Economic Aspects of "Love"

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Re: Economic Aspects of "Love"

Postby American Dream » Sat Jul 14, 2012 12:53 pm

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Re: Economic Aspects of "Love"

Postby American Dream » Sat Jul 14, 2012 7:27 pm

Listen, You Can Hear the Sound of Direct Democracy, or Orchestroles

July 14, 2012

By Cindy Milstein


Source: Occupy Wall St.


Among the many things to remark on here in Montreal in relation to the remarkable student strike and the maple movement it has engendered is that people don’t seem to beat tactics to death. When new tactics have strategic uses that are underpinned by solid aims, and crucially, when they exhibit a bit of novelty or flair, they stay in play. On the other hand, when tactics appear to have outlasted their usefulness and especially their vibrancy, they are abandoned, reworked, or take another enlivening form.

It’s still unclear exactly how this happens. Ideas are put out there — on Facebook, posters, or the streets, and especially at student and neighborhood assemblies — and clearly, strategic and tactical decisions are made as well as implemented. Directly democratic along with highly participatory forms of decision making have long been institutionalized at many of the schools on strike, and several members of the student coalitional association CLASSE have mentioned that this self-governance was pivotal to planning, organizing, and mobilizing this strike. Or more strongly, that the strike couldn’t have happened without those bodies.

But there’s also this curious way in which a sort of “general will” or popular consensus — outside any formal process, and more like a gravitational pull — makes it apparent that a particular tactic has people’s enthusiasm and participation, or not. And not in a cynical or mean-spirited way; people on the ground seem to somehow, inexplicably, concur that something feels right to do.

The key point is: there’s a palpable and (compared to contemporary movements in the United States) profound lack of tactical, not to mention strategic, staleness.

So it is with the casseroles.

Nearly as quickly as they burst on to the scene in Montreal some six weeks ago, swelling in numbers and locations and volume, the casseroles diminished to the occasional few folks at an intersection for about fifteen minutes. They were magical while they lasted, and made their point, plus helped to kick off popular assemblies in various neighborhoods here, and offered an easy solidarity tool for folks in other cities and countries, such as the “Canada casseroles night” every Wednesday. And probably a sizable number of Montreal households now have a thoroughly dented pan as proud symbol of this struggle.

Then, the Saturday before last, various Montreal popular assemblies decided they would pull those battered pots into battle again, and head downtown to add strength to the nightly illegal demos. They each started casseroles on particular corners in their own neighborhoods, at staggered times, and then walked from neighborhood to neighborhood toward downtown, picking up people until a hefty contingent of casserolers with banners for each popular assembly converged at the usual meeting spot next to UQAM for the (second) illegal evening march, and everyone strolled out again together. There was also a flash mob on the way that swooped into a bookstore chain that had supposedly fired an employee for wearing a red square; inside, for several exuberant minutes, people banged on pots and waved red-covered books.

Meanwhile, a small group of diehards in the Mile-End neighborhood had apparently been bringing their cookware out on Wednesdays to two “hot spot” intersections at 8 p.m. At last Thursday’s Mile-End popular assembly, in the six-person breakout group on culture and arts, two enthusiastic guys — part of an enthusiastic collective space in the neighborhood — said they wanted to add an orchestra and bring it out into the streets at this Wednesday’s tiny casseroles, or our own neighborhood version of Montreal’s Chaotic Insurrection Ensemble, “born May 27th 2006 during the ‘Status For All’ march/demo in Montreal” (http://chaoticinsurrectionensemble.org/). Maybe it was another one of those “lost in translation” moments for me, but I could have sworn they said they didn’t want to promote it; just spread the idea via word of mouth, which is what happened. The breakout group ran the idea by the reconvened assembly, or what was left at it some three hours into our popular gathering in a public park. Everyone affirmed that it sounded good, and away we all went into the night last week.

At 8:10 p.m. this evening, at the appointed Waverly and St.-Viateur intersection, it was me and maybe three or four other folks with pots and pans. I started banging on my saucepan, filled with homemade red felt squares and safety pins in each (to give out when — or if — we really got going), and the rest of the cookware crew joined me, along with a couple dogs that started barking. At about 8:15 p.m., one of the two enthusiastic guys marched over to us with his drum, quadrupling (or more) our noise level. At 8:20 p.m., now with maybe six casseroles on pots and ladles, he asked me if I thought we should give up on the plan. He wondered if it had been promoted, though I reminded him that he and his friend been opposed to that last week. He then wondered if maybe we should just call it quits for this week, and promote it for the next one.

Fortunately, soon, our popular assembly banner arrived from one direction, and a definite scrappy DIY orchestra appeared in the other direction — horns, drums, tambourines, and perhaps the showpiece, a quiet bicycle with a big red-square banner. More on that in a minute.

Suddenly there were also more pots and pans, and more dogs, and some kids, and lots of red squares on bodies and instruments, and we set about “tuning up” our street-corner insurrection ensemble, and then . . . away we went, out into the unsanctioned streets as popular assembly marching band in solidarity with the student strike and social strike (because that’s been the clear sentiment at the first two assemblies). Or rather, out with our newly blended tactic: “Orchestroles”! Part instruments, musicians, and discernible songs; part cookware, neighbors, and clanging chaos.

Suffice it to say, the neighborhood came alive as we passed by in the streets, with people popping their heads out windows, doors, and balconies, and some zipping back inside to grab a pot and wooden spoon, and then join us. The musicians increasingly hit their stride, starting to really jam, and the sound of music — a mix of joyful and somber, mournful and celebratory — echoed off the buildings, wafting through the gentle night breeze, outward well beyond our numbers (maybe forty tops, but never the “true” illegal number spelled out in special law 78, which for about a minute, we chanted against with the usual “fuck you” slogan in French).

A casseroler had brought flyers about our next assembly, and she and I handed them out to curious onlookers, who leaned out open-air cafes to get a peek or stopped on their bicycles to savor the music. Mostly, I held out my saucepan full of freshly made red squares to people who seemed more than curious. They’d peek inside, a big grin would spread across their face, and more often than not, they’d exclaim their surprise at this gift. I could never hear what they said, due to the orchestroles’ overwhelming din, but expressions can speak louder than words sometimes. They’d eagerly grab one, pinning to their shirt or bag, again looking astonished at this gift that allowed them, too, to participate. I didn’t invent this tactic; it’s one I borrowed after seeing a few folks do it on previous casseroles. Several members of our orchestroles realized I had these red squares, and since they weren’t wearing one, they ran up to me to get a “loaner,” and soon I could see my saucepan was nearly empty. Then one of our popular assembly crew — a striking student — sidled up to me, asking if I needed more, and then pulled out a ziplock bag full of them. This student told me that they made them in batches to give out at their student association meetings. So voila! Refilled saucepan, ready to be emptied again!

We took the streets, our popular assembly banner at the head, musicians toward the front, cookware all around, and bicycle with banner at the rear, all of us illegal and self-directed, winding our way through quieter residential streets and busier commercial ones in Mile-End, nearly always against traffic, for about an hour. And just when we were nearly back at our starting point, which clearly (via that inexplicable general will) was going to be our ending point, suddenly one, then two, and then five cop cars with lights flashing decided they had to intervene — with the usual excuse of, as they told one of our orchestroles, “preventing an accident.” Their method to ensure our “safety” was to use the front of their cars to “nudge” several us off the street. When someone would “insist” on remaining in the street, they’d turn their cruiser toward them, brushing car against person’s body. Without any “fuck you cops” or confrontation, our orchestroles just stayed its course, in our streets, back to our beginning intersection, where we raised our pots and pans as the musicians raised the volume in a gorgeously insurrectionary finale, with smiles all around.

“Next week?” “Yes, next week!” “Hey, can’t we do an encore now?!”

We engaged in short and sweet schmoozing in the street instead, while the five cop cars sat ineffectually nearby. “Hey, we must have been successful tonight,” someone observed happily. “Look, they sent five police cars for less than fifty people!” At one point the police used a microphone to announce that we needed to get out of the streets and stop socializing, but like the bigger nightly demos, no one listened. The police aren’t who people listen to these days. We talk and listen to each other.

Which brings me back to the quiet bicycle with the big red-square banner, with one word (well, two, if you count the French and English versions): LISTEN.

LISTEN. That’s what direct democracy sounds like. A whole lot of listening, to each other, and what we need, desire, and feel good about doing. Maybe that goes a long way to explaining why neither tactics, strategies, or aspirations go stale. People here in Montreal, in building toward and moving forward with this student-social strike, have made use of and/or are creating deliberate spaces for listening, from assemblies to the wake-up calls of casseroles and now orchestroles.

Which brings me to an anecdote about a different kind of interaction this evening.

