Posted on August 4th, 2010 in AK Distribution
Well, friends, another month has come and gone and I’m so relieved I am no longer in elementary or high school or I’d be sooooo depressed that summer is half over. (“It’s not fair!!” *tears*) Anyway, to help you all with your midsummer depression, here’s some new things to buy on the Internet!!! That always helps, no? These little beauties are all 50% off during August!
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A History of the French Anarchist Movement, 1917 to 1945
By David Berry
David Berry’s study is the first English-language evaluation of the development and lessons of the French anarchist movement between the wars. Using an impressive array of archival sources and personal interviews, Berry’s original research explores the debates and growing pains of a massive, working-class, revolutionary movement facing great obstacles and uncertainty. Focusing on the organized wings of the movement—the anarcho-communist and syndicalist groups—it offers a ringside seat to the legacy of the First International, the upheaval of the Russian Revolution and subsequent Bolshevik treachery, and the fight against fascism.
Now just $10.00!
The Spanish Anarchists: The Heroic Years 1868-1936
By Murray Bookchin
This popular, well-researched book opens with the Italian Anarchist Fanelli’s stirring visit to Spain in 1868 and traces the movement’s checkered but steady growth for the next seventy years. Intimate portraits are vividly juxtaposed with striking descriptions of events: peasant revolts, labor unrest, the saintly Fermin Salvochea, official repression, the terrorists, and the evolution of exciting organizational forms. Bookchin weaves his way geographically through the whole of Spain, revealing the shadings and subtleties of each small section. From the peasants of Andalusia to the factory workers of Barcelona, the Spanish people—and their exuberant belief in and struggles for freedom and self-determination—come alive.
Now just $11.50!
Another Dinner is Possible
By Isy and Mike
Another Dinner Is Possible is not your average vegan cookbook. It’s a guide to developing a healthier relationship with the food we eat and the planet we inhabit. And it is an exploration of how food affects us on all levels and how we can improve our practical and political relationship to it.
The recipes use easy-to-find and easy-to-prepare ingredients combined in unexpected ways. All the basics of everyday cooking are covered for those just starting out in the kitchen (with detailed instructions and essential tips on everything from sharpening knives to choosing the right variety of potato), but even more seasoned chefs will find a surprising number of must-try recipes for original concoctions and vegan versions of old favorites.
Now just $12.50!
Anarcho-Syndicalism: Theory and Practice
By Rudolf Rocker
In 1937, at the behest of Emma Goldman, Rudolf Rocker (1873-1958) penned this political and philosophical masterpiece as an introduction to the ideals fueling the Spanish social revolution and resistance to capitalism the world over. Within, he offers an introduction to anarchist ideas, a history of the international workers movement, and an outline of the strategies and tactics embraced at the time (internationalism, federalism, anti-militarism, direct action, sabotage, and the General Strike). A prolific writer and speaker, Rocker was one of the most beloved and dedicated anarchists of his time.
Oh my lord! Now just $6.50!
Scum Manifesto
By Valerie Solanas
Valerie Solanas gained underground notoriety when she shot, and nearly killed, Andy Warhol. Her classic Scum Manifesto went through several self-published and small-press editions before sinking into obscurity. Valerie Solanas gained posthumous international celebrity status with the release of the film I Shot Andy Warhol. Wonderful advocation of the overthrow of the government, elimination of the money system, and the destruction of the male sex. A truly awesome polemic. An essential text. Includes a biography of the author by Freddie Baer.
Now a measly $4.00!
Shutdown: The Rise and Fall of Direct Action to Stop the War
Directed by Sticks and Stones
On March 20, 2003—the day after the Iraq war started—San Francisco was brought to a grinding halt by thousands of activists who occupied the streets to oppose the war. It was a mass uprising that forced the police to declare the financial district “shut down.” The planning and outreach coordinated by Direct Action to Stop the War (DASW), filled downtown San Francisco with approximately 15,000 people clogging traffic, stopping business as usual, communicating with passersby, and creating a pandemonium that lasted for several days. But neither DASW nor the mass resistance outlasted Iraq’s occupation. This DVD chronicles how DASW successfully organized to shut down a major US city and how they failed to effectively maintain the organization to fight the war machine and end the occupation of Iraq.
Now just $7.50!
Also, while I have your ear I’ll let you know that all books by Arbeiter Ring will be 25% off through the month. Check it out!
Posted on August 3rd, 2010 in AK Authors!, Happenings
THIS SATURDAY! BE THERE.
