Date: Mon, 17 Mar 1997 10:06:53 -0600 (CST)
Subject: E;Cleaver,"Preface" to Encuentro Documents, Mar 7


This posting is being sent to you as a service of 
Accion Zapatista de Austin.

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
 

	


............................................................................
Harry Cleaver
Department of Economics
University of Texas at Austin
Austin, Texas 78712-1173  USA
Phone Numbers: (hm)  (512) 478-8427
               (off) (512) 475-8535   Fax:(512) 471-3510
E-mail: hmcleave-AT-eco.utexas.edu
Cleaver homepage: 
http://www.eco.utexas.edu/faculty/Cleaver/index.html
Chiapas95 homepage:
http://www.eco.utexas.edu/faculty/Cleaver/chiapas95.html
Accion Zapatista homepage:
http://www.utexas.edu/students/nave/
............................................................................





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