by Erik Ose
UNC-Chapel Hill SEAC
Winona LaDuke, who is president of the Indigenous Women's Network, laid it on the line concerning the basic flaw of our modern day industrial society, from an indigenous perspective...
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"8,000 SEAC members from around the globe gather for Catalyst conference," Daily Tar Heel, 10/10/90
By MARY MOORE PARHAM, Staff Writer
They came from 50 states and 12 countries. Armed with little more than tents and the desire for environmental change, about 8,000 members of Student Environmental Action Coalition (SEAC) gathered at the University of Illinois last weekend for Catalyst, a three-day student convention with an agenda as varied as its participants. Panel discussions, benefit concerts and workshops were held at the Champaign-Urbana campus for Catalyst, the second annual national SEAC convention.
The first, Threshold, took place at UNC last year. This year's convention included a march and a rally as well as 5,000 more participants. Among those present were 49 students from UNC, the second largest group coming from outside of Illinois.
For SEAC co-chairman Alec Guettel, the convention was akin to being at a football game extended for an entire weekend. "All that energy was there, not for football, but for something a lot of these people have dedicated their lives to," he said. "It was totally inspiring." The UNC contingent made the 14-hour trip to Illinois by van, arriving Friday at the county fairgrounds where they set up camp.
At the time of the convention, only 2,700 students had registered. However, as SEAC members quickly realized, their numbers were much greater. "Because Catalyst was such a new concept, we had little to go on in terms of estimating the number of participants," said SEAC co-chairwoman Lisa Abbott. "But as we arrived, it was clear that we had about 4,000 people, and by Friday night, almost 8,000. It was phenomenal, absolutely phenomenal."
Indoor housing for SEAC members was limited, and most students chose to camp at the fairgrounds in tents or simply under the stars. A tent city emerged, complete with portable latrines and four showers per 3,000 people. Free mass transit was arranged to get students to and from the campus. At night, bonfires dotted the fairground, and spontaneous outbursts of guitar and drum playing filled the air, sophomore Ruby Sinreich said. SEAC members woke in the morning to small bands of students playing flutes and tambourines.
Catalyst was more than a small-scale Woodstock, however. The program opened with speeches by consumer and environmental advocate Ralph Nader, actor Robert Redford, the Rev. Jesse Jackson and Dr. Helen Caldicott, president emeritus of Physicians for Social Responsibility. Each addressed his or her personal concerns as they related to the focal topics of corporate environmental responsibility and environmental justice.
The first session targeted the oil industry and other corporations responsible for environmental transgressions caused by off-shore drilling or excessive product packaging. Freshman Stephanie Jayne explained the need to attack corporations directly to reach a lot of people. "Although attack may seem a strong word, I believe that when a corporation is targeted, it reaches more than just their executive board," she said. "Employees, stockholders, advertisers and the government will begin to take notice." In addition to corporate accountability is the need to conserve resources for future generations. "We're going to be giving this earth to someone else, and what people don't necessarily realize is that oil is a finite resource," Jayne said. "We can use it for only so many years and then it's gone."
Sunday's session on environmental justice dealt with the issue of minorities in the environmental movement. The movement has been criticized for lack of racial diversity. Students and speakers focused their attentions on diversity, not only of the movement's participants, but of its agenda as well. Part of this diversity came in the form of a new committee within SEAC called the People of Color Caucus, which will elect a representative to sit on the national SEAC board. "There was a lot of anger, and for a while, it looked really scary,” Guettel said. "But I believe that if the environmental movement alienates a minority, it is an immediate failure and will cease to grow."
Part of this growth is dependent on the actual definition of environmental-ism itself. Catalyst also addressed the issue of defining a term previously synonymous with rain forests and the ozone layer. "I think environmentalism is beyond trees and sky and is taking on a more universal sense," freshman Kirti Shastri said. "The environment is also about the people we live with and how we are all interrelated." Jayne said environmentalism needed to be treated as a social issue. "Especially if you consider that the majority of toxic waste dumps are in low-income, minority neighborhoods."
