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"The principal problem of national liberation struggle for the anti-statist anarcho-syndicalist form of organisation is that it is inherently statist. Advocating a more local form of state, the national liberation movement bows to the idea that the state …]]>
"The principal problem of national liberation struggle for the anti-statist anarcho-syndicalist form of organisation is that it is inherently statist. Advocating a more local form of state, the national liberation movement bows to the idea that the state is a desirable institution – just not in the current form. As such, it has the fundamental flaw that, if successful, it will generate a new state – which may or may not be 'worse' than the current oppressor, but it will nevertheless be an oppressive mechanism." – Solidarity Federation
"Anarchists refuse to participate in national liberation fronts; they participate in class fronts which may or may not be involved in national liberation struggles. The struggle must spread to establish economic, political and social structures in the liberated territories, based on federalist and libertarian organisations." -Alfredo Maria Bonanno
As this is published there come news reports that the Islamic State (ISIS) has been almost completely pushed out of the city of Kobane, party headquarters of Democratic Union Party (PYD) the Syrian affiliate party to the Group of Communities in Kurdistan (KCK), their co-president Saleh Muslim calling such developments the liberation of Kobane.[1] Hopefully as such progress in the region moves forward anarcho-syndicalists and social revolutionaries of all tendencies can start to objectively discuss the situation in West Kurdistan without the emotional reflex to a population under siege, facing a humanitarian disaster.
Anarcho-syndicalists should should hold no illusions about the Rojava Revolution. Since the turn of the millenium there have been reports of a libertarian municipalist turn in the Kurdish national liberation struggle inspired by Murray Bookchin. This change in politics has been lead by jailed founder and ideological leader Abdullah Öcalan of the Kurdish Workers Party (PKK) who discovered Bookchin while in prison. The PKK a former Maoist/Stalinist organization had turned to ethnic nationalism after the fall of the Soviet Union and discreditation of "really existing socialism" and so such a turn has been welcomed by many on the revolutionary left. However such processes of political transformation do not automatically translate to full adoption within a populace nevermind their official representation in leading parties.
After the start of the Syrian mass uprising and resultant civil war a power vacuum was created where the forces of Assad, tyrannical head of state in Syria, left Western Kurdistan, known as Rojava, to the Kurds. At first the Free Syrian Army (FSA) a so called moderate opposition force tied to Western Imperialism attacked the Kurdish forces but was soon repelled. In this open situation the PYD and it's armed militias the People's Protection Units (YPG) and Women's Protection Units (YPJ) decided to implement their now long held program of democratic autonomy and democratic confederalism on the ground.
As reported by the Kurdish Anarchist Forum (KAF) a group of pacifistic Kurdish anarchists in exile, as the Arab Spring took hold of Syria there was the development of a directly democratic grassroots movement created by everyday workers and people in Rojava called the Movement of the Democratic Society (Tev-Dem). It was this movement that with pushed for the implementation of "its plans and programs without further delay before the situation became worse." [2] This program was very extensive and it is worth quoting the KAF report at length:
"The Tev-Dem's programme was very inclusive and covered every single issue in society. Many people from the rank and file and from different backgrounds, including Kurdish, Arab, Muslim, Christian, Assyrian and Yazidis, have been involved. The first task was to establish a variety of groups, committees and communes on the streets in neighborhoods, villages, counties and small and big towns everywhere. The role of these groups was to become involved in all the issues facing society. Groups were set up to look at a number of issues including: women's, economic, environmental, education and health and care issues, support and solidarity, centers for the family martyrs, trade and business, diplomatic relations with foreign countries and many more. There are even groups established to reconcile disputes among different people or factions to try to avoid these disputes going to court unless these groups are incapable of resolving them.
These groups usually have their own meeting every week to talk about the problems people face where they live. They have their own representative in the main group in the villages or towns called the 'House of the People'.
They believed that the revolution must start from the bottom of society and not from the top. It must be a social, cultural and educational as well as political revolution. It must be against the state, power and authority. It must be people in the communities who have the final decision-making responsibilities. These are the four principles of the Movement of the Democracy Society (Tev-Dem)."
In other eras and places such a movement of democratic assemblies and committees at the base of society open to the people have been known collectively as workers' councils. If these developments are true the Tev-Dem was quite the achievement.
However such reports have included accounts of the creation of a constituent assembly like parliamentary legislative body called the Democratic Self-Rule Administration. As New Compass a Bookchinite publishing collective has reported:
"While in many areas the Kurdish population already has decades of experience with the Kurdish movement's concepts of women's liberation and social freedom, here too there are of course also divergences. Some wish to organize in classical parties rather than in councils.
This problem has been solved in Rojava through a dual structure. On one hand a parliament is chosen, to which free elections under international supervision are to take place as soon as possible. This parliament forms a parallel structure to the councils; it forms a transitional government, in which all political and social groups are represented, while the council system forms a kind of parallel parliament. The structuring and rules of this collaboration are at the moment under discussion."[3]
This among other questions lay bare the reality of the political situation in Rojava. It is unclear if the establishment of such a social democratic apparatus is a push by certain elements, or if this is part and parcel of Kurdish democratic confederalism. With anarchists the world over looking towards these developments as some libertarian light in the region, the question of the State and what form of governance is being established should continue to be watched closely. Historically the libertarian socialist program though has been for the development of genuine workers' councils and committees like those originally set up by the Tev-Dem, and there have been bitter fights against the establishment of parliamentary democratic state projects, with free votes, where participation is atomized, and power really held by executive powers above the people.
If there is one great hope for libertarian openings in the region it is the existence of the women's movements. Kurdish society like world society as a whole has historically been a deeply patriarchal society to the point that Öcalan from his own admission in 1992 is probably a rapist, with is especially worrying with the personality cult developed around him.[4] Though still tied to his teachings Kurdish women out of their own experience through the last few decades started to organize themselves autonomously. Groups like the Kurdish Free Women's Movement (KJB) and the Free Women's Units Star (YJA Star) call for world wide solidarity between women's movements against the patriarchal nation-state. As Dilar Dirik an activist close to YJA Star describes in her talk on forming a "Stateless State" as seen in a widely circulated video, the Kurdish women's movement through the experience of patriarchy in the Kurdish national liberation movement and Kurdish society at large has come to the conclusion that forming a new nation state should no longer be part of the Kurdish liberation project, as the nation state is an inherently patriarchal institution. However, though many anarchists would agree with this analysis and are surely nodding our heads in agreement, Dirik makes clear that the movement is not at the moment in favor of the general abolition of the State, but organizing democratic autonomy inspite of the State. As anarcho-syndicalists it is our duty and not a criticism to point out that the Syrian state, as well as the rest of the nation states encircling Rojava and which in the rest of Kurdistan exists will not merely disappear with the development of their project for regional democratic autonomy. The State must be actively fought and smashed, by the masses within every nation and it is the historical mission for all revolutionary internationalist liberatory forces.
In conclusion, the development of the social democratic representative democracy, the patriarchal and ethnic nationalist past of the PKK (PYD Saleh Muslim leader has hinted at needing a war to expel Arabs down the line[5]), the PYD's cooperation with and truce with the FSA and Islamists[6], the draft since July[7], the different elements seeking US/international community support are reason enough to be hesitant to put too much emphasis on the official leadership. The bright spots where they exist are with the resistance and self-activity of the masses and the women's movement. Social processes of transformation are complicated and often rife with internal conflicts and dynamics. The political program put forward might be decentralist with strong potentialities towards social democracy rather than anti-statist and social revolutionary. There is also still much research to be done about industrial and agricultural economy and organization. That shouldn't hold anarcho-syndicalists back from defending the self defense of the everyday masses and their own organizations of struggle in Rojava against ISIS, local states and western imperialism, but we should be careful not to jump to cheerleading for the official representation of the Kurdish movement through it's traditionally statist parties like PKK and PYD.
Long live the struggle of the toiling masses and free women!
With the oppressed against the oppressors, always!
[1] "The air-strikes were very very successful. In a short time, we will report to the world liberation of Kobane." -Saleh Muslim
[2] The experiment of West Kurdistan (Syrian Kurdistan) has proved that people can make changes. http://www.anarkismo.net/article/27301
[3] Democratic Autonomy in Rojava http://new-compass.net/articles/revolution-rojava
[4] In a book written by Öcalan in 1992 titled Cozumleme, Talimat ve Perspektifler (Analyses, Orders and Perspectives), he stated: "These girls mentioned. I don't know, I have relations with thousands of them. I don't care how anyone understands it. If I've gotten close with some of them, how should this have been? (…) On these subjects, they leave aside all the real measurements and find someone and gossip, say 'this was attempted to be done to me here' or 'this was done to me there'! These shameless women both want to give too much and then develop such things. Some of the people mentioned. Good grace! They say 'we need it so, it would be very good' and then this gossip is developed (…) I'm saying it openly again. This is the sort of warrior I am. I love girls a lot, I value them a lot. I love all of them. I try to turn every girl into a lover, in an unbelievable level, to the point of passion. I try to shape them from their physique to their soul, to their thoughts. I see it in myself to fulfill this task. I define myself openly. If you find me dangerous, don't get close!"
[5] PYD Leader Warns of War with Arab Settlers in Kurdish Areas http://rudaw.net/english/middleeast/syria/24112013
[6] Details about the development of an alliance between the PYD and the FSA and Islamist forces including a split from Syrian Al Queda.
[7] Conscription begins in the Kurdish region of Syria, evasion elsewhere
August 3rd, 1981: Approximately 13,000 air traffic controllers across the United States declare a strike through their union, the Professional Air Traffic Controllers' Organization (PATCO).
August 3rd, 1981: Approximately 13,000 air traffic controllers across the United States declare a strike through their union, the Professional Air Traffic Controllers' Organization (PATCO). Their strike echoed the usual demands of the labor movement: better wages, better working conditions, a shorter workweek, and ultimately a greater voice for workers at work. Indeed, the PATCO strike was hardly remarkable in any way. In our own decade, we have seen public-sector workers walk out several times over grievances basically identical to those of the PATCO workers, whether they were Chicago schoolteachers in 2012, New York City subway workers in 2014, or Philadelphia subway workers again in the same year.
As public employees, PATCO workers were in an unfortunate position where their employer was the same body that writes and enforces the law. The state is predictably hypocritical when it comes to dealing with its own employees: while it maintains a general policy of non-intervention in allowing private-sector workers to strike, it does not extend the same rights to its own employees – in 39 states, it is illegal for public-sector workers to strike. Clearly, the state sees no conflict of interests in an arrangement where the body responsible for administering workers' right to strike is also a body which employs workers.
Despite the rather routine pattern followed by the PATCO workers, then-President Reagan made it clear that his goal was to break the strike and crush the union. Speaking as both the employer and the state executive, Reagan ordered PATCO workers to return to work at the threat of termination, on the very same day they had walked out. With only 1,300 air traffic controllers heeding Reagan's warning, the strike lived on. On August 5th, Reagan summarily fired the remaining 11,500 workers and called in military air traffic controllers to replace them. Finally, on October 22nd, the government formally stripped PATCO of the right to legally represent workers as a labor union.
What the State Gives, It Can Take Away
To be clear, the government did not destroy PATCO. It did not raid its union halls, arrest its leaders, or murder its organizers. It merely stripped PATCO of the legal title of "union:" PATCO could no longer be considered the legal representative of workers. Very simply, in the eyes of the state, PATCO was no longer a union. As such, PATCO was only "destroyed" inasmuch as it relied on legal recognition for its existence. PATCO as a labor organization dissolved not from the result of state aggression, but due to its own over-reliance on state recognition.
Labor law has transformed the landscape of labor organizing. Before labor law was introduced, labor unions relied exclusively on the collective power of workers to stop working. To "organize" a plant was simply to gain a majority of workers to become union members. The union would then approach the employer and declare, "Either give us better working conditions, or we will stop working until you do." Labor unions were simply bodies created by workers to organize and coordinate their collective power. If the union was unable to initiate or enforce a work stoppage, it had no power at the bargaining table. The bargaining power of the union was thus totally dependent on the active participation of the workers.
Nowadays, most labor unions have abandoned the power of united workers for the power of the law. Today's organizing drive has little to do with organizing. Rather, the union initiates an election campaign in which they convince the workers to consent to the Union "representing"
them. The government will then hold an election and, if the Union wins a majority of the votes, the Union is certified to be the legal representative of those workers. In this arrangement, unions rarely depend on inspiring workers to act collectively. Indeed, they do not depend on the worker or his/her power at all: their legitimacy is derived from government recognition, not from workers identifying the union with their interests.
What happens if, like in the PATCO strike, the government takes away the Union's right to legally represent workers at the bargaining table? For a union that relies on the law's power rather than the workers', this means immediate destruction. But for a genuine union of workers, this would make little difference. Genuinely, a labor union is nothing more than a coalition of workers uniting to gain power in their workplace. Workers do not need state recognition to organize their collective ability to shut down production.
In an analogous situation, the lumber workers of the Industrial Workers of the World came to the same conclusion (in 1917, no less):
When workers sign an agreement not to strike, they sign away the only weapon they possess. Past experience has shown that employers only respect contracts so long as the workers have power to enforce them. When the workers have such power, contracts are unnecessary. When they lack power, contracts are useless, for the employers break them whenever it suits their purpose…
Where workers are organized enough to demand a union to be recognized as their legal representative, they do not need the law in the first place. Where workers are so disorganized to the point where they need legal recognition to force the employer to the bargaining table, they have no power at the bargaining table to begin with, as the only true power workers possess is their collective ability to stop or interfere with work.
By abandoning shopfloor-level mobilization of workers, we are surrendering the only power we as workers possess. Now that a union's bargaining power is tied to state recognition, the unions must obey the law to remain "legitimate" in the eyes of the government: if the state rules a strike illegal (as with PATCO), the Union must call it off or be decertified. The Union must further turn against its workers when they engage in collective activity which has been deemed illegal (sympathy strikes, boycotts and hot cargos, slow-downs).
