Our friends at Upside Down World are celebrating ten years of reporting on social movements and politics in Latin America! And in order to ensure that they can keep doing what they’ve been doing for the last decade, they are running a fund drive to cover their operating expenses. We’ve come up with a way that we can all help them out—and you can pick up some new reading material in the process! From now through May 26, for each sale the following AK Press titles on Latin America (in either print or e-book format) through akpress.org, we’ll donate $5 to Upside Down World!

Titles included in this fundraiser are:

The Price of Fire: Resource Wars and Social Movements in Bolivia (Benjamin Dangl)

New social movements have emerged in Bolivia over the “price of fire—access to basic elements of survival like water, gas, land, coca, employment, and other resources. Though these movements helped pave the way to the presidency for indigenous coca-grower Evo Morales in 2005, they have made it clear that their fight for self-determination doesn’t end at the ballot box. From the first moments of Spanish colonization to today’s headlines, The Price of Fire offers a gripping account of clashes in Bolivia between corporate and people’s power, contextualizing them regionally, culturally, and historically.

Territories in Resistance: A Cartography of Latin American Social Movements (Raul Zibechi)

“Emancipation,” argues Raúl Zibechi, “is not an objective but a way of life.” For the last half century, new and emancipatory social formations have worked to carve out their own territories in Latin America, experimenting in rural and urban settings with new forms of liberatory politics that challenge neocolonialism, neoliberalism, and the very basis of the state itself. Not limited to a single path, these “societies in movement” have adopted forms of communitarian relations that allow experimentation and innovation to flourish at a riveting pace. Blending case studies and history with social theory and analysis, Zibechi opens our eyes to the new world being born just outside our gaze.

Zapatista Spring: Anatomy of a Rebel Water Project & the Lessons of International Solidarity (Ramor Ryan)

Eight volunteers converge to help campesinos build a water system in Chiapas—a strategy to bolster the Zapatista insurgency by helping locals to assert their autonomy. These outsiders come to question the movement they’ve traveled so far to support—and each other—when forced into a world so unlike the poetic communiqués of Subcomandante Marcos—a world of endemic rural poverty, parochialism, and shifting loyalties to the movement. The quiet dignity of the local compañeros and echoes of B. Traven, Conrad, and Camus, round out this epic yarn.

More about Upside Down World, from their appeal for support:

“Ten years ago Upside Down World began as a website with a small group of writers scattered around the hemisphere, reporting on the emerging leftist politicians and burgeoning social movements that would go on to reshape the region.  Neoliberalism had dug its own grave, and grassroots struggles and socialist policies were paving a new path for Latin America. Foreign corporations were ousted in popular uprisings, and presidents were elected across the region on anti-imperialist, progressive platforms. Upside Down World was there from the beginning, reporting from the ballot boxes and inaugurations, and later when the celebratory confetti turned into teargas and protests. From the victories and failures of the left and the everyday struggles of social movements for a better world, Upside Down World has reported on the roller coaster of the past decade without stopping. And we need your help to continue the ride…

From the Andes Mountains to the shores of the Caribbean, Upside Down World works hard to bring you regular news and analysis on grassroots politics and social change across the hemisphere. Our reporters are based on the frontlines of struggles over mining, soybean cultivation and human rights. Our site breaks stories long before they hit the pages of the New York Times. And Upside Down World always puts the actions, demands and voices of social movements at the top of our concerns.”

You can read the whole appeal here.

Jared Davidson’s new book is a history of both an influential figure – Philip Josephs – and a movement: anarchism in New Zealand. It is a beautifully-written and impeccably-researched volume that brings to our attention an often overlooked aspect of our political history.

Sewing Freedom traces the journey of Josephs and his family from Latvia to Scotland and then to Wellington in 1903, where he ran a tailor’s shop and distributed anarchist literature. ‘Between sewing machines, pulleys, pressing irons and a button-hole machine, workers could converse, browse anarchist pamphlets … and measure up for a custom-made suit’. Over time, Josephs helped to spread anarchist ideas from one end of New Zealand to the other, including the work of key international figures: Pyotr Kropotkin, Mikhail Bakunin and Emma Goldman, among others. The indefatigable Josephs also took part in protests on behalf of workers and against the tyrannies of governments and bosses.

Davidson clearly situates anarchism in relation to wider transnational labour movements over the first two decades of the twentieth century, and demonstrates the relationships between anarchist thinkers and activists both here and overseas. Along with Josephs, we meet Christchurch chemistry professor Alexander Bickerton as well as several immigrants: English doctor and eugenicist Thomas Macdonald – an acquaintance of Kropotkin – and German billiard table maker Johann Trunk. The reader gains a clear sense of international connections as well as Josephs’ ‘key role in the establishment of a distinct anarchist identity and culture’ in New Zealand.

Sewing Freedom offers an excellent discussion of class politics, adding Davidson’s voice to the critique of the myth of New Zealand as a classless society. There are useful discussions of the strikes at Blackball in 1908 and Waihi in 1912, and the (sometimes complex) relationships between anarchism, socialism and the state. The latter ramped up the pressure in the Wellington waterfront strike of 1913, when ‘Massey’s Cossacks’ violently clashed with workers. Philip Josephs was there, standing on a platform near Queen’s Wharf, loudly expressing his horror at the government’s actions. Soon the forces of repression came for him. Although Josephs escaped imprisonment – on a technicality – his shop was raided, his anarchist materials confiscated and his pamphlet operation shut down. ‘Despite its liberal façade’, Davidson argues, ‘New Zealand was one of the most stringent suppressors of dissent in the Western world’. Josephs left New Zealand for Australia in 1921, having ‘placed New Zealand anarchism firmly on the global anarchist map’.

