Today's Topics:
1. Australia, Boris Franteschini The devoted anarchist (gr, it)
[machine translation] (a-infos-en@ainfos.ca)
2. France, Alternative Libertaire AL #285 - Judicial Reform:
Towards court robotization ? (fr, it, pt)[machine translation]
(a-infos-en@ainfos.ca)
3. France, Alternative Libertaire AL - High schools pro: no
savings on our future! (fr, it, pt)[machine translation]
(a-infos-en@ainfos.ca)
4. black rosefed - CRIMINAL FIRE AT THE NATIONAL MUSEUM OF
BRAZIL: THE ANSWER MUST COME FROM THE STREETS! (pt)
(a-infos-en@ainfos.ca)
5. London Anarchist Communists: Libertarian Communism 2018:
Advancing The Class Struggle, Dayschool (a-infos-en@ainfos.ca)
6. black rose fed: ORGANIZING AT THE FRONTIERS: APPALACHIAN
RESISTANCE TO PIPELINES : Courtesy La Rote Art. By BRRN Radical
Ecology Committee (REC) (a-infos-en@ainfos.ca)
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Message: 1
Boris was one of those active Italian Melbourne anarchists. --- His dedication and
enthusiasm for anarchism were elements he preserved until the last hours of his life. ---
Boris Franteschini was born in 1914 in the USA by a family of Italian anarchist
immigrants. --- At the age of 7 he returned to Italy with his family. --- In 1927, due to
the increasing repression in Italy by the fascist regime, the family migrated to Australia
and settled in Melbourne. --- He worked for some time on his father's farm in the outpost
of Melbourne suburb Narre Warren and later as a woodcutter, beethez (or bricklayer as
mentioned elsewhere) and lastly as a marble man. --- In the 1930s and 1940s, Boris
actively participated in a large anarchist group of Italian exiles and immigrants in
Melbourne. --- This group intervened mainly within the Italian community, publishing a
newspaper and taking part in the anti-fascist activity. --- It also provided financial and
other assistance to anarchists from abroad, mainly Italy and Spain.
With the death of the older members of the group, Boris became the man-reporting of the
whole movement after the Second World War.
In the period 1950-1965 there was a strong Italian anarchist group in Melbourne, under the
name of the Italian Anarchist Movement (Italian Anarchist Movement). about 30 people, most
of whom were anarchists who had migrated to Australia. But, unfortunately, this group was
involved in a relative isolation since it was active only within the great Italian
community and not in the general Australian society. They spoke very little English,
while, on the other hand, there was no such anarchist movement in Australia, except for
individual cases, and the third generation Italian-Australians were not interested in
anarchism.
The group called monthly assemblies. They were raising money to boost the anarchist press
in Italy. In their most active phase, they collected thousands of dollars that sent them
to the anarchist movement in Italy to better propagate anarchist ideas. Various anarchists
from abroad were assisted, especially refugees from the Franconian Spain. Even to those
who came to Australia showed their solidarity, with the offer of friendship and direction
in that country.
However, since 1965 the group has begun to decline in number of members. Some of her
members died, others settled in other parts of Australia or returned to Italy. With Boris
Franteschini's death, only four members remained from the team, Amendu Ceccaroni, Jack
Farrello, Raphaele Turco and Bruno Vannini. (the last survivor was Bruno Vannini who died
in the 1990s in Melbourne).
Although this group had relations and contacts with Spanish and Bulgarian anarchists and
in Australia and abroad, just a few years ago it gained some contact with the Australian
anarchist movement and this was achieved in 1985-1986, with the organization of
celebrations and events for the 100 years of anarchism in Australia, which took place in
late April to early May 1986 in Melbourne. On May 3, 1986, Boris Francescini, despite his
serious health condition, took part in the events and spoke about the Melbourne Italian
anarchists and their story.
On May 3, 1986 and despite his illness, Boris Franteschini participated in the events he
was pleased about and renewed his old contacts. Through these contacts, the 60-year-old
presence and activity of the Italian anarchists in Australia became known and the
linguistic gap bridged.
Italian anarchist Boris Franteschini died on 26 August 1986 from cancer.
Today, we still remember Boris Franteschini as a generous and brilliant anarchist, full of
energy and enthusiasm for our common struggle, which kept the flame of anarchism lit for
several decades in an environment often hostile to such ideas.
* This text was written by S. Russell (with thanks to Joe Toscano and Bruno Vannini for
the information) and was published in issue 7 (31), October 1986, of the Sydney
anarcho-syndicalist journal «Rebel Worker». Greek translation "neither god nor master"
10/6/9/2007
------------------------------
Message: 2
While nothing advances on the side of alternatives to confinement, the Belloubet reform
strengthens the powers of the executive to the detriment of the judiciary, and accentuates
the drift towards dehumanization and a purely administrative treatment, on scale: more
Internet , dematerialization and videoconferences. The professionals of justice protest
---- The beginning of the year 2018 was marked by unprecedented movements of claim in the
judicial world. The prison guards blocked the prisons to demand more security, more
construction, more confinement. They were heard, they won the case ... As soon as this
movement was over, another front opened, bringing together, exceptionally, magistrates,
lawyers, clerks, judicial staff. The professionals of justice rose up (and still rise)
against a plan for the reform of justice, many of whose provisions had not been the
subject of prior consultation. Those who fight for the poorest, who refuse that the rights
of the weakest are still reduced, have not yet won.
