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"...MAKE OUR ENEMIES FEAR THE CONSEQUENCES OF THEIR ACTIONS"

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This wasn't what I planned to post today, but I read it and thought it is what I should post today.  I agree with most of this  analysis. (
I don't agree, for one example, with letting racism and white supremacy off as a mental illness and thus with the title chosen for this piece.   I believe rather that white Americans are "blinded and bound"  by their white skin privilege.  However, that is me, and that is minor, and I do get the idea, and it does SEEM like madness).  I do most assuredly agree with the advice to African Americans which is the conclusion in the piece by the executive editor of Black Agenda Report posted here,

"We must organize for self-defense, in every meaning of the term, and create a Black political dynamic – a Movement – that will make our enemies fear the consequences of their actions."

For white American my advice is to look to the life of John Brown and figure it out. 


Trayvon and White Madness


by BAR executive editor Glen Ford

“George Zimmerman is no more provably racist in a U.S. court than most white Americans” – which is why a Justice Department action will get nowhere. Whites consider it “reasonable” to believe in the inherent dangerousness of Black males. “’Not guilty’ is reasonable, when everyone that counts shares the same assumptions as the perpetrator.”

The government would have to prove that Zimmerman was motivated by racial animus.”

When Trayvon Martin was murdered by a “creepy cracker” in February, 2012, an outraged Black America mobilized to force the State of Florida to put the perpetrator on trial. Seventeen months later, in the words of President Obama, “a jury has spoken,” affirming Florida’s original contention that Trayvon’s death was not a criminal act.

The White House also wanted Trayvon to be forgotten. Three weeks after the shooting, speaking through his press secretary, the president declared, “obviously we're not going to wade into a local law-enforcement matter." A few days later, Obama sought to placate Black public opinion with a statement of physical fact: “If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon.”

In the wake of the acquittal, Obama’s press people have announced he’ll stay out of the case while Attorney General Eric Holder pretends to explore the possibility of pursuing civil rights charges against George Zimmerman. Holder told the sorority sisters of Delta Sigma Theta that Martin’s death was “tragic” and “unnecessary,” but a federal prosecution of Zimmerman is highly unlikely. The government would have to prove that Zimmerman was motivated by racial animus – a fact that is as obvious to Black America as a mob lynching at high noon at Times Square. However, except for the fact that he murdered a teenager, George Zimmerman is no more provably racist in a U.S. court than most white Americans – which is why the Florida cops and prosecutors initially refused to arrest him, why the jury acquitted him, and why the bulk of the corporate media empathized with the defense.

Zimmerman was acting on the same racist assumption that motivates police across the country.”

The white public at-large shares with Zimmerman the belief – a received wisdom, embedded in their worldview – that young Black males are inherently dangerous. From this “fact” flows a reflex of behaviors that, to most whites, are simply commonsensical. If young Black males are inherently dangerous, they must be watched, relentlessly. Black hyper-surveillance is the great intake mechanism for mass Black Incarceration. Zimmerman, the self-appointed neighborhood watchman, was acting on the same racist assumption that motivates police across the country, which is why the cops in Zimmerman’s trial were more valuable to the defense than to the prosecution. The same goes for the prosecutors and judge, much of whose daily lives are organized around the inherent dangerousness of young Black men.

Naturally, the cops testified that they saw no racial animus in Zimmerman’s actions – just as they would deny that their own hyper-surveillance of Black communities is motivated by animus. The jury, like the vast majority of white Americans, approves of the Black surveillance regime, and of those civilians that also keep an eye out for “crime” – which is synonymous with “Black males.” As juror B37 put it, Zimmerman’s “heart was in the right place” – meaning, she saw Zimmerman’s profiling and pursuit of Trayvon as well-intentioned and civic-minded; clearly, not malicious. Something “just went terribly wrong" – an unfortunate turn of events, but not a crime. The unanimous verdict shows the other jurors also perceived no malice – no racial motivation – by Zimmerman.

In fact, white folks in general do not think it is racist or evidence of malice to believe that Black males are a prima facie threat; it’s just a fact. Therefore, it is “reasonable” that civilians, as well as cops, be prepared to use deadly force in confrontations with Black males.

The white public at-large shares with Zimmerman the belief that young Black males are inherently dangerous.”

The answer to the question: What would a reasonable person do? is essential to American law. Police, prosecutors, judges and jurors base their decisions on their own subjective perception of the state of mind of people who harm or kill, and the reasonableness of their actions. To most white people, it is reasonable to reflexively suspect young Black males of having criminal intent, and reasonable to fear for one’s life in a confrontation with such a person. “Not guilty” is reasonable, when everyone that counts shares the same assumptions as the perpetrator.

Black people cannot fix that. We cannot change white people’s warped perceptions of the world, although, Lord knows, we’ve tried. It has been 45 years since passage of the last major civil rights bill, the Fair Housing Act, yet housing segregation remains general, overwhelmingly due to white people’s decisions in the housing market, based on their racial assumptions. So powerful is the general white racist belief in Black criminality and inferiority, the mere presence of African Americans on or near property devalues the land. This is racism with the practical force of economic law. The same “law” has locked Black unemployment at roughly twice that of whites for more than two generations – an outcome so consistent over time it must be a product of the political culture (racism) rather than the vicissitudes of the marketplace.

The Brown Supreme Court decision is nearly 60 years old, yet school segregation is, in some ways, more entrenched than ever – again, because of white peoples decisions. Not only is school segregation on the rise, but charterization is creating an alternative public-financed system designed primarily for Black and brown kids. In many cities, whites can only be retained in the public schools by offering them the best facilities and programs. School desegregation has largely been abandoned as a lost cause, because of the whites’ “intransigence” – a euphemism for enduring racism: a refusal to share space with Black people.

But, the criminal justice system is white supremacy’s playground, where racial hatreds, fears and suspicions are given free rein. One out of eight prison inmates on the planet are African American, proof of the general white urge to purge Blacks from the national landscape. Trayvon Martin fell victim to the extrajudicial component of the Black-erasure machine.

Racism is a form of mental illness, in which the afflicted perceive things that are not there, and are blind to that which is right in front of their eyes.”

White people don’t think they are malicious and racist; rather, they are simply defending themselves (quite reasonably, they believe) from Black evildoing. That whites perceive themselves as under collective attack is evident in the results of a Harvard and Tufts University study, which shows majorities of whites are convinced they are the primary victims of racial discrimination in America. Such mass madness is incomprehensible to sane people, but racism is a form of mental illness, in which the afflicted perceive things that are not there, and are blind to that which is right in front of their eyes.

To live under the sway of such people is a nightmare. Most of African American history has been a struggle to mollify or tame the racist beast, to find a way to coexist with white insanity, possibly to cure it, or to make ourselves powerful and independent enough that the madness cannot harm us too badly. George Zimmerman’s acquittal is so painful to Black America because it signals that our ancient enemy – white supremacy – is alive and raging, virtually impervious to any legal levers we can pull. The feeling of impotence is heightened by the growing realization that the Black president – a man who, in his noxious “Philadelphia” speech, denied that racism had ever been endemic to America – cannot and will not make anyone atone for Trayvon.

We have been in this spot before – or, rather, we have always been in this spot, but have for the last 40 years been urged to imagine that something fundamental had changed among white Americans. Trayvon smacks us awake.

We must organize for self-defense, in every meaning of the term, and create a Black political dynamic – a Movement – that will make our enemies fear the consequences of their actions.

BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com.


SEE YOU MONDAY...OR SO THEY SAY

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Starting some nine month long,  just no fun dental stuff...something strange about paying for pain.

 God willing and the creeks don't rise, I'll be here on Monday...

STRANGE DAZE

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Apparently getting my teeth pulled wrecked my modem.  So until that is fixed SCISSION will be silent.  It is just too much trouble to do on my ipad.  I should be back in service one week from today.

BYE BYE

ED SNOWDEN IS RON PAUL

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I am so tired of the left propping up Ed Snowden as one of OUR heroes. Has he not said or done anything that is not out of the Ron Paul right wing libertarian play book?  Has he been involved in any truly leftist struggles...against white supremacy, racism, global capital, patriarchy, etc. etc. has he spoken out on the US history of genocide of American Indians? Has he had anything to say about George  Zimmerman, about stand your ground, about mass incarceration? Get over this absurd love affair with a man who didn't tell us anything we didn't already know.


I needed to say this, so I am using my ipad to say it, since my computer is down.

Below are some links, I would suggest you who believe in Ed Snowden as a hero should glance at.

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/06/exclusive-in-2009-ed-snowden-said-leakers-should-be-shot-then-he-became-one/3/


http://www.addictinginfo.org/2013/07/06/have-we-all-been-fooled-by-edward-snowden/

http://littlegreenfootballs.com/article/42287_Crazed_Libertarian_Militia_Loves_Edward_Snowden

http://www.buzzfeed.com/hunterschwarz/edward-snowden-donated-to-raul-paul-in-2012

ELABORATION ON ED SNOWDEN KS RON PAUL

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Because my post on Ed Snowden raised such a howl in certain quarters, I am going to copy a few of my responses to those attacks on me in Facebook.  They often will refer to specific comments, but you will get the drift and I hope this further defines my position and why I posted what I'd did.

FROM FACEBOOK

FROM ME:  The linked articles are for information purposes,only.  As I,have said I don't buy all the opinions expressed in them, just the facts in them...most importantly Snowden's own words.  That is why I linked them.  I encourage anyone to do the research themselves.  One last comment for the hundredth times.  I support completely the deed, I do not support completely Snowden himself.  Finally, I am not out to get Snowden obviously.  The fact that he is a small time right wing libertarian doesnt really matter much to me as far as him personally.  What I am trying to point out is that the left has no reason to canonize him personally (because they have not made the effort to bother with an understanding of his politics).  By doing so in an uncritical way, the left fails to distinguishing between what is progressive and what is reactionary.  This in turn only helps to further the cause of those like Ron Paul, and worse, who may be anti state, or may oppose this or that war, or may support the legalization of marijuana but who also just happen be right wing.  This sows confusion within our ranks and amongst those we are trying to reach.  It is as simple as that.  This is not really about Snowden, it is about "us."  It is the same situation as those who were themselves progressive in the Occupy movement while embracing Paul and his ilk ( who just so happen to be a pack of right wing racist, Jew hating, capitalists, conspiracy theorists and more).  This is the same as those who mistakenly allowed the anti globalization movement to be infiltrated by the likes of Pat Buchananites, and worse because these reactionaries and racists happened, for their own reasons, to oppose globalization.  We do not ally with reactionaries, white supremacists, nazis or even right wing libertarians.  Again, the issue is not Snowden personally, it is the political orientation he represents.  Should he change, hey, more power to him.  It is not difficult to support the deed without supporting his politics. I do not support the government persecution of Snowden.  I obviously believe the violations of civil liberties by not merely Obama ( as  Snowden and some here would have you believe), but by the State...this did not just start.  it has been going on for long, long time.  I, in no way defend Obama or the State.  To imply such is a lie and a red herring.  I oppose Empire and global capital, white supremacy, white skin privilige, patriarchy in all it's manifestation, and have been actively doing so for nearly five decades now. My blog Scission is very clear.  i am an autonomous Marxist and a communist with a little c.  i am anti vanguard party and support the self organization and self emancipation of the working class and the multitudes.  i am a consistent opponent of white skin privilige which I view as a crucial prop holdong up capitalism and the US state.  I have served prison time for my political beliefs and deeds (if you want to know more about my beliefs feel free to bother with my Facebook info).  I hope this clears things up, Ellen.  I suppose I was not clear enough to begin with.  Maybe because I have been making the case for decades now that it important for "us" to understand these things, to distinguish between friends and foes, between progressives and reactionaries, between left wing revolutionaries and right wing revolutionaries, and to weed all the reactionaries like the Paulists, the anarcho-capitalists, white nationalists etc, who can sound like they are one of us on some issue, but certainly are not, and who attract vulnerable good folks with some part of their message.  Okay, is that clear.


FROM ME:  My belief is that there are two reasons which are really one as to why he released the documents.  He is a libertarian, be it a right wing one, and libertarians are opposed to government imtrusion into our lives...and do support some civil liberties ( of courser, amongst the civil liberties they support is the "liberty" to be, for example, a racist). Also, I think that it was only when Snowden realized even people like him, a nice priviliges white man and reactionary libertarian were amongst those being snooped on, he became outraged. Notice his comments that he would have shot previous leakers in the balls...notice that although the State has been spying on leftists, Black liberation supporters, civil rights leaders, Muslims, etc for a long time, and that the Patriot act was passed more than a decade ago, he has never said a word before and gone quietly about his work...doing just that apparently. However, as they say "when the State came for him", so to speak, he gets some backbone and does his deed. I am glad he did, but I am not fooled as to why he did. Whew,,,I can blather on...sorry...

SCISSION BACK TOMORROW??

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My new modem has arrived.  My computer should be back on line.   With luck SCISSION will be back to normal and really back tomorrow...god willing and the creeks don't rise...

WE WILL NEVER KNOW ED SNOWDEN

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Believe it or not, I actually have a friend who once worked for the NSA in a very similar position to that of Ed Snowden.  I was talking to him about Snowden's politics and what I had found.  He comments that there is no way we will ever really know who Snowden is or why he did what he did.  I asked my friend how I knew he is who I think he is.  His reply, with a wry smile, was, "No one knows who I am."

Don't even ask how I am acquainted with this guy.

Anyway, my conclusion is that he is right.  Snowden could be anyone, anything.  Maybe he is a right wing libertarian, maybe he is a closet leftie, maybe he is really just an NSA guy or a geek, maybe he is none of the above.  Who knows.  Who knows why he leaked what he did and who knows if what he leaked is real or leaked for some reason other than we can guess.  Who knows what the government knows.  Who freakin knows?

In any event, one thing I still hold to at this time is that he does not belong in some pantheon of left or progressive heroes.  

I'll let it go at that and return to regular programing right here tomorrow.

THOSE WORKING THE LAND AREN'T WORRIED ABOUT HOW YOU DEFINE THEM

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The peasantry has always been a perplexing "class" for Marxists.  Let's face it, most of us have always considered them somewhat reactionary, hardworking, but most assuredly not part of the working class.  There are many reasons for this, none of which I am going to bother getting into now.  I will just say that   Marx considered the peasantry to be disorganized, dispersed, and incapable of carrying out change. Marx also expected that this class would tend to disappear, with most becoming displaced from the land and joining the proletariat. The more successful might become landowners or capitalist farmers.  It has not exactly yet turned out that way, though the peasantry has certainly diminished in size, just take a gander at China.  It is also that when Marx wrote of the peasantry he saw them as a feudal remnant that stood in the way of the progressive development of capitalism.

Later communists such as Lenin and Mao took different and often contradictory positions on the role of the peasantry...mostly to suit the needs of how they viewed the revolutionary situation within their respective countries.


The question now is for some is with Empire, with global capital, with social production, where is the peasantry in relations to the working class, and, perhaps, more importantly, in relation to the multitude.

Antonio Negri writes:

I think that after ’68 and with the beginning of the neo-liberal counterrevolution the structure of organising labour and in consequence the organization, the making of class composition has changed profoundly.

The factory stays no longer in the centre of value production. The value is created by putting to work the whole of society. We call multitude all the workers who are put to work inside society to create profit. We consider all the workers in the whole of society to be exploited, men, women, people who work in services, people who work in nursing, people who work in linguistic relations, people who work in the cultural field, in all of the social relations, and in so far as they are exploited we consider them part of the multitude, inasmuch as they are singularities. We see the multitude as a multiplicity of exploited singularities. The singularities are singularities of labour; anyone is working in different ways, and the singularity is the singularity of exploited labour....

When we take for example the peasantry. Peasants have always been considered to be outside the working class, to be something that should become working class. This always has been complete rubbish because the peasants always worked, worked hard, worked on things, worked as singularities. Nowadays we find ourselves facing a peasant class in the countries that are becoming increasingly irrelevant for capitalist development, and inside this peasant class we find on one side to a great extend the organisation of industrial labour, on the other side we find the specificity of peasant labour, which is singular, which means a specific contact with nature, the making of good cheese, of good vine. It means finding this unique quality of labour, finding inside the diversity, inside the difference the common elements, that are, of course, joint elements of exploitation, but on the other side the specificity of the peasant’s capacity to relate oneself to the earth and to transform it, transform it into good cheese and good vine. Only in this way we can think of relations with the industrial working class, and not with workers’ aristocracy, that wouldn’t be mechanical.

In a review of the book Empire by Negri and Hardt, Eric Mason writes:


One problem caused by giving immaterial labor a central role in the project of the multitude is the question of the participation of those who labor on the land and do not trade primarily in immaterial labor-namely, peasants. Hardt and Negri admit as much when they state that the “figure of the peasant may pose the greatest challenge for the project of the multitude.” The disappearance of the peasant from struggles over democracy (like the disappearance of the “figure of the industrial worker, the service industry worker, and all other separate categories”) is welcomed by Hardt and Negri, who see this as part of the “more general trend of the socialization of all figures of labor.” In other words, the multitude depends on the becoming common of multiplicity, while each form of labor is assumed to be able to retain its singularity.

Of course, there are "multitudes" who disagree totally with Negri and Hardt and others who make a mountain out of the multitudes.  They say they are totally muddling class and class struggle...and worse.

The truth is I am not getting into that debate here, today.  

The post below is simply an example of the fact that not everyone is all that concerned with how anyone defines class or the peasantry.  They just are...

The following is from Red Pepper.


Twenty years of peasant organising

Adam Payne of the newly-formed Landworkers’ Alliance in the UK reports from La Via 

Campesina's global conference

La Via Campesina's 6th conference

Between the 5 and 14 of June, La Via Campesina, the global peasants union, held its 6th international conference in Jakarta, Indonesia. Alongside 500 delegates from member organisations around the world, two representatives from the recently affiliated ‘Landworkers’ Alliance’ in the UK joined the gathering.

La Via Campesina (literally ‘the peasants’ way’) is an international union of peasants and small farmers representing 188 member organisations in 88 counties. The total membership is in excess of 200 million and growing constantly as new organisations join. The international conferences are held every four years and are the highest forum for decision making within the organisation. This conference also marked the 20th birthday of the movement and was a place for the membership to celebrate as well as strategise.

The past 20 years have seen La Via Campesina grow to become the largest and most internationally respected farmers organisation in the world. Not only is it seen as the representative voice of peasant farmers in civil society and inter-governmental forums; it is also considered by many as offering the most legitimate critique of neoliberalism and the most convincing vision of alternatives. Its power in international forums is derived from its strict ‘producers only’ membership policy, and its democratic functioning which give it a grassroots and representative voice.

La Via Campesina was established in 1993 to unite the opposition of peasants movements to the World Trade Organisation’s agreement on agriculture, a free market trade agreement that has had disastrous implications for the livelihoods of small-scale producers. Since then they have been extremely successful in giving international visibility to the peasant movement. As Julia, a farmer from Germany said: ‘we have the dexterity of an organisation combined with the courage of a social movement’. They take every opportunity to remind the world that 75 per cent of our food is produced by peasants, but that rural areas are often the most deprived and exploited. La Via Campesina argues that peasants and peasant-led solutions must be seen and heard as protagonists in food and agricultural policy.

A primary aim of the conference was to build consensus in the organisation about the focus for the coming four years. Unlike the last conference, which focused on improving internal functioning, in Jakarta a lot of space was given to formulating strategy. A number of topics emerged and were passionately articulated but there was a remarkable consensus on the main challenges that peasants farmers face worldwide and the most effective ways to challenge these forces of oppression. 


Land grabbing and agrarian reform emerged as a significant issue at the conference. It is clear that in the five years since the 2008 food crisis the enclosure and privatisation of land and common resources has increased significantly worldwide. Both state led and private sector land acquisitions are leading to higher and higher concentrations of ownership, taking previously common resources away from peasants and driving up the cost of land. The issue of land grabbing is set firmly in a wider critique of the corporate ‘green’ economy and the commodification of nature. 


In response to the increase in land grabbing, La Via Campesina has amplified its discourse on agrarian reform. Redistribution of productive land to producers and public legislation to prevent land grabs are high on it’s agenda. This is happening at national levels through lobbying and direct actions and internationally through the UN’s Comittee on Food Security (CFS) where ‘voluntary guidelines for the responsible tenure of farms, fisheries and forests’ have recently been agreed, and ‘guidelines for responsible agricultural investment’ are being discussed. As always, these international forums have yielded vague results, with no binding mechanisms for implementation, but represent important steps in the slow path to public policy on tenure, land grabs and investment. 


Closely linked to the opposition to land grabbing are increasing campaigns against public-private partnerships that use development rhetoric to open markets and create space for international investment in agriculture. The G8’s new alliance on food security and nutrition is one such example of a ‘development programme’ that seeks to facilitate access to land and markets for agribusiness at the expense of peasant livelihoods and traditions.

GM and the commodification of seed remained high on the agenda with a recent proposal from the European commission on the regulation of plant health and marketing taking up a lot of energy in the European regional meetings. The proposal seeks to streamline the European seed industry, creating better incentives for companies to invest in seeds. However the proposal would place fees and registration requirements on small scale seed breeders and growers that would threaten livelihoods and the development of peasant seeds. Internationally the anti GMO campaign has been growing in strength with large scale direct actions against GM in Spain, France, Mexico, India and Haiti. La Via Campesina’s position on GM is that it is an unnecessary technology that damages peasant livelihoods and food security by concentrating power in the food chain in the hands of a few companies and commodified crops. They argue that to end hunger we need to address the situations of those who already produce food, and those who want to. Seeking to build a diverse and resilient local food system rather than the export-focused business-led model that GM is designed for.

