by Daniel F Systems are grinding down this city And unrest is risingA small group fights against passivityAnd is organizing At the heart of this group was a friendwith colorful charmThey fought against hate and oppression And shut down harm Their sense of humor was very fastand often sidesplittingThey planned events that were a blastand always welcoming […]

by Harlow Sinclair The dominant narrative is that police make our communities safer than anything else could. The biggest lie the devil ever told, they say, was convincing the masses he didn’t exist. The greatest farce is the idea that the police are the only thing standing between you and chaos. We accept policing on […]

While you were picking up your kids from school, Joe Hogsett, backed by Statehouse Republicans, and billionaire lobby groups decided that a democratically-elected school board isn't profitable enough.

This is an opinion piece written by an individual member and was not voted on by membership. Opinion pieces from members do not reflect the opinions of other members and are not chapter approved statements.

On November 27th, 2025, Now This Impact made this post on Instagram: “Karoline Leavitt’s family member was just taken by ICE,” with the caption, “The media war has only just begun … and you thought your family drama was bad …”

I want to talk about this because, as a leftist, no scratch that, as a human being, anytime I hear about these disgusting occurrences of kidnapping by the Trump administration and its army of racist terrorists, my heart breaks and my blood boils. 

You’d think that on a post by Now This Impact, a Left-leaning news and entertainment page, you’d find the same reaction to this; that you’d find people upset that yet another immigrant has been snatched up by ICE. 

Well, to an extent, you and I would be wrong. 

If you go into the comments, you have some reasonable reactions to a situation like this:

But once you start reading more of the replies to this—in my honest opinion, unempathetically captioned—post, you have comments like the following:

Obviously, I think the Trump family is terrible; I believe those serving in the administration are fascists. However, if you are genuinely anti-deportation and pro-immigration, what kind of backward logic is it to cheer for ICE terrorism when it happens to, mind you, the extended immigrant family member of someone in the administration? 

Imagine if you were taken by these masked cowards, thrown into a detention center, and facing deportation. Later, it came out that your ex-partner’s dad voted for Trump. Then, because of that, people said heinous stuff like this and cheered on your deportation. It just doesn’t make sense. 

Even if this person is a Trump supporter*, yes, as humans, we cannot help but feel justified in seeing our points of view and our fears come to fruition, no matter how horrifying (there’s the whole leopards ate my face subreddit), but to all of a sudden be cheering on the deportation of immigrants just to squeeze in an “I told you so!” is bizarre.

*As of writing this, WMUR Manchester has reported that Ferreira, “…has no bad blood with the Leavitt family, and has deep respect and admiration for the White House press secretary…” 

And the worst part of siding with the fascists is that, if we’re being completely honest, there is a 0% chance Karoline Leavitt genuinely cares. Do you really think this hateful person is losing sleep over their brother’s ex-fiancée, an immigrant, may I remind you, being detained by ICE? 

Absolutely not! She’ll just slip into her white robes like any other night and sleep like a baby.

Look, I’m not a conspiracy theorist in the slightest, but you even have people in the comments theorizing that maybe it was even Leavitt herself or someone else within the family orchestrating this so that the ex-fiancée can take full custody of their child.

To be honest, I don’t know whether there’s a custody dispute happening or what that situation is; it doesn’t really matter. We’ve seen that the people serving and supporting this administration have no morals and no empathy for anyone or anything.

I just got a weird, unsettling feeling from some of the reactions to this. It’s similar to people cheering about people losing health care, SNAP benefits, and other crucial social services. Why are we celebrating the dismantling of what little the capitalist elite allows us to have? It’s fair to be outraged, it’s fair to dislike people for their terrible views, but why the need for fireworks and party hats at the expense of the working class?

Leftist YouTuber Kavernacle recently made a video about racism on the left and how some liberals and leftists are fine with being racist as long as it’s toward someone with whom they disagree. If you want to see a different, perhaps more well-organized, point of view toward a similar topic, I’d recommend watching it.

We already know the people voting for conservatives are voting against their own interests, and yes, it is incredibly frustrating. I cannot forgive that a lot of these people do it out of disdain for immigrants, refugees, the native peoples of this land, LGBTQ+ comrades, women, and other marginalized groups, but do we really need to cheer on these horrible anti-human policies?

