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Social Movements

ALBA Movements’ Assembly Kicks Off In Argentina

April 28, 2022 People's Dispatch. , , ,
For the next four days, delegates from people’s movements, trade unions, and left political forces will be gathered in Buenos Aires, Argentina in the third Continental Assembly of ALBA Movements. Members of ALBA Movements announced the launch of the assembly in a press conference organized on Monday April 25 in the headquarters of the Argentine Federation of Press Workers (Fatpren). Manuel Bertoldi, a member of Frente Patria Grande of Argentina and the International Peoples’ Assembly secretary told members of the press: “This third continental assembly is taking place here in Argentina, understanding that we are going through a moment in our continent of a lot of struggles and resistance.

Amid Global Uncertainty, ALBA Movements Forge Unity And Hope

April 23, 2022 Zoe Alexandra, People's Dispatch. , , ,
In Latin America, a series of electoral victories have allowed for the arrival of new governments of a popular, progressive nature or for at least a break with the neoliberal hegemony in those countries which we can say remained steeped in neoliberalism during the 1990s and the first decade of the 21st century. We are talking about Chile and Peru. We also have the recovery of democracy in Bolivia after the coup d’état and we have a series of upcoming elections in Brazil and Colombia, where there are also possibilities of new forces coming to power. To this we must also add the victory in Honduras [of Xiomara Castro], which defeated the coup d’état that had removed Zelaya. At the same time, within the realm of people’s movements, there have been new struggles and we have seen new sectors that have taken to the streets before and during the pandemic, because the States did not respond to the basic demands related to health, food, decent work, etc.

Why We Need To Shift From Crisis Mode To Sustainable Organizing

April 21, 2022 Matthew Arlyck, Resilience. ,
As we in this part of the world are entering the spring season, it seems like a good time to consider the cycles in our ongoing struggle to become Martin Luther King Jr.’s beloved community. Just as King’s political strategy and moral concerns evolved and even shifted radically during his life, most of us involved in justice work have experienced growth in our consciousness. I’m personally starting to understand how movements work, and why they change. I recently had the opportunity to reflect on my time with Occupy Wall Street as the Fellowship of Reconciliation was creating a documentary film on the 10th anniversary of the movement. In September 2011, I was starting an internship with FOR, and through my involvement with a student group from Union Theological Seminary, called the Protest Chaplains, I became one of FOR’s on-the-ground respondents to the Occupy movement.

The Triumph Of A Pedagogy Of The Oppressed In Progress

April 15, 2022 Charo Mina Rojas, Black Agenda Report. , , ,
It is very interesting and important how Francia has learned to be respectful and coherent in echoing the voices of the people, instead of the phony politicking to which we are used to. The enormous growth in her political narrative is not only due to her beautiful and natural intelligence, (not in vain blessed by [the Orisha] Orunmila). It’s also fundamentally due thanks to her life experience as a Being who has suffered all the forms of oppression, against which she rosed up in rebellion, allowing her a capacity for listening and transcending words in action and deeds, resonating in those of us who come from the same place. These are capabilities and attitudes only typical of those who always dare to know that, with nothing more to lose in a white-male supremacist, arrogant, violent predatory world like this one, at the end of the day we have everything to gain by facing risk. Risks that are existential because either we are, or we are not.

How Movements Can Maintain Their Radical Vision While Winning Reforms

April 15, 2022 Mark Engler And Paul Engler , Waging Nonviolence. , , ,
For movements in the U.S. and beyond wondering how they can engage with the system without being co-opted, the MST offers a powerful example. Many social movement scholars believe that movements can institutionalize their wins over the long-term by having the state and mainstream political parties adopt their demands and programs. However, these scholars also contend that such institutionalization comes at a price: too often, as movement programs are incorporated into mainstream structures, grassroots forces become demobilized, dull their radical edge and lose their ability to exercise disruptive power.

