The Arts of Living in Common

This talk by El Kilombo was given as part of an event at El Kilombo social center in Durham, NC, titled "Art and Revolution," held on Februrary 19, 2009 with guest speakers Fred Moten and Robin D.G. Kelley. The event was part of El Kilombo's spring 2009 speaker series: "Things Unseen: Building Autonomy in a Time of Crisis."

The Arts of Living in Common
by El Kilombo Intergaláctico

I want to expand on the presentation that was given by Kilombo at our last event by briefly proposing an additional four points which we feel directly relate to tonight’s topic and which we hope will resonate with what Robyn Kelly and Fred Moten have already said. I will make sure to be brief so that everyone has an opportunity to participate in the Q&A that will immediately follow:

1) The Way of Viewing Change From Above: Exceptionality and Appear(ing) in the Given Field of the Visible.

I wanted to start giving some context to the points below by mentioning that Kilombo lives in this neighborhood that you find yourself in tonight, a neighborhood that in Spanish is known as “El Hoyo,” which I think we can translate as “the hole in the ground.” In the process of starting to learn to live in this hole in the ground Kilombo has begun to see things upside down. That is from the bottom up. But in order to better explain this I will start from the top down. Given our starting point we have begun to delineate that in the world out there, in the world up there, there is a way of viewing the issue of change, even of revolution, that we feel expresses itself simultaneously in art and politics. This vision begins with a simple premise; all movements for change should be directed outward and upward—the goal of movements for change should be to grow beyond themselves so as to eventually have the strength to “take power” and occupy the existing political and cultural institutions of our society. Power is up there and we must somehow get at it. As a consequence of this obsession with that which exists above, this vision of change has two defining characteristics; the first is that an overwhelming amount of energy is placed on appearing in the given field of the visible. Thus, the activist, the artist, the academic, and the politician all share a thirst for the various mediums of appearance; the bright lights of the media, the walls of the hip gallery, the pages of that sexy journal publication, and the microphones of the next electoral process. The goal is to organize that one protest, that one opening, to write that one article or that one special speech, that will allow you to be seen and heard by those who have not seen and heard you, believing that through the expression of opposition to existing policy there can be a change in the correlations of forces that will eventually allow you entry into those institutions up above. As a correlate, this vision of change has a second characteristic; in order to believe that it is you or your group that should be seen and heard, you must also believe that you have something to show and say that others do not. In other words, the desire to appear is always accompanied by an implicit belief that you are exceptional; unlike everyone else whose words, semblance, or images might appear, the appearance of your words, semblance or images is “different.” Your appearance, unlike all the other appearances that have come before and that will follow you in those very mediums, will produce change. In sum, for this vision from above, power is up there, and only by being led by those with the exceptional skills to appear, what we used to call the vanguard or the avant-garde, can we get there, can we get to power and use it for change.

2) The Creative Class, As Our Local Vanguard

From this hole in the ground we see our neighborhood under assault. An assault that takes various forms; one obvious form is the constant harassment of Black, Latino and poor white residents by all types of police forces, a second more subtle but yet equally effective form of assault on the life of Durham's neighborhoods has been the deployment of the discourse of art and creativity to relegate the poor residents of our neighborhood and of the city of Durham as a whole to the realm of the unproductive, to the living dead. That is, before we were sold the idea that Durham was being "revitalized" (that it was being given an injection of life) it was necessary to convince us all that somewhere along the way it had died. Part and parcel of this project has been the discourse of the "creative class" as a vanguard of sorts, a discourse that insists that our neighborhoods become interesting only when an exceptional class of artists, students, academics, and high-tech knowledge workers more generally move into the area and place their images and semblances up for display. Of course these neighborhoods weren't suffering from a lack of creativity but from the processes of white flight and suburbanization that led to an enormous disinvestment from urban neighborhoods across the country. In order to further obscure this fact, the "revitalization" of Durham has been intimately tied not only to attempts to attract "the creative class," but also to portray Durham as a city friendly to the arts more generally. Our neighborhood and the surrounding neighborhoods have in particular been selected as the site for an "arts corridor," a series of arts galleries, and a newly constructed Center for the arts, all sponsored by the very people who through their investment practices force the removal of Durham's Black, Latino, and poor white populations. A fact that in itself makes one wonder whether this influx of the “creative class,” wasn’t in fact the influx of a “new middle class” intended to make Durham safe, not for creativity, but for real estate speculation.

3) The Way of Viewing Change from Below: Life in Common and The Reorganization of the Sensible.

This narrative from above that has been built around the “creative class” as the agent of change in Durham has to be seen as a rather obvious attempt to invert reality. Composed primarily of a population running from those cemeteries known as suburbs, the new residents of the city are attracted to the neighborhoods that they settle in exactly because of the forms of life nurtured by their poor Black, Latino and White neighbors. The very people portrayed in the narrative of the “creative class” as unproductive. That is, anyone who has spent time in this neighborhood knows that it is teaming with life. On any given day one can walk through this hole in the ground and find: a daily pick up soccer game in the park, a tamales sale, merchandise day on Trinity Ave. with the accompanying food and music, parking lot festivals, enormous block wide barbecues, what seems to be an infinite number of apartment complex wide quinceañeras and baptisms, outdoor movie nights, neighbors planting their own stock of corn and beans in their front yard, full fledged impromptu parades up and down Geer St., and of course the endless circulation of chisme (gossip) that takes place around the Paleta cart. The point I want to emphasize here is not that these neighborhoods are entertaining, but rather, that these outward signs of conviviality are under-girded by an invisible and yet immense network of social cooperation that is simply unimaginable in other parts of the city. The very condition of exclusion from the benefits—the property and the income, although not the process, of socialized production, forces these communities into a struggle for survival. In this struggle, and having limited access to outside goods and services, these neighborhoods begin to collectively produce goods and services for themselves, and to establish rules that guarantee the equitable distribution of those items (Sudhir Venkatesh and Mike Davis). That is, in sharp contrast to the vision of change up above that places such value on exceptionality, here below it is understood that an improvement in social conditions can take place only to the extent that one accepts that one’s condition is common. Quoting Eduardo, who played for us earlier tonight, the situation down here forces us to acknowledge that in order for conditions to change in this neighborhood “we have to build a life in common and understand that within that life each of us is common.” Thus, these invisible practices of cooperation become seeds that grow inward and downward, the very seeds that today comprise Kilombo. That is, they do not seek some future point where they might appear in the given field of the visible. Rather, the logic of these seeds, of these practices, of these exercises of power, is to reinforce themselves, to intensify the experience of the new social relations that are built within them so as to enact a reorganization of the senses, so as to produce new subjects with a radically different field of vision. That is, these seeds are not content to act merely in the given, rather they tend to reach beyond and directly work on the parameters of possibility. Yet, if one has doubts of the extent or capacity of these invisible forces to intervene in the real, ask yourself, who up above was not caught by total surprise at the enormity of the events of May 1, 2006? (The day that Kilombo first opened its doors)

4) The Art of Revolution Today

Today, in the world up above, there is endless chatter about a “financial crisis,” a crisis that has no doubt bruised the new middle class, and devastated poor Black and Latino communities. Up there we’re bombarded with questions of whether we should bailout the financial sector, nationalize the banks, or reconstruct “the real economy?” In short, in the world up above, the discussion remains limited to asking what forms of knowledge will help us to rebuild the corporate and institutional ladders that have just crumbled out from underneath our feet; to rebuild the system in which artists, academics, politicians...etc. can continue aspiring to heights of visibility and exceptionality. Down here where capitalism has never been experienced as anything but a crisis, talk of the “crisis of capitalism” hardly helps to clarify the situation. Rather, down here the persistence of things unseen demands a rather different discussion, one that directly raises the question of belief. Do we believe in this world? Do we believe that this world is always and forever giving birth to another? Do we still believe in the power of the invisible? If so, and if we’re ready to act on our belief then another option begins to take shape…we must turn the world upside down, and make those invisible forms of cooperation already in motion down here the very basis for a new life, a life where there will no longer be a down here and an up there. From our perspective, from this hole in the ground, it is only these practices that open to that which is beyond the given that will allow us as artists, activists, and academics to introduce collective action and innovation back into the very heart of art and politics. In other words, for Kilombo this inversion is the art of revolution today. Anything else will be more of the same.

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Reports from the 2nd NYC Anti-Displacement Encuentro

photo by Karen Yi

UPDATE July 2 '09: Check out Voices of the Other New York on ZNET.

UPDATE June 15 '09: The Indypendent just posted a slideshow of the Encuentro.

Below is the report from Movement for Justice in El Barrio on their Second Encuentro for Humanity and Against Displacement. I'll link to more reports on the Encuentro at this post as they come out...

(en español abajo)

To our sisters and brothers of The People’s Front in Defense of the Land:
To our Zapatista sisters and brothers:
To our compañer@s, adherents of the Other Campaign in Mexico:
To our compañer@s adherents of the Zezta Internazional:
To our compañer@s adherents of the International Campaign in Defense of El Barrio and our allies from all over the world:

From the Other New York and zapatista East Harlem, which is not for sale and does not forget the prisoners of Atenco, receive a greeting from the women, men, and children, those socially marginalized and globally excluded, who belong to The Other Campaign New York, Movement for Justice in El Barrio:

We are writing to share with you that this past Sunday, June 7th, 2009, we held here, in zapatista East Harlem known as El Barrio, the Second New York City Encuentro for Dignity and Against Displacement, with the participation of 38 organizations representing the resistance against neoliberalism in New York, Connecticut, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts. This second encuentro, just as the first one – held two years ago -, was inspired by the encuentros of the Zapatistas in Mexico from below and to the left, in order to get know each other and recognize one another in our struggles for a world where many worlds fit and against neoliberal exclusion.

As The People’s Front in Defense of the Land expressed in their message sent to us from Atenco for our Second Encuentro: “One fight unites us, the fight against capitalism. It does not matter where we find ourselves, in Harlem, Bombay, Buenos Aires, Zaragoza, Sidney, Cochabamba, Paris, Manchester, the fight against all forms of domination are one and the same.” This is what we confirmed in this encuentro, where in addition to exchanging experiences and informing each other about our forms of struggle, we had the opportunity to go into depth about who we are, where we are, the conditions we face, our forms of struggle, who is our enemy, and what is our dream. We arrived at the conclusion that, just as we did in the First Encuentro, the enemy of the organizations fighting displacement is the capitalist system of global exclusion, including the fact that this system has allies who operate at a local level as tools of the system.

As our compañero Filiberto expressed, representing Movement for Justice in El Barrio:

Eviction and displacement are happening all over the world. Which is why we have to organize so that united we can destroy this corrupt system in its entirety. Here in El Barrio we have realized that the Mayor Mike Bloomberg and the city council members: Melissa Mark-Viverito, Robert Jackson, and Inez Dickens do not represent the community and on the contrary support and implement aggressive plans for displacement. These politicians have approved projects that directly affect the entire community, they make the people think that they are for the development and progress of the community, but they do not publicize the bad side of their proposals… By keeping themselves in a position to fill their pockets with money, these politicians are capable of buying the people, as in the case of one of our compañeros whom Melissa Mark-Viverito offered money to in exchange for abandoning Movement and working with her, but he refused and did not sell out. But we know that certain organizations and groups do sell out and receive money from politicians and do not represent the community, also they do fake publicity stunts and promote themselves as being against displacement when everything is the contrary.

