Sovereignty Rising

Zibechi cites that 71% of worker-run factories distribute income in an egalitarian manner where janitors earn the same as more highly-skilled workers. Would you design a school the same way? Would you differentiate between levels of experience but not what the experience is in? Would there be janitors or would everyone clean toilets?

Are there empty commercial spaces in our vicinity? If the city owned these spaces, how would you suggest they use them? Should they be used on a “need” basis or on a “potential for good” basis? How should we define “good”?

In Brazil barter networks involved 2-5 million people at one point. What are some obstacles to creating a barter network here?

In Argentina a common trait of recuperated production is that it tends to be for their own needs and blur the line between producer and consumer. What percentage of food, goods and energy consumed in our vicinity is produced locally, would you guess? What percentage of local production is shipped elsewhere?

Argentina has moved beyond the barter network and alternative currency to creating venues that put producers and consumers in face-to-face contact with fair-trade markets, direct distribution and community purchasing. Could (or is) the same thing work(ing) here? What are obstacles and are there ways around them? Does cash hold any advantages over an alternative currency?

In the US the left associates itself with the unions and citizenship movement. Latin America, when capital flight left devastation in its wake, abandoned these interests and pursued a path of independence. Do you think the same thing could happen here? Are unions and citizenship carrots dangled by the capitalist state? What do you think about the teachers’ union and the Seattle boycott of standardized tests?

In El Alto there are 400 to 550 neighborhood councils, with one for every 1,000 inhabitants. In Santa Cruz County there are around 220,000 adults with 50,000 in the City of SC. This would be 220 neighborhood councils in the county and 50 in the city. Is this too many, not enough, or the right amount? Each neighborhood council is made up of several neighborhoods with several blocks per neighborhood. Would it be helpful for us to organize this way? Could it be done?

In the US, in my experience, people rarely like their neighbors and even more rarely like their families. Why is this? Has capitalism broken our “tools for conviviality” as Ivan Illich calls them. Do we have families and neighborhoods anymore or just places where people live in proximity?

Zibechi sees representation as a “structure of domination.” He juxtaposes it to expression: “Whereas the logic of representation is separation and transcendence, that of expression is one of experience and immanence. So the key categories of representation are: consensus, articulation, opinion, explicit networks, communication and agreement. Those of expression are encounters, composition, disarticulation, resonances, and diffuse webs.” At what size would direct democracy work without representation?

Are the welfare state and the warfare state tied, as Zibechi implies? If the Republicans in Congress destroy the welfare state will they also “weaken their ability to maintain their hegemony” and “weaken the state’s hold over the oppressed and exploited, which facilitates the cooptation or neutralization of the dangerous classes?” Would that be a good thing?

Is sovereignty a human right? Does it necessarily include land? Is it the only positive human right (as opposed to a right to not be tortured, imprisoned w/o trial, etc.) Why is it not included in the UN list? Are the others rights or someone else’s obligation?

Zibechi emphasizes the importance of non-capitalist forms of relation with no division between intellectual and manual work or between those who give and those who obey orders. Compare our social relations to these characteristics of the movements:

• They have become producers, taking the everyday life of the people into their own hands.
• They have adopted organizational forms based on the family with new, stable and complex forms of extended family relationships.
• Not only is patriarchy breaking down but there is a feminization of the movement – not just women in men’s roles. In Bolivia “the political exists not so much in the streets but in the more intimate sphere of markets and households, spaces in which women undoubtedly dominate.”
• ‘It is not only teachers who teach but… the whole movement itself is an educating space.’
• In production they seek self-sufficiency and diversification of products, distribution venues, skills and roles within the process.
• Health movements are recovering lost knowledge and eliminating the passive, dependent “patient” relationship.

This article gives an interesting perspective. Read it and respond by applying the information in the book:

Reclaiming Our Imaginations from ‘There Is No Alternative’

We live in a time of heavy fog. A time when, though many of us dissent and resist, humanity seems committed to a course of collective suicide in the name of preserving an economic system that generates scarcity no matter how much is actually produced. To demand that all have enough to eat on a planet that grows enough food, that absurd numbers of people do not die from preventable disease, that utter human deprivation amongst plenty is not tolerated, or that we put the natural laws of the biosphere above socially constructed economic “laws” — is presented as unrealistic, as the fantasy of idealists or those who are naive to the “complexity” of the world’s problems. If we create and recreate the world everyday, then how has it become so supposedly absurd to believe we might actually create a world that is honestly making the possibilities of egalitarianism, justice and democracy?

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Indigenous peoples are combining ancestral knowledge with modern medicine. Their first step in community healthcare is constructing a local dispensary for emergencies that cause the highest mortality rates. Could we do the same here at a fraction of medicare costs? Should our only socialized medicine be at the end of life?

In the indigenous cosmovision the health of individuals depends on the health of the community. What would that say about health in our society? Is our health affected by U.S. foreign policy? Would spaces for “harmoniously liberating the subconscious, both of the individual and the collective” help our mental health crisis?

The Zapatista health centers employ community volunteers who receive no salary but get food, travel expenses, footwear and clothes. If it weren’t for liability, could we do the same but provide vouchers for rent, mortgages, or farmer’s markets? What else could we do if there were no liability? Would a free school for herbalists, midwives and bonesetters be successful in our society?

What do you think about the “reflection groups” for personal problems and the idea that “fear is a sickness?” Do you believe “verticality induces sickness?” Could this explain the prevalence of anti-depressants in the U.S.? Should the U.S. have more peer counseling and “life-coaches” or is our culture psychopathic?

In Latin America schools are often the only state presence, teaching the individualistic values of neo-liberalism. The landless movement in Brazil has started 2000 self-managed schools in which families are involved in planning and administration. Movement education has three goals:

developing critical awareness through studies that “lead to reflection and the acquisition of a broader world view, differentiated from official discourse.”
the “understanding of the history and meaning of the struggle for land and agrarian reform that led to the creation of the settlement.”
“practical exercises in arenas of knowledge needed for the development of the settlement.”

Do schools here teach the individualistic values of neoliberalism? What might a localized curriculum look like in the U.S.? Should families run the schools? What practical knowledge is needed in our “settlements?” Is homeschooling a form of self-managed school or neo-liberal individualism? How might the homeschooling movement be affected by the Newtown school murders?

“Productive work is educational if it is transformative.” Zibechi asks, “how can we organize ourselves to work and produce so that we can establish pedagogical relations?” Well?

In our neighborhoods, can we “de-institutionalize space” by “generating communal and flexible places” and integrate time by dissolving the divide between working time, leisure time, school time and domestic time? Has that been done by the home-office, with the result that families now grow up in workplaces where the kids need to stay quiet and the parents are accessible to work 24/7?

In our society what is the goal of higher education – the real goal, in your opinion? Is it worth the money? Does it depend on whether the student needs to take out loans or whether the parents can pay? In Nigeria a student can be given a scholarship to attend school for $67 per year. For the same price as a $20,000/yr university, 300 Nigerian youth could attend school. The University of San Francisco, which boast a “passion for justice” and a “global perspective,” cost $38,500 before room and board, books and fees. Is it ethical for a parent to spend on their own child what would educate 575 Nigerians, in order to teach them about global justice? Do they owe this to their child, if they have the money?