by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Apr 10, 2018 | Strategy & Analysis
by Max Wilbert / Deep Green Resistance
“Deep down, every liberationist is an optimist.” – Steve Biko
Steve Biko was a South African anti-apartheid activist and organizer who was murdered by the secret police in 1978. He was 32 years old when he was tortured and beaten, resulting in his death. “I Write What I Like” is a collection of writing by Biko and includes some commentary.
The collection is defined by radicalism. Biko was a believer in the mantra that freedom cannot be given, only taken. In this idea lies the core of why the liberal solution to South African apartheid remained incomplete, resulting in a highly unequal, racialized capitalist society. This is the difference between “equality” under the law and true liberation.
Biko understood that racism and apartheid were not simply technical problems. “One needs to understand the basics before setting up a remedy,” he writes. “A number of organizations now currently ‘fighting against apartheid’ are working on an oversimplified premise. They have taken a brief look at what is, and have diagnosed the problem incorrectly. They have almost completely forgotten about the side effects and have not even considered the root cause. Hence whatever is improved as a remedy will hardly cure the condition.”
Biko’s philosophy of Black Consciousness was built on undermining both the political structures that upheld apartheid as well as the internalized inferiority and superiority that still characterize race relations in many locations worldwide. He rejected integration for its own sake, recognizing that mainstream integration ideas are “white man’s integration—an integration based on exploitative values. It is an integration in which black will compete with black, using each other as rungs up a step ladder leading them to white values… these are the concepts which the Black Consciousness approach wishes to eradicate from the black man’s [sic] mind before our society is driven to chaos by irresponsible people from Coca-Cola and hamburger cultural backgrounds.”
He aimed to uphold African cultural values as important, writing “The easiness with which Africans communicate with each other is not forced by authority but is inherent in the make-up of African people… this is a manifestation of the interrelationship between man and man [sic] in the black world as opposed to the highly impersonal world in which Whitey lives.”
He understood that oppressive systems maintain their power primarily by the consent of the oppressed, which is gained via coercion, psychological tricks, propaganda, fear, and so on.
This is the reason that Biko was confident in the ability of non-violent aboveground political organizing to liberate South Africa. He was not a pacifist, and spoke in favor of the militant organizations (ANC and the PAC) that operated underground during his most active years.
These organizations had limited effectiveness in that context, but Biko strove to forge multi-generational alliances regardless, recognizing the primacy of shared goals. His approach to other groups was “tough, even aggressive language” tempered “with a basically friendly underlying spirit.”
Biko was a leader, but not an authoritarian. He promoted initiative rather than centralization. This proved to be key when many figures within various resistance movements were banned from participation in public life or sent to prison on the remote Robben Island.
He was a highly effective organizer, as one passage from his friend Aelred Stubbs C.R. makes clear. “Although Steve could hold no office in BPC because of his banning order he was constantly being consulted. It was amazing how much he knew… more than once he warned me not to get too close to certain people, white or black, whose contacts were less than desirable. He was always right. He never spoke against anyone if he could possibly help it. Even when he did, it was always in a particular context… There was this fierce integrity about them all. If you were with them you were in, and everything was given and taken. If in any way you were furthering your own ends, or trying to run with the hare and hunt with the hounds, you were out.”
Biko, like all historical figures, was no saint. His behavior was frequently sexist, and he derided feminism as an irrelevance—not an uncommon attitude at the time (or today), but inexcusable in someone fighting for justice. Like with other historical figures, we can learn from his weaknesses as well as his strength. In 2018, those lessons are still as relevant as ever.
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Mar 10, 2018 | Women & Radical Feminism
Featured image: The International Coalition Against Human Trafficking
by Max Wilbert / Deep Green Resistance
“Feminism is the struggle to end sexist oppression. Therefore, it is necessarily a struggle to eradicate the ideology of domination that permeates Western culture on various levels, as well as a commitment to reorganizing society so that the self-development of people can take precedence over imperialism, economic expansion, and material desires.” – bell hooks
Last weekend, I was tabling for Deep Green Resistance at an environmental conference. A young man, who looked to be in his early 20’s, came up to the table. I approached him and asked if I could answer any questions.