And look, I’ve taken part in this in the past; at times, I was reactionary to these situations because I thought, “Why should I show any empathy for people who obviously don’t give a shit about me?” But we have to realize this is not how we’re going to build solidarity within the working class. 
This is not me calling for centrism or “compromise”, not even a little bit, but please do not give these horrible people credibility by agreeing with fascism when it’s egotistically convenient!

The post On Liberal Hypocrisy   first appeared on Salt Lake DSA.

I will come to a time in my backwards trip when November eleventh, accidentally my birthday, was a sacred day called Armistice Day.  When I was a boy, and when Dwayne Hoover was a boy, all the people of all the nations which had fought in the First World War were silent during the eleventh minute of the eleventh hour of Armistice Day, which was the eleventh day of the eleventh month. It was during that minute in nineteen hundred and eighteen, that millions upon millions of human beings stopped butchering one another. I have  talked to old men who were on battlefields during that minute. They have told me in one way or another that the sudden silence was the Voice  of God. So we still have among us some men who can remember when God spoke clearly to mankind. Armistice Day has become Veterans’ Day. Armistice Day was sacred. Veterans’ Day is not. So I will throw Veterans’ Day over my shoulder. Armistice Day I will keep. I don’t want to throw away any sacred things. What else is sacred? Oh, Romeo and Juliet, for instance. And all music is.

-Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions

Tacoma seemed to bloom on November 11th, 2025. Beautifully painted clouds permitted plenty of sunshine to cast down on city streets. A lively crowd numbering just over one hundred trickled into the plaza bringing flags, or signs, or wearing a reminder of service. They all brought their fears, hopes, gripes, and their ideas about themselves and the land they grew up walking. It was a gorgeous backdrop for the city to recommence the annual observation of Armistice Day. The crowd respectfully encircled a motley group of tattooed, long-haired, sometimes bearded, always opinionated veterans wearing fatigues and patches. No dress uniforms, no military drills. It was about leaving all that behind.

Armistice Day opened with a land welcoming ceremony led by veteran Toby Joseph, Sr. He performed a moving rendition of his father’s love song and reflected on militarism from an indigenous perspective. Veterans spoke to pressing problems such as Veterans Affairs and LGBTQ+ medical care, the right to refuse illegal orders, and the history of active duty resistance. In one of the more memorable moments a physician and current conscientious objector spoke poignantly about his courageous decision to choose peace. Flanked by veterans stoically holding large pictures of Zahid Chaudhry in uniform and with family, Melissa Chaudhry delivered a tour de force keynote about her husband, moving me and many others to tears. Melissa sharply defended Zahid, elucidated the militarism that led to his detainment, and articulated beautifully the meaning of Armistice Day.

Zahid is a disabled veteran and immigrant; he is the President of Veterans for Peace 109 and for years has been an immovable fixture of the peace movement. He didn’t get to see the beautiful sky that day. He has been a comrade of mine for over a decade, going back to when I began organizing against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Zahid is wrongfully detained in the concentration camp known as the Northwest Detention Center on the Tacoma tideflats, two miles and a world away from city hall. As I write this, Zahid is experiencing cruel medical neglect and risks blindness if he is not released for required medical procedures soon. We would agree every person deserves excellent healthcare. It’s just especially cruel that a disabled veteran, with private health insurance in Olympia, risks blindness in the unnecessary custody of the U.S. government.

The day concluded with a memorial ceremony led by Pastor Shalom of First United Methodist Church. It was a wholly dignified ceremony that seemed to me life-affirming, peace-affirming, and inclusive. The enhancement of the remembrance ceremony to include not just our WWI veterans but all victims of militarism was beautiful, and only natural, given the armies can’t seem to keep the wars to themselves. The ceremony honored the original purpose of the day as imagined by folks like Kurt Vonnegut, while maintaining the universality that so many must have felt in the wake of the Great War. It is a high standard that future remembrance ceremonies will be based upon.