Ironically, it was "illegal" labor action like that of the PATCO strike which established these laws in the first place.
Labor Law: Comfort at the Expense of Power
Labor laws were not passed out of benevolence or good-will on the part of the state. Nor was it strategic political lobbying or campaign funding by unions which created these laws (no matter how much AFL-CIO leaders would like you to believe otherwise). No – faced with an increasingly militant and powerful labor movement, the state was forced to create a system which reigned in unions' power. The laws that govern labor today, in every case, were introduced as emergency measure by business interests to halt the progress made by organized labor.
The National Labor Relations Act of 1935 (which is the foundational law for collective bargaining in the United States, and covers virtually all private-sector workers) is the most obvious example. 1934 saw a wave of militant work stoppages across the country: workers initiated a general strike in San Francisco while dockworkers up and down the west coast
collectively paralyzed shipping; commercial truck drivers shut down the city of Minneapolis (and 20,000 construction workers went on strike to support them), while factory workers in Ohio occupied their factories in a mass strike supported by leagues of unemployed workers.
In the summer of 1934 alone, 12 strikers were killed by police, the National Guard, and employer-hired militiamen. One police report from the Minneapolis Teamsters' Strike read plainly:
Police took direct aim at the picketers and fired to kill. [...] No weapons were in possession of the picketers.1
How did the state go from a policy of shooting strikers in 1934, to "guaranteeing" their right to strike in 1935? In one year, the police and military lined up behind the employers; a few months later, the state proclaimed that it cherished workers' right to strike, and would defend that right from the employers. The National Labor Relations Act and other laws like it disarmed the labor movement and turned organizing into a stage-managed reenactment of genuine labor organizing. Thus, the state came to support striking, so long as these strikes were conducted within the parameters of laws which greatly reduced whatever threat was posed by organized labor to employers or politicians. Rather than gain the trust and confidence of workers, unions merely had to collect signed authorization cards; rather than rely on a mass work stoppage to enforce a contract or to oppose an unjust firing, unions need only to turn to the "impartial" labor courts.
Labor law makes running a union much simpler for union executives, just as it makes dealing with unions much easier for employers and the state alike. Indeed, it would seem that labor law is beneficial for everyone except actual workers. Whereas labor law gives generously to employers, and concedes much (though conditionally) to unions, labor law has only curtailed the power of workers.
Though it may be tempting to make the case that the state will only respond with an iron fist to public-sector unions, the truth is that both public- and private-sector unions must deal with the price of state recognition. The state regularly breaks strikes in the private sector – after all, it was the state's iron-fisted response to private-sector strikes in 1934 which created these very laws! The trade-off between the comfort and security provided by the law, and the power it takes away from workers, is a price that all unions must grapple with – whether they are public or private, and whether they operate under the National Labor Relations Act, the Railway Labor Act, or any other labor law. Without state recognition, does the labor movement have the degree of workplace-level self-organization to survive? Indeed, if we took away state recognition altogether, would there be any real "labor movement" left?
1: 1934 Teamster Strike from the International Brotherhood of Teamsters' official website. http://teamster.org/about/teamster-history/1934
It's been clear that the Chinese and American economies have become closely intertwined since the end of the Cold War. Once arch-enemies, China is now a close trading partner with the United States, able even to influence …]]>
It's been clear that the Chinese and American economies have become closely intertwined since the end of the Cold War. Once arch-enemies, China is now a close trading partner with the United States, able even to influence the content of American motion pictures (re: the remake of "Red Dawn"). A vast distribution network, evidenced most dramatically in the dollar stores, has arisen primarily for cheap Chinese-made consumer goods. Impoverished Americans now buy cheap goods made by equally impoverished Chinese workers. The pauperization of the American working class by neo-liberal policies has meant massive profits for the exporters and importers of these cheap commodities.
American capitalists look with envy and admiration at the efficiency of Chinese capitalists. The Chinese entrepreneurs enjoy the complete support and protection of the Chinese state, the only requirement being a share of the loot. Any complaints from Chinese workers are dealt with swiftly and brutally by the forces of the police state. China once pretended to be a workers paradise, and is now a neo-liberal paradise in fact. The ruling elite must have realized at some point that there were limits to how much wealth they could accumulate operating a faux workers state, and decided to become the world's first totalitarian capitalist state instead.
Neoliberal forces in America have been moving toward an equivalent vision in the USA, also since the end of the Cold War. While Chinese oppressors use the rhetoric of glorious revolution to maintain loyalty, Americans have turned to patriotic allusions to our own revolution. Since both revolutions were devoid of any real liberatory content despite the rhetoric, this seems a perfect fit.
China still advertises itself as a workers state, though workers have no power and only the most limited of freedoms. The Chinese labor movement is completely controlled by the state through the official Communist Party and offers no resistance or aid to workers.
The USA still advertises itself as a representative democracy, though workers have no power and the system of two capitalist parties is quickly approaching the efficiency of a single faux workers party. The US labor movement, once a nominal voice for the interests of workers, first entered into open partnership with the capitalist class and then was discarded by both the capitalists and the vast majority of the working class; it is currently living on the fringes of the political system and dying a slow and painful death.
Both China and the United States have successfully exploited the most expansive expression of love of one's home and neighbors: "patriotism". They have twisted this useful tool to the service of convenient lies and hatred-on-demand.
The governors of China have only one use for the working people of China, and it is the same use as the American governors have for American workers: as producers of surplus profit which the rulers can share out among themselves. The fake egalitarianism of China has found a perfect partner in the fake equality of opportunity in the United States. They are a living exercise in perverted dialectics: a mock thesis and a mock anti-thesis moving ever closer to a truly horrific synthesis.]]>
The destruction of Detroit continues according to the plans of Michigan's Teapublican-controlled state government. Their racist intentions are obvious. They want to drive out the existing African American population, and replace it with one more to their …]]>
The destruction of Detroit continues according to the plans of Michigan's Teapublican-controlled state government. Their racist intentions are obvious. They want to drive out the existing African American population, and replace it with one more to their liking. The recent proposal by Governor Snyder to offer financial incentives to encourage high-tech workers to relocate to Detroit is only the most blatant, while cutting off WATER to thousands of current residents is certainly the most despicable. The parallel to the post-Katrina depopulation of New Orleans is brought to mind; New Orleans, that other major American city with a majority African American population.
Disaster capitalism is a euphemism for pillaging and looting, and it has hit its stride in Detroit. The $175 million in tax breaks given to Marathon Oil to expand their refinery was supposed to mean good jobs for local people. Instead, only 15 local people got any of the 200 jobs created by the expansion.
Meanwhile, just a few days after the announcement of Detroit's bankruptcy, governor Snyder announced that approximately $250 million in taxpayer money would be spent to help a billionaire build a new for-profit hockey arena in the city.
The attack on Detroit is an odious expression of the reassertion of white supremacy. It clearly presents the racist roots of the hard right turn of the Republicans under the so-called "Tea Party" banner. In the same way that the racist Republicans (and Democrats) of Louisiana were asking "why rebuild New Orleans?," the racists of Michigan are fighting any attempt to help Detroit that doesn't involve brutalizing and removing the current population.
The recent re-opening of Belle Isle Park by the emergency dictator further underscores their plans. Now policed by Michigan State Troopers (the governors private paramilitary force), their first action was to target any and all African American drivers entering the park for searches and tickets, the purpose being to deliver the message that they weren't welcome there.
The working people of Detroit are the people getting punished, and like the working class of Memphis or Miami, it is multi-racial. But as in both of those cities the people occupying the most precarious positions are usually not white, and are by overwhelming majority the direct subjects of white supremacy. The pro-capitalist African American middle class, committed as they are to the dull fantasy of boot-strap "entrepreneurialism" that has infected that class forever, has proven itself as corrupt and selfish as any other bourgeoisie. But the attack on the working class that began in earnest after 1980 is only the backdrop for what is happening in the Motor City.
Detroit in the 1950s was the engine that drove the automotive economic wave that seemed to lift ALL boats. Well-paying jobs were plentiful and available to everyone, whatever their race. The fact that, even in this prosperity, African Americans in Detroit were still treated like sub-citizens, denied equal access to housing, to credit and education, and were regularly abused by the Detroit police, is what fueled the outburst of rage that became the 1967 insurrection. This was not in the former Confederacy, it was in the heart of the industrial Midwest, serving as undeniable verification that the civil rights reforms being demanded in the Southern states could only raise African Americans to the level of "legal equality"; alone they would do nothing to destroy the structure of white supremacy that continues to rule, seriously challenged but still as powerful as it is hateful. And white supremacy sinks ALL boats, now as it did in the last century.
Two anonymous critics of my last Detroit article complained that I focused too much on white supremacy, implying that it would alienate white workers. I believe the low-waged white workers of Detroit understand what's happening to them better than that. There are surely many racists in Detroit, and even the headquarters of two nationwide white supremacist organizations, but these people are not worth appealing to, and make up only a tiny fraction of the white people in the Motor City. Most white people are well aware that their city is being targeted out of racist vengeance.
One anonymous critics even complained that there was "no syndicalist analysis at all" in the article. This is true, and I apologize. To satisfy the need for a syndicalist viewpoint on Detroit I give you the following quote from Georges Sorel in 1906:
"Before the working class could accept this dictatorship of incapacity, it must become as stupid as the middle class, and must lose all revolutionary energy, at the same time that its masters will have lost all capitalist energy. Such a future is not impossible; and a great deal of work is being done to stupefy the worker for this purpose." (from: Reflections on Violence)
We now live under a "dictatorship of incapacity". The non-response of the Michigan labor movement to this and other outrages would say that we are. Sorel was writing in reference to what a total disaster it would be if the social democrats ever achieved their goal of taking power via the ballot box. Are many workers now as "stupid as the middle class"? The limp propaganda of the labor movement and the electoral left has consistently termed the war on workers as an "attack on the middle class". And truly many workers, whatever their job or income, happily self-identify as "middle class". Sad to say, it would seem that many workers have been thoroughly stupefied.
As for capitalist creative energy, that is over and done. Contemporary capitalism is only concerned with extraction, not creation. I'm reminded of that hokey science fiction movie "Independence Day", concerning a race of aliens that roamed the universe destroying planets by stealing all their resources. These aliens represent degenerate capitalism in its most destructive form. When the president asks the alien if there can be peace between them, the alien says there can be no peace. Then the president asks: "What do you want us to do?" to which the alien replies: "Die". When we think of humanity, we can no longer include degenerate capitalists in that group; they are an alien species concerned only with its own prosperity and preservation.
Dan La Botz, a long-time labor activist who has considerable familiarity with Mexican affairs, marked the 20th anniversary of the Zapatista rebellion by penning a reflection on their legacy. His critique reflects his openness to electoral …]]>
Dan La Botz, a long-time labor activist who has considerable familiarity with Mexican affairs, marked the 20th anniversary of the Zapatista rebellion by penning a reflection on their legacy. His critique reflects his openness to electoral strategies for social change. La Botz is a member of Solidarity, one of the handful of Trotskyist-inspired groups of any visibility in the U.S. His views may be taken as broadly representative of a substantial chunk of the left, particularly Marxists.
In his assessment – "Twenty Years Since the Chiapas Rebellion: The Zapatistas, Their Politics, and Their Impact," January 13, 2014 – La Botz accuses the Zapatistas of "political abstentionism." The phrase requires some translation for those not steeped in left historical minutiae. Under this logic, political activity refers only to the electoral realm. One may engage in occupations, sit-ins, or demonstrations, while still being a political abstentionist.
La Botz holds the orthodox Marxist view that "elections by parties which are genuinely independent provide an opportunity for the left to propagandize for its ideas and to use elected positions to contribute to the organization of social movements." History furnishes few instances to support this supposition.
La Botz recounts how,
"When the 2000 elections approached, the EZLN announced that it would not support either of the two rightwing parties—the National Action Party (PAN) and the Institutional Revolutionary Party—nor would they support the leftwing Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) led by Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas. Cárdenas, who had been a presidential candidate in 1988 and 1994, remained enormously popular on the left. Many hoped that the Zapatistas would support him, though organizations of the revolutionary left were divided over the issue of whether to support Cárdenas or back some independent socialist candidate. The EZLN, however, rejected elections in general and Marcos excoriated Mexico's political parties of all stripes as compromised and corrupt."
For La Botz, the problem with this approach is that even illegitimate elections have consequences: "the election proved not to be irrelevant to the Zapatistas." This is a refrain particularly familiar in the U.S. during the Obama era.
The more consequential error for La Botz, came during the next presidential contest:
"In 2006 when the next presidential elections took place, Marcos and EZLN adopted a different approach. Once again, most of the Mexican left hoped that the EZLN would support the left candidate, Andrés Manuel López Obrador of the PRD, who was speaking out strongly against NAFTA, neoliberalism, and the corruption of the PRI and PAN. The EZLN, still rejecting both elections and the existing parties, had other plans. Marcos announced the organization of la Otra Campaña (the Other Campaign). Unlike other political parties, the EZLN would not put forward its own candidates and would not support the candidates of other parties, but would instead organize a campaign that would travel around the country speaking out against the Mexican government and against capitalism. ….
Meanwhile the PRD's left candidate López Obrador harangued crowds of up to a million, mostly working class and poor people, with his populist rhetoric. When it became clear that President Fox and the ruling PAN party were violating election law and preparing an enormous fraud, which in fact took place on election day in July, there arose an enormous protest movement in defense of a fair election and citizens' right to have their votes counted. Tens and perhaps hundreds of thousands in Mexico City joined the protests blocking the boulevards and occupying public plazas.
Several of the revolutionary left groups involved in the Other Campaign went off to join the election protests as a matter of principle; even if they hadn't liked the parties and candidates offered up in the election they felt the citizens had the right to vote and have their vote counted. Marcos and the EZLN, opposed on principle to elections, refused to participate in the defense-of-the-vote protests. So they withdrew and retired to Chiapas. The Zapatistas sectarian attitude toward that movement did enormous damage to their reputation among those in the broad left and those on the far left. They lost much of the moral authority that had clung to them since the 1994 uprising."