He pointed at the sticker on the table: “Patriarchy + Capitalism = Pornography.” With a sneer he asked, “Do you really believe that?”
I told him I did. “So are you a SWERF,” he asked, using a common acronym for sex-worker exclusionary radical feminist. “What about agency?”
What an insane thing for a leftist to ask! Would anyone say that I’m “denying the agency of U.S. soldiers” because I oppose US imperialism? Would anyone say that I’m “excluding McDonald’s workers” because I oppose capitalism and the fast food industry?
Of course not. These arguments are self-evidently bullshit. It’s possible (and I can’t believe I have to say this) to oppose larger systems while still having sympathy, and even acting in solidarity, with those who are trapped inside those systems. And just because some women “choose” and “enjoy” working in pornography and prostitution doesn’t mean that we can’t critique the industry—and even critique these women for choices that have harmful effects on others.
The fact that a member of an oppressed class chooses to participate in the oppressive system doesn’t mean their choice can’t be criticized. After all, as the wonderful anti-porn activist Gail Dines has said, “Systems of oppression are flexible enough to absorb some members of subordinated groups; indeed, they draw strength from the illusion of neutrality provided by these exceptions.”
So why does this young white man believe that when it comes to pornography, “agency” is more important than the real, material impacts of the porn industry?
What I explained to the young man is that mass media and culture shapes the way we think. This has been a fundamental understanding of the left for decades. We can call it manufacturing consent, propaganda, or cultural hegemony.
Advertising works. Propaganda works. That’s why they use it.
That’s why Arundhati Roy, writing about right-wing police forces battling indigenous land defenders in rural India, quotes the superintendent of police chief as saying, “See Ma’am, frankly speaking this problem [sic] can’t be solved by us police or military. The problem with these tribals is they don’t understand greed. Unless they become greedy there’s no hope for us. I have told my boss: remove the force and instead put a TV in every home. Everything will be automatically sorted out.”
Take the same approach and apply it to patriarchy, and you’ll have the last 50 years of this culture: pornography becoming more and more normalized, softcore porn moving into pop culture and social media, and ubiquitous access to demeaning, woman-hating content 24/7 from the device in your pocket.
The pornography industry in the United States is more profitable than Hollywood. It’s also more profitable than the NFL, NBA, and MLB—combined. Porn sites, at any given time, have about 30 million unique visitors watching.
As Sheila Jeffries writes, “Pornography, then, educates the male public. It would be very surprising if it did not.”
Do you really think that getting paid a small amount of money in order to have a strange, smelly man aggressively fuck you is “empowering?”
Here’s the reality: prostituted women are often “physically revolted and hurt by the sex.”
Women who have escaped prostitution have higher rates of PTSD than soldiers who have been in combat.
Read that sentence again.
There are an estimated 40 million people in prostitution worldwide, most of them (more than 80 percent) women and children. Women of color make up a highly disproportionate number of prostituted women. Of the 40 million, 2.5 million are trafficked. In other words, they are sex slaves. The average age of entry to the industry is 13 years old.
Thirteen fucking years old.
But in the face of this violence, the “agency” of a few relatively wealthy “sex workers” who claim to enjoy their jobs is more important.
If we call prostitution a “job” (rather than a form of abuse), it would be by far the most dangerous job in the US, with a murder rate of 204 per 100,000. Even if we don’t call every sex act within the context of prostitution a rape, about 80 percent of prostituted women have been raped, and they are raped an average of 8-10 times per year.
As indigenous feminist Cherry Smiley writes (brilliantly) in the Globe and Mail, “Prostitution, akin to the residential school system, is an institution that continues to have devastating impacts on the lives of aboriginal women and girls, who are disproportionately involved in street-level prostitution. Prostitution is an industry that relies on disparities in power to exist. We can see clearly that women, and especially aboriginal women and girls, are funneled into prostitution as a result of systemic inequalities such as their lack of access to housing, loss of land, culture, and languages, poverty, high rates of male violence, involvement with the foster care system, suicide, criminalization, addiction, and disability. To imagine that prostitution, a system that feeds these inequalities, should be allowed or encouraged, is dangerously misguided and supports the ongoing systemic harms against our women and girls.”