To remove the justice of the citizens
This reform project concerns everyday justice: civil procedure, criminal procedure, and
the meaning and effectiveness of sentences. There is also a reflection on the digital
world, yet archaic, jurisdictions ever poorer ... Despite the assertions of the custody of
the Seals, Nicole Belloubet, the professionals.les were little consulted.es, or the va
-vite, within extremely tight deadlines. All of them had the unpleasant surprise of
discovering, at the moment when the project was communicated to them, measures that had
never been discussed beforehand, and did not even appear in the electoral program of a
president who has no vision of what justice must embody.
And for what result, what project ? A desire to further remove justice from those in whose
name it is rendered, from those whom it must protect. Justice is already badly perceived
by those to whom it is addressed: it is long, it is obscure.
A frenzied rationalization of civil procedures ...
What is envisaged by the government is to move it further away from litigants, to
eliminate hearings and even judges. While the behavior of some and some magistrates may be
problematic, the transfer of decision-making to administrations, in personal and human
litigation, is frightening. However, this is what is envisaged concerning the fixing of
contributions to the maintenance and upbringing of children, in family disputes, which
would thus be entrusted to the family allowance funds (CAF). Without hearing, on parts,
and with scales. This question of the scales is all the more important as it concerns the
promoters of an allegedly faster justice, to improve the treatment of " mass litigation".
---- The dematerialization of proceedings, which may have an advantage, can not, however,
be exclusive unless it prevents a large number of litigants from taking legal action.
However, this is what is envisaged: firstly, as an experiment, litigants who wish it will
be able to seize a jurisdiction over the internet and receive news of the procedure
launched. Eventually, this mode of seizure would become exclusive. Just see Moi, Daniel
Blake, Ken Loach, to imagine the confusion of some people left alone in front of a
computer - provided they have one - connected to the internet, without access to a human
or a capable to answer him.
Civil procedure is indeed slow, expensive and not easily accessible to those who sometimes
can not afford the advice of a lawyer because they are too " rich " to benefit from
legal aid, and too poor to pay fees. However, how can one claim to reform it by not
admitting that for these " mass litigation ", it is magistrates and clerks that justice
needs ? With real hearings, where the arguments can be exchanged without the parties have
had to travel several hundred kilometers to access their judges, unless we consider that
videoconferencing could replace the actual discussion ...
... which is also penalized
This thirst for digital technology also carries criminal proceedings, where complaints
will have to be lodged on the internet for victims of crime, where it does not seem to be
the case that anyone can be judged by the perpetrators of the offense. a video screen ...
to streamline costs.
In the same vein, and to satisfy the Ministry of the Interior (sic), facilities are
granted to police officers, " guarantees Procedures are transferred from a judge to a
prosecutor of the republic - the European Court of Human Rights has ruled that he was not
a judicial authority, since he is not independent of the executive power. So police powers
are being strengthened, although they have already been increased since the last
anti-terrorist laws passed, and those of the prosecutors, to the detriment of the rights
of suspected persons. The justice reform project is expected to be debated in Parliament
in September. It would still be likely to move after protests in the streets of Paris and
several provincial cities. Modifications are hoped for ... Professionals have not won yet!
Delphine Boesel (lawyer)
IMMEDIATE APPEARANCE: IT CONTINUES
While the Belloubet reform wants to reduce the access to the judge, no real reflection was
carried out on the immediate appearances, these emergency procedures allowing a
jurisdiction to judge a person quickly, at the exit of the police custody. . This
procedure is the most intrusive to the rights, the most provider of confinement, but is
never questioned. It is the justice of misery, which everyone accommodates because it
meets the requirements of speed.
Even as French prisons crumble under the weight of obsolescence, promiscuity (more than
70,000 people are locked up to date, 30% of whom are awaiting trial), while the most
optimistic speeches on the institutional will to promote alternatives to incarceration
flourish in colloquia and on TV sets, nothing is reflected in the acts. Despite unanimous
findings on the state of French prisons no and no politician has enough courage to
consider another criminal policy, to dare to say that it should less lock up.
Special file: Security without the security
In summary:
Judicial Reform: Towards court robotization ?
