Category: Articles

A recession or even a depression does not mean the end of the economy as such, anymore than the death of a president means the end of presidency. The boom/bust cycle is integral to capitalism and that cycle will continue regardless of whether or not there are people calling for an end to capitalism. The only question for anarchists is how to best take advantage of this inevitability.

The US economy is slowing down considerably right now and everyone’s talking about it. Whether or not it will officially go into “recession” is a subject of debate, but it certainly seems more likely today than it did a year ago.

We must look for the ways to make the most of the opportunities created by the periodic cycles of capitalism. Concretely, this means that an economic downturn should be scoured for opportunities to create anarchy, build networks of solidarity, and put forth an analysis of the forces that are mutilating peoples’ lives. To put it succinctly: direct action, mutual aid, and communication.

Economic downturns create new material realities as capitalism becomes temporarily incapable of providing for segments of the population that were previously integrated into the system. Finding ways to meet material needs for ourselves and those around us with an eye towards expanding relationships of mutual aid beyond the confines of temporary economic hardship can become a large-scale challenge for anarchists during a recession. I emphasize the word “ourselves” because an economic downturn would not just affect other people in other places but would also create real hardships for many radicals, even those at the extreme margins of the capitalist economy. This challenge can be in a myriad of ways, depending on how far the economy falls.

Take, for example, organized theft, as happens in a bread riot. Theft can serve as a means of meeting material needs, it can target specific corporations for damage, and it can illustrate the absurdity of abundance in the face of unmet needs. That’s just one example; direct action does not have to meet an immediate material need to be effective, nor do tactics for economic survivalism need to take the form of illegal direct action. The point is to respond to changing circumstances by applying our creativity and analysis to a situation created largely outside of our control.

Are the opportunities for action presented by economic downturn themselves different than at other times, or just their effects? I’d say both. There is a point when differences in degree become differences in kind. Certainly organized theft is appropriate in both boom times and bust, but the meaning of the action changes with the context thus changing the action itself. Every action has multiple aspects, which can be reduced to intent, perception, and effect. The effect of organized theft may remain similar (goods are stolen, although the exact effect of this can vary dramatically), but the intent can change entirely (meeting the needs of others rather than ourselves, for example) and so can the perception, depending on how the action is percieved (most of which is beyond the immediate control of the actors). So in a way, yes the impact has changed more than the act itself, but the act itself and the reasons for it can be completely different.

It’s important to remember that a recession, or any other historical event for that matter, has no inherent meaning. A recession could be an opportunity to turn away from the status quo, but it could just as easily (and usually does) lead to a greater reliance on the system that produces it. The ‘problem’ is blamed variously on incompetent politicians, greedy bankers, or clueless bureaucrats, which leads to the assumption that with better people in charge, such problems would not occur. To veer into the theoretical, the contradictions in history do not create themselves; they are made by people and if we want them to become critical we must make them so by our own actions.

Since I want to encourage everyone to take advantage of whatever unique opportunities are presented by recession, I offer the following broad questions to ask one’s self when thinking about organized responses to a recession, or during the planning of an action. What exactly is the outcome you desire? Does the action you’re planning rely on local information i.e. something that is known because of a unique position)? Will the context allow it to achieve its maximum impact? Are you making an effort to shape the perception of the action as much as is reasonably possible? If you answered ‘no’ to any of these question, tweak your plan and start from the top until you answer ‘yes’ to all of them. If you do that, by necessity, you will come up with a unique plan.

Lobsterbeard contributes to the Center for Strategic Anarchy, (http://anarchiststrategy.blogspot.com), a site of anarchist analysis of contemporary events.

The Kuala Lumpur Food Not Bombs– serving once a week for only about a year now– was still enough inspiration for visitors from nearby Bangkok to return home and start one themselves. I checked them out as well while visiting Malaysia and was impressed by the activity going on around them. A year of unexpected protests in 2007 hit this Muslim country near the equator. The protests are not welcomed despite the establishment’s claim that the country is a democracy. Yet 2008 promises a dramatic unraveling that will put the ball in people’s hands to create effective change in the streets as the state goes through spasms trying to maintain their legacy of inequalities.

In 1957, the British relinquished control of colonial Malay, but their influence remained. This may be a surface level boon for the traveler limping along with the English language, readily used by the diverse populace of Malay Muslims, Chinese and immigrant Hindus. But other methods of suppression and race separation the great British empire practiced are continued by the government today. Though the country recently celebrated its 50 years of Merdeka (liberty), the government has not rescinded the nefarious Internal Security Act (ISA) which Americans would recognize as similar to the PATRIOT Act.

The ISA rationalizes the police grabbing any person, foreign or domestic, under the pretense of preserving order. Prisoners are held up to two years without charges or trial. But in fact, the ISA usually applies to people who pit themselves against the government’s interests. In 1985, villagers from the Perak region protested the construction of a radioactive dump near their homes. Several people were detained using the ISA, forcing people to fight the project in court for nearly ten years. In 1998, the ISA was used against Anwar Ibrahim, an opposition member in the government, setting off widespread protests with the slogan “Reformasi”.

Many of the people I encountered remarked on the treatment given to protestors. In early January 2008, a permit was denied to hold a candlelight vigil protesting the ISA on a Saturday night at Merdeka Square. The offical reason was that the vigil would create a traffic jam; however, the square is about 3 football fields long and the attendance would only number a few hundred. Organizers pushed ahead anyway and, the police were right, traffic problems resulted. But they were due to sloppy police action–rolling a riot tank on the candle holders, dousing them with water cannons and chasing them with batons onto nearby streets.

The heavy-handed response may be a symptom of spiraling forces that neither human nor government can contain. Both usually exacerbate the crisis as they attempt to control the situation.

