In recent years, many researchers and social activists from very different countries, like myself, have rediscovered the notion of the commons as a key idea to deepen social and environmental justice and democratise both politics and the economy. This reappropriation has meant questioning the vanguardist and hierarchical visions, structures and practices that for too long have characterised much of the left. This concept has resurfaced in parallel with the growing distrust in the market and the state as the main suppliers or guarantors of access to essential goods and services. The combined pressures of climate change and the crisis of capitalism that exploded in 2008 (a permanent and global crisis, which is no longer a series of conjunctural or cyclical recessions) force us to reconsider old paradigms, tactics and strategies. This means discarding both the obsolete models of planning and centralised production at the core of the so-called ‘real socialism’ of the last century and the state capitalism that we see today in China and a few other supposedly socialist countries, as well as the equally old and failed structures of present-day deregulated capitalist economies.

At first, the concept of the commons was disseminated by progressive intellectuals inspired by the work of Elinor Ostrom, the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in Economics, in 2009. Ostrom, an American political scientist, was a progressive academic, but could hardly be classified as a radical thinker or as a leftist activist. In the last decade, academics and activists from very diverse ideological families of the left have reviewed her contributions and have engaged in intense theoretical debates about the potential of the commons, based on the analysis of many inspiring prefigurative experiences currently underway.

Ostrom’s main contribution was to demonstrate that many self-organised local communities around the world successfully managed a variety of natural resources without relying on market mechanisms or state institutions. Currently, it is possible to identify various perspectives in the theoretical debates around the commons, but in general they all converge on the importance of a third space between the state and the market (which should not be confused with the Third Way outlined by Anthony Giddens and adopted by politicians as dissimilar as Tony Blair in Britain, Bill Clinton in the United States, or Fernando Henrique Cardoso in Brazil as a hypothetical social democratic alternative to socialism and neoliberalism).

Nowadays, a quick search in Google about the commons results in millions of references. Most definitions tend to characterise commons as spaces for collective management of resources that are co-produced and managed by a community according to their own rules and norms. We (TNI) have recently published a report on the commons in partnership with the P2P Foundation, in which we refer to this concept as the combination of four basic elements: (1) material or immaterial resources managed collectively and democratically; (2) social processes that foster and deepen cooperative relationships; (3) a new logic of production and a new set of productive processes; and (4) a paradigm shift, which conceives the commons as an advance beyond the classical market/state or public/private binary oppositions.

In Latin America and Spain, those of us interested in this field of activism and research must overcome a linguistic obstacle, since the translation of the concept of the commons from English into Spanish is not always easy or appropriate. This problem also appears in other parts of the world, so we often use the original English word to avoid confusion. Some of our friends and comrades use the concept of bienes comunes, but this term refers to ideas linked to the old economy or the social imaginary propagated by the church and other conservative institutions, without capturing all the richness, complexity and potential of recent theoretical developments and empirical processes around the commons. Obviously, the production of meaning in this field has already spread beyond the Anglo-Saxon world and there are already many people in countries of the South involved in this type of processes. That’s why the P2P Foundation and other friendly organisations have added a new word to the Spanish dictionary, procomún, while others (like myself) prefer to use the word comunes, which derives from a literal translation of the original term. From a similar perspective, many European or African activists prefer to use the English term instead of bens comuns (Portuguese), beni comuni (Italian), biens communs (in French), or gemeingüter (German).

Are the concepts of ‘the commons’ and ‘the public’ synonymous?

This question is the axis of heated theoretical debates, since it alludes to the old discussion about the nature and role of the state. The defenders of the commons who are most disillusioned with the left in government in several Latin American countries, particularly those linked to the fundamentalist autonomist current (like many of my friends in the Andean region, mainly those who are involved in struggles around the rights to water or energy) are convinced that the state should not assume any role and that the social order should be restructured by transferring political and economic power to self-organised local communities. Other researchers and activists (including myself, something that’s not surprising having been born in a country as state-centric as Uruguay) retort that such a contradiction is artificial and that we should at the same time expand the reach and influence of the commons – for example, by creating and interconnecting new types of authentically self-managed cooperative enterprises– and democratising or ‘commonising’ the state – for instance, incorporating workers and users into the management of existing state-owned enterprises or creating new public-public partnerships for the provision of essential public services.

My friend Michel Bauwens, a Belgian social activist internationally recognised as one of the most creative and influential thinkers in this field, often highlights the importance of what he has characterised as the partner state. From his (and mine) perspective, the state is perceived not as the enemy, but as an entity that could provide local communities and self-organised workers with the institutional, political or economic power that would be required for these processes to reach their maximum potential in the framework of the political and economic transition that we need. It also means, among several other possibilities to be considered, the provision of financial or in-kind support for cooperatives or other initiatives inspired by the notion of the commons.

The idea of the ​​partner state is in line with some relatively recent theoretical debates among Marxist thinkers. Today, and especially after a series of counter-hegemonic governments that we have had in Latin America, we’re already very aware that the contemporary state is not simply that “committee for the management of the common affairs of the bourgeoisie” that Marx and Engels referred to in the Communist Manifesto. Neither Marx nor Engels were interested in developing a unified or integral theory about the state, so we should not interpret their statement (from the year 1848!) literally,. In the 1970s, Nikos Poulantzas and other non-dogmatic thinkers began to rethink the institutional framework of capitalist societies and argued that the state should be understood as a social relationship and not as an abstract entity floating above conflicting social classes, and added that the transformation of state institutions could be possible in the context of a “democratic way to socialism” (opened by the government experience of Popular Unity in Chile and brutally repressed by a military coup in 1973). More recently, Bob Jessop has shown how, although the state has a strong structural bias towards the reproduction of social relations, it’s also influenced by the totality of social forces, including counter-hegemonic struggles. My perspective of analysis on the state and the commons is very influenced by Jessop, and also by David Harvey, when he argues that a big problem on the left is that many – pointing to John Holloway and other proponents of the thesis of “changing the world without taking power” – think that the capture of state power wouldn’t be of much importance in emancipatory processes. We must recognise the incredible power accumulated in the institutions of the state and, therefore, we shouldn’t underestimate the importance of state institutions; in particular when there’re opportunities to enable the expansion of the commons.

To those who are interested in deepening the knowledge of contemporary theoretical debates on the state and the commons, I would recommend reading our comrade Hilary Wainwright, the British political economist with whom I co-coordinate the TNI New Politics Project. A few years ago Hilary wrote a beautiful book, Reclaim the State: Experiments in Popular Democracy, where she argued the need to ‘occupy’ state institutions while, in parallel, we organise ourselves to create and connect new political and economic institutions rooted in local communities and workers’ collectives. Her books, the one mentioned here and more recent ones, are based on the detailed investigation of positive examples of commons-related initiatives across the Globe.

In recent years, within the framework of our New Politics project, Hilary, myself, and many other activist-scholars from different regions of the world have tried to make sense of a substantial shift in emancipatory thinking. Until not long ago, the economic policy of much of the left included the proposal of nationalisation of key industries. Nowadays, and maybe influenced by the recognition of the failures or shortcomings of nationalisation in places like Venezuela (where in recent years there’s been a recentralisation of political and economic power in the hands of the bureaucrats and military that control the reins of the state, with very negative in terms of lesser autonomy and influence for popular organisations and with very bad indicators in the management of nationalised companies) many of us are more interested in the design of a new economy based on cooperative relations, in which state institutions would play a facilitating and protective role. We emphasise the importance of public ownership of public services and productive infrastructure, but only as long we ensure a significant level of decentralised ownership and management; for example, in the provision of water and energy services and in the production of a vast range of goods through networks of self-managed ventures.

This perspective also means a deeper and more serene examination of the ambivalent consequences of the scientific and technological changes currently underway. We already know that the emerging forms of organisation and control of information and communication technologies and distributed production constitute a very contested space, in which a few transnational corporations (I’m thinking of Uber, Airbnb and other examples of the wrongly called ‘sharing economy’) financialise and benefit from precarious workers, the users of social networks and independent software programmers – with negative impacts on unions’ power and on the quality of work – but we should also be able to recognise that the same technological developments could be beneficial for the (re)creation of truly solidarity, democratic and self-managed forms of ownership and management. Around the world, we can see the emergence of a new generation of workers who use their technological knowledge to launch new enterprises and networks based on the principles of the commons and coordinate and collaborate among themselves, transcending economic sectors and geographical borders, and being ethically (and increasingly also politically) aware of the new social and economic order they’re creating.

How would you appraise the so-called ‘pink tide’ in Latin America vis-à-vis the commons?

My personal perspective on these issues has evolved, as I tried to understand the arguments of comrades from other Latin American countries who posed a very strong critique of the statist political culture prevalent in some political and academic circles of the region. Like many Uruguayans, it was hard for me to assimilate the positions of compañeros like Pablo Solón in Bolivia, Edgardo Lander in Venezuela, Arturo Escobar in Colombia, Maristella Stampa in Argentina, or Eduardo Gudynas himself in Uruguay. They (and many others) are strong critics of ‘development’, and in particular of its ‘(neo)extractivist’ component. In short, my critique to them focused on two aspects: their staunch criticism of the state, and their inability to formulate alternatives or proposals to transcend the reality that they criticised. With the passage of time, and after many and agitated discussions with Pablo and Edgardo in workshops at the World Social Forum, seminars of our New Politics project and other similar spaces, I could understand that their criticisms of the state (not always so homogeneous nor so acidic as I perceived them) were not that far from my own criticism of the Latin American left, and I also ended up realising that indeed there were proposals embedded in their criticisms.

My position on these issues has also been influenced by my increasingly pessimistic interpretation of the outcomes of our progressive of left governments. After having followed very closely the processes of Venezuela, Ecuador, Argentina, Uruguay and Brazil, and to a lesser extent also those of Bolivia and Nicaragua, I think we should ask ourselves up to what point is it possible for the left to get involved in government without losing autonomy and our utopian perspective. In other word: is it possible to operate within the state apparatus without being caught in the demobilising logic of institutional power? Unlike some of the friends I mentioned before, I don’t have a single or categorical answer to such question. I still believe that the state has a very important role to play, but I’m also convinced that it is now imperative for the left to get rid of its obsolete state-centric vision and open up to fresh perspectives like those of the commons.

For the Uruguayan left, such transition could be difficult, if we consider the heavy weight of the state in our society, politics, economics and culture. A significant difference between Uruguay and most other countries in the region is its long tradition of strong and efficient state-owned companies, which are highly appreciated by the population. In Uruguay, people perceive the state as a catalyst for development and guarantor of equity and social integration. On the other hand, the transition could be made easier if we consider the already high significance of workers’ and housing cooperatives. I grew up in a mutual-aid housing cooperative, so I might not be entirely objective. And we know that not all cooperatives are well managed or are internally democratic or participatory, but when we compare the reality of the Uruguayan cooperative sector with other countries of the region and the world, it’s clear that we already have a very fertile terrain for the development of the commons.

From a purely theoretical or ideological point of view, many components of the current global debate around the commons wouldn’t be a novelty for the Uruguayan left. If we look at several parties that compose the ruling coalition Frente Amplio(Broad Front), we realise that parties as different as the Progressive Christian Democrats (PDC, the advocates of the thesis of socialismo autogestionario, self-managed socialism), the People’s Victory Party (PVP, in line with their libertarian roots), or the Socialist Party (PS, with their proposal of transition from co-management to self-management, which the party has been advocating since 1930, when it demanded workers’ control of the economy) have been for a long time formulating programmatic ideas that transcend the limits of statism.

In other countries of the region, it would seem that the proposal of the commons would be more compatible with the governmental discourse. In fact, the proponents of the commons in Europe often refer to the concepts of vivir bien (living well) or buen vivir (good living), which came from Latin America. These concepts became popular on a world scale as a supposed alternative paradigm to capitalism. The concepts of suma qamaña and sumaq kawsay have their roots in the economic and societal models developed over centuries by the indigenous peoples of the Andean and Amazonian regions, prioritising forms of production more horizontal and in harmony with nature. The translation (or ‘export’) into other languages and cultures is problematic, but in the countries of origin the significance of these concepts can be debated as well. Bolivia and Ecuador, during the governments led by Evo Morales and Rafael Correa, incorporated the notions of living well and good living in their respective constitutions and policy guidelines, but the policies implemented have not always been coherent with the spirit or with the letter of the new legal and institutional framework. In Ecuador, in the framework of the very radical turn to the right performed by president Lenin Moreno in recent months, the discourse of buen vivir (which sounds beautiful and guarantees a left patina) is being used to provide justification for an impending wave of privatisation and corporatization of public services. In Venezuela, there was also much talk around self-management and people’s power, and considerable resources were allocated to the creation of cooperatives and associative ventures of a new type, but in practice very little progress was achieved; the rentier model based on the exploitation of a single resource – oil – deepened during the governments of Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro, and its current exhaustion is the most important factor to explain the political, economic and social crisis that the country suffers today.

What are the organisational and programmatic challenges of the left for the integration of the idea of the commons into its political platform?

To answer this question, I should start by clarifying that I do not believe that the promotion of the commons should be the only strategy of the left. I believe that we must embrace the emancipatory vision of the commons, but without forgetting the role of the state and the need to respond to the very urgent problems of large sectors of the population. I agree with the criticisms of the hegemonic model of development and support the struggles against extractivism. I also tend to agree with many elements (not the whole package) of the emerging theorisation around the concept of degrowth – which is already very influential among European left circles, but not very significant within the Latin American left. But I disagree with visions such as Escobar’s when he speaks of “underdevelopment” as a mere “narration”, presenting it as an abstract concept that the colonialists would have elaborated and spread for the colonized to repeat. We can’t ignore the terrible rates of poverty, exclusion, and poor access to basic goods and services that still affect millions of Latin Americans. Our region should be incorporated into the global fight against climate change, and we must promote new forms of organisation and production that preserve the ecological balance, but we must also respond to social demands in the context of a quite likely deterioration of the economic situation in the short or medium terms. In that sense, I believe that the impulse to the commons must be framed within a broader strategy of growth, different from that offered by predatory and savage capitalism.

Thinking about the specific conditions of Uruguay, and based on data and projections published by local researchers, it should already be evident that the promotion of mega-projects like the huge paper mills run by Finnish corporations, or the already privatisation of the wind segment of the energy sector, don’t constitute the most appropriate developmental strategy. I would have preferred that the effort made by the government to convince us that the attraction of direct foreign investment and the liberalisation of trade are the right path would have been accompanied by serious studies sustained by reliable information to appraise the pros and cons of two different strategies: supporting large private investment on the one hand, and the promotion of the local and popular solidarity economy on the other. What would be the impacts of redirecting the tax exemptions and the large explicit or covert subsidies received by large transnational corporations if all that money were used to support cooperatives and other associative enterprises rooted in the national economy? I don’t have concrete answers to these queries, but I know that other Uruguayan economists and social researchers also raise similar questions and could provide objective and relevant information to deepen this exchange.

How to incorporate the commons within a political project that aims at the de-commodification of public services?

In Latin America we have many valuable examples of de-commodification of public services, past and present, that we should reconsider in the framework of current exchanges around the commons. A few years ago, during the heyday of what we then praised as the Bolivarian ‘revolution’, I worked in Venezuela and I was able to appreciate very closely the emergence of multiple processes of popular self-organisation in which millions of people participated. I’m referring to the mesas técnicas (people’s technical committees), the consejos comunitarios de agua(community water councils), the consejos comunales (communal councils) and the comunas (communes). Unfortunately, most of these processes are no longer in existence or in terminal crisis. Individualism and competition has been stronger than solidarity and cooperation in the responses to the crisis that Venezuela is experiencing today. This is a sad realisation, which forces us to question ourselves about the reasons and the conditions that made possible the erosion of processes that many of us considered very strong and even irreversible. A large part of the communal and participatory initiatives that had emerged in the most fecund years of the Venezuelan transition have gone into rapid regression when faced with the loss of the resources provided by the state (of which they had become dependent), in the context of the terrible deterioration of the social and economic situation. I think that many lessons can emerge from Venezuela, both on the potential of the commons and on the fragility of processes of this type. It also forces us to rethink the limits of ‘revolutionary’ political projects that are excessively focused on the state.

At the international level, and taking as a basis for analysis the European reality – which is the one that today I know better, since it’s my place of residence, activism and research – I believe that Latin Americans could ‘import’ some interesting ideas from current European exchanges on alternatives to commodification and corporatization. The side of the European left most active side in the promotion of the commons is that linked to struggles around the right to the city and the citizen platforms that won local office in several Spanish cities. Today, an important part of the European left perceives the city as the privileged space for political, social and economic experimentation, without seeing cities as isolated entities or at the margin of processes aimed at changing the state on a national scale, but recognising their growing significance in the new regional and world order. It’s not by chance that the fight against climate change or for the recovery of public services are led by networks of progressive local governments. Barcelona En Comú, the citizen coalition that now governs the Catalan capital, in particular, is a very powerful source of inspiration of regional and world importance. The political influence of Barcelona today is comparable to the hope that Porto Alegre, Montevideo and other Latin American capitals had been generated in the 1980s and 1990s, when the left began to experiment with participatory budgeting and other innovative policies for the radicalisation of democracy at the municipal level. Barcelona is today a laboratory for the design and testing of multiple initiatives inspired by the principle of the commons.

Another possible source of inspiration could be the current program of the British Labour Party. Since Jeremy Corbyn became party leader, Labour has become much more radical than our Frente Amplio and most other left parties in Latin America and Europe. The Labour Party has a proposal for renationalisation that’s much more advanced than similar initiatives applied or proposed anywhere else in the world. In the specific case of the energy sector, Corbyn and his party propose to bring back the sector into public hands, so that the country’ energy becomes environmentally sustainable, affordable for users, and managed with democratic control, as stated in the programmatic manifesto launched last year. But renationalisation, from this perspective, does not simply implies that the state retakes control by going back to the obsolete state-owned companies of the past, but rather the combination of different forms of public ownership and management. In short, Labour proposes not merely to re-nationalise companies that had been privatised during Thatcherism and Blairism, but to reconvert the big banks and other financial institutions that during the crisis had been saved from bankruptcy with public monies into a network of local banks based on mixed ownership (state and social), or the creation of new municipal utilities. The party is committed to create new municipal utilities, inspired by some socially-owned companies already in operation – such as Robin Hood Energy in Nottingham – or by popular campaigns – such as Switched On London – that propose the de-privatisation of power through the launch of new public enterprises, rooted in a more democratic type of management based on the active participation of users and workers, being environmentally sustainable, and securing services with affordable rates for the entire population.

Originally posted at the Transnational Institute Website

Lead image by Roger Cunyan. Additional image by Isabella Jusková.