The refusal of the Zapatistas to ally with the corrupt political parties is to their credit, even if it did lose them prestige within the left, as La Botz claims.
However, this is not to say that one should totally ignore elections. Was the Freedom Summer of the Civil Rights movement – now, 50 years hence, sanctified – which attempted to register black voters and mount a challenge to the Democratic Party a waste of energy? Or the entirety of the suffragist movement? Clearly not. Yet it is important that independent social movements, while recognizing the real opportunities presented by voting within a system of elite-managed democracy, not lend their credibility to the legitimacy of the proceedings.
Should the Zapatistas have participated in the election fraud protests? Quite possibly. But the disillusionment La Botz sees on the left with the Zapatista attitude towards the whole episode reflects more poorly on the left and its sectarianism than on the EZLN. An unhealthy focus on electoral productions as a venue for improving society is not limited to the U.S.
Another target that comes in for criticism from La Botz is John Holloway. Holloway "suggested that, in part under the influence of indigenous ideas, the EZLN had rejected the old Marxist paradigm of the proletariat struggling for state power, putting on the agenda a new theory and practice of revolution that seemed to have more in common with anarchism: anyone from any social class could begin to make the revolution by asserting their dignity and forming a liberated community where they were. The Zapatistas seemed to be building such a communitarian alternative to capitalism in the remote communities in Chiapas."
There are two things to note immediately in this passage:
1) It is quite clear that Holloway's central thesis, as popularized, is ridiculous. One cannot simply ignore the national government and ultimately its power must be overthrown – it will not permit any other course of action as no government will willingly tolerate threats to its monopoly on the use of violence. Of course, the Zapatistas have simply been pragmatic in retaining their autonomy within Chiapas; if they have failed to spark a revolution, it was not because they did not desire to do so, as La Botz himself notes in his piece. However, those who would follow Holloway and make a virtue out of necessity are clearly barking up the wrong tree.
2) La Botz employs an amorphous concept of anarchism and thereby makes it synonymous with Holloway's ideas. This is quite unsupportable. Anarchism is a far richer ideology than La Botz's reference would imply. Yet this notion of anarchism remains lodged in the minds of many on the left; seemingly immovable and unresponsive to countervailing historical information.
La Botz wishes the EZLN had "help[ed] to organize—not to insist on controlling—a national social movement and a genuinely independent national political party." The first part of that admonition is good, though as discussed above, we can drop the last bit. I am not able to evaluate La Botz's charge of "sectarianism;" nor his accusation that they "cut themselves from other sections of the far left" within Mexico.
Certainly, internationally, the EZLN managed to engage the solidarity movements formed around the globe that were instrumental in providing the public prominence that helped to protect their autonomy from a full siege by the Mexican state.
However, this aspect of La Botz's criticism warrants greater attention. How have the Zapatista's fallen short in engaging with other Mexican social movements? La Botz recounts his observations from the late '90s:
"Living in Mexico in those years, I attended in Mexico City and in Tijuana meetings of the Zapatista Front for National Liberation (FZLN) which held a founding of the national organization in 1997. The Zapatistas, however, seemed to have no interest in a real front, that is, in a coalition of various left organizations and movements. EZLN leaders found difficult the give and take of coalition building in a country where there were scores of social movements, labor unions, and left political parties. The EZLN's insistence on dominating the supposed front that they had created meant that it never grew or became popular and never had an impact in Mexican society at large.
The EZLN also attempted at about the same time, with the aid of leftists in the labor movement, to organize a Zapatista workers' organization. The labor union activists I knew and with whom I spoke told me that the Zapatistas opposed participation in the existing labor unions, not only because they believed they were bureaucratic, but also in part because the unions held elections and the EZLN didn't believe in elections and voting. With an unwillingness to deal with the unions and their existing structures and with longstanding rank-and-file labor organizations, the Zapatista labor organization was stillborn. The Zapatistas' attempt to turn themselves into a political force in Mexican society failed utterly, and they withdrew again to the canyons of Chiapas."
Later, with the Other Campaign – an attempt to engage Mexican society, or at least the left – La Botz sees similar problems:
"The EZLN's Other Campaign was joined by several other left groups, from the Trotskyist Revolutionary Workers Party (PRT) to the followers of Albanian Enver Hoxa in the Communist Party Marxist-Leninist (CPML). The Campaign took place during a period of a number of dramatic social conflicts, most important the civil unrest in Sal Salvador Atenco in the State of Mexico. When police suppressed flower sellers and other street vendors, the Peoples Front for the Defense of the Land called upon the EZLN for support. Marcos and EZLN showed up bringing thousands of supporters. During the Other Campaign, Marcos and other speakers held moderately successful meetings and rallies around the country, sometimes speaking to thousands against the evils of capitalism. Everywhere they went, the CPML's giant portraits of Stalin hung in the background, casting doubt in some minds about the meaning of it all."
This sounds like a fair criticism. One might hazard a guess that independent trade unions and other social movements with some popular membership may have made for a better alliance than an outlandish Stalinist sect.
The success of the Zapatistas, though inspirational and far more impressive than anything the U.S. has mustered in recent memory, has certainly been limited – they have carved out autonomy but not stirred a national revolution. As La Botz summarizes:
"The Zapatistas failure in launching a revolution and the Mexican army's siege of the zone in which they operated forced them to retreat and fall back on the indigenous and other poor people in the canyons where they had their base. The Zapatistas now did more openly what they had been doing clandestinely for years, organizing their indigenous and mestizo supporters into communities that constituted a kind of liberated zone—though interspersed with other indigenous and mestizo communities that did not support them and surrounded by the army which sometimes harassed them."
Certainly, more than mere praise is appropriate in commemorating the Zapatistas. They deserve skeptical appraisals as well. Like La Botz, I have long been curious about the Caracoles and Juntas de Buen Gobierno that the EZLN has organized as a form of governance in territories under their control. And like him I have been frustrated by the failure to publicize the details of these apparent organs of self-governance. If they are truly models of democracy, then the mechanisms by which they operate and the principles they abide by are of universal interest and should be promoted broadly.
It is ironic that the famed Zapatista masks, donned, they claimed, to avoid creating distracting personality cults around leaders, nonetheless permitted their most public spokesperson to be elevated to celebrity status. True, he was no Hugo Chavez ("Chavez is the people!" proclaimed a poster I was once given). But, as La Botz notes, "Many were charmed by subcomandante Marcos' sardonic wit and great creativity both as a speaker and a writer." The fascination came despite, or perhaps because of, a rhetorical style that is offputtingly vague, poetic, and fantastical.
The critique La Botz has presented of the Zapatistas may be largely off the mark, but there is considerably need for a more substantial analysis by a less party-focused analyst. The 21st year of the Zapatistas public existence provides an excellent opportunity for such a look at this movement that still holds global fascination.]]>
"Government has no other end, but the preservation of property." –John Locke
The granting of corporations the status and protections usually reserved for individuals has hammered home a simple message: property is more important than …]]>
"Government has no other end, but the preservation of property." –John Locke
The granting of corporations the status and protections usually reserved for individuals has hammered home a simple message: property is more important than people. Nowhere has this been more apparent than in the repression of the radical ecology movement known as the "Green Scare"; in every prosecution for civil disobedience or sabotage, the "rights" of private property have consistently been demonstrated as superior to those of individual human protesters freedom to act on their beliefs.
The leveling of felony charges against protestors during the Occupy movement and in previous summit protests has been out of all proportion to the supposed crimes committed, making it clear that such egregious prosecution can only be understood as an act of intimidation.
In the recent trial of three women for blockading the Endridge Pipeline in Michigan, the judge, William Collette, announced in a pre-trial hearing:
""I am tired of people coming in here seeking publicity for themselves…I'm ready to try these cases. … I'm tired of it, and it's going to go to trial…I am unsympathetic to people who try to use this courtroom as some place to make a statement about your problems."
He was tired of protestors and civil disobedience. With such a judge, the outcome of the trial was a foregone conclusion.
"The trial of peaceful activists ended today with the jury finding Vicci Hamlin, Lisa Leggio, and Barb Carter guilty of both charges brought against them: trespassing and resisting and obstructing an officer. Supporters are deeply saddened that after deliberation for over 10 hours the verdict returned was guilty of all counts. The jury was split most of this time, returning to the courtroom several times for clarification. Sentencing was scheduled for March 5th and the defendants' bail was revoked and they were immediately taken into custody."
Along with ecological dissidents, animal rights activists have also been specifically targeted for suppression: "Bills that criminalize whistleblowing on farms have passed in over a dozen states so far. Often referred to as "Ag-Gag" bills, they prohibit taking pictures or filming on a farm without permission to prevent whistleblowers from exposing animal cruelty. Many of the bills are based on ALEC's model legislation, "The Animal and Ecological Terrorism Act." The ALEC model bill not only bans taking pictures or video on farms, but would also place violators on a "terrorist registry." (http://frackthemedia.com/surveillance-political-dissent-part-ii-criminalizing-dissent/)
The price of peaceful protest has been increased exponentially, or rather, the price of effectively expressing dissent has increased. Participation in ineffective expressions of dissent is still okay, such as participating in elections. With the electoral system owned completely by the capitalists, all electoral politics are ineffective politics.
Using the legal system as a stick to beat dissidents with isn't a new development of course. You would need to go no further back than the trials of the protesters of the Vietnam era to find people being prosecuted not for actual crimes, but for their opposition to the status quo. The thing that's hard to digest is that twenty years ago the majority of people would have readily agreed that such prosecutions are contrary to the spirit of free speech within an open society. Now, if people actually do think this way they seem content to be silent on the subject.]]>
I would like to thank everybody for coming today. I understand it's a public holiday today. So, thanks for coming. Now, …]]>
I would like to thank everybody for coming today. I understand it's a public holiday today. So, thanks for coming. Now, Black Flame is a big book, and taken as a whole the book is quite a complex one. So I'm going to focus on some of the main arguments in the book. Maybe in the discussion time, later, we can go into detail about some of the other issues, but for the talk, I'm just going to stress the main issues. I must also just mention that this is volume one, of two: there will be a second book. Volume one is Black Flame; volume two will be Global Fire.
So this is the foundation block for a bigger project, and it focuses on themes in the history of anarchism, and its offshoot, revolutionary or anarcho-syndicalism, which is anarchist trade unionism.
Please note that when I use the term "syndicalism" here I am using it in the English sense of specifically meaning revolutionary syndicalism and/ or anarcho-syndicalism, not in the Romance language sense of meaning unions in general. And when I just say "anarchism" I am usually including "syndicalism" because its a variant of anarchism.
One of the key issues that must be addressed for a book like this, a book which looks at anarchism and seeks to do so in a truly global and planetary way, rather than through a narrow focus on parts of Europe (which is how the history of anarchism is often done), is that you have to think very carefully how you define the subject.
The issue of where you draw the boundary around "anarchism" is very important. This is important to the analysis and the research; I am not talking about drawing an arbitrary boundary, just to be exclusive for its own sake.
The problem with a loose definition is that you do not have a clear subject of study; inclusion and exclusion becomes vague, arbitrary and often absurd. There is, in English, a well-known survey of anarchism by Peter Marshall. This is an important and insightful book. But it defines anarchism very loosely: basically to be anarchist is to be against "authority", especially the "authority" of the state. "Authority" is not really defined here, and evidently, as I will show, just being against the state, for whatever reason, by no means provides a reasonable basis to define something or someone as "anarchist."
Using this approach, we find Marshall including in his survey of anarchism the neo-liberal Margaret Thatcher, because she opposed state intervention, as well as the Marxist-Leninist Che Guevara, because Guevara was mildly critical of some of the bureaucratisation of the Castro regime. These were people who embraced the state, as such, but were against certain state forms.
And remember, Thatcher played a key role in breaking the British welfare state and trade unions, in driving down wages and closing industries, and in shifting income to the rich. For her, being against the state meant merely to be against the interventions of the state in the free market. She was perfectly happy to use the state to beat up protestors, strikers, to invade the Falklands. As for Guevara, we are talking here about a man who admired Joseph Stalin, who worked with the Russian dictatorship, who helped erect a one-party state with a secret police, in Cuba. So, yes, he was mildly critical of some elements of the Castro regime, but it's a regime that he, of course, helped construct and helped run, a regime he never repudiated.
But if we just define anarchism as being "against" the state, and use the notion of being "against" the state in a very loose and vague way (and here, it obviously does not even entail wanting the abolition of the state, but just some changes in the state), then it is logical to include Guevara and Thatcher.
But if, by the same token, we can logically have a study of anarchism, like that of Marshall on anarchism, that is comfortable including neo-liberals and Marxist-Leninists as part of the story anarchism, then we have a logical problem.
Specifically, if we define anarchism loosely, as mere anti-statism, or maybe as a vague commitment to "freedom" of "the individual," then it becomes very difficult to consistently distinguish it from other ideologies – not least, from neo-liberalism and Marxism-Leninism. And if we cannot distinguish anarchism from neo-liberalism and Marxism-Leninism, then it is pretty difficult to demonstrate that such a current as anarchism even exists.
Analytically, the problem goes even further: if we follow the line of argument that Marshall makes, where anarchism is effectively reduced to opposition to the state, then one must be consistent, not arbitrary.
If you define anarchism just as being against the state, there is no reason why Karl Marx or Joseph Stalin or Mao Tse Tung cannot be included, because they all said, quite explicitly, that the state must "wither away" in the future, as part of the final emancipation of humankind. Guevara may have made an appearance in Marshall's book, but there is no reason to exclude Stalin or Mao. That is simply arbitrary. If Guevara can fit, there is no reason Stalin and Mao cannot.