This past year, the Hindu Rights Acton Force (HINDRAF) also initiated protests. The primary motivation was to stop the demolition of temples and shrines. The demands would soon include challenging racial discrimination and reforming the electoral system. The government’s response was to put the HINDRAF leaders in prison under the ISA. This fueled 20,000 people to rally on November 25th, making the government release all but five of the detainees. By late January, the government was purposing new laws to limit and deport visiting Hindu workers, a remedy that will only create more street protests. The Hindi population are living in perpetual poverty and as second class citizens. They work the most undesirable jobs, if they can get one at all, that is. They go to schools that are underfunded by the government, thereby ensuring a life of menial labor and destitution.

This past year also saw the shrinking of the country’s primary crop and staple, palm oil. Greedy western European countries have discovered it as a source of fuel for their cars, thereby denying food and livelihood to much of the Malaysian populace. Bloody upheavals in Indonesia have already started in the new year over similar palm oil shortages; how long before they come to Malaysia is uncertain. A regional flour shortage and soaring gasoline prices will only increase the potential for agitation.

In the eastern part of the country, where some of the world’s oldest jungles remain, indigenous tribes fought displacement from their ancestral land to build a dam. The Penan tribe lost and are in another battle against a timber company threatening to deforest their new home in the jungle in the Barram region. The land they inhabit is evidently a coveted source of wealth for corporations. The tribe’s leader, Lony Kerong, suddenly went missing and was found dead days later. This probably shortened the time until indigenous people are forced to give up living on the land and move to the decaying cities.

Much of the Malaysian population has yet to take to the street or to join the growing protests. People barely exist, spending too much time working useless jobs while being inundated by shopping centers and television induced entertainment. Meanwhile, life and death struggles of immigrants, indigenous people and the extremely poor are distant and obscure. Sometimes the issues surface to public consciousness but the government is doing its best to keep them submerged.

The beginning of 2008 will see elections in Malaysia and many peope don’t see the Muslim government budging much from their seat, though they may fall asleep in it on occasions. I accompanied protesters recently as we traveled to the Prime Minister Abdullah Badawi’s base of operations. The small group of 10 protestors demanded he step down, since he keeps dozing at public functions, offering him a pillow as a retirement gift. I wondered as contemplating the 30 soldiers surrounding the protest, if this is a symptom of having dinosaurs in the leadership of government offices.

Malaysia is not alone in trying to hide the crumbling facade of free elections. In 2007, protests in nearby countries like Pakistan included lawyers throwing molotovs and the assasination of opposition leaders. The unrest and shooting of protestors in Myanmar will testify how dictators like General Than Shwe may age, but they do not step down easily and without the spilling of blood. To the south, former Indonesian military dictator Suharto rots in his deathbed having the legacy of one of the most bloody governments of the 20th century. When he stepped down in the late 90’s, rowdy protests demanded changes that still have not come. In nearby Thailand the former Prime Minister Thaskin, who was ousted in a military coup, is making inroads to regaining influence in the government. This is disturbing fortune, since he implemented a heinous war on drugs in which over a thousand people were executed without a trial. His policies sparked an insurgency in the south where Thailand borders Malaysia. Clearly people are not happy with the distribution of power.

Malaysia’s capital city, Kuala Lumpur, holds the Merdeka Square where traffic will likely be interrupted by swelling protests and standoffs with the police. A growing crime rate spurred the city to promise 600 more cops on the streets. Hopefully they will be ineffectual in stopping the political graffiti sprouting up around town or the new Critical Mass that recently started. These may be small changes and only intially affect a fraction of people, as Food Not Bombs does. But small acts are a testimony that in times of disarray and panic it is essential we don’t let the problems created by multinational corporations and Ivy League ideologies bog us down. We just need to do something simple and immediate.

“Who am I, as a white American man, to decide how an oppressed group should express their resistance? I support anyone fighting against U.S. imperialism, whether they are insurgents in Iraq or American Indians in Colorado, and I am not going to tell them what they should and should not do.”

About 25 of us were packed into the back room of a local Infoshop to attend a talk about the role of violence in movements for social change. When the presenter arrived at this point, I was not surprised; I had heard this argument so many times, in so many different forms, that I had spotted it long before it was spoken.

One person protested, politely suggesting that many Iraqi insurgent groups do horrible things that are not worthy of anyone’s support. The presenter retorted that the mainstream media misrepresents the struggles of groups in resistance. Heads nodded in agreement, and the conversation quickly moved on to other topics. I am ashamed to say that I remained silent and allowed the issue to be buried.

“Those in positions of privilege who are interested in radical social change should support resistance movements led by oppressed people, withholding all judgment.”

This principle has surfaced in countless radical spaces that I have been a part of, from feminist meetings to Indymedia workshops to anti-war events. Whether explicitly spoken or silently assumed as a foundational truth, it has often had the status of an axiom that is nearly impossible to question. Sometimes it leads to awkward clashes and moral dissonance, but I have never seen it thrown out into the open for all to debate.

I think that this principle contains powerful and misguided claims about human subjectivity. It casts oppressed people as essentially simple and good and constructs their subjectivity as radically different from that of privileged people. It homogenizes complex factions into unified wholes, denying diversity and individual agency. It answers nuanced questions about justice with overly simple statements about human character, jumbling up important discussions within social movements.

We live in a society where constant criticism, insult, and dismissal are everyday instruments and manifestations of oppression. People in positions of privilege learn and adopt these oppressive behaviors, not necessarily because they want to, but because their social positions shape who they are. In order to help disrupt this dynamic and contribute to collective liberation, people in positions of privilege must radically transform themselves; they must examine and change their own oppressive thoughts and behaviors and fight against the oppressive social structures — whether cultural or institutional — that they are caught up in.

The principle that “people in positions of privilege should withhold all judgment of oppressed people in resistance” is an attempt to solve this problem. It suggests that, in order to reverse oppressive social dynamics, privileged people should avoid criticizing and judging oppressed people; indeed, privileged people telling oppressed people what to do and who to be is the very problem, according to this line of thought. Instead, privileged people should take leadership from oppressed people in combating social problems, whether those problems are expressed in interpersonal dynamics or social structures. Only then can we turn social hierarchies on their heads within social movements, and thus ensure that the change we create is truly liberating.