At one point in handing out my homemade red felt squares, a woman who looked to be in her early twenties, waved me over to her front door. When I held out my saucepan, she said in perfect English, with not a moment’s hesitation about whether I would understand or not (coincidence or not, this is something that’s always been my experience at demos, when someone wants to complain about the strike, which is heavily Francophone inflected and organized), “Don’t you think you’ve protested enough? You’ve already lost, no one agrees with you, and the government isn’t going to give you what you want.” Her initial smile turned to hostility, and her voice got an angry edge. “But look around you. Can’t you see that there’s lots of support, right here on your block?” I responded, because hoards of people all around us had come outside to wave and cheer the orchestroles on, and even start participating too.

She dived, agitatedly, into the tired and misguided line that the students were spoiled, they had it better than students elsewhere, and so on. I dived, calmly, into the idea that everyone should have cheap or free education, and maybe health care and housing too. “Like you do,” I said, because I was looking right into her lovely home, its front door wide open.

She started pointing a finger at me, about to yell, and I quietly pointed my finger at her T-shirt, which sported a big heart made out of hundreds of little versions of the word love. Even more calmly, I said, “Isn’t that what love is about? Love in the most expansive sense, as a love of humanity? That we believe that each of us — you, me, and everyone around us — is deserving of what they need and want?” She stopped, looked at me, less sure of herself. I could hear her listening, maybe not to me, but to something inside her head, like she was now forced to have an internal dialogue because she’d listened to that word love — a word that she herself was wearing, perhaps without even thinking hard about its meaning before.

LISTEN. Nightly and daily here, for the time being at least, you can hear the faint but growing sound of things changing.



Cindy Milstein is a board member of the Institute for Anarchist Studies–focused on projects such as the new Lexicon pamphlet series, the IAS/AK Anarchist Interventions book series, and curating anarchist theory tracks–and author of Anarchism and Its Aspirations(IAS/AK Press, 2010) and the forthcoming collaboration with Erik Ruin Paths toward Utopia: Graphic Explorations of Everyday Anarchism (PM Press, 2012). She has been overly engaged in numerous collective projects aimed at creating autonomous spaces of resistance, reconstruction, and education, including most recently, Occupy Philly, Station 40 in San Francisco, and before that, Black Sheep Books in Montpelier, Vermont. She also taught at the “anarchist summer school” called the Institute for Social Ecology, and has long been involved in community organizing and social/political movements from below. Her essays appear in several anthologies, including Realizing the Impossible: Art against Authority and Globalize Liberation. When not at home, she travels (frequently) to do public speaking and popular education around topics related to anarchism, direct democracy, anticapitalism, and other political interventions, to encourage critical thought and prefigurative politics, and to do indie media as a sort of anarchist political correspondent/commentator, such as right now in relation to the maple spring in Montreal. More of her writing can be found at her blog, Outside the Circle.


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URL: http://www.zcommunications.org/listen-y ... y-milstein
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Re: Economic Aspects of "Love"

Postby American Dream » Sun Jul 15, 2012 12:10 am

THE COLONIZATION OF THE AMERICAS, AFRICA, AND THE ASIATIC WORLD BY THE EUROPEAN POWERS SET THE FOUNDATION FOR CONTEMPORARY RACIAL INEQUALITY. THESE COLONIAL PROCESSES DIVIDED THE WORLD BETWEEN CONQUERED AND COLONIZER, MASTER AND SLAVE, WHITE AND NON-WHITE (I.E., OTHER). IT INCLUDED THE DEVELOPMENT OF AN IDEOLOGY, AND PROCESSES OF SPREADING THAT IDEOLOGY (MOSTLY THROUGH EDUCATION), TO JUSTIFY COLONIZATION. FROM THESE PAST RELATIONSHIPS, LEGAL PRACTICES, IDEOLOGIES, AND SOCIAL MORES EMERGED THE CONSTRUCTION OF RACIAL DIFFERENCE AS NATURAL AND FIXED. LAW UPON LAW, PRACTICE UPON PRACTICE, AND CONSTRUCTION UPON CONSTRUCTION HAS BROUGHT RACIAL INEQUALITY TO ITS CURRENT STATE.

- Zamudio et al., Critical Race Theory Matters: Education and Ideology


The major critique of liberalism is that it constructs an image of society as fair and egalitarian where individuals rise and fall based on their own merits. Liberalism presents society as a meritocracy where individual actors compete on a level playing field. Liberalism sees inequality as a natural product of fair competition. Liberalism refuses to examine the structural causes of inequality (such as capitalism, racism, and patriarchy) that CRT scholars highlight. Liberalism’s emphasis on individual rights precludes any consideration of special protections under the law for minority groups. In fact, liberalism rejects any consideration of the structural rather than natural or individual causes of inequality because it might lead to the transformation of unequal power relations (Daniels 2008), a prospect feared by those in power. Ultimately, the liberal perspective fails to consider the multiple power relationships that give some individuals much greater advantage over others, and that allow some people to be freer than others.

From the very beginning, liberal societies were constructed along the status lines of class, race, gender, and citizenship. In America, Blacks and indigenous people were denied even the most basic human rights. Women were relegated to second class status and denied the rights of citizenship. Birthrights, not human rights, protected only those privileged enough to be born white, landowning males. As a society, we have never practiced justice and liberty for all. Liberal societies use the slogans of equality to benefit an exclusive, privileged group. And while over the years liberal societies have extended legal and political rights to a greater number of people, they have never addressed the fundamental material inequality passed down through generations of modern capitalist development. From the very beginning, then, the ideal of equality in the abstract has been celebrated within a broader context of concrete inequality.


--Zamudio et al., Critical Race Theory Matters: Education and Ideology
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Re: Economic Aspects of "Love"

Postby American Dream » Sun Jul 15, 2012 9:17 am

http://recomposition.info/2012/07/12/de ... ng-squads/

Developing Workers Autonomy: An Anarchist Look At Flying Squads

July 12, 2012

Image


This post reprints an article that first appeared in issue 8 of The Northeastern Anarchist, which featured several articles on the theme “Anarchists in the Workplace". The Northeastern Anarchist is a publication of Common Struggle, formerly known as the Northeastern Federation of Anarchist Communists (NEFAC). This article describes organizations of mutual support and struggle built by Canadian workers.


Developing Workers Autonomy: An Anarchist Look At Flying Squads
by Jeff Shantz, Punching Out Collective (NEFAC-Toronto)


Recently much interest and discussion has been generated by the emergence of union flying squads in Ontario. Flying squads — rapid response networks of workers that can be mobilized for strike support, demonstrations, direct action and working class defense of immigrants, poor people, and unemployed workers — present a potentially significant development in revitalizing organized labor activism and rank-and-file militancy.

Here are organizations with rank-and-file participation working to build solidarity across unions and locals and alongside community groups, engaging in direct action while striving to democratize their own unions. No wonder then that the re-appearance of flying squads in Ontario, in a context of halting resistance to a vicious neoliberal attack, notably among some sectors of the labor movement, has been cause for much excitement.

Militant anti-capitalists of various stripes, recognizing the crucial roles played by workers within production relations, have viewed the flying squads as important in the development of workers’ organization against capitalist authority and discipline. Anarchists, maintaining the necessity of working class self-organization and autonomy from bureaucratic structures, have been encouraged by the possible emergence of active networks of rank-and-file workers bringing collective resources to defend broad working class interests.

At the same time the struggles over the make up and control or direction of flying squads has reflected struggles between rank-and-file members and union bureaucracies more generally. Most accounts have been so caught up in the excitement generated by the emergence of the flying squads that they have not addressed critically the obstacles and difficulties faced by flying squads as they attempt to build on a truly rank-and-file basis. Similarly, these hopeful accounts fail to take stock of the current, diminished, status of the flying squad movement in Ontario, substituting promise for reality.

Rank-And-File Groups

The flying squad is a rapid response group of members who are ready to mobilize on short notice to provide direct support for pickets or actions. It may or may not be a recognized body of the local. The flying squad structure may consist of little more than phone lists and meetings but, significantly, should maintain its autonomy from the local and national union executives. Generally flying squads should be open only to rank-and-file members since they must be free to initiate and take actions that the leadership may not approve of. Some flying squads refuse even a budget line item so that they are in no way dependent upon leadership. In Canada, flying squads have offered crucial support to direct actions around immigration defense, tenant protection, squatters rights, and welfare support by mobilizing sizeable numbers of unionists who are prepared for actions without regard to legality. Flying squads take direct action to interfere with bosses’ abilities to make profits. Not limited in their scope of action by specific collective agreements or workplaces, flying squads mobilize for community as well as workplace defense.

Working groups are generally recognized bodies that are established to deal with specific areas of need. They step beyond the limitations of traditional unionism to assist both members and non-members. Rank-and-file and community alliances offer one example of how to make the connections which are crucial to developing militant working class solidarity. They can bring anti-capitalist activists, community members and unionists together to work on a day-to-day basis.