The whole notion of a SWERF is ridiculous. As Jindi Mehat writes, “Supporting an argument that excludes the majority of women in prostitution, while calling the very women who consider the whole picture ‘exclusionary,’ shows how intellectually vapid and hypocritical so-called liberal feminism is. Just like calling support of prostitution, which exposes the most marginalized among us to increased levels of violence and abuse, a feminist position, this isn’t about women’s liberation, it’s about feeling good and progressive and not having to actually change anything…
“Supporting prostitution and screaming ‘SWERF’ at abolitionists isn’t feminism, it’s capitulating to male supremacy and writing marginalized women off as collateral damage. It’s living in a dream world of consequence-free individual choices. It’s refusing to go beyond scratching the surface, and instead hiding behind buzzwords and tepid half-measures while trying to silence women who are willing to dive deep no matter the cost.”
So what do we actually want?
Radical feminists generally advocate for what is called “The Nordic Model,” a legal approach in which the people (almost entirely men) who buy sex are criminalized, and the people (almost entirely women and children) who work in the industry are provided with resources and programs to help them exit the sex trade and build alternative livelihoods.
This approach has been proven to result in positive outcomes. First, it teaches sex buyers (“johns”), who are primarily men, and the broader society, that women are not for sale at any price. Second, it provides support and full decriminalization to those who are prostituted, giving them options to exit the inherently-violent industry.
In my book, that’s not exclusionary, that’s human rights. That’s feminism.
To repost this or other DGR original writings, please contact newsservice@deepgreenresistance.org
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Feb 26, 2018 | Biodiversity & Habitat Destruction
by Max Wilbert / Deep Green Resistance
“One person died and another was badly burned when a gas well exploded here last year,” my friend Adam says, pointing to an oil well set back a hundred yards from the road. We’re on the plains beneath the Front Range in Colorado, where the Rockies meet the flatlands. Oil country. Wells and fracking rigs are everywhere, scattered among the rural homes and inside city limits.
I’m on my way home from volunteering with Buffalo Field Campaign outside Yellowstone National Park, and I’ve stopped in Colorado to see friends and learn more about the fight against fracking that’s going on here.
Adam explains to me that there are thousands of wells in the area, despite widespread opposition. Cities have passed laws against fracking, been sued by industry groups in response, and lost the lawsuits. Democracy is clearly less important than profits in the United States—but that’s no surprise to anyone who is paying attention.
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A few days earlier, Buffalo Field Campaign held the first annual Rosalie Little Thunder memorial walk through Yellowstone National Park.
We walked 8 miles past “the trap” where Yellowstone National Park uses tax money to trap and send to slaughter wild buffalo, past APHIS (Animal and Plant Health Inspection Services) facilities where buffalo are captured, confined and subjected to invasive medical testing and sterilization, and past Beattie Gulch where hunters line up at Yellowstone’s boundary to shoot family groups of buffalo en masse as they walk over the Park’s border. As we walked, I watched two of Rosalie’s sisters holding hands as they walked together in honor of their sister.
Cresting a small rise, we came upon a group of more than a hundred buffalo, grazing and snorting softly to one another. As we approached the herd, indigenous organizer and musician Mignon Geli began to play her flute, accompanied by drums. As if they could sense the whispers from our hearts and the prayers carried in the music, the buffalo began to move south, further into the park and towards safety.
Safe for the moment. But by late March, that entire group may be dead. Yellowstone National Park workers—including biologists—will lure the buffalo into the trap, confine them in the “squeeze chute” for medical testing, and then ship them to slaughter. As I write this, there are about three hundred buffalo who have now been trapped, very likely including the one pictured above.
I’ve never seen a wild buffalo confined in a livestock trailer, but I’m told it’s a horrible thing. Some describe it as a metal coffin on wheels.
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Earlier today, I gave an interview to a radio show. The host asked me about why Deep Green Resistance focuses on social justice issues in addition to saving the planet. My response was to quote my friend, who explained it more concisely than I ever could when she said, “all oppression is tied to resource extraction.”
In other words, racism doesn’t exist just for the hell of it. It was created (and is maintained) to justify the theft of land, the theft of bodies, the theft of lives. Patriarchy isn’t a system set up for fun. It’s designed to extract value from women: free and cheap labor, sexual gratification, and children (the more, the better).
