The Movement Against NATO Capitalism in Chicago

Wars throughout history have been waged for conquest and plunder. In the Middle Ages when the feudal lords concluded to enlarge their domains they declared war upon one another. But they themselves did not go to war any more than the modern feudal lords, the barons of Wall Street go to war. The feudal barons of the Middle Ages, the economic predecessors of the capitalists of our day, declared all wars. And their miserable serfs fought all the battles. The poor, ignorant serfs had been taught to revere their masters; to believe that when their masters declared war upon one another, it was their patriotic duty to fall upon one another and to cut one another’s throats for the profit and glory of the lords and barons who held them in contempt. And that is war in a nutshell. The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and all to lose—especially their lives.

-Eugene Debs, Canton, Ohio, 1918 (the speech for which Debs was arrested and sentenced to 10 years in prison under the Espionage Act of 1917)

As the Week Without Capitalism progressed in Chicago, the various social movements of the city mingled, feeding off of each others’ energy and forging a common analysis in opposition to the NATO/G8, which we gloss as the “war and poverty” agenda.

On the march to Rahm Immanuel’s house.

On Saturday, a day after a massive National Nurses United rally for a global “Robin Hood” tax to fund universal health care, we marched with the grassroots “Mental Health Movement” of patients from across Chicago mobilizing to stop the mayor from shuttering half of the city’s mental health clinics. Less than a month earlier, Mental Health Movement activists had barricaded themselves inside the Woodlawn Mental Health Clinicjust before its imminent closure. The police responded by cutting open the doors with chainsaws and boltcutters and arresting 23 people. In response to the mayor’s escalation, we occupied his home on the North Side with thousands of supporters. Hundreds of riot police were there waiting for us, to defend the so-called “Mayor 1%”, so we sat down in the street and on his lawn for the rest of the day, sharing stories and writing messages on the asphalt in chalk.

Mental Health Movement and allies blockading the road in front of Rahm Immanuel’s house.

While we waited for the mayor to come home, Debbie told me the story of her son who was shot in a drive-by, and how his younger brother had begun to cope with the shock and grief through counseling at the Northwest clinic near where they live. After the NW clinic was shut down, he stopped going to school, stopped going out at all, and Debbie joined the movement. “I never protested before,” she told me, “but I am doing this for my son.” We cried together on the police line.

police lined up in front of Rahm Immanuel’s North Side home.

Later in the day, I listened in as a police commander talked on his cell phone directly with the mayor’s office. “Has the mayor made a decision yet about how long they can stay before we force them off?” he asked. An hour earlier, protesters had faced off with the riot police, chanting, “Police / are / the army of the rich!”, not knowing how immediately correct they were.

That night, we slept on the lawn of Trinity Episcopal Church, the first of several churches to open its lawn for a tent city of out-of-town activists. We were just blocks from the McCormick Place convention center where the NATO summit was taking place, close enough that the Secret Service was parking its vehicles next to our encampment out of convenience rather than as a way of keeping an eye on us (though, the next day, eight of the folks camping with us were detained and arrested as they walked to the meetup point for the big Sunday march because they “looked suspicious”, and released later in the day after pressure from the ACLU). Most of the congregants couldn’t make it in to church that day because of the security cordon anyway, so the priest invited us in to fellowship. We shared coffee and kettle corn as we read Isaiah 58:

Yet on the day of your fasting, you do as you please and exploit all your workers.

Your fasting ends in quarrelling and strife, and in striking each other with wicked fists.

You cannot fast as you do today and expect your voice to be heard on high.

Is this the kind of fast I have chosen, only a day for people to humble themselves?

Is it only for bowing one’s head like a reed and for lying in sackcloth and ashes?

Is that what you call a fast, a day acceptable to the Lord?

Is this not the kind of fasting I have chosen: to loose the chains of injustice and untie the cords of the yoke, to set the oppressed free and break every yoke?

We discussed tactics, social change, peace, and the church. When a few activists objected to the participation of anarchists in the NATO protests, saying that anarchism sounds “ominous” because it rhymed with “anti-christ”, the priest gave a lesson in Greek, explaining the etymology of an-arkos (no rulers). After the priest gave a reasoned defense of Christian anarchism, everyone seemed to agree after all.

marching together to the NATO summit

On Sunday, we joined the march of tens of thousands from Grant Park to the edge of McCormick Place, where dozens of veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars shared the stage with young women from Afghans for Peace. The veterans spoke one by one before throwing their service medals over the police line toward the NATO summit, returning them to the generals who had sent them to kill and die. The biggest cheer went to Scott Olsen, the Iraq War vet and Occupy Oakland activist who was nearly killed by police during an eviction on October 27th. Iraq Veterans Against the War pledged to continue supporting other soldiers as they withdraw their labor from empire.

After the permit expired, police attacked the crowd with billy clubs and forced thousands of us away from the protest site, arresting a few dozen that held their ground. The march regrouped a few hours later, still over a thousand strong, and held an impromptu general assembly in an intersection of Michigan Avenue in front of the Art Institute, where Obama was scheduled to have a private dinner party with other NATO dignitaries that night.

