By Matt Rendell
This story weaves the indigenous cultural revival of the Muysca people of Suba in Colombia, together with the transition to more sustainable living. It is contributed by award-winning author Matt Rendell who spoke with Muysca social activists and grew to know the community through his work as a cycling journalist in the riding obsessed country, and the elite cyclist, Nairo Quintana, who is probably the best known international Muysca advocate.
As the climate emergency bites, sustainable new social and cultural practices are urgently needed. Lasting change may require not just temporary good intentions, but permanently reconfigured identities. Around the world, groups are already working hard on such a project. On a steep hillside in an area called Suba above Bogotá, the capital of Colombia, a new group of Colombians are claiming ancestry from the ancient Muysca people – indigenous people whose land this was when the Spanish invaded in the 1530s – and proposing a complete regeneration of their culture. They intend to restore the language and return the landscape to its previous mystical role, bringing what remains from history alive with new myths and rituals. The group believes it has much to teach the rest of the world about understanding how we are all indigenous people with a need to connect to shared places, traditions, and rituals.
The Cabildo Indígena Muysca de Suba – the local organisation spearheading the Muysca revival – has its centre in the town square, where traditional crafts such as weaving are taught, and the beautiful fabrics produced are used to raise money for the project. This small but ambitious organisation is trying to reverse the identity loss caused by urbanisation through restoring the Muysca collective memory. Its leader, anthropologist Jorge Yopasa, explains how much of the knowledge is still available:
“We read what the anthropologists say, and the historians and archaeologists, but we also talk to our grandparents. Oral history yields surprising results. What the anthropologists say they were doing in 1680, our grandparents remember doing in 1960 or 1970.”
Numerous small vegetable plots form urban gardens across the slopes, alongside traditional round houses with conical roofs, traditionally made with wood, clay and reed, but now often made from recycled materials. These houses face East in memory of how, in pre-Columbian times, such dwellings might be arranged in large enclosures in the form of a vast cosmological clock. The East and West-facing doors turned the buildings themselves into a three-dimensional calendar detecting equinoxes and solstices. The people who live here are researching their own indigenous history, re-planting their traditional foods – such as quinoa – and reclaiming and cleaning up what they see as their land. This is an environmental, social, and spiritual effort. They wish to reverse what they see as the erosion of the spiritual dimension that came with urbanisation. They hope to undo the negative, impoverishing impact of science and Enlightenment thinking that the sociologist Max Weber described in his famous expression, “the disenchantment of the world.”
The Muysca have already been under attack for hundreds of years. But Muysca quinoa and the Muysca language are on their way back, and linguists are using old, colonial dictionaries, and surviving, closely-related languages, to revive the old tongue. Nearly five centuries after the Spanish conquest, the Muysca revival is real.
Credit: “Quinoa” by RahelSharon (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
Wider relevance
Protecting the world’s indigenous inhabitants has been shown to be an effective way of safeguarding the natural world – particularly if knowledge held by the older generations can be saved in time to be passed on. Awareness of this is growing slowly and there are currently active campaigns by indigenous peoples to support elders whose intimate knowledge of the Amazon is threatened by Covid-19. But there is another indigenous group that are often forgotten: the original dwellers in the spaces now occupied by the world’s cities, dispossessed by modern development of their land and culture, and only now rediscovering and reviving their cultural specificity as a spiritual, environmental, anti-consumerist cultural force for good.
Modern urban sprawl has taken over indigenous territories all over the Americas, Africa, and Asia. Only now are they beginning to reconstruct their identities, and build, as they do so, a new way of working-class urban existence that encompasses and absorbs youth culture, environmentalism, the rejection of consumerism, and the re-spiritualisation of the cosmos. The modern Muysca call this “el proceso” – the process.
Of course, the Muysca are a small group who are unlikely to be able to shift national policy. But openness to their culture could bring with it an understanding of other ways of being in the world. For example, the pre-Columbian system worked on gift-exchange rather than currency. And before the arrival of the European invaders, gold was not used as currency of exchange, but as a means of communicating with the gods. It was mixed with copper, moulded into shining religious figurines called tunjos and, within hours of production by the Muysca metalworkers, buried in the earth or dropped into lakes in a passion play of the visible and the invisible. The urban Muysca today are not rich in gold as their ancestors were. In fact, they lie right at the base of Colombia’s social pyramid. But their decision to take an active role in retelling their own history is interesting. Today, the Muysca elaborate new stories of their ancestral past, integrating, revising, and occasionally forgetting ‘official’ versions imposed by representatives of the State.
Context and background
After years of urban expansion, during which Bogotá engulfed the remaining of the Muysca people, it finally annexed Suba in 1954. By then, much of their identity had been forgotten. But, according to the academic Pablo Felipe Gómez, who has spent twenty years studying the urban Muysca movement, “Most of these elders never recognised that they were Muysca. Their identity lay dormant in the memory because of the historical processes that had overwhelmed them. No one ever told them that they were indigenous!”
When Carlos Caita, the first governor of the Suba cabildo or indigenous council, began studying land titles in the 1980s, he realised that they went back as far as the abolition of indigenous reserves and collective indigenous property in 1875, when the land had been distributed among five resident Muysca families. After its annexation by Bogotá, the families who had not sold their lands were dispossessed by unscrupulous surveyors and lawyers, and the Muysca, bereft of both language and traditions, disappeared into a historical dead-end as manual labourers or caretakers of other people’s property.
Credit: “Bogota, Colombia” by szeke (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
In 1990 descendants of the five families resident on the nineteenth-century Muysca reservation began legal proceedings to recover their lost estates. In 1991 Colombia adopted a new Constitution that undertook to recognise and protect its ethnic and cultural diversity. Under the framework established by this new Constitution, the Ministry of the Interior gave the group of five families its blessing, thereby transforming it into the first urban Muysca community. Before long, the descendants of peoples expunged from history centuries before began to assert their indigenous identity. Between 1991 and 2006, four Muysca councils were given state recognition and Muysca was one of 101 ethnic identities listed in the 2005 national census. However, since 2006, the State has refused to certify further groups, perhaps seeing that the community in Suba had tripled its membership in a decade, and that new organisations were emerging. The rebuilding of their cultures proposed by these groups, reviving ancient myths, rituals and elaborating new ones, also meant bringing back their language, which was forbidden in 1770 by royal decree, when Spanish became the dominant language for social, religious, economic, and political reasons.
