RADICAL DEMANDS of the people of planet earth (an open
document)
RADICAL: adj. . . of or proceeding from a root . . . essential,
fundamental . . . marked by a considerable departure from the usual
or traditional
DEMAND: n . . . something claimed as due . . . a desire
or need for
I
We demand what is due to us. Firstly then, who is us?
Us is the people, the human beings inhabiting this planet. We are
interfaced with a machine that never says "enough". The result is a
global factory.
Us is a child working in a factory in East-Asia producing shoes
for Western markets. Us is a student bent over a book at night
learning useless dogmas. Us is a woman patronised by a doctor. Us is
a doctor working 100 hours a week because there is no money around to
hire more doctors, while there are many unemployed doctors. Us is an
unemployed in a big metropolis forced to compete with everybody else
because "there is no work around". Us is another unemployed forced to
compete with everybody else because a competitive labour market is
good for the economy. Us is those people behind the statistics of the
economy.
Us is a woman carrying water for miles every day because there is
no water in the village, but there is electricity for the police
station and there are the pipelines for the oil plants, and there are
golf courses in deserts. Us is the people who need air to breathe,
clear skies to dream, green fields to run in, forests to receive
healthy rains, and to hide in when we feel like it. Us is a teacher
who is asked to be a policeman, and grade many exams, and make
students feel stupid. Us is a policeman who is supposed to be a
racist and a murderer and realises that this is not a job for him. Us
is an immigrant abused by the police and the customs. Us is a human
being made alien, because illegal, by those in authority who believe
there are no UFOs. Us is a gay being told he should be straight in
order to be normal. Us is a straight been told he should update his
know-how and train himself in order to be normal, and conform with
the requirement of the global market and global competitition. Us is
a mother going shopping in a country of the South and buying less
tortillas, less vegetables and less fruit because the prices are
higher so her money can go towards paying the banks of the North. Us
is those who are told that debt is sacred and must be repaid. Us are
those in debt because we need to consume and live in a society that
uses money to get by, but concentrates money in the hands of the few.
Us are the overworked because are insecure of the tomorrow. Us are
those for whom there is no tomorrow. Us are the invisible, or the
visibly stigmatised. Us are those who fight in the war. Us is a
worker assembling batons in UK to use against the heads of workers
organising strikes in Indonesia. Us is a worker on strike in Asia, in
Europe, in Australia, in Africa, in the Americas. Us is a retired man
and a retired woman who have been declared a burden upon society, and
therefore their already small pensions have been cut still further.
Us is an indigenous man with eyes looking into the future and
stories about the past. Us is an indigenous woman with eyes looking
from the future into ourselves. Us is a child who lives in the
present and in the future.
Us are the fragmented, the classified, the ones allocated within a
hierarchy, the ones pitted against each other so that the global
factory can turn and turn without end, without anybody stopping it,
in an endless, meaningless motion. Us are the fragmented, isolated,
atomised individuals, divided across races, sex, occupations, jobs,
status, nationality, colour, sexual preferences, who by virtue of
their differences are made to believe that there is no hope, that
murder will continue, that starvation will continue, that rape will
continue, that torture will continue, that silence will continue,
that censorship will continue.
Today we say that us is the people, all the rest is a tedious
residual called power.
Us is the people, the human beings inhabiting the planet. The
people are interfaced with a machine that never says "enough". The
result is that we, the people, now say "enough!, let's unplug
ourselves from the machine and shut the global factory down". We're
now starting to do things our way. It will take some time, but we
have started.
Meanwhile, we empower ourselves of the things taken away from us,
and demand what it is due to us.
II
We demand what is due to us. Secondly then, what do we demand?
We demand what is due to us. We demand what is ours. All that we
have is life. We therefore demand our life back. Life is stolen from
us in a million ways.