Hundreds of passersby and patrons of nearby bars joined from the street, participating in what was for some of them probably their first general assembly. We were surrounded on three sides by hundreds, perhaps a thousand, riot police, ready to clear the intersection by force. That’s the moment when, seeing an opening, the crowd turned jubilant, dancing together as the drizzle turned to a constant rain, forming a giant human peace sign in the intersection, and taking turns sharing the People’s Mike to explain why we were there to protest NATO that day. It was a moment that disrupted the typical script, the ceremonial pattern, the cat-and-mouse of protester steps up / cop beats him down, as hundreds of militants sat together in the street, facing inward rather than out to the police lines, unmasked themselves to each other, and shared words of encouragement and righteous rage. We sang out songs from our childhood- Les Miserables showtunes followed by chants of “Re-create ’48!”, gospel songs, old hymns with re-written words – long and loud enough to get nicknamed “the people’s LRAD” and fall in love again with the magic of nonviolence.

celebration of the Boeing shutdown

On Monday, we marched to the war profiteer Boeing to celebrate our victory in shutting down their international headquarters for the day. After we announced the week before that we would blockade Boeing on the 21st for paying no income or property taxes while making accepting over $12 billion from the US Department of Defence to produce war machines, Boeing voluntarily announced it would shut its doors for the day. Moving on from the suppliers to the buyers, we marched downtown to to Obama’s headquarters on Michigan Avenue to demand that he stop wasting money on warfare instead of basic human needs.

Thanks to all those that came together in Chicago to support the grassroots movements that are building against capitalism and war. Solidarity,

Week Without Capitalism begins in Chicago

Needing NATO 

No one here wants NATO

But…..

Do we need NATO?

We have to find a way not to need NATO

We need to grow food

We need to live off the land

We need to build our own houses

We need to make it so we don’t need NATO

In order to not need NATO, we need to need our land

And then we will live off the bounty of our land

Instead of the bounty of somebody else’s land

In order to live off the land

We will need each other

And if we need each other

We won’t need NATO

(an easy essay by John Bambrick/Rust of the White Rose Catholic Worker)

John read that easy essay to us this morning at the conclusion of the Catholic Worker Faith and Resistance Retreat. We had just returned from the Prudential Building in the downtown Chicago financial district where Obama’s campaign is based.

The idea was to invite Obama and the other NATO leaders to “break bread over a symbolic meal to encourage true withdrawal from Afghanistan, and transform NATO from an instrument of war and empire into an instrument of peace, love and community.” The Obama campaign hasn’t accepted the offer yet, nor have any of the staffers of the NATO militaries coming to Chicago this week. Eight Catholic Workers were arrested in the Prudential Building lobby, as hundreds of us joined them in solidarity and talked with the thousands of workers passing through the financial district during the beginning of the workday. The level of support even from workers in the Prudential Building was astounding. See Common Dreams and the Chicago Tribune for details of the action.

This is just the beginning of the Week Without Capitalism. Last night was the culmination of the weekend People’s Summit, featuring dozens of panels including a free hip-hop show by Rebel Diaz and a keynote message over the phone from Mahanoy state prison with celebrated journalist and death row prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal. As I type this, supporters are gathering to defend public education with the Chicago Teachers Union at Dyett High School in South Chicago.

This week will see multiple actions each day (see the Chicago Spring) leading up to the mass march on the NATO summit led by Iraq Veterans Against the War, who plan to deliver their war medals and a message: poor kids won’t go overseas to die so that the rich can make money any more. The following day, May 21st, we will meet in the downtown financial district, once again, to shut down Boeing international headquarters, the base from which Boeing profits from war, busts unions, and dodges taxes.

As the G8 meets in hiding in Camp David to avoid public scrutiny and NATO militarizes Chicago and suspends the First Amendment, we join the social movements of Chicago in demanding economic justice and an end to Rahm Immanuel’s budget cuts that are closing half of the mental health clinics in the city and slashing workers’ benefits while giving tax breaks to financial and military interests. We join with the 400,000 public sector workers (including 30,000 police) marching against austerity in London last week, the 2,000 Palestinian prisoners on hunger strike in Israeli jails against the policy of detention without trial, the hundred thousand indignados that took the public squares of Spain on May 12th.

See you in the streets,

BYU and Queer Liberation

education is the first step in the struggle for liberation. it’s wonderful to see the work continuing at BYU. I hope we remember the strength of all the lonely, committed gender revolutionaries that went before us!

Campesinos Refusing To Disappear: Guatemala’s Polochic Valley One Year After the Evictions

by Tristan Call. Posted Simultaneously at Upside Down World

Juan with his daughter at the former site of the village of Parana. Photo by Stacey Irvin

Juan lived in the village of Paraná until August, when for the second time in six months the private security forces of an international sugar company reduced his home to ashes and tilled his crops under to plant sugarcane. Now he lives across the road from Paraná, a short walk that took us just a few minutes. Where he lived and farmed corn with dozens of other families just a few months ago, there is now an unbroken expanse of tightly-planted rows of sugarcane. Where he lives now, the houses are temporary, crowded, cobbled together with sticks and plastic sheeting. He shows us the one-room house he shares with his displaced wife and children; he shows us the cacao residue they add to hot water and drink in the mornings instead of coffee. They drink it without sweetener, he explains apologetically, because they can’t afford to buy the bags of sugar.

Juan's shack where he lives with his family. Photo by Stacey Irvin

The Polochic Valley is now full of farmers, surrounded by a sea of sugarcane, who can’t afford to feed their children sugar. This snapshot is a telling example of what hunger and poverty look like today –according to the FAO three-fourths of the people who experience food insecurity live in rural farming areas –and the most recent round of dispossession in the Polochic dramatically illustrates the larger pattern of how small farmers become landless laborers.

