Implications of the 2020 US Elections for Humanity and Mother Earth, Part 1
OCTOBER 26, 2020 It is often said, in relation to elections taking place in the US, that “The whole world is watching.” This is perhaps never more so however than this year, in November 2020. This is the case for many reasons, some more obvious than others, but most attributable to or consequent on the fact that the US is the most powerful imperial power. This time, it’s also a function of having a person as president who has swung the country and its politics to the extreme right and normalized a political culture of deceit, manipulation, and abuse – and which is resonating with similar tendencies that have arisen across the world, and especially in sub-imperial powers, as one outcome among many, of neoliberalism.
But the US today faces challenges both from within and without, most of its own making. The white supremacy that defines the US republic is today being challenged from the streets and in popular culture by African Americans, Latinx, Indigenous, other people of color, together with self-defined white progressives and allies. Although the rebellion today recalls a previous, near-decade-long broad challenge, the civil rights and Black movements beginning in the 1960s, it confronts a very different state, one that is at once enfeebled by decades of neoliberal globalization and empowered by new surveillance and repressive capacities. Nonetheless, the authoritarian populism of its current administration, just as that of its extreme right global counterparts, renders it uninterested in effectively responding to and addressing pandemics, economic dislocations, and climate breakdown. But saying that they are ineffective or incompetent responses should not suggest that they are unimpactful; quite the contrary, the world as a whole is today being pulverized by the US ruling class’s neoliberal and militarist responses to its own inadequacies.
A strategic analysis that centers the building of exchanges between people’s movements is the core of Movements of Movements process – of its books, website, and web event series. The Movements of Movements Conversations is therefore now looking to activist thinkers from across the world and their readings of the implications of the US elections, the first on October 16, 2020, before the elections, and the second on November 20, 2020, immediately after the elections. Our objective is to critically discuss the nature and meanings of the US elections this year, and of their implications for the peoples of the US, for the peoples of the world–both colonized and free–and for life on Mother Earth. These combined web dialogues will together chart the Movements of Movements as peoples around the world envision and work towards new realities and liberation.
Our meeting’s facilitators are Liz Mestres and Suren Moodliar.
Speaker Bios
We are grateful to Kolya Abramsky, Walden Bello, Mama Charlotte, and Marie Cruz Soto who are joining the Movements of Movements Conversations to address the US elections and their implications for humanity and Mother Earth.
Walden Bello
Walden is currently a professor of sociology at the State University of New York at Binghamton and senior research fellow at the Center for Southeast Asian Studies of Kyoto University in Japan. He served as a member of the House of Representatives of the Philippines from 2009 to 2015, during which he was chairman of the Committee on Overseas Workers Affairs. His resignation from the House in 2015 in protest at the policies of the Aquino administration is the only instance of a resignation on principle in the history of the Congress of the Philippines.
He is the author or co-author of 20 books, including Food Wars (London: Verso, 2009), Capitalism’s Last Stand? (London: Zed, 2013), Dragons in Distress: Asia’s Miracle Economies in Crisis (London: Penguin, 1990), and Development Debacle: the World Bank in the Philippines (San Francisco: Institute for Food and Development Policy, 1982).
Mama Charlotte
Charlotte Hill O’Neal aka Mama C is an internationally known writer/poet, visual artist, musician, priestess, film maker and long time community activist of more than three decades of experience. She was born in Kansas City, KS in 1951 and has lived in Africa since 1970. She is the mother of two children, co-founder and Programs Director of the United African Alliance Community Center UAACC located outside of Arusha, Tanzania. Mama C’s music is by the jazz, blues and gospel for which Kansas City is famous. She notes that, “As a member of the Black Panther Party I was taught the importance of building international solidarity among all people while honoring my Ancestral roots. That philosophy has never changed and many of my poems and songs reflect this burning desire and mission to spread peace, love and unity through my art”, Mama C reflects.
She launched her first book of poetry, Warrior Woman of Peace in 2008 and her second book of poetry Life Slices: A Taste of Magic in 2016. She is currently working on her memoir entitled “Hard Head.”
Kolya Abramsky
Kolya Abramsky is an archivist at the George Padmore Institute archive in London, where he is responsible for cataloging the late John La Rose’s personal archive relating to the Oilfields Workers’ Trade Union of Trinidad and Tobago. He is interested in the struggle over memory, and the importance of preserving and recuperating historical memory for emancipatory politics today. He moved into archival work following more than 15 years as an organizer, educator, and researcher, on different social, political, and economic aspects of the global energy sector. He was very active with different global anti-capitalist networks and processes from the late 1990s-mid-2000s. In his work on energy, he was, formerly, the International Energy Officer for the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa; coordinator of the World Wind Energy Institute, based in Denmark; a Visiting International Scholar and Winner of the Manfred-Heindler Award for Energy and Climate Change Research at the Institute of Advanced Studies in Science, Technology and Society in Graz, Austria. Together with the NGO Focus on the Global South, he produced the website Understanding China’s Energy Landscape: Achievements, Challenges and Conflicts – Past, Present, Future. He has edited two books: Sparking a Worldwide Energy Revolution: Social Struggles in the Transition to a Post-Petrol World, and Restructuring and Resistance – Diverse Voices of Struggle in Western Europe.
Marie Cruz Soto
Marie Cruz Soto is interested in imperial/colonial processes of becoming (i.e., in the creation and naturalization of coloniality), and in those struggles to un-become upon which survival sometimes hinges (i.e., in the imagining of a different world). She is particularly interested in the island of Vieques, Puerto Rico, and in how militarized colonialism has shaped the makings of the Viequense community. Her work explores how the long history of violent displacements and dispossessions in the island has ensured a vulnerable and unruly population. Her work consequently engages with the violence of militarized colonialism and with the proposals of anti-colonial and anti-militarism struggles. Cruz Soto is also a peace activist who has participated in Viequense community initiatives, in the organization New York Solidarity with Vieques and in transnational networks of solidarity against US military bases. As part of this work, she has, for example, given public lectures and participated as a petitioner in the United Nations Decolonization Hearings on Puerto Rico. At Gallatin, she teaches courses that delve into feminist and anti-colonial epistemologies, into the workings of the US Empire, into struggles to narrate the past and claim places, and into the formation of communities and the edification and transgression of boundaries.
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