I think that this approach begins to break down when you look at how it constructs the subjectivity of the oppressed versus the privileged person. When I use the word subjectivity, I refer to the internal reality of the person: her interpretation of experience, process of thought, repository of memories, and unique consciousness. I use this word because of its strength; I wish to demonstrate the totalizing effects of claims about human subjectivity.

First of all, to claim that oppressed people are beyond reproach implies certain boundaries. It suggests that privileged people exist within a field where outside and internal criticism is welcome and constructive, but that they should make sure that this criticism stays within their field and does not extend into the realm of oppressed people. This framework is cast as important for the political transformation of privileged people; by absorbing and internalizing criticism from the outside, as well as generating criticism of those who share her social advantage, the privileged person can begin to identify and change her own oppressive ways and those of the larger group to which she belongs. Thus, individual and collective transformation are closely related; the privileged person must continuously work on herself in order to challenge structural oppression and affect positive change in her personal life. Within this framework, the subjectivity of the privileged person becomes hugely important for political struggle. The privileged person must navigate a complex mental terrain, fraught with dangerous thoughts, learned behaviors, and possible mistakes. By employing agency and force of will, the privileged person can transform herself into an agent of positive social change.

The subjectivities of oppressed people are decidedly more static, according to this line of thought. Oppressed people exist within a field that is closed off to criticism — this tool for understanding and growth, by which the privileged person is established as a political subject, is denied them. The oppressed person is seen from the outside — as a part of an oppressed whole — but it is impossible to peer in to learn about her inner workings, if they exist at all. She is a political subject because of the group to which she belongs, not because of her unique desires, goals, motivations, or personal choices. Within this framework, the oppressed person is no longer insulted, harassed, and disproportionately criticized. But she is still “other.” The self that she occupies is unknowable; questioning and criticism cannot be used to decipher the cause of her actions. She is still contained within the category that oppression has created for her — a category of difference as defined by the privileged outsider.

It is easy to see how this line of thought leads to the essentialization of oppressed people as inherently good. The reasoning is that those who suffer under oppressive institutions, governments, and cultures know far more about the workings of oppression than those in positions of privilege ever could. Thus, oppressed people are driven towards positive radical change as a direct consequence of their conditions. Unlike the privileged person, who must fight against the oppressive behaviors she has inadvertently learned, the oppressed person must merely be who she is and follow the knowledge that her social position affords her.

It is true that direct exposure to oppression is a powerful source of knowledge. However, as Joan Scott has argued, personal knowledge through experience is not unmediated. Systems of oppression also serve to beat people down, delude them, and shape their responses. No one can avoid being situated in a historical moment that has power to affect her perceptions of reality. To claim that oppressed people do not have to struggle, self-criticize, introspect, and search in order to do the right thing denies them agency, creativity, and force of will, and in fact, reserves these qualities for privileged people alone, who are constantly tempted to do the wrong thing.

There is no doubt that privileged people in resistance movements need to do a great deal of work to overcome learned oppressive behaviors. However, this effort will only be hindered by embracing clichés about the essential goodness of oppressed people. I think that it is absolutely vital to re-think an approach that renders oppressed people infallible and unreproachable and devise new methods for combating oppression that take human variation and complexity
into account.

Let us return to the previous example to look at what happens when the principle that “oppressed people in resistance are beyond reproach” is applied to real political situations. The presenter essentialized all resistance movements against U.S. imperialism as deserving of indiscriminate support — as pulled by the same force towards good. Yet, who are these “oppressed Iraqi people” bound together by common struggle? Are they Sunnis, Shiites, secularists, socialists, or capitalists? Are they the ones blowing up crowded markets, fleeing Iraq, attending peace rallies, or hoisting the caskets of their children on their shoulders as they march through the streets? Are they the ones carrying out honor killings or fighting for their abolition? The category of the “unified oppressed group” becomes dangerously homogenizing; a complex social situation, with many competing political visions, is reduced to a cliché. Individual subjectivity is lost; all become a part of a whole that does not represent them — that is patently false.

It is easy to see how dangerous this line of thought can become. The false category of the oppressed group makes it impossible to openly discuss oppression within that group — ethnically motivated discrimination and murder, patriarchal oppression, religious tyranny, etc. It also prevents distinction between groups with different political goals.

The principle that oppressed people are beyond reproach contains claims about human subjectivity that are damaging and false. Yet, it is an attempt to answer vital questions about justice within social movements. How do we create fair, equitable movements for radical change? How do we prevent the oppressive power relations that we are fighting against from infecting resistance movements? How do we create coalitions among diverse group of people? How do we handle political disagreement amongst people of differing cultural and privilege backgrounds?

The answers to these questions are beyond the scope of this essay. What I have argued here is that the answers do not lie in clichés about the essential goodness of oppressed people. Political situations are infinitely variable, and so must be correct courses of action. Questions about justice within social movements must be addressed honestly and deeply, with attention to nuance and specificity. While it is important to discuss these issues collectively, it is also vitally important to think for oneself — to approach these questions with open eyes and to take on the full weight of one’s decisions.

The Energy Biosciences Institute (or EBI) was created by the largest deal in US (and possibly world) history between a corporation and a university. In February 2007 The University of California and BP (formerly British Petroleum) announced that BP would commit $500 million to UC Berkeley, the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, in order to establish a center for biotechnology research, development and deployment for energy production. The main focus of the research center will be “next-generation biofuels”, which are being touted as the solution to global warming, but will also include research on biological technologies that will increase fossil fuel extraction.

The EBI will introduce onto the Berkeley campus a large, sealed-off, private research facility — a base for fifty BP employees to work closely with university researchers who are looking to develop bio-technologies with the most money-making potential. BP will get first pick of any new technologies and it will also decide what gets researched, as it has an equal say with all of the academic partners combined.

