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“There was a broad based, centrist, moderate, reformist United States anti-war effort right before 1900. This Original Populist Era organization was run under similar structure to 21st Century Populist movement’s cooperative involvement in the 2000s Anti Iraqi Occupation ground swell.

The American Anti-Imperialist League that organized over nine decades before George H. W. Bush invaded Iraqi occupied Kuwait was broad based.

Political groups outside of the two party duolopoly spoke up in opposition to the proposed illegal annexation of the Spanish Philippine Islands at the ‘other’ turn of the century. This group of Non Republicans and Non Democrats was formed over a century before the current American occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq.

First meeting on June 15, 1898, in San Francisco, California. Its members included Andrew Carnegie, THE Billionaire Steel Magnet and Philanthropists; Mark Twain (Samuel Longhorn Clements); William James, Philosopher, Writer, Educator; David Starr Jordan; and Samuel Gompers, Union Legend.

George S. Boutwell, former secretary of the treasury and Massachusetts U. S. senator, served as first and only president of the League.

On December 21, 1898, United States President William “Big Bill” McKinley issued his Benevolent Assimilation Proclamation, unilaterally and quite illegally ceding the Philippines to the United States. He also was secretly instructing the American occupying service members to use force, as necessary, to impose American sovereignty over the Philippine Islands. This second criminal act was informal and unlawful. It was issued even before the nation obtained formal Senate ratification of the (’Paris’) peace treaty with the global Spanish “Iberian” Empire.

As we fulfill our lives in this 21st Century doesn’t it seem that the more things ‘change’ the more they seem to ‘re-invent’ themselves. Like Ho Chi Min City and Baghdad, Americans were originally hailed as liberators in Manila! These same United States troops were later fired upon and then bombed with make shift materials by local patriots. To add injury to insult, the Imperial Japanese Empire mimicked the United States of America by ‘liberating’ Manila from it’s second group of light skinned European based over lords on December 7th, 1941. The Philippines were FINALLY an independent, unoccupied territory in 1946, almost half a century after the American Anti- Imperialism League.

Citizens For A Better Veterans Home, not just more lethal, politicized, uncaring programs that create hack patronage jobs, spend taxes in constituent communities, while doing little or nothing for real veterans, their real families, with their real problems……

Tags: anti imperialism, centrist, Democrats, empire, history, imperialism, populist, power, Republicans, resistance
Categories: Commentary, Power, Empire, History
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by Russell Cole

What ever happened to the Green Party?  Remember, the Green Party; the People’s Party; the Party with an egalitarian structure that practiced grass-roots politics and social democracy when deliberating over its own policies and affairs?

The Green Party of old no longer exists in any substantive form; only in a projection of text displayed as a representation of the Green Party’s internal organizational practices.  The Party has installed a hierarchical structure and has developed a culture of suspicion and ideological dogma that is tantamount to a cultural condition that exists under a totalitarian state such as fascism. 

The Green Party still attempts to project an image of itself which reinforces the prejudices developed from impressions of the organization as it first emerged as the premier third party movement in American politics.  However, the rhetoric consists of propositions that describe states-of-affairs that are absent of any reference to the external facts comprising the Party’s practices. 

I speak as a former insider, and I can state with absolute conviction that The Green Party is dominated by a clique of cronies who have successfully consolidated power within the party structure, and quite actively preserve their power through the silencing of dissent and the praxis of exclusionary politics.  They go so far as to banish members under contrived charges of impropriety in order to maintain the cohesion of an organization that is void of deliberative participatory democracy.  There is no democracy left in the Green Party.  There is perhaps a form of republicanism, but one can enjoy this mitigated, marginal form of political participation in the Democratic Party.  So, I ask:  What is the need for the Green Party, other than to act as the spoiler party to the Democrats?  The Green Party promises no democratic reform; no political decentralization that would empower the individuals emotionally attached to one another in local communities; therefore, The Green Party is an entity that is a hindrance to oppositional politics in America, and certainly not a guiding light in the struggle to democratize a society that has slipped into a state of Empire.  ‘Green’ is no longer a signifier of populist reform; it is a symptom of pathology.  The Green Party has been infected by the corrupting elements of petty minded people who aspire to the advancement of their own provincial interests at the expense of a movement that once promised to be the People’s emerging voice in American politics. 

I could list names, but to publicly embarrass people would contrary to the most pragmatic solution to the problem at hand.  At this point in time, attempting to salvage the Green Party is a waste of activist resources.  The Party is starting to implode, due to the tyrannical imposition of the will of a faction that believes it needs to take control of the organization in order to impose structure and coordination to the activities of the minions under its control.  California Greens are nearly in revolt.  They are by far the largest pocket of Greens in the nation, and their disassociation from the Party would render the Green US a mere vestige of what it once was.  The national organization would be politically impotent. 

Let the Green Party die of this infection, and let something new originate from the organic processes associated with grass-roots activism.  It is time for a new voice to be heard from the wilderness, and the most viable organization to assume this role is the Populist Party of America; a party that has yet to succumb to the dynamics of institutionalization, which leads to stasis, rendering the entity inert.  The Populist Party of America is poised to take hold of the reigns of the American third-party, oppositional culture, and the time is coming near to a transition that will be abrupt and definitive.  Those who still value direct, deliberative democracy; grass-roots politics; decentralization of governmental power; and social and economic reform; need to find a new home within Populist America, because it is now the lone voice crying out from the wilderness - the new dynamic of oppositional politics in American culture.

Tags: democracy, grassroots politics, green party, politics, populist, populist party, russell cole, third parties
Categories: Commentary, National, Democracy, liberty, Politics, Third Parties
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Like all dimensions of the identity politics associated with the New-left, the Green Party’s philosophical underpinnings consist of a bullet list of values. It is the purpose of this essay to demonstrate that such an approach to politics consists of merely creating paradoxical tangles of propositions that result in a philosophy that is practically void of any pragmatic qualities. The lack of any usefulness results from the inability of one to actually infer any deductions from the core principles contained in the philosophy, which might provide some direction as to the posture one should assume when facing issues of political and social significance. The Green Philosophy can be considered nothing more than pure sophism in the sense that it is rhetoric void of any substantive insights.

We do not want to bore the reader so we shall just proffer a single instance of the type of confusion to which we are referring. The following are both principles contained in the “Key-values” of the Green Party: One should possess personal responsibility to his or her social and ecological environment; as well as, one should, contemporaneously, have a respect for cultural diversity. We shall first provide a broader context in order for the reader to better understand the implications of these two positions.

Communitarianism, which we consider to be the general ideological framework from which the former of the two Key-values is derived, is a philosophy that stresses the positive obligations one has to his or her community along with the positive expectations that he or she is obliged to expect from his or her community. This value - derived from communitarianism - is at odds with the predominate American ideology, which stresses Liberalism in its classical form, which we consider to be the ideological perspective from which the latter of the two Values emanates.

This Anglo philosophy, classical Liberalism, emphasizes the negative rights and negative obligations of individuals within a community. We emphatically believe that classical Liberalism, or what we shall call libertarianism, is a crucial component of the Key-values of the Green Party, in the sense that it is the bedrock for Values such as the tolerance for diversity, which consists, mostly of negative obligations; namely, not to interfere with the practices of others.

For instance, for one to possess the value of tolerance for diversity, he or she must be prepared to abstain from condemning an individual who transgresses the conventions and norms of the community in question, and understand that this particular individual has a different understanding of what constitutes appropriate behavior.

The Value of Personal Responsibility, however, seems to run in contradistinction to the Value of Tolerance, because a member of a community should be expected to act in a manner that falls within the moral boundaries as they are defined by the community, due to the Value of Personal Responsibility. One, so to speak, is to be a good citizen, which curtails an individual’s negative rights not to be persecuted for practicing his or her own unique form of life.