Europe: The fortress is also a prison
United States: Chained to Slave History
Big Brother: A real public-private partnership
History: Police sometimes, justice nowhere
Rojava: security and local justice
Chiapas / Zapatistas: Repairing rather than Closing
Practices: Dealing with gender-based violence in a militant environment
Treat the sexual abuser through feminist education
And the " dangerous fools " ? And the " psychopaths " ?
http://www.alternativelibertaire.org/?Reforme-judiciaire-Vers-la-robotisation-des-tribunaux
------------------------------
Message: 3
CLASH, the high school and student bulletin of Alternative Libertaire, September 2018
edition, is out: ---- Making huge savings on vocational high schools is the project of the
Minister of National Education. Far from talking about " excellence ", the reality is
that our study conditions will worsen. ---- ? High schools cut with an ax ---- * Hundreds
of hours less: almost 400 hours in baccalaureate, 200 hours less in CAP. With less time to
learn a trade, we will be less well trained. We will have less grip on what we do in our
work with our employers. ---- * All subjects are targeted, and in particular those of
general education: History-Geography, Mathematics, French ... The objective of the
government is to give us fewer courses that would give us a critical look at society ? In
total it is the equivalent of 7000 teaching positions that will be threatened !
to download in PDF
? The more the right to make the mistake
* In all sectors, learning will be much more present. Learning is more time in a company,
alternately, than in continuing education. Having to learn a trade with the pressure of
profitability in the company, is to lose the right to the error that we have in high school.
* The business is not a " wonderful world ". The world of business is also a conflicting
one between those who work and those who benefit from it.
Let's meet again in the cafeteria, cafes, use every possible time to talk to each other
and mobilize in our high schools.
Let's get together, let's organize the response !
Also read High School: The chainsaw Blanquer of the monthly of September.
http://www.alternativelibertaire.org/?Lycees-pro-pas-d-economies-sur-notre-avenir-7918
------------------------------
Message: 4
We republish this statement by our comrades in Brazil in response the tragic and criminal
fire which erupted on the evening of Sunday, September 2, 2018 and destroyed much of the
National Museum of Brazil. The statement is by Resistência Popular Estudantil (Student
Popular Resistance) which describes itself as a collective of students organized to
struggle in the defense of a the autonomous student movement and which is classist[class
struggle in orientation], combative and built by the base. ---- By Resistência Popular
Estudantil - Rio de Janeiro ---- A fire has burned the first scientific Brazilian
institution, the National Museum of Brazil in Rio de Janeiro. As many know through through
social media and news, fossils and archives that survived thousands of years and
geological processes, now find themselves as ashes due to the economic war, that of
traditional neoliberalism, in which we live today.
There is no way yet to calculate the size of the loss to the scientific heritage of the
country. Besides the destruction of the oldest Latin-American human fossils the museum
holds an archive of more than 20 million items which is the fifth largest in the world.
The destruction also includes the source of materials for research about our history, with
one of the largest archives of Brazilian indigenous ethnology and linguistics, and about
our animals which includes the largest zoological archive of the Latin America. All of
that turned to ashes last night.
In additional to the fire, it is important to highlight the recurrence of fires in
buildings from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ) community. There has
already been five fire outbreaks in less than four years. Obviously, these incidents, just
like the one in the National Museum, weren't by accident and do not fail to have a guilty
party.
In the year of the celebration of 200 years of the institution, the National Museum
couldn't survive to the largest crisis Brazil has experienced. A national laboratory for
the effects of crisis, the City of Rio de Janeiro shows another example of the future
people from above want for our country. A country where there is no guarantee of access to
education, health or culture for the ones who cannot afford it. A country that lives
without knowing its past, so it does not overcome and continues the slavery that chains
it. A country where the police state is normalized and those who "get out of line" has the
necessary answer for their silencing.
The consequences of the Constitutional Amendment 95/2016 (1) are already being felt. We,
the ones from below, are feeling on the skin the fire that the government lit two years
ago with the burning of our rights. Thus, we would like to emphasize that what happened
last night[the museum fire]was not an accident, but a consequence of the project from the
above to our people.
We, from the Student Popular Resistance of Rio de Janeiro, express our solidarity with all
the students, professors, technicians and workers that lost a huge part of their work,
just as the whole world lost a huge part of its history. As such, the necessity of
organization and going to the streets are more than evident. To fight against PEC 55 (2)
is to fight for the survival of our people, our history.
ONLY RADICALIZED STRUGGLE WILL CHANGE OUR LIVES!
AGAINST THE PEC 55, THERE WILL BE POPULAR RESISTANCE!
STRUGGLE, CREATE, BUILD POPULAR POWER!
Translation Notes
1. Any austerity measure, this amendment was proposed by right-wing President Michel Temer
who assumed office following the impeachment of Dilma Rousseff of the PT (Workers Party).
The measure was approved in December 2016 and freezes government spending towards primary
expenses (education, health, security) for the next 20 years and limits increases only
towards the cost of inflation.
2. Another name for Constitutional Amendment 95/2016. See Note 1.
http://blackrosefed.org/criminal-fire-national-museum-of-brazil/
------------------------------
Message: 5
"There are periods in the life of human society when revolution becomes an imperative
necessity, when it proclaims itself as inevitable. New ideas germinate everywhere, seeking
to force their way into the light, to find an application in life." ---- "We are
profoundly convinced that no revolution is possible if the need for it is not felt among
the people themselves. No handful of individuals, however energetic and talented, can
arouse a popular insurrection if the people themselves through their best representatives
do not come to the realization that they have no other way out of the situation they are
dissatisfied with except insurrection." ---- Kropotkin ---- Austerity and poverty, attacks
on wages and working conditions, unaffordable housing, war and nationalism, the rise of
right-wing populism and increase in racism, climate change- all things to make us feel
that the situation is hopeless and that all we can do is make feeble efforts to resist.
