Panels
- Panel sessions amongst others ...
- Opening Panel: Balancing Act or Contradiction
- Security-Sector EU?
- Everyday struggles in everyday work
- Movements of Flight and Anti-Racist Interventions
- Opposing the Looting of the Biological Wealth of Asia
Panel sessions amongst others on:
Revolutionary work inside and outside of companies (W. Schaumberg) / Labour disputes in China / Campaign „Cleaners for a better future“ (NL) / Workers Punk University, Labour unions in Slovenia / One-Euro-jobs & precarisation (Stiftung-W) / Persecution of trade unionists in Columbia (C. Olaya)
Frontex: civic-military rejection of refugees (IMI, Antira-Camp-08-group) / Europe as corporate power (with J. Wagner a.o.) / No Border, No Nation, No War? (Panel with B. Drücke, K. Majchrzak a.o.) / The EUrope of polices / The EUropean war politics after the reform contract (T. Pflüger) / „Failed“ states (I. Kuepeli)
Biodiversity and climate change (A. Riekeberg) / Deconstructing the climate change debate / Instrument of legitimization: natural sciences / Agro-sprit: what to do? / Discussion: BUKO position on natural relations (with U. Brand, K. Dietz, M. Wissen a.o.) / Climate politics: Whitewashing and modern selling of indulgences / Events on COP9 with Usha S., Prof. Kuang, J. Nellithanam a.o.
Do we give the debates on integration a cold shoulder on the right? (with B. Watara, Ü. Kosan a.o.) / Solidarity with illegalised persons ( ARI Berlin, kmii Köln) / Ethnicizing of violence against women (D. Lindenberg, H. Vasiri) / Police violence, migration control (D. Vogelskamp) / Migrant labour disputes in agriculture (S. Mendy) / Germany – Country of human rights? (C. Wandji, M. Mbah) / UN-convention on migrant workers
Congress subject and diverse issues: Deprivation of rights in the security state / Struggle for and appropriation of rights in Mexico (LateinamerikaNachrichten) / Promoting elites in universities (T. Bultmann) / Politics of memory, postcolonialism / Women's movement in Turkey / Development politics as domination instrument / The extrem right and the state / and many, many more ...
Opening Panel
Balancing Act or Contradiction - Rights as a Reference Point for an Emancipatory Left?
Much is talked about "Global Social Rights" (GSR). In the radical left spectrum, the references made to GSR are almost inflationary, too, connected with the hope to be able to bundle different fights, establish links between them, to go on the offensive again using these "keywords". And, as a matter of fact, mobilisations have increasingly been connected with demands for rights, e.g. in the "Block G8" campaign as a part of the actions against the G8 summit in Heiligendamm in 2007, the calls for the demonstration against the surveillance state or for the Euromayday. But can the demand for rights really connect and strengthen struggles in various fields, in different regions?
Long years of neo-liberal policies and accompanying wars have aggravated poverty and social polarisation on a world-wide scale and have led to an increase in the number of marginalised people - the "surplus population". They are absorbed by slums, banlieus, prisons, refugee camps. To this the manifold and everyday discrimination along the lines of gender, ethnicity, religion, class is added. Does the reference to rights challenge these mechanisms of exclusion and does it offer possibilities for developing powerful, emancipatory movements - or are other struggles those that strengthen resistances and lead to cracks in the structures of domination?
The Buko31 opening panel discussion will tackle these questions and discuss them under different aspects. Is a reference to rights possible that is critical of power and domination and how could it look like from the point of view of different movements? Does the term 'right' belong to the discourse vocabulary of those in power and should we leave it there or are there good reasons to adopt it? And what, for that matter, distinguishes the discourse on GSR from the discussion about political, cultural, social human rights - and why are these no longer referred to?
Discussion with:
Iris Nowak (AK-Redaktion, Hamburg),
Tomás Herreros (Ateneu candela, Barcelona),
Detlef Hartmann (Rechtsanwalt, Köln),
Gaston Ebua (The Voice Refugee Forum, London).
Security-Sector EU?
In April and May the German parliaments will adopt the EU reform treaty (Treaty of Lisbon). There will probably not be any public debate on it despite its contents being dramatic: It obliges the member states to improve their military capabilities and allows them to deploy their armies within other member states. Furthermore it establishes an EU military budget ("start-up fund"). Even nowadays, EU military missions are decided on without getting public attention as in the case of the Central African Republic, Chad and Guinea-Bissau.
In principle the EU is a neo-liberal project which has committed itself to the opening of markets - by force, if necessary - securing routes of transport and supporting its own industries including the "critical infrastructures" last but not least against the own employees.
The EU has torn down borders - for goods and capital. But Schengen and the European Rights can be suspended anytime if a state claims his internal security to be "threatened". Other boundaries were softened, especially those, which limit security forces of the member states to a certain territory and rule of law. Even the national armies and defence industries came closer to each other and therefore war between the member states indeed seems impossible. The price to be paid seems to be continuous “stabilizing operations” beyond European borders. The EU will find no peace, and analogous to the phrase, that internal and external security can’t be separated , it wont find peace in its interior likewise. To that effect, there is no time left for democratic processes or the legal protection of the individual. There is the need to govern resolutely in efficient procedures and with effective management by "best practices".
