Category Archives: direct democracy

The Global Agenda: Europe’s Move

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We Don’t Owe, We Won’t Pay! (Spain 13O)

The global social movements move. First it was Tunisia and Egypt that moved the Arab Spring. Then Spain set in motion the Take the Squares Movement across Europe. Last September, a group of people in New York set off the Occupy movement. Now for good reasons and bad, it’s looking as if Europe may be taking the lead again.

The bad reasons are really bad. As austerity continues to intensify, there’s a real sense of desperation and urgency.This film by Ross Domoney about the situation in Greece over the last two years shows this intensification in process.

Athens: Social Meltdown from Ross Domoney on Vimeo.

Greek dockworkers yesterday managed to occupy the defense ministry in Athens, while conservative prime minister Samaras is reduced to comparing the national situation to that of Weimar Germany. Just to calm things down, Angela Merkel goes to Greece on Tuesday and should be met by a very clear rejection of her austerity plan.

The Troika’s Orientalist plan to build a firewall around the crisis in Southern Europe and pass it off as a set of local errors, caused by laziness and inefficiency, is blowing up in their faces. Occupy Fake Democracy began a week of continent-wide action today in Strasbourg, home of the European Parliament.

On October 17 and in the week around it you’ll see actions around the world but especially in Europe. Check out Barcelona and Madrid (in Spanish) for exemplary days and weeks of action.

What makes this moment feel different to me, however, is that long-term strategizing and planning about alternatives is well underway. In November a four-day meeting called Agora 99 will bring together participants from across Europe. Here’s their call (lightly edited for idiom:

The cuts and plundering policies we are suffering are generated on a global and European level. The financial economy plays its game in a board that very much exceeds national borders.

What does this space mean for the 99%? What made millions of people feel deeply affected by what had happened in Egypt, in Tunisia, in Portugal, in Syntagma Square in Greece, on Wall Street, in Chile, in Mexico and in many other places around the globe? How does this new type of political structure work after the outburst of the Arab Spring, Iceland, Greece, after the 15th May in Spain? Even more importantly, how do we proceed?

What for?
We want to put in relation what we have learned in the square and the networks in the context of the 15M movement with the knowledge of other European and Mediterranean networks. We want to produce a space for interaction, cooperation and organization that could work at least at a European level.

The aim is to end the meeting with a common working calendar and common events around the three axes (Debt, Democracy and Rights) and common working tools.

The themes of debt, democracy and rights are close to those of OWS’s S17 call relating to debt, the corruption of democracy and environmental justice.

Both sets of ideas feed into the major convergence of social movements, networks and civil society organizations called Firenze 10+10 to be held 8-11 November. The name derives from the European Social Forum that was held in the same location ten years ago but the new meeting

aims at creating a space for movements and networks to meet and to work towards the building of convergence of our struggles.

To that end 150 delegates have already met to define a set of “pillars” for the agenda in Florence:

1) Democracy in Europe

Democratic grassroots “constituent process” and development of a citizen pact and assembly; rebuilding European institutions beyond the current undemocratic treaties; migrants and the proposal of an European citizenship by residency; democratic floodwall against the right, neo-fascism and racism; rebuilding social solidarity.

2) Finance/debt/austerity

“Debt tribunal”, audit of the debt; campaigns against austerity measures and the fiscal compact; financial transaction tax etc.

3) Labor and other social rights

Labor and social rights in the time of neoliberal globalization and austerity; sustainable social development; social Pact; adequate income (wages and social protection) etc

4) Natural and social common goods + public services

Land, food, water, energy, climate and post-Rio agenda etc; the defense of territories against useless big infrastructures and projects imposed top-down; the struggle against the financialization of nature etc.

5) Europe in the Mediterranean and the world

Peace and support to the fight for democracy and peoples’ rights; War/peace and social justice; cooperation and solidarity; fair trade; denuclearization of the Mediterranean; arms trade control; “Arab revolutions”; stop the occupations; exchanges between different cultures and identities (building a bridge towards the WSF Tunisia – and the “World Social Forum-Free Palestine” in Brazil)

The gender dimension is transversal to all the pillars.

In addition to these five working groups or pillars, a sixth group will be working to co-ordinate the process of each working group towards a single agenda, comprising of  a general common action in the short term, and a proposal for a joint common strategy in the long term.

There will be “demands” after all. Somehow I don’t think that all those media types are going to like them nonetheless.

 

Move on, no crisis to see here

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It seems that there’s a concerted effort at the level of the nation state and the transnational institution to assert that the status quo is assured. The European Central Bank has written a blank check for the Euro, pollsters are predicting a win for Obama and stock markets are back to 2008 levels. The wrinkle comes from Quebec, where forty years of organizing has laid the background for the election of the new Parti Quebecois government, committed to abolishing the tuition hike and the noxious Loi 78.