Rank-and-file committees and flying squads can become important parts of struggles over a broad spectrum of issues affecting working class community life, including those which the mainstream unions ignore such as housing and unemployment. They can offer spaces for building bridges between workers, across unions and industries and between union and community groups. Autonomous from traditional union structures and organized around militant non-hierarchical practices, rank-and-file working groups and flying squads can provide real opposition to conservatism within the unions as well. They provide a better approach than the more common model of the “left caucus” which tries to reform union policy, usually, again, through resolutions at conventions (Clarke, 2002). The rank-and-file committees actively and directly challenge the leadership within their own locals and across locals.

Flying squads of various types have long been an important part of labor militancy internationally. In Britain, community flying pickets successfully mobilized to defend hospitals in working class neighborhoods against closure in the 1970s. In India several farmers’ unions recently formed flying squads to confront officials at purchase centers to ensure that their demands for proper payment for their crops were satisfied. Members of the Carpenters Union in southern California, who were primarily immigrants, many of them undocumented, used flying squads and direct action effectively during the framers’ strike of 1995.

While some type of rank-and-file organizing, along the lines of what we now call flying squads, has been a constant in labor movements, the contemporary flying squads in Ontario are inspired by the flying pickets that emerged during the CIO strikes of the 1930s. Flying squads played an important part in the 1945 UAW strike against Ford in Windsor. That strike, which won the rights associated with the Rand Formula (union recognition, dues check off and closed shop) for workers in Canada, turned when strikers organized an incredible vehicle picket in which the entire Ford plant was surrounded and shut down by several rows of vehicles. Flying squads were used effectively to mobilize people for actions throughout the strike and to spread information throughout the community.

Not coincidentally, the contemporary flying squads in Ontario made their reappearance in several Canadian Auto Workers (CAW) locals in Windsor during the mid-1990s as a mobilization force for actions against the newly elected neoliberal provincial government (See Levant, 2003: 20). The network within the CAW spread during organizing of the Ontario Days of Action, rotating, city-by-city one-day mass strikes against the Tories. In the midst of a lengthy strike against Falconbridge mining, during which picketers were subjected to ongoing violence by company goons and security thugs, members of CAW local 598 initiated a regional Northern Flying Squad to reinforce and defend the lines and step up the struggle against the company. They helped to organize a solidarity weekend that brought flying squads from across Ontario for militant actions against Falconbridge, actions that many consider to have been the high point of the strike.

My union, CUPE 3903, inspired by the CAW flying squads and the direct action movements against capitalist globalization, formed a flying squad three years ago to support OCAP’s direct action casework around immigration defense and welfare support as well strike solidarity and organizing direct actions within mass anti-capitalist demonstrations. The flying squad is currently made up of more than 80 members who are ready to mobilize on short notice to provide direct support for pickets or actions. Significantly, the flying squad maintains its autonomy from the union executive, refusing even a budget line item. 3903 has already made it known that it is willing to do direct action training and to hold workshops on forming and developing flying squads.

In early September, 2001, OCAP along with the 3903 flying squad went directly to Pearson International Airport to demand an end to threats of deportation against three families. Leaflets were given to passengers alerting them to the situation and a visit was paid to the Immigration Canada deportation office in the basement of Terminal One. OCAP demanded and received a meeting with the airport’s Immigration management and gave a deadline of the end of the business day for management to issue stays of removal in all three instances. All three deportations were eventually cancelled. This unusual result, in which the removal dates were cancelled prior to a Federal Court challenge, is a testament to the powers of direct action.

It must also be stressed that the presence of flying squads has been crucial in the success of this and other actions. Clearly government officials, security and cops respond differently when confronted with a room packed with workers holding union flags and banners than when confronted with a smaller numbers of people that they are willing to dismiss as activists. Through such actions, the flying squad demonstrates how organizations of rank-and-file workers can step out of traditional concerns with the workplace to act in a broadened defense of working class interests. The expansion of union flying squads, with autonomy from union bureaucracies, could provide a substantial response to the state’s efforts to isolate immigrants and refugees from the larger community. The emboldened aggressiveness of Immigration Canada after September 11 makes such actions in defense of working class people absolutely crucial.

In addition 3903 is home to vital working groups with real links to community struggles. In November, 2001, 3903 provided an office and resources for OCAP to work along with members of the 3903 Anti-Poverty Working Group. The working group moves beyond the limitations of traditional unionism to assist people (members and non-members) experiencing problems with collection agencies, landlords, bosses and police and to help anyone having difficulties with welfare or other government bureaucracies. The new office provides a possibly significant example of a rank-and-file initiative that forges community alliances while fighting the local implementation of the global neoliberal agenda. This type of alliance offers one example of how to make the connections which are crucial to growing our movements. Indeed, it brings anti-globalization activists and unions together to work on a day-to-day basis.

Bureaucracy Against The Flying Squads

The national and local executives of some unions in which flying squads have emerged have clearly shown concern about this development. This has played out particularly badly within the CAW.

During the summer of 2001, people in cities, reserves and towns throughout Ontario were gearing up for a campaign of economic disruption which would directly confront and interfere with the political programs and economic practices of the government and their corporate backers. This effort suffered something of a setback when the CAW leadership decided to withdraw support from the campaign in June. The decision came following a mock eviction of the Finance Minister from his constituency office by OCAP, students and members of CAW and CUPE flying squads. The National President of the CAW, Buzz Hargrove, was so upset by the action that he agreed to meet with the Labor Minister to discuss union support of OCAP. In an inexplicable act of collaboration, Hargrove sat down to establish union policy with the man who had only months before introduced legislation gutting the Employment Standards Act and extending the legal workweek from 44 to 62 hours.

Significantly, not only did Hargrove cut OCAP’s largest source of funding, but he also clamped down on the CAW flying squads which were only beginning to grow. CAW flying squads were brought under control of the National by requiring approval of the National or of local presidents prior to any action. The National even tried to prohibit use of CAW shirts, hats and banners at actions not sanctioned by the National. Thus the CAW leadership cynically used the excuse of the eviction to camp down on a rank-and-file movement that it saw as a possible threat to its authority. The strangling of the flying squads by the bureaucrats may be one of the sharpest blows rank-and-file activists have suffered recently and will deeply hurt fightback efforts in Ontario.

These actions effectively derailed actions in major industrial centers like Windsor, where activists, recognizing the vulnerability of just-in-time production in Windsor and Detroit, had initially planned to blockade the Ambassador Bridge, the main U.S.-Canada node in the NAFTA-superhighway. Stopping traffic on the bridge for even a short period of time would have caused millions of dollars in damages because of the reliance on just-in-time production in the factories on both sides of the border. This possibility was not lost on Hargrove, who let it slip during a meeting with representatives of OCAP Allies when he angrily voiced his concern that in Windsor some members were talking about shutting down production at “our plants.”

At this point it seems that the CAW bureaucracy’s clampdown on the flying squads is complete. At a panel discussion on creative tactics that I took part in at this year’s Labor Notes conference, Michelle Dubiel, a CAW “Ontario Chapter” flying squad representative, stated with great satisfaction that marshals had finally been instituted in the CAW flying squads. Dubiel noted that there had been much discussion and some resistance to this but happily concluded that members were eventually brought to see the necessity of marshals.

The impact of this takeover of the flying squads has been lethal in some areas. A comrade in Sudbury recently told me that the northern flying squads were virtually extinct. Similarly the rank-and-file, cross-local flying squad in Windsor has not been able to get off the ground.

Leninist Reformism: Flying Squads As Left Opposition

Some Leninists and their Trotskyist sidekicks have viewed the flying squads primarily as a means of union reform, a companion piece of the left caucus’ loyal opposition to the union leadership. A prime example of this approach is expressed by Alex Levant, (who has put much work into building my union’s flying squad and is currently a vice president in the local), in a recent article in ‘New Socialist’ magazine (March/April, 2003).

Levant poses the problem for rank-and-file activism largely as one of “conservative leaders who practice ‘business unionism’” (Levant, 2003: 22). Levant (2003: 22) suggests that flying squads “pose a threat to such union leaders’ positions by fostering membership activism, which bolsters left opposition currents in these unions.” Business unionism, far from being a preference of specific leaders, however, is a structured relationship, legally and organizationally, within unions and between unions and bosses. Levant (2003: 22) is correct to suggest that such locals “contribute to the crisis of working-class self-organization by discouraging members’ self-activity”, but this crisis will not be overcome by replacing conservative leaders with leftist ones. Nor should we accept that social unionism is not still a form of business unionism. This is shown clearly in the case of the CAW, which has long practiced “social unionism.”

Taking the left opposition perspective, Levant is unable or unwilling to openly or directly criticize bureaucrats in the CAW for their ongoing efforts to control that union’s flying squads. In his article Levant quotes CAW representative Steve Watson approvingly while making no mention of his role in the CAW breaking of the rank-and-file aspects of the flying squads. Notably, at the above-mentioned anti-deportation action at the airport, it was Watson who intervened at the last minute to keep CAW flying squads from participating, even though many workers at the airport are CAW members, and could have played an important part in stopping the deportation.