La Via Campesina’s struggle against agribusiness spreads far beyond the issue of GM. The conference saw the adoption of a global ‘campaign against agrotoxics’ (genres of chemical known in the UK as pesticides which includes herbicides, fungicides and insecticides) that was initiated by Latin American organisations in 2011. The campaign highlights that monopolies in the agrochemical market (just 6 control 67.9% of the market) force farmers into debt and dependence, but also that agrotoxics are dangerous to people and ecology and are responsible for a lot of death and disease among agricultural workers.

Repression of social movements was also high on the agenda and space was made in the conference to honour the hundreds of peasants who have been threatened, persecuted, imprisoned and murdered in their struggles. In a number of the regions where members are active state and paramilitary violence against peasant movements is extreme. A member of the delegation from Honduras described how many of his colleagues had been killed for speaking and organising to defend the rights of agricultural workers. The issue is linked closely to the campaign against violence against women which seeks to build the strength and solidarity in the movement by challenging prejudices. In recognition of the intense repression faced by many members, La Via Campesina works hard to build inclusion and solidarity within the movement. As practical steps towards this they set quotas on the participation of men, women and youth, ensuring equal space for different voices.

Food sovereignty and agroecology 


To develop their proposals for an alternative agricultural policy framework, La Via Campesina came up with the concept of food sovereignty in 1996. Set upon the recognition that food and agriculture are a key element of struggles for social justice in both rural and urban areas, food sovereignty is the fundamental right for all peoples, nations and states to control food and agricultural systems and policies, ensuring everyone has adequate, affordable, nutritious and culturally appropriate food. This requires the right to define and control methods of production, transformation, and distribution at local, national and international levels. Most significantly it encompasses as socio-economic and political transformation. Food sovereignty was a huge part of the discourse at the conference and is used by all kinds of organisations to describe the alternatives that the La Via Campesina offers. While it sounds complicated when dressed in the language of policy, the fundamentals of food sovereignty are the basic demands of farmers around the world: fair prices for food and agricultural products, prioritisation to local and sustainable production and support for new entrants to agriculture alongside a curbing of the power of transnational corporations. 


As the failures of the import dependant food security model become clearer, food sovereignty is getting a broader recognition in public policy. Some counties, including Ecuador, Bolivia, Venezuela, Senegal, Mali and Nepal have written food sovereignty into their policy frameworks, and it is gaining recognition in the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) and Committee on Food Security (CFS). The sharing of victories and strategies for taking food sovereignty to public policy was a big component of the conference and something that will be happening more in the coming years. 


In the institutions 


The work of La Via Campesina was described to me by an Italian farmer as 1 per cent institutional, 99 per cent mobilisation and mutual aid. At the institutional level, La Via Campesina have been working to create and hold a space for social movements in the UN’s intergovernmental forums for agricultural policy. They are actively lobbying in the FAO, the CFS and the European Union. The main focus here at the moment is twofold, first, following a successful attack on the World Bank’s attempts to write an ‘initiative on responsible investment’, La Via Campesina has been active in taking the issue to the more democratic forum of the CFS where it is working to build the ‘guidelines on responsible agricultural investment’ into an instrument that can be used to defend communities against land grabbing.

In addition La Via Campesina have drafted a bill for the rights of peasants that has been accepted by the UN human rights commission and is now being pushed for ratification by the general assembly. 


In the institutions, La Via Campesina’s main aim is often just to give visibility to peasant issues and hold a channel open for farmers voices. As a farmer from Canada said at the conference, ‘often a victory in the institutions is just preventing a bad thing from happening’. Nevertheless, both the bill on the rights of peasants, and the guidelines for responsible agricultural investments hold huge potential for supporting la via campesinas work on the ground with internationally recognised frameworks. 


Don’t forget you are a farmer 


In the achievements of the organisation it is easy to forget that really this is a farmers movement, focussed on supporting the livelihoods of peasants around the world. It is in this realm that the movement is having its biggest impacts and it came through clearly in the feeling at the conference. The last 20 years have seen a huge quantity of visits and exchanges with innumerable ideas translated between producers in different contexts. The cumulative effect of all this is to build confidence and capacity among farmers organisations to take active and political roles in directing their futures. 


In a time when protest seems to come and go it is inspiring to see an organisation build to this size without compromising its vision, its voice or its demographics. It is amazing that the organisation remains such a united, democratic and honest representation of the issues producers face.




FREE IRINA LIPSKAYA

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FREE IRINA


So who is Irina Lipskaya?  She is a friend and she is a comrade and she is an anti-nazi fighter and she is brave and she is in jail and she has been there for over a year with no trial.

She is in Russia.

Remember Russia.  Thank god, they cast off the yoke of "communism" and became free...well, not exactly free, well not really free at all, and it really wasn't communism they cast off, but whatever...Mr. Gorbachev bring down that wall...and all that bully rahahahaha.

Russia is sort of a center of the international not just fascist, but out and out nazi movement.  It's odd, since Mr. Putin seems, oh so powerful, and oh so able to get his way, to crack down on whoever he wants, yet these nazis just keep being there.

What's up with that?


You may write to Irina using this address:
Irina Antonovna Lipskaya, k. 308
SIZO-6 "Pechatniki"
ul. Shosseynaya 92
109383 Moscow Russia
But note that letters in English are seldom accepted in Russian prisons, so if you do not have the chance to write in Russian (i.e. by using simply phrases and translating them via the google translation program) just send photos and postcards.
SUPPORT IRINA, FREE IRINA, FREE ALL POLITICAL PRISONERS.

The following is from Denver Anarchist Black Cross.


Irina Lipskaya, Imprisoned Anarchist and Anti-Fascist in Moscow, Needs Support!

Irina Lipskaya
Irina Lipskaya

Irina was arrested on the 2nd of July 2012.  She has been on the inside for a little over a year, awaiting a trial.  Her incarceration is prolonged due to dubious claims by her alleged “victims” that they still have not acquainted themselves with the results of the investigation.  However, according to sources within Moscow doing support for Irina and other anti-fascist and anarchist allies (Alexy SutugaIgor Kharchenko, and others) clear evidence of their guilt still has not been presented.

On July 4th, 2012, the Presnenski district court of Moscow’s judge Dmitry Dolgopolov, fulfilled a police request to imprison two of six anti-fascists who were remanded on the second of July, not far from club “Barrikada” (see story here).  23 year old Irina Lipskaya and 19 year old Andrey Molchanov, were picked up on suspicion of having violated statute of Russian criminal codex 213 part 2 (hooliganism, committed with a group of people).

According to police reports, anarchists and anti-fascists attacked guests of a Nazi concert with rubber bullets and flares.

Irina and Andrey’s story is different. According to them six anti-fascists were traveling by Zvenigorskoye highway in Moscow. They stopped their car near the club to have a smoke. Guests of the fascist concert attacked their car with rubber bullets.  Anti-fascists jumped into their car and attempted to drive away, but were arrested after few seconds by SOBR special forces of the police.

They were beaten both during their arrest and inside of the Presnenski district police station. The “victims” that the police took statements from were the same fascist nationalists from the club, who were more than happy to imprison our anarchist allies.  It is clear that despite any actual evidence of their involvement, Irina and Andrey are being held because of their anti-fascist beliefs.

It is obvious, that this is a political case against anti-fascists. As SOBR special forces were on the spot, anti-fascists were under police surveillance prior to arrest.  This is not the only political case against anti-fascists in Moscow – besides Irina and Andrey, three more anti-fascists are currently detained in Moscow – Alexey Sutuga, Alexey Olesinov and Igor Kharchenko.

She has been charged with three felonies, including “hooliganism, committed by a group and with a preliminary intent” and “involving minors to a felony hate crime”.

Irina was arrested just few days after her graduation from the Journalist Faculty of the Moscow State University. She needs a medical care for her hand, as she was stabbed by Nazis during a fight in 1st of May of 2011, but while in prison she may not receive proper medical care.

During the remand court session of 27th of June, Irina was strong and showed that system is not about to crush her.  According to Moscow ABC, she is also not in a need of material support. However, moral support is necessary, a full year of prison is hard for anyone especially because during the investigation she has been betrayed by some of her former comrades.

WHITE CULTURE, WHITE CRIME, WHITE THUGS: WHAT IS WRONG WITH THESE PEOPLE

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What is wrong with white people anyway?  They go about rioting and tearing up their own communities, shooting, raping, tearing up their schools, killing each other and anyone who gets in their way,  and just committing all kinds of mayhem on each other...and everyone else.  Kids walking around looking like a bunch of schlumps...and the parents, well, they just don't give a damn.

I'm thinking we need some sort of program to teach white how to act in a civilized manner.  Or maybe, it is just in their genes and their isn't a damn thing we can do about it.  

I'll tell you one thing for sure, we don't need any more of these whites coming into our country from their historical homelands where violence and savagery are legendary.  Keep em out I say.  We need a wall on our northern border since I have a feeling a lot of white people are slipping in, I mean, states like North Dakota, Minnesota, Montana, Idaho, are full of whites.  Where is our heritage going?

It is all an outrage.

The following is from  Gawker.


Video of Violent, Rioting Surfers Shows White Culture of Lawlessness
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Video of Violent, Rioting Surfers Shows White Culture of Lawlessness


A frightening and violent mob swept through the normally quiet seaside community of Huntington Beach last night following a surfing competition in the area. Businesses were vandalized and looted, portable toilets overturned, and brutal fistfights waged right out in the open. It was an ugly display and a sad day for California. But more than that, it was a reminder that we must begin to seriously consider the values of our thuggish white youth.



      (You can find the video which was not found at  the link above for gawker)
Many people don't want to hear this kind of tough love, of course. They'd like to bury their heads in the sand and pretend that all white children are as sweet and harmless as Taylor Swift. But the reality is that the statistics tell a different story. For instance, according to research from the Department of Justice, 84 percent of white murder victims are killed by other white people[PDF]. Similarly, white rape victims tend to be raped by other whites [PDF]. White-on-white violence is a menace to white communities across the country, and yet you never hear white leaders like Pastor Joel Osteen, Bill O'Reilly, or Hillary Clinton take a firm stance against the scourge.
More important than white politicians are the white parents. I'd like to ask the caregivers of the children in these videos what they've been doing. When did so many white parents fall asleep at the wheel? You can complain about poor schools all you'd like, but the fact of the matter is that it's the parents of these children who are letting them leave the house looking like slobs in their baggy board shorts and Hollister t-shirts. It's the parents of these kids who are letting them listen to violent, self-destructive trash like "Anarchy in the UK" or "Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue"—performed loudly by noted conservative rocker Johnny Ramone.
As I said, I know a lot of whites don't want to hear this kind of tough talk. But as an American of color who considers himself an ally to the white community, I'm just tired of seeing young, belligerent white people disgrace themselves year after year at surfing events, horse racing infields, and Ivy League campuses. Whites in America have been out from under their European ancestors' boot heels for centuries; California specifically outlawed preferences for nonwhites in state hiring and education nearly two decades ago. So being "oppressed" is no longer an excuse for behavior like this. How long must we wait for the white community to get its act together?

SOLIDARITY WITH THE DREAM 9

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Today is prison friday and the hunger strikes in California continue and many prisoners are now in bad shape and need all the support you can give them.  

I, however, am turning to another story involving an immigration detention center in Arizona.  These places, these "concentration camps," for lack of a better word are notorious.  

Anyway, read the post below and support another hunger strike now in progress.

By the way Dream 9 refers to nine activists, "undocumented" immigrants who have been in the country since they were children and lived here most of their lives.   They have been in custody were picked up after crossing the border from Mexico into the US in protest of immigration policy and the detention of hundreds of thousands. .They are now awaiting a decision on whether or not they will be deported or granted asylum.

The LA Times reports:

Margo Cowan, attorney for the nine, said U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services officials finished interviewing her clients this week and will probably hand down a decision soon on whether the Mexican nationals will be deported to their place of birth or released back to the American communities they’ve lived in most of their lives.


As the nine await a decision, they’ve kept busy organizing within the facility, staging hunger strikes and gathering dozens of names and numbers of other people who are with them in immigration detention. Their case information has been passed to activists on the outside. The hope is to find these detainees some sort of immigration relief and to make their stories public, said Mohammad Abdollahi, organizer with the National Immigrant Youth Alliance.

The Arizona Star adds:


 Domenic Powell, a spokesman with the National Immigrant Youth Alliance, said the group is awaiting formal notification on their applications for humanitarian parole but is also seeking asylum based on "credible fear" of persecution should they return to Mexico.


Powell initially said earlier Thursday the parole requests had been denied, but later indicated the group's attorney had not yet received official word from U.S. authorities.
Should asylum be considered, the group may be released into the U.S. temporarily pending hearings before an immigration judge on their ability to remain.

These are some brave folks...

The following is from ColorLines.



‘A Girl Hanged Herself Here’

Immigrant detainees sit in their housing cell in the women’s wing of the Eloy Detention Center on` July 30, 2010. John Moore/Getty

When the Dream 9 entered the Eloy Detention Center last week in Florence, Arizona, they planned to start organizing. That effort has now grown into a hunger strike protesting the conditions in one of the most notorious immigrant detention centers in the country—and a deportation machine that continues to remove more than 1,000 people per day out of the United States. 

Shortly after arriving at Eloy, the Dream 9 say their phone use was unfairly restricted. In protest, they began a hunger strike—but six were placed in solitary confinement for their decision to do so. Most are back in the general population, but two remain. At the time of publication, 24-year-old Lulu Martinez and 22-year-old Maria Peniche have spent 104 out of the last 108 hours in complete isolation. Mohammad Abdollahi works with the National Immigrant Youth Alliance (NIYA), which organized the action that resulted in the Dream 9’s detention, and he remains in steady contact with the nine. He says that when Martinez and Peniche are brought out of their individual cells and into the yard once a day, they are shackled and interact only with guards.

But Martinez and Peniche aren’t the only ones facing horrid conditions at Eloy. Thesla Zenaida, who met the Dream 9 at Eloy and is now participating in a hunger strike along with other women detainees, explained in a phone call that a guard’s treatment at the detention facility drove a fellow detainee to suicide.

Look, a girl hanged herself. A girl was hanged here. [After] she was hanged, they didn’t want to take her body down. And for the same reason—because they treat us poorly. A guard treated her poorly, and that guard is still working here. They us like the worst dogs.

There were in fact two apparent suicides at Eloy in as many days in March of this year.

The NIYA’s presence at and near Eloy is also inspiring those on the outside with loved ones in detention as well. Jesus Magaña, 24, says that his sister Alejandra Pablos has been at Eloy for two years. Magaña says the 29-year-old had permanent residency after arriving to the U.S. at the age of two—but was picked up by authorities after two misdemeanor convictions. The vigils outside of Eloy have renewed his hope that his sister might be released. Pablos refuses to allow herself to be deported to Mexico because she has no family there, and is afraid what she’ll face in a country she doesn’t know.

Magaña returned from service in the Air Force one year ago, and recently moved from California to Arizona in order to be closer to his sister, whom he visits every weekend. He says he can’t imagine being separated from his sister, who has always supported him and wrote him for the four years he was on duty. “It’s like we were both deployed—she was in Eloy and I was in Kuwait,” says Magaña. “But they get treated worse here than I was in deployment.”
Magaña says that treatment includes humiliating remarks and the constant threat of solitary confinement. He adds that Pablos explained that she’s been told by guards that 70 women in various pods have joined the hunger strike—but that she was warned that if she did so, she would “face charges.”
The NIYA has started a campaign encouraging supporters to hold a one-day hunger strike in solidarity with the strikers inside Eloy.

ANTONIO NEGRI: A REVOLT THAT NEVER ENDS

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Well, for Theoretical Weekends at Scission, I thought we would take a different route, or, more like, a different medium.  It's our old friend Antonio Negri, and when you are sitting around twiddling your thumbs, you can lay back and watch this video from Lib.com.

In case you don't actually get the video, here is the link to it

http://libcom.org/library/antonio-negri-revolt-never-ends

Documentary about the life and ideas of Italian Marxist Antonio Negri. With interesting footage and information from Italy in the 1960s-70s it follows his development from the 'Operaisti' through to his trial for supposed involvement in the Red Brigades all the way up to Empire and the anti-globalisation movement.

THE JERUSALEM SYNDROME

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Jerusalem.  

When you hear the city's name you can't help but imagine something, think of something.  What that may be will certainly vary greatly from person to person, but one thing many of us think of is the massive headache it gives anyone who has any thought about some sort of resolution to the whole Palestine/Israel question.

It needn't be that big of a headache.  There are several logical answers to the problem of how to deal with it, but few seem willing to even give them serious thought.

Too bad.


Anyway, what I have below is a long, and I mean long for Scission on a Monday, piece which tells you more about Jerusalem's history and questions, and even some answers, then you have likely run into for a while.  It's worth the read whatever your (or my) thoughts.  It also demonstrates that it isn't like the Israeli's didn't have a plan (or plans) relating to Jerusalem since the get go.

The following is from New Left Review.



NEW JERUSALEM

YONATAN MENDEL



Encyclopædias of psychology cite a type of religious psychosis known as the Jerusalem Syndrome, which can be triggered by a visit to the city. Symptoms can include bellowing liturgical songs, delivering moralistic sermons and an intensified concern with cleanliness and ritual purity. Though similar reactions have been recorded at other holy cities, notably Rome and Mecca, Jerusalem holds the record for this psychopathology. [1] From the point of view of any normal urban logic, however, the city itself appears crazier still. Its boundaries extend far beyond its core population centres, encompassing dozens of villages, barren hilltops, orchards and tracts of desert, as well as new-build suburbs with scant relation to the historical city; in the north, they stretch up, like a long middle finger, nearly to Ramallah, to take in the old Qalandia airport, some 10 kilometres from the Old City walls, and bulge down almost to Bethlehem in the south.
Jerusalem’s former Deputy Mayor, Meron Benvenisti, has said of these monstrously extended city limits:
I’ve reached the point that when someone says ‘Jerusalem’ I am very cynical about it. This is a term that has been totally emptied of its content. Today there is no geographic concept called ‘Jerusalem’, and instead I suggest using a new term, ‘Jermudin’, which is the territory stretched from Jericho to Modi’in. Someone decided to rub the hills that have no connection to Jerusalem with holy oil, and today we need to deal with a ‘Jerusalem’ region, which is unmanageable and which is held by force. [2]
But if the cityscape of Jerusalem has no decipherable urban logic, what rationality has shaped its growth? In Benvenisti’s view, ‘it all started from the post-1967 municipal borders and the famous principle of maximum square kilometres of land and minimum number of Arabs.’ [3] There is much to be said for this hypothesis; but we will have to begin a little earlier than that.

From Canaanites to colonizers

The history of the Old City probably starts around 1,500 BC, when a Canaanite community known as the Jebusites built the first walled fortifications, taking advantage of an elevated location amid fertile lands, raised above the coastal plain, and sited on the mountain aquifer. The walls would be rebuilt, torn down and built again countless times in the centuries that followed, as the city was conquered by the Jews under King David (c. 1,000 BC), followed by the Babylonians (c. 600 BC), the Persians (536 BC), Alexander the Great (333 BC), the Maccabees (164BC), the Romans (63 BC), the Arabs, under Umar Ibn Al-Khattab (637 AD), the Crusaders (1099), Saladin (1187) and the Ottomans, under Sultan Selim (1517). In the course of this, it is said, King Solomon built the first Jewish temple in the city, Jesus was crucified here and the Prophet Mohammed ascended to heaven. The present walls were built in the 1530s, at the command of Suleiman the Magnificent, encompassing a square kilometre of narrow streets and alleyways. For the next three centuries or so, the life of the city persisted within the walls, only expanding beyond them in the latter part of the nineteenth century.
After the British conquered Jerusalem in December 1917, replacing the Ottomans as the imperial power in the region, the city was subject to more dramatic change. Intensified Jewish immigration raised the proportion of Jews in the British Mandate Palestine population from 10 to 40 per cent and brought Arab–Jewish relations to a nadir. Jerusalem was declared the capital of Mandate Palestine. Construction in the fast-expanding ‘New City’, outside the walls, proceeded apace: the Hebrew University on Mount Scopus (1925), the King David Hotel (1929), where the British administrative and military headquarters were located; the National Institutions House (1930), which lodged the Jewish Agency, the Jewish National Fund and the Jewish Foundation Fund; and modern residential quarters, such as the Jewish neighbourhood of Rehavya (1923) where Benjamin Netanyahu later grew up, and the Arab-Palestinian neighbourhood of Talbiyah (1920), from which Edward Said and his family fled in 1947. By the end of the Mandate period, Jerusalem’s population had risen to 160,000—around 100,000 Jews and 60,000 Palestinians—almost three times more than in 1922, and the New City enjoyed a modernized infrastructure of water, electricity and improved roads. But if Jerusalem’s administrative and political importance made it a locomotive of urban construction in Palestine, it also brought increasing turmoil. Official British estimates number the Arabs killed by security forces during the Great Revolt of 1936–39 in their thousands. In 1946, the Irgun blew up the King David Hotel, killing 91; in 1948, Palestinian militants blew up the National Institutions House, killing 12.
The UN Partition Plan of November 1947 assigned 60 per cent of Palestine, including the coastal areas, to the minority population (‘the Jewish State’), and 40 per cent, including western Galilee, to the majority population (‘the Arab State’). Jerusalem was designated a Corpus Separatum, to be ruled by an international body. The Corpus Separatum concept, however, proved to be untranslatable into either Hebrew or Arabic. The Arab Higher Committee objected to the whole idea of the partition of Palestine, while control of Jerusalem—or at least part of it—was a strategic priority for the Zionist leadership under Ben-Gurion, which rejected any form of internationalization. [4] The UN Plan therefore marked the outbreak of the 1948 War, resulting in the creation of the State of Israel and the expulsion of more than 700,000 Arab-Palestinians, the beginning of the ongoing Palestinian Nakba.
The aim of the Israeli forces in Jerusalem was to ‘establish facts on the ground’, annexing Palestinian land and villages to create a territorial continuity between surrounding Jewish neighbourhoods of the city, in order to create a viable, defendable capital. The targeted districts included Deir Yassin (renamed Giv’at Sha’ul in Hebrew), where the massacre of April 1948 hastened the flight of Palestinians from the city, as well as northern villages such as Lifta (Mei Nafto’ah), southern neighbourhoods such as Katamon (Gonen), Talbiyah (Komemiyut) and Baq’a (Ge’ulim), and western villages including Beit Mazmil (Kiryat Yovel), Malha (Manhat), Khirbet al-Hamama (today the site of the Yad Va-Shem Holocaust Museum) and Ein Karim (Ein Karem). Israeli military occupation established the basis for the Green Line demarcation between Israeli and Jordanian-administered territory, enshrined in the April 1949 Armistice Agreement. Jerusalem was to be partitioned, with a concrete and barbed-wire barrier separating the much larger Israeli-controlled Jerusalem (26 sq km), which included Palestinian villages such as Qalunya (renamed Motsa in Hebrew) and Sheikh Badr (now the site of the Israeli parliament), from the smaller Jordanian-controlled Jerusalem (6 sq km), which included the Old City with its Jewish Quarter and holy sites.
The period of 1948–67 saw the development of two very asymmetrical Jerusalems, on either side of the barbed wire. Israeli Jerusalem became the country’s official capital, and state symbols—Parliament, government administration buildings, Mount Herzl National Cemetery, the National Museum, the Shrine of the Book, Yad Va-Shem Holocaust Museum, the National Library—were rapidly established there, boosting employment. Box-like apartment blocks sprouted across Jerusalem’s hillsides, creating new neighbourhoods such as Kiryat Menahem (1956) and Nayot (1960). The Israeli government approved a generous expansion of its municipal boundaries to the west, north and south, the city’s territory growing to 38 sq km by 1963. Meanwhile Jordanian Jerusalem, cut off from the old commercial quarter, experienced impoverishment, net population loss and a downgrade in status. The Western powers had cynically overseen the annexation of the ‘Arab state’ by the Hashemite monarchy of Jordan. The King did all he could to erase Palestinian national consciousness and encourage a ‘Jordanian identity’, not least by decreeing that official textbooks should replace the term ‘Palestinians’ with ‘Arabs’. [5] The eastern side of Jerusalem was reduced to being Jordan’s second city, a holy site to be exploited by the King for political reasons, while power and economic growth shifted to Amman. [6] With Jerusalem partitioned by barbed wire, the two populations lived back to back, observing each other only from the roof tops. In his Hebrew poem Jerusalem, the late Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai captured this urban division well:
On a roof in the Old City
laundry hanging in the late afternoon sunlight
the white sheet of a woman who is my enemy,
the towel of a man who is my enemy,
to wipe off the sweat of his brow.
In the sky of the Old City
a kite
At the other end of the string,
a child
I can’t see
because of the wall.
We have put up many flags,
they have put up many flags.
To make us think that they’re happy
To make them think that we’re happy.

