land and autonomy

Athens GayPride 2009

2009-06-15T11:12:00.000-07:00

gay pride in Zagreb

2009-06-15T11:10:00.000-07:00

The life of a Swiss banker and fascist anti-Imperialist.

2009-06-15T09:52:00.000-07:00

François Genoud was born in 1915 in Lausanne, in the french-speaking part of Switzerland. In his teens he became an admirer of Adolf Hitler, met the future “Führer” in person in 1932, and remained a staunch National-Socialist until his death in 1996.
In 1936 this was amended with another life long committment: to Arab nationalism, when he and a friend traveled to the middle east and met many leaders of the Palestinian national movement then exiled in Iraq, and in Jerusalem most importantly the Mufti, Haj Amin al-Husseini, himself not only the historic leader of Palestinian nationalism, but also a close ally of Nazi-Germany.

Genoud, back in Switzerland, opened a milkbar named Oasis in his hometown, which apparently became a meeting point for Axis agents (in some literature the Oasis is referred to as a “nightclub”).
He was already a member of the National Front, the most prominent of the fascist movements in Switzerland, which was oriented towards German National-Socialism (other fascist groups in Switzerland, especially in the French speaking west, tended to be more oriented towards Mussolini’s Italian fascism). In the years from 1933-38 the swiss fascists seemed to be growing in popularity, although they remained marginal compared to the success of the fascist movements in most other European countries at the time. Popular support for the NF collapsed more or less with the “Anschluss” of Austria in 1938.
Many Frontists - such as Genoud - became direct supporters of the German “Reich” then and moved to Germany to offer their services for the National-Socialist cause.
In 1941 he met again with al-Husseini who was setting up headquarters in Berlin to coordinate the formation of the muslim SS-brigade in Bosnia, as well as the anti-British and anti-Zionist activities of Arab insurgents in Palestine, consistently lobbying Berlin not to allow Jews to escape to Palestine, but to murder them instead.
Not that the Germans weren’t doing that already, but there is at least one case where Himmler was prepared - as a propaganda coup - to exchange 5’000 Jewish children for 20’000 German POW’s. Al-Husseinis incessant lobbying made sure that this “deal” fell through and the children were sent to the gas chambers instead.
Genoud and al-Husseini remained friends until the latters death in 1974.

Another life-long friendship was starting in the same year: with Paul Dickopf.
Dickopf was a SS-officer and became Genoud’s contact at the Stuttgart office of the Abwehr (Intelligence Agency). After the war, Dickopf claimed he had deserted in 1942 and had gone into hiding in Switzerland - at Genoud’s place. In reality he only “disappeared” in 1944 and indeed stayed with Genoud in Lausanne. That Genoud was a fanatical Nazi is only one of the facts that make Dickopf’s story lack credibility. It’s true that he started working for both the Swiss and the Americans (via Allen Dulles’ OSS office in Bern), but it’s almost certain that simultaneously he still worked for Germany - a triple agent, something he managed to obscure after the war, when he was making a steep and rapid career in the Federal police of West Germany, becoming the chief of the BKA (the German equivalent of the FBI) in 1965, and in addition to that head of Interpol in 1968.
It is said that he was partly elected to this post thanks to his friend François Genoud’s good connections to the Arab countries.
In 1971 he was deposed under allegations of incompetence, but he had certainly proved to be able to place a staggering number of former Nazi agents in the BKA.
Besides this it is noticeable that under Dickopf’s leadership Interpol essentially refused to deal with the emerging modern terrorism (hijackings of planes, Munich), claiming these were “political” and not criminal deeds.

But back in time:
The Mufti of Jerusalem escaped from Berlin in the last days of the “Reich” and tried to make his way into Switzerland. The Swiss arrested him and deported him to France where he was put under house arrest. Yugoslavia was seeking extradition for his involvement in war crimes comitted by the Bosnian SS brigade he had helped set up. Al-Husseini however managed to escape to Egypt.
He wasn’t the only war criminal who was seeking refuge there, the country became - not dissimilar to Peron’s Argentina - a safe haven for active Nazis, allowing them to continue their struggle.

Genoud in the meantime had kept himself busy moving Nazi money into safe Swiss accounts and also helping Nazis escape to the Middle East or South America.
Soon after he made his first steps in a new direction: Publishing.
His first coup was when he got his hands on the Martin Bormann archives which contain the transcripts of Hitler’s “table talks”. Later he secured literary rights to them, making a deal with Hitler’s sister, and the literary estate of Goebbels, which thanks to the diaries would make Genoud a fortune in the coming decades.

On May 14, 1948, David Ben Gurion declared the statehood of Israel in Tel Aviv. The next day the troops of Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon and Iraq attacked Israel. Abd ar-Rahman Assam, secretary general of the Arab League declared:”This war will be a war to extermination and lead to a terrible massacre.” This makes it clear that the Israeli defense was not only for the statehood of Israel but for the very lives of the Jews living in Palestine.
The Mufti did whatever he could to contribute to the success of this massacre, by lobbying in Egypt, setting up a “Holy War Army” and later an “All-Palestine Government” in Gaza (then a part of Egypt).

In 1952 the “Free Officers” under Gamal Abdel Nasser and Muhammad Naguib took power in Egypt by way of a coup. Early on a number of Nazi exiles were among the advisors for the Free Officers. Active Nazi involvement in the 50’s is estimated several hundred strong.
After the king was deposed, Egypt also became a safe place for the Algerian anti-colonial struggle, in which François Genoud took part in a particular way, mainly through the foundation of the “Arab Commercial Bank” in 1958 which started playing a considerable role in trade with Middle Eastern countries and served as the conduit for arms acquisitions by the Algerian FLN.
Hjalmar Schacht, once Hitler’s finance minister and now a banker and financial advisor for governments and businesses from Syria to Indonesia, was consulted in the process of setting up the bank and declared in one meeting: “Germany can conquer the world without waging war”.

In 1960 a setback happened for Genoud: First Paula Hitler died without signing the contract that would have given him the rights for all of Hitlers works. A year later Adolf Eichmann was found in Argenitina and taken to Israel by a Mossad commando. Genoud was financing the defense.
In the same year there was the conference of Evian which brought an end to the war and lead to independence of Algeria and the freeing of the jailed leaders of the FLN.
After independence François Genoud was at the heart of power of the new state.

Soon there were cracks in the unity of the FLN leadership, at first with Ahmed Ben Bella, Boumedienne, Khider on the one, and Belkassim Krim and Mohammed Boudiaf on the other side. But it only took months until cracks between Ben Bella and Khider started appearing.
Mohammed Khider - one of the historic leaders and its Secretary General - was concentrating the warchest of the FLN in the Arab Commercial Bank. A total of nearly 42m Swiss Francs was deposited in numbered accounts.
As Genoud was covering for Khider he soon lost his privileges in Algeria and even spent a few months in prison there. Khider himself was assassinated by Algerian agents in Madrid in 1967.

After independence, Yasser Arafat, leader of the Palestinian Fatah (and a remote relative of al-Husseini), asked the new Algerian leadership to open an office for his movement. Under the auspices of Abu Jihad (Chalil al-Wazir) it iwas through this “embassy” that contacts to the Soviet Union, China, North Vietnam, North Korea and other countries were established and leaders like Che Guevara were received as guests.
Arafat was developing a “Chinese option” of guerilla warfare against Israel, a development that was seen with critical eyes by the Egyptians who saw their influence on Palestinian Nationalism vane, but who also understood that the guerilla option was not a promising one in a country like Israel where there were no remote areas for retreat as they existed in countries like Algeria or Vietnam.

Not surprisingly, François Genoud soon made contact with members of the new generation of exponents of Palestinian nationalism. The closest relation he struck was with the supposedly “left wing” PFLP (Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine), becoming a good friend of Waddi Haddad, one of its historic leaders.
Palestinian nationalism started having a great attraction towards young Europeans who projected their respective ideas of the “people’s war” onto it. Among the first who were trained by the PFLP in their guerilla camps in Jordan were Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof, the founders of the Red Army Faction.
The first European casualty was the neo-Nazi Roger Coudray who died as a member of Fatah.
Neither the PFLP nor Fatah had problems associating with old and new Nazis, or members of the “New Left” at the same time. Fatah sent two observers to a congress of an ultra-racist organisation called the New European Order, headed by the notorious Swiss Nazi and holocaust denier Gaston-Armand Amaudruz. This of course was in the same year - 1969 - that the German SDS (left wing student organisation) sent a delegation to the PLO congress to Algier to express their comittment to the “Endsieg” of the Palestinians against Israel. One of the German delegates was Josef (“Joschka”) Fischer, who would later become German Foreign minister (and as one could argue, kept up his support for armed nationalist rackets by intervening on the side of the “Kosovo Liberation Army” in Yugoslavia in the late 90’s).

1968 was the year that the PFLP started its campaigns of plane hijackings, which reached a peak in 1970.
This was the year when Genoud met a new young recruit to the Palestinian cause, the Venezuelan Illich Ramirez Sanchez, who would later be known as Carlos and rise to notoriety for the kidnapping of the OPEC oil ministers.

His involvement with Palestinian terror groups didn’t keep Genoud from pursueing his career as a publisher of the Goebbels diaries and other Nazi literature. Often there were problems that were fought out in courts, but he usually came out on top and made a fortune with it.

The courts were also a platform for Genouds struggle to help all kinds of Nazis and Anti-Semites. After already orchestrating the legal defense of Adolf Eichmann, he did the same for the Palestinian commando that attacked an Israeli air plane on Zürich airport, for Klaus Barbie, the “butcher of Lyon”, and for Carlos, often in collaboration with Jacques Vergès, a prominent figure in France oscillating between anti-imperialism and anti-Semitism.

In the meantime the attempts of the Algerian government to regain the “treasure of the FLN” cost more lives, and was also battled out in courts. Years later there was finally a settlement, whereby the BCA became a part of the Algerian banking system. However a measly 2,5m Swiss Francs were left of the “treasure” by then.

Genoud’s life remained action packed and his comittment to the Nazi cause never faltered.
He was believed by Swiss authorities to have been the founder of Lugano-based al Taqwa Bank, which was shut down in 2002 for reputed status as a funding conduit for al Qaeda and Hamas.

On May 30th, 1996 Genoud committed suicide, with the help of the Swiss pro-euthanasia group Exit, a short time after Jewish leaders and Swiss banking officials announced an unprecedented agreement to set up a commission to examine secret bank and government files to search for funds deposited in Switzerland by Holocaust victims.
To what degree this inquiry would have touched on his activities and transactions will remain unknown. A master of secrecy he managed to stay in the shadows.

Main source:
Karl Laske: Ein Leben zwischen Hitler und Carlos: François Genoud, Limmat Verlag, Zürich 1996
German translation of: Le banquier noir. François Genoud, Editions du Seuil, Paris 1996

Datacide Author: Christoph Fringeli

Morze infoshop new poster

2009-06-03T09:09:00.000-07:00

Consumerism: an Historical Perspective

2009-06-01T02:08:00.000-07:00

from http://thomaspainescorner.wordpress.com/2009/04/26/consumerism-an-historical-perspective/

21 February 2009

The Pacific Ecologist, whence this article came, provided this editorial note: Sharon Beder explores the history of consumer societies from the 1920s when over-production of goods exceeded demand. Instead of stabilising the economy, reducing working hours, and sharing work around, which would have brought more leisure time for all, industrialists decided to expand markets by promoting consumerism to the working classes. The social decision to produce unlimited quantities of goods rather than leisure, nurtured wastefulness, obsolescence, and inefficiency and created the foundation for our modern consumer culture. People were trained to be both workers and consumers in a culture of work and spend.

Consumption was promoted through advertising as a “democracy of goods” and used to pacify political unrest among workers. With the help of marketers and advertisers exploiting the idea of consumer goods as status symbols, workers were manipulated into being avaricious consumers who could be trusted “to spend more rather than work less.” But if we admired wisdom above wealth, and compassion and cooperation above competition, we could undermine the motivation to consume.

The development of consumer societies meant the erosion of traditional values and attitudes of thrift and prudence. Expanding consumption was necessary to create markets for the fruits of rising production. Ironically this “required the nurture of qualities like wastefulness, self-indulgence, and artificial obsolescence, which directly negated or undermined the values of efficiency” and the Protestant Ethic that had originally nurtured capitalism.1 Advertisers sought to redefine people’s needs, encourage their wants and offer solutions to them via goods produced by corporations rather than allowing people to identify and solve their own problems, or to look to each other for solutions. 2

Consumerism also played a major role in legitimising a social system which rewards businessmen and top corporate executives with incomes many times those of ordinary workers. The consumer society gives ordinary workers some access to the good life. Surrounded by the bounty of their work — the television set, stereo, car, computer, white goods — they are less likely to question conditions of their work, the way it dominates their life, and the lack of power they have as workers. Advertisers constantly tell them these are the fruits of success, that this is what life is all about. To question a system that delivers such plenty would seem perverse.

Over-production and the shorter working week

The growth in production in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries required growing markets. This meant expanding the consuming class beyond the middle and upper classes to include the working classes. Production between 1860 and 1920 increased by 12 to 14 times in the US while the population only increased three times.3 Supply outstripped demand and problems of scarcity were replaced by problems of how to create more demand.

By the early 1920s, when American markets were reaching saturation, “over-production” and lack of consumer demand were blamed for recession. More goods were being produced than a population with “set habits and means” could consume.4 There were two schools of thought about how this problem should be solved. One was that work hours should be decreased and the economy stabilised so production met current needs and work was shared around. This view was held by intellectuals, labour leaders, reformers, educators and religious leaders. In America and in Europe, it was commonly believed consumer desires had limits that could be reached and production beyond those limits would result in increased leisure time for all. 5

The opposing view, mainly held by business people and economists, was over-production could and should be solved by increasing consumption so economic growth could continue. Manufacturers needed to continually expand production so as to increase their profits. Employers were also afraid of such a future because of its potential to undermine the work ethic and encourage degeneracy amongst workers who were unable to make proper use of their time. Increasing production and consumption guaranteed the ongoing centrality of work. 6

Keen to maintain the importance of work in the face of the push for more leisure, businessmen extolled the virtues and pleasures of work and its necessity in building character, providing dignity and inspiring greatness. Economists too argued that the creation of work was the goal of production. John M. Clark, in a review of economic developments, stated: “Consumption is no longer the sole end nor production solely the means to that end. Work is an end in itself…” Creating work, and the right to work, he argued, had a higher moral imperative than meeting basic needs. 7

Manufacturer, H. C. Atkins, along with president of the National Association of Manufacturers, John E. Edgerton, warned a five-day week would undermine the work ethic by giving more time for leisure.8 If work took up less of the day it would be less important in people’s lives. Edgerton, observed: “I am for everything that will make work happier but against everything that will further subordinate its importance…. the emphasis should be put on work – more work and better work, instead of upon leisure.” 9

Most businessmen believed shorter hours meant less production, which would limit the growth of America’s business enterprise. They argued they could not afford shorter work weeks, that they would become uncompetitive and go bankrupt. They also feared that given extra free time, people would spend it in unsociable ways, turning to crime, vice, corruption and degeneracy and perhaps even radicalism. “The common people had to be kept at their desks and machines, lest they rise up against their betters.” 10 And Edgerton, argued “nothing breeds radicalism more quickly than unhappiness unless it is leisure. As long as the people are kept profitably and happily employed there is little danger from radicalism.” 11 In the US consumption rates were increasing in the mid-1920s and the “new economic gospel of consumption” gained many adherents. 12 The idea there were limits on consumer wants began to be eclipsed by the idea such wants could be endlessly created. In 1929 the President’s Committee on Recent Economic Changes stated: “wants are almost insatiable; one want satisfied makes way for another… by advertising and other promotional devices, by scientific fact- finding, and by carefully pre-developed consumption, a measurable pull on production… has been created.” 13

The public was urged by the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) to “end the buyers’ strike.” 14 However the desire to consume did not come naturally, it had to be learned: “People had to move away from habits of strict thrift toward habits of ready spending.”15 From the 1920s corporations began advertising to the working classes in an effort to break down these old habits of thrift and encourage new consumerist desires. At the same time they sought to counter anti-corporate feelings generated by the conditions of work in their factories. 16

Hooking work and leisure to consumption

Higher wages helped in this shift from the Protestant ethic of asceticism to one of consumerism that fitted with the required markets for mass production.17 In boom times, workers were given increased wages rather than increased leisure. Between 1910 and 1929 the average purchasing power of workers in the US increased by 40%. 18 With these rising wages they bought more and the upward spiral of production and consumption was maintained. In earlier times higher wages might have encouraged workers to work shorter hours, but once workers had been coached into becoming consumers there was little danger of this. With the help of marketers and advertisers, workers could be trusted “to spend more rather than work less.” 19

In this context it was important leisure was not an alternative to work and an opportunity to reflect on life but rather a time for consumption. In this way the forty-hour week, rather than threatening economic growth would foster it. Leisure goods such as radios, phonographs, movies, clothes, books and recreational facilities all benefited from increased leisure time.20 At the same time leisure had to be subordinate to work and importantly, a reason to work.

Business people still wanted to limit the reduction of work hours and believed that by ‘educating’ workers to become consumers, the demand from workers for reduced working hours would also be limited. 21 Manufacturers expanded markets by expanding the range of goods they produced, moving from the basic requirements of living such as food, clothing and building materials to items such as cars and radios that provided entertainment and recreation. 22 US unions fell in with the consumption solution to overproduction in the late 1920s and concentrated on fighting for higher wages. Union leaders promoted increased production and economic growth as a way of increasing wages. It was not till the Great Depression of the 1930s that they again fought for a shorter working week as a solution to unemployment. 23

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After the Second World War the idea of solving unemployment by reducing working hours disappeared from mainstream thinking. During the war a demand for consumer goods built up and following it workers tended to prefer wage rises to shorter hours.24 Unions no longer pressed for shorter working hours and workers themselves became wedded to a consumer lifestyle that required long hours to support. Many unions in fact gave up their fight for control of production in favour of a share of the fruits of production and “ever-increasing levels of material well-being for their workers.”25

The promise of full-employment assuaged fears that long work hours might create unemployment. Leisure became consumer-oriented, revolving round the home with its entertaining and convenience goods and the vacation where workers could enjoy living in luxury for a short time. 26 As Cross noted: “The identification of leisure with consumption won many to hard and steady work in disagreeable jobs.” 27

Juliet Schor noted in her book, The Overworked American that by 1991 productivity in the US had increased steadily from the 1940s: “we could now produce our 1948 standard of living (measured in terms of marketed goods and services) in less than half the time it took in that year. We could actually have chosen the four-hour day, or a working year of six months….” Instead, workers work more hours now than in 1948 and consume more than twice as much. 28 It was the “social decision to direct industrial innovation toward producing unlimited quantities of goods rather than leisure” that created the foundation for our modern consumer culture, “a culture of work and spend.” The movement for more free time for workers and leisure time free of market forces, was defeated by the middle of the 20th century when mass consumer culture took off. 29 The consumer culture, rather than eroding the work ethic, tied people even more closely to working long hours in order to earn the money for their consumer desires.