I wrote earlier that protecting the buffalo requires dismantling global systems in addition to local fights. That’s because the destruction of the buffalo today is tied into the same system of “resource” extraction. Buffalo can’t be controlled like cattle, and they eat grass, which makes ranchers angry. The ranching industry exists to extract wealth and food from the land. It does this by stealing grass and land from humans and non-humans, and privatizing it for the benefit of a few.
The story is the same with fracking. The people of the front range are dealing with atrocious air quality and poisoned water. Cancers and birth defects on one hand, and big fat paychecks on the other hand, will be the legacy of the short-lived fracking boom. That, and the destruction of the last open spaces that have been preserved from urban sprawl. No vote or political party can make a difference, both because the two major parties are thoroughly capitalist and fully invested in resource extraction, and because the U.S. constitution is set up to privilege business interests above all other considerations.
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There are differences of opinion at camp. These divides emerge during late night conversations around the woodstove and during long car rides. But looking at the rampant oppression and resource extraction we’re facing, it strikes me that we must remember to stick together. One of my friends says that we must practice radical forgiveness. Another often says that we must learn from how the buffalo take turns breaking trail in deep snow, the strongest taking the longer turns.
On the Rosalie Little Thunder memorial walk, indigenous activist Cheryl Angel spoke about how Rosalie’s fighting spirit lives on in each of us. She made a material change in the world that those of us who live have a duty to carry on.
At BFC, there is a quote from Rosalie that is often mentioned. She said, “Remind yourself every morning, every morning, every morning: ‘I’m going to do something, I’ve made a commitment.’ Not for yourself, but beyond yourself. You belong to the collective. Don’t go wandering off, or you will perish.”
Permaculture and resistance, restoration and direct action, working inside the system and revolutionary action, aboveground and underground—we all must work together to tear down the brutal empire we live within, and to build a new world from the ashes.
To repost this or other DGR original writings, please contact newsservice@deepgreenresistance.org
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Feb 14, 2018 | Biodiversity & Habitat Destruction
Featured image by Buffalo Field Campaign
by Max Wilbert / Deep Green Resistance
Two days ago, three of last wild bison were shot and killed illegally in a no-shooting zone in a campground barely 100 yards from the boundary of Yellowstone National Park.
The next morning, I skied out of the woods with a patrol from Buffalo Field Campaign and found the buffalos’ butchered carcasses; ribcages, stomachs, patches of hide, and a few leftover chunks of flesh parting the slowly flowing water of the Madison River.
I’m not opposed to hunting. In fact, I’m a hunter myself and am looking forward to elk season. The problem is that the Central Herd of the Yellowstone buffalo number less than 700. Their numbers have plummeted in recent years. Park biologists say that the population decline is “unexplained,” but it seems pretty well explained to me: hazing, harassment, human manipulation, and overhunting are driving wild buffalo in Yellowstone to the brink.
I just learned a few minutes ago that the other major threat (besides unsustainable overhunting) to wild buffalo in the greater Yellowstone area is nearly ready to begin operation. Yellowstone National Park is opening their buffalo trap on the north side of the park in the Gardiner Basin. At this facility, your tax dollars and your public lands are put to work to trap and ship to slaughter hundreds of wild buffalo each year in an effort to maintain populations at an artificially low “minimum sustainable number.” All this is being done on behalf of Montana’s infamous livestock industry.
The total buffalo population is less than 4700, and the U.S. government and legally permitted overhunting is killing hundreds per year.
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Here at Buffalo Field Campaign, everything revolves around the buffalo. Patrols leave every morning and afternoon to keep tabs on herds and hunting activity. Another group monitors the trap and firing-line style hunting at Gardiner. We gather each evening to discuss the day’s activity and share information on where the buffalo are, how many are located in which areas, which direction they are moving, what patrols to do the next day, and so on.
On bad days, we share information on how many were killed.
We bear witness to these atrocities and organize to stop them under a buffalo skull mounted on the wall and a shrine of artwork, poems, quilts, and other items dedicated to or inspired by the buffalo. As I write this, I can look up and see artwork from kids. “I heart buffalo – Tatanka roam free!” “Don’t kill the buffalo!” “I love buffalos.”
