vthesis submitted to the faculty of San Francisco State University In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree Master of Arts

Transcription

1 FRAGMENTS OF A STATELESS FUTURE A5 30 PoLT. LG6 vthesis submitted to the faculty of San Francisco State University In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree Master of Arts In Political Science by Christopher Brian Longenecker San Francisco, California May 2016

2 CERTIFICATION OF APPROVAL I certify that I have read Fragments o f a Stateless Future by Christopher Brian Longenecker, and that in my opinion this work meets the criteria for approving a thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirement for the degree Master of Arts in Political Science at San Francisco State University.

3 FRAGMENTS OF A STATELESS FUTURE Christopher Brian Longenecker San Francisco, California 2016 In this work, I explore the question of stateless governance in the post-soviet era and ask how such movements can thrive and successfully replicate state-like functions using egalitarian assembly models. I analyze four case studies in which prefigurative models have worked with a clear social base to either challenge or supplant state authority in a community or a region. These case studies are laid out into two pairings. The first pairing is with movements in Rojava, Syria and Chiapas, Mexico which represent a model in which guerrilla groups acquire statelike authority, and then use that authority to construct egalitarian assembly models which are designed to eventually govern the region. The second pairing of movements is of El Alto, Bolivia and Occupy Wall Street, United States, in which prefigurative models emerge more organically through a social base already invested in egalitarian governance, and explore whether assembly models can govern over large metropolitan areas. Within this study, I conclude that in the post-soviet, neoliberal era, revolutionary movements are shifting tactics from attempting to seize control of a state to instead carving out an area in which they can experiment with stateless governance models, with impressive results. I certify that the abstract is a correct representation of the content of this thesis Date

4 PREFACE AND/OR ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank my mother, Ellen, for her endless fountain of love and encouragement, and for my friends for standing with me during the course of this project. 1would also like to take this opportunity to thank my thesis advisors, Dr. James Martel and Dr. Nicole Watts, for their support and encouragement during the course of this project. Without your careful edits and support for my work, this would not have been possible. Finally, I would like to thank everyone who struggles in the movement against oppression and for a more egalitarian future. You inspire me daily and have taught me everything I know.

5 TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction...1 Chapter 1: Rojava, Syria Chapter 2: Chiapas, Mexico...31 Chapter 3: El Alto, Bolivia...51 Chapter 4: Occupy Wall Street, United States Concluding Thoughts Bibliography...94

6 1 Introduction: In 2011, the global political order was rocked by uprisings in cities and towns throughout the world in which protestors occupied public spaces, established tent cities, practiced radical new approaches to democracy and either demanded the abdication of their government or refused to recognize the legitimacy of the state entirely. (Gerbaudo 2014) This global movement, starting in the Middle East as the Arab Spring became known globally as the Movement of Squares and has emerged in geographic locations as diverse as Kiev, Ukraine and Nashville, Tennessee. (Gerbaudo 2014) While the media attention on these public square occupations has been intense, they have not occurred in a vacuum. A movement has emerged since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the global spread of neoliberal economics which shares common characteristics coupled with unique strategies and tactics adapted for the context of the region in which the struggle takes place. After the fall of the Sovi et Union and with it their financial and material support for leftist parties and guerrilla groups around the world, the global left was decoupled from this giant, homogenizing force of Soviet ideology. The promise of weapons and material support was too alluring for most groups to pass up, so through these offers the Soviet Union had been able to largely control the orientation of the global left for decades. The Soviet model for leftist revolutions, in which a guerrilla army seizes control of the capital city of a state and then, from the old locus of power, builds a new, leftist state, was largely buried with the Soviet Union. The space opened up by the collapse of

7 2 the Soviet model allowed those on the left to begin theorizing about new ways to move past the capitalist state, and for new struggles based on new models to emerge around the world. Simultaneously, neoliberal economic models were being implemented inside states around the world, diminishing the size of such states, eliminating many of the social services the state formally offered and creating a restive and increasingly impoverished population. (Martinez and Garcia 1996) The weakening of the state through neoliberalism, paired with the end of the dominance of the Soviet Union over the global left has created space for new models to be tested and proliferated, a process which I believe led to the 2011 Movement of Squares. Richard Stahler-Sholk refers to this process as the shifting terrain of power and argues that the evolution of revolutionary groups during this time is a logical and pragmatic response: It should come as no surprise that old paradigms of taking state power by armed assault should be waning in the face of new realities in which the state is not the sole locus of power, forcing a rethinking of what we even mean by the concept of revolution. (Stahler-Sholk 2010) So, armed struggle with the goal of seizing the capital city of a state is no longer the main drive of most revolutionary groups. Understanding this, and looking at the movements which have emerged on the left in the Post-Soviet age, I will ask in this work why some of these movements have been able to effectively challenge the state and in some cases displace it entirely, and why others have failed to do so. My assertion, the central argument of this work, is that a focus on what is known as prefigurative politics,

8 3 coupled with an existing social base amicable to, or already practicing such politics are the keys to a successful revolutionary movement in the post-soviet, neoliberal era. To this end, I examine four cases in which I believe the confluence of these two modes resulted in an outcome where a type of egalitarian governance model was able to effectively take on state-like functions. In two of these cases, the Zapatista movement in Chiapas, Mexico, and the Syrian Kurdish movement to create the region known as Rojava, this confluence resulted in de facto autonomy and an egalitarian governance apparatus which effectively replicates state-like functions. In the other two cases, in El Alto, Bolivia and the Occupy Wall Street movement in New York City, United States, social movements emerged with alternative, egalitarian governance structures that showed glimpses of the ability to supplant the state and replicate state-like functions even in densely populated urban areas. Mathijs van de Sande in his study of the Movement of Squares or Arab Spring uprising in Cairo, Egypt, defines prefigurative politics: Prefiguration or prefigurative politics refers to a political action, practice movement, moment or development in which certain political ideals are experimentally actualized in the here and now, rather than hoped to be realized in the distant future. Thus, in prefigurative practices, the means applied are deemed to embody or mirror the ends one strives to realize, (van de Sande 2013) Prefiguration is thus best understood as the cultivation of a new society as a tool of struggle against the forces of the old society, removing the temporal distinction between the two worlds. In the post-soviet age, this has largely taken the form of

9 4 assembly-based democratic models offering an alternative governance apparatus in which members of a community deliberate together as equal participants to decide on issues that effect the community as a whole. Those participating in prefigurative practices get to actually experience a process of forging new, egalitarian social relationships, and I believe that has contributed greatly to the spread of such models. As the theory goes, a landless farmer in Chiapas getting to experience for the first time having equal control over the decisions made by their community is reluctant to give that power up, and handing back such authority over their lives back to a distant and frequently oppressive state. However, offering a prefigurative political model on its own is not enough to build an effective movement that can challenge and supplant the state. In his work The Prefigurative Politics of Tahrir Square - An Alternative Perspective on the 2011 Revolutions, van de Sande details the prefigurative, assembly-based politics of that particular movement. Yet, that movement resulted in the profoundly non-egalitarian Muslim Brotherhood party taking control over the state, resulting in a counter-revolution which overthrew that party and re-established a military dictatorship, (van de Sande 2013) In the case of Egypt, however, prefigurative politics had little-no social base, and a population inexperienced in the practice of self-governance. This resulted in an outcome in which a group that did have such social grounding, in this case the Muslim Brotherhood party, was able to seize control of the state.

10 5 The question of why the Tahrir Square uprising ultimately failed to result in an egalitarian outcome despite its clear focus on prefigurative politics led me to the second component of my assertion in this work, that a form of social base is also essential to the success of models which rely on prefiguration. This social base is built through a variety of methods throughout the four case studies offered in this work, although they can be broken down into two broad categories. The first, displayed by the PYD and the EZLN in the Rojava and Chiapas case studies, is the proven ability by a group to offer necessary services to a community in the absence of effective solutions by the state. The PYD was able to offer its YPG and YPJ militias to defend Syrian Kurdistan from the Islamic State, and the EZLN was able to offer a variety of workshops on medicine and literacy to the indigenous community in Chiapas. (Allsopp 2014; Ross 1995) In both of these cases, the ability of these groups to offer practical and necessary services built trust and grounded them into broader society, later driving buy-in for their egalitarian governance projects. The second methodology through which a social base can be leveraged is the presence of a sizable community within broader society already deeply rooted in prefigurative politics, and able to evangelize its benefits to the rest of society. I see this occurring in both the El Alto and Occupy Wall Street case studies. In El Alto, the radically egalitarian organizational models of recently unemployed miners collided with the long history of self-governance among the Aymara people to create a ripe setting for a prefigurative model to emerge in the absence of state assistance. At Occupy Wall

11 6 Street, the long-term prefigurative practices of the American anarchist community and the broader activist left made adaptation of prefigurative governance models within Occupy encampments a pragmatic step forward. The four case studies in this paper were carefully chosen for their use of both prefigurative politics and a social base allowing for such politics to penetrate social and civic institutions. They were also chosen to form complimentary pairings in both strategic and temporal senses. The experience of the Zapatista movement since the mid-1980s works to illuminate the newer uprising in Syrian Kurdistan which resulted in the creation of the region of Rojava. Both of these uprisings were initiated by leftist guerrilla groups which seized territory through armed struggle, and have subsequently worked with local populations to dismantle their authority and replace it with community-led assemblybased prefigurative institutions. The pairing of the EZLN with the PYD s sister organization, the PKK, has been made by a number of other scholars noting their base similarities as demobilized guerrilla groups not currently engaged in active combat, while illuminating the impact of key strategic differences between the groups. (A1 2011; A1 2014; Gambetti 2009) Similarly, the PYD and the Zapatista movement have been paired together by activists seeking to understand revolutionary movements in the neoliberal, post-soviet age. (Stanchev 2015) In the second pairing of case studies, the occurrences of El Alto, Bolivia illuminates the case of Occupy Wall Street in New York City by displaying a successful implementation of assembly-based governance over an urban center by leveraging a

12 7 social base intimately familiar with self-governance and prefigurative politics and detailing the successful long-term growth and proliferation of such models through a community invested in their success. In the first chapter, I examine the case of Rojava, Syria, in which the PYD political party and guerrilla group asserted control over Syrian Kurdistan in the chaos caused by the Syrian Civil War and the rise of the Islamic State. Following the theories of its leader, Abdullah Ocalan, the PYD has worked to establish neighborhood assemblies and to build horizontal decision-making structures. The example of Rojava is unique among the four case studies in that prefigurative politics was not a core part of the subject population s political life prior to implementation of the model. Instead, the social base is formed by the PYD party itself, which had operated in Syria since 2003 and focused on building a variety of alternative governance apparatuses, particularly the YPG defense militias, which I argue it was able to leverage this into buy-in for its prefigurative political project. In the second chapter, I turn to the Zapatista movement in Chiapas, Mexico. The collieries to the model in Rojava are stark, as the Zapatista movement was also initiated by a leftist guerrilla group, the EZLN, who, like the PYD, features a charismatic leader: Subcomandante Marcos, an intellectual and guerrilla leader from Mexico City. The chapter details the three major phases of the Zapatista movement, the history of the group prior to their 1994 uprising, the period from in which the EZLN worked with the Zapatista support base to construct their governance model and finally from 2003-

13 8 date, in which the Good Governance Councils were implemented, and the EZLN ceded authority over Chiapas to civilians using prefigurative models. (Klein 2015) The social base in this case which make prefigurative politics possible come both from the history of self-governance through assembly models practiced by the indigenous population of Chiapas, as well as the decades of trust established between that population and the leftist guerrillas who, like Subcomandante Marcos, largely came from Mexico City. (Marcos 2001) The third chapter details the history of the city of El Alto just outside the Bolivian capital of La Paz. According to Raul Zibechi, this city was essentially settled en masse in one generation largely by economic refugees from the privatization of the mining industry and indigenous Aymara being displaced from their homes in the Andes mountains. (Zibechi 2010) These groups came to El Alto desperate for work, drawn to its proximity to the capital city. Finding that the neoliberal state was largely ignoring their needs for base requirements for urban survival like laying water pipes, the newly settled population worked together to essentially build the city from scratch. (Lazar 2008) Leveraging the ex-miner s experience with anarcho-syndicalist labor organizing and the Aymara s experience with self-governance through ayllu democracy, the populated created prefigurative institutions such as community councils and assemblies, which replicated and replaced governance functions, later allowing them to challenge the state during Bolivia s 2003 Gas Wars. (Zibechi 2010) These two groups, the ex-miners and

14 9 and Aymara, formed the social base which allowed prefigurative politics to thrive in El Alto. Finally, I look towards Occupy Wall Street in New York City for an example of prefigurative politics and alternative governance models in the Global North. Occupy Wall Street, of which I was an active participant, was a movement of public square and plaza occupations which constructed prefigurative micro-cities in the hearts of towns and cities through the United States, while simultaneously exposing thousands to assembly-based egalitarian governance models. (Graeber 2013) At the height of the movement it featured over 1,000 such occupations and assemblies. (CNN 2016) In this case, the social base allowing for prefiguration to take hold successfully are found in the anarchist and activist communities in the United States, which had been practicing and proliferating prefigurative politics models for decades prior to their explosion in popularity during the Occupy Movement. (Cornell 2016)

15 10 Chapter 1: Rojava. Syria In March 2011, Syrians rose up against the government of Bashar al-assad, creating a new front in the Arab Spring and launching years of multi-polar civil war. (BBC News 2015) In the void left by the weakening of the Assad government and his Ba ath party, the Kurdish regions in Northern Syria began to assert their autonomy and fiercely defend their lands from outside antagonists, including the emerging Islamic State and occasional skirmishes with the Free Syrian Army. (Human Rights Watch 2014) Despite numerous incursions by these hostile forces, the Kurdish rebels have held their ground and continue to exert de-facto autonomy over the region, which they call Rojava, the Kurdish word for west. Syrian Kurdistan has long been referred to as Western Kurdistan. In this backdrop, the vision of one political party has emerged as the hegemonic governance framework in Rojava: The Democratic Union Party (PYD). Founded in 2003, the PYD is a branch of the Union of Communities in Kurdistan (KCK) headed by Abdullah Ocalan, founder of the Kurdistan Worker s Party (PKK), based in Turkey. (Marcus 2007; Allsopp 2014) For several decades, the Kurdish movement has been divided along geographic and ideological lines. (Marcus 2007) The militant, anticapitalist PKK, based in Turkey and the internationally-recognized, parliamentarian Kurdish Regional Government (KRG), based in Iraq, have both struggled to gain recognition as the sole legitimate representative of the Kurdish people. (Marcus 2007; Dirik, 2014; Jongerden 2015)

16 11 As the Assad regime began to weaken under the pressures of civil war and international pressure against his brutal handling of the uprisings, the PYD was able to assert itself as the de-facto governing apparatus in Syrian Kurdistan. (Human Rights Watch 2014; Jongerden 2015) Long accused of being collaborationist with the regime, the PYD chose to negotiate de-facto autonomy with Assad rather than encouraging the Kurdish population to support the armed movement. (Human Rights Watch, 2014; Daher, 2014) Subsequently, they began cultivating a revolutionary society using democratic confederalism as the guiding political framework. Understanding the chaos in Syria and deep divisions in the Kurdish liberation movement, one is forced to ask why the PYD s democratic confederalism was able to become the hegemonic governance framework in Syrian Kurdistan? I argue that the PYD s strategic shift away from state socialism and towards an egalitarian, horizontalist model rooted in prefiguration theory was able to leverage the PYD s existing connections into Syrian Kurdish society, allowing democratic confederalism to become the hegemonic political framework in the region. In other words, successful implementation of democratic confederalism is why Rojava has been able to survive; a combination of the PYD s existing social base, most prominently its alternative institutions such as the YPG milita, and the promulgation of a horizontalist governance structure entrenched in prefigurative politics have served as a type of antidote to the chaos that has engulfed the rest of Syria.