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Of Friends & Whirlwinds: Contemporary Radical Currents in the United States: with the Team Colors Collective, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Chris Carlsson, and other friends.
Saturday August 07
7:00 PM – 9:00 PM
Saturday, August 7th, 7pm
AK Press Warehouse – 674 A 23rd St. Oakland, CA
http://www.akpress.org
Explore contemporary radical currents with the Team Colors Collective and celebrate their recently released AK Press title, Uses of a Whirlwind: Movement, Movements, and Contemporary Radical Currents in the United States!
Uses of a Whirlwind, an edited collection of more then thirty contributors, is more than just a snapshot of current activity, organizing, ideas, and questions circulating among today’s radicals. It’s an opportunity for organizers, theorists, strategists, and movement elders to share and connect, to speak honestly of the challenges before us, to articulate new demands and possibilities in the ongoing war against state and capital.
A short reading and presentation will be followed by a discussion period, and we ask participants to bring stories and reflection of their own organizing to the event.
Copies of Uses of a Whirlwind will be available, as will the recent Team Colors companion volume titled Wind(s) from Below: Radical Community Organizing to Make a Revolution Possible; visit the collections website at: http://www.whirlwinds.info.
Posted on August 2nd, 2010 in Recommended Reading
Anyone out there read Deer Hunting with Jesus: Dispatches from America’s Class War by Joe Bageant? It was published back in 2007, but the book has legs. I read it a couple years ago and have passed it off to numerous friends. If you haven’t read it, pick up a copy.
I keep up with Joe’s writings here and there and came across this clip of him. Hopefully a couple minutes of Joe telling his truths will convince you to check out the book. You’ll either “get it” or you won’t (and if you don’t, maybe you should). After reading the book you might see why Joe and the people of his community aren’t anarchists. …And you just might realize that they would be, if so many anarchists weren’t so distant from their everyday concerns. Enjoy.
Posted on July 30th, 2010 in About AK
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Posted on July 30th, 2010 in About AK
Today is my last day working at AK Press.
After spending the last several years answering the phone (“hello, AK Press”), learning all the best book-packing strategies so customers are impressed at how not-damaged everything is when it arrives (please tell me you are impressed!), tabling all kinds of events around North America, and, yes, collecting energy drinks from the corner store, it’s time for me to move on.
Naturally, I wanted to put something out there to say a bit about my experience here at AK and how thankful I am to have had this job and worked with so many amazing folks (both collective members and customers). But, a heartfelt and serious letter or essay seemed too stuffy and, let’s face it, anxiety provoking to produce. So instead I give you this not-as-serious (but no less heartfelt) comic, based on a beloved children’s book. My gift to you, AK and friends.
*To those unfamiliar with anything referenced above, I recommend you stop by the Oakland warehouse if ever you get the chance. The box pile and Durruti portrait will be waiting for you!
Also, if you want to keep in touch and see what I’m working on in the future (hint: one of the things I’m working on is a book—you haven’t seen the last of me, AK Press Distribution!!), you can “friend” me here.
Posted on July 28th, 2010 in AK Authors!
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This video has been around since March, so I suspect I might be one of the few people who hadn’t seen it until now. In case there are any more of you out there, take a look. It’s Noam Chomsky answering questions from reddit.com readers (and asking them one of his own at the end).
The first six minutes or so is his take on the field of cognitive science. Interesting stuff that actually relates to the rest of what he talks about. But if you’re only interested in the straight-up political verbiage, the rest is all about anarchism—its problems, its possibilities, and the sort of future trajectory that Noam thinks it should take.
Very clear, straightforward, and highly recommended … especially for those who are unclear about his position on (and deconstruction of) the generally oversimplified “reform vs. revolution” question.
Here’s a link to reddit’s anarchist community, which was partially responsible for setting up the interview: http://reddit.com/r/anarchism
Click here for a list of Chomsky titles that AK Press carries. And also check out the best-selling (okay, for us) Chomsky on Anarchism (also available in Spanish).
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Posted on July 26th, 2010 in AK Authors!, Happenings
| A couple of AK-related audio recordings have appeared on the almighty Interweb over the last week or so. I can’t embed either in this post, so you’ll just have to follow the links, comrade. |
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1) New World from Below Collaborative Book Party
As we’ve mentioned on this blog before, AK Press was one of ten collectives that sponsored an anarchist workshop track at the US Social Forum (A New World from Below). This also included a convergence space where NWFB held a shindig celebrating anarchist authors, editors, and publishers. The lovely folks at the defenestrator recorded it (well, they recorded the talks, not the drinking and partying and such). Go here and scroll to the bottom of the page (though you might want to stop along the way and listen to one of their many interviews) .