In addition to the two panel discussions, SEAC members planned a march and rally to culminate in the main quad of the campus. "We took up five blocks of street, and it really made you feel that we were large enough to effect change," Sinreich said. "To have so many people committed to making a difference was incredibly uplifting." Abbott agreed. "We would pass people on the side of the street and yell out for them to join us," she said. "The whole march was very symbolic of the movement. It was about reaching out to people, saying, 'Come join us, this is the direction we've got to head in.'" During the rally, foreign students spoke about their own involvement in environmentalism. In the forefront of discussion was the 1992 United Nations conference in Brazil, where many decisions will be made about the status of international environmental policy.
SEAC, in association with other student coalitions, is already planning two parallel youth conferences to take place worldwide. The first would be held two months before the Brazil date and would draw up a list of demands to be presented during the U.N. conference. The second would take place during the U.N. meeting. "If decisions aren't made here in 1992, they will never happen," Guettel said.
As Catalyst came to a close, the most often heard criticism of the meeting was its brevity. Smaller student discussion groups had to be cut out to make room for speakers and student workshops. What the convention lacked in time was compensated for by the empowerment for change brought home by its participants. "I left with an understanding that students are more ready than expected to take serious and definitive steps toward action," said UNC senior Ericka Kurz, national office coordinator. "There are a whole lot of people around the country ready to do something. They see the environment as more than just trees, but as people."
Students interested in joining SEAC should attend Thursday's meeting in room 217A of the Student Union at 5:15, or stop by the SEAC office in the Campus Y for more information.
Karl Marx's works were written during the latter half of the nineteenth century, almost a century after the dawn of the industrial revolution. By this time, feudal relations of production had been replaced by capitalist relations throughout the developed world. Essentially, the shift was one from small-scale, independent production of goods to mass production. This was all made possible by the invention of engines and machines which soon replaced individuals as producers (because they allowed for commodities of a consistent quality to be manufactured using only a fraction of the labor as before - hence, cheaper). The industrial revolution changed life on our earth more than any other development to date in mankind's onward historical march.
What Marx did was to spell out how capitalism as a system of production fails to satisfy human needs and hurts all who live under it - both workers and capitalists. Marx defined capitalists as those who own the means of production under capitalism, and profit from their operation, i.e., the bosses, the ruling class. Workers are those who work for the bosses, who own nothing but their labor power, and who consequently are forced to sell this labor in order to earn a means of survival. In Marx's view, it is not by any means a fair trade.
His notion is that capitalist production alienates workers from themselves. Marx's concept of alienation is multifaceted; in one sense, workers are alienated by factory production because it removes them from the end product of their labors, reducing them to not hing more than "mere appendages of flesh in machines of iron." They are also alienated because their most creative potential, the act of work, becomes nothing more than a commodity, and worse, one which ends up in the hands of someone else!
For the most important way in which workers are alienated by capitalist production is that through its motions, workers are deprived of something that otherwise would be rightfully theirs. In the process of selling their labor, Marx argues, workers get ripped off. Some of their labor's value is lost, since producers of goods can only make a profit by charging potential consumers more than what the goods cost to produce. It is by not compensating workers fully for the value of their labor that producers make money from manufacturing.
Many arguments have been devised by capitalists to refute Marx's observations concerning owners' profits and the injustice of their origins. Perhaps the most straightforward justification of profits flowing to the owners of capital has been that profits are fair renumerations for the multitude of things that owners of capital must bankroll, procure, and maintain in order for large-scale production to take place and workers to be gainfully employed. Obviously, a considerable scale of organization is required before modern day manufacturing can occur in an ordered fashion. However, Marx stresses that under capitalism, present day owners are enjoying the fruits of labor expended by countless previous generations. Is it fair, he asks, that the invention and labor of thousands of years be the exclusive privilege of the wealthy few?