Sewing Freedom works on several levels. It is a meticulous biography, a portrait of an era, a sophisticated discussion of anarchist philosophy and activism, and an evocation of radical lives and ideas in their context. Davidson has designed a fresh, crisp book with visual impact, nicely enhanced by Alec Icky Dunn’s wonderful sketches of key places in this history: working class backyards, a miner’s hall and striking workers under attack by the forces of the state. This beautifully-executed book tells an important story in New Zealand’s political history.

Chris Brickell is Associate Professor of Gender Studies at Otago University. His work explores histories and theories of gender and sexuality, adolescence, citizenship and the social sciences. His recent book is Manly Affections: The Photographs of Robert Gant, 1885-1915 (Genre Books, 2012).

Freedom Books the oldest anarchist publisher (founded by Charlotte Wilson and Peter Kropotkin in 1886) was firebombed this morning. No one was hurt, but they lost a substantial number of books and equipment.

They will be hosting a clean up day tomorrow (Saturday 2/2/13) at 1pm and need lots of helpful hands.

If you can’t make it to the clean up you can help them out from afar by buying books online and e-mailing to let them know your purchase was a donation: http://www.freedompress.org.uk/news/bookshop/shop-online/

Stay Up to Date on the Repairs:

Freedom’s Facebook Group

Freedom’s Twitter Account

Solidarity,
The AK Press Collective

There’s an interesting discussion brewing around the annual Bay Area Anarchist Bookfair. We saw this posted on Anarchist News this morning … follow this link to the original if you’re interested to see what others have said (but remember that Anarchist News has a tendency to turn into a free for all, in mighty unproductive ways).

Bay Area Anarchist Book Fair is all PM Press
Tue, 01/22/2013 – 12:40 |  Anonymous

The 2013 Bay Area Book Fair speaker list is in. 15 of the 19 authors are PM Press authors. At least five, probably closer to half, of those PM authors do not self-describe as anarchists. With the Bay Area Book Fair being organized by Ramsey Kanaan, co-founder of PM Press, I suppose this doesn’t come as much of a surprise.

The Bay Area Book Fair exists, then, to promote PM Press and its authors, a fact that is clearly visible by the overwhelming dominance of PM authors in the lineup. So who is PM Press? While PM press presents itself to anarchists as an anarchist press, publishing a wide variety of anarchist books, it is not an anarchist press. It is a traditionally run, hierarchical business with bosses and owners. Ramsey and Craig, the owners, are using their years of work in anarchist publishing to continue to market to us without doing the hard work of not being bosses and minor capitalists who profit off the work of others. (In fact, despite being a traditional business, they continue in the anarchist practice of using volunteer labor.)

Ramsey presumedly left AK Press because he found collective process too stifling. He preferred to just be in charge. But the anarchist market is one he knows well, so he continues to market to it. It’s possible he still identifies personally as an anarchist, but he has made it clear both in his press and his decisions that PM Press is not an anarchist publisher.

There are anarchist publishers in the US, willing to practice what they preach: AK Press, CrimethInc., Little Black Cart, Eberhardt Press, and Combustion Books, to name a few. I’m certain they don’t work the same way as one another, but each has shown a commitment to non-hierarchical decisionmaking and a world without bosses. To being anarchists, not just selling books to them.

I know Ramsey has been an organizer of the Bay Area Book Fair for a long time, and I do think he deserves credit for that work, but it is inappropriate that he has stacked the speakers entirely from his own ranks. It is inappropriate that PM Press is welcomed as equals in the world of anarchist publishing, instead of being seen as a traditional press that publishes books of interest to anarchists.

So, the 2013 Bay Area Book Fair authors:

PM Press authors:
Terry Bisson
David McNally
Kim Stanley Robinson
Joshua Kahn Russell
Eddie Yuen
Chris Crass
Scott Crow
George Katsiaficas
Jay Kinney
Vikki Law
Sasha Lilley
Paul Mavrides
Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz
James Davis
Leslie James Pickering

Non-PM Press authors:
Fly
CrimethInc.
Nick Riotfag
John C. Clark

A friend sent us this photo of the tribute he left for Ricardo Flores Magon…

Domestic

• UPS Ground – Order by Thursday Dec 13 at Midnight (UPS does not guarantee holiday ground shipment delivery dates, but recommends 7 business days)
• USPS Priority Mail – Order by Tuesday, Dec 18 at Midnight

International

• UPS Ground to Canada -  Order by Monday Dec 10 at Midnight (UPS does not guarantee holiday ground shipment delivery dates, but recommends 10 business days)
• USPS Priority Mail Mexico/Australia/Asia – Order by Monday, Dec 10 at Midnight
• USPS Priority Mail Canada/Europe – Order by Thursday, Dec 13 at Midnight

Our comrade Jorell is raising money to help support the publication of a new book on anarchism in Puerto Rico. Check it out, and consider donating if you have the capability!

Living Ghosts

Not as ghost of Moloch dead,
But as ghost of Moloch living,
Speaks the State in accents dread,
Stones instead of life-bread giving;
Shall we falter, cringe, and kneel
’Neath its heavy iron heel?
On, on! drink unto the lees!
Martyrs lead the way with pride,
Conqu’ring death e’en when they died:
PARSONS! FISCHER! ENGEL! SPIES!

