Year: 2011

HuffPo: Occupying The Comic Book

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Stephanie McMillan Is Occupying The Comic Book
The Huffington Post | By Arin Greenwood

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/12/09/stephanie-mcmillan-occupy-comic_n_1137636.html?ref=dc

WASHINGTON — There’s no superhero in cartoonist Stephanie McMillan’s two-part comic detailing the early days of the Occupy movement in the nation’s capital. But there are plenty of idealistic and persnickety revolutionaries in them.

“The Beginning of the American Fall” came out in November. The second part came out on Monday. Both comics are put out by Cartoon Movement, a site that’s been putting out a lot of comics and cartoons about the Occupy movement.

McMillan is from South Florida — she came to D.C. to participate in the protests, not just chronicle them. And her role as an insider comes through. The comics are affectionate if sometimes pointed looks at the people occupying D.C.’s two protest encampments — Occupy DC in McPherson Square and Occupy Washington DC, formerly called “Stop the Machine,” in Freedom Plaza.

McMillan gets into everything from the demonstrators’ hopefulness and radical idealism to the groups’ internal struggles over how to deal with the police and illustrates how annoying the consensus process and camping can be even for radical idealists.

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Interview — WashPo

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Here’s a story in the Washington Post blog “Comic Riffs” — http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/comic-riffs/post/occupy-comics-cartoon-movement-journalists-sketch-a-multi-city-composite/2011/11/15/gIQAxRvtPN_blog.html

Excerpt:

“When I heard about ‘Stop the Machine,’ it seemed to have more potential than traditional protests, because they declared that they weren’t going to leave until their demands were met,” McMillan tells Comic Riffs of one of the D.C. protests. “It promised a higher level of determination and militancy than the usual actions — so I really wanted to go and be a part of it.

“Meanwhile, during the period before ‘Stop the Machine’ was due to begin, Occupy Wall Street emerged, and many other encampments in its wake,” McMillan continues. “It seemed that the American people were waking up and deciding that they were no longer prepared to silently tolerate the many injustices that those in power have been perpetrating on the people and the planet.”

Interview in Transindex

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Here’s an interview in Hungarian in the Transylvanian online newspaper Transindex:

Rácz Tímea

A többszörösen újságírói díjakkal kitüntetett, eléggé extrém környezetvédelmi nézeteket valló lány a TOTB-nek mesélt munkájáról és nézeteiről.

Amellett, hogy környezetvédelmi témákat dolgozol fel, aktivista is vagy? Mióta, és mit csinálsz?

Igen, a One Struggle (Egyetlen harc) nevű csoport szervezője vagyok. Ezt néhány emberrel indítottam el itthon, Dél-Floridában. Egy antikapitalista, antiimperialista kezdeményezés, amely mind az ökológiai problémákra, mind a társadalmi igazságtalanságokra, valamint az ezek közötti kapcsolatra szeretné felhívni a figyelmet.

Már középiskolás korom óta – a ’80-as évek elejétől – aktivista vagyok, foglalkoztam a bevándorlók jogaival, a rendőri brutalitásokkal, a nők reprodukciós szabadságával és harcoltam az imperialista háború ellen. Az elmúlt néhány évben jobban megértettem az ökológiai válság sürgető helyzetét, és az energiám nagyrészét erre összpontosítottam. Ha nem tudjuk megállítani a bolygó tönkretételét, semmi más nem fog számítani.

Melyek a legsürgetőbb környezetvédelmi problémák szerinted?

Az egész természetes világ rohamosan romlik, így nehéz megmondani, melyik a legszörnyűbb aspektusa. Mindegyik hatással van egy másikra. A globális felmelegedés, a fajok tömeges kihalása, a haldokló óceánok, az édesvízkészlet fogyása, az atomerőművek… mindegyikük nagyon fontos, és az összessel foglalkoznunk kell.

Honnan merítesz ihletet a rajzaidhoz?

Bárcsak ne lenne ihletem, de sajnos minden nap újabb bűncselekményeket követnek el a természet ellen. Túl sok témából tudok válogatni. A problémák gyorsan szaporodnak, elég egy pillantást vetni a hírekre.

Ebben a pillanatban több millió ember éhezik Szomáliában, a klímaváltozás okozta szárazság és éhínség miatt; egy amazonasi törzs – akikkel eddig még nem vettük fel a kapcsolatot – már nincs meg, és félő, hogy a drogdílerek kiirtották őket. Az Egyesült Államokban soha nem látott hőhullám sepert végig, és még sok minden egyéb történik… Bárcsak ne lenne, ami Ellen küzdeni vagy amit kritizálni, de mindezekkel a problémákkal szembe kell néznünk,

A rajzaid közül melyek a személyes kedvenceid?