Resistance to land theft is something of a family tradition in the Polochic. Some of the old-timers still remember their parents’ stories of the 19th-century colonization of highland Alta Verapaz by German and American coffee planters. They pushed the indigenous Q’eqchi’ population from their lands, leaving many land-poor Q’eqchi’ to seek new homes in the Polochic lowlands. The oldest campesinos there were children when President Arbenz’s 18-month attempt at agrarian reform was cut short by a CIA-backed coup. The valley is still haunted by memories of the popular movement of the 1970′s that culminated in the infamous massacre of Panzós, during which over a hundred Q’eqchi’ campesinos were killed by the army as they agitated for legal recognition of their land titles. The children of today – those that survive the 3rd-highest child mortality rate in the hemisphere – will grow up remembering March of 2011, when 3,000 indigenous farmers in 14 communities were violently evicted by a combination of private mercenaries, army troops, and federal police.

When we visited and wrote about the Polochic crisis in August of last year, we found not only death threats and paramilitary murders of local activists, but also a more quiet but equally devastating assault wearing down those evicted communities: a food price crisis of unprecedented proportions, forcing the displaced families to buy basic grains at sky-high prices because their crops had been destroyed just weeks before harvest. The government swore that it would comply with the Interamerican Court of Human Rights’ (IACHR) June 20^th rebuke by delivering emergency food aid and shelter, a claim that at the time ended up being rather spectacularly false.

A shoot of maize grows where Parana used to be - now only cane remains. Photo by Mark Romeril

We returned to the valley on the first anniversary of the March evictions, visiting the same communities and families we had met in August. The displaced communities had always said that food aid was necessary but not sufficient – that the only way to end their hunger would be to guarantee their right to farm their own land unmolested. As one man in Paraná told us last week: “we don’t want sugarcane here, we want corn, livestock, pigs, and things we can eat.”

Still, peasant organizations brought international scrutiny to the Guatemalan government’s promise to provide food aid, documenting the state’s failure to comply with even its own, partial, commitments. We were told by displaced families who had sent two of their own up to a series of negotiations and IACHR hearings in Washington, DC in October and November that the government had finally committed to begin delivering food aid to the displaced. In the end, though, the quantity of food the government offered in its “monthly” food aid packages was laughable – an amount that locals reported would last them only two or three days per family, depending on how many children.

Apparently even that commitment, though, was short-lived. Displaced families from several of the 14 evicted communities told us that food arrived in January, but when it was supposed to arrive on February 27^th, there was no aid. They said that government officials that notified them the food wouldn’t be coming had dismissed even the farmers’ existence, using that as the excuse to cut off the promised corn, beans, and oil: “there are no displaced people sheltering here, so no food aid is necessary!”

This approach is reminiscent of that taken by the Colom administration back in July, when the country’s widest distribution newspaper, Prensa Libre, quoted a government spokesperson saying that the reason that they haven’t complied with the Interamerican Court of Human Rights’ ruling was that they “haven’t managed to identify the communities” that were evicted. In my prior article, I refer to that approach, saying that the “internal incompetence and contradictions of the government took an almost comic turn.” But the pattern is becoming clearer with time. This is not incompetence; this is a long-term public relations strategy every eight-year-old would recognize: if you break something, sweep it under the rug and pretend it doesn’t exist. The Otto Perez Molina administration appears to be following the same strategy, hoping to turn the evictions of the Colom era into a full-fledged disappearance.

This is an old enough tactic –during the genocidal war of the 1980′s in which General Otto Perez Molina played a major part, the military regime would regularly simply disappear its opponents rather than try or face them in public. This may seem like a cheap comparison, so let’s walk through it to be clear what this new kind of disappearance looks like

1. in March, hundreds of federal police and soldiers were mobilized and sent to the Polochic Valley to evict thousands of residents and provide firepower and cover for the sugar company’s private security while plantation workers destroyed homes and crops, erasing any visual evidence of those families’ prior occupation of the land.
2. Then, the sugar company engaged in an ongoing terror campaign, hunting down, ambushing, and killing several vocal land reform activists and delivering death threats to dozens more.
3. These now-landless farmers searched the valley for paid work to sustain their families, land to plant crops on, and neighboring or dispersed lots to construct temporary shacks on. During our visit to Paraná, we are all clustered under a single tin roof maybe covering eighty square feet of ground, and as we look around at the dozens of displace men and women who are gathered there for the meeting we ask: where do you sleep at night? The group explains that since the evictions many of them are renting lots to camp on, sometimes a different lot every month. Because they lost their possessions, even their clothing, when their homes were burned in March and August, most don’t have the $30 a month that rent averages, so they take out loans from a local bank or arrange to rent on credit until the landlord kicks them out, and then they go somewhere else, and then somewhere else. The loans continue, on the hope that at least the men can find some kind of job to pay it off, but these men have been blacklisted by the sugar company and few find work anywhere in the valley, so the leapfrogging from one squat to another continues.
4. When the government arrives and doesn’t find refugees lined up in an orderly fashion, ready to be counted and certified, it declares that the communities “cannot be identified” or, perhaps, they simply do not exist.

The irony of this approach, of course, is that it requires us to believe that the state has simply shut off its surveillance apparatus, now that it suits them to simply pretend that the problem is no longer there. The courts are able to competently sign out eviction and arrest warrants, deploy hundreds of troops to a valley 250 kilometers away from Guatemala City, arrive at the right spot to preside over the systematic destruction of hundreds of homes, and then fail to find any of the broken pieces when it is time for the aid trucks to arrive.

In response to the Otto Perez Molina administration’s pretext of peasant invisibility, the campesino movement has begun a new strategy of hyper-visibility in the Polochic.

