In many cases the assemblies are based geographically (by neighborhood, town, county, state, etc.) as in Argentina or Bolivia.

The union base itself is not a popular assembly because it excludes those who don’t belong to the union. Nevertheless, the Bolivian Water Wars depended on the spontaneous participation of the non-union population ready to struggle.

In Oaxaca, as in those countries, the assemblies sprang up virtually simultaneously in many cities and neighborhoods. The assemblies are inclusive as opposed to exclusive, and develop in process rather than being pre-planned.

A peoples’ initiative, the first plenary meeting of the ‘Dialogue for peace, democracy and justice’ general assembly held in Oaxaca on Oct 12, 2006. [Photo: G.S.]

Grievances may come to the ya basta point, the last straw, with a particular land taking, privatization of water, theft of bank savings, privatization of electricity, oil, gas, increased school fees, etcetera.

When the word harto—fed up—appears, as it did in Argentina and in Oaxaca in the popular slogans and songs, I take this to mean that the conflict has been simmering a long time, and the resentment has reached its climax.

The Argentinean popular assemblies set the anti-neoliberal pattern, emerging as spontaneous, unplanned uprisings of the outraged.

Fed up with electoral politics

Popular assemblies form as a furious alternative to electoral politics.

In this era we see everywhere, including the United States, the ownership of elected officials by large, usually transnational corporations. The elected, whether honestly or fraudulently installed, have a paying boss who is different from the voters from whom the officials are distanced by both their membership in the political class and isolation from the lives of the multitudes they supposedly represent.

The politicians are often very corrupt; they are often overtly and murderously repressive against their own populations in Mexico (not just Oaxaca), Latin America and around the globe. Some nations like the United States and some European countries keep their repression under wraps; one need only consider the number of persons imprisoned in the United States—according to the Justice Department's Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2.2 million in federal or state prisons in December 2005.

Transnational corporations have stripped away the social and financial power that used to belong to the nation-states. They are now left only with the physical power to repress, and to administer whatever is left of their bureaucracies. The laws serve mainly to enforce the property rights of the ownership class, and facilitate transfers of wealth from the newly colonized nation-states to the transnational corporations.

The asamblea consists of people who define themselves as actors; it is their show of power. Direct participation is the hallmark of the asamblea. It takes direct democracy to the participants and abandons the useless representative government—with good reason; elected or assumed (royal or dictatorial) governorship cannot respond to the needs of the ordinary people while simultaneously obeying the financial demands of the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the corporations controlling social agendas, including health, educational and environmental agendas.

In this context, it is interesting that Hugo Chavez of Venezuela bailed out Argentina from its IMF debt. Subsequently Bolivia declined to accept an IMF loan.

Popular by definition

By definition, a people’s assembly (asamblea popular) must be anti-capitalist and anti-neoliberal. The hierarchical structure of governments and corporations implies a boss and/or owner who benefits from the work of the people, hires and fires at will, and frequently owns or appropriates the national resources. (Coca-cola makes millions bottling and selling the public water supply, with or without added flavors.)

Transnational capitalism erodes the middle-classes and siphons off wealth to the wealthy. It is therefore logical that the assemblies are not just the concern of the poor, but of the middle-class as well. They, along with intellectuals, workers, the unemployed, youth, seniors, and professionals, see the handwriting on the wall.

The assembly is not class-structured. The assembly is composed of people who are being screwed and know it. They come together in recognition of the other, their previously invisible fellow citizens, and for a common purpose which may be economic but which may also be to defy repression or prevent environmental depredation or guard their farm lands or to demand some change in benefit to the people.

In Argentina the founding piqueteros were workers, but the caceroleras of December 2001 were middle-class housewives whose savings vanished into a bank vacuum-cleaner. Along with the working class they all rose up together, simultaneously, and took to the streets. In Cochebamba, Bolivia, everyone’s water supply was threatened, by privatization accompanied by very high costs. A participatory struggle was mounted via a popular assembly.

In these three situations, the original organization, a union, was abruptly swallowed up by the popular assembly. In Oaxaca, the first nucleus of the asamblea popular was the local branch of the national teachers union. The spark to organize the assembly was outrage caused by yet another repression on the part of the state governor, Ulises Ruiz, against the 70,000 highly regarded Oaxaca teachers. Popular assemblies are not class artifacts such as Marxists might hope for. They are public, socio-economic responses to public grievances.

