Category Archives: decolonial

Decolonizing the Imagination

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How can we develop David Graeber’s insights into the importance of the imagination as a tool of resistance? Regular readers with good memories may recall a discussion about the Charter of the Forest (1217) that came out of my reading of Hardt and Negri’s Declaration. What gives me some pause about this intersection is that, while the Charter did inscribe some freedoms, it does so in the context of feudalism. While that might ironically be congenial to the present-day neo-feudalism of rents and debts, it’s not a platform for the current global social movement.

On the other hand, I have long thought, in the tradition of Tony Benn and Christopher Hill, that the Diggers do have something to offer here. So on a quiet day, I thought I might develop the thought for what it’s worth. It turns out to pose some interesting questions about the tension between the direct and the representation.

During the English Revolution (1642-49), a range of radical sects saw the end of Charles I’s monarchy as the beginning of new era and the end of slavery. Their goals were exemplified by the Diggers, inspired and led by Gerrard Winstanley (1609-76), a sometime Baptist and itinerant preacher. Winstanley was working as a cow-hand when he felt himself called upon:

As I was in a trance not long since, divers matters were present to my sight, which must not here be related. Likewise I heard these words, Worke together. Eat bread together; declare all this abroad.

If Winstanley understood this as inspiration, it is also what we would now call imagination, a vision of collectivity at a time of social, economic and political crisis, following the execution of the king. He was inspired to send a letter to General Fairfax, the army commander, asking

Whether all Lawes that are not grounded upon equity and reason, not giving a universal freedom to all, but respecting persons, ought not to be cut off with the King’s head? We affirm they ought.

This remarkable radicality was typical of his style, which insisted on following through first principles, all of which can be derived from the first sentence of his first pamphlet, written as his small group were beginning to reclaim the common and waste land on St George’s Hill, Surrey:

In the beginning of time, the great creator Reason made the earth to be a common treasury for all.

It’s worth looking closely at this sentence. Divinity was expressed as rationality, present in each individual, not as an external deity, as the forces of “vision, voice and revelation,” a trinity of the imagination. “Earth,” or land, is assumed to be the common property of all, the treasury of a land without a state. Notably, Winstanley wrote “common” not “the commons.” Having experienced the Absolutist monarchy of Charles I, he would have been very aware of the hierarchical ordering of feudalism and the setting aside of certain spaces as “the commons” did not satisfy his understanding of all land as common.

His vision was a relay of divine inspiration, internal rights, and righteousness to be grounded in a common sense of equality. Although the Diggers claimed to be restoring justice to its condition before the Fall of Man, their actions were practical and modern. By cultivating land on an equal basis and denying the possibility of exclusive ownership of the land, Winstanley envisaged sustainable small-scale cultivation as the basis of social life. His non-violent form of resistance was to advocate that workers refuse to labor for others, a refusal of the wage system at its beginnings. Historian Christopher Hill called this action the first general strike. Indeed, in a manner familiar to present-day social movements, Winstanley declared: “Action is the life of all, and if thou dost not act, thou dost nothing.”

It was in response to such theories of radical direct democracy that Thomas Hobbes defined the state as Leviathan (1651). The Leviathan was the figure of the commonwealth, the social contract by which individuals arrogate their right of governance to the sovereign. Of the three possible modes of commonwealth—monarchy, aristocracy and democracy—Hobbes was convinced that monarchy was by far the most effective.

Frontispiece to Leviathan

So the figure seen in the famous frontispiece to his book represents the monarchy as a living form of the social contract. The body of the King is composed of hundreds of other bodies, his subjects, combined to make the whole known as Leviathan. Hobbes imagined the Leviathan as a demi-god, like Hercules and other creatures of legend. He was interested in such “compound creatures” as he called them, as a special instance of the power of imagination, or Fancy. This was not simply an artistic or creative attribute:

whatsoever distinguisheth the civility of Europe, from the Barbarity of the American savages, is the workmanship of Fancy.

Representational images are created by this “fancy” meaning:

 any representation of one thing by another.

