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Radical Pasts, Radical Futures
Conversation on Contemporary Social Movements
with
Andaiye
scott crow
Gustavo Esteva
Selma James
George Katsiaficas
Peter Linebaugh
Ruth Reitan
Moderated by Sasha Lilley
(host of KPFA's Against the Grain)
Friday, March 30th, 2012
California Institute of Integral Studies
1453 Mission Street
San Francisco, CA 94103
Namaste Hall
3:00-7:00 pm
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Participants' biographies:
Andaiye is co-founder and international coordinator of Red
Thread in Guyana. Begun in 1986 as a self-help
income-generating group, it brings low-income women together
despite often violent racial divides. Red Thread is now a
campaigning organization, with three immediate priorities: a
living income for the poorest women and their families;
protection and justice for women and children in violent
situations; and the political visibility and voice of
grassroots women— Indo- and Afro-Guyanese as well as
Indigenous. Andaiye is the author of several key papers
(soon to be anthologized) such as “The Valuing of Unwaged
Work”, an analysis of the cost to women in the Caribbean of
IMF policies. In 1979, she was a founding member and leader
of the Working People’s Alliance of Guyana along with
historian Walter Rodney, author of How Europe Underdeveloped
Africa, who was assassinated in 1980. She is the Caribbean
coordinator of Women of Color in the Global Women’s Strike.
As a leading women’s activist in the English-speaking
Caribbean, and with her extraordinary political background,
organizing experience and gifts as an orator, she is much
sought after as a speaker. In 2007 she and Selma James
toured the US together to much acclaim.
When both levees and governments failed in New Orleans in
the Fall of 2005, scott crow headed into the political
storm, co-founding a relief effort called the Common Ground
Collective. In the absence of local government, FEMA, and
the Red Cross, this unusual volunteer organization, based on
‘solidarity not charity,’ built medical clinics, set up food
and water distribution, and created community gardens. They
also resisted home demolitions, white militias, police
brutality and FEMA incompetence side by side with the people
of New Orleans. scott crow is a community organizer,
writer, strategist and author of the new book Black Flags
and Windmills: Hope, Anarchy and the Common Ground
Collective (PM Press, November 2011).
Gustavo Esteva is an independent writer, a grassroots
activist and a deprofessionalized intellectual. He works
both independently and in conjunction with a variety of
Mexican NGOs and grassroots organizations and communities.
He has been a key figure in founding several Mexican, Latin
American and International NGOs and networks. Though not an
economist by training, he received Mexico’s National Prize
of Political Economy for his contribution to the theory of
inflation, and though not a sociologist was President of the
5th World Rural Sociology Congress. He also served as
President of the Mexican Society of Planning, as
Vice-president of the Inter-American Society of Planning,
and served as Board Member and Interim Chairman of the
United Nations Research Institute for Social Development. He
is a well known writer, with three dozen books and hundreds
of essays and articles published around the world in
numerous languages. Gustavo is an active voice within the
“deprofessionalized” segment of the Southern intellectual
community.. Gustavo argues that even the “alternative”
development prescriptions lead inexorably to depriving the
people of control over their own lives and shifting this
control to bureaucrats, technocrats, and educators. Rather
than presume that human progress fits some predetermined
mold leading toward an increasing homogenization of cultures
and life styles, he prefers a “radical pluralism” that
honors and nurtures distinctive culture variety and enables
many paths to the realization of self- defined aspirations.
In Grassroots Postmodernism: Remaking the Soil of Cultures
and Escaping Education: Living as Learning at the
Grassroots, that he wrote with Madhu S. Prakash, he
elaborates on his thesis. He was invited by the Zapatistas
to be their advisor, in 1996. Since then, he has been very
active in what today is called Zapatismo, involving himself
with the current struggle of the indigenous peoples. He
lives in a small Zapotec village in the south of Mexico.
