Este libro narra la conmovedora historia de Patrocinia Polanco Rivas, una campesina salvadoreña que personifica la lucha por la dignidad en medio de la adversidad. A través de su testimonio y el análisis del autor Andrés McKinley, la obra recorre su vida, desde una infancia marcada por la pobreza extrema y la opresión de la oligarquía cafetalera, hasta su participación en la guerra civil como operadora de radio del FMLN tras el asesinato de su mentor, el padre Rutilio Grande. La guerra le arrebata a su padre, pero forja en ella una resistencia inquebrantable.
Tras los Acuerdos de Paz de 1992, la esperanza de una vida digna se desvanece ante la persistente pobreza y las políticas neoliberales que mantienen a las familias campesinas en la miseria. Para sobrevivir, Patrocinia trabaja incansablemente cortando caña de azúcar, mientras la falta de oportunidades lleva a su esposo y, posteriormente, a sus seis hijos a emprender el peligroso viaje migratorio hacia Estados Unidos. El libro documenta los horrores de este periplo: el abandono, la extorsión, el secuestro y la constante amenaza de la muerte.
Una vez en el norte, los hijos de Patrocinia se enfrentan a la dura realidad de la vida indocumentada y a la maquinaria represiva del ICE, especialmente bajo la administración de Donald Trump. La autora establece un poderoso paralelismo entre la violencia de los escuadrones de la muerte en El Salvador y la persecución sistemática de los migrantes.
El Precio de la Dignidad es un testimonio de la resiliencia humana, mostrando que la dignidad no reside en el éxito de la lucha, sino en la propia lucha, un legado que Patrocinia heredó de su padre. El libro se erige como un recordatorio urgente de las consecuencias humanas de la guerra, de la injusticia económica y de las políticas migratorias despiadadas.
Andrés (Drew) McKinley was born in the United States but has worked for over 50 years in programs for sustainable development, environment and human rights in Africa, Latin America and the United States. He has worked for the past 48 years…
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어떻게 자본주의를 넘어설 것인가라는 질문에 대한 답을, 지금 우리가 “감히” 찾아보려고 한다. 이 소책자를 통해, 자본주의를 벗어나 생태사회주의로 향하는 길을 찾는 우리의 노력이 뚜렷해지길 바란다.
자본주의에 갇힌 우리는, 어떤 형태로든 행동 또는 비행동inaction에 관여하고 있다. 행동은, 자본주의를 직접 마주하기 보다는 자본주의가 초래하는 심각한 여러 문제를 개선하기 위한 투쟁에 참여하는 모습을 띈다. 즉, 우리의 행동은 원인이 아니라 결과에 초점을 맞추는 모순을 보인다.
반면, 비행동은 동의를 의미하게 된다. 우리는 자본주의 경제 체계를 영속시키는 경제 활동에 문제 제기를 하거나 변화를 요구하는 행동을 하지 않음으로써 자본주의에 [암묵적으로] 동의하고 있다. 결과적으로 평범한 우리가 자본주의에 봉사하는 자본가 역할을 계속하고 있는 것이다.
왜 자본주의 억압의 대상인 우리가 억압에 동의하는가? 그 이유가 단지 [외부의] 탄압 때문만은 아니라고, 이탈리아 파시즘 하의 감옥에서 그람시Antonio Gramci는 말했다. 즉, “헤게모니”를 장악하는 이념이 우리의 삶을 둘러싼 억압적인 환경을 설명하고 정당화하는 것이다.
“소소한 혁명”은, 개개인의 삶 속에서, 쉽고 안전하게, 엄청 근사하지는 않지만 일상적이고 실천가능한 행동과 비행동을 얘기한다. 지금까지의 혁명사는, 혁명을 가능하게 했던 전체 민중보다는 소수의 혁명가에 주목했었지만, 자본주의에 맞서는 “우리는” 마르크스나 엥겔스가 떠올렸던 주인공들보다 훨씬 다양하고 규모가 커졌다. 자본주의를 수호하기 위해 싸우는 “그들은” 전 세계 인구의 극소수일 뿐이다.
