A "Letter"?

       It seems that petulant Boris has sent something to the EU but hasn't signed it. That reminds of of an incident away back in my slavery employment days, when I was tasked with sending a large bundle of pre-printed letters to clients. There was so many that I just rapidly put in the name and address of the client added the info the company wanted me to insert, and duly popped them in the post. Some days later, the head office got a "letter" from a gent who said "I received this piece of paper through the post this morning, I assume your were trying to send me a letter. Perhaps you should instruct your staff that a letter requires a date and a signature. Therefore I will just simply ignore this piece of paper and drop it in the bin".
       I don't know if this is the law or just protocol but worth thinking about on this occasion.

Smug arrogant petulant dangerous prat. Boris.

Visit ann arky's home at https://radicalglasgow.me.uk

Dissent And The State.

          A short video of a day of protest in Catalunya, October 18th, 2019. A brief view of how democracy works in Europe, how the state treats dissent, the force and brutality varies from state to state, but the methodology is easily recognisable, militarised police, and random violence against protestors. A methodology that should surely shatter the illusion of democracy. Thanks Loam for the link.

Visit ann arky's home at https://radicalglasgow.me.uk

France, Haiti, Ecuador, Chile, Now Catalunya---.

 

        Across the globe people are taking to the streets, to mention a few, Haiti, Ecuador, Chile, France, and elsewhere, now Catalunya, the demands may differ, but they all have something in common, dissatisfaction with the system. A realisation that the system isn't delivering what it says it will, it is not meeting the demands of the vast majority of the people.

This from crimethinc:

 

  Catalunya: A Week of Escalation
Could the Riots Open a Horizon Beyond National Sovereignty? 

        Starting Monday, in response to draconian sentences imposed on politicians who promote Catalan independence, tens of thousands of people across Catalunya have engaged in sustained rioting and disruption. Although the majority of the movement remains pacifistic, a few thousand participants have rejected the leadership of political parties and organizations, opting for open confrontation with police. The various mobilizations are still taking place in confluence, however, making it very difficult for the police to control. Protesters have reportedly used caltrops, Molotov cocktails, and paint balloons to disable police riot vans, while keeping individual officers at a distance with lasers and slingshots and driving away helicopters with fireworks. In the following report, we review the events of the past week and explore what is at stake in this struggle.

       As anarchists, we have a more robust conception of self-determination than mere national sovereignty. All governments are based on the asymmetry of power between ruler and ruled; nationalism is just one of several means by which rulers seek to turn us against each other so we don’t unite against them. We consider it instructive that the Catalan police have worked closely with Spanish national police throughout the last several years of repression; even if Catalunya gains independence, we are certain that independent Catalan police and courts will continue to repress those who fight against capitalism and seek true self-determination. At the same time, there is a longstanding tradition of anarchist and anti-state activity in Catalunya, and we are inspired to see some of this coming to the fore in resistance to the violence of the Spanish state. It is possible that the latest escalation of conflict in the streets of Catalunya will be a step towards the radicalization of the entire movement and the delegitimizing of state solutions.

Let’s look closer to see.

A detailed day to day report on the events: 

Visit ann arky's home at https://radicalglasgow.me.uk  

Thomas Muir Festival 2019.

         Thomas Muir, one of Scotland's many principled radicals, one of those severally dealt with by the authorities he challenged, is being celebrated in a festival at the end of October until the end of November. Well worth marking your diary.

Thomas Muir Festival 2019.

Whats on / All Events

         Events and times may change, please check website and/or our facebook prior to attending an event, to make sure times & details are up to date

Thomas Muir Symposium:  Tuesday 22nd. October.

‘Commemorating Thomas Muir:

Past, Present and Future’

Drawing on speakers from Scotlands’ academic community, secondary school pupils and members of local history societies. Afternoon includes talks and music

Where: St Ninians High, Kirkintilloch

Time: 12.45pm to 4.30pm

Free: Booking required -

email address: dwmmartindon@live.co.uk

University of Glasgow Thomas Muir Lecture. Thursday 31st. October

on Democracy and Civil Society

Inaugural Lecture: Professor Sir T.M. Devine, 'Unyielding Power: Foundations of Elite Supremacy in Eighteenth Century Scotland'

Where: Kelvin Hall, Glasgow

Time: 6pm Free (Booking essential)

2019 East Dunbartonshire Schools

Art Competition & Exhibition, 16th.-24th. November.

