Arggh. I'm a moneyless, unemployed anarchist, and their are no trains that can be hopped to South Africa. I've also gotten an invite to spend part of my winter in Porto Allegre.
My rich sister just spent several week's at her condo on St Barth's while her brother is rediscovering the joys of college food: frozen burritos. Talk about a widening class division within my own family.
> A job? Whatever happened to Steal-this-Bookism? Actually, don't bother
> figuring that last chapter of strategy-less jargon, Chuck, it's most useful
> as a brick for chucking through Niketown windows...
Ackk! That's brings up one of the most bizarre things about my life as an overeducated, professional webmaster, anarchist activist. I'm surrounded by working class activist friends who are constantly telling me about all the greatest scams around this town. For example, I didn't know that it was that easy to fare dodge on the Metro. I also didn't know about how folks were printing their own fake coupons. Then there is that undergound pamphlet on how to scam Barnes and Noble. Scamming Home Depot? I know about it.
Seriously, I want to thank the LBO "elves" who "appropriated" a copy of Empire for me this afternoon. It's pretty interesting so far.
We'll see if I have to eventually give it that gut review, i.e. throwing it through some store window.
> No knocking PGA on this, be sure. Three of our most militant grassroots
> activists spent late September in Cochabamba with them, and their
> orientation to getting organic radicals from the South to that meeting, as
> well as the Caravan a couple of years ago, was exemplary. The question is
> whether, beyond networking, there are emerging political formulae for
> linking mass democratic organising in the South with the hits on the big
> meetings in the North (amongst other great things you comrades are doing). I
> think there are, mainly in the communities of struggle associated with 50
> Years is Enough (which sponsors a lot of these types of visits); one is the
> unifying call for a World Bank Bonds Boycott, and I think another that will
> take off more is the campaign against Citigroup... and maybe the best
> example was the multiple hits done -- at the request of SA's Treatment
> Action Campaign -- on Big Pharma the first week of March, when they were
> sueing the SA government on the issue of patent protection. And then the
> question becomes establishing common platforms and universal rights-based
> discourses so that in contrast to the coherence of the neoliberal attack on
> the environment, women, poor, workers, aged, youth, disabled etc, we've got
> something concrete to unite behind. Maybe Porto Alegre will tighten up and
> get processes for programmes going; I kind of doubt it given what I
> understand are the dynamics there, and instead probably we'd find more by
> going into each of the struggle-sectors to identify what anti-neolib
> programmes are emerging, and what debates are underway.
How familiar are you with the current state of mind of American NGOs involved in these campaigns? There has been alot of ass-covering since 9/11. There are many more militant anti-glob activists who are pretty pissed at the NGO wing of the movement, for a variety of reasons. I'm currently pissed at some of them for aiding the journalists who keep writing those obits for our movement (see the new Wash Post article by Blustein on Doha).
I have alot of respect for what the NGOs are doing. I think they are doign important work and I like many of the NGO activists. They are also easier to work with than the crazy vanguardist groups. But there are some new tensions that need to be resolved in the near future.
> It's just not satisfying, to the masses who are involved in life/death
> struggles, to claim that the organisational principles are the programmatic
> content. That's not a luxury our comrades can afford, I'd say. They have to
> put concrete demands out and build their movements upon winning gains each
> day... or they recede. The mass democratic organisational styles that exist,
> say, in the Soweto Electricity Crisis Committee have involved, over the past
> six or twelve months, meetings of several hundred at a time, hammering out
> strategies, tactics, and formal demands. And their victory last month - the
> electricity company agreeing to stop the cutoffs of tens of thousands of
> households - only came through mass-democratic decisions to back up the
> groups of comrades who go to ANC councilors' houses and chop off their
> electricity and water supplies directly. Several hundred presented
> themselves for arrest a couple of weeks ago, and it was this kind of mass
> democratic process that intimidated the ruling party and the neolib managers
> of the soon-to-be-privatised electricity firm. I'm not sure, in this kind of
> struggle, how micro-networked affinity groups (even linked through
> spokescouncils) would have substituted for the lengthy, hardwon process of
> education, mobilisation and establishment of a general will in which the
> demands arrived at are defended through what is literally a life/death
> struggle (several comrades have been killed in battle with the electricity
> company's goons).
