This summer, Brown and her allies wrapped up a remarkably successful crowd sourcing campaign and raised more than $17,000 to take their work on the road. The finished product will be “Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction Stories From Social Justice Movements,” an anthology of speculative fiction written by activists. The project is also the work of Walidah Imarisha, a writer and activist based in Portland. Along with the book, the editors and authors will also host writing workshops across the country.

“There have been great anthologies of explicitly political or identity-based sci-fi, but to our knowledge there hasn’t been a collection of original sci-fi from people who do social justice work,” Brown says. “And our work needs us to be so visionary so it’s an exercise and experiment.”

“A lot of our movements are shaped defensively, necessarily,” Brown says. “It can be easy to set our dreams only on the horizon of what seems possible in circumstances largely controlled by oppressive systems. It feels like radical work to actually stretch our imaginations and recenter ourselves in the long arc of what we need to survive.”

I really am looking forward to the end result.

“All Organizing is Science Fiction:” Walidah Imarisha on Her New Crowdfunded Project, Octavia’s Brood

Walidah Imarisha is proud to be a nerd. The Portland-based writer, organizer, educator and performance poet is obsessed with sci-fi, and she’s equally passionate about social change. Those two interests collide in Walidah’s newest project with adrienne maree brown, Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements, an anthology of visionary science fiction and speculative fiction written by organizers and activists, inspired by prominent science fiction writer Octavia Butler.

Octavia’s Brood reached its funding original goal on Indiegogo earlier this month, and is currently seeking contributions for stretch goals. You can read more about the project and contribute here.

We interviewed Walidah last week about Octavia’s Brood, her relationship with Butler’s work, and why it might be time for Uhura to give Captain Kirk a piece of her mind.

Matt Lurie: How has Octavia Butler influenced you?

Walidah Imarisha: I’ve been a science fiction nerd my entire life. My earliest memory is watching Star Trek at the age of 2, I tried to learn Klingon when I was in middle school, and used to try to do Princess Leia buns every Halloween… Afros and Princess Leia buns do not go together, unfortunately. [laughs]

So I’m biased, but I think everyone should read Octavia Butler. It’s been amazing working on this project and seeing everyone’s different entry points into radical science fiction—or what we like to call visionary fiction. The difference is that visionary fiction is aware of power dynamics, and may show a dystopian future, but focuses on ability of people, especially those that are marginalized, to make change and to become aware of power structures. We can explore these dystopian futures—that are very much based on the inequalities and oppressions that happen here, in the present—while empowering and showing folks that they have the potential to make change. Octavia Butler is a cornerstone for that type of story.

And it’s been interesting talking to many of our writers, who said things like, “I never liked science fiction because I never saw any reflection of me. I can’t make it to the future, so why would I wanna read that future?” For many folks it was really Octavia’s writing that was the first time that they saw themselves and their issues written into the future, in a way that felt hopeful—instead of the message we’re used to hearing. You know: “Sorry y’all got massacred, sucks to be you.” Uh, wow, really?

Octavia Brood is part of a legacy of visionary ancestors who, especially for marginalized and oppressed groups historically, are the ones who dreamed of us. For adrienne and me, as two black women, it’s important for us to remember that for our enslaved ancestors, dreaming of us without chains was science fiction. They had no conception or frame to understand that future, and yet being able to envision it made them able to work towards it. They literally bent reality to create us, and to create this world. That’s the importance and the power of science fiction. It’s the only genre that allows us to do that—to completely re-envision the future, to dream, and then to move towards making those dreams possible.

ML: That term, “visionary fiction,” is interesting, because it’s the opposite of what we’re used to seeing. I think, for a lot of people, modern science fiction is about all the terrible things that could happen, the dangerous, dystopian future we could find ourselves in if we’re not careful. Visionary fiction sounds like it’s more about making the future better than the present.

WI: And even when things aren’t great, people are working to make spaces great. We’ve been doing these short videos called Voices from Octavia’s Brood where we’ve been interviewing different writers for two or three minutes about Octavia or their work. One of the writers I was interviewing, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, was clear—she was like, “Octavia isn’t easy.”

Yeah, Octavia is hard. There’s no sugar with that medicine. She doesn’t give you what you want; she gives you what you need, and she doesn’t mess around when she gives it to you. For example, stories like Parable of the Sower. In their interviews, probably ninety percent said how hard it was to read that book because it is so close to where we are now—it is just a half step away—and it is so terrifying that it’s so close. So many people said things like, “I had to start it five or six times,” but when they got into it, there was this overwhelming feeling that, yes, this future is horrific and frightening, but even within this devastated landscape, if we are ready, if we are prepared, we can build. We can build a community, and out of this kernel, this “Earth Seed”—as Octavia calls it—something beautiful and huge can sprout.

ML: Even within this dark future, there’s a kernel of hope.

WI: Right, and for us, I think it’s about being realistic. Again, Star Trek is interesting, because so many people who watch it see this idealized, perfect future. I certainly didn’t believe it was perfect, because I identified with Uhura. And after three seasons, you really don’t know anything about her other than the fact that she answers the phone on the Enterprise.

ML: She’s a space secretary.

WI: “How may I direct your call, please?” [laughs] You know. And that said, it was incredibly important for me to even see her make it to the future, and she was an officer, and she could—in theory—take over the bridge if everyone else was wiped out. But I definitely feel like visionary fiction is about re-centering those folks who are on the margins, saying what would Star Trek look like through Uhura’s eyes? It would certainly not look like the idyllic landscape that Kirk sees. She’s like, “If I could just— I gotta think about my galactic pension. If I get it, I’d have some things to say to you, sir.” [laughs]

adrienne maree brown (left), Walidah Imarisha (right)

So I think that reality is important too. It’s really saying that, for so many people, the world has never been ideal. For oppressed and marginalized communities, it’s never been a hopeful time to have children. It’s never been a good time to have dreams for the future, because they’re so fragile and they could be crushed in an instant. And yet it’s only because folks triumph, and hold onto those dreams, and hold onto that hope that any of us are here for us today.

ML: Where do you see Octavia’s influence?

WI: I think she’s everywhere. She’s inspired an entire generation of people to dream and to remember to dream. Every radical person I know either loves Octavia Butler, and they were sci-fi nerds before they read her, or Octavia was was got them into science fiction. That reality can’t be denied, that she wrote so many complex stories that don’t have easy answers, and that appeals to people who live complicated lives. There’s no easy answer to creating transformative social change; there’s just the process. One of the things that Octavia says is that, from Earth Seed, “All that you touch you change. All you change changes you.”