자본주의의 어떤 특징이 억압적이고 그래서 제거되어야 하는지, 또 반대로 어떤 사회경제구조의 특징이 억압적이지 않으며 그래서 남겨져야 하는지를 뚜렷이 설명하는 전략이 필요하다. 자본주의 이후 사회가 어떤 모습이어야 할지는 점점 명확해지고 있다. 소소한 혁명은, 자본주의의 영속과 발전에 필수적인 과정에 대한 우리의 동의를 거두는 데에서 시작하여, 수 백 만의 우리가, 여전히 적은 소수이긴 하지만, 건설적인 혹은 파괴적인 노력에 창의적으로 참여할 수 있는 방법 또한 포함한다.
세상은 자본주의 그 이후로 이미 진행 중이다. 세계 곳곳에서 창의적인 모습의 공동체communal organization들이 생겨나 스스로 통치하고 구성원들의 생존과 안녕을 보장하기 위해 활동하고 있다. 복지 국가를 포함한 자본주의 국가를 넘어서는 것은 국가 자체를 넘어서는 결과로 이어진다. 연대 경제solidarity economy는 먼저, 소규모의 협동조합 성격을 띄는, 저렴하고 유쾌하고 편안한 주거 공간을 구성하는 방법을 모색하여, 착취적인 임대료, 빚, 세금, 보험에 대한 공동의 해결책을 제시한다. 또한 이러한 공동체는, 영양이 풍부한 먹거리를 지역에서 생산하여 유통하는 방법으로, 자본주의식 농업으로부터 독립을 꾀할 수 있다.
창조적 파괴는, 허가를 받아 하는 대규모의 시위가 아니라 자본주의가 순조롭게 기능할 수 없게 멈추거나 둔화시키는 직접 행동으로 가능하게 된다. 우리가 투자나 세금으로 흘러가게 내버려 두는 돈의 흐름을 비자본주의적인 연대경제에 돌리는 것도 창조적 파괴의 한 방법이다.
소소한 혁명은, 간단하고 안전하며, 자신의 삶을 조금이라도 바꾸고 싶은 의지가 있는 사람이라면 실천가능하다. 자본주의가 우리의 안녕과 행복을 파괴하는 체계라는 것을 알면서도, 부지불식간에 자본주의를 지지하고 동의하는 행동을 멈추는 즐거움을 누릴 수 있다. 놀랍게도 혁명을 위해 다치거나 죽지 않아도 되고, 심지어 큰 불편을 감수하지 않아도 된다. 우리가 해야 할 일은 단 하나. 어차피 하기 싫었던 여러 일들을 이제 정말 그만두는 것이다.
History is written by the victors of any war. But what happens when the victors forget to write down their history or omit the cog of the struggle? This is the untold story of Mathare Slum that has never been told to the world: of the role it played in anti-colonial struggle and the planning ground for the Mau Mau struggle which culminated with the fall of the British Colonial Empire in Kenya in the midnight of December 12th 1963. Mathare has also played a critical role in anti-oppression struggle against the four regimes that we’ve had since independence and continues to do so up to date. This history has not been documented and has only been done piecemeal. This has overtime eroded the rich history of Mathare and led to a distorted history of once a planning ground and a bulwark of Kenya Land and Freedom Army (KFLA). The current generation are not cognizant with the critical role Mathare played in the independence of our country. Presently, Mathare is majorly known for all the negative reasons and its proximity to Mathari Mental Hospital has contorted its image to the outside world. My story tries to re-tell the history of Mathare from an informed insider perspective by threading the struggles from the colonial era to the present day and the role it has played in agitating for social justice. My story brings to view the past history of this informal settlement in the heart of Nairobi, the present struggle and the promising future through community organizing.
Este panfleto aborda la pregunta: ¿cómo podemos pasar de A a B, del capitalismo al poscapitalismo? La revolución de Rinky-dink involucra acciones e inacciones que son fáciles, seguras, mundanas, sin glamour y factibles dentro de la vida de cada persona.