However, we believe, as Kropotkin says, that real change is possible and may come when it
is most unexpected. So what can we do to bring this moment closer? We will discuss this
question in the context of actual struggles going on in Britain today.
Defend the NHS?: An anarchist communist perspective on health
Organising to win?
There are thousands of people in Britain committed to social change. They are involved in
a multitude of groups and campaigns. However, despite this we seem to be continually on
the defensive and very far from creating the kind of society we would like to see. This
workshop will discuss why this is the case. Why aren't we more effective? It will begin
with a presentation on the importance of organisation and a discussion of what we think
are the key characteristics of effective organisation. We will then look at a number of
examples of different sorts of strategies in order to highlight some of the strengths and
weaknesses of different approaches. We will also hear from at least one example of
effective organisation.
Facebook Event Page:ww
w.facebook.com/events/453867468435624/
https://londonacg.blogspot.com/2018/09/libertarian-communism-2018-advancing.html
------------------------------
Message: 6
The history, ecologies, and cultures of Appalachia are interwoven with the expansion of
fossil fuel industries. Appalachia, both across its landscape and within its depths, has
historically been a commodity frontier for Capital investment in low-wage and low-cost
energy production. Appalachia, particularly Central Appalachia, serves as an
"appropriation zone" for capital investment from core urban areas, such as New York and
Philadelphia. (1) Appalachia has astounding similarities to both "developing" extraction
regions of the Global South and the environmental toxic Locally Unwanted Land Use zones
(LULUs) experienced by segregated communities of color throughout the United States. The
poverty and marginalization of working-class Appalachians, the ecological destruction,
including species extinction, and the deterioration of public health are all intimately
bound up with over 100 years of the coal, petrochemical, and shale oil/natural gas
industries' drive for accumulation.
Outsourcing to cheaper labor markets in the Global South and the automation of the coal
industry through extreme techniques like Mountaintop Removal and natural gas "fracking"
has intensified this ongoing "accumulation by dispossession" through natural resource and
land grabs. Neoliberal policies, state subsidies to fossil fuel industries, and
financialization of new infrastructure projects, such as pipeline construction, has
accelerated this accumulation. This drive for profit dispossesses those who work and live
here, not only of their wealth, land, and resources, but also of their ability to sustain
their communities in increasingly toxifying environments. (2) In Appalachia, like other
resource "appropriation zones" such as the petrochemical "Cancer Alley" of Louisiana's
Gulf Coast, rural poor, working-class, and communities of color live in contaminated areas
created by industries that remove the cheap energy resources and leave behind toxic waste
and ravished landscapes.
This uneven development in Appalachian zones of fossil fuel extraction involves a complex
mixture of land grabs, often from "public" wilderness spaces as well as from smaller,
working-class land plots, often with the complicit go ahead and subsidization from state
bureaucracies. Extraction industries increasingly employ technologies that for the most
part don't rely on paid human labor, and if used, involve temporary jobs with higher than
average job-safety risks. These projects, whether they be Mountaintop Coal Removal
Projects or Natural Gas Pipeline construction, are characterized by the type of volatile
financialization that has come to characterize neoliberal capitalism. How these factors
co-produce global fossil fuel development can provide significant insights into how
sustainable, popular movements against extraction may be built.
At the Frontiers. . .
The frontiers of capitalism expand through the commodification of untapped cheap natures
(labor, food, energy, raw materials). Why and how these sites of resource extraction are
always situated within these commodity frontiers is of strategic importance. Capitalist
World-Ecology theory is a useful lens to explore how Capital, Power, and Nature co-produce
this frontier accumulation and can provide some valuable insights into the production
process of these extraction industries. Expanding on Marx's theory of value, World-Ecology
theory holds that the creation of value occurs in two interrelated zones, that of
exploitation and that of appropriation. The "zone of exploitation" in commodity production
is ruled by the capital-labor relation and involves the "paid" wage work that Capital
extracts from the worker, while profiting from the surplus value the worker produces. But
this ‘exploitation zone' depends heavily on a close relation with the "zone of
appropriation."(3)
This appropriation zone includes all of the human and extra-human "unpaid work/energy,"
including not only the labor of women, migrants, and other racialized groups, but also
that of forests, soils, and rivers. This unpaid work/energy is what autonomist-feminist,
Maria Mies, calls the work of "women, nature, and colonies."(4) Without the constant (and
rising) appropriation of this unpaid work, capitalism cannot expand, develop, or be
maintained. The entire capitalist production-commodification process relies on how much
can be extracted cheaply from these appropriation zones. A crucial contradiction exists
between the zone of paid work and this zone of unpaid work/energy. (5)
Frontiers of fossil fuel extraction function as "appropriation zones" to consolidate the
work of humans and the rest of nature into an ecological simplification centered on one or
two lucrative commodities. These specific commodities, in the case of Appalachia, coal and
most recently, natural gas, develop their own set of contradictions which often result in
recurring, regional crises. The history of Appalachia involves the exhaustion and
succession of these commodity frontiers, which form in regions with low costs that are
also rich with resources and cheap labor. These commodity frontiers rely on
under-reproduction, which allows Capital to cut into the subsistence needs of humans and
extra-human natures "through not ‘paying' for the socially necessary levels of
reproduction" to maintain life. This under-reproduction of labour power includes wage
repression, forced underconsumption, and inadequate housing. Capital's under-reproduction
strategies turn on both the paid and unpaid work of humans and the rest of nature, a
project that exhausts earlier forms of production and reproduction. Accumulation and
reproduction crises occur throughout these zones, directly impacting communities in their
ability to socially reproduce and live in these areas. Capital flows in and out of these
regions as it ecologically remakes the rise and fall of these frontiers attempting to fix
these contradictions and expand accumulation in its search for cheap commodities. (6)
From these interrelated zones arise "the family of processes through which capitalists
and state-machineries map, identify, quantify, measure, and code human and extra-human
nature in service to capital accumulation." (7) Accumulation relies on Capital's ability
to organize Nature and expand towards its next "Great Frontier." Extractive industries
organize land, labor, and resources along power relations that create and maintain a
structural binarity between what is considered Society, mostly "white, male,
property-owners" and what is relegated to part of Nature, which includes the unpaid cheap
labor/ energy of other humans and extra-human "resources."