Consumerism as opiate of the masses

Stuart Ewen in his book Captains of Consciousness: Advertising and the Social Roots of the Consumer Culture showed that advertising for mass consumerism was not only aimed at increasing markets for goods but also at shifting the locus of discontent from people’s work to arenas that advertisers could promise would be satisfied by consumption. Their frustrations and unhappiness could then be directed towards buying rather than political protest against working conditions or other elements of industrial society.30

Ewen claims that consumerism: “the mass participation in the values of the mass-induced market,” was not a natural historical development but an aggressive device of corporate survival.” Discontent in the workplace could lead to a challenge to corporate authority but discontent in the consumer sphere provided an incentive to work harder and reflected an acceptance of the values of the capitalist enterprise. 31 Similarly Robert Lane claims in his book on Political Ideology that: “The more emphasis a society places upon consumption-through advertising, development of new products, and easy installment buying-the more will social dissatisfaction be channeled into intraclass consumption rivalry instead of interclass resentment and conflict… the more will labor unions focus upon the ‘bread and butter’ aspects of unionism, as contrasted to its ideological elements.” 32

If people were dependent on the products of the factories they were less likely to be critical of the appalling working conditions within them. The good life attained through this consumption was also compensation for the unpleasantness of work and distracted attention from it. Advertisements were careful not to depict people working in factories. A leading copywriter in the 1920s, Helen Woodward, advised consumption could help sublimate and redirect urges that might otherwise be expressed politically or aggressively. “To those who cannot change their whole lives or occupations,” she argued, “even a new line in a dress is often a relief.” 33

Department store merchant Edward Filene, a spokesperson for industrialists in the 1920s and 30s, spoke frankly about the need for social planning in order to create a consumer culture where industry could “sell to the masses all that it employs the masses to create” and the need for education to train the masses to be consumers in a world of mass production. He argued that consumer culture could unify the nation and, through education, social change could be limited to changes in the commodities that industry produced.34

Consumption allows people at the bottom of the social hierarchy to feel they have some measure of access to the good life for all their troubles. The escape from real life provided by leisure activities allows people to continue what might otherwise be a dreary and downtrodden existence. Lisa Macdonald and Allen Myers from Green Left Weekly, claim workers attempt to gain ownership of what they produce and overcome their alienation through consumption: “it is only as purchasers, ’shoppers’, that we are treated with the courtesy worthy of a human being.”35 Employers encouraged workers to think of consumerism as the rationale for their work but measures of success were moved from the realm of production and work to the realm of consumption. Advertising messages affected people’s aspirations. They portrayed a bounty of consumer goods as the fruits of the American Dream. Rather than aspiring for their children to become leading businessmen or top executives or political leaders, advertisements offered messages such as “Some Day your Boy will own a Buick.”36

Advertisers also undermined the nineteenth century “culture of character” which was the basis of the myth of the self-made man, someone who succeeded as a result of hard work, morality and discipline. In its place a “culture of personality” evolved which promoted the importance of presentation and appearance, things that advertisers were so helpfully offering to assist with. What mattered in getting ahead and influencing people was the impression a person made on others. Things like their clothes, their home furnishings, their personal cleanliness were all used by others to judge their character.37 Also advertising and consumerism played a major role in the acceptance of the capitalist vision and its associated inequalities. Roland Marchand in his book Advertising the American Dream argued advertisers repeatedly used “the parable of the democracy of goods” to sell their products to the middle classes. In this parable, although there was a social hierarchy with wealth concentrated at the top, ordinary people could enjoy the same products and goods that the people at the top did. Joe Blo could drink the same brand of coffee as the wealthiest capitalist. Mary Jane could buy the same soap as the lady with the maid in waiting. The most humble of citizens (although not the poor who were not the targets of these advertisements) could afford to purchase the same quality products as a millionaire. 38

The social message of the parable of the Democracy of Goods was clear. Antagonistic envy of the rich was unseemly; programs to redistribute wealth were unnecessary. The best things in life were already available to all at reasonable prices. Incessantly and enticingly repeated, advertising visions of fellowship in a Democracy of Goods encouraged Americans to look to similarities in consumption styles rather than to political power or control of wealth for evidence of significant equality. 39

According to Filene, the process of buying goods was a means by which people were supporting industry and thereby electing the manufacturers, who made the goods, to a government which would satisfy their needs. They were voting industry leaders into positions of leadership in society. In this way “the masses have elected Henry Ford. They have elected General Motors. They have elected the General Electric Company, and Woolworth’s and all the other great industrial and business leaders of the day.”40 Not only was the desire for social change displaced by a desire for changes in commodities, but political freedom was equated with consumer choice and political citizenship with participation in the market through consumption. Consumption was promoted as democratising at the very time it was being used to pacify the political unrest of workers.41 According to well-known sociologist Daniel Bell: “If the American worker has been ‘tamed’ it has not been through the discipline of the machine, but by the ‘consumption society,’ by the possibility of a better living which his wage, the second income from his working wife, and easy credit all allow.”42

Production, consumption and status

Vance Packard, in his book The Status Seekers argued the use of consumer goods as status symbols was a deliberate strategy of advertisers, or “merchants of discontent,” who took advantage of the “upgrading urge” people felt. The message that workers could improve their status through consumption was particularly aimed at people who had little chance of raising their status through their work because opportunities for promotion were slim.43 employers sought to divert the dissatisfaction of workers with the nature of their work into a more personal dissatisfaction that could be fed with consumer goods: “offering mass produced visions of individualism by which people could extricate themselves from the mass.”44

The advertiser offered workers the possibility of gaining social status through buying goods that were better than their neighbours. With the help of installment plans and credit, they could purchase the signifiers of success even if they weren’t achieving success in their workplace. This was not something that came naturally to working people who were, for the main part, resigned to their position in life. According to Packard “they need prodding and ‘educating’ to desire many of the traditionally higher-class products the mass merchandisers want to move in such vast numbers, such as the electric rotating spits or gourmet foods.”45

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Car manufacturers, particularly, exploited people’s desire for status, spending “small fortunes exploring the status meaning of their product.” They found, for example that people in housing developments where all the houses looked similar, were most likely to leave their large new cars parked on the street in front of the house rather than in the garage where no-one would see them. Plymouth advertisements pictured a family in front of their car saying “We’re not wealthy… we just look it!” Dodge advertisements featured a man saying to a Dodge car owner “Boy, you must be rich to own a car as big as this!” And Ford advertisements showed the back of one of their cars and stated “let the people behind you know you are ahead of them!”46

Such advertising was so successful people began diverting funds from other purchases into the purchase of a car to enhance their status, and by the end of the 1950s Americans “were spending more of their total income on the family chariot than they were in financing their homestead, which housed the family and its car or cars.”47 Not to be outdone home builders and sellers ensured the home became a status symbol that rivalled the motor car.

Chinoy observed consumption provided automobile workers in the 1950s with a way of rationalising their failure to advance in their work: “Advancement has come to mean the progressive accumulation of things as well as the increasing capacity to consume… If one manages to buy a new car, if each year sees a major addition to the household-a washing machine, a refrigerator, a new living-room suite, now probably a television set-then one is also getting ahead.”48 Rather than question the American Dream, workers would either blame themselves for their failure to live up to it, or find other ways to interpret it.

Such trends were not confined to the US. The consumerism that proliferated in the US in the 1920s and 1930s, spread to other industrialised nations after the Second World War, particularly in the 1950s. 49 In his book on the rise of a consumer society in Australia, Greg Whitwell said: “The ownership of certain sorts of consumer goods, each ranked according to brand names, came to be seen as guides to an individual’s income which in turn, so it is believed, said something about his or her inner worth. Consumer goods became external signs, used to give a sense of hierarchy by members of a society characterized by an emphasis on change and on social and geographical mobility.”50

More pay needed to buy “goods”

In a British study of the working class in the 1950s Ferdynand Zweig found: “a steep rise in acquisitive tendencies and pre-occupation with money in work attitudes.” There was far less difference between middle class and working class purchase of consumer durables (cars, white goods, electrical appliances) than previously and class self-identification had come to depend more on factors such as house ownership than type of work. In fact Zweig found workers impatient with questions about class. They were more interested in status as a way of organising the social spectrum.51

Increased consumerism led to an increased emphasis on the importance of pay. Many people work so as to earn the money to buy consumer goods and some measure of status that accompanies them. A European study by the Henley Centre in 1991 found “better pay” was the priority for new jobs for 70 percent of those surveyed, compared with enjoyable work, which was a priority for 58 percent.52

A U.S. study found those who believed “having lots of money” was “extremely important” had gone up to almost two thirds in 1986 from less than half in 1977. It ranked higher than any other of goal in life.53 Americans born since 1963, those referred to as generation X, are more likely to agree that: “The only really meaningful measure of success is money” than any previous generation. They spend more money on stereos, mobile phones, beepers and cars than older people and are more likely to take a less interesting job if it pays well.54

Jimmy Carter, as President of the US noted: “Human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns.”55 Consumption has become a more important source of self-identity and status than work for many people. Compton Advertising undertook a survey of public attitudes to the economic system in 1974 and found two thirds of those surveyed identified their role in the economic system as that of “consumers and spenders of money” rather than workers or producers. This included one half of those in the labour force. 56

More recent opinion surveys show that in countries like the US and Japan, “people increasingly measure success by the amount they consume.”57 In a society where people don’t know each other very well, appearances are important and social status, though more securely attained through occupation, can be attained with strangers through consumption. When people are uprooted and move to the cities they are strangers to each other. Previously everyone knew one another’s business and the status that should be accorded to each person. In an anonymous city a person can adopt a certain lifestyle, clothes, car that is higher up the status ladder than their occupation would indicate, particularly if they are willing to go into debt to do it. Consumption then becomes an indicator of achievement.58

The desire to consume is often portrayed as a natural human characteristic that cannot be changed. However it is clear populations have been manipulated into being avaricious consumers. What people really want, more than the multitude of goods on offer, is status. History has shown the determinants of status can change. If we want to live in an ecologically sustainable society, then we need to award status to those who are happy with a basic level of comfort rather than those who accumulate possessions. If, as a community, we admired wisdom above wealth and compassion and cooperation above competition, we would be well on the way to undermining the motivation to consume.

This article was first adapted for publication in Pacific Ecologist from chapter 12 of the book Selling the Work Ethic: From Puritan Pulpit to Corporate PR, by Sharon Beder, Publisher Scribe, Melbourne 2000. Professor Sharon Beder is head of the Science, Technology and Society Programme at the University of Wollongong, NSW, Australia. She writes a regular column for Engineers Australia and has written several books including Power Play Toxic Fish and Sewer Surfing; The Nature of Sustainable Development. Professor Beder was awarded the 2001 World Technology Award in Ethics.

References

[1] Roland Marchand, Advertising the American Dream: Making way for modernity, 1920-1940 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), p, 158.

[2] Stuart Ewen, Captains of Consciousness: Advertising and the Social Roots of the Consumer Culture( New York: McGraw-Hill, 1976), pp. 70, 108.

[3] David J. Cherrington, The Work Ethic: Working Values and Values that Work (New York: AMACON, 1980), p. 37.

[4] Gary Cross, Time and Money (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 38; Rodney Clapp, ‘Why the Devil Takes Visa’, Christianity Today, Vol. 40, No. 11 (1996).

[5] Cross, note 7, pp. 7-8, 28.

[6] Ibid., pp. 7,9,39; Benjamin Kline Hunnicutt, Work Without End: Abandoning Shorter Hours for the Right to Work (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988), pp. 42, 67.

[7] Ibid., pp. 62-3.

[8] Paul Bernstein, American Work Values: Their Origin and Development (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1997), p. 157.

[9] Cross, note 7, p. 16.

[10] Juliet B. Schor, The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline in Leisure (USA: BasicBooks, 1991), p. 74.

[11] Quoted in Hunnicutt, note 9, p. 41.

[12] Hunnicutt, note 9, p.; 42.

[13] Quoted in Cross, note 7, p. 41.

[14] Quoted in Ibid., p. 38.

[15] Clapp, note 7.

[16] Ewen, note 5, p. 19.

[17] Ibid., p. 29.

[18] Cross, note 7, p. 7.

[19] Hunnicutt, note 9, p. 43.

[20] Ibid., p. 45.

[21] Ibid., pp. 46-7.

[22] Robert Eisenberger, Blue Monday: The Loss of the Work Ethic in America (New York: Paragon House, 1989), p. 11.

[23] Hunnicutt, note 9, p. 79.

[24] Cross, note 7, p. 85.

[25] Schor, note 15, p. 78; Daniel Yankelovich and John Immerwahr, ‘Putting the Work Ethic to Work’, Society, Vol. 21, No. 2 (1984), p. 59.

[26] Cross, note 7, p. 155.

[27] Ibid., p. 153.

[28] Schor, note 15, p. 2.

[29] Cross, note 7, pp. 5, 9.

[30] Ewen, note 5, pp. 43-5.

[31] Ibid., pp. 54, 109.

[32] Robert E. Lane, Political Ideology: Why the American Common Man Believes What he Does (New York: The Free Press, 1962), p. 80.

[33] Ewen, note 5, pp. 77-8, 85-6.

[34] Ibid., p. 54.

[35] L. Macdonald and A. Myers, ‘Malign Design’, New Internationalist (November 1998), p. 21.

[36] Marchand, note 4, pp. 162, 222.

[37] Ibid., pp. 209-10.

[38] Ibid., p. 218.

[39] Ibid., pp. 220, 222.

[40] Quoted in Ewen, note 5, p. 92.

[41] Ibid., pp. 89, 91.

[42] Daniel Bell, ‘Work and Its Discontents (1956)’, in A. R. Gini and T. J. Sullivan (eds), It Comes with the Territory: An Inquiry Concerning Work and the Person (New York: Random House, 1989), pp. 122-123.

[43] Vance Packard, The Status Seekers: An Exploration of Class Behaviour in America (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1961), pp. 269-70.

[44] Andrew Hornery, ‘Family Pack aims for the children’, Sydney Morning Herald, 24 September 1998, p. 45.

[45] Packard, note 84, p. 271.

[46] Ibid., pp. 273-4.

[47] Ibid., p. 274.

[48] Ely Chinoy, Automobile Workers and the American Dream, 2nd ed (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinios Press, 1992), p. 126.

[49] Stewart Lansley, After the Gold Rush: The Trouble with Affluence: ‘Consumer Capitalism’ and the Way Forward (London: Century Business Books, 1994), p. 85.

[50] Greg Whitwell, Making the Market: The Rise of Consumer Society (Melbourne: McPhee Gribble Publishers, 1989), p. 7.

[51] Ferdynand Zweig, The New Acquisitive Society (Chichester: Barry Rose, 1976), pp. 15, 21-2, 26-7.

[52] Cited in Lansley, note 90, p. 136.

[53] Alan Thein Durning, How Much is Enough: The Consumer Society and the Future of the Earth, ed. Linda Starke, Worldwatch Environmental Alert Series (London: Earthscan, 1992), p. 34.

[54] Dan Zevin and Carolyn Edy, ‘Boom Time for Gen X’, US News and World Report (20 October 1997)

[55] Quoted in Thomas H. Naylor, William H. Willimon and Rolf Osterberg, The Search for Meaning in the Workplace (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1996), p. 69.

[56] Compton Advertising, ‘National Survey on the American Economic System’, (New York: The Advertising Council, 1974), p. 17

[57] Durning, note 94, p. 22.

[58] Bell, note 71, p. 68.

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Solidarity Action with Greek Uprising, Unsmooth Operators Eight

2009-05-31T14:20:00.000-07:00

During a small manifestation outside the greek embassy in January, showing support for the uprising in Greece, although a police photographer happily pranced around taking photos from all directions, it aparently wasn’t enough in the profiling of those who dare express political belief in representative democracy.

A women with two small children approached one of those holding the banner and informed them of the covert photographer dressed in black lying down pointing his camera at the spectacle, hiding behind the barrirer on the second story of a car-park she was exiting.

It is well known to anyone politically active in this country that ‘operation eight’, an intensive and covert surveillance operation continues, stalking those who resist the colonial and state capitalist system.

Atleast it’s nice to know that even random members of the general public are willing to go out of their way to expose what they see as highly offensive behaviour on the part of the police spy’s and secret service.

PHOTOS HERE

NO" to oil pipe-line "Bourgas-Alexandroupolis

2009-05-20T15:25:00.000-07:00

98.97 % out of the 14 900 people who voted in the Pomorie municipality
voted "NO" on the referendum about the oil pipe-line
"Bourgas-Alexandroupolis".

This became clear once 100% of the votes had been counted. The ones that
voted "Yes" are 1,03%, and the turnout is 50,12%, this had been stated by
the chair of the election commission - Luba Stravolevoma, as quoted in
Focus information agency. Such a turnout means that the locals had managed
to pass the 51% and that the referendum is legitimate. The Pomorian
referendum is the first legitimate referendum out of the three that had
place. In Bourgas 50 000 said 'no' to the project, 5000 from Sozopol, who
also expressed their negative attitude towards the project. But in both
cases the turnout did not go over the 51% barrier that would have made
them legitimate.

The question was "Do you agree on the construction of the oil pipeline
'Bourgas-Alexandroupolis', having its track and installations on the
territory of the Pomorie municipality?" The results will be send to the
local authorities as well as to the company that will be implementing the
project.

Earlier, the mass participation of the citizens of the Pomorie
municipality, had made the city mayor - Petar Zlatanov, happy. "I am
grateful to the citizens, that they went to give their vote. In this way
they help our administration, the help the government and the people, that
are engaged in the project. The referendum showed that citizens are
gaining confidence, that their opinion will be taken into account. I am
completely confident in this, because I see the useful contact between the
government, the municipal authorities and and companies that will
implement the project.

The election day started at 6.00 in 47 sections, reported the chair of the
municipal election commission. The activity of the citizens at about 9.00
am was 9.5% already, that is more in respect to the last local elections,
when at that point the turnout was at about 6%. At about 12.00 27% had
voted and it was expected that the turnout will be high and that it will
go over 50%.

In the Pomorie municipality there a bit more than 23 000 people have
voting rights.

Solidarity action with Rozbrat squat in Poland, Poznan

2009-05-20T15:00:00.001-07:00

Today (2009.04.06) a small group protested in front of the Polish Embassy in Budapest, showing the letters "Save Rozbrat" in a hopefully not so bad Polish. They gave a letter addressed to the ambassador and the city council of Poznan, which was received by the housekeeper and her small child. Rozbrat is one of the oldest squats in Europe and under threat of eviction these days because of an imminent auction. The squat called for an international day of action for May 6th.

Athens : report from Legalize Festival

2009-05-11T07:01:00.000-07:00

Legalize pro-testival is an annual event that takes place in Greece. A diversity of groups , artists , cultural activists gather every year to protest against the Greek drug policy. Legalize protestival is also a mobilization for all those people who faced the state repression because They like to smoke weed. This year the Festival has been divided in two parts (weekends). The first weekend of May the festival took place at Ermou street in the very (center)heart of Athens and the second at the park of environmental awarreness quite close to the city center. The first weekend , before the concerts , the big party and so on, a street parade inspired by reclaim the streets was extending in the big traffics of the city center. A diversity of music like reggae , drum n bass , trance , other accoustic styles , hip hop , punk etc and a lot of people who were willing to stand openly on the the streets for basic legal rights . Therefore the festival was successful , with a lot promises for its development next year. I was not in the organizational collective but I got impressed with the people who joined it as well as the radical overview of the organizers.

I think that even the most suspicious persons about the political background of that festival got satisfied from the participation as well as the collective’s announcement that I put forward bellow.

“This festival is organized from all of us ,for the benefit of all of us and it can take place only through the conscious participation and help from everybody. It is an open public celebration for Freedom of Expression and Freedom of Choice, Self-Determination, Personal and Social Autonomy. There is not any separation between the “organizers”, the “artists”, the cultural activists and all the participators. There is no ticket, no payments or any financial profit , Self-Organization,Voluntary participatory responsibility, Liberation of the Public Space, Anti-commercial logic, Non-Employment, Non-Profit Economics are the values that you find hidden inside the core of Athens Legalize it Festival , in the fight against all prohibitions and against all addictions, in the same way as in all events and festivals of the underground social and political movement in GreeceThis festival fights openly against any kind of drug culture, against the drug-dealers ,against heroin, against cocaine, against ego-trips, against using of multi substances, against junkie attidute and irrational overdose selfish using of substances (whatever kind of them! ) This festival is against stupefaction, freak-out and self-delusion Freedom, Love,Friendship, Music,Travelling, Celebrations,Existential experience of collective Joy,The Dreaming, Creativity, Opening of Consciousness Could never surrender to jailers, Judges, psychiatrists, policemen Or drug-dealers It is an obligation of all of us. This gathering to be a lesson From all of to all of us, An experience that can make us better people an empowering experience a gathering of awareness. This festival is organized against all prohibitions And against all addictions!”

refer links

:
www.iliosporoi.net
www.myspace.com/iliosporoi
www.voidnetwork.blogspot.com
www.elefsyna.org
www.ecogreens.gr
www.neoiprasinoi.blogspot.com
http://ashinartfriends.blogspot.com
http://naturalhighfamily.blogspot.com/

For all info about the festival:
www.legaliseprotestival.blogspot.com

London: police represion in Rampart

2009-04-03T08:47:00.000-07:00

In an obvious attempt to de-escalate the situation after the events of yesterday, police aggressively raided Rampart today.