So, the problem has been identified and this conflict between the Key-values of the Greens, if not corrected, debases the very validity of the Green Philosophy in its totality. The paradox can be summarized as follows: One is to be community oriented, because of his or her personal responsibilities, while, contemporaneously, he or she and others are to be tolerant of difference, which might run counter to the conventions and values of the local community.

How is one to balance these opposing dynamics, not just in theory, but in practice as well? We have not even begun to attempt to unravel this mess of contrary and competing positions, which provides no practical guidance as how to position oneself when politically engaged.

Russell Cole

Tags: community, decentralization, democracy, government, green party, liberty, philosophy, populist, populist party, responsibility, Russell Coles Blog, third parties
Categories: Commentary, Populist Party, Democracy, liberty, government, Russell Cole's Blog, Decentralization
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We, The Midwest Alliance, have ostentatiously proclaimed that the collective representation of social and political reality, which predominately defines the most basic elements of the world-views of the majority of American subjects, is a false ideology; an illusory perception propagated by the “Manufactured Consent” engendered by a media that parades itself as news, but in actuality lacks any journalistic component.  The mass media is simply a means through which the managers of public relations disseminate their press releases.  There is no criticality involved in the reporting.

The pseudo-journalists, whose physically attractive appearances hold our attentions captive, are not investigating a story.  Rather, they are involved in a system of reciprocity with their sources, who offer them contents for their reports.  This amounts to a situation where the correspondent is obliged to frame a message that projects the image that the source is involved in crafting, in order to maintain the relationship.  It is embedded reporting in two senses of the word:  It is dependent upon the subjects of its coverage for access to their carefully planned dramaturgical performances, and, furthermore, it is prisoner to the corporate interests that have consolidated mass media sources in America.  These corporations depend upon politicians and people of power for the de-regulation of the media industry, which creates a conflict of interests that undoubtedly tarnishes any attempt at the production of authentic journalism by these profit driven entities.

Therefore, if we are two extrapolate from these two preceding propositions, we can conclude that the media has little or no independence from the elites who dominate American society.    Additionally, it is our position that this representation - the conventional political wisdom of American subjects shaped by the flow of discourse emanating from these media sources - is not an effective conceptualization of America and its system of polity, at all.  America is not a democracy, or even a Liberal democracy; it is Empire, which maintains a vestige of a dilute republicanism.  This is not hyperbole.  The rest of the world acknowledges that America is a facade of the edifice that it attempts to project as the care-keeper of the values associated with the Enlightenment.  We, as Americans, are alone in our oftentimes intransigent belief that we are the messengers of freedom in the world.  America implants within the Trojan Horse of “making the world safe for democracy,” a form of cultural and economic imperialism.  America is Empire.

Tags: democracy, empire, journalism, media, midwest populist party, populist, populist party
Categories: Commentary, Midwest, Society, Populist Party, Democracy, Empire, Media
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by Bill Templer

The figures are not yet in for CEO salaries stateside in 2005.  In 2004, CEOs of America’s 500 biggest companies got a whopping aggregate pay raise of 54 percent, with the average CEO of a major company receiving $9.84 million in total compensation. According to Forbes magazine, their total compensation as a super economic elite was US$5.1 billion, up wildly from 3.3 billion in fiscal 2003.

The remuneration pyramid is something working class people know is abominable. And apparently as ‘American’ today as apple pie.  People are well aware: that pyramid, with most workers and families pretty much at the bottom, is getting higher and higher. In 1980, the average CEO in a major American firm was making about 42 times as much as non-supervisory workers at the bottom of the Great Pyramid. By the mid-90s, that had increased to a multiple of 160.  Five years ago, the estimate is that CEOs were paid salaries on average 460 times (!) as much as the ordinary bottom rung of workers in their own firm. Meanwhile, the highest echelons of corporate America are awash with criminality and fraud. Hard to count the number of CEOs who have pillaged their companies while workers have paid the price. Most of the largest bankruptcies in American history have taken place since 2001.

And who is paying for executives’ errors? Right: the workers.  As David Zweifel recently noted in The Progressive Populist:

Unionized workers at Delphi Corp. are being asked to take a two-thirds pay cut while the once-healthy auto parts maker deals with bankruptcy. GM workers have voted to pay at least a billion dollars more of the corporation’s health care costs. Indeed, companies across the land are asking for and receiving wage reductions from workers in every field from the airlines to the grocery business.
(Vol. 11(20), Nov. 15, 2005, http://www.populist.com/05.20.html )

Companies dare to claim these cutbacks are “essential to stay competitive” in a globalizing economy.  Zweifel spotlights another facet in this bundle of contradictions:

Further, a new survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation and Health Research and Educational Trust reveals that the percentage of businesses that offer health insurance to their workers has dropped to 60 percent, compared to 69 percent in 2000 and 66 percent in 2003. Heaven knows what it will be next year.

And he wonders: “It all seems backward, doesn’t it?”

Backward, yes. But none of this is a secret. Under the impress of our great Dream Machine, such knowledge often gets smothered by the incessant spin of the Spectacle, the mind-numbing inundation with images, the subtle kind of brainwash into conformity that is ‘hegemony.’ As linguist Julian Edge phrased its chemistry:

that we act in ways that reinforce the power structures that control us because, in the end, we see it as being in our interests to do so. We may do this consciously or unconsciously. …  We have choices, albeit constrained by the over-arching systems and power structures of ‘the way things are.’
(http://www.developingteachers.com/articles_tchtraining/intlpolitics_julian.htm )

‘The way things are’: a handful of giant corporations own or control nearly all newspapers, TV networks, radio stations, sports teams, movie companies, book publishers, and other sources of information, ‘infotainment’ and distraction, engineering our vast depoliticization  constructing and reproducing our alienation.

Yet ordinary working people can cut through the fog and doubletalk. They understand that this Great Pyramid of inequity in pay and possessions is the ugly face of their own exploitation. Maybe they don’t use that word, but call it unfair, unequal. The scales of pay in a populist economy will be a lot fairer, looking far more like the plains of Kansas than the slopes of Mt. McKinley.

America in 2006 is more polarized economically than maybe ever before. Though the contradictions may remind some of the 1880s and 1890s, when the first Populist movement emerged as a powerful force of protest, especially across the American Midwest.  The gap today is pretty mind-boggling. And anything but democratic: the top 1 percent owns more than 40 percent of total wealth in this country, and over 80 percent of assets like stocks and bonds. In 2002, the top tenth of 1 percent, the wealthiest 130,000 households, had some $505 billion in income,  averaging a cool $4 million a piece. Meanwhile, some 25 percent of all wage workers earned less than the official minimum hourly wage.

Along with some nine million workers officially unemployed in the U.S., there are maybe another five million not counted, considered “discouraged” and hard-core unemployed, not looking for work anymore. Another  25 million are working part-time, most for low pay and few benefits. Median household income over the past few years has been falling, especially in the Midwest, due to job losses in manufacturing and the relentless dynamo of outsourcing. Real wages have generally stagnated or even declined since the mid-1970s, and American workers have been compelled to work longer and longer hours just to pay their bills.

Have working hours for the average full-time worker really increased over that same period? You bet they have: statistics indicate up from 1,720 a year in 1973 to about 1,900 hours a year in 1998. That’s a rise of nearly 180 hours, or the equivalent of more than four additional weeks (!) of work per year if you average it out. Universities and public schools today are full of a growing mass of ‘adjunct’ or ‘contingent’ teachers, with low pay and no job security. 

In Europe, this ballooning phenomenon in the workplace in industry and the service sector is now known as ‘precarity’ in labor, and is spreading fast. The British call it ‘casualisation of the workforce’ 
(http://www.anarkismo.net/newswire.php?story_id=1828 ).

Everywhere it means massive new job insecurity under the impact of neo-liberal capitalist agendas. And people often holding down more than one ‘contingent’ job just to make ends meet.  Working people, blue-collar and white-collar, know this. Many college graduates have joined that club.

