Street roots
O c t 28, 2011
Occupiers can learn from those who succeeded before
BY DEVAN SCHWARTZ
CONTRIB U TIN G W R ITER
opened Augusta Dwyer’s “Broke but
Unbroken: Grassroots Social Movements
and the Radical Solutions to Poverty” on
October 6th. It was the morning Occupy
Portland began. For weeks I’d followed
Occupy Wall Street coverage: articles,
interviews and tweets either optimistic or
pessimistic, enthusiastic or embittered,
angry or dismissive. Some politicians
disavowed OWS while
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others supported it.
Unions
located in
broke
cheap-rent buildings
unbroken
near the Twin Towers
site and Zucotti Park
had started to show
1 1 ■
UN»
.fK.
support The protests
were modeled after
Arab Spring protests,
in turn influenced by
■
Civil Rights-era
Broke but
protests in the U.S.
Unbroken:
and others across the
Grassroots Social globe.
Movements and
Call them trickle-
down protests.
the Radical
Portland is a fraction
Solutions to
of New York’s size and
Poverty, by
certainly not the
Augusta Dwyer,
epicenter of financial
176 pages
institutions on the
scale of Wall Street,
even if concentrated wealth is reflected in
West Hills mansions and Sunset Highway.
Porsches. Portland is a city known for its
natural beauty, gray .climate, vibrant arts and
music. Yet like many cities, Portland suffers
deindustrialization aftershocks and is
propped up by a flimsy service economy.
Unemployment ranks among the top in the
nation, as do the figures for Portland’s
homeless population.
As demonstrators met under the
Burnside Bridge, their noisy carnival ensued
with chanting and costumes. Some sign-
carriers had concrete demands (Reinstate
Glass-Steagall!), while others shouted snarky
or vulgar slogans, excited by the prospect of
protest Dwyer’s book found a welcome
home in my back pocket, baptized by
Northwest rain. An independent journalist,
Dwyer traveled to Brazil, Indonesia, India
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and Argentina to track their grassroots
movements’ impacts on the global
community.
In Brazil, Dwyer narrates the experiences
of Paulo Barros Da Silva. Da Silva joined the
Landless Rural Workers Movement after
working land for years with no prospect for
ownership. Da Silva knows what it means to
occupy — he lived for years in a tent camp,
un acampado, before winning land rights.
This man’s struggles and successes mirror
those of the larger movement, a strategy
employed throughout Dwyer’s book.
“Occupy! Resist! Protest!” is one slogan
cited by Dwyer, who examines movements’
development, their organizational structure
and educational ethos, drawing upon
another Paulo, Paulo Friere — well known
for his 1968 “Pedagogy of the Oppressed.” A
forerunner in community education, Friere
taught illiterate adults to read by focusing
on their own experiences. Dwyer cites
Friere, “It is not enough to teach ‘Eva viu a
una’ (Eva saw the grape), if we don’t know
Eva’s position in the social context, who
produced the grape and who profited from
its production.”
To give some context and scale, Brazil’s
Landless movement occupied 150 estates in
April 2004, composed of 200,000 families.
Dwyer discusses achievements from such
grassroots movements and occupations, like
land for the landless, alongside the
possibilities of infighting and cooptation by
political parties —“like a hug from a boa
constrictor.”
Another struggle over land.is embodied
by the. Peasant Union of Indonesia, based in
the world’s fourth most populous country.
The organization was born in response to
deforestation (10 acres per minute) and
anemic peasant. fights,within private-and,,
government-owned forests. The author
asserts that the Indonesian movement has
since “won or reclaimed a million hectares
of land from big plantation owners
cultivating rubber, tea, palm oil and other
commodities.”
Dwyer rubs an interesting wrinkle into
the fight for land and rights when discussing
the presence of Big Conservation. These
are international organizations who seek
“protection” for the land — a noblesounding
goal which displaces those who live and
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the world’s seventh-largest economy shrink
by fifteen percent and their poverty rates
nearly double in a year. Perhaps 100,000
Buenos Aires residents, Los Portenos, took
to scrap-picking as their only means of
income. The middle class shrank and many
became unemployed and unhoused.
Dwyer examines the framing mechanism
that led poor Argentinians’ to shift blame
from themselves to capitalism itself.
Through capitalism, large populations of
factory workers saw their livelihoods
disappear. Yet the factories still remained
and the workers’ knowledge did too. So why
should their work stop, they asked. Why not
keep making tires, ships and breadsticks?
So Argentines formed the grassroots
National Movement of Factories Recovered
by Workers. Since then, cooperatives have
occupied many factories and reopened
them. Their new power structures are
worker-oriented, with democratic elections
and decision-making. Oftentimes factories
boast equal pays “regardless of jobs
(employees) do or responsibilities they take
on.” Dwyer acknowledges that many
factories may not turn huge profits, though
balance sheets change when no longer
focused on “owner costs”— the need for
large profits after paying wages and
expenditures.
Dwyer closes with an idealistic note about
the Argentinian workers which applies to
each of her grassroots movements. “The
worker-managed enterprises of Argentina
thus offer a glimpse into a future where the
creative energy and spirit of the working
class is liberated and the exploitation of the
majority for the profit of a minority is a
thing of the past.”
Though far from exhaustive, Dwyer’s
. “Broke bu t Unbroken” offers an excellent ¿A
lens to frame movements of Brazil,
Indonesia, India and Argentina. For
protestors here in Portland, and at Occupy
Wall Street, there will be no magic formula
— only lessons to learn and knowledge to
share.
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pursue livelihoods there. “Out of the
108,000 areas given official protection
worldwide since 1910,” Dwyer writes, “more
than half were occupied or used by forest
dwellers.”
While preventing bulldozers and
agrobusiness is one thing, displacement of
small-scale farming that maintains
biodiversity is another. Dwyer doesn’t
advocate divestment in The Nature
Conservancy or The World Wildlife Fund,
though she does assert destructiveness in
top-down governments and NGOs alike.
In India, Dwyer brings readers from rural
to urban. The National Slum Dwellers
Federation, as part of the Indian Alliance, is
composed of increasingly-common armies of
the poor. Dwyer tell us that the world sees
200,000 people flee every day from
countrysides to cities. Eighty-five percent of
city occupants in the Third World are slum
dwellers, with one billion worldwide.
Dwyer bases her research in Mumbai, the
world’s slum dwelling capital according to
United Nations data. Their slums are almost
beyond fathomable, and the author employs
camera-style moves for her descriptions:
everything from close-ups (families fighting
for better maintenance of common toilets)
to panoramas of “marginalized lands edging
mushrooming cities” and “customary
wretchedness.”
Again, Dwyer investigates large-scale
successes such as the 70,000 families
Who’ve become housed through the efforts
of the Indian Alliance. She also casts
disparaging light onto foreign assistance
packages called “tied aid” where
governments tie aid money to spending on
goods from their countries or other political
gains. This mismanagement of funds and
ineffective developmental assistance lead
Dwyer to focus on micro-credit, as many
writers do, but also on small-scale savings
circles and crisis-credit funds. Dwyer again
chooses families whose experiences she
tracks and universalizes,
j Of the four grassroots movements,
Argentina’s seems closest to home in
Portland. Argentina was an affluent country
boasting a cosmopolitan Capital City and a
robust economy. Thrown into deep
recession in 2601 by factors including
financial speculation, Argentinians watched
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