The G8/G20 are anti-democratic illegitimate institutions that inflict daily violence on our communities. Everywhere the G8 and G20 have met to further their exploitative agendas – from London to Pittsburgh to Toronto - they have faced huge opposition from local communities. The kind of mass resistance we have seen in Toronto has and will continue to follow them wherever they go.

For several months, communities across Toronto have been coming together to resist the imposition of austerity measures advanced at the G8/G20 summits. The Harper government spends 1.2 billion taxpayer dollars to host the G8/G20 summits while it cuts social spending in ways that have drastic impacts people in the Toronto area and other parts of Canada.

Since these communities have come together, the police have been using intimidation tactics to repress and silence people in the Toronto community. Police and intelligence officers went to community organizers' homes and harrassed them in the streets. Now they have arrested many of these people, many of them young organizers of color, and charged them with conspiracy.

These people hold the Harper government to account and they speak out against policies that are making ordinary people poorer, sicker and more desperate. As a result, they have been intimidated, harassed, and imprisoned. They are political prisoners in this country, where the police repression shows that its claims of democracy are simply window dressing.

While police continue to intimidate people, individuals and community members keep going out in the streets to show that they are not afraid and stand with political prisoners as well as oppressed peoples – first nations communities, immigrants and refugees, poor people, people of color, women, trans people, people with disabilities and queer communities.

The police intimidation and repression added to the anger and frustration people have with the G8/G20 policies and leaders that destroy their lives and the lives of people around the world. This is why people targeted banks and multinational corporations, and the property of police.

Ultimately, 1 billion dollars were spent on beating people who were demonstrating throughout the week, on intimidating community members in the streets, on arresting organizers of color and indigenous solidarity organizers, on sending demonstrators to hospital with broken bones, and on using tear gas on those in the so-called designated “free speech” zone. 1 billion dollars has not been used to protect people and to keep the city safe. Instead it has been used to repress the people who are working to make this city, and planet a fairer, more just, and more humane place.

Toronto Community Mobilization Network

by Gwalgen Geordie Dent -

Hundreds of illegal detentions and searches have became common place this weekend for everyday Toronto residents and protesters while Alternative Media Centre (AMC) journalists have also been subject to mass illegal searches, detainments, 8 arrests without charge and 1 arrest for breaching the peace.

Dozens of AMC journalists have reported illegal searches and detainments by police. Police are not allowed to detain, search or arrest people without a charge (or their consent in the case of a search), unless they are caught commiting a crime or unless the police believe a terrorist activity is taking place.

Over 900 arrests have been reported during the G20 Summit making this the largest mass arrest in Canada's history. Many have been arrested without charges and held in small cages crammed with protesters for hours or even days.

An AMC journalist was seriously injured when a stun device was used on him while filming an illegal search. The journalist had a pacemaker and was rushed to hospital.

Meanwhile, AMC journalists Maxx Lennox and Brianna Chatwin were witnessed being illegally searched while covering events in Downtown Toronto on Sunday. Isaac, a friend with Maxx at the time, recounted that both were walking around the corner at 4:15pm when police saw that Chatwin had a bandana. A Constable, Badge # 10038, confiscated the banada informing her that "We're taking all banadas so you can't put it on," and stated it was "a new order." Chatwin said police did not believe that she was media.

Both Chatwin and Lennox say they were also stopped an hour and a half before near College subway station by Toronto Police Services officers who were not wearing badge numbers and refusing to identify themselves. When asking for police identification, Lennox said that police responded "we don't have to respond to your questions" and "protesters took our ID". Police are required to show badge numbers under the law. Chatwin also said that police told her, "If you take my photo, I'll smash your camera."

Two other AMC journalists who happened upon Lennox and Chatwin's detainment took photos and repeatedly asked police what grounds they were using to search both journalists as neither had consented to a search. Police told both that they were "blocking the sidewalk" and that if they did not walk away from the illegal detention, they would be arrested for "obstruction of justice". Constable's #10430 and #9909 took photos of all the journalists and repeatedly threatened AMC journalists with arrest.

All 4 were eventually allowed to leave.

from the Socialist Project -

The massive police presence in Toronto over this week has been officially justified on the basis of protecting the leaders of the G8 and G20 countries meeting in Huntsville and Toronto. We were told that the creation of the fenced-in fortress, the massive mobilization of police (estimates ranging from 10-20,000) from across Canada, and even the passing of a secret law on policing (by the executive of the Ontario government without reference to the Legislative Assembly and the opposition parties) that made it a crime to appear within five metres of the security fence, would protect our right to protest as well.

This is not what unfolded in Toronto over the weekend.

Thousands of protesters marched peacefully on Friday, challenging the purpose and agenda of the G20, although completely hemmed on all sides by thousands of heavily armed police over the entire march (and severely hampering the freedom of assembly). On Saturday, in the midst of a larger demonstration (estimated at between 10-25,000), organized by the labour, anti-privatization and peace movements, a series of unwarranted acts of vandalism by a small number of protesters against stores, vehicles and buildings, was used as an excuse for a massive unleashing of repression and attacks by police against the democratic rights of both protestors, and Torontonians as a whole. (Like what happened at the Montebello Summit of North American leaders in August 2007, it will come out over the next weeks how widely the police had infiltrated some of the key groups – especially the so-called Black Bloc, knew the planning and participated as agent provocateurs.)

There seemed to be no real effort on the part of the police to stop the attacks on the stores. As well, none of the massive police contingents tried to stop some of the small groups from burning three of their police vehicles. It was as if the police weren't all that concerned with these actions. Reporters from European broadcasters and newspapers reported that this was totally out of keeping with any real concern to prevent violence.

The police then unleashed waves of repression against the legitimate protesters. This included those who wished to push toward the security fence – in an effort to challenge the militarization of the streets and demand that the G20 leaders respond to concerns about austerity and attacks on poor and working people; those who were simply voicing their concerns about the G20 agenda (with its radical austerity agenda of having the public sector and the poor pay for the bailout of the banks); and journalists and even innocent and curious bystanders. In one attack on a “free protest” zone (previously negotiated with the police) rubber bullets and tear gas was used, and people were indiscriminately taken down, beaten and arrested.

In all, by Sunday morning estimates were that some 500 people were arrested (and there have been hundreds more over the course of the day bringing estimates up to 900 detainees). It is impossible for anyone to know how many of these were instigators of violence and how many were people simply exercising their right to protest. But clearly the mass majority were only protesting and exercising their rights to assembly and free speech, which the Toronto police and the wider security forces have been systematically violating.

The temporary jail that protestors have been placed in is located at the old Toronto Film Studios on Eastern Avenue on the eastern edge of the downtown, converted into a series of cages in essentially a huge warehouse. The jail is described by inmates as a kind of Guantanamo North: cold, dirty and especially humiliating for those who were said to have refused arrest. People have been held for hours without recourse to legal representation, of which there has been a large legal team at hand. Protesters hoping to provide some type of support for those incarcerated, have themselves been attacked, tear-gassed and dispersed by police violence, with several more being arrested.

Listening to the mass media and the interviews with the police and security spokespeople for the City of Toronto and the Canadian state, one would have thought that there was full scale rioting, and that the massive, billion dollar spending spree on security for the Summit – that angered people across the country – was somehow worth it. As part of this, all protesters are being demonized and the police are being portrayed as heroes, notably by the political leadership and the Mayor of Toronto, David Miller.

The message of the protests (and of the thousands who protested across the week at hundreds of talks, meetings, protests, cultural events) – that the G20 meeting reflected the underlying agenda of the corporations and the political elites, to make sharp cutbacks across the public sector, to impose wage cuts, to not raise significant (or any) new taxes on financial capital and to impose new forms of hardship in the form of higher taxes and cuts in benefits for working people and the poor – was drowned out in a demonizing of the entire project of the protest. The ruling classes in the G20 were doing everything in their power to have the working classes pay for the crisis and their project of re-constructing neoliberalism and the political hegemony of the banks and financial capital.

The police and much of Toronto's political and economic establishment sought to use the incidents to change the entire discourse of the G20 week.

Socialists, of course, take their distance from the foolish acts of the few who confuse violent attacks and trashing with revolutionary politics. This is to substitute individual acts of dissent for the working class and the mass movement as a whole. It is the adventurism that calls forth the most violent features of the security and policing apparatuses of the state, catching hundreds of innocents in the wake, and helps justify the endless expansion of the security state. To challenge the neoliberal globalization agenda of the G20, and overturn all the undemocratic exploitative relations of capitalism, we need to build a political movement in Canada, based among the working classes who don't earn their income from capital ownership, and who also are oppressed by the unequal relations of race, gender, sexuality and nationality.

At this moment, it is a point of fundamental solidarity to denounce, as forcefully as possible, the police repression being unleashed against G20 protesters. We insist that those incarcerated on Eastern Avenue have their full civil rights restored and that civilian authorities take control from the Toronto Police Services of oversight of these proceedings. They have proven incapable of protecting – and understanding – basic civil rights (starting from the special emergency powers asked for by Police Chief Blair, and granted by stealth by Premier Dalton McGuinty). The accused should immediately be released without charge, or be freed on bail and given the right to defend themselves in open courts (not the kangaroo courts with limited or no public access that have been operating over this week).

