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How to navigate the white water of these turbulent times
How to navigate the white water of these turbulent times
The latest lurch in global statecraft — Trump’s dissing NATO allies then playing footsie with Vladimir Putin — leaves many scrambling to maintain some balance. Republicans for whom the enemy status of Russia is an article of faith are beside themselves. Democrats are running out of adjectives to describe Trump’s behavior. And activists who have been around for longer than the last election are wondering how to steer a steady course in the midst of extremities.
It reminds me of whitewater rafting on the Upper Gauley River in West Virginia, the kind where people aren’t supposed to even get into the raft unless they’ve had prior experience. I never paddled so hard in my life. At one point, even our guide was tossed out of the raft; thankfully a nearby kayaker grabbed him and returned him to us.
When the activist and lesbian feminist writer Barbara Deming encountered Frantz Fanon’s “Wretched of the Earth,” she praised his raising the question of balance. Fanon, involved with with the Algerian war of independence from the French empire, was writing about armed struggle for liberation. He said a major challenge for revolutionaries at a time of accelerating turbulence is how to avoid vertigo, the dizziness that accompanies highly emotional events happening around us.
Deming’s personal experience in the 1960s civil rights movement brought that kind of challenge, she said in her reflection “On Revolution and Equilibrium.” Deming found in the midst of turbulence that her commitment to nonviolence was steadying for her and others. Locked up in jail in Albany, Georgia, as one of a group of pacifists arrested for breaking the segregation laws, Deming undertook a fast that — when I saw her in the courtroom — left her hardly able to walk. The group won their struggle with the infamous Sheriff Laurie Pritchett.
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Lessons from the front lines of anti-colonial pipeline resistance
Lessons from the front lines of anti-colonial pipeline resistance
A bridge leads to the entrance of the Unist’ot’en territory in British Columbia, Canada. (WNV/Jeff Nicholls)
The Standing Rock standoff over the Dakota Access Pipeline was a reminder that colonization, and resistance to it, both exist in the present tense. Fossil fuel pipelines that despoil indigenous lands and waters have become key flashpoints in long-standing anti-colonial resistance.
An important precursor and inspiration for the Standing Rock camp is an indigenous occupation in northern British Columbia, Canada. For the past eight years, the Unist’ot’en clan have reoccupied their traditional territory. When the camp began in 2009, seven pipelines had been proposed to cross their territory, as well as their water source, the salmon-bearing Morice River. But thanks to Unist’ot’en resistance, oil and gas companies have been blocked from building new fossil fuel infrastructure. The lesser known but wildly successful Unist’ot’en encampment holds crucial lessons for anti-pipeline and anti-colonial organizers across North America, or Turtle Island, as many indigenous nations call it.
We visited the occupation this summer. Upon arriving, visitors must undergo a border-crossing protocol. There is only one way in and out of Unist’ot’en territory – a bridge that crosses the Morice River. Before being allowed to cross, we were asked where we came from, whether we worked for the government or the fossil fuel industry, and how our visit could benefit the Unist’ot’en.
We explained that we are both settlers, people living on and benefiting from indigenous lands. We also expressed our willingness to help in whatever ways were needed during our stay, such as kitchen duty, gardening and construction. Finally, we shared our commitment to decolonization and climate justice, and our appreciation for how Unist’ot’en land defense accomplishes both; it returns indigenous lands to indigenous peoples while blocking fossil fuel infrastructure that threatens the entire human estate. After a short consultation, clan members welcomed us to leave Canada and cross into Unist’ot’en territory.
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Thousands reject the extractivist logic at the World Bank-IMF meeting in Peru
Thousands reject the extractivist logic at the World Bank-IMF meeting in Peru
The annual governors’ meeting of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank opened on October 5 in Peru’s capital city. In the meeting, an estimated 800 representatives from 188 countries were negotiating the shape of the world’s soon-to-be renovated finance infrastructure.
While the international media focused on the official meetings, no news outlets outside of Latin America have mentioned the Plataforma Alternativa conference — a parallel three-day meeting organized under the theme “Belying the ‘Peruvian Miracle.’”
More than 1,200 people attended Plataforma Alternativa’s conference. Dozens of young volunteers zoomed through the marbled hallways of Lima’s Hotel Bolívar, which hosted the conference. Participants represented dozens of organizations and countries as diverse as the Netherlands, China, the United States, Belgium, Zimbabwe, Colombia, Indonesia, Spain, Mexico, the Philippines, Germany, Palestine and Argentina.
