows a family of homeless migrants fleeing the "Dust Bowl."

In the 1930s, Oklahoma was ground zero for the “Dust Bowl“. Unsustainable industrial farming practices such as the monoculture of cotton without crop rotation caused the soil to die, then be picked up by the wind and create enormous dust storms. On page 41, Steinbeck laments, “You know what cotton does to the land; robs it, sucks all the blood out of it.” The settling layers of dust killed the crops and made it harder for small farmers to earn a living, and many were driven into debt and became tenants on land that was then technically owned by the bank. At the same time, large, wealthy landowners were able to use tractors and other new farming machinery to replace the many tenants who had previously been needed to work the land. “Pa borrowed money from the bank, and now the bank wants the land. The land company – that’s the bank when it has land – wants tractors, not families on the land” (193).

In this passage, Steinbeck brilliantly exposes the evictions as part of the normal functioning of capitalism, as a land owner arrives to evict a tenant family:

As far as capitalism is concerned, whatever will maximize profit is the arrangement that must be pursued, regardless of the human consequences. The situation in Mexico today resembles that of Oklahoma 75 years ago. Small family farms are no longer profitable enough, and people are being thrown off their land every year by the thousands.

The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), signed into law by Bill Clinton on December 8, 1993, created the largest “free trade” zone in the world: Canada, the United States, and Mexico. The treaty stipulated that there could be no “barriers to trade”, such as a tariff/tax on foreign products. In this video MIT professor Noam Chomsky, interviewed by Rage Against the Machine frontman Zack de la Rocha, explains how the modern enclosures in Mexico are a result of NAFTA, which has not had the effect it was promised to have for the U.S. and Mexican economies.

As mentioned by Prof. Chomsky, one direct result of NAFTA was the flooding of the Mexican market with artificially cheap agricultural products from the United States, such as corn, which is heavily subsidized by the U.S. government. From 1990-2000, the price of corn in Mexico fell by 58 percent, and as there is simply no way for the vast majority of Mexican tenant farmers to compete with this artificially low cost of American corn and other products, millions were driven into poverty and debt, and soon faced eviction.

This excellent article from the Institute for Food & Development Policy states that “Since NAFTA, 80 percent of rural Mexicans live in poverty, with 60 percent living in extreme poverty.” It also points out that as of 2004, a total of 1.7 million subsistence farmers had been pushed off their land because of NAFTA. So it should be no surprise that the number of Mexican immigrants entering the U.S. increased by 75 percent in the 5 years after NAFTA became law.

The form of enclosure has changed, but the fact has remained. People driven from their land will search for work in other places.

Xenophobia

The second great lesson The Grapes of Wrath reveals about the immigrants is how they are feared and hated, by the local population as well as the authorities, and what it means to endure and overcome this xenophobia.

Throughout the book, as the weary Joads meander west on their old jalopy, their eagerness and optimism about finding decent work and a better life in California are dashed against the rocks of poverty and hatred. Early in the book, Tom’s pregnant sister Rose-of-Sharon Joad goes on about her expectations for life in California.

But shortly after crossing the border into California, the Joad family encounters the authorities, who are less than pleased by the arrival of more migrants into their state. After setting up camp by a river, Ma settles down for a nap in the tent, only to be disturbed by a law enforcement agent who gives her a threatening welcome.

"Minutemen" vigilantes patrol the U.S.-Mexico border / picture courtesy of boinboing

It becomes clear through the story that the California police and authorities tolerate the presence of the “Okies” so they can be exploited for their extremely cheap labor. Sheriffs and rangers even guard the grounds of large private farms where migrants are bussed in. However, the cops maintain a close eye on the Okies, and are not afraid to resort to violence when they step out of line.

The Joads arrive one night in a “Hooverville,” the name for the slums on the edges of towns during the Great Depression where unemployed would set up camp. Here a contractor comes to find desperate workers, escorted by a deputy sheriff with whom Tom Joad gets into an altercation.

The goal of the authorities in the story, as in the country today, is to keep immigrants in a constant state of precariousness, where they cannot make waves for fear of being imprisoned or deported. This climate of fear is the real effect of Arizona SB1070, not to actually deport all the undocumented workers from the state, because that would hurt the economy that depends on their cheap labor. In fact, this CNN video documents that SB1070 has already driven away too many workers from the state and hurting the businesses that had employed them. It seems it has backfired so much that even Russell Pearce, the author of the legislation, has now reversed his stance and is supporting “guest worker” legislation to invite undocumented workers back into the state.

What does the climate of fear surrounding immigrants do for the U.S. capitalist economy and its ruling class?

First, it keeps undocumented immigrants in that precarious state where they will not seek help or point out injustices, nor will they try to organize unions and demand higher pay or working conditions. It guarantees they will mostly toil for less-than-minimum wages and suffer in silence. Most Americans are not even aware that since NAFTA was enacted, at least 3,000 Mexicans have died trying to cross the border. Every wall that goes up on the border drives the immigrants into more remote deserts to reach their destination, increasing the likelihood of injury and death, but precious few U.S. citizens are willing to stick their necks out to help prevent such unnecessary deaths.

Second, the xenophobia encouraged by measures like SB1070 is useful for the ruling class because it drives a racial wedge into the American working class. Instead of uniting to fight for better jobs, affordable education, health care, housing, an end to environmental nightmare and endless wars, the anger of the common people is directed at the scapegoat of the immigrant. Steinbeck illustrates this phenomenon when “a crowd of men… armed with pick handles and shotguns,” confront the Joads after they flee the Hooverville. Interrogating and threatening the Joad family, these self-styled vigilantes act just as the “Minutemen” who today rove the deserts of Arizona, looking for “illegals.”

Though these people’s anger and fear over the economy and lack of democracy in the U.S. is warranted, they are failing to confront the actual thieves and criminals who have plunged the world into a new Great Depression. Because by identifying “foreigners” and people with brown skin and different accents as the reason why wages are low and jobs are lost, corporations and politicians are able to deflect attention away from the real source of economic hardship: themselves.

Conclusion

The crisis in the Southwest in the 1930s is unfortunately similar to the situation today. Hundreds of thousands of poor migrants, their land enclosed and with nowhere to go, facing long trips through the heat of the desert and the ice of xenophobia, are nevertheless persisting to do what they need to do to feed their families.

There is a tidal wave coming north now, which resembles one that 3 generations ago came west, but like that one there will be no stopping it by putting up walls and threatening people with violence or deportation. Desperate people will always do what they need to do to survive.

The only way to stem the flow is to repair the dam that has burst, through poverty and enclosure. Latinos need decent livelihoods in Latin America before they will stop coming here, “scurrying to find work to do.” Repealing NAFTA and ending the massive corn subsidies for U.S. agribusiness would be two huge steps in the right direction. Rather than making the United States into a nasty place that no one will want to come to, why not focus on helping Mexico, Latin America and the world as a whole, to be suitable places to live, work and raise a family?

The Grapes of Wrath, though it details the hardships of the migrant workers at great length, won the Pulitzer prize and captured the hearts of the nation because it is ultimately a hopeful book that inspires us to act for positive change. John Steinbeck, flexing his radical muscles, argues in the book that by targeting the weak and poor with desperate measures such as those currently being enacted in Arizona, capitalism is only putting off its inevitable demise. “The great owners ignored the cries of history.” “[Especially,] the little screaming fact that sounds through all history: repression works only to strengthen and knit the repressed.”

He explains:

Many people today have heard the cries of history and are taking a stand. The website Alto Arizona is coordinating a national day of action on Saturday, May 29 to repeal SB1070, which they call “a law that creates 21st century apartheid in the United States.” They invite us to “join the right side of history” by standing up for immigrants’ rights and against racial profiling.

A wonderful note that’s currently circulating on Facebook from the Catalyst Project shows us ten ways, large and small, to meet this challenge:

[Thanks to Beau Bibeau for sharing.]

BP Oil Disaster in the Gulf - Energy Department Photo. retrieved from http://www.flickr.com/photos/leonarddoyle/4583740105/in/set-72157624005298860/

Just two weeks after the Massey Energy coal explosion on April 5 that killed 29 miners in West Virginia, the BP oil rig Deepwater Horizon exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, killing 11 more workers. These back-to-back tragedies have brought attention to the fossil fuel industry’s terrible safety record – in both cases there were known safety violations on site, but the government did nothing to prevent disaster from occurring. See the interview below which explains how the federal government approved this BP rig and many more without conducting the environmental review they are legally obligated to.

Unlike the industry executives attempting to shift blame and avoid responsibility, we must look beneath the surface to discover the deeper meaning of these horrible crises.

Is the universe giving us a warning that fossil fuels are going to destroy us? Because if global climate change continues at the rate it has, in the not-too-distant future we will see many thousands, or even millions more deaths as crops dry up, floods destroy coastal wetlands, and diseases migrate to temperate regions. This is no joke. Families and communities are being destroyed so coal and oil corporations can boost their profit margins.

We need to be open to hearing the lessons that are all around us, especially  from those who have been silenced and beaten down by capitalism.

Immediately after the Massey explosion and the BP explosion, was Earth Day – April 22. And on this date, indigenous and poor people from around the globe were meeting in Cochabamba, Bolivia for the World People’s Conference on Climate Change, a grassroots response to the corporate fraud that was the Copenhagen Summit. Bolivian President Evo Morales, who was proclaimed “World Hero of Mother Earth” by the United Nations General Assembly in October, hosted the conference, proclaiming “The capitalist system looks to obtain the maximum possible gain, promoting unlimited growth on a finite planet. Capitalism is the source of asymmetries and imbalance in the world.”

30,000 people from 140 countries convened and approved the “Cochabamba Protocol”, which calls for an International Climate Justice tribunal to prosecute climate criminals, and condemns REDDs which put a price on wild forests and encourage development, along with carbon market schemes. The protocal proposes a Universal Declaration of Mother Earth and demands that industrialized polluting nations cut carbon emissions by 50 percent as part of a new, binding climate agreement.

Global momentum is building towards confronting capitalism in terms of the ecological devastation it is causing. Here in the United States, Rising Tide North America is calling for a “Day of Action, Night of Mourning” this Friday, May 14 to call for BP to pay for all cleanup and long-term ecological effects of their spill, for the abolition of offshore oil drilling, and for “a rapid and just transition away from fossil fuels.”

[alex]

Government Exempted BP from Environmental Review

Video/interview published by Democracy Now!

May 7, 2010

JUAN GONZALEZ: Well now to the Gulf of Mexico where the enormous oil slick in the Gulf continues to expand. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar has ordered a 3-week halt to all new offshore drilling permits. Emphasizing that the companies involved had made “major mistakes,” Salazar spoke to reporters Thursday outside BP’s Houston crisis center. He noted that lifting the moratorium on new permits will depend on the outcome of a federal investigation over the Gulf spill and the recommendations to be delivered to President Obama at the end of the month.

SECRETARY KEN SALAZAR: Minerals Management Service will not be issuing any permits for the construction of new offshore wells. That process will be concluded here on May the 28th. At that point in time, we’ll make decisions about how we plan on moving forward. There is some very major mistakes that were made by companies that were involved. But today is not really the day to deal with those issues. Today and the days ahead really are about trying to get control of the problem.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Secretary Salazar added that the existing offshore oil and natural gas drilling will continue, even as public meetings to discuss new oil drilling off the Virginia coast have been canceled for this month.

AMY GOODMAN: Salazar’s announcement comes on the heel of a Washington Post exposé revealing that the Minerals Management Service had approved BP’s drilling plan in the Gulf of Mexico without any environmental review. The article notes that the agency under Secretary Salazar had quote “categorically excluded” BP’s drilling as well as hundreds of other offshore drilling permits from environmental review. The agency was able to do this using a loophole in the National Environmental Policy Act created for minimally intrusive actions like building outhouses and hiking trails. Well, for more on this story, we’re joined now from Tucson, Arizona by Kieran Suckling, executive director of the Center for Biological Diversity. Welcome to DEMOCRACY NOW!, Kieran. Explain this loophole, how you found it, and what it means for the Gulf.

KIERAN SUCKLING: Well, when a federal government is going to approve a project, it has to go through an environmental review. But for projects that have very, very little impact like building an outhouse or a hiking trail, they can use something called a categorical exclusion and say there’s no impact here at all so we don’t need to spend energy or time doing a review. Well, we looked at the oil drilling permits being issued by the Minerals Management Service in the Gulf, and we were shocked to find out that they were approving hundreds of massive oil drilling permits using this categorical exclusion instead of doing a full environmental impact study. And then, we found out that BP’s drilling permit—the very one that exploded—was done under this loophole and so it was never reviewed by the federal government at all. It was just rubber-stamped.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, according to the Washington Post article, in one of its assessments of the agency “estimated that a large oil spill from a deep platform like the Deepwater Horizon would not exceed a total of 1,500 barrels and that a deepwater spill occurring off the Intercontinental shelf would not reach the coast.” Obviously, both of those—both of those assessments have proven dramatically off the mark. As many as 250-400 waivers a year for drilling in the Gulf?

KIERAN SUCKLING: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. It’s also important to note that when the government says it’s very unlikely this spill will occur, it’s unlikely the spill will reach shore, those aren’t even the government’s own assessments. They’re just repeating what BP, Exxon, and other oil companies put in their drilling applications. And since there’s no environmental impact study, the government never actually does an independent review. So everyone is just repeating the industry’s statements as they rubber-stamp the approvals.

AMY GOODMAN: Reporters questioned White House press secretary Robert Gibbs on Wednesday about why BP’s Gulf of Mexico drilling operation was exempted from the detailed environmental impact analysis last year.

REPORTER: …Why BP was exempted from the environmental impact analysis?SECRETARY ROBERT GIBBS: Yeah, well, I—the—there are a series of reviews that have to—that have to—you have to go through in order to get drilling permits. The process by which was referenced in that article is part of the review that Secretary Salazar is undergoing.

REPORTER: Robert, does the White House believe it was a mistake, for this categorical exemption to be granted to BP for Deepwater Horizon?

SECRETARY ROBERT GIBBS: That’s part of the investigation. I don’t know the answer to that.

REPORTER: Ok, so that’s something that you’re looking into presently?

SECRETARY ROBERT GIBBS: I would say as the President asked Secretary Salazar to undertake a thirty-day review of what happened, that that would certainly be part of the process under which he would evaluate.

AMY GOODMAN: Kieran Suckling, that was Robert Gibbs, White House press secretary. Respond to his response.

KIERAN SUCKLING: The White House and the Department of Interior are really sort of ducking their heads on this issue right now because it’s an enormous problem. Especially since just a few months ago the Government Accountability Office came out with the report on MMS’s operations in Alaska, where they also have offshore drilling, and specifically said the agency is not doing these environmental studies properly. They’re avoiding doing them at all. And then they went ahead knowing that the GAO had just done this study and continued to put them out. So, this is not something new. MMS knew they had a problem. In fact, when Interior Secretary Salazar first came into office, he announced ‘There’s a new Sheriff in town, I’m going to clean up this corrupt agency,’ and instead of doing that, he’s pushed them to put out more offshore oil drilling permits while not cleaning up what is clearly a broken process of doing any environmental review at all.

JUAN GONZALEZ: I want to play a clip of President Obama where he says that oil spills don’t come from rigs, but from refineries. He was speaking on April 2nd, just over two weeks before the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon rig.