The weather was great for Armistice Day. The political climate was another matter; we gathered on stolen Puyallup land against a backdrop of hegemonic struggle, military belligerence, terror campaigns, genocide, and the rise of the authoritarian right across the breadth of the international system. At home we face surveillance, extra-constitutional policing, mass deportations, wanton nuclearisation, and the militarization of our streets. Political assassinations are on the rise. There is a massive military build up off the coast of Venezuela and already western operatives on the mainland. Domestically, our coffers are ransacked and public institutions are seized. Homeland Security has been allocated an unprecedented wartime budget to terrorize immigrants and urban dwellers for the delight of an increasingly openly white nationalist base. Trans rights are being ripped away. Peace is questioned as a value, human rights as a cause, and the worthiness of empathy itself is mocked by our leaders. The U.S. regime foolishly stokes dormant embers in the Caribbean and saber-rattles in the Pacific. The United States has funded, provided intelligence and abundant material support, and suppressed public knowledge of Israel’s genocide. We face a very real and imminent threat of ethnic cleansing and a collapse of LGBTQ+ and women’s rights. We face war.

So we celebrate peace. But we cannot simply enjoy the peace there is; we are without peace. It is only through resistance that we can create peace. It is only through solidarity that we can resist. And it is through love that we find solidarity. So we celebrate Armistice Day: Peace through Resistance.

by Eric Ard

The Oregon White Oak, also known as the Garry Oak (Quercus Garryana) is the only native Oak species in Washington state. A keystone species needed for endangered lifeforms like the Western Gray Squirrel, Garry Oaks occurs in the endangered South Sound Prairie ecosystem, and as such are also called Prairie Oaks by a select few enthusiasts. Prairie Oaks grow slowly in open areas, and support more species of wildlife than any other tree species in the region. This is due to the abundant food they produce (acorns), and their tendency to form cavities that become homes for various types of wildlife. On average, Prairie oaks don’t begin producing acorns until 30 years of age. 

The city of Lakewood in Pierce County is home to one of the highest concentrations of these oak trees in Washington state, once part of a vast oak prairie stretching beyond Pierce County into Thurston, Lewis and Skamania counties, then on into Oregon. There are isolated groves of these oak-prairies around Puget Sound as well in Shelton, Port Townsend, and Whidbey Island. The town of Oak Harbor on Whidbey proudly exclaims its oaken character, providing a map of the towns catalogued oak trees, and serious protections for these trees. Their resident Garry Oak Society successfully created a culture of appreciation for the gnarled specimens that dot the town. The state of Washington designates oak stands critical habitat for conservation, and in 2020-2022, I was a part of an effort to develop priority tree protections for Lakewood’s oak trees. 

None of this has stopped the proliferation of warehouses in Pierce County, who often set up shop on prime oak habitat. 

During the covid pandemic, a global logistics market that was hurdling towards more online shopping went over a ledge. Millions of people were stuck and home, and a new warehouse boom began. WallStreet firms read the writing on the wall, and invested big in logistics. Private Equity and investment firms rallied behind a new concept: the speculative warehouse. That is a warehouse built with the hope of attracting tenants. Many of these warehouses have been built and sit empty in Lakewood.

In 2023, Lakewood activist Christina Manetti saw her worst fears realized. She had sparked the effort to save Lakewood’s Garry Oaks after learning of a speculative warehouse slated for the Springbrook neighborhood that would cut down over 50 oak trees in the floodplain of Clover Creek. Some of these trees were over 150 years old. Bisected by I-5 and the McChord Air Force Base, Springbrook is one of the poorest neighborhoods in Pierce County, and is considered overburdened by air pollution. In spite of protests, the project broke ground, and put the oaks under the axe. This marked a string of defeats for oak activists in Pierce county, as we watched concrete and cement seal over our aquifer for more Wall Street speculation for the fourth or fifth time. In spite of protections for the rare Prairie Oaks, our laws do not allow us to truly get in the way of capitalism. The developers pay minor mitigation fees, and the habitat is lost for the next hundred years. 

The State Environmental Protection Act (SEPA) allows a permitting body (city or county) to authorize an environmental review and request mitigation. It also authorizes these bodies to waive this process via a determination of non-significance. 

As chair of TDSA’s Ecosocialist committee, I learned of a proposal to build one of the largest warehouses in Washington state in south Tacoma, and organized our small membership to build opposition to the project. We knocked doors and drove turnout to a public hearing, where we learned just how far along the project already was.

