social movements

oday, many of these groups are blacklisted, as a direct result of the so-called War on Terror. This has resulted in the freezing of bank accounts, the enforcement of travel bans, and the cancellation of passports.Cynically enough, this means that through the act of blacklisting, those who are already without a state are turned stateless once more, facing a double negation. Blacklisting these organizations — literally placing them “outside” of democracy — has much to do with the threat they pose to the status quo of the global capitalist doctrine.

A collectively written text, the “Social Contract,” clarified the points of departure: Rojava was to become a non-state entity, where self-governance, gender equality, ethnic and religious diversity, the right to self-defense and communal economy would form the foundational pillars. Ever since — while in the middle of a war against the Islamic State and other jihadist groups such as the Al-Nusra Front, and surrounded by the forces of the Assad regime, Russian troops and the international “coalition forces” — Rojava revolutionaries have begun to put their new ideals of self-governance into practice.

The lines drawn throughout North Africa and the Middle-East were drawn by bureaucrats and colonists. As artist Golrokh Nafisi has said, it is time to draw new lines. Not according to the occupiers, but according to the resistance. Not lines that isolate one nation from another, but lines of new shapes and forms that allow us to enact this world anew. To create a new world we need the imaginary of what that world could or should look like. As such, every political imaginary needs an artistic imaginary as well.

Some universities present themselves as caring, as providing mental health services and a personalized environment that will help students meet their individual needs and goals. For the most part, this is advertising -- as everybody knows. The reality is  stress, debt, the reproduction of privilege, and, for some, a few years of extreme partying.

What's innovative in the last round of protests is the weaponization of safety and vulnerability. Think cultural revolution rather than therapy, hundreds and thousands of students on campus after campus rejecting the status quo and demanding change. The attack on privilege is an attack on hierarchies of race and class, waged in the language available to those told they live in a post-racial society offering no alternative to capitalism.

The risk of invoking vulnerability and appealing to safety comes in the reinforcing of an authority who would promise security, who would recognize the vulnerable as vulnerable and guarantee that he would protect them from harm.

the Blaise Compaoré regime left behind a country that was characterised by mobilisations that claimed the streets, going beyond the organised structures and that was not the sphere of the urban and/or “intellectuals”.

What really led Compaoré’s fall was a primarily young population (60 of Burkinabe are under 25) that was fed up, and the degree of awareness this population has regarding the real reasons for the burdensome reality faced by the vast majority. It is significant that primarily because they experienced its trials in a very concrete manner (land grabs, dispossession, repression, etc.), it wasn’t merely among the intellectual and urban classes that individuals would point fingers at the regime and rebel against it.

These protest dynamics are also due to the groundwork some trade unions and public organisations carried out (Collectif contre l’impunité [Collective against impunity], Organisation démocratique de la jeunesse [Democratic youth organization], Mouvement burkinabé des droits de l’Homme [Burkinabe Human Rights Movement], Coalition contre la vie chère [Coalition against high cost of living, etc.], that for years broadened and politicised the realm of protest activities in the country.

Human rights groups around the world must innovate or risk being rendered irrelevant by the new surge of street activism.

The African region is no exception, despite its diversity. Consider Senegal, where in 2011 the Y’en a Marre (“Enough-is-Enough”) youth movement and Mouvement 23 (“June 23 Movement”) seized the limelight during a turbulent political moment, and played a critical role in preventing former President Abdoulaye Wade’s attempt to amend the constitutional provision on term limits and hang on to power. In the process, long-established and extremely important Senegalese human rights organizations, such as Rencontre Africaine pour la Défense des Droits de l'Homme  (RADDHO), appeared virtually irrelevant. They were not always present on the streets, and were not consistently able to use the moment to give their causes new visibility.

How can professional human rights organizations become more nimble, while also maximizing impact and sustaining their work over the long term? Doing all these things is crucial to remaining relevant in an age of increased grass roots activism.

The Left has always been prone to self-flagellation: what’s wrong with us? Why can’t we get our act together? Why can’t we convince the masses to join us? Such self-criticisms are understandable and, to some extent, justified. The history of the Left and the labour movement in the United States is nauseatingly full of the leadership's cowardice, opportunism, bureaucratism, and cooptation by the corporatist state. There is much to criticize.

