The Unpredictable Future: Stories From Worker-Run Factories in Argentina

Written by Benjamin Dangl

November 24, 2009

Reviewed: Sin Patron: Stories From Argentina’s Worker-Run Factories, edited by Lavaca, 320 pages, Haymarket Books, 2007.

Following the social upheaval in Argentina in 2001-2002 a book was published in Spanish that a lot of activists and independent journalists in the country began trying to get their hands on. It wasn’t in all of the bookstores, but news about it traveled like wildfire. Now the legendary book, Sin Patron: Stories From Argentina’s Worker-Run Factories, is translated and available to the English-speaking world.

The book includes a number of illuminating interviews and chapters by Lavaca, a journalism collective based in Buenos Aires that continues to produce some of the best analysis and stories on social movements in the country. With Sin Patron, Lavaca brings together dynamic voices and stories from the hearts of Argentina’s inspiring movements.

The timing couldn’t be better for the release of this book in English. Readers in the US seeking creative solutions to the current economic crisis may find some helpful suggestions in Sin Patron.

Workers in Argentina during that country’s crash figured out they needed to go beyond the law to survive. “For workers in Argentina there is no law. It only exists for the powerful,” said Eduardo Murua, President of the National Movement of Reclaimed Companies. “If we were stuck outside [of the factory] asking the judge to keep it open, we would get nowhere. If we were to ask politicians, we’d get even less. Only through occupation could we recover the jobs.”

One story of occupation and worker control told in Sin Patron is that of Sime Quarry, located in the province of Entre Rios. The owners of the quarry ran the business into the ground, but it was taken over by its workers and kept in operation under worker-control. Leading up to the closure the bosses abused the workers verbally and physically. María del Huerto, 45 years old, said that in December of 2002 the bosses of the quarry “gave us a 35-day unscheduled vacation.” The “vacation” lasted until January 20th, when the workers went back to the quarry to find it abandoned. It was “a pasture with no lights, running water, or telephone service. Nothing. It was desolate,” María said. Just a few machines were left.

María met with fellow workers and members of the Movement of Recuperated Companies, and they discussed taking over the quarry themselves. They decided to arm themselves before the takeover in case they ran into any resistance. “We took firearms, and some neighbors lent us shotguns. We announced that we didn’t want to shoot anyone, but wanted to defend our workplace and keep the bosses from stealing anything else.”

It was a terribly hot time of the year and mosquitoes were everywhere. No one had any money, so they used the guns to hunt. “To eat, the men hunted apereá rabbits – they’re brown; they look like big mice. They also fished caruchas from a nearby lagoon, and Don Joaquín would send us tarpon fish from the market. What had happened to us? We thought of ourselves as middle class, and here we were, begging and hunting to make ends meet,” María said. At one point, the workers were getting so desperate they had to sell furniture in order to buy meat.

Over time, they formed a cooperative and a judge ordered the plant be given over to them in April of 2003. Now the quarry is back in business, fully operational under worker-management.

The Zanon ceramics factory was also occupied and put under worker control around the same time. Reinaldo Giménez, a long time worker at Zanon, spoke of when the business was closing down and the boss refused to pay the workers what was owed to them. The boss “put everyone in the same boat, and the workers with the longest tenures said, ‘This scumbag should have paid me. I gave him my life, but he has no feelings, no compassion, and he makes no distinctions.’”

The tension with the boss blew up, and the workers went on strike, setting up tents outside the factory, marching, picketing and organizing a communal kitchen. Local schools, workers and neighbors helped out however they could; even prisoners in jail supported the workers by donating their food. The workers reached out to the community, explaining their plight to passersby. Locals empathized with them because they were hard-working people with families. It was this connection and support from the community that helped the workers of Zanon eventually transform the factory into a cooperative. Ramírez said, “We always said the factory isn’t ours. We are using it, but it belongs to

the community.”

That’s a key message at the heart of this book – that these failed factories and businesses should belong to the people, not the wealthy bosses who mistreated workers and then abandoned ship. Such challenges to classic ideas of private property and workplace hierarchy course through every page in Sin Patron. These examples of worker management defy the bankrupt logic of capitalism itself.

Angry workers everywhere should grab a copy of Sin Patron to read of the Argentines who built new worlds when the old ones failed. As the Lavaca editors write in the introduction to their book, “The limit of all prediction is what people are capable of doing. It is not chance, but courage, that makes the future unpredictable.”

From Chile to Guatemala: A Gringo in Latin America

Reviewed: Gringo: A Coming-of-Age in Latin America, by Chesa Boudin, 240 pages, Scribner, 2009.

In Gringo: A Coming-of-Age in Latin America, Chesa Boudin writes of sleeping in a hammock on his way up the Amazon River on a 200 foot boat, working as a translator in Hugo Chavez’s presidential palace, witnessing the rise of President Lula in Brazil and traveling through Argentina during the country’s economic crisis. His reflections and reportage on such experiences provide an exciting road trip through pivotal moments in Latin America’s recent history.

Activist and writer Boudin is a former Rhodes Scholar and the translator of Understanding the Bolivarian Revolution, the co-author of The Venezuelan Revolution, and the co-editer of Letters From Young Activists.

In Gringo, Boudin’s writing places the reader in his shoes by peppering his stories with striking details and anecdotes from Chile to Guatemala. On one bus ride in Honduras, he writes, “the driver stopped an hour into a three-hour itinerary so he could visit at his girlfriends’ house for forty-five minutes, leaving those of us on board to sweat in the afternoon heat.”

The book is populated by the people Boudin meets in buses and living rooms across Latin America. He brings these characters to life on the page with descriptions such as this one, of Colombian farmer Enrique Echeverría: “His hands, clearly those of a man who has worked every day of his life, carried a machete, which he kept in a leather scabbard on his belt.”

Boudin contextualizes the journey with reporting and illuminating interviews. In Ecuador, he quotes Magdalena who says, “Many of us had to sell or abandon our land in favor of work in the informal sector or in flower export companies. Our ancestors have been farming the mountains for thousands of years but these days you’ve got to have faith to farm.”

In Colombia, he writes of the thousands of people displaced from paramilitary and military violence. While on a human rights delegation to the country, he tries to put to use advice he heard from Zapatistas in Chiapas years earlier: “If you have come to help us, please go home; if you have come to join us, welcome. Pick up a shovel or a machete and get busy.” In Colombia, he writes, “my digital camera would be more useful than a machete: the solidarity we showed by joining the community and documenting the paramilitary activity were key steps in their strategy to reclaim control of their land.”

As the title of the book suggests, Boudin regularly contemplates his identity as a gringo in a foreign land, at one point writing of the complicated “struggle to build honest, equal relationships with people, not just relationships based on financial support.” But he does establish many friendships on the road, creating a community of comrades, a broad network that spans the hemisphere.

Interspersed throughout the book are the author’s reflections on the fact that when he was just 14 months old his biological parents, members of the radical Weather Underground group, were sent to jail for their involvement in a bank robbery that left three men dead. Boudin’s father, David Gilbert is still in jail while his mother, Kathy Boudin was released in 2003.

The robbery and subsequent imprisonment of his parents is often brought up by Boudin alongside his political and social observations in Latin America. The experiences, friendships and freedom he encounters in his travels are described in contrast to the jail time served by both his parents.

“Part of the point of travel was to appreciate the passage of time,” Boudin writes, “quite the opposite of time spent, for example, in prison where passing time quickly is an imperative, every minute on the road counts and should be dragged out, savored.”

From the politics of bus travel in Central America to 21st century socialism in Venezuela, Boudin’s colorful introduction to some of the most dramatic and hopeful years in Latin American history is itself a journey to savor.

Reclaiming a Continent: Latin American Experiments in Democracy

Written by Benjamin Dangl

Tuesday, 25 August 2009

Reviewed: Reclaiming Latin America: Experiments in Radical Social Democracy, Edited by Geraldine Lievesley and Steve Ludlam. Zed Books (August 18, 2009), 288 pages

Reclaiming Latin America: Experiments in Radical Social Democracy provides an in depth and accessible introduction to Latin American politics for people seeking to understand this past tumultuous and hopeful decade. While avoiding superficial analysis and simplistic leftist cheerleading, this book addresses the complexity and diversity of the new Latin American left.