O’er the graves of Waldheim’s dead,
Where the spotless snow is falling,
Glares above them Law’s dread head
Timid Souls with fear appalling.
See! Take hope! To Courage Cling!
Yonder rises Louis Lingg!
On! on! spread unto the breeze
The red flag beneath whose fold
Stand the souls of leaders bold:
PARSONS! FISCHER! ENGEL! SPIES!

Moloch! Christ! Mahomet! State!
Sword and fagot! cell and gallows!
Hath mankind no higher fate
Than what grim oppression hallows?
Up against the foulsome thing,
Call to aid the Ghost of Lingg!
On! on! mankind dimly sees
’Neath the banner of the poor
Opening wide fair Freedom’s door:
PARSONS! FISCHER! ENGEL! SPIES!

—Dyer D. Lum

I remember sitting in Minneapolis last November chatting with a dear friend, talking about upcoming book projects, and him asking: So who do you have doing an AK Press book on Occupy? It was a good question. I thought about it, weighed the options, talked to authors, activists, and organizers, and came to the conclusion that, in fact, it somehow made sense for me to do the AK Press book on Occupy. It was a moment of insanity, and I’m not sure why no one talked me out of it. See, I don’t have a lot of free time, and my AK workload on top of my Red Emma’s workload and my organizing commitments means that I already don’t get enough sleep, am always behind on everything, and am constantly on the verge of a complete nervous breakdown. Why I thought that taking on the project of pulling together a book on Occupy, written by (very busy) activists, was something I had the time to do, I don’t know. How I thought that I’d be able to get it done in nine months – in time for the one-year anniversary of Occupy Wall Street on September 17 – I really don’t know. Luckily, I wasn’t alone in my quest; I was fortunate to be able to draft two of my very favorite people (who are also far too busy all of the time) as co-editors: Baltimore-based global justice organizer Mike McGuire, and nomadic author and activist Margaret Killjoy. And, thanks to the amazing work of my co-editors, to the dedication of our group of contributors, and to the faith placed in this project by the AK Press collective, nine months later, We Are Many: Critical Reflections on Movement Strategy from Occupation to Liberation is born. The printer assures me copies will arrive in Minneapolis and New York for our launch events this weekend – and you can order a copy here from AK Press (or Amazon, or Powells, or your local indy bookstore).

When we named this project back in January, we chose We Are Many because it was a nice blend of old and new. We liked the referents it implied, but it was a phrase that hadn’t been taken up and over-used yet by the movement. (Our first choice was 99 to 1, but someone else managed to announce a book with the same name before we did, sending us back to the drawing board, and searching for something that wouldn’t have the same results!) As the project grew (and grew, and grew), to encompass the contributions of over fifty authors and even more artists and photographers, we started to joke about the name: We Are (Too) Many. But once we’d made our final selections, staring at all of the contributions written down on index cards and arranged in various configurations on my floor as we tried to set the final order, we started to realize exactly how apt that title is.

We Are Many is a multiplicity. It doesn’t seek to present a single party line, doesn’t pretend to have solved all of the problems, or resolved all of the conflicts. It presents multiple perspectives on the same question, sometimes contradictory ones, sometimes just different ones. It’s a hodge podge of ideas, perspectives, tactics, contexts, and ideologies. Just like the movement it seeks to reflect. For me, reading this book from cover to cover is sort of like the feeling I have attending a General Assembly: confusing, chaotic, overwhelming, fascinating, frustrating, exhilarating, and very, very real.

We are many: we speak as individuals. We are many: we speak as one. I don’t know that I really considered the double nature of the phrase when we originally chose that title so many months ago, but as we’ve pulled the project together over the last eight weeks, it has really come to signify the way that I think not just about this project, but about Occupy itself, and really about contemporary social movements as a whole.

Let me be clear: We Are Many is only a start. It’s the beginning of a much larger, and sorely needed, conversation about movement strategy: about what works, and when, and why; about respect for each other’s opinions; about understanding difference; about the need for revolutionary zeal; about new ideas that we have pioneered this past year; about the new things we’ll do in the next. Those conversations are happening all around us. This book captures only a few of them, a representative sample of a much, much larger multiplicity of perspectives. It’s up to you – all of you, or perhaps all of us – to carry that conversation on. To take this book as a jumping off point, as an invitation into the conversation, as a challenge to keep the discussion and the debate going as we look towards the second year of this still-nascent, ever-changing social explosion that we’ve come to think of as Occupy.

I almost forgot! Check out this amazing list of contributors. There are so many people in this book who have inspired me with their words and their actions, not just this past year, but for many years. I’m honored to have had the opportunity to edit their essays for this project:

Michael Andrews, Michael Belt, Nadine Bloch, Rose Bookbinder, Mark Bray, Emily Brissette, George Caffentzis, George Ciccariello-Maher, Annie Cockrell, Joshua Clover, Andy Cornell, Molly Crabapple, CrimethInc., CROATOAN, Paul Dalton, Chris Dixon, John Duda, Brendan M. Dunn, Lisa Fithian, Gabriella, David Graeber, Ryan Harvey, Rachel Herzing, Gabriel Hetland, Marisa Holmes, Mike King, Koala Largess, Yvonne Yen Liu, Josh MacPhee, Manissa M. Maharawal, Yotam Marom, Cindy Milstein, Occupy Research, Joel Olson, Isaac Ontiveros, Morrigan Phillips, Frances Fox Piven, Vijay Prashad, Michael Premo, Max Rameau, RANT, Research & Destroy, Nathan Schneider, Jonathan Matthew Smucker, Some Oakland Antagonists, Lester Spence, Janaina Stronzake, Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, Team Colors Collective, Janelle Treibitz, Unwoman, Immanuel Wallerstein, Sophie Whittemore, Kristian Williams, and Jaime Omar Yassin.