Marx foresaw capitalism's eventual downfall because of the contradictions inherent in its basic structure. Of necessity to a capitalist system's well-being is an ever-increasing flow of wealth from the working classes to the owners of capital. Marx's logical conclusion was that eventually, something would have to give. Oppressed workers the world over, once no longer able to bear their impoverishment, would rise up and seize control of all means of production from the capitalists.
What Marx did not foresee was that during the century after his death, capitalism's global penetration would create a whole new set of exploitative conditions. The size of the world's working class has been greatly enlarged; now, it is much of the third world whose labors prop up the abundance of our western standards of living. No longer is there as great a danger of communist revolution shaking the industrialized world from within, for most remaining workers in the developed world live at least reasonably comfortably. The impoverished workers who toil under oppressive conditions so that international capitalism may profit now do so in faraway lands. Are they capable of rising up in revolution against a west armed to the teeth with high-tech, trillion dollar militaries, not to mention atom bombs?
This is not to say the relationships between workers and capitalists as described by Marx do not still exist in our industrialized societies today, only that the scope of workers' exploitation by capitalists has expanded in other, global directions under new circumstances. When their jobs are not eliminated entirely by relocation of factories to the third world, workers in America today are still squeezed first and hardest by bosses looking to maintain profit levels during times of financial hardship. Workers are still robbed of the value of their labor through woeful undercompensation for their work. If you want to understand worker-owner dynamics under our world's current global capitalist framework, nothing can substitute for an understanding of Marx.
John Locke subscribed to the view that God gave man the earth and everything on it to use for his own benefit. Thus, our planet can be thought of as common property, belonging to all of us. However, since we all are distinct individuals, we have the right to property in one respect - we do own ourselves, and may enjoy whatever benefits our labors produce.
In Locke's view, private property is created when value is added to that which was formerly unimproved. Common property then becomes personal property. For example, if a man expends the time and energy needed to pick a bushel of apples, then the apples literally become his. They become something entirely new by virtue of being acting upon by his labor - no longer are they merely apples, but instead become apples that have been picked. However, there are limits to how much of the earth's riches one has the right to accumulate. According to Locke, "nothing was made by God for men to spoil or destroy" and therefore, one is prohibited from taking more than their fair share, i.e., more than it is possible to use.
Fundamentally, though, Locke feels that private ownership of property is justified. He extends his argument to land as well as to material possessions and goods, excluding, of course, land that has been set aside specifically by law as common property. In his opinion, the common welfare is not decreased, but increased when individuals labor to "till, plant, improve, cultivate, and use the product of" land that they lay claim to as their own. Land which is cultivated is more productive than land which is not.
Nowhere does Locke exhibit concern about there not being enough land for all individuals to use what they need. This is understandable, since when he was writing in the mid-seventeenth century, there was little need to worry about overpopulation or the earth having finite resources in danger of being used up. With this in mind, it is easy to see why Locke feels the size of a man's estate should not be subject to regulation, only that nothing should be allowed to perish uselessly while in one's possession. His conception of property properly put to use includes that which is bartered with others for mutually beneficial ends. Again, the important thing to remember is that acquired property must be put to use in order to benefit the common good.
Locke saw one of the main purposes of government to be the preservation and regulation of individuals' property rights within a society. He believed there were limits to how much a government could interfere with such property rights.
Locke's conception of property is radical because it justifies the accumulation of private property, yet realizes that it can only be beneficial to all if the wealth acquired by individuals is put to good use. If Locke were alive today, I think he would consider most of the wealthiest individuals in our society guilty of misusing their naturally given and socially sanctioned property rights, for two reasons. Firstly, because the sheer magnitude of their overconsumption approaches obscenity in comparison to the impoverished standards of living most people in the world are forced to suffer under every day. If some of the very rich today are not guilty of accumulating more than they need, then no one has ever done so, in the entire history of mankind. Secondly, because much of the wealth the truly rich acquire is not put to any use, but accumulated simply for the sake of accumulation.