Life is stolen from us when we are forced to overwork; when we are
underpaid; when we are not paid at all for our work; when we don't
work and therefore we don't get paid; when we are sacked from a job;
when we are hired into a new one; when the bank takes our home and
our land; when we don't have a home or land; when we can't broadcast
a radio program because there is a law against it; when the land we
had squatted is taken away from us, even if the owner has so much of
it; when we are told that our human needs cannot be met because of
the inhuman needs of competition; when we die of diarrhoea because
women's nipples have been declared obsolete technology by a food
company that has promoted powder milk in areas with dirty water; when
our water is made dirty with the excrement of soldiers in the
military camp or of the multinational plant which has settled
upstream; when the media reports the horror stories while
respectfully interviewing the perpetuators; when a logging company
decides that the only use of a forest is to produce timber and the
people living in the forest for centuries have been declared illegal;
when there seems no escape from poverty; when escape from poverty
means dullness in front of the TV.
We don't demand the possible, because what is possible for power
doesn't let us live with dignity. We don't demand the impossible,
because nothing is impossible for those who dream, and power cannot
give us dreams. Dreams are ours only. We therefore demand what is
real and virtual, what is and could be, what is and is not yet.
We demand what power says it cannot afford. We demand what power
says it cannot concede. We demand what power will have to afford and
have to concede. We have heard enough of its lies. We cannot
compromise on our lives.
There are many demands, because there are many of us. There will
be more demands to come. Demands require a general rule: power
fragments us, therefore our demands will build bridges among us.
Bridges are strong when the river banks are strong. Power weakens
river banks one at a time. Thus the bridge collapses. We want all the
river banks to get strong, all of us to be strong.
For these reasons, we demand the following:
1. Continuous and systematic reduction of working time for those
of us who have a job.
In each day, each year, each decade of our work, we the people
employed in the global factory produce more and more wealth. Most of
this wealth is used against us to colonise our bodies and minds. Or,
it is used to create instruments of destruction. Or simply to produce
more and more next day, next year, next decade, while most of us in
the world will not get any benefit and our natural environment is
destroyed.
We look back at history, and discover that our ancestors fought
terrible battles to carve out day time for themselves. Our ancestors
fought heroic battles to free their lives from the unnecessary work
imposed upon them by the market, by the power of money, by the power
of competitive ideology.
We declare these powers inhuman.
In the last few decades we have been forced to work more in the
midst of incredible technological wonders that could reduce our work
load and share the benefit with all.
We say "enough!" We question the machine which never says
"enough". We question power's ideology of growth for growth's sake.
We demand a continuous and systematic reduction of working time
for those of us who are employed in the global factory at a given
wage.
It is not a demand to reduce unemployment and increase employment,
because nobody can trust what power will do when we win the right to
work less. Also, it is not a demand for a 30, 35 or 38 hours working
week. No, since social productivity increases, the demand is for a
continuous and systematic reduction in the working week, every week,
every year, every decade. It is a way for us, the people, to
introduce a basic principle of liberation from meaningless and
unnecessary work.
This demand has at its first objective the abolition of the horror
of horrors. The reduction of meaningless and unnecessary working time
as a principle of human liberation implies that we denounce and
demand the abolition of life time stolen from our children. No to
forced child labour. No to slave labour.
2. Social wage (taking the form of guaranteed income for everybody
and public spending in health, education, infrastructures to minimise
invisible work).
Many of us work in the global factory but are not called employed.
The work that many of us are doing is therefore invisible. Yet, in
the last two decades neoliberal strategies have been targeting this
invisible work, and have made it more burdensome.
Who'll take care of that child if the kindergarten has been shut?
Who'll take care of that old man if the hospital won't keep him in
observation because no more beds are available? Who'll walk for miles
to fetch the water for the entire family if no water is available in
the village? The invisible work of women, in the metropolises and in
the fields, North and South has always been high, and now is growing
with the growth of cuts in social spending in many different forms
everywhere in the globe. The invisible work of women is growing with
the growth of women's poverty, marginalization, and humiliation by
patronising bureaucrats that power decided should have a say over
their lives.