On Friday, an estimated 5,000 people marched across 70 blocks in Lima, from Plaza San Martín to the first of three police perimeters around the official conference. Groups at the protest included indigenous feminist organizations, the Lima-based Comando Feminista, Bloque Hip Hop, worker unions, the Peruvian Campesino Confederation, and dozens of others.
Peru reportedly mobilized 20,000 police for this event, many of whom were safeguarding key areas around the city for the 12,000 visitors: from the airport to hotel areas.
The counter-conference was free, open to the public, and streamed online. It featured U.S. economist Joseph Stiglitz, a former World Bank chief economist and an outspoken critic of its policies, as its keynote speaker.
“Inequality is a choice — not the result of inevitable economic laws,” Stiglitz said in his speech after reminding the audience that Latin America has the highest rate of wealth disparity among world regions. At the end of September, Oxfam — one of several organizations in charge of the conference — released a report indicating that, at the current pace, one percent of Latin Americans would be wealthier than the remaining 99 percent by 2022.
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When the next crisis comes, which movements will seize the opportunity?
When the next crisis comes, which movements will seize the opportunity?
You, too, could be caught in a situation where people are ready for an alternative, yet your group has none to offer.
It’s understandable. We who work for change seem years away from convincing a critical mass of people that it is both stupid and wrong to have a school-to-prison pipeline, or a rate of carbon emissions killing hundreds of thousands of people, or a “national security strategy” that mainly breeds insecurity.
Historic change does not always have the gradual-then-accelerating curve shown by the LGBTQ movement. At times, a system goes into crisis. In 2007-2008 financial sectors in many countries skidded toward the cliff; Iceland’s even went over the cliff. Crisis equals opportunity, for those who are ready to use it.
I asked a Washington, D.C., friend who works among progressive Democrats what he heard after the Wall Street disaster. Did people in his circle discuss organizing the strong, grassroots anger into a push for major reform? He knew of none. As it turned out, that anger was organized by the right and became the Tea Party. Polls show that even today many people identifying as Tea Party members express hostility to Wall Street.
All this missed opportunity should be seen in the context of Barack Obama’s presidency, since it was he who said, during his candidacy, that the Swedish solution to its own banking crisis had been correct: Seize the banks rather than bail them out. (In a recent New Yorker article on Greece, former finance minister Yanis Varoufakis said President Obama told him that the U.S. bailout was against his personal politics.)
Presidents do what they do, given the existing power realities they face. The lesson for us in the United States is: In 2009 we lacked a powerful movement that had a vision, and was willing to mobilize direct action on behalf of that vision.
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Cincinnati’s experiment with an economy that works for everyone
With the 2016 presidential campaigns underway, economic populism has taken center stage. Bernie Sanders, calling for a $1 trillion investment in a sustainable infrastructure jobs program along with publically funded health care and college education, has forced Hillary Clinton to offer vague support for similar measures, while even some Republican candidates, like Marco Rubio, have asserted the need to stop the “fall of the [American] worker.” Not content to wait for national politicians to follow through on non-binding proposals, 1worker1vote — a joint venture launched in 2009 by the United Steelworkers, or USW, and Mondragon USA — has been pursing a grassroots agenda to move populist discontent beyond protest and toward the building of new institutions.
The 1worker1vote network has developed and is beginning to implement a “union co-op” model, which calls for a business structure that combines worker, and sometimes community, ownership with union representation. With the model, 1worker1vote hopes to demonstrate the viability of a democratic economy, both in terms of ownership and management, capable of eventually replacing the corporate-managed economy that generates astounding wealth for those at the top while leaving nearly a quarter of the country living in poverty and half the population stuck in a debt trap with zero net assets.
“Profit should be for people, not for profit’s sake, and capital, while important, is subordinate to labor,” explained Ellen Vera, a founding member of both 1worker1vote and one of its member coops, the Cincinnati Union Cooperative Initiative, or CUCI.
The claim conjures images of the clashes between labor and capital of a bygone era, and, more recently, growing grassroots protest for a democratic global economy that began in 1994 with the Zapatistas in Chiapas, Mexico and have continued during the first years of the new millennium with the global justice and Occupy movements.