Finalist Exhibition: Art work short listed and selected by a panel of judges. Over all winning pupil and school will be announced.

Ages: P1 to S6

Where: Thomas Muir Coffee Shop, Bishopbriggs, G64 1RP

Time: 9.30am to 4pm (Mon - Sat) Free (Drop in)

Michelle McManus

& The Flaming Blackhearts in Concert. Friday 29th. November.

Unique, intimate venue with superb acoustics

Support: Jo Mango

Where: Cadder Church, Bishopbriggs G64 3JJ

Time: 7:00pm for 7.30pm to 10.15pm

Price: £14 + booking fee

Booking info...

 Visit ann arky's home at https://radicalglasgow.me.uk 

Between Dignity And Poverty.

A small extract from an article by Chris Hedges:

       Immanuel Kant coined the term “radical evil.” It was the privileging of one’s own interest over that of others, effectively reducing those around you to objects to be manipulated and used for your own ends. But Hannah Arendt, who also used the term “radical evil,” saw that it was worse than merely treating others as objects. Radical evil, she wrote, rendered vast numbers of people superfluous. They possessed no value at all. They were, once they could not be utilized by the powerful, discarded as human refuse.
        We live in an age of radical evil. The architects of this evil are despoiling the earth and driving the human species toward extinction. They are stripping us of our most basic civil liberties and freedoms. They are orchestrating the growing social inequity, concentrating wealth and power in the hands of a cabal of global oligarchs. They are destroying our democratic institutions, turning elected office into a system of legalized bribery, stacking our courts with judges who invert constitutional rights so that unlimited corporate money invested in political campaigns is disguised as the right to petition the government or a form of free speech. Their seizure of power has vomited up demagogues and con artists including Donald Trump and Boris Johnson, each the distortion of a failed democracy. They are turning America’s poor communities into internal militarized colonies where police carry out lethal campaigns of terror and use the blunt instrument of mass incarceration as a tool of social control. They are waging endless wars in the Middle East and diverting half of all discretionary spending to a bloated military. They are placing the rights of the corporation above the rights of the citizen.

      Sometimes I read a phrase, a paragraph, a few words, and they sink in through the dark labyrinth of my ageing mind and out trickles a stream of words. the following is my latest such a trickling.

Between Dignity and Poverty

In this metropolis of wealth with its fountains of opulence
We are the excluded army that walks that tightrope
Between dignity and poverty.
The excluded, the marginalised, the forgotten,
Regulated by mercenaries, some with guns, others with pens.
They know not, we are their brothers and sisters.
Nor do they know,
Our strength is forged in the humiliation of the bread line
Our daily question, will there be bread,
Or will the pangs of hunger stay.
We exist in a system of numbers and balance sheets,
Our lives, dehumanised statistics,
Catalogued and filed by a blind accountant.
When asked to count our dead, do we count the living dead?
Will this tightrope be the inheritance to our children
Or shall our tortured journey lead us from anxiety to revolt
Will the anguish of our children feed our righteous anger
Causing us to tear asunder this fabricated web of injustice.

Visit ann arky's home at https://radicalglasgow.me.uk

The Rent Strike Revisited And Lessons To Be Learned.

        The Glasgow Rent Strike 1915, culminated in a mass march and demonstration outside of the Glasgow Sheriff court which forced the government to introduce the "Rent Restriction Act, 1915" which benefited tenants across the country. 

        A Glasgow group is organising some events during mid November to mark the anniversary of this magnificent working class victory. Those wishing to take part are welcome to attend the next organising meeting which will be held on Sunday 27th. October, 1:30pm in the Electron Club at the CCA, 350 Sauchiehall Street, Glasgow. All welcome, hope to see you there with your thoughts and ideas.

      There will be march/rally held outside the Sheriff Court and  film show. Details of the march/rally have yet to be finalised, and will be made public as soon as possible, the details of the film show are:

Free Film Show,

Date: Monday, 11th. November.

Time: 7:30pm.

Venue: CCA cinema,

           350 Sauchiehall Street,

           Glasgow.  

Visit ann arky's home at https://radicalglasgow.me.uk

Empathy.

 

           I posted this away back in 2010, and we are still at it, fostering hate in the defence of the wealth and power of the privileged few in the capitalist world. If only we would walk a mile in somebody else's shoes. Or as Rabbie Burns said, 

" O wad some Pow'r the giftie gie us
To see oursels as others see us"

Visit ann arky's home at https://radicalglasgow.me.uk

Ecuador, The Struggle Continues.