17 12 American anthropologist David Graeber, part of a December 2014 academic delegation to Rojava says of the movement: they ve managed to come up with a kind of formula: one can t get rid of capitalism without eliminating the state, one can t get rid of the state without getting rid of patriarchy. (Graeber 2014) Therefore, I look at these three superstructures (i.e. capitalism, the state and patriarchy) which democratic confederalism ostensibly seeks to undermine and eventually abolish, and analyze this new governance model by seeing how well functioning and widely supported Rojava s alternatives to them are. The challenge to these three systems, patriarchy, the state and capitalism, by democratic confederalism, has seen the emergence of vibrant new institutions, policies and structures, which have been made hegemonic by the outpouring of support across Rojavan civil and political society. I would be remiss in proceeding without first acknowledging some of the troubling tendencies and checkered history of the PYD and its allies. The PYD and PKK have a long history of doing whatever they can to gain and assert authority, including attacking and intimidating rival groups and even assassinating members of their own. (Marcus 2007) Indeed, upon assuming power in Rojava, the PYD proceeded to ban all other political parties which were not among the fifteen to have signed on to the Rojavan social compact, although members of banned political parties may participate in neighborhood assemblies and community councils. (Allsopp 2014) While democratic confederalism has clearly extended far beyond the reach of the PYD itself, and has been embraced by wide swaths of Rojavan civil society, this may not be enough to keep the

18 13 more authoritarian tendencies of the group in check. These fears are well expressed in the words of Syrian-Kurdish journalist, activist and anarchist, Shiar Nayo, who says: I do not doubt for a moment that the PYD - if things carried on like this - will re-produce an oppressive, totalitarian regime, just as what the Ba ath party or the two ruling parties in Iraqi Kurdistan did... (Tahrir-ICN 2014) To further fuel skepticism and a cautious approach to the Rojavan experiment is that there exists a parallel governance structure, which looks much like a state largely filled with PYD activists. (Kurdish Question 2015) Staffing various technical ministries and running portions of the government that the councils are so far ill equipped to manage, these entities are, in theory, answerable to the councils themselves, and their hierarchy lies under the control of the co-presidents of the three cantons. (Kurdish Question 2015) Meant as a transitionary phase to full council control, in some ways they seem quite practical. For example, in order to fly an airplane out of Rojava, there must be an entity that other states can interact with for communication purposes. (Kurdish Question 2015) Extremely encouraging, however, is the fact that the YPG, YPJ and Asayis, representing the means of force and coercion, have been placed in the unquestioned hands of the councils, not the parallel governance model. Despite these positive developments and decisions, it remains troubling for an organization with as checkered a history as the PYD & PKK to claim that they are constructing a parallel governance model that resembles a state, but will not in fact, behave like one in the end. The fear that

19 14 they may, someday, assert dominance over the councils, looms large, and must be noted before proceeding with the more encouraging developments in their democratic confederalism project. This chapter breaks down into four primary sections. In the first, I work to offer a brief history of the PKK, PYD, Abdullah Ocalan and democratic confederalism itself in order to explain the PYD s social base inside Syrian Kurdish society, which I argue allowed it to gain buy-in for its radical new governance model. In the following section, I analyze democratic confederalism as a governance model, and its ability to replicate and supplant state functions through assembly-based participatory democracy. In the third section, I look at Rojava's efforts to undermine patriarchy through the empowerment of women. Finally, I look towards Rojava s nascent efforts at constructing a new, cooperative economy to replace capitalism, while acknowledging that of the three main superstructures democratic confederalism seeks to undermine, the process of replacing capitalism is the least developed. The PYD, the PKK and the YPG in Syria The Syrian PYD is closely affiliated with the Turkish PKK. Abdullah Ocalan, inspired by socialism and Maoist guerrilla movements, founded the group in 1978, with the goal of forging an independent Kurdish state from the Kurdish enclaves inside Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran, through armed conflict. (Marcus 2007; Human Rights Watch 2014; Allsopp 2014) In 1980, Ocalan and much of the PKK central command fled

20 15 to Syria, following a military coup in Turkey. (Marcus 2007) Assad initially gave the PKK safe haven, hoping to weaken his long-time nemesis, Turkey. In 1998, Ocalan and the PKK were finally kicked out of the country, the Turkish government subsequently captured Ocalan, and he has languished in solitary confinement in Turkish prison since (Marcus 2007) The PKK s institutional infrastructure in Syria was eventually leveraged to create the PYD in 2003, and the party continues to have deep ties to both the PKK and Ocalan himself. (Allsopp 2014; Marcus 2007; Human Rights Watch 2014) Isolated from other prisoners, but having access to texts and permitted to correspond with his followers through writing, Ocalan underwent an apparent ideological transformation. In 2008 he renounced both state socialism and violence, embracing instead an ideology rooted in anarchist thinking, which he referred to as democratic confederalism. (Ocalan 2011; Ocalan 2008; Jongerden 2014) Democratic confederalism, inspired by American anarchist Murray Bookchin and refined by Ocalan, is an egalitarian governance model whose principles are based in horizontality, ecological harmony, anticapitalism and empowerment of women. (TARTOT Kurdistan 2013) Prior to the Arab Spring uprising against Assad, Syria hardly seemed like a place on the verge of forging a new direction for the Kurdish movement. Following the ouster of the PKK in 1998, the local movement floundered under brutal repression and without solid leadership. In 2004, Ba ath party security forces murdered several Kurdish soccer fans who were feuding with Arab fans of the opposing team. The murders enflamed longstanding anger over political and ethnic discrimination against the Kurdish minority, who

21 16 held large demonstrations across northern Syria, which came to be known as the Qamishli uprising. (Tahrir-ICN 2015; Human Rights Watch 2014; Allsopp 2014) Assad spent the next 7 years brutally repressing the Kurds, including banning demonstrations and cultural celebrations. (Human Rights Watch 2014) During the same time the PYD was being overpowered, the Kurdish Regional Government (KRG) in Iraq was flourishing. The ouster of Saddam Hussein and subsequent sectarian violence had made Iraq s Kurds one of the few stable, legitimate partners the United States occupation force had in the nation, and the KRG gained a great deal of local autonomy and international legitimacy during this time. In the aftermath of the anti-assad uprising, the group created the Kurdish National Council (KNC) in Syria, to compete with the PYD for the governance of Syrian Kurdistan. (Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness 2014) Given the relative weakness of the PYD at the time, and the strength of the KRG, it would have been reasonable to assume the newly formed KNC would fill the vacuum left by the Assad regime. Or, alternatively, that the KNC and PYD would begin to engage in sectarian warfare for control of the territory, particularly given the PKK s historic propensity for violence against other Kurdish liberation groups. (Marcus 2007) Instead, on July 11th, 2012, in a deal brokered by KRG President Massoud Barzani, the Erbil Declaration was signed between the KNC and the PYD. Out of this agreement the Democratic Society Movement (TEV-DEM) was bom, which consists of over fifteen political parties (including both the KNC and the PYD) and hundreds of community

22 17 councils, yet critically adheres to the PYD framework of democratic confederalism and is the formal governing apparatus for Rojava. (International Crisis Group 2013; Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness 2014) The social base theory works to explain why the PYD was able to assert hegemony over the region, and receive buy-in for it s democratic confederalism project. Explaining the existence of a social base which allowed the PYD to enact a prefigurative model throughout Syrian Kurdistan, two factors stand out above the rest. The first is that unlike the various other Syrian Kurdish political parties which would have competed with it, the PYD experienced comparatively little state repression. (Sinclair 2011) The Syrian Kurdish political parties of 1957, so named since they all trace their lineage back to the first such party, formed in 1957, were largely repressed by the Assad regime. (Allsopp 2014) Their families were denied public sector jobs and activists for the parties were frequently detained. (Allsopp 2011) This, predictably, made organizing difficult and kept recruitment numbers suppressed and the parties largely underground. The PYD, on the other hand, did not experience such heightened levels of repression. Assad s long-running feud with neighboring Turkey prompted him to tacitly support the PKK and offer safe haven for the group and its leader, Abdullah Ocalan, in Syria throughout the 1980s and much of the 1990s. (Marcos 2007) Following Assad s decision to oust the PKK group in 1998, the PYD was created by former PKK guerrillas in 2003, and allowed to do a fair bit of above-ground recruitment and other political activities, raising its profile above that of competing Syrian Kurdish Parties of 1957.

23 18 (Sinclair 2011) The PYD was also was able to leverage its connections to the PKK and tap into its network of international support, allowing it to receive substantial financial and material support from abroad, further privileging it above other competing parties. (Sinclair 2011; Allsopp 2014) Secondly, the PYD was able to leverage its ability to exist above-ground into the creation of many alternative governance structures, replicating state-like functions. (Allsopp 2014) It had constructed a variety of civil and security apparatus including Kurdish schools, civil organizations and a militia group called the YPG. (Allsopp 2014) The YPG was of particular importance since once the threat of armed Jihadist groups such as the Islamic State began emerging on the borders of Syrian Kurdistan, the PYD was able to offer its YPG militia group as a means to secure the region against hostile forces, greatly increasing civilian buy-in for the group s political project. (Allsopp 2014) For a short time following the beginning of the Syrian Civil War, the Assad regime also kept state services flowing into Syrian Kurdistan, trusting the PYD to administer them, allowing the PYD to govern with state-like authority. (Allsopp, 2014) Democratic Confederalism & Stateless Governance: At its core, democratic confederalism is envisioned as a participatory, egalitarian governance project founded on anarchist principles that exists parallel to the state, working to achieve a type of dual-power. Rather than seeking to earn a type of autonomy within the nation-state model, as the KRG has in northern Iraq, democratic confederalism

24 19 is an attempt to create a replicable model that can eventually supplant the state as the standard governing body for the global system. As Joost Jongerden asserts below, democratic confederalism seeks to develop the self-governing capacities of people and to radicalize democracy. Democratic autonomy concerns the ability and capacity to have (or regain) control over political, economic and cultural institutions, while democratic confederalism refers to the ability to decide and administer. The aim is not to build a state, but to develop a democratic society. (Jongerden 2015) Rojava is seeing the construction of a governance model that draws from the bottom up, rather than from the top down. Democracy flows upwards, rather than from mandates made from above. The central units in Rojavan democratic confederalism are councils. Councils exist throughout several tiers of Rojavan society, with governance beginning at the neighborhood level, flowing up to the district level, to a city level, and finally at the canton level. (Biehl 2014) The three autonomous cantons of Afrin, Cizire and Kobani represent the largest regional grouping in Rojava, and each of their copresidents, elected by the councils, are the systems highest authority. (Tax 2015) Neighborhood councils make up the largest number of councils and participants. Every person can participate in these councils where they live. Some can be as small as a few dozen people, while others number in the hundreds. (Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness 2014) Councils can also be formed around identities (women, youth, etc.), policy questions, transformative justice, workplaces, civic organizations, political parties, religious organizations and distribution of resources. (Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness

25 ) Some councils use voting to determine outcomes of debates, although many require full consensus of all participants present. Councils are permitted to choose their own decision-making model at the local level. Many of the councils choose to use majority voting for anything technical or logistical items. For topics that are of moral or political importance, full consensus is used. (Kurdish Question 2015) From here, the idea is that democracy flows up to the district councils. These consist of members elected by the neighborhood councils to relay decisions made by the neighborhood to the larger body, and are also permitted to make decisions at this higher level. People participating in the district council then elect two co-presidents, one man and one woman, to serve on the district people s council. (Biehl 2014) Democracy continues to flow upwards to the city level, and eventually to the canton level itself. All of these various co-presidents are held accountable to their local population and serve only at the leisure of their constituents. (Graeber 2014) All decisions made by an upper council must be ratified at the lower levels to become binding rules and laws for the constituents of that assembly. In other words, direct consent of the governed and the constant revisiting and renewal of that consent, is a crucial component of Rojavan democracy. All power rests in the local level, with the higher levels used exclusively for coordination purposes. For example, in August 2014, a decision was reached at a regional council that local security forces, called Asayis, should be allowed to carry weapons. Three neighborhood assemblies did not approve of this

26 21 regional decision, and therefore in those three neighborhoods, Asayis are not permitted to carry weapons. (Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness 2014) Democratic confederalism, however, was not bom in Syria, and this is one of the many advantages it had in becoming the hegemonic governance framework in Rojava. In Turkey, the PYD's allies in the PKK have been practicing the model since 2005, in areas within Northern Kurdistan (Southeastern Turkey) under their control. (TARTOT Kurdistan 2013) Having nearly a decade to experiment with the model in Turkish Kurdistan not only allowed many initial growing pains to be sorted out, but since the Kurdish movement in both nations are so closely related, presumably helped the PYD achieve buy-in for the system in Syrian Kurdistan. Democratic confederalism as practiced in Turkish Kurdistan, while still espousing revolutionary ethos, proved to be quite pragmatic in blending radical approaches to democracy with cooperation from the existing state institutions, largely governed by the pro-kurdish BDP party. This model of governance represented a profound shift from the PKK s previous opposition to working with the state at all, and allowed them to both construct these models with comparably less repression than they were accustomed to, and made them an actor other parties and movements became more comfortable negotiating in good faith with. The European Union, to which Turkey was applying for admission at the time, encouraged the growth of these councils as a sign of a democratizing Turkey that was granting some level of regional autonomy to the Kurds. (TARTOT Kurdistan 2013)

27 22 More evidence of the success of the council model in Rojava can come by looking at the behavior of its would-be competitors for governance: the KRG and its Syrian ally, the KNC. Less than a year after creating the KNC, ostensibly to challenge the PYD for hegemony over Syrian Kurdistan, KRG President Massoud Barzani brokered the Erbil Declaration, forming the unified TEV-DEM front, which is the political coalition governing Rojava. TEV-DEM is committed to carrying out the work of democratic confederalism, and largely adopted the PYD platform. (Graeber & Ognuc 2014; Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness 2014) Indeed, directly breaking with the standing governance orthodoxy of their KRG allies, a co-president of the KNC described the democratic autonomy project as a question of how to rule not with power, but against power. (Coles 2014) The KRG, who initially responded to the Roj avail movement by attempting to build a massive canal physically separating Rojava and Iraqi Kurdistan, has since abandoned the divisive project. (Graeber 2014) Confronting Patriarchy The empowerment of women and the goal of abolishing patriarchy are central to the revolution in Rojava. Enshrined in the Charter of the Rojava Cantons are a number of articles dedicated to the empowerment of women. These include article 27, which states that Woman have the inviolable right to participate in political, social, economic and cultural life and article 28, Men and women are equal in the eyes of the law. The charter guarantees the effective realization of equality of women and mandates public

28 23 institutions to work towards the elimination of gender discrimination. (Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness 2014) However, the empowerment of women in Rojava cannot be adequately represented by a few words in the constitutional charter. Patriarchal social relationships are rapidly being undermined and gender-discrimination challenged, to real-world effect. The district communes, which American writer Janet Biehl describes as the building block of the whole (democratic confederalism) structure incorporates 300 members, and two elected co-presidents, who by law must be one male and one female. (Tax 2015) Any convening of a district commune must include at least 40% women, or the meeting is cancelled until a more accurate representation of the community can be brought together. (Biehl 2014) Additionally, the three top officers from each municipality must include people from three different ethnic groups, and at least one woman. (BBC 2014) In addition to ensuring participation of women in the general councils, there are also separate councils for women s issues. These exist alongside and parallel to the general councils at all levels of governance and focus on issues particular to women and gender liberation. Such policy-focused women s councils include forced marriages, honor killings, polygamy, sexual violence and discrimination. (Tax 2015; Biehl 2014) If policy decisions made by the mixed-gender, general councils conflict with policies made on women s issues in the women-only councils, the latter have veto power over the general councils. (Biehl 2014)

