“The great are only great because we are on our knees. Let us rise!”—Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

Occupy, Resist, Produce! Lessons from Latin America’s Occupied Factories

Marie Trigona

Latin America’s occupied factory movement has built an expansive system of workers’ self-management through direct action and the expropriation of the means of production. The worker occupations lend insight to workers around the world, demonstrating that direct actions at the workplace can lead to revolutionary practices, self-determination, and worker control—three essential elements of a free society, and an essential component for an anarchist economics if we are to study what self-management might look like in a post-capitalist future. In Argentina, more than 13,000 people work in occupied factories and businesses, otherwise known as recuperated enterprises. The sites, which number more than 200, range from hotels to ceramics factories, balloon manufacturers, suit factories, printing shops, and transport companies, as well as many other trades. And these sites provide examples in embryonic form of what anarchist economics might mean applied to our experiences of work.

The working class has occupied factories since the onset of the industrial revolution as a strategy for workers to defend themselves against deplorable work conditions, unsafe workplaces, and retaliation. Recently in Latin America, workers occupied the workplace not only to make demands heard, but also to put worker self-management into practice. In Argentina, and other nations throughout South America such as Brazil, Uruguay, and Venezuela, workers rediscovered the factory occupations starting in 2000. Occupations spread in Argentina as the region faced a financial crisis in 2001 in which thousands of factories closed and businesses bankrupted. Growing unemployment, capital flight, and deindustrialization served as the backdrop for the factory takeovers in 2000.

Even though worker-recuperated enterprises have created jobs, fostered community projects, and improved working conditions for thousands, these sites face legal uncertainty and state attacks that have forced them to resolve problems autonomous from government intervention. The Argentine experiment in self-management has essentially questioned the very logic of capitalism. This may be why government representatives, industry representatives, and factory owners have remained silent and often times reacted with hostility on this issue; they are afraid of these sites multiplying and the example they have set. These experiences potentially could replace capitalism.

In anarchist writer Voltairine de Cleyre’s text “Direct Action,” she writes that capitalists’ possession of the means of production is absolutely worthless without workers’ activity and labor. Argentina’s recuperated enterprises reaffirm the notion that workers do not need bosses to produce. When workers expropriate land, factories, businesses, or housing, they provide solutions to their own problems without the intervention of the state or other authoritarian institutions. This is what governments and capitalists find unacceptable—that workers are proving that the foundation of the capitalist model and the supposed “need” for state management is a farce. Nearly a century after Voltairine de Cleyre published “Direct Action,” the text still proves relevant. As capitalism falls into an irreversible crisis now, workers throughout the world are employing factory occupations as a viable direct action to defend workers’ rights and transform social relations.

Along with the birth of industrial capitalism, the working class commenced the dream of freeing themselves from exploitation, destroying the capitalist system through direct action, and re-appropriating the means of production. As historians and writers long noted, the aspiration for direct worker management of production has culminated in many worker takeovers through the greater part of the twentieth century—Russia (1917), Italy (1920), Spain (1936), Chili (1972), and Argentina (2001).

Industrial capitalism brought the employment of wage labor and, with wage labor, revolutionized the means of production igniting class struggle. Capitalist owners, since they owned the means of production, could then control labor, accumulating capital from the labor of the workers, in a concept which Karl Marx termed “surplus value.” Given the very nature of capitalism, class relations have remained antagonistic throughout the course of modern society and the expansion of globalized industrial capitalism.

Since capitalists extract their profits from the productive process, they want the lowest wages possible for their workers and the least amount of costs in production (even at the expense of workplace safety and the environment). The objective of this cycle of exploitation is selling their products back to the masses at the highest price possible. Bosses have long sought to suppress the bargaining power of workers through economic and political manipulation. Throughout history they have sought to do so by any means necessary—including forceful, violent coercion. The state has unleashed violence on workers who decided to defend their rights in numerous attacks in the past 200 years (e.g., the Homestead Massacre in Pittsburgh 1892; Ludlow Massacre 1914; Memorial Day Massacre in Chicago 1937; and Argentina’s own 1976–1983 military dictatorship, which targeted union organizing and “disappeared” 30,000 people).

Within capitalism, workers have no other choice than to sell their labor. In order to survive, workers needs a wage or they starve. Of course, this system has led to a conflict of interests between the working class and capitalist class. Through direct action, workers throughout history hoped not only to make their demands heard for a shorter workday, better working conditions, and higher salaries, but also transformed their own consciousness to understand that another system of production is possible.

Argentina offers one of the longest-lived experiences of direct worker management of this century. As such, the experiences of self-management in Latin America provide an example of new working-class subjectivities, self-determination, and working culture while they fight against dominant institutions, including the state and capitalist bosses. Their struggles provide a liberatory vision by sowing the seeds for a new society today, challenging market systems of domination, and questioning the legitimacy of private property.

Many anarchist traditions have been interwoven into the resistance strategies of Latin America’s autonomous social movements, which includes the worker-controlled factory movement. In many cases, the worker occupations transformed class struggle into a collectivized system of self-management through direct action, essentially changing the entire premise of production within a capitalist society. No longer do workers produce under the exploitive supervision of bosses who appropriate their surplus capital. The workers themselves, after occupying their workplace and appropriating the means of production from their bosses, transformed the workplace into a space for liberation and cooperation.

“All cooperative experiments are essentially direct action”

—Voltairine de Cleyre, “Direct Action”

The occupied factory movement carries to its core the ideals and practices of class struggle—not only in the way they have adopted the factory occupation as a legitimate tool for workers around the world, but also in the way they have resolved their problems autonomously from state intervention and put into practice workers’ self-management.

The sites that have fostered systems of worker self-management first began with a worker occupation or some direct action at the point of production. The context and circumstance of each of the sites vary, but almost all share the commonality of the occupation. Many of Argentina’s recuperated enterprises borrowed the slogan “Occupy, Resist, Produce” from Brazil’s Landless Workers’ Movement (MST), which for nearly a quarter of a century has built a massive movement of over one million families and taken over nearly thirty-five million acres from large land owners. Like MST in Brazil, Argentina’s worker-controlled factories were occupied to find a solution to joblessness autonomously from the state, which was unwilling to intervene.

First the workers occupied their workplace, in a number of different circumstances, widely in the context of a bankruptcy. Then they had to defend the occupation and resist forceful eviction attempts. Production was frequently started when the workers were resisting and fighting for legality. Often actions such as highway blockades, street protests, and even threatening to destroy the sites of production accompanied the occupations.

Breaking Chains

One of the most emblematic actions was the workers’ decision at various locations to cut off a lock to the factory or workplace with the lock symbolizing the protection of private property. Workers break the chain, putting their legitimate claim to jobs with dignity over the sanctity of private property.

“The most important factor, and most subversive, is that the recuperated enterprises confirm that businesses don’t need bosses to produce,” says Fabio Resino from the BAUEN Hotel. The nineteen-story, 180-room hotel has been operational since workers took it over in 2003. It operates despite a court-ordered eviction notice and void of legal recognition. The hotel has been a launch pad for the new occupied factories; many of the workers from the new take-overs have come to the BAUEN Hotel seeking advice and support.

The BAUEN Hotel had closed in December 2001. The alleged owners, Grupo Solari, acquired the hotel in 1997 and filed bankruptcy in 2001. Leading up to the hotel’s closure, the hotel’s rooms and facilities deteriorated, and the bosses began laying off workers. The remaining workers were fired in December 2001. The bosses abandoned the hotel located on a major avenue in downtown Buenos Aires, boarding it up and allowing it to become an eyesore, reminding the city of the impending financial crisis and widespread unemployment the nation faced.

The decision to occupy came in 2003, two years after the initial closure. Nearly thirty workers, along with supporters from other occupied factories and workers’ movements, participated in the action. The workers first held an assembly at Chilavert, a printing press collectively run by its workers since 2002. There the workers voted to occupy the hotel.

