email: hobgoblinlondon@aol.com
The Hobgoblin - No. 9 - 2007
UNISON CONFERENCE 2007: The Impasse of Partnership
Booklaunch-Reclaiming Marx's Capital
The Trap: What Happened to Our Dream of Freedom? A review of Adam Curtis's BBC documentary
Guinea: The Fall of Another Dictator?
The Realm of Freedom and the World of Work: Marx, Hegel and Aristotle
The Battle for Oaxaca: Repression and Revolutionary Resistance
Book Review: Sophie Scholl and the White Rose
Booklaunch
Reclaiming Marx's Capital - A Refutation of the Myth of Inconsistency
By ANDREW KLIMAN
!THIS DEBATE CAN BE NOW BE HEARD ON AUDIO. SEE LINK BELOW!http://ourmedia.org/node/328156
London July 11 School of Oriental And African Studies Brunei Gallery, Rm B104. WC1H 0XG. Tube: Russell Sq 6 pm, Wednesday 11th July. Discussion with speakers:
Martin Graham, Economic Committee of the Communist Party of Britain, Chris Harman, editor, International Socialism journal, Michael Roberts, columnist at marxist.com
Alan Freeman, co-editor, Marx and Non-equilibrium Economics, Andrew Kliman, author of Reclaiming Marx's 'Capital'_Chair: David Black, author of Helen Macfarlane.
This book seeks to reclaim Capital from the myth of internal inconsistency, a myth that serves to justify the censorship of Marx’s critique of political economy and present-day research based upon it. Andrew Kliman shows that the alleged inconsistencies are actually caused by misinterpretation. Written especially for the non-specialist reader, with the bare minimum of mathematics, Reclaiming Marx’s “Capital” introduces readers to Marx’s value theory and contrasting interpretations of it, the history of the controversy, and interpretive standards and methods. Kliman then surveys Marx’s falling-rate-of-profit theory, the relation-ship of prices to values, Marx’s exploitation theory of profit, and other topics. The book ends with a discussion of why the myth of inconsistency persists, and a call to set the record straight.
Kliman’s arguments operate like a buzz saw clearing away the underbrush of misplaced criticisms that have kept the real Capital hidden. The project is brilliantly and clearly (and for this reader, convincingly) executed. Highly recommended for all those who need Capital (and who doesn’t?).
— Bertell Ollman, New York Univ.
It had to be done: someone has finally rescued Marx from the Marxists.
— Alan Freeman, Univ. of Greenwich
Cutting through swathes of misconception, the author writes in an accessible way especially for the non-specialist reader and keeps the maths to a minimum.
— Labour Research
I was impressed with Kliman's refutation of the Okishio theorem. I didn't think that was possible. I couldn't see any mistakes.
–– Robert Vienneau,
“Thoughts on Economics” blog
More information on 'Relaiming Marx's Capital'
Meeting at Amnesty International on Stoning in Kurdistan - 18/05/07
By George Shaw
About 100 people, the majority Iraqi and Iranian women packed a hall to hear the issues around the brutal stoning of a 17 year old girl by members of her family and clan in a village in the north of Kurdistan. The Supporting Panel. included Houzan Mahmood as main guest speaker. This followed a previous meeting in London in celebration of International Women’s Day, which discussed issues around the veiling of women.
Relatives of Du’a Khalil Aswad’s committed the ‘honour killing’, with other men allegedly From the Yezidi minority in the village of Bashika (the Yezidi religion predates Islam and is influenced by Suf’ism). Du’a was beaten, and then stoned to death as punishment for simply falling in love with a Muslim boy. The whole disgusting process was recorded on video film and subsequently widely shown on the Internet. Members of local security forces stood by, failing to intervene or arrest the perpetrators.
With the institutionalised barbarism of the most reactionary kind of human (female) repression there is also the ever-pervading climate of Sharia law. The situation in particular in Northern Iraq has some noteworthy features that are different from that of Iran. In northern Iraq the character of the repression is expressed in tribal/clan terms by people who reside in isolated mountain communities.
Another feature is that incidents such as the murder of Du’a Khalil Aswad are not isolated but fairly prevalent in the entire region, in which people accept family retribution almost as the norm. Some people at the London meeting held that the incidents were not so much inspired from a religious point of view; but more a cultural phenomena of female repression. Also, as the Amnesty speaker pointed out, ‘honour killing’ was not a feature confined to Middle Eastern societies but was perpetrated in other societies as well.
In the discussion, from the platform it was announced that Houzan Mahmood, the campaigner from Kurdistan, has had a ‘fatwa’ issued to by the Al Queda inspired group known as Answar al Islam which has been involved in some of the incidents in the area. Of note is the fact that when the coalition forces came into Northern Iraq that is Kurdistan, Ansar al Islam was barely touched and left to continue to abet the repression and enforcement of Sharia Law. Their arbitrary sentencing tariffs were based on the levelof religious devotion of the parties and the amount of blood money that would be offered by one family to the other.