The post The commons, the state and the public: A Latin American perspective appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Southern European countries were among the hardest hit by the 2008 economic crisis. In response to the economic pressure, declining public services and drastic unemployment situation generated by the crisis and the corresponding public policies, the Southern regions of the continent became terrains of experiments in self-organisation and gave birth to new forms of the civic economy. In this contribution, Tiago Mota Saraiva analyses the consequences of austerity policies on Portugal, Italy, Greece and Spain, focusing on how people tried to create networks of solidarity and resistance.

n his brilliant book about the history of Latin America – “Las Venas Abiertas de América Latina”, (The Open Veins of South America) originally published in 1971 – Eduardo Galeano (1940-2015) starts by writing that the international division of work consists of defining that some countries specialise in winning and others in losing. Galeano describes a history of the region that is made by its own People, a history that does not depend on the greatness and the richness of the Country. A system where development deepened inequalities and popular sovereignty had to be bonded because There Is No Alternative. “It’s a problem of mindsets”, would declare the canny eurocrat after reading Galeano’s introduction. But the system is not far from what is now happening in Europe. This article is about the PIGS, the continental countries of Southern Europe.

The PIGS

This racist acronym has never been claimed by any author. Some sources refer to its use during the end of the 70’s, but it definitely started to be used more often after the 2008 financial crisis as PIIGS (Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece and Spain) to refer to the five countries that were considered weak economies and possible threats to the eurozone. After 2013, with the Irish exit of eurozone bailout program, PIGS became four again as they were before. While each of these countries had different political and historical contexts and scales, over the last five years they have shared the similar financial impacts of EU austerity measures.

The PIGS countries. Image (cc) Eutropian

The People

From 2001 (the European economic and monetary union fully started on 1st January 2002) until the 2013 crisis peak, Southern Europe’s employment situation changed drastically according to Eurostat. In Portugal (unemployment increased from 3,8% in 2001 to 16,2% in 2013), Italy (9,6% to 12,1%), Ireland (3,7% to 13,0%), Greece (10,5% to 27,5%) and Spain (10,5% to 26,1%) unemployment rates increased dramatically. In the same period, unemployment increased in other European countries, more or less following the EU average, besides Germany and Finland where unemployment decreased, respectively, from 7,8% to 5,2% and 10,3% to 8,2%. These rates assumed an impressive impact on youth unemployment. The April 2014 Eurostat report unveils that one month prior to the official census in unemployment in Portugal, Italy, Greece and Spain the figures were, respectively, 35,4%, 42,7%, 56,8% and 53,9%.

Poverty in Europe. Image (cc) Eutropian

Despite the brain drain (for example in Portugal the emigration numbers were higher than in the 60’s peak, when the country was living under a fascist regime and fighting several wars in its former colonies), this data shows the massive number of people with no jobs and more free time. If we add to this those people living from precarious labour, with low salaries or low pensions, we may find a number of people that are in need of support to barely survive. Always according to the Eurostat it is in Southern Europe that we find the countries with the largest part of the population in risk of poverty with Greece (36,0% in 2014) and Spain (29,2%) at the top of the ranking.

The Politics

In opposition to what is happening in almost all other parts of Europe, the nationalist and far right parties in Southern European countries are not fighting in order to win elections or lead the opposition towards EU policies. The Greek Golden Dawn, probably the most exuberant party, is far from winning national elections. On the other hand – in Italy, Greece and Spain – there are social movements and local activists gathered in so-called anti-systemic parties/political movements, all with different characteristics, but presenting themselves as the face for the change. Although Syriza – the only one of those parties that, until now, has won national elections – is being severely criticised for its acceptance of the very strong EU austerity policies against which it once was established, in Spain, civic movements won local elections in large cities with a diverse set of new public and city policies that are being implemented.
In Portugal, the massive demonstrations during the Troika’s official period of intervention, did not translate itself into a significant change in the architecture of national parties. However, despite the primacy of the coalition of right wing parties at the 2015 national elections, it did not achieve the majority of MPs to form the government. Instead of a right wing government, the Socialist Party was invested with the parliamentary support of the Left Block, the Communist Party and the Greens, under the agreement of progressively reversing the cuts on wages, pensions and the Social State. For the first time since 1974, when the long fascist dictatorship of Portugal was defeated, the Socialist Party is now leading the country, only backed by the left wing parties in the Parliament.

The State

Even though with different characteristics and at different levels, all these four countries have been witnessing the dismantling of the State. Privatisations of fundamental public sectors and the decrease of the public presence in economy have never been as evident as nowadays.
In Greece and Portugal the situation was extreme. The Troika’s program forced governments to quickly sell the most powerful and profitable public companies at low prices. On the other hand, the Welfare State has proven to became an Assistentialist State only programmed to act in desperate situations and not working on people’s emancipation from poverty. With the increase of sovereign debt, states have increasingly lost their independence in a process that inevitably damaged the democratic system. The “oxi” vote at the Greek referendum and the following reaction of the EU leadership, forcing on the Greek government an even more severe agreement, constitute a historical event we should never forget when analysing the growth of anti-EU feelings and the rising popularity of sovereignty movements among the working classes and poorest urban areas.

Esta es una plaza, self-organised garden in Madrid. Photo (cc) Eutropian

Self-organisation

Despite the high proportion of people unemployed and retired, people in Southern European countries do not have more time left to participate in common or community issues. Precarious and low-wage jobs, the insecurity of personal futures, longer daily commuting, or the family assistance of children and older people are some of the new issues that overload working days. These may be some of the reasons why people tend to participate more in initiatives that start from a will of reaction or resistance to a specific problem – either locally based or humanitarian – than from a global and theoretical ambition of structural and global societal change.
Whilst, on the one hand, PIGS are living under the described extreme economical pressure where people generally think the future will be worse then the present and focus their energies on everyday issues that require immediate responses, on the other hand, locally based self-organised initiatives are flourishing as a consequence of specific and local problems as illustrated by many examples:

Coop57 is a financial services co-op that started in Catalonia, emerging from workers’ fight to keep their jobs at Editorial Bruguera, during the 1980s. Over the last decade, the action of the cooperative spread all over Spain. Its main declared goal is to help the social transformation of economy and society, assuming that money and the Coop57 cannot do it on their own, but that they can play a role in helping people, organisations, collectives and groups that promote policies for investment and quality jobs in food and energy sovereignty, inclusion and spaces for culture and socialisation.

Sewing workshop in Largo Residencias, Lisbon. Photo (cc) Eutropian

Carrozzerie | n.o.t is a theatre space in Testaccio, a former working class neighbourhood in Rome – now in the process of gentrification. The space was renovated in 2013 and it hosts dance, theatre and performative projects of younger generations of artists. It defines itself as a space for slow time, courageous and far-sighted projects. Carrozzerie | n.o.t works in the same artistic areas as Largo Residências, in the Intendente neighbourhood of Lisbon. Until 2012, Intendente was seen as one of the most dangerous areas in the city centre and an area to be renewed on a large-scale urban operation. Largo Residências started in 2011, renting a building on the square, and assuming the goal to fight against the gentrification of the area. The cooperative that organises all of Largo’s activities is now running in the building a floor of artistic residences, a hostel, a café open in to the square and a massive cultural program developed with and for the inhabitants of the area. Portugal is a good example of the unbalanced states of civic initiatives, whose development depends on the political approaches of local governments. Whilst in Lisbon, these initiatives have been flourishing over the last few years, in Oporto they have been under attack by the former authoritarian and conservative mayor Rui Rio. Lisbon’s local government created a program (BIP/ZIP) that, each year, finances around 30 different projects in priority intervention neighbourhoods/areas (Largo Residências was also supported by this programme) At the same time, projects like “es.col.a,” held in a squatted school with a very important social and cultural program at Fontinha (one of the poorest areas of Oporto) have never had any political or financial support from the municipality: es.col.a was evicted and consequently eliminated by the municipality’s decision.

Navarinou park, a self-organised garden in Athens. Photo (cc) Eutropian

The consequences of austerity were the most severe in the Greek context,. where state structures were partially destroyed. Nowadays, local and national governments tend to be involved with citizen initiatives even though with almost no resources, since the funds are all being directed towards structural or emergency goals. Almost everywhere in Greece, the exodus of refugees to Central Europe appears to be one of the most important challenges of the present and near future. Mostly addressing people who aim at crossing the country, EU policies has turned Greece into Europe’s buffer country before nationalist walls. Even though the walking routes are not passing through Athens, when I visited them last July, both the Elionas and Piraeus camps – the first one organised by the government, the second set up informally by a local citizen initiative (now, apparently dismantled) – accommodated thousands of people, waiting. In these camps, local or national governments are not receiving any direct support from EU funds for refugees.

Parco delle Energie, self-organised sports facility in Rome. Photo (cc) Eutropian

Probably more than other PIGS countries, Italy has already had, since the 1980-90s, a very strong and politicised structure of self-organised movements and local citizen initiatives. During the last decades, those initiatives worked as a kind of a blow-off to political institutional collapse. However, the lack of strong national networks and, probably, the missing ambition to upscale local initiatives has prevented the initial energies from unfolding.

Despite the deception of the June 2016 national elections, Spain, where the networks of citizen initiatives and protests created strong networks, now face their second stage: disputing power. Local movements that emerged from the 15M movement succeeded in winning elections in the most important cities in Spain – Madrid, Barcelona or Valencia. Even though Podemos. in coalition with other political forces, did not achieve the expected share of votes at the last elections, city governments are already networking, organising new forms of decision-making and empowering citizenship initiatives. However, it is still too soon to measure the results of these new cooperations. A country or a society in crisis is not a “time of opportunities“ as we often hear when stock markets are translated into real life. From what I could see and live, during the last years in these four countries, crises are thrilling times of resistance, but also desperate moments of destruction. The decisive question for these initiatives is how to move from the idea of resistance, within this society frame, towards construction. This will be the only way to step forward from precariousness to resilience.

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This interview was completed in early 2016 as part of the research for Joyful Militancy. We (carla and Nick) sent Marina Sitrin a ‘preamble’ outlining some of the ideas behind the book, and then included a couple questions based on Sitrin’s other writings (especially Horizontalidad — published in English as Horizontalism — and Everyday Revolutions). As time went on in the researching, interviewing and writing of the book our ideas and articulations shifted and for that, we are deeply indebted to all our interviewees who offered new insights and shed light on areas that needed reworking.

Interview:

carla & Nick (c&N): Based on what we’ve told you about the book project, can you tell us what resonates and what doesn’t?

Marina Sitrin (MS): I am so excited for this project. It all resonates deeply with things I have been thinking, witnessing, fearing and dreaming. The role of joy, in particular in the way you describe it, is often absent – though not entirely – from our conversations and constructions in the northern part of the Americas and Europe. I do see joyful militancy as closely tied with emotion, on the individual and collective level, and will get to that with some of the later questions. It is both a fairly large and abstract concept, and at the same time a very simple direct and emotive one.

How do we feel when we participate in a movement or group? What are our relationships to others in the group? Does it feel open? Caring? Social? Is there trust? Why do we come back to assemblies and actions? Are people open to one another?

c&N: We have been told that “joyful militancy” or “militancia alegre” is a more common notion in Latin America.  Do you know anything about the genealogies or origins of “militancia alegre” in Latin America?

MS: I don’t know of any specific genealogy, but there are for sure many examples of the practice and language of care, trust, love and affect throughout the history of movements in Latin America. I see joyful militancy as both a practice and an articulation – ideally both together. As a practice it does not always come with an articulation of the experience, and then there are those groups and movements that have the explicit language of care and love, but do not always practice it. My first exposure to it as a concept together with a practice was in Argentina in the post 2001 popular rebellion and all the social creation that transpired.

In Argentina, when people found themselves without even the basic means for survival, they turned to one another. They did this without political parties, intermediaries or any sort of hierarchy. People explained this moment in history as a rupture, a break with past ways of organizing, but also a break in their finding one another – looking to one another. The effects of the dictatorship maintained a hold on many aspects of daily life, including fear of the other and a culture of turning one’s back in silence. HIJOS, the children of the disappeared, had been organizing for a few years in this silence, with internal forms that focused more on social relationships than an “end”. Their argument is that, at least in part, it was people in society who allowed the dictatorship to take place, with what they call a social silence. They organize in neighborhoods, speaking to people, face to face, and trying to recreate community. Their internal forms of organizing are also focused on social relationships, and in particular horizontal and affective forms. They speak of love as a relationship necessary in their group’s internal relationships as well as the sort of movement that has to be built. HIJOS in many ways was a precursor to the forms of organizing a few years later with the neighborhood assemblies, unemployed movements and recuperated workplaces, among tons of other collectives and networks that emerged.

I would love to share quote after quote of people in the movements in Argentina. I was honestly a bit surprised at how much people spoke of love and care as necessary to create the sort of world they desire. But now, in retrospect, the fact that the forms of organizing are all about social relationships—paying attention to power, making sure people are heard and can speak, prioritizing voices often excluded and ignored, organizing events with food, drinks, music and other tools that make them more social—were crucial and often just necessary for survival. Care is at the heart of the new forms of organizing. Horizontalism as a relationship is all about a shifting relational form between individuals and a group – paying attention to both – now. It is not a means to an end, but the means are a part of the end, and the end keeps changing.

Another example from Latin America, and one that is more of a practice and less something talked about as a tenet around which they organize, is the Zapatista communities. Their forms of organizing are based in assemblies striving for all people to participate equally and in creating structures of care, from health care to food and education, and then also creating processes for alternative adjudication—all of this is deeply affective, even if they do not shout to the world that they are joyous and grounded in affect. The joy is seen in these affective practices as well as in the celebratory nature of many of day to day experiences.

I see the concepts of joyful militancy, affective politics and a care/love-based organizing as also directly tied to prefigurative politics, and that has a long history and roots in Latin America. By prefigurative I mean as much as possible creating the desired future alternatives in the present.  This is an idea and practice that has roots all over the world, from the IWW in the US to the writings of W.E.B DuBois, and the practices of anarchists and autonomous activists in Latin America. It has become more popular and widespread, both in theory and practice, in the last twenty years with the rise of more autonomous and horizontal organizing, particularly in Latin America, but also with the Global Justice Movement and Occupy and movements of the Squares.

Going back to Latin America, while the more contemporary movements organize with affective politics as one of the hearts, consciously and intentionally, there is a long history of this sentiment as a part of organizing, including say the FORA in Argentina (the largest Anarchist federation in the world) which was a part of organizing Patagonia Rebelde, a free region in the south of Argentina in the early 1900s. While it was brutally repressed, the movement organized to create a free society then and there, rather than demanding or building towards a future society. This included all sorts of different social relationships which entailed care, trust and love as their foundation. This is a history that many contemporary movement participants have ideas about, but few have read about it in great detail. It is one of those funny things where historical memory is somehow imbued in current practice, even without a direct intentionality.

I also wonder about liberation theology and the role of love and care in Latin American movements today. Similar to the role of the memory of anarchism in Argentina, in some parts of Latin America, the liberation theologists actively supported revolutionary movements and for sure brought in the importance of love and care in the present – not just the future. Of course the Catholic church as a whole, like the communist parties, were all about the future and not the present.

c&N: You have described the work you do as a form of militancy.  Can you say what you mean by this concept?  What is militancy about, and what does it do?

MS: I also describe myself as a militant. I say this in part to counter the concept of activist, especially as it is understood in parts of Latin America, which is as oriented to NGOs – more ‘professional and paid’. In Spanish una militante is often someone who was a part of something, such as a movement or group, though not something like Greenpeace. It describes a more direct action sort of politics. And, in English, as it sounds, it has a force or action orientation – not militaristic, that is not what I mean – but determined and maybe hard left. I am not sure exactly how best to translate it alone; I use it as an alternative to identifying as an activist and to indicate direct involvement and revolutionary politics.

As for the work I do, I tend to think of it as militant research, and by this I mean a form of research and investigation that is together with people in movement, so again, militant meaning a sort of direct participation and action. I try as best as I can to not only use interview-based work, but to be involved in those things I write about and to engage back and forth with movement participants (if I am not active in that movement all the time) so as to check and make sure I am reflecting what people are doing/thinking. Sometimes this leads to a lot more work or investigation, as happened in Argentina when I was close to finishing the book Horizontalidad: Voces de Poder Popular en Argentina.^[i] I thought it was just about finished and circulated it with a number of movement participants. I got great feedback, and a few women from two different unemployed movements gently told me, compañera, you cannot publish this, it does not include the direct struggles of the Mapuche or Guarani, not in their own words. So, I took another many months, built relationships with a few indigenous communities in the far north, was fortunate to be joined by one of these two women when I went, and then was able to finish the book.

All together then, this sort of work can become a form of militancy as it can help connect people from different groups and movements who might not otherwise meet one another. For example, having developed relationships with more autonomous movements in Greece, and collaborating with a network of assemblies who translated Horiozntalidad into Greek, we found that not only were the voices in the book useful, but there was an opportunity to create direct relationships. So twice I helped initiate visits of Argentines to Greece. The second such visit was a worker from a recuperated workplace who met with workers in Vio.Me in Thessaloniki, and after the visit and exchange of ideas the Greek workers decided absolutely to recuperate their workplace. They say that without the direct exchange of ideas they might not have done it. The sharing of movement contacts and relationships across movements, countries and continents is for me a part of being a militant who does militant research.

c&N: What’s been your experience of sad militancy^[ii]–meanness, shame, fear, guilt, and ideological purism–in movement spaces?

1.     What sustains sad militancy?
2.     What provokes or inspires it?  What makes it spread?

MS: I have put off this question for second to last. And now am again taking a break, since as important as it is, it is such an ugly and sad part of our movements I am going to wait a moment before writing about it. I will answer it however, since it is also what has destroyed so many groups and movements – so utterly important.

Sad militancy can come from many places. First, and important to identify is when it comes from external forces, people who are paid to disrupt movements and do so in all sorts of ways from disrupting democratic processes and assemblies, to those who spread gossip and create divisions amongst people in the movement. This has been seen in so many movements historically and there is a great deal to learn from these experiences, particularly the disruption of the Black Panthers – and here I am thinking of some of the lesser known and insidious tactics such as “poison pen letters”.

I would like to end it there, but sad militancy is not just something that people from the outside are paid to do – and in fact, they are able to be paid to do it because we are so susceptible to it. On a basic level, the space a group or movement creates from the beginning is key – the tone and openness, or not, makes a big difference if one wants to focus on new relationships with one another. Along these same lines, ideological rigidity and hierarchies in ideas, formal and informal, create a closed and eventually nasty space for those not ascribing to the ideology or a part of the clique. People do not stay in movements that organize in this way, or if they do it is with a sort of obedience that is not transformative for society and instead creates versions of the same power and hierarchy – with people not being actors or agents of change, not to mention that dignity cannot grow or flourish.