Arminda Palacios worked as a seamstress at the hotel for over twenty years and played a key role in the occupation. Her account of the occupation rings with emotion, which she describes as a turning point in her life as a worker. The occupiers entered through an adjacent hotel on the block. When they got to the gate that connected the two hotels in the basement they made a pivotal decision to break in. “There was a small lock. We cut it off and we walked in,” said Palacios giving the impression that the owners were assured that the private property was so sacred that no one would question the fraudulent bankruptcy. Immediately afterwards, the workers went to the reception area and huddled together in tears when they realized what they had accomplished: saving their jobs and recovering their dignity.

Since the workers’ occupation, the space has transformed into a modern-day commune, a far cry from the origins of the hotel with ties to the nation’s bloody military dictatorship—which forcefully “disappeared” 30,000 workers, activists, and students. Hotel BAUEN was built in 1978 with loans from the military junta which dictated the nation from 1976–1983. Argentina’s national soccer team took the 1978 World Cup and the military used the world championship as a media campaign to cover up the gruesome human rights abuses occurring at the time. Guests at the hotel, among whom were high-profile military and government reps, chanted a counter-human-rights slogan: “Somos derechos y humanos!” (We are right and human! ) They cheered with the Argentine flag in hand, as thousands of women and men cried in terror while undergoing indescribable torture sessions; as the military drugged prisoners and then dropped their bodies into the Atlantic Ocean in the vuelos de muerte, or death flights. “This hotel was a symbol of the dictatorship: of the repression and looting that this country endured,” said Raúl Godoy, a worker from the Zanon ceramics plant, the largest recuperated factory in Argentina in the Patagonian province of Neuquén. “Now this hotel is a symbol of the workers, the workers that are beginning to recover from 30,000 disappearances and take back what was stolen from us.”

Hotel BAUEN’s original owner, Marcelo Iurcovich, received more than 5 million to construct the BAUEN, with a government loan from the National Development Bank (BANADE). Iurcovich never held the hotel up to safety inspection codes, and never paid back state loans. He ran up debts and committed tax evasion while making millions of dollars in profits and acquiring two more hotels. Throughout the ’90s the hotel became the emblematic symbol of neoliberalism, serving as the election bunker for former president Carlos Menem (1989–1999), who, ironically, has been blamed for ruining the nation’s economy through privatization and reactionary free market policies.

In 2008, Victoria Donda, a national deputy whose mother and father were disappeared by the military dictatorship, sponsored an expropriation law in the national congress that would give the BAUEN legality. “The purpose of the bill is for the hotel to be expropriated by the State and for the workers to manage it. We are fighting for a law to declare this workplace, which already belongs to the community in Buenos Aires and the people, to declare it public domain.” Donda’s past was also clouded by the terror of the military junta. She was born at the ESMA (Military Navy Mechanics School), the nation’s largest clandestine detention center, while her mother was in captivity. She is one of the 500 children born and kidnapped by the military and by people with connections to the military from 1976–1983.[351]

Nearly thirty workers occupied the BAUEN when it was first taken over in 2003. Today the cooperative employs more than 150. The BAUEN cooperative has proven that workers can efficiently manage hotel services, but also demonstrated creativity in opening this space to the cultural and social movements in the city. On a local level, BAUEN Hotel has participated in efforts at coalition building and the development of a broad mutual support network. In the midst of legal struggles and successfully running a prominent hotel, the cooperative’s members haven’t forgotten their roots. The worker-run hotel has become a political center for movement organizing.

Direct action led to the BAUEN collective redefining the workplace on three fronts: struggle, culture, and work. Hotel BAUEN serves as a meeting place for worker, human rights, and environmental justice organizations. Subway delegates who have been organizing an autonomous, independent union use the BAUEN as a meeting space and venue for press conferences when announcing wildcat strikes. Human rights organizations like the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo, HIJOS, and international intellectuals such as Noam Chomsky, Immanuel Wallerstein, and Michael Albert have expressed their support of the Hotel BAUEN’s commitment to worker control. Nora Cortinas, president of the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo’s founding chapter, has confirmed her commitment to defending the BAUEN Hotel. When asked how she would defend the BAUEN she said, “Like this,” while striking a boxer’s pose ready to deliver the knockout punch.

On the cultural front, the Hotel BAUEN has held numerous street festivals in defense of workers’ control. Thousands attended a street festival in November 2008 for a national expropriation law for Hotel BAUEN where Argentine rock legend, Leon Gieco, performed. Inside the hotel, many collectives have performed fundraising shows for the BAUEN and other social movements.

In order to survive, the BAUEN cooperative has resisted legal attacks and an uncertain future. Despite numerous eviction orders and lack of legal support, the BAUEN cooperative has continued to operate successful hotel services, convinced that they have a legitimate right to work without a boss. The global economic crisis has brought negative consequences for business at the hotel as tourism continues to drop. Many of the occupied factories have had to forge autonomous solutions to legal and market challenges. State representatives have been reluctant to put into motion an eviction attempt, sensing that because of the BAUEN Hotel’s strategic location and ability to rally support, efforts at eviction would result in a costly bloodbath. Subway workers have threatened a total city transport shutdown if the courts were to sanction a police operation to evict the hotel collective.

The BAUEN Hotel has demonstrated that through direct action workers can avenge their historic exploitation by expropriating symbols of neoliberalism and oppression for the benefit of the community and working class. Since the workers broke the chains protecting private property, their lives and the workplace have transformed into a liberatory space. Whereas the hotel had been a dark symbol of the nation’s state repression and neoliberal policies, today it symbolizes working-class resistance and culture.

Hide-and-Seek Capitalism

A number of factors set off each of the occupations in Argentina. When asked why the workers made the decision to occupy, 77 percent answered that the bosses owed the workers unpaid salaries; 41 percent answered that the company went bankrupt; 35 percent said that the company attempted to liquidate assets/empty out the factory; 29 percent pointed out work instability as a significant factor; 29 percent answered that they were expecting impending firing; and 18 percent answered that the boss or owner had abandoned the workplace.[352]

Most of the worker takeovers were actions to guarantee that the owners wouldn’t be able to liquidate assets before filing bankruptcy to avoid paying workers indemnities and back salaries. Workers’ demands steadily grew from measures to safeguard their jobs to the idea of implementing a system of self-management. With little hope that bosses would ever return to pay workers what they owed, they devised plans to start up production with no boss or owner whatsoever.

Bosses abandoning their workplaces were a common impetus for the workers’ occupations. This was the case of La Nueva Esperanza cooperative, a balloon company formerly known as Global, which employed more than eighty workers in the 1980s. At the time of the factory’s closure, the plant only employed forty workers. When the workers came to work on a Monday in 2004, to their surprise the factory’s gate was closed with a sign reading, “closed until further notice.” They jumped the fence to find that the factory’s machinery had been taken away—essentially the workers found the plant ransacked. “We didn’t know what to do. The first idea we had was to set off the factory’s security alarm so the owner would show his face,” said Claudia, a young worker with nearly ten years at the plant. The owner, Jorge Sasinsky, never showed up, having owed taxes, four years in unpaid salaries, contributions to workers’ social security funds, unpaid vacation time, and cash to suppliers.

Neighbors living next to the plant in a residential neighborhood in Buenos Aires informed the workers that on Friday after they finished their shifts at 5 p.m., they saw moving trucks and men removing machinery from the plant. The balloon workers interviewed said that they immediately set out on an independent investigation to find out where the boss took the machinery. They discovered that the boss had transferred the balloon manufacturing equipment to a warehouse in a nearby suburban city outside of the capital, in an industrial belt, but they didn’t know exactly where. “There are a lot of factories in that area; factory owners get suspicious if they see a group of workers knocking on factory doors and asking questions. But we kept looking,” said Nereo, a veteran worker at the factory. After days of searching, and losing what little hope they had left of finding the “factory,” three workers persevered in their hunt.

