Just occasionally we all appal ourselves with our reluctance to embrace new ideas. Who wants to be on the same side as the people who scoffed at Copernicus or the Wright Brothers? There was one such moment at yesterday’s Socialist Resistance and Green Left day school. An early contributor from the floor suggested that we should seek to create an alliance between farmers growing coca, the distributors and the users in rich countries. If the utter silence when he sat down was a measure there were a lot of people in that hall stuck in old ways of thinking.

The advantages of the scheme are obvious. Affluent consumers in Europe and the United States can give overt practical support to hill farmers in Bolivia. A campaign to legalise the production, distribution and sale of cocaine is guaranteed to have lots of celebrity endorsements as well as innumerable hyper activists who’ll never be short of something to say. An added bonus is that when we have to set up armed workers’ militias to seize state power we’ll already have lots of contacts with guns and won’t need to wait for the state’s forces to disintegrate.

Videos of several of the main contributions will be popping up on the SR site over the next few days but in the meantime here are some quick impressions which others may want to supplement.

One idea that Hugo Blanco raised is worth considering. He said that in many indigenous communities when a major decision is made they try to take into account the impact it will have seven generations later. When a community is living in almost unmediated contact with the environment which provides almost all its material needs this is self-evidently rational. Hugo counterposed this to the logic of capitalism which in search of profit is not able to take into account the long term needs of human society. Contrasting the morality of indigenous  societies in which mutual support and solidarity are essential for survival he quoted an author who said words to the effect of "if our early ancestors had the morality of modern capitalism they would not have last fifteen minutes in world where they were surrounded by animals which were faster and bigger than they were." He was very passionate in his defence of the Zapatistas’ way of doing politics. I can’t say I agreed with everything he said but you can make up your own mind by listening to what he says on the video.

Diana Raby gave a tour d’horizon of developments in the continent and the video will repay watching. She supported the view of Richard Gott that the recently announced changes in Cuba do not mean a capitalist restoration is the motive behind the recently announced changes. 

Picking up the baton of resistance to big landowners was Jota Ramos, a hip hop singer from Villa Rica in Colombia. There’s an article in the current edition of The Economist about land distribution in the country and the mass terror that is used against small farmers. Jota helped make a powerful little video which shows what being a landless farmer in Colombia looks like. Inevitably he has had death threats made against him by groups which don’t make these idly and he showed the scars on his hand where they’d cut him with a machete as a warning. He hasn’t bowed the knee.

Jota is in Britain as a guest of the Colombia Solidarity Campaign and they have arranged a series of events at which he’ll screen his film and perform. Details are here. CSC’s Andy Higginbottom spoke in the final plenary. He has some bracing views on the demand for a million climate jobs but the meat of his stimulating presentation was an overview of capital transfers from Latin America to Europe, particularly Britain and Spain. What was noteworthy was that the ALBA countries have proportionately much lower transfers to the imperialist states than other countries in the region.