29 24 In addition to political participation, social safety nets and laws have been enacted to protect women and realize gender equality. Shelter systems have been put into place throughout Rojava for women that have to leave abusive families or spouses. (Tax 2015) Women are now granted equal access to educational opportunities and can study whatever they please and can choose any profession they wish. A transformative justice model has been put into place where women can bring issues of domestic violence before a public assembly, and work to determine how to resolve the abuse. (Biehl 2014) Women in Rojava have gained international fame and recognition for fighting on the front lines against the Islamic State. In one of the more dramatic episodes of the war, on August 2014, the United States and its allies struggled to free over 50,000 Yazidi s, abandoned to the Northern Iraqi mountains by the Iraqi army and KRG peshmerga militia. With Islamic State surrounding them on all sides, a massacre of the Yazidi s was anticipated. Instead, the Rojavan fighters left their own lands, fought though ISIS lines, and cut a corridor through which the Yazidi refugees could escape. (Tax 2014; Reuters 2014) Images of the Rojavan women in uniform, fighting the Islamic State, became prolific throughout Western media (Vice 2014; Dirik 2014) Similarly to the method with which the governing councils are set up in regards to gender, the Rojavan militia has two primary branches. The YPG (People s Protection Units) are a mixed-gender force, and the YPJ (Women s Defense Forces) are a women s only force. In total, around 15,000, or roughly 35% of the total Rojavan militia, are

30 25 women. (Dirik 2014) There are several hundred women s-only battalions throughout Rojava. (Dirik 2014) The military force itself is designed to put men and women side-by-side on the battlefield, and undermine patriarchy through shared experience. In the words of Sozda, a YPJ commander, We don t want the world to know us because of our guns, but because of our ideas. We are not just women fighting ISIS. We struggle to change the society s mentality and show the world what women are capable of. (Dirik 2014) This process of undermining patriarchal social relationships, while in its nascent stage in a conservative society is creating a sizeable segment of the population, led by the women in the YPJ, fiercely willing to defend the revolution against outside antagonists, fearful their progress towards equality will be challenged by any new regime that comes in. (Dearden 2015; VICE News 2012) Faced with the specter of the Islamic State, the undermining of patriarchy is perhaps the best recruitment tool of revolutionary activists in Rojava, and goes a long way towards explaining how the cantons have been able to survive. Constructing a New Economy The word capitalist appears 43 times in Abdullah Ocalan s Democratic Confederalism pamphlet, more than once per page, leading scholars, such as David Graeber and Janet Biehl, to conclude a post-capitalist economic structure to be the end goal of the new system (Ocalan 2011; Graeber 2014; Biehl 2015) Despite these scathing

31 26 critiques by Ocalan, his pamphlet and the official line coming out of TEV-DEM is one supporting a mixed economy, while encouraging the creation of cooperatives and other elements necessary to the formation of a post-capitalist system. (Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness 2014) Abdurrahman Hemo, advisor for economic development for the Cizire canton, describes an economy with three pillars: the community economy, the open economy and the war economy, with the emphasis being on the community economy. On this, he says, Our main focus for development would be on the community economy... We need some kind of common economy, and factories should be communally owned. But we won t create a state economy, or a centralized economy. It should be locally organized. (Biehl 2015) The measurable economy of Rojava currently depends largely on the Cizire canton, where there are substantial oil reserves. (Biehl 2015) Currently, only 200 of these oil wells are operational, providing oil to the Rojavan people themselves, with none being made available for export. This is not by choice, but rather due to an international embargo that prevents them from selling their oil on the open market. Turkey, with whom Rojava shares a 900-kilometer border, has closed all crossings and initiated a political and economic boycott of Rojava. (Biehl 2015; Biehl 2014) As of February 2015, the only open border crossing controlled by the Rojavan people is the Semalka crossing into Iraq, which the KRG has periodically closed under Turkish pressure. The Syrian regime also controls the only airport in the region, making it nearly impossible for Rojava to export anything. (Biehl 2014) All the income for the cantons currently comes from selling oil

32 27 and diesel, at subsidized prices, to its own people, and from the occasional border crossings from Iraq. (Biehl 2015) Finally, 70% of what meager income the cantons do collect is re-directed to the war economy, helping pay for clothes, weapons, food and supplies for the YPG, YPJ and Asayis in their struggle against the Islamic State. (Biehl 2014; Biehl 2015) Despite these conditions, the cantons have made considerable progress in their goals towards building a new economic system. In 2010, one year before the Arab Spring, what is now Rojava provided over 40% of Syria s GNP and 70% of its exports. (Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness 2014) Now that Turkey has made exports effectively impossible and much land has been rendered useless by the war with the Islamic State, most Rojavans survive off of subsistence agriculture and the informal economy. (Graeber 2014) Additionally, a model called ownership by use was put into place in late What it meant, effectively, was that all buildings, land and infrastructure fell under control of the various city and district councils. (Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness 2014) Occupants using a home, business or piece of infrastructure continued to control it, but could not sell it on the open market. Instead the local council would decide the best use for the building if its previous owners abandoned it. Buildings abandoned by the Syrian regime were also appropriated and put to use by the councils. (Graeber 2014) Ownership by use applies only to land, buildings and infrastructure and does not extend to individually owned commodities.

33 28 Furthermore, worker cooperatives and worker self-management have been implemented in the fields of heavy industry and agriculture. (Graeber 2014; Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness 2014) According to the Rojavan Ministry of Economics worker councils had been established in one-third of these enterprises across Rojava, as of (Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness 2014) Cooperatives have been established in the fields of dairy, construction, textiles and greenhouse agriculture. Finally, to increase their self-reliance and autonomy, an oil refinery and grain mills have been built, which were previously denied to the region by the Assad government, despite providing the bulk of Syria s oil and grain. (ROAR Collective 2014; Biehl 2015; Graeber 2014) Social services have also been a focus of the Rojavan people, including the creation of new neighborhood health clinics, hospitals, rehabilitation centers and cultural centers. These are often constructed inside of buildings abandoned by regime forces. (Kurdish Question 2015; ROAR Collective 2014) Staple foods are subsidized, with every family getting three loaves of bread per day at the cost of 60 Syrian lire, despite costing 100 Syrian lire to produce and get to market. (Biehl 2015) Perhaps the most ambitious of the projects is a Kurdish-speaking university called the Mesopotamian Academy of Social Sciences, which opened in September (Tax 2015) Located in the Cizere canton, the university so far has three departments: law, sociology and history, with courses being offered by 20 faculty members. The campus boasts classrooms, a library, sports facilities and a cafeteria. (Rojava Report 2014) The importance of such a project to

34 29 the Kurdish people, long denied even the ability to speak their native language in formal settings, should not be underestimated. Looking Ahead Since mid-2011, in spite of an economic embargo and periodic military incursions by Turkey, open warfare against the Islamic State and occasional skirmishes with the Syrian regime and the Free Syrian Army, the people of Rojava have been constructing the beginnings of a new governance model, tearing down old structures and building new, egalitarian ones in their place. There has been widespread participation in neighborhood councils, cooperative workplaces and the Rojavan defense forces. Syrians have also begun seeing Rojava as a sort of safe haven from the violence that continues to shake the country, with an estimated 200,000 people emigrating to Rojava from other parts of Syria since the war began. (Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness 2014) Offering some insight as to whether or not this model can succeed in the long run, I next examine the Zapatista movement in Chiapas, Mexico. The parallels between these two structures are quite profound. Both were initially founded by small guerrilla groups led by charismatic leaders, and have worked to undermine their authority over time through the introduction of a governance model rooted in participatory, assembly-based governance. While neither situation is ideal to achieving the goals of prefigurative politics, since the small guerrilla cadre (in these cases the EZLN or the PYD) could attempt to assert control over the councils, or the charismatic leader (Ocalan or

35 30 Subcomandante Marcos) could change their strategies back to a more top-down socialist model, disrupting the revolutionary process underway, the fact that the opposite occurred in Chiapas will illuminate our consideration of the Rojavan model. Based on principles of direct action and horizontality, occupied plazas whose agitants organize in assemblies very similar to Rojava s councils have been springing up across the world to protest the state and capital, while using prefigurative politics to design and display a new series of possible social relationships and governance models. Rojava, the largest beachhead that has yet to emerge from this vibrant global movement, is the first to gain established territory, run an economy and field a defensive military apparatus. As the argument for prefigurative politics goes, once people experience this type of radical, participatory democracy and a governance project founded on consent rather than coercion, it becomes extremely difficult to dislodge this desire from their minds. In the cantons of Rojava, we may find out just how powerful and alluring real, consensual democracy can be, and how much people are willing to risk in order to defend their new way of life.

36 31 Chapter II: Chiapas, Mexico In the case of Rojava, it is perhaps reflexively difficult for scholars, activists and political organizers to imagine an egalitarian organizing model rooted in prefigurative politics emerging from an armed political party and guerrilla group whose ideology was originally rooted in more orthodox Marxist-Leninist theory and practice. We do, however, have at least one modem example of this model functioning effectively, becoming greatly inspirational to a variety of grassroots struggles across the world, competently governing territory for more than two decades, and decentralizing more and more as time goes on. For corollaries to the PYD in Rojava, we can look towards the jungles of Chiapas, Mexico, at the Zapatista movement, originally initiated through an armed struggle against the Mexican state by the EZLN (Zapatista Army of National Liberation) guerrilla force but evolving into something else altogether different. Founded in 1983, the EZLN remained a clandestine military and political organization until it emerged on New Year s Day, 1994, in protest to the first day of the effects of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). (Klein 2015) EZLN militants, having spent over a decade building support within the largely rural, indigenous communities inside the Mexican state of Chiapas, famously occupied the town of San Cristobal, declaring to assembled media that the state of Chiapas was now under their control, and calling for a nation-wide revolution to overthrow the ruling PRI party, which held onto power for seventy-one years following the Mexican Revolution. (Klein 2015) When their revolution never materialized, the EZLN quickly shifted tactics to one of

37 32 prefigurative politics, largely laid down their weapons and Chiapas has been under de facto autonomy for twenty-two years. (Starr, Martinez-Torres, and Rosset 2011) The terms EZLN and Zapatista are often used interchangeably, but there are critical distinctions to be made between these terms. The term EZLN refers to the guerrilla army that ostensibly pushed the Mexican military and much of the Mexican state out of Chiapas. The term Zapatista support base refers to communities in Chiapas who support the EZLN, and participate in their governance projects. When used in context, EZLN refers to the political-military apparatus and Zapatista refers to civilian and civilian governance. The indigenous communities in Chiapas, which would eventually form the Zapatista support base, had long struggled under abusive labor practices. It is frequently remarked that...the Mexican Revolution never reached Chiapas. (Klein 2015) Zapatista women in the district of Morelia described to Hillary Klein, an American solidarity activist who lived in Chiapas for several years, their working conditions before the uprising and de-facto autonomy that followed afterwards. They described patron s (land-owning bosses) who would whip them for the slightest infraction, tie their husbands naked to trees for days, deny them the right to learn how to read and keep them bound to the patron s land through endless cycles of debt. (Klein 2015) Women who worked inside the patron s house were only allowed to eat after the patron s animals were fed, ate leftovers off the patron s table, and had to go out and eat alongside the animals, being forbidden from eating inside the home itself. (Klein 2015)

38 33 Under these conditions, the struggle for land became paramount, signifying autonomy from both abusive land-owners and the Mexican state. In 1992, to prepare for the passage of NAFTA, the ruling PRI party modified article 27 of the Mexican federal constitution, allowing communally-held land parcels, a treasure of the revolution of which the PRI was the original driving force, to be broken up and sold to wealthy business owners. (Klein 2015) This served as the final offense to the EZLN, who resolved to go to war over the decision. The EZLN and the larger Zapatista movement represents a struggle against neoliberalism and late capitalism, part of what Richard Stahler-Sholk calls...an antisystemic movement of movements. Referring to the alter-globalization movement sparked in large part by the Zapatistas, themselves. (Stahler-Sholk 2010) Frequently overlooked, however, is how intrinsically intertwined a struggle against neoliberalism has become with a struggle against the state model, itself. As states weaken and contract, privatizing state-managed functions such as the aforementioned communally-held land parcels, they are changing the terrain of power itself. As as the terrain of power shifts, so must the strategies of those who struggle to undermine this power. As Stahler-Sholk further remarks, It should come as no surprise that old paradigms of taking state power by armed assault should be waning in the face of new realities in which the state is not the sole locus of power, forcing a rethinking of what we even mean by the concept of revolution. (Stahler-Sholk 2010)

39 34 Following this logic, of challenging a new type of power using a new type of struggle, the Zapatista s proved influential to social movements and revolutionary forces across the world for a variety of reasons. The reason most important to us, however, is their quick decision to lay down their arms and shift from a model largely based on guerrilla warfare and nationwide conflict to a model of prefigurative politics over a swath of land in which they already had a social base and widespread support. (EZLN 1995) A new type of revolution for a new type of global order, one in which states are not the sole arbiters of power. Since the Zapatista political project has existed for over three decades, governed territory for over twenty years and gone through several dramatic organizational and philosophical shifts over time, 1have chosen to break this section into three chronological segments. While these segments do indeed tell the story of a political-military organization and its support base, they more importantly for our purposes chart the growth and evolution of their alternative governance apparatuses, and their embrace of prefigurative politics over a period more than thirty years. The first section will detail the EZLN s growth from , in which the EZLN was a clandestine military apparatus, working in small guerrilla cadres to prepare themselves for what they assumed would be a long asymmetrical civil war more in line with other Latin American struggles in Cuba, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Colombia, etc. (Klein 2015) The second section will show the group s development into a governing body from , in which Chiapas was largely governed though thirty-eight

40 35 Zapatista Autonomous Rebel Municipalities (MAREZ), and assembly-based community organizing models were developed. (Stahler-Sholk 2010) The third and final section will focus on the time period from 2003-date, in which the Good Government Councils were implemented, representing a seismic shift in Zapatista governance. It was during this time that the EZLN largely removed themselves from governance functions, deciding that support-base communities were now able to effectively manage their own affairs using the assembly-based models, and did not need their guidance any longer. (Starr, Martinez-Torres, and Rosset 2011) In viewing the EZLN, Zapatista support-base communities and Chiapas, we can see glimpses of possibilities for the future of Rojava. A small group of radical leftist revolutionaries liberated a swath of land by force from a largely repressive and distained government, and then proceeded to carefully chip away at their own state-like authority by empowering communities to govern themselves though autonomous, but networked, assemblies. While this strategy is tenuous as it relies on a guerrilla group or political party to voluntarily cede authority to community councils, perhaps there is a more pragmatic reason both of these groups follow this model. In an age where neoliberalism has simultaneously expanded the military might of many states, making them difficult to overthrow with guerrilla armies, while diminishing the social services those same states offer, it is possible that both groups turned to prefigurative politics and alternative institution building not out of strict idealism, but rather as a practical adaptation to the new terrain of power forged by neoliberalism.