Mario Draghi, head of the ECB, announced yesterday that it would buy bonds from member nations in unlimited quantities. His action was designed to forestall all rumors that the Eurozone might break up, by restoring liquidity to nation states. For the inflation-shy German central bank this action was held to be

tantamount to financing governments by printing banknotes.

And indeed it is. Against neo-liberal economics, Draghi and other central bankers assume that there will be no inflation because consumer demand and wages alike continue to be depressed.

Across the world we see the reasons why. The US economy added no more than a rounding error of jobs last month. The battered Greek welfare state is about to undergo another $11.5 billion in cuts. Portugal increase its social security tax from 11 to 18%. Like all the other money poured by government into banks, none of this will find its way out to people.

Meanwhile, in the NAFTA-zone, Mexico is set to return to the institutional rule of the PRI and Canada remains under the oil-first government of the Liberals. The 538 blog (now hosted by the New York Times gives Obama a 77% chance of victory, which is good news in terms of preventing further neo-liberal and culture wars insanity by the Republicans. Given the low chance of the Democrats taking the House, it will nonetheless mean the continuance of gridlock, with continued impunity for banksters and no risk to the one per cent.

The exception to all the gloom comes from Quebec. After the narrow election win by the Parti Québécois, they smartly decided they did not want to be saddled with the Liberals’ baggage:

“We had a call from the PQ assuring us they will cancel the tuition increase and Bill 78,” said Martine Desjardins, president of the Fédération étudiante universitaire du Québec, noting students will also meet with Parti Québécois Leader Pauline Marois. “They said they will reimburse any students who have already paid.”

 

CLASSE have indicated that the national demonstration of September 22 will go ahead, in the absence of an actual repeal, and in support of their claim for a student grant increase. It will most likely have the feel of a victory party.

There are no doubt questions as to what happens next in Quebec. For now, let’s note their successul formula so far

  • building a radical community over an extended period of time
  • working in alliances, even with groups with whom you have distinct differences, towards specific goals
  • great messaging and symbolism, together with resolute direct action
  • keeping it local.

These tactics resonate with those used by the horizontal and popular movements in the Southern half of the hemisphere. They did not back down, even in the full force of law, and have made a real difference. There’s really something to see there.

Reconstructing Haiti 1801/2010 and on

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Reconstruction in the US after abolition was, whether it knew it or not, following the pattern established by Haiti during its revolution. So it seemed like a good time to take a look and see how reconstruction after the disastrous earthquake of 2010 has been going. The headlines are bad: multinational sweatshops and mining are moving in, very little of the promised aid has been disbursed, debt continues to be a burden. The glimmer of hope comes from the literally grassroots work of the Haitian peasant movement. It is as if nothing has happened since 1801: capital wants to see a restoration of the plantation, while the peasants want land, water and sustainable employment.

The Haitian revolution was long and violent. By 1801, it was clear that the formerly enslaved would win. Toussaint Louverture issued a constitution, which intensely disappointed his own side. For Toussaint, large scale cash-crop agriculture was vital both to the formation of a nation-state in general and to repaying his loans to the United States in particular. The formerly enslaved were to work as laborers for a wage.

The subaltern rank-and-file revolted against their own revolution, in search of small plots of land they could farm collectively and create a long-term guarantee against re-enslavement, whether as chattel or wage slaves. Toussaint felt compelled to repress the revolt, and even assassinated his own nephew Moïse who was its leader. The Trinidad radical C. L. R. James later saw this as the defining failure of the revolution in his classic The Black Jacobins (1938, reissued 1968).

CLR James

Although Pétion, later President of Haiti, did indeed begin an experiment with land redistribution, until the imposition of a massive indemnity on the country by France in 1825 did away with it. The indemnity of 150 million French francs is widely held to have decimated Haiti’s nascent recovery from the revolutionary wars and pushed it towards the poverty with which it is now synonymous. At the time of the disastrous earthquake in 2010, Haiti had once again accumulated extensive external debt of about $1.8 billion, mostly due to the antics of the U. S.-backed Duvalier dictatorship. Although the IMF and World Bank were pressured into cancelling about $250 million of that debt, the bulk remains.

A group of intellectuals, led by Etienne Balibar and Noam Chomsky, reiterated in 2010 the call made by former President Jean-Baptiste Aristide in 2003, for French reparations to Haiti. Needless to say, given that Sarkozy was then President of France, this did not happen. But finally, two centuries after the citizens of Haiti had done so, the op-ed intellectuals began to call for small-scale sustainable agriculture as the way ahead for the country.

