E;Cleaver,"Preface" to Encuentro Documents, Mar 7

["Harry M. Cleaver" <hmcleave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

This posting is being sent to you as a service of
Accion Zapatista de Austin.

NOTE BENE: The following is a short preface prepared for an Italian
collection of the final documents from the 1st Intercontinental Encuentro.
It's too damn bad that such a collection is not available in English. As I
say below, material prepared for the 2nd Encuentro and the meetings in
Spain should build on what was done last year. The Italian collection will
make that easy in Italy and reach a much wider audience.

Harry

Documents from the First Intercontinental Encounter

Preface

	For over a hundred years many activists have recognized
two things: first, that capitalism operates on a global level and
second, that to achieve enough power to overthrow capitalism the
working class must find ways to organize its own struggles at the
same level.

The Global Character of Workers' Struggles

	In one sense, of course, working class struggle has always
been international.  Capital's primitive accumulation imposed waged
textile work in Europe and unwaged plantation slavery in Africa and
the New World. It connected that Atlantic proletariat through
extensive oceanic shipping that provided linkages which working
class antagonism turned into circuits of struggle.  Ever since,
workers have circulated their struggles from country to country
through their own work (e.g., seamen) and migrations (e.g.,
sometimes forced, sometimes voluntary).  Workers in a given
country have also repeatedly developed collaborative activities with
their counterparts elsewhere (e.g., international trade unionism and
solidarity movements) and the repetition of such movement and
collaborations have produced transnational working class
communities with permanent ties within different countries.

	Such efforts have not proceeded without obstacles, including
those within the labor movement.  We used to call the AFL-CIO the
"AFL-CIA" because of its role in undermining worker movements
in the Second and Third Worlds. However, in these last few years,
the emergence of new means of electronic communication such as
the Internet has made it possible for rank & file workers to bypass
such union and party bureaucrats to elaborate their struggles on an
ever more global scale. The recent globalization of the Mersey Dock
Workers' (Liverpool, England) strike is an striking example. More
generally, grassroots efforts such as PeaceNet and the European
Counter Network of "controinformazione" have accelerated the
circulation of struggle both within and among countries.

Recognition of the Necessity of Global Organizing

	Little by little the theorists and spokespersons of an ever
more global proletariat have learned to articulate the political strategy
inherent in this situation.  As early as 1847, Engels wrote the
following in his essay on the "Principles of Communism":

"Will it be possible for this revolution to take place in one country
alone? Ans: No, Large-scale industry, already by creating the world
market, has so linked up all the peoples of the earth, and especially
the civilised peoples, that each people is dependent on what happens
to another . . . The communist revolution will therefore be no merely
national one; it will be a revolution taking place simultaneously in all
civilised countries, that is, at least in England, America, France and
Germany . . . It will also have an important effect upon the other
countries of the world, and will completely change and greatly
accelerate their previous manner of development.  It is a worldwide
revolution and will therefore be worldwide in scope."

 	To some degree, Marx and Engels would outgrow the
Eurocentrism in this formulation,  but they would never abandon the
fundamental insight that to be effective revolutionary struggle must
be global.  This was the understanding that led them to the First
International in 1864 and led many other militants to the various
Internationals which followed.

	Marxists, of course, have not been alone in recognizing the
importance of the globalization of struggle.  Among those who have
embraced other political ways of conceptualizing the struggle against
capitalism, anarchists have also commonly emphasized this central
need. From those who joined (and fought with) Marx and Engels in
the First International to those who have responded to the
Zapatistas' Intercontinentalism, many anarchists have both
articulated their vision and organized their struggles as globally as
possible.  From Bakunin's dream of an "International Brotherhood"
through Western anarchists' initial solidarity with the Russian
revolution and the blood spilled in Spain to contemporary
international organizing, a great many anarchists have translated
their understanding into hard practice.