Itt nagyon élveztem megrajzolni a gyászos, apokaliptikus jelenetet, amelyet aztán több helyen felhasználtam:

Aranyos állatokat is szeretek rajzolni, ez a gyerekkönyvem egyik illusztrációja:

Ez pedig egy friss rajz a Minimum Security című napi sorozatomból. Cuki állatok és kemény politika ötvözete – a kedvenc kombinációm:

Mit gondolsz, mit szeretnek legjobban az emberek a rajzaidban, mi az erősségük?

A rajzaim azokhoz szólnak, akik kedvelik a képregényekben ritka, radikális politikai kritikát. A munkám antikapitalista perspektívákra alapoz, és bátorítja mindazokat, akik egyetértenek velem. Emellett igyekszem vicces és szórakoztató lenni, ahogyan Oscar Wilde is javasolta: “Ha el akarod mondani az embereknek az igazságot, akkor nevettesd meg őket, máskülönben megölnek.” Ha a rajzok vizuális szempontból vonzóak, segíthetnek az embereknek eszméket felkarolni. Ezt szeretném elérni.

Interview with "Quill" magazine

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Here’s an interview I did with SPJ’s “Quill” magazine.

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Thursday, August 04, 2011
Ten with Stephanie McMillan

By Scott Leadingham

To call Stephanie McMillan a cartoonist is like calling Paul McCartney a musician. It’s accurate in all meanings of the word. But leaving it at just cartoonist (even adding “editorial” as a descriptor) comes up short. She might rightly be described as a social activist and agitator, one whose pointed commentary and analysis are conveyed most visibly through pictures and their associated dialogue bubbles. Her incisive work caught the attention of the Sigma Delta Chi Awards judges, who recognized her excellence for the recurring syndicated cartoon “Code Green,” about environmental issues. The Fort Lauderdale, Fla., native studied film animation at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. Next year will mark her 20th drawing regular cartoons for newspapers.

What was your first reaction to winning a Sigma Delta Chi Award?

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One storm, two responses

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In 2005, Hurricane Wilma crossed over South Florida. The destruction was substantial. A telephone/electric pole lay across my back yard, its transformer trailing wires. Most of a large tree had come down on my neighbor’s roof. Branches were everywhere. Bits of the corrugated fiberglass roof of a plant nursery littered the ground ten blocks away. The electricity stayed off for eleven days. The municipal water supply stayed off for three.

I still had to go to work. As I made my way around town on my bike in the following days, I saw a difference in the way the people of my neighborhood and the people of the next neighborhood over handled their respective difficulties.

In the best of times, my neighborhood – mostly populated by short-term renters who were only around when not out working on boats for weeks or months on end – enjoyed little-to-no social cohesion. Few people even recognized each other as neighbors. Each was generally on his or her own.

Residents made a rather pathetic scene as they used soda cans to scoop water from street puddles into plastic kitchen garbage bins, to use for flushing toilets. The general mood was testy. It was hot and humid. Everyone was sweaty, with no showering in the foreseeable future, and food was rapidly spoiling. A fight broke out at a nearby gas station over ice.

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Why are there so many small groups on the Left?

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People coming into political motion often take a look at the field of activity on the Left and shake their heads. “Why are there so many small, disunited groups?” they ask. “Why can’t they get along and work together?”

Line differences within groups have come from practice, or responses to the practice of others. At certain points in history the line differences are worth splitting up over, because they lead to qualitatively different further practice. Sections of groups part ways because each believes their way is correct and the other way is going to lead to failure.

But most of the sects that exist today emerged out of a previous era of struggle, and their differences are rooted in the past. Many of the questions that were once crucial and defining, are irrelevant to people coming into political life today. They don’t want to (and shouldn’t have to) go through a long list of historical verdicts and ideological points that they have to agree with to join a group. It’s too hard – what if they agree on 60% or 80% but can’t come to agreement on the rest? Then they’d either have to suppress their differences and join anyway, or would have to form another sect with that minor difference as the distinction between them.

Instead, now people are seeking to organize new groups from the ground up, with people who generally agree on current issues and basic goals, and are willing to figure out the rest as needed.

This is why, I think, there are so many small collectives starting everywhere. People coming into political life for the first time, or getting back into it after a long break, or coming out of some of these sects, are figuring out what they think about our current conditions. They are putting aside the impulse to form verdicts on historical questions, and starting over.