The Bridge Industrial Warehouse was fast-tracked by the city of Tacoma as the lead permitting agency, and we quickly learned the limit of the state’s environmental protections laws. The project, which is now under construction, seals over even more of our non-glacially fed sole source aquifer with 2.5 million square feet of warehouse. We had no path within the law to defeat the warehouse. 

Front and Centered, a Washington-based legislative advocacy group introduced a bill in 2023 that would have created a lever to stop the Springbrook and Bridge Industrial warehouses. The CURB Act would effectively create a veto option for communities suffering from the cumulative effects of environmental harm. Lack of tree canopy and green space, air pollution from I-5 and Air Force Base McChord, and the existing burden of polluting industry would all be taken into account, as well as public voice. This bill did not make it to the house floor for a vote, in spite of democratic party control of the house, senate, and governor’s office. 

Bridge Industrial, the company behind the South Tacoma warehouse, rode a new trend: developing polluted land. Companies like BI offer municipalities a path to clean-up EPA-designated pollution sites that they couldn’t afford to remediate on their own. The “South Tacoma swamps”, where BI is constructing its mega-warehouse, is one such EPA superfund site, a former dumping ground for the Burlington Northern Santa Fe rail company. Companies like BI also peddle public safety, turning sites that function as homeless encampments and illegal dumps into trucking, concrete, and jobs. While this makes communities shudder, this offer makes neoliberal politicians and economic planners salivate. Under this form of capitalism, all economic growth is considered good growth, and even helps fund the government through new tax revenue to appease even some moderate social democrats. Never mind that they’re allowing Wall Street to carve up our communities and economic destinies how they please. 

Neoliberal economics has been the name of the game for some time in the county. Under the leadership of the Master Builders Association, a powerful developer lobbying group, Pierce County has consistently chosen to forget environmental protections in favor of economic development. The MBA fielded several County Charter Review candidates this cycle, and until recently held the seat of County Executive under their lobbyist Bruce Dammier. The unincorporated Pierce County community of Fredrickson is a prime example of this legacy. Designated a new industrial and logistics hub, Fredrickson today is more asphalt than anything else. Here the headwaters of Clover Creek, once the main drinking water source for the city of Tacoma, is besieged by a massive Amazon warehouse, Boeing plant, and the Niagara bottling facility, devastating the natural recharge of the aquifer and causing dry conditions downstream. 

A preemptive tool granted to municipalities is zoning. It was industrial/light commercial zoning that created the modern Fredrickson. Municipalities are granted this level of planning, if done ahead of time. Zoning cannot be changed once an investor has submitted a project, no matter how much the locals dislike it. This is playing out today in Dupont, where the city will have the distinct embarrassment of having a warehouse built directly across from their city hall, destroying over 20 acres of forest and a section of the beloved Sequalitchew Creek Trail. The Dupont West project, another speculative warehouse, is a product of poor planning, loopholes in regulation, a polluted site, and a city leadership afraid to confront an economic giant. My watershed-based advocacy organization, the Clover Creek Restoration Alliance, organized against the Dupont West project, which was unanimously opposed by the town residents. Large projects with environmental impacts like Dupont West are arbitrated by an appointed judge called a hearing examiner, who reviews state law, as well as county and city code to determine the legality of a project. During this time, public comment is accepted into the record as a part of the consideration. On rare occasions, members of the public are able to persuade hearing examiners that development proposals are not consistent with the law and must be rejected. More commonly, mitigation measures are recommended and projects are approved. In the case of Dupont West, the project is to be on a site steeped in history, the site of the first Methodist Mission in the state, as well as the first Fourth of July Celebration in the Washington territory and thousands of years of indigenous history primarily associated with the modern Nisqually tribe. The hearing examiner ruled that the project be approved, but ordered the developer to provide a small buffer around the historic mission marker as mitigation. The historic Methodist Mission Marker will now be cartoonishly placed as an island amidst a sea of asphalt. 

The last option available to cities is that of eminent domain, a power to force the sale of private property for the public good. While we made a strong case for the city of Dupont to do so, the timid town councilors refused to consider this in spite of public support, fearing the financial burden and a potential legal battle. 

