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Buenaventura, Colombia Strikes Against Racial Capitalism

In 2017, Junior Jein, a rapper from Buenaventura [Colombia], released a song that became the anthem of a protest. But he did not appear in the music video. Instead, karaoke-style lyrics play alongside a CGI television set that shows clips of police motorcades patrolling the city, cops raiding neighborhoods, and children choking on tear gas. In the background, a steady fire burns through a chain link fence bordered by the yellow and green flags of Buenaventura.

The chorus repeats: “ESMAD, fucking ESMAD. Esa es la respuesta que el gobierno nos da.” ESMAD, that’s the response that the government gives us.

Junior Jein’s song, aptly named “Fucking ESMAD,” goes on to describe the conditions of state violence in the city: “If we ask for water, they send us ESMAD.

Movements And Leaders Have Seasons

Over the last two years, social movements, organizations and leaders around the world have been thrust into a period of tumult, transition and uncertainty. These moments of crisis in our personal lives and in society can force sudden changes in our capacity to respond. What happens when we are not able to offer leadership like we used to? Or inversely, what happens when we do have the energy and capacity to respond, but our efforts don’t yield the results that are expected?

Responsibility is the essence of leadership, and millions of community leaders who are working hard to resolve difficult, structural problems are uncomfortable when they feel like they need to respond to the moment, but are unable to. This can lead to burnout, or worse: leaders leaving the movement altogether, creating vacuums of leadership that don’t honor the cycles of our own development.

Burnout Leadership Organizing Social Movements

Resistance Against Military Coup In Sudan Continues Despite Crackdown

The crackdown on the pro-democracy movement in Sudan continued on Saturday, January 15, as security forces detained more anti-coup protesters. The protesters had been injured during the January 13 demonstrations and were leaving the Royal Care Hospital in Burri in eastern Khartoum when they were arrested.

The injured protesters, along with their companions, were reportedly seized outside the hospital by men in civilian clothes and taken away in vehicles with no number plates to unknown locations.

Among those arrested is 17-year-old Mohamed Adam, aka Tupac, who was being treated in the hospital for two gunshot injuries. He is reportedly being charged for the alleged murder of a police brigadier general who, according to the police, was stabbed to death by a protester on January 13.

Military coup Social Movements State Violence Sudan

2022’S First Major Nationwide Protests Were To ‘Kill The Bill’

Home secretary Priti Patel’s authoritarian Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill (the police bill) has caused uproar. Many see it as racist against Black people and the Gypsy, Roma and Traveller (GRT) community. It will also clamp down on our rights to protest, to roam, and to take strike action. Amnesty International said the bill:

represents an enormous and unprecedented extension of policing powers

2021 was filled with protests over the bill. Some of these were marred by police violence. Courts have sent some protesters from Bristol to prison – possibly the shape of things to come.

Since the Tories first unveiled the police bill, they’ve made several changes to it. It’s now even worse.

So, on 15 January, people hit the streets once more to show their anger over the bill.

Freedom of Speech Police Social Movements United Kingdom

Should We Disrupt The Democratic Party Or Try To Take It Over?

When trying to figure out how they should interact with political parties, social movements face a common challenge: Should they push from without or seek to operate from within? Should they act as a destabilizing threat to all politicians, or should they work to build strength within a mainstream party?

Frances Fox Piven and Daniel Schlozman are two theorists who stand at opposite poles of this debate. In Piven’s view, movements win by deploying disruptive power from the outside that can polarize the public and create discomfort among politicians. “[M]ovements of mass defiance fired the most important episodes of class and racial reform in the 20th century,” she contends. “This capacity to create political crises through disrupting institutions is … the chief resource for political influence possessed by the poorer classes.”

Democratic Party Electoral Politics popular power Social Movements

The Treaty On The Prohibition Of Nuclear Weapons And The Future

Late January of this year will mark the first anniversary of the entry into force of the UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. This momentous international agreement, the result of a lengthy struggle by the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) and by many non-nuclear nations, bans developing, testing, producing, acquiring, possessing, stockpiling, and threatening to use nuclear weapons. Adopted by an overwhelming vote of the official representatives of the world’s nations at a UN conference in July 2017, the treaty was subsequently signed by 86 nations. It received the required 50 national ratifications by late October 2020, and, on January 22, 2021, became international law.

Nuclear Ban Treaty Nuclear Weapons Social Movements United Nations

When Revolutionary Moments Arise Again — What Will We Do?

The world is in a prolonged period of global unrest. Since the financial crisis of 2008, every region of the planet has experienced levels of mass protest unprecedented in recent history, from the Arab Spring in the Middle East and Black Lives Matter in the U.S., to the farmers’ protests in India and the recent upheaval in Kazakhstan.

Yet decades of social movement struggle haven’t produced a break from capitalist domination, and in most places they have failed to even accomplish the more modest aims of reform. Meanwhile, the global climate crisis has added another layer of urgency to the task of social transformation.

What can past struggles teach us about the possibility of achieving a liberated world?