So for all the fact that his Leviathan was filled with little people, Hobbes was civilized because he adhered to the principles of representation, whereas the “savage” believes in the direct, whether in democracy or image making. So Hobbes places a challenge: all representation is colonial.

So we might want to look into “direct” forms of acting and making, as we have of course been doing, “Direct” imaging might include photography, video, performance and other media where there has been a question about whether it is “mechanical,” or “simply” imitative or other phrases that tend in the direction of the colonial critique like “slavish” (as in imitation) or “apeing” as in copying but also as in simians.

Does this mean we must jettison all media that represent? Certainly not–but we do have to think about how to decolonize them, to disadhere them from the elite privilege they have long held, and, yes, I am thinking about painting here.

For the state colonized the land but also the faculty of imagination itself as representation. It designated sovereignty and colonial authority in and as the power to represent. Representation was a matter of sign formation, for Hobbes distinguished the mark, which is recognizable only to its maker, and the sign, which is legible to others. The opposite of authority was not, then, the primitive pre-social contract condition of the fictional “war of all against all” but the opposite of representation, which is to say, direct democracy. These ideas became equated with madness, which Michel Foucault called the “colonizing reason” of the West. By 1660 the British monarchy was restored and the first law code for the enslaved was published in the British colony of Barbados in 1661. Winstanley had called the revolution, the “world turned upside down.” Plantation monarchy restored it. Nonetheless, the common had preceded it.

Mindful Occupation

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The name of this post is also that of community of radical mental health activists. Funded by Kickstarter, they have produced a new publication called Rising Up Without Burning Out. The project seeks to direct the movement’s attention to the normative mental health standards that police the boundaries of the social, to challenge those norms, and to think about how the movement should care for itself. It made me think about the sustaining of the movement, about the history of radical movements and radical mental health, and some lessons that these histories might provide for our “mindful occupation.”

Radical mental health differs from standard psychiatry in not seeing people as divided into “normal” and “pathological” mental states. The American Psychiatric Association, meeting this weekend in Philadelphia, produces the massive Diagnostic and Statistical Manual containing thousands of conditions and diseases for which the extensive pharmacopeia of psychotropic drugs can be prescribed. It’s huge business from the $500 an hour consults to the billion dollar annual revenues of drugs like Celexa and Lexapro.

By contrast, radical mental health first sees a person, not a set of brain chemicals or even, for those who can afford therapy, sets of personal histories, but as a place of

convergence of social, emotional, cultural, physical, spiritual, historical and environmental elements….We don’t have to see ourselves as separate beings, but rather in terms of relationships.

It would remind us that psychiatry classified “homosexuality” as a mental disease as recently as 1973 and that gender-queer and trans people still have to negotiate the psychiatric diagnostic mill. Going further back, there was actually a so-called disease that afflicted the enslaved in the U.S. known as “drapetomania”: the compulsion to run away.

In almost all other cultures, alter conditions of mental health have been afforded respect as part of the sacred, a gift of divination, as contact with spirit worlds, or as possessors of “dangerous gifts.” One mark of the modern “West” is its designation of such people as “insane,” requiring treatment and restraint. Our isolating and cash-mediated society clearly produces the multiple symptoms of depression, bipolar disorder and schizophrenia that it then medicates into passivity. That does not mean that people do not suffer and experience intense personal difficulties. At the same time, Occupy people are widely called crazy, obsessed, lazy and degenerate–all forms of mental health diagnosis. Evidence of this was claimed to be the prevalence of people in need that were attracted to the encampments and whose behavior did not change when they were there.

As Mindful Occupation points out, one occasion when medications can be helpful is when a person’s symptoms have gone unaddressed for a long period, like those who made their way to Liberty and other encampments. They also describe how people sleeping outside are likely to become sleep-deprived due to discomfort, light and noise–to say nothing of the cops. As sleep deprivation is widely recognized as a form of torture, it is not surprising that one simple way to mitigate symptoms may be to help the person get sleep, which may require sleep aids. Much of the pamphlet consists of sensible and practical ways to sustain ourselves without “burning out,” that combination of exhaustion and depression which has been a little in evidence post May Day.