But to define anarchism in such a way that it can embrace Stalin or Mao seems to me highly problematic – not to add that this is an approach way that elides all sorts of crucial issues. For example, figures like Stalin and Mao were associated with massive repression, a one-party state and so on. I don't think that it is unreasonable to suggest that historic anarchism has been in favour of pluralism, debate and basic political and civil rights. But if we define it in a way that can include Stalin, then surely we cannot claim that historic anarchism has been in favour of pluralism, debate and basic political and civil rights.
Similarly, neo-liberals are sceptical of the state, and they believe the power of the state must be reduced as much as possible, whether it's in the economy as a whole, or in economic transactions between contracting individuals. So, if to be anarchist is just to be against the state, then there is no particular reason not to include, for instance, J. S. Mill, von Mises or von Hayek or Milton Friedman, or even General Pinochet in Chile, into the anarchist tradition, because they are anti-statist in the sense that they distrust state intervention, and view the free market as emancipatory, efficient and natural.
But to include Thatcher – even if we stop at Mill and the rest, although as I said, there is no reason to stop there – must mean that certain elements that may be reasonably suggested to be part of historic anarchism, like opposition to capitalism, wage systems, and private property, must also be thereby treated as irrelevant to, as inessential to, historic anarchism. So, anarchism here has become something compatible with one party states (through Stalin) and free markets (through Thatcher), and simultaneously with increased and reduced state intervention, and with one party states and multi-party states.
Throughout history, you'll find some people who are against the state in some way or other, but treating them all as "anarchists" leads us to straight into an analytical dead end.
If anarchism is just anti-statism, we can and must include as "anarchists" both Stalin and Pinochet. But if we can include Stalin and Pinochet, Marxist-Leninists and neo-liberals, dictators of left and right, and a whole host of others, then if there is anything evidently or specifically "anarchist" anywhere, it's not clear what it might be.
We can treat all of those people as "anarchists," but in this case, the very notion that something called "anarchism" even exists becomes nonsensical, because it becomes impossible to actually delineate anarchism from anything else. And once that is done, the very possibility or utility of actually studying and understanding anarchism in the first place is destroyed by the project of trying to do so.
But there is an alternative approach, which is argue that anarchism emerged, at a specific point in history, in the form of a new mass movement, that was evident to observers as a new movement – a revolutionary movement. Then we look at what that movement sought, and what its historical trajectory entailed. Then we can also start to understand the historical conditions – material, intellectual and social – in which this movement emerged, and so, explain its rise and fall and rise and fall, that is, its history as a social force, through social analysis. And we can also examine the evolution, that is, the history, of its ideas. And we can identify an anarchist lineage of movements, and an anarchist canon of writers.
That is, if we historicise anarchism, we can delineate it, and explain it and understand it.
If you use the argument that "anarchism" means pretty much anything that is against the state, then you will certainly find anarchists everywhere. Marshall is perfectly consistent when he says that the first anarchist was Adam, in the Garden of Eden, who didn't listen to God. The problem, analytically, is that if anarchism is universal in human history, then it cannot be explained by reference to changing social conditions. This would mean, in effect, that anarchism is in some way a natural part of humanity. But if that is the case, then there is a serious analytical problem: if anarchism is natural to people, then we cannot understand much of human history, which undoubtedly involves the ongoing expansion of oppression, exploitation, and of the power of an elite few over the working and poor majority.
Now here we must grapple with a problem, which is that all political movements, all movements to change the world, create around themselves a set of myths … and the anarchists have also made their own myths. The argument that anarchism is somehow a universal feature of human society is one that some key anarchists also made, in order to legitimise their embattled, controversial movement.
Making claims that anarchism is universal and steeped in the ages is a simple and easy way of deflecting claims that the movement is new, impossible or bizarre. But it's just not a valid claim, however politically useful it might seem to be.
We must distinguish between certain anarchist myths, from the actual history of anarchism. So, to study anarchism we have to study anarchism, but not necessarily always in the way that the anarchists themselves have presented themselves.
Allow me to draw an analogy. Nationalists usually develop a mythical history of their nation, presented as reaching back into deep antiquity, with an unchanging culture, a shared history, common food, dress, territory, language and so on. Very often, these claims are simply not true; we can recognise these as myths. Analysing these as myths is important, because it tells us something about how the nationalists view themselves, how their ideas are expressed and so on. But it would be fundamentally mistaken to take nationalist views of the nation's history literally, since these views are usually profoundly flawed, misleading and elective.
Likewise, it is important to study how anarchist ideologues like Piotr Kropotkin and Rudolph Rocker created (to give two examples), these mythical histories, and why they did so, and what effects these histories had on anarchism and anarchists.
Nationalists, we know, make myths, and we do not take these at face value, as self-evidently true. But we examine the myths.
But anarchists also made up myths, and these should also not be taken at face value. Rather we must examine the myths.
What gets included in the myths is very interesting, since it tells us something about the anarchists. For example, Kropotkin is quite explicit in suggesting that anarchism has deep roots in both Asia and European cultures, and in this sense, it is striking to note how deliberately he presents anarchism as universal, rejecting Eurocentrism. And Rocker stresses the links between the anarchists and the first modern working class movement, citing similarities between the Chartists in Britain in the 1840s, and visionary early labour leaders like Robert Owen: this shows his stress on trade unionism and on anarchism's links to other socialists.
But it would surely be a mistake to literally follow Kropotkin in claiming Lao Tze in ancient China, or Zeno in ancient Greece, was literally an anarchist, or to suggest, as Rocker almost does, that the Owenites were anarchists.
The point is that we must understand the movement that was making the myths, rather than take the myths the movement made as literally true. To understand anarchism, as a movement, we should understand what it says about itself, but we need to understand that there was a movement, which emerged, and which could then speak about itself, using various rhetorical strategies …
Let me stress here, and this is important, that not every anarchist has bought into these mythical histories, or that the anarchists even have one unified set of mythical histories.
There is a strong tradition in anarchism that was never involved in creating these mythical histories: Mikhail Bakunin, for example, never made such claims, while writers like Georges Fontenis were very critical of such myths. On the other hand, there were many myths and no real unified synthesis of them: different part of the movements had different myths. For example, the Korean anarchist Ha Ki Rak claimed that the Dong Hak peasant war of 1894 in Korea was in many respects identical to the anarchist 1936 Spanish Revolution.
Now, a last issue: if we define anarchism as anti-statism (or even as vaguely committed to "freedom") and then, logically enough, must include under the anarchist banner such radically different people as Thatcher, Guevara and Bakunin, and so on, then our discussion of anarchism as a set of ideas must be always be profoundly superficial because it trying to understand ideas that are totally different to each other – and that do not belong together in any way.
That is, we can only group these disparate figures if our discussions of anarchist theory are vague, and if we ignore the many points of deep divergence between these figures.
If, to put it another way, we claim that Thatcher, Guevara and Bakunin can all be seen as somehow part of one tradition, then we have to only examine what they share; and what this means is that we cannot take into account a wide range of issues on which they differ, such as capitalism and states, not to mention the very meaning of "freedom" and "anti-statism," not to mention even more complicated issues, of theory (for example, around social structure), of strategy (for example, over vanguardism and one-party rule) and tactics (even issues as key as how anarchists should act) …
Instead, we have to studiously vague, grasping for commonalities, and skirting over
With this sort of approach, the debates in the historical anarchist movement, the achievements of the movement, in theory and in praxis, and, indeed, the very basic theory and politics of the movement all get lost. We end up with banal discussions that deal vaguely and superficially with many issues, and that entirely ignore a great deal more issues …
So, a definition of anarchism as anti-statism, cannot really say who is in anarchism and who is outside of anarchism, cannot really say what anarchism was, and why it emerged, cannot really say what the anarchists did, and why, and why they succeeded or failed, and why, and cannot even say really, what the anarchists wanted and thought…
Again, the only way to solve this problem is to look history and see when the "problem" of anarchism as a subject emerges, and this means looking when an explicitly anarchist movement that is also recognised by its contemporaries as something new actually emerges. And to start there and to look at what that movement said and did.
Well, the historical record shows very clearly that a specific, self-defined, consciously anarchist movement only, and first, emerges in the First International around Mikhail Bakunin and the International Alliance of Socialist Democracy. That puts it in the period from 1864, around 150 years ago, and not in the Garden of Eden and not in the Ancient world.
This is not to say that there were not people who had ideas that anticipated that prefigured parts of anarchism or that there were not other libertarian currents, before this moment.
But it is to argue, to insist, that to understand what anarchism was and is, we have to use a historical approach. A historical approach points us to the First International. That locates, as a consequence, as rooted in the working class and socialist movement. That also places it firmly in a tradition of radical thought going back to the 1700s.
And if we look here, the First International, then a good place to start to grapple with its key ideas is to look at the writings of Bakunin, his theories, and also those of Piotr Kropotkin, the other great luminary of the movements.
Now, please let me stress that this approach, which stresses a historical approach, does not claim that these two, Bakunin and Kropotkin, had a perfect and comprehensive world view that was unchanging and that emerged perfectly formed. It does not claim that anything and everything that they said was a perfect revelation, against which all claims of truth have to be judged.
It's not saying anything like that that.
Rather, it's arguing, simply, that their ideas and writings are, by any reasonable measure, foundational and representative texts of the anarchist movement.
Certainly, the anarchist movement, which emerged in the First International, was influenced, very influenced indeed, by the libertarian socialism of P.J. Proudhon, who was writing from the late 1830s – and in particular, by his stress on self-management, decentralisation and anti-statism.
But influence does not mean something is identical. The anarchist current was very different to Proudhon because (as I will show in its strategy and its overall outlook) it engaged in some serious ruptures with Proudhon's approach.
It's not Proudhonism but it was influenced by it.
Similarly the new "anarchist" movement was influenced by Karl Marx, who was writing from the 1840s – and in particular, by the economic theories of Karl Marx, not his politics but his economics. It used Marxist economics, but in a critical way, in a way that that engaged and actually transcended and developed those economics, in a way that I would suggest even seems to solve some of the problems in Marxist economics (for example, it develops a better price theory, which takes into account the impact of power relations).
It's not Marxism but it is influenced by it. Influence is not identity.
And last, the anarchist ideas were only possible against the backdrop of massive ferment in radical thought, driven by massive class struggles, from the 1700s. They were part of the ferment of modern ideas of science and freedom, which we can give many labels, including that of "the Enlightenment."
Now, I'm assuming people here have an understanding of what anarchism is, but perhaps I should take a step back and clarify: if we look at it [anarchism] there've been three or four main fundamentals of the movement. These include opposition to relations of domination between human beings, including those expressed in the government (or the state) and those expressed in capitalism, but also including those expressed in all sorts of other ways among human beings (such as national oppression).
The liberals stress the importance of individual freedom and so forth, just like the Marxists stress the importance of abolishing capitalism, but it was anarchism that took these two parts, and put them together in a way that none of these others really managed.
So, anarchism is a movement that's against hierarchy and that's against exploitation, and its a movement that (in other words) links the struggle for individual freedom to the struggle against capitalism and the state … With this theoretical position it was able to develop a critique of a range of other forms of domination, for example imperialism and national oppression, and to also point out the dangers of opposing capitalism by using, for example, dictatorial states.
And, in terms of its strategy, the overall strategy that it emphasised was the need to build a movement from below of the popular classes (the broad working class and the peasantry), which would fight against all those inequities and create a new and better world. It aimed at revolution from below, the forcible occupation of the workplaces and the defeat of the state machinery in a conflict… this was quite different to Proudhon, who envisaged a slow process of cooperatives being built up, slowly replacing capitalism …
One of the key things in this regard, in regard to this revolutionary perspective and stress on class struggle, that I must just stress before moving on, is that what defined anarchism (contrary to, say, nationalism) was a thoroughgoing internationalism– a literal and principled internationalism, literally "Workers of the World Unite!" as a vision, as a practice, and as a way of thinking…
This means a class-based politics, which sees the popular classes worldwide as having more in common with each other no matter their country, than they can ever really have with the political and economic elites within their home countries …
Now, armed with a historicised definition and understanding of anarchism and its offshoot of revolutionary and anarcho-syndicalism, and an idea of its basic principles and its key figures, we can start to analyse anarchism globally, and look at it as a worldwide movement … something that has major implications for how we understand its history, its impact and its achievements.
In one way, we have "narrowed" the definition of anarchism but this very narrowing allows us to have a clearer focus, just like with a camera: you can see more, despite a tighter focus.
So, then, we can work in a systematic way to understand this anarchist movement, as it emerged and as it operated globally, and we can start to really understand the patterns in the movement. So if we are looking at the movement from the 1860s onwards, and we are taking a global view there are some important changes in our mindset that must arise, that must follow.
Now, one of the key things that arise, which I want to stress here, is that, very often when we think of the history of anarchism, we focus very much on Spain and on Spanish anarchism. And of course, the story of Spanish anarchism is central to the story of anarchism and syndicalism worldwide.
But when we look globally we find that the story of Spain is not so unique, we find that Spanish anarchism just one "province" in a in a worldwide anarchist "country." And, in fact, by some measures (for example if we look at the influence of anarchism in trade unions) we find movements elsewhere that are bigger than that of Spain.
So, this isn't to say Spain is not important but that Spain is part of a larger anarchist world and that Barcelona is just one of a whole chain of red-and-black cities
To Spain's great fiery rose of anarchism, Barcelona, we must add other red-and-black cities like Auckland, Buenos Aires, Chicago, Guangzhou, Glasgow, Havana, Mexico City, Montevideo, Santos, Tokyo … all cities with a major anarchist or syndicalist influence. And then the second tier red-and-black cities, with substantial movements (but not as large as those just mentioned), like Alexandria, Auckland, Johannesburg …
I could go on, I've given examples, but the point of this is that when you understand anarchism clearly and you take a global view, you start to see that this history needs to be brought back into many other histories: the histories of unions, peasant struggles, of civil rights and national liberation struggles were all histories that the anarchists and syndicalists shaped … and histories that cannot be understood adequately unless we look at how these histories intersect with anarchist and syndicalist history, globally.