The distinct groups from New York that participated in our round table discussion echoed this reflection. Representatives from the Thomas Jefferson Houses Tenants Association, Coalition to Preserve Community, Harlem Tenants Council, Sunset Park Alliance of Neighbors, and the combative group CAAAV from Chinatown were there, amongst others, including the group Make the Road New York that presented us with a skit about their struggle, with songs that spoke about the deplorable housing conditions they face and the useless or false response from the landlords and politicians.

Through this exchange CAAAV informed us that, in Chinatown, urban rezoning plans in the last year have accelerated to the point that people must remove all of their belongings and evacuate their homes within three hours. Meanwhile, in Harlem, the criminalization of being young and African American is a tactic of war against the community in order to expel them, not just from Harlem but from the entire system, since the young people who are arrested and marked with criminal records will no loner have access to basic services, such as housing, and to essential human rights, such as education. “Our young people are being killed in our streets by the police, for the single fact of being youth,” expressed our compañeros.

With respect to the subject of education, which should be free, and the repression of youth, we want to share with our fellow student and youth members of The Other Campaign the reflections concerning the rezoning plans in the surrounding area of Columbia University, which is a private university. “They tell us that the university is good, that it cooperates with the community, and that the reurbanization plans for its surrounding areas are good for the community because they will bring a safe environment. But how? As soon as neighborhoods become residential zones, along with evicting the original community members through violent means, police arrive, sieges arrive, armed detectives arrive,” expressed our compañero from the Coalition to Preserve Community in the surrounding area of Columbia University, pointing out that this has to do with a system of global exclusion. Referring to a university that promotes excluding rebellious and informed students and educating only the elites of the United States, he stated, “It is not just the elites of this country but the elites of the whole world, so it will be those who are privileged who will be displacing poor people from communities.”

For their part, the representatives of that community told us the history of Central and West Harlem and of the streets that are beginning to change due to Mayor Bloomberg’s plans to rezone the area. A fundamental part of our dialogue referred to those allies of the system: elected public officials that, in their district, try to bribe the people, and the “community boards” that first tried to fool the people into believing that the displacement will only happen with their opinion. “Meanwhile, the contracts with the big construction companies were already signed a long time ago; the government officials and the members of these community boards already know the pact is made since before: they don’t fool us,” expressed the representing organizations.

Likewise, one of the aspects of our struggle in our very own community, El Barrio, consists of dealing with cosmetic organizations that, paid for by the local government, try to confuse the community by organizing activities that don’t represent the local community, with merely theatrical effects, without any social or economic repercussions, even falsely imitating symbols of the social struggle. While they do this, they promote the political agenda of public officials that approve and impose, from above, their plans of displacement. Nonetheless, we were pleased to see that, at this second encuentro, in addition to the organizations in favor of our same cause and that were with us two years ago, many more organizations joined us as well.

In the segment of our program that followed, we showed the New York City premiere of the video that we received about the struggle in New Orleans against neoliberal displacement. As very few know, at the end of last year, the City Council of New Orleans, made up by mostly white people, not only allowed an attack, but they themselves ridiculed in front of the cameras, the protesters, members of the African American community, victims of Hurricane Katrina whose homes were demolished in order to build luxury condos. They were reprimanded, beaten, sprayed with tear gas and arrested.

We expressed our solidarity with the people of New Orleans in resistance and we reiterated our struggle is not only local, but also national. And worldwide...

It extends from New York to New Orleans and from here to Atenco, Mexico. With great excitement we read the message from our sisters and brothers from Atenco and we concluded this dialogue by showing a video about the repression in Atenco. In the video we also showed the different protests that happened in distinct parts of the world during the day of solidarity with Atenco, including the takeover of the consulate in New York on May 4th by the members of Movement for Justice in El Barrio, who succeeded in entering the consulate, unfolding their signs once inside, marching, chanting loudly, demanding the liberation of the 12 political prisoners and handing out to the people in line copies of videos of the struggle of Atenco, which made the authorities shut down the Consulate.

The pain was shared, but also the solidarity and the joy of recognizing one another: of knowing that we are not alone. In closing, once again, we asked the children to break the neoliberal piñata. They broke it with force and, by doing so, found candy, just like candy are the fruits we hope to find in the end of this struggle for a world where many worlds fit, for peace and justice, dignified housing, health, and education for all, and for the liberty of political prisoners in Atenco, in Mexico, and throughout the world. Our heart is with all of you.

We are all Atenco!
Liberty for political prisoners!
Long live the Other Campaign!
And long live the Zapatista Army for National Liberation!
Fraternally:
Movement for Justice in El Barrio.The Other Campaign New York

---

A nuestr@s hermanas y hermanos del Frente de Pueblos en Defensa de la Tierra:
A nuestr@s hermanas y hermanos zapatistas:
A nuestr@s compañer@s, adherentes de La Otra Campaña en México.
A nuestr@s companer@s de la Zezta Internazional:
A nuestr@s companer@s adherentes a la Campaña Internacional en Defensa de El Barrio y nuestros aliados de todo el mundo:

Desde la Otra Nueva York y el Este del Harlem zapatista que no se vende y que no olvida a los presos de Atenco, reciban un saludo de las mujeres, hombres y niñ@s, los marginados sociales y excluidos globalmente, pertenecientes a La Otra Campaña Nueva York, Movimiento por Justicia del Barrio:

Les escribimos para compartir con ustedes que este domingo 7 de junio de 2009, realizamos aquí, en el Este del Harlem zapatista conocido como El Barrio, el Segundo Encuentro Nueva York por la Dignidad y Contra el Desplazamiento, con la participación de 38 organizaciones sociales representativas de la resistencia contra el neoliberalismo en Nueva York, Connecticut, Nueva Jersey, Pensilvania y Massachusetts. Este segundo encuentro, al igual que el primero -realizado hace dos años-, se inspiró en los encuentros realizados por l@s zapatistas en el México de abajo y a la izquierda, para conocernos y reconocernos en nuestras luchas por un mundo donde quepan muchos mundos y contra la exclusión neoliberal.

Como nos manifestó el Frente de Pueblos en Defensa de la Tierra en su mensaje enviado desde Atenco para nuestro Segundo Encuentro: “Una lucha nos une, la lucha contra el capitalismo. No importa desde donde nos encontremos, en Harlem, Bombay, Buenos Aires, Zaragoza, Sídney, Cochabamba, Paris, Manchester, la lucha contra las formas de dominación son las mismas”. Eso fue lo que corroboramos en este encuentro donde, además de intercambiar experiencias e informarnos sobre nuestras formas de lucha, tuvimos la oportunidad de profundizar sobre quiénes somos, dónde estamos, qué condiciones enfrentamos, cuáles son nuestras formas de lucha, quién es nuestro enemigo, y cuál es nuestro sueño. Llegamos a la conclusión de que, si bien tal como nos habíamos planteado en nuestro Primer Encuentro, el “enemigo” de las agrupaciones que luchan contra el desplazamiento es un sistema capitalista de exclusión global, también es verdad que ese sistema tiene aliados que operan a nivel local como herramientas de ese sistema.

Tal como expresó nuestro compañero Filiberto, en representación de Movimiento por Justicia del Barrio:

...El desalojo y el desplazamiento está pasando en todo el mundo. Es por ello que nos tenemos que organizar para que unidos podamos derrotar a todo este sistema corrupto: aquí, en El Barrio, nos hemos dado cuenta que el alcalde Mike Bloomberg y los concejales Melissa Mark-Viverito, Robert Jackson e Inez Dickens, no representan a la comunidad, y por el contrario, ellos respaldan e implementan planes agresivos de desalojo. Han aprobado proyectos que afectan de manera directa a toda la comunidad en general; ellos hacen pensar al pueblo que todo esto lo hacen para el desarrollo y progreso del pueblo, pero no anuncian el lado malo de sus propuestas... Ellos, por mantenerse en el puesto llenándose los bolsillos de dinero, son capaces de tratar de comprar al pueblo, como en el caso de uno de nuestros compañeros, al cual la concejal Melissa Mark-Viverito le ofreció dinero a cambio de que abandonara Movimiento y para que trabajara con ella, pero él se negó y no se vendió... Pero sabemos que ciertas organizaciones y grupos sí se venden y reciben dinero por parte de los funcionarios, y no representan a la comunidad; además, se hacen propaganda falsa y se promueven que están en contra del desalojo cuando es todo lo contrario.

Hicieron eco de esta reflexión las distintas agrupaciones de Nueva York que participaron en nuestra mesa redonda. Compartieron sus luchas representantes de la Asociación Inquilinaria Thomas Jefferson, de la Coalición para Preservar a la Comunidad, del Consejo de Inquilinos de Harlem, de la Alianza de Vecinos Sunset Park, y del combativo grupo CAAAV del Barrio Chino, entre otros, además de que el grupo Se Hace Camino en Nueva York nos presentó una obra de teatro sobre su lucha, con canciones que hablaban sobre las deplorables condiciones de vivienda que enfrentan y la nula o falsa respuesta de los propietarios y politicos.

Mediante este intercambio nos informamos de que, en Chinatown (Barrio Chino), los planes de rezonificación urbana en el último año se han acelerado a tal grado que a la gente se le obliga a sacar todas sus pertenencias y evacuar sus casas en un plazo de tres horas. Mientras tanto, en Harlem, la criminalización por el hecho de ser joven y afroestadounidense es una táctica de guerra contra la comunidad para expulsarla, no sólo de Harlem sino del sistema entero, pues los jóvenes a los se les arresta y se les marca con antecedentes penales después ya no tendrán acceso a los servicios básicos, como es la vivienda, y a los derechos humanos elementales, como lo es el de la educación. “Nuestros jóvenes están siendo asesinados en nuestras calles por la policía, por el sólo hecho de ser jóvenes”, expresaron nuestros compañeros participantes.

Respecto al tema de la educación, que debería de ser gratuita, y de la represión a los jóvenes, queremos compartir con nuestros compañeros adherentes de La Otra Campaña jóvenes y estudiantes las reflexiones respecto a los planes de rezonificación en los alrededores de la Universidad de Columbia, que es una universidad privada. “Se nos dice que la universidad es buena, que coopera con la comunidad, y que los planes de reurbanización de sus alrededores son buenos para la comunidad porque van a traer un ambiente seguro. ¿Pero cuál? En cuanto los barrios se convierten en zonas residenciales, además de desalojar a los antiguos pobladores con métodos violentos, llegan los policías, llegan los cercos, llegan los detectives armados”, nos manifestó el compañero representante de la Coalición para Preservar a la Comunidad en los alrededores de la universidad de Columbia, señalando que se trata de un sistema de exclusion mundial. Al referirse a una universidad que se propone excluir a sus estudiantes rebeldes e informados y educar sólo a las élites de Estados Unidos, señaló: “No sólo son las élites del país sino las élites de todo el mundo, entonces serán los privilegiados quienes estarán desplazando a la gente pobre de los barrios”.

