Politics (You all heard me yammer away about this, if you were in Alcobendas.)
Of course, there has been a lot of talk in the EZLN, FZLN, and during the Encuentros about the oppression and exploitation of women and colonized peoples everywhere. The struggles of women against patiarchy was supposed to be a cross-sectoral theme. Thus, it was a shame to see in mesa 1A that men still dominated the discussion, both as a proportion of the population represented at the meeting and in terms of interventions made in it. It wasn't just that men, for whatever reasons, presented more ponencias. Many resorted to typical alpha-male habits of shouting, browbeating, and using disparaging language and tone. (I don't pretend to be blameless.) A few women were guilty of some of these infractions, but they were mainly male attitudes. This is nothing new. Given this persistent obstacle to democratic participation, I hope we can see why one of the mesas in the bloque on patriarchy excluded men. Perhaps we'll be able to get it together some day.
Some of these problems could have been mitigated by careful facilitation of the plenaries--assuming that some interlocutors can't keep their inflated egos (undeveloped ids?) in check. However, at mesa 1 and, judging from subsequent conversation, in other bloques, facilitation was pretty much a formality. I think the moderator of 1A was warm, affable, intelligent, and caring man, who didn't want to over-structure the meeting and thereby stiffle important debates not on the proposed agenda. But his antimethod of "productive chaos" didn't even leave room for deciding in a conscious, participatory manner how we might deviate from the order of business. With all the interjections, lack of regard for needed translation, and ultimatums passing as "proposals," we were hard pressed just to fulfill the task set out for us. It was the similar elsewhere, though perhaps not everywhere. For example, some participants in bloque 3 told me their facilitator appeared occasionally to get bored and would wander out of the room without explanation.
Perhaps the most embarassing incident of breakdown in democratic process, which dissolved into an unproductive shouting match full of indefensible rhetoric, happened at the final mass meeting at El Indiano. A person reading a report from the bloque on "marginalization" mentioned in passing Australian professor Peter Singer's 1976 book Animal Liberation. Immediately, the stage was rushed by at least a hundred people screaming "Fascist! Fascist...!" over and over again. Now, I will profess ignorance at this point. I know little else about Singer than the gist of his books Animal Liberation and Practical Ethics. I have been told that he has written some things recommending euthanasia for people with physical and mental challenges, but I've never seen the context. Ostensibly, this eugenicist proposal was the reason for the jeering crowd. Soon one of the "moderators" took over the microphone and declared, "We do not tolerate fascists in our meeting!" Okay. Kick the fuckers out. It isn't their meeting. But had anybody established that Singer was a fascist, let alone the reporter for bloque 6, by then cowering behind the stage? Did anybody care to get up and give a rebuttal to Singer's supposedly pernicious ideas? These considerations were apparently out of the question, and for fifteen or twenty minutes a tangle of people around the stage kept shouting "Fascist!", and from time to time someone would sieze the mic and blather on irrelevantly for a few minutes about how the bastards had to go, etc. The absolute low point, to my mind, was when someone said from stage, "Even mentioning Peter Singer is complicity with fascism." This is the "zero-tolerance" attitude way out of control, and the statement was thoroughly irresponsible and authoritarian. Is this the kind of politics we want to espouse?