Ready to give up, balloon producers saw a man sweeping the sidewalk outside of a factory and asked him if he had seen any sign of a factory opening. He tipped them off of a nearby deposit warehouse. It occurred to Nereo to open one of the garbage bags outside the warehouse. “Inside I found—the factory—I mean balloons.”

Immediately the workers set up camp outside the warehouse to demand their jobs, unpaid salaries, or severance pay. The desperate situation dragged on for months. The workers rotated shifts at the sit-in. Judges from the labor courts and government representatives refused to hear the workers’ claims. The trustee handling the workers’ claims never met with the workers. Now jobless and broke, the workers relied on outside support to survive. “People who you don’t even know bring you coffee, sugar, yerba mate. We couldn’t believe the support that we got,” said Eva, a worker at the factory for more than twenty years. The solidarity they received changed their perspectives and outlook. They also describe how uniting as workers while camping out gave them the courage to form a cooperative and take action. For more than eight months, eighteen workers maintained the sit-in outside the factory until they were violently attacked. According to the workers, following a news report that aired on television the boss sent lackeys to beat them. While two women were guarding the tent, a group of men attacked them, hitting one worker over the head with a bottle. That’s when the workers decided: “Enough is enough.”

Along with other social movements and workers from occupied factories, the ex-Global workers voted to expropriate the machinery and take it back to the original, but now abandoned plant. Workers from IMPA, a recovered metallurgical factory in Buenos Aires, provided trucks since they couldn’t “rent” trucks to move equipment that legally didn’t belong to the workers. Other activists from the recuperated enterprises, including the Chilavert printing shop, BAUEN Hotel, and Conforti, also participated in the expropriation. One worker describes how he packed up the truck until the last piece of machinery was loaded. Often times, workers from recuperated enterprises have decided to cease production at their workplace to participate in solidarity actions with other occupied sites—the idea being si nos tocan a uno, nos tocan a todos, (if they mess with one of us, they mess with all of us.)

Together they entered the plant in the suburbs, moved the machines onto trucks, and brought the machines back to the factory in the capital. When they were unloading the last truck the police showed up. They called for backup and five patrol cars came. The police told them they couldn’t unload the truck, and the workers resisted until they were able to unload the last compressor. Video footage shows the workers, supporters, and other occupiers hurriedly locking the gate to prevent police from raiding the plant.

When the workers arrived at the plant, they found it in ruins and a part of the deposit area burn down. To assure that the workers wouldn’t try to occupy it, the former owner set fire to the plant, according to the workers. Most of them had produced balloons for the company for at least several decades at the factory.

Another stage in the struggle implied the fight for legalization. The workers had to convince legislative representatives to support an expropriation bill to hand over the real estate and machinery to the cooperative. For five months, the workers occupied the factory illegally. On September 22, 2005, the city legislature granted the La Nueva Esperanza cooperative temporary expropriation and legal rights. “I never thought that I would be working in a cooperative; we feel as if the factory belongs to us and we’re running it perhaps better than the former owner,” said Claudia.

In many of the occupations, the bosses often played a game of hide-and-go-seek capitalism. Bosses have to hide because what they are doing is unethical, unfair, exploitive, and often times illegal. The post-modern theorist Michel Foucault posed the following question in his book Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison: “Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals?” Given the nature of modern capitalism, it is not surprising—factories, in fact, resemble prisons in their layout and organization of time, as Foucault suggests. The factory in modern globalization serves as a location for manufacturing that can disappear and reappear across borders—spaces that are hidden from the gaze of society so they can exploit and control workers toiling inside with impunity. Many transnational manufacturing sites could be considered modern-day prisons—with workers laboring for nearly slave wages for unrestricted workdays and in deplorable conditions, bussed into extensive labyrinths of barbed wire and fences like the little media has shown viewers of maquiladoras in free trade zones. And many prisons have been transformed into modern-day factories with corporations paying inmates less than humane wages to manufacture products. In the case of Global balloons, the owner abandoned the old plant and workers to open a new factory with new workers willing to accept lower wages and higher production rates. The workers had to find their boss, who “disappeared” into thin air, to make their demands. The boss didn’t count on the workers winning this game of hide-and-go-seek.

The workers, on the other hand, have opened their factories under worker control to the community. No longer do the sites have guards and gates to keep outsiders out—they have invited students, activists, and other workers to visit the factory to see what they have accomplished: creating jobs with dignity and building democratic workplaces. These sites have also fostered cultural spaces and community programs. More than twenty-three adult education programs operate in recuperated enterprises and the factory has now become a classroom for hundreds of adults. Chilavert printing shop, BAUEN Hotel, and Zanon ceramics factory regularly host schoolchildren who tour the sites to learn that workers can successfully run a business without a boss or owner, where all workers are equal—a concept children find inspiring and fascinating.

Syndicalism and Self-management

“Revolutionary syndicalism, basing itself on the class-war, aims at the union of all manual and intellectual workers in economic fighting organizations struggling for their emancipation from the yoke of wage slavery and from the oppression of the State. Its goal consists in the re-organization of social life on the basis of free Communism, by means of the revolutionary action of the working-class itself.”—Rudolf Rocker

As the largest recuperated factory in Argentina, the Zanon ceramics factory has redefined the bases of production: without workers, production is impossible and without bosses, production flourishes. Zanon, still Latin America’s largest ceramics manufacturer, is located in the Patagonian province of Neuquén, a region with rich working-class traditions and history. The workers officially declared the factory under worker control in October 2001 following a bosses’ lockout.

In 2001, Zanon’s owners had decided to close its doors and fire the workers without paying months of back pay or severance pay. Leading up to the massive layoffs and plant’s closure, workers had gone on strike in 2000. The owner, Luis Zanon, with over $75 million in debt to public and private creditors (including the World Bank for over $20 million), fired most of the workers en masse and closed the factory in 2001—a bosses’ lockout. In October 2001, workers declared the plant under worker control. The workers subsequently camped outside the factory for four months, pamphleteering and partially blocking a highway leading to the capital city of Neuquén. While the workers were camping outside the factory, a court ruled that the employes could sell off remaining stock. After the stock ran out, on March 2, 2002, the workers’ assembly voted to start up production without a boss.

Since the occupation, the workers renamed the factory FASINPAT (Factory without a Boss). The Zanon workers have grown from a group of workers self-managing a union organization to a collective self-managing a factory under worker control. Omar Villablanca, a young worker, said that worker control wouldn’t have been possible without the union organizing efforts previous to the occupation. “Zanon is what it is today because the workers recuperated the factory’s internal trade union. If we hadn’t won back the union, Zanon wouldn’t be functioning under worker control. The Zanon workers learned from the lessons of the internal union and listening to workers organizing in other factories.”

Prior to the takeover in 2001, workers organized and won control of the ceramics union. A shop-floor movement won union representation elections inside the factory in late 1998, ousting the old union delegate tied to the bureaucracy and the employers. In 2000, delegates from the rank-and-file movement won the provincial-wide elections of the Neuquén Ceramists Union by a three-to-one margin. By 2007, having operated four years under worker control, Neuquén Ceramists Union assembly voted in favor of a new union statute reinventing the democratic principles and guidelines for the union inspired by the Spanish anarcho-syndicalist trade union, the General Confederation of Labor (or CGT).

Without support from the union, workers held a strike in 2000 following the death of Daniel Ferras, a twenty-two-year-old worker who died in the factory due to lack of emergency medical care and employer negligence. The eight-day work stoppage forced the company to provide an ambulance on site and form a joint commission of workers and managers to oversee production safety within the factory.

While FASINPAT includes a diverse array of political ideologies and backgrounds, in numerous public talks I have heard workers reference the historic example of anarcho-syndicalist organizations that organized self-managed work places during the Spanish Civil-War. The Zanon workers’ experience of fighting for control of a mass union prior to the worker take-over at the plant helped create a precedent of collectively self-managing a struggle within capitalist society. It also helped to develop in the workers a sense of their power to run things. In this case, the sense of self-managing a union struggle led to the autogestión of a massive factory.

