A Therapist Talks About the Occupy Wall Street Events

Occupy Philly General Assembly, October 6, 2011

By Lane Arye

Originally published by In Front and Center.

Last night I was talking with a group of activists/organizers from around the country about their impressions of the OWS movement. They were curious how the insights of a therapist and conflict facilitator schooled in Worldwork (which was developed by Arnold Mindell) might be useful to folks in the movement. After our teleconference, the activists encouraged me to write this.

First off, OWS is surrounded by a host of critics, from long-time social change organizers to mainstream media.  (Much of the media criticism has been debriefed, so I’m focusing on internal criticisms I have heard.)

We can learn from critics in at least two ways. They can help us improve by pointing out what we genuinely need to change. Paradoxically, they may be criticizing us for something we actually need to do more congruently. Seen from this angle, critics may be highlighting strengths we don’t yet know we have.

Take one criticism: The General Assemblies lead to a kind of individualism of people wanting to be heard and contribute, unaware of the impact on the thousand people listening.  In one recent GA, a small group of frustrated men hijacked the meeting, cursing and physically threatening the entire assembly.  Even in less dramatic situations, most GA’s are filled with judgment, fracturing statements, and individuals repeating each other just so they can get themselves heard.

From one point of view, the criticism is valid. Yes, Western individualism can be very problematic and it is always a good time to learn to become communitarian.  But perhaps there is also something beautiful about this individualism. People have the sense that they can finally speak up about the economy, that their voice is important, that they do not have to shut up and listen to talking heads who supposedly know better.

It can be useful to think about this in terms of roles. (Just as an actor plays many different roles, we all play different roles in our lives, sometimes without awareness.) Individuals wanting to be heard at a General Assembly might be in the role of someone who wants attention. “Pay attention to me! I have something to say!”  For years our “democratic” system has ignored these voices.  They have been excluded by money, a political system that merely offers citizens a chance to vote, and a financial system bent on inequality. But now this role is finding a public voice.

This role is talking to another role that does not listen. Many bankers, politicians, media and others are part of the role of “not listening.”  In essence the voice says: “Shut up! I am not listening to you!”  (Though they have learned to be more subtle: ”I wish the protestors had a single message.”)

There must be a third role here – the listener, who holds the space and receives what someone is offering.

Making this useful: Perhaps facilitators, organizers and activists could benefit from knowing that these three roles are around. For example, when someone is talking a lot at a General Assembly, the facilitator could echo back what the speaker is saying, getting to the essence of it so the speaker knows she/he is heard, and perhaps so the person knows what she/he is trying to say.

I have seen this work around the world. During a forum for reconciliation in the Balkans soon after the war there, a Bosnian Croat would not stop speaking, holding a virtual filibuster, despite the impassioned pleas of his fellow participants. When I echoed back what I thought he was trying to say, he thanked me and sat down. When people feel heard, they stop demanding the time to speak, because filling the missing role of the listener is relieving to the one who has something to say.

Of course, doing this can be challenging. Everyone wants to speak, but who can really listen? In Worldwork we say thatthe elder is the person who can listen to all voices, who supports everyone to speak and be heard, who wants the best for all sides of a given conflict. OWS, like the rest of the world, needs more elders.

Another way to make this useful is to think that probably everyone needs to be heard, and everyone needs to cultivate the listener. Having large groups move into pairs or groups of three people who can actively listen to one another about a given topic might be one way to incorporate this important need.  Occupy Minneapolis used this with huge success during a consensus process that had been routinely blocked. After pair-sharing, the group was able to move forward.  Or Aussie facilitator Holly Hammond has found value in “asking people to raise their hands in response to some questions e.g., ‘Raise your hand if this is your first General Assembly’ (very useful information!); ‘Raise your hand if you camped at City Square’; ‘Raise your hand if you were present at the eviction’, etc.”  Both methods gave people the sense that someone was listening to them, interested in them, and that they were an important part of what was happening.

This is one reason, by the way, that the spokescouncil model can be effective.  In that model there are affinity groups — embedded small groups so everyone can speak — and they each send representatives who sit at the spokescouncil, like spokes of a wheel.  Each spoke can consult with its affinity group and the whole process is done in public so it marries transparent representation and participation.

Similar to the listener is the appreciator. At some GA’s people are attacked when they step into new roles of leadership. How much more exciting it could be if these brave souls were cheered when they took the risk to lead. One OWS activists came up with a different solution: put up a large chart where people can leave anonymous (or signed) messages of appreciation for people in the camp.  It’s another way to model that people are hearing!

The one who wants attention is related to the role of the one who wants to contribute. Even long-time organizers may find themselves not knowing how to contribute to this movement that has its own culture, that may not seem to them to be strategic or sustainable. They might feel disempowered as well, and feel they have to adapt to the General Assembly culture and the rules that have been set up by the OWS organizers. And those who anticipate that the long history of oppression will be repeated yet again may feel that their voices and contributions will not be as welcomed.

When we notice the companion role, the one who receives someone’s contribution, then we find ways to work with this dynamic. For instance, facilitators might again try getting people into small groups, and having folks take turns saying what they personally feel they have to contribute to this movement. The other people in the small group can draw them out, and encourage them to find ways to bring their unique gifts. Many people want to contribute, but do not know how. It is important to support people to find their strengths and fulfill their need to contribute. This can prevent people from feeling discouraged or disempowered (and thus prevent harmful consequences like deciding not to return, or discouraging others from engaging with the movement). It also breathes new life into a movement by bringing new ideas and energy from the grassroots.

When I mentioned this point to the social change organizers, they put it to immediate use. One young woman of color from New York was talking about her frustration that, while People of Color have shown up, their contributions have often been minimized. She felt that OWS needs just the opposite- to value and prioritize these contributions in order to continue expanding and diversifying the movement. Another Philly organizer of color drew her out, asking how she imagined making a difference. Her initial hesitancy was transformed into excitement as he appreciated and received her great ideas. Then he asked if she would like coaching on one point, which she welcomed. A week later she facilitated a 100 person POC meeting, as well as a media training for POC/women, teaching them to better find their voice, initiate interviews, and speak up in the media. She also had other projects/contributions in the pipeline. As she wrote, “My mind and my heart are a-whirlin.”

Here was one great example of what I imagine are a multitude of potential contributions that could be supported to come forward if we notice and fill the various roles in the field.

Let’s not forget that the man who wanted to hear her ideas also made a contribution of his own. Filling the role of the receiver was itself a contribution!

He had been one of those experienced organizers who had not found a way to be of use to the OWS movement. He had at various times tried to give advice to OWS facilitators about how to have better GA’s and create a more sustainable movement, without having had much impact. Now he realized he had been stuck in the role of the one who speaks (one of the many well-meaning people who turn into advice givers) rather than being an elder. That’s when he decided to try something different. (It is important to note that after listening to her, he asked if she wanted coaching, then waited for her feedback before offering his own ideas.)

Another way to look at all of this is through the lens of a criticism that has been leveled by the mainstream media at the OWS movement – that it has so many heads and no unified message. Rather than looking at the truth or falsehood of this criticism, let’s see if there is something good about it! If OWS is creature with many heads, then anyone can be the head. When so many heads are singing beautiful songs, it is up to each of us to both listen, and to sing our own song. The most beautiful and compelling ones will be heard. (Writing this article after listening deeply to those activists is my own attempt to contribute a song. Perhaps someone will hear it.) From this perspective, we are all potential leaders of this movement.

According to Mindell’s idea of Deep Democracy, when all voices and roles have a chance to be heard and interact, the wisdom of a group or community can arise. Perhaps the many-headed creature that is OWS needs our particular song, our particular direction. The world is trying to express itself. It is using us. By believing in our own voice, in our own special part, and by actively listening to our peers, we can help the wisdom and power of the movement to develop.

flyer by Ivan

On March 3 and 4, 2011, acclaimed radical feminist theorist Silvia Federici gave two talks in Philadelphia. On the 3rd, she spoke at the Wooden Shoe anarchist bookstore about her book, Caliban and the Witch, on “The True Nature of Capitalism.” That event literally overflowed with an audience eager to connect the pieces of the historical violence against women, and the ongoing crisis of capitalism.

The next night, on March 4, Silvia spoke at Studio 34 Yoga in West Philly to another packed crowd, on the subject of “Our Struggles, Ourselves: Rethinking Healing Work.”  This was a more personal, and in many ways a much deeper talk, which touched on a multitude of subjects from capitalism’s attacks on humanity and the Earth, to how to build self-reproducing movements that avoid the mistakes of past generations.

Today I am posting the audio recording from that amazing event!

One of Silvia’s most powerful insights that continues to work its way through my brain was the distinction between “suffering,” which may be necessary in movement work, and “sacrifice,” which ultimately harms the movement because it harms us as individuals.  She makes it clear that there should be no place for sacrifice in a movement for our liberation:

“What do we mean when we say sacrifice? Because, it’s very true, in many ways, when we say, ‘I’m not going to go into this career, and instead I’ll do the struggle. I’ll be poor, but eh!’ It may sound like sacrifice. But I would like to say that it’s not!

[Sacrifice] means that I’m taking away something vital from my life, something that I need, and then give it up for the struggle…

It doesn’t mean that the struggle does not make you suffer. But suffering is not sacrifice. It’s really different. There may be pain that comes too. But maybe it’s a pain that is better than the pain you would have if you didn’t struggle.

Maybe it’s a pain that prevents you from dying. Because we can die from numbness, irrelevance, wasting your life in triviality, despair, inertia, passivity, from giving up whatever creativity you have in yourself. So, sometimes it’s worth suffering not to see that in yourself. But i wouldn’t call that sacrifice.”

I am very proud to post this inspiring discussion, including the Question and Answer period, which we recorded in audio format.  There are 2 video recordings which were also made, 1 of each of the talks, and I look forward to making those videos available in the near future.  For now, please enjoy the audio!

Silvia Federici MP3

This is a 2-hour recording, so you might want to download it and put it on your mp3 player or computer.  There is a LOT here, so it may not be possible to get through it all in one sitting!

Also, here I’ll post some notes I’ve taken while re-listening to Silvia’s talk:

At 4 minutes – How can we build movements of resistance without destroying ourselves? How can we build self-reproducing movements?

5:15 – Thesis: We cannot liberate our individual selves without changing the world. At the same time, we cannot change the world without liberating ourselves.