Their anger is palpable, often expressed in a refusal to even bother to get involved in anything political, let alone vote — a vast sense of political impotence. And disempowerment in the workplace, no unions or totally co-opted ones, though the struggle for worker-controlled unions continues
(http://www.ainfos.ca/ainfos336/ainfos22174.html ). 

The Populist Party has to speak to that gut awareness, that disaffection, and build on it, become a vehicle for its articulation, as its predecessor sought to become over a century ago. The July 1892 platform of the Populist Party stated it well:

The conditions which surround us best justify our cooperation; we meet in the midst of a nation brought to the verge of moral, political, and material ruin. … The people are demoralized … The newspapers are largely subsidized or muzzled, public opinion silenced, business prostrated, homes covered with mortgages, labor impoverished, and the land concentrating in the hands of capitalists. … The fruits of the toil of millions are badly stolen to build up colossal fortunes for a few, unprecedented in the history of mankind; and the possessors of these, in turn, despise the Republic and endanger liberty. From the same prolific womb of governmental injustice we breed the two great classes—tramps and millionaires.
(http://www.wwnorton.com/eamerica/media/ch22/resources/documents/populist.htm )

Sound familiar?  The party needs to project an alternative vision of a democratic people’s economy beyond this exploitation, these steep Great Pyramid differentials in income and wealth – and voice.  Populist proposals for greater self-determination have to be drafted. Workers need an economic bill of rights. In firms run by workers’ committees and not ridiculously overpaid CEOs. Some useful ideas on remuneration within a “participatory economic vision” can be found  in Michael Albert’s Parecon: Life After Capitalism  (Verso 2003).  Pay scales are at the core of economic democracy: the “economic bill of rights” 2000 platform proposal from the Greens/GPUSA, the smaller and more radical, now almost defunct wing of the stateside Green movement, is worth  discussing, reinventing (http://www.greenparty.org/program/econbor.html ). Populist economic thinking can tap past progressive imagination and analysis, while forging new conceptions that speak to people’s needs and dreams.

We would do well to remember the vision of the Populist orator Mary Elizabeth Lease, the ‘People’s Joan of Arc,’ speaking to women in Kansas in 1890, urging them to join the ‘Alliance.’ In the interim, less has changed than some think:

Let no one for a moment believe that this uprising and federation of the people is but a passing episode in politics. … We seek to enact justice and equity between man and man. We seek to bring the nation back to the constitutional liberties guaranteed us by our forefathers. … Crowns will fall, thrones will tremble, kingdoms will disappear, the divine right of kings and the divine right of capital will fade away like the mists of the morning when the Angel of Liberty shall kindle the fires of justice in the hearts of men. “Exact justice to all, special privileges to none.” No more millionaires, and no more paupers; no more gold kings, silver kings and oil kings, and no more little waifs of humanity starving for a crust of bread. No more gaunt faced, hollow-eyed girls in the factories, and no more little boys reared in poverty and crime for the penitentiaries and the gallows. … when we shall have not a government of the people by capitalists, but a government of the people, by the people.  
(http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/5303/)

Tags: ceos, corporations, democracy, economy, labor, policy, populist
Categories: Commentary, Economics, Democracy, Labor, Corporations
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by Bill Templer 

Abstract

The paper develops 13 theses on libertarian perspectives for building a new grassroots anti-authoritarian, Populist movement in Israel/Palestine to press forward from the bottom up through people’s politics, neighborhood autonomy and radical direct democracy to a solution to the impasse in politics and economy there — ‘regaining the commons’ on both sides of the divide. American activists can tap some of the ideas in forging a popular movement of anti-Power, dual power and revitalized inclusive democracy stateside. It is one struggle.

The Inversion of the Dynamics of Socio-economic Power

1. Networks not Pyramids. Nothing viable can come from structures imposed from the top down by political and economic elites.  Politics must be returned to the people, the grassroots, inside the Israeli state and throughout Arab space everywhere in Palestine. Creativity in building practical vision must be at the heart of a new thinking inside initiatives to move toward a unitary radically democratic and Populist polity, a Cooperative Commonwealth of Canaan.[2]  A powerful chemistry for changing hearts and minds must be catalyzed, in the best sense of what Wallerstein has called “utopistics” in charting new decentralized institutions.[3]  Such bottom-up decentralized autonomous structures are one answer to fears about demographic numbers, majority and minority, in a unitary state, and also can provide an authentically rooted framework for networks of cultural autonomy.

These emergent networks, already existent in part in the work of groups such as the Arab-Jewish solidarity group Ta’ayush (Together!) and Anarchists Against the Wall in Israel, can look to the example of horizontalidad and neighborhood autonomy and solidarity now multiplying, for example, as a complex of movements and grassroots initiatives across Argentina. Marina Sitrin notes: “Autonomy is a bubble that exists within the system. With autonomy what we are able to do is to construct spaces where the logic of the system does not reign. […] What we can do is continue constructing, without falling into the logic of the system.”[4]

After Argentina’s economy collapsed in 2001, workers took control over their factories, seized the machines and started once again to produce — but without the bosses. The unemployed movements continued to provide for the unmet needs of their various communities, creating bakeries, small cooperatives, and community gardens to provide food and jobs. Populist movements in the United States and among Israelis and Palestinians can draw inspiration and learn from that ongoing concrete experience in social transformation.

2. Regaining the Commons. This will require a massive popular movement to “regain the commons” among ordinary Jews and Arabs,[5] energizing a new ensemble of struggles for direct & inclusive democracy and participatory economy from the desert to the sea.[6] It means bringing ordinary people into a new kind of political and economic decision-making in their own streets and neighborhoods and communities, a pro-active role in the management of their own affairs and those of the new commonwealth at all levels. A simple motto for such a transformation: “there can be no justice without freedom, and no freedom without the power to participate directly and democratically in the decisions that affect our lives.”[7]  This is radical Populist vision extrapolated to the deadlock that politics in traditional modes and modalities has reached in Israel and Occupied Palestine.

George Salzman has noted: the belief that ”nation-states constitute the only rationally conceivable form of political organization … is a key part of the ‘mental cage’ in which most of us live,” stressing the urgency of breaking free from that prison.[8]  Building a new Canaan will require shedding a whole shelf of mental cages. Gustavo Esteva stresses that many indigenous movements across the planet have “alternative cultural understandings of power that do not fit easily into the nation-state structures.” They are interested in “not just taking over existing power structures, but transforming existing notions of how power itself should be wielded. Their view of power is built from the grassroots upwards – that is, it is embedded in the community.”[9] This rethinking of the very geometry of Power should be the model for a new politics in Canaan.

Shared desire for a transformed political imaginary can begin to alter the rules of the political game itself, a “sub-politics … shaping society from below.”[10] What is needed is an anti-authoritarian sub-politics on both sides of the divide, anchored in networking, mobilizing from the bottom up. To counter the “manufacturing of consent” from above. Such a “rule-altering politics” seeks to overcome “statecraft,” the classical top-down game of political spectacle in all its duplicity, which most citizens in all existing polities – including Israel and the PA – are wise to and weary of.[11] Aware in their guts of the old saw: “Whoever you vote for, the government gets in.”

In Ron Dugger’s  August 1995 call to rebuild a Populist movement in the U.S., he stressed:

We are ruled by Big Business and Big Government as its paid hireling, and we know it. Corporate money is wrecking popular government in the United States. The big corporations and the centimillionaires and billionaires have taken daily control of our work, our pay, our housing, our health, our pension funds, our bank and savings deposits, our public lands, our airwaves, our elections and our very government. It’s as if American democracy has been bombed.[12]

He called then for a “new national force to end corporate rule.” The picture a decade later is far bleaker and more critical.