Similarly, while Levant is rightly critical of the Ontario Federation of Labor Solidarity Network, which required permission of the OFL bureaucracy to undertake any action, he has been less critical of similar developments within our own flying squad. At a meeting in July 2003 it was determined that the flying squad would be coordinated by no more than 3 members who have a number of responsibilities including, crucially, the responsibilities of maintaining the membership list and calling and organizing the flying squad’s actions. Ideally all members should have access to the membership list and be able to initiate calls for actions. Creating coordinator positions with this authority is a troubling and potentially dangerous development. During an earlier meeting where the coordinator structure was challenged by members who favored getting the lists to every member and canceling the coordinator positions, several members who take the Trotskyist approach and supported the coordinator structure walked out, purposefully blowing quorum just before the vote.

I do agree with Levant that the flying squads have a tremendous potential in building rank-and-file militancy and self-organization. However, that potential can only be met if autonomy from the leadership is established and defended with vigilance. Flying squads do NOT “work best” when they “respect” the roles of the leadership as Levant advocates. Flying squads work best when they understand the roles the leadership plays, including the role of taming and reigning in members’ self-organizing initiatives.

Notes On The Buearucracy

For all of their potential power, the trade unions are restricted by a leadership that cannot allow decisive force to be unleashed. To understand the difficulties facing rank-and-file resistance we must understand the roles and structures of leadership beyond a focus on conservative or progressive union leaders. In Ontario, during the 1930 and 1940s waves of union organizing, wildcat strikes and occupations pressed a tactical retreat on the bosses and their state, leading to the extension of new rights to workers’ organizations.

In place of open class war, a process of limited and uneven concession granting was established. This truce had the effect of regulating and compartmentalizing workplace struggles to keep them below the level of serious disruption. Each industry, workplace or section of workers was viewed as having its own issues to attend to or, indeed, to bargain over. A new layer of union functionary emerged to broker and execute this deal. These union executives needed to placate membership with regulated contract gains while simultaneously ensuring labor force stability and an environment conducive to accumulation for the bosses. Negotiation is presented as a reasonable and effective solution to most problems. Bureaucrats strive to get the best possible deal for labor power rather than attack or end the overall system of exploitation. Emphasis is placed on bargaining power within the capitalist labor market.

Strike action became a last resort to be deployed only under very limited and legally defined conditions. Wildcat strikes and varieties of worker-initiated shopfloor actions are negotiated away and prohibited within contracts. Workers who engage in such actions are open to sanction, a point the union leadership often reinforces within the membership.

While limited outbursts were permitted, leaders were obliged to police the deal and restore order in the ranks of the workers when the bosses deemed necessary. Bosses are not going to negotiate with people who can’t or won’t deliver what is agreed to. The bureaucracy developed centralized structures and methods of control and direction which fit its role and function. In times of mobilization the union leaders, rather than helping to overcome hesitation, view those who are mobilizing as a threat to be isolated or stopped entirely. Critically, all of this is related to structural pressures on the union leadership based on their role within capitalist relations of production rather than on personal characteristics or perspectives as the left reformists would have it.

At times bureaucrats will call on the services of left militants when a show of strength is tactically advantageous only to abandon, isolate or purge them when things have gone as far as the leadership deems necessary. This is a crucial lesson that must be kept in mind when we consider flying squads with marshals under the direction of national and local executives. Militant activists must reject the role of “left critics” of the bureaucracy, refuse the terms of the compromise with the bosses and directly challenge those who seek to enforce it. It is necessary to build a rank-and-file rebellion in the unions that actually works to break the hold of the bureaucracy.

Conclusion: Rank-And-File Autonomy

Real rank-and-file autonomy means being prepared and willing to fight independently of the bureaucracy and against it when required. As anarchists we must be upfront, open and direct about confronting the bureaucrats and conservatives within our unions. We should not put any gloss on efforts to contain rank-and-file militancy or excuse it for any reason. We must contest reformist and Leninist approaches to rank-and-file movements which would position them as conscientious pressure groups.

None of this is meant to imply that the leadership is holding back an otherwise radical membership. That is romantic silliness. Rather, the point is that developing militancy within union movements requires a clear recognition of the necessity for developing experiences of effective struggle that go beyond what the bosses or governments would permit and, at the same time, viewing honestly how the current unions leadership impedes this.

Rank-and-file movements offer a space for radicalizing workers to come together and focus our energies. When people engage in struggles, whether strikes or demonstrations against neoliberalism, we develop at least some sense of collective power, confidence and an experience of doing things differently. This can encourage an openness to more radical ideas and practices with which to address to problems we find ourselves facing. Mainstream unions, even where some resources are given to political education, are generally not going to present and develop radical alternatives. Certainly the leadership of mainstream unions cannot be expected to do so. As anarchist workers this is one area in which we can and should be active. Putting forward radical alternatives, agitating for those alternatives and working to make them real should be part of the work we do within rank-and-file networks.

These are merely first steps in a long process of building rank-and-file opposition. They are initiatives for working class self-activity that should not be limited to being a democratic complement to the bureaucracy. We need to think beyond this to see something more in the emergence and growth of autonomous rank-and-file networks. The need to build a resistance that includes rank-and-file unionists, non-organized workers, non-status workers and migrants is critical.

The capitalist offensives of the last decade in Ontario have broken down working-class organization and resistance. Dismantling employment standards, freezing the minimum wage, eliminating rent controls and deepening cuts to social assistance for unemployed workers have made life more precarious for broadening sections of the working class.

This situation is not just a matter for deep humanitarian concern but a serious warning to the workers’ movement. If the working class is reaching such a level of polarization and a section of it is experiencing such misery and privation, we are in a profoundly dangerous situation.

The working class is potentially a force for moving struggles beyond rebellion to fundamentally transform social relations and actually create society anew. This force must, however, break down many of the constraints and limitations that keep its development from realizing this anti-capitalist potential. Currently unions are largely defensive organizations geared to protect and improve workers’ wages and conditions of work. They are not revolutionary, or even radical, organizations. At the same time, radical movements do emerge within existing unions.

Many workers are becoming tired of engaging in struggle only to find themselves under attack, not only by the boss, but by the officials of their own unions. The questionable actions of the OFL, especially during last year’s Tory convention when the OFL organized a separate action and then left the scene when activists were attacked by police, have convinced some grassroots activists and rank-and-file workers alike of the need to make end runs around the unions officialdom and develop real alliances. Certainly this is a healthy development, one which anarchists must take seriously. This means meeting with rank-and-file workers and having serious discussions about what sort of assistance anti-capitalist movements can offer in their struggles against conservative leadership, policies and structures in their own unions.

Too often the measure of labor involvement in coalitions in Ontario has been the amount of money given to a campaign, the forcefulness of rhetoric from high profile leaders, or the winning of a motion at this or that convention. The only way that any sort of credible resistance movement is going to be forged in Ontario, however, is through a redoubling of efforts to make connections between grassroots community groups and rank-and-file workers. Indeed direct action workshops are something anarchist activists can and should offer. We should also be ready to provide picket support, help build flying squads or industrial unions among unorganized workers, as the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) have done among squeegee workers in Vancouver and involve ourselves in the creation of joint union-community anti-racism and anti-poverty working groups. Anarchist workers must play an active part in building truly rank-and-file flying squads and working groups whether we are in a union, in unorganized workplaces, or unemployed.

===============

REFERENCES

Clarke, John. 2002. The Labor Bureaucracy and the Fight Against the Ontario Tories. Unpublished Manuscript.

Neill, Monty. 2001. “Rethinking Class Composition Analysis in Light of the Zapatistas.” In Auroras of the Zapatistas: Local and Global Struggles of the Fourth World War, edited by Midnight Notes. Brooklyn: Autonomedia, p.119-143.
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Re: Economic Aspects of "Love"

Postby American Dream » Sun Jul 15, 2012 3:40 pm

During the heyday of westerns on U.S. television, anyone watching saw spectacle after spectacle of white men destroying hundreds of Native Americans. No psychoanalytic studies have been done exploring the psychological impact on individuals (especially Native Americans) who have suffered holocaust and genocidal attack only to live in a culture where the major medium of mass communication reenacts this tragedy for “entertainment.” Yet this has always been the case with Native Americans. When westerns were regularly shown on television, one could daily witness the slaughter of nations by white people. Children naturally mimic this genocidal drama and play cowboys and Indians.

--bell hooks
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Re: Economic Aspects of "Love"

Postby American Dream » Mon Jul 16, 2012 12:43 pm

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History has shown me that as long as some white middle-class people can live high on the hog, take vacations to Europe, send their children to private schools, and reap the benefits of their white skin privileges, then they are “liberals.” But when times get hard and money gets tight, they pull off that liberal mask and you think you’re talking to Adolf Hitler. They feel sorry for the so-called underprivileged as long as they can maintain their own privileges.

Assata Shakur


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Re: Economic Aspects of "Love"

Postby American Dream » Mon Jul 16, 2012 3:26 pm

A vision of cultural homogeneity that seeks to deflect attention away from or even excuse the oppressive, dehumanizing impact of white supremacy on the lives of black people by suggesting black people are racist too indicates that the culture remains ignorant of what racism really is and how it works. It shows that people are in denial.