6:30 – Capitalism has not asserted its hegemony simply through economic and military violence, but also by a massive process of disempowerment, by destroying many of our historical, social and natural powers.

Capitalism’s two-fold process of disempowerment:

1. Separation of humanity from nature, “de-naturalization” of the body.
2. Destruction of human communities and relationships with one another, “de-socialization” of society.

Capitalism has destroyed a vast range of knowledges, resistances, needs, desires, in a far more severe way than any other system that preceded it.

13:30 – Our bodies need to encounter the wind, sun, seas, land, plants, etc.

16:00 – Capitalism has broken the patterns of the sun and seasons, and trapped us working indoors in artificial light all year round, without even windows.  This is “a daily torture that is part of a whole sea of unhappiness.”

20:30 – Pre-capitalist society: “most activities were collective activities.” Talks about women giving birth, surrounded by other women.  A very social experience, in which women were empowered and in control of the process.

21:30 – “There is no returning to the past, there is no idealizing of the past, because in many cases those collective structures were not egalitarian structures.” Nevertheless, it is important to be aware that humans have lived drastically different ways throughout history.  We can learn from the past.

27:00 – Most of the important experiences in our lives we now confront alone – birth, death, disease – the situations where we most need to feel connected to other people, are now isolated individual experiences.

31:10 – Many people are even coming to the conclusion that they should be ashamed for experiencing pain and loss.

32:40 – We are losing our sense of ourselves as part of a collective body, a broader community.  Along with the loss of connection with the natural world, this helps explain why there is so much unhappiness and anxiety in today’s world.

36:00 – Two pitfalls in organizing:

1) The idea of political work as a form of self-sacrifice, when you subordinate your own desires, needs, energies, creativity, to the realization of a goal that is outside of you.  This is what much of political work has traditionally been.

2) When you separate political work from your own day-to-day reproduction. This tends to exclude people from the movement who have illnesses, disabilities, or various traumas, who feel that they can’t keep up.

40:30 – Discussion of the amazing success of ACT UP in combating homophobia and AIDS.

43:00 – “We need to rethink what it means to do political work. We cannot do political work, unless, at the same time, as part of it, we also begin to provide, to take into account the very basic reproductive needs that we have individually, collectively, in our communities.”

46:15 – Q+A begins

50:30 – On self-sacrificing organizing: “The worst thing you can do to yourself is to be alienated in the very process that is supposed to liberate you.”

55:15 – Discussion of the “reproductive commons” – the home, how do we create a different way of reproduction that does not turn us into atomized family units, like a kind of prison?  Historically, the home has been the prison where women have been enclosed.

1:01:30 – We need to challenge the dominant ideology that “you have to be self-reliant”, and this whole notion that you cannot depend on others to survive, and to need others is something that degrades you.

1:04:45 – There’s been a growing attack on care work.  Cuts to nursing, aides, etc. by the state.  Most care workers don’t even have time to have a short conversation with the people they are serving – cannot have a human relationship with them, “even though they are probably desperately alone and needing that more than anything else.”

1:07:15 – “The general devaluation of reproductive work”: Reproductive work is supposed to be strictly functional, subordinate to the process of production for the market, functional of making people capable to market-oriented work and cutting the cost of labor.

1:11:30 – Each of us has to understand where we can contribute best – where you’re most drawn to because of the experiences you have.   There is a broad range of struggle.  What we are missing today is the connection between different struggles – to go beyond the Enclosures that separate us into different segments of single-issue politics.  This is the challenge!

1:17:45 – Discussion of the amazing work of Mujeres Creando, in Bolivia.

1:22:30 – “The scam that is microcredits.” Instead of being an instrument to lift women out of poverty, its an instrument of enslavement because it traps women in debt, and many have committed suicide.  Banks humiliate women publicly if they fall into debt.

1:27:00 – “What do we mean when we say sacrifice? Because, it’s very true, in many ways, when we say, ‘I’m not going to go into this career, and instead I’ll do the struggle. I’ll be poor, but eh!’ It may sound like sacrifice. But I would like to say that it’s not! [Sacrifice] means that I’m taking away something vital from my life, something that I need, and then give it up for the struggle.

To me, the struggle is a healing process.  If the struggle itself is not a healing process, it’s not worth it!  There’s something wrong with it. You struggle because you need to liberate yourself.  If the struggle does not liberate you, if it doesnt carry that hope, why bother?

It doesn’t mean that the struggle does not make you suffer. But suffering is not sacrifice. It’s really different. There may be pain that comes too. But maybe it’s a pain that is better than the pain you would have if you didn’t struggle. Maybe it’s a pain that prevents you from dying. Because we can die from numbness, irrelevance, wasting your life in triviality, despair, inertia, passivity, from giving up whatever creativity you have in yourself. So, sometimes it’s worth suffering not to see that in yourself. But i wouldn’t call that sacrifice.”

1:29:30 – As a rule, the struggle must be in itself a reward.  Otherwise you need to rethink it.  Maybe you’re doing something wrong.  I’ve gone through periods in my life where one more meeting and i would have cried.  And i paid a price for it.

1:35:30 – Many younger women now are rethinking feminism, which they first rejected because it was institutionalized and for what it has become.  Many are now discovering in their own lives some dynamics of sexism, but without the broad networks of support and discussion that existed in the 70s. What does feminism mean today?

1:43:40 – The struggle around student debt, education, teaching – the closing of schools, funding, the attack on teachers, is a “major attack on reproduction”.  This is an attack on the future.  Student debt is a form of slavery, a tremendous discipline that shapes the decisions people make about their careers and lives.

1:48:00 – Discussion of the accomplishments of the anti-globalization movement of the early 2000s.

1:50:45 – On electoral politics: The movement periodically gives up its power to electoral campaigns, to the state.  We have a continuous ritual of disaccumulation of knowledge, energies, possibilities, and revolutionary potential every time an election comes around.  We had a lot of energy in the end of the Bush era, which seems to have dissipated now.

1:51:55 – On historical memory: It’s absolutely necessary for us to hand down our stories to the next generations of organizers.

Thanks for listening / reading!  Thanks to scott for uploading, and sarah for recording.

alex

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!

Organizing outside the Chinese Communist Party’s official union, workers have initiated a series of crippling strikes that repeatedly shut down factories, among other forms of rebellion. They are openly defying the totalitarian state-capitalist government of China, as well as the Western corporations whose factories they are closing. And they are winning. Wages are being increased by 40, 60, even 100% at some plants.

If the Chinese workers’ movement continues to disrupt the sweatshops pumping out our electronics and car parts, they could throw a wrench into the China->U.S. cheap goods conveyor belt that has carried global capitalist growth for more than a decade.  The destruction of this global trade alliance will not only free the Chinese workers from the abominable conditions Hari describes, but potentially free the entire planet from an economic system hell-bent on relentless growth and plunder.

image from The Economist

In short, capitalism relies on China’s absurdly cheap labor for its profit margins. This unsanctioned frenzy of Chinese labor organizing is striking a blow in the heart of the system. More power to ‘em! We should support these workers however possible. [alex]

And the Most Inspiring Good News Story of the Year is…

by Johann Hari, August 6, 2010

At first, this isn’t going to sound like a good news story, never mind one of the most inspiring stories in the world today. But trust me: it is.

Yan Li spent his life tweaking tiny bolts, on a production line, for the gadgets that make our lives zing and bling. He might have pushed a crucial component of the laptop I am writing this article on, or the mobile phone that will interrupt your reading of it. He was a typical 27-year old worker at the gigantic Foxconn factory in Shenzen, Southern China, which manufactures i-Pads and Playstations and mobile phone batteries.

Li was known to the company by his ID number: F3839667. He stood at a whirring line all day, every day, making the same tiny mechanical motion with his wrist, for 20 pence an hour. According to his family, sometimes his shifts lasted for 24 hours; sometimes they stretched to 35. If he had tried to form a free trade union to change these practices, he would have been imprisoned for twelve years. On the night of May 27th, after yet another marathon-shift, Li dropped dead.

Deaths from overwork are so common in Chinese factories they have a word for it: guolaosi. China Daily estimates 600,000 people are killed this way every year, mostly making goods for us. Li had never experienced any health problems, his family says, until he started this work schedule; Foxconn say he died of asthma and his death had nothing to do with them. The night Li died, yet another Foxconn worker committed suicide – the tenth this year.

For two decades now, you and I have shopped until Chinese workers dropped. Business has bragged about the joys of the China Price. They have been less keen for us to see the Human Price. KYE Systems Corp run a typical factory in Donguan in southern mainland China, and one of their biggest clients is Microsoft – so in 2009 the US National Labour Committee sent Chinese investigators undercover there. On the first day a teenage worker whispered to them: “We are like prisoners here.”

The staff work and live in giant factory-cities that they almost never leave. Each room sleeps ten workers, and each dorm houses 5000. There are no showers; they are given a sponge to clean themselves with. A typical shift begins at 7.45am and ends at 10.55pm. Workers must report to their stations fifteen minutes ahead of schedule for a military-style drill: “Everybody, attention! Face left! Face right!” Once they begin, they are strictly forbidden from talking, listening to music, or going to the toilet. Anybody who breaks this rule is screamed at and made to clean the toilets as punishment. Then it’s back to the dorm.

It’s the human equivalent to battery farming. One worker said: “My job is to put rubber pads on the base of each computer mouse… This is a mind-numbing job. I am basically repeating the same motion over and over for over twelve hours a day.” At a nearby Meitai factory, which made keyboards for Microsoft, a worker said: “We’re really livestock and shouldn’t be called workers.” They are even banned from making their own food, or having sex. They live off the gruel and slop they are required to buy from the canteen, except on Fridays, when they are given a small chicken leg and foot, “to symbolize their improving life.”

Even as their work has propelled China towards being a super-power, these workers got less and less. Wages as a proportion of GDP fell in China every single year from 1983 to 2005.

They can be treated this way because of a very specific kind of politics that has prevailed in China for two decades now. Very rich people are allowed to form into organizations – corporations – to ruthlessly advance their interests, but the rest of the population is forbidden by the secret police from banding together to create organizations to protect theirs. The political practices of Maoism were neatly transferred from communism to corporations: both regard human beings as dispensable instruments only there to serve economic ends.