‘Unification’

In 1967, military expansion once again played a major role in reshaping the city. This time fighting erupted after a long period of tension between Israel and neighbouring Arab countries, with a pre-emptive Israeli attack on the Egyptian Air Force on 5 June 1967, which brought Syria and Jordan into the war. Israel’s swift defeat of the Arab armies, IDF occupation of the Golan Heights, West Bank, Gaza Strip and Sinai Desert, all had geopolitical implications and repercussions on the countries involved. [7] For Israel, whose territory had been quadrupled in six days, conquest brought a euphoric sense of power, combined with messianic sentiments about the country’s ‘might’ and its ‘miracle’ victory, taken as evidence of the Almighty’s support. [8] Jerusalem was the ideal stage for this ‘power trip’ and the Old City—of which, pre-war, Defence Minister Moshe Dayan had said, ‘Who needs this Vatican, anyway?’—became in the post-war period ‘the rock of our existence’. Images of the Paratroopers Brigade crying at the Western Wall and the voice of their commander, Mordechai Gur, excitedly informing the military radio, ‘Har ha-bayit be-yadenu’—‘The Temple Mount is in our hands’—became synonyms for the 1967 Israeli victory and for the new state of affairs which now prevailed.
The first urban-planning decision was taken the next day. Jerusalem’s new mayor, Teddy Kollek, toured the Old City with Ben-Gurion. Both agreed the 800-year-old Mughrabi neighbourhood should be demolished, to create a ceremonial national plaza in front of the Wailing Wall. Hundreds of Muslim inhabitants were ordered out and their houses were destroyed. The Western Wall Plaza became a reality almost overnight, and the Israeli flag planted on the site where the houses had stood symbolized the triangle between state, religion and collective forgetfulness in post-1967 Israel. And while the future of the rest of the Occupied Territories remained a matter for debate—should the land be annexed to Israel, kept under military occupation or negotiated for peace?—there was no doubt about what was to be done with East Jerusalem: it was to be ‘unified’ with West Jerusalem, at least according to Israeli law, and become an integral part of the State of Israel. A committee appointed by Dayan, including three IDFgenerals—Chaim Herzog, Rehavam Ze’evi, Shlomo Lahat—submitted a new map of Jerusalem on 27 June 1967.
Not surprisingly, given the nature of the committee, the boundaries they drew were an irrational mix of military requirements and the desire for territorial expansion, with hardly any thought given to urban planning. The result was a disturbing new city: ‘unified’ Jerusalem was not simply the sum of west Jerusalem (38 sq km) and east Jerusalem (6 sq km), but included an additional 70 sq km of land from the Occupied Territories surrounding the city in the north, east and south. This was a new kind of Jerusalem, not only in terms of its borders, but also for its residents. Twenty-eight Palestinian villages which had never been part of any Jerusalem now found themselves under the jurisdiction of ‘the united capital of the Jewish people’. The city multiplied its territory by three, based on the Israeli demographic and military-strategic ‘equation’ described by Benvenisti above: maximum square kilometres of land, minimum number of Arabs. In several instances—for example, Beit Iksa and Beit Sahour—the orchards and farmland of Palestinian villagers were included in Jerusalem, while the villagers and their homes were left out.
Nevertheless, some 70,000 Palestinians were unavoidably absorbed into the city, making up a quarter of its new population. The Ministry of the Interior offered them the option of Israeli citizenship but most rejected this, on the grounds that it would help legitimize the occupation and annexation. The Jerusalem Palestinians were therefore given the status of ‘resident’, which meant they were entitled—at least on paper—to municipal services. They could also vote in municipal elections, but again Palestinians generally scorned this ‘right’ as merely legitimizing their subordination.
The annexation of East Jerusalem and its periphery was, of course, widely condemned abroad as flouting international law. Even Israel’s great ally felt compelled to register a protest, the American Ambassador to the UN, Charles Yost, stating that:
The US considers that the part of Jerusalem that came under the control of Israel in the 1967 War, like all other areas occupied by Israel, is occupied territory and hence subject to the provisions of international law governing the rights and obligations of an occupying Power. [9]
Exceptionally, the US even voted for UN Resolution 267, which stated that the UN Security Council ‘censures in the strongest terms all measures taken by Israel to change the status of the City of Jerusalem’, adopted unanimously on 3 July 1969. The city’s status was changed regardless. In 1980, Israel went on to enshrine the position of ‘unified Jerusalem’ in a Basic Law of the Knesset, titled ‘Jerusalem, Capital of Israel’. Apparently prey to the sensation of déjà vu, the Security Council then adopted UN Resolution 478, which ‘censures in the strongest terms the enactment by Israel of the Basic Law on Jerusalem and the refusal to comply with relevant Security Council resolutions’. It declared the Jerusalem Law null and void, to be ‘rescinded forthwith’, and called on ‘all states that have established diplomatic missions in Jerusalem to withdraw such missions from the Holy City’, which in practice meant relocating to Tel Aviv. ‘Unified Jerusalem’ thereby entered a select class of capital cities acknowledged as such only by themselves.

Outside-in

Waving aside the international condemnation, weightless as it was, Israeli leaders turned to the task of planting their own population in the annexed zones. ‘We must bring Jews to Eastern Jerusalem at any cost’, said Ben-Gurion, in June 1967. ‘We must settle tens of thousands of Jews in a brief time. We cannot await the construction of orderly neighbourhoods. The essential thing is that Jews will be there.’ [10] The strategy of engineering a new reality by putting ‘facts on the ground’, later associated with Ariel Sharon’s initiatives in other parts of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, was pioneered in Jerusalem. By July 1967 the Labour Prime Minister Levy Eshkol had appointed a committee of senior officials, headed by Yehouda Tamir, to find ways to ‘populate and develop East Jerusalem’. The aim was to de-problematize the act of occupation and unification by creating a continuum between West and East Jerusalem that would obliterate the Green Line, the 1948–1967 border, and make the violation of international law appear as ‘natural’ as possible. The committee’s master plan, submitted in September 1967, proposed the creation of crescent-shaped Shekhunot ha-Bari’ach—‘hinge’ or ‘lock neighbourhoods’—that would link the existing Jewish enclave on Mount Scopus to West Jerusalem via a new road, Levy Eshkol Avenue, that would pass through Jewish quarters only. Over the next few years a series of new residential quarters, planned primarily for Jewish inhabitants, sprang up on the far side of the Green Line; Ramat Eshkol (1968), Giv’at ha-Mivtar (1970), Ha-Giv’ah ha-Tsarfatit [The French Hill] (1971) and Ma’alot Dafna (1972) became the Jewish ‘security lock’ on Mount Scopus.


 
Click here to open a larger version of this picture in a new window

In 1969 Golda Meir, the Israeli ‘Iron Lady’, succeeded Eshkol and took control of the ‘unified Jerusalem’ project. A new master plan now proposed the development of Shekhunot ha-Taba’at, or ‘Ring Neighbourhoods’, a bizarre new turn in the dialectic of military, political and urban-development considerations. Rather than building outward from the older neighbourhoods at the heart of Jerusalem, this plan advocated the construction of Jewish residential quarters on its remote periphery, strung around the new city limits. As if stolen from the office of an IDF engineer, the blueprints were strategic in nature: new-built houses, clad in the mandatory white ‘Jerusalem stone’, were positioned like turrets on the mountain ridges overlooking the city and along the arteries leading into it. The first of these were Neve Ya’akov (1970), established on land confiscated from Al-Ram, in the far north of the city, and Gilo (1971) in the south-west, on land confiscated from Beit Jala, which had the highest elevation in Jerusalem. They were followed by Talpiyot Mizrah (1973) in the south-east, on land confiscated from Jabal Mukabar; Ramot Alon (1974) in the north-west, on land confiscated from Beit Iksa, and now Jerusalem’s largest suburb; and Pisgat Ze’ev (1982) on the city’s north-east frontier, on land confiscated from Beit Hanina and Hizma. This urban-development logic, or illogic, repeated itself in the 1990s at the time of the Oslo Accord negotiations, when ‘unified Jerusalem’ expanded to 125 sq km after further annexations in 1993. Ramat Shlomo (1995) was built on the city’s north-east boundary, on land confiscated from Al-’Issawiya; Har Homa (1997) was established in the far south-east on a hill known in Arabic as Jabal Abu-Ghneim, with land confiscated from Beit Sahour.
These Jewish suburbs in the Occupied Territories created, as Eyal Weizman puts it, ‘a belt of built fabric that enveloped and bisected the Palestinian neighbourhoods and villages annexed to the city’. [11] They served not only as satellites of the Jerusalem ‘mothership’, claiming Israeli sovereignty over all the territory in between, but also as bridges to the ‘Greater Jerusalem’ settlements located beyond the municipal border, deep in the Occupied Territories. Settlements such as Ma’ale Adumim in the east (given city status in 1991) and Giv’at Ze’ev in the north-west (established 1983) were linked by roads and architecture to the neighbourhood-settlements on Jerusalem’s municipal perimeter, which were in turn connected to the city centre. Weizman has described the upshot as ‘disparate shards’ of homogeneous Jewish housing, woven together by road and infrastructure networks. Another Israeli planner likened the neighbourhood-settlements’ links to the city centre as ‘balloons tied by a string’. [12]

Neo-Orientalism

Something more was clearly required in addition to these underlying military-strategic rationales if Israelis, and Israeli-Jewish Jerusalemites in particular, were to imagine their capital as a legal, ‘natural’, coherent geographical space. Regardless of what was said abroad about the illegality of Jerusalem’s expansion, under Israeli law the terrain encroached upon could be legitimately annexed to the city. This was helpful because, of the 497,000 Israeli-Jewish residents of Jerusalem today, more than 200,000 live beyond the Green Line; which means that, according to international law, almost every second Jewish inhabitant of the official Israeli capital is a settler. Municipal annexation ensures that, under Israeli law, this figure will never be included in the official statistics for Jewish settlers in the West Bank. Terminology was also deployed to naturalize the process: housing estates built in the Occupied Territories were always referred to in the media and official records as neighbourhoods, part and parcel of ‘unified Jerusalem’, never as settlements; this helped to disconnect—at least in the Israeli mind—the eastern part of municipal Jerusalem from the rest of the occupied West Bank. A question of semantics, for some; of political reality, for others.
But it was architecture that was given the most far-reaching role in ‘uniting’ the city. Here there was a clear break from the utilitarian modernism that characterized the first decades of the Israeli state. In the early years the question had been how to build the maximum residential units with minimal infrastructural expenditures. The solution in West Jerusalem—but also in other cities, including Haifa—was a monolithic take on the International Style: rectangular blocks that looked a bit like railway carriages set on end, which gave these new neighbourhoods a rather boring character; square, in both the geometrical and the slang sense. [13] By contrast, the post-1967 construction style responded to what Israeli authorities saw as a new set of problems: their unprecedented sovereignty over the Old City, including the holy sites of Muslims and Christians; international criticisms of Israeli-Jewish neighbourhood-settlements built on land confiscated from Palestinian villages; the difficulty of creating a continuum between the western neighbourhoods and those in the east, built on newly confiscated Palestinian land. Their solutions—simulacra of ‘historic’ styles; surface ‘cladding’—would make ‘unified Jerusalem’ the most postmodern of cities.
The architects selected by Kollek and his team went first to the Old City as part of their fieldwork, to soak up ideas and inspiration. Filled with the euphoria of the 1967 military victory, they agreed that a neo-Orientalist style would be most appropriate for an Israelified Jerusalem, demonstrating how aesthetically sensitive the Israelis were to the region’s cultural heritage, and how naturally they blend into the landscape. Features of an Orientalized-Arab architecture—arches, gates, domes—were adapted for modern construction techniques and became part of the landscape of the ‘new Jerusalem’. The style corresponded closely to several key political ideas: the Israeli stress on the ‘return’ of the Jewish people to their Oriental ‘roots’; the need to forge a unification between old (and biblical) Jerusalem and the new housing projects that would downplay the act of occupation; and an extension of the Zionist colonialist paradigm of bringing modernization and development to the ‘unchanging East’. In reality, as the Israeli architectural historian Zvi Efrat has argued, this so-called ‘contextual’ architecture involved formless clusters of ‘sentimental buildings, influenced by alleged “regional” connections’—‘pseudo-historical creations of Oriental and Mediterranean mimicry’, said to embody ‘an association with antiquity and national roots.’ [14]

Holy stone

Another crucial architectural element, which helped to both whitewash the occupation and to create a continuum between east and west, was the decision by the Israeli authorities to reinforce a British Mandate by-law that all buildings in the city must be made of bona fide ‘Jerusalem stone’. In the 1930s this had involved using solid blocks of limestone in construction work; during the 1948–67 period, the city authorities in West Jerusalem had sanctioned the use of an outer layer of stone, covering an inner structure of bricks or cinderblocks. After 1967, this by-law was extended to all areas annexed to the city, thus raising the price for Palestinian construction work and rendering much of it illegal. The ubiquitous use of ever-thinner stone-cladding on shopping malls, hotels and high-rise blocks played a vital part in Israel’s strategic and symbolic struggle to imbue the sprawling suburbs of new Jerusalem with the ‘sacred’ identity of the holy city. The use of Jerusalem stone was as much ideological as architectural: it served to ‘authenticate’ areas which had never previously been part of Jerusalem and to extend the mantling of holiness to far-flung settlements, both inside and beyond the municipal borders. By means of a mere 6 cm of limestone, outpost cities such as Ma’ale Adumim can share in Jerusalem’s sacred aura.
Architecture thus played an essential role in the temporal as well as the spatial unification of the city. It added a romantic and artistic dimension to the military and political contingencies that had driven the city’s expansion, creating a ‘natural’ continuity between different epochs: from the Bible, through Jerusalem’s sacredness, up to Zionism and modern Israel. Weizman suggests that the use of neo-Orientalist architecture and Jerusalem stone provided ‘the fantasy deemed necessary for the consolidation of a new national identity and the domestication of the expanded city’:
It placed every remote and newly built suburb well within the boundaries of the ‘eternally unified capital of the Jewish people’, and thus, as far as most Israelis are concerned, away from the negotiation table. What is called Jerusalem, by name, by architecture, and by the use of stone, is placed at the heart of the Israeli consensus. [15]
There is a double irony about this iconic stone, which has become a symbol of the city in Israeli eyes and of ‘Jewish building’ worldwide. First, the stone is mainly quarried and produced in Hebron, Nablus and other areas of the West Bank—in Arabic it is known, more scientifically, as hajar Nabulsi—and much of the heavy labour involved is carried out by Palestinians. Second, its use exemplifies the post-67 colonialist attempt to imitate local Palestinian architecture while excluding Palestinians: thus tens of thousands of stone-clad houses sprouted on the higher land in the north, east and south of newly annexed ‘Jerusalem’, overlooking the far poorer and underdeveloped Palestinian villages and townships of the ‘united city’. [16]
Indeed this is the heart of the ‘unification’ project: not just putting architectural facts on the ground, but populating them with Jewish-Israeli inhabitants, far beyond the Green Line. Yet while Israel’s abrogation of international law can tell us much about the Jewish state—not least its obsession with power, demography and fears of the day after tomorrow—focusing on definitions of international law alone would be insufficient for an understanding of the complex processes taking place in the city. It can foster the illusion that partitioning could still be an equitable solution, which I believe is far from the truth. On a more concrete level looking at the Green Line alone, rather than the people who live on both sides, can limit our analysis of what the state is doing and the motives and experience of the people themselves.