Now, looking at international patterns is one way to understand and assimilate all of this information. So let us take one trend, let's look at one trend, which is the role of anarchists (including syndicalists) in founding and pioneering trade union movements
And let's start in the colonial and postcolonial world. Isabelo De Los Reyos, who founded the first trade union in the Philippines in 1902, was deeply influenced, in doing so, by the Spanish anarchists. In China it was the anarchists who formed the first modern trade unions from 1914 onwards, and in Guangzhou and Hunan the unions in China were led by anarchists far into the 1920s.
In South Africa the first trade union for black Africans was set up by revolutionary syndicalists in 1917. Similarly in Ireland the first industrial unions were led by people identified with the IWW (Industrial Workers of the World, formed in the USA in 1905) tradition of revolutionary syndicalism, in 1900. And these unions were successes, they won victories, they organised and educated people, and at times they grew explosively: in Ireland, by 1920, the revolutionary syndicalist-influenced unions had grown from 5,000 to 120,000.
And this points us to another major pattern in the history of the anarchist and syndicalist movement, which was its role in organising massive strikes and class struggles. I will illustrate this by referring here to some important strikes: Parma, Italy, in 1907; Paris, France, in 1910; Auckland, New Zealand, in 1913 …
If you look at this photo, if you look at the banner carried by these workers from the New Zealand Federation of Labour (known as the "Red Feds"), that slogan is straight from a poem wide;ly distributed (author unattributed) by the IWW, and which starts "We have fed you all for a thousand years, and you hail us [greet us] still unfed…" A poem that tries to explain how the working and poor people have built the world we have, but have been excluded from its benefits. And that text on the banner, which says, "If blood be the price of your cursed wealth, Good God, we have paid in full," is based on the poem. It means the wealth of the ruling class is paid for by the blood of the working class – and that the working class has paid heavily, has paid more than enough.
And to continue: in Mexico City, they led massive strikes in 1915 and 1916; in Johannesburg, South Africa, in 1918, syndicalists worked with black nationalists to try and organise a general strike; in Chicago, the United States, in 1919, syndicalists like William Foster played a leading role in a massive strike by steel workers. In Japan, too, the anarchists were very important in the trade unions, and published the first paper dealing specifically with labour, called "Labour Movement." Anarchist-led syndicalist unions in Portugal included a range of groups not normally thought of as union members, such as artists and tenants, and this enabled a leading role in actions such as a major tenants' strike against high rent in Lisbon in 1921.
To draw together this outline of the union role, and the role in workplace struggles, I want to list some countries where the anarchists or the syndicalists at one stage or another were the main force in the labour movement: Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Cuba, France, Mexico, the Netherlands, Peru, Portugal, and Uruguay. And of course Spain, although there they were always challenged by a large social democratic rival union, the UGT, that often matched them in numbers and influence. And other countries where they were large and influential, but not hegemonic, in labour, include Australia, Bolivia, Bulgaria, China, Ecuador, Egypt, El Salvador, Guatemala, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Mozambique, New Zealand, Paraguay, Poland, South Africa and the United States.
That's an outline covering just a few years, and a few places, just a narrow slice of history; that is not the whole history of the movement by any means, a movement that went back into the 1860s and continues today, and that has had many major organisations and achievements in that 150 year span of time. But more examples, I think, would not add much to the point and would take a lot more time …
Now, the point of this is simply to underline the popular imprint of the movement, to show that the movement of Bakunin and Kropotkin was important in workplaces, was important for millions of people, was able to win real material gains, whether in the form of higher wages or in the form of lower rents; also, that it was also a movement that organised in the neighbourhoods and territories of the working class and of the peasantry.
And this was not a movement that only dealt with issues like wages and rents … it was actively involved in political issues, in struggles around rights, in struggles over power. Let us take the IWW in Australia. This was an important current in the larger union movement, and opposed the prevailing trends of social democratic reformism and of overt white racism.
When Australia, as part of the British Empire, entered into the First World War in 1914 against the German bloc, the IWW stood firm to its internationalist, anti-militarist and anti-imperialist positions. It stood against the tide. The leadership of the IWW was tried for treason, and the organisation was made illegal. Some people paint the revolutionary and anarcho-syndicalist unions as solely focussed on wages and conditions; this is just not true, as this example surely illustrates.
You see, with that Australian case, just one example of the movement raising basic issues around war and the power of the state, and asking the simple questions: Whose war? In whose interests? And why should working class youth kill each other, for the benefit of elites that do not sacrifice or risk life or limb, yet gain from the bloodshed of others?
Now, another of the key features of the movement, especially in the period from the 1890s to the 1930s, was the role of networks of people, of newspapers, and of the linkages created by worker migrations.
A lot of the history of anarchism and syndicalism is written in the mode of national case studies, that is, for example, the history of Cuban anarchism, of Brazilian anarchism and so on. This is useful, but it also actually blinds us to an important process in the movement, and so, to an important part of its history.
There are many processes and connections which take place across state borders, and despite the existence of state borders, but these don't get captured by a national framework of analysis. And we need to look at these transnational processes and connections, so that we can understand what happens within specific countries better, and so that we can also examine processes that operate transnationally and that cannot be understood within national frameworks.
I'm just going to give one example, I can give others, but I'm just going to give one for now. Lala Har Dayal, a brilliant South Asian (that is, Indian) scholar, born in Delhi, won a scholarship to Oxford University in Britain. Increasingly politicised, he moved to India, then to France, Algeria and Martinique, before ending up in California in the United States in 1911. Associated increasingly with anarchist ideas, he joined the IWW and served as secretary of its San Francisco branch, and also set up a Bakunin Institute; he also had a job at Stanford University.
And meanwhile, always committed to Indian independence and radical social change, Dayal made contact with local South Asian communities, mainly Sikhs from the Punjab region of India, and in 1913 co-founded and played a central role in the radical Ghadar Party in California. "Ghadar" means "mutiny," referencing an uprising, a rebellion.
The Ghadar party platform, and ideas, had elements of anarchism, and elements of Indian nationalism mixed up… it developed as a global formation, building an international network that included Canada, Japan, parts of Africa (notably Kenya), Afghanistan and elsewhere. In India its key connections were in the Punjab and in 1915, the party launched an armed uprising in India against British rule. By this time Dayal had lost his job, and arrested in the United States, had fled into exile in Europe.
Now the 1915 rising was repressed and defeated, but in the years that follow the party rebuilt itself and remained active into the 1940s, not least in Kenya. And it retained throughout an anarchist imprint.
The point is that a story like this, is a global story, and it locates anarchism and syndicalism firmly in international migrations, transnational networks and worldwide movements. It is not easy to grasp a story like this through a national framework that divides the world into discrete movements in the United States, in India, in Kenya …
Another pattern that I am going to point to, as I start to bring this to a close, is the role of anarchists and syndicalists in moving in some cases from resistance to attempt to change society in a fundamental way, that is, to revolution.
What I have mentioned, as struggles so far, were about building mass movements and campaigns. These were about resistance and they were about fighting … but there were times when the popular classes, with and through the anarchists, actually took control of society and remade it … in this sense, they moved from being classes in an existing class system, to creators of a system without classes.
Some of these experiences are partial, and some far more thoroughgoing.
Let's start with some of the more limited attempts at recreating the world.
An early example was in Macedonia in 1903, in the struggle for independence from Turkey, which was then called the Ottoman empire. Anarchists were leading figures in this struggle and in 1903 a number of the key areas were taken over by militias in which anarchists were key figures, and there were attempts to create radical "communes." Then in Mexico 1911, Ricardo Flores Magon's movement, in Baja California, attempted to create a revolutionary anarchist territory.
Some struggles were perhaps more modest than these, yet still radical and still able to start making some real changes in society. In Ireland, during the Irish war of independence, syndicalist-influenced unions were involved in taking over workplaces and running them. One, a creamery, had the slogan "We make butter not profit."
There is also of course the Italian factory occupations movement of 1920, centred in the metal industry of Turin, and this was in a context where there was a powerful revolutionary syndicalist movement and an important anarchist influence at the working class base. Many of these workers were not, in fact, in the important Italian Syndicalist Union, then almost 1 million strong, but they were influenced by the large anarchist and syndicalist current of the time.
At least in the English-speaking world, much of the story about these events has been retroactively written around the figure of Antonio Gramsci, later a famous Marxist. He's presented as the intellectual leader of the movement. But this is simply not true. In fact Antonio Gramsci's newspaper, "New Order." was selling over 5,000 copies every two weeks, and this at a time that the anarchist Errico Malatesta's anarchist "New Humanity" was selling 50,000 a day. And the editor of the Gramsci paper was a follower of the anarchist Kropotkin, while the early Gramsci was far closer to anarchism and syndicalism than many Marxists of the time.
Now, I'm going to look at actual revolutions that anarchists made, because all these things I have looked at so far should be, I think, be seen more as rehearsals, as revolutionary rehearsals. In terms of anarchist revolutions, I am talking about events that in terms of scale, in terms of depth, in terms of the number of people involved, and in the amount of time that they lasted, were quite distinctive, were qualitatively different.
I am sure many here will have heard of the anarchist revolution associated with the forces of Nestor Makhno in the Ukraine from 1917-1921. This involved a territory of millions, a democratic and participatory system of councils and assemblies, for workers, peasants and soldiers, and various efforts at self-management. It was also, and this is worth remembering, deeply entangled with the struggle for independence for the Ukraine from Austria, Germany and Russia. And for the anarchists an independent Ukraine would have to be a revolutionary, anarchist, society.
Less well known was the revolution that took place on the Manchurian and Korean borderlands. In 1929, Korean anarchists including militants from the Korean Anarchist Federation and anarchists like Kim Jwa-Jim (who led a larger part of the Korean Independence Army) organised a revolutionary society, rather similar in key respects to that seen ten years earlier in the Ukraine. The parallels do not stop there either. This revolution was also deeply linked to an independence struggle, in this case against Japanese imperialism.
Why a "Korean" anarchist revolution that was not really in Korea? Well, Japanese colonialism in the Korean peninsula was very, very severe, so nearly three million Koreans were in exile in Manchuria; anyway, Manchuria was not quite a discrete territory either. It was claimed by Chinese, claimed by Koreans. And it was at the time an area largely outside the control of the Japanese empire and also largely outside of the control of Chinese warlords and Chinese authorities.
So, in this territory for three years, in Shinmin, anarchists made a revolution that was in many ways the same as uh as that we saw in Ukraine. This included institutions like collective production, libertarian education and a fairly free social order based on worker and peasant councils and so forth.
And of course, Spain from 1936-1939, was also very important indeed, incredibly radical.
The point is that the Spanish revolution was very important but wasn't the first or the only anarchist revolution. It was the third in a period of around twenty years. Certainly in much of the literature, including on the left, the impression is generally created of "Spanish exceptionalism": that is, that only in Spain was there a big anarchist and syndicalist movement and that only in Spain was there a revolution.
But in fact some of the questions faced by the Spanish anarchists (for example whether to join the government) had already been posed elsewhere. Indeed in Korea a section of anarchists joined the Korean government in exile, and after independence in 1945, a wing of the movement even ran in elections, and some anarchists had seats in government.
I see there is a question being asked about which of the "big three" revolutions should be seen as the biggest? According to me?
It depends what we use as a measurement. If we are talking about complete control of an area, that is, the full realisation of popular self-governance through councils and self-management and so on, then both Ukraine and Korea are "bigger" than Spain, where the revolutionary forces co-existed in the republican zone with a capitalist state…
But if we are talking of numbers of people involved, or the number of self-managed collectives, then it's probably Spain that was the biggest, in that there were more collectives than Korea, than Ukraine. Part of the difficulty for the movement in Ukraine and the movement in Korea was the situation of extreme warfare, and rapid shifts over territory controlled: for both of them this posed the difficulty of creating sustainable and stable structures. In contrast, for much of say, Catalonia, in Spain, the territory was defended and enemy incursions were slow and steady rather than rapid land seizures by the enemy, followed by rapid expulsions of the enemy by anarchist forces, as in Ukraine…
These points, in fact, help us understand better the reality of an anarchist revolution led by Koreans and Korean anarchists but largely outside of Korea itself. We need to bear in mind that for East Asia large-scale war does not start in 1939 with the Second World War but goes back to the 1920s. And the anarchist territory created from 1929-1931 was facing on the one side pressures from the Soviet Union, which was arming Korean Marxist communists (who waged incessant attacks on the zone), on the other, Chinese forces, and on the third, a very determined and powerful Japanese Imperial Army that was pushing through Korea and Manchuria and into China …
So the first part that I spoke about was on the issue of how we define anarchism, and on this issue, the need to be historical; the second part of my talk has stressed the need to think globally.
When this is done, it is important to identify the political debates within the anarchist and syndicalist movement. It's easy enough to say you're against capitalism or against domination or against the state, but what do you do tomorrow? What does this mean for concrete political activity, what does this mean in terms of strategy and tactics?
When we look historically, and when we look globally, at anarchism and syndicalism, its possible to identify two basic strategic approaches in anarchism.
The first one is insurrectionist anarchism. When we are using this term, we are talking about a wing of the movement which says that reforms are useless, that all small improvements are useless, that if wages go up then prices go up … and you're back where you started. That's an example of this sort of thinking.
And politically, strategically, this leads straight to the conclusion that instead of fighting for reforms and small improvements, that you must only fight for revolutions and do so right now ….that would be the idea.
