Posts Tagged analysis on politics & race

By freelark

If I’m to be a white ally, I figure I should take some of the burden off people of color to explain what’s wrong with some of the things white people say. With that in mind I’ve decided to compile a list of things that white people — specifically, white activists — should never say.

While reading this list, keep in mind that I’m drawing heavily from my own experience. There are plenty of fucked up things white people can say. However, with one exception I’ve decided to focus on blatantly racist comments that I’ve heard first hand. Also, I tend to mention anarchists a lot, because I used to be an anarchist, so I organized with other anarchists. This does not mean that white anarchists have a monopoly on racism. In many cases one could substitute the term social liberal or socialist for anarchist, and the point would still be applicable.

1. “They belong to that religion.”

I have yet to visit an activist group with religious homogeneity. That said, in my experience certain religious views are more acceptable among activists than others. If a disproportionate number of the people who hold a religious stance are European or of European descent, the stance is acceptable. So it’s okay to be an atheist, a pagan, or a Quaker. If a religious stance doesn’t meet this criterion, it tends to be viewed with suspicion.

In the US white activists reserve scorn for the Roman Catholic Church (RCC) that they have for few other religious institutions. It would be outside the scope of this piece to argue that the RCC is good or bad. But I will point out that it’s folly to treat Catholics as a monolithic, univocal group that stands opposite of everything activists believe in. Individual Catholics have differences of opinion on pretty much everything, and often membership to the church (as is the case with so many other religious institutions) has more to do with wanting to preserve family or community ties than with adhering to a certain set of doctrines. If white people don’t want to alienate people of color from their organizing, they’re going to have to learn to show more tolerance for the religions they adhere to.

2. “All nationalism is bad.”

The idea that all nationalism, including ethnic nationalism, is bad is often rooted in anarchism, an ideology that was first propounded by European men in the nineteenth century and which since then has drawn more than its fair share of white thinkers. Even if we set this aside, white people who raise the “all nationalism is bad” objection often miss the point that the essence of ethnic nationalism has nothing to do with what anarchists mean by state and everything to do with racial or ethnic identity.

It’s important to keep in mind that some people link themselves to a nation in order to express racial or ethnic identity rather than allegiance to a state. If white people can avoid doing this, this doesn’t mean that they’re all awesome anti-statists; rather it means that they have the privilege of being part of the group that is seen as the default racial or ethnic group. When white activists forget this, it’s a disaster in the making. For example, I once saw an activist remove a poster from a wall, simply because it said (when translated), “I am as Puerto Rican as the coquí.” The message, which should be obvious to anyone who claims to be anti-racist, has nothing to do with a particular state; it is that one’s ethnic identity is something to be proud of.

3. “I know what it’s like to face racist oppression; I face oppression too.”

No, unless you’ve experienced racism you do not know what it’s like to experience racism.

I used to find this response somewhat confusing. Surely, racist oppression isn’t completely disanalogous to other kinds of oppression, right? After all, don’t we use much the same vocabulary — words like privilege, oppression, and intersectionality — while discussing all kinds of oppression? And can’t someone who faces one sort of opression gain insight into another by making a comparison? I think the answer to all these questions is a very cautious yes — cautious because there’s a danger lurking just around the corner. If comparing racist oppression to your oppression helps you realize that something you said or did was racist, then it’s probably a good thing that you made the comparison. Even so, before you share your insight with the world you should run it by someone who faces both kinds of oppression, because no matter how oppressed or well-intentioned you may be, you’re still coming from a perspective of white privilege and you may be wrong about something crucial. Better yet, start reading the works of people who face multiple kinds of oppression and let them guide you into appropriate analogies.

The danger of white people’s comparisons is that often the only “insight” gained from analogy is that because the white people making it are oppressed, they can never be racist. This denies one of the central components of anti-oppression work which is that the oppressed have unique insight into their oppression by virtue of having experienced the oppression, including the ways in which it is disanalogous to other kinds of oppression. This is important, because it may be that it was just these disanalogous elements were at play when you said what you did five minutes ago and that what you said is therefore racist for reasons you don’t understand. Not incidentally, the unique knowledge that an oppressed group has is known as the epistemic privilege of the oppressed. If your goal is to eliminate inequality, you don’t want to appropriate one of the few kinds of privilege that oppressed people have, do you?

Though many examples of analogies gone wrong could be listed, I’ll give only one here — one that’s limited to activist circles. Some activists are inclined to make statements like, “I know what it’s like to be black; I’m an anarchist.” I think what often happens is that white activists identify one sort of oppression, such as state oppression, as the Big Evil. They don’t see that other oppressive forces besides the Big Evil are at work and therefore they fail to see that some people face oppression that they don’t comprehend. If you’re white and have gone to jail for political reasons, that is unfortunate, but this does not mean you know what it’s like to be a person of color. As a white person, you have the privilege of choosing whether or not to engage in political activities that may land you in jail; people of color can abstain from such activities and still end up in jail simply for being people of color. As a white person, you will probably be treated better in jail than a person of color who is your counterpart. As a white person, you don’t know what it’s like to experience the racist oppression people of color experience outside of jail. As a white person, you don’t know what it’s like to be a person of color in white activists’ space, hearing white people say that they know exactly what it’s like to experience racist oppression. In short it is incredibly myopic to think that one point of (apparent) commonality gives white people insight into what it’s like to be people of color.

4. “If we focus on this other kind of oppression, racism will disappear.”

In the previous section I noted a tendency of white people to fail to see any oppression outside of the oppression they consider the Big Evil. In a related phenomenon white people will, while perhaps acknowledging that orther kinds oppression exist, argue that without the Big Evil other forms of oppression would not exist. Therefore anyone who confronts other kinds of oppression is only treating symptoms; the only cure for society’s ills is to fight the Big Evil. The Big Evil could be statism, sexism, or any number of other things, but I’d like to focus on classism, because in my experience it’s named as the Big Evil in activist circles more than anything else.

If this piece were about the oppressions I face, you’d see I have a lot to say against classism. However, it wouldn’t be appropriate for me to focus on it here. All too often white activists derail conversations about racism by bringing up classism. The problem with white activists’ saying that racism reduces to classism is that it is an attempt to keep people of color from directly confronting their oppression so that they will instead confront an oppression that directly affects white people.

To support the claim that racism reduces to classism some white activists point out that in the US at least racist institutions were established as a part of divide-and-conquer scheme to keep the working class from rising up against the upper class. Setting aside the fact that this gives an account of only some racist insitutions (the expansion that drove Native Americans west, for example, was already well underway), the argument presupposes that if working class white people had not bought into the view that they were superior to their black counterparts, they may have succeeded in revolting against the upper class. In other words white people’s racism prevented the demise of classism. I do not mean to say that we should make a reversal and say that generally speaking classism is reducible to racism. However, I do mean to say that racism is a problem in its own right.

5. “There are no people of color in our activist group; let’s go to a meeting of people of color and invite them to join our group.”

Many white activists have the impression that they have arrived. They think they no longer have any racist bullshit they need to work on. Therefore if people of a particular racial or ethnic group don’t want to work with them, it must be because they have yet to be informed the awesomeness that is their group of white activists.

There’s a reason I’m putting this remark last. I hope that after even a small sampling of racist comments white activists make — there are many others that aren’t included here — it’s apparent just how ridiculous it is to think that the only matter keeping people of various ethnic and racial minorities out of a given activist group is a lack of information. If an organization has disproportionately few people of color as members, it’s often because people of color don’t see how it benefits them, and that is often because the organization has racist tendencies that it has yet to address.

Perhaps the bigger problem with this remark is that it’s blatantly tokenizing. The people who make it aren’t primarily interested in forming a diverse coalition to confront the problems that people of color face; if they were, they’d visit the meeting of the people of color regularly and ask them how they could help without expecting glory for themselves or their organization. Instead they want to use people of color to make their activist group more diverse. They are making one more thing — segregation itself! — the responsibility of people of color.

Via Beyond White Guilt

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Check the full article here:

One item that comes up over and over in discussions of racism is that of tone/attitude. People of Color (POC) are very often called on their tone when they bring up racism, the idea being that if POC were just more polite about the whole thing the offending person would have listened and apologized right away. This not only derails the discussion but also tries to turn the insults/race issues into the fault of POC and their tone. Many POC have come to the realization that the expectation of politeness when saying something insulting is a form of privilege. At the core of this expectation of politeness is the idea that the POC in question should teach the offender what was wrong with their statement. Because in my experience what is meant by “be polite” is “teach me”, teach me why you’re offended by this, teach me how to be racially sensitive and the bottom line is that it is no one’s responsibility to teach anyone else. And even when POC are as polite as possible there is still hostility read into the words because people are so afraid of being called racist that they would rather go on offending than deal with the hard road of confronting their own prejudices.

When someone is accused of racism/prejudice and they don’t want to address the concern or even think about it, well then the POC accusing is too loud, too angry. But that ignores the fact that we have every right to be loud and angry. If I were to say something sexist/classist/racist/ablist/etc. I would not expect my friends to say “Well I’m offended by what you said and let’s have a calm discussion of why.” (especially with my friends) I would expect their first and most visceral reaction to be “Listen up, what you just said is fucked up and you better research and correct yourself!” Hell, I’d expect the same response from strangers because I don’t expect them to teach me or help me work through my unconscious prejudices. If I have some fucked up unconscious thoughts it’s my job to break it down and deal with it, no one else’s. Sure there are friends I could turn to but I don’t expect people to help me. For clarifications sake in my mind asking friends for help is not the same as expecting people to teach you. A white friend coming up to me and saying ‘Hey I’m writing this story with a black main character can you read it over?’ is completely different from putting some prejudiced writing/thoughts/beliefs out there and expecting me to be nice and teach you when I run across it. It’s the expectation not the asking that is privilege.

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Irene Monroe writes:

If you are African American and gay, and fighting alongside your white brothers and sisters for queer civil rights, the notion that “Gay is the new black” is not only absurdly arrogant, it is also dangerously divisive.

In a presumably “post-racial” era with the country’s first African American president-elect, it’s easy for some to assume that race doesn’t matter.

But when critiquing the dominant white gay community’s ongoing efforts to gain marriage equality and its treatment of blacks as their second-class allies in the struggle a reality check happens — both straight and queer African American communities bond together against their strategy for marriage equality.

Why?

Because race does matter!

Case in point: Proposition 8 and blaming the black community for its win at the ballot box.

The Proposition 8 debate has brought much consternation and polarization between white gay community and African Americans.

And with the expectation of a dominantly white Marriage Equality movement pushing forward a single — issue agenda, the movement arrogantly ignores vital ways for coalition — building within black communities, and honorable ways of connecting their struggle to those of African Americans.

But there’s an example that defused the tension in much of the heterosexual African American community when it was publicly arguing that same-sex marriage is not a civil rights issue.

In commemorating the 40th Anniversary of Loving v. Virginia in the June 12, 1967 historic Supreme Court decision that advanced racial and marriage equality in this country, the NAACP Legal Defense & Educational Fund, Inc., marked the anniversary by stating the following: “It is undeniable that the experience of African Americans differs in many important ways from that of gay men and lesbians; among other things, the legacy of slavery and segregation is profound. But differences in historical experiences should not preclude the application of constitutional provisions to gay men and lesbians who are denied the fight to marry the person of their choice.” And in April of 2006, NAACP LDF filed a friend-of-the-court brief in the case brought by New York same-sex couples challenging their exclusion from marriage.