As a solely rain-fed system, the watershed I advocate for, the Clover-Chambers watershed, is uniquely harmed by these warehouse projects. The impervious surfaces created by large buildings, asphalt, and even the non-native turf grasses repel the water needed to replenish our wells and flush them into storm drain and retention ponds, picking up pollutants like the salmon-killer 6-PPD, found in most tire dust, along the way. Add in the state of drought we find ourselves in today, with rainfall at 50% of average (75% is considered drought conditions), and we find ourselves in a water crisis. Lakewood, Spanaway, Dupont, JBLM, and Parkland all rely on water drawn from aquifer wells. Tacoma also considers the aquifer its back-up water supply, should water from the Green River run low. Warehouse impacts are being felt in the rest of the county as well, like in Puyallup, where the Puyallup tribe has filed an appeal against the city and a new mega-warehouse that would pave over critical farmland. To neighboring King County, we also must remember the loss of the farmlands in the Kent valley, which are now almost entirely warehouses. 

As climate change worsens, it’s expected that a majority of alpine glaciers will vanish in the next 25-50 years, meaning more water demand and less availability from here on out. Global temperatures are rising as well, as is population and demand for electricity. There is absolutely more that can be done for mitigation. Warehouses are a blank canvass for the production of solar energy. Permeable pavement and eco-friendly design like green roofs, tree retention, native landscaping, or even submerged structures would reduce the blight on the environment. And at the core of the issue, communities need to be able to democratically plan the communities they live in, and if needed, reject economic plunder. Under the madness of capitalist development, we must stop condemning our future to a hydrophobic, polluting, heat island Warehouse Hell.

by Sean Arent

On Wednesday, November 19th, Hogsett’s ILEA board presented several models that do not solve the real problems that threaten quality public education in Indianapolis. ILEA members, parents, teachers, advocates for […]

With record member turnout, and 96 percent of voters in favor, Buffalo DSA has voted to endorse Adam Bojak for New York State Assembly in District 149. The Buffalo DSA Steering Committee looks forward to working with Adam and his campaign toward a socialist future for Western New York.

Adam has been a dedicated, dues-paying member of Buffalo DSA since 2017. A leader in the chapter’s early years, and previously endorsed for Assembly in 2020, he has organized primarily with our Infrastructure (formerly Housing) and Electoral Committees. Adam’s commitment to DSA and its principles is also evident across a decade of fighting for the working class. In addition to serving as assigned counsel in Family Court, he takes on tenant legal cases pro bono. Over the past decade, he has never charged a housing justice client for services.

Through a robust endorsement process, the chapter determined that Adam’s campaign shares our goals for housing justice, universal healthcare, labor rights, and social equity. Additionally, despite New York’s undemocratic closed primaries and ballot access hurdles hindering Buffalo DSA’s political independence, the campaign nonetheless shows potential to build toward a true workers’ party. For too long, Republicans and Democrats alike have exploited our class and ignored our needs; Adam’s proud, socialist campaign offers us new ways to fight the capitalist status quo and agitate the masses.

Last, but not least, the incredible turnout we saw in this vote shows the strength of the American socialist movement, and of our organization. We urge all members and inspired supporters to help Buffalo DSA sustain our organizing–not just for Adam, but for our entire political project. This is our chance to build on our momentum for Good Cause Eviction and the New York Health Act, and continue to support workplace organizing and the labor movement. 

We need you. Join DSA today and get involved in our committee work, to learn the same skills and principles that brought Adam’s campaign to life.

On Wednesday, River Valley DSA members successfully passed a pro-labor city council resolution in Easthampton in collaboration with UFCW Local 1459 and the Western MA Area Labor Federation. The resolution was also supported by the Easthampton Education Association, which spoke in solidarity at the rally before the city council meeting. The resolution and rally were […]

By: Juan Reardon & Nils McCune

November 2025

“Formation must be linked to a strategic political project for the transformation of society. This very project is constantly under development and formation must be part of the process. For this reason, formation cannot be dogmatic nor spontaneous but instead should be prepared, planned and combined with the development of the strategic objectives of the organization.” 

