Heads Up: The People of Sand and Slag

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As readers of this blog should know, one of the things that make me happiest in life in science fiction.

This is tenuously related to my politics, but like all cultural/aesthetic passions, there is a lot more than just that. What kind of art (yeah, and stories are art) one likes cannot be reduced to what one “should” like, or even what one can adequately explain liking. So I ain’t even gonna try…

Instead, I’d like to give a heads up to those of you who may share my taste in SF, about one of the best stories I have read this year. The People of Sand and Slag, by Paolo Bacigalupi, is not only a very beautiful and dystopian glimpse at what might be, but you can also read it online – just follow the hyperlink.

Enjoy!

Categories: science-fiction

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Revolutionary Women Stencils for International Women's Day

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One of the nice things about running the Kersplebedeb website is that people sometimes send me neat stuff. As an example of this, back in January i was sent this superb little zine, the Revolutionary Women Stencil Book, from Cherry Bombs Comics in Aotearoa (New Zealand).

It contains black-and-white stencils of twelve revolutionary women, along with short biographical sketches - methinks this is a very nice idea, paying hommage to and celebrating the “lives, deeds, and leadership of women of the revolution.”

From Harriet Tubman and Louise Michel to Leila Khaled and Emma Goldman - and also women like Lucia Sanchez Saornil and Eva Rickard who North American comrades may be less familiar with.... this is a snazzy little zine, and i was really happy when i received it!

i emailed Tui, who put it together, and got permission to reprint it on (North American) letter size paper - it is now available and can be ordered for $2.00 if you email me.(It is also available from Cherry Bombs Comics, which may be easier if you are in the south seas.)

Just as exciting - i have scanned the images Tui made and converted them in resolution-independent WMF and EPS files (as well as really big JPGs). With the right software - hopefully available at your local library if not on your computer - you should be able to use these images to make your own zines, t-shirts, buttons, flyposters... you get the idea...

ALL OF THESE IMAGES ARE UP AND AVAILABLE FOR FREE DOWNLOAD - JUST GO TO THE NEW REVOLUTIONARY WOMEN STENCILS PAGE ON THE KERSPLEBEDEB SITE!

Categories: art, feminism, history, revolution, women

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Finished It!

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OK, i’ve read Gramsci Is Dead: Anarchist Currents in the Newest Social Movements, by Richard J.F. Day. It’s a good book. I disagree with a few things, but we’ll get to that later… stay tuned.

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Joelle Aubron Has Escaped This World

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Joelle Aubron Is Dead

This March 1st, 2006, Joelle left this horrible world.
Since her release from Bapaume prison in June 2004, she has devoted herself to battling cancer and fighting for the liberation of hum comrades Nathalie Menigon, Georges Cipriani, Jean-Marc Rouillan and Regis Schleicher.
Tomorrow, she will be there with us, demonstrating against the offices of the penitentiary administration to demand their liberation, as intensely as she ever did. As intensely as her commitment for the social liberation of the human majority, everywhere in the world.

Collectif Nlpf !

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I just received the above from the Ne Laissons Pas Faire Collective, which has been struggling for freedom for Action Directe’s political prisoners. It is very sad news – Aubron dedicated her life to the struggle for a better world. Her commitment moved her to join the communist guerilla organization Action Directe, which was active in France in the 1980s.

AD grew out of the French autonomist scene, drew heavy inspiration from both the struggles of the Third World proletariat and the intellectual legacy of the new communist currents of the 1960s and 70s. It carried out a number of spectacular attacks, many of which were in cooperation with Germany's Red Army Faction. Aubron was arrested in February 1987, along with fellow Action Directe members Jean-Marc Rouillan and Natalie Menignon. On June 16th 2004, at the age of 44, Aubron was released from prison on health grounds - she was suffering from cancer. (According to French law, those suffering terminal illnesses can be released to die at home.) “The liberation of my comrades is a battle still being waged,” she said, as she left the prison.

Yesterday Aubron died. She will be sorely missed.

Below is an excerpt from Short Biography of Action Directe Prisoners, written by Aubron in 1996:

I was born in 1959. My family came from the traditional French bourgeoisie, but lived in a working class neighbourhood in Paris. I learned quickly that social equality was just a word engraved over my public school doorways.

The other even more important factor was the renewal of the revolutionary movement that took place in the sixties. Its anti-capitalism, anti-imperialism and anti-revisionism infused the atmosphere of that period.

By the late seventies very radical levels of confrontation had already been tried out and were still taking place, the Black Panther Party in the United States, the guerilla movement in Latin America, the Palestinian struggle… Closer to home, in Italy and Germany other guerillas were hitting the system at the heart of its cities. While there were many different struggles with specific demands, they all existed within a common dynamic against the system. So I lived in squats, in working class neighbourhoods in Paris that were facing real estate development. There was the anti-nuclear demonstration in Malville in the summer of 1977, where a demonstrater was was killed by a cop’s grenade. In October, at the same time in France was getting ready to extradite the lawyer Klaus Croissant to Germany, the RAF prisoners were executed at Stammheim. I was not a member in any group, but at these times I was going to demonstrations armed with molotov cocktails and took part in minor actions (against Ecuador’s embassy after the bloody repression of sugar workers in Guyagil; the truck that was rigged to look like it was booby-trapped and left in front of the Minister of Justice following the sentencing of revolutionary activists….) Revolutionary violence was integrated into the everyday praxis of activists, guerilla attacks showed us that we too would have to engage in armed struggle in our class warfare, it was a period full of discussion about the armed experiment, specifically the Italian situation.

To give a very short summary, one of the things we discussed was whether or not it was necessary to have a political-military organization. In 1980, even though the autonomist group that I was a part of participated in AD actions and lent our logistical support, its members were not members of Action Directe.

I was arrested with a comrade from AD in 1982 while leaving a place where there were arms. I did not declare myself to be a member of AD. I continued to think about things while in prison. It was a period marked by the cowardice of the French extreme left in general and the inanity of the French autonomist movement in particular. Imperialism advanced in all its splendor: the Israeli intervention in Lebanon, Thatcher in the Malvines, the French bombing of Beeka in Lebanon, Reagan’s attack on Grenada, the mining of Nicaragua’s harbours… The supposedly left-wing French government’s policies revealed the social-democrats’ submission to the neoliberal line that was dominant around the world. At the same time the former revolutionary movement was going to pieces. On the one hand were those who would jump at any chance of acquiring power, on the other those whose who did nothing but recite the old formulas that left the proletariat just as defenseless against the attacks of the bourgeoisie. I now saw not only the usefulness of armed struggle, but also the necessity of the strategy of having a guerilla organization. Despite this, when I was released from prison in 1984, at first I only engaged in legal activities : support for the organization’s prisoners, book distribution, newspaper. Even though I had decided to get back with AD I did not want to go underground as soon as I got out of prison. It was almost a year later, when the repression was intensifying, that I went underground.

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In 2002-2003, while still in prison, Aubron was interviewed by the anarcho-punk webzine Future Noir (the entire interview was translated and is available on the web); she was asked what she thought of activism today, and what she thought had changed from the 19702 and 1980s when Action Directe and the RAF carried out their attacks. While the entire interview is worth reading, his is how she answered that one question:

When I look at activism over the past few years, it is from a very particular point of view. My perspective basically consists of two things.
First, the years in prison. My relationship with what is going on today is necessarily very intellectual. I can’t see, or hardly, the living contributions, how people actually come together in the different situations and, along with that, the connections, the emotions… in short, that collective subjectivity, an essential part of the struggle and of life. I am in a certain sense out of touch, kept in an involuntary ivory tower where what people are theorising is more important than what they are doing. Given the way in which I lived out my own politics, it is not a very comfortable place to evaluate things from.
Secondly, the “defeat” that we suffered. When I say “we”, I am referring to far more than just those Action Directe activists who are still in prison. In 1968 I turned nine years old, so I am not of the generation of ’68. Nevertheless, I started from that revolutionary surge “there”.
There were many different expressions of the strength of the desire for liberation and emancipation in that surge. They were present throughout the different experiences of men and women:

1. The struggles, whether armed or not, in the three continents, which confronted local dictators supported by the imperialist powers, or else directly confronted the armed forces of the latter, and the struggles of the oppressed in the very heart of those imperialist powers.