The police occupation of Toronto should end immediately, and our full civil rights – and especially our rights to our city and streets – be restored. There clearly will need to be a full and independent investigation about the role of the police in the violence of the last few days, the role of agent provocateurs and plants in the planning of these events and the astonishing violation of the rights of ordinary people and protesters alike on the streets of Toronto over the last week. •

from the Socialist Project

by Billy Wharton -

If one political concept dominated the proceedings of the US Social Forum, it was horizontalism. Organizers mentioned it in relation to media access, workshop panelists offered it as an alternative to top-down NGOs and political parties and participants already engaged in politics employed it as a measurement of their own groups’ internal functioning. To some, horizontalism represented more of an abstract democratic sense informed by anarchist sentiments. For others, it meant thinking through power relations that operate inside the new structures they sought to set up – frequently things like cooperatives, community supported agriculture or community gardens. Kandace Vallejo an organizer with the Student Farmworker Alliance (SFA) offered a more concrete definition.

Vallejo spoke as part of the panel I helped to organize for the Socialist Party USA at the Social Forum. SFA is an ally organization to the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW), an organization that represents farm workers throughout the state of Florida. Vallejo spoke about CIW’s remarkable string of victories at a moment when nearly all of organized labor seems to be in deep retreat. Multinational food giants such as Taco Bell, McDonalds and WholeFoods have all yielded to the demands of this organization.

Vallejo presented these successful campaigns as a part of a larger process of trial and error. At first, workers in the region did what workers everywhere do – prepared to fight their bosses. This meant organizing against the growers. However, CIW soon realized that multinational food corporations held growers hostage by their demands for cheap produce. In response, the focus shifted to these companies and, in the process, the CIW needed to call on external ally organizations to assist the organizing. High-profile campaigns ensued as picket lines were thrown up in front of Taco Bell and other food chain stores throughout the country.

How could the CIW maintain this broad network of allies and still keep the focus on the workplace struggles? The driving force behind these campaigns, Vallejo related, are the workers themselves. The initial organizing was quite challenging since workers came from radically different historical traditions in Haiti, Central America and Mexico. Eventually, after struggling together, the workers devised a three-prong system for organizing – popular education, the identification and development of leaders and mass mobilizations.

Vallejo described the manner in which popular education played a critical role in mobilizing both the workers and the surrounding community. By employing graphic art and a low power radio station, CIW is able to reach a beyond the worksite and enter into the everyday lives of people in the region. Organizers employ the notion of “accompaniment” to express their desire to march with the community not over its head or not in an attempt to force changes that they see as desirable, but the community does not.

However, the internal workings of the CIW express the clearest ethic of horizontalism. Vallejo spoke about the yearly assemblies of CIW members in which major decisions about campaigns and the election of representatives take place. Further, elected leaders are held to a similar position as that of workers themselves as staff salaries are kept close to the average worker and staff must spend ¼ of the season working in the fields. Such measures are meant to prevent the formation of elitism amongst officials and are a far cry from the way a typical trade union operates. CIW members work side-by-side with their representatives thereby placing real limits on vertical hierarchies within the worker's movement. This type of organization also allows the campaigns to flow from the bottom up as ally organizations express solidarity with real organizing conducted by the farm workers themselves.

The next test for the CIW and its allies will come as they continue a campaign that targets the Trader Joe’s chain. Once again a corporation that markets a sense of sustainability to its consumers has proved to be resistant when farm workers come knocking. And so, again, the CIW will roll out its networks of allies in order to employ mass mobilization as a tactic to lessen exploitation and defend the base level organizing underway in Florida.

The CIW was not the only organization advertising its horizontal structures. Many other workshops offered the argument that transforming a society based on hierarchy would require a grassroots democratic response. Such a response aims at simultaneously challenging the non-profit and NGO sector and the political party formations that rest on vanguardist or hierarchical assumptions. So, as the latest version of the US Social Forum draws to a close, a message from below is beginning to materialize – the self-organization, self-reliance and self-determination that horizontalism allows will be a fundamental part of any attempt at social transformation in the US. Exploitative vertical institutions such as multinational corporations beware.

***
Billy Wharton is a writer, activist and editor of the Socialist WebZine whose articles have appeared in the Washington Post, the NYC Indypendent, Spectrezine and the Monthly Review Zine. He can be reached at whartonbilly@gmail.com

by the Socialist Party USA National Committee-

By now, nearly everyone on the planet is aware of the creeping disaster that is the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. Many call the oil spill a crime. People are rightfully outraged and many are calling for criminal prosecution of the British Petroleum Corporation. Many blame the problem on corporations. While it is clear by now that crimes were committed, this is not the issue. The problem isn’t the crimes. The problem is capitalism.

Workers and the environment are perpetually exploited by corporations for profit, but the true nature and functions of corporations must be understood. Corporations are no more than tools of capitalism. While it is important to recognize and disable the tools of exploitation, it’s even more important to recognize who wields those tools: the capitalist class.

Even without these tools, this would still be happening under capitalism. Before there were corporations as we know them, labor was mercilessly exploited (often under deadly conditions), poisons were dumped into the waters, forests were mowed down, and the skies were blackened with industrial waste. Corporations don’t destroy people and the environment; capitalism does.

This is because the capitalist system is a continuous race, because the failure to keep up means destruction by the competition. Capitalists are forced to seek every advantage to make a profit. This, not greed, is the reason why capitalists are forced to crush unions, slash wages, increase hours, cut corners and lower safety. This, not greed, is why the capitalist fights against regulations, and ignores them when he can.

British Petroleum is only one of many corporations that evade basic safety measures. Only a few months ago we saw the deaths of dozens of miners at the Upper Big Branch mine for the same reasons. On the Deepwater Horizon, eleven workers were killed, seventeen injured. While this disaster never should have occurred, under capitalism, these disasters are inevitable.

The supply of energy in all its forms is held hostage to a system that must put profits above everything. Held hostage by corporations, Congress betrayed the public by capping damages arising from environmental catastrophes. Government regulators are held hostage to by capitalism, betraying the by looking the other way or even aiding the capitalists.

The Socialist Party USA calls for the immediate socialization of all energy companies and the creation of a publically owned entity that can meet energy requirements while being operated under community and worker control. These corporations should be transferred to the public sector without compensation. Because of the inherent danger in deep water drilling, the SPUSA calls for the total ban on offshore exploration, drilling, and for immediately phasing out of existing off shore wells.

The United States must reverse its dependence on oil and gas. The SPUSA calls for free mass transit and a massive program to greatly expand light rail in urban areas and build a network of inter-city fast rail. Electrical energy needs should be met through the use of renewable resources such as wind and ocean power.

The oil spill is indicative of the necessary disregard of human life and our environment that is fundamental to the capitalist market economy. Efforts to tinker with this system, attempting to regulate capitalism, are bound to fail. Only the abolition of the for-profit, market system and its replacement with a democratic, socialist society can prevent more catastrophic ecological disasters.

Kathy Kelly is one of the most important voices for peace in the US. Her pacifism and peace activism has placed her on the frontlines of the resistance to US war and empire. The following interview came after twenty-four peace activists were acquitted of charges against them relating to a January 2010 protest in the Capitol Building. The protest marked the passage of President Barack Obama's promised one year deadline to close the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay. Guantanamo remains open and Kathy Kelly and her fellow peace activists remain determined to close it and end the wars and occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan. In this first of a two part interview she discusses Guantanamo, Afghanistan and the importance of citizen resistance to empire.

Billy Wharton - I heard there was an important victory in court on Monday for the folks who were doing the anti-Guantanamo Bay protests. Can you tell us about what happened?

Kathy Kelly - We might not call what happened exactly a victory because we honestly didn’t believe we had broken the law in this instance. I know that most of us have engaged in civil disobedience, but we believed that we were holding up our First Amendment rights and even under international law, our duty to expose and protest what has happened in Guantanamo and we wanted really wanted to use the courtroom theater, the courtroom drama, to bring out more information.

It was clear that the judge really didn’t know much about the cases we were raising. He was interested and I think what happened was that the judge realized that the prosecution had a weak case against us and he didn’t want it on his conscience that he had totally sidelined our claims and so I think he looked for a way to acquit us. He could do that by saying that the prosecution had not proven that and it didn’t look like it was going to be able to prove given the evidence it had presented that we were a credible threat that would constitute a breach of the peace because that’s a threat to incite violence. But, had he wanted to, he could have looked at the whole of the statute and said well, you know, they were disorderly or they were boisterous.

Anyway, it was clear that he didn’t want us to be found criminal by a prosecution that had seemed to have launched a very weak case. And, compared to the very considerable skill and eloquence that Bill Quigley demonstrated to the court, the prosecution seemed almost hapless.