But the Marriage Equality movement neither extends its reach beyond its concerns within its community nor outside of it.

How the marriage debate should have been framed — in a way that speaks truth to various queer communities of color and classes — has not been given considerable concern.

And with no public language to adequately articulate the unique embodiment of queer communities of color and classes within the same-sex marriage debate, this has become contentious. The dominant white queer languaging of this debate, at best, muffles the voices of these communities, and, at worst, mutes them. In other words, in leaving out the voices of queer communities of color and classes, the same-sex marriage debate is hijacked by a white upper class queer universality that not only renders these marginalized queer communities invisible, but — as it is presently framed — also renders them speechless.

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“white” is a social construct. it is not an absolute category that is fundamental to the universe. whiteness is something created in the minds of humans. you are white if you are considered white by society. you are white if you receive the benefits of white privilege.

white is not a skin color. white is not about physical appearance or physical characteristics. while skin color highly correlates to whether or not you are considered white, it is not about the pigmentation in your skin. there are people of color that are paler than people who are considered white.

white is not a biological category. white is not about genetic descent. when a person of color has a child with a white person, their children may or may not be white or colored. more to the point, this same child in one culture may be considered white and in another culture considered colored.

white is not universal or even global. a person can be white in one country (like mexico or brazil), and considered colored in another (like england or the united states). within the united states, people of mediterranean descent can be white in one part of the country and considered colored.

white as a social construct, comes with perceptions about what it means to be white, how to treat white people, how white people expect to be treated, benefits and privileges given to white, who is or isn’t white, where white people live, what white people are like, what white people eat, etc. white becomes the touchstone construct for what it means to be not white, how to treat not white people, how not white people expect to be treated, benefits and privileges not given to not white, who is or isn’t not white, where not white people live, what not white people are like, what not white people eat, etc.

white as a socially constructed racial characteristic is culturally normative. that is to say there are cultural norms around white. these are cultural norms that whites buy into without much examination, and that not whites also buy into, but with some resistance and friction. while it is tempting to call these cultural norms “white culture”, that isn’t correct or useful. this collection of cultural norms is a kind of “meta culture” – a “culture” that is shared by/included in many cultures.

these cultural norms are what define white.

Via Beyond White Guilt

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February 21 marked the 40th anniversary of Malcolm X’s assassination. Only 39 years old at the time of his murder, Malcolm X would have turned 80 on May 19 of this year.

Today, while the mass mobilizations of the civil rights movement in the 1960s did away with legally-codified racism, in the 40 years since Malcolm’s death the underlying economic roots of racial inequality have not gone away. In fact, the social conditions facing many African Americans have worsened.

According to the U.S. census bureau, the official poverty rate for White Americans is a high 8.1%. However, the rate for Black Americans is an enormous 24.1%. In the U.S., which has the world’s largest imprisoned population both in absolute numbers and as a percentage of total population, black people account for just over 12% of the total population but over 44% of the prison population.

Enduring realities like these led Malcolm X to claim “the system in this country cannot produce freedom for an Afro-American. It is impossible for this system, this economic system, this social system, this system period.”

More Than a Nationalist

Malcolm X is most widely known as a leader of the black nationalist Nation of Islam. What is less known is that in the last year of his life Malcolm left the Nation and his political views changed drastically.

As the civil rights movement began to pick up steam in the early 1960s, Malcolm’s will to participate in politics ran up against the conservatism of Nation leaders who wanted to remain a mostly religious and cultural organization. By 1964, the corruption of Nation leader Elijah Muhammad and developments in Malcolm’s political thinking led him to leave the organization that had trained him as a leader and an organizer.

During the 50 weeks between Malcolm’s split from the Nation of Islam and his murder, his ideas and political methods changed rapidly. Malcolm began to move away from the rigid black nationalism of the Nation of Islam.

On his trip to Africa in 1964, Malcolm met non-blacks who he considered “true revolutionaries dedicated to overthrowing the system of exploitation that exists on this earth by any means necessary.” Reflecting on his experiences in foreign countries, Malcolm said, “I had to do a lot of thinking and reappraising of my definition of black nationalism. Can we sum up the solution to the problems confronting our people as black nationalism? And if you noticed, I haven’t been using the expression for several months.”

Malcolm’s Development as a Revolutionary

During the last year of his life, Malcolm moved towards recognizing the system of capitalism as the root cause of the oppression and indignities suffered by African Americans. Though he never rejected Islam, he stopped doing his political organizing on a religious basis. In June 1964, he founded the secular Organization of Afro-American Unity.

At the OAAU’s founding rally, Malcolm stated “we want equality by any means necessary.” In a 1964 speech, he said “you can’t have capitalism without racism.” Malcolm never became a socialist and he never broke with some of the conservative ideas he had acquired early in his life. However, at the time of his death the trajectory of his political thought was towards anti-capitalism, internationalism, and revolution.

Those who misrepresent Malcolm X as an anti-white racist do so only by ignoring much of what he actually said.

In January 1965, he said “I believe that there will ultimately be a clash between the oppressed and those that do the oppressing. I believe that there will be a clash between those who want freedom, justice, and equality for everyone and those who want to continue the systems of exploitation… It is incorrect to classify the revolt of the Negro as simply a racial conflict of black against white, or as a purely American problem. Rather, we are today seeing a global rebellion of the oppressed against the oppressor, the exploited against the exploiter.”

Malcolm’s identification of the economic and political system of global capitalism as the underlying basis of racial oppression and his arguments in favor of international political struggle anticipated the worldwide growth of revolutionary movements in the late 1960s.

Malcolm was a leader with serious credibility among the most militant sections of African Americans and with an uncompromising commitment to revolutionary change. Any movement he built was not likely to be placated by tokenism or co-opted into big business political parties. Malcolm’s founding of a secular, radical political organization prepared to work within the growing civil rights movement represented a real threat to the establishment.

Only half of the 40,000 pages in FBI files on Malcolm X have been made public. Manning Marable, a prominent historian who will soon complete a new biography of Malcolm based on previously unknown material, believes evidence points clearly toward New York City Police and FBI involvement in Malcolm’s assassination (Democracy Now interview, 2/21/05). Marable’s biography, to be published in 2008, also promises to shed important new light on Malcolm’s political trajectory at the end of his life.

Opposition to Imperialism and Independence From the Democratic Party

Having learned first about the government’s vicious treatment of black people in the U.S., Malcolm could not help but recognize similar underlying racism in the U.S. government’s interventions overseas.

A man who had always survived by his wits, Malcolm understood why President Lyndon Johnson was sending “peace corps to Nigeria and mercenaries to the Congo.” He judged U.S. interventions around the world according to the material ambitions of the ruling class rather than the things that politicians said to drum up support. He spoke out against colonialism and apartheid in Africa, the U.S. interventions in the Congo and in Vietnam, and in support of the Cuban Revolution.

Forty years later, there is a lot to learn from the way Malcolm X spoke out and organized against U.S. imperialism. In Malcolm’s time, the official, reformist leadership of the civil rights movement at first supported or refused to publicly oppose the Vietnam War (or U.S. interventions in the Congo and the Dominican Republic). Malcolm’s opposition was uncompromising, even when public opposition to the war initially confined him to a small minority.

Mainstream civil rights leaders were not prepared to take a principled stand and educate blacks and workers about how these wars and foreign interventions were not in their interests. Instead of leading, it was only after the anti-war movement exploded that some of them followed behind and started campaigning against the Vietnam War.

Following 9/11, the civil rights establishment and liberal black Congressional Democrats played a similarly rotten role. Maxine Waters, John Conyers, Bobby Rush (who was previously a Black Panther leader), Charles Rangel, to name a few, all lined up behind Bush and supported the Afghan War and the “war on terrorism.” Again in April 2003, leading Democratic members of the Congressional Black Caucus voted to spend $78 billion for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Malcolm X clearly explained that to win victories from a hostile system, the African American community needs to build a militant and principled movement which cannot rely on either party of big business.

In stark contrast to the leaders of liberal civil rights organizations, he never tried to conceal the role of the two main capitalist parties that continue to dominate U.S. politics. In January 1965, Malcolm said that “the Democratic Party is responsible for the racism that exists in the country, along with the Republican Party.”

While the Democratic Party continues to cast itself as the party of blacks, latinos, and the poor, it has kept up the Iraq war and kept down the minimum wage. Malcolm knew well that the Democratic Party has a long history of sending African Americans to war and to prison, while cutting social welfare programs.

In the last election, black Democrats like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, who pose as natural leaders of all African Americans, supported John Kerry despite his support for big business policies and his failure to advocate a program which represented the interests of African Americans and working people. The AFL-CIO leaders also gave over $160 million of workers’ money to the Kerry campaign.

Blacks, latinos, and workers still need to remember Malcolm’s observation that “you put the Democrats first and the Democrats put you last.” In the process of building a working-class political force that can take on big business and do away with racism, we should learn from the example and experience of fighters like Malcolm X.

Via RBG Street Scholars

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By Kristian Hackett

All across the world, people are partaking in counter-culture communes in which they seize old abandoned buildings not only for housing needs, but also to actively protest the over-arching societal pressures created by capitalism, patriarchy, exploitation and racism.

This act of reclaiming free housing from existing vacant structures, called “squatting,” has become a globalized movement, creating space for networking and making the act of day-to-day living a type of activism.

”Squatting, in a way, is an active participation of a non-stop critique of the city itself as a capitalist structure,” said Alex Ross, a young, experienced traveler and squatter who spoke about his experiences July 23 at the “Okupas: Towards an Anarchist Ecology” discussion held at the Brecht Forum, a social justice organization in the West Village.

Sharing the panel with Ross was Robin, a petite adventurer in her 20s, who also discussed her knowledge of the growing global squatter movement. She focused her discussion on her experiences journeying to and participating in various squatter communities abroad.

Ross, who squatted with various groups and residencies across Western Europe, and Robin, who traveled to South America and squatted with various groups there, were in agreement that squatting is an active form of criticism of everyday life – of the world that mainstream society adheres to.

Plain and simply put, “The act of squatting is also an act of criticism,” Robin said. Robin, outfitted in baggy jeans and t-shirt and knit hat, was very enthusiastic about her experience, smiling and laughing while interacting with the audience.

The squatting communities both Ross and Robin participated in and described during the discussion were not those only set in motion for housing purposes, but were enacted as self-sustaining, “autogestion” communities that strived to survive without participating in conventional culture as it stands today.

”It’s a constant protest,” said Ross, who was dressed in a black t-shirt and black cut-off shorts. “Whenever there are squatters, it’s kind of understood that this is going to be a really big kind of criticism of everyday life within the ecological constructs.”

Both panelists also discussed the act of squatting as a reuse of space, an autonomous re-appropriation of waste and the redeveloping of the system within the wasted space. “It’s moving into houses that already exist,” Ross described, “it’s moving into spaces that aren’t being used, that have been abandoned, and that are being wasted.” He compared squatting to the act of helping yourself to someone else’s garbage.

While squatting is an active challenge to the existing mainstream society, the squatter societies can not help but interact with the very culture they are resisting. “The houses generally have a source of income,” Robin explained. This money is used within the commune “to better the resources of the squat.” As Ross pointed out, “it is too idealistic to think that you will never need money.”