How they got in

Somebody being led away under arrest

"evidence"

The FIT doing research work

Legal observer at work

People being searched outside

The FIT having a good day...

G20 Summit London

2009-03-26T04:27:00.000-07:00

The G20 group (or G22) will be meeting at the Excel Center, London, on April 2nd 2009. The main aim of this summit is to discuss how to re-build confidence in the financial markets and “re-stabilise” the world economy given the current financial crisis. The meeting will be composed of finance ministers from the European Central Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the European Union, and the World Bank.

Callouts: Reclaim The Streets | Climate Camp | Summer Of Rage | Bristol Dissent | Fossil Fools Day

Free Spaces Demonstration-Berlin March 14 2009

2009-03-18T07:10:00.000-07:00

At the 14. march 2009 arround 4.000 people were gathering on the Hermannplatz in Berlin to demonstrate for the survival of left free spaces in Berlin and everywhere and against the ugly gentrification in lot of the center’s districts of Berlin. Many residents already have been forced to move in other districts of Berlin, since they cannot afford the constantly increasing rents in the center’s districts anymore. The demonstration was part of the “United We Stay” action weekend. The campaign, which organised the demonstration is called “We Stay All”. They also claim an immediately political solution for the few stayed house projects and Wagenburgen (squatted places where people live in trucks and cars). The concept of the demonstration was to appear as colourful and openly as possible so that common people also join the demonstrations and to avoid attacks of the riot cops (which in last time offener happened on demonstrations of the radical lefts).

The demonstration started at 15:00 from Neukölln, went through Kreuzberg and ended then in Friedrichshain. The cop’s presence and repression took place with 900 of them following and disturbing the peacfull protest. They started with randomly controls to people who started gathering, filming the protestors during the whole event. At the Warschauer Bruecke the whole demonstration had to stop because the cops arrested two prostesters. They said that they shall have went on the rail tracks of the underground. After they took their blood type and their personal data they released them and the demonstration went on. But already short time later the cops started trouble again, they splitted the demonstration into two parts after some ppl surrounded and attacked a singled cop car. The cops stated later that they weren’t completely innocent that the situation escalated because the cops in the car got scared and locked themselves inside the car. At the same time that happened a group of arround 1.000 demonstrants splitted from the demonstation and went in the Warschauer Strasse, where some cars, cop cars, a Mc Donalds and a bank has been smashed and some waste containers were looted. One cop car has turned upside down. Later they also tried to attack the new opened Nazi’s clothes shop but it was protected by arround 50 cops. As the first coming 100 demonstrants saw the cops they stepped back and after one minute hundreds of cops were coming from all sides and hunting the protestors. During that situation a bunch of cops were passing by a person who had nothing to do with the demonstration, one cop hit him and the person felt with his head on the kerb stone edge. That person has been seriously injured with a basal skull fracture, but instead of the cops helping him and call the emergency they went away and let him lay helpless on the street. Also the feminist squat near the place the person was injured was attacked by cops. At the time that this event happed the rest of the demonstration went through the Revaler Strasse, where people of the culture project RAW made a fire show, further through the Simon Dach Staße (a street full of trendy tourist’s bars), where some protestors smashed windows of a bar and later in the night four bars were attacked with butyric acid. The demonstration went then on through the Scharnweberstrasse where people from the house project Scharnweberstrasse 29 made a fire show on the balcony and people from the second house project Scharni were standing on the roof and waving flags. The demonstration ended in front of the city hall in the Frankfurter Allee observed from a cop’s helicopter and lot of cops with dogs in front of the city hall. During the demonstration 12 people were arrested and two cops injured. After the demonstration the cops were present in the whole district all the night over and randomly pressed charges against people. Police and fire-fighting operations continued through the whole night.

http://de.indymedia.org/2009/03/244145.shtml

http://de.indymedia.org/2009/03/244389.shtml

http://de.indymedia.org/2009/03/244296.shtml

Foto: http://www.flickr.com/photos/maly_krtek/sets/72157615557269050/

On the Idea of Communism - Conference 13th,14th & 15th March

2009-03-10T08:39:00.000-07:00

“It’s just the simple thing that’s hard, so hard to do.”(B.Brecht)

The year of 1990 stands for the triple defeat of the Left: the retreat of the social-democratic Welfare State politics in the developed First World, the disintegration of the Soviet-style Socialist states in the industrialized Second World, and the retreat of emancipatory movements in the Third World. A certain epoch was thereby over, the epoch which began with the October Revolution and was characterized by the Party-State form of organization. Does this mean that the time of radical emancipatory politics is over?

In recent years, there are multiple signs which indicate the need for a new beginning. The utopia of the 1990, the Fukuyamaist “end of history” (liberal-democratic capitalist as the finally found natural social order) died twice in the first decade of the XXIst century. While the 9/11 attacks signaled its political death, the financial crisis of 2008 signals its economic death. In these new conditions, the task is not only to reflect on new strategies, but to radically rethink the most basic coordinates of emancipatory politics. One should go well beyond the rejection of the Party-State Left in its “Stalinist” form – a common place today -, and extend this rejection to the entire field of the “democratic Left” as the strategy to reform the system from within its representative-democratic state form. Much more than the debacle of the Really-Existing Socialism, the defeat of 1990 was the final defeat of this “democratic Left.” This defeat raises the question: is “Communism” still the name to be used to designate the horizon of radical emancipatory projects? In spite of their theoretical differences, the participants share the thesis that one should remain faithful to the name “Communism”: this name is potent to serve as the Idea which guides our activity, as well as the instrument which enables us to expose the catastrophes of the XXth century politics, those of the Left included.

The symposium will not deal with practico-political questions of how to analyze the latest economic, political, and military troubles, or how to organize a new political movement. More radical questioning is needed today - this is a meeting of philosophers who will deal with Communism as a philosophical concept, advocating a precise and strong thesis: from Plato onwards, Communism is the only political Idea worthy of a philosopher.

“The communist hypothesis remains the good one, I do not see any other. If we have to abandon this hypothesis, then it is no longer worth doing anything at all in the field of collective action. Without the horizon of communism, without this Idea, there is nothing in the historical and political becoming of any interest to a philosopher. Let everyone bother about his own affairs, and let us stop talking about it. In this case, the rat-man is right, as is, by the way, the case with some ex-communists who are either avid of their rents or who lost courage. However, to hold on to the Idea, to the existence of this hypothesis, does not mean that we should retain its first form of presentation which was centered on property and State. In fact, what is imposed on us as a task, even as a philosophical obligation, is to help a new mode of existence of the hypothesis to deploy itself.” (Alain Badiou)

Speakers:
Judith Balso, Alain Badiou, Bruno Bosteels, Terry Eagleton, Peter Hallward, Michael Hardt, Jean-Luc Nancy, Toni Negri, Jacques Ranciere, Alessandro Russo, Alberto Toscano, Gianni Vattimo, Slavoj Zizek

Friday 13th March, Saturday 14th March & Sunday 15th March

The booking for this conference is now closed - it is full.

Logan Hall
Institute of Education, University of London
20 Bedford Way
London WC1H 0AL

No Borders or Prison Walls: Beyond Immigrants' Rights to Ending Criminalization of All People of Color

2009-03-08T05:07:00.000-07:00

http://deletetheborder.org

How bad do things have to be for a group of people to be afraid to leave their houses because la migra might pick them up and place their family members in separate detention centers to eventually deport them? Or that people crossing the border not only have to be concerned about the environmental dangers, but also the more recent upsurge of people who kidnap migrants, steal from them, assault them, and hold them for ransom. The police or ICE commit similar atrocities, but masquerading as heroes; “saving” the immigrants from the drop houses. Many citizens believe undocumented immigrants deserve the harm or misfortune inflicted upon them because they are here “illegally”.

Nearly any debate about “illegal” immigration comes down to one thing: the law is the law. They say illegal people have no legitimate claims in “our” country. Despite the many illegal actions that people take everyday without feeling an ounce of guilt (speeding, downloading music), being in the country “illegally” is seen as a crime against the citizens. Despite the fact that many of us see this law, like so many others, as illegitimate and hypocritical based on its historical roots and the context in which it is enforced, as a means to maintain an exploitable class, as enforcement of the color line, and as a tool of government to control people and quash dissent; we seem quite silent about what we think about it.

What is largely missing from the debate on immigration is this perspective on the law. We find it difficult to convince others of these ideas who value and feel protected by the exalted law and order, and so we may not even try. What kinds of changes can we hope for if we are not willing to challenge people on their attitudes about the legitimacy of immigration law, and beyond?

The common attitudes, promoted by special interest groups and the media serve to justify the horrible treatment of undocumented immigrants and allow people to dismiss the actions of law enforcement or vigilantes as warranted. Most people know about the reasons that immigrants have to come here “illegally”, yet many would even say they deserve the worst of the terrorism they face here.

What we need to talk about is the criminalization of people- the politically/racially/economically motivated practice that has led to a vast increase in the prison industrial complex and immigration detention centers in the last several years, as well as the increased collaboration between the police and the federal government. Even though in most cases, undocumented immigrants have only committed a civil offense and not technically a crime, it is just as easily considered a crime. Of course, in addition to this, immigrants are purposefully associated with other crimes, and new laws continue to be created to further criminalize them. The war against “illegal” immigration is just one part of institutional racism, except this is an example that makes it all the more clear that crimes have been made out of the actions of people because of who they are. It is clear that the law has been used purposefully to render people powerless and exploitable.

Because so many people are not willing to touch this, it has to be us. This may only be part of the struggle, but it is necessary to challenge the way criminalization not only affects the people it criminalizes, but everyone who is treated unfairly because of their association with criminals, and everyone else in their attitudes about those people. This criminalization maintains a racism which can easily be denied- because “it’s not about race. It’s about the law.”

The focus on the law is employed so that a person’s opposition to “illegal” immigration seems to just be about the law; not about race. Those of us who are citizens, and especially those of us who are white have a responsibility to fight the racism within our communities (even the communities that we don’t feel are ours). No matter how many solidarity demos or actions against the wall or ICE, if we let the racism within the citizenry fester and increase, we can not hope to succeed. Many white people are ripe for recruitment in fascist groups. For decades, people of color have been advising white folks to organize within their own communities. Although this is a challenge, it must occur. People of color have also informed most of the concepts below, and it is important that white people take their words seriously.

The limits of current strategies

In our fight for immigrants’ rights, freedom of movement, and/or no borders, we have many challenges. The minutemen and associated groups and politicians, while not achieving as much as they had hoped in terms of law enforcement and border security, have in fact influenced many people’s thinking (with the help of well-funded FAIR and other such groups, and of course the media). Newly passed laws or even attempts at passing laws, as well as stepped up enforcement by ICE and the police have shaped people’s view of immigrants as criminals.

Despite a multitude of efforts, the minutemen still seem somewhat sensible in the eyes of many; immigrants still face the dangers of crossing the border; hate crimes, ICE raids, police sweeps, harassment and racial profiling still happen; people’s rights (the few that they have) are still violated; and the detention centers still exist. This is not to say that the organizing that’s done is pointless, but that in conjunction with these activities, we need to challenge the ideas that perpetuate this situation. There have been few efforts to challenge the legitimacy of the law. Many of the efforts attempted have not made a point of relating the racism against recent undocumented immigrants to the current and historical racism against black people and other people of color.

Immigrants’ rights advocates often accuse the anti-immigrant movement of being racist, but nothing gets the opposition to admit that race has anything to do with it (additionally, it is often about personal racism and not systemic racism). Many efforts have been made on the part of the anti-immigrant movement to maintain a non-racist appearance for the sake of appealing to the mainstream, due to racism being so taboo. Examining the comments to any online Arizona-based newspaper article on immigration will provide one with a view of this repetition about the law and a veiled, or not so veiled, hatred for outsiders (specifically Mexicans). The rule of law rhetoric creates a smokescreen over the reality of intertwined racial, economic, and political motivations behind the laws.

In the context of immigration, understanding racism is crucial but complicated. Race is a social construct, so the fact that undocumented immigrants are a diverse group of people does not matter as much in terms of how white supremacy functions. More than anything, the stereotypes about undocumented immigrants inform anti-immigrant rhetoric, policies, and enforcement (exemplified by the emphasis on the U.S./Mexican border rather than that of Canada). People’s concepts about race are complicated, mainly because race is only real in how it affects people. Class also plays a role in this context since foreigners with more wealth are not treated as a burden, and because citizenship is not available to most people, especially the poor. Undocumented immigrants, at least the ones that somewhat fit the stereotypes, are thought of and treated as inferior. It is considered acceptable that they have little access to safety, health, and dignity. A useful definition of white supremacy is from Elizabeth “Betita” Martinez: “White Supremacy is an historically based, institutionally perpetuated system of exploitation and oppression of continents, nations, and peoples of color by white peoples and nations of the European continent, for the purpose of maintaining and defending a system of wealth, power, and privilege.” Police in particular are said to enforce the color line by treating non-white people as criminals.

The attitudes people have about undocumented immigrants need to be challenged. Although they may partly be based on feeling threatened (they’re taking over), they are also based on a racism that is “justified” and shaped by the idea that the unwelcome people are criminals. These attitudes often effectively override compassion for the misfortunate. A starting point would be to engage people who are compassionate and identify as anti-racist, but build upon that to figure out how to change other peoples’ minds. An analysis of the purposeful construction of laws to criminalize undocumented immigrants would have two objectives: an end to the attitudes described above, and an end to institutionalized racism. This effort obviously applies to the criminalization of people of color in general in the United States. We cannot fight white supremacy if we do not consider the bigger picture of what has been taking place in this country.

The emphasis on the legality of people should not be confused with legalizing people exactly, but to bring attention to the politically motivated criminalization of people and to change it. Legalizing immigrants (though not very likely to happen in an acceptable way if at all) does not address many of the economic and race issues that currently exist.

Assimilation and therefore whiteness being historically accessible to Mexican-Americans especially, we should consider the ways in which the struggle should avoid the trend of maintaining a hierarchy with black people on the bottom. Martha Escobar, in “No One is Criminal” printed in Abolition Now! addresses efforts at legalization but mostly the rhetoric about immigrants not being criminals. “Thus when we claim that immigrants are not criminals, the fundamental message is that immigrants are not Black, or at least, that immigrants will not be ‘another Black problem.’ Tracing the construction of criminality in relationship to Blackness and how it is re-mapped onto brown bodies through the notion of “illegality” gives witness to the ways that criminality allows a reconfiguration of racial boundaries along Blackness and whiteness. In other words, criminalizing immigrants serves to discipline them into whiteness.” Explaining that immigrants are not criminals (via studies on crime rates, etc.) and complaining about the police or the government not putting the real criminals in jail in some ways is counterproductive.

It is also important to be concerned that most of the immigrants’ rights efforts do not address the fact that we are on stolen ground in the first place. Existing land struggles are not addressed by legalization efforts. We also tend to fail to address the relationship between the war on immigrants and the war on terror. A myopic focus on legalizing immigrants would contribute to the continuing abandonment of the past and current effects of the criminalization of people of color and cannot hope to abolish whiteness.

Suggestions

The attitudes people have are fueled by and feed the criminalization of people. We need to find ways to change people’s attitudes to undermine the racism that exists. A number of things need to be articulated in a way that is accessible to a variety of people. We especially have to be able to explain these concepts to people who don’t feel they have any interest in considering them, much less changing anything. On the other hand, there are many people who would benefit from changes and a new analysis of the function of criminalization would empower them. Either way, those of us who are in this fight need to understand the complex aspects of the immigration/criminalization issues. Below is my attempt to start to construct an analysis specifically regarding the law from which talking points can emerge.

“In order to figure out why people get locked up and under what circumstances, we need to look at what are sometimes called ‘root causes.’ This strategy requires looking at the competing priorities of the systems in which we live and understanding why they work well for some and horribly for others. The systems of race, class, gender, and sexuality, for instance, are commonly understood as privileging some people’s needs and ideals over others. By exploring why and how those systems work for some and not for others, we can begin to develop a better understanding of how to include concrete steps in our work that deal with the negative effects of these systems on the people who are most often put in cages.” –Critical Resistance

Economic Motives

We need to talk about the economic motives behind the criminalization of people and therefore the illegitimacy of the laws involved. Of particular interest are the immigration laws because immigrants are currently a huge target and because, as I mentioned above, it can perhaps be shown more easily that there is intentional politically-motivated criminalization of people. The exploitation of labor is the primary motive. This is accomplished by keeping the laboring class from uniting (divide people by race and by immigration status) and from keeping certain individuals from having the power to organize for a better situation (undocumented workers who organize in their work places are often threatened with deportation). We must also discuss the fact that undocumented workers are largely from regions that have been affected negatively by neo-liberal economic projects. These forces have led to the loss of land and other resources and an intentional lack of employment options which leaves them more exploitable. Of course there is money to also be made in the prisons and detention centers, at least for those run privately. The businesses that have relationships with these facilities (food providers, prison-related products manufacturers, investors, etc.) also profit. Homeland Security has some good deals for border security technology with companies like Halliburton and Boeing that also profit from the war in Iraq. Included also in the war against undocumented people are the funds that go into transporting immigrants by land and air. Criminalizing people of color is a lucrative business, and we are well aware that when profits are the motive, human rights are scarce.

The hope is that revealing the economic motives of certain actions would destabilize the appearance of those actions as legitimate.

The Reality of Criminalization and Immigration Detention

Many people remain ignorant about the reality of immigration detention. It would be useful to share information about the extent to which detention centers have increased in the past few years, and the fact that many are privately owned (many by corporations that also own private prisons). We should be aware of the plan devised by the Department of Homeland Security called Endgame, which seeks to remove “all removable aliens” by 2011, using new relationships between police and ICE such as 287g. With about 27,500 people in immigration detention on any given day and triple the number of detainees than just nine years ago, many immigrants in private detention, without proper care, legal assistance, and adequate understanding of their rights and recourses, we have an astounding crisis on our hands.

Immigrants are not only ending up in detention centers, but also in jails and prisons. Increasingly, yet another tactic of attrition, in order to discourage them from coming back is to imprison immigrants instead of just sending them back to where they came from. Many immigrants sign guilty pleas for crimes like identity theft, without even understanding that often the authorities have no evidence. Charging them with additional crimes also increases the consequences for coming back.

What are the forces at work? In the context of immigration, there are two manifestations of white supremacy that feed off of each other and are interconnected. One is personal prejudices, attitudes, and resulting discrimination. The second is the racism within the various institutions (such as law enforcement) that play out these previous manifestations in a less visible way. The institutional racism in turn shapes peoples’ attitudes about race. Two forces behind these manifestations of racism are the anti-immigrant movement and the business interests that employ immigrants. Because business interests enjoy the labor provided by penetrable borders, they would seem to oppose those who are interested in border security. In fact, undocumented immigrants have been used as a weapon against organized workers. While those in favor of heightened border security and internal enforcement subscribe to a more blatant racism (keep the outsiders out), the business interests also benefit from the continued and increased anti-immigrant efforts because they can profit from an exploitable, expendable (made so by the war against immigration) labor force allowed by the seemingly unconquerable stream of migration. Although these two forces have different desired means and ends, the results are the same: criminalized migrants.

