archivi delle proteste globaliarchives of global protestsNOTE BENE: The following is a short preface prepared for an Italian collection of the final documents from the 1st Intercontinental Encuentro. It's too damn bad that such a collection is not available in English. As I say below, material prepared for the 2nd Encuentro and the meetings in Spain should build on what was done last year. The Italian collection will make that easy in Italy and reach a much wider audience. Harry
Documents from the First Intercontinental Encounter Preface
For over a hundred years many activists have recognized two things: first, that capitalism operates on a global level and second, that to achieve enough power to overthrow capitalism the working class must find ways to organize its own struggles at the same level.
The Global Character of Workers' Struggles
In one sense, of course, working class struggle has always been international. Capital's primitive accumulation imposed waged textile work in Europe and unwaged plantation slavery in Africa and the New World. It connected that Atlantic proletariat through extensive oceanic shipping that provided linkages which working class antagonism turned into circuits of struggle. Ever since, workers have circulated their struggles from country to country through their own work (e.g., seamen) and migrations (e.g., sometimes forced, sometimes voluntary). Workers in a given country have also repeatedly developed collaborative activities with their counterparts elsewhere (e.g., international trade unionism and solidarity movements) and the repetition of such movement and collaborations have produced transnational working class communities with permanent ties within different countries.
Such efforts have not proceeded without obstacles, including those within the labor movement. We used to call the AFL-CIO the "AFL-CIA" because of its role in undermining worker movements in the Second and Third Worlds. However, in these last few years, the emergence of new means of electronic communication such as the Internet has made it possible for rank & file workers to bypass such union and party bureaucrats to elaborate their struggles on an ever more global scale. The recent globalization of the Mersey Dock Workers' (Liverpool, England) strike is an striking example. More generally, grassroots efforts such as PeaceNet and the European Counter Network of "controinformazione" have accelerated the circulation of struggle both within and among countries. Recognition of the Necessity of Global Organizing
Little by little the theorists and spokespersons of an ever more global proletariat have learned to articulate the political strategy inherent in this situation. As early as 1847, Engels wrote the following in his essay on the "Principles of Communism":
"Will it be possible for this revolution to take place in one country alone? Ans: No, Large-scale industry, already by creating the world market, has so linked up all the peoples of the earth, and especially the civilised peoples, that each people is dependent on what happens to another . . . The communist revolution will therefore be no merely national one; it will be a revolution taking place simultaneously in all civilised countries, that is, at least in England, America, France and Germany . . . It will also have an important effect upon the other countries of the world, and will completely change and greatly accelerate their previous manner of development. It is a worldwide revolution and will therefore be worldwide in scope."
To some degree, Marx and Engels would outgrow the Eurocentrism in this formulation, but they would never abandon the fundamental insight that to be effective revolutionary struggle must be global. This was the understanding that led them to the First International in 1864 and led many other militants to the various Internationals which followed.
Marxists, of course, have not been alone in recognizing the importance of the globalization of struggle. Among those who have embraced other political ways of conceptualizing the struggle against capitalism, anarchists have also commonly emphasized this central need. From those who joined (and fought with) Marx and Engels in the First International to those who have responded to the Zapatistas' Intercontinentalism, many anarchists have both articulated their vision and organized their struggles as globally as possible. From Bakunin's dream of an "International Brotherhood" through Western anarchists' initial solidarity with the Russian revolution and the blood spilled in Spain to contemporary international organizing, a great many anarchists have translated their understanding into hard practice.
The efforts of militants focused on environmental, gender and indigenous issues have also been increasingly global. Led partly by theories that emphasize the simultaneous complexity and interconnectivity of all life processes even unto the plantetary whole (Gaia) and partly by experiences in confronting capitalists who shift operations from country to country to outflank and undermine controls, many ecologists now struggle to build global coalitions of eco-warriors able to cut-off and destroy such tactics. Faced with a patriarchal set of relationships throughly integrated into the structure of the hierarchical capitalist organization of the world, feminists have also found themselves forced (and drawn) to share experience and collaborate across borders (e.g., the international wages for housework campaign, the counter-conference in Bejing, cross- border struggle against the international sex industry, and so on). One essential element of the current period of indigenous rennaisance has been its global character. Resistance to genocidal murder and social marginalization has provided a common ground for the most diverse peoples and upon that ground is being woven a web of cooperation and mutual aid across vast cultural differences, languages and experiences. Global Class Struggle
Despite this long history of increasingly global self-activity and self-reflection, however, it remains the case today that capital has elaborated its own mechanisms of domination, control and exploitation apace. Indeed as Ranireo Panzieri pointed out in QUADERNI ROSSI back in 1964 (taking Marx's writing on factory despotism as his point of departure) capital's planning expands both as a necessary response to working class struggle and as the means to its limitation and subordination. As our struggles have globalized and recomposed themselves so have the institutions of business and the state.
Neocolonial institutions were crafted in response to anti-colonial struggles. Supranational state institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) were created to manage the class struggle of the Keynesian period on a global scale. Current capitalist policies which are being implemented today in an unusually homogenous manner (what Africans' know by the IMF title of "structural adjustment" and the Latin Americans call NEOLIBERALISM and has been known in the North under various rubrics such as Thatcherism, Reaganism, Maastricht, anti-immigrant policies, etc.) have been developed in response to the global cycle of struggle which ruptured Keynesianism. Institutions such as the IMF have been reorganized and reoriented to plan and oversee these new policies, everywhere. We are thus engaged in an historical dialectic that we will only be able to escape by developing ways of organizing globally that outstrip capital's ability to cope. Recognizing this should put global collaboration in such development at the top of our agenda.