The settler-colonial implications of this frontier movement, with its environmental-racist
overtones, is particularly pronounced in these extraction-based industries. Historically,
throughout Appalachia, the divide between absentee capitalist landowners and a largely,
semi-proletarian population has been marked by multiple layers of racial, colonialist, and
patriarchal divisions.The underlying environmental racist aspects of resource extraction
in Appalachia are particularly evidenced in the proposed route for the Atlantic Coastal
Pipeline, in which ninety-nine families live within one mile of the compressor station and
one mile of the pipeline; and of those 99 families, 85% of them are African American.
Dominion Energy paid $2.5 million for a 68-acre parcel from the white descendants of a
large tobacco producing slave plantation known as Variety Shade. Dominion seeks to build a
massive 55,000-horsepower compressor station here to service the Atlantic Coast Pipeline
(ACP) for 200 miles in each direction. The compressor station would run 24/7, powered by
burning ‘fracked' methane gas from the pipeline, and spew volatile organic compounds,
including formaldehyde and ammonia, into what pipeline planning documents refer to as the
"incineration zone." The compressor station would increase nitrogen dioxide pollution by
54.5% in a 24-hour period resulting in massive ozone pollution[i.e. smog]. The pipeline
would run through Nash County, North Carolina, which has an Latinx population that is
about three times the state average, as well as Robeson County, North Carolina, which is
more than 50% Native American, and more than 80% Native American in some areas running
directly through indigenous tribal lands. 64% of the communities targeted by the ACP raise
"environmental justice concerns because of significantly larger percentages of minority or
impoverished communities (or both) within one mile of the pipeline route." The pipeline
would "traverse regions of Eastern North Carolina and Tidewater Virginia that are among
the most ethnically and racially diverse and among the poorest regions in their respective
states." (8)
Capital accumulation by extraction functions along neo-colonialist lines through "land
grabs". Most Appalachians do not have legal "mineral rights," meaning that the land on
which they live is subject to investment and development at any time because the minerals
beneath its surface are owned by a coal or other extractive industry. In this absentee
land-ownership arrangement, land-holding companies and coal companies have ‘broad form
deeds,' giving companies the right to mine subterranean minerals. (9) Legally, this has
been sanctioned throughout Appalachia, allowing extraction industries to survey, mine, or
"frack" land at will, without paying taxes or reclaiming the land. When this occurs, folks
are presented with a difficult dilemma of either staying in the toxic, ecologically
depleted areas or being displaced from their homes. This bears striking similarities to
the massive land grabs throughout the Global South, for example, with the clear-cutting of
Amazonian rainforests, where many indigenous communities are displaced into urban areas
with the devastation of the forest ecosystems. In the case of Appalachia, ‘public' lands,
such as the so-called Jefferson National Forest, which comprise historically occupied
Monoken, Tupelo, Shawnee, and Cherokee lands, are the proposed route for the Mountain
Valley Pipeline. Already evident from the Mountain Valley Pipeline construction has been
immense flooding from water runoff and erosion that have destroyed surrounding Appalachian
farmlands and homes. Rural communities in and near these "appropriation zones" face
similar dispossession, in which the environmental-toxicity of extraction, such as acid
mine drainage, coal slurry, and soil contamination from Mountaintop Coal Removal or
pipeline rupture and explosion results in forced displacement, because living conditions
becomes untenable.
