Prospects for Global Solidarity
Today is May Day, International Workers Day. A day to celebrate worker’s struggle, commemorate invisibilized histories, and continue building movements for economic justice and liberation. For the past several weeks, I have been involved in organizing with the Student Labor Action Coalition on our Defending Oberlin’s Financial Accessibility (DOFA) campaign. Today, we will be speaking out, marching, and occupying administrative buildings to demand financial accessiblity, worker justice, and an end to police/state violence. We will also be gathering, sharing food and stories, performing, dancing and celebrating. Today is May Day.
In this class, we’ve been talking a lot about poverty and displacement, migrants and borders, globalized flows of capital and bodies that are regulated and controlled. Through narrative, literature and theory we’ve been exploring these concepts, attending to difference in lived experience, and attempting to draw connections between parallel systems of oppression. Our most recent text on ‘Planetarity’ asks us to questions Area Studies, Ethnic/Cultural Studies, and Identity Politics, perhaps even transcending a ‘Global’ focus for a ‘Planetary’ one. In an age of planetary systems collapse, globalized localities, and intertwining diasporas, it is impossible to separate any single thing out from the whole.
All the while, we are left wondering, ‘What is to be done?’ Is it possible to resist the ever expansive neoliberal regime? Is it possible to slow climate destabilization and imagine a future on a livable planet? Is it possible to find a nuanced unity while elevating identity and individual experience?
I would say, it is not only possible, it is our duty. Assata Shakur reminds us, “It is our duty to fight for our freedom. It is our duty to win. We must love each other and support each other. We have nothing to lose but our chains."
Today I will be out there struggling for financial accessibility and an immediate Tuition Freeze. Today I will be out there supporting my co-worker and friend, who was summarily fired from Campus Dining Services because temp workers have no rights at this college. Today I will be out there in solidarity with movements against debt, austerity, economic injustice, exploitation, and police/state violence. These struggles are intertwined. Our liberation must be collective. Planetary struggle is a struggle over imagination, as much as it is a struggle for material changes in the world. Today I believe, “We are unstoppable, another world is possible!”