My early organizing experiences were fortunately with anti-racist and later Central American Solidarity movements, with people who had been a part of the civil rights and later anti-nuclear movements, so they had a focus—at least in part—on social relationships and democracy. Later however, when I decided I needed to be a part of a revolutionary group that was organizing against capitalism as a whole, well, I found myself in a few different centrist socialists groups which were really soul deadening. It was all about ideology and guilt. One could never do enough, and could never know enough or quote enough of whomever was the revolutionary of the day (James Cannon, Tony Cliff, etc.). It was also politically all about the end and not the day-to-day. This even included women: one would think after the radical feminist movement these groups would get that relationships have to change now, but no, it was all about the future free society we all had to work for – accepting relationships as they are pretty much. I later came around some anarchist groups, thinking that they would be more open and focused on the day-to-day, as that is what I had read from the theory, but found the rigidity around identity too harsh and since I was not squatting or dressing a certain way I was kept at arm’s length – which was fine since I felt too rejected to try very hard.

Enough of these icky groups. I think the big question for today is how do we organize in ways that try to prevent sad militancy from creeping into our practice. Articulation of a joyful movement is important, and not as easy as one might think since there is so much resistance to the idea of feelings, which is also to say, relationships. Many in Argentina reflected on this, especially men in the unemployed movements and workplaces who would joke that they would approach people on the street and ask if they wanted to join a “love movement” and get punched. But it was a real question of machismo they were addressing. I do not mean just men here either, though it is the joke. Social relationships are increasingly given lip service, but we often do not work on them in our movements in a way that makes them dynamic enough to really create an affective space. Relationships here means not only how we treat one another individually, but things like our democratic practices as a whole and how and if we adjudicate or resolve conflicts that arise. So first, talking about it and stating clearing that it is important. But then, some movements do this and still sad militancy sneaks in, or jumps in, depending … it often concerns democratic practices and questions of flexibility—it is crucial to be able to change our practices as well as our ideas. That does not mean to be without clear ideas that are collective, but to avoid the ideological traps that can happen. Autonomous and anti-authoritarian movements are hardly exempt from this. In Occupy we sometimes found people arguing they were more horizontal than others, or more autonomous … this creates a closed and defensive space.

One way to try and keep our movements and groups more open is to be more open ourselves. To call things out when we see them. Not in a hostile way, but in the sense of identifying it and talking about it collectively, in special assemblies or in the moment. This is tricky as it can come off as hostile and people can easily get defensive – we live in a society where we are all so very fragile that calling someone out almost always leads to defensiveness … so figuring out ahead of time how we will deal with these issues as they come up and sticking to it. I am thinking now of how Occupy Farms in Albany California, learning from some of the difficult and sometimes nasty things that emerged in Occupy, organized based on a few common agreements and to participate all had to agree. Things that included participation – not as a ‘work ethic’ sort of thing, but that if one was going to be a part of a collective farm, one had to be a part of a working group that did things (without creating ableist hierarchies, of course).

This avoided people coming to just hang out and speaking in assemblies from a position of ideas alone without practice. In Argentina, when people were disruptive in assemblies, it was called out (this was learned first by having assemblies destroyed by disruption). People are told to stop, and if it does not work they are asked to leave. It is more complicated than that, but that is the essence for some assemblies. In the 15M they had a group of people that was always roving during assemblies to try and support those people who were disrupting, believing they needed support, and not to be silenced.

c&N: What’s been your experience of joyful militancy?

1.     What inspires/encourages/sustains it?
2.     How do you try to embody it?

MS: My first experiences with joyful militancy, without having a name for it at the time, were very specific and location-based. I went to Seattle in 1999 to participate in the protests. Later in the day, when the repression picked up, I found myself alone and scared for a moment – only a moment however as an experienced anarchist from San Diego helped me quickly join their affinity group. Not only did I come without an affinity group, but what I knew of them was from reading Murray Bookchin on the Spanish Revolution. It was all a wonderful idea, like assembly based decision making and councils, but I had no direct experience with them. I had been a part of a few different hierarchical socialist groups and left all of then in part due to the hierarchy and centrism, but also what for sure can be called sad militancy. I had witnessed mass assemblies and direct democracy, including in Tepotzlan Mexico where people had taken over the town in the later 1990s, but still had had no direct participation – I did not know what it felt like to be a part of it. Not until Seattle.

So, this wonderful person, whose name I have since forgotten, brought me into a small group and together we blocked an alley where delegates were trying to pass, and supported one another in the massive tear gas attacks by the police, as well as negotiated road blocks of burning dumpsters and projectiles launched to protect people from the police. It was quite scary, but I did not feel fear as much as energy. I was now with a small group of people who were taking care of each other, checking in with one another all the time and taking breaks to do so.  And then that evening there was a spokescouncil and I felt that “aha” moment where it all made sense. The ideas I had read about with direct democracy and people caring for one another was all around me, even amidst the tear gas and injured people – perhaps even because of it – which brought up the stakes and made the care and trust all the more important. It was a short lived experience, but has marked me forever.

As for longer, deeply grounded movements based in affective politics and joyful militancy, that for sure would be Argentina post 2001. While emerging from necessity, from a rupture in society that was both crisis and a newfound finding of one another on the streets, it continued in many of the movements, taking deep root and becoming the place from which people organized and mobilized. What sustained it in many places was concrete projects around which people were organizing, from running workplaces to maintaining popular kitchens or media groups, together with open discussion of what it was/is. Collective reflection cannot be underestimated, and by this I do not mean only having assemblies to discuss what we are doing or will do next – and not either reflecting on what we have done. But reflecting on the meanings behind what we are doing and why. Taking time to explore ideas and our feelings related to them. There were constant discussions and assemblies in all of the movements, from the recuperated workplaces during lunch and breaks to weekly gatherings within the unemployed movements and parts of the agenda of the neighborhood assemblies. There were also assemblies comprised of people from the different movements to discuss things together, like autonomy, autogestion and affective politics, and this was done in a way that reflected the politics of the movements, with openness and care, in the discussions and infrastructure – meaning there was food and breaks with music and murgas, helping to facilitate the celebratory and emotive elements involved in all of it.

As for my personal attempts to try and embody a politics of affect and joyful militancy, I don’t know. On a very basic level, but one that really does mean a lot, and at the risk of being dismissed as unserious, I try and be open, smile, and really listen and ask questions with others in the movements. Welcoming people, asking about their lives and being friendly is a bigger deal than most people realize. Feeling welcome into a space that is new, feeling like people care about who you are and not just what action you are participating in is huge. On a more general level, I try and create space for others to speak and be heard, and in a way that is meaningful. This often means things like helping to make sure there is facilitation that allows and develops listening, as well as creating a warm climate and atmosphere around discussions, assemblies and other spaces. I like to think I try and reach out to younger and sometimes lesser experienced participants so as to help them feel heard and involved. This is almost always with younger women. In Occupy in New York, I shifted early on to focusing on the legal group since we did not have much of one when it began. A space or movement without legal support, especially in an action that is not legal in certain respects, is not serious, and for sure does not have affect and care at its core. We must protect all people in their/our bodies; this means legally and in the streets with affinity groups. Within the legal group of Occupy we quickly discovered that we not only needed to create legal support for the hundreds arrested, but also to create spaces of mediation for the conflicts coming up in the Plaza. I was a part of a legal subgroup, together with Safer Spaces, that was trying to set up a mechanism not only for mediation but also the adjudication of conflict. Without ways of resolving conflict within our movements we cannot say we take care, trust and affect seriously.

c&N: Because we think joy and sadness are always moving and shifting into new configurations, we are really curious about how these shifts take place.  Have you seen spaces, conversations, or practices shift from joyful militancy into sad militancy, or vice-versa?  What leads to these shifts?

MS: I have seen movements go from joyful to sad, though it is usually soon before they break up as that specific form of movement. From my experience, this has often been when there is very specific activity on behalf of one or a few people who are extremely disruptive and their disruptions are not dealt with. Our culture of silence or even being polite and not wanting to say things out loud, at least not collectively is a real problem. It allows one or a few people to dominate groups of hundreds and event thousands as was the case with Occupy. This was not the only thing that happened with Occupy, but was among them. In Argentina I saw it happen with left political parties intentionally destroying horizontal assemblies (something that is much harder to do today since they have learned hard lessons and changed their practices). I also saw it with the role of money in movements: from the unemployed movements having to be “managers” of state money and deciding who gets it or not as the government never gave enough, to NGO money in movements creating divisions and finally, to what was for sure government intervention by way of paid disruptors who—when all the other forms of disruption did not work—used direct violence, burning homes and shooting at participants until the land-based movement dispersed. This however raises bigger questions about defense of movements, perhaps for another book.

c&N: In your book, Everyday Revolutions,^[iii] you continually return to the rejection of ideology and how important this has been for movements to create communities based in love and trust. It sounds like in Argentina, what is being rejected is the traditional ideology of Marxism that tends towards vanguardism, hierarchy, and so on. Is there something about all ideology that gets in the way of love and trust across differences?

MS: After the 2001 economic collapse people in Argentina came together from all sorts of backgrounds, as well as networked across all sorts of social classes and identity based groups. The unemployed with the formerly identified urban middle class, the Guarani and Mapuche with media collectives and children of the disappeared (HIJOS) and workers recuperating their workplaces with all of the above. People organized in their locations and came together out of necessity. They forced out four governments in the first months of the rebellion with sheer popular power – people in the streets banging pots and pans (cacerolando). No one called people together, not unions or political parties, they did not have formal leaderships, banners or posters, or even united slogans in the beginning. They came together banging pots and pans and created the song – Que se vayan todos, que no quede ni uno solo (They all must go, not even one shall remain). And it worked. They forced out presidents, heads of the judiciary, economy and other ministries. There was a rejection of what was – of political parties and forms of hierarchy (power over) that people saw as responsible for the economic crisis and mass privatization which in part destroyed the economy.

Again and again people who I spoke with while living there and those I’ve visited over the years insisted that they did not want to replicate the forms of organization that they saw as responsible … not only responsible for the crisis, but also all those groups and forms of organizing that were also seen as unable to respond sufficiently to these groups – so forms on the right and left. All political parties. So, yes, what you suggest with a rejection of Marxism as an ideology is true, but it was also true for anything that seemed to harken a pre-formed ideology or set of ideas. People wanted to create things anew – social relationships and forms of organizing. And this is where we get to some of the ideas in your next question. There were and continue to be consistent forms and ways of thinking about organizing and while it was in no way an ideology – there is an amazing consistency in the ways people across class and identity spoke and speak about these forms: new – rejecting the old – and creating something new in similar ways. I believe this is tied to what is being rejected, but will get to that next.

c&N: You continually point to the concepts of horizontalism, affective politics, autogestion, and autonomy as concepts that are widely shared among movements in Argentina. It’s clear that they’ve been central to constructing and sustaining movements, and warding off ideology and co-optation. You quote a number of movement participants who seem to refuse any concrete definition of the movements they’re part of, and you call these concepts “living words.” It seems clear that you and the voices you highlight are refusing rigid definitions of these terms–autonomy, horizontalism, love, and trust–so that they can be part of an ongoing discussion, and that this is different from an ideology. Can you say more about these differences? What is the difference between an ideological concept and a living word?

MS: First, the idea of a living word comes not from me, but people in the movements. I repeat it a lot since I love the way it captures what people are doing and striving towards, but it is for sure a concept that is also living and dynamic, from within the movements in Argentina. What is rejected is ideology, as I understand people in the movements, by this they mean any predetermined set of ideas or concepts that then are applied to life – to concrete situations. I don’t know that all ideology is rejected as an analysis for what is wrong in society – so elements of Marxism to explain capitalism … it is possible, but what is rejected is a set of ideas that will then “free” people or make for new social relationships. The focus of the movements is how people organize and relate now – in the day to day – and from there construct the future. This already implies a dynamic as the everyday changes, and thus the future, as related to the everyday, must change. The same is true for the ideas around which much of the organizing takes place.

Take for example Horizontalidad – a word that did not exist before in Spanish, or if it did it might have been used a few years prior by HIJOS, the children of the disappeared in Argentina… Horizontalidad was and is described as a relationship, a way of coming together without power over the other, as a way of having conversations and relating more generally. It is always described as a changing relationship since as people relate to one another they change and the group changes, thus the concept of the tools used also must change, thus the living part of the word. It is ever-changing and dynamic as it is used in life by people… It is not a description of a relationship either – not direct or participatory democracy, nor consensus – it is a relationship itself that might or might not use these other tools.

Similarly, autonomy and autogestion. Autonomy was used, together with horizontalidad and autogestion to articulate the focus of the movements being on and with one another – not looking ‘up’ but horizontally. Seeing power as something created together, and also as a live thing, not something to take or be given. Autonomy has been used to distinguish both movements and groups, as well as individuals. Deciding for ourselves or oneself. Not having a party or politician dictate what to do or how… autonomy is a practice and dynamic – not an ideology and theory – and the danger of calling it a theory is that it can become less “alive” less of a practice. In a number of movements, when offered ‘gifts’ and subsides from the state, they continued to call themselves autonomous while simultaneously organizing based on the agenda of the state, and eventually the splits within the movements became too big. But that is another story, and entails sad militancy: with the stagnation of autonomy, the trust and care within the movements also unraveled.

One of the things that I believe has helped keep autonomy and horizontalidad as living words is the practices connected with them. It is not abstract. To be autonomous and horizontal is related to concrete practice. So what is that practice? Those movements that self organize, from the recuperated workplaces (of which there are over 350) to the self organized unemployed movements (a handful still) and media networks and alternative outlets (of which there are around 60) have all continued, even with challenges, and they all argue that part of their ability to face the challenges posed by the state has been their level of self-organization or autogestion. They also intertwine this practice of autogestion with a practice of autonomy and every changing relationships of horizontalidad.

This brings us to affective politics: a politics based in affect, trust, care and love, as people in the movements describe it. This is something I describe more earlier, but it cannot be left out of any question related to the dynamics of the movements and how they are rejecting ideology and instead are creating ever-changing dynamic relationships.

c&N: We have the sense that the situation in North America is a lot different Argentina and other places in Latin America. One of the most striking differences, from our perspective, is that the dense networks of love, care, and trust do not seem to exist in the same ways among the Left in North America, especially among European-descended settlers. What’s your impression of these differences, and what are the implications for movements in North America?

MS: Hmmm … I think a lot of this has to do with identity, class, experience and options in life. People who lack options, such as the unemployed workers in Argentina or the population facing a total economic collapse, have seemed to come together in very similar ways; both movements rejected hierarchy, power-over, and ideology while at the same time creating new ways of being together, self-organizing grounded in horizontal relationships and affect. As the movements continued over time it does seem like those that have self-organized out of necessity have lasted longer and continued with the same dynamic forms of organizing based in new social relationships.

Saying all this, I am now thinking about a conversation I recently had with two young people, one Mexican and one US, who had both been living in Oaxaca for years, collaborating with the Universidad de la Tierra and Gustavo Esteva in particular. They are now in another part of Mexico struggling to organize a social center, a small editorial (printing books and booklets) and a few other projects, all based in horizontal, autonomous and affective relationships. They are facing internal challenges for sure, and that is some of what we spoke about, but they continue and are quite motivated and really lovely, passionate, smart young organizers. They would be examples of people from the left, working with others on the left, to create these sorts of space – and while they need to self organize to survive, it is not to the same degree as say the unemployed in Argentina. They could get other jobs, even if with difficulty … so maybe I am contradicting myself, or maybe the first response to organize with autogestion, autonomy and horizontalidad, developing and grounding in affect, is something that is first a response, but can also be something intentional, if one is very very careful with each step and moves slowly. And, if we could all spend years with Gustavo Esteva, learning and sharing, well, that would be a wonderful gift.

So, after being so wordy here, the conclusion is that while joyful militancy is easier to maintain in places where organizing is based in necessity and the rejection of ideology and pre-formed ways of organizing take root much faster, it is not impossible or even improbable in other spaces where people have less urgency and necessity in their survival questions and options … what it does require in these ‘left’ spaces is a lot of attention to maintaining relationships as flexible and ever-changing. Learning from our companeros in the global south.

c&N: Where do you see love, trust, horizontalism, and autonomy being generated and sustained in North America? Or, do you see other, alternative common notions that animate North American movements?

MS: While I do for sure see autonomy, horizontalism, affect, trust and love animating US and Canadian movements, it is not what occurs to me first for these regions. Too often, at least in the US, there is a sort of territoriality of left ideas and sadly ideologies, even in the more autonomous spaces, so rather than flexible and caring ideas guiding our actions and relationships we cling to ideas and notions such as autonomy as a rigid dogma – “I am more autonomous than you” using forms of comparison with actions and even life choices. It has even occurred more recently with horizontalism, so rather than seeing it as an ever-changing relationship that must change as people change and a group changes, it is used as a particular definition of a form of consensus decision-making. We saw this in particular around the Occupy plazas. I have no idea where this came from since it has nothing to do with the way Argentines use it, but instead people argued for horizontalism to mean absolute consensus, not the striving for consensus, but that all must discuss and agree with the exception of one. (Something impossible in groups of people who do not know one another and particularly large groups as we had in New York, with over a thousand or two thousand people in assemblies at times.) What this points to is the rigidity that people—even those who have not been organized in movement or groups before—tend towards, which is a sort of hierarchy of ideas instead of flexible open relationships … maybe we have not broken from the traditional forms of change on the left as many others have. Or maybe when we become more flexible, those who have preconceived ideas of how change should happen jump in so fast and occupy the space that it seems like that is the majority opinion when it is not. I could explore this more, but would rather begin to think about those spaces where people have organized in these more dynamic and open ways.

Historically, there are tons of examples from the history of the US as well as around the world – we just have to look for them and listen well. For example, SNCC was grounded in participatory and direct democracy, with attempts at creating leadership and horizontal relationships, as well as beloved community overall. The radical feminist movement is fairly well known for working on more affective and care-based ties, focusing on sharing personal stories and creating atmospheres of openness within the movement. Following chronologically is the Anti Nuclear movement in the 1970s and 80s that in many areas was based in direct democracy and affinity groups, making sure to take care of each person bodily as well as with emotional support. I could go into many more examples, though that perhaps is for another project.

c&N: A common perception we’ve been grappling with is that joyful militancy is naïve—a failure to appreciate how bad things are (if you’re not sad/angry/cynical, you’re not paying attention) – how do you react to this?

