Visionary Politics

This week's session included a panel that was ON FIRE! People from truly visionary organizations really laying out the framework of radically different paradigms for the world they want to see.

We got to hear from four amazing women:
Rachel Herzing from Critical Resistance, Chela Delgado from INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence, Sara Kershnar from the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network, and Michelle Mascarenhas-Swan from Movement Generation.

Resilience - Resistance - Reimagining
Michelle spoke on Movement Generation's work to connect the people who are working locally to stop the disastrous effects of environmental racism in their communities - connect them to the larger global struggle around climate change to create - voila - the climate justice movement. Their approach is visionary: Resilience - Resistance - Reimagine. For resiliency, they aim to foster the learning of "hard skills" around sustainability - greywater reclamation, urban agriculture, etc - that will help peoples survive as the world's resources get exploited. In the Resistance arena, they look to "changing the system" via campaigns, new policies, and taking over governance. In Reimagining, Michelle spoke of replacing capitalism's place as "common sense" and shift to a more cooperative second nature, transforming the mindset of "gotta get min" to "let's share ours."

One of the most useful mindflips Michelle laid out was the shift from giving people "jobs" to looking at people's "roles." Looking pre-capitalism, people didn't have jobs, they had roles within society. Only certain people get jobs (namely the able-bodied, young & middle aged adults, with a heavy preference for white men) and they must compete for them, but everyone in a society has a role, and the sooner we learn to respect that, the sooner we can live in a more equitable society.

She also talked about how important it was to be creating a transformative counter narrative different from the one we have been taught (capitalist and based on domination). Stories are powerful - that is why cultural workers, who are slowly shifting mindsets on a major level, introducing new words and concepts via posters, stories, songs, etc - are so instrumental. The sooner more people see the world through a different lens, one that we have deliberately crafted, the sooner the world will actually become the way we envisioned it.

Why do we think punishment = justice?
Rachel spoke to us about the prison industrial complex: which is far beyond just prisons and police - it includes the whole machinery of punishment and surveillance that we accept as normal and necessary - militarized schools, depressed education system, unaffordable and inaccessible health care, normalized policing, etc.

From Angela Davis' article: "What then, would it mean, to imagine a system in which punishment is not allowed to become the source of corporate profit? How can we imagine a society in which race & class are not primary determinants of punishment? Or one in which punishment itself is no longer the central concern in the making of justice?" This last sentence is so crucial to think about - how often do we look at the doling out of justice solely in the terms of how heavily the perpetrator was punished? Does this bring back a murdered loved one? Does this actually ease someone's injuries from violence? Does this actually ever heal a community?

For anyone who might not instantly see how race & class are "primary determinants" of punishment, think about this: What's the difference between a "criminal" and a "lawbreaker"? Think of all the white middle class kids off smoking pot or doing acid or cocaine in their homes - are they "criminals" - then picture the black working class kids with a culture of hanging outside of the home - smoking pot - then ask yourself how easy it would be to call them "criminals" and watch them get arrested and sent through jails and probation. People are sent to prison, not so much because of the crimes they may have indeed committed, but largely because their communities have been criminalized.

The System is Not Broken
Rachel is fond of saying "The system is not broken; it is working perfectly doing exactly what it was built to do." This is deep. This is why reform of the "justice system" will never create a just society - so what we must do is abolish it completely and rebuild society to address issues in a totally different way. Another helpful quote from Angela Davis "The first step would be to let go of the desire to discover one single alternative system of punishment that would occupy the same footprint as the prison system." We need a holistic recreation of society that doesn't create the ills of poverty and racism that allows us to think we need a prison punishment system. Rachel talked about Critical Resistance's no compromise stance by saying we demand what we want, we don't settle for what we think we can get. The idea of the transformative counter narrative comes back here, as people are working to create a narrative of what holistic justice looks like, and this is the first step to making it a possibility. CR has a motto similar to Movement Generation's 3 prong approach: Change, Dismantle, Build.

Anti-Zionist Judaism
Sara was a powerful speaker who brought to light the truly elitist roots of Zionism and the need for Jewish resistance to Zionism. A piece of IJAN's work is looking to rescue the humanitarian, liberationist roots of Judaism from the racist, colonialist Zionist strains that dominates public understanding of Jews. Or as Ricardo Morales says "Self love in Jewish life requires displacing the ultra-nationalist cult that has hijacked Jewish public life and caused so much suffering."

