Something changed in 2011, and despite the massive repression that protest movements have faced, something has changed within people. That’s going to have a massive impact on the future. There’s going to be a lot of change happening in the region, and we’re only at the start of that process.
What happens when people camp together, sleep together, and are not in a rush? Well, they talk about all kinds of things. They establish forms of solidarity through conversation.
We will fight the forces of death with life! We will fight colonial violence, capitalist greed, and ecological destruction with our memories, our witness, our songs, and our bodies! We will not give up! We will stop Line 3, and we will build a better future without it!
What we saw in Portugal in 1974 was men and women fighting together, black and white people fighting together, shantytowns and highly-qualified workers fighting together. The working class had a universal project of changing society. The Portuguese road to socialism in ’74 and ’75 was full of liberty.
The call is for a particular recognition of coherence, of racist misogyny and the fact that you can’t separate racism from misogyny—you just can’t. But everybody does.
As long as patriarchy perpetuates the violent idea that men have more rights than women, no one will live in freedom. The moment for internationalist feminism is here.
The state can’t do anything on its own, not even with the “best” person in power. Without social mobilization and organization, a left political party or leader will inevitably run up against limitations: the power of investors, the power of the ruling class.
To create unity, we need to take into account our differences, and the different ways in which we are oppressed under capitalism. We need to start from these differences, and on this basis elaborate projects of liberation for everybody.
The power of feminism right now is that it can be a uniting tool to make people understand how their struggles are related. We are much more powerful when we are fighting together and learning from each other than if we stick to our little pet cause or only work with what’s in front of us instead of working from a systemic analysis.
The failure of humanity to meaningfully tackle this problem is completely off the scale. For thirty years we’ve seen calls to reduce carbon emissions, and they’ve gone up sixty percent. We are going a hundred million miles an hour in the wrong direction and we only seem to get faster.