Central to the organization at FASINPAT is the notion of class struggle. At the factory, the workers transmit their identity as workers in social conflict with the capitalist and managerial classes with a perspective of emancipation for the working class. Beyond worker control at FASINPAT, the worker general assemblies held at the plant often discuss issues related to labor conflicts throughout Argentina. The assembly has voted to contribute to numerous strike funds and to participate regularly and physically in protests in support of social movements locally and nationally.

The Zanon occupation took place in the context of an explosion of social movements and political organizing. Leading up to the popular rebellion in December 2001, in which former President Fernando de la Rúa was ousted, unemployed worker organizations were blocking highways throughout the nation to demand real jobs and a solution to the deepening economic crisis that left more than 50 percent of the population in dire poverty. The unemployed worker organizations, or piqueteros, were also building networks of popular movements based on the ideals of direct democracy, autonomy, and direct action. Popular neighborhood assemblies were appearing in neighborhoods in nearly all metropolitan areas, occupying banks and other abandoned spaces to provide autonomous solutions to local problems.

Many of the occupied factories have had to physically resist eviction attempts. At Zanon, the government has tried to evict the factory collective five times with massive police operations. Community support for Zanon has culminated to such a level that the government has had to back down. On April 8, 2003, more than 5,000 community members from Neuquén defended the factory, surrounding it, demonstrating their willingness to put their bodies on the line to defend a factory that “belongs to the people.” The nearly 500 ceramics workers have sent a clear message to the government that the factory will not be taken back without a fight. “We have said that the factory belongs to the people, we are going to defend our factory. We are going to use the legitimate tools of defense that we have to successfully run this plant,” said Raúl Godoy to a press conference prior to the April 2003 eviction attempt, appearing with activists from Mothers of Plaza de Mayo sitting behind him with their emblematic white handkerchiefs on their heads.

Zanon workers’ prior experience in class-struggle syndicalism helped to catapult FASINPAT into the forefront of the occupied factory movement. Here they have proven that through direct democratic organization and class-based solidarity workers can develop successful experiences of worker control.

The workers will defend their factory regardless of the possible consequences, forging resistance to an unfavorable legal future. Rosa Rivera, worker at Zanon for fifteen years, explains that Zanon is not only a struggle for the 470 workers inside the factory, but a struggle for the community and social revolution. “If factories are shut down and abandoned, workers have the right to occupy it, put it to work, and defend it with their lives.”

A New Chapter in Working-Class History

When left with no other option, workers decided to take over factories and take charge of production themselves. Only later, when they had the support of the community and proved that they could run a factory did they demand legality. First came the occupation. “Occupy, resist and produce; production is the last stage,” explains Candido Gonzalez, a veteran in the occupied factory movement from the recuperated Chilavert printing shop. “In order to produce you can’t skip the two previous stages of occupying and resisting.” Labor history suggests that without direct action, workers have little chance of winning. The stronger the action, the more likely they are to win their demands. The occupied factory movement embodies this logic with the slogan “Occupy, resist, produce!”

The state thus far has been unwilling to make changes to bankruptcy laws to protect workers from fraudulent lockouts and closures. In 2009, BAUEN has yet to gain full legal recognition although after nearly a decade of self-managing their workplaces, a forceful eviction is unlikely as long as the hotel can continue to rally support.

The workers at FASINPAT won a major legal victory in 2009. The provincial legislature voted in favor of expropriating the ceramics factory and handing it over to the workers’ cooperative to manage legally and indefinitely. While Zanon now has legal standing, the cooperative will continue to defend workers’ rights and self-management. This means these sites should stick to their roots as part of a worldwide network of working-class struggles.

We Can Write Our Own Futures!

Will direct actions like workplace occupations continue to grow as the world faces an economic crisis? From 2008 to 2010, Serbia, Turkey, France, Spain, South Africa, England, and Canada have seen worker occupations. The most well-known case in the United States has been the sit-down strike at the Chicago-based Republic Windows and Doors plant where workers occupied their factory to demand severance pay and benefits after being abruptly fired. The occupations in Argentina continue to rise as the global crisis hits the South American nation. The Arrufat chocolate factory, Disco de Oro empanada (pastry) manufacturer, Febatex thread producer, and Lidercar meat packing plant joined the ranks of the worker-occupied factory movement from 2008 to 2009.

These sites in Latin America have developed a new model of organizing after learning the lesson that workers can’t rely on governments, even “progressive” governments, and unresponsive unions to resolve the problems of unnecessary firings and joblessness. The worker occupations have proven that through the power of direct action, the reinvention of social relations, and producing for the benefit of the community and workers rather than greedy bosses, a factory can be transformed into a liberatory space. “Maybe one day our story will be included in a chapter in working-class history that a group of workers occupied a plant and began producing,” said Adrian, from Arrufat chocolate occupied factory after lamenting the loss of his hand in the plant under capitalist supervision. And the occupied factories in Argentina are doing just that: writing a new future for working-class history and sending the message that workers can do what capitalists aren’t interested in doing—creating jobs and dignity for workers.

Call It an Uprising: People of Color and the Third World Organize against Capitalism

Ernesto Aguilar

Dignidad, Spanish for dignity, is a deceptively basic idea. Translated into the realm of political unrest, dignidad has become synonymous with the idea that poor people have a right to live without shame, hunger, want, or fear. Such an idea is so simple yet it cuts right to the chase to speak to the dreams and demands of the masses of disenfranchized people in the global South and around the world.

Today, ideas like dignidad are at the base of scores of popular crusades. The early part of the twenty-first century saw Nepal’s masses, led by Maobadi rebels, overthrow a king, with memories of suffering prominent in the radical encounter. Evo Morales came to power on the strength of Bolivia’s ethnic pluralities asserting themselves. Nigeria’s civil society continues to campaign against oil conglomerates around the contention that its citizens should have the country’s resources. Pakistan has seen a burgeoning anti-imperialist mainstream in response to US interventionism. In addition, the United States continues to have debates over race that play out through issues like immigration and disparities in the realms of health care and the criminal justice system. In each case, even if not so explicit, oppressed people in each land’s minority sector and, more importantly, large numbers of those regarded as people of color by white majorities have taken considerable risks to challenge business and political leaders consorting with Western power and capital. Convulsions like these, whether in the streets, schools, or homes, require serious answers, implies István Mészáros:

we cannot attribute the chronic problems of our social interchanges to more or less easily corrigible political contingencies. So much is at stake, and we have historically rather limited time at our disposal in order to redress, in a socially sustainable way, the all too obvious grievances of the structurally subordinated social classes. The question of why?—concerning substantive matters, and not simply the contingent personal failures, even when they happen to be serious, as the frequently highlighted instances of widespread political corruption are—cannot be avoided indefinitely.[353]

In a period when the dominant line was for people to rest their fortunes on cooperation with multinational industry, how did notions of dignidad take hold? Moreover, why have these ideas captured imaginations so deeply? What can anti-imperialist First World tendencies, be they liberal, revolutionary, communist, or anarchist, learn?

Support for basic human rights as a cornerstone to political life is integral to populist and revolutionary politics in many Third World countries, especially in those that have seen dictatorships come to power, such as Paraguay, Uruguay, and Brazil. The repression people experience pervades the subconscious of the mainstream as well as the opposition. In the United States, memories of brutal expressions of racism remind millions, despite initiatives to obfuscate such history, that the United States is no exception. In addition, intense conflicts are giving way to equally intense contentions over power.