One of the speakers described how a clandestine network of ‘refuge houses’ which has been set up and with the help of outreach workers travelling in the mountains, has increased awareness of the issues. Resistance slowly is emerging with the help of those lucky to move abroad.
As previously stated, the security forces have stood by and done little to deal with the situation. As the organisation known as OWFI can verify, this starts from the top government officials and involves such incidents the security forces in Tal Aafar raping Wajida Muhamed, where it was fortunate that there were witnesses, so that the woman concerned could not be discredited. Essentially in areas of Kurdistan the rule of law is at best informal. Reprisals are mostly ignored, as in the Du’a’ Khalil Aswad’s case when a busload of Yezidis were savagely gunned down, it was claimed, by a group calling itself the Islamic State of Iraq.
In a conversation I had with a senior family member of a group lucky enough to get to Europe recently, he said it was not so much only the repression of the female and the ‘dishonour’ but how it also affects profoundly the whole family with a far embracing stigma lasting for a long time. There were obviously many people at the meeting who were obviously traumatised and who related their individual experiences in Iranian, Kurdish and Arabic. Many women told me they did not know what normality meant as women in a ‘civil society’.
If Saddam Hussein was no emancipator of women at least in general they fared better under that regime. His departure however unleashes something quite different: the hordes of men holding mobile phone cameras aloft dancing with glee at the crumpled figure below them is almost an echo of Abu Ghraib with its demonstration of human bestiality. A horrifying genie has been let out of the bottle; a barbarism that must be met with not only solidarity with the repressed and those fighting on the inside but a vision of a new society. It is hoped from the meeting that the 95 odd women will build solidarity ties with their compatriots the thousands of Iraqi women who fled with some of their families to Jordan and Syria living in appalling deprivation that were not fortunate to reach Europe.
It can only be hoped that solidarity will be transformed concretely into something that will enable to those who are working in the ‘refuge houses’ to slowly set up an alternative to the theocracy that pervades the communities such as Bashika or Tal Aafar. That alternative is something far more than just rights, equality and freedom but a philosophy for our age.
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GUINEA: THE FALL OF ANOTHER DICTATOR?
By Ba Karang
In 1958 the People of Guinea voted against continued Colonial Rule in a referendum. This humiliation of French Colonialism was not taking lightly by the Gaullists. From the very first day when the referendum results were known, they not only tried to strangle the Guinean economy but put into action the “Alby Plan” to train mercenaries for possible invasion of the country.
The Independence of Guinea was another Pan-African victory, that put the Leader of the revolution on the map of the Continent. That leader, Ahmed Sekou Touray, was a devout Muslim, who remained one of the most inspirational Pan-African ideologues and political leaders. Under his leadership, Guinea strove to develop an independent economy, which would protect the natural resources of the Country and put special emphasis on the development of agriculture and human skills . Under his rule, Guinea became a One Party State; suppressing anything that was against the dictate of the ruling Party. There is no doubt that his long survival in power was due to the fact that, among all the Pan-Africanist leaders, he was the only one who saw mass mobilisation as the most important tool for the survival of the Party in power. Even Nkurumah a close ally and friend, was never to match the effort of Touray in mobilising the masses as the protectors of his revolution. His relationship with the state-capitalist nations in Eastern Europe, and the Soviet Union, was one of love and hate. Though many Guineans were to find themselves in Eastern European universities, Touray was suspicious of the fact that they were mostly interested in exploiting the natural resources of his country. He was in open confrontation with them on several occasions.
Touray continued to give assistance to many Liberation movements and to this day remains an inspiration for them. In contrast with many independent African countries, Guinea under Touray was always food-sufficient. But he continued to rule the country with an iron fist, until his death, tolerating no opposition. With the growing resentment under his rule, his death gave the Military an opportunity to seize power and depose his socialist party, the Democratic Party of Guinea (PDG) in a military coup in 1984. General Lasana Conteh, who led the coup, turned civilian and has since then been ruling the country as the new dictator. And without any political ideology and programme, he eventually plunged the country into uncontrollable corruption and poverty.
The Economy
Guinea is the leading world producer of bauxite. Together with copper, gold and diamonds this constitutes 70% of national exports. The coming to power of the military dictatorship gave global capital the opportunity it had been waiting for. Global capital – especially in the international mining companies - was now free to exploit at will the natural resources and the result was a surge of corruption and economic mismanagement. With East European capital no longer in the picture, it was now the turn of the international financial institutions like the IMF to impose their economic reforms in the country and by 1985 these reforms were in full force: including the elimination of restrictions in agriculture, which supports 80% of the work force, as well as restrictions in foreign trade.