Howard Waitzkin presenta una intervención clara y directa para el cambio revolucionario en el sistema económico capitalista global. Cubre mucho terreno, con sofisticación, mientras mantiene la discusión en tierra. Su enfoque en las formas de facilitar un desafío al capital y construir una mayor transformación revolucionaria es crucial en esta coyuntura histórica. Esta discusión sobre construcciones creativas y destrucciones creativas es particularmente útil.
— Brett Clark, profesor de sociología de la Universidad de Utah y autor De El Robo De La Naturaleza: Capitalismo Y Grieta Ecológica, The Robbery of Nature: Capitalism and Ecological Rift en inglés.
El fin del capitalismo es posible. Waitzkin nos lleva un paso más allá en el proceso creativo para esta transformación. A través de ejemplos específicos de grupos organizados dentro de los Estados Unidos y en el extranjero, este trabajo constituye una guía práctica para todos. Waitzkin alienta nuestra creatividad para actos organizados y seguros además de omisiones para trascender el capitalismo.
— Nylca J. Munoz Sosa, abogada, líder de salud pública y activista centrada en la justicia sanitaria y la descolonización en Puerto Rico.
This deeply personal and introspective work explores survival—not merely physical survival, but emotional and spiritual endurance through love, war, and loss. Written by a Palestinian author against the backdrop of the Gaza genocide, the book weaves together reflections on love, betrayal, killings, displacement, and the search for meaning in a world stripped of humanity.
The narrative oscillates between intimate romantic relationships and the brutal realities of life under bombardment. The author chronicles a turbulent love affair marked by passion, jealousy, betrayal, and eventual dissolution, examining how relationships fracture under the weight of pride, misunderstanding, and external pressures. Simultaneously, he documents the devastating experience of genocidal attacks by Israel in Gaza: displacement, hunger, the loss of loved ones, the daily struggle for survival, and the erosion of human dignity.
Central themes include the nature of survival—questioning whether mere existence constitutes living, and whether those who survive emerge intact or fundamentally altered. The author grapples with grief over the death of his grandmother, the loss of his beloved, and the collective trauma of a people under siege. He explores the tension between hope and despair, the betrayal of humanitarian aid systems, the corruption of values in times of crisis, and the profound loneliness of carrying unspoken pain.
Writing serves as both confession and catharsis—an attempt to staunch internal bleeding and make sense of chaos. The prose is poetic, fragmented, and emotionally raw, reflecting the author’s belief that true survivors do not write; they simply endure. Ultimately, the book is a testament to the impossibility of returning unchanged from love or genocidal attacks, and the quiet dignity of continuing despite everything.
The volume includes two sections exploring nonviolence in the long Black freedom struggle within the US. From Ella Baker to Martin Luther King, Jr. and Fannie Lou Hamer, from Vincent Harding and Grace Lee Boggs to Colin Kaepernick, the two sections on the Black liberation movement highlight the theory of nonviolence in direct and indirect ways and foreground the relevance of these historic texts for the present moment of political uprisings on both the left and the right. Black strategies for survival and power are analyzed in terms of the ongoing US economic and epidemiological crises as well as the global climate crisis and ecological collapse. A section on revolutionary nonviolence in Africa presents a previously unpublished piece on the role of armed struggle by Franz Fanon, as well as essays by Amilcar Cabral, Barbara Deming, Graca Machel, Kenneth Kaunda, and Nozizwe Madlala-Routledge This section clearly contextualizes the continent’s anti-colonial struggles with the practical thinking about military and unarmed tactics which those movements faced over the course of a half-century.
The section on nonviolence and feminist struggle highlight the work of Grace Paley, Audre Lorde, and Arundhati Roy, along with a little-read piece by Johnnie Tilmon, a leader of the 1960s welfare rights movement. The section on resistance against empire tilts toward Latin American scholars/activists with essays by Maria Lugones, Anibla Quijano and Berta Caceres. This section includes pieces that draw from current debates about the role of state power in building towards radical change and the push to build holistic perspectives on what liberation means for all peoples. The final section on social change in the 21st Century reflects on specific aspects of organizing that are facing campaigns and movements of today and tomorrow. Our goal is to provide challenges and insights for building effectively against all forms of oppression! Though primarily compiling key texts not often seen or contextualized together, the book also provides new strategic commentaries from key leaders including Ela Gandhi, Ruby Sales, ecofeminist Ynestra King, Africa World Press’ Kassahun Checole, and Palestinian Quaker Joyce Ajlouney, Hakim Williams, and Mireille Fanon Mèndes-France.