Some of the 125 homes being built in 8 de Agosto. Photo by Stacey Irvin

On March 4^thwe arrived in Ocho de Agosto, the most accessible and exposed of the 14 displaced communities. Where there had once been a corn field just between the highway and the river, we came upon an enormous construction project. Using some of their painstakingly-raised aid funds, the communities had decided to build 125 bamboo-pole temporary homes, fastened together with wire and staples and roofed with tin and tarps. Ten families from each of the 14 displaced communities will be invited to take the risk and the temporary comfort of the refugee camp, braving the nightly drive-bys of the plantation’s paramilitary security team in order to challenge the government’s stategy of dispersal and narrative of disappearance.

More well known to Guatemalans and, increasingly, to the world, is their second strategy. Since March 19^th, a group of the evicted families, joined by other campesino activists from around the country, have been marching along the highway from Cobán to Guatemala City. The march is 215 kilometers and will last nine days, not only blocking road traffic but also bringing their cause to the similarly-impoverished communities of farmers and landless workers that lie along the route. The Long March is a strategy Guatemalan social movements use periodically, but never as iconically as when the miners of San Ildefonso Ixtahuacán went on strike in 1977 and walked 250 miles to Guatemala City, joined by hundreds of thousands of supporters who donated food, supplies, and marching feet along the way. That march was understood as a central part of the growing indigenous labor movement of the late 1970′s, proving that unity between rural communities and urban workers was possible. That unity would crescendo and then face brutal disarticulation during the dirty war of the early 1980′s.

But by uniting movements for land reform and against mining and other ‘megaprojects.’ the Polochic campesinos hope to reinvigorate the social alliance that was destroyed in the 1980′s, and their refusal of invisibility is already bearing some fruit. Solidarity statements from the Ch’orti’ indigenous organizations of Eastern Guatemala and UNSITRAGUA, a conglomeration of national labor unions, led the chorus of support, and thousands of supporters have joined the march as it prepares to enter Guatemala City on Tuesday morning.

For on-the-ground updates and photos of each day of the march, see Mark Romeril’s blog.

The Coalition of Immokalee Workers and Inspiration

from Tristan Call

posted simultaneously at sfablog.org, the blog for the Student-Farmworker Alliance

My years of involvement in the Campaign for Fair Food have involved an increasing appreciation for the ground beneath our feet. I mean ‘ground’ in the obvious sense, of course –the pasture clay that Tennessee farmworkers dig out of their boot-treads; the sandy soils from which tomato plants vine up towards the sky and towards farmworkers’ calloused hands in Southwest Florida. But I also mean ‘ground’ as our most valuable metaphor: the grounded-ness of our ‘grassroots’ organizing, our ‘rhizomatic’ activist networks, our ‘radically’-rooted analyses and strategies for change. We talk about ground in order to say that something is almost hyper-real, and that’s the kind of ground I think a Fort Meyers-based attorney for the Department of Justice was invoking when he called Immokalee “ground zero” for modern-day slavery. We do it, too, when as members of the Student Farmworker Alliance we instinctively refer to our full-time staff as being organizers “on the ground” in their Immokalee office.

Earthy metaphors fit in part because of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers‘ organizing strategy –methodical, gradual, transformative, long-haul. It’s biological, it persists and grows tenaciously This is a revolution, but it looks a lot more like the growth of a pecan grove or the slow, settling-in of a mangrove swamp than it looks like the flash of a Molotov cocktail. For those of us giddy over the volatile energy of barricaded Tahrir and Zucotti and Syntagma Squares in Cairo and New York and Athens, the movement of the CIW can seem almost geological in comparison. The reforms we are seeing in Florida agriculture have taken time and will continue to, but they will be solid and lasting like continental drift, pulling the earth inexorably along.

Earlier this week, I was walking across Guatemala City’s central park, and found myself standing on a black-and-white image of a student activist who had been killed by the police 3 decades before. I had run into the yearly commemoration of the victims of the country’s 36-year civil war, in which over 250,000 people were killed by the army. Young activists from the “HIJOS” (childen) collective, descendants of those killed and disappeared during the war, were painting an enormous mural on the plaza directly in front of the presidential palace and wheatpasting portraits of the disappeared below it with a gigantic caption: “Justice for Genocide Now!” It’s a bold demand, since the man who now occupies the presidential palace is widely acknowledged to be one of the architects of the genocide in the department of K’iche’ while he was director of military intelligence in 1982. But it’s also a demand that seems possible, after former dictator Efraín Rios Montt was put under house arrest for the belated investigation into his war crimes last month. So these children of the disappeared paste the images to the plaza, so that government functionaries will have to walk over them on their way into work each day.

I was in Immokalee on the day Rios Montt was arrested, and the CIW office was abuzz with discussion between Guatemalan farmworkers, many of whom come from areas that were targeted by the army’s “scorched earth” policies 30 years ago – would it just be a show, like all of the previous attempts to prosecute the military, or would it be real this time?

Now, standing in front of the palace, things came full circle. The Estudiantina, a revolutionary folk music group from the university, was playing for the commemoration, and I ran into one of the guitarists afterwards. His CIW shirt matched my CIW cap, and he yelled to his fellow musicians- “hey, this guy is with the Coalition!” Some of the other students rushed over to talk about the CIW, and wish the farmworkers success in the upcoming fast for the Publix campaign. Some of them had been to Immokalee themselves, it turns out, and now, as they stood on the plaza in Guatemala City in front of the palace of a war criminal, they wanted to talk about la lucha – and they meant the Campaign for Fair Food.

