What’s LLZ Tours?
LLZ Tours invites activists (and other interested folk) to accompany us on visits to liberated zones where folks are creating the world they want and need, while resisting the claws of the beast.
Good thing I have claws, too.
Uh huh, now I feel totally safe.
Actually, in liberated zones the underdogs and undercats have a better chance, being spaces activists carve out to build collective power and create strongholds from which to challenge the beast.
At LLZ Tours we feel that activists and our movements can benefit greatly by seeing and experiencing a range of liberated zones. It is inspiring to witness the collective commitment, courage, and exhilaration of doing things in new and better ways, in support of ourselves and our efforts toward complete social transformation.
Quite a few organizations [link to list] conduct visits and tours to the better known of these LZs, whose very existence fills many people with hope, excitement and yearning to participate. Many more folks go on their own, drawn by the community, the experimentation, the chance to relate to others in daily life while participating in a transformative struggle for justice.
For example, in 2011 and 2012 people flocked to Occupy sites around the country and the world; in 2016-17 thousands were drawn to the encampments at Standing Rock. People have been visiting and to the revolutionary Zapatista territories. Despite the U.S. blockade, people have never stopped visiting socialist Cuba and other places where people have developed alternative social relations as both the means and the goal of their struggles for justice, such as the Zapatista territory in Chiapas, Mexico, a liberated zone established in 1994 and assiduously defended since then against all kinds of aggression.
Many more liberated zones are out there, large, small, connected to many different struggles, less known to us.
While they may not call them liberated zones, their purpose is to show the folks who take their tours first hand the liberatory nature of these places, which helps both the visitors and the LZs.
JB and her friends and fellow tour guides (link) invite you to read the LLZ Tours blog, which talks about visitng a broad range of liberated zones, some personally, some through interviews and other research, and some via creative means of travel on the reality<=>fiction continuum.
In the future, we hope to lead actual tours with actual acturistas (activist tourists), probably in conjunction with experienced organizations such as those on this list.
