A presentation recorded at the 2007 Renewing the Anarchist Tradition conference in Montpellier, Vermont.
www.anarchist-studies.org
Throughout all of history, and all over the world, people have organized in various ways to collectively run their societies. This panel will discuss three of so many inspiring examples: Iran, Portugal, and Argentina. During the Iranian and Portuguese revolutions in the 1970s, as in Argentina in the early 1900s and contemporarily, factory takeovers and widespread political participation emerged from popular power struggles and direct democracy movements. This panel will explore the social, political, and economic context of these experiments in popular power, including the challenges and contradictions of the movements. The session will end with an open discussion. What are the current challenges and obstacles to building popular power? What roles have anarchists and other political tendencies had in these social movements? What are the strengths and weaknesses of anarchist involvement in these experiments, and in building horizontalism? We can learn much from the histories of these struggles. They have many ways to offer us insight and inspire us.
Arya is a member of the Iran Solidarity Group and the Antithesis Collective (NEFAC-NYC). He is currently a graduate student in political science at the New School for Social Research.
Marina is a professor at New College of California and the author of Horizontalism: Voices of Popular Power in Argentina. She is working on a new book with Citylights Press called Insurgent Democracies: Latin America's New Powers.
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