BW - It seemed like the judge was trying to limit it to some kind of technical decision that it was the wrong charge filed.

KK - Right, that the prosecution wasn’t prepared to convict us on the charge that had been filed and had another charge been filed maybe he would have been able to uphold that. The lawyers who were present, one of whom who knows the judge, and both of whom are very familiar with the legal system in this country, felt very strongly that this judge did not want it on his conscience to have taken the very important matters that we were trying to raise and kind of subordinated them to a charge that we acted rudely or we acted boisterously.

BW - I think it is important that you tried to run a political trial from the get go.

KK - It was also significant that we were all acting as pro-se defendants. I think a lot of times, people feel intimidated by the courts, and they think, “Oh, I can’t afford a lawyer and then I’ll be found guilty and then what.” I think it is very very good for people to feel confident that they can enter into the judicial branch, just as we try to enter into the legislative branch and executive branch, that we have a role to play and a responsibility going into the judicial branch as well and going right into these court rooms and being assertive and you can start to figure out the language and the rhythm of these courts as well. Or not. I think it is fine to disrupt the courts too.

BW - What's the next step in the campaign to close Guantanamo and how can people reading this help out?

KK - The Witness Against Torture (WAT) campaign has, every year now, gathered in January for some kind of activity. This is a group that went to Cuba and sat outside the the base at Guantanamo and they did a 100 days campaign two years ago during the first 100 days of the Obama administration. Last year was a 12-day fast which culminated in going into the rotunda and also an action outside of the rotunda.

I think it is very very important that we begin to build more linkage with people from Central and South Asia living here in the United States. I think there are many families who have been fearful that their loved ones could be accused of being terrorists, could be sent to Guantanamo. There’s a sense of intimidation and fear every time something like the car bomb in Times Square happens. Every time something like that happens, it raises the specter of people seeing Muslim brothers and sisters as terrorists, as enemies. So, I think it is important to build those links.

If people decided to locally plan a WAT action or an action to close Guantanamo it is important to ask people in the local Muslim and Arab communities will you join with us. I think we can do more along that line. I am also hoping that another delegation from Voices for Creative Nonviolence will be able to go over to visit in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Three of us left in May to go to Pakistan and then two of us stayed on and went over to Afghanistan as well. It’s very expensive, it’s energy consumptive, but I think it is important to try and put a human face on the people who are bearing the brunt of our wars. Quite often those are the faces of children.

850 children die every single day in Afghanistan and these are, by and large, the poor children. They are such hard workers, my God, they never get a day off, they just work and work. They work in the fields as they go to school and they get a day off and they just go right out to the fields. At age five and six they are working hard. Over ¼ of these children don’t live beyond the age of five. We are talking about a country that is second only to Sub-Saharan Niger in terms of poverty.

The US is spending this obscene murderous amount of money, wealth and resources to maintain an occupation and attack people in that country. So, all of us can do more to protest this war. There is an assembly happening in Albany in July, at the end of July, and I hope that if people can get there, they will go to that assembly and say, “Hey, I want to be part of the group that is really going to really press in an organized and determined fashion to bring these troops home.” I think that people can go into their elected representatives’ offices and make themselves known and go back with a bigger delegation the next time. And, maybe decide that they are going to occupy the office, that has certainly been done before, we have had occupation campaigns.

We have to up the anti for our own non-violent resistance to this ongoing warfare. I think that the place to start is with the recognition of who is bearing the brunt, particularly children. In Pakistan next door, same thing, horrendous poverty. People are begging us “how will we fill our bellies?” Their country is told by the IMF and World Bank, you have to impose an even higher tax on citizenry so you can spend even more money on your police and military.

BW - Can you tell us how your delegations have been received by people in these countries?

KK - Last year when we went, people were very afraid to be responsible for us going say to Peshawar and the Swat valley. There was a sense that it was such an unknown, that it would be a risk to us and a risk to the people we visited. I think in the year that ensued there have been so many violent acts, either retaliation after the Taliban groups were dislodged, I think there were retaliatory acts happening in Islamabad and Lahore that were the result of the Pakistani military offensives that the US pressed for. There have been uprisings and attacks against small sects that have been undertaken by groups and people are not even sure who is organizing them. There have been attacks on military convoys, there have been explosions in many different places including universities.

My sense, this time, was that people thought that no place was particularly safe. If you want to take the risk and go there take the public bus, go ahead. There was a different sense, there was a more muted sense that the government had to provide security for people by eliminating the Taliban. I think that the people who were saying that last time, who tended to be the affluent and elite group, were realizing that it hadn’t brought more security for them, in fact, it brought less security. I think there is more a sense that there will eventually have to have more negotiation with these Taliban groups.

BW - I recently listened to Johann Galtung on Democracy NOW! He argued that the American Empire will end in 2020. He also stated that he loves the American Republic but despises the American Empire. How do you respond to his prediction and his separation of the Republic from the Empire?

KK - I long had a sense that we in the US are collaborators. We are not asked to give our bodies over to fight in these wars, we are not even asked to give our consent, but we are asked to pay for it. Most people go along with that. I don’t want to sound arrogant, but I haven’t paid my taxes since 1980. I can’t and I won’t, I just don’t. I don’t think this is something people think about very reflectively.

I also think that there is a certain convenience that people like in our society. It’s almost as though there is a hidden message that says to those who exercise this menacing imperial might, “Look, do what you have to do, but don’t tell us that much about it. But don’t rock the boat of our lifestyle.” I’m sort of haunted by something that George Bush Sr. said in January of 1991 at an energy conference in Rio De Janeiro “The American way of life is a non- negotiable.” I think that if we want to rescue ourselves from being saddled with empire, and all of the bloodshed and the cruelty and the menace that comes with empire, if we want to liberate ourselves from that, we have to change our lifestyles. We have to say we don’t want this menacing might to protect our ability to be the hogs of the world, hogging resources. We don’t, any longer, want to be people that are obscenely over-consumptive. We don’t, any longer, want to presume we can just drive as many cars as we want, as far as we want, and consume as much natural resources and fuel as we want. We don’t want to be able to fly every time we feel like it and take vacations by air travel and encourage our children to do that. It’s almost like a train going over the abyss and we are all in the observation deck saying, “Yeah! Keep going! We like the scenery don’t stop, don’t stop.” This is nuts! This kind of insanity is what characterizes our collaboration, we’re collaborators with war crimes.

So, if you separate the empire from the republic, I’m a little nervous that people will just say, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, we’re not part of that empire, those are the elites and we are the sheep and those are the goats.” I don’t think it quite works that way. I think we have all had a hand in living very comfortably and very well as an empire. And tolerating genocide without requiring of ourselves the adult responsibilities that would be necessary to make change. I don’t want to be shrill and I know that speaking in this way is not the way to build the circles of people who will say, “Ok, I know, I would much rather be involved in politics instead of organizing a soccer league.” I want to be careful. I hope that we can be inviting to the people who have these very good skills organizing sports and entertainment for their children. And be inviting to that group of people and say that here is an opportunity to create a better world, a survivable world, an inhabitable world for your children. And here is how you can do it. You can take exactly the skills that you have donated to setting up play dates, organizing soccer leagues and creating family parties and mandatory gift giving events and all these things that take tremendous organizing skills. Transfer that into working for a movement that’s really going to build peace.

BW: I’m guessing you don’t have much access to the White House, so if you had a meeting with President Obama, what would be a few things on your agenda? What message would you give him?

KK: Well, I would tell him to level with the United States people and be clear that although the attack, for instance, had a very strong influence on Congressional Representatives they don’t have a strong influence on the vast population and that if he were to talk with the US public about how much money the United States, how much money and resources and ingenuity the United States has had to put into projects, war projects, in order to secure the interests of Israel and the Middle East, you know, allowing Israel to acquire 200 to 400 thermonuclear weapons and supporting Israel in this war against Lebanon and its siege against Gaza and its attacks on refugee camps in the West Bank and its usages of conventional weapons against civilian populations and that there’s no inherent reason why he should continue to perpetuate that relationship.

And then, I think he should level with the US public about the ways in which corporate control and collusion with the military and the defense sector and say that he as President doesn’t think that a second term presidency is worth the lives and the limbs that would be lost in order to continue this so-called defense project. I think he should level with the US people, I mean, maybe he won’t be re-elected, but he will certainly have a chance to delink with some of those truly prophetic people of our time like the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King and Mahatmas Gandhi and for the sake of a second term presidency to be in collusion with the fat cats and the war profiteers I think is a very bad bargain, so it’s a disappointment to me that he doesn’t speak up.

Editor's Note: Read Part 2 of the interview with Kathy Kelly - CLICK HERE

by Dan La Botz -

The United Steelworkers (USW), which represents 850,000 workers in Canada, the Caribbean, and the United States, and the National Union of Miners and Metal Workers (SNTMMSRM), known as the Mineros, which represents 180,000 workers in Mexico, have announced plans to explore uniting into one international union. The agreement to begin exploration of a merger was signed on June 21.