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: I want to put out, by the way, that oil rigs today generally don’t cause spills. They are technologically very advanced. Even during Katrina, the spills didn’t come from the oil rigs, they came from the refineries onshore.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Kieran Suckling, your response?

KIERAN SUCKLING: Yeah, I mean, I think what the President has said here is actually just very, very critical, because he is repeating, and I suspect without even knowing it, the big lie of offshore oil drilling. For decades, the oil companies and the Minerals Management Services have told us, ‘Oil drilling is safe, it’s fine, that’s not where oil spills come from.’ In fact, that’s the basis of not doing any environmental review is, you simply assert it will never be a problem, therefore, you don’t even have to study it. When it’s true that they don’t leak often, but when they do leak, it’s absolutely catastrophic. It’s very similar to nuclear power plants. They don’t often fail, but when they fail it’s catastrophic. And, therefore, you have to plan for catastrophe. You have to do very intensive environmental analysis, not simply say, ’It’s rare, so we can ignore it.’

AMY GOODMAN: Kieran Suckling, what do think has to happen right now?

KIERAN SUCKLING: Well, first off, I think that the President should announce a complete moratorium on all new offshore oil drilling. This three-week time-out is really too little, too late. And it’s very important to do that now because the president, under the urging of Secretary of Interior Ken Salazar, has planned to open up new offshore oil drilling in Alaska, in the eastern Gulf of Mexico, and on the Atlantic coast. And that just needs to end. It’s not safe anywhere, anytime.

Secondly, the president should immediately revoke existing oil permits and especially in Alaska. Shell Oil, this July, has- is going to start doing offshore oil drilling in the Chukchi Sea of Alaska. And if you think it’s difficult to clean up oil in the relatively warm, calm Gulf of Mexico, imagine trying to do this with icebergs and sea ice, twenty hours of darkness in the Arctic oceans. It just cannot be done. If this spill had happened in Alaska, its magnitude would have been ten times worse than has happened in the Gulf.

Then, thirdly, the President should start an initiation of an investigation of Ken Salazar and his role in allowing this to happen. Salazar has been a major proponent of the offshore oil drilling industry. He passed legislation as a senator in 2006 to open up the Gulf of Mexico in the first place to offshore oil drilling. He gets campaign contributions by British Petroleum. And then he walks into this agency he is supposed to reform, and instead of reforming it, pushes it to do even more offshore oil drilling. So Ken Salazar is part of the problem here, not the solution. He should not be doing the investigation of MMS. He should be under investigation for helping to cause this crisis.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, Kieran Suckling, we want to thank you very much for being with us, Executive Director of the Center for Biological Diversity speaking to us from Tucson, Arizona. This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, the War and Peace Report. When we come back, we’ll talk about a new bill being introduced in the Senate to strip some Americans of their citizenship if they are somehow involved with terrorism– or the government thinks they are. We’ll get reactions. Stay with us.

Life in Limbo?

By Turbulence

We are trapped in a state of limbo, neither one thing nor the other. For more than two years, the world has been wracked by a series of interrelated crises, and they show no sign of being resolved anytime soon. The unshakable certainties of neoliberalism, which held us fast for so long, have collapsed. Yet we seem unable to move on. Anger and protest have erupted around different aspects of the crises, but no common or consistent reaction has seemed able to cohere. A general sense of frustration marks the attempts to break free from the morass of a failing world.

There is a crisis of belief in the future, leaving us with the prospect of an endless, deteriorating present that hangs around by sheer inertia. In spite of all this turmoil – this time of ‘crisis’ when it seems like everything could, and should, have changed – it paradoxically feels as though history has stopped. There is an unwillingness, or inability, to face up to the scale of the crisis. Individuals, companies and governments have hunkered down, hoping to ride out the storm until the old world re-emerges in a couple of years. Attempts to wish the ‘green shoots’ of recovery into existence mistake an epochal crisis for a cyclical one; they are little more than wide-eyed boosterism. Yes, astronomical sums of money have prevented the complete collapse of the financial system, but the bailouts have been used to prevent change, not initiate it. We are trapped in a state of limbo.

Crisis in the middle

And yet, something did happen. Recall those frightening yet heady days that began in late 2008, when everything happened so quickly, when the old dogmas fell like autumn leaves? They were real. Something happened there: the tried and tested ways of doings things, well-rehearsed after nearly 30 years of global neoliberalism, started to come unstuck. What had been taken as read no longer made sense. There was a shift in what we call the middle ground: the discourses and practices that define the centre of the political field.

To be sure, the middle ground is not all that there is, but it is what assigns the things in the world around it a greater or lesser degree of relevance, validity or marginality. It constitutes a relatively stable centre against which all else is measured. The farther from the centre an idea, project or practice is, the more likely it is to be ignored, publicly dismissed or disqualified, or in some way suppressed. The closer to it, the more it stands a chance of being incorporated – which in turn will shift the middle more or less. Neither are middle grounds defined ‘from above’, as in some conspiratorial nightmare. They emerge out of different ways of doing and being, thinking and speaking, becoming intertwined in such a way as to reinforce each other individually and as a whole. The more they have become unified ‘from below’ as a middle ground, the more this middle ground acquires the power of unifying ‘from above’. In this sense, the grounds of something like ‘neoliberalism’ were set before something was named as such; but the moment when it was named is a qualitative leap: the point at which relatively disconnected policies, theories and practices became identifiable as forming a whole.

The naming of things like Thatcherism in the UK, or Reaganism in the US, marked such a moment for something that had been constituting itself for some time before, and which has for the past three decades dominated the middle ground: neoliberalism, itself a response to the crisis of the previous middle, Fordism/Keynesianism. The era of the New Deal and its various international equivalents had seen the rise of a powerful working class that had grown used to the idea that its basic needs should be met by the welfare state, that real wages would rise, and that it was always entitled to more. Initially, the centrepiece of the neoliberal project was an attack on this ‘demanding’ working class and the state institutions wherein the old class compromise had been enshrined. Welfare provisions were rolled back, wages held steady or forced downwards, and precariousness increasingly became the general condition of work.

But this attack came at a price. The New Deal had integrated powerful workers’ movements – mass-based trade unions – into the middle ground, helping to stabilise a long period of capitalist growth. And it provided sufficiently high wages to ensure that all the stuff generated by a suddenly vastly more productive industrial system – based on Henry Ford’s assembly line and Frederick Taylor’s ‘scientific management’ – could be bought. Bit by bit, the ferocious attack on the working classes of the global North was offset by low interest rates (i.e. cheap credit) and access to cheap commodities, mass-produced in areas where wages were at their lowest (like China). In the global South, the prospect of one day attaining similar living conditions was promised as a possibility. In this sense, neoliberal globalisation was the globalisation of the American dream: get rich or die trying.

Clearly, neoliberalism also relied on a ‘deal’ of some kind. But the word here has a different meaning; its mode of attraction/incorporation was quite unlike that of Fordism/Keynesianism. The latter involved visible, constituted collective forces through the likes of trade unions or farmers’ organisations; the former worked more as a buyout from the original deal, addressing individuals directly as individuals. It was a middle ground that emerged out of ‘deviant’ desires, discourses and practices that looked for ways out of the existing one (the fear that unions had become too powerful, dissatisfaction with the drab uniformity of everything, para-statal practices of corruption that compensated an over-regulated life), and as such were very much about individualisation. Indeed, it aimed to create a certain kind of individual, an atomised self-entrepreneur whose collective social ties are subordinated to the search for private gain.

Crisis of the common

Today, the neoliberal deal is null and void; the middle ground has crumbled away. We’ve gone past the era when cheap credit, rising asset prices and falling commodity prices could compensate for stagnant wages. Those days are over but no new middle ground has cohered. Nobody has ‘agreed’ any replacement ‘deal’. That’s why we find ourselves in a state of limbo.

Mind you, deals and middle ground don’t necessarily go hand in hand. A new middle ground might result from a deal, explicit (like that of the New Deal of the 1930s) or implicit (like neoliberalism) – indeed, it will be firmer, more stable, if this is the case. But a new centre of the political field can also emerge without one. A middle ground does not require the degree of consent implied by a deal; it’s a sufficient but not a necessary condition. It does, however, always involve a process of attraction and incorporation of forces that could threaten it – the extent of which is defined by the terms of each emerging middle ground itself.

Striking a deal is like agreeing – consciously or otherwise – to a (temporary) truce following a fierce battle. But a middle ground could establish itself in the midst of a period of ongoing conflict and contestation – a more protracted struggle of attrition. From our current vantage point, much is unknown. We certainly can’t predict the duration or outcome of the struggle over what becomes the new political ‘common sense’. Moreover, the sides aren’t even clear. Finding out who your allies are only really happens once a fight has been picked. So who will be fighting whom and about what? What will be the common ground among movements in the new struggles and those further down the line?

Our concept of ‘common ground’ is, like middle grounds, a theoretical tool. We use it to name the intersections and resonances of diverse struggles, practices, discourses, targets and referents. In the previous alter-globalisation movement, the common ground was the shared ‘One No’ – against the monopolising logic of neoliberalism – along with the acceptance that there were ‘Many Yeses’ – the multiplicity of alternative notions of economy, commons and sociality. For many years, many movements could meet and recognise one another as kindred on this common ground of rejection of neoliberalism – without denying their difference. But the shattering of the middle ground means a common ground rooted in antagonism to it now lies in ruins.

SHIFTING GROUNDS

From madness to mainstream?

Until recently, anyone who suggested nationalising the banks would have been derided as a quack and a crank, as lacking the most basic understanding of economics and the functioning of a ‘complex, globalised world’. So strong was the grip of ‘orthodoxy’ that such an idea would have been disqualified without the need to offer a counter-argument. Yet over the past year, governments around the world have effectively nationalised large parts of the financial sector, while handing over dizzyingly large amounts of public money to those institutions that remained in private hands. Similar moves into the mainstream have taken place with the discourses around climate change and commons. Every ‘serious’ politician must at least appear to be concerned about global warming. And the ‘commons’, long an exclusive focus of the left, has also entered the vocabulary of centrist intellectuals and politicians: from widening recognition of the ‘public benefits’ of access to cheap drugs and other intellectual property, to cautiously approving comments in The Economist, and the economics professions’ faux Nobel prize going to Elinor Ostrom for her work on commons. Put these together and some might argue that the centre of gravity of public discourse has shifted to the left.

Yet it cannot escape notice that the recent nationalisations were argued for precisely on the grounds that they are necessary to save financialised capitalism, not as part of a social democratic programme of redistribution, let alone a strategy for a socialist transition. Likewise, the new green economy that is now on politicians’ public agendas aims to maintain a big-business, productivist model of development by marrying it to more environmentally sustainable energies and processes.

So things have changed, but, trapped in limbo, the extent of change is by no means obvious. Let us be clear, then, about where things have started to happen. Perhaps the most obvious change is at the level of what can be said - what can be accepted as valid argument, rather than being consigned to a wilderness inhabited by raging ideologues, and the ignorant. In its heyday, neoliberal ideology was effective in banishing all other thought because it posed as non-ideological, as merely the ‘reasonable’ application of the ‘science’ of utility. Today, however, it is possible to see (and say) that the presuppositions of these reasonable decisions were, of course, ideological. The market does not tend toward equilibrium, the maximisation of self-interest can override instincts of self-preservation and lead to sub-optimal outcomes, and in times of crisis any trickle down is reverted into the upstream splurge of bailouts. The premises of those supposedly non-ideological arguments – such as the transformation of ‘the market’ into a natural given governed by scientific laws available to ortho-dox (‘correct opinion’) but not to hetero-dox (‘other opinion’) economists – have now been debunked. Hardcore neoliberal ideology will cease to shape the space of politics by defining its terms, what is good and bad (investment rather than public spending, efficient private versus inefficient public, markets not planning), and pulling the centre of gravity of the debate towards itself. Neoliberal orthodoxy no longer forms the middle ground of politics in regard to which all other opinions have to position themselves.

Zombie-liberalism

But does the disappearance of the ideological middle ground mean that the neoliberal era is actually over? Or is this just a pause, a kind of radical diet to shed inefficient capital and institutions, in order for neoliberalism to emerge leaner and meaner at the other end? On the one hand, rather than the banking system being restructured, and financial capital being subordinated to political direction, the recent bailout mania has simply been a massive robber-baron-style plunder of public resources, exacerbating 30 years of neoliberal upward redistribution of wealth. On the other, this major heist has lost its ideological justification, and been revealed as just that: theft. Neoliberalism has always had two sides. It was both a counterattack by elites against social gains won by workers’ and other movements from the 1930s onwards, an attempt to shift wealth back up the social ladder; and an ideological project claiming to rid ‘the markets’ of unwarranted intervention by governments and their ilk.

What remains of neoliberalism once the ideological padding comes off? It is no longer a (relatively) coherent politico-economic programme: it has become the plunder of a retreating army, a way of booby-trapping the political system before it has to relinquish control over it. But these booby traps, even if stripped of their ideological camouflage, are dangerous and deadly. In all the countries that have seen bailouts and/or financial crises, the enormous government deficits created are now being used by exactly those social forces that most benefited from them (in absolute terms) to argue that they should be paid off through yet more rounds of austerity and spending cuts. By handing over control to some ‘safe hands’ outside any form of accountability, neoliberalism gets locked in. A neat trick: the financial sector uses the debts incurred bailing it out to secure continued control over policy.

The picture is confusing, and gets even more so. As credit dries up and food and energy prices rise, workers are left underpaid and, in the North, over-indebted – a so-called recovery that doesn’t massively increase wages and/or cancel personal debt will not change that. Deal’s off, as it were. But if there is no more deal, and no more ideology, what of the social basis of neoliberalism – the neoliberal power bloc? In short, it is in disarray, if not totally shattered. There is no longer any social group that can credibly claim ‘leadership’ in society, politics, culture or the economy. ‘The centre cannot hold’, the middle ground is broken, leaving behind a confused and vicious army, institutions no longer guided by a coherent framework, political parties still vying for power but without any real programmes.

So if the power bloc is weak, engaged in obvious, large-scale looting of the system it used to run, and if – above all – the ideological core of neoliberalism is gone, why is a new middle ground failing to emerge? Why is the apparent discursive shift to the left not paying off in practical terms? The answer lies at least partly in the fact that the neoliberal project relied a lot less on ideology than its critics tended to think. Theories and ideologies are used to create neoliberal ideologues and activists, but persuasion through argument isn’t how it transforms our subjectivities and the limits of what we perceive possible. These changes are brought about more operationally than ideologically, that is, through interventions into the composition of society. Neoliberalism re-organises material processes in order to bring about the social reality that its ideology claims already exists. It attempts to create its own presuppositions.

Rather than being persuaded by the power of neoliberal arguments, people are trained to view themselves as rational benefit-maximisers, those elusive creatures of economic theory. This training takes place through a forced engagement with markets, not just in our economic activities, but in every sphere of our lives: in education, health care, child care, you name it. Take the school system in Britain. An army of government inspectors and statisticians compiles mountains of data on schools’ performance; parents, for their part, are expected to use this information to make the best decision regarding school choice. Education is seen as preparing bodies for the labour market, so ‘rational choice’ is invoked to justify the channelling of certain students into vocational training from an early age. Meanwhile, many ‘middle-class’ parents attempt to maximise their offspring’s chances of ‘getting the best start in life’ by engaging private tutors or dragging themselves to church every Sunday morning (Anglican faith schools having the best reputation).

