In Lebanon, some 40 years later, he is to pay a visit.

In America, a Black minister agitates in a New Orleans City Council meeting and demands entrance for residents who have come to protest the demolition of their homes to make way for luxury apartments. The protesters are met with Tazer guns and mace.

In Beirut, this response might include snipers and bullets. A non-violent tent occupation of Martyr’s Square is criticized for the economic damage inflicted on the downtown business district, itself occupied by foreign Capital.

In Detroit, residents destroy their valueless homes with gasoline and fire in order to recoup insurance money that will allow them to move out to the suburbs.

In Beirut, real estate barons offer a pittance to anyone willing to raze the city’s heritage to make way for hermetically sealed buildings closed off from the doomed street life below.

In Louisiana, six Black teenagers face emprisonment for assault in reaction to the hanging of nooses from a tree deemed “reserved” for white students.

In Beirut’s airport there is a waiting room clearly marked for arriving laborers. In Lebanon, the marginalized are stabbed in their sleep; thrown from their balconies; killed on construction sites. No one is prosecuted for these crimes.

In America, logos and signs maintain the country’s racist roots: Uncle Ben, Aunt Jemima, the Native American as symbol for sports teams. Consumers eating their rice or pancakes, patrons of baseball games wearing face paint and waving tomahawks, do not challenge this.

In Beirut, diners are entertained in sushi restaurants by Filipina women dolled up as Japanese geishas; in Indian restaurants by Syrian men sporting salwar kameez. No one protests.

In Philadelphia, white parents pull their children out of a private swimming pool when Black children from a summer camp show up for some relief from the summer heat. There are few if any public spaces for swimming.

In Beirut, scandals erupt due to the presence of foreign servants in private beach resorts. Similarly, the “public beach” is but a tiny strip of trash-littered sand along water polluted by untreated sewage. No one cares.

In Los Angeles, the architect who planned out a bunker-like U.S. chancellery in Damascus builds a library, the symbol of democratic access to information. Its design reflects the security needs of a prison complex. Its location is a low-income immigrant community seen as undesirable.

In Beirut, an Art Center rises in an industrial neighborhood, and touts its communal use. It welcomes a small subset of the population, none of whom is from the neighborhood.

On American theater screens, the movie “Driving Miss Daisy” portrays a fictitious scene in which a Black man chauffeurs a Southern doyenne to a speech by Dr. Martin Luther King. The chauffeur waits outside, far removed from the man who speaks of his liberation.

In Lebanon, nannies and domestic servants take care of households while their owners listen to Black artists who speak of their exclusion from American society.

In America, in one of his more famous works, Emory Douglas collages the controlling hand of Capital decorated with logos of corporations and other Voice destroyers.

In Beirut, the sponsors list of any given cultural event proudly lists the banks, foreign NGOs, and other corporations that make such importation and implantation of outside culture possible. No one seems to mind.

In Denver, at the mayoral state-of-the-city address, a Black woman is excoriated for singing “Lift Every Voice and Sing”–referred to as the Black National Anthem–instead of “The Star-Spangled Banner”. She replies to the harsh criticism: “Art is supposed to make you think.”

In Lebanon, a craftsman sings silently to himself and creates his artworks which, when copied by thieving “local artists”, will sell for more than he can ever imagine.

In American museums and gallery spaces, almost fifty years after his group arose from an oppressed community, the work of Emory Douglas is literally given currency by the very media that helped destroy the Panthers in the first place.

In Lebanon, former signs and symbols of resistance find themselves equally evaluated by a similar over-mediation. They are thus rendered void of actionable meaning.

In America, millions of voters walked into polling stations and cast a ballot for a Black man thinking they would bring change to the country. In fact, they didn’t.

In Beirut, a dozen or so art mavens walk into a lecture and listen to a Black man speaking of his activism yesteryear, thinking they are part of some minor revolution. In fact, they aren’t.

In America, any local cultural manifestation, any expression of history and context, any resistant voice that dares speak out is suppressed; co-opted; destroyed.

In Beirut, a Voiceless man far from his hometown works in a corner shop of a neighborhood he can’t afford and writes his poetry in a beautiful calligraphic hand. Then, he throws the pages away. He explains: “No one will ever read them; I write for no one.”

From an America that doesn’t deserve him, Emory Douglas is coming to Beirut. For fifty dollars, one can enter an Art Center’s hallowed halls and benefit from a workshop with the artist.

Meanwhile, in a Lebanon that deserves him less, the Voices most in need of him remain outside, ever marginalized; waiting to be lifted, their song never heard.

Now, it is kicking into full gear in Haiti. As we know, the member companies of the Orwellian-named mercenary trade association, the International Peace Operations Association, are offering their services in Haiti. But look for more stories like this one:

On January 15, a Florida based company called All Pro Legal Investigations registered the URL Haiti-Security.com. It is basically a copy of the company’s existing US website but is now targeted for business in Haiti, claiming the “purpose of this site is to act as a clearinghouse for information seekers on the state of security in Haiti.”

“All Protection and Security has made a commitment to the Haitian community and will provide professional security against any threat to prosperity in Haiti,” the site proclaims. “Job sites and supply convoys will be protected against looters and vandals. Workers will be protected against gang violence and intimidation. The people of Haiti will recover, with the help of the good people from the world over.”

The company boasts that it has run “Thousands of successful missions in Iraq & Afghanistan.” As for its personnel, “Each and every member of our team is a former Law Enforcement Officer or former Military service member,” the site claims. “If Operator experience, training and qualifications matter, choose All Protection & Security for your high-threat Haiti security needs.”

Among the services offered are: “High Threat terminations,” dealing with “worker unrest,” armed guards and “Armed Cargo Escorts.” Oh, and apparently they are currently hiring.

The concrete action undertaken by Rescue South Africa and Gift of the Givers is a clear expression ofubuntu. Ubuntu ngumuntu ngabantu. As we all know, many people remain buried under tons of ruble and debris waiting to be rescued. When we think of their suffering, we feel deeply and profoundly that we should be there, in Haiti, with them, trying our best to prevent death.

To symbolize this readiness we have decided to meet not just anywhere, but here, in the shadow of the Oliver Tambo International Airport. As far as we are concerned, we are ready to leave today, tomorrow, at any time to join the people of Haiti, to share in their suffering, help rebuild the country, moving from misery to poverty with dignity. Friends from around the world have confirmed their willingness to organize an airplane carrying medical supplies, emergency needs and ourselves.

While we cannot wait to be with our sisters and brothers in Haiti, we share the anguish of all Haitians in the Diaspora who are desperate to reach family and loved ones.

Soufrans youn nan nou se soufrans nou tout.

L’Union fait la force. Kouraj! Kenbe! Kenbe!

Youn soutni lòt nan lespri Mèm Amou an.

Our love to the nation now labeled the poorest of the western hemisphere. However, the spirit of ubuntu that once led Haiti to emerge as the first independent Black nation in 1804; helped Venezuela, Colombia and Ecuador attain liberty; and inspired our forefathers to shed their blood for the United States’ independence, cannot die. Today this spirit of solidarity must and will empower all of us to rebuild Haiti.