God is change. Whether you believe in God or not, change is the only constant force, and it’s going to come, and you can be ready for it or not. You can get bulldozed, but it’s coming. For folks who organize, for people whose lives are institutionally unstable anyway, that’s comforting in some way, to know that it’s not just my life, it’s the constant force of the universe, and I can get ready for it. I can’t stop it, but I can be ready, so when that comes—like Lauren Olamina [from Parable of the Sower]—I can grab my survival bag, and run out while people are coming over the wall and destroying my little space of community that was my protective bubble. And now it’s gone, and that’s scary, but I prepared for it, and I’m ready for the lessons I’m going to learn along the way.

ML: What do you hope to accomplish with Octavia’s Brood?

WI: I’m just so happy that there’s been a resurgence in reclaiming, and holding and lifting up Octavia Butler. The Octavia E. Butler Legacy Network is an organization that was just recently started by Ayanna Jamieson. It started because Ayanna took a trip to Octavia’s grave and it was overgrown, neglected. People didn’t really know where she was buried and, especially for black women, this is a story that happens again and again. It makes me think of Zora Neale Hurston, who wrote these foundational stories that completely changed American literature, that shifted the black experience indelibly. She died penniless and alone, and people couldn’t even find her grave. So even if this larger society isn’t going to honor our visionaries, we’re going to honor our visionaries. That process is so powerful because it’s holding up Octavia as well as all those folks that Octavia acknowledged freely and happily and constantly that she was holding up.

So by holding up Octavia, there are all these layers. We’re holding up this lineage, and we’re also holding up the future. Alexis Pauline Gumbs quotes an interview Octavia did in the eighties, when someone asked “What does it feel like to be THE black female science fiction writer?” And Octavia said something like, “I never wanted that, I didn’t want it. I want there to be hundreds of black female science fiction writers, I want thousands of people writing themselves into the future. That’s why I started writing, because I wasn’t present in any of the futures, in any of the literature I’ve been seeing, and I want everyone to write themselves into the future.” This is the responsibility Octavia has placed on us, to continue this work. She has laid down the challenge to say, “Can you dream?” And it’s all our responsibility to echo back to the universe all of our complex, beautiful, challenging, complicated, contradictory, beautiful, ugly truths. And then work to make the future.

That’s why we wanted specifically to reach out to organizers and people who are creating social change. Many of the folks we reached out to at first we like, “You want me to write what now?” And I would say at least half of the initial response was, “No, I can’t do that.” So we said, “Okay, just sit with it, think about it, and we’ll get back to you.” And by and large, when we got back to folks, they said, “Oh my God, so I had this amazing idea, and I’ve written fifteen pages already! And I’m going to keep going, and how long of a submission can I submit?” I think it’s because to us, all organizing is science fiction. I mean, what does a world without prisons look like? What is a world without hunger? What is a world where there is justice and people have enough to eat and decent education… We don’t know! It’s science fiction.

ML: Mission statements are science fiction premises.

WI: Yeah, vision statements, mission statements, “We believe in a world where…” Once you start that, you are writing science fiction. All organizing is science fiction. Organizers should have the space to claim that.

A lot of times, we’re so focused on the strategic plan, and the next six months, and “what are our action steps?” And those are incredibly important to making change, but we rarely have the space to step back and take a minute to collectively dream. We found that when we offer these visionary organizers that chance, it’s mind-blowing what they come up with.

Learn more about and support Octavia’s Brood at its Indiegogo campaign page.

Excerpt from “Black Angels and Blue Roses”

by Walidah Imarisha

[Note by Noah: This is an excerpt from a story by Walidah Imarisha which will be included in the anthology Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction Stories From Social Justice Movements, edited by Walidah Imarisha and Adrienne Maree Brown. The book is a collection of sci-fi stories by social activist writers, inspired by the work of Octavia Butler. The editors are currently running a funding campaign on indiegogo, where you can find out more about the project.

Thanks to Walidah and Adrienne for running this excerpt here!

Octavia Butler

… The gang stayed for a few hours, drinking copious amounts of whiskey and making more noise than the rest of the bar put together.

Finally they started to trickle out. Tamee, who had to take a piss, was the last one out. He walked down Lennox on unsteady legs. Night still warm from the summer’s day heat, like the hood of a parked car. He looked up at the moon. It was blood red. Damn, Tamee thought. Rubbed his head. His fingers tracing the uneven scar that ran from the top of his cranium, down the right side of his forehead. Crossed the socket where his right eye used to be. Ended an inch or so under his bottom lid. Like a permanent tear.

The doctors said he was damn lucky. If his head had been turned just a few degrees up, it would have penetrated his brain. If it didn’t kill him, it would have left him a vegetable.

This is why you don’t try to take on five nazi skinheads all by yourself, he mused ruefully to himself. Especially not if one of them has a crowbar. His mother always said he was stubborn as a mule and had to learn everything the hardest way possible.

As if called into existence by his thought, Tamee caught sight of a nazi he knew sauntering on the other side of the street. Tamee didn’t know his real name, only knew the bonehead went by Joker. Tamee had had a number of run-ins with Joker and his crew. Tamee had come out the worse for wear on most of those too.

But not tonight, he thought grimly. Cracked his knuckles. Tonight was payback night.

Tamee started loping across the street after him, his long legs gazelle-like in their movements.

“Hey fuckwad!”

Joker’s turning face smashed into Tamee’s fist. Blood rained on the ground. Tamee hit him with a flurry of punches. A knee to the gut. Threw him up against the wall. Another combo to the face.

Tamee was so intent on administering the beating, he didn’t hear Joker’s three man crew approach from his right side. His blind side. And he was blindsided. A fist slammed into his skull right behind his ear. He didn’t see stars; he saw a nuclear bomb explode behind his eyelids.

The four nazis circled around Tamee. Boots fell like autumn leaves. Tamee was protecting his head, his face, his internal organs. But not for long. He knew they were just getting started. He wouldn’t be able to hold out long. Tamee could tell they didn’t mean to leave anything of him when they were done.

Just when Tamee felt his consciousness begin to slip away, A. rounded the corner. She stopped, took a couple seconds to assess the scene.

“Hey, get out of here! Get out of here, black bitch, if you know what’s good for you!’