41 36 Forging a Social Base: The EZLN before 1994 The EZLN was founded by members of a leftist guerrilla group based in Mexico City called the National Liberation Forces, or FLN. (Klein, 2015) The FLN was founded on August 6th, 1969 by a group of young students and urban leftists led by brothers Cesar German and Fernando Munoz Yanez, as well as fellow revolutionaries Alfredo Zarate and Raul Perez. (Chaparro 1990; Romero 2013) These young Marxist-Leninists had given up on institutional change after the Mexican government responded to a student protest movement earlier in the year with violent repression, resulting in hundreds of dead, missing or injured protestors. (Romero 2013) Following a raid on one of their safe houses outside of Mexico City on February 14th, 1974, the group began to focus most of its efforts on recruitment from universities and building up of infrastructure in Chiapas, with an eye towards a guerrilla th war fought in the jungles, rather than in the cities. (Romero 2013) On November 17, 1983, they officially founded the Zapatista Army of National Revolution, or the EZLN. (Romero 2013) These urban guerrillas added to a growing revolutionary fervor in Chiapas, which for decades had already been home to Maoist political organizers and Liberation Theologists. (Stahler-Sholk 2010) The clandestine EZLN militants went about constructing guerrilla camps in the jungles of Chiapas, stocking armaments and preparing for a long military campaign. (Klein 2015) They also recognized, however, that in order to survive in these conditions,

42 37 they would need to draw material support from the largely rural and indigenous inhabitants of the region, as well as recruit new soldiers from Chiapas, itself. The first few years were full of distrust from the locals and an attitude of superiority which emanated from the largely university-educated EZLN members. (Romero 2013) Guerrillas were persecuted, accused of being cattle thieves, witch doctors or bandits. (Romero 2013) Subcomandante Marcos, a former professor who would eventually become the chief global spokesperson for the group s efforts, describes how the tepid reception by the locals led the group to rethink its approach. We really suffered a process of re-education, of re-styling. As if they had disarmed us. As if they had dismantled all we were made up of - Marxism, Leninism, socialism, urban culture, poetry, literature - all that formed part of us, and things we did not even know we had. They disarmed us and then armed us again, but in a different way. And that was the only way to survive. (Marcos 2001) Realizing the futility of an approach centered around the guerrillas knowing best for the population of Chiapas, they began a tactical shift that would profoundly shape the group for the rest of its existence. They began to focus on offering workshops to communities that wanted them, recruiting those in the population who seemed to share parts of the EZLN world view, and educating themselves on the struggles of the locals, rather than attempting to educate the locals on the importance of Marxist-Leninist ideology. (Ross 1995) EZLN members would offer various workshops to communities nearby their guerrilla encampments. Instead of focusing on revolutions and socialism, they offered

43 38 classes on pharmaceutical and herbal medicine, as well as courses on reading and writing. (Ramirez 2008) As they earned the trust of community members, they would begin to recruit for their organization. Newly recruited EZLN members would secretly leave their communities for a few hours to receive political and military education from nearby EZLN camps. (Klein 2015) While EZLN members who lived in the villages initially worked to hide their participation in the group, villagers knew that at least some of their peers were in the organization, and began to provide material support. Forming the beginning of the Zapatista support-base communities, these villagers would provide food and hand-sown uniforms to the EZLN encampments. (Klein 2015) The EZLN also evolved during this period to focus on issues that held specific resonance for the villagers in Chiapas. Alcohol had long been used to keep indigenous communities disrupted and weak, and therefore more easily managed by the state and capital. (Klein 2015) Recognizing that the most common crisis pointed to by rural, indigenous women was alcoholism among their husbands, the EZLN worked to organize women to ban alcohol from their communities. By the early 1990 s, the EZLN had penetrated deeply enough into society in Chiapas that many communities were using the assembly-based decision-making models shared with them by the EZLN. Women organized to use these assemblies to ban alcohol in their communities, to great success. (Ramirez 2008) In March, 1993, just months before the insurgency burst into the world s political consciousness, the EZLN disbanded its original leadership body, made up largely of FLN

44 39 urban leftists, and created the CCRI or Clandestine Revolutionary Indigenous Committee. (Klein 2015) An early display of their later willingness to give up their own authority to live up to their egalitarian ethics, the CCRI was created so that the indigenous population of Chiapas was now in charge of the EZLN. (Ross 1995) One of the first acts of the CCRI was to pass the Women s Revolutionary Law. (Klein 2015) This law contained ten articles, dealing with the equal rights of women to work, participate in governance, choose who they marry, and be free from abuse. (EZLN 1994) The drafting of the law was a cooperative affair, perhaps the first major regionwide effect of the new governance model the EZLN had been spreading in its now robust support-base communities. Each Zapatista region wrote a draft of the law, which was then compiled with drafts from other regions, and sent back for more revisions from each region. This process continued until a consensus was reached, and became referred to as a consulta. (Klein 2015) The consulta process was also used when the EZLN asked permission to go to war with the Mexican state over the passage of NAFTA. Zapatista support base communities were consulted until a consensus was reached to declare war to protest the free trade agreement, and later during the negotiations with the Mexican state over the San Andres Accords. (Klein 2015) : From Guerrilla Army to Governance Structure On December 31st, 1993, the EZLN army assembled, preparing to emerge from the jungles for the first time to challenge the Mexican state in armed conflict. The army

45 40 was almost entirely indigenous, and about one third of the insurgents were women. (Marcos 1995; Klein 2015) The armed conflict, largely centered around the small, colonial city of San Cristobal, lasted a mere twelve days before a cease-fire was called. The city of San Cristobal itself was occupied for less than forty-eight hours, but was just long enough for them to read their declaration of war from the balcony of the municipal palace to assembled national and international media, showcasing a unique ability to cultivate friendly media attention that would serve them well for decades to come. (Klein 2015) Subcomandante Marcos and other key leadership of the EZLN evaded capture or death in the government raids that ensued following the uprising, but many EZLN combatants and civilians were not so lucky. In the city of Ocosingo, the Mexican army was able to surround the city and murdered dozens, if not hundreds, of EZLN militants and civilians. (Klein 2015) While occasional skirmishes occurred periodically throughout the next decade, the conflict largely remained dormant after the first twelve days. The Mexico-wide uprising the EZLN had hoped for never materialized, so they shifted their focus instead to strengthening the assembly-based alternative governance models and alternative institution building they had started constructing in the jungles during their clandestine years. (Marcos 2001) Richard Stahler-Sholk describes the evolution of the Zapatistas and their governance model during this period in three phases. The first phase launched a year after the uprising, in December 1994, in response to a government encirclement and siege of

46 41 Chiapas. During this time, the EZLN formally declared autonomy in the Third Declaration from the Lacandon Jungle, and announced their presence in thirty-eight municipalities across Chiapas. (Stahler-Sholk 2010) The second phase followed the signing of the San Andres Accords, which were an attempt by the Mexican state to concede to some of the demands of the EZLN and end the conflict, but was deemed by the group to not go nearly far enough, and was ultimately largely ignored by both sides. (Marcos 2001) In the aftermath of the failed negotiations, the EZLN and Zapatista support-base communities boycotted municipal elections and instead used open community assemblies to elect their own, autonomous leadership. The move is largely considered to represent the birth of a clear parallel governance structure emerging out of the struggle. (Stahler-Sholk 2010) While leaders are elected in these assemblies to fulfill day-to-day governance functions, whenever an assembly is convened in a community that assembly immediately represents the highest authority in the community, above all elected leaders. (EZLN 2012) The final phase, according to Stahler-Sholk, began in 1997, when the government began reneging on the already modest commitments it had made during the San Andres Accords. This resulted in the EZLN expelling many official government employees and agencies from its territory, further institutionalizing its alternative governance model. (Stahler-Sholk 2010) Attendance at these assembled councils is generally considered mandatory for Zapatistas over 12 (or 15, depending on the community s rules) and follows a loose form of consensus. The larger network connecting assemblies to one

47 42 another was named the Association of Autonomous Municipalities, and during this period in Zapatista history represented the highest level of civilian authority and governance. (Starr, Martinez-Torres, and Russet 2014; EZLN 2012) The assemblies developed by the EZLN and Zapatista support-base communities deliberately draw on many elements of traditional indigenous governance structures, with community assemblies historically serving as important institutions in Mayan villages. (Ross 1995) While these assemblies were not inherently democratic, Hillary Klein asserts that they became far more participatory after influence from Maoist groups and Liberation Theologists began organizing in Chiapas in the 1970 s. (Klein 2015) In addition to codifying their assembly-based governance model, the EZLN also began to tackle some of the most pressing issues that had long-plagued their communities. Chief among these was the recuperation of land. Data from the Mexican government suggests the EZLN occupied 60,000 hectares of land in Chiapas in the first six months of 1994 alone from land-holders fleeing the revolution, and re-distributed those holdings to peasant farmers. (Klein 2015) The Mexican government estimates that between 1994 and 1998, between 500,000 and 700,000 hectares were occupied either by Zapatistas or by other campesino organizations across Mexico who were inspired to act after seeing the EZLN s success. (Klein 2015) During this period the Zapatistas also focused on their alternative infrastructure, focusing on the fields of education and medical needs. Classes were offered on language,

48 43 communication, math, social sciences, natural sciences and humanities, all in the indigenous Tzotzil language. (Ramirez 2008) While these programs were all still in their nascent phases in the mid-1990 s, the Zapatistas began investing far more resources into them after a crucial decision made in Between 1994 and 1996 the Mexican government had been waging a campaign of trying to buy off Zapatista communities by offering extensive social programs and benefits for pledging loyalty to the PRI party. (Ramirez 2008) According to Zapatistas, the government used a combination of land recuperation programs to forcibly displace Zapatistas off their land, while simultaneously granting other social welfare programs and agricultural subsidies to sow anger and division inside the movement. (Klein 2015) In response to this pressure from the state, Zapatista communities decided in 1996 to reject all government aid programs in their territories. (Stahler-Sholk 2010) Communities within Chiapas which were still loyal to the Mexican state continued to receive such benefits. As time went on, the EZLN began to realize that they had, in effect, created two, parallel governance structures, not including their complex relationship to the Mexican state itself. They had created both a networked system of neighborhood assemblies as well as the EZLN s political-military hierarchy. (Ross, 2005) The overlapping responsibilities of these two groups became muddled over time, making it difficult to tell when one s authority ended and the other s began. The EZLN felt like it was ready to cede authority completely to the community assemblies in the early 2000 s, and began to prepare for such a transition (Klein 2015) Following the model they had relied on since

49 44 their initial shift toward prefigurative politics in the 1980 s, and their creation of the CCRI in 1993, the EZLN again ceded more of its authority to the networking community councils. In 2003, they propelled into the third major phase of the Zapatista movement, the formation of the Good Government Councils, and the beginning of a period of complete civilian control over governance functions. (EZLN 2012; Klein 2015) 2003-date: Good Government Councils and Autonomous Civilian Governance Never a group to pass up the opportunity for extraordinary symbolism, the Good Government Councils (GGC s) were created by the EZLN on August 8th, 2003, the birthday of the Mexican revolutionary from whom the group derived their name, Emiliano Zapata. (Ross 2005) A new regional formation was also introduced that day, with each Good Government Council forming the governance structure for each of five newly-created Caracoles, called Morelia, La Garrucha, La Realidad, Oventic and Roberto Barrios. (Klein 2015) Inside of these five caracoles are the roughly 1,100 Zapatista support-base communities and twenty-nine autonomous municipalities. (Ross 2005) Together, these three structures, each one operating autonomously but networked to all the others, make up the current formation of the Zapatista governance model. (EZLN 2012) The word caracoles literally translates to conch shells, which are traditionally used by the indigenous population of Mexico to summon the community together. (Ross 2005)

50 45 Being autonomous, each of the five caracoles, as well as each of the twenty-nine municipalities which form them, have slightly different formations, although they tend to follow the same rough structure. While only Zapatistas, supporters of the EZLN s political project, can serve on the GGC s, the councils provide governance functions for the Zapatista and non-zapatista people living in EZLN controlled areas in Chiapas, estimated to be around 300,000 people. (Starr, Martinez-Torres, and Rosset 2011) Participation on the GGC s rotates, usually a member can only serve for days before being recalled to their community. This is both to keep permanent leadership from forming and to give every Zapatista a chance to participate in the governance of their region. (Starr, Martinez-Torres, and Rosset 2011) GGC offices are open twenty-four hours a day and are designed to coordinate between municipal assemblies, resolve disputes between communities, and to ensure an equitable distribution of resources. (Ross 2005) They also oversee the health, education, housing, agricultural and other projects for the region. (Ross 2005) No member of the military leadership or the CCRI can participate in the GGC s, since, in the words of Subcomandante Marcos, The military structure of the EZLN contaminated in some ways a democratic and self-governing tradition and the GGC s were created in response to this issue. (Marcos 2003; Stahler-Sholk 2007) One of the most common issues resolved by the Good Government Councils are resolution of conflicts, civil and criminal. (Starr, Martinez-Torres, and Rosset 2011) The councils have developed a reputation throughout Chiapas for impartiality and

51 46 expediency, and are frequently chosen to resolve conflicts over Mexican state courts, even by the non-zapatista population of Chiapas. (Starr, Martinez-Torres, and Rosset 2011) In one case, a Mexican taxicab driver s union from outside of Chiapas travelled to Zapatista territory to have a dispute resolved, with both sides believing that the GGC s would serve as more impartial arbiters than the Mexican state. (Starr, Martinez-Torres, and Rosset 2011) For issues around mediating disputes, facilitating agreements and determining punishments, the GGC s and municipal councils have have created a series of autonomous Honor and Justice Commissions, which are largely made up of indigenous elders, and serve as the court system throughout Zapatista territory. (Klein 2015) For matters which require restitution to the community, the Zapatistas rely on a system of transformative justice rather than incarceration. Examples of the types of punishments they issue include planting 1,000 trees, helping build a school or opening a new road. (Starr, Martinez-Torres, and Rosset 2011) Incarceration is not employed as a type of punishment in Zapatista territory, and expulsion from the community is the ultimate punishment. (Klein 2015) These commissions offer their services free of charge and are conducted in a variety of languages, including Spanish and indigenous dialects. (Starr, Martinez-Torres, and Rosset 2011) Finally, in a stark display of prefigurative politics, it is worth noting that in many cases a community in question is able to get together in an assembly and solve a dispute

52 47 for themselves, without feeling the need to elevate the issue to an Honor and Justice Commission or to the GGC s. (Starr, Martinez-Torres, and Rosset 2011) Another field in which Zapatistas have effectively taken over governance functions from the Mexican state is in health care. In EZLN-controlled territory, every Zapatista carries a health card, which enables them to receive free health care, medicine and even surgery at Zapatista health clinics. (Ramirez 2008) Non-Zapatistas and PRI members are charged between ten and twenty-five pesos (depending on the community) for consultations and medicine in order to offset some of the cost involved in the program. (Ramirez 2008) Penetration has been fairly impressive, with clinics throughout communities in all five caracoles. In Oventic, for example, there are clinics in all eight of the townships in the town of Los Altos, and more than 300 community health houses that offer basic medicines. (Ramirez 2008) The system has a focus on preventative care and boasts small health houses, full-size clinics, and hospitals that offer surgery. (Ramirez 2008) Finally, the entire system has a focus on reclaiming traditional indigenous medicines, practicing them alongside Western techniques. In the caracol of La Realidad, an entire herbalist lab and center has been built to empower and provide resources to herbalists, bone healers and midwives. (Ramirez 2008) The recuperation of this knowledge is an important part of the Zapatista political project, with Amulfo, a member of the Health Commission in La Garrucha, stating:

53 48 Salesmen came here selling medicine and pills...they work faster, to get rid of diarrhea for example. But now we know that they are not actually killing the real cause of the diarrhea. These pills, they sell them to us at a very high price, and we don t even know what they re doing to us. We have won back much respect for medicinal plants. Many people have started using them again...this knowledge was of great use to our parents and grandparents. We want to rescue this knowledge before its lost forever. The knowledge has always been here but for a long time no one gave it any importance. (Klein 2015) The Zapatista political project has also focused carefully on building up an education system across Chiapas. Before the uprising, many of their people were illiterate and lacking in formal education, having been systematically denied schools and teachers. (Ramirez 2008) Missionaries began giving classes to residents of Chiapas in the 1970 s, followed by EZLN members in the 1980 s and 1990 s. By the time the Good Government Councils were created, Zapatistas who grew up under those systems were ready to teach a new generation, and many took volunteer positions as educators. (Ramirez 2008) As mentioned earlier, Zapatista schools offer courses on language, communication, math, social sciences, natural sciences and humanities, all in the indigenous Tzotzil language, as well as the Zapatista political project. (Ramirez 2008) They feature chalkboards, new desks and are made of concrete. (EZLN 2012) One surprising effect of the Zapatista education program has been that the state has made efforts to build schools in their territory, to compete with Zapatista schools. In just two decades, many communities in Chiapas split between Mexican state supporters and Zapatistas have gone from having no school to having two schools. One Zapatista,

54 49 and another run by the Mexican state. (Ramirez 2008) Zapatista parents do not send their children to schools run by the Mexican state, and communities that contain no Mexican state supporters have universally refused to allow Mexican state teachers into their community. (Klein 2015) This, however, has created problems in the rare situation in which a strictly Zapatista community has no nearby school, families prioritizing their children s education over the movement have left the Zapatistas in order to get their children to attend school at a state-run institution. (Klein 2015) Similar to the issues with getting an effective school into every Zapatista community, the Good Government Councils have struggled, to date, in several key areas of effective and egalitarian governance. While the EZLN has been able, over time to get a nearly-acceptable percent female participation rate in the CCRI, in Good Government Councils less than 1% of those elected to day terms are women. (Klein 2015) This goes against a tradition of including women that dates back to the earliest attempts of the EZLN to engage with the local population. In the words of Hillary Klein The work of government is still the prerogative of men. (Klein 2015) Additionally, the EZLN and CCRI still maintain they have the right to re-exert authority over the Good Government Councils...in order to prevent acts of corruption, intolerance, injustice and deviation from the Zapatista principle of Governing by Obeying (Forbis 2014) While they have yet to act on this right after over a dozen years of governance by the Good Government Councils, it does worryingly set them up as a

55 50 kind of shadow vanguard in the jungles, which could seize control of Chiapas if they deemed it necessary. It must be recognized, however, that after existing for over thirty years, the EZLN has developed a clear track record and tendency to give up its authority, not to take more of it. First by creating the CCRI, then by giving power to the municipal and neighborhood assemblies to solve local issues, then by ceding all governance authority to the GGC s. This is where the corollaries to the PYD in Rojava get particularly fascinating. While they haven t had nearly as much time as the EZLN to prove their benign intentions, if the PYD, like the EZLN, turns out to truly be interested in consistently undermining its own authority and eventually phasing it out altogether, this could have revelatory implications for revolutionary strategy across the world. Or, perhaps more provocatively, if either the EZLN or the PYD attempts to re-exert its control over the assemblies they largely created, would the people participating in these models allow them to do so, or would they fight back to defend their autonomy? Prefiguration theory suggests the latter, that people who experience a truly decentralized, autonomous and democratic world will not be quick to return to the state and the coercive power of violence.