We’ll never know the names of all the people who paid with their limbs, their lungs, or their lives for the goodies in my home and yours. Here’s just one: think of him as the Unknown Worker, standing for them all. Liu Pan was a 17 year old operating a machine that made cards and cardboard that were sold on to big name Western corporations, including Disney. When he tried to clear its jammed machinery, he got pulled into it. His sister said: “When we got his body, his whole head was crushed. We couldn’t even see his eyes.”

So you might be thinking – was it a cruel joke to bill this as a good news story? Not at all. An epic rebellion has now begun in China against this abuse – and it is beginning to succeed. Across 126,000 Chinese factories, workers have refused to live like this any more. Wildcat unions have sprung up, organized by text message, demanding higher wages, a humane work environment, and the right to organize freely. Millions of young workers across the country are blockading their factories and chanting “there are no human rights here!” and “we want freedom!” The suicides were a rebellion of despair; this is a rebellion of hope.

Last year, the Chinese dictatorship was so panicked by the widespread uprisings that they prepared an extraordinary step forward. They drafted a new labor law that would allow workers to form and elect their own trade unions. It would plant seeds of democracy across China’s workplaces. Western corporations lobbied very hard against it, saying it would create a “negative investment environment” – by which they mean smaller profits. Western governments obediently backed the corporations and opposed freedom and democracy for Chinese workers. So the law was whittled down and democracy stripped out.

It wasn’t enough. This year Chinese workers have risen even harder to demand a fair share of the prosperity they create. Now company after company is making massive concessions: pay rises of over 60 percent are being conceded. Even more crucially, officials in Guandong province, the manufacturing heartland of the country, have announced they are seriously considering allowing workers to elect their own representatives to carry out collective bargaining after all.

Just like last time, Western corporations and governments are lobbying frantically against this – and to keep the millions of Yan Lis stuck at their assembly lines into the 35th hour.

This isn’t a distant struggle: you are at its heart, whether you like it or not. There is an electrical extension cord running from your laptop and mobile and games console to the people like Yan Li and Liu Pan dying to make them. So you have to make a choice. You can passively let the corporations and governments speak for you in trying to beat these people back into semi-servitude – or you can side with the organizations here that support their cry for freedom, like No Sweat in Britain, or the National Labour Committee in the US, by donating to them, or volunteering for their campaigns.

Yes, if this struggle succeeds, it will mean that we will have to pay a little more for some products, in exchange for the freedom and the lives of people like Yan Li and Liu Pan. But previous generations have made that choice. After slavery was abolished in 1833, Britain’s GDP fell by 10 percent – but they knew that cheap goods and fat profits made from flogging people until they broke were not worth having. Do we?

Johann Hari is a writer for the Independent. To read more of his articles, click here or here.

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.

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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.

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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.

The interview will be available in four parts. Scroll to the bottom to read all of Prof. Carriere’s questions.

Part 1. Crisis and Opportunity

MC: 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?

AK: Absolutely. I see opportunity springing from every crack in the structure of capitalism. For all those who wish to see a different world, this moment is dripping with opportunity because the old order is crumbling before our eyes.

Shock and Awe on the New York Stock Exchange

The crisis extends far beyond the broken financial system. Millions of people are losing their jobs, homes, and savings as the burden of the crisis gets shifted onto the poor and working class. Public faith in the system, both the government and the capitalist economy, has been shattered and is at an all-time low. And it’s not just the economic crisis. The bank bailouts, the endless wars in the Mid East, the BP spill and the meltdown of the climate, and about a dozen other crises have shaken us deeply. It’s become common sense that the system is broken and a major change is needed. Barack Obama was elected in the US precisely by promising this change. Now that he is failing to deliver, more and more people are questioning whether the system can provide any solutions, or whether it’s actually the source of the problem.

Shattered faith is the dominant sentiment today. You can see it in people’s faces – the disappointment, grief, worry, and anger. To me, this loss of faith presents an enormous opening for putting forth a new, non-capitalist way of life. People are ready to hear radical solutions now, like they haven’t been since the Great Depression.

Historic Crossroads

If we go back to 1929, we’ll see some interesting parallels to our current moment. When that depression started, millions lost their livelihoods to pay for the bankers’ crisis. Faith in capitalism sunk to rock bottom. The public flocked to two major ideologies that offered a way out: socialism and fascism.

Socialism presented a solution to the crisis by saying, roughly: “Capitalism is flawed because it divides us into rich and poor, and the rich always take advantage of the poor. We need to organize the poor and workers into unions and political parties so we can take power for the benefit of all.”

Socialism attracted millions of followers, even in the United States. The labor movement was enormous and kept gaining ground through sit-down strikes and other forms of direct action. The Communist Party sent thousands of organizers into the new CIO, at the time a more radical union than the AFL. Socialist viewpoints even started getting through to the mass media and government. Huey Long was elected Senator from Louisiana by promising to “Share Our Wealth,” to radically redistribute the wealth of the country to abolish poverty and unemployment. (He was assassinated.) Socialism challenged President Roosevelt from the left, pushing him to create the social safety net of the New Deal.

On the other side, fascism also emerged as a serious force and attracted a mass following by putting forth something like the following: “The government has sold us out. We are a great nation, but we have been disgraced by liberal elites who are pillaging our economy for the benefit of foreign enemies, dangerous socialists, and undesirable elements (like Jews). We need to restore our national honor and fulfill our God-given mission.”

When people hear the word fascism, they usually think of Nazi Germany or Mussolini’s Italy, where successful fascist movements seized state power and implemented totalitarian control of society. Yet fascism was an international phenomenon during the Depression, and the United States was not immune to its reach. General Smedley Butler, the most decorated Marine in US history, testified before the Senate that wealthy industrialists had approached him as part of a “Business Plot” and tried to convince him to march an army of 500,000 veterans on Washington, DC to install a fascist dictatorship.

Today we are approaching a similar crossroads. When I hear the story of the Business Plot I think about the Tea Party, which has sprung from a base of white supremacist anger, facilitated by right-wing elements of the corporate structure like Fox News. This is an extremely dangerous phenomenon. The “teabaggers” have moved from questioning Obama’s citizenship, to now trying to reverse the gains of the Civil Rights Movement, such as the ability of everyone, regardless of color, to enjoy public accommodations like restaurants.

I think it’s fair to name the Tea Party, Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, the Christian Right, etc. parts of a potential neo-fascist movement in the United States. Their words and actions too often encourage attacks on people of color, immigrants, Muslims, LGBT folks, and anyone they don’t see as legitimate members of US society. Ultimately, many in this movement are pushing for a different social system taking power in the United States: one that is more authoritarian, less compassionate, more exploitive of the environment, more militaristic, and based on a mythical return to national glory. This is not a throwback to Nazi Germany. It’s a new kind of fascism, a new American fascism. And it’s a serious threat.

Tea Party racism in Denver, April 15, 2009

On the other hand, this crisis is also an opportunity for all of us who see capitalism as a destructive force and believe the message of the recent U.S. Social Forum that “Another World is Possible. Another US is Necessary.”  “Socialism” in the post-McCarthy/Cold War era of the United States is a dead word, because it carries a lot of baggage from the Soviet Union. Rightly so, the USSR was a terrible dictatorship that is hardly an example to follow. The question is, how do those of us who are progressive and anti-capitalist articulate our ideas to resonate with a mass audience in this moment?

Common Values

I argue that we need to speak to the population in a language of our common values: democracy, freedom, justice, and sustainability.

Adopting this mainstream language is not an attempt to be deceptive. These words have captured people’s hearts for a real reason: they offer a window to the world we want to see. It is the government, corporations, and media who deceive us by evoking these words to justify their atrocities, as in “Operation Iraqi Freedom.” (Over a million dead, and the Iraqi people are no closer to any kind of “freedom” I would want.) Rather than surrendering these noble ideals to the right wing, where they become meaningless dogma, I see immense potential to take language back and use it with honesty, as if words actually mean something.

So what if progressives reclaim these common values and make them guideposts on the way to a better society? For example, how can we talk about freedom if there is no self-determination, either in Iraq or here in the US? Let’s be honest, what freedom do we really have? The freedom to choose Coke or Pepsi, or similarly, to vote Democrat or Republican?

What about the freedom to determine our own destinies outside the constraints of corporations and government? What freedom is more basic than freedom from poverty and suffering? How can anyone speak of freedom if they have no income and no opportunity to escape unemployment? Or if they have nowhere to live because their home was foreclosed? What if their community is torn apart because so many youth are filling the prisons on nonviolent drug offenses? Is a prisoner free? Is their mother, spouse, or loved ones free? What does freedom mean if you’re queer or trans, and you face emotional and physical violence every time you express who you are and live your own life? How can we claim to be a free society if immigrants live in fear of being locked up by ICE and deported? What freedom do you have if your neighbor has none?

I think real freedom requires self-determination, the ability of an individual or community to choose their own destinies. We can’t pretend we have freedom in this country until “we, the people” have a say in our neighborhoods, towns and cities, in our workplaces, our schools, and our government. This requires that the public actively participate in managing their own affairs, for example through neighborhood councils to have a say in the neighborhood, through labor unions to have a say at work, student unions to have a say at school, and other democratic organizations that give people the power to defend their rights. There is a dire need to hold our corrupt representatives in Washington accountable to popular will. But to be truly free, might we also need to structure government in a new way, so it can be run by the people themselves? Or even to abolish the government, if it can’t do what the people say?

So I believe when we get to the meaningful core of the word “freedom,” it poses a radical challenge to capitalist society. We can say similar things about “democracy,” “justice,” and “sustainability,” and I would add, “love.” I’ll talk more about this in response to your third question. These values reinforce each other, and if we honor them for their true depth of meaning, they can be effective tools for change.

The Power of Imagination

This might sound good, but do progressives have the power to achieve these kinds of changes? It may sound farfetched. The media and government, especially in the U.S., have done an excellent job convincing us that we can never win. People with our views are routinely excluded from official conversation on the news or in elections. When we try to protest and take our voices to the street, they corral us within “free speech zones” so we look crazy and feel powerless. If a progressive voice does get through to the public somehow, it’s dismissed as “unrealistic.” We’re pressured to just vote for the lesser of two evils and be silent. The result of this silencing is that we have no idea how many people share our values and aspirations, because we’re often too intimidated to proclaim our views proudly. Worse, to some degree we’ve internalized this silencing so that we hesitate even to imagine our progressive hopes and dreams, lest they accidentally slip past our lips into polite conversation.