In Guatemala, where I work with peasant unions engaged in a life-or-death struggle for land reform, I often tell Guatemalan activists stories of the CIW: the campaigns for fair food, the pennies-per-pound, the David-and-Goliath confrontations with Burger King and Publix. Almost always, they are astonished. Many of those activists are familiar with working in the US; many have made the crossing at some point themselves, and everyone has a family member washing dishes in Queens or picking tobacco in North Carolina or landscaping the mini-mansions of the rich in Orange County. They tell me, “I thought everyone just hid and kept quiet up there!” They listen to the stories of U-haul trailers and slaves in shackles, and nod with recognition: many of their own parents were born as serfs (colonos) on the piedmont coffee plantations of Guatemala’s southwest coast. The thought of their compatriots in Immokalee successfully bucking the bosses off their backs, even in the land of ICE and Joe Arpaio, elicits a smile, a soft, hopeful venceremos.

In Nashville, I have spent the last two years volunteering with a scrappy grassroots outfit called the Workers’ Dignity Project, which has grown from an idea and a handful of visionaries to a base organization of dozens of low-wage immigrant workers supporting each other in the fight to end our city’s wage theft epidemic. Workers’ Dignity is well on its way to becoming a full-fledged workers’ center, and becoming a powerful force of solidarity in the struggle for a living wage and racial justice in the middle South. All along the way, the CIW accompanied that growth. The CIW came through Nashville with their Modern-Day Slavery Museum last year, and met with the Workers’ Dignity membership for two days of collaboration and strategy discussion. Not long after, a group of immigrant workers and allies went down to Florida to join the “Do the Right Thing” march on four Publix supermarkets in Tampa. I will never forget my friend Juan’s face glowing as he saw the marches converge together and the chants of “si se puede” magnified, as he led the column with his Workers’ Dignity banner. He was still smiling as he looked out the van window on our way back to Nashville. I asked him what he was thinking about, and he said, “I had no idea that there were so many white people, black people, citizens of this country, that supported our cause.” There had been dozens of church congregations, student groups, labor unions, and families out that day, a testament to the transformative power of the social alliances that Florida farmworkers have been nurturing for two decades.

Now that Workers’ Dignity is taking root, we stand in solidarity with the CIW that showed solidarity to us. Publix is expanding in our state, hoping to construct dozens of new family-friendly supermarkets in a growing market. We will be there to hold them to the advice that their founder George Jenkins gave to his grandson Ed Crenshaw, the current CEO of Publix: “don’t let making a profit stand in the way of doing the right thing.”

An Injury to One: Part 2

What can the anarchist labor movement teach us about solidarity in the fight against sexual violence? [published simultaneously at Feminist Mormon Housewives]

In part 1 of this piece, I introduced the Wobblies’ iconic approach to ‘solidarity unionism’, and ways that we can take the lessons of class struggle literally in the joint fight against sexual violence. In part 2, I look at two examples of the role of feminism in anti-capitalist and anti-authoritarian struggle.

Rape survivors organizing against capitalism

Most of what I would like to say here is said better, and from experience, by Liberté Locke, a barista and organizer of the Starbucks Workers Union (IWW), in her piece “My Body, My Rules”. I’ll make extensive references to her account in this post, but it’s worth just reading it in its entirety first.

In my previous piece (Part 1), I argued that abusers often learn how to abuse by brutalizing women, and then afterwards branch out to brutalizing men. This is obviously overly schematic, but it’s one more reason why men might want to face down misogyny from the beginning instead of letting it take root – because it comes back to bite us eventually, too. It also helps us to understand oppression in its more generalized forms (i.e. modern capitalism), so we should pay special attention to the sexist or racist origins of some kinds of violence if we want to be able to achieve liberation for everyone. And that’s not a bad basis for ‘solidarity’ between genders in the fight against sexual violence even when we recognize that men and women have dramatically different experiences and risks.

I’ll begin with the ways feminism can help us develop a general theory of oppression.

Liberté Locke starts her essay this way:

I was raped by a boyfriend on August 18th, 2006. The very next day I held back tears while I lied to a stranger over the phone about why I was unavailable to go in that day for a second interview for a job that I desperately needed. When I hung up the phone I saw a new text message. It was from him. “It’s not over. It will never be over between us…”

The next day I went in for the second interview. It was inside of the Sears Tower Starbucks in Chicago. I took the train to the interview constantly looking around me and shaking. I needed work. I had just been fired from Target two weeks prior and had no prospects. I knew I would have to go through a metal detector in order to enter the building so despite every instinct in my body I did not bring a knife with me.

She got that job, and Liberté eventually became one of the most active and notorious organizers of the IWW Starbucks Workers Union in New York City. Where mainstream ‘business unions’ have decided that the high turnover and low-paying service sector is too difficult or unrewarding to unionize, the IWW is trying to fill the gap and support organizing among the ‘unskilled’ and low-wage workers that make up the majority of America’s postindustrial workforce (this is essentially the same thing that happened a hundred years ago, which was why the IWW was originally founded. With the IWW, Liberté fought for wage increases, health care, the right to organize, and an end to sexual harassment. But once a year, on the date of her hiring, she has

annual reviews where I generally get to argue with someone younger than me who makes significantly more than do about why my hard work, aching back, cracking hands, sore wrists, the bags under my eyes, the burns, the bruises on my arms, the cuts on my knees, the constant degrading treatment by the customers, the “baby, honey, sugar, bitch”, the “hey, you, slut…I said NO whip cream!”s, the staring, the following after work…I get to argue why all that means I’m worth a 33cent raise rather than 22cents.