Politics and peoples

The Israeli authorities have fought relentlessly to increase the number of Jews and reduce the number of Palestinians in Jerusalem, in order to thwart attempts to challenge Israeli sovereignty there. But despite their policies, the proportion of Palestinians in the city has grown from 25 per cent in 1967 to 36 per cent in 2012. According to the projections, ‘united Jerusalem’ will be 40 per cent Palestinian by 2020; and by 2030, if Israel does not find a way to change this ratio—and it will—Palestinian Jerusalemites would make up a majority. The fifty shades of discrimination that have been deployed against the Palestinian residents of Jerusalem under successive mayors and governments, radically different in some respects, all shared a joint goal: to act against the Palestinian national interest within the city. [17] The evidence for this is most bluntly stated by the Israeli authorities themselves. As Amir Cheshin and Avi Melamed, two former ‘advisers on Arab affairs’ to Jerusalem mayors in the 1980s and 1990s, warned:
Do not believe the propaganda . . . the rosy picture Israel tries to show the world, of life in Jerusalem since the 1967 reunification. Israel has treated the Palestinians of Jerusalem terribly. As a matter of policy, it has forced many of them from their homes and stripped them of their land, all the while lying to them and deceiving them and the world about its honourable intentions. [18]
The ‘logic’ behind this strategy is spelt out in the Jerusalem 2000 Master Plan, under the heading ‘Demographic balance “according to government decisions”’:
According to the aim presented by the municipality and adopted by the government, the city needs to keep a ratio of 70 per cent Jews and 30 per cent Arabs. However . . . demographic patterns in the city since 1967 have distanced Jerusalem from this aim. There has not been a 70:30 ratio in Jerusalem since the 1990s and the proportion continues to be violated. [19]
The Master Plan goes on to make ‘severe predictions’ about the growing ratio of Palestinians—who are supposed to be equal residents—in the ‘united city’ and the need to take ‘far-reaching measures’ in order to prevent this process. Jerusalem’s ‘ratio’ strategy has very practical implications for the Palestinian population, both as a ‘matter of policy’, as Cheshin and Melamed put it, and through deliberate neglect. Teddy Kollek, the legendary Labour Mayor of Jerusalem for three decades (1965–93), provides a good illustration of overt and covert attitudes towards the Palestinian Jerusalemites. Kollek’s 1968 Plan included massive construction projects in the eastern part of the city, ‘to ensure Jerusalem’s unification, in a manner that would prevent the possibility of its being repartitioned’.[20] Officially, Kollek is remembered in Israel as a ‘die-hard advocate of religious tolerance’, who ‘made many attempts to reach out to his Arab constituents’, while ‘improving the water and sewage systems in Jerusalem’s Arab neighbourhoods’. [21] But as Kollek himself confessed to the Israeli daily Ma’ariv in 1990, after 25 years in office:
We said things without meaning them, and we didn’t carry them out. We said over and over that we would equalize the rights of the Arabs to the rights of the Jews. [This was] empty talk . . . Never have we given them a feeling of being equal before the law. They were and remain second and third class citizens . . . For Jewish Jerusalem I did something in the past twenty-five years. For East Jerusalem? Nothing! What did I do? Nothing. Sidewalks? Nothing! Cultural institutions? Not one. Yes, we installed a sewerage system for them and improved their water supply. But do you know why? Do you think it was for their good, for their welfare? Forget it! There were some cases of cholera there, and the Jewish residents were afraid that they would catch it, so we installed a sewerage and water system for cholera prevention. [22]
In the 1993 municipal elections, Kollek and the Labour Party were defeated by the Likud Party’s Ehud Olmert, in coalition with the Ultra-Orthodox parties. This signalled a significant shift of power, for Olmert was heavily dependent on the Haredi community, 90 per cent of whom turned out to vote, compared to a 50 per cent turnout for the secular community. This gave the Ultra-Orthodox a much larger role in decisions on budgets, infrastructure and housing in the city, and they did what they could in order to secure the needs of their voters and people. Broadly speaking, however, Olmert during his ten years as Mayor of Jerusalem (1993–2003) continued Kollek’s policies of speaking about the need to equalize the provision of services and infrastructure between Jewish and Arab-Palestinian neighbourhoods while failing to do anything meaningful about it. [23] There were plenty of reasons for this—inherent preferences, strained finances, the 70:30 ratio which both Labour and Likud took as their aim, practical political considerations on where to spend largesse, as ‘the Arab-Jerusalemites will not vote for me anyway’.
However, the principal consideration was always to make sure that Israel remained the sovereign power in East Jerusalem and—especially after the Oslo Accords—to weaken the Palestinian Authority’s position there. Thus the historic Orient House, the Jerusalem headquarters of the PLO in the 90s, was closed down by the Israeli police in 2001. Palestinian cultural centres were also shut down. In addition, the demolition of Palestinian houses increased during this period, mostly on the grounds that they were built ‘with no permit’. [24] Under Olmert’s successor Uri Lupolianski, Jerusalem’s first Ultra-Orthodox Mayor (2003–08), there was little change in policy. When asked by Channel 10 why many Arab houses in Jerusalem were not connected to the water supply, Lupolianski first denied it and then declared: ‘It’s a matter of mentality. The Arabs, by their nature, prefer not to be connected to the water pipe.’ It was during Lupolianski’s term that the Israeli government started to build the Separation Wall around and through the ‘united city’, leaving Palestinian neighbourhoods like Kafr ’Aqab and the Shu’afat refugee camp inside the municipal boundaries but walled off from the city, while the principal effect has been to cut Jerusalem off from the rest of the West Bank.
Yet these policies have had the unintended consequence of convincing more and more Palestinian Jerusalemites to stay in the city, and attracting back others who had left for other parts of the West Bank, once they realized that Israel was trying to revoke their Jerusalem-resident status. One result of their return has been a steady growth in the proportion of Palestinians in the city. Palestinian school students, for example, were estimated in 2012 at 88,845, or 38 per cent of all school students in the city, by the Jerusalem municipality. However, this number is far from representing the real situation on the ground. The municipality’s own figures state that there are 106,534 Palestinian-Jerusalemite children aged 6–18—that is, about 44 per cent of the city’s children—who are all supposed to be at school. The figures indicate not only that the Jerusalem City Council wants to play down the numbers but that it turns a blind eye to the low attendance record, itself an indication of the fact the municipality has never provided this sector of the population with sufficient schools. [25] The socio-economic asymmetry is equally stark: the average wage in West Jerusalem stands at $54 a day; in East Jerusalem it plummets to $27. An estimated 78 per cent of East Jerusalem Palestinians live in poverty, and 84 per cent of Palestinian children are below the poverty line. [26]
Jerusalem’s current Mayor, the secular right-wing millionaire Nir Barkat, elected in 2008, has taken a slightly different approach. Like his predecessors, Barkat is also driven by the desire to strengthen Israeli sovereignty over all parts of the city; but his strategy suggests that the continuing discrimination against Palestinians and the obvious inequalities between the different zones has been playing against Zionist interests, as it reinforces the sense of two different cities within ‘united Jerusalem’ and so makes a future political partition of it seem more feasible. Barkat’s policies were therefore more sophisticated. He gave the East Jerusalem portfolio to his opposition rivals, the leftist Meretz Party. He has begun a project of naming streets in East Jerusalem, which had previously been neglected by the City Council. One such was the ceremonial opening of Umm-Kulthum Street in Beit Hanina, where Barkat could cheekily hint to the Palestinian population that the Israeli-Jewish municipality could ‘contain’ them and their culture, synecdochically represented by the great Egyptian singer. At another ceremony, launching a 43-million shekel project to improve the ‘mechanics street’ in Wadi al-Joz—new sewerage, lighting, sidewalks, trees, roundabouts—Barkat announced: ‘This is just one example of the comprehensive project of narrowing the gaps between the east side of the city [and the west]. We are active in all fronts, including transportation, education, and infrastructure, and you can now start to see the results.’ As he told the Times of Israel:
Years of neglect damaged the unity of the city in the eyes of the world. When we claim that the city is united but we don’t demonstrate that we know how to deal with all the residents, it hurts us . . . [We need] to work hard and make sure that we deal with all the residents so we actually unite the city much more strongly. [27]
Barkat went on to explain that this could prevent a Palestinian uprising, in the context of the seething anger over the Separation Wall: ‘The strategy has to be to improve the quality of life for the [Palestinian] residents of Jerusalem, improve how they feel about the city, make sure that they have a lot to lose. As long as that trend continues, the rationale for any kind of violence among the residents of Jerusalem will decline.’ At the same time, Barkat’s policy of ‘Judaizing’ Arab Jerusalem included stepping up the number of Jewish settlement projects inside Palestinian neighbourhoods, strengthening the Israeli grip and making it impossible to define where ‘Arab Jerusalem’ ends and ‘Jewish Jerusalem’ starts—and thus ruling out the possibility of political partition. His plans include a Jewish-Israeli student village, Sha’ar Ha-Mizrah [Eastern Gate], in the Palestinian village of ’Anata; a 200-unit settlement, Kidmat Tsiyon [Harbinger of Zion] between Abu Dis and Jabal Mukkabar, funded by the Florida multi-millionaire Irving Moskowitz; two settlements named Olive Heights and David Heights, also funded by Moskowitz, overlooking the village of Ras al-’Amud; and Simon’s Estate in the Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood, in alliance with the US-based group Nahalat Shimon International. Mayor Barkat has also given full backing to the dubious archaeological projects of Elad, which has been undertaking large-scale excavations in the heart of the Palestinian township of Silwan, looking for remnants of a mythologized ‘City of David’. These measures need to be seen as part and parcel of his efforts to ‘improve’ Palestinian neighbourhoods.

Pray for Jerusalem

Yet perhaps the most dramatic division that has opened up over the past few decades has been inside the Jewish-Israeli population. The demographic change is again perhaps best illustrated through education. The Jewish school system is separated into three streams: ‘general’—that is, secular—‘national-religious’ and ‘Haredi’. From 1998, the number of Haredi students in Jerusalem overtook the other two categories; since then, the gap has continued to widen. Between 2006 and 2011, the number of students in the general stream fell from 32,400 to 30,200, a drop of 7 per cent; the national-religious stream increased by 3 per cent, from 25,700 to 26,500; but the Haredi stream shot up by 10 per cent, from 85,900 to 94,200. In 2013, Haredim make up 63 per cent of Jerusalem’s Jewish-Israeli schoolchildren. This process of de-secularization—or religification, if you prefer—started in the 1980s, and began to show up in Jerusalem’s statistics from the 1990s. ‘It was a very simple demographic story’, commented the historian David Kroyanker. ‘There was no group of Orthodox elders of Zion that met around a table and planned to take over Jerusalem. The growing number of Ultra-Orthodox in the city was just an outcome of the fact that they reproduce in figures ten times higher than the secular community.’ [28]
Many of the Jewish neighbourhoods of Jerusalem have now taken on an entirely different character. The ‘Hinge Neighbourhoods’ established on occupied territory to the east of the Green Line after the 1967 War initially had a mixed population of secular and national-religious residents; but from the 1980s, things started to change. The Ultra-Orthodox neighbourhoods just west of the Green Line, such as Shmu’el ha-Navi and Sanhedriya, began to suffer from over-crowding; a growing number of Haredi residents started to move eastward, buying apartments in the Hinge Neighbourhoods and creating Ultra-Orthodox ‘enclaves’ there. In one of these, Ramat Eshkol, the process of Haredification began in the late 80s and intensified in the 90s, followed by a similar pattern in nearby Giv’at ha-Mivtar and Ma’alot Dafna. The same process occurred in Ramat Shlomo, creating a continuity of Ultra-Orthodox neighbourhoods in north-eastern Jerusalem. The success of Haredi candidates in the 1993 City Council elections, noted above, led to more municipal investment for the community. The average Haredi-Jerusalemite family earns half the amount of a secular family—in 1995, the figure was 3,700 shekels, compared to 7,100 shekels—and is correspondingly more dependent on government support and national insurance. [29] In the latest development, a combination of rising house prices in Jerusalem and the overcrowding of newly established Ultra-Orthodox neighbourhoods has forced some to leave the city in search of cheaper accommodation, ‘found’ for them by the government in Modi’in Illit and Beitar Illit, two Haredi city-settlements in the West Bank.
Accompanying this has been the growing flight of mostly young, secular residents from the city, in search of what they perceived as more liberal, peaceful or promising habitats. From the 90s, Jerusalem has been experiencing net emigration combined with a rising population, due to the high birth-rate of the Haredi and Palestinian communities. At the same time, the city has been growing poorer: average income per person is 3,300 shekels, exactly half that of Israel’s business capital, Tel Aviv. In 2010 Jerusalem was awarded the dubious title of the poorest city in Israel.[30] These trends have begun to alarm Israeli policy-makers. Since 1998 the Jerusalem Development Authority, a joint agency of the Israeli government and the City council, has been trying to initiate projects that will attract entrepreneurs, students and high-tech workers to come to live—and invest—in the city. Among these are BioJerusalem and AcademiCity, which aim to ‘attract’—the keyword—bio-tech companies and students to the city; if they are ‘secular’, ‘Zionist’, ‘working’ and ‘wealthy’, all the better. The JDA has also been connected to more controversial projects, such as the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s attempt to build a ‘Museum of Tolerance and Human Dignity’ on the lands of the Muslim cemetery in Mamilla, in West Jerusalem. Another suggestion is to expand the boundaries of the city to the west: instead of bringing new Jewish-Israelis to the city, which is quite a mission, Jerusalem will swallow the ‘strong’ villages on its border—‘strong’ meaning in the Israeli context ‘national’, ‘Zionist’, ‘working’—such as Beit-Nekofa, Even-Sapir and Beit-Zayit. This is just another stage in the ever-lasting Israeli struggle to keep Jerusalem ‘united’, ‘Jewish’ and apparently, since 1998, ‘attractive’.

A personal tale

I was born in Jerusalem in 1978, but now I live in Tel Aviv. My two sisters have left the city as well, and so have the vast majority of their school friends and mine, choosing to live in the Tel Aviv metropolitan area, or in between the two cities—in Modi’in, for example. The next stage, once the young adults have flown the nest, is the decision of their parents to follow, especially once grandchildren make their appearance. This is a personal story, but it is not unrepresentative of many ‘secular’ Jewish-Jerusalemites’ trajectories over the past decade or so. To keep it in the family, one might consider the changing residential patterns in my parents’ apartment block, along the lines of an Israeli ‘Yacoubian Building’. For the past thirty years my parents have lived on the third floor of an eight-storey building in Giv’at Oranim, a neighbourhood in West Jerusalem. The social changes that have occurred in the city over this period are clearly reflected in the identity of the residents. So far as I know, none of the children of my age group who grew up there have stayed in Jerusalem. Moreover, every secular family that left the building was replaced with a national-religious or Ultra-Orthodox family who moved in. The change is strongly apparent in the streets. On Friday evening, for example, if I go to pick up my grandmother from the nearby district of Rehavya, I have to drive very carefully as many Ultra-Orthodox Jews are making their way to the synagogues, old and new, located in the area. My old primary school, Lurya, now functions as a synagogue on Saturdays and high holy days, to fulfil the growing needs of the observant population. On a short walk around the area last Yom Kippur, I heard the sounds of prayer coming from several other primary schools. I don’t mean this to be judgemental; it is just an attempt to personalize the changes that have swept Jerusalem in the last three decades.
As a child growing up in Jerusalem in the 1980s, my perception of the division between ‘West’ and ‘East’ was limited to the contrast between my immediate neighbourhood, where I studied and played, and the Old City—an adventurous, colourful Orient, where we strolled through crowded alleyways on Saturday family outings. Inside the massive walls, which I always associated with King Solomon, my imagination was captured by the image of a sheikh, a rabbi and a priest, walking side by side, while the smell of incense mingled with the taste of almond juice and the shouts of Arab shopkeepers. Memories that today sound like the Orientalist Moorish Bazaar of Edwin Lord Weeks. I remember being taken on a school trip to David Citadel—‘The Tower of David Museum: Where Jerusalem Begins’ was its slogan—where we 12- and 13-year-olds searched for the exact spot from where King David had glimpsed Bathsheba bathing on the roof. It was only much later that I dared to accept that the celebrated symbols of ‘the eternal Jewish capital’ had other stories: that, despite their homophonic names, the magnificent city walls were not built by our beloved Solomon but 2,500 years later, by the Muslim-Ottoman Sultan Suleiman; that David Citadel got its name from the 11th-century Crusaders; that the Tower of David, ‘Where Jerusalem Begins’, was in fact a 19th-century mosque with a cylindrical minaret, built almost three millennia after the peeping king. I realized that the Old City was not synonymous with East Jerusalem, but only a tiny part of it, and that many Jerusalemites—Yerushalmim in Hebrew, Maqdisiyyin in Arabic—were Palestinians. Later I learned that they lived in places I had never heard of nor visited, such as Umm-Tuba, Kafr ’Aqab and Al-Walaje. To my confusion, I found out that there was even a refugee camp within the municipality of ‘my city’.
Those images and the denials they represented may have been formed in a little boy’s mind, but they are suggestive of much greater processes of rejection and erasure. The fact that these are so intensively practised by both sides might even be considered a unifying phenomenon in this city of tensions. Debates between Jews and Muslims, Israelis and Palestinians, are seen as zero-sum games, battles in which all weapons—religious, archaeological, legal or political—are recruited to prove the city does not belong to the other. While American tourists will be sold Elad’s excavations of Byzantine ruins as biblical locations, visitors to the Museum of Islam at al-Haram al-Sharif will find no reference to a historical Jewish presence. Mordekhai Keidar, a lecturer at Bar Ilan University, made a political fortune for himself, at least among right-wing Israelis, when he told Al-Jazeera that ‘Jerusalem is not to be found anywhere in the Qur’an’. [31] But this kind of argumentation can be counter-productive, not only because it demonstrates a narrow understanding of the processes of sanctification, but because it can equally well be used by either side. Should one decide to play the game and check the holy books, one will indeed find that Jerusalem, Al-Quds in Arabic, is not mentioned in the Qur’an; the only hint given is to Al-Aqsa, ‘the farthest mosque’. But nor is Jerusalem, Yerushalayyim in Hebrew, mentioned in the five books of the Torah; again, the only hint is to a ‘place which the Lord your God shall choose’. [32] Samaritan Jews argue that the only indication of the place ‘chosen by God’ as the location of the holy temple is ‘next to the shoulder of Nablus’, which they take to be Gerizim Mountain, where they live. Have we been praying in the wrong direction all these years?
The religious, social and political unrest continues to simmer, if under the surface. It seems impossible that Jerusalem will be able to contain all its contradictions. The Israeli determination to have all of Jerusalem, never to share sovereignty with anyone, together with the increasing number of Palestinians, and the layers of myths on both sides, have created an absurd political reality that takes the city nowhere. The official celebrations of Jerusalem Day, the Israeli national holiday dedicated to the 1967 ‘unification’ of the city, are a supreme example of this: the vast majority of those dancing with Israeli flags under the Old City walls are national-religious Jews, representing the ‘new spirit’ of Jerusalem—a messianic, non-integrative, Zionist urban space. There are hardly any Haredim there, nor any ‘secular’ Jews, let alone any of the Arabs who make up over a third of the city’s inhabitants. In celebrating its ‘unification’, the city looks more fragmented than ever.
It is therefore only logical to believe that Jerusalem will be genuinely united only if its sovereignty is shared by both its peoples. In my view the ‘two-state’ option of partition—dividing it in the middle to create a ‘pure’ Jewish west and a ‘pure’ Palestinian east—is no longer a feasible solution, either to the Jerusalem question or to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict at large: the ‘facts on the ground’ of Israeli settlements and Palestinian population growth have rendered a ‘pure’ geographic division on any equitable basis all but impossible. The other option remains: a joint sovereignty exercised by both Israelis and Palestinians, with a mandate to develop the city to meet the national, social and political needs of both peoples. Then Jerusalem might stand a chance of recovering from the psychopathological syndrome that carries its name.



[1] See for example Mark Popovsky, ‘Jerusalem Syndrome’, in David Leeming, Kathryn Madden and Marlan Stanton, eds, Encyclopedia of Psychology and Religion, vol. 2, New York 2009.
[2] Nir Hasson, ‘Meron Benvenisti, Why Does Jerusalem Not Exist Anymore?’ (in Hebrew), Haaretz, 29 May 2011.
[3] Haaretz, 29 May 2011.
[4] Avi Shlaim, The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World, London 2000, p. 36.
[5] See, for example, Riad M. Nasser, Palestinian Identity in Jordan and Israel: The Necessary ‘Other’ in the Making of a Nation, New York 2004, pp. 68–70.
[6] Roger Friedland and Richard D. Hecht, To Rule Jerusalem, Berkeley 2000, pp. 248–49.
[7] See, for example, Tom Segev, 1967: Israel, the War, and the Year that Transformed the Middle East, New York 2007.
[8] Baruch Kimmerling, The Invention and Decline of Israeliness: State, Society and the Military, Berkeley 2001, p. 109.
[9] Cited in Amir S. Cheshin, Bil Hutman, and Avi Melamed, Separate and Unequal: The Inside Story of Israeli Rule in East Jerusalem, Cambridge 1999, pp. 46–7.
[10] Uzi Benziman, A City without a Wall, Jerusalem 1973, p. 2.
[11] Eyal Weizman, Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation, London and New York 2007, p. 25.
[12] Quoted in Moshe Amirav, Jerusalem Syndrome: The Palestinian–Israeli Battle for the Holy City, Eastbourne 2009, p. 72.
[13] David Kroyanker, Jerusalem: Neighbourhoods and Houses, Periods and Style, Jerusalem 1996, p. 190 (in Hebrew). Kroyanker, an Israeli architectural historian, sees the buildings in Stern Street (Kiryat Yovel neighbourhood) and Ha-Nurit Street (Ir Ganim neighbourhood) as the ultimate examples of this style: 8- and 9-storey buildings with no elevator, due to the austerity of the times.
[14] Zvi Efrat’s text in his exhibition, ‘The Israeli Project’, held in Tel Aviv in October 2000, quoted in Weizman, Hollow Land, p. 47.
[15] Weizman, Hollow Land, p. 47.
[16] Haim Yacobi, ‘The Third Place: Architecture, Nationalism and the Postcolonial Gaze’, Theory and Criticism 30, 2007, pp. 63–88 (in Hebrew).
[17] According to the Israeli Information Centre for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, B’Tselem, Israeli policy towards the Palestinians in Jerusalem cannot be described in any other way than discriminatory; see their extensive reports on the subject at: www.btselem.org/english/jerusalem
[18] Amir Cheshin, Bil Hutman and Avi Melamed, Separate and Unequal: The Inside Story of Israeli Rule in East Jerusalem, p. 251.
[19] Jerusalem 2000 Master Plan, published August 2004, Chapter 7, ‘Population and Society’ (in Hebrew).
[20] Jerusalem Master Plan 1968 (in Hebrew).
[21] See the Go-Jerusalem official website page on Kollek.
[22] Cited in the B’Tselem report, ‘A Policy of Discrimination: Land Expropriation, Planning and Building in East Jerusalem’, May 1995.
[23] This was nicely illustrated when an opposition member of the City Council, Meir Margalit, tabled a question for Olmert about the provision of municipal services to the Arab village of Ein Fuad in eastern Jerusalem. The reply duly came back from Olmert’s office, denying that there was any discrimination in provision: ‘Ein Fuad receives all municipal services, including welfare, education, lighting and cleanliness.’ A sly smile no doubt played Margalit’s lips when he read those lines. He penned back a short message to the mayor: ‘There is no such place as Ein Fuad’. See Meir Margalit, Discrimination in the Heart of the Holy City, Jerusalem 2006, p. 176.
[24] In reality, and due to the discriminatory Israeli policies, these permits became almost impossible for Palestinians to get. Therefore, their decision to build with no permit can be considered as their ongoing act of ‘spatial protest’ against Israel’s and the Jerusalem municipality’s urban-planning policies. See Irus Braverman, ‘Powers of Illegality: House Demolitions and Resistance in East Jerusalem’, Law and Social Inquiry, vol. 32, no. 2, 2007, pp. 333–72.
[25] Or Kashti, ‘East Jerusalem: The Capital of Dropouts’, Haaretz, 5 September 2012.
[26] Association for Civil Rights in IsraelJerusalem Day 2012: Unprecedented Deterioration in East Jerusalem.
[27] David Horovitz, ‘Nir Barkat: How I’m ensuring Israeli Sovereignty in Jerusalem’, Times of Israel, 29 February 2012.
[28] Neta Sela, ‘Jerusalem should be a Haredi city’, Ynet, 24 May 2006 (in Hebrew).
[29] Momi Dahan, ‘The Ultra-Orthodox Jews and Municipal Authority, Part II: Budgetary Effects of the Demographic Composition in Jerusalem’ (in Hebrew), Jerusalem Institute for Israel Studies Research Series No. 82, Jerusalem 1999, pp. 15–16.
[30] This is according to the statistics of poverty in big cities in Israel. See Asah Shtull-Trauring, ‘Ahead of Jerusalem Day, reports highlight extent of city’s poverty’, Haaretz, 11 May 2010.
[31] Chana Ya’ar, ‘Prof. Mordechai Kedar: “A Ball of Fire”’, Arutz Sheva: Israel National News, 12 January 2012.
[32] Qur’an, Sura 17:1; Bible, Deuteronomy 12:5.





