Raúl Zibechi in the United States!
Are you in New York? Because if you are, you need to cancel all of your plans for tonight and head over to Bluestockings to catch Uruguayan political analyst Raúl Zibechi, in the United States for the first time since the ’80s, on a mini-east coast tour to discuss the first English edition of one of his many books: Dispersing Power: Social Movements as Anti-State Forces, published this summer by AK Press.
Dispersing Power provides a prescient analysis of social struggles in Bolivia and the forms of community power instituted by that country’s indigenous Aymara. Like the movements it describes, the book explores new ways of doing politics beyond the state, gracefully mapping the “how” of revolution, offering valuable lessons to activists and new theoretical frameworks for understanding how social movements can and do operate independently of state-centered models for social change. This new translation by Ramor Ryan (author of Clandestines) captures the intensity of the original Spanish-language edition, and includes a preface by John Holloway, a preface by Ben Dangl (who is also on the road, and missed Raúl by a day in NYC), and an afterword by Colectivos Situaciones.
Zibechi has already spoken to packed houses in Baltimore (at Johns Hopkins and at the Renewing the Anarchist Tradition Conference), in Boston (at Encuentro 5), and in Amherst (Hampshire College & UCONN). He wraps up his first US tour in New York, with an event tonight (Thursday, November 11) at Bluestockings @ 7PM, and then another one tomorrow at the CUNY Graduate Center, @ 2PM. Don’t miss this opportunity!
If you’re not in the NYC area, then you might want to check out this recording Red Emma’s made of Zibechi’s talk at Johns Hopkins last week. His lecture there was entitled Suma Qamaña (Good Living) as an Alternative to the Crisis of our Civilization.
AK Press is already hard at work at additional translations of Zibechi’s works into English, so stay tuned for more! We’ll be trying to bring him back to the US in the Spring for a West Coast tour …