Effectively, people are forced to become human capital, little enterprises locked in competition with others – an isolated atom entirely responsible for itself. In this context accepting the individual ‘deal’ offered by neoliberalism made sense. Neoliberalism isn’t – or wasn’t – just about changes in global governance or how states should be governed: it is about the management of individuals, about how you should live. It set up a model of life, and then established mechanisms that shepherded you towards ‘freely’ choosing that manner of living. The dice are loaded. Today, if you want to participate in society, you have to behave as homo economicus.

In many ways it is this neoliberal coding, not just of public institutions and policy programmes, but of our very selves, that keeps us trapped in limbo. Neoliberalism is dead but it doesn’t seem to realise it. Although the project no longer ‘makes sense’, its logic keeps stumbling on, like a zombie in a 1970s splatter movie: ugly, persistent and dangerous. If no new middle ground is able to cohere sufficiently to replace it, this situation could last a while… all the major crises – economic, climate, food, energy – will remain unresolved; stagnation and long-term drift will set in (recall that the crisis of Fordism took longer than an entire decade, the 1970s, to be resolved). Such is the ‘unlife’ of a zombie, a body stripped of its goals, unable to adjust itself to the future, unable to make plans. A zombie can only act habitually, continuing to operate even as it decomposes. Isn’t this where we find ourselves today, in the world of zombie-liberalism? The body of neoliberalism staggers on, but without direction or teleology.

Any project that wants to slay this zombie will have to operate on many different levels, just as neoliberalism did, which means that it must be tied to a new manner of living. And it must start from the here and now, the current composition of global society, large parts of which are still in the grip of the neoliberal zombie. This is the greatest challenge facing those advocating a New or Green New Deal. It isn’t a case of simply changing elite thinking or dabbling with government spending: it requires a more fundamental change. Not just a change of consciousness at the head of society, but a transformation of the social body.

The middle and the common

We can detect many symptoms of the waning of the old middle ground. In a way, this is where the significance of the Obama phenomenon lies: a political project that comes to power on a tide of vague promises of ‘hope’ and ‘change’ speaks less of the strength of its own ideas than of the weakness of others. Meanwhile, on the other side of the Atlantic, we have seen the collapse of the parliamentary left in a number of recent elections. Whether in or out of power, Europe’s centre-left parties have been punished at the ballot box, while the vote for the right has generally held up better. Many have been mystified as to why the centre-left has taken the blame for the economic crisis, but the left that embraced neoliberalism became the truest of believers: it was they who came to see it as a progressive force that could bring development even to the world’s poor. (There is never a greater zealot than a convert.) It is the obliteration of this illusion that has led to the neoliberal left’s collapse.

So does that mean that the many left-wing critics of neoliberalism (and, sometimes, capitalism), from the radical left parties to the alter-globalists of Seattle and Genoa, can now simply bask in a self-satisfied glow? They can now claim to have been right all along in opposing not only the neoliberal triad of financialisation, deregulation and privatisation, but also the Blairite Third Way? We count ourselves amongst these critics, and we have certainly been right about some of these things – the instability of the neoliberal credit system, say. But one of the worst mistakes we could make right now would be to assume that old answers and certainties are still valid. With the disappearance of the old, anti-neoliberal common ground, and the emergence of new struggles, we must not only revisit the question of who ‘we’ are (or were). We must also construct a new ‘we’. We need a new attentiveness to emerging responses to the present conjuncture. We need a capacity to recognise at what levels these responses communicate and an active effort to identify the points where they overlap and reinforce each other. In other words, we need – collectively – to create, identify and name new common grounds.

The work of naming a common ground is for the most part analytic: it seeks to identify the components and directions of different trajectories, and to act back on them to strengthen commonalities, work through tensions that can be resolved, recognise the sources of those that can’t. Of course, the act of naming something as a common ground always entails proposing a partial synthesis; but this synthesis can only be as effective as the depth of the analysis that underpins it. It only works to the extent that what it names means something to those to whom it speaks.

Common grounds, like middle grounds, have a double character. On the one hand they have an ‘objective’ side: diverse practices, subjectivities, struggles and projects may share common aspects, or even resonate with one another, even if the one is unaware of the other. On the other hand, common grounds may have a subjective side, which requires a certain self-awareness and the ability to recognise what’s common in other struggles or projects. The ‘one no’ rejection of neoliberalism is an obvious example of a self-aware, subjective common ground. It takes an active effort to identify common grounds, but identifying and maintaining them helps make them more effective. This self-awareness creates a feedback loop that can allow the common ground to gain consistency and exceed the established middle ground’s ability to contain it. Common grounds contain an element of autonomy, asking their own questions on their own terms.

This leads to the next question: how do common grounds affect middle grounds? To begin with, this often occurs in ways that are invisible, as centrifugal forces countering the middle ground’s centripetal pull. They are new practices and ways of living and thinking that deviate from the synthesis; they spread out without necessarily becoming a visible challenge to the middle. Think of the many hidden struggles of factory or office workers that slow down the pace of work without organising a strike; the impact on society of gays and lesbians carving out of niches for their desires; of the syncretic religions of Latin America and Africa, where indigenous and slaves practised their traditions right under the nose of the colonisers. Think of the advent of the pill and the way it gave women more power over their own bodies, producing mutations in sexual relations, in social roles and identities.

Such phenomena become visible when they rub up against the middle ground, coming into conflict with existing institutions and practices. Common grounds problematise the way that the middle ground has composed the world, posing problems that it can’t get to grips with. The effects of such unnamed common grounds and the mutations they produce can still be limited, and are often accompanied by some form of disqualification or repression. Common grounds become more powerful and their effects more pronounced when they are made both visible and named. This is when their centrifugal force is turned into open antagonism.

But this antagonism is not simply an end in itself. During the 1990s, when the neoliberal middle ground was at its strongest, its most ‘hegemonic’, it was necessary to name and maintain an antagonism that remained at a distance to the middle ground precisely because one of neoliberalism’s dogmas – the ‘end of history’ – had proclaimed the end of all antagonism. Today, the situation is different. Globally, the left appears to be weak, but the simultaneous and equivalent weakness of the middle ground gives ‘us’ a unique ability to intervene into the shaping of the new middle ground. The work of naming new common grounds is at the same time the work of increasing our power to shape the outcome of the many global crises, by influencing the way they are dealt with.

We should be aware, however, that the emergence of a common ground that unsettles a middle ground is not necessarily a good thing. We could think here of the genesis of neoliberalism itself. The Mont Pelerin Society, founded by Friedrich Hayek in 1947, studied free-market ideas throughout Keynesianism’s ‘golden age’, as did that circle of admirers that gathered around Russian-American writer and philosopher Ayn Rand in the 1950s. The Mont Pelerin Society’s members included George Shultz and Milton Friedman – Shultz went on to serve in the Nixon and Reagan administrations and, at the University of Chicago, both men trained the ‘Chicago boys’ who liberalised Latin American economies in the 1970s and ’80s. The young Alan Greenspan, who later became Chairman of the Federal Reserve, was a member of Rand’s circle. These free-market thinkers and activists articulated a common ground that profoundly unsettled the Keynesian/Fordist middle and went on to destroy it.

Towards new common grounds?

But while we might appear to be trapped in limbo, history is still being made. In the last few years we have seen the irruption of a multiplicity of struggles, some more visible than others. In parts of the global North a direct action movement against climate change and for climate justice has emerged and grown rapidly. There’s been an increase in political activity around universities – such as the wave of occupations and strikes across Italy against the country’s Education Reform Bill, and mass protests against the raising of tuition fees and job losses at the University of California. In some cases, protest movements have emerged around issues directly connected to the financial crisis, for example, in Iceland, Ireland, France (remember ‘bossnapping’?); or, as in Greece, they have tapped into the widespread social malaise concerning the lack of prospects for the ‘700-euro generation’. In Latin America, surely the part of the world where left forces are most ascendant, there have been explosive indigenous struggles around the control of natural resources. Indigenous people in Peru successfully confronted the government and its army to prevent the destruction of forests and livelihoods in the pursuit of new sources of oil. Elsewhere, the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta has fought the Nigerian army to a standstill and disrupted several of Shell’s operations in the area. In South Korea, sacked workers occupying the SsangYong car plant in Seoul fought pitched battles with the police and army, only to be dislodged after a massive security operation.

While the list could go on and on, it is hard to avoid the impression that these struggles have remained relatively separate from each other. By and large, they have not resonated sufficiently to constitute new common grounds. But: we can be certain on a few points and, from here, it may be possible to identify some emergent tendencies. First and foremost, we know that in an epochal crisis such as this one, both new middle and new common grounds will initially have to emerge around the problematics that brought the old era to its knees.

Take again the crisis of Fordism. By the 1970s, not only had persistently high wages led to a crisis of profitability, there were also widespread fears that unions had become too strong, the state too expansive and too bureaucratic, life too uniform. The success of the neoliberal project, at least in its Anglo-American heartlands, lay partly in the fact that it effectively tackled these problems, that it captured previously ‘deviant’ desires, discourses and practices by promising individuals the ability to realise them. When neoliberalism crushed the unions, shrank the welfare bureaucracy, ended stagnation and beat inflation, it on the one hand effectively addressed the problems that brought the old New Deal to its knees, and on the other, laid the groundwork for a new set of systemic problems to emerge.

The first, most immediately obvious, problematic apparent in the crisis of neoliberalism appears very different, depending on where you are standing. What from the top looks like an ‘economic crisis’ (not enough growth, not enough profits, not enough demand) is experienced, from below, as a ‘crisis of social reproduction’. Unemployment is soaring and national deficits are placing ever-greater constraints on social security. The zombie-liberal response has been ultimately self-defeating: bail out the banks and some well-connected industries (but at huge cost to governments, increasing deficit spending), try to re-inflate the bubble of cheap credit, and hope that someone will borrow the money that is made available. Alas, there is no source of mass demand, no consumer of last resort, no new large-scale investment opportunities. Along this road lies nothing but future ruin.

These two perspectives on the same crisis obviously call forth two different ‘logical’ responses. While the reaction of zombie-liberalism makes sense according to its own (undead) logic, the logical response to the crisis of social reproduction is perhaps a strategy of commoning. This would be a defence, creation and expansion of resources held in common and accessible to all: expanding public transport, socialising health care, guaranteeing a basic income, and so on. This type of strategy would achieve two linked and essential goals. First, it would address our immediate fears of losing our livelihoods – because it would create spaces where social reproduction becomes possible outside the crisis-ridden circuits of capital. Second, it would counter the atomisation caused by three decades of neoliberal subjectivation in markets – just as engaging in market-based interactions tends to create market-subjects, engaging in commoning tends to create ‘commonistic’ subjectivities. And if another, equally ‘logical’, response to the economic crisis is the attempt to exclude certain people from collective resources, then the creation of open commons as a response to the crisis of social reproduction would counteract this, too. Open commons would undermine the nativist, racist politics that are gaining ground, certainly in Europe, and in parts of Africa and Asia.

A second central problematic is that of the biocrisis, of the many socio-ecological crises that are currently afflicting the world as a result of the contradiction between capital’s need for never-ending growth and the fact that we live on a finite planet. Again, the biocrisis has two faces. From the perspective of governments and capital, it looks like an emerging threat to social stability. Climate change is undermining livelihoods, which increases the number of people forced to secure their reproduction through extra-legal means. Large-scale movements of ‘climate refugees’ are feared by many governments. Piracy is a response by Somali fisherfolk and others to over-fishing off the Horn of Africa. But states and capital also perceive precisely these threats to social stability as opportunities to relegitimise political authority, to expand government powers and to kick-start a new round of ‘green’ economic growth, fuelled by uranium and austerity.

But the biocrisis, as the name implies, is one that threatens life; and disproportionately the lives of those who have done the least to cause it. Increasingly, the movements coalescing around this contradiction – between capital and life, growth and limits – are doing so around the notion of climate justice: the idea that responses to the crisis should undo rather than exacerbate existing injustices and imbalances of power, and that their construction should involve the direct participation of those affected.

Of course, we cannot be sure that new middle and common grounds will emerge around either of these issues – the economic crisis/crisis of social reproduction and the biocrisis – but we are convinced that any successful new project will need to address both.

From commons to constitutions

Allowing a new common ground to emerge involves a moment of grace, a stepping back from the assumptions, tactics and strategies of the anti-neoliberal, counter-globalist protest cycle of the turn of the century. The common ground constructed and maintained from that period must be recomposed through the prism of our contemporary situation.

The counter-globalisation movement was suspicious of – often even opposed to – institutions per se, constituted forms of power. This suspicion was obvious, for example, in the tension within one of its most institutionalised forms, the World Social Forum (WSF). The reason for the counter-globalisation movement’s scepticism was, of course, well founded: the result of the generalised recognition that neoliberal ideology had successfully colonised most social democratic parties and trade unions.

But when the crisis of neoliberalism irrupted, it became apparent that this mistrust of institutions had translated into an inability to consistently shape politics and the economy. Antagonism against institutions as an end in itself is a dead end. The power to vacate institutions leaves a void that politics, which abhors vacuum, tends to cover up with the calculations of piecemeal cooptation. Moments of antagonism are either part of ongoing processes of building autonomy and constituting new forms of power, or they risk dissipation, or even worse, backlashes. Today, it is necessary to have more than the sporadic show of strength: we need forms of organisation that start from the collective management of needs, that politicise the structures and mechanisms of social reproduction, and build force from there. What form could these take in the present climate? Campaigns against foreclosures, around the cost of utility bills, private debt, energy resources…? In any case, what is needed are interventions that start from shared life and acquire their consistency there; that employ moments of antagonism in order to increase their constituent power, rather than as ends in themselves.

If a decade ago, with the neoliberal doctrine at the height of its power and most institutional roads well and truly blocked, outright rejection was a credible tactic, the brittle ground of today presents us with very different problems.

We do, in fact, have some present examples of important transformations that have managed to inscribe themselves in institutional forms. The most remarkable are undoubtedly the constituent processes in Bolivia and Ecuador, which have resulted in political constitutions that represent radical innovations not only in relation to the countries’ histories, but to constitutional law itself. First of all, because they give a form to a new arrangement of forces in which, for the first time in their history, the vast majority of the population actually has a voice, and some degree of representation. More than that, however, in instituting pluri-nationality as a principle of the state, both of them signal a remarkable break with modern notions of sovereignty by recognising multiple, autonomous sovereign forms within the state itself, as well as acknowledging the historical debt of the colonisation process. In the case of Ecuador, in fact, it is not only pluri-nationality, but also the indigenous concept of ‘the good life’ (sumak kausay) and the ‘rights of nature’ that are made into principles. The latter, a unique invention in legal history, follows directly from the former: ‘the good life’ necessarily involves the environment in which one lives – not as the source from which, but as the medium in which, one subsists. The idea that, in the modern parliamentary state, the world had found a definitive, non-perfectible form, was central to the ‘end of history’ doctrine. While emphatically opposing the doctrine, the alterglobalist cycle seemed to accept the premise in inverse form: institutions were not subject to change. But rejecting institutions as such does not follow necessarily from rejecting institutions-as-we-know-them.