	The efforts of militants focused on environmental, gender
and indigenous issues have also been increasingly global. Led partly
by theories that emphasize the simultaneous complexity and
interconnectivity of all life processes even unto the plantetary whole
(Gaia) and partly by experiences in confronting capitalists who shift
operations from country to country to outflank and undermine
controls, many ecologists now struggle to build global coalitions of
eco-warriors able to cut-off and destroy such tactics. Faced with a
patriarchal set of relationships throughly integrated into the structure
of the hierarchical capitalist organization of the world, feminists
have also found themselves forced (and drawn) to share experience
and collaborate across borders (e.g., the international wages for
housework campaign, the counter-conference in Bejing, cross-
border struggle against the international sex industry, and so on).
One essential element of the current period of indigenous
rennaisance has been its global character.  Resistance to genocidal
murder and social marginalization has provided a common ground
for the most diverse peoples and upon that ground is being woven a
web of cooperation and mutual aid across vast cultural differences,
languages and experiences.

Global Class Struggle

	Despite this long history of increasingly global self-activity
and self-reflection, however, it remains the case today that capital
has elaborated its own mechanisms of domination, control and
exploitation apace.  Indeed as Ranireo Panzieri pointed out in
QUADERNI ROSSI back in 1964  (taking Marx's writing on
factory despotism as his point of departure) capital's planning
expands both as a necessary response to working class struggle and
as the means to its limitation and subordination. As our struggles
have globalized and recomposed themselves so have the institutions
of business and the state.

	Neocolonial institutions were crafted in response to anti-
colonial struggles.  Supranational state institutions such as the
World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) were
created to manage the class struggle of the Keynesian period on a
global scale.  Current capitalist policies which are being
implemented today in an unusually homogenous manner (what
Africans' know by the IMF title of "structural adjustment" and the
Latin Americans call NEOLIBERALISM and has been known in the
North under various rubrics such as Thatcherism, Reaganism,
Maastricht, anti-immigrant policies, etc.) have been developed in
response to the global cycle of struggle which ruptured
Keynesianism.  Institutions such as the IMF have been reorganized
and reoriented to plan and oversee these new policies, everywhere.
We are thus engaged in an historical dialectic that we will only be
able to escape by developing ways of organizing globally that
outstrip capital's ability to cope.  Recognizing this should put global
collaboration in such development at the top of our agenda.

	Fotunately, just such an understanding and just such efforts
do seem to be increasingly widespread. The top-down push for
European Union and the Maastricht Treaty has evidenced capital's
attempts to cope with widespread working class struggle in Europe.
They have been met not only with local resistance but also with
almost continent wide organizing.  The elaboration of the kind of
computer networks and rank & file labor efforts mentioned above
have been complemented with face to face encounters such as the
1991 International Meeting in Venice. Such efforts have
demonstrated a shared understanding of the need to jump the
struggle to a new, higher level.  At an international level, in limited
ways, the working class has used G-7 summit meetings, IMF
annual meetings and UN gatherings such as the Rio Conference on
the environment and the Beijing Conference on Women as vehicles
for a global dialog and consultation about possible paths and forms
of struggle.

The Zapatista Initiative

	Among the most interesting and promising of such initiatives
are those documented in this collection of material: the
Intercontinental Encounter organized by the Zapatistas that took
place at the end of July 1996 and brought together over 3,000
grassroots activists from 42 countries. The Encounter originated
directly in a call made by the Zapatistas in January 1996 that
suggested continental meetings for the Spring to be followed by an
intercontinental encounter in the Summer. The backdrop to that call
was the amazing global circulation of support for the Zapatistas and
the struggle of peasants and indigenous people which had developed
in the two years since January 1, 1994 when their struggles
exploded into public view.

	The Zapatista Call, which they issued with some trepedation,
high hopes but low expectations, suggested a gathering to discuss
the the world-wide phenomenon of neoliberalism, the effects it has
had on people, resistances which have developed and possible paths
of further struggle. The Call generated a mobilization of a scope and
depth that no other individual group has ever been able to do.  It far
exceeded the expectations not only of the Zapatistas but of their
sympathizers.  Not only did thousands of people respond
enthusiastically to the invitation and move quickly to organize a
series of continental meetings, but the stimulus of those meetings
provoked an outpouring of thinking, discussion, writing and other
creative activities.  Unlike international meetings organized by
business, the state, or academics, these gatherings had no
institutional funding, no high-tech conference facilities, and no
promise of payoff (neither profits nor publication) except for the
opportunity to accelerate the struggle to build a new world.  That so
many participated, in so many ways, with so much energy was truly
remarkable.