I hope you’ll all check out the book, and that you’ll find something in it to appreciate. I look forward to continuing the conversation in the months and years to come …

Paradoxes of Utopia – Anarchist culture and politics in Buenos Aires 1890-1910 – Review
by Sean Mathews

When the Argentine economy collapsed in 2001, many were surprised by the factory takeovers and neighbourhood assemblies that resulted. But workers’ control and direct democracy have long histories in Argentina, where from the late nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, anarchism was the main revolutionary ideology of the labour movement and other social struggles. Most histories of anarchism in Argentina tend toward dry analyses of labour politics, lists of union acronyms, and the like. For Juan Suriano, that’s just one part of the story. Paradoxes of Utopia gives us an engaging look at fin de siècle Buenos Aires that brings to life the vibrant culture behind one of the world’s largest anarchist movements challenging the myth that anarchist was merely a euro-centric movement: the radical schools, newspapers, theatres, and social clubs that made revolution a way of life. Cultural history in the best sense, Paradoxes of Utopia explores how a revolutionary ideology was woven into the ordinary lives of tens of thousands of people, creating a complex tapestry of symbols, rituals, and daily practices that supported-and indeed created the possibility of-the Argentine labour movement. The author creates an innovative panorama that gives equal weight to the strengths and weakness of anarchism in Argentina, effective strategies and grave mistakes, internal debates and state repression, all contextualized within the country’s broader political, economic, and cultural history.

The history of anarchism in Argentina also has a local angle as Irish born Dr John Creaghe also took part in the emerging movement returning to Argentina in 1894 to find anarchism under the banner of FAO and later FORA (Argentine Regional Workers’ Federation) gaining enormous influence within the wider labour movement. Creaghe became editor of the daily newspaper ‘La Protesta’ which was closed down on numerous occasions. Alan O’Toole notes that, “It was the major paper of revolution in Argentina until recent years… its establishment and continuation was probably his greatest single contribution to the politics of revolution.” (See)

This immersing of anarchist ideas and practices into the emerging labour movement resulted in major state repression, including imprisonment, censorship and killings with the police estimating that there were around 5,000-6,000 anarchist militants in Buenos Aires alone during the first ten years of the century. Indeed the number of libertarian centres and anarchist circles peaked to 51 by 1904 dropping to 22 by 1910, overwhelmingly concentrated in working class neighbourhoods. For example in Rosario’s Casa del Pueblo, the centre was a collaborative effort between ten different groups. The list of activities carried out in 1900 speaks for itself: they found employment for 446 people, a library holding 380 books on science, art, sociology and literature; even a permanent orchestra and a theatre group, sixty four lectures and lent the hall to workers’ associations.

Read More

(This essay originally appeared on Frontline: http://www.frontlineonnet.com/stories/20120907291709500.htm)

The whole thing is a blur to me. It was sometime in 1985 or 1986, a warm night, when a band member from either Black Flag or the Circle Jerks told me about Alexander Cockburn. We were standing in one of the side alleys near Los Angeles’ Roxy Theatre, smoking, when he told me about Cockburn’s fulminations against Ronald Reagan and contemporary America. Reagan’s jarringly brutal wars were a preoccupation for me. My political friends and I took our lessons from the cyclostyled sheets produced by the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador (CISPES) and the various solidarity committees for divestment from apartheid South Africa. Their content was of the essence, but the papers were dreary to read.

Events seemed to drain the ink of human vitality: massacres of Salvadorian peasant farmers and police firing at black workers did not require embellishment, only the dry tones of an activist’s pen. Finding Cockburn was a treat. He was no less moved by the outrages of our time, and he seemed to be reading the same activist broadsheets as I did. But his stylistic translation into his columns of those events and the rage that should greet them for The Village Voice and The Wall Street Journal, for The New York Review of Books and Vanity Fair took my breath away. As my musician friend told me, this guy was a punk writer.

Already known as a superb left-wing stylist in England, Alexander came to the United States in June 1972 to escape what he called “the relics of an empire corrupted far beyond the reach of popular indignation”. He arrived in the U.S. at the time when President Nixon’s burglars broke into the Watergate hotel, and when the bombardment of South-East Asia had discomfited U.S. allies, who had begun to leave its side (the Thai army left in January and New Zealand’s forces left in December).

Washington and its hypocrisies provided sufficient material for his acidic pen. Alexander took up residence at The Village Voice, the counter-cultural journal of New York City, where he hosted the “Press Clips” column and (with James Ridgeway) wrote “The Moving Target” reports. As the American media gasped for breath between the claustrophobia of its ulcerative political landscape and of its corporate-induced “balanced” journalism, The Village Voice became a life raft. Old-school municipal journalism came from Wayne Barnett, vibrant essays on imperialism, socialism and gay rights came from the witty pen of Andrew Kopkind, amusing music journalism and bold essays on abortion rights and feminism came from Ellen Willis, and sharp and witty film reviews came from J. Hoberman. This was good company.

At The Village Voice, and in his forays into Esquire, Harper’s and The New York Review of Books, Alexander fired volley after volley against the mendacity and mediocrity of the corporate media and against the powers that be. Old traditions of American journalism that fearlessly derided the powerful had declined by the 1970s. Muckrakers such as Ida Tarbells and Nellie Bly, Jacob Riis and Ida B. Wells no longer found mainstream homes. Razor-edged columnists such as H.L. Mencken and I.F. Stone had not been reproduced. Alexander perched in this gap.

