Marina Sitrin on Horizontalism-- transcript part 2

Marina:   I'm not in the food working group. I'm not sure what some of the things are that they are going to be bartering. It's a combination of barter, gifting, and someone donated money to buy some of the foods, and I think they're being sold at cost directly from the farmers. And then I was told barter yesterday on the telephone. I'm not sure what's being bartered. I can find out for you though.

Rob:  That sounds very interesting. The next word after "creation" is "power."

Marina:   Yes, and this one we've talked about a little bit as it relates to autonomy and horizontalism and the idea of creating power with one another. That power is not a thing and actually in Spanish, "poder" is both. It could be the thing but it's also a verb. In a lot of other languages, power is a verb. And so it's to have power with or it's something you make and you do together. It's active; it's not something you wield. So that's how people talked about power as creating power, not empowerment, that wasn't the framework. It was the power with, or a power to, where people talked about being against a certain concept of power, and creating a power together.

Rob:  So like powering up your engine, powering up your activism, powering up your work groups, powering up your protests?

Marina:   I guess, Yeah. And I'm saying that we have power. Right. Powering up, but it implies that we already have power to power up, so I guess that's yeah--seeing that the location of power is already in us and with us, not somewhere else. Yeah.

Rob:  What is the power that it is not about?

Marina:   Where people have power over one another, where they use it as coercion, as a thing to force people; that kind of power. That's the power that's being rejected.

Rob:  That's hard power. I interviewed Joseph Nye, who wrote the The Future of Power, and when he talks about hard power, it's power of coercion. And really, that's an awful lot of the power that we have in the United States period--in government and politics.

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