A.’s eyes smoldered, but she turned to leave. Her eyes caught Tamee’s. His desperate, terrified, hopeless eyes. She had seen that look so many times before. That look had gotten her kicked out of heaven. That look had cost her everything. She would have nothing to do with that look.

But the nazis took her moment of reflection for defiance. Three of them peeled off. Menaced towards her. Circled her like jackals. One of them pulled out a knife.

“You shoulda left when you had the chance, bitch.”

She locked her eyes on them. She knew they couldn’t seriously injure her. They didn’t have the power. But they could hurt her. And she’d felt enough pain for three lifetimes.

And she just really really hated boneheads.

With one fluid motion, A. whipped her trenchcoat off. Her remaining wing was wrapped across her shoulder like a shawl. Tied down by a cord wrapped firmly around her waist. She ripped the cord free, and her wing, black as the night’s sky, snapped back and out with a five foot span. Reaching for the lost heavens.

“What the fuck???” The closest nazi to her scrambled backwards.

“Man, it’s kind of costume or something. Don’t be fucking stupid!” Joker yelled. “Fuck her up!”

The nazi nodded and charged A. She jumped in the air, flapping her wing while she did. She could not fly with only one wing, but she could jump much higher than humans, and descend slowly.

The nazi ran right under her, carried by his own momentum. As he passed, she kicked him with a boot to the back of his head. He sprawled on the concrete like split milk, unconscious.

She made short work of the other two who bellowed and ran at her, enraged. An elbow to the face. Flurry of punches. Broken nose. Blood. Silence.

Joker stared at her. Fear and loathing mixed in his eyes. He looked about to rush her. But he must have calculated his odds because instead he turned to run. A. leapt forward. Wrapped her wing around him. Squeezed. Squeezed until he stopped struggling and slumped to the ground, breathing shallowly.

She surveyed the five men sprawled on the ground, the nazis and Tamee, who had uncurled himself from a ball but had not moved during the fight. Frozen with amazement and awe. He felt absolutely no fear. He knew he was in the presence of something incredible. Exalted. Divine.

She looked down at Joker. She should just leave them all here for the cops to find and be done with it. This wasn’t her problem. She wouldn’t have gotten involved if they hadn’t pulled her into it. She shouldn’t have gotten involved at all. Why the fuck did she? she asked herself, disgusted. She glanced at Tamee, the cut on his forehead leaking blood into his good eye.

A. sighed. She had lived in Harlem long enough to know sending anyone into the criminal justice system did nothing but make them more damaged and desperate. She hid in the shadows, watched the police patrolling the streets. Not patrolling. Hunting. There was no mercy behind those shining badges. The scene played out over and over like a flickering film projected onto the city. And she had done nothing each time before, just waited for the reel to end.

She knelt down next to Joker. Like this, he looked so fragile. So breakable. She could end this right now. Do to him what he had planned to do to Tamee. She was an Angel, after all, even if she was fallen – she would be merciful.

A small voice in the recesses of her mind asked, Should I use the Voice? She stared down at this manchild she knew to be a killer. She could smell it on him; this was not his first attempt at taking a life, nor would it be his last if something wasn’t done. She shook her head, trying to clear the thought out, but it clung like a burr.

When she was an Angel, A. had used her Voice to change hearts. Sing humans good. There were no repercussions as an Angel, with a sanction from the Almighty. It had actually been a joyous communion, and the glow she felt had filled her with even more warmth and peace than she thought possible.

But God had taken that when he set fire to her and expelled her from Heaven. Sure, He had left her the Voice. But if she used it, she took on these humans’ pain. She had tried it only once, when she was first exiled. It was flames of the barrier between Heaven and Earth licking at her flesh again, biting and tearing until she could not take it. She had collapsed; it took days to recover fully. One of the many reasons she avoided interacting with humans when at all possible. She’d already suffered enough pain for them.

But now that this situation stared her in the face, she found she could not just walk away. Even though everything inside her screamed to. She could not shake the look in Tamee’s eyes, the plea for help. Mercy. Grace. It had been a long time since she had been reminded not only of the horror of humans, but the vulnerability.

A. opened her mouth. She began to sing. It was the most incredible sound Tamee had ever heard. Cool clean waterfalls cascading down into cool green valleys, his mother’s hands cool on his hot forehead, the beauty of a grove of olive trees bright in the sunshine in his stolen home of Palestine. His whole family, even the ones murdered and lost, gathered, arm and arm. Complete peace.

A golden light shone in A’s mouth, illuminating through her flesh. She leaned over Joker. The light cracked and rained down on his face. Soaked into his skin. At the same time, a murky darkness crept up the stream of light. Climbed into A. through her mouth. Darkened the glow emanating from her chest. She grimaced and her voice faltered, but she continued singing.

Joker’s face, twisted with hate and rage even when unconscious, began to relax. The lines of anger smoothed out. His face became serene. A child curled up in the arms of its mother, protected and safe.

A. turned and did the same to the others. The light in her chest almost entirely eclipsed by the smoky darkness from their mouths. She could barely reach the one furthest away, had to drag herself over, still singing but now her voice sounded like a small wounded animal.

When she finished with the last one, she leaned backwards. Wavered like a candle in a strong wind. She keeled over, her head hitting the ground with a sickening thud.

Tamee rushed forward to lift her up, despite the many injuries that screamed at him.

“Are you all right?” he stared down into her face. The color of coffee beans dusted with rose petals. Flawless like glass. Eyes like galaxies.

She was more beautiful than anything he could have ever imagined.

Her eyes focused on him. She jerked away and tried to stand up. She failed, and only accomplished rolling away onto her side.

“Get off.” Her voice, though thin, was infused with steel. Reached out her hand to try to lift herself up.

“I… I can’t believe you’re here. You exist. I never thought I would see something… someone like you…” Tamee sputtered.

A. gave up trying to stand. Laid there breathing shallowly for a while. Reached into her trenchcoat pocket. Pulled out a cigarette.

“So you think you know what I am.” The snap of the lighter.

“Of course I know what you are.” A touch of awe in his voice. “It’s been a minute since I touched the Qu’ran. Years since I went to masjid. But I would know you anywhere.

“You’re an angel.”

She paused, the look of pain on her face completely unconnected to her injuries.

After a long minute, she growled, “I used to be an Angel. Now I’m just like all of you. Scraping away on the face of this cesspool called a planet until you fucking die.”