This first step in the creation of a global union -- as opposed to a global federation of unions -- represents a significant new development for labor in the Americas with implications for workers around the world. Building on the 2008 trans-Atlantic merger between Unite in the United Kingdom and the USW, now the USW and the Mineros are working to build a worldwide labor union with the power to confront the concentrated capital of the mining and metal working industries.

USW President Leo W. Gerard and Minero general secretary Napoleón Gómez Urrutia together asserted the two unions continued "common commitment to democracy, equality, and solidarity for working men and women throughout North America and throughout the world."

The two unions have had a strategic alliance since 2005. Now a commission made up of five members from each of the unions will create a joint commission to propose "immediate measures to increase strategic cooperation between our organizations as well as the steps required to form a unified organization."

Several Years of Close Cooperation

The attempt to create an international union by these two unions arises within the context of the 16-year-old North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Since NAFTA took effect in on January 1, 1994, several Canadian, Mexican, and U.S. unions have sought greater cooperation as they faced transnational corporations with new reach and power. This is, however, the first attempt to create a new international union in response to the greater mobility and power of international capital since NAFTA and what has been called the neoliberal era of privatization and free trade.

This new development also comes as a result of several years of intense and intimate collaboration between the Steelworkers and the Mineros at many different levels. The two unions have joined together in campaigns against common employers and in mutual support on issues facing them. Most notably, the USW has helped the Mineros as it came under a brutal attack by Grupo Mexico, that country's largest mining company, and by the administration of Felipe Calderón, Mexico's president. "

When the Mexican government brought trumped-up charges against the Mineros' general secretary, Napoleón Gómez Urrutia, threatening to jail him, the USW played a central role in helping him find safety in Vancouver, B.C. For three years with the aid of the USW, he has been leading the Mineros through a series of difficult strikes and other confrontations from that city.

History of U.S.-Mexico International Solidarity

This is by no means the first time that unions in the three countries have attempted to build more powerful labor organizations through international solidarity. The path to solidarity has been fraught with problems and strewn with the wreckage of failures, while at the same time filled with inspiring examples and some significant successes. While today's situation poses altogether new challenges, the past history holds some lessons too.

With the development of modern industrial capitalism in all three nations in the late nineteenth century, there developed a complex exchange of organizational methods, union strategies and tactics, and social and political programs. At the center of the process was the construction of the railroad networks first in the United States and Canada and then in Mexico.

Mostly the influence spread from the more advanced and industrialized United States with a long history of trade unionism to Mexico. Those railroad lines, built by U.S. and British capital, employed British, Canadian, and mostly U.S. railroad workers. The American railroad workers carried with them their 16 railroad craft unions, and their practice of striking the employer over grievances, structures, and strategies were soon imitated by the Mexican workers.

Mexican workers who went to work in the mining industry in the United States joined the American Federation of Labor (AFL) unions or more frequently the Western Federation of Miners or the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), adopting their militant strategies and revolutionary syndicalist politics. The influence was not all one way. The Mexican Liberal Party, actually a revolutionary anarchist group, came to organize workers in Mexico and sometimes in the Southwest of the United States.

After the discovery of oil in the Mexican states along the Gulf of Mexico around 1900, accompanied by the growth of oil storage and shipping facilities at the docks, the IWW became established there among the oil workers. At the same time, Spanish revolutionary syndicalists won a strong base among seamen, and their influence spread into the ports of Mexico, while Spanish anarchists came to organize department store clerks, restaurant workers, and factory workers in central Mexico. Their influence became pervasive. By the time of the outbreak of the Mexican Revolution in 1910, the anarchist House of the World Worker with branches in many major Mexican cities had become the dominant labor movement.

The Mexican Revolution and Samuel Gompers

During the Mexican Revolution (1910-1920), the Constitutionalists -- founders of what would eventually evolve into the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) and rule Mexico for decades -- reached an agreement with a faction of the House of the World Worker to provide troops for that wing of the revolution in exchange for support for the union's organizing efforts. So thousands of workers organized in Red Battalions rode off to fight Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata, leaders of the plebeian and peasant left wing of the revolution. Thus the Mexican state came to control the formerly anarchist labor movement.

In those years, as the new state was being established first under Venustiano Carranza and then under Álvaro Obregón, Samuel Gompers, head of the American Federation of Labor, moved into Mexico. The new Mexican government welcomed Gompers as an aid in helping to create the state-sponsored Regional Confederation of Mexican Workers (CROM) which with the government was fighting to destroy the anarchist General Confederation of Workers (CGT). So between 1920 and 1925, anarchist unions with an internationalist perspective battled the business unions with a nationalist vision backed by the Mexican government, a war ultimately won by the government-backed unions with the breaking of the Mexico City streetcar workers union in 1924.

Gompers principal aim, however, was to expand the reach of his Pan-American Federation of Labor (PAFL), an international union confederation that had already established branches in the U.S., Canada, and Puerto Rico. As U.S. capital and the U.S. State Department spread their power and influence throughout Latin America, Gompers expected to see the PAFL spread the model of his so-called "pure-and-simple" trade unionism, sweeping aside the Red unions of anarchists and Communists. Gompers' death in 1924, followed by the Crash in 1929, and the Great Depression for the next decade meant that his dream was never realized.

The 1930s Upsurge and the Post-War Right Turn

The worldwide economic crisis of the 1930s led to a working-class upsurge in Canada, Mexico, and the United States, initially under the leadership of a variety of political leaderships: Socialist and Communist, Catholic and conservative, but all independent of the employers and their respective governments. The brief period 1929 to 1939 saw powerful unions and new labor federations grow up in all three countries.

In the United States and Canada, the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) organized industrial workers, while in Mexico the new Confederation of Mexican Workers (CTM) organized a broad spectrum of workers in industries of all sorts. The CIO and the CTM and some of their industrial unions established strong fraternal relations during this period. The CIO-CTM alliance evolved and was transformed during the course of the U.S.-Mexico alliance against the Axis Powers during World War II. Both the CIO and the CTM emerged from the war having been drawn into closer relations of partnership with the corporations and with their respective governments.

With the outbreak of the Cold War in 1948, the governments of both the United States and Mexico, working closely with the employers, forced a purge of leftists from the unions, while in the U.S. the Taft-Hartley Law hamstrung the unions. In Mexico the purge was particularly violent and brutal, as the Mexican government sent police and gangsters into the industrial unions to conduct a transfer of leadership at gunpoint. The independent elected union leaders were turned out in favor of men who were loyal to the government.

So by the 1950s, while ties still existed between the CIO and the CTM, they were now relations between U.S. labor officials working closely with the U.S. State Department and American corporations and Mexican officials subservient to their government. Meanwhile, around the world, labor unions became divided between the Communist-led and pro-Soviet World Federation of Trade Unions and the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions led by U.S. and European unions under the tutelage of the U.S. State Department. Within this context, real working-class solidarity virtually disappeared, as the U.S. and Mexican unions' tasks on the international scene became working to stop Communist, nationalist, and other radical unions throughout the Americas.

For a hundred years, attempts to build international worker solidarity have been disrupted by the imperial power of U.S. corporations and the U.S. State Department and by the Mexican nationalist government, as well as by conservative business unions loyal either to government or employers. Genuine international worker solidarity was greatest during periods of working-class upsurge in the 1910s and 1930s within the context of worldwide labor mobilizations. The opening of the era of globalization raised new challenges.

NAFTA Changes the Game

Such was the state of labor solidarity in North America in the 1990s when the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was being negotiated. NAFTA, opening up the borders to capital (while keeping the movement of labor restricted), suddenly changed the rules. While the U.S. and Mexican union bureaucrats of the AFL-CIO and the CTM had been able to cooperate within the context of the Cold War, they suddenly found themselves at odds in the age of neoliberalism and free trade.

U.S. labor unions opposed NAFTA, fearing that it would lead to the importation of products produced with cheap labor, commodities which would undermine their employers' market share and therefore their jobs. Mexico's "official" or government-controlled unions such as the CTM had no choice but to follow the government's directives and support the agreement. With U.S. unions opposed to NAFTA and Mexico's "official" unions supporting it, the pact between the AFL-CIO and the "official" CTM practically dissolved under the impact of NAFTA, forcing U.S. unions to look for other relationships. At the same time, independent unions in Mexico which were critical of NAFTA also looked for other relationships abroad.

The United Electrical Workers (UE) which represented workers in the United States, and which was not part of the AFL-CIO, discovered the independent Authentic Labor Front (FAT) in the early NAFTA period. Those two unions formed a model strategic alliance, and many other U.S. and Mexican unions began to establish ties of various sorts in the 1990s and 2000s. The Communications Workers of America (CWA), for example, established a relationship with the Mexican Telephone Workers Union (STRM). At times there were attempts to establish broader organizations around specific industries or problems, such as the Coalition for Justice in the Maquiladoras.