The stifling of progressive views is part of a larger culture of silence that helps the system maintain control. Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman call it Manufacturing Consent, the use of media and propaganda to create a passive, obedient population. The message we receive constantly from media is that we are spectators, not participants. Rather than take a stand on an issue and risk being wrong or foolish, why not leave it to the experts? Besides, we’re too busy being consumers, workers and students to worry about politics. Better to not make waves. We might as well amuse ourselves with television, celebrity gossip, and Facebook, and try not to get involved. From all the propaganda we consume over the course of our lives, we come to develop the core belief that we are powerless to affect change. This myth of powerlessness is one of the biggest lies in the history of the world, and we need to dismantle it.

What the U.S. Social Forum proves is that there is a large, broad-based movement for change here in the United States, the very core of the global capitalist machine. There are millions of average, everyday people all across the nation who are working and pushing in a progressive direction in large and small ways, whether on immigrants’ rights, women’s rights, housing, health care, education, prison justice, queer and trans justice, environmental justice, peace in the Middle East, etc. The system doesn’t want you to know about this, which is why they don’t show it on television. Our movements are alive and well. They are strong. They are inspiring. And in many places they are winning.

Coalition to Save the Libraries confronts the Philadelphia City Council and its Budget Cuts, May 21, 2009

I’ll just share a local example from here in Philadelphia. In late 2008, Mayor Nutter announced he would close 11 libraries due to budget constraints. Seemingly out of nowhere – but actually out of strong communities throughout the city – a movement emerged to oppose and prevent this decision, facilitated by the multiracial, multigenerational Coalition to Save the Libraries. The coalition organized creative actions at library branches slated for closure and at City Hall. People from across the city came together to imagine what kind of library system would best serve the public. Pressure kept mounting until the Mayor had to abandon his closures. All the libraries remain open to this day, despite continuing budget cuts and layoffs.  Kristin Campbell wrote a fuller description of how grassroots organizing saved the libraries.

We can look at this victory and downplay it as limited because it only restored a public service that shouldn’t have been attacked anyway. But like all grassroots organizing it points towards a better future, for the simple reason that people became empowered by working together. Capitalism is a system of disempowerment. It cannot tolerate our active participation in public affairs. As soon as we begin to break our silence and speak out against the injustices we are being subjected to, the system begins to quake and it searches for ways to pacify and silence us again. If we remain alert, active, and vocal, we can break the culture of complacency and bring more and more people into the awareness of their own power. So I think that’s the opportunity we have in this crisis.

I want to excite people’s imaginations of what a better world might look like. There is no better time to do it. If my theory is right, then capitalism, the system that has dominated the world for the past 500 years, is coming to an end. Recognizing this opens up a world of possibility for the future. Maybe that’s scary, because who knows what will happen? We might be driven into a neo-fascist nightmare. Things might keep getting worse, in which case maybe we should just find reasons to enjoy our current way of life while it lasts. I can see some of my friends saying that. But that leaves out two crucial truths that I want to highlight.

The first truth is that capitalism is a terribly abusive and destructive system, which we would be better off without. The second truth is that if we organize and push for a better world, we might win. So the time for complacency is over, and the time for taking bolder steps toward our dreams is here.

—–

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

by Kristin Campbell

Reposted from Organizing Upgrade, March 1, 2010

Organizing Upgrade is honored to offer a preview of this insightful reflection on organizing – Engaging the Crisis: Organizing Against Budget Cuts and Building Community Power in Philadelphia – which will appear in Left Turn magazine #36 (April/May 2010).  You can subscribe to Left Turn online at www.leftturn.org or become a monthly sustainer at www.leftturn.org/donate.

On November 6, 2008, just days after Philadelphians poured onto the streets to celebrate the Phillies winning the World Series championship and Barack Obama the US presidency, Mayor Michael Nutter announced a drastic plan to deal with the cities $108 million budget gap. Severe budget cuts were announced, including the closure of 11 public libraries, 62 public swimming pools, 3 public ice skating rinks, and several fire engines. Nutter also stated that 220 city workers would be laid off and that 600 unfilled positions would be eliminated entirely, amounting to the loss of nearly 1,000 precious city jobs. In classic neo-liberal style, the public sector was to sacrifice, while taxpayer money would bail out the private banking institutions.

City in crisis

Well before the economic crises of 2008, a decades-long process of economic restructuring and deindustrialization had left Philadelphia, with a population just over 1.4 million, an incredibly under-resourced city. Philadelphia has the highest poverty rate out of the ten largest cities in the US, an eleven percent unemployment rate and a high-school dropout rate that hovers dangerously around 50 percent.

The proposed budget cuts sparked waves of popular outrage especially concerning the closure of the libraries, many of which are located in low-income communities of color and serve as bedrock institutions for many basic resources. Eleanor Childs, a principal of a school that heavily relies on West Philadelphia’s Durham library, and later a member of the Coalition to Save the Libraries, recalls “a groundswell of concern about the closing of the libraries… people rose up. We had our pitchforks. We were ready to fight to keep our libraries open.”

Nutter’s administration set up eight townhall meetings across Philadelphia, designed to calm the citywide uproar. Thousands of people filled the townhall meetings poised to question how such drastic decisions were made without any public input. Under the banner “Tight Times, Tough Choices,” Mayor Nutter and senior city officials attempted to explain the necessity of such deep service cuts. They explained that the impact of the economic crisis on the city had only become apparent in recent weeks, and because the city could not raise significant revenue to offset its financial loses in the timeframe that was needed, rapid cuts were mandatory and effective January 1, 2009.

Community response

In the following days and weeks, Philadelphians quickly mobilized against the decision that their public services and city workers pay for the fallout of a economic system that had already left so many of them struggling. Neighborhood leaders organized impromptu rallies at the eleven branch libraries. Along with organizing people to turn out at the Mayor’s townhall meetings, these rallies gained media attention on both the nightly news and in the major newspapers, demonstrating widespread opposition to the budget cuts. Sherrie Cohen, member of the Coalition to Save the Libraries and long-time resident of the Ogontz neighborhood of North Philly remembers her neighbors coming together to say, “We are not going to let this library close. It’s not gonna happen. We fought for 36 years for a library in our neighborhood.”

"We Love Our Library" Day, Feb. 14 2009

In mid-December 2008, Sherrie Cohen and attorney Irv Ackelsberg, along with plaintiffs from the eleven branches and three City Council members, filed suit against the City citing a 1988 ordinance that says that no city-owned facility may close, be abandoned, or go into disuse without City Council approval. After two days of court hearings packed with library supporters and just hours before the mandated closure, Judge Idee Fox ruled in favor of the plaintiffs and council members by granting an injunction against the closures. In her ruling Judge Fox said, “The decision to close these eleven library branches is more than a response to a financial crisis; it changes the very foundation of our City.”  Commenting on the major victory, Sheila Washington, who lives just a few doors down from the Haddington branch library in West Philadelphia recalls: “I’ve never been so proud in my life to sit in that courtroom and see justice get served. The Coalition out-maneuvered the Mayor and I don’t think he’s gotten over it yet!”

Grassroots leadership

Initially a non-profit advocacy organization, the Friends of the Free Library (FFL)—itself largely funded by the city—coordinated the opposition to the mayor and positioned itself as the leader of the struggle by attempting to negotiate with the City. Without community input, FFL proceeded to put forth a series of low-level demands calling for “shared sacrifice” and a three day-a-week schedule for the entire library system. Having established itself as a mediating force, FFL’s centered its efforts around media attention and backroom negotiation, shying away from any community organizing or alternative legal and civil disobedience strategies.

Community leaders, rooted in the neighborhoods where libraries were about to close, decided they could not afford to settle with the FFL’s “shared sacrifice” strategy. People who organized the very first rallies to defend their neighborhood branches came together with a broader layer of organizers and activists who wanted to support the fight against the budget cuts and the Coalition to Save the Libraries (CSL) was formed.

The CSL quickly set up a working group structure, loosely based on a spokes-council model that allowed for a multiplicity of work to happen simultaneously. We divided into working groups representing our tactical focuses; media, action, outreach, and influencing decision-makers.  Each working group included a mix of people, some experienced in a particular area and others who were coming to the work for the first time. Members taught each other how to draft media talking points and phone scripts for outreach calls, prep meeting agendas and media spokespeople and write press releases for actions at City Hall. With the intention of structuring the leadership of those most affected by the budget cuts at the center of the organization, CSL formed a coordinating committee where multi-racial and cross-neighborhood membership was prioritized.  Weekly meetings featured rotating co-facilitators, usually paired across difference as way to underline the importance and power in multiracial and intergenerational organizing in Philadelphia.

The CSL was born just weeks before the libraries were mandated to close, which left us with a very short timeline and very high stakes. Organizing in the midst of the economic crisis was fast-paced, anxiety-ridden and offered little time to think about long-term vision and strategy. Nonetheless, CSL’s campaign to keep the libraries open and fully functional consistently attempted to combine short-term demands with a long-term vision for educational and economic justice. The Coalition argued that defending community access to public educational resources—computers, books, librarians—becomes even more important in times of economic crisis, especially in light of how many low-income neighborhoods in Philadelphia have been systematically stripped of these resources over the last few decades.

CSL developed a collective analysis that saw libraries as much more than mere buildings with books, but rather, as powerful organizing bases across the city. As Sherrie Cohen put it: “Libraries are one of the few government sponsored institutions left in our communities. They are a beacon of light in our communities, a sanctuary, a community center, a hub of information and resources.” Closing the 11 libraries would be an attack on poor and working people throughout our City, because as Carolyn Morgan, Coalition leader and Southwest Philly resident put it unequivocally, “Taking away these materials would be a form of murder because the mind is not being fed. Just as the physical body needs to be fed in order to be healthy, the mind needs to be fed in order to grow in wisdom and knowledge.”

While the Mayor was proposing stark neoliberal solutions—including a proposal to sell the eleven library buildings and turn them into privately managed “knowledge centers”—we were demanding that public services be considered common, neighborhood-owned institutions. A common refrain of the CSL has been, “You can’t close these libraries because they are not yours to take!” Looking for more action oriented strategies to involve people outraged by the Mayors proposal, the CSL began to create a community budgeting process for Philadelphia by establishing a ‘People’s Court’—a series of actions outside of City Hall coinciding with the opening day of legal hearings, which stated that it was ‘illegal’ to close down the 11 libraries.