“Wow… um, okay,” Tamee stuttered.

Silence. Her ragged exhale.

“Well, thanks. For saving me. I mean. I really appreciate it. Really,” he babbled.

“Don’t thank me.” Her tone stung more than a slap to the face. “If I’d had my way, I wouldn’t have done shit.”

Tamee was a little taken aback by her callousness. She didn’t sound much like an angel. For one thing, he had not imagined an angel would curse. He thought there would be more love and compassion. She wasn’t really at all how he imagined an angel.

She was a million times better.

A. reached into her pocket and pulled out some more black cord. She propped herself up against the brick of a building. Gingerly folded her wing forward across her shoulder. Began wrapping the cord around and around, until the wing was strapped down securely.

“So, what’s your name?” Tamee asked after a minute.

“Don’t have one.”

“Well, what did they call you back then? In… you know, in Heaven?”

“Nothing. Angels don’t have names. We know each other. We can… “

A. had no words to describe the flow of energy. The connected contentment that linked all of the Angels. God. Heaven itself. They were all one. Separate and one. There was a me, but there was no you. Everything was felt. A continuous feedback loop of perfect joy. There were no human words to describe it, because they could not even fathom the depths of beauty that come from being part of God. It made her angry to try to find words to explain the most painful loss she would or could ever have.

A. barked, “ We just feel each other, okay.”

“Okay, can I just call you Angel then?”

“No.” She threw her trenchcoat over her shoulders as she staggered to her feet. She began dragging herself away. Tamee sat, frozen, wanting to yell for her to wait, wanting to say something, anything, that would make her stay. Make her turn around so he could see her face one more time. But he could think of nothing. His heart contracted in his chest as he watched her limp away.

She stopped, hand on the dirty brick beside her. She turned her head slightly to the right. Enough for him to see her face in profile.

“You can call me A.

“Ain’t no Angels in Harlem.”

On November 2, 2006, Jeff Deskovic’s indictment charging him with murder, rape, and possession of a weapon was dismissed on the grounds of actual innocence. Postconviction DNA testing both proved Deskovic’s innocence and identified the real perpetrator of a 1989 murder and rape.

Mariarosa Dalla Costa explores the relation between capital and reproduction and regards the powers of the “actors” of the latter (women, indigenous people and earth) as decisive force “that can lift the increasingly deadly siege capitalist development imposes on human reproduction”. She argues that the woman’s question, the question of the indigenous populations, and the question of the Earth have close synergies, and thus it is no surprising that in the last two decades they have become of great importance. If the path towards a “different kind of development cannot ignore them” it is because of the many powers (powers to) these subjects have. The many powers of civilisations that have not died “but have managed to conceal themselves” reside in the secrets that “have been maintained thanks to their resistance to the will to annihilate them.” The gift of struggles. Also the Earth has “many powers, especially its power to reproduce itself and humanity as one of its parts.” And these powers have been “discovered, preserved and enhanced more by women’s knowledge than male science”. These triple knowledge/powers – of women, of indigenous people and of the earth – should “find a way of emerging and being heard” and act as the decisive force they are.

Marxism and art

My name is Jason. I turned 35 less than a week ago. My first job was maintenance work at a public pool when I was 17. I worked 40 hours a week while I was in college. I’ve never gone longer than six months without employment in my life and I just spent the last three years in the military, one of which consisted of a combat tour of Afghanistan.

Oh, and I’m now on food stamps. Since June, as a matter of fact.

Why am I on food stamps?

The same reason everyone on food stamps is on food stamps: because I would very much enjoy not starving.

I mean, if that’s okay with you:

Mr. or Mrs. Republican congressman.

Mr. or Mrs. Conservative commentator.

Mr. or Mrs. “welfare queen” letter-to-the-editor author

.
Mr. or Mrs. “fiscal conservative, reason-based” libertarian.

I do apologize for burdening you on the checkout line with real-life images of American-style poverty. I know you probably believe the only true starving people in the world have flies buzzing around their eyes while they wallow away, near-lifeless in gutters.

Hate to burst the bubble, but those people don’t live in this country.

I do. And millions like me. Millions of people in poverty who fall into three categories.

Let’s call them the “lucky” category, since conservatives seem to think people on welfare have hit some sort of jackpot:

Those living paycheck to paycheck? They’re a little lucky.

Those living unemployment check to unemployment check? They’re a little luckier.

Those living 2nd of the month to 2nd of the month? Ding! We’ve hit the jackpot!

The 2nd of the month being the time when funds gets electronically deposited onto the EBT card, [at least in NY] for those who’ve never been fortunate enough to hit that $175/month Powerball.

I fall into the latter two categories. But I’ve known people recently — soldiers in the Army — who were in the first and third. They were off fighting in Afghanistan while their wives were at home, buying food at the on-post commissary with food stamps.

And nobody bats an eye there, because it’s not uncommon in the military.

It’s not uncommon — nor is it shameful. It might be shameful how little service-members are paid, but that’s a separate issue.

The fact remains anyone at a certain income level can find it difficult from time to time to pay for everything. And when you’re poor you learn to make sacrifices. Food shouldn’t be one of them.

...despite prevailing racial stereotypes, which first became mainstream during President Ronald Reagan’s tenure and his propagation of the Chicago “welfare queen” myth, the overwhelming majority of food stamp recipients are white. And curiously, many of them are Republicans. USDA data show that in 2011, 37 percent of food stamp users were from white, non-Hispanic households.

And of the 254 counties where the number of food stamp recipients doubled between 2007 and 2011, Republican candidate Mitt Romney won 213 in last year’s presidential election. Bloomberg News compiled research revealing that Kentucky’s Owsley County — which backed Romney with 81 percent of its vote — had the largest proportion of food stamp recipients of all the communities where Romney won.

What is most curious is that this isn’t surprising. The poorest states in the union tend to be the most reliably red, with Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Kentucky, Tennessee and Arkansas among the top 10.

According to the Bloomberg research, more than half of Owsley County’s population — 52 percent — received food stamps in 2011 alone. The county’s racial makeup is 97.6 percent white, and it has a median household income of $19,344 — in comparison with the national median household income of $52,762. In fact, four in 10 of the country’s residents live below the poverty line, based on U.S. census statistics.