Ukwanda kwaliwa umthakathi.

Thank you.

The country has faced more than its fair share of catastrophes. Hundreds died in Port-au-Prince in an earthquake back in June 1770, and the huge earthquake of 7 May 1842 may have killed 10,000 in the northern city of Cap Haitien alone. Hurricanes batter the island on a regular basis, mostly recently in 2004 and again in 2008; the storms of September 2008 flooded the town of Gonaïves and swept away much of its flimsy infrastructure, killing more than a thousand people and destroying many thousands of homes. The full scale of the destruction resulting from this earthquake may not become clear for several weeks. Even minimal repairs will take years to complete, and the long-term impact is incalculable.

What is already all too clear, however, is the fact that this impact will be the result of an even longer-term history of deliberate impoverishment and disempowerment. Haiti is routinely described as the “poorest country in the western hemisphere“. This poverty is the direct legacy of perhaps the most brutal system of colonial exploitation in world history, compounded by decades of systematic postcolonial oppression.

The noble “international community” which is currently scrambling to send its “humanitarian aid” to Haiti is largely responsible for the extent of the suffering it now aims to reduce. Ever since the US invaded and occupied the country in 1915, every serious political attempt to allow Haiti’s people to move (in former president Jean-Bertrand Aristide’s phrase) “from absolute misery to a dignified poverty” has been violently and deliberately blocked by the US government and some of its allies.

Aristide’s own government (elected by some 75% of the electorate) was the latest victim of such interference, when it was overthrown by an internationally sponsored coup in 2004 that killed several thousand people and left much of the population smouldering in resentment. The UN has subsequently maintained a large and enormously expensive stabilisation and pacification force in the country.

Haiti is now a country where, according to the best available study, around 75% of the population “lives on less than $2 per day, and 56% – four and a half million people – live on less than $1 per day”. Decades of neoliberal “adjustment” and neo-imperial intervention have robbed its government of any significant capacity to invest in its people or to regulate its economy. Punitive international trade and financial arrangements ensure that such destitution and impotence will remain a structural fact of Haitian life for the foreseeable future.

It is this poverty and powerlessness that account for the full scale of the horror in Port-au-Prince today. Since the late 1970s, relentless neoliberal assault on Haiti’s agrarian economy has forced tens of thousands of small farmers into overcrowded urban slums. Although there are no reliable statistics, hundreds of thousands of Port-au-Prince residents now live in desperately sub-standard informal housing, often perched precariously on the side of deforested ravines. The selection of the people living in such places and conditions is itself no more “natural” or accidental than the extent of the injuries they have suffered.

As Brian Concannon, the director of the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti, points out: “Those people got there because they or their parents were intentionally pushed out of the countryside by aid and trade policies specifically designed to create a large captive and therefore exploitable labour force in the cities; by definition they are people who would not be able to afford to build earthquake resistant houses.” Meanwhile the city’s basic infrastructure – running water, electricity, roads, etc – remains woefully inadequate, often non-existent. The government’s ability to mobilise any sort of disaster relief is next to nil.

The international community has been effectively ruling Haiti since the 2004 coup. The same countries scrambling to send emergency help to Haiti now, however, have during the last five years consistently voted against any extension of the UN mission’s mandate beyond its immediate military purpose. Proposals to divert some of this “investment” towards poverty reduction or agrarian development have been blocked, in keeping with the long-term patterns that continue to shape the distribution of international “aid”.

The same storms that killed so many in 2008 hit Cuba just as hard but killed only four people. Cuba has escaped the worst effects of neoliberal “reform”, and its government retains a capacity to defend its people from disaster. If we are serious about helping Haiti through this latest crisis then we should take this comparative point on board. Along with sending emergency relief, we should ask what we can do to facilitate the self-empowerment of Haiti’s people and public institutions. If we are serious about helping we need to stop trying to control Haiti’s government, to pacify its citizens, and to exploit its economy. And then we need to start paying for at least some of the damage we’ve already done.

It has represented the type of political model which has been promoted to the Arabs, by their rulers and by the West.

When George W Bush, the former US president, visited the United Arab Emirates during his last year in office, he praised Dubai and its models of economic and political prosperity; he promoted the UAE’s mantra and ethos as glimmers of hope to the new generation of Arabs.

It took the former president little more than a few hours during his stop-over to assess the conditions in the region, and to reach his conclusions: resistance to Israel clashes with the type of prosperity that was prevalent in Dubai.

Antithesis of Palestine?

Dubai hit a dramatic rise in the 1990s and became a success story that was carefully calibrated, promoted and disseminated in the Arab media and collective psyche.

Daniel Pipes, who has a reputation for hostility towards Arabs and Muslims, was interviewed two years ago in the Jerusalem Post praising Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, the ruler of Dubai, after the release of his memoirs.

There was not one word about Palestine in that book which nevertheless offered a recipe of unregulated and unrestricted capitalism.

Dubai was supposed to be the antithesis of Palestine. It was designed to create a concrete Utopia that would encourage all young Arabs to forget about their political aspirations and dreams.

In Lebanon, the March 14 opposition movement has been posing this question to the Lebanese people for three years: Hanoi or Dubai? But Hanoi is today a far more promising model than Dubai.

Not only has Hanoi been liberated from foreign occupation and a corrupt puppet regime, but it has also become part of a sovereign country with a record of fast economic growth.

Much has been written about Dubai and even more will be written about the emirate which was positioned as the success story that all Arabs were to emulate.

However, its success is not based on sound economic or classical political theories. It was in fact a projection of what the West wanted to see in the Middle East.

This projection represented the fruits of US co-operation with Middle Eastern governments, especially in the realm of defence and national security. Dubai was more important for the US due to military intelligence co-operation than for its lavish seven-star hotels.

Playground for the rich

Dubai was supposed to be a vision but one not rooted in the productive sectors of the economy.

There were early warnings of the debacle that struck Dubai World – too much glitz and ostentation and little attention to a careful building of culture and economy that reflect the region.

There was a rush to build multi-billion dollar artificial ski slopes and playgrounds for the very rich of the world.

But Dubai did not want to be part of the region, politically speaking. Instead it modelled itself as a copy of Las Vegas in the heart of the Arab Middle East.

Dubai carefully steered away from all the issues that alarmed and agitated Arab public opinion.

Instead, Dubai and the other six emirates which comprise the UAE made sure that they operated within the realm of US foreign policy priorities. Dubai became a regular stop on the travel routes of US diplomats.

But people will wonder whether the recent crisis in Dubai is the apparent economic mismanagement resulting from rapid urbanisation and modernisation that lacked a soul.

Was this an example of a fundamental contradiction between economic growth and lack of democracy?

China and Vietnam have proved that rapid economic growth without democratisation could work, and work splendidly. Yet, Dubai’s model of economic growth seemed less planned and less guided by a realistic vision of the future.