This is a direct connection with the mainstream culture, but in other, more unintentional ways, squatter communities have been interacting with and participating in mainstream culture, modernization and globalization. Many squatter communities are creating websites to represent themselves and generate awareness.

La Casa Aki, one of the houses where Robin stayed for a three-week period was in Santiago, Chile. She discovered the squat after talking with a local resident she met along her journey. Eager to attain more information on the community, she researched the house on the web. “I googled it,” she said.

This seems to be the way many people are becoming involved in the global squatting movement. Instead of squatting in their locales, it seems there is a growing number of people that find squatting communities abroad. “I encountered Australians, Germans, English, other Americans and more,” Ross recalled from his experiences through living in communities in England, Amsterdam and Barcelona.

Global squatters, or “nomadic barbarians,” as Ross described them, are driven across time and space by protests. “They’ll be out at the G8 meeting, hear about a protest up in Copenhagen, and go there the next day.”

Ross referenced this mobile radical core of activists and organizers to describe the way in which squatters are utilizing global processes for their own cause, despite their common aversion to globalization. “[They] really focus on global issues, but only because they want to absolutely disassemble globalization, and part of it is disassembling modernization so it’s just supporting localism,” Ross said. Ross continued to describe how localism, the philosophy of organizing society based on local resources, has become a way to challenge the increasingly globalized world.

Squatting is an ancient practice with the first documentation dating back to 1649 with the Diggers of England. It began as a social movement not only to utilize vacant housing structures, but also to live communally and equally. Squats sprouted up all over the world, wherever there has been available wasted space and people who need that space and the determination to utilize it.

While the two panelists, Ross and Robin, did value their experiences from squatting, Robin said that while this way of life was something she supported, it was not for her. “You have to be inclined to [squat] in a certain way, or need it. Those are the factors,” she said.

For Ross, squatting takes on a different meaning. “It’s something I do, I think it’s part of activism and I have called it a ‘lifestyle’ in the past, but I call it an active critique of everyday life. It’s always with me, almost like a religion. It’s something that I can’t always get, but it’s a dream, for me.”

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A Strategy for Failure?

“You may not be interested in strategy, but strategy is interested in you.” Leon Trotsky

While we do not want to cause any division in the anarchist movement in the USA, honesty in evaluating direct action is important when anarchists in the United States seem like we might have a chance at actually winning by redefining the dominant discourse in the United States. It is in this spirit that we produce the following critique of the astoundingly conventional “three-tier strategy” put forward by Unconventional Action in hope that at best this late stage in the build up to the Republican National Convention a viable action alternative strategy can be created or anarchists can at least be aware of the high potential for failure of the “three-tier strategy” and plan accordingly.

The first thing to notice about the “Three-Tier Strategy” is that it is a plan based on blockades. All three tiers are blockades based on stopping delegates, with each tier simply being a different kind of target. Essentially, the “three tiers” are one and the same thing. You don’t need a Webster’s Dictionary to realize that all three are described by synonyms – “blockade; immobilize; block.”. The inspiration for Unconventional Action seems to be a heartfelt but desperate hope to repeat the success of Seattle for the RNC 2008. This fetish for blockades ignores the reality that the Seattle blockades were successful because the police were not prepared and there was a large amount of people in the Northwest, primarily Earth First! veterans, who were well-trained and had a large tradition of blockading. Despite exclamations that “we already have blockading skills” by the RNC Welcoming Committee, the reality of this is doubtful at best. The anarcho-liberals from California will no doubt come, but they are a minuscule force at best, incapable of shutting anything down outside of San Francisco, as proven by the disastrous day of action at the 2004 RNC. Furthermore, they will not likely come in large numbers due to the lack of a non-violence code. When is the last time large-scale blockades have been successful in the USA? Are there going to be large, mass-scale participation by liberals, with skilled blockading trainers? None of these factors seem to hold in St. Paul.

Victory will only be gained by numbers or surprise, and surprise has been lost. Unconventional Action claims that RNC 2008 hosts “strategic vulnerabilities unique to any trade summit or party convention of recent years.” Although the river does present obvious blockading points, these strategic vulnerabilities have at this point been announced to the police. In RNC 2008, the police would be foolish not to be very well prepared for any blockades, especially as Unconventional Action has announced the strategy long in advance. The police should be ready and waiting at the obvious intersections to pounce on protesters. The success of the blockades at Seattle were entirely due to surprise, which has been lost over a decade. Previous attempts to repeat Seattle have almost all ended in failure. Blockades at the A16 protests against the IMF in Washington DC in 2001 had mixed results, and the protests at the FTAA in Quebec in 2001 where the blockades failed but the move towards massive street fighting was viewed as a success.

One could object that we are misinterpreting the blockades as merely nonviolent civil disobedience. While there were no huge burning barricades, some of the blockades at the RNC 2000 were far from non-violent, and yet were still swept off the streets by cops quickly and effectively with minimal to no disruption of the delegates. The same can be said of the decentralized blockading strategy based on a “diversity of tactics” put forward by the People’s Strike in Washington, D.C., which resulted in almost everyone being arrested before they even got to the streets. For some inane reason this decentralized blockading idea was foolishly repeated with a more fluffy flavor and even less results at the A31 at RNC 2004. Recent moderately successful blockades overseas at the G8 in Scotland in 2005 and Germany in 2007 relied on a huge rural terrain and a police force that was spread very thin, conditions unlike those in St. Paul. The best bet for blockades would be if there were few police and the blockades were spread around the city in an unpredictable manner, but this would require a level of self-organization of affinity groups and blockading skills that seems to be unlikely at best. The definition of insanity is to repeat something that has failed again and again, and expect different results.

If one does not have surprise, one can assume sheer numbers might lead to success. In the RNC 2008, who exactly is going to do these blockades proposed by Unconventional Action? Where are the numbers? The primary difference between this convention action and the Seattle WTO protests is that it finally seems that many Americans may actually sympathize with action against the Republicans. However, sympathy does not translate into numbers, as the decline of the anti-war marches happened at the same time popular discontent with the Iraq war was at its highest. If liberals are having a hard time marching, one wonders about their ability to do blockades. One can assume that maybe large amounts of liberals and pacifists will show up, although this is questionable at best given the distance from San Francisco to Minneapolis. Unlike the West Coast, the Midwest does not have a tradition of blockades. Minneapolis radicals do have a tradition of defending autonomous zones like the Minnehaha Free State in 1998 and even fighting through a police line at the International Society for Animal Genetics (ISAG) in 2000. Midwest anarchists recently with the I-69 campaign also are learning well the skills of fast-moving “hit and run” direct actions.

The “Three Tier” plan seems to be aimed at mostly Black Bloc anarchists, despite it not calling for a Black Bloc. Even assuming that most Black Bloc anarchists types decide to do the blockades, this is likely at most a thousand protesters (the largest Black Bloc being A16 2001 at the Inaugural 2004, or maybe two thousand if everyone from San Francisco comes), which might very well be surrounded with ease if divided into a dozen roving mini-Black Blocs. Perhaps a few small Black Blocs could be successful, but again, the key is numbers and surprise. We should remember that at RNC 2000 and 2004, about seven thousand or so non-Black Bloc people showed up for the blockades in total (including liberals, anarchists, and every stripe in between), and were easily wiped off the streets by a large, well-equipped, and moderately brutal police force. Maybe the liberal march will somehow merge with the blockades like the Steel Workers in Seattle, but betting money or time in jail on this seems foolish. The main positive difference is that the Minneapolis and St. Paul police forces are considerably smaller than those at earlier RNCs, but the Minneapolis Police are already well versed in tasers, and if their crackdown on the Critical Mass of the preRNC is any sign, they will not hesitate to just arrest people at the earliest opportunity. Also, cops may be bussed in from elsewhere. The only hope seems to that SDS will motivate thousands to show up and do civil disobedience, and that the police will be both unprepared and not increase their relatively small numbers. This is unlikely as the convention is during school, so SDS will not show in large numbers. The numbers game does not look good.

The general trajectory at the protests in the United States is generally some sort of untenable plan based on “repeating Seattle” via blockades thought up by either the local organizers or a series of consultas…or rammed down our throats by professional activists. Like in Miami FTAA 2003, after people start arriving at the protest they realize the plan put forward by the “organizers” is a bad idea. At the last minute there is a consensus meeting where the vast majority of people try to come up with an actual plan with some chance of working, but this is usually derailed by professional activist “facilitators” who attempt to preserve their untenable plan and – worse case, as in Miami – any deals they struck with the police. In frustration, anarchists usually attempt a Black Bloc, there are some last minute secret plans, and many people gravitate towards the “Official” plan. This results in a botched and ineffective protests, since there is neither time nor resources to put together a good alternative. While we appreciate the idealistic yet untenable plan is being put forward based on blockades by Unconventional Action, who we have the utmost of respect for, we feel like it would be a good time to step back and honestly look “outside the box” of the “Three-Tier” plan while there is still a little time left. The time is now to formulate a Plan B. A rather academic analysis of the Seattle WTO protest is not enough.

There is an Alternative

“Do not repeat the tactics which have gained you one victory, but let your methods be regulated by the infinite variety of circumstances.” Sun Tzu

The obvious alternative is to attempt to disrupt the convention via a frontal assault with large numbers: the infamous Black Bloc. Given their behavior at previous events, increasing numbers of everyone from the SDS to punks are interested in this alternative. At every recent protest from the Inaugural 2004 to the “Suicide March” at the G8 in Scotland to the 2007 October Rebellion in DC, a large Black Bloc has been surprisingly effective. Our courage seems to be directly proportional to the amount of other anarchists near us, and Black Blocs of over a few hundred are difficult for police to simply mass arrest, unlike smaller groups doing blockades. Ideally for the RNC, a Black Bloc of over a thousand could be formed, one with a tight tactical group of locals who can both help prepare defensive materials and have a great knowledge of the local streets. Black Blocs are best organized via closed affinity groups who meet before-hand and then announce a Bloc in public on the Net so people can come prepared, but keep the details of its precise meeting hidden with an eventual public announcement right before the protest. If a Black Bloc is exceptionally well-prepared, having the ability to move fast, break down into smaller groups and reform (as in the “Five-Fingers” tactic at the G8 in Germany, although this tactic is best used with very large numbers), as well as reform at agreed-upon reconvergence spots, can be a huge asset. At worse, the Black Bloc leads to an epic confrontation with the police and large arrests, which is arguably better than hosts of small confrontations of the police and large arrests that would go unnoticed. At best, the police can be overpowered. There is a call for an Anti-Capitalist Bloc by what apparently is the IWW (Industrial Workers of the World), but it appears to be more of a public relations strategy during the march, as they explicitly deny being a “black bloc” like in Seattle, strange given that it was the most effective Black Bloc in recent history, with the possible exception of the A16 Anti-IMF Black Bloc.

A second alternative would rely on surprise, not just the numbers of a Black Bloc. Closed blockading affinity groups that scout the locations and and decide on blockading places in secret have a chance of actually getting to their blockading locations. Unlike the vast majority of protesters, these groups could rely on whatever disruption is caused by the “public” blockades and a possible Black Bloc to put themselves into position, even as protesters are being swept off the streets by the cops. By preparing blockading material and being trained in advance, these groups could move swiftly and quickly reconfigure their blockades based on police presence. Again, such group or groups would have to form outside any open meetings, but this could be done and has been done with success in the past, ranging from the G8 in Scotland 2005 to the IMF protests in Prague in 2001. These networks of closed group do not have to limit themselves to “blockades” but going after whatever targets they believe will maximize the chances of victory. What locations and times would the police never suspect? These are the places and times for closed groups to strike.