The planet is in the midst of a spate of rebellions, refusals, wars, and the kind of global conflicts signifying dissatisfaction with the current world order not seen since the anticolonial insurgencies of the twentieth century. That these pursuits have emanated primarily from the Third World—nations of postcolonial peoples fighting for existence in the shadow of US capitalism—as well as classes of oppressed people (people of color) in the First World should not be surprising. Many of these nations are seeing the harshest expressions of profiteering and their populations are resisting forces of international capital, which shows itself in the worst ways for these communities: land seizures, environmental devastation, and hopelessly troubled loan arrangements, to name just a few. Foreign projects force rural populations into urban centers and such relocations are often unsustainable; thus reinforcing immigration into the United States as the only viable alternative for many people in the Third World.

Colonial practices by Western powers against the Third World have manifested through the centuries to rest today in unequal allocations of property, power, and labor. Over the long march to national sovereignty, oppressed people have fought to establish a new vision that has broken them free of the imperialistic yoke, which employs such machinations as stealing local customs for integration into—and forcibly pushing loyalty for—a new, codified law. Modern influences such as the transnational flow of immigrants, the political muscle of emigrants abroad, and nongovernmental organizations with outside money and alliances influencing national destinies have all further muddied the political waters of self-determination and capital.

For these people, whose memories are long and whose resolve hinges on the fact that they have few political and economic opportunities, there is little option but to fight for a different world. One need only look back upon efforts like the Revolutionary Action Movement, a US-based black revolutionary nationalist formation; Mexico’s Partido Democratico Popular Revolucionario (PDPR)/Ejercito Popular Revolucionario (EPR), which emerged during the recognition of police killings of indigenous peasants; and South Asia’s myriad battles for cultural autonomy and economic justice as poignant examples. In these cases, the affected communities had little to lose, and the issues at hand were significant enough to warrant a diverse response.

C. L. R. James, in discussing the drive for Haitian independence in a speech published in You Don’t Play with Revolution: The Montreal Lectures of C. L. R. James, suggests that these movements often find themselves underestimated by the ruling class:

These people were backward, but as we learned…they had a certain integrity, a certain social consciousness of their own, which was developed apart from their masters. That was shown, not only in general and by observers who watched them closely, but also by what took place in the revolution. The revolution took place and, before long, they had made a clean sweep and were completely in charge of San Domingo.[354]

Whether people’s strikes against the powerful in Oaxaca, the Naxalite rebellion against capital and secure economic zones in India, black communities defending undocumented immigrants in the United States, or Venezuela’s fierce advocacy of the plight of the dispossessed, women, the indigenous population, and poor, the Third World is fighting back and igniting hope for other upturns in the process. Just as years before the Brown Berets were inspired by the Black Panthers who were inspired by the Chinese Revolution, solidarity has extended openly for generations. Even when, as in the Chinese experience, policies (in this case, toward Africa) were dismal, solidarity remained unwavering. Robin D. G. Kelly says in Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination:

The status of the Chinese as people of color served as a powerful political tool in mobilizing support from Africans and African-descended people. In 1963, for example, Chinese delegates in Moshi, Tanzania, proclaimed that the Russians had no business in Africa because they were white. The Chinese, on the other hand, were not only part of the colored world but unlike Europeans they never took part in the slave trade. Of course, most of these claims serve to facilitate alliance building.[355]

Such solidarity is rooted in people who have a gut-level interest in challenging the current order to defend dignity and create better futures. While generally socialist in character, this kind of internationalism unfolding is a politics rooted in the view of the interconnectedness of oppressed people and their fights against fluid though evident exploitation. The exploitation in turn is rooted in the subjugation of oppressed people in scenarios of production and exchange.

It is here where ideas of dignidad were born. In these instances, almost exclusively impoverished and downtrodden ethnic and racial minorities have taken the lead in eruptions driven by complex experiences. Race and culture in turn shaped these experiences. Those new and subversive paradigms, however, understood that institutional discrimination and profiteering were not just matters influenced by race, but also the relationship of exchange. Many such intrusions into business as usual have constituted what Amilcar Cabral called an advance-guard in international barrages, providing guidance, political theory, practice, inspiration, and hope to those with dreams of social justice, freedom, and equality.

This chapter will explore resistance to capitalism by people of color, or, broadly, oppressed-class people in the Third World and oppressed-nation First World people of color, and the characteristics that have defined desires to dismantle power relationships as well as the practices behind them. In addition, the chapter will examine globalization’s impact on class composition and people of color. Finally, where will these revolts of people of color rebelling against capitalist exploitation go? While specters of the administration of US President Richard Nixon’s attempts at equating “Black Power” with the ability to own a business, buy a home, and shop still loom in the popular imagination as part of capital’s endless attempts at co-optation, noteworthy elements could challenge that process.

As a movement that aims for libertarian socialism, anarchism must account for the experiences of people of color because of their unique role in (sometimes forcibly) building modern capitalism, as well as maintaining it. Further, as a movement that aims to abolish all hierarchical authority, anarchism requires an analysis of colonialism, imperialism, and white supremacy in order to live up to its own aims. Unfortunately, in much anarchist theorizing and movement building this is notably absent. For an anarchist economics, this means we need an analysis of the resistance of people of color to capitalism, as well as an analysis of the complex processes of globalization and how they have affected people of color generally, and the global South specifically, as staging grounds for economic colonialism and imperialism. This essay will contribute to the growing body of literature making such an analysis.

Globalization and the Reshaping of Race

In The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World, author Vijay Prashad suggests that the Third World is more than countries along the sidelines of the Cold War or throw-ins among the First and Second Worlds, but rather is a product of the fray against colonialism and the galvanization of internationalism. Prashad shows that the unifying experience of colonialism brought together divergent peoples and histories to such important breakthroughs as the founding of the League Against Imperialism in 1927, the 1955 Asian–African Conference in Bandung, Indonesia, and the Tricontinental Conference held in 1966 in Havana, Cuba. Nevertheless, there is a space to understand capitalism as national liberation victors betrayed the character of their revolutions by surrendering their economies to global corporations.

Globalization, shorthand for transnational capitalist exchange, has been in this period almost exclusively an initiative in which the majority-white First World exploits the majority-nonwhite Third World, paying a fraction of what First World labor would receive for harvest, work, production, and manufacture for First World consumers. In the First World, where slavery nourished such arrangements generations before, globalization became acceptable as a model that implied international cooperation and unity of purpose, and thus somehow being better than the servitude that operated before. Globalization, however, has come at heavy costs to the Third World and associated pressures in the First World. Such practices have created a class of oppressed people in the Third World as well as people domestic to the First World, whose general role is labor, the result of which has been a profound imbalance of wealth. Desperation and indignation in the Third World and a sense of relative deprivation among people of color in the First World are challenges to globalization, which implicitly promised to erase inequalities through financial advancement, greater consumer choices, buying power, and skilled trades.

Globalization is further a process inside imperialism that is shrinking the world and breaking down the cultures and autonomy of the oppressed nations beyond what imperialism was able to do in its earlier stages (which tended toward control through economic relations). Globalization has complicated race by sharpening contradictions. Transnational capital deploys comprador classes in the gutting of the Third World. In the First World, as there has always traditionally been, a deep tension exists over people of color and loyalty to betterment, democracy, and self-determination—values largely co-opted by imperialism. In Meditations on Frantz Fanon’s “Wretched of the Earth”: New Afrikan Revolutionary Writings, James Yaki Sayles refocuses the fissure:

What does Fanon say, “There is no native who does not dream at least once a day of setting himself up in the settler’s place.” That is, the “native” that Fanon describes as “wanting to take the place of” the settler is not the ex-native the person who comes to believe it’s not his skin or the settler’s skin that matters, and that being in the settler’s place will not change the inherent exploitative character of the system of colonialism, i.e. capitalism. Let’s be clear: to merely want to be “in the settler’s place” means that you really like the system—you support the system—and you just complain because you’re not getting your “piece of the pie.”[356]

There’s a direct link between the “skin analysis” of the mid-1960s and the reasons that “Black Power” went from a revolutionary slogan to an accommodationist one, taken up even by the rulers of capital, and reshaped as “green power” and “black capitalism” and what we today know as “empowerment” or as a call for “a piece of the action.” It’s no accident that the mass consciousness today is heavily “racialized,” and not revolutionary, just as “black nationalism” became “ethnic pluralism” and “cultural equality” in the form pushed by the rightist tendency of Afrocentricity. The real revolutionaries were disrupted and fell by the wayside, the bourgeois forces filled the vacuum, and today the people think that “racial feeling” is the same as revolutionary thought and practice.