The broad contours of Alexander’s political view had been formed within a decade of his residence in the U.S. His columns in The Village Voice and in, of all improbable places, The Wall Street Journal provided the weekly diagnosis of the emergence of Reaganism. In 1987, Alexander’s inquest yielded the following summary: “Reaganism is shorthand for a particular culture of consumption, a reverie of militarism, of violence redeemed, of a manic, corrupted and malevolent idealism. The priorities of this culture at the directly political level have been simple enough: the transfer of income from poor to rich, the expansion of war production and an ‘activist’ foreign policy, traditional in many ways but as Noam Chomsky has said, ‘at an extreme end of the spectrum: intervention, subversion, aggression, international terrorism and general gangsterism and lawlessness, the essential content of the ‘Reagan doctrine’.”

Reaganism would become the general doctrine of the Republican Party, and it would draw the Democrats into engagement and then mimicry. What was the antidote to this national malaise? In 1976, Alexander and James Ridgeway followed Jimmy Carter and Reagan through the corn of Iowa and the thickets of New Hampshire. Carter would win that election, but there were already indications of how the Democrats would falter before the rise of Reaganism, and then lurch to the Right under Bill Clinton. “It is absurd that a Democratic candidate is not triumphantly conquering all before him with a powerful reforming message,” Alexander wrote. “But 1976 does not seem to be 1932, and currently no such Democrat is in view.” This prognosis holds to this day: the Republicans have withdrawn into the furthest corner of the Right, and the Democrats are eager to edge as close to them as possible while mouthing earnest liberal sentiments.

While at The Village Voice, Alexander got into his share of scuffles. It was hard to stay at his desk when his own paper began to slip into the arms of Reaganism. In 1977, Rupert Murdoch bought the parent company of The Village Voice, whose new management threatened to get rid of Marianne Partridge, the much loved, smart editor of the magazine (now publisher of the Santa Barbara Independent). The sports writer Jack Newfield asked Alexander if he had Murdoch’s home number, which he did, and so Alexander fixed a meeting for the three of them to discuss the changes at The Village Voice.

Murdoch, who was not comfortable with a woman at the helm of his publication, welcomed the men into his apartment, “Relax, fellows. We’re back to square one. Marianne will remain the editor. Have a drink, please.” Murdoch then told them stories about his own time at Oxford, when he was Red Rupert. Not long after this, the publisher fired Marianne Partridge anyway, but her staff fought back. They walked Marianne Partridge and her dog to work each day. Alexander did not let the old Oxford tie or the steak and red wine cloud his vision. He would later call Murdoch a “world class monster” and write bitingly that Murdoch dispensing with his newspapers would be like “Dracula selling his coffins.”

In 1973, the black ink of censorship covered over Alexander’s first essay on Palestinians. The New York Times briefly reported that Palestinian guerillas fired on an Israeli army post and so “Israeli planes flew north and dumped high explosives on a refugee camp in Lebanon, killing a dozen or so men, women and children”. Alexander wrote this up for his “Press Clips” column and wondered about the “lack of moral disquiet in the Times’ story about the lethal retaliation inflicted on innocent refugees”. Dan Wolf, The Village Voice’s editor, called Alexander, asked him to reconsider, and then simply dropped the story. This got under the skin of Alexander, who would then throw his entire arsenal of sarcasm and wit at the blockade around the Truth when it came to the Middle East (West Asia), and mainly Israel.

On November 19, 1980, Alexander published an extended interview with the Israeli dissident Israel Shahak, who laid out the basic parameters of Israeli colonialism, and whose translations from the Hebrew press over the course of the next decade revealed the dynamics: roads and walls to cut off Palestinians from each other, settlements and military posts to link the occupied territories to Israel proper, and a thirst for the water that lay under the Palestinian aquifer. Alexander wrote about all this, and it got to be too much for his employers. What galled the Israel lobby was Alexander’s column from August 10, 1982, where he wrote in the context of the invasion of Lebanon, “The Israelis are behaving like war criminals.”

In 1984, The Village Voice editor David Schneiderman found the reason to remove Alexander (Schneiderman, who was Murdoch’s man, would later recall Murdoch marvelling “how a bunch of Communists could manage a paper so well”). The Institute for Arab Studies had in 1982 given Alexander $10,000 to fund a trip to Lebanon so that he could write a book on the Israeli invasion. He had not disclosed this to his editor. The muck flew that the Institute and Alexander were anti-Semites. It was rubbish. Still, Alexander was suspended from The Village Voice. It would not be the last time that Alexander would be accused of anti-Semitism. As he put it, “Anti-Semitism has become like a flit gun to squirt at every inconvenient fly on the window pane.”

Victor Navasky of The Nation (founded in 1865) poached Alexander on the advice of Andrew Kopkind. Alexander began to write Navasky a column, which he wrote until his death: it was the longest-running column in the history of this venerable magazine. If you read Alexander’s essays, you know that an immense influence on him was his father, the former Communist, journalist and newsman Claude Cockburn. It was his father’s novel Beat the Devil (made into a film by John Huston in 1953) that provided Alexander with the name of his column. At The Nation, Alexander went after the same old scoundrels. The columns from The Village Voice, The Wall Street Journal and from The Nation sit on my shelf in his great collections: Corruptions of Empire (1987), The Golden Age Is In Us (1995), Washington Babylon (1995), and one that I anticipate, Colossal Wreck (2012).

