Aff Decolonization

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Thornography/AK47 and the Grool kids
Decolonial International
Table of Contents
HOW TO THINK ABOUT THIS ARGUMENT .............................................................................................. 2 Sample 1AC........................................................................................................................................................ 4 Sample 1AC........................................................................................................................................................ 6 The Fourth World War ....................................................................................................................................... 7 We Want Everything - Thisness ......................................................................................................................... 9 Impacts - Neoliberalism ................................................................................................................................... 11 Solvency - Decolonize ...................................................................................................................................... 12 Solvency - War Machine / Become Minor ....................................................................................................... 13 Perm .................................................................................................................................................................. 14 Perm .................................................................................................................................................................. 15 A/T: Rspec ........................................................................................................................................................ 16 Framework - Geo-Epistemology ..................................................................................................................... 18 Framework - Geo-Epistemology ...................................................................................................................... 19 Framework - Silencing ..................................................................................................................................... 20 Framework - A/T: democracy .......................................................................................................................... 21 Other Campaigns Our Americas ................................................................................................................... 22 Other Campaigns Huey Newton .................................................................................................................... 23 Other Campaigns Margaret Walker............................................................................................................... 24 Other Campaigns - tawantinsuyu ..................................................................................................................... 25 Other Campaigns Mao Zedongs A/T: imperialism inevitable ..................................................................... 28 Storytelling good .............................................................................................................................................. 29 NEG ARGUMENTS NEG Speaking for Others .............................................................................................................................. 32 2NC impact: epistemology/turns the aff........................................................................................................... 34 Neoliberalism good .......................................................................................................................................... 35
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HOW TO THINK ABOUT THIS ARGUMENT
The Affirmative argues that it is significant the topic asks us to consider our relation with (particular countries) in Latin America. The topic asks us to take an international perspective with respect to our subject positions and relations with others. This does not mean that we think we should just affirm the topic unquestioningly. In the topic is a set of normative assumptions about who we and they are. Who is USFG? Who is Venezuela? Cuba? Mexico? What does it mean to engage another? What does economic engagement mean when neoliberal policies have played such a large role in constructing US-LA relations, causing poverty and dispossession not only in Latin America, but also in the United States (think Katrina, or the Prison Industrial Complex, union busting, austerity measures, social policing, etc.)? The topic seems to invoke our names. We are supposed to role play at being the USFG but we know that we are not really the USFG. At the same time, it is not that simple, because as people in the United States we do have privileges that others in the Southern Hemisphere and around the globe do not. While we are simultaneously messed over by the USFG, capitalism, and racism/sexism, we also benefit from some of those things from an internat ional perspective. Why say benefit in quotation marks? Well, because it is not a question of whether or not the global capitalist system is good or bad (we on the AFF think it is bad, but again, not really the point). The global capitalist system is a part of a set of historical forces that lead to the fact that we are here right now, and they are over there, in Mexico, in Cuba, in Venezuela. And that means we are in some way responsible even if we are not the USFG, because the USFG speaks in our names even when it is messing us over too. In one sense, we could say that what unites all of our struggles the struggles of protestors, freedom fighters, radical intellectuals, etc. all around the globe, is that they are all in one way or another fighting against this system. They are fighting this system while simultaneously being within the system. Just like us. And yet not like us, because it would be violent to say that we can know the struggle of the Venezuelan miner, or the Mexican indigenous, etc. Because we are not them, and everything we can know about them is in some way mediated and determined by our faulty epistemologies. If we are all struggling, and we are different but also somehow struggling in common, how do we connect our struggles toget her? How do we think about the relationship we have to them? This is the purpose of the AFF. The AFF asks all these questions and works with these kinds of realizations. There are many struggles happening, especially in Latin America. And there are struggles happening here too. They are connected even though they are unique. But we can learn from others and they can learn from us. We call that space of learning encounter. Encounter is the space in which we think about the relationship between the we over here and the we over there. It is where we build visions for what is beyond this world and we practice how to get there. The AFF argues that this requires a linking of struggles. It is the linking up of other struggles, in our minds and in our practice, that we exercise real power to transform the world. That is what the 1AC does, what it performs, what it affirms, and how it solves. Here is a step by step way to think of the AFF: A) Neoliberalism is messing us all up. It is the Fourth World War a war in which instead of nation states fighting against other nation states, wars are waged externally and internally. They are waged everywhere. The war is one of the logic and practice of capital versus everything that resists capital. That means that we are all potentially enemy. We are all potentially dispossessed. We must be policed in order to keep the forces of discontent at bay so that capitalism can run its course. This is happening here and all over the world. B) And yet there are people who fight and resist and struggle. In fact, we should be more correct and say that actually people are living their lives all the time. It is as the moment when they meet resistance or when the system says they cannot or should not survive, they must be policed, they must be driven off the land, etc. that the system reveals itself. Resistance Begets Power not the other way around. This means that it is not a matter of overturning something, or taking control of the government if our goal is liberation. We have to make new connections, linkages, ways of being and thinking and relating to each other. New epistemologies. C) The AFF performs this alternative process by connecting neoliberalism to the United States, to Veneuzuela, to Cuba, to Mexico to other struggles (the Maoists, etc.), and to ourselves. All of these struggles paint a picture a world picture that we can intervene in. These connections show the history beneath the history, the history that is always happening, the connections always being made. Each struggle is a repetition of another struggle we carry the energy of those struggles even if our struggle has a different content. D) THE AFF disidentifies with the resolution. Disidentification is a way of relating to norms that both recognizing how those norms interpolate us (make us who we are, or make us intelligible) and also recognizes that those norms can never fully capture our existence. In relation to Latin America it would be a lie to say that we are not the USFG, but it is also completely a lie to say that we are the USFG since we are not Obama or politicians or any of that. That is disidentification. It is not about being opposed it is about not buying in or cashing in on the logic of the state or capitalism. E) The AFF argues that this process of making connections and making the struggle against capitalism/racism/sexism/etc. powerful is a form of decolonization. Decolonization is about starting from today, the world that is only made possible
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by colonization, imperialism, genocide, theft of land and bodies, slavery to start here and now in this world to make a new future by remembering our dead. We are all only here now because nameless others have died. They too are part of our struggle. They teach us how to live and why. We cant ignore or forgive history, but we can learn from it and we can honor our dead and each other. F) The AFF says that the best way build a new future is to make the memories of the future by looking into the past and looking horizontally across space to other struggles. This AFF is about creating alternatives alternative ways of thinking about politics, and alternative ways of thinking about who we are and who they are. I am we. They are us. When we build linkages between our struggles we build an army, or what Deleuze and Guattari call a war machine. How many are we? Is the question that helps to us say Another world is possible or Ya Basta! (Enough!) or todo para todos (Everything for Everyone!) or We Want Everything !
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Sample 1AC
At the Summit of the Americas the late Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez hands president Obama a book, The Open Veins of Latin America by the Uruguayan journalist Eduardo Galeano. Chavez pats Obama on the shoulder and insists on shaking his hand. Obama turns towards the camera and smiles for a photograph but the look of confusion on his face is evident. This is not the broad foreign policy smile from earlier in the video. Later Obama told a reporter I thought it was one of Chavezs books. I was going to give him one of mine. Of all the insinuations of Chavezs cult of personality, it turns out that Obama is the real narcissist. All of this talk of leaders and figureheads obscures the history that passes between the hands of the two presidents. Chavez gives Obama a gift that he cannot return not my book for your book, quid pro quo, tit for tat the gift can only be returned when the historical structures of economic violence that the book describes are dismantled. Lets read from Galeano:
Eduardo Galeano, 1973 The human murder by poverty in Latin America is secret; every year, without making a sound, three Hiroshima bombs explode over communities that have become accustomed to suffering with clenched teeth. This systematic violence is not apparent but is real and constantly increasing: its holocausts are not made known in the sensational press but in Food and Agricultural Organization statistics. Ball says that it is still possible to act with impunity because the poor cannot set off a world war, but the Imperium is worried: unable to multiply the dinner, it does what it can to suppress the diners. "Fight poverty, kill a beggar!" some genius of black humor scrawled on a wall in La Paz. What do the heirs to Malthus propose bur to kill all the beggars-to-be before they are born? Robert McNamara, the World Bank president who was chairman of Ford and then secretary of defense, has called the population explosion the greatest obstacle to progress in Latin America; the World Bank, he says, will give priority in its loans to countries that implement birth control plans. McNamara notes with regret that the brains of the poor do 25 percent less thinking, and the World Bank technocrats (who have already been born) set computers humming to produce labyrinthine abracadabras on the advantages of not being born : "If," one of the Bank's documents assures us, "a developing country with an
average per capita income of $150 to $200 a year succeeds in reducing its fertility by 50 percent in a period of twenty-five years, at the end of thirty years its per capita income will be higher by at least 40 percent than the level it would otherwise have achieved, and twice as high after sixty years." Lyndon B. Johnson's remark has become famous: "Let us act on the fact that less than $5 invested in population control is worth $100 invested in economic growth." Dwight D. Elsenhower prophesied that if the worlds inhabitants continued multiplying at the same rate, not only would the danger of revolution be increased, but there would also be a lowering of living standards for all peoples, including his own. The United States is more concerned than any other country with spreading and imposing family planning in the farthest outposts. Not only the government, but the Rockefeller and the Ford foundations as well, have nightmares about millions of children advancing like locusts over the horizon from the third world. Plato and Aristotle considered the question before Malthus and McNamara; in our day this global offensive plays a well-defined role. Its aim is to justify the very unequal income distribution between countries and social elates, to convince the poor that poverty is the result of the children they don't avoid having, and to dam the rebellious advance of the masses. While intrauterine devices compete with bombs and machine-gun salvos to arrest the growth of the Vietnamese population, in Latin America it is more hygienic and effective to kill guerrilleros in the womb than in the mountains or the streets. Various U.S. missions have sterilized thousands of women in Amazonia, although this is the least populated habitable zone on our planet. Most Latin American countries have no real surplus of people; on the contrary, they have too few. Brazil has thirty-eight times fewer inhabitants per square mile than Belgium, Paraguay has forty-nine times fewer than England, Peru has thirty-two times fewer than Japan. Haiti and El Salvador, the human antheaps of Latin America, have lower population densities than Italy. The pretexts invoked are an insult to the intelligence; the real intentions anger us. No less than half the territory of Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Ecuador, Paraguay, and Venezuela has no inhabitants at all. No Latin American population grows less than Uruguay's a country of old folk yet no nation has taken such a bearing in recent years, with a crisis that would seem to drag it into the last circle of hell. Uruguay is empty, and its fertile lands could provide food for infinitely more people than those who now suffer in such penury. Over a century ago a Guatemalan foreign minister said prophetically: "It would be strange if the remedy should come from the United Stares, the same place which brings us the disease." Now that the Alliance for Progress is dead and
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Sample 1AC
buried the Imperium proposes, more in panic than in generosity, to solve Latin America's problems by eliminating Latin Americans; Washington has reason to suspect that the poor peoples don't prefer to be poor. But it is impossible to desire the end without desiring the means. Those who deny liberation to Latin America also deny our only possible rebirth, and incidentally absolve the existing structures from blame. Our youth multiplies, rises, listens: what does the voice of the system offer? The system speaks a surrealist language. In lands that are empty it proposes to avoid births; in countries where capital is plentiful but wasted it suggests that capital is lacking; it describes as "aid" the deforming orthopedics of loans and the draining of wealth that results from foreign investment; it calls upon big land-owners to carry out agrarian reforms and upon the oligarchy to practice social justice. The class struggle only exists, we are told, because foreign agents stir it up; but social classes do exist and the oppression of one by the other is known as the Western way of life. The Marines undertake their criminal expeditions only to restore order and social peace; the dictatorships linked to Washington lay foundations in their jails for the law-abiding state, and ban strikes and smash trade unions to protect the freedom to work. Is everything forbidden us except to fold our arms? Poverty is not written in the stars; under development is not one of God's mysterious designs. Redemptive years of revolution pass; the ruling classes wait and meanwhile pronounce hellfire anathema on everybody. In a sense the right wing is correct in identifying itself with tranquillity and order: it is an order of daily humiliation for the majority, but an order nonetheless; it is a tranquillity in which injustice continues to be unjust and hunger to be hungry. If the future turns out to be a Pandora's box, the conservative has reason to shout, "I have been betrayed." And the ideologists of impotence, the slaves who look at themselves with the master's eyes, are not slow to join in the outcry. The bronze eagle of the Maine, thrown down on the day the Cuban Revolution triumphed, now is abandoned. Its wings broken, in a doorway in the old town in Havana. Since that day in Cuba, other countries have set off on different roads on the experiment of change; perpetuation of the existing order of things is perpetuation of the crime. Recovery of the resources that have always been usurped is recovery of our destiny. The ghosts of all the revolutions that have been strangled or betrayed through Latin America's tortured history emerge in the new experiments, as if the present had been foreseen and begotten by the contradictions of the past. History is a prophet who looks back: because of what was, and against what was, it announces what will be. And so this book, which seeks to chronicle our despoliation and at the same time explain how the current mechanisms of plunder operate, will present in close proximity the caravelled conquistadors and the jet-propelled technocrats; Hernan Cortes and the Marines; the agents of the Spanish Crown and the International Monetary Fund missions; the dividends from the slave trade and the profits of General Motors. And, too, the defeated heroes and revolutions of our time, the infamies and the dead and resurrected hopes: the fertile sacrifices. When Alexander von Humboldt investigated the customs of the ancient inhabitants of the Bogota plateau, he found that the Indians called the victims of ritual ceremonies quihica. Quihica meant "door"; the death of each chosen victim opened the door to a new cycle of 185 moons.
The above was written in 1973, before Reganomics and the neoliberal consensus, the War on Terror and the War on Drugs. But History cant be read as what happened but what repeats it is not simply the dead and the tortured of failed revolutions whom we must remember in order to face the day. Simon Bolivar, who Chavez evokes for the name of the Venezuelan revolution, Che Guevara, the Argentine who witnessed the Hiroshimas inflicted on South America by the United States and capitalism, who joined the Cuban revolution, went to Algeria and the Congo as consultants for revolutions before being assassinated by the CIA in Bolivia, Mao Zedong whose name is evoked by Castro and Chavez, not to mention Huey Newton and the Naxalites in India. Or, in Assata Shakur, who calls cuba one of the largest most resistant and most courageous palenques [maroon camps fugitive slave colonies] that has ever existed on this planet. The names of revolutionaries, and Ive missed a few, themselves are the signatures of something else, of what happens when the people invoked in the Food and Agriculture Association statistics organizethey name the nameless who are already inside the anger, the stubbornness and the hope we carry. But who are we? How many are we? We know why Obama could only shake Chavezs hand with an awkward smile, why he couldnt have regained composure by pulling out his copy of The Audacity of Hope. International diplomacy is a reality where leaders exchange pleasantries and decide the fate of the world. In it, there are closed doors, diplomatic
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Sample 1AC
smiles backed up by military force that open the doors to the world market. The presumption of reciprocity between the U.S. and Venezuela within the existing order of things perpetuates the crime. When neoliberal economic policies call for Latin America to let the economy take its course, this is a naturalization of the crime. The statistics of underdevelopment record the holocausts visited on the poor as if they were written in the stars. How to recover these numbers as quihica as a death which is also a door -, to cross through them to the other side, to build another world against this one? Which is why the real question of the resolution is how to return Chavezs gift that is, the demand to redeem everything that made it possible to read and understand the resolution in the first place. Obamas book wont do, nor will any amount of U.S. dollars. A book that is equal to Chavezs challenge does not yet exist it is the book of another world that is possible, which we must write in practice. The resolution is a test of our resolve, but unlike the a long chain of U.S. presidents, bureaucrats, policy hacks, debaters, judges, & c who resolve to defend the we against the unpredictable, we take affirmation as a process of linking our performance in a chain of struggles, to affirm the resolution in the histories that constitute it. Decolonize the resolution.
Mignolo 5 (Walter, Literature @ Duke. The Idea of Latin America, pp. xviii-xx)
There is one proviso: at this point in time, the colonial difference must be kept in view , because Creoles in the Americas of European descent (either Latin or Anglo), as well as Creoles of European descent around the world, may still see
civilization and barbarism as ontological categories, and therefore they may have trouble accepting Indian (or Islamic, for that matter) civilizational processes and histories when entering into dialogue .There are no civilizations