But these constitutions can only be a beginning, and in a certain way, it is after they are written that the real constituent process begins: that of filling the letter of the text with real transformation. This, indeed, is the real test that the Latin American ‘Pink Tide’ will have to confront very soon: it is not so much in an increasingly organised backlash (see Honduras), but in the future of its own most-vaunted ‘success’ stories, that the question mark lies. Of course, this is also a matter of new middle and common grounds: a question of how far from the old middle ground these processes can move, and what new common grounds will have to be constructed in order to affect them. The recent experiences in Latin America have been, and remain, contradictory: the recognition of ‘the rights of nature’ and ‘the good life’ goes hand-in-hand with a resurrection of ‘developmentalism’, increased exploitation of natural resources, and a renewed emphasis on primary commodity exports. The question is: has the constituent power of existing movements been entirely spent in this process? Is the coming time one of consolidating gains instead of raising the game – of tactical rearguard manoeuvres rather than strategic movements? In Brazil, as in Bolivia, Venezuela etc., will new dynamics below the state level rekindle the transformative energy that created the present situation, or will we see its cooling off and crystallisation?

*****

How relevant are these processes, and these questions, to those of us outside Latin America? In many ways the continent, with institutional actors responsive to social movements’ common ground, seems like an anomaly. Indeed its anomalous status is perhaps a symptom of neoliberalism’s breakdown. Most of the world faces very different symptoms and a different set of questions: If zombie-liberalism is an ongoing form of governance, then how can social movements affect the wider world? If there is no dominant middle ground for emergent common grounds to rub up against then how are struggles made visible? How do we form an antagonism against an incoherent enemy? If neoliberal subjectivities continue to be reproduced then how do we interrupt this process and create new subjects with expanded horizons?

However, many current struggles are also premised on the idea that zombie-liberalism won’t persist and a new middle ground will emerge. Just think of the movements around climate change where the battle is not only against inaction but simultaneously against the manner in which the problem is being framed and the solutions being offered. From this perspective the Latin American anomaly can seem like an outpost from a potential future and its problematics can suddenly seem timely. This is the true difficulty of acting in a crisis. When the future is so unclear we must operate in many different worlds at once. We must name a common ground, while keeping it open to new directions. We must look for institutional interlocutors while accepting that, in part, we will have to create them ourselves. We must set the conditions for a new middle ground to emerge while not getting trapped by it.

These are all, of course, difficult tasks but it is how a new ‘we’ is constructed. The smallest step may seem near impossible now, but we should remember that once a new common ground begins to take shape, things can move very quickly. Such is the fragility of the current state of things that a little movement could have a dramatic effect. It may not take too much to tip a world gripped by entropy into a world full of potential.

http://www.democracynow.org/2009/12/17/bolivian_president_evo_morales_on_climate

AMY GOODMAN: Just before we went to air today, I interviewed Evo Morales, Bolivia’s first indigenous president. He was re-elected in a landslide victory earlier this month. On Wednesday, Evo Morales called on world leaders to hold temperature increases over the next century to just one degree Celsius, the most ambitious proposal so far by any head of state. Morales also called on the United States and other wealthy nations to pay an ecological debt to Bolivia and other developing nations.

AMY GOODMAN: President Morales, welcome to Democracy Now!

PRESIDENT EVO MORALES: [translated] Thank you very much for the invitation.

AMY GOODMAN: You spoke yesterday here at the Bella Center and said we cannot end global warming without ending capitalism. What did you mean?

PRESIDENT EVO MORALES: [translated] Capitalism is the worst enemy of humanity. Capitalism—and I’m speaking about irrational development—policies of unlimited industrialization are what destroys the environment. And that irrational industrialization is capitalism. So as long as we don’t review or revise those policies, it’s impossible to attend to humanity and life.

AMY GOODMAN: How would you do that? How would you end capitalism?

PRESIDENT EVO MORALES: [translated] It’s changing economic policies, ending luxury, consumerism. It’s ending the struggle to—or this searching for living better. Living better is to exploit human beings. It’s plundering natural resources. It’s egoism and individualism. Therefore, in those promises of capitalism, there is no solidarity or complementarity. There’s no reciprocity. So that’s why we’re trying to think about other ways of living lives and living well, not living better. Not living better. Living better is always at someone else’s expense. Living better is at the expense of destroying the environment.

AMY GOODMAN: President Morales, what are you calling here—for here at the UN climate summit?

PRESIDENT EVO MORALES: [translated] Defense of the rights of Mother Earth. The earth is our life. Nature is our home, our house. Happily, the United Nations have declared a Mother Earth Day. If the mother is recognized as Mother Earth, it’s something that can’t be sold, it’s something that can’t be—it can’t be violated, something sacred. This is nature. This is planet earth. And that’s why I’ve come here, to defend the rights of Mother Earth, to defend the rights to life, to defend humanity and saving Mother Earth.

AMY GOODMAN: What does climate debt mean, President Morales?

PRESIDENT EVO MORALES: [translated] After the destruction of Mother Earth, it’s important to recognize the rights of Mother Earth. And the best way to recognize this is by paying a climate debt. Second, it’s important to recognize the damages that have been done and attend to the people who have been affected by climate change, people who will lose their island homes, for example, people who will remain without water.

AMY GOODMAN: Hillary Clinton, the Secretary of State, said today, “We can’t look back; we have to look forward.”

PRESIDENT EVO MORALES: [translated] Looking forward means that we have to review everything that capitalism has done. These are things that cannot just be solved with money. We have to resolve problems of life and humanity. And that’s the problem that planet earth faces today. And this means ending capitalism.

AMY GOODMAN: The Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, also said today that $100 billion would be promised if a deal were arrived at, not just by the United States, per year, but in a public-private partnership with a number of countries around the world, but only if a deal is arrived at. She would not say what the US would contribute to this. What do you say about the US spending on the issue of global warming versus—well, you talked yesterday about war.

PRESIDENT EVO MORALES: [translated] The best thing would be that all war spending be directed towards climate change, instead of spending it on troops in Iraq, in Afghanistan or the military bases in Latin America. This money would be better directed to attending to the damages that were created by the United States. And, of course, this isn’t just $100 billion; this is probably trillions and trillions of dollars. How are we going to spend money to kill and not save lives? We have to spend money to save lives, not to kill. These are our differences with capitalism.

AMY GOODMAN: You called the war in Afghanistan terrorist. Are you saying President Obama is a terrorist?

PRESIDENT EVO MORALES: [translated] People who send their troops to kill outside their country, that’s terror. There’s not only civil—terrorists dressed as civilians; they can also be dressed in military uniforms. Worse still if they’re financed with the money from the peoples, from taxes. Of course, every country has the right to defend itself, just as every country can defend itself. But invading another country with uniformed people, that’s state terrorism. Moreover, to establish military bases in Latin America with the objective of political control, and where their military base is an empire, that’s not respect for democracy. There is no peace, social peace. There is no development for those countries nor integration in those regions. This is what we’ve lived in South America and Latin America.

AMY GOODMAN: What is your message to President Obama at these climate talks?

PRESIDENT EVO MORALES: [translated] After listening to his speech at the heads of state Summit of the Americas, we were very hopeful that he would be an ally in addressing poverty. Now I’m not so hopeful. Rather, we’re disappointed. If something has changed in the United States, it’s the color of the president. So I’ve been called upon, through administrative resolutions, to close unions, or to eliminate unions, when I’m doing exactly the opposite.  In the report that was done regarding access to trade preferences under the ATPDEA program, it was charged that the Bolivian government has been involved in suppressing unions, when, in fact, quite the contrary, the government’s been very active in providing infrastructure and support to unions through improving the centers where unions meet, etc. Even President Bush did not make any observations about the new clauses in the constitution of Bolivia, whereas under the new administration there have been observations and comments made about the new constitution that’s been drafted, in particular in relation to the management of the gas and oil sectors. This is a clear involvement in Bolivian internal affairs by the Obama administration. At the end of the day, it seems that they’re asking us to change the constitution. This is something that not even Bush did. If we just look at this, this makes Obama seem—look worse than Bush. And the documents are there.

AMY GOODMAN: I know you have to leave. My last question is: you’ve called for a climate tribunal; what do you mean?

PRESIDENT EVO MORALES: [translated] Those who do damage to planet earth and those who do damage need to be judged. Those who do not fulfill the terms of the Kyoto Protocol should also be judged. And for those ends, we have to organize a tribunal for climate justice in the United Nations.

AMY GOODMAN: And one degree Celsius?

PRESIDENT EVO MORALES: [translated] That’s our proposal.

AMY GOODMAN: Do you think it could be achieved?

PRESIDENT EVO MORALES: [translated] Yes. Yes, otherwise it would be a lack of commitment to humanity.

AMY GOODMAN: Do you think there will be a deal that comes out of Copenhagen?

PRESIDENT EVO MORALES: [translated] I doubt it. We’re developing other proposals for my intervention.

AMY GOODMAN: Do you think it’s catastrophic that there’s no deal?

PRESIDENT EVO MORALES: [translated] No, it’s a waste of time. And if the leaders of countries cannot arrive in an agreement, why don’t the peoples then decide together?

AMY GOODMAN: We will leave it there. I thank you very much, President Morales.

AMY GOODMAN: The Bolivian President Evo Morales speaking to us here in Copenhagen. This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. It’s Climate Countdown. You can go to our website at democracynow.org to read the transcript of what President Morales had to say and also to see or hear the video podcast.

“We had gone underground in the early eighties, not a high-tide period for revolutionary activity in the US. Unlike the people who had formed the Weather Underground Organization in the sixties, we were not swept into clandestinity as a response to the Vietnam War or the militancy of the Black Panthers…As we saw it, armed struggle was still a necessary component of every revolutionary movement, and the movement within the US was no exception.” – Diana Block

How do we decide where to put our political energy? For many of us on the left our politicization began with critiques of the dominant ideology. Our critiques may have been a result of formal education, though for many our critiques were lifeboats we clung to keep from drowning in the chasm between what we were told and what we experienced. Upon confronting contradictions we look for explanations. We attempt to deconstruct the world and then reconstruct it to make sense of it and find our place in it. We make our underlying ideologies conscious. We develop our analysis and principles and then attempt to act in a way that is aligned with their logical conclusions.

As leftist revolutionaries we ask ourselves the same questions at different times in our history. What is to be done? What does revolutionary work look like in our time and what is my role within it?

Diana Block’s memoir, Arm the Spirit: A Woman’s Journey Underground and Back, is an example of a leftist making sense of the world around her, attempting to act with integrity, and searching for political strategy and home. The memoir moves easily back and forth between two aspects of her story. The book begins with Block’s partner, Claude Marks, finding a bug in their car in 1985 after several years of organizing and living clandestinely, and only two months after she gave birth to their first child. This main narrative details her life underground and her re-emergence and re-engagement with organizing from 1995 to the present. It is interspersed with the back story of Block’s experiences, politics, and the context that led to her decision to form a clandestine revolutionary collective to support Third World anti-colonialist armed struggles. Block’s book is her answer to the question of what it means to be a revolutionary in one’s own time. In particular, Block analyzes her role as a white person in the US with feminist, lesbian/queer, anti-imperialist, and anti-racist politics.

I do not feel compelled to use this book, or this review, as a site to evaluate the usefulness of clandestine work, or the question of armed struggle. Due in part to the fact that Block does not provide us with enough information about the years of clandestine work to fully evaluate or understand those actions, but mainly because the debates that Diana engaged in around the question of armed struggle are not those that are currently relevant on the ground in social movements or at large in in broader left intentional spaces today. However, understanding the climate in which these decisions came about, the fissures, fractures, and traumas of past movements, and the personal roads traveled by our  revolutionaries, help us to understand our current conditions. It assists us to recognize the roots of our ideas about what is possible, and the state of our left institutions and movements. For myself, at age 31 and with more than a decade of movement involvement, and for my leftist identified activist peers, the most interesting aspects of ATS are the ways in which Block articulates the internal and external factors that influenced her political trajectory, in her particular circumstances and time. For this purpose I will ground this review in looking at Blocks political circumstances, choices, and their consequences through the lens of her memories and analysis.

In prose as engaging as a good novel Block depicts her childhood, her politicization, her coming out, her search for the right political program, her experiences with partnering and parenting, and the day to day details of life underground. At the same time the book offers a wealth of history lessons.  Her experiences attempting to do radical political work and then being underground in the US eras of Reagan and Bush, and of solidarity organizing with what seemed a radical anti-colonialist peoples’ movement in Zimbabwe (and then experiencing the profound disappointments of that movement), and with the Puerto Rican Independence movement, have not been described in other memoirs of revolutionaries from that era, such as those by Bill Ayers, or Mark Rudd, or Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz.  In particular, Arm the Spirit is a great start for learning some of the history and continued struggles around Puerto Rican anti-colonial movement in the US.

How did Block and her collective get to the decision to organize clandestinely in support of the Puerto Rican independence movement? According to her memoir, mostly through frustration. Frustration with a lack of radicalism, holistic approaches, and strategic programs within various aspects of left movements and the rollbacks of even the most reformist social justice programs.

“Most of the white left had distanced themselves from the efforts of Blacks, Native Americans, Puerto Ricans, and Chicanos to develop clandestine organizations and activity, denouncing these endeavors as “ultra-left” and out of touch with the social reality of the masses of Americans. We argued that a social reality dominated by electoral politics, unions tied to the Democratic Party, white supremacy, debilitating cynicism, and an increasing right wing backlash had to be contested on many different levels in order for any significant political breakthrough to occur…”

Block describes how she moved from group to group following her political ideals. Arm the Spirit could be read as a series of disappointments. As she tells it, Block was critical of the anti war student movement for its patriarchal sexism, so didn’t get involved while in school. Living in NY, in 1968, she attempted to teach in a Harlem program that was a response to the civil rights movement, but was disappointed by the white supremacy within the teachers union, and the limits of relying on institutionalized reforms.

She then became active in the radical anti-rape movement in NY and then SF, helping to found San Francisco Woman Against Rape (SF WAR) in 1972. Block became disappointed with the lack of connection and commitment to larger leftist organization, the debates about serving victims by building alliances with the criminal injustice system and state law enforcement, and the unchallenged white supremacy in the anti-rape and woman’s liberation movement. As Block was becoming disenchanted with SF WAR, she was exposed to the Weather Underground’s book Prairie Fire (1974) as it emerged from the underground. In it, she found the anti-imperialist critique, clear arguments for white revolutionaries to support anti-colonialist armed struggle within and outside of the US, and the specific instruction for action that she was looking for. Her excitement about the text was augmented by witnessing the strong leadership of lesbian feminists, like Laura Whitehorn, in the East Coast Prairie Fire Organizing Committee.

Block joined the Prairie Fire Organizing Committee and became involved in, and inspired by,  more directly building relationships and working in solidarity with third world revolutionary groups. After doing this work above ground for some time Block and her collective threw all of their efforts towards supporting the Puerto Rican Independence movement.

“The debates (over armed struggle) went on for years and in the end we had to put our theoretical commitments to the test. We owed it to the third world forces we worked with and to our own political integrity. And so, as Ronald Reagan embarked on his effort to consolidate counter-revolution worldwide, we went underground.”

Supporting the Independentistas’ movement for self-determination of a colony of the US was an obvious fit with her anti-racist and anti-imperialist principles and beliefs about the roles of white revolutionaries. Yet even after making the decision to do clandestine solidarity work there were sacrifices to Block’s desire for strategic political work. Block recalls her remorse that their clandestine acts were not done in connection to a larger left movement as they had hoped.

Like many on the far left who ended up underground for fear of prosecution, their political isolation dramatically intensified after they found evidence of surveillance. During this time Block and some of her comrades tried to find low profile ways to engage in political work. For Block and several of the other women in the collective this mostly took the form of doing local based work with women in the AIDS movement and being involved with other parents in their communities. Though they attempted to continue to live their principles and transmit them to their children while underground, they were unable to be explicit about their politics and were cut off from the political communities that they had left.

