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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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