NEZ PERCE VERSUS TARSANDS MEGALOAD

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Been dealing with electrical issues today, so no time to comment on the post below.  Barely time to post it.  It comes from Censored News.




Nez Perce Executive Council Arrested Blocking Tarsands Megaload

Wild Idaho Rising Tide

Wild Tide Rising photo


2:30 AM UPDATE: Twenty to thirty remaining, standing Nez Perce tribal members gathered around the tribal flag and sang, as about 20 combined state/county/tribal police confronted them. The majority of protest participants stood on the sidelines in support of this Nez Perce blockade. Traffic started piling up behind the convoy again, and police used their vehicles to push through the crowd that the megaload breached at 2:20 am. This blockade lasted longer than any other regional megaload obstruction since the first tar sands extraction modules rolled from Lewiston area ports on February 1, 2011. People are talking about further blockades on upcoming nights, perhaps in Kamiah

Rising Tide photo
Also see: 

"BLACK PEOPLE...WHO SHOWED UP UNEXPECTEDLY...IN INCONVENIENT PLACES"

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So what is this thing we call freedom anyway.  I can tell you what it is not.  It isn't getting to vote for someone else to represent you and a score of other people.  It isn't getting to pick between which TV news station to watch.  It isn't getting to decide on one of a hundred brands of toothpaste, and it sure isn't getting to sleep under a bridge.  It isn't even getting to say what you think, and again, it sure isn't getting to decide to quit your job.  There is a little bit of choice in all of those things, but freedom is much more.  Is freedom really just another name for nothing else to lose?  

No, it is more that that.  Freedom is not a negative.

Sometimes freedom is something that doesn't even seem like freedom or is something that is really in a way beyond all the simplified definitions of what freedom is all about.  

One thing I do know, freedom is something we have to make ourselves and it is always a struggle.

The post below explores the concept of freedom from a perspective that I found interesting and you may find surprising.

Sometimes freedom pops up in strange places.

DISCLAIMER:  rightly or wrongly, I am a fan of Sons of Anarchy (mentioned in the piece below)...so get over it.  .

The following is from We Are Respectable Negroes.




Real Freedom is Black Folks in Surprising Places: Introducing the Black Outlaw Motorcycle Clubs the "Chosen Few" and the "East Bay Dragons"



In a democratic society, freedom does not just involve the ability to vote. Freedom is also those small acts and "obvious" liberties that so many people take for granted


Freedom is the ability to freely associate and communicate with those of your choosing. Freedom is also the ability to be free from harassment. Freedom is the the opportunity to live and be happy, where your rights and liberties as a full citizen are respected and honored without question.


Following the Trayvon Martin case, the public dialogue that transpired in its aftermath, and also in talking to my students, most of whom are white, it has become readily apparent to me that our recurring and moribund "national conversation on race"--especially in regards to racial profiling, the extra-judicial murder of people of color, and the criminal justice system--is at its root one about basic conceptions of freedom.


While much has been written about the great divides in public opinion regarding how White America and Black America perceive the fairness of the criminal justice system and the legitimacy of George Zimmerman's acquittal for killing Trayvon Martin, much less has been written about how public opinion in these matters is a function of both individual life experiences and historical memory.


An example here is very useful. A few months ago, I was talking to some of my white students about the George Zimmerman trial. One of them very honestly stated that if Trayvon Martin had just been polite and submissive to George Zimmerman none of the events that evening would have transpired.


Of course, I pointed out that George Zimmerman is not a police officer. I then, much to this student's surprise, highlighted how Trayvon Martin had no obligation to submit, answer questions from, respond to, or even be polite to a random stranger who was interrogating him.

Moreover, I told this same student, that if I were in Trayvon's position, exercising my Constitutional right to walk down the street, I would have used some very direct language regarding Zimmerman, his mother, and what he should with her.


I will leave the details to your imagination.


As we talked some more it occurred to me that this young white man, a nice guy, one who is a product of American society and all of its unstated but taken for granted rules about white authority over people of color, never imagined that a black man would stand up for himself.


When I asked him "what would you do if a stranger was harassing you and demanding to know the hows and whys of your choice to walk down the street?" his answer was pretty close to my own.


Why then did his answer change when it applied to Trayvon Martin?


I was taught that as a black man I must not sacrifice my dignity or self-respect to random white people or those who are allied with white racism in conducting my life. In dealing with the police, or those others with State authority to kill me, there are other strategies to be deployed. But I will not, under most or any other imaginable circumstance, surrender to a random person wondering about my legitimacy to be in a given public space.


If you are not taught those lessons in the context of what it means to be black in America, I am unsure if it is possible to communicate the power and salience of that prime directive.


For centuries, Black Americans have been subjected to rules limiting our freedom of movement. Slavery and Jim and Jane Crow were prefaced on that fact. Slave passes limited the freedom of black people in their own communities. The police and others, using debt peonage and terrorist groups such as the KKK, limited the mobility of African-Americans in an updated version of the plantation system during Jim Crow. Sundown towns, red lining, restrictive housing covenants, and other manipulations of the housing market also limited the mobility of African-Americans and our freedom.


Consequently, there are many reasons for African-Americans' historic embrace of automobiles and motorcycles. Ultimately, the car and other means of travel were ways for black people to escape Jim and Jane Crow by finding the relative freedom of the road (even when we still had to come up with our own self-help and guidebooks for navigating it).


Freedom is also the liberty to be who you want to be, to fulfill your own dreams, and to defy the unfair expectations forced upon you by the colorline.


There are many millions of ways to be black in America; the politics of racial authenticity as internally policed and contoured by the realities of white supremacy and white racism, have also shaped how so many black and brown folks think about the boundaries and limitations of their own human possibilities.


There are so many untold stories about black people who were in places "they did not belong", were not welcome, and who showed up unexpectedly much to the surprise of those whites folks who chose to greet and welcome them (or not).


The Black Freedom Struggle is not just one centered on public marches by the thousands, or great men and great women who we honor for one month out of the year. Like other groups who have been marginalized in any society, there are and were day to day struggles, by real people, who just wanted to be free in the most basic sense of the word, who were also an integral part of the broader civil rights project.


I am so fascinated by those black and brown folks that show up in inconvenient places because I count "ghetto nerds" like myself among that group. In learning that history, I am discovering so much about the history of Black America, the Black Diaspora, and their relationship to quotidian struggles for freedom and human dignity.


Popular culture pushed me in this direction as it often does. After watching the TV show Sons of Anarchy, I said to myself that there must be, and have been, black and brown folks who were involved in the outlaw motorcycle tradition too. After some basic research, I then learned about groups such as the Chosen Fewand the East Bay Dragons:



I was also pleasantly surprised that the iconic movie Easy Riderfeatured motorcycles designed by an African-American brother named Ben Hardy:



The freedom of the road and travel that compels the devotees to motorcycle culture is universal across divides of race, class, gender, sexuality, and ethnicity. For African-Americans, a people who were denied such freedoms by law, it makes sense that we would find motorcycle and car culture especially compelling.


I love learning new things. If you have any resources, stories, or other information to share about black motorcycle culture, and that of other people of color (and their white brothers and sisters) who are part of it do share.


The brothers in the Chosen Few, the East Bay Dragons, and other pioneers in black and multiracial outlaw motorcycle culture constitute an American story that deserves and needs to be told to and shared among a larger public.

(ED: CLICK ABOVE AND WATCH A COOL VIDEO)


THERE IS NO SPRING IN PRISON/THE FIGHT GOES ON

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“Oppression” by Michael David Russell,
C-90473, Pelican Bay SHU D7-217, P.O. Box 7500, Crescent City CA 95532


There is no spring in prison and no one is talking about a California prison spring.  There is no freedom in prison.  There aren't a lot of angels in prison either.  No one, including prisoners, says otherwise.  


There are, however, human beings in prison and human beings have the right to be treated as such.  I don't know what everyone in California's prisons are guilty of or not guilty of, and neither do you.  I am sure thrown into the bunch are some real bad actors.  I've been in prison.  I know that to be a fact.  You know what else I know.  Most people in prison are just pretty much like the rest of us except they made some mistake, got caught up in some misfortune, got screwed by someone, got taken advantage of by a system that doesn't care.  


No State or state has the right to torture, yet torture they do.  They may call it something else.  They almost always do.  Doesn't matter, you and I know torture when we see it.


In California, today, and for more than a month a group of human beings, prisoners, have put aside their many differences, their many hostilities, given up the little comfort they have to carry on a struggle not just for themselves but for prisoners everywhere, and not just for prisoners but for you and I, and not just for you and I, but in some ways for humanity itself.


We owe them our support.


The following post for Scission Prison Friday comes from the San Francisco Bay View.



Mediators talk with prisoners as hunger strike reaches one month mark, situation remains critical, negotiations crucial

August 8, 2013


by Isaac Ontiveros, Prisoner Hunger Strike Solidarity Coalition


Oakland, Aug. 8, 2013 – Today marks one month for prisoners on hunger strike throughout the California prison system. Earlier today, the mediation team working on behalf of the strikers was able to speak to the prisoners at Pelican Bay who initially called for the strike. Just moments ago members of the mediation team issued the following statement:


“All of the members of our mediation team were able to speak with hunger strike representatives at Pelican Bay for two-and-a-half hours. All four representatives are totally united and resolute. They were clear that this peaceful protest is not about them – it is about making real, fundamental changes to an incredibly unjust system.



“They haven’t eaten for 32 days but they are cogent, focused and committed.


“We were able to work together to develop new ideas about how to move forward, which we’ll be acting on over the next few days. The mediation team will be staying in contact with the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation and issuing statements daily.”


Reports from prisoners at Pelican Bay indicate escalated mistreatment from guards in the Administrative Segregation and Security Housing Units. Prisoners report being verbally abused by guards and overhearing them discussing orders “to treat some prisoners really nicely and others really badly.”

Today marks one month for prisoners on hunger strike throughout the California prison system.


Despite the abuse, prisoners remain steadfast in continuing their protest. “They are obviously feeling the effects of not having eaten in over a month, but they remain strong and in high spirits” said Anne Weills, a lawyer representing strikers at Pelican Bay. “They are fighting for themselves, their fellow prisoners and those who will come after them. They are incredibly inspired by all the support they’ve received and are steadfast in their commitments to improving conditions.”

“They haven’t eaten for 32 days but they are cogent, focused and committed.”


On the outside, prisoners’ loved ones, activists and advocates continue their fight to compel the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) and Gov. Jerry Brown to urgently address the human rights violations happening in the prison system by calling for immediate good-faith negotiations with strikers.


“These men are risking their lives to insist on humane conditions and an end to indefinite sentences of solitary confinement in California’s prison system,” said mediator Barbara Becnel.


“Recent reports from these prisoners demonstrate that their brave efforts have been made all the more difficult by prison guards who are treating them very harshly. Meanwhile, the hunger strikers have entered a very dangerous phase of their protest: their health could be permanently damaged and they could even die.”


“These men are risking their lives to insist on humane conditions and an end to indefinite sentences of solitary confinement in California’s prison system,” said mediator Barbara Becnel.


As for Gov. Brown and CDCR Secretary Beard: “How many prisoners have to be harmed by guards and the conditions which violate international human rights standards before state authorities are willing to seriously consider their demands for real change? How many prisoners have to die?”


Becnel’s full statement follows:


Prisoner hunger strike Day 32: Countdown for humane conditions


by Barbara Becnel, Mediation Team member


Aug. 8, 2013 – Today is the one-month anniversary of a hunger strike initiated by prisoners at Pelican Bay State Prison that quickly spread to other correctional facilities across the state of California. To be precise, it is Day 32 of a month-long period of no solid foods for what are now hundreds of prisoners.


These are men risking their lives to insist on humane conditions and certain terms for those prisoners who have otherwise been banished toindefinite sentences of solitary confinement in California’s prison system. Many of these men have been isolated for decades with no windows, no contact visits, no outside sunlight and no real exercise.



Recent reports from these prisoners demonstrate that their brave efforts have been made all the more difficult by prison guards who are treating them very harshly.


Guards are knocking them into walls, handcuffing them incorrectly to cause suffering and bending their arms to provoke extreme pain. Guards are spitting out racial epithets or deliberately placing an African American prisoner, for example, in a cell with racist graffiti.


Guards are also being strategically divisive by tactically treating some prisoners nicely and others in the most demeaning ways, hoping – as the guards openly discussed in front of some prisoners – to create division so the prisoners will begin to fight each other. The guards’ goal: to undermine the hunger strike.


According to these same talkative guards, this unprofessional behavior is what they were instructed to do to help bring the hunger strike to an end.


Ironically, those prisoners who have gotten off the hunger strike are also being treated badly. Guards are calling them “cowards” and “bitches” and other demeaning labels.


How many prisoners have to be harmed by guards and by the prisoners’ struggle for justice before state authorities are willing to consider, seriously, their demands for real change? How many prisoners have to die?



Meanwhile, the hunger strikers have entered a very dangerous phase of their protest: their health could be permanently damaged by their refusal to eat solid foods; they could even die.


The questions for California Gov. Jerry Brown and Secretary Jeffrey Beard of the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation are these: How many prisoners have to be harmed by guards and by the prisoners’ struggle for justice before state authorities are willing to consider, seriously, their demands for real change? How many prisoners have to die?


Hunger Strike Mediation Team


  • Ron Ahnen, California Prison Focus and St. Mary’s College of California
  • Barbara Becnel, Occupy4Prisoners.org
  • Dolores Canales, California Families to Abolish Solitary Confinement
  • Irene Huerta, California Families to Abolish Solitary Confinement
  • Laura Magnani, American Friends Service Committee
  • Marilyn McMahon, California Prison Focus
  • Carol Strickman, Legal Services for Prisoners With Children
  • Azadeh Zohrabi, Legal Services for Prisoners With Children

To learn more and get involved, go to Prisoner Hunger Strike Solidarity.

VIRTUOSITY AND REVOLUTION

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It is theoretical weekends and I am in a bit of a hurry, so I am going to print something about which I know nothing at all.  The title struck me as interesting as did the first paragraph, so, that was enough for yours truly.  We shall see together if reading this is/was worth our while.

This is taken from something called either Make Worlds or not Yes, beats me.