Republican Rep. Hal Rogers, who represents Owsley County and won his 16th term in the House of Representatives last year, boldly joined the GOP majority that voted to cut billions from food stamp services. It seems mind-boggling that Rogers also won 84 percent of the vote, yet in matters that most concern the economic interests of his constituents, he acts with impunity.

And Rogers isn’t alone.

Two-thirds of the 39 legislators who represent America’s 100 hungriest counties voted “yea” on behalf of the measure, which eventually passed 217-210. Reps. Andy Barr, R-Ky., Paul Broun, R-Ga., Gregg Harper, R-Miss., and a host of others joined. In fact, all but 15 members of the Grand Old Party voted in favor.

During the food stamp debate, GOP Rep. Stephen Fincher, who received thousands in farm subsidies, responded to a Democratic Congressman during the debate over the cuts by quoting the bible, saying “the one who is unwilling to work shall not eat.”

The Republican Vote to Cut Food Stamps is Really a Decision to Kill the "Useless Eaters"

 Our agricultural systems are threatened by industries that seek to control our seeds by all available means. The outcome of this war will determine the future of humanity, as all of us depend on seeds for our daily food.

In their drive to build monopolies and steal our natural wealth, corporations and the governments who serve them place at risk all of humanity’s food and agriculture. A handful of genetically uniform varieties replace thousands of local varieties, eroding the genetic diversity that sustains our food system. Faced with climate change, diversity is a strength, and uniformity a weakness. Commercial seeds drastically reduce the capacity of humanity to face and adapt to climate change. This is why we maintain that peasant agriculture and its peasant seeds contribute to the cooling of the planet.

...hybrid and genetically modified seeds require enormous quantities of pesticides, chemical fertilizers and water, driving up production costs and damaging the environment. Such seeds are also more susceptible to droughts, plant diseases and pest attacks, and have already caused hundreds of thousands of cases of crop failures and have left devastated household economies in their wake. The industry has bred seeds that cannot be cultivated without harmful chemicals. They have also been bred to be harvested using large machinery and are kept alive artificially to withstand transport. But the industry has ignored a very important aspect of this breeding: our health. The result is industrial seeds that grow fast have lost nutritional value and are full of chemicals. They cause numerous allergies and chronic illnesses, and contaminate the soil, water and air that we breathe.

Let us not be mistaken. We are faced with a war for control over seeds. And our common future depends on its outcome. It is through this lens that we must analyze the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture (ITPGRFA), in order to understand what is at stake and what positions we should take.

...we must situate the Treaty in its historical context of constant attempts to steal our seeds. The industry and most governments are using the Treaty to legitimate the industry’s access to those peasant seeds that are stored in collections around the world. The Treaty recognizes and legitimizes industrial property over seeds, thus creating the required conditions for theft and monopoly control. In the Treaty, the florid language used to describe Farmers’ Rights entrusts individual states with the responsibility for their implementation. However, states do not apply them. Therefore the mentioning of these rights is only an attempt to inoculate the Treaty against our possible protests and denunciations.

The result is a treaty that legitimates the World Trade Organization (WTO) and laws on industrial property rights. It is therefore legally binding with respect to industrial property rights and the rights of plant breeders, while allowing states not to respect Farmers’ Rights. It is a contradictory and ambiguous treaty, which in the final analysis comes down on the side of theft.

The seed treaty must no longer allow the stealing of seeds from peasants

Published on Wednesday, 25 September 2013 20:46

Press release of La Via Campesina

“The defendant’s burden is only to raise a reasonable doubt concerning self-defense...The defendant does not have the burden to prove the victim guilty of the aggression defended against beyond a reasonable doubt.” 

No Selves to Defend: Curriculum for Marissa Alexander Teach-In

Scission believes that a disciplined, yet free, counter rally in sight of the white supremacists makes far more sense then holding some festival far from the scene.  Scission believes a large turnout at the Courthouse counter rally is important for any number of reasons, not the least of which is the safety of those counter demonstrating.  It is also important that the white supremacists see what Kansas Citians really think of them, hear directly what Kansas Citians have to say to them, understand that Kansas Citians are not afraid of them.  Scission calls upon those planning the far away event to reconsider or, at a minimum,  to let those who attend their rally know that another event is happening which will express our outrage directly without any intent of violence. 

Fighting fascists after 1945

Meanwhile the fight against white supremacy, white skin privilege, and racism continue every day. Groups like the NSM are dangerous, obnoxious, full of bravado, but they are still a sideshow. They currently have few followers and little power. Groups like them represent a very small part of the whole white supremacist foundation upon which this country is built. Sure, they must be challenged whenever they rear their heads precisely in order to keep them a sideshow, but the real battle is much deeper, much more real, and much more difficult. The white supremacy and white skin privilege which is engrained in the very fabric of this country (and in fact in virtually all white people, even workers, by the very real material privileges the system of white skin privilege provides them) and which, by allowing them to identify as white ties them to the very system which oppresses the vast majority of us all ( though not equally), a system which is enforced by Capital and the white power structure (through its police and military if and when necessary) is our biggest enemy. We need to all remember that.

NO PLATFORM FOR NAZIS!

The recent appearance of BNP leader, Nick Griffin, has generated much discussion over the question of his right to a platform on the BBC and, more generally, over the issue of free speech for fascists. For me this is an old question about which I made up my mind in the course of the struggle against the National Front in the seventies. At that time we, Anti- Nazi League supporters and the left generally argued the case for no platform in every student union and trade union we could and pretty much won the argument throughout the labour and student movement. Today there is a new generation of fascists (the BNP, EDL etc) and anti- fascists and we need to have, and win, the argument again. This is my contribution.

The first reason for refusing Nick Griffin and other BNPers a platform on the BBC and elsewhere in public life is simply that they are NAZIS. I am not opposed to giving them a platform because I don’t agree with them or don’t like them. I don’t agree with (and actively dislike) Tories, and indeed Blairites, but I don’t want to no platform them. Its because they are NAZIS i.e. fascist followers of Adolf Hitler. Some people don’t realise this because it has long been Nick Griffin’s strategy to present the BNP as just British Patriots, but in fact Griffin and other BNP leaders, like fellow Euro MP Andrew Brons, are long standing hard core Nazis who go back to John Tyndall, the NF and Oswald Mosley of the British Union of Fascists (Hitler’s main supporter in Britain). Moreover Griffin is surrounded by hardcore Nazi thugs, like Tony Lecomber, with numerous convictions for racist violence and terrorism.