Strategic alliances

Building a strong cross-neighborhood alliance to fight the library cuts became central to CSL’s strategy and was successful for a few reasons. Connecting structurally segregated neighborhoods in Philadelphia meant that we were inevitably building a multi-racial, cross-class, intergenerational organization, which we learned holds tremendous power and potential. Gregory Benjamin, Coalition leader and Southwest Philly block captain remarked, “The citywide coalition was dynamite. It gave us an opportunity to connect with other people, communities and  ethnic groups that really had the same concerns that we had.”

By bringing different people from different neighborhoods together the Coalition built a very real feeling of collective power. Sheila Washington recalls: “I was invited to a Coalition meeting and it was wonderful because I was so stressed out. They were removing books and packing up our library. They were moving the after-school program. And I thought, oh my God, what is this neighborhood going to do?” Organizing to defend the libraries helped us cope with the incredibly difficult economic times, together. The budget cuts were coming down in multiple neighborhoods across the city, mostly low-income neighborhoods, and by building alliances among people who were experiencing the affects of these budget cuts our organization replaced feelings of isolation and shock with feelings of strength and a belief that together we could win.

People's Court action - Jan. 13, 2009

Strategic alliances were built not only across neighborhoods but also across generations. In Philadelphia, a majority of elementary schools rely heavily on their closest public library. With this in mind, a group of third graders led one of our most creative actions—a two-mile book trek from their school to the library. Through the action, young people demonstrated the extremely negative effects of the proposed closings simply by the distance they walked.  Along with strengthening the popular struggle to save the libraries, youth-led actions like these served to build power among the students themselves. Katrina Clark, the students’ teacher, says that whenever they talk about the civil rights movement or other human rights issues the students refer back to the book trek and say, “Like what we did with the libraries?” She added,  “They now have prior knowledge about what it means to fight for their rights…Honestly, that’s what education is about. It’s about empowering students to change the world and giving them the tools they need to do it.”

Long haul

What ultimately stopped the eleven libraries from closing, was the combination of CSL’s short term demands along with its long term vision and popular organizing strategy targeting multiple pressure points. The Coalition accurately assessed the moment and turned widespread anger around the budget cuts into an organized power base; we helped file a lawsuit against the City and organized turnout at legal hearings; and we seriously prepared for a library takeover in the event that the lawsuit failed. Together, the CSL implemented a successful model of crisis-response organizing, by channeling popular outrage into a strong, unified cross-neighborhood force that framed the debate in terms of economic and racial inequity.

Even after winning the court injunction, Philadelphia is still struggling with constant staffing shortages and reduced operation hours due to an $8 million budget cut to the library system. As the library campaign drew to a close, the CSL redirected its efforts to protesting pool closings, attempting to grow and develop into a multi-issue organization.  It was a logical extension of our initial work, as the pool closings affected the same constituencies that were hit hardest by the library closings, poor and working people of Philadelphia.

Because we see this as a long-term struggle, we’ve been working to transition our organization from a crisis-response, single-issue coalition into a multi-issue, long-term grassroots institution in Philadelphia. In order to build for the long haul as an organization, we have continued to tie the budget cuts together and show how they are interconnected, train and develop our leaders, and maintain our cross-neighborhood network. This article is part of our effort to document and reflect on our work as we gear up for the US Social Forum in Detroit this summer.

Our city is in dire need of multi-issue grassroots organizations that are led by poor and working people fighting for social and economic justice and oriented towards organizing to build power in our communities.

Our victory and the relationships we’ve built in the process have given us the inspiration to continue to struggle. Betty Beaufort, Coalition leader and a resident of the Point Breeze neighborhood of South Philadelphia offers powerful advice – “Fight for what you want cause if you don’t fight, you not gonna get nothing. Cause life is a struggle and you wanna turn a struggle into a movement. Don’t get discouraged, cause some days you might say to heck with it, but we need to fight on. Being involved in the Coalition has reminded me of my own strength. We have to be reminded of our own strength because there’s always gonna be something we got to fight for and I’m ready for the fight!”

Kristin Campbell wrote this piece in collaboration with Andalusia Knoll and with additional help from Alia Trindle and Sarah Small. inspired by Eleanor Childs, Sherrie Cohen, Sheila Washington, Carolyn Morgan, Katrina Clark, Gregory Benjamin and Betty Beaufort.

Kristin Campbell grew up in Philadelphia and is a member of the Coalition to Save the Libraries. She has been involved with student, anti-war, global justice, and community organizing efforts over the years. For more information on the CSL please see their blog at: http://coalitiontosavethelibraries.blogspot.com

The Civil Rights Movement remains the most inspiring example of successful social movements in the United States, breaking down the evil system of racial segregation and opening up possibilities for Black people, as well as for other races, that never existed before. It’s important to remember that 50 years ago, most African Americans could not vote, but now we have a Black President.

Obviously the work of the Civil Rights Movement remains unfinished, as we still live in a racist society with many other severe social problems caused by capitalism as well. But as Eyes on the Prize displays so dramatically, the hope we seek lies not in politicians but in our very own hands. We must learn from the past in order to change the future.

I watched episode 1 today and will be viewing the others over the next few weeks. Would you like to watch and discuss the series with me? Please respond by leaving a comment!

Love and struggle,

alex

p.s. anyone know how to embed these videos on WordPress?

Episode 1: Awakenings (1954-1956)

Subjects: Origins of the Civil Rights Movement, Segregation, Black Soldiers in World War II, Brown v. Board of Education, Emmett Till, Rosa Parks, Montgomery Bus Boycott, Martin Luther King Jr, White Citizens Council, Ku Klux Klan, White Allies

Episode 2: Fighting Back (1957-1962)

Subjects: NAACP, Integration v. Segregation, Little Rock AR, The Little Rock 9, James Meredith, University of Mississippi

Episode 3: Ain’t Scared of Your Jails (1960-1961)

Subjects: Student Sit-ins, Nashville TN, Direct Action, Civil Disobedience, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), Ella Baker, Boycott Movement, Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), Freedom Rides, Southern Jails

Episode 4: No Easy Walk (1961-1963)

Subjects: Martin Luther King Jr, Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), Freedom Songs, Albany GA, Bull Connor, Birmingham AL, Fire Hoses and Dogs, John Lewis, March on Washington, John F. Kennedy, Civil Rights Act

Episode 5: Mississippi: Is This America? (1962-1964)

Subjects: Medgar Evers, Murder of Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner, SNCC, Voting Registration Drives, Mississippi Freedom Summer, Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, Failure of the Democratic Party

[This is the BEST video in the series. What SNCC did in Mississippi changed America forever.]

Episode 6: Bridge to Freedom (1965)

Subjects: Voting Rights Movement, Selma, AL, March from Selma to Montgomery, Lyndon B. Johnson, Voting Rights Act

Episode 7: The Time Has Come (1964-1966)

Subjects: Malcolm X, Nation of Islam, Lowndes County Freedom Organization, Stokely Carmichael, Black Power, March Against Fear, James Meredith

Episode 8: Two Societies (1965-1968)

Subjects: Urban Rebellions, Martin Luther King Jr, Housing, Chicago IL, Richard Daley, Watts CA, Detroit MI, Kerner Commission

Episode 9: Power (1966-1968)

Subjects: Black Power, Carl Stokes, Cleveland OH, Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, Oakland CA, Education, Ocean Hill-Brownsville, Brooklyn NY

Episode 10: The Promised Land (1967-1968)

Subjects: Assassination of Martin Luther King Jr, Vietnam War, Poor People’s Campaign, Resurrection City, Washington DC, Sanitation Workers, Memphis TN

Episode 11: Ain’t Gonna Shuffle No More (1964-1972)

Subjects: Muhammad Ali, Black Consciousness, African Heritage, Howard University, National Black Political Convention, Gary IN

Episode 12: A Nation of Law? (1968-1971)

Subjects: Fred Hampton, Black Panther Party, Chicago IL, Police/State Repression, Attica Prison Rebellion

Episode 13: The Keys to the Kingdom (1974-1980)

Subjects: Boston School Busing Controversy, Maynard Jackson, Atlanta GA, Affirmative Action, Allan Bakke

Episode 14: Back to the Movement (1979-1985)

Subjects: Miami 1980 Riot, Harold Washington, Chicago, Unemployment, Gangs, Jesse Jackson, Operation PUSH, New Hope

The Seattle direct actions shut down the World Trade Organization for a weekend in 1999, because the WTO had been spreading the corporate agenda across the planet, and this began a string of movement victories that shut down the WTO permanently – by delegitimizing the organization and emboldening Global South nations to refuse rich countries’ poverty-spreading deals and abandon its negotiations.

Now, as Global South nations lead the call for justice in Copenhagen and as we gear up for the US Social Forum in Detroit next summer, it’s a great time to look back at the lessons the movement for justice, democracy and sustainability has learned in the past decade. [alex]

From Seattle to Detroit: 10 Lessons for Movement Building on the 10th Anniversary of the WTO Shutdown

By Stephanie Guilloud November 30, 2009 | Reposted from the Indypendent

The Health Care “Reform” bill that is currently being debated in the Senate is nothing but a total sell-out to the insurance industry. Not even a public OPTION (when we really need a Medicare-for-All single payer system). No extension of Medicare. Only a mandate that if you don’t insurance you have to buy it!  There’s no way people are going to take this turd and call it gold, no matter how good Obama sounds when he pitches it. It’s crap and everyone knows it.

The House bill, while woefully inadequate to help the 50 million Americans without access to a doctor, is a lot better than the Senate version. As Howard Dean has said,”Honestly, the best thing to do right now is kill the Senate bill, go back to the House, start the reconciliation process, where you only need 51 votes and it would be a much simpler bill.”

Lieberman be damned. [alex]

Healthcare: First They Came for the Banksters

by Thom Hartmann

Wednesday, December 16, 2009

Originally published by Common Dreams.

With apologies to Pastor Niemöller:

First they came for the banksters, and showered them with money and put them in the Administration in a way that was not change we could believe in.

Then they came for the military industrial complex, and sent more and more of our children to die in faraway lands that had never attacked us in a way that was not change we could believe in.

And now they’ve sold out our hope for a national health care system not run by millionaire gangsters in suits. And who is left to speak for us?

President Obama is playing the Bill Clinton game of throwing people a bone and telling them it’s steak. Perhaps he’s doing it because he thinks it’s his only choice; perhaps it’s because he’s surrounded himself with Bill Clinton advisors (and Hillary as Secretary of State); whatever the reason, while it worked for Clinton, it won’t work for Obama.