Poverty and decadence were becoming commonplace: rising crime, deterioration in health, rising illiteracy, and inflation that made prices of commodities unaffordable for the Majority. More than 40 % of the population fell below the poverty line. The reforms, as the years went by, never produced any thing better; and even things that Guineans were taking for granted - which had been brought about by the newly found wealth of Bauxite mining in 1970 - like free education, could no longer be taken for granted. In the present period, the crisis caused by these malaises and the increasing dictatorial and militaristic tendencies of the civilian government has reached a boiling point, with the mass struggle we have witnessed daily in the streets of Guinea.
The Crisis
As in 1958, the Workers Union has become the leading force in the crisis that the country is facing today. The conditions are unbearable and the 23 years of political brutality has brought together 14 opposition parties to join the national unrest in the country. Last year June saw the beginning of the crisis and by December the Workers Union led a national strike which was met by repression, resulting in the deaths of 20 civilians. By January 29, the Workers Union had suspended the national strike after President Conteh gave in to the demands of the Union after a lengthy negotiation. He agreed amongst other things, to name an independent Prime Minister to whom he would hand over most of his power, not to interfere with the judiciary, and allow freedom of expression.
But when President Conteh named one of his close allies as the Prime Minister, this was not accepted by the Union, so he responded by declaring a curfew and marshal law. By February, the Union had already mobilised the masses in the street. Police stations were burned down and homes and offices of government officials were looted and burned. Among others whose properties were attacked and burned were the President of Guinea Bissau, Bernardo “Nino” Viera, a close friend of President Conteh, who despite the huge poverty in his country was able to buy a house in Guinea. The houses of Aichia Conneh, who was a leading member of the defunct Liberian United for Reconciliation and Democracy, a reactionary and criminal rebel movement involved in armed struggle during the Liberian crisis, were also attacked. Conneh is suspected of recruiting ex-Liberian rebel forces and bringing them to Guinea to support the embattled President.
The violence got of control when police stations were raided and guns and ammunitions taken away. There was a running battle between the masses and the military in the streets of Conakry, the capital, and other big cities, resulting in the loss of many civilian lives. No one, so far, in the military has taken the risk of declaring a military coup as yet; even with part of the military rising in the camps and demanding higher wages and with the country in bloody crisis. The reason I believe, might be the fact that the military know very well that the Guinean masses, with the deep-rooted hatred they at present have for the military, will be demanding more than just a change of political power, No military leader is yet certain he will be safe in a democratic and free Guinea; for now they might see unity among themselves as the best bet.
International Involvement.
Omali Yeshitela, the Chairman of the African Socialist International based in the USA, issued a statement demanding that the only genuine force in the struggle for Guinea on the ground, is the Africanist Movement and that the international community should give them support to take over political power. But contrary to his assumption, it is the Workers Union that have been leading and directing the mass struggle in Guinea.
The United States of America, who in the 1990s signed a trade agreement with President Conteh favouring American mining companies in the country, also issued a statement short of any substance; only saying that they do not accept the use of force against civilians. And as usual, the head of the UN is calling for calm in the country. Regional African organisations, like Ecowas and the African Union are all blind to the demand of the Guinean Masses; as if liberal political appeal might solve the situation.
The result of the mass uprising might reduce the powers of President Conteh, but not to the suffering of the Guinean masses. This we know, but will the end of Conteh serve as the new beginning for the inevitable total liberation of Guinea ?
On February 27th, the Nigerian envoy, Babangida, was able to convince the Guinean leader to choose among the five names presented to him by both the Trade union movement and the civil society movement. Electing the new Prime Minister from the list, as of now, has reduced the tension. Though a humiliating defeat for the president, it does not in any way spell the end of the suffering and struggle of the ordinary Guineans. The new Prime minister will have much to prove.
FALLING APART
All apart from the Africanist Movement, seem to be satisfied with the outcome; with President Conteh choosing from the list of names presented to him to choose as the Prime Minister. The Africanist Movement however, believed that the Workers Union leaders were much more interested in having some one who will be representing their own interest and not that of the working class they are supposed to represent, and that they are a disgrace to the African working class by presenting and accepting the Prime Minister, who is an open representative of imperialist forces, having served both the US government and other international institution hostile to the interest of the African masses. No matter what this position entails, the fact is that the Prime Minister is likely not to be the one to uplift Guineans from their acute poverty.
[Ends]
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The Battle for Oaxaca: Repression and Revolutionary Resistance
By Eugene Gogol
Eugene Gogol participated in an Emergency Human Rights Delegation in Oaxaca, Mexico in the third week in December.
Oaxaca is a land of revolutionary upsurge, repression and resistance. At the present moment, (the end of December), repression with a mano dura (hard hand) is the order of the day as Oaxaquenos, who have been active in the upsurge, are picked up on the streets, beaten by local or state police as a warning to spread fear in the community, and then released. Others remain imprisoned weeks after they being swept up by the federal prevention police, who viciously broke up a protest march in late November. Ulises Ruiz, the fraudulently elected, corrupt governor and the undoubted author and manipulator of the present repression, still remains in power.