When people got wind of the deal, opposition quickly mounted, and the University went on the defensive. A protest with a fake “oil spill” (really molasses) attracted attention, and students organized teach-ins where professors spoke about the problems with the project. Faculty members denounced the deal in public and EBI opponents quickly won the battle of public perception. Chancellor Birgeneau switched from talking about “this generation’s moon shot” to saying that the EBI wasn’t all that big, or that groundbreaking, really. The deal was reported in the media as “controversial” and as a question of how much influence big corporations should have in public universities, rather than as a chance for idealistic scientists to do good for the environment.

The BP/Berkeley contract was signed in November 2007, but opposition continues, particularly to the construction of ten buildings that Lawrence Berkeley Labs plans to build in the hills above the Berkeley campus over the next decade. Meanwhile, the university has continued entering into similar deals, such as the Joint Biosciences Energy Institute (funded by $125 million from the Department of Energy, best known for managing the nation’s nuclear arsenal), and a $10 million “sustainable research” deal with Dow Chemical, who so far has brought us napalm, Agent Orange, and the Bhopal chemical disaster of 1984.

Next-generation Biofuels?

Most folks these days know about biodiesel and ethanol, two proposed plant-based substitutes for gasoline. The theory is that they are carbon-neutral fuels, since plants are part of the global carbon cycle the carbon released when they burn was taken up by the plant from the atmosphere, so no net carbon is released. But remember: these are plants; they have to grow somewhere. Biodiesel sold in Europe was recently calculated to be responsible for ten times more carbon than gasoline, since Indonesian rainforest is being razed to plant oil palms to meet the increased demand. This illustrates a fundamental problem with any plant-based fuel: planting fuel crops will compete with other uses of the land, reducing the amount of land for native habitat and for food. By any estimate, the amount of land needed to replace fossil fuel consumption with a plant-based fuel would be huge, putting first-world consumption in direct competition with third-world bellies and ecosystems.

Already the increased demand for biofuels is causing increased food prices (mostly due to the use of corn for ethanol) around the world and intense deforestation in Brasil (for sugar cane), Indonesia (for oil palm), and other places.

The proposed solution to all these problems is the promised “next-generation biofuels”, which are still far enough out of reach that all kinds of wonderful things can be said about them. Foremost is the idea of ”cellulosic ethanol”, which will be made by genetically engineered microbes out of the inedible portions of plants, supposedly removing the pressure on the world’s food supply. Even if the technology comes to fruition, only the most starry-eyed claim that we’ll be able to keep consuming as much energy as we currently do without continuing global ecological disaster.

However, this is precisely what UC Berkeley researchers will be working on, under the direction of BP, a technological “solution” that trivializes the social and ecological realities of the situation. The researchers will have high-profile, high-budget lifestyles working to “save the world”, BP will get to greenwash its image, and possibly glean very lucrative patents, and the rest of us get no voice and business as usual, while support for research into real alternatives, like sustainable agriculture and transportation, dries up.

Technological Solutions

The research-industrial complex in general, and UC Berkeley specifically, has a long history of providing technological solutions to major world problems. The best-known example was supposed to end all wars: the nuclear bomb. Pushers of the EBI strove to highlight this connection, drawing parallels between the Manhattan project and future research at the EBI.

Today’s biofuel boom is a reaction to one specific crisis that modern, industrialized society is facing: global warming. Industrialized biofuels are one proposed way to get around that particular crisis, but as they are envisioned, even if they help reduce carbon emissions, they will likely worsen many of the other problems associated with industrialized agriculture: global economic inequality, deforestation, topsoil depletion, soil salinization, loss of biodiversity, and water pollution. Industrialized biofuels will not threaten the profits of agroindustry, the auto industry… or of BP, if they control the technology.

Throwing our weight and resources at this particular capital-intensive solution diverts attention and funding from other solutions that address the root causes of the issue, like decreasing consumption and localizing agriculture. BP is not interested in funding research that will allow people to drive less, nor will technology that allows small farming communities to become energy-independent allow them to continue to profit.

Climate Justice

The BP/Berkeley partnership represents a clear choice of one vision of the planet’s future – a global corporate consumer car-culture for the lucky and a miserable life of toil for the rest – as opposed to an egalitarian, democratically sustainable alternative future. As the changing climate transforms from a fringe issue to a global economic crisis and corporations and governments scramble to seize control of the new energy economy, climate justice movements are sprouting around the world. Landless peasants organizing against slave labor on sugar-cane plantations that produce Brazilian ethanol, South Africans fighting to keep communal land from being taken for biofuel production, and Brits sitting-in to stop a new runway at Heathrow airport are all part of the same movement: it is now clear that while the climate crisis is an environmental issue, what we do about it is a global justice issue. Like the Dineh (Navajo), Brazilians, South Africans and others, the people in Berkeley who have organized against the EBI are fighting to prevent global corporate energy projects from destroying their community. It is our responsibility and a never-to-be-repeated opportunity to create a sustainable and just new world. Corporations that have spent the last century promoting internal combustion, plotting the overthrow of foreign countries, and investing in propaganda to discredit climate change research can only stand in our way.

As I write this, activists are sitting in trees at the University of California, Santa Cruz. UCSC has tried to quell the growing protest by arresting people who would support the tree-sit and filing a lawsuit, a la UC Berkeley. They have even gone so far as to pepper-spray a group of students and community members gathered at the base. But the people in the trees remain. The trees and adjoining parking lot are slated to become the site of UCSC’s new Biomedical Sciences Facility — only the first project in the 2005 Long Range Development Plan (LRDP), which would replace 120 acres of forested land with students housing, recreational facilities, roads and research facilities.

