What is the Landless Workers Movement, Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (MST)

A documentary about the history of the fight of the rural workers in Brazil. Go here for the list of videos

What is the MST?

Brazil’s Landless Workers Movement, Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (MST) in Portuguese, is a mass social movement, formed by rural workers and by all those who want to fight for land reform and against injustice and social inequality in rural areas.

The MST was born through a process of occupying latifundios (large landed estates) and become a national movement in 1984.  Over more than two decades , the movement has led more than 2,500 land occupations, with about 370,000 families - families that today settled on 7.5 million hectares of land that they won as a result of the occupations. Through their organizing, these families continue to push for schools, credit for agricultural production and cooperatives, and access to health care.

Currently, there are approximately 900 encampment holding 150,000 landless families in Brazil.  Those camped, as well as those already settled, remain mobilized, ready to exercise their full citizenship, by fighting for the realization of their political, social economic, environmental and cultural rights.

Call-out for actions and manifestations on the 22 February 2014 !

Thursday 6 February 2014, by zadist

All the versions of this article: [English] [français]

Resistance and Sabotage !
This call-out is motivated by:

=> the call-out of the NoTAV movement at Val di Susa in Italy calling for a national day (22 02 2014) of mobilisation and action, each one in their area, city, environment.
=> the call-out of the ZAD movement at Notre-dame-des-Landes in France calling for a national manifestation in Nantes, France

This is a call-out for actions and manifestations on the 22 February 2014 !

• A day of action and sabotage to abolish all those megalomaniacs, devastating projects with the illusions of a durable development, green capitalism, geo-engeenering !
• A day of action and sabotage to regain our freedom and rights to take decisions about our own lives, our environment, our planet,( in a emancipated manner), instead of those in position of global decision-making, who are using the flag of democracy to impose their society of totalitarian power.
• A day of action and sabotage to bring to a halt the destructions and exploitation of entire species, the waste of tons of raw materials and natural resources everyday, justified by the term ’public interest’, while behind it there’s only money, profit and capital.
• A day of action and in solidarity with all those who fight, and for all those that lost their freedom and especially all those that are oppressed or imprisoned as "terrorists" or as simple delinquents.
• A day of action and convergence with all those struggles heading for a different world, where life and common values are worth more than money, competition and dominance.

No border ! No Nation ! No Pasaran ! No more BULLSHIT !

From the ZAD to Val Susa ! From Hambacher Forst to Square Taksim ? From Calais to Lampedusa Hambourg to Exarchia From Heathrow to Atenco From Valogne to Wendland From Niscemi to Mayo Monte Belo to Khimki Fukushima to Tshernobyle From prison to prison

Resistance et Sabotage !

ZAD, France: This is not a camp

Translated by resistrA http://resistra.espivblogs.net/2014/01/zad-france-this-is-not-a-camp/

Jan 27 2014

it’s a pirate look-out

Following various announcements for a possible start of construction of the Notre Dame des Landes airport, a series of articles were released in the press that pretty much regurgitated copy-pasted clichés. One of these articles caught our attention notably. In almost all the articles that would preach the possible eviction and the final catastrophe of ZAD we read “200 people, alter-globalists, continue to camp in ZAD.” The figure might seem rough. The term “alter-globalists” is not a term that the people who chose to fight against the airport and the world of “development” would embrace. But we don’t give a damn about that! For now we will hang on to the bad joke that describes what’s happening here as “camping”.

A good thing to grow on sunny dry warmer climates

The Grand Amaranth Experiment

Of all the grain crops, amaranth has to be the easiest to turn into something that you can eat.  If you have ever wondered how to add a cereal crop to your garden, consider amaranth.  This versatile, beautiful, and easy to grow plant can add another dimension to gardening.  Unlike wheat or oats, where you need to cut the stalks, thresh the grain and then grind it into flour, amaranth literally falls from the seed heads ready to eat.

I started this experiment last year with a small test crop just to get an idea of what to expect.  Andrew Still of the Seed Ambassadors spoke highly of amaranth and gave me a few seeds of Copperhead, an ornamental yet grain producing variety.  There are two or three species of grain amaranth, Amaranthus caudatus, and Amaranthus cruentus (Copperhead is this species) being the most important, each of which encompasses many varieties.  Most of the amaranth varieties have purple or red hues in the plant stalks and leaves as well as brilliantly colored flowers.  Copperhead is an exception with rust and copper tones in the stems and flowers.  The common commercial variety called Plainsman is a hybrid of two other species,  Amaranthus hypochondriacus, from Mexico and Amaranthus hybridus, from Pakistan.

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

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(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?

Building a Home with the Earthbag Technique

Step-by-Step Earthbag Building
by Owen Geiger http://www.instructables.com/id/Step-by-Step-Earthbag-Building/

This Instructable explains each main step of construction for building vertical earthbag walls. Videos on my Earthbag Natural Building YouTube channel demonstrate the process.

For those who don’t know, earthbag building uses polypropylene rice bags or feed bags filled with soil or insulation that are stacked like masonry and tamped flat. Barbed wire between courses keeps bags from slipping and adds tensile strength. The final plastered walls look just like adobe structures. Thousands of people are now building with bags to create their dream homes, home offices, shops, resorts, rootcellars, storm cellars and survival shelters. Non-profit organizations are building schools, orphanages, emergency shelters and other structures.

I got involved with earthbag building when the Indian Ocean tsunami hit Southeast Asia in December, 2004. As the director of Builders Without Borders at that time, I searched all available affordable, sustainable building methods and decided building with bags was the most practical. They’re flood resistant (used for flood control), earthquake resistant (passed an ICBO shake table test), bullet and blast resistant (used for military bunkers), and now engineer and code approved plans are available. Just search for earthbag house plans on the Internet.