In 1994, with the U.S. convulsed by the madness of the Republicans and the neoliberalism of the Democrats, Alexander joined with Ken Silverstein and later Jeffrey St. Clair to produce an alternative, Counterpunch. I remember taking out a subscription to the hard-copy newsletter (before the website was produced) and enjoying the honest journalism. It tells you something about the integrity of Alexander that he forsook fame and fortune for the small magazine, preferring to keep to his opinions and build his audience than to align himself to the advantages of corporate power.

Within 10 years, Counterpunch’s website would receive three million daily hits, with 100,000 unique visitors and 300,000 page views. The website scintillated after 9/11, when Counterpunch was one of the few U.S.-based harbours for critical thinking around the War on Terror, the war on Afghanistan, the growth of domestic surveillance, and the emergence of a new kind of political arithmetic that favoured free markets and unfree citizens. Alexander found writers from across the political spectrum who were willing to stand sentinel against the madness.

For two years Alexander battled his cancer privately, letting only his daughter, Daisy, and a few friends know of what had begun to overrun his body. His suffering remained private, but his own thoughts continued to appear in Counterpunch until his last week. He missed only one column during his last month.

Territories in Resistance: A Cartography of Latin American Social Movements

By Raul Zibechi, Translated by Ramor Ryan

Chapter 3

A community has an emancipatory approach to health care when it recovers its own healing powers, which have been ex- propriated by the medical industry and the state, and liberates itself from the control that capital exercises over health care through multinational pharmaceuticals. Zapatista health care practices, as well as those of many indigenous peoples and piqueteros groups, share many commonalities despite their enormous cultural differences.

Indigenous peoples often recover their ancestral knowledge, which goes hand-in-hand with recognizing the wisdom of traditional health practitioners while not discarding modern medicine. In fact, they attempt to combine the two. Much like when communities decide to construct a school, so too the first step in community health care is constructing a lo- cal dispensary capable of dealing with those emergencies that cause the highest mortality rates.

But Indian peoples have their own long tradition of healthcare.

In the traditional indigenous cosmovision, there is no separation between health and lifestyle or, that is, the community. Therefore, “the health of individuals as physical bodies, depends, at root, on the health of the community” (Maldonado 2003). The concept of healing in indigenous medicine is identical to the concept of healing in that society and it is based on a dense network of reciprocal social relations: minga (community work), community assemblies, and collective fiestas. These are spaces for “harmoniously liberating the subconscious, both of the individual and the collective” (Ramon 1993, 329).

In indigenous societies, the capacity to heal emerges from self-generated structures, unlike Western society, which has medical bodies that are separate from society as a whole and that control and monitor health care. Indigenous health practitioners have organized in various regions to recover and enhance indigenous medical knowledge. (Acero and Dalle Rive 1998; Freyermuth 1993). This is part of the emancipatory process of the indigenous peoples of our continent and part of the lengthy process of constituting these peoples as political subjects. In some cases, indigenous organizations (such as CONAIE in Ecuador and the Regional Indigenous Coun- cil of Cauca in Colombia, among others) have created their own health programs, with the support of doctors and nurses trained in Western medicine, and with some support from the state (CRIC 1988).

The Zapatistas have set up a system of health care in the five Caracoles that cover all rebel communities. Some eight hundred of casas de salud [community health centers] are operating, served by a similar number of health promoters, alongside a dozen municipal clinics and two hospitals that perform surgery (Muñoz 2004). The San Jose hospital near La Realidad was built in three years by thousands of indigenous locals working in shifts. There is also a training school for health promoters there, as well as dental care facilities, an herbalist center, and a clinical laboratory. Several volunteers hailing from the communities work full-time in the hospital; they do not receive a salary but are supported by the Good Government Council, which “provides them with food, travel expenses, footware, and clothes”(Muñoz 2004). The Zapatistas have set up an herbal laboratory there as well:

This dream started when we realized that the knowledge of our elders and our elderly was being lost. They know how to cure bones and sprains, they know how to use herbs, they know how to oversee the delivery process for pregnant women, but all of that tradition was being lost with the use of medicines purchased in the pharmacy. So we came to an agreement among the people and brought together all the men and women that know about traditional healing. It was not easy to bring everyone together. Many compañeros [comrades] did not want to share their knowledge, saying that it was a gift that cannot be transferred because it is something they carried within them. But then a sense of awareness and understanding grew among the people, the heath authorities held discussions, and they convinced many to change their way of thinking and to participate in the courses. They were some twenty men and women, older people coming from the communities, who acted as teachers of traditional health and about three-hundred-fifty students signed up, most of them Zapatista compañeros. Now they have increased the amount of midwives, bonesetters, and herbalists in our communities. (Muñoz 2004, 319)

In the autonomous regions, there is a functioning network of community health centers and clinics, dental consultants, clinical analysis and herbal laboratories, where eye and gynecolological services are available, and pharmacies. Consultations cost a nominal fee for the Zapatista base and are often given free of charge. Anybody in the communities, Zapatista or not, can avail themselves of the medical services; the medicines are dispensed without cost if they have been donated and sold at cost if they were purchased; traditional medicines are free. In some Caracoles, infusions and oin ments are made from local medicinal plants. All this has been accomplished through the work of indigenous communities as well as through national and international solidarity efforts. Significantly, the Mexican state has not been involved at all.

Autonomous piqueteros groups organize health care around the same principles, despite the differences between Mayan cultures and popular sectors in a huge city like Buenos Aires, birthplace of the Latin American labor movement and a showplace of global consumerism. During the health workshop held at the Autonomous January gathering in 2003, groups concluded was that “the cure is within the movement itself.” The MTD has organized preventative health clinics in many of the neighborhoods where they have a presence, staffed by professionals working in solidarity. This is true of other piquetero groups as well. The MTD Solano in Buenos Aires and MTD Allén in Neuquén supply their members with free medicines and eyeglasses. This illustrates what can be acomplished beyond the market: Thanks to a sympathetic optician, discarded or out-of-style frames are paired with lenses bought at cost and now all the movement’s members in need have affordable glasses.