Nick Griffin

John Tyndall on left

Oswald Mosley in the 30s

Tony Lecomber (5 convictions under Explosives Act, 12 convictions total)

Some people who know the BNP are Nazis don’t realise what this means. Nazis are not just people with unpleasant views. They are a political movement bent on winning power with the aim of destroying democracy (and freedom of speech), destroying the labour movement (who are all ‘Communists’ in their eyes) and driving out, by intimidation and force, non- white ethnic minorities. Whatever Griffin may say in public, the BNP aim of achieving a white only, non- multicultural Britain could ONLY be achieved by smashing the trade unions and socialist organisations and violent intimidation and persecution of people of colour, and Griffin knows this.

The second main reason for not giving the BNP a platform is that we are not just talking about words here. Every time and everywhere the BNP gets a foothold or an airing of its views there is an increase in racist violence and attacks. This is what happened in SE London when the BNP had its headquarters in Welling, culminating in the racist murder of Steven Lawrence. Its what happened with former BNP member, David Copeland , the nail bomber who bombed Brixton, Brick Lane and Soho. Griffin will not go on TV and openly urge violence but that’s what his thug sympathisers on the street will hear and act on.

Stopping the BNP (and other fascists) from growing and building influence, including by stopping their marches, and denying them public platforms is therefore both a political duty, a necessary act of solidarity with all vulnerable minorities AND, for everyone of colour, LGBT people, Jews, Muslims, trade unionists, socialists etc a matter of self preservation. To put it personally, if the BNP were in power I, and people like me, would be in prison at best and most likely dead. In a town or community where they were dominant I and people like me would not be safe to walk the streets. Anyone who doubts this should check the historical record and see what the fascists did to Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht in Germany, to Antonio Gramsci in Italy, to Andreu Nin in Spain and to hundreds of thousands of rank and file socialists across Europe, long before they started on the Holocaust.

Some Common, but Mistaken, Arguments for giving the BNP a Platform

1. Put Griffin on TV, he’ll only make a fool of himself. Griffin was bad on Question Time, but the publicity he received enabled the BNP to get 3000 enquiries for membership. Every time Griffin or other BNP leaders get these platforms they get more publicity, become more accepted as part of the ‘mainstream’ and gain support.

In these stories, Old Antonio smokes cigarettes and tells Marcos tales of the Mayan gods, who love to dance and walk while asking questions. Through these stories we can understand some of the philosophies of the Zapatistas.

"The streams, when they descend, have no way of returning to the mountains except beneath the ground."

"In the time before the world came into being, the gods came
together and decided to create the world and to create men and
women. They thought to make the first people very beautiful and
very strong. So they made the first people of gold, and the gods
were very content because these people were strong and shining.
Then the gods realized that the golden people never moved; they
never walked or worked because they were so heavy. So the gods came
together again in order to figure out a way to resolve this
problem. They decided to make another group of people and they
decided to make this group of people of wood. The wooden people
worked and walked and the gods were again content. Then the gods
realized that the golden people were forcing the wooden people to
work for them and carry things for them. The gods realized that
they had made a mistake, and in order to remedy the mistake, they
decided to make some people of corn, a good people, a true people.
Then the gods went to sleep and they left the corn people to find
a solution to the problem. The corn people spoke the true tongue,
and they went to the mountains in order to find a path for all the
peoples. . . "

     Old Antonio told me that the golden people were the rich, the
whites, and the wooden people were the poor, the ones who forever
work for the rich. They are both waiting for the arrival of the
corn people. The rich fear their arrival and the poor hope for it.
I asked old Antonio what color was the skin of the corn people, and
he showed me several types of corn with different colors. He told
me that they were of every sort of skin color, but that nobody knew
exactly, because the corn people don't have faces.

     Old Antonio has died. I met him ten years ago in a community
deep in the jungle. He smoked like nobody else I knew, and when he
was out of cigarettes he would ask me for some tobacco and would
make more cigarettes. He viewed my pipe with curiosity, but the one
time I tried to loan it to him he showed me the cigarette in his
hand, telling me without words that he preferred his own method of
smoking.

     Two years ago, in 1992, I was travelling through the
communities attending meetings to decide whether or not we should
go to war, and eventually I arrived at the village were old Antonio
lived. While the community was discussing whether or not to go to
war, old Antonio took me by the arm and led me to the river, about
100 meters from the center of the village. It was May and the river
was green. Old Antonio sat on a tree trunk and didn't say anything.
After a little while he spoke, "Do you see? Everything is clear and
calm. It appears that nothing will happen. . . ""Hmmm," I
answered, knowing that he wasn't asking me to answer yes or no.
Then he pointed out to me the top of the nearest mountain. The
clouds laid gray upon the summit, and the lightning was
illuminating the diffuse blue of the hills. It was a powerful
storm, but it seemed so far away and inoffensive that old Antonio
made a cigarette and looked uselessly around for a lighter that he
knew he didn't have. I offered my lighter. "When everything is calm
here below, there is a storm in the mountains, " he said after
inhaling. "The mountain streams run strongly and flow toward the
riverbed. During the rainy season this river becomes fierce, like
a whip, like an earthquake. Its power doesn't come from the rain
that falls on its banks, but from the mountain streams that flow
down to feed it. By destroying everything in its path, the river
reconstructs the land. Its waters will become corn, beans and bread
on our tables here in the jungle. Our struggle is the same. It was
born in the mountains, but its effects won't be seen until it
arrives here below." He responded to my question about whether he
believed the time had come for war by saying, "Now is the time for
the river to change color. . . " Old Antonio quieted and supported
himself on my shoulder. We returned to the village slowly. He said
to me, "You are the mountain streams and we are the river. You must
descend now." The silence continued and we arrived to his shack as
it was growing dark. The younger Antonio returned with the official
result of the meeting, an announcement that read, more or less,
"We, the men, women and children of this village met in the
community's school in order to see if we believed in our hearts
that it time to go to war for our freedom. We divided ourselves
into three groups, one of men, one of women, and one of children to
discuss the matter. Later, we came together again and it was seen
that the majority believed that it was time to go to war because
Mexico is being sold to foreigners and the people are always
hungry. Twelve men, twenty-three women and eight children were in
favor of beginning the war and have signed this announcement." I
left the village in the early morning hours. Old Antonio wasn't
around; he had already gone to the river. Two months ago I saw old
Antonio again. He didn't say anything when he saw me and I sat by
his side and began to shuck corn with him. "The river rose," he
said to me after a bit. "Yes," I answered. I explained to the
younger Antonio what was happening with the consultations and I
gave him the documents that outlined our demands and the
government's response. We spoke of what had happened in Ocosingo
during the offensive and once again I left the village in the early
morning hours. Old Antonio was waiting for me at a turn in the
road. I stopped alongside him and lowered my backpack to look for
some tobacco to offer him. "Not now," he said to me as he pushed
away the bag of tobacco that I was offering him. He put his arm
around me and led me to the foot of a tree. "Do you remember what
I told you about the mountain streams and the river?" he asked me.
"Yes," I responded whispering as he had when he had asked me the
question. "There is something I didn't tell you," he added looking
at his bare feet. I answered with silence. "The streams. . . " he
was stopped by a cough that wracks his entire body. He took a
breath and continued, "The streams, when they descend. . . " Once
again he was stopped by a cough and I went for a medic. Old Antonio
turned down the help of the compasero with the red cross. The medic
looked at me and I made a sign that he should leave. Old Antonio
waited until the medic left and then, in the penumbra of the dawn,
he continued, "The streams, when they descend, have no way of
returning to the mountains except beneath the ground." He embraced
me rapidly and left. I stayed there watching as he walked away, and
as he disappeared in the distance, I lit my pipe and picked up my
backpack. As I mounted my horse I thought about what had just
occurred. I don't know why, it was very dark, but it seemed that
old Antonio was crying. I just received a letter from the younger
Antonio with his village's response to the government's proposals.
He also wrote me that old Antonio became very ill and that he had
died that night. He didn't want anyone to tell me that he was
dying. The younger Antonio wrote me that when they insisted that I
be told, old Antonio said, "No, I have already told him what I had
to tell him. Leave him alone, he has much work to do."

