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