Understanding the production of mental illness as a disciplinary mechanism of hierarchical societies has long been a feature of decolonial and radical movements but it has not been prominent in the Occupy movement. Perhaps the very claim to have a more rational understanding of political economy and the crisis in some way precludes it. Looking back at some earlier instances of anti-psychiatry can suggest what there might be to gain by developing such a project.

Working as a psychiatrist in colonial Algeria, the Caribbean radical Frantz Fanon enacted what were then untried therapies in his hospital at Blida. At the time, colonial psychiatry held that Algerians were, to quote a 1952 textbook a

primitive people [that] cannot and should not benefit from the advances of European civilization.

Fanon decolonized his building by allowing everyday North African activities to happen as normal, meaning here also as if they were normal, in contrast to the French presumption they were not. There was a café, a newspaper and even a mosque for people in therapy. The traditional segregation between “patients” and “medical staff” was ended, with everyone eating together. Fanon even ran a cinema evening.

The creation of this “safer space” was without precedent in colonial Algeria. When the revolution began in 1954, it was attributed by the leading colonial psychiatrist to “xenophobia against the occupying race.” Fanon had to leave for Tunis, where he created a clinic for Algerian refugees that made use of visualization techniques for children that are now regarded as standard.

Drawing made by an Algerian child in Fanon's Tunis clinic 1961

The drawings show violence, even torture. While some were typical child’s drawings as above, others were more experimental as in this cutout

Cut out showing searches and torture

The point here is two-fold. What can seem extremely radical in one moment can come appear entirely unremarkable not long afterwards: the idea that children’s drawings are therapeutic and reveal the source of their trauma is now a Hollywood cliché, after all. At the same time, Fanon’s clinic was militant only in its acceptance of the right of those he worked with to choose their own everyday experience over one that was expected of them.

Lecturing in Tunis, Fanon described those classified as insane as

the ‘stranger’ to society..an anarchistic element.

In this view, the psychiatrist worked as “the auxiliary of police” in these situations. Fanon sought to create a “sociotherapy”:

a society in the hospital itself.

What matters, then, is that Occupy create a validating form of the social that allows the anarchic to remain anarchic by means of enacting our own everyday. That’s why mutual aid, food, education and other such axes of every day sustaining have been so vital to the movement. None of these should be institutionalized, even the occupation tactic, until we can decolonize them.

Occupy Passover

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Why is tonight different from all other nights?–and all other Passover nights? Because tonight we don’t say “next year in Jerusalem.” We say “next year in Cairo.” Tonight we do not think about Occupy but about the ongoing colonial occupations around the world that continue to oppress. And tonight we hope for another future.

In the traditional Passover service, the gathering say “Next year in Jerusalem,” the utopian wish of the diaspora. The “Jerusalem” of the Haggadah (the text used during the service) was interpreted by many modern progressives in the manner of Blake as a place without slavery, the place of emancipation.

The Liberation Haggadah

Often, such affinities are felt to have been expressed by the work done by Jews during the U. S. Civil Rights Movement.

The Sarajevo Haggadah, noted for its beautiful illustrations was the exemplar of how the book could also mobilize cross-cultural alliances. It was hidden and protected from the Nazis during World War II by local people, including a Muslim cleric. Later it was again saved from damage during the devastating “ethnic” civil war in the former Yugoslavia.

The Sarajevo Haggadah

These affirmative histories feel remote from modern Jerusalem as it is ruled under what is, to use Jimmy Carter’s telling phrase, a “new apartheid.” In Jerusalem, Orthodox Jewish men actually send Jewish women to the back of the bus, as if to say that they want to erase the Civil Rights history.

So today the anti-slavery “Jerusalem” is somewhere much more like Cairo after the Tahrir revolution than it is the city of that name.

Perhaps no visual example is more telling than this picture:

The "separation wall" in Bethlehem.