– La Via Campesina

Introductory Note

Across a vast Latin American landscape, the imperialist project of past and present runs up against a plurality of organized resistance. Be they extractive mining conglomerates and the dams they need built, corporate agribusiness and its endless expansion of the agricultural frontier, or the financial capital behind it all, the incursions of capital into Latin America – with the collaboration of corrupt local elites – are almost always met by an extraordinary diversity of worker-, student-, peasant-, Indigenous-, Black-, LGBTQIAPN+- and women-led movements defending their lived, lands, waters, territories, peoples, histories, and horizons. When one looks specifically to the countryside, Latin American social movements stand firm in the recuperation of ancestral knowledge, the defense of multiple ways of life, and the popular construction of food sovereignty – the right of all peoples to define, develop and defend their own food systems through the exercise of rights to land and territory, agroecological production systems, and an end to free market neoliberal impositions. In contrast to the amnesia characteristic of imperial ‘America’ [See: Monroe to Trump], the place known as Nuestra América (Our America) is the carrier of a historical memory rich in organizational experiences and approaches towards collectively building social justice, sovereignty, rights and self-determination. In the face of military dictatorships, fascism and armed extractive industries, the struggle for democratic transitions towards just societies has developed a creative maturation of strategies and tactics among popular movements, with political education at the heart of many.

 

The Coordinadora Latinoamericana de Organizaciones del Campo, or Latin American Coordination of Rural Organizations (CLOC), is a “movement of movements” that includes all Latin American member organizations of the global peasant movement La Via Campesina (LVC). CLOC’s remarkable experience in combating colonialism, racism, patriarchy, agribusiness and capital’s extractivist agenda has given rise to a continental system of political education beyond the scope of traditional cadrefication. CLOC’s is a process of experience- and reflection-based education the movements call formación. 

CLOC-Via Campesina: Who, What, Where and Why?

The Latin American Coordination of Rural Organizations (CLOC-Vía Campesina) is a continental articulation of peasant, farmworker, fisherfolk, and other land- and territory-based movements with decades of direct experience in the struggle for human, economic, social, cultural, and political rights. The accumulated experience of cadre within CLOC is deep, as many come from the collective experience of building revolutionary transformation in local, national, continental and international contexts. Born in 1994 from an alliance of people’s organizations mobilized in what was known as “500 years of Indigenous, Black, and Popular Resistance”, a protest against official celebrations of Columbus’ arrival to the Americas, CLOC’s steadfast embrace of class struggle offers a profound and pluralistic understanding of socialism, as it stands at the forefront of the struggles against patriarchy, racism, colonialism, capitalism, neoliberalism, and imperialism in the effort to build a new society free of oppressors or oppressed in right relation to Mother Earth. 

Currently, the CLOC includes 84 member organizations in Latin American and Caribbean countries. Some of its more well-known members are Brazil’s Landless Workers’ Movement (MST) [See: Brazil’s MST by DSA], Chile’s National Association of Rural and Indigenous Women (ANAMURI), Cuba’s National Association of Family Farmers (ANAP), Haiti’s Papaya Peasant Movement (MPP), Puerto Rico’s Organización Boricuá for Ecological Agriculture (Boricuá) and Guatemala’s Peasant Unity Committee (CUC). Among its many efforts, CLOC is dedicated to consolidating food sovereignty at the levels of nation and territory by multiplying experiences and knowledge in agroecology. To confront the living legacies of colonialism, patriarchy and racism, CLOC connects peasant organizing efforts with those of workers, students, and others disproportionately demeaned and disenfranchised by corporate interests. 

At the global level, CLOC brings together the struggles for peasants’ rights in Nuestra America with permanent solidarity with the Palestinian people in their struggle for life, rights, and sovereignty. The CLOC campaign “Sovereign Peoples, People in Solidarity”, for example, helps people across the continent hear from and connect with the efforts of the people of Cuba, Haiti, Venezuela, and Nicaragua to build and sustain transformative political projects while resisting U.S. imperialist aggression and unilateral coercive sanctions. Unapologetic in nature, CLOC expresses a firm and public commitment to “furthering debates that contribute to building the theoretical and programmatic foundations for a socialist project in the Americas.” 