There was little attempt to match future planning with Dubai’s demographic realities or even of the area around it. Instead, the emirate had to rely on the import of large numbers of Asian workers without any effort to integrate them, or even to afford them decent living standards and human conditions.

Lack of co-ordination

Dubai has dominated the imagination of young Arabs for less than two decades. Its rise was rapid and its decline may also be rapid as recent press stories seem to indicate.

Dubai’s shortcomings may indicate the lack of economic integration between Arabs. Worse, the UAE’s constituent emirates made no effort to co-ordinate economic planning among them.

In reality, the seven emirates acted like independent sovereign states, up until the recent crisis when Dubai had to plead with Abu Dhabi, the capital, in the name of Arab brotherhood.

It is not clear whether Abu Dhabi will bail its neighbour out, but the capital seems glad to be playing the role of the partial rescuer.

Lessons have to be taught. The relationships between the different emirates, and even between the different Arab countries, will have to be rethought.

Dubai was supposed to be the model of non-politics, or the model of anti-politics. Dubai TV, for example, reflected that message in Arab political and popular cultures. Paris Hilton replaced all the symbols of the Palestinian revolution in the Dubai TV culture. Fun, not resistance, was the new catchword.

Educated and skilled Arabs were welcomed in the Utopian emirate provided they left their political dreams and passions behind them. There was no room for the slogans of the Arab nationalist era, nor for the demands of the democracy or feminist movements.

Dubai would welcome you provided you did what you were told and provided you paid homage to the ruling family.

Arabs questioning policies

But the collapse of Dubai may redraw the political and economic pictures of the region. Maybe governments will now be pressed to explain the purposes and motives behind their economic policies. And maybe the Arab public will now raise more questions about the various models that are promoted as exemplary by the West.

It was only a few years ago that Western governments and media believed the emirate of Dubai could do no wrong. Western publications that had once praised the Dubai experiment and the wisdom and vision of “Sheikh Mo” are now discovering the shortsightedness of the policies that guided the emirate’s growth. Western media are suddenly discovering the plight of Asian workers in the region.

The Arab public has experienced disappointments and disillusionments before but this one will have consequences for US foreign policy.

The Arab people have been urged to abandon struggle and the search for justice and to seek the model of Dubai. Now, the young generation of Arabs will not seek pilgrimage in Dubai.

Another destination will be sought and this could signal a return to Palestine.

For among these many are they who never regarded the US as an empire, and thus were woefully unprepared for the hunger of any president for more executive power and the necessities of any empire to expand, rather than cede, power.

Many of the most vociferous critics of the expansive powers of the Bush Administration, of his wire traps, his secret prisons, of his penchant for total surveillance over Americans at home or abroad are strikingly silent now when under Obama these same powers reside in the executive. Secret prisons? Yes, still there. Illegal renditions? Still there. Wire taps of Americans without court order? Yup.

Indeed, little has changed but the public tone of debate. There’s little bombast. A good deal less bluster. A whole lot less “fear” talk. But the same programs are on tap. And there’s still wars begun in deception and greed, and continued because of simple political necessity.

Yet there’s more. In the next five years or so, many of the men who fought in these wars will be back in the US working as prison guards, cops, security specialists, and the like. Many will be as bitter as vinegar, as angry as a hornet’s nest because they’ll know, as previous generations of veterans learned, that they fought not for the people, not even for the constitution, but for the wealthy rulers who can care less about their lives or their loss. What will this mean to US society? How will it impact the future?

Almost 90 years ago, at the end of World War I, soldiers, bitter at the loss of the war and humiliated by the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, became a right-wing political force that would later emerge as the Nazis which tore through Europe with a vengeance. That is to say, wars don’t end when politicians or diplomats sign treaties or pacts. They fester and feed off unresolved issues and reemerge sometimes worse than before, and they sometimes return to the land that birthed them.

From death row, this is Mumia Abu Jamal

December 6, 2009

LISTEN TO “WARS TO COME”

]]> http://www.elkilombo.org/wars-to-come/feed/ 0 http://www.elkilombo.org/cant-pay-wont-pay/ http://www.elkilombo.org/cant-pay-wont-pay/#comments Tue, 08 Dec 2009 22:37:12 +0000 El Kilombo http://www.elkilombo.org/?p=909 In post-apartheid South Africa, social movements are using direct action to fight privatization, displacement and police brutality. In an interview with KPFA’s “Against the Grain”, the Western Cape Anti-Eviction Campaign’s Ashraf Cassiem talks about their work opposing neoliberalism on the ground, helping poor people to self-organize to fight eviction, turn back on water and electricity for which they cannot afford to pay, and resist the commodification of basic resources. Listen to the interview

[Related: "Fighting Foreclosure in South Africa"]

But there is another reason. Wars fought overseas are real-life metaphors for political wars fought here at home. War abroad are ultimately about domestic politics; about the struggle for political supremacy in America. War, the old adage goes, is the sport of kings. In the US, war is the sport of political parties. She or he who sounds most hawkish, who shows political toughness with other peoples’ children will tend to prevail in the elections.

Afghanistan is thus a prop in a great play of little importance in and of itself but of great symbolic value in the long wars between right and left in the American body politic. It matters not one wit what Americans want, nor what party they belong to. US political parties are bought and paid for tools of great corporate and private wealth.  Thus we see the spectacle of people voting for ostensibly anti-war candidates who once in office vow to more wars, more weapons, and more troops. Why? Because war is big business. It has been since the US Civil War when fortunes were made arming, feeding, and equipping troops.

War is never about what politicians say war is about. Afghanistan is no more about terrorism than Iraq was about weapons of mass destruction. Today, Britain is about to launch a rare parliamentary inquiry into how it got into the Iraq war. Isn’t it remarkable that they can ask questions after the war, but not before? Of course, they did so in fealty to their big brother, the US, for the basest of reasons, for politics and for profits.

From death row, this is Mumia Abu Jamal

November 29, 2009

LISTEN TO “GHOSTS OF VIETNAM”

Aided in no small part by the explosive exposé published by UC Santa Cruz Professor of Political Science Bob Meister, the student, faculty, and workers’ movements the length and breadth of the state were no longer willing to accept privatization disguised as crisis-imposed budget cuts. As Meister explained in no uncertain terms, the proposed (and now passed) tuition increase has nothing whatsoever to do with budget cuts, but the cuts merely provided the pretext for a long-planned drive (and Reaganite wet dream) to privatize public education in California once and for all.

Anti-Capital Projects

A statewide day of action on September 24th generated mass walkouts and sporadic occupations, both successful (at UC Santa Cruz) and not (at UC Berkeley). A UC-centric assembly called for a month later yielded mixed results: a plan to build for a March 4th action, but only the vaguest of decisions regarding what such actions would entail. This sporadic guerrilla struggle, however, would yield a full-scale war of maneuver once the stakes of the November 18th UC Regents meeting became clear.

