Learning To Be Loyal To Each Other : Conversations, Alliances, And Arguments In The Movements Of Movements

I should start this Afterword with a confession. When Jai Sen as editor asked me to write an essay reviewing and responding to this book as a whole, I found the request hugely exciting – but also incredibly daunting, almost impossible to live up to. At an individual level, many of the authors are extraordinary human beings, and figures who carry an aura with them that goes beyond their own : In their lives and their words, they express the realities of the struggles of enormous numbers of people, in some cases across great spans of time, engaging with huge challenges. Collectively, too, this book is an unparalleled record of thought and action, an attempt to grasp something of the immediate backdrop to where our movements are now. It comes out of a long series of practices, among them the ‘auroras of the Zapatistas’, popular struggles in India, the Social Forum movement, the extraordinary summit protests, the attempts to remake states in Latin America and – not least – the work of Jai Sen, Peter Waterman, and their many collaborators, who have attempted to construct conversations between the experiences of these different movements in books like this, online and in and around the Forums. It is a great privilege to read the resulting book, but there is almost a sense of vertigo in trying to grasp the struggles that lie behind the individual chapters, let alone in reading them collectively