Date: Tue, 02 Jul 1996 19:29:01 +1000
From: pmargin-AT-xchange.apana.org.au (Profit Margin) (by way of sjwright-AT-vaxc.cc.monash.edu.au (Steve Wright))
Subject: Re: Resolution for Intercontinental Gathering


Dear comrades,

Below is the resolution which came out of our regional encounter a few
weeks ago. Any comments would be much appreciated, and can be directed
either to this list or to zap-AT-xchange.apana.org.au

I hope that one or more of the other members of the Melbourne Committee
will also soon offer their reflections upon the encounter itself.

Till we get it right,

Steve
Committee in Solidarity with Chiapas & Mexico (EZLN)
Melbourne, Australia

__________________________________


Resolution of the Melbourne Committee in Solidarity with Chiapas & Mexico
(EZLN), prepared for the Intercontinental Gathering 'Against Neo-liberalism
and for Humanity' being held in Chiapas, Mexico.

"Two, Three, Many Chiapas"

1.  Neo-liberalism has assumed a variety of names in our region:
economic rationalism, restructuring, privatization, enclosure,
structural adjustment.  In each case, it has attempted to fragment
long-standing notions of community in favour of market relations, and
to shift the price of "development" on to the backs of those with
little to sell beyond their ability to work.

2.  Neo-liberalism is society subjected to totalitarianism of
capitalist expropriation and accumulation of wealth, space, time,
energy, the environment.  Multinational corporate capital can now
choose through which State apparatuses it can exercise power.  The
overwhelming majority of us are the new exploited class of precarious
workers, unwaged workers, and the immiserated, trapped in the factory
and the factory of society, integrated into global streams of money,
commodities and power.

3.  The struggles of the 20th Century that led to "reformism" are
over.  This is now the period of "counter-reformism".

4.  In Australasia, neo-liberalism has meant:
4.1 On going efforts to break the ties between indigenous people and
the land.
4.2 A marked growth in the productivity of paid workers, especially
through full scale automation, accompanied not by shorter working
weeks for all, but rather by mass unemployment, rapid fall in real
wages, and an increasingly precarious, casualized labour market.
4.3 The partial dismantling of social services, leading in turn to an
increase of unpaid work in both the home and in the paid workplace.
The consolidation of the regimes of social benefits to force the
unwaged towards increasingly degraded forms of work.
4.4 The growing subordination of the official structures of the
labour movement, social and student movements, to capital and the
state.
4.5 Further polarisation of wealth and power.
4.6 The complete reduction of the environment to a mere source of
"profitable" raw materials.

5.  Across Oceania, neo-liberalism has meant:
5.1 A new wave of enclosures of the land and the destruction of
traditional social structures.  Like the 18th Century enclosures that
forcibly uprooted the peoples of Europe and led to the colonisation
of the region, populations are being "cleared" in order to make room
for "profitable investment".
5.2     Development and its necessary corollary 'underdevelopment'
based on mining, logging, cash cropping, and nuclear testing.
5.3 The recognition of the persistence of forms of colonialism which
still have not been seriously attacked, and neo-colonialism,
alongside the direct subordination from transnational and economic
organisations in the form of IMF/SAP, Australian Aid Programs and
military forces in the region which increasingly subordinate these
countries to the global economy.
5.4 Continued militarisation and nuclear terror.
5.5 Destruction of community control and autonomy, for example, moves
to abolish communal land ownership.

6.  In the Asia-Pacific as a whole, neo-liberalism has meant:
6.1 Regional trading blocs, and the ascendancy of globalizing forces
over national elites.
6.2 A range of military alliances, and the militarisation of areas of
resistance.
6.3 Development has meant the continual movement into the hinterland,
specifically from North-East Asia to the South-East, in search of
cheaper workers.
6.4 The system of free trade zones has meant concentrated areas of
extreme low wage employment, with particular suffering for women and
children.
6.5 Nuclear testing, and the development of nuclear sickness and
terror.
6.6 Population control through repressive family planning programs,
involving massive coercion and physical abuse.

7.  It is said that we have already entered the twenty first century,
and that this is the century of the Asia-Pacific.  It is the
"frontier" of global capitalism, accumulating unprecedented wealth
and unprecedented poverty and suffering.  The tendencies of the Asia-
Pacific remain confused, disjointed, uneven, and contradictory.

8.  Fortunately, opposition to neo-liberalism in all its forms has
been widespread within our region.  Resistance is widespread.  In
order to make resistance more effective a broader understanding of
neo-liberalism is required.  "We" remain a perpetual contradiction to
neo-liberalism, in the struggle for land, over paid work, for our
communities, against colonialism, war, and ecological construction.

9.  While in Australasia opposition has primarily taken the form of
struggles to defend traditional levels of income, working conditions,
and social services, it has also assumed new and unexpected forms,
such as mass protests against the Gulf War.

10.1    In Oceania, struggle has meant a defence of traditional
communities and land against encroachment and dispossession and a
struggle against the model of economic development based on the cash
economy, centred on mining, logging and nuclear testing and leading
to degradation of the land and proletarianization.  Under conditions of
exploitation and oppression and continued colonisation and neo-
colonisation, struggles of the region have frequently taken ruling
elites by surprise.  These struggles range from subterranean
unrecognised struggle such as the social solidarity of Wantok in PNG
and squatting in Pacific Island communities to open rebellion.  These
include, rebellions and struggles in Bouganville, East Timor and West
Papua, the labour movements of PNG and Fiji, and the uprisings of
people in Kanaky and Taihiti.
10.2    The rejection of these forms of predominant capitalist
development, especially in Bouganville, has assumed a revolutionary
form and is beginning to assume revolutionary forms in other areas.

11. In the broader Asia-Pacific, opposition to neo-liberalism has
been felt in the resistance of the new industrial working classes,
learning their power to disrupt production.  Women and young people
are in the forefront of many of these struggles.  Indigenous people,
peasants, and urban communities fight to defend the spaces and
cultures they have built, or they have traditionally maintained.
Throughout the region, struggles both civil and armed, sometimes the
two intimately entwined (eg. Burma), force the state and capital on
to the defensive.  Such struggles blossom into movements for reform,
democratisation (of the state and society), human rights, and even
into moments of revolution (eg. Kwangu 1980).

12. There has been a marked and growing tendency for struggles to
focus on the regional (and indeed global) bases of exploitation,
destruction and oppression.  A thematic has emerged of
transnationalization of resistance, emblematic in the ecological
movement, human rights' struggles, the anti-nuclear movement, the
indigenous movements, and the increasingly international links of the
workers and the poor.

13. Unfortunately, these various movements of resistance and moments
of rebellion have not yet found the means to move definitively toward
an ensemble of alternative projects.  Radicalisation of popular
struggle has in fact occurred.  And it still occurs.  But so does the
process of containment by the state, capital, and various
bureaucracies.

14. Chiapas has taught us that outside the State and against the
market a rediscovery of democracy and community is possible.  What we
continue to search for is a language and a way of seeing that will
allow the richness of struggles and resistance to resonate one to the
other, to chart some mutual, complementary paths beyond the logic of
neo-liberalism.  While that search is now more pressing than ever
before, we have also begun to learn that Chiapas is perhaps nearer
than we think.  Struggles circulate.  Chiapas is a breathing space,
as the Zapatista movement is a "wake-up call".

For civil society...
For the new revolution...




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