Ecological Struggle as Class Struggle
Significantly, many of the direct actions against extraction within these ecological
struggles have been undertaken by women on the front lines of resisting this
appropriation. Appalachian women have been central to ecological justice organizing, often
identifying as "mothers" and "Appalachians" within their communities, opposed to the
dominant patriarchal narrative that masculinizes the region as "King Coal," in alliance
with the coal and other extraction industries. Over the last few decades, while many women
have entered the formal workforce, they continue to shoulder most of the unpaid work of
the household. This is leading to a social-reproduction crisis, where even as women work
more hours in paid jobs, because men's employment is also increasingly precarious, women
are forced to ‘make up' through their ‘supplemental' paid and unpaid work for this loss in
income to support themselves and their families.Women's earnings in most of these service
sector jobs fail to pay living wages, so women often do housework, gardening, childcare,
eldercare, among others, to survive. (10) These economic conditions are exacerbated by the
ecological depletion and contamination that has disproportionate effects on women's
health, including fertility issues, birth defects, and fetal death through toxic chemical
exposure. The 750 or so chemicals pumped into the ground at high pressure to frack shale
rock alone has been associated with these fertility and development problems, not to
mention potential later illnesses from exposure. (11) It is not surprising that it has
been predominantly women who have engaged in the tree-sits and lockdowns against pipeline
construction in Appalachia. This ‘direct action' tendency has parallels in other contested
"extraction zones,"such as the indigenous and environmental women water-protectors against
the Dakota Access Pipeline at Standing Rock and the "L'Eau est La Vie" resistance against
the Bayou Bridge Pipeline outside Lafayette, Louisiana. It is foremost women in these
struggles who recognize that unless extraction is stopped, communities will no longer be
able maintain the necessary social reproduction essential for life.
Popular Appalachian resistance to pipeline construction, in their use of collective direct
action and solidarity-based community organizing, are contesting these extractive
frontiers. These movements provide some important insights into how emergent,
anti-systemic movements against Climate Change can be grown, strengthened, and spread. The
terrain of class struggle, in relation to these extraction industries, has shifted within
this Appalachian frontier over the last century. From the coal miner strikes and
insurrections in the early 1900s, through the militant union organizing of the 1920-1930s,
the Keynesian labor "compromise" of the 1950-1970s, to the current neoliberal
restructuring of the coal industry, and the "fracking" boom to bust economy, working-class
resistance has dramatically shifted. In the past, these communities have been deeply
divided between those who endure this toxic dispossession in exchange for the "jobs" it
brings and those who struggle to resist and stop further extraction, because they are not
willing to put up with the death, impoverishment, and destruction any longer. Today, as
the allure of "living wage" jobs is disappearing with the automation of fossil fuel
industries and the spread of precarious conditions, Appalachians are drawing upon these
strategic lessons of class struggle to build a growing movement of counterpower against
resource extraction.
Building on decades of fighting Mountaintop Coal Removal, which contaminates soils, land,
and rivers, making them toxic sinks for human and other species, many Appalachians are
cultivating a grassroots resistance movement against Natural Gas Pipelines. This
"Appalachians Against Pipelines" movement targets the extraction infrastructure projects
that store and carry "fracked" methane gas, whose extraction process involves not only
local water, land, and air pollution, including periodic pipe ruptures and explosions, but
is also one of the largest fossil fuel contributors to planetary warming, ozone depletion,
and Climate Change.
Courtesy Energy Information Administration Credit: Leanne Abraham, Alyson Hurt and Katie
Park/NPR
As of 2017, there are nearly a dozen approved or pending projects to build interstate
pipelines, that spread through Appalachia to markets in every direction, comprising 2,500
miles of steel that would flow out of Pennsylvania, Ohio, and West Virginia beneath
rivers, through mountains and people's backyards. (12) Of these, two specific pipeline
projects are facing mounting popular resistance: the Mountain Valley Pipeline (MVP), which
would traverse West Virginia into eastern Virginia, crossing numerous regional freshwater
streams and rivers, and the Atlantic Coast Pipeline (ACP), which would cross Virginia and
branch deep into North Carolina, covering over 800 miles. Both pipelines would move
"fracked" natural gas from Marcellus and Utica Shale for market export. (13) If built,
together, MVP and ACP would contribute to as much greenhouse gas pollution as 45
coal-fired power plants, emitting over 158 million metric tons per year. (14) Both
pipeline projects are facing growing popular movements that are impeding their continued
construction.
Courtesy Appalachian Mountain Advocates
Towards Extraction Abolition
These "Appalachians Against Pipelines" movements are using a combination of strategic
tactics to stop construction, including environmental direct actions (tree-sits,
lockdowns, blockades), legal defense, divestment campaigns, and widespread community
solidarity and mutual aid. As "Appalachians Against Pipelines" movements grow, there are
immense opportunities to broaden these tactics of resistance. The environmental direct
actions, such as tree-sits and lockdowns, can be expanded through a ‘Blockadia' network to
prevent new fossil fuel extraction. This could broaden and strengthen resistance through
alliances between local residents and environmental organizers. A ‘Blockadia' network has
the potential to develop solidarity-based connections with other struggles against
extraction, such as Louisiana's No Bayou Bridge Pipeline, No KeystoneXL, and No DAPL at
Standing Rock, to share and coordinate on-the-ground strategic actions to prevent new
infrastructure projects from being built.