           Anybody who stands up to state repression or struggles for justice, knows full well that the state apparatus will use whatever force is needed to try and subdue the protestors. The state needs control of the population to safeguard its power, wealth and privileges. The people living on that plot of land called Ecuador are at present feeling the wrath of a frightened state institution as its brutality intensifies in a desperate battle to gain control of the population. Despite this force the people continue their struggle for justice and freedom.
         An extract from an article on Crimethinc:

 

 

     --------On October 8, thousands of indigenous people occupied the Parliament building in Quito. Can you describe for us what happened there?

       In fact, the Indians arrived on October 7, on Monday, and there was a pitched battle in Quito that lasted five or six hours involving students, social movements, and other residents of Quito who were trying to keep the police busy in order to enable the indigenous comrades to enter. Recall that we are living in a State of Exception, so the military is on the streets and had blocked Quito’s main entrances, the North and South entrances, to prevent indigenous people from other provinces from entering. However, the people were so well-organized that the military did not have enough intelligence at their disposal to stop them. The fact that the fight took place in the city center also opened up gaps that enabled the indigenous people to reach the historic center.
      Just as we pushed the police back, we saw the crowded trucks coming and the bikes that accompanied the indigenous caravan. It was a very exciting moment.
      They went directly to El Arbolito Park, next to the Salesian University, where logistical support for the movement is organized. The following day, a rally took place at Parque El Arbolito and people agreed to take the Assembly (the parliament building in Quito). When we arrived there, a first delegation entered, then gradually more and more people entered, while there were thousands of people at the door of the Assembly wanting to enter. Police shot tear gas canisters at people, which created a mass panic. People could have been trampled to death because many could not breathe; people ran in various directions. Meanwhile, police continued to fire tear gas canisters and rubber bullets at protesters. At that moment, a very great repression began.
      The Assembly, strategically speaking, is like a small fort perched on a hill; to protect it, the police positioned themselves at a higher point so that snipers could hit the protesters with tear gas canisters and also live rounds. As a result, the police inflicted a large number of injuries and some deaths, as they were in a strategic position.
      The idea of going to the Assembly was one of the actions that the indigenous movement had decided to carry out during these days in Quito. Until yesterday [Wednesday, October 9], there was a lot of concern because there was no clear strategy, while the government refused to back down and kept increasing the repression. The fact that police sent tear gas into shelters and peace encalves such as the Salesian University and the Catholic University caused a great deal of outrage; in a way, this was a blow to the government, because the news circulated despite the news shutdown that the mainstream media and the government have been trying to maintain.
       Today [Thursday, October 10], in the morning, eight police officers were captured by the movement and brought to the large popular and indigenous assembly at the House of Culture, where there were about 10,000 or 15,000 people. The reporters who were there ended up broadcasting the assembly live, even if they didn’t do it in the best way. In a way, this broke the media siege by disclosing, for example, the fact that an indigenous leader of Cotopaxi, Inocencio Tucumbi, had been killed. He had lost consciousness after inhaling a lot of tear gas and was then trampled by a police horse. That had not appeared in the mainstream media. Suddenly, the dead appeared on the big television channels and it became clear to the general public that—yes, the government is killing people and carrying out repression at an extreme level!--------

Read the full article HERE:

Visit ann arky's home at https://radicalglasgow.me.uk

Extinction Submission!

       On Extinction Rebellion, I have made my views known in a couple of previous posts, I still hold the view that those behind this movement are not what they portray themselves to be, and are leading the public along a road that will not solve the problem of possible planet extinction.

     This is an extract from an article, which I endorse, from Acorn:

         We are well aware that there are many genuine grassroots activists involved in Extinction Rebellion protests, people we know are on our side. But more and more questions are being asked about the nature of the organisation itself, about the true agenda of the leadership lurking behind a flimsy illusion of horizontality.
         The non-existence of a mass radical anti-capitalist movement in the UK (let alone a radical ecological anti-capitalist one!) means that XR has appealed to a lot of people who have long been waiting for some kind of rebellion to finally emerge.
        Perhaps they have been tolerant of XR’s eccentricities (starry-eyed love of the police, dogmatic non-violence bordering on control-freakery, connections with business interests, refusal to consistently condemn capitalism) because they are the only show in town and it is a question of XR or nothing.
        The same is not true in France, though, where revolution is often in the air and where the last year has seen a full-on yellow-coloured challenge to the neoliberal state. XR have been active there too, but their fake radicalism and lame submissiveness to authority has shocked many eco-radicals and anti-capitalists, who have been voicing their concerns online.
        On October 12 the “Désobéissance écolo Paris” collective published an open letter to Extinction Rebellion members, containing a wide-ranging critique of the organisation and its approach.
      Then on Monday October 14 two reports appeared on the anti-capitalist Paris Luttes site. The first of these was entitled “Extinction Rebellion : ni désobéissance, ni obéissance, mais servilité et crédulité” – “Extinction Rebellion: Neither Disobedience or Obedience, but Servility and Credulity”.
      Reporting on the XR occupation in Châtelet, it said “Extinction Rebellion scuttled its own initiative in a total absence of strategic thinking and analysis of power struggles”.
       It explained: “The ‘diversity of tactics’ working group on Wednesday evening had asked each of the six blockade points to start thinking about what we would say to the press, the authorities, the public, on the day that we were moved on.
     “For instance, it was suggested, in the spirit of a convergence of struggles, that we say ‘we are not leaving without the passing of a law for carbon neutrality by 2025 and an amnesty for all activists incarcerated during the various Gilets Jaunes protests’. That would have been awesome.
      “But the XR leadership decided, at a sparsely-attended assembly on Friday morning, October 11, to dismantle the camp, to move most of the equipment and to pull out from the six blockade points.
      “In short, XR removed everything which made this public space a living space where we could discuss, debate, get to know each other.
       “The given reason was, of course, the next day’s action, but anyone with a minimum of strategic sense should have seen that this camp, now that it was there, now that it had been reinforced by Gilets Jaunes and other anti-capitalist and environmental activists, the night before the weekend, had definite subversive potential. Predictably the action on Saturday October 12 was, on the other hand, a total flop”.
       The article went on to comment: “This is not a case of ‘non-violent civil disobedience’ nor indeed of ‘obedience’ since there was no official warning from the police or the authorities. It was rather a case of servility: we ended the camp before even having been ordered to leave. This is exactly the opposite of struggle or rebellion”.-------

------- They added: “It was a rather pleasant surprise to see that many XR activists did not stay stuck in the XR box, did not shy away from more radical action, less focused on media PR, and were asking real political questions about the scope of these actions. As often happens, the grassroots could quickly outgrow the organisation”.

Read the full article HERE: 

Visit ann arky's home at https://radicalglasgow.me.uk 

Glasgow Protest Against Turkish Attack On Kurds.

         On Saturday, 12th. October, Glasgow like many other cities across the world people took to the streets in protest at the Turkish savage invasion against the Kurds in northern Syria. Another onslaught by a state on people trying to shape their world in a fairer manner than the states that surround them. No matter the ideology, the particular faith or politics, the people should always resist any state waging war on another. In all these state conflicts, it is never the leaders and political ballerinas that face the death and destruction, it is the ordinary people. When a state wages war it is a well trained well armed military machine against civilians, bus drivers, plumbers, shop keepers, teachers, grandparents and grandchildren, these are the people that suffer most.

      Glasgow's protest was a varied collection of groups and individuals, in my estimate probably in the region of over three hundred, lots of banners and flags and lots of passion and speeches. We must keep up the protests at this all too familiar act of man's inhumanity to man.

 

Visit ann arky's home at https://radicalglasgow.me.uk

Working Class Kids And A Loaded Education System.

         Most working class families realise that their kids get a raw deal when it comes to education. Even so, it is nice to have it made clear in facts and figures, and Professor Diane Reay's book does just that. Her recent book has been reviewed in the Guardian and makes for very interesting reading.
     Diane Reay, is a Cambridge University professor of education, her background might surprise you, The daughter of a coalminer, and the eldest of eight, she grew up on a council estate and received free school meals. She then spent 20 years working as a teacher in London primary schools before moving into academia and ending up at Cambridge.