There are other invisible workers. The unemployed of many
countries must perform the most tedious, unfulfilling, and utterly
unnecessary work: to incessantly look for jobs. If they don't do that
they are stigmatised and humiliated, their small dole withdrawn where
they had one, their lives checked, scanned, and judged upon by
patronising bureaucrats. This endless search for jobs has become an
end in itself; to keep our minds occupied, to prevent some of us
thinking about alternative ways we could all live; to make us compete
with each other, which keeps everybody's wage down and make
everybody's working harder.
The beast of power feeds on our unnecessary sweat and reciprocal
animosity.
There are other invisible workers. Neoliberal strategies
restructured the ugly large factories that up to the 1970s pulled
together workers who learned to fight together. To cope with these
struggles, power fragmented us and spread us around, casualized us,
eliminated income security obtained in the past and made the access
to income temporary through temporary work. Power calls this
"flexibility". We call it flexible exploitation. Temporary and
casualized workers are invisible. Temporary and casualized workers
have no rights, have little wages, are dismissed any time the market
machine says so. Power believes temporary, casualized and poor
workers, by virtue of being so much fragmented, dispersed, and
isolated, cannot get together and organise.
There are other invisible workers. Power has a name for our brain,
our imagination, our dreams, our aspirations. Power calls these
moving forces of life "human capital". In so doing, power insults our
humanity, by equating it to dead things, instruments of production,
inputs, raw materials. Yet, power treats us like all this in schools
and universities around the world. It does so by confining
imagination and dreams to what is sellable. It redraws imagination
and dreams through teaching us discipline and competition, through
exams and deadlines. Human capital, is human and is capital. Of
humanity it retains imagination and dreams. As capital it deploys the
chains over imagination and dreams. It can do so by enforcing poverty
on the many of us who are students. Power believes poor students
combined with strict deadlines and boring syllabuses will not have
time to think for themselves.
There are other invisible workers. Power tells the small farmers,
the truck drivers, the petty traders and most of the poor
self-employed that they are free, that they are their own boss. Yet
power's right hand, the global market, intervenes like a factory
foreman to remind them that what power's mouth says is a lie. They
are not free, they are not their own boss. They are thrown into ruin
or they will soon be if they stop running, if they stop competing, if
they stop moonlighting, if they stop putting their prices down, if
they don't take on another debt, if they stop repaying that other
debt, if they refuse to become the enforcers of their own poverty.
Few may escape from this destiny: they are the mirror of a false
happiness that keeps all the rest running.
For these and other invisible workers the demand for a reduction
in the working week is meaningless. Other ways must be found to
reduce tedious and unnecessary work and increase access to the huge
amount of social wealth already created and produced every year.
For this reason we demand that all of us receive a guaranteed
income which is sufficient to meet basic needs. In this way we want
to reduce the conditions of blackmail imposed on many of us by the
market. We demand a guaranteed wage that allows us to refuse low paid
work and fulfil our basic needs in a dignified way. We demand a
guaranteed wage that pays the invisible work of women and allows them
to reduce it, as well as to empower themselves vis-a-vis despotic men
holding the purse. We demand a guaranteed wage that pays the
invisible work of students and allow them to have less pressure and
more time to think for themselves, and to imagine different ways of
being. We demand a guaranteed wage that reduces the useless work of
the unemployed called job-hunting, thus putting a stop upon market
pressures to reduce everybody's wage, thus allowing them to reject
the stigma of the excluded, and empowering them to take whatever life
path they choose.
For this reason we demand the reversal of neoliberal policies
aimed at the privatisation of health, with a corresponding increase
in both the price we have to pay and in the burden for those of us,
especially women, who are asked to do unpaid caring work in the
homes. This demand is therefore to reverse this strategy, recognising
health as something to which everyone is entitled free of charge and
as something about which everyone (including supporters of
alternative medicine) is entitled to have a say on and, consequently,
empowered by society to do so.