When I expressed my concerns about the breakdown or lack of democratic process in many of the meetings, I found many sympathetic listeners, and I was glad. But I was also worried by some of the opinions I heard expressed. One comrade told me that, yes, democratic process was important, but we could wait to work it out at future Encuentros; there was important groundwork to get done now. Make decisions first and then worry about who made them, how they were made, and whom they affected? That doesn't seem like the right priority for participatory democratic, "socialist" politics. If we don't get it right now, we may never get it right. I'm thinking bringing copies of the excellent pamphlet The Tyrnany of Structure/The Tyranny of Structurelessness to the next Encuentro. (It will soon be on line at <http://www.acephale.org/labyrinth/tyranny.html> .) I also saw a problem in the development of informal élites. The incidents in themselves may seem minor, even trivial, but taken together they add up to a tendency worthy of serious consideration. Informal élites, as I'm sure we all know, can rapidly become formal, as more and more people are excluded from important decisions and come to depend on "leadership," if they care to stick with the movement at all. They ranged from a self-deputized comrade denying people access to the kitchen at León Felipe on the second day of the Encuentro, to "facilitators" (appointed by whom?) deciding unilaterally how each day's meetings would be structured, to small cliques of writers drafting reports late at night. I know that the drafting group of mesa 1A & B--in which I was involved--did announce to the plenary where and when it would be meeting, but the group that actually convened consisted mainly of the persons who had prepared ponencias for the mesas. I'm not criticizing any particular persons at my mesa, all of whom, I believe, sincerely wanted to include everyone's opinion in the reports and proposals. However, I don't think the lack of broader participation in the drafting documents was from lack of interest. After all, many of the drafts were sharply criticized in the plenaries. Sure, some people like to complain about things that they had the opportunity to influence or rectify and then passed up, but I bet there would be a lot less complaining if more effort was made to insure that those who want to be involved are, more than just saying at the end of a meeting, "We'll be at this place at that time. Hope to see you." If a mass meeting on drafting would be unmanageable, then representatives should be chosen. Division of labor is good, but we all should be involved in how it's done.
"Cultural politics," for want of a better term: I heard grumbling among the African and the Central and South American participants about what they thought was the lack of regard for some of the concrete proposals they made. Although I didn't hear anyone call this straight up racism or "cultural imperialism," they thought it had to do with the assumed priority of issues in Europe and the ignorance of the priorities, types of struggles, and the way they are expressed in the rest of the world. This contention is certainly debatable, but I think we need to be more tuned in to these issues. (I'm thinking in particular of the representatives of the Moroccan unemployed graduates association.) There were other incidents of racism and cultural insensitivity of different degrees of subtlety and blatancy. When I talked informally about the troubles I was having with some disorganization at the Encuentro (see below), I heard Northern Europeans say time and again "It's just the Latin way of doing things." This stereotypical explanation is at best facile. Then there was crass interpretation of the Zapatista slogan "Todos somos Marcos, todos somos indios" (We are all [Subcomandante] Marcos, we are all "Indians"). The slogan can be rather profound. But people at the rally in Puerto Serrano who wore feathers in their hair and put bogus war paint on were doing about as much justice to the indigenous peoples of the Americas as supporters of the Washington Redskins do. We've got some work to do on this front.
Finally, I was disappointed in how much local political infighting figured into the Encuentro. The schism between the Madrid and Barcelona organizing groups was a problem from the beginning. Many of the English and almost all of the Greek comrades had registered through Barcelona, and they got to Alcobendas (Madrid) to discover that there was no record of their registration. Furthermore, Mesa 1 ended up being split between the two cities. Those of us who participated should applaud ourselves for having made the principled declaration that we thought that there was only one mesa 1 and that we would do everything we could to draw the discussions of the two sections together. The schism was a problem until the very end, leading to still another ad hoc meeting of those within earshot (at night in an isolated playground) deciding who from Madrid-based mesas would partipate in meeting on the conduct of the final plenary at El Indiano, so as not to offend the Barcelona-based representatives. Even if the split was inevitable, both factions could have been more ingenuous about it, since apparently it had been developing since December of last year. Being up front might have saved some people from the confusion of arriving in the Spanish state assuming that the mesas in Madrid and Barcelona were options and then discovering they were conflicts. (The effect of the exodus from the Madrid group shortly before the Encuentro got under way is dealt with in the next section.)
Before I left Madrid, I stopped by the CNT office. I was told there that the CNT had chosen not to participate in the Encuentro, because the CGT had been invited--indeed, CGT shops had printed Encuentro documents. I hope this was simply a major political faux pas by the organizers and does not reflect a politics that would exclude this exemplary organization.
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