How the Indigenous Organized

"The revolutionary organization must learn that it can no longer combat alienation with alienated means."

- Situationist International

This was a central tenet of the SI, guiding their work on the spectale's recuperative strategies and especially the strategies of the subordinated classes. I am taking a look at the indigenous organization in Bolivia from the 1990s to the present. The indio community there has created a revolutionary struggle that, while not impervious to recuperative forces, is possibly the best model for decentralizing power and collective bargaining in the present era.

The organization of indigenous groups changed after the political turmoil of the late 1990s. The indigenous supplanted the labor unions as the primary working class mode of resistance by forming ad hoc groups organized around specific issues from their different but overlapping perspectives.

Urban employment after Coca Zero - the U.S.'s plan to eradicate coca growing in Bolivia - brought the indigenous to the cities, where they displaced miners (long considered the vanguard of the working class by the Bolivian left). They functioned primarily in neighborhood collectives that incorporated many elements of labor unions, but were not based on connections to particular employers. The neighborhoods maintained constant pressure on the government, with an overall emphasis on the failed Coca Zero plan, and the privatization of natural resources.

“By freely combining indigenous, nationalist, and anti-neoliberal discourses, they often incorporated the demands of other groups to broaden their base of support or increase their legitimacy.”

- Benjamin Kohl and Linda Farthing, Impasse in Bolivia

While the neighborhoods increasingly assumed the vanguard position toward social change in Bolivia, each followed its own agenda, organizing strategies, and rationale for action, but often worked side by side under unlikely conditions. For example, coca growers in Aymara joined forces during the “water war” of 2000 to combat privatization and defend the indigenous way of life in the highlands. This method, which has been echoed elsewhere all over the world in resistance movements, is broadly anarcho-syndicalist in its outlook though the political makeup of the Bolivian groups may have specific ideological goals that are not. With over 35 distinct cultures in Bolivia, the groups remain distinct but culturally cohesive (Wise et al. 2003).

Both the unions and the campesinos – the rural laborers and coca growers – act as the basis for local governments, assigning land and mediating disputes both within and between communities. The local unions collaborated to form federations of unions, and the federations were large enough to democratically make decisions at the municipal level. Almost without exception, the mayors, council members and congressional deputies in the Chapare region have come from coca-growing unions. This mixture of neighborhood, government and union has created a broader class of people working together toward a common goal.

Eliminating imperialism anywhere cannot happen without such a broad organization force like this. Imperialism in all its forms will have to confronted in such a way that gives resistance to it an intrinsic satisfaction, as the SI was quick to point out. I often have the feeling that resistance in the U.S. does not have intrinsic qualities like this. It's more like a separate activity from everyday life. People who enjoy "politics" on an abstract discursive level may be like that, but resistance is purposive, active, and connected with daily living.

Of the tools at the oppressor's disposal, the dismissal of resistance culture is one of its strongest. As Nietzsche said in BGE, despising the "smell" of another human being is one of the most acerbic ways to reprobate the Other. Look how the mestizos hate the smell of indigenous people in Bolivia. Anything indio is unwanted and unaccepted: indio labor, indio life, indio music, indio skin tone. Racist class war in Bolivia therefore made it necessary to create a revolutionary struggle beginning with a cohesive indio solidarity movement.

A Day of Mournful Overcast 09/14/08

Nigerian Rebels Declare 'Oil War'. Al Jazeera: September 14, 2008.

The nameless and faceless Movement For Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND), a militant indigenist group, has declared war on Chevron, Royal Dutch Shell, ExxonMobil, Total, and Eni. Nigeria is the world's eighth largest oil exporter, where indigenous peoples are fed up with the wealthy elite foreigners expropriating their wealth. They have announced that the fight is for "total control" of the oil region against the multinational oil companies who are complicit in abuses against the Nigerian people.

The Fourth World: Struggles For Traditional Lands and Ways of Life. Ward Churchill. Left Turn: June 16th, 2007.