56 51 Chapter III: El Alto. Bolivia In October, 2003, Bolivians across multiple layers of civil society rebelled against their central government in protest to the state s management of the Andean nation s ample natural gas reserves, estimated to be the second largest in the world. (Iamamoto 2013) Twenty years of austerity and adherence to neoliberal economic doctrine had left much of the state s infrastructure, including natural gas production, privatized, and had led to geographical displacement and poverty amongst large segments of the population. (Arbona 2006) The October 2003 protests against these policies resulted in the ouster, on October 17th, of president Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada. (Rohter 2003) Subsequently, the natural gas industry was re-nationalized by referendum, approved by 92.2% of the voting population, and the leftist MAS (Movement Towards Socialism) political party, led by Evo Morales, rose to power, where they have remained since (Forero 2005) This period of social upheaval and revolution which took place in October 2003 has come to be known as the Bolivian Gas Wars. The epicenter of this social movement was a city called El Alto, on the outskirts of the capital, La Paz. El Alto provides La Paz with much of its low-wage workforce, and in fact was not declared a city in its own right, independent from La Paz, until (Abona 2006) It is a poor and economically depressed city, with most of its population trekking into El Alto for work, or barely scratching out a living in El Alto s informal economic sector. (Lazar 2008) A 2001 census reported that 48% of the city s residents lived in poverty, 17% lived in extreme poverty and 25% lived on the verge of poverty.

57 52 (Lazar 2008) It is also a very new city, fashioned out of necessity due to the kinds of geographic displacement and rapid urbanization that has come to be associated with nations pursuing neoliberal economic policies. (Harvey 2012) In 1976 El Alto had 96,000 residents; by 1985 there were 307,000 and by 2005 the population rested close to 800,000. (Zibechi 2010) By noting that ninety percent of the population settled El Alto between 1976 and 2005, Raul Zibechi, a leading Uruguayan political theorist, remarked that...we can say that the El Alto population settled in the city en masse in the space of one generation. They all come together for the same reason: they were expelled by the neoliberal model which is actually a kind of neo-colonialism, re-colonizing the country and its people. (Zibechi 2010) Yet El Alto did not become the epicenter of the Gas Wars simply because it was a city full of poor, geographically displaced migrants on the outskirts of the capital city. Under these unique conditions a confluence of forces came together, fashioning a horizontal governance apparatus that was able to force the state out of a city with nearly a million inhabitants, effectively manage the resources and needs of that population for weeks without the state, and offer egalitarian decision-making models which enabled them to spread their message across the nation, shocking Bolivia s political elites into abdication. In Zibechi s one generation of migration two major, largely overlapping groups settled El Alto; indigenous Aymara and recently-unemployed miners. Both of these groups had long history s of self-governance and participatory democracy, with the Aymara s practice of what has come to be known as Ayllu Democracy and the miner s

58 53 association with labor unions and federations deeply influenced by the egalitarian unionization models offered by anarcho-syndicalist theory and practice. It was these two groups coming together in El Alto that laid the groundwork not just for a month of successful mobilizations against the Bolivian state, but for a horizontal governance model and deeply democratic civil society that continues to exist alongside the Bolivian state, with the proven capacity to take over governance functions when the need and opportunity arise. The confluence of events that led to the founding of El Alto as a sizable city and an epicenter for revolutionary struggle against the Bolivian state was no accident. Rather, it was a direct result of the imposition of neoliberal economic policies onto a population with the capacity for self-governance, and with it the modes and methods for effective resistance. The closure of state-owned mines following the privatization of the industry, for example, led both to the migration of many disgruntled, unemployed miners with experience in grassroots organizing to El Alto, but also to the dwindling of the state s budget and inability to pay for social programs to care for a newly impoverished population. By simultaneously lowering the quality of life for its citizens as well as stripping the state bare of its abilities to pay for social services to mitigate the economic pain of its policies, neoliberal economics leads almost inevitably to social revolt and upheaval. Few places exemplify this more than El Alto. In this chapter, I will examine both of the grassroots groupings that formed the basis for innovative political organizing in El Alto as well as the governance models they

59 54 fashioned before the Gas Wars began, laying the foundations for directly democratic processes in both the workplace and the city blocks. I start with the worker s federations, including the Regional Trade Union Federation (COR). The COR, working in the anarcho-syndicalist tradition, kept the bulk of their power rested firmly in the membership of their organizations, not within the leadership, and helped forge a working class population deeply committed to horizontality in their workplaces. I will analyze the miner s methods of organizing, and how they affected the culture of a rapidly urbanizing El Alto. Secondly, I move to the analyze the Federation of Neighborhood Councils (FEJU VE), a network of hundreds of assemblies organized on a block-by-block basis to provide public works projects, settle neighborhood disputes, and perform other functions of governance for the city, which was largely ignored by Bolivian federal authorities. (Zibechi 2010) These assemblies operate in the tradition of Ayllu Democracy, historically practiced by the indigenous Aymara, who make up the bulk of El Alto s population, estimated at eighty-two percent of the city. (Spronk 2015) Finally, I move to the time period of the Gas Wars, and examine how the people of El Alto used these structures to temporarily push the state out of El Alto in October 2003, lay siege to the city of La Paz by preventing the flow of capital and goods into the city, and effectively governed themselves, quickly supplanting even the authorities of the labor and neighborhood assembly federations, putting all authority in the horizontal assemblies themselves.

60 55 Mining Federations, Street Traders Associations & Workplace Democracy In 1985, the international price of tin, a resource long relied on by Bolivia s powerful mining unions to provide tens of thousands of jobs, bottomed out. (Webber 2005) The state took the opportunity to argue the necessity of privatizing the mines, claiming it would make them more competitive in a diminished global market. The Estenssoro administration passed Supreme Decree 21060, privatizing wide swaths of Bolivia s state-owned enterprises. (Morales 1995) Once privatized, the state quickly set about crushing the once-powerful mining unions, particularly the Bolivian Worker s Center (COB) who Dr. Jeffery Webber describes as having been the vanguard of the Bolivian left since the 1952 revolution. (Webber 2005) Webber estimates that during this year alone, over 30,000 miners were unemployed, displaced and forced to find new sources of income to support themselves and their families. Many migrated to El Alto, unable to afford to live in La Paz, but hoping the city would provide them with a muchneeded source of income. Many of these miners were unable to find a steady source of income, but they were able to find one another, and maintain strong solidarity in the face of struggle and economic hardship. Santiago II is one of the neighborhoods in El Alto where many former miners relocated after the privatization of the industry. (Arbona 2008) The National Council for Miner s Housing (COVIMIN), and the miners themselves, had bought up much of the land in this neighborhood in the late 1960 s, at the height of the union s economic and political power. In the late 1970 s and throughout the 1980 s,

61 56 miners began moving here en masse, hoping to find a new life in the city. These miners would organize themselves into a cooperative, numbering around fifty people, which would apply for a loan to receive a plot of land in the neighborhood. Once approved, they would have to work together, through the COVIMIN councils, as well as in their smaller cooperative councils to establish conditions suitable for human habitability on these empty parcels of land. NS, one of the early residents of the neighborhood, describes the conditions of the settlements build by these economic refugees, and how they worked together to construct them: Most of us relocated mining families had no house, we had nothing, we were living in tents. All we had were our little plots of land. Then we got organized with other people, as a few more were arriving by then. We said, the first thing we need is to get water, and we brought in just one pipe, as far as where the market is now. (Lazar 2008) Families that had once been a part of Bolivia s rural working and middle classes were now forced into extreme poverty, heading to districts like Santiago II with nothing but a tent and one another, in a fight for their very survival. The miners, accustomed to using participatory democratic models in their workplace, set about establishing their new urban communities using those methods they knew best. They established the Neighborhood Association Committee to govern their district, using a system of street delegates. (Arbona 2008) The streets were laid out in a grid pattern, each one about 1km long, and two delegates were nominated from each street, one from the north and one from the south. (Arbona 2008) For day-to-day business, the delegates were entrusted to

62 57 handle most basic decision-making. When an urgent or dangerous situation came up, it was the delegate s responsibility to call for a street-wide assembly, forming a neighborhood council to discuss the issue. Not only did this model allow them to effectively set up habitable living conditions in Santiago II, but it also made them more effective in making demands on the state for improvements and services to the district, including street paving, water pipes, electricity and other infrastructure upgrades. (Arbona 2008) In addition to inspiring ex-miners to create councils to build and develop their districts, workplace organizing models developed in the mines and union halls of rural Bolivia became fixtures in the new economy of El Alto. Despite an economy where seventy percent of workers are based in the officially unorganized informal sector, the positive experience with organized labor many experienced prior to their migration led the residents of El Alto to create a variety of informal sector associations, the largest and most influential of which was the street trader s association. (Zibechi 2010) These associations were federated, along with the neighborhood assemblies, into the Regional Trade Union Federation. (Lazar 2008) The street trader s association exists in large part in order to ensure selfgovernance and encourage participation in participatory democratic structures. Participation is strongly encouraged, and referred to as organizational life. (Lazar 2008) Since one of the primary functions of the association is to mediate disputes, this privileges those who attend meetings, marches and parades called for by the association.

63 58 While this raises questions about who has the privilege to spend free time attending meetings and demonstrations, it certainly helps foster participation in the structure of self governance. Disputes are typically resolved by general secretaries of the street trader s federation, empowered by the general assembly for the particular association. Disagreements usually revolve around price-fixing, issues of competition or encroachments on the staked out territory of individual traders or associations of traders. (Lazar 2008) If general secretaries are unable to resolve the dispute themselves, the issue is escalated to the general assembly itself, or to COR. (Lazar 2008) Leadership in the association and related unions varies by group. In some unions, leaders are limited to one or two-year terms. In others, they can serve indefinitely. (Lazar 2008) In either case, particularly with leaders who serve long-term, practicing what is known as vitalisimo (life-long-ism), the grassroots membership has various methods of maintain control over them. It is reasonably easy to remove one leader, by holding an election for another. It is also common to whistle at a disliked leader while they speak, or engage in public gossip about their poor performance. These methods allow the grassroots to maintain control over their representative, making these positions often less than desirable to hold and keeping power vested in the general assemblies. (Lazar 2008)

64 59 Ayllu Democracy Enters the City Out of the migrant population that settled and essentially built the city of El Alto, it was not just the former miners who had deeply engrained experiences with participatory, grassroots democracy. The inhabitants of the Andres mountains region in Bolivia, largely of Aymara decent, had been practicing for centuries what is now referred to as Ayllu (rural, or indigenous) Democracy. (Cusicanqui 2002) This cultural practice, long a target of failed campaigns of repression and extermination by the Bolivian state, when interwoven with the practices of the ex-miners well versed in workplace democracy, created the conditions that make El Alto such a unique example of egalitarian, grassroots governance. Anthropologist John Victor Murra defined the Ayllu the basic cell of Andean social organization, dating back to pre-hispanic times. (Murra 1975) Ayllu Democracy refers then to the particular governance methodologies employed by the people of these communities, independent of the Bolivian state. In the literature surrounding guerrilla warfare and insurgent governance, it has long been documented that liberal states in the Westphalian system struggle to exert control over areas with inhospitable climates, such as jungles, deserts and mountains. (Risse 2011; Mampilly 2011; Caspersen 2012; Marten 2012) Hardly surprising, then, that Ayllu Democracy was able to survive and thrive for centuries, despite the implicit threat its very existence posed to the liberal, Bolivian state. The state was never truly able to

65 60 penetrate into the Andes mountains region until very recently, allowing Ayllu Democracy to continue as the de facto governance methodology for the region. Ayllu Democracy is a segmented system, vertically organized. A typical model has 3-4 levels, which together make of the system of governance. (Cusicanqui 2002). The ayllu minimo is the smallest of these, and is often just a small hamlet, perhaps with a couple other, even smaller hamlets also considered part of the ayllu minimo. Flowing upwards, there is the ayllu mayor, which refers to an often contiguous swath of territory connecting several ayllu minimos, and the ayllu maximo, which connects all ayllus. (Cusicanqui 2002) While the structure of Ayllu Democracy itself is fairly regimented and hierarchical, its outcomes are largely egalitarian and redistributive. The primary function of the system in rural Andean life is to ensure the equitable distribution of productive resources among the families at each level. (Cusicanqui 2002) The authorities of the ayllu maximo are often called in to settle disputes over land claims by the major and minor ayllus, and to regulate the distribution and rotation of communally-held land parcels used by multiple ayullus, or even to solve disputes between individual families. (Cusicanqui 2002) At the minor and mayor ayllu levels, authorities are empowered to collect taxes, distribute land to families, and to fulfill other state-like functions. To ensure fairness and to avoid replicating the models of the liberal Bolivian state, authorities at each level must be nominated by consensus of the assembled community in a council formation and leaders can by recalled using the same model. Leadership rotation is

66 61 compulsory by design, and avoids the problem of vitalisimo seen in the mining unions. (Cusicanqui 2002) The structure is designed so that every family in an ayllu will hold authority at one time or another. Once neoliberal economic policies had forced the migration of thousands of people familiar with the practice of ayllu democracy from their homes in the rural highlands and into the city of El Alto, they began to construct the city with a model they knew worked; one built in the image of Ayllu Democracy. They set about developing community councils and neighborhood assemblies, an urban adaptation of the ayllu model. And as El Alto grew over the decades, the city s reliance on its own governance methodologies grew with it, expanding and penetrating deeper into civic life as the population boomed. In 1988, when El Alto had a population of about 360,000, there were 180 neighborhood councils, each one representing about 2,000 people. (Zibechi 2010) By 2004, when the city had a population of about 750,000, there were 540 such councils, each one representing 1,400-1,500 people. (Zibechi 2010) Neighborhood councils usually meet once a month, although if needed can meet up to once a week. Decisions are usually reached by a voting process, although consensus is employed for controversial or very important decisions. (Zibechi 2010) Similar to the pressures of participating in organizational life in the mining communities, attendance at the assembly meetings is not mandatory', although there is often a social sanction for failure to attend the meetings, and therefore failure to fulfill what is perceived as one s major responsibility to the community. (Zibechi 2010)