Por su parte, los compañeros representantes de ese pueblo nos contaron de la historia del Centro y Oeste de Harlem y de las calles que están empezando a cambiar debido a los planes del alcalde Bloomberg de rezonificarlo. Una parte fundamental de nuestro debate se refirió a los aliados del sistema: los funcionarios públicos electos que, en su localidad, tratan de sobornar a los pobladores, y las “juntas comunitarias municipales” que incluso en un principio engañaron a la gente haciéndole creer que el desalojo se hará pidiéndole su
opinión.

“Mientras tanto, los contratos con las grandes constructoras ya están firmados desde hace mucho; los gobernantes y los miembros de las juntas ya saben que el pacto está hecho desde antes: no nos engañemos”, expresaron los representantes.

Asimismo, uno de los aspectos de nuestra lucha en nuestra propia comunidad de El Barrio consiste en enfrentar agrupaciones cosméticas que, pagadas por el gobierno local, tratan de confundir a la población realizando actos que no tienen una representatividad de la comunidad local, con efectos meramente teatrales, sin ninguna repercusión social ni económica e incluso, imitando falsamente los emblemas de la lucha social. Mientras hacen esto, ellos promueven la agenda politica de los funcionarios publicos que aprueban y imponen, desde arriba, sus planes de desplazamiento.

Sin embargo, nos dio gusto ver que, a este segundo encuentro, además de la mayoría de las organizaciones partidarias de nuestra misma causa y que estuvieron con nosotros hace dos años, se sumaron otras muchas también independientes.

En el siguiente segmento de nuestro programa, proyectamos el estreno en Nueva York del video que recibimos sobre la lucha en Nueva Orleáns contra el desplazamiento neoliberal. Como muy pocos saben, a finales del año pasado, el Concejo Municipal de Nueva Orleáns, formado en su gran mayoria por gente blanca, no sólo permitió un ataque, sino que se burló ante las cámaras, de los manifestantes, pobladores de raza negra, damnificados del huracán Katrina a quienes ahora les demolieron sus viviendas para construir zonas de lujo. Éstos fueron reprimidos, golpeados, rociados con gases lacrimógenos y arrestados. Expresamos nuestra solidaridad para el pueblo de Nueva Orleáns en resistencia y reiteramos que nuestra lucha no sólo es local, sino nacional. Y mundial...

Se extiende de Nueva York a Nueva Orleáns y desde aquí a Atenco, México. Con gran emoción leímos el mensaje de nuestros hermanos de Atenco y concluimos ese debate con la proyección de un video sobre la represión en Atenco. En él, mostramos también las diferentes protestas que ocurrieron en distintas partes del mundo durante la jornada de solidaridad con Atenco, incluyendo la toma del consulado de México en Nueva York efectuada el 4 de Mayo por los compañeros de Movimiento por Justicia del Barrio, quienes lograron entrar al consulado, desdoblar sus pancartas una vez dentro, marchar, gritar consignas, exigir la liberacion de los 12 presos politicos y repartir a la gente formada copias de los videos de la lucha de Atenco, lo que hizo que las autoridades cerraran el Consulado.

Se compartió el dolor, pero también la solidaridad y la alegría de reconocernos: de saber que no estamos solos. Para concluir, una vez más pedimos a los niños asistentes que rompieran la piñata del neoliberalismo. La rompieron con fuerza y, al hacerlo, encontraron dulces, como dulces son los frutos que esperamos encontrar al final de esta lucha por un mundo donde quepan muchos mundos, por la paz con justicia, vivienda digna, salud y educación para todos, y por la libertad a los presos políticos de Atenco, de México y del mundo. Nuestro corazón está con ustedes.

¡Todos somos Atenco!
¡Libertad a los presos políticos!
¡Viva La Otra Campaña!
¡Y que viva el Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional!
Fraternalmente:
Movimiento por Justicia del Barrio. La Otra Campaña Nueva York

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Invite to 2nd NYC Anti-Displacement Encuentro

Español abajo

The rebels search each other out. They walk towards one another, breaking down fences, they find each other. The rebels begin to recognize themselves, to know themselves to be equal and different. They continue walking as it is now necessary to walk, that is to say, resisting....--words of the Zapatistas at the First Intercontinental Encuentro for Humanity and Against Neoliberalism

An invitation to: Members and families of organizations fighting against displacement in their communities across NYC

From: Movement for Justice in El Barrio

Second NYC Encuentro for Dignity and Against Displacement

An Encuentro is a space for people to come together, it is a gathering. An Encuentro is not a meeting, a panel or a conference, it is a way of sharing developed by the Zapatistas as another form of doing politics: from below and to the left. It is a place where we can all speak, we will all listen, and we can all learn. It is a place where we can share the many different struggles that make us one.

EL BARRIO, NYC

SUNDAY, JUNE 7th, 4:30 PM

On Sunday, June 7th, Movement for Justice in El Barrio invites members and families of organizations fighting against neoliberal displacement for an evening of sharing, dialogue and food to learn from one another’s resistance throughout the city.

In our first Encuentro, the voices of groups resisting neoliberal displacement across the city echoed together as we learned from each other’s rage and each other’s dreams.

In this Encuentro, we would like to hear once again from people impacted by the devastating effects of displacement who are fighting back in their own communities, people who will not be bought by and are not dependent on politicians, political parties, or government agencies but look to the power of the people for strength to resist.

Please RSVP by Tuesday, May 26th

We are Movement for Justice in El Barrio. We are a group of humble and simple people who fight for justice and for humanity. Movement for Justice in El Barrio is fighting against gentrification in El Barrio, a process that is better understood by we who are affected by it as the displacement of families from their homes for being poor, immigrants and people of color. We are part of the Zapatista initiated transnational movement called “The Other Campaign.”

For Movement for Justice in El Barrio, the struggle for justice means fighting for the liberation of women, immigrants, lesbians, people of color, gays and the transgender community. We all share a common enemy and its called neoliberalism. Neoliberalism wishes to divide us and keep us from combining our forces. We will defeat this by continuing to unite all of our communities until we achieve true liberation for all.

Movement for Justice in El Barrio fights against capitalists and against bad governments and their neoliberal agendas. The landlords and the government belong to a culture of capitalism that uses the power of money to take control of that which belongs to the community. They want to displace poor families to renovate their buildings and rent the apartments to rich people, to white people with money. With the excuse of “developing the community,” they want to change the look of our neighborhood.

They want to remove from the street the street vendors, who earn an honorable and dignified living, the families that have their small restaurants, small clothing stores, and the small bodegas on the corners in our neighborhood. They want to displace us to bring in their luxury restaurants, their large expensive clothing stores, their supermarket chains. They want to change our neighborhood. They want to change our culture. They want to change that which makes us Latin@, African-American, Asian or Indigenous. They want to change everything that makes us El Barrio.

Together, we make our dignity resistance and we fight back against the actions of capitalist landlords and multinational corporations who are displacing poor families from El Barrio. We fight back locally and across borders. We fight back against the government institutions that help the landlords fulfill their goals. We fight back against Mayor Bloomberg and a city council that is pushing a neoliberal agenda across our neighborhoods and our city. We know that this is happening all over the city and around the world and that we do not stand alone in our resistance.

Here in Harlem, the three council members that represent East, Central and West Harlem, Melissa Mark-Viverito, Inez Dickens and Robert Jackson have time and again joined billionaire Mayor Bloomberg to plan, promote, and approve plans that displace our communities. We, as the community in El Barrio, and our sisters and brothers in West and Central Harlem have had the experience of seeing the members of the city council come to agreements amongst themselves to approve their neoliberal gentrification projects that betray the communities that they claim they represent. We have stood together to reject these plans and will continue to fight back and demand respect for our long histories and rich cultures

From Chinatown to Chiapas, from Sunset Park to South Africa to Salford, from Harlem to Morocco to San Salvador Atenco and in all of the places in between, we know that there are humble and simple people like ourselves rising up in dignified rage and fighting back against neoliberal displacement to keep their homes and save their communities.

As we struggle here we do not forget our brothers and sisters resisting in the far corners of the world. Nor do we forget where we come from and that many of us have already experienced displacement from our homelands. We join the humble and simple people across the world in their resistance as we stand up and join the fight against a global capitalist system that has pushed us to this dignified rage.

We fight so that:

The oceans and mountains will belong to those that live in and take care of them.

The rivers and deserts will belong to those that live in and take care of them.

The valleys and ravines will belong to those that live in and take care of them.

Homes and cities will belong to those who live in and take care of them.

No one will own more land than they can cultivate.

No one will own more homes than they can live in.

We hope people will share their struggle in whatever form of expression they choose, whether it be verbally, through song, poetry or rhyme, through a video, through artwork or however people can best express their struggle.

P.S. Children are especially invited to come break open the “Neoliberal” Piñata!

We will provide dinner, childcare and Spanish/English translation.

PLEASE RSVP BY TUESDAY MAY 26th!!

Due to our limited resources as a grassroots organization, please limit your group or organization’s participation to 3 community members plus children.

Please RSVP by May 26th with the number of members and children that will be attending, their names and an address at which you would like to receive your tickets.

Once you have RSVP’d you will receive your tickets and more details on the Encuentro.

For more info or to RSVP please contact us at (212) 561-0555 or movementforjusticeinelbarrio@yahoo.com

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Los rebeldes se buscan entre sí. Se caminan unos hacia los otros. Se encuentran y, juntos, rompen otros cercos…los rebeldes empiezan a reconocerse, a saberse iguales y diferentes. Caminan como hay que caminar ahora, es decir, luchando... --palabras zapatistas en el “Primer Encuentro Intercontinental por la Humanidad y contra el Neoliberalismo”

UNA INVITACIÓN PARA: Familias y personas que forman parte de organizaciones que luchan contra el desplazamiento neoliberal en la ciudad de Nueva York.

De parte de: Movimiento por Justicia del Barrio

Segundo Encuentro Nueva York por Dignidad y Contra el Desplazamiento

Un Encuentro es un espacio de intercambio humano y de reflexión. Un Encuentro no es una conferencia con discursos o con un panel de oradores, sino un momento de intercambio que los Zapatistas han diseñado como otra forma de hacer política: de abajo y a la izquierda. Es un lugar donde todos podemos hablar, donde todos vamos a escuchar a los demás, y donde todos podemos aprender. Es un lugar donde podemos compartir las muchas luchas diferentes que hacen de nosotros uno solo.

EL BARRIO, NUEVA YORK

DOMINGO, 7 DE JUNIO, 4:30 PM

El Domingo, 7 de Junio, Movimiento por Justicia del Barrio invita a las familias y personas integrantes de las organizaciones que luchan contra el desplazamiento a una noche de intercambio de experiencias, dialogo, y buena comida para que conozcamos las luchas de cada uno de nosotros por toda la ciudad.

En nuestro primer encuentro, las voces de grupos resistiendo el desplazamiento neoliberal en muchas partes de la ciudad hicieron eco todos juntos mientras aprendimos de la rabia y los sueños de cada una de nosotr@s.