The MTD also mixes, packages, and distributes medicinal herbs purchased directly from local producers. Now the movement is proposing to take it a step further by developing homeopathic tinctures from plants cultivated in small community plots. The result is that piquetero families are discovering the advantages of alternative medicine and using conventional medicine less frequently, or doing so only in emergencies. In some neighborhoods people have begun working with Chinese therapies such as acupuncture and have organized workshops dealing with native herbs in order to broaden the use of alternative cures (Salud Rebelde 2004).

The movement has also set up “reflection groups” in every neighborhood “to deal with personal problems, relation- ships, feelings, and collective growth.” In these groups, ac- cording to one participant, “one learns to lose fear; that fear is a sickness.”

Indeed, with respect to dependency on doctors and specialists, these groups believe that “verticality induces sickness” and that “wellness is finding ourselves” (Enero Autonomo 2003). The story of one of these groups’ meetings, as told by a social psychologist who participates in the movement and who coordinated their first meeting (which was held in a very poor neighborhood under MTD Solano influence), speaks for itself:

After the presentations, we began the meeting with an open question: Does anybody want to say anything? It was like turning on a tap. Almost immediately an anguished woman began telling us that she had been sexually abused as a girl by her father. Between sobs, she told a story of overcrowding, promiscuity, males and females sleeping in the same room, and the subsequent violations as part of family life, a situation all too common for poor households in the townships spread through the peripheries of big cities.

When she had finished her painful story, the silence in the room was powerful, a silence made from seventy-odd, quietened people, the silence of not knowing how to react together when so much deep pain was exploding forth in the room, seeking a response forty or fifty years after the event, a resonance, or some kind of understanding or forgiveness or just simply to be heard. Those assembled seemed uncertain how to express the compassion they felt toward the companera. In the end, the group focused on the most basic fact: that the companera had shared her pain with them and now they must begin to consider what can be done about it. Really it was just a simple notion, but one that opened the way for the participation of other voices. Words of comfort flowed out, understanding, hugs, gestures of solidarity, in many instances from others who recognize in themselves a similar kind of suffering. (Ferrara 2004)

Certainly, as indicated by the indigenous and piqueteros, it is the movement and community itself that has the power to heal. But the paths were different for each.

Indigenous peoples are recovering their traditional medicinal practices, which had been suppressed by the conquerors; the ex-workers and unemployed, molded by the culture of consumption, have had to de-institutionalize work, space, time, and politics to reinvent their lives. In summary, this has included:

• self-managed productive projects, or production “for itself.”

• opening up spaces in the “galpones”6 and in move- ment territories in order to have permanent and free meeting places in which new relations are practiced.

• “the integration of the various temporal spheres of everyday life and respect for time itself,” meaning an attempt to reunite time fragmented and parceled up by the system.

• and practices of horizontality, autonomy, collective participation, dignity, cooperation-based solidarity, and direct democracy as opposed to representation, hierarchy, and the instrumentalization of the tradi- tional political practices (Sopransi and Veloso 2004).

The AK Press collective was saddened this weekend to hear of the death of our comrade Alexander Cockburn. Over the years, we have had the privilege of working closely with him on publishing our popular CounterPunch book series—including several titles written or edited by Cockburn himself.

We find ourselves a bit at a loss for words at the moment, so we’ll leave you with the words of his longtime collaborator (and CounterPunch book series co-editor) Jeffrey St. Clair:

“Alex lived a huge life and he lived it his way. He hated compromise in politics and he didn’t tolerate it in his own life…

He taught at least two generations how to think, how to look at the world, how to live a life of joyful and creative resistance. So, the struggle continues and we’re going to remain engaged. He wouldn’t have it any other way.”

You can read Jeffrey’s full tribute on CounterPunch.

(Photo by Tao Ruspoli, from CounterPunch.)

Social Security: not for nothing do politicians call it the “third rail of American politics—touch it, and you die.” Yet a powerful, well-funded movement to phase out Social Security or even privatize it has been gathering strength since the election of Ronald Reagan. Each time it comes close to succeeding, it’s beaten back by a coalition of labor, grassroots organizers, and the elderly. Meanwhile, Social Security has only become more vital to retirees and their families as the federal and state governments slash other benefits and services—a trend that’s grown ever more troubling in recent years.

The People’s Pension is both groundbreaking history and an eye-opening guide for anyone concerned about one of the biggest issues of our times. With 95 percent of Americans participating in the program either as beneficiaries or through their payroll tax contributions, Social Security is quite literally the glue that binds Americans together as a community. In a provocative epilogue, Laursen argues to democratize, not disable, the program, suggesting that the only solution for Social Security may be to de-link it from government altogether.

For more on the book, visit: http://www.akpress.org/peoplespension.html

Eric Laursen is an independent financial and political journalist, activist, and commentator. He is co-author of Understanding the Crash (2010). and his work has appeared in a wide variety of publications, including The Nation, The Village Voice, Z Magazine, The Indypendent, and the Huffington Post. He lives in Buckland, Massachusetts.

Social Security: not for nothing do politicians call it the “third rail of American politics—touch it, and you die.” Yet a powerful, well-funded movement to phase out Social Security or even privatize it has been gathering strength since the election of Ronald Reagan. Each time it comes close to succeeding, it’s beaten back by a coalition of labor, grassroots organizers, and the elderly. Meanwhile, Social Security has only become more vital to retirees and their families as the federal and state governments slash other benefits and services—a trend that’s grown ever more troubling in recent years.