In ways similar to how the brutalities of maintaining white supremacy has stripped many whites of their humanity, maintaining the racist apartheid of Zionism in Israel has stripped many Jews of their humanity. Sara read a really powerful quote from Chaim Weizmann, the first president of Israel, that was shocking to hear

“Palestine cannot absorb the Jews of Europe. We want only the best of Jewish youth to come to us. We want only the educated to enter Palestine for the purpose of increasing its culture. The other Jews will have to stay where they are and face whatever fate awaits them. These millions of Jews are dust on the wheels of history and they may have to be blown away. We don’t want them pouring into Palestine. We don’t want Tel Aviv to become another low-grade ghetto.”

This said in 1938, in the midst of growing fascism and the soon to come Holocaust.

One of the articles we read, Lihish'tah'weel by Ricardo Levins Morales, laid out the argument that if Israel's purpose was to create a safe and secure homeland for Jews, it has not worked. The Zionist, racially defined society has not worked and will never work, and any moves towards a two-state solution where Jews have one place and Arab Palestinians have another will also not worked - this will always be apartheid which requires force to maintain. "No polity, no matter how well intentioned, can govern a system based on racial privilege without becoming reactionary."

Making the Road by Walking
Chela spoke to us about INCITE!'s work and their commitment to using consensus based collective models, even on a national scale. Though there are many difficulties in working this way, remaining true to their ideals is extremely important. In speaking of the slowness of building a new world based on consensus, and the frustration that can bring up in real life organizing, she said "When you are making the road by walking, it's hard to run." Wow. Think about that for a while. If the work you are doing is truly groundbreaking, truly pioneering, it will be slow hard work.

Two more articles that were in this weeks reading packet were:

Love & Community
bell hooks' "love as the practice of freedom" which boils down to the fact that domination is built upon suffering and liberation is built upon love. "The absence of a sustained focus on love in progressive circles arise from a collective failure to acknowledge the needs of the spirit and an overdetermined emphasis on material concerns." She talks a bunch about the levels of despair created by the current system and how draining that is for everyone. She quotes Joanna Macy, " the energy expended in pushing down despair is diverted from more creative uses, depleting the resilience and imagination needed for fresh visions and strategies."

I think to how many of my closest friends and companeros that have been lost to depression and addictions and are no longer able to be active in the struggle for liberation. bell also says that "in choosing love we also choose to live in community, and that means that we do not have to change by ourselves." this is so relieving, to not carry the weight of transforming the world as individuals. I can be part of a collective process, where the workload is manageable, and together we will get somewhere. This I think to me is why I crave working in collective so deeply - it is easier and more nourishing.

Last Thing! La Mestiza
We read this awesome, beautifully written article by Gloria Anzaldua called "La conciencia de la mestiza - towards a new consciousness." It wove together crafted myth and poetry and political reality. The main thing I got out was the power of mixed blood people to be creating new ways of thinking that synthesize the contradictions of different racial & cultural beliefs. "In our very flesh, (r)evolution works out the clash of cultures. It makes us crazy constantly, but if the center holds, we've made some kind of evolutionary step forward." She speaks of alchemy, morphing, crossroads, borderlands, synthesis, transformation - the creation of something that is more than the sum of its parts. Like the way that transgendered people have created an understanding of gender that supersedes the binary system, and in doing so, liberates all from the oppressive implications of binary gendered socialization.

It is people at the crossroads of race, of gender, of sexuality, of class - that have the broadest range of experience, and thus are best posed to lead us all into liberation.

Assimilation into Whiteness in our Own Family Lines

“The great force of human history comes from the fact that we carry it within us, are unconsciously controlled by it in many ways, and history is literally present in all that we do…It is to history we owe our frames of reference, our identities, and our aspirations. And it is with great pain and terror that one begins to realize this. In great pain and terror one begins to assess the history which has placed one where one is and shaped one’s point of view. In great pain and terror because, therefore one enters into battle with that more historical creation, oneself, and attempts to recreate, oneself according to a principle more humane and more liberating, one begins the attempt to achieve a level of personal maturity and freedom which robs history of its tyrannical power and also changes history.” - James Baldwin, “White Man’s Guilt” 1965

Here's some hot quotes from this sessions readings:

• "A hostile posture toward resident blacks must be struck at the Americanizing door before it will open." - Toni Morrison, speaking of how immigrants are only assimilated into whiteness (and gain white privilege) once they learn to hate and mistreat blacks.
• "White men - from Norway, were they were Norwegians [not white people] - became white: by slaughtering the cattle, poisoning the wells, torching the houses, massacring Native Americans, raping Black women. This moral erosion has made it quite impossible for those who think of themselves as white to have any moral authority at all." - James Baldwin
  