Many of the contributors to this book write of the leftist shift with sober exuberance peppered with undeniable facts that point to a geopolitical sea change. As analyst Emir Sader says, “Eleven Latin America presidents have been ejected before the end of their mandates over the last fifteen years, not by the traditional process of US-backed military coup, but through the action of popular movements against the neoliberal policies of their governments. The one old-style coup attempt of the period, against Chavez in 2002, was defeated.” This quote and other hopeful commentaries on the left throughout the book are shadowed by the coup in Honduras, which took place after this book was completed. As I mixed reading this book with reading reports from Honduras, I kept wondering how the authors of Reclaiming Latin America might have altered their assessments had they written their chapters after President Manuel Zelaya was ushered off in his pajamas to Costa Rica.

However, there have been many recent events just as profound as the coup in Honduras taking place in Latin America, and this book offers a rich field map of the currents that still move the continent. This book particularly shines when the authors’ gazes move toward the relationships between social movements and left-leaning governments in the region.

Central to the book are questions of power, autonomy and sustainable pathways to radical change. As editor Geraldine Leivesley writes, “Radical social democratic governments can support social transformation but they cannot develop, consolidate and sustain it. This can only really be done by people themselves, working in communities and forging links with other, like-minded communities within and across national borders. This does not mean that such groups should not deal with the state – this is inevitable – but that they should structure and take control of that relationship.”

Also present in many of the pages are discussions of the role social movements played in electing leftist governments. Fransisco Dominguez writes, “The Brazilian [Workers Party] PT originates in the militant trade unionism of the 1970s, and the Bolivian MAS originates in the cocalero union of coca growers… In Argentina it was mainly the four thousand-odd actions of the piqueteros (roadblockers) which led to President Fernando de la Rua’s ousting in December 2001.”

Democracy and Social Change: From Montevideo to Caracas

Uruguay is set up in Reclaiming Latin America as a fascinating and emblematic example of a left of center leader taking power with support from grassroots networks. Lievesley writes that the Frente Amplio (Broad Front), the political party and coalition of current President Tabaré Vázquez, was created in 1971 out of a collection of Christian Democrats, leftists, communists and socialists that united to break the two party rule of the Blanco and Colorado Parties. Those two parties had run the country since 1830 when Uruguay had won independence from Spain. “The Frente’s founders formed comités de base, grassroots committees which they hoped would promote participatory democracy and contribute to the transformation of what was a hidebound political system,” writes Lievesley. The primary goals of the FA from the start were land reform and a stronger public sector.

Though the FA coalition faced widespread repression, torture and disappearances during a dictatorship which began in 1973, it re-emerged as a political force with the return to democracy in 1984. The momentum of these early years culminated in 1989 with the election of Tabaré Vázquez as the mayor of Montevideo, the capital city. However, the Lievesley writes, “Since 2004, a growing distance has developed between the Frente’s ambitious hierarchy and its grassroots… Veteran activists do not share the same values as younger Frente members, who have no memories of the years of clandestinity and struggle, and view the organization as a means to further their careers.”

The Bolivarian political process in Venezuela under Hugo Chavez has been more dynamic than that of the FA in Uruguay. One chapter in Reclaiming Latin America explores social democracy within the educational, health and community programs in the country. Author Sara C. Motta describes some of the government’s social programs in the La Vega barrio in Caracas, Venezuela. Motta writes that while access to healthcare certainly helps people’s lives, the institutionalization of social movements in this process can be harmful to community organizing. “[H]ealth can become a particular issue solved in a functional manner that undermines the community’s organization and therefore the development of a participatory social democracy. Individuals who were once organizers of their communities become functionaries of the state.” This can have a weakening effect on the community’s autonomy and capacity to self-organize, Motta explains.

With Mission Ribas, classes are taught in neighborhoods across the country to meet the local needs of the community. Students use their education to solve problems in their communities with projects and planning. Elizabeth, a participant in this process, reflects, “We have organized all over La Vega. Many of the students are women. It has been an emancipatory experience for me and many others who have begun to believe in their ability to solve problems in the community.” Yet in seeking to solve a housing or public service problem, writes Motta, the education “seeks to enable the student to find solutions for particular problems, such as inadequate housing, within the limits of broader structures of power. In doing so it attempts to democratize these broader structures, but not transform them.”

Motta also writes of the Consejos Comunales, which provide a means for regular citizens to participate in governance and the management of funds and resources. Through this program, communities can organize themselves into a Consejo with a representative, then design proposals and projects. “Consejos are an attempt to create a new set of state institutions that bypass the traditional state, and distribute power in a democratic and participatory manner,” writes Motta.

At one national meeting addressing this process a working group concludes, “We must obtain the tools to be able to struggle against the bureaucracy and search for a way to get rid of leaders that want to control us, look to maintain their own power and who divide the community.” Participant Edenis Guilarte says, “What we are doing is training, creating consciousness, which is a process that goes beyond repairing a road, obtaining a service, enabling access to water, it’s a macro process, a process of social change, a fight over ideas and practice.”

In spite of any setbacks to the Consejos Comunales, they do offer new spaces for growth, localized responses to development which can and do dismiss clientelistic tendencies, and assert autonomy over time. The Consejos have given the people the seeds to grow beyond the state. Yet Motta concludes, the political struggle “revolves around the question of whether [the consejos comunales] become an institution that channels the demands of poor communities to a localized social democracy (with all the possibilities and limitations that this entails) or whether they enable the expansion of demands for community self-management that challenge capitalist and social relations.”

Protests and Parties in Bolivia and Brazil

John Crabtree contributed a chapter on Bolivia which provides a brief overview of the country’s political and social history, the roots and policies of the Evo Morales government, and the social movements’ actions in directing the country’s future. Crabtree looks at the role the state has played in managing natural gas resources since Morales took office, as well as describes the constituent assembly to rewrite the country’s constitution and the regional and political divisions in Bolivia. He looks at Morales’ new social programs in health, education and housing, and describes Morales’ relationships with other regional leaders seeking independence from Washington. In spite of success in a number of areas, Crabtree does say, “The MAS lacked a clearly articulated program; it lacked experience in government; the machinery at its disposal for administering change was absent; and it was in no way a tightly disciplined party.”

In a chapter on Brazil, Sue Branford describes the euphoria of Lula’s victory, but goes on to write that in spite of leftist rhetoric and promises to his base on the campaign trail, upon taking office for the first time Lula turned his back on his progressive supporters: “The agreement with the IMF was quickly reaffirmed, and the target for the public sector surplus, required to service the internal debt, was set higher, at 4.25 per cent of GDP, than even the IMF demanded.” Lula later announced a 45% budget cut which disproportionately affected social programs for the poor. Unemployment and poverty skyrocketed across the country; in May of 2003, unemployment reached 20.6%, a new record at the time. Thanks to Lula, foreign corporations now dominate industrial, agricultural and banking sectors, and GM crops, specifically pushed by Monsanto, are produced across the country.

Reclaiming Latin America sets out to cover a lot of ground, and succeeds in doing so with other chapters on Argentina, Cuba, Chile, Mexico and the entire region. Over all, the contributors to the book maintain a healthy balance of analysis and reportage, throwing in the occasional anecdote and prose that keep the pages turning. The book, much like this past decade in Latin America, offers important lessons from ongoing experiments in democracy.

Dissecting Utopia: New Book Assesses Latin American Left

Written by Benjamin Dangl

July 28, 2009

Reviewed: The New Latin American Left: Utopia Reborn, edited by Patrick Barrett, Daniel Chavez and Cesar Rodriguez-Garavito. Published by Pluto Press (2008), 320 pages.

The conflict in Honduras has been an ongoing challenge for governments across the political spectrum in Latin America. In the years leading up to this tense and decisive event a number of leaders and social movements have pushed the region to the left. It is this regional shift that is the focus of The New Latin American Left: Utopia Reborn, edited by Patrick Barrett, Daniel Chavez and Cesar Rodriguez-Garavito.

This book includes a series of insightful chapters by various experts on the roots and rise of the new Latin American left in nations such as Brazil, Bolivia, Venezuela, Argentina and Uruguay. Many of the authors are progressive academics and analysts from the countries they are writing about. Packed with behind the scenes information and eye-opening analysis, this book should be required reading for anyone interested in the most dramatic leftist political events of the decade.

At the start of The New Latin American Left the authors explain that so far, most analysts looking at the region have focused exclusively on “partisan politics” or “grassroots mobilization.” Yet in this book, the country and regional case studies examine the political parties, governments and social movements as three separate forces in the new Latin American left.