This doesn’t mean they don’t learn from previous struggles. People are studying — not to just appropriate a finished system of thought in the abstract, but creatively, in order to see how others approached similar problems in different times and places, and to find solutions and methods that can help today. It’s great that they’re starting fresh, because when people define their own theories, ideologies and political lines, then they’re rooted in their own experiences, observations, and emotions. The ideas become an integral part of the people, who then become an integral part of a movement, in a way that can’t happen if they come in and rely solely on the previous work of others. The creative process of articulating beliefs and forming principles, incorporating what makes sense from past lessons, and testing what parts of the new mix works and what doesn’t, is part of the liveliness of an emerging movement.

The people coming into motion today don’t see the need to divide themselves along the same lines, or down to the same level of detail as those who have been around a long time — though divisions are still there based on very broad historical verdicts and deep scars. For example, in recent decades I haven’t noticed anyone refuse to work with someone who has a different opinion on Enver Hoxha’s break with Mao. Most people don’t know or care about it. On the other hand, many anarchists still feel betrayed by communists because of the Spanish Civil War and other blunders and won’t even consider working with them, or will only with extreme wariness and some expression of regret on the part of the reds.

Splits form along new lines: anarchists are splitting over being vegan or omnivore. Deep green environmentalists demarcate themselves from technotopians. Anti-war activists congeal into mutually frosty camps around whether or not to express support for the rulers of countries being attacked by the U.S.

So the splits and divides are more (not always, but much more) based on issues and events that are occurring and relevant today.

It’s like ecological succession. The groups that emerged from the 1960s are mature, solid, complex organisms. They’ve been through a lot and grown into big trees. The new collectives emerging everywhere are pioneer species, like the small plants that spring up on damaged ground, fast-growing and highly adaptive, but fragile and less formed. Some will be short-lived and not very well-defined. They’ll prepare the ground for stronger plants to take root and become established.

A revolutionary situation will require a lot of different kinds of forces working in tandem. Like in an ecosystem, there is strength in diversity, and a particular role for all of these types of groups in relation to the others. We should cooperate as much as possible. The elders of the movement have experience and wisdom. The new people have fresh views and energy. We should appreciate both, and all be learning from one another.

50 Ways to Prepare for Revolution

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[edited 5/10/11: added #42, combined #23 & #26. Edited again 5/13: added #31, combined #26 and #27, changed wording of #35]

by Stephanie McMillan

The people of the United States are currently unprepared to seize a revolutionary moment. We must fix that.

How can we raise our levels of revolutionary consciousness, organization and struggle?

Raise consciousness

1) Raise consciousness with the purpose of building organization and raising the level of struggle.

2) Investigate before forming opinions. Research how the world and the system function.

3) Read foundational and historical works about revolution, by those who have participated in and led them.

4) Analyze the system’s current condition and trajectory.

5) Learn about the resistance, uprisings and revolutions going on in the world today.

6) Read the material that currently active groups are issuing and discussing.

7) Continuously develop, elaborate upon and refine principles, theories and strategies for our movement.

8. Raise our voices. Articulate revolutionary ideas, and give them a public presence.

9) Listen and speak in the spirit of mutual clarification.

10) Participate in discussion, to develop our ideas and hone our skills in expressing them, and to help others do so.

11) Figure out how to use all our various talents, positions, energy and resources as effectively as possible, to expose the system’s evil, irredeemable and unreformable nature.

12) Analyze and explain the many ways the system dominates and exploits.

13) Stand with the dominated, exploited, invaded, colonized, threatened and oppressed.

14) Display a revolutionary spirit and celebrate it in others.

15) Exercise patience in winning over reluctant potential allies and supporters.

16) Ridicule and discredit the enemy.

17) Create revolutionary culture. Make videos and art, speak, sing, and write blogs, books, comments, leaflets, rhymes, stories, and articles about the enemy’s crimes and the people’s resistance.

18) Exchange ideas locally, nationally and (within the law or safe channels) globally.

19) Encourage others to participate in the revolutionary process.

Organize

20) Organize as a way to raise consciousness more broadly and to build struggle.

21) Start with people we know.

22) If our friends discourage us, make new friends.

23) Network sensibly with people online. Find local people online who express similar ideas, and meet with them.

24) Find a group that we basically agree with. Work with it.

25) If there’s no local group we want to work with, start one.

26) Write a leaflet with contact info. Pass it out in public to find potential comrades.

27) When we meet people, assess our points of agreement. If we agree on basic essentials, decide how to work together. If not, say goodbye for now.

28) Build strong ties locally and nationally, and build solidarity globally.

29) Define allies according to overall outlook and goals.

30) Don’t let secondary differences prevent cooperation. Handle differences between allies non-antagonistically.

31) Do not tolerate oppressive (sexist, racist, homophobic etc.) dynamics within the movement. Confront their expression and put a stop to it.