In The World, There Are Many Traps, And It Is Necessary To Shatter Them

March 25, 2022 Vijay Prashad, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. , , ,
On 31 March 1964, the Brazilian military initiated a coup d’état against the democratically-elected progressive government of President João Goulart. The next day, Goulart was deposed and, ten days later, the 295 members of the National Congress handed the state over to General Castello Branco and a military junta. The military ruled over Brazil for the next twenty-one years. The Brazilian military is an institution with deep roots in society and constitutes the second largest military force in the Americas, after the United States. The 1964 coup was not the first time that the military left the barracks and seized power over the state. Along with its role in overthrowing the Brazilian Empire (1822–1889), the military entered to remove President Washington Luís in the Revolution of 1930, replacing him with Getúlio Vargas, and then intervening in 1945 to end Vargas’ Estado Novo, also known as the Third Brazilian Republic.

The Unity Of Theory And Practice

March 9, 2022 Yanis Iqbal, Orinoco Tribune. , , ,
In 1969, Fred Hampton – chairman of the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party – said: “we saying that theory’s cool, but theory with no practice ain’t shit.” He elaborated this statement in another speech that he gave in the same year: “I don’t care how much theory you got, if it don’t have any practice applied to it, then that theory happens to be irrelevant. Right? Any theory you get, practice it. And when you practice it you make some mistakes. When you make a mistake, you correct that theory, and then it will be corrected theory that will be able to be applied and used in any situation. That’s what we’ve got to be able to do.” Hampton’s words continue to be relevant. In the current conjuncture, Western Leftists – with a few principled exceptions – have been denigrating and viciously condemning concrete mass struggles and socialistic experiments in the Global South from a perspective of self-congratulatory moral purism.

The Left Has Culture, But The World Still Belongs To The Banks

February 11, 2022 Vijay Prashad, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. , , ,
‘[T]here is great intellectual poverty on the part of the right wing’, Héctor Béjar says in our latest dossier, A Map of Latin America’s Present: An Interview with Héctor Béjar (February 2022). ‘There is a lack of right-wing intellectuals everywhere’. Béjar speaks with a great deal of authority on these matters because, for the past sixty years, he has been intimately involved in the intellectual and political debates which have taken place in his native Peru and across Latin America. ‘In the cultural world’, Béjar notes, ‘the left has everything, the right has nothing’. When it comes to the great cultural debates of our time, which are manifest in the political sphere around social changes (the rights of women and minorities, the responsibility to nature and to human survival, etc.), the needle of history bends almost fully to the left.

Buenaventura, Colombia Strikes Against Racial Capitalism

January 30, 2022 Herrinson Campara Campaz, Anthony Dest, and Esther Ojulari, Black Agenda Report. , , ,
In 2017, Junior Jein, a rapper from Buenaventura [Colombia], released a song that became the anthem of a protest. But he did not appear in the music video. Instead, karaoke-style lyrics play alongside a CGI television set that shows clips of police motorcades patrolling the city, cops raiding neighborhoods, and children choking on tear gas. In the background, a steady fire burns through a chain link fence bordered by the yellow and green flags of Buenaventura. The chorus repeats: “ESMAD, fucking ESMAD. Esa es la respuesta que el gobierno nos da.” ESMAD, that’s the response that the government gives us. Junior Jein’s song, aptly named “Fucking ESMAD,” goes on to describe the conditions of state violence in the city: “If we ask for water, they send us ESMAD.

Movements And Leaders Have Seasons

January 27, 2022 Carlos Saavedra , Waging Nonviolence. , , ,
Over the last two years, social movements, organizations and leaders around the world have been thrust into a period of tumult, transition and uncertainty. These moments of crisis in our personal lives and in society can force sudden changes in our capacity to respond. What happens when we are not able to offer leadership like we used to? Or inversely, what happens when we do have the energy and capacity to respond, but our efforts don’t yield the results that are expected? Responsibility is the essence of leadership, and millions of community leaders who are working hard to resolve difficult, structural problems are uncomfortable when they feel like they need to respond to the moment, but are unable to. This can lead to burnout, or worse: leaders leaving the movement altogether, creating vacuums of leadership that don’t honor the cycles of our own development.