The University of California, Santa Cruz, is not your typical UC campus. Unlike UC Berkeley or UCLA, which are outgrowths of suburban sprawl surrounded by university-themed shopping centers, UCSC occupies a space made of meadows, chaparral, mixed evergreen and redwood forests on a mountain above the city of Santa Cruz. Only about a third of the campus land is built upon. The north part of campus is undeveloped, with an impressive array of forest ecosystems crisscrossed by hiking trails and dirt roads. Over 500 distinct plant species and 500 species of mushrooms have been identified within campus boundaries. Furthermore, UCSC is surrounded by protected State and City park lands: Wilder/Grey Whale Ranch State Park, Henry Cowell Redwoods State Park and the Pogonip city preserve. Upper Campus is an important wildlife corridor between these parks, and contains the headwaters of three important watersheds that each pass through downstream wildlife preserves before draining into the Monterey Bay.

The LRDP maps out a rapid expansion of campus facilities over the next 13 years to accommodate up to 4,500 new full-time students. It plans new buildings and roads on 120 acres of currently forested land and promises to degrade the quality of life in Santa Cruz at large, a community which is already completely “built out” and experiencing traffic congestion, water shortages and unaffordable housing costs.

The ecological and academic consequences of the trajectory set by the LRDP will be far-reaching. One must ask, what is pushing these plans forward, in the midst of a general lack of funding for existing programs? UCSC is under pressure to give up its counter-cultural, liberal arts reputation and become an impersonal research institution with tall, glassy laboratories that can attract private funding and prestigious faculty. The ecosystems that have always been so vital to both the campus and surrounding community are now appreciated only for the “green aesthetic” that they lend to UCSC’s public image.

In the early hours of November 7th, people began hoisting climb lines and wooden platforms into three clusters of redwood trees. By 11 am that morning, one person had been arrested and three people were in redwood trees surrounded by UC police. The tree-sitters had been without food and water all night and one sitter, whose platform had been confiscated before it could be raised, sat in a redwood tree in only his climbing harness. Elsewhere on campus, a planned rally in opposition to the LRDP was underway. Hundreds of students listened to speakers elucidating the numerous problems with UCSC’s expansion plans. In a burst of energy, the rally morphed into a march, led by Santa Cruz’s own Trash Orchestra, to deliver supplies to the tree-sitters.

Hundreds of supporters arrived at the tree-sit on Science Hill armed with food and water. The first group of people to break police lines with bags of food were tackled to the ground by police and arrested, additional waves were met with pepper-spray and batons, but the crowd was not deterred. In a burst of success, they pushed the police line back and surrounded one of the tree clusters. Cheers went out as food and water began going up. The police seemed powerless in the face of the determined mass of people and eventually left, much to the surprise of the crowd.

Opposition to the expansion has been fomenting from all quarters of Santa Cruz society since the University began the planning process three years ago. The comment section of the LRDP’s Environmental Impact Report is flooded with criticisms and concerns, citing the inaccuracy of impact analysis and the inadequacy of proposed mitigations. The city, county and community organizations have filed dozens of lawsuits, after having their concerns ignored by the UC, which holds the authority of a state agency yet behaves in many ways as a private corporation. In August of this year, a judge ruled that the university’s EIR did not adequately account for housing, traffic and water impacts. This lawsuit is currently stalled in attempts at out of court negotiations. The final outcome of these court cases is anyone’s guess, and the University is showing no intention of altering its plans. Before giving their final approval to the LRDP, in spite of the criticisms and exhortations of city officials and local residents, the only comment from the Regents — the board that governs the entire University of California system — was to ask – why only 4,500 new students?

On campus, little had been said about the LRDP since its final approval in 2006. But since November 7th, forums and discussions have being held, educating students and generating ideas that were never touched upon during the original planning process. Professors discuss the issues in their classes, anti-LRDP graffiti abounds and the administration has devoted considerable resources to trying to repair their image after the police violence of November 7th.

At UC Berkeley, tree-sitters are celebrating a year spent in the trees, and in light of UCSC’s reluctance to respond to criticism the UCSC tree-sitters are prepared for a long-term campaign that may take on many different forms before the expansion plans are called off. But the forest of UCSC is worth the effort and energy that will be required. The tree-sitters recognize their struggle in the larger context of defending the little remaining wild areas that exist and opposing the profit-driven agenda that the LRDP represents.

For more information, please visit http://lrdpresistance.org/

In the East Bay, a new campaign has been formed to combat animal testing. This campaign is focused on the University of California at Berkeley and the researchers that make their livings inflicting pain on non-human animals. This has been the first time in nearly a decade that there has been an active anti-vivisection campaign in Berkeley. Most recent animal rights activism in the Bay Area has been focused around indirect and reform-based campaigns.

According to the University Relations Office, over 40,000 animals are housed on the UC Berkeley campus. Forty percent are various cold-blooded animals, fifty percent are mice and nine percent are other rodents. The remaining one percent is comprised of non-human primates, cats, hyenas (who are in the only captive breeding colony in the world, located in the hills above campus), rabbits, and invertebrates. Some of the violence these animals endure includes fluid deprivation, head restraints, and electrodes inserted into their brains. The University plans to extend the existing Northwest Animal Faculty by seventy percent with the construction of the Li-Ka Shing Center for Biomedical and Health Sciences, which is currently under construction and taking the place of just-demolished Warren Hall. This facility is a sign that UC Berkeley is not only continuing animal testing but planning to expand.

This campaign is making use of the tactic of home demonstrations that has become popular in recent years, in which a group of activists demonstrate at the homes of vivisectors and those complicit in vivisection. These days of demonstrations have been occurring frequently.

One protest organized recently was in opposition to the tenth anniversary of the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute at the Berkeley City Club Ballroom, which took place on September 17, 2007. Protesters stood outside with signs and megaphones calling on the city of Berkeley not to sponsor such events and for the university to stop this needless testing. One of the vivisectors harassed protesters and shoved his camera into their faces. Federal agents taking pictures also attended this event, showing how important these animal research dollars are.

October 21, 2007, 18 activists were cited and 4 arrested at a home demonstration in El Cerrito. UCPD Detective Jason Collom trailed protesters in an unmarked car and ordered around local police during the citations. These activists were all charged with disturbing the peace. Det. Collom has made it clear that he wants to kill this campaign and will use any amount of intimidation and repression that he can get away with. Unfortunately for him, the court date never even happened — since the UC police had no jurisdiction in El Cerrito — and all of the citations were thrown out.

