social movements

Leading up to the World Cup there were more evictions and pending court cases in different parts of the country. Poor street traders had their belongings confiscated as they had no permits to sell in restricted zones and the taxi industry suffered the impoundment of their taxis.

We also know that the South African government still wants to look good in the eyes of the international communities and that they fear disgrace and shame. They want to show the world Soccer City but hide eTwatwa, Blikkiesdorp, Westville Prison, the red ants and the shack fires all around the country. We wish to thank all the international activists and organisations who have raised their concern against the repression that we have faced, including those that have organised protests against the South African diplomats in their respective countries.

 From wage and benefit concessions to reductions in social services, in an openly anti-union political climate, it is now being demanded that the working class pay for a crisis which it did not create.  

A June 2010 article by Robert McChesney and John Bellamy Foster discusses the weak state of progressive forces in the United States and their inability to translate significant support for their political positions into commensurate political influence.

Our approach was motivated by the inability of the labour and social justice movements, as well as opposition political parties, to develop an effective response to ongoing attacks against working-class living standards.  It was evident that a fresh organizational approach based on new strategies, new alignments, and new objectives was needed -- an approach that came to be dubbed Workers Assemblies.

The reduction of western aid, induced by the ‘global’ financial crisis, will challenge the perceived dependency between the global North and South. And, with the rise of the economic and political clout of so-called ‘emerging’ powers in the South, the globe is expected to see significant, if not permanent, shifts in societal order.

Widespread understanding of the inter-connection of struggle, the centrality of power in oppression, the necessity to fight all forms of oppression, the ownership of one’s own contradictions and a desire to transform these, indeed, simply the imagination to develop a vision of full liberation is wanton throughout our movements.

Nevertheless the recent rise in acts of civil resistance across Africa is indicative of an ongoing powerful force and movement building process.

Until now, the plunder of natural resources of Africa continues. But I think there will be growing resistance, not only of the people, but also of the ruling classes and therefore the state-power systems. Because there is possibly an alternative to that plunder, which is the rapprochement – let's call it a Bandung 2 – that is, the rebuilding of a solidarity of African and Asian nations and peoples against the plunder of imperialism. And now the possibility of the African nations getting back the control of those resources and supported by emerging countries like China, like India, like Brazil, who do need some of those resources for their own development, but who are in a position to negotiate with and give opportunity to African states to negotiate the conditions of access which are not negotiated usually with imperialists who ask for a complete capitulation.

It is the responsibility first of activists in the grassroots movements to see that however legitimate their action, it's efficiency is limited by the fact that it doesn't move beyond a fragmented struggle here or there. But it is also the responsibility of the intellectuals. I don't mean by that the academics, but those thinkers and the political people operating in politics to consider that they will have no possibility of changing the balance of powers without integrating in their movement, but not absorbing them to dominate them, but integrating the social movements on the grassroots into their political strategy of change.

One of the stories least reported has been the one about Haitians organising for themselves, particularly stories presented within a framework of feminist organising and movement building.

Once it was established Rea’s family were all safe – a house just five minutes walk from Rea’s own home collapsed – she set about caring for the many in her community and where ever she was needed.   Everyone was in shock but there was no time to think about what had happened as people were injured.   Many people – students, families knowing about her community work, flocked to Rea’s home and at one point there were some 60 people in her home. 

I was surprised when I heard Rea had started a Micro-Credit scheme as there were so many negative reports on schemes which rather than enhance and empower women, ended up impoverishing them even more.   So I was interested to find out more about the SOPUDEP scheme, whether it was working and why it worked and I will write about this later after meeting with the various women’s group.

The saboteurs had no interest, for instance, in providing evidence in support of local government against claims that it was doing far too little to address the desperate water situation. They could have done this in question time, but decided instead to sabotage the event from the moment it started, strongly suggesting that they were merely interested in blindly defending the perceived interests of the ANC, even if morally dubious. ‘This is the ANC government’, one of the saboteurs claimed, ‘so the ANC will have the last say’. In other words, ‘We are in power and we do what we like’. A corollary to this claim is, ‘Don’t you mess with us’.

given the environment of intimidation and, except for and handful of exceptions, the lack of interest by the media in systematically reporting violations against the poor, these incidents tend not to be widely discussed in public space. And, yet, the health of our young democracy depends on there being clarity regarding what sorts of undemocratic political pressures are being exerted on a large percentage of the generally voiceless electorate.

What I have said above could be thought of as evidence that the ANC leadership is coordinating things from the top, but I don’t know that it is. And there probably would be little reason for them to do this given that there are structural conditions in place that will encourage grassroots oppression to mushroom spontaneously across the country, without the need for centralised coordination. But the fact that the relevant structures are not decisively being undermined from the top should be seen as a grave failing on the part of the ruling party, and should shed doubt on their commitment to the ideals they claim dearly to uphold.

I think he would take it for granted that elites are basically Marxist -- they believe in class analysis, they believe in class struggle, and in a really business-run society like the United States, the business elites are deeply committed to class struggle and are engaged in it all the time.  And they understand.  They're instinctive Marxists; they don't have to read it.

