Hillary Lazar: This special issue intends to provide space for reflecting on where we are today, and where have we come in the last couple of decades since the heyday of global justice movement and what some of the key takeaways are that we can glean from two decades of mobilizing. Where I would like to begin are conversation is hearing about where you were both in terms of your own political work at the turn of the 21st century leading into that Seattle moment. What were the struggles that you were involved with? How did it relate to that Seattle moment and the mobilizations during the heyday of the global justice movement? And what trajectory did that put the two of you on?
Walda Katz-Fishman: Fundamentally my trajectory starts with my childhood in the Jim Crow South in the 50s and 60s and then in the 70s, when I went to Detroit for grad school and was introduced to Marxism, which I immediately embraced. It explained so much of the world I lived in, in the US South—which for me is the belly of the best—in terms of race, class, and patriarchy and the intractability of trying to reform capitalism. So, I started on a journey of studying Marxism as a tool for political struggle and work within political organizations, which was initially the Communist Labor Party. And this gave me the foundation, which has guided me and steadied my understanding of the revolutionary process of race and class in the American context. Then, in the 80s, just twenty years after the Voting Rights Act, there was a major attack on voting rights in the South, particularly for rural poor black folks, which was anchored in Alabama, where Jeff Sessions was the Attorney General of the State of Alabama. This led to a multiracial group of people that were part of trying to broaden out the franchise in the South. So, it was at this point, that Jerome and I met and were both working to address the Southern question, which is how Project South began—which initially was just as an informal educational project that worked on this issue of disenfranchisement and the broader questions of race, class, and poverty in the South.
Through Project South, and the Up and Out of Poverty Now network, we were effectively fighting the effects of neoliberalism (although that is not what we called it at the time), and the attack on welfare. This is really when we were beginning to see the on-the-ground impact of these new reforms and policies as capitalism entered into a crisis period during the Regan administration. At that time, we were also beginning to think about the interrelationship of chattel slavery, colonialism, and neocolonialism on the African continent, and the relationship to the genocide of indigenous in this country as well as between the black and the indigenous community. Which, of course, also relates to the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), an incredibly important piece in the struggles for black, brown, and indigenous folks, who are some of the most oppressed segments of the working class. After all, this is when we began to see the consolidating of neoliberalism under Clinton’s administration. And that is where we were, in the 90s as things began to really kick off in terms of the global movement of resistance.
Jerome Scott: I am originally from Detroit, where I was born and raised. I came from a very poor community called Black Bottom and went into the military to try to escape the economic situation there. And I ended up in Vietnam, which is really the experience that turned my life around—it was the experience of being in a war zone that made me consider what was it that I believed and re-think why I was doing what I was doing. Vietnam made me realize that you should never go anywhere or do anything that you cannot at least explain to yourself. And that question really became the central one governing my political development. Vietnam also made me question what I thought I knew about the United States and politics. For instance, it made me reframe my definition of patriotism. Patriotism is not to blindly do anything for your country, but is really about fighting for your country to be the best that it can. And if that means fighting against the government, that is what it means. And because Vietnam ushered me into this new frame of mind, when I got back and went to work in the factories, I already intended to hook up with people who were organizing and working to make this country the place it should be and not what it was.
So, I ended up at the Ford Plant in Detroit and becoming part of the Revolutionary Union Movement, a part of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers. That is how I got involved with the revolutionary process. It was after we had been doing work in the factory for a few years that we began to be introduced to the question of Marxism. And we decided that this framework best fit working-class people and those who were at the point of production. It helped us to realize how the process worked and that we were producing a lot more value than we were getting paid in the factory. As Walda spoke to, with this as my guiding framework, once I was involved with Project South, there were the two issues that actually connected us up with this global struggle that was developing; one was runaway shops, particularly in Tennessee and Georgia, and the other was this whole question of NAFTA and how that would affect the working people in and around the Southern part of this country.
Lazar: Were either of you involved with the Seattle moment and, if so, how does that fit into this broader narrative of connecting the experiences of working class folks of color in the US South with global struggles?