It shows the city of Bethlehem, named as the birthplace of Jesus, a city of importance for Jews as the seat of King David and long part of the Arab Caliphate. Now it is divided by the separation wall that epitomizes the key tactic of global counterinsurgency: once you have identified your insurgent, separate them from the “good” population.

There’s so much writing about the disastrous consequences of Israeli policies, above all from progressive Israelis like Ariella Azoulay, Eyal Weizman and Adi Ophir, that there’s perhaps no need to dwell on them. Except that it has now become clear that Israel has embarked on a “necropolitics,” a sovereign determining of who it is that must die, which now extends to other nations. The entirely unsurprising “October surprise” of the 2012 election will be the Israeli attack on Iran, telegraphed and planned by Benjamin Netanyahu, whose contempt for Obama might be enough to get him on the Supreme Court. Just because we can see this coming does not mean it will not have most serious consequences.

Not least will be a renewed clampdown on all anti-militaristic, anti-hierarchical politics. It should be remembered that the tent city in Tel Aviv was evicted long before Liberty Plaza. Only you can’t call it the Israeli Occupy because that already exists.

Looking back, as one does on ceremonial days, I reflect on the opportunity that the Oslo Accords appeared to present in 1993. Among them was the possibility for a secular Jewish identity that was not linked to Israel and also not shamed by it. At the time, the late lamented Edward Said indicated that Oslo was going to be a disaster. Along with many others, I could see that but hoped that it would lead to something better. It did not and the possibility to play with being “Jewish” disappeared as well. Israeli officials do so much in the name of “Jewish” and not just Judaism that it would be sophistry to do otherwise.

Nonetheless, there is of course a new Haggadah this year, translated and commented upon by earnest, bearded young men from Brooklyn of the Jonathan Safran Foer kind. Actually, it is edited by Foer.

The Haggadah says that

in every generation, a person is obligated to view himself as if he were the one who went out of Egypt

I don’t want to do that now. I want to stay in the “Egypt” that we’ve seen since 2011, the Egypt of Tahrir. I want to decolonize Palestine and finally bring an end to slavery. L’chaim.

X-marks

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For all its success, Occupy has had conceptual failures as well. So far, the movement has been aware of the need to address indigenous issues but–at least in New York–we have not got very far with it. By the same token, while people are aware of climate change, it’s been hard to turn it into an action agenda item. It could be that the accelerating disaster of the Keystone XL pipeline serves as the catalyst to bring these crucial questions to the forefront.

Yesterday two votes in the Senate showed that the Keystone advocates continue to gain ground. A proposal to void the requirement for a federal permit to cross the US-Canada border won by 56-42, falling only on the filibuster rule. That means that eleven “Democrats” voted for the pipeline and with two Republicans absent, Big Oil needs only two more votes to get this passed. While the White House is oddly touting this as a victory, a quick look at the list of pro-pipeline Democrats reveals a major overlap with seats the party needs to retain to hold the Senate. Translation: expect a “compromise” soon.

Environmentalist Bill McKibben has become a convert to direct action. Yesterday he wrote:

we need to stop just playing defense against bad projects and go on the offense. The next clear target is subsidies for fossil fuels–why are we paying the richest industry on earth billions in taxpayer dollars?

The Black Hills Sioux Nation Treaty Council, along with the Oglala Sioux Tribe, have already passed legislation against the Keystone XL oil pipeline and have adopted the Cochabamba Mother Earth Accord. Debra White Plume explains why in this video.

Now Oglala Lakota people from Pine Ridge in South Dakota have started to take direct action against the pipeline by placing their bodies in the way of trucks carrying its equipment. This Monday 5 March, as Brenda Norrell’s blog Censored News reports:

Lakotas Alex White Plume, Debra White Plume, Andrew Ironshell, Sam Long Black Cat and Don Iron Shell, were arrested at a blockade of tar sands pipeline trucks. Debra White Plume, released from jail in Kyle, South Dakota, said Monday night: “We formed a blockade to stop tar sands oil mine equipment from passing our lands. The truckers told us the corporation office from Calgary, Alberta, Canada and the State of South Dakota made a deal to save the truckers $50,000 per truck, there were two trucks, from having to pay $100,000,” Debra White Plume told Censored News. “There were about 50 to 75 people on the blockade at the village of Wanbli in Eagle Nest District on the northern side of the Pine Ridge rez.” Debra White Plume said the trucks were coming from Texas and going to Alberta, Canada to the tar sands oil mine. “They each carried a ‘treater vessel’ which is used to separate gas and oil and other elements.”

