Very
Tentative Steps Toward a Preliminary Statement for the EZLN's Intergalactic
Preparatory Meeting
El Kilombo Intergaláctico
December 30, 2006
www.elkilombo.org
Introduction
We are a collective of community members and university students in Durham,
North Carolina. We came together around a shared desire to live differently
and act politically, and a common dissatisfaction with the single issue and
charity-based interventions characteristic of NGO's and the mainstream Left.
We have spent several years together investigating alternative models for
social change based in collective self-determination. At a moment when the
globalized nature of the contemporary economy has exposed the tragic limitations
and planned depoliticization which ensues from an over-reliance on under-funded
state institutions, we have been inspired by movements of autonomy to search
for concrete projects that are socially and environmentally self-sustainable,
responsive to the particular demands and desires of a community, and actively
and radically democratic. We attempt to practice our politics by socializing
our knowledge, creating spaces where we can form new social relations, and
making decisions through collective assembly. We seek to strengthen the collective
political struggle of working class and people of color communities in Durham
while simultaneously connecting our struggles with the global anti-capitalist
movements.
Our collective is composed in its majority by “people of color.”
That is, by students, workers, and immigrants who are Asian, African, Latino,
and Women (what colors are women?) Perhaps we could be more precise in saying
that our “color” is not simply a result of having been born “different”
(with our histories and traditions denied through a brutal historical process)
but rather a place from which we have learned to understand and act in the
wholescale battle lived today between these differences (which are themselves
always in a constant process of change and differentiation) and the total
indifference of money. Like the Zapatista Army of National Liberation once
said, we are dedicated to the struggle between the colors of the earth and
the insipid color of money.
Our
Global Context
The growth and consolidation of the world market, the information and technology
revolutions, as well as innovations in international finance, tele-communications,
and entertainment industries have changed the relationship between work and
wage, commodity and consumer. Domains of social activity previously "outside"
capitalist accumulation—emotional labor, image generation, knowledge
production— have been taken up by the world market, collapsing base
and superstructure and making value harder to measure. Better said, the increasing
profitability of these cooperative, communicative, “immaterial”
labors have overcoded all production, not displacing the economic realm with
the social/cultural, but rather making evident that the social/cultural is
not outside production. “Immaterial” labor also makes clear what
has always been the capitalist mode of production—not the production
of necessary or desirable objects for needy wanting subjects, but the production
of subjects that need and want certain objects.
This capital relation is now actively global. We work in a global configuration
of classes, with a global division of labor. But this configuration does not
follow the borders established in the modern nation-state system. Under current
integrated world capitalism, the “third world" now lives in the
“first” and the “first” in the “third.”
There is no inside and outside to global capitalism: the pittance paid to
peasant artisans in Latin America is just as vital a part of capitalism as
the international financial hubs of London and New York; the success of the
latter depends on the exploitation of the former. The historical process of
primitive accumulation—the theft and violence required to dispossess
people of the natural, human, and technical resources they live from and that
establishes the capital property relation of owners/employers and those that
must sell their labor to buy their survival—continues today not only
in the form of the appropriation of “natural” resources—water,
land, air, biodiversity—but also in the appropriation of the collective
processes of creativity, of knowledge, of imagination, of social relationships
in general, making the substance of society itself, life itself, subject to
exploitation.
This global interdependence has put into question the relationship between
sovereignty and democracy. The loss of nation-state sovereignty has been assumed
to imply the lack of democracy. Our studies and experience have shown us that
nation-state sovereignty, dependent on a command-obey relationship between
ruler and ruled, requires a power relationship of domination, precluding democracy
from its very definition. Social movements around the world in the last decades
have insisted, in theory and practice, that they will no longer be subject
to a sovereign. They demand a democracy that does not consist of choosing
someone to rule over them, but to establish a society where all rule, or,
as the Zapatistas have said, to “rule by obeying.” The crisis
of representational democracy and the figure of the nation-state it sustains
is global and irreversible; today we must see democracy not as the recuperation
of sovereignty but as the badly needed alternative to it.
Our
History and our Moment
As many of us are students in a corporatized university system, we have had
to recognize our place in the system of social production—the ideas
and practices created with our bodies and minds—as subject to a process
of exploitation. We have refused to privilege either an ideological-conceptual
production—where ideas transcend and determine the material world, or
a base pragmatism that takes the form of an activist anti-intellectualism.
Ideas are bodies, too, we have learned, they enter the dialogue of social
forces, but the creation of concepts is not the space between life and life,
it is a mode of life and as such can have no privilege over the creation of
other affects to which it must be relayed.
Durham, North Carolina, like every city contending with the global realities
of the twenty-first century, is a city rife with contradictions. The tobacco
factories which once served as the city’s economic and physical backbone
now stand empty, slowly succumbing to the advances of powerful business interests
eager to transform their spacious remains into corporate offices and trendy
"urban lofts" (urban used rather loosely here due to the fact that
the rest of the city continues to lie in ruins). The troubled legacy of tobacco
production, and the fate it has shared with much of North Carolina’s
long-standing manufacturing industries, is anything but relegated to Durham’s
history. Rather, it is an integral moment in the course of economic, social
and political reordering that defines the contours of contemporary life the
world over.
