From my friend and mentor who publishes Lucha Indigena, indigenous fight. take a look here
http://www.luchaindigena.com/http://www.luchaindigena.com/
Editorial
BUILDING
ALTERNATIVE POWER
The
present reality is that it is big capital -- the transnational corporations and
financial institutions -- that truly rules the world. Meanwhile, the states -- both the USA and in Europe
-- are in a grave economic crisis. The
beneficiaries of this crisis are the banks and other financial institutions.
The crisis is not just economic but
also political. The United Nations
Organization (UNO) has been displaced by NATO, a military organization headed
by the United States. The Organization of American States (OAS) is
discredited. "Legitimate"
capitalism is more and more tied to the drug trade by way of "financial
havens" that also serve to launder funds arising from corruption, as in
the case of the Spanish government.
So-called "international law" is trampled underfoot by the USA and its
European servitors, as in the case of Evo Morales's flight.
The crisis is environmental as well,
as seen in the global warming that worsens every year. In each of the UNO-sponsored meetings, this
is affirmed by the very countries most responsible for climate change. They say so openly, and the only question
under debate is how to profit from the global disaster. The environmental crisis becomes steadily
worse, thanks to technical and scientific advances, with the cutting down of
rain forests, open-pit mining, the increasing use of transgenics, the
extraction of hydrocarbons, the construction of hydroelectric plants and
rapid-transit systems, the transport of food from one continent to another,
etc.
Furthermore, it is a moral
crisis. The Nobel Peace Prize was
awarded to the head of state of the world's most bellicose country and later to
the European Union, the world's main arms exporter. The UNO's Food & Agriculture Organization
(FA)) awarded its 2013 World Food Prize to Monsanto and two other
representatives of agricultural biotechnology, mortal enemies of human health.
The policy of priestly celibacy,
together with the Catholic Church's operation of schools, has led to a pattern
of sexual abuse of children by clergy protected by the church hierarchy. This and other immoral practices within the Vatican led to
the resignation of one pope and his replacement by another with a known close
association with a South American dictatorship.
Meanwhile, the Catholic religion continues its discriminatory practices
against women. Other Christian churches
condemn the cultural practices of the world's native peoples, while the system
identifies the Muslim religion with terrorism.
The cases of Bradley Manning and
Edward Snowden, as well as the prisoners held in Guantánamo, are a great
scandal that shows the crisis in its moral dimension.
All signs indicate that this is the
final crisis of the capitalist system in its ultimate, neoliberal form. It is quite plain that capitalism cannot
survive this crisis. What we do not know
is how it will die. Perhaps it will be
pushed aside as the world's ruler by humanity acting together to form
egalitarian, truly democratic society.
Failing this, the system in crisis may drive us toward the extinction of
the human race, including the very governments that capitalism now commands.
In the face of the system's ever more
scandalous oppression of the rest of humanity and its destruction of the
environment, more and more sectors of society are erupting into open rebellion,
breaking with the system's norms and replacing them with practices that benefit
people and the environment.
The best known example is undoubtedly
the native Zapatistas who are building a new world in a small part of the
Mexican state of Chiapas. They elect their governing councils in
rotation. These comrades serve without
pay under the command of their base, not the other way around. Unlike in the ruling system, their purpose is
to serve, not to profit from their office.
The Zapatistas grow their crops and raise their livestock in an
environmentally sound way in small personal plots or larger collectives. They are developing an educational system
rooted in freedom and truth, in opposition to the official system that
suppresses the students, fills their heads with lies and turns them into
servants of capitalism. They are also
building a health system whose goal is to heal, in contrast to the neoliberal
health system that aims to enrich the laboratories and corporations to the
detriment of its patients' wellbeing.
Because the Zapatistas are encircled
by the system that aims to stamp out the example they are setting, they are
obliged to maintain a militia for self-defense, the Zapatista Army of National
Liberation (EZLN).
This, then, is the best known example
of the construction of alternative power, but it is by no means the only
one. On practically all sides we find
attitudes that break down the norms imposed by the system and depart from the
framework it imposes. They are steps,
largely unconscious ones, toward an alternative, popular form of power in
opposition to the oppressive official system.
The world's native populaces maintain
their own communal forms of organization, which in lesser or greater degree are
democratic and horizontal, with collective labor practices.
There are also factories that are
occupied and operated by the workers, themselves, in a horizontal form and for
the collective benefit. In Argentina and
other countries, this is another manifestation of alternative-power building in
embryonic form.
Cooperatives of environmentally sound
producers in coordination with consumer associations are yet another example of
incipient alternative power, as are the promoters of alternative medicine
throughout the world. We see, too, the
many mass demonstrations that have rolled back transportation fares in Brazil and those on a smaller scale in Lima that put a stop to
the parliamentary nomination of a putschist to serve a guardian of the
constitution. In Uruguay the
workers' organizations have established their own television channel. And it is important to note that the
manifestation of power by peasant communities in defense of water stands as an
obstacle to the developing new open-pit mines.
In various forms and degrees the
peoples of the world are resisting the power of the system. They are contributing their own grains of
sand -- for the most part in an unconscious way -- to the construction of
alternative forms of power. Let us join
our hands in defense of humanity. We
know that the world's present rulers will utilize violence in their attempt to
crush us, but we will learn to defend ourselves. We are confident that we, like the
Zapatistas, will be able to build a new world in which humanity governs itself
in a horizontal manner and reintegrates itself with Mother Nature as her sons
and daughters, not her enemy.
This is the real alternative. If we fail, the ever more savage attacks
against nature and humanity by the system in crisis will bring down the
destruction of our species, including the destroyers themselves.
Hugo Blanco