Enabling factors
Leaders who are inquisitive about the past and about culture – in this case anthropologists – undoubtedly helped the transition, along with some favourable legislation in the form of a Constitution that was trying to renew itself in order to include formerly excluded people. This interest in the past includes the chronicles of the Conquest, which contain accounts of Muysca legends taken down by the priests who accompanied the Conquistadors. These have been scoured to identify possible sources from which to shape a modern Muysca culture. However, to renew a culture and reconnect it with the land, detailed knowledge from the past plus a generous dose of imagination to fill in the missing gaps has enabled the Muysca people to rebuild – and to regenerate when rebuilding is no longer possible.
The local food illustrates this process. The area’s name Suba means “quinoa seed.” The Conquistadors long ago replaced quinoa, a Muysca staple, with wheat. But the old ways, once outmoded, have a way of coming back, and local people are beginning to grow vegetables and medicinal plants of spiritual significance to the Muysca. These include sweetcorn, potatoes, coriander, uchuva – known in the UK as physalis and in North America as golden berry – and, of course, quinoa, which has taken the better part of five hundred years to become the latest superfood. There are other examples of how modern life rejects the past, stigmatises it, then rediscovers it with a premium price tag attached. For example, the crop hemp, once enormously important in Europe for making rope, clothing and a huge range of materials, has returned after decades in the wastebin as an alternative, more sustainable crop for making designer clothing and as an insulator in eco-builds.
Perhaps the extreme poverty of Colombian urban life for many has turned people elsewhere to look for a better kind of life – particularly with the knowledge that it was not always this way. Young Muysca talk about how their grandparents used to eat trout from the Bogotá River. To do so today would be unthinkable: millions of gallons of industrial chemicals, farm run-off, household detergents and human waste drain unfiltered into it, while it has become a sewer to Bogotá’s 8 million inhabitants, and for hundreds of thousands more along its basin. The river has become so toxic that inspectors require oxygen masks and special clothing. The Muyscas are part of the environmental movement pressing for a clean-up. Many are active in public and development policy, fighting to save the environment. These people recognise how urban life separates economic life from nature and separates people from their spiritual selves; they want to create a new way of urban living that will not destroy the planet. This is something we have seen in other places, from London’s National Park City movement to efforts to pedestrianise cities and grow food in cities.
Editor’s note: We are no Marxists, but we find it important to look at history from the perspective of the usual people, the peasants, and the poor, since liberal historians tend to follow the narrative of endless progress and neglect all the violence and injustice this “progress” was and is based on.
How 16th century reformers fought privatization of land and capitalist agriculture
Featured image: A 16th Century printing press. Commonwealth views were widely disseminated in books, pamphlets and broadsides.
Capital versus Commons is a series of articles on early capitalism and agriculture in England. It was previously titled ‘Robbing the Soil.’
PART ONE discussed the central role of shared property and common rights to resources in pre-capitalist agriculture. In the 1400s that system began to break down, beginning the transition from feudalism to capitalism
PART TWO discussed the processes known as ‘enclosure.’ In the late 1400s, landlords began evicting small tenant farmers to increase profits, often by creating large sheep farms. In the 1530s that change was intensified when Henry VIII seized the church’s vast lands and sold them to investors who raised rents and imposed shorter leases. The twin transformations that Marx called primitive accumulation — stolen land becoming capital and landless producers becoming wage workers — were well underway when thousands of peasants rebelled against the changes in 1549.
PART THREEdiscusses the protestant reformers who opposed the growing drive for privatization of land in the mid-1500s.
by Ian Angus
“I must needs threaten everlasting damnation unto them, whether they be gentlemen or whatsoever they be, which never cease to join house to house, and land to land, as though they alone ought to purchase and inhabit the earth.”—Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury, 1550[1]
“Accumulate, accumulate! That is Moses and the prophets!”—Karl Marx, 1867[2]
The privatization of land has been justly described as “perhaps the weirdest of all undertakings of our ancestors.”[3]
Enclosure — the transformation of common resources into private property — was a fundamental feature of the rise of capitalism in early modern England. It involved not only new ways of using the land, but also, as both cause and effect, new ways of thinking about it.
The idea that individuals could claim exclusive ownership of parts of nature on which all humans depend was very weird indeed. Contrary to the oft-expressed view that greed is inherent in human nature, the shift from commons-based to private-profit-based farming was not accepted easily — in fact, it was denounced and resisted as an assault of the laws of God and the needs of humanity.
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Henry VIII died in 1547, succeeded as king by Edward VI, then only nine years old. For the next six years, actual political power rested with a regency council, headed by the Duke of Somerset until 1549, and by the Duke of Northumberland from late 1549 until Edward’s death in 1553.
Somerset and Northumberland were strong protestants who wanted the English church to move farther from catholic doctrine and practices than Henry had allowed. To promote that, the law outlawing heresy was repealed and censorship was relaxed, beginning a period that has been called “the first great era in the history of English public discussion.”[4]
Liberal protestants took advantage of that opening to campaign vigorously, not just for religious reform, but against sin and corruption in society at large, particularly the erosion of traditional economic values. Their powerful condemnations of greedy landlords and merchants circulated both as books and sermons addressed to the wealthy, and as inexpensive pamphlets and broadsides that were sold in city streets.
They don’t seem to have acted as an organized group, but their speeches and writings clearly reveal the presence of a strong current of anti-capitalist opinion in England in the mid-1500s. Because they focused on the common weal — common good — historians have labelled them the commonwealth men.
Cormorants and greedy gulls
R.H. Tawney’s 1926 book Religion and the Rise of Capitalism remains the best account of the complex connections between social and religious criticism in Tudor England.
“It was an age in which the popular hatred of the encloser and the engrosser found a natural ally in religious sentiment, schooled, as it was, in a tradition which had taught that the greed of gain was a deadly sin, and that the plea of economic self-interest did not mitigate the verdict, but aggravated the offence.
“In England, as on the Continent, doctrinal radicalism marched hand in hand with social conservatism. The most scathing attack on social disorders came, not from the partisans of the old religion, but from divines on the left wing of the Protestant party, who saw in economic individualism but another expression of the laxity and licence which had degraded the purity of religion, and who understood by reformation a return to the moral austerity of the primitive Church, no less than to its government and doctrine.”[5]
The great sin they condemned was covetousness — the desire to accumulate ever more wealth. Hugh Latimer, the most popular preacher of the day, condemned landlords’ greed in general, and enclosure in particular, in a sermon preached before the King and other worthies.