32) Refrain from saying anything aloud, on the phone or electronically that we wouldn’t want to hear played back in court.

33) Keep illegal drugs away from our political life.

34) Research and practice good security culture.

35) Prioritize the wellbeing of our organizations over personal benefit.

36) Ready our ranks to seize on any breaks in the legitimacy of the system.

Struggle

37) Use struggle to spread revolutionary consciousness and build organization.

38) Collectively determine what we want, and declare our demands.

39) Act as far as possible within our capacity, not either beyond or below our capacity.

40) Continuously strive to expand and consolidate our capacity and strength.

41) Assert our rights and our responsibilities.

42) Bring our revolutionary perspective into struggles already occurring.

43) Defend, support, and encourage our allies.

44) As opportunities arise, weaken the enemy and its ability to rule.

45) Obey the small laws. Don t get taken out of the game for something unworthy.

46) For illegal acts, make sure you can trust your comrades with your life and the lives of everyone connected to you.

47) Avoid being distracted and diverted into symbolic action-for-action’s sake.

48) Don t expect the enemy to act against its nature. It has no mercy and can not be reasoned with.

49) Turn every attack by the enemy into an opportunity to speak out, organize, and grow more powerful.

50) Be willing to work hard. Be smart. Be brave. Remember we’re all in this together.

Fight Our Common Enemy: Global Industrial Capitalism

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Global capitalism is the economic system that dominates the planet. It runs on the exploitation of human labor to turn the living world into dead commodities, for the profit of a few. The small, powerful minority who own the means of production enforce their dominance through their control over political and cultural institutions, and their monopoly on force. They create a situation of dependency – forcing us to work for them to obtain basic needs like food and shelter. They annihilate those who resist or refuse to assimilate.

This system values profit over life itself. It has been built on land theft and destruction, genocide, slavery, deforestation and imperialist wars. It commits numberless atrocities as a matter of routine daily functioning. It kills 2.4 million children worldwide under age 5 each year by withholding adequate nutrition. It kills 100,000 people annually in the US by denying decent health care. More than 54% of the US discretionary budget is spent on perpetrating imperialist aggression, and recent casualties include more than a million civilians in Iraq, and more than 46,000 American soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq. Aside from outright murder, the economic and psychological violence wrought upon the world’s inhabitants is so extensive and comprehensive that it’s effectively all-encompassing.

The system is killing the entire planet, the basis for all life. It’s converted 98% of old growth forests into lumber. 80% of rivers worldwide no longer support life. 94% of the large fish in the oceans are gone. Phytoplankton, the tiny plants that produce half of the oxygen we breathe, have declined by 40% since 1950. 120 species per day become extinct.

Industries produce 400 million tons of hazardous waste every year. Recently, the water in 89% of US cities tested has been found to contain the carcinogen hexavalent chromium. To feed capitalism’s insatiable need for economic expansion, increasingly dangerous methods of energy extraction are being perpetrated: deep sea drilling, oil extraction from tar sands, fracking. No matter the consequences, no matter what the majority of people may want, those in power insist on (and enforce) their non-negotiable right to poison the land, water and air in pursuit of maximum profit.

The threat to our common existence on Earth is accelerating and intensifying. This is a situation of extreme urgency.

Clearly, a global economic system based on perpetual growth is unsustainable. A system characterized by oppression and coercion is pure misery for the majority. The obvious conclusion is that we need to get rid of it, and change to a way of life that doesn’t involve exploitation and ecocide. But first we must face one hard fact: this system won’t stop unless it’s stopped. It can not be escaped, reformed, redeemed, cajoled, abandoned, or rejected. It must be fought, defeated and dismantled.

The global economy is currently falling deeper into a convergence of deep crises. This presents us with a rare opportunity to build resistance. More than an opportunity, this is also a necessity, and our responsibility. This situation is crying out for action.

Yet our movement is weak and fragmented, unable to adequately respond. Our habitual modes of opposition (like protests and demonstrations) no longer seem to work in the ways they once did, and we are unsure how to best proceed. Currently there is no organizational formation that is capable of engaging this situation on the scale that is required. Yet there are countless individuals and small groups who, though we may disagree on much, share the desire for a sustainable, classless alternative to this omnicidal system.

If we are to survive, we must develop ways to work together to combat global capitalism and its crimes, and ultimately bring it down. Individually we are weak and ineffective; together we can be strong. We must build a movement that embraces our political and ideological diversity, and our independent autonomy, while creating mechanisms for common and complementary action. The struggles to end all forms of domination, oppression and ecocide are intertwined. If we can unite our energies, we will increase our chances for success.

Let’s unite and organize to destroy global capitalism, before it destroys us.

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