archivi delle proteste globaliarchives of global protestsProposal for a 5th table: Minorities and all victims of domination
Politics as we know it was invented by the Greeks - by property-holding Greeks - to settle amically between themselves their problems as members of the ruling class. Greek politics, dialogue, democracy and liberty were politics, dialogue, democracy and liberty of dominants. All those under the rod of the property-holders, who were their property or who rated as second class citizens, were excluded from the process: foreigners, but above all, women, slaves, children and non-humans sentients. Their politics, their democracy, their liberty implied the subjugation of others.
We are going to come together to congress, democratically and freely, intent to change the world and establish a true democracy, true equality and true freedom. We are coming together because we are oppressed by a system - neoliberalism - that benefits others (and sometimes ourselves too). We are united in the struggle against this system. Yet this same system affects, as much as it affects us, those individuals under our dominion, such as human children or sentient beings of other species, such as women, and various other victims of discrimination - the mentally or physically handicaped, the social misfits, etc. And we may well unite against neoliberalism, and even overcome it, and create a world of equal and free property-holders, a world of justice, liberty, equality and fraternity, a world of democracy - for the property-holders, yet which would still be a world based on the negation of the interests of others.
Against neoliberalism and for Humanity... Women struggle to voice their opinions in a show run by men - and have great difficulties being heard. Natives, though at the very origins of the movement, remain grossly underrepresented and poorly considered. "Minors" are wholly excluded from the debate, and are not taken into account as specific victims of oppression, domination and exploitation. The victims of other forms of discrimitation (the old aged, the physically handicaped, the mentally "insane", the immigrants, homosexuals, "criminals"...) are denied any opportunity to formulate, communicate and analyse what their life is in this world. As for non-humans, they are disregarded right from the start: as we all know (only too well), the Symposium is, after all, "for Humanity"!
So let us each put aside for a moment our feelings, rationalizations, ideologies, and pre-formed categories, let us consider the sentient individual; let us try to imagine for a moment, as best we can, the life of the "minor" confined under legal guardianship of others for her or his first 10 to 20 years of life; the life of the "criminal" locked away in her or his cell; that of the woman, property of her husband or father; that of the old woman lost in a world which is no longer hers; that of the non-human in a cage, with no other future than the slaughterhouse...
If we wish to avoid becoming just one more group of dominants fighting under the banner of universalism for our sole interests as property-holders straining to regain what the current system has taken from us, let us pose the problems of others: of all those who are victims of other systems of exploitation, of systems of exploitation which are not solely or directly capitalist. We therefore propose that alongside the other tables, which should include the table the women ask for feminism, there be a table concerned with Domination/Discrimination/Exclusion, aimed at studying the relations between all the "precapitalist" modes of domination (e.g. patriarchy) and their relations with capitalism itself, and at studying ethics and its relation to politics:
aimed at studying what utopia we wish to propone.
A table on all forms of oppression
We suggest that the slogan of the Intergalactic symposium be:
"Against all forms of oppression" ---------------------------------
We propose that the 5th table be held in addition to that on patriarchy and women.
Proposed contents of table 5 (by no means of definitive or exhaustive) :
Specific sub-tables: --------------------
- Natives
- Racism/immigrants
- Patriarchy/"minors"
- Patriarchy/different forms of sexuality
- Discrimination/segregation of the old-aged
- "Criminals", the ideology of guilt
- Handicapped people and persons living outside the usual social and economic relationships
- Speciesism/other (non-human) sentients
- The appropriation of the individual by the collective
Other subjects that should be taken up by table 5: --------------------------------------------------
- Ethics : morals and morality, ethics and politics
- Interdependence and interrelations of the various forms of oppression, and of the different struggles
We propose that, just like the position of women in this world, these themes be necessarily taken up in all the other tables. -------
To refuse to consider the situation of the various victims of domination that we ourselves hold under our rod, who moreover are often those who suffer most from neoliberalism, is to refuse to work towards a world without dominations, for a just world.
What do you think of this?
Yves Bonnardel
Translation : Kate Bingley and David Olivier
To the For Humanity and Against Neo Liberalism index
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