Examining the history of immigration law reveals its racist history. Of course many will explain it away and insist that we have changed our regretful ways. A possible effective strategy might include showing how the U.S. concept of who belongs (white people) and who doesn’t has been shaped by immigration laws (as well as laws criminalizing Black and Native American people). The ways in which the racism and stereotyping of the Chinese led to and fed off of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 mirrors the anti-Mexican sentiment in a lot of ways today. Many groups and individuals have been excluded or deported because they were seen as political threats to the country. In 1924, the National Origins Quota passed, which was due to WWI-related fears of foreign people. It strictly limited immigration from eastern and southern Europe. Later in 1952, quotas for immigration from Asian countries were severely limited. The national origins quota was abolished during the civil rights era, but is still biased in many ways. Shortly after September 11, 2001, the federal government broke its own laws holding various immigrants from mostly Middle-Eastern countries in custody for too long without deporting them or charging them with any crime.

Prior to the last few decades, only pockets of the population had any concern over “illegal aliens”. During the 80’s and 90’s the wide-ranging anti-immigrant rhetoric was similar to that of today, but was largely unpopular. Due to September 11, 2001 and the recession around that time, just like other times of economic hardship and other turmoil, immigrants became scapegoats. Mexicans especially became targeted because they were coming in at higher rates after the 1994 launch of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Especially in 2003 when the Minuteman Project started, the media and various politicians (both directly or indirectly influenced by business interests and/or nativists) stepped up the anti-immigrant message. The state is primarily responsible for constructing the idea of “illegal aliens”. It is now mostly socially acceptable to hate on immigrants. But the intolerance for undocumented immigrants cannot be separated from the history of American racism.

Race & Criminalization

“Crime is thus one of the masquerades behind which ‘race,’ with all its menacing ideological complexity, mobilizes public fears and creates new ones.
-Angela Davis, Prisons, Repression, and Resistance

We need to connect this reality with an analysis of the system of criminalization of people of color, historically and currently. History shows many examples of the law being used for racist ends, whether it be the blatant racism of the slavery era, or the veiled racism of the reconstruction era when black men were accused of a number of crimes such as vagrancy and subsequently sent to work as punishment. In effect, business interests were able to continue to profit from the labor produced by repression: convict leasing, or “Slavery by Another Name” as it was called by author Douglas A. Blackmon. Although it may be difficult to convince someone that the laws that are currently on the books are racist, certainly we can talk about how the law is easily manipulated to be racist, including the constitution. “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime where of the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction,” says the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

As it gradually became socially unacceptable to kill or enslave people, the moral way to deal with them was to treat them as criminals, such as placing American Indian children in prison-like Indian schools. People who are considered of lesser value and who can be contrived as “other” can easily be used for the benefit of those in power.

Not so long ago, Richard Nixon said, “You have to face the fact that whole problem is really the blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognizes this while not appearing to...” In a letter to Dwight Eisenhower, he wrote, “I have found great audience response to this [law and order] theme in all parts of the country, including areas like New Hampshire where there is virtually no race problem and relatively little crime.” With blatant racism being frowned upon, there have been many examples of ways people of color have been especially painted as being more likely to commit crime, even though there are many examples of worse crimes that rich white men commit that are not considered worthy of our attention. Much of people’s racism is manufactured by the idea that people of color tend more often to be criminals. Examining the increase in the prison industrial complex and the drug war can provide us with various insights into specifically politically-motivated measures taken up against people of color.

Institutionalized racism in the form of law and order results in complex effects on people of color. One effect is that people of color disproportionately get caught up in the criminal “justice” system. Although this has happened because of its historical roots, today it “justifies” the treatment of most people of color as criminals. This means that even someone who has not committed a crime can be killed, brutalized, or harassed by the police because of their association with criminals due to their darker skin. Sexual assault or harassment against women of color is allowable in the context in which they are associated with criminality.

Sylvanna Falcón in “’National Security’ and the Violation of Women: Militarized Border Rape at the US-Mexico Border” printed in The Color of Violence examines how this effects immigrant women. “The cases of militarized border rape… can be categorized as a form of “national security rape”… [T]he absence of legal documents positions undocumented women as ‘illegal’ and as having committed a crime... the existence of undocumented women causes national insecurity, and they are so criminalized that their bodily integrity does not matter to the state…”

We can see that “national security” most certainly does not refer to the health, safety, and dignity of the nation’s residents, but instead protects the state.

The media plays a large role in perpetuating ideas about who to feel threatened by, which in turn affects peoples’ attitudes about and behavior towards others and themselves. Although nearly every person of color is in some way touched by the criminal “justice” system, there are efforts made to maintain an image of non-racism, in which the elite allows people of color certain privileges and access to status. This produces the idea of the criminal people of color vs. the non-criminal person of color, thereby maintaining the legitimacy of the criminal “justice” system.

The U.S. prison population is the highest in the world. One out of every 133 U.S. residents is behind bars. “Compared to the estimated numbers of black, white, and Hispanic males in the U.S. resident population, black males (6 times) and Hispanic males (a little more than 2 times) were more likely to be held in custody than white males. At midyear 2007 the estimated incarceration rate of white males was 773 per 100,000… At midyear 2007, the incarceration rate of black women held in custody (prison or jail) was 348 per 100,000 U.S. residents compared to 146 Hispanic women and 95 white women” (drugwarfacts.org). Women have been entering prisons at higher rates than men. Even when women of color are not directly criminalized, they are treated as reproducers of criminals, while prisons function as an attack on their reproductive freedom and their ability to maintain healthy family structures.

We should also look at the ways in which this benefits the government and the social order. Many efforts have been made by the poor and people of color to change or overthrow the government and economic system. Dividing the working class by race has been a wise strategy to weaken the power of the people. In addition, imprisoning dissidents of various sorts under the guise of law enforcement (remember, we don’t have any political prisoners) is also a tactic against successes of various liberation movements, especially the Black and American Indian movements.

We can also see that putting people in prison instead of solving problems such as poverty and drug abuse is the chosen course of action by the state, because the idea is not to resolve these problems in the first place but to appear to do so while at the same time dealing with the issues in the most useful way to those in power. The government obviously has inextricable ties to business, so maintaining a good relationship is a large factor in the law enforcement that takes place. Those in the government also have a lot to gain from an increase in wealth secured through exploitation of a criminal class. And finally, the government has a lot to gain from an image of control, which can be achieved through Homeland Security and law enforcement.

Many examples exist of ways in which crime-fighting is not, in fact, intended to end the activities which are considered crimes. The government has no interest in ending crime unless it is targeted towards the government itself, the rich or their property. One could list a number of crimes committed by people who get away with it everyday, and a number of acts that should be crimes because they hurt people, other beings, and/or the planet, yet they are not crimes because it is not in the interest of the government to control those actions. Crimes against people who are seen as less valuable are not important to enforce unless it benefits the system in another way. Black on black violence, for example is acceptable to the criminal “justice” system and is even encouraged. Crimes committed by government, government agents, businesses, are treated differently, with the perpetrators facing much less harsh punishment than their civilian counter-parts face, if any. Often crimes are enabled by involvement with the government such as the drug trafficking done with government vehicles and physical and sexual abuse by police, border patrol, and prison officials, yet the criminals in these cases are treated as a few bad apples.

Much of the history of illegalization of drugs is linked directly to racism. Marijuana was associated with Mexicans and Black people, opium with the Chinese. The drug war has created many new criminals. More than half of people in federal prison are in for drug offenses. We also see how the use of crack, associated with Black people, is disproportionately punished compared to that of cocaine, more associated with white users. Some interesting parallels exist between the drug war and the war against “illegal” immigration, which deserve further examination elsewhere. A notable parallel lies in the fact that the criminalization of the respective activities has created underground markets and added crooked criminal activity.

The illegalization of certain underground activities (drugs, immigration, prostitution) relegates the participants (willing or unwilling) to having little access to the “justice” system or community support, and in fact makes those without the means to escape, vulnerable to violence and exploitation. Often more money is to be made when access to something (such as free movement) is restricted and desperation is higher. The result is that some are terrorized by others and it is of no concern to the citizens who implore that the laws be enforced. The work of the coyotes has been increasingly carried out by elements of organized crime such as the drug cartels. The violence of the Mexican drug cartels is touching the U.S. more and more. Immigrants get kidnapped and held for ransom, people are sexually assaulted or worse. Communities along the border, especially non-white communities like the O’odham are terrorized by those in the drug trade as well as those “fighting” the drug traffickers. This cannot be viewed in a simplistic fashion. We cannot ignore that the criminalization is what has created these situations.

“It is important to recognize how violence--not only in Ciudad Juarez, but also in Mexico City--is not simply a problem for the state but is in fact endemic to it, a ‘state of exception’ produced by an authoritarian government that has cultivated extreme forms of violence, corruption, and yes, even death, in order to cripple people’s capacity to resist, to smother effective counterdiscourse and over-power the revitalized democratic opposition... We should consider femicide in Ciudad Juarez as part of the scenario of state-sponsored terrorism...”

Regarding Rosa Linda Fregoso’s quote from “The Complexities of ‘Feminicide’ on the Border” (from The Color of Violence), it is impossible to separate the actions (and inactions) of the Mexican government from the influence of the governmental and economic forces based in the United States. The impacts of colonialism and neoliberalism and the resulting poverty, corruption and anti-resistance efforts have profound consequences.

It is worth noting that the drug war, just like the war against immigrants, is not intended to actually stop the flow. The U.S. government is spending over one billion dollars “helping” the Mexican government deal with the drug cartels through the new Plan Mexico or Merida Initiative. They could instead be decriminalizing drugs or curtailing demand by increasing what has been proven to be effective: treatment. Let us also not ignore the many cases in which government officials (U.S. and Mexican) are directly or indirectly involved in the drug trade.

Law enforcement officials act like they are heroes when they save the captives of human traffickers, or when they rescue perishing immigrants crossing the harsh desert; even though they enforce the laws that produce these conditions in the first place.

Conclusion

Is it not a bigger crime that people are afraid to leave their houses? White supremacy means some lives are more valuable than others and what results is danger, repression, and punishment for those who are not considered white.

What do we do about all of this? Institutional racism and individual white supremacy feed off of each other. We should consider ways to struggle against instituational racism, although many disagree on how. At the very least we can keep white people from joining white supremacist militias, and ideally get those people to act on behalf of immigrants and other people of color.

In our efforts, whatever those look like, we need to understand the issues discussed above and be able to explain them to other people. Art, posters, fliers, press releases, articles, demonstrations, one-on-one debates, etc., need to reach a variety of people so they can gain a better perspective on the whole picture. We need to influence the various movements in favor of ending oppression overall, not just a single group of people, and not in a superficial way.

It is hopeful to see many people mobilized against detention centers. The general feeling tends to be that the people do not deserve to be imprisoned because they haven’t done anything to justify that. Hope resides in people’s realization that the government would imprison innocent people- that the law isn’t legitimate. The relationship between the detention centers and the prison industrial complex as a whole needs to be highlighted so that people can see that the immigration detention centers are not the only unmerited manifestation of imprisonment of people. It is also vital that the people see a common cause in dealing with these issues in a larger context.

As far as dealing with institutional racism, organizations such as Critical Resistance, INCITE!, and copwatch groups have been developing responses to institutional racism in the form of law enforcement and the prison industrial complex. While many immigrants’ rights strategies are myopic, these groups tend to have a more inclusive perspective. The most powerful efforts to bringing justice to undocumented immigrants must involve uniting people who are affected by the criminal “justice” system and coming up with alternatives to dealing with social problems using that system. Supporting the efforts that existing groups like these are doing may be a good place to start.

Solving the “immigration problem” will not mean securing the border, nor the legalization of immigrants, nor will it mean shifting around a few things so we can again easily ignore immigrants and allow them to remain exploited. Radical changes will have to occur- things that are very threatening to the status quo and would therefore likely encounter the criminal “justice” system as well. It is also not okay if somehow immigrants are given justice; there is already a system of oppression against people of color that will not be resolved unless we connect these issues. Small successes are good, but if we do not demand the fullest extent of what needs to change, we cannot have any hope of gaining it. Angela Davis’s quote below can be related to today’s struggle.

“If convict leasing and the accompanying disproportionality with which black people were made to inhabit jails and prisons during the post-Emancipation period had been taken up with the same intensity and seriousness as- and in connection with- the campaign against lynching, then the contemporary radical call for prison abolition might not sound so implausible today.” Angela Davis: From the Prison of Slavery to the Slavery of Prison

Stop Arpaio, Stop 287g!

2009-02-26T08:58:00.000-08:00

call from Netherlands (taken by squat.net)

2009-02-22T16:15:00.000-08:00

Amsterdam: Call for help from Commelinstraat

We are a group that squatted Commelinstraat 246 - 250 on Sunday 15th of February. On Monday morning we were awakened by a group of at least ten men, led by Menno Jeen Bos (the owner of this building) into the house. They broke down the door, and threatening physical violence, they demanded that we leave within ten seconds.

By breaking into this house, where we had secured the right to domestic peace, they took the law into their own hands. They throw us out onto the street and then threw our belongings down from the second floor onto our heads. Due to these actions a few people sustained physical injuries.

The police came and asked mister Bos the reason for the disturbance. He claimed that the house had not been empty for a year and that anti-squatters were living there last sunmmer. We know this is a lie for we have received from several neighbours, declarations that say that the house is empty for at least a year (average astimation - 2 years). When mister Bos could not reproduce any documentation for his story, the police respected our legal rights to be there and let us back into the building, with no further immediate action taken against mister Bos.

On the same evening, agent from Nuon Company, together with 2 police officers appeared in our door, send by mr. Bos. We allowed the Nuon agent in, but refused to let the police join him. The police was threatening to use force and to cut the electricity. At that point we called an alarm, some people arrived to support us. As a result, the winds were calmed, Nuon and police left calmly after declaring that electricity is safely used.

Till this moment, we had no further contact with the owner, nor the police.

We are busy occupying, working hard on cleaning, building and fixing the building. Our goal is to make it a beautiful warm house, and in the future, as well create an open public space in the lower floors. It is a large space with big potential for the community in the middle of the city. It is as well a politically important case for the future of squatting in Amsterdam.

WE NEED YOUR HELP!!!

How Could You Help?

1 - We need people to occupy the place for the first period. Sharing shifts to keep the place occupied with as many people possible at all times. Come and be with us.

2 - Building materials. Everything is welcome, but we are specially looking for: - Copper pipes (no. 22 and 15) - Chimney pipes - Connection bites for gas pipes - Gyps (plaster) boards - Wood - Electric wires - Doors - Smoke detectors - Banners - Sink

3 - Help in work, cleaning and building. We need your hands! If you have some sort of knowledge and experience - great, but if not, no worries, we can closely direct you to work safely (and happily).

If you have any other suggestions, ideas or initiatives, they are more then welcome. We have a new space with open arms. Mail us (address below) or, simple and best - just pass by Commelinstraat 246 - 250 (near the corner of the Dappermarkt).

Thanks to all of you, hope to see you soon,

The Commelin Group - Esmeralda Dapperbuur

commelinstraat246.250[AAA]gmail.com

reports on Crisis

2009-02-17T05:55:00.000-08:00

Reports on Crisis

TWO: Romania

We asked people in several countries to write down observations about social effects of the crisis.
The following is a report from Romania, written in February 2009.

»The return of the strawberry pickers «

Romania, Turnstile of Migration

At the turn of the year the airport Bucarest-Baneasa bursts at the seams. During normal business times the passenger volume of this airport for cheap airlines is already enormous, now things have gone way beyond capacity limits. Endless queues, undefined waiting hours and sticky air. Most of the people pushing and shoving their way through the terminal hall are Romanians working abroad: capsunaris, strawberry pickers as they are called in Romania, disregarding whether they work as construction workers in Bologna, as old people's carer in Paris, dockers in Rotterdam or agriculture labourers in Andalusia. Approximately 10 to 20 percent of the Romanian population - up to five million people - permanently or temporarily work abroad, mainly in Italy and Spain. Most of them spend the festive season at the end of the year 'at home' in Romania and this is when you can observe one of the biggest inner-European migration movements in the bus terminals and airports of this country. .

For some time emigration has posed a massive problem for local companies. According to a study by Manpower, Romania was the country with the highest degree of labour-shortage in 2008 [1]. Particularly affected were; the construction sector (with half of the vacancies remaining unfilled), tourism and the shoe- and textile industry.

Although in the past years the wage level in Romania has increased considerably it is still the lowest in the EU. In the textile factories workers are still only being paid a little more than the legal minimum wage [2]. Nowadays hardly anyone is willing to sweat for these wages. Efforts undertaken by the companies to recruit more people from the countryside fail again and again due to lacking qualifications, frequent absence from work and the unmotivated attitude of the workers towards factory work. In order to retain the remaining local employees the companies offer them two months unpaid holiday for seasonal work abroad in addition to the regular paid holidays. Despite this they did not manage to curb labour attrition due to workers shifting jobs to the new plants of the automobile parts manufacturers and electronic industries where higher wages were on offer.

The labour shortage was supposed to be solved by import of work force from Asia. Right from the beginning these migrant workers from China, India, Pakistan, Vietnam, Bangladesh and the Philippines caused conflicts and organised resistance against the management.

We report here on two examples from the textile industry:

Of the former 1,200 local employees at the apparel manufacturer Mondostar in Sibiu, only 350 kept working after new offers became available. In order to avoid bankruptcy the company hired 95 female Philippine textile workers in May 2008. The work contract with a commercial job agency in Manila guaranteed a basic wage of 400 US Dollars, 100 percent bonus for over-time and free accommodation and food. On the basis of these promises the workers took the risk of taking out individual loans of 2,500 US Dollars for the agency fee and the travel expenses.
Forcing the women to sign a second contract after arrival Mondostar tried to undermine the previous contractual agreement, to squeeze out a maximum labour performance and to lower their own expenses. For a 60 hour working week the women received a monthly wage of 235 US Dollars. From the agreed basic wage 165 US Dollars were deducted for food and accommodation and the over-time was not paid at all. The Philippine women found themselves in an real dilemma: their permission to stay in Romania was tied to the work contract, but if they quit the job they would have had to face massive debts back home in the Philippines.
Most of them have years of experience of working in textile factories in Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, Namibia, South Africa or Brunei or as domestic workers in Hong Kong or Singapore. They are able to compare conditions and they know how to organise themselves. After two months they started to boycott the over-time and confronted the company with an ultimatum. Their complaint at the Philippine embassy resulted in Mondostar not being allowing to hire any more Philippine workers. In reaction Mondostar sacked six women for 'lack of discipline', amongst them the four spokeswomen elected by the workers, and cut the wages even further alleging that the seamstresses did not meet the companies' fixed production targets. In consequence 78 workers decided to stop being fucked over and to quit their jobs with Mondostar in September 2008.
Back in the Philippines the workers filed a legal case against the job agency in Manila and Mondostar, supported by a welfare organisation for the OFW [3], which had also paid the travel expenses for the return trip. The legal proceedings saw a first success: the workers did not have to pay the 2,500 US Dollars commission to the agency.

The condition for the migrant workers' struggle for the betterment of their situation is everything but favourable. The workers' permission to stay is bound to the work contract, which provides the employers with an effective way of putting pressure on them. Usually the textile workers live in dormitories on the factory premises, which makes them easier to control. The contact to local workers is further impeded by the fact that in most cases their work stations are separated from each other. In addition to that there are the language barriers.

The degree of employers' repression against migrant workers is shown in the example of the Italian textile manufacturer Gamba, which runs two bigger plants in Bacau, under the name Sonoma and Wear Company. Three years ago the manufacturer was the first in Romania to apply for a licence to employ 1,000 Chinese garment workers. Some months later in January 2007 Wear Company became internationally known when 400 Chinese women went on a spontaneous strike after not having been paid the promised wage sum. After the strike some of the women returned to China, but it has still not become clear whether they returned on their own accord or whether they have been deported.
At Wear Company Gamba started a new attempt, this time employing 500 contract workers from Bangladesh. But here again, the company was only able to quell the workers' discontent by heavy intimidation and repression. In summer 2008, after several textile workers from Bangladesh did not return to the factory, their remaining colleagues were locked inside the factory premises for two months. More workers left the factory and did not return, again the remaining workers got locked in - this procedure became common practice. Despite the the Romanian media and the Inspectorat Teritorial de Munca (ITM) - the official board responsible for labour law issues - being informed about the matter, no one followed up the case. In January 2009 a report was published in the English Bengali press saying that more than half of the 800 employed contract workers from Bangladesh had left the job and crossed the border to other European countries. The reports also mention a week long strike of 200 Bangladeshi workers in a Romanian textile factory [4]. Little to nothing is known about the current situation of the remaining workers at Wear Company. What is known is the fact that the textile entrepreneur Gamba aspires to become the consul general for Bangladesh in Romania.