In response to an originally Maoist formulation of the first, second, and third worlds hypothesis, Churchill proposes the "Fourth World" to include the indigenous people, which are often transformed into "Settler States", wherein a foreign population takes over a new land after it denounces the colonial power - but then continues to abuse the native population. "All but inevitably," Churchill writes, "this would lead to the contours of the resulting societies conforming closely to bioregional realities, a circumstance that would go far towards shaping the nature of their economies and facilitating a high degree of interactivity among/between societies through the medium of satisfying reciprocal needs."

HUD is a Sewer. Diffon Read & Co. Inc. And the Aristocracy of Stock Profits. Catherine Austin Fitts.

Written in memoir-form by a former US HUD assistant secretary during the First Bush Administration, Austin Fitts chronicles the vast and extensive exposure to corruption she experienced while working for just one year. She recalls, I asked why we should spend money to lose more money in a way that would harm communities. After a long silence during which 30 staff members intently studied their feet, one brave soul explained to me that the mortgage bank was owned and run by a major Republican donor.

MEDUSA Phase 1 Report. The United States Navy: 2004.

The device – dubbed Mob Excess Deterrent Using Silent Audio (MEDUSA) – exploits the microwave audio effect, in which short microwave pulses rapidly heat tissue, causing a shockwave inside the skull that can be detected by the ears. A series of pulses can be transmitted to produce recognizable sounds. The device is aimed for military or crowd-control applications, but may have other uses... such as mind control!!!

Postmodern Writer Is Found Dead at Home. Timothy Williams. New York Times: September 14, 2008.

Writer and professor at Pomona college, David Foster Wallace, was compared to Borges, Pynchon and Don DeLillo. His opus, “Infinite Jest,” was the most widely known in a series of writings that gained him a reputation for the postmodern sensibility. "A lot of contemporary literature uses irony as a self-protective gesture, but he never did that," a colleague at Pomona said about him. "He was brilliantly funny. People stayed with these long, complicated novels because they made them laugh," another said. He hung himself in Claremont, CA and was discovered by his wife.

Against the Logic of Submission. Wolfi Landstreicher. Venomous Butterfly Publications: 2005.

ALoS is a collection of anarchist essays written between 1996 and 2005 in the publication Willful Disobedience. The author's name is the nom de plume of an Oregon-based anarchist whose ideas are mainly influenced by insurrectionary anarchism, Max Strirner's egoism, surrealism, the Internationale Situationiste and non-primitivist critiques of civilization.

Same Day Deportation

I came across an article on the WW4 Report about recent ICE raids in the LA area. It's also on Free Speech Radio here. Angélica Salas from the Coalition for Humane Immigration Rights in LA (CHIRLA) said it "seemed strange" that recent detainees were "deported so quickly, because that doesn't happen unless they have final orders of deportation, and none of these people even had the chance to talk to a lawyer." The pace of deportation is becoming faster and faster, in accordance with Homeland Security's End Game plan to oust all illegal immigrants by 2012.

The phrase I'm using--"same day deportation"--characterizes these raids perfectly. That is exactly what had happened in these more recent cases. (If this becomes a popular phrase then I want my blog to get the credit for it.) At any rate, I'm going to use the phrase freely to talk about the new kinds of raids that are going on.

There's a very dry blog (Immigration News Briefs) that tries to document as many ICE raids it can. However, there should be a better resource out there in order to keep pace with End Game, especially when ICE's website (ice.gov) is in no way transparent. As should be expected, it is very unsatisfactory as a source for whistle-blowing. ICE itself prefers to publish selected events and topics which they presumably believe to be Homeland Security victories, leaving out the sorts of human rights failures that happen on a day-to-day basis. It is also worth noting that the larger project, End Game, cannot be found on their website. Or if it is there it's been buried so well it does not come up in any searches.

The "Benign Neglect" of Native Rights

In 1976 the Inuit in Canada wished to divide the Northwest Territories into two, so that they will form the majority in the eastern half. This was seen as essential to the implementation of their right of self-government. Some liberals object that this proposal violates the separation of state and ethnicity by distributing public benefits and state powers so as to make it easier for a specific group to preserve its culture. But all decisions regarding boundaries and the distribution of powers in multi-nation states have this effect.