Steelworkers and Mineros: Toward Unity

All of this then forms the long and complicated background to the events taking place today, at the center of which now, however, is fight against the mining companies. At the moment the USW is in the 11th month of a strike of 3,500 of its members against Vale Inco, a huge Brazilian mining company in Sudbury, Canada, while the Mineros, after three years on strike at Cananea, Sonora, face the military occupation of their town to break the strike. The USW and Mineros plan to build the power to stop such assaults on miners and metal workers in the Americas.

The Minero-Steelworker agreement to begin exploration of unity represents an exciting new development in international labor solidarity. With such unity, workers might have greater power in confronting the transnational mining and metal companies and could respond to challenges more rapidly and with more flexibility than a federation of union usually can. Still, the challenges to this process will be enormous. No doubt both the employers and the governments will work to sabotage any arrangement which threatens to empower workers, and the unions themselves which have worked together so well for the last few years will face new challenges in developing a common leadership, organizational structure, philosophy, strategy, and vision.

***
Dan La Botz is a labor writer, Cincinnati school teacher, and Socialist Party candidate for US Senate.



from MrZine

Lena Mary Calhoun Horne (June 30, 1917 – May 9, 2010) was an American singer, actress, civil rights activist and dancer.

Horne joined the mike chorus of the Cotton Club at the age of sixteen and became a nightclub performer before moving to Hollywood, where she had small parts in numerous movies, and more substantial parts in the films Cabin in the Sky and Stormy Weather. Due to the Red Scare and her left-leaning political views, Horne found herself blacklisted and unable to get work in Hollywood.

Returning to her roots as a nightclub performer, Horne took part in the March on Washington in August 1963, and continued to work as a performer, both in nightclubs and on television, while releasing well-received record albums. She announced her retirement in March 1980, but the next year starred in a one-woman show, Lena Horne: The Lady and Her Music, which ran for more than three hundred performances on Broadway and earned her numerous awards and accolades. She continued recording and performing sporadically into the 1990s, disappearing from the public eye in 2000.

Horne was long involved with the Civil Rights movement. In 1941, she sang at Cafe Society and worked with Paul Robeson. During World War II, when entertaining the troops for the USO, she refused to perform "for segregated audiences or for groups in which German POWs were seated in front of African American servicemen", according to her Kennedy Center biography. Because the US Army refused to allow integrated audiences, she wound up putting on a show for a mixed audience of black US soldiers and white German POWs. She was at an NAACP rally with Medgar Evers in Jackson, Mississippi, the weekend before Evers was assassinated. She also met President John F. Kennedy at the White House two days before he was assassinated. She was at the March on Washington and spoke and performed on behalf of the NAACP, SNCC, and the National Council of Negro Women. She also worked with Eleanor Roosevelt to pass anti-lynching laws.

from Wikipedia

Mollie Steimer -

ISRAEL AND WMDs
The anti-Iran sanctions vote at the Security Council on June 9 targeted the wrong country. It should have been aimed at Israel, and its nuclear stockpile in the Negev. In the lead-up to that vote, the Israeli government was urging China to back further sanctions against Iran.

Looks like they succeeded. As the NYT reported:

In February, a high-level Israeli delegation traveled to Beijing to present classified evidence of Iran’s atomic ambitions. Then they unveiled the ostensible purpose of their visit: to explain in sobering detail the economic impact to China from an Israeli strike on Iran — an attack Israel has suggested is all but inevitable should the international community fail to stop Iran from assembling a nuclear weapon. “The Chinese didn’t seem too surprised by the evidence we showed them, but they really sat up in their chairs when we described what a pre-emptive attack would do to the region and on oil supplies they have come to depend on,” said an Israeli official with knowledge of the meeting and who asked for anonymity so as not to upset his Chinese counterparts.

Some experts rank Israel third or fourth behind only the USA, Russia and maybe France in maintaining a huge stockpile of nuclear weapons at its remote Dimona nuclear facility deep in the Negev. That capability is supported by an extraordinary arsenal of delivery systems. The Shavit rocket, according to some scientists, can be converted to an ICBM with a range of 7,000 miles. The IDF’s Dolphin class submarines are armed with cruise missiles capable of carrying nuclear warheads. Israel may also have developed nuclear artillery shells as well as nuclear land-mines, deployable in a future confrontation with Syria over the annexed Golan Heights.

IN HOWARD’S MEMORY
As Will Shapira noted in these pages, Howard Zinn’s final book, The Bomb, is scheduled for publication in August: a personal memoir of reflection on his role as a bombardier in WW II and analysis of the 1945 nuclear atrocities at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It is a fervent plea for banning nuclear weaponry and an end to all forms of war. For rejecting the “abstractions of duty and obedience.” A call to dismantle the nuclear super-complex outside Dimona in Israel should be in that spirit. No to nukes, no to the nuclear industry.

FROM BARAK TO BARACK, A WALL OF SILENCE
Israeli policy on their arsenal is termed in diplomatic discourse ‘nuclear ambiguity,’ a euphemism for state lies. There’s a small inner circle in Israel, and a corps of engineers and nuclear scientists, and other confidants, who are fully knowledgeable about precisely what the country has hidden in its atomic stockpile. Western intelligence services must have a fairly full picture. Most ordinary Israelis know the bombs are there but think it’s all ‘necessary’ given what Jewish Israelis euphemistically call “the situation,” haMatsav, המצב. A lot of U.S. taxpayer dough goes to maintain the brutalities and contradictions of המצב. Barack Obama says as little about it as Israeli defense minister Ehud Barak.

All this is tolerated by the international club of bourgeois states. They only recently admitted Israel to the OECD. To my mind, that’s one more reason why an ‘economic boycott’ is not a serious strategy for struggle against the Israeli state and its hi-power MIC.

NEEDED: A NEW CALL AGAINST ATTACK ON IRAN
In August 2008, there was a >Jewish International Opposition Statement against Attack on Iran< signed and circulated. That call should be revitalized, maybe in a coalition spurred by SP USA activists. In late May, it was revealed through painstaking research that Israel offered to sell nukes to South Africa in 1975. Journalist and peace activist Gideon Spiro, one of the few in Israel to openly speak out against the State.

FREEDOM FOR MORDECHAI VANUNU!
Israel remains a rogue nuclear state. Progressives in the US need to triple their active support for the struggle of Mordechai Vanunu, the whistleblower on Dimona's reactor and the stockpiles of nuclear warheads that Israel possesses. After 18 years behind bars, Mordechai was recently returned to prison for 3 months on May 23 for 'violating his parole'. His lawyer said it is because he lives with a Norwegian female companion. Mordechai is not supposed to ‘talk to any foreigners.’

Once again, the State's prime example of what protest against ‘state secrets’ can do to your life, is behind bars. Once again, Mordechai declined nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize. Why? Because it was earlier awarded to Shimon Peres, the chief architect over decades of Israel’s nuclear arsenal.

Consider Eileen Fleming's video with Mordechai, January 2009, during the Gaza attack and when Mordechai spoke on Hiroshima Day 2008:

Now is the time to rally around what he represents. SP USA activists and other progressives should join hands in a renewed international campaign to free Vanunu and get him out of the grip of the Israeli state. The US Campaign to Free Mordechai Vanunu came to a halt five years ago. It should be revived, the website still up. SP branches across the country could spark the renewal. Even on parole, he is prohibited from leaving Israel. Nominated more than 17 times over two decades for the Nobel Peace Prize, once again Mordechai declined the nomination ---- in protest, because a Nobel was once awarded to Shimon Peres, the father of the Dimona nuclear complex.

TANTAMOUNT TO TREASON?
One prime reason Israelis activists may feel hesitant to act against Israeli nukes and for Vanunu’s freedom is of course fear: the possible charge of בגידה , treason. The formal charge of complicity in בגידה frightens even the most outspoken critics of Israeli policy inside the State, Jewish and Palestinian. Especially given the pervasive Israeli 'siege mentality' that saturates everyday life. The endless reproduction of a kind of persistent traumatic stress disorder, what Jonathan Cook has called a “cult of victimhood” that serves to justify all violence by the state. Read Ilan Pappe on ‘The closing of the Israeli mind’. In this national psychosis, few Israelis, even on the left, dare to support Vanunu, a kind of national ‘pariah.’

Ordinary Israelis have to be released from their schizoid political bubble, “the abstractions of duty and obedience” to the State, and won over to struggle, solidarity with Palestinians, fundamental change. Unfortunately, much critique of Israeli policy seems to forget ordinary Jewish Israelis. Our politics is about mutual aid, letting people decide. Showing people there’s a safe world beyond what nationalism and armies, oligopolies and Capital have created.

BUILD DIRECT ACTION INSIDE ISRAEL
There should be sustained Direct Action against the Dimona reactor site, at least at its massive perimeter fence. None at the moment. IDF response will of course be fierce. What is needed are large numbers. The ‘development town’ of Dimona is nearby, with good transport from Beersheva. The government worried much in Jan. 2009 during the war on Gaza that longer-range rockets fired by Hamas or the socialist PFLP
( http://www.pflp.ps/english/ ) could strike the Dimona reactor complex, 145 km to the southeast. They did hit Beersheva, ca. 75 km same direction. Some of the Scuds fired by Saddam Hussein in the 1991 Iraq War were apparently aimed at Dimona but missed their mark. By how much remains a classified military secret.