Impact of the global economic crisis

In this young member country of the EU the global crisis will change the social relations drastically. An economic growth rate of 9.3 percent as in 2008, wage increases of 25 percent and an unemployment rate of under 4 percent - this dynamic might well be broken. Currently short-time work is spreading in Romania and for the first time in years the Romanian labour market is witnessing an end to hiring. In the automobile industry, in the steel- and chemical industries redundancies are on the agenda.
Due to the abolishment of the import quota [5], the increasing wages and labour-shortage, the textile industries are retreating from Romania. The employers' association of the Romanian textile industry announced that this dynamic is aggravated by the current lack of orders. It is most likely that the importing of foreign workforce - which has not gone beyond an experimental phase yet - will find a sudden end.

In the near future the turnstile of migration might also change direction for the "strawberry pickers". In Spain the real estate sector and therefore the construction industry has collapsed due to the global crisis; 500,000 Romanian construction workers are now threatened by unemployment. Will the airports and bus terminals soon be over-crowded by homecoming labour migrants. What kind of future outlook do they have? Will they be willing - after having got used to much higher wages and having made new experiences - to subject themselves once more to the prevalent conditions of long working-hours and low wages in Romania?

Ana Cosel

Endnotes:

[1]Manpower has published a survey on 22nd of April 2008 stating that 73 percent of employers questioned in Romania complain about not being able to find enough workers.

[2] In the time between 2000 and 2008 the legal minimum wage has quadrupled from 35 Euro to currently about 135 Euro. In the textile industry workers are hardly ever paid more than 200 Euro.

[3] OFW = Overseas Filipino Workers, for more information see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OFW

[4] In the Romanian press only one item was published reporting that out of the 500 Bangladeshi workers employed in Bacau 100 had disappeared. The police asked the public for assistance.

[5] In January 2005 the international import quota for textile goods was lifted. The textile industry in China and India benefited from this reform given that their products can now be more cheaply exported to the US and European market. The textile companies in Romania could hardly keep up with these new competitors.

For more detailed reports about (migrant) workers struggles in Romania see: http://www.labourstart.org/[...]

Brainstorm presents Datacide fundraiser @ Scharni 38 in Berlin F’hain 20.02.2009

2009-02-15T04:07:00.000-08:00

Anti-Zionism is Anti-Semitism

2009-02-12T05:51:00.001-08:00

Terminal 119

[January 2009]

A week ago we wrote a text with the title “Is Anti-Semitism going to achieve what truncheons did not?”, noting that an evident anti-Semitism had started being manifested in various places within the country, hidden behind the anti-Zionist veil of opposition to the bombardments in Gaza. Our main concern in that text was to prevent any kind anti-Semitic outburst in Greece, something that would wash out any right attempts with a direction towards ‘inside’ (the creation of the ‘domestic enemy’), caused by December’s riot 2008 against the Greek state’s structures. While writing that text we could not imagine that we would soon face such a direct realization of the text’s title, something that happened three days ago in front of Larisa’s synagogue, during a rally. While a large group of riot police was standing at one side of the synagogue holding their truncheons, at the other side there was a battle taking place between some people who wanted to remove the Star of David from the synagogue’s entrance and those who wanted to protect it. Indeed, at this specific moment there was no external suppression. The problem was within the rally.

But let’s see things from the beginning: on the 17th of January 2009, a rally of 2,000 people took place in Larisa, expressing their solidarity with those that had been detained during December’s riot and their opposition to the anti-terrorist law, with which 19 people are being persecuted for their participation in the events in Larisa. This rally was partially the first implementation of the slogan that has been widely heard in many cities: “Let’s take back our prisoners!”

The amok
The moment, however, that the rally reached the square of the Jewish Martyrs of the Occupation, on which the monument of the Holocaust of the Greek Jews of Larisa is located and around which the synagogue, the Jewish school and the offices of the Israelite Community of Larisa are, near Palestine street, some revolutionaries from the anarchist part of the demonstration went into an Anti-Semitic frenzy.

It is worth noting that since the beginning of the demonstration some Palestinian flags had appeared in the anarchist bloc, waving next to the black and red ones, indicating some comrades’ selective tolerance towards the flags of only some nations and states.

Although the Palestinians that tried to hang the Palestinian flags on the monument of the Holocaust showed considerable understanding and were persuaded within a minute not to do something like that, some Greek anarchists were straight tried to hang their flags on the monument using screams and bullying. This is the renowned “solidarity with the Palestinian people” and the celebrated “solidarity with the intifada” we have been hearing about for so long! Greek anti-Semites and paranoids try to sharpen the situation and bring about fanaticism in order to provide their—supposed—help to the struggle of Palestinians, the best mean for which proved to be the desecration of the monument of the Holocaust!

Exactly the same moment, the two cameras placed outside the Community’s offices for the Synagogues security were broken and a lot of people gathered and started swearing at the cops that were at the alley where the entrance of the synagogue is. Although these moves had as a target the representatives of ‘order’ and the gear of surveillance, none was prevented from making comments such as “there are guarding the Jews”…and the slogan “dogs, guard your masters” that was suddenly shouted acquired a new flavor…since the cops at that moment were standing in front of the synagogue, a newsstand and a kebab place. We do not believe that the slogan implied that the cops’ masters are the owners of the newsstand or the kebab shop.

The last and worst incident happens in front of the old entrance of the synagogue, where, while the rally was moving, a group of anarchist revolutionaries helped by two Palestinians (you know, those used as excuse for any type of anti-Semitic action…) decide to rip away the Star of David from the entrance. From somewhere at the back someone was shouting “destroy it”, “burn it” and other similar…revolutionary calls.

The reaction
Before any destructive actions took place, comrades from various collectives, as well as immigrants that were participating in the rally, spontaneously stood in front of the synagogue’s entrance in order to protect it, while other comrades started quarreling with the anti-Semites, pushing and yelling to each other. The fact that some comrades were shouting to the aggressors that they are “nationalists” and “Fascists” caused a feeling of perplexity which could not be thought over by the wrathful revolutionaries. They, therefore, turned this perplexity into questions like: “who are those guarding the door? Are they Jews?”. While some of them had already raised their flags to destroy the Star of David sensing that something weird was happening—namely, that some of the people participating in the protest started protecting the star—and admitting their immature level of thought, started asking us holding their shafts questions like “explain to me, I don’t know, I want to know the reason why I should not rip it away…”, etc. These ‘beautiful moments’ ended soon, since the star was not ripped away and the rally moved towards its end.

This unity describing the broad ‘antizionist’ trend in Greece shows clearly who benefits from this. It is something that not only has to raise discussions and thoughts, but also needs to be condemned and treated without any prevarications. A collective memory that ‘forgets’ what fascism was and spots ‘fascisms’ everywhere has as a result the relativization of the old crimes. Today’s supposedly revolutionary memory that overlooks the character of the war it enters, leads to the destruction of the total historical memory and, indirectly, to reactionary and racist paths. When the targets and the slogans of some people, whoever they are, get identical with those of neo-Nazis, something peculiar is going on.

Whoever pretends not to understand the differences between the state of Israel and the monuments dedicated to greek Jews in memory of their annihilation by the Nazis of Hitler is dangerous. 86% of the greek Jewry, around 60,000 people, were exterminated by the Nazis between 1942 and 1945. These monuments are devoted to these victims, the victims of German fascism and anti-Semitism. Whoever does not accept this denies a priori the extermination itself or desecrates the memory of the genocide, by implying that the victims are responsible for things that are totally irrelevant. They continue in this way connecting the choices of the state of Israel with the greek-jewish communities (as the Communist Party also did in 2006 during the war between Hezbollah and Israel) and do the very job of fascists! With the veil of antizionism (that attacks whoever is considered a “Zionist”) and the blessings of a part of the greek Left and some radicals, it seems there is something emerging now that will end up out of control. It is our responsibility to realize it and stop it.

Whoever begins his supposed anti-religious campaigns (against someone else’s religion and not his own) today, that the limits between antizionism and anti-Semitism become socially more and more indistinguishable, proves proves to be, if not an anti-Semite, at least a useful idiot of anti-Semitism. Whoever gets involved in such things simply provides an additional argument of left origin to fascists themselves. What do we mean by that? That neonazis, not being justified to use their old kind, hitlerist, biological anti-Semitism anymore, they nowadays promote their anti-Semitism through the three central and very successful—in terms of camouflaging hatred—arguments of the Left: the anti-capitalist one (“I love Jews but I hate their companies and banks”), the anti-zionist one (“I love Jews but I hate the racist jewish state”) and the anti-religious one (“I love Jews but I hate the racist jewish religion”). Through these three arguments, anyone can say and act as he likes by replacing the word “jew” with the word “zionist”. In this way, from Mihaloliakos to Papariga and from Plevris to Alavanos, everyone speaks the same solid language without any obstacles.i

Finally, we have to say that we condemn this desecration in the city of Larissa, as well as the one in the jewish cemetery in Ioannina, as despicable anti-Semitic actions. We call everyone who still remains anti-fascist to resist against this kind of actions and stand by all those threatened by anti-Semitic attacks. We call all groups and organizations to take a strong stance about the latest wave of anti-Semitism in Greece that during these days has been directed against jewish buildings and monuments, and to isolate all those expressing anti-Semitic hatred and ideas.

Anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism!
Against any kind of anti-Semitism!
Solidarity with the Jewish Communities!

Terminal 119
For social and individual autonomy
21/01/09

Ps. many comrades the last few days and after our previous text (which we wrote together with Café Morgenland) asked us to take a stance against Israel because of the war break in Gaza during January between Hamas and Israel. We have to respond publicly to this request, by saying that the conflict in Gaza has nothing to do with greek anti-Semitism. What we were discussing in our previous text is greek anti-Semitism and not “Gaza”. These are two different issues. Secondly, the conflict in Gaza is not for us the only conflict taking place today in the whole world—and it is certainly not the most tragic one—so we cannot understand why we have to take a selective stance about this conflict only, while no other greek anarchist group, leftist group or Media doesn’t even say a word about, for example, the genocide in Sudan, the dead Arabs of Iraq or the dozens of conflicts that the local media constantly refuse to televise. We should also squarely state that we refuse to criticize Israel in any way. And that’s because Israel receives a mainly anti-Semitic criticism from its very first appearance as a state (see our analysis about anti-Semitism—in Greek—in our first and second issue and in many of our texts). Finally, we have to say that, being loyal followers of the old political slogan “Our enemy is here!” (Karl Liebkneht), we choose without hesitations and second thoughts to primarily criticize greek society and the greek state, the destruction of which we desire. The task of criticizing the Israeli state has been already undertaken by our comrades inside Israel and we are happy to send them, once more, all our revolutionary greetings! Of course our comrades in Israel always try to persuade us that the Israeli state is the worst of all states, but we always respond that they are mistaken, probably because they have not visited Greece yet…

Will anti-Semitism succeed where the repression didn’t?

2009-02-12T05:44:00.000-08:00

Cafe Morgenland & Terminal 119

[January / 2009]

Will anti-Semitism succeed where the repression didn’t?

«For every known or unknown person whom we want or are forced to form an opinion of, we constantly and consistently make the same, stereotypical and set question: How would he or she react, how would this or the other collective or social group react if Auschwitz or something proportional would be repeated? The answer to this question is the dominant, the absolute and the decisive criterion by which we count and esteem the individuals and the groups, their actions and their behavior».

In 31.12.2008, a “revolutionary” attack took place against the Jewish synagogue in Volos (the older one was blown up by the Germans in 1943). The attack consisted of writing some threatening slogans^ⁱ on the synagogue walls (elsewhere, they call it desecration or sacrilege). This act of disgraceful anti-Semitism, consists of another attempt at changing the direction in the radical scene (the first occurred at Athens Indymedia which, “for the Greek lords’ favour”, rapidly left behind the theme of the December riots in Greece so as to promote the Middle East issue with its all necessary reflexives and accesoires).

Because, of course, it is very convenient, after seeing in Greece an outburst, a rebellion, that at last, looking “inside,” found the enemy in the Greek state, and all the shit of Greek society, clearly attacked the local putrescence and conservatism… where even social de-alienation (“p l i a t s i k o” as it was called in a pejorative term) started to blossom in mid-Winter… now, to have those that that will start to burn American flags, those that will speak against the Jews about the international financial crisis and the war, those that will target synagogues, those that will care to “drake” the rebellion’s violence to targets (read here the embassies of Israel and USA) more compatible with local nationalism and the old, pure patriotic feelings that we have got used to blessing in every revolutionary-patriotic anniversary. Thus, it is very convenient when the structures that this rebellion left behind, go on to insinuate themselves using all possible connections among the immigrants and the workers that receive murder attacks with acid, like the immigrant syndicalist Konstantina Kouneva, and when, in solidarity to Kouneva, demonstrators attack and injure cops in response, in Piraeus and elsewhere. It is very convenient when someone wants to mislead us from the solidarity to the dozens of arrested immigrant rebels that this repression left behind, it is very convenient when over 50 Albanian and Arab immigrants have been put in jail for 18 months in Athens alone, and will be deported. It is very convenient when the Riot Police are tired to death by the thousands of rioters and when the para-militaries and indignant Greek citizens and fascists take their guns out and shoot people. It is precisely this moment, now, that it seems that anti-Semitism, always in the form of anti-Zionism, manages to repress whatever the cops “magic weapons”^ⁱⁱ didn’t succeed in repressing…

At this definitive point, it is a fact that such actions can have only one goal and one result, namely to gather people once again around the Greek national pole, either for anti-imperialist or for humanist reasons, where, of course, one can make distinctions between these two. Thus, they try in this manner to bury one of the slogans shouted during the December riot: “Righteous are the rebels, national unity with blood is stained!”

Until now, the communist party of Greece was the “usual suspect” for such actions (desecration of the Holocaust memorial, mob gatherings by “communists” and other good citizens outside the offices of the Jewish community in Thessaloniki, screaming anti-Semitic chants against the Greek Jews in 2006, etc.), not to mention the neo-nazis of Golden Dawn and all the remaining democratic powers, each one of them, of course, for their very own political reasons. Now, another group took over, with the signature of “AK” (in Volos). What is strange about this last action is that there is no “AK Volos” group, as far as we know^ⁱⁱⁱ, while it is definitive of this period that we live in, that we can’t distinguish which actions were carried out by neo-nazis and which ones by others. The only thing for certain is that not a few people from the “scene” cheered the action in Indymedia (and in “Stohos”, a greek nationalist newspaper). We say this without, of course, trying to lessen the value of many people’s opposition to the above “revolutionary” action.

The threat of their “intervention” yesterday is expressed with a rhetorical question in one of their slogans on a wall of the synagogue:

The state of Israel murders! Whose position do you support? (signature Α.Κ.).

Those who criticize Israel for corporate responsibility, without hesitation lash out with exactly the same accusation against the Greek Jews of Volos.

With their question, they don’t just express their curiosity, so as to learn their fellow citizens’ opinion, as they also never cared about their fellow citizens’ opinion about other issues, they have never cared about their blood-stained history^{^iv}, the one that smells of Zyklon B and crematories, about their feelings, about their dreams and hopes. They demand that the Greek Jews of Volos take a position about the facts in Middle East and, thus, a position condemning Israel, as any other position will make them “guilty by definition”. Only so can they be certain that the stigmatised will not escape them.

Of course, they themselves give the answer that they ask of the OTHERS, those that are DIFFERENT, with their second slogan, as they already know, before they make their “visit” to the synagogue. Since the day they were born, they already knew everything about this chthonic race which is responsible and guilty for the politics of Israel (even in the greek “Antifa” magazine, the Jews are not even Greeks, but citizens, and thus agents, of a foreign country, Israel). So as not to leave any doubts, they respond to themselves with their second slogan:

In genocide there is no “neutrality” and “equal distance”! (signature Α.Κ. - antiauthoritarian movement) a greek group

The threat to physical integrity, to property, synagogues, cemeteries, Holocaust memorials and, in general, everything that is or is supposed to be Jewish, manifest themselves as the tacit consequences of these slogans, consequences that the stigmatised will have caused the perpetrators to perpetrate, consequences that the stigmatised will have to bear.

Die Bedrohung der körperliche Unversehrtheit, des Eigentums, der Synagogen, der Friedhöfe, der Holocaust-Mahnmale, und generell allen was jüdisch ist oder als solcher definiert wird, sind die implizierten Konsequenzen solche Parolen, Konsequenzen, die die Stigmatisierte durch die „Angreifer“ zu tragen haben.

So, what will be the next step, their next “revolutionary” act, if (the Jews) do not abide and keep “a neutral position” or maintain an “equal distance”? What will their next dynamic action be, if they that survived Auschwitz, and their descendants, take a pro-Israeli stand? (Indeed, we don’t even want to imagine it). Others have already spread the rumor that they attacked the Larissa synagogue – a lie, as far as we know – and try, in this way, to create a wave of attacks against Jewish targets all over the country, by sweeping up more people from the mob, under the mask of their anti-Zionism and/ or opposition against… religions in general.

We will say it again here, without any hesitation. After Auschwitz, every anti-Semitic act and every anti-Semitic threat, is synonymous with annihilation. Don’t forget that, at the anteroom of the Holocaust, in parallel with the free smearing of the inferiority and noxiousness of the chthonic Jews (which a writer from Babylonia newspaper called “freedom of speech”), were also the attacks against Jewish synagogues (in “Kristallnacht”, for example), houses, shops etc. Back then, they were writing on the synagogue walls «Juda verrecke!» («death to the Jews») or «kauft nicht bei Juden!» («don’t buy from the Jews») etc. That, 70 years ago, they were not writing the same things on the walls as today, is simply because of the fact that there was no Middle East issue back then. Nothing else matters.

We condemn every action and expression of threat against the Greek Jews and we promise to do everything to stop these actions by any means, so as to allow every person and every Israelite community to freely decide, whether they want to be for or against Israel, whether they want to keep a neutral stand or no stand at all etc, without anyone daring to force them sign certificates of loyalty.

We demand from the anti-authoritarian scene, we demand from every person and group, that they themselves condemn and isolate such actions and groups as a phenomena of an anti-Semitic cesspit, of racist behavior and patriotic sublimity.

We demand from those intellectuals that write these abstract, spectacular articles against anti-Semitism and racism to condemn the particular.

Silence stands for Guilt by accessory!

Hands off the Greek Jews!

Café Morgenland – antifascist immigrant group from Germany

Terminal 119 – for social and individual autonomy

03/01/09

i Five days after the attack, the Greek Helsinki Monitor published the following announcement “Greek Jew’s fears following new outburst of anti-Semitism” (in English): Greek Helsinki Monitor (GHM) has been receiving messages from Greek Jews following the desecration of the Volos Synagogue on New Year’s Eve (http://cm.greekhelsinki.gr/index.php?sec=194&cid=3392). With the sender’s permission and on condition of confidentiality, one such message is reprinted here. It eloquently describes how many Greek Jews live in the provinces and the consequences of anti-Semitic acts and –especially– media coverage. “The Jews in our community are experiencing a climate of intimidation following the graffiti on the Volos Synagogue. Since that act was taken as an attack, it resulted in the cancellation of Sabbath services and all other events and gatherings scheduled over the next several days. Some even considered removing their names from their apartment house bells! These concerns are intensified by various bombastic programs on local and national TV channels where everything becomes grist for the mill (Jews, Masons, Zionism, arrival of the Antichrist and the end of the world with globalization and so forth)!”. Café Morgenland group immediately republished the news in Greek http://www.cafemorgenland.net/archiv/2009/2009.01.06_Wohnungsklingen_gr.htm and German (http://www.cafemorgenland.net/archiv/2009/2009.01.06_Wohnungsklingen.htm.

ii A reference to the riot’s classic slogan “The cop’s gun is magic/ he shoots in the air and hits in the flesh”. The slogan mocks the usual excuse of the Greek cops when they kill someone, usually immigrant, with their guns: “the gun drakes”.

iii Ten days after the incident, “AK” organization (Anti-authoritarian movement) and particularly its groups in Ioannina, Thessaloniki and Athens published an announcement that condemned the action by saying that it was a “dangerous stupidity” and that everyone that acts similarly can only be compared with the neo-nazis of Golden Dawn. Also, demanded the perpetrators to expose themselves so as to take the responsibility of their actions. http://athens.indymedia.org/front.php3?lang=el&article_id=966719 (in Greek)

iv The hunting had already begun from October 1943. On the 25th of March in 1944, the Jews were arrested and sent to the Concentration Camps, where they were exterminated. Totally, 227 Jews from Volos lost their lives (“Hronika” magazine, KIS). Thanks to the attempts that the rabbi Pessah, the archbishop Ioakeim and some parts of EAM, the 74% of the Jews of Volos, were saved. Today, the “Jewish danger” in Volos includes only 120 survivors of Holocaust and their descendants.

the new http://deletetheborder.org/ online

2009-02-09T17:02:00.000-08:00

Deletetheborder.org is an online community with the goal of nurturing a global network of movements against borders. We began the project in 2005. Sensing the tremendous potential energy and having seen the existence of many networks around the world like NoBorder.org and No One Is Illegal in Canada, we sought to use the latest technology to provide a site which would make international connections and act as a hub of resistance and emergence...

Deletetheborder.org is designed to be a place for information sharing through the use of open posting, news feed collection, media galleries, blogs and forums. We are currently in the midst of the largest migration in human history. The intense processes of neoliberal enclosure continue on despite unprecedented levels of resistance across the world. Thus, migration continues, from South to North, from colonized to colonizer. Most recently, under the guise of the war on terror, States are retaliating against this migration with repressive measures and elaborate systems of control and exploitation that function much like in-country colonization.

Against this murderous violence, movements have sprung up to work in conjunction and solidarity with migrant people. Our site seeks to aid the growth of these movements by providing information about borders and resistance to borders, but also by providing support for organizers including forums, hosting for data sharing and event calendars.

Our site currently offers visitors the option to see the site's interface elements such as menus and buttons in English, Spanish or French. It also allows visitors to post translations for their stories. We frequently have posts in each of these languages as the posts often originate in the US, Canada, Mexico and Spain. Our contexts are some of the most contentious and violent borderlands of the world.

The project was begun, and is maintained by the o.r.g.a.n.i.c. collective and the borderlands hacklab in San Diego, California. The content of Deletetheborder.org is contributed by numerous organizers, hackers and bloggers in the US, Canada and Mexico. Stories are regularly posted by members of o.r.g.a.n.i.c, by organizers with No One Is Illegal in Canada and by net activists such as Ricardo Dominguez. Moving forward, the o.r.g.a.n.i.c collective and the borderlands Hacklab is working on a more formalized North American Network For Freedom of Movement. The administration of the site therefore, will soon include members of various groups around the country, including the Bay Area Coalition to Fight the Minutemen.

Within the last month our site traffic has doubled as the largest mobilizations ever seen in many cities across the US have taken place, including self-organized spontaneous walkouts by tens of thousands of students.

Deletetheborder.org is based on the Civicspace content management system, which is a variant of Drupal. It is composed of a PHP/MySql environment with various modules to provide different functions of the site. It runs on a GNU/Linux server running Fedora. The software that runs the site is GPL and the server runs on Free Software as well. The content posted on the site is licensed under the Creative Commons, By Attribution - Non-Commercial - Share-Alike license, unless otherwise specified.

give up activism

2009-02-08T09:58:00.000-08:00

taken from the blogzine "apples from the underground''

yes i posted this article for obvious reasons, unless otherwise specified

Pavlov is alive and well...

In 1999, in the aftermath of the June 18th global day of action, a pamphlet called Reflections on June 18th was produced by some people in London, as an open-access collection of "contributions on the politics behind the events that occurred in the City of London on June 18, 1999". Contained in this collection was an article called 'Give up Activism' which has generated quite a lot of discussion and debate both in the UK and internationally, being translated into several languages and reproduced in several different publications.[1] Here we republish the article together with a new postscript by the author addressing some comments and criticisms received since the original publication.

[See also the Postscript to this article]

One problem apparent in the June 18th day of action was the adoption of an activist mentality. This problem became particularly obvious with June 18th precisely because the people involved in organising it and the people involved on the day tried to push beyond these limitations. This piece is no criticism of anyone involved - rather an attempt to inspire some thought on the challenges that confront us if we are really serious in our intention of doing away with the capitalist mode of production.

Experts

By 'an activist mentality' what I mean is that people think of themselves primarily as activists and as belonging to some wider community of activists. The activist identifies with what they do and thinks of it as their role in life, like a job or career. In the same way some people will identify with their job as a doctor or a teacher, and instead of it being something they just happen to be doing, it becomes an essential part of their self-image.

The activist is a specialist or an expert in social change. To think of yourself as being an activist means to think of yourself as being somehow privileged or more advanced than others in your appreciation of the need for social change, in the knowledge of how to achieve it and as leading or being in the forefront of the practical struggle to create this change.

Activism, like all expert roles, has its basis in the division of labour - it is a specialised separate task. The division of labour is the foundation of class society, the fundamental division being that between mental and manual labour. The division of labour operates, for example, in medicine or education - instead of healing and bringing up kids being common knowledge and tasks that everyone has a hand in, this knowledge becomes the specialised property of doctors and teachers - experts that we must rely on to do these things for us. Experts jealously guard and mystify the skills they have. This keeps people separated and disempowered and reinforces hierarchical class society.

A division of labour implies that one person takes on a role on behalf of many others who relinquish this responsibility. A separation of tasks means that other people will grow your food and make your clothes and supply your electricity while you get on with achieving social change. The activist, being an expert in social change, assumes that other people aren't doing anything to change their lives and so feels a duty or a responsibility to do it on their behalf. Activists think they are compensating for the lack of activity by others. Defining ourselves as activists means defining our actions as the ones which will bring about social change, thus disregarding the activity of thousands upon thousands of other non-activists. Activism is based on this misconception that it is only activists who do social change - whereas of course class struggle is happening all the time.

Form and Content

The tension between the form of 'activism' in which our political activity appears and its increasingly radical content has only been growing over the last few years. The background of a lot of the people involved in June 18th is of being 'activists' who 'campaign' on an 'issue'. The political progress that has been made in the activist scene over the last few years has resulted in a situation where many people have moved beyond single issue campaigns against specific companies or developments to a rather ill-defined yet nonetheless promising anti-capitalist perspective. Yet although the content of the campaigning activity has altered, the form of activism has not. So instead of taking on Monsanto and going to their headquarters and occupying it, we have now seen beyond the single facet of capital represented by Monsanto and so develop a 'campaign' against capitalism. And where better to go and occupy than what is perceived as being the headquarters of capitalism - the City?

Our methods of operating are still the same as if we were taking on a specific corporation or development, despite the fact that capitalism is not at all the same sort of thing and the ways in which one might bring down a particular company are not at all the same as the ways in which you might bring down capitalism. For example, vigorous campaigning by animal rights activists has succeeded in wrecking both Consort dog breeders and Hillgrove Farm cat breeders. The businesses were ruined and went into receivership. Similarly the campaign waged against arch-vivisectionists Huntingdon Life Sciences succeeded in reducing their share price by 33%, but the company just about managed to survive by running a desperate PR campaign in the City to pick up prices.[2] Activism can very successfully accomplish bringing down a business, yet to bring down capitalism a lot more will be required than to simply extend this sort of activity to every business in every sector. Similarly with the targetting of butcher's shops by animal rights activists, the net result is probably only to aid the supermarkets in closing down all the small butcher's shops, thus assisting the process of competition and the 'natural selection' of the marketplace. Thus activists often succeed in destroying one small business while strengthening capital overall.

A similar thing applies with anti-roads activism. Wide-scale anti-roads protests have created opportunities for a whole new sector of capitalism - security, surveillance, tunnellers, climbers, experts and consultants. We are now one 'market risk' among others to be taken into account when bidding for a roads contract. We may have actually assisted the rule of market forces, by forcing out the companies that are weakest and least able to cope. Protest-bashing consultant Amanda Webster says: "The advent of the protest movement will actually provide market advantages to those contractors who can handle it effectively."[3] Again activism can bring down a business or stop a road but capitalism carries merrily on, if anything stronger than before.

These things are surely an indication, if one were needed, that tackling capitalism will require not only a quantitative change (more actions, more activists) but a qualitative one (we need to discover some more effective form of operating). It seems we have very little idea of what it might actually require to bring down capitalism. As if all it needed was some sort of critical mass of activists occupying offices to be reached and then we'd have a revolution...

The form of activism has been preserved even while the content of this activity has moved beyond the form that contains it. We still think in terms of being 'activists' doing a 'campaign' on an 'issue', and because we are 'direct action' activists we will go and 'do an action' against our target. The method of campaigning against specific developments or single companies has been carried over into this new thing of taking on capitalism. We're attempting to take on capitalism and conceptualising what we're doing in completely inappropriate terms, utilising a method of operating appropriate to liberal reformism. So we have the bizarre spectacle of 'doing an action' against capitalism - an utterly inadequate practice.

Roles

The role of the 'activist' is a role we adopt just like that of policeman, parent or priest - a strange psychological form we use to define ourselves and our relation to others. The 'activist' is a specialist or an expert in social change - yet the harder we cling to this role and notion of what we are, the more we actually impede the change we desire. A real revolution will involve the breaking out of all preconceived roles and the destruction of all specialism - the reclamation of our lives. The seizing control over our own destinies which is the act of revolution will involve the creation of new selves and new forms of interaction and community. 'Experts' in anything can only hinder this.

The Situationist International developed a stringent critique of roles and particularly the role of 'the militant'. Their criticism was mainly directed against leftist and social-democratic ideologies because that was mainly what they encountered. Although these forms of alienation still exist and are plain to be seen, in our particular milieu it is the liberal activist we encounter more often than the leftist militant. Nevertheless, they share many features in common (which of course is not surprising).

The Situationist Raoul Vaneigem defined roles like this: "Stereotypes are the dominant images of a period... The stereotype is the model of the role; the role is a model form of behaviour. The repetition of an attitude creates a role." To play a role is to cultivate an appearance to the neglect of everything authentic: "we succumb to the seduction of borrowed attitudes." As role-players we dwell in inauthenticity - reducing our lives to a string of clichés - "breaking [our] day down into a series of poses chosen more or less unconsciously from the range of dominant stereotypes."[4] This process has been at work since the early days of the anti-roads movement. At Twyford Down after Yellow Wednesday in December 92, press and media coverage focused on the Dongas Tribe and the dreadlocked countercultural aspect of the protests. Initially this was by no means the predominant element - there was a large group of ramblers at the eviction for example.[5] But people attracted to Twyford by the media coverage thought every single person there had dreadlocks. The media coverage had the effect of making 'ordinary' people stay away and more dreadlocked countercultural types turned up - decreasing the diversity of the protests. More recently, a similar thing has happened in the way in which people drawn to protest sites by the coverage of Swampy they had seen on TV began to replicate in their own lives the attitudes presented by the media as characteristic of the role of the 'eco-warrior'.[6]

"Just as the passivity of the consumer is an active passivity, so the passivity of the spectator lies in his ability to assimilate roles and play them according to official norms. The repetition of images and stereotypes offers a set of models from which everyone is supposed to choose a role."[7] The role of the militant or activist is just one of these roles, and therein, despite all the revolutionary rhetoric that goes with the role, lies its ultimate conservatism.

The supposedly revolutionary activity of the activist is a dull and sterile routine - a constant repetition of a few actions with no potential for change. Activists would probably resist change if it came because it would disrupt the easy certainties of their role and the nice little niche they've carved out for themselves. Like union bosses, activists are eternal representatives and mediators. In the same way as union leaders would be against their workers actually succeeding in their struggle because this would put them out of a job, the role of the activist is threatened by change. Indeed revolution, or even any real moves in that direction, would profoundly upset activists by depriving them of their role. If everyone is becoming revolutionary then you're not so special anymore, are you?

So why do we behave like activists? Simply because it's the easy cowards' option? It is easy to fall into playing the activist role because it fits into this society and doesn't challenge it - activism is an accepted form of dissent. Even if as activists we are doing things which are not accepted and are illegal, the form of activism itself - the way it is like a job - means that it fits in with our psychology and our upbringing. It has a certain attraction precisely because it is not revolutionary.

We Don't Need Any More Martyrs

The key to understanding both the role of the militant and the activist is self-sacrifice - the sacrifice of the self to 'the cause' which is seen as being separate from the self. This of course has nothing to do with real revolutionary activity which is the seizing of the self. Revolutionary martyrdom goes together with the identification of some cause separate from one's own life - an action against capitalism which identifies capitalism as 'out there' in the City is fundamentally mistaken - the real power of capital is right here in our everyday lives - we re-create its power every day because capital is not a thing but a social relation between people (and hence classes) mediated by things.

Of course I am not suggesting that everyone who was involved in June 18th shares in the adoption of this role and the self-sacrifice that goes with it to an equal extent. As I said above, the problem of activism was made particularly apparent by June 18th precisely because it was an attempt to break from these roles and our normal ways of operating. Much of what is outlined here is a 'worst case scenario' of what playing the role of an activist can lead to. The extent to which we can recognise this within our own movement will give us an indication of how much work there is still to be done.

The activist makes politics dull and sterile and drives people away from it, but playing the role also fucks up the activist herself. The role of the activist creates a separation between ends and means: self-sacrifice means creating a division between the revolution as love and joy in the future but duty and routine now. The worldview of activism is dominated by guilt and duty because the activist is not fighting for herself but for a separate cause: "All causes are equally inhuman."[8]

As an activist you have to deny your own desires because your political activity is defined such that these things do not count as 'politics'. You put 'politics' in a separate box to the rest of your life - it's like a job... you do 'politics' 9-5 and then go home and do something else. Because it is in this separate box, 'politics' exists unhampered by any real-world practical considerations of effectiveness. The activist feels obliged to keep plugging away at the same old routine unthinkingly, unable to stop or consider, the main thing being that the activist is kept busy and assuages her guilt by banging her head against a brick wall if necessary.

Part of being revolutionary might be knowing when to stop and wait. It might be important to know how and when to strike for maximum effectiveness and also how and when NOT to strike. Activists have this 'We must do something NOW!' attitude that seems fuelled by guilt. This is completely untactical.

The self-sacrifice of the militant or the activist is mirrored in their power over others as an expert - like a religion there is a kind of hierarchy of suffering and self-righteousness. The activist assumes power over others by virtue of her greater degree of suffering ('non-hierarchical' activist groups in fact form a 'dictatorship of the most committed'). The activist uses moral coercion and guilt to wield power over others less experienced in the theology of suffering. Their subordination of themselves goes hand in hand with their subordination of others - all enslaved to 'the cause'. Self-sacrificing politicos stunt their own lives and their own will to live - this generates a bitterness and an antipathy to life which is then turned outwards to wither everything else. They are "great despisers of life... the partisans of absolute self-sacrifice... their lives twisted by their monsterous asceticism."[9] We can see this in our own movement, for example on site, in the antagonism between the desire to sit around and have a good time versus the guilt-tripping build/fortify/barricade work ethic and in the sometimes excessive passion with which 'lunchouts' are denounced. The self-sacrificing martyr is offended and outraged when she sees others that are not sacrificing themselves. Like when the 'honest worker' attacks the scrounger or the layabout with such vitriol, we know it is actually because she hates her job and the martyrdom she has made of her life and therefore hates to see anyone escape this fate, hates to see anyone enjoying themselves while she is suffering - she must drag everyone down into the muck with her - an equality of self-sacrifice.

In the old religious cosmology, the successful martyr went to heaven. In the modern worldview, successful martyrs can look forward to going down in history. The greatest self-sacrifice, the greatest success in creating a role (or even better, in devising a whole new one for people to emulate - e.g. the eco-warrior) wins a reward in history - the bourgeois heaven.

The old left was quite open in its call for heroic sacrifice: "Sacrifice yourselves joyfully, brothers and sisters! For the Cause, for the Established Order, for the Party, for Unity, for Meat and Potatoes!"[10] But these days it is much more veiled: Vaneigem accuses "young leftist radicals" of "enter[ing] the service of a Cause - the 'best' of all Causes. The time they have for creative activity they squander on handing out leaflets, putting up posters, demonstrating or heckling local politicians. They become militants, fetishising action because others are doing their thinking for them."[11]

This resounds with us - particularly the thing about the fetishising of action - in left groups the militants are left free to engage in endless busywork because the group leader or guru has the 'theory' down pat, which is just accepted and lapped up - the 'party line'. With direct action activists it's slightly different - action is fetishised, but more out of an aversion to any theory whatsoever.

Although it is present, that element of the activist role which relies on self-sacrifice and duty was not so significant in June 18th. What is more of an issue for us is the feeling of separateness from 'ordinary people' that activism implies. People identify with some weird sub-culture or clique as being 'us' as opposed to the 'them' of everyone else in the world.

Isolation

The activist role is a self-imposed isolation from all the people we should be connecting to. Taking on the role of an activist separates you from the rest of the human race as someone special and different. People tend to think of their own first person plural (who are you referring to when you say 'we'?) as referring to some community of activists, rather than a class. For example, for some time now in the activist milieu it has been popular to argue for 'no more single issues' and for the importance of 'making links'. However, many people's conception of what this involved was to 'make links' with other activists and other campaign groups. June 18th demonstrated this quite well, the whole idea being to get all the representatives of all the various different causes or issues in one place at one time, voluntarily relegating ourselves to the ghetto of good causes.

Similarly, the various networking forums that have recently sprung up around the country - the Rebel Alliance in Brighton, NASA in Nottingham, Riotous Assembly in Manchester, the London Underground etc. have a similar goal - to get all the activist groups in the area talking to each other. I'm not knocking this - it is an essential pre-requisite for any further action, but it should be recognised for the extremely limited form of 'making links' that it is. It is also interesting in that what the groups attending these meetings have in common is that they are activist groups - what they are actually concerned with seems to be a secondary consideration.

It is not enough merely to seek to link together all the activists in the world, neither is it enough to seek to transform more people into activists. Contrary to what some people may think, we will not be any closer to a revolution if lots and lots of people become activists. Some people seem to have the strange idea that what is needed is for everyone to be somehow persuaded into becoming activists like us and then we'll have a revolution. Vaneigem says: "Revolution is made everyday despite, and in opposition to, the specialists of revolution."[12]

The militant or activist is a specialist in social change or revolution. The specialist recruits others to her own tiny area of specialism in order to increase her own power and thus dispel the realisation of her own powerlessness. "The specialist... enrols himself in order to enrol others."[13] Like a pyramid selling scheme, the hierarchy is self-replicating - you are recruited and in order not to be at the bottom of the pyramid, you have to recruit more people to be under you, who then do exactly the same. The reproduction of the alienated society of roles is accomplished through specialists.

Jacques Camatte in his essay 'On Organization'[14] makes the astute point that political groupings often end up as "gangs" defining themselves by exclusion - the group member's first loyalty becomes to the group rather than to the struggle. His critique applies especially to the myriad of Left sects and groupuscules at which it was directed but it applies also to a lesser extent to the activist mentality.