In Israel, a workers’ movement struggling to expose the veiled dictatorship of a handful of  families over the Israeli economy, media and politics has stated that the established political parties are the:

servants of the 12 billionaire families that control this country, and do their bidding, at our expense. They only pretend to address our problems, in order to win our votes. We have been suckers for too long. It is time we stopped supporting the parties of the bosses. It is time we, the workers, organize ourselves to utilize our enormous power in order to defend our rights, and secure decent living conditions for all.  …  Once in power, we would take control of the economy away from the 12 families who own the major banks and concerns, and place them under public ownership, run under workers control. This vast wealth could then be used to secure decent lives for all. [13]

It is often forgotten that the blind national-chauvinistic politics of successive Israeli governments have been dictated by very small and powerful corporate and political elite. An Israeli and Palestinian Populist movement would seek to break the stranglehold of this capitalist plutocracy on the masses of the population and the economy, truly ‘regaining the commons’ for both peoples moving forward toward the dream of a ‘cooperative commonwealth’ beyond the dark legacies of interethnic strife and Israeli settler colonialism and its ideology. As Dugger stresses: “We, 21st century Populists, are committed to the equal importance of every person, no matter the person’s race, religion, gender, age, sexual orientation, politics, or nation of origin.”

3. Communalist Alternatives. What is to be undone? Chaia Heller stresses the need for us to free ourselves of “internalized capitalism,” the belief that this system is inevitable and can only be reformed or complemented.[14] Experiments around the world to create autonomous spaces are spreading. Their experiences – part of “grassroots activism – a world on fire”[15] – can be tapped, creativity shared, learning from the ferment in the World Social Forum[16] and People’s Global Action.[17]  That too can serve for as a taporoot for Populist vision both in the U.S. and in Palestine.

The impasse in Israel/Palestine is, in its distinctive form, a microcosm of the pervasive vacuity of our received political imaginaries. And the ruling elites that administer them. The very “insolubility” of the conflict in Palestine in terms of the conventional “State” invites a unique historical laboratory for alternative pathways leading from mutual struggle to mutual aid and trust.[18] In that crucible for change, Arabs and Jews can test structures and chemistries for constructing a radically inclusive social and economic order based on communalist principles – or something akin. Not just the “emergence, among Jews and Arabs alike, of a new political class,” as Tony Judt projects,[19] but a new democratic consciousness, a groundswell of Jewish-Arab ta’ayush, pulling and living together, a kind of ‘harambee!’ in the classic East African sense.

The appeal of Zapatismo’s answers in Chiapas for addressing problems in the El Sereno community in northeastern Los Angeles can also be applied in moving forward toward a people’s Canaan: “Finally there are no more illusions. Civil society is quickly becoming aware that it must do what governments have no will to do and no longer can. Out of the global political- economic ruins are being born several phoenix movements that offer liberating solutions of democratic autonomy, participatory democracy. These are proactive self-sustenance; movements aiming to rebuild society from the bottom up.”[20]

In this spirit, nodes of action can be created both on the Israeli and Palestinian left to popularize a call for “non-hierarchy, confederated direct democracies, communal economics, social freedom, and an ecological sensibility.”[21]  Beyond the clash of antipodal national narratives, we need to move toward redefining the possible architecture of a non-nationalist pluralistic polity in Palestine.  In the spirit of what Heller has called “a new understanding of citizenship defined not in relation to a state or nation but in opposition to nations and states.”[22] Rifat Odeh Kassis echoes a similar key in closing his August 2003 paper with the text of John Lennon’s classic lyric “Imagine.”[23]

4.  New Modes and Topographies of  Pluralist Polity Have To Be Drafted – beyond existing models such as that of Switzerland, Belgium, the “concordance democracy” of  the Lebanese polity or other multicultural pluralistic states. In projecting an end to Israeli ethnocratic structures and mentalities of apartheid,[24] our imagination should not be limited by comparisons to the South African model and its lessons. Federalism has to be reinvented, multiculturalism reconfigured in Canaan if it is to succeed. We should not be afraid to envision what direct democracy might galvanize in a populist Israel/Palestine. Militarism pervades Israeli society, decades of oppression, occupation and lack of self-determination have generated a complex geometry mass disempowerment and pyramided power within Palestinian society.  It is that culture of hierarchy which a radical rethink must address.

One relevant body of theory for imagining a Canaan commonwealth underpins the vision of  “libertarian municipalism”  (aka communalism) developed by Murray Bookchin and associates at the Institute for Social Ecology in Vermont.[25] Its ultimate goal is a Commune of communes that can replace the conventional State and all its hierarchies, with “land and enterprises … placed increasingly in the custody of the community – more precisely, the custody of citizens in free assemblies and their deputies in confederal councils.”[26] “Each confederal council in turn would send a delegate to a confederation of a still wider region. […] all regional interrelationships would be structured around local assemblies, confederated or unified through city and confederal councils, in a Confederation of Confederations. […] This system of self-managed political life would be more like a network than a statelike pyramid.”[27] This is directly reminiscent of Martin Buber’s  vision of  “an organic commonwealth . . . that is a community of communities.”[28] Buber’s communalism sought to address “the greatest crisis humanity has ever known”[29] and is not welded to Zionism.[30]

5. Breaking Free: Hands-On Grassroots Restructuring. James Herod’s strategies for “getting free” foresee an array of people’s initiatives: neighborhood associations,  employees’ associations, coop housing associations, meeting halls, as in Chiapas, for people’s assemblies, peer circles, more worker-owned enterprises, locally controlled radio and TV stations, alternative schools, new forms of home schooling.  He goes into detail exploring the structure and physiology of such neighborhood and employees’ associations. And asks: 

what if we changed direction entirely, and stopped spending all our time trying to stop the crimes of capitalists, and started fighting instead for what we really want? What if the 15,000 towns in the United States with 2,500 inhabitants or less started switching to direct democracy, through neighborhood assemblies, scuttling their hierarchical mayoral governments, something they could easily do if they wanted to? What if peasant villages started converting to cooperative labor? What if workers in stores, offices, and factories forgot about unions and started setting up workplace assemblies to get control over their lives there? What if neighbors on a block started combining resources to create households of 100 to 200 persons?[31]

Herod’s ideas need to be looked at in depth in projecting modes of anti-Power and politics at radically local scales as a tool in building a Canaan Commonwealth. 

Central is the view that social transformation in Canaan must build bottom-up from the scale of the household and neighborhood.[32] That if “place” is “humanised space,” Israelis and Palestinians must learn to forge their own identities and futures through the construction of “progressive places,” the matrix for a “new politics of ethnicity, race, gender and class.”[33]  In the fight to transform capitalism, we are really struggling against our own dehumanization, at the molecular level of everyday life and the household as consumption unit on up the pyramid of hegemony to neoliberal globalization and its “Disequilibrium Machine.”[34]  Anti-authoritarian transformative politics is distinctively sensitive to this geometry of what geographers call “scale.”

As stressed, this is one answer to fears in a unitary Canaan about the “numbers game” of majority and minority typical of conventional elite-dominated pyramided democracies. An armature of genuine autonomy with real power at lower scales is likewise an effective framework for ensuring secularism in the new Canaan and the total “separation of church and state.”[35]

A kindred compelling vision for change is participatory economics.  Parecon is a wide-ranging blueprint of revitalized community that withers received conceptions of social life and the conventional neoliberal nation-state in moving toward ParPolity. Parecon’s concrete aims of a communal being-in-the world center on five principles: equity / diversity / solidarity / self-management / ecological balance,[36] and envision feasible trajectories for getting from here to there.[37] Its topography of authentic community based on change from below and by your own bootstraps can be transposed in part to the work of imagining what a unitary polity in Palestine might become. Parecon elaborates the contours of a more humane economy, exploring new conceptions of just wages, transformed consumption, balanced job complexes, self-management, even speculating on alternative institutions to the WTO and World Bank. It too can feed into Populist economy theory for the 21st century.