The event featured:
- Benjamin Holtzman, editor of SICK: A Collaborative Zine on Physical Illness (Microcosm Publishing, 2010)
- Cindy Milstein, author of Anarchism and Its Aspirations (AK Press, 2010)
- Jeff Conant, author of A Poetics of Resistance: The Revolutionary Public Relations of the Zapatista
Insurgency (AK Press, 2010)
- Jordan Flaherty, author of Floodlines: Community and Resistance from Katrina to the Jena 6 (Haymarket, 2010)
- Josh MacPhee, editor of Paper Politics: Socially Engaged Printmaking Today (PM Press, 2009)
- Justseeds Artists’ Cooperative, authors of Firebrands: Portraits from the Americas (Microcosm Publishing, 2010)
- Seth Tobocman, author and artist of Understanding the Crash (Soft Skull, 2010)
- Team Colors Collective, editors of and contributors to Uses of a Whirlwind: Movement, Movements, and Contemporary Radical Currents in the United States (AK Press, 2010)
- Turbulence Collective, authors of What Would It Mean to Win? (PM Press, 2010)
2) David Graeber on the Authority Smashing Hour
The ever-fascinating David Graeber made an appearance on the Authority Smashing Hour‘s show. He was supposed to share the bill with Uri Gordon, but Uri had technical difficulties, so it’s a full hour of David talking about two of his AK Press books (Possibilities and Direct Action), his forthcoming book on Melville House Press, Debt: The First 5,000 Years, and lots more. The ASH site seems to be under renovation, but you can find the interview here (it’s the one that happened on July 15, 2010).
Posted on July 23rd, 2010 in AK Allies, Reviews
The International Socialist Organization recently produced yet another off-the-mark critique of “contemporary anarchism” in their journal International Socialist Review. Actually, that’s not entirely fair: Eric Kerl’s article does demonstrate more familiarity with anarchist theory and practice than many I’ve read, and he does occasionally raise some valid points about certain contemporary and historical strands of anarchism. But he misunderstands the big picture completely.
Enter Tom Wetzel, who wrote a thorough and well-informed response for Ideas & Action, a publication of the Workers Solidarity Alliance. Read on…
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Review: International Socialist Review on
“Contemporary Anarchism”
Tom Wetzel
The word “anarchism” is a rather vague word that covers such a wide variety of political views and approaches it is often hard to see how they have anything in common. This means it is also probably not very productive to produce “critiques” of anarchism that lump the many different viewpoints together. This problem is on display in the most recent critique of “contemporary anarchism” offered up by the International Socialist Organization in their magazine ISR1. A weakness of the article is that it offers only brief pit stops at the various anarchist or libertarian socialist tendencies.
Unlike some previous ISO critiques, this article, written by Eric Kerl, does make an effort to discuss the historically dominant form of libertarian socialist politics — revolutionary syndicalism and, in general, forms of libertarian socialism oriented to working class struggle and mass organizing. But it’s treatment is superficial.
Syndicalism & Self-emancipation
A problem with Kerl’s discussion of revolutionary syndicalism is that he never says what it is. This is particularly relevant to our organization, Workers Solidarity Alliance, which describes itself as a “social anarchist organization in the syndicalist tradition.” (I use the terms “social anarchism” and “libertarian socialism” interchangeably.)
Libertarian (or anarcho-) syndicalism is based on the principle that “the emancipation of the working class is the work of the workers themselves.” This means workers need to have a movement they control in order to be able to change the society and gain power.
Syndicalism is both program and strategy. The goal of syndicalism is the creation of a form of self-managed socialism where workers manage the industries, the land and means of production are owned by the whole society, and the old hierarchical government apparatus is replaced with a new form of popular power — rooted in the direct democracy of assemblies in workplaces and neighborhoods. The profit system would be replaced by production for direct benefit.
To escape the present system of oppression and exploitation, syndicalists advocate for the development of a certain kind of labor movement — controlled by its members, works to widen solidarity, looks out for the interests of the working class as a whole, extends a hand across borders to coordinate struggles with workers in other countries, opposes racism and sexism, rejects “partnership” with the employers, remains independent of the political parties and professional politicians, rejects the imperialist policy of the American federal state, and works to develop an alliance with other social movements.