The political group or party substitutes itself for the proletariat and its own survival and reproduction become paramount - revolutionary activity becomes synonymous with 'building the party' and recruiting members. The group takes itself to have a unique grasp on truth and everyone outside the group is treated like an idiot in need of education by this vanguard. Instead of an equal debate between comrades we get instead the separation of theory and propaganda, where the group has its own theory, which is almost kept secret in the belief that the inherently less mentally able punters must be lured in the organisation with some strategy of populism before the politics are sprung on them by surprise. This dishonest method of dealing with those outside of the group is similar to a religious cult - they will never tell you upfront what they are about.

We can see here some similarities with activism, in the way that the activist milieu acts like a leftist sect. Activism as a whole has some of the characteristics of a "gang". Activist gangs can often end up being cross-class alliances, including all sorts of liberal reformists because they too are 'activists'. People think of themselves primarily as activists and their primary loyalty becomes to the community of activists and not to the struggle as such. The "gang" is illusory community, distracting us from creating a wider community of resistance. The essence of Camatte's critique is an attack on the creation of an interior/exterior division between the group and the class. We come to think of ourselves as being activists and therefore as being separate from and having different interests from the mass of working class people.

Our activity should be the immediate expression of a real struggle, not the affirmation of the separateness and distinctness of a particular group. In Marxist groups the possession of 'theory' is the all-important thing determining power - it's different in the activist milieu, but not that different - the possession of the relevant 'social capital' - knowledge, experience, contacts, equipment etc. is the primary thing determining power.

Activism reproduces the structure of this society in its operations: "When the rebel begins to believe that he is fighting for a higher good, the authoritarian principle gets a fillip."[15] This is no trivial matter, but is at the basis of capitalist social relations. Capital is a social relation between people mediated by things - the basic principle of alienation is that we live our lives in the service of some thing that we ourselves have created. If we reproduce this structure in the name of politics that declares itself anti-capitalist, we have lost before we have begun. You cannot fight alienation by alienated means.

A Modest Proposal

This is a modest proposal that we should develop ways of operating that are adequate to our radical ideas. This task will not be easy and the writer of this short piece has no clearer insight into how we should go about this than anyone else. I am not arguing that June 18th should have been abandoned or attacked, indeed it was a valiant attempt to get beyond our limitations and to create something better than what we have at present. However, in its attempts to break with antique and formulaic ways of doing things it has made clear the ties that still bind us to the past. The criticisms of activism that I have expressed above do not all apply to June 18th. However there is a certain paradigm of activism which at its worst includes all that I have outlined above and June 18th shared in this paradigm to a certain extent. To exactly what extent is for you to decide.

Activism is a form partly forced upon us by weakness. Like the joint action taken by Reclaim the Streets and the Liverpool dockers - we find ourselves in times in which radical politics is often the product of mutual weakness and isolation. If this is the case, it may not even be within our power to break out of the role of activists. It may be that in times of a downturn in struggle, those who continue to work for social revolution become marginalised and come to be seen (and to see themselves) as a special separate group of people. It may be that this is only capable of being corrected by a general upsurge in struggle when we won't be weirdos and freaks any more but will seem simply to be stating what is on everybody's minds. However, to work to escalate the struggle it will be necessary to break with the role of activists to whatever extent is possible - to constantly try to push at the boundaries of our limitations and constraints.

Historically, those movements that have come the closest to de-stabilising or removing or going beyond capitalism have not at all taken the form of activism. Activism is essentially a political form and a method of operating suited to liberal reformism that is being pushed beyond its own limits and used for revolutionary purposes. The activist role in itself must be problematic for those who desire social revolution..

[See also the Postscript to this article]

Notes

1) To my knowledge the article has been translated into French and published in Je sais tout (Association des 26-Cantons, 8, rue Lissignol CH-1201 Genève, Suisse) and in Échanges No. 93 (BP 241, 75866 Paris Cedex 18, France). It has been translated into Spanish and published in Ekintza Zuzena (Ediciones E.Z., Apdo. 235, 48080 Bilbo (Bizkaia), Spanish State). It has been republished in America in Collective Action Notes No. 16-17 (CAN, POB 22962, Baltimore, MD 21203, USA) and in the UK in Organise! No. 54 (AF, c/o 84b Whitechapel High Street, London E1 7QX, UK). It is also available on-line at: http://www.infoshop.org/octo/j18_rts1.html#give_up and http://tierra.ucsd.edu/~acf/online/j18/reflec1.html#GIVE If anyone knows of any other places it has been reproduced or critiqued, I would be grateful to hear of them, via Do or Die.

2) Squaring up to the Square Mile: A Rough Guide to the City of London (J18 Publications (UK), 1999) p.8

3) 'Direct Action: Six Years Down the Road' in Do or Die No. 7, p.3

4) Raoul Vaneigem - The Revolution of Everyday Life, (Left Bank Books/Rebel Press, 1994) - first published 1967, pp.131-3

5) 'The Day they Drove Twyford Down' in Do or Die No. 1, p.11

6) 'Personality Politics: The Spectacularisation of Fairmile' in Do or Die No. 7, p.35

7) Op. Cit. 4, p.128

8) Op. Cit. 4, p.107

9) Op. Cit. 4, p.109

10) Op. Cit. 4, p.108

11) Op. Cit. 4, p.109

12) Op. Cit. 4, p.111

13) Op. Cit. 4, p.143

14) Jacques Camatte - 'On Organization' (1969) in This World We Must Leave and Other Essays (New York, Autonomedia, 1995)

15) Op. Cit. 4, p.110

Do or Die DTP/web team: doordtp@yahoo.co.uk

peoples global action at crabgrass

2009-02-07T06:14:00.000-08:00

There is a new communication-tool developing at riseup.net, called crabgrass. There is a new group formed there...

see: https://we.riseup.net/pga

solidarity with cox 18

2009-02-03T06:56:00.000-08:00

Milano: COP 19 evicted

2009-02-02T09:32:00.000-08:00

Bulgaria: Violence against the protesters or against the protest?

2009-02-01T12:48:00.000-08:00

http://balkans.puscii.nl/?q=content/bulgaria-violence-against-protesters-or-against-protest

On 14th January 2009 a protest in front of the Parliament took place. A protest for a better state, nothing more. Weeks before the protest there were so many rumors, that the radical left groups like the Federation of the Anarchists in Bulgaria (FAB), Anarch oResistance collective and also the students-pupils' movement “Priziv” were forced to distinguish from this event. As it turned out – absolutely reasonably.

The planed as a “nationwide peoples' protest” was practically occupied form a small group well known neo-nazi football hooligans, who more than an hour were trowing snow balls, self-made bombs, smoke bombs, were destroying the metal fences in from of the Parliament, beating with cops, journalists and event other protesters. Despite the calls for calmness from the organizers of the event this small group did not stop and the police did not react at all. After that because of orders from “above” the police “cleand” the square, beating up brutally everyone (including the normal protesters), instead of isolating the neo-nazi hooligans.

So far there are 154 arestees, some of the carrying knuckle-dusters, sticks, helmets and even stickers with swastikas; some others – regular students, beaten by the one repressive face of the state (the other we saw earlier: the paid neo-nazi football hools), who were at the wrong place in the wrong time.

The scenario is obvious. The goal of the oligarchic puppet-masters is to vitiate the protesters and to make the protest demos a privilege only for the paid unions and “opposition party” leaders. And against the unpaid normal people the state will use the arguments for the “violence during the protests”. Obvious for this plan are the upcoming changes in the law for protests and demonstrations, which will reduce our liberties for protesting.

The picture says "One and the same"

http://bulgaria.indymedia.org/article/34683

when the streets are burning , open discussion in Budapest with F.P apples from the underground

2009-02-01T12:05:00.000-08:00

Info event at Morze Infoshop
Tűzraktér, Hegedű utca 3., 1. emelet, end of the corridor"
2009, February 4., 18:30

apples from the underground

balkans.puscii.nl

The murder of Alexis Grigoropoulos last December initiated one of the more massive uprisings in Greece, from the era of dictatorship until now. The murder of the 15-year-old boy by the agents of violence and oppression from the state ignited a general insurrection of the greek youth, as well as an international solidarity movement. The solidarity movement was directed not only towards the actual incident of the murder, but also caused a number of actions and criticism against the innumerable capitalistic barbarities, financial crisis and the right wing government.

We call for a public info night including discussion about the Greek insurrection and the upcoming revolts in Europe as well as presenting/discussing the history of the Greek radical movements. According also with the current situation into the Greek youth during the ''new capitalist fact'' of the financial crisis , violent precarization and other related issues to that popular uprising.

We would like also to initiate a discussion about some questions and problems that this movement tried to make visible!

* "What does it means in the age of post fordist capitalist western or western ''inspired'' metropolis to win?"

* "Which popular demands are again in the surface of the movement?"

* "How horisontality can function successfully in the anticapitalist movements of the modern world?"

* "How can practical autonomy and local alternatives to global capitalism and self organization remain relevant?"

* "Which new forms of organization and networking are necessary to coordinate successfully the international resistance against capitalism in our daily lives?"

* and YES! for establishing again "new Seattles", "new greek revolts", "new temporary autonomous zones", "new grassroot movements and victories?"

These are only some questions related to the Greek insurrection but we hope to discuss more. Our aim is to avoid the gap between presenters and consumers. You are definitely welcome to add your questions and statements to this debate...

cover of the special edition balkans.puscii.nl

2009-01-25T05:34:00.000-08:00

Calling for a special edition of balkans.puscii.nl concerning the greek uprising

2009-01-16T06:41:00.000-08:00

The murder of Alexis Grigoropoulos last December initiated one of the more massive uprisings in Greece, from the era of dictatorship until now. The murder of the 15-year-old boy by the agents of violence and oppression from the state ignited a general insurrection of the greek youth, as well as an international solidarity movement. The solidarity movement was directed not only towards the actual incident of the murder, but also caused a number of actions and criticism against the innumerable capitalistic barbarities.

Since December 6th, activists and comrades administrating the web site of Balkan Decentralized Network have tried to keep up the web site with news and correspondence from the uprising as often as possible. This is a calling to any individual or collective who are interested in our work in the Balkan Decentralized Network and would like to contribute in any way in writing and distributing an english edition of the chronicle of the insurrection in Greece, and a respective translation to greek or other languages. Additionally, we appeal to designers of fanzines and other editions to help in the design.

Finally, we call anybody interested in taking part in the team working on Balkan Decentralized Network to send an email to these emails: riseup.net or riseup.ca. Also we have set an emailing list for communication between autonomous entities and the working team of the Balkan Decentralized Network: list. For taking part in the discussion and info from the Balkans, you can subscribe to the emailing list: PGA Balkans, by sending an email with “subscribe PGA balkan” as the email subject.

Gathering Our Dignified Rage

2009-01-02T16:12:00.000-08:00

Gathering Our Dignified Rage

Building New Autonomous Global Relations of Production, Livelihood and Exchange

Kolya Abramsky

“Up there, they intend to repeat their history.

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

Down here we are being left with nothing.

Except rage.

And dignity.

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

We are no one.

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

Rage and dignity are our bridges, our languages.

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

Let our rage grow and become hope.

Let our dignity take root again and breed another world.

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

With no other tool than our rage, no other material than our dignity
(Communique announcing the World’s First Festival for Dignified Rage, 15th/16th September 2008)

It has been three and a half years since the Zapatistas1 issued their 6th Declaration of the Lacandon Jungle 2. The declaration, issued through collective discussion in the Zapatista communities in the summer of 2005, calls for a Third Intergalactica to take place, “from below and to the left”. Since the declaration was issued, much has happened. The developments of both global capitalism and global resistance described so eloquently and humourously in the call have come into clearer definition. Dynamics have accelerated, and the stakes have increased. And, now, with the capitalist world-economy seemingly unravelling before our eyes, the Zapatistas are seeking to usher in the next stage in the process. People in struggle throughout the world have been invited to Mexico to participate in the World’s First Festival of Dignified Rage, which will take place at the end of 2008.3 Let us dare to seize this glimmer of hope that has been so generously and boldly offered, in order to come together in such a way as to collectively shape the world which emerges from the current crisis, ensuring that it is centred around respect and nourishment of human life, and not destruction, suffering and despair. Time is ticking fast. The abyss is near, and the moment is ripe for action, for hope and for long term strategic visions.

******

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

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

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

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

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

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

******

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

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

In the USA, there is a slowly reawakening resistance on foreclosures, ranging from political lobbying, to collectively negotiating rescheduling of bank loans, to direct action and community based resistance to eviction, to squatting of building. While nowhere near the scale of anti-eviction resistance during the 1930s Great Depression, there are nonetheless encouraging signs underway.4 And, of great significance, is the grassroots, predominantly Latin@ worker occupation of the Republic Windows & Doors factory in Chicago over the issue of receiving severance pay and other benefits owed to them by Bank of America in the face of being laid off due to the factory suddenly being closed down. The occupation took place under the leadership of Local 1110 of UE (the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America), a union with a history of important struggles including being one of 11 trade unions which during the early days of the Cold War were persecuted and thrown out of the major US labor federation at the time, the Congress of Industrial Organizations, for their unwillingness to persecute radicals within these unions. The factory occupation, which lasted six days, was supported by solidarity actions in numerous cities throughout the US and around the world, and ultimately was victorious.5 An important victory in the US, showing once again people’s determination and creativity in times of crisis. A week of action calling for a “People’s Bailout” has been called by Jobs With Justice, for December.6

People in Europe have responded particularly strongly and fast to the crisis, especially in its Southern peripheries, Italy, Spain and Greece. In Italy repeated waves of strikes, tending towards general strikes, have mobilized literally millions of workers throughout the country. In Spain, a country where the speculative housing and construction boom is rapidly unraveling causing great social dislocation, there was a major day of protest in many places throughout the country on November 15th in response to the G20 meeting which took place in Washington with the aim of shoring up the international financial system. Bank workers have also staged an occupation of the main branch of the BBVA Bank. And, within days of Lehman Brothers going under, “Robin-Bank” announced that he had stolen close to half a million euros from 38 Spanish Banks in order to give the money to emancipatory social movements7. In Greece, mass riots and protests were triggered by the police murder of a teenager, but also coincided with a strike that had been called previously by two major unions, and has turned into a many day major social uprising, in a country where youth unemployment is as high as 70% in some places, even prior to the effects of the world-economic crisis being felt. Importantly, in all three of these countries, a common slogan has emerged in a very short space of time: “We will not pay for your crisis”.

On the other hand, processes of globally coordinated resistance in the face of crisis have been slow to emerge. Nonetheless, a number of interesting, if entirely embryonic, initiatives are underway. A wide-ranging statement combining demands and a program of action for a “transitional programme for radical economic transformation.” to a radical economy was issued by participants in an international meeting of social movements which took place at the Asia-Europe People's Forum in Beijing in October 2008.8 There were some attempts to have globally coordinated protests during the November 15th G20 meeting, including a meeting of the Latin American Continental Social Alliance which took place in Ecuador, though this emergency G20 meeting was held so swiftly that it was impossible for any major global coordination of protests to occur. One interesting feature, was a statement put out by ALBA countries saying that the G20 was not the appropriate space to resolved the crisis. It is expected that preparation for protests during the next G20 meeting which will take place in April in London might be more impacting9. And international NGO meeting to discuss the crisis and responses has been called for to take place in Paris in January 2009. On the level of direct action, groups in Spain and in the USA have come together to call for a global debtors strike and boycott of banks.10 As a side note, it is also worth mentioning two other global processes of resistance, neither of which are explicitly connected to the financial crisis itself, but are none the less intimately related. The first are the food and fuel riots which rocked more than 30 countries earlier this year, a rapid and spontaneous reaction to food and fuel inflation. These took place even before the banking crisis became fully developed. The bailouts are likely to generate a period of major inflation, thus making such protests and riots increasingly common occurrences. The second important process is the international mobilizations which are underway to protest the Copenhagen UNFPCC climate change talks which will take place in December 2009, exactly 10 years to the day since the WTO was routed in Seattle in 1999.

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

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

Above all, now is not a moment for complacency, but one for seizing in order to win strong reforms in the immediate term, avoiding cooptation, and preparing seriously for revolution in the medium term...It is a moment for gathering the combined powers of our Dignified Rage.

******

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

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

The current situation is likely to open up all kinds of calls for financial and monetary reform, some new, some rehashes of old schemes. The Tobin Tax, designed as an international mechanism to simultaneously curb financial flows and also raise revenue for desirable purposes11 is one such example. Already much of the mainline press in the USA and western Europe are quick to condemn “greedy finance capital” and call for its regulation, while simultaneously celebrating and attempting to prop up the “good industrial capitalism”. Noble “Main Street” is pitted against heinous “Wall Street.” However, the debate about monetary and financial reform, and the extent to which it is either possible or desirable, is not a new debate. It is one that has surfaced repeatedly, with more or less energy, at different moments of financial crisis. The debate was central to the development of the 1848 European (and elsewhere) revolutions which followed close on the heels of a major financial crisis in 1847, forming the central component of Marx’s critique of different proposed “alternatives”, famously debated with the French anarchist, Proudhon in The Poverty of Philosophy. More recently, the attempt to curb “finance capitalism” while shoring up “industrial productive capitalism” was closely related to the rise of corporatism, fascism and Hitler in the Great Depression of the 1930s. On the other hand, in 2001, when Argentina’s banks went under, a twin process of factory occupation and the creation of local alternative currencies which for a period sustained literally millions of people who simply could not affort to use the existing official currency.

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

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

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

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

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

Undignified Paths in the Face of Resistance

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 Rival power/imperialist blocs. Rivalries between regional power blocs have increased in recent years, and are likely to continue doing so in the future, especially along the lines of tensions between USA, China and EU countries, but also other countries including India, Brazil, Russia, Japan and the Koreas and the alignments that these latter countries’ governments and their capitals choose in relation to the former countries. Currently it is still fairly easily for information and people to circulate between these regions, however, regional and national protectionisms (as well as military tensions) could emerge which make such contact more difficult in the future. Importantly, until now, Chinese struggles, which are accelerating rapidly in parallel to China’s growth as an economic power, have been more or less entirely absent from global anti-capitalist networking process. However, in recent years there have been some intentional contact making processes outreaching towards Chinese struggles driven by people active in a range of different global networks, the most prominently the World Social Forum, and most recently the Asia-Europe People's Forum in Beijing in October 2008. The fact that the last major WTO summit took place in Hong Kong also provided an important moment for connections to be made between different struggles, but there is still a great deal of work to be done in this area. The world-economic crisis makes this task even more urgent. The US bailout effectively mortgages generations of workers, and in particular, Chinese workers, since the Chinese economy is the only real guarantee of these loans. In other words, the bail out is based on the highly spurious assumption that workers in China will actually be prepared to shoulder the burden of propping up the world-economy. The crisis is hitting Chinese export factories particularly hard, especially migrant workers, and it remains to be seen what type of responses emerge.12 There is great danger that interstate competition, rivalry and conflict can increase as different powerful states seek to find “national” solutions to the crisis through offering protections to workers in these countries. And, while history does not repeat itself, the responses to the breakdown of the world-market which preceded World War Two nonetheless serve as an ugly historical reminder of what undignified “solutions” look like.

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

Building the Intergalactica Slowly but Surely: A Review of Events from the 6th Declaration to the World’s First Festival of Dignified Rage

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

To date, the process outlined in the 6th Declaration has passed through a number of stages13. The Other Campaign within Mexico itself, an initiative aimed at building a strong country-wide non-electoral political process from below and to the left, has gone through various phases14; the first and second Encuentros of the Zapatista Peoples with the Peoples of the World (December 2006/January 2007 and July 2007), paralleled by a period of consultation in which struggles around the world were able to make proposals for the Intergalactica. In October 2007 an Encuentro of the Indigenous Peoples of the Americas was convened by eight indigenous organizations, including the Zapatistas, in Sonora, Mexico. In December 2007/January 2008, there was an international women’s Encuentro, dedicated to Comandanta Ramona who died in 2006. In response to the ongoing escalation of repression directed against the Zapatistas, an international Observation and Solidarity Caravan took place in Zapatista territories, Chiapas, in the summer of 2008. All of these events have been important events in their own right. However, none of them are the Intergalactica proposed in the 6th Declaration. Rather, they can all be understood as steps along the way to building an ongoing and long term global process, one that may take the name Intergalactica, or perhaps some other name. And now, the Zapatistas are marking their 25th anniversary by holding the next stop along the way, the World’s First Festival for Dignified Rage.15

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

The two Encuentros Between the Zapatista Peoples and the Peoples of the World drew several thousand people to the autonomous Zapatista Caracoles16 in Chiapas, about half from Mexico and the other half from close to fifty countries from around the world. The first meeting was held in one of the Caracoles, Oventic, over four days, and the second held in 3 Caracoles (Oventic, La Morelia and La Realidad) over nine days. The two meetings were opportunities for the Zapatistas to present their grassroots achievements of autonomy and self-government to people in struggle from different parts of the world, as well as for the Zapatistas to learn about struggles in other countries.