TOWARD A MIDDLE EAST FREE OF WMD
Two weeks ago, the UN call for a conference in 2012 to achieve a nuclear arms-free Middle East was rejected by the Israeli government, which remains intransigent. Obama’s Washington looks the other way. In October 2007, a strong statement was circulated calling for a Middle East free of WMD, signed by numerous groups and prominent peace activists, including Mairead Maguire and the late Harold Pinter. In a vigil to mark Hiroshima Day 2008, one co-signatory, the Israeli Coalition for a Middle East Free of Nuclear, Chemical and Biological Weapons, demonstrated in front of the U.S. Embassy in Tel Aviv. Their call is more urgent today than ever:
• An international initiative to create a Middle East free of nuclear, biological and chemical weapons, in a step-wise process to include all countries in the region.
• An end to all threats by the U.S. and Israel of a war against Iran, the result of which will be a disaster for all.
• An end to the production of weapons of nuclear mass destruction in Dimona in southern Israel, and biological and chemical WMD in the Israel Institute of Biological Research in Ness Ziona, which is fuelling a WMD arms race in the Middle East.
• Immediate shutdown of the nuclear reactor in Dimona, and opening of the facility to international inspection.

ANOTHER FORGOTTEN TARGET FOR PROTEST: IIBR / המכון למחקר ביולוגי בישראל
Significantly, that same Tel Aviv protest called attention to chemical and biological weapons R & D at the top-secret Israel Institute of Biological Research located a short drive away. Despite differences between Israel's nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons programs, there are significant parallels.

SOCIAL FORUM AND BEYOND
The upcoming 2nd US Social Forum June 22-26 in Detroit provides a unique platform for spotlighting the danger Israeli WMD policy – supported by the U.S. administrations since Eisenhower -- poses to its own citizens and working families across the region. At USSF, there’s a workshop No More Rallies! No More Marches! which will explore revitalizing Direct Action strategies for change. Pouget’s classic short work Direct Action is one handbook for reinventing strategic resistance by people power to these regimes of nuclear subterfuge. There are plenty of official Israeli targets for protest action, from NYC to LA, and across Israel. Now is ripe time for what Pouget a century ago called ‘expropriatory education.’ Class meets in solidarity out in the streets.

by the SPUSA Queer Commission

June 9, 2010 - On June of 1969 fed up queers fought back when police began harassing them at the Stonewall Inn bar on Sheridan Square in New York City. By most accounts the most oppressed, drag queens and lesbians, lead the charge. This was a flashpoint in a long history of struggle. The homophile movement, the Mattachine Society and the Daughters of Bilitis laid the groundwork for the uprising. Stonewall was also influenced by the feminist movement, the civil rights movement, the sexual revolution, and the struggle against the war in Vietnam.

The first organized group that sprang from the Stonewall Riots was the Gay Liberation Front which was consciously named after the Vietnamese Liberation Front and included socialists, communists, anarchists and other radicals.

The Socialist Party USA stands with Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgendered, and Questioning people for liberation and full and equal participation in society. LGBTQ people deserve the same rights of marriage as heterosexuals, including the right to adopt children. LGBTQ people who chose to enter the military should have every right to live openly without penalty or harassment, and have every right that their heterosexual peers have.

Gay Power and Gay Liberation were the rallying cries of Stonewall. The Stonewall riots demonstrate the power of resistance and confrontation against injustice. Socialist liberation goes beyond rights and demands full empowerment and participation. The Socialist Party USA celebrates the legacy of Stonewall and the movement for LGBTQ liberation.

by the SPUSA International Commission-

June 7, 2010 - It is almost beyond belief that Israel could again shock us, after the siege and blockade of Gaza, the destruction of Lebanon, and decades of brutal colonization of the Palestinian people. Yet, in the early dawn hours of May 31, military forces of Israel attacked an unarmed aid convoy bound for the Gaza Strip, massacring between nine and sixteen civilians, injuring as many as sixty. The convoy intended to breach the illegal blockade of the Gaza Strip, delivering humanitarian aid supplies to the Palestinian people. The ships were attacked and seized in international waters, in violation of international maritime law.

The International Commission of the Socialist Party USA strongly condemns this act of piracy and murder. We join tens of thousands around the world in demonstrating against Israel's crimes at all Israeli consulates and embassies. We demand Israel immediately end the cruel and inhuman blockade of Gaza and withdraw from the Occupied Territories. Until this is done, we call for all to join in the international boycott of Israel and Israeli goods. We demand an end to all American military aid to Israel. We demand an international tribunal to pursue the crimes against humanity committed by Israel. The seized goods must be delivered to Gaza and restitution must be made to the injured and the families of the slain.

Israel is not alone in blame. The United States is also at fault. Without the five billion dollars that the American taxpayer annually gives to Israel, the Israeli military would not be capable of such murderous disregard for human life. It is through this payoff that the American ruling class maintains its grip on the politics of the Middle East through division of the workers. It is through this payoff that Israel is able to ward off its enemies and international criticism of its policies. It is through this payoff that Israel continues to illegally occupy Palestine and the Golan Heights of Syria. It is through this payoff the Palestinian people are colonized. This donation, taken from the American workers to divide their brothers and sisters in the Middle East, must cease.

Israel's continuing colonization of Palestine and the resultant war crimes and crimes against humanity are the fundamental reasons that peace does not exist in the Middle East. The Israeli military must withdraw from Palestine.

by Kristin Schall -

Communism is alive on the stage of the Acorn Theater in New York City. The play Modotti brings to life Tina Modotti, a little known Italian communist, photographer and free spirited women’s rights advocate. The play opens in the home of Modotti and Roubaix "Robo" de l'Abrie Richey and draws the viewer into the life of prohibition era American bohemians. The opening scene is highlighted with a lively discussion of the free-spirited sexual politics of the era, communism and the juncture of art an politics. This discussion sets the tone for the rest of the play and introduces the audience to the complex topics the show tackles through its depiction of Tina Modotti’s life as an artist and communist organizer during the Mexican Revolution.

Modotti was born in 1896 in Italy and moved to the US at the age of 16. She worked as an actress during the 1910’s and 1920’s. Modotti put into practice the free-love philosophy that she espoused. Though she entered into a co-habitation relationship with Robo in 1918 she also had a relationship with the photographer, Edward Weston. It is with Weston that she would eventually move to Mexico to photograph the Mexican Revolution. Once there, she became embroiled in communist politics and transformed herself from an artist to a militant.

Complex relations between men and women, politics and art, and party politics and personal principles are all explored. Using sparse, minimalist sets that locate Modotti’s photographs as a focal point, writer and director, Wendy Beckett effectively captures the emotions and frustrations of political life. She treats radical politics gently and honestly is able, allowing the ideas and characters to speak for themselves in a language that political activists of today will recognize.

However, the shortcomings of the play may have more to do with the bleak historical and political knowledge of the average American than any fault in Beckett’s treatment of the politics of the age. The tumultuous period she is attempting to capture requires a lot of insider knowledge about the complex history of the Mexican Revolution, and the workings and factionalism within the Communist Party. Much of the historical subtly of the play will fly past the average theater goer. This leads to making the show difficult to follow at times.

Modotti is clearly a political play. It treats political activity as difficult on the artistic soul, but worthwhile for society, and the play has positive contributions to make regarding gender politics. Tina Mondotti is a free sexual spirit, an innovative artist and a committed political actor. This breaks down a bit near the end of the play when action is moved forward with Edward reading from Tina’s letters. This serves to take the viewer out of the first person perspective of Tina and gives control over the narrative to Edward.

Alysia Reiner gives a stellar performance as Tina Modotti and Mark Zeisler is a commanding presence in multiple roles, but most notably as the Comintern representative, Vidala. A notable weak point in the show is the forced Mexican accents. It might be best, in this case, to lose the accents and let the suspension of disbelief set the scene.

Overall Modotti is well executed and highly enjoyable. Unfortunately, it might have a limited appeal in this apolitical cultural environment. The insider knowledge may confuse those who are uninitiated to left politics, but even they can appreciate the passion of Tina Modotti and her struggle between love and politics. Then again, you might pick up Adolofo Gilly’s concise The Mexican Revolution before heading out to the Acron Theatre to encounter the history of a woman whose life was exciting as it was inspiring.

Modotti runs through July 3 at the Acorn Theater located at 402 W. 42nd St.

***
Kristin Schall is a writer and activist whose articles have appeared in Common Dreams, Dissident Voice, The Socialist and Socialist Webzine.

by Antenea Jimenez and Jeffery R. Webber and Susan Spronk

We met with Antenea Jimenez, a former militant with the student movement who is now working with a national network of activists who are trying to build and strengthen the comunas. The comunas are community organizations promoted since 2006 by the Chávez government as a way to consolidate a new form of state based upon production at the local level. She told us about the important advances in the process, as well as the significant challenges that remain in the struggle to build a new form of popular power from below.