A coalition of organizations at UC Berkeley endorsed a three day strike in which the third day, contingent upon the expected Regents’ decision, called simply for “Escalation.” On Thursday the 19th, UCLA protestors seized Campbell Hall (now renamed “Carter-Huggins Hall” after the slain Black Panthers who lost their lives between those very walls in 1969). Across campus, protestors confronted the Regents themselves as they voted for the fee hikes, with the militarized atmosphere sparking first clashes on Wednesday and then a veritable state of siege in Thursday from which the Regents were forced to flee the angry crowds

Just a few short hours later, UCSC students marched from the already-occupied Kresge Town Hall to Kerr administration building, gaining unexpected access to and holding the building until Sunday. Also on Thursday, hundreds of UC Davis students occupied the Mrak administrativebuilding on campus, clearly touching a nerve and prompting 52 arrests. Less than 24 hours later, students again occupied: this time in Dutton Hall, where they remained until being dispersed by police. As this goes to press, Mrak is again in the crosshairs.

At Berkeley on Wednesday afternoon, after a rally and march of some 1,000 students, workers, and faculty at UC Berkeley, a group of more than thirty surreptitiously gained access to the diminutive Architects and Engineers Building, nestled between Sproul and Barrows Halls and which hosts UCB’s capital projects. Responding in part to Meister’s revelation that it was capital projects rather than budget cuts that were driving the cuts and fee increases, activists responded with a communiqué and website aptly entitled “Anti-Capital Projects”

The arriving freshman is treated as a mortgage, and the fees are climbing. She is a future revenue stream, and the bills are growing. She is security for a debt she never chose, and the cost is staggering… No building will be safe from occupation while this is the case. No capital project but the project to end capital.

The occupation of the Capital Projects Building, however, would be short-lived, as police soon gained access and occupiers negotiated a strategic withdrawal on the promise that they would not engage in any other unlawful activity for a week. But a week is a long time at moments like these.

Lines of Force are Revealed

At around 6am on Thursday morning, UCPD became aware that Wheeler Hall, a prominent and massive building at the very heart of the Berkeley campus, had been occupied by more than 40 protesters. Police quickly gained access to the lower floors of the building, arresting three occupiers, who were immediately and vindictively charged not with trespassing, but with felony burglary. By 6:30a.m., an already surprising number of supporters, in the dozens, had received word of the occupation and gathered on the west side of Wheeler to show their support. By mid-morning, the number had increased to hundreds. As the crowd grew, UCPD responded with a mutually-reinforcing combination of aggression and fear: aggressively smashing into the growing crowds to install metal barriers where caution tape had proven insufficient, and calling desperately for backup first to Berkeley PD, then to the Alameda County Sheriff’s Department, and finally to Oakland PD.

Around 1pm, the skies opened up in a downpour that might have, in other conditions and other situations, dispersed the crowd entirely. But instead, umbrellas popped up like mushroom caps, tents were erected, and plastic bags distributed as makeshift ponchos as the crowd of hundreds persisted. Had the police gained access to the occupiers during the storm, the day would have ended much differently. But as it turned out, the occupiers held strong, the skies cleared, and as evening fell, the crowds began to swell further. One demonstrator confessed nostalgia at the sight of the umbrellas, and the reminder they offered of another seminal moment in trans-sectoral unity: that of the 1999 anti-WTO demonstrations in Seattle that sparked the alter-globalization movement.

The occupiers, visible through a series of windows on the west side of Wheeler, relayed their demands to the gathering crowds by megaphone:

1. Rehire all 38 AFCSME custodial workers recently laid off;
2. Drop all charges and provide total amnesty to all persons occupying buildings and involved in student protests concerning budget cuts;
3. Maintain the current business occupants of the bears lair food court and enter into respectful and good faith negotiations;
4. Preserve Rochdale apartments leased to Berkeley student cooperative for $1 a year in perpetuity.

It became clear that the police and university administration were in no mood to negotiate on these terms: this much they communicated non-verbally with their pepper spray under the door, with their battering rams and wedges, and verbally with their promises of violence, as occupiers were told to “get ready for the beatdown.” Some of the occupiers, overtaken by the unmistakable candor of such threats, sought a last-minute compromise that would allow them to leave unscathed.

For a while it seemed as though such negotiations had failed dismally. Demonstrators outside could hear the police making a final offensive to smash down the door, and the occupiers could be seen as dusk fell, back to the window, visible only in outline with their hands raised to be arrested. But the atmosphere was tense, and the swelling crowd had no plans to let the police carry the arrestees out without a fight. Hours earlier, tactical groups had been preemptively dispatched to all possible exits from the network of underground tunnels that connect Wheeler to the neighboring buildings. Students who, by all outward appearance, could have been members of sororities or fraternities, demanded to know where bodies were most needed to maintain a strong and impermeable perimeter.

Let this be clear: if the students were arrested and carried out, there was going to be a fight. A riot? Perhaps (this much depended on the police). A fight? Mos def.

A “Victory”?

As with all massively important political moments, the rancid stench of opportunism was never far off, emanating from some student leaders and faculty alike. While many faculty members performed admirably during the standoff (some, like Professor of Integrative Biology Robert Dudley even being arrested for their efforts), some skillfully substituted their own voices and their own demands for those of the students engaged in the occupation.

Particularly egregious in this respect was Democratic Party “framing” strategist and self-styled movement guru George Lakoff. Visibly angered by the occupiers’ refusal to leave Wheeler voluntarily (without any of their demands having been met, of course), Lakoff seized the megaphone to spew the morally bankrupt argument that since the students knew they would be met with police violence, they would themselves be responsible for creating that violence if they chose to remain. No more repulsive a phrase was uttered that day. And were this not sufficient, Lakoff was even heard lying repeatedly to the occupiers, insisting that there had been no police violence, no rubber bullets, and no injuries outside the building, all in an effort to manipulate those inside into abandoning the occupation.

In speaking with more than a dozen of the occupiers, one sentiment above all was expressed regarding the role of many faculty that day: a deep sense of betrayal. As one occupier told me: “we asked the faculty to mediate and to negotiate with the administration as a way to get our demands out, but apparently they interpreted this as a call to negotiate with us so that we would leave the building.” In fact, many of those mediating–be they faculty, ASUC officials, and leaders of student organizations–were self-appointed and drawn almost unanimously from the ranks of those who had opposed the tactic of occupation to begin with. And this would show: according to many of the occupiers, these mediators, in focusing their attention on calming the crowds outside and encouraging the occupiers to leave, had effectively performed a “policing function” that protected the administrationfrom the protesters.

Ali Tonak, a UC Berkeley graduate student, summarizes the feeling that many expressed:

They have a warped understanding of how power works. They think that calming people outside was keeping the people inside safe, when it was really the opposite: the only thing that was keeping the folks inside safe was people being rowdy outside. In the end, the negotiators were doing the job of the state.