2. The struggle of women to act and think critically against all those institutions where human beings are molded to serve capitalist social relations and the reproduction of alienating submission…

By the end of the 1980s, this surge was “finished”. In quotation marks though. It was a defeated at the hands of a bourgeois counter-offensive that we had seen getting stronger and stronger since the 1970s. In the long war between exploiters and exploited, a battle was lost. Yet the undeniable historical break which is the cruel result of this surge ending should not be confused with being finished once and for all. It is simply a cycle of struggle which was finished.
The 1990s, especially the first half, were a nightmare, as we fled from the naturally oppressive march of history. Our oppressors were in a position to brag.
Today, that phase is behind us, and over the past years we see the outlines of what we hope may be a new surge.
Within which there is of course what the media calls the anti-globalization movement. At first it seemed to me to be monstrously dominated by social-democratic assumptions. Nostalgia for a “social” State, demands for “better redistribution of wealth”, which don’t really question the foundations of the system. Indeed, in this way they limit the hopes of life, pull them down inexorably into the rut of reformism, all the more senseless given that the decay of this very system is characterised, amongst other things, by a deep reactionary impulse (see what I said about the ATTAC and other partisans of global citizenship). Faced with this, the more radical expressions were put on the defensive, people dusted off their prayerbooks (whether communist or anarchist) in an attempt to to counter this falsified and falsifying view of reality. This was a high point in sect-like behaviour and competition between different brands in the marketplace of the protest spectacle. Over the last little while, I have the impression that things have started to get better. The opening of spaces for critical discussion and actions and all sorts of interesting things. You’ve got to admit that reality really helps us here. Especially since September 11th and the pretext that the new “holy crusaders” made of it.
Already, in light of the series of events that have transpired over the past months, it is difficult to continue to reject the analysis of imperialist relations. Globalization is the name of the new form of imperialism. In the same was that the means of accumulation changes within an “eternal” capitalist mode of production, the forms of imperialism change. On the one hand, a clearly visible pyramid with the United States sitting on top; on the other hand, the utterly reactionary nature of this relationship of forces where its pretentions of acting on the world seem to be exhausted by the very spectacle of its powerlessness. It is definitely a very dangerous situation. For at least two reasons: the impressive attack power that imperialism has developed and the temptation of miracle-solutions with their scapegoats and heaven-sent politicians.
But despite myself, despite being well aware of these dangers and what they mean for the different spaces where life and creativity exist, I am not convinced that the desire for liberation and emancipation has been destroyed. A while back I wrote a text about commitment where I compared it to the old myth of Prometheus, who stole fire from the gods so that men would no longer be at the mercy of their blind and arbitrary power. An insurrection where perseverance turned lost illusions into power for the future. The goal of developing liberatory relations between people is at the heart of the human adventure. Throughout the ages its ideological, political and social aspects are expressed differently, there are often mistakes made about how to realize it, but nevertheless it is always reborn from its own ashes. It is intimately tied to life, to its surging forth there where it was least expected.
I am thinking about really a lot of things that all have in common the desire to change the situation and change it concretely. In a maquiladora town close to Tijuana, faced with the desertion of the so-called public authorities from this free trade zone, the women are creating popular education initiatives, they set up as school with 300 places, and set up a university of knowledge and philosophy. Recently a Civil Mission for the Protection of the Palestinian People succeeded, through the presence of internationals, in allowing Palestinian workers to fix the water-pumps in a camp, abandoned for 15 days and under fire from Israeli snipers. A film-maker makes a film with street-children in Daker after having set things up so that his project helps the kids in the long term. I have chosen “small scale” examples, carried out in situations where death is never far away. There are countless others. Day after day, they deconstruct the destruction and the unfavourable balance of power, even if they are not enough to reverse this balance.
There are more and more people resisting around the world. For those of us who persist in fighting for the future, having experienced defeat may be an advantage. We have lived through the exhaustion, the death of an upsurge. Today, we are seeing and living the budding new life behind that phase. These situations where the invisible recreate the consciousness of being the only creative multitude, they reinvent our ability to function while asking questions.
From various things I have been reading, I am seeing things coming together. It seems that anticapitalist critiques and actions are once again taking place. After having thrown out lots of babies with their bathwater, notably in the way of concepts and grasping reality in a way that serves the oppressed, we are leaving our defensive positions. Calls that “we want it all and we want it now” can once again be heard. In any case, nothing else is possible. What I am saying here is very vague but there are so many realities where once again we can see global understandings of struggles, resistance and hope. In any case, it is going better than it was in the mid-nineties.

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Categories: action-directe, france, revolution

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Octavia Butler, Rest In Peace

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Octavia Butler, perhaps the most politically relevant science fiction writer i have ever had the pleasure of reading, died last Friday, after falling and hitting her head on the cobbled walkway outside her home. She was 58.

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I only first heard of Butler a few years ago, when i was in the process of publishing my comrade Butch Lee’s book The Military Strategy of Women and Children, a call for women to organize an autonomous movement to wage war on patriarchy and imperialism. In the introduction, Butch mentioned Butler as “an outrider of Women’s intellectual advance,” one who “lit up the terrain in flashes ahead of us.”

I assumed she was a political theorist…

Later that year i was visiting Seth Hayes, a political prisoner who has been in prison since 1973 for activities he is accused of having carried out as a member of the Black Liberation Army. We got to talking about books, and Seth told me he liked reading science fiction – seeing as i also love the genre i asked him if he had any recommendations for me.

He had one: Octavia Butler.

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Born to a Black working class family in 1947, Butler’s father (who died when she was a child) was a shoeshine man, and her mother was a maid who brought her along on jobs. She began writing at age 10, turning to SF after watching the movie Devil Girl from Mars and realizing that she could do a much better job. Despite the fact that there were so few models for Black woman authors – her aunt told her that “Negroes can't be writers” – she would eventually win the Hugo, Nebula and James Tiptree awards, and in 1995 became the first and only science fiction novelist to ever be granted the MacArthur “Genius” award.

Butler’s first novel was published in 1979. Defying the expectations of the genre, Kindred took place in the antebellum south, the only SF “gimmick” being that the protagonist was a Black woman from the 1970s who found herself transported through time for reasons initially unclear. The book – which was repeatedly rejected by publishers who balked at a science fiction novel set on a 19th century plantation – would eventually have over a quarter million copies in print.

It was followed by almost a dozen other books, as well as numerous short stories and essays.

Science fiction, at its best, is an intensely political genre. By creating characters we can identify with, and telling stories which seduce us both emotionally and intellectually, good authors actually convey the implications and qualities of different social systems and realities in a way which can seem more real than non-fiction speculation or analysis. Of course this is not a fact limited to either SF or politics – the whole notion of conveying a more vivid and authentic picture of reality by actually departing from a strictly “objective” and “realistic” portrayal is common to many forms of storytelling and art (think impressionism!) – but for me it is the SF genre that succeeds at doing this most beautifully.

Butler herself alluded to the importance of this kind of storytelling, explaining in regards to Kindred that her goal was “to make real the emotional reality of slavery. I was trying make people feel more about the data they had learned. I wanted to make the past real and [show] how it scars the present.” [Interviewing The Oracle: Octavia Butler, by Kazembe Balagun]

While Kindred was a way of countering the way in which slavery is trivialized and “normalized”, Butler’s subsequent works continued to draw on the past, but in much more subtle ways, as she cast her view to the future, using it to illuminate current trends and also to examine deeper philosophical and psychological questions.

Dystopia vs. Utopia: The Earthseed “Trilogy”

I had somebody review that book, Parable [of the Sower], and say “Well interesting book but she should have been more clear about how we could possibly get from where we are to where they are in Parable because I just don't see it.” I thought, “You poor baby.”