Although syndicalism of the early 1900s was focused on struggles at the point of production, libertarian socialism’s emphasis on mass struggle can also be applied to struggle and organizing in the community. This is why Lucien van der Walt and Michael Schmidt describe this tradition as “mass anarchism” in their recent book Black Flame.
Syndicalism is an alternative to the Leninist strategy of a political party capturing state power, and then implementing its program top-down through the hierarchies of the state. In our view, this would lead inevitably to the empowerment of a bureaucratic class. The working class would continue to be dominated and exploited.
Kerl states his agreement with the principle of “workers self-emancipation” but fails to acknowledge that this principle is central also for libertarian socialism. I think this leads him to misunderstand “prefigurative politics.” For revolutionary syndicalists, the development of a mass workers movement where the organizations and struggles are “self-managed” by the workers themselves is “prefigurative” of a society self-managed by the working class. This is why the IWW spoke of “building the new society in the shell of the old.”
Moreover, it’s hard to see how a socialism based on direct, democratic workers’ self-management of industry and society could come about if these practices are not first developed and gain deep support within the working class. Only if the working class becomes used to running its own organizations is it less likely to lead to “condescending saviors” ruling over us.
After discussing Black Flame‘s emphasis on syndicalism, Kerl objects by saying: “anarchism can’t be reduced to its class struggle wing.” The problem here is that Kerl is falling back on the ISO’s fallacious tendency to group together all those who call themselves “anarchists”…as if they were all singing the same song. The authors of Black Flame don’t say that mass/class struggle social anarchism is the only form of anarchism. What they do say, and what we say, is that support for syndicalism is based on an orientation to mass struggles of the working class and oppressed…and this is central to our social anarchism.
Eric Kerl’s article offers no criticism of revolutionary syndicalism as a strategy. Kerl’s only comment is that syndicalism is broader than anarchism because some revolutionary syndicalists have been Marxists. Examples are the IWW’s “Big Bill” Haywood or Antonio Gramsci during the mass upheavals in Italy in 1919-20. When they were syndicalists, both Haywood and Gramsci were in fact libertarian Marxists, not (yet) advocates of the sort of Leninist Marxism advocated by the ISO. Libertarian socialist ideas in fact had significant influence in the left-wing of various socialist parties in that era.
As Carl Levy documents in Gramsci and the Anarchists, the Italian Socialist Party was highly influenced by libertarian socialist ideas. This is why it was possible for Gramsci’s branch of the party to work closely with the social anarchist Turin Libertarian Group. The factory council movement built in Turin in 1918-20 — a radical shop stewards movement based on workplace assemblies — was based on this alliance. The construction of a “self-managing” worker mass movement was itself a living application of libertarian socialist ideas.
Kerl is trying to draw a hard and fast barrier between “Marxism” and libertarian socialism…as if the ISO’s Leninist brand of Marxism is the only choice for people who find value in Marx’s ideas. In fact there has been an historical two-way street of influence between Marxism and anarchism. Mark Leier’s sympathetic biography of Michael Bakunin argues that there was a substantial area of agreement between Bakunin and Marx…more than people usually realize.
In the wake of the Russian revolution, many of the libertarian Marxist syndicalists like Haywood and Gramsci did gravitate to Leninism. In an earlier ISR article, ISOer Lance Selfa put it this way:
“In a period when real world, revolutionary events put anarchist theories to the test, the theories came up short. That was why one group of anarchists whose libertarian ideas were most connected to workers’ struggles–people like Victor Serge, Alfred Rosmer, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Lucy Parsons, and Big Bill Haywood–actually left the ranks of anarchists and joined the Communist Parties. They, like thousands of rank-and-file IWW members, came to the conclusion that only collective, mass struggle could attain socialism and that only a revolutionary party could organize that struggle.” (April 2004)
Of course, “collective mass struggle” is what syndicalism and working class-based libertarian socialism is all about. Nor do we reject revolutionary political organization.
Before he became a Bolshevik, Victor Serge had been an individualist anarchist who backed activities like robbing banks — is this a form of “working people’s struggle”? Nor is there any proof that Lucy Parsons abandoned anarchism or joined the Communist Party. Nonetheless, Selfa has a point.
The Bolshevik regime in Russia was hyped as a form of “workers power” and a “successful revolution”. With the tide of radical left opinion running that way, quite a few syndicalists were drawn to the new Leninist parties. But now we have the advantage of a century of hindsight. The various Leninist party-controlled revolutions developed dismal bureaucratic class systems and one-party police states. It’s not so clear that Leninism has stood the test of time.