Nevertheless, on the day I began this essay, December 22, thousands took to the streets in Oaxaca, as the Popular Assembly of the Peoples of Oaxaca, (Assamblea Popular de los Pueblos de Oaxaca), APPO, organized a march with a large contingent of teachers, as well as activists recently released from imprisonment and family members of those still detained, participating in resistance to the state and federal police occupation of the city. This same day, supporters in some 37 countries held demonstrations on a Day of World Mobilization for Oaxaca, originally called by the Zapatistas, (Ejercito Zapatista de Liberacion Nacional), EZLN. The date was also the 9th anniversary of the massacre (la matanza) of 45 Indigenous in the community of Acteal, Chiapas, an obscene horror, which goes unpunished to this day, including the intellectual authors of this crime, who remain uncharged.
This continuous repression must not obscure what has occurred from May/June through November, and continues in open and underground ways—the emergence of a Oaxaca in revolt, first responding to Ruiz’s crude attempt to crush the teachers’ strike, and then blossoming and developing in a multitude of ways, encompassing the dimensions of Indigenous, of women, of youth, all joining the labor dimension of the striking teachers. Indeed, one often finds Indigenous, teacher, woman, within a single person. Further, in at least one of the mega-marches in Oaxaca City, the number of demonstrators far exceeded the population of the entire city as tens of thousands came from hundreds of municipalities in the state of Oaxaca, claiming the struggle as their struggle. It was truly the population to a woman, man and child taking matters into their own hands.
How can we comprehend this new moment of emancipatory struggle in Mexico with its multiplicity of creative forms? Some have spoken of the Oaxaca Commune, finding historical echoes in the 1871 Paris Commune, where the population seized the city and began to create a “non-state state” including attempts to reorganize work and move toward freely associated labor. Marx would note that the greatness of the Commune was “its own working existence,” which encompassed, not a reform of the state, but smashing the old state-machinery and replacing it with the Commune. Oaxaca has not at the present moment reached such a stage. While some may have such a vision, others have argued that only a reform of the state machinery is needed.
Another commentartor writes of moving “toward dual power” in Oaxaca, intimating the Soviets of Russia 1917. Is APPO a 21st Century form of the soviet, embodying within, not the industrial proletariat, but the multitude, here encompassing many different subjects of social change?
Before we label the events historically, or for that matter globally, we need to probe the Oaxaca uprising in and of itself. Among its important dimensions:
1) the creation of APPO, rooted in an Indigenous tradition, which, as we will see, became the most crucial forum to organize action and express ideas from below; 2) the multi-faceted participation of women: from a group of APPO women who took matters into their own hands and seized a radio and television station, thus finding and speaking with their own voices, to many women building barricades in the streets together with the men to defend their new voice and halt the “death squad” caravans that sought to intimidate, injure, and at times shoot the population who were protesting and doing so in a peaceful manner without arms; 3) the youth, particularly from the university, who fought to defend and extend the gains of the struggle, including the important act of seizing the university radio station when the teachers’ Radio Planton was destroyed; 4) the neighborhood activists, who, particularly in poor areas, defended their streets, building barricades in the evening to stop the caravans, and pouring out to participate in the mega-marches that stretched from the summer into the fall; 5) the teachers, tens of thousands strong, who had catalyzed the rebellion with their initial strike and occupation of the central plaza, and continued to remain at the heart of the occupation of Oaxaca City, until, through lack of pay and faction fighting within their hierarchal union structure, finally felt forced to return to work; 6) the teachers, campasinos and others from outside Oaxaca City who created their own assemblas where they lived, and traveled to the capital to join the protests; 7) And always, always, the Indigenous dimension, the heart and soul of Oaxaca.
Let us begin at the beginning, with a brief survey of the immediate social-economic-political background, then trace the unfolding of the revolutionary upsurge with concentration on the organizational form of APPO, the role of women, and the participation from Oaxaquenos living outside the capital—all occurring in face of, indeed catalyzed by, direct governmental, or government-sponsored, repression. Perhaps then, we can return to situating the specificity of Oaxaca within a historical and global context, including its contributions and limitations for the present moment.
(For the following I am indebted to the many presentations and testimonies, which I was privileged to hear while in the State of Oaxaca.)
The Background
The origins of the crisis lie far deeper than Governor Ruiz’s attempt to break a teachers’ occupation of the central plaza of Oaxaca on June 14. In a political sense, they can be traced to the seven decades-long domination of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional, PRI, in Oaxaca. While the mid-1930s era of Lazaro Cardinas was a limited, progressive consolidation of the Mexican Revolution, that heritage was transformed in the decades that followed into a single-party authoritarian, repressive governmental state apparatus, nowhere more suffocating then in Oaxaca.
The limited “opening” in Mexican politics in the 1990s and 2000s was repressed in Oaxaca, where the PRI continued its single-party rule. A particular egregious manifestation of this was the fraudulent election of Ruiz as governor in 2004, and his subsequent corrupt and increasingly repressive rule. If there is one slogan that has united the masses of Oaxaca it has been Afurera Ruiz (Out with Ruiz!).