6. One No, Many Yeses. Of course, such libertarian socialist blueprinting is not everyone’s political meat. It will not seem a feasible or plausible path forward to some. In dialogue on the unitary state in a variety of fora, a pluriverse of views can be accommodated, with multiple input from many quarters, streets, groups and individuals. The crux here is to begin concrete discussion oriented to vision, generating practicable scenarios of change.  As Harry Cleaver notes: “This does not mean unity for socialism or any other singular post-capitalist ‘economic’ order, but rather the building of […] a new mosaic of interconnected alternative approaches to meeting our needs and elaborating our desires.”[38]

My thesis is that at the present juncture, probing exploratory dialogue is imperative: in the spirit of One “No” (to a neoliberal capitalist two-state pseudo-democratic solution) but many “Yeses” (to exploring a variety of views and options in political economy, a mix of alternative socialities and political structures, an inventive Populism for two people on a path to creating a radical democracy that is the only pathway forward for Palestinians and Israelis).[39] 

7. Utopian Realism: A Staged Path Forward? I have argued elsewhere that even within a two-state pseudo-solution imposed by circumstances and elites, it will be possible to build a movement of anti-Power that seeks to create the unitary state from below. [40] Many who support a one-state solution will disagree with such a “staged” or “phased” strategy, rejecting it as a doomed compromise. But given the constraints of realpolitik, a game plan is needed.[41]

Consider this alternative: the truncated Palestinian state to be born – and a still Zionist-nationalist Israel dominating it – would be the initial arenas for nurturing the embryo of the new in the shell of the old, a turf (however fractured in a Palestinian Bantustan) for creating “dual power” over the middle term. The emergent counter-institutions on the ground would seek to “hollow out” or “gut” capitalist structures and top-down bureaucracies, and, inside Israel, confront all forms of discrimination rooted in Zionist ideology. Moving forward toward fusion, building a dialectic for the sublation of the two-state monstrosity. Perhaps a phased view is akin to what Anthony Giddens in a related context has called  “utopian realism.”[42]

8. Khalas (Enough is Enough. Ya basta!)! Organize, Organize, Organize. In any event: start to build infrastructure now. A hundred flowers can blossom, a hundred schools of thought contend in this pluralistic political vision – its very eclecticism a necessary component at this juncture. Establish ateneos (self-managed social, cultural and educational centers) to defend, promote and foment demands. Create an organization in Israel and Palestine akin to the new Alliance for Freedom and Direct Democracy, whose manifesto can serve as a guideline for praxis.[43] Collectives crystallizing around opposition to the Apartheid Wall can evolve in the Zapatista spirit of the Ya basta! movements in Italy and New York. Remembering that organization grows out of struggle, not vice versa. 

Beginnings can be small, generating nodes for a new mode of sub-politics that does not exhaust itself in protest and defense but goes beyond. One such grouping exists: the progressive space now opened on the Israeli left by the collective One Struggle (Ma’avak Ehad) needs to be widened, and extended into Palestinian society. The focus on animal rights inside One Struggle (human & animal liberation) is a singular component some activists would not espouse so centrally. But the group’s overall analysis is congruent with core libertarian socialist positions, and they are in daily direct action against militarism, Zionism, the IDF, the Occupation and the Separation Wall, and some of its members linked to Anarchists Against the Wall.[44] 

Create new media: imperative is a periodical in Hebrew and Arabic, online and in print, popularizing the idea of the unitary state. More study groups for alternative and autonomist politics need to be established now, and an array of literature translated into Arabic and Hebrew, in part in easy-to-grasp language and visuals that kids and working folk can understand. [45] One prototype for a popular grassroots medium is the “comic book” on people’s geography nearing completion with the People’s Geography Project stateside.[46] It could be translated and adapted for praxis in Israel/Palestine, where geopolitics at multiple scales is at the very core of the struggle. The PGP is indeed a model for a Populist geography.

More broadly, activists for a new Canaan can learn to use comic journalism techniques modeled on those of Joe Sacco and others to reach broader segments of the population.[47] “Street theater” geared to a unitary state is also needed, a great tool for touching minds and hearts, set in an imagined Arab-Jewish Commonwealth of the future. Dynamic togetherness at micro- scales must be translated not only into simple concepts ordinary people can understand but enacted in authentic structures. Inside Israel, it is crucial to multiply initiatives to bring together Jewish and Arab kids and youth, neighbors, younger and older married couples –  creating programs pro-actively oriented to the vision of a unitary state.

9. Labor Autonomism and Dual Power.  Central to an engine for change under the authoritarian PA and the iron grip of the Histadrut labor bureaucracy in Israel are autonomous labor movements of Palestinian and Israeli workers. Dual power in a class society means building a class force to oppose its ruling elites. And the creation of counter-institutions: “Dual power seeks to erode the legitimacy of the state and other systems of centralized power […] while working to meet people’s material needs and satisfy their desires for freedom, these counter-institutions consistently create dissonance with the top-down institutions they seek to dismantle.”[48]

How structures of democratic dual power could be crafted in a Palestinian society now facing the deeply anchored dual power of Hamas, Islamic Jihad and other movements of defensive counter-violence is a separate complex question only Palestinian activists can begin to address.

Hamas is poised in January 2006 to enter the electoral arena in Palestine  in earnest and perhaps become a major political force. In its own gut way, Hamas is a people’s insurgency movement,  with a solid anchoring in the neighborhoods and hearts of the people. And its popularity among the working and oppressed Palestinian masses reflects this role, despite the idiom of violence for which it is known to the broader non-Palestinian media and publics.

Massive non-violent resistance (see below) and militant autonomous unions are two alternatives. It is imperative to generate agenda and praxis oriented to transforming the economic and class structures of Israeli and Arab society in a broad program for greater solidarity, equity, joint working-class action, across “national” lines. Over the longer term, self-management is direct democracy’s best school – in work places, especially inside new forms of libertarian syndicalist praxis, modeled in part on the Italian cobas “base union” experience.[49] 

10.  Prefiguring the New in the Shell of the Old. Integral to new movements for social transformation that look to Zapatismo and the non-violence of the EZLN is a “prefigurative” politics: building the future in the present. James Herod sees this strategy applied to creating free associations  centered on democratic, autonomous neighborhoods, governed by direct-democracy Household and Home Assemblies, the incubators of the new society. That is also reflected in some of the structures Zapatismo has been forging in Chiapas state in southern Mexico[50] – now some 1,200 “autonomous” communities, organized into 50 autonomous municipalities and six autonomous regions.  And, on a micro scale, is present in the experimental village councils the Association of Forty has helped to craft in “unrecognized” Bedou villages inside the Israeli state.[51]

A major bridging goal should be the proliferation of “rainbow” communities. Indeed, social-geographical  work on the “five mixed Jewish-Arab cities” in Israel by Ghazi-Walid Falah and others could provide part of the researched foundation for rethinking multiethnic communities, a hundred new towns and co-operative settlements, with mixed multicultural neighborhoods and schools. This is in effect the idea behind a recent initiative “Mosaic Communities” launched by Fred Schlomka: “By building an alternative institution on a firm democratic foundation, MOSAIC COMMUNITIES may eventually motivate a change in the exclusive Jewish nature of the national institutions in Israel. Since civic institutions form the backbone of any vibrant democracy, we envisage that our success will spawn additional alternative institutions in other areas of the economic and social matrix.”[52] In the evolving metabolism of such an interactive system for decision-making and allocation, extending across the “mixed cities and mixed neighborhoods and mixed families” that Haim Hanegbi dreams,[53] the salience of “ethnic- national” identities could begin to atrophy fade as organic solidarity builds.  Organic solidarity is the foundation for a Populist Cooperative Commonwealth throughout all of historical Palestine.