Jewish Assimiliation
There were a few articles that looked at the specific case of Jewish assimilation into whiteness - in Europe, Jews were the "dark" ethnic minority subject to centuries of discrimination, slavery, and genocide. Come to the U.S., the community at large opted to become white and participate in racism against Blacks and other people of color, just as now it is the Zionist Jews who are oppressing the Arab Palestinian on the basis of race.
__________________________________________________________________

The buildup for this week was extensive: we were asked to spend some time investigating our family histories - not just genealogy, but trying to put our ancestors lives into context. As we are all white, we know thatmostly our families came as immigrants from Europe. Why did they come? What challenges did they face as immigrants? What jobs/roles were open to them? What were their social networks?

Family Tree
I personally got caught up in climbing my family tree - tapping into online genealogy resources that helped you fill out your tree based on work others had done, as well as connecting you to primary sources - such as census records, land grants, newspapers, etc. (I did this thru ancestry.com, which is expensive but gives a free 2 week trial so I spent all my free time those two weeks really digging in.) I found tons of interesting things, such as the Spanish land grant proving one of my ancestors' title to land in Florida from 1816, stories of the first Purvis (John Purvis) coming to the colonies in the mid 1600s, confederate pension records of another ancestor, etc. I also talked to my grandma a bunch who shared stories and photos, like the gem to the left, which is my great-grandfather, maybe around 1916, with the ginormous tomatoes from the family farm. I learned that the German side of my family, which immigrated in the late 1800s, came over as Lutherans who wanted to escape conscription into the military. From then on, the Lutheran community was their main support network - which ends, on my lineage, with my mom.

Half of me was overjoyed to feel long roots in Florida, the other half was left with questions about how my family and their communities figured in to the Seminole Wars and the civil war. One of my g-g-g-grandpas was definitely on civil war confederate pensions, but said that he served home duty. I really wanted to uncover something that showed where my ancestors stood on the issues of slavery and native genocide - participants? slaveholders? economically locked out? passive bystanders? resistors? - but I didn't find anything that revealing.

During the actual session, we got together in small groups based on where in Europe our principal ancestry descends from, and just talked about our families and what we learned in our research.

Why Study your Family History?
Why did Catalyst put Family History in the Braden program? It is a deliberate strategy to fight the assimilationist force in the US by understanding the different cultures our ancestors came from. Our ancestors were not culture-less - that is part of the myth of whiteness. The process of becoming white goes hand in hand with loss and dehumanization, brokenness, violence - this is the legacy of white supremacy. But whiteness was deliberately created to break unity which means that it can also be deliberately dismantled. People have resisted and tried to reclaim history/culture (including ourselves). We can create a cultural shift which leads to social and economic shifts.

The questions we ended the session with was this: What's it going to take for white people to see ending white supremacy in our self interest? And what role are we going to play in making that happen?

We got the Whole World, in our Hands

Imperialism & Global Resistance

Since I had really come of age politically with the rise of the anti-globalization movement, this week felt familiar, which actually enabled me to quickly take everything deeper. We looked at the fallout of September 11, in the wars against Iraq and Afghanistan, the continuous colonization of Palestine and the war machines that support that, the attempts of the majority nations to create an alternative world vision (i.e. the Third World project) and the success of the South African anti-apartheid movement and the Zapatista uprising.

Empires: Large, composite, multinational unit, usually created by conquest and divided between a dominant centre and subordinate peripheries

Imperialism: actions and attitudes which uphold empires (without direct political rule.)

Together we crafted a streamlined theory and definition of neoliberalism, which is also referred to as globalization, building on our understanding of the rise of capitalism from last session:

How Neoliberalism Came About, I think.
There was feudalism, which had lords and serfs where serfs still worked the land directly to meet their needs and there was little wage exchanged. Then as the serfs began to resist being lorded over, the ruling class changed the game, privatized the common lands, and forced some people into waged jobs, and others into unpaid labor – i.e. capitalism. This built up the power of European nation-states (governments) which allowed them to roam the globe and colonize 80% of the world. Then as other places began to resist, overthrow the colonizers, and create their own nation-state powers, and unite together under various coalitions, including the United Nations, the European/US ruling class, were like, crap now how do we overpower all these nation states? So they began to focus on corporate power, which doesn’t have to play in the same arena as governments – they are accountable neither to common citizens (as governments have to pretend to be) nor to the UN or other international bodies. So they started to erode the power of states. Now, corporations have more wealth and more power than most countries.