Extract from the Guardian review:

 

  Photograph: Martin Godwin/The Guardian

  -------Research suggests it is the wealth and inclination of parents, rather than the ability and efforts of the child, that have the most bearing on a child’s educational success today. “If you’re a working class child, you’re starting the race halfway round the track behind the middle class child. Middle class parents do a lot via extra resources and activities.”
       Less affluent children also get a more restrictive educational offer, she discovered. “It wasn’t until I talked to young people about their experiences that I realised how different and unequal their educations were. Because the schools that working class children mostly go to are not doing well in the league tables, there’s a lot of pressure on their teachers and heads to increase their league table position. That means they focus ruthlessly on reading, writing and arithmetic.”
      Some children in these schools talked wistfully about hardly ever doing art, drama or dance: “These children come from families where their parents can’t afford to pay for them to do those activities out of school. It almost feels criminal. It feels very unfair.”
       The difference between amounts spent on educating children privately or in the state sector is stark. She cites research from University College London that found £12,200 a year is the average spending on a privately educated primary pupil, compared with £4,800 on a state pupil. For secondary, it’s £15,000 compared with £6,200.
       “Society has got more unfair, and the gap between the rich and poor is a lot greater than it was even 30 years ago. We’ve got to move back instead of going further in the direction of austerity, which seems to be punishing the poor.”
       She believes the government’s support for academies and free schools is powerfully ideological. “It’s about opening up education to the markets. I found it particularly shocking – and I had to read some quite boring parliamentary reports to get the information – that masses of money has gone into the academy and free school programme, and it’s been taken out of the comprehensive school system.”
       Reay found that free schools receive 60% more funding per pupil than local authority primaries and secondaries, and that £96m originally intended for improving underperforming schools was redistributed to academies.
      To make things worse, an analysis of Department for Education data reveals that schools with the highest numbers of pupils on free school meals are facing the deepest funding cuts: in secondary schools with more than 40% of children on free school meals, the average loss per pupil will be £803. That’s £326 more than the average for secondary schools as a whole. And primary schools with high numbers of working class pupils are expected to lose £578 per pupil.
          Another blow being inflicted on working class children is through the way they are treated in some super-strict schools, argues Reay. She says some academies operate on the principle that working class families are chaotic and children need school to impose control. “There’s lots of lining up in silence, standing to attention when an adult comes into the room, and mantras. I think it’s about disrespecting working class young people and their families. ------

It is well worth reading the full review HERE:
      Perhaps reading these facts and figures will bring home to the ordinary people that it is not just the education system that is loaded against them, it is the ideology of the entire system, it is designed to make sure you know your place in this hierarchical system where wealth and power are the tools that load the system against the ordinary people. I have ordered the book.

 Visit ann arky's home at https://radicalglasgow.me.uk 

Politicalised In A Repression Cage.

 

        We all know that prisons are inhumane institutions of state repression. There sole purpose is to subdue the rebellious and disobedient in society, and turn them into subservient humble citizens, who will quietly follow the rules no matter what shape or form those rules take. Though that may be the aim of the state in imprisoning humans in cages, the result can quiet often be the opposite and produce a politically alert and active individual. It can sharpen the individual's awareness of the nature of the state and the cruel injustices inherent in this type of society.  

          The following is a letter first published in 325, from John Bowden, long term prisoner in the UK, one of those whose internment raised his political awareness, and far from becoming a subservient humble citizen he became a political activist locked in a cage but still with a voice that can and does reach outside the state's cages.