MS: That is total nonsense. And I do not call many opinions nonsense, really, almost none. But from my experience, those people from whom I have learned about joyful militancy and affective politics are people in unemployed movements, people living in situations such as shanty towns, with nothing to live on and no real future prospects. Or, workers facing a life of unemployment taking over their factories. Or women in the Southern Non Violent Coordinating Committee in the south of the US. Here of course I did not participate, but have spoken to people who were involved in the movement and I read a great deal, and the concept of Beloved Community was key to what they were trying to construct. Inspired in part I believe by this form of organizing is now Black Lives Matter, who are best known for their interruptions in business as usual; less known is that the organizers try and ground their organizing explicitly in the politics of care and love. Black Lives Matter as a hashtag created by co-founder Patrisse Cullors was made famous almost instantaneously, though lesser known is the simultaneous “love letter” that was written by Alicia Garza, the other of the three women co-founders. Written to “Black folks” it speaks of the importance of loving oneself as well as organizing based in love. And recently, in interviews I have done and read with people who are spending lots of time in Rojava, from Janet Biehl to Kurdish women militant researchers, they all speak of the joy, happiness, laughter and smiles that fill the spaces of self-defense and creation that are the autonomous Cantons of Rojava. Women there speak of the importance of this care, joy and laughter. If they do not appreciate how “bad” things are, then, well, shit, no one does.

I do not write this to dismiss the question, it is an important one, and one I get all the time. Affect is not seen as serious. Both due to what people think is something “soft” or not looking to the bad, but also I think it is a deeply gendered and race-based argument. The people I know who are or did ground their organizing explicitly in affect, joy and beloved community are on the margins of society – they are women in groups and networks all over the world, the unemployed and queer movements in Argentina, SNCC in the US and currently the coordinators of Black Lives Matter, women in Rojava … I could go on and on, but the reality is the opposite of the argument being put forward. I do not want to place ideological or identity boxes on those posing these questions, but from my experience they do not come from similar backgrounds as the movements and networks I just mentioned. And last, forget academia. The idea that affective politics or love based organizing is seen as serious in social movement theory is just, well, not happening. I have been asked so many times, “what is that?” and then told to remove it from articles (which I refuse). Emotion yes, and negative emotion, for sure, but love and affect, no, it is seen as not serious. Who dominates the academic world? Some real similarities with those on the left also making the critique. But, I don’t want to spiral into who is to blame for not taking it seriously; it is not particularly useful. Most important is to do what you both are doing, which is bringing this form of organizing more into the public discourse as an option for organizing.

___________________________________________

^[i] The English translation of this book, edited by Marina Sitrin, was published as Horizontalism: Voices of Popular Power in Argentina. Oakland: AK Press, 2006

^[ii] Earlier in our process of researching and writing the book, we were using the concept of ‘sad militancy’ to describe the ways that radicalism can be intertwined with shame, fear, guilt and ideological purism. We later changed ‘sad militancy’ to ‘rigid radicalism’ in the book, in order to avoid confusion with the emotion of sadness.

^[iii] Marina Sitrin. Everyday Revolutions: Horizontalism and Autonomy in Argentina. London: Zed Books, 2012.

Images by Pete Railand at Justseeds

Lead image of Marina Sitrin from an interview with M Cem Menguc, “Horizontalism: This, But Not This (1001 Plateaus, # 1)”

Reposted from Joyful Militancy

The post Care is at the heart: an interview with Marina Sitrin appeared first on P2P Foundation.

By creating opportunities for exchange, mutual action and sharing, A4C not only operates as a platform but attempts to create a new commons, a synthesis between arts and political engagement.

A4C intends to explore the  interstitial spaces between power and communities, traditional arts system and society, states and territories. We pursue documentation as artistic practice.

In an historical phase of what Antonio Gramsci named “interregnum” whereas we know what we leave but do not know what we will find, A4C is a space for collective search, experimentation, creation of what post-colonial philosopher Homi Babha named ” a third space”, that transcends traditional definitions of arts and politics. Particular attention will be devoted to building bridges and opportunities for collective work, exchange and dialogue between European and Latin American artists and activists.

Our first steps have moved along the issue of migrations and war, starting with the participation at the Nationless Pavillion at the 2015 Venice Biennale, to the pop-up exhibition “From the shores of Tripoli to the hills of Moctezuma” in Rome-based gallery Ex-Elettrofonica,  to continue with “Dispacci-Dispatches” an exploration in the history of Italian colonial wars in Libya by means of displacements and re-enactment of historical chronicles and documents read in various locations of the Quartiere Africano (African quarter) in Rome, built to celebrate fascist colonies in Africa.

SHOWREEL A4C #ArtsForTheCommons from Rosa Jijon on Vimeo.

The post Project of the Day: Arts for the Commons appeared first on P2P Foundation.

This interview with Silvia Federici was conducted in early 2016 by carla bergman and Nick Montgomery for Joyful Militancy. For this interview we (Nick and carla) sent a ‘preamble’ outlining some of the ideas behind our book project, and had a conversation with based on the themes of our book and Federici’s other work.

Silvia Federici: My politics resonate with your idea of “joyful militancy.” I’m a strong believer that either your politics is liberating and that gives you joy, or there’s something wrong with them.

I’ve gone through phases of “sad politics” myself and I’ve learned to identify the mistakes that generate it. It has many sources. But one factor is the tendency to exaggerate the importance of what we can do by ourselves, so that we always feel guilty for not accomplishing enough.

When I was thinking about this conversation, I was reminded of Nietzsche’s metamorphoses in Thus Spoke Zarathustra and his image of the camel. The camel is the prototype of the militant who burdens herself with huge amounts of work, because she thinks that the destiny of the world depends on her overwork. Inevitably she’s always saddened because the goal is always receding and she does not have the time to be fully present to her life and recognize the transformative possibilities inherent to her work.

carla and Nick: You said that you feel like there are so many sources to sad militancy[1] and can you speak to some more of those?

Federici: Sad militancy comes from setting goals that you cannot achieve, so that the outcome is always out of reach, always projected into the future and you feel continuously defeated.  “Sad politics “ is also defining your struggle in purely oppositional terms, which puts you in a state of permanent tension and failure. A joyful politics is a politics that is constructive and prefigurative. I’m encouraged by the fact that more people today see that you cannot continuously postpone the achievement of your goals to an always receding future.

Joyful politics is politics that change your life for the better already in the present. This is not to deny that political engagement often involves suffering. In fact our political involvement often is born of suffering. But the joy is knowing and deciding that we can do something about it, it is recognizing that we share our pain with other people, is feeling the solidarity of those around us. Militants in Argentina speak of  “politicizing our sadness.”

This is why I don’t believe in the concept of “self-sacrifice,” where self-sacrifice means that we do things that go against our needs, our desires, our potentials, and for the sake of political work we have to repress ourselves. This has been a common practice in political movements in the past. But it is one that produces constantly dissatisfied individuals. Again, what we do may lead to suffering, but this may be preferable to the kind of self-destruction we would have faced had we remained inactive.

The inability to make politics a rewarding experience is part of the reason why, I think, the radical Left has been unsuccessful in attracting large numbers of people. Here too we are beginning to learn however. I see that many young militants today are recognizing the importance of building community, of organizing activities that are pleasurable, that build trust and affective relations, like eating together for instance. It is not an accident that Indigenous peoples’ movements in Latin America give so much importance to the organization of events like the fiestas.

Nick and carla: We wanted to ask you specifically about the feminist movement and what are some of the ways that feminists and other movements have struggled with sad militancy in the past. We’re thinking of Jo Freeman’s essay on “trashing” from the ‘70s, where she talks about real tendencies to destroy relationships within the feminist movement.[i] In one of the interviews that you’ve done, you mention “truculent forms of behavior that were typical of the movement in the ‘60s” and that you see new forms of kindness and care emerging that maybe were absent back then. So we wanted to ask you about how things have changed from your perspective, and whether you see a connection between trashing and what is now called call-out culture in contemporary movements.

Federici: When I wrote about truculent behavior, I was thinking of relations in the male Left and male-dominated organizations, where you found a lot of protagonism and peacock-like competition, as well as a manipulation of women, sexual and otherwise. These were among the factors that motivated the rise of the women’s liberation movement. Not only women’s demands were pushed off the agenda, but everyday relations were often degrading for them.

A good description of women’s lives in male-dominated organizations is Marge Piercy’s “The Grand Coolie Dam,”[ii] where she powerfully describes the many forms of subordination women suffered in male-dominated groups. In comparison, the organizational forms the women’s movement adopted were a major improvement. Possibly feminists moved too far in the opposite direction. I am thinking of Jo Freeman’s critique of the “tyranny of structurelessness.”[iii] But she’s excessively critical of the feminist movement. I don’t agree that feminists were especially prone to trashing each other. The attack on leadership, for instance, though it often worked against people’s capacity to express themselves, also opened the way to more egalitarian relations—like ensuring that everyone would have a change to speak in a meeting. The resistence against women getting credit for authoring articles or speaking too much in public was a legacy of the experiences we had made in male-dominated organizations. In time, it is a fear that most women left behind, as they felt more confident in their own powers.

Some of the bitterness that you find in Jo Freeman comes perhaps from the fact that, when we joined the women’s movement, many of us believed that we had reached a sort of paradise. As I wrote in “Putting Feminism On Its Feet,” when I began to work with other women I truly felt that I had found my home, my tribe.[iv] We thought that we had reached a place where everything would be harmonious; where there would be love, care, reciprocity, equality, cooperation—sisterhood as we called it. So we dis-activated our critical thinking and left our defenses down. Unfortunately, we didn’t reach paradise, and the disappointment was especially severe because we assumed that in the women’s movement we would find happiness, or at least we would not encounter the kind of jealousies, power plays, and power relations we had experienced with men.

Spinoza speaks of Joy as coming from Reason and Understanding. But we forgot that all of us bear on our bodies and minds the marks of life in a capitalist society. We forgot that we came to the feminist movement with many scars and fears. We would feel devalued and easily take offense if we thought we were not properly valued. It was a jealousy that came from poverty, from fear of not being given our due. This also led some women to be possessive about what they had done, what they had written or said.

These are all the classical problems and distortions that life in a capitalist society creates. Over time you learn to identify them, but at first, many of us were devastated by them. For me coping with this realization has been an important learning process. But I have also seen women leaving the movement because they were so deeply hurt by it.

On the other hand, the feminist movement, because it stressed the importance of sharing experiences and engaging in a collective examination of our everyday lives and problems, gave us important tools to deal with this situation. Through “consciousness-raising” and the refusal to separate politics from our everyday reproduction it created forms of organization that built trust and showed that our strength was rooted in our mutual solidarity.

I found a vision in the women’s movement that allowed me to overcome some bitter experiences and over time insulated me from disappointment. I see politics now as a process of transformation; a process by which we learn to better ourselves, shed our possessiveness and discard the petty squabbles that so much poison our lives.

I think that this has been a collective experience that has left a mark on other organizations as well. It seems to me that, over the last two or three decades, the women’s movement has been the most important influence on the organizational forms of most radical movements. You don’t find today, on a general level, the kind of behavior that was common among men thirty or forty years ago, not at least among the new generations, although there is still a good amount of machismo around. But you also have men who genuinely want to be feminist, and define themselves as anti-patriarchal, or organize against male supremacy—all unthinkable stands—with few exceptions—in the ‘60s.

carla: I have all these questions! There seems to be some kind of paradox in this: that joy is about feelings and relationships, but not just an individual feeling. And while we want to speak to the power of joy, it can’t be turned into a commandment, and in fact it gets lost when it becomes something imposed on people. But it also can’t be about just feeling happy or feeling good, or being okay with the way things are. It feels like a little bit of a paradox and I haven’t figured out how to think that through. A lot of my activism over the years has been around youth liberation and working with children having more of a say, and getting that form of oppression into the discussion and into activist spaces, and my work was very centered around that in a public way. I don’t want to replicate individualism in liberation; I want it to always be connected to the larger systems and social struggles. But it also needs to be about thriving right now, because they’re kids! And when things were working well it seemed that there was a lot of room for freedom and growth but it was held and felt collectively, without a bunch of rules or norms. There was happiness, sure, but also difficulty and a willingness to work through it. So it feels like a constant paradox to work through joy …

Federici: I like the distinction between happiness and joy. Like you, I like joy because it is an active passion. It’s not a static state of being. And it’s not satisfaction with things as they are. It’s part of feeling powers and capacities growing within yourself and in the people around you. It’s a feeling, a passion, that comes from a process of transformation and growth. It does not mean that you’re satisfied with your situation. It means, again using Spinoza, that you’re active in accordance to what your understanding tells you to do and what is required by the situation. So you feel that you have the power to change and feel yourself changing through what you’re doing, together with other people. It’s not a form of acquiescence to what exists.

Nick and carla: We’ve found your concept of the accumulation of divisions really compelling, and the ways you’re centering how capitalism is always using white supremacy, patriarchy, colonization, and other oppressive hierarchies to create divisions and enable exploitation. Your historicization of those divisions is powerful, because you show how the state and capitalism have deepened and entrenched patriarchy and racism as a strategy to stop resistance and enable more intense exploitation. And for us, in this book we really want to center the importance of rebuilding trust and connection and solidarity across those divisions, while leaving space for difference and autonomy. One of the things that we like about your work is that you don’t jump to a simple unity—that overcoming these divisions doesn’t look like a simple unity. And so we wanted to ask you to talk about that a little more. Is there a distinction between divisions, which are hierarchical and exploitative, and differences, which might be something else? And can you talk about the positive horizon you see for resisting the accumulation of divisions while warding off a kind of homogenizing unity?

Federici: Yes, the distinction between differences and divisions is important. When I speak of “divisions” I speak of differences that carry hierarchies, inequalities, and have a divisive power. So, we need to be very clear when we speak of “differences.” Not all should be celebrated.

The lesson we learned in the ‘60s from the women’s movement and the Black Power movement is that the most effective way to respond to unequal relations is for those who have less social power to organize autonomously. This does not exclude the possibility of coming together for particular struggles. But in a society divided along racial and gender lines, unity is a goal to be achieved, not something that can be assumed to already exist. Organizational autonomy, or at least the construction of autonomous spaces within mixed organizations—as it often happens in Latin America—is a necessary condition to subvert these divisions. The women’s movement could not have developed the understanding of the situation of women that it developed if women had remained in male-dominated organizations. It was crucial for women to move away from these organizations to even begin to think about their problems and share their thoughts with each other.

You cannot think of a problem, give voice to it, share it with others, if you fear that you will be dismissed, ridiculed, or told that it is not important. Moreover, how could women have spoken of sexuality and their relations with men in front of them? And how could Black militants speak openly of their experience of racism in front of white people?

Autonomy within movements that are working toward unity but are traversed by power relations is fundamental. A crucial reality would have remained hidden if the feminist movement had not organized autonomously and this is also true of the Black Power movement. Important areas and forms of exploitation would have continued to be unnoticed; would not have been analyzed and denounced and would have continued to be reproduced.

carla and Nick: You often point to Latin America and other places where the social fabric is much stronger in general, and movements are a lot more capable of reproducing themselves and meeting their own needs, relying less on the state and capital. The maintenance of communal and cooperative forms of life seems to be central to the capacity for sustained struggle and resistance. Can you elaborate on all this?

Federici: I went to Nigeria in the ‘80s and one of the big surprises for me was to discover that large amounts of land were still managed communally. That doesn’t mean that in communal land regimes relationships are necessarily egalitarian. Generally men have more power than women; but until recently they could not sell the land. Clearly these communal regimes have gone through many changes, especially because of colonial domination. But the fact that communal ownership has been widespread in Africa until at least the nineteenth century and, in some regions, continues even today, has had a deep impact on relationships and people, which is why I believe so much violence has been and is necessary to privatize the land and the continent’s immense natural resources.

It’s the same thing in Latin America. In Mexico, in the 1930s, during the government of Lázaro Cárdenas, some land was returned to indigenous communities that had been expropriated by colonial invasion. Today the Mexican government is trying to re-privatize everything, but until recently at least thirty percent of the country’s land was still held communally.

Again, this is not a guarantee of egalitarian relations. Women in these communities are coming forward, criticizing the patriarchal relations often prevailing within them. A good example are the Zapatista women. As you can read in Hilary Klein’s book Compañeras, many of the transformations that have taken place in Zapatista communities, like the application of the Revolutionary Law On Women, have been the product of the struggle that women have made against patriarchalism. But communal land regimes guarantee the reproduction of the communities that live on the land.

Today many of these communities are facing dispossession because of land privatization, deforestation, the loss of water to irrigate their milpas. But when they are forced out and come to the cities, they still act as a collectivity. They take over land though collective action, they build encampments, and take decision collectively. As a result, in many cities of Latin America, new communities have formed that from their beginning were built collectively. It appears that the narcos now try to infiltrate some of these communities. But when people take over the land and cooperate to build their houses, to build the streets, to fight with the government to connect the electricity and get water pipes, there is a good chance that that they will be able to respond to this threat, and you can see that there’s a new social reality emerging in these communities.

As Raúl Zibechi often points out, something new is emerging in these communities because they have had to invent new forms of life, without any pre-existing model, and politicize the everyday process of their reproduction.[v] When you work together, building houses, building streets, building structures that provide some immediate form of healthcare—just to give some examples—you are making life-choices, as all of them come with a high cost. You must fight the state, fight the police, the local authorities. So you have to develop tight relations with each other and always measure the value of all things.

Nick and carla: Following up on that, part of what we are curious about is how we can learn from places where, in general, the degree of politicization is higher and the social fabric is much stronger. What kind of lessons can North American–based organizers draw from this for organizing in our own communities? How can people in the global North learn from all of the vibrant struggles and forms of life in Latin America while being attentive to differences in context at the same time?

Federici: This is a discussion that is taking place in New York. People in the social movements who are inspired by the struggles in Latin America are now thinking in terms of territorial politics, the territory being a place where you have some form of collective control and even self-government. Clearly, the situation in the US is profoundly different. But thinking in terms of territory enables us to see that the neighborhoods in which we live are not neutral spaces, they are not just conglomerates of houses and people. They are very politically structured. In New York, for instance, since the ‘70s, there’s been a process of “spatial de-concentration,” whereby every neighborhood has been studied by local and federal authorities to figure out how to better control the movement of people and guarantee that the wrong people do not go to certain neighborhoods. Subway lines, bus lines, playgrounds have been restructured, to make sure that poor people cannot easily go to places of wealth.