To recap: feudalism -> peasant resistance -> capitalism (state power) -> national liberation (development of Third World nations) - > neoliberalism (corporate power).

Structural Adjustment in the World and in the United States of Amerikkka
A lot of this happened via the World Bank/IMF’s structural adjustment programs, which basically preyed on countried in need, giving them loans with really strict requirements that they cut social spending (education, health, etc), stop protecting their local economy via labor unions, labor laws, subsidies, and environmental regulations, and forced them to open up to international corporations.

From here, it’s really interesting to see how similar strategies get employed in the US. In schools, for example, with things like the No Child Left Behind Act, where schools now have to “perform” according to a strange set of national standards, or lose their funding and get privatized via charter schools, whose teachers don’t have the power of teachers unions. Similarly, we looked at the sub-prime mortgage crisis, whereby oppressed peoples (people of color, poor) were given loans with really unrealistic terms and super high interest rates, which then resulted in foreclosures and thus the robbing many poor people and people of color of what little capital they’ve been able to amass. Note that in most cases, the same banks which profited from these loans are the same banks that benefit from structural adjustment-based loans to poor nations.


Some more things that stuck out:

• Just like white privilege, US citizens benefit from imperialism whether we support it or not. When people go to the gas pumps and can fill up their tanks, they are feeling the benefits of our oil wars. When we go to the grocery store and can buy bananas and chocolate and coffee, we are reaping the benefits of CIA-backed coups in central America.
• Radical movements being co-opted into the imperialist way looks like a move from struggles for LIBERATION (self-determination for all peoples) to demands for EQUALITY (one group getting the privileges of white hetero males). Two specific examples: Queers – from rebellion and deep solidarity with other oppressed people to a gay rights movement for equality (to the privileged hetero white male class) - and then a push for say, gays in the military, a military which has been constantly involved in imperialist war for the last 50 years. Women – from liberation and connection with non-privileged groups to accepting the vote/places in the economy while leaving people of color behind, to then allowing the war in Afghanistan, an imperialist war, to be framed as a feminist mission.

Anti-Imperialist Movement
We also had some rad guest speakers, and one of them laid out a framework within which to be doing just activism/organizing:

1) Starting within a strategic alliance with a rights-based approach to policy, 2) with an agenda that is mass-based and movement building, 3) characterized by grassroots, localized resistance, using 4) direct action to achieve goals.

The Readings

September 11
There was a pretty awesome speech by Arundhati Roy, Come September, available here as a video. Speaking about all the meanings and consequences of September 11, she brought up some really lucid quotes from people in power that showed some pretty intense racist ideology, namely:

• Former British foreign secretary Lord Arthur Balfour (1919): “Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age-long tradition, in present needs, in future hopes, of far profounder import than the desires and prejudices of 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land.”
• Winston Churchill (1937), who is often spoken of as a hero for his stances during World War II, speaking also of Palesinians: “I do not agree that the dog in a manger has the final right to the manger...I do not admit, for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians fo America, or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher grade race, a more worldly-wise race, to put it that way, has come in and taken their place.”
• US Ambassador to the United Nations, Madeleine Albright spoke of the half a million Iraqi children who died because of US backed sanctions: “We think the price is worth it.”

She also quoted New York Times’ columnist Thomas Friedman, “The hidden hand of the [capitalist] market will not work without the hidden fist...[of the] US Army, Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps.”

Here's another shocking quote, not from Arundhati Roy's work, but from an essay by the Notes from Nowhere Collective:

“To attract companies like yours… we have felled mountains, razed jungles, filled swamps, moved rivers, relocated towns… all to make it easier for you and your business to do business here.”

– Philippines government advert in Fortune, placed in 1975

The Third World as a Collective Project

I also came to learn through the readings that the "Third World" which I long thought was a euphemism for a derogatory perspective of worlds outside US, European, USSR power, was actually a self-determined label by those countries as they organized collectively to create an alternative world vision. It started with the Non-Aligned Movement, which first organized in the 1950s to ensure "the national independence, sovereignty, territorial integrity and security of non-aligned countries" in their "struggle against imperialism, colonialism, neo-colonialism, racism, and all forms of foreign aggression, occupation, domination, interference or hegemony as well as against great power and bloc politics."

The non-kinky BDSM
Want an action item? How about this? Support the Palestinian call for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions against Israel, which you can learn about here. This is a strategy that proved successful in bringing down south African apartheid.