However, in the Third World, such questions of loyalty are not so easy and affect people’s everyday existence. Globalization has helped vastly perpetuate class divisions on a worldwide scale with the associated diversity in each class. Antagonisms most clearly seen through income distribution have kept oppressed people (people of color) and Third World countries in difficult straits and drawn racial lines starkly despite post-racial pretensions.

In Latin America, where the idea of dignidad first rose to prominence, indigenous mobilizations have turned to the Internet and other technology to broadcast their demands for recognition and land rights as well as opposing globalization, which most often threatens the resources on which they depend and their local economies. While the Zapatistas are the best-known insurgents, organizations of Quichua, Quechua, and Aymara-speaking peoples in the Andes; the Mapuche in Chili; and Mayan indigenous groups in Guatemala are important examples as well.

Perhaps no leader in the early twenty-first century has symbolized the rise of oppressed people’s internationalism and that challenge to globalization as Hugo Chávez. Venezuela’s revolution united the country’s diverse ethnic poor and melded strands of socialism, nationalism, and the sort of Latin American solidarity advocated by Fidel Castro years before. By arguing for the idea of participatory democracy, Chávez has emboldened oppressed people in his country to see themselves, and not the corporations who vie for Venezuela’s vast oil resources, as stakeholders in their own futures. No better example of this was the soaring literacy rate during constitutional revision under Bolivarian principles (criticisms of Chávez being a nationalist rather than a revolutionary anti-capitalist notwithstanding). Venezuela’s economic power in the capitalist framework and its willingness to be intransigent with the established Western authorities by wielding its might for the disenfranchized has made it a leader on the world stage.

Venezuela’s rise illustrates the limitations of some political arrangements, however. The press of US imperialism has united a range of forces in the country, but also ensured the debate has not provided proper audience to various radical forces. For example, anarchist organizers, critical of the dominant sides vying for state power, struggle for footing in the shadow of Chávez and Venezuela’s political elite. In 2010, instances of similar processes were visible in China, which saw a spontaneous workers’ movement explode outside of established Communist Party apparatuses and as a challenge to private enterprise, and in the United States, where immigrant worker advocates mobilized nationally against regressive lawmaking supported by the political establishment. Anarchism is among the leading sets of ideas that offer an ideological break with the orders of the day, though lessons have yet to be gleaned from what a serious refutation of power over from all sides looks like. Regardless, even in cases where the people are putting community-oriented principles into practice, vigilance is required to ensure such aspirations are not lost in periods of compromise, revisionism, and expansion.

Whereas some have bemoaned the demise of the Third World, the energy the people of Venezuela and others offer anti-globalization forces hints at least at a reconception of what older opposition politics may have been. Whereas people of color before were thwarting the ambitions of capitalists and the attendant inequality, forced labor, and poverty that historically came with it, the push for dignidad signals a shift in oppressed-nation internationalist politics from such reaction to an action-oriented vision to which the majority-white First World has not been prepared to respond.

Oppressed nations going on the offensive with visions of better futures knocked the powerful off kilter and dependence on globalization hastened the decline of US political and economic power and created a crisis among US whites, whose hegemony went south, literally and figuratively. In 2009, the overwhelmingly white and conservative Tea Party movement became a mainstream media preoccupation. The Tea Party movement gained synergy with extremist white politicians apt to wage race war on countless fronts—including draconian laws against brown-skinned people while fighting undocumented immigration, banning the likes of Cesar Chávez from textbooks, and raising the specter of socialism when challenging politicians of color. The US working class, which has always enjoyed a relatively more privileged position within the global market, has historically fought solidarity with Third World workers and instead jockeyed for its own interests. Now white communities in the United States are seeing a painful set of contradictions, including internalizing middle and ruling-class interests in the name of financial security and competitive tensions with internal Third World counterparts (e.g., immigrant labor), who themselves organized mass rallies for greater inclusion in 2006 and 2010.

Far from being a surprise, the capitalist framework’s need for stability requires clashes between different sectors of the working class (like white backlash to people of color) and the necessity to balance capital by marginalizing labor in the Third and First World. One need not read too far into history to find the manipulation of color and caste lines to maintain power, order, and the dominant class structure. In his essay “The Limits of Anti-Racism,” Adolph Reed, Jr., points out how such issues nested insidiously:

what the political scientist Preston Smith calls “racial democracy” came gradually to replace social democracy as a political goal—the redress of grievances that could be construed as specifically racial took precedence over the redistribution of wealth, and an individualized psychology replaced notions of reworking the material sphere. This dynamic intensified with the combination of popular demobilization in black politics and emergence of the post-segregation black political class in the 1970s and 1980s.

We live under a regime now that is capable simultaneously of including black people and Latinos, even celebrating that inclusion as a fulfillment of democracy, while excluding poor people without a whimper of opposition. Of course, those most visible in the excluded class are disproportionately black and Latino, and that fact gives the lie to the celebration. Or does it really? From the standpoint of a neoliberal ideal of equality, in which classification by race, gender, sexual orientation or any other recognized ascriptive status (that is, status based on what one allegedly is rather than what one does) does not impose explicit, intrinsic or necessary limitations on one’s participation and aspirations in the society, this celebration of inclusion of blacks, Latinos and others is warranted.[357]

In the heat of this moment, fissures in class and race are forging political and economic opportunities for oppressed-nation capitalists. These participants are willing to serve dominant interests as well as splintering class in a way that tolerates Third World people internally, via undocumented immigration, for a utilitarian exchange of money to work, at little cost to capitalists (who might see a fine for hiring such workers, but no other recrimination).

The tolerance of undocumented workers, in spite of feigning the contrary, should make evident how white supremacy—which has driven much of the American project, from colonialism and racial inequality to basic teaching and socialization—is changing its hue, approach, and tenor in fundamental ways as the United States fights for its position in a changing world. Americans, who have built their fortunes on selling Americanness (cultural imperialism) to the world while, in the last generation or so, shedding key industries for cheaper consumption, no longer have work, and growing populations in the Third World and elsewhere are not interested in purchasing an American esthetic. That the First World happens to be majority-white and its own exploited classes, as well as the Third World, happen to be majority-nonwhite, has forced critical structural changes. In this period overt racism is losing acceptability and countries traditionally thought of as Third World are rising as a result of Communist and/or socialist advances over decades in those lands.

Into this environment, the rise of Barack Obama as a politician and an icon of American leadership ushered in a new understanding for First World functionaries to ideas Third World organizers have long maintained as bitter lessons of capitalism and imperialism. The ascension of an oppressed-nation bourgeoisie may give globalization new clothes, from old-school visions of white supremacy to a business-school advocacy of dialogue, but the effects remain in essence the same. Whereas capitalism once flourished through slavery and colonialism, today developing contradictions between production, technology, the flow of transnational capital and class struggles have forged a new social order in the Third World, one that has resonating effects in the United States and First World.

Fighting Back against Capitalism

In exploring contemporary conflicts between people and capitalism, activists and scholars acknowledge how uniquely ethnicity, culture, and race play a central role in defining not only the conditions of people, but also the strategy and tactics employed in building mass operations and the revolutionary message itself. Writers like Fanon and organizers like Rameshwari Nehru and Claudia Jones helped define how issues of race, white supremacy, and the exploitation of oppressed people have reshaped our collective grasp of anti-capitalism. W. E. B. DuBois, for instance, postulated that there is a single capitalist ruling class in the United States, and that tumults such as the Civil War are therefore splits between different kinds of capitalists. Others, like poets Pablo Neruda and Khalil Gibran, tapped into the collective imaginations of the oppressed to bring about new ideas on identity, race, and politics.