So looking at our neighborhoods as “territories” in this case means recognizing those factors of tension, of crisis, those power relations that traverse them that divide people but can also bring them together. The social centers that have opened in recent years in New York are attempting to do that, trying to engage in practices that create “territory,” that is, create forms of aggregation. Building more collective forms of reproduction is a key aspect of this process. It is indispensable if we want to create “communities of resistance,” spaces where people are connected and can engage in some collective decision-making.

carla and Nick: Maybe one thing to follow up on this. In that question you talked about the forgotten impacts of really subtle things like architecture, planning, and in Caliban and the Witch you talk about the forgotten impacts of the witch hunts, and how those impacts are still with us today. Are there underappreciated movements of joy and transformation where we haven’t fully appreciated the impacts?

Federici: There are so many movements. The Suffragette movement, for example, is always portrayed as a bourgeois movement, but I’m discovering that it had a working-class dimension as well. But rather than thinking of particular movements, what most matters is discovering and recreating the collective memory of past struggles. In the US there is a systematic attempt to destroy this memory and now this is extending across the world, with the destruction of the main historical centers of the Middle East—a form of dispossession that has major consequences and yet is rarely discussed. Reviving the memory of the struggles of the past makes us feel part of something larger than our individual lives and in this way it gives a new meaning to what we are doing and gives us courage, because it makes us less afraid of what can happen to us individually.

Nick and carla: Another thing that we wanted to talk to you about is the style and tone of intellectual engagement. Your style is so generous, and you have a really militant critique of capitalism, but you’re always pointing to examples in a range of different movements and you seem to reserve really pointed attacks for large destructive institutions like the World Bank. It seems to us that this differs from a lot of radical critique today, which can be very focused on exposing complicities or limitations, talking about the ways that movements are lacking, that they haven’t yet reached this or that, as well as targeting individuals. So we wanted to ask: Is this style something that you’ve cultivated and that you’re intentional about, and maybe more generally, can you talk about the potential of theory in intellectual work today, and what joyful theory might look like? What makes theory enabling and transformative, and what gets in the way of that?

Federici: It’s partially a consequence of growing old. You understand things that when you’re younger you didn’t see. One thing that I’ve learned is to be more humble and to hold my judgment of people until I know them beyond what I can make out from what they say, realizing that people often say foolish things that they do not really believe or have not seriously thought about.

It also comes from recognizing that we can change, which means that we should stress our potential rather than our limits. One of the most amazing experiences in the women’s movement was to see how much we could grow, learning to speak in public, write poetry, make beautiful posters. All this has given me a strong distaste for the impulse to squash everything at the first sign that something is not right.

I’ve made it a principle not to indulge in speech that is destructive. Striving to speak clearly, not to make people feel like fools because they don’t understand what I say, is a good part of it. That’s also something I’ve taken from the women’s movement. So many times we had felt humiliated, being in situations where we didn’t understand what men had said, and didn’t have the courage to ask what they meant. I don’t want to make other people ever feel this way.

carla and Nick: You’re really good at that! One of the things we were talking about this morning is the question of identity and a lot of the critiques of sad militancy that we have read really make identity into the problem quite a bit more than we would want to. We’re trying to think through how to speak to the power of identity and experience while also pointing to power of transformation and working across difference, and how the two of those aren’t antithetical in the way they’re sometimes set up, that they’re crucial for each other.

Federici: I think the critique of identity has taken on dimensions that are not always justified. What people often criticize as identity is actually the position that a person has had in the capitalist organization of work. For example, is being a housewife an identity? Yes, it’s an identity, but it is also a particular place in the capitalist organization of work, like being a miner, it’s also a particular form of exploitation. Identity is often used in a way that hides that exploitation. That’s when it becomes problematic.

Moreover, behind identity there’s also a history of struggle and resistance to exploitation. Identity can be a signpost for a whole history of struggle. When I say I am a feminist, for instance, I consciously connect myself to history of struggle that women have made. Identities can be mutable as well. “Woman,” for example, is not a fixed identity. The concept of woman has undergone a tremendous change over the last fifty years.

The problem has been the wedding of “identity” with the politics of rights, as when we speak of women’s rights, Indigenous peoples’ rights, as if each group were entitled to a packet of entitlements, but in isolation from each other, so that we lose sight of the commonalities and the possibility of a common struggle.

Nick and carla: That’s really helpful. Our last question is about hope. Spinoza himself is pretty wary of hope, but he sees it as quite future-oriented: to hope is also to fear, because you’re attached to a future object or outcome. More generally hope is often equated with a naïve optimism: it can become fixated on a certain outcome. But in one of your interviews,[vi] you talked about it as something that’s a lot more open-ended. It’s more the sense that we can do something. Do you think that hope is necessarily attached to a vision of the future?

Federici: Hope is positive if it is an active passion; but only if it does not replace the work necessary to make our action successful.

**

Silvia Federici is an Italian activist and author of many works, including Caliban and the Witch and Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle. She was co-founder of the International Feminist Collective and organizer with the Wages for Housework Campaign in the ‘70s. She was a member of the Midnight Notes Collective.

[1] Note: when we interviewed Silvia Federici, we were still using the phrase “sad militancy” in place of “rigid radicalism.” The original terminology is retained throughout.

[i] Jo Freeman, “Trashing: The Dark Side of Sisterhood,” JoFreeman.com, n.d., http://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/trashing.htm.

[ii] Marge Piercy, “The Grand Coolie Dam,” (Boston: New England Free Press, 1969).

[iii] See Jo Freeman, “The Tyranny of Structurelessness,” Ms. Magazine, July 1973.

[iv] Silvia Federici, “Putting Feminism Back on Its Feet,” Social Text 9/10 (1984), 338–46.

[v] See Raúl Zibechi, Dispersing Power: Social Movements as Anti-State Forces, trans. Ramor Ryan (Oakland: AK Press, 2010); Zibechi, Territories in Resistance.

[vi] Silvia Federici, “Losing the sense that we can do something is the worst thing that can happen,” interview by Candida Hadley, Halifax Media Co-op, November 5, 2013, http://halifax.mediacoop.ca/audio/losing-sense-we-can-do-something-worst-thing-can-h/19601.

Lead image of Silvia Federici by Luis Nieto Dickens

Reposted from Joyful Militancy

The post Feeling Powers Growing: An Interview with Silvia Federici appeared first on P2P Foundation.

During the past four decades, the Uruguayan Federation of Mutual-Aid Housing Cooperatives (FUCVAM) has been promoting workers’ autogestión (self- management), participatory democracy, and ayuda mutua (sweat equity; the direct contribution of work in the the building site by all cooperative members) as viable tools for the construction of high-quality dwellings. At the same time, FUCVAM has been a leading force in the resistance to authoritarianism and social exclusion.

Throughout its history, housing construction and political activism have been two highly intertwined components of the Uruguayan cooperative housing movement, as the active involvement of its members in the building process translates into a much broader social engagement.

FUCVAM understands housing as a commons. The houses built by the cooperatives are not privately owned. The cooperative members search for a suitable plot of land and take out a loan from the state together, and then, as a collective, they assume control of the whole building process and the management of the urban space once construction is completed, fostering internal solidarity, social empowerment and democratic innovations along the way.

This six-minute short documentary film presents the multifaceted elements of this movement through the eyes and words of three FUCVAM activists: Matías, Isabel and Gustavo. Belonging to different generations and representing diverse social and generational backgrounds, they collectively tell a history of struggle and triumph in the search for practical solutions to vital problems faced by workers and low-income communities around the world.

Daniel Chavez is a Uruguayan/Dutch social scientist and documentary photographer. He specialises in public policy and development issues, with special emphasis on public services provision and participatory democracy. He is a Fellow of the Transnational Institute (TNI). Daniel has authored and edited a number of books, published in several languages. He holds a BA in Social Anthropology from the University of the Republic (Montevideo, Uruguay) and a MA and a PhD in Development Studies from the International Institute of Social Studies (ISS) of Erasmus University-Rotterdam.

Republished with permission from the author.

The post Sweat Equity: How Uruguay’s housing coops provide solidarity and shelter to low-income families appeared first on P2P Foundation.

In much of Latin America, the state does not protect its citizens. This is particularly true for the popular sectors, indigenous peoples, people of colour and mestizos, who are exposed to the onslaught of drugs trafficking, criminal gangs, the private security guards of multinational corporations (MNCs) and, paradoxically, from state security forces, such as the police and the army.

There have been several massacres in Mexico, for instance – such as the killing of 43 students in Ayotzinapa in September 2014 – and they are no exception. There continues to be impunity for the 30,000 who have disappeared and 200,000 who have died since Mexico declared its ‘war on drugs’ in 2007. Slight differences aside, the current situation in Mexico is replicated across the region. In Brazil, 60,000 people meet a violent death every year, 70% of them of African descent, and mostly youths from poor areas.

Against this backdrop of violence that threatens the lives of the poorest, some of the most affected have created self-defence measures and counter-powers. Initially, these are defensive, but ultimately develop power structures in parallel to the state.

Since they are anchored in community practices, these self-defence groups are key to forming a form of power that differs from the hegemonic powers centred around state institutions. This essay examines them in more detail in order to understand this new trend in Latin American social movements.

The logics of the state and the community are opposed, since the former rests on its monopoly of the use of legitimate force within an established territory, and on its administration by means of a permanent, unelected, civil and military bureaucracy that reproduces and is answerable to itself. The bureaucracy brings stability to the state because it survives any change of government. Transformation from within is a very difficult, long-term process.

Latin American countries face an additional challenge: state bureaucracies are colonial creations, made up principally of white, male, educated elites in countries where the population is mostly indigenous, mestizo and black.

By contrast, the community logic is based on rotating tasks and functions among all of its members and whose highest authority is the assembly. In this sense, the assembly, as a space/time for decision-making, is a ‘common good’.

However, we cannot reduce ‘common good’ to the number of hectares of collective property, buildings, and authorities elected by an assembly that can be manipulated by caudillos or bureaucrats. We need to understand that there is the community as an institution and the community as social relations, a fundamental difference in dealing with questions of power.

In my analysis, the heart of the community is not common property, although it remains important, but collective or communal labour – minga, tequio, gauchada, guelaguetza – which should not be reduced to institutionalized forms of cooperation in traditional communities.

Collective labour underpins the commons, and is the true material base that produces and reproduces living communities, based on relations of reciprocity and mutual help rather than the hierarchical and individualized relations at the core of state institutions.

Collective labour underpins the commons, and is the true material base that produces and reproduces living communities, based on relations of reciprocity and mutual help rather than the hierarchical and individualized relations at the core of state institutions. The community lives not because of common property, but because of collective labour that is creative, and is re-created and affirmed in everyday life. This collective work is the means through which the comuneros and comuneras make a community, expressed in social relations that differ from the hegemonic ones.

In her sociological work, the Guatemalan Mayan, Gladys Tzul, argues that in a society based on common labour, there is no separation between the domestic environment, which organizes reproduction, and political society, which organizes public life. In reality, both feed and nurture one another. In the communities, the two spheres are complementary, embodied in communal government.

‘The communal indigenous government is the political organization that can guarantee the reproduction of life in communities. Communal labour is the fundamental basis underlying and producing those same communal government systems, and where the full participation of all men and women plays out.’

Collective labour is part of all community activities. It enables both the reproduction of material goods and the community as such, from the assembly and feasts to funerals and wakes, as well as alliances with other communities. Resistance struggles that ensure the reproduction of community life are also anchored in collective labour.

Emphasizing the multiple forms of collective labour allows us to see power and counter-power from a different perspective. First, collective labour is not an institution but social relations. Second, because they are social relations they can be produced by any collective subject in any space. As they are distinct from the community’s property relations and authorities, they can reappear wherever the subjects or movements engage in community-inspired practices.

Third, highlighting social relations enables us to examine fluctuations and changes in power relations and, in the case of social movements, the cycles of birth, maturity and decline that are inherent in the collective logic. Thus, we avoid making the mistake of ascribing power to institutions that are effectively cogs in the state machinery, such as the case, for example, of the communal councils in Venezuela.

The Venezuelan communal councils depend on state funding and speak the language of bureaucracy; they form part of the organizational structure of the state and help to secure it rather than transcending it. Over time, they have become increasingly homogeneous and lost their independence. Although there is a strong egalitarian culture in the popular neighbourhoods in Venezuela, of horizontality and the absence of hierarchy, the contradiction between the base and the leadership has been resolved through directives that have set limits to and controlled egalitarian spaces.

An important barrier to emancipation is that, to a greater or lesser degree, every culture has features of a hierarchical culture which feed on patriarchal and machista relations. This is equally true of indigenous and Afro-descendant communities, where caudillismo, personalism and paternalism are reproduced almost ‘naturally’. I therefore believe to put the emphasis on how social linkages are expressed in ‘collective labours’ more broadly, from assembly to feast. It is in this form of life and creative work that it becomes possible to modify cultures and ways of doing things, rather than within institutions whose inertia reproduces oppression.

Counter-power is, in fact, collective work that rural and urban communities establish to defend themselves from superior powers that jeopardize their survival. Below I list some examples of experiences where popular collectives or communities have exercised anti-state powers.

In cities, like Cherán and Mexico D.F., counter-powers are enmeshed in territorialized social movements that control and defend common spaces. They show that there are many similarities between what happens in a rural indigenous community and in a popular peri-urban area. In both cases, their collective life is challenged by extraction and capitalist accumulation through dispossession: in rural areas hydroelectric dams and open-pit mining in rural areas, and in the cities by real-estate speculation and gentrification.

The colourful mobilization of the Nasa people in the Colombian Cauca mountain region features a cordon of guards, both leading and flanking the mass of comuneros and comuneras to protect them. They are disciplined and ‘armed’ with their wooden sticks marked with ancestral symbols. The Indigenous Guard, the Guardia Indígena, says that its aim is to protect and defend the communities, as well as to be a body for education and political training.

Every year there is a graduation ceremony for hundreds of guards in the North Cauca. Men, women and young people from 12 to 50 years of age participate in the Escuela de Formación Política y Organizativa (School for Political and Organizational Training), and receive instruction in human rights and ‘indigenous law’ that they must apply in performing their duties. The graduation is a deeply mystical act that takes place in a harmonization centre, guided by wise community elders alongside university professors and human rights defenders.

Children, young people, adults and seniors begin the second day of the sixth meeting of indigenous guards with a tribute from the student body of the Yanacona Farming Institution to the visitors of the Nasa people.

The structure of the Indigenous Guard is simple and shows its true purpose: each vereda or community chooses ten guards and a coordinator. A second coordinator is then chosen for each resguardo or indigenous territory, and a third for the entire region. The North Cauca region has 3,500 Indigenous Guards, corresponding to the 18 cabildos or authorities elected by the resguardos.

‘We are not a police force at all, we build organization, we provide protection to the community and defend life without getting involved in the war’, explains one of the coordinators. Participation is voluntary and unpaid, and the authorities and neighbours in each community help with the upkeep of the family plot of each guard and sometimes carry out sowing and harvest mingas (collective work).

Guards are evaluated annually, with members either continued or replaced as the organizational model is based on rotating among all its members. Community justice – the main task of the Indigenous Guard – seeks to restore internal balance and harmony, based on the Nasa cosmovision and culture, as opposed to state justice that separates and locks away convicted criminals.

The Guard defends its territory from the military, paramilitaries and guerrilla forces that have murdered and kidnapped hundreds of comuneros since the war began. In recent years, they have also protected their territory from the multinational mining companies that pollute and displace populations.

As well as training and organising the communities, the guards encourage food sovereignty, and promote community plots and gatherings to reflect on derecho propio, as community justice is known. Every six months, they take part in harmonization rituals, guided by traditional healers, as a form of collective and individual ‘cleansing’.

The Indigenous Guards are characterized by peaceful resistance. On several occasions, hundreds of them have convened, responding to the traditional whistle, to rescue someone kidnapped by the narco-paramilitary or the guerrilla forces. The sheer number of disciplined and determined guards free victims without recourse to violence. At times, they have also faced down the armed forces.

In 2004, the Indigenous Guard received the National Peace Prize, awarded every year by a group of institutions, including the UN and the Friedrich Ebert Foundation. The Guard has become a point of reference for other peoples, such as Afro-descendants, peasants and the popular sectors that suffer state or non-state violence.

Self-defence and social movements

Nasa’s Indigenous Guard is not an exception, as many Latin American movements have established forms of self-defence to protect their communities and territories. The advance of extractive industries in recent years, whether mining companies, monocultures or infrastructure, is being met with popular resistance everywhere, sometimes taking the form of community-based territorial control.

To explore the forms self-defence takes and their relation to counter-powers, I will briefly describe four cases in addition to the Indigenous Guard: the Rondas Campesinas in Peru, the Community Police in the Mexican state of Guerrero and the Cherán fogatas in the state of Michoacán, and the Acapatzingo Housing Community Brigades in Mexico City.

Rondas Campesinas, Peru

In the 1970s, the state in practical terms did not exist in remote rural areas of Peru, which left peasants exposed to cattle rustlers. These were very poor and fragile cattle communities in the highlands, and any theft posed serious threats to their subsistence economy.

The communities therefore formed an assembly and decided to establish night watches or Rondas Campesinas to guard against cattle rustlers and protect the communities. At first they organised night watches by rotating responsibility among everyone in the community, but then they started carrying out public works, such building roads and schools. Later on, they even started to impart justice, acting like local authorities.

The Rondas came back to life in Cajamarca in northern Peru, against the Conga gold-mining project. They sought to protect the water sources, on which family agriculture depends, from the pollution caused by the mine. They call themselves Guardianes de las Lagunas (Guardians of the Lagoons), and camp at an altitude of 4,000 m. in barren and almost uninhabited terrain, to watch over, witness and resist the presence of the multinationals.

Guerrero Community Police, Mexico

The Regional Coordination of Community Authorities–Community Police (Coordinadora Regional de Autoridades Comunitarias-Policía Comunitaria, CRAC-PC) was born in 1995, when indigenous communities sought to protect themselves from rising criminality. Twenty-eight communities were part of the initial effort, and managed to reduce delinquency by 90–95% https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cJm0XiJo6lk.

Initially, they would hand over the offenders to the Public Prosecutor. But, after seeing them back on the streets after a few hours, in 1998 a regional assembly decided to create the Houses of Justice (Casas de Justicia). The accused can be defended in their own language, without the need for lawyers or the imposition of fines, since the aim of community justice is to ‘re-educate’ those found guilty. During the trial, the main goal is to reach an agreement between the parties, involving family members and communal authorities.

This ‘re-education’ is carried out mainly through community work rather than punitive justice, because the goal is the transformation of the person under community supervision and monitoring. The highest authority of the CRAC-PC is the open assembly in the towns that have Community Police. The assemblies ‘appoint their coordinators and commanders, and can relieve them from their post if they are accused of failing to fulfil their duties.