At the Rio+20 summit, some information did emerge about what has happened since 2010. The UN has come to be seen as a neo-liberal occupation force. Mining companies have moved in. The Guardian reports:

More than a third of Haiti’s north – at least 1,500 sq km – is under licence to US and Canadian companies.

It’s such a small country, but there is allegedly copper, silver and gold up there and very little of the environmental legislation that is so bothersome to mining elsewhere.

Map of Caracol from the NY Times

The one major financial investment to date is by a South Korean company who intend to create a maquiladora site in Coracel. Needless to say, the plant will use heavy fuel oil for electricity generation (built by the US) and is situated on prime farm land and at a key watershed.

Jean Anil Louis-Juste (1957-2010)

There are glimmers of hope, even if one of most effective intellectual advocates for change, sociology professor Jean Anil Louis-Juste was mysteriously assassinated just prior to the earthquake. He created reading groups like the Gramsci Circle at the State University’s School of Human Sciences and Ethnology, where he taught. He wrote and taught in Kréyol, the local language that emerged out of slavery. Anil had advocated for a $5 a day minimum wage, especially at his university, and for an a new environmentally-centered education program and citizenship. He noted that the ecological disaster in Haiti has accelerated, rather than improved:

In the 1920s, we had 20% of the country covered with forest. In the 1990s,we had less than 2%. We are about 60% short of the land we would need to live in equilibrium with the environment.

The Mouvement paysan de Papaye (Peasant Movement of Papaye) are another. They advocate for sustainable agriculture, health care, education and a self-supporting Haiti.  MPP’s website appears to be down at the moment but others report on their work educating farmers how to conserve water through the dry period and to create irrigation. However, this is slow work, 60 peasants at a time.

But the multinationals won’t stay once the easy money from the Clinton foundation dries up.

The MPP have been working on this for two hundred years.

Occupy is ten months old today.

Learning to Organize

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The Strike Debt campaign had its fifth assembly today in a very warm Washington Square Park. Summer madness was affecting some of the transient population that use the park during daylight hours but the assembly was surprisingly focused and businesslike in the close to 100 degree heat.

I’ve learned some interesting things about organizing and about learning already. Debt is a very technical topic, full of complexity and difficult math. Seen another way, it’s not about that at all. It’s a set of stories, often about lives or projects begun in a flurry of optimism only to founder on the hidden reefs of compounding interest, credit ratings and wage garnishing. We’ve learned that to organize around debt, you must first allow people to tell their stories and to reclaim their personhood.

What we’re doing here is reclaiming the 99% as a set of individuals, all of whom made choices that were inspired by their hope of making a contribution in some way. Seen together, even in the relatively small groups that gather in hot New York parks, you get a vertiginous glimpse of what has been lost, not just in this crash but in the turn to finance capital as a whole.

So what we don’t yet know is the end(s) of the stories. Where we’re not going is to put our trust in a higher power, divine or human. A system that places so many people in servitude can only properly end in abolition. Before abolition, it can seem hard to envisage reconstruction but in the moment it’s not so complicated. Now I’m getting ahead of myself, except that part of this moment is to give people a sense of a different outcome, which the original OWS sketched in far broader terms. By being specific about debt, which is not exactly a small field, we can target real but very different futures.

In organizing this story telling and imagining, we’ve found that it works best either to allow the meeting to proceed as horizontally as possible or to have it tightly facilitated. There’s a glib one-liner about direct democracy that uses the title of Jo Freeman’s 1970s pamphlet “The Tyranny of Structurelessness.” Freeman was discussing consciousness raising sessions in the (then) Women’s Liberation movement and how they could lead to a “star” system. There’s a long discussion to be had here but for the moment I want to suggest that these strategies are precisely directed towards avoiding what is less tyranny than muddling in the middle.

Self-facilitated peer-to-peer discussions also rely on the group making sure that individuals don’t dominate and that a due division of points of view is heard. Such discussions are great when you’re trying to get a sense of where to go and what the possibilities are in a given area. Facilitation allows you to make progress from that beginning and to not repeat the same discussions over and over. What we had to learn in the case of debt was that you could not separate the personal and the political, even in organizing. It’s a very old lesson now but one that needs to be relearned until absorbed or until things have actually changed sufficiently that we no longer need it. Which will not be soon.

We’ve learned not to target specific dates by which certain things must happen and to set low, achievable goals as part of creating a sense that things are happening, rather than shoot very high all the time. Some might say that political organizers have long known these tactics and that may well be right. On the other hand, it is my impression that sometimes such organizers take the content of the action too much for granted. Certainly we’ve heard that debt is a “weak” concept. Perhaps it lacks a one-liner so far. We’re working on that.