The protestors were, ironically enough, arrested by Tribal Police for disorderly conduct, the catch-all offense that has been widely used by the NYPD.

No doubt it was entirely a coincidence that the next day the New York Times ran one of those long social issue pieces about alcoholism in indigenous populations: on the very same Pine Ridge reservation. This is not to minimize the issue but there was no mention of the Keystone action, the questions of sovereignty and Treaty observance that it raises.

I’m reminded of Scott Richard Lyons’s work on the signing of those treaties and the x-marks that were used to designate native signers:

The x-mark is a contaminated and coerced sign of consent made under conditions that are not of one’s making. It signifies power and a lack of power, agency and a lack of agency.

Lyon suggests that all the Indian nations are in effect x-marks. It might be interesting to think of Occupy sites as x-marks as well, places where we try to do what we want under conditions that are not of own making. And then get evicted whenever they want. One of those conditions is that we occupy land that is already occupied and cannot do otherwise.

Decolonize Wall St

This problem was and is recognized but has been hard to address. An issue like Keystone allows us to demonstrate actual solidarity with First Nation peoples in Canada and indigenous peoples in the US, creating a new space between Occupy and Un-Occupy that could be where we should go next, a horizontal action against the inequality that is constitutive of the settler colony.

 

January 25: (Re)Occupy Egypt

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Tahrir Reoccupied 1-25-12

Today we salute the courage of Egypt, one year on from the beginning of the revolution.
If we want to remind ourselves why the legend of Antigone risking her own life to bury her brother seems so relevant today, look at this new video by Mosireen, the inspiring Cairo video collective (I first embedded this last night: this morning, it had been sub-titled–amazing).

The dead body of a protestor, Mohammed Tousi, is hauled to the side of Tahrir and left in the garbage. His niece speaks of her grief, followed by his mother. It becomes clear that he was killed during the eviction of the midan or encampment in Tahrir on November 20, 2011. Tousi was beaten to death and hauled to the garbage: “Is this what they call honoring the dead?,” asks his sister. In a further evocation of the judicial killing of Antigone, she then criticises the walling-in of the square by SCAF, calling it a “separation wall,” like that used by Israel. But the conclusion is firm–this violence will not drive the protestors away but motivate them to renew their struggle. These women, veiled or not, want justice for their murdered son/brother/relative–Antigones all. The final long pan around the room shows the entire group, all radicalized, all looking for ways to claim their rights.

Today, and in the run-up to the anniversary, this vow to seek justice has been fulfilled.

Here’s a remarkable account by Ahdaf Souief, the novelist/activist of Mosireen’s recent action:

The campaign against SCAF has gained huge traction over the past three weeks. Inspired by anger at the mid-December killings of protesters in the parliament area, young revolutionaries held a press conference called Kazeboon (“they lie”). It was a packed and emotional meeting. They screened a film by the Mosireen Collective that showed the generals making statements – and the actions that belied them. A young woman gave an impassioned speech holding up a piece of fabric soaked in the blood of a protester: Rami Hamdi. The film ended with the camera slowly tracking the trail of blood that had poured out of the young man as his friends tried to carry him to safety. On each side of the blood the pathway had been marked with small stones. At intervals there were young people sitting by the trail. Kazeboon is now a countrywide campaign where young people screen footage of the military’s deeds in streets and squares and universities – despite intimidation, and often violence.

You can download all of Mosireen’s films here. Do it today, show them widely.