Resistance Against Military Coup In Sudan Continues Despite Crackdown

January 18, 2022 Pavan Kulkarni, People's Dispatch. , , ,
The crackdown on the pro-democracy movement in Sudan continued on Saturday, January 15, as security forces detained more anti-coup protesters. The protesters had been injured during the January 13 demonstrations and were leaving the Royal Care Hospital in Burri in eastern Khartoum when they were arrested. The injured protesters, along with their companions, were reportedly seized outside the hospital by men in civilian clothes and taken away in vehicles with no number plates to unknown locations. Among those arrested is 17-year-old Mohamed Adam, aka Tupac, who was being treated in the hospital for two gunshot injuries. He is reportedly being charged for the alleged murder of a police brigadier general who, according to the police, was stabbed to death by a protester on January 13.

2022’S First Major Nationwide Protests Were To ‘Kill The Bill’

January 17, 2022 Steve Topple, The Canary. , , ,
Home secretary Priti Patel’s authoritarian Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill (the police bill) has caused uproar. Many see it as racist against Black people and the Gypsy, Roma and Traveller (GRT) community. It will also clamp down on our rights to protest, to roam, and to take strike action. Amnesty International said the bill: represents an enormous and unprecedented extension of policing powers 2021 was filled with protests over the bill. Some of these were marred by police violence. Courts have sent some protesters from Bristol to prison – possibly the shape of things to come. Since the Tories first unveiled the police bill, they’ve made several changes to it. It’s now even worse. So, on 15 January, people hit the streets once more to show their anger over the bill.

Should We Disrupt The Democratic Party Or Try To Take It Over?

January 17, 2022 Mark Engler And Paul Engler, Waging Nonviolence. , , ,
When trying to figure out how they should interact with political parties, social movements face a common challenge: Should they push from without or seek to operate from within? Should they act as a destabilizing threat to all politicians, or should they work to build strength within a mainstream party? Frances Fox Piven and Daniel Schlozman are two theorists who stand at opposite poles of this debate. In Piven’s view, movements win by deploying disruptive power from the outside that can polarize the public and create discomfort among politicians. “[M]ovements of mass defiance fired the most important episodes of class and racial reform in the 20th century,” she contends. “This capacity to create political crises through disrupting institutions is … the chief resource for political influence possessed by the poorer classes.”

The Treaty On The Prohibition Of Nuclear Weapons And The Future

January 12, 2022 Lawrence Wittner, Counterpunch. , , ,
Late January of this year will mark the first anniversary of the entry into force of the UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. This momentous international agreement, the result of a lengthy struggle by the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) and by many non-nuclear nations, bans developing, testing, producing, acquiring, possessing, stockpiling, and threatening to use nuclear weapons. Adopted by an overwhelming vote of the official representatives of the world’s nations at a UN conference in July 2017, the treaty was subsequently signed by 86 nations. It received the required 50 national ratifications by late October 2020, and, on January 22, 2021, became international law.

When Revolutionary Moments Arise Again — What Will We Do?

January 11, 2022 Anton Woronczuk, Truthout. , , ,
The world is in a prolonged period of global unrest. Since the financial crisis of 2008, every region of the planet has experienced levels of mass protest unprecedented in recent history, from the Arab Spring in the Middle East and Black Lives Matter in the U.S., to the farmers’ protests in India and the recent upheaval in Kazakhstan. Yet decades of social movement struggle haven’t produced a break from capitalist domination, and in most places they have failed to even accomplish the more modest aims of reform. Meanwhile, the global climate crisis has added another layer of urgency to the task of social transformation. What can past struggles teach us about the possibility of achieving a liberated world?
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