Reason enough to acquaint oneself with this new structure of dominance - certainly without making peace with it. We think that life and resistance are possible in the security-sector EU. The sceptical indifference, that parts of the left have shown towards the EU was simply broadening the leeway of its security agents and left the new channels of participation on European level mainly to well financed lobbyists. An European movement from below as a reaction against this supra-national structure of governance takes shape only very slowly. Maybe because there is a lack of ideas how to criticise the EU without promoting nation-state models of participation, fundamental rights and social politics. How can we counter the delimitation from above with an abolishment of boundaries from below? That is one question we want to pose on the BUKO. We want to describe the EU policies on different topics, unmask them to make them exposable.
Everyday struggles in everyday work
In the last years the disfranchised, enslaved and despised people are resising a little bit more again against the oppression by capital, nation and state. Work-struggles have increased again, strikes are “in”. Networks built around Euromayday and revolutionary 1st of May demonstrations organize concrete actions and structures which cannot merely be considered as symbolic politics. The fragmented radical left again discovers the social question. The fight for a material change gains momentum. Many assume that more can be achieved.
Regarding the strikes the difficult question arising is how a group of radical left supporters can participate in solidarity in the struggle of workers on strike from the outside. Rejecting the claim of avant-garde, rejecting (trade union-) officers and Marxist reading circles and agitation groups is a practice getting more common.
But this resistance in the everyday life is tentative: many of the subcultural structures which have been fought for and which should cheat the capital, got bourgeois, were evicted or are caught up in defence struggles. It is difficult to get proactive. Nevertheless the autonomous spaces we have eked out could give us all a strategic moving advantage as those who have to eke out their existence in small flat-sharing communities, families or single household, are much more exposed to the eternal rush for more money: Hartz IV (unemployment and forced labour) breathes down on the back of all of us.
It is about time that we combine workers struggles and everyday resistance stronger. It is about time, that the reproduction of our life will gain more importance again. Reproduction is not solely a dominated process in which women and migrant household workers keep the production process running through their cheap and unpaid work, it is also a process in which it gets possible to come to oneself, at least as long as one gets not distracted by the temptations and amusements of the industry.
In our everyday life we must try to socialize. We must let the relations which have developed between us dance. Groups which have not tried to change the world together up to now need to do so. Solidarity is and stays one of our strongest weapons. The struggles for autonomous spaces can be combined with the work-struggles in a promising manner. A time in which the overcoming of the capitalist wage labour society not merely stays an utopia but gets our everyday practice.
Movements of Flight and Anti-Racist Interventions
Migration patterns are subject to a permanent process of change: Nowadays, the application for asylum is less and less used as a possibility for immigration; other ways - such as family reunifications - have gained in importance. At the same time, racist and hetero-sexist immigration law provisions on "marriage migration" are tightened. Institutional racism is also evident in other areas of law (e.g. German nationality law and social law) and in racist police violence. We want to try and examine these processes of change in order to further develop counter strategies.
The forms of migrants' struggle, self-organisation, and everyday resistance against institutional racism are multifaceted: People take the liberty to stay, although they will then find themselves in precarious life circumstances; they cross borders, form networks. Particularly in the Ruhr Area, a look back reveals that immigrants' struggles have played an important role in the history of the region. Therefore, this aspect must not be forgotten at the BUKO congress. How can we link other struggles to the struggles of migrants today?
Even if refugee migration to Central Europe has nominally declined, the causes of flight are not less numerous now than before - on the contrary: exploitation and violence on a global scale, the destruction of the basis of existence of many people and the accompanying creation of a "surplus population" are progressing. The advancing militarisation of the EU's border regime - keyword "Frontex" - aggravates the risk to lose one’s life while crossing the border. To comprehend this as an interface to the activities of anti-militarist initiatives could open up new possibilities for action.
Migration is discussed in the public arena within the context of an aggressive discourse on integration. On the one hand, this debate can be analysed as a discourse turned in a racist, repressive way against migration / migrants; on the other hand it is used by migrant self-organisations to raise demands for political and social participation. How do we position ourselves on this issue? Should "integration" be rejected as a governmental and societal demand for assimilation and allegiance to the state, or can the term "integration" be turned into a positive one, by understanding it as an antithesis to exclusion?
Again and again, the public discourse has generated racist clichés about migrants - currently this happens by ethnicising "domestic" and sexual violence against women. What alliances can we promote to counter this taking the side of migrant women?
Opposing the Looting of the Biological Wealth of Asia
Biopiracy, Biological Diversity and Food Sovereignty in India, Pakistan and China
From May 19th -30th, the Conference of the Parties of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) will take place in Bonn. The objectives of the CBD are the conservation of biological diversity, the sustainable use of its components and the fair and equitable sharing of the benefits arising out of the utilisation of genetic resources.
The latter will be in the centre of this year’s Conference of the Parties. This Benefit Sharing is supposed to compensate indigenous communities for the extraction of active ingredients from plants they watched over for centuries and which lead to huge profits of the pharmaceutical industry. But the concept of a monetary benefit sharing is opposed by the indigenous communities in the South, since they have a very different understanding of how to deal with nature and knowledge, which does not include any private acquisition. Therefore, they understand the commodification of nature and knowledge as just another attempt of western countries to not only take possession of their resources, but to force them into adopting a western paradigm as well.
We have invited resource persons from India, Pakistan and China to our workshops. The aim is to trigger a discussion on alternatives to the privatisation of nature and knowledge.
» All BUKO workshops about biopiracy in Asia