Women wearing V for Vendetta in Tahrir today

As the news today shows, the reoccupation of Tahrir is underway, huge crowds have moved in. “The revolution is on its way to Tahrir”, was the chant. Earlier they were singing “Bread, freedom and human dignity, bread, freedom and social justice.” The continued crisis in basic food provision drives the revolution as it has since 2010.  Above, women using Anonymous masks as veils complicate and repurpose the debates over masking and veiling.

The young man mic checking early on in the video from Ahram Online says:

Yes, we’re chanting against the military./

We’ve come back again and this time we’re not leaving.

The slogan of January 25, 2011 “the people and the military are one hand” has gone. It’s now clear to the revolution that SCAF is the regime. Keep watching, it’s not over: follow events online via Twitter #J25 and please ignore The New York Times.

J19 History of the Anonymous: Steps to Direct Democracy

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Oliver Ressler "We Have A Situation Here" (2011)

To the anonymous, as I’ve often said, the police declaim: “move on, there’s nothing to see here.” To form a subject capable of enacting a different history, the anonymous claim at once the right to look and the right to be seen. When I was writing my book, I found it difficult to even imagine this scenario under the pressure of the neo-liberal state of exception. Now it’s possible to think about breaking that process down into a set of steps.

Take the emblematic case of Mohammed Bouazizi, the fruit-seller whose self-immolation on December 17, 2010, set in motion the Tunisian Revolution and from there the global Occupy movement. He lived in a small town called Sidi Bouzid, the epitome of anonymous for many even inside Tunisia. Some 80,000 people live there, and work centers on huge new olive groves planted by the state (M 15) [for references, see below]

Sidi Bouzid to Gafsa (Tunisia)

About 100 km south-west of Sidi Bouzid is Gafsa, a major phosphate-mining town. In the 1970s, the first cultural dissent against the regime began there, with the formation of an alternative theatre group, including performers like Fadhel Jaziri and Jalila Baccar (M 146). The mining company was given over to members of the ruling clan, specifically relatives of Leila Trabelsi, Ben Ali’s legendarily corrupt wife (G 51). So extreme was the corruption that the entire city rose up on January 5, 2008, protesting unemployment, corruption and repression. Although the occupation lasted for six months, there was a total news blackout. The one journalist who did report it was jailed for four months.

So Mohammed Bouzazi was unlikely to have been as politically naive as he was often presented. Western reports first claimed that he was an unemployed graduate–like many others–but soon retrenched to saying he was a simple fruit-seller. According to Martine Gozlan’s book on the 2011 revolution, the truth was in-between. Mohammed had dropped out of high school to support his family but did want to go to university. One of those he supported, his sister Leila, was in her third year of university ( G 16). For Gozlan, the family epitomized the clash of the “two Tunisias.” There was a high degree of university training with 34% of the population having a degree. On the other hand, the economic crisis since 2008 had led to price rises in basic necessities, mass unemployment and the withdrawal of state ownership in favor of privatization.

However, one year earlier in the city of Monastir, a young man selling doughnuts had also had enough of the police and immolated himself in front of a state building. Nothing happened (M 40). A year later, Mohammed Bouzazi repeated the act, whether in conscious imitation or not, and Tunisia moved to a revolutionary situation. Hamadi Kaloutcha, who blogs as Sofiane Belhaj, is clear that the difference was simple: the diffusion of Facebook and other forms of peer-to-peer communication (M 31, 41). It’s quite unpopular in digital circles here to make this case but Sofiane is not saying that Facebook caused the revolution, only that it allowed for the dissemination of information.

It’s interesting to see that, as the revolution got under way, some of the signature gestures of Occupy were already being used. On January 9, 2011, striking students at Sousse held a general assembly (G 36). In Tunis four days later, key phrases from the national anthem were repeated across the length of the massive demonstration in the manner we now call the people’s mic (G 43).

Back in Gafsa, the workers occupied the phosphate mines again, creating a tent city,

and there were demonstrations, including Che Guevara banners.