Why is it so difficult for many white folks to understand that racism is oppressive not because white folks have prejudicial feelings about blacks (they could have such feelings and leave us alone) but because it is a system that promotes domination and subjugation? The prejudicial feelings some blacks may express about whites are in no way linked to a system of domination that affords us any power to coercively control the lives and well-being of white folks. That needs to be understood.

Concurrently, all social manifestations of black separatism are often seen by whites as a sign of anti-white racism, when they usually represent an attempt by black people to construct places of political sanctuary where we can escape, if only for a time, white domination.


—bell hooks
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Re: Economic Aspects of "Love"

Postby American Dream » Mon Jul 16, 2012 3:49 pm

One white woman raised her hand and protested, “Why are we reading about Black people? I thought this was a women’s studies class.” The professor lost her temper and told her that in case she didn’t know, it was a Black woman teaching the class and that Black people can also be women. The white woman started crying and angrily left the class. I was amazed at this white woman’s sense of entitlement and privilege, of being able to protest and cry in the classroom.

—Siobhan Brooks, ”Black Feminism in Everyday Life"
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Re: Economic Aspects of "Love"

Postby American Dream » Tue Jul 17, 2012 10:50 am

South Asian Anarchism: Paths to Praxis

Meditations on Maia Ramnath’s Decolonizing Anarchism: an Antiauthoritarian History of India’s Liberation Struggle (AK Press, USA, 2012) and her Haj to Utopia: How the Ghadar Movement Charted Global Radicalism and Attempted to Overthrow the British Empire (California World History Library, USA, 2011) – by Michael Schmidt, founder member of the Zabalaza Anarchist Communist Front (ZACF) of South Africa, co-author with Lucien van der Walt of Black Flame: the Revolutionary Class Politics of Anarchism and Syndicalism, Counter-power Vol.1 (AK Press, USA, 2009), and author of Cartographie de l’anarchisme révolutionnaire (Lux Éditeur, Canada, 2012). This piece was kindly edited by van der Walt.

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Setting South Asia ablaze:
the Ghadar (Mutiny) Party


What the Institute for Anarchist Studies’ Maia Ramnath has achieved with these two books whose angles of approach differ yet which form companion volumes in that they intersect on the little-known anarchist movement of South Asia, is a breathtaking, sorely-needed re-envisioning of anarchism’s forgotten organisational strength in the colonial world which points to its great potential to pragmatically combat imperialism today.

Anarchism’s Anti-imperialism Enabled its Global Reach

To paint the backdrop to Ramnath’s work, we need to break with conventional anarchist histories. Lucien van der Walt and Steven Hirsch’s Anarchism and Syndicalism in the Colonial and Post-Colonial World (2010) states: “The First International provided the womb in which the anarchist movement emerged, but the formal meetings of the International, its press, and its debates were located within the body of a dynamic global working class and peasant network. Anarchism had an organised presence in Argentina, Cuba, Egypt and Mexico from the 1870s, followed by Ireland, South Africa and Ukraine in the 1880s. The first anarchist-led, syndicalist, unions outside of Spain (the Spanish Regional Workers’ Federation, 1870) and the USA (the Central Labor Union, 1884) were Mexico’s General Congress of Mexican Workers (1876) and Cuba’s Workers’ Circle (1887). These were the immediate ancestors of the better known syndicalist unions that emerged globally from the 1890s onwards. To put it another way, anarchism was not a West European doctrine that diffused outwards, perfectly formed, to a passive ‘periphery.’ Rather, the movement emerged simultaneously and transnationally, created by interlinked activists on [four] continents – a pattern of inter-connection, exchange and sharing, rooted in ‘informal internationalism,’ which would persist into the 1940s and beyond.” They concluded that to “speak of discrete ‘Northern’ and ‘Southern’ anarchist and syndicalist movements’” as is common in contemporary anarchist discourse, “would be misleading and inaccurate.”

It cannot be overemphasised how for the first 50 years of its existence as a proletarian mass movement since its origin in the First International, the anarchist movement often entrenched itself far more deeply in the colonies of the imperialist powers and in those parts of the world still shackled by post-colonial regimes than in its better-known Western heartlands like France or Spain. Until Lenin, Marxism had almost nothing to offer on the national question in the colonies, and until Mao, who had been an anarchist in his youth, neither did Marxism have anything to offer the peasantry in such regions – regions that Marx and Engels, speaking as de facto German supremacists from the high tower of German capitalism, dismissed in their Communist Manifesto (1848) as the “barbarian and semi-barbarian countries.” Instead, Marxism stressed the virtues of capitalism (and even imperialism) as an onerous, yet necessary stepping stone to socialism. Engels summed up their devastating position in an article entitled Democratic Pan-Slavism in their Neue Rheinische Zeitung of 14 February 1849: the United States’ annexation of Texas in 1845 and invasion of Mexico in 1846 in which Mexico lost 40% of its territory were applauded as they had been “waged wholly and solely in the interest of civilisation,” as “splendid California has been taken away from the lazy Mexicans, who could not do anything with it” by “the energetic Yankees” who would “for the first time really open the Pacific Ocean to civilisation…” So, “the ‘independence’ of a few Spanish Californians and Texans may suffer because of it, in some places ‘justice’ and other moral principles may be violated; but what does that matter to such facts of world-historic significance?” By this racial argument of the “iron reality” of inherent national virility giving rise to laudable capitalist overmastery, Engels said the failure of the Slavic nations during the 1848 Pan-European Revolt to throw off their Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian and Russian yokes, demonstrated not only their ethnic unfitness for independence, but that they were in fact “counter-revolutionary” nations deserving of “the most determined use of terror” to suppress them.

It reads chillingly like a foreshadowing of the Nazis’ racial nationalist arguments for the use of terror against the Slavs during their East European conquest. Engels’ abysmal article had been written in response to Mikhail Bakunin’s Appeal to the Slavs by a Russian Patriot in which he – at that stage not yet an anarchist – had by stark contrast argued that the revolutionary and counter-revolutionary camps were divided not by nationality or stage of capitalist development, but by class. In 1848, revolutionary class consciousness had expressed itself as a “cry of sympathy and love for all the oppressed nationalities”. Urging the Slavic popular classes to “extend your had to the German people, but not to the… petit bourgeois Germans who rejoice at each misfortune that befalls the Slavs,” Bakunin concluded that there were “two grand questions spontaneously posed in the first days of the [1848] spring… the social emancipation of the masses and the liberation of the oppressed nations.”

By 1873, when Bakunin, now unashamedly anarchist, threw down the gauntlet to imperialism, writing that “Two-thirds of humanity, 800 million Asiatics, asleep in their servitude, will necessarily awaken and begin to move,” the newly-minted anarchist movement was engaging directly and repeatedly with the challenges of imperialism, colonialism, national liberation movements, and post-colonial regimes. So it was that staunchly anti-imperialist anarchism and its emergent revolutionary unionist strategy, syndicalism – and not pro-imperialist Marxism – that rose to often hegemonic dominance of the union centres of Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Cuba, Mexico, Paraguay, Peru and Uruguay in the early 1900s, almost every significant economy and population concentration in post-colonial Latin America. In six of these countries, anarchists mounted attempts at revolution; in Cuba and Mexico, they played a key role in the successful overthrow of reactionary regimes; while in Mexico and Nicaragua they deeply influenced significant experiments in large-scale revolutionary agrarian social construction.

The anarchist movement also established smaller syndicalist unions in colonial and semi-colonial territories as diverse as Algeria, Bulgaria, China, Ecuador, Egypt, Korea, Malaya (Malaysia), New Zealand, North and South Rhodesia (Zambia and Zimbabwe, respectively), the Philippines, Poland, Puerto Rico, South Africa, South-West Africa (Namibia), and Venezuela – and built crucial radical networks in the colonial and post-colonial world: East Africa, Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Central Asia, Central America, the Caribbean, South-East Asia, and Ramnath’s chosen terrain, the South Asian sub-continent. In recent years, there have been several attempts to take on the huge task of researching and reintroducing anarchists, syndicalists and a broader activist public to this neglected anti-authoritarian counter-imperialist tradition: Lucien van der Walt’s and my two-volume Counter-power project is one global overview; the book edited by van der Walt and Hirsch is another; and there are important new regional studies such as Ilham Khuri-Makdisi’s, Levantine Trajectories: the Formulation and Dissemination of Radical Ideas in and between Beirut, Cairo and Alexandria 1860-1914 (2003), and Benedict Anderson’s study of the Philippines, Under Three Flags: Anarchism and the Anti-colonial Imagination (2005).