Letter from John Bowden, long-term radical prisoner (UK)
           There is a group of prisoners who although imprisoned for non-political offences subsequently become politicised or radicalised whilst in jail, and in both the USA and Britain this is a phenomenon that has become increasingly widespread.
        In the USA during the 1960s and 70s the radicalisation of ordinary black prisoners, in particular, was fostered by the centrality of imprisonment in the experience of black activists and revolutionaries like Malcolm X (who described prisons as “universities of revolution”), Eldridge Cleaver, George Jackson, H Rap Brown, Angela Davis and others. George Jackson described his own politicisation succinctly: “I met Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, Engels, and Mao when I entered prison and they redeemed me”.
         Thus those whom W.E.B. Dubois described as an “army of the wronged” increasingly defined themselves as political prisoners who were the products of an oppressive political-economic order. This belief underpinned the praxis of radical groups such as the Black Panthers and Symbionese Liberation Army, and prisons were seen as the epicentre of a broader social and political revolution. The call for recognition of radicalised prisoners claim to political status underpinned prisoners’ demands in a series of protests that punctuated the 1970s in U.S. Prisons such as Folsom, Soledad, San Quentin and, later, Attica.
          The radicalisation of ordinary prisoners in both the UK and the USA was channeled through both identity politics and the prisoner union movement. In the UK such groups during the 1970s were highly active in organised protests and uprisings against oppressive prison conditions, particularly for long-term prisoners. The politicisation of ordinary prisoners who link their imprisonment to broader social and political inequality and oppression, and prison as the epicentre of their struggle, transforming them into proto-revolutionaries striking out against the capitalist state, is a spectre that terrifies those responsible for managing and enforcing prison repression.
          Islamic radicalisation within prisons is currently considered by the state a primary “intelligence and security concern”, and a leaked UK Home Office document identifies prison as a “key site of radicalisation for young Muslims”, justifying measures like the political vetting of Imams before they are permitted to preach in jails and the creation of “separation wings” or isolation units for militant Muslim prisoners. In the UK the segregation or isolation of politicised and radicalised prisoners in separate wings and units is a method of control imported from British occupied and controlled Northern Ireland where during “The Troubles” Irish Republican prisoners of war were confined to the notorious H-Blocks of The Maze prison, which through the dirty protests and hunger strikes actually became an epicentre of the wider Irish Republican struggle. Concentrating radicalised prisoners in separation units and wings inevitably creates greater solidarity amongst those prisoners and re-enforces their radicalisation, and of course in any case political ideas and ideologies cannot be isolated or segregated, even within an oppressive institution like prison. The treatment of politicised prisoners is always inevitably brutal and discriminatory, and within total institutions whose fundamental purpose is to tame and subdue the rebellious and disobedient poor, prisoners who develop a political consciousness and psychologically liberate themselves from existential and penal obedience are perceived by the prison system as the most dangerous of all the imprisoned.
         Prisoners serving indeterminate or life sentences for non-political offences but who subsequently become politicised whilst in prison have a very minimal chance of hope of ever being released, even when their actual risk to the public is considered minimal or even non-existent. Officially, the prime criterion determining the “suitability for release” of indeterminate sentenced prisoners is their assessment as “low-risk” to public safety, but in fact what actually determines a life sentence prisoner’s chance of release is not a perceived level of risk to the public, but their level of obedience to prison authority.Those life sentence prisoners who embrace an ideology considered by their jailers as “subversive” and “anti-authority” are viewed as the absolute antithesis of the “model prisoner” and therefore permanently “unsuitable for release”. Prisons are microcosms of the society that creates them, and the treatment of prisoners who identify with a political belief system that directly challenges the authority and legitimacy of the state reveals the fascist core of that state, which has implications for society generally, especially during times of social unrest.

John Bowden October 2019

Visit ann arky's home at https://radicalglasgow.me.uk 

The Struggle Of Indigenous People.

         We should share and spread this update on the growing struggle for freedom and justice in Ecuador from Roar Magazine:

 

        In the Ecuadorian Amazon, Shuar and Achuar people radicalize the strike, marching towards Puyo. Photo: CONAIE.