When she resurfaces in the mid 1990s, however, she reports that much of the political landscape has changed.

“There were dozens of political groups-anti-racist, feminist, queer, environmentalist, globalist. Yet as I began to investigate their programs and activities, it seemed each one operated separately from the others, pursuing projects and goals that I supported, but without the breadth of vision of ideological orientation that was necessary to build a more unified political movement. In fact the burgeoning non-profit industrial complex seemed, in many ways, to have taken over the spirit and structure of the left.”

As a reader it was profound to recognize that her observation upon surfacing largely echoes her thinking about her political work in the mid-70s. In the 70s she was involved in various campaigns and commitments, including building SF WAR, working on immigrant education and education local reform issues, and collective studies of Marxism-Leninism. But this work lacked cohesion. “This was the question that preoccupied me. All various pieces of work that I was doing were good, up to a point. But there was no over arching vision to fit them all together, no set of principles and no organizational framework.”  I wonder after reading Block’s memoir, how much did the conditions change and how much of it just followed the trajectory that was beginning in those early SFWAR debates? How could radical voices like Block’s have influenced the direction of these organizations which had been born out of popular struggle as so many colluded with the state to become a-political service centered nonprofits?

In Block’s reflections from a SFWAR reunion that she attends in 2003, she realizes that she had been oblivious to the women from her initial group of founding members who committed themselves to working with SFWAR. She had been so frustrated with the political choices and debates within the group that she hadn’t even been aware that they had made the choice to stick around and commit to the group. SFWAR, she writes, has resisted becoming co-opted by the system and has struggled to maintain its anti-racist analysis both within its own distribution of power within the organization and in its programmatic work. Block credits this to her and other of the founding members initial values, but this history would not have been enough if none of those members had committed to domestic violence work and to the organization.

The question of where to focus political work is one so many struggle to answer. I have heard many anti-racist, anti-imperialist activists of the younger generations who study revolutionary histories bemoan that they do not perceive themselves to have obvious anti-imperialist, people of color led movements to join or work in solidarity with. Others relocate to countries in the Global South to do just that. Others move from group to group working on single issue campaigns, working for non-profits or in cafes, taking part in political study groups and anti-oppression workshops, creating community gardens, co-ops and other and new or alternative institutions, creating queer social spaces with chosen families, etc and still lament the lack of overarching left strategy, and diverse inclusive political community. I am not encouraging one over the other, but noting how these diverse options illustrate the ways this lack of shared strategy plays out in a contemporary landscape.

Arm the Spirit is in part the story of an activist’s search for political home. This is a search that so many of us embark on. The questions continue: Where am I most useful? Where am I fully my self? What should I commit to? When is a group worth trying to transform and when should I move on to the next group more in line with my principles? Many of us want to commit, but we still find our selves engaging in something, being disappointed, and moving on to find a better fit–all the while critiquing and defending our own and each others choices. How do we link our various left work to a larger struggle? How do we have a strong unified left capable of socialist revolution? Block’s story, however compelling and insightful, cannot provide us with a solution as to where to work. She is still active, and still engaging with these same questions today. In her words:

“Superficially my life had begun to assume the same normalized contours as those of my friends. Our relative privilege and the support we received had allowed me to resume a viable life…But inside I was driven by constant self-interrogation. What should I be doing politically at this time? What would be the most effective choices, given who I was? Was there any way to apply everything that I felt I had learned from our history that didn’t sound like a didactic lesson from an anachronistic past?”

Block continues to be a principled activist working mainly with political prisoners, and California Coalition For Women Prisoners, and with this book acts as a historical resource for the next generations. Her collective’s solidarity work with the Puerto Rican independence movement’s militant challenge to US imperialism, their support for political prisoners and grand jury resisters, and protest of the violence of colonialism against independence activists was and is needed and important.  The importance of their solidarity work was reaffirmed to Block by the Puerto Rican community’s fierce support and loving embrace of her collective when they resurfaced in 1995. Our work on the left is on many fronts, but though the questions that Block tried to respond to still remain, revolutionaries today can benefit from her acknowledgment of the destructive processes that surrounded determinations of strategy in the late 70s.

At a point early in the book Block talks about the years of polarizing debates on the left that locked them into dichotomous positioning. She reflects that if the arguments weren’t so polarizing, and if they weren’t so headstrong, they could have admitted and explored their own doubts and concerns about how to strategically support anti-imperialist struggle. They could have discussed questions about their clandestine formation and its “sustainability at that point in history” and “which type of activities were feasible at that stage of struggle.” It’s possible that it wouldn’t have changed their choice, but it might have changed their preparation, their way of going about it, and their connection to broader, public movements. Maybe there could have been a way to make it more connected and more sustainable if only they had the space to deeply discuss it?  One of the most important lessons to take is the necessity for multi-tendency discussions about left strategy that are not polarizing.

Recent convergences in the US such as the Left Forum, the US Social Forums, cross organizational attempts at “strategic dialogues,” and the abundance of movement people involved in multi-tendency political theory study groups gives reason to hope that many revolutionaries today recognize it as our task to have unifying discussions about revolutionary strategy. While some from Block’s generation still seem to be hashing out the same debates with the ghosts of movements’ past, I believe that there are more possibilities for productive dialogue for this generation of activists who have some emotional distance from the past, a willingness to study, access to contemporary and historic sources of information, and an analysis rooted more strongly by anti-racism, feminism, and queer liberation.

As the last chapter of the book is titled: A Luta Continua! Block concludes her book with a quote from political prisoner Jalil Muntaqim, former member of the Black Panther Party*. Jalil was a founder of Arm the Spirit, the prisoner-written and produced newspaper of the late 1970s-early 80s, in which Block and many others who were incarcerated and outside found a source of education and inspiration. In response to the question of what the phrase “arm the spirit” means to him today Jalil responded “The call to arm the spirit is for revolutionaries to comprehend their capacity to love, to give themselves to humanity, to know one’s purpose in the course of building and sustaining the revolutionary struggle.” May it be so.

***

*For more information about the campaign to support political prisoner Jalil Muntaqim visit http://www.freejalil.com/

Dana Barnett is a leftist activist, organizer, mediator, trainer, and legal aide paralegal in Philadelphia, PA.

I read this when it first came out in the summer of 2006 and it pretty much rocked my socks off and made me excited to get involved in the new SDS, so I figured I’d repost it for folks who never got to read it. [alex]

Ten Questions for Movement Building
by Dan Berger and Andy Cornell

Originally published by Monthly Review Zine.

For five weeks in the late spring of 2006, we toured the eastern half of the United States to promote two books — Letters From Young Activists: Today’s Rebels Speak Out (Nation Books, 2005) and Outlaws of America: The Weather Underground and the Politics of Solidarity (AK Press, 2006) — and to get at least a cursory impression of sectors of the movement in this country.  We viewed the twenty-eight events not only as book readings but as conscious political conversations about the state of the country, the world, and the movement.

Of course, such quick visits to different parts of the country can only yield so much information.  Because this was May and June, we did not speak on any school campuses and were unable to gather a strong sense of the state of campus-based activism.  Further, much of the tour came together through personal connections we’ve developed in anarchist, queer, punk, and white anti-racist communities, and, as with any organizing, the audience generally reflected who organized the event and how they went about it rather than the full array of organizing projects transpiring in each town.  Yet several crucial questions were raised routinely in big cities and small towns alike (or, alternately, were elided but lay just beneath the surface of the sometimes tense conversations we were party to).  Such commonality of concerns and difficulties demonstrates the need for ongoing discussion of these issues within and between local activist communities.  Thus, while we don’t pretend to have an authoritative analysis of the movement, we offer this report as part of a broader dialogue about building and strengthening modern revolutionary movements — an attempt to index some common debates and to offer challenges in the interests of pushing the struggle forward.

Challenges and Debates:

The audiences we spoke with tended to be predominantly white and comprised of people self-identified as being on the left, many of whom are active in one or more organizations locally or nationally.  We traveled through the Northeast (including a brief visit to Montreal), the rust belt, the Midwest, parts of the South, and the Mid-Atlantic.  Some events tended to draw mostly 60s-generation activists, others primarily people in their 20s, and more than a few were genuinely intergenerational.  Not surprisingly, events at community centers and libraries afforded more room for conversation than those at bookstores.  Crowds ranged anywhere from 10 to 100 people, although the average event had about 25 people.  Even where events were small gatherings of friends, they proved to be useful dialogues about pragmatic work.  Our goals for the tour were: establishing a sense of different organizing projects; pushing white people in an anti-racist and anti-imperialist direction while highlighting the interrelationship of issues; and grappling with the difficult issues of organizing, leadership, and intergenerational movement building.  The following ten questions emerge from our analysis of the political situation based on our travels and meetings with activists of a variety of ages and range of experiences.

1. What Is Organizing?

Every event we did focused on the need for organizing.  This call often fell upon sympathetic ears, but was frequently met with questions about how to actually organize and build lasting radical organizations, particularly in terms of maintaining radical politics while reaching beyond insular communities.  There are too few institutions training young or new activists in the praxis of organizing and anti-authoritarian leadership development. This doesn’t stop people from taking on radical political work, but it does limit the movement’s widespread effectiveness, particularly in smaller towns.  Part of the problem is that many of the nationally visible entities that do provide training in organizing and leadership development — specifically, the mainstream labor unions — are not anti-authoritarians rooted in a radical analysis of society.  The training centers that are based in such an analysis, such as Project South, the Midwest Academy, and Z Media Institute, lack the capacity to work with all the activists interested in gaining such skills.   Developing this capacity is crucial, as younger radicals in particular need models and mentors of how to be rooted in a community, mobilizing around concrete demands, consistently bringing new people into the movement and keeping them there.  At the same time, we need to be more aware of those organizing initiatives that already exist and the ways we can be of most use to them.

When discussing organizing, we often heard the common refrain to “go knock on doors.”  However, it’s not enough to encourage people to just start knocking on doors as individuals or loose groups.  Without a sense of why they are there or a program about which to talk with people, door knocking will yield few productive results.  Thus, it is not just about encouraging people to organize — it’s also about recognizing that people need the skills, confidence, and groups with which to do so.  Furthermore, potential organizers need careful guidance on the different tasks, goals, challenges, and motivations the practice of organizing has to include if we are to take seriously the now decades-old challenge to organize not only in oppressed, but also oppressor communities (and to understand how most people are multiply situated in relation to different forms of privilege and power).

To be sure, there is a lot of organizing going on.  The most successful work that we saw was more locally or regionally based than nationally, yet there are various projects that seem to be bringing in new people, operating from a systemic analysis, and winning concrete demands.  An organizer we met in Pittsburgh offered a useful definition of the twofold task for radical organizers and organizations: Build Dual Power, Confront State Power.  That is, we must develop our own power — by building coalitions, political infrastructure, and visionary, alternative institutions that prefigure the types of social relationships we desire — while simultaneously confronting the state, right-wing social movements, and other forms of institutional oppression.  One without the other is insufficient.  This twofold approach can also address what an organizer in North Carolina identified as the gap between opposition to something and action around it — a chasm that is solved by a feeling of empowerment, the belief that people can actively contribute to making change.

The widespread interest in organizing that we found, as well as the “Build Dual Power, Confront State Power” conceptualization, seems to be a promising departure from the tendency among many young anti-authoritarian activists to reject the concept of leadership outright.  Since organizing implies leadership and leadership implies hierarchy, the process of moving others to take action or even agree with one’s political analysis has been seen as suspect and sometimes rejected outright in certain circles.  This, we fear, has prevented activists from building the types of respectful personal and institutional relationships across social divides that can provide the groundwork for active solidarity.  It has led many younger activists to focus on creating elective alternative communities and model projects (infoshops, puppet troupes, publications, service projects) that are intended to exist outside of the sphere of oppressive values and institutions.  The call to build “dual power” respects the importance of these initiatives, but the paired determination to effectively confront the power of the state and other reactionary social forces demands, in addition, a type of strategic, coalitional work requiring semi-permanent organizations, mass involvement, and openness to a range of tactics.  We believe that this work requires skillful, democratic, grassroots leadership with an unabashed commitment to organize others in a manner that helps them, in turn, to develop their own leadership skills.

2. How Do We Build Intergenerational Movements? (A Challenge to Young and Old!)

Most people we met do not work in productively intergenerational groups or live intergenerational lives outside tightly prescribed roles (e.g., teacher-student).  This presents a challenge for activists and organizers of all ages, who constantly need to be looking to work with those older and younger.  Recognizing that the struggle is for the long haul means that no generation can or should exist in a political vacuum.  While both younger and older folks bear the responsibility for this, the onus may indeed rest on older people to make themselves available; most young people we met were excited by the prospect of intergenerational discussions and groups but didn’t know where to find the older radicals in their area.  (As people in our mid- and late-20s, we have a responsibility to find and work with the teenage radicals who are just now becoming political conscious and active.)

Intergenerational movements are not simply about people of various ages being in the same room.  Instead, it is about building respectful relationships of mutual learning and teaching based on a long-haul approach to movement building.  In raising this issue, we saw three typical responses that are generally unhelpful to building intergenerational groups and movements: The Nike Approach (Just Do It!) — the older activists who tell young people to just go out there and change the world already and to stop looking for validation from older people.  But young folks aren’t looking for a go-ahead; we are out there, doing our best.  Validation and encouragement from people we respect can bolster our resolve, but what we’re really looking for is mentorship, multigenerational commitment, and solidarity.  We’re willing to put ourselves out there, even to make mistakes.  But it would be helpful if we didn’t have to make the same mistakes older people have already made.  And young folks need to see that older activists maintain their political commitments in both word and deed.  The Retired Approach (We Had Our Turn, Now You Try) — several older activists echoed the sentiment that they did their best and now it was up to us.  Some with this position argue that they and their generation need to get entirely out of the way of the young folks, which functionally removes older people from the equation.  This abandonment masquerading as support is equally unhelpful in actually learning from the past and moving forward together because it serves to enforce a generational separation.  The Obstructionist Approach (Only If You Accept My Politics and Unquestioned Leadership) — people with this position demand adherence to the politics and vision of the older generation as the prerequisite for any working relationship.  They make The Retired Approach more appealing and are a reminder that, frankly, some people do need to get out of the way.  This is where older allies committed to collaboration could be potentially helpful, proving that political divides are not inherently generational gaps.

A lack of intergenerational relationships and groups is apparent nationally and locally.  In one town we visited, for instance, the “peace community” seemed to lack any relationship to anyone under 50 or to impoverished communities of color that are most directly affected by the war machine.  Another town saw a largely generational split over confrontational anti-war activism, where older people generally refused to support any confrontational tactics and anyone using them.  Yet when the younger folks went out by themselves to picket the recruiting station, they were able to successfully shut it down on two separate occasions.  Intergenerational movement building could be useful not only in expanding the base of people willing to engage in such confrontational tactics (and thereby hopefully contributing to hastening the war’s end) but also in trying to push other older people to work with and support youth leadership.

Young people, for our part, make it difficult for movement veterans to find us and assess our work when we organize only as temporary affinity groups that usually lack office space and sometimes even contact information.  Expressing interest in building such ties is also important.  When one of us off-handedly commented to an SDS veteran and radical historian that many younger activists would appreciate being asked by organizers of his generation to have coffee or lunch and talk shop, he seemed genuinely surprised.  “Really?  You think folks would want to get together with people like me?”  We assured him that we at least appreciated it — especially when the older folks picked up the tab.