Also, decisions are made related to justice in difficult and sensitive cases, or if it is important business that involves the organization’. The CRAC-PC has never generated a vertical, centralized chain of command, showing that community authorities function as different kinds of powers than state authorities.

After 2011, Community Police spread throughout the state of Guerrero and the country as a whole, partly due to the growing levels of state and narco-trafficking violence, and the de-legitimation of the state apparatus. In 2013, self-defence groups emerged in 46 of the 81 municipalities in Guerrero, involving some 20,000 armed citizens.

There are considerable differences between community police and self-defence groups. The latter are citizens who spontaneously take up arms to defend themselves from criminal activities, whose members are often neither appointed nor fully accountable to the community and where regulations or basic principles are minimal. Their rapid expansion came about because of the growth of indigenous self-defencein the wake of the 1994 Zapatista uprising. This was recognized in the Ostula Manifesto of 2009, approved by indigenous peoples and communities in nine Mexican states during the 25th Assembly of the National Indigenous Congress (Congreso Nacional Indígena, CNI), that established the right to self-defence.

Cheran fogatas, Mexico

Cherán is a city with a population of 15,000 in the Mexican state of Michoacán, most of whom are indigenous purépecha. On 15 April 2011, the population rose up against talamontes, loggers, in defence of the common use of the forests, their community life and to ensure their safety from the organized crime and the political powers that protect it.

Since then, the population has set up a system of self-government through 179 braziers or community fires, the beating heart of indigenous counter-power, located in the city’s four neighbourhoods https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dql9_kKBwws.

Based on their usos y costumbres (customs and traditions), the population elects a High Council, the highest municipal authority, which is also recognized by state institutions. There are no more elections by parties, but rather via assemblies that choose their authorities. The braziers are an extension of the communal kitchens among the barricades; a space for neighbourhood gatherings, exchange and discussion, where ‘children, youth, women, men and the elderly, are actively included and where all decisions are made’.

Communal power in Cherán is best depicted as a set of concentric circles. On the outside are the four neighbourhoods, in the centre of which is the Community Assembly backed by the High Council of Communal Government, which includes three representatives from each neighbourhood. Then, there is the Operational Council and the Communal Treasury, which form the first circle around the centre/the assembly. Around it, there are six other councils: administration, communal goods, social, economic and cultural programmes, justice, civil issues, and the neighbourhood coordination council.

As they say in Cherán, this is a government structure that is circular, horizontal and articulated.

Acapatzingo, Mexico

The Housing Community of Acapatzingo includes 600 families in the south of Mexico City, with a population of 23 million. It belongs to the Organización Popular Francisco Villa de la Izquierda Independiente (Popular Movement Francisco Villa of the Independent Left). It is the most consolidated popular neighbourhood in urban Mexico, based on the criteria of autonomy and self-organization.

Brigades, in which 25 families are represented, form the basis of the self-organization. Each brigade appoints representatives to committees, generally four: press, culture, public order and upkeep. Participants rotate and they appoint representatives to the General Council for the settlement, where representatives from all brigades convene.

The brigade intervenes whenever there is conflict, even in family matters. Depending on the gravity of the issue, intervention can be requested from the public order committee and even the general council. Each brigade takes turns in protecting the area once a month. The brigade’s security does not follow the traditional understanding of control, because it is based on self-protection by the community and has as its main function the education of the residents.

The public order committee also has a role in determining the community’s boundaries, deciding who can enter and who cannot. This is a central aspect of autonomy, perhaps the most important. When there is violence in the home, the children go out into the street sounding their whistle, a device also used if there is an emergency. The atmosphere in the community is so peaceful that it is common to see children playing alone in absolute calm, in a safe space, protected by the community – something unthinkable in the otherwise violent Mexico City.

From Global South to Global North

This essay has focused on Latin America, although the experiences are not exclusive to the Global South. In the aftermath of the 2008 crisis, there has been similar territorialization of resistance and collective projects, particularly in Greece, Italy and Spain.

Azienda Mondeggi, for example, close to Florence in Italy, has been taken over by scores of young people, whose produce includes wine, olive oil and honey. They live in collectives and have managed to recover several hectares as ‘common goods’. Another notable collective territory experience is the resistance to the high-speed train in northern Italy, the No-TAV movement in the Susa Valley. In the Spanish city of Vitoria, the youth of popular movements have recovered an entire neighbourhood, Errekaleor, that they defend from real-estate speculation.

In the three European countries, there are also scores of recovered factories, hundreds of social and cultural centres and, in Spanish cities like Salamanca or Valencia, semi-urban farms where unemployed women and men work to provide a minimum income and some food for themselves. As cities in the Global North are increasingly reshaped through real-estate speculation, young men and women with low-paid jobs have begun to open spaces, from city plots to cultural collectives and alternative communication, as a means to maintain solidarity and camaraderie in their social relations.

Power, counter-power and non-state power

As a general rule, social movements are counter-powers that seek to bring balance or present a counterweight to the large global powers, such as MNCs and the states that work with them. Often, these counter-powers act in a way that imitates state power, with similar hierarchies even if they are made up of individuals from different social sectors, ethnicities and skin colours, genders and generations.

Counter-power is usually defined as seeking to displace hegemonic power, but is often constituted in a similar manner to state power as we know and endure it, at least in western societies. This is not to enter the theoretical debate about power, counter-power or anti-power, as argued by Toni Negri and John Holloway respectively.

However, I believe that the main problem is that these arguments ignore the Latin American reality, where families, rather than individuals, participate in social movements. (When you go to an indigenous community, a landless farmer settlement, or a camp of homeless and jobless, you will always be told ‘we are so many families’). This takes us back to the community, not an essentialist understanding of the community as an institution, but rather one based on strong, direct, face-to-face relationships among people whose daily life is closely intertwined.

The proposals of the left for ‘counter-power’ are always marked by an underlying temptation to become a new power, constructed in the image of the state. The historical example would be the Russian soviets or the Committees for the Defence of the Revolution (CDR) in Cuba, which gradually became a cog in the state apparatus, subordinated to the state and institutionalized.

In the reality of communities that resist, constructed power comes from an entirely different source than those that dominate the great revolutions or within social movements

There is a need to discuss concrete experiences because, in the reality of communities that resist, constructed power (whether a form of self-defence or ways to exercise power) comes from an entirely different source than those that dominate the great revolutions or within social movements. In hegemonic political culture, the image of the pyramid inspired by the state and the Catholic church is constantly reproduced in political parties and unions, with amazing regularity. Controlling power happens at the apex of the pyramid, and all political action channels collective energy in that direction.

There are, however, distinct traditions in which communities channel all their energy into avoiding having powerful leaders, and that reject state-types of power, as French anthropologist Pierre Clastres’s work has shown. A community is certainly a form of power that includes power relations, but its character differs from that of state power. Elders’ councils or appointed and rotating positions are transparent powers, under constant collective control. This means they are not autonomous forms of power; they cannot exercise power over the community, which is a characteristic of the state with its non-electable community, separated from society and standing above it.

In discussing such types of power, we need to differentiate them from other forms of exercising power – which is why I refer to them as non-state-powers. Perhaps the best-known cases are the Juntas de Buen Gobierno (Councils of Good Government) in the five Zapatista regions or caracoles. Women and men are equally represented in the councils and are elected from among hundreds of members in the autonomous municipalities. The entire government team – up to 24 people in some caracoles –changes each week.

This rotating system, as the Zapatista community members explain, gradually enables everyone to learn how to govern. The rotation is carried out at the three levels of Zapatista self-government: within each community by those who live there, within each autonomous municipality through delegates who are elected, rotated and whose mandate can be revoked, and within each region at the level of the Council of Good Government. More than 1,000 communities, 29 autonomous municipalities and some 300,000 people are governed through this system.

Two things are worth noting on the experience of the Zapatista Juntas de Buen Gobierno. First, this is the only case in Latin America where autonomy and self-government are expressed at three different levels with the same logic of assembly and rotation as in the community. Of the 570 municipalities in the state of Oaxaca, 417 are governed by an internal democratic system, known as ‘usos y costumbres’, or customs and traditions, by which Oaxacans can elect their authorities in a traditional manner, through an assembly and without political parties. But even this extensive case of self-government only got as far as the municipal level.

The second characteristic of the Zapatista autonomy is that it does not create bureaucracies, because the rotation system disperses them, avoiding the formation of a separate, specialized body. Something similar happens in Cherán, among the Guardia Indígena en Colombia and the Guardianes de las Lagunas in Peru. In the Colombian case, the cabildos govern a territory or resguardo, similar to the Zapatista regions.

Nevertheless, state involvement through education and health projects, and, especially through state funding of the cabildos, has led them to become more bureaucratic, although there are counter-trends such as the Guardia Indígena, the heart of power for the Nasa people.

The importance of these non-state-powers, among which I include the different forms of self-defence mentioned above, stems from the double and complex dynamic at play in social movements throughout Latin America. On the one hand, they interact with the state and its institutions, as all other movements throughout history have done. This is a complex and changing relation that depends on each country and political reality. They resist the state and the large companies; they make demands, negotiate and often get their demands met. This is typical of unions and most other movements.

On the other hand, these movements are also creating their own spaces and territories, whether by recuperating lands that had been expropriated from them, or occupying idle land in private hands or official institutions, in the most diverse rural and urban areas. The second type of action is more recent and has gained strength in the last few decades, especially in Latin America.

Around 70% of Latin American cities, for example, have effectively been ‘seized’ as rural migrants set up their homes, neighbourhoods and social infrastructure such as schools and health and sports centres. Many of these illegally occupied spaces are legalized by the very institutions that offer them public services. Many others, however, are repressed. Many are made up  members with different goals, such as creating different ways of living, or ‘other worlds’ as the Zapatistas put it. They become ‘territories of resistance’ that may even move towards ‘territories of emancipation’, in which women and youth play a large role.

It’s clear that the economic system pushes millions to create their own spaces and territories in order to survive, because they have no housing or work, or are marginalized for whatever reason. In those spaces, people will seek to achieve the health and education that the system denies them, whether because the services are of poor quality, or because they are far away and difficult to access. In the 5,000 MST rural settlements in Brazil, for instance, there are 1,500 schools with teachers from those communities and trained in state teacher schools.

All these experiences need to be defended. They are not exceptional. One such experience emerged towards the end of last year in the Brazilian city of São Bernardo do Campo in São Paulo where 8,000 families or about 30,000 people have been camping in an urban area. This is the Pueblo Sin Miedo settlement, supported by the MST.

They need water, food and sanitation services every single day. But they also need to defend the space (several neighbours have tried to shoot them), they need to create forms of decision-making and of problem-solving for everyday issues. They have established internal regulations to guarantee safety and teamwork. So, they have created an internal coordination system, to elect their members and support them every day for months at a time.

This is the seed of counter-power or of non-state power. There is no fixed path. Each concrete experience must take whatever path it can, or the path its members choose.

The post People in defence of life and territory: Counter-power and self-defence in Latin America appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Franck Gaudichaud: Following their participation in the international symposium that we coordinated last June on “Progressive governments and post-neoliberalism in Latin America: End of a golden age?” at the University of Grenoble, France,[1] we thought it would be worthwhile going back over the Latin American context with the sociologists Edgardo Lander (Venezuela) and Miriam Lang (Ecuador). Both of them have a sharp critical view, very often at odds concerning the present scene, and both have participated actively in recent years in the debates on the initial balance sheets of the progressive governments of 1998-2015, in particular those of the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation in Miriam’s case[2] and of the Transnational Institute in Edgardo’s case.[3]

For example, they have written probingly on such topics as the problematics of development and the state, neocolonialism and extractivism, the lefts and the social movements, and both have tackled the difficult issue of conceiving roads of emancipation at times in which humanity is going through a profound ecosystemic crisis of civilization, challenges that mean, inter alia, re-inventing the left and (eco)socialism in the 21^st century. — FG

Franck Gaudichaud: In the recent period there have been many debates concerning the end of a cycle of progressive and national-popular governments in Latin America, or rather their possible retreat and loss of political hegemony. What are your thoughts about this debate? From where you stand, can we say that this debate is going beyond the question of an end to a cycle? And what can we say about the present situation compared with the progressive experience from 1999 to 2015?

Edgardo Lander: This is indeed a very intense debate, especially in Latin America, because there had been many expectations about the possibilities for profound transformation in these societies beginning with the victory of Hugo Chávez in Venezuela in 1998. That was the point of departure of a process of political change that led to the majority of the governments in South America being identified with something referred to as progressive or left-wing in one of their versions. These expectations of transformations that will lead to post-capitalist societies posed severe challenges both in terms of the negative experience of the socialisms of the last century and in terms of new realities like climate change and the limits of the planet Earth that it was necessary to confront. To think about transformation today necessarily means something very different from what it meant in the past century. At a time when the discourse of socialism had practically disappeared from the political grammar in much of the world, it reappears in this new historical moment in South America. Based especially on the struggles of the indigenous peoples, some of these processes seem to incorporate in a very central way a profound questioning of fundamental aspects of what had constituted socialism in the 20^th century. Centrally present in part of the imaginaries of the transformation were themes like pluriculturalism, different forms of relationship with the other networks of life, notions of the rights of nature, and conceptions of buen vivir that pointed to a possibility of transformation that could take into account the limitations of the previous processes and open new horizons to address the new conditions of humanity and the planet.

FG: So, we’re talking about the initial period, the beginning, in the early 2000s, when resistance from below was combined with the creation of socio-political dynamics more or less rupturist and post-neoliberal depending on the case, which also happened to emerge on the national electoral and governmental plane.

EL: Yes, in a period in which extraordinary hopes were developing that radical transformations were beginning in society. In the cases of Ecuador and Bolivia, the new governments were a result of the processes of accumulation of forces of social movements and organizations fighting neoliberal governments. The experience of the Indigenous Uprising in Ecuador and the Water War in Bolivia were expressions of societies in movement in which social sectors that were not the most typical in the political action of the left played protagonistic roles. It was a plebeian emergence, social sectors previously invisibilized, indigenous, peasants, urban popular forces, that came to occupy a central place in the political arena. This gave rise to extraordinary expectations.

However, over time severe obstacles appeared. Despite the high-flown rhetoric, important sectors of the left that had leading roles in those processes of struggle had not submitted the experience of 20^th century socialism to sufficiently critical thinking. Many of the old ways of understanding leadership, party, vanguard, relations between state and society, economic development, relations with the rest of nature, as well as the weight of the Eurocentric monocultural and patriarchal cosmovisions were present in those processes of change. The historic colonial forms of insertion in the international division of labour and nature were deepened. Obviously, any project that aims at overcoming capitalism in the present world must necessarily deal with the harsh challenges posed by the profound crisis of civilization now facing humanity, in particular the hegemonic logic of endless growth of modernity that has come to overload the planet’s capacity and is undermining the conditions that make possible the reproduction of life.

The experience of the so-called progressive governments is occurring in times in which neoliberal globalization is accelerating, and China is becoming the workshop of the world and the major economy on the planet. That produces a qualitative leap in the demand for and price of commodities: energy resources, minerals and products of agro-industry such as soy. In these conditions, each of the progressive governments has opted to finance the promised social transformations via the deepening of predatory extractivism. This has not only the obvious implications that the productive structurerof these countries is not questioned but also that it is deepened in terms of the neocolonial forms of insertion in the international division of labour and nature. Also, the role of the state is increased as the major recipient of income from the rents produced through the export of commodities. Thus, over and above what the constitutional texts say about plurinationality and interculturalism, there is an overriding conception of the transformation centered primarily on the state and the identification of the state with the common good. This inevitably leads to conflicts over territories, indigenous and peasant rights, struggles for the defence of and acess to water, and resistance to megamining. These popular and territorial struggles have been viewed by these governments as threats to the national project presented, designed and led by the state as representing the national interest. To carry forward their neo-developmentalist projects in the face of this resistance governments have resorted to repression and are taking on increasingly authoritarian tendencies. Defining from the centre which are the priorities, and viewing anything that stands in the way of this priority as a threat, there is established a logic of raison d’état that requires the undermining of the resistance.

In the case of Bolivia and Ecuador this has led to a certain demobilization of the major social organizations as well as divisions promoted by the government in the movements, which has resulted in fragmentations of their social fabric and weakened the democratic transformative energy that characterized them.

FG: In contrast to this analysis, and particularly to what you say about raison d’état, militants and intellectuals participating in those processes as part of the governments and members of pro-government parties argue that in the last analysis the only way to pursue an authentic post-neoliberal course in Latin America was, first, to recover the state through the social and plebeian mobilizations that overthrew the old party-based elites, and after overwhelming anti-oligarchic electoral victories begin using the state (but with links to those below) to distribute and reconstitute the possibility of a “real” alternative to neoliberalism.

Miriam Lang: Before getting into that, I would like to go over again what Edgardo said, because the term “end of cycle” suggests somewhat that we are looking at the whole region in light of the Argentine and Brazilian experience where the Right has indeed come back. However, a more appropriate reading would be to look at how the project of transformation has changed during the years of progressive governments and why now we are in all respects in a different situation than we were 10 or 15 years ago, including in those countries where there are still progressives in the government, as in Bolivia or Ecuador. I am referring to what some call the transformation of the transformations and also the diversity of political tendencies that make up those governments, in which the transformative lefts are not in fact necessarily hegemonic but where the processes have become successful projects of modernization of capitalist relations and insertion in the global market.

FG: After all, you both have a clear critical position on the international division of labour, commodities, the use of extractivism, the problem of the state (often authoritarian and clientelist even today), phenomena that have certainly not disappeared and have even been consolidated in various ways under the progressive governments. But you do not mention here the balsas familia [family allowances], the big reduction in poverty and inequality, the incorporation of subaltern social classes into politics, the reconstruction of basic service systems, of public health, the spectacular growth of infrastructures, etc. during the decade-long golden age of the progressive governments. In short, if I can act as a spokesman for the logic of García Linera, the Bolivian vice-president, you would be those “coffee-shop critics” that he denounces[4] as not having a genuine empathy toward the popular sectors and their day-to-day living conditions. That is, to say the least, a classic argument of the progressive government supporters in their present debate with the critical left.

ML: Well, it depends somewhat on how each of us looks at the reality. If you look, for example, at the new constitutions of Bolivia and Ecuador, the transformation project delineated therein goes much further than the reduction of poverty. The previous social struggles, whatever they sought, went much further than a small distribution of income. In saying that I do not want to ignore the fact that the day-to-day life of many people has become easier, at least in those years of high prices for hydrocarbons. But we also have to look beyond the poverty statistics. We can say that so many people have risen above the poverty line, and that’s great, but we can also take a closer look and ask what type of poverty are we talking about? In Latin America poverty is still measured in terms of incomes and consumption; this measures to what degree a household is participating in the capitalist way of life and possibly it says a little about the quality of life of that household. What it does not reveal is the dimensions of the subsistence economies, the dimensions of the quality of human relations, etc. To what degree were people able to really express their needs according to their context? To what degree have these policies of redistribution of income strengthened or expanded territorially the logics of the capitalist market in countries where a large part of the population, because of the enormous cultural diversity that exists, still did not live completely under capitalist precepts?