This is not a book about films in the conventional sense. It is a book about the conditions under which films become legible, forgettable, weaponised, or necessary.
Across essays that move between review and reportage, festival and platform, myth and documentary, Narendra Pachkhédé reads global cinema as a moral technology of the present. He follows the contemporary attention regime, the coercions of watchability, the choreography of awards and public virtue, and the quiet ways propaganda teaches a society what to feel plausible. The question is not only what we watch, but how we have been conditioned to watch: how viewing is trained by ideological settings, how sensibility is numbed by repetition and spectacle, how attention is corralled into habits that feel like choice.
This is a book about the world of cinema and its assemblages. It attends to cinema’s extended life in media ecologies: streaming interfaces and festival circuits, platform logics and institutional gatekeeping, the politics of narrative and the global circulation of stories. It returns repeatedly to the politics of reception, where a work is domesticated or rejected, where controversy polices a field, where filmmakers bond, quarrel, protect, and betray, and where institutions decide what counts as witness. Cinema, here, is not only an art form but a system of mediation that defines the political terms under which stories are consumed.
The book crosses geographies and film worlds, tracing how nations dream through genre and how history is refashioned into culture, suspended between memory and forgetting. From the seductions of nostalgia to the endurance of Béla Tarr, from Korean modernity’s neutralised ruptures to Palestinian cinema’s custody under pressure, these essays insist that cinema is never only an image. It is an argument about reality, and a rehearsal for what a public can bear to know.
The Cinema of Unfinished Witnessing asks a simpler, harsher question: why do some stories become global vigils while others vanish into the feed? It is a book about how we come to believe what we believe, and what cinema has to do with that failure. It is also a wager that, by looking closely and naming the terms of looking, one can still be a form of care.
This pamphlet tackles the question: how do we get from A to B, capitalism to post-capitalism?
It is critical reading to understand why:
* Capitalist-oriented industrial agriculture and its destruction of habitat are the upstream causes that led to the COVID-19 pandemic as well as other past and future pandemics of devastating, emerging viral pathogens.
* COVID-19 may trigger a collapse of the global capitalist system but it is not the cause.
* Health-care and public-health systems organized around capitalist principles don’t do well in pandemics, compared to those not organized around capitalist principles.
* The current economic collapse, triggered by a pandemic, opens a door for revolutionary transformation.
The pamphlet is also available in Spanish and Korean.
We hear for the first time from the internationalist secretly working for the ANC’s armed wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), in the struggle to liberate South Africa from apartheid rule. They acted as couriers, provided safe houses in neighbouring states and within South Africa, helped infiltrate combatants across borders, and smuggled tons of weapons into the country in the most creative ways. Driven by a spirit of international solidarity, they were prepared to take huge risks and face great danger. The internationalists reveal what motivated them as volunteers, not mercenaries: they gained nothing for their endeavours save for the self-esteem in serving a just cause. Against such clandestine involvement, the book includes contributions from key people in the international Anti-Apartheid Movement and its public mobilisation to isolate the apartheid regime. These include worldwide campaigns like Stop the Sports Tours, boycotting of South African products and black American solidarity. The Cuban, East German and Russian contributions outlined those countries’ support for the ANC and MK. The public, global Anti-Apartheid Movement campaigns provide the dimensions from which internationalists who secretly served MK emerged. Edited by Ronnie Kasrils. First published by Jacana Media (Pty) Ltd in 2021, ISBN: 978-1-4314-3202-8, this Daraja Press edition is available in North America and East Africa.
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Daraja Press
Este es un libro sobre la dignidad humana.