What young people don’t want to deal with is patronization or abandonment, people who focus on their glory days or on lecturing “the youngens.”  What young folks do want are older activists who remain steadfast in their resolve and organizing, who seek to draw out the lessons from their years in the struggle (and are clear about where they differ with others of their age cohort without being sectarian), who look to younger activists for inspiration and guidance while providing the same, and who are focused on movement building.  Building on the more multigenerational roots of Southern organizing, two older organizers in Greensboro beautifully summed this up at an event in saying, “We aren’t done, we’re not leaving, and we’re in this together.”

3. What Role Do Militancy and Confrontation Play?

In our experience, almost no one was talking about engaging in acts of violence — even at events focused on the Weather Underground, an organization remembered most for its tactical embrace of large-scale property destruction.  Despite the occasional utterance of a desire to see the White House reduced to rubble, there is a clear understanding that the movement is not at the level of militant confrontation with the state that radicals were in the late 1960s and early 1970s.  (This was, to be sure, a distinction we focused on in talks about that political moment relative to this one.)  While some people may romanticize the past or have facile notions of militancy or underground resistance, most of the people we met were interested in developing strategies and tactics that could effectively end the war and contribute to other fundamental changes in society.  Particularly in relation to the war, we noticed widespread disappointment with the national coalitions: for being sectarian, for mobilizing but not movement building, for not developing or supporting youth leadership, for not using the pervasive frustration with the war to deepen anti-war and, ultimately, anti-imperialist consciousness.  People want to not just register their dissatisfaction with the war through petitions and periodic protests but actually end it, and many young people in particular don’t see either of the dominant anti-war coalitions as vehicles for doing that.

Many people are looking for other ways — including more confrontational ones — to directly target the war machine.  In fact, various groups and individuals have been directly confronting the war machine on a local scale since the U.S. invaded Iraq.  To date, this seems largely to have taken the form of counter-recruitment work.  What such confrontation has meant varies based on the specifics of a particular community; in some places, a picket was enough to shut down a recruiting center, whereas in other places it meant attempts to enter and disrupt the center or block its doors.  The groups we were most impressed by were able to develop a strategy that incorporated a sense of direct action in line with the state of local movement.  That is, they upped the ante in directly confronting the state, pushed the notion of what was acceptable somewhat beyond what the movement had been doing in that town to date (e.g., from vigils to protests, from protests to civil disobedience), and maintained relationships with other activists and groups who may not have engaged in the same tactics but who remained committed and sympathetic.  Such an approach recognizes that increasing pressure on war-makers requires us to continually expand the movement numerically, while simultaneously increasing the militancy of those prepared to take risks.  It also recognizes the careful maneuvering and relationship building work required to navigate the tension these two goals inevitably produce.  We need to build mass movements where militant tactics can be present without dividing the movement — and it was a former Catholic Worker who underscored this point for us in expressing critical support for militant wings of the movement historically.

Counter-recruitment work and the growth of organizations led by Iraq war veterans and their families remain the most exciting and promising aspects of the U.S. anti-war movement.  Since anti-war organizing has not been the primary focus of either of our political work for the past couple of years, we were very excited to hear firsthand accounts of successful, repeated, day-long shutdowns of recruiting offices and similar actions.  However, several challenges remain, including making this work more coordinated, extensive, and visible on a national level.  Furthermore, direct-action anti-war efforts need to expand beyond recruiting centers to other targets, such as the offices of war profiteers, that can be materially impacted by relatively small groups.  The small victories reported by organizers in numerous mid-sized cities seem to imply that local actions might be more successful than those against obvious, heavily-policed targets such as the Pentagon that require significant lead-time and national coordination.  Activists whose circumstances don’t allow them to participate bodily in such actions have important roles to play in securing legal and financial resources, as well as working to prevent less militantly inclined sectors of the movement from denouncing or attempting to marginalize those seeking to obstruct empire from functioning.

If, as we argued throughout the tour, militancy is not to be conflated with violence or property destruction, but is instead understood as a stance of political integrity and commitment in spite of serious consequences, activists young and old might also more seriously consider the challenge directed at the two of us by a long-time radical pacifist anarchist who housed us for a night: the challenge of becoming “war tax” resistors.  While the unpublicized, moralistic actions of scattered, aging individuals that seem to have characterized the war tax resistance movement for many decades haven’t proven particularly appealing to many younger radicals, it seems that a coordinated, media-savvy campaign of joint declarations of tax resistance by a significant group of the younger-generation activists, expressing an explicit anti-imperialist politics, has enough potential to ignite debate as to at least be given a thoughtful appraisal.  “After all,” expressed our new friend, “the only thing the government wants is your money.  They sure don’t care if you vote, or if you approve of what they’re doing.”

Whether withholding taxes or sabotaging Bechtel is on the table, concretely understanding the prospects, pitfalls, and practice of increasing confrontation is a vital need in this period — both in terms of our local/regional work as well as for the movement on a national level.

4. What about Anti-racism and Multiracial Movement Building?

Throughout the tour, the only discussions that were genuinely multi-racial — where people of color comprised at least half of those in attendance, rather than only a smattering — were either organized by people of color groups or ones where the local event organizers had consciously worked to ensure the event was co-sponsored and planned by a variety of local organizations, including ones comprised of and led by people of color, who worked to bring their members and contacts out.  Because the left, like U.S. society in general, remains significantly divided by race, proactive measures are needed to create multi-racial spaces where work to bridge that divide can take place.  When that work was done, and when participants started from a place of respect, recognizing our differences as well as our similarities, we found that we shared similar analysis of the current situation and many common principles of the world we would like to move towards.  As participants in these conversations often arrived at their radical politics from different experiences, we found that discussing our motivations and the thought processes that led us to do the work we do helped participants build trust and understanding.  Recognizing and appreciating the sacrifices and contributions to the broader struggle for justice made by people from the different organizations, nationalities, and tendencies of those in the room was also important to this process.

At one event, an older white/Jewish activist queried the extent to which young people’s lives and groups today are multiracial and wondered what specific factors divided white activists from people of color.  In response to the latter, we argued that radical young people’s social lives are often in large part built around oppositional youth cultures such as hip-hop and punk that tend to be racially distinct.  Furthermore, few organizations or forums exist where younger activists from different class and race backgrounds can interact while taking part in discussions and joint work.  This leaves young people to meet and attempt to forge connections on a personal basis — an often difficult and intimidating task in today’s fraught racial landscape.  Encouraging multiracial interactions and organization building is a task where guidance and direct involvement from older-generation activists could prove especially useful.

Building these multiracial relationships requires steady organizing, a demonstrated commitment among white people to racial justice politics, and incorporating anti-racism into our daily lives — recognizing that “multiracial” and “antiracist” are related but not interchangeable phenomenon.  It emerges from and through the organizing work, not from proscribing all-white versus only-multiracial organizational forms; both models exist, and each has its own advantages and disadvantages.  The call for Black Power, raised 40 years ago, challenged whites to organize with other whites against racism while practicing concrete solidarity with people-of-color liberation movements.  How do we build a radical power base among white people that is profoundly anti-racist to contribute to toppling white supremacy?  Few people are framing the struggle in those terms.  And how do class differences among white people shape the ways in which people can be won over to anti-racist politics?  White folks of our generation seem to be better at talking to other white people about racism, though not necessarily organizing them or making material aid and concrete solidarity central responsibilities of our political work.  One problem lies in being too comfortable with all-white spaces, as well as in thinking that the presence of some people of color makes the event or group not a white space.  Debate over organizational forms continues, but the need to shift the politics, culture, and practice of the movement in thoroughly anti-racist ways remains a priority.

At some events where we challenged people to discuss the differences in how white supremacy operated in the 1960s and how it does currently, many demurred.  This may indicate that race and racism are topics still so loaded that many white people feel unsure how to navigate even a discussion of them, let alone political practice. In many ways, we’re still fighting to understand the significance of the national liberation struggles of the last generation (including Black Power), and we haven’t even begun to grasp all the nuances of modern white supremacy.  One of the advances by the Black liberation struggle and other theorists of “internal colonialism” in analyzing the situation of people of color in the U.S. was the recognition that white supremacy was about class relations as well as racial oppression.  That is, being oppressed nationally as a colonized people means bearing the brunt of military or police violence, disproportionately occupying the most precarious positions economically, denied access to land, and under constant cultural pathologization or attack.  Even if generally not expressed as a position of (neo-) colonialism, many of these realities are still true for the Black and Brown populations of this country, immigrant and citizen alike, and yet the relationship of race to gender to class is still a challenging one for many U.S. radicals to grasp and organize around.  While left scholars have written extensively about the “new imperialism” in recent years, few of these accounts attempt to theorize imperialist-race relations within the United States.  In addition to what it offers in understanding the situation of African Americans, such an analysis certainly provides insights into the super-exploitation and racist discrimination directed at Latin Americans and Asians who have migrated to industrialized nations after being pushed out of their home countries by free trade agreements, structural adjustment programs, and brutal counter-insurgency operations.

If we are to undertake useful anti-racist work as leftists differently positioned in U.S. and global racial hierarchies, we need a thorough and frequently updated understanding of the many and quickly changing racial projects presently at play.  Clearly, though, the current crisis situations we are living through don’t provide us the option of sitting idle while great thinkers perfect a comprehensive new framework for understanding race; theoretical breakthroughs are made in the course of struggle.  This means we must do our best to internalize lessons of the past and to practice anti-racist principles daily in our personal relationships and movement building initiatives as we target white supremacy with a program of racial justice.

5. What Does Solidarity Mean, Especially with the Immigrant Justice Movement?

In our events, we talked about solidarity as a centerpiece of radical activism, particularly among white people.  Building off the example of the Weather Underground and other white anti-imperialists of the 1970s, we defined solidarity not just as financial or administrative support of other people’s struggles but fundamentally recognizing the ways in which we all would benefit by the successes of movements of oppressed people and the ways, therefore, that we all have active roles to play in the movement.  The challenge, then, is to give life to an active notion of solidarity where people with privilege don’t sideline themselves but instead endeavor the difficult task of both providing and respecting other’s leadership in the movement, based on our complicated positioning and responsibility.

The need to understand, untangle, and unleash solidarity was particularly apparent for us in relation to the immigrant rights movement and to the situation in the Gulf Coast.  Hurricane Katrina captured people’s attention and empathy, but few people seemed to know how to express concrete solidarity with people from the region.  In terms of immigrant justice, we saw widespread inspiration from and interest in the movement from the people we met but a general confusion about how to be involved.  While individuals turned out to rallies and marches, they frequently didn’t know next steps or ongoing work they could participate in.  Non-immigrant activists rooted in small towns sometimes had stronger pre-existing connections to leaders within local immigrant communities than those in larger cities and were therefore able to plug into demonstration prep-work and help mobilize supportive communities.  Even in these situations, however, radicals committed to anti-racist movement building sometimes felt conflicted between their political analysis and their understanding of what successful movement building strategies (and common respect) require.  In North Carolina, for instance, organizers we met agreed with the critique of the relation between capitalist globalization and the influx of undocumented workers expressed by a dogmatic Marxist organization that had positioned itself to take a leading role in springtime immigrant rights mobilizations.  However, they also found it important to let local immigrant communities set the terms of their movement, even though representatives of those communities took a more liberal approach emphasizing that hard-working immigrants deserved respect.

Two positive examples in terms of solidarity with the movement, one we saw and the other we heard about: In Chicago, a day laborer worker’s center tied to a group called the Latino Union relied on numerous volunteers from outside the various Latino communities to teach English language classes, provide tech support, and other tasks.  And the mobilizations in the southwest to confront and disrupt the Minutemen vigilante groups are an exciting recent example of active anti-racist solidarity.  They work to intercede and prevent the racist violence and intimidation carried out by the Minutemen, while presenting an anti-racist perspective on immigration to whites, in person and through the press.

6. What Is the State of the Struggle Today, Particularly Internationally?

In talking about movement history, we always focused on the national liberation struggles as the dominant revolutionary force of the post-WWII period (circa 1945-1975) and how that is not the primary mode of struggle today.  This shift is due both to those movements’ successes, in gaining formal independence, and their shortcomings, including those pointed to by feminist and queer critiques of nationalism and the state as constructs for liberation.  To this can be added broader political economic changes: capitalist globalization weakening the state as a means of achieving self-determination and attempting to isolate revolutionary governments, the (environmental) link between self-determination and interdependence, and the presence of right-wing opposition to imperialism.  Based on this reality, some organizers are describing the climate as being a “three-way fight.” “Three-way fight” politics argue that the struggle today consists of the global capitalist/imperialist ruling class (of liberal, moderate, and conservative persuasions), the revolutionary left, and the revolutionary right (al-Qaeda, neo-Nazis, etc.).  The question of what it means to be on the left today, of deciding friends and enemies, is a complex one that needs to be treated seriously.  (For more, see the blog: www.threewayfight.blogspot.com).

What are the criteria for being on the left, both within this country and internationally?  And how do or should we think about those forces that are not leftist but are tying down, and therefore limiting, U.S. imperial reach?  This question is particularly urgent for the anti-war movement, as there is a wide array of forces opposed to U.S. imperialism — in Iraq, Afghanistan, the U.S., and elsewhere — which are not revolutionary leftists or our allies but  whose existence stalls the ability of the U.S. to pursue military conquest elsewhere (from Venezuela to Iran and beyond).  This has created confusion in the U.S. of who and what to support on the international level and has particularly affected the anti-war movement in terms of there not being a clear, progressive-revolutionary, mass-based movement to champion as the victor in Iraq the way the National Liberation Front was for Vietnam.  At the same time, there are other situations of imperial aggression and revolutionary Left activity that people rarely brought up in discussions of international politics.  Debate about the occupations of Iraq and Palestine prevailed, whereas few people mentioned Haiti, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, Nepal, or elsewhere.  We need to sharpen our international awareness and connections beyond the hotspot areas.

When discussing the Weather Underground, we talked about a time when national liberation struggles abroad had a lot of influence on the domestic left.  People on tour didn’t speak in much depth about their assessment of the international left as a whole or its effect on organizing in this country.  However, there is a definite impact.  Many groups, especially in Latin America, are pushing forward ideas about more direct and participatory forms of democracy on an international scale.  This doesn’t seem to be derived from a deep study and adoption of classic (European) anarchist texts but more from building on local and indigenous traditions of self-governance and self-management.  (Here, of course, the Zapatista movement in Chiapas, Mexico, stands out as a particular example.)

As in the 1950s and early 1960s, there is a strong anarchist impulse in several of today’s auspicious organizing projects.  These anarchistic currents flow among people and groups who do not consider themselves anarchists (for instance, organizations such as Incite! and Critical Resistance, which seek non-state solutions to problems such as domestic violence and are doing some of the most thoughtful work around state violence and restorative justice).  To these projects could be added those who proudly identify as anarchists in some of the more successful anti-war, racial justice, and workplace organizing that we saw.  Thus, the anarchist critique of state power, and its valuing of principles such as direct democracy/transparency and mutual aid, find much expression in radical movements.