En este Encuentro, quisiéramos escuchar una vez mas de la gente directamente afectada por los efectos devastadores del desplazamiento neoliberal que están luchando en sus propias comunidades; gente que no se vende ni depende de los politicos, ni de los partidos politicos, ni de las agencias gubernamentales, sino que busca el poder del pueblo como una fuerza para resistir.

POR FAVOR, CONFIRMEN SU ASISTENCIA ANTES DEL MARTES, 26 de MAYO!!

Somos Movimiento por Justicia del Barrio. Somos una organización de gente humilde y sencilla que lucha por justicia y por la humanidad. Movimiento por Justicia del Barrio lucha contra los capitalistas y contra los malos gobiernos y sus agendas neoliberales. Movimiento por Justicia del Barrio está luchando contra el desplazamiento neoliberal en nuestro vecindario. Es un proceso que nosotros los afectados entendemos como un desplazamiento de las familias para sacarlas de su vivienda por ser personas de bajos ingresos, inmigrantes y gente de color. Somos parte del movimiento transnacional iniciado por los zapatistas, llamado "La Otra Campaña".

Para Movimiento por Justicia del Barrio, la lucha por justicia significa luchar por la liberación de las mujeres, inmigrantes, lesbianas, la gente de color (latinoamericanos, africano americanos, asiáticos e indígenas), homosexuales y de la comunidad transgenero. Todos tenemos un enemigo en común que se llama neoliberalismo. El neoliberalismo desea dividirnos y evitar que nosotros combinemos nuestras fuerzas. Nosotros vamos a derrotarlo al continuar unificando a toda nuestra comunidad hasta que logremos la liberación de tod@s.

Juntos, hacemos de nuestra dignidad una resistencia y luchamos contra las acciones de los propietarios capitalistas y de las grandes empresas transnacionales que están desalojando a las familias pobres de nuestro vecindario. Luchamos a nivel local y más allá de las fronteras. Luchamos contra las instituciones del gobierno que ayudan a los propietarios a lograr sus objetivos. Luchamos contra el Alcalde Bloomberg y el Consejo Municipal de la ciudad quienes están imponiendo un plan neoliberal en todos nuestros barrios y en toda nuestra ciudad.

Nosotros sabemos que esto está ocurriendo por toda la ciudad y por todo el mundo y que no estamos solos en nuestra resistencia.

Aqui en Harlem, los tres Concejales del gobierno municipal que dicen representar el Este, Centro y Oeste de Harlem, Melissa Mark-Viverito, Inez Dickens y Robert Jackson, una y otra vez se han unido con el billionario Alcalde Bloomberg para planear, promover, y aprobar planes que desplazan a nuestras comunidades. Nosotr@s, la comunidad de El Barrio, y nuestr@s hermanas y hermanos en el Oeste y Centro de Harlem, hemos tenido la experiencia de ver los concejales colaborar para aprobar proyectos de desplazamiento neoliberal cuales traicionan al pueblo que ellos supuestamente representan. Nosotr@s nos hemos unido para rechazar a estos proyectos y vamos a seguir luchando y demandando el respeto para nuestras largas historias y ricas culturas.

Desde Chinatown a Chiapas, de Sunset Park a Sur Africa a Salford, de Harlem a Marruecos a San Salvador Atenco y todos los lugares en medio, nosotr@s sabemos que hay gente humilde y sencilla como nosotr@s levantandose en su digna rabia y luchando en contra del desplazamiento neoliberal para salvar sus hogares y sus comunidades.

Mientras estamos luchando aquí, nosotros no nos olvidamos de nuestros hermanas y hermanos resistiendo en cada esquina del mundo. Ni nos olvidamos de donde vinimos y que much@s de nosotr@s ya hemos experimentado el desplazamiento de nuestras tierras. Nosotr@s nos unimos con la gente humilde y sencilla en todo el mundo en su resistencia mientras nos unimos a la lucha en contra del sistema global capitalista que nos ha empujado hacia esta digna rabia.

Luchamos para que los mares y las montañas serán de quienes los habitan y los cuidan.

Los ríos y los desiertos serán de quienes los habitan y los cuidan.

Los valles y las quebradas serán de quienes los habitan y los cuidan.

Las viviendas y las ciudades serán de quienes en ellas viven y las cuidan.

Nadie será dueño de mas tierra de la que pueda cultivar.

Nadie será dueño de mas casas de la que pueda habitar.

Esperamos que la gente comparta su lucha en la forma que quieran, ya sea platicando, o a través de una canción, un poema, unas coplas, a través de un video, una pintura, carteles o de la manera como la gente mejor pueda expresar su lucha.

P.D. ¡Los niños están especialmente invitados a venir y a romper la "Piñata Neoliberal"!

Habrá cena, cuidado para sus niños chiquitos y traducción en español y en inglés.

POR FAVOR, CONFIRMEN SU ASISTENCIA ANTES DEL MARTES, 26 de MAYO!!

Como nuestros recursos como organización de base son escasos, le pedimos que limite la participación de su organización a 3 compas más aparte sus niños.

Es necesario confirmar su participación no mas tardar que el Martes, 26 de Mayo avisándonos cuántos compas y cuántos niños asistirán, sus nombres, y dándonos una dirección a la que quisiera recibir sus boletos.

Después de confirmar su participación recibirá sus boletos y más detalles sobre el Encuentro.

Para más información o para confirmarnos su asistencia, por favor llámenos: (212) 561-0555 o escríbanos a: movementforjusticeinelbarrio@yahoo.com


Read More!

Favorite Piece on the Crisis

"Promissory Notes: From Crisis to Commons"
by Midnight Notes and Friends

After five hundred years of existence, capitalists are once again announcing to us that their system is in crisis. They are urging everyone to make sacrifices to save its life. We are told that if we do not make these sacrifices, we together face the prospect of a mutual shipwreck. Such threats should be taken seriously. Already in every part of the planet, workers are paying the price of the crisis in retrenchment, mass unemployment, lost pensions, foreclosures, and death.

To make the threats more biting, there are daily reminders that we are in an era when our rights are everywhere under attack and the world’s masters will spare no atrocity if the demanded sacrifices are refused. The bombs dropped on the defenseless population of Gaza have been exemplary in this regard. They fall on all of us, as they lower the bar of what is held to be a legitimate response in the face of resistance. They amplify a thousand-fold the murderous intent behind the Athenian policeman’s fatal bullet fired into the body of Alexis Grigoropoulos in early December of 2008.

On all sides there is a sense that we are living in apocalyptic times. How did this “end-of-times” crisis develop, and what does it signify for anti-capitalist/social justice movements seeking to understand possible paths out of capitalism? This pamphlet is a contribution to the debate on these questions that is growing ever more intense as the crisis deepens and the revolutionary possibilities of our time open up. We write it in an attempt to penetrate the smokescreen now surrounding this crisis that makes it very difficult to devise responses and to anticipate the next moves capital will make. All too often, even within the Left, explanations of the crisis take us to the rarified stratosphere of financial circuits and dealings, or the tangled, intricate knots of hedge-funds/derivatives operations—that is, they take us to a world that is incomprehensible to most of us, detached from any struggles people are making, so that it becomes impossible to even conceptualize any forms of resistance to it.

Our pamphlet has a different story to tell about the crisis because it starts with the struggles billions have made across the planet against capital’s exploitation and its environmental degradation of their lives.

You can purchase copies of the 16-page pamphlet, saddlestitched from Autonomedia here or can download the PDF here


Read More!

Science Fiction From Below

a still from Alex Rivera's Sleep Dealer

It would seem that the role of speculative fiction is more important than ever as the technologies and cultures we produce and engage shift at an increasingly rapid pace. With Octavia Butler's passing in 2006, we lost a pathbreaking s/hero of what we might call "science fiction from below." Or perhaps, as recent activity might suggest, many more amongst the living have now found her. Butler proved that this genre, so often dominated by the concerns and colonial fantasies of white men, could be a powerful tool for the oppressed to undertake exploration and self-expression.

While at the 2008 Sundance Festival as part of the Slingshot Hip Hop crew, I was fortunate to meet Alex Rivera -> the Director, Writer and Editor of a tremendous film called Sleep Dealer. Rivera definitely carries a strong dose of zapatismo in his heart along with the torch that Butler had to pass off all too soon...

Science Fiction From Below
Alex Rivera, director of the new film Sleep Dealer, imagines the future of the Global South
By Mark Engler

Tapping into a long tradition of politicized science fiction, the young, New-York-based filmmaker Alex Rivera has brought to theaters a movie that reflects in news ways on the disquieting realities of the global economy. Sleep Dealer, his first feature film, has opened in New York and Los Angeles, and will show in 25 cities throughout the country this spring.

Set largely on the U.S.-Mexico border, Sleep Dealer depicts a world in which borders are closed but high-tech factories allow migrant workers to plug their bodies into the network to provide virtual labor to the North. The drama that unfolds in this dystopian setting delves deeps into issues of immigration, labor, water rights, and the nature of sustainable development.

Rivera's film drew attention by winning two awards at Sundance--the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award and the Alfred P. Sloan Prize for the best film focusing on science and technology. Los Angeles Times film critic Kenneth Turan wrote of the movie, "Adventurous, ambitious and ingeniously futuristic, Sleep Dealer... combines visually arresting science fiction done on a budget with a strong sense of social commentary in a way that few films attempt, let alone achieve."

Rivera spoke with Foreign Policy In Focus senior analyst Mark Engler by phone from Los Angeles, where the director was attending the local premier of his movie.

M.E.: How do you describe your film?

A.R.: Sleep Dealer is a science fiction thriller that takes a look at the future from a perspective that we've never seen before in science fiction. We've seen the future of Los Angeles, in Blade Runner. We've seen the future of Washington, D.C., in Steven Spielberg's Minority Report. We've seen London and Chicago. But we've never seen the places where the great majority of humanity actually lives. Those are in the global South. We've never seen Mexico; we've never seen Brazil; we've never seen India. We've never seen that future on film before.

M.E.: Your main character, Memo Cruz, is from rural Mexico, from Oaxaca. In many ways, the village that we see on film is very similar to many poor, remote communities today. It doesn't necessarily look like how we think about the future at all. What was your conception of how economic globalization would affect communities like these?

A.R.: One of the things that fascinates me about the genre is that, explicitly or not, science fiction is always partly about development theory. So when Spielberg shows us Washington, DC with 15-lane traffic flowing all around the city, he's putting forward a certain vision of development.

Sleep Dealer starts in Oaxaca, and to think about the future of Oaxaca, you have to think about how so-called "development" has been happening there and where might it go. And it's not superhighways and skyscrapers. That would be ridiculous. So, in the vision I put forward, most of the landscape remains the same. The buildings look older. Most of the streets still aren't paved. And yet there are these tendrils of technology that have infiltrated the environment. So instead of an old-fashioned TV, there is a high-definition TV. Instead of a calling booth like they have today in Mexican villages, where people call their relatives who are far away, in this future there is a video-calling booth. There's the presence of a North American corporation that has privatized the water and that uses technology to control the water supply. There are remote cameras with guns mounted on them and drones that do surveillance over the area.

The vision of Oaxaca in the future and of the South in the future is a kind of collage, where there are still elements that look ancient, there is still infrastructure that looks older even than it does today, and yet there are little capillaries of high technology that pulse through the environment.