June 10, 2010

Can you tell us about the barrio where you live and the comuna?

I live in a barrio in the north part of Caracas and work in a national network that is building comunas. Currently we operate in seven states; the majority of the comunas are situated outside Caracas.

We are working with the comunas to construct a political space in participatory way. It is a new experience in Venezuela. Above all, the comuna is a political space, not like the State or a parish; it is created by the people for the people.

Currently there are many comunas in construction in the rural areas, where they are the strongest. Every comuna has its own reality depending on political culture and the form of production in the specific locale. For example, on the coastal zone the community is dedicated to fishing, while in a rural zone the production is based on the land.

We are working to discover which elements and principles unite these different experiences, which elements are the same despite the fact that the methods of production and cultures may be different. We organize national meetings where the comunas from north, south, east and west can share their experiences and learn from each other—the errors as well as the successes.

What is the main aim of the comunas?

The aims of the comunas are diverse, and take different forms. Before the comuna existed there were all kinds of community organizations where people would participate looking for solutions to their problems, their neighborhood association, the municipal government, etc. The goal of the comunas is to build on these processes and consolidate them by organizing on the basis of territory where people live.

For us the comuna is a territorial space, but also a political space where the aim is to build socialism on a permanent basis, where the people take charge of their own education and political formation. We teach about “convivencia” (living together well) and elaborate a plan for a particular territory. What is new about the process is that the people are also elaborating their own plan of formation.

The people are very creative; the most advanced work with the other neighbors in this process to create a permanent space of formation. Civil servants, working for the state, who went to these spaces, quickly learned that the people were elaborating their own plan by and for themselves.

Obviously some comunas are more advanced than other ones. It is much more difficult to build a comuna in urban areas, for example, because they have no experience with [different forms] of production; for example, they have no experience with [non-capitalist] social relations with the land. There is a dynamic in the city that is very capitalist. But in the rural areas they have conserved many elements of what is “ours”, from our ancestors, the indigenous communities, the afro-Venezuelan communities. These values are still there. For this reason it is easier in the rural areas than in the urban areas. While there are fewer people in the countryside, the quality of the compañeros is very high. Sometimes there is not one person who did not vote for Chávez; this is less common in the urban areas.

Can you describe your personal political formation? How did you get involved in the comunas?

I was a student activist in University. I was active in political movements before Chávez, but there was no relationship between the social movements and political parties. In 1992, when Chávez was released from prison, things began to change. We have always been involved in the grassroots of the popular movement; there were few political spaces to participate in before [Chávez’s release] so you would get involved instead in your neighborhood, in your popular organization, in your cultural group.

But since Chávez was released [and began to build a political movement for the 1998 elections] things changed. I got involved; it was our responsibility to help build the process and the movement in Caracas. I was involved in the Popular Coordinator of Caracas, and afterwards the initiative to create the comunas. Now we are a group that works on the comunas.

There are a lot of different ideas about the communas, for example, between our network of activists and what Chávez has suggested. There are various ideas. We are building it from the people, not the government. We have had extraordinary advances; but the strongest advances have come when when the people have been convinced that this is the path, when they have become active in their own neighborhood.

How do the comunas work?

Historically there were diverse organizations that came together to resolve the problems of the neighborhoods. Our idea was to bring these organizations together to start to participate with concrete issues. We organize workshops. Let’s say that a community does not have water. We will organize a meeting about water. The people say, “Ah see! We can solve our own problems.”

We look for a socialist solution to the problem. Not just to hire a private company to fix something, but to work with the government and the people to fix the problem. Working first from the basic needs of the people will inspire them to participate. We also work with them to think more about the future, how we can improve things over the long term.

Step by step we work together towards solving simple things, like living together. Things that just require norms, a little bit of effort that helps us live together better. The community might decide that “We can’t drink in the streets,” for example. Other people see these small changes and then join the struggle when they see the results. They see that collective organization is possible.

There is a network of promoters of the comunas that coordinates, but the participation of the people is fundamental. There are people of all kinds that participate in the comuna: people from the left, people from the right, people that don’t care about anything. The people get involved with a problem that touches their family, the school for example because it involves their children.

Not everyone is socialist. Actually, a minority of participants in the comunas are socialists. We have to attend to the issues that matter to them. This can only be done through practice, and this is the way people get involved.

What are some of the main problems that you face trying to build socialism from the neighborhoods up to higher levels?

There is one factor that impedes our work which is the electoral dynamic, which is very exhausting. Constantly being in campaigns does not permit us to consolidate the organic process at the neighborhood level. It is difficult to deal with the problems in the community when we have to focus on issues like the constituent assembly, then the referendum, general elections, then presidential elections, then elections for governor, etc. Currently we are in elections for municipal councilors. This constant electoral dynamic weakens the organic process at the local level because it distracts us from confronting the daily issues that people confront in their neighborhoods.

What are the main demands in the north zone of Caracas where you live?

The main problem in this area is unplanned urbanization. Most of the land is in the hands of a very small bourgeoisie and so the common people have had to build their houses on the hillsides near the canyon, areas that were originally left vacant [because of the precarious conditions]. There are 29 rivers in the area of Caracas, and every time it rains heavily the people who live in these areas are at great risk. Their houses get washed away. Many people die. For example in 1999 there was a disaster in which many people were killed. People want a resolution of this problem.

The other theme is physical security or insecurity. It is difficult to find a place to meet because people are afraid. It is a real problem. But the right-wing opposition and the media has exaggerated the issue, and made it the problem in the barrios. I think that there are more serious problems. Security is the issue of the opposition, the press covers it, so there is debate about this problem.

How has the quality of people’s lives changed since the beginning of the Bolivarian revolution?

One of the main changes is in the area of education with the missions, Mission Sucre, for example. Now anyone who wants to go to university can go. Before only 7% of the students in the UCV were poor people like me. And perhaps only 2% of the students in Simón Bolívar were poor. Now everybody is studying at night. In fact, sometimes it is difficult to find a time to meet because everybody is studying! We can only hold meetings during the weekends.

Another fundamental thing that has changed is that before 1998, there was no political debate in the barrios. I was part of a small vanguard that was resisting this, trying to raise political debate in the university. In the 1980s, it was only the students who would mobilize, come out on the streets. But now people are talking about politics everywhere, on the bus and in the bars. It is rare that two people having beers are not talking about politics.

Another important success is that people talk about socialism. Maybe they do not talk about socialism in a “scientific” way, like about what Marx or Lenin said. But they talk about socialism with familiarity. There is still some fear, but way less than before. For example, once we showed a film about socialism in a barrio in the 1980s or 1990s. People just repeated what they heard from the press, that the socialists will torture you and that all socialists are dictators. Now people associate socialism with democracy. Indeed, the very concept of democracy has changed. If Chávez was assassinated, which is a real possibility because there have been many plans to assassinate him, there would be a civil war.

But no matter what happens, the advance of participatory democracy is irreversible. We cannot go back to representative democracy. There could be another kind of left, but now the people always have to participate; participatory democracy is a fundamental part of this revolution. The people understand the importance of it, demand it, and want to do it.

And they notice the difference in how politics works. Before the political reality was centered on what happened in “Miraflores” (the presidential palace). Now there is a lot of political activity, there are important social movements. There is possibility, there is hope. Now people do more than just wait every five years to participate in elections. We have 7 million people who are militants in the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV). There are millions of people participating in the communal councils.

This does not mean that everybody has a developed political consciousness or political experience; it is still a process in transition. There can be no revolutionary party without revolutionary militants. And the commitment to forming revolutionaries remains underdeveloped.

There are still problems in the Bolivarian process. There have been important economic improvements, for example, less unemployment, higher minimum salary, better pensions, but there is still a low level of political consciousness. People have to be able to handle political and economic theories if we are to advance further, like in Cuba, where the average person on the street has an analysis of what is going on in the country, in the world. In Cuba there is a high level of political consciousness. This level of [revolutionary] consciousness is still lacking in Venezuela. It is dangerous for the revolution. We have come a long way but we can still do more.

What does participatory democracy mean in the comunas?

There is a saying here that suggests that participatory democracy is not about what we are doing but about how we are going to do it. It means that we all build together that which we want to do, we decide what we want to contribute, our projects for improving our lives.

Participation has to be for everyone whether they are with the government, against the government, from the left, from the right. The only one who has authority is the assembly of citizens. It is the assembly, not an elected group… no, it is the assembly that decides on the development plan in each comuna.

When there are debates we try to reach a consensus, and if we don’t, we keep debating. When there is no agreement we break the issue down bit by bit to reach agreement on smaller parts. Participation for us is in the formulation of politics; we also participate in the execution of the project. For example, a community wants an aqueduct. The state says, “Ok. Here is the money. Now build it, execute the funds.”