At the same time, as an ideology for making revolution and building a non-capitalist, anti-oppressive society, anarchism is woefully undertheorized.  Though anarchism remains powerful as critique, many seem to adopt it as a vision and organizing model more by default than as a result of the concrete political programs it offers.  Social democracy and authoritarian communism have been proven un-solutions.  Anarchism has had little chance to prove itself a success or a failure.  A significant factor in the Marxist-Leninist turn among sectors of the 1960s/1970s left was the fact that various third world revolutions were based on those ideas.  With that model no longer dominant, anarchism has reemerged — if not as a fully realized framework, than as a sensibility and a name for a deep-rooted belief in the possibility of radical alternatives.  And as third world liberations struggles helped define ’60s and ’70s radicalism in the U.S., anarchism today is buoyed by the exciting recent experiments and successes in Latin America.  Still, while opposition to the state in its current form and criticism of the state as a construct are both valuable, and despite the fact that anarchism has attracted many impressive and committed organizers, an ideology that is dominant by default is not a stable enough ground to fight from.  We have serious and substantial work to do to create a praxis that synthesizes and further develops the achievements of feminist, anti-racist, Marxist, anarchist, queer, and ecological theory and practice.

7. How Do We Organize Simultaneously on Local, Regional, National, and International Levels?

Many people expressed a desire for a national (or international) movement and yet frustration with attempts to date or confusion as to how.  The rebirth of Students for a Democratic Society should be seen as an effort to move in that direction.  SDS organizers we met boast of significant interest among not only college but also among high school students (building, no doubt, on the successful and impressive role of high school youth of color in struggles for education and immigrant justice).  While the ’60s nostalgia indicated in the organization’s choice of name and promotional materials concerns us, perhaps the explicit modeling on an historic initiative has helped to overcome the hesitancy towards building nationally coordinated organizations expressed by some radicals in recent years.  How successful SDS will be in training people as organizers, incorporating a profoundly diverse membership and leadership, and building a radical anti-war, anti-racist, queer-positive, and pro-feminist program among students is unknown and unfolding.

While SDS is developing, there are other efforts at regional organizing that are more developed, recognize geographical specificity, and extend beyond students.  The two main networks we saw were the Northeast Federation of Anarcho-Communists (NEFAC, a syndicalist association of anarchists involved in union organizing primarily in Montreal and Boston) and Project South (a Black-led training and leadership development organization based in Atlanta).  Project South helped organize the recent Southeast Social Forum and is spearheading the U.S. Social Forum to be held in 2007, which should prove an exciting prospect for developing regional and national collaboration.

In general, although urban areas have a bigger left base and more organizing going on, it would be a mistake to overlook or neglect the political work emerging from rural and non-urban areas, particularly in the South.  The South has been a vital place in U.S. radical history, and it remains the site of an impressive multiracial and multigenerational collection of organizers and organizing.  In smaller towns, sectarianism tended to be less of a problem because people cannot afford the disunity that often prevails in bigger cities and places with a larger left presence.

8. How Do We Relate to Sectarian Groups?

In addition to the ever-present divisions of class, race, and generation already mentioned, a wide gulf persists, as it has for decades, between groups seen to be sectarian and those not.  This division runs so deep that participants on the opposing sides frequently refuse to recognize one another as true radicals, or members of the left.  Although they exert a bigger presence in the major cities, the various groups hawking papers, obsessing over the “right political line,” and supposedly building vanguard communist parties are a ubiquitous, if frustrating, reality for those, including us, who take different approaches.  We ran into people active in such groups — more than a few of them doing concrete political work — in several places, including smaller towns that would have seemed unlikely homes for these groups.  While many of us have learned (or been counseled) to ignore them, this response is insufficient.  It is not enough to write them off for their dogmatism, their rigidity, or their hostility to other groups — although all of these things tend to be there in the practice if not the theory of groups such as the Spartacist League and the International Socialist Organization.

Despite these characteristics, sectarian organizations have an appeal that needs to be understood.  Such groups offer people, especially newer activists, a defined organizational structure, political education, leadership development, and a sense of strategy and participation in a broader movement.  All of these attributes are valid and valuable, even if their application is thoroughly problematic.  The fact that democratic and non-sectarian groups have generally been unable to offer such things to newer activists expands the ranks of the sectarian groups.  We need to see what they do right so as to understand their appeal.  We need to be able to articulate our differences with these groups more specifically and concretely than we have to date.  It is insufficient to dismiss them solely for peddling papers too aggressively or making long-winded statements during Q&A periods.  Rather, our criticisms must be of their political vision and organizing approach — one which prioritizes the promotion of their organizations over what is best for the movement as a whole.  Where possible, we need to have some kind of relationship to these groups — not to tolerate their disruptions or manipulations, but to be able to work with the expatriates and frustrated former members.  And, ultimately, we need to out-organize them, to build organizations and movements that offer a sense of analysis, development, and program without making claims at being the vanguard or losing our sense of transparency.

9. What Role Does the Environment — as Well as the Environmental Movement Itself (Particularly Its More Militant Sectors) — Play in the Movement?

During our travels we were gently criticized for saying little about where ecology and environmental activism fits into libratory practices, and specifically, the lack of contributions by eco-activists in the Letters From Young Activists book — criticism we took to heart.

We were pleasantly surprised to find that, even in as unlikely places as rust-belt cities, many of those who came to events were aware of and concerned about the slew of recent indictments, investigations, and grand jury subpoenas against radical environmental activists, occurring predominantly in the Western half of the United States. This is a positive sign, since even those who find property destruction to halt development tactically unsound should find common cause in fighting the post-PATRIOT ACT increases in surveillance and arrests, in addition to the undemocratic grand jury investigations that have been crucial in cracking down on many radical movements, historically and still today.

The militant environmental and animal rights movements face significant repression, which merit our solidarity, and yet there are also legitimate political differences that should not be overlooked or minimized.  To cite a somewhat extreme example, a “green anarchist” recently responded to a query about what “a primitivist response to the global AIDS crisis would look like” by arguing that, in the long run, the crisis might be for the best, as it reduces the human impact on the environment!  Approaches like this, not surprisingly, have not attracted a very broad following, at least not in the places we visited.  Such misanthropic and anti-civilization politics do find a following among some sectors of the radical environmental movement.  Yet, with widespread concern over and attention to the global climate crisis, among other things, an environmental focus can provide a crucial point of organizing.  We met with a 91-year-old movement veteran who was most politically inspired today by the urban gardening and ecological self-sufficiency movements.  She promoted the slogan made popular by Black farmers, “If we can’t feed ourselves, we can’t free ourselves.” At the same time, a community organizer working predominantly with low-income Black women championed these efforts while disagreeing that everyone is able to participate in them and that they are sufficient to meet the needs of the most marginalized.

The environment serves as a limit and Achilles heel to neoliberal developmentalism.  The fact that the eco-system cannot support all inhabitants of the planet in living anything like current American lifestyles proves the lie that neoliberal policies are pursued as the most promising path to universal material well-being.  The environment also provides a personal stake for economically privileged people in anti-capitalist struggle.  Capitalism doesn’t only destroy pristine potential vacation spots for the well-to-do — it threatens the sustainability of life on earth in general.  If the idea of total ecological collapse in some unspecified, seemingly far-off future, is not tangible enough to inspire action, the threat of more localized, if still catastrophic, climate-related disasters in the lifetime of children and grandchildren might provide some impetus to fractions of the middle classes in industrialized countries to enter into anti-capitalist alliances.  A greater emphasis on ecology and sustainability in an anti-imperialist organizing approach, then, has some potential to link constituencies and perhaps to attract some passionate activists who had previously focused primarily on direct action eco-politics.

10. How Can We Develop Strategy?

Fundamentally, the above questions and our discussions on tour all revolve around developing a winning strategy within the movement — a strategy to stop the war, to repeal the right-wing attacks (on immigrants, on queers, on women. . .), to raze the walls and borders, and to begin proactively building non-capitalist alternatives.  What does it mean to say all the issues are connected?  How can we move forward on different fronts but with a defined strategy to win?  How can we organize in a way that successfully targets the root causes and not just the more visible outgrowths?  These are the type of tough questions we need to be grappling with in defining broad, long-term strategies.  Strategy, of course, grows out of analysis, organizing, and reflection — intentionally grappling with the realities, possibilities, and pitfalls of the contemporary political conditions and of the “forces on the ground” that do and could constitute the left.  While there are many difficult questions we need to answer, our biggest deficiency is not a lack of analysis of the political situation.  Rather, with academics and organizers too often lacking strong organizational ties to one another, circulating information and disseminating analysis remains one of the biggest challenges to informed strategic planning.  In addition to building these linkages, we need a much better assessment of our forces.  The left is so splintered that we often don’t know what organizations exist, what resources we have, and what each other is doing.  As overwhelming a task as it sounds, if we are to begin developing winning strategy, we need to map out the left by city, state, and region.   Taking these steps can deepen our understanding of the situation, its roots, and possibilities for ruptures in the system, along with popularizing and organizing around radical conceptions.

There is a definite relationship between the war, immigration, prisons and criminalization/repression, patriarchy, the media, the transgender liberation movement, radical unionism, the education system, struggles for the environment, and beyond.  How do we connect those issues in our own work?  How do our organizations work strategically on their own fronts but in shared strategy/coalition with groups working on different fronts?  What should we expect to happen, and what goals should we set for ourselves for the next 10, 25, and 50 years?  Collectively grappling with these questions can lead to collective liberation.

Concluding Comments:

Although at nearly every event we critically discussed Weather’s gender politics and read a powerful excerpt from the Letters book about the state of the feminist movement and the continued centrality of a gender analysis to radical political projects, few people seemed interested in discussing the state of feminist and LGBTQ activism in the U.S. or how to conceptualize and respond to the persistent right-wing attacks against women and queer rights.  While many seemed to acknowledge and decry the severe and unique burdens placed on third word women by war and by the new international division of labor, we had few conversations about how to conceptualize the relation of domestic feminist and queer work to anti-imperialism and a unified left political project.  Regrettably, this is a pattern that we have reproduced in this report.  It signals a need for more concerted theoretical work and relationship building in these areas.  At the same time, the strengths and legacies of the queer and women’s liberation movements, along with the emerging transgender liberation movement, were apparent.  Even if not the subject of as much explicit conversation, many young people in particular have internalized feminism and queer and transgender liberation as fundamental to their politics, and queer cultural expressions infused many of the activist scenes or spaces we experienced.

Histories of groups like the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the original Students for a Democratic Society show the important role played by traveling speakers and organizers in attempts to link local efforts, debate strategies, and provide support to activists who felt isolated in less than hospitable climates.  Though we didn’t represent an organization, we found our trip to be a success and worth the effort (not to mention, a lot of fun), as it allowed us to make new contacts and pass along old ones, debate common issues in many places, and serve as a transmission belt of ideas and actions between different cities.  More traveling to promote ideas, books, films, and other projects is likely to help create and expand activist networks and to raise the level of discourse in ways that will hopefully lead to more formal connections.  Of course, traveling requires time and money, making fundraising and other forms of assistance to such efforts crucial.

We would like to thank everyone who helped organize events, provided us with a place to stay, donated generously for gas money, engaged us in brilliant conversation, or otherwise helped make our trip incredibly fun, productive, and stimulating.  We decided to write this report because we have found similar “debriefs” and “report-backs” by traveling comrades to be thought-provoking and to provide a feeling of connection with a wider movement that it is often easy to lose in the daily grind of local work.  We hope this report has, to some small degree, served these same purposes, and we are eager to hear your reactions and continue these conversations.

Andy Cornell is a union organizer and graduate student living in Brooklyn, NY.  He is a contributor to Letters From Young Activists and editor of the political fanzine The Secret Files of Captain Sissy.  Contact him at arc280@nyu.edu.

“The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism”

by Naomi Klein

2007 Metropolitan Books

I feel confident saying that The Shock Doctrine is one of the most important political non-fiction works of the last decade. This should be a high school textbook, or at least required reading in college. Naomi Klein applies her extensive vision and intellect to present us with a way of seeing our world that is extremely relevant and powerful: in the pursuit of enormous profits, those running the global economy intentionally exploit terrible catastrophes, or even create them, to take things for themselves that only shocked and traumatized populations would give up. This ambulance-chasing strategy of those in power is defined as the “shock doctrine,” and “disaster capitalism”, alternatively known as “neoliberalism” is the dominant social paradigm it has created.

Although there are flaws here, which I will mention, this book is both timely and well-written; Klein carries the reader through a story about grandiose topics like neoliberalism, torture, psychology, and international politics that is fundamentally readable.

The most important contribution made by this book in my view is the dismantling of the myth that capitalism’s global dominance is a function of democracy or destiny. This is the notion that with the defeat of the Soviet Union, all alternatives to “the free market” have naturally faded into history, presumably because capitalism is so irresistible. To the contrary, Naomi Klein provides numerous case studies to show us the exact opposite is true – the temporary triumph of global capitalism has been fertilized by the victims of natural disasters, terrorist attacks, wars, campaigns of torture, and economic calamity. In short, alternatives to capitalism have been shocked into submission wherever they’ve appeared.

This is no accident, it is part of a conscious crusade by market fundamentalists, those devoted to the pseudo-religious belief that “the market solves all.” Klein explains that the shock doctrine was developed (at least in part) by the patron saint of neoliberalism, free-market economist Milton Friedman. In his words, “only a crisis – actual or perceived – produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around.” And he intended to provide those ideas. It was Friedman’s opus “Capitalism and Freedom” that proclaimed neoliberalism’s core edicts: deregulation, privatization and cutbacks to social services.

Since the 1970s, these teachings have been vigorously applied across the globe by the “holy trinity” of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization (WTO). Their institutional missions have been to turn the globe into one enormous marketplace, and generate maximum profits by compelling governments to shed the ability to protect their people and natural environments from the plunder of capital. The trinity’s painful prescriptions (like selling health care and education to for-profit industries) typically followed on the heels of disaster, and were attached to much-needed loans or aid that could not be turned down in a time of crisis. Distressed governments took the bait, but in the long run the shock doctrine just created more poverty and ruin. Davison Budhoo, an IMF senior economist who designed these policies in Latin America and Africa throughout the ’80s explained in his resignation letter, “sometimes I feel that there is not enough soap in the whole world to cleanse me from the things that I did do in your name.”

Naomi takes us on an extensive tour to survey the damage. The first stop is probably the most striking – Chile 1973. It was here that Salvador Allende, democratically-elected socialist president of Chile, was overthrown by the Chilean military with the support of the CIA and Richard Nixon. The brute violence, disappearances and torture that followed are painful to recount, but equally painful were the economic policies implemented straight out of Milton Friedman’s neoliberal playbook. Following the coup, it was disciples of Friedman – the “Chicago Boys” – who were put in charge of the economy, and they acted swiftly to reduce wages, break unions, and sell off vital social services to private multinational corporations. This first neoliberal testing ground showed that Friedmanism succeeded in raising profits, just as it raised the inflation, unemployment, and hunger that soon gripped the country.

These origins of the shock doctrine are fascinating, but Klein also brings us up to the present to inspect disaster capitalism as it operates in today’s world. One of the examples is Iraq, where “Shock and Awe” facilitated the complete dismantling of the Iraqi state, and continued US military occupation still prevents the population from interfering with highly unpopular shock treatment policies like selling off the nation’s vast oil wealth to western oil corporations. Likewise we see the same pattern in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, as officials jumped at the “opportunity” of this cataclysmic storm to push through policies that normally would have faced stiff opposition, like the shutting down of public schools and housing projects to make way for charters and condos. This privatization may have the effect of increasing the suffering of the impoverished and now somewhat homeless black majority of the city, but in the shock doctors’ eyes, such suffering is hidden behind large stacks of money.

