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Arabica Robusta

Whatever is happening to the Egyptians? | openDemocracy - 0 views

  • In all cases, empirical evidence shows that the 1952 military-coup was not only rebellion against Egypt’s political regime, but also against the values and norms of its political subjects.
  • If the repugnance or fear of the AUC community about [real] slums can be explained in terms of class tensions or a growing abyss between the classes, the question which prevails is: why would AUC students be entertained by observing a virtual slum? What is the fascination? And what is perceived as particularly “exceptional” about people who, a few years back, were not even perceived as “other”? How, and why, did no one raise this question as the event was being planned and organised? Did no one question the purpose or logic behind the construction of a virtual human zoo of people who are neither less human nor less Egyptian than those coming to observe them? I searched the images and messages displayed and communicated on the day of the event for some answers.
  • Yet, it should definitely be taken into consideration that the struggle between the Nasserist social agenda and Sadat’s Infitah came to the surface in the July coup of 2013. A critical mass of the elites have now decisively aligned themselves with Sadat’s socio-economic policies (reflected in the recent economic forum, the reconciliation with corrupt businessmen, and the embrace of regressive taxation); bringing to the surface the symptoms of Sadat’s socio-economic revolution more vividly and bluntly
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  • The event signals the way in which the socio-economic gap is taking an ideological and cultural form, with implications not only limited to some AUC members, but widely accepted by other elites (in the media, the arts,academe, etc).
  • On Thursday April 23, the American University in Cairo's (AUC) Theatre and Film Club invited the AUC community to an event, where they could watch a simulation of an Egyptian slum, talk to "people of this ghetto", eat "their" food, and shop in places similar to where "they" shop.
  • Entering into this constructed slum, all you can hear are noises in variant forms: the market, the wedding, the beggars, the harassers, and loud popular music. To make it noisier, every few minutes, quarrels would break out here and there. The environment was designed to make one not only feel very irritable, but also unsafe. For how could a person feel safe among those wild barbaric creatures? Anyone who has ever entered a real Egyptian slum would quickly notice how different it is from the AUC-exaggerated version. The markets may be as noisy as portrayed, but only during peak hours (no more than 4-6 a day). Other sources of noise do not reflect reality. For instance, why would a beggar beg in a slum?
  • These were mere reflections of a mental picture of slum-seekers, constructed through their 'othering' by movies, advertisements for gated communities, and other forms of mass media messages familiar in the communications of the upper-middle classes.
Arabica Robusta

Sick and tired: Sri Lankan domestic workers fight back against violence | openDemocracy - 0 views

  • As The International Labour Organisation has recognised ‘domestic workers, whether working in their home countries or abroad, are vulnerable to many forms of abuse, harassment and violence, in part because of the intimacy and isolation of the workplace’. 
  • What is likely to make a difference this time is that the allegations of violence against Abrew have been taken up by the Domestic Workers Union (DWU). The union has been able to mobilise support from fourteen other civil society organisations and trade unions, including the International Domestic Workers Federation and the Women’s Political Academy. 
  • The feminization of housework means that domestic work is considered low skilled, not ‘real work’. It is subject to the idiosyncratic standards and whims of each household, where varying degrees of docility and acquiesce are encouraged. I have seen domestic workers in Sri Lankan homes managed through the smallest of gestures – the nod of a head, a glance, the movement of fingertips. 
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  • Using figures from the International Labour Organisation, Verité Research has highlighted a worldwide increase in demand for domestic workers. Verité  estimates that one in every thirteen women in the labour force will be a domestic worker. To use statistically crude imagery, on a packed London double decker bus, which at full capacity takes 84 people, you would be rubbing shoulders with at least six women domestic workers.
  • The power to capture and consume the time of others is what maintains and fixes modern class differences and the accumulation of status, the sociologist Bev Skeggs has argued recently.
  • Wetherell observe, “wherever the multiple between the wages of the rich and the poor grows, so does the number of servants.”
  • In her rousing Birkbeck Annual Law Lecture in 2013, the scholar Angela Davis suggested that in the twentieth century, the situation of black women domestic workers in North America approximated that found in slavery.
Arabica Robusta

Social movements and the fall of Compaoré - International Viewpoint - online ... - 0 views