67 62 The communities also elect local leadership councils to meet more frequently than the general assembly and decide day-to-day matters. (Lazar 2008) In the El Alto district called Rosas Pampa, there is an elected committee of fourteen, which meets every few weeks. In this neighborhood, the general assembly of the entire community only meets about every two or three months. (Lazar 2008) These councils were connected through the Federation of Neighborhood Councils (FEJUVE), similar to the relationship between minor and maximo ayllu s. The FEJUVE has its own executive committee, twenty-nine ministries, president and vice-president. All officials are elected by the smaller councils to serve two-year terms. (Zibechi 2010) The local councils have imposed various restrictions on who cannot serve inside the FEJUVE leadership, including real estate speculators, bankers, traders or political party leaders. (Zibechi 2010) In addition to these limitations on who can serve inside the leadership apparatus of the FEJUVE, the population of El Alto keeps them in check using a powerful tool of social pressure: rumor and gossip. (Lazar 2008) In a system that allows for quick recall of officials, leaders who are accused of being corrupt or incompetent, or who have all of their public comments interrupted by whistles, heckling and jeers, are not typically able to stay in their position for much longer. James C. Scott refers to this as grumbling, a method of inserting private misgiving towards the power structure into what he calls the public transcript and asserts the subversive power such acts have over leadership structures, ensuring they remain beholden to the grassroots. (Scott 1990) Leadership in El

68 63 Alto is best viewed as a coordinator role, and those who view themselves as above or superior to other members of the community are commonly ostracized and replaced. The councils primary functions are public works projects and solving neighborhood disputes. Because of a lack of social distance between governance and the governed, these two primary goals can occasionally find themselves sharing a resolution. For years, the main focus of the Rosas Pampa neighborhood council, where Anthropologist Sian Lazar performed the bulk of her field research, was to get the roads paved. (Lazar 2008) A combination of community resources and social pressure on individuals was used to accomplish the job. When planning for the annual fiesta one year, an individual named Calixto was initially told by the assembled community that he could not have his bar open during the festival, because his establishment typically brought intoxicated outsiders to the community who tended to cause trouble during the event. (Lazar 2008) As part of his appeal to have the decision reversed, Calixto pointed out that he had begun paving the curb in front of his bar. (Lazar 2008) This most likely helped his case to assert his belongingness in the community, as the assembled council, in a compromise solution, eventually allowed him to open his bar for the day, but only to members of the community. (Lazar 2008) While still operating under a largely vertical model, with various layers of hierarchy and levels of elected leaders and representatives, various components of the

69 64 adaptation of Ayllu Democracy for the urban setting of El Alto laid the groundwork for the horizontal structures that would emerge during the Gas Wars. By creating neighborhood assemblies and empowering them to fulfill most governance functions, the capacity was laid for those councils to eventually take total responsibility for the city. By making leaders easily recallable, an ethos was embedded that led leadership to be a tenuous position, open to constant questions of legitimacy, rather than the Western models in which politicians are often from the elite classes and populations are socialized to feel beholden to obey their whims. Once this model connected with the ethics of the ex-miners, who had already been challenging leadership within their unions for decades, the possibility for a truly egalitarian civil society in El Alto became a very real one, a development that occurred, as we shall see, in the month of October, El Alto in Revolt: The Gas Wars In October 2003, for nearly two weeks, the people of El Alto entered into open revolt against the Bolivian state, engaging in a general strike, blockading highways into the capital in order to shut down down the flow of goods and capital into La Paz and governing their city using democratic assembly models. (Zibechi 2010; Lazar 2008, Webber 2011) In public policy terms, the protestors across Bolivia demanded the resignation of president Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada, and the re-nationalization of the natural gas industry. (Arbona 2005) Both of these demands were achieved, but not without substantial cost. Over 63 Bolivians were killed and over 300 wounded during the nearly two weeks of social upheaval. (Arbona 2005) In El Alto, the Bolivian state was

70 65 challenged for more than just policy reforms; the very legitimacy and purpose of the state was challenged at its core by the models developed in a synthesis between the ex-miners and the practitioners of Ayllu Democracy. In the words of Dr. Jeffery Webber,...the rebellions, in their best moments, were characterized by assembly-style, democracy, and mass-based mobilization from below, drawing upon the organizational patterns of the Trotskyists and anarcho-syndicalists tin miners - the vanguard of the Bolivian left for much of the twentieth century - and variations of the indigenous ayllus - traditional communitarian structures - adapted to new rural and urban contexts. (Webber 2011) The protests themselves began several weeks earlier, in September 2003, with the initial political rupture being around a government proposal to regulate real estate transactions. (Arbona 2005) Blockades were established on El Alto s main roads, blocking the flow of goods and capital into La Paz, in addition to similar acts of direct action across the nation. Within 48 hours, the government conceded and withdrew the proposed resolution. (Arbona 2005) The quick and overwhelming victory created new political spaces, which did not dissipate following the policy victories. In stark contrast to the victories in El Alto, in the town of Waristata, a similar series of road blockades were met with brutal state repression, leaving four dead. (Pulsa 2003) The outrage sparked from these murders convinced the citizens of El Alto to keep up their pressure on the Boli vian state and to expand their initial demands to include the resignation of the president and the re-nationalization of the natural gas industry. (Arbona 2008) The

71 66 Federation of Neighborhood Councils (FEJUVE) initially led and organized these protests, but they would not exert authority over the movement in El Alto for long. In perhaps the most dramatic event in this entire period, the neighborhood assemblies themselves became the sources of governance and authority, with FEJUVE leadership essentially collapsing, and each neighborhood assembly becoming what Juan Manuel Arbona refers to as a micro-government. (Arbona 2005) These assemblies, already accustomed to coordinating under the FEJUVE model, were connected to each other in a network, like a complex spider web elegantly woven through city blocks. FEJUVE did little to attempt to re-exert their authority over the assemblies, as they had always viewed their role as more of a coordinating body than a apparatus of governance. (Arbona 2005) According to Raul Zibechi, The assemblies organized by zone and by street replaced the authority of representation, and in many cases these assemblies revitalized the neighbor s council leadership...or obligated the parties to subordinate themselves unconditionally to the assembly. (Zibechi 2010) During this period, over four hundred assemblies were functioning autonomously throughout El Alto. (Zibechi 2010) In a model that would later influence Occupy Wall Street, the Arab Spring and other protest formations during the 2011 global plaza occupation movements, communities would govern their actions during this time by first meeting in mass assemblies, then secondly by dispersing into a number of smaller working groups focused on various tasks. In the case of the rebellion in El Alto, these would include blockades,

72 67 communication, digging ditches, marches, vigils, cooking and distributing food, etc. (Zibechi 2010; Arbona 2005) These communities would then reconvene into another mass assembly, typically even larger than the one that preceded it. During this two-week period, the rallying cry of the residents of El Alto became El Alto, always on its feet, never on its knees! (Arbona 2005) The residents of El Alto organized themselves into what they referred to as an Allyu Army, commanded by the assembles. (Zibechi 2010) Like the roles of families in Ayllu Democracy, or of authorities in FEJUVE, the roles in this ayllu army are in constant rotation. In reference to their internal structure, participant Juan Carlos Condori stated: The Indian army is an ayllu army. The ayllu directs the army...it is a democratic army, managed by the ayllu. There is no division between those who give the orders and those who fight because in the Indian army, one is a commander because of one s merit and not for eternity; others may be more capable...everyone has an equal opportunity to be commander. (Zibechi 2010) Authorities were only able to quell the uprising by conceding to all of the protestor s demands. The president resigned, and a referendum was scheduled for the near future to decide the fate of the nation s natural gas resources. (Zibechi 2010) The uprising was extinguished, but the governance models they rested upon would re-emerge during the struggles for water rights that would present themselves later in the decade, and remain in place to this day, ready to take over governance functions if necessary.

73 68 The events in October 2003 in El Alto present some of the most powerful evidence for prefiguration theory in the modem era. By working to design a governance structure where power was vested in assembled communities, not inside of its leadership or coordination structure, the people of El Alto designed a system where, when enough pressure was put on them, people began organizing together and asserted the autonomy of each neighborhood, temporarily dissolving the coordination structures they had put in place out of ease and necessity. In the case of El Alto, prefiguration theory s assertion that if people practice participatory democracy in their day-to-day lives, rather than just passively consuming politics once every few years in a voting process, they will turn to democracy in a flashpoint, rather than authoritarianism. This model, as we shall see, provided great inspiration for activists in Occupy Wall Street and others during their 2011 plaza occupations. Additionally, it provides evidence that the model being employed by the PYD in Rojava is one that could perhaps hold up to a major crisis, turning people towards each other and dismantling the party s coordination apparatus, rather than demanding the state assert control over the region in an authoritarian manner.

74 69 Chapter IV: Occupy Wall Street, United States To this point, the case studies we have examined have all taken place in the socalled Global South in areas where the state is either comparatively weak, or where indigenous organizing models are conducive to the birth of a decentralized governance model based on prefigurative politics, and sometimes both. This inevitably leads one to wonder whether or not such models are practical, or even possible, in the so-called Global North, the geographic location of the heartbeat of capital and the birthplace of the modern state formation. In these regions, the state is far more ubiquitous and penetrates far deeper into civil society, all but eliminating the alternative governance models that formed the backbone of the movements in Chiapas and El Alto, and repressing organized radical opposition parties long before they can develop the ties to civil society that the PYD had in Syria. However, neoliberalism has devastated the working and middle-classes in the Global North as well as the Global South, forging a similar hostility towards the state that continues to grow and evolve. Additionally, technological developments in computer, smartphone and internet technology in the last several decades now allow for a sharing of information to a degree previously unimaginable, while simultaneously uncoupling the sharing of information from a corporate media apparatus. The distributed nature of the internet has allowed, for possibly the first time in human history, for those without financial means to share information to those who have it, rather than the other way around. It is no coincidence, then, that Western radicals, having found themselves in am

75 70 ideological crisis following the collapse of the Soviet Union, now look largely towards the Global South for revolutionary inspiration, inverting a paradigm that had existed since the emergence of the Soviet state. Describing the Global Justice movement of the late 1990 s and early 2000 s, David Graeber remarks on this phenomenon: There is one striking contrast between this and earlier internationalisms, however. The former usually ended up exporting Western organizational models to the rest of the world; in this, the flow has if anything been the other way around. Many, perhaps most, of the movement s signature techniques... were first developed in the Global South. In the long run, this may well prove the single most radical thing about it. (Graeber 2002) In this chapter, then, I will examine what was the largest mass occurrence of assembly-based participatory democratic processes in the modem history of the Global North, the Occupy Movement based in the United States. I will do this by largely focusing on the activities of the largest of the more than 1,000 occupations and assemblies that existed in the late Fall of 2011, the original occupation in New York City s Financial District, Occupy Wall Street, of which I was an active participant. (CNN 2016) Building on the core thesis of this project, that prefiguration theory functions optimally when its ethics have penetrated throughout a society or community, and has a clear social base, I begin this chapter by tracing the history of prefigurative politics from its American roots in anarchist theory and praxis, its eventual adaptation by various social movements throughout the last half century, and its mass emergence in the Global Justice

76 71 movement, the immediate predecessor to Occupy Wall Street. Secondly, I focus on the history and timeline of the Occupy Movement itself, to illustrate how quickly these models proliferated across the country and were embraced by wide swaths of the population. Finally, I discuss the Occupy Wall Street model itself, as a contribution to an ongoing movement dialogue around successes and failures of the structures we created, with an eye towards further developing and solidifying horizontal, leaderless, assembly-based models as a structure that can eventually supplant the state. Anarchists & Prefiguration in the United States In the middle of the twentieth century, the anarchist movement in the Untied States began to evolve from one primarily concerned with organizing towards and for a revolution, a massive rupture in the state and capital that they could take advantage of, and began theorizing about building those new structures in the here and now. Holley Cantine, Jr. writing for Why?, one of the few anarchist periodicals still in existence in the 1940 s, describes the beginnings of this philosophical and strategic shift: Since both violent revolution and parliamentary activity seem to lead away from the realization of fundamental liberty, a realistic radical movement should concern itself with building up a nucleus of a new society within the shell of the old. Communities and various other kinds of organization must be formed, wherein the ideals of the revolution are approximated as nearly as possible in everyday life. The new society must be lived out by its advocates, both as a way of influencing the masses by example, and in order to iron out weaknesses of theory by actual practice. (Cornell 2016)

77 72 Why? And other anarchist magazines and periodicals began to spread the idea of living the revolution in the here and now and the radical labor union, the International Worker s of the World (IWW) began to organize worker s under the mantra of building a new world in the shell of the old. (Cornell 2016) In 1948, roughly 300 radical pacifists, including many anarchists, formed the Peacemakers, an anti-war group searching for organizational structures distinct from political parties and top-down liberal organizations. (Cornell 2016) Rather than joining a staff or organizational system, prospective members were encouraged to form local affinity groups with trusted friends and comrades, a term that persists to this day to describe small cadres that attend a mass protest together with a specific plan of action and roles, or a group of friends that works to serve free food to homeless folks in a local park as a town chapter of Food Not Bombs. (Cornell 2016) Critically, the Peacemakers were also the first major group on the U.S. left to use consensus-based decision making, a method developed by the Quaker church. (Cornell 2016) This tool, which I will explore in depth in part 3 of this chapter, proliferated throughout both the anarchist movement and the U.S. left in general, replacing majoritarian voting as the decision-making model of choice in most social movement groups by the turn of the century. (Cornell 2016; Graeber 2013) Also in the 1940 s, postwar anarchists began to develop the new world in the shell of the old metaphor in another direction, encouraging anarchists to live the revolution in all aspects of their lives. The types of communities they lived in, the family

78 73 and romantic relationships they maintained and they way they treated others in need all became revolutionary acts, in their own right. (Cornell 2016) For the anarchists themselves, these efforts resulted in the creation of an alluring countercultural movement, ripe with alternative communes to live in, wild parties to attend, and liberation from social norms around sexuality and drug use. (Cornell 2016) Andrew Cornell describes this period, particularly in the California Bay Area, as the...time and place where an anarchist scene emerged - exciting and socially rewarding to participants, but easily perceived as insular and exclusionary to those less connected. (Cornell 2016) This dynamic has persisted ever since, with anarchists in the United States and elsewhere in the Global North having done a reasonable job of carving out for themselves a relative oasis where their values and ethics are practiced but struggle to turn this new world into more than a countercultural enclave. Throughout the last century, it was when anarchists participated in mass movements and offered to their allies the organizing models they had developed, practiced and evolved in their anarchist milieus that prefiguration theory began to have reverberations throughout society. (Cornell 2016) Historian James Farrell asserts that the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), a prominent group in the Civil Rights Movement, followed a communitarian anarchist model and Claybome Carson notes that SNCC strongly opposed any hierarchy of authority such as existed in other civil rights organizations. (Cornell 2016) On all major group strategic decision, SNCC members attempted to reach consensus. (Cornell 2016) Similarly, consensus and an

79 74 opposition to hierarchy formed core elements of other prominent groups on the U.S. Left in the 1960 s, including the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), The Diggers, the IWW, the Manhattan-based East Side Anarchists and Up Against the Wall/ Motherfuckers (UAW/MF), among others. (Cornell 2016) Eventually, the models formed the structures to be employed for decision-making in mass movements, such as the second-wave feminist movement, the anti-nuclear movement, and the Global Justice movement. (Cornell 2016) The immediate predecessor to the Occupy movement was the Global Justice movement, often erroneously referred to by the corporate media as the anti-globalization movement. (Graebem 2002) Inspired by the uprising of the Zapatista s against the NAFTA trade deal, this global social movement was famously successful at forcing the scuttling of the Free Trade Agreement of the Americas (FTAA) proposal as well as forcing the early closure of the World Trade Organization (WTO) summit in Seattle in (Graeber 2002) In gatherings in 1996 and 1998, to borrow the words of Subcomandante Marcos, all the rebels around the world streamed into Chiapas to see what the Zapatista s had been able to create, and to take what they learned home. (Graeber 2002) The vision of a intercontinental network of resistance was laid out in August 1996, and after three years of groundwork, the movement would emerge into the public eye in dramatic fashion at the Battle of Seattle in (Graeber 2002) In a practice that became known as summit-hopping, activists would travel to a chosen location for a mass protest, usually against an arm of global capital such as the