“You landlords, you rent-raisers, I may say you step-lords, you unnatural lords, you have for your possessions yearly too much. For what here before went for twenty or forty pound by year, (which is an honest portion to be had gratis in one lordship of another man’s sweat and labour) now is let for fifty or an hundred pound by year. … Too much, which these rich men have, causes such dearth, that poor men, which live of their labour, cannot with the sweat of their face have a living …
“These graziers, enclosers and rent-raisers, are hinderers of the King’s honour. For where as have been a great many householders and inhabitants there is now but a shepherd and his dog.”[6]
Those views found support in the country’s top ruling circles. The Book of Private Prayer, prepared by Archbishop Cranmer and other officials of the established church in 1553, included a prayer “For Landlords.”
“We heartily pray Thee to send Thy Holy Spirit into the hearts of those that possess the grounds and pastures of the earth, that they remembering themselves to be Thy tenants may not rack nor stretch out the rents of their lands, nor yet take unreasonable fines. … Give them grace also … that they … may be content with that which is sufficient and not join house to house and land to land, to the impoverishment of others, but so behave themselves in letting out their lands, tenements and pastures that after this life they may be received into everlasting dwelling places.”[7]
One of the most vehement critics of greed and exploitation was the London-based printer and poet Robert Crowley, who offered this explanation for the 1549 peasant rebellions.
“If I should demand of the poor man of the country what thing he thinks to be the cause of Sedition, I know his answer. He would tell me that the great farmers, the graziers, the rich butchers, the men of law, the merchants, the gentlemen, the knights, the lords, and I can not tell who; men that have no name because they are doers of all things that any gain hangs upon. Men without conscience. Men utterly devoid of God’s fear. Yea, men that live as though there were no God at all! Men that would have all in their own hands; men that would leave nothing for others; men that would be alone on the earth; men that be never satisfied.
“Cormorants, greedy gulls; yea, men that would eat up men, women, & children, are the causes of Sedition! They take our houses over our heads, they buy our lands out of our hands, they raise our rents, they levy great (yea unreasonable) fines, they enclose our commons! No custom, no law or statute can keep them from oppressing us in such sort, that we know not which way to turn so as to live.”[8]
Condemning “lease mongers that cancel leases on land in order to lease it again for double or triple the rent,” Crowley argued that landlords should “consider themselves to be but stewards, and not Lords over their possessions.”
“But so long as this persuasion sticks in their minds — ‘It is my own; who shall stop me from doing as I like with my own as I wish?’ — it shall not be possible to have any redress at all. For if I may do with my own as I wish, then I may suffer my brother, his wife, and his children toil in the street, unless he will give me more rent for my house than he shall ever be able to pay. Then may I take his goods for that he owes me, and keep his body in prison, turning out his wife and children to perish, if God will not move some man’s heart to pity them, and yet keep my coffers full of gold and silver.”[9]
Back to the feudal
While no one can doubt the sincerity of their criticism of the rich, the commonwealth men were also “united in denouncing the rebels, whose sin could never be justified even if their grievances could.”[10]
The Archbishop of Canterbury, whose denunciation of wealth accumulation is quoted at the beginning of this article, also, in the same sermon, condemned “unlawful assemblies and tumults,” and people who “confound all things upsy down with seditious uproars and unquietness.” “God in his scriptures expressly forbids all private revenging, and had made this order in commonwealths, that there should be kings and governors to whom he has willed all men to be subject and obedient.”[11]
Speaking of the 1549 rebellions, Latimer declared that “all ireful, rebellious persons, all quarrelers and wranglers, all blood-shedders, do the will of the devil, and not God’s will.” Disobedience to one’s superiors was a major sin, even if the superiors were themselves violating God’s laws. “What laws soever they make as concerning outward things we ought to obey, and in no wise to rebel, although they be never so hard, noisome and hurtful.”[12]
Immediately after condemning landlords as cormorants and greedy gulls, Crowley told the 1549 rebels that they had been misled by the devil: “to revenge wrongs is, in a subject, to take an usurp the office of a king, and, consequently, the office of God.” The poor should suffer in silence, awaiting royal or divine intervention.
Like the nineteenth century “feudal socialists” who Marx and Engels criticized three centuries later, the commonwealth men were literally reactionary — they wanted “to roll back the wheel of history.” “From the ills of present-day society this group draws the conclusion that feudal and patriarchal society should be restored because it was free from these ills.”[13]
As historian Michael Bush says, the commonwealth men “showed concern for the poor, but accepted the need for poverty.”
“Without exception they subscribed to the traditional ideal of the state as a body politic in which every social group had its place, function and desert. … They pleaded with rulers to reform society, and proposed various means, but not by changing its structure. Their thinking was paternalistic and conservative. Although they censured the nobility, it was for malpractices, not for being ruling class.”[14]
English protestant reformers in the mid-1500s “inherited the social idea of medieval Christianity pretty much in its entirety,” so their views were “especially antithetical to the acquisitive spirit that animated the emerging society of capitalism.”[15]
In the 1500s, Tawney wrote, “the new economic realities came into sharp collision with the social theory inherited from the Middle Ages.”[16] What shocked and frightened the commonwealth men was not just poverty, but the growth of a worldview that repudiated “the principles by which alone, as it seemed, human society is distinguished from a pack of wolves.”
“That creed was that the individual is absolute master of his own, and, within the limits set by positive law, may exploit it with a single eye to his pecuniary advantage, unrestrained by any obligation to postpone his own profit to the well-being of his neighbours, or to give account of his actions to a higher authority.”
The wolf-pack creed they were fighting, Tawney commented ironically, was “the theory of property which was later to be accepted by all civilized communities.”[17]
A Losing Battle
The commonwealth men were eloquent and persuasive, but they were fighting a losing battle. The aristocrats who owned most of England’s farmland and controlled the government could tolerate public criticism and ineffective laws, but not anything that actually threatened their wealth and power. They blamed the 1549 rebellions on the critics, and quickly ousted the Duke of Somerset, the only member of the regency council who seemed to favor enforcing the anti-enclosure laws.
What remained of the commonwealth campaign collapsed after 1553, when the catholic Mary Tudor became queen and launched a vicious reign of terror against protestants. Some 300 “heretics,” including Hugh Latimer and Thomas Cranmer, were burned at the stake, and hundreds more fled to protestant countries on the continent.