Liberté says this annual review is the one reason why she still remembers the anniversary of her rape.

An Injury to One

What can the anarchist labor movement teach us about solidarity in the fight against sexual violence?

Can Men and Women Have One Big Union?

[posted concurrently @ FeministMormonHousewives]

Back in June 1905, workers representing dozens of unions from around the United States gathered in Chicago to form one big revolutionary union, the Industrial Workers of the World. IWW members, or Wobblies, as they came to be known, left a permanent mark on our country, helping to win battles for the 8-hour day, free speech, overtime pay, workplace safety, and the right to organize. But the biggest thing they left was their idea of ‘solidarity unionism,’ summed up in their motto, “an injury to one is an injury to all.”

Heard through the filter of today’s liberal multiculturalism, that motto might ring of “we’re all in this together”, the sort of hollow inspirational grandstanding we’re used to seeing on classroom posters and corporate advertising and moralistic sermons from capitalists in suits. But that’s not at all what the Wobblies meant by it – they were the original class warriors of American labor, and if there is a clear historical precedent to today’s “We Are the 99%” it is probably the preamble to the IWW constitution: “The working class and the employing class have nothing in common”. But even after drawing a clear line between the ‘owners’ and the ‘workers’, the abusers and the abused, they were still left with one major challenge: how to convince the 99% of people who worked for a living, as divided as they all were by race, gender, language, and trade, that they had common interests. The Wobblies emerged out of an environment where only white male skilled workers (like carpenters and railroad conductors) were really encouraged to organize for better labor conditions. The Wobblies, though, saw that ultimately if there were any workers that could be underpaid and abused on the job, those conditions would eventually become a reality for everybody because they could always replace you with someone a little more desperate for the job –a prediction that’s been dramatically illustrated over the last several decades, as US corporations have gradually replaced their ‘good union jobs’ with outsourced sweatshops.

Lucy Parsons, Chicago anarchist and co-founder of the IWW

The Wobblies’ predictions and their message of solidarity hit close to home. I work as a volunteer at the Workers’ Dignity Project, a scrappy outfit of immigrant workers and allies fighting to stop the wage theft epidemic in Nashville. Since I answer the organization’s phone, I’m the first listener for desperate stories. This morning a construction worker called; fifteen minutes earlier his former boss had spotted him on the interstate and chased him, tailgating his truck, pulling alongside the cab to shout, and following him off the exit –when the worker pulled off and stepped out of his truck, the boss yelled he was going to have him killed, soon, if he went anywhere near the Workers’ Dignity Project again, before jumping back in his Mercedes and speeding off. Or last week: I got a call from a woman whose husband was picked up by the police in a routine traffic stop during a construction job in Louisiana, and has been incarcerated for more than three weeks because he didn’t have an ID. Their boss is refusing to pay the $8000 he owes for weeks of contracted work, and now she is about to give birth, without her husband or the cash to cover medical expenses.

When workers in Nashville do stand up to this kind of brutality, they usually do so with an explanation like this: “I am tired of being treated like nothing. I might not win this battle, but if I don’t stand up, my boss is going to do this to lots of other people after me, like he did to me and lots of people before me.” They are struggling for the benefit of someone else down the line, knowing that if one worker can be abused with impunity the bosses will get used to it and eventually use those same tools against everyone.

The Tyrant’s Toolbox

For men engaged in the struggle against patriarchy and sexual violence, “an injury to one is an injury to all” isn’t always easy to apply literally.

We might resonate with the touchy-feely idea that we’re ‘all in this together’, or the sentimental notion that I’m just affected as my girlfriend by misogyny because I love her and don’t want her to feel bad, or the real but still laughably inadequate worry that oppression hurts the oppressing class (in this case, men) as much as it hurts the oppressed (in this case, women). But, in the end, women are still usually the ones that bear the brunt of sexual violence. Is gender just different, or does the Wobbly slogan hold any promise for us here?

I think men can benefit enormously from a feminist (woman-centered) analysis of power and abuse, even when they are trying to fight violence against men. Bear with me for an example or two:

Last month I read Yashar Ali’s “A Message to Women From a Man: You Are Not ‘Crazy’,” about what happens when men are cruel, and then when women confront that cruelty men blow it off as women being ‘overly emotional’ or ‘unable to take a joke.’ For this, Ali borrows the term ‘gaslighting’ from the 1944 film Gaslight, in which a greedy husband schemes to steal his wife’s jewelry:

He realizes he can accomplish this by having her certified as insane and hauled off to a mental institution. To pull of this task, he intentionally sets the gaslights in their home to flicker off and on, and every time [his wife] reacts to it, he tells her she’s just seeing things. In this setting, a gaslighter is someone who presents false information to alter the victim’s perception of him or herself.

Today, when the term is referenced, it’s usually because the perpetrator says things like, “You’re so stupid,” or “No one will ever want you,” to the victim. This is an intentional, pre-meditated form of gaslighting, much like the actions of Charles Boyer’s character in Gaslight [...]

The form of gaslighting I’m addressing is not always pre-mediated or intentional, which makes it worse, because it means all of us, especially women, have dealt with it at one time or another.

Those who engage in gaslighting create a reaction — whether it’s anger, frustration, sadness — in the person they are dealing with. Then, when that person reacts, the gaslighter makes them feel uncomfortable and insecure by behaving as if their feelings aren’t rational or normal.