And this opportunism was not limited to faculty. As word came down that a deal had been struck to allow the students to walk out the front doors of Wheeler with nothing but misdemeanors, those who had spent the day attempting to calm the angry crowds shifted their demobilizing efforts into full gear, shutting down any and all possible debate regarding what had transpired. The crowd was urged to sit (ironically, while chanting that they were “fired up,” and that students should “stand up” for their rights), and self-appointed student leaders, most of whom had opposed the occupation plans from the very beginning, set about explaining that the day had been a “victory.”

Of course, in a sense it had been a victory of sorts, but not in the sense that it was presented to the crowd. It was no coincidence that all interruptions from the crowd, from those who wondered aloud, “What about the demands? What about the layoffs? What about the fees?” were quickly and summarily dismissed and silenced by self-appointed “mediators” whose only common feature was their previous opposition to occupations.

A recent statement from the UCLA occupation of Carter-Huggins Hall sets its sights on student body president Cinthia Flores, “a junior politician careerist bent on control,” and in so doing provides an acute diagnosis of the more general danger of political opportunism, a danger which must be fought tooth-and-nail if the movement is to move forward:

These people thrive on the status quo, it’s their realm, and they always want to drag back those who escape. There are CINTHIA’s everywhere who make up and direct the movement-police to be encountered at any site of struggle. Occupation takes power and immediately destroys its concentrated form. Beware of bureaucrats, occupy everything!

A “Peaceful” Ending?

And the claim that the occupiers had emerged victorious erased more than their unfulfilled demands. It also concealed the aggressively violent response that UCPD and its imported proxies had unleashed that day. As mentioned above, this violence began early on, as UCPD attempted to install metal barricades by wading into the growing crowds and attacking anyonestanding their ground. As the day progressed, police from various forces were seen ruthlessly pounding any and all protestors who disobeyed the momentary absoluteness of their sovereignty, with one such protestor beingshot in the chest with an unidentified projectile.

The pettiness of such sovereignty and the repulsiveness of its executors were in no case so clear as that of UC Berkeley graduate student Zhivka Valiavicharska. As this video shows, an unidentified member of (what appears to be) the UCPD suddenly found his authority called into question by the fact that Zhivka’s hands were on a police barrier, and found it necessary to threaten her and strike the barrier with his baton. What the video does not show occurred just a minute later, when the officer again approached the barrier and smashed Zhivka’s hand with full force, breaking two fingers and nearly reducing one to pulp so that it was hanging by threads.

As Zhivka herself describes the attack:

I was holding on to the barrier with one of my hands, and this cop came up and started rudely shouting at me, telling me to take my hand off and threatening me.  My hand remained there. The cop made me withdraw my hand by hitting the rail right next to it. When I leaned it again on the rail, he smashed it with full force. It was very deliberate, very skillful, and extremely excessive, since no one was challenging the barriers where I was at that moment.

Who was the officer that maliciously and intentionally attacked a member of the student population with the intention to do serious bodily harm? What of the witnessing officer, J. Williams, Badge #93, who is clearly identifiable in the video? Will UCPD and Chancellor Birgeneau immediately begin an investigation into the officer’s identity, suspend him immediately, and press criminal charges?

Former Berkeley undergraduate Yaman Salahi was present to witness the police violence, and immediately penned a thoughtful and necessary letterto the UC Berkeley community in which he heaps responsibility, quite rightly, onto the shoulders of Chancellor Robert Birgeneau, for not only loosing these various police forces onto the campus community, but also for attempting to cover up the violence he himself had unleashed in an email dispatch later sent to the entire campus community. Despite the many instances of documented violence by police, the Chancellor nevertheless insisted that the situation “ended peacefully” and thanked the police for playing a positive role.

Salahi demands a “statement against the deployment of non-UCPD personnel against students on this campus in the future,” adding that “In addition to students’ limbs, something has been broken, and Chancellor Birgeneau’s cover-up will not fix it.” But while I agree with Salahi’s general concerns, it is worth noting that it was not OPD, BPD, or the Alameda County Sheriff’s Department that smashed Zhivka’s fingers. It was UCPD, a force which remains as alien to the university community as OPD is to East Oakland. When we challenge their privatizing efforts, they will meet us with whatever force is at their disposal and with whatever violence is deemed necessary. As I write this, however, it appears as though Salahi’s call is meeting some receptive ears, and a group of prominent faculty members have begun an investigation into the police brutality deployed against students all across the UC system.

Remembrance the Past, Realizing Our Power

Remembering and reinscribing the violence of this police response into our collective memory of the occupation is of more than historical interest, however, and consists of more than merely remembering the pain inflicted upon our comrades, however necessary this may be. It is in this violent police response that a strategically correct interpretation of events lies, and this fact makes efforts to conceal the conflict of the day more than merely an effort to prevent further violence. The police response showed precisely what was at stake in the occupation, and what remains at stake in the movement more generally. The police response showed exactly how far the UC Regents, President Yudof, and the local administrations are willing to go in order to drive the privatization of public education down our unwilling throats. It showed us, in short, that we were doing something right, and we can expect more of the same if we ever hope to win.

And that’s not all: the final police and administration response–that of opting to let the occupiers walk out of Wheeler of their own accord–tells even more of the story. It tells us just how powerful our collective presence was on that day. There can be no doubt that every single occupier would have been arrested, likely beaten and abused to some degree, and hit with the trumped-up felony charges, had the crowd not been assembled outside. And this was not merely because the crowd was bearing witness to injustice or expressing its verbal non-consent.

It was not moderation and negotiation that created and sustained this pivotal moment and generated its outcome: it was the unmistakable show of force that the students gathered represented, a force that was not merely symbolic. As the great revolutionary CLR James once put it: “The rich are only defeated when running for their lives.” The same could be said of today’s privatizers of public education, and those running things more generally. Oakland’s Oscar Grant rebellions taught us this much in January, as it was only the threat of continued rioting that put BART officer Johannes Mehserle behind bars. The Berkeley occupation movement teaches us the same lesson today.

And we have late word of a library occupation at Cal State Fresno, and more are on the way, at Berkeley and elsewhere. Earlier today, marchers occupied the UC Office of the President in downtown Oakland to demand a face-to-face with Mark Yudof. Further, the contagion is international, as the students who have held Austria in a constant state of occupation for weeks on end descended en masse yesterday onto the US embassy in Vienna as a demonstration of solidarity with the California occupations and outrage at the images of police violence that have been broadcast across the globe. This is a force that is expanding as we speak, and will do so as the months pass and contradictions become more acute. The university struggle has turned a crucial corner on the UC Berkeley campus, and a qualitative leap in consciousness has occurred, by weight not of peaceful entreaties but of forceful demands.

George Ciccariello-Maher is a Ph.D. candidate in political theory at U.C. Berkeley. He can be reached at gjcm(at)berkeley.edu.