ME: How far into the future did you set the film?

A.R.: I started working on the ideas in Sleep Dealer ten years ago, and at that point I thought I was writing about a future that was forty or fifty years away, or maybe a future that might not ever happen. Over this past decade, though, the world has rapidly caught up with a lot of the fantasy nightmares in the film. That's been an interesting process.

But, you know, a lot of times we use the word "futuristic" to describe things that are kind of explosions of capital, like skyscrapers or futuristic cities. We do not think of a cornfield as futuristic, even though that has as much to do with the future as does the shimmering skyscraper.

M.E.: In what sense?

A.R.: In the sense that we all need to eat. In the sense that the ancient cornfields in Oaxaca are the places that replenish the genetic supply of corn that feeds the world. Those fields are the future of the food supply.

For every futuristic skyscraper, there's a mine someplace where the ore used to build that structure was taken out of the ground. That mine is just as futuristic as the skyscraper. So, I think Sleep Dealer puts forward this vision of the future that connects the dots, a vision that says that the wealth of the North comes from somewhere. It tries to look at development and futurism from this split point of view--to look at the fact that these fantasies of what the future will be in the North must always be creating a second, nightmare reality somewhere in the South. That these things are tied together.

M.E.: It's interesting that at the recent Summit of the Americas, Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez gave President Obama a copy of Eduardo Galeano's Open Veins of Latin America. This is a book that was written over 30 years ago, but that really emphasizes the same point that you are making now, that underdevelopment is not an earlier stage of development, but rather is the product of development. That development and underdevelopment go hand in hand.

A.R.: Exactly. And I think that you can also add immigration into that mix. Because the history that Open Veins lays out is a lot about resource exploitation and transfer from South to North. And today, of course, one of the main entities that places like Mexico export is workers.

M.E.: There's a quote from the film that says a lot. Memo's boss, who runs this sort of high-tech Mexican sweatshop, says, "We give the United States what it's always wanted. All the work without the workers." Can you describe this concept of the "cybracero" that you have been developing?

A.R.: The central idea for this film occurred to me about ten years ago when I was reading an article in Wired magazine about telecommuting. The article was making all of these fantastic predictions that, in the future, there won't be any traffic jams anymore, and no one will have to ride the subway, because everyone will work from home. Well, I come from a family that's mostly immigrant, a family in which my cousins are still arriving and working in landscaping and construction. I tried to put them into this fantasy of working from home--when their home is Peru, 3000 miles away, and their work is construction.

And so I came up with this idea of the telecommuting immigrant, where in the future the borders are sealed, workers stay in the South, and they connect themselves to a network through which they control machines that perform their labor in the North.

The end result is an American economy that receives the labor of these workers but doesn't ever have to care for them, and doesn't have to fear that their children will be born here, and doesn't ever have to let them vote.

When I started this project, the idea of a remote worker was political satire. About eight years ago, it became a reality in the call centers of India and in the idea of off-shoring information-processing jobs that could be done in real time by people on the other side of the planet.

My movie goes further by putting forward a vision of remote manual laborers. What if somebody in India could drive a taxi in New York or bus dishes in a restaurant in Los Angeles? I wonder, do we live in a world where it would be acceptable to have someone in Jakarta laying the bricks for a building that's being built next door to us?

I think under the rules of the economy that we live with, if that were technically possible, it would be considered morally acceptable. It's just another stage of globalization. Yet it seems so surreal, and it makes me wonder: What kind of social order would that produce? What kind of communities would that produce?

M.E.: At the same time, I think in the film you suggest that this new technology also has the possibility to connect people across great distances. I wonder how you weigh the alienating effects of technology with some of its redemptive potential?

A.R.: To me, Sleep Dealer is a parable, a myth. There are three characters: One is a remote worker. The second is a remote soldier--a person who is in the United States but flies a drone that patrols the South. And the third character is a kind of writer, a blogger, who connects her body to the network and uploads, not words that she is typing, but rather her memories. And by sharing her memories she is able to let people see these far-away realities that maybe they're not supposed to. She's able to use technology to erase borders for a moment.

And to me, that is the tension of the moment we're living in. We live in a moment when the military is using technology to wage remote war. Corporations are using technology to move extraordinarily quickly around the globe to take advantage of weak environmental standards and weak labor standards.

And yet, we're living in the moment of the social forums, which are organized over the network. We're living in the age of the Zapatistas, who in 1994 sent messages by horseback, messages written on paper, to Internet cafes where they could be sent out as press releases and could be used to build a global network of solidarity. We're living in a time when I'm starting to hear tremors from the labor movement about creating cross-border unions, which will also be built over the network.

So I think we're in this moment when we don't know who will be more empowered by this connectivity and by new technology. And that's the battle in Sleep Dealer. It's over the future of this connected planet and what kind of globalization we'll be living in.

M.E.: Beyond immigration politics, the commodification and privatization of water is a major theme in the film. How did you choose water as an issue you would focus on?

A.R.: When I look at dramas of immigration, one of the things that I find unsatisfying is that they always focus on an internal dream, a dream that someone has of going to America and making his or her life better. And, instead, what I wanted Sleep Dealer to start with was this idea that immigrants from Latin America, in the places where they're born, are usually living somehow in the shadow of U.S. intervention, that immigrants come here because we--the United States--are already there.

In my film I wanted to have a presence of U.S. power in my character's village. And so I put in a dam. The dam controls the local water supply, and it makes traditional subsistence life much more difficult. In reality, in Latin America, it's been banana plantations controlled by paramilitaries. It's been gold mines and copper mines and silver mines. It's been oil fields. It's any number of situations that have made it hard for the people there to survive.

I chose water because it also has a symbolic and spiritual dimension to it. When my characters have their first kiss, they are by a little river. When they make love, they go down by the ocean. It would have been a lot harder to do that with petroleum.

M.E.: But, of course, struggles over the control of water are not purely metaphorical.

A.R.: When you talk to people about this, the idea that an evil corporation would go in and take the water from the people sounds so bombastic, so bizarre, that it feels like science fiction. And yet it's absolutely happening today.

A lot of people are familiar with the story of Cochabamba, Bolivia, where an American company, Bechtel, privatized the water, and there literally was a water war. All of this stuff can sound like a bad Kevin Costner movie--the idea of a water war--and yet it's one of those realities that, if you were to graph it, is only going to trend upwards in terms of its intensity in the future.

M.E.: The characters in the film are moved to take action about water privatization. Yet this takes the form of a highly individualized type of action--they don't join a social movement. I wondered about the absence of more collective resistance in the movie.

A.R.: Well, I think you've hit on the Achilles' heel of political narrative film. Narrative film is driven by psychology and by identifying with a character. And I think that's why there are so few truly transcendent political films. In narrative cinema we're used to identifying with one person, and so even if the story is anti-imperial or anti-racist or anti-misogynist, it's usually one character's journey in overcoming those things.

In Sleep Dealer there are three characters that represent three vast segments of our society. Those characters are in conflict at first, and then they come together. And their story is meant to have larger resonance than just the three individuals.

But I think that devising a narrative where political hope and political power doesn't belong to one actor, but is somehow made collective, that is very, very challenging. I look at The Battle of Algiers as an incredible model, where there is a single character--Ali la Pointe--who we meet, but then his subjectivity sort of bleeds away from him and is given to a social movement by the end of the film.

That film is a masterpiece; I am but a learner. When we were writing Sleep Dealer we were trying to think about what the future of what a radically networked social movement would look like, but we couldn't get there. Instead, I think the contribution of Sleep Dealer is in being a parable, a myth, that thinks through some of the impulses of globalization.

M.E.: How did you first come to this type of work?

A.R.: I grew up in upstate New York, and when I was 15 years old I met Pete Seeger. Without knowing who he was, I ended up doing volunteer work for one of his organizations. After meeting him I learned about his life using music and song as a part of social movements. When I went to college, that's what I went to study--music and social movements.

M.E.: So you had taken up the claw-hammer banjo?

A.R.: I did learn how to play the five-string banjo, actually! I can still do it. But at a certain moment I decided that the banjo wasn't the future of social movements. And I decided that through film and video you could express much more complicated and subtle arguments about the world than you can through song.

M.E.: I think you're pissing off all of the political songwriters out there.

A.R.: With song I think you have an access to the spirit, access to the heart. But with film we have two hours with people trapped in a dark room. You can refer back to something that happened 60 minutes earlier in the film, and you can play with what your viewers remember, and you can build really intimate relationships with characters. You can lay out both an emotional journey and an intellectual argument. I don't think there's anybody who will say that you can do all of that in a song.

M.E.: Are you concerned with being pigeonholed as a political filmmaker or having the movie labeled as a "political" film?

A.R.: I'd be happy to be pigeonholed as a political filmmaker. For me, making a film is so difficult and so challenging that I only want to make films that are relevant to the world we live in.

M.E.: Do you see a trend toward politics, or maybe away from politics, in science fiction filmmaking today?

A.R.: Science fiction has always had a radical history, all the way from Fritz Lang's Metropolis to Terry Gilliam's Brazil, which is a comedic portrait of fascism, up to Gattaca, which looks at the way that DNA profiling could be used by the government, to Children of Men, to Michael Winterbottom's Code 46.

Science fiction has always been a space for radical critique on one hand, and, on the other, for selling Happy Meals. I do think that science fiction today is at risk of being completely co-opted by superhero movies, big franchises, and xenophobic fantasies about space aliens. It has that face as well. But I think the long history, going back almost a hundred years, is of science fiction as a place for forward-thinking, radical thought.

M.E.: Perhaps unique among these movies you've mentioned, Sleep Dealer is a bi-lingual film, with the vast majority of the dialogue in Spanish. How did you think about language in the film?

A.R.: We need to know in our guts that we are going into a future that will be multi-cultural. I think we are seeing in the news right now that America might not be the only world power in the future, that English might not be the international language of choice. So, for me, doing a science fiction set in the South and doing it in a language that was not English was fundamental. I'd love to do a science fiction in Nahuatl, or in Tagalog, or in Pashto. The language is just part of a gesture that says, the future belongs to all of us.

I think the situation we're in is very striking. It is as if you met somebody and you asked them, "What do you want to have in your future?" And they said, "I don't know. I've never thought about it." In the cinema, that's what we have for the entire global South. We don't have any cinema that reflects on the future of the so-called Third World. There's zero.

Why is it that we've seen comedies from the South, we've seen romances from the South, we've seen action movies from the South? We've seen everything but reflections on the future. To me, the first step to getting to the future that you want to live in is to imagine it.

— Mark Engler, a writer based in New York City, is a senior analyst with Foreign Policy in Focus and author of How to Rule the World: The Coming Battle Over the Global Economy (Nation Books, April 2008). He can be reached via the web site www.DemocracyUprising.com.


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Letter from Atenco to the Zapatistas

The People's Front in Defense of the Land-Atenco

There is a long-running relationship of support and solidarity between these two groups. Do consider joining the National and International Campaign "Freedom and Justice for Atenco"! Many thanks to my compa Lopex for this excellent translation...

LETTER FROM THE PEOPLE’S FRONT IN DEFENSE OF THE LAND-ATENCO
TO THE ZAPATISTA ARMY OF NATIONAL LIBERATION (EZLN)

San Salvador Atenco, May 3, 2009.