80 75 WTO, World Bank or International Monetary Fund, or in protest to a meeting designing a new free trade agreement such as the FTAA. In many ways, the atmosphere immediately before a mass protest resembled what the Occupy parks would look like a decade later, a decentralized public encampment with free food, medical supplies, and other services, which also served as as staging ground for direct action against the state and capital. The Global Justice movement was also organized with prefigurative politics at its heart, and was famous for its use of spokescouncils to organize protest summits and camps. A spokescouncil is a collection of autonomous groups, who each nominate a spoke to relay to the larger, assembled group, the decision of the collective on the topic being discussed. (Graeber 2002) Spokes are non-autonomous and cannot make decisions for themselves, but are permitted only to relay decisions made by their group, typically seated behind them. (Graeber 2002) The spokescouncil model allowed disparate groups from all over the world, with different agendas and organizing models, to effectively communicate and come to decisions together and effectively participate in mass mobilizations together. This model was the Global Justice Movement s great contribution to prefigurative politics, yet while it had a deep impact on those who participated in it, the message did not get out to the broader population. David Graeber, who was an active participant in both the Global Justice movement and a prominent figure in Occupy Wall Street, remarked: Back in the days of the Global Justice Movement, we thought that if we exposed enough people, around the world, to these new forms of direct democracy, and traditions of direct action, that a new, global, democratic culture would begin to emerge. But as

81 76 noted above, we never really broke out of the activist ghetto; most Americans never even knew that direct democracy was so central to our identity, distracted as they were by the media images of young men in balaclavas breaking plate glass windows... (Graeber 2012) The assertion Graeber cites above is one often referred to as contaminationism, the idea that the experience of those who participate in something like a large spokescouncil followed by a mass protest will be contaminated by freedom, permanently transformed by the experience, and unwilling to place their hopes in liberal democracy any longer, instead seeking out and actively building alternative structures; a kind of prefiguration of one s self. (Graeber 2009) Mathijs van de Sande, writing about prefigurative politics in Tahrir Square during the Arab Spring, challenges readers to think of prefigurative social movements by viewing their actions as their demands, rather than one being abstracted from the other, (van de Sande 2013) Viewed in this context, the forms of direct democracy developed and spread by the Global Justice movements, which largely ended in 2003 or so, were both its ideology and its demands. Working in a prefigurative fashion, the activists contaminated by their experiences in the Global Justice movement set about developing an extensive network of alternative infrastructure. Graeber and long-time anarchist activist Lisa Fithian both write about the network of egalitarian social spaces created in the time between the Global Justice movement and the emergence of Occupy Wall Street, with Fithian describing

82 77 them as a whole other world out there, just hidden form view by the social and media distractions around us. (Fithian 2012) These institutions included Food Not Bombs chapters, cooperative workplaces, anarchist infoshops, clinic defense groups, community gardens, Anarchist Black Cross prisoner support groups, pirate radio collectives, squats, Anti-Racist Action chapters, bicycle cooperatives and community agriculture projects, just to name a few. (Fithian 2012; Graeber 2009) These groups all practiced some form of consensus decision-making with a focus on prefigurative politics, further developing and refining the models they learned in the Global Justice Movement. Other groups, such as the New York City chapter of the Direct Action Network, were primarily focused on continuing to plan and implement direct actions with a focus on spreading a certain vision of direct democracy, to provide a model of egalitarian decision-making process that would eventually become standard practice for everyone interested in directly confronting the state and capitalism (Graeber 2009) Many of those who were a part of these projects in New York City throughout the 2000 s, including David Graeber, became the earliest participants of the Occupy Movement, bringing to the new movement their more refined versions of the processes they had been practicing for over a decade. Understanding the growth of prefigurative politics from the anarchist movement, eventually contaminating the U.S. Left more generally, is critical to understanding the Occupy Movement in the context of the other three case studies contained within this paper. The social base within the anarchist community and the broader activist left are the

83 78 Occupy Movement s corollary to the the powerful civic support of the PYD party among Syrian Kurds, or the long-term history of indigenous governance in Chiapas and El Alto that allowed those movements to develop profoundly prefigurative governance models which effectively challenged or supplanted the state. From Meme to Movement: A Brief History o f Occupy Wall Street th On July 14, 2001, Micah White, founder of the Canadian anti-consumerist magazine Adbusters sent out a message to the subscribers of his magazine s list. (White 2014) Along with the was an associated meme, which featured a dancer on top of Wall Street s famous Charging Bull statue and simply read #OCCUPYWALLSTREET September 17th. Bring tent. (White 2014) From these humble origins, fitting for the first major U.S. social movement in the post-smartphone age, emerged the Occupy Movement. While their meme generated tremendous attention on the internet among techsavvy radicals like the hacker collective Anonymous and disaffected liberals frustrated by the slow pace of change under the Obama administration, attention and energy were all Adbusters and Micah White were capable and willing to provide. Neither White nor the magazine had many organizational connections to the New York City area, where the protest and occupation were to take place. It was left up to local activists to organize the protest, if anything was to take place at all. A meeting was called for by New Yorkers

84 79 Against Budget Cuts to take place on August 2nd, in Bowling Green park next to the Charging Bull. (Holmes 2012) Those who arrived found themselves at less of a meeting and more of a soapboxing rally organized by the statist left. (Graeber 2013) Worker s World Party, a Maoist group, had taken the opportunity to rent a stage and sound system, and their organizers gave speeches about the evils of capitalism and liberalism, ignoring the call for a meeting to take place, and speaking little of the Adbusters meme that had caused the group to assemble in the first place. (Graeber 2013) David Graeber and other anarchists and anti-authoritarians decided to take matters into their own hands and spontaneously organize the meeting they, and the bulk of the other attendees, had come to take part in. They broke off and held a consensus-based general assembly meeting on the other side of the park, drawing most of the rally s attendees with them. (Graeber 2011) At this th meeting, the assembly agreed to meet every week until September 17, and to break out into working groups tasked with particular functions, including Outreach, Communications/Internet, Action and Process/Facilitation. (Graeber 2013) This assembly continued to meet every week to prepare for the occupation, eventually expanding to about fifty people, and referring to itself as the New York City General Assembly (NYCGA). (Holmes 2012) On September 17th, about 2,000 people assembled for the Adbusters call. (Graeber 2013) After a couple hours of speeches and a short march, the group headed to the location selected by the Action working group for occupation, Zuccotti Park. (Holmes

85 ) Zuccotti Park was a privately-owned public space, required by law to be open twenty-four hours a day, which the Action group believed gave them some legal foothold to stand on for occupation. The facilitators of the NYCGA called for a mass assembly at 7pm, in which one major question was discussed: whether or not to occupy the park. (Holmes 2012) By 10pm, a consensus had been reached, and the park was declared to be occupied; about 100 activists slept overnight in the park, sleeping on concrete slabs and resting their heads on little more than cardboard and sleeping bags. (Holmes, 2012) Within weeks the protests had expanded all over the United States, with mainstream media estimating over one thousand individual occupations at the height of the movement. (CNN 2016) One of Occupy Wall Street s most dramatic moments was a successful defense of Zuccotti Park on October 14th, 2011, in which thousands swarmed the park in response to an ultimatum by New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg to leave, forcing the mayor to renege on his commitment to eviction and allowing the protestors to stay. (Graeber 2012) In Oakland, California, a general strike was called for by the occupiers on October 26, 2011 in response to a similarly failed eviction attempt on the movement s West Coast epicenter. (San Francisco Chronicle 2011) While the general strike did not materialize due to a lack of support from local labor leaders, tens of thousands took to the streets of Oakland that day to express support for the occupation, and the Port of Oakland was shut down for the day, disrupting the flow of goods and capital into the city. (New York Times 2011)

86 81 By late-november, however, the state decided to crack down on the expanding protest movement. Coordinating with the federal government, local authorizers forcibly evicted several of the largest camps across the country in a week of raids, crushing the occupations in its major strongholds in New York, Oakland, Seattle, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C. and others. (Graeber 2012) The hope was that without the material and strategic support of its epicenters, the smaller occupations across the nation would fade off organically, a strategy of state repression which proved largely effective. By December, 2011, almost all the occupations had either been evicted or voluntarily dismantled. While the movement showed gasps of life by staging its largest national day of action on May 1st, 2012, its inability to re-establish physical occupations in its former strategic epicenters signaled the end of the movement. (Bay of Rage 2012) Despite the brief period in which it controlled physical space, like the anarchist and Global Justice movements that lay the groundwork for it, the Occupy Movement should be judged not just by the successes and failures of its street mobilizations, but also by its contributions to a process of proliferating a model that can eventually supplant the state. By that metric, Occupy Wall Street exposed more Americans to assembly-based participatory democracy than the Global Justice movement could have ever dreamed of, removing these structures from the activist ghetto and placing them, for a time, squarely in the center of American political discourse.

87 82 Prefiguration and a Social Base in the Activist Community: The Occupy Process When reading a timeline of the Occupy Movement, one can hardly be blamed for wondering why it took four years after the 2007 financial crisis for such a movement to manifest itself. In fact, many groups tried to initiate such movements prior to Occupy Wall Street, most notably a coalition of labor unions and other groups on the institutional left who assembled a march of thousands on Wall Street just several months before Occupy emerged, which caught much media attention at the time, and then fizzled into the annals of history. (Graeber 2012) Bearing this in mind, and reasserting the central contestation of this piece, it was once a movement emerged which had prefigurative politics at its ideological core and possessed a social base within a broader community which led to an outcome that allowed the group to effectively challenge state power and replicate some functions of the state. In this case, the approach to prefigurative politics was by turning every occupied square into a post-capitalist micro-city with access to free medical care, food, clothing and shelter, governed by an assembly-based horizontal model. The community with a vested social base in prefigurative politics was in this case, the anarchist and activist communities. While this community is numerically and culturally of more limited influence than, say, the Aymara people of the Andes mountains region or the Kurds who had worked for years with the PYD in Syria, it was of enough significance to sustain the occupation movement. And, in perhaps its most profound contribution to the growth of prefigurative politics and American political life more generally, it was able to remove

88 83 such models from what David Graeber calls the activist ghetto and introduce untold thousands to their uses and applications. (Graeber 2002) As Graeber wrote a decade after his activist ghetto remark, For small-a anarchist such as myself - that is, the sort willing to work in broad coalitions as long as they work on horizontal principles - this is what we d always dreamed of. For decades, the anarchist movement had been putting much of our creative energy into developing forms of egalitarian political process that actually work; forms of direct democracy that actually could operate within self-governing communities outside of any state (Graeber 2012) Ryan Harvey, an activist and author who participated in the movement, later remarked...it is hard to imagine hierarchical organizing becoming popular among a generation that was brought into politics through Occupy. (Harvey 2012) So this was the major thrust of the Occupy Movement, continuing decades of work in the anarchist tradition to make horizontal decision making processes the prevalent model for the broader activist left, while simultaneously decoupling such techniques from the activist ghetto and introducing them to the broad coalition of liberals, progressives, libertarians, socialists and other groups who populated Occupy encampments, many of whom shared a profound sense that something was amiss with American liberal democracy, but less of a sense of what the cure may be. The Occupy Movement featured a broad range of horizontal organizing tools. Those who entered an Occupy park for the first time often had their first experience with participatory democracy inside of a general assembly meeting. Once the occupation took

89 84 place, the NYCGA became the decision-making body for the occupation as a whole. (Holmes 2012) This body deliberated larger strategic directions for the movement as a whole, and was the place the discuss things related to the occupation as a whole. Sometimes these decisions would be as complex as drafting a statement of autonomy for the occupation as a whole, declaring protestor s independence from political parties and labor unions, and other times it would be as simple as an allocation of funds for a massive laundry run after a major rain storm. (Harvey 2012; Holmes 2012) Arising out of the general assembly were the smaller working groups and identity caucuses. These were groups of people interested in similar topics who would form a group dedicated to their interests and invite whoever shared such interests to join. (Graeber 2012) These groups included such diverse activities and identities as working groups around Facilitation, Direct Action, Kitchen, Labor Outreach, Process, Comfort, and caucuses around identities such as People of Color, Queer, Women, and more. (Holmes 2012) Working groups would design their own internal process, as long as it followed the larger Occupy ethics of horizontality, inclusion and consensus process, and issue report-backs to the general assembly every day on their progress. Critical to functionality and efficiency, the working groups did not need to seek approval from the general assembly to make decisions and carry out their functions, unless it was deemed to be a decision that effected multiple groups or one that changed the trajectory of the movement as a whole. (Graeber 2012)

90 85 Finally, a spokescouncil model was later employed as a way to decouple day-today organizing and coordination around issues such as allocations of funds from the general assembly. (Holmes 2012) The spokescouncil, modeled after those in the Global Justice movement, featured working groups and caucuses as its units of decision-making, rather than the general assembly in which everyone participated as an individual. (Graeber 2002) Participants would discuss an issue within their working group or caucus internally, and then a selected spoke would relay their group s decision to the rest of the assembled groups. (Graeber 2002) This spokescouncil worked to coordinate between disparate working groups and caucuses in a more efficient manner, allowing the general assembly to function as a movement-building body that made broader, strategic decisions. (Holmes 2012) The decision to create a spokescouncil to coordinate between disparate groups was designed to resolve three issues that arose from the use of a general assembly model. First, the general assembly, open to anyone who walked into the park made it easily susceptible to infiltration by agents of the state and other disrupters. Since working groups were far smaller and often met several times a day, they proved much harder to infiltrate and were able to deal with such elements organically. (Holmes 2012; Fithian 2012) Secondly, as the movement grew, more direct connection was needed between the working groups themselves, where much of the movement s actual work was taking place. (Graeber 2012) Third, the general assembly proved too unwieldy to make financial decisions at the pace required by the rapidly expanding movement that now had access to

91 86 over a million dollars in cash donations, since its consensus process only allowed it to make 2-4 decisions per evening and frequently featured many new participants unfamiliar with the process. (Holmes 2012) The creation of the spokescouncil may have resolved these issues, but it is difficult to know since its introduction occurred only a few weeks before the forcible eviction of the New York occupation. (Holmes 2012) Underlying all of these organizational models was a commitment to consensusbased decision-making models, rather than majoritarian voting. In majoritarian democracy, votes are taken, and group to win either a plurality or the votes or 50%+1 of them, wins the debate. This leads us to think of democracy as a fight, and every discussion a battle with concrete opponents, with the goal being able to cobble together a strong enough coalition to defeat those opponents and exert one s will over them. Consensus, rather, seeks to incorporate everyone s ideas into a synthesis that one can live with. Under consensus, those who feel differently about an issue than you are not your ideological opponents, but rather people who have a different way of viewing the issue, and probably have a number of excellent points on the topic that you hadn t considered, many of which may be worthy of incorporation into the original proposal. Andrew Cornell, writing on Quaker consensus policy, describes the process as such: Participants take turns expressing ideas, and refrain from responding directly to one another or voting to set policy. Instead, discussion continues until there is a sense that all participants share a general agreement about what is to be done, or can at least accept the position of their compatriots. (Cornell 2012)

92 87 Finally, it is critical to understand that consensus process is only really possible when coupled with what David Graeber calls...a principle of radical decentralization. (Graeber 2012) If every working group had to approve every decision made with the general assembly, nothing would ever get done. Instead, smaller groups were empowered to make decisions within their purview, and anyone who expressed an interest in that field could drop in on a working group meeting, and perhaps join that group and help shape the course of it. Finally, this section on Occupy Movement process would be incomplete without a discussion of demands, or lack thereof, made by the movement on the state. Mathijs van de Sande, when describing Occupy encampments, noted: No Occupy camp looked like any other. Strikingly, what most clearly united them was the critique to which they were all subjected: they failed to articulate particular and realizable demands; they refused to institutionalize or formalize their movements into durable structures and procedures, (van de Sande 2013) Later in his piece, The Prefigurative Politics oftahrir Square, van de Sande offers that when viewing social movements that incorporate prefigurative politics as a core part of their ethos, one must view the process itself as the demand made by the group, (van de Sande 2013) In this case, the Occupy Movement had nothing to demand from the state, as its only shared demand was that the state fade into history and allow the assembly-based prefigurative models demonstrated inside of the Occupy encampments to take over and supplant the state as the governance model for the nation. While such models, unlike the others covered here from various parts of the Global South, have not

93 88 yet penetrated deep into into civil society to be capable of reaching this goal, Occupy Wall Street was a powerful step forward towards actualizing prefigurative politics in the Global North, decoupling them from the activist ghetto and exposing untold thousands to a different way of organizing themselves and their society.