For this reason we demand the reversal of neoliberal policies in
education. These policies are aimed at gearing the production and the
communication of knowledge to the restricted aim of efficiency and
competitiveness. We declare instead knowledge an essential element of
human metabolism, and therefore we demand it must be free of charge
for any individual, freely created, freely communicated. This is the
only way it can be put at the service of humanity, its needs and
aspirations, and not at the service of power. We are against the
factory of knowledge. We also demand the recognition of education as
something which everyone (including supporters of non-market geared
education) is entitled to have a say on and, consequently, empowered
by society to do so.
For this reason we demand the immediate repeal of structural
adjustment policies and the implementation of social spending in
infrastructures controlled by grassroots communities. This is aimed
at the minimisation of invisible work every where in the world.
3. All inclusive rights and right of free mobility.
Power destroys the bridges that people create. Power is afraid of
bridges among the diverse. Power tolerates diversity only to the
extent diversity is packaged and sold as a commodity in gift shops
and museums around the world. Therefore, power tolerates diversity
only to the extent conformity takes its place.
The basic principles:
a) Power uses diversity in order to divide and classify, to
establish who has the right and who has not, to arrange humanity
along a ladder to keep us apart. Power uses "rights" to destroy
bridges that people create among themselves.
b) Power shivers in front of people's mobility, yet power moves
around with no control in the form of capital. Capital move to
destroy bridges. Bridges among the diverse are necessary conditions
of anything that can be considered a people's "victory". Any people's
victory gained from our struggle is always followed by power's
attempt to reverse it. Capital moves to destroy bridges.
Illustrations of the basic principles:
a) An hypothetical victory of guaranteed income in any area of the
world will be followed by power's attempt to define who is entitled
to it, who is the citizen. A victory on the health and education
front will be followed by power's attempt to define who has free
access and who has not. An advance for humanity would be turned into
a further instrument of division. Power destroys bridges that people
create.
b) Higher wages and better conditions of work and life in the
First World mean that capital will attempt to use more immigrant
labour for worse and low paid jobs. Or it will move out of the first
world and go in those areas of the South, and, after having
dispossessed farmers and turned fishing communities in industrial
estates, it can "create jobs" and pay lower wages. When people
struggle in areas of the South, capital moves and go deeper South,
expropriate other farmers, turns sacred indigenous land into mines
and export processing zones.
Capital moves and destroys bridges. Power can succeed in its
strategy to the extent people are not allowed to move, to the extent
immigrant are made illegal and called, like aliens, non-human. Power
forces people to move and yet is afraid of people moving.
The people's strategy.
We aim at preventing power's manouvring. People's strategy is
inclusive, not exclusive. We therefore demand:
1. Free mobility across the globe to all.
2 The principle of guaranteed income must be based on a
territorial concept of citizenship: that is, whoever happens to be in
the territory where this right is won he or she gets it,
independently of their nationality or legal status! This criterion is
fundamental if we want to avoid the use of guaranteed income as a
tool to recreate a wage hierarchy between those who have access and
those who don't have access to it and if we want to fight social
exclusion.
As our demand for reduction in working time lead to the demand for
guaranteed income to meet the needs of those of us who are
non-employed and unwaged workers, so the demand for citizen's income
lead to the demand of territorial rights (with no nationality
discrimination) in order to meet the needs of immigrants, etc. and
avoid further fragmentation along a new, wider, hierarchy.
This territorial rights also applies to other social functions
such as health and education.
3 To the scare mongers who then will waive the flag of "what will
we do with the consequent invasion of immigrants" we can reply in two
ways:
first, with the reminder that no human being is illegal;
second, with the invitation to join us in the struggle for the
abolition of the debt of the South which we demand together with the
closure of IMF and World Bank, and the immediate financing of
policies similar in spirit of those proposed above.
