MTD Solano and the Subway on strike

Well, we finally met the revolutionaries.

We went to Solano yesterday. A guy from Basque country met us in Plaza Constitucion in the capital and took us to Solano on the bus. When we got there we were introdced to a guy Andre or Andres, who gave us the best theory lecture about the autonomist movement I could have ever hoped to get. These people rock. They got together 6 years ago because they were all unemployed, and after a bunch of meetings, decided that instead of being a party or a union or anything like that, they would be a totally new thing: an MTD: Movimiento de Trabajadores Desocupados. And that they would struggle for Work, Dignity and Social Change. And that this meant that they had to be a horizontal autonomous organization, because social change starts with the group that´s working for it. They make decisions by consensus in an assembly. There´s 6 neighborhood assemblies, and they all make some decisions together. In addition, MTD solano is part of the larger coordinating group MTD Anibal Veron, and THEY do some things together and some things individually. They pool their unemployment money (part of it, anyway) and they have a bakery, a farm, a communtiy education center, a public health center, all sorts of things.

Anyhow, that was the gist of the lecture, and then today was practice: we went to the farm. First, though, we went to a vegetable distribution center and got all the veggies out of the dumpster to feed to the animals: pigs and rabbits and chickens. Who knew you could run a farm off of dumpstered vegetables!

We met all sorts of cool people, from a couple different parts of the country, so now we have people to go visit!

And on the way back, we ran into a subway strike. People with red and black bandannas were blocking the ticket machines--so our ride was free! And they provided us with lovely drumming for our trip. Apparently a few hours later the police came down and arrested a bunch of people, but as of recently, they got released.