Class Struggle Global Protests Neoliberalism Social Movements

Revolution In An Age Of Resurgent Fascism

The late sociologist Erik Olin Wright used the phrase “ruptural transformation” as stand-in for revolution, inaccurately summarizing this as “Smash first, build second.” His immensely popular and useful work also unfortunately erased historical European anti-fascist strategy whose approach to revolution differed from the caricature he presented. To move beyond Wright’s important, yet misleading framework, one can even turn to DSA-founder Michael Harrington’s last book, Socialism: Past and Future.

Published in 1989, Harrington expanded upon his own earlier critique of the German social democratic party, specifically the electoral path to socialism as strategy against Hitler and the Nazis. Harrington would ultimately look to a leading member of that same party at the end of this book as the basis for what he referred to as a “new middle class” on the march of “visionary gradualism.”

Collective Liberation Fascism Social Movements

Sudanese Dictatorship’s PM Hamdok Resigns Amid Protests

On Sunday, Sudan’s Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok announced his resignation from his post in the wake of the political crisis in the country.

“I announce to you my resignation from the post of prime minister to make way for another person from the daughters or sons of this generous country,” said Hamdok in a speech to the Sudanese people broadcast by the official Sudan TV.

Africa Military coup Social Movements Sudan

How The World Went From Post-Politics To Hyper-Politics

Ten years and a decade of populist turmoil later, Ernaux’s testimony reads both familiar and unfamiliar. The rapid individualisation and decline of collective institutions she diagnosed has not been halted. Barring a few exceptions, political parties have not regained their members. Associations have not seen attendance rise. Churches have not filled their pews, and unions have not grown precipitously. Across the world, civil society is still mired in a deep and protracted crisis. On the other hand, the mixture of diffidence and apathy so characteristic of Ernaux’s 1990s hardly applies today. Biden was elected on a record turnout; the Brexit referendum was the largest democratic vote in Britain’s history. The Black Lives Matter protests were mass spectacles; many of the world’s biggest corporations took up the mantle of racial justice, adapting their brands to support the cause.

Political Parties Politics Populism Social Movements

Our Age Of Uprisings: We Are A World Remaking Itself

The global pandemic unfolds amidst a world of uprisings. Some have seen huge numbers gather in the streets and become ungovernable, including the victorious farmer’s strike in India, the efforts to expropriate the landlords in Berlin, the mass refusal of anti-Black police violence in the US, and the mobilizations against the neoliberal regime in Chile.

Elsewhere, in Chiapas, Kerala, Rojava and an archipelago of smaller “zones to defend,” the uprisings take more sustained forms as people reinvent or reclaim life in common. Indigenous people around the world are refusing to allow their lands and lives to be sacrificed on the altar of extractive capitalism. The great global struggle against capitalism’s climate apocalypse is escalating.

Collective Liberation Social Movements Uprisings

The Latin American Left Is Ready For 2022

Latin America, the 21st century’s leading region for progressive victories, is in the midst of a leftist resurgence. A new “pink tide” is commencing, with the left holding office in a number of countries and challenging for power in upcoming presidential elections. Kicking off a collection of articles on Latin America’s left, we present an overview of the continent’s war between progressive and conservative forces as flashpoints loom from Chile to Brazil.

The original pink tide of leftist electoral victories began in the early 2000s, reaching a climax between 2006 and 2007. Evo Morales assumed the presidency in Bolivia in January 2006, Hugo Chávez was re-elected in Venezuela in December 2006, and in January 2007 Rafael Correa took office in Ecuador.

Electoral Politics Latin America Leftist Social Movements

COP26: Governments Play Deaf To Social Movements

Glasgow, Scotland – One element that runs through all social movement climate summits is their rejection of the official meeting of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the low ambition of its outcomes – and the treaty’s 26th Conference of the Parties (COP26) was no exception.

The leaders of the UNFCCC “gladly welcome those who caused the crisis. COP26 has done nothing but pretend and greenwash,” Mitzi Jonelle Tan, a member of the non-governmental organization Youth Advocates for Climate Action from the Philippines, told IPS during a rally at the Glasgow Screening Room, a few blocks from the venue where the official meeting is being held until Friday, Nov. 12.

climate crisis COP26 COVID-19 Social Movements

Bolivian Organizations Reject Call For Strike And Destabilization

Social organizations and various Bolivian unions rejected this Friday the call for a national strike for next November 8, made by sectors of the opposition that participated in the 2019 coup d’état, as well as any attempt that seeks to destabilize the country. Union leaders branded this call as illegitimate, stating that it aims to affect the economic reactivation of the South American country, in the aftermath of the de facto government and in the midst of the current COVID-19 pandemic.

Bolivia Labor Unions Social Movements US Imperialism

Chile, Two Years After The Popular Uprising

That October 18, 2019 was a blow that, in one fell swoop, brought down the deceptive façade of the conservative regime and inaugurated a new stage in the history of Chile. The enormous injustices maintained and deepened during the very slow (and failed) “democratic transition” initiated in 1990 were exposed. The explosive combination of free market without anesthesia and a democracy lacking in substance and completely delegitimized—thus becoming a rapacious plutocracy—was able to stay afloat thanks to the resignation, demoralization and apathy of the citizenry, skillfully induced by establishment politicians and the media oligarchy, partners of the ruling class. The spell was broken on October 18.

Chile Neoliberalism Revolution Social Movements