Where radical white First World elements have reduced questions of race and nationality to simplistic terms—interpretations drawn from turn-of-the-twentieth-century Eastern Europe, mechanical dualities of assimilation or secession—people of color have developed anti-capitalist practice that considers cultural autonomy and community control. These efforts to challenge people of color to see themselves differently, to grasp their identities with an acknowledgment of racism while refusing to be reduced by it, have been important in emboldening forces for change.

Central to oppressed-nation and Third World fights against capitalism has been a demand to understand pertinent issues in a way outside of established Anglo models. The revolutions of the 1960s in places like Ghana, led by Kwame Nkrumah, Guinea, led by Sekou Toure, and Cuba, with Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, among others, would prove a powerful influence on oppressed people in the United States, both in terms of seeing people of color leading advancements, but also in terms of advocating alternative economic models. Even for elements that may reject the outcomes of the political visions by some of the leaders noted, as many anarchists do, learning from their successes and failures is important. In the United States, the black liberation movement presented the most important theory and practice in such a regard. As Huey Newton wrote in To Die for the People, initial revolutionary shocks raise consciousness long term by empowering people to meet their daily needs and helping them survive. Note the idea of survival, as opposed to the language of white capitalists of the time: economic opportunity, and the privilege of access to resources. Community survival conjures images of self-sufficiency in a unified, collective way. Newton’s Black Panther Party sought to do that by launching dozens of “service to the people programs,” from free plumbing and maintenance programs to land banks and child development centers. These models created work for people in the community that served a larger political purpose, while simultaneously meeting the needs of the community more generally. Further, they were an important contrast to established models that dictated people of color hustle to get loans, assimilate into the business world, amass money, learn English, and join the bourgeoisie.

Former Black Panther Party activist and anarchist community organizer Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin is one of the more important revolutionary-left thinkers on counter-institutions. He dedicated much of his lifetime on work opposing racism and the criminal justice system, careful to point out its relationship to capitalism:

The prison system is the armed fist of the State, and is a system for State slavery. It is not really for “criminals” or other “social deviants,” and it does not exist for the “protection of society.” It is for State social control and political repression. Thus, it must be opposed at every turn and ultimately destroyed altogether… Organizing against the enemy legal and penal system is both offensive and defensive. It is carried on with individuals, groups and among the masses in the community. We must inform the people on a large scale of the atrocities and inhumanity of the prisons, the righteousness of our struggle, and the necessity of their full participation and support. We must organize our communities to attack the prison system as a moral and social abomination, and we must fight to free all political/class war prisoners.[358]

Groups like Critical Resistance (CR) and Anarchist Black Cross note that prisons are tools of control. CR and the Jericho Movement have rallied thousands to fight capitalist expansions such as private prisons, super-maximum facilities, and more. In his 2010 political report to the African People’s Socialist Party fifth congress, Omali Yeshitela took it further, saying US laws are illegitimate because of the manner in which the country was founded and that dominant sections paint incarceration and settler-colonial justice in democratic terms rather than for the oppressive tactics they are.

While addressing US examples, it should also be noted in these efforts how people of color have actively fought capitalism by refuting assumptions among some sectors of the Left, which confuse white supremacy and the fundamentally reactive nature of white racial identity. Racism, for writers like Oliver Cox, is a social attitude among individuals that compliments the capitalist exploitation of people of color. Perceptions of white group power among individual whites give attitudinal racism much of its virulence. Kali Akuno is among a new generation with roots in the black liberation cause who are organizing and furthering theoretical frameworks most read in US political circles. Many new reviews of people of color–based anti-capitalism come with the understanding that the subjugation of black and all oppressed people is rooted in not merely the structures and needs of the US capitalist system, but in the privileges of ordinary whites. Simply renouncing whiteness, as some theorists advocate, avoids myriad social, political, and cultural histories and realities.

Some characteristics of anti-capitalism led by people of color which have retouched our understanding of the substance of these concerns include aggressive efforts to reeducate members and supporters about themselves and their relationship with the world. Mao Zedong, for example, suggested that restructuring society also meant remaking people to conceive of their relation to their world in new ways. The Young Lords Party, a Puerto Rican national liberation formation with bases most prominently in New York City and Chicago, organized men’s groups to combat patriarchy, largely at the behest of women leaders in the organization like Iris Morales and Denise Oliver, and to retool the ways revolutionary men related to their female counterparts. Johanna Fernandez, writing about Oliver in Want to Start a Revolution? Radical Women in the Black Freedom Struggle, presents Oliver’s viewpoint on the necessity for organizing within the community clearly:

Responding to the feminist critique of nationalist women, the Young Lords emphasized that race and class cast a complexity on their oppression, which could not be understood or analyzed by Anglo feminism. Oliver and others argued that these “right wing” women’s groups, for example, did not take into account the exploited conditions of Third World women who, by virtue of race, were used as a cheap source of labor and paid significantly lower wages than white women.[359]

Globally, many of these outbreaks have openly condemned ideas of US exceptionalism and entitlement.

So much of US history avoids or obscures the forging of “democracy” in a way that explains the savagery, impunity, and sheer number of crimes committed against people of color in the United States. Historical events are taught and explained in a way that removes the event from context, while an ahistorical lens is applied to history itself. The slaughter of Native Americans, raw seizure of the Southwest United States, and chattel slavery of Blacks for cotton profiteering—all crimes without subsequent correction of injustice—are almost exclusively understood in shorthand. Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz addresses the romanticism in “The Grid of History: Cowboys and Indians”:

Reconciling empire and liberty was a historic obsession of U.S. political thinkers and historians, in the twenty-first century openly being debated once again. Thomas Jefferson had hailed the United States as an “empire for liberty.” Andrew Jackson coined the phrase “extending the area of freedom” to describe the process in which slavery had been introduced into Texas in violation of governing Mexican laws, to be quickly followed by a slaveholder’s rebellion and U.S. annexation. The term “freedom” became a euphemism for the continental and worldwide expansion of the world’s leading slave power. The contradictions, particularly since the initial rationalization for U.S. independence was anti-empire, are multiple.[360]

It should come as no surprise why many important Third World revolutionaries reject capitalist democracy as a model. Going still further, anti-authoritarians, and those comprising what may be regarded as an ultra-left wing, critique all power relationships. Such is presented oftentimes less as the necessity of no power at all (Jo Freeman, most popularly, reminds organizers that, in the absence of no one having power, the connected and cunning will rule), but more an issue of exploring new ways to guide our collective dreams.

In India, this has included a massive people’s war, based among the country’s poorest and most oppressed ethnic groups and aimed at dismantling the Indian government and its complicity with Western capitalism. The so-called Naxalites, christened after the state of Naxalbari, argue that economic advancement for the poor has meant ancestral lands are stolen and large tracts are literally given away to create factories which serve multinational corporations. Though their tactics are widely criticized, with people like Prashad condemning them in 2010, the Naxalites’ takeovers of entire districts is indicative of wide support among oppressed people in India, but also other classes dissatisfied with how globalization and Western business has made powerful countries like China and India semi-colonial in many respects.