A last alternative would be some yet unarticulated plan based on both numbers and surprise, a Plan B. This could involve striking at a different time and place, going after some target besides the obvious moving of the delegates, an action meant to maximize morale and puncture the media spectacle of the ritualized mass protest that no-one, even most anarchists, seem to believe in anymore. This was the spirit of the Seattle Black Bloc, and while repeating its form like dressing in black may be foolish, the actual content may be possible. With surprise, less numbers are needed. The trick would be to make whatever happen in this Plan B actually work, with full knowledge that most of the time “Plan B” fails at the last possible moment, like in Germany in 2007. The main reason for Plan B failing is lack of having a plan that makes people complicit and so it lacks enough numbers – so that a small group striking by itself of course looses its backbone. What would be needed is a Plan B that happened at the same time as the majority of people were on the streets, and could join in organically.

What do these alternatives leave the RNC Welcoming Committee and Unconventional Action? First of all, they are complementary to the official “three-tier” blockading strategy. All the proposed alternatives also need all the concrete resources, from housing to large meetings, provided by the RNC Welcoming Committee. Already, it is far too late to convince everyone to abandon the “three-tier” blockading strategy, and no doubt there will be people attempting to go ahead with it. The alternatives from a Black Bloc to closed groupings could then strike at the same time and in the same general location as the official “three-tier strategy” could take advantage of the chaos caused by whatever groups are involved in the “three-tier strategy” distracting the police and being arrested. Groups involved in the “three-tier strategy” could also not go to any announced locations and so into the waiting arms of the police, but be prepared to move in a chaotic, swarm-like fashion over the entire zone of conflict, making themselves less predictable and likely to be arrested. Lastly, all these groups could come prepared not just for vaguely “blockading,” but for the necessity of self-defense against the violence of the police. Remember that a vague plan one cannot easily visualize happening is not going to happen. And there should always be even more secret plans, not just a single “Plan B” but one, two, a thousand. Betting everything on one day of action may not be the best of ideas. Any plan should have enough angles so that if one component fails, another component may still succeed. If these are components are well-known and spread, depending on the level of security needed, through word of mouth and public announcement, it seems like real victory might be possible. Never accept the verdict of the “organizers” for any strategic plan – always think for yourself. And as for the day of action – the combination of groups with secret plans, public blockades that are more chaotic than the police are ready for, and a large Black Bloc could be a perfect storm to defeat the Republicans, much more so than the “three-tier” blockading plan by itself.

Why Anarchists Need Strategy

“Tactics teaches the use of armed forces in the engagement; strategy, the use of engagements for the object of the war.” Karl von Clausewitz

The difference between tactics and strategy is subtle but magnified in times when history itself is open for the taking. Tactics are means, made concrete by the use of actions to accomplish victory at a particular engagement in a war. For example, if one wishes to stop a car, one could sit down in front of it, or puncture its tires. To break a window requires rocks or boots. One could cause “disruption” by sitting in the streets or throwing a rock at a cop. These are tactical, not strategic, choices and a diversity of tactics means to agree that different tactics can be used at the same time. Nothing more, nothing less, from the Black Bloc to nonviolent blockades. Strategy is the use of engagements in the pursuit of ends, and the ends of war are victory. Why should one break a window or stop a car in the first place? How does this gain you any advantage? The “Three-Tier Strategy” is not a strategy, but a tactical framework for a particular engagement, the RNC 2008. It just fails as a strategy. It assumes that the end is the blocking of delegates getting to the convention, and so the “Three Tier So-Called Strategy” actually limits tactics by assuming that everyone shares this goal of blocking delegates. One could argue that despite a lack of strategy, any action is better than no action. Yet is a defeat based on a flawed tactical framework better than nothing happening? That is nothing more than the logic of endless campaign-based activism and summit-hopping. A failure on the scope of Miami 2003 could actually kill off the resurgent anarchist activity in the United States, Some may be offended that we dare critique the “Three-Tier Strategy”? Is that not also the type of thinking of of liberals and leftists, who have never been able to talk to their friends honestly and constructively? It is great to put a plan forward early like Unconventional Action did, but only if it begins a conversation, not ends it prematurely.

What is lacking is a real strategy for anarchists in the United States and around the globe. After RNC 2008, what next? Anarchists in the United States has no answer. The ends of the strategy is not stopping the delegates of the RNC 2008, but the destruction of capitalism itself and the self-organization of new social relationships. We have no choice but to join this social war, as capitalism is engaged in total war against most of humanity and life on this planet. The real strategic question is whether or not the RNC 2008 is a useful engagement in this longer war against capital. We believe it is, but not just by repeating the same worn-out formulae of yesteryear like the blockading of the WTO Seattle protests in 1999. The world has moved on. It is time not just for tactical thinking, but strategic thinking by the anarchist movement in the United States.The discourse of the War on Terror is no longer even believed by large swathes of Americans, and the Republicans are hated by more and more as the embodiment of a dying order and a failed occupation. If the stage of history can be redefined not as America versus Al-Qaeda, but as anarchists against capital, then there has been victory regardless of whether or not any delegates are stopped. In this analysis, it does not matter if anarchist block a single delegate. What matters is that we win by committing new and dangerous actions that both raise our morale, build our collective strength instead of dissipating it, spread the knowledge that resistance is possible throughout the media, and increase the complicity of all those around us in our war against capital. A tactical framework that keeps these broader tactical goals in mind can then show how the RNC 2008 can play a part in a strategy for victory in the war against capital. There is always a Plan B. The goal is the complete destruction of the enemy’s potential, and such a victory can almost always be obtained.

By merely two individuals (with no anarcho-Trotskyist front groups, unlike some of the groups endorsing the “Three-tier strategy”!) involved in the last decade of summit mobilizations.

Via Infoshop

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By George Caffentzis

‘Food riots’ in response to huge food price hikes have hit numerous countries around the world this year. George Caffentzis explores the current food crisis, its causes and implications.

Food prices are rising so much and so fast that millions are now on the verge of starvation. Between May 2007 and May 2008, corn prices increased by 46%, wheat prices by 80%, and soybeans by 72%; while rice increased by 75% in 2008 over its average 2007 price.

People in many cities throughout the world have responded to the explosion of staple food prices in the last few months by demanding that their national governments reduce them immediately. From Port-au-Prince, Haiti, to Cairo, Egypt, the demonstrations often turned into riots, shutting down these cities for days. Millions are now calculating that unless they obstruct the ‘normal’ circuit of capitalist reproduction by taking to the streets they will face starvation.

Indeed, the scenes from these places are no less dramatic in the suffering and anguish they suggest than those coming from Burma after the cyclone. The price hikes themselves have taken on the character of a natural disaster. They are treated by many commentators as a sort of ‘perfect storm,’ to use the deceptive jargon of our day. According to Steve Hamm, a Business Week journalist, a multiplicity of unrelated factors from the drought in Australia, to the “richer diets” in China and India, to “the soaring cost of oil” and “the increased use of corn for ethanol” have come together to make food unaffordable for a substantial part of the world’s population.

This explanation, however, is far from convincing. It does not explain why these millions of people are exposed to international markets and hence at risk from the ‘perfect storm’. The apparently unrelated factors listed by Hamm would not lead to widespread starvation if people were not dependent on world grain markets in a way that they were not a few decades ago.

In reality, the latest grain price hikes are the last act in a long process that started in the mid-1980s with the implementation in much of the world of the World Bank’s and IMF’s Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs), whose first task was to privatise agricultural lands and totally commodify food production and distribution.

If we look at the policies that governments across the world, but especially in the South, were forced to adopt in the name of the ‘debt crisis’ or ‘economic development’ we see that each of the recommended policies was geared to raise people’s dependence on the world market for access to food:

• government subsidies for agricultural inputs (from fertilisers to seeds) were eliminated, as were price control and marketing boards;

• land privatisation was instituted with drives to titling and registration;

• large amounts of acreage were removed from local food production and devoted to mining, oil extraction, or the production non-edible or export crops;

• most important, violating a long tradition, the World Bank and IMF insisted that governments in the South dismantle their food reserves and put them on the market, arguing they were no longer needed in a global economy.

Not surprisingly, countries that in the past had always been self-sufficient as far as food production was concerned were by the end of the millennium net food importers. A good example of this dynamic is the case of Mexico and corn. Millions of corn-growing peasant farmers have been driven from their ejidos(inalienable land held in common or by families) over the last decade due to their inability to compete with US corn exported to Mexico under the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), a model neoliberal trade treaty. As a result, Mexicans are now dependent on corn imports from the US for the provision of their basic staple food at a moment when corn prices are soaring.

Once this history is understood, no one can see the price hikes as in any way caused by a surprising conjuncture of unrelated factors. For the crucial question to be posed both logically and politically is: Why is it that billions of people are now dependent on an international grain market that literally condemns them to death? For if they were not so dependent, then the storm in the international grain exchanges, however perfect, would have passed by without hurting many. Far from being natural, this dependence has been constructed step-by-step, policy-by-policy despite a long series of oppositional demonstrations, general strikes, and rebellions throughout the world, and the criticism of anti-globalisation scholars.

Capitalist planners’ obstinate attachment to this strategy is not hard to decipher, for it is at the heart of the neoliberal agenda that strives to:

• establish international capital’s ever tighter control of all natural resources, especially staple food stocks, which constitute a formidable weapon, already used throughout history to impose discipline over recalcitrant workers and reward compliant governments;

• eliminate populations not considered productive;

• reduce the real wage everywhere.

In sum, these price hikes are the dénouement of a long war on the people of the planet to eliminate the most elementary right: the right to eat to live.

This is not a new strategy discovered by geniuses like Larry Summers on H Street in Washington. In fact, as the novelist Sol Yurick writes in his forthcoming autobiography, Revenge, the biblical Joseph was the archetype for the IMF/World Bank officials of today. Joseph, as financial advisor to the Pharaoh, recognised a cycle of seven “good years” and seven “lean years.” He cornered the market by hoarding the grain in the good years and was able to use the stored grain in the lean years both to sell at an exorbitant price and to buy the peasants’ land cheaply in the face of their imminent starvation. What is important to note about this story is that Joseph and the Pharaoh were not ‘middlemen’ interested in the money they made in selling the hoarded grain; they were using their control of grain to enslave Egyptian workers and to appropriate their land.

What is to be done to prevent a repetition of this ancient tale? Across the world people are rioting in desperation, as they often did in response to the introduction of SAPs. The pace of these riots and rebellions will increase, since for most people the affordability of food is a question of life and death. These uprisings might bring some restraint in the grain markets and cause governments to bend the neoliberal rules by providing more subsidies.

However, a reversal of the trend towards increasing dependence of people on the world grain market for accessing their staple food will require the strengthening of the already existing long-term international movement of both farmers and city dwellers committed to restoring land to the people producing food for their localities. The hunger generated by the food price hikes on the world market, which was meant to breed docility, will give this movement a tremendous impetus.