Many of these debates take place through CLOC’s formación infrastructure, processes, and programs. The CLOC’s ‘Banners of Struggle’, available online in Spanish, give a sense of its vision for structural, democratic change to defend life, biodiversity, and rights in the Americas:

• Popular, Comprehensive, and Redistributive Agrarian Reform
• Peasant Agroecology based on the Recovery of Ancestral Knowledge
• Food Sovereignty based on Public Policy supporting the Peasant and Small Farm Sectors
• Implementation of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas (UNDROP)
• The Construction of Popular Peasant Feminism
• Alliance-Building with Organizations of Other Sectors
• Youth-led Processes for Intergenerational Renewal
• Internationalist Solidarity
• Political, Ideological and Technical Training or formación…

What is Formación?

People’s movements develop a collective identity based on a shared analysis and, above all, a shared experience of struggle for a fundamentally different society. As noted in DSA’s 2023 article on Paulo Freire and Political Education, “there can be no theory that doesn’t inform practice, and vice versa. While distinguishable, the two must be inseparable, two sides of the same coin”. While in some contexts [See: Global North] for one person to wear “many hats” – to the point that often there can be meetings with more organizations “present” than people in the meeting – this can be problematic and is often an obstacle in the construction of a collective political project. Within the CLOC’s political culture, it is understood to be much more advantageous to have a shared analysis and greater levels of organicity – which is a kind of organizational culture that helps individuals understand where their unique contributions can be most impactful and appreciated within the larger needs of the collective. There is a popular saying that reflects this concept: “It’s more helpful to have one idea in a hundred people than one person with a hundred ideas.” Movements create specific moments for people to share their unique thoughts, reflections and opinions – with consensus and unity being the overall objectives – adjoined by moments in which members are expected to carry out responsibilities effectively without imposing their own desires or opinions on the collective’s agreed-upon commitments.

Formation is simply one part of a larger whole. As social movements or popular organizations attempt to change society, they must take action of some kind – whether that be through street protests, sit-ins, occupations, encampments, boycotts, lawsuits and beyond. Action is a moment in a long-term struggle, and should be planned and carried out collectively. Organization is another moment; this is when people debate and decide what their long-term vision is, and what kind of a structure can help them get where they hope to go. Assemblies, internal elections, designation of roles, and the creation of political positions are all part of organization. Formation, in turn, is a moment of struggle in which people temporarily remove themselves from action in order to critically reflect upon that action. Formation gives form to the action of an organization. By studying their own experiences and mistakes, as well as those of others across borders or throughout history, organizations can more effectively adjust their strategies and tactics, to be able to return to their practice with a more accurate understanding of their context and situation. The cycle of action-reflection-action, like the practice-theory-practice cycle described by Paulo Freire, is part of a collective movement through history known as praxis, as people resist and learn from that resistance. Formation is part of a critical process of collective self-preparation for world-changing activity.

According to La Via Campesina’s International Formation Collective, of which CLOC is an integral part, “formation is an infinite and permanent process of producing, socializing and sharing new knowledge derived from confronting ideas and comparing them with reality. It is a process of producing and reproducing the knowledge of our own reality, including the commitment to seek and distinguish our unique reality from the rest. All of this, of course, not only to understand the world but with the intent to transform it.”

Over 30 years into its development, the many movements that make up CLOC now maintain multiple formation processes with diverse tracks and methodologies. Designed to prepare new and experienced grassroots cadre for a lifelong – often difficult and dangerous – journey of political engagement for social transformation, these processes also serve to strengthen internationalist unity within diversity that is unique to the CLOC and La Via Campesina. 

A few of the CLOC’s most prominent formation processes are:

• Latin American Institutes of Agroecology (IALA)

Beginning with the IALA Paulo Freire in Barinas, Venezuela, the IALA model of peasant universities created by and for member organizations of the CLOC has now spread to include Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Mexico, Nicaragua, Paraguay, Puerto Rico and Venezuela. These autonomous social movement universities provide advanced training in agroecological production methods, as well as organizing skills, dialogue, and reflection to learn from concrete struggles and improve the practice of social movements in territories. 

The IALAs are a space of Latin American integration that recover the historical memory of 500 years of colonialism and over 200 years of formal independence while US neocolonialism has continued.