Furthermore, there is no vanguard. There is no political party attribute, because by definition the asamblea is a refutation of elected politics and politicians who have sold out and failed the constituents they supposedly represented.

In Oaxaca, the pretext of representation was very thin anyway. The Institutional Revolutionary party (Partido Revolucionario Institucional, PRI) was, and has been, a mockery of democracy for decades, operating with bribes, bosses, corruption, assassinations, imprisonments, disappearances, all of which are amply documented.

The inclusion of all sorts of political-left parties is not a contradiction (and how many American visitors were astonished to see the red flags and the photos of Stalin and Mao), because a hallmark of the asamblea is that all participants are political-social actors. The struggle of any political party to gain power is subordinated to the specific social struggle. That’s not easy. Fractures and schisms come about when elements break off , not willing to sustain the horizontal structure of the asamblea.

In other words, none of the popular assemblies, including the Zapatistas, exclude adherents to political parties, but the asamblea is not a political party and refuses ownership of political power apart from the social power which comes from below, from the multitude. The asamblea by definition is the pueblo and that means people working on their own behalf. It is the counter to individualism; it is community of purpose and goal. The popular assembly forms spontaneously and without leaders. Since it is not easily controlled, the force that holds it together must be a common, not a particular, cause.

Only a symptom

In Oaxaca the rallying cry was “Ulises Out” but nobody believes the State Governor is more than a symptom of what is wrong: social neglect, educational neglect, stripping of resources, neglect of public needs, corruption, institutionalized theft. In other words, and as the people frequently say outright, “Ulises doesn’t live here.”

I should add, my definitions are abstract and idealized. I recently heard from a socialist here in Mexico who declared that the Oaxaca asamblea has been at fault for not being more “representative” of its constituent groups, such as political parties and unions. My understanding is, it’s not supposed to represent those entities; it’s supposed to be a tool for challenging certain social-economic insults. In the case of Oaxaca, the first call was to depose Ulises Ruiz. That goal was universally accepted. So I’m not clear why he said the groups were not represented. Perhaps he meant consulted? Methodology must be a constant problem.

In a so-called representative democracy the multitude can march till they drop and nothing affects the power or decisions of the “elected leaders”, much less removes them from their “legitimate” positions as officials of the state.

At the close of 2006 the elected officials of Mexico squandered, through deals and in-fighting, the possibility of serving the people of Oaxaca. Instead they resorted to force.

All the major industries—even those like PEMEX (oil) supposedly owned by the state—are in reality controlled by international corporations, mostly foreign. The Bank of Mexico is foreign owned.

The telephone company, "owned" by the Mexican Carlos Slim, is actually an international conglomerate sprung from SBC (Southwestern Bell) which also owns both Prodigy and AT&T.

Continuum Resources Ltd., a Canadian mining corporation, holds in excess of 70,000 hectares of exploration rights around Oaxaca. Included in their property portfolio are two of the most significant past-producers of gold and silver in southern Mexico: the San Jose epithermal silver-gold deposit and the Natividad epithermal gold-silver deposit.

Furthermore, all the political parties suffer the same defects, whether they are right or left. They are top down, easily corrupted, and dogmatically exclusive. They are based on ideologies rather than on practical solutions to pressing social needs. When the people march, they march for, and with, unity. When political parties march, they march for power and control. End of story. I needn’t tell you how many times I have been taken in by the “promises” of the left, like those made by Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (“First the poor”); I imagine we have all had the same sad experiences.

Take us to your leader

The mainstream media identify the popular assemblies' principal persons “leaders”. Some “leaders” may have personal charismatic influence (like Subcomandante Marcos), or may be mocked like Flavio Sosa; other “leaders” may act as spokespersons. A popular assembly “leadership” position is held at the will of the pueblos, and is completely revocable. The “leader” is replaceable; that is to say, if one leader falls another person can step into the breach. This is possible because the leader is not a decision-maker but a decision-implementer.

Decisions are made in the course of the assembly meeting, often—as with the the Zapatistas—by consensus, sometimes by majority vote. Decisions are fluid and evolving, hence driving crazy the Left which thinks there must be a program all fore-planned.

There certainly is a desired goal: social justice.