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Posted on July 21st, 2010 in AK Authors!, Current Events
Just a few weeks ago, I was fortunate enough to run into AK author and longtime Bay Area organizer David Solnit at the US Social Forum, and hear a bit about his recent trip to Bolivia. I asked David to send us a reportback on his experiences for the AK blog, and he was kind enough to share this article, which he just wrote for the new issue of Fifth Estate.
Water Wars, Climate Wars, and Change from Below:
Reflection from Bolivia
By David Solnit
Fifth Estate Magazine, Summer 2010
In spring 2000, the people of Cochabamba, Bolivia rose up against the privatization of their water, forcing out the US based corporation, Bechtel, and Bolivia’s neo-liberal government to back down. The rebellion opened up new political space in Bolivia, catalyzing the most powerful, radical, visionary mass movements and mobilizations on the planet.
My friend and collaborator, Mona Caron, a public muralist from San Francisco, and I spent six weeks in Cochabamba, a city in central Bolivia, during March and April co-creating art and visuals with local communities and organizations. We came at the invitation of the organizing committee for the International Feria del Agua (Water Fair) commemorating the ten year anniversary of what has come to be known as the Water War. We also participated with 30,000 others in the World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth, organized by the Bolivian government of President Evo Morales.
At a Bay Area “Peoples Movement Assembly” of local grassroots organizations leading up to the June 2010 US Social Forum in Detroit, a well-respected, longtime community organizer spoke of his desire for a “socialism for the 21st century, like Evo Morales in Bolivia.”
For many, Bolivia serves as a model and an inspiration to those fighting for change in the US and around the world. Bolivian social movements are among the world’s most sophisticated and powerful and although Bolivia is very different, those of us seeking change in our own communities can learn much from what is occurring there.
Bolivian social movements have practiced two different paths of social change: by taking government power as Evo Morales and his political party MAS (Movement Towards Socialism) have done, or change from below proposed in the past visionary movement-wide proposal for a Constituent Assembly, and in the well-organized, directly democratic and strategic practices of the movement organizations and mobilizations. Neither model fit’s into simplistic old ideological boxes—anarchist, socialist or progressive.
I returned with a complicated view of Bolivian social movements particularly the contradictions of movements for radical change becoming governments, the Bolivian government taking leadership globally on addressing climate, and ecological crisis with its own economy based on resource extraction. Massive organizing and mobilizations of Bolivia’s social movements opened up the space for Evo Morales to be elected as the first indigenous president in an majority indigenous country. In office, he has enacted many positive changes and contributed to the demise of right-wing elites and parties.
However, trying to radically change our communities and world by having left parties assume the power of the state has mostly resulted in social and ecological disasters. Conversely, the practices and experiments of movements around the world creating change from below—especially in Latin America—thereby avoiding the trap of pursuing political power, offer a hopeful path that we can study and learn from.
Seattle 1999 and Bolivia’s Water War
Bolivia’s “Water War” began the month after the November-December 1999 Seattle WTO shutdown, and culminated in April 2000, when thousands of us in the US were occupying downtown Washington DC to disrupt IMF and World bank meetings.
Cochabamba was much more intense and sustained than Seattle, but both mass actions opened new political space within each country and marked an escalation against corporate-globalized capitalism.
As Mona led the painting of a 128-foot water war mural, and we both facilitated art making workshops at the factory worker-owned complex, Complejo Fabril, we spoke daily with Oscar Olivera.
Oscar was a shoe factory worker, who became a rank and file union leader and acted as spokesperson—and key organizer and strategist—for the Coordinadora de Defensa del Agua y de la Vida (The Coalition in Defense of Water and Life), that coordinated the mobilizations and strategies that won the water war which took on ferocious intensity leading to the government’s collapse.
Oscar is Bolivia’s most profound critic of his former fellow organizer, Evo Morales, and one of the worlds strongest voices, strategists and thinkers for creating change from below based on lived experience and practice.
In his account of the Water War, Cochabamba!, Oscar explains the government’s privatization law that triggered the massive popular resistance.
“In 1999 and 2000—after privatizing many industries, most significantly the mines—the transnationals, the World bank and the government mafias, attempted to take away our water. When Law 2029 was passed on October 29, 1999, only half of Cochabamba’s population was connected to the central water system.
“Many others obtained water from cooperative water houses which had been built in each barrio to meet the community’s needs. Law 2029 demanded that the autonomous water systems be handed over without reimbursement to the people who had invested their own time and money to build their own systems.
