Crisis of Humanity and the Specter of 21st Century Fascism

http://www.soc.ucsb.edu/faculty/robinson/Assets/pdf/Crisis%20of%20Humanity.pdf
World Economy  www.worldfinancialreview.com  May - June 2014 Pg 14 – 16

Global Capitalism:
Crisis of Humanity and the Specter of 21st Century Fascism

By William I. Robinson

About the Author

William I. Robinson is professor of sociology, global and international studies, and Latin American studies, at the University of California - Santa Barbara. Among his many books are Promoting Polyarchy (1996), Transnational Conflicts (2003), A Theory of Global Capitalism  (2004), Latin America and Global Capitalism(2008), and Global Capitalism and the Crisis of Humanity (2014).

World capitalism is experiencing the worst crisis in its 500 year history. Global capitalism is a qualitatively new stage in the open ended evolution of capitalism characterised by the rise of transnational capital, a transnational capitalist class, and a transnational state. Below, William I. Robinson argues that the global crisis is structural and threatens to become systemic, raising the specter of collapse and a global police state in the face of ecological holocaust, concentration of the means of violence, displacement of billions, limits to extensive expansion and crises of state legitimacy, and suggests that a massive redistribution of wealth and power downward to the poor majority of humanity is the only viable solution.

The New Global Capitalism and the 21st Century Crisis

The world capitalist system is arguably experiencing the worst crisis in its 500 year history. World capitalism has experienced a profound restructuring through globalisation over the past few decades and has been transformed in ways that make it fundamentally distinct from its earlier incarnations. Similarly, the current crisis exhibits features that set it apart from earlier crises of the system and raise the stakes for humanity. If we are to avert disastrous outcomes we must understand both the nature of the new global capitalism and the nature of its crisis. Analysis of capitalist globalisation provides a template for probing a wide range of social, political, cultural and ideological processes in this 21st century. Following Marx, we want to focus on the internal dynamics of capitalism to understand crisis. And following the global capitalism perspective, we want to see how capitalism has qualitatively evolved in recent decades.

our efforts are for peace, their efforts are for war

How can we express enough solidarity and who are we to voice such a thing?  How can we ever mention the struggle of the indigenous people of Mexico and not broadcast the following text loud and clear?  How can we stand still and read, learn, think, and discuss, when order is threatened by the forces of human disorder and suffering?  Rage?  No words can ever describe what we feel.  We feel as we are in prison, locked far away from our comrades.  Locked up in a world without autonomy, without daily dignity for the land we step on, the food the masters feed us, the lies they serve us, the labor extortion they subject us, the humiliation of being trapped and powerless on their land.  The submission to a world where they decide and we materialize and execute their wishes, unable to ever materialize any of our own.

Solidarity is a simple word used by many, but few are able to carry on the weight of its true meaning.  How can you express solidarity without sharing the struggle?  How can you not express solidarity without sharing the defeat from it? And what is there to do?  Are we consciously ready to make the leap?  Are we ready to leave the world of the masters and create our own world?  Are we afraid?  Do we have second thoughts?  Is there life away from struggle?  Is there any meaning in such other life? 

Long live the struggle of compañero Galeano 

Long live the meeting (the Sixth) of all struggles around the world

Always we will win always

May 12, 2014

Where Has It Brought You?

Zapatista Pain and Rage

by SUBCOMANDANTE MARCOS

To the Compañeras and Compañeros of the Sixth:
Compas:
To tell you the truth, the communiqué was all ready. It was succinct, clear, precise, how communiqués should be. But…well…maybe later.
For now the meeting with the compañeros and compañeras bases of support of the community of La Realidad is about to begin.
We listen.
We have known the tone and the emotion with which they speak for a long time: pain and rage.
So it occurs to me that a communiqué will not adequately reflect this.
Or at least not fully.
True, maybe a letter won’t do so either, but at least the words that follow are an attempt, even if they are only a pale reflection.
Because…

Editorial. Rebeldía Zapatista (Zapatista Rebellion)

the Word of the EZLN

Front Cover of Rebeldía Zapatista #2

We rebellious Zapatistas, along with our mother earth, are threatened with destruction in our Mexican homeland. Both above and below the earth’s surface, the bad governments and bad rich people, all neoliberal capitalists, want to commodify everything they see.