    Over the past days, women, children and elders from the diverse nations and Indigenous communities in Ecuador have paralyzed highways, and carried out assemblies in their communities, neighborhoods, and cities. These dignified women and men, who live at the middle of the world, have risen up to recover and take back their country, their present and their future, which is under threat once more by the same elites as always, allied to the predatory right wing patriarchs that monopolize political life.
         With the declaration of a national strike and an Indigenous uprising, they have created a powerful space of discussion that questions the nefarious Decree 883, which dictates austerity measures, the most obvious of which is a dramatic increase in the cost of fuel. “If the price of gas rises, everything gets more expensive, transportation and food get more expensive,” said one Indigenous woman into a microphone in front of a crowd of mobilized community members in the Cotopaxi region.
         Communities in the mountains, in the Amazon and along the coast are standing up together. Through their speeches, posters and songs, they are producing a plurality of meanings, and weaving rejection to the issues that affect them: resisting poverty, resisting being subjected to the economic measures and agenda of the International Monetary Fund, and stopping the extractive regime that is destroying their collective wealth.
A long term struggle has been activated
         As part of this powerful uprising, which is connected to strikes in the cities, calling up historic Indigenous struggles for land and water, and against oil and gas camps and mining projects which sow misery wherever they operate, is clear. In Ecuador we can tell that a long term struggle has been activated, because while today we see that effort and energy are devoted to rolling back economic austerity, the power of the Indigenous and community struggle demonstrates the frustration of the people with state aggression against their communities.
        On October 5, the government of Lenin Moreno declared a sixty day State of Emergency to avoid demonstrations, gatherings and public actions. In response, the president of the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (CONAIE), together with members of the Popular Front and the Unified Workers’ Front, responded: “Don’t play with fire, the destiny of 17 million people is at stake.”
     In the days following, the CONAIE has announced that Indigenous communities have also declared themselves in a State of Emergency, and stated that they will not allow police of the army to destroy the homes of those they detain, or mistreat women and children. Their communiqué makes clear that anyone found taking part in human rights violations will be brought before Indigenous justice.
        The communities that are rising up are doing so with the aim of re-establishing the order of communal life. Indigenous justice does not threaten or contradict the Constitution, nor does it allow rights and guarantees that have been won through organization to be ignored in such an arbitrary and crude manner. The State of Emergency, through an Indigenous lens, is against the detention of more than 477 people, the attacks on many others, and the killing of one.
        The images from Ecuador that are spreading around the world today show the decision and the energy of the youth, of children, of women and elders. These images have profoundly moved Indigenous people throughout the continent. The speeches of Indigenous leaders in Ecuador have been seen thousands of times on social media. Their speeches are expansive, they nurture Indigenous struggles and at the same time, they include cities in their demands.
The dignity of community struggles
       Students around the country have also powerfully spoken out. The green kerchiefs from recent feminist struggles for legal abortion can also be seen in the images of the demonstrations in the cities, as organized women add their voices and bring with them the capacity to sustain a strike. The cacerolazos (pots and pans demonstrations) convened by womens’ collectives force us to take note of the double workday and the exploitation of women via unpaid work, it also demonstrates how the paquetazo (series of economic reforms ordered by the IMF) will impact them. Urban women recognize the dignity of community struggles, and seek to add their voices, their screams of frustration, by self-organizing to take the streets.
      On October 8th, at the barricades in the Pastaza region, the people demanded the resignation of Lenin Moreno, in other parts of the country, interior ministry buildings have been occupied. The Indigenous movement entered Quito from the south, receiving support and solidarity from working class and poor neighborhoods who joined them to chant: “Join in, pueblo, join the struggle against this government that is against us.”
        Social organizations represented by workers unions and others in the cities will now join in the massive National Strike on October 9th. An Indigenous uprising is, once again, at the heart of the struggle, opening a horizon of re-appropriation in the face of an attempt to expropriate all of the peoples of Ecuador. The Indigenous mobilization calls for the generalization of protest actions so that the struggle can grow stronger.
      This moment of struggle is a moment to re-appropriate strength and self determination, a time of rebellion towards the production of a renewed sense of struggle, woven together with diverse voices that warn, clearly and firmly: “Not Moreno or Correa, not Lasso or Nebot! The struggle is ours!” This makes clear that this uprising will not end in new alliances between power brokers or in other kinds of patriarchal pacts.
        On October 7, Lenin Moreno moved the seat of his government to the coastal city of Guayaquil. His actions remind us of the nervous and fearful priests and colonial bureaucrats during the colonial period, who hid in walled houses and called for military aid, fearing the moment that Indians in resistance would, in the words of Bartolina Sisa, reign again.
        From our communities, from the cities we live in, we are and will continue to follow and express solidarity with what is taking place in Ecuador. The strength of Indigenous communities nurtures ours. We raise our voices together and show our support for popular and Indigenous resistance. Here and there, we resist being overseen by the state, and we yell once again that we are moved by a desire to change every single thing.
        ¡Nos queremos vivas, libres y desendeudadas en todas partes! We want to be alive, free and without debt, everywhere! ¡Que se sigan tejiendo entramados comunitarios y populares de lucha! May community weavings of popular struggle continue to be woven! ¡Que siga creciendo la dignidad! May dignity continue to flourish!

Signed,
Gladys Tzul Tzul, Guatemala
Raquel Gutiérrez, México
Claudia López, Bolivia
Mariana Menéndez, Uruguay
Noel Sosa, Uruguay
Veronica Gago, Argentina
Luci Caballero, Argentina
Jovita Tzul Tzul, Guatemala
Ita del Cielo, México
Victoria Furtado, Uruguay
Siboney Mora, Uruguay
Dunia Mokrani, Bolivia
Claudia Cuellar, Bolivia
Silvia Federici, United States
Dawn Paley, Canada

    

  Visit ann arky's home at https://radicalglasgow.me.uk