As the online comments attest, the article served as a sort of inkblot test for its readers. One critical comment that really stood out to me, though, and which I think can help us think through the politics of solidarity in male feminism, goes roughly like this: “Gaslighting is done by and to all genders; it isn’t just a tactic men use against women.” Which is, of course, true, although the commenter misses the article’s point: when was the last time you heard a guy say, “ya, that girl was just cray-zee”? Probably yesterday. When was the last time you heard a girl say that about a boy? Probably less recently.

But on the other hand, this gender-neutral theory of abuse has a point: the reality is that abusers are often not that creative – they use the weapons and practices they already know, and use them against whoever they have selected as their next victim. But abusers do often have a lot of practice – and in a patriarchal society, a lot of their abuse is practiced at the expense of women. Let’s think of a typical example from my middle-school days: girls were treated as though they were more irrational, weaker, less intelligent, and generally less valuable than boys where I lived in northern Alabama. So when a boy wanted to pick on another boy, it was generally as simple as labeling that boy a “girl” and then treat him as he would normally treat a girl.

inmates at SCC, one of California’s first integrated prisons, in 2009

Tactics like these are used all the time to hurt both women and men- but they are developed and practiced most often and viciously on women. When men get ‘gaslit’ (or worse), we are being subjected to a patriarchal tactic that exists largely to subordinate women. If we really want to understand what we are experiencing, feminist analyses of patriarchy will help us see general patterns. Similarly, a lot of the tools that were developed by American white supremacy are now used against white people too – for example, the abuses of convict labor in our prison system were developed as a way of violently controlling African American laborers after the ‘abolition of slavery’, and those patterns persist, but those tools are now used against white prisoners as well.

Even if we recognize that today’s abusive CEO’s and prison guards could very well be African Americans themselves, our critiques of the prison system will always lack depth and our resistance will lack grounding if we don’t recognize how those tools became patterned and practiced through white supremacy.

Derrick Jensen, my favorite male feminist thinker and a creative writing teacher in the California State Prison system, suggests in his book The Culture of Make Believe that:

Most people acknowledge that at least on the inside, rape is not a sex crime, but a crime of power. In an all-male prison, the absence of women forces men to create women, that is, to create a subordinate class, the feminine to their masculine, the submissive to their aggressive, the penetrated to their penetration, to create a class of the fucked.

Male prison rape, then, is an atrocity in which, on the surface, no women seem to be involved. But in a real sense, women are intimately involved: they are the class on which this kind of brutality is rehearsed ‘in real life’. After all, as Jensen goes on to point out, male prisoners are raped at a rate between 9 and 20 percent, but,

There’s something interesting about the rate at which men in prison are raped: it’s lower than the rate at which women are raped in the culture at large. Most studies suggest that 25 percent of women in the United States are raped during their lifetimes, and another 19 percent have to fend off rape attempts. I suppose you could say that for women –and not just those in prison – rape is “a fact of life.” When a man goes to prison, everyone seems to think: “Oh, shit, he’s going to get raped.” But every day, women walk down the streets, or stay in their homes, and face that same possibility.

To adapt the Wobblies slogan, then: behind every injured man, there is a series of injured women. We begin practicing solidarity by understanding that we all have different experiences, different risks, different privileges and vulnerabilities, and the structures of oppression in our society are a result of specific racialized and sexualized patterns that go back hundreds or thousands of years. Oppression is not equal. Then, we realize that even if some of us are at more immediate risk than others, we can’t afford to ever let the oppressors successfully practice, because they will inevitably use that practice against us, too.

Check back for Part 2: Rape survivors organizing against capitalism in today’s IWW, and the politics of gender in Occupy Nashville.

A brief homage to the applied brilliance of the people I have met in the last 12 hours at Occupy Nashville:

Dillon has been on the street for years, but as a kid used to sneak into quantum physics classes after he ended up on his own in Denver a few years ago. He spent the night explaining neuroscience to me. He’s hoping he can get afforable access to Middle Tennessee State University soon- he is thinking he might study political science. He let me sleep in his tent with him, after finishing a great graffiti mural on a big piece of cardboard he found.

After I woke up and packed my stuff, I met Chris, who lives here at the plaza, and asked me what I study. When I said anthropology, he started asking me questions about Marshal Sahlins and the political economy of hunter-gatherer societies. We talked about the dialectic of simple living versus overproduction as different roads to affluence. He’s reading a book on nonviolence he found in the Occupy Nashville library, but says he’d love to get a copy of some Marshal Sahlins articles. I’ve been in anthropology grad school for years, but the intellectual curiosity and commitment of my bunkmates on the street is something I haven’t seen for a long time.

Solidarity to our Occupier brothers and sisters around the world,

Tristan

Occupied Nashville

Pelican Bay State Prison Hunger Strike May Resume

[Note: After posting Tim DeChristopher's letter from prison -see last post- I received several responses suggesting that we should be paying more attention to the general brutality experienced by all victims and survivors of abusive incarceration, and not just those like Tim who have well-publicized intentions to risk jail time. So here is one of what will hopefully be a series of posts regarding recent events in the prison resistance movement. Freedom for Tim DeChristopher, and all political prisoners (all prisoners are political prisoners).]

“censored pelican” drawn by Pete Collins, who is imprisoned at Bath Prison, Ontario, Canada

As I understand it, the Pelican Bay State Prison say a massive hunger strike this summer begun by prisoners in the Special Housing Unit, a 23-hour lockdown facility.  The hunger strike eventually spread to over 6,000 prisoners in the California prison system, dozens of solidarity actions on the outside, and even a piece of graffiti I ran into in Oaxaca, Mexico last month urging solidarity with the Pelican Bay prisoners. Now prisoner Mutope Duguma is calling for a new hunger strike to begin September 26th, in a letter published by the San Francisco BayView.