But so far, research into historical anarchism and syndicalism in South Asia (in Ramnath’s pre-Partition terminology, India) has been lacking. In part this is because it was an immensely fragmented sub-continent, with three imperialist powers, Britain, France and Portugal, directly asserting dominance over a multiplicity of principalities and other indigenous power-structures, often integrated into the European empires through alliances and indirect rule, a patchwork not unlike Germany prior to Prussian expansion in the mid-19th Century: Ramnath calls India’s pre-colonial structures “a range of overlapping, segmentary, sovereign units oriented towards different centers”. This “beehive” polity was further fractured and complicated by religion, language, colour, and caste, so it is arguably difficult to scent the anarchist idea and its diffusions in such a potpourri.

Then again, van der Walt and my experience in researching Counter-power over 12 years has suggested that the lack of knowledge of the Indian anarchist movement is probably simply because (until Ramnath), no-one was looking for signs of its presence. While the history of Indian Marxism has been well documented, the anarchists have been ignored, or conflated with the very different Gandhians. For example, it was obvious to us that the strength of the French anarchist movement in the first half of the 20th Century definitely implied that there must have been an anarchist or syndicalist presence or impact on the French colonial port enclave of Pondicherry; and indeed Ramnath now confirms that Pondicherry was at least a base for anarchist-sympathetic Indian militants.

There were, of course, very real structural obstacles to the diffusion of anarchism and syndicalism in colonial South Asia. Much of India was pre-industrial, even semi-feudal; and while there was a large mass of landless labourers, capitalism had a limited impact. Despite the misrepresentation of anarchism and syndicalism in mainstream Marxist writings as a refuge of the declining artisanal classes, and as a revolt against modernity, it was primarily in the world’s industrial cities – Chicago, San Francisco, Buenos Aires, Valparaíso, São Paulo, Veracruz, Glasgow, Barcelona, Essen, Turin, Yekaterinoslav (Dnipropetrovs’k), St Petersburg, Cairo, Johannesburg, Shanghai, Canton (Guangzhou), Yokohama, Sydney and so forth – that the movement raised strongholds: the ports, slums, mines, plantations and factories were its fields of germination; and it was the shipping lanes and railways that were its vectors. Its agrarian experiments were also centred on regions where old agrarian orders were being shattered by imperialism, capitalism and the modern state, like Morelos and Pueblo in Mexico, Fukien in China, Shinmin in Manchuria, Aragon, Valencia and Andalusia in Spain, Patagonia in Argentina, and Zaporizhzhia in Ukraine. So in some respects, India’s colonial fragmentation and level of development can be seen as similar to contemporary West Africa, where syndicalist unions only sprung up in the 1990s in Sierra Leone and Nigeria.

Yet India was also very much part of the modern world, its older systems being transformed by imperialism as well as the rising local bourgeoisie; the “jewel” of the British Empire, it was locked into late nineteenth century globalisation as a source of cheap labour (including a large Diaspora of indentured migrants), raw materials and mass markets; Indian sailors were integral to the British fleets and Indian workers and peasants were integral to British industry; Indian workers and intellectuals resident in the West were heavily involved in radical milieus and alliances. So I am fairly certain, given that syndicalism was propagated incessantly in the pre- and inter-war period by Indian revolutionaries, and given their links to the British working class, the leading edge of which in the pre-war period was syndicalist, that someone actively looking for de facto syndicalist unions in India’s port cities would unearth something of interest.

Introducing Ramnath’s Books

Briefly, Decolonizing Anarchism looks through what Ramnath calls “the stereoscopic lenses of anarchism and anticolonialism” for both explicitly anarchist as well as less explicitly libertarian socialist approaches, in the words and deeds of a wide range of local thinkers and activists, from the Bengali terrorists of the early 1900s, to the Gandhian decentralists of the mid-century Independence era, and to the non-partisan social movements of today. This is an important recovery of a tradition that rejected the statism of both the Indian National Congress, and of Communist traditions, and that raises important questions about the trajectory of Indian anti-imperialism.

Her Haj to Utopia explores the closest thing that colonial-era India had to an explicitly anarchist-influenced sub-continental and in fact international organisation, the Ghadar (Mutiny) Party. This took its name from the 1857 “Mutiny” against British rule, an uprising revered by Indian revolutionaries of all ideologies, as reflected in Ghadar’s fused and phased mixture of syndicalism, Marxism, nationalism, radical republicanism, and pan-Islamicism. The two books intersect in the figure of Ghadar Party founder Lala Har Dayal (1884?- 1939), a globe-hopping, ascetic Bakuninist revolutionary and industrial syndicalist, secretary of the Oakland, California, branch of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and founder of the Bakunin Institute near that city. Har Dayal is of interest to van der Walt and I, in writing the South Asian section of Counter-power’s narrative history volume Global Fire because he was explicitly anarchist and syndicalist and because he was a true internationalist, building a world-spanning liberation movement that not only established roots in Hindustan and Punjab, but which linked radicals within the Indian Diaspora as far afield as Afghanistan, British East Africa (Uganda and Kenya), British Guiana (Guiana), Burma, Canada, China, Fiji, Hong Kong, Japan, Malaya (Malaysia), Mesopotamia (Iraq), Panama, the Philippines, Siam (Thailand), Singapore, South Africa, and the USA, with Ghadarites remaining active in (for example) colonial Kenya into the 1950s.

Oddly, Ramnath often uses the formulation “Western anarchism” – by which she says she means a Western conception of anarchism, rather than a geographic delimitation. Yet her own work underlines the point that anarchism/syndicalism was a universal and universalist movement, neither confined to nor centred on the West, a movement sprung transnationally and deeply rooted across the world. Of course, it adapted to local and regional situations – anarchism in the Peruvian indigenous movement was not identical to anarchism in the rural Vlassovden in Bulgaria, or amongst the Burakumin outcaste in Japan (this latter having implications for the Dalit outcaste of India) – but all of these shared core features and ideas. Anarchism in South Asia is a small but important link in the vast networks of anarchism across the colonial and postcolonial world. I feel Ramnath could have benefited from a deeper knowledge of the movement’s historical trajectories across and implantation in colonial Asia, not least in China, Manchuria, Korea, Hong Kong, Formosa (Taiwan), Malaya (Malaysia), the Philippines, and the territories of Tonkin, Annam and Cochinchina (together, Vietnam) – but then our Global Fire is not yet published.

Lucien van der Walt and my books have challenged the narrow, North Atlanticist bias of most anarchist historiography, and were written from such a perspective because we live in post-colonial Africa, and we needed to rediscover and re-establish the legitimacy of the anarchist/syndicalist praxis in our own region – where, for example, syndicalists built the what was probably the first union amongst Indian workers in British colonial Africa in Durban, South Africa, in 1917 on the IWW model, and where we work alongside Indian Diasporic militants today. It is hugely to Ramnath’s credit that the implications of her work in restoring to us the contemporary relevance of South Asian libertarian socialism far exceed her own objectives. Despite her location in the imperialist USA, her motivations appear to be similar to our own: a rediscovery of her own people’s place in anti-authoritarian history. And despite the fact that our approach favours what David Graeber calls “big-A anarchism” – the organised, explicitly anarchist movement of class struggle – and hers what he calls “small-a anarchism” – the broader range of libertarian and anarchist-influenced oppositional movements – our objectives coincide; taken together, her and our trajectories amount to a Haj, a political-intellectual pilgrimage, towards recovering a viable anarchist anti-imperialist praxis.


Continues at: http://www.anarkismo.net/attachments/ju ... i_gunj.jpg
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Re: Economic Aspects of "Love"

Postby American Dream » Tue Jul 17, 2012 3:05 pm

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Vigil for missing and murdered native women Winnipeg, Manitoba
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Re: Economic Aspects of "Love"

Postby American Dream » Wed Jul 18, 2012 12:03 pm

http://chaka85.wordpress.com/2012/07/17 ... privilege/

Positionings: radical reflections on race, sexuality, & privilege

Posted: July 17, 2012 | Author: chakaZ


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Militant origins of queer struggle: Masha P. Johnson, co-founder of Street Action Transgender Revolutionary (STAR),
fliers for their NYU sit-in to protest the campus banning queer dance parties


Recently i have been thinking a lot about identity: my own, others, and the ways the system conditions us in certain identity categories that relate to our overall material power within society. Some people have more freedom to be and act the way they want, because their privilege affords such movement. Specifically, I have been reflecting a lot about race and sexuality. What does it mean for a person to be white or primarily of European descent, but to identify as a person of color or a mixed person? What does it mean for a straight person to identify as queer? What I am really trying to understand is what does it mean to me as a queer/lesbian, mixed black womyn. Ultimately people’s business is none of mine, but people can be triggering and that isn’t always bad if you process those feelings in a productive and healthy manner. I try to check the judgement and ask myself what do these feelings say about my own character and life experience? How can I learn more about myself and my own triggers through paying attention to these complex feelings that rise towards others.