Meetings are called as often as necessary. In the case of an asamblea popular for a state, as in Oaxaca, there is a council of directors who help the process. However, the asamblea is self-organizing, allowing complete participation for those who chose a particular area in which to act. Thus, in the Oaxaca assembly movement during 2006, some people brought food, others staffed the first aid station, others drove around in the city to check on night activities, others supported the barricades, others blocked the highways, yet others ran the radio stations.

In different cities people took over their municipal buildings, threw out the municipal presidents, held closed the schools against scabs. All these activities are part of the Asamblea Popular de los Pueblos de Oaxaca, but surely similar in direct method wherever the people assert their power.

The asamblea is a free-wheeler, it does what seems possible and correct toward a goal, using various spontaneous and creative decisions. Thus it is often blamed for lack of long-range strategy, but the long-range strategy is clear: do away with neoliberalism and reclaim the common wealth for the people.

“Long-range”, in the outsiders’ complaints about Oaxaca, really amounted to some months. For example, apparently nobody thought ahead very much to what would happen if Ulises Ruiz was not deposed. Many of us thought he would be—I wrote myself once that I thought he would be gone “by the weekend”, and I was not the only one who thought so. Indeed, the asamblea counted on it. So a back-up plan was lacking. Such a plan is now emerging, from much discussion and thought, although the goal of getting Ulises Ruiz out has not been renounced.

It seems to me not possible that the popular assembly movement vanish, despite the murderous repression the government practices. It cannot vanish because the cause has not vanished. I suppose the popular assembly movement will evolve over years. The entire population is in the process of re-educating itself about the nature of power and who holds it. Oaxaca specifically is a clear example of failed electoral politics, failed state and national governments, failed neoliberal economics and failed social policy.

And the next step...?

Some challenges have not yet been addressed, among them how to wrest financial control from the international neoliberals. How to link the thousands of local asambleas which must achieve common goals to make national changes has been discussed—but not resolved. The next step is international, so will that be an enlarged block of Latin American nations? Will the USA let Mexico slip away? An amusing side-light is the building of a wall to exclude Mexicans but not Mexico, from the USA’s orbit.

Some believe the nation state is useless and unnecessary; some regard it as the source of the cultures which in turn support the struggles for equity. Ways to own and redistribute the “national” wealth, especially natural resources, must be discussed—over and over, and in the context of horizontal decision making.

The popular assembly movement is spreading, and with good reason. Many consider ourselves people who can rightfully participate in our own empowerment—how would one support, for example, a popular assembly movement in the United States? I begin to remember local “neighborhood” activism during the past thirty years—Love Canal? The Dorchester Neighborhood Association? The Grange, the town meeting—all of us (by us, I mean senior citizens!) must have memories of that sort of local organization.

Younger people certainly know of younger organizations. Why did those old organizations vanish? Or did they? They were largely based on some injustice, and the injustices have not vanished. But perhaps they unsustainable by being single-issue and hence by definition exclusive.

And other organizations, such as unions, professional organizations, League of Women Voters—all the ways in which people come together? People come together as exclusive groups, denominational groups, special interest groups—how can we come together in a common cause, like the people of Latin America and Oaxaca?

The common attribute of social movements is a moral sense of injustice, concern for the welfare of others whom we perceive to be fellow human beings, pueblos, like ourselves. Is that sense lost in our individualist competitive society? Can it be reclaimed?

A further and final note is the success of “organizations” or asambleas which provide services to the local people. The piqueteros help buy food in bulk for reduced price distribution, the Black Panthers offered social services, Hamas in Palestine does the same. Thus far in Oaxaca the asamblea has managed to feed striking teachers, provide emergency health care, and is now proposing ways to assist the families of the dead and disappeared. It snatched from the government commercialized tourist events cherished in the culture (Guelaguetza, Night of the Radishes) and returned them free to the public.

In all these cases, the free social aid—undeniably small scale—is given, not to highlight political points of view, but to engage the people with the people’s self-interest, by providing services which the governments can’t or won’t provide. Services, non-governmental, are provided to the extent that people contribute to them. So the people know from whom the sharing emanates—themselves.

A popular assembly movement emphasizes the dignity of the people who are not helpless, but who have the capacity to organize, direct and sustain their own governing structures.

Nancy Davies’ reports and commentaries appear primarily on the indispensable Narco News website, which is at http://www.narconews.com/ . Her attempts to stay abreast of day-to-day (and even minute-to-minute) developments, and her exchanges with subscribers to the Oaxaca Study-Action Group (OSAG) discussion listserv are often posted to that listserv