Luigi Galleani, an Italian anarchist, was one of the key thinkers in this tradition, and he argued that anarchists must use the "tactics of corrosion," by which he meant that rather than supposedly "waste" time with things around wages and rents, the anarchists must attack the ruling class directly and relentlessly all the time. And do so without demands, without negotiations, with instead the perspective of an immediate revolutionary assault…
You could, of course, simply do this by making by telling people "now, you must make a revolution," that is, propaganda of the word. That is a "tactic of corrosion," in that it undermines the system and the ruling class. But in practice the insurrectionist anarchist approach, which cannot really immerse itself in movements like unions, in struggles for lower rents, in demands for better laws, ends up with one main tactic of "corrosion," a tactic that becomes a strategy. And this is "propaganda by the deed" in the form of direct armed action against the ruling class: assassinations, of "expropriations" of banks, of bombings.
This is "corrosion" since it supposedly weakens the ruling class, but how is it propaganda? Its propaganda, claim the insurrectionists, in that these actions will supposedly inspire and awaken the masses, showing them their enemies and showing them they can fight these enemies, and showing them how to fight these enemies. The idea is basically that these actions will provoke massive spontaneous rebellions with directly revolutionary purpose i.e. sudden uprisings for the creation of anarchist society.
And these insurrectionist anarchists were not idle speech makers, they were and are very committed to this politics. As a simple example, the first car bomb, many writers suggest, was done by a Galleanist who bombed Wall Street in 1920, a man called Mario Buda… And you get this movement not just around Galleani and his network, but also in Spain, Argentina, in Japan and elsewhere. In Japan Kanno Sugako, an anarchist woman militant, was executed in 1911 for being part of a plot to kill the Japanese emperor.
Now, for many people, at first, insurrectionist anarchism, emerging from the 1880s, was very appealing, and it was actually widely defended even by anarchists who were not insurrectionists. Even Kropotkin thought it a good idea for a while.
And the reputation for militant violence also attracted people to anarchism who were looking for alternatives, among them Chinese and Indian youth. And insurrectionist anarchists certainly managed to assassinate a great many heads of state.
But there were many problems with insurrectionist anarchism, and these ensured that most anarchists remained in what was always the main current in anarchism: mass anarchism, what we call mass anarchism.
Some of the problems with insurrectionist anarchism are obvious. First, it never came close to inspiring a revolution, and this partly because there was and is a certain passivity built into this model. People watch the armed attacks of the active insurrectionists, admire them, and identify with them. But they don't join them. They really watch them, they're spectators.
Secondly, as people like Malatesta noted, kings and emperors and presidents and big capitalists are easily replaced; the system is not really weakened by a few assassinations, and the basic problem of most people accepting the need for such rulers is not really tackled by the insurrectionist model. After all, Wall Street still operates, nearly a century after Buda's bomb; in fact it was operating the very next day after Buda's bomb, and hasn't stopped since.
And last, of course, insurrectionist anarchists provided a pretext for massive crackdowns on labour and the left: just to go back to Japan in 1911, 26 anarchists were executed for treason against the emperor and most of them had nothing to do with insurrectionism: Kōtoku Shūsui, the key figure in Japanese anarchism, and who promoted anarcho-syndicalism, was among the victims. The Red Scare repression in the United States in the late 1910s was directly precipitated by Galleanist and related bombings. And most victims of that repression were trade unionists and rights activists among ethnic and racial minorities, including in all these cases anarchists and syndicalists, but also the larger left, including the most moderate of socialists.
And of course anarchists are still tarred with this brush, of terrorists, bombers and killers, long after insurrectionists has ceased to be a significant force … this was made possible by the insurrectionists' actions, and continues to hinder anarchism even today.
The alternative approach, far more influential amongst the anarchists, and certainly an approach that demonstrably had a record of building up mass movements and a mass base for anarchism – of securing for anarchism many social "vectors" into the popular classes – was mass anarchism.
I am talking here about a type of anarchism which says that immediate struggles, for small improvements, whether around wages, prices, transport, rent, land, discrimination, oppression, civil rights are where it is possible to build a mass revolutionary anarchist movement.
The key task, from this perspective, is for anarchists to immerse themselves in these immediate struggles, and in the movements that are built around these struggles. And within these spaces to systematically link the daily struggles and concerns of the popular classes to the larger vision of the anarchists for radical social transformation.
How? It is possible to use these immediate struggles to build confidence; to clarify thinking, debate politics and win the battle of ideas for anarchism; and to build strong and participatory movements that directly lay the foundations for a new anarchist order.
So for example, winning a higher wage will give a worker more confidence that he or she can really make a difference, can really matter. It builds confidence and motivation, and also provides more time and space to think and fight. Someone who is not willing to stand up to their boss is not going to make a revolution that gets rid of all bosses. But in these immediate struggles themselves, people get opened to new ways of seeing the world, and open to the anarchist critique of domination and exploitation, and the anarchist explanation of where the problems come from and who the enemy is.
There is nothing automatic here: there is an opportunity to win people to anarchism, and to win respect for anarchism, and to show the validity of anarchist ideas and methods (especially the use of direct action, and participatory movements).
At the same time, large and stable organisations get formed, which lay a basis for further struggles and victories, such as trade unions. Here too the anarchists can play a key role in ensuring that such movements are open, democratic and participatory schools of bottom-up democracy, comradeship and equality.
The key thing, in short, is to use those immediate struggles that are happening today to start to lay the foundation of the future. It's what Black Flame describes as building a counter culture (that is, winning the battle of ideas among large numbers of people), and building a counter power (that is, building mass movements that can both challenge the ruling class in the day-to-day reality, and eventually also replace it entirely with alternative structures to run society).
The syndicalists, as an expression of mass anarchism, called this the revolutionary role of syndicalists unions: to fight battles today, to educate the masses, and to organise, through the unions themselves, the very basis of self-managing the factories and other workplaces, the structures that would occupy and run the workplace itself…
Simply put, for this perspective, you still need a revolution, but there are no shortcuts. To have a revolution, you need the masses to make it; and to get the masses, you need to go to the masses, and fight alongside them, but also point them to a better future and the methods and ideas needed to bring about that future.
It was sometime in late February, 2011 when we let the cat out of the bag. I was working the swing shift in the college's main cafeteria – "The Den" as it was known. It was starting to get …]]>
It was sometime in late February, 2011 when we let the cat out of the bag. I was working the swing shift in the college's main cafeteria – "The Den" as it was known. It was starting to get dark, and I had just clocked out for my lunchbreak and stepped outside onto the smoking dock. No sooner had I sat down on an overturned milkcrate, when my friend and co-worker Emilio came charging around the corner, panting, wide-eyed and grimacing.
"Mallory's telling everybody, fool!" he hissed at me through clenched teeth.
Like me, Emilio was a cook (though we sometimes joked our job description was "lunch lady"). We were also both on a union organizing committee for our kitchen. We'd been organizing "underground" for months, building the committee in secret. We weren't yet ready to go public.
I spasmed a double-take. "Are you fucking with me?"
"Nah, fool, she in there all like 'AARON wants to start a UNION!'" he wailed in his best old woman impression. "The fuck you tell her?"
"Nothing, dude!" I sputtered defensively. "I just asked if I could meet her after work to talk about something important, I didn't tell her what it was!"
"Shit. Shit. Shit," he mused, chewing his lip. He settled onto a milkcrate next to me and fell silent for a moment. "Okay, here's what you're gonna do," he said finally. "You get your ass back in there right now, and you tell her you gay."
"What? I'm not -" I started, but then I got it. "That's brilliant. Yeah, OK."
"Go, fool!"
Minutes later, I found Mallory and pulled her aside. I explained, in as sincere a tone as I could muster, that I couldn't stand living a lie any longer, that I desperately wanted to come out of the closet but just didn't know how, and that I'd asked to meet in private because I sought her sage wisdom for advice on how to embrace my sexuality. Mallory is a devout born-again Christian. I wouldn't necessarily say she went "into shock" per se, but all the blood certainly drained out of her face.
I left very pleased with myself. The secrecy of our insurgent labor conspiracy is secure, I thought. By any means necessary.
Three weeks later, all pretext of paranoid confidentiality was violently stripped away. The organizers called it The Blitz. The students – our customers – went away for spring break, and everyone but a tiny skeleton crew was laid off. We were all there at that night's committee meeting. There were 20 of us then – eleven from the Den; five from Tchotchke's, the other dining hall; two cashiers from the company-run convenience store; a server from the campus diner; and a cook from their late-night pizza outfit. Emilio, his older brother Charlie, and Cesar the pizza cook were already close friends of mine. Looking around the crowded room, we realized all but one of the company's departments was represented. A staff organizer began listing names in marker on a big sheet of paper on the wall – mapping out who each of us knew, or rather who was in our "structure," as they called it. There were almost 160 workers in total. After months (or for some of us, a year) of painstakingly recruiting only the most trustworthy social leaders, now we'd recruit everyone else, all at once. Each committee member was responsible for visiting the people in their structure, spreading the good news of the union drive, and organizing them to sign a petition for an election. My list had six names on it; all folks I knew pretty well, with whom I bantered and ate – and from whom I'd been hiding our clandestine organization for the six months I'd been on the committee. I had eight days to recruit them before spring break ended. "After that," a smiling organizer assured me, "the workers and the company will be at war."
There was one organizer, Eddie, who I got to know pretty well as an accomplice to house visits. One day, when I was asking about tactics we might use to punch back after the company's reaction, he quoted Mao Zedong to me: "The liberal revolutionary is preoccupied with combat. The true revolutionary is preoccupied with organization." I have no idea if Mao ever actually said this; I've looked and I can't find it. Still, for anyone waging the class struggle, I think the principle bears remembering: tactics are fleeting – they're only ever as strong as their underlying organization. It's more a war of position than a war of maneuver. As I began to learn in the weeks to come, direct action on the job is fundamentally about power.
I took my first stab at building the organization later that morning in a busy westside McDonald's. I had arranged to meet my co-worker Chaquon there. She wasn't comfortable meeting at her house; I think she got weirded out and suspicious when I asked to meet her privately for a reason I couldn't tell her. Chaquon worked next to me every day – mostly grilling chicken, cutting massive quantities of vegetables, and doing other prep for a chopped salad station. Then, during the lunch rush, we'd mix salads to order in a three-person assembly line. Our customer base was a very health-conscious student body, so naturally we were the busiest station in the cafeteria. Our manager often reminded us, in a manner much like that of a kindergarten teacher addressing errant children, that we were a "high-volume unit" and therefore must keep our line moving as fast as humanly possible. Sometimes we'd serve upwards of 1,000 kids in a single rush. Every day we'd pull on gloves, look down, and finally look up four hours later. It was exhausting and mind-numbing. On top of that, the dishwasher had been broken for five weeks – so we were tasked with the impossible feat of keeping the line moving while also washing out our own mixing bowls by hand after each order. And I had never once heard Chaquon complain.
I'd already heard plenty of horror stories about other people's first visits. I was prepared for the worst. From the sound of it, house visits were trials by fire. People slammed doors in your face; they cussed you out; they kicked you out of their houses; they freaked out and pulled knives on you. Being asked to organize and fight your employer is scary, and fear makes people do all kinds of things. Chaquon had a conservative disposition and a proper, almost saintly demeanor, and at work she seemed to identify with the company. She virtually oozed team spirit. Sitting and waiting for her in the McDonald's with Eddie, I was nervous about how someone like her might react.
People have a way of surprising you. Chaquon arrived, I introduced her to Eddie, and I told her we were forming a union. She was interested, and not hostile, but at first she replied with a noncommittal "oh, really?" I tried to guide the conversation through steps-of-organizing they'd taught us in committee meetings. The first, of course, is agitation – and according to the union, the key to that was simply sharing stories. "You know the dishwasher's been broken for more than a month now?" I started. "I asked Chef Ferdinand when they'd fix it – you know what he said? He was like 'we don't have the budget for that right now.'"
I didn't get to step two. That was all it took. For the next half hour, Chaquon launched into an impassioned rant about how every day brings a new humiliation, how we're treated like animals, how to the company we're nothing but pieces of equipment made of meat. It blew me away. This was poetry. I'd worked with this woman for a year, and I'd never seen her so much as roll her eyes at the chef. Suddenly, her fury at the company was animating an impromptu call to arms. We got some weird glances from other customers, and she didn't care in the least. It was as if by giving her permission to vent about our exploitation, we'd opened a floodgate that might never close again. Significantly, our actual working conditions and the broken dishwasher were secondary concerns to her – far more important was the lack of dignity and respect these things represented. She signed the petition and proudly took a union button on the spot, and she remained a staunch union partisan for the duration of the year-long conflict that was to come.
I think that's what I miss most about being in the midst of an organizing drive. More than the thrill of sticking it to the boss; more than the frantic catharsis of attacks and counterattacks; more, even, than the deepening of bonds that turns friends into comrades – it's the stuff you hear people say. Melodramatic stuff. Hollywood stuff. Declarations that under any other circumstance might be ridiculously corny, but when spoken with absolute conviction are anything but. Organizing is a transformative experience. It forces people to take sides, and consequently shows you who they really are. "This fight is forever," Emilio told me after we won recognition. "The minute you stop fighting is the minute you lose."
By the end of the blitz, we had collected signatures for more than 80 of our co-workers, in addition to our 20. I encountered a lot of different reactions in visits that week. Chaquon's instant fervor was the most positive. The other five ranged from guarded curiosity to frightened confusion to panicked hostility. The procedure was the same for everyone: listen closely; share stories; ask pointed questions; agitate people around their issues; "inoculate" them, or prepare them for retaliation ("I won't lie to you, the company might fire us. But they might fire us anyway.") Anyone who's been to an IWW Organizing 101 training will note the parallels with AEIOU. The last step was always the "push": issuing a specific personal challenge, daring someone to be brave enough to do something for the campaign. Eddie would often tell me "Organizing is the art of bringing out the best in people."
Eventually, I got five signatures: one from each person, with the exception of the last one. The last one was a crotchety older cook – let's call him "Archie Bunker" – who'd taken me under his wing since my first day. We were both transplants from east coast rustbelt cities, and we'd bonded over football and feeling out of place in this fake-ass west coast Babylon. One time, after a night of heavy drinking at a cook-out in his backyard, my mother called me. Realizing I was talking to my mom, Archie Bunker grabbed my phone away from me and bellowed, "I'm gonna look after your boy. I promise. I got his back."