The origins of the rebellion encompass not only the political, but the economic-social. Oaxaca’s population of three and a half million is more than two-thirds Indigenous, with 16 different groups, 15 languages and many additional dialectics spoken. For decades a social exclusion has been practiced, resulting in deep poverty. Statistics indicate that some three-quarters of the population live in poverty or extreme poverty. The majority of the poor don’t even earn the poverty minimum wage of $6 a day. The crisis is greatest in the campo, the countryside, where, for much of the population, it has become impossible to earn a living. There is little government investment to assist the rural population. The North American Free Trade Agreement, which has permitted U.S. government-subsidized farmers to flood the marked with cheaper agricultural products, has cut the ground out from Mexican farmers being able to making a living in southern Mexico, particularly from corn production.
Economic devastation in the countryside has contributed substantially to large-scale migration. Some have gone to the city, in Oaxaca and other parts of Mexico. Others, hundreds of thousands, have been forced to survive by leaving to find work in the United States. This vast social dislocation has meant that in some communities in Oaxaca upwards of 50% of the population has left. Those migrants are both men and women, with women making up an estimated 45% of the migrants.
Some 85% of Oaxacan land is communal in one form or another. Only 15% is private property. The Indigenous communities have fought to preserve their land and their ways of organizing their communities, through rules and traditions called “usos y costumbres.” Oaxaca is the one state in Mexico where the government has been compelled to recognize “usos y costumbres” in hundreds of communities. These autonomous organizing centers around fiestas, communal work, certain governmental and religious services. Even this limited self-rule, often decided in community asambleas, has been subject to continual government pressure and fragmentation, played out in the economic whirlpool of neo-liberalism, and the change in the Constitution implemented by Salinas to open up the collective lands of the ejido to division and individual sale. It was the historical form of the asamblea that would be infused with a content of rebellion and resistance when Ruiz chose to try and break the teachers’ strike and occupation.
The Unfolding of the Oaxaca Rebellion
The Teachers’ Strike and Occupation of the Central Plaza
On May 22, after a week of unproductive negotiations with the state government, tens of thousands of teachers, other educational workers, family members and supporters marched to the central plaza in Oaxaca to set up an occupation and express their demands which included a salary increase and educational improvements. This was by no means the first time the teachers had taken such an action. For more than 20 years their fight for wages and improved educational conditions had resulted in the occupation of the central plaza for a few days as a way of compelling the state government to negotiate a settlement. But this year, events would unfold in a different manner.
The Oaxacan teachers are organized under section 22 of the National Union of Educational Workers. (El Sindicato Nacional de Trabajdores de la Educación, SNTE). Some 70,000 strong state-wide, the union has a militant, fighting history often at odds with the national union, whose hierarchical structure has done the bidding of the ruling PRI for decades.
On May 22, after a week of fruitless negotiation, the teachers and their supporters occupied the central square and dozens of surrounding blocks. Rather than a settlement in a few days, the teachers’ found themselves in a battle with the Ruiz regime. Over the next three weeks the confrontation grew. Faced with a government-influenced near monopoly over the means of communication, the Oaxacan teachers broadcast information to the community through their Radio Planton. Support for the teachers grew dramatically as the occupation continued, with two “mega-marches” of June 2 and June 7 drawing supporters of 75,000 plus and 120,000. The call was no longer only for a settlement of the teachers’ demands, but for the removal of Ruiz from the governor’s office.
In the pre-dawn hours of June 14 Ruiz gave his response, sending state police to attack the sleeping teachers, many of who were encamped with their families. Facing physical force, including large amounts of tear gas, the teachers were driven from the central plaza, their encampment broken up, Radio Planton destroyed. But the teachers refused to yield, battled back, and after several hours, took over the center of the city.
The government’s unprovoked attack, designed to terrorize and break the teachers, proved to be a major turning point in the battle of Oaxaca. Not only did the teachers in a courageous and determined manner hold their own, but an outraged citizenry throughout the state of Oaxaca came to the aid of the teachers and saw the battle as their own. Two days after the attack a third mega-march was held. The more than 300,000 who poured out included members from Indigenous communities from the coast to the sierras. In support of the teachers workers from other government unions, Indigenous groups and campesinos participated. Zapoteca, Mezateco, Mixes, and Mixteca traditional authorities joined with political organizations, students, human rights activists. The following day the movement created a revolutionary form to catalyze its struggle—the Popular Assembly of the Peoples of Oaxaca, APPO (Asamblea Popular de los Pueblos de Oaxaca).
APPO—The Indigenous Asamblea Infused with New Content
APPO is the synthesis of many movement organizations. Hundreds of organizations would eventually come together “in all colors and flavors” to become part of APPO. The central demand was the removal of Ruiz. As the movement developed, this came to mean not only his person, but all the representatives of the political authoritarian system which had been in power for some seven decades. APPO was anti-systemic. At the same time there was the beginning of the construction of popular power.