- Octavia Butler (interviewed by Jelani Cobb)

Butler’s Earthseed “trilogy” (she only completed the first two books, Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents – Parable of the Trickster was started but she put it aside to work on other projects) was set in the very near future. Again, there is a dearth of high-tech gadgetry, apart from some new recreational drugs and “slave collars” (both of which are currently within the realm of the easily manufactured, i’m sure) the only truly “new” thing is a form of psychic empathy some individuals develop.

By avoiding a focus on technology, the Earthseed books avoid a pitfall of much science fiction, where the “futuristic advances” become dated, and in fact eventually seem anachronistic as real-life comes to surpass fiction. Instead of technology, the Earthseed books focus on political turmoil, at what might happen if the State collapsed and there was no humane alternative to fill the vacuum. Large numbers of people are debilitated by drug use. Many men take the opportunity to seize power in their “personal lives” and “local communities”… which translates into power to control and own women especially. Racism veers into tribalism.

In this context of overwhelming distrust and violence – at times barely a page goes by without a rape or murder – Butler follows the struggle of the teenage empath Lauren Olamina, who has a clear vision that society needs to be rebuilt on humane and egalitarian foundations – short-term solutions, escapism and tinkering are not going to be good enough. Indeed, it becomes clear that if a humane alternative is not found, then a fascistic one may rise in its stead.

Butler describes these books (which were published in 1993 and 1998) as “cautionary tales”, meant to show where America was heading if right-wing government policies continued unchecked. While they certainly work as such, for me they also warn of the horrors that will come if society merely “breaks down” and no left-wing movement exists to build anew…

Some anarchists dream of such a breakdown, as they see the State and capitalists as the only problem, and thus a collapse – any collapse will do! – will provide the opportunity for people to just “do their own thing” and set up their happy autonomous lives. We saw this during the flooding of New Orleans, where some “revolutionaries” (white people living in other cities!) hailed the devastation as if it was the proletariat and not government neglect that had brought about the destruction. I can also remember an essay from the early 90s entitled Somalia Shows The Way, in which the breakdown of the Somali State and was hailed as a revolutionary advance, and warlords were described as freedom fights all the more radical as they did not purport to have any “grand schemes”.

One doesn’t have to deny the role of creative imagination to see how Butler’s own experiences growing up as a Black working class woman contributed to her ability to grasp and communicate the way in which “breakdown” and “collapse” can actually be bad and threatening things. The problem – as the best anarchists and feminists have pointed out – is not only institutional power, but all forms of subjugation and exploitation. Non-institutional forms of exploitation and oppression are overwhelmingly directed against women, queers and people of colour, and as such the anarchist/ultraleft faith in “collapse” reveals a privileged perspective of little use to the majority of people who may be struggling against this society, but fear that things could still get worst - and know enough to know that they will likely be the ones to bear the brunt of this!

If the oppressed are kept disarmed and disoriented, with no vision to fight for a better society (a vision provided in the Parable books by the Earthseed religion), when collapse comes they may be all the more vulnerable to the most brutal and naked forms of exploitation and abuse. Although Butler never used the S-word in the Earthseed books, they serve as a reminder that the choice is between Socialism and Barbarism, not of reaching Socialism by way of Barbarism!

In an interview with National Public Radio, Butler explained that she felt the best antidote for hierarchical and racist systems was tolerance, but she recognized that in and of itself this was not enough: “because you can’t depend on other people to be equally tolerant. My example was way back in the schoolyard, school bullies. I mean, no matter how tolerant you may be, they aren’t, and your being tolerant won’t stop them from tackling you if that’s what they want to do.”

Indeed, the perils of hoping that you will just be “left alone” – a common fantasy amongst many countercultural types – are vividly and brutally brought home in the Parable of the Talents, when Christian fundamentalists invade and enslave members of a free community.

In her excellent interview with Kazembe Balagun, Butler explained that “I wrote the Parable books because of the direction of the country. You can call it save the world fiction, but it clearly doesn’t save anything. It just calls people’s attention to the fact that so much needs to be done and obviously they are people who are running this country who don’t care.”

More Than Human
Although Kindred and the Earthseed "trilogy" may be her most obviously political books, all of Butler’s stories resonate with the deeper philosophical questions of what it means to be good person, how societies change, how the dilemmas of “tolerance” can be resolved, and most importantly what it means to do the best you can, when that may not seem like enough. Her characters live in imperfect, difficult, unsatisfactory worlds, and grapple with the necessity and pain of doing their best, while trying to hold onto a vision of a better future with greater possibilities.

For instance, Butler’s Xenogenesis series (Dawn, Adulthood Rites and Imago – all of which were also pubished in one volume as Lilith’s Brood), which are very different from the Earthseed books, take place after the Earth has been decimated by nuclear war. The last surviving humans are clearly doomed to perish, if not for the lucky intercession of some spacefaring aliens (the “Oankali”), who see in human biology something that they themselves desire. The Oankali save humanity, essentially by breeding with people, but even so “humanity as we know it” seems destined for extinction. Without giving it all away, these books (following the lives of the human woman Lilith and her more than human progeny) explore issues of consent, colonialism, progress and identity in a provocative – and beautiful – way.

Similarly, the book Wildseed – with its rich descriptions of love and loneliness that remind me of Anne Rice’s Taltos –  tells the story of a superhuman woman immortal, a deeply moral and good person, whose humble life in an African village is disturbed when an amoral immortal spirit notices her, and yearns for her company. Again – not wanting to spoil the tale – this is the kind of book that makes me want to cry when i finish it, both because it’s the end, and because the story itself is so moving.

Rest In Peace
Butler described herself as “a pessimist if I'm not careful, a feminist, a Black, a former Baptist, an oil and water combination of ambition, laziness, insecurity, certainty and drive.”

She also described herself as “a writer who can remember being a ten year-old writer and who expects someday to be an 80 year-old writer.”

Sadly, that is not to be.

All i can say is, i hope that more people continue to find her books, and that the seeds she has planted help us in our struggle for a better world.

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I have only mentioned Octavia Butler’s books which i myself have read – i still look forward to discovering the rest of her works. You can view and order many of Octavia Butler’s books from Powell’s Books online.

Categories: authors, book-review, science-fiction

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Making Me Want To Vomit

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Twenty three new prisons... I just had to post this article by Janice Tibbetts, versions of which appeared in newspapers across the country last week (this one from the February 18th Kingston Whig-Standard).

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OTTAWA - Prime Minister Stephen Harper's tough-on-crime agenda would cost billions of dollars in additional spending and force the government to build new prisons as Canada moves toward a U.S. style of justice, experts say.

They say skyrocketing costs are a certainty, and even an analysis by the federal government estimates that the Conservative plan to imprison more people and keep them there longer could meaning building up to 23 new prisons because existing penitentiaries are full.

The costs of increased imprisonment are not mentioned in the latest Conservative election platform.

Criminologist Neil Boyd described the Conservative plan as "an extremely expensive agenda of prison building."

It costs an average of $82,000 a year to house each federal prisoner and billions more to build and maintain additional facilities.

Boyd, a professor at Simon Fraser University, called on the government to come clean on details of the plan, projected costs and solid evidence that keeping people in jail for longer deters crime.

"There's no evidence it will make us a safer society and it involved an enormous expenditure of funds," he said.

The government cost analysis, prepared by Correctional Services of Canada during the 2004 election campaign, estimates extra prison spending at somewhere between $5 billion and $11.5 billion over 10 years, depending on the number and types of facilities needed, according to a document obtained by the Ottawa Citizen.

But the costs could be significantly greater because that figure, based on four Conservative election promises, does not take into account several other key prison-related pledges that were added in the recent campaign that vaulted the party to victory.

The new plan calls for more automatic jail terms, severely restricting "house arrest" sentences that allow people to serve their time in the community, ending early release after serving two- thirds of a sentence and imposing consecutive rather than concurrent sentences for certain serious crimes.

The government also proposes to repeal the "faint-hope" clause that gives prisoners serving life sentences a chance at early release, and to jail serious repeat offenders indefinitely.

The government has completed an updated cost analysis based on the Conservatives' more expansive law-and-order agenda, but refuses to release the spending estimates.

Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day, who has seen the new figures, acknowledged the government's plan could strain the $1- billion-a-year prison system, but he said it's a worthwhile price to pay.

"If there's going to be an increase in that, and it is going to make our streets and homes and parks safer, then so be it," Day said in an interview. "I think most citizens are prepared to see the government spend more money if that's what it takes to give the bad guys more time to think about what they've done."

The Conservative plan will send Canada down the same road as the United States, which has the highest incarceration rate in the Western world, Boyd predicted.

A study prepared for the Canadian justice department last year noted the Australia Bureau of Statistics reported in 2003 that the prison population in its northern territory increased 42 per cent since the inception of mandatory sentencing.

Data also shows that the stiffened penalties have not lowered crime rates.

Cutting through the fog about “how much will this cost taxpayers”, let’s get to the heart of the issue: how much will this cost the people destined to serve time in these prisons?

Overwhelmingly working class people, disproportionately First Nations people – warehoused people, kept in storage, kept on ice, kept isolated from a society which only accepts them when it can exploit them.

…i do so love science fiction, but i’m feeling like i’m lost in this grey dystopia…

We’re talking as many as 23 new prisons, so think how many people that is, who will lose years of their lives, sometimes even decades, because that’s just what middle class Canada thinks is right…

Makes me want to vomit.

Categories: canada, prison

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4strugglemag

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Just received this in my Inbox… it’s a great magazine, and it fulfills an important function… please check it out!

(please forward)

Warm and revolutionary greetings to all of our friends!

We are proud to announce the completion of Issue 6 of 4strugglemag, our zine of writings by and for political prisoners and their supporters. We are now entering our third year of publishing and we continue to raise the voices of imprisoned activists. Check it out at www.4strugglemag.org.

This issue features a special tribute to Ohio 7 anti-imperialist PP Richard Williams, who died in prison in December 2005. His closest comrades, including our editor Jaan Laaman, freed PP Ray Levasseur, his son Nedahe, Kazi Toure and PP Russell Maroon Shoats, remember his life and his inspirational work.

We also take a look at anti-war organizing, the International Day of Solidarity with PP/POWs, black history, and the recent wave of repression against activists in the United States and Puerto Rico.

We continue to send free copies to prisoners, and our readership is growing quickly, so if you can support the project by making a donation or getting a subscription ($12/year), please contact us at montrealabcf@gmail.com.

Yours in solidarity,
Sara Falconer
Montreal ABCF

Categories: prison, repression, revolution, united-states

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Freedomland

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Last night we went to see Freedomland, the cinematic adaptation of Richard Price’s novel by the same name.

Different things could be said about this movie – but seeing as it’s still in the theaters and i don’t want to ruin anyone’s movie, i’m actually not going to say any of them. I mean, The Battle of Algiers this ain’t, so it’s not as if i would normally even feel any particular need to mention it here…

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Which is why i am mentioning it. You see, without being Politically Important or groundbreaking, Freedomland was – from within the Hollywood gamut – one of the better dramas to hit the big screens over the past months. We went because we both like Samuel Jackson, and he played his part very well, but i have to say that it was Julianne Moore and Edie Falco who stole the show.

In other words, it was a “good”, perhaps even a “very good” movie…

Which is why i am writing about it.

You see, Freedomland has been getting lousy reviews. On Cinema Clock it has been reviewed by 40 people so far, and the average person is giving it 5.5 out of 10; the Detroit News called it “a car wreck, though nowhere near interesting enough for rubbernecking”; USA Today says “stay clear from Freedomland” and the Canadian JAM says “Freedomland misses the mark” while the Denton Record Chronicle simply states that it is “An unpleasant, strident film marred further by unpleasant, strident performances.”

My guess is part of what some people find difficult to swallow is that this movie takes for granted certain truths – America being racist, cops being pricks, working class people being human beings (& other things too) – and just moves on. As such, it refuses to cater to any putative need to “prove” or “justify” or “provide balance” for these facts. While racism and the humanity of the oppressed (& other things too) – the unexceptional content of life-as-it-exists – do get presented in mainstream movies (think Crash), movie-makers often act like they’re touching on Truths weighty and controversial enough to have to become the focus of the entire work. Whereas in Freedomland they’re just there – as obvious and trivial as ever – and the plot, the story, and the characters develop without being reduced to this or that Issue.

So… without even mentioning the plot, i’m just quietly recommending this movie. If you’re going to see a mainstream Hollywood production anyway, give this one a chance. My guess is that those of us who are nonplussed by the “shock! horror!” revelation that poor people – and poor Black people especially – suffer under capitalism (& other things too) will actually find this to be a good movie.

But i could be wrong – it could be me, just another white guy who likes movies, whose take on his is somehow out of phase.

So if you see it and you hate it, don’t be shy – share in the comments.

Categories: movie-review

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La Rivolta! Anarchist-Feminist Festival in Boston: March 4th

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I just received this in my Inbox, and it makes me wish i could get to Boston…

SECOND ANNUAL LA RIVOLTA! FESTIVAL
A Radical Celebration of International Women's Day
Saturday March 4.  Boston.

The Schedule:
Friday, March 3.  Black Flag Tavern, anarchist brew and chatter, location and time, TBA.

March 4
WORKSHOPS
11am - 6pm
Community Church of Boston.  565 Boylston st, Copley Square
(orange line to Back Bay, Green Line to Copley, 39 bus to BP Library)
Workshops are free, childcare will be provided (please let us know if you will be bringing kids, contact possiblyclaire@yahoo.com)
Anarchist pot luck donated by local anarchist collectives will be served during the workshops

Scheduled workshops:

• Woman and Art


• International Sex Trafficking


• Sex Work in the usa


• Patriarchy Smashing & Gender Fucking


• Indigenous Women's Resistance


• Childeren Zine Making (part of childcare)


• More TBA

NIGHT OF MUSIC
8 pm
Mass College of Art, 621 Huntington ave
(green 'E' line to longwood, 39 bus to mass art)
No chilid care at concert, All Ages, dont bring alcohal.

Performances Include:

• Cojoba (from Puerto Rico)


• Resistant Culture (indigenous female band from Los Angelos)


• Ballast (from Montreal)


• Sonya Renee (Washington D.C.)


• Lemuria (buffalo, NY)


• Reflect and Strengthen (from right here in Boston)


• Several more pending TBA

For up to the minute updates, go to www.larivolta.org
Collective Contact dumett@bu.edu
you play on my space?  www.myspace.com/larivolta


Want to table at the concert?  contact jvertigo@juno.com  Space is limited, so please email us now!  $20 plus one entry for a table.

Categories: anarchism, events, feminism

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Giving Up On Revolution

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Last night i went to hear Richard Day – author of Gramsci Is Dead: Anarchist Currents in the Newest Social Movements – speak about his book, along with a panel of local activists commenting on their own experiences/observations about “hegemony”, “affinity”, solidarity and radical social change.

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I had some misgivings about going: my mother had bought me a copy of Gramsci Is Dead for Christmas, and i had given up about half of the way through. It wasn’t only the constant references to post-modernist and post-structuralist authors who i have never read (and have no desire to read), it was more the fact that i couldn’t see how the book related in any way to my own experiences and observations about what activism is all about.

After hearing Day speak, i now suspect that i was deeply mistaken in my initial appraisal of his book. Which isn’t to say that i agree with his conclusions, but i do think the questions he is tackling are very relevant to radical social change, and he represents ideas that must be confronted and wrestled with by serious revolutionaries - even if only for us to reject (some of) them.

I write this without having read the entire book (add it to the reading list!) but only on the basis of last night’s talk, so perhaps it is best to actually deal with what was said last night…

Day argues that radical movements have to “overcome a logic of hegemony” in favour of a “logic of affinity.” He identified this position as being “post-anarchist”.

The term “hegemony” seemed to be understood in quite different ways by almost everyone who spoke last night, so i will try to explain how i understood Day to be using the term here:

Hegemony: As Day explained it, the “logic of hegemony” seeks to impose change across an entire social space all at once. Think the overthrow of the State, the destruction of capitalism… the event or series of events which will separate “then” from “now”, “today” from “tomorrow”, “the bad old days” from the utopian future… really, what Day is talking about is Revolution (or the possibilities it represents).

Day claims that hegemonic (or revolutionary) strategies rely on offensive force (i.e. violence, and not just in self-defense) and involve “organizing others”. By this last criterion, i am not sure if Day meant that hegemonic strategies involve activists substituting themselves for “the masses”, or if he meant that they act as a vanguard (i.e. trying to lead the way), or if it is a matter of hegemonic strategies designating one specific “revolutionary agent” (such as the proletariat, oppressed nations, indigenous people, etc.)… but from what i could gather he kind of meant all three of these… making his position quite the anti-revolutionary critique!

Looking around at the “newest social movements” Day is encouraged by what he sees as a lack of hegemonic thinking, and in his talk he did a good job of distilling what this “non-hegemonic” approach entails. This he called “the logic of affinity”, and as it too was misunderstood by most of us, it too is worth defining.

Affinity: The logic of affinity, which Day proposes we embrace, involves abandoning “grand schemes” and instead setting up alternative structures, combating oppression within these structures and then reaching out to others in solidarity.

This is not an affinity group, nor does it mean organizing with those whom we have an affinity for (i.e. with our friends). Rather, it means organizing with those who recognize that they have common interests with us, and with whom we have a shared approach.

When i asked Day how affinity differed from class consciousness, he said that affinity is not restricted to questions of class (i.e. one can also unite on the basis of “race”, gender, nation, or really anything else that works for you) and that as he understands it class consciousness is something people have to be taught as opposed to an awareness people can come to on their own. (That this last generalization is either confused or grossly simplistic is not really important to his argument.)

For what it’s worth, i think a better term than “affinity” would be “antagonism”, as this word does a much better job at describing a consciousness of being opposed to and in struggle against the system…

Day anticipated many criticisms of the “logic of affinity” in his talk, and by doing so he showed (to me) that his position is not simply some shallow deviation. He acknowledged that by abandoning revolution people may assume he embraces reformism, but he denied that this was the case. The goal of (post-)anarchist groups should not be to reform capitalism or the State, but to set up spaces outside of the system – “the way to make a different world is to construct small-scale experiments” as he put it – which would federate, encourage others, snowball, and eventually… well, eventually was left somewhat up in the air…

Day also acknowledges that even when successful spaces or alternative structures have been established, they are all too often co-opted and re-integrated into the system, or else (if they resist this) the system just flows around them, untroubled by their “non-hegemonic” alternative.

So Day is not pretending to have all the answers. He seemed to suggest that we should just continue working on and struggling with these questions, while resisting any temptation to adopt hegemonic strategies.

Day fielded several questions after his talk – almost all of which quite hostile to his downgrading of class struggle and his retreat from revolution. Although i think most if not all of the audience was unfamiliar with “post-structuralism”, and somewhat confused by the terms hegemony and affinity in how they were used, there was a sense that Day was rejecting essential elements of the anarchist tradition. I point this out because i am aware that some M-L comrades reading this might see it as proof of their worst impressions of anarchism, so (just to keep the record as accurate as possible) it bears telling that most anarchists have certainly not staked out a “non-hegemonic” or “post-anarchist” position.

….

Not having read it, i cannot comment on Day’s book itself. I have put it on my list, and hopefully at some point over the next month i’ll get through it, and then i’ll let you know. However, as i have spent a lot of time thinking about the questions he raised last night, i do have a thing or two to say about them. Here it goes…

There has never been an anarchist revolution anywhere, nor has there been a revolution led by Marxists that has managed to establish a classless society. But by abandoning Revolution and embracing a far less ambitious “affinity” (or “antagonism”), Day is merely making a virtue of our failures.

Indeed, the defensive posture of Day’s “logic of affinity” – not attacking the State or capitalists, rather trying to out-maneuver them or limiting one’s response to self-defense – is suicidal. As political prisoner David Gilbert (formerly of the Weather Underground and the Revolutionary Armed Task Force) has put it: “[Self-defense] can be important, especially when it is done to help sustain mass struggle. But people also have to be aware of the strategic danger of being trapped in a static, defensive position where the government can bring in their overwhelming superiority of force.”

In other words, by rejecting any offensive strategy against capitalism or the State, comrades merely abandon any possibility of choosing the terrain upon which they will eventually be forced to struggle. We are not going to be “left alone” – telling ourselves that this is a viable strategy is not a solution – and if we do not even try to determine the terms on which we will struggle, the State will determine them for us. While Gilbert was discussing armed struggle, this fact applies to all levels of confrontation.

Furthermore, missing in Day’s talk last night was an explanation of why revolutionary goals should not co-exist with antagonistic organizations. In other words, why can’t different groups operate with what Day would call “affinity”, working on practical solutions to people’s everyday problems, while at the same time thinking in terms of strategies which will eventually (and sooner is better than later!) abolish rather than merely circumvent capitalism and the State?

So far as i am concerned, it is precisely through building such antagonistic movements with revolutionary goals that we will best effect radical social change. But it is not just a seamless quantitative progression of this struggle combining with that struggle, this infoshop federating with that commune, etc. – at some point the quantitative does become qualitative, and it will either be a matter of Revolution or else Reaction winning out.

Choosing to not fight that battle – or closing your eyes to its inevitability – will not prevent you from being defeated.

….

p.s. Though it did not come up last night, I should also mention that by turning it into a contradiction like all others, we risk forgetting that “class” (no matter how problematic as a be-all-and-end-all category) is nevertheless fundamentally different from “race” or “gender” or “nation”. By making class no more central than anything else that gives rise to subjective feelings of antagonism/affinity, i wonder if we do not (unknowingly) abandon the very concept that binds the revolutionary left to the struggle for human liberation.

To put it simplistically: “class warfare” has a liberatory and humanist connotation because by abolishing class differences, the human misery that comes from poverty and exploitation will also be abolished. “Racial warfare” and “national warfare” contain within themselves none of this inherent humanism, except inasmuch as particular circumstances may invest entire nations (or “races” or genders) with specific class attributes, in which case – temporarily - these other struggles can embody this liberatory dimension of class warfare. (Fanon’s Wretched Of The Earth is an excellent book that deals with this...)

….

p.p.s. as luck would have it,  just a few days ago i was reading one of my favourite blogs – Red Flags – where there has been a long string of comments by (mainly) Leninists about precisely this kind of “non-revolutionary” trend in anarchism. While i think they grossly exaggerate the degree to which the anarchist movement had given up on revolution, some of those M-Ls do make some good points – so i recommend you check it out.

Categories: anarchism, identity-politics, revolution

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British Soldiers Abusing Iraqi Children – The Movie

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WARNING: The below footage – obviously filmed by some sorry excuse for a human being involved in occupying Iraq - is both graphic and upsetting. It may make you want to throw up, or do something equally violent (and, i must add, illegal) to a member of the armed forces.

• Windows Media Player


• Quicktime

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Missing, Raped, Murdered

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Last week i wrote about Benoit Guay, the Montreal cop who was charged with being the “North Shore Rapist” who has attacked and raped several women over the past two years.
I repeated what i had written last October, before anyone knew the rapist was a cop, namely that more police is not an effective answer to violence against women. I suggested at the time that – no matter how daunting a task it may be – women organizing to “take matters into their own hands” was the only solution that made sense to me

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The fact that the Montreal serial rapist is a cop is relevant because it gives lie to the State’s trump card, its insistence that the police protect us. It makes it deceptively easy to make the argument that the police are not the ones who will put an end to violence against women. At best, the police are just like “regular” people who are put in positions of power, at worst they are like cynical bullies with violent training who are put in positions of power.

Regardless of the “assurance” (!) given by the chief of police, that Guay “was not on duty” when he raped, other police officers have admitted that his training in the Montreal police surveillance unit would make picking out victims and avoiding capture a piece of cake. Furthermore, we have not been told if the gun he threatened women with was “police issue” or not…

…but when you think of it, does it really matter?

I still can’t help but feel that a far greater outrage is the fact that the police kept quiet about the fact that there was a serial rapist until last October. It apparently took their computers until spring 2005 to notice a pattern - this despite two attacks occurring within ten days of each other in St-Jerome in summer 2004, and three different attacks occurring in Laval – and after that they waited until the Fall because they hoped undercover police would be able to catch the perpetrator. (Did his elite “surveillance and counter-surveillance skills” help Guay spot these decoys? And did i mention that last summer, while police were sitting on this information, another woman was attacked?)

The problem is far greater than the fact that police rape (although that is a serious problem). More serious still is the fact that by their very nature the police make it much more difficult – both psychologically and materially – for women to protect themselves. Most efforts at organized self-defense are in fact illegal unless they are organized under the State’s control. Efforts to organize an armed capacity outside of the State invariably meet with repression.

Even more importantly, though, by monopolizing the function of “community defense” the existence of the police serves as a powerful disincentive for anyone to organize themselves. “How can we ever be as effective as the cops are anyway?” we wonder. They have these high-tech computers and training and infrastructure, while we have nothing.

Or so they would like us to think.

The hole in their logic lies in the fact that the majority of victims of violence are already members of oppressed groups… women, people of colour, queers, otherly abled… all of the same people who are more likely to be poor, more likely to be disregarded, more likely in fact to be abused by the police: these are the people who are most likely to suffer from violence.

When the police intervene, it is often to protect the violent perpetrators and to aggravate the damage they have done.

This cannot be repeated too often: the police tend to make matters worst.

The oppressed are the most likely to be victims of violence, and the oppressed have little to gain from trusting in the police, and the oppressed know this all too well.

Take for example the case of Robert Pickton, the British Columbia man accused of killing dozens of women on a misogynist murder-spree that stretched over decades. Dozens of women “went missing” from Vancouver’s East end during his period, but because most of them were poor, were from the First Nations, and so many of them were sex trade workers, the police turned a blind eye as they disappeared one by one.

According to the CBC:

Families of the missing women have accused Vancouver police of mishandling the investigation from the beginning by ignoring evidence that a serial killer was at work. The RCMP became involved in 2001.

The families also say police neglected the cases because many of the women were prostitutes and drug addicts.

It wasn't until August of 2001 that Vancouver police began hinting that a serial killer could be responsible for the disappearance of the missing women.

Pickton’s kill-spree may have started as early as 1978. The police would not admit that there was a serial killer at work for over twenty years. Pickton was not arrested until 2002 – despite the fact that the police knew about him since 1997… when he had been charged with attempted murder… of a prostitute… the charges were dropped – are we catching on yet?

If women and their loved ones had not organized to call attention to the slaughter, it is possible Pickton would still be victimizing women today.

Or in another Canadian city… look at how since 1983 the bodies of over 20 women have been found in or around the city of Edmonton – “all are described by police as being prostitutes or having high-risk lifestyles and only five of the cases have been solved.” In Edmonton, too, the majority of missing people are First Nations women. Indeed: according to the Aboriginal Youth Network, since 1988 over 500 First Nations women have “gone missing” across Canada.

So to recap: the fact that a Montreal police officer called Benoit Guay is accused of raping eight women is something that should make you angry. As should the fact that a pig farmer called Robert Pickton stands accused of several dozen misogynist murders. As should the fact that over 500 First Nations women have been “disappeared.”

The fact that this “extra-State violence” follows the contours of “legitimate” capitalist exclusion and violence suggests that the solution will entail overthrowing class society itself. As a step in that direction, supporting women’s efforts to organize against the ongoing war against women – up to and including developing an armed capacity – is necessary and just and obvious.

Some related links worth checking out:

• Missing/Murdered First Nations (Native) Women


• missingpeople.net – dedicated to Vancouver’s missing eastside women


• Sex Trade Workers of Canada


• The Military Strategy of Women and Children, by Butch Lee

And finally, for those who can make it (or organize something similar in your own community):

Rally against Racist Police Inaction and Impunity
Hundreds of Native women have gone missing or been murdered from B.C. to Nova Scotia in the past 20 years. Many of their cases remain unsolved and too often no police investigation has ever been conducted. Family members seeking help are met with disinterest and racism.

Join us for a rally and ceremony at 12:00 Noon on Feb 14th at Toronto Police Headquarters – 40 College Street at Bay – BRING DRUMS!

Now is the time to take concrete steps to ensure that the lives of Native women in Canada are no longer treated as disposable.

NO MORE SILENCE is a network of native and non-native individuals and organizations in Canada.

NO MORE SILENCE is a campaign to break through societal indifference towards the murders and disappearances of Indigenous women in Turtle Island.

NO MORE SILENCE believes that all native and non-native Canadians have a responsibility to act to restore justice to Indigenous communities, that all non-native Canadians need to learn to de-colonize their thinking and practices about Native peoples, to speak out against the violence of Native women, to insist that the Canadian state ensures that all crimes receive adequate responses from the police, the RCMP, the coroners’ offices, and the courts.

- No More Silence Network
nomoresilence@lists.riseup.net

Categories: canada, edmonton, first-nations, montreal, police, racism, vancouver, violence-against-women, women

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The North Shore Rapist Is Caught - Guess Who?

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The rapist is a cop.
That’s the punch line, the plate of steaming shit that we are being served as if it were just another dish at the local diner.
But i’ve tumbled ahead of myself… let’s go back to the beginning and recap:

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Back in October, the police announced that there was a serial rapist attacking women on Montreal’s North Shore. Eight women had come forward since May 2004, and gawd-only-knows how many others had been raped and not gone to the police. And yet it took until spring 2005 for "the authorities" to realize there was a serial rapist – this despite two attacks occurring within ten days of each other in St-Jerome in summer 2004, and three different attacks occurring in Laval.

This late realization – call it incompetence or willful ignorance or simply a lie – was bad enough, but what made me particularly angry at the time was the cops admitted staying quiet about this throughout the summer “because making details available would have hurt the investigation”, which involved putting undercover cops on buses.

As i wrote at the time:

Putting decoys on buses sounds like a great idea, but think a moment: how would warning women in any way interfere with this? Well, he says it: warn women and “the offender is likely to alter his patterns” – don’t warn women, and the rapist will keep to his pattern!

Don’t warn women, and women won’t take any special precautions to protect themselves, so he’ll keep on raping them on Wednesday and Thursday nights, and hopefully eventually he’ll stumble upon a decoy and the police can say they saved the day!

Well, as it turns out our rape-happy mystery man never did stumble on any of these decoys. Apart from the fact that women weren’t warned even after the police figured they had a guy with a very specific m.o. (and at least one was raped during this period – in June 2005), their master-plan was without effect.

Just Beavis and Butthead pretending to be Dick Tracy.

I’ll not dwell on that now, i’ll move on, because as i noted earlier, we have something bigger than that to contemplate, more nasty and in your face than incompetence or callous manipulations.

Coz like i said at the beginning  this posting, it now looks like the man who raped at least eight women was himself a cop. Don’t believe me? Look, it's right there in that three inch news brief on page A8 of the Montreal Gazette:

Montreal cop accused of rapes
A man identified as a Montreal police officer and accused of committing rapes in Laval, St. Jerome and Terrebonne was arrested yesterday. A task force led by the Surete du Quebec and including police investigators from those three cities arrested the 34-year old. He is to be charged today with one count of sexual assault stemming from an incident in St. Jerome on June 30. The victims, aged 15 to 20, were attacked near bicycle paths, SQ constable Chantal Mackels said. The Montreal police force is to offer its reaction at a press conference today.

The Gazette – as always when police are abusing people (just look at their Mohamed Annas Bennis coverage) – is not even pretending to take this seriously. The “North Shore Rapist” who merited a front page story in October is now only worth a news brief. To find out that the raping policeman’s name is Benoit Guay, to read the details of his attacks and learn that he made a point of targeting teenagers, one has to check out the Journal de Montreal… but i digress.

Back in October, when i first wrote about this case, i suggested that the solution lay not in more police, but in women’s organized self-defense:

Regardless of whether you are anti-cop or not, an anarchist or a liberal, you have to admit that the police are just not able to deal with this problem, and unless you think rape and murder of women aren’t problems that need dealing with…

Avoiding completely the question of whether we even want police in our communities, there is an obvious need to develop our own capacities for collective self-defense. Call it “safety” or call it “armed struggle” or call it a “feminist guerilla”, there is a particular need for women to develop their capacities, because – sad to say – even a left-wing or anarchist group led by us guys will most likely be unable to effectively appraise and intervene in cases of male violence against women.

Today’s news amplifies the above.
It’s not that organized self-defense would be easy, obvious or even guaranteed success.
But how long can we live with the alternative?

Categories: media, montreal, police, quebec, violence-against-women, women

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Back Soon

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My apologies for not writing recently – i had the pleasure of spending almost a week out of town, on one of my semi-annual pilgrimages to Toronto.

I will be back to business soon, i promise…

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Transphobic Abuse in Nepal [BBC]

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From the BBC:

Nepal transsexual 'abuse' concern  

A leading human rights group has written to Nepal's government voicing concern over what it calls continuing police abuse of transsexuals.
Human Rights Watch says there has been a pattern of arbitrary arrests and violence against "Metis", who identify themselves as women.

The organisation has called for a full investigations of such abuse and appropriate punishments.

Police in Nepal say they are taking the allegations very seriously.

However, the head of a human rights cell in the police said many of the Metis were working as prostitutes and that as this was illegal in Nepal, raids on hotels were "permissible".

The BBC's Charles Haviland in Kathmandu says Metis are a common sight in the city's streets late at night.

Job skills

Human Rights Watch said that in the past few weeks, Metis had been detained without warrants, badly beaten, burned with cigarettes, forced to strip and even had guns pointed at them.

Similar allegations - sometimes with photographic evidence - are regularly made by the Blue Diamond Society, a charity working among Nepal's transsexuals.

The officer said the police were in dialogue with Blue Diamond on how to train the Metis in other job skills.

Blue Diamond is the subject of a lawsuit by a conservative lawyer who wants it closed down.

However, the government has said there are no legal grounds for doing so.

Now i have two questions:

• why did the BBC headline its article Nepal transsexual 'abuse' concern - why was abuse in quotation marks? Is it because the BBC is an ‘objective’ bourgeois news source?


• There is a Maoist insurgency poised to take power in Nepal – how is this likely to impact Kathmandu’s transsexuals?

Categories: media, nepal, queer, transsexual

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Appeal From Action Directe Prisoners [FRANCE]

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Action Directe was an armed organization which was active in France in the 1980s. AD grew out of the French autonomist scene and drew heavy inspiration from both the struggles of the Third World proletariat and the intellectual legacy of the new communist currents of the 1960s and 70s. It carried out a number of spectacular attacks, many of which were in cooperation with Germany's Red Army Faction. On February 21st, 1987, Nathalie Ménigon, Georges Cipriani, Jean-Marc Rouillan and Joëlle Aubron were apprehended by the French State, effectively putting an end to the organization.

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Through their actions AD attempted to tie the struggles of the French proletariat to the international struggle against imperialism. They have paid an incredible price – nineteen years behind bars – and yet remain militant and outspoken critics of imperialism and capitalism.  

What follows is an Appeal from the prisoners, that has been distributed in French by the Ne Laissons Pas Faire collective [very roughly translated: “Don’t Let Them Do This To Us” Collective]. As this February will mark the beginning of their twentieth year behind bars, they have called on people to demonstrate in front of the prisons where they are being held:

Appeal from Action Directe Prisoners

As we enter our twentieth year of incarceration, we are asking people to gather in solidarity in front of our places of detention on this coming February 25th.

Over the past year the sentencing tribunals rejected our requests for conditional release in the name of that eternal blackmail: if one wants to be free one must repent.

What this means in concrete terms is that we remain imprisoned because we have declared ourselves to be on the side of Revolution; because despite everything we still believe that the anti-imperialist struggle is key; and, finally, because we refuse to condemn the insurrectionary violence of our class and its guerillas around the world, from Palestine to Colombia.

During this second round of mobilizations in February, we call for solidarity with Georges Ibrahim Abdallah, an Arab Communist who has been imprisoned since 1984. Our support should be expressed in front of the Lannemezan Central where he is being held, and also in front of the Bapaume and Ensisheim prisons. We fought the same enemy together and we have experienced the same daily violence within the prison system. Our bond cannot be broken. Through him, we are in solidarity with all of the comrades from the revolutionary anti-imperialist left who refuse to renounce their past commitments and actions. The vengeful State violence that confronts political prisoners is the expression of the reactionary wave that has flooded the entire entire country. On this terrain too we must spread and reinforce resistance.
Solidarity is a weapon! Seguiremos adelante!

Action Directe prisoners: Nathalie Ménigon, Georges Cipriani, Jean-Marc Rouillan, Joëlle Aubron (whose sentence has been suspended)
January 6th, 2006

Please note that i translated the above, and that (as always) my translation style is loose and fast – my priority is keeping the meaning accurate and conveying the feeling of what is being said, not maintaining some kind of word-by-word parity. Just because i translate something does not mean that i agree with it, so i should specify in this case that i wholeheartedly endorse this call for solidarity rallies, and think that it would be great if those of us who do not live in France took this opportunity to demonstrate in front of French consulates and embassies on the 25th.

If anyone makes such plans please let me know and i will post them here.

NLPF, which is devoted to supporting the AD prisoners, can be contacted at nlpf@samizdat.net; they have a French-language bulletin you can subscribe to. One can also read more about Action Directe in French at the Action Directe International Campaign and Agence de Presse Associative websites.

Also: i have translated three texts ("Short Collective Biography of Action Directe Prisoners", "Political Prisoners and the Question of Revolutionary Violence" and "Resistance is a Duty!") by Action Directe prisoners which are available in the pamphlet Three Essays by Action Directe – email me if you would like to order a copy. I also translated an interview with Joëlle Aubron from the anarcho-punk webzine Future Noir, which you can view online.

Categories: action-directe, france, prison, translation

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2005: France Was A Riot

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Riot coverage of the 2005 Rebellion which swept France has been uploaded to my Kersplebedeb site, on the new 2005: France Was A Riot page.

Everything i posted to my blog is up there in chronological order, for what it is worth. I figure that way the information will be more accessible and easy to find than it would in the blog archives.

Sorry for the short posting… but it is a busy week!

Categories: france, riot, translation

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The Police Insist: "We Are Professionals And We Have No Interest In Hiding Anything"

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There is an article about the police killing of Mohammed Anass Bennis in today’s Montreal Gazette (page A8) by Katherine Wilton – all about how the police are doing such a nice job investigating each other, and how they’ll be sure to let us know when they’re done.

Just sit tight kids, nothing to worry about at all:

Quebec City police investigating the shooting death last month of a Muslim man by Montreal police promised yesterday all the facts in the bizarre case will be made public once their work is complete.

“We are professionals and we have no interest in hiding anything,” said Constable Hughes Lavoie of Quebec City police, who were called in to investigate the Dec. 1 shooting of Mohammed Annas Bennis in Cote des Neiges.

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Really?

I feel better aleady…

Simply put, what seems to have happened is this:

After effectively burying this case for a month (just three articles in the Gazette, for instance, none on the front page – similar coverage in the other press), last Saturday there was a demonstration organized by members of the Muslim community. The biggest demonstration about a cop killing in years – two thousand people – and this on the coldest day of the winter.

The Gazette tried to downplay this too – reporter Ann Carroll, who later admitted not even attending the march, simply wrote that “as many as 200 people rallied” – while other media reported that “hundreds” (CTV) or even “a thousand” (Journal de Montreal) people showed up.. None of them gave it the coverage that it deserved.

Nevertheless, a little is better than nothing at all – or in the eyes of the cops, worst than nothing at all – and so here they have to make their statements again, basically saying “Trust Us, We Know What We’re Doing.” (Which is what some of us are worried about…)

So now the cops want to reassure us that there is no need for a public inquiry and no need for transparency, because the police will eventually tell us what happened (once they’ve gathered, sifted, and sanitized the facts): “When the investigation is over, we will notify the media. But we never say anything about our findings until the investigation is complete.” (Constable Lavoie)

Again: this is a case where the police version of events was initially the only version presented in the media, and is still the main version. It is a case where protests by the community have been downplayed, and reassurances by the authorities have not been questioned. It is also a case where no reporters have done any real investigating of their own – we still don’t know the name of the cop who killed Bennis, we still don’t have any real understanding of why the surveillance tapes from the nearby Bell building have not been shown, there has been no pressure on the police to show the knife Bennis was allegedly wielding… the list of things that haven’t been looked into just goes on and on.

It makes me wonder… following the mass protests that surrounded the police killings of young Black men like Anthony Griffin and Marcellus Francois in the late 80s/early 90s, and after the Collective Opposed to Police Brutality and other groups managed to repeatedly call attention to police killings throughout the 90s… why are reporters so keen on not challenging the police and not actually reporting? Why are the papers burying these stories so much more than they did twenty years ago? Why are we no longer told the name of the cop who kills someone – shit, looking through the Gazette archives I note that in many cases we are not even told the name of their dead victims!

Is there some new media protocol for how to handle police killings?

Now that’s something that someone should report on…

Categories: media, montreal, police, racism

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Upping the Anti, Identity Politics, etc.

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I feel guilty.

It has been almost three weeks since i received my box of Upping the Anti – the Toronto journal of radical theory and action, put out by comrades from Autonomy and Solidarity – and still nothing on this blog about it…

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…the problem is that the journal is actually really good. Lots of interesting interviews and “panel discussions,” and some good articles to boot - it feels like it deserves a thorough review, and as with any such daunting task the easiest way to approach it is procrastination.

Nevertheless, one can’t procrastinate for ever, and it really is a good journal… so why don’t we just begin at the beginning?

The editorial to UTA #1 explains that “Upping the Anti refers to our interest in engaging with three interwoven tendencies which have come to define much of the politics of today’s radical left in Canada: anti-capitalism, anti-oppression, and anti-imperialism.”

Developing this theme, the editorial to UTA #2 attempts to grapple specifically with what “anti-oppression” politics mean (we are told that the next issues will deal with anti-capitalism and anti-imperialism). Swimming against the current, UTA affirms the centrality of class but refuses to reject identity politics out of hand. Their analysis is pretty close to my own on this question – namely, that “anti-oppression politics” developed out of (but not against) the left, as a way of supporting and understanding people’s resistance to oppression beyond the edges of the obvious class struggle.

As their editorial puts it:

As activists, we are often initially radicalized through our inductions into “identities” of class, gender, race, sexuality, or culture. These identities emerged out of specific struggles against different forms and instances of oppression: from struggles against segregation, racism, and colonialism, to feminist struggles for reproductive rights and against male violence and to queer struggles against sexual repression and the gender binary. They also emerged out of a critique of the limitations and silences, both in terms of political strategy and organizational practice, of “malestream” socialist politics.

As these various struggles developed they came face to face with the failures of the “old left” to adequately conceptualize relations of oppression in capitalist society, and the failure of mass movements to address their own internal dynamics of domination and unequal power relations. In the first case, these new social movements came up against a class reductionist Marxism which often treated class itself as an undeclared identity for white, Western and male workers. Although there existed some marginalized Marxist groups and theorists who continued to analyze class as a relation and process of social formation, for the most part Marxism seemed unable to offer a liberatory alternative to either Western capitalism or Soviet Stalinism. While Marxist movements continued to be influential during the 1960s, identity politics and activism emerged both within and outside of Marxist circles as a way to address patterns of oppression that were too often ignored or dismissed.

I might quibble that this actually underplays the degree to which “anti-oppression politics” developed organically within the left, and exaggerates the hegemony of so-called “class reductionism” (at the risk of turning it into a strawman)... but recognizing that in our quite snippety activist culture even internal developments are often expressed as being antagonistic to what came before (ah, the romance of the S-M dialectic), i think the above account is more correct than incorrect.

Of course, “anti-oppression politics” eventually took the form of “identity politics,” which contained both radical and reactionary tendencies. Today most on the left would agree that the reactionary tendencies won out, but i believe that this was largely due to external factors.

Here’s how i see it: “anti-oppression politics” (if that’s what we’re calling it today) have been a constant aspect of revolutionary left-wing politics since gawd knows when, but what is called “identity politics” only crystallized in the 1980s – the very decade when a cycle of revolt culminated in defeat. The 1980s were the first decade after the wave of anti-colonial revolutions had been put in check. The 1980s were the decade that the Soviet Union was defeated – and while “the other superpower” had not been communist, its death nevertheless represented a right-wing victory. Throughout the world, the 1980s were a decade where the working class met with one setback after another. In the 1980s the last remnants of the revolutionary movements of the 60s and 70s were pretty much mopped up.

Which of these factors were causes and which were effects can be debated, but it should be clear to all that for us the decade of Reagan and Thatcher was a decade of defeat.

This defeat was felt lastly and leastly in the privileged world of academia and related “activist circles.” It was here that what are now being called “anti-oppression struggles” crystallized into “identity politics.” In an age of defeat and located in these atypical milieux, it is easy to see why these “identity politics” often became moralistic, manipulative and demagogic. They were reflecting the perspective and culture of the university students and professional activists who developed them. But this fact should not be used to discount the liberatory perspective in which they were rooted…

(This process occurred alongside the triumph of “post-modernism,” and while i am no expert of the arcane debates that surround the latter, i smell a lot of parallels.)

As UTA quite excellently puts it:

in many cases, identity based “anti-oppression” politics have failed to develop a clear perspective on capitalism. The totality of class relations is often reduced to a “classist” attitude held by the rich or middle class and capitalism is generally thought of as an abstract, amorphous “thing” whose worst excesses are opposed on moral grounds. Within this rhetoric, “class” itself becomes simply one thread woven into a multi patched fabric of competing identities.

While social relations must not be reduced to political economy, class must be understood as a pervasive set of historically specific social relations of property, production, and social power that implicate everyone, and through which all of our oppressions are lived.

I am reminded of how political prisoner Bill Dunne underlines the need for “the incorporation into political consciousness of issues whose material significance is not yet understood.” Which i take as meaning that just because we do not yet see how they may factor into the class struggle, we can be sure that every fight against oppression includes a class dimension, and can and should be incorporated into the fight for a classless (and Stateless) society.

This is why i appreciate UTA’s willingness to engage with anti-oppression politics, because i consider the latter to be wholly part of the struggle against capitalism and imperialism. I know that even those comrades who most vehemently hate “identity politics,” will often agree that women’s issues, queer liberation and the like are all very important, but somehow “different from” other issues like fatphobia or ageism or ableism. I would argue that what may separate these categories is simply the success or failure of past struggles to reveal – as Dunne would put it – the “material significance” of these questions. And as we are all such pragmatic people, you gotta admit that sometimes this “revelation” has simply come in the form of seeing how many people can get so pissed off and so militant around such “secondary” questions.

More and his later, i promise…

For more information on Upping The Anti #1 and #2, you can check out the page i have up on my Kersplebedeb site.

Copies of Upping The Anti are available for $11.00 each postage included – you can email me at info@kersplebedeb.com or just click on the icon below to order via PayPal.
Please get in touch for information about wholesale prices.

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Categories: autonomous-marxism, book-review, feminism, identity-politics, protest, queer, revolution

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