The People’s Pension is both groundbreaking history and an eye-opening guide for anyone concerned about one of the biggest issues of our times. With 95 percent of Americans participating in the program either as beneficiaries or through their payroll tax contributions, Social Security is quite literally the glue that binds Americans together as a community. In a provocative epilogue, Laursen argues to democratize, not disable, the program, suggesting that the only solution for Social Security may be to de-link it from government altogether.

For more on the book, visit: http://www.akpress.org/peoplespension.html

Eric Laursen is an independent financial and political journalist, activist, and commentator. He is co-author of Understanding the Crash (2010). and his work has appeared in a wide variety of publications, including The Nation, The Village Voice, Z Magazine, The Indypendent, and the Huffington Post. He lives in Buckland, Massachusetts.

Social Security: not for nothing do politicians call it the “third rail of American politics—touch it, and you die.” Yet a powerful, well-funded movement to phase out Social Security or even privatize it has been gathering strength since the election of Ronald Reagan. Each time it comes close to succeeding, it’s beaten back by a coalition of labor, grassroots organizers, and the elderly. Meanwhile, Social Security has only become more vital to retirees and their families as the federal and state governments slash other benefits and services—a trend that’s grown ever more troubling in recent years.

The People’s Pension is both groundbreaking history and an eye-opening guide for anyone concerned about one of the biggest issues of our times. With 95 percent of Americans participating in the program either as beneficiaries or through their payroll tax contributions, Social Security is quite literally the glue that binds Americans together as a community. In a provocative epilogue, Laursen argues to democratize, not disable, the program, suggesting that the only solution for Social Security may be to de-link it from government altogether.

For more on the book, visit: http://www.akpress.org/peoplespension.html

Eric Laursen is an independent financial and political journalist, activist, and commentator. He is co-author of Understanding the Crash (2010). and his work has appeared in a wide variety of publications, including The Nation, The Village Voice, Z Magazine, The Indypendent, and the Huffington Post. He lives in Buckland, Massachusetts.

ERIC LAURSEN, author of “The People’s Pension: The Struggle to Defend Social Security Since Reagan” (AK Press), will be speaking at Washington’s Busboys and Poets about his book and about the political challenges facing Social Security and the 213 million Americans who participate in it.

Social Security has been the centerpiece of one of the biggest public-policy debates in America, starting with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980. In “The People’s Pension,” author Eric Laursen refocuses on the political struggle itself: the fight by millions of grassroots activists, organizers, the elderly and disabled to defend this crucial program against a well-funded campaign aiming to privatize it or phase it out. “The People’s Pension” offers not only the first comprehensive history of the contemporary Social Security wars, but an analysis of the real retirement crisis facing Americans and what’s needed to preserve and expand Social Security in the future.

ERIC LAURSEN is an independent journalist and author. He first began reporting Social Security more than 15 years ago as managing editor of Plan Sponsor, the leading monthly magazine for pension managers. Since then, he has written for a wide variety of publications including Institutional Investor, The Nation, The Village Voice, CFO, In These Times, and The AICPA Journal of Accountancy. He is co-author of Understanding the Crash (Soft Skull/Counterpoint, 2010).

This event is cosponsored by Campaign for America’s Future, the Economic Policy Institute, and the Strengthen Social Security Coalition.

More information about the event: http://bbpbooks.teachingforchange.org/book/9781849351010

A conversation with authors: Michael Staudenmaier, Jason Ferreria, Amy Sonnie, and labor organizer Carole Travis. Moderated by James Tracy.   What: Nostalgic for Nothing: Emerging Authors Tackle the New Left When: Friday, July 20, 7:30 pm Where: Pegasus Books Downtown What else: Wheelchair accessible; refreshments served. This event is free.

Truth and Revolution author Michael Staudenmaier discusses the history and legacy of the Sojourner Truth Organization – a revolutionary Leninist group active in the 1970s with an interesting critique of whiteness. Don’t miss it!

We were very pleased to see this review of David Porter’s Eyes to the South: French Anarchists and Algeria by Javier Sethness-Castro.

It is held in some circles that anarchism, like Marxism, is a form of thought and praxis that originated in nineteenth-century Europe and as such is inseparably related to this social milieu; interventions and mobilizations taken outside of this geographical-historical intersection, however strongly critical they be of patriarchy, the State, and capital, are in patronizing manner considered not to be anarchist. This raises the question of ethnocentrism among self-identified proponents of anarchist social philosophy—a concern that is not without its historical basis, given that even the Spanish anarchists of the CNT and the FAI refused seriously to consider emancipating Spain’s colonies in Morocco as part of the radical socio-political program it would counterpose to feudalism and capitalism in the Iberian peninsula.1 These glaring trends are ones that anarchist academic David Porter confronts and challenges strongly with his Eyes to the South: French Anarchists and Algeria, an extensive work that examines the various dramas of modern Algerian history and the engagement by French anarchist observers of this. In broad terms, it can be said that Porter in this work seeks to advance a mutual enrichment between established Western anarchist perspectives with the effectively anarchist practices seen in the Algerian context after the military defeat of Nazism in Europe, in addition to challenging the reactionary tendency of residents and workers of core Western societies to identify with the colonial projects promoted by their ruling classes as well as showing the potential of anarchism’s relevance to the lives of the social majorities of the world—following in the example of the CNT-FAI in Spain.
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