The headquarters of Buffalo Field Campaign is located in a 100-year-old cabin that was originally built for railroad workers. The irony that a building originally constructed by one of the prime instruments of western colonization is now being used to house a resistance movement isn’t lost on us.
But the walls are thick and the old stonework throws heat from the big wood stove nicely. This is a good place now. A 20-year spirit of resistance emanates from the patina on the lodgepole pine walls and the hearts of the people moving through the space. It’s practical, too. We’re close to the areas where hunting and hazing pressure is highest, and having a place to warm up, eat a delicious meal (fresh 20-inch trout and wild rice last night), and sleep soundly is important after a day out skiing in 5-degree temperatures.
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Sitting around camp this afternoon after returning from patrol with a few friends, we talked about how the dominant culture is killing everything. Prairie Dogs are being poisoned en masse in Colorado (and elsewhere). Pinyon-Juniper forests are being bulldozed into oblivion. The oceans, the watery womb of all life on this planet, are dying.
Places like Buffalo Field Campaign provide a starting point for building effective resistance. Long-term, grassroots projects based on non-compromising defense and material support are essential. And organizations allow for enough resources to be gathered in one place to be more effective.
In an article titled, “Once, the Monsoon,” my friend Suprabha Seshan writes about her work in plant conservation in the Western Ghat mountains in India. She writes of the breathtaking beauty of her home, “where a small team of dedicated ecosystem gardeners, skilled in various aspects of horticulture, plant conservation and Western Ghat ecology, grow native plants of this mountain ecosystem, or biome, through techniques honed over four decades of experimentation and practice.
“The trails are full of jackfruit (Artocarpus heterophyllus) and smashed, partly-eaten remains of its relative, the ainili (Artocarpus hirsutus), which sports smaller orange fruits with a spiny skin enclosing lobes of sweet flesh and large seeds. Wild jamuns and mangoes, rose apples, guavas and sweet limes, and dozens of forest tree species are also fruiting. Bonnet macaques, Nilgiri langurs, Malabar grey hornbills and giant squirrels are gorging in the canopy. Someone reported seeing a troop of lion-tailed macaques with babies. It is feasting time for everybody in this valley: wild boar, humans and cattle included. Elephants come by at night, attracted from afar by the smell of overripe jackfruit—to them, a delicacy.”
Her team cultivates more than 2,000 species of highly endangered plants, “mostly from areas that have already been deforested.” She describes their work as a search-and-rescue mission, writing that “we refer to these plants as refugees, similar to human refugees suffering the depredations of war, displacement, climate change and general toxification of the environment.”
The monsoon that brings life-giving rain to the Western Ghat mountains is failing because of global warming. Rains are coming late or not at all. All the beings that are dependent on the monsoon, including humans, are at risk of total collapse because industrial civilization is destroying the Earth’s climate. The heroic work being done at the Gurukula Botanical Sanctuary could be undone by the collapse of the biosphere as a whole. Suprabha concludes her article by saying that we need to be asking where our loyalty lies: with “the machines or the monsoon?”
Here with the buffalo, the same questions are occurring to me. The heroic work of defending the buffalo is absolutely essential, and unless the death march of this culture is stopped, the buffalo are headed for the same extinction that faces us, too.
I want a world in which wild buffalo roam 60 million strong and in which the monsoon brings rivers of rain to the Western Ghat mountains. This will require working with organizations like the Buffalo Field Campaign and the Gurukula Botanical Sanctuary, and it will also require dismantling the larger systems that are killing the planet.
Without both approaches—fighting for the local, and dismantling the global—we, and the buffalo, and the monsoon, are doomed.
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Feb 12, 2018 | Biodiversity & Habitat Destruction
by Max Wilbert / Deep Green Resistance
This morning, I spent four hours lost in an industrial neighborhood in Pocatello, Idaho. I was carrying two bags and a box full of food—altogether about 70 or 80 pounds—the wind was howling through the flat grey morning, and I must have covered five miles before I found the coffee shop that I’m sitting in right now.