Selma James is a women's rights and anti-racist campaigner
and author. Raised in a movement household, she joined CLR
James’s Johnson-Forest Tendency at age 15, and from 1958 to
1962, she worked with him in the movement for Caribbean
federation and independence. In 1972, she founded the
International Wages for Housework Campaign, and in 2000 she
helped launch the Global Women's Strike which she
coordinates. She coined the word "unwaged" to describe the
caring work women do, and it has since entered the English
language to describe all who work without wages, on the
land, in the home, in the community . . . In 1975 she became
the first spokeswoman of the English Collective of
Prostitutes. She is a founding member of the International
Jewish Anti-Zionist Network (2008). She has addressed the
power relations within the working class movement, and how
to organize across sectors despite divisions of sex, race
and class, South and North. Selma James spoke recently at
Tent City University at Occupy London on “Why
Anti-capitalism?” to a packed audience.
George Katsiaficas is author or editor of eleven books,
including ones on the global uprising of 1968 and European
social movements. Together with Kathleen Cleaver, he
co-edited Liberation, Imagination and the Black Panther
Party. A longtime activist for peace and justice, he was a
student of Herbert Marcuse. Currently, he is based at
Chonnam National University in Gwangju, South Korea, and at
Wentworth Institute of Technology in Boston. His most recent
book is Asia's Unknown Uprisings Volume 1: South Korean
Social Movements in the 20th Century. Using social movements
as a prism to illuminate the often-hidden history of 20th
century Korea, this book provides detailed analysis of major
uprisings that have patterned that country’s politics and
society. South Korean opposition to neoliberalism is
portrayed in detail, as is an analysis of neoliberalism’s
rise and effects. With a central focus on the Gwangju
Uprising (that ultimately proved decisive in South Korea’s
democratization), the author uses Korean experiences as a
baseboard to extrapolate into the possibilities of global
social movements in the twenty-first century.
Peter Linebaugh, a student and colleague of E.P. Thompson,
received his Ph.D. in British social history from the
University of Warwick in 1975. A graduate of Swarthmore
College and Columbia University, he taught at the University
of Rochester, New York University, University of
Massachusetts (Boston), Harvard University, Attica prison,
Tufts University, and Bard College before joining the
University of Toledo in 1994. He is the author of the The
London Hanged (1991), a study of capital punishment and the
punishment of capital. With Doug Hay, E.P. Thompson and
Cal Winslow he edited Albion’s Fatal Tree (1975). With
Marcus Rediker he wrote The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors,
Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the
Revolutionary Atlantic (Beacon, 2000) which has been
translated into German, French, Italian, Portuguese,
Spanish, Korean, and with a Japanese edition in progress.
His most recent book is the Magna Carta Manifesto: Liberties
and Commons for All (California, 2008), which has become a
reference point in the international discussion of the
commons. He has written for New Left Review, Radical History
Review, Social History, the Times Literary Supplement, and
the online magazine CounterPunch. He was an active member
of the Midnight Notes Collective. For Verso's Revolutions
Series he wrote 'Peter Linebaugh Presents Thomas Paine'
(Verso 2009) and for PM Press he has written a preface to
the new edition of Edward Thompson’s William Morris:
Romantic to Revolutionary (Spring 2011). He is the author
of Ned Ludd & Queen Mab: Machine-breaking, Romanticism, and
the Several Commons of 1811-12, which inaugurates the Retort
Pamphlet Series (PM/Retort, 2012).
Ruth Reitan is an assistant professor at the University of
Miami Florida. She has been doing participatory research at
coordination meetings and mass mobilizations for
alter-globalization and against capitalism and war for the
past 12 years, including at World and European Social
Forums. She’s especially focused on the Jubilee anti-debt
campaigns, Our World Is Not for Sale, Via Campesina, the
Zapatistas and Peoples Global Action, Climate Justice
mobilizations against the UNFCCC, and the post 9/11 anti-war
and anti-bases networks. She teaches courses on left and
rightwing social movements and international relations
theory.
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