outside of Europe or, if there are, like those of Islam, China or Japan (to follow Huntingtons classification: see chapter 1), they remain in the past and have had to be brought into the present of Western civilization. That is the colonial difference that should be kept in mind. The future can no longer be thought of as the defense of Western civilization, constantly waiting for the barbarians. As barbarians are ubiquitous (they could be in the plains or in the mountains as well as in global cities), so are the civilized. There is no safe place to defend and, even worse, believing that there is a safe place that must be defended is (and has been) the direct road to killing . Dialogue, properly speaking, cannot take place until there are no more places to be defended and the power differential, consequently, can be redressed. Dialogue today is a utopia, as we are witnessing in Iraq, and it should be reconceived as utopistic: a double movement composed of a critical take on the past in order to imagine and construct future possible worlds. The decolonial shift is of the essence if we would stop seeing modernity as a goal rather than seeing it as a European construction of history in Europes own interests. Dialogue can only take place once modernity is decolonized and dispossessed of its my thical march toward the future. I am not defending despotism of any kind, Oriental or Occidental. I am just saying that dialogue can
only take place when the monologue of one civilization (Western) is no longer enforced.
This book can be read in two different, but complementary, ways. Readers not familiar with current academic debates can enter through the argument that America was not discovered but invented, and from there follow the path that made of Latin America an ext ension of the initial imperial/colonial invention. Those who are familiar with conversations in the humanities could see the argument itself as an attempt to shift the geography, and the geo-politics of knowledge, of critical theory (as introduced by the Frankfurt School in the 1930s) to a new terrain of decoloniality. The first reading can still be performed within the paradigm of modernity that emphasizes the linear evolution of concepts and, above all, newness. The second reading, however, demands to be performed within the paradigm of (de)coloniality that implies modernity but emphasizes co-existence and simultaneity instead. I will introduce a concept of historicostructural heterogeneity at the end of chapter 1 to locate the argument in that paradigm of co-existence and to critique the paradigm of newness and historical progression.f Within the limits of European local histories, critical theory pushed humanists
and critical social scientists toward critical explorations of the conditions that make events and ideas possible, instead of taking ideas for granted and seeing events as carrying their own, essential, meaning. A critical theory beyond the history of Europe proper and within the colonial history of America (or Asia or Africa; or even from the perspective of immigrants within Europe and the US who have disrupted the homogeneity) becomes decolonial theory. That is, it is the theory arising from the projects for decolonization of knowledge and being that will lead to the imagining of economy and politics otherwise. By going to the very roots of modern coloniality the invention of America and of Latin America this book
is a contribution to that decolonization of knowledge and being; an attempt to rewrite history following an-other logic, another language, an-other thinking.
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The Fourth World War
We are in the Fourth World War A war against the imposition of a logic and practice of capital. This is a war with no fronts. Because humanity fights against capital we are all potentially enemies, we must all be policed.
[A people of color collective made up of students, migrants, and other community members in Durham, NC that has met with and connected their cause with that of the Zapatistas and the global anti-capitalist movement, kilombo is a Kimbundu (a Bantu dialect) term that has rhizomatically become the basis for the Brazillian term for encampment or commune quilombo built and utilized by marooned communities of Afro-Brazillians as a form of resistance from slavery, translation would be intergalactic commune, such that it references the many layers of meanings of Afro-Futurism, Pan-Americanism and Anti-Globalization, Beyond Resistance: Everything: An Interview With Subcommandante Marcos, p. 2-3/AK47]
El Kilombo Intergalctico 2007
In presenting this premise, the first and most obvious question that arises is, what is wrong with the world today that the EZLN and others might want to change it? According to the Zapatistas, our current global condition is characterized by the fact that today humanity suffers the consequences of the worlds first truly TOTAL war, what the EZLN has aptly named the Fourth World War.5 The nature of this war is best understood by contrasting those World Wars that have preceded it. Taking for granted that the nature of the First and Second World Wars are well known (i.e. Allied Powers vs. Central Powers and Allied Powers vs. Axis Powers), we will turn to the immediately preceding world warthough it is rarely understood as suchthe Third World War. The Third World War (or the Cold War) was characterized by the fact that nation-states faced down other nationstates (most typically the United States and its allies in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and its allies in the Warsaw Pact) for the control of discrete territories around the globe (most specifically Central Africa, Southeast Asia, and Central America). At the height of this conflict, the guerrilla style tactics adopted by each side made it appear, as General Nguyen Van Giap noted, that the front today is everywhere.6 And yet, most anyone would agree that like the previous World Wars, the Third World War ended with the conquest of specific territories and the ultimate defeat of an externally identifiable enemy (the U.S.S.R.). In contrast, what the EZLN has identified as the Fourth World War is a war between what the EZLN has termed the Empire of Money7 and humanity. The main objectives of this war are: first, the capture of territory
and labor for the expansion and construction of new markets; second, the extortion of profit; and third, the globalization of exploitation. Significantly then, for the first time, we are in the midst of a World War that is not fought between nations or even between a nation and an externally identifiable enemy. It is instead a war for the imposition of a logic and a practice, the logic and practice of capital, and therefore everything that is human and opposes capital is the enemy; we are all at all times potentially the enemy ,8 thus requiring an omniscient and omnipotent social policing. As the EZLN explains, this qualifies the Fourth World War as the first truly TOTAL war because, unlike even the Third World War, this is not a war on all fronts; it is the first world war with NO front.
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The fourth world war
Global cap transforms politics. It is not that the politicians or the administrative state are of no use, but that they are only of use to the expansion of the logic of capitalism. They are of no use to us. The AFF must begin with the question of our own struggles. The nation is no longer the nation of the Cold War today the nation, politicians and army are made to work for our dispossession.
[A people of color collective made up of students, migrants, and other community members in Durham, NC that has met with and connected their cause with that of the Zapatistas and the global anti-capitalist movement, kilombo is a Kimbundu (a Bantu dialect) term that has rhizomatically become the basis for the Brazillian term for encampment or commune quilombo built and utilized by marooned communities of Afro-Brazillians as a form of resistance from slavery, translation would be intergalactic commune, such that it references the many layers of meanings of Afro-Futurism, Pan-Americanism and Anti-Globalization, Beyond Resistance: Everything: An Interview With Subcommandante Marcos, p. 3-4/AK47]
In the eyes of the EZLN, the Fourth World War has had three major society-wide consequences, each played out at varying sites. First, States: the State in the Empire of Money, as mentioned above, is reorganized. It is now the downsized
state where any semblance of collective welfare is eliminated and replaced with the logic of individual safety, with the most repressive apparatuses of the State, the police and the Army, unleashed to enforce this logic.
This state is in no way smaller in the daily lives of its subjects; rather, it is guaranteed that the power of this institution (collective spending) is directed purely toward new armaments and the increasing presence of the police in daily life. Second, Armies: the Army in previous eras was assumed to exist for the protection of a national population from foreign invasion.
Today, in the structural absence of such a threat, the army is redirected to respond with violence to manage (and yet never solve) a series of never-ending local conflicts (Atenco, Oaxaca, New Orleans) that potentially threaten the overall stability of international markets. In other words, as the EZLN points out, these armies can no longer be considered national in any meaningful sense; they are instead various precinct divisions of a global police force under the direction of the Empire of Money. Third, Politics: the politics of the politicians (i.e. the actions of the legislative, executive, and judiciary branches) has been completely eliminated as a site for public deliberation, or for the construction of the previously existing nation-state. The politics of the politicians has been redirected and its new function is that of the implementation and administration of the local influence of transnational corporations. What was previously national politics has been replaced with what the EZLN refers to as megapoliticsthe readjustment of local policy to global financial interests. Thus the sites that once actually mediated among local actors are now additionally charged with the mission of creating the image that such mediation continues to take place. It is best to be careful then and not believe that the politicians and their parties (be they right wing or progressive) are of no use; rather, it is important to note that today their very purpose is the out right simulation of social dialogue (that is, they are of no use TO US!).
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We Want Everything - Thisness
We Want Everything! We think the resistance is everywhere, all around us. The resistance is in the international. We want another world and we must believe that another world is possible.
[A Spokesperson of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation and the Indigenous movement of Chiapas, Beyond Resistance: Everything: An Interview With Subcommandante Marcos, p. 20-21/AK47]
Subcommandante Marcos 2007
It has to do with the parameter in which things are valued. In reality, what is the criteria people are using when they say there isnt a universal sentiment of discontent with regards to neoliberalism? Why? Because the governments are neoliberal governments, because leftist parties do not arise. So these are considered indicators to say that the people are not discontent, that if they were they would demonstrate their discontent. No. We say that the people are discontent, but we dont have paths [for change], or we dont have satisfactory paths. If, in Mexico or the North American Union, to be a rebel is to be part of the Democratic Party, well a lot of people are going to say, Hmm, no. I think Ill just stay where I am. If in Mexico that means being part of the Revolutionary Democratic Party (PRD), a lot of people are going to say no. [The choice is] youre either a Democrat or a terrorist, or in favor of armed struggle. And in the face of this farce of a dichotomy, many people say, No, Im not a Democrat and Im not for armed struggle or violent action, or even direct action. So then they say, Well that means these people are very conservative, conformist, or they are not being affected by neoliberalism. When really what is happening is that we nee d another way that has nothing to do with the radical Left of armed struggle, or with the reformist left of the electoral realm. We think that this discontent and inconformity exists across the world, and that you have to find it. It doesnt have one channel of expression, or the channels of expression that exist do not satisfy it. And in the case of young people, who are the majority of the world population, this is exactly what is happening. Not even the parameters of fashion, or musical style, or artistic forms can encompass this. Thats why new movements, new musical generations arise, because people dont identify with one or the other, so they create another and then another, and this one is co-opted, and so they make another and yet another, and thats how it goes. So we think that if this path of inconformity isnt constructed, well everyone wil l go about constructing their own ways of manifesting it, but we will continue to lack the place of encounter. That is why we say, this isnt about
constructing a world rebellion. That already exists. Its about constructing the space where this rebellion encounters itself, shows itself, begins to know itself. To those that say there isnt discontent in the American Union, the
thing is there is, but we cant see it. Or we cant see it because it doesnt show itself. And it doesnt show itself because it has no place to do so. In this situation, we think that in this we want everything, there is above all a valorization, how do I put it, not of personal capacity, but of a willingness to take risks. In 1994 in the dialogues in the cathedral, the government representatives told us, The thing is, youre asking a lot. And we said, Those who are willing to die for their
demands have the right to ask for everything. That is when one begins to ask, how much is life worth? What life do I want? And this is what its about, right? We said resistance is not enough. Resistance may be sufficient to detain the
enthusiasm of neoliberal destruction, but we would need a global resistance, an effort of such force that you have to ask, If we already have this much strength, plus excess, why am I going to settle for stopping here? Because this is the problem, right? Because between something and we want everything... Yes, we want not to die, agreed. But in order not to die, we need a force of such str ength that we arrive at the question, the place of not dying is the desire to live like this. How? I dont know. However each person determines. And the answer is different from one place to the next. We think that this movement has to encompass the
international network of resistances, but even with this strength of force we must ask, is it only about this, that the army stays away from me, that Im not harassed as a woman, that Im not criminalized as a young person, that Im not attacked as an indigenous person? Or is it about, now with this strength, I can conquer and create my own identity as a woman? Because the problem with a woman saying, Its enough if they just leave me
alone, is that another woman may say, That isnt enough! I have other aspirations. And that theyre supposed to be praised because they arent raping or beating me, well no. I want more. Its the same with indigenous people. Young people, too. So when thi s is put on the table, one begins to ask, What am I capable of ? How far can I go? Because the politician is always going to tell you, Up to here, no further, or, Okay, there, thats sufficient, or, This is progress, and if you dont accept this, youre going to lose everything. Because one thing is that its not armed struggle, and another thing is that its not non-violent. One example is the APPO. In Oaxaca, there was not armed struggle, but there was violence, on both sides. And this popular violenc e, I dont condemn it. On the contrary, I salute how they confronted the Federal Preventative Police and defeated them numerous times. And many have advised and are advising them [the Oaxacan resistance], and this is the dispute over the movement in Oaxaca, that they should stop where theyre at, that they have made significant progress, they achieved some things, and that now they should try to get a few prisoners out and leave it at that. But the kids, the young people, men and women, the ones who maintained the movement, they are saying, Why? And here lies the issue. Why am I going to set tle for Ulises Ruiz stepping down and someone else the same steps in? Why dont I ask at this point, who do we want to be the government? Or why dont I ask if were going to have a government? Somebody said, I think it was a drawing that said, They are trying to obligate us to govern. We wont fall into the trap! That is, they want us to be like them. And when this is what is put on the table, imagine this at the national and global level: why are we going to settle with saying, well okay, good enough that the capitalists just dont destroy nature completely. Were going to make laws so they cant contaminate the rivers, destroy the beaches, the air, and all of this. But, why
do we have to settle for there being capitalists at all? That is the next question. We could demand that they give us good salaries, or that prices not be so high, or that they dont manufacture such trash. But why does there have to be someone that does this? Why dont we do it ourselves? Even the most radical leftist sectors in Mexico, the non-electoral
Left, said, the truth is we hadnt even asked these questions. We were talking about the taking of power, the dictatorship o f the proletariat, but we never put on the table that everything just belongs to the people. This is what we are doing here in Zapatista territory.
We didnt rise up in arms to say, Okay, lets ask for better salaries from the plantation owners. No! We said, We are not going to die anymore and we are going to run off the plantation owners and keep the land
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ourselves. Are we going to ask that they give us a good municipal president? No! The municipal president has to go and were going
to make our own government. It is this force, not personal strength, not Im strong because I do exercise, but I am strong because I am willing to offer this, risk this, in the struggle. We think that in the Other Campaign, the Zapatistas are strong because we risked everything. And we challenge everyone else: and you, what will you risk? And well see the size of the risks, a nd thus the size of the demands, and the [size of the] fear, of each person. So this is what we say: if it is great movements that have recently turned over governments and opened the possibility for change in a place, even if that [change] hasnt been con cretized, those movements in the last few decades have not been armed struggles. But neither have they been non-violent. In the cases of Bolivia, Ecuador, Argentina, these werent armed struggles but neither were they struggles of flower power. There wer e confrontations, there were clashes, fighting that resulted in injured and dead on both sides. And we think this is what must be done. But this is the problem, the problem of, for what? There are some that say, In order to create a party, and others that say, No, in order to change society. This is the great difference. And this is what those who are lobbying for the Other Campaign to join forces with Lopez Obradors movement dont understand. Its not the same thing! They want to change presidents, to switch governments. We dont want the government. We want
another country, another world.
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Impacts - Neoliberalism
[also see Santos card in the Brazil CP net benefit] Neoliberalism destroys global governance, collective security, and free trade. This is caused by the aftermath of genocidal global politics which leads to collapse of the working class that are key to maintaining global societies. Paramano 2 Siswo Pramono, Journal of Economic and Social Research 4 (2), 115-138, The Genocidal Global Politics
and Neoliberalism, http://jesr.journal.fatih.edu.tr/Neoliberalism.pdf
The Genocidal Global Politics and Neoliberalism Siswo Pramono Abstract. Neoliberalism is the precursor of the current genocidal global politics. The world should thus critically reassess neoliberal theoriey-as-practice. This paper will investigate the fundamentalist and closed character of neoliberalism that destroys global democracy, global governance, free trade, and collective security. It will also examine the neoliberal attacks on the working class, which have undermined the main pillar of global social structure. Finally, this paper will discuss the possible upsurge of upheavals that might lead to the creation of genocidal societies at the local and global levels. JEL Classification Codes: Z00. Keywords: global politics, neoliberalism, genocide.
1. Introduction Global politics refer to "all forms of interaction between the members of separate societies, whether government-sponsored or not" (Holsti, 1992: 10) and the decision making that gives effect to such interaction. Global politics are thus a form of global social structure that shapes or is being shaped by agents' behaviours. If genocide is defined as an act committed with intent to destroy, in whole or
in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group1, then genocidal global politics is a form of selfdestructive, if not suicidal, global social structure. But is it possible to identify the genocidal intent of a neoliberal policy? The point is that if neoliberal policies cause, or are associated with, massive death or acute deprivation among the poor in particular regions, then such policies might qualify as either second or third degree genocide (Pramono, 2002). Everyone thus has the right to life, and hence to be free from such suicidal global structure The main argument
presented is this: neoliberalism is the precursor, and hence the prime inspirational source, of genocidal global politics. To have a non-genocidal global politics, the world should critically reassess and then decide whether or not to dismantle neoliberal theoriey-aspractice. As such, the purpose of this paper is threefold. First, it will investigate the fundamentalist and closed character of neoliberalism that ironically destroys the very basic tenets the
liberals intend to attain, namely global democracy, good global governance, free trade, and collective security. Second, in order to reveal such genocidal nature, it will examine particularly the
sustained attacks on the working class. The attacks are genocidal since they undermine the main pillar of global social structure. The collapse of the working class means the collapse of global societies based on work. Thus, third, this paper will discuss the possible upsurge of upheavals that might lead to the creation of genocidal societies at the local and global levels. It is now time to take the first step in the investigation of genocidal global politics by determining the linkage between neorealism and genocide. 2. Neoliberalism and genocide In global politics, neoliberalism preoccupies itself with the promotion of four basic issues: (1) global democracy, (2) free trade, (3) global governance through international organizations, and (4) collective security. Neoliberalism focuses on regime creation and institutional building.
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Solvency - Decolonize