The authors write that social movements have perhaps been the most important forces of these three players in bringing about progressive change, or paving the way to the election of various left-leaning presidents. In some cases movements called for national change based on rights, against privatization by a corporation, or from a class or ethnic based position.

Central to the discussions presented in the book is the relationship between political parties and social movements. A political party, write the editors in the first chapter, “can serve as the political arm of social movements, enabling them to project their social power and express their demands in the political arena and providing them with a necessary means for gaining access to the state.” Alliances between movements and parties can help promote important policies, fight against the right, and advise politicians.

At the same time, the “electoral logic” of parties can operate at odds with the movements’ logic, write the editors. As parties need a broad base, movements are often going to make up a smaller part of that base than other sectors. Plus movements, as in the case of Brazil, are often asked to refrain from actions that could make the movement look bad during or outside of an election season. The editors argue that an ideal situation is one in which the parties and movements can operate together, or at least co-exist, in the defense of human rights and against neoliberalism and the right wing. However, as The New Latin American Left illustrates, such collaborations between the street and the state often turn out to be rockier than planned.

Brazil, Lula and the Landless Movement

The rise to power of the Workers’ Party (PT) in Brazil under President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (Lula) says a lot about the challenges of moving from the grassroots to the government palace.

The PT began as a working class party, with a worker (Lula, a former steel worker) as its leader, and won 11 million votes in the 1989 presidential elections. The PT’s directions were initially conceived by the workers and party base. Lula was elected president for the first time in 2002, and quickly turned his back on the working class orientation of his party.

While Brazil’s Landless Farmers Movement (MST) formed some of the crucial backbone of the PT’s electoral and social power, the authors write that in Lula’s agricultural policies since he has become president, “priority has been given to huge farms with extensive tracts of land that make intensive use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides, and which are devoted to the production of monocultural export crops.” Most of this industry focuses on the production of sugarcane, soybeans and coffee.

Many of Brazil’s social movements (particularly the MST), are completely at odds with these devastating policies, and have been working for a small scale network of family and community farms, aimed at helping the some 5 million family farmers without the necessary amount of land to survive, and the other 4 million family farmers without any land at all. Some of the aims of this movement are agriculture without pesticides, employment, respect for ecology, soil and biodiversity, and not using GMO seeds.

However, the authors explain that in 2006 Lula did implement the Family Grant program targeting low income families with social support, including grants for food, school and cooking gas, and which impacted some 11 million families – approximately 25% of the population. In exchange for receiving the support, “the benefiting families with children under 15 years of age must enroll their children in school and guarantee their attendance, keep their vaccinations up to date, seek prenatal care and participate in educational programs on breast feeding and nutrition.” In some places this support goes to nearly half of the families in a town or city.

Yet, the authors write, “the implementation of this program was not accompanied by policies that addressed the causes of poverty in Brazil, such as access to land or privileging propertied and wealthy classes in the tax system. Hence, Brazil continues to be one of the most unequal societies in the world.”

In 2006, Lula won the presidency again, in part thanks to support from unions and movements such as the MST, which supported him largely because the alternative was worse; the lead opposing candidate represented the most destructive forces of the right wing and elite. One editorial in the progressive newspaper Brasil de Fato at the time explained, “An analysis of the four years of President Lula’s first term in office leads to a disappointing balance for the working class, above all with respect to the economy.” Yet the editorial asked readers to “properly distinguish between our principal enemy, our adversaries and our allies. Wherever we get this wrong, we end up defeated… Thus, to vote for Lula, even with no illusions about his economic policy, is the duty of all of us who constitute the working and the Brazilian people.”

Power and the Grassroots in Venezuela and Argentina

Edgardo Lander, the author of the chapter in The New Latin American Left on Venezuela, strikes an interesting balance when assessing the hopes and challenges in this country. Lander discusses the abundance of new neighborhood groups, communal councils, Bolivarian circles and electoral battle units have been developed by the government in collaboration with social sectors. The relationship between the communities participating in these programs and the state has varied in intensity and autonomy over the years and involves a broad range of experiences. On the other hand, Lander writes that many of the widely applauded social and political programs of the government “are heavily dependent on oil revenues, to the point that a significant decrease in the latter could endanger their continuity.”

Regarding President Hugo Chavéz, Lander says his “style of leadership could become an obstacle to a process of democratization if many of the key and small decisions of the process remain in his hands, thereby closing the door to the urgent necessities of the institutionalization of public administration and of the organization and autonomy of the popular movement. The great dependency of the transformative process on one person makes the process itself very vulnerable.”

In a chapter on Argentina, Federico Schuster writes that the Nestor Kirchner government ignored and isolated radical sectors of piquetero movement in order to demobilize them. Kirchner did not repress the movements, knowing that doing so would generate an enormous backlash as it did with the two deaths of piqueteros under former President Eduardo Duhalde. “Faced with this prospect, he has preferred a strategy of wearing out the resistance,” Schuster writes. Due to their relative lack of structure and unity, the movements proved to be unsustainable in this context.

“Instead of encouraging the development of these movements,” Schuster explains, “the majority of the leftist parties that have begun working with the unemployed have only ended up contributing to division, attempting to bring as many people as possible into their ranks, rather than building an authentic movement, a broad space that respects the movement’s self-determination. This has contributed to one of the greatest problems of the piquetero movement, which has ended up exacerbating its weakness – namely, dispersal.”

At the start of The New Latin American Left, the editors explain that the book is not a conclusive work; many of these movements and governments that the authors focus on have still only recently come to power, so it’s hard to make “definitive evaluations.” Yet in dissecting the recent history of the new Latin American left, the book sheds light on immediate challenges posed by the relationships between social movements, political parties and governments elsewhere in the region, from Lima to Tegucigalpa.

Beyond Voting: Guerrilla Gardeners, Outlaw Bicyclists, and Pirate Programmers

By Benjamin Dangl, 8/28/08

This US election year, an unprecedented number of voters will likely head to the polls to cast their ballots in an exercise that should take just a few minutes to complete.  But what about the rest of the minutes left in the year?  Author and activist Chris Carlsson has some suggestions for social change beyond voting in Nowtopia, a new book about modern day rebels who, in his words, “aren’t waiting for an institutional change from on-high but are getting on with building the new world in the shell of the old.”

Chris Carlsson is a long-time community organizer, writer, and radical historian based in San Fransisco.  He helped launch the Critical Mass monthly bike-ins, which now take place in five continents and over 300 cities, and was a founder of the dissident magazine, Processed World, a publication reporting on the “underside of the Information Age.”  These experiences enrich his enjoyable and fascinating new book, Nowtopia: How Pirate Programmers, Outlaw Bicyclists, and Vacant-Lot Gardeners Are Inventing the Future Today (AK Press, 2008).

A driving argument throughout the book is that nowtopians are more than their jobs or class and are working outside of the capitalist economy to create “A social revolt against being reduced to ‘mere workers,’ to being trapped in the objectified and commodified status of labor power.”  It is this movement that the dynamic book focuses on, telling stories from across the garden plots, bicycle parties, and kitchen tables that play essential roles in creating utopia now.  Though there are many more examples of community organizing and activist work that could ever fit into the pages of one book, Nowtopia presents compelling stories of activism that anyone can learn from.

In a chapter on vacant-lot gardeners Carlsson digs into the roots and legacies of community gardening.  Readers are informed that during World War I, a campaign was launched to “plant for freedom” and “hoe for liberty” in which five million gardeners produced $520 million in food in just two growing seasons.  By 1944, in World War II, 18-20 million families had “Victory Gardens” which produced 40% of the nation’s vegetables.  More recently, in 2004, 37 gardens in NYC produced more than 30,000 pounds of food.  Globally, there are approximately 200 million urban gardeners producing food and income for around 700 million people.

Yet as this book illustrates, these gardens grow more than food, they grow community.  Neighbors come together around gardens, experiences and knowledge are shared across generations, and empty city lots once full of fear and street violence are replaced by gardeners with flowers, vegetables, and families.  New York City gardener Sarah Ferguson describes the community gardens she’s been involved with: “Like the antic shrines and alters they construct in their flower beds, these eclectic havens are in a very real sense churches, where people find faith — both in themselves and in their neighbors.”  But NYC Mayor Rudolph Giuliani waged a war on gardens, working to sell the lots off to real estate developers.  In 2000, he told the New York Times: “If you live in an unrealistic world then you can say everything should be a community garden.” Yet many NYC neighbors banded together and resisted, preserving their garden lots and strengthening their community in the process.