The clue comes from looking at how warm the Pacific Ocean was in the week or more before Haiyan started to build. The temperatures of surface water as well as the deeper waters of the Western Pacific had risen steadily. Huge amounts of energy were stored up, integrated through the water column, and available for release and for the storm to absorb, fuelling Haiyan’s intensification.

 “Once [cyclones] do form, they get most of their energy from the surface waters of the ocean,” Professor Steffen said. “We know sea-surface temperatures are warming pretty much around the planet, so that's a pretty direct influence of climate change on the nature of the storm.”

What the new paper — “Pacific Ocean Heat Content During the Past 10,000 Years” — shows is that the recent oceanic warming is happening at a historically unprecedented rate. The study was authored by three researchers: Braddock Lindsay, a geoscience researcher at Columbia University; Delia Oppo, a climate scientist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution; and Yair Rosenthal, a geologist at Rutgers.

 “That rate of change in ocean heat content is 15 times greater now than it’s been in the last 7,000 or 8,000 years.”

We told you on Friday that climate delegates representing poor and developing countries are begging wealthy countries for financial help — not just for help in reducing their carbon emissions, but also for help in dealing with crazy weather that’s already happening. They say they can’t afford to do it alone, and many of them feel that their countries shouldn’t have to, since the rich nations of the world have pumped so much of the excess carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

Rich countries have pledged to provide $100 billion in annual climate assistance starting in 2020 via the Green Climate Fund, but they’ve contributed very little so far. “We have not seen any money from the rich countries to help us to adapt,” Saño said. And some delegations in Warsaw are seeking more funding still, to compensate developing countries for the damage caused by climate disasters.

“To anyone who continues to deny the reality that is climate change, I dare you to get off your ivory tower and away from the comfort of you armchair,” he said. “I dare you to go to the islands of the Pacific, the islands of the Caribbean and the islands of the Indian ocean and see the impacts of rising sea levels; to the mountainous regions of the Himalayas and the Andes to see communities confronting glacial floods, to the Arctic where communities grapple with the fast dwindling polar ice caps, to the large deltas of the Mekong, the Ganges, the Amazon and the Nile where lives and livelihoods are drowned, to the hills of Central America that confronts similar monstrous hurricanes, to the vast savannas of Africa where climate change has likewise become a matter of life and death as food and water becomes scarce.”

“Not to forget the massive hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico and the eastern seaboard of North America,” Sano continued. “And if that is not enough, you may want to pay a visit to the Philippines right now. What my country is going through as a result of this extreme climate event is madness. The climate crisis is madness.”

Sano said that he identified with the young people and activists around the world who are standing up to the fossil fuel industry, protesting in the streets and committing civil disobedience. He shared their frustration and appreciated their courageous action. The same sort of leadership was necessary here in Warsaw, he said.

“We can take drastic action now to ensure that we prevent a future where super typhoons are a way of life,” said Sano. “Because we refuse, as a nation, to accept a future where super typhoons like Haiyan become a fact of life. We refuse to accept that running away from storms, evacuating our families, suffering the devastation and misery, having to count our dead, become a way of life. We simply refuse to.”

Sano then went off the prepared script of his remarks that were released to the media to announce that he would be commencing a voluntary fast.

“In solidarity with my countrymen who are struggling to find food back home and with my brother who has not had food for the last three days, in all due respect Mr. President, and I mean no disrespect for your kind hospitality, I will now commence a voluntary fasting for the climate. This means I will voluntarily refrain from eating food during this COP until a meaningful outcome is in sight.”

Philippines: 'Let our people live! Climate justice now!'

At least 10,000 people are feared dead due to Typhoon Haiyan (known as Typhoon Yolanda in the Philippines).

The statement below was released by the Party of the Labouring Masses (PLM, a Filipino socialist party) on November 10 in response the huge humanitarian disaster caused by Typhoon Haiyan/Yolanda. Details on how to donate to the PLM's relief efforts at at the bottom. You can also sign a petition initiate by the Philippines Movement for Climate Justice.

* * *

Let Our People Live! Save Lives, Redistribute Food, Stop the Economic and Environment Plunder! Climate Justice Now!

The people are still reeling from the impact of possibly the biggest typhoon to strike the country. Death toll numbers are rising rapidly. There is huge devastation.

Many are still trying to contact their relatives, friends and comrades, but communication systems are down, in the hardest hit areas. How should we, as activists and socialists, respond to the crisis?

Firstly, we have to support and take whatever measures are necessary to protect the people. This means all measures that bring the people immediate relief.