Virtuosity and Revolution



BY PAOLO VIRNO
Nothing appears so enigmatic today as the question of what it means to act. This issue seems both enigmatic and out of reach--up in the heavens, one might say. If nobody asks me what political action is, I seem to know; but if I have to explain it to somebody who asks, this presumed knowledge evaporates into incoherence. And yet what notion is more familiar in people's everyday speech than action? Why has the obvious become clothed in mystery? Why is it so puzzling?
The answer is not to be found in the customary realm of ready-made responses: the present unfavorable power balance, the continuing echo of past defeats, the resignation that postmodern ideology endlessly foments. All these do count, of course, but in themselves they explain nothing. Rather, they confuse, because they foster a belief that we are going through a dark tunnel at the end of which everything will go back to being the way it was. That is not the case. The fact is that the paralysis of action relates back to very basic aspects of the contemporary experience. It is there that we have to excavate, in the knowledge that these aspects represent not some unfortunate deviation but an unavoidable backdrop. In order to break the spell, we need to elaborate a model of action that will enable action to draw nourishment precisely from what is today creating its blockage. The interdiction itself has to be transformed into a laissez-passer.
According to a long tradition of thought, the realm of political action can be denned fairly precisely by two boundaries. The first relates to labor, to its taciturn and instrumental character, to that automatism that makes of it a repetitive and predictable process. The second relates to pure thought, to the solitary and nonappearing quality of its activity. Political action is unlike labor in that its sphere of intervention is social relations, not natural materials. It modifies the context within which it is inscribed, rather than creates new objects to fill it. Unlike intellectual reflection, action is public, geared to exteriorization, to contingency, to the hustle and bustle of the multitude. This is what the long tradition teaches us. But we cannot necessarily go along with this definition any longer. The customary frontiers separating Intellect, Work, and Action (or, if you prefer, theory, poiesis, and praxis) have given way, and everywhere we see the signs of incursions and crossovers.
In the pages that follow, I will propose first that Work has absorbed the distinctive traits of political action and second that this annexation has been made possible by the intermeshing between modern forms of production and an Intellect that has become public--in other words, that has erupted into the world of appearances. Finally, what has provoked the eclipse of Action has been precisely the symbiosis of Work with "general intellect," or "general social knowledge," which, according to Marx, stamps its form on "the process of social life itself."11 will then advance two hypotheses. The first is that the public and worldly character of the nous--or the material potentiality (potenza) of general intellect-- has to be our starting point for a redefinition of political praxis and its salient problems: power, government, democracy, violence, and so on. To put it briefly, a coalition between Intellect and Action is counterposed to the coalition between Intellect and Work. Second, whereas the symbiosis of knowledge and production produces an extreme, anomalous, but nonetheless flourishing legitimation for a pact of obedience to the State, the intermeshing between general intellect and political Action enables us to glimpse the possibility of a non-State public sphere.
Activity without Work
The dividing line between Work and Action, which was always hazy, has now disappeared altogether. In the opinion of Hannah Arendt--whose positions I would here seek to challenge -- this hybridization is due to the fact that modern political praxis has internalized the model of Work and come to look increasingly like a process of making (with a "product" that is, by turns, history, the State, the party, and so forth).2 This diagnosis, however, must be inverted and set on its feet. The important thing is not that political action may be conceived as a form of producing, but that the producing has embraced within itself many of the prerogatives of action. In the post-Fordist era, we have Work taking on many of the attributes of Action: unforeseeability, the ability to begin something new, linguistic "performances," and an ability to range among alternative possibilities. There is one inevitable consequence to all this. In relation to a Work that is loaded with "action-ist" characteristics, the transition to Action comes to be seen as somehow falling short, or, in the best of cases, as a superfluous duplication. It appears to be falling short, for the most part: in its structuring according to a rudimentary logic of means and ends, politics offers a communicative network and a cognitive content that are weaker and poorer than those to be found within the present-day process of production. Action appears as less complex than Work, or as too similar to it, and either way it appears as not very desirable.
In "Results of the Immediate Process of Production" (but also, in almost identical words, in Theories of Surplus Value), Marx analyzes intellectual labor and distinguishes two principal kinds. On the one hand, there is the immaterial activity that has as its result "commodities which exist separately from the producer..., e.g. books, paintings and all products of art as distinct from the artistic achievement of the practising artist." On the other hand, Marx defines those activities in which "the product is not separable from the act of producing"3--in other words, activities that find their fulfillment in themselves, without being objectivized in a finished work existing outside and beyond them. The second kind of intellectual labor may be exemplified by "performing artists," such as pianists or dancers, but also includes more generally various kinds of people whose work involves a virtuosic perform.ance, such as orators, teachers, doctors, and priests. In short, this second kind of intellectual labor refers to a wide cross section of human society, ranging from Glenn Gould to the impeccable butler of the classic English novel.
Of the two categories of intellectual labor, for Marx only the first appears to fit fully with the definition of "productive labor" (wherein productive labor is defined only as work that procures surplus value, not work that is merely useful or merely tiring). Virtuosos, who limit themselves to playing a "musical score" and leave no lasting traces, on the one hand "are of microscopic significance when compared with the mass of capitalist production" and on the other are to be considered as "wage-labour that is not at the same time productive labour."4 Although it is easy to understand Marx's observations on the quantitative irrelevance of virtuosos, one experiences some perplexity at his observation that they are "nonproductive." In principle, there is nothing to say that a dancer does not give rise to a surplus value. However, for Marx, the absence of a finished work that lives on beyond the activity of performance puts modern intellectual virtuosity on a par with actions undertaken in the provision of a personal service: services that are seen as being nonproductive, because in order to obtain them one spends income, not capital. The "performing artist," put down and parasitic, is thus consigned to the limbo of service work.
The activities in which "the product is not separable from the act of producing" have a mercurial and ambiguous status that is not always and not completely grasped by the critique of political economy. The reason for the difficulty is simple. Well before becoming swallowed up within capitalist production, virtuosity was the architrave of ethics and politics. Furthermore, it was what qualified Action, as distinct from (and in fact opposed to) Work. Aristotle writes that the aim of production is different from production itself, whereas the aim of action could not be, inasmuch as virtuous conduct is an end in itself.5 Related immediately to the search for the "good life," activity that manifests itself as a "conduct," and that does not have to pursue an extrinsic aim, coincides precisely with political praxis. According to Arendt, the performing arts, which do not lead to the creation of any finished work, "have indeed a strong affinity with politics. Performing artists-- dancers, play-actors, musicians, and the like--need an audience to show their virtuosity, just as acting men need the presence of others before whom they can appear; both need a publicly organized space for their 'work,' and both depend upon others for the performance itself."6 The pianist and the dancer stand precariously balanced on a watershed that divides two antithetical destinies: on the one hand, they may become examples of "wage-labour that is not at the same time productive labour"; on the other, they have a quality that is suggestive of political action. Their nature is essentially amphibian. So far, however, each of the potential developments inherent in the figure of the performing artist--poiesis or praxis, Work or Action-- seems to exclude its opposite. The status of waged laborer tends to militate against political vocation, and vice versa. From a certain point onward, however, the alternative changes into a complicity--the aut-aut gives way to a paradoxical et-et: the virtuoso works (in fact she or he is a worker par excellence) not despite the fact, but precisely because of the fact that her or his activity is closely reminiscent of political praxis. The metaphorical tearing apart comes to an end, and in this new situation we find no real help in the polar oppositions of Marx and Arendt.
Within post-Fordist organization of production, activity-without-a-finished-work moves from being a special and problematic case to becoming the prototype of waged labor in general. There is not much point, here, in going back over the detailed analyses that have already been conducted in other essays in this volume: a few basic points will have to suffice. When labor carries out tasks of overseeing and coordination, in other words when it "steps to the side of the production process instead of being its chief actor,"7 its function consists no longer in the carrying out of a single particular objective, but in the modulating (as well as the varying and intensifying) of social cooperation, in other words, that ensemble of relations and systemic connections that as of now are "the great foundation-stone of production and of wealth."8 This modulation takes place through linguistic services that, far from giving rise to a final product, exhaust themselves in the communicative interaction that their own "performance" brings about.
Post-Fordist activity presupposes and, at the same time, unceasingly re-creates the "public realm" (the space of cooperation, precisely) that Arendt describes as the indispensable prerequisite of both the dancer and the politician. The "presence of others" is both the instrument and the object of labor; therefore, the processes of production always require a certain degree of virtuosity, or, to put it another way, they involve what are really political actions. Mass intellectuality (a rather clumsy term that I use to indicate not so much a specific stratum of jobs, but more a quality of the whole of post-Fordist labor power) is called upon to exercise the art of the possible, to deal with the unforeseen, to profit from opportunities. Now that the slogan of labor that produces surplus value has become, sarcastically, "politics first," politics in the narrow sense of the term becomes discredited or paralyzed.
In any case, what other meaning can we give to the capitalist slogan of "total quality" if not the attempt to set to work all those aspects that traditionally it has shut out of work--in other words, the ability to communicate and the taste for Action? And how is it possible to encompass within the productive process the entire experience of the single individual, except by committing her or him to a sequence of variations on a theme, performances, improvisations? Such a sequence, in a parody of self-realization, represents the true acme of subjugation. There is none so poor as the one who sees her or his own ability to relate to the "presence of others," or her or his own possession of language, reduced to waged labor.
Public Intellect, the Virtuosos' Score
What is the "score" that post-Fordist workers have unceasingly had to play from the moment they were called upon to give proof of virtuosity? The answer, stripped to basics, is something like this: the sui generis "score" of present-day labor is Intellect qua public Intellect, general intellect, global social knowledge, shared linguistic ability. One could also say that production demands virtuosity and thus intro-jects many traits that are peculiar to political action, precisely and sdlely because Intellect has become the principal productive force, premise, and epicenter of every poiesis.
Hannah Arendt rejects out of hand the very idea of a public intellect. In her judgment, reflection and thought (in a word, the "life of the mind") bear no relation to that "care for common affairs" that involves an exhibition to the eyes of others. The insertion of intellect into the world of appearances is first sketched by Marx in the concept of "real abstraction," and then, more important, that of general intellect. Whereas real abstraction is an empirical fact (the exchange of equivalents, for example) that has the rarefied structure of pure thought, general intellect marks rather the stage in which pure thought as such comes to have the value and the incidence typical of facts (we could say the stage at which mental abstractions are immediately, in themselves, real abstractions).
I should add, however, that Marx conceives general intellect as "a scientific capacity" objectified within the system of machines, and thus as fixed capital. He thereby reduces the external or public quality of intellect to the technological application of natural sciences to the process of production. The crucial step consists rather in highlighting to the full the way in which general intellect, rather than being a machina machinarum, comes to present itself finally as a direct attribute of living labor, as a repertoire of a diffuse intelligentsia, as a "score" that creates a common bond among the members of a multitude. Furthermore, we are forced into this position by our analysis of post-Fordist production: here a decisive role is played by conceptual constellations and schemes of thinking that cannot ever be recuperated within fixed capital, given that they are actually inseparable from the interaction of a plurality of living subjects. Obviously, what is in question here is not the scientific erudition of the particular worker. What comes to the fore-- to achieve the status of a public resource--is only (but that "only" is everything) the more general aspects of the mind: the faculty of language, the ability to learn, the ability to abstract and correlate, and access to self-reflection.
By general intellect we have to understand, literally, intellect in general. Now, it goes without saying that Intellect-in-general is a "score" only in the broadest of senses. It is certainly not some kind of specific composition (let us say, Bach's Goldberg Variations) as played by a top-notch performer (let us say Glenn Gould, for example), but rather a simple faculty. It is the faculty that makes possible all composition (not to mention all experience). Virtuosic performance, which never gives rise to a finished work, in this case cannot even presuppose it. It consists in making Intellect resonate precisely as attitude. Its only "score" is, as such, the condition of possibility of all "scores." This virtuosity is nothing unusual, nor does it require some special talent. One need only think of the process whereby someone who speaks draws on the inexhaustible potential of language (the opposite of a defined "work") to create an utterance that is entirely of the moment and unrepeatable.
Intellect becomes public when it joins together with Work; however, once it is conjoined with Work, its characteristic publicness is also inhibited and distorted. Ever anew called upon to act as a force of production, it is ever anew suppressed as public sphere, as possible root of political Action, as different constitutional principle.
General intellect is the foundation of a kind of social cooperation that is broader than the social cooperation based specifically on labor--broader and, at the same time, entirely heterogeneous. Whereas the interconnections of the process of production are based on a technical and hierarchical division of functions, the acting-in-concert implied by general intellect takes as its starting point a common participation in the "life of the mind," in other words a prior sharing of communicative and cognitive attitudes. The excess cooperation of Intellect, however, rather than eliminating the coercions of capitalist production, figures as capital's most eminent resource. Its heterogeneity has neither voice nor visibility. Rather, because the exteriority of Intellect, the fact that it appears, becomes a technical prerequisite of Work, the acting-in-concert outside of labor that it engenders in its turn becomes subjected to the kinds of criteria and hierarchies that characterize the factory regime.
The principal consequences of this paradoxical situation are twofold. The first relates to the form and nature of political power. The peculiar publicness of Intellect, deprived of any expression of its own by that labor that nonetheless claims it as a productive force, manifests itself indirectly within the realm of the State through the hypertrophic growth of administrative apparatuses. Administration has come to replace the political, parliamentary system at the heart of the State, but it has done this precisely because it represents an authoritarian concretion of general intellect, the point of fusion between knowledge and command, the reverse image of excess cooperation. It is true that for decades there have been indications of a growing and determining weight of the bureaucracy within the "body politic," the predominance of decree over law. Now, however, we face a situation that is qualitatively new. What we have here is no longer the familiar process of rationalization of the State, but rather a Statization of Intellect. The old expression raison d'Etat for the first time acquires a nonmetaphorical meaning. If Hobbes and the other great theoreticians of "political unity" saw the principle of legitimation of absolute power in the transfer of the natural right of each single individual to the person of the sovereign, nowadays we might speak of a transfer of Intellect, or rather of its immediate and irreducible publicness, to State administration.
The second consequence relates to the effective nature of the post-Fordist regime. Because the public realm opened by Intellect is every time anew reduced to labor cooperation, in other words to a tight-knit web of hierarchical relations, the interdictive function that comes with "presence of others" in all concrete operations of production takes the form of personal dependency. Putting it another way, virtuosic activity comes across as universal servile labor. The affinity between the pianist and the waiter that Marx glimpsed finds an unexpected confirmation in which all wage labor has something of the "performing artist" about it. When "the product is not separable from the act of producing," this act calls into question the self of the producer and, above all, the relationship between that self and the self of the one who has ordered it or to whom it is directed. The setting-to-work of what is common, in other words, of Intellect and Language, although on the one hand renders fictitious the impersonal technical division of labor, on the other hand, given that this commonality is not translated into a "public sphere" (that is, into a political community), leads to a stubborn personalization of subjugation.
Exodus
The key to political action (or rather the only possibility of extracting it from its present state of paralysis) consists in developing the publicness of Intellect outside of Work, and in opposition to it. The issue here has two distinct profiles, which are, however, strictly complementary. On the one hand, general intellect can only affirm itself as an autonomous public sphere, thus avoiding the "transfer" of its own potential into the absolute power of Administration, if it cuts the linkage that binds it to the production of commodities and wage labor. On the other hand, the subversion of capitalist relations of production henceforth develops only with the institution of a non-State public sphere, a political community that has as its hinge general intellect. The salient characteristics of the post-Fordist experience (servile virtuosity, the valorization even of the faculty of language, the necessary relation with the "presence of others," and so forth) postulate as a conflictual response nothing less than a radically new form of democracy.
I use the term Exodus here to define mass defection from the State, the alliance between general intellect and political Action, and a movement toward the public sphere of Intellect. The term is not at all conceived as some defensive existential strategy--it is neither exiting on tiptoe through the back door nor a search for sheltering hideaways. Quite the contrary: what I mean by Exodus is a full-fledged model of action, capable of confronting the challenges of modern politics--in short, capable of confronting the great themes articulated by Hobbes, Rousseau, Lenin, and Schmitt (I am thinking here of crucial couplings such as command/obedience, public/private, friend/enemy, consensus/violence, and so forth). Today, just as happened in the seventeenth century under the spur of the civil wars, a realm of common affairs has to be defined from scratch. Any such definition must draw out the opportunities for liberation that are to be found in taking command of this novel interweaving among Work, Action, and Intellect, which up until now we have only suffered.
Exodus is the foundation of a Republic. The very idea of "republic," however, requires a taking leave of State judicature: if Republic, then no longer State. The political action of the Exodus consists, therefore, in an engaged withdrawal. Only those who open a way of exit for themselves can do the founding; but, by the opposite token, only those who do the founding will succeed in finding the parting of the waters by which they will be able to leave Egypt. In the remainder of this essay, I shall attempt to circumstantiate the theme of Exodus--in other words, action as engaged withdrawal (or founding leave-taking)--through consideration of a series of key words: Disobedience, Intemperance, Multitude, Soviet, Example, Right of Resistance, and Miracle.
The Virtue of Intemperance
"Civil disobedience" is today the sine qua non of political action--but only if it is conceived differently and freed from the terms of the liberal tradition within which it is generally encapsulated. Here I am not talking about rescinding particular laws because they are incoherent with or contradict other fundamental norms, for example, with the provisions of the Constitution; in such a case, nonobedience would imply only a deeper loyalty to State command. Quite the contrary, through myths that may be its single manifestations, the radical Disobedience that interests me here must bring into question the State's very faculty of command. According to Hobbes, with the institution of the body politic we put an obligation on ourselves to obey even before we know what that obedience is going to entail: "Our obligation to civill obedience, by vertue whereof the civill Lawes are valid, is before all civill Law."9 This is why one will find no specific law that says explicitly that one is not to rebel. If the unconditional acceptance of command were not already presupposed, the actual provisions of the law (including, obviously, the one that says, "Thou shalt not rebel") would have no validity. Hobbes maintains that the original bond of obedience derives from natural law, in other words, from a common interest in self-preservation and security. He hastens to add, however, that this natural law, or the Superlaw that requires obedience to all the commands of the sovereign, becomes effectively a law only when one emerges from the state of nature, in other words, when the State is already instituted. What we have here is a paradox: the obligation to obedience is both cause and effect of the existence of the State; it is maintained by that of which it is also the foundation; it simultaneously precedes and follows the formation of the "supreme power." Political Action takes as its target the preliminary and content-less obedience that provides the only basis for the subsequent development of the baleful dialectic of acquiescence and "transgression." In contravening a particular decree on the dismantling of the health service, or on the banning of immigration, one goes right back to the hidden presupposition of every imperative prescription and saps the force of that prescription. Radical Disobedience is also "before all civill Law," inasmuch as it not only violates the laws, but also challenges the very foundation of their validity.
In order to justify the prior obligation to obedience, an end-of-the-millennium Hobbes, rather than appealing to a "natural law," would have to invoke the technical rationality of the process of production--in other words, "general intellect" precisely as despotic organization of waged labor. In the same way as we saw with "natural law," the "law of general intellect" also has a paradoxical structure: whereas on the one hand it seems to provide the basis of the State Administration's powers of command, demanding the respect of any decision that it may happen to take, on the other hand, it appears as a real law only because (and after) Administration already exercises an absolute command.
Radical Disobedience breaks this circle within which public Intellect figures simultaneously as both premise and consequence of the State. It breaks it with the double movement to which I referred previously. Most particularly, it highlights and develops positively the aspects of general intellect that are at odds with the continued existence of waged labor. On this basis, it sets in motion the practical potentiality of Intellect against the decision-making faculty of Administration. Delinked from the production of surplus value, Intellect becomes no longer the "natural law" of late capitalism, but the matrix of a non-State Republic.
The breeding ground of Disobedience consists of the social conflicts that manifest themselves not only and not so much as protest, but most particularly as defection -- or, to put it in the terms used by Albert 0. Hirschman, not as voice but as exit.10 Nothing is less passive than flight. The "exit" modifies the conditions within which the conflict takes place, rather than presupposes it as an irremovable horizon; it changes the context within which a problem arises, rather than deals with the problem by choosing one or another of the alternative solutions already on offer. In short, the "exit" can be seen as a free-thinking inventiveness that changes the rules of the game and disorients the enemy. One has only to think of the mass flight from the factory regime set in motion by the workers of North America halfway through the nineteenth century as they headed off to the "frontier" in order to colonize low-cost land. They were seizing the truly extraordinary opportunity of making their own conditions of departure reversible.11 Something similar happened in the late 1970s in Italy, when a youthful workforce, contradicting all expectations, decided that it preferred temporary and part-time jobs to regular jobs in big factories. Albeit only for a brief period, occupational mobility functioned as a political resource, bringing about the eclipse of industrial discipline and permitting a certain degree of self-determination. In this case too, preestablished roles were deserted and a "territory" unknown to the official maps was colonized.
Defection stands at the opposite pole to the desperate notion of "You have nothing to lose but your chains." It is postulated, rather, on the basis of a latent wealth, on an abundance of possibilities--in short, on the principle of the tertium datur. But how are we to define, in the post-Fordist era, the virtual abundance that favors the escape option at the expense of the resistance option? What I am talking about here is obviously not a spatial "frontier" but an abundance of knowledges, communication, and acting-in-concert implied by the publicness of general intellect. The act of collective imagination that we call "defection" gives an independent, affirmative, high-profile expression to this abundance, thus stopping its being transferred into the power of State administration.
Radical Disobedience involves, therefore, a complex ensemble of positive actions. It is not a resentful omission, but a committed undertaking. The sovereign command is not carried out, because, above all, we are too busy figuring out how to pose differently the question that it would interdict.
We have to bear in mind the distinction--fairly clear in ancient ethics, but subsequently almost always overlooked--between "intemperance" and "incontinence." Incontinence is a vulgar unruliness, disregard for laws, a giving way to immediate appetite. Intemperance is something very different--it is the opposition of an intellectual understanding to given ethical and political standards. As a guiding principle of action, a "theoretical" premise is adopted in place of a "practical" premise, with consequences for the harmony of societal life that may be dangerous and deviant. The intemperate person, according to Aristotle, is possessed of a vice, because he or she counterposes two kinds of discourse that are essentially diverse.12 The intemperate is not ignorant of the law, nor does he or she merely oppose it;rather, the intemperate seriously discredits it, inasmuch as he or she derives a public conduct from that pure Intellect that should operate within its own realm and should not interfere with the affairs of the polls.
In Intemperance the Exodus has its cardinal virtue. The preexisting obligation of obedience to the State is not disregarded for reasons of incontinence, but in the name of the systematic interconnection between Intellect and political Action. Each constructive defection plays upon the visible reality of general intellect, drawing from it practical consequences that break with "civil laws." In the intemperate recourse to Intellect-in-general there is finally outlined a possibility of a nonservile virtuosity.
Multitude, General Intellect, Republic
The decisive political counterposition is what opposes the Multitude to the People. The concept of "people" in Hobbes (but also in a large part of the democratic-socialist tradition) is tightly correlated to the existence of the State and is in fact a reverberation of it: "The People is somewhat that is one, having one will, and to whom one action may be attributed; none of these can properly be said of a Multitude. The People rules in all Governments," and reciprocally, "the King is the People."13 The progressivist notion of "popular sovereignty" has as its bitter counterpoint an identification of the people with the sovereign, or, if you prefer, the popularity of the king. The multitude, on the other hand, shuns political unity, is recalcitrant to obedience, never achieves the status of juridical personage, and is thus unable to make promises, to make pacts, or to acquire and transfer rights. It is anti-State, but, precisely for this reason, it is also antipopular: the citizens, when they rebel against the State, are "the Multitude against the People."14 For the seventeenth-century apologists for sovereign power, "multitude" was a purely negative defining concept: a regurgitation of the state of nature within civil society, a continuing but somewhat unformed leftover, a metaphor of possible crisis. Liberal thinking, then, tamed the unrest provoked by the "many" through the dichotomy between public and private: the Multitude is "private" both in the literal sense of the term, being deprived of both face and voice, and in the juridical sense of being extraneous to the sphere of common affairs. In its turn, democratic-socialist theory produced the dichotomy "collective/individual": on the one hand, the collectivity of "producers" (the ultimate incarnation of the People) comes to be identified with the State, be it with Reagan or with Honecker;on the other, the Multitude is confined to the corral of "individual" experience-- in other words, condemned to impotence.
We can say that this destiny of marginality has now come to an end. The Multitude, rather than constituting a "natural" ante-fact, presents itself as a historical result, a mature arrival point of the transformations that have taken place within the productive process and the forms of life. The "Many" are erupting onto the scene, and they stand there as absolute protagonists while the crisis of the society of Work is being played out. Post-Fordist social cooperation, in eliminating the frontier between production time and personal time, not to mention the distinction between professional qualities and political aptitudes, creates a new species, which makes the old dichotomies of "public/private" and "collective/individual" sound farcical. Neither "producers" nor "citizens," the modern virtuosi attain at last the rank of Multitude.
What we have here is a lasting and continuing reality, not some noisy intermezzo. Our new Multitude is not a whirlpool of atoms that "still" lacks unity, but a form of political existence that takes as its starting point a One that is radically heterogeneous to the State: public Intellect. The Many do not make alliances, nor do they transfer rights to the sovereign, because they already have a shared "score"; they never converge into a "general will" because they already share a "general intellect." The Multitude obstructs and dismantles the mechanisms of political representation. It expresses itself as an ensemble of "acting minorities," none of which, however, aspires to transform itself into a majority. It develops a power that refuses to become government. Now, it is the case that each of the "many" turns out to be inseparable from the "presence of others," inconceivable outside of the linguistic cooperation or the "acting-in-concert" that this presence implies. Cooperation, however, unlike the individual labor time or the individual right of citizenry, is not a "substance" that is extrapolatable and commutable. It can, of course, be subjected, but it cannot be represented or, for that matter, delegated. The Multitude, which has an exclusive mode of being in its "acting-in-concert," is infiltrated by all kinds of Kapos and Quislings, but it does not accredit stand-ins or nominees.
The States of the developed West are today characterized by a political nonrepresentability of the post-Fordist workforce. In fact, they gain strength from it, drawing from it a paradoxical legitimation for their authoritarian restructuring. The tangible and irreversible crisis of representation offers an opportunity for them to eliminate any remaining semblance of "public sphere"; to extend enormously, as observed above, the prerogatives of Adminstration at the expense of the politico-parliamentary process; and thus to make an everyday reality of the state of emergency. Institutional reforms are set in motion to prepare the requisite rules and procedures for governing a Multitude upon whom it is no longer possible to superimpose the tranquilizing physiognomy of the "People." As interpreted by the post-Keynesian State, the structural weakening of representative democracy comes to be seen as a tendency toward a restriction of democracy tout court. It goes without saying, however, that an opposition to this course of events, if conducted in the name of values of representation, is pathetic and pointless--as useful as preaching chastity to sparrows. Democracy today has to be framed in terms of the construction and experimentation of forms of nonrep-resentative and extraparliamentary democracy. All the rest is vacant chitchat.
The democracy of the Multitude takes seriously the diagnosis that Carl Schmitt proposed, somewhat bitterly, in the last years of his life: "The era of the State is now coming to an end... .The State as a model of political unity, the State as title-holder of the most extraordinary of all monopolies, in other words, the monopoly of political decision-making, is about to be dethroned."15 And the democracy of the Multitude would make one important addition: the monopoly of decision making can only really be taken away from the State if it ceases once and for all to be a monopoly. The public sphere of Intellect, or the Republic of the "many," is a centrifugal force: in other words, it excludes not only the continued existence, but also the reconstitution in any form of a unitary "political body." The republican conspiracy, to give lasting duration to the antimonopoly impulse, is embodied in those democratic bodies that, being nonrepresentative, prevent, precisely, any reproposi-tion of "political unity." Hobbes had a well-known contempt for "irregular politicall sys-temes," precisely because they served to adumbrate the Multitude within the heart of the People: "Irregular Systemes, in their nature, but Leagues, or sometimes meer concourse of people, without union to any particular designe, [not] by obligation of one to another, but proceeding onely from a similitude of wills and inclinations."16 Well, the Republic of the "many" consists precisely of institutions of this kind: leagues, councils, and Soviets. Except that, contrary to Hobbes's malevolent judgment, here we are not dealing with ephemeral appearances whose insurgence leaves undisturbed the rights of sovereignty. The leagues, the councils, and the Soviets--in short, the organs of nonrepresentative democracy--give, rather, political expression to the "acting-in-concert" that, having as its network general intellect, already always enjoys a publicness that is completely different from what is concentrated in the person of the sovereign. The public sphere delineated by "concourse" in which "obligation of one to another" does not apply, determines the "solitude" of the king, in other words, reduces the structure of the State to a very private peripheral band, which is overbearing but at the same time marginal.
The Soviets of the Multitude interfere conflictually with the State's administrative apparatuses, with a view to eating away at its prerogatives and absorbing its functions. They translate into republican praxis, in other words, into a care for common affairs, those same basic resources--knowledge, communication, a relationship with the "presence of others"--that are the order of the day in post-Fordist production. They emancipate virtiiosic cooperation from its present connection with waged labor, showing with positive actions how the one goes beyond the other.
To representation and delegation, the Soviets counterpose an operative style that is far more complex, centered on Example and political repro-ducibility. What is exemplary is a practical initiative that, exhibiting in a particular instance the possible alliance between general intellect and Republic, has the author-itativeness of the prototype, but not the normativity of command. Whether it is a question of the distribution of wealth or the organization of schools, the functioning of the media or the workings of the inner city, the Soviets elaborate actions that are paradigmatic and capable of blossoming into new combinations of knowledge, ethical propensities, technologies, and desires. The Example is not the empirical application of a universal concept, but it has the singularity and the qualitative completeness that, normally, when we speak of the "life of the mind," we attribute to an idea. It is, in short, a "species" that consists of one sole individual. For this reason, the Example may be politically reproduced, but never transposed into an omnivorous "general program."
The Right to Resistance
The atrophy of political Action has had as its corollary the conviction that there is no longer an "enemy," but only incoherent interlocutors, caught up in a web of equivocation, and not yet arrived at clarification. The abandonment of the notion of "enmity," which is judged as being too crude and anyway unseemly, betrays a considerable optimism: people think of themselves, in other words, as "swimming with the current" (this is the reproof that Walter Benjamin directed against German Social Democracy in the 1930s).17 And the benign "current" may take a variety of different names: progress, the development of productive forces, the choice of a form of life that shuns inauthenticity, general intellect. Naturally, we have to bear in mind the possibility of failing in this "swimming," in other words, not being able to define in clear and distinct terms the precise contents of a politics adequate to our times. However, this caution does not annul but corroborates the fundamental conviction: as long as one learns to "swim," and thus as long as one thinks well about possible liberty, the "current" will drive one irresistibly forward. However, no notice is taken of the interdiction that institutions, interests, and material forces may oppose the good swimmer. What is ignored is the catastrophe that is often visited precisely and only on the person who has seen things correctly. But there is worse: when one fails to define the specific nature of the enemy, and the places in which its power is rooted and where the chains that it imposes are tightest, one is not really even in a position to indicate the kinds of positive instances for which one might fight, the alternative ways of being that are worth hoping for. The theory of the Exodus restores all the fullness of the concept of "enmity," while at the same time highlighting the particular traits that it assumes once "the epoch of the State comes to an end." The question is, how is the friend-enemy relationship expressed for the post-Fordist Multitude, which, while on the one hand tending to dismantle the supreme power, on the other is not at all inclined to become State in its turn? In the first place, we should recognize a change in the geometry of hostility. The "enemy" no longer appears as a parallel reflection or mirror image, matching point by point the trenches and fortifications that are occupied by the "friends"; rather, it appears as a segment that intersects several times with a sinusoidal line of flight-- and this is principally for the reason that the "friends" are evacuating predictable positions, giving rise to a sequence of constructive defections. In military terms, the contemporary "enemy" resembles the pharaoh's army: it presses hard on the heels of the fleeing population, massacring those who are bringing up the rear, but never succeeding in getting ahead of it and confronting it. Now, the very fact that hostility becomes asymmetrical makes it necessary to give a certain autonomy to the notion of "friendship," retrieving it from the subaltern and parasitic status that Carl Schmitt assigns it. The characteristic of the "friend" is not merely that of sharing the same "enemy"; it is defined by the relations of solidarity that are established in the course of flight--by the necessity of working together to invent opportunities that up until that point have not been computed, and by the fact of their common participation in the Republic. "Friendship" always extends more broadly than the "front" along which the pharaoh unleashes his incursions. This overflowingness, however, does not at all imply an indifference to what happens on the line of fire. On the contrary, the asymmetry makes it possible to take the "enemy" from the rear, confusing and blinding it as we shake ourselves free.
Second, one has to be careful in defining today the degree or gradation of hostility. By way of comparison, it is useful to recall Schmitt's proverbial distinction between relative enmity and absolute enmity.181 The wars among the European States in the eighteenth century were circumscribed and regulated by criteria of conflict in which each contender recognized the other as a legitimate title-holder of sovereignty and thus as a subject of equal prerogatives. These were happy times, Schmitt assures us, but they are irrevocably lost in history. In our own century, proletarian revolutions have removed the brakes and impediments from hostility, elevating civil war to an implicit model of every conflict. When what is at stake is State power--in other words, sovereignty--enmity becomes absolute. But can we still stand by the Mercalli scale elaborated by Schmitt? I have my doubts, given that it leaves out of account the truly decisive subterranean shift: a kind of hostility that does not aspire to shift the monopoly of political decision making into new hands, but that demands its very elimination.
The model of "absolute" enmity is thus seen to be deficient-- not so much because it is extremist or bloody, but, paradoxically, because it is not radical enough. The republican Multitude actually aims to destroy what is the much-desired prize of the victor in this model. Civil war sits best only with ethnic blood feuds, in which the issue is still who will be the sovereign, whereas it is quite inappropriate for conflicts that undermine the economic-juridical ordering of the capitalist State and challenge the very fact of sovereignty. The various different "acting minorities" multiply the non-State centers of political decision making, without, however, posing the formation of a new general will (in fact, removing the possible basis of this). This then entails a perpetuation of an intermediary state between peace and war. On the one hand, the battle for "the most extraordinary of all monopolies" is premised on either total victory or total defeat; on the other, the more radical scenario (which is antimonopolistic) alternates between negotiation and total rejection, between an intransigence that excludes all mediation and the compromises necessary for carving out free zones and neutral environments. It is neither "relative" in the sense of the ius publicum Europaeum that at one time moderated the contests between sovereign States, nor is it "absolute" in the manner of civil wars; if anything, the enmity of the Multitude may be defined as unlimitedly reactive. The new geometry and the new gradation of hostility, far from counseling against the use of arms, demands a precise and punctilious redefinition of the role to be fulfilled by violence in political Action. Because the Exodus is a committed withdrawal, the recourse to force is no longer gauged in terms of the conquest of State power in the land of the pharaohs, but in relation to the safeguarding of the forms of life and communitarian relations experienced en route. What deserve to be defended at all costs are the works of "friendship." Violence is not geared to visions of some hypothetical tomorrow, but functions to ensure respect and a continued existence for things that were mapped out yesterday. It does not innovate, but acts to prolong things that are already there: the autonomous expressions of the "acting-in-concert" that arise out of general intellect, organisms of nonrepresentative democracy, forms of mutual protection and assistance (welfare, in short) that have emerged outside of and against the realm of State Administration. In other words, what we have here is a violence that is conservational.
We might choose to label the extreme conflicts of the post-Fordist metropolis with a premodern political category: the ius resistentiae--the Right to Resistance. In medieval jurisprudence, this did not refer to the obvious ability to defend oneself when attacked. Nor did it refer to a general uprising against constituted power: there is a clear distinction between this and the concepts of sedi-tio and rebellio. Rather, the Right of Resistance has a very subtle and specific meaning. It authorizes the use of violence each time that an artisanal corporation, or the community as a whole, or even individual citizens, see certain of their positive prerogatives altered by the central power, prerogatives that have been acquired de facto or that have developed by tradition. The salient point is therefore that it involves the preservation of a transformation that has already happened, a sanctioning of an already existing and commonplace way of being. Given that it is a close relation of radical Disobedience and of the virtue of Intemperance, the ius resistentiae has the feel of a very up-to-date concept in terms of "legality" and "illegality." The founding of the Republic eschews the prospect of civil war, but postulates an unlimited Right of Resistance.
Waiting for the Unexpected
Work, Action, Intellect: following the line of a tradition that goes back to Aristotle and that was still "common sense" for the generation that arrived in politics in the 1960s, Hannah Arendt sought to separate these three spheres of human experience and show their mutual incommensurability. Albeit adjacent and sometimes overlapping, the three different realms are essentially unrelated. In fact, they exclude themselves by turns: while one is making politics, one is not producing, nor is one involved in intellectual contemplation; when one works, one is not acting politically and exposing oneself to the presence of others, nor is one participating in the "life of the mind"; and anyone who is dedicated to pure reflection withdraws temporarily from the work of appearances, and thus neither acts nor produces. "To each his own" seems to be the message of Arendt's The Human Condition, and every man for himself. Although she argues passionately for the specific value of political Action, fighting against its entrapment in mass society, Arendt maintains that the other two fundamental spheres, Work and Intellect, remain unchanged in their qualitative structures. Certainly, Work has been extended enormously, and certainly, Thought seems feeble and paralyzed; however, the former is still nonetheless an organic exchange with nature, a social metabolism, a production of new objects, and the latter is still a solitary activity, by its nature extraneous to the cares of common affairs.
As must be obvious by now, however, what I am arguing here is radically opposed to the conceptual schema proposed by Arendt and the tradition by which it is inspired. Allow me to recapitulate briefly. The decline of political Action arises from the qualitative changes that have taken place both in the sphere of Work and in the sphere of Intellect, given that a strict intimacy has been established between them. Conjoined to Work, Intellect (as an aptitude or "faculty," not as a repertory of special understandings) becomes public, appearing, worldly. In other words, what comes to the fore is its nature as a shared resource and a common good. By the same token, when the potentiality of general intellect comes to be the principal pillar of social production, so Work assumes the aspect of an activity without a finished work, becoming similar in every respect to those virtiiosic performances that are based on a relationship with a "presence of others." But is not virtuosity the characteristic trait of political action? One has to conclude, therefore, that post-Fordist production has absorbed within itself the typical modalities of Action and, precisely by so doing, has decreed its eclipse. Naturally, this metamorphosis has nothing liberatory about it: within the realm of'waged labor, the virtuosic relationship with the "presence of others" translates into personal dependence; the "activity-without-finished-work," which nonetheless is strongly reminiscent from close up of political praxis, is reduced to an extremely modern servitude.
Earlier in this essay, then, I proposed that political Action finds its redemption at the point where it creates a coalition with public Intellect (in other words, at the point where this Intellect is unchained from waged labor and, rather, builds its critique with the tact of a corrosive acid). Action consists, in the final analysis, in the articulation of general intellect as a non-State public sphere, as the realm of common affairs, as Republic. The Exodus, in the course of which the new alliance between Intellect and Action is forged, has a number of fixed stars in its own heaven: radical Disobedience, Intemperance, Multitude, Soviet, Example, Right of Resistance. These categories allude to a political theory of the future, a theory perhaps capable of racing up to the political crises of the late twentieth century and outlining a solution that is radically anti-Hobbesian.
Political Action, in Arendt's opinion, is a new beginning that interrupts and contradicts automatic processes that have become consolidated into fact. Action has, thus, something of the miracle, given that it shares the miracle's quality of being surprising and unexpected.19 Now, in conclusion, it might be worth asking whether, even though the theory of Exodus is for the most part irreconcilable with Arendt, there might be some usefulness in her notion of Miracle.
Here, of course, we are dealing with a recurrent theme in great political thinking, particularly in reactionary thought. For Hobbes, it is the role of the sovereign to decide what events merit the rank of miracles, or transcend ordinary law. Conversely, miracles cease as soon as the sovereign forbids them.20 Schmitt takes a similar position, inasmuch as he identifies the core of power as being the ability to proclaim states of exception and suspend constitutional order: "The exception in jurisprudence is analogous to the miracle in theology."21 On the other hand, Spinoza's democratic radicalism confutes the theological-political value of the miraculous exception. There is, however, an ambivalent aspect in his argumentation. In fact, according to Spinoza, a miracle, unlike the universal laws of nature that are identified with God, expresses only a "limited power"; in other words, it is something specifically human. Instead of consolidating faith, it makes us "doubt God and everything," thus creating a predisposition to atheism.22 But are not these very elements--a solely human power, a radical doubt regarding constituted power, and political atheism--some of the characteristics that define the anti-State Action of the Multitude? In general, the fact that in both Hobbes and Schmitt the miracle is the preserve of the sovereign in no sense runs counter to the connection between Action and Miracle; rather, in a sense, it confirms it. For these authors, it is only the sovereign who acts politically. The point is therefore not to deny the importance of the state of exception in the name of a critique of sovereignty, but rather to understand what form it might assume once political Action passes into the hands of the Many. Insurrections, desertions, invention of new organisms of democracy, applications of the principle of the tertium datur: herein lie the Miracles of the Multitude, and these miracles do not cease when the sovereign forbids them.
Unlike what we have in Arendt, however, the miraculous exception is not an ineffable "event," with no roots, and entirely imponderable. Because it is contained within the magnetic field defined by the mutually changing interrelations of Action, Work, and Intellect, the Miracle is rather something that is awaited but unexpected. As happens in every oxymoron, the two terms are in mutual tension, but inseparable. If what was in question was only the salvation offered by an "unexpected," or only a long-term "waiting," then we could be dealing, respectively, with the most insignificant notion of causality or the most banal calculation of the relationship between means and ends. Rather, it is an exception that is especially surprising to the one who was awaiting it. It is an anomaly so potent that it completely disorients our conceptual compass, which, however, had precisely signaled the place of its insurgence. We have here a discrepancy between cause and effect, in which one can always grasp the cause, but the innovative effect is never lessened. Finally, it is precisely the explicit reference to an unexpected waiting, or the exhibition of a necessary incompleteness, that constitutes the point of honor of every political theory that disdains the benevolence of the sovereign.
Translated by Ed Emory
Notes
1. The following is the complete passage: "The development of fixed capital indicates to what degree general social knowledge has become a direct force of, production, and to what degree, hence, the conditions of the process of social life itself have come under the control of the general intellect and been transformed in accordance with it. To what degree the powers of social production have been produced, not only in the form of knowledge, but also as immediate organs of social practice, of the real life process." Karl Marx, . Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, trans- Martin Nicolaus (New York: Random House, 1973), 706.
2. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University' of Chicago Press, 195S), in particular "The Traditional Substitution of Making for Acting," 220-30.
3. Karl Marx, "Results of the Immediate Process of Production," in Capital, vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (New York: Vintage, 1977), 1048.
4. Ibid., 1044-45.
5. Aristotle, Nicowachean Ethics, book 6 (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1985), 1139b.
6. Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future: Six Exercises in Political Thought (New York; Viking, 1961), 154.
7. Marx, Grundrisse, 705- 8. Ibid.
9. Thomas Hobbes, De Cive (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), chap. 14. sec. 21, 181.
10. Albert 0. Hirschman, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty:Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States (Cambridge; Harvard University Press, 1970).
11. Marx discusses the North American "frontier" and its economic and political importance in the final chapter of the first volume of Capital, titled "The Modern Theory of Colonization." Marx writes: "There, the absolute numbers of the population increase much more quickly than in the mother country, because many workers enter the colonial world as ready-made adults, and still the labour-market is always understocked. The law of the supply and demand of labour collapses completely. On the one hand, the old world constantly throws in capital, thirsting after exploitation and 'abstinence'; on the other, the regular reproduction of the wage-labourer as a wage-labourer comes up against the most mischievous obstacles, which are in part insuperable. And what becomes of the production of redundant wage-labourers, redundant, that is, in proportion to the accumulation of capital? Today's wage-labourer is tomorrow's independent peasant or artisan, working for himself. He vanishes from the labour-market--but not into the workhouse. This constant transformation of wage-labourers into independent producers who work for themselves instead of for capital, and enrich themselves instead of the capitalist gentlemen, reacts in its Turn very adversely on the conditions of the labour-market. Not only does the degree of exploitation of the wage-labourer remain indecently low. The wage-labourer also loses, along with the relation of dependence, the feeling of dependence on the abstemious capitalist." Capital, vol. 1, trans. Ben Pbwkes (New York: Vintage, 1977), 935-36.
12. Aristotle, 'Nicomachean Ethics, book 7, 1147a25-h20.
13. Hobbes, De Cive, 151.
14. Ibid., 152.
15. Carl Schmitt, Der Begriffdes Politischen: Text von 1932 wit eimen Vorvo'lt und drei Corollarien (Berlin: Dunckerand IIumblot, 1963), 10.
16. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), chap. 22, 163.
17. See Walter Benjamin, "Theses on the Philosophy of History," in Illuminations (New York: Schocken, 1968), in particular thesis XI, 258-59.
18. See Schmitt, Dei- Begnffdes Politischen, 102-11.
19. See Arendt, Between Past and Future, 168-70.
20. See Hobbes, Leviathan, chap. 37.
21. Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985), 36.
22. Baruch Spinoza, Theologico-Political Treatise, in The Chief Works of Benedict de Spinoza, vol. 1, trans. R. Elwe-s (New York: Dover, 1951), 81-97.