Capitalist practices already had a strong foothold in the countryside in the 1540s, and they spread rapidly in the rest of the century, without regard to what Christian preachers might say. “Forms of economic behavior which had appeared novel and aberrant in the 1540s were becoming normalized virtually to the point of being taken for granted.”[18]
For landowners who wanted to preserve their estates, that shift wasn’t a choice. It was forced on them by changes beyond their control.
“Between the beginning of the sixteenth century and 1640 prices, particularly of foodstuffs, rose approximately sixfold. … [This] put an unusual premium energy and adaptability and turned conservatism from a force making for stability into a quick way to economic disaster. Landed families which stuck to the old ways, left rents as they were, and continued to grant long leases soon found themselves trapped between static incomes and rising prices.”[19]
As a result, the trends that Latimer and his co-thinkers opposed actually accelerated, and their vision of a reborn feudal paternalism was replaced in ruling class thought by what historian C.B. MacPherson calls “possessive individualism” — the view that society is a collection of market relations between people who have an absolute right to do as they wish with their property.[20]That view has remained central to all variants of capitalist ideology, down to the present.
Parliament never passed another anti-enclosure bill after 1597, and the Stuart kings who succeeded the Tudors in 1603 only gave lip-service to protecting the poor from enclosure. “Commissions were issued from time to time for the discovery of offenders, but their crimes were pardoned on payment of a money fine. The punishment of enclosers had degenerated into a revenue-raising device and little else.”[21]
As Christopher Hill writes, in the century before the English Revolution, ruling class attitudes toward the land changed radically. “No government after 1640 seriously tried either to prevent enclosures, or even to make money by fining enclosers.”[22]
But only the rich had decided that land privatization was a good idea. The poor continued to resist that weird undertaking, and for some, the objective now was communism.
To be continued …
Notes
I have modernized spelling, and occasionally grammar and vocabulary, in quotations from 16th and 17th century authors.
[1] Thomas Cranmer, “A Sermon on Rebellion,” The Works of Thomas Cranmer, ed. John Edmund Cox (Cambridge University Press, 1846), 196. The date 1550 is approximate.
[2] Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1, (Penguin Books, 1976), 742.
[3] Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (Beacon Press, 2001), 178.
[4] Arthur B. Ferguson, The Articulate Citizen and the English Renaissance (Duke University Press, 1965), xiii.
[5] Richard H. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism: A Historical Study (Angelico Press, 2021 [1926]), 140-41.
[6] Hugh Latimer, “The First Sermon Preached before King Edward, March 8, 1549,” Sermons by Hugh Latimer, (Christian Classics Ethereal Library)
[7] Quoted in Thomas Edward Scruton, Commons and Common Fields (Batoche Books, 2003 [1887]), 81-2.
[8] Robert Crowley, “The Way to Wealth,” The Select Works of Robert Crowley, ed. J.M. Cowper, (Kegan Paul Trench Trubner & Co., 1872), 132-3.
[9] Robert Crowley, “An information and petition against the oppressors of the poor commons of this realm,” The Select Works of Robert Crowley, ed. J.M. Cowper, (Kegan Paul Trench Trubner & Co., 1872), 162, 157.
[10] Catharine Davies, A Religion of the Word: The Defence of the Reformation in the Reign of Edward VI (Manchester Univ. Press, 2002), 159.
[11] Thomas Cranmer, “A Sermon on Rebellion,” The Works of Thomas Cranmer, ed. John Edmund Cox (Cambridge University Press, 1846), 192, 193
[12] Hugh Latimer, “The Fourth Sermon upon the Lord’s Prayer (1552)” Sermons by Hugh Latimer, (Christian Classics Ethereal Library) https://ccel.org/ccel/latimer/sermons/
[13] Karl Marx & Frederick Engels, Collected Works, vol. 6, (International Publishers, 1976) 494, 355.
[14] M. L. Bush, The Government Policy of Protector Somerset (Edward Arnold, 1975), 61.
[15] Arthur B. Ferguson, The Articulate Citizen and the English Renaissance (Duke University Press, 1965), 248.
[16] Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, 135.
[17] Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, 146-7.
[18] Keith Wrightson, Earthly Necessities: Economic Lives in Early Modern Britain (Yale University Press, 2000), 202.
[19] Lawrence Stone, The Crisis of the Aristocracy, 1558-1641 (Oxford University Press, 1965), 188, 189-90.
[20] C. B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (Oxford University Press, 1962).
[21] Joan Thirsk, “Enclosing and Engrossing, 1500-1640,” in Agricultural Change: Policy and Practice 1500-1750, ed. Joan Thirsk (Cambridge University Press, 1990), 67.
[22] Christopher Hill, Reformation to Industrial Revolution (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1968), 51.
This post looks at if it’s possible to have a coherent strategy for the emancipatory transformation of a complex social system, 5 anti-capitalist strategies and revolutionary strategy.
What does ‘emancipatory transformation of a complex social system’ mean? We currently live in a capitalist society or capitalist social system that is not equal, just, democratic or sustainable. Emancipatory means the struggle for political, economic or social rights or equality for disenfranchised groups or sections of society. So this post is focused on thinking about how we think about the route to ending the dominance of capitalism so we live in an alternative society that is equal, just, democratic and sustainable.
Revolutionary and anti-capitalist strategy is a huge topic that will take several posts to explore. This first post aims to start in the broadest way by considering if it’s possible to have a revolutionary and anti-capitalist strategy and reference a useful framework to help understand the different anti-capitalist strategic approaches.
Is it possible to have a coherent strategy for the emancipatory transformation of a complex social system?
In other words, is it possible to create a desirable social transformation (revolution) through deliberate, intentional action? Eric Olin Wright, sociologist and educator who specialised in egalitarian future alternatives to capitalism, explains that there are desirable objectives of social transformation that are not possible, either because they are not viable (won’t work) or because there is no way to get there. Wright describes how Frederick Hayek, the arch-conservative and key advocate of neoliberalism, believed that a social transformation strategy was a fantasy. This is due to the negative unintentional consequences of such a large social engineering project that would overwhelm the intended consequences. Concern for unintentional consequences is valid, and I agree with Wright when he says:
“It remains the case that capitalism is immensely destructive, obstructing the prospects for broad human flourishing. What we need is an understanding of anticapitalist strategies that avoids both the false optimism of wishful thinking and the disabling pessimism that emancipatory social transformation is beyond strategic reach.” [1]
Anti-capitalist strategies
Eric Olin Wright in “How to Be an Anti-capitalist in the 21st Century” describes five ‘strategic logics’: smashing capitalism, dismantling capitalism, taming capitalism, resisting capitalism, escaping capitalism. This framework is a useful starting point for thinking about anti-capitalist and revolutionary strategy. But it is simplistic and I explain where my thinking differs in the last section of this post.