We could say that this diversity of ways of life constituted a significant transformative potential in terms of horizons for overcoming capitalism. And if we look at the ecological conditions of the planet, many peasant, indigenous, Black or popular urban communities, instead of being labelled as poor or underdeveloped, could have been viewed as examples of how we can consume less and be more satisfied. However, what has happened is precisely what I call the “mechanism of underdevelopment”;[5] in the context of “ending poverty” they are told: your way of life, which requires so little money, is undignified, you have to become more like the urban, capitalist, consumerist population that has to manage money, and the form of exchange in the capitalist market, no other forms of exchange are valid. So-called financial literacy, which was part of the progressive anti-poverty policy, has helped financial capital to establish new credit markets among the poorest people and at much higher interest rates. And the famous introduction to consumption tends to occur in third-rate conditions. So in the end, we have populations that are indebted through consumption because needs have been generated for them that they may not have had in the past. So it depends a little on how we look at these things. It’s a problem of values and perspective, of how we want future generations to live. It’s not simply a question of democratizing consumption; the commitment was to build a world that is sustainable for at least five, six, seven generations to come, and I have serious doubts as to whether this form of erradicating poverty has contributed to those objectives.

EL: In the Venezuelan case, the use of the petroleum rent in a form that differed from how it had been used historically had huge consequences during the first decade of the Chávez government. Social spending came to represent something like 70 percent of the national budget. This public expenditure on health, education, food, housing and social security effectively signified a profound transformation in the living conditions of a majority of the population. Venezuela, which like the rest of Latin America has historically been a country of deep inequalities, not only reduced poverty levels quite significantly (measured by monetary income), but it also managed to sharply reduce inequality. The CEPAL [Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean, ECLA, a UN regional commission] has pointed out that Venezuela came to be, along with Uruguay, one of the two least unequal countries on the continent. This was a very major transformation, and it was expressed in such vital matters as a reduction in infant mortality and an increase in the weight and height of children. These are not in any way secondary issues.

On the other hand, this was accompanied from the political standpoint by processes of very broadly based popular organization in which millions of people participated. Some of the most important social policies were designed in such a way that they required the organization of the people in order to function. The best example of this was the Barrio Adentro Mission, a primary healthcare service providing broad coverage to the popular sectors throughout the country, and made possible principally by the participation of Cuban doctors. It was a program that held out the possibility of other forms of understanding public policies in a non-clientelist way that required the participation of the people.

With Barrio Adentro, important steps were begun to transform the country’s healthcare system. It went from a medical system that was fundamentally hospital-based to a decentralized regime with primary services located in the local communities. From a situation in which, for example, a child who was dehydrated in a Caracas neighborhood in the middle of the night had to be transferred, outside the public transit schedule, to the nearest hospital, where the family had to deal with the tragic scenes in the emergency wards, to a situation in which the primary care module, where the physician lives, is a short distance from the child’s home and at any time one can knock on the door and be attended to.

Barrio Adentro was conceived as a project that required community participation in order to function. The doctor, alone, especially if he or she was a Cuban who did not know the neighborhood or the city, could only work with support from the community. This meant, among other things, conducting a census of the community, identifying the women who were pregnant, the children with problems of undernourishment, the elderly, and in general the people with special needs. This was a conception of social policy completely different from some gift from above because it made the community a co-participant in its operation. There was in this dynamic an extraordinarily rich potentiality.

FG: So, has this constituent potentiality, disruptive of the process, been exhausted? Is that what you are saying?

EL: During the years covered by the Bolivarian process not only has the country’s productive structure not been altered but the country has become more highly dependent on petroleum exports. The public policies directed to the popular sectors have been characterized at all times by their distributive character, with a very limited drive toward alternative productive processes to petroleum extractivism. This dependency on high petroleum revenues imposed severe limits on the Bolivarian process.[6]

The dynamic, motivating nature of the popular organizational processes of the public policies was exhausted for various reasons. First, because not all of the Missions (the generic name for the various social programs) were given the resources they had in such areas as the literacy program and Barrio Adentro. But also because the larger-scale organizational processes including the Communal Councils and Communes were processes in which there was always a strong tension between the tendencies toward self-government, autonomy, self-organization, etc., and the fact that almost all the projects that these organizations could carry out depended on transfers of resources from above, from some state institution. This has generated a recurrent tension between the political-financial control from above and the possibilities for more autonomous self-organization. These tensions have operated in quite varied ways, depending on the existing conditions in the location: whether or not local leaderships were present previously; whether or not the community had had experiences in organizing themselves politically prior to the Bolivarian process; and the political conceptions of the functionaries and militants of the PSUV (Partido Socialista Unido de Venezuela) responsible for relations between the state institutions and these organizations.

The fact is that there has been an extraordinary dependence on the transfer of resources from the state. Most of the popular base organizations had no possibility of autonomy because they lacked their own productive capacity. When the transfers of resources to these organizations declined with the onset of the present economic crisis in 2014, they tended to weaken and many of them went into crisis. Another factor in this weakening has been the creation of the Comités Locales de Abastecimiento y Producción (CLAP) as a mechanism for the distribution of highly subsidized basic food products to the popular neighorhoods. In practice, these have become clientelist organizational methods dedicated exclusively to the distribution of food and lacking any autonomy, and they tend to replace the Communal Councils.

The policies of Latin American solidarity and cooperation have also been highly dependent on petroleum revenues. To carry out international programs like the subsidized provision of oil to Central American and Caribbean countries, or the financial support to Bolivia and Nicaragua, and various other initiatives taken by the Venezuelan government in the Latin American context, it was necessary to guarantee an increase in oil revenues in both the short and medium term. When Chávez passed away in 2013, petroleum accounted for 96 percent of the total value of the exports, and the country was more dependent on oil than it had ever been.

In the history of the Venezuelan oil industry, the first decade of this century was the moment in which there were the best conditions possible for Venezuelan society to debate, think about, and begin to experiment with other practices and other possible futures beyond petroleum. It was a privileged moment for addressing the challenges of the transition toward a post-petroleum society, a conjuncture in which Chávez counted on an extraordinary leadership and legitimacy. He had the ability to give Venezuelan society a sense of direction, and, with oil prices as high as US$140 a barrel, the resources existed to meet the needs of the population and take, albeit initially, steps to a post-petroleum transition. But the opposite occurred. In those years there was a repetition of the intoxication with affluence, the imaginary of the Saudi Venezuela that had characterized the time of the first Carlos Andrés Pérez government in the 1970s.

No one in Venezuela thought it was possible to decree the shutdown of all the oil wells overnight. But government policies, far from taking steps, even timid and initial steps, to overcome dependency on oil, served to deepen that dependency. In conditions of an over-abundance of foreign exchange, with an end to any attempt to slow down capital flight, an absolutely unsustainable controlled exchange rate parity was established. This had the effect of accentuating the so-called Dutch disease, contributing to the dismantling of the country’s productive capacity.

The income distribution programs and the state political initiatives did improve the living conditions of the population and they helped to strengthen the social fabric, with plenty of experiences of popular participation. However, this was not accompanied by a project of transformation of the country’s productive structure. This marked the limits of the Bolivarian process as a project of transformation of Venezuelan society. It means that the broadly-based organizing processes that had involved millions of people were based on redistribution and not on the creation of new productive processes.

FG: Now, again referring to García Linera (as he sometimes summarizes more intelligently what other opinion-makers, followers, and what I call palace intellectuals are trying to say and write along these lines) – according to this Bolivian sociologist and government leader these tensions between state and self-organization, between government and movements, between the demand for buen vivir and extractivism, in the short term, are normal creative tensions in a long process of revolutionary transformation in Latin America. In his view, the radical left critics of the progressive processes do not understand that they are necessary tensions, and he alleges that they want to proclaim socialism by decree.

ML: One problem is that the progressive governments, to the degree that their members came from social movement processes and protests with a left-wing political identity, have taken on a sort of vanguard identity, as if they know what people need. So spaces for real dialogue and partnership with people of a diverse nature have been lost. And political participation has become a type of applause for whatever project the government leaders are proposing. That’s exactly where there is an impoverishment. There are many examples in European history that incline me to think this is an inevitable dynamic, one that we underestimate a lot. The lefts that come to lead in the state apparatus end up immersed in powerful dynamic characteristic of those apparatuses and they are transformed as persons, through the new spaces in which they move, because the logics of their responsibilities provide them with other experiences and begin to shape their political horizons as well as their culture. Their subjectivity is transformed, they embody the exercise of power. And then, if there is no corrective on the part of a strong organized society, that can complain, correct, protest, and criticize, that necessarily has to divert the project.

On the other hand, it is not so much a question of criticizing the time it takes to change things – because in this, I agree, profound transformations need much time, they need a cultural change and this can take generations. It’s a question of looking at the directionality that a political project takes, that is, whether it is going in the right direction or not, at its rhythm. And here I think the question of deepening extractivism and finishing off nature in a country simply cancels out other possibilities of future transformation. If we are closing off certain future options that mattered to us through more short-term calculations, or because of difficulties that occur at the time, then we cannot say it is a question of a temporary nature; it is a question of directionality. You can commercialize or decommercialize, but if you say first I am going to commercialize everything and later decommercialize, it doesn’t seem to me there is much logic. If you say I am decommercializing but I am going to take more time, however here they can see that I am taking steps in the direction indicated, that would be fine. So that way, I think there is a fundamental difference in the reading of the processes.

EL: In the critical debates on extractivism, one of the things I think is essential is, What do we mean by extractivism? If we think of extractivism simply as an economic model, or as Álvaro García Linera says as “a technical relation with nature” that is compatible with any model of society, it could be concluded that it is necessary to deepen extractivism not only in order to meet social demands but also for the purpose of accumulating the necessary resources to invest in alternative productive activities that can help to overcome extractivism. But if extractivism is undertood in broader terms, if it is understood as a relationship of human beings with nature, that it is part of a pattern of accumulation of global capital, a specific form of insertion in the world capitalist system and the international division of labour and nature, and that extractivism generates and reproduces some definite institutionalities, some state models, some behavioural patterns of the state bureaucracy; and if it is understood that extractivism generates social subjects and subjectivities, that it builds a culture, you necessarily reach different conclusions.

Suffice it to look at the hundred years of extractivism in Venezuela. We have established an extremely deep culture as a rich country, an affluent country. Since we have the biggest petroleum reserves on the planet we deserve to have the state satisfy not only our needs but also our aspirations as consumers. We imagine that it is possible to be a society with rights but not responsibilities. We deserve to have free gasoline. These cultural patterns, once they are firmly rooted in the collective imagination, constitute a severe obstacle to a possible transformation not only to overcome capitalism but to confront the crisis of civilization that humanity is now going through. These imagineries of ever-growing material abundance serve to sustain economist/consumerist conceptions of life that leave out a wide range of fundamental matters that we have to confront today. This blocks the possibility of recognizing that the decisions that are taken today have long-term consequences that differ absolutely from what is proclaimed in the official discourse as the future horizon for Venezuelan society.

Based on this gilded imaginery of a land of infinite abundance, large-scale mining in the so-called Arco Minero del Orinoco, for example, is deemed necessary. Through a presidential decree Nicolás Maduro in early 2016 decided to open up 112 thousand square kilometers, a territory the size of Cuba, 12 percent of the national territory, to the major transnational mining companies. This is an area that forms part of the Amazon forest (with the importance this has in the regulation of global climate systems); an area inhabited by various indigenous peoples whose territories were to be demarcated under the 1999 Constitution and whose culture, and their life, is now severely threatened; a territory in which a major portion of the basins of the principal rivers in the country, the principal sources of fresh water, a territory of extraordinary biological diversity, and in which hydro-electricity dams that produce 70 percent of the country’s electricity are located. All of this is threatened in an opening that has been initiated by a call for tenders issued to 150 transnational corporations. It is being designed as a special economic zone that cannot comply with fundamental aspects of the Constitution and laws of the Republic, such as the rights of the indigenous peoples and the environmental and labour legislation. And this is for the purpose of creating more favourable conditions to attract foreign investment. That is how decisions are being taken that are designing a country-wide project that may have consequences over the next 100 years.

FG: Another essential subject for discussion, as I understand it, is the geopolitical problematic, and in this case the advances in regional integration connected to the assessment of the new strategies of imperialism and its interference on the continent. Left critics (Marxists, eco-social activists, feminists, etc.) are often criticized for allegedly underestimating the impact of U.S. intervention or destabilization, and for focusing essentially on an internal critique of the processes and governments. That is what the Argentine sociologist Atilio Borón, among others, says: a number of his writings argue that we have to understand that, moderate as the progressive governments are, they have opened a new wave of integration without the United States, and that this represents a giant step forward in regional history from a Bolivarian perspective. So what do you think about the state of Latin American integration, what are the advances and the limits as of now in this regard?

ML: Ten years ago there were real initiatives and important and encouraging proposals at a global level coming from Latin America, in the sense that regional integration was posed in a different direction from that of the European Union in its neoliberal constitution, especially in the idea that the Banco del Sur was to promote projects of sovereignty and sustainability and not of development in classical terms. Another example was the SUCRE. Unfortunately, these initiatives have not prospered throughout the decade, above all because of resistance from Brazil, which obviously has an important role in the region and is much more oriented toward its partners in the BRICS and prioritizes its interests as a world power.

EL: In the end, Brazil agreed that the Banco del Sur as such should be just one more development bank…

FG: If we look now at the deep crisis in Venezuela, a subject, a drama that has polarized the intellectuals a lot (as of course Venezuelan society), that polarization was presented to us in translation around two international appeals. The first, with Edgardo’s active participation, originated in Venezuela: “Urgent International Call to Stop the Escalation Of Violence in Venezuela. Looking at Venezuela beyond polarization,”[7] that you both signed, the second, the response entitled “Who Will Accuse the Accusers?,[8] by the members of the etwork of Intellectuals and Artists in Defense of Humanity (REDH), which is quite hostile. One of the central arguments of the REDH members is that the crisis in Venezuela, in their view, is above all a product of imperialist agression and an insurrection of the neoliberal right as well as an “economic war.” They argue that we are in a regional context of a right-wing return, citing the [parliamentary] coup in Brazil, and that this obliges the left to close ranks behind the governments that are confronting this agression, setting aside “secondary contradictions.” The call that you signed, on the contrary says:

“we do not believe, as certain sectors of the Latin American left affirm, that we should acritically defend what is presented as an ‘anti-imperialist and popular government’. The unconditional support offered by certain activists and intellectuals not only reveals an ideological blindness, but is detrimental, as it – regrettably – contributes to the consolidation of an authoritarian regime.”

At this point, how do you read this debate, which was expressed in a number of other documents and exchanges that were sometimes clearly offensive on both sides?

ML: A short while ago a colleague told me that she thought geopolitical views tend to obscure the interests and voices of the peoples. And I don’t know if that is a secondary contradiction. It seems to me that the form in which this confrontation developed was very regrettable because it tended more to close off spaces for reflection than to open them. I think what we need at this point is precisely deeper thinking, spaces for debate and not for closure, if we are to find some solution to the Venezuelan crisis. And I have the feeling that the more alienated people are from the Venezuelan process the more need there is to affirm a sort of identity in solidarity, which is more a sort of anti-imperialist reflex that is fairly abstract, delinked from what goes on day to day in Venezuela. I think the solidarities that we need to build are different. They should not revolve around ourselves, our needs to affirm a political identity like a profession of faith, but be more a joint search for paths forward among concrete peoples. Solidarity should be with the actually existing people, who often do not have the same interests as the government.

And this brings me to a self-criticism, Recently, I returned to Venezuela and had an opportunity to chat with some sectors of critical Chavismo, and it was only then that I learned how that camp has been transformed in recent years. And how complicated it is to express solidarity, in a critical and differentiated way, in the hyperpolarized scenario that exists today. The call that I signed at best should have been given more thought, more discussion before it was circulated, and I should have taken more time discussing it with the various sectors of critical Chavismo before signing it, precisely in order to be more coherent with my own thinking. While I continue to think that it is necessary to defend democratic institutionality and certain liberal values, as the call does, we have to broaden and deepen them while at the same time defending them as results of past struggles. And above all, I think that external agression can never justify the errors that are being made internally.

This polarization that has occurred in Venezuela and in other countries as well, which does not allow any grey shading beyond black and white, is very negative and very harmful to the transformation. It makes it very hard to express solidarity without causing damage on one side or another. As a feminist, I also feel that the form in which this whole debate is taking place is extremely patriarchal, plagued with simplistic binaries, agressive logics and self-gratifyng egos while what we should be doing is building links and other forms of doing politics, that is, accompanying ourselves in the search for alternative roads.

FG: In fact, it seems that a certain dialectic of critical thinking has been lost in this debate.[9] Concerning the polarization in Venezuela, the unconditional defenders of Maduro argue that the polarization is principally between the right wing allied with imperialism vs. the “people” and the Bolivarian government. This analysis is based, of course, on concrete aspects of the coordinates of the present conflict but leaves no space for understanding the tensions, differentiations, and contradictions internal to Chavismo as well as within the popular camp.

ML: There is a kind of artificial construction of a unity between government and people, as also occurred often in relation to Cuba, for example. That is, the Cuban people is one, and only one, and the one that speaks for the Cuban people is necessarily their government. As if there were no relations of domination and conflicts of interests in Cuban society. Between men and women, but also between state and society, or between Blacks, Mestizos and whites, or between countryside and city. From this perspective, which unifies government and people in a single symbolic bloc, nothing really emancipatory can arise. Finally, the challenge before us is reducing or overcoming these relations of domination, if I understand the task. In this dichotomous construction, polarization, war-like logics reappear, a cultural legacy that has been borne by the left since the Cold War, and that now in this historical moment has enabled us to avoid many of the things we need to learn. It is a legacy that was somewhat partially overcome by the ’68 revolt with its cultural impact on societies, but is now suffering a reactualization that I feel is quite distressing.

FG: Edgardo, on the military logic and the situation in Venezuela. How can an attempt be made to confront the Venezuelan crisis from below and from the left? Personally, I did not sign either of the international appeals, because I genuinely felt that neither responded at the time to the urgency of the situation, to the necessary denunciation of imperialist agression, the right wing and its openly coup-oriented sectors and, at the same time, on the other hand, was capable of issuing an open, clear critical analysis of the authoritarian drift of Madurismo; but away from not only the formal defense of the 1999 Constitution but also from the necessary recovery of the forms of popular power, the experiences of self-organization, the communal project that was still alive, notwithstanding everything, in the interstices of the process….