Decolonial thinking activates what the hegemony denies. It connects struggles across the colonial framework without subscribing to the power of the latter it deactivates and delinks the institutions and knowledges of imperialism and uses them for emancipation Nicols Panotto, Walter Mignolo: Epistemic disobedience. Rhetoric of modernity, logic of coloniality and decolonial grammar (Buenos Aires 2010), Culture, Plural Space, Politics, http://postcolonialnetworks.com/2011/07/27/walter-mignolo-epistemicdisobedience-rhetoric-of-modernity-logic-of-coloniality-and-decolonial-grammar/ Tiana This book summarizes the main aspects of the Research Project on Modernity/ Coloniality and the central theorical proposals of the famous Argentine decolonization theorist, Walter Mignolo. The main thrust of this work is explained thus: if knowledge is an instrument of imperial colonization, one of the urgent tasks ahead is the decolonization of knowledge. First, the book attempts to broaden the definition of colonialism. This concept refers to a complex matrix in which
various spheres intertwine (economy, authority, nature, gender and sexuality, subjectivity and knowledge) and is based on three main foundations: knowledge (epistemology), understanding or comprehention (hermeneutics) and the ability to feel (aesthesis). On the other hand, there also exists a relationship between colonialism and modern rationality, where the latter is undestood as a construction of a Totality that overrides any difference or
possibility of constructing other totalities. Although there is a critique of these notions from postmodern writers (postcolonialism being the wellspring in this field of study), it is circumscribed to European history and the history of European ideas. Thus, this critique is incapable of reaching deep into the colonial paradigm and imagination. This is why a decolonial project is ultimately
necessary in order to make possible a programmatic analysis of delinking categories (Anbal Quijano) of colonial knowledge. The book also takes some of the contributions from the philosopher Erique Dussel as a proposal of
decolonization of knowledge, as exemplified by the differentiation he makes between emancipation (as liberal framework that serves to the pretensions of the bourgeoisie) and liberation (as a broader category that seeks ways of leaving the european emancipatory project). But decolonization, for Mignolo, goes further than liberation: it involves both the colonizers and the colonized (using the ideas of Franz Fanon), by including emancipation/liberation on a same level within its framework. But because emancipation is a modern project linked to European liberal bourgeoisie, it is better to think in terms of liberation/decolonization, which includes in itself the rational concept of emancipation. Mignolo proposes a delinking strategy, which involves denaturalizing the concepts and fields of knowledge within coloniality. This does not mean ignoring
or denying what cannot be denied, but rather using imperial strategies for decolonial purposes. Delinking also implies disbelieving that imperial reasoning can itself create a liberating reason (i.e. proposals of
decolonization from a marxist enterprise, which do not involve a radical delinking but rather a radical emancipation; the reason being marxism offers a different content but not a different logic). Postmodern thought attempts to be a liberating discourse, but still maintains a European framework that is far from creating a delinked colonial logic . In this sense, Mignolo argues that while modernity is not strictly a European phenomenon, its rhetoric -as Dussel argues- is formed by European philosophers, academics and politicians. Hence, modernity involves colonization of time and space, defining a border in realtion to a self-determining Other and its own European identity.The project of decolonization proposes a displacement of the theo- and ego- hegemonic logic
of empire into a geo-political and a body-logic of knowledge. This project arises from a de-clasification and de-identification of imperially denied subjects, as a de-colonial policy and epistemology that affects both the political and economic control of neoliberalism and capitalism, each frameworks of the imperialist project. The decolonization process begins when these same agents or subjects, who inhabit the denied languages and identities of the Empire, become aware of the effects of coloniality on being, body and knowledge. This
process does not imply a call to an external element/actor/project but a movement towards an exteriority which make visible the difference in the space of experience and the horizon of expectations registered in the colonial space. Is this a proposal of cultural relativism? No. What Mignolo suggests is a questioning of the posture taken from divisive borders. In other words, the borders that both unite and separate modernity/coloniality . Henceis the main proposal of the book:
border thinking. This epistemology evokes the pluri-versity and di-versity of the dynamics between the spaces of experience and horizons of expectations found within the larger arena of coloniality/modernity . Border thinking implies that decolonization will not come from the conflicts over the imperial difference but from the spaces of experience and horizons of expectations generated by the colonial difference. Decolonial critical thinking connects the pluri-versity of experiences enclosed within the colonial framework with the delinking uni-versal project that is in constant tension within imperial horizons. It builds a proposal that goes beyond the implementation of a model constructed within modern categories (right, center, left) and onto reflecting on the subversive spaces inscribed among the actions of colonized agents through the fissures and cracks of the imperial system.The concept of decolonization offered in Mignolos work is a major contribution towards creating a theoretical framework outside the standards of modern Western philosophy. What must also be recognized, however, is that this theoretical proposal and its development is still influenced by those
same theories and epistemologies that it intends to criticize. It could be said that the book itself is a decolonization proposal in how it subversively re-orients traditional theoretical frameworks into a deep questioning of themselves.
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Solvency - War Machine / Become Minor
How many are we? Becoming minor is the innumerable that becomes the war machine.
Deleuze & Guattari 1987 [Giles & Felix, nomads of the universe, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Shizophrenia, 469-71] 6. Minorities. Ours is becoming the age of minorities. We have seen several times that minorities are not necessarily defined by the smallness of their numbers but rather by becoming or a line of fluctuation, in other words, by the gap that separates them from this or that axiom constituting a redundant majority ("Ulysses, or today's average, urban European"; or as Yann Moulier says, "the national Worker, qualified, male and over thirty-five"). A minority can be small in number; but it can also be the largest in number, constitute an absolute, indefinite majority. That is the situation when authors, even those supposedly on the Left, repeat the great capitalist warning cry: in twenty years, "whites" will form only 12 percent of the world population. . . Thus they are not content to say that the majority will change, or has already changed, but say that it is impinged upon by a nondenumerable and proliferating minority that threatens to destroy the very concept of majority , in other
words, the majority as an axiom. And the curious concept of nonwhite does not in fact constitute a denumerable set. What defines a minority, then, is not the number but the relations internal to the number. A minority
What distinguishes them is that in the case of a majority the relation internal to the number constitutes a set that may be finite or infinite, but is always denumerable, whereas the minority is defined as a nondenumerable
can be numerous, or even infinite; so can a majority.
set, however many elements it may have. What characterizes the nondenumerable is neither the set nor its elements ; rather,
it is the connection, the "and" produced between elements , between sets, and which belongs to neither, which eludes them and constitutes a line of flight. The axiomatic manipulates only denumerable sets, even infinite ones, whereas the minorities constitute "fuzzy," nondenumerable, nonaxiomizable sets, in short, "masses," multiplicities of escape and flux. Whether it be the infinite set of the nonwhites of the periphery, or the restricted set of the Basques, Corsicans, etc., everywhere we look we see the conditions for a worldwide movement: the minorities recreate "nationalitarian" phenomena that the nation-states had been charged
with controlling and quashing. The bureaucratic socialist sector is certainly not spared by these movements, and as Amalrik said, the dissidents are nothing, or serve only as pawns in international politics, if they are abstracted from the minorities working the USSR.
It matters little that the minorities are incapable of constituting viable States from the point of view of the axiomatic and the market, since in the long run they promote compositions that do not pass by way of the capitalist economy any more than they do the State-form.
The response of the States, or of the axiomatic, may obviously be to accord the minorities regional or federal or
statutory autonomy, in short, to add axioms. But this is not the problem: this operation consists only in translating the minorities into denumerable sets or subsets, which would enter as elements into the majority, which could be counted among the majority. The same applies for a status accorded to women, young people, erratic workers, etc. One could even imagine, in blood and crisis, a more radical reversal that would make the white
: women, nonmen, as a minority, as a nondenumerable flow or set, would receive no adequate expression by becoming elements of the majority, in other words, by becoming a denumerable finite set. Nonwhites would receive no adequate expression by becoming a new yellow or black majority, an infinite denumerable set. What is proper to the minority is to assert a power of the nondenumerable, even if that minority is composed of a single member. That is the formula for multiplicities. Minority as a universal figure, or becoming-everybody/everything (devenir tout le monde). Woman: we all have to become that,
world the periphery of a yellow world; there would doubtless be an entirely different axiomatic. But what we are talking about is something else, something even that would not resolve
whether we are male or female. Non-white: we all have to become that, whether we are white, yellow, or black.
Once again, this is not to say that the struggle on the level of the axioms is without importance; on the contrary, it is determining (at the most diverse levels: women's struggle for the vote, for abortion, for jobs; the struggle of the regions for autonomy; the struggle of the Third World; the struggle of the oppressed masses and minorities in the East or West...). But there is also always a
sign to indicate that these struggles are the index of another, coexistent combat. However modest the demand, it always constitutes a point that the axiomatic cannot tolerate: when people demand to formulate their problems themselves , and
to determine at least the particular conditions under which they can receive a more general solution (hold to the Particular as an innovative form). It is always astounding to see the same story repeated: the modesty of the minorities' initial demands,
coupled with the impotence of the axiomatic to resolve the slightest corresponding problem. In short, the struggle around axioms is most important when it manifests, itself opens, the gap between two types of propositions, propositions of flow and propositions of axioms. The power of the minorities is not measured by their capacity to enter and make themselves felt within the majority system , nor even to reverse the necessarily tautological criterion of the majority, but to bring to bear the force of the non-denumerable sets, however small they may be, against the denumerable sets, even if they are infinite, reversed, or changed, even they if imply new axioms or, beyond that, a new axiomatic. The issue is not at all anarchy versus organization, nor even centralism versus decentralization, but a calculus or conception of the problems of nondenumerable sets, against the axiomatic of denumerable sets. Such a calculus may have its own compositions, organizations, even centralizations; nevertheless, it proceeds not via the States or the axiomatic process but via a pure becoming of minorities.
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Perm
The decolonial is the pluriversality of intersecting political horizons pluriversality involves coordinating multiple struggles for the other world that is possible even when they may not agree with each other Mignolo 11(Walter, Literature @ Duke, Epistemic Disobedience and the Decolonial Option: A Manifesto in Transmodernity: A Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production in the Luso-Hispanic World, pp. 45-6)
One of the reasons for the failure of the decolonization movements is that, as in socialism/communism, they changed the content but not the terms of the conversation, and maintained the very idea of the state within a global capitalist economy. The appropriation of the state by native elites in Asia and in Africa (as before in the Americas, Haiti being a particular case, which we cannot analyze here, the construction of the colonial states by Creole elites of Iberian descendents in the south and British in the north), remained linked to and dependent from global imperial politics and economy. So much so that in certain cases, the decolonial states followed the same rules of the liberal game, as in India; in other cases, they attempted an approximation towards Marxism, as in the case of Patrice Lumumba (Prime Minister of the Democratic Republic of the Congo). The enormous contribution of decolonization (or independence), as much in the first wave from 1776 to 1830 in the Americas as in the second in Asia and Africa, has been to plant the flag of decolonial pluri-versality against the flag and the tanks of imperial uni-versality. The limits of all these
movements were those of not having found an opening and a freedom of an other thinking: that is, of a decolonization that would carry them, in the Zapatistas terms, towards a world that would fit many worlds (e.g., pluri-versality), that would reaffirm the conviction that another world is possible in the World Social Forum. This includes not only the Zapatistas and the World Social Forum, but also Hugo Chvez. The epistemicpolitical platform of Hugo Chvez (metaphorically, the Bolivarian revolution) is not the same platform as that used by Fidel Castro (metaphorically, the Socialist revolution). The rules of the game that are being proposed by Chvez in Venezuela and Evo Morales in Bolivia are different from those of past movements. By 2010, it is clear also that Lula da Silva went engaged in the route of dewesternization, joining East Asian countries that, while maintaining capitalist economy, reject to be told by the IMF or by the European Union what is the correct course of action. If China had followed the IMF instructions, we can be sure that it would not be what it is now. It was their epistemic disobedience in economic theory first and political theory now that made possible the miracle.
What I wish to say is that that other world that we begin to imagine cannot merely be liberal, Christian, or Marxist or a m ix of the three, which would assure that the modern/colonial bubble, capitalistic and imperial, would triumph and that this triumph would assure what Francis Fukuyama celebrated as the end of history. Thus, I imagine what Fukuyama would think: that the entire population of China, the entire Islamic population from the Middle East to Central Asia and from Central Asia to Indonesia; all the Indigenous peoples of the Americas from Chile to Canada to Australia and New Zealand; the entire African population from south of the Sahara, and including the Diaspora in the Americas; all the Latino/as and other minorities in the USA; alas, that all those millions of peoples that quadruple or quintuple the population of the European Atlantic and North America, would yield at their masters feet and to a way of life that is a paradise on earth that Western capitalism and the Democratic liberal statemaintained by a television and music industry without comparison; mummified by a technology that creates a new trick of fascination and jubilee each minuteis projected as a success without limits, an excellence without borders and as techno-industrial-genetic growth that assures paradise for all mortals. In this panorama, Marxism would continue as the opposition necessary in order to maintain the system. The end of history would thus be the triumph of liberalism, seconded by conservative Christianity against the constant protest of the Marxist Left and the Philosophy of Liberation. Thus it would be, until the end of time. Whether we like it or not, after the end of history came: Afghanistan, Iraq, Katrina, and France 2005. Literally, an-other history is coming to the forefront in which planetary and pluri-versal decolonial thinking, growing since the foundational momentsixteenth centurywould lead the way toward a non-
capitalist and imperial/colonial future.
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Perm
We must risk encounter with others even at the risk of losing and becoming ourselves. The ethic of encounter proliferates the network of global resistance.
El Kilombo Intergalctico 2007 [A people of color collective made up of students, migrants, and other community members in Durham, NC
that has met with and connected their cause with that of the Zapatistas and the global anti-capitalist movement, kilombo is a Kimbundu (a Bantu dialect) term that has rhizomatically become the basis for the Brazillian term for encampment or commune quilombo built and utiliz ed by marooned communities of Afro-Brazillians as a form of resistance from slavery, translation would be intergalactic commune, such that it references the many layers of meanings of Afro-Futurism, Pan-Americanism and Anti-Globalization, Beyond Resistance: Everything: An Interview With Subcommandante Marcos, p. 7/AK47] The Zapatistas have used this practice in order to look beyond themselves and build an archipelago of islands, or a massive network of global resistance. According to the Zapatistas, the first such encounter that occurred was within the EZLN itself, and it took place between the guerrilla members of the Frente de Liberacin Na cional (National Liberation Front) and the members of the indigenous communities of Chiapas. As the EZLN tells this history, it was here that the communities forced these guerrilla fighters to listen and dialogue, to, in effect, learn to encounter others even when the deafening noise of weapons and vanguardist ideals would have it otherwise. Thus, encounter is first and foremost an ethic, an ethic of opening oneself
to others even, or perhaps especially, at the risk of losing oneself. Although these lessons were painful for the guerrilla fighters of the EZLN and their community counterparts, they became deeply ingrained within the ethos of the EZLN, and they have led to the organization of encounters as a central practical activity between the EZLN and innumerable others. Even a rather incomplete selection of the encounters proposed and hosted by the
Zapatistas in the last 13 years is overwhelming in its diversity and innovation. The First National Democratic Convention was held in August of 1994, the First Continental Encounter in April of 1996, and the First Intercontinental Encounter for Humanity and Against Neoliberalism, also known as the Intergalactic, in July of 1996, all attended by thousands of people flooding into Zapatist a territory to meet not only the Zapatistas, but each other. Any surface investigation of these encounters will show that they were absolutely crucial to the formation of the alter globalization movement and the subsequent events that were to take place in Seattle, Prague, and Genoa. Then, in spectacular disregard for the containment the Mexican military claimed to have on Chiapas, the Zapatistas began to come out of their territory to create additional encounters with Mexican society: 1,111 civilian Zapatistas in September 1997 attended the founding of the National Indigenous Congress in Mexico City; 5,000 Zapatistas in March of 1999 hosted a national and international referendum on the EZLNs demands; and in February of 2001, 24 Zapatista commanders took the issue of constitutional rights for indigenous people to Mexico City in The March of the Color of the Earth. Back in rebel territory, in July 2003, five Caracoles were inaugurated as bastions of Zapatista cultural resistance, portals from Zapatista territory to the world, and spaces of encounter for global resistance. With the release of the Sixth Declaration of the Lacandn Jungle in 2005, the Zapatistas proposed another series of encounters: the Other Campaign, which included the visit of an EZLN commission to every state of the Mexican Republic in 2006, and another Intergalactic. That Intergalactic is now pending, preceded by a series of Encounters between Z apatista Peoples and Peoples of the World in December 2006, July 2007, and December 2007, which has been specified as the first Encounter Between Zapatista Women and Women of the World. Yet, no matter how many encounters are actualized, the Zapatista ethic of encounter cannot be exhausted. Rather, as the Zapatistas insist on reminding us, any ethic of encounter worthy of the
name must necessarily be based on the premise that what is missing, is yet to come (falta lo que falta).
Depolarization is the key differences have to be articulated rather than opposed to each other Santos 8 (Bonaventura de Sousa, Depolarise pluralities. A Left with a Future in The New Latin American Left. 259-60)
Is a synthesis between the extreme positions within the contemporary Latin American left possible? I do not think so, and even if it were possible, it would not be desirable. The search for a synthesis requires a conception of totality that reduces diversity to unity. In my opinion, no totality can contain the limitless diversity of practices and theories within todays Latin American left. Rather than synthesis, I believe it is necessary to search for depolarised pluralities . This amounts to inverting a tradition firmly rooted in the left that asserts that politicising differences is equivalent to polarising them. On the contrary, I propose
that politicisation occurs by way of depolarisation. It consists of giving meta-theoretical priority to the construction of coalitions and articulations around concrete collective practices, debating the theoretical differences in the exclusive sphere of that construction. The objective is to transform the recognition of differences into a factor of aggregation and inclusion, eliminating the possibility of rendering collective action impossible
as a result of those differences, and thus creating a context of collective political debate in which the recognition of differences occurs on a par with the recognition of similarities. In other words, it is a matter of creating contexts of debate in which the drive