  • 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.
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  • It cannot be denied thatsucceeded in bringing together people that did not see themselves represented by established political organisations, which effectively was one part of the ‘critical mass’ mobilised against Compaoré. Furthermore, it also mobilised people around social issues (power cuts, state of hospitals, etc.). In that sense, it is an important movement. However, Balai citoyen had a tendency to consider fighting for Blaise Compaoré’s departure to be sufficient in itself; it considered organisations insisting on the exigency and necessity to create an alternative political and social project as not being separate steps but inseparable, and to be in fact adding fuel to Compaoré’s cause.
  • The fact that during the popular uprising no politician was called upon by the protesters is still a good indication of the credibility of the formal political opposition. In an opposition consisting of dozens of parties there is none that offers an alternative.
  • With regards to the Sankarist parties, understandably fighting for justice to be served for the assassination of Tomas Sankara, they cannot be considered to be carrying an alternative political project (economic, social, etc.). Judging by the mass of people identifying with Sankara and gauging from these parties’ low popularity, one has to recognise that they are not considered as his true heirs in terms of a political alternative, including the rejection of all external domination.
Arabica Robusta

Full text of "Letters from Baron Friedrich von Hügel to a niece [microform]" - 0 views

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    As Austrian theologian Friedrich von Hügel said, "The Golden Rule is to help those you love to escape from you."
Arabica Robusta

Africa's social movements present opportunities, not threats, for rights groups | openD... - 0 views

  • 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.
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  • Professional African rights organizations by contrast tend to focus on reforming the state, or on interacting with international organizations.
  • African organizations are also dependent on Northern donors, forcing their activities and thinking into short-term, project-based frameworks. As a result, they can’t see what’s going on in the periphery of their areas of expertise, even if those new developments are game changers. Moreover, ordinary people are often moved to action by events that are not on the human rights organizations’ radar. Thus, the mass movement that also mobilized so rapidly and powerfully against long-time Burkina Faso president Blaise Compaoré took most local human rights organizations completely by surprise.
  • Fast-moving, street-smart “fluidity” is thus crucial. At the same time, Senegal and other African countries also need the “solidity” of the traditional rights groups, including their permanent organizational structures, and their expert, paid staff. These traditional elements can form a bridge between moments of social protest, while also providing access to stable financing. This, in turn, will help sustain human rights campaigns over time.
  • Today, most African rights groups depend on foreign donors, but this does not have to remain forever true. As Austrian theologian Friedrich von Hügel said, “The Golden Rule is to help those you love to escape from you.” If foreign donors really do want to help African rights organizations, they must assist in creating a domestic philanthropic infrastructure.
  • During and after Africa’s liberation struggles in the 1960s, many groups became political parties, and lost touch with their organic roots. Let’s not allow the same thing to happen to African human rights groups.
Arabica Robusta

Always historicize! | openDemocracy - 0 views

  • 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.
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  • Radicals can mitigate destructive trends and hasten constructive ones, but that's the extent of the systemic ‘agency’ they can exhibit. Accordingly, they can have a lucid and correct interpretation of their activism only by understanding the historical context of their society, and the significance of its dominant tendencies.
  • We are in the early stages of the very protracted collapse of corporate capitalism and the nation-state system itself. We know that ‘climate change’ is going to constitute a global cataclysm; we know that, under the impact of neoliberal policies, the world's social fabric is being torn apart; and even the business press recognizes that economic trends of underconsumption and overproduction portend catastrophe.
  • Amidst the horrific tragedies, one may take comfort in the knowledge that at least it is not permanent. In fact, myopic anti-social politics is undermining the ruling class and its economy, by destroying the conditions for its long-term survival. It may destroy most life on earth in the process, or it may not; but the Left should recognize, in any case, that the coming crises in every country of the world will not mean the extinguishing of hope.
Arabica Robusta

The History Of Oil, Protest And The Economy | PopularResistance.Org - 0 views

  • 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.
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  • This sabotage takes economic forms as well. Another way of stating my argument about oil companies is to say that these were not companies set up to produce oil, they were companies set up to produce a return on investment. We should think of Exxon, BP, Shell etc. as financial machines, not energy companies. While it may seem like economic life today is dominated by the power of financial firms, the truth is that the history of energy has always been a history of finance.
  • Once you realize an oil company functions not to deliver oil but to structure the future as a system of financial flows, then the points of sabotage shift a little bit. This is why I think projects like Carbon Tracker’s “Unburnable Carbon” are really important. Carbon Tracker shows that the share price of fossil fuel companies is a bubble, since it is based on a projected use of energy that is incompatible with keeping the planet livable. This campaign works precisely at the point at which the corporation understood as a set of financial flows is vulnerable—the calculability of future revenue.
Arabica Robusta