Via Turbulence

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By Betsy Hartmann

The greening of hate – blaming environmental degradation on poor populations of color – is once again on the rise, both in the U.S. and overseas. In the U.S., its illogic runs like this: immigrants are the main cause of overpopulation, and overpopulation in turn causes urban sprawl, the destruction of wilderness, pollution, and so forth.

Internationally, it draws on narratives that blame expanding populations of peasants and herders for encroaching on pristine nature.

In the first instance, the main policy `solution’ is immigration restriction; in the second it is coercive conservation, the violent exclusion of local communities from nature preserves. Both varieties of the greening of hate are about policing borders. By stressing the negative role of population growth, both target poor women’s fertility as the fundamental root of environmental evil.

In the U.S. the first big greening of hate wave occurred in the mid-1990s when conservative anti-immigrant forces began mobilizing within the Sierra Club, the nation’s largest membership-based environmental organization, to pass a ballot initiative supporting a “reduction of net immigration” as a component of a “comprehensive population policy for the United States.” An opposing coalition of environmental justice, immigrant rights, and reproductive rights advocates successfully challenged the initiative, and it was voted down in 1998.

Anti-immigrant forces kept on organizing, however. Today, three out of fifteen members of the Sierra Club Board of Directors are key players in the anti-immigrant lobby which is pushing for another ballot initiative in 2005. They are Ben Zuckerman, a UCLA astronomy professor, board member of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society and a leader of the 1998 ballot initiative; Captain Paul Watson, a founding member of the Greenpeace Foundation and Sea Shepherd; and Doug LaFollette, Wisconsin Secretary of State and board member of Friends of the Earth. All three are conservationists – but what exactly do they want to conserve?

One does not have to scratch very far beneath the surface to find the links between the green wing of the anti-immigration movement and nativism and white supremacy. The summer 2002 issue of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s (SPLC) investigative magazine Intelligence Report documented these connections, focusing in particular on John Tanton, the main organizer and funder of the anti-immigrant movement, who has close ties to a number of racist hate groups.

Ben Zuckerman has described Tanton as “a great environmentalist.” Concerned about growing anti-immigration momentum in the Sierra Club, Mark Potok of the SPLC wrote the Club’s President in October warning of “a hostile takeover attempt by forces allied with Tanton and a variety of right-wing extremists.” At this point, one of the main right-wing strategies is to get anti-immigration activists to join the Club en masse.

Meanwhile, overseas certain international conservation agencies, notably Conservation International (CI) (see ZNet commentary by Aziz Choudry, 10/16/2003), are greening hate through supporting the militarization of nature preservation. Coercive conservation measures, of course, are nothing new. From colonial times onwards, wildlife conservation efforts have often involved the violent exclusion of local people from their land by game rangers drawn from the ranks of the police, military and prison guards. To legitimize this exclusion, government officials, conservation agencies and aid donors have frequently invoked narratives of expanding human populations destroying pristine landscapes, obscuring the role of resource extraction by state and corporate interests.

Today, one of the most well-known cases of coercive conservation is CI’s involvement in the Lacandon Forest in Chiapas, Mexico. In an interview with the Houston Chronicle, CI’s Chiapas director blamed deforestation there on overpopulation: “It’s obvious that the main problem is overpopulation. The children of the farmers don’t have any land. They can’t all be peasants.”

With USAID assistance, CI and the World Wildlife Fund are promoting a conservation campaign in the region focused on identifying illegal settlements — often Zapatista communities — which are then forcibly removed by the Mexican army. These efforts are complemented by the government’s aggressive female sterilization campaign in the region. CI’s close ties to bio-prospecting corporations raise questions of just who the forest is being preserved for.

Increasingly, international conservation agencies like CI are embarking on what are called “joint population-environment projects” which involve collaborations between family planning and conservation NGOs. Despite a professed commitment to communities identifying their own health and environmental needs, the main priority of many such projects is to reduce population growth through increased uptake of contraception. Ideologically, the projects also reinforce the message that it is population growth and the practices of the local people themselves that cause environmental degradation.

Population-environment projects often use population monitoring systems, not only to register births, but to track migration. Potentially, such tracking could be of use to defense and intelligence interests, especially in areas of political conflict. A proposed monitoring system for the World Wildlife Fund in the Calakmul Biosphere Reserve in Mexico, where many refugees from Chiapas have settled in recent years, would select key informant households in “sentinel” communities to track in-migration. Recruiting households as informants raises disturbing concerns about the impact and intent of such monitoring.

Indeed, coercive conservation provides an important means by which militaries can expand their reach. For example, the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) now has biodiversity and conservation projects in 15 countries in Africa. In Malawi, for example, it has facilitated the equipping of park guards with semi-automatic weapons. In Central America, the DOD and Southern Command are working to involve national militaries in the MesoAmerican Biological Corridor project, and in the Philippines U.S. environmental aid is a component of current anti-terrorism efforts. Within the U.S., meanwhile, the DOD is now billing itself as the preserver of biodiversity through its `stewardship’ of vast tracks of land it controls for military testing and training. “Biodiversity helps us achieve military readiness in harmony with nature,” claims DOD environmental security official Sherri W. Goodman.

The greening of hate has been able to take root in U.S. environmentalism because it draws on widely shared popular beliefs regarding the relationship between population, conservation and the environment. These are the myths of man versus nature, the wilderness ethic, the degradation narrative, and scarcity.

Man versus nature: Because Americans live in such a rapacious and parochial capitalist society, many assume that people are de facto bad for the environment. There is little understanding of the ways in which human agency can shape the environment in positive ways and even improve biodiversity. There is a big difference, for example, between a corporate corn farm in the Midwest which uses massive applications of pesticides and a peasant corn plot in Mexico where new seed varieties are constantly evolving over time and other species of plants and animals can thrive in the non-polluted environment.

Similarly, there is a big difference between a city with a strong zoning department, environmental regulations and a well-developed public transport system and one in which business prerogatives and an unregulated real estate market shape development and encourage urban sprawl. Political and technological choices, not levels of immigration, explain the difference between the ecologically healthy city and the unhealthy one.

The man vs. nature myth is rooted in a problematic tradition of conservation biology which views human populations as behaving in the same way as exponentially growing pondweed or bacteria in a petri dish. In the U.S. major environmental figures like Paul Ehrlich of population bomb fame and Garrett Hardin, who advocates pushing the poor off the lifeboat, come from this tradition. It not only ignores the capacity of humans for rational thought and action, but history, politics, economics, and demography.

It is a particularly insidious ideological trap because it leads to an acceptance of wars and diseases like AIDS as `natural’ checks on human population growth. The website of the anti-immigrant group, Support a Comprehensive Sierra Club Population Policy (SUSPS), currently features two stories about “My Bacteria Neighbors” and the “Lily Pond Parable.” Use your imagination to fill in the blanks.

The Wilderness Ethic: William Cronin has described the unique place the idea of wilderness holds in the American psyche, both as a romantic, sublime, quasi-religious force and a vehicle for frontier nostalgia. The ways in which wilderness is constructed have a number of problematic outcomes. The ahistorical myth of wilderness as “virgin” land obscures the systematic forced migration and genocide of its original Native American inhabitants.

By locating nature in the far-off wild, it allows people to evade responsibility for environmental protection closer to their homes. And it is geographically parochial, blinding many Americans to the complex ways in which people relate to the land in other countries and cultures. Critiquing the wilderness ethic does not mean one is opposed to national parks and nature protection – rather, it calls for equitable and democratic processes to ensure local communities are not pushed off their lands and robbed of their livelihoods.

The degradation narrative: This is the belief that population pressure-induced poverty makes Third World peasants degrade their environments by over-farming marginal lands. The ensuing soil depletion and desertification then lead them to migrate elsewhere as “environmental refugees,” either to ecologically vulnerable rural areas where the vicious cycle is once again set in motion or to cities where they become a primary source of political instability.

The degradation narrative has proved particularly popular in Western policy circles because it kills a number of birds with one stone: it blames poverty on population pressure, and not, for example, on lack of land reform or off-farm employment opportunities; it blames peasants for land degradation, obscuring the role of commercial agriculture and extractive industries; and it targets migration both as an environmental and security threat. It is a way of homogenizing all rural people in the Global South into one big destructive force, reinforcing simplistic Us vs. Them, West vs. the Rest dichotomies.

Last but not least is the myth of scarcity – the belief, common in the U.S., that there are not enough resources to go around and the human population is close to overshooting the carrying capacity of the earth. There is a certain irony in the fact that the country with the most profligate waste and consumption levels is the most obsessed with planetary resource limits (and the least willing to do anything about them).

Andrew Ross makes the point that fears about scarcities of natural resources parallel the manufacturing of social scarcities by competitive capitalist regimes. In the public consciousness, imposed limits to growth in social welfare expenditures become intertwined with the notion of environmental limits. Missing from the picture, of course, is the role of the rich in gobbling up both economic and natural resources at an ever expanding rate, undermining effective environmental protection, and refusing to invest in new, non-polluting energy sources.

Challenging these myths is no easy matter, but challenge them we must if we are going to effectively resist the greening of hate and the conservation of racism.

– Betsy Hartmann is the director of the Population and Development Program at Hampshire College and a member of the steering committee of the Committee on Women, Population and the Environment. She is the author of Reproductive Rights and Wrongs and the novel The Truth about Fire.

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By Ian Alan Paul of the Friendly Fire Collective

This article is meant to develop an analysis of the spectacular nature of the upcoming confrontations at the DNC/RNC, and contemplates how the North American anti-authoritarian movement can relate to this specific type of summit protest. Will the movement be successful in breaking down the spectacle of ‘law and order’, or will we continue to be marginalized by its message?

Setting the Stage for Confrontation

With the Democratic and Republican national conventions just over the horizon, it has become time to think both tactically and strategically about how we can best direct our collective power in the streets of Denver and St. Paul. While some of our past manifestations of resistance have focused on disruption as both the means and the ends, particularly during economic summits (WTO, World Bank, EU, IMF, etc), what makes mobilizing against the DNC/RNC fundamentally different is that these events are not defined by decision making processes, but are instead defined by theatre. At one point in American history, the conventions actually served as a battleground within each party to nominate their respective candidates. However, conventions in recent times have become spectacles put on for the partisan bourgeois in an attempt to turn out votes in November and to garner support for the American electoral system. The latter function of the conventions seems to be even more pressing now than in recent history, as the faith in this electoral system seems to be corroding. With the failure to successfully occupy Iraq, a depressed economy throwing members of the middle class out of their homes, and unprecedented environmental devastation, the disasters caused by the current system are no longer contained to foreign countries and their peoples, but are instead being experienced by the working class within the belly of the beast. The spectacle put forth by the ruling class, that the government is serving public interests and that the population must be protected from terrorists at any cost, is being questioned by the public on the largest scale since September 11th.

When we as a movement decide to dedicate our efforts to disrupting events like the DNC/RNC, we must be aware that what we are disrupting is not the literal functioning of government or representative democracy, but rather the functioning of political spectacle. While it seems as though the street tactics that will be used in both mobilizations has already been determined by the movement in some sense (through the transparent organization of blockades, black blocs, etc), there still seems to be a gap in understanding as to how we as an antiauthoritarian movement relate to the spectacle of democracy and terrorism. It is essential that we develop praxis centered on how we hope to most effectively utilize our voice in relation to these ideas and effectively seize this opportunity to crack the foundations of faith in representative democracy and capitalism. If we want to maintain agency and have a voice outside of the confines of our own movement, we need to have a strategy for not only confronting this spectacle, but we must also be able to open dialogue about the complexity and beauty of our actions, politics and ideas.

