MST Poster - March 2016

Raúl Zibechi: Latin America Today, Seen From Below

Original interview published in the June 2013 issue MU Magazine, from the La Vaca popular media collective in Buenos Aires. Translated by Margi Clarke.  Reprinted with permission. Upside Down Word

1- ECUADOR

In Ecuador there is a government that proclaims a “citizen revolution” and that has a constitution with explicit environmental values that speaks of Well Being and the rights of Nature.  At the same time, there are 179 or 180 indigenous leaders and activists accused of sabotage and terrorism for doing what they always have done: blocking roads and occupying public land to protest and stop the mining projects that threaten their livelihood and communities.  The greatest struggle of the social movements right now is to defend water and to halt open-pit mining.  President Correa calls them “full-bellies” (‘pancitas llenas’) who have plenty to eat and can dedicate themselves to criticizing the government and the mining industry alongside their imperialist NGO allies (non-governmental organizations).

The World Cup as Pacification

Christopher McMichael, The Con

The 2014 World Cup is not only a jamboree for the world’s premier national football teams, but it is also a showpiece for the repressive power of the state. In conjunction with the deployment of more than 170 000 of the country’s security forces , stadiums will be patrolled by Israeli-made drones, US-manufactured surveillance robots and officers equipped with facial recognition glasses reporting back to surveillance centres. Brazilian forces have also received training from the mercenary firm Blackwater / Academi, notorious for its violence against Iraqis during the US occupation. In April 2013, the Paramount Group, a South African arms manufacturer, announced that it had sold “hand grenade attack protected” armoured vehicles to the state government of Rio de Janeiro for service at the World Cup and 2016 Olympics.

The New Brazil: Regional Imperialism and the New Democracy

The New Brazil

Reviewed by Levi Gahman, ROAR Magazine 

Raúl Zibechi, The New Brazil: Regional Imperialism and the New Democracy (translated by Ramor Ryan), Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2014.

Brazil is bleeding, and in his book, The New Brazil: Regional Imperialism and the New Democracy, author Raúl Zibechi demonstrates how neoliberalism is responsible for inflicting the wounds. The latest offering from the Uruguayan journalist, militant and political theorist is a perceptive and incisive dressing-down of the capitalist world system, the multinational corporate cartels that drive it, and the ongoing colonial domination that is currently plaguing the masses of Brazil. The book forcefully exhibits how the insatiable drive for capital accumulation continues to dispossess, exploit, and repress the disempowered and voiceless. Zibechi also demonstrates how the historical trajectories of imperialism continue to operate within Brazil during contemporary times, thereby preserving privilege and power for a select minority elite at the expense of both the environment and the majority of Brazilian society.

Autonomy in Brazil: towards a new political culture

By Raúl Zibechi, Roar Magazine

This is the second part of an article by Raul Zibechi on the recent Brazilian uprisings (read part one here). The full piece was originally published by the Observatorio Social de América Latina (OSAL Nº 34). English translation by Ramor Ryan for Upside Down World.

The Pan-American Games as a Rehearsal

“People have the illusion that they will profit from the World Cup events, but the truth is that they will be brutally suppressed,” said Roberto Morales, deputy adviser to Marcelo Freixo of the Socialism and Liberty Party (PSOL), a year and a half before the Confederations Cup. (Zibechi, 2012b) Morales participates in the Comitê Popular da Copa (Popular Committee for the World Cup) that was created during the Pan-American Games in Rio de Janeiro in 2007, when local people began to resist forced relocation to make way for games’ facilities.

Autonomy in Brazil: below and behind the June uprising

by Raúl Zibechi, Roar Magazine

This article was originally published by the Observatorio Social de América Latina (OSAL Nº 34). English translation by Ramor Ryan for Upside Down World.

The huge mobilizations in June 2013 in 353 cities and towns in Brazil came as much a surprise to the political system as to analysts and social bodies. Nobody expected so many demonstrations, so numerous, in so many cities and for so long. As happens in these cases, media analyses were quick off the mark. Initially they focused on the immediate problems highlighted by the actions: urban transport, rising fare prices and the poor quality of service for commuters. Slowly the analyses and perspectives expanded to include the day-to-day dissatisfaction felt by a large part of the population. While there was widespread acknowledgement that basic family income had risen during the last decade of economic growth, social commentators began to focus on economic inclusion through consumption as the root of the dissatisfaction, alongside the persistence of social inequality.

Participatory Democracy in Action: Practices of the Zapatistas and the Movimento Sem Terra

EZLN and the MST by peterrosset

Insurgent Citizenship: Disjunctions of Democracy and Modernity in Brazil

by James Holston, 2007

Insurgent citizenships have arisen in cities around the world. This book examines the insurgence of democratic citizenship in the urban peripheries of São Paulo, Brazil, its entanglement with entrenched systems of inequality, and its contradiction in violence.