toward unity and similarity has the same intensity as the drive toward separation and difference. Collective actions orchestrated via depolarised pluralities give rise to a new conception of unity of action, insofar as the unity ceases to be the expression of a monolithic will and instead becomes the more or less broad and enduring point of encounter for a plurality of wills.
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A/T: Rspec
Proliferate Identities Identity requires no referent Linking identities to each other, the border crosses us, we dont cross the border We dont cross the border. The border crosses us.
[A Spokesperson of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation and the Indigenous movement of Chiapas, Beyond Resistance: Everything: An Interview With Subcommandante Marcos, p. 14-6/AK47]
Subcommandante Marcos 2007
El Kilombo Intergalctico: In the United States, we have a concept of people of color, people that for economic reasons have been forced, or their ancestors have been forced, to live in the United States. But even though these people have been marginalized and discriminated against, they do not consider themselves ex-nationalsthey are not simply ex-Mexicans, or ex-Colombians, or exAfricansbut neither do they consider themselves (US) Americans. That is, while they may have deep memories of their lands, many havent seen those lands for 400 years; but neither do they identify with a national project in the United States. In our own personal experiences, we recognize a growing population of de-nationalized people that could never recognize the reconstruction of a nation as their project, because they have never belonged to a nation. Currently, we see in the marginalized communities of the United States and Europe that this subjectivity is growing, and we think that this subjectivity may have an important role to play in the construction of resistance against global capitalism/neoliberalism. In your experiences in the encounters with the Other Side and along the border in general, how have you seen this experience and its possible role in the construction of the Other and the Sixth? The problem is identity. This, what you are saying, is exactly what an indigenous compaera from Oaxaca in New York said. She said, The thing is that Im here now. And whats more, she said it by video from New York
because she couldnt cross [the border], so she said, Im here now, and here Im going to be something else. Im not going to be gringo, Im not going to be an indigenous Oaxacan because Im not in Oaxaca though I have my roots there, and Im not going to be Mexican. Im going to be something else. But she wasnt comfortable with this, and she asked, So if thats how it is, that Im not anything, do I have a place in the Other Campaign or not? We think this is the problem of identity, when one says, Who am I? And they skim the yellow pages thinking, lets see, my referent should be here somewhere. Yet it doesnt occur to them that this referent doesnt exist, that it must be constructed. The problem is not if someone is African or North American or Mexican, but rather that one is constructing their own identity and that they define themselves: I am this! The basic element of the notion of indigenous peoples determined by the National Indigenous Congress (CNI) in the San Andres Accords, is that indigenous are those who self-proclaim themselves indigenous, who selfidentify as indigenous. Theres no DNA test, no blood test, no test of cultural roots; to be indigenous it is enough to say so. And thats how we recognize ourselves , the CNI says. There is no referent in these realities, above all in
marginalized sectors, which have been stripped of everything, or have been offered cultural options that dont satisfy thembecause this happens a lot to young people, no? Because one says, If the option of rebellion is what the mass media offers, be tween Britney Spears and Paris Hilton, then Ill make my own rebellion. Or, Is this the only way to be rebellious or unruly? Or can I create my own way? And they start to construct an identity, and they form small collectives, and they say, Who are we? We are... whatever they call themselves. [And when someone asks] But you guys, what are you, anarchists, communists, Zapatistas? [They answer] No, were such and such collective. We think that with regard to communities and collectives, this is going to arise.
The world that we are going to construct has no reason to use former national identities or the construction of a nation as a referent. If some group in a North American city constructs its own identity and says, I am whatever-they-callit, maybe not even a recognized name, then a community in Southeast Mexico can do the same thing, to say were not indigenous Tzeltales or Tzotziles, were indigenous Zapatistas. We constructed that identity. Now [that identity] is not something
that we grant, nor something that we belong to. It is a new identity, though there may be elements of, I am a woman, I am a young person, I am indigenous, and I am a soldier, in the case of an insurgenta , for example. Its the same for the indigenous woman in New York. Her husband hits her and she cant even report it because the police can deport her instead of protecting her. She says, I have this reality and here I am going to construct my identity, and it has to do with the fact that I am indigenous, that I come from Oaxaca, with the reality that I suffer as a woman, that I am undocumented, that I work in a restaurant. And her children are going to have an identity that has to do with all this but is different still. In all of the groups that are on the North American border, the southern border with Mexico, there are some that say, Were Chicanos, others that say, Were Mexicans, others that say, Were not Mexicans or Chicanos or North Americans, were.... And they give themselves a name. And this is our identity, and these are our cultural forms, and we dress like this and we talk like this, and this is our music and our art. And they begin to construct their own civilization, and just like a civilization their existence doesnt depend on history books with refere nces to the Roman civilization or the Aztec or whatever, but rather that there is a relationship in a community, a self-identity, a cultural, artistic, economic development. So we say that in this reality that you mention and explain, where you all live and work, the surest thing is that these people create their own identity, and that theres no reason for us to pressure them to define themselves: Are you Mexican or arent you? There remains this problem of, Am I in the Sixth International or am I in the Other Campaign? Well, wherever you want to be! And they say, Well the thing is, Im from the Other Side. Well yes but no, this doesnt matter. We think what has
to be done in these cases is not so much talk to the people, but listen to them. And with questions and everything, they start to draw their profile. And [they begin] to say, Well, I dont identify as Mexican. I dont identify as African. I dont identify as North American. I have these characteristics of all of them, but I also have these oth ers, so Im going to call myself... And they give themselves a name, like the Chicanos gave themselves a name. The problem isnt existence; its identity. Because theyre going to exist whether or not they are named. The problem is how this identity relates within itself, between those that identify as such, and how this identity relates to others. This is the relation that we want to construct, the new world, where these identities have a place, not just that they are there, but the way in which we relate to them.
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MDAW 2013
Framework - Geo-Epistemology
Epistemic location matters we cant escape where we come from. Decolonial thinking is a matter of interrogating and advancing a geo-politics of knowledge based on our own link to subalternity this is what their framework arguments forclose by definition Grosfoguel, Ramn, University of California, Berkeley, Decolonizing Post-Colonial Studies and Paradigms of Political-Economy: Transmodernity, Decolonial Thinking, and Global Coloniality 20 11 TRANSMODERNITY: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production
of the Luso-Hispanic World, School of Social Sciences, Humanities, and Arts, UC Merced http://escholarship.org/uc/item/21k6t3fq Tiana The first point to discuss is the contribution of racial/ethnic and feminist subaltern perspectives to
epistemological questions. The hegemonic Eurocentric paradigms that have informed western philosophy and sciences in the modern/colonial capitalist/patriarchal world-system (Grosfoguel 2005; 2006b) for the last 500 hundred years assume a universalistic, neutral, objective point of view. Chicana and black feminist scholars (Moraga and
Anzalda 1983; Collins 1990) as well as Third World scholars inside and outside the United States (Dussel 1977) reminded us that we always speak from a particular location in the power structures. Nobody escapes the class, sexual, gender, spiritual,
linguistic, geographical, and racial hierarchies of the modern/colonial capitalist/patriarchal worldsystem. As feminist scholar Donna Haraway (1988) states, our knowledges are always situated. Black feminist scholars called this
perspective afro-centric epistemology (Collins 1990) (which is not equivalent to the afrocentrist perspective) while Latin American Philosopher of Liberation Enrique Dussel called it geopolitics of knowledge (Dussel 1977) and, following Fanon (1967) and Anzalda (1987), I will use the term bodypolitics of knowledge. This is not only a question about social values in knowledge production or the fact that our knowledge is always partial. The main point here is the locus of enunciation, that is, the
geo-political and body-political location of the subject that speaks. In Western philosophy and sciences the subject that speaks is always hidden, concealed, erased from the analysis. The ego -politics of knowledge of Western philosophy has always privilege the myth of a non-situated Ego. Ethnic/racial/gender/sexual epistemic location and the subject that speaks are always decoupled. By delinking ethnic/racial/gender/sexual
epistemic location from the subject that speaks, Western philosophy and sciences are able to produce a myth about a Truthful universal knowledge that covers up, that is, conceals who is speaking as well as the geo-political and body-political epistemic location in the structures of colonial power/knowledge from which the subject speaks. It is important here to distinguish the epistemic
location from the social location. The fact that one is socially located in the oppressed side of power relations does not automatically mean that he/she is epistemically thinking from a subaltern epistemic location. Precisely, the success of the modern/colonial worldsystem consists in making subjects that are socially located in the
oppressed side of the colonial difference, to think epistemically like the ones on the dominant positions. Subaltern epistemic perspectives are knowledge coming from below that produces a critical perspective of hegemonic knowledge in the power relations involved. I am not claiming an epistemic populism where knowledge produced from below is automatically an epistemic subaltern knowledge. What I am claiming is that all knowledges are epistemically located in the dominant or the subaltern
side of the power relations and that this is related to the geo- and body-politics of knowledge. The disembodied and unlocated neutrality and objectivity of the ego-politics of knowledge is a Western myth.
Ren Descartes, the founder of Modern Western Philosophy, inaugurates a new moment in the history of Western thought. He replaces God, as the foundation of knowledge in the Theo-politics of knowledge of the European Middle Ages, with (Western) Man as the foundation of knowledge in European Modern times. All the attributes of God are now extrapolated to (Western) Man. Universal Truth beyond time and space privileges access to the laws of the Universe, and the capacity to produce scientific knowledge and theory is now placed in the mind of Western Man. The Cartesian Cogito ergo sum (I think, therefore I am) is the foundation of mod ern Western sciences. By producing a dualism between mind and body and between mind and nature, Descartes was able to claim nonsituated, universal, Godeyed view knowledge. This is what the Colombian philosopher Santiago CastroGmez called the point zero perspective of Eurocentric philosophies (Castro-Gmez 2003). The point zero is the point of view that hides and conceals itself as being beyond a particular point of view, that is, the point of view that represents itself as being without a point of view . It is this godeye view that always hides its local and particular perspective under an abstract universalism. Western philosophy privileges
ego politics of knowledge over the geopolitics of knowledge and the body -politics of knowledge. Historically, this has allowed Western man (the gendered term is intentionally used here) to represent his knowledge as the only one capable of achieving a universal consciousness, and to dismiss non-Western knowledge as particularistic and, thus, unable to achieve universality. This epistemic strategy has been crucial for Western global designs. By hiding the location of the subject of enunciation, European/Euro-American colonial expansion and domination was able to construct a hierarchy of superior and inferior knowledge and, thus, of superior and inferior people around the world
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Framework - Geo-Epistemology
Our framework is the only one that allows us to interrogate the emergence of resolutional knowledges we explore structural background conditions that condition our ability to speak the rez Linda Mart n Alcoff, philosopher at the City University of New York, Mignolos Epistemology of Coloniality, Syracuse University, 2007, https://muse.jhu.edu/login?auth=0&type=summary&url=/journals/new_centennial_review/v007/7.3.alcoff.html Cindy
Yet Foucault himself formulated that relationality as dyadic rather than reductive, insisting that knowledge is not reducible to power, even though it cannot be properly understood as disassociated from power (Foucault 1980; Alcoff 1996). Power operates not only in the spheres of application and discoverythe two spheres traditional epistemologists acknowledge as affected by irrational elementsbut also in the spheres of justification and the delimitation of the regime (or sphere) of the truth, or what passes for truth. Foucault worked out these claims with detailed case studies that both supported them and elucidated their meaning. For those of us who found these arguments plausible, even persuasive, the normative implications are clear:
epistemology needs to work with this better and more truthful description of how actually existing knowledges (as opposed to idealized reconstructions) emerge, and needs to incorporate not only an analysis of power in its analysis
of knowledge but also a set of normative criteria for judging various relationships between power and knowledge. Foucault provided such criteria in his epistemic assessments of hegemony-seeking versus subjugated knowledges: subjugated or local
knowledges always tend to do less violence to the local particulars and are also less likely to impose hierarchical structures of credibility based on universal claims about the proper procedures of justification that foreclose the contributions of many unconventional or lower-status knowers. Many Latin American philosophersfrom Leopoldo Zea to Enrique Dussel to Mignolo and othershave pointed out the hierarchical patterns of epistemic judgment under colonial systems. As Zea succinctly put it, the identity, the rationality, and the very humanity of the peoples of the New World were put on trial and judged by the jury of its conquerors (Zea 198889, 36). Amerindian peoples
were not considered to be in a position to present their own epistemic credentials, much less to judge European ones. This fact is clear. What is also clear is that extra-epistemic concerns are being used to do epistemic work in cases where , for example, ones ethnic or racial- ized identity determines ones epistemic justification or the status of ones beliefs. But these facts do not, for most epistemologists, have normative epistemological significance. Conquerors used bad epistemic practices, and it is assumed that the effort to establish good epistemic practices can only take negative lessons from such examples. However, we might also ask, following both Charles Mills (1997) and Michele Le Doeuff (1991) who have asked similar questions: what is the relationship between the project of conquest and this reliance on bad epistemic practices? Could it be that conquerors are in an epistemically poor cultural, intellectual, and political context for judgment, and are more likely to develop what Mills calls epistemologies of ignorance that include substantive cognitive practices that obscure social realities? If so, this would i ndicate that in developing an account of best practices, we need to consider more than individual epistemic agency and include a
much broader array of structural background conditions that directly enhance or inhibit the pursuit and identification of truth
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Framework - Silencing
Their framework arguments replicate neoliberal governance our aff contents that the silences of the resolution are constitutive of it we are the only ones who access democratic participation by speaking the resolution from the perspective of the silent Santos 2008 Beyond Neoliberal Governance: The World Social Forum as Subaltern Cosmopolitan Politics and Legality Boaventura de Sousa Santos is a Professor of Sociology at the Scho ol
of Economics, University of Coimbra. Sousa Santos has taught in various universities including Yale, Wisconsin-Madison Law School and University of Warwick
In order to identify the political meaning of neoliberal governance we must pay attention not only to what it says but also to what it silences. The most important silences in the governance matrix are: social transformation, popular participation, social contract, social justice, power relations, and social conflict. These were the concepts with which the legitimacy crisis was formulated in the 1970s. They were also the concepts that grounded modern critical theory. By silencing them and offering no positive alternative to them, governance signals the defeat of critical theory in both social and political affairs. Indeed, the alternatives offered by governance to the silenced concepts are all of them negative in the sense that they define themselves by opposition to the legitimacy concepts : rather than social transformation, problem solving; rather than popular participation, selected-in stakeholders participation; rather than social contract, selfregulation; rather than social justice, positive sum games and compensatory policies; rather than power relations, coordination and partnership; rather than social conflict, social cohesion and stability of flows. These alternative concepts are not unequivocally negative. Indeed, some
of them echo some of the aspirational features of deep democracy. They are negative in so far as they are used in opposition to the other silenced concepts, rather than as complementary parts of the same political constellation. Thereby, rather than being at the service of a project of social inclusion and
social redistribution, they are at the service of social exclusion and economic polarization.
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Framework - A/T: democracy
Deliberative democracy only works when we learn from below in order to effect a noncoercive rearrangement of desires. Only we access the reconstitution of the chooser of best policy options.
Spivak 9 (Comp Lit @ Columbia, Speaking for the Humanities in Occasion: Interdisciplinary studies in the humanities)
For literature, it is to teach in fact how one can learn without regard to verification, to work in the interest of justice. It is an extremely difficult thing to learn. It is also training in suspending oneself in the text, which is of course in turn training in accessing the Other. Thus is what I mean by training the imagination. We get to this by learning how to attend to the rhetorical signals in the text. This is of course close readinga literary training is not necessarily devoted to close reading. And everybody who teaches close reading doesnt necessarily give up the idea of verifying it and presenting it in a legalist framework. Prestigious sch ools of morphological and classificatory work court rational choice. Literary history takes a qualitative historical model where a linear model offers didactic value. Im urging literary studies not to ignore what is specific about the literarylearning to learn from the singular and the unverifiable. I believe I could make a case for this characteristic even in most ancient traditions, where myth and history are imbricated. And today this is certainly the defining characteristic of the literary. It is this skill, this craft, that we teach when we teach literature as such. And this, I believe, is what takes, by way of rhetoric and figure, the accountability of consistency as reason outside of its own merely logical outlines.
On the subaltern, elementary level, where the trainer attempts to develop the intuitions and rituals of a deliberative democracy and a sense of the public sphere, it is the details of learning to learn from below in order to devise a viable philosophy of education that is sustained by a training of the imagination,
It is a bit amusing for me that, in this abstract language, what I am describing is the practical details of varieties of classroom pedagogy. What the students learn is also an exercise of the imagination, for such an education emphasizes the working out of meanings, in conjunction with the basic skills of numeracy. Democracy is caught in a special double bind of self, autonomy and otherequal rights for all. And the training of the imagination allows this double bind to operate in this special
way. If democracy were a matter of rational choice alone, and the conventional idea of the oneness of reason were correct, either the ground of choice would be annulled, or democracy would depend on data alone a
very old Aristotelian theme, but it hasnt gone away.
It is in order to accede to the double bind that the students desires are rearranged . Not transformed, that is in the hands of chance, but rearranged again and again so that the possibility of using, guarding, and keeping responsible reason, accountable reason, can at least emerge. This persistent effort at rearrangement is not a means to an end, but an end
itself. It affects teacher and taught both, it operates in different ways on all levels. Broken down this way, I do not believe my proposal teaching the humanities in a certain waydoes not seem so preposterous or utopian at all. Indeed, what strikes me as unrealistic by contrast is that general rational choice theory seems to assume a simple model of the human mind that even if we are very diversified there are areas where we behave in a similar way. Whereas my model does not take democracy as a natural or as a matter of style of government alone. It does not accept the generalization that most people in democracies leave well enough alone, while the State works its benevolence.[9] I offer this activist notion, dependent upon a
humanities education as a prefigurative and effortful substitute for mere prediction.