It worked for Reagan, and for the first Bush, and even worked somewhat for George W. Bush.

But it won’t work anymore. Here’s why.

From 1929 until the 1980s, most Americans were “high information voters.” They were paying attention to politics. The Republican Great Depression of 1929-1938, World War II, the Korean War, Kennedy’s election, and the War in Vietnam were all Big Events that caused Americans to pay attention. Americans of that era needed to know what was up in Washington, DC, because they felt the consequences directly.

This is why in November of 1954, Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower wrote a letter to his John Bircher brother Edgar, “Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these things. Among them are H. L. Hunt (you possibly know his background), a few other Texas oil millionaires, and an occasional politician or business man from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid.”

The voters knew. Even as late as 1977, when George W. Bush ran for Congress from Texas on a nearly singular platform of privatizing Social Security, he lost badly. The voters knew.

Then came Reagan. He seemed so nice. He talked friendly. At the very minute – to the second – that he put his hand on the bible to be sworn in, those nasty Iranians let go the hostages they’d been holding (a kidnapping that had so humiliated the Carter administration that Carter lost the election).

America was once again a “shining city on the hill” and even though there were a few small invasions, Panama and Grenada and all, and a small recession, and a few S&L bank failures, mostly people lost interest in politics. TV was going big, home entertainment was huge, blockbuster movies were coming onto the big screen, and America was prosperous. Americans partied on cheap debt. We went to sleep. It was the beginning of the era of the “low information voter.”

During the 1980s, the right wing was working hard. Reagan stopped enforcing the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, and most of the media Americans consumed was consolidated in the hands of about a dozen very conservative-leaning corporations. Top tax rates were cut from over 70 percent to around 30 percent, so salaries at the top exploded, including those of the stars on TV…including the “news” stars.

The newly-rich TV news people began to hang out with the becoming-fabulously-rich business people, never again criticizing them because they now worked and played together and were members of the same clubs and their kids went to the same best schools. Lifestyles Of The Rich And Famous became our new religion, “greed is good” our new mantra.

Conservatives began a war on textbooks, stripping from them references to the labor movement, so that anybody who went to middle school or high school during or after the mid-1980s can’t today tell you why phrases like “Pullman Porter” or “Haymarket Square” or “Great Flint Sit Down” have any meaning.

Reagan, and then Clinton, serially deregulated the media so it came into fewer hands still, while right-wing voices exploded across the landscape. By the mid 1990s there was virtually no corner of America, not even the smallest town, where a person couldn’t hear Rush Limbaugh. After Rupert Murdoch lost $100 million a year for a half-decade, finally around Y2K Sean Hannity and Fox News began to turn a profit and became equally ubiquitous. They all made sure that voters were “low information” or “wrong information.” The labor sections of the newspapers had vanished; NPR and 60 Minutes no longer did corporate-expose investigative reporting.

Reagan used our collective somnambulance to cut taxes for his rich buddies and throw trillions their way in defense contracts. George HW did more of the same, albeit without the elegance of Reagan. Bill Clinton smiled nice and raised taxes a few tiny points – from 33 to 36 percent on the most wealthy – and just that was enough to balance the budget, and during all those years it seemed like peace and prosperity were here. Politically, people stayed asleep.

The attacks of 9/11 woke a lot of Americans up, but they didn’t know what to believe. Retired generals taking million-dollar payoffs from defense contractors were wall-to-wall on the corporate news, telling us we needed more wars and more contractors and more military toys. The two dissenting voices – Bill Maher and Phil Donahue – were immediately silenced. Keep the people asleep. Other than a few old lefties from the 60s who showed up for anti-Iraq-war protests, it mostly worked.

Then came Barack Obama. People were sick of Bush, and Obama’s campaign for the presidency reminded the oldsters of what it meant to be politically active, while it taught the same lesson to the first generation to really involve itself in politics since the Vietnam War. Weeks before the election, the Bush crew had to admit that the phony-baloney Reaganonics games played by Reagan/Bush/Clinton/Bush while we were all asleep were collapsing. The economy was about to disintegrate. A wave of foreclosures, followed almost immediately by layoffs, swept the land.

People woke up, just like they had in 1929. They began to pay attention. And they had more than just Limbaugh and Fox to learn from; this new thing called the internet proliferated information without corporate control; Air America was birthed and liberal talk radio is now heard coast-to-coast; MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann caught fire (followed by Rachel Maddow); and even the normally cynical and innocuous Jack Cafferty at CNN began to go off on screeds worthy of the movie “Network.”

The Great Depression of 2008 – or what was billed as such – and the election of an African American president who used a ground-up instead of a top-down campaign caused high information voters to emerge again for the first time in 30 years.

Many, of course, were high with the wrong information. They showed up at tea parties and Palin rallies. But their passion is real, and their grievances are mostly legitimate. Thirty years of Reaganomics/Clintonomics has destroyed the labor movement, hollowed out our industrial sector, put us on a permanent war footing, wiped out the equity of the middle class, and created an entire generation of college-loan-indentured-servants. Who are now fully awake and seriously pissed.

We slept while Clinton’s boys Robert Rubin and Larry Summers and the whole gang, Republicans and Democrats together, signed us up for NAFTA and GATT; created the WTO; moved our jobs to China; sold off our airwaves; and “financialized” our economy (fully a quarter of all corporate profits in 2007 were from the “financial services industry” – an “industry” that creates nothing whatever that can be used or eaten or has any other real-wealth value). We slept through the explosion of the private prison industry and the wars in the Balkans (who knows where Kosovo is, anyway?). Seinfeld was far more interesting.

But now both the Vietnam oldsters and the Hip Hop youngsters are awake. Even the Reagan generation is awakening, but confused, as they’ve grown up on Limbaugh and Fox, and didn’t learn much in school about politics after Reagan’s guys stripped most classes of in-depth civics requirements. (It’s interesting – when Michael Medved and I debated in Chicago last year in front of 1000 people, 500 tickets sold by each of our radio stations, my side of the room was mostly people over 50 or under 30. His side of the room was almost entirely 30- and 40-somethings.)

And that’s why Obama is heading for a disaster.

He’s betting that he can do like Bill Clinton did to us with NAFTA and the World Trade Organization – hand us a turd and tell us it’s gonna blossom beautifully if we’ll just wait a year or three or five. Rahm’s betting that if he can “deliver health care reform” – even if the fundamental system of gangster corporations standing between us and our doctors while skimming 40 percent off the top for their mansions and private jets is intact – we’ll be all excited at his “victory” and elect more Democrats in 2010 and reelect Obama in 2012.

Ditto for cosmetic repairs of the banks, which is really just trickle-down Reaganomics on steroids. Rahm and his DLC buddies truly believe that this “change” brought to us by Bush’s man Tim Geithner or Clinton’s man Larry Summers is something we’ll “believe in.”

We don’t.

We oldsters of the Vietnam era, and the youngsters coming up who see how college loan banksters are screwing them as badly as their Clinton-era parents were screwed by the mortgage scammers, are all now fully awake.

President Obama, sir: Meet what is in large part your own creation – the High Information Voters of 2009/2010.

We’re awake, we’re mad as hell, and we’re not going to take it any more. Natalie Portman to Matt Taibbi to Arianna Huffington to Bill Moyers represent the span of our four awakened generations; generations who have figured out how the game is played. And don’t like it.

First Obama continued Bush’s policy of giving the banksters money, and we protested feebly.

Then he expanded Bush’s wars, and we protested more loudly.

Now he’s going to force us to give trillions to the gangsters who run the “health insurance” companies (while they promise to behave nicely in return) and thinks we’re going to go along with it and it’ll get him re-elected.

He’s wrong.

Please, President Obama, step up and lead. We’d like some that “change we can believe in” that’s actually the real thing.

Kill the bill.

Thom Hartmann (thom at thomhartmann.com) is a Project Censored Award-winning New York Times best-selling author, and host of a nationally syndicated daily progressive talk program The Thom Hartmann Show. www.thomhartmann.com His newest book is Threshold: The Crisis of Western Culture.

<www.commondreams.org/view/2009/12/16-3>

David Korten, long-time global justice activist, co-founder of Yes! Magazine, and author of such books as When Corporations Rule the World, lays out the fundamental crossroads facing the world in his 2006 book The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community. In response to global climate change, war, oil scarcity, persistent racism and sexism and many other mounting crises, Korten argues we must recognize these as symptoms of a larger system of Empire, so that we might move in a radically different direction of equality, ecological sustainability, and cooperation, which he terms Earth Community. This is a powerful and important book, which excels in overviewing the big picture of threats facing our ecosphere and our communities at the hands of global capitalism¹, and translating this into the simplest and most accessible language so we might all do something about it. It’s pretty much anti-capitalism for the masses. And it has the power to inspire many of us to transform our lives and work towards the transformation of society.

Capitalism and Empire

Of course, Korten has made the strategic decision to avoid pointing the finger at “capitalism” as such in order to speak to an American public which largely still confuses the term as equivalent to “freedom” or “democracy.” In fact the “C” word is rarely mentioned in the book, almost never without some sort of modifier as in “corporate capitalism” or “predatory capitalism”, as if those weren’t already features of the system as a whole. Instead, Korten names “Empire” as the culprit responsible for our global economic and ecological predicament, which is defined as a value-system that promotes the views that “Humans are flawed and dangerous”, “Order by dominator hierarchy”, “Compete or die”, “Masculine dominant”, etc. (32).

Korten explains that Empire, “has been a defining feature of the most powerful and influential human societies for some five thousand years, [and] appropriates much of the productive surplus of society to maintain a system of dominator power and elite competition. Racism, sexism, and classism are endemic features” (25). In this way the anarchist concept of the State is repackaged as a transcendent human tendency, which has more to do with conscious decision-making and maturity level than it does with political power. While this compromise does limit the book’s effectiveness in offering solutions later on, it does speak in a language more familiar to the vast non-politicized majority of Americans, and may have the potential to unify a larger movement for change.

Whatever you want to call the system, the danger it presents to the planet is now clear. Korten spells out the grim statistics: “Fossil fuel use is five times what it was [in 1950], and global use of freshwater has tripled… the [Arctic] polar ice cap has thinned by 46 percent over twenty years… [while we've seen] a steady increase over the past five decades in severe weather events such as major hurricanes, floods, and droughts. Globally there were only thirteen severe events in the 1950s. By comparison, seventy-two such events occurred during the first nine years of the 1990s” (59-60). If this destruction continues, it’s uncertain if the Earth will survive.