The massive return of refugees to the spaces of Canaan’s Negev/al-Naqab and elsewhere could be directed in part to such new mosaic towns.[54] The returnees, long oppressed, will be open to the experimental praxis of a new economy and society. The epitome of gross disempowerment  at every scale, including the household, over several generations, they are a natural constituency for fresh departures.  The dialectic of such reconfiguration of power and its scalar spaces would have to operate through a ”rainbow space” that must be created, with the two national communities in ever more integrative synergy. It entails transforming neighborhoods, generating hybrid places out of now still segregated spaces.[55]

These ”spectrum” communities, more radicalized than in Schlomka’s conception, would also be platforms for evolving flexible, decentralized systems of autonomy, non-hierarchical critical thinking and self-reflexivity. The “nested federation” of workers’ and consumers’ councils from micro-levels on up to the “national” plane and beyond affords an alternative political architecture: “we envision such decentralized confederations on the regional, continental, and even global levels.”[56]  How this might function in a co-operative Canaan commonwealth is part of the uncharted wilderness of direct democracy there, and perhaps within a broader regional Near Eastern communalist transformation yet to come. 

11.  Energizing a Heuristics for Change.  Unblock creativity. We need to flush the mind in everyday thinking about alternative structures and processes. That means foregrounding political brainstorming as a central mode of idea multiplication. It means ideating a kaleidoscope of solutions, learning to defer “closure,” suspending judgment, leaving criticism to a later stage. Learning to incubate new angles.[57] People can workshop on guided fantasy, projecting what creative ta’ayush, mosaic communities, new forms of Arab-Jewish synergy and symbiosis could become.  We need to dust off classic manuals like R. H. McKim’s Experiences in Visual Thinking, Alex Osborn’s Applied Imagination or James Adams’ Conceptual Blockbusting, applying them to “idea generation sessions” on the elaborated architectonics of the République de Canaan. 

Take Fausto Guidice’s recent Canaan reverie “Faisons un rêve,” for example. It is just such an experiment in political imagining. As he notes: “Il faut rêver. Alors, pour vous encourager à rêver, je vous propose cette petite fiction […] À chacune et à chacun de développer selon son imagination cette fiction somme toute réaliste.”[58] So is Ursula LeGuin’s now classic utopian novel The Dispossessed and her vision of a libertarian socialist society on distant Anarres.

One of the forgotten American futuristic novels by the key Populist writer and  politician Ignatius Donnelly (author of the 1892 Populist Platform Preamble) is The Golden Bottle (1892). It is a narrative in which a poor farmer named Ephraim Benezet from Kansas becomes Populist president of the United States, reforms the American society and economy and even establishes a world government. Hamlin Garland’s A Spoil of Office (1892) is also an imaginative Populist classic novel, with its heroine Ida Wilbur, perhaps modeled on Populist orator Mary Elizabeth Lease, who says at one point: “The heart and center of this movement is a demand for justice, not for ourselves alone, but for the toiling poor wherever found. . . . It is no longer a question of legislating for the farmer; it is a question of the abolition of industrial slavery.”

Inside Israel, Ehud Tokatly, a maverick populist decentralist, has fleshed out a vision for Israel/Palestine set in the 21st century: a federation of autonomous communities in a porous structure beyond the modern state. Tokatly has fictionalized a form of Jewish-Arab “community democracy” in his recent Hebrew utopian novel Neualtneuland, playing on Herzl’s 1902 novel Altneuland (Old-New Land). Neualtneuland is a kind of Looking Backward à la Edward Bellamy set in a 21st-century neo- communitarian Israeli future based on “non-territorial autonomy and federalism.” Tokatly is (still) a Zionist but his Israeli- Populist ideas, couched in a fictive mold, may be worth tapping and debating.[59]

12. A Therapeutics for Synergy. Learn from therapeutic initiatives: like the Centre for Trauma and Transformation in Omagh, Northern Ireland.[60] Set up in 2002 for inventive applied communal “political psychotherapy,” it seeks to assist  individuals and communities suffering from the shock and bloodshed of ethnic communal violence in Ireland’s north. Research indicates that those who go through the trauma of violence can emerge with great creative resilience. The hands-on practice of NICTT in dealing with post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) can be tapped in moving forward to a Canaan commonwealth, as can the somewhat analogous fund of experience of the National Center for PTSD in the U.S.[61]

PTSD therapies can provide fresh angles for generating modalities for reconciliation, healing the wounds on both sides of a century of struggle between Palestinians and Jewish settlers. A therapy for freeing the resilience in our peoples that is there. A network of such centers will be needed in laying the psychological groundwork to undergird a unitary polity: “Through transformation, the grip of the past is loosened and the future is discovered. For both people and communities, transformation holds the hope of incorporating the past, along with its pain, losses and injustices, into a future of rediscovered and perhaps even enriched experiences of community and of life itself.”[62] 

Crucial in this psychological healing process for a shared Canaan are practices in the self-management of identity, which means confronting the structures and entrenched beliefs that oppress the Other, especially militarism and patriarchy.[63] Particularly in the Israeli “warrior state,” with its highly intricate and interlinked bureaucracies of Control and hierarchies of power, it is urgent to carve out counter-spaces to challenge the militarized social order, its “militarization of knowledge”[64] and dignity-denying norms and values – in the words of a New Profile activist: “the major mechanism to keep all Arabs, the disabled, homosexuals and particularly women in their ‘place.’”[65]

As New Profile co-founder Rela Mazali has noted: “living within a war culture, the consciousness of each and every member of society is militarized to some degree. The presuppositions, what gets left out, what goes without saying, what remains unseen, are prescribed, circumscribed, by a deeply militarized socialization. The process of identifying and peeling off the militarized filters through which I have learned to see reality is possibly unending.”[66] Overcoming these multiple filters and blinders will be central to self-therapy and self-discovery in the Jewish communities across Canaan.

13.  The Ultimate Power Tool. In advancing a mass movement for fundamental grassroots change in Israel and Palestine, non- violence should gravitate to the heart of its practice. The work of the ISM and initiatives around www.stopthewall.org are models in our time and place. Jalal Ghazi has counseled: “using civil disobedience and not suicide bombs, a non-violent Palestinian struggle for freedom might reinvigorate the Israeli peace movement.”[67] Traditions of resistance and defiant defense as exemplified in the non-violent, locally organized civil struggle against the Separation Wall in Zawiya[68] village, Budrus,[69]  Biddu and Ar Ram[70] need to become more central. They signal a nascent qualitative change in popular organizing for anti-Power in Palestine. In future, large-scale scenarios are conceivable: “Massive marches toward the borders in support of the Right of Return must be planned. While the governments in neighboring Arab states can easily prohibit armed incursions across their borders, they would be hard pressed to stop Palestinians from attempting to peacefully return to their homeland.”[71] 

Mubarak Awad has suggested that the refugees could even burn their camps in rage, challenging the conscience of the international community and the Israeli masses[72]  – creating their own “facts on the ground,” long the strategy of the Israeli state. Inside the Israeli ethnocracy, new forms of non-violent resistance can be applied by Israel’s Arab citizens here and now to press for full equality

The necessary venues are legion. One at a more “symbolic” cultural scale is a non-violent confrontational movement to have the mosque in Beersheva/Bi’r As-Sab’, the largest in Israel south of Tel Aviv and soon a century old, restored to the al-Naqab Bedouin. Arguably Beersheva’s most elegant structure, the grand mosque is presently standing derelict, long desecrated as a museum for the Jewish-Zionist history of Negev settlement and Negev archeology. And presently defaced by a huge metal sculpture of a rooster at its very portals, a quasi-emblem of an apartheid state. There is no active mosque anywhere in Beersheva, the center of a region with tens of thousands of Muslims.  