Saturday, January 5 was another afternoon of demonstrations in opposition to UC Berkeley vivisection. The day of action was preceded by a smear article written by Matt Krupnick in that morning’s Oakland Tribune full of fear mongering that implied that there was a connection between local protests and the current UCLA campaign that has used firebombing of cars and vandalism of property to save animals. It is important to mention that nothing of that sort has gone on with this campaign.

The article mentioned that UC Police had warned the vivisectors of the day of action and that the animal facility was locked down for the day. The afternoon started off with a UCPD officer sitting ten feet away from the rendezvous point. As the protestors left the location for the mobile demonstrations, the officer did three dangerous U-turns in an unmarked Prius to follow the protesters. Activists were able to lose the trailing officer on the freeway. The day of action went fairly well, and without any further police contact or presence. Fifteen activists gathered in the cold and rain to again send the message that those who cause suffering to sentient beings for grant money and career status will no longer be able to enjoy silence and relative calm in their homes — mostly hillside mansions — while the animals they torture are locked in cages.

Since this campaign began, a main researcher of the Hyena project mentioned above has announced his retirement. He has given 10 hyenas to zoos and sanctuaries, while the remaining hyenas have received emergency funding from the national science foundation for 15 more months. Organizers see these demonstrations being a catalyst for change on the UC Berkeley campus, an opportunity for these researchers to come of age and leave behind archaic research methods.

The UC system is a for-profit institution with millions of dollars tied up in animal research. These protests are done in solidarity with the current tree-sit at UC Santa Cruz. The tree-sit seeks, in part, to stop the building of another animal research facility.

Activists also are mindful of the intense actions that are being carried out at UCLA. They feel that every student and neighbor of the UC system can help to create a hostile environment for vivisection and its practitioners.

The animal rights activists involved vow to continue with this campaign, with the demand that the university phase out all animal models of research. More reliable alternatives, like computer modeling and clinical research, exist. Most of all the organizers need more like minded folks to come out to demos. The only way to stop this silly and brutal research is to do something about it, vegan potlucks are not going to free animals from the UC Berkeley Labs. To get involved in this campaign and to be added to the e-mail list, get in touch with them at: stopcalvivisection@hushmail.com.

To educate yourself about the amount of animals used in different vivisection facilities around the State of California, go to:

www.all-creatures.org/saen/ca/res-fr-ca.html

Compared with most other places in the world, a likely majority of us inhabiting the United States live with plenty and abundance, so much so that we take it for granted. We eat food but know not where it was harvested, or how many pairs of hands touched those tomatoes before they came to crown our organic arugula and endive salad. We watch television, live through the internet, read by lamplight, yet remain unaware of where and how the necessary electricity was generated. And we flush our toilets, water our lawns, and wash our sore bodies in steaming showers, ever ignorant of the intricate system of pipes and dams that pump this most precious of liquid, fundamental to life itself, from distant sources to our lips and drains.

“Take This House (and Float it Away)”, a new work of theater by K. Qilo Matzen and Andrea del Moral (Change of State Performance Project), aims to provoke its audience into reconsidering our uses of and attitudes toward water. While water is ubiquitous, found in oceans and in our cells, the play focuses on a presumably affluent white couple living in the Sacramento River Delta. Stu and Marlene immerse themselves in the mundane: Stu obsessively watches birds through a living room window, and Marlene keeps herself ever active in the local Kiwanis club and playground construction projects at local schools. Over the course of several days, Sacramento becomes increasingly inundated with relentless storms. The region’s levees, second only to those of New Orleans in terms of disrepair, breach, and soon the streets of Stu and Marlene’s tranquil neighborhood are raging with the relentless flow of long-obstructed water.

The play is the result of del Moral and Matzen’s long-time artistic collaboration. While both artists have their primary foundations in dance and movement-based theater, this piece appears to be much more a “straight” play, where a great deal of the action occurs through the dialogue. The script emerged from improvisations, and from these two actors’ desires to address our use and misuse of water in a direct and relevant way. While the play seems like it could be the product of a playwright, the performance of the text is enriched by moments of sudden speed and exaggerated slowness, as well as sequences dreamlike and otherworldly, which augment with the otherwise naturalistic and comedic tone. It is in these places, the decelerated card game or the floating newspapers, when Matzen and del Moral let their physical training and aesthetic infuse the piece.

In the program for the play, Matzen and del Moral propose this question: “Would the Gulf Coast response look different if the capital of a wealthy state, and all its white, affluent residents, stood in disaster’s path?” The creators provide no answers. The audience leaves deprived of a conveniently profound revelation that explains everything neatly. Instead, in a post-show discussion, the actors ask the audience to respond to their experience, to voice their own perspectives, concerns, and ideas. Change of State rejects the notion of an external savior and calls upon its spectators to look within ourselves for our own methods and actions with which to engage the enormous dilemma of modern industrial water use and management. According to del Moral, the long-term vision places the play first in a three-part series. The second will be a slide presentation of the current water system and the benefits and limitations of alternative water technologies, followed by a final workshop with hands on community-level visioning and design.

del Moral told me of a Yurok/Wintu community whose sacred burial grounds are partially drowned by the Shasta Dam, located on the McCloud River in northern California. There is a proposal to raise this dam between 6 and 200 feet, in an effort to postpone its inevitable and growing obsolescence. If raised, the Yurok/Wintu’s remaining burial grounds will be totally submerged. These people feel that without this place, without their connection to ancestors and the land, their culture will cease to function or have meaning, and they will commit mass suicide. This threat recalls the U’Wa of Colombia, who vowed to do exactly the same if their land was opened to petroleum extraction. What is particularly shocking and illuminating of our own interconnectedness through water, del Moral informed me that if every home and business in San Francisco switched from incandescent to flourescent light bulbs, the need for the extra energy to be produced by the raising of this dam would be eliminated.