Community gardening also offers a down-to-earth alternative to buying into the corporate food world.  Environmental justice activist Jessica Hayes, for example, who worked at The Food Project in Boston, said, “I can fight that [industrial agricultural system] until I die, but at the same time build an alternative so that at some point we can just cut the global system off.”

Another nowtopian activity understandably outlined in this book is bicycling.  This mode of transport has long been applauded by activists against oil wars, oil dependency, and cars.  Like gardening, working together to fix and ride bikes can also build community.  In Nowtopia, Ted White talks of his experience at the Center for Appropriate Transport in Eugene, Oregon, where he worked with young kids to fix and put bikes together.  White says the work was empowering and confidence-building: “They took metal and rubber and plastic parts, put them together, fine tuned them, and then — voila! — they had literally made themselves a vehicle for both external exploration and self-discovery.”  Similarly, Eric Welp, who teaches people how to fix their own bikes at “Chain Reaction” in Washington, DC, said that “we’re not going to solve the world with bikes, but we can change it by changing a kid’s outlook” and mode of transportation.

Carlsson also guides readers through the rich history of bicycle zines, providing the example of the early 1990s zine called Mudflap by Greta Snider, where the author wrote a cartoon called Equipment Fetish, which goes, “you know how it feels . . . there’s something so good about MACHINE PARTS . . . knurled wheels, dials, level meters; the KA-CHUNK of a shutter, the clicks of indexed things falling into place. . . .”  In her zine, Snider also tells stories of “haunts for bike-punks in Toronto,” “rants against buying stolen bikes,” and develops different city-specific games for bicyclists.

Other zines and publications cited by Carlsson critique the car culture of the US.  An issue of Resist proclaims, “. . . all you habitual motorists are suckers.  You’ve been hoodwinked.  Your automobile is expensive, annoying, and anti-social.  My bicycle is cheap, fun and at times, a traveling party.”  Critical Mass bike rides — when bicyclists converge to take back the streets from cars — are another inspirational example of renegade bike culture redefining streets and protest.  Carlsson says of these gatherings, “The bike ride is the premise, but the deeper transformation of imaginations and social connections is hard to measure.”

Nowtopia also moves off the streets and into cyberspace in another chapter called “The Virtual Spine of the Commons” which includes a brief people’s history of the internet and a celebration of the rise of open and free software.  This software movement, Carlsson writes, has “helped to radically reduce the price of software, providing access to thousands of new programmers and technically skilled people.”  However, he laments the fact that with programs like Blogger, MySpace, and YouTube, “A profitable business model arose by placing things people have been making privately for a long time (personal diaries, novels, photos, ramblings, poetry, school gazettes, etc.) in a public context of advertising and ecommerce, and then working to make those public, commercial platforms as monopolistic as possible.”

The author also shows many examples of how the internet has been an incredible organizing, media, and fundraising tool for social movements and activists all over the world.  From the Zapatistas getting their messages out via the internet, to non-profits and social organizations networking in ways that were unimaginable in pre-internet days, Carlsson analyzes the highs and lows of this powerful tool.  He writes, “Typically, online communities are criticized for promoting disembodied and immaterial connections.  Too often political campaigns that may once have mobilized a street action or something directly physical have instead turned into a cascade of emails and online petitions.  But as the remarkable participation in the February 2003 global anti-war demonstrations revealed, the same electronic communities can network themselves to produce an unprecedented public demonstration.”

At the end of election day, many of the nowtopians we encounter in this book will likely still be teaching kids how to fix bikes instead of take standardized tests, crunching their shovels into new soil, and democratizing cyberspace.  Carlsson’s Nowtopia reminds us that there is much work to do beyond simply voting, and the examples he outlines in his book can be a good place to start, or expand, your own local revolutions.  They are not necessarily end-all solutions, but could be catalysts toward broader social change and movements. As Carlsson writes, a nowtopia might be right around the corner: “An unfolding potential can and does erupt in the most surprising places, seemingly simple and limited but also embodying deeper aspirations for a more profound transformation.”

Revolution! New Book Charts Roller Coaster Ride of South American Left

By Benjamin Dangl

Monday, 08 September 2008

Throughout the past eight years of the Bush administration, North and South America have politically and economically been heading in opposite directions. While Bush waged wars, curtailed civil liberties and spread neoliberalism, South Americans stopped corporate looting, ousted corrupt presidents and developed economies for people instead of profit. Journalist Nikolas Kozloff’s new book, Revolution! South America and the Rise of the New Left (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2008) looks behind the scenes and politics of this changing continent.

At the start of this lively and accessible book, Kozloff, a Senior Research Fellow at the Council on Hemispheric Affairs and author of the earlier book, Hugo Chávez: Oil, Politics, and the Challenge to the U.S. (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), poses the question he seeks to answer with Revolution!: “What are the contours of this political earthquake that has spread through the hemisphere?”

The book serves as a useful introduction to the region’s current political dynamics, and Kozloff’s writing shines when he describes lesser-known characters and stories in the South American shift to the left. Readers are introduced to Efrén Icaza, an environmental activist in Quito who tells of his family’s hardships growing up under the thumb of the oil industry in rural Ecuador. While sitting in a café and being approached by some of the city’s all too common begging children, Icaza describes his father’s 16 hour workdays in the oil fields, their 60-70 mile drives on horrible roads between oil wells–living in squalor so that private oil company executives could become rich. Telling Kozloff of his father’s struggles, Icaza says, “I think you never would have found those kinds of labor conditions in the US.”

Icaza’s stories underscore the fact that so much money has historically gone into building up the oil industry in Ecuador to export oil, while very little money has gone into social programs and development for the actual communities living and laboring in Ecuador’s vast oil country. The author charts the bubbly, toxic and corrupt history of oil in Ecuador and how the new President Rafael Correa is working to take back the reigns of this industry–which account for 40% of the country’s export wealth–and put it under state control.

Throughout the book, Kozloff meets with people inside and outside the government halls of power. Alberta Acosta, Ecuador’s Minister of Energy and Mining under Correa, listens to jazz in his office and during the interview digs up a small book of writing by Bertolt Brecht, quoting a passage by the author on the political decisions one makes in everyday life. Acosta says, “I believe you have to have values, and those values can be processed throughout political engagement.” He tells Kozloff of the private oil companies that interfered with different government ministries in the past. “Before, oil companies would communicate with the president in an arrogant manner, almost an order, indicating what needed to be done.” Now, as Kozloff explains, the times are changing, and Ecuador is another nation that is asserting its energy sovereignty.

Kozloff also looks at Venezuela’s “Oil Sowing Plan” in which Venezuelan “communities design their own development projects and PDVSA [the Venezuelan state oil company] provides the funding.” In 2005 PDVSA paid $6.9 billion for social, educational and health programs in Venezuela. Venezuela and Cuba are natural allies, and Kozloff adeptly digs into some of the two nations’ recent collaborations. Also among the successes Kozloff applauds is the fact that “Chavez helped to undercut the US trade embargo” against Cuba. Without the Soviet Union, Cuba faltered, but Chavez stepped in with money and oil, allowing Castro, “in May of 2005 to double the minimum wage for 1.6 million workers, raise pensions for the elderly, and deliver cooking appliances to the poor.” The Chavez government also provided Cuba with $412 million in subsidized goods and opened a state bank. This type of aid and new state business collaborations are developing throughout the region thanks largely to Venezuelan support.

This new regional integration, Kozloff writes, is formed in part by Cuban doctors at community health clinics in Caracas, in rural hospitals in Bolivia, and by new South American cooperations in lending and financial aid. For example, the Bank of the South, an institution promoted by Chavez and powered by oil money, “could eclipse the IMF in the region.” The author also points out that though Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has disappointed much of his leftist base by pursuing neoliberal policies, the leader of the region’s most powerful economy has offered breathing room for Chavez and other leftist leaders in South America.

In sections of the book on the changes in Bolivia under President Evo Morales, Kozloff describes the partial nationalization of the gas industry, the redistribution of land, expansion of health and educational services to marginalized communities and other positive policies. However, he gives the impression that much of these changes are due specifically to Morales as a leader, when in fact they are the result of years of mobilizations among various grassroots groups. Similarly, Kozloff depicts Morales as a key leader in the 2003 Gas War against Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada. However, Morales was outside of the country during much of those protests and played a limited role in them, while other militant groups, particularly in El Alto, led the charge against the president and his neoliberal policies.