When the disciplines that use rational choice wish to complicate the idea of the human mind, they rely, as I have already said, on behavioralism, a view of the mind that is peculiarly suited to the predictive instrumentality of rational choice, so much so that one justifies the other.[10] Rational choice and behavioralism do not only run a certain spectrum of social science disciplines, they also run the disposition of capital, in capitalism and socialism, as well as policy.[11] This is indeed my feeling about all policy, all
social engineering based on rational choice laced with behavioralism. No reform will last if the beneficiaries are not treated with developed imaginations to an uncoercive rearrangement of desires.
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Other Campaigns Our Americas
Our Americas is a diversity that undergirds the borders of nations and the colonial encounter. It enables us to link struggles here and struggles there as collective we Linda Mart n Alcoff, philosopher at the City University of New York, Mignolos Epistemology of Coloniality, Syracuse University, 2007, https://muse.jhu.edu/login?auth=0&type=summary&url=/journals/new_centennial_review/v007/7.3.alcoff.html Cindy
For Ramos, Paz, Zea, Edouard Glissant, and the many others in this tradition who identified colonial alienation of consciousness, the
solution to alienation is a positional shift to our America in which a philosophy reflective of its own Latin American reality might be developed. In his most recent work, The Idea of Latin America (2005), Mignolo expresses doubts
about this alternative Latin America construction, predicated as it is on another exclusionary paradigm. Before we can go about the process of developing a new philosophy and new account of our reality, he argues, we need a more extensive period of epistemological reflection. We need to develop a decolonial critical theory that will be more thoroughly delinked
from the contemporary variants of the modern imperial designs of the recent past. The fact that language, space, time, and history have all been colonized through the colonization of knowledge must give us pause before we bor- row the founding concepts of Eurocentric thought, such as center/periphery, tradition/modernity, and primitive/civilized, or the very evaluative binary structure that grounds these. Mignolo develops Quijanos concept of the coloniality of power, then, as a way to name that set of framing and organizing assumptions that justify hierarchies and make it almost impossible to evaluate alternative claims. Why was it said that there were no pre-Colombian books or forms of writing, when it was known that the codices had been raided and burned in heaps? How could the claim that modernity represented an expansion of freedom not be challenged by its development within the context of colonialism? Why do we continue to conceptualize rationality as
separate from and properly in dominion over the realm of affect, a distinctly Greek and nonindigenous notion, as Mariategui showed many decades ago? Why is it considered sufficient, even exemplary, to have one Latin Americanist in a university history department in the United States, when 5 or 10 or even 15 Europeanists are required? And in philosophy departments, it is not necessary to have a single one. To think through and beyond these persistent limitations in Western knowledge practices, Mignolo argues that we need to reinscribe what he calls the colonial difference into the order of representation. If the Eurocentric imaginary of modernity has forgotten colonialism and relegated the colonized spaces to the periphery and to the past in its description of universal reality (even if that past paradoxically exists in the present) , the task of the colonial difference is to reinscribe simultaneity. To make our America no longer considered peripheral and behind the now, hierarchical and binary categories must be replaced with pluralist and egalitarian ones. Mignolos concept of the colonial difference is thus an attempt to reveal and displace the logic of the same by which Europeans have represented their others. Non-Europeans are seen as existing on the same historical trajectory, but further behind; their goals are the same, but not achieved to the same degree; their knowledge is subject to the same justificatory procedures, but it is less well-developed. In this way, true otherness or difference is invisible and unintelligible. By use of the term colonial difference, Mignolo seeks to break out of this logic of the same. He seeks both to reveal the way in which power has been at work in creating that difference (that is, the way in which colonialism creates backwardness both materially and ideologically) as well as the way in which colonial power represents and evaluates difference. The coloniality of power, in other words, produces, evaluates, and manages the colonial difference. Now here let me signal one of the issues of critical debate I want to raise later on in the paper: What is the nature of the difference that Mignolo means to signify by the term colonial difference? Is it an absolute or a rela- tive difference; that is, does it stand alone or is it dependent on its relation to Eurocentrism? Is it, like the concept of race, an epiphenomena of colonialism itself, or does it preexist the colonial encounter in the way that Dussel suggests that living labor preexists capitalism? What, in other words, is the metaphysical status of the colonial difference?
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Other Campaigns Huey Newton
Huey Newton, revolutionary, 1973 - In the Epilogue of his autobiography, Revolutionary Suicide (1973)
There is an old African saying, "I am we." If you met an African in ancient times and asked him who he was, he would reply, "I am we. This is revolutionary suicide: I, we, all of us are the one and the multitude. So many of my comrades are gone now. Some tight partners, crime partners, and brothers off the block are begging on the street. Others are in asylum, penitentiary, or grave. They are all suicides of one kind of another who had the sensitivity and tragic imagination to see the oppression. Some overcame; they are the revolutionary suicides. Others were reactionary suicides who either overestimated or underestimated the enemy, but in any case were powerless to change their conception of the oppressor. The differences lies in hope and desire. By hoping and desiring, the revolutionary suicide chooses life; he is, in the words of Nietzsche, "an arrow of longing for another shore." Both suicides despise tyranny, but the revolutionary is both a great despiser and a great adorer who longs for another shore. The reactionary suicide must learn, as his brother the revolutionary has learned, that the desert is not a circle. It is a spiral. When we have passed through the desert, nothing will be the same. You cannot bare your throat to the murderer. As George Jackson said, you must defend yourself and take the dragon position as in karate and make the front kick and the back kick when you are surrounded. You do not beg because your enemy comes with the butcher knife and the hatchet in the other. "He will not become a Buddhist over night." The Preacher said that the wise man and the fool have the same end: they go to the grave as a dog. Who sends us to the grave? The unknowable, the force that dictates to all classes, all territories, all ideologies; he is death, the Big Boss. An ambitious man seeks to dethrone the Big Boss, to free himself, to control when and how he will go to the grave. There is another illuminating story of the wise man and the fool, found in Mao's Little Red Book. A foolish old man went to the North Mountain and began to dig; a wise old man passed by and said, "Why do you dig; foolish old man? Do you not know that you cannot move the mountain with a little shovel?" But the foolish old man answered resolutely, "While the mountain cannot get any higher, it will get lower with each shovelful. When I pass on, my sons and his sons and his son's sons will go on making the mountain lower. Why can't we move the mountain?" And the foolish old man kept digging, and the generations that followed after him, and the wise old man looked on in disgust. But the resoluteness and the spirit of the generations that followed the foolish old man touched God's heart, and God sent two angels who put the mountain on their backs and moved the mountain. This is the story Mao told. When he spoke of God he meant the six hundred million who had helped him to move imperialism and bourgeois thinking, the two great mountains. The reactionary suicide is "wise," and the revolutionary suicide is a "fool," a fool for the revolution in the way Paul meant when he spoke of being "a fool for Christ." That foolishness can move the mountains of oppression; it is our great leap and our commitment to the dead and the unborn. We will touch God's heart; we will touch the people's heart, and together we will move the mountain.
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Other Campaigns Margaret Walker
Margaret Walker, For My People, 1942