Building this ‘Blockadia' network is particularly urgent, given the rapidly expanding,
proposed fossil fuel infrastructure projects in these "appropriation zones." The
Appalachian Storage and Trading Hub (ASTH) is the largest proposed infrastructure project
in the region's history. It would serve as a mega petrochemical hub in West Virginia and
Pennsylvania, consisting of hundreds of miles of pipelines, fracked gas processing
facilities, and underground storage of petrochemicals and fracked gas liquids. Once
completed, ASTH would stretch along the Ohio-West Virginia border from Kentucky to
Pennsylvania. If this Shell Oil project is constructed, with its $84 Billion investment
from the Chinese government and brokered support from the Trump administration, it would
result in the creation of an Appalachian Cancer Alley with leaks, spills, and explosions
even more dangerous than the Gulf Coast's, because of the mountainous topography. Air
pollution in the mountains gets trapped in the low valleys and hollows "like a smothering
blanket, and any leaked gases from underground storage could remain stagnant and ignite
with one spark."(15) This potential for trapped air pollution was a similar concern for
Kanawha County residents in 1984, when the same chemical products made by Union Carbide in
Charleston, WV, methyl isocyanate (MIC) was released from its sister plant in Bhopal,
India, exposing more than 500,000 people to MIC and other toxic chemicals and resulting in
a confirmed 3,787 deaths from the gas release. (16)
Courtesy Blue Ridge Outdoors Magazine
In conjunction with the direct action approach of ‘Blockadia', Jeremy Brecher, in Against
Doom: A Climate Insurgency Manual, describes the strategic importance of invoking a legal
concept known as the public-trust doctrine. Under this precept, no one has the right to
destroy the climate, where public trust redefines natural resources, land, and the means
of production as a commons that must be protected. This means that the public has the
right and responsibility to protect ourselves, our communities, and the world's ecology.
Invoking ‘public trust' has the potential to massify and mobilize ecological resistance
through civil disobedience. Its use has the capacity to drive a wedge between sections of
State bureaucracies, for example Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), the U.S.
Forestry Department, and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) on whether extraction
projects are given the go-ahead. Emphasizing public trust helps reconfigure power into the
hands of workers and their communities, by undermining State authority and its political
"representatives" and "bureaucrats" who pretend to follow public will, all the while
enacting corporate agendas. ‘Public trust' can also help support the public lawsuits
against construction and permitting and support those participants arrested in collective
direct actions. (17)
Another important aspect of ecological resistance employed in "Appalachians Against
Pipelines" are divestment campaigns. These can range from boycotts of corporations to
protests and occupations of corporate offices. In each case, these divestment campaigns
target the banks that finance the pipelines, as well as the extractive industries
themselves. Divestment campaigns serve a movement-building function and may build public
support for wider demands for non-cooperation with fossil capital. This could lead to
societal demands to not only defund fossil fuels and stop infrastructure construction,
many of which receive state subsidies, but could also lead to a demand to leave new fossil
fuel reserves in the ground. (18)
This appropriation of cheap natures have taken an interesting turn at the frontier, in
which no longer are these extractive industries, with their ecocidal implications,
involved in substantial wage labor production. A pivotal point by which workers and
communities can strengthen resistance to resource appropriation involves a widening
economic contradiction within extraction industries themselves: the acceleration of
automation, artificial intelligence, and technological innovations that seek to reduce
"time and costs." Automation translates into the eating-away at jobs, severely reducing
and eliminating the need for paid human labor. While this trend has been consistent in the
coal industry over decades, with Mountaintop Removal, it appears that the shale oil/gas
industry is rapidly shrinking their human workforce at drilling and fracking sites and in
pipeline construction. An example of the extent to which this development has advanced
industry-wide involves the use of Iron Roughnecks, remote-controlled machines that
construct and pull apart drill pipes on rigs, replacing the rig workers who previously did
that job. (19)
The potential for workers in these industries to organize against further automation is
fertile ground for convergent ecological resistance to extraction, something along the
lines of a "Redwood Summer" uprising. In 1990, in northern California, loggers and
environmental organizers, drawing on the syndicalist tradition of the IWW union merged
with Earth First! environmental defenders, created a grassroots movement that helped stop
clearcutting of Old Growth Forests. In the case of Appalachia, there is a similar dire
situation, where extraction workers can organize through collective direct action, win
some of their demands from the industries that are slashing their jobs, contribute to
delays or halt infrastructure projects, while protecting their communities from further
ecological destruction and impoverishment. Substantial numbers of workers from fossil fuel
industries are also transitioning into renewable industries such as solar construction and
installation.
Conclusion
Organizing resistance at these points of frontier production has the potential to create
"cracks" in global "fossil fuel" commodity chains that maintain and finance Capital
accumulation. As these frontiers, with their land grabs and extraction schemes in conquest
of nature, are primarily spaces where the unpaid work of nature and humans are
appropriated, organizing mass resistance at these sites is strategic in the global
struggle against Climate Change and towards a post-carbon, post-capitalist world. Many of
these extraction frontiers are declining, despite increased financial investments,
resulting in higher costs for production and capital. This increasing system-wide cost for
capital development creates deepening crises that can only be temporarily resolved through
"spatial fixes" towards new commodity frontiers. The combination of quicker depletion and
unpredictability, especially in natural gas fracking, are co-producing these rising costs
of production, that in turn create negative value for the industry. The rate of Capital
decline in extraction industries is coupled with financialization that is highly
unpredictable, especially with an impending "carbon bubble" in the financial markets.