Smashing capitalism
This is the classic revolutionary strategy of seizing state power by force. I call this the vanguard Marxism.
Wright describes its rationale: The system is unreformable and all attempts to make life bearable will fail. Small reforms improve people’s lives when popular movements are strong but these gains are vulnerable to attack and reversible. It is an illusion that capitalism can become a benign social system so ordinary people can live meaningful happy lives. Capitalism needs to be destroyed and an alternative built. The progress of an emancipatory alternative society may be gradual but it requires a decisive rupture with the existing systems of power to get there.
Critiquing this theory, Wright asks how it’s possible for anti-capitalist forces to build enough power to destroy capitalism and replace it with an alternative. He explains that the power of the ruling classes blocks both reformist gains and revolutionary ruptures. He describes how those in the ‘smashing capitalism tradition’ argue that capitalism is a highly contradictory system that is prone to disruptions and crises, and sometimes these crises make capitalism vulnerable to a serious challenge. There is a further argument that these crises increase over time so in the long term capitalism is unsustainable and ‘destroys its own conditions of existence.’ The role of the revolutionary party is therefore to be ready for this situation and lead a mass movement to seize state power. The revolutionary party then works to ‘rapidly refashion the state itself to make it a suitable weapon of ruptual transformation,’ and also to repress the ruling class opposition and destroy their power structures to allow the new revolutionary state to build an alternative economic system.
Wright describes how this strategy was applied several times in the 20th century with some success, but never created a ‘democratic, egalitarian, emancipatory alternative to capitalism.’ This strategy gave people the hope and motivation to make great sacrifices in the pursuit of achieving such as a society, and material conditions were improved for a lot of people. Examples include Russia, China and Cuba. But, “it is one thing to burn down old institutions and social structures; it is quite another to build emancipatory new institutions from the ashes.”
He describes some of the reasons given for the failures of these revolutions: (1) history-specific unfavourable circumstances; (2) revolutions happened in economically backward societies surrounded by enemies; (3) strategic leadership errors; (4) leaders motivated by power and status rather than the well-being of the masses; (5) failure of these revolutions as being inherent to any attempt to radically rupture a social system – too many moving parts, too much complexity and too many unintended consequences.
This is a key point for me: “attempts at system-rupture will inevitably tend to unravel into such chaos that revolutionary elites, regardless of their motives, will be compelled to resort to pervasive violence and repression to sustain social order. Such violence, in turn, destroys the possibility for a genuinely democratic, participatory process of building a new society.” [2]
Wright is clear that he does not believe that ‘system-level ruptures’ work as a strategy for social emancipation.
Dismantling capitalism
Wright describes this as a transition to democratic socialism through state-directed reforms that gradually introduce socialism from above. He sees this strategy as having ‘revolutionary aspirations,’ because it seeks to replace capitalism with a different economic system: socialism. He explains that in this tradition there is no simple point of rupture when one system replaces the other. Instead, “there would be a gradual dismantling of capitalism and the building up of the alternative through the sustained action of the state.” [3]
Wright describes how this approach sees a period when capitalist and socialist relations will coexist, such as both private and state-run banks; private and state enterprises in transportation, utilities, health care and some heavy industry; capitalist labour markets and state employment; state-directed planning for investment decisions and private profit-driven investment.
Wright describes the necessary preconditions for this strategy to be possible. “First, a stable electoral democracy, and second, a broad, mass-based socialist party capable of winning elections and staying in power for a sufficiently long time that these new state-run economic structures could be robustly institutionalized. Of course, there would be opposition and resistance, but the belief was that these state-organized socialist economic institutions would demonstrate their value and thus be able to sustain popular support.” [3]
This strategy had significant support in the 20th century and following World War II, when several governments looked to be implementing this “mixed economy” approach. An example is Sweden. It did not succeed and Wright put this down to the ‘dynamism of capitalism,’ and to the right-wing ideological offensive against socialist ideas in many countries, which, from the 1970s “pushed the expansion of nationalization in mixed economies off the agenda.” He describes the “military overthrow of the democratically elected socialist government in Chile in 1973, along with other setbacks to efforts at democratic socialism, further eroding any belief that democratic elections could offer a reformist path to dismantling capitalism.” By the end of the twentieth century, neoliberalism and privatisation dominated the mainstream political agenda instead of nationalisation, even by large political parties thought to be on the left, such as New Labour in the UK.
Taming capitalism
This tradition sees capitalism as a “source of systemic harms in society,” but does not look to replace it. It wants to reduce and remove those harms. This was the main strategic approach of social-democratic reformist parties since World War II.
Wright describes that although this tradition identities the harms of capitalism, its response is to work on “building counteracting institutions capable of significantly neutralizing these harms.” This tradition does understand that to achieve this, there will need to be political struggles to reduce the power and control of the capitalist class, and that the capitalists will claim that these redistributions will undermine capitalism’s dynamism and incentives. These arguments are self-serving justifications for the privilege and power of the capitalists.
Wright describes two types of reforms: (1) those that stabilise capitalism (such as banking regulation to reduce system-disrupting, speculative risk-taking), and (2) anti-capitalist reforms that introduce egalitarian, democratic and solidaristic values and principles into how capitalism operates. He explains that these anti-capitalist reforms will also likely stabilise capitalism, and that is what makes them partially possible, but also result in the system working in a “less purely capitalist way.”
Wright describes three types of state policies which change the way capitalism operates to reduce the harms and increases egalitarian, democratic and solidaristic values and principles. Mostly these policies benefit capitalists but some benefit ordinary people:
Reduce individual vulnerability to risks through publicly run and funded social insurance or a welfare state.
The provision of public goods – such as basic and higher education, vocational skills training, public transportation, cultural and recreational facilities, research and development – paid for by re-distributional taxation.
Use the State to develop a regulatory framework to reduce the most serious negative externalities caused by capitalist investors and companies, including regulation of pollution, product and workplace hazards, predatory market behaviour, and property and stock market volatility.
Wright states that during the “golden age of capitalism” in the 30 years after World War II, these policies were used to tame capitalism. Since the 1980s these gains have been rolled back under neoliberalism, leading to reduction of social insurance benefits, reduction in taxes and therefore social goods, deregulation of capitalist production and markets, and privatisation of many state services.