Given this ‘logic’ of history, what have we to look forward to and what lessons can we learn from the past? One lesson, I think, pertains to how activists should conceptualize their activism. There is a tendency, common among every group from centrist liberals through to Leninists and anarchists, to interpret activism in very un-Marxian and unsophisticated ‘voluntaristic’ terms.

For example, it is hopelessly benighted to think that an international revival of the centralized welfare state (even in an 'updated' form) and of twentieth-century social democracy is possible. Those social formations were appropriate to a time of industrial unionism and limited international mobility of capital, very different from the present. They have been dying for 40 years (starting in the US and UK), and no such magical incantation as “We propose a new anti-austerity coalition” can call them back to life. Coalitions of that sort are desperately needed, and their targets should be at every level of government, but their outcome will not be a new and improved manifestation of twentieth-century social democracy.

Because production of energy now occurred a long way from where it was consumed, it was more difficult for workers to coordinate actions along the energy chain. Oil also occurs in a fluid form so it’s much easier for managers to supervise or replace workers (as in the recent U.S. refinery strikes), and easier to shift supply routes so that if one area is on strike you can use a different source of supply.

Something really extraordinary happened in the mid-twentieth century, as we shifted to an oil-based energy system. Economists began focusing not on well-being but on national income, calculated in the narrow terms of GDP. And the growth of GDP was imagined as something that could go on forever. This coincided with a period when fossil fuels, and oil in particular, became extraordinarily abundant. There was a sense that you no longer had to account for the cost of energy, a cost that had previously made limitless growth unthinkable. So oil enabled not only a new form of accounting, but really a new form of failing to account for what you are doing.

With the rise of oil, it was much harder for workers to interrupt the flow of energy. But that’s not the end of the story of sabotage. The power of sabotage switched hands to the oil companies. See, originally most business firms only had to concern themselves with rivals in the same region, because it was too expensive to transport goods between particular areas of dominance. But oil was so light and easy to transport that competition was a global threat. Oil companies realized that their profits would only continue if they were able to organize sabotage power on a global level, to restrict supply and eliminate rivals. By the 1920’s, a handful of companies like Exxon Mobil (as they are known today) and Shell had taken control of every major site of oil production in the world, outside the U.S. and the Soviet Union, and they maintained that dominance for about half a century. They used this control to strategically limit the production of oil for the purpose of keeping profits high.

While both campaigns have clear symbolic meaning, they include larger issues like an infusion of Black theorists in the curriculum, hiring more Black professors, on-campus workers rights and more.

Culture is a product of history. Historically, under capitalism, white workers were exploited to produce commodities, but Black workers WERE commodities. So, although the oppression of Blacks is primarily economic, slavery and colonialism produced an ideological superstructure to legitimate and reinforce white supremacy in general and anti-Black racism in particular. Since all human beings have a history and culture, one of the primary means used to exclude Blacks from the Human family is to write Black people out of history.

While the colonizer uses history to deny our humanity, for us, Our Art and History is a weapon we use to cut the throat of our oppressor. The learning of history helps us to de-colonize our minds but to be clear, there is no pre-existing ‘African nation’ prior to slavery that we are attempting to reclaim. Our intent is to supplant white imposed definitions of reality with Black definitions of the world; therefore, we assert that Black or Pan African identity is principally a product of the Black Liberation Movement. Our common oppression is not what makes us African; it is our movement for freedom that give us consciousness of our identity. Therefore, we are not just acted upon but are agents of history.

Kabat-Zinn’s work appears to vindicate Marxist philosopher Slavoj Žižek’s critique of Western Buddhism as a supplement to neoliberal capitalism: “It enables you to fully participate in the frantic pace of the capitalist game while sustaining the perception that you are not really in it.”

But Davis has seen the benefits of mind/body practices and is not so swift to dismiss them. How can mindfulness genuinely support social justice? This was the basic question she kept returning to in Oakland.“In a racially unjust world,” Davis earnestly asked Kabat-Zinn, “what good is mindfulness?”