>
> But I'm an academic observer/supporter of such struggles, not a Soweto
> resident, so I'll plead ignorance!
Perhaps we are talking about different situations. The organizational needs that relate to a local struggle are different than those of a far flung network of activists.
I don't think that micro-networked affinity groups preclude popular education, mass mobilizations, and so on. One of the advantages of a network of affinity groups are that they are less legible to the state. The state has traditionally used several effective methods to stop worker dissent. These include stuff like co-optation of leaders, outright repression, and disruption of centralized organizations. It's much harder for the state to infiltrate dozens of affinity groups. Small scale decentralized groups also devolve power to the local community or constituency.
> This is an area to be careful about. The control by nation-states of
> physical space, through the monopoly on violence, hasn't really ebbed at all
> (even if comrades in Chiapas can carve out some very very tenuous terrain).
> The issue isn't actually about physical power, it's about legitimacy. And
> there's nothing new here. In 1980s, South Africa, the rhetoric associated
> with Zap-style autonomous municipalities involved "dual power," "township
> soviets," "organs of mass people's power," "ungovernability" and the like.
> (There's a nice book describing this process -- Township Politics: Civic
> Struggles for a New South Africa -- that my pal Mzwanele Mayekiso did in
> 1996 for Monthly Review Press.) But let's be clear that this contestation of
> territory and ideology always occurs in a bid to delegitimise the ruling
> party, the state apparatus, and its ideological and material orientation
> (today, "neoliberalism" in most of the world). We would still need to
> establish massively redistributive processes, such as in the
> free-electricity-for-Soweto campaign, to achieve decades-old demands by
> these mass democratic organisations, and to do that, we'd still need a
> national state apparatus. After winning a few of these over with PT-type of
> organisations over the next decades, then maybe we'd be in a position to
> link radical regions and talk about global citizenship and social wages.
> Until then, I believe it's naive to do so in anything but rhetoric. And
> serious politics has to be about much more than that.
Interesting. I'll have to check out that book.
> > meant there are all sorts of new possibilities of creating
> > living alternatives immediately in the cracks and fissures.
> > It's a terrible dilemma still because those areas which
> > have effectively established their autonomy (and these exist
> > in lots of places, really, many we don't even know about)
> > then end up having resources withdrawn and becoming even
> > more horribly impoverished - like Zapatista-controlled areas of
> > Chiapas - but it is a necessary and crucial part of any larger
> > revolutionary strategy to start creating such free zones and
> > showing what a radically different social order might
> > really be like.
>
> I've been there and appreciate what you're saying. But given the poverty of
> Chiapas, and the human needs for the material goods that Mexico as a whole
> could provide that region were there to be powerfully redistributive
> "development" politics, I doubt that decentralisation-without-resources has
> much of a future. I may be wrong. But I gather that Marcos and his comrades
> are in regular touch with Keynesian-oriented comrades (Gustavo Castro,
> Carlos Salas, Alejandro Bedal, David Barkin, etc) to make exactly these
> points to the broader society.
>
> Gotta run, but stay in touch!
>
> By the way, aside from being in the streets of Ottawa next weekend, are
> N.American anarchos doing good groundwork on issues such as shutting the
> Bretton Woodsi institutions, via protesting
> university/municipality/pension/church investments in the World Bank? Join
> us! http://www.worldbankboycott.org
We are mostly focusing on building broad opposition to the institutions (see our website: http://www.abolishthebank.org). North Americna anarchos are doing a few things relating to the bank fund boycott. I've long had a link to the campaign from my Infoshop webpage on the WB and IMF. One of my anarcho-syndicalist friends in Baltimore slipped some language into a resolution about the WB/IMF that the IWW passed at their general assembly in September. I'm told that a few of the dozing Wobs woke up when the part of the resolution was read that mentioned supporting the bond boycott.
Chuck0