In case you weren’t convinced yet, we also get to tour South Asia following the 2004 tsunami, post-Soviet Poland and Russia, post-Tiananmen Square Massacre China, post-Apartheid South Africa, and at least 5 other traumatized regions to study the shock doctrine in action, and everywhere we find the same theme – exploiting disasters with economic projects that benefit the few before the many can respond. Whether the crises are intentionally created or merely opportunistically seized upon, Naomi Klein helps us see that it’s the policies of deregulation, privatization, and cutbacks to social services that prove to be as disastrous as the calamities they follow.

My main criticisms of this book center around the fact that it’s simply too long and too depressing. There’s a tremendous wealth of information here, and the points are well made, but it ends up being overwhelming (even for me, and I’m used to reading about horrible tragedies). How much can one read about torture chambers, mass poverty, and violent exploitation before despair sets in? At 466 pages, this is overkill, and the author can’t help but be redundant. Worse, only the last of the 22 chapters actually deals with solutions, providing essential hope for our otherwise desolate and traumatic landscape.

This conclusion is by far the best and most important section, because it shows that in many ways this disaster capitalist complex is being defeated by the efforts of regular people, most dramatically in Latin America. Detailing how the global justice movement has delegitimized the neoliberal project and its trinity of institutions provides necessary knowledge for all organizers and activists today – the weakpoints of the worldwide capitalist menace.  But preceded by 400+ pages of gloom, I bet most readers don’t even reach this before giving up on the book. In short, as vital as The Shock Doctrine is, it could have been made truly transcendant by cutting at least half the exposee of the problem and supplementing several more hopeful chapters along the lines of the (excellent) conclusion. Surely the shock doctrine’s traumatic story doesn’t have to be a trauma to read.

In the end, Naomi Klein stands out as a genius who’s mastered an incredible library of knowledge, and an artist able to weave together a torrent of difficult concepts and facts into a compelling story that educates the reader on basic truths of their reality. The lessons and themes of The Shock Doctrine can be applied much more extensively than Klein dares to here, as it’s not just “disaster capitalism” that requires an element of shock to propagate itself, but capitalism as such. From the beginning with the land enclosures and the witch burnings of 15th-17th century Europe, capitalism was built through appalling theft and horrific flames. Understanding how the system we have to deal with now was birthed in those pioneering social and ecological shocks (as part of a more-or-less deliberate strategy by elites) is an effort made much easier with the help of this book.

And now that capitalism is suffering its own shocks, will new disasters present themselves as opportunities for the powerful to develop fresh forms of exploitation (bank bailouts spring to mind), or will we establish the space to finally heal from the trauma we’ve been subjected to under capitalism, as we move towards a more just and sustainable future?  That story is still being written, one day at a time, by all of us.

As the demonstrations in Iran continue despite mounting repression, another dramatic showdown between military and public has broken out in Honduras after a violent coup organized by the country’s wealthy elites kidnapped left-leaning president Manuel “Mel” Zelaya and removed him from the country.  This action has not only been condemned by much of the international community, it was immediately resisted by Hondurans taking to the streets in large numbers.

Image from Narco News

Image from School of Americas Watch

Image from the BBC

Even before the coup had taken place, anxious pedestrians shouted and cursed the approaching soldiers. In this video, one woman hits every soldier passing her. The surging protesters than begin to block military vehicles and surround a tank!

I’ve also reposted an article giving some background on the situation, this one from the School of Americas Watch. The “School of Americas”, now called the “Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation,” is a combat and torture training institute in Fort Benning, Georgia that has trained thousands of Latin American paramilitary soldiers to return to their countries and terrorize peasant and student movements. Many of these “graduates” have gone on to become fascist generals or dictators in their home countries, as in the current coup in Honduras. The institute remains open to this day, but every year SOA Watch organizes large protests to shut it down.

Military Coup in Honduras

A military coup has taken place in Honduras this morning (Sunday, June 28),

led by SOA graduate Romeo Vasquez.

In the early hours of the day, members of the Honduran military surrounded the presidential palace and forced the democratically elected president, Manuel Zelaya, into custody. He was immediately flown to Costa Rica.

A national vote had been scheduled to take place today in Honduras to consult the electorate on a proposal of holding a Constitutional Assembly in November. General Vasquez had refused to comply with this vote and was deposed by the president, only to later be reinstated by the Congress and Supreme Court.

The Honduran state television was taken off the air. The electricity supply to the capital Tegucigalpa, as well telephone and cellphone lines were cut. Government institutions were taken over by the military. While the traditional political parties, Catholic church and military have not issued any statements, the people of Honduras are going into the streets, in spite of the fact that the streets are militarized. From Costa Rica, President Zelaya has called for a non-violent response from the people of Honduras, and for international solidarity for the Honduran democracy.

While the European Union and several Latin American governments just came out in support of President Zelaya and spoke out against the coup, a statement that was just issued by Barack Obama fell short of calling for the reinstatement of Zelaya as the legitimate president.

Call the State Department and the White House

Demand that they call for the immediate reinstatement of Honduran President Zelaya.

State Department: 202-647-4000 or 1-800-877-8339
White House: Comments: 202-456-1111, Switchboard: 202-456-1414

Visit www.SOAW.org and www.SOAW.org/presente for articles and updated information.

Click here to watch TeleSur (in Spanish) for live updates

Salt of the Earth is a classic organizing movie about striking Mexican-American miners and their wives. Based on an incredible true story, the 1953 film follows the organizing efforts of the town’s women, who must overcome the company’s classism, the sheriff’s racism, as well as their own husband’s sexism, to win the strike (while the men stay at home and take care of the house and children). Highly recommended!

This is just the first segment of the movie, make sure to click the Up-Arrow button to watch the rest!

After reading this article by Betsy Hartmann rebutting recent psuedo-environmental hysteria surrounding overpopulation, I wanted to investigate further how fears of overpopulation facilitate sexist, racist and imperialistic policies by Western countries and NGOs against poor women of color in the Global South.

As Hartmann states with clarity:

“The population controllers have blinders on their eyes when they attribute the cutting down of forests, the polluting of water supplies, and the extinction of species to too many poor people, rather than the unchecked power of large corporations to monopolize resources and ravage the land. Missing from the picture is the question of technological choice: for example, reducing the population of automobiles and investing in public transport worldwide would do much more to curtail climate change than imposing limits on family size.”

This seems to me fundamentally correct. It’s clear that human civilization has overshot the capacity of the Earth to provide for it, that’s not in question. The question is about what forces are responsible for this, and what can we do about it?

For Hartmann and myself, the number of people alive is not nearly as important as the structure of the economic system in which we live. The planet could support 6, or maybe even 9, billion people living a low-impact lifestyle, based on community subsistence and a diet full of fruits and vegetables. But the planet cannot possibly support 6 billion people living like Americans, with their cars, and their computers, and their wars.

As with all things, the debate on “overpopulation” is a political debate, because its a question about who has power and who doesn’t. Placing the blame on poor women is just a way of ignoring the real power-holders: Large multinational corporations and Western capitalist governments.

Below are excerpts from an article that I found helpful in explaining this more clearly. [alex]

10 Reasons to Rethink “Overpopulation”

By the Population and Development Program at Hampshire College

Fears of overpopulation are pervasive in American society. From an early age we are taught that the world is overpopulated and that population pressure is responsible for poverty, hunger, environmental degradation and even political insecurity. If we don’t get population growth under control now, the argument goes, our future is in danger.

Conventional wisdom, however, is not always wise. Placing the blame on population obscures the powerful economic and political forces that threaten the well-being of both people and the planet. It leads to top-down, target-driven population control programs that undermine voluntary family planning and women’s reproductive rights. It reinforces racism, promoting harmful stereotypes of poor people of color. And it prevents the kind of global understanding we need in order to reach across borders to work together for a more just, peaceful and environmentally sustainable world.

Here are ten reasons why we should rethink ‘overpopulation.’

…

2. The focus on population masks the complex causes of poverty and inequality.

A narrow focus on human numbers obscures the way different economic and political systems operate to perpetuate poverty and inequality. It places the blame on the people with the least amount of resources and power rather than on corrupt governments and economic and political elites. It ignores the legacy of colonialism and the continuing unequal relationship between rich and poor countries, including unfavorable terms of trade and the debt burden. It says nothing about the concentration of much wealth in a few hands. In the late 1990s, the 225 people who comprise the ‘ultra-rich’ had a combined wealth of over US $1 trillion, equivalent to the annual income of the poorest 47% of the world’s people.

3. Hunger is not the result of ‘too many mouths’ to feed.

…There is enough food for every man, woman and child to have more than the recommended daily calorie intake. People go hungry because they do not have the land on which to grow food or the money with which to buy it. In Brazil, one percent of the land owners control almost half of the country’s arable land, and more land is owned by multinational corporations than all the peasants combined. Globally, more than 1.2 billion people earn less than $1 per day, making it difficult to afford enough food to feed a family. Many governments have failed to make food security a priority. In 2002, when at least 320 million people in India were suffering from hunger, the government tripled its rice and wheat exports. The U.S. is the largest food producer in the world, yet more than one in ten American households are either experiencing hunger or are at the risk of it.

4. Population growth is not the driving force behind environmental degradation.

Blaming environmental degradation on overpopulation lets the real culprits off the hook. … And just who is destroying the rain forest? While poor peasants sometimes play a role, corporate ranching, mining and logging operations are chiefly responsible for tropical deforestation. Worldwide militaries are major agents of environmental destruction. War ravages natural landscapes and military toxics pollute land, air and water. Nuclear weapons, reactors and waste pose the most deadly environmental threat to the planet. Imagine what a different world it would be if all the resources invested in producing deadly armaments went instead to environmental restoration and the development of cleaner, greener energy sources and technologies.

Focusing on population also blinds us to the positive role many poor people play in protecting the environment. In many parts of the world, small farmers, especially women, are the main preservers of plant biodiversity through cultivating local crop varieties, preserving seeds, and forest stewardship.

…

6. Population control targets women’s fertility and restricts reproductive rights.

Population control programs view women as ‘breeders’ of too many babies without considering the complex circumstances of their lives and their reasons for having children. All women should have access to high quality, voluntary reproductive health services, including safe birth control and abortion. In contrast, population control programs try to drive down birth rates as fast and cheaply as possible through the aggressive promotion of sterilization or long-acting, provider-controlled contraceptives like Norplant and Depo-Provera. In addition to their side effects, these contraceptives pose greater health risks for marginalized women in areas where screening and follow-up care are inadequate or nonexistent. Unlike condoms, they do not protect women from sexually transmitted diseases, such as HIV/AIDS.

…In China, the one-child policy is still enforced through forced sterilizations and abortions. In both countries, the strong preference for bearing at least one son, coupled with restrictive population control policies, has led to sex-selective abortions of female fetuses and skewed sex ratios.

9. Threatening images of overpopulation reinforce racial and ethnic stereotypes and scapegoat immigrants and other vulnerable communities.

Negative media images of starving African babies, poor, pregnant women of color, and hordes of dangerous Third World men drive home the message that ‘those people’ outnumber ‘us.’ Fear of overpopulation in the Third World often translates into fear of increasing immigration to the West, and thereby people of color becoming the majority. Harvard professor Samuel Huntington argues that high numbers of Latino immigrants threaten a unified American Anglo-Protestant culture and identity. Anti-immigrant groups tied to white supremacists strategically deploy population fears to appeal to liberal environmentalists. The demonization of immigrants ignores their positive contributions to the U.S. economy as well as the global economic forces that drive many people to migrate.

…In the U.S. there is a strong link between negative images of Third World overpopulation and racist views of African Americans as burdens on society. Eugenics programs and punitive welfare policies have subjected African Americans and other marginalized communities to sterilization and contraceptive abuse because of racist assumptions that their fertility is out of control. Even though women on welfare have on average fewer than two children, the image of the overbreeding ‘welfare queen’ remains firmly fixed in the white imagination.

…

For more information on population issues, see:

• Population in Perspective: A Curriculum Resource, by MaryLugton with Phoebe McKinney, http://www.populationinperspective.org
• Population and Development Program at HampshireCollege, http://popdev.hampshire.edu
• Committee on Women, Population and the Environment, cwpe.org
• The Corner House, www.thecornerhouse.org.uk

http://popdev.hampshire.edu/projects/dt/40

For me as a young person in the United States, the heart of the Empire, I see my current role as organizing youth and students in resistance to the forces of domination (war, debt, oppression).  Others may be better positioned to organize their workplace or their communities, or to start urban gardens, or other projects.  We each have a role to play, and we need to discover it ourselves. [alex]

Building a Sustainable Economy

by Marcin Gerwin

Democracy first

In 1994 the government of Haiti lifted tariffs and allowed imports of cheap, subsidized rice and other crops from abroad. This policy was recommended by the International Monetary Fund and urged by the U.S. government (1). Over the years this tiny change in policy led to an estimated 830,000 job losses, it damaged food security and rural livelihoods, and eventually led to food riots and hunger in 2008 (2). If people in Haiti were to decide by themselves on their country policy, would they choose the recommendations of the IMF that brought them into starvation? Would people of Ecuador allow toxic pollution in the Amazon for the sake of Chevron Texaco profits? Would people in India accept genetically modified seeds of cotton that caused crop failures, spiral of debt and hundreds of farmer suicides? And would people in the USA support bailing out banks with their own money in a way that is not transparent and does not lead to the recovery of the financial system? They wouldn’t. These things happen around the world because we still don’t have true democracy, where people set the rules for themselves.

Women sowing rice in India Photo: Michael Foley

In 2001 twenty subsistence farmers, small traders, small food processors, and consumers, mostly women, and some of them illiterate, met in Indian village to decide on the future of agriculture in the state of Andhra Pradesh. They were chosen to represent the rural diversity of their state. They presented three different models of development. The official plan, put forward by Chief Minister of the state, was backed by grants and loans from the World Bank and the UK government. The plan was to mechanize, consolidate and genetically engineer agriculture of the state to produce cash crops for export, and to reduce the farming population from 70% to 40%, to have more workers for industry. The second vision involved developing environmentally friendly agriculture to produce cheap organic products for domestic and Northern supermarkets and it was supported by the International Federation of Organic Agriculture Movements and the International Trade Center. The third vision was influenced by Gandhian and indigenous ideas, and involved increasing local self-reliance and sustainability in both agriculture and economics.

Each model was illustrated by videos, farmers and traders could hear the summary of the policies, ask questions, consult with government officials, scientists, corporate and NGO representatives from the state, national and international level. They also considered advantages and disadvantages of each vision, based also upon their own knowledge, priorities and aspirations. After one week they made a decision.

Tom Atlee writes:

In their recommendations (…) they said they wanted self-reliant food and farming, and community control over resources. They wanted to maintain healthy soils, diverse crops, trees and livestock, and to build on their indigenous knowledge, practical skills and local institutions. They wanted to maintain the high percentage of people making their livelihood from the land, and did not want their farms consolidated or mechanized in ways that would displace rural people. Most of them could feed their families through their own sustenance farming. They did not want to end up laboring in dangerous brick kilns outside of Hyderabad, like so many who had left their farms. They also rejected genetically modified crops and the export of their local medicinal plants. (3)

If we wish to make some meaningful changes in the world, we need appropriate tools for that. A number one tool in the earth repair workshop is community-based democracy. It is a key for unlocking the potential for sustainability.

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