A través de las conmovedoras palabras de una mujer extraordinaria,Andrés McKinley teje una historia de los últimos cincuenta años enhonor a las personas del mundo que luchan cada día por sobrevivircon dignidad. Patrocinia Polanco Rivas es una mujer con una historiaque merece ser contada. Nacida en la pobreza y sufriendo bajo eldominio de las oligarquías cafetaleras y azucareras que gobernabanEl Salvador, Patrocinia sobrevive a la violencia de los abusos paramili-tares, a los horrores de una guerra civil alimentada por Estados Unidosque cobró la vida de 75,000 personas (ella fue operadora de radio delejército guerrillero), a la pobreza de una economía desigual, al dolor dever a sus hijos soportar el terror de migrar a Estados Unidos y al temorcotidiano de que sus hijos vivan bajo la maquinaria migratoria del ICEdurante la era Trump.
Al mismo tiempo, Patrocinia comparte las alegrías de una familiaamorosa, el despertar de las Comunidades Eclesiales de Base de ladécada de 1970, las esperanzas de los Acuerdos de Paz de 1992, eldolor y peligro de 20 años de cortando caña para poner comido sobrela mesa de sus 6 hijos, y la extraordinaria fortaleza y valentía que senecesitan para sobrevivir una vida de pobreza; una pobreza nacida depolíticas impuestas por los sectores más ricos de nuestra tierra.
Gran parte de este extraordinario libro está compuesta por las propiaspalabras de Patrocinia, pero Andrés McKinley entrelaza su historia conla historia de las comunidades cristianas de base, el papel de EstadosUnidos en el respaldo al terror de la guerra civil, el milagro y las decep-ciones de los Acuerdos de Paz, la violencia estructural de las políticasde Reagan y de sus aliados salvadoreños que empobrecieron a lamayoría de campesinos de El Salvador, el surgimiento de las pandi-llas y, posteriormente, los años de gobernación autóctona de NayibBukele, así como la dura realidad que enfrentan los salvadoreños enEstados Unidos bajo Trump.
Cada página arde con las palabras que Patrocinia recuerda de supadre en los días más oscuros de la guerra civil: “Nuestra dignidadno siempre se encuentra en el resultado de nuestras luchas; nuestradignidad reside en la lucha misma.”
– John Cavanagh, Instituto de Estudios Políticos (Institute for PolicyStudies), y coautor (junto con Robin Broad) de Los Defensores delAgua: Cómo la gente común salvó a un país de la codicia corporative
Este es un libro extraordinario que conmoverá a sus lectores tantoemocional como intelectualmente. Vincula la crisis actual de crueldadcontra los migrantes salvadoreños en Estados Unidos con la crisis decrueldad ejercida contra los pobres salvadoreños durante la guerrade la década de 1980. Combina la historia personal de Patrocinia,una campesina salvadoreña con una asombrosa trayectoria de sufri-miento, resistencia y resiliencia, con la forma en que Andrés McKinleysitúa su historia dentro de las acciones de los gobiernos de EstadosUnidos y de los poderosos y acaudalados salvadoreños, desde aquellaguerra hasta la actualidad. Esta es una lectura imprescindible paraquienes desean comprender lo que significa ser pobre y carecer depoder, y cómo los salvadoreños, a pesar de todo, han continuadobuscando todas las formas posibles de sobrevivir y vivir con dignidad.– Jenny Pearce, Profesora Visitante, Instituto de DesigualdadesInternacionales, London School of Economics
El Precio de la Dignidad es una lectura indispensable, especialmentepara quienes desean comprender el flujo migratorio hacia el norteprovocado por los conflictos en Centroamérica que fueron finan-ciados en gran medida por Estados Unidos. Está escrito con pasióny con frecuencia da la palabra a las voces elocuentes de campesinosy campesinas, cuyas vidas han sido moldeadas por el sufrimiento yla lucha. Ofrece una mirada actualizada sobre la vida en El Salvador ysobre las vidas valientes, aunque a menudo peligrosas, de las personasindocumentadas.
– Charlie Clements, MD, MPH, autor de Witness to War (Testigo de laGuerra) (Bantam, 1984; Daraja Press, 2025).