Katz-Fishman: I was not personally in Seattle. As I mentioned, Project South, which Jerome and I were among the founders of, was a revolutionary organization. And we were both doing political education in different ways and were also involved in these mass struggles—Up and Out of Poverty, challenging NAFTA, and so forth. And it was our assessment, that there should be a social movement organization that was dedicated to the mission and the purpose of doing political education to allow movement actors to stay grounded, clear, and in the revolutionary process for the long haul. After all, social movements tend to be very spontaneous, and are also very responsive to internal and external influences. So, the question is—after the big events like Seattle, after the big demonstrations, where is the analysis of capitalism? Where is the movement? And what is that interrelationship if we are really committed to the transformation of capitalism into socialism and communism? That was always the orientation that we had in Project South to political education and its role in the struggles against globalization.
So, along with developing political toolkits and being intentional about who was on the board or involved with our networks, we were also attentive to our ties with broader struggles and mobilizations, including the Zapatistas. One of our board members, Guillermo Glenn, who was Mexican-American, was particularly critical in helping to educate Project South about what the Zapatista movement represented in the context of the development of neoliberalism. And he was really the one who said, "We need to begin understand this, because this is at the center of the global justice movement." So, even though we were not involved in Seattle or the official Zapatista encuentros, our orientation and understanding shifted. We were also involved on the ground with local Zapatista solidarity and support groups, which often get forgotten or overshadowed in the story by the well-known, larger NGOs and activist organizations. And it is important to remember the bottom-up actors—often, working class, black and brown and indigenous folks—who were the core of the alter-globalization movement.
We also embraced the necessity of developing a toolkit and timeline to look at the U.S. experience within the context of globalization. We now saw the U.S. movement for justice and equality at that period in history as informed by neoliberalism. We understood that the crisis of capitalism was deepening. And it was during the Southwestern Network Economic Environmental Justice convening in Jemez, New Mexico—a year before Seattle and primarily attended by working class people of color and our organizations—when we began to explicitly ask: "How come organizations have co-opted the inter-globalization movement when we have been fighting it since slavery and genocide in the Mexican American war?” This is where these Jemez Principles came about. It was really this attention to thinking about the role of working class people of color in the anti-globalization movement and the need to give them more voice that eventually led to Project South being invited to have a delegation in the World Social Forum in Puerto Alegre.
Scott: If you look at it politically, for us in the South, we were on a different track to the World Social Forum and the alter-globalization movement than the people who gathered in Seattle. We were on the track that led from NAFTA and runaway shops and trying to figure out what was happening with the industrial base that was being wiped out in the South. It was the two different tracks that ended up coming together at that second World Social Forum.
Katz-Fishman: As Jerome said, we were always part of that whole Southern anchor, which is a different trajectory than activists coming to struggles for global justice and the World Social Forum from Seattle and in a somewhat different way. I even think that the folks in Detroit that we have these historic relationships with approached it from a much more proletarian and proletarian intellectual perspective than a 20th century NGO, nonprofit industrial complex perspective. It is important to lift up that there were a whole lot of folks who got to this understanding of the crisis of global capitalism and how it was destroying our communities and the planet from these different paths. The proletarian working class intellectuals, for example, are very different than college educated intellectuals. And this is a critically important part of our collective story.
Lazar: In addition to highlighting that there was not a single path to engaging in this global struggle, you are also lifting up the critical work coming from black and brown folks and those who are most impacted by the deleterious effects of neoliberalism, which are often invisiblized in our historical narratives of global struggle. Related to this, it would be helpful to hear more from you on the interrelated dynamics between race and class in the alter-globalization movement.
Katz-Fishman: If one is an indigenous person in America today or a southerner of African descent whose ancestors were enslaved or sharecroppers—this is not a new struggle. That is an absolutely essential point, that the white supremacy of American society, which legitimated and justified both indigenous genocide, chattle slavery, manifest destiny, and the wars of conquest of Mexico and Puerto Rico, informs the experience of working class folks. Certainly, it is very complicated and nuanced, but class exploitation and oppression, for instance, can be intensified for workers of color. We can also think about how this plays out by region. The South essentially became an internal colony of the North, post-Civil War. And if you go to parts of the South today, much as if you go to the Indian reservations, things have not changed much in terms of experiences of poverty, oppression, exploitation. White supremacy is not only a justification for exploitation, but is, for the ruling class, a strategic tool for the division of the working class, which we see playing out before our eyes today. If you can keep the working class divided and if white workers think that black and immigrant workers are their enemy, then the ruling class has won.