TO THE CCRI-CG OF THE EZLN.
TO THE SIXTH COMMISSION.
TO THE GOOD GOVERNMENT COUNCILS.
TO THE SUPPORT BASES.
TO ALL ZAPATISMO.

SISTERS AND BROTHERS.

When it all began for us, many people told us: “You cannot beat the government.” Back then in 2001, when they condemned us to extermination and to the loss of our history and identity in order to build an airport, we knew that it must not be so, that we had to fight to defeat the idea that things are that way and nobody can change them.

At that time, we looked all around, we looked for others that, like us, were also fighting, we wanted to follow that path to walk it together, because we knew we were not the only ones. We must tell you that you could be seen in all places, there was a great trail full of dignity and hope that announced your presence, there was no need to ask who you were, we always found the brilliant eyes and the soft hands of resistance, of the small women and men that showed us the path built by justice and freedom. In their wake they also sheltered us in their brotherly embrace of solidarity. This is how we met, on the same path, side by side, with your happy and rebellious smile that, reflected on our machete, would light our way. Since you had come from afar and we found you as you walked, we did not hesitate, we decided to follow your steps and open other paths for those who would follow.

We want to tell you that we have learnt the meaning of life from you: To fight and to resist. From your strong shout we learned the message that we owe life: Rebellious dignity. From its heart, which moves the world, we took the only true reason for struggle: Love. This is how we, like many others, took from your hidden face the identity of the hidden, those who refuse to be invisible because they assume their role in history, those who become the motors of humanity’s march. This is how we recognized ourselves in your humble word and in your skin bathed in earth. In Atenco we know that your word is now part of the history of the universe and that your struggle already lives in our hearts. In this time people will call you zapatistas; we do not only call you that, we also call you and recognize you as our brothers and sisters.

You must know that after several months of direct confrontation with bad governments in 2001 and 2002, we achieved what we knew was possible, we defended our land, we blessed it with our struggle and prevented Fox and Montiel from despoiling us of the most sacred: Our mother earth. This is how we brought down the most important project of the Fox administration, the International Airport of Mexico City. It was then that we understood our role in history, we understood that things are not this way because someone decides, but that we too can decide what to do when faced with a decision from the powerful. When we prevailed in July and August of 2002 we confirmed what we already knew: “The government can be beaten.” From then until now, nothing can stop us, no matter how dark and stormy the path, since that time we know that victory lies at the end of our path.

However, as you well know, on the path of The Other Campaign, when we rode along with you back in 2005 and 2006, we had to once again confront the powerful. On May 3 and 4 of 2006 they undertook a violent State action, murdered two of our brothers, raped our sisters, detained 207 people, searched our homes, tortured and occupied our communities. They brought out all of their contained rage, charged at us with all their strength, once more they tried to exterminate us, they wanted to finish off the People’s Front in Defense of the Land and strike at the Mexican social movement. Throughout that period you were in our struggle, taking on as yours a fight that had in its wake a victory and an affront to the powerful. However –as you know well- in 2006 Atenco was only one more instance of violence in the Mexican State, the repression in Sicartsa had take place before, then came Oaxaca and electoral fraud. 2006 marked the Right’s offensive against the social movements that today sees its resurgence as the army leaves its barracks to carry out public safety functions, in a war disguised as one against so-called “organized crime.” Throughout this period you, brothers and sisters, have been with us, from here we received all the calls for solidarity from our imprisoned and persecuted brothers; from Atenco we know that in the zapatista heart there will always be a small place for those who are equal, that there will always be the serious and committed promise of its rebellious fight.

But we also know that you are still fighting a low-intensity war against bad government. That the situation in which you find yourselves is a war less hidden each day, of confrontations with diverse forces, of attrition and constant blows. That on both fronts they are trying to undermine resistance, wanting to put an end to one of the most important social processes in Mexico and in the world. This explains the aggression suffered these days by our indigenous brothers of the San Sebastian Bachajon cooperative, in the Chilón municipality, when they were detained and tortured by Juan Sabines’ government, being accused of robbery and drug-trafficking; likewise, the recent armed aggression suffered by the compañeros of the Caracol IV Good Government Council, in Morelia, who were in charge of the El Salvador resort, suffered at the hands of the paramilitary Organization For The Defense Of Indigenous People And Peasants (Opddic). We know that aggression against the EZLN is always latent, because you have built a counterpower able to confront the State, that your process is a very important effort to build democracy from below and that a blow against you would be a victory for the political and economic powers of not only Mexico, but of the world. Because of that, we say to you that we are with you, that the zapatista struggle is our struggle and, as much as possible, as much as we are able, we are with you, brothers and sisters.

We also reaffirm our fight for the freedom of 12 compañeros and 2 others who are fugitives; 9 of them are Alejandro Pilón Zacate, Jorge Alberto Ordóñez Romero, Román Adán Ordóñez Romero, Juan Carlos Estrada Cruces, Julio César Espinosa Ramos, Inés Rodolfo Cuellar Rivera, Edgar Eduardo Morales, Oscar Hernández Pacheco y Narciso Arellano Hernández, who are in the Molino de Flores Prison, Texcoco, Mexico State, sentenced to 31 years, 10 months and 15 days of imprisonment; Felipe Álvarez, Héctor Galindo and Ignacio Del Valle (Nacho) are imprisoned in the maximum security prison of El Altiplano, in Almoloya de Juárez, Mexico State, the first two sentenced to 67 and a half years, while Nacho is sentenced to 112 and a half years; on top of this, they have another three arrest warrants pending; in the same way, Adán Espinosa Rojas and América Del Valle are declared fugitives facing arrest warrants. To gain their freedom we constituted the Promoting Committee of the National and International Campaign “Freedom and Justice for Atenco,” made up among many by Don Samuel Ruíz, Don Raúl Vera, Manu Chao, Ofelia Medina, Julieta Egurrola, Luis Villoro, Ricardo Rocha, Bruno Bichir, Demián Bichir, Alejandro Bichir, Odiseo Bichir, Diego Luna, Luís Hernández Navarro, Paco Ignacio Taibo II, Daniel Giménez Cacho, Adolfo Gilly, Alejandro Toledo, Miguel Ángel Granados Chapa, Carlos Montemayor, Miguel Concha, Rocco, Rubén Albarran, Los de Abajo, Asian Dub Foundation, Las Reinas Chulas, Ana Francis Mor, Jorge Zarate and other compañeros who are joining up. With them we intend that their voice will raise the demand for freedom and justice for our movement, because their voice reaches other sectors that we have not reached and also because we want it to be a voice that will make a deep impression in our country’s and the world’s collective memory.

As our elder grandfather Nezahualcóyotl, whose lot in life was for a long time persecution and repression from Tezozomoc, king of Azcapotzalco, we have decided that we do not want to live in that condition, but will instead learn from the Triple Alliance that gave the Poet King his victory, to defeat the tyrant and achieve the Acolhua-chichimeca Kingdom’s splendor.

It is because of this that they have not beaten us thus far, that despite the hardening of Felipe Calderón and Enrique Peña Nieto, the Front of Peoples in Defense of The Earth is not defeated, and we know that the more our enemy’s profile grows, the bigger our victory will be, because they will not last 112 years in power.

Brothers and sisters, we will keep struggling until we gain freedom for our political prisoners and fugitives, but what we are really fighting for is for the liberation of our peoples, because we are aware that the powerful can be defeated and we will do so.

We send our combative and brotherly regards to the whole Zapatista Army of National Liberation.


FREE THE POLITICAL PRISONERS!
(¡PRESOS POLÍTICOS LIBERTAD!)


SHOULDER TO SHOULDER, ELBOW TO ELBOW, THE EZLN IS ALL OF US!
(¡HOMBRO CON HOMBRO, CODO CON CODO, EL EZLN SOMOS TODOS!)


WHEN THE PEOPLE RISE UP FOR BREAD, FREEDOM AND LAND, THE POWERFUL WILL TREMBLE FROM THE COAST TO THE MOUNTAINS!
(¡CUANDO EL PUEBLO SE LEVANTE POR PAN, LIBERTAD Y TIERRA, TEMBLARAN LOS PODEROSOS DE LA COSTA HASTA LA SIERRA!)

People’s Front in Defense of the Land - Atenco.

Translation to English by Lopex

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Mexican Consulate in NYC Shut Down for Atenco!

MEXICAN CONSULATE SHUTS DOWN IN FACE OF PROTEST FROM THE OTHER CAMPAIGN NEW YORK DEMANDING FREEDOM FOR POLITICAL PRISONERS OF ATENCO

On the third anniversary of state repression against the people of Atenco, the Mexican Consulate in New York was “taken over” by the pro-zapatista group Movement for Justice in El Barrio.

Authorities decided to close down the Consulate for the entire day.

During a press conference the Consul, who was very angry, denounced and blamed the members of The Other Campaign New York.


PRESS RELEASE FROM THE OTHER CAMPAIGN NEW YORK

MOVEMENT FOR JUSTICE IN EL BARRIO

To our sisters and brothers from the People’s Front in Defense of the Land:

To our Zapatista sisters and brothers:

To our compañer@s of the Other Campaign:

To our compañer@s from the Zezta Internazional:

To our compañer@s who are adherents of the International Campaign in Defense of El Barrio and our allies from all over the world:

Receive this greeting in solidarity from the women, men, and children, those marginalized in society who belong to the Other Campaign New York, Movement for Justice in El Barrio, in Zapatista East Harlem.

Today, May 4, 2009, the Other Campaign New York took over the Mexican Consulate in New York to demand the liberation of the 12 political prisoners who have been brutally repressed for resisting neoliberal urbanization projects that are destructive to human life and culture, specifically the construction of an airport in Atenco, and for protecting displaced flower vendors in Texcoco.

Today, on this third anniversary of the repression, the arrests, the violations, the torture, and the breaking and entering made by the military police in Atenco, a delegation of members of Movement for Justice in El Barrio succeeded in entering the offices of the Consulate of Mexico in New York despite the fact that these offices have been under strict and tightened security since precisely 3 years ago when Mexicans of The Other Campaign New York with real heart and memory, demanded the liberation of the political prisoners of Atenco. We succeeded in entering the offices to hold a non-violent protest demanding the immediate release of the prisoners of Atenco.

Once inside, the compañer@s of the Other Campaign New York, amongst the clamor of: “Freedom for political prisoners (Presos politicos, libertad)!, Liberty, liberty, to those prisoners for fighting (Libertad, libertad, a los presos por luchar)!, We are all Atenco (Todos Somos Atenco)!”, along with other chants, and with our signs, some with prison bars to look like a cell, and also with bandanas, gave out to our fellow country men and women at the Consulate DVD’s of the video "Breaking the Siege", about the repression in Atenco, and informational flyers where we explain our main demands.

Later, we demanded to speak with the consul Ruben Beltran in order to give him a letter of demands. First, they told us that he was not there because he was in Mexico, but we knew that this was a lie, since the day before the consul was in El Barrio at an event proselytizing for PAN during the imposed Cinco de Mayo celebration.