Activists for Canaan can learn from sites on non-violent social change like that maintained by Psychologists for Social Responsibility.[73] The journal Peace Magazine is packed with practical ideas for massive civil disobedience as a people’s tool for sub-politics, localized transformation and the building of a non-violent, self-reliant inclusive social order, from the bottom up. [74] It is relevant for Palestine/Isrel, and relevant for the struggle stateside to revitalize the American Populist Movement and forge “for the first time, a democracy that is actually governed by the people who live in it, in our own interests and those of posterity.”[75]

Khalas!/ Basta ya! All this requires grassroots experimental praxis. The mindsets on both sides of the divide have been frozen by fire. Be realistic and begin to think the impossible. A mass Populist movement is central to that realism.

Bill Templer, a Chicago-born Israeli, worked many years with the Association for the Support and Defence of Bedouin Rights in al-Naqab/Negev Desert, the Galilee Research Center in Nazareth, and in the Roma civil rights movement in eastern Bulgaria. A widely published translator from German and Hebrew, he is on the staff of the Simon Dubnow Institute for Jewish History and Culture at the University of Leipzig, and is currently teaching at a technological university in Thailand’s far south.

*This is a revised version of a paper originally included in the papers of the Conference on One Democratic State in Palestine/Israel, Lausanne/Switzerland, June 23-25, 2004. On the conference, organized by the Association for One Democratic State in Palestine/Israel (http://one-democratic-state.org), see http://usa.mediamonitors.net/content/view/full/8516

Notes

[1]  Murray Bookchin, Anarchism, Marxism and the Future of the Left, San Francisco: AK Press, 1999, p. 347.

[2]  See Sami Aldeeb: “A State that we can call Canaan […] unless the population choose another name,” in idem, “The
Solution of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: One or Two States?,” http://www.one-democratic-state.org/articles/aldeeb002.html ;
Mazin Qumsiyeh, Sharing the Land of Canaan: Human Rights and the Israeli-Palestinian Struggle, New York: Pluto Press,
2004. For similar vision, though devoid of any program for direct democracy,  see also the 2001 essay by Edward Said, “The
Only Alternative,” http://www.one-democratic-state.org/articles/said.html and the book-length study by Virginia Tilley, The One-
State Solution, Ann Arbor: U of Michigan Press, 2005. Tilley’s weakness is in part her inability to imagine and project a people’
s movement among Israelis and Palestinians for radical democratic and economic transformation; her scenarios remain within
the frame of capitalist relations as usual.

[3]  Immanuel Wallerstein, Utopistics: Or, Historical Choices of the Twenty-first Century, New York: New Press, 1998.
Wallerstein terms “utopistics”: “not the face of the perfect (and inevitable) future, but the face of an alternative, credibly better,
and historically possible (but far from certain) future” (p. 2). My primary thesis is that a utopistic heuristic is in order in the
disorder of Israel/Palestine. To generate another kind of political and economic imaginary.

[4] On new directions in autonomy and neighborhood solidarity, see Marina Sitrin, “Horizontalidad in Argentina,” http://info.interactivist.net/article.pl?sid=05/07/26/1417232 . The actions of Anarchists Against the Wall are regularly reported on in http:
//www.ainfos.ca .

[5]  See Naomi Klein, “Reclaiming the Commons,” New Left Review 9, May-June 2001, http://www.newleftreview.net/NLR24305.shtml

[6]  See Takis Fotopoulus, Towards an Inclusive Democracy, The Crisis of the Growth Economy and the Need for a New
Liberatory Project, London: Continuum International, 1997; see also his journal The International Journal of Inclusive
Democracy (formerly Democracy & Nature), http://www.inclusivedemocracy.org/journal .

[7] Manifesto, Alliance for Freedom and Direct Democracy, http://www.afadd.org

[8] He questions the whole idea of the nation-state as a basis for any solution in the Israel/Palestine conflict, see his “Out of
the Prison!”  (March 2003), http://site.www.umb.edu/faculty/salzman_g/Grass/Infra/Infra-9.htm ;  see also Chaia Heller,
“Revving It Up! The Revolutionary Potential of the New Anti-Globalization Movement,” http://www.social-ecology.org/article.php?story=20031028150435799

[9]  Gutavo Esteva, G. “A flower in the hands of the people,” The New Internationalist, #360, 2003 http://www.findarticles.com/cf_0/m0JQP/360/108648118/p1/article.jhtml

[10]   See “The Reinvention of Politics,” in Ulrich Beck, Anthony Giddens, Christopher Lash, Reflexive Modernization,
Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994, p. 40; Ulrich Beck, Die Erfindung des Politischen, Frankfurt am Main: suhrkamp, 1993.

[11]  Bookchin defines statecraft as “a state with its top-down system of rule, bureaucracy, and force, that all but excludes the
people from the management of public affairs” (op cit., p. 312).

[12] Ronnie Dugger, “A Call to Hope and Action. Let Us Rebuild a True Populist Movement,”   http://www.geocities.com/progpop/popcall.html ; originally published as “A Call to Citizens: Real Populists Please Stand Up!,” The Nation, 14 August
1995.

[13]  Socialist Struggle (Ma’avak Sotsialisti), articles 28 January and 3 February 1999, http://www.maavak.org.il/maavak/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=67  and http://www.maavak.org.il/maavak/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=66 . There is no need to agree with all political positions of the Socialist Struggle (a CWI affiliate)
group to profit from their analysis of the contradictions of Israeli capitalism.

[14] Heller, ibid.

[15]   See George Salzman, http://site.www.umb.edu/faculty/salzman_g/Grassroots/

[16]  See the report at http://stopthewall.org/worldwideactivism/235.shtml ; on the WSF, see http://www.wsfindia.org/

[17]  See http://www.agp.org . Among its hallmarks: “We reject all forms and systems of domination and discrimination
including, but not limited to, patriarchy, racism and religious fundamentalism of all creeds. We embrace the full dignity of all
human beings.”

[18]  See George Salzman, “Mutual Aid and Mutual Trust,”
http://site.www.umb.edu/faculty/salzman_g/Grass/Infra/Infra-5.htm ; Harry Cleaver, “Kropotkin, Self-valorization and the Crisis
of Marxism,” Anarchist Studies, February 1993, http://www.eco.utexas.edu/Homepages/Faculty/Cleaver/kropotkin.html

[19] See Tony Judt, “Israel: the Alternative,” New York Review of Books  50, No. 16,  October 23, 2003, http://www.nybooks.com/articles/16671

[20]  Roberto Flores,  “Community Autonomy: the El Sereno Community in Northeast Los Angeles,” In Motion Magazine, 1999,
http://www.inmotionmagazine.com/chprop.html

[21] Manifesto, Alliance for Freedom and Direct Democracy, ibid.

[22]   Heller, ibid.

[23]  Kassis, “A One Democratic State might be THE Solution,” http://www.one-democratic-state.org/articles/kassis.html

[24] See Oren Yivtachel, “Ethnocracy: the Politics of Judaizing Israel/Palestine,” Constellations 6 (3), 1999, pp. 364-390. Some
of the “key regime characteristics” of ethnocratic polity: “Despite several democratic features, mainly ethnicity (and not
territorial citizenship) determines the allocation of rights and privileges; a constant democratic-ethnocratic tension
characterizes politics. … A dominant ‘charter’ ethnic group appropriates the state apparatus, determines most public policies,
and segregates itself from other groups” (p. 368).

[25]  See http://www.social-ecology.org

[26]  Bookchin, “Libertarian Municipalism: An Overview,” Green Perspectives, October 1991,  http://www.democracynature.org/dn/vol1/bookchin_libertarian.htm

[27]  Bookchin, Anarchism, Marxism and the Future of the Left, p.  313.

[28]  Martin Buber,  Paths in Utopia,  Boston: Beacon Hill 1958 [1949], p. 136.

[29]  Ibid., p. 129.