Explaining why I am here requires that we go back almost 200 years. By the mid-1800’s, the U.S. empire was growing rapidly and expanding west. As guns and horses spread across the Great Plains, bison herds began to fall to hunters and settler-colonists in need of hides. At the same time, industrialism was expanding. Factories used buffalo leather straps as a strong yet elastic material to drive belts on their machines, which means that the bison were literally killed to drive machines.
By the year 1902, there were only 23 bison alive on this continent who took refuge in Pelican Valley in what is now Yellowstone National Park. This means that between 30 and 60 million had been killed in less than 100 years, most of them in less than 20 years. That’s a survival rate of less than one in ten million, or 0.0000007 percent.
The removal of the bison allowed cattle ranching to expand and allowed the U.S. army to force the powerful plains nations onto reservations. The removal of the native nations to reservations via a series of concentration camps allowed settlers to move in.
Over time, with the establishment of Yellowstone National Park and surrounding wilderness areas, the last 23 bison were able to expand their populations. Today, there are around 4,700 bison in the Yellowstone area who are direct descendants of those final 23 survivors.
At this point, you might be forgiven for thinking that as a society, we’ve learned better, and now we protect wild buffalo—especially within Yellowstone. The reality is the opposite. Over the past 33 years, government agencies including the National Parks Service and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service have used our tax dollars to kill more than 10,000 wild bison in and around Yellowstone. In service of livestock interests, Yellowstone National Park has, in the words of my friend Stephany Seay, “more wild buffalo blood on their hands than anyone since the 19th century.”
Today the U.S. Government continues its 200-year-old war against the bison by herding, baiting, and hazing them into a trap located on the North Side of Yellowstone National Park. Here, they are kept for months, subjected to invasive medical procedures (including sterilization experiments), and then murdered. In the past few months, 169 bison have been killed (and counting).
The justification for this slaughter is misguided “management plans” which are heavily influenced—written, more or less—by the ranching industry lobbyists. As was true in the 1800’s, cattle reign supreme in Montana today, and bison pay the price. Idaho is the same. They have a “zero tolerance policy,” which means that any buffalo who enter Idaho are tracked down and killed.
Just so we’re clear, this slaughter is preventing the Yellowstone bison herds from naturally expanding their population into suitable habitat in adjacent National Forests. There is enough land and food and water for the bison, but the cattle barons want all of it
I’ve written and said many times before that we’re living in a war, and that the dominant culture (capitalism, industrialism, civilization, whatever you want to call it) is destroying the planet.
Most people in this culture don’t acknowledge this war, and as the saying goes, “silence is complicity.” Once you understand this war, continuing to stand aside is a betrayal to the planet. There are, however, thousands of people around the world who do acknowledge that this is a brutal war, and that we need to fight back.
These people include the organizers of Buffalo Field Campaign. Buffalo Field Campaign is a grassroots campaign that was founded by Lakota activist Rosalie Little Thunder and activist videography Mike Maese in the winter of 1996-7, when more than a thousand bison were slaughtered by the National Parks Service and Montana Department of Livestock.
Over the intervening 21 years, Buffalo Field Campaign has worked through advocacy, whistleblowing, lawsuits, and direct action to protect the last remaining wild bison in Yellowstone.
I’m on my way right now to Yellowstone. I don’t have a car to travel with, so I rented a one-way vehicle to Pocatello, where another group of friends will pick me up. There are seven or eight of us converging on Yellowstone to express our solidarity, bring donations and supplies, and join in the fight to protect bison.
I’ve often heard the saying that the life of a soldier is 99 percent waiting, and one percent overwhelming terror. In my experience, the life of a revolutionary organizer in the modern world is much the same. We need to prepare, write, organize, build our groups and political consciousness, and gain more resistance skills. Much of this work is boring, dangerous, or downright exhausting.
This morning, after driving through the day yesterday and sleeping on a friend’s grandmother’s couch (thanks for the bag lunch, Lois!), I woke up before 6, jumped in the car, and drove the middle leg of my trip. After dropping the rental car in a tiny, dingy office in the middle of an industrial park covered in trash and tumbleweeds, I had two options: sit awkwardly in the corner for a few hours, or shoulder all my bags, zip up my down jacket, grab my food box, and push open the squealing front door, and try to find my ways sans-GPS to a coffeeshop to get some writing done.
That’s why I was lost on the streets of Pocatello, Idaho this morning.