These central processes of capital accumulation are now generating more barriers to the
expanded reproduction of capital. (20)
Direct action approaches to organizing, within workplaces and communities on the front
lines of ecological struggles,are playing a central role in massifying this resistance.
The contradictions within capital in these extraction industries, "arising from
negative-value, are encouraging an unprecedented shift towards a radical politics beyond
capital." The more conventional appeals to state legislators and agencies as well as the
symbolic protesting of many nonprofit organizations have been found to be limited. These
‘indirect' appeals to the state are beginning to be replaced by grassroots anti-systemic
movements, led by and embedded in the communities most affected by extraction. Some of the
multiple layers involved in this shift relate directly to social reproduction in a
toxifying system of "unpaid costs" and "unpaid labor." It is "Capital's drive to expand
accumulation (that) becomes unmoored from its social bases and and turns against them.The
logic of economic production overrides that of social reproduction, destabilizing the very
social processes upon which capital depends." (22)
Extraction itself has exhausted the social ecology of Appalachia's political economy and
has led to a deepening reproduction crisis. Working-class communities are beginning to
challenge this (il)logic of Capital, especially in its patriarchal and racial dimensions,
by resisting the very extraction industries that are undermining their ability to sustain
and reproduce life. Solidarity and mutual aid are integrated as a path of both resistance
and transition through struggle. These resilient communities have their eyes on creating a
more liberated, ecological society beyond extraction. Appalachians, like all who reside in
extraction zones, have lived and died with ‘business as usual." Mere survival is no longer
an option; the stakes are higher now.
If you enjoyed this piece, we recommend checking out The State Against Climate Change:
Response to Christian Parenti.
Footnotes
1. Walls, David. 1978. Central Appalachia: Internal Colony or Internal Periphery. In
Lewis, Johnson, et al. (eds.), Colonialism in Modern America: The Appalachian Case (Boone,
NC: Appalachian Consortium Press), 319-350.
2. Harvey, David. 2004. The ‘New' Imperialism: Accumulation by Dispossession. Socialist
Register, Vol. 40 (2004), 63-87.
3. Hartley, Daniel. 2016. Anthropocene, Capitalocence, and the Problem of Culture. In
Moore (ed.), Anthropocene, Capitalocence, and the Crisis of Capitalism (Oakland: PM
Press), 154-165.
4. Mies, Maria. 1986. Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in the
International Division of Labor. London: Zed Books, 77.
5. Hartley, 158-159.
6. Marley, Benjamin J. 2015. The Coal Crisis in Appalachia: Commodity Frontiers and the
Geographies of Capital. Journal of Agrarian Change, Vol. 16, No. 2 (Apr 2016), 225-254.
7. Moore, Jason W. 2014. The Capitalocence Part II: Abstract Social Nature and the Limits
of Capital. (posted in jasonwmoore.com)
8. Sokolow, Jonathan. 27 Nov 2017. Dominion's Atlantic Coast Pipeline, Environmental
Racism, and The Appalling Silence of Good People. (posted on bluevirginia.us)
9. Marley, 225-254.
10. Marley, 225-254.
11. Achen, Ellee. 3 Aug 2018. In Appalachia, Women Put Their Bodies on the Line for the
Land. (posted on rewire.news)
12. Lombardi, Kristen and Jamie Smith Hopkins. 17 July 2017. Natural Gas Building Boom
Fuels Climate Worries, Enrages Landowners. NPR: Morning Edition. (posted on npr.org)
13. Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA). 27 April 2016. Study:
MVP and ACP Show Overbuilding by Natural Gas Industry. (posted on appalmad.org)
14. Turnbull, David. 15 Feb 2017. New Analysis: Mountain Valley and Atlantic Coast
Pipelines are Climate Disasters. (posted on priceofoil.org)
15. Stickel, Natalie. 13 June 2018. Appalachia's $84 Billion Secret. Blue Ridge Outdoors
Magazine. (posted on blueridgeoutdoors.com)
16. Wikipedia. Union Carbide entry. (posted on en.wikipedia.org)
17. Brecher, Jeremy. 2017. Against Doom: A Climate Insurgency Manual. Oakland: PM Press,
79-88.
18. Out of the Woods Collective. 9 June, 2015. 6 Ways to Fight Climate Chaos. (posted on
libcom.org)
19. Mikulka, Justin. 29 June 2018. Rise of the Machines: Fracking Execs Plan Profits by
Using Automation to Shrink Workforce. (posted on desmogblog.com)
20. Moore, Jason W. 2015. Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of
Capital. Brooklyn: Verso, 276.
http://blackrosefed.org/organizing-at-the-frontiers-appalachian-resistance-to-pipelines/
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