South America’s many populist mutinies, which have demanded autonomy in resource control, provide a fresh understanding of colonialism’s history and dynamics that are creating new realities. Globalization in Latin and South America is a product of market-driven neoliberal economic and political policies, many of which the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank (WB) enforced with First World support. In Mexico, ejidos (communal lands) once protected under the Constitution, were eliminated and the lands sold to corporations. Other issues bringing about conflicts, such as “structural readjustment,” have meant eliminating aid for peasant farmers and poor people to buy food, privatized social services, an end to wage supports, and undermining of networks in Bolivia, Peru, and Nicaragua. IMF/WB dabbling coupled with the North American Free Trade Agreement for Mexico, and the corresponding Central American Free Trade Agreement, can be seen as the basis for explosive riseups that have taken off as a reaction to what many see as the sabotage of the subject country’s autonomy for economic ends. In no other context could leaders like Ecuador’s President Rafael Correa be so bold as to pledge the reexamination of debts in 2007 to determine their legitimacy, as well as to reject US trade agreements for the potential damage (and inflation) they would do to the poor in his country.

These exciting models are but a few of the many ways people of color are challenging capitalism and oppression. They are also creating alternative institutions intended for subsistence and options for oppressed peoples outside of the master-servant structure of capitalism, while likewise engaging in acts of courageous resistance to globalization, all efforts which face potential destruction internally and externally. Mobo Gao writes in The Battle for China’s Past: Mao and the Cultural Revolution how China’s current history is often told by and from the perspective of those whose privilege was threatened during the Cultural Revolution, those with Western patrons and others who were not direct beneficiaries of anti-capitalist reforms, namely peasants and the poor. Thus, rather than an engagement with impoverished communities to gain an understanding of their suffering and the land redistribution during this period for the majority’s needs, in universities and Western flash-card historical reports a generation later, the narrative is solely of slave labor camps, torture, and hate. This is another example of the consequences of using ahistorical perspectives. Third World anti-capitalist victories, Gao implies, may ultimately be undone by people intent on serving the capitalist impulse:

In the enterprise of constructing the past through the discourse of the present, remembering the Cultural Revolution as a nightmare identifies with the West, its values and its way of life, especially these of the United States. This is not surprising due to the hegemonic position of the West headed by the United States. The political, economic and military superiority can easily be translated as superiority in cultural and life value. These globally dominant values are therefore taken as universally and transcendentally true.[361]

Replace “Cultural Revolution” with any battle led by the oppressed and anyone can easily see why such observations raise the stakes for Third World anti-capitalism even higher—and how these historical narratives need to account for complexities that are currently ignored.

Interrogating the Future

People of color and the Third World will most assuredly continue to fight the impact transnational capitalism has had on oppressed communities. Examples of revolutionary resistance are prominent today, but the Third World has seen more reactionary responses, including xenophobia, retreats into patriotism, patriarchy, dictatorships, and militarism. Indeed, the questions for politics related to people of color and anti-capitalism are multifaceted.

Internationalism tends toward various fixed sciences and contradictions that are a part of the sum of history. However, Third World understandings (as well as the theory and praxis most associated with thinkers such as Gloria Anzaldua and Patricia Hill Collins) of race, ethnicity, and culture have helped to create a “subjectivity of oppression.” Yet culture cannot be dissolved into economics, and race relations cannot be fetishized in a way that holds boundaries around racial identity categories as political objectives in themselves. How organizers of color integrate internationalism and intersectionality’s recognition of multiple subjectivities will be monumental as political upheavals gel.

Radical white revolutionary tendencies such as First World socialism and anarchism have not adequately responded to the ways people of color and the Third World have taken on capitalism. Most tragically, tailism, practiced as an incorrect abstraction of Leninist or anti-authoritarian ideals, has taken hold in isolated quarters. Tailing oppressed-nation turbulence was most clearly expressed in US claims by people of color for national independence, a demand which has always been a marginal one among people of color, as it does not appear to offer a solution to capitalism and imperialism which are wrecking the Third World through transnational economic relationships. Worse, a profoundly conservative thrust argues that all revolutionaries should fall in line simply because oppressed-nation First World people or Third World forces make a call, without examining the aspirations, or possible consequences, of that call.

In the same breath, one of Marxism’s most stunning failures, and a major obstacle to relevance beyond shorthand in the new millennium, has been a chronic inability to understand race and to dismiss racial oppression in favor of economism and reductionism. Such critiques paradoxically reduce race and gender to personal identity and competitors to class, thus missing their material basis and the ways they intersect with class. In what respects? Cultural norms, when used to divide labor into dominant groups and the Other, give the idea of internal colonization validity, particularly in the development of the US Empire. Likewise, the Communist International admirably stood at various points in time with national independence in the Third World, while denying cultural self-determination at a community level in its own project of Othering. That such an antiquated analysis (which was originally used to describe oppressed groups of the time such as the Polish people becoming a majority culture and economic power) is a default position stands as a glaring error that does not see the particularity of race in the United States, among other regions. Anarchists, however, need not, and should not, be limited by vulgar Marxism’s stultifying reductionism.

To be fair, Third World and oppressed-nation fermentations have not had all the answers either. In truth, Third World liberation trends and oppressed-nation First World people of color can both look upon failures of their own revolutionary moments and turning points where eruptions were unable to respond to political, social, economic, and cultural conditions.

Theoretical tussles include how capitalism has shaped the most complex questions of various liberation movements’ perceived goals and ideas of self-determination and autonomy. How do communities effectively address matters of privilege and power when those ascending the ladder are members of the oppressed-nation’s bourgeoisie?

In Mexico, the release of the major-studio motion picture Frida, on the life of multiethnic artist and communist activist Frida Kahlo, brought on a dialogue. Culture and politics, writers articulated, must define identity rather than national origin and ethnicity. Globalization has exacerbated an interdependent but unequal relationship between the United States and Mexico, writes Isabel Molina-Guzmán in Dangerous Curves: Latina Bodies in the Media, and US-based representations of Latin American icons take on some gravity related to how culture and politics collide. Molina-Guzmán sums it up this way:

Ethnic identity is not fixed; rather it is in a constant state of formation and reformulation as it responds to the ever-shifting terrain of post-colonial global culture…. By questioning how we are represented, we are provided the opportunity to redefine ourselves and in redefining ourselves critique dominant systems of social signification. Competing constructions of ethnic identity provide an opportunity to negotiate the symbolic colonization of Latinidad and open up more fluid understandings of the mediated performance of gendered Latinidad.[362]

However, much work in the political realm remains in process. How can those committed to the revolutionary project clarify these relationships further?

Akuno and others stress dialectical perceptions by people of color of anti-capitalism. Concerned people should look at the essence of every happening, separating out what is positive and revolutionary from what is negative and reactionary. Some storms, after a thorough analysis, are capitalist at their core, through the positions for which they speak in support.

Eric Mann, in discussing the 2001 World Conference against Racism hosted in Durban, South Africa, notes that an effective strategy would require organizers to understand openly the strengths and weaknesses of capitalism and imperialism.

Whether under Republican or Democratic tactical leadership, the strategy of U.S imperialism is to rule the world. In a society in which big business is king, U.S. led monopoly capitalism relies on profits and superprofits from Third World nations. It achieves these objectives by “integrating” Third World nations into an international economy structurally dominated by the IMF, World Bank, WTO, NATO, and yes, the UN, which in turn, are controlled by the U.S. Under this totalitarian capitalist system, Third World nations are systematically underdeveloped through a global network that destroys their local industries, obliterates protective tariffs, penetrates their local markets, privatizes their national and natural resources, and impounds cash crops to feed Western banks. As Christian charities get rich exploiting pictures of emaciated Third World children, they exhibit a racist blind spot where they refuse to connect the dots between Third World poverty and first world wealth, between structural racism and U.S. imperialism.[363]

These issues are most certainly salient, and perhaps likely soon to be addressed.

In 1999, a host of Third World countries, including from the Caribbean and Asia, fought back against Western interests on key economic and trade issues. Solidarity by thousands of protesters in Seattle gave punch to the anti-globalization actions. Years later, the Third World and oppressed-nation First World people of color keep fighting. Whether modern populism evolves into a genuinely anti-capitalist vision or one in which nationalist impulses will further divide internal classes is yet to be seen. However, it is the idea of dignity that the world can put off no longer.