After a while, the authorities of the Consulate told us that the Consul was in New York but that he could not be found in the Consulate, and they closed consular services to the public, asking all of their clients to abandon the offices. By the end of our action, the consul arrived. We gave him a giant size letter on a poster-board with the following demands:

1. Liberty for the political prisoners in Atenco.

2. Cancel the arrest warrants for those 2 who are being persecuted.

3. Revoke and appeal the sentences.

4. Complete respect for the human rights of the detained and the persecuted.

5. Punishment for those responsible for the violations of human rights.

The consul, Rubén Beltrán, first told us that he was open to engage in dialogue with all Mexican people in New York and listen to all opinions, but then blamed us – and our cause, the liberation of the prisoners in Atenco – for having closed the services of the Consulate and for having left so many people & unattended.

We consider that the consul’s reaction is an act of great injustice and cynicism, since ifthe Mexican government would not torture, kill, rape and unjustly incarcerate its people for resisting its doing business with huge transnational companies that turn everything even water into merchandise, these things would not have to happen.

Nonetheless, we are satisfied for having done this successful protest for the liberation of the martyrs of Atenco, and now we know that many Mexicans in New York will be able to inform themselves through alternative media like the DVD "Breaking the Siege".

Afterwards, in the afternoon of this same day, the press was convened to gather at the Consulate for another event, and the consul took advantage to denounce us, and say that because of us the Consulate had to close for the entire workday. In this early evening event, the consul showed the press photographs of us from distinct angles. In this respect it was clear that our demonstration was peaceful. If he had retaliated against us for having exercised our right to freedom of expression in Mexican territory (as is in whatever representation of the Mexican government in other countries), this means that the Consulate’s authorities would have been violating our rights, just as they don’t respect the rights of the people of Atenco.

It brings us much pain that dignified fighters for social justice, the real defenders of our land and our country, remain in prison. We will not rest until they are liberated. Human beings are not merchandise. They can’t move us & place us anywhere they wish so that they can build airports and hotels, not in Atenco, nor in Agua Azul, nor in our Barrio in East Harlem.

From the Other Campaign New York, fraternally:

¡WE ARE ALL ATENCO!

¡FREEDOM FOR POLITICAL PRISONERS OF ATENCO!

Movement for Justice in El Barrio, New York, May 4, 2009

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The Emerging Commonism

The talk below was given as part of an event at El Kilombo social center in Durham, NC, titled "The End of an Era: The New Unrest and the Emerging Commonism," held on March 3, 2009 with guest speaker Gustavo Esteva. The event was part of El Kilombo's spring 2009 speaker series: "Things Unseen: Building Autonomy in a Time of Crisis."

The Emerging Commonism
by El Kilombo Intergaláctico

I want to start by saying that we have invited Gustavo here tonight because he and his work and his life have played an important role in ours and in the development of this space and this project, El Kilombo. When we began thinking about how to do something in our own surroundings that would have an effect on our own lives and the lives around us, something that was neither a campaign slogan, nor a charity effort, nor an isolated corner in which to either wallow or relish in our discontent, there were not exactly booming echoes of support and understanding around us. Nor did we immediately attract the masses or become a vanguard for progressive action in the area. Glory and recognition both in this society in general and in leftist circles in particular belongs to highly visible activity with highly visible results—be they massive momentary protests or widely published pieces or entry into the inner circle of analysts, activists, and academics huddled inside, and often guarding the doors, of the “progressive” community.

What we did become

What we did become was another kind of community, not big, not loud, not univocally coherent in any of the traditional senses of the term, and far from politically united on anything resembling the kind of platform political organizations are supposed to have. Rather, we began to be, and continue to become, a place in common. We mean this both in the sense of creating a place where people who ordinarily would not cross paths meet—students, migrants, communities of color, workers of various rank—as well as creating a project in which it becomes possible to assume collective control of our lives: our survival, yes—food, housing, health; but also our desire to grow and transform ourselves—our relationships, our daily reality, the energy to desire something and the capacity to create it. This is not a finished project or a guaranteed achievement. We know that we have to do it again and do it a little better every day.

A recent study said that in polls carried out before 1980, 10% of the US population said they had no one they would call a close friend and no one they could confide in; in 2008, 25% agreed with that statement (no close friend, no confidant). Current statistics vary widely citing the use of anti-depressants or mood-stabilizers as anywhere from 10% to 45%, and I site this with no judgment on their use or effectiveness, with an additional 13% on stress-related drugs; to which we must add self-medicating tendencies which include some of the 20% of the population using illicit substances and between 7% and 16% reporting very heavy alcohol use. The excess in these numbers reflect not a sick population so much as a sad one. Making a community, or creating a common, out of that context is no small task and no small triumph.

Current Context

I didn’t know if Gustavo would give US-based data. So here are a few facts about our current conjuncture:

• Unemployment at 7.6%; 30% rise from 2007; 2 million jobs lost in 2008, with the job cut rate increasing at the record-setting rate in 2009; blacks have highest unemployment rate, followed by latinos, trailed by whites
• In addition salary cuts for those who manage to keep jobs
• Since the peak of the housing bubble in mid-2006, prices have fallen 20% and are expected to fall up to 50-60% before the plummet slows. They are not decreasing gradually but are rather in free fall
• Foreclosure rate rising steadily. In 2008 they had jumped 57% in a year: at that point one in every 538 houses undergoing foreclosure; now one in every 433. 2 million more expected to lose their homes in the next two years; affecting families of color at disproportional rates
• Sixteen banks have already failed this year compared with twenty-five in all of 2008. 250 more slated to fail.
• Americans have supplmented what was already a real wage decline with their credit cards, currently amounting to nearly 100 billion in collective credit card debt; this bubble is probably nearing its explosion point also as people lose jobs and houses and will be unable to make payments.
  

For a social fabric that is already thin, instability, uncertainty, and what will in many cases become desperation makes for a volatile situation. Even the evaluation “from above” recognizes the stakes: Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair told Congress last week that the economic crisis had become a greater security concern than terrorism.

In this context, most people do not have much hope for, or much reason to believe, in change or liberation as an event or a point at which we will arrive in some moment. It is clear that this is nothing that charity or service-oriented organizations can handle. It should be increasingly clear to many people at this point that government, willing or not, has almost no capacity to actually resolve the current situation and limited capacity manage it. And in any case we should be clear by now that do not want to be the needy and dependent clients of either of these institutions, over which we have either no democratic control (NGOs and philanthropy) or only an artificial or simulated control (representative government). We can’t here fully explore the options for acting on this situation, but I want to make a few broad strokes helping us to bridge our situation to the necessity of what Gustavo has talked to us about, taking lessons from movements such as the Zapatistas that have fought the economic and social destitution of neoliberalism and the dangerous vacuum of power created in its crises.

Too many times, so much time, has been spent arguing over candidates and parties and approaches to the state before discovering that power evacuated the state long ago and we have been left uselessly holding our campaign paraphernalia and political texts, left, that is, on the streets not in a protest march but rather laid-off and foreclosed or evicted and unemployable. Neither does a dogmatic and self-isolating anti-electoralism serve any productive purpose here—both because such a position ignores the historical use of electoral strategies to specific situations, none of which we happen to be in now, and because at this stage of crisis it is not helpful to be or claim to be the lonely voice that was right. It is helpful to be organized and together. And so what we do have hope for is liberation as a collective habit-forming practice. We identify that collective habit-forming practice as the common.

Liberation, why and how

We use collectivity not as an ideological item or political platform. There are certainly many good arguments promoting cooperative rather than competitive designs for economic and social systems, and I don’t feel it necessary to rehearse them here. Rather, we understand collectivity as both the reality we exist within—we share the city, we share the roads, we use libraries and parks and sidewalks and stoplights, we breath each other’s air—as well as an absolute necessity for acting upon our current context. Why an absolute necessity?

First, if we have understood, as we have studied many years in this space, as Gustavo has pointed out many times, as many movements all over the world have declared, that capital is not a thing but a social relation, and that neoliberalism is not an economic system but a social one that requires the fragmentation, isolation, in fact creation, of ‘individuals,’ then we must conclude that fighting capital, or better yet, creating something other than capital, must require different social relations, different social units, different subjects. And one certainly cannot create different social relations by oneself.

Second, what is generically called “change” is often made difficult, as one of our speakers in the last event in this series points out, by the inability to see anything other than the urgent present which requires a great deal of putting out fires, responding to emergencies, and finding temporary measures of survival or pleasure (Kelley). No one can be unfamiliar with the endless parade of information and issues necessary to maintain a grasp on even one’s most basic life and well-being—work and work security, bills, functioning utilities, mortgage/rent obligations, childcare, health concerns—and doing these things household by household, individual by individual, is an often not just time-consuming but life-consuming task. And so we think that daily life must be the place where we act out the most basic and most important changes we see necessary, not, again, because we herald “daily life” as the virtuous, and now quite popular in academic texts on social change, platform for political discourse. But rather because to some extent, daily life must be the project or daily life will always get in the way; it must become the place of liberation or it will always be its obstacle. That is, to say it one more time, that infinite parade of things to attend to as well as the daily routines we build up to make such a parade sustainable, either erases the possibility for revolution or it becomes the revolution itself. Kelley called this “lessening the contradiction between everyday life and our wildest dreams.”

Third, I want to situate this call for a habit-forming and daily collective liberation firmly in the framework in which we have built this speaker’s series, which is in turn based firmly in the place and reality in which we live. Our first event was on Gentrification and the City. There we named gentrification not as an isolated phenomenon but as the territorialized manifestation of dominant power relations in society, global society, as a whole. The same way that suburban flight segregated and de-serviced populations and organized capital investments accordingly, gentrification reorganizes that urban space once again, proposing “progressive” investments—the so-called walkable community of gallery and boutique with its charter schools and “free-range” children—that by necessity exclude some populations. These are usually, nearly always, those very populations that have inhabited that de-serviced space and through pure social cooperation and innovation created an alternative lifestyle to both ghetto and suburbia—and here we mean alternative in terms of social organization, not of consumption. Our second event was on Art and Revolution, in which we differentiated between the “arts corridor” which is slated to run through our neighborhood courtesy of a coalition between developers and what is now referred to as the “creative class,” and the activities of the people who have inhabited these blocks to use creativity—social, technical, and artistic—to survive and design their lives everyday. We are not romanticizing the hazards of poor communities or glorifying our own. We are, to cite that event’s presentation, claiming the right and the space to develop those activities that may not produce fame for any one artist but which produce a daily reorganization of the senses, in common, and a constant renovation of the common.

The freedom to “remake city and self” as proposed in the first event, and as proposed in the second, to make the common forms already in motion “down here” not new sites of visibility “up there” but new organizations and intensifications of life in common, depends upon an understanding of the great wealth that we do have—the wealth of difference.

The Zapatista Initiative

Many years ago already the EZLN (Zapatista Army for National Liberation) warned us that if could not achieve some kind of mutual articulation among those below, those who both sustain and suffer capital through their individual labor and collective production, the current economic instability, the discontent created by neoliberal policies, and the weakness, incompetence, and desperation of a flailing government, would lead to violent outbreaks and great destruction. That destruction, social and environmental, was already happening and would increase, they insisted, but unless there was some kind of organized alternative, the poor would suffer most, and suffer brutally, its effects.