Yet throughout the book, Kozloff doesn’t back away from addressing the complexities and contradictions of the region’s various leftist governments and movements. He occasionally looks at the Venezuelan government with a critical eye, commenting on the Chavez administration’s centralization of power and offers examples of the government’s inefficiency, mismanagement of funds, and troubling environmental track record, suggesting that in the oil-powered economy, “the environment could prove to be Chavez’s Achilles’ heel.” Kozloff also mentions the new “boliburguesía”–a word compound of “Bolívar” and “bourgeoisie”–which is “a riff on Chavez’s Bolivarian Revolution and the new class of elites it has created.” This new class of politicians, bureaucrats and middlemen, Kozloff writes, “could form an impediment to the advancement of socialism.”

However, Venezuela offers plenty of reasons to be hopeful. A chapter entitled “South American Media Wars” starts off with a close look at Telesur, Venezuela’s new hemispheric TV station. The network has an audience of 5 million viewers and is broadcasted in 20 Latin American and Caribbean countries with 24-hour programming. As its proponents explain, Telesur is a way to show South America through South Americans’ eyes. In an interview, Kozloff asks Uruguayan Aram Aharonian, Telesur’s director at the time, “To what extent does Telesur contribute to South American integration?” Aharonian responds, “The problem in Latin America is that we don’t know anything about each other, we are blind to ourselves. We always saw ourselves through the lens of Madrid, London, New York. We begin with the idea that first we must get to know ourselves. Our problems are similar, the expectations are similar. Telesur is merely a tool so that people get to know what’s happening in Latin America, so that people recognize, ‘Oh, that’s Ecuador,’ or ‘Oh, that’s Chile.’ And this may spur the process of integration, as you say.”

Many nations in South America are working together with a revived civil society and using natural resource wealth to empower the state and development projects. Kozloff writes that Valter Pomar, Secretary of International Relations with Brazil’s Workers’ Party, is confident that progressive regional integration between nations would have a positive geopolitical impact because it “would take place within the context of a rising left movement. That is important, because the European Union was pushed for and created under conservative governments.”

As Revolution! South America and the Rise of the New Left is a book about a currently unfolding phase in Latin America, it sometimes raises more question than it answers, namely–what’s next? In a chapter aptly titled, “Integration For Survival” political analyst Emir Sader looks to the future of the region: “It’s unclear where it’s all headed. But the continent has three or four more years left with these regimes in power. That’s why it’s possible to deepen the process of regional integration, not to the point of being irreversible, but relative irreversibility to the point that a new neo-liberal government might have problems changing course.”

***

Benjamin Dangl is the author of The Price of Fire: Resource Wars and Social Movements in Bolivia (AK Press, 2007). He edits TowardFreedom.com, a progressive perspective on world events, and UpsideDownWorld.org, a website covering activism and politics in Latin America.

Correction: The article previously stated that PDVSA provided $6.9 billion for Cuban social programs in 2005. That was actually the amount that was used within Venezuela during that year for community-developed programs. The correction was made to the article on Sept. 22, 2008.

Mexico Unconquered: Reviewing a People’s History of Power and Revolt

By Benjamin Dangl

Feb. 29, 2009

Reviewed: Mexico Unconquered: Chronicles of Power and Revolt, by John Gibler, 356 Pages, City Lights Publishers, (January, 2009).

Carlos Slim, the second richest man in the world, calls Mexico home, as do millions of impoverished citizens. From Spanish colonization to today’s state and corporate repression, Mexico Unconquered: Chronicles of Power and Revolt, by John Gibler, is written from the street barricades, against the Slims of the world, and alongside “the underdogs and rebels” of an unconquered country. The book offers a gripping account of the ongoing attempts to colonize Mexico, and the hopeful grassroots movements that have resisted this conquest.

Gibler, a Global Exchange Media Fellow, has been reporting from Mexico since 2006. While writing for dozens of media outlets, he has covered events such as the Zapatistas’ Other Campaign, the teachers’ revolt in Oaxaca and other stories of police repression and popular resistance. These reports form the basis for much of the book. (His articles are collected at the Global Exchange website.)

In the prologue, Gibler writes of Mexico Unconquered: “each chapter bleeds into all the others: they all share the same blood.” It’s true: the chapters flow together smoothly, bonded by Gibler’s steady class analysis and excellent story-telling skills. He breathes poetry and anecdotes into the history, and empathy and prose into the reporting, so these stories can be understood and felt, not just read.

Mexico Unconquered starts off with an engaging people’s history of Mexico. Gibler guides the reader through the country’s various presidencies and popular uprisings. From Oaxaca, Gibler offers a first hand account of the incredible teachers’ revolt, with unbelievable reports on police brutality and people’s solidarity. From Chiapas, Gibler provides a concise overview of the Zapatistas’ history, contextualized with background information on indigenous autonomy and reports on the Other Campaign. The book also tells stories from Mexico’s ghost towns, with numerous interviews with families that bear the burden of immigration to the US.

But the book is more than just an account of neoliberal nightmares and grassroots revolts. It cuts to the heart of the problems ravaging Mexico today, dissecting the roots of the country’s corruption, state repression, drug wars and poverty. In this respect, the book’s approach reflects what the late folk singer Utah Phillips once said: “The Earth is not dying it is being killed. And those who are killing it have names and addresses.” Well, Gibler offers the names and addresses of the people – and companies and ideologies – that are still trying to conquer Mexico.

“I hope that the thoughts and stories presented herein will be of use to others reflecting on similar social conditions in other lands,” Gibler writes. Indeed, harrowing accounts of Mexican police using torture to spread fear and expand power – but not necessarily get information – recall the torture methods employed in the US-led “War on Terror.” The book’s stories of how the drug war in Mexico is used as a pretext for police to murder and repress with impunity is shockingly similar to the drug war in the Andes. Numerous examples are also given in the book of how the law in Mexico – as in so many other countries – works only for those with political power and weapons.

Beyond its analysis, history and reporting, this book is also call to revolt. Readers around the world could learn much from the popular uprisings in Mexico. Just as the tactics of repressive states and exploitative corporations are similar around the world, the strategies of resistance could be also be connected and shared across international borders. Toward the end of the book, Gibler recalls the words of a friend, “[I]f we are all complicit in the damage, then we all share responsibility in the solutions; that is, we are united, or can be united, in taking a stand, in revolt.”

1491: The Truth About the Americas Before Columbus

By Benjamin Dangl

Sunday, 11 June 2006

In many high school history classes students are told that before Columbus arrived the Americas were full of untamed wilderness loosely populated with savage Indians. Charles Mann’s book, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus proves that the opposite is true.

He draws from recent archeological and scientific discoveries to describe booming civilizations which thrived throughout the Americas centuries before the arrival of Europeans. Like Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States this book made me want to call up my old history teachers and tell them they were very wrong. In fact, Mann’s self-described thesis is to show that indigenous societies before the arrival of Columbus deserve more than a few misleading pages in a textbook.

Mann was able to hold my attention not just with the details of complex indigenous societies, but also with controversies, adventures and divisions among the scientists and archeologists which have contributed to what we know of pre-Columbian history. Not only is he able to make squabbles between European archeologists interesting, but he’s able to smoothly describe scientific data and Mayan politics in the same breath.

The book is brimming with shocking information like the fact that the city of Tiwanaku, in what is now Bolivia, had 115,000 people living in it in 1000 A.D., a population that Paris would not reach for five centuries. Among other surprises we learn that Pocahontas means “little hellion” and there are less people living in the Amazon now than there were in 1491. Mann points out that the British and French, not the indigenous people, were the savages. The Europeans arriving in North America smelled horrible; some of them had never taken a bath their whole lives. On the other hand, the indigenous people were generally very clean, strong and well nourished.

The first section of the book deals largely with new revelations about the sicknesses such as small pox and Hepatitis A which ravaged the native populations of the Americas shortly after the arrival of the Europeans. The death toll is as surprising as the size of the populations before Columbus. When Columbus landed, there were an estimated 25 million people living in Mexico. At the time, there were only 10 million people in Spain and Portugal. Central Mexico was more densely populated than China or India when Columbus arrived. An estimated 90-112 million lived in the Americas, which was a larger population than that of Europe. Mann also pointed out that the Incas ruled the biggest empire on earth ever. In their prime, the kingdom’s span equaled the distance between St. Petersburg and Cairo.