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

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

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

The Third Encounter for the Zapatista Peoples With the Peoples of the World took place from December 28th 2007 to January 1st 08. It was a women’s encounter, of Zapatista Women, with Women of the World17. Why a women's encounter? ¨Because it was time,¨ repeated the Zapatista voices, Zapatistas who had implemented the Revolutionary Law for Women in the very early stages of the Zapatista uprising. Over 3,000 people came together to listen, observe, celebrate, and build stronger resistances with these rebellious Tzetzal, Tzotzil, Chol, and Tojolabal Zapatista women. The days were filled with talk of the concrete measures Zapatista women and girls have taken to organize for self-determination, liberty, democracy and justice in their own communities. Through a long process of struggle, Zapatista women have gained many advances in their communities, ranging from the outlawing of alcohol and drugs to curb domestic violence, to taking ever more positions of representation and responsibility, as education and health promoters, in the Good Government Councils, as comandantas of the EZLN, and in artisan cooperatives, to choosing their own partners. And, for the days of the encuentro , men were given a secondary role. They were not allowed to represent or translate, nor sit inside the auditorium. Signs had been hung around the Caracol reading "In this gathering, men cannot participate as note-takers, translators, presenters, spokesmen, or representatives [of an organization]. Men can only work making food, sweeping and cleaning the Caracol and the latrines, taking care of the children, and carrying firewood.". By having a women's encuentro, women’s voices were heard directly and not spoken over or marginalized, while at the same time, they emphasized that the movement included their brothers, husbands, children, elders...everyone in the community.

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

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

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

No Time to Lose! – Accelerating the Construction of New Autonomous Global Relations of Production, Livelihoods and Exchange

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Let our dignity take root again and breed another world.

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

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

Demonstration in San Franscisco tomorrow 20/12

2008-12-19T07:13:00.000-08:00

"We don't forget, we don't forgive" - day of international action against state murders, 20.12.2008

2008-12-17T05:39:00.000-08:00

Saturday, December 13, 2008

Today (Friday), the assembly of the occupied Athens Polytechnic decided to make a callout for European and global-wide actions of resistance in the memory of all assassinated youth, migrants and all those who were struggling against the lackeys of the state. Carlo Juliani; the French suburb youths; Alexandros Grigoropoulos and the countless others, all around the world. Our lives do not belong to the states and their assassins! The memory of the assassinated brothers and sisters, friends and comrades stays alive through our struggles!

We do not forget our brothers and sisters, we do not forgive their murderers. Please translate and spread around this message for a common day of coordinated actions of resistance in as many places around the world as possible.

http://balkans.puscii.nl/?q=content/we-dont-forget-we-dont-forgive-day-international-action-against-state-murders-20122008

solidarity poster with the greek anarchists (USA)

2008-12-10T06:47:00.001-08:00

15 years old anarchist killed by Cops in the Center of Athens reports the video from the murder and a video from the Athens Riots

2008-12-07T11:52:00.000-08:00

Yesterday night at 21.30 in the center of Athens a young boy murdered by the cops in the center of Athens. The murder was the answer of the police after arguing with the small group of anarchists with a crew of patrol police car. The anarchist didnt have with them any petrol bombs nor carrying stones or other weapons nether.

The boy killed due to some eyewitness , the place is very crowded with a lot of busy bars around , especially the Saturday night. One of the policemen get off the car , shot in the heart and killed in cold blood the 15 years old young boy.

The pig (policeman) left the boy dead on the ground. On various greek radical websites a lot of different people who saw what happened try to share this information. The greek authorities didnt give any announce statement still.

the names of the policemen who killed the boy are Epaminodas Korkoneas 37 years old and vasilis Saraliotis 31 years old

After a night of rage , the day of insurrection is coming.

All around Greece riots and demonstrations are taking place at the moment. Demonstrators attacked against police departures and burned patrol cars , banks.

Demonstrations , riots and solidarity actions are taking place (or took place) at the moment in Athens , Thessaloniki , Chania , Sparta , Mitilini , Alexandroupolis , Ksanthi , Volos and many more

riots as an answer to the state repression and a political mobilization in Greece

REPORTS AND UPDATES FROM THE DEMONSTRATIONS AND ACTIONS

* a brief report from Athens

More than 1000 anarchists/autonomous and others started riots the same night around the politechnical university in the center of Athens. That university is a symbol of the greek radical resistance for many years. The police answered by arresting 7 persons . In One of them the police bastards found a carbine.

- At the demontration : more than 12.000 people from different political groups or just simple citizens joined.

**a report from the demo in Athens by a participant

Hello, just got back from the center of athens. There's a lot going on, I'm not sure if I can describe it correctly. Today a march was decided for yesterdays murder of 15 year old Alex. Many people came, ecologists, leftists, anarchists, it was the largest march of this kind I've attended to. About 7-10 thousand occupied literaly the center of athens. From the beggining the atmosphere was electrified, we knew that this was not to be a peacfull marching but none was to leave because of this. Along the way the scenary was full of anger, fires, chasing and gas bombs, we were beaten and splitted up in pieces but some of us managed to get to the central police station of athens, the ending of this march. People were trying to reform groups, some of them decided to go to the parliament instead and finally after 3 hours we started gathering back to the occupied polytechnical school. As far as I know there are a few arrests and only a few injuries.

Since yesterday many bank atm and banks are burnt to the ground, attackes to police stations around Greece have happened and still happening, there are occupied universities and still people is out fighting the state forces.
I'm sorry I can't say more right now, I tried to give you an idea of the feeling that is all around us.

it's payback time you bastards

- High school Student with an sms chain call tommorow for a demonstration in Athens.

- Riots started from members and funs of AEK / Athens football club around OAKA field

- New demonstration on Monday 8/12 at 18.00 in the central offices building of the university of Athens (propilea)

photos from the riots in Athens

* a brief report from Chania

Anarchists burned state cars in the morning , more information soon (we will start updating this page as many times as possible)

* a brief report from Sparta (southern Greece)

Members of the anarchists/autonomous assembly of the city started to write slogans on the walls of state buildings. The police wasnt there just an undercover bastards car who when they saw the people writing on the wall left away

* a brief report from thessaloniki

All the anarchist groups as well as extra parliamentary ultra left groups call for a demonstration.

- Around 200 people attacked with petrol bombs and riots in the center of the city near the white tower. Afterwards the anarchists moved into the university and the special forces of the police sou rounded the space

- Anarchists occupied the school of theater in the city , the cops answered with tear gass. At the moment the people are trapped inside because the university is surrounded by the police

* a brief report from Alexandroupolis

people gathered in front of the police station

* a brief report from Patra

more than 300 people gathered for a demonstration in memory of Alexandros Andreas Grigoropoulos. The demo It hasn't ended yet, because protests are not extinguished by tear gases as they've just done here at the center of the city. People are still around in the streets.
It's gonna be a long night tonight.

- since now 5 people arrested by the police in Patra

* Volos (central greece)

A demonstration will take place today at 18.00 (more info soon)

* Giannena

street fighting is taking place now in the city . more than 500 people on the streets

* Corfu

more than 100 anarchists joined a demonstration in Corfu. The block of the anarchists burned an atm bank machine. An other block of members of extra parliamentary groups joined the demo as well

* Karditsa (north Greece)

Organizations and groups call for a demonstration on Monday 8/12

solidarity actions already took place in other countries

* In Zagreb anarchists organized a solidarity action in the greek embassy

* In Berlin a solidarity action organized by autonomous groups

all of the info are translated into English from greek

I invite all the greek radicals to send news , corrections , udpdates to the editiorial team of the balkans.puscii.nl at balkans-infoshop@lists.riseup.net ,

the solidarity is our weapons

insurrection against the State violence

no Justice , no peace , fuck the police

ps: sorry for grammar errors and mistakes but I try to translate as fast as possible

video from the murder

video from the Demonstration in Athens

http://balkans.puscii.nl/?q=content/15-years-old-anarchist-killed-cops-center-athens-reports-video-murder-anda-video-theathens-r

Wake Up, Freak Out - then Get a Grip by Leo Murray

2008-12-05T12:41:00.000-08:00

Wake Up, Freak Out - then Get a Grip from Leo Murray on Vimeo

solidarity with the Migrants struggle in Crete Island Greece

2008-12-04T06:40:00.000-08:00

Since 11 November 15 migrants in Chania, Crete, Greece, active members of the Crete Forum of Migrants, have been on hunger strike, demanding the legal status they are eligible for, fighting for dignity and equal rights, for them and their families, for all migrants within Fortress Europe.

http://balkans.puscii.nl/?q=content/solidarity-migrants-struggle-crete-island-greece

Squatters Posing A Problem

2008-12-02T04:22:00.000-08:00

As the government moves ahead with its ambitious housing program to construct 3,000 new homes and service lots during its five year term in office, they are somewhat stumped as a number of squatters in certain areas simply refuse to move, according to Housing Minister Kenneth Russell.
Mr. Russell said as it now stands, the government has so far secured some 64 acres off Carmichael Road to build homes and should also acquire an additional 10 acres off Cowpen Road, four acres off Bacardi Road as well as acreage in Fox Hill.
He noted, however, that there are squatters residing on these parcels of land.

“All of these areas of course have people squatting on them. We have had a meeting already with these squatters and I got an agreement from them that we would be able to do our survey [of the land] in peace and once that survey is completed, we will seek to meet with them to work out a regularization process for them,” Mr. Russell said while touring homes under construction in the newly-developed Ardastra Gardens and Pride III estates on Monday.

“As I told them when we met, we are not going to run a bulldozer through their house. We will not destroy their belongings, but we will sit down, we will talk and come up with something that all of us can live with and once this is done, we will be well on our way in New Providence, Grand, Bahama, Exuma and San Salvador to produce the 3,000 service lots and houses in our first term in office.”

The Housing Minister also revealed that in some extreme cases, the government offered to assist with regularizing some squatters in the Pride Estates area.

“When that subdivision started there were quite a number of squatters living here and those squatters are being regularized one way or another,” Mr. Russell said, adding that there is an elderly lady who lives in the Pride Estates area with three invalids who are now getting assistance

“For some of them we are building a couple of smaller frame houses…And we are hoping that in regularizing them they would upgrade their homes to match what we have here in terms of probably stuccoing it, putting in proper bathrooms and getting authority to hook up the electricity and potable water.”

But the squatting issues faced by the Ministry of Housing are nothing new.

Former Minister Housing in the Progressive Liberal Party administration, Shane Gibson told the Journal Tuesday that squatting was also a serious problem when the former government began its housing program back in 2002.

Each case of squatting, he said, was examined to determine whether or not these persons would qualify for some type of assistance such as a land grant.

“We negotiated with these persons but we had some illegal immigrants, some migrants with work permits and some Bahamians, so each case we dealt with on its own merit and depending on the outcome we sat down and outlined our goals to them, but in all cases we were able to get them to move,” Mr. Gibson said.

The former housing minister also noted that if someone was squatting on a piece of land for a very long time and qualified for a government low-cost house, the former government worked out an agreement to build and finance a house for these individuals on the land, having the squatter pay for the infrastructure and the cost of construction.

He highlighted, however, that compromises were only offered to those squatters who were Bahamian citizens.

A total of 40 homes are currently being constructed by nine different contractors in Ardastra Gardens Estates on the 65 lot subdivision and five homes are almost completed.

A total of 66 homes are being constructed in Pride Estates, which houses a total of 117 lots.

And as shoddy workmanship has been an on-going complaint with many new homeowners, Mr. Russell said his ministry is ensuring that all homes are inspected at least once everyday.

“The inspector here at this [Ardastra Gardens’ location has already encountered some problems that was corrected to ensure that we don’t have the problems that we had before. The overall work and the overall camaraderie between the inspectors, the staff from the ministry and the contractors here on site is positive and I believe that we would end up with a very good product here at Ardastra Estates,” Mr. Russell said.

Revolution & Evolution in the 21st Century

2008-11-30T07:17:00.000-08:00

http://zapagringo.blogspot.com/2008/11/revolution-evolution-in-21st-century.html

Grace Lee Boggs

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

****

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

****

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

****

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

****

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

xi In 1980 Coleman Young,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

GLOBAL CONFERENCE & NEW START FOR PGA? (extract from a reflection text from april 2006).

2008-11-29T05:39:00.000-08:00

hi today I post a part of a text/debate from the PGA process. I found the text interesting , with essential questions how to build connections again and discuss for a stronger , bigger network again. Send me your comments bellow

[A little while ago one of us sent some reflexions about the crisis of the PGA process. Since, there has been some discussion and a new call for the conference has been issued. Here are some ideas of how the PGA phoenix could rise once again from its ashes! ]

Despite the disorganisation and the dispersion of the PGA network, it is the only radical, anticapitalist network proposing action on a global level. As such, it is a precious tool, that we cannot let fall apart (especially now, when many organisations have realised the limitations of the Social Forum process).

YES, WTO AGAIN !

In Asia, PGA is stronger than ever. They have taken the initiative of organising a conference to once again organise global action against WTO. Because, for the peasants of the world (that is most of humanity) this is literally a question of life or death. And, although it isn't so visible, the movement has scored significant victories. WTO and other
free trade agreements, such as ALCA, are stalled or moving much, much slower than planned. In fact, WTO is so afraid of summit mobilisations that it is trying to take as many decisions as possible before, in Geneva. Opposition (including more institutional actors) has gradually radicalised. From talking about market access for southern farmers, they have moved to taking agriculture out of WTO, food sovereignty and often questionning WTO and free trade as such. We are gradually winning the argument. This war is not yet over, nor lost. And it must not be! So that is the first good reason for the conference. There are many (justified) calls for global actions, but hitting WTO again, now, as hard as possible, would be really strategic.

AND REVOLUTION...?

But maybe its also time to look further ahead. When PGA first proposed global actions or declared itself anticapitalist, it was way out in front, and that galvanised a huge energy. Now maybe its time to take a new step: to start discussing the forms and strategies for a radical transformation of society. There is a very large part of the movement - and of the population in general - that realises, more or less clearly, that this is the only hope, the only real solution. But (apart from some old fashioned political parties, which haven't understood anything), the disasters of the 20^th century and the apparent omnipotence of State (anti?)terrorism still make it difficult to use the word «revolution» again. The term needs to be reclaimed and redefined: not as a predefined process or point of arrival, but more as a set of values - a compass that indicates a direction. And as a variety of parallel, decentralised, grassroots processes constantly redefining themselves and nurturing each other through international networks. If we could collectively flesh out a vision of this kind, it could be a powerful means for mobilisation and social change.

POWER FROM BELOW

This isn't an idle, theoretical, question. In South America, our friends in Ecuador, Bolivia, Argentina and Venezuela have all taken down (or put back in place!) their governments, often several times, in the last few years. They have extraordinarily interesting experiences to share concerning forms of popular power from below, of its relation to state power. And of course, the subject is just as important in places where
the movements are less powerful, since we always need to know how to relate to state power, parties, reform, defense of what has been gained in the past, etc.

There are no simple answers, but what is common to all power from below is that it is based on autonomy. For indigenous, peasants, squatters and others this means the control and organisation of spaces and territories. For non-territorial struggles and collectivities, such as migrants, feminists, precarious workers, etc., it can be a (re)construction or defense of communities through mutual support and solidarity. The challenge is to create meaningful forms of exchange and solidarity between such diverse forms of struggle. One thing they certainly have in common is to be constantly attacked by market relations and capitalist forms of domination. And again nothing is simple, since we simultaneously reproduce and question capitalist social relations every day. Which brings us to the question of alternatives.

ALTERNATIVES FOR TODAY

Experiences of this kind are being tested in really every part of the world. Here again, it would be urgent to share, both at the level of political reflection (potential and pitfalls of alternatives) and of very concrete skill-sharing.

Unlike the (related) question of «horizontal» organisation, all these are questions and perspectives that are common to PGA worldover. The PGA hallmarks specify decentralisation and autonomy, but as caracteristics of the network, not of the organisations that compose it. Some of the most important of these (such as KRRS, which was the driving force to create PGA) have always been organisations with hierarchies and leaderships. This is certainly not only a cultural, historical or subjective option, but also conditioned by some objective constraints (like not all being on internet, for ex.). That said, there is room for respectful dialogue on these issues, since we DO all share a desire to move in that direction. Probably because we all share having had bad experiences with the State, parties, NGOs and other organisations that pretend to speak in the people's name and bring them solutions from above, whatever the problems and internal contradictions we (all) fall
into. The organisations that happily assume the topdown rule of central committees dropped out of PGA very quickly.

A MODEST AND AMBITIOUS PROPOSAL

This proposal is modest, seeing PGA simply as a unique political space that has from time to time galvanised energies worldwide, and which should therefor be kept open, as a potential for the future.

It is ambitious obviously because of its goals... but also because PGA's structures (convenors, support group, communication tools) have actually never functioned as they were supposed to. Can a network without a permanent secretariat or finances still play a significant role, with respect to well funded forums, NGO networks, etc. (not to mention the USA, WTO, etc.)? Perhaps. We have no proposals to make the convenors committee work better. We can all see the danger that people in networks tend to use them («consume» them, in a sense), without contributing to sustain their minimal structures (700 people at the European conference, 20 next winter to organise things...). Well, if we really want self-organisation from below to reach out beyond local initiatives, if we are really convinced that we won't change our local realities all alone, then more of us must step forward NOW to help. A couple of open questions:

NEW ACTIONS AND FORMS OF ACTIONS?

First, these may be vital subjects to discuss, but how can they lead to action? Can one imagine a global day of action for revolutionary change, for example? (hi Mr. Bush!) Or raising that kind of question during an anti-WTO action? Can we invent other forms of common action apart from Global Days?

TIME TO COMMIT TO COMMUNICATION

Second, it makes no sense opening such a huge discussion if it does't continue after the conference, and PGA has been as bad about ongoing discussion as it has been good for action. To take this seriously, we would need real commitments from organisations and concrete persons, to feed a regular PGA webjournal, as a minimum. There are also certainly
many websites of political reflexion, ressources for skill-sharing, etc., that exist already. Just making these links available to the whole network would already be a valuable contribution.

We must also explore other - more in depth - ways of sharing. In particular, longer «caravans», visits and exchanges. Actually, given the fact that the convenors committee has very rarely done its job, this kind of exchange has always been vital to the network. However, it should be organised. Otherwise, spontaneously, it remains mostly a privilege of northerners.

17th of November video report from the Demos in Greece and Cyprus

2008-11-19T06:07:00.000-08:00

At 17th of November of 1973 the students of the politechical university of Athens and other universities near by , occupied the building to resist against the military fascist dictatorship of the country .

After days of occupation the fascist leaders decide to order a military tank to enter the university and repress the student uprising. More than 80 died in in the entrance of the university and others murdered on the streets. For several days local people from Athens , students and ultra leftist groups have organized the resistance with barricades , riots and big demonstrations. Since then , every year several grassroots and radical groups organize a demonstration.

This year the majority of the participants in Greece and also in Cyprus combined the demo with the demands of the prisoners who are in hunger strike more than 6 days now.

http://balkans.puscii.nl/?q=content/17th-november-video-report-demos-greece-and-cyprus