3. Food and energy.
a)
People are still dying of hunger, they lie down and die next to
warehouse filled with food, they die while the export accountants sum
up the gains obtained in precious foreign currency, they die while
they are asked to produce packaged crops for export. The people don't
need the package. The people don't eat precious foreign currency and
are suspicious about its ability to bring them food and freedom. The
elderly tell stories of starvation in the midst of plenty that goes
back hundreds years. The people would rather see that all the people
have the power to feed themselves.
We therefore demand the progressive abolition of the monopoly of
great corporations on world agriculture through the redistribution of
land to landless peasantry who will autonomously decide the use of
them, we demand the reduction of cash-crop strategies and the
priority to food self-sufficiency.
As immediate measure, we demand clear publicity of the genetically
engineered food products (like soy-beans and corn) and its
derivatives. We also demand the constitution of and maximum publicity
to register of the horrors aginst humanity and nature of the world's
agri-business industry. For example, a detailed list of corporations
using genetic engineering (like Monsanto), or promoting powder milk
responsible of the death of thousands of children in the South (as
Nestle) or other such horrors.
We demand that in any school, place of work, neighbourhood,
churche, prison, library and any other place of aggregation, such a
register be available.
b)
The people wants autonomy and freedom. Much of this autonomy and
freedom depends on the ability to move, on the ability to create, on
the ability to communicate, on the ability to produce. Much of this
ability is today accompanied by pollution and destruction,
fragmentation, isolation, exploitation. Much of our attempts to build
a new world and to move within it depends on our ability to access a
source of energy, independently from the power of great corporations
or any other body external to the people themselves.
We therefore demand the progressive abolition of the monopoly of
big corporations on the production and distribution of energy, which
is wasteful, polluting, smelly, dangerous, murderous, the object of
war and of the killing of millions, and constraints the lives of all
of us. We demand maximum development of renewable and self-manageable
sources of energy. We demand political prices for easy access by
everybody to these sources of renewable and self-manageable energy.
As immediate measure, we also demand the constitution of and
maximum publicity to a register of the horrors against humanity and
against nature of the world's energy industry. For example exposure
of anti-human rights and polluting activities of corporations
colluding with dictatorial regimes such as Shell in Nigeria and BP in
Columbia.
We demand that in any school, place of work, neighbourhood,
church, prison, library and any other place of aggregation, such a
register be available.
4. Direct access to the means of production and communication.
Whatever our struggles succeed in obtaining, power will try to
take it away from us. We have already encountered this danger before,
and spelled out some of our counter-strategies. But the danger is
even more insidious. Power uses the market as objective presence
outside our control, a presence that conditions any of our
activities.
We must learn to govern ourselves, we must learn to become master
of our destiny. We must learn to ignore the alien force of money and
the market with new social practices. We must develop practices based
on the patient construction of social nexus not mediated by money,
weaving relation among different local productions and alternative
communication. We are already doing so.
Also in this case we cannot have many illusions, but we can have
dreams and sharp strategic thinking. It is true that the
dismantlement of the welfare state in many regions and the reduction
in social spending every where has been accompanied by the
self-activity of people, the seizure of land, the practices of
self-help, the seizure of opportunities for new collective projects.
However, power is now flirting with many of these experiments, as it
did with workers' co-ops in the past, and calls these experiments
coming from the grassroots "third sector". We do not trust power's
flirting. In the current circumstances it attempts to recuperate our
activity and use it to produce a buffer to the social devastation
produced by unemployment, poverty, social exclusion, low paid jobs,
etc. Power is afraid that its own creation can disrupt the working of
the machine. Power flirts with our solidarity and humanity in order
to make it working for its own purpose. It gives us grants if we
confine ourselves into a role compatible with its policies. It bless
us, if we are willing to recognise its inhuman market might as
legitimate.