We can draw boundaries and distribute legislative powers so that a national minority has an increased ability within a particular region to protect its societal culture; or we can draw boundaries and distribute legislative powers so that the majority nation controls decisions regarding language, education, immigration, etc. on a state-wide basis. This form of native gerrymandering is often used to restrict native access to democracy putting them at a disadvantage, while at the same time advantaging the white settler constituents by giving them a disproportionate amount of representation in government.

The response of many states to these sorts of issues is the policy of benign neglect. This was first initiated during the period following the Civil Rights movement in the United States. The Urban Affairs adviser to the Nixon administration wrote the president a memo in ___ arguing the urban black population, now enjoying a period of relatively increased freedoms and liberties, could "benefit from a period of benign neglect" -- a period of rhetorical calm which is best interpreted as a call to abandon federal programs to improve the lives of black families.

The eastern half of the Northwest Territories were eventually transitioned to the control of the Inuit population in 1999 in cooperation with the Canadian government. The territory that now exists under their control is called Nunavut. It means "our land" in Inuktitut, the language of the Inuit peoples. But what has happened in Nunavut should happen everywhere.

Group-differentiated rights--such as territorial autonomy, veto powers, guaranteed representation in central institutions, land claims, and language claims--can help rectify the disadvantages that native populations have today in contemporary American society. American and Canadian histories are full of abuses to native and indigenous populations. And by allowing indigenous populations the right to self-government and self-determination, we are rectifying past harms and allowing for greater democracy.

The United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues is an advisory body to the Economic and Social Council, which mandates and discusses indigenous peoples' issues in formal UN settings. The Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples is a body of text that outlines the rights that the West has finally come to realize. Article Three states that "Indigenous peoples have the right to self-determination. By virtue of that right they freely determine their political status and freely pursue their economic, social and cultural development." This is followed by Article Four which states that "Indigenous peoples, in exercising their right to self-determination, have the right to autonomy or self-government in matters relating to their internal and local affairs, as well as ways and means for financing their autonomous functions."

Outlined here, we have a series of legal rights that assign traditional, natural property rights and natural theories of self-determination to those who are commonly neglected in legal settings. The rights as we seen them here, apply not only to indigenous populations in the Rothbardian-Lockean theory of natural rights. These apply to all peoples, and all natural squatters. My own ideas about territory and property here are much more in line with the Lockean-Rothbardian notion rather than the United Nations notion, since the idea that these rights apply only to 'peoples' of the indigenous sort does not take this argument to the logical conclusion, and that is that each individual has these rights as well.

But for the time being, it is important to articulate why these are important for indigenous communities. At its most basic level, these rights will make it more difficult for the members of the larger society, ex.g. white Christianized society, to move into and colonize the territory of the minority. Native reservations have seen this constantly. Mines exist all over Nunavut, due to excessive extraction and exploitation of their land which was set in place before their control. It is difficult to roll back these exploitations. If the Inuit had full control over their territories, as they should, the resources in their territories would be theirs to sell, not for corporate forces to exploit freely. In American reservations there is a lot of interference from the white community. Industries, commercial farms, commercial centers, and even residential areas have been constructed for the white community. The native populations are scarce, as it turns out, on their own lands.

Where these rights are recognized, members of the majority who choose to enter the minority's homeland may have to forgo certain benefits they are accustomed to. This is a burden. But without such rights, the members of many minority cultures face the loss of their culture, a loss which we cannot reasonably ask people to accept.

Any plausible theory of justice should recognize the fairness of the external protections, for the time being, for national minorities, and eventually give rise to internal autonomy. This is clearly justified, I believe, within a liberal philosophical framework, such as Locke's or Rothbard's or Nozick's, which emphasizes the importance of rectifying unchosen inequalities. Indeed inequalities in cultural membership are just the sort which natural rights lawyers says we should be concerned about, since their effects are profound, pervasive and present at birth.