This ecological damage is considered alongside the social damage of billions living without clean water or adequate food, as well as the immense costs of war and genocide. But Korten understands that the danger is relative to where you stand in the social hierarchy – the system creates extreme poverty for many, and an extreme wealth for a few others. He explains how the system is based on a deep inequality that is growing ever worse, “In the 1990s, per capita income fell in fifty-four of the world’s poorest countries… At the other end of the scale, the number of billionaires worldwide swelled from 274 in 1991 to 691 in 2005″ (67). The critical point that these few wealthy elites wield excessive power and influence within the system to stop or slow necessary reform could be made more clearly, but at least the book exposes the existence of this upper class, who are usually quite effective at hiding from public scrutiny and outrage over the suffering they are causing.²

Earth Community – Growing a Revolution

Standing at odds with the bastions of Empire is what David Korten calls “Earth Community,” a “higher-order” value-system promoting the views of, “Cooperate and live,” “Love life”, “Defend the rights of all”, “Gender balanced”, etc. (32). These values are elaborated to describe a counter-force to the dominant paradigm of society that seeks to replace it. “Earth Community, which emphasizes the demonstrated human capacity for caring, compassion, cooperation, partnership, and community in the service of life, assumes a capacity for responsible self-direction and self-organization and thereby the possibility of creating radically democratic organizations and societies” (33). It’s immediately obvious that these values stand in direct opposition to the self-interested, competitive and top-down capitalist order that now stands over the entire planet.

In an era when “TINA – There Is No Alternative” (to capitalism)³ remains the dominant political-economic viewpoint, at least in the U.S., it’s this clear contrast between the two fundamental directions of Empire and Earth Community which is the book’s main strength. The crisis-laden society we live in today is rightfully understood as not a result of destiny, but merely one possibility that we have the power to overturn through our individual and collective actions.

Actually, Great Turning does one better and puts forward the controversial, though I think certainly correct, argument that the “corporate global economy” (capitalism) is facing unprecedented disruptions which will likely spell the end of its worldwide dominance, “forc[ing] a restructuring in favor of local production and self-reliance” (70-71). The conditions bringing about this potentially monumental paradigm shift are pinpointed as peak oil,⁴ global warming, the decline of the U.S. Dollar, and the ineffectiveness of standard military strategy.

As the editor of endofcapitalism.com, it makes me glad to see others writing about the limits to capitalist expansion, both ecological and social. However I would have hoped that as a veteran of the global justice movement Korten would have added to this outline of obstacles to global capitalism at least a broad description of how organized communities are consciously resisting and making progressive change possible. From labor to environmentalists to students to feminists to people of color to queer and trans communities and far beyond, everyday people everywhere are involved in an active struggle to restore their dignity and create a better world. And despite a steady stream of propaganda to the contrary, in many ways these movements are winning.⁵ We must give thanks and honor their successes, and their failures, so that we may grow a wiser movement for change.

The Great Turning also lays out a vision for what a future society organized around the values of Earth Community would look like, from culture to economy to spiritual values and more. Economically, the proposals are put forward under the heading “Local Living Economies”, and include such common-sense but radical ideas as “Economic Democracy”, “Human Scale”, “Information and Technology Sharing”, and “Fair and Balanced Trade” (342-45). It must be noted that Korten advocates the use of markets as “an essential and beneficial human institution”, but only if they are thoroughly regulated to “assure an equitable distribution of ownership and income” (304).

Another key insight is the distinction made between the “fictional wealth” of bank accounts, stocks, bonds, derivatives and so forth which are the obsession of our current economy, and what Korten calls “real” wealth: “Real wealth consists of those things that have actual utilitarian or artistic value: food, land, energy, knowledge, technology, forests, beauty, and much else. The natural systems of the planet are the foundation of all real wealth, for we depend on them for our very lives” (68). By flipping the idea of wealth on its head, Korten shows that social and ecological benefit should be primary considerations in all economic decision-making. For the author, and for myself, the goal is to create a system that seeks to maximize these real forms of wealth, not the profits of a few large corporations and wealthy investors. Investing in this form of wealth would allow for dramatically different economic outcomes, for example after surveying the poverty and immense pollution created through Mountain-Top Coal Removal, we might decide that it made more sense to use sites such as Coal River Mountain, West Virginia to produce wind energy instead.⁶

Korten outlines the society we are working towards in such vivid language that it’s worth quoting from him at length:
“We will know a society has succeeded when it matches the following description…
- There is a vibrant community life grounded in mutual trust, shared values, and a sense of connection. Risks of physical harm perpetrated by humans against humans through war, terrorism, crime, sexual abuse, and random violence are minimal. Civil liberties are secure event for the most vulnerable.
- All people have a meaningful and dignified vocation that contributes to the well-being of the larger community and fulfills their own basic needs for healthful food, clean water, clothing, shelter, transport, education, entertainment, and health care. Paid employment allows ample time for family, friends, participation in community and political life, healthful physical activity, learning, and spiritual growth.
- Intellectual life and scientific inquiry are vibrant, open, and dedicated to the development and sharing of knowledge and life-serving technologies that address society’s priority needs.
- Families are strong and stable. Children are well nourished, recieve a quality education, and live in secure and loving homes. Rates of suicide, divorce, abortion, and teenage pregnancy are low.
- Political participation and civic engagement are high, and people feel their political civic participation makes a positive difference. Persons in formal leadership positions are respected for their wisdom, integrity, and commitment to the public good.
- Forests, fisheries, waterways, the land, and the air are clean, healthy, and vibrant with the diversity of life. Mother’s milk is wholesome and toxin free, and endangered species populations are in recovery.
- Physical infrastructure – including public transit, road, bridge, rail, water and sewerage systems, and electric power generation and transmission facilities – is well maintained, accessible to all, and adequate to demand” (297-98).

This kind of vision for the society we want is all too rarely discussed, but it should inform all our decisions – otherwise we can too easily be confined to false choices and distractions from the way forwards. In its best moments, this book acts as a beacon, illuminating the path we need to walk.

Limitations

In a book as ambitious as The Great Turning, there are bound to be parts that don’t succeed. Perhaps the most problematic ideas in the book come from the section on “Culture and consciousness.” Here David Korten lays out a system of five “orders” of consciousness, from the lowest, “Magical Consciousness”, up to the “Fifth Order: Spiritual Consciousness” (54). This hierarchy of consciousness is used to explain that those who favor Empire tend to think in terms of either fantasies or in simple power terms, while those favoring Earth Community are much more complex thinkers, incorporating concern for others and concern for the future into their decisions. It’s an analysis that appears relatively benign at first, but in the end is sadly limited by the problematic liberal belief that we must win a “culture war” against the other half of society which is perceived as hopelessly ignorant. This line of thought fits in nicely with Red-State/Blue-State politics and the essentially classist stereotype that Southerners and rural Americans are backwards and uneducated. As long as progressives allow politicians and the media to convince us of the enormity of this “cultural divide”, forward motion on the path to a just and sustainable world will be held hostage by partisan bickering.

Another direction, based on overcoming differences and emphasizing unity of interests is far more strategic. This can be made much easier by dropping the obsession with “culture and consciousness” and talking specifically about class, wealth, and power. Not that necessary and potentially divisive issues like race, gender, or sexuality should be left unraised! But when we begin to study the ways that most everyone, including the vast majority of Americans, are being victimized by capitalism, it becomes much easier to locate the true enemy. For one example, recall that upwards of 95% of calls, emails and faxes to Congress in advance of the vote on the $700 billion Wall St. bailout last September were strongly negative. Here we can find an immediate rallying point against entrenched financial elites (who were able to buy the politicians into passing the bailout package over public opposition).

The “five orders of consciousness” analysis is further weakened by its apparent ageism. It’s bad enough to suggest that supporting the values of Earth Community is a function of “maturity”, which implies that education and age are prerequisites for human decency. But the book goes one step further and actually assigns age numbers to each of the five levels of the consciousness ladder. Level 4, “Cultural Consciousness”, which is associated with having “the capacity to question the dysfunctional cultural premises of Empire,” is specifically declared the domain of adults. “A Cultural Consciousness is rarely achieved before age thirty,” states page 46, in direct contradiction to Abbie Hoffman’s warning not to trust anyone older than the big three-oh. Speaking as someone under thirty, I have to question the notion that older folks are more inclined to support justice than my generation. Ageist statements like this have the effect of invisiblizing youth and student activism, which has always been at the forefront of progressive change. At this very moment, hundreds of students in California are organizing rallies and occupations of their school buildings in order to save public education from unprecedented tuition increases.⁷ I’d like to see the over-thirty crowd take such inspiring action for change!

A final limitation of the book is the lack of strategy it puts forward for achieving the “Great Turning” itself. As described by Korten, this enormous transformation will occur mostly by people elevating their consciousnesses and living differently – “a turning from relations of domination to relations of partnership based on organizing principles discerned from the study of healthy living systems” (295). But what steps must be taken to transform these relations are not adequately explained. Instead there are vague passages such as, “As communities of congruence grow and connect, they advance the process of liberation from the cultural trance of Empire and offer visible manifestations of the possibilities of Earth Community. Individually and collectively they become attractors of the life energy that Empire has co-opted – thus weakening Empire and strengthening Earth Community in an emergent process of displacement and eventual succession” (317). It sounds good, but how is that supposed to actually happen?

If history is any guide, Empire doesn’t just fade away when something better comes along. Overcoming the system will require confronting the real forces of power that dominate our lives, and taking power back for our communities. The Civil Rights Movement remains the most inspiring and instructive example of democratic change in America. Black folks in the South had been struggling for freedom since before slavery ended and continued to resist Jim Crow laws through the 1960s, when legal segregation was finally defeated (though de facto segregation and racism continue today). It wasn’t enough to set up separate Black-owned schools or restaurants as refuge from the white supremacist realities of America, although this helped and is a positive step. Taking down legal segregation required direct confrontations with power – sit-ins at “Whites Only” restaurants, legal action which brought about Brown v. Board of Education, the Montgomery Bus Boycott, voter registration drives, and many, many other manifestations of mass-based popular struggle. To take down global capitalism and U.S. imperialism, the actual institutions behind what Korten calls Empire, any viable strategy will require a worldwide and multi-faceted, long-term movement for democratic change. This movement already exists, thankfully, so let’s celebrate it and talk about how to strengthen it to achieve our common goals!