James Holston argues that for two centuries Brazilians have practiced a type of citizenship all too common among nation-states--one that is universally inclusive in national membership and massively inegalitarian in distributing rights and in its legalization of social differences. But since the 1970s, he shows, residents of Brazil's urban peripheries have formulated a new citizenship that is destabilizing the old. Their mobilizations have developed not primarily through struggles of labor but through those of the city--particularly illegal residence, house building, and land conflict. Yet precisely as Brazilians democratized urban space and achieved political democracy, violence, injustice, and impunity increased dramatically. Based on comparative, ethnographic, and historical research, Insurgent Citizenship reveals why the insurgent and the entrenched remain dangerously conjoined as new kinds of citizens expand democracy even as new forms of violence and exclusion erode it.

Slum politics: Community leaders, everyday needs, and utopian aspirations in Recife, Brazil

by Martijn Koster and Pieter A. de Vries

This article envisages slum dwellers’ politics in Recife, Brazil as a realm of possibility in which care and recognition are central. Community leaders are its main facilitators as articulators of slum dwellers’ needs and aspirations. The article’s notion of slum politics is an elaboration of Chatterjee’s (2004) ideas on popular politics as a “politics of the governed.” Yet the article critiques the governmentality perspective for its inability to envisage a politics of hope and possibility. It distinguishes among slum politics, governmental politics (projects and programs), and electoral politics (voting), which are entwined and interdependent, but different. Zooming in on a community leader’s urban agriculture project, the article argues that this project, which from an outsiders’ perspective may be considered non-viable, provided slum dwellers with possibilities to strive for community solidarity and personal recognition. Slum politics, the article concludes, is about claiming the right to be counted and recognized, and about the care for the other.

Frantz Fanon's reception in Brazil

Antonio Sérgio Alfredo Guimarães, Penser aujourd'hui à partir de Frantz Fanon, Actes du colloque Fanon, Éditions en ligne, CSPRP - Université Paris 7, Février 2008

Frantz Fanon is a central figure in cultural, post-colonial and African-American studies, whether in the United States, Africa or Europe. We often speak about Fanonian studies, such is the volume of research that has been based on his work. My black Brazilian colleagues and students have the same admiration, respect and devotion for him as their black North American and African brothersHowever, when I looked for material to write this paper, I was met with a conspicuous silence, both in cultural and academic journals which lasted all the way to the mid 1960s.

The Politics of Starving: An Interview with Raj Patel

Chandra Kumar, Upping the Anti

In Stuffed and Starved you write about the international system of food production and distribution. You argue that this system results in starvation and obesity. Can you elaborate?

These problems are an inevitable outcome of the way capitalism controls and distributes food. When you distribute food through a capitalist market, you’re guaranteed two outcomes: people who have money get to eat, and people who don’t have money don’t get to eat. The original imperial idea behind the creation of world food markets was that they would allow people around the world to eat. But under this model people who don’t have money go hungry, and it’s no accident that these people live in the countries where food is grown.

Moving the State: The Politics of Democratic Decentralization in Kerala, South Africa, and Porto Alegre

by Patrick Heller, Politics & Society, Vol. 29 No. 1, March 2001 131-163

Over the past decade, a large number of developing countries have made the transition from authoritarian rule to democracy. The rebirth of civil societies, the achievement of new freedoms and liberties have all been celebrated with due enthusiasm. But now that the euphoria of these transitions has passed, we are beginning to pose the sobering question of what difference democracy makes to development, or to be more precise, whether democracy can help redress the severe social and economic inequalities that characterize developing countries.

Democratic Deepening in Brazil, India, and South Africa

by Patrick Heller, 2010

City of Walls: Crime, Segregation, and Citizenship in São Paulo

“This is an extraordinary treatment of a difficult problem. . . . Much more than a conventional comparative study, ”City of Walls is a genuinely transcultural, transnational work—the first of its kind that I have read."—George E. Marcus, author of "Ethnography Through Thick & Thin

"Caldeira's work is wonderfully ambitious-theoretically bold, ethnographically rich, historically specific. Anyone who cares about the condition and future of cities, of democracy, of human rights should read this book."—Thomas Bender, Director of the Project on Cities and Urban Knowledges

Unlawful occupation : informal settlements and urban policy in South Africa and Brazil

by Marie Huchzermeyer, 2004

In 'Unlawful Occupation', Huchzermeyer provides an international perspective on this problem in Brazil and South Africa. Arguing that the South African paradigm is distorted the author also tracks the development of influential international positions on settlement intervention.