“The law went so far as to include wells established in people’s houses. It required people to ask permission of the superintendent of water to collect rainwater.”
After the Water Law took effect, details emerged about the deal that the government had cut with a private business consortium:.
Olivera wrote: “Worse than Law 2029 was the forty year contract with Aguas del Tunari to run the Cochabamba water system. Registered in the Cayman Islands, the US-based Bechtel Corporation held the majority interest in the Aguas del Tunari consortium. In some cases, peoples water bills skyrocketed as much as 300 percent. A pensioner or a teacher who made $80 a month might see his or her bill jump from $5 to $25 a month. The people look at water as something quite sacred. Water is a right for us, not something to be sold.”
Following the Water War, Bolivian social movements fought the 2003 Gas War to reclaim Bolivia’s oil and natural gas from multinational corporations, still yet to be fully won. When the government responded to mass demonstrations and blockades with bullets, killing and injuring many, the country rose up in outrage, driving out President Gonzalo “Goni” Sanchez de Lozada, who fled to the US where he remains today.
Two years later, Evo Morales was elected President of Bolivia, and together with his party MAS, has changed Bolivia and complicated the role of social movements.
Call for a Constituent Assembly to Replace the State
“One lesson of the Water War stands out clearly; the need to dismantle the existing state.”—Oscar Olivera, 2004
Bolivian social movements catalyzed by the Water War are, perhaps, the most radical and visionary in the world with their mass participatory, democratic and horizontal way of organizing and mobilizing, drawing on the communitarian roots of the majority indigenous country.
Since 2000, there had been widespread support among the social movements to replace the elite-dominated system of political parties, elections, and professional politicians with a directly elected Constituent Assembly.
I asked Marcela Olivera, Oscar Olivera’s sister, about where the idea for the Constituent Assembly came from Marcela was a participant in the Water War, an organizer with The Coalition in Defense of Water and Life, and currently is a coordinator of Red Vida, the international network of water movements that emerged in the years following the Water War. She was also one of the organizers of the ten year anniversary.
She said, “In Bolivia, for almost 20 years, the neoliberal system left the decisions in hands of an elite. So, we said: ‘Let’s change the rules of the system; let’s call for a constituent assembly where we, the people, can decide what kind of country we want to live in.’”
“That was not possible in the short term, but it happened when Morales assumed the power. When Morales called for the constituent assembly, we realized that the parameters for the assembly to be were completely wrong.”
“The different sectors that make up Bolivia—factory and other workers’ unions, indigenous, etc., couldn’t participate. Instead, the same political parties with other names were there—old leftists, old right wing, the same people.”
Feria Del Agua & Water Committees
On April 15, Mona and I marched with 3,000 people through Cochabamba’s streets ten years after the Water War to commemorate the victory. The factory workers union led the procession together with a group of kids from the city’s poorer Zona Sur (Southern Zone) neighborhoods carrying the giant blue puppet their community had made in workshops with Mona and me. Many others joined in the march and the Feria del Agua, including representatives from movements fighting for water rights all over the world.
The bulk of the marchers came from Zona Sur, large numbers of whom resisted fiercely during the water war. The public water system, SEMAPA, does not serve their neighborhoods, so they have self-organized into neighborhood water committees of several hundred families each and self-manage their own communitarian water systems. Besides making decisions and choosing coordinators in assemblies, they physically built their local water system with their own hands.
The International Feria del Agua took place the following weekend and each water committee displayed the water systems they had constructed and the innovations they had devised. Thousands of families came out for the fair, visiting the displays and tables, enjoying food, drink, and performances.
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Posted on July 19th, 2010 in AK Authors!, AK Book Excerpts
We’ve done a lot of posts lately about our new book with Team Colors, Uses of a Whirlwind: Movement, Movements, and Contemporary Radical Currents in the United States, but we realized we hadn’t posted an excerpt from the book yet! Since the book is an edited collection, trying to find a representative sample to post here proved more difficult than I had expected … each of the essays is so different, and it’s really the totality of all of them together that makes the book as awesome as it is. So, I decided to just post one of my favorite pieces instead. Below you’ll find an interview with the legendary historian of black culture and politics, Robin DG Kelley, by Benjamin Holzman (editor of Sick: A Compilation Zine of Physical Illness). This interview opens the section of Whirlwinds that features conversations with movement elders, and it’s definitely one of the pieces in the book that excited me the most. So read on, and be sure to check out the Whirlwinds website for other excerpts, and info on when Team Colors is coming to a city near you to present the book!