By now we should be learning to be careful to make claims of originality. But the emerging story of the Tunisian revolution suggests the following pattern for the emergence of direct democracy:

  • economic crisis combined with government and corporate indifference and/or corruption
  • a dramatic difference in rhetoric and practice–human rights were taught in all Tunisian schools but not even minimal press freedom existed before 2011
  • state violence to repress dissent
  • peer-to-peer electronic communications to alert people to what’s happening
  • a generalized use of horizontal tools that have been used by a few in specific locations and circumstances

Looking at the list, it’s interesting to see how closely the pattern has been replicated in Western capitalist countries. Let’s hope it does not take more violence for people to want to make a generalized use of direct democracy here.

references:

G: Martine Gozlan, Tunisiee, Algérie, Maroc: La colère des peuples (Paris: L’Archipel, 2011)

M: Abdelwahab Meddeb, Printemps de Tunis: La métamorphose de l’Histoire (Paris: Albin Michel, 2011).

Re-(Un)Occupy the Square: Chiapas

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A re-(un)occupation of the public square is underway. The local population has reclaimed its space, forbidden drug and alcohol use and taken over the property of a Canadian mining company. Zuccotti? No, Chiapas, Mexico.

The Movement for Justice in El Barrio has circulated a report filed by Hermann Bellinghausen from Chiapas in La Jornada (1/14/12):

Organized residents of Siltepec Municipality, in the Sierra Madre of Chiapas, closed off access to the municipality to beer companies and distributers of alcohol and drugs, as well as Canadian mining and logging companies that exploit their territory. They also closed 18 cantinas (bars) and seriously questioned the police, the mayor and the state’s agent from the Public Ministry, who protect the criminals. Starting this Thursday [1/12/12] they decided to organize “as a municipal headquarters [country seat], in coordination with the ejidos, rancherías, barrios and colonias, to exercise control of our territory without the intervention of the political parties and the government.”

The action has been taken by Luz y Fuerza del Pueblo [People’s Light and Power] in the Sierra region. They have closed bars, banned drug sales and excluded polleros (migrant traffickers) from the area. However: “the Black Fire [sic] mining company has been coming in at night and has already covertly taken eight trucks of a mineral from the Campo Aéreo barrio (neighborhood) of the Honduras ejido [collective farm]. We warn that we are no longer going to permit this anywhere in the Sierra.”

They note that last year “their compañero Salomón Ventura Morales was shot dead,
in his home in the barrio of Las Cruces, ‘by clearly identifiable people’. Enough already (ya basta), they conclude, “of corruption, injustices and secret deals between criminals and authorities.”

The Canadian mining company in question is not part of Brookfield Asset Management, owner of Zuccotti Park but Blackfire Exploration, who even claim to be “benefiting the local indigenous people of Chiapas.” It looks harmless enough on the company website:

Blackfire open barite mine, Chiapas. View of the open mine

Let’s see what happens if we turn the camera around:

Alternative view of the open mine

Not so good. In addition to this devastation, Blackfire have been accused of colluding with the murder of activist Mariano Abarca Robeldo in December 2009.

What is barite anyway? According to Wikipedia, three-quarters of mined barite is “a weighting agent for drilling fluids in oil and gas exploration to suppress high formation pressures and prevent blowouts.” The mined barite is, then, simply a component of further drilling for oil and gas, especially in the process known as “fracking” or hydraulic fracturing. New York State is about to decide on whether to permit fracking and Pennsylvania has already allowed it across the state. It pumps water under high pressure into rock with a secret combination of toxic chemicals in order to “fracture” the rock and release natural gas for human use. It’s a combination of environmental disaster in its own right and continued obsession with fossil fuel-powered growth.

So the occupation by Luz y Fuerza of their own territory is a defense against such devastation and the multinational corporate greed that motivates OWS. The focus on primary extraction should remind us that global capital is not all about finance–some of it is old fashioned “primitive accumulation,” as Marx would have had it. What is striking is how that extraction now leads immediately into new fossil fuel extraction to power, amongst other things, computers like the one I’m using now.