He describes the forces that have resulted in a reduction of the state’s ability to limit capitalism’s harms: “The globalization of capitalism has made it much easier for capitalist firms to move investment to places in the world with less regulation and cheaper labor. The threat of such movement of capital, along with a variety of technological and demographic changes, has fragmented and weakened the labor movement, making it less capable of resistance and political mobilizations. Combined with globalization, the financialization of capital has led to massive increases in wealth and income inequality, which in turn has increased the political leverage of opponents of the social democratic state. Instead of being tamed, capitalism has been unleashed.” [4]
Wright raises the question of whether the three decades of the golden age were perhaps a historical anomaly; “a brief period in which favourable structural conditions and robust popular power opened up the possibility for the relative egalitarian, social democratic model.” Before this period capitalism was rapacious, and it has become rapacious again under neoliberalism. He suggests that capitalism is not tamable. I certainly don’t think it is.
Wright concludes the section on taming capitalism with a thoughtful paragraph on how the limits of a state’s ability to raise taxes, regulate capitalism and redistribute wealth are based on people’s belief that globalisation imposes powerful constraints. But, he argues, it’s the willingness of voters to be taxed more that is the main factor, not if the capitalists move their capital to avoid taxation. The willingness of the electorate to be taxed depends on the general level of collective solidarity. He maintains that the “limits of possibility are always in part created by beliefs in those limits.” He explains that neoliberalism is an ideology backed by powerful political and economic forces and it is possible to break through the limits set by neoliberalism if there is collective will to do so. He argues that social democratic politics have become less effective and need rethinking, and that the political obstacles to their success are significant, but that it is still possible for the harm of capitalism to be reduced by state action.
Resisting capitalism
Wright explains that ‘resisting capitalism’ could be a broad term for anti-capitalist struggles. Here, he is using it in a narrower sense to identify struggles to end capitalism from outside the state and parliamentary politics, and also that do not want to gain state power. This strategy is different from the previous three that were all aiming to gain and use state power.
This tradition aims to reduce the harms of capitalism by influencing the behaviour of capitalists and political elites through protest and campaigning: “We may not be able to transform capitalism, but we can defend ourselves from its harms by causing trouble, protesting and raising the cost to elites of their actions.” (p50) He lists some examples: “environmentalists protesting toxic dumps and environmentally destructive developments; consumer movements that organize boycotts of predatory corporations; activist lawyers who defend the rights of immigrants, the poor, and sexual minorities. It is also the basic strategic logic of unions that organize strikes for better pay and working conditions.” [5]
Wright sees resisting capitalism as the most common response to the harms caused by the capitalist system. It is based on civil society and the solidarities that exist in workplaces and the community. Different identities play a part in this approach including class, ethnicity, religion, race, gender, sexuality. Its most organised forms are social movements and trade unions. Even when unions are weak, workers can resist exploitation by withholding their maximum effort and diligence.
Escaping capitalism
Wright explains that this may not have been developed into a systematic anti-capitalist ideology, but it does have a ‘coherent logic’, which is: Capitalism is too powerful to end. It is unrealistic that collective mass movements will form to dismantle or tame capitalism. The ruling class are too strong to remove and they always co-opt opposition and defend their privileges. Also, social systems are too large and complex to control. The best we can do is insulate ourselves from the worst harms. We may not be able to change the world but can escape the circuits of domination and build a micro-alternative to live better lives.
Wright lists some examples of groups attempting to escape capitalism: migration of poor farmers to the western frontier in the 19th century; utopian self-sufficiency communities in the 19th century; worker cooperatives that are managed collectively based on principles of democracy, solidarity, equality, working to avoid alienation and exploitation of capitalist firms; the hippies of the 1960s; religious communities such as the Amish. He also cites the family unit as a “non-competitive social space of reciprocity and caring in which one can find refuge from the heartless, competitive world of capitalism.”[6]
Wright explains that escaping capitalism involves avoiding political engagement. For some, this is the ‘individualistic lifestyle strategy’, which can be contradictory if this lifestyle is funded by wealth that was gained from capitalist activities.
Intentional communities are a good example of a desire to escape capitalism, as well as being a model for more collective, egalitarian and democratic ways of living. In addition, worker cooperatives are an attempt to escape the oppressive nature of capitalist workplaces, and are a model of how an alternative economy to capitalism could operate so as to challenge the current capitalist economic system.
Revolutionary strategy
When I use the word ‘revolution’, I mean it in a broad way for the ending of capitalism and the creation of an alternative society – radical transformational system change. In the summary above of Wright’s description of the different anti-capitalist strategies, he labels ‘smashing capitalism’ and ‘dismantling capitalism’ as revolutionary. And I would agree.
The anti-capitalist strategy that Wright advocates is a combination of dismantling capitalism, taming capitalism, resisting capitalism and escaping capitalism. He calls it ‘eroding capitalism’ and I’ll describe this in more detail in a future post (reference). I agree with him on this and that we need both revolutionary and reformist approaches.
My understanding of Wright’s perspective is that he believed that we could end capitalism without a rupture. I don’t agree with this. I think we will need to fight for reforms to rebuild the power of the left but at some point, there will need to be a rupture, so that we would go from a mixed economy with socialist and capitalist institutions to one with only socialist/anarchist/communist ones and the end of private property. But at this dark point in history that we currently live, this is hard to imagine.
I don’t support the ‘smashing capitalism’ (vanguard Marxist) strategy for a few reasons. The main one is because although it has shown itself in history to be effective at ending capitalism, there are no examples of it creating egalitarian and democratic societies. In each case, it has involved a militant minority taking power and dominating the majority, and this can only result in repression. I have asked different people that advocate different versions of this strategy (Leninists, Trotskyists, Maoists, Stalinists), how to use this strategy and not end up with things turning repressive and sometimes totalitarian, but I have not got a clear answer. If you do have an answer, I’d love to hear from you.
There is a lot that needs to be unpacked for the ‘dismantling capitalism’ strategy. Wright states it would be a transition to democratic socialism through state-directed reforms that gradually introduce socialism from above and that it would require a broad, mass-based socialist party. Democratic socialism is a broad term which ranges in meaning between political parties led from the top like the Corbyn leadership, and those parties formed from grassroots movements such as Podemos in Spain. I’m not saying that Podemos is the exact model to follow but we can learn from this experiment and municipalist citizen platforms such as Barcelona en Comú. We have seen from the 20th century that big changes happen when the grassroots of labour unions become militant and make radical demands of union leaders and political parties. Social movements campaigning on specific issues have also made gains and reforms have been implemented.