Sexuality and ‘race’ have colored my life deeply. Ever since i can remember having consciousness i have been conscious of skin and desire. This is unavoidable under capitalism, where ‘race’ ‘gender’ and ‘sexuality’ have become social categories regulated through the system. Under no other historical epoch has sexuality and gender been used to limit and enforce relationships and identity so severely. This is due to European colonization and the development of capitalism globally, and its structural and ideological relationship to patriarchal/western puritanical religious practices and beliefs. This has created a hierarchy of what is socially acceptable sex and love and what isn’t. My working-class background has always been expressed through my identity as a queer womyn of color. These are identities that I have been socialized in through the system and bourgeois society. But as long as I have lived in this physical body, I have carried these identities and contradictions, and nourished them with my own thoughts. As I have grown these thoughts have been imbued with revolutionary politics and values. A type of reclamation on this path for liberation. This has been no easy task, and it will be one that I am actively engaged in all my life, because i have no other choice. This is who I am.

I grew up in a diverse home of strong womyn, where gender, race and sexuality were fluid. The womyn were/are economically and spiritually independent of men. The ‘luxury’ of co-dependent heteronormative relationships were not the norm for me, nor are they even a possibility when you are working-class. My mother was always a fierce ally to queer community yet I still waited till I was 23 years old to come out to her despite the fact I knew I was queer from the age of 5. This speaks to the depth of oppression and patriarchy within society. As queers, especially working-class radical queers of color, our existence is too threatening to the workings of capital so we do not exist. And not only are we not represented in mainstream society, but the ruling class uses its material power over popular culture to speak on the ‘evils’ of homosexuality. When queerness is represented it almost always reflects some problematic aspect of bourgeois patriarchal society. For an example, The L Word is a transphobic, bourgeois, femme dominated, racially problematic representation of lesbians. But it is not The L Word that is the problem. It is the power structures of society that produce The L Word. The structures that have created a physically and spiritually violent process of regulation that keeps a lot of us in the closet for longer than we need to.

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Rainbow warriors of the Stonewall rebellions..also working class and of color

Capitalism needs to control the populations of people within this world, because it needs people to exploit in order for it to exist. Not just to work, but also to notwork. The bosses use the unemployment rates as a mechanism to hyper exploit employed workers. You don’t like the low pay or conditions? Ok bye then, because there are plenty of other people who need a job. How do they control people? Through patriarchal conditioning and the regulation of people’s social relations and bodies. We learn from a young age that homosexuality is a deviation from what is socially acceptable, and abortion barely exists for the vast majority of womyn around the world. This is why the issue of homosexuality and abortion are still incredibly relevant to the survival of capitalism. Not because these things are seen as morally wrong to the system, although the government uses morality to brainwash people, but because they threaten the social order of the system. When people choose to engage in queer relationships they are deviating from the heteronormative relationship model, which socializes men and womyn into specific roles within the home and within society as workers reproducing the next population of [un]employed workers. When womyn decide to terminate their pregnancies they are also threatening this social order through reclaiming control over their bodies and reproductive functions. It is not about morals; it is about the money and the government, which facilitates the whole process.

Racially, my home was mixed, primarily black and portuguese. I understood the diversity of ‘race’ through the truths from my home in comparison to the contradictions and harm of the racist society we lived in. Being mixed politicized me, because the divisive nature of race placed me outside of racial categories, within the system and within my community, which can’t help but internalize the system. Yet, I was, and am, very much a product of society and colonization, which restructured the world and brought people from all over it closer together. However, I never saw myself as anything other than my people, yet I have been ‘othered’ by my people my entire life. This has been a challenging experience, but as I have become more spiritually and politically awaken, I am able to move through the feelings of alienation with more ease and grounding. Understanding the ways the system has othered me as a mixed womyn and lesbian, has allowed me to humanize myself, and my people. The system is structured in ways that pit us, as working people of all colors and sexualities, against each other in competition over limited resources for survival. The capitalist government does not need all of us to survive for their hustle to continue. With the economic crisis we have a surplus of workers and alarmingly high unemployment rates. What does Obama care if people are robbing, policing and killing each other? The founding oppressors of this system have created a world structured by power and domination that we reproduce within our communities. They colonize us; we colonize each other; and they get to reap all the material benefits of the violence.

Understanding the system and my own origins has been important to my emotional health. No longer do i blame myself, and my community for my alienation and feelings of otherness. This has been something enforced upon us and we all hurt and hurt each other. I am trying to develop compassion for myself so that I may have compassion for others. We all live in this system, and have our own truths that have shaped us and made us into who we are today. Recently these compassionate practices have been challenged as I struggle with the many layers of feelings that rise when I engage and work with people, who carry privilege, but identify with communities I am a part of that do not have the same privileges. There are choices that have been denied to me and loved ones, but given to others. For an example, I struggle A LOT, with people who solely engage in heterosexual intimate relations, whether they be partnerships or lovers, and still identify as queer or any other queer signifier (femme, stud, top, ect.,). In the bay area this is unavoidable when being queer is so in vogue. I have met a lot of straight people who identify as queer, because they are poly, and are therefore resisting bourgeois heteronormative enforced relationships. However, they still have the privilege to live in a heterosexual world, where these are the givens, where spaces are abundant, and where safety is more accessed. When straight people identify as queer I feel erased, again, from the category. I also can’t help but fear that as more ‘straight’ people get the freedom to identify as queer then we lose the militant origins of what queer and queer struggle means for queers; a people shut out of mainstream society, and, depending on where you live, violently punished for not passing. This is something that straight people will never understand, no matter how queer they are. Our open existence is resistance, when employed correctly. This speaks to the seriousness of the conditions and the militancy required of us, to not only survive, but to struggle for a quality of life denied to us, but with which straight people have access to. To be queer is to be against the system in it is totality; to understand the ways our sexuality relates back to capitalism. To be queer is to be revolutionary.

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STAR taking it to the streets. Revolutionary struggle that centralizes gender and sexuality
led by queer/trans/drag queens of color!


I have similar feelings towards race. When ‘white’ people decide to identify as people of color without acknowledging the white privilege given to them, then the realities and struggles of people of color are erased. For an example, I met this person a few years ago in struggle, who had pale skin, blond hair, and blue eyes. They claimed indigenous ancestry and identity, while aggressively rejecting white people and European everything. They were able to speak very authoritatively about native people and native struggles. This was confusing and difficult for me, because I felt their experience as a native person from the city was much different then native folks, who look native and who are in native communities and struggle. I also thought of my great great grandmother Didi, who is half native. Most black people in the US have indigenous ancestry somewhere along the line. I am proud of this ancestry and the legacy of rebellion by black and indigenous people in the America’s. But, you won’t see me speaking on behalf of Native people, because I know I have a different experience than my indigenous comrades. It is one thing to grow up with your culture, and to become politicized through the system oppressing your people and culture. And it is another thing to grow up with primarily european lineage in a ‘white’ community, and then decide later that you are native, because you discovered you have some native blood in your family, and then proceed to present yourself in a way as if you have the same experience as the latter. Even as a mixed black womyn I will never understand what it is like to fit easily into the category ‘black’. My experiences with blackness are different than my friends, but we share a common colonial experience of being objectified in the system and denied privileges given to whites.

Privilege blinds people from the realities of others. When white people or straight people identify with categories of difference (race and sexuality) without understanding or expressing their privilege then it is assumed that their experience is similar to other people in those categories. However, their privilege gives them a different experience. To not understand that is to erase the experiences and truths of people, who deal with real struggles because of their race and sexuality within bourgeois society. I brought up these complex feelings recently to my comrade and brother Crunch and he, as always, gave me some tips and insight. He also has had similar thoughts and conversations around the subject matter. He brought up the examples of white ethnic studies students and whether they should be in the department. He said we can’t police people and tell them what they can do and how they can identify, but what we can do is ask what their intentions are. I really liked this bit of wisdom, because it helps shift the direction of the conversation from a place of judgement or attacks to a place of learning. When we engage in political dialogue about our life experiences with each other we are able to better understand our commonalities, but also our differences, which helps us understand the system. i have no time for emotionally driven conversations that largely seek to just smash people with privilege, when the system is killing us directly and indirectly. Sure, white hipsters and straight people are annoying, and also filling up oakland, but hating on them isn’t giving the people any more clarity of the system and why it oppresses us. Vulgar identity politics offers no agency for the people to struggle, and therefore is liberal at the root, and we definitely have no time for liberalism. The frustrations, and, sometimes, anger that rise when we encounter privilege in society is righteous and should be dealt with, but from a emotionally productive place of seeking its roots. This is necessary work for revolution. We must always be striving to understand the total picture of the system we live under if we want to change it. And we can do this through understanding our different positionings within it. We have been colonized and exploited objects of this system, but we are also the subjects of our history. When we strive to understand ourselves, and each other, from a place of making history then we will finally begin to take hold of our own destinies and stop doing the work of the system on each other. And I have faith, because as my wise brother Crunch once told me, ‘the people got this’.
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Re: Economic Aspects of "Love"

Postby American Dream » Wed Jul 18, 2012 12:11 pm

http://schomburgcenter.tumblr.com/post/ ... rik-clarke

Remembering Dr. John Henrik Clarke

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“[Arthur Schomburg’s] first words to me have re-echoed encouragingly within me throughout the years. They were ‘Sit down, son.’ Then he said, ‘what you are calling African history and Negro history is nothing but the missing pages of world history. You will have to understand more about world history in order to understand who displaced our people from its pages.’ He leaned forward and spoke almost confidentially although we were alone. He said, ‘Son, go study the history of your oppressor. Once you know the history of your oppressor and why he had to oppress you, you will also learn why he had to remove you from the respectful commentary of human history…’ Our relationship began that noon hour in 1934…”
Dr. John Henrik Clarke
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Re: Economic Aspects of "Love"

Postby American Dream » Wed Jul 18, 2012 1:46 pm

How capitalism works


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Re: Economic Aspects of "Love"

Postby American Dream » Wed Jul 18, 2012 1:51 pm

It has been part of the genius of neoliberal theory to provide a benevolent mask full of wonder-sounding words like freedom, liberty, choice, and rights, to hide the grim realities of the restoration or reconstruction of naked class power, locally as well as transnationally, but particularly in the main financial centres of global capitalism.