94 89 Concluding Thoughts In the preceding four chapters, we have seen four examples of a revolutionary left that has evolved to adapt to the post-soviet and neoliberal era. While each of these movements is unique and autonomous, they all share characteristics of a reliance on prefigurative politics to begin immediately constructing a new world in the shell of the old and a social base within a community who is familiar with, or ready to adopt, these new prefigurative practices. We see evidence here of a movement that has been growing for decades, and an exportable model that can be adapted for a variety of different uses. With Soviet hegemony no longer a homogenizing force over the global left, communities and political groupings have been free to craft their own forms of resistance and alternative governance models. Many of these experiments have resulted in the forms of stateless governance analyzed in this work. In Rojava we see a political party working to construct self-governing assemblies across a territory in which it has achieved hegemony, and at least for now, seems genuine in its desire to see these assemblies become the prime organizational unit of a new, stateless model of governance. The people of Rojava have used democratic confederalism to construct an entirely new model for governance, and forged a social compact dedicated to challenging patriarchy and capitalism. They have also been deliberate in bringing many different social groups into project, striving for equal participation from men, women, Christians, Kurds and Arabs. Their ability to successfully implement this model is particularly impressive given the conditions on the ground, with Rojava fighting off the

95 90 Islamic State on one border, and hostile incursions and bombings from Turkey on the other. In Rojava, there is impressive progress towards a new, more egalitarian governance model which challenges existing, conservative social relationships despite being forced to spend 70% of economic output on a war economy. In Chiapas, Mexico we saw the EZLN, and the larger Zapatista political project, go through three distinct phases. Each one of these phases represents a period in which the EZLN, the political-military cadre, gave up a large chunk of its authority to civilians organizing themselves in community-based assembly models. From , the EZLN was a guerrilla group in the jungles of Chiapas, initially viewed with skepticism by the indigenous community, and forced to adapt. Instead of attempting to educate the communities on Marxism-Leninism, they began to take direction from the communities themselves, incorporating many aspects of their governance models into a new political project that came to be known as Zapatismo. By 1994, the EZLN handed off leadership of the political-military project to an all-indigenous group, the CCRI. By 2003, after over a decade of building networked neighborhood assemblies, that group decided that the time had come for civilian governance to replace the military leaders of the EZLN, and the Good Government Councils were created. Over time, the EZLN has made good on it s promise to lead by obeying and to gradually cede its power over time to egalitarian, civilian councils. These two models are informative for one another, since they both follow what I believe is a counter-intuitive path for the creation of an egalitarian governance project,

96 91 but one that should not be ignored. The model of having a small guerrilla cadre work with a local population to build neighborhood assembly models which will eventually take over the governance authority of that military group itself is one that has worked in Chiapas and for now, seems to be working in Rojava. While I remain skeptical of such a model and its corollaries to the vanguardism of Marxism-Leninism, perhaps there is another lesson to be learned here about being careful not to prescribe Western theories and solutions onto the rest of the world. In the chapter on El Alto, Bolivia, we saw a different path taken to achieve an outcome rooted in prefigurative politics. Once the egalitarian organizing models of the miners, who had previously belonged to anarcho-syndicalist labor unions, collided with the history of self-governance among the Aymara people, a synthesis was reached which resulted in a prefigurative outcome. The people who migrated to El Alto, largely economic refugees, used these tools to essentially construct their city, after seeing their needs ignored by the Bolivian federal government just a few miles away in La Paz. Later, when the state attempted to continue neoliberal reforms and further privatize and commodity gas and water resources, El Alto emerged as the epicenter of a decentralized movement against such policies. This resulted in the replacement of the government with one more sympathetic to the needs of the social movement, but one which was not successfully able to coopt the assemblies and alternative governance models in El Alto. The people of that city continue to periodically assemble to solve pressing issues for their

97 92 community, and retain the capacity to govern the city for themselves again, if the need or opportunity should arise. At Occupy Wall Street in New York City, we saw glimpses of how prefigurative politics could take root in the Global North. The social base in this case were anarchists and other left activists who have either consciously dedicated themselves to prefigurative politics, or have been influenced by them thanks to their near-ubiquity on the activist left beginning in the 1980s. This social base was able to evangelize the benefits of a prefigurative political approach which laid the groundwork for the post-capitalist microcities which would dot the landscape of the United States in the Fall of The popularity of this movement removed prefigurative politics from the activist ghetto at least for a time, by taking such approaches to politics out of the private homes and community spaces designed exclusively for activists and anarchists and placing them in public squares for anyone to participate in. These two case studies compliment each other by showing an approach to prefigurative politics which does not involve a small, armed cadre exerting dominance over a region and largely pushing the state out. It displays a more organic approach to prefiguration in which communities develop a model over a number of decades and it slowly emerges, rather than an armed group emerging and then constructing a model once it has largely pushed the state out of an area. The case of El Alto also shows that it is possible for prefigurative institutions to effectively manage the resources and needs of a major metropolitan area, and is not theoretically limited to rural areas with more

98 93 dispersed populations, while the case of Occupy Wall Street shows that prefigurative ethics can be effective and attractive even to those living in wealthy metropolitan centers in the Global North. In an era where neoliberal economics continues to globalize the flow of capital while simultaneously diminishing the power of the state to regulate that flow, challenges as well as opportunities lay ahead for those who seek a future beyond the state and capital. The diminished power of the state allows for the ability to begin building prefigurative counter-institutions in preparation of eventually supplanting the state entirely. In some areas, such as Chiapas and Rojava, the state is weak enough, and prefigurative institutions are strong enough that state can largely be pushed out of territory entirely, leading to defacto autonomy by the counter-institutions. In areas like El Alto and New York City, the counter-institutions can continue to expand and evolve, in preparation for the next inevitable crisis of the state, or recession of the capitalist economy, when they can then re-assert themselves. I believe the four case studies examined here show a new type of model emerging in resistance to the state and capital, one which has its roots in prefigurative politics and egalitarian social and economic relationships. Even community, social group and region that pursues prefigurative politics in some way has now become a laboratory for a new, radically egalitarian approach to democracy.

99 94 BIBLIOGRAPHY Introduction: Al, Serhun 2011 Lessons for the Kurds from the Zapatistas: Globalization from Below within Domestic Movements Researchgate February 2011 Al, Serhun 2014 Local Armed Uprisings and the Transnational Image o f Claim Making: The Kurds o f Turkey and the Zapatistas o f Mexico in Comparative Perspective Crossmark December 2014 Gamberri, Zeynep 2009 Politics of Place/Space: The Spatial Dynamics of the Kurdish and Zapatista Movements New Perspectives on Turkey No. 41 Fall 2009 Gerbaudo, Paolo 2014 "'The Movement o f Squares and the Contested Resurgence o f the Sovereign People in Contemporary Protest Culture Social Science Research Network May 20th, 2014 Martinez, Elizabeth and Garcia, Amoldo 1996 What is Neoliberalism? A Brief Definition fo r Activists Corpwatch Stanchev, Peter 2015 From Chiapas to Rojava: seas divide us, autonomy binds us ROAR Magazine, February 17th 2015 Chapter 1: Rojava BBC Our World, 2014 Rojava s Secret Revolution November 26, 2014 BBC News, 2015 Syria: The Story of the Conflict March 12, 2015 Biehl, Janet 2014 Poor in Means but Rich in Spirit Ecology or Catastrophe December 30th, 2014 Biehl, Janet 2015 Rojava's Threefold Economy Kurdish Question, February 26th, 2015 Coles, Rebecca A Revolution in Daily Life Peace in Kurdistan, December 22nd, 2014 Daher, Joseph 2014 Syria: On the Syrian Revolution and the Kurdish Issue - an Interview with Syrian-Kurdish activist and journalist Shiar Nayo Tahrir-ICN April 7th, 2014

100 95 Dearden, Lizzie 'Isis are afraid o f girls': Kurdish female fighters believe they have an unexpected advantage fighting in Syria The Independent UK, December 9th, 2015 Dirik, Dllar Western fascination with 'badass'kurdish women A1 Jazeera English, October 29th 2014 Graeber, David 2014 Why is the World Ignoring the Revolutionary Kurds in Syria? The Guardian UK, October 8th, 2014 Graeber, David 2014 Some Concrete Examples o f how the Rojava Revolution is Anticapitalist Libcom.org December 29, 2014 Graeber, David and Ogunc, Pinar No. This is a Genuine Revolution. ZNet, December 26th, 2014 Human Rights Watch Under Kurdish Rule: Abuses in PYD-Run Enclaves o f Syria International Crisis Group Turkey s Kurdish Impasse: The View from Diyarkakir International Crisis Group Syria s Kurds: A Struggle Within a Struggle. Jongerden, Joost Radicalizing Democracy: Power, Politics, People and the PKK Radical Turkey- Centre for Policy and Research on Turkey Klein, Hilary, 2015 Companeras: Zapatista Women s Stories New York: Seven Stories Press Kurdish Question, 2015 Victory in Kobane: What Next for the Rojava Revolution? Part 2 Interview with David Graeber Youtube, February 22nd 2015 Marcus, Aliza 2007 Blood and Belief: The PKK and the Kurdish Fight for Independence. New York: New York University Press Ocalan, Abdullah 2008 War and Peace in Kurdistan London: Transmedia Publishing, LTD. Ocalan, Abdullah 2011 Democratic Confederalism London: Transmedia Publishing, LTD. Soloman, Erica 2014 Special Report: Amid Syria's violence, Kurds carve out autonomy Reuters January 22nd, 2014 ROAR Collective, 2015 Joint Statement o f the Academic Delegation to Rojava ROAR Magazine January 15th, 2015

101 96 Sinclair, Christian 2011 The Evolution o f Kurdish Politics in Syria Middle East Report Online, August 3 1st 2011 Tax, Meredith 2015 The Revolution in Rojava Dissent Magazine April 22nd, 2015 Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness 2014 ''A Small Key Can Open a Large Door: the Rojava Revolution. San Bernardino, Ca: Combustion Books TARTOT Kurdistan 2013 Democratic Autonomy in North Kurdistan. Porsgrunn, Norway: New Compass Press VICE News, 2012 Female Fighters o f Kurdistan July 23rd, 2012 Chapter 2: Chiapas EZLN, 1994 Zapatista Women s Revolutionary Laws The Mexican Awakener, Janurary 1st, 1994 EZLN, 1995 Third Declaration o f the Lacandona Jungle SchoolsforChiapas.org EZLN, 2005 Sixth Declaration o f the Selva Lacandona EZLN, 2012 Autonomous Government I: First-Grade Textbook for the Course Freedom According to the Zapatistas Forbis, Melissa 2014 The Zapatistas at 20: Building Autonomous Community Solidarity Online March 23rd, 2014 Klein, Hilary Companeras: Zapatista Women s Stories New York: Seven Stories Press Marcos, Subcomandante Insurgente 2001 Our Word is Our Weapon New York: Seven Stories Press Ramirez, Gloria Munoz 2008 The Fire and the Word: A History o f the Zapatista Movement San Francisco: City Lights Books Ramirez, Gloria Munoz 2008 Caracol #l-caracol #5 America s Program December 15th 2008 Romero, Raul 2013 The EZLN-A Look at its History (Part I): The Guerrilla Nucleus Upside Down World December 17th, 2013 Ross, John 1995 Rebellion from the Roots: Indian Uprising in Chiapas Monroe, Main: Common Courage Press

102 97 Ross, John 2005 Celebrating the Caracoles: Step by Step, The Zapatistas Advance on the Horizon Humboldt Journal of Social Relations (29) No Stahler-Sholk, Richard 2007 Resisting Neoliberal Homogenization: The Zapatista Autonomy Movement Latin American Perspectives Issue 153, Vol. 24 No. 2, March Stahler-Sholk, Richard 2010 The Zapatista Social Movement: Innovation and Sustainability Alternatives: Global, Local, Political (35) Starr, Amory; Martinez-Torres, Maria Elena and Rosset, Peter 2011 Participatory Democracy in Action: Practices o f the Zapatistas and the Movimento Sem Terra Latin American Perspectives Issue 176, Vol. 38, No. 1 Janurary Chapter 3: El Alto, Bolivia Arbona, Juan Manuel 2006 Neo-Liberal Ruptures: Local Political Entities and Neighborhood Networks in El Alto, Bolivia Geoforum, Vol. 38, Issue 1, January 2007, Pages Arbona, Juan Manuel 2008 Histories and Memories in the Organization and Struggles o f the Santiago II Neighborhood o f El Alto, Bolivia Bulletin of Latin American Research, Vol. 27, No. 1, Caspersen, 2012 Unrecognized States Cambridge, United Kingdom: Polity Press Cusicanqui, Silvia Rivera 1990 Liberal Democracy and Ayllu Democracy in Bolivia: The Case o f Northern Potosi The Journal of Development Studies Vol. 26, Issue Forero, Juan 2005 Coca Advocate Wins Election for President in Bolivia New York Times, December 19th, 2005 Harvey, David 2012 Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution London: Verso Press lamamoto, Sue 2013 Bolivia s Gas War Ten Years On Equal Times, November 26th 2013

103 98 Lazar, Sian Alto, Rebel City: Self and Citizenship in Andean Bolivia London: Duke University Press Mampilly, Zachariah Cherian Rebel Rulers: Insurgent Governance and Civilian Life During War" Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press Marten, Kimberly 2012 Warlords: Strong-Arm Brokers in Weak States Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press Morales, Juan Antonio 1995 Bolivia and the Slowdown o f the Reform Process The World Bank, PSD Occasional Paper No. 7 Risse, Thomas 2011 Governance Without a State? New York, New York: Columbia University Press Rohter, Larry 2003 Bolivian Leader Resigns and his Vice President Steps in New York Times, October 17th 2003 Scott, James C Domination and the Arts o f Resistance: Hidden Transcripts New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press Spronk, Susan 2015 Crisis and Contradiction: Marxist Perspectives on Latin America in the Global Political Economy Chicago, Illinois: Haymarket Books Webber, Jeffrey R Left-Indigenous Struggles in Bolivia: Searching for Revolutionary Democracy Monthly Review: An Independent Socialist Magazine Vol. 57, Issue 04 (September) Zibechi, Raul 2010 Dispersing Power: Social Movements as Anti-State Forces Oakland, California: AK Press Chapter 4: Occupy Wall Street Cornell, Andrew 2012 Consensus: What It Is, What It Isn t, Where It Comes From and Where It Must Go Oakland, California: AK Press Cornell, Andrew 2016 Unruly Equality: U.S. Anarchism in the 20th Century Oakland, California: University of California Press

104 99 Fagan, Kevin; Berton, Justin; Bulwa, Demian 2011 Occupy Oakland protestors regroup - Iraq vet hurt San Francisco Chronicle, October 27th, 2011 Fithian, Lisa 2012 Strategic Directions for the Occupy Movement Oakland, California: AK Press Graeber, David 2002 The New Anarchists New Left Review vol. 13, Jan-Feb 2002 Graeber, David 2009 Direct Action: An Ethnography Oakland, California: AK Press Graeber, David 2011 Occupy Wall Street s anarchist roots A1 Jazeera English, November 30th, 2011 Graeber, David 2012 The Democracy Project: A History, A Crisis, A Movement. New York, New York: Random House Harvey, Ryan 2012 Occupy Before and Beyond. Oakland, California: AK Press Holmes, Marisa 2012 The Center Cannot Hold: A Revolution in Progress Oakland, California: AK Press Schneider, Nathan 2011 Thankyou, Anarchists The Nation December 19th, 2011 Some Oakland Antagonists 2012 Occupy Oakland is Dead. Long Live the Oakland Commune. Bay of Rage, May 16th, 2012 Van de Sande, Mathijs 2013 The Prefigurative Politics oftahrir Square - An Alternative Perspective on the 2011 Revolutions Res Publica, March 14lh, 2013 Wollan, Malia 2011 Oakland s Port Shuts Down as Protestors March on Waterfront New York Times, November 2nd, 2011