Fotunately, just such an understanding and just such efforts do seem to be increasingly widespread. The top-down push for European Union and the Maastricht Treaty has evidenced capital's attempts to cope with widespread working class struggle in Europe. They have been met not only with local resistance but also with almost continent wide organizing. The elaboration of the kind of computer networks and rank & file labor efforts mentioned above have been complemented with face to face encounters such as the 1991 International Meeting in Venice. Such efforts have demonstrated a shared understanding of the need to jump the struggle to a new, higher level. At an international level, in limited ways, the working class has used G-7 summit meetings, IMF annual meetings and UN gatherings such as the Rio Conference on the environment and the Beijing Conference on Women as vehicles for a global dialog and consultation about possible paths and forms of struggle.
The Zapatista Initiative
Among the most interesting and promising of such initiatives are those documented in this collection of material: the Intercontinental Encounter organized by the Zapatistas that took place at the end of July 1996 and brought together over 3,000 grassroots activists from 42 countries. The Encounter originated directly in a call made by the Zapatistas in January 1996 that suggested continental meetings for the Spring to be followed by an intercontinental encounter in the Summer. The backdrop to that call was the amazing global circulation of support for the Zapatistas and the struggle of peasants and indigenous people which had developed in the two years since January 1, 1994 when their struggles exploded into public view.
The Zapatista Call, which they issued with some trepedation, high hopes but low expectations, suggested a gathering to discuss the the world-wide phenomenon of neoliberalism, the effects it has had on people, resistances which have developed and possible paths of further struggle. The Call generated a mobilization of a scope and depth that no other individual group has ever been able to do. It far exceeded the expectations not only of the Zapatistas but of their sympathizers. Not only did thousands of people respond enthusiastically to the invitation and move quickly to organize a series of continental meetings, but the stimulus of those meetings provoked an outpouring of thinking, discussion, writing and other creative activities. Unlike international meetings organized by business, the state, or academics, these gatherings had no institutional funding, no high-tech conference facilities, and no promise of payoff (neither profits nor publication) except for the opportunity to accelerate the struggle to build a new world. That so many participated, in so many ways, with so much energy was truly remarkable.
As many expected, the resulting meetings, first continental, then intercontinental were tumultuous, even arduous, affairs as a diverse array of individuals with equally diverse backgrounds (in terms of both their struggles and organizing experience) came together to attempt a multi-sided, multi-lingual conversation about the state of the world and how to change it. Differnt kinds of people working within different political and theoretical perspectives shared their views on the state of the world and their proposals for struggle. Marxists, feminists, environmentalists, indigenous organizers, social democrats, human rights activists, of all stripes did their best to engage each other and to find common ground. Organized in five different campesino communities in various parts of Chiapas but gathered together at the beginning and at the end, the week-long struggle for dialog went on day and night, often in rain and mud, broken only for music, dancing and sleep. As the discussions drew to a close the participants struggled to draw up documents that would reflect the complexity of the perspectives and opinions that had come together. Some of those documents are included here.
Under the noses of the Mexican state's repressive military and police, these meetings were remarkable not for their difficulties but for achieving such a degree of coherency that virtually all concerned decided that they should be repeated as one vehicle for the continuation of the conversations begun. Out of the Intercontinental Encounter came the decision to organize another --in Europe next time-- and enthusiasm for creating not just periodical but on-going conversations on a global scale about fighting capitalism and building alternatives. At the time of writing this preface the decision has been taken to hold the 2nd Intercontinental Encounter in Spain in late July, 1997.
For the 2nd Encounter to be a success, those who attend it need to build on the work of the first, and on the conversations which have occurred in the interim. It is not enough that people gather to talk; the talking needs to progress, to build on itself, and of course on the accumulating experience of struggle in the world. The documents of the last Encounter published here make it possible not only for those who attended to look back and reflect on what was said and done, but for those who did not attend to have a sense of how the conversations went.
One of the great lessons that the Zapatistas have learned within their communities and which they have shared first with other Mexicans and then with the world is the fundamental importance of listening. Of listening, and understanding, before you speak. With their guns and their eloquence they have made large numbers of Mexicans realize that they had NOT listened to the indigenous in Chiapas. The Zapatista spokesperson Subcommandante Marcos has often told his own story of how he and a few friends came to Chiapas to tell the locals how to organize but soon realized that it was they who needed to listen and learn from the communities. Unfortunately, politicos are not always inclined to listen. Those in struggle are often so hell bent on talking, on getting out their own message, their own interpretation and program, that they don't listen to all the voices around them. As a result, they are often out of touch with and not in synch with the underlying character of the day to day struggles of their communities. In the 1st Intercontinental Encounter the participants, sitting there in the jungle, in an strange environment, surrounded by campesinos whose struggles and dignity they respected, did display an encouraging willingness to listen. It was an experience and a spectacle quite unlike many political meetings in the North which have often been torn and even destroyed by an endless non-dialog of sectarians deaf to each others' words.
Therefore, for this 2nd Intercontinental Encounter to progress beyond the first it needs to be well prepared and well organized. Among those preparations familiarity with the work, conversations and results of the 1st Encounter is basic. Hopefully current plans to make materials that are prepared for the 2nd Encounter available ahead of time, so that discussions can proceed on the grounds of prior collective knowledge will be realized as well. For those who have come to understand the centrality of such discussions to the building of an ever more effective global network of struggles and who want to participate in the next Encounter this book should be considered absolutely required basic reading.
Harry Cleaver
Austin, Texas
March 7, 1997
To the For Humanity and Against Neo Liberalism index
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