The Theatre of Terror

While we hope to disrupt their spectacle of law an order, it is important for us to realize our role in the current global theatre of symbols and meaning manufactured by those in power under the current structure. Since the events of September 2001, the ruling class has created a new dominant narrative for a post 9/11 world. The people that occupy this new theatre of terror have been forcibly split into two distinct and opposite groups. On one side of the spectacle are the agents of order and security, the guardians of the status quo, and on the other side is an omnipresent network of anarchic terrorists bent on ending the modern world. Through the production and proliferation of this worldview (or spectacle), governments and corporations have had free reign to implement their policies of police-state-ism and exploitative neoliberal economics, justifying these policies as our last option to combat the ‘new enemy’ and protect democracy.

The military-entertainment complex, or the synergy between the police state, the terror spectacle, and capital, has successfully caused this binary worldview (us versus them, democracy versus terrorism) to become the dominant paradigm soon after the towers fell. According to this narrative, the American public has never faced an enemy so menacing, inhuman, chaotic and undefeatable until now. It seems that they would like you to forget about the threat of communism, which was portrayed remarkably like the terrorist networks of today and was used to implement very similar policies. This terror spectacle has given us such enlightening phrases as “freedom isn’t free”, and has allowed for unprecedented repression against radicals of all tendencies in the name of “law and order”. If we are to be successful in stopping more than just the buses carrying delegates at the DNC/RNC, we must be able to disrupt their spectacle and tear down the facades of the capitalist theatre as well. The most successful way to do this, I would argue, is not to create a counter-spectacle containing an opposite worldview, but rather pose the questions which inherently destabilize power and decenter the production of meaning in our society.

I think it is important to emphasize that the power of our movement lies not in the answers that we may imagine laying in a future utopian society, as this line of thinking has only produced authoritarian groups unwilling to challenge power structures and instead seek to only supplement who is in power. Instead, I am suggesting that we must find the power of our movement in questions: in the questioning of power, in the questioning of violence, and in the questioning of the status quo. It is through this radical gesture that we can hope to create room for new meanings and new social formations to exist in our cultural geography. So long as the people in power in our society continue to successfully control the definitions and boundaries of whom a terrorist is, and what type of response is appropriate to enact upon ‘them’, our movement will be marginalized and controlled by this modern spectacle. Similarly, as long as the state is able to define what violence is justified and what violence is not, our movement will be pushed to the fringes of society. One of our central objectives when confronting power at these sites of struggle must be to destabilize the ideas that support these institutions. Through the deliberate creation of cognitive dissonance, dissonance between their spectacle of law and order and our actions in the streets, we can profoundly alter the nature of discourse and thought in our society and not allow the theatre of terror to progress any further.

Breaking the Spell

When we begin to see a trend of European style ‘Summit Hopping’ as one of the defining qualities of the antiauthoritarian movement, we must question ourselves as to why it’s important to confront power at such sites in the first place. Rarely have we been successful at actually stopping the functioning of summits and conventions, and even if we accomplished such a disruption we would not achieve the nonhierarchical society we are fighting for. I believe that the answer lies not in our explicit tactical goals (in the case of the RNC/DNC blockading the streets), but rather in the long-term strategies for the movement beyond the conventions. The spectacle/reality that is being manufactured by both parties in the electoral system is becoming more and more of a farce in the eyes of the general public as the ruling class’ policies and military operations begin to self-destruct all around them. One of the functions of our manifestations is to cause a break in this narrative, essentially shifting the focus from their plans to deregulate the economy and ‘democratize’ the Middle East to our plans to transform North American society.

In the now infamous WTO protests in Seattle, windows were smashed, streets were blockaded and teargas hung low over the business district for days, but we failed as a movement to physically stop enough representatives to disrupt the decision-making process of the multitude of nation-states. Yet, it is important to note that despite our tactical failure to stop the meetings, Seattle is still remembered as one of North America’s greatest manifestations of resistance and continues to inspire new generations of radicals. The power of our movement blossomed not in the physical blockades of downtown or in the bricks thrown through “Nike Town” storefront windows, but rather in the images and symbolic significance of these events being propagated into the imaginations of the global radical Left. What this has meant on a very base level is that the current formations of power (in this case corporations and neoliberal governments) were vulnerable to attack. This new narrative that was created in the streets of Seattle showed that there were people resisting and forcing history in a new direction, very much away from the future desired by the heads of the WTO member-states. This particular effect has been described by people participating in the demonstrations as “breaking the spell”; which essentially was a strategy aimed at snapping people out of the spectacle of law and order. From the streets of Seattle, the WTO began its long decent towards impotency and summit protests began to blossom all around the world in what is now known as the anti-globalization movement.

Similarly, the mobilization against the G8 summit in the fields of Heiligendamm, Germany failed to stop the leaders of the world from holding their meetings, but that isn’t what was important about holding the demonstrations in the first place. Why the demonstrations were largely hailed as a success was not due to the fact that the roads were successfully blockaded, or that we witnessed the return of widespread militant tactics from the European Autonomen, but rather that a mass international manifestation of resistance confronted the global power-structures in the German countryside. In essence, it was the profound collective refusal of the current society that made the resistance to the G8 so significant to the global Left.

Occupying the Other Factory

In the coming month, the spectacle of representative democracy will be confronted head-on by the reality of our resistance, and the old capitalist society will be forced to stare into the eyes of our resistance. This is significant not because of the physical confrontations in the coming weeks but rather because the current structures’ spectacle of “law and order” will be challenged by our militant denial of the status quo. The only question that remains to be resolved is whether our collective refusal will speak louder and clearer than their conventions singing the praises of the American political system. While on one hand we must seriously consider which tactics are best suited to disrupt the functioning of the convention and to evade/fight the police, at the same time we must have the creativity and vision to act in ways which inspire and attack the current system on the level of spectacle and of ideas. Surely, if we spend so much time attacking and deconstructing the current formations of power, we must at the same time be able to articulate our envisioned alternatives to hierarchy and domination.

The events of September 11th did a great deal to immobilize the radical Left in North America, largely due to the theatre of terror echoed by every media outlet in the country. American society has been dominated by the current spectacle of “law and order”, and the Left has been unable to create narratives that effectively challenge the dominant spectacle. The ‘other factories’, the sites where these spectacles are manufactured and replicated, have been incredibly centralized in our society and have allowed for a massive concentration of power and wealth in very little time. Having strategies to occupy these “other factories”, the factories of spectacle and of theatre, should be as much of a part of our movement strategy as street tactics have been in the past.

It is absurd to suggest that in order to be successful we need to collectively consense on ‘our’ message during these summits – by doing so we would only silence one of the most powerful parts of our movement. It is precisely our plurality and our diversity that have led us to success in the past, and it is in these traits that we can find the vocal chords needed for future confrontations. Rather than speak and act using the stale voice of a vanguard (the authoritarian voice), we instead can choose to yell with the gravity of all of our voices. With the multitude of our critiques, poems, actions and ideas we can disrupt the spectacle at both conventions by exterminating the notion of national consensus and uniformity. We must be able to ask the questions that do not allow for simple answers, questions that are able to demolish assumptions and change the way the world is perceived. If we are to gain power as a movement, we must be able to move away from the spectacle of terror and towards a world of diversity, beauty and complexity. Our collective manifestation has to transcend marginalization and become more than the sum of our street actions – it must strive to create the vocabulary and poetry of a new society outside of the walls and categories of the old one.

Ian Alan Paul is an artist and writer currently living in San Francisco and is a member of the Friendly Fire Collective.

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By Michel Martin

So the House apologized for slavery and Jim Crow. An interesting move coming as it does 140 years after the end of slavery and many years after apologies for the atrocities committed against Native Americans and the internment of the Japanese — events that occurred before, during, and after slavery. On one level it’s just interesting if you’re interested in politics, as I am: Why this and why now? How did this come about?

Not so interesting to me were some of the objections. So predictable: I didn’t own any slaves, my family were immigrants and they didn’t own any so why should I apologize, and blah, blah, blah. As Katrina Browne, a descendent of this country’s most successful family of slave traders, said on this program last week: “If you wore cotton or put sugar in your tea, at some point you benefited from the slave trade.”

But let’s set that aside and focus on what is “not” being talked about — the other part of the apology— the apology for Jim Crow, the system of legally imposed, culturally sanctioned and violently enforced discrimination that lasted well into this century. The legal framework of Jim Crow was dismantled only a generation ago, which means that the people who lived with, suffered from and benefited from Jim Crow are very much with us today.

Just last month for example, Virginia unveiled a monument to the students who walked out of their all-black high school in Prince Edward County, Virginia to protest inferior conditions there — a case that later became part of the landmark Brown v. Board of Education case that was decided in 1959. But the monument also serves to remind us about what happened after Brown. Prince Edward actually closed the schools for five years rather than educate black and white kids together. Of course all-white private academies, funded by state and local tax credits, quickly sprang up for the white kids. But most black kids were left to fend for themselves until 1964, hardly ancient history. If that doesn’t merit an apology, well I don’t know what does.

Can I just tell you? What I think this debate is really about is acknowledging privilege.

In this country, we hate to acknowledge that any of us gets any sort of leg up at all. In fact, the more privileged you are, it seems the less likely you are to admit it. At tax time we complain about having to pay up but those of us who benefit rarely acknowledge the breaks we get as homeowners that renters don’t, or that married heterosexuals get that singles and same-sex couples do not. At college admission time people grouse about race preferences and conveniently forget all about legacies. And how about all those SAT prep courses, private tutoring, or the simple leg up that a stable, functional household gives you? The more you have of it, the more invisible privilege becomes — and then that becomes the entitlement of forgetting, as if it never happened at all.

I noticed this when — through the miracle of frequent flyer miles — I recently got a chance to take a trip in first class with my husband and kids. What an amazing experience. On my own, in coach, I was just another butt in a seat. But in the front cabin with the nice husband and two adorable tykes no less — why I was upholding Western civilization. There was none of this having to stand in a long line to check our bags, no begging for a jacket to be hung up, for a drink to be refreshed. Oh no, it was smooth sailing all the way. So this is how it is.

“This is how it is?,” I said to my husband, who frequents that part of the plane far more than I do. He looked at me puzzled and asked, “What’s the big deal?”

Exactly!

Via NPR

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Speech by Grace Lee Boggs, presented at the Left Forum Closing Plenary, Cooper Union, in New York, on March 16, 2008.

I have decided to talk about the next American Revolution because I believe it is not only the key to global survival but also the most important step we can take in this period to build a new, more human and more socially and ecologically responsible nation that all of us, in every walk of life, whatever our race, ethnicity, gender, faith or national origin, will be proud to call our own.

I also feel that it would be a shame if we left this historic gathering in this Great Hall, at this pivotal time in our country’s history – when the power structure is obviously unable to resolve the twin crises of global wars and global warming, when millions are losing their jobs and homes, when Obama’s call for change is energizing so many young people and independents, and when white workers in Ohio, Michigan and Pennsylvania are reacting like victims — without discussing the next American revolution.

