Sunday, July 02, 2006

July 2. BLOG TRANSFORMATION

This post signals the end of this blog as it has existed until now, and its transformation into a space of analysis of the process of the Sixth Declaration via the formation of the Intergalactic. [photos from today’s July 2 march of the Other Campaign, those from below interrupting the farsical election day of those from above]

Today, as the scuffle and spectacle among those “above” climaxes in the Mexican presidential elections—what the mass media deems a brutal battle between left, right, and further right and what those from below see as a mere power struggle between neoliberal, semi-fascist, and clown, the Other Campaign makes itself visible again, not just in the thousands that marched to the Zocalo in Mexico City today, but in a new manifesto by adherents of the Sixth Declaration that represents the national organization of the Other Campaign and the fact that people all over Mexico have indeed, as the Zapatistas set out in the Lacondon Jungle last fall, taken the Sixth and the Other and made it theirs.

The current blog focused on the journey of the Other Campaign from December 31, 2005 through mid-June, 2006. With the instances of police brutality and state terrorism May 3-4 in San Salvador Atenco, and the pause of the Sixth Commission in Mexico City until all the political prisoners taken those two days are freed, the rhythm of the Sixth Declaration has changed, and the organization of the Other Campaign and the Intergalactic have accelerated.

El Kilombo proposes the continuation of this blog as a space of collective analysis, critique, and proposals toward the formation of the Intergalactic, not just the proposed encounter but the potential network. As many have analyzed, and as the Zapatista Sixth Commission has said explicitly in the journey of the Other Campaign, capitalism has no “seat”, no home, no headquarters. The global capitalist class employs state systems when and where it serves them, without loyalty to a nation, representivity of a population, or accountability to a people. As we have determined our own political project as El Kilombo, and in accordance with the spirit of the Sixth, we are responsible not just for organizing ourselves in support of the Other Campaign in Mexican territory, but in the formation of a global anticapitalist network of communities establishing their own autonomy. As people of color communities and working class communities in the United States have shown us, neither the violence and coercion of state repression nor the possibility of autonomous struggle is limited to Mexico and countries considered the global “south.” Our decision to choose a battlefield of struggle where we can construct our own autonomy is not a question of solidarity but of our own survival and dignity. That is, for most in the United States, health, well-being, and survival are increasingly difficult to secure without self-determined and self-sustaining systems. For others, depending on where we are positioned in the hierarchy of races, classes, and genders, lack of autonomy may not mean lack of food, but without our own struggle we can watch the destruction from the window of our stunted subjectivities, from the enslaved safety of our house on the hill, but we will never be able to go outside and create the world as we want it.
[photo: the El Kilombo space and community center, Durham, North Carolina.]
In this sense, as we declare in our explanation of why we chose “Kilombo” as our name, and as we have learned from the Kilombos, Palenques, and Maroon societies of history as well as the Zapatistas and other autonomous initiatives, in Argentina and Bolivia for example, of today, “an effective warfare against our captors is the one we wage on a daily basis with our hands and tools to create what has yet to be, and not the one limited to tanks, guns, and bullets directed at the destruction of what has already been.”

Welcome to the El Kilombo Intergalactico blogspot. Join us (here via comments section) in a project of creation.

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