EL: Obviously, there has been a sustained offensive by the Empire, by the United States. From the beginning of the Chávez government there were attempts by the government of the United States to undermine this process for reasons that were both geopolitical and economic. We know that Venezuela’s oil reserves, and its gold, coltan, uranium and other abundant mineral reserves in the south of the country are essential for the United States, either for itself or to limit access to them for its global rivals. Since 1999, Venezuela has represented a point of entry for changes in the continent, and that is why the US also supported the 2002 military coup and the 2002-2003 business lock-out in the oil industry that paralyzed the country for two months, with the express intention to overthrow the government of President Chávez. We know that groups and parties of the Venezuelan far right have relied on permanent advice and funding from the State Department. The financial blockade and the explicit threats of armed intervention formulated by Trump can not in any way be taken lightly. There have also been important interventions by Uribism and Colombian paramilitarism. This type of aggression is part of the panorama of the current crisis in Venezuela, and no one from the left can avoid it or put it in the background.

Now the problem of the Bolivarian process is: What is it that we want to defend? and How should we defend it? Do we have to defend any government with a discourse confronting the United States? Or are we to defend a collective process of a democratic, anticapitalist and anti-imperialist nature that points to a horizon that responds to the profound civilizational crisis we are going through? Do we have to defend the increasingly authoritarian government of Maduro, or do we have to defend the transformative potential that emerged in 1999? Today, the preservation of power for the Maduro government, clientelism and the threats of cutting off access to subsidized basic goods (in conditions in which for a high percentage of the population this is the only way to have access to food) play a much more important role than the appeal to popular participation. And, in the background, a matter for debate is what do we understand today by the left? Can we think of the left without questioning what was socialism of the last century? When forces that sought to overcome bourgeois democracy ended up being authoritarian, vertical, totalitarian regimes. … Today, in Venezuela, we have to ask ourselves if we are moving in the direction of deepening democracy or if the doors to direct participation of people in the orientation of the country’s destiny are closing.

In Venezuela, in 1999 a Constituent Assembly (CA) was held with very high levels of participation, a referendum was organized to decide whether a CA was to be carried out, the constituent members were elected with high participation, the results were approved by a majority of 62% of the votes, enormous resources were spent to modernize the electoral system, establishing a totally digitized, transparent system with multiple control mechanisms, and audit. A reliable electoral system, virtually fraud-proof, as has been recognized by numerous international organizations and electoral experts around the world. But, in December 2015, the opposition wins the parliamentary elections with a large majority, and the government is faced with the dilemma of respecting these electoral results and remaining faithful to the constitution of 1999, or on the contrary, doing everything possible to remain in power, even if this meant ignoring the will of the majority of the population or sacrificing the electoral system that had conquered such high levels of legitimacy. It clearly opts to remain in power at all costs.

Step by step decisions are made that define an authoritarian drift. The holding of the recall referendum in 2016 is prevented, the election of governors in December that year is unconstitutionally postponed, the attributions of the National Assembly are not recognized and these are usurped between the Supreme Court of Justice and the Executive Power. As of February 2016, the President begins to govern by way of a state of emergency (“economic emergency”), expressly violating the conditions and time limits established in the Constitution of 1999. Assuming powers that under the Constitution are attributed to the sovereign people, Maduro issues a call for a National Constituent Assembly, and electoral mechanisms are defined to guarantee total control of that assembly. A monocolour National Constituent Assembly is elected, its 545 members are identified with the government. This assembly, once installed, proclaims itself supra-constitutional and plenipotentiary. Most of its decisions are adopted by acclamation or unanimously without any debate. Instead of addressing the task for which it was supposedly elected, the writing of a new draft Constitution, it begins to make decisions referring to all areas of public powers, dismisses officials, calls elections in conditions designed to prevent or make very difficult the participation of those who do not support the government. It approves what it calls constitutional laws, which in fact results in the abolition of the 1999 Constitution. They adopt retroactive laws, such as the decision to outlaw those parties that did not participate in the mayoral elections of December 2017. The participation of left-wing candidates different from those decided by the PSUV leadership is prevented. Meanwhile, the National Electoral Council fraudulently blocks the election of Andrés Velázquez as governor of Bolivar State. …

What is at stake here is not the formal defense of the Constitution of 1999, but the defense of democracy, not a formal bourgeois democracy, but the opening towards the deepening of democracy that the 1999 Constitution represented. Without any single milestone defining a clear break with the democratic constitutional order created in 1999, that democratic constitutional order has been sliced ​​up step by step, successively, like a salami, until we find ourselves in the current situation, which is no longer recognizable.

FG: Then, in light of this very complex panorama where progressives experience brusque or gradual setbacks, where the critical or radical lefts fail to emerge as a massive popular force, where the actually existing replacement electoral forces are, at the moment, aggressive neoliberal rightists, even insurrectional in some cases, such as Venezuela, how can we think of concrete alternatives in this end to the hegemony of progressivism and the rebound of a late neoliberalism? From the perspective of buen vivir and ecosocialism, from criticism to the limits and contradictions of progressive governments, from popular or decolonial feminism, how are we to imagine utopias with concrete perspectives for Our America?

EL: In Venezuela, the only source of optimism for me at this moment is the fact that the crisis has been so deep and has impacted the collective consciousness in such a way that it is possible that the charm of oil, of rentism and of the Magical State as beneficient provider is slowly beginning to dissipate. All the left-right political debate in recent decades has operated within the parameters of the oil imaginery, within this notion of Venezuela as a rich country, owner of the largest oil reserves on the planet. Politics have revolved around the demands that different sectors of society make on the state in order to access these resources.

I am starting to see signs, still lamentably weak, of an acknowledgment that it is not possible to continue on that path. There is the beginning of an acceptance that a historical cycle is drawing to an end. People are starting to scratch their heads, and now what? I have had relations for years with what is the most continuous and most vigorous process of popular organization in Venezuela, CECOSESOLA.[10] This is a network of cooperatives operating in several states in the center and west of the country that links a wide network of agricultural and artisanal producers with urban consumers, as well as a splendid cooperative health center and a funeral cooperative. I have been impressed by the presence of topics such as the recovery and exchange of seeds in everyday conversations. The recognition of a before and an after the beginning of the current crisis.

Recently, when someone in a farming community came down from a nearby town, he was told to remember to bring back a can of tomato seed. That was an every day occurrence. These were seeds of imported, selected and hybrid tomatoes that did not reproduce, that were not necessarily transgenic but they were sterile after the first sowing. With the economic crisis, that access to seeds is abruptly cut off. Ancestral peasant practices are resumed. They begin holding meetings between farmers in which it is asked, who has seeds of what? Indigenous seeds that were only preserved on a small scale begin to be exchanged – potato seeds, tomato seeds, etc. This opens up new possibilities. We are going to wake up from this dream (which turned out to be a nightmare) and think about the possibility that we are somewhere else, in another country, in other conditions and life goes on but now it is taking a new path.

FG: Miriam, what Edgardo says is interesting but he describes, for the moment, very small embryos of popular power, which may seem inoperative in the face of immense regional challenges, financial globalization, world chaos. …

ML: Of course, that is, it depends a little from where you are looking at it. I think that here, for example, in Europe, what we have to do is start to become aware of the effects that the intensive consumption lifestyle, which everyone assumes is completely natural, cause in other parts of the world. It seems to me that the scale of destruction that this causes, not only in environmental terms but also in the social fabric, of subjectivities, is much more important than what is assumed in Europe, where it all remains practically invisible, camouflaged by consumer environments that are pleasant and anaesthetizing.

EL: Or the belief that the standard of living of the North does not depend on extractivism in the South.

ML: Some of us call this the imperial way of life, which automatically assumes that the natural resources and cheap or enslaved labour of the whole world are for the wealthiest 20 percent of the world population who live in the capitalist centers or the middle and upper classes of the peripheral societies. And if it’s cheap, that’s good. It provides a sensation that the planet is going to collapse ecologically and socially because of the enormous quantity of gadgets that are produced, which nobody really needs except “the markets” for everything that capitalism suggests as artificially constructed needs. So, here in the capitalist centers there is a very important task of reducing the amount of material and energy that is expended. For example, the movements around degrowth have a good perspective in terms of cultural transformation, where because of the discomforts with neoliberalism that you mentioned before, people rediscover other non-material dimensions of the quality of life, and also the wealth of self-production of clothes, or honey, or other things.

FG: Yes, here in France too, there are currently a lot of alternative rural networks, collective self-managed experiences, areas to defend (ZAD), alternative currencies, etc. but they are still very small.

ML: Of course, they are small networks for now, but the important thing is to transmit to more people these imaginaries of different kinds of well-being, so that the change is made not by force, or not by the crisis, but by the desire itself. So that people can feel, experience in their own flesh that there are other dimensions of the good life that can easily compensate for having less materially, and that a decrease does not have to be experienced as a loss.

EL: Nor as a sacrifice to stop having things. …

FG: In fact, here, there is more and more talk about the necessary conquest of a cheerful sobriety and voluntary austerity in the face of consumer waste. It is an interesting, powerful concept that can be connected to buen vivir and ecosocialism.

ML: I feel every time I go to Europe that there is a lot of discomfort with this super-accelerated lifestyle that prevails here. I have many friends who get sick, if not physically, they get sick psychologically, from stress, depression, burnouts, panic attacks. The dimensions that this acquires are hidden quite systematically in the dominant discourses that continue to associate wellbeing with economic growth, and much more so in what is perceived from the global South. Seen from Latin America, here in the central countries, everything is necessarily a wonder. Then, to visualize these discomforts and make visible the other forms of life that already result from them, would be an important step. Because in the South, curiously, everyone believes that it is better to live in the city, while in Germany or Spain, on the contrary, there is an increase in the numbers of ecological communities that go to the countryside. In other words, it would be a step to help break this hegemony of imitative development, which forces the South to repeat all the mistakes that have already been made in Northern societies, such as clogging cities with cars, for example. But some of these errors, as in the division of labor between men and women here in the North, are being overcome also by the new generations, Now, from my generation on down, it has become more normal to share the tasks of care not only in the couple but beyond the couple, perhaps in the building, in the community where a reduced space for coexistence, can be generated.

This is also another important element, building community against forced individualization, both in the countryside and in the city. I do not mean the community understood as the small ancestral peasant village, fixed in time, but political communities in movement, which incorporate their tasks of care as collective tasks and then reorganize life around what life reproduces, and not around what the market or capital demands. And I think we should make visible all the efforts that are already being made in this sense, where people live relatively well, both in the North and in the South. In the South, in part, they will be ancestral communities, but there are also new ones, while in the North they are usually newly constituted. It’s about changing monolithic thinking and looking at the things that exist, you do not have to invent everything from scratch.

For example, there is a view that urban suburbs are hell, in the global South above all. But if you are going to look closer, there are many logics there that are absolutely anti-capitalist, the logic of not working, of giving priority to fiestas, of exchanges not mediated by the logic of money. … Maybe it’s not the model. Anyway, there is no model and there should not be, that is very important to emphasize. We are not, after 20th century socialism, going to have a new unique recipe which we will all enroll in and follow, but rather it is a question of allowing that diversity of alternatives, so that they can be built from each culture and context, from the people who are involved in them. Buenos vivires in the plural.

We also have to generate a culture of alternatives that allows us to err, to make mistakes, to learn from mistakes. These spaces of social experimentation in which we say good we are going to try that, it does not work, we are going to try something else, but in cohesion and without competing, according to the principle of cooperation and not competition. A book called The Future of Development[11] states that the percentage of the world population actually inserted in the circuits of the neoliberal globalized market is barely half, and that the rest is still in what we would call the margins. That provides hope, it also means that half the world population is in something else, beyond the dominant model, so we should start looking around.

FG: Very good, thank you very much.

Transcription of interview by Alejandra Guacarán (Master LLCER, Université Grenoble-Alpes. Revision, correction and updating by FG, EL and ML.

[1] Some of the papers and videos of the presentations by Pierre Salama, Miriam Lang and Eduardo Lander may be viewed at http://progresismos.sciencesconf.org.

[2] www.rosalux.org.ec.

[3] https://www.tni.org.

[4] Álvaro García Linera, “Conferencia Magistral en el Teatro Nacional de la Casa de la Cultura Ecuatoriana,” Quito, Ecuador, 2015: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DeZ7xtBJT8U.

[5] Miriam Lang and Dunia Mokrani (ed,), Más allá del desarrollo, Fundación Rosa Luxemburg/Abya Yala, Quito, 2012, www.rosalux.org.mx/docs/Mas_alla_del_desarrollo.pdf.

[6] Edgardo Lander, The implosion of Venezuela’s rentier state, TNI, 2016, https://www.tni.org/es/publicacion/la-implosion-de-la-venezuela-rentista?content_language=en.

[7] http://llamadointernacionalvenezuela.blogspot.fr/2017/05/llamado-internacional-urgente-detener_30.html.

[8] www.resumenlatinoamericano.org/2017/06/01/la-red-de-intelectuales-redh-responde-a-una-declaracion-en-la-que-se-ataca-al-proceso-bolivariano-de-venezuela/. For a critical assessment from a Marxist perspective of these and similar statements, see Claudio Katz, “The Left and Venezuela,” http://lifeonleft.blogspot.mx/2017/06/the-left-and-venezuela.html. – RF.

[9] For an initial balance sheet on the Venezuelan crisis, with a plurality of opinions: Daniel Chávez, Hernán Ouviña y Mabel Thwaites Rey (ed.), Venezuela: Lecturas urgentes desde el Sur, CLACSO, 2017, www.biblioteca.clacso.edu.ar/clacso/se/…/Venezuela_Lecturas_Sur.pdf.

[10] http://cecosesola.net.

[11] Gustavo Esteva, Salvatore Babones, and Philipp Babcicky, The Future of Development: A Radical Manifesto, Policy Press, Bristol, 2013.

Photo by szeke

The post Latin America: End of a golden age? How the Commons creates alternatives to neoliberalism and the vanguard left appeared first on P2P Foundation.

The concept in construction

Commons is a concept in construction broadly defined as tangible and intangible resources shared by a group of individuals shaping patterns of access, use and reproduction. This analytical concept emerged as an alternative to the fixed public-private divide that masks other forms of appropriation and governance models. It has evolved from a narrow contextual focus on social dilemmas in social-ecological systems into an integrative analytical perspective to address social change at large.
The incorporation of cultural and political resources allows for an analysis of social processes not only around traditional ‘commons’ (natural resources such as water, forest, fish, land, ocean, air) but also relating to the what are known as new commons (e.g., knowledge, memories, identities, urban public spaces, digital spaces, collective practices). The commons perspective has become a vibrant interdisciplinary field to articulate theoretical questions usually polarized by domains that may be geographic (e.g., rural and urban commons), scalar (e.g., local to global commons), institutional (e.g., formal and informal commons) and tangible (e.g., material and immaterial commons).

Click here for our position paper.

About this Co-Lab

This co-lab aims at unpacking plural perspectives of the commons in Latin America and exploring ways to create a dialogue across different fields. Students from different disciplines, practitioners, activists and policy makers will debate on the commons in the region. There will be plenty of room for discussion and knowledge exchange.

Call for papers

We invite activists, practitioners and policy makers to participate in this conference. Please send us your affiliation, a brief summary of your work experience and why you are interested in the commons to the email address below before November 30, 2017

Keynote speaker John Powell

President of the International Association for the Study of Commons / University of Gloucestershire, UK

Governance of Commons: The Rhetoric and Reality 

Commons and ‘rights’ of common have always been contested, but in the years following publication of Hardin’s paper on the ‘tragedy’ of the commons the notion that some form of sharing of resources was not only possible but desirable, both socially and economically, came under sustained attack. Ostrom’s work over several decades has demonstrated the fallacy of some of the neo-liberal arguments, and created the space to explore alternatives to the privatisation-statist approaches to resource governance. More recent developments have seen the rise of ‘new’ commons as the concept is applied to a wider range of resources, and of ‘commoning’, the result of new ways of thinking about the nature of the social processes that generate shared services and resources. In many situations the reality of governing commons and commoning is often different from the idealism and conceptual frameworks that drive activities in this arena. Separating the reality from the rhetoric is an important function for an international organisation involved in analysing the concept of commons, and an area where the Latin American experience has a lot to offer.

This presentation will explore the wider context of commons governance, with the aim of opening the doors between regions to enable the cross-fertilisation of ideas, and to encourage wider learning from the struggles, scholarship, research, and practice currently happening across Latin America.

Contact

Pictures from Creative Commons
:: De todos los Colores ::, Desde cúpula del Palacio Nacional. Centro de Medellín. Colombia (CC BY 2.0)
Remi. Santo Tomas Chichicastenango, Quiche, Guatemala (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
Remi. Cocora, Colombia (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
Fotos.rotas. San Nicolas, Buenos Aires, Ciudad de Buenos Aires (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
Ted’s photos – For Me & You. Las Palmitas. Colonial, Pachuca, Hidalgo. Mexico (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
Speculum Mundi. Huancayo, Perú (CC BY 2.0)
Inmigrante a media jornada. Phunchäwi (Carnaval Popular). Estrecho de Tiquina, Lago Titicaca, Bolivia (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

The post The Commons in Latin America: Struggles, Policies and Research appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Mural at the Cooperativa Martín-Baró featuring Padre Ignacio Martín-Baró. (Photo: Amber / https://www.flickr.com/photos/amccy/878267727 )

This excellent article opened my eyes to Liberation Psychology, a discipline which seeks to shine a light on the inherent bias towards the political status quo which is present and goes undetected in mainstream psychology, and one of its main adherents historically,  Ignacio Martin-Baró who was murdered in El Salvador by a “counter-insurgency unit” created at the US Army’s School of the Americas.

As a Jesuit priest, Martin-Baró embraced liberation theology in opposition to a theology that oppressed the poor, and as a social psychologist, he believed that imported North American psychology also oppressed the majority of people. Martin-Baró concluded that mainstream psychology either ignored or only paid lip service to social and economic conditions that shape people’s lives.

Ruling elites and power structures – from monarchies to military dictatorships to the US corporatocracy – have routinely used “professionals” to control the population from rebelling against injustices so as to maintain the status quo. While power structures routinely rely on police and armies to subdue populations, they have also used clergy – thus, the need for liberation theology. And today, the US corporatocracy uses mental health professionals to manipulate and medicate people to adjust and thereby maintain the status quo – thus, the need for liberation psychology.

Read more here…

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