While the brief discussion between Davis and Kabat-Zinn remained abstract, actually existing experiments at the intersection of mindfulness and social change are blossoming. Several organizations are now focusing their efforts on the fold between subjective and social change: the Center for Transformative Change, Generative Somatics and the Movement Strategy Center are three leaders.

There is an uncanny choreographic affinity between recent urban revolts in the Middle East and eruptions of discontent and urban protest in Athens, Madrid, Lyon, Lisbon, Rome, London, Berlin, or Paris, among many other cities. However, although the Middle Eastern uprisings are celebrated by Western media pundits and politicians, their European counterparts are often disavowed as illegitimate outbursts of irrational anger and anarchic violence.

Politics inaugurate the re-partitioning of the Police logic, the re-ordering of what is visible and audible, registering as voice what was only registered as noise, and re-framing what is regarded as political. It occurs in places not allocated to the exercise of power or the instituted negotiation of recognized differences and interests. As Badiou insists, politics emerge as an event: the singular act of choreographing egalitarian appearance of being-in-common at a distance from the State. Whereas any logic of the Police is a logic of hierarchy, of inequality, politics is marked by the presumption of equality within an aristocratic order that invariable ‘wronged’ this presumption.

It is within this aporia between la politique (the Police) and le politique (the political) that urban insurrections can be framed.

Despite what melancholic lyrics may suggest, they exist – the men and women who want to change things. In the months leading up to the 2006 elections in Uganda, there were demonstrations outside the Central Police Station and the High Court where an opposition presidential candidate, Dr Kiiza Besigye, was first detained and then brought to trial.

The vendors only came back at lunchtime. As I learnt over the coming days, their commitment was striking: day after day the market vendors attended court in solidarity with Dr Besigye. By contrast, office-workers stayed at their desks. You do not win government contracts by demonstrating in the streets.

It is heartbreaking to watch the video footage [iv] of Sankara appealing to his fellow presidents to repudiate unfair debt agreements with IMF and other foreign creditors at the Organization of African Unity Summit in 1987. He accused them of degrading their people. He says, only half-jokingly, that if they do not support him he is going to be assassinated: “I may not make it to the next meeting.”

Powered by the growing indignation against austerity and impoverishment, as well as by the hostility against the growing number of ‘strangers’, the Nazi party was able to turn its pariah status into an emblem of political purity and a desire for radical transformation of Greek politics.

Golden Dawn’s covert agenda has always been domination over the streets by holding pogroms. In this context, the Nazi group spread its local offices in many low-income and heavily populated neighborhoods. It was free to launch organized and planned attacks against immigrants, homosexuals and ideological opponents, as though unilaterally ‘legitimized’ to do so, to ‘keep our race pure‘.

The first 15 years of the twenty-first century have generally been quite positive for Latin American economies. This has been due, to a great extent, to the rising price of most exports, which in turn has produced an improvement in tax revenues that different countries have used to reduce disturbing poverty levels. Oil has regularly exceeded $120, but high prices for natural gas, copper and soybeans have also helped the economies of these countries to grow vigorously and to improve the living conditions of their people.

It seems, however, that the continent is capable of exporting more than just commodities. Together with the economic good times linked largely to rising exports, we are currently witnessing an unusual phenomenon from a historical perspective: Latin America is beginning to export political practices and ways of doing things.

This is the fertile ground from which Podemos springs. But we must add to this the political tools that Podemos is using to take advantage of the situation. This is where the adaptation of Latin American leftwing neo-populism comes in.

The widespread indifference toward the August 14 massacre that accompanied a rising fascistic spirit just confirmed that fall from grace.

Though I do not affirm the Brotherhood's cause to return to power, I believe in their right to dissent. All those that risk their bodies, like Bassem, risk the bullet. I will by no means try to justify the shocking actions of Egyptians that started the morning of June 30, the rise of the fascistic, the acceptance of the torment of others. The most powerful tool to these ends is the discourse of terrorism that has fed into the deep fear in the hearts of so many living inside a regime of terror.