ANTI ROMA VIOLENCE AND RACISM: A PLAGUE IN CZECH REPUBLIC AND BEYOND

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But ordinary citizens have also staged anti-Roma marches. On Sept. 10, about...
                          Ordinary citizens have also staged anti-Roma marches. 
              Here, about 1,000 locals and far-right demonstrators gathered in Varnsdorf.



It amazes me how little attention is given to the rise of outright nazism in the Czech Republic by either the mainstream press or leftists.  No one seems to give a damn.  Roma communities and Roma individuals are under constant attack and faced with nazi terror, and the world in general says, "whatever."

The truth is it isn't just nazi thugs like those described in the first post below who are the problem, it is regular, everyday, Czech citizens, those ordinary local folks.    BIS, the Czech intelligence service,  pointed out early this year, 


Anti-Romany moods in a part of the Czech society may become a more serious problem for the country's security than groups of rightist extremists, the BIS counter-intelligence service...

"If there is even a minor impulse, their everyday problems and their frustration provoked by them combined with latent anti-Gypsyism are expressed openly and result in more radical manifestations."


Social Watch concurs.  The Prague Daily Monitor writes,



The report ( from Social Watch) writes about the serious problem of "attempts at pogroms" on Romanies.

It says minor or seeming conflicts can spark off the pogroms. The report highlights the case from Breclav, south Moravia, in which a 15-year-old boy was injured. He falsely claimed that he had been beaten up by Romanies.

This provoked anti-Romany demonstrations in the town that "would have turned into a pogrom if the police had not intervened," the report said.

The report also described the riots targeting Romanies in Duchcov, north Bohemia, and Ceske Budejovice, south Bohemia, this year.


Amnesty International says,



Discrimination affects Roma in all aspects of society, including housing, health care and employment. The last years have seen an upsurge in violent attacks against Roma...


“The situation is extremely tense in the Czech Republic at the moment, with far right groups rapidly gaining in influence. Many Roma families and activists we talk to fear for their safety, in particular ahead of demonstrations like those planned tomorrow,” said Dezideriu Gergely, Executive Director of the ERRC (European Roma Rights Center).


Of course, the racism goes far beyond the Czech Republic and is a fact of life across Europe today. Grattan Puxon, 73, who co-authored the first book about the Nazi Porrajmos or 'devouring' committed against the Roma.  –Gypsies Under The Swastika -  says, .


 "It's not just remembering what happened under Hitler, but also that we see many thousands of Roma being persecuted again by Nazis in Europe. I have been doing this for 50 years and people are sensing that there is danger again. The Roma are vilified so that the public will accept them being singled out for brutal and unfair treatment. It's disheartening to see the amount of anti-Gypsy feeling."

The first post below is from romea.cz.   The second is from   Ekklesia.