The bloodshed unleashed by the Europeans had a lot do with killing off of these populations. Yet sickness played perhaps an even larger role. Smallpox hit the Andes before Spain’s Pizarro did, killing off most people and plunging the area into civil war. The sickness is thought to have arrived to the region from the Caribbean. Hepatitis A killed off an estimated 90% of the population in coastal New England in 3 years. Within first years of European contact, 95% of native populations died. These numbers seem hard to believe, but Mann’s exhausting research draws from decades of investigations from dozens of scientists and archeologists.

While reading this book, I realized how inaccurate it is to describe the Americas as the “New World.” Nothing could be further from the truth. The Americas were inhabited by people 20-30,0000 years ago. Europe, on the other hand, was occupied by humans more recently, 18,000 years ago at the most.

This book proves that the wilderness in the Americas before the Europeans arrived was far from wild and untouched by humans. Mann argues that pre-Columbus wilderness was totally affected and shaped by the native people that lived there. For example, the Mayans destroyed their own environment; they cut down too many trees and exhausted the soil. As their population expanded the environment and agriculture could no longer sustain them. This greatly contributed to their collapse.

Other indigenous groups altered their ecosystems to facilitate their survival. Societies in the Amazon regularly burned down vast expanses of the forest; the charred soil was good for agriculture and the fire flushed out animals for food. The plains the US are believed to be a result of similar forest-burning techniques. Indigenous hunters before Columbus sought out pregnant animals to lower the population; indigenous people competed with animals for food, berries and nuts. Indigenous societies also built vast canals, cities, irrigation systems, large agricultural fields, entirely changing the wilderness for human use.

When the first European explorers passed over the Mississippi they saw millions of bison and other animals. This was not because indigenous people didn’t hunt them. In fact, these animal populations were large because their predators, the indigenous people, had been killed off by European sicknesses. Similarly, the death from these sicknesses allowed ecosystems to thrive without the impact of humans until the European colonies expanded. What Europeans actually saw when they fully explored and settled in “wilder” regions was the death of the landscape shaped by indigenous cultures.

Though I was in awe of such revelations and the vast research Mann put into the book, I couldn’t help but wonder about his sources. I know that most indigenous societies did not have any extensive written history, and so much of what is known about their day to day life, culture, wars and religion is guesswork. Mann’s book is based primarily on research, analysis and theories from Europeans and North Americans. Perhaps this reflects the academic, scientific and archeological world more than it does Mann’s approach. However, I wanted to hear more from contemporary Mayan, Mapuche, Incan and Aymara people about their own versions of this history, people who still practice these ancient politics, customs and religions. Stories and histories exist among descendent of these civilizations, but Mann doesn’t draw from them enough.

My wariness of his choice of sources increased when he described visiting ruins in Peru and commented on a “curious sight”:

“…[S]kulls from the cemetery, gathered into several small piles. Around them were beer cans, cigarette butts, patent-medicine bottles, half-burned photographs and candles shaped like naked women. These last had voodoo pins stuck in their heads and vaginas. Local people came to these places at night and either dug for treasure or practiced witchcraft, Haas [Mann’s archeologist friend] said. In the harsh afternoon light they seemed to me tacky and sad.”

This sounds similar to the kind of disdain with which the Spanish looked upon indigenous religions when they first arrived. How does Mann know that this “witchcraft” isn’t a modern day version of what the Incas practiced? Instead of ancient broken pottery and gold jewelry, he found beer bottles and photographs. Why does he immediately dismiss this as “tacky and sad”? Could this “witchcraft” serve as a gateway to understanding ancient Andean religions? Elsewhere in the book he criticizes locals who rob from the ruins to sell gold and artifacts to feed their families. I’d say that gold is put to better use feeding a family than sitting in a museum. Observations such as these from Mann made me think even more about the millions of indigenous voices left out of this book about indigenous societies.

None the less, it deserves to be required reading in high schools along with the many other books which have taken on the “official” histories of the hemisphere.

Charles Mann’s book, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus is available on Amazon.com

Benjamin Dangl is the editor of UpsideDownWorld.org, a website uncovering activism and politics in Latin America. He is the author of “The Price of Fire: Resource Wars and Social Movements in Bolivia,” forthcoming in March, 2007 from AK Press. He recently won a Project Censored Award for his coverage of US military operations in Paraguay.

The Vietnam War: Getting Behind the Spitting Image

Written by Benjamin Dangl, Transcribed by April Howard

Tuesday, 03 January 2006

Jerry Lembcke is the author of “The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of Vietnam”. In 1969, he was assigned to the 41st Artillery Group in Vietnam as a Chaplain’s Assistant, and joined the Vietnam Veterans Against the War when he returned in 1970. As an associate professor of sociology at Holy Cross College during the Persian Gulf War, Lembcke began to research the origins of stories about Vietnam Veterans being spit on by female antiwar protesters. Not only did the stories conflict with Lembcke’s experiences as a veteran and member of the anti-war movement in the 1970’s, he could not find a single documented case of a veteran being spit on. It was in this research that Lembcke began to realize that the spitting myths also served the Nixon-Agnew administration as political tools with which to damage the image of the antiwar movement, and to bolster the injured masculinity of a country which had just lost its first war.

He also began to question the diagnosis of “post traumatic stress disorder,” which he now argues was an effective way for the administration to discredit the political opinions of veterans. His book was published by New York University Press in July of 1998. In this interview, Lembcke discusses the experiences that led him to write the book, his interpretation of the “spitting myths” as political tools, and applies those ideas to the war in Iraq and the current antiwar movement.

BD: Did your experiences in Vietnam politicize your life, and how?

JL: Most Definitely! I was not political at all before the war. I was drafted in 1968, I had been to college by that that time, had a BA in math, and after graduation in 1966 I took a job as a highschool math teacher in Iowa. Up to that point I had played baseball, basketball, had not been involved politically at all. The draft experience, for me, was kind of a wake-up call. I went to basic training in Washington, and at the end of basic training, I volunteered to go to chaplain’s assistant school. So off I went to Fort Hamilton in New York.

Fall and summer of 1968 was a very raucous time to be in New York City. That was my first exposure to the anti-war movement: meeting and being met by antiwar activists just off the coast of Fort Henry and in Manhattan. The first antiwar rally I witnessed was at St. Patrick’s Cathedral on 5th Ave., and I was standing a half a block away, watching and looking and realizing that hey, these people know something that I don’t know, and probably something that I am going to need to know.

Later, that experience in New York City in that summer became a part of how I knew that the stories about hostilities between antiwar activists and soldiers and veterans weren’t true. It was in that summer of 1968 when a lot of these stories (as rumor would have it) were taking place. I’ve had people tell me that directly: “I was in Manhattan in the summer of 1968, and I’ll tell you, soldiers were getting spat on left and right.” And I’ve even had some veterans tell me: “Well you weren’t there the summer of 1968, so you don’t know what it was like,” and of course I was there, and there was mostly mutual respect and supportiveness between the antiwar movement and the soldiers. I remember that we were offered sanctuary at churches in Brooklyn when we came off the posts at Fort Henry.

So, of course then I went to Vietnam, was sent to Vietnam on New Years day 1969, and stayed all of 1969 and the first few months of 1970 as a chaplain’s assistant, mostly in the central highlands of South Vietnam

BD: How were you received when you returned? You didn’t fly in to San Francisco and get spit on?

JL: (Laughs) No! Actually, at the time I came back in 1970, I came back looking for the antiwar movement because I wanted to join it - and I was disappointed! I went to Seattle Tacoma airport, and flew back to my home town, Sioux City, Iowa and didn’t meet antiwar activists at all. You see, the fall of ‘69 was the time period of the October and November Moratorium Days Against the War. There was a lot of support for the moratorium amongst the soldiers in Vietnam, and I remember quite clearly that, in those fall months of ’69, we heard a lot about the moratorium. So that’s what I was thinking- When I get home, I’m going to join the antiwar movement. Eventually I left my home in Iowa and went to Denver, and that’s where I hooked up with Vietnam Veterans Against the War.

BD: Who do you think started the spitting myth and why? Was the government complicit, the CIA, or was the media most at fault?