They want to own everything.

They are destructive, they are murderers, criminals, rapists. They are cruel and inhuman, they torture and disappear people, and they are corrupt. They are every bad thing you can imagine, they do not care about humanity. They are, in fact, inhuman.

They are few, but they decide everything about how they will dominate countries that let themselves be dominated. They have made underdeveloped countries into their plantations, and made the underdeveloped capitalist so-called governments of those countries into their overseers.

This is what has happened in Mexico. The neoliberal transnational corporations are the bosses, their plantation is called Mexico, the current overseer is named Enrique Peña Nieto, the administrators are 
Manuel Velasco in Chiapas and the other so-called state governors, and the badly named municipal “presidents” are the foremen.

This is why we rose up against this system at dawn on January 1, 1994.

Mining, the destruction of land by neo-colonialists

AGAINST THE IMPERIALISM AND NEOCOLONIALISM OF MINING COMPANIES, THE CURRENT BATTLE OF THE PEOPLES

A New Store for Zapatista Women’s Cooperative

** Organization is required to win, NGO’s from several countries point out in Puebla
** Emissaries from Mexico, Panama, Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador expose abuses of transnationals

By: Rosa Rojas

Tlamanca, Puebla, March 15, 2014

The struggle against extractive mining “it’s not only for our life, but also an anti-imperialist struggle and against neo-colonialism that is imposed on the peoples with the servile attitude of the neoliberal governments and the agreements on free trade and on protection for foreign investment,” according to what was made clear here today after the exposure of particular cases of problems with mining companies that communities from different states of the country confront, as well as those in Panama, Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador.

The rights of Zapatista women

There can never and will never be any real social change without women equally participating in this change.  The zapatistas (men and women equally and from below) have done precisely this.

From Latin American Press

Orsetta Bellani
4/10/2014
Womens Revolutionary Law provides for access to political and military posts, fair wages, education, health, freedom from abuse and free choice of couples.

Fabiana wakes every morning at 4:30 a.m., like all the women in her community. She grinds the corn she boiled the night before until it becomes soft dough, from which she forms a few balls that once flattened and cooked on a griddle become tortillas. Fabiana, who is ethnically Tzotzil Maya, is 23 years old, with a husband and two children, and also a member of the support base for the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN).

She works at home almost all day, every day, while toting her youngest child. Her husband helps with some chores traditionally considered “women’s work,” like shelling corn or plucking poultry, and sometimes he takes care of the children while she cooks.

Agriculturists or People Without Land

Agriculturists Without Land 

www.csusbgreencampus.com/agriculturists-without-land/

The following is a critique of the content of the above article and aims to open a discussion on the issue of social movements being incorporated within the system when they can not be defeated by physical (violent repression) means. Comments related to the subject are welcome and will be published as soon as possible.

MST is a 30 year old movement in Brazil.  It has both class and social characteristics.  It is a movement for people without land by the people without land.  Brazil is the country with the largest percentage of the population having no access to land.  Very counter-intuitive if you consider the vast area of jungle and unexplored forests created by the Amazon.  This means that a very small group of people have converted all land to private status.  This was done with a mechanism called IMF when the country first started going bankrupt 40 years ago.

This article nevertheless calls the MST movement agriculturists without land, which apart from being poorly written reveals a specific political value.  What we can conclude from it is that land is perceived as means of production which utilizes specialized workers to produce for others.  Something that as far as we can find about MST it is not.  What is odd about the article and drew our attention is the term agriculturists, meaning agricultural workers, which if searched through the net it has not been used before in reference to MST.