	As many expected, the resulting meetings, first continental,
then intercontinental were tumultuous, even arduous, affairs as a
diverse array of individuals with equally diverse backgrounds (in
terms of both their struggles and organizing experience) came
together to attempt a multi-sided, multi-lingual conversation about
the state of the world and how to change it. Differnt kinds of people
working within different political and theoretical perspectives shared
their views on the state of the world and their proposals for struggle.
Marxists, feminists, environmentalists, indigenous organizers,
social democrats, human rights activists, of all stripes did their best
to engage each other and to find common ground.  Organized in five
different campesino communities in various parts of Chiapas but
gathered together at the beginning and at the end, the week-long
struggle for dialog went on day and night, often in rain and mud,
broken only for music, dancing and sleep. As the discussions drew
to a close the participants struggled to draw up documents that
would reflect the complexity of the perspectives and opinions that
had come together.  Some of those documents are included here.

	Under the noses of the Mexican state's repressive military
and police, these meetings were remarkable not for their difficulties
but for achieving such a degree of coherency that virtually all
concerned decided that they should be repeated as one vehicle for the
continuation of the conversations begun.  Out of the Intercontinental
Encounter came the decision to organize another --in Europe next
time-- and enthusiasm for creating not just periodical but
on-going conversations on a global scale about fighting
capitalism and building alternatives.  At the time of writing this
preface the decision has been taken to hold the 2nd Intercontinental
Encounter in Spain in late July, 1997.

	For the 2nd Encounter to be a success, those who attend it
need to build on the work of the first, and on the conversations
which have occurred in the interim.  It is not enough that people
gather to talk; the talking needs to progress, to build on itself, and of
course on the accumulating experience of struggle in the world.  The
documents of the last Encounter  published here make it possible not
only for those who attended to look back and reflect on what was
said and done, but for those who did not attend to have a sense of
how the conversations went.

	One of the great lessons that the Zapatistas have learned
within their communities and which they have shared first with other
Mexicans and then with the world is the fundamental importance of
listening. Of listening, and understanding, before you speak.  With
their guns and their eloquence they have made large numbers of
Mexicans realize that they had NOT listened to the indigenous in
Chiapas.  The Zapatista spokesperson Subcommandante Marcos has
often told his own story of how he and a few friends came to
Chiapas to tell the locals how to organize but soon realized that it
was they who needed to listen and learn from the communities.
Unfortunately, politicos are not always inclined to listen.  Those in
struggle are often so hell bent on talking, on getting out their own
message, their own interpretation and program, that they don't listen
to all the voices around them. As a result, they are often out of touch
with and not in synch with the underlying character of the day to day
struggles of their communities.  In the 1st Intercontinental Encounter
the participants, sitting there in the jungle, in an strange
environment, surrounded by campesinos whose struggles and
dignity they respected, did display an encouraging willingness to
listen. It was an experience and a spectacle quite unlike many
political meetings in the North which have often been torn and even
destroyed by an endless non-dialog of sectarians deaf to each others'
words.

	Therefore, for this 2nd Intercontinental Encounter to
progress beyond the first it needs to be well prepared and well
organized. Among those preparations familiarity with the work,
conversations and results of the 1st Encounter is basic. Hopefully
current plans to make materials that are prepared for the 2nd
Encounter available ahead of time, so that discussions can proceed
on the grounds of prior collective knowledge will be realized as
well. For those who have come to understand the centrality of such
discussions to the building of an ever more effective global network
of struggles and who want to participate in the next Encounter this
book should be considered absolutely required basic reading.

Harry Cleaver
Austin, Texas
March 7, 1997


	


............................................................................
Harry Cleaver
Department of Economics
University of Texas at Austin
Austin, Texas 78712-1173  USA
Phone Numbers: (hm)  (512) 478-8427
               (off) (512) 475-8535   Fax:(512) 471-3510
E-mail: hmcleave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Cleaver homepage:
http://www.eco.utexas.edu/faculty/Cleaver/index.html
Chiapas95 homepage:
http://www.eco.utexas.edu/faculty/Cleaver/chiapas95.html
Accion Zapatista homepage:
http://www.utexas.edu/students/nave/
............................................................................





     --- from list aut-op-sy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx ---