Dans le cadre du mois d’Août et de sa thématique visant à publier les récits/entrevues de gens ayant subit une transformation radicale afin d’à la fois inspirer mes lecteurs à créer du changement autour d’eux et de démontrer que tout le monde peut changer (et gagne donc à être trai
Read the rest of this post on the original site at De Nationaliste blanc à éco-anarchiste – Entrevue avec Maxime Fiset
I’ve seen a number of posts lately on tumblr –and other social media– about the clenched-fist and cultural appropriation. More specifically, it seems a number of African-American activists wants to claim the clenched-fist for themselves.
Read the rest of this post on the original site at About the clenched-fist and cultural appropriation... : Libre expression
The UK’s gradually expanding porn law restrictions have been going on for years and eventually came to a climax the end of 2014, when previously existing restrictions were applied to all pornographic material made in the UK.
Read the rest of this post on the original site at Porn, Sex Positivity, and Working Class Solidarity
There are many college-educated revolutionaries in cities and towns all through the United States. Whether they work at cafes, wash dishes, teach in public schools, or drive trains, they share the common experience of a college education.
Read the rest of this post on the original site at The Problem With College Educated Revolutionaries
Des dizaines de milliers de Montréalais doivent s'affamer pour payer leur loyer ou sont contraints de vivre dans des logements insalubres, deux situations susceptibles d'entraîner des problèmes de santé physique et mentale.
Read the rest of this post on the original site at Portrait de la misère quotidienne à Montréal
Russia seems to be getting serious about building an international alliance of extreme right parties that would aim at undermining the liberal democratic consensus in the West.
Read the rest of this post on the original site at Russian politicians building an international extreme right alliance
Exclusif - La Grande Bibliothèque a de nouveau fait appel à un exterminateur, début septembre, en raison d'un problème de punaises de lit. Les spécialistes des parasites affirment que l'année 2015 est la pire de toutes et qu'ils ont du mal à répondre à la demande.
Read the rest of this post on the original site at Punaises de lit à Montréal : « On a perdu le contrôle »
Gary Wassaykeesic's 39-year quest to find the man he believes killed his mother came to a surprising end in a hospital room last week in Sioux Lookout, Ont. Sophie Wassaykeesic died in the small northern Ontario mining town of Central Patricia, now part of Pickle Lake, Ont., in 1976.
Read the rest of this post on the original site at First Nations man tracks down person he believes killed his mother
(francais ci dessous)
Memorial/Celebration for Peter Collins in Montreal
When: September 25, 2015 at 7pm
Where: QPIRG Concordia, 1500 de Maisonneuve Ouest, #204
A night to remember and celebrate Peter Collins, an activist, artist, and prisoner who died in prison on August 13, 2015. Come out to QPIRG-Concordia on September 25, 2015 at 7pm to remember and celebrate the life of Peter Collins. Peter was an artist, activist, and prisoner with a life-sentence who died of cancer in Bath Penitentiary in Ontario. Peter’s art will be on display along with memories of him written by folks who knew him. There will be time for folks to speak about Peter and listen to some of his contributions to Montreal’s Prison Radio Show, where he was a contributer from inside prison for many years.
In lieu of flowers please donate to CFRC Radio, online here http://ift.tt/1hV2egZ (MEMO: “Calls from Home Hotline”) or by cheque:
CFRC Radio (MEMO: “Calls from Home Hotline”),
Lower Carruthers Hall
62 Fifth Field Company Lane
Queen’s University
Kingston, ON
K7L 3N6
Calls From Home is a radio project that aims to bring prisoners and their family members and friends together once a month through community radio. It collects voicemail messages from loved ones and broadcasts them over the airwaves on the last Wednesday of each month from 7-8PM. Peter regularly listened to and participated in interviews for this program.
facebook event here:
——————————
Commémoration/Célébration de Peter Collins à Montréal
Quand: le 25 Septembre, 2015 à 19h
Ou: GRIP Concordia, 1500 de Maisonneuve Ouest, #204
Rejoignez-nous au GRIPQ-Concordia le 25 septembre 2015 à 19h pour commémorer et célébrer la vie de Peter Collins. Peter était un artiste, activiste et prisonnier condamné à la prison à perpétuité qui est mort d’un cancer dans le pénitencier de Bath en Ontario. Des œuvres d’art de Peter et des textes écrits en sa mémoire par des personnes le connaissant seront exposés. Il y aura aussi un temps accordé pour ceux et celles voulant parler de Peter et pour écouter quelque unes de ces contributions à l’émission de radio portant sur la prison (Prison Radio Show) de CKUT, une émission pour laquelle il a contribué grandement pour plusieurs années lorsqu’en prison.
À la place de fleurs, vous pouvez faire un don à CFRC Radio par internet au http://ift.tt/1hV2egZ (mémo: «Calls from Home Hotline») ou par chèque à «CFRC Radio» (mémo «calls from Home Hotline») et nous l’envoyer par la poste à
CFRC Radio
Lower Carruthers Hall
62 Fifth Field Company Lane
Queen’s University
Kingston, ON
K7L 3N6
«Calls From Home» est une émission qui a pour but de réunir les prisonnierÉREs avec leur famille et amiEs une fois par mois à travers la radio communautaire. Ce projet rassemble les messages laissés sur notre boîte vocale et les diffuse chaque dernier mercredi du mois entre 19h et 20h. Peter écoutait régulièrement cette émission et nous a accordé quelques entrevues.
F
Chicano Power and the Struggle for Aztlán is a must read for all involved in national liberation struggles in the United $tates today. Integrating gender and class into the discussion of the Chican@ nation, this book frames the struggle in a much needed analysis of history. Chicano Power and the Struggle for Aztlán lays the groundwork for the way forward for our struggle.
Read about:
The principal authors, Cipactli of the Brown Berets – Prison Chapter and Ehecatl, have served long prison sentences due to their class and nationality, and have worked many years as members of United Struggle from Within, the anti-imperialist prisoner organization.
This is the first book-length publication to come out of a MIM(Prisons)-led study group. This group included Chican@ scholars who come from the imprisoned lumpen class, spanning the divide imposed on the nation, north to south. The collaborative writing and editing effort began with the aim of bringing a clear analysis and history to the Chican@ masses. As the project grew, the final product is a vision of the path towards the liberation of Aztlán.
This data is analyzed and interpreted in a Maoist framework, in order to decipher some of the implications of the past hundred years of Chinese—and world—history, for those who seek the overthrow and end to capitalism and imperialism in all its forms.
Readers who wish to correspond with the author, NB Turner, please write to nbturner14@gmail.com
Available from leftwingbooks.net
An Act of Genocide, Colonialism and the Sterilization of Aboriginal Women was written by Karen Stote, an assistant professor of women and gender studies at Wilfred Laurier University in Ontario.
Read the rest of this post on the original site at Sterilization of indigenous women an act of genocide, new book says
More than 65 years after the fall of the Third Reich, Nazi Germany remains an obsession with millions of people around the world. Adolf Hitler was one of the most prominent historical figures from the 20th century, evoking both disgust and fascination.
Read the rest of this post on the original site at Heinrich Himmler: The Nazi Hindu by Palash Ghosh
Q1. This summer, you are digitizing a variety of LGBTQ newspapers at the University of Southern Maine in the Special Collections’ Jean Byers Sampson Center for Diversity in Maine.
Read the rest of this post on the original site at Q5 (#4): Ryan Conrad
Feminist Fightback take a class-based look at intersectionality and identity politics. It reflects ‘thought in process’ rather than a final or united ‘position’, and was first circulated for discussion at the Plan C ‘Fast Forward’ event in September 2014.
Read the rest of this post on the original site at Is intersectionality just another form of identity politics - Feminist Fightback
Escaping the Prism … Fade to Black is a collection of Jalil’s poetry and essays, written from behind the bars of Attica prison. Combining the personal and the political, these texts afford readers with a rare opportunity to get to know a man who has spent most of his life — over forty years –- behind bars for his involvement in the Black Liberation Movement of the 1960s and early 1970s.
Jalil’s poetry deals with a range of themes — spirituality, history, and the struggle for justice; depression, humor, and sexual desire; the pain and loneliness of imprisonment, the ongoing racist oppression of New Afrikan people in the United States, and the need to find meaning in one’s life. At the same time, his political essays show him to be as eager as ever to intervene in and grapple with the events of today, always with an eye to concretely improving the lives of the oppressed.
As Walidah Imarisha states in her introduction, “This collection is not just about rebuke, but a commitment to living fully and loving completely. To exploring all aspects of humanity, all pieces that make up liberation … Escaping the Prism defies the attempts of the state to silence political prisoners, to disconnect them from those on the ground working to create change. In the context of the international Black Lives Matter movement, this roar for justice led by Black youth, Jalil’s poetic voice, and the voices of all our political prisoners, are vitally necessary to continue the continuity of Black resistance.”
Escaping the Prism … Fade to Black also includes an extensive examination of the U.S. government’s war against the Black Liberation Army in general, and Jalil and the New York Three in particular, by renowned scholar-activist Ward Churchill. In “The Other Kind: On the Integrity, Consistency, and Humanity of Jalil Abdul Muntaqim,” Churchill traces this story from the FBI’s murderous COINTELPRO repression of the Black Panther Party, through the NEWKILL operation which led to the NY3’s incarceration, to the more recent Phoenix Taskforce which orchestrated the re-prosecution of Jalil and other veteran Black activists, in the case of the San Francisco 8.
With illustrations by revolutionary prisoner-artists Zolo Agona Azania and Kevin “Rashid” Johnson, as well as outside artist-activists Bec Young, Pete Railand, Rocky Dobey, and the We are the Crisis collective.
You can download a press sheet about Escaping the Prism here: escapeprism_press-sheet
For more information about Jalil: www.freejalil.com/
To learn about other political prisoners and prisoners of war held by the United States government: http://ift.tt/1qplrcx
Jalil Muntaqim’s prose and poetry analyze life within “America as prison.” Decades of sacrifice and resistance allow him to critique state oppression and social acquiescence. We are reminded here of democracy’s capacity for repression and terror through police, courts, and captivity; and the mystification and near disappearance of political prisoners who resisted such as Muntaqim, who writes that his name is spoken either as taboo or in reverence. Aided by Ward Churchill’s invaluable afterword, remember the historical and ongoing wars against dissent, and the brutal punishments activists risked in order to expand freedom. In the current debates about racism, legal duplicity and lethal violence, Escaping the Prism instructs that in our love for freedom, “let the spirit guide us.”
–Joy James, Seeking the ‘Beloved Community’When soldiers of a nation-state return home from war, they are thanked for their service. When they die in battle, they are honored posthumously. But there are no medals for an army of slaves. Escaping the Prism…Fade to Black is a stunning anthology of rare and tender love poems, unflinching struggle poems, and requiem poetry for a people whose personhood is denied. Muntaqim’s poems as well as the political vignettes and biographical sketches contained herein should be required reading for students who wonder why the world is on tilt. For forty-three years as a prisoner of war (nearly twice as long as Mandela who was released after 27 years), BLA soldier Jalil Muntaqim has nurtured us with his pedagogy and his poetry. Thank you for your service.
–Frank B. Wilderson III, author of Incognegro: A Memoir of Exile and ApartheidJalil Muntaqim is known for his letters and petitions and essays. Now, for the first time, we have a collection of his poetry. The poems are analytical and tender, inspiring and angering, nostalgic and sobering. In Escaping the Prism Jalil meditates on life, love, struggle, music, and everything else that prisons contain but fail to crush.
–Dan Berger, author of Captive Nation: Black Prison Organizing in the Civil Rights Era
SUBJECT CATEGORY
Poetry
Criminal Justice/sociology
PRICE
$20.00
ISBN
978-1-894946-62-9
PAGE COUNT
320
SIZE
5.5 x 7.75
FORMAT
Paperback
PUBLICATION DATE
9/15
DISTRIBUTED BY
AK Press
674-A 23rd St.
Oakland, CA
94612
phone:(510) 208-1700
email:info@akpress.org
web:akpress.org
Kersplebedeb Publishing and Distribution, CP 63560
CCCP Van Horne
Montreal, Quebec
Canada H3W 3H8
email:info@kersplebedeb.com
web:www.kersplebedeb.com
http://ift.tt/1pxRDaV
Also available from
Ingram and Baker & Taylor.
CORRECTION: The book was not republished jointly by AK Press and Kersplebedeb, but as a joint project of the Kalikot Book Series and Kersplebedeb. AK Press only distributed it.
Read the rest of this post on the original site at Robert Biel’s Contribution to Anti-Colonial Marxism: Book Review — Eurocentrism in the Communist Movement
This is a second, substantially revised version of the document we published in March 2015. It has been revised after additional internal study and discussion, and in preparation for the release of Volume #7 of Uprising.
from Pocket http://ift.tt/1fOh1c2
via IFTTT
Des membres et ex-membres des Forces armées canadiennes sont au coeur d'une «communauté» d'extrême droite qui fait l'apologie de thèses nazies et de théories du complot, en vantant les «guerriers» et en exaltant le «combat», a appris La Presse.
from Pocket http://ift.tt/1Ipmw81
via IFTTT
When a group built around right-wing conspiracy theories sends heavily armed white men onto streets filled with Black Lives Matter protesters, it makes sense to be worried.
from Pocket http://ift.tt/1fOh1bY
via IFTTT
For free physical copies of Mortar (plus the costs of shipping), please send us a message at mortar@riseup.net. Common Cause is an anarchist-communist organization based in Ontario, Canada, with active branches in Hamilton, Kitchener-Waterloo and Toronto.
from Pocket http://ift.tt/1pFVtBm
via IFTTT
Science fiction often achieves the remarkable feat of being both futuristic and reactionary at the same time. The history of the genre is replete with writers who have given us glittering visions of radically different tomorrows, of robots and androids, aliens and galactic empires.
from Pocket http://ift.tt/1FQFAey
via IFTTT
Since at least the landmark Supreme Court decision that legalized same-sex marriage across the United States, it’s been trendy to say that the culture war is over.
from Pocket http://ift.tt/1NFb0dg
via IFTTT
Fear. Fear is real. There are times when fear should be listened to. Like when shots ring out and fear tells you to duck and run. There are other times when fear needs to be pushed through. We leave it up to each person to decide when to push and when to run.
from Pocket http://ift.tt/1J9v5Yf
via IFTTT
My father usually starts off his curries by roasting a blend of cinnamon, cardamom, coriander, anise, cumin and bay leaves. Then he incorporates the onions, garlic and ginger — and then tomatoes and chilies and a touch of cream.
from Pocket http://ift.tt/1IG6PtT
via IFTTT
Bill Cosby is accused of raping 50 women, and his Q score is still better than Kardashian's. How is that possible? VIDEO This article originally appeared on The Daily Dot.
from Pocket http://ift.tt/1TVRkDU
via IFTTT
In the wake of the attacks by the Center for Medical Progress, Planned Parenthood’s origins and its founder, Margaret Sanger, have once again become the center of conversations regarding Black women and abortion.
from Pocket http://ift.tt/1WHJH8s
via IFTTT
San Quentin 6 defendants Fleeta Drumgo, Hugo Pinell, and David Johnson stage an impromptu sit-in at San Quentin in 1975 when trial jurors toured the prison
Hugo Pinell was assassinated at new Folsom State Prison. this is another example of the racism people of color inside those prisons are confronted with on a daily basis. like Comrade George, Hugo has been in the cross hairs of the system for years. His assassination exemplify how racist working in conjunction with prison authorities commit murderous acts like this. We saw it on the yard at Soledad in 1970 and we see it again on the yard at Folsom in 2015.
His life was a living hell. We witness the brutality inflicted on him by prison guards as they made every effort to break him, he endured more than fifty years of sensory deprivation, for decades he was denied being able to touch his family or another human being, as well as attempts on his life. This is cruel and unusual punishment! Hugo is not the monster that is being portrayed in social media / news media. The CDC is the real monster.
During the six trial we really got to know Hugo. He was as we all were under a lot of stress. His stress was heavier than mines because he had the additional load of being beaten on regular occasions. We saw the strength of his of his spirit, and through it all he manage to smile.
We mourn the loss of our comrade brother, yogi. We have been hit with a crushing blow that will take some time to recover from. We must expose those who under the cover of law orchestrated and allowed this murderous act to take place. The prisoners who did it acted as agents of the state. It comes at a time when prisoners are collectively trying to end decades of internal strife. Those who took his life have done a disservice to our movement, their actions served the cause of the same oppressor we fought against! No longer do you have to endure the hatred of people who didn’t even know you and never dared to love you. You have represented George & Che well, and we salute you!
SQ SIX
David General Giap Johnson
Luis Bato Talamantez
Willie Sundiata Tate
By / thestranger.com The roar of internet response to what happened in Seattle on Saturday surprised even one of the activists behind the action. But in retrospect, it makes some sense.
from Pocket http://ift.tt/1hB8D15
via IFTTT
Originally published in 1985 as a "movement" mimeograph in the anti-revisionist Marxist-Leninist circles in the UK, Robert Biel's [ECM] is a subterranean classic.
from Pocket http://ift.tt/1gJloWK
via IFTTT
Biel provides convincing arguments as to how the failure of Marxist movements to divest themselves of a Eurocentric worldview is intimately connected to opportunism and mechanical materialism. The opportunist position of reform over revolution, or the peaceful existence with capitalism, was historically premised on the denial of struggles at the global peripheries, and collaboration with colonialism; the theory of productive forces was premised on a development discourse where colonial development should be supported so as to create a third world proletariat and bourgeoisie. This Eurocentric blockage would carry over into other Marxist tendencies, even ones that were not immediately revisionist or economistic. For example, in the First Congress of the Third International, Trotsky could make the Eurocentric argument that the ‘smaller peoples’ in Africa and Asia would be freed, not by their own agency, but by a proletarian revolution in Europe that would ‘free the productive forces of all countries from the tentacles of the national states.’ (115) Of course, Biel notes that there was also a creative development of theory under Lenin that challenged these Eurocentric categories: hence, in the Second Congress of the Third International, the position expressed by Trotsky (and others) above was replaced, through debates on the national question, by the position (that Lenin had held earlier) that resistance movements at ‘the weakest links’ possessed the most revolutionary potential.
But alongside every creative development of theory emerging from revolutionary struggle that challenged the Eurocentric aspects of Marxism, there has also been, despite important successes, an inability to go far enough. Biel traces this problem from the time of Marx and Engels right up to the Chinese-inspired New Communist Movement (the context in which the original version of this book was written) that was not only at risk of ‘dogmatism’ – because ‘with any movement to uphold orthodoxy, you risk becoming conservative and scared of new ideas’ (6) – but failed to truly grasp ‘that aspect of the corrupting influence of imperialism [Eurocentrism] which ought to have been the target of struggle … [that] will sneak into the anti-revisionist movement and grab it from within.’ (6)
Hugo Yogi Pinell
(from freedom archives)
We are saddened by the news of Hugo Pinell’s death. Hugo Pinell always expressed a strong spirit of resistance. He worked tirelessly as an educator and activist to build racial solidarity inside of California’s prison system.
Incarcerated in 1965, like so many others, Hugo became politicized inside the California prison system.
In addition to exploring his Nicaraguan heritage, Hugo was influenced by civil rights activists and thinkers such as Malcolm X, Martin Luther King as well as his comrades inside including George Jackson. His leadership in combating the virulent racism of the prison guards and officials made him a prime target for retribution and Hugo soon found himself confined in the San Quentin Adjustment Center.
While at San Quentin, Hugo and five other politically conscious prisoners were charged with participating in an August 21, 1971 rebellion and alleged escape attempt, which resulted in the assassination of George Jackson by prison guards. Hugo Pinell, Willie Tate, Johnny Larry Spain, David Johnson, Fleeta Drumgo and Luis Talamantez became known as the San Quentin Six. Their subsequent 16-month trial was the longest in the state’s history at the time. The San Quentin Six became a global symbol of unyielding resistance against the prison system and its violent, racist design.
As the California Prisons began to lock people up in long-term isolation and control unit facilities, Hugo was placed inside of the SHU (Secure Housing Unit) in prisons including Tehachapi, Corcoran and Pelican Bay. There, despite being locked in a cell for 23 hours a day, he continued to work for racial unity and an end to the torturous conditions and racially and politically motivated placement of people into the SHU. This work included his participation in the California Prison Hunger Strikes as well as supporting the Agreement to End Racial Hostilities in 2011.
At the time of his death, Hugo had been locked behind bars for 50 years yet his spirit was unbroken.
*************************
Freedom Archives is currently working on an audio piece based on one of the last recordings done with Hugo. We will include materials from the San Quentin 3 – David Johnson, Luis Talamantez and Sundiata Tate.
| We would like to share this brief poem by Luis ‘Bato’ Talamantez:Hasta Siempre Hugo
Solidarity forever And we are saddened Solidarity left You when (it) should have Counted for something and What your long imprisoned Life stood for Now all your struggles To be free have failed And only death a Inglorious and violent Death has Claimed you At the hands of the Cruel prison system
La Luta Continua
-Bato and the San Quentin 3 |
and a short poem written by Hugo Pinell from a publication issued in 1995.No
Matter How long it takes, Real Changes will come, And the greatest personal reward Lies in our involvement and contributions, Even if it may appear that nothing significant Or of impact really happened During our times, But it did, Because Every sincere effort Is as special as every human life -Hugo Pinell (1995) |
Here is a link to the Freedom Archives San Quentin 6 collection (note there are 19 non-digitized items as well as those that are already digitized)
Freedom Archives 522 Valencia Street San Francisco, CA 94110 415 863.9977 http://ift.tt/1jsDuaB
h
Peter Collins
Peter Collins, our friend, brother and comrade in struggle passed away August 13, 2015 at 2am. He will always be remembered for his endless fight for justice, his sense of humour, his kind heart and his unwavering integrity. His contributions to changing the world we live in will continue to live on through his art, cartoons, audio recordings, short films and his writing. His spirit will live on through our hearts and minds as he deeply touched so many of us.
Over the coming months there will be memorial services held in Ottawa, Kingston, Montreal and Toronto.
Peter Collins
There is so much to say about the lack of proper care that he received but we will write more about that later.
this article touches on points related to the Neocolonialism and Noise thing i wrote a few days ago, and which i continue to think about
Maybe the best thing to say is just that contemporary culture is complicated by a deep confusion about underdogs and bullies, that we can no longer identify insider or outsider easily, and that capital has undertaken a deliberate process of mystification about power. The linguistic and culture code I’m describing arose from an insurgent tendency, and indeed, those who use it do not occupy a seat of economic or political power. They have, instead, become part of a dominant cultural force that has been divided entirely from that base in material power. Capitalism has given us cool and kept power for itself, divorced the affect of resistance from actual resistance, and at this stage we have to merely remain alive to what is happening under our noses as we attempt to secure the inevitable next stage of human affairs.
The world has changed over the past fifty years. There are different names for this change — neoliberalism, postmodernism, postfordism, globalization. The term i prefer to use is “neocolonialism”. But despite this clear reference to one specific thing — colonialism, the relationship between oppressor and oppressed nations, which i would argue remains central — the change that has taken place encompasses much more than that, being not just about the fake integration of of colonized people as pretend “equal partners” in imperialism, but also about the fake integration of women as “equal partners” in patriarchy, and about all kinds of direct and indirect ways in which global capitalism was restructured to respond to the political challenge of the 20th century anticolonial movements.
Whatever you want to call it, one thing that is clear is that within the imperialist centers (countries like canada, the united states, etc.), there is a lot more mainstream cultural space allowed for rebellious noise, innovation, and “freedom” of a sort than there used to be in capitalism’s previous phase. Indeed, all kinds of cultural innovation, love it or hate it, is allowed to thrive as it can under these conditions, the sole condition being that it not frontally assault the system today. My guess is that partly this is because the constraints of old style colonialism were defeated, but also partly because this noise, innovation, and “freedom” has become a big moneymaker, not just a fringe niche. And partly, looking at the settler colonies and especially the united states as a trendsetter culturally as much as economically within the anglosphere, this can be seen as an immediate echo of the integration into “whiteness” of myriad non-WASP europeans in the early 20th century, followed by the integration/appropriation/commercialization on a world scale of various oppressed-nation cultures1 in the postwar period. Things opened up.
At the same time, under neocolonialism, there is less space for actual change which will make life better for the oppressed majority, by which i mean (speaking schematically) the world proletariat and peasantry, the overwhelming majority of whom are found in the oppressed nations, within which women play an increasingly prominent and critical part. Capitalism in the previous period, but especially after World War II, had a lot of wiggle room, and there were tangible victories that could be scored. (Was this “low lying fruit” in historical terms? i would say no, though maybe it appears that way looking back.)
Not only is there less room for improving the lives of the most oppressed under neocolonialism, but as there is less and less economic wiggle room in general, the memo has gone out to every nation and would-be-nation and class and collectivity out there: get ready to fight for what you have, or for what you want, or if for nothing else then at least for the crumbs. Because it is like a global game of musical chairs, who will be out next? Greece? Spain? China? Wait and see … but know if you’re just sitting on your thumbs waiting, you might end up resembling that deer in the headlights …
In other words, whether it is the NDP or the Parti Quebecois, or QS or Syriza, this thing they call “austerity” is on the agenda, even for the global middle class. Less wiggle room all around.
At the same time, while there is less room for economic change or even consistent social bribery under neocolonialism (offbalanced by plenty of room still for sporadic and ad hoc bribery and privilege), the present world order incorporates a higher level2 of instability than old-style colonialism — not really unrelated to the aforementioned game of musical chairs — and this makes various conflicts and challenges appear super risky, and confusing — think Syria, Libya, Ukraine … ISIS, Boko Haram, etc. — there is no unified left position on these things, and even where bunches of us do agree, we neither know how to intervene, nor do we (in the imperialist west) have the capacity to intervene in a meaningful way.
It is all very discouraging. Add examples like Nepal and Palestine and the Dominican Republic into the mix, and it gets downright depressing.
So what to do, when there is extra space made for words, including angry words, but less space for real change … plus remember, more dangerous and daunting possibilities whenever even one of the system’s satraps is challenged?3
Lined up like a math equation that way, the answer isn’t a mystery: energies get spent developing those angry words, and the relationship of those words to real change becomes less and less important. Indeed, we think away from change, whenever we can.
i think it is rare on the activist left for people to do this in a machiavellian or malevolent way. i don’t think people are saying to themselves “how can i opportunistically posture while not actually doing anything that would make me a target”. i think it generally happens on a more subtle, subconscious, diffused-through-the-global-middle-class-and-expressed-with-good-intentions kinda way. But that is what i see happening, in a process than affects me as much as anyone around me.
In this way the current economic-political setup which is neocolonialism structures even those movements that oppose it. And as this is done, they bring into being a particular emotional register, as all social structures do. The living consequence as people feel it, is movements in which there is a pressure to be judgmental and conformist, in which people feel unusual amounts of insecurity about saying or doing “the wrong thing” (often without anybody being able to articulate why it is wrong in a way that makes sense outside of the clique), in which we have lots of nice sounding words for people from oppressed nations or suffering gender oppression, but also in which we have few solutions which are both collective and real4 — in other words, despite our subjective intentions, we build movements with all the characteristics of neocolonialism itself.
i wrote the above, in somewhat shorter form, in a facebook thread about the statement “men are the enemy”, which was defended on the grounds that it was some kind of syllogism to “white people are the enemy”. Statements which — as is usually the case in my experience — were being made by men and white people, amongst others. i was trying to explain why i objected to the statements, in that i do not feel such statements are “real”, i do not feel such statements are generally said with any kind of intention to act as if this were true, that such statements are more about staking out positions than anything else, and why i find that to be characteristic of radical movements in the imperialist centers during the neocolonial age.
But to be clear, i think the above applies to a whole range of practices and ideas which increase in their shiny impressive edgey radicalness5 just as they abandon any intersection with people’s lives or actual political choices. Following the rightward swing of the 1980s, pretty much anything coming out of academia seems to have to contend with this as an overwhelming temptation. In terms of identity politics … well, identity politics is often a prime example of this, but it should be kept in mind that it is not the root of it, and bashing identity politics can be just as much emblematic of the neocololonial grandstanding imperative. In fact, grandstanding is a big part of what this is all about.
Of course, all of this is a schematic look at how neocolonialism engenders this kind of attitude on a macro level. On a more intimate, more on-the-level-of-our-experiences, level, this stuff plays out according to its own identifiable mechanisms. But that is not specific to this, it is more how stuff operates in general. The macro level creates openings and opportunities which are then filled, generally autonomously, by things thought up or developed or chanced upon by actual people, and then generalized/popularized/institutionalized. For better or for worse. What i am trying to say here, is in this case it is for worse.
This is something i may return to in future posts. It is certainly something i have been thinking about. i don’t consider it to be a major strategic issue, or something that uncovers some big bad truth about capitalism or the world today. However, within sections of the radical left, i feel the most pressing issue facing us is to “get real”, and the noise described above is one of the first obstacles to us doing that.
It’s just that I’m really not that interested in playing punk rock anymore. I sometimes feel like punk rock, not necessarily the way the songs are supposed to go, but the way they end up going, live, for a lot of bands, in a lot of shows, they’re so fast that’s it’s really hard to dig the melody, because it just flies by, and you don’t have a chance to even grab onto it. The other thing is, the formula for writing lyrics in punk rock—and I’m a slave to the punk rock formula—is really in your face. There’s no ambiguity whatsoever. This is what we’re telling you, and it’s black and white, you know what I mean? And that’s not really where I’m at in terms of lyric-writing anymore. I want to move beyond that. I’m not saying I do move beyond that, but ideally I would like to. And I think the songs on Coming Home, there’s a little bit more room for the listener to move around in the lyrics without being hit over the head with a sledgehammer and told how to think.
(/français ci-dessous/)
Rally and Hearing for Deepan in Montreal!
http://ift.tt/1D2SoxV
Monday, 13 July, 8am
Immigration and Refugee Board,
Guy Favreau Complex (200 René Lévesque Blvd.), Montreal
Deepan Budlakoti, our comrade and friend, will soon be in Montreal to challenge his conditions of release at the Immigration and Refugee Board. Deepan is under a deportation order to India, his parents’ country of birth. He spent months in immigration detention and was released under conditions that limit his freedoms. Because India does not recognize him as a citizen and is refusing his deportation, Deepan is under these conditions indefinitely, with no end in sight.
Deepan was born in Ottawa and his Canadian citizenship was never in question until a racist prison guard reported him to Immigration Canada. This initiated a process in which Canada arbitrarily decided that he was not a citizen on the pretext that his parents came to Canada to work as household help in the Indian Embassy and then proceeded to strip him of permanent residence because of his criminal record. More information on his struggle to have his citizenship recognized: www. justicefordeepan.org.
Join us on July 13th for a rally and then stay afterwards; we’ll try to fill the room with supporters if they allow us to attend the hearing.
NO to double punishment!
NO deportations!
NO detentions!
JUSTICE for Deepan!
Rassemblement et audience pour Deepan à Montréal !
http://ift.tt/1D2SoxV
Lundi, 13 juillet, à 8h
Commission de l’immigration et du statut de réfugié du Canada
Complexe Guy Favreau (200 boul. René-Lévesque), Montréal
Deepan Budlakoti, notre camarade et ami, sera bientôt à Montréal pour contester ses conditions de libération devant la Commission de l’immigration et du statut de réfugié du Canada. Deepan a reçu un ordre de déportation vers l’Inde, le pays de naissance de ses parents. Il a passé des mois en détention de l’immigration et a été libéré sous des conditions qui limitent ses libertés. Parce que l’Inde ne le reconnaît pas comme un citoyen et qu’il refuse sa déportation, Deepan est sous ces conditions indéfiniment, sans en voir la fin.
Deepan est né à Ottawa et sa citoyenneté canadienne n’avait jamais été remise en question jusqu’à ce qu’un gardien de prison raciste le dénonce à l’immigration. Cela a initié un processus durant lequel le Canada a décidé d’une manière arbitraire//qu’il n’était pas un citoyen canadien sous le pretexte que ses parents étaient venus ici pour travailler comme aides domestiques à l’ambassade indienne, puis il lui ont retiré sa résidence permanente à cause de son dossier criminel. Pour plus d’informations sur sa lutte pour faire reconnaître sa citoyenneté : www. justicefordeepan.org.
Joignez-vous à nous le 13 juillet pour un rassemblement et restez avec nous ensuite; nous essayerons de remplir la salle avec des alliéEs s’ils nous laissent assister à l’audience.
NON à la double peine !
NON aux déportations !
NON aux détentions !
JUSTICE pour Deepan !
Recently one of those issues that arises constantly to tangle up leftists and liberals reared its head in my little world. Some folks (all of European decent) in a band I know were in the studio and someone proposed using an aburukuwa, a Ghanian drum, I am told, to get just the right sound. One of the young men in the band objected that that was “cultural appropriation.”
Although people who use this term rarely take time to define it, I presume that the issue with cultural appropriation is the apparent commodification of an oppressed culture’s artefacts to the advantage of an oppressor culture, or in layman’s terms: ripping off other people’s shit – and maybe killing them in the process – for fun and profit. I personally consider the question of cultural appropriation to raise issues that are much messier and more complex than the young feller’s simple (perhaps simplistic) statement suggests. I sort of think of it as the next-door neighbour of political correctness: not quite as pointlessly guilt-ridden and paralyzing, but not as straight forward as its proponents suggest.
We’re talking about rock music here, so let’s just pause for a moment to think. Let’s start with Elvis, who definitely didn’t create rock ‘n’ roll, but who, nonetheless, is the single figure most likely to leap to mind when one thinks about the genre – which has to do with media propensity for oversimplification, but I digress. Chuck Berry is fond of being pissed off about not getting his dues (in the form of cash) as the fountainhead of rock ‘n’ roll. Bo Diddley probably has an argument on his side as well, and he’s also got that real cool box-shaped guitar. Me, personally I think the first rock ‘n’ roll song was Hot Tamales (They’re Red Hot) by Robert Johnson – and if we’re going to talk about appropriation and not getting your dues, I mean really, the man pretty much invented a genre that everyone and his/her dog has appropriated.
Anyway, back to Elvis. Everyone knows Elvis stole black music. Then, I think, well, what about the Sun Sessions? I mean, yeah, you can hear the impact of R&B, but you can also hear the impact of hillbilly music – some people might actually think that the idea of synthesizing those two styles and then spicing it with some this and that was actually pretty ingenious – apparently both Sammy Davis Jr. and James Brown thought the man rocked (as it were).1 Fucking sellouts – who’s black and proud now?
Of course, I also find myself wondering: Would it have been a better world if Elvis had just stayed with the hillbilly music, rather than playing a role in creating a form of music that was one of the sparks for the youth revolt that became the mass uprising of the sixties?2 Let’s see what John Trudell, former national chairman of the American Indian Movement, has to say about it in a song entitled Baby Boom Ché, (he sings in a form distinctly integrating aspects of white rock music and white beat poetry with traditional Native drumming):
The first wave rebelled,
I mean, we danced even if we didn’t know how,
I mean Elvis made us move.
Instead of standing mute he raised our voice
And when we heard ourselves something was changing,
You know, like for the first time we made a collective decision
About choices.3
Fucking sellout!
Anyway, we all know how that ends: Vegas gets Elvis, and a bunch of guys (mostly white) grow their hair long and learn how to make guitars feedback (I will ultimately lose a good deal of hearing listening to them do their various party tricks). Rock is born in little shitholes in London and New York City and Hamburg and San Francisco … well, basically anywhere where there was a high concentration of European and Euro-American youth. Now, we all know that these guys stole the blues – I mean the Rolling Stones (definitely the robber barons of the genre, as it were) named themselves after a Muddy Waters song. My friend Phil says he advised them to adopt the name, but that’s another story – and undoubtedly a lie.
This round of appropriation all gets a bit confusing. For example, Hendrix was routinely criticized for playing “white man’s music.” So, was Hendrix appropriating white man’s music that had been appropriated from black folks – mostly men, actually – or was he re-appropriating black man’s music? Fucking sellout … maybe … I can’t tell … I’m getting confused here … What is the issue exactly? Should everyone just make sure to never play anything that wasn’t played by dead people of their own pigmentation? That would be boring – not to mention the fact (which I’m clearly about to mention), that culture has always grown by cross-pollination. I mean, arguably the major restaurant option in London is Indian food – which is often actually Pakistani food, but let’s keep things simple for the honkies. Often, said Indian restaurants will curry up some local foodstuff that one wouldn’t find in India – are we appropriating them, or are they appropriating us? (Editorial comment: This raises an interesting question – Why is there a hierarchy in emphasis around these issues which parallels the hierarchy of senses as it were – visual art gets the most heavy critiques for appropriation, music and poetry next in line, food never gets criticized for it. Like who would ever want to give up all the spices and comfort flavours they like, based on some political checklist?) Right you are – that is an interesting question.
Enough of Indian food – I find it too heavy for summer, in any case – and back to rock music. Fatigued of the 317-minute guitar solo played at the speed of light with $82,000 worth of technological distortion and manipulation – here come the punks (a goodly number of them being bored middle class kids who appropriated “white trash” sensibilities as a political statement of sorts). Now, you couldn’t get a whiter music – well, not for the first year or so, in any event – then the Clash and the Slits and the Ruts… appropriated reggae music with the help of Adrian Sherwood. Lo and behold, a genuine Jamaican Rastafarian named Mikey Dread soon gets involved – Did we appropriate him? When Prince Far I, Mikey Dread and Bim Sherman – all Jamaicans – work with Adrian Sherwood, a white man, are they being appropriated? I keep trying to find that fucking line.
Let’s move onto hip hop, the music that improbably took over the world – what a clusterfuck. From that point on it’s an appropriation free for all. Hip hop starts sampling white pop and rock hooks, white kids start rapping, rap metal is born, then trip hop … I mean, country stars like Brad Paisley are doing duets with people like LL Cool J – who’s appropriating who? They don’t seem to care, so I guess I won’t either.
Am I saying that appropriation from other cultures and peoples is a non-issue? Not at all. I live in Montréal, ergo I live on unceded (i.e., appropriated – and pretty fucking violently so) Mohawk land. That in effect means that every moment of every day of my life is part of an ongoing act of criminal and genocidal appropriation. That seems to me to be the kind of appropriation that should get people’s panties in a bunch. It is a source of a lot more human pain and suffering than beating on any drum could ever be – you can’t just shy away like you saw the ghost of George Custer eating Tašú?ke Witkó’s4 brain, you have to do something.
Back to cultural appropriation: slowly I’m getting to my point – trust me (or don’t, I don’t really care). Like the land we appropriated, what it is we ultimately appropriate is far more important than some drum most Europeans and Euro-Americans (oh, and those white folks down under) have never even heard of being played by a band they don’t know. What we routinely and as a matter of course appropriate is the surplus labour of the people of the Third World or the Global South or the Three Continents (whatever ideological formulation works for you – in the end they’re all names for the same areas and the same process). Let me explain what I mean here. Look down at your feet. Those Nikes or Adidas or knockoffs you’re wearing were assembled in a Third World sweatshop by people making a few dollars a sixteen-hour day, maybe in one of those factories with the nets around it to keep people from committing suicide to escape their jobs. In short, we in the First World spend all day walking around on the appropriated sweat and blood or super-exploited people. Now that there’s some “killer” appropriation.
Now go to the mirror – that really rad t-shirt might have been produced in one of those factories where the doors are locked to prevent the slowly suffocating workers from escaping the 45° C heat. It might even be one of the ones where the workers were immolated because they couldn’t get out when the substandard factory burst into flames. Come to think of it, my air conditioner probably comes from a factory like that too.
You can see where I’m going here, right? Your food – the appropriated labour of disenfranchised peasants forced to slave away in dangerously polluted conditions on agribusiness plantations so we can buy avocados and raspberries and kiwis… all year round (and bitch about how fruit and vegetables don’t taste like anything anymore – go figure!). The dishes you’re eating that food off of – why do you think Dollarama’s so cheap? (First clue: the top 1% of the population is getting richer – and the top 0.1% even more so – and the rest of us are getting poorer.) Then, there’s all those technological gewgaws that have replaced human relationships in your life – assembled by people who could probably not afford them in conditions that will cut many of their lives short. When they break, which they usually do pretty quickly, or when they become “pseudo-obsolete” (who wants an iPhone 5 when the iPhone 6 is on the market?), they will be turned into toxic garbage mountains where the children of workers just like the ones who assembled this crap play. What’s our major reaction to all of this? We’re pissed when we have trouble communicating with that egregiously underpaid woman in Lahore who answers our tech support call when one of the aforementioned gewgaws isn’t cooperating. I mean, really, how thoughtless of her to have an accent we have difficulty with when she speaks a language the British imposed upon her and her country, a country where she has to take a crappy phone job or starve.
All of this has me thinking that what these folks might well like would be for us to stop appropriating their lifeforce and converting it into our vacuous lifestyle, and I rather doubt they give a fuck if we’re playing an aburukuwa when we do that. In one sentence: Not playing the aburukuwa is not enough – it’s not even really a start.
A useful series of musings on consent, seduction, and queerness in the realms of sex and politics; from the people at Crimethinc
source: http://ift.tt/MzuvD0
The four-year study tracked nearly 900 women at three Canadian universities, randomly selecting half to take the 12-hour “resistance” program, and compared them to a second group who received only brochures, similar to those available at a health clinic. One year later, the incidence of reported rape among women who took the program was 5.2 per cent, compared to 9.8 per cent in the control group; the gap in incidents of attempted rape was even wider.
source: http://ift.tt/1GfMNrA
What I do know is that Cindy Gladue was not killed by an Indian man. Bradley Barton is a white man. I suppose, however, that Cindy Gladue’s case wouldn’t even be factored into this type of statistical analysis since, according to the courts, she wasn’t murdered at all.
source: http://ift.tt/1Q9G3Dl
There are two reasons he was careful to organize his image for posterity. First, he must have thought that the rumours and social pressures existing during his lifetime would continue immediately after his death. What would have happened if in the 19th Century, historiography had discovered this deception? The risk was that his music would no longer be played. He had spent his life convincing the public to believe that he had only European origins. After composing one of the most important monuments of the history of art and the human spirit, he wished above all that his work would be passed to posterity.
A second, more important reason exists: to play his music as he played it, to understand it, to hear it, so that it produced the same enchantment as when he played or led it when alive, one had to understand that an important part of the music education that he received in his childhood and early adolescence was an intimate knowledge of polyrhythmic science and art. And, he was a bit of a joker. He must have been amused to see that with the scores he had produced, interpreters were unable, and still are, to produce the same music that came out these texts when he played it. He often said, “It will take at least 50 years before my music is understood.” In actuality, his calculation was off by 150 years. Today, we realize that to play it properly, one has to understand that he had a dual identity. That he was also an African.
source: http://ift.tt/1Mbu5mv
This essay investigates the explosive Soviet interest in space travel during the New Economic Policy (NEP) era of the 1920s, as expressed through amateur societies, the press, literature, painting, film, and other popular culture. In recovering an obscured history of the roots of Russian cosmonautics, it shows how the cause of space exploration in early twentieth-century Russia originally stemmed from two ideological strands: technological utopianism and the mystical occult tradition of Cosmism. The former (seemingly modern, urban, international, materialist) alternately clashed and meshed with the latter (superficially archaic, pastoral, Russian, spiritual), creating an often contradictory but urgent language of space enthusiasm. Cosmic activists, who saw themselves as part of a new Soviet intelligentsia, actively used both ideals to communicate their views directly to the public. The essay argues that despite superficial differences, technological utopianism and Cosmism shared much of the same iconography, language, and goals, particularly the imperative to transform and control the natural world. In other words, the modern rocket with its new Communist cosmonaut was conceived as much in a leap of faith as in a reach for reason.
source: http://ift.tt/1Mj9xZj
Not having any pretensions of giving an overview of all of Muslim national communism, I am interested here in someone who remains its major figure, the Tartar Bolshevik intellectual and militant Mirsaid Sultan-Galiev, whose first arrest was remarked upon by Trotsky in 1923, when he cited Kamenev’s words:
Do you remember the arrest of Sultan-Galiev? […] This was the first arrest of a prominent Party member made upon the initiative of Stalin […] That was Stalin’s first taste of blood.4
But let’s take things up from the beginning.
source: http://ift.tt/1EuvC2x
From this anxiety of imitation, it is a short step to seeking authenticity in texts from the past, even if one of those texts is itself a modern imitation. The effect is further magnified by a narrowly instrumental education, the shrinking of public debate, the subservience of media to business interests, the proliferation of social media, and an influential but alienated diaspora, especially in the United States, that seeks to find a glorious Hindu past that can be seen to have exceeded the very West upon which India’s recent success depends so heavily. When this past does not exist, it has to be created, often in less imaginative ways than the manner in which Sastry fashioned the V.S.
It has meant, for instance, the destruction of books with perspectives on ancient India that the Hindu right finds unpalatable. In 2001, when the Delhi University historian D.N. Jha wrote, in The Myth of the Holy Cow, that the ancient Vedic people were eaters of beef, he and his publisher were threatened, subjected to demonstrations, ritual book burnings, calls for the book to be banned, and a court order preventing its distribution. Jha’s work was based on extensive archaeological and textual evidence, and his argument itself is widely accepted by professional historians in India and abroad, but it went against the Hindu right’s insistence that beef-eating was an evil brought into the subcontinent by Muslims (a process it is determined to reverse by force, as in a recent ban in the state of Maharashtra that makes possession of beef punishable by a five-year jail term). Similarly, when University of Chicago scholar Wendy Doniger published The Hindus: An Alternative History in 2009, the campaign against it ran all the way from the United States to India, where the book’s publishers, Penguin India, after a four-year legal battle, agreed to an out-of-court settlement that involved withdrawing all copies of the book and pulping them. Among the arguments against the book in the lawsuit initiated by Dina Nath Batra, founder of a Hindu right-wing educational organization and author of textbooks depicting ancient glories, like television and cars, was that “your approach is that of a woman hungry of sex.”
source: http://ift.tt/1JiKCWS
A weakness of large parts of the “left” opposition and the radical Left becomes apparent: after the pogroms of the early ’90s many abandoned the working class as a revolutionary force. They could therefore only turn to “civil society” and thus ultimately the state as an ally against the Nazis. This ally supported fascist structures and helped to establish them, while at the same time it gave the left-wing opposition the opportunity to turn itself into a force supportive of the state. This fact paralyses many Antifa and other leftwing groups. Instead of naming the state’s role in the NSU complex, they focus on the investigation committees and the trial, they lose themselves in the details which are produced there. There were no significant movements on the streets when the NSU became public. All this allows the state apparatus to minimize the NSU – but many people still feel the horror.
source: http://ift.tt/1KKcYrw
Some examples? Let’s start with something — an opinion or claim — that is not ideology, even though it might seem to be. Here’s one: “Canada is a democratic society that treats its citizens fairly.”
It may be bullshit, but it’s not ideology. The ideology is this: that one barely notices the fact that there are “borders” instituted around “nation states,” and that one of these is “Canada”; that this “Canada” is “a society,” in the singular, rather than multiple societies, or multiple systems and structures some of which cross borders, etc.; that “countries” can be labelled “democratic,” rather than institutions or practices or specific decisions, so that the question of whether it is or isn’t democratic is a sort of total judgment, appealing to some unspoken but supposedly obvious criterion; that many of the people in the supposed “country” are “citizens,” while some are “non-citizens”; that the standard for treating “citizens” “fairly” will differ from the standard for treating “non-citizens” fairly. And so on. Ideology lies here, in this stew of unexamined obviousness. None of it is stated in the claim under consideration (“Canada is a democratic society that treats its citizens fairly”). But all of it is presupposed by that claim.
source: http://ift.tt/1T1SSPa
grand·stand
??ran(d)?stand/
verb derogatory
gerund or present participle: grandstanding
seek to attract applause or favorable attention from spectators or the media.
“they accused him of political grandstanding”
Just saying: i think there is a connection between neocolonialism as the current phase of global relations, and grandstanding as a personal practice within the multicultural middle class. On all sides.
Tesla Motors Inc., SolarCity Corp. and Space Exploration Technologies Corp., known as SpaceX, together have benefited from an estimated $4.9 billion in government support, according to data compiled by The Times. The figure underscores a common theme running through his emerging empire: a public-private financing model underpinning long-shot start-ups.
Profession • % des employés qui ne résident pas à Montréal
Pompiers 82%
Policiers 81%
Contremaîtres 62%
Cadres 49%
Cols Bleus 48%
Professionnels 38%
Cols Blancs 32%
Brigadiers 5%
Total 49%
source: http://ift.tt/1HLR0Up
It is said that history repeats itself. There is some truth to be found within this statement. All existing matter, be it organic or inorganic, and social phenomenon alike, have a history of endless development, a process of becoming, being, and passing away and into something qualitatively new altogether.
But development does not, nor should it be misunderstood, as proceeding along a straight line. Linearism is a product of the human mind, a human construct, that fails to correspond with the external material world and the laws inherent within it that govern the direction and development of its endless transformation.
History, like every other existing thing in this world, develops not in a straight line, like a recording on a reel that repeats itself continually, but in a cyclical like ascendancy, with each cycle repeating itself qualitatively distinct from the previous one, or as V.I. Lenin described: “A development that repeats, as it were, stages that have already been passed, but repeats them in a different way, on a higher basis (negation of negation), a development, so to speak, that proceeds in spirals, not in a straight line.”
At this particular stage in our struggle, we are coming full circle as history is once again repeating itself. This is a critical moment, and the life or death of our struggle is being decided by our response to the Security Threat Group and Step Down Program [S.T.G. and S.D.P. respectively] that we have allowed the state to impose upon us.
The fact that we are assisting the state to perpetuate its policy of social extermination under a new label directly reflects the deterioration of our collective unity and the resurgence of the vile individualism that has come to characterize the prison population of the last two decades.
If we are to take a correct measurement of our current situation and the trajectory we are now on, we must place the S.T.G. and S.D.P within its proper historical context, and this requires that we once again revisit the Castillo case with an understanding of the 602 process and the function it serves. The 602 process serves two main simultaneous functions: First, by seeking relief on an individual basis, it distracts and divides us from the issues that impact us as a group. Secondly, the administrative process is dragged out for so long and the petitioner is required to jump through so many hoops that eventually most petitioners grow exhausted and abandons all attempts at seeking relief from the violations committed by the state.
Embodied with this statement is the age-old strategy of “divide and conquer”, which the CDC has learned to employ against us with great efficiency. And everytime we utilize the 602 process individually as the only means of achieving transformation, like a ju-jitsu fi ghter we allow the state to turn our own individualism against ourselves as a means to deprive us of the unity and momentum necessary for waging a successful struggle. More important, this strategy is not limited to the 602 process alone, but is a common feature that permeates all interactions between the state and ourselves. This is inevitable being that the state’s apparatus of repression in all of its various forms—the judicial system, police, military, intelligence, etc., especially the prison system—is an inherently oppressive institution by design.
As most of us can recall, the Castillo case was a long, arduous legal battle that raged in the judiciary arena for some ten years in a noble effort to eliminate the state’s inhumane practice of “social extermination”, i.e., keeping us alive as living and breathing empty vessels without the social intercourse necessary for one to develop identity (emphasis added by Ed). For reasons left unexamined we failed to complement this legal battle with any other forms of direct resistance, while IGI fascists and the CDC bureaucracy remained adamantly consistent throughout in its own efforts to keep us divided. Despite the absence of subjective conditions (a politically conscious mass of prisoners), the state recognized that nonetheless the objective conditions were conducive for large-scale resistance. And once again, remaining true to form, we allowed them to exploit our own self-interests in a successful effort to prevent this potential from materializing. When, as Anthony Artiaga pointed out in his recent article: The six year “active/inactive gang status review” was created and implemented. A policy requiring a validated inmate to remain free of any and all gang related activity and association “for no period less than six years in order to reconsider (but rarely granted) general population release….
All hope for a unified resistance dissipated and “everyman-for-himself” was now consolidated and set in stone, with the initial release of a relatively insignificant number of validated SHU prisoners back into general population, we cultivated and insured our own further atomization from each other as we pursued our search for escape on an individual basis by way of the six year inactive review policy. Despite the fact that group oppression necessitates group resistance, the state has learned long ago that we are easily defeated when we are tossed a bone that appeals to our self-interest. The state accomplishes this with little effort, sadly, when it sold us on a false hope that we could all obtain inactive status as individuals.
To reiterate, Joseph Dzhucashvili stated that dialectical and historical materialism teaches us that: “…the process of development should not be understood as a movement in a circle, not as a simple repetition of what has already occurred, but as an onward and upward movement, as a transition from … the simple to the complex.”
It has been roughly fifteen years since the Castillo case settled, and the empty promise of the six year inactive review policy was implemented—and here we are coming full circle. Like in the Castillo case, the state has initiated its imposition of the S.T.G. and S.D.P., pacifying potential resistance with the release of SHU prisoners back into the general population, although this time around the numbers have been significantly greater and have included elements from amongst the “leadership” thus creating an externally superficial illusion of victory.
Throughout the hunger strikes we paid an extraordinary amount of lip service to the necessity of collective unity, and yet when the state employed its own counter-tactics to create fissures and divisions amongst us once again, we assisted them in their endeavor. Without any consideration for long term consequences, or the immediate obvious fact that our current circumstances, or the immediately obvious fact that our current circumstances are far more dire now that when we first initiated our strikes, we could not trip over each other fast enough to sign release forms acknowledging guilt of past association, or membership, “post facto” in our scramble to get out. This fidelity to philosophic pragmatism and its application will come back to bite us. Within the last twelve months the state claims to have released seventy percent of those previously held within the tombs of the Security Housing Unit (SHU), and yet the number of those in isolation have remained consistently steady. Philosophically, idealism is a still a poisonous weed that continues to distort the mind of many. In spite of those who are proclaiming victory, reality is not determined by wishful thinking.
The demand to eliminate collective punishment was not only not achieved, but true to its fascist inclinations the CDC retaliated by making it policy and thus giving pseudolegitimization to its practice, via the new STG with the SDP, the IGI has extended its reach even further. Anyone having belonged to any group, or street gang (past or present), or possessing any political opinions reflecting a class position other than their own, can be isolated indefinitely without any connection to a particular prison gang. Our vulnerability has increased in direct proportion to the increase of state power.
Like the six year inactive review policy, the number of those now being released under the S.T.G. and S.D.P. will decrease dramatically and ultimately taper off to a trickle in correlation to our own struggle losing steam with the waning of outside support. If we are to inject life back into our struggle, we must absolutely understand the S.T.G. and S.D.P. for what it is, i.e., another means to perpetuate indefinite isolation under a new label. We have not achieved our goal of ending social-extermination. This is not a spiteful, nor rhetorical question, but we must sincerely ask ourselves—“is this truly a victory, or a failure being sold as a victory by those reactionary elements amongst us?
With each state in the historical development of our struggle, changes in policy alone have only amounted to a change in label, allowing the state to maintain it trajectory without interruption. If we are to eliminate social-extermination, “abstract” changes in policy must be facilitated with “concrete” transformations. We must transform the various Ad Seg and SHU facilities from within, otherwise indefi nite isolation will continue unabated and the state will manufacture a new label whenever circumstances necessitate, be in “program failure”, “validation”, or the latest gem from the CDC’s book of labels “S.T.G. and S.D.P.”, etc.
If we are to greatly reduce, or eliminate, their ability to permanently isolate us, we must struggle for the installation of two 4-man tables in each pod, phones, exercise bars (dip, pull up, push up combo) designed and fabricated by prisoners, cellies, Day Room time for social development and preservation of the individual’s identity. Social intercourse is a “human right” that needs to be established to facilitate these changes—both in policy and practice. To accomplish this, “limited association” must be our primary demand, and if collective unity is to be more than empty rhetoric, then we must likewise adjust our demands (which can be done without compromising the original five) and address the interests of those in G.P., such as weights, family visits, the question of prison labor and wages, etc. These are issues that concern all prisoners, S.N.Y.1 and solid alike, and therefore we should be appealing and accepting support from all corners of the prison system.
If we are to resuscitate life back into our struggle, we must adjust our tactics to meet the changing conditions. If there are any amongst the leadership or anyone politically conscious, who are still dedicated to our original goals, I believe we can achieve this with a small group of strikers consisting of 10, 15, maybe 20 “volunteers” willing to fast consecutively one at a time (or in pairs?) to the end. Each striker could initiate his fast with a new striker on standby joining in at 20-day intervals. And with leadership guidance and blessing, this could be complemented with a state with a statewide prisoner work-stoppage and halt of all movement.
Pre-written and recorded statements, interviews, photo, etc., of each “volunteer” could be provided to various media outlets, TV, radio, newspapers, internet, etc., prior to each striker initiating his fast, preventing the CDC from denying or sweeping deaths under the rug with minimal publicity. This may seem drastic but have we not already lost life with each strike, while not accomplishing anything substantial?
Nonetheless, I know this is a controversial issue with many sides and aspects to it and a proposal of this magnitude needs to be put on the table and discussed. And although the Comrade Ed and I are probably in more or less agreement with my analysis, we have gone back and forth on the issue of a smaller strike of dedicated “volunteers.” I believe that we have both made valid points, but we would encourage both the leadership and other potential volunteers for their contribution to this discussion.
This article first appeared in Prison Focus #44, Fall 2014
Posts
All Comments
PDF