How to communicate with Oaxaca’s multitude was central to this construction. With Radio Platon smashed, students at Benito Juarez Autonomous University of Oaxaca took over the University radio station. It became one of APPO’s principle ways of reaching the cities masses, informing them of news of the movement, of marches and other protest activities, as well as warning of state police threats. Communication as governmental manipulation and propagation of falsehoods from above was replaced with a communication desde abajo, from below. As we will see shortly, this was particularly true in the action of a group of APPO women, who seized and ran a national television and radio station, a crucial high point in the development of the movement.
Because the state government greatly feared this revolutionary communication from below, they organized their police force and their “private” underground forces to carry out assaults on the movement-controlled communications. This included “death squad” car caravans roaming the streets of Oaxaca at night. To protect themselves, APPO organized its own security forces and used their communications media to defend the rebellion. They appeals when out over the air to guard the radio station(s) and resists government attacks. One form of resistance was the building of barricades to protect the occupation of the center of the city, the radio stations and transmission towers in the movement’s hands, and in general to prevent secret night attacks by the government-sponsored forces. Sometimes these were fortified permanent-type barricades including using commandeered buses. Others were temporary barricades to stop the movement of caravans in the evening. These were constructed anew each night. When a call went out to construct such barricades, it was answered immediately with the construction of several hundred the first night, a thousand the second and hundreds more the third night.
The barricades also meant a new form of communication within neighborhoods. Neighbors went out at night to construct and occupy the barricades. They began speaking with one another in a way they had never done before—discussing questions of radical reform, how to transform the state, and beyond reform: what did it mean to not only transform institutions but take to the streets.
APPO’s form of representation was simple and direct, born from Indigenous practices. Decisions were taken in asambleas in which all participated. While there are spokespersons, the organization is horizontal, not with a hierarchy of leaders. Activists speak of APPO not only as an immediate form of organization, but as a spirit of rebellion and communalism that has grown over many, many years.
The formation and practice of APPO brought forth the creative activity of many social subjects. Two of the most important were the women in APPO and the mobilizations outside Oaxaca City—of Indigenous communities, campesinos and teachers.
Women in APPO—Finding Their Own Voices
August 2 marked an important leap in the movement. It was on that day when a group of APPO women seized the state television and radio stations whose signal covered the state. They had gone to the station with a simple request—to have 15 minutes a day in which to present the movement’s point of view. But when they were refused, they responded by taking over the entire station. A new stage in the struggle had arrived. Now working women, Indigenous women, who never had had a chance to tell their stories in public, to present their ideas, were able to speak, to find their own voices and be heard in a way they had never been heard before.
The television station was in the hands of the movement for three weeks: “What a vision of hope sprang from the screen those three weeks! Ordinary people in everyday clothes spoke of the reality of their lives as they understood them, of what neo-liberalism meant to them, of the Plan Pueblo Panama, of their loss of land to developers and international paper companies, of ramshackle rural mountain schools without toilets, of communities without safe water or sanitary drainage.” (George Salzman, Oaxaca resident.)
The women were everywhere, in front of everything. Not alone the radio and television, but in the numerous mega-marches as well as La marcha de las caserolas (the march of women beating their pots and pans with wooden spoons). They were building the barricades and defending them. They brought food to those operating the radio stations. Women in APPO formed Cordinadora de Mujeres de Oaxaca (COMO) and held their own general meeting at the end of August.
Outside Oaxaca City
If Oaxaca City was the storm center of the upsurge, the countryside was by no means passive. During the months of the uprising, many communities in Oaxaca took the initiative to form there own local APPOs. They traveled to Oaxaca City to participate in the mega-marches. These communities had as well felt the repressive hand of the state government for decades. The Emergency Human Rights Delegation traveled to the community of Tlaxiaco, several hours outside Oaxaca City to hear presentations on the conditions in the countryside and testimonios from teachers and campesinos who had participated in the movement and felt the government’s heavy hand. What was clear from the presentations by a local human rights organization, Nu-Ji-Kaandi, were the difficult conditions faced by Indigenous communities. Particularly powerful was the presentation by an Indigenous woman human rights worker on the continual violence against women.
We hear stories of the self-organization of the community as teachers organized to have their own asamblea to voice their concerns and to support the activities occurring in Oaxaca City. Many traveled to Oaxaca City to participate in the marches. It was when a group of teachers organized a contingent of several hundred to travel to the city and participate in the mega-march of October 30 that they were directed confronted by the Federal Protective Police, the troops sent in by the Fox government to try and crush the movement. Traveling in several buses, the contingent faced a blockaded highway manned by hundreds of the federal police. The police pulled people off the buses, roughly interrogated and detained those who they thought were the leaders and prevented the members of the Tlaxiaco community from traveling further to join the protest march.
During the testimonios a discussion/debate occurred which perhaps reflects some of the battle of ideas occurring in the movement today. A campesino activist, in telling of his experiences in the protest bus caravan that was stopped by the federal police, argued for the need to directly confront the repressive state authorities. A teacher quickly responded that the only way the movement could success was through a peaceful route. The unresolved question is what happens when the peaceful protest is continually met with repression?
The Authoritarian State in Oaxaca
Our concentration on the creativity of the movement in not meant to minimize the repression which Oaxaqueños face day in and day out, and which is being expressed with particular viciousness, brutality and outright murder in the battle for Oaxaca over the last seven months. At least 17 people have been murdered directly during, and because of, their participation in the movement. Hundreds have been arrested and many of those remain as political prisoners. The emergency human rights delegation heard numerous testimonies to this effect. One student who had been arrested, beaten, made to pose falsely with arms while the police took pictures, forced to write a “confession” of a crime he did not commit, was imprisoned for several weeks. After testifying before us in the morning, he was later in the day again kidnapped by police with two other activists, beaten and then released!
We heard testimony from a woman teacher who was participating with her husband in one of the protest marches. Suddenly shots rang out and her husband fell mortally wounded.
Another woman, a mother of three, was just leaving work, not participating in the protests but simple in the area when the police on a rampage rounded her up: “I couldn’t see, I was trying to find my son…they [the federal police] grabbed me, shoved me against the pavement, handcuffed my hands behind my neck and hurled me onto a pile of other women. They kicked and beat us if we moved and kept us that way for almost two hours.” (translation by Bob Stout, Emergency Human Rights Delegation) She, together more about 140 others, were taken by helicopter to a prison in Nayarit, hundreds of miles away. The charge? “Sedition.” At the end of her testimony she said that after this experience she now wanted to join the protest movement.
The Battle of Ideas; Questions for the Movement
What is the meaning of the battle for Oaxaca?
1) It is clear that the vast majority of Oaxaqueños call for the immediate removal of Ulises Ruiz as governor. The wholesale repudiation of the PRI in the July 2 federal elections spoke strongly to this. Furthermore, removal of Ruiz has come to mean more than the mere change from one governing face to another. After all, the federal government may find it convenient for its own purposes to oust Ruiz. The call demands as well a removal of the federal and state police occupation of Oaxaca, a dismantling of the repression nature of the state apparatus and reform of the state government in Oaxaca. But how deep that reform will go, whether the battle for Oaxaca will reach to challenge the very nature of the state remains an unanswered question. However, should it be an unexplored question?
The question of the state of course, is inseparable from the social-economic composition of the society. This would mean a probing of the nature of capitalism, particularly in underdeveloped lands, and even more concretely in poverty-stricken regions such as Oaxaca within those lands. The Zapatistas, in their 6th Declaration from the Selva Lacondona and in the La Otra Campaña, have called for a movement that is anti-capitalist and from the Left. What does it mean to be anti-capitalist today? Is anti-imperialism sufficient, or do we have to reach deeper? Do we see capitalism as for more than mere property forms—private vs. state or nationalized forms—and centered instead on the extraction of value and surplus value in the labor process? To be anti-capitalist in full comprehension is to recognize the necessity to destroy value-producing, commodity production, and begin to implement freely associated labor. Communal, collective labor of Indigenous groups, as in Oaxacan communities, will have much to contribute here if we recognize that that this cannot “co-exist” with value production. Rather it is only the destruction of the capitalist mode of production that will allow a freely associative mode to arise on its ashes. If instead we remain in the reform or remaking of existing institutions, won’t we be trapped in a “self-limiting revolution” that does not reach the fullness of a new human society? Let us beware of our own “mind-forged manacles.”
2) What the battle of Oaxaca has brought to the fore is the creativity of mass self-activity as an emergence of diverse social subjects. Indigenous, worker, women, youth and other human dimensions, not as fixed essences, but as self-developing individuals and groups, as, paraphrasing Hegel, individuality which lets nothing interfere with its quest for universality. What Oaxaca demonstrates, as so many other creative movements have bore witness to historically and globally, is that masses are not alone muscle, but Reason of social transformation. Their actions, ideas, questions are not limited to moments of revolutionary practice, but a form of revolutionary theory. This is one of the lessons from the movement. Oaxaca has much to teach here. It is a lesson we need to study over and over as each new revolutionary moment from below arises.
3) As crucial as is the emergence and recognition of the creativity of new social subjects of revolutionary transformation, is it in itself sufficient? Some have argued that such social subjects within non-hierarchical forms of organization are sufficient to allow for uprooting social transformation. That is, that the active organizational participation by a multiplicity of revolutionary subjects can of itself bring forth new beginnings.