Pambazuka - The Pan-African cultural revolution - 0 views

  • 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.
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  • Our Cultural Revolution is inspired by the Black Arts Movement in the US, the Black Consciousness Movement in South Africa, and the Cultural Revolution in China. The fundamental objective of Political Revolution is to democratize the means of production i.e. the establishment of a Socialist system. Although we keep ‘Politics in Command,’ without the Cultural Revolution the Political Revolution is impossible.
Arabica Robusta

Zen and the art of social movement maintenance | openDemocracy - 0 views

  • 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.
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  • Practices like yoga and meditation were woven throughout Occupy, and were integral to its endurance and impact; they were not a sideshow.
  • Meditation and yoga, however, do not automatically nurture an anti-racist and egalitarian ethos. If they did, Western practice communities would be sanctuaries from what bell hooks calls “imperialist white supremacist capitalist heteropatriarchy.” As hooks has noted, based on her experience as a Buddhist and a woman of color, exclusions along multiple axes of oppression — such as race and class — continue to shape the dissemination of meditation and yoga in the West.
  • During conversations with Occupy activists, I learned that, while short meditations like moments of silence were used by assembly facilitators in the early days of the camp, the practice became more common as the occupation continued, and challenges intensified.
  • “As decision-making processes began breaking down,” facilitator Marisa Holmes explained to me, “with more disruption coming from within the camp, from the state, from all angles, we used these practices more and more.”
  • While grounding exercises helped ease aggression and facilitate communication among Occupiers, they could not stop the violent eviction executed by the New York Police Department in November 2011. They were also unable to transform debilitating internal conflicts that weakened the occupation. At the root of these conflicts, many activists believed, was the fundamental disagreement over whether and how Occupiers should engage with structures of power, including more established institutions on the left, like unions.
  • “I think a lot of mistakes resulted from the inability to engage with power, interact with it and build strategies around how to shift it,” said journalist Nathan Schneider, who is an editor-at-large for Waging Nonviolence and the author of “Thank You, Anarchy: Notes from the Occupy Apocalypse.”
  • Many of the participants in Occupy Manifest became leaders in the Occupy Sandy relief effort after the superstorm hit New York on Oct. 29, 2012. Occupy Sandy was tremendously successful in its response, using social media to quickly raise over $1 million and mobilize 60,000 volunteers — four times the number of volunteers engaged by the Red Cross. A key element of Occupy Sandy’s success was participants’ willingness to work across political differences, coordinating activities with churches, FEMA and other relief organizations that didn’t necessarily share Occupy’s values and horizontalist style of organizing.
  • During their dialogue, Jon Kabat-Zinn noted his original skepticism towards Davis’s radical stance on prison abolition. “But then you gave me your book, ‘Are Prisons Obsolete,’ and I’ve changed my mind. I think it’s a fantastic idea.”Mindfulness alone will not spark a political revolution, but when joined by actual revolutionaries, it might expand all of our possibilities for freedom.
Arabica Robusta

March | 2011 | cities@manchester - 0 views

  • 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.
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  • This constitutive gap between Police and Politics needs to be affirmed. Politics cannot be reduced to managing and ordering space, to consensual pluralist and institutionalized policy-making. This is the terrain of the Police; the ontic dimension of everyday socio-spatial management.
Arabica Robusta

Pambazuka - Where are the people who are going to change things? - 0 views

  • 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.”
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  • Mariam Sankara describes him in terms reminiscent of Biko’s conscious black man, “Thomas knew how to show his people that they could become dignified and proud through will power, courage, honesty and work. What remains above all of my husband is his integrity.”
  • He too repudiated debt as a solution to all that ails Africa. But after an attempt to barter trade with neighbouring countries he gave in to the beckoning finger of the North.
  • In either case, his official statement was clear, “When it comes to medical care for myself and my family there is no compromise [vi].” The families of the 16 women a day who die in childbirth for lack of essential drugs, properly motivated (or simply paid) staff and lack of equipment held their peace.
  • Agricultural reform in Uganda was meant to be brought about by the National Agricultural Advisory Service (NAADS). It was funded to the tune of $100m over 8 years, with $50m repayable to the World Bank. The project review after eight years reported “no significant differences were found in yield growth between NAADS and non-NAADS sub counties for most crops….[vii].”
  • Genuine agents of change die young. Either they do not make it to State House or they die while there (with the possible exception of Jerry Rawlings in Ghana). Such is the dynamic. The rest capitulate early while continuing to assume the demeanour of revolutionaries. They can do so because Western powers are willing to turn a blind eye to their increasing profligacy in return for their signatures on a succession of documents keeping their countries in debt bondage. They rule for decades, well into old age at which point they usurp the role of Elder Statesmen and receive credits due to others [viii].
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