Scott: I want to add a couple of things about this question of race and class. Walda mentioned earlier that Project South developed as a political education organization and that this whole question was one of the fundamental reasons why we understood that a number one priority is to educate and be educated around these issues. After all, if we cannot get people to understand that we live in a class society that is dominated by the ruling class, it will be difficult to embrace and enter the revolutionary process. Consequently, we have to ensure that people understand these fundamentals of capitalist society and how it relates to white supremacy, which is one of most powerful ideological weapons. This ideology tells white workers—no matter how poor you are, no matter how downtrodden, you are still better than those other black and brown folks over there. So, our ability to get people to understand the role that race and class white supremacy play in our society became one of the most important aspects of political education in this entire process.
Katz-Fishman: The only way to abolish white supremacy is to abolish capitalism. So, in Project South and all our work, the political education piece was not just about anti-globalization, but it was about challenging oppression and exploitation, including dynamics of white supremacy. And the question, then, of how to build unity within the working class struggle is absolutely critical. This was something we also worked to address in the world social forum process.
Lazar: Can you elaborate on your work with the Social Forum coming out of the global justice period and the ways this informs your current analysis of the interrelated struggles against capitalism, but also white supremacy, patriarchy, and systems of oppression?
Katz-Fishman: During that delegation to Puerto Alegre, many of the grassroots, often women of color led organizations, were really fighting this image that there was no movement in the United States because the US is synonymous with imperialism and empire. They wanted to say there is another story of participation and social struggle coming out of the United States. Coming out of this, in 2004, Grassroots Global Justice was formed, which became the umbrella group for many working class and people of color organizations, including Project South. And, for us, we saw that we had to have the buy in of the most depressed and exploited peoples, otherwise there would be no real process. They needed to be the ones to step up and form the leadership. Only then could we have this forum. This again, speaks to the race-class question. Although many people would think of this process as raising dynamics about race in grassroots organizing, we would think of it one about race-class.
Scott: We had a lot of discussions as to whether or not we wanted to put the kind of resources that it would take to have a social forum and/or to be a part of the global social forum process. In the end, our political thinking was that, of course, we have to be involved in this process because what we are dealing with is a global movement. And if we do not lay the basis for unity among the people around the world who are also struggling against the same enemy—capitalism—if we do not take this opportunity to build those relationships, we might not get another chance to do so. We saw this as not just activity, something that we could do, but we saw it as part of the revolutionary process and part of an opportunity to help others around the world to understand that there were deep and developing struggles happening in the US and particularly in the South, which were tied into this global movement.
Katz-Fishman: Yes. And we eventually had a 2010 social forum in Detroit, which led to many relationships and conversations that spoke about being a world working class movement. But one of the issues that really became visible at that time, is that there were forces within the social forum process and social movement organizations that said, above all, we are fighting neoliberalism and a certain set of policies within global capitalism. Many were not yet ready to talk about Marxism and the revolutionary process. They could not yet envision getting rid of the problems and think about what it means to have a transformed, co-operative world. Now ten years later, I think we are in a new place, where people are more willing to talk about in the revolutionary process—not just reform—and what we must do to protect humanity and the planet from oppression, exploitation, and the destructive forces of capitalism.
Lazar: What do you feel movements need to be doing today to advance the revolutionary process?
Katz-Fishman: The struggle is out there. Spontaneous movements are popping off. It is everywhere. And so, one thing, is for folks to really connect to some part of the struggle where they are located. Jerome and I have always worked to support popular education, but this is a moment when we people really need to understand what global capitalism is—from the 1400s to 2020—and what its trajectory has been. Patriarchy, white supremacy, and climate destruction, are part and parcel of this overall system and trajectory. So, we also need to have more people see how different segments of the working class, which is multiracial and multi-gendered, are more adversely affected than we have ever been in the history of humanity. And, at the same time, that we do have one common enemy and can craft a common vision. In Project South we developed this popular way to talk about the revolutionary process: consciousness, vision, and strategy. We need to push people to develop a vision of the actual solutions . . . Healthcare for all, housing for all, education for all, food for all. Only renewable energy. We need to think about how we struggle with each other in way that recognizes that our struggles are interconnected, without being identical. As we learned from the League of Revolutionary Black Workers—what we need is to study and struggle—and to see these interrelationships of oppression and exploitation.
Scott: I have a very short answer for you. In this moment, our job is to make Proletarians intellectuals and intellectuals Proletarian, so that we end up with an organization of Proletarian Intellectuals.