The immense commercial, intellectual, and scientific production of Duke and
surrounding Universities as well as the neighboring technological powerhouse
of Research Triangle Park have guaranteed the city’s stake in transnational
research and informational networks, military and technological commerce,
and international policymaking. Caught up in the reorganization of transnational
business and labor patterns, it has not been immune to the effects of swelling
unemployment and the concomitant expansion of the wealth disparity between
rich and poor. In the wake of NAFTA’s aggression, North Carolina’s
booming immigrant population is the fastest-growing in the United States;
while highlighting the general crisis of so-called social services, these
demographic changes have also thickened a new dimension in race and class
relations in a city that still sees Ku Klux Klan cross burnings. These are
the dynamic conditions of Durham’s current life – the intensification
of wealth as well as suffering and the incapacity of state and civil institutions
to offer redress; the increasing mobility of money, information, business,
and people; and the struggle to control that mobility. Durham is the locale
in which we find ourselves, and Durham, we must understand, is globalized.
Our politics
In the past few decades the United States left has been relegated to social
and political margins, to a fading traditional industrial working class or
to new identity-based “cultural” movements, to party politics
or altruistic programs. We saw a need for an analysis of the system of production
that took into account the immeasurability of labor and the incommensurability
of labor to wage, and thus the limitations of struggles for better working
conditions and a better wage relationship, but also one which went beyond
legal “recognition,” sectarian rights or “tolerance,”
and “cultural” freedom.
We were weary of the ascetic politics of self-denial, the religious politics
of self-repression, the oedipal politics of guilt, the identitarian politics
of navel-gazing (in which the imposition of White universalism and the false
modesty of White guilt loom larger than life), the representative politics
that allow us to choose our master. In examining our own context and our collective
heart, we found that in the consumerist capitalist world that absorbs the
political subjectivity of our communities, it wasn’t that we wanted
to reduce our desires but to increase them; not to want more of (what
capitalism could give us) but more than.
We were created, as a collective, in the “para todos todo” of
Zapatista politics, in the “que se vayan todos” of the piqueteros
in Argentina, in the courage and desire of contemporary migrant communities
who take flight from relations of domination and create new lives, in the
dignity and self-respect of the movements in the United States (that of the
IWW and the Black Panther Party, for example) and the rest of the world where
we learned to recognize struggle not as a fight for sovereign power but rather
as a process of the construction of autonomy, for another organization of
life that does not depend on domination.
Our
name
Kilombo is the Bantu word for an encampment. This word was taken up in the
New World within the Portuguese sphere of influence to describe the societies
of those African slaves and at times Indigenous peoples of the Americas that
sought to end their enslavement through direct flight. This phenomena of runaway
slave societies appeared throughout the Western Hemisphere. What has attracted
us to this word is the phenomena that called it into existence—slave
flight and what it can teach us in our contemporary context. It is these runaways
that first understood that it was their sweat and blood that made the “modern
world” possible and that it was this same sweat and blood that could
bring another such world into existence. It was thus these runaways that were
able to demonstrate that liberation is not built through a life and death
struggle against the slave-master, but rather through a life and death struggle
for the construction of another life, another formation of daily habit, rituals,
and beliefs that would in practice make the slave-master function obsolete.
In this respect it may be true, as many scholars have observed, that the modern
notion of guerrilla warfare is in many respects directly indebted to these
runaways and the military resistance they exerted against their would-be captors.
But in this sense our insight must go further in order to understand, as did
our Maroon predecessors, that an effective warfare against our captors is
the one we wage on a daily basis with our hands and tools to create what has
yet to be, and not the one limited to tanks, guns, and bullets directed at
the destruction of what has already been.
It is important to note that our usage of this term is not a metaphorical
borrowing, it is a necessary acknowledgment of a gift handed down to us by
courageous Africans and Indigenous peoples, and a commitment to both flight
and the trans- and inter-racial character of the original Kilombos.
Our Project
Every day we ask ourselves, how do we go about constructing our liberation
today? What is today’s context? What is today’s map?
In addition to, or within, the creation of a global anti-capitalist network,
we need practical experiments in autonomy. Our experiments have taken the
form of our webspace and our physical space in Durham, North Carolina. We
created our webpage as a way to socialize our studies and experiences as well
as to connect to Others and learn from their experiences, and to make this
connection immediately global. Locally, after first organizing our thought,
we moved forward to connect ourselves with our most immediate neighbors who
have also had to learn to think and act in this new global conjuncture (in
particular the migrant community). Together we decided to create a concrete
space to open the possibility and opportunity for new encounters, autonomous
production, and political organization. In May of 2006 we opened a community
space with a free technology center (with internet access and computer classes),
a bilingual bookstore with a focus on radical thought and social movements
in the United States and Latin America, English as a Second Language and Spanish
classes, youth programs and alternative education classes for children, and
what will soon be a community garden and food distribution program. All of
these services are cooperatively administered and freely distributed. Perhaps
most importantly, these services have functioned as an impetus for the creation
of a community assembly with the capacity to make decisions not only regarding
the space but also the future of our communities, and thus to become one more
node in the network of anticapitalist movements around the world.