From Fire to Autonomy: Zapatistas, 20 Years of Walking Slowly

Saturday, 25 January 2014 09:28  

By Andalusia Knoll and Itandehui Reyes,  truth-out.org

Note: truth-out does great work in sharing knowledge about the reasons we should not yet give up any struggle.  In this great piece one should not overlook this paragraph:
mandar obedenciedo (command by obeying): to serve and not be served; represent and not supplant; build and not destroy; propose and not impose; and convince, not defeat, from below not above.

Speaking in the mountains of Chiapas, Mexico, on a cold drizzly New Year's Eve, the Zapatista Comandante Hortensia addressed the crowd: "Twenty-five or 30 years ago we were completely deceived, manipulated, subjugated, forgotten, drowned in ignorance and misery." She was communicating the official words of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) on the 20th anniversary of their rebellion, when thousands of indigenous people rose up in arms, took over dozens of major towns and villages in this southern state, and declared "enough is enough, never again will there be a homeland that doesn't include us."
Comandante Hortensia went on to explain how over the past two decades, they have constructed their own autonomous government, complete with their own health and education system, based in the indigenous traditions of their ancestors. Despite the continual efforts of the "neoliberal bad government" to displace them from their land, the Zapatistas have successfully recuperated thousands of acres of land on which they have constructed communities that are governed "from the bottom up." Community members participate in rotating government positions that operate under the democratic principle of "mandar obedeciendo" (commanding by obeying).

Dialectical Communitarian Anarchism as the Negation of Domination

A Review of "The Impossible Community"

Saturday, 30 November 2013 09:50 By Javier Sethness, Truthout | Op-Ed

• Print 

(Image: Bloomsbury)Professor John P. Clark's The Impossible Community: Realizing Communitarian Anarchism (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013) is a masterful work, one which seeks to invert radically the destruction of nature and oppression of humanity as prosecuted by capitalism, the state and patriarchy by encouraging the intervention of a mass-confluence of anarcho-communist - or communitarian anarchist - socio-political movements. This project is only "impossible" because its realization is heterotopic - inherently contradictory - to the prevailing system of domination, such that it demands the abolition of hegemony in favor of a different, liberated world: that of the "third great epoch of history," in Clark's vision, when "humanity finally frees itself and the earth from the yoke of dominion." Taking equally from Buddhism as from dialectical philosophy, Clark stresses the importance of enlightenment, mindfulness and awakening as preconditions of revolutionary political praxis. And although he implicitly seems to agree with the overall thesis of the (anti)catastrophist line developed by Sasha Lilley and company, he also affirms the productivity of a commitment to truth that squarely confronts the profoundly shocking, traumatic and even convulsive nature of such truth: the very first page of his preface acknowledges the sixth mass extinction in which terrestrial life is at present entrapped and notes the "horror" of a capitalist world in which billions go without the basic necessities of a good life. Advancing the philosophy and practice of communitarian anarchism as an exit from the depraved present, Clark dedicates much of his text to examining the anti-authoritarian and cooperative spirit of humanity, as embodied in many of the customs of pre-modern or "traditional" societies, as in the history of Western revolutionary movements. In this sense, Clark does well to distance himself from the Eurocentrism advanced by many Western radical thinkers, including social ecologist Murray Bookchin, whose imprint on The Impossible Community is otherwise nearly palpable.

November 17th 1983 ... rewinding 30 years of constant revolution

If we only loved one thing about the Zapatistas it would be the clean refreshing feeling that comes in their writing.  Inspired by ideas of Europe and by the ideas and struggles of native people instead of producing through a dialectic blend even more complexity for us to digest, they create from 0 something new and simple.  Instead of complicating what for centuries seems too complex to implement, they implement what it was so simple to implement to begin with.  But as every major human discovery has in the past, the notion of "why didn't I think of that before", for 30 years they are continuing to discover new ground and content so fast that we must forget what we are and what we do in order to comprehend the significance of their discoveries.

Here is a sample of what we are (and probably failing) trying to convey:

Original source from the jungle

nov192013

REWIND 3.

REWIND 3.