Change of State’s ultimate goal for this project, explicitly stated by the performers, is to support the creation of a new culture around water, one that recognizes it as sacred and precious, that reflects gratitude and humility toward this ultimate force of life.

Book Review: Subcommander Marcos: The Man and the Mask ($24.95 Duke, 2007), By Nick Henck, 499 pp.

The Zapatistas are widely credited with launching the anti- globalization movement on New Year’s day 1994, the first day the North American Free Trade Agreement came into effect. What is less known is that in doing so the Zapatistas created a new model that has made taking up arms compatible with simultaneously taking up the cause of grassroots democracy, a paradoxical phenomenon vividly illustrated by Nick Henck in his fascinating new book Subcommander Marcos: The Man and the Mask.

When I interviewed Subcommander Marcos and reported for CNN on the uprising on that day in San Cristobal de las Casas, it appeared as if they had emerged overnight, a spontaneous rupture in the supposed political calm of Mexico and the emerging web of a restructured global system. Nothing could be further from the historical record, a record Hick Henck, associate professor of law at Keio University in Japan, recounts and examines with exhaustive thoroughness and insight. The Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN or Zapatista) uprising was no spontaneous rebellion, but a model of revolutionary armed struggle refashioned by local indigenous communities facing the terror of local violent greedy landholders and corrupt local and state officials.

While never having met Marcos, Henck’s biography carefully explores countless published interviews, communiques, media reports, web postings, and the two other existing published books about Marcos. Although a biography, Henck’s focus is informed by his passion to understand the movement of Zapatismo from the perspective of the man who has become a charismatic, even sexy, icon of the rebellion. Subcommander Marcos makes a convincing case that Zapatismo transformed not only the global movement challenging to “neo- liberalism” and globalization but how the movement was organized.

Despite preparing for guerrilla warfare in the jungles and countryside for 10 long years, after a mere 12 days of conflict in 1994 the Zapatistas agilely transformed themselves from an “army of liberation” into a facilitator of mass mobilization of what they call “civil society”. That they were eventually successful in achieving significant progress towards three major objectives in less than a decade has remained the backstory to coverage about the enigmatic and secretive masked pipe brandishing icon Subcommander Marcos. The Zapatista uprising put indigenous issues center-stage with the Mexican media and public for the first time, with an indigenous rights bill being debated in both chambers of the Mexican Congress. This debate led to the passage of a watered down version of the San Andres Accords between the Zapatistas, its civil society allies and the government as a constitutional amendment. Although it is impressive that the government would amend the constitution in response to the Zapatista movement, the amendment has not lived up to claims that it expanded the rights of Mexico’s indigenous peoples. The amendment also did not reverse NAFTA’s rescinding of Article 27 of the constitution, which prohibited the privatization of communal ejido land, and some indigenous groups even consider it to be unconstitutional. Lastly, the Zapatistas were one of the primary forces that contributed to the end of the PRI’s seven decades of one party rule.

It appears that for Henck the transformation of the Zapatistas into Zapatismo is of much greater significance than either the story of the former professor turned revolutionary cell leader Subcommander Marcos or their ability to change government policy and provoke a political realignment. After a few years of being ignored in the jungles the handful of FLN (Forces of National Liberation or Fuerzas Liberacion Nacional) members who composed the cell in Chiapas found the locals were sympathetic to calls to pick up arms in self-defense against the theft of their lands by rancher death squads. But the indigenous only really responded to their calls to organize and arm themselves when Marcos and his compatriots realized that “in order to survive we had to translate ourselves using a different code…this language constructed itself from the bottom upwards.” (p. 94)

This was no abstract rhetorical exercise but took on tangible dimensions for those who joined, especially among women. As Henck so fascinatingly details, once local young indigenous women discovered that joining the Zapatistas protected them from being raped and forced marriages, they began to join in droves. (p. 100-101) And as the Zapatistas gained a few allies in assorted villages those allies used their family relationships and status in their communities to literally open the tap to a rush of recruits.

As Marcos so deftly recognized, after years of futile effort the number of recruits exploded from only a few dozen members to thousands in just a matter of a few months when they finally surrendered to the needs of the local communities and “decided it would be better to do what they said.” (p. 135)

Whether this sudden change in fortunes for the EZLN was catalyzed by Marcos’s own innate skill of organizing or something that was thrust upon him from below is less important than Marcos’s own flexibility in recognizing the need to break with his own inflexible model of insurgent politics. Eventually, the EZLN formally broke off from the increasingly irrelevant and inactive FLN.

The shift from a military to political strategy resulted in a shift in the man we know as Marcos. As Henck explains, “Marcos abandoned his own personal dreams of becoming a revolutionary guerrilla hero and, reacting to the general public’s response to the uprising, began to explore an alternative role for both himself and the movement. He and the EZLN had been gearing themselves for a decade toward a predominantly military role. Now, almost overnight, they opted instead for a predominantly political one. Few politicians and military men have abandoned so rapidly a course of action pursued so intensely, for so long, at such a high personal cost to adapt, revise, and reject their strategies when faced with the dawning realization that they were obsolete.” (p. 224)

This internal shift in Marcos’s thinking makes Henck’s book invaluable less as a biography than as a case study of the emergence and evolution of a new political model, one in which a marginalized top down political organization is reformulated by those it aspires to lead to being led by them. In this process of self-organization from below the movement’s objectives become indistinguishable from the model they choose to organize themselves. As a result the EZLN transformed itself from vanguard to facilitator of a horizontal political project of movement building and decentralizing and de- evolving power to local autonomous communities.

Soon after the ending of actual fighting, the EZLN became the framework for building a national movement of movements to challenge the neo-conservative restructuring forced upon Mexico by the PRI and NAFTA. The EZLN and its network of allies soon began organizing frequent Encuentros (or “encounters”) and nationwide tours to accompany numerous rounds of negotiations with the government. These efforts were facilitated by the charismatic Marcos becoming an irresistible media spectacle that could at once attract vast national and international media coverage and attention and facilitate a bridge across the diversity of interests among its allies in civil society.