Here, form of organization, in this case the popular assembly of APPO, but other forms as well—the autonomous communities and juntas del buen gobierno in Chiapas, or historically such magnificent mass organizational forms as the Commune of Paris, the soviets of Russia, the workers’ council of Hungary 1956—have become transformed from a crucial particular to a universal. However the only absolute universal is the creation, the absolute becoming, of a new society. We cannot substitute a particular, as revolutionary as it may be, including a particular form of organization, for the universal reaching toward and entering a new society. The particular is a necessary concretization of such a reaching, but it is not in itself the totality of the reaching. For that we need not alone the practice of reaching toward a new society, but the mind, the philosophic vision that is part of the journey.
An emancipatory philosophic vision worked out concretely— thus a concrete universal—can arm us against the imposition of false ideological solutions.
In place of eliminate this word: such end of elimination ideological obfuscation lies the need to theoretically work out the meaning of Oaxaca’s revolutionary upsurge. It is precisely here that being rooted in emancipatory philosophic thought is central to the present moment. The double rhythm of revolutionary transformation, the negation of the old society and the creation of the new, is not alone the action of practice. It is as well the act of cognition, of the emancipatory Idea, and it is precisely the unity of the two, of practice and of theory/philosophy, which opens the door fully to a new society.
--December 29, 2006
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Book Review: Sophie Scholl and the White Rose
by Annette Dumbach and Jud Newborn
Revised and expanded edition published by Oneworld Publications, Oxford, 2006.
Reviewed by Richard Abernethy
The White Rose was a clandestine group based in Munich that wrote and distributed a series of leaflets calling for the overthrow of Hitler and the Nazis, between June 1942 and February 1943. These people, who risked and finally sacrificed their lives to oppose the Third Reich, were five students at the University of Munich: Hans and Sophie Scholl, Christoph Probst, Alexander Schmorell and Willi Graf; later joined by Professor Kurt Huber. All were executed by the Nazis during 1943. This book gives us a detailed account of the group, their social background and the ideas that moved them, their decision to take up active resistance despite the obvious dangers, the few months of secret activity and their arrest, trial and execution. The full texts of all seven leaflets (the last was an unfinished draft when they were arrested) are included as an appendix.
The White Rose began without significant connections to any previously existing organisation, whether political, religious or military. Willi Graf had been involved in the illegal Catholic youth movement, but found little support there for active opposition to the Nazis. Initially the group had no links to the wider German resistance, although they were beginning to make
those links before their arrest. They had been indoctrinated in Nazi ideology in school and as compulsory members of the Nazi youth organisations. Without models to follow, they had to work everything out for themselves. They devised a relatively safe method of distributing the leaflets, leaving some around for people to find and mailing others to people picked at random from telephone directories. Later on, encouraged by signs of mass hostility to the Nazis and hoping for an imminent uprising, they took more extreme risks. Hans and Sophie Scholl took a suitcase, no less, full of leaflets to place around the university. As Sophie scattered the last of the leaflets from a balustrade, they were spotted by a university guard,
arrested and handed over to the Gestapo. The leaflets vary greatly in style and content. The earlier ones call for resistance to the Nazis as a religious and moral duty, oppose fascism in the name of "Western and Christian civilization" and even identify Hitler with "the power of evil, the fallen angel, Satan". While all of the group remained Christians to the end, the later leaflets do not use any explicitly religious language and are more political. The fifth leaflet is particularly interesting as it sketches a positive vision for the future and refers for the first time to the need for some form of socialism: "Imperialistic designs for power, regardless from which side they come, must be neutralized for all time. Prussian militarism must never come to
power again. Only in a generous, open cooperation among the peoples of Europe can the groundwork be laid for genuine reconstruction. All centralized power, like that exercised by the Prussian state in Germany and Europe, must be eliminated. The coming Germany must be federalistic. At this juncture, only a sound federal system can imbue a weakened Europe with new life. The working class bust be liberated from its degraded conditions of slavery by a reasonable form of socialism. The illusory structure of autonomous national industry must disappear. Every nation and each man has a right to the goods of the whole world.
"Freedom of speech, freedom of religion, the protection of individual citizens from the arbitrary will of criminal regimes of violence - these will be the bases of the new Europe".
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In Defence of the Luddites
The following letter by Richard Abernethy was published in Newsweek International, November 13, as a response to an article by Gordon Brown on globalization:
Dear Editor,
Gordon Brown dismisses protests against capitalist globalization an "an angry resistance to change - old-style Luddism, in other words". ("We Need to Be More Fair," Sept. 18). It may interest you to know that the original Luddites were weavers in early 19th-century England who opposed, unsuccessfully, the introduction of new technology that, in the social conditions of the time, deprived them of their livelihood and threw their families into poverty. The propertied classes who put down the Luddites were themselves resistant to social and political changes, such as the extension of the vote to working people, the formation of unions and the reduction of working hours. Today's workers have good reason to be anxious about how
capital moves around the world in search of low paid, non-union workers without effective legal rights. Brown's globalization manifesto says nothing about the need for effective laws to protect workers from overwork and hazardous conditions, and for free, independent unions in all countries.
Richard Abernethy, Oxford
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