I do not think that Locke would find fault only with the lifestyles of our country's very rich. Just as they enjoy a far greater share of our society's riches than most ordinary Americans, so do the rest of us live beyond our means compared to the rest of the world. We are no different in this respect than other late-twentieth century inhabitants of the industrialized nations. In some ways, the first world resembles a multi-tentacled cancer eating away at the planet, selfishly siphoning resources from other regions and peoples.
Overall, the standard of living our nation enjoys is extremely comfortable. What are we, as average wasteful Americans, to do? How can we change our consumptive habits in order that we might stop living at the expense of others we share our world with? The challenge is to get people to think more responsibly about the consumption choices we make in our everyday lives.
It is fast becoming clear that we can no longer afford to maintain the fast paced, cutting edge consumer lifestyles that characterize life in our society today. The many modern conveniences and technological advances that we have surrounded ourselves with - are they all truly necessary, or designed solely with manufacturers' profit-making in mind? Substantive change will only come about when people also bring pressure to bear upon corporations to adopt socially responsible production methods and market non-wasteful products. Then, and only then, will we inhabit a world in which property rights play a supporting role in treating our earth and our fellow men with the respect that both deserve.
Rafael Trujillo, ruler of the Dominican Republic from 1930 until 1961, was very ingenious in maintaining his hold on power. His wide-ranging powers were constitutionally granted...that is, granted to him by a revised Dominican constitution and constitutional reforms that he himself had authored. In doing this, Trujillo always maintained a facade of constitutional legitimacy. His regime could more properly be called a tyranny than a true dictatorship.
He saw to it that his younger brother Hector and other cronies loyal to him were elected to the presidency during two intervals in his reign, while continuing to hold behind-the-scenes power, in order to create the impression that political competition existed in the Dominican Republic. Nepotism, in fact, was one of Trujillo's most identifiable characteristics. Dozens of his relatives occupied posts at every level of the government, or were granted controlling interests in major Dominican industries such as the media and sugar processing. He hoped his dynasty would live on forever, and groomed his oldest son "Ramfis" for the presidency almost from the day he was born in 1929. At the age of three, "Ramfis" was made a colonel in the army, and was only nine years old when promoted to the rank of brigadier general.
Extreme megalomania was another of Trujillo's traits. He granted himself a lengthy list of official titles, including "The Benefactor" and "His Excellency." He named provinces, villages, squares, the capital city, even mountaintops after himself. The degree to which he cultivated national worship of his greatness was rivaled in modern times only by that which Hitler and Stalin commanded.
His graft surely rivaled that of the Phillipines' Ferdinand Marcos. Trujillo's eventual fortune was estimated in 1961 to be $800 million. He reaped profits from the production of staples such as milk, meat, salt, and rice; from the domestic sale and export of goods such as sugar, tobacco and wood products, and exercised controlling interests in Dominican banking, insurance, and all media concerns. For most of Trujillo's reign, he felt bold enough to claim that the regular elections which kept returning he and his candidates to power were unanimous, with no dissenting votes at all cast. In the 1930 election, before he perfected his later election stealing techniques, he claimed to have been elected by more votes than there were people in the country at that time!
One of the methods he used most effectively to control the Dominican Republic's entire political system was requiring all legislators, judicial appointees and officials to submit their own signed resignations upon taking office, so that any one of them could be fired whenever Trujillo wished. Government turnover was incredible, with officials constantly being shuffled from one position to the next.
Immediately after World War Two, several Central and South American dictators fell from power (Ubico in Guatemala, Martinez in El Salvador). Trujillo feared that his reign could be next, and was very alarmed at stirrings of a Dominican labor movement. There was a week-long strike in the sugar fields in January, 1946 by workers demanding better conditions and pay.
In order to mislead international opinion into believing that his rule was benevolent, Trujillo relaxed his iron grip on power for a brief period. He allowed two opposition labor parties and even a small communist party to form in time for the 1947 elections. Votes were manipulated to elect one candidate from each of the two labor parties to congress, but of course Trujillo himself was overwhelmingly again elected president.