Since it is hard to struggle for something which you haven’t struggled to define and name, my aim this evening, quite frankly, is to initiate impassioned discussions about the next American revolution everywhere, in groups, small and large.

****

I begin with some history. Forty years ago my late husband, Jimmy Boggs, and I started Conversations in Maine with our old friends and comrades, Freddy and Lyman Paine, to explore how a revolution in our time in our country would differ from the many revolutions that took place around the world in the early and mid-20th century.

We four had been members of the Johnson-Forest Tendency, a tiny group inside the Workers Party and the Socialist Workers Party, led by C.L.R.James and Raya Dunayevskaya. Lyman, an architect, and Freddy, a worker and organizer, had been in the radical movement since the
1930s. Jimmy, an African American born and raised in the deep agricultural South, had worked on the line at Chrysler for 28 years and was a labor and community activist and writer. I was an Asian American intellectual who had been inspired by the 1941 March on Washington movement to become a movement activist, and after spending ten years in New York studying Marx and Lenin with CLR and Raya, had moved to Detroit in 1953, married Jimmy Boggs and became involved in the struggles organically developing in the Detroit community.

Our mantra in the Johnson-Forest Tendency had been the famous paragraph in Capital where Marx celebrates “the revolt of the working class always increasing in numbers and united, organized and disciplined by the very mechanism of the process of capitalist production.” In the early 60s when the working class was decreasing rather than increasing under the impact of what we then called “automation,” we separated from CLR when he opposed our decision to rethink Marxism,

Our separation freed us to recognize unequivocally that we were coming to the end of the relatively short industrial epoch on which Marx’s epic analysis had been based. We could see clearly that the United States was in the process of transitioning to a new mode of production, based on new informational technologies, and that this transitioning was not only epoch-ending but epoch-opening, with cultural and political ramifications as far-reaching as those involved in the transition from Hunting and Gathering to Agriculture or from Agriculture to Industry.

As movement activists and theoreticians in the tumultuous year of 1968, we were also acutely conscious that in the wake of the civil rights movement, beginning with the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962, and the exploding anti-Vietnam war and women’s movements, new and more profound questions of our relationships with one another, with Nature, and with other countries were being raised with a centrality unthinkable in earlier revolutions.

Hence, as our conversations continued, we became increasingly convinced that our revolution in our country in the late 20th century had to be radically different from the revolutions that had taken place in pre-or-non-industrialized countries like Russia, Cuba, China or Vietnam. Those revolutions had been made not only to correct injustices but to achieve rapid economic growth. By contrast, as citizens of a nation which had achieved its rapid economic growth and prosperity at the expense of African Americans, Native Americans, other people of color, and peoples all over the world, our priority had to be correcting the injustices and backwardness of our relationships with one another, with other countries and with the Earth,

In other words, our revolution had to be for the purpose of accelerating our evolution to a higher plateau of humanity. That’s why we called our philosophy “Dialectical Humanism” as contrasted with the “Dialectical Materialism” of Marxism.

Six years later the practical implications of this somewhat abstract concept of an American revolution were spelled out by Jimmy in the chapter entitled “ Dialectics and Revolution” in Revolution and Evolution in the 20th Century (Monthly Review Press, 1974).

“The revolution to be made in the United States,” Jimmy wrote, nearly
30 years before 9/11, “will be the first revolution in history to require the masses to make material sacrifices rather than to acquire more material things. We must give up many of the things which this country has enjoyed at the expense of damning over one third of the world into a state of underdevelopment, ignorance, disease and early death.” Until that takes place, “this country will not be safe for the world and revolutionary warfare on an international scale against the United States will remain the wave of the present.”

“It is obviously going to take a tremendous transformation to prepare the people of the United States for these new social goals.” Jimmy continued. “But potential revolutionaries can only become true revolutionaries if they take the side of those who believe that humanity can be transformed.”

Thus, the American revolution, at this stage in our history and in the evolution of technology and of the human race, is not about Jobs or health insurance or making it possible for more people to realize the American Dream of upward mobility. It is about acknowledging that we Americans enjoy middle class comforts at the expense of other peoples all over the world. It is about living the kind of lives that will end the galloping inequality both inside this country and between the Global North and the Global South, and also slow down global warming. It is about creating a new American Dream whose goal is a higher humanity instead of the higher standard of living which is dependent upon Empire. About practicing a new more active, global and participatory concept of citizenship. About becoming the change we want to see in the world.

The courage, commitment and strategies required for this kind of revolution are very different from those required to storm the Kremlin or the White House. Instead of viewing the American people as masses to be mobilized in increasingly aggressive struggles for higher wages, better jobs or guaranteed health care, we must have the courage to challenge them and ourselves to engage in activities that build a new and better world by improving the physical, psychological, political and spiritual health of ourselves, our families, our communities, our cities, our world and our planet,

This means that it is not enough to organize mobilizations calling on Congress and the President to end the war in Iraq. We must also challenge the American people to examine why 9/11 happened and why so many people around the world who, while not supporting the terrorists, understand that they were driven to these acts by anger at the U.S. role in the world, e.g. supporting the Israeli occupation of Palestine, overthrowing or seeking to overthrow democratically-elected governments, and treating whole countries, the world’s peoples and Nature only as a resource enabling us to maintain our middle class way of life.

We have to help the American people find the moral strength to recognize that, although no amount of money can compensate for the countless deaths and indescribable suffering that our criminal invasion and occupation have caused the Iraqi people, we, the American people, have a responsibility to make the material sacrifices that will help them rebuild their infrastructure. We have to help the American people grow their souls (which is not a noun but a verb) enough to recognize that since we, who are only 4% of the world’s population, have been consuming 25% of the planet’s resources, we are the ones who must take the first big steps to reduce greenhouse emissions. We are the ones who must live more simply so that others can simply live.

Moreover, we need to begin creating ways to live more frugally and cooperatively NOW because as times get harder, we “good Americans,” if we view ourselves only as victims, can easily slip into scapegoating the “other” and goose-stepping behind a nationalist leader, as the “good Germans” did in the 1930s, with Hitler

This vision of an American revolution as transformation is the one projected by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in his April 4, 1967 anti-Vietnam war speech. As Vincent Harding, Martin’s close friend and colleague, put it recently on Democracy Now, King was calling on us to redeem the soul of America. Speaking for the weak, the poor, the despairing and the alienated, in our inner cities and in the rice paddies of Vietnam, he was urging us to become a more mature people by making a radical revolution not only against racism but against materialism and militarism. He was challenging us to e was “rededicate ourselves to the long and bitter, but beautiful, struggle for a new world.”

King was assassinated before he could devise concrete ways to move us towards this radical revolution of values. But why haven’t we who think of ourselves as American radicals picked up the torch? Is it because a radical revolution of values against racism, militarism and materialism is beyond our imaginations, even though we are citizens of a nation with 700 military bases whose unbridled consumerism imperil the planet?

***

In Detroit we are engaged in this “long and beautiful struggle for a new world,” not because of King’s influence (we identified more with Malcolm) but because we have learned through our own experience that just changing the color of those in political power was not enough to stem the devastation of our city resulting from deindustrialization.

I don’t have time this evening to tell you the story of our Detroit-City of Hope campaign. We hosted a panel about it yesterday morning and you can read about it in the Boggs Center broadsheet.

Our campaign involves rebuilding, redefining and respiriting Detroit from the ground up: growing food on abandoned lots, reinventing education to include children in community-building, creating co-operatives to produce local goods for local needs, developing Peace Zones to transform our relationships with one another in our homes and on our streets, replacing punitive justice with Restorative Justice programs to keep non-violent offenders in our communities and out of prisons that not only misspend billions much needed for roads and schools but turn minor offenders into hardened criminals.

It is a multigenerational campaign, involving the very old as well as the very young, and all the inbetweens, especially the Millennial generation, born in the late 1970s and 1980s, whose aptitude with the new communications technology empowers them to be remarkably self-inventive and multi-tasking and to connect and reconnect 24/7 with individuals near and far.

Despite the huge differences in local conditions, our Detroit-City of Hope campaign has more in common with the struggles of the Zapatistas in Chiapas than with the 1917 Russian Revolution because it involves a paradigm shift in the concept of revolution.

One way to understand the paradigm shift is by contrasting our vision of health in a revolutionary America with the health care programs offered by the Democratic presidential front-runners.

Hillary’s and Obama’s “health care” programs are really insurance programs having more to do with feeding the already monstrous medical-industrial complex than with our physical, mental and spiritual health. By contrast, once we understand that our schools are in such crisis because they were created a hundred years ago in the industrial epoch to prepare children to become cogs in the economic machine; once we recognize that our challenge in the 21st century is to engage our children from K-12 in problem-solving and community-building activities, our children and young people will become participants in caring for their own health and that of our families and communities. Eating food they’ve grown for themselves, creating and sharing information from the Net, and organizing health festivals for the community, they will not only be caring for their own health. They will be helping to heal our communities.

This kind of transformation is what the next American revolution is about. It is not a single event but a process. It involves all of us, from many different walks of life, ethnicities, national origins, sexual orientations, faiths. At the same time, based on our experiences in Detroit and the panels I attended at this weekend’s Forum, I see the Millennial generation playing a pivotal role. As Frantz Fanon put it in The Wretched of the Earth, “Each generation, coming out of obscurity, must define its mission and fulfill or betray it.”

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By Steve Yip

At the 1968 Mexico City Olympics, two Black athletes, Tommie Smith and John Carlos thrust their fists in the air on the victory stand in a symbolic gesture against the oppressive treatment of Black people. Forty years later, on July 16, they will be the recipients of the Arthur Ashe Courageous Award at the ESPY Awards in Los Angeles.1 The Awards will be televised on Sunday evening, July 20. Previous recipients of this award include Billie Jean King, the tennis player who fought for equality of women in tennis, Cathy Freeman, the Australian 400 meter Olympic champion, who struggled for aboriginal rights, Muhammad Ali, and Kevin and Pat Tillman. Pat was the pro-football player who was killed in Afghanistan by friendly fire and Kevin, his brother, who opposes the crimes of the Bush regime and fought to expose the government cover-up of the incident when his brother was killed.2

This is the story of why Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised their fists at the 1968 Olympics and the significance of this historic stand.

It was 1968.

One of those times where it seemed like a whole century of events gets crammed into a few months or even weeks.

Black neighborhoods across the U.S., smoldering with discontent, burst into flames of rebellion. Across the ocean, students in Paris shut down the university. Chicago police attacked protesters at the Democratic National Convention. National liberation struggles raged in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in socialist China was in full swing. Headlines reflected intense conflict, winds of change, and sky high dreams. The Vietnam War… the assassination of Martin Luther King… The Black Panthers… hundreds of thousands demonstrating against poverty, war, racism, and women’s oppression.

It was on this backdrop that Tommie Smith and John Carlos stepped onto the stage of history and made their mark.

It was as part of this whole struggle for a better world that these two men took a courageous stand that today, 40 years later, is something to remember, cherish, and learn from.

Taking a Stand in Speed City

As star sprinters, for Smith and Carlos it was all about speed. They were not only tremendous athletes, but their whole style reflected the attitude of the times—sporting shades as they sprinted around the track. Both men were world-class athletes: Smith held 11 world records simultaneously, including in the 200 and 400 meters, some individually and some as a member of a relay team. John Carlos, at one point, held the 100-meter world record.