— David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism
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Re: Economic Aspects of "Love"

Postby American Dream » Wed Jul 18, 2012 5:43 pm

http://libcom.org/intro/share-our-future-–-classe-manifesto

Share Our Future – The CLASSE Manifesto

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The Coalition Large de l'Association pour une Solidarité Syndicale Étudiante (CLASSE) is a temporary national student organisation that inclues, across Quebec, more than 100 000 members in many student unions from both colleges and universities. It embodies, today, the continuation of the student movement that has been a key player in Quebec society and an important agent of social progress in education for forty years. They have been striking for more than five months now, fighting against tuition hikes and austerity measures in Quebec. This is its manifesto.


Share Our Future – The CLASSE Manifesto

For months now, all over Quebec, the streets have vibrated to the rhythm of hundreds of thousands of marching feet. What started out as a movement underground, still stiff with the winter consensus, gathered new strength in the spring and flowed freely, energizing students, parents, grandparents, children, and people with and without jobs. The initial student strike grew into a people’s struggle, while the problem of tuition fees opened the door to a much deeper malaise – we now face a political problem that truly affects us all. To find its remedy and give substance to our vision, let us cast our minds back to the root of the problem.

The way we see it, direct democracy should be experienced, every moment of every day. Our own voices ought to be heard in assemblies in schools, at work, in our neighbourhoods. Our concept of democracy places the people in permanent charge of politics, and by « the people » we mean those of us at the base of the pyramid – the foundation of political legitimacy. This becomes an opportunity for all those who are never heard. It is a time for women to speak up as equals and to raise issues that are too often ignored or simply forgotten about. The democracy we see does not make promises: it goes into action. Our democracy banishes cynicism, instead of fuelling it. As we have shown many times over, our democracy brings people together. Each time we take to the streets and set up picket lines, it is this kind of democracy that at last breathes free. We are talking about shared, participatory democracy.

Democracy, as viewed by the other side, is tagged as « representative » – and we wonder just what it represents. This brand of « democracy » comes up for air once every four years, for a game of musical chairs. While elections come and go, decisions remain unchanged, serving the same interests: those of leaders who prefer the murmurs of lobbyists to the clanging of pots and pans. Each time the people raises its voice in discontent, on comes the answer: emergency laws, with riot sticks, pepper spray, tear gas. When the elite feels threatened, no principle is sacred, not even those principles they preach: for them, democracy works only when we, the people keep our mouths shut.

Our view is that truly democratic decisions arise from a shared space, where men and women are valued. As equals, in these spaces, women and men can work together to build a society that is dedicated to the public good.

We now know that equal access to public services is vital to the common good. And access can only be equal if it is free.

Free access does more than simply banish prices: it tears down the economic barriers to what we hold most dear. Free access removes the stumbling-blocks to the full flowering of our status as humans. Where there is free access, we share payment for shared services.

By contrast, the concept of price determination – the so-called « fair share » – is in truth no more than veiled discrimination. Under the supposedly consensual « user-payer » principle, a surtax is in fact charged to people whose needs are already at the bottom of the heap. Where is justice, when a hospital can charge the exact same fee from a lawyer as from a bag clerk? For the lawyer, the amount is minimal; for the bag clerk, it is a back-breaking burden.

This burden is one that we all shoulder, each and every one of us, whether we are students or not: this is one lesson our strike has taught us. For we, students, are also renters and employees; we are international students, pushed aside by discriminating public services. We come from many backgrounds, and, until the colour of our skin goes as unnoticed as our eye colour, we will keep on facing everyday racism, contempt and ignorance. We are women, and if we are feminists it is because we face daily sexism and roadblocks set for us by the patriarchal system; we constantly fight deep-rooted prejudice. We are gay, straight, bisexual, and proud to be. We have never been a separate level of society. Our strike is not directed against the people.

We are the people.

Our strike goes beyond the $1625 tuition-fee hike. If, by throwing our educational institutions into the marketplace, our most basic rights are being taken from us, we can say the same for hospitals, Hydro-Québec, our forests, and the soil beneath our feet. We share so much more than public services: we share our living spaces, spaces that were here before we were born. We want them to survive us.

Yet a handful of greedy persons, answering to no one, is hard at work devastating these spaces – and they are getting away with it, with projects such as Plan Nord, shale gas, and more. For these few, who view the future in terms of the next quarter’s profit, nature has value only when measured in economic spin-offs. Blind to the beauty of the common good, this clique is avid and unpredictable, with eyes only for its faraway stockholders. It caters to those stockholders’ whims in colonial style, with no consultation. The primary victims of this wholesale sell-off are Native women, far from the media, poor and easily ignored.

Fortunately, though Native peoples are displaced each and every time wealth is found under or on their land, they have kept up the fight. Some of these ruthless exploitation projects have been put on ice due to the women and men who have dared to defy them. These men and women have stood their ground against this plunder of resources, despite dire warnings that our economic survival depends on the speedy exploitation of our underground wealth, whatever the price.

Together, each and every one of us will be affected by the waste of our resources, because we are concerned, not only for those who will come after us, but also for the people with whom we now share these spaces – we want to think better thoughts: we want to think ahead.

This is the meaning of our vision, and the essence of our strike: it is a shared, collective action whose scope lies well beyond student interests. We are daring to call for a different world, one far removed from the blind submission our present commodity-based system requires. Individuals, nature, our public services, these are being seen as commodities: the same tiny elite is busy selling everything that belongs to us. And yet we know that public services are not useless expenditures, nor are they consumer goods.

Together we have realized that our underground wealth cannot be measured in tons of metal, and that a woman’s body is not a selling point. In the same way, education cannot be sold; it ought to be provided to each and every one of us, without regard to our immigration status or our condition. Our aim is for an educational system that is for us, that we will share together.

Because education is a training ground for humanity, and because humanity does not bow to economic competitiveness, we refuse to allow our schools to bend under the weight of well-stocked portfolios. Together, we call for an egalitarian school system that will break down hierarchies, one that will pose a threat to all those men and women who still think they can rule over us with a free hand.

In providing everyone with the resources they need to develop their full capacities, we will succeed in creating a society where decision-making and the ways in which we organize our lives with one another are shared. This is the heart of our vision. Education is not a branch of the economy, nor is it a short-term training service. Our educational system, which is at the root of all knowledge, can allow us to pave the way towards freeing society as a whole; it can provide a liberating education that will lay the foundation for self-determination.

We believe that if our educational system is to be seen as a space where universal knowledge is shared, it must banish all forms of gender-based discrimination and domination. And yet a woman in the current educational system walks a path just as difficult as the one she walks in today’s society. It is futile to believe that unequal status is no longer reproduced in the halls of academe: we are disgusted to see that the professions traditionally associated with women are still undervalued, and that it is still mostly women who study for these professions. We women are numerous in Bachelor’s-level classrooms, but how many of us climb to the highest rungs of the academic ladder?

We are against prolonging this discrimination against women as well as against people who are in any way shunted aside by society. Our aim is to make our educational system well and truly a space where equality reigns and differences are respected. Our fervent wish is for an educational system that allows each and every one of us to blossom.

In choosing to strike, we have chosen to fight for these ideas. We have chosen to create a power relationship, the only mechanism that will allow us to tip the scales. Sharing this responsibility together, we can accomplish a great deal: but in order to do this we have to speak up, and speak up forcefully. History has shown us eloquently that if we do choose hope, solidarity and equality, we must not beg for them: we must take them. This is what we mean by combative syndicalism. Now, at a time when new democratic spaces are springing up all around us, we must make use of these to create a new world. Now is no time for mere declarations of intent: we must act. In calling for a social strike today, we will be marching alongside you, people of Quebec, in the street tomorrow. In calling for a social strike today, we hope that tomorrow, we will be marching, together, alongside the whole of Quebec society.

Together, we can rebuild

Share our future

- Coalition large de l’Association pour une solidarité syndicale (CLASSE)
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