In fact, Malaysia also came out of the Asian crisis.  It was imposing capital controls.  Now the economists were all saying it's a disaster.  But they did quite well.  Same with Argentina, the former poster child for the IMF, leading to a serious crisis.  It then disregarded all the warnings and doctrines and the economy did very well, contrary to predictions.

using the multidimensional poverty index, there were 645 million poor, or 55 percent of India's population -- more than in the poorest 26 African countries combined. 

Similar popular protests have failed in sub-Saharan Africa (and may very well be failing in Egypt) precisely because the army invariably concludes that its corporate interests and privileges are best protected by the status quo rather than a new political order.

During the 1991 ghost town campaign, military concluded after its cost-benefit analysis that its privileges were better protected under the Biya regime than in a nouveau regime that might strip it of these privileges.

while a viable civil society is critical and even indispensable in harnessing, organizing and channeling popular discontent towards regime change, the success of this venture is largely dependent on what the army decides to do or not do based on its corporate interests.

Colombia is one of the world's biggest per capita polluters with mercury, in the artisanal mining sector, with an average of between 50 and 100 tons a year lost during the gold extraction process, according to a report by UNIDO, which points out that artisanal mining has expanded fast as gold prices have risen.

The broad social movement in Santander has added its voice to the long-time struggle by environmentalists in Cajamarca, in the central province of Tolima, against the South African company AngloGold Ashanti.

Protests have also been held to the south of Bogotá against polluting activities in quarries run by the army on the grounds of the Artillery School, and by the Catholic diocese of Bogotá's Fundación San Antonio, Mexico's Cemex company and the Swiss firm Holcim.

The more of us that stand together the more our humanity is fulfilled. The power of the poor becomes evident when the poor are able to organise ourselves for ourselves. When we begin to achieve this it is always a moment of great promise and great danger. Frederick Douglass, the great hero of one of the greatest American struggles, the struggle against slavery, said: ‘Power concedes nothing without a demand.’ This is why a collective demand, a demand backed by organisation, determination and courage is a moment of great promise.

The state has many strategies to silence the poor. Leaders are offered money and jobs. There is quiet diplomacy through which the movement is given some acknowledgment. There are meetings that lead into all kinds of technical debates and away from the simple politic of our demand for land and housing. There is intimidation. But when all these efforts by the state to silence the poor fail they send in the police. The police do not come, as we have asked, to protect the poor but to beat us, arrest us and even shoot us. We have braved all that and survived brutal attacks. Our popular activism in action has made our movement grow rapidly despite repression

But as we kept building a strong movement the state was busy preparing itself to destroy our movement. On the 26 and 27 September 2009 a group of about 40 armed men violently attacked our head quarters in the Kennedy Road settlement. The police failed to protect us.

Progressives all over the country sat back for 18 months without pushing him to guard those terms of debate, namely those of equality, fairness, decency, and a society that must depend on the state to protect the poor and the vulnerable.

During his presidency, FDR confided to unions and progressive activists that they had to “force” him to do things that would be politically unacceptable.

History reminds us that any social movement that changes the terms of debate will eventually change the national conversation.

“The events in Ecuador at the end of September, the latest elections in Venezuela, the huge popular expectations that have been shelved in Brazil over the past eight years, the coup in Honduras last year, the election of the right-wing candidate Sebastián Piñera to the Chilean presidency, are signals that cannot fail to raise concern,’  Toussaint concludes.

The internalisation of whiteness by the Irish workers broke the solidarity in the ranks of the working people. Consequently, sections of the Irish workers became part of the most rabid racists in some parts of the USA. But the realities of the moment have shown that capitalists’ oppression against the working class people knows no borders. There are already projections that the financial crisis will induce a new mass emigration from Ireland. Progressives in Ireland must intensify the ideological and political work inside Ireland to educate these potential émigrés against joining the wave of counter-revolution and racism that is now sweeping North America. It is in this context that we call for an international resistance that transcends national borders and racial categorisation. It is such resistance that is needed to save our common humanity from dehumanisation and plunder by the capitalist class, whose drive for exponential profits is pathological.

These austerity measures and the consequent resistance bring home to the Western workers what the African peoples have been enduring for more than 30 years of neoliberal plunder. It was the African workers that have been at the forefront of the delegitimisation of the IMF structural adjustment programmes. In Africa, the intellectuals have exposed the capitalist interests that dismantle popular social programmes of access to health and education and strip wealth from workers, placing profits before and above human beings.

In Ireland itself, international capitalists such as Peter Sutherland established intellectual institutes within Trinity College Dublin to divert attention from the kind of research that could expose the speculative bubbles that were being heralded as the success story of Ireland. Mainstream economists accepted the propaganda about unbridled capitalist globalisation while proclaiming Ireland as the ‘Celtic Tiger’. Ireland was presented in textbooks all over the world as the example of the benefits of foreign direct investments and capitalist globalisation.