They called for the organization of a national network of struggle. Without dogmatic formulas for mobilizing the masses or sentimental appeals to a false unity, they called for people to join them in organizing the life they shared, both to confront the coming crisis and to dignify their daily existence. Their experience gives us several lessons to draw from.

One. That the great wealth of the poor, or the great richness of those below, came from the great range and abundance of difference that existed there. Any cooperative endeavor would have to maintain and promote those differences, and to create rather than assume commonality. There could be no unity in which differences would submit in the struggle to a pragmatic necessity for sameness for the purposes of an end goal. “The only thing that makes us the same,” the Zapatistas said, “is that we are all different.”

Two. That there is a difference between differences. That is, there is the kind of difference that is a difference between how people interpret orders and either follow or reject rules imposed on them from above or from outside. This creates hugely conflictive and contradictory relations and is a very difficult place from which to “reconcile” anything or from which to create something new. There is another kind of difference however that is a difference of experience, perspective, background, viewpoint, a difference that is essentially singularity. This difference provides many more possibilities for productive discussion and self-mobilization; it is not necessarily harmonious, but neither is it necessarily contradictory; it does not inhibit the creation of the common but rather is the very material, the necessary components of dynamism and diversity, that make possible that common. Maybe this difference can be thought of as autonomy, because it an issue of how the people themselves, singularly and collectively, will decide how they encounter each other and where they will go together, rather than how they will obey or respond to decisions and actions made in a place above or outside of them.

Three. New historical conjunctures require experimentation with new practices, new practices both require and create new subjects who are in turn capable of entirely new ideas and inventions. Such practices are useful only to the extent that they remain “living” or changeable and we are able to resist the temptation to congeal them into new dogmas or movement idols. Let me give just one example:

Horizontalism. The Zapatistas could probably be given credit for the emergence and sudden swelling of popularity of the term, thought it doesn’t matter that they usually aren’t. Their horizontalism was essentially the creation of a new common: a common form for organization in which self-government was a turn-taking activity maintained, upheld, and self-run by and for the same communities corresponding to the territory covered by that government. The democratizing effects and sociality created from this system cannot be understated for the lives of its participants and as an example to people all over the world searching for alternative organizing mechanisms.
The accompanying risk, which here as many times results from the appropriation of an idea as ideology instead of as a contextually-based practice, was that in the earnest attempt to be “horizontal,” many groups or collectives just ended up flat.

We need to be able to make the distinction: flat has no internal energy; it is unable to use its diverse elements to make collective decisions about structures that enable action, and so often it either remains paralyzed and unable to act, or its structures arise covertly leaving its acts without a democratic base to support them. It is unable to utilize its differences (of self, capability, of training, of perspective) as wealth and instead resorts to suppressing them for the purpose of remaining “horizontal.” In effect, it flattens its very possibilities to be horizontal. Horizontal in its dynamic sense, however, has energies running back and forth all over it; it magnifies and multiplies its differences (the unique being and offering that each person or group brings) in ways that enable a greater development and proliferation of more difference, which is in turn reinvested in the common. The possibilities created in this kind of production of the common are infinite, exciting, and necessary.

Finally, and to close, one of the key points that the Zapatistas have insisted on in their initiative to create a common beyond their communities, and another lesson for us, has been the issue of “espejismo,” literally mirrorism. The EZLN has said over and over to groups struggling internally and between themselves with personal and political conflicts: stop looking in the mirror! Espejismo is the disease of separation and self-obsession, a depoliticization of society and a disintegration of the collective political subjects possible. The struggle against global capitalism and the reality of the current crises does not allow us these rewardless, self-indulgent but self-alienating detours that are inevitably dead-ends. Mirrorism, seeing or recognizing a reflection of ourselves, may be helpful but is not sufficient, because what we already are is not enough. We will have to become something else. EZLN Major Ana Maria said at a gathering of Zapatista supporters over a decade ago, if we have been a mirror for you, for your movements, then now let that mirror shatter and become an open window into another world, into becoming something else. Creating the common, or becoming common, as a collective, habit-forming, everyday endeavor will require many windows, or perhaps doors, or better yet bridges, in the art of living together. And that is what we see as our task today.

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Homeland Hip Hop!

Big ups to the Palestine Education Project for pulling this together!

Is this not the hip hop show of the year?! And not only that, it's also a fundraiser for an indigenous youth delegation to Palestine -> this is the real deal: SNAG Magazine, Huaxtec and Haskell Indian Nations University are headed to Palestine this August and you can help them get there while enjoying the show of the year... it sold out last year so get your tix ahead of time here.

And if you don't know...

DAM is Palestine's premier hip hop crew
-> an early, and great track - with an action/video a la Public Enemy's Fight the Power- represents for their hometown of Lyd - check out Born Here. And they're also featured in a little film called Slingshot Hip Hop :p

Invincible & Finale are Detroit's finest
-> Here's their Docu-Music-Video, Locusts, breaking down gentrification in the D. Also make sure to listen to Emperor's New Clothes, Invincible's emergency response to the bombing of Gaza.

Rebel Diaz are an inspiration hailing from many, many places. With Chilean and Afro-Taino roots, Rebel Diaz are Chicago transplants holding it down here in the South Bronx...
-> They regularly rep their many homes and loyalties on songs such as Which Side Are You On?, and are also no strangers to the timely response - check out A Trillion - that's 12 zeros :-)

And last but definitely not least is Brooklyn's own DJ Oja on the 1s and 2s
-> and his band/movement, Earthdriver, just dropped an album.

...now you know.

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Movements, Bearers of the New World

A panel at the World Festival of Dignified Rage -> I'm pretty sure this is Adolfo Gilly, a zapatista rep (duh), zapatista compañera Everilda moderating, Mónica Baltodano, and Oscar Olivera

There have been way too few English-language reportbacks from the first World Festival of Dignified Rage, which took place for 11 days in three locations in Mexico over New Years. Here's one from a compa in Cali and the new issue of Left Turn Magazine provides a few snippets from speeches at the Festival as well.

Below is one such speech by the wonderful Raúl Zibechi whose work is still woefully under-available in English (check out his bio at the bottom of the piece). This is our second collaboration with the Boston Interpreters Collective and is a translation of a partial transcript of Zibechi's speech. To listen to the complete audio of the speech (in Spanish) go here. It's well worth it as you'll also get a chance to hear his powerful denunciation of South America's left governments' participation in the occupation of Haiti as well as an incredibly extensive list of the movements he so articulately and concisely describes below - Enjoy!

The Movements, Bearers of the New World
by Raúl Zibechi*
(Short version of the text read at the Festival of Digna Rabia, Mexico, January 3 - translated by Frances Miriam Kreimer of the Boston Interpreters Collective)

Some four decades ago, there emerged a new generation of movements, very different from what had been hegemonic in Latin America until that moment. This set of movements, born in the early 1970s and during the 1980s and very active in the 1990s, challenged neoliberalism and occupied the place left vacant by the leftist parties, which became supporters of the neoliberal models, and unions, which did more or less the same (with a few honorable exceptions).

These movements changed the face of the continent; delegitimizing the neoliberal model, or at least the most blatant problematic elements of the model, installed a new balance of power and changed the political map. Despite their differences, they have some features in common.

They turned the struggle for land (rural and urban) into the fight for territories or areas where people (indigenous people, peasants, urban popular sectors) live their daily lives and transform survival initiatives into modes and forms of resistance to the system.

They proclaim themselves independent from political parties, churches, trade unions and the state. But such autonomy embodied in physical territory goes hand in hand with the creation of new ways of living and of exercising power, that is, of self-governance.

These are community-based movements in the broad sense of the term. Unlike previous movements, membership is not individual but familial, and the social base of these movements involves the collective organization of the community structure.

These are not strictly social movements; they are political movements, or political-social, if you will. The division between the social and the political set up by the social sciences and the traditional left is not useful for understanding this new generation of movements.

It is not possible to understand these movements from the outside, or with a focus on the visible structures, those that capture the attention of the media, academia, and the institutional left. Rather, it takes an inside perspective, capable of capturing the underground and invisible processes, which can only be done in a long process of engagement with the movements, not only with their leaders. The concept of "field work" is limited, since it does not consider either living or affective attachment with the oppressed.

They are bearers of the new world because both families and communities establish their lives based on relations of reciprocity and mutual aid -- not to accumulate capital or power, but rather to grow and strengthen themselves as communities and movements. In this respect, I believe that in the movements’ territories, non-capitalist relations predominate, certainly not in a pure and uncontaminated form, but rather in a permanent struggle against the state and the capital that seek to destroy them. In other words, the material and symbolic production of values of use has taken the place of the production of values of exchange, not forever, not absolutely, but with steady progress.

We can see this in many initiatives, from those begun in cities such as El Alto and Plan 3000 in Santa Cruz, Bolivia, to the Piquetero neighborhoods of Buenos Aires, where people built houses, public facilities, streets, water, health and education. Thousands of gardens, in urban as well as rural areas, thousands of productive enterprises, hundreds of restored factories -- we are talking not only about rural areas but also in peripheral urban areas there is an enormous capacity to produce without bosses, without supervisors, and without a hierarchical division of labor.

In these worlds different kinds of thoughts arise. No longer are the academies and the system’s parties thinking about the oppressed, but rather we, ourselves, are doing the thinking. Not in order to produce a theory or a thesis, but in order to strengthen the movement, in order to defend it better, in order to expand it and share it with others. So no theory is produced, but simply ideas and strength to keep going.

This other world cannot be represented in the formal world of State and capital. Moreover, it cannot be represented because only that which is absent can be represented. I also believe that participating in the state weakens and diverts them from their main task, which is "to strengthen that which is ours." However, there are many movements that are still combative and fighting for real changes that maintain relations with states. This is a debate that will be with us for a long time and we have no alternative but to face it in the most united way possible, that it should always be a debate “among ourselves”.

Finally, in these areas in resistance, there exist worlds that are different than the world of capital and the state. Of course, they have their forms of power, with greater or lesser degrees of development. The assembly is the common form of collective decision. A world without power does not seem possible. But the facts show that there can be non-state powers, i.e., non-hierarchial and decentralized powers; rotating shifts, so that everyone can learn to give orders collectively and obey collectively. In each place and in each country people adopt different approaches, but these worlds exist, they have life, and they have not become involved with the State as the unions have.

How does it triumph, this world of values of use, this world that is feminist, communitarian, self-focused and self-directed, able to produce and reproduce life? We do not know. What we see is that it grows by expansion, extension, diffusion, contagion, radiation, resonance It does not grow alone, nor in a form symmetrical to capital and the State -- killing, destroying, imposing, digesting and directing. We cannot impose this other world because we would be negating it, but we may breathe life into it, acting as a ferment and yeast, in the belief that the movements and the other worlds are the only thing that can save us from the catastrophe that the upper classes are preparing.

* Raúl Zibechi is an international analyst for Brecha of Montevideo, Uruguay, lecturer and researcher on social movements at the Multiversidad Franciscana de América Latina, and adviser to several social movements. He writes the monthly "Zibechi Report" for the Americas Program.


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