Today, neozapatismo must be a central focus of any attempt to evaluate the question of possible autonomy. Not only has the Zapatista movement survived despite two serious military efforts to wipe it out (January 1994, February 1995) and years of state counterinsurgency operations (including murderous paramilitary violence) but it has also successfully carried out a whole series of innovative restructurings in its own communities. Elsewhere in the world, and not just in Oaxaca or the rest of Mexico, many other autonomous movements and projects – some newly launched, some thriving, some faltering, some threatened with annihilation – have been inspired by what the Zapatistas have accomplished.

For all of these movements and projects – including those of the Zapatistas – one of their most common and serious weaknesses has been their isolation from each other and from other struggles. Breaking out of that isolation requires making connections with other efforts in other places and creating networks of solidarity and mutual aid. When the EZLN first came out of forests and invaded cities in January 1994 they were few and they were isolated. The heavy military counterattack (some 15,000 troops, armored vehicles and bombers) threatened to wipe them out. Only the mobilization of hundreds of thousands demanding a political rather than a military solution from the government made their survival possible. As time revealed that the government’s pretense at political negotiation was only a public relations ploy masking a counterinsurgency strategy of repression, again and again it was the mobilization of people throughout Mexico and around the world that supported both their continued survival and their ability to discuss and implement reforms within their communities. That mobilization was not sufficient – it complemented but did not replace the Zapatistas’ own efforts – but it does seem to have been necessary, to prevent even more brutal and bloodier repression. How the Zapatistas were able to break out of their isolation, build networks and retain them, therefore, has to be a key issue in any attempt to draw lessons from their experience.

Yesterday, Guiomar Rovira analyzed how the rapid dissemination of information by journalists and others, through a variety of media, including the Internet, played a central role in the mobilization of the solidarity and support for the Zapatistas that helped them survive and continue to elaborate autonomous approaches to self-organization. We also know that not only the dissemination of information but also the spread of discussion about tactics and strategy in those same networks circulated the efforts at solidarity and the mobilization of support: from demonstrations against the Mexican government around the world to the arrival of international observers and material aid to the rebellious communities. Moreover, we also know that those networks not only facilitated the organization of the Continental and Intercontinental Encounters against Neoliberalism and for Humanity in the spring and summer of 1996 and the Second Intercontinental Encounter in Spain in 1997 but led to the formation of Peoples’ Global Action and the first Global Action Days against the World Trade Organization (WTO) in Geneva in 1998. Those beginnings led, in turn, to the subsequent Battle of Seattle and the emergence of Indymedia in 1999 and the many demonstrations against the WTO, the IMF, the World Bank, and the G8 that followed in places such as Davos, Prague and Genoa, i.e., a global movement contesting the capitalist neoliberal reorganization of the world.

The importance of these developments cannot be overestimated. Never before in history have we seen anything like them. Never before has there been such intense and interconnected opposition to capitalism. Capitalism has always been resisted and opposed but never before have so many moments of resistance and opposition been linked in the ways achieved during the last ten years.

What has been the role of neozapatismo – born in the fires of indigenous struggle in one small area of Mexico - in these developments? It wasn’t just the justice or valor of the Zapatistas’ struggles, there have been many others as just and as valiant, including some far larger, e.g., across the border from Chiapas in Guatemala. It wasn’t just the circulation of information, or even of discussion, those things happened in opposition to NAFTA and on a world scale in opposition to the First Gulf War. Clearly one thing that was new, one thing that had been missing from previous situations was the way the Zapatista message reverberated and resonated around the world, provoking action where previous knowledge of other cases of injustice and valiant rebellion had only provoked sympathy.

But why did their message resonate? It was not just their spokesperson Subcomandante Marcos’ intellectual, literary and rhetorical gifts – though they certainly helped. The real reason for the resonance, it seems to me, was because the message spoke to common concrete concerns in ways previous messages had not. Whereas cries for help from many earlier struggles had often provoked little action, this time the story being told sounded all too familiar to be ignored. The Zapatistas may have been one more in a long history of indigenous struggles, but what they were struggling against was no longer just local repression but policies that had become general and all too familiar around the world. No longer did capitalist policy makers employ one kind of strategy here, and another there, so that those in struggle here had difficulty identifying with those in struggle there. As the 20^th Century drew to a close similar strategies were being wielded against people everywhere and the Zapatistas recognized this emerging homogeneity and spoke of it in ways that others could understand.

From Imperialist & Colonial Hierarchy to the post-WWII Era

Before, for a very long time, there was no such homogeneity. This was obvious in the days of imperial empires where the people in colonies were treated quite differently than the people in the colonizing countries. Most, in both places, were exploited, of course, but the modes of exploitation, levels of productivity, wage and income hierarchies were quite different. Imperial hierarchies tended to concentrate more highly productive manufacturing industry and higher wages at home and lower productivity agriculture and mining and lower wages in the colonies. Racism, patriarchy and ethnic discrimination often rationalized the brutality needed to impose the hierarchy and keep colonial majorities abroad on the bottom. The overall higher level of productivity achieved through colonization also made it possible to pay the higher wages in the “home” country and construct an imperial wage and income hierarchy as a whole. The theorists of “dependency” tended to dichotomize this structure in terms of a rich “center” that exploited a poor “periphery” but in reality people were being exploited at every level, only some won higher wages and standards of living and others saw theirs reduced.

Even after end of most colonialism, however, when national liberation struggles bore fruit and formal colonial Powers were expelled in the years following World War II, both the existing international hierarchy and the radical difference between policies implemented by capital in the “First” or industrialized world, and those judged appropriate for the new “Third” or “underdeveloped” ex-colonial world continued.

On the one hand, the Keynesian solution to the Great Depression adapted to the new wave of industrial worker struggles that exploded in the 1920s and 1930s, reworked capitalist development in the First World around collective bargaining, rising wages, welfare and state support for technological change (to increase productivity to pay for the higher wages). In those areas, rising wages for some and welfare expenditures for others were seen through the optic of “macroeconomics” as central positive elements in “aggregate demand” that would induce capitalist investment and spur growth.

There were, of course, local hierarchies, with waged income generally exceeding unwaged welfare payments and wage growth limited by frequent capitalist recourse to new sources of labor, , e.g., recent rural-urban black immigrants or Mexican labor in the United States, West Indian or South Asian immigrants in Britain, North or West African immigrants in France.

On the other hand, in the “Third World” policy makers still reasoned, more often than not, in terms of zero-sum games, “development economics” and “growth models” – and sought to minimize wages and maximize exploitation, savings and profits to generate investment through repressive labor practices, the absence of welfare and such mechanisms as intentional inflation to redistribute value from fixed-wage workers to the business owners of the commodities whose prices were rising. Such economic policies were complemented by the “modernization” theories of political science and widespread institution, elite and nation building designed to replace the old colonial structures of command with new “modern”, i.e., neocolonial, ones.  Something similar was taking place within the “Second World” of Soviet-dominated countries where continuing industrialization in Russia was facilitated by more intense exploitation of workers in other “socialist” republics and in China where peasants were being squeezed to generate the surplus necessary to finance the build-up of manufacturing industry.