Conclusion – Giving Thanks for Life and Struggle

The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community is a much-needed book, which accomplishes a surprising amount despite its limitations. We can all be thankful that David Korten has compiled such wisdom from many different sources of inspiration in order to present a holistic vision of the world we need to lose and the world we want to gain. By translating anti-capitalist and anarchist concepts into everyday language, Korten widens the appeal of the fundamental transformation of society that is needed.

Moreover, he points towards a common-sense, radical politics by highlighting the strong majority of Americans supporting progressive change. For example, he quotes from various polls to show that, “Nearly nine out of ten U.S. adults (87 percent) believe we need to treat the planet as a living system and that we should have more respect and reverence for nature… Seventy-six percent of Americans reject the idea that the United States should play the role of world police officer, and 80 percent feel it is playing that role more than it should be… Eighty-eight percent distrust corporate executives, and 90 percent want new corporate regulations and tougher enforcement of existing laws.” And, “More than two in three would like to see a return to a simpler way of life with less emphasis on consumption and wealth (68 percent)” (332-33). This is the common ground held by Americans that should be seen as the base for moving in the direction of Earth Community. If the United States can transform itself, than surely other nations will follow.

This Thanksgiving, let us be thankful for our friends, families and communities, as well as our spiritualities for enriching our lives. And let us be grateful for the planet which sustains all that we do and all that we work towards. But let us also give thanks for those who speak and act boldly for justice and sustainability. From the generations that came before us and won so many victories, like ending segregation so that we might strive for unity, to the new generation currently struggling to save education in California and clean energy in Appalachia, millions have been struggling so that we might continue working towards a future worth living in. By giving thanks, we honor that challenge.

1 – I’ve tried to summarize the main features of capitalism in my essay “What is Capitalism?” Online at http://endofcapitalism.com/about/2-what-is-capitalism/
2 – The “ruling class” is exposed in simple but compelling terms by Paul Kivel in his 2004 book You Call This a Democracy? Who Benefits, Who Pays and Who Really Decides
3 – Right-wing British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher coined the TINA phrase. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There_is_no_alternative
4 – For a good introduction to the concept of “peak oil” see Energy Bulletin’s “Peak Oil Primer.” Online at http://energybulletin.net/primer
5 – Anarchist anthropologist David Graeber has written about the surprising success of grassroots movements for change in his essay “The Shock of Victory.” Online at http://endofcapitalism.com/2008/01/31/the-shock-of-victory/
6 – See Coal River Wind for background on this choice, Online at http://www.coalriverwind.org/ and Mountain Justice for ongoing news from the struggle to stop Mountain-Top Removal, online at http://www.mountainjusticesummer.org/
7 – After the UC Board of Regents passed a 32% tuition increase and similar measures were taken across the state, students have fought back by building an enormous movement to save affordable education. A recent compilation of links and information regarding the California student struggle can be found here (although it’s all over the internets): http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2009/11/20/18629379.php

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.

Lately i've become convinced that hope is our greatest ally in working for a better world. If this article doesn't inspire you, look at what's happening in Iran at this moment. - alex]

Look on the Bright Side

Richard Heinberg

Originally published by Post Carbon Institute, June 5, 2009.

Recently I’ve begun compiling a list of things to be cheerful about. Here are some items that should bring a smile to any environmentalist’s lips:

• World energy consumption is declining. That’s right: oil consumption is down, coal consumption is down, and the IEA is projecting world electricity consumption to decline by 3.5 percent this year. I’m sure it’s possible to find a few countries where energy use is still growing, but for the US, China, and most of the European countries that is no longer the case. A small army of writers and activists, including me, has been arguing for years now that the world should voluntarily reduce its energy consumption, because current rates of use are unsustainable for various reasons including the fact that fossil fuels are depleting. Yes, we should build renewable energy capacity, but replacing the energy from fossil fuels will be an enormous job, and we can make that job less daunting by reducing our overall energy appetite. Done.
• CO₂ emissions are falling. This follows from the previous point. I’m still waiting for confirmation from direct NOAA measurements of CO2 in the atmosphere, but it stands to reason that if world oil and coal consumption is declining, then carbon emissions must be doing so as well. The economic crisis has accomplished what the Kyoto Protocol couldn’t. Hooray!
• Consumption of goods is falling. Every environmentalist I know spends a good deal of her time railing both publicly and privately against consumerism. We in the industrialized countries use way too much stuff — because that stuff is made from depleting natural resources (both renewable and non-renewable) and the Earth is running out of fresh water, topsoil, lithium, indium, zinc, antimony…the list is long. Books have been written trying to convince people to simplify their lives and use less, films have been produced and shown on PBS, and support groups have formed to help families kick the habit, but still the consumer juggernaut has continued — until now. This particular dragon may not be slain, but it’s cowering in its den.
• Globalization is in reverse (global trade is shrinking). Back in the early 1990s, when globalization was a new word, an organization of brilliant activists formed the International Forum on Globalization (IFG) to educate the public about the costs and dangers of this accelerating trend. Corporations were off-shoring their production and pollution, ruining manufacturing communities in formerly industrial rich nations while ruthlessly exploiting cheap labor in less-industrialized poor countries. IFG was able to change the public discourse about globalization enough to stall the expansion of the World Trade Organization, but still world trade continued to mushroom. Not any more. China’s and Japan’s exports are way down, as is the US trade deficit.
• The number of vehicle miles traveled (VMT) is falling. For decades the number of total miles traveled by all cars and trucks on US roads has relentlessly increased. This was a powerful argument for building more roads. People bought more cars and drove them further; trucks restocked factories and stores at an ever-growing pace; and delivery vans brought more packages to consumers who shopped from home. All of this driving entailed more tires, pavement, and fuel — and more environmental damage. Over the past few months the VMT number has declined substantially and continually, to a greater extent than has been the case since records started being kept. That’s welcome news.
• There are fewer cars on the road. People are junking old cars faster than new ones are being purchased. In the US, where there are now more cars on the road than there are licensed drivers, this represents an extraordinary shift in a very long-standing trend. In her wonderful book Divorce Your Car, Katie Alvord detailed the extraordinary environmental costs of widespread automobile use. Evidently her book didn’t stem the tide: it was published in the year 2000, and millions of new cars hit the pavement in the following years. But now the world’s auto manufacturers are desperately trying to steer clear of looming bankruptcy, simply because people aren’t buying. In fact, in the first four months of 2009, more bicycles were sold in the US than cars and trucks put together (over 2.55 million bicycles were purchased, compared to fewer than 2.4 million cars and trucks). How utterly cool.
• The world’s over-leveraged, debt-based financial system is failing. Growth in consumption is killing the planet, but arguing against economic growth is made difficult by the fact that most of the world’s currencies are essentially loaned into existence, and those loans must be repaid with interest. Thus if the economy isn’t growing, and therefore if more loans aren’t being made, thus causing more money to be created, the result will be a cascading series of defaults and foreclosures that will ruin the entire system. It’s not a sustainable system given the fact that the world’s resources (the ultimate basis for all economic activity) are finite; and, as the proponents of Ecological and Biophysical Economics have been saying for years, it’s a system that needs to be replaced with one that can still function in a condition of steady or contracting consumption rates. While that sustainable alternative is not yet being discussed by government leaders, at least they are being forced to consider (if not yet publicly) the possibility that the existing system has serious problems and that it may need a thorough overhaul. That’s a good thing.
• Gardening is going gonzo. According to the New York Times (“College Interns Getting Back to Land,” May 25) thousands of college students are doing summer internships on farms this year. Meanwhile seed companies are having a hard time keeping up with demand, as home gardeners put in an unusually high number of veggie gardens. Urban farmer Will Allen predicts that there will be 8 million new gardeners this year, and the number of new gardens is expected to increase 20 to 40 percent this season. Since world oil production has peaked, there is going to be less oil available in the future to fuel industrial agriculture, so we are going to need more gardens, more small farms, and more farmers. Never mind the motives of all these students and home gardeners — few of them have ever heard of Peak Oil, and many of the gardeners are probably just worried whether they can afford to keep the pantry full next winter; nevertheless, they’re doing the right thing. And that’s something to applaud.

[T]he items outlined above suggest that we’ve turned a corner. It’s no longer a matter of nature “eventually” providing checks on humanity’s boisterous expansionism. That’s starting to happen. And it’s not yet due to climate change: yes, we are indeed seeing potentially catastrophic impacts in terms of melting glaciers and so on, but those by themselves have not tempered the economic juggernaut. Instead, it is resource depletion that has begun to slow the freight train of industrialism. Over the past two or three years, high energy prices burst the bubble of unsupportable property prices and pulled the rug out from beneath the teetering financial derivatives market.

That’s what the whole Peak Oil discussion has really been about. It’s an attempt to identify the key resource whose scarcity will tip the global economy from growth to contraction.

Okay, my point is this: we have reached the inevitable turning point. The growth trance that has gripped the world for the past several decades is in the process of ending. Even if we get short periods of economic growth, that growth will be in the context of a significantly contracted economy and will only be temporary in any case, as Peak Oil and other resource constraints will quickly damper increasing economic activity. Gradually, as “recovery” gets put off for another month, another year, another few years, people may begin to realize that the expansionary phase of the era of cheap energy is finished. There are of course no guarantees that the public and their business and political leaders will indeed finally “get it,” because the urge to hang onto the growth illusion will be very strong indeed. But if the misery persists, there’s at least a chance that understanding will finally dawn in the collective mind of our species — the understanding that we must get out ahead of nature’s checks and deliberately reduce the scale of the human enterprise in ways that maximize the prospects of both present and future generations.

But all won’t automatically come to that conclusion on their own. A fundamental change in our comprehension of the human condition will depend on more and more public intellectuals articulating the message of deliberate adaptation to limits, so that the general populace has the necessary conceptual tools with which to mentally process their new circumstances. We will also need far more people working on practical elements of the transition. Those will be ongoing needs — a growth opportunity, if you will pardon the irony, for smart and articulate young people interested in making a difference. And they’ll be most successful if they find ways of framing needed behavior and attitudinal changes in ways that are attractive and inviting — as the Transition Initiatives so brilliantly do.

So in that sense, when I say “Look on the bright side,” no irony or sarcasm is intended.