Tommie Smith was the seventh in a family of 12 children, growing up in Clarksville, Texas. His father was a sharecropper and Tommie got strong working in the fields. He remembers, as a kid, going to the store to buy ice cream and getting harassed by white racists who told him to “go back to the jungle.”

John Carlos grew up in Harlem and got involved in civil rights and became an activist at a very young age. In high school he was already a track star and got a scholarship to East Texas State. He tells how, “About two minutes after I got there, I noticed that my name changed from John Carlos to Boy.”

The two men ended up going to school at San Jose State College (now San Jose State University) in California. They joined what became known as “Speed City”—named for the collection of world-class sprinters trained by the innovative coach, Lloyd C. “Bud” Winter. It was here that athletes, both Black and white, helped form the Olympic Project for Human Rights (OPHR), which included athletes trying to make the 1968 Olympic team.

The OPHR’s founding statement pointed out that “the oppression of Afro-Americans is greater than it ever was” and the athletes attempted to form a boycott of the Olympics in order to advance their demands. Three key demands were: (1) “Restore Muhammad Ali’s title” that had been removed because he refused to go into the army and fight in Vietnam,” (2) “Remove Avery Brundage as head of the U.S. Olympic Committee” because he was a white supremacist and a Nazi sympathizer, and (3) “Disinvite South Africa and Rhodesia” in order to support the black freedom struggles in these apartheid states.

When the International Olympic Committee decided not to allow South Africa and Rhodesia in the Olympics, many of the Black athletes decided not to boycott the Olympics, but began to look for other ways to protest.

As Smith and Carlos, along with others, prepared for the 1968 Olympics, controversy continued to swirl about whether there would be—and whether there should be—forms of protests by Black athletes at the games. Things divided out sharply. Some Black athletes were saying that they didn’t want to make such a sacrifice, that they really wanted to get a gold medal. While others argued that the times demanded—and this was an opportunity to make—a strong statement to the world about the condition of Black people in the United States, even if this meant jeopardizing your scholarship or career.

This was the spirit of the times. These were the kinds of big questions lots of people, especially the youth, were confronting: What was your life going to be about? Were you going to just “look out for number one”? Or was your life going to count for something bigger? Were you going to just try and etch out a life for yourself in this messed up society? Or were you going to stand with the people of the world and join the struggle for liberation?

The very idea of Black athletes taking such a defiant, rebellious stand elicited angry reactionary responses and ugly threats. Athletes involved with OPHR received death threats and hate mail. And Avery Brundage, the president of the International Olympic Committee who was an open racist, publicly stated: “I don’t think any of these boys will be foolish enough to demonstrate at the Olympic games and I think if they do they’ll be promptly sent home.”

At the same time, the strong stand by OPHR put a real pole out in society. And their cause got a lot of support and attracted people in society very broadly who saw this as part of the overall struggle for a more just society. That summer, leading up to the Olympics, many people started wearing the Olympic Project for Human Rights button as a way to show mass support and say to the world that this really mattered.

Victory and Defiance in Mexico City

October 2, ten days before the Games opened, the Mexican security forces massacred hundreds of students in Mexico City who were occupying the National University. When athletes arrived in the city for the Olympics, the government wanted to give an image of order and control and the Olympic Stadium was completely surrounded by armed soldiers. (See “The Year of the 1968 Olympics: A World of Struggle and Turmoil,” online at revcom.us.)

Among the Black athletes there was a lot of tension and anticipation about what was—or wasn’t—going to happen. Larry James, who won the Silver Medal in the 400 meter race, expressed what many of the Black Olympic athletes were thinking when he recalled: “When you go to the games you take yourself with you and what you do and how you do it is going to have an impact.”

The performance of the United States men’s track team was astounding. They won 7 of 12 gold medals and smashed five records. Tommie Smith and John Carlos finished first and third, respectively, in the 200 meters with Smith setting a world record.

The moment came when they were getting ready to take the victory stand. They were still trying to figure out what to do. At the last minute, they decided to put on black gloves. Peter Norman, the second place winner from Australia, wore an OPHR button on the victory stand. Norman later recounted, “I believed in human rights, I believed in what these two guys were about to do.”

Smith and Carlos stood on the stand with no shoes, their feet only in black socks. As the national anthem began, both bowed their heads and raised their fists, covered with the black gloves, in the air. Tommie Smith had a black scarf around his neck and John Carlos wore beads.

Smith later recalled, “The black fist in the air was only in recognition of those who had gone, it was a prayer of solidarity, it was a cry for help by my fellow brothers and sisters in this country, who had been lynched, who had been shot, who had been bitten by dogs, who water hoses had been set on, a cry for freedom. You could almost hear the wind blowing around my fist.”

The entire world saw this cry for freedom.

These two men courageously put the struggle of the people ahead of their own personal interests. And the power of their simple but profound gesture tremendously inspired people—then, and ever since, for the last four decades.

Immediately afterwards, in an interview with Howard Cosell, Smith explained the symbolism in their protest: “My raised right hand stood for the power in black America. Carlos’s left hand stood for the unity of black America. Together, they formed an arch of unity and power. The black scarf around my neck stood for black pride. The black socks with no shoes stood for black poverty in racist America. The totality of our effort was the regaining of black dignity.”3

John Carlos, in a recent interview with Dave Zirin, said, “The beads were for those individuals that were lynched, or killed that no one said a prayer for, that were hung tarred. It was for those thrown off the side of the boats in the middle passage. All that was in my mind.”

The International Olympic Committee board met the very next morning. They threatened to disqualify the whole track team for the remainder of the games. The decision was made to send Smith and Carlos home and ban them from the Olympic games for life.

The press was relentless with their attacks on Smith and Carlos. The Los Angeles Times accused them of a “Nazi-like salute.” Time Magazine changed the Olympic motto to “Angrier, Nastier, Uglier.” Sportscaster Brent Musburger called them, “Black-skinned storm troopers.”

Despite the fact that they were being attacked broadly for what they did, Smith and Carlos had many supporters, including the Olympic Crew Team, all white and entirely from Harvard, who issued the statement: “We, as individuals, have been concerned about the place of the black man in American society in their struggle for equal rights. As members of the U.S. Olympic team, each of us has come to feel a moral commitment to support our black teammates in their efforts to dramatize the injustices and inequities which permeate out society.”

Once back home, the two athletes received more than 100 death threats each. Both found it difficult to get a job. John Carlos said in an interview with Dave Zirin, “We were under tremendous economic stress. I took any job I could find. I wasn’t too proud. Menial jobs, security jobs, gardener, caretaker, whatever I could do to try to make ends meet.”

To the masses of oppressed people and others who hate the way things are in this country and in the world, Smith and Carlos were heroes because they took responsibility for telling the world the way things are and they never backed down from that stand.

In his autobiography, Silent Gesture, Tommie Smith answers the question why it is important for celebrities to speak out on social and political issues. He says, “…if you are one of the world’s greatest in a particular field, as I was in athletics, you have an avenue, and you have a responsibility to use it, especially if you have something to say about society and how people are treated, people who are not in the position to say it themselves or who don’t have the ability to say it.”4

In 2002 Erik Grotz, a white student at San Jose State, organized to raise funds for a statue of Smith and Carlos when he found out about them and that they attended the school. “I couldn’t understand why the campus didn’t acknowledge their efforts as student activists,” said Grotz. “It would be an inspiration to other students. It would prove to them they can make an impact now.”

The 20-foot statue of Smith and Carlos on the victory stand was unveiled in October 2005. The second place spot on the podium, where Peter Norman was standing, was left open, so people could stand there to have their pictures taken with Smith and Carlos. Norman attended the unveiling, where he continued to support what Smith and Carlos had done 37 years prior. Norman was vilified when he returned to Australia after the 1968 Olympics for wearing the OPHR button on the medal stand. He, too, was not able to find a job, and when the Olympics came to Australia in 2000, he was not allowed to be a part of any events, despite the fact that he was one of the greatest Olympic sprinters ever.

Norman died in 2006, and Smith and Carlos, who continued to stay in touch with Norman throughout the years, were pallbearers at his funeral. About Norman, John Carlos said, “At least me and Tommie had each other when we came home. When Peter went home, he had to deal with a nation by himself. He never wavered, never denied that he was up there with us for a purpose and he never said ‘I’m sorry’ for his involvement. That’s indicative of who the man was.”

1968 was a high tide of struggle against the oppression of Black people in this country, and what Tommie Smith and John Carlos did at the Olympics is one of the greatest symbols of this struggle. In today’s world acts of courage, like what Smith and Carlos did, stand out and really do make a difference. And there is a real need, now more than ever, for people to follow such footsteps—to dare to go against the tide, defy the oppressive status quo and fight to bring about revolutionary change.

To be recognized as the recipients of the Arthur Ashe Courageous Award just brings that point home, and Tommie Smith said it well at the unveiling at the statue where he expressed being proud of the past, but also acknowledging the challenges before us. “I don’t feel vindicated,” Smith said. “To be vindicated means that I did something wrong. I didn’t do anything wrong. I just carried out a responsibility. We felt a need to represent a lot of people who did more than we did but had no platform, people who suffered long before I got to the victory stand….We’re celebrated as heroes by some, but we’re still fighting for equality.”

*****

Tommie Smith and John Carlos never got the pro contracts or the big endorsements. They didn’t “get paid” off their tremendous victory. Instead, they used their moment in the limelight to make a powerful statement about justice… and to move forward the struggle for liberation.

The powers-that-be made them pay dearly for standing up.

But they’ve never renounced it. They’ve never backed down. They’ve never apologized.

Was it worth it? Worth it to sacrifice so much to strike a blow for freedom?

Well, ask yourself this: Who does history remember? Who do the masses cherish?

The ones who go for self?

Or those who take a stand for the people, no matter what the cost?

NOTES

1. Arthur Ashe was the first Black tennis player to win the U.S. Open Tennis championship in 1968 and the Wimbledon title in 1975. He was the first African-American player named to the U.S. Davis Cup team and later was appointed captain of the Davis Cup team.

In 1983, along with Harry Belafonte, he founded Artists and Athletes Against Apartheid, which worked toward raising awareness of apartheid policies and lobbying for sanctions and embargoes against the South African government. In 1985, he was arrested outside the South African embassy in Washington during an anti-apartheid demonstration. He was also arrested during a protest against U.S. policy toward Haitian refugees outside the White House.

He contracted AIDS after he received an HIV infected blood transfusion following bypass surgery. In his memoir, Days of Grace, he wrote, “I do not like being the personification of a problem, much less a problem involving a killer disease, but I know I must seize these opportunities to spread the word.” In the last year of his life, he founded the Arthur Ashe Foundation for the Defeat of AIDS, which raised money for research into treating, curing and preventing AIDS, the end goal being the eradication of the disease.

On February 6, 1993 Arthur Ashe died of AIDS-related pneumonia in New York at the age of 49. His funeral was attended by nearly 6,000 people. The U.S. Tennis Association named the center stadium at the USTA National Tennis Center the Arthur Ashe Stadium. [back]

2. See Revolution #68, November 5, 2006, “Kevin Tillman and the Killing Lies of the U.S. Army.” [back]

3. Silent Gesture: The Autobiography of Tommie Smith, Tommie Smith with David Steele, Temple University Press, 2007, p. 173. [back]

4. Silent Gesture, p. 38. [back]

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