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Challenging Power and Creating New Spaces for Possibility:
A Discussion with Robin DG Kelley
Benjamin Holtzman:Growing up, what was your introduction to politics and political engagement?
Robin D.G. Kelley: I grew up in New York, my young years right up in the Harlem/Washington Heights area. My mother was a single parent whose politics were informed by her spiritual convictions. She was a member of the Self-Realization Fellowship. Paramahansa Yogananda. Back in the 1960s, everyone was reading Autobiography of a Yogi, which wasn’t political, but it informed a kind of bohemian, collectivist politics and a concern with the public. With my mother, she was always involved in school issues. In the middle to late 1960s, the main issues were overcrowded schools, community control. These were issues that were dear to my mother. She was a role model. Then, moving to the West Coast, it was more of the same. Makani Themba, who is the Founding Director of the Praxis Project, she’s my big sister, so she was a role model as well in terms of her high school and college activism, mainly around issues of race. Like a lot of young African Americans—especially growing up in New York City, where the Black Panther Party had a presence and had a free breakfast program in our area, where Black Nationalism was in the fabric of social life—you just can’t help it; race becomes the dominant factor. It was not until I got to college, and then listening to my sister, that we began to move towards Marxist/Leninist politics. That led both of us to join the Communist Workers Party. To go from the All-African People’s Revolutionary Party to the Communist Workers Party made sense in the early 1980s. It may not make sense to young people today. That was really the beginning of it. It’s still evolving.
BH: How do you think your background and upbringing contributed to your political beliefs and positioning and the types of activities that you’ve been involved with over the years?
RDGK: I guess there are three things. One, growing up in a low-income, oppressed community of people, every day you witness grassroots, community-based organizing. We didn’t see much labor union organizing. We didn’t see much national organizing. We saw local, grassroots, community-based organizing, where women, who were friends with my mother, who lived up on 157th street, would be fighting the landlords on a day-to-day basis. They would be out there protesting the conditions of the schools, the failure to pick up the trash, the basic survival issues. Number two, growing up in New York and later in Los Angeles, political education was important. It wasn’t enough to take battle by battle, issue by issue. We also witnessed street corner speakers and soapbox speakers who would speak to a crowd for two hours at a time about issues, like why we need reparations. This is like 1969, ’70, ’71. Issues like, why we need to support the Chinese revolution and why we need to support the struggles of African peoples worldwide. So suddenly, what appears to be a world dominated politically by local issues then connects with the globe. Most of those speakers weren’t talking about landlords. They really were talking about what was happening across the Pacific, or the Atlantic, or in the Caribbean. The third thing, in terms of my own upbringing, had to do with my mother’s household. My mother never cursed. She never raised her voice. She never really showed anger. She showed enormous empathy for people, and care and love of other people. She would bring strangers into the house who didn’t have a place to stay. Her politics were driven not by a hatred of the man or a hatred of power, but by a love for humanity. And that was spiritual for her. Her religion demanded that she treat human beings as if they’re her family and that she love everybody. She practices it to this day. You ask my mother, “Is that politics?” She’d say, “No, not really.” And yet it is politics, very much as a political practice.
BH: I suspect you might continue on some of those themes with this question. One thing that is striking about your work is the tremendous sense of optimism you have about the future—that today’s political activities really can led to significant change and that greater freedom and liberation really may not be too far off in the future. Where did this optimism come from, and how have you retained it so well in your outlook, especially during periods of low political mobilization?
RDGK: You know what, that’s a good question. It doesn’t come from any abstract sense of hope. Nor does it come from any sense of denial about the political realities that confront us and the extent of power and how it works. It comes out of being a historian. There are so many historical examples of seemingly impossible circumstances in which we had these revolutionary transformations. The period I always turn back to is the period of the end of slavery and Reconstruction. W.E.B. Du Bois’ masterpiece, Black Reconstruction, I think is the most important political text I’ve ever read in my life. What he shows is what happens when enslaved people have this vision of what society ought to look like: what the public sphere should look like, how to govern, how to reconstruct social lives around schools, churches, the right to vote, reconstructing families. You have, in a matter of less than a decade, a moment where people who were enslaved go to suddenly passing legislation in the states of South Carolina and Mississippi and places like that, calling for land reform, implementing free universal public education. There’s been nothing like it. We had more black senators in those days than today. No one in 1864 thought, “This is what’s going to happen in 1869.” In the so-called Civil Rights movement or human rights movement in 1951, no one thought that Jim Crow would actually be toppled. It’s hard to see what’s possible. It’s hard to see the future. It’s easy to look in hindsight. I think our problem is that when we look in hindsight, we tend to focus on the failures and losses and the intransigence of power. If our expectation is that you can challenge power and create space for new possibilities, then we have millions of examples of that.