Two revolutionary strategies do not easily fit into Wright’s framework. The first is the council communism tradition of left communism. This Marxist strategy is based on the worker councils or soviets that formed in Russia during the 1917 Russian Revolution. It has elements of smashing capitalism, especially regarding the belief that there would need to be a clear rupture to end capitalism, but that this will be done from the bottom or grassroots, where different workplaces and community institutions are self-organised and working together in a federated governance structure. This worker control approach is anti-state and anti-parliamentary politics meaning that this tradition has elements of Wright’s ‘resisting capitalism’ strategy. Although this tradition does not seek state power, it does see ordinary people creating a federated system of self-government that would replace the state, so has elements of smashing capitalism and resisting capitalism.
The second revolutionary strategy that does not fit into Wright’s framework is anarcho-syndicalism, which has similarities to council communism. It aims to end capitalism, wage slavery and private property. A new society would be built without hierarchy, based on direct-democracy, workers’ self-management and an alternative co-operative economic system. This alternative society would replace the state with a federated structure of self-run workplaces and community institutions.
In future posts, I want to analyze how the left organises itself into social and political movements, by ideology and how groups operate in practice. Then look at the strategies these traditions follow. I also plan to summarise the different radical and revolutionary strategies that thinkers and writers on the left have proposed. After this I will start to explore the situation we find ourselves in and relate this to “Good Strategy Bad Strategy” by Richard Rumelt (read a summary here) and his three-part framework for developing a good strategy. There is:
diagnosis, what is going on here;
guiding policy – outlines an overall approach for overcoming the obstacles highlighted by the diagnosis;
coherent action – this needs to be consistent and coordinated, and also requires making painful choices about what can be achieved with limited resources.
This post looks at what is social change, causes of social change, what is historical change, and theories of social and historical change. This final section of the post includes something on Marxist theories of history.
I looked at theories of change at the social movement and institutional level in previous posts: part 1, part 2, part 3.
What is social change?
Social change is the changes to the social structure and social relationships of society. There is also cultural change. Social changes include changes in age distribution, birth rates, changes in the relationship between workers and employers when there is more union activity. Cultural changes include the invention and popularisation of new technology, new words added to a language, changing concepts of morality, new forms of music and art. They overlap and all important changes include both social and cultural changes. In sociology, ‘sociocultural change’ is used to describe changes of both forms. [1]
The main characteristics of social change include:
social change is universal to all societies
social change happen across a whole community or society, not small groups of individuals
the speed of social change is not uniform within a society
the speed of social change is different in each age or period, it is faster than in the past
social change is an essential law of nature
definite prediction of social change is not possible
social change shows a chain-reaction sequence – on change leads to the next
social change results from the interaction of several factors
social changes generally result in modification or replacement [2]
Causes of social change
There are several causes of social change:
Natural factors such as storms, earthquakes, floods, drought and disease
geographical factors such as availability or national resources and levels of urbanisation
demographic factors such as birth and death rate
socio-economic factors such as levels of industrialisation, market capitalism and bureaucratisation
cultural factors as describes in the section above
science and technology factors
conflict and competition factors such as war and popular movements for change
political and legal power factors such as redistribution of wealth or corporate power
ideas and ideology factors such as religious beliefs, political and economic ideology
diffusion factors which is the rate that populations adopt new goods and services
acculturation which is the modification of the culture of a group due to contact with a different culture [3]
What is historical change?
This is gradual and fast (rupture) transformation change in society. The transition from feudalism to capitalism was a historical, transformation change. So is a transition from capitalism to an alternative – socialism, communism.
Theories of social and historical change
There are four broad theories of social change: evolutionary, cyclical, functionalist, and conflict. And several other theories of historical change.
Evolutionary theories
These are based on the assumption that societies gradually change from simple or basic to more complex. There are three forms.
Linear or unilinear evolution describes the change to be progress to something better, more positive and beneficial to reach higher levels of civilisation. This theory was developed by the early theorists of human society in the 19th century. They believed that each society would pass through a “fixed and limited number of stages in a given sequence.”
Universal evolution is similar to the previous theory but does not view each society going through the same fixed stages of development.
Multilinear evolution has been developed by modern anthropologists. They see the process of social change as flexible, open-ended and not a universal law. They still see societies developing from small-scale to large-scale and complex. These theorists state that change takes place in many different ways and does not follow the same direction in every society. They do not believe that ‘change’ means ‘progress.’ [4]
Cyclical theory
This is also known as process theory and natural cycles. This describes how civilisations go through a process of birth, growth, maturity, decline and death in the same ways as living beings. Then the process is repeated with a new civilisation. [5]
Functionalist theories
These theories focus on social order and stability so some argue this limits their ability to explain social change. These theories ask what function different aspects of society play in maintaining social order. Examples include religion, education, economic institutions and the family. Some see society as at equilibrium and change results in a new equilibrium forming. Changes can come from other societies outside the society or from inside. [6]
Conflict theories
These can be seen as a response to the functionalist theories, that were seen to not have a place for change so could not explain social change. Conflict theorists argue that institutions and practices were maintained by powerful groups. Conflict theorists do not believe that societies evolve to a better place but that conflict is necessary for change and groups must struggle to ensure progress. Conflict theories are influenced by Karl Marx. [7]
Great man theory of history
This is a 19th-century idea that states that history is driven by great men or heroes, who are “highly influential and unique individuals who, due to their natural attributes, such as superior intellect, heroic courage, extraordinary leadership abilities or divine inspiration, have a decisive historical effect.”[8] Recently this concept has been ‘de-gendered’, replacing ‘Great Man’ with ‘Big Beasts’ [9]
Marxist theories of history
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote about and inspired several Marxist theories of historical and social change. See a previous post on Marx’s Marxism.