• Political and Ideological Formation Schools

Organized at two distinct levels – regional grassroots leadership and continental organizational leadership – the CLOC’s Political and Ideological Schools aim to consolidate an experienced collective of cadre at the national, regional, and continental levels capable of accompanying popular struggles with political clarity and determination. 

At the regional levels, both the “Andean School” (Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia) and “School of the Southern Cone” (Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay) host grassroots organizers in a diversity of national venues – schools, churches, cultural centers, and more – where selected participants share organizational updates, contextual analyses, contributing to a dialogue of knowledge as well as mística, meals and other daily commitments (cooking, cleaning, studying, and more).

At the continental level, the rotative 15-day Egidio Brunetto School (held in different contexts and countries each time it’s organized) and multiple short-courses held at Managua’s Francisco Morazán International Peasant School host leadership development processes for those who have completed courses and processes at the regional levels.    

• Continental Women’s Schools

The CLOC’s Continental Women’s Schools are about empowering rural women organizers in what La Via Campesina defines as “popular peasant feminism,” a uniquely movement-based contribution to grassroots feminism that centers class analysis and the collective construction of food sovereignty. The most recent CLOC Women’s School took place in the Dominican Republic (May 2024) –- the sixth such school in recent years. In it, Nicaraguan feminist leader Yolanda Areas Blass noted that, “each region in La Via Campesina used to organize their own political education processes. Now we have been able to strengthen the school system of the Women’s Articulation from the first International Women’s School carried out in Africa, where we advanced globally in the discussion about popular peasant feminism and about women’s political participation.” From grassroots to global, the CLOC and Via Campesina’s popular peasant feminism are contributing to other important formation processes such as the Berta Cáceres International Feminist Organizing School (IFOS).

• Continental Communication Schools

Involving many of the same grassroots leaders engaged in the above mentioned processes, the CLOC’s Continental Communication Schools are an equally important cycle of action, reflection, and matured action designed specifically to deepen political and technical expertise in “popular anti-capitalist communication.” According to their own reporting, the 5th Continental Communication School (online due to Covid-19) included critical reflections on “the concept of internationalism and its implications for popular struggles” as well as “the ongoing challenges facing communication in CLOC organizations.” 

Participant communicators, “learned about and evaluated CLOC’s current continental communication work as a counter-hegemonic strategy in the class struggle.” They then, “delved into the nature of CLOC’s communication, current strategies and challenges, internal and external communication tools,” before engaging in practical, “workshops strengthening skills in areas such as photography, video, audio, graphic design, social media, newsletters, and internal communications”. 

“The rich process of political education in popular communication,” left participants of the 2020 course with, “many lessons learned, challenges identified and, above all else, a growing collective (of communicators) with transformative dreams and hopes, strengthened by a revolutionary and internationalist spirit.”

• Continental Youth Encampments

Last but by no means least, the CLOC’s multiple youth-led processes feed into their own larger political education process known as ‘Encampments’. Each held in a unique national/historical context, hosted by the youth of a CLOC-LVC member organization, dozens of organized youth gather to, “promote formation and reaffirm the principles of CLOC Via Campesina as well as to exchange productive experiences, celebrate Latin American and Caribbean culture, cultivate the mystique and strengthen the peasant struggles of the regions of our territories.” In Spanish only, the following documentary shares some of the voices, smiles, and experiences of the XVII Youth Encampment of 2022.

Closing Remarks

Latin America’s Coordination of Rural Organizations (CLOC) is a living, breathing, and learning articulation of people’s movements prioritizing the political development of cadre within a larger process of action, reflection, and matured action aimed at consolidating a socially just and ecologically sound society for all. It listens to and learns from its own organizers – encouraging honest debate amongst the many – while encouraging friends and allies to contribute their own experiences through a dialogue of knowledges. From a place of organizational strength and sincerity, the CLOC learns while teaching and teaches while learning. For those of us engaged in our own processes of political education for societal transformation, the CLOC inspires. 

Readers interested in contacting the CLOC directly can do so in both English and or Spanish emailing: secretaria.cloc.vc@gmail.com. 

See Also: 

https://cloc-viacampesina.net

https://www.instagram.com/cloclvc/?hl=en

https://web.facebook.com/cloc.viacampesina

https://web.facebook.com/friendsatc/?locale=es_LA&_rdc=1&_rdr#

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