Under the emblem of Subcommander Marcos, the EZLN gave birth to a new radical democracy that at once built a national movement to challenge the global capitalist agenda while linking up to the movement as a support network to defend its project of de-evolving political power to local autonomous cooperatively run villages.

Ever able to read political forces of change and adapt, Marcos early on recognized the shift taking place: “What other guerrilla force has agreed to si
t down and dialogue only fifty days after having taken up arms? What other guerrilla force has appealed, not to the proletariat as the historical vanguard, but to the civic society that struggles for democracy? What other guerrilla force has stepped aside in order not to interfere in the electoral process? What other guerrilla force has convened a national democratic movement, civic and peaceful, so that armed struggle becomes useless? What other guerrilla force asks its bases of support about what it should do before doing it? What other guerrilla force has struggled to achieve a democratic space and not take power? What other guerrilla force has relied more on words than bullets?” (p. 235)

The answers to these questions are less important than the fact that they were being asked by the nominal leader of an armed guerilla “army of national liberation.” Merely asking these questions underlined a gradual shift of autonomous politics from the margins to the center of the methodology and strategies of the global resistance, anti-war, social justice and environmental movements that have blossomed over the past 13 years. Self-organized, de- centralized, bottom up, and horizontally organized movements, networks, affinity groups and campaigns have achieved a new level of respect, legitimacy and power since the emergence of Zapatismo. These models are exemplified by the higher profile anti-WTO/IMF/World Bank and environmental justice movements, the massive growth of the World Social Forum and less obviously the indie music, microcinema and freecycling movements to name just a few. We have Zapatismo to thank for the re-emergence of what some now call “horizontalism” since 1994.

Throughout Henck’s Subcommander Marcos its is hard to avoid asking the inevitable question of “why a biography?.” Despite all the glittering stardom for Marcos, his mask and pipe, the success of Zapatista movement is about far more than the man behind the mask. Even as he was “outted” as former UAM professor Rafael Guillén, his own identity no longer mattered. Like the similarly masked hero “V” in the film “V for Vendetta”, Marcos had become the anonymous face of those who dreamed of justice and flirted with the forbidden thoughts of escaping to the jungles and picking up a gun to get it. In Mexico at least, where millions answered his calls to mobilize against military repression, it was a dream shared by too many for either the PRI (the Institutional Revolutionary Party or Partido Revolucionario Institucional) or its successor the PAN (the National Action Party or Partido Acción Nacional) or needless to say the Zapatista’s “ally” the PRD (the Party of the Democratic Revolution or Partido de la Revolución Democrática) as well to ignore. As Henck generously concludes, “Marcos’s charisma served a higher cause than his own ego; it elevated the Zapatista struggle from a localized indigenous uprising to an internationally recognized symbol of resistance to neo- liberalism.” (p. 239)

If there is one failing in Henck’s biography is it exactly how Marcos was able to translate the hopes and aspirations of the indigenous led Zapatistas into an effective digital media campaign at the dawn of the internet age. Henck provides us with little to envision how Marcos’s skillful use of the internet and relationships to Mexican and international celebrities and elites could have possibly emanated from the remote EZLN jungle camps and low tech impoverished indigenous villages. But then again, that could be because it is a safely guarded secret tactic held closely to the chests of the Zapatistas. Despite the obvious need for secrecy, my insatiable craving to know how the EZLN not only crafted their message but actually got it into the right hands to build the national and international recognition and support that repeatedly halted the onslaught of the Mexican military and brought them back to the negotiating table has not been satisfied. For that one must turn elsewhere such as the writings of theorist Harry Cleaver for insights into the workings of the Zapatismo media machine.

For all my biases as the reportedly first journalist to break the story of the Zapatista’s new year’s uprising for the English language media , Henck’s Subcommander Marcos is less a biography than an enlightening case study of how one of the possibly most influential political movements of the 21th century was born, faultered and was then rejuvenated by those it sought to lead. Subcommander Marcos convincingly demonstrates that Zapatismo has created a new model in which taking up arms may finally no longer be incompatible with simultaneously taking up the cause of autonomy and democracy. This book has arrived just in time, when the anti-globalization movement appears to have run out of steam precisely because it has failed to provide a visionary model of the future in the present.

Robert Ovetz, PhD is an adjunct instructor of political science at College of Marin and of sociology at Cañada College in California. Write him at rfovetz@riseup.net

Exclamation Point In New Zealand

Photocopied 24 pages.

Contact www.myspace.com/helladubc to order.

This sporadic zine is from the suburban town of Walnut Creek, just over the hill from Berkeley. We get what you expect from a zine made from an army one: hand drawn graphics and text, typos, and stories that end right as they get started. This issue the writer takes us with her to Aotearoa (New Zealand) and shares with us the revitalizing urge to make things happen in her home town. An eight page comic shows us the story of how simply visiting a contact in the Slingshot resource list made a boring tourist experience into one with squats, protests, and a deeper understanding of the indigenous Maori struggles. There’s also a page on slang used on the island as compared to the slang used in the states. Apparently the phrase “bro” is universal. From the looks of it expect more to come.

By Give Me Back, $1.50, 56pgs.

PO Box 73691Washington D.C. 20056

This is the third issue of this music zine focusing on independent punk and hardcore thought. Intelligent columns get feature space and the rest is for the latest bands, either through interviews, ads, or reviews. Some topics include a harrowing experience trying to get work from a sleazy porn collector and the ABCs of Fuck MySpace, which focuses on their corporate ties and punks’ lack of motivation. Also, a handy how-to guide on getting into Canada, and practical tips on caring for your tour van. This zine is starting to get respect for its efforts and not rely on or try to live up to the legacy of its predecessor Heart Attack zine. Give Me Back is providing an up-to-date physical document in the continuous fight against apathy.