The reorganization of the international capitalist hierarchy from the colonial to the ex-colonial period was both a response to struggles against the old organization and an effort to cope with new ones. Britain may have pulled out of places like the South Asian subcontinent or Nigeria, just as France pulled out (well, was thrown out) of places like Vietnam and Algeria, but struggles in those places continued (sometimes quite obviously as in Korea where US government forces replaced the Japanese, or Vietnam where they replaced the French). As a plethora of “post-colonial” studies have amply demonstrated, the end of formal colonialism by no means meant the end of colonial-type social relations or the struggles that had grown up against them.

As a result, struggles against exploitation, alienation and repression multiplied and to some extent circulated, both within the First, Second and Third Worlds and among them – through awareness and empathy but also through multinational investment and trade. Capitalists always tend to invest in areas of high profitability and to abandon those of lower profitability. That is to say: they flee from stronger workers to exploit weaker ones, or to exploit weaker ones in order to make it possible to make concessions to stronger ones. The resulting changes in patterns of investment produce changing patterns of production and trade and thus changing patterns of struggle as well, e.g., Western investment in South Africa led to an internationalization of the struggle against apartheid in that country. Foreign aid, on the other hand, whether deployed by Western Powers or Eastern ones, tended to rush to areas of intense conflict, either to counter or support local struggles but creating another link between struggles at home and those abroad, e.g., US aid – military and economic – to the government of South Vietnam led to an intensified anti-war movement all across North America and beyond. Conflict also circulated through the movement of those in struggle, whether from countryside to city or from one country to another (and often back again). So while American, British, French (or even Soviet) planners often imported cheaper foreign labor (to limit the growth of local wages), the multinational workers who came (often autonomously in violation of capital’s rules) not only brought their experience of struggle with them – creating ethnic communities of mutual aid – but in interaction with local labor and new production relationships learned new forms of struggle (which they often took back home).

The Crisis of the post-WWII Global Capitalist Hierarchy

For some years – almost a quarter of a century – these conflicts, for the most part, proved manageable, but in the end they tore the post-WWII order apart. In theFirst World struggles of the unwaged buttressed those of the waged and severed the connection between wage and productivity growth upon which the upper end of the international income hierarchy had been based. In the Third World, struggles by both unwaged peasants and waged industrial workers disrupted the ability of multinational corporations to pit them against better paid workers in the First World. In the Second World of the Sino-Soviet axis, the power of covert resistance against police-state repression undermined the state planning of exploitation. The withdrawal of imagination and creativity from the state sabotaged its ability to elaborate technological solutions to its political problems via Keynesian-style concessions in both countryside and cities. In the late 1960s and early 1970s struggle-induced crisis spread like wildfire across the capitalist world, West and East.

Counterattack and the Rise of Neoliberalism

The capitalist response was a halting and often ad-hoc series of moves: abandoning Bretton Woods and fixed exchange rates, using food and energy inflation against real wages, fear of limited nuclear war (presaging current efforts to use fear of terrorism), a crackdown on immigrant workers, dramatic hikes in interest rates and debt service demands, and finally global depression with falling trade and rising unemployment in the early 1980s. In the First World, Keynesian macroeconomics was replaced first by monetarism (the tight money attack on inflation and behind inflation, wages) and then supply-side economics (the direct attack on labor unions, high wages, welfare payments of all kinds, and entitlements such as social security coupled with deregulation and privatization). These shifts were all designed to shift income flows from wages to profits, from consumption to investment – in other words, to shift the balance of power back toward capital. At the same time, a conservative “social agenda” was pursued to restore patriarchal authority and discipline women and children by wiping out abortion rights, imposing standardize testing in schools and shifting student financial aid from grants to loans.

In the Third World, and then in the old Second World after the Fall of the Wall, the dismemberment of the Soviet Empire, and the crushing of the pro-democracy movement in China, capitalist initiatives took the form of massive debt crisis, the implementation of austerity and wide-spread privatization of state firms – sold off to private business to slash wages and benefits and increase profits – and the opening of both trade and capital flows to unregulated multinational corporate decisions, e.g., “free trade” rules, institutionalized in regional arrangements like the European Union or the North American Free Trade Agreement or globally in the WTO. All this was rationalized with a refurbished 19^th Century ideology of market worship. In Latin America this combination of policies and ideology was soon given a proper title: Neoliberalism.

As these policies were increasingly implemented, North and South, East and West, the differences between the theories and policies applied in industrialized countries and those applied in so-called underdeveloped or developing countries disappeared. First brazenly implemented in Latin America during the debt crisis of the 1980s, then even more viciously applied in Eastern Europe, Russia and the various ex-socialist republics in the 1990s, and finally piece-meal and to varying degrees within the industrialized countries themselves in the same period, a new capitalist world order was crafted – still with a nasty hierarchy of waged and unwaged, rich and poor, less polluted and more polluted, etc., but being shaped with a much more homogenized set of theories, strategies and policies.

Zapatismo versus Neoliberalism

Both the existence of those more homogenized theories and policies and the clear Zapatista grasp of them made their discourse against neoliberalism in Mexicoresonate with others involved in struggle against similar policies elsewhere in the world. Discussion at the Continental Encounters against Neoliberalism and for Humanity in the spring of 1996 quickly made it clear that in England neoliberalism had the face of Thatcherism, in the United States the guise of Reaganomics and so on. The capitalists themselves, in the generalization of their theories and policies, created the possibility that the Zapatista “One No!” would echo around the world and galvanize people with many different “Yes’s!!” Global capital launched the Fourth World War to crush or subordinate our struggles; it is up to us to win that war and free ourselves once and for all.

Some are confronting this new situation with familiar, but stale and unappealing – because of past failures – theoretical and political paradigms. Orthodox Marxists with their “working class party” to synthesize diverse oppositional currents make up one example. Anarchists who only repeat their mantra of “smashing the state” – presumably at both national and supranational levels constitute another.

One new theorization of this new capitalist homogeneity which has sought to ground a more innovative approach to organization has been Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s concept of post-imperialist “Empire” – a shift in sovereignty that corresponds to the multinational corporate subordination of the nation state to the maintenance of a world in which capital can move freely to reorganize itself to counter changing patterns and intensities of many different kinds of struggle. They, and others, have sought to grasp that diversity of opposition and affirmation, that combination of “One No!, Many Yes’s!!” in terms of Spinoza’s constitutive, world-reordering “multitude”.  Unfortunately, the leap to organizational proposals has been hesitant and vague at best.

But whatever theoretical approach you decide to use, the basic point is to recognize two things as the basis for organizing: first, the existence of, and therefore the ability to point to, a common enemy and second, the possibility of diverse autonomous projects being complementary in their struggles against that common enemy at the same time that they construct the future along diverse paths. In earlier times, the commonality of the enemy was not so apparent, given the diversity of its means and methods. Today the unique, neoliberal face of capitalism is recognizable to more and more people. Political organizing must, of course, continue to sketch its features so that it will, eventually, be recognizable to all. But, thanks to capital itself, and the vivid prose of the Zapatistas, that’s the easy part.