It had been difficult to keep the campaign secret from him – not only were we close friends, but he was as agitated as they come. There were constant problems with his paychecks, either arriving late or coming up short. He agreed with me that the company was a bunch of shady motherfuckers, and payroll probably committed wage theft on purpose. He'd been working there for going on 10 years and scarcely made more than when he started. He hated all the chefs and practically every other manager. I was sure he'd be a shoe-in. Of everybody I knew in that kitchen, he was the one I was most eager to recruit. So when I confidently walked into his dining room, handed him a petition, and glibly said "Archie, we're forming a union. We're gonna fix that place. You down?" – I was in for a disappointment.
"What the fuck?!" he roared in my face. His wife started to say something conciliatory from behind him, but he cut her off with a snarl. "Man, I thought you were better than that! Get the fuck out of my house!" I did just that, more than a little shaken. He followed me onto his porch. There was a vein bulging in his forehead. "What put that shit in your head, man?"
"I don't know, Archie. Mostly stuff you told me," I lied. That just threw fuel on the fire. He made a fist and pulled his arm back like he was going to throw a punch. I flinched. He didn't swing. He was still fuming, obviously, but he looked me in the eye and spoke very softly.
"I promised your mama I was gonna look after you," he muttered. And then, confusingly, "I care about me, my wife, and my daughter. Get out of here and keep that racist shit away from me."
For this man to object to something because it was racist was, to say the least, rich. That was the one thing that had always made me uncomfortable about him. Sometimes he was so ridiculous it was almost funny – he'd once commented, philosophically, "Fidencio's a good dude. But they oughta ship him back to Mexico." Months later, he finally told me he'd worked in an auto-plant in his youth, and, because he was black, the UAW had refused to protect him. The experience had turned him against the labor movement for 40 years. I'm still not sure, but I think he called a manager and blew our cover that same night. People have a way of surprising you.
The world is a messy place. You can never take anyone's support for granted, no matter how strong a relationship you have with them. There are no shortcuts; no substitutes for the careful, maddeningly slow process of organizing. Rank-and-file militants ignore this truism at their peril.
Two days after we went back to work, we marched on the boss. It would be the first of seven such confrontational actions. The organizers euphemistically called it a "delegation," but having spent my teen years in various anarchist organizations, I knew the traditional name. Months later, we did some polite, conversational delegations to management – but when we went public, we clapped and chanted and didn't let the bastards talk back.
We had a committee meeting the night before to prepare. They showed us footage of other food service workers going public, some who worked for our employer in different shops. A few of the videos were of restrained delegations that ended in dialogue with a manager, but others showed workers chanting and doing "Si Se Puede" claps (the in-unison slow clap that originated in the farmworker struggles of the UFW). Some people were more apprehensive than others. In general the older folks were more hesitant, but that wasn't true across the board – one otherwise gentle baker in his 60's was especially itching for a fight. I thought he might have been radical politically, but his English and my Spanish were bad enough that our conversations never got that complex. To conclude the meeting, we did a sort of dress rehearsal. We each prepared a personal grievance we would tell Cruella, the general manager, and we decided the order we would speak in. The only fully scripted part belonged to Charlie – at the end, he would say "We are asking for a neutrality agreement to allow us to organize without retaliation. You have 36 hours to give us an answer." An organizer played the GM, and we crowded into her office and ran through the motions several times. After some discussion, we agreed ours would be an aggressive delegation – if the boss tried to interrupt us, we would chant to drown her out.
The big day also happened to be St Patrick's Day. I remember being vaguely put off that our glorious moment would have to take place against the backdrop of paper shamrocks and plastic green hats that littered the college, but now I like to think my Irish trade unionist ancestors would have approved. The plan was to clock out at 3:30pm, meet at the campus chapel, and march to Cruella's office from there. We would be accompanied by a priest, a rabbi, and a student-labor solidarity group (no, that's not the set up line for a joke). These outside allies were a crucial element of our strategy: we needed them to pressure the administration of the school, which could then pressure our employer, its subcontractor. An organizer and some of the committee had been meeting with a member of the student group for a couple months. The clergy were from a city-wide solidarity group. As far as I could tell, its sole purpose was to lend out religious figures to unions to give their campaigns an air of moral authority. I scoffed at the idea at the time. In retrospect, I think it worked like a charm. The company had recently had its contracts cancelled at other universities after another union tarnished its image. The threat of bad publicity was the best leverage we had.
It was 3:20pm. The lunch rush was over and I was covering my line with plastic wrap. My gaze darted back and forth across the cafeteria, scrutinizing the other committee members closing their stations. I searched their faces for some hint of resolve, or of cowardice, but found nothing. Is this thing really going to happen? I thought. Will anybody really come through? I could hear my own heartbeat. I was so tense that when somebody socked me in the shoulder from behind, I jumped and dropped a cutting board. Emilio chuckled.
"You scared, bitch?" he asked. He wasn't just talking about my skittishness.
I looked at the clock. It was 3:25. "Yeah, a little."
"Well just think about that last time Dante yelled at you," he said, suddenly very stern. Dante was a sadistic supervisor who rode my ass more than anyone else, and Emilio knew I hated him. I realized he was trying to agitate me. Then I realized it had worked. I was too pissed off to have doubts. "Come on," he said, motioning towards the timeclock. I silently chided myself for lacking faith in my fellow workers. We clocked out, hurriedly left the cafeteria, and, because I'm a total dork, I started humming the Spanish anarchist anthem A Las Barricadas. Contra el enemigo nos llama el deber.
We met in the campus chapel. I think 17 or maybe 18 of the committee were there. An organizer and a few students were waiting for us, one with a video camera. We held hands in silence, and then the two clergy led everyone in a prayer. The concluding line was something like "God bless the working men and women of all countries. The work of organizing together is holy work. Amen." We walked back up the hill into the Den, where the GM's office was. The organizer said she couldn't come inside with us. We entered from a back door and marched single file up a narrow staircase leading straight to the office door. The older baker started clapping and chanting first, and gradually everyone else joined in: "Que queremos? Justicia!" (most of the committee spoke Spanish as their first language). The kid with the camera was the first to try to go inside. He opened the door, and standing right in front of us was a squat, wide, fireplug of a man: Benito, the district manager. He was above Cruella in the company hierarchy, and we'd had no idea he was going to be there. He slammed the door shut, smacking the student and his camera. Everyone in front pushed against the door, forcing it back open and flooding into the office. We barely all fit. The secretary looked up from her computer, mouth agape. Cruella and Benito were literally backed up into a corner, both trying to shout over us. As rehearsed, we kept chanting until they quieted.
One by one, each of us stepped forward and said our piece. Workers went first, then students. Some people called out abusive managers by name; some said they'd been with the company for over 20 years and still made the same wage as new hires; some listed promises management had broken. One young line cook said "You know I respect you both," and, rolling up his sleeves to display burns on his arms, "but these have the company's name on them." When I spoke, I just talked about my station's workload and the damn broken dishwasher. Cruella got the message early on that this was our turn to talk, but Benito kept trying to butt in – which was great, because then we could chant at him again at point-blank range. That must have happened upwards of 10 times. Some of us, including a few macho, stoic men, were moved to tears.
After Charlie wrapped it up with the neutrality demand, we did a Si Se Puede union clap, and walked back out into the kitchen. Pandemonium ensued. Everybody was crowded around the door trying to listen in, and when we walked out and mingled with them there was an uproar that was audible from the dining area. Some people were ecstatic, some were terrified, but everyone was interested. I maneuvered my way out of the kitchen and walked up to Tuesday, a cashier I was friendly with, to tell her what had just happened. "You look like you floating!" she exclaimed.
When I came into work at 7am the next morning, there was already a technician there fixing the dishwasher. Chef Ferdinand was doing the dishes. Benito emerged from the office wearing an apron and crawled on his hands and knees to clean out the floor drains. More than one manager made a point of going around to each station and complimenting everyone's work. It was immensely satisfying to watch. Their desperation was palpable.
Sure enough, no less than 36 hours after D-day, the company signed a neutrality agreement. Pressure from the students had yielded pressure from the administration, and if they wanted to keep their contract with the school, they really had no choice (I suspect the fact that we had video of Benito slamming a door on a student might have helped encourage them, too). This meant it was now illegal for them to run an anti-union campaign. They'd ignore it and campaign against us anyway, but they had to be a little more covert about it, so I think it bought us a measure of breathing room. The union submitted our petitions to the labor board. At the next committee meeting, they told us the election was scheduled for the end of April. The managers kept trying to garner "no" votes, putting on happy faces and wooing us with newfound kindness. The supervisors did their dirty work: intimidation, surveillance, and just generally being cops. We continued to organize around issues. It felt good to finally be out in the open about it.
At first it baffled me that we'd won our first demand without firing a shot, so to speak. What kind of second-rate, off-brand class war was this? Why build power if not to wield it? With one possible exception during the contract fight later that year, we never did anything to inflict direct economic damage on the company. And yet we were winning concessions. How?
Saul Alinsky – certainly no revolutionary, but nonetheless a brilliant tactician – once wrote, "The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself." Capitalists the world over know this well. Fear greases the wheels of production everywhere; every wage worker is driven by perpetual negative reinforcement. Employers can coerce us without resorting to disciplinary action because we know they have power. Turnabout is fair play.
There was nothing special about our campaign. Compared to other organizing drives against the same company, it was utterly unremarkable. Some of those were bitter, protracted conflicts that culminated in strikes, boycotts, lockouts. Our militancy never exceeded a handful of rowdy delegations. Management's reaction never extended beyond a few bullshit layoffs and firings. We won our election, got some managers fired, kept agitating for a year throughout negotiations, and ended up with affordable healthcare and a reasonably good first contract. But our negotiator settled for a raise of $1.50 over three years: 20 cents less than the minimum offer we had agreed we'd accept. There was at least one private meeting between the union and the company that I know of. For all the organizers' efforts to involve and mobilize us, the union was still profoundly undemocratic: shop stewards were not elected, but appointed. Eventually, I got fired for being late. By then I didn't have the heart to fight for my job back.
Full of surprises as ever, Archie Bunker's had a change of heart since I've been gone. Last I heard he was on the committee. Woe to whichever manager is first in his line of fire.
I don't mean to hold up this campaign as a model for comrades to emulate. There was nothing revolutionary about our fight. It depended on the NLRB. It ended when we got a contract. It was extremely reliant on paid staff, who, while they may have performed admirably, did not equip workers with the skills that would make them obsolete. I wish I could say we bossnapped the GM, we occupied the dining halls, we pushed the level of struggle past its limit…but I can only write about what actually happened. My hope is that fellow workers can learn something from our modest achievements, and go on to accomplish more marvelous feats of rebellion.
If there's a moral to my story, it's this: all genuine organizing transforms people. Even the most restrained, mediated campaign takes intensive relational work to get off the ground – and once it has, can awaken workers to our own power. This should be even truer for struggles with revolutionary aspirations.]]>
By Lyudmila
Dec 1, 2013
1. Since its inception a year ago, and its initial public announcement …]]>
By Lyudmila
Dec 1, 2013
1. Since its inception a year ago, and its initial public announcement as an organization on International Women's Day, La Alzada has gone through many collective experiences, changes, and continual redefinition. Can you describe some decisive moments, experiences, and thoughts that have helped define La Alzada during this period?
Since the formation of La Alzada, we have gone through a process of constant growth and maturation, whose origin lies in two concerns: to insert feminism in the public space from a leftist and revolutionary perspective, as well as position issues such as sexism and patriarchy within organizations of a militant character. At the time in our definition as feminists and anarchists, we set out with the idea of recovering the historical memory of the women's liberation movement, building our own vision of what we mean by the feminist movement. Also, from a process of self-education, we found ourselves with a theoretical and practical challenge: to provide analytical content to anarcha-feminist practices.
If our first months were decisive in terms of design, formation, and definition, the months following our public appearance were even more dynamic. During this period there was a lot of interest from people nearby, from feminist academic spaces, asking us to share our viewpoint. The hallmark of La Alzada, unlike other feminist spaces, it was initially designed as an organization that conceives feminist work from concrete practice, from actual work with workers, students, urban women, etc. Besides the search in how to position the issue of feminism as an absolutely valid element when talking about the current situation, our organization is understood as a space for reflection and action, of concrete work within labor, community, and student spaces, both within secondary and post-secondary education.
Thus, throughout the course of the year, we have been able to take an anarcha-feminist position within the popular movement. From these discussions, we have managed to sketch an outlook in how patriarchy was embedded in Chilean society, while focusing on four areas in particular: education, work, health, and gendered violence. In addition, there are other important issues for our organization such as abortion, symbolic violence, sexism in education, etc. These issues have made us come together with other feminist's organizations, as was the case with the abortion marches and other events related to issues of body sovereignty and female sexuality. Chile, being a highly conservative country, possesses at its base a cultural tradition that impedes the real and open discussion needed to address these problems.
This is why a new outlook for the feminist movement in Chile is being redrawn. We seek to be part of this, while inserting a class understanding to the issues: the precariousness situation of women in the workplace and clandestine abortions that end with death (while those with greater resources can abort in private clinics or abroad). These are a few examples of feminist issues that must be read from a class perspective.
2. The group is currently discussing the principles, tactics, and strategies of the organization. I find it interesting that La Alzada decided to form and participate in actions first before "defining" itself. This appears to be a very organic way to create movement and build an organization. Since the purpose and objectives of the organization are now more intimately being discussed, what are some of the major points of discussion and why?
When we created La Alzada a year ago, we were really starting from zero, due to the lack of a real political-theoretical viewpoint of 'anarcha-feminism' in Chile. Because of this, everything needed to be built, even the most basic definitions. Instead of relying on abstract theory, we decided to build it out of liberatory practices themselves to see how to forge and develop our struggle against patriarchy from those practices.
