Rob: Where are you from originally?
Marina: I'm originally from the U.S. I had lived in Cuba, and my mother did as well for a period of time. And so I have family in Cuba, but I was born and raised outside New York City.
Rob: Okay. So, let's talk about Horizontalism. Now the reason I'm fascinated with this is I call the Bottom Up Radio Show, because I believe we're in a transition from a top down to a bottom up world, and horizontalism has come back to me in a lot of different ways. When I would talk to some of the people in Occupy about them being bottom up people, they would go, "No, we're horizontal," And they would do it with vehemence and so, "No we're not bottom up, we're horizontal."
Marina: Right.
Rob: First, let's talk about horizontalism. What is horizontalism? And this is what you talk about in your first couple chapters, and what a whole lot of people talk about in the voices section.
Marina: Right. And it's a tricky thing, because when I say really early on, the word exists in Spanish as "Horizontalizad," and I'm not being difficult, but it really doesn't have an English translation, and it's actually-- because in Spanish, it's not called "ismo." It's not an "ism." So, the politics of horizontalism is it's a relationship, and it's one that's ever-changing, and it's one that people form with each other. So, it's almost against the idea of "isms," but it felt like just using the word the word horizontal (or horizontality) was too descriptive, it wasn't getting at the fact that this is this kind of ongoing, changing relationship.
So it's a relationship where people are with one another in a way that is direct, that is - later people came to call it "Direct Democracy" and things like that. They didn't at first. Neither did people say "It's anti-hierarchy," but that is part of what it's about. It's about people speaking for themselves, listening to one another actively, not having power over each other, and creating relationships where they can voice what they feel and think and then together come up with ideas. So, it's a relationship-based concept, and when we talk about it in Occupy--I mean, I do think it is funny that bottom up, because to say it's horizontal or even before the movements in Argentina, we're talking about, Horizontalizad in 1994, you had this Zapatistas coming out into the public and then taking over hundreds of thousands of hectares of land and creating autonomous communities, which they continue in Chiapas in Mexico, and one of the things they articulated was that their politics were from below and to the left, and they say that's where the heart resides.
So, it's a very similar idea that they're going from below, but we don't want, actually, to form power above: to have a power over one another, but to create power with each other. To create it, whether that's horizontally, or there to the left where the heart is, but that same idea.
Rob: Okay. That's very interesting. So, the difference is the idea of bottom up, because you don't want to go up, you want to stay at the bottom and comfortable--
Marina: Well, it's not as much staying at the bottom. It's the idea of not wanting to have people have power over other people. So, it's the not wanting there to be an above other people, which means, everyone--it's shifting the idea of space. It's not that we all stay in a poor situation, or without housing, or that sense of below? But only that there aren't decision makers that aren't us. So, we all have an equal distribution of power.
Rob: Okay. Now some of the people in the voices section on horizontalism talk about rather than it being in a relationship, being a process.
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