For my people everywhere singing their slave songs repeatedly: their dirges and their ditties and their blues and jubilees, praying their prayers nightly to an unknown god, bending their knees humbly to an unseen power; For my people walking blindly spreading joy, losing time For my people lending their strength to the years, to the gone years and the now years and the maybe years, washing ironing cooking scrubbing sewing mending hoeing plowing digging planting pruning patching dragging along never gaining never reaping never knowing and never understanding; For my playmates in the clay and dust and sand of Alabama backyards playing baptizing and preaching and doctor and jail and soldier and school and mama and cooking and playhouse and concert and store and hair and Miss Choomby and company; For the cramped bewildered years we went to school to learn to know the reasons why and the answers to and the people who and the places where and the days when, in memory of the bitter hours when we discovered we were black and poor and small and different and nobody cared and nobody wondered and nobody understood; Let a new earth rise. Let another world be born. Let a For the boys and girls who grew in spite of these things to be man and woman, to laugh and dance and sing and play and drink their wine and religion and success, to marry their playmates and bear children and then die of consumption and anemia and lynching; For my people thronging 47th Street in Chicago and Lenox Avenue in New York and Rampart Street in New bloody peace be written in the sky. Let a second generation full of courage issue forth; let a people loving freedom come to growth. Let a beauty full of healing and a strength of final clenching be the pulsing in our spirits and our blood. Let the martial songs be written, let the dirges disappear. Let a race of men now rise and take control. For my people blundering and groping and floundering in the dark of churches and schools and clubs and societies, associations and councils and committees and conventions, distressed and disturbed and deceived and devoured by money-hungry glory-craving leeches, preyed on by facile force of state and fad and novelty, by false prophet and holy believer; For my people standing staring trying to fashion a better way from confusion, from hypocrisy and misunderstanding, trying to fashion a world that will hold all the people, all the faces, all the adams and eves and their countless generations; being lazy, sleeping when hungry, shouting when burdened, drinking when hopeless, tied, and shackled and tangled among ourselves by the unseen creatures who tower over us omnisciently and laugh; Orleans, lost disinherited dispossessed and happy people filling the cabarets and taverns and other peoples pockets and needing bread and shoes and milk and land and money and somethingsomething all our own;
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Other Campaigns - tawantinsuyu
Tawantinsuyu nation acknowledges knowledge is an instrument of imperial colonization therefore they decolonize their knowledge by liberating themselves through learning from their indigenous roots and denying colonial normalizing truths.
Tawanation. Tawantinsuyu Nation. The White Left http://tawanation.wordpress.com/about/ Aayan 2013
TAWANTINSUYU is the name the Inca gave their territory. Tawa = Four, Inti = Sun and Suyu = Direction; the Four Directions Under the Sun. We use this name today instead of South America which
was forced on us by European invaders. Another name that has been forced on us is Latino. We are not Latino, we are Nican Tlaca; the indigenous people of our continent. Our ancestors in what is now known as Mexico used to call themselves Nican Tlaca before our identities were destroyed by the European colonialists. We use this name too because we see our continent as one land, and we will identify ourselves as one people. Tawantinsuyu Nation believes that we must educate ourselves so that we can liberate ourselves from colonial rule. Many of us still believe that Europes colonisation ended hundreds of years ago, unfortunately that is far from the truth. Europe still controls most of the Tawantinsuyu. Today our continent is in a poor state despite its material riches. There is poverty, violence, prostitution, drug problems and millions have been forced to migrate to Europe and the European settler country that is known as the USA. These problems all have a root in white supremacy (colonialism, imperialism, capitalism, neoliberalism). European domination has been an ongoing process for at least 5 centuries. In the beginning of this process Europeans outwardly declared themselves masters of the Earth and set out on a journey of BLOODY expansion. Today, Europe and European settlers living in what is now called the USA dominate the worlds economy, politics and nearly all aspects of society. As Tawantinsuyu Nation we refuse to give in to their control. Tawantinsuyu Nation carries on the fighting tradition of our warrior ancestors who refused to bow down to white supremacy. We understand that if we are to see humanity as One we must first understand ourselves and our position within the system that has been imposed on the rest of humanity by Europe. For Tawantinsuyu Nation, liberation can only come through education. We will dedicate ourselves to the education of our
people and other oppressed peoples of the world. We organize classes, talks, discussion and protests. If you are interested in attending or joining the Nation please write to us at tawantinsuyu520@gmail.com Kawsachum Tawantinsuyu, Kawsachum Nican Tlaca! Long Live Tawantinsuyu, Long Live Nican Tlaca!
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MDAW 2013
Other campaigns the communal/communes, Venezuela
Mcmillan and Caswell 13 REBECCA MCMILLAN AND CALAIS CASWELL, graduate students in International
Development and Globalization at the University of Ottawa Their research is sponsored the Social Science and Humanities Research Council, the North-South Institute, and the University of Ottawa Learning to Govern Ourselves: Venezuelas National Network of Commoners, Turtlewalker 1/2/13 (http://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/7583)
Communes are a structure of community self-government. Adopted into law in 2010, they are the latest part of the Chvez governments efforts to build a separate, participatory state apparatus referred to as the communal state. The idea of the commune is inspired by the experiences of indigenous and Afro Venezuelan people, as well as socialist ideas and the work of Latin American Marxist thinkers such as Perus Jos Carlos Maritegui. In theory, the communal state is supposed to eventually replace the bourgeois state. The new state will be subordinate to popular power and overcome the division between civil society and political society that underpins the capitalist system. The emphasis on grassroots participation is also seen as a departure from the undemocratic, centralist tendencies of some previous socialist experiences [1]. In practice, the communes group together all communal councils and other community organizations in a
given geographic territory. Communal councils are community planning bodies that encompass 150-400 families in urban areas and about 20 in rural areas. The communes aim to prioritize and address community needs. The national
government transfers funds directly to the communes to execute projects, without the intermediation of state or municipal governments. The communes also advance the socialist economy by bringing production and services under direct community control. Many communes operate their own banks and community enterprises. For example, El panal 2012 in Caracass militant 23 de enero neighborhood is packaging
and distributing sugar and grains. The Juana Ramrez commune in Antmano parish runs its own bakery and condiment and cleaning-supplies factories. These initiatives ensure that prices remain affordable and that goods reach the people. (In
Venezuela, opposition-dominated distribution cartels have frequently withheld supplies of essential products as a form of leverage against the government). Communes in the states of Lara, Portuguesa, and Yaracuay are also tackling the challenge of food selfsufficiency. They are constructing a Communal Network for the Production and Distribution of Food, which also promotes organic production. Finally the communes are seen by the comuneros as a classroom for political ideology and
learning about self-government.
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Alternate forms of knowledge production are critical to avoiding the monetization and exploitation of key sub-sects of the population Santos 08 (Boaventura de Sousa Santos 2008 Beyond Neoliberal Governance: The World Social Forum as Subaltern
Cosmopolitan Politics and Legality Boaventura de Sousa Santos is a Professor of Sociology at the School of Economics, University of Coimbra. Sousa Santos has taught in various universities including Yale, Wisconsin-Madison Law School and University of Warwick)
The WSF entails the reemergence of a critical utopia, that is to say, the radical critique of present-day reality and the aspiration to a better society. It has arisen as an alternative to the dominance of the conservative utopia of neoliberalism the utopian belief in the unregulated market as the source of economic and social well-being and the standard by which all other alternatives are to be measured (or rather, discarded). As all conservative utopias, neoliberalism distinguishes itself from critical utopias by the fact that it identifies itself with present-day reality, so that its utopian dimension in the radicalization or complete fulfillment of the present (Hinkelammert 2002: 278). The utopian dimension of the WSF consists in affirming the possibility of a counter-hegemonic globalization. Thus, the utopia of the WSF asserts itself more in negative terms (the definition of what it critiques) than in positive terms (the definition of that to which it aspires). As the first critical utopia of the twenty-first century, the WSF aims to break with the tradition of the critical utopias of Western modernity, many of which turned into conservative utopias. The openness of the utopian dimension of the WSF is
its attempt to escape this perversion. For the WSF, the claim of alternatives is plural. The affirmation of alternatives goes hand in hand with the affirmation that there are alternatives to the alternatives. Moreover, the utopia of the WSF is a radically democratic one. The WSFs focus on the processes of intercourse among
the movements (rather than on an assessment of the movements political agendas) is the main reason of its inte rnal cohesion. It helps to maximize what unites and minimize what divides. This utopian design, which is clear in the WSFs Charter of Principles, is ai med at promoting consensuses beyond the ideological and political cleavages among the participating movements and organizations. 3.2.2. A
very broad conception of power and oppression Neoliberal globalization did not limit itself to submitting ever more interactions to the market, nor to raising the workers exploitation rate by transforming the labor force into a global resource while preventing the emergence of a global labor market. Neoliberal globalization showed that exploitation is linked with many other forms of oppression that affect women, ethnic minorities, indigenous peoples, peasants, the unemployed, workers of the informal sector, legal and illegal immigrants, ghetto subclasses, gays and lesbians, children and the young. All these forms of power create exclusion. One cannot ascribe to any one of them, in abstract, nor to the practices that resist them, any priority as to the claim that another world is possible. Political priorities are always situated and conjunctural. They depend on the concrete conditions of each country at a given historical moment. To respond to such conditions and their fluctuations, the movements and organizations must give priority to the articulations among them. This ultimately explains the organizational novelty of a WSF with no leaders, its rejection of
hierarchies, and its emphasis on networks made possible by the internet.4 3.2.3. Equivalence between the principles of equality and of recognition of difference We live in societies that are obscenely unequal, and yet equality is lacking as an
emancipatory ideal. Equality, understood as the equivalence among the same, ends up excluding what is different. Herein lies the grounding of the aforementioned political and organizational novelty, as well as the grounding of the WSFs option for participatory 4 democracy as ruling principle of social emancipation, to the detriment of closed models such as that of state socialism.
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Other Campaigns Mao Zedongs A/T: imperialism inevitable
US Imperialism is a paper tiger Mao Zedong, revolutionary, 1959 (http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume5/mswv5_52.htm)