The Sixth, the Other Campaign and the Search for a New Politics

The hard part remains: imagining and constructing ways to achieve complementarity among diverse autonomous struggles, i.e., the politics of our own movement of movements. Our struggles for autonomous forms of life are always elaborated in particular places, among particular sets of relationships and at particular points in the international hierarchy of income and power that capital has imposed on our world. Our struggles are not automatically complementary, indeed they are often contradictory, or indifferent, and therefore isolated from one another.

One very partial solution has been joint action against the common enemy by representatives of many, many different struggles. This has the approach of international mobilizations that have brought tens of thousands of protestors into the streets against the WTO, the IMF and World Bank and the G8. Representatives of diverse struggles have stood shoulder to shoulder, quite literally, against these institutions of neoliberal capitalism. Success in such endeavors has been found partly in whatever degree of disruption has been achieved and partly in the inevitable, informal networking that has taken place prior to and during such protests. These gatherings have overcome isolation, at least momentarily, and not only given participants an acute sense of connectedness with others in struggle but laid the groundwork, through networking, for future common actions. For these reasons alone, such mobilizations have been fruitful.

On the other hand, participation in such mobilizations is both irregular and expensive (in both monetary and human terms) and despite communication ahead of time for organizing, and discussion afterwards for evaluation, actual gains in terms of disrupting capitalist planning or thwarting neoliberal strategies have been minimal. At the moment, such forms of joint struggle seem to have peaked in the summer of 2001 in Genoa, Italy when over 300,000 people protested the G8 and their neoliberal policies. Despite widespread continued resistance, and multiplying autonomous initiatives, there have been no such massive gatherings in the last five years.

We have been going through a very necessary period of reassessment and exploration of alternative ways to proceed. Now what? Or in Chernechevsky and Lenin’s classic formulation “What is to be Done?” next. This is the question that was posed by the Zapatistas’ Sixth Declaration of the Lacandona in the summer of 2005 and this is the question to which we must all seek answers. As is typical of their ways, “asking as they walk”, the Zapatistas did not offer a final answer to this question, only a proposal for one step in searching for an answer (or for a collection of complementary answers). They proposed changing the terrain of discussion (away from the formal electoral spectacle) and then set about organizing that change, first through a series of meetings with diverse people in struggle in Mexico and then through their “Other Campaign”.

The Other Campaign, as it wound its way through Mexico from Chiapas to the northern border where it met with those from “the other side”, effectively created, as it went, new terrains of discussion, of listening and of speaking, of the exchange of experience and of reflection on the past, present and possible futures. As has been typical of Zapatista encounters, no unified program was proposed by the organizers or adopted by the many, many discussants in those dozens and dozens of meetings. But the whole process constituted a dramatic political act, far more dramatic although less spectacular than the formal presidential elections with all their fraud and ex-post contestation by AMLO and the PRD. Not only do I know of no other example of such a nation-wide campaign of grassroots discussion and sharing of experience and ideas, but I do not know, unfortunately, any other group besides the Zapatistas with both the power of convocation to carry out such a campaign and the interest in doing so.

The Other Campaign’s criticism of and refusal to be drawn into the electoral arena, either in supporting the PRD before the elections, or in protesting against PANista-PRIista fraud afterwards, was highly controversial and infuriated a great many who have dedicated themselves to struggle on that terrain. Yet, as events have unfolded since the elections, from the vicious state violence in Atenco, through the popular uprising in Oaxaca, to repression in that state, the bankruptcy of the professional political parties, including the PRD, continues to be demonstrated as they either lag far behind, or participate in the repression of those in struggle at the grassroots.

Phase One of the Other Campaign is now over, another phase is beginning. That phase will include a new Intercontinental Encounter in Chiapas in the summer of 2007 – one in which, I suspect, the Zapatistas will share with comrades from around the world their experience and the lessons they have drawn from their many discussions in Mexico. What the Zapatistas have organized needs to be replicated, in one form or another, around the world. We need to be engaging – locally and globally – in the same kinds of discussion, sharing experience, evaluating the successes and limitations of past efforts and ideas about what to do next.

And to the question of “what to do next?” there is no simple answer. For if we are really proposing to build new worlds we are not just talking about finding other ways of doing politics, we are talking about the reorganization of all of society. While the possibility of global discussion and the search for complementary strategies may be a function of capitalist globalization, it also means the possibility of discussing, comparing and learning from alternative autonomous projects of reorganization of every aspect of life, e.g., ways of growing and consuming food, making textiles and clothing, how we house ourselves, manufacture items we want, the way we take care of our health, our bodies and their interrelationships, the way we build and use computers, the ways we play, the relationships in our families, the ways we learn, the ways we repair the damage done to the land, the oceans, the atmosphere and ourselves. There is already a multiplicity of interesting, alternative approaches to all these things. There are already coordinated efforts to change many of these things simultaneously, as in Zapatista and other indigenous communities. Innovations such as the Good Government Councils or APPO’s are not models to mimic but small scale examples of the concrete reconstruction of social, economic and political relationships.

Local situations are already materially interlocked, both by the circuits of capital and by our efforts. Some interlockages can, and should be broken, e.g., Mexicodoes not need US government subsidized corn grown in Iowa for its tortillas. Some should be reconfigured, .e.g., shifts from “free” trade to fair trade that excludes exploitative middlemen and is geared to meeting the needs of communities rather than profit. To achieve the power to force such reconfigurations we need to find ways to reorganize our own regional and international linkages and for that we need exactly the kind of discussions organized by the Other Campaign, but at a global level. We need, in short, a Global Other Campaign. Instead of plowing our political energies into formal electoral politics – as many in Mexico did in 2006 and as many people in the United States did in the mid-term elections of 2006 and have been urged to do by professional politicians during the long run-up to the 2008 presidential elections – we need to be creating, as the Zapatistas have been doing, new terrains of very different kinds of discussion in order to find ways to fight outside, and against, the electoral straightjacket in which capital seeks to keep us bound.

For those of us in the United States, the parallels of the current situation with those of the recent Mexican past are disturbingly close. Existing repressive regimes – in Mexico first those of the PRI and then that of the PAN and in the US the administration of George W. Bush – provide oppositional politicians (the PRD in Mexico and the Democrats in the US) leverage to frighten us into backing them in the hopes that if elected they won’t be as repressive and might even, if we’re lucky and if circumstances permit, marginally reduce the repression and improve the services available to us. But even if they win, past experience demonstrates that the odds of improvement are themselves marginal and along the way they succeed in draining whatever energy and hope we have right back into the pseudo-democratic political structures which have distracted us for so long from imagining what real democracy could be like and from constructing new approaches to autonomous control over our own lives. Somehow, thousands of people in Zapatista communities have been able to free themselves of these distractions and illusions and employ their energy and hopes in more fruitful ways; we need to learn from what they have achieved and figure out how to accomplish something similar ourselves.

Harry Cleaver

Austin, Texas

October 2006