JL: I think the spark was made by the government, the Nixon administration, through vice president Spiro Agnew. Quite commonly, Agnew would say in speeches, “Our veterans are being treated badly by the anti war activists,” though he never used the exact expression “being spat on.” Actually, when I started working on tracking down these stories, that’s what I thought that I would find: a speech in April of 1971, in which Spiro Agnew said “The people are spitting on our veterans.” I’ve never found anything in the record referring to or alluding to spit, but plenty of references referring to Nixon or Agnew saying that “our soldiers are being greeted with hostility. I think that that sparked or primed people’s imaginations. I did hear about stories that circulated in Germany after World War I of soldiers being spit on, so it’s even possible that those stories somehow found their way to the United States after Vietnam, I don’t know.

Still, a more important clue for me came when I heard that so many of these stories have women or young girls as the spitters. For a while it didn’t really register in my mind, but then I started thinking “why so often is it girls, and why does the storyteller gender the identity of the spitter?” It seemed unusual. Later, when I was telling a psychologist friend about these stories, she asked me about the demographics of the spitters, and I said “it’s often times women or young girls.” Well, she smiled and said, well, it’s got to be a myth right? And I knew what she was going to say at that moment and I don’t know why it didn’t think of it before, but it brought it to consciousness for me, and she said “girls don’t spit, right?” And I smiled and I said “Yeah, I think you’re right. So what’s going on here?” So it was then in conversation with her the idea that it could be the wounded masculinity of soldiers who came home from Vietnam and had to face the stigma of having fought America’s first lost war that stimulated the imaginations of American people. Then, this sentiment of wounded pride came together with the stories of hostility that the Nixon Administration had been putting out on people, and they formed a kind of urban legend.

I didn’t originally use the term urban myth or urban legend, other people have used it, but that’s the way that urban myths start. The main characteristic of the origin of an urban myth is that it has no point of origin or time of origin, and that it is being told across a wide geographic area. So, the absence of any point of origin, suggests that the spitting stories are of the same nature as an urban legend.

To me, this means that the stories are reflecting something deeper about an anxiety in American culture; that they are an inarticulate expression of something that is really bothering people, which is “Why did we lose this war?” What the spitting stories help construct, then, is an answer to that question, which is “We lost the war because of betrayal at home. We did not lose the war to the Vietnamese; we lost the war to ourselves, were defeated by ourselves.”

BD: What impact did this myth of spat upon veterans have on the relationship between protesters and veterans in the 60’s and 70’s?

JL: The first effect it had was to discredit the voice of the Vietnam Veterans. The idea that the Nixon administration tried to put across to people was that “These people coming home are physically and emotionally wounded. They’re hurt, they’re damaged, they’re angry, but that doesn’t mean that we should listen to them as authorities on what the war is about, and how this war should be fought. We should be sympathetic to them, try to help them, but we shouldn’t be moved politically by what they’re trying to say.”

This message was a way of pathologizing the political behavior of Vietnam Veterans. When I came home for Vietnam in May of 1970, my view was that the Vietnam War had been a politicizing phase of my life, an empowering period of my life, and I think it was that way for a lot of guys. I think it was that political clarity that was a danger to the political establishment. By pathologizing the statements made by veterans, the administration could reduce the authenticity and credibility of them it in the eyes of the American people. And I think it was a pretty successful strategy.

BD: In your opinion, how has this myth effected American public opinion since its creation and in the present?

JL: The effect on American publics opinion in the early to mid 70’s was to establish a message that “We could have won the war in Vietnam if the American people had stayed solidly behind the mission,” and for a while that kept alive the idea that we could go back and re-start the fight. That’s the Hollywood scene of Rambo movies, the go back and do it right this time movies, which, of course, eventually faded out into the nineties.

But the myth also gives life to the idea that we could win wars like Vietnam someplace else, sometime in the future if the American people would just rally around the soldiers and rally around the mission. So it shouldn’t have been any surprise, though it took me a while to figure out what was going on, when in the run up to the Persian Gulf War of 1991 that stories about spat upon Veterans began to circulate in large numbers.

That’s really when I became interested in them; I had not heard these stories before 1990 (which is another clue that these stories are myths and legends). I should add that, if you go back to the late 60s and early 70’s and look for evidence that these things happened, not only don’t you find any evidence, but you don’t find anyone claiming that it was happening at that time. So again, that suggests something imaginative about these stories, because at later times there were thousands of people who claimed that they were spat on, but none of them were saying it at the time it was supposedly going on.

Around 1990 then, I first became interested in finding out where these stories came from and who first started telling them? My interest was sparked because in the fall of 1990, the stories were being used to leverage support for the looming war in Iraq, and to silence people who were opposing the war. They produced a narrative that ran “We don’t want to oppose the war in Iraq lest we do what we did to our solders and our vets during the Vietnam War, and we all know what that was about” (laughs). And that seemed to have been pretty persuasive.

I work at Holy cross college, and there was a large anti-war movement in the fall of 1990, but there were a few students who said to me “What about the people who are there fighting the war? I don’t support the war, but I don’t want to do any thing to hurt the people who were sent to fight.” So it definitely was put into people’s minds and worked, if not to actually quiet some antiwar voices, at least to intimidate them. So since these stories started in ‘90, ‘91 they really have not stopped; they just keep percolating through the cultural imagination.

In the spring of 2003, in the run up to the War in Iraq, these stories started circulating again. After a country-wide campaign of antiwar rallies in March, I started receiving phone calls about supposed attacks on Veterans. The first was a reporter from Burlington, VT, who asked if I had heard that a Vermont National Guardswoman had had stones thrown at her at a store in Burlington and that the stone throwers were highschool students who were protesting the war. I said that I hadn’t heard about it. And he said he was calling me because someone had told him about my book, and he thought that I might know something about this.

Later that same day, or maybe the next day, I got another phone call, a reported from Ashville north Carolina, and he said that there was a report going around there, in the local press, that two marines walking on the street had been spat on. And again, he said that he knew or had heard about my book, and so he was suspicious of the story, and he had started asking around, poking his nose around, and people who should have seen this happen if it really happened hadn’t seen anything, nobody could remember having seen two marines in uniform that day. And, as it turned out, the guy that was telling the story said that he was a Vietnam Veteran and that he had been spat on when he got home. So the reporter was suspicious of the stories.

Then he asked if I had heard about the “Support the Troops” rallies that were happening all across the south. And, at that time, it was early enough that I said didn’t know. Then he told me that a lot of the rallies were using people who say that they are Vietnam Veterans and say that they were spat on when they came back from the war. Well, within a few days, I was getting phone calls from all over the country.

What I found was that a lot of these “Support the Troops” rallies were organized or partially organized by radio stations in these medium-sized cities and towns across the country and it was specifically the Clear Channel stations that were helping to organize the rally, and then broadcasting it. So I was very interested and when, in a few weeks, there was a “Support the Troops” rally in Worcester, I went to it. And sure enough, it was the Clear Channel radio station that seemed to be behind it and, sure enough, there was a guy who spoke who said that he was a Vietnam vet, and that he was spat upon when he came home. I guess it was a kind of a script that they were using.

BD: Do you think it was a top-down thing that the higher-ups of the Clear Channel radio stations were doing?

JL: Well, you never know about these things. It could have been that one station did it, and then it kind of caught on, but at some point somebody at the top must have realized what was going on and said Go for it!

BD: Do you think that the stories have become a grassroots thing, perpetuated by people now, rather than the government or the media?

JL: Nowadays I think yes, it’s more organic than it was. I think that this myth is very much ingrained in society at this point that it is fed and kept alive both by the people and the government, when they find it useful. If you go back to March of ’03, there were these huge antiwar rallies; some estimated the largest in American history. Public opinion in this country was not supportive of the invasion of Iraq. But then, toward the end of March and early April, public opinion really turned around.

I think the chemistry of that change came from the fact that there are a lot of people who are still angry about the War in Vietnam, and that anger gets mustered at times like this. Some people supported the war in Iraq, as a way of flipping off the American anti-war movement. In a lot of people’s minds, the American antiwar movement is part of a greater package of grievances, and a lot of these are righteous grievances, though misdirected. People who are suffering job loss, insecurity about their futures, etc, at times use this package, which sometimes says “liberals” and sometimes “anti –war movement,” as an object to be fought against. And, in this light, the chance to go to war again is a way to say “in your face” to the antiwar movement, to “liberalism,” to everything that a lot of people are angry about. From this point of view, the story of the spat upon veteran rises up a kind of a “perfecting myth.”