The United States owes debts everywhere. It owes debts not only to the countries of Latin America, Asia and Africa, but also to the countries of Europe and Oceania. The whole world, Britain included dislikes the United States. The masses of the people dislike it. Japan dislikes the United States because it oppresses her. None of the countries in the East is free from U.S. aggression. The United States has invaded our Taiwan Province.
Japan, Korea, the Philippines, Vietnam and Pakistan all suffer from U.S. aggression, although some of them are allies of the United States. The people are dissatisfied and in some countries so are the authorities. All oppressed nations want independence.
Everything is subject to change. The big decadent forces will give way to the small new-born forces. The small forces will change into big forces because the majority of the people demand this change. The U.S. imperialist forces will change from big to small because the American people, too, are dissatisfied with their government.
In my own lifetime I myself have witnessed such changes. Some of us present were born in the Ching Dynasty and others after the 1911 Revolution. The Ching Dynasty was overthrown long ago. By whom? By the party led by Sun Yat-sen, together with the people. Sun Yat-sen's forces were so small that the Ching officials didn't take him seriously. He led many uprisings which failed each time. In the end, however, it was Sun Yat-sen who brought down the Ching Dynasty. Bigness is nothing to be afraid of. The big will be overthrown by the small. The small will become big. After overthrowing the Ching Dynasty, Sun Yat-sen met with defeat. For he failed to satisfy the demands of the people, such as their demands for land and for opposition to imperialism. Nor did he understand the necessity of suppressing the counter-revolutionaries who were then moving about freely. Later, he suffered defeat at the hands of Yuan Shih-kai, the chieftain of the Northern warlords. Yuan Shih-kai's forces were larger than Sun Yat-sen's. But here again this law operated: small forces linked with the people become strong, while big forces opposed to the people become weak. Subsequently Sun Yat-sen's bourgeoisdemocratic revolutionaries co-operated with us Communists and together we defeated the warlord set-up left behind by Yuan Shih-kai. Chiang Kai-shek's rule in China was recognized by the governments of all countries and lasted twenty-two years, and his forces were the biggest. Our forces were small, fifty thousand Party members at first but only a few thousand after counter-revolutionary suppressions. The enemy made trouble everywhere. Again this law operated: the big and strong end up in defeat because they are divorced from the people, whereas the small and weak emerge victorious because they are linked with the people and work in their interest. That's how things turned out in the end. During the anti-Japanese war, Japan was very powerful, the Kuomintang troops were driven to the hinterland, and the armed forces led by the Communist Party could only conduct guerrilla warfare in the rural areas behind the enemy lines. Japan occupied large Chinese cities such as Peking, Tientsin, Shanghai, Nanking, Wuhan and Canton. Nevertheless, like Germany's Hitler the Japanese militarists collapsed in a few years, in accordance with the same law. We underwent innumerable difficulties and were driven from the south to the north, while our forces fell from several hundred thousand strong to a few tens of thousands. At the end of the 25,000-li Long March we had only 25,000 men left. In the history of our Party many erroneous "Left" and Right lines have occurred. Gravest of all were the Right deviationist line of Chen Tu-hsiu and the "Left" deviationist line of Wang Ming. Besides, there were the Right deviationist errors committed by Chang Kuo-tao, Kao Kang and others. There is also a good side to mistakes, for they can educate the people and the Party. We have had a good many teachers by negative example, such as Japan, the United States, Chiang Kai-shek, Chen Tu-hsiu, Li Li-san, Wang Ming, Chang Kuo-tao and Kao Kang. We paid a very high price to learn from these teachers by negative example. In the past, Britain made war on us many times. Britain, the United States, Japan, France, Germany, Italy, tsarist Russia and Holland were all very interested in this land of ours. They were all our teachers by negative example and we were their pupils. During the War of Resistance, our troops grew and became 900,000 strong through fighting against Japan. Then came the War of Liberation. Our arms were inferior to those of the Kuomintang. The Kuomintang troops then numbered four million, but in three years of fighting we wiped out eight million of them all told. The Kuomintang, though aided by U.S. imperialism, could not defeat us. The big and strong cannot win, it is always the small and weak who win out.
Now U.S. imperialism is quite powerful, but in reality it isn't. It is very weak politically because it is divorced from the masses of the people and is disliked by everybody and by the American people too. In appearance it is very powerful but in reality it is nothing to be afraid of, it is a paper tiger. Outwardly a tiger, it is made of paper, unable to withstand the wind and the rain. I believe the United States is nothing but a paper tiger.
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Storytelling good
Storytelling is decolonial in laying claims to where we are from in any context it makes visible colonial violence and indigenous resistance
Aman Sium-Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto, Canada , Eric Ritskes- Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto, Canada, Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, Speaking truth to power: Indigenous/ Tiana, 13 http://decolonization.org/index.php/des/article/view/19626/16256 Storytelling as an act of living resistance. This issue begins with Mendozas examination of neoliberalism and nativist longing and, as she demarcates and explores the problem, it is the rest of the issue that sets out to explore the possible answers to globalized neoliberalism and its reliance on multicultural difference . While
some have spoken to the infinite substitutability of neoliberal globalization, Arif Dirlik (2006) argues that Rather than erase difference by converting all to Euro/American norms of
modernity, capitalist modernity, as it has gone global, has empowered societies once theoretically condemned to premodernity or tradition to make their own claims on modernity on the bases of those very traditions, as filtered through experiences of colonialism... (p. 3). These
articulations of Indigenous theory through story speak against colonial claims of premodernity but not through a claim to neoliberal modernity, but a rejection of the Truth that this modernity has constructed under the guise of postmodern fragmentation of truth . While Njoki Wane (this issue) reminds us that colonial imposition leaves Indigenous societies changed and unable to
recraft a pure pre-colonial reality, Indigenous truth rests on the empowerment of Indigenous land and sovereignty, not needing any legitimation from colonial states or modernity. These claims to Indigenous epistemologies and truths. Each of the articles can also be seen as insurgent moments (Mendoza, 2006). Frantz Fanon (1963), the well-known Martinican scholar and activist, promised, decolonization never takes place unnoticed (p. 36). It makes a spectacle of colonial violence and Indigenous peoples resistance to it . In the same vein, the contributors to this important issue write about decolonization in ways that command our attention; and in ways that begin from familiar sites of
personal pain and dislocation, land struggle, historical erasure, and the many other violences inflicted by global coloniality. These papers dont simply ask but demand that we conceptualize decolonization in terms that take on both material and discursive definitions. Honor Ford-Smith (1987) asserts that, The tale-telling tradition contains what is most poetically true about our
struggles. The tales are one place where the most subversive elements of our history can be safely lodged... (p. 3). While dominant scholarship might push aside methods such as autoethnography or traditional storytelling as not rigorous enough or as identity politics, the experiences of those who live out decolonization are integral to the integrity of the movement, grounding it to the material realities of the people whose lives bear the scars of colonialism and the long histories of resistance and triumph. There is a reason that many of the insurgent
Indigenous movements around the globe have been sustained by poets, musicians, and artists
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Storytelling
Storytelling is an act of rebellion 1. It rebels against dominant epistemologies of debate which rejects stories as evidence 2. It enables transgenerational and transnational transmission of communities affected by colonialism Aman Sium-Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto, Canada , Eric Ritskes- Ontario Institute for Studies
in Education, University of Toronto, Canada, Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, Speaking truth to power: Indigenous/Tiana, 13 http://decolonization.org/index.php/des/article/view/19626/16256 Of course who does the storytelling, remains an important question in decolonization
work. While Indigenous peoples have been the subjects of objectivity, it has been White settlers who have been in the position of power to wield it with impunity . How can we contest
and break down these settler positions to further a decolonization agenda that includes solidarity between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples? In her exploration of the psychiatrization of Indigenous children in the child welfare system, LeFrancois speaks from the tenuous position of a settler scholar. First, describing her article as a storytelling approach to research (p.87) that seeks to disrupt and implicate, she continues to explain the fragility of telling from the position of an outsider: There are no short phrases or words to signify whether I should be given access, whether I fit the definition, whether I am really a privileged intruder or not, whether I am a pretender or not; I cannot be authenticated easily (p.88). In many ways, LeFrancois speaks to the sometimes contested nature of storytelling, both who speaks and from what perspective they enter the story. Although its not an easy task, this article pushes us to think about how
Indigenous peoples, settlers, and arrivants can ethically produce knowledges about the others. In
truth, Kaomea (2003) demands of settlers and Indigenous alike, We need to tell more uncomfortable stories (p. 23). But if storytelling is inherently personal, then how do we do it without appropriating the voices of those we speak of/to? Howard (2006), in his exploration of White bodies in antiracist classrooms, speaks to what LeFrancois is trying to accomplish when he states, Detached, rational discussions of an unembodied whiteness cannot serve antiracist ends (p. 59). Settler narratives must speak stories of embodying colonial violences and
complicity in the ongoing settler violence(s) against Indigenous peoples. Particularly evident in knowledge production as personal is the fact that storytelling is agentic and participatory. Storytellers have never been silent in the face of colonial violence that subverted and neutralized various other forms of resistance; the storytellers and griots have never been idle, working through participatory mediums to maintain and sustain Indigenous ways of being and living. Here, the role of the storyteller is central to the exercise of agency and renewal. In Indigenous traditions around the world, storytellers are sacred knowledge keepers, they are the elders and medicine people, and they shape communities through the spoken and written word. Stories are not only agentic and individual but they are communal sharings that bind communities together spiritually and relationally . As Leanne Simpson
(2013) tells us: Spiritual and social practices such as storytelling, the oral tradition, ceremonies, feasting, and gift-giving
are designed to bond people together toward a common understanding. Stories become mediums for Indigenous peoples to both analogize colonial violence and resist it in real ways. A kind of embodied reciprocity exists between a people and their stories.
African novelist Ben Okri says that people are as healthy and confident as the stories they tell themselves. Sick storytellers can make their nations sick. And sick nations make for sick storytellers (Okri in Parkinson, 2009, p. 31). Contrary to liberal notions of stories as depoliticized acts of sharing, we must recognize stories as acts of creative rebellion.
Decolonizing the very act of storytelling means breaking from liberal notions of stories as a kind of multicultural show and tell. It means closing the false gap that often exists between speaking and acting. Lastly, it means calling upon Indigenous concepts like Ankh Mdw - Kemetic beliefs in the Living Word - and others that recognize words as alive inside us, what Somerville
(2010) describes as the home fire burning within each person. Its fitting to paraphrase a question asked by Watts (this issue): What does it mean to think of words as living acts? Or as creative acts? Finally, in answering these questions in the affirmative, how will this be reflected in our scholarship? If stories are archives of collective pain, suffeIseke explores the institution of eldership in the process of storytelling. In her own words, Indigenous Elders are the educators, storytellers, historians, language keepers, and healers of our
communities (p. 36). Through the trans-generational memory transmitted by their stories, Elders ensure the survival and continuance of Indigenous epistemic traditions . For many communities under siege by the triangular threats of (settler) colonialism, patriarchy and capitalist-modernity, storytelling becomes a site and tool for survival . Trask (1999) reminds us
that surviving as an Indigenous person in any colonial situation is a strange mix of refusal, creation, and assertion (p. 89) and that is what these articles and stories are, part of that same strange mix.
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Storytelling
Decolonization can take place via storytellingthe genealogy from the affirmative does not forget this colonization, but rather remembers itby continuing the stories pasts will not continue to be forgotten although there are voices that cant be heardwe can make sure that the voices which are on the brink will remain and never be lostno more being buried in historyno longer being burned in vainbut rememberedthe genealogy of the affirmative allows this to take place while simultaneously decolonizing Mallory Whiteduck Aboriginal Cultural Liaison Officer Degrees: B.A. (Ottawa), M.A. (Carleton) But its our story. Read it.: Stories my grandfather told me and writing for continuance Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society Vol. 2, No. 1, 2013, pp. 72-92 20 Blaize 13
Decolonization, for me, rests in the ability to know my home. We choose our work to meet the needs of our people. Decolonization includes pressing forward, bearing in mind the strength in our culture and traditions, and the post-colonial history of relations with settlers on this land. Although I do not necessarily think of my people as colonized, since such a description effectively erases our many and continued acts of resistance and history of resilience, it is evident that our communities have suffered, and continue to suffer, from the ongoing effects of colonization. Thus, our efforts to achieve decolonization must take place on two interconnected levels: 1) where we fight back (or write back) and resist oppression; and 2) where we forge paths into the future and empower the next generations. Much current Native literary criticism focuses on both resisting colonization and establishing
ways to move forward in light of its history. Womack (1999) writes: I will seek a literary criticism that emphasizes Native resistance movements against colonialism, confronts racism, discusses sovereignty and Native nationalism, seeks connections between literature and liberation struggles, and, finally, roots literature in land and culture (p. 11). I work to resist ongoing colonization by knowing my own stories
and ensuring that the stories my grandfather tells about colonization are not forgotten. The witnessing of certain acts of colonization has been passed down through generations. Remembering the conditions upon which our community was formed, as my grandfather
describes in the next story, is essential in order to understand our history, and how we arrived at this place. Bird (1998) points to the importance of such a process: Thus both witnessing and testimony become, for me, viable tools that serve the purposes of decolonization by providing
details of individual processing of the complexities of inheritance that living in the aftermath of colonization provides (p. 29). It has been important for me to understand the history of my community and the ways in which its formation was born out of a colonial order:
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NEG Speaking for Others
A) Speaking for others as an academic practice ignores mediation that occurs when we try to advocate for the position of the oppressedthe impetus to speak for them is not borne out of altruism, but rather a narcissistic desire for control and mastery of the other Alcoff 92 (Linda, Syracuse Philosophy, The Problem of Speaking for Others
http://www.alcoff.com/content/speaothers.html) The impetus to speak must be carefully analyzed and, in many cases (certainly for academics!), fought against. This may seem an odd way to begin discussing how to speak for, but the point is that the impetus to always be the speaker and to speak in all situations must be seen for what it is: a desire for mastery and domination. If one's immediate impulse is to teach rather than listen to a less-privileged speaker, one should resist that impulse long enough to interrogate it carefully . Some of us have been taught that by right of having the dominant gender, class, race, letters after our name, or some other criterion, we are more likely to have the truth. Others have been taught the opposite and will speak haltingly, with apologies, if they speak at all.16 At the same time, we have to acknowledge that the very decision to "move over" or retreat can occur only from a position of privilege. Those who are not in a position of speaking at all cannot retreat from an action they do not employ. Moreover, making the decision for oneself whether or not to retreat is an extension or application of privilege, not an abdication of it. Still, it is sometimes called for .
B) The right to advocate for the oppressed only exists because of privilegeit is a form of epistemic violence that relies upon a hierarchy of civilizations that turns the case. Alcoff 92 (Linda, Syracuse Philosophy, The Problem of Speaking for Others
http://www.alcoff.com/content/speaothers.html) Here is my central point. In order to evaluate attempts to speak for others in particular instances, we need to analyze the probable or actual effects of the words on the discursive and material context. One cannot simply look at the location of the speaker or her credentials to speak; nor can one look merely at the propositional content of the speech; one must also look at where the speech goes and what it does there. Looking merely at the content of a set of claims without looking at their effects cannot produce an adequate or even meaningful evaluation of it, and this is partly because the notion of a content separate from effects does not hold up. The content of the claim, or its meaning, emerges in interaction between words and hearers within a very specific historical situation. Given this, we have to pay careful attention to the discursive arrangement in order to understand the full meaning of any given discursive event. For example, in a situation where a well-meaning First world person is speaking for a person or group in the Third world, the very discursive arrangement may reinscribe the "hierarchy of civilizations" view where the U. S. lands squarely at the top. This effect occurs because the speaker is positioned as authoritative and empowered, as the knowledgeable subject, while the group in the Third World is reduced, merely because of the structure of the speaking practice, to an object and victim that must be championed from afar. Though the speaker may be trying to materially improve the situation of some lesser-privileged group, one of the effects of her discourse is to reenforce racist, imperialist conceptions and perhaps also to further silence the lesser-privileged group's own ability to speak and be heard.18 This shows us why it is so important to reconceptualize discourse, as Foucault recommends, as an event, which includes speaker, words, hearers, location, language, and so on.
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NEG Speaking for Others
C. The AFF is a project of Lefist Voyuerism Solidarity for those who fight and die over there reentrenches the belief that there possibility for authentic revolution at home. This is a politics of nihilism and white guilt which destroys radical political potential of revolutionary movement and reproduces global racism of First World over Third World
[A people of color collective made up of students, migrants, and other community members in Durham, NC that has met with and connected their cause with that of the Zapatistas and the global anti-capitalist movement, kilombo is a Kimbundu (a Bantu dialect) term that has rhizomatically become the basis for the Brazillian term for encampment or commune quilombo built and utilized by marooned communities of Afro-Brazillians as a form of resistance from slavery, translation would be intergalactic commune, such that it references the many layers of meanings of Afro-Futurism, Pan-Americanism and Anti-Globalization, Beyond Resistance: Everything: An Interview With Subcommandante Marcos, p. 2/AK47]
In our efforts to forge a new path, we found that an old friendthe Ejrcito Zapatista de Liberacin Nacional (Zapatista Army of National Liberation, EZLN)was already taking enormous strides to move toward a politics adequate to our time, and that it was thus necessary to attempt an evaluation of Zapatismo that would in turn be adequate to the real event of their appearance. That is, despite the fresh air that the Zapatista uprising had blown into the US political scene since 1994, we began to feel that even the inspiration of Zapatismo had been quickly contained through its insertion into a well-worn and untenable narrative: Zapatismo was another of many faceless and indifferent third world movements that demanded and deserved solidarity from leftists in the global north. From our position as an organization composed in large part by people of color in the United States, we viewed this focus on solidarity as the foreign policy equivalent of white guilt, quite distinct from any authentic impulse toward, or recognition of, the necessity for radical social change. The notion of solidarity that still pervades much of the Left in the U.S. has continually served an intensel y conservative political agenda that dresses itself in the radical rhetoric of the latest rebellion in the darker nations while carefully maintaining political action at a distance from our own daily lives, thus producing a political subject (the solidarity provider) that more closely resembles a spectator or voyeur (to the suffering of others) than a participant or active agent, while simultaneously working to reduce the solidarity recipient to a mere object (of our pity and mismatched socks). At both ends of this relationship, the process of solidarity ensures that subjects and political action never meet; in this way it serves to make change an a priori impossibility. In other words, this practice of solidarity urges us to participate in its perverse logic by accepting the narrative that power tells us about itself: that those who could make change dont need it and that those who need change cant make it. To the extent that human solidarity has a futur e, this logic and practice do not! For us, Zapatismo was (and continues to be) unique exactly because it has provided us with the elements to shatter this tired schema. It has inspired in us the ability, and impressed upon us the necessity, of always viewing ourselves as dignified political subjects with desires, needs, and projects worthy of struggle. With the publication of The Sixth Declaration of the Lacandn Jungle in June of 2005, the Zapatistas have made it even clearer that we must move beyond appeals to this stunted form of solidarity, and they present us with a far more difficult challenge: that wherever in the world we may be located, we must become companer@s (neither followers nor leaders) in a truly global struggle to change the world. As a direct response to this call, this analysis is our attempt to read Zapatismo as providing us with the rough draft of a manual for contemporary political action that eventually must be written by us all.
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2NC impact: epistemology/turns the aff
Location determines the validity of epistemic claimsthey have not defended their choice to import their advocacy into debate Alcoff 92 (Linda, Syracuse Philosophy, The Problem of Speaking for Others http://www.alcoff.com/content/speaothers.html)
The recognition that there is a problem in speaking for others has followed from the widespread acceptance of two claims. First, there has been a growing awareness that where one speaks from affects both the meaning and truth of what one says, and thus that one cannot assume an ability to transcend her location. In other words, a speaker's location (which I take here to refer to her social location or social identity) has an epistemically significant impact on that speaker's claims, and can serve either to authorize or dis-authorize one's speech. The creation of Women's Studies and African American Studies departments were founded on this very belief: that both the study of and the advocacy for the oppressed must come to be done principally by the oppressed themselves, and that we must finally acknowledge that systematic divergences in social location between speakers and those spoken for will have a significant effect on the content of what is said. The unspoken premise here is simply that a speaker's location is epistemically salient. I shall explore this issue further in the next section. The second claim holds that not only is location epistemically salient, but certain privileged locations are discursively dangerous.5 In particular, the practice of privileged persons speaking for or on behalf of less privileged persons has actually resulted (in many cases) in increasing or reenforcing the oppression of the group spoken for. This was part of the argument made against Anne Cameron's speaking for Native women: Cameron's intentions were never in question, but the effects of her writing were argued to be harmful to the needs of Native authors because it is Cameron rather than they who will be listened to and whose books will be bought by readers interested in Native women. Persons from dominant groups who speak for others are often treated as authenticating presences that confer legitimacy and credibility on the demands of subjugated speakers; such speaking for others does nothing to disrupt the discursive hierarchies that operate in public spaces. For this reason, the work of privileged authors who speak on behalf of the oppressed is becoming increasingly criticized by members of those oppressed groups themselves.6
Another card about the epistemic necessity of analyzing positionality
Alcoff 92 (Linda, Syracuse Philosophy, The Problem of Speaking for Others