[30]   Buber’s communalist political thought was significantly shaped by his mentor Gustav Landauer, the social-anarchist
thinker who led  the abortive Munich Council Republic in 1919, murdered in its quelling. In his eulogy, Buber called Landauer
the “secret spiritus rector” and “designated leader of the new Judaism” (see Yaacov Oved, “Anarchism in the Kibbutz
Movement,” 2000,
http://www.anarchistcommunitarian.net/articles/kibbutz/kibbtrend.html ; Buber, ibid., 46-57). Y. Goren and Haim Seeligman
have edited An Anthology of Jewish Anarchists (Bernard Lazarre, Gustav Landauer and Erich Mühsam), Tel Aviv, 1997 (Hebr.)
where they stress Landauer as a potential source for renewal of utopian thought within Israeli society. Buber’s communalism
has best to be retrofitted to the present and stripped of any Zionist dross.

[31]  J. James, “The Weakness of a Politics of Protest,” http://site.www.umb.edu/faculty/salzman_g/Strate/GetFre/16.htm

[32] Bill Templer, “From Mutual Struggle to Mutual Aid: Moving Beyond the Statist Impasse in Israel/Palestine,” borderlands
ejournal, 2(3), 2003, http://www.borderlandsejournal.adelaide.edu.au/vol2no3_2003/templer_impasse.htm ; idem, “The
Impasse in Israel/Palestine: Moving Forward Toward a Cooperative Commonwealth,” Social Anarchism, in press.

[33]  Peter Taylor and Colin Flint, Political Geography. World Economy, Nation-State and Locality, Harlow: Prentice Hall, 2000,
pp. 326-27.

[34] R. Hodge, “Monstrous Knowledge in a World Without Borders,” borderlands ejournal 1 (1), 14, http://www.borderlandsejournal.adelaide.edu.au/vol1no1_2002/hodge_monstrous.html

[35]  Individual religious freedom and other lifestyle preferences can of course flourish in this ambient of personal and
community liberation.

[36] Michael Albert, Parecon. Life after Capitalism, London: Verso, 2003, pp. 4 ff. See their website http://www.parecon.org 
For a draft of what a pareconic polity might look like, see Stephen R. Shalom, “ParPolity: Political Vision for a Good Society,”
http://www.zmag.org/shalompol.htm

[37]  See Michael Albert, Moving Forward. Program for a Participatory Economy, San Francisco: AK Press, 2001; idem,
Trajectory of Change , Boston: South End Press, 2002.

[38] Harry Cleaver, “Nature, Neoliberalism and Sustainable Development: Between Charybdis & Scylla?” (1997), http://www.eco.utexas.edu/Homepages/Faculty/Cleaver/port.html

[39]  See “One No, Many Yeses,” Midnight Notes 12, http://www.midnightnotes.org/12intro.html

[40]  See Templer, “From Mutual Struggle to Mutual Aid,” ibid., 27 ff.

[41] Though he presents no plan for moving toward a unitary state, Michael Neumann has argued that “the one-state solution
absolutely requires a two-state solution. If ever there was a false dilemma, it is any claim that the two alternatives are mutually
exclusive.” See “One State or Two? A False Dilemma,” Counterpunch, Oct. 8, 2003,  http://www.counterpunch.org/neumann10082003.html2003 ).

[42]   Reflexive Modernization, p. 194.

[43]  Manifesto, AFADD, ibid.

[44]  See their website at http://www.onestruggle.org

[45]  Too much of our discourse is too erudite, academic. We need to learn how to reach ordinary people, most especially kids
and working youth in the Israeli and Palestinian street, finding fresh language and inventive modalities to capture their
imagination, a people’s rhetorics.

[46]  See  http://www.peoplesgeography.org

[47] See for example Joe Sacco,  Palestine, Seattle: Fantagraphics, 2002 . A June 2003 interview with Sacco is at http://www.januarymagazine.com/profiles/jsacco.html  For excerpts from Sacco’s “The Underground War in Gaza” in New York Times
Magazine, July 3, 2003, see  http://www.csl.sri.com/users/mwfong/Commentary/Underground_War/

[48]    Manifesto, AFADD, ibid. An instructive website is http://www.dualpower.net  See also Brian Dominick, “An Introduction to
Dual Power Strategy,” http://www.anarchistcommunitarian.net/articles/theory/bdsdp.shtml

[49]  See Donato Romito,  “Anarchist Communists and the Italian ‘Base Union’ Movement,” The Northeastern Anarchist, No. 8,
Fall/Winter 2003,
http://www.ainfos.ca/03/oct/ainfos00539.html

[50] See Midnight Notes Collective, Auroras of the Zapatistas. Local and Global Struggles of the Fourth World War,  New York:
Autonomedia 2001; Gustavo Esteva & Madhu Suri Prakash,  Grassroots post-modernism. Remaking the soil of cultures.
London: ZED Books, 1998; idem, “Basta and Beyond – Linking and Learning with the Grassroots,” Forests, Trees and People
Newsletter, No. 38, March 1999, http://www-trees.slu.se/newsl/38/38esteva2.pdf

[51]  See http://www.assoc40.org

[52]  F. Schlomka, “Concept Paper for the Development of Mosaic Communities” (2003), http://www.cjme.org/MosaicConceptPaper.pdf  ; see also his “Mosaic Communities: Defying Institutionalized Racism,” Palestine Center, http://www.palestinecenter.org/cpap/pubs/20030718ftr.html

[53]  Hanegbi, H. and Benvenisti, M. “Cry, the beloved two-state solution,” Ha’aretz, Aug. 9, 2003, http://www.labournet.net/world/0308/ispa1.html. I have no doubt that at some very essential level, “mixed families” (for want of a better term) is what
it’s all about.

[54]   See Templer, “From Mutual Struggle to Mutual Aid,” ibid., 49-57.

[55]  See Peter Taylor, Modernities: A Geohistorical Interpretation, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999, pp. 96-105.

[56]  Manifesto, AFADD, ibid.

[57]  See David D. Edwards, How to Be More Creative, San Jose/CA: Occasional Productions, “How to Create Ideas,” pp. 69-
96.

[58]    See http://www.one-democratic-state.org/articles/giudice.fr.html [no longer accessible online].

[59]   See his articles at the Alternative National Design Forum, http://www.hopeways.org  He remains a committed Zionist, an
ideology which many radical democrats in Israel would reject.

[60]  See http://www.nictt.org

[61]   See http://www.ncptsd.org/  The American fund of experience has been vastly ‘expanded’ in the wake of 9-11 and the
war in Iraq.

[62]  See http://www.nictt.org/transformation.html

[63]  And of course religious fundamentalisms and orthodoxies of various kinds and intensities in the Palestinian and Jewish
communities.

[64]  Adina Aviram, “Militarization of Knowledge” (New Profile 2003), http://www.newprofile.org/showdata.asp?pid=347

[65]  Ruth Hiller, “Chipping away at the core,” Peace News, June-August 2002, http://www.peacenews.info/issues/2447/index.
php

[66]  Rela Mazali, “’And What About the Girls?’: What a Culture of War Genders Out of View,”  New Profile, http://www.newprofile.org/showdata.asp?pid=254

[67]  J. Ghazi, “True Democracy: Palestinians Must Reject Separate State and Change Israel,” May 2002, via http://www.one-state.org

[68]   On the struggle in Zawiya, see http://stopthewall.org/latestnews/572.shtml 

[69]   See Gideon Levy, “’The peaceful way works best’ - the example of Budrus,” Ha’aretz,  Feb. 11, 2004,   http://taayush.tripod.com/new/20040612-haaretz-e.html

[70]  See http://stopthewall.org/latestnews/575.shtml

[71]   Jonathan Kuttab and Mubarak Awad, “Non-Violent Resistance in Palestine: Pursuing Alternative Strategies,” http://www.palestinecenter.org/cpap/pubs/20020329ib.html

[72]   “Non-Violence in the Middle East: a Talk with Mubarak Awad,” Peace Magazine, October 2000, Vol. 16, No. 4, http://www.peacemagazine.org

[73]  See http://www.psysr.org/NV/index.htm

[74] See Gene Sharp’s “198 methods of non-violent action” at http://www.pe