The materialist conception of history (or Historical materialism), Marx argued that the material conditions of a society’s mode of production (productive force and relations of production) that determine a society’s organisation and development and not ideas or consciousness. ‘Material conditions’ mean the ability for humans to collectively reproduce the necessities of life. [10]
Dialectical materialism can be understood as Marx’s framework for history:
“History develops dialectically, that is to say, by a succession of opposing theses and antitheses followed by their synthesis, which contains part of each original thesis. For Marx, this dialectical process would necessarily be a material one; developments in the substructure of economic life, such as those in production, the division of labor, and technology, all have enormous impact on the superstructure of the political, legal, social, cultural, psychological, and religious dimensions of human society.” [11]
Marx and Engels’ “stages of economic development, or modes of production, build on one another in succession, each brought about by a development in technology and social arrangement” They argued that societies pass through various stages with their own social-economic system – slavery, feudalism, capitalism, communism. Each stage develops because of conflict with the previous one. [12]
Economic determinism states the economic relationships such as being a business owner or worker, are the foundation on which political and societal arrangements in society are based. Societies are therefore divided into conflicting economic classes (class struggle) whose political power is determined by the makeup for the economic system. There is some controversy over Marx and Engel’s exact position on this concept. [13]
There is a Marxist gravediggers thesis (also known as gravediggers argument/dialectic or Marxist teleological theory of history). This is based on the quote from the Communist Manifesto “What the Bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave diggers.” That the internal contradictions of capitalism will result in its inevitable destruction. As capitalism continues the class antagonism between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat will increase and push more and more people into the proletariat. [14] There is some controversy about this theory among Marxists and this post does a good job arguing that the end of capitalism is not inevitable.
Technological theories
Technology refers to the use of knowledge to make tools and utilise natural resources. Changes in technology result in changes in social relations. For Marx, “the stage of technological development determines the mode of production and the relationships and the institutions that constitute the economic system. This set of relationships is in turn the chief determinant of the whole social order.” [15]
Multiple causation theory of history
This states that historical change is complex and likely due to multiple causes related to political, economic, social, cultural and environmental events, as well as the significant individuals. [16] Max Weber supported this perspective “historical events are a matter of the coming together of independent causal chains which have previously developed without connection or direct import for one another” [17]
World-systems theory
This is a large scale approach to world history and social change, with the focus of social analysis on the world-system over the nation-state. The ‘world-system’ refers to the inter-regional and international division of labour, which divides the world into ‘core countries’, ‘semi-periphery countries’ and ‘periphery countries’. Core countries focus on ‘higher skilled capital-intensive production’, with the rest of the world focusing on ‘low-skilled, labour-intensive production’ and extraction of raw materials. Immanuel Wallerstein’s World-systems theory describes the shift from feudalism to capitalism; and then during the modern era, the centre of the core has moved from the Netherlands in the 17th century, Britain in the 19th century and the US after World War I. [18]
The survival of the last uncontacted tribe in South America outside the Amazon is at stake.
Indigenous people living in a South American forest with one of the world’s highest rates of deforestation have appealed to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights to save it from total destruction. Their uncontacted relatives are fleeing from one corner of the remaining forest to another, seeking refuge from ever-present bulldozers.
The Ayoreo-Totobiegosode of Paraguay’s Chaco forest have been trying since 1993 – when they submitted a formal land claim – to protect their forest in the face of a rapidly expanding agricultural frontier.
In 2013, given a total lack of political will in Paraguay to uphold the law and stop the destruction of their lands, they requested that the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights intervene.
In 2016, at the government’s request, they agreed to enter formal negotiations with the government for their land titles, but for 5 years, and despite 42 meetings, the destruction of their forest has continued unabated. Satellite photos reveal that the Ayoreo now live in an island of forest surrounded by monocultures and beef production.
The Ayoreo have now announced they are pulling out of the negotiations, and have written again to the Inter-American Commission, asking it to order the Paraguayan authorities to finally return their land to them, and expel the agribusiness corporations that have taken it over.
Although most Ayoreo-Totobiegosode were forcibly contacted by American evangelical missionaries some years ago, an unknown number remain uncontacted in the last island of their forest, which is now being cut down around them.
Earlier this year one uncontacted group made contact with a settled community of their relatives, to express their fear at the destruction of their forest refuge, before returning to the forest.
The Ayoreo-Totobiegosode leader Porai Picanerai, who was forcibly contacted by the American New Tribes Mission in 1986, said: “My uncontacted relatives are suffering and in danger because they barely have any space now to live in. There are many outsiders occupying our land and burning the forest for beef production.”
Porai also said: “After having participated in most of the 42 meetings, I can confirm that the government doesn’t keep its word, that it lies and doesn’t want to protect my people or return the lands that we’ve always lived in and cared for. We’ll only get the government to act by going to outside bodies like the Commission.”
Survival Researcher Teresa Mayo said today: “The Ayoreo-Totobiegosode have called a halt to the negotiation process as the government was just dragging it out while allowing the rampant destruction of the Ayoreo’s forest to continue. The state knows that it simply has to do nothing to effectively condemn the uncontacted Ayoreo to death – and if a government sees the solution to its “problem” as the extermination of a people, we’re talking about genocide.”
Cas Yikh of the Gidimt’en Clan are counting on supporters to go ALL OUT in a mobilization for the biggest battle yet to protect our sacred headwaters, Wedzin Kwa. We have remained steadfast in our fight for self-determination, and we are still unceded, undefeated, sovereign and victorious.
In January 2019, when Gidimt’en Checkpoint was raided by the RCMP, enforcing an injunction for Coastal GasLink fracked gas pipeline, your communities rose up in solidarity!
You organized rallies and marches. You published Solidarity Statements. You wrote your representatives. You put on fundraisers and donated to the Legal Fund. You pledged to stand by the Wet’suwet’en. The pressure worked to keep Wet’suwet’en land defenders and supporters safe as they navigated the colonial court system. All charges were dropped.
In January 2020, you answered the call to #SHUTDOWNCANADA! The world watched as the RCMP violently confronted unarmed Wet’suwet’en land defenders, on behalf of CGL, in an intense 6-day struggle for control over the territory, following industry’s eviction by Hereditary Chiefs.
This invasion ignited a storm of solidarity! The Wet’suwet’en were embraced in beautiful and powerful actions coast to coast and overseas. During February and March, thousands of people rose up in hundreds of demonstrations in solidarity with Indigenous sovereignty and environmental protection against the fracked gas industry.
During a wave of international uprisings, Canada came under fire for its refusal to engage in meaningful Free, Prior and Informed Consent with Indigenous Nations across Turtle Island. Canada’s denial of responsibility and failure to implement the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples resulted in the fight for #LANDBACK.
We are humbled by the power of our allies, friends and supporters. We have love, respect, and gratitude for those that stood their ground beside us on the yintah to defend Wedzin Kwa. We vow to reciprocate the solidarity from everyone that followed, all our allies/relatives and supporters that put their feet in the street defending Indigenous sovereignty.