http://www.alcoff.com/content/speaothers.html)
The claim here that "truth is connected to politics" follows necessarily from Premise (1). Rituals of speaking are politically constituted by power relations of domination, exploitation, and subordination. Who is speaking, who is spoken of, and who listens is a result, as well as an act, of political struggle. Simply put, the discursive context is a political arena. To the extent that this context bears on meaning, and meaning is in some sense the object of truth, we cannot make an epistemic evaluation of the claim without simultaneously assessing the politics of the situation. Although we cannot maintain a neutral voice, according to the first premise we may at least all claim the right and legitimacy to speak. But the second premise suggests that some voices may be dis-authorized on grounds which are simultaneously political and epistemic. Any statement will invoke the structures of power allied with the social location of the speaker, aside from the speaker's intentions or attempts to avoid such invocations. The conjunction of Premises (1) and (2) suggest that the speaker loses some portion of control over the meaning and truth of her utterance. Given that the context of hearers is partially determinant, the speaker is not the master or mistress of the situation. Speakers may seek to regain control here by taking into account the context of their speech, but they can never know everything about this context, and with written and electronic communication it is becoming increasingly difficult to know anything at all about the context of reception.
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Neoliberalism good Neoliberalism solves global poverty.
Bandow 01 senior fellow at the CATO Institute [Doug Bandow, , March 25th, 2001 Globalization Serves the World's Poor, http://www.cato.org/dailys/0425-01.html]
Indeed, the problems
of globalization must always be "compared to what?" Yes, factories pay low wages in Third World countries. But workers in them have neither the education nor the skills to be paid at First World levels. Their alternative is not a Western university education or Silicon Valley computer job, but an even lower-paying job with a local firm or unemployment. The choice is clear: according to Edward Graham of the Institute of International Economics, in poor countries, American multinationals pay foreign citizens an average of 8.5 times the per capita GDP. Overall, the process of globalization has been good for the poor. During the 1980s, advanced industrialized countries grew faster than developing states. In the 1990s, as globalization accelerated, poor nations grew at 3.6 percent annually, twice that of their richer neighbors. Despite the illusion of left-wing activists that money falls from the sky, poverty has been the normal condition of humankind throughout most of history. As even Marx acknowledged, capitalism is what eliminated the overwhelming poverty of the pre- industrial world. That remains the case today. Resource endowment, population level and density, foreign aid transfers, past colonial status none of these correlate with economic wealth. Only economic openness does. The latest volume of the Economic Freedom in the World Report, published by the Cato Institute and think tanks in 50 other countries, finds that economic liberty strongly correlates with economic achievement. Policies that open economies strongly correlate with economic growth. By pulling countries into the international marketplace, globalization encourages market reforms. With them comes increased wealth. Neoliberalism solves human rights international coalitions. Shelton, 02, Dinah, Professor of Law, Notre Dame Law School, Spring, 2002
GLOBALIZATION & THE EROSION OF SOVEREIGNTY IN HONOR OF PROFESSOR LICHTENSTEIN: Protecting Human Rights in a Globalized World , 25 B.C. Int'l & Comp. L. Rev. 273, Lexis
responses to globalization are significantly changing international law and institutions in order to protect persons from violations of human rights committed by non-state actors. To the extent that these changes have brought greater transparency to and participation in international organizations, globalization has produced unintended benefits and further challenges to the democratic deficit in global governance. At the same time, an emphasis on subsidiarity and a strengthening of weak states and their institutions may be necessary to ensure that globalization does not mean a
The Article concludes that decline in state promotion and protection of human rights. To ensure that such strengthening does not lead to further human rights violations, the international community should make concerted multilateral efforts to enhance its ability to respond to human rights violations, rather than unleashing each state to control what it views as the sins of the private sector.
Neoliberalism solves extinction and genocide. Teune, 02, Henry, Political Science Department at the University of Pennsylvania, May, 2002
Global Democracy, The Annals of The American Academy of Political and Social Science, 581 Annals 22, Lexis
During the past three decades, social
scientists and professional observers described an emerging global political It may well turn out to be the best invention for human survival and
economy, but without democracy.
It took most of the 1990s to grasp that without democracy, globalization could not continue in a peaceful, orderly fashion. Democracy began to
become the bedrock of the prosperity promised by globalization.
the betterment of everyday living. Indeed, in time, democracy in large-scale societies may be judged the most important discovery of the twentieth century since vaccines. Governments systematically killing their own peoples and nearly nonstop international wars of scale marked the first half of the twentieth century (Rummel 1996). The killing of masses of people by legitimate authorities may be the most important international fact of the first half of the twentieth century. But the most important fact of this era of globalization is that almost all governments, save one or two, stopped doing that around the century's end, following the spread of democracy.
35

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MDAW 2013

Thornography/AK47 and the Grool kids

another country, another world.

capitalist and imperial/colonial future.

humanities education as a prefigurative and effortful substitute for mere prediction.

Margaret Walker, For My People, 1942

learning about self-government.

US Imperialism is a paper tiger Mao Zedong, revolutionary, 1959 (http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume5/mswv5_52.htm)

Another card about the epistemic necessity of analyzing positionality

Alcoff 92 (Linda, Syracuse Philosophy, The Problem of Speaking for Others

Neoliberalism good Neoliberalism solves global poverty.

Indeed, the problems

During the past three decades, social

economy, but without democracy.

become the bedrock of the prosperity promised by globalization.

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