For background and some nice commentary, check out this piece from Sketchy Thoughts

Here’s a piece written by the striking prisoners back in July just after ending the 3-week hunger strike, pulled from the website Prisoner Hunger Strike Solidarity:

Declaring a Victory & Ongoing Struggle

Written Statement by Short Corridor Collective (a small representative of the Hunger Strike Leaders at Pelican Bay)

To Supporters:

On July 1, 2011, a collective group of PBSP-SHU inmates composed of all races began an indefinite hunger strike as a means of peacefully protesting 20-40 years of human rights violations. The offenses against us rose to the level of both physical and mental torture—for example, the coercing of SHU inmates into becoming known informants for the state and thereby placing those prisoners, and possibly their families outside of prison, at serious risk of danger in response to being known to have informed on and caused harm to other inmates via informing on them. The decision to strike was not made on a whim. It came about in response to years of subjection to progressively more primitive conditions and decades of isolation, sensory deprivation and total lack of normal human contact, with no end in sight. This reality, coupled with our prior ineffective collective filing of thousands of inmate grievances and hundreds of court actions to challenge such blatantly illegal policies and practices (as more fully detailed and supported by case law, in our formal complaint available online here) led to our conclusion that a peaceful protest via hunger strike was our only available avenue to expose what’s really been going on here in CDCR-SHU prisons and to force meaningful change.

Letter from prison: Climate Prisoner Tim DeChristopher speaks

originally posted on Grist and Peaceful Uprising

The following text appeared in a handwritten letter from Tim DeChristopher addressed to Grist’s Jennifer Prediger.

[note: Tim DeChristopher was finally sentenced after years of court delays that hoped to blunt the force of planned solidarity mobilizations. He was arrested and tried for successfully disrupting an illegal federal oil and gas auction -as "Bidder 70"- that was later canceled by the Obama administration]

If I had ever doubted the power of words, Judge Benson made their importance all too clear at my sentencing last month. When he sentenced me to two years in prison plus three years probation, he admitted my offense “wasn’t too bad.” The problem, Judge Benson insisted, was my “continuing trail of statements” and my lack of regret. Apparently, all he really wanted was an apology, and for that, two years in prison could have been avoided. In fact, Judge Benson said that had it not been for the political statements I made in public, I would have avoided prosecution entirely. As is generally the case with civil disobedience, it was extremely important to the government that I come before the majesty of the court with my head bowed and express regret. So important, in fact, that an apology with proper genuflection is currently fair trade for a couple years in prison. Perhaps that’s why most activist cases end in a plea bargain.

Since that seems like such a good deal, some people are asking why I wasn’t willing to shut my mouth and take it. But perhaps we should be asking why the government is willing to make such a deal. The most recent plea bargain they offered me was for as little as 30 days in jail. (I’m writing this on my 28th day.) So if they wanted to lock me up for two years, why would they let me walk for an apology and keeping my mouth shut for a while? On the other hand, if they wanted to sweep this under the rug, why would they cause such a stir by locking me up? Why do my words make that much of a difference?

With all criminal cases, of which 85 percent end in a plea bargain, the government has a strong incentive to avoid a trial: In addition to cutting the expense of a trial, a plea bargain helps concentrate power in the hands of government officials.

The revolutionaries who founded this country were deeply distrustful of a concentration of power, so among other precautions, they established citizen juries as the most important part of our legal system and insisted upon constitutional right to a jury trial. To avoid this inconvenience, those seeking concentrated power free from revolutionaries have minimized the role of citizens in our legal system. They have accomplished this by restricting what juries can hear, what they can decide upon, and most importantly, by avoiding jury trials all together. It is now accepted as a basic fact of our criminal justice system that a defendant who exercises his or her right to a jury trial will be punished at sentencing for doing so. Transferring power from citizens to government happens when the role of citizens gets eliminated in the process.

With civil disobedience cases, however, the government puts an extra value on an apology. By its very nature, civil disobedience is an act whose message is that the government and its laws are not the sole voice of moral authority. It is a statement that we the citizens recognize a higher moral code to which the law is no longer aligned, and we invite our fellow citizens to recognize the difference. A government truly of the people, for the people, and by the people is not threatened by citizens issuing such a challenge. But government whose authority depends on an ignorant or apathetic citizenry is threatened by every act of open civil disobedience, no matter how small. To regain that tiny piece of authority, the government either has to respond to the activist’s demands, or get the activist to back down with a public statement of regret. Otherwise, those little challenges to the moral authority of government start to add up.

Over the last couple hundred years of quelling dissent, the government has learned a few things about maintaining power. Sometimes it seems that the government has learned more from our social movement history than we as activists have. Their willingness to let a direct action off with a slap on the wrist while handing out two years for political statements comes from their understanding of the power of an individual. They know that one person, or even a small group, cannot have enough of a direct impact on our corporate giants to really alter things in our economy. They know that a single person can’t have a meaningful direct impact on our political system. But our modern government is dismantling the First Amendment because they understand the very same thing our founding fathers did when they wrote it: What one person can do is to plant the seeds of love and outrage in the hearts of a movement. And if those hearts are fertile ground, those seeds of love and outrage will grow into a revolution.

Let’s Win! from Alexander on Vimeo.