BD: You mentioned in your book that support for the Gulf War focused on support for the troops, rather than the war itself. Can you relate that to the current war in Iraq?

JL: Yes, I think that supporting the troops rather than the war itself is a way of depoliticizing the war. Again, that was very true during the end of the war in Vietnam; people who knew nothing about the war supported the war because they supported the troops. And some of that had to do with the POW question, because the Nixon administration really exploited the fact that we had POWs still in Vietnam, and therefore had to stay there to get the POWs out, which was an endless process. So I think that the policy planners and strategists during Vietnam figured out that you don’t muster public opinion first, and then send the troops, no! You send the troops and then rally the people around the troops. It’s a kind of demagoguery; it erases reason and appeals to peoples’ emotions.

When you think about it, it’s pretty hard to oppose the war and still be supporting the troops. It collapses the means and ends of reason. Reasonably, the soldiers are the means of the war, but the war supposedly has its own end to be supported or not. But, if you make the means the ends, then really you have nothing left but emotions to act on, because the ends are disappeared, collapsed into the means, and the soldiers become the ends of the war themselves.

I don’t know how much that’s happened today. Certainly that’s what was going on in spring of 2003, and reasoning about the looming war was really stymied, long enough to get the troops there and the war underway. Now it’s kind of hard to read public opinion. We had a couple of years here in which the antiwar movement was kind of quiet. But now it’s beginning to find its voice again, and become more effective. And, because the end of the war in Iraq very much appears to be another defeat for the US, just now in the last few weeks, we are again beginning to hear accusations against the anti-war movement.

For example, about 6 weeks ago, at the national convention of the American Legion, the commander said that the American Legion will now oppose aggressively any organization that does not support the action in Iraq. He said “we have etched in our minds Jane Fonda spouting anti-American rhetoric and we have not forgotten.” Identifying Jane Fonda, of course, as another icon of betrayal and a way of remembering why and how it was that we lost the war in Vietnam. A couple of weeks ago, G Gordon Liddy, one of the Nixon plumbers and now a radio talk show guy referred to Cindy Sheehan, the woman whose son Casey died in Iraq, and who camped out in Crawford Texas at the Bush ranch, and said that she was whoring her son in support of the anti-war Movement.

There was also a big march and rally in DC a few weeks ago, and on the internet there circulated a story about one of the counter protesters who had been spat on by one of the anti-war people. I think as the anti-war movement begins to step out again, and as we inch closer and closer to a lost cause in Iraq, there will be more of a search for scapegoats at home as an explanation for why this turned out so badly.

BD: In light of this history, what would you say to a person now who was against the war, but was on the fence about speaking out because they didn’t want to seem unsupportive of the soldiers?

JL: Well, to the extent that the person would draw on the Vietnam experience, I would say that it’s a myth, it didn’t happen then and the truth about what happened then is that thousands of people came home from Vietnam opposed to the war and that thousands of veterans joined the anti-war movement, and that that is what’s forgotten when you believe that anti-war people spat on Vietnam veterans. It revises by 180 degrees the truth about what was going on in those years. In the present context today we need to inform ourselves better about what the soldiers in Iraq really think about the war and, just like in the Vietnam war years its very likely that there’s more dissent in Iraq than what we are hearing about. And in the case of Vietnam, we didn’t hear that much about it during the earlier years, it wasn’t until the war was over that we began to hear a little more, and then increasingly more as the years went along, and that’s probably going to be the case with Iraq too. So we need to find out more about that, and we need to be supportive of that when we hear that it’s happening. Those are the soldiers that need to be supported.

Buy a copy of The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of Vietnam from Amazon.

Benjamin Dangl is the editor of www.TowardFreedom.com, a progressive perspective on world events. April Howard is a writer/translator and Spanish teacher in Vermont.

Argentina: Hope in Hard Times

By Benjamin Dangl

7/25/05

“Imagine you lost your job and the government closed down the banks, so you couldn’t get out your savings. What would you do?” asks the narrator of the new film, Argentina: Hope in Hard Times. In the case of Argentina’s economic crisis in 2002, the situation brought about a renewal in grassroots democracy. This film covers the social movement that broke out in Argentina during that crisis, taking the viewer on a wild ride to street protests, worker-controlled factories, barter fairs and a Citibank transformed into a community center. It discusses the rise and fall of a country that, in a matter of days, went from being one of the richest nations in the region, to one of the poorest.

For decades, Argentines enjoyed a higher standard of living than many of its neighbors. Yet due to corrupt politicians and pressure from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank to develop new economic policies, these glory days came to an abrupt end.

During an interview in the film, Abraham Leonardo Gak, Rector of the School of Business at the University of Buenos Aires, explained that during the nineties the Argentine government’s control over the economy was gradually shifted into the hands of the market. “There’s an idea that the market is the best way to manage resources,” Gak said. “It’s been preached continuously for more than 27 years. It was installed, not just in the economy, but in the minds of the people. Imports replaced local manufacturing and investment capital could go in and out of the country at any moment. It seemed like the economy was growing…”

“But wealth became more concentrated in the hands of a few and unemployment went up,” explained the film’s narrator as the camera cuts to a shot of pedestrians walking below a giant Coca-Cola sign. “Argentina privatized public services. The government laid off workers and cut regulation of business. This was supposed to free up the private sector for an economic boom.”

The house of cards fell in December 2001. In an attempt to stop the flow of dollars out of the country, the government froze everyone’s bank accounts. Middle class people became poor, unemployment skyrocketed and protests filled the streets. The country went through four presidents in less than a month.

In the midst of this crisis, people worked together to develop the many creative solutions that are the focus of this film. One visit is to a barter fair in Palermo, a neighborhood in Buenos Aires that before the crisis was economically well off. At this fair they use creditos, an alternative currency to the official Argentine peso. People use this new currency to buy shoes, shirts and tools as well as hire painters and plumbers for housework. Few had official pesos, so creditos worked as a survival measure. “I don’t get paid that often, so I try and get by in other ways,” one customer at the fair explained.

The film also includes interviews at a barbeque held in another formerly upper-class neighborhood. The event is a fundraiser to pay for tetanus shots for cartoneros, people who search the garbage for recyclable material in order to earn a meager amount of money. A man helping out at the event explained, “I’ve lived here for seven years and only knew two people. Now I know my neighbors.”

“It’s fashionable now to help others,” another woman said.

Other phenomena which the documentary depicts are the popular assemblies which sprouted up in Argentina during the crisis. The assemblies were basically made up of distraught neighbors gathering in the streets, trying to figure out what to do next.

Referring to the politicians that had helped to create the economic mess in the first place, one citizen at an assembly said, “Everybody out! Get rid of them all! This new force that is emerging in the neighborhoods and factories could someday replace the current system.”

“People should give money that we were paying to the government to the popular assembly now,” a young man commented.

The film crew also visits a poor neighborhood in Quilmes, outside Buenos Aires, where a community of people occupied land to live on and grow their own food. In interviews with the workers there, one woman discussed the essential function of their community cafeteria: “Three hundred children come here each day because they don’t have anything to eat.”

The film includes a number of interviews with formerly wealthy people who were well-dressed, but could not afford to feed themselves. It was this group that was finding out, possibly for the first time in their lives, what it meant to be poor. Out of necessity, these newborn activists joined the popular cry, “Que Se Vayan Todos!” (Throw them all out!), banged pots and pans against bank windows and began, along with other social sectors, to create grassroots networks and projects that helped their communities survive the crisis.

Unfortunately, the amount of solidarity between Argentine citizens has plummeted significantly since 2002. Whereas poverty still affects much of the country, and some social sectors are working for change, many who were forced to protest and organize with their neighbors in order to endure the crisis now have steady salaries and aren’t as inclined to participate in such activism.

Argentina: Hope in Hard Times provides an exciting look at this social movement in its heyday. It takes an exhaustive, panoramic shot of Argentine activism in 2002, capturing the grassroots power people felt as they transformed the broken pieces of their country into new opportunities. This is the best documentary yet on what was a pivotal moment in Argentina’s history and should be required viewing for anyone who is interested in working for a better world.

Argentina: Hope in Hard Times was produced by Melissa Young and Mark Dworkin. To order a copy of the film, email video@bullfrogfilms.com, call 1-800-543-FROG or go to www.bullfrogfilms.com.

Benjamin Dangl studied in Argentina during the country’s 2002 crisis and has since written from there on the worker-controlled factories movement in Buenos Aires.