But we do not participate in the formulation of national policy, not directly. The policy of the ministers is not decided by a participatory process. We have said, “But we should participate!” We participate at the local level, but socialism is not something that happens only at the local level. We need to weave together a web that brings together the local spaces, the territories, and the comunas, because the national and international levels have an impact on what’s happening at the local level. We can’t just be a socialist comuna, a little island in a sea of capitalism. After all, who are we going to exchange with?

There is a Ministry of Popular Power for the Comunas and Social Protection but there are no participatory mechanisms to set its policy. Right now this is happening with the indigenous communities. There is a Ministry of Indigenous Affairs and the communities are participating, they decide. They have a national council that makes policy. We have put forward a proposal to have more control over the Ministry for the Comunas, but it has not yet been approved. There is a lot of resistance.

You have to understand one thing. The comunas are a space of power. There are comunas that have executed more resources than some municipal governments. So, the comunas are constituted spaces of power; a majority of the comunas are formally part of the PSUV, but often Chavista officials at the local levels do not really want to share power. Instead, there is a confrontation between the comunas and the Chavista mayors and governors. Although we all stand with our arms together in the photo with Chávez, in practice there is a real confrontation. The governors do not understand this dynamic because the governors do not want to lose power.

The governors and mayors think that they are going to build socialism from their municipality, from their leadership. But we say, if a communal state is not born, socialism will not be possible. At the moment there is no perfect socialist comuna, where everything is debated, where there is an alternative, socialist, economic plan, where the teachers are also from the comuna, giving classes to the youth. This might be possible one day, but not now when there is another level of government that is deciding the overall budget. The project is to connect all these comunas at the national level; at the moment this is not viable because in most places we do not even participate in deciding the budget of the municipality. We participate in small projects, and the local government continues independently as if we were not in a socialist transition.

I only know of two isolated cases where this [participatory budgeting with the involvement of the comuna] takes place in reality: in the city of Torres in the state of Lara, and in Bolívar city in the state of Falcón. This is the case because in these municipalities the comrades [the mayors] are really from the left. The majority of the governors are not from the left. In most cases, the state is a bourgeois state and taking apart this state is the focus of continual conflict. This is taking a lot of political energy. The president is aware of these contradictions but I don’t think that he has found a way to overcome the problem. It is not simple. On the one hand you have people who are organized and making proposals and on the other hand people from the same party who are consolidating the bourgeois state.

What is the role of women in the comunas?

The majority of the people who participate in the comunas are women. I think that when we are talking about the advances of the process, this is a very important one. Right now there is a lot of participation by women and the grassroots level. But it ends there. When it is time to hold elections for positions with more responsibility, then it is men who are the candidates.

The president has put forward a number of initiatives to counter this tendency, and there have been many advances. In the party, for example, 50% of the candidates must be women. And when you go to the communities, the majority of those who are participating are women, and the majority of people who are studying in the missions are women. Historically in Venezuela and in Latin America, the societies have been very sexist and it has often been difficult for women to even leave the house. Before Chávez came to office, women’s participation was really rare. Women from the Left—from the vanguard—have always participated in social and political life. But now it is more widespread. I think that in the higher levels of the process, there are a number of valuable women doing incredible things.

There are some things that still need to change. Like the laws. For example, if I get pregnant I have six months of rest but my husband does not even get a day. One of the things that we have asked for is equality on this issue. I think that we will win on this issue.

Another limitation is that women are responsible for the children in Venezuela. It is difficult for women to participate, in the communal council, for example, because they have to leave their kids somewhere. This influences women’s decisions not to take political positions with more responsibility, especially if the position involves travel. This is a real barrier, although the level of participation in the communities is really high.

What is the long term vision for promoting participatory democracy from below through the comunas?

Here I have a different vision from the government. The vision of the government is that I show up in a community, starting from zero, and within half a week give workshops on politics. As I mentioned above, the level of political consciousness in Venezuela is still weak.

The process of building political consciousness, formation, can not be instantaneous. It is not like you can go to a school for a week and get a certificate. It has to be permanent. If you have a team constituted by the same people from the communal council raising the consciousness of people in their community, this is the way to create facilitators. It is a long process to learn about all of the different categories: anarchism, socialism and its various currents. It takes at least fifteen years. It is not just theory; it is also learned in practice. You learn in practice, but also through reading and reflecting. It takes a long time to figure out that certain social and political practices belong to socialism, while other ones are capitalist.

Some communal councils have higher levels of political formation than others. These organizations understand that the communal council is not just a space to receive resources. They understand that the council is a new “civil association.” It is a political space and a political exercise. Honestly, the majority of the councils do not understand it this way. We are still working with the councils to work on the idea that “hey, we can solve this problem in a capitalist way or a socialist way.” We want to solve the problems, but do so in a new way. But it is difficult when the companies that provide the services, for example, produce the materials for a house, are still capitalist. Housing is a good example because the problem of housing continues to be serious. Maybe we are making the blocks, but we have to buy the cement from a capitalist company. And then hiring the person to lay the blocks… It is not just solving the problem, but how we solve the problem… to build socialism rather than strengthen capitalism. We have 500 years of colonialism and exploitation, so this is a big challenge, to rebuild all of the socio-economic system. Building a new state is a big challenge.

For example, in some cases we have increased agricultural production. But the rice has been sent to a company that processes and packages the rice and sells it back at ten times the price. It makes me laugh, it doesn’t make sense. We have to take over the plants, take over the companies. But it is not easy to do. And the communal councils are not necessarily ready to take on all these tasks.

We find ourselves in a bit of a vicious circle. The only way to overcome this is to create relations between the communal councils, public institutions and the state. The councils are in the process of becoming stronger but it will take a lot to move to the next step.

What is the idea over the long term? Will the comunas continue to exist alongside the bourgeois state, or will they eventually replace it with new forms of self-governance?

This question makes me think because the revolutionary process has taken place through many kinds of organizations that got stuck on the path. The president mentioned once that the nucleos of endogenous development did not function well. The people often ask, “What kind of organization do we need, which is the adequate tool to help bring us what we want… a comuna, a cooperative?” And I explain what a cooperative is, a company of social property. The comuna is something else. We are doing everything to try to make sure that the comuna becomes the main instrument of social change because we are Marxists… it is the only way to build socialism, from below. In addition, in Venezuela there are historical experiences with comunas. This is our original form of organization. It is not strange for us. Of course, because of colonialism all of this changed. But the original form in “Our America” was this one. This is the political form through which people collectively governed their lives.

We have also seen other forms of socialism that were constructed by the state, like the Soviet Union. When that state collapsed, everything was destroyed. So, something happened there. Did the people really feel like they were a part of this process? There were some successes but people did not really feel part of it. The experience of all the revolutions of the past, in Russia, in Cuba, in the other countries of the South, show that if the people do not really participate, the bourgeois state simply continues. Such a conception of socialism is not viable, because the bourgeois state is not of the people. We are working now to build alternative systems, of solidarity exchange and barter. The idea is that the comuna also starts to run the community radio stations, the TV stations.

We are discussing how the comunas will be structured. What will be the relations of forces, which powers will the comunas be in charge of—judicial, executive, etc. All that exists now is the assembly for debate. But authentically socialist comuna does not yet exist; we are still constructing the comunas. We are in comuna when we govern ourselves, when we do not need a judge to tell us, “This house is not yours.” Or let’s say you live in a neighborhood and you need a letter that proves your place of residence. You have to go to an institution that says this. The comuna could do this. Your neighbor can verify where you live.

Capitalism created a layer of people who are the owners of peoples’ lives. If you do not have a residence card, there are many things that you can’t do. Why do we need resident cards? The bourgeois state has created this class of administrators that we do not need, who pretend they know things. The popular layers of community at the bottom have to wait until they solve the problems. But the comuna can do all of these things, decide all of these things. Before the Spanish came, this is how we lived. But it is a long process to raise the consciousness of the people so that they can take charge of their lives. It is also not an “anarchist thing” where anyone can do whatever they want. There are norms of living together that one has to respect. There are norms that regulate working life that also have to be respected. People have to respect these laws out of consciousness rather than because there is a law that represses them.

Ultimately, whether President Chávez is here or not, the process depends on the people. At the moment, the process as a whole is too dependent on the president. He is seen as the guarantee that this process will go forward, and for this reason the reactionaries want to get rid of him.

If another government replaces Chávez it may no longer be possible to meet politically in the streets. With the right-wing governments of the past, you only had to have a single book by Marx, Che Guevara, or Fidel Castro, to be persecuted.

from The Socialist Project

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Susan Spronk teaches in the School of International Development and Global Studies at the University of Ottawa. She is a research associate with Municipal Services Project and has published several articles on class formation and water politics in Bolivia.

Jeffery R. Webber teaches politics at the University of Regina. He is the author of Red October: Left-Indigenous Struggles in Modern Bolivia (Brill, 2010), and Rebellion to Reform in Bolivia: Class Struggle, Indigenous Liberation and the Politics of Evo Morales (Haymarket, 2011).