We are aware of this, and must go beyond the market-collusion of
this "third sector". A third way is only possible beyond the market
and beyond the state. A third way is only possible in
self-organisation, and self-organisation needs direct access to the
means of production, distribution and exchange.
Therefore, we want to talk about wealth, how it is created, what
is available, haw can we redistribute it, how can we re-organise it,
how can we expropriate it when it is concentrated in few hands and
make it available for new social practices.
If the current power's neoliberal strategies talk about
"privatisation", our strategy cannot counterpoise statalisation to
it, but socialisation. Where to start from? We start from the
beginning and from the humanly obvious, from the inhuman waste
produced by power. Thus, we demand:
De-criminalisation of the right of squatting of non utilised land,
empty building and social expropriation of means of production non
utilised.
The production for profit implies an enormous waste, not only of
consumer goods, but also of factories, machines, warehouses, lands
and building. The processes of restructuring of the 1970s and 1980s,
the continuous running of capital of the 1990s have turned
"wastelands" around cities in all world. Furthermore, the speculation
on the price of land and of the building is based on the abandonment
of these, while many people does not have a house or a piece of land,
while many of us could utilise the space of a non used warehouse in
order to produce cultural, social and otherwise self-organised
productive activities. This demand is therefore against the
capitalist waste and against speculation, and at the same time it
offers us a platform within which we can start thinking about
alternative uses of means of production of different kind and open
ways towards the constitution of new identities de-linked as much as
possible from the capitalist market.
We also demand:
Universal right to the means of social communication.
Us, the people, are interfaced with a machine that never says
enough. The result is a global factory. The interface is made
possible by the great social nexus of our time, money. Money allows
us to substitute itself to direct communication of people, and to
mediate our interaction with each other. Thus, we turn into
commodities. But the people often say enough of this. They build
bridges, and refuse to be things, refuse to be commodities. They talk
to each other instead of having money to do the talking. They tell
each other stories. They talk about actions, and ways forward. Then
power deploys the police, the army, the law, secret services, hired
assassins. But most of all, it deploys lies. There are many lies.
Lies are things said which are not true. Lies are the many things
which are not said and left out of the picture. Both lies are spread
by powerful bodies which manage the world's media in different ways.
In this way, power's attempt to model our many cultures and our
minds is based on the almost total monopoly on the means of
communication. This monopoly is not broken by the substitution of one
media master with two or three, or ten. A dictatorship is still a
dictatorship when there are more than one sharing the role of
dictator. A part from the case of cyberspace, which is a terrain in
which there exists a certain degree of people's autonomy in
communication, radio, newspapers, TV are in the hands of global
capital in collusion with restrictive laws that prevent the creation
of non commercial and self-organised radio and TV. This in a
situation in which the production of music, recorded interviews,
stories, images, has become increasingly easy and potentially open to
everybody. The result is misinformation on people needs and
aspirations, misinformation on people's struggles around the world,
and cultural colonisation.
The only way to get rid of lies is that the people has free access
to the means that allow them to talk and tell their stories, to
organise, to imagine new worlds. The only way people can continue
build bridges among themselves is that they talk to each other, and
listen to each other. The building of a new world that include the
many worlds, the building of new inclusive identities necessarily
passes through the communication among us.
III
We demand what is due to us. Third then, why do we demand it?
We demand what we demand in order to discover each other in our
differences, as part of a collective that power attempts to interface
to the machine that never says enough.
We are demanding what we demand only in order to shift the balance
of power away from power, away from the machine, away from the global
factory.
We demand what we demand only in order to empower ourselves of
what is ours. We empower ourselves of what is ours so as we exercise
power in any aspect of our lives.
Much more than what we demand is ours. But we start little by
little, so as we gain strength in the process, and acquire confidence
in ourselves.
We demand what we demand to continue our struggles on a different
ground.
We demand what we demand as a way to say enough to the machine
that never says enough and to build a world that containts the many
worlds.
We demand what we demand because we are working for a revolution
that makes revolution possible.