BH: I want to keep talking about history for a little bit. I understand that when you first began to study history seriously—not just as an undergraduate, but even in graduate school—that you did so not with the intention of becoming a historian, but to “attempt to solve a series of political problems.”2 Can you discuss how “political problems” led you to pursuing historical research?
RDGK: At the time, I was literally caught between a very classic debate or struggle of living between a black nationalism/Third World nationalism/anti-colonial position versus emphasis on class struggle and proletarian revolution. So, I’m reading everything I can read on the subject, from the Russian and Chinese revolutions to African and Caribbean to the United States, and I’m trying to figure out what’s the best path forward for someone who, at the time, identified as a Communist in the United States. That’s why I decided to write my dissertation on the Communist Party in a place that did not have traditions of Marxism/Leninism and did have a black majority.3 That was my lesson. I learned a lot about how people bring their own cultures and traditions to movements. I learned a lot about the dynamics between race and class and, in particular, the challenge—always the challenge—to mobilize white working people in support of anti-racism. I went there thinking, “I’m going to study black history.” I learned more about white working-class consciousness and building solidarity—and what that means and the cost of that—than I did about the black liberation movement. It was very helpful to me. Each one of the texts that I ended up publishing grew out of the political questions of the day. They didn’t grow out of trying to make a contribution to scholarship. In fact, to this day, I’ve never written a book, ever, with the mindset of, “Here’s a gap in the scholarship, I really want to fill it.” I’m not interested in that.
BH: In your experience, how great of a sense of history do you think those involved in current U.S. political movements have? Do you think that history is underutilized as a tool or form of knowledge amongst those engaged in political activities today?
RDGK: I’m afraid to generalize too much because I think that there are some organizations and movements in which history is essential. In the Labor/Community Strategy Center in Los Angeles, they’re constantly studying history. The Miami Workers Center, a great activist center, they’re always thinking about historical issues. I think that it’s on peoples’ minds. I also think that we as so-called “professional historians” have not done as good a job of looking at things that really matter. I include myself in that. There are some movements that are studied over and over again. How many takes on Garveyism can you really have? How many books on the Civil Rights movement can you really have? But what happened in Detroit in the 1970s and ’80s is extremely important for understanding history; it’s just not on the agenda. Moreover, I think that we place so much emphasis on studying the history of social movements, successes, and failures, and we probably need to spend more time looking at the reproduction of power and how things work. What are the weaknesses in a system? How are decisions made? Something as basic as the history of Katrina. So much of the story is about grassroots organizing on the ground. But a good part of the story is about the recent history of corruption and business as usual for the Bush administration. I think the more that stuff is exposed and the more we trace the relationships between those corporations and slumlords and gentrification, then we start to realize that the communities that are falling apart are not falling apart by accident; they’re connected to public policy. I think how they’re connected is something we need to know more about. I hope future historians deal with these questions of power more directly.
BH: Do you mean specifically that historians who have focused on social movements have not engaged enough with what is happening on a policy level or the interactions between the two, and instead focus too much on the grassroots efforts?
RDGK: Well, I’m being self-critical. I don’t want to attack or criticize everybody. What I’ve come to realize is that a lot of people involved in social movements want history that’s inspiring: successes, strategy. But with strategy comes understanding how power works, where it lies. Even something like an electoral strategy at a local level is actually useful. Greensboro, North Carolina is really a great example of what happens when a group of radicals decide, “You know what, we’ll calculate: we could actually take over the city council.” What’s so radical about that, taking over the city council? They essentially pass a living wage bill at the municipal level, which raises wages significantly. They wage a battle against Kmart. They have a platform now. In some cities, that’s not going to work. In other cities, it does work. We need to understand just how power operates. Even for those people in the university who say, “Where do these investments go?” What’s the relationship between university endowments and, say, the prison industrial complex? Expose those things. I love when I tell my students, “Your project now is to study the university from the top down and follow the money.” I think the more that you follow the money, it will change the way you talk about strategy. Because then you can actually hit up certain soft spots or expose certain things that are not meant to be exposed.
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