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Radical Pasts, Radical Futures
Conversation on Contemporary Social Movements
with
Andaiye
scott crow
Gustavo Esteva
Selma James
George Katsiaficas
Peter Linebaugh
Ruth Reitan
Moderated by Sasha Lilley
(host of KPFA's Against the Grain)
Friday, March 30th, 2012
California Institute of Integral Studies
1453 Mission Street
San Francisco, CA 94103
Namaste Hall
3:00-7:00 pm
-
Participants' biographies:
Andaiye is co-founder and international coordinator of Red
Thread in Guyana. Begun in 1986 as a self-help
income-generating group, it brings low-income women together
despite often violent racial divides. Red Thread is now a
campaigning organization, with three immediate priorities: a
living income for the poorest women and their families;
protection and justice for women and children in violent
situations; and the political visibility and voice of
grassroots women— Indo- and Afro-Guyanese as well as
Indigenous. Andaiye is the author of several key papers
(soon to be anthologized) such as “The Valuing of Unwaged
Work”, an analysis of the cost to women in the Caribbean of
IMF policies. In 1979, she was a founding member and leader
of the Working People’s Alliance of Guyana along with
historian Walter Rodney, author of How Europe Underdeveloped
Africa, who was assassinated in 1980. She is the Caribbean
coordinator of Women of Color in the Global Women’s Strike.
As a leading women’s activist in the English-speaking
Caribbean, and with her extraordinary political background,
organizing experience and gifts as an orator, she is much
sought after as a speaker. In 2007 she and Selma James
toured the US together to much acclaim.
When both levees and governments failed in New Orleans in
the Fall of 2005, scott crow headed into the political
storm, co-founding a relief effort called the Common Ground
Collective. In the absence of local government, FEMA, and
the Red Cross, this unusual volunteer organization, based on
‘solidarity not charity,’ built medical clinics, set up food
and water distribution, and created community gardens. They
also resisted home demolitions, white militias, police
brutality and FEMA incompetence side by side with the people
of New Orleans. scott crow is a community organizer,
writer, strategist and author of the new book Black Flags
and Windmills: Hope, Anarchy and the Common Ground
Collective (PM Press, November 2011).
Gustavo Esteva is an independent writer, a grassroots
activist and a deprofessionalized intellectual. He works
both independently and in conjunction with a variety of
Mexican NGOs and grassroots organizations and communities.
He has been a key figure in founding several Mexican, Latin
American and International NGOs and networks. Though not an
economist by training, he received Mexico’s National Prize
of Political Economy for his contribution to the theory of
inflation, and though not a sociologist was President of the
5th World Rural Sociology Congress. He also served as
President of the Mexican Society of Planning, as
Vice-president of the Inter-American Society of Planning,
and served as Board Member and Interim Chairman of the
United Nations Research Institute for Social Development. He
is a well known writer, with three dozen books and hundreds
of essays and articles published around the world in
numerous languages. Gustavo is an active voice within the
“deprofessionalized” segment of the Southern intellectual
community.. Gustavo argues that even the “alternative”
development prescriptions lead inexorably to depriving the
people of control over their own lives and shifting this
control to bureaucrats, technocrats, and educators. Rather
than presume that human progress fits some predetermined
mold leading toward an increasing homogenization of cultures
and life styles, he prefers a “radical pluralism” that
honors and nurtures distinctive culture variety and enables
many paths to the realization of self- defined aspirations.
In Grassroots Postmodernism: Remaking the Soil of Cultures
and Escaping Education: Living as Learning at the
Grassroots, that he wrote with Madhu S. Prakash, he
elaborates on his thesis. He was invited by the Zapatistas
to be their advisor, in 1996. Since then, he has been very
active in what today is called Zapatismo, involving himself
with the current struggle of the indigenous peoples. He
lives in a small Zapotec village in the south of Mexico.
Selma James is a women's rights and anti-racist campaigner
and author. Raised in a movement household, she joined CLR
James’s Johnson-Forest Tendency at age 15, and from 1958 to
1962, she worked with him in the movement for Caribbean
federation and independence. In 1972, she founded the
International Wages for Housework Campaign, and in 2000 she
helped launch the Global Women's Strike which she
coordinates. She coined the word unwaged to describe the
caring work