In La Alzada, we believe that social and political discussions must be practiced simultaneously in order to advance the struggle against patriarchy, and against all power of domination in general. That's why it started to become urgent to develop a strategic guideline that will help us to combine these two objectives. In this sense, it was important to define the conditions in which we were immersed as an organization. Politics can be understood from multiple perspectives, however, it should always be understood within a particular place and time. A place and time that confines us within a framework of delimited action, requiring us to understand and plan what we should do and what we can do as an anarcha-feminist organization in Chile today. Because of this, it was necessary to define two issues: the objectives of our organization and our capacity to achieve those ends. We diagnosed the scope of action and set objectives that are constant, collaborative, horizontal, and long-term endeavor. Clarity and transparency within the project prevented a processes slowdown that occurs when discussions become repetitive.
Finally, it's important to note that that clarity and transparency is made possible when our actions are in conjunction with a feminist liberatory perspective—via work strategies such as horizontality, mutual aid, solidarity and sisterhood, self-governance, and direct democracy. From these basic precepts, we have sought to establish relations without domination or authoritarianism, where we practice sovereignty within and from our own bodies, our own circumstances, interests, perspectives, etc. Without these principles and constant practices, the clarity and transparency of our project would not be concretely possible.
3. Revolutionary and queer women involved in building social movements have always faced a push and pull in terms of where to invest their political time. Revolutionaries have explained gender work in the past as secondary to structural or political work. While there is more awareness of the importance of feminist and gender issues, people who are "double militants" often feel the pressure of double the work, double participation in meetings, and double the demonstrations in which to participate. Has this been discussed and/or acknowledged as a group or individually?
La Alzada was born by the very need to position feminism as a place of militant thought and action. Although there were anarchist organizations that defined themselves as anti-patriarchal, this did not translate into actual practice and politics. Therefore, within these organizations, the feminist struggle was seen as the younger sister of the larger anti-capitalist struggle. This binary has been characteristic of leftist organizations with revolutionary intent. Our work places gender
at our center, in which we can function from a place interpolating the contradictions arising from the economic system. Gender is intertwined with capitalism, making it necessary to understand it. For this reason, our work is directed towards a common criticism of patriarchy and capitalism as systems of domination. It is a contradiction to declare oneself a feminist and not fight against capitalism and vice versa. In La Alzada, being an anarcha-feminist organization, our intent is to be a part of both fights.
At any rate, we have activists who participate in student organizations, for example, whose time is respected but whose constant participation in our various activities is still demanded from them. Undoubtedly, being part of two organizations at once carries a toll. Many people put aside their personal projects, studies, and even family to meet the various commitments of militancy. La Alzada requires an even stronger and reliable commitment, to constantly think in two dimensions, from a daily and personal practice, to a transversal and real operation at the societal level. We aim to imprint feminism within society, and this requires a coordinated and holistic response in order to meet our objectives.
4. In the last interview done with the group in March 2013, you clearly indicate an intersectional approach with gender, sexuality, race, and class. How have you been able or intend to put into practice these theoretical and social issues as an organization? Why do you think it's necessary to create a theoretical cross between sexual dissidence and the class struggle?
We understand this intersectional (or multi-sectional) approach by how social and political relations are intertwined in the current conditions of domination, exploitation, and oppression we experience in Chile. It is important to understand these conditions within this totality, which affects different areas of our lives. It is in this framework that we position ourselves against all forms of domination and exploitation, and therefore see them as part of the same struggle. An example of this can be seen in how economic groups who have power exploit natural resources in order to enrich themselves, using up the lands of farmers and indigenous peoples.
Those same economic groups, backed by a conservative constitution acceded from the dictatorship along with a closed democracy, maintain a sector of society impoverished by low wage jobs and minimal job security. These [marginalized sectors] are removed from a quality education that allows for the tearing away of inequalities. [The capitalist] ally themselves with religious groups, while imposing laws that prevent us from having a choice over our bodies. We believe that disputes with powerful groups are not thematic, rather they respond to a common enemy, and that this fight positions us in a particular social class.
However, because we are an emerging organization we lack the forces to cover all these sectors. For now we have decided to base our work on contingencies and/or the relationships we have built with other organizations. These two instances gave us concrete opportunities to establish ourselves as a feminist organization, this in relation to the zenith of this year's abortion campaigns, as well as the relationships we've sustained with other organizations.
5. As someone who has participated in many marches for women's rights and pro-abortion rallies in the United States, I was struck to see the great participation of men in feminist marches in Chile in recent years. In the U.S. we have the argument that men should not participate because "it's not their space." What is the feeling here (personal or as an organization) about the presence of men within feminist organizations, rallies, and marches?
Within La Alzada we believe that both men and women must participate in the struggle against patriarchy in order to achieve a real social change. Within the organization we don't conceive of the issue separately between men and women, even if at first we were made up only of women. With the passage of time and in our collective formation, we confronted a social reality that is transversal for women as it is for men.
Patriarchy configures social relations for all society. Men are also subjected throughout their lives to a moral and social system that forces them to fulfill a specific role, that judges and isolates them if they step out of its bounds, encouraging them to subjugate women. Lately, there has been a growth in men's movements and organizations, particularly in Argentina, claiming and working on demasculinization. They seek, on par with feminism, to break the pattern of what is understood as masculine and to free themselves from the oppression of patriarchy exerted on them as males. Furthermore, patriarchy affects all of us (men and women) in imposing heteronormativity, restricting our right to make decisions concerning our bodies, in the field of sexuality as well as contraception and abortion. In this regard, the submission to heteronormativity is much greater in women, as it is the female body that has been subjected more deeply than men.
However, this greater degree of intervention toward the female body does not mean that the male body is not also involved in imposing heteronormative power structures. But even the subjugation of bodies and sexuality results in heteronormative regulation of our bodies, categorizing and defining them as male and female. One cannot escape from that dichotomy or definition, and ends up oppressing the self in order to be molded into one of these two definitions. Hence, the added importance of the sexual dissidence struggle. In order to break this patriarchal logic, it's necessary to include everyone in a process of transformation that must be built in a collective manner, so that men and women can emancipate themselves together, transforming social reality and the roles reproduced within it.
6. About a month ago, there was a demonstration in favor of abortion in which demonstrators entered the main Catholic Cathedral of Santiago. Since then, the cathedral has been well protected with bars and police. Do you think this action was important and why?
While La Alzada respects Christian beliefs represented in the church, we share the unease generated by this institution in the feminist world, given the continuing moral interference that the Catholic Church constantly unleashes in our country. We must remember that it is the Church that throughout history and along with colonialism forced its morals upon various Latin American communities, condemned homosexuality, and omitted information about the sexual abuse of children. If we put aside the personal actions of some priests who have dedicated their lives to workers and the community, the institution of the Church has contributed to the submission of popular groups through, as an example, the use of guilt.
The intervention in the Cathedral was a landmark in the feminist struggle and an added step in the growing discrediting of the Catholic Church. Although powerful groups criminalized this action, it gave visibility to the issue of abortion within Chilean society. Thus, when speaking of violence in protesting while entering a church, you have to first consider the moral, cultural, and structural violence exercised by the Church, along with the State, over our bodies and lives.
7. Since the formation of the group, what could be described as its greatest successes and difficulties? Do you still believe that an anarcha-feminist organization is necessary today in Chile?
The somewhat subjective, organizational, and programmatic reconstruction of the Chilean popular movement is where anarchists gradually have more and more to say. This is how La Alzada today frames itself, as a cohesive and strong organization, establishing itself both within Chilean feminist and popular movements—earning our space. Today, Melissa Sepulveda is a feminist who leads the most important social organization as president of the Federación de Estudiantes de una Universidad de Chile (FECH) [Student Federation of the University of Chile]. This is an example in how our positions and organizations have advanced.
Also, the major difficulties are in trying to install gender issues into existing mass organizations, within student organizations as well as labor unions. The development of gender issues within these movements that do not dedicate themselves entirely to gender has been minimal. This is something that we must continue to build by gradually opening up spaces for this to happen.
8. As the first anniversary of La Alzada approaches, what are some of its main aims? How do you further plan to insert yourselves into the groundwork?
La Alzada currently projects gaining greater influence within the popular movement, and has made the necessary adjustments to its organizational body and objectives. When March 8 arrives in a few months—Women's Day, the day our organization became public—it will be a time to take accounts and reflect on how we started and where we are going. At the same time, it will be an opportunity to set new goals and demonstrate that we are an important and relevant organization, not only to the anarchist movement, but also to the social and popular movement.
Indeed, in celebrating our one-year of existence, our organization has grown and matured, as much inwardly as outwardly. Recently, we decided to completely restructure our central body. As anarchists, we believe that a well-structured body and a good distribution of tasks allows for better horizontalism, as it prevents most of the tasks from becoming centralized amongst a few militants.
While some groups close to anarchist thought reject these forms of structured bodies. We believe that this is just the foundation of a horizontal division of tasks within an organization, provided it does not become hierarchical, everyone has about the same workload (or as much as one can commit), and that all political decisions are made in the open (plenary meeting, with all members).
This maturation process has led us to increasingly prioritize the social part of La Alzada, the part of feminist action, which from the beginning we wanted to develop. In working with labor, indigenous, and student organizations, we have used various methodologies from popular education and participatory techniques, such as Theatre of the Oppressed, in particular image-Theatre and forum-Theatre. These tools allows for the awareness of an oppressive condition by experiencing the problem through physical expression. They have contributed to our internal development that aided our discussions and reflections on strategy and tactics—either organic or theoretical. Over the last several month, we have worked with the domestic housekeepers' union. Our workshops with union members have allowed the enhancement of the public speaking abilities and physical expressions.
The new challenge now is to develop work in conjunction with workers and labor unions, as well as establishing more links with regional organizations, community groups, etc.
[Note: Since this interview, La Alzada actively participated in a port worker strike. They wrote a pamphlet titled "Feminist Solidarity with the Port Workers Conflict: Towards a Fighting, Working Class Syndicalism." Link: suu.com/laalzadaafl/docs/port_feminismo/8]]]>
The court has ruled, so the legalized looting of Detroit will go ahead as Governor Snyder has planned. The Emergency Manager has ordered the DIA to provide him with a list of the values of the many …]]>
The court has ruled, so the legalized looting of Detroit will go ahead as Governor Snyder has planned. The Emergency Manager has ordered the DIA to provide him with a list of the values of the many artworks in the institute. The city water works are also probably going to be sold, as well as city parks and anything else they can get a nickel for. We've heard they have even discussed selling all of the animals in the zoo.
But the people set-up by this ruling for the most egregious screwing are the city workers and retirees. The offer on the table is to pay retirees about.30 cents on the dollar. From the Detroit Free Press:
"But for a retiree counting on a modest annual pension of, say $30,000, the proposed cut would leave him or her with $4,800. Of all the once-proud city's creditors, including banks, vendors and bondholders, retired workers are the least able to take the hit."
"Orr already created a tsunami of controversy when he acknowledged late last month that billions of dollars worth of art that the city owns and has housed at the Detroit Institute of Arts are vulnerable to creditors. But he potentially could sell or privatize numerous other city assets, too, from public parks to operations of the city's Water and Sewerage Department to sundry treasures found in some of Detroit's other cultural institutions."
Baltimore, Providence, Chicago, all are in financial situations similar to that of Detroit, yet no one is even considering bankruptcy. What's different about Detroit? Detroit is in a state ruled by rightwing racist Teapublicans. The destruction of Detroit is a political project of these men, and their end goal is to strip the city of anything of value, to the point where they drive off the remaining population, and are then able to replace them with people more to their liking. In fact, the city that Detroit most resembles today is New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, when the same sort of shifty thieves and con artists did everything possible to drive off the population. The difference is between one catalyst being a storm, and the other being a storm of pure racism.
No one can appreciate the disaster unfolding in Detroit without addressing the fight against white supremacy and the struggle for social equality that provides its background. The assertion of white supremacy in Detroit is the underlying cause of the current economic and social destruction of the city.
The history of racial conflict in Detroit is traced by many politicians to the insurrection of 1967. In fact the events of 1967 were the crescendo of inter-racial warfare that had been burning hot and cold in Detroit since before World War One. The riot of 1863 was caused by racism and opposition to the military draft. But the 20th century began the real blood-letting. It was at this time that Detroit became a key destination for African-Americans leaving the Jim Crow south in the Great Migration.
In 1910 the black population of Detroit was 5741 people (1% of the total population).By 1920 that number had increased to 40,838. By 1930 that number had doubled, with African-American residents making up almost 8% of the city population. At the same time thousands of white southerners also migrated north to escape the endemic poverty of the rural south, as well as thousands of European immigrants fleeing the class system and oppression of the Old World.
In the 1920s the KKK made Detroit a stronghold (50% of the 40,000 members of the Michigan Klan lived in Detroit). In the 1930s, the white supremacist Black Legion made Detroit its headquarters. The increase in industrial production in the late 30s and early 1940s brought an additional influx of black Americans to Detroit, and likewise produced murderous race riots over housing and white workers objections to working with black workers on the assembly line. The 1943 riot lasted three days and resulted in 34 deaths, 25 of them African Americans, 17 of them killed by the police. 43 people died in the 1967 Detroit Insurrection, 33 of them African Americans, at least 26 killed by the police or the National Guard.
The struggle to maintain white supremacy in Detroit has been an ongoing project. White flight after the 1967 insurrection had a different character than similar events in other cities. Where whole neighborhoods in Chicago and other cities suffered from loss of economic investment, the entire city of Detroit was subjected to disinvestment. The primarily white suburbs were the obvious beneficiaries of white flight and the relocation of capital. Meanwhile the city of Detroit was left on its own to absorb the de-industrialization of the American economy. Disinvestment and capital fight inspired by racial hatred have made Detroit what it is today.]]>