Following the elections, he cracked down hard on the small Communist party and a fledgling opposition student movement, but he did preserve some of the benefits granted to labor during this brief period. Like Peron in Argentina, he won support from workers because of this. Also like Peron, Trujillo set up a female branch of his ruling party. He encouraged a Dominican feminist movement in the early 1940's, granting women civil and political rights, including the right to vote, in hopes of ensuring new legions of electoral support for his regime.
His rule was maintained for as long as it was not because of massive repression but because he kept the country's living standards at subsistence levels, which ensured that mere survival, rather than demands for political participation, would be foremost in the minds of most Dominicans. By exercising the right to demand a sizable share of every economic activity/business enterprise in the country, Trujillo made certain that no one could make a living without demonstrating obedience to his regime.
All the same, the army, police force and security apparatus commanded by Trujillo was enormous. Political murders, tortures and disappearances occurred frequently enough to discourage any public opposition to Trujillo throughout most of the thirty years he remained in power. The gruesome murder of Jesus de Galindez in 1956 serves as proof of the brutality with which he dealt with his enemies and rivals. In closing, it seems clear to me that Trujillo truly was the most absolute, tyrannical, iron-fisted dictator that Latin America has ever known.
Source: The Era of Trujillo, Dominican Dictator (1973) by Jesus de Galindez (published posthumously)
"Forum aim turns to student power," Daily Tar Heel, 4/5/90
By CARRINGT0N WELLS, Staff Writer
Student power in grass roots movements, not just student government reform, turned out to be the focus of a forum Wednesday intended to bring about better communication among student activists and to discuss possibilities for the future of a student coalition.
Brendan Mathews, a junior English major from Albany, N.Y., and one of the sponsors of the petition signed by more than 1,100 students in the Pit last Tuesday, opened the forum by reading a statement of his ideas about the problem he and his group wanted to address. "Last week's petition proved that there are lots of other students who are concerned, who see problems with the way things are, not just in Suite C, but on campus and beyond," he said. "We looked for some current issue that dramatized the loss of student power. Student government seemed the obvious choice."
Student government reform was not the sole purpose of the coalition that wrote the petition, Mathews said. Concerned students need to be unified, he said. "We all have different interests, but if we are to get what we want then we need to work together." The group first met two weeks ago, Mathews said, and got started by a few students making phone calls to get some people together to discuss concerns. "Now we want to get input from other people. We're still in the talking stage, trying to get some solid things going."
Brien Lewis, former SBP, said he misunderstood the purpose of the group that started the petition. "I thought the petition was going in a different direction than it apparently was. I saw the petition as being the direct result of people wanting to do something about problems with campus elections. "In a sense, this (reaction from students) is the best response, the kind of response that students and administrators need to see. The worst would be no response, if people were willing to just let things die."
Elizabeth Kolb, a freshman from Raleigh, said she was led to believe the petition and the group that wrote it were emphasizing the flaws of student government. "I came here tonight with the understanding that there would be discussion about how student government could improve." But Mathews said the group's purpose was to build unity among activists and to empower students, not to be an adversary of student government. "I think it's self-centered of you to think that student government is our only focus."
Emily Lawson, a freshman from Washington, D.C., said, "Student government is merely a symbol of dissatisfaction, and the petition served its purpose to alert people to one specific problem." Ericka Kurz, a junior from Middleton, Wis., said she wanted to form an organization that would be the base for many different activist groups. "This grass roots organization could have a complementary relationship to student government. But student government cannot tackle a lot of issues which such a group could."
Bill Hildebolt, student body president, said he thought the meeting had an overall positive result. "Although we didn't get very far today, a lot of people left there knowing where a lot of other people were coming from. A lot of promise was shown for future meetings." The group will hold its next meeting April 10 at 4 p.m. in the Union, and all students are welcome.