Czech Republic: Neo-Nazis repeatedly assault Romani social worker in Duchcov
Duchcov, 10.8.2013 1:22, (ROMEA)

Jan Dufek (PHOTO: Antifa)
Jan Dufek (PHOTO: Antifa)

Jan Dufek and Jindřich "Pinďa" Svoboda, two antigypsyists known for having said they want Romani people to be murdered off, have been targeting Štefan Horvát of Duchcov, who works for the Květina (Flower) civic association as a field social worker. Horvát says these men have been the protagonists in two incidents of both physical and verbal assault against him.
The persecution began during an anti-Romani event earlier this summer, when neo-Nazis threw a plastic bottle at the social worker. In mid-July about 70 Romani people had gathered on Karel Čapek Street in Duchcov in response to a neo-Nazi gathering supported by several local "whites".
Some of the right-wing extremists set out for Karel Čapek Street after gathering on the main square. Police prevented them from marching into the Romani neighborhood.
"A small group of neo-Nazis and locals from Duchcov came here and started cursing at me. Then a black car drove up with four people inside, two guys and two females. One guy pulled out a plastic bottle half full of beer and threw it at me,"Štefan Horvát told news server Romea.cz at the time.
Social worker Zlatuše Tomášová confirmed Horvát's account, adding that "police detained the Nazis and took them in for interrogation along with the victim." Police had to address two such incidents related to the assembly in Duchcov that day.
"Those incidents are currently qualified as misdemeanors against civil coexistence," police spokesperson Veronika Hyšplerová has told news server Romea.cz. Horvát says he has also been informed that the man who threw the bottle at him will be fined, primarily thanks to his testimony.
Assaults on the street
Initially it seemed possible that the bottle-throwing incident was random and not worth taking too seriously. However, a second, more serious assault on Horvát soon followed.
"A week ago I was walking home from work after 18:00. On the way, Jan Dufek saw me as he was riding his bicycle. He headed straight for me on the sidewalk. Luckily I heard him coming and turned around right when he was about to crash into me, so he only clipped the bag on my shoulder. I was terribly startled," Horvát told news server Romea.cz.
Horvát has filed an official complaint against Dufek and requested a misdemeanor proceeding. Jana Víchová, the staffer in charge of misdemeanor hearings at the town hall, is currently on vacation, so news server Romea.cz will report on the state of the investigation into this matter when she returns.
Assault at the swimming pool
Last Saturday Štefan Horvát took his three children to the swimming pool. When they went to buy some refreshments at a stand, about eight neo-Nazis, all of whom had attended the anti-Roma march, began to harass them, led by Jindřich Svoboda, who organized one of the recent anti-Roma events there together with Dufek.
Svoboda used a tablet to photograph Horvát and his children from a distance of about five centimeters away, laughing at them the whole time. "They shouted racist insults at us the whole time, 'black fucks', 'Gyppos', etc. Dufek started to shout that I was the gypsy thief who snitched on him. They evidently wanted to spark an argument. I stayed calm and told them to leave us alone. We went back to the water but the children were terribly afraid and wanted to leave immediately. When the other Romani people there saw we were leaving, they also packed up and left too. The Nazis shouted after all of us derisively. We took an indirect route home, just to be sure they couldn't follow us," Horvát said. He intends to file criminal charges over this incident.  
Roma refuse to negotiate with neo-Nazis
This week representatives of the Romani community in Duchcov rejected an offer from Mayor Jitka Bártová to participate in round table negotiations with the neo-Nazi Svoboda (Dufek was most probably invited to participate as well). Svoboda is a member of the Workers' Social Justice Party (DSSS), convened at least one of the recent anti-Romani events in Duchcov together with Dufek, and is organizing more for the future.
Bártová tried to calm the situation after the first neo-Nazi demonstration was held in her town this year by convening a public discussion. When that meeting was over, Míra Brož of the Konexe association held the following exchange with Dufek and Svoboda, which was captured on video:
Brož:  "Really, gentlemen, every march exacerbates the situation and makes it worse."
Dufek: "That's good, the people will finally rise up and murder them all off."
It can be deduced from this statement that Dufek and Svoboda are holding anti-Romani demonstrations in order to deteriorate and exacerbate the situation to such a degree that non-Romani people begin to murder Romani people. Even though only Dufek was captured saying this on camera, news server Romea.cz previously reported that Svoboda expressed himself in those same words on his Facebook profile, as follows:
"So finally it's out! The secret video of the assault in Duchcov! Those black fuckers! They should all be massacred! How much longer will we tolerate this? I propose that it is time to unite and fucking give them what for! I'm going to go throw up and then I'm going to sharpen my knives...."
Bártová:  The DSSS has not been banned, so it's ok
Mayor Bártová has expressed astonishment that someone would be opposed to attending a round table together with DSSS representatives, as the party is not banned. "I can believe whatever I like about various political parties, but that doesn't mean I won't negotiate with them," the mayor said.
Posting to a Facebook discussion about the incident at the swimming pool, the mayor was duplicitous:  At first she made no statement about the reported behavior of the DSSS members, instead claiming that Romani children really do bother people and that some citizens believe Roma get free entry to the swimming pool (a rumor she herself has already refuted). 
The Anti-Fascist Action organization has reported that both of the men convening anti-Romani events in Duchcov are neo-Nazis. "Dufek is a longtime neo-Nazi activist. He has been previously convicted of giving the Nazi salute, weapons possession, and welfare fraud. He has reportedly also previously participated, along with a larger group of people, in attacking a group of Romani people in Slovakia. While standing on the main square in the town of Krupina there, he first insulted Romani people, gave the Nazi salute, threatened to shoot them in the head, and then physically assaulted them," Antifa wrote in a press release earlier this year.
Svoboda recently faced the possibility of spending between two and eight years in prison for fraud. He was eventually sentenced by a court in Teplice to three years in prison and five years on parole.
The case marked the first time the court has upheld a plea agreement reached between a defendant and a state prosecutor. "I claimed reimbursement for costs related to my travel to Thomayer Hospital in Prague for chemotherapy without authorization," Svoboda told the court as part of the plea agreement.
From April 2008 until February 2012, Svoboda was paid almost CZK 950 000 by the VZP public health insurer as reimbursement for trips related to his cancer treatment - trips which either never took place or for which he was not entitled to reimbursement. He will have to return the money to the insurance company.
Svoboda is unemployed, so paying the money back will not be easy. "Momentarily I am unemployed and on disability. I have been promised a job in Duchcov as an electrician and maintenance man. Once that begins I would like to start payments," Svoboda promised the listeners of Czech Radio this past February.
Members of the Duchcov cell of the DSSS described the incident at the swimming pool as follows on their Facebook page:
"Today the local organization of the Workers' Social Justice Party, together with several other dissatisfied citizens of the town of Duchcov, visited the local swimming pool to determine what was actually going on with the oppression of majority-society citizens by the Romani minority. Immediately after arriving, we noticed an unusual disturbance among the Romani people there, who began to immediately warn one another that some guys with short hair had come to the swimming pool... We properly followed everything going on at the swimming pool and fortunately did not notice any conflicts or assaults being committed by the Roma (evidently thanks to our presence). After about a half an hour the Romani families began to pack up and leave the swimming pool en masse, for which two majority-society citizens came over to thank us. After most of the Roma had left the swimming pool, we determined that there was basically no one left there to keep an eye on, so we set off for our homes... At the exit the lady at the cash register informed us that several Roma had demanded their entry fees back, claiming they had to go home because of 'Nazis', that they had not had time to swim, and that they did not feel safe at the swimming pool. What would it look like if every majority-society citizen of Duchcov said they want their money back because they don't feel safe when gypsies are at the swimming pool...?"    
DSSS leader Vandas has posted his thanks to the cell for their successful action.
František Kostlán, translated by Gwendolyn Albert



---------------------------------


Roma remember holocaust and protest mistreatment

By staff writers

Romani rights activists have commemorated the Roma Holocaust and protested at Europe’s continued mistreatment of them.

The event took place last weekend, and has been followed up by continued human rights advocacy over the past week.

It was on 2 August 1944 that Nazi guards at Auschwitz murdered almost 3,000 Roma at its ‘Gypsy family camp’.

This has become the memorial day of the Roma Holocaust – or Porajmos (the ‘devouring’) in which an estimated half a million Roma people were killed .

Romani rights activists gathered in Hyde Park, in London, to learn the lessons of this history and to take heed of an anti-Roma racism that is reaching fever pitch across Europe, reports the Institute of Race Relations - a research and campaigning organisation that has taken up Roma rights as a major issue.

Ekklesia has reported the significant and growing hostility, abuse and violence towards Roma people and travelling communities in Hungary, Romania and a range of other European countries over the past few years.

The day began with a protest outside the Czech embassy, against the rise of neo-Nazi attacks against the Roma in the Czech Republic and Slovakia, IRR reports.

Delegates from the Halifax Roma Group, Europe Roma, the Roma Virtual Network, the European Roma Rights Centre and Derby’s Roma Community Care were among those who gathered to hand a letter of protest to the Czech Ambassador.

The group then travelled to Hyde Park’s Holocaust Memorial to meet others who had come to commemorate the Porajmos.

Grattan Puxon, a Gypsy, Roma and Traveller rights activist, told IRR News that the same Nazi feeling of the 1940s was gathering pace today: "We see the racism against Roma turning into ever more acts of violence and murder almost everywhere in Europe."

"The problem is even mainstream governments are failing to curb the threatening revival of fascism and are themselves adopting anti-Roma policies – which include mass evictions and deportations," Gratton pointed out.

The next stop was the French embassy, for a protest against the enforced evictions of Romani people from camps on the outskirts of Paris, before protestors made their way to Marble Arch, where, earlier this year, the process was mirrored – homeless Romani people were rounded up by the Metropolitan Police, with the aid of Romanian police officers and UKBA immigration enforcement officers, in a ‘voluntary’ deportation programme bizarrely dubbed Operation Chefornak.

The protests of 2 August were a timely rebuke to a mainstream media that blames Gypsy, Roma and Traveller people for their own persecution, misdiagnosing the rise of violent anti-Roma fascism as a response to the inherent criminality of the persecuted, rather than the result of a pan-European policy of criminalisation, pauperisation and deportation.

Acknowledgements to IRR.



CLIMATE CHANGE, END OF TIMES, AND THE SKY GODS

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There are many interest groups out there with all kinds of selfish and lousy reasons for declaring that climate change is a fraud, and even if it isn't, why it should be ignored.

You know  most of the players of course.

I won't bother you with a list.

Today, I just want to focus on one group, one religious group.  I am talking about the powerful and even more influential disastrous effect on the debate which is the result of evangelical, fundamentalist, end times thinking.  The end times thinkers are intent one would think on creating the end times.  They want Jesus and they want him now.


It is indeed ironic as motherboard aptly puts it that:


"...conservatives often deride environmentalists who calling for policies to address climate change, as being "apocalyptic" or "alarmist" or preaching "gloom and doom." It's somewhat ironic, then, that the most steadfast critics of policies to defend civil society against climate change are also the most steadfast believers in religious Armageddon."


On top of this is the attitude that God controls the Earth and everything else, so it is blasphemous for anyone to interfere with the plan (well, of course, this only counts when the interference is with a plan that certain people happen to decide is God's plan...or something like that) or as it is put more clearly and succinctly at motherboard again, 



"...the big guy controls the Earth's climate, and even deigning to believe that puny humanfolk could mess with the temperature is blasphemy."

After all, what are we to make of the fact that a 2012 study by the Public Religion Research Institute in partnership with the Religion News Service found that nearly four in 10 US residents believe that recent patterns of extreme weather activity such as Hurricane Sandy were evidence that the world is coming to an end as predicted in the Bible.  In fact,  nearly 65 percent of white evangelical Protestants said the storms are evidence of fulfillment of "end times" prophecies.

And if the Bible predicts it, really what can we do anyway?




Lisa Wellman-Tuck in a 2012 article on e-international relations writes;

When assessing end – times theology, it is clear that these beliefs have a defined influence on public attitudes towards action on climate change. Whilst non-believers may have an inherent concern for the future, ‘…end-times believers “know” that life on Earth has a preordained expiration date, no matter what—and that all Christians will be raptured before the going gets too tough’ (Barker and Bearce, 2012, p. 4). Following this premise, many fundamental religious organisations perceive efforts to mitigate the effects of climate change to be both futile and ill-advised.



In an interesting interview which I found at Climate Etc, .Dr. David Gushee, who is Distinguished Professor of Christian Ethics at Mercer University is asked, " What are the ingredients of evangelical climate skepticism?"  He replies:



 I have suggested in some public lectures that there are several ingredients of evangelical climate skepticism:


1) Disdain for the environmental movement


2) Distrust of mainstream science in general (evolution vs. creationism is indeed a factor here for some)


3) Distrust of the mainstream media (nicely captured by Sarah Palin’s derisive term “lamestream media”)


4) Loyalty to the Republican Party


5) Libertarian economics as God’s will–God is opposed to government regulation or taxation


6) Misunderstandings of divine sovereignty–God won’t let us ruin creation


7) Unreconstructed Dominion theology–Genesis 1–God calls human beings to subdue and rule creation


To summarize, then: God is sovereign over creation and therefore humans can do no permanent damage. God entrusted the earth to human dominion and we should not be afraid of economic development or other uses of human creativity. God established government for very limited purposes such as providing for the common defense–government should not intervene much in the workings of a free market economy. The Republican Party has taken a skeptical posture toward climate and we support that posture and that party. The media is overplaying climate change worries, at the behest of scientists who cannot be trusted anyway; it may all be a conspiracy to limit our personal and business freedoms and tax us even more. The environmental movement is secular/pagan and has always been a threat to American liberties and has always been anti-business and exaggerated environmental problems.


It is hard for us (the us being you and me and those like you and me) to comprehend the numbers of people in this country who not only really believe this stuff, but are willing to see the world literally come to an end so that their peculiar superstitions can seem real.  It's weird.  These righteous Christians would shout to high hell if you told them there is no difference between this sort of thinking and those who thought the Greek, Roman, or Norse Gods caused all this stuff through their playing around with each other and sometimes just for amusement sake.  Yet, what is the difference really.



Can it really be true that a few million religious nuts will one day be one of the primary factors that led to the death of our planet as we know it, that were key players in the greatest of the great extinction events?  Sadly, yeah, it could.

The following is from Policymic.



Global Warming Debate: Study Shows Links Between End-Times Believers and Global-Warming Deniers




We millennials have seen and (obviously) survived a lot of doomsday fear-mongering over the years. From the Y2K scare, to the half-mad ravings of Harold Camping (as well as other warnings of Rapture and the Second Coming of Jesus) to the worrying over the December 21 Mayan calendar prophecy, most of us are pretty immune and just ignore it. There are those who take it seriously though, seriously enough to where it affects the rest of us. Researchers from the University of Pittsburgh and the University of Colorado have found that belief in the biblical end-times has been a motivating factor behind a much of the resistance to curbing global climate change.

The study, carried out by David C. Parker (Univ. of Pittsburgh) and David H. Bearce (Univ. of Colorado) and set to be published in the June issue of Political Science Quarterly, is based on data gathered from the 2007 Cooperative Congressional Election Study. It has shown that belief in the “Second Coming” reduced the probability for strong support of government action on climate change by 12% after controlling for demographic and cultural factors. Once other effects such as party affiliation, ideology, and media distrust were removed the number jumped to 20%.

“The fact that such an overwhelming percentage of Republican citizens profess a belief in the Second Coming (76% in 2006, according to our sample) suggests that governmental attempts to curb greenhouse emissions would encounter stiff resistance even if every Democrat in the country wanted to curb them...It stands to reason that most nonbelievers would support preserving the Earth for future generations, but that end-times believers would rationally perceive such efforts to be ultimately futile, and hence ill-advised,” the study states. The most prominent evidence of the attitude comes from Rep. John Shimkus (R-Ill.), chairman of the House Subcommittee on Environment and Economy. In 2010 Shimkus stated that he opposed action on climate change because “the Earth will end only when God declares it to be over.”

It's not really that surprising a find. If you think you and all the other True Believers are going to be whisked away to heaven, then you don't really have much incentive to care about the environment. The only ones who'll be left to it are all the non-Christians, and they of course deserve whatever ill befalls them for refusing to believe in the one true God. So since you're off to the land of sunshine and butterflies what does it matter if the environment is damaged beyond repair? As one of the dedicated nonbelievers I'm patently unamused by this kind of selfish, backwards thinking. It really does boggle my mind that how scientifically and environmentally illiterate men like Lamar Smith and John Shimkus have managed to rise to positions of power in committees dealing with issues that they have zero understanding of.

It's impossible to gauge exactly how much damage this kind of thinking has caused or know how much could've been avoided, but the study goes on to conclude that any change to the status quo is unlikely while so many American Christians (particularly Republicans) believe in the Second Coming. “That is, because of institutions such as the Electoral College, the winner-take-all representation mechanism, and the Senate filibuster, as well as the geographic distribution of partisanship to modern partisan polarization, minority interests often successfully block majority preferences,” Barker and Bearce wrote. “Thus, even if the median voter supports policies designed to slow global warming, legislation to effect such change could find itself dead on arrival if the median Republican voter strongly resists public policy environmentalism at least in part because of end-times beliefs.”

Unlike many of my fellow atheists, I don't particularly care if other people choose to believe in gods. I do have an issue, however, when they let those beliefs carry over from the personal realm into the professional realm, where their delusion of being whisked away from the world leads them to not care that we've taken the one home humanity has and brought it to the brink of an environmental cliff with no road back. The environment isn't going to get better, so we need to do our best to stop it from getting worse, but as long as people continue to believe that the world is going to end it's unlikely to happen
.



SEATTLE SOLIDARITY NETWORK/THAT'S WHAT I'M TALKING ABOUT

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Sometimes it is not about some giant ideological struggle, sometimes it is not about taking on a giant global corporation, sometimes it is not about anything anyone almost anywhere even hears about.  Sometimes it is just a group of working people deciding they have had enough large injustice and that they are not going to take anymore small injustices.  Sometimes most of the "left" forgets that for working and poor people, small injustices are big deals, are life changing deals.

This leads us to a group I know little about.  It is a group which describes itself simply as, 


...a network of volunteers, open to workers both employed and unemployed, active and retired.


This is a group which in one paragraph sums a whole lot of things up:


Each of us at some time has suffered from unjust treatment by employers, landlords, or other wealthy people who hold power over our lives.  We've learned from experience that the only way we'll be treated fairly, equally, and with dignity is by being prepared to stand up to such people and defend our rights.  It's hard to do this alone.  That's why we've come together, and we're seeking out other local people with similar problems who feel the same way.  Together we can find ways of dealing with abusive bosses, greedy landlords, and those who would deny us, our friends, families, neighbors and co-workers the right to a decent life.

This is a group with a rather simple, yet profound vision:


We see our efforts as helping to build a powerful and democratic working class movement.  One day we will be strong enough to take full control over our lives.

This is a group without a political platform whose goal is simply:


...to stand together and defend our rights against bosses and landlords—is what brings us together.  Individuals are free to discuss, argue, and agree to disagree about everything else.

This is a group then when asked to give examples of their work, responds with some examples: 


•    Bert got his rental deposit stolen.  He and a group of Solidarity Network supporters visited the property manager at her home one morning, and within a few days she paid up.

•    Jorge was owed $892 of wages, and the boss adamantly refused to pay. Jorge and a group of other workers visited the boss’s house, then leafleted the boss's church twice on Sunday mornings. After that, the boss agreed to pay Jorge every cent.

•    Stephanie, Yvette and other long-term motel residents demanded relocation assistance when they were ordered out of their homes at short notice.  Organized with the Solidarity Network, motel tenants and supporters defied eviction threats, visited the landlords’ neighborhood and launched an online and on-the-streets boycott campaign. Within a month the landlords met all our demands, paying 3-months’ rent per household to all residents who got involved.

This is the Seattle Solidarity Network and the posts below introduced them to me.  The first is from their own web site. The second is from lib.com.  This is what it is all about.




Quick win in poverty-wages fight

at White Center grocery store







New SeaSol member Antonio worked at a grocery store in White Center for two grueling years. Working regular 6-day, 72-hour weeks, Antonio received no breaks, no overtime pay, and was irregularly compensated at less than $7 per hour (far below Washington State's minimum wage). When he learned of our win at Jumbo Buffet, Antonio got in touch with the Seattle Solidarity Network. After much discussion and research, SeaSol and Antonio voted to fight for 30 weeks of back wages, or $6,710, for Antonio.


On Saturday July 27th 2013, Antonio, his family, and over forty SeaSolers filed into the store to deliver our demand. The atmosphere was tense as the boss read the letter, shaking, and looking around at the stern faces glaring in solidarity with Antonio. The boss was so intimidated by our direct action that he immediately contacted a lawyer friend for help. His lawyer called us the following Monday with weak - and quickly shut down - attempts at bargaining.


On Thursday August 8th 2013, the thieving boss and his lawyer friend met up with Antonio, his daughter, and other SeaSol members. More attempts to bully Antonio into accepting less money were rejected, and Antonio was paid $6,710 on the spot.
The unwavering position presented by SeaSol and Antonio throughout this fight, our refusal to play legal games with a lawyer, and flawlessly carried out direct action quickly resulted in a swift win in this fight. Congratulations to our new comrade Antonio, and thanks to all who showed up to the demand delivery!

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A fungus among us: Direct action cleans up landlord's act

 A fungus among us: Direct action cleans up landlord's act
A demand delivery scares landlord into returning the deposit of two SeaSol organizers.


Here's the story of a fight we recently won, in Wendy's words:


My partner & I, both longtime SeaSol members and organizers, moved into our apartment in the Central District in June of last year. After about a month of living there we started to notice substantial mold growth in the apartment. We emailed the landlord (a top executive at Starbucks) who suggested leaving the window open when we took a shower and cleaning it using bleach. The mold continued to spread despite this "treatment." Every time we cleaned the mold it would grow back right away, and with renewed intensity. Worse than that, I was experiencing light-headedness, dizziness and low energy, especially after I cleaned the mold.


As the mold infestation continued to worsen, my partner developed a low-grade fever, his tongue turned white, and his doctor recommended in writing that he move out of the apartment as soon as possible. Our dog developed allergies that caused open sores on his legs as well as ear infections requiring several trips to the vet. It became clear that it was no longer safe to live in the apartment and after being out of the apartment for just a few days, all of our symptoms, even our dog's allergies, began to clear up. Back at the apartment our landlord refused to consult mold specialists or make any serious attempt to get rid of the mold.


We told our landlord that our apartment was uninhabitable and moved all our possessions out on Dec.18th. In response, she insisted we were breaking the lease and threatened to sue us for "waste." She refused to give back more than $400 of our $1000 deposit. Meanwhile, we were seriously struggling to get the money together to get moved into a new place. We called SeaSol.


SeaSol voted to support us in a direct action campaign demanding that our former landlord return the missing $600 of our deposit. We arranged a fake showing at one of her properties and planned to present a letter to her outside the house en masse demanding that she return our stolen deposit. At the pre-action huddle, standing around me, supporting me, were about forty people.


We headed toward the corner where our former landlord was expecting to meet "Sarah," a fake tenant. There were close to forty of us marching down the middle of the street. As we approached she and two prospective tenants tried to skirt the large, silent group but I stepped toward her, letter in my hand, and said her name. Quickly, and while the tenants were still listening I explained to her that the letter was "in regards to the $600 of our security deposit that was taken". At this point she was surrounded by all forty, intensely quiet and serious-looking SeaSolers. She took the letter, said as professionally as she could that she was going to read it later, and scurried off to get in her BMW. Unfortunately for her she was parked on a dead-end street, so the experience was not over until she had started her car, turned around and slowly driven past all of us while we watched and filmed her. As soon as she was out of view we erupted into applause and whooping. I felt an unprecedented surge of empowerment.
Within ten days our landlord sent us an email stating she would pay back the $600! She was apparently unwilling to face the prospect of that same group of forty people staging future actions. Thank you so much to everyone who supported us.
Solidarity forever!





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