Empire as a Way of Life In a culture where we are trained to be consumers, as organizers it is very easy to fall into the trap of censoring ideas to the community that we think they would not "buy," appealing only to what we think is palatable to consume. For example, as our daily lives are directly connected to an international world economy, empire is still not a word we hear or say very often, even though it has shaped our existence and our worldview. From the Nike sneakers worn on the feet of teenagers to the image of a Texaco refinery looming over Wilmington, multinational capital is ever present in our daily lives. In February 1995, I traveled to Ecuador with a Strategy Center delegation to meet with Acción Ecológica, a creative grassroots organization also taking on Texaco. Our goals: to energize our Watchdog environmental organi-zation's Texaco Boycott work, to get a first-hand education in Third World insurgencies, and to strengthen the international demand that Texaco pay reparations to Ecuador for its drill-and-run despoliation of the rain forest. Throughout Los Angeles County, we worked to popularize the facts: Texaco is a multibillion dollar corporation that emits more than 200,000 pounds of toxics into the Harbor Area annually. Texaco dumped over 17 million gallons of crude oil and 20 billion gallons of toxic waste water into the Ecuadoran rain forest and rivers. Texaco has been one of the leaders in working to gut any existing environmental regulations internationally. Our goal was not simply a transferal of information about international capital, but a transformation of consciousness about the Harbor Area's relationship to an international world economy. When we were in Ecuador, Esperanza Martinez of Acción Ecológica said, "People in the First World have to give something up to equalize wealth with the Third World. Your wealth is directly connected to our poverty." Esperanza asserted that the growth of capitalism in so-called "developed" countries was directly connected to the process of underdevelopment and extraction of resources from the Third World. As organizers in some of the poorest communities of color in Los Angeles, we are grappling with how to raise consciousness about the structural difference between oppressed communities of color in the United States and the subordinate relationship of the Third World to the First World that all of us living in the "belly of the beast" must acknowledge. Otherwise, even the poorest communities of color that suffer national oppression in the U.S. can be enlisted to participate in international structures of domination. Popularizing the abuses of multinationals in the Third World is a first step in generating an internationalist consciousness. But that must be accompanied by a plan to expose how those same multinationals produce impoverished communities in the U.S., their role of domination in the world economy, and our own roles in legitimizing those power relations. For example, post-rebellion Los Angeles' Rebuild L.A. and other public-private partnerships have strengthened the power of capital to create urban pools of low-wage labor and lax environmental standards. Local acceptance of these projects validates the power of multi-national capital internationally. When working with local institutions in the Wilmington area, we often found that, even after major accidents, church and school officials accepted donations from petrochemical giants intent on silencing community leaders.
Raising consciousness in urban poor communities means challenging and engaging the community about what kind of local institutions we want: institutions that directly
or indirectly support corporations like Texaco or those that support social movements in countries such as Ecuador.RITA BURGOS |