Here we explain the reasons behind this strange title and those that will follow, narrate the story of an exceptional encounter between a beetle and a perplexing being (that is, more perplexing than the beetle) and the reflections of no immediate relevance or importance which occurred therein; and finally, given a particular anniversary, the Sub tries to explain, unsuccessfully, how the Zapatistas see their own history.

November 2013
To whom it may concern:

WARNING – As noted in the text entitled “The Bad and Not So Bad News,” the writings that preceded that text had not yet been published. Ergo, what we are going to do is “rebobinar” (that is, “rewind” the tape) to what should have appeared on the Day of the Dead. Having rewound, you may then read in inverse order the inverse order in which the texts will appear and that way you will…hmm…forget it, I’ve even managed to confuse myself. The point is that you get the gist of the “retrospective” perspective. It’s as if one is going in one direction but later returns to see how they got going in that direction in the first place. Got it? No?

Counter-Infrastructure School of Autonomy

In recent weeks we have been discussing and researching ideas on infrastructure as means of dependency and extortion of especially the lowest social strata.  This inquiry begun from questions and suggestions sent by readers of this blog.  What we will attempt here is a brief introduction to the dialog that has started between us and those in contact on the subject and we will gradually incorporate our perspectives into one document that will be the product of this discussion.  We strongly believe that this is the way it should be done.  From the bottom we come into the same level and organize equally amongst us to produce something of value to all.

The Effective Extremist Collective

... they can't be too extreme or else they will be ignored ...

"First, social-psychological studies of small groups show that "moral exemplars" -- those who stand outside the general consensus and at first are labeled as "extremists" -- can often be very effective, but with one important qualification: they can't be too extreme or else they will be ignored. Thus, the trick for any social change agent is to be just extreme enough to be an "effective extremist."

Second, historical case studies of social change show that a very small number of highly organized and disciplined people, drawing great energy from their strong moral beliefs and supreme confidence in their shared theoretical analysis, can have a big impact."

What Social Science Can Tell Us About Social Change
by G. William Domhoff
March 2005

http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/change/science.html

Did you listen? It is the sound of your world crumbling. It is the sound of our world resurging

Communiqué of the Clandestine Indigenous Revolutionary Committee – General Command of the Zapatista National Liberation Army, Mexico
 

December 21, 2012

To Whom It May Concern: Silent march in Chiapas 12.21.12

Did you listen?
It is the sound of your world crumbling.
It is the sound of our world resurging.
The day that was day, was night.

And night shall be the day that will be day.

Democracy!
Liberty!
Justice!

From the Mountains of Southeastern Mexico,

For the Clandestine Indigenous Revolutionary Committee – General Command of the EZLN

Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos,

Mexico, December 2012

The system of education is the education of the system

Zapatistas Showcase Their Autonomous School System to the Nation and the World

Refusing Government Money or Teachers, Indigenous Communities Have Built More Schools and Educated More Children Than Ever Before

By Amber Howard
Special to The Narco News Bulletin

January 6, 2007

When the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN, in its Spanish initials) began the public phase of its struggle on New Year’s Eve, 1993, it made eleven demands, one of which was “education” (the others were: work, land, shelter, food, health, independence, freedom, democracy, justice, and peace). Thirteen years later, they have seen that demand met as never before in the highlands and jungles of Chiapas. But it was not the Mexican government or any other institution that complied. They did it for themselves.

Foto: D.R. 2007 Gerardo Osuna

Whereas prior to the rebellion in these rural lands of Mexico’s poorest state schools were few and far between, Zapatista communities have built new ones, trained teachers from their own ranks, and widened the scope of what kind of education their children receive. And they did this without accepting a peso from the government. On December 31, 2006, thousands of Zapatistas and visitors from throughout Mexico and the world met in the mountain town of Oventic for the Gathering of the Zapatista Peoples and the Peoples of the World, where an entire session was dedicated to “The Other Education” and civilian authorities from throughout EZLN territory explained what they have done, and what they still hope to do.