In the hardest hit city of Tacloban, in south eastern Visayas, the people are already taking what food and relief supplies that they need from the malls. The media reports this as looting and the break-down of law and order.

But we say: let our people live. This is not "looting". People are taking food, where they can get it, in order to survive. If there is no timely and organsed support system from government, people just have to do it themselves and they should organise themselves to do it more effectively.

Even some grocery owners understand the need for this. According to one report of a man who broke into a grocery store: "The owner said we can take the food, but not the dried goods. Our situation is so dismal. We have deaths in our family. We need to save our lives. Even money has no use here now”.

Where possible, PLM will assist them to organise to take over food supplies and necessary relief goods.

Then there’s the issue of the government response. Our experience has been that it has always been too slow and inadequate. Any efforts are undermined by corruption. The exposure of the organised plunder by the political elite and sections of government, of development funds or “pork barrel” funds meant for the people, is a testimony to this.

This outraged the country and brought almost half-a-million people out in to the streets in a huge show of protest on August 26. While one plunderer has been arrested, the president has not responded decisively to clean up the system.

The public funds plundered by the elite should have been used for preventative measures to support the people weather these disasters: for infrastructure, including better sea walls and communication infrastructure; for early warning systems; for well-constructed and therefore safe public housing, to replace huts and shacks built out of dried leaves and cardboard; for health and education; for equipment and personnel for rapid emergency response, and the list is endless.

But no, this was not the case, it was eaten up by the greed of the elite classes.

Unfortunately, we have no reason to believe that the government and the system will deliver and meet the needs of the people, this time round either. The self-interest of the elite, and their control of the government and the system that is designed to perpetuate their interests, through the plunder of the people’s assets and resources, renders the entire set-up inutile in the face of a disaster on this scale.

Then there are our international "allies", such as the United States government, who have sent us their best wishes. But these so-called "allies" are also responsible for the situation faced by our people.

These typhoons are part of the climate crisis phenomenon faced by the world today. Super Typhoon Haiyan (referred to as Yolanda in the Philippines) was one of the most intense tropical cyclones at landfall on record when it struck the Philippines on November 7. Its maximum sustained winds at landfall were pegged at 195 mph with gusts above 220 mph.

Some meteorologists even proclaimed it to be the strongest tropical cyclone at landfall in recorded history. Haiyan’s strength and the duration of its Category 5 intensity — the storm remained at peak Category 5 intensity for an incredible 48 straight hours.

The still-rising greenhouse gas emissions responsible for the climate crisis are disproportionately emitted by the rich and developed countries, from the US, Europe to Australia. For centuries, these rich, developed countries have polluted and plundered our societies, emitting too much greenhouse gases to satisfy their greed for profit. They have built countless destructive projects all over the world like polluting factories, coal-fired power plants, nuclear power plants and mega dams. They have also pushed for policies allowing extractive industries to practice wasteful and irresponsible extraction of the Earth’s minerals.

They continue to wage environmentally destructive wars and equip war industries, for corporate profits. All of this has fast-tracked the devastation of the Earth’s ecological system and brought about unprecedented changes in the planet’s climate.

But these are the same rich countries whose political elite are ignoring climate change and the climate crisis. Australia has recently elected a government that denies the very existence of climate change and has refused to send even a junior minister to the climate conference in Warsaw, Poland.

The question of climate justice — for the rich countries to bear the burden of taking the necessary measures for stopping it and to pay reparations and compensate those in poorer countries who are suffering the consequences of it — is not entertained even in a token way.

The way the rich countries demand debt payments from us, we now demand the payment of their “climate debts”, for climate justice and for them to take every necessary measure to cut back their greenhouse gas emission in the shortest time possible.

These rich "friends’" have preached to us about our courage and resilience. But as many here have pointed out, resilience is not just taking all the blows with a smiling face. Resilience is fighting back.

To be truly resilient we must organse, fight back and take matters in to our own hands, from the relief efforts on the ground to national government and to challenging and putting an end to the capitalist system. This is the only way to ensure that we are truly resilient.

Makibaka, huwag matakot! Fight for our lives, don’t be afraid!

Donations can be sent to: Transform Asia Gender and Labor Institute
Account No. 304-2-304004562
Swift Code: MBTCPHMM
Metrobank, Anonas Branch Aurora Blvd., Project 4
Quezon City, Metro Manila, Philippines
Email: transform.asia1@gmail.com
Mobile/cell No. +63(0)9088877702
PayPal donations can be made here: http://transform-asia.org/

DOES THAT SYMBOL IN THE MIDDLE REMIND YOU OF ANYTHING? THINK SS THINK NAZIS HMMM

...a key founding member of the groupAbolish Human Abortion, a pro-life organization looking to drive a wedge into the pro-life movement by pitting Prots against Catholics apparently.

There's a group of Christians on facebook who call themselves Abolish Human Abortion. They sell tee-shirts and posters, buttons and bumper stickers and go to pro-life marches to verbally attack Catholic abortion protesters saying things like this: 

“Abortion is legal in America because the Catholic Church and the Protestants are not standing up and fighting against it. Marching does not help end abortion… One sermon a year is not enough. Marching is not enough.” – Todd Bullis (AHA)

Their founding members are from a fringe group of Calvinism known as hyper-Calvinism and believe that only those who share their extremely narrow view of Calvin's writings will be saved. It is unclear to me if they are really pro-life or just using a pro-life front to market their anti-Catholic rhetoric. They address those who don't agree with their version of the gospel as apostate and have made negative comments against several prominent pro-life patriots. The founders of AHA call former evangelicals to Catholic converts by the loving and non-divisive appelation "apostate."
"We do not consider Catholics brothers in Christ or Christians at all. We will not seek unity with a Satanic religious system. The only unity that can come is for Catholics to repent of their false religion and idolatry and repent and put their faith in Christ alone (not rituals, not Mary, nor the Church of Rome or any mere man.)" Toby Harmon,  AHA

These folks are the Jack Chicks of the pro-life movement and have tactics very much like the Westboro Baptist cult. When Catholics are standing up for life at Marches for Life, they are cowering with bull horns in the shadows shouting things like the above and trying to make money selling merch. Supposed pro-lifers like this will only add to the chaos and confusion and will cause much harm to the real pro-life movement, which is made up largely of Catholics.

   Avoid AHA group like the plague they are and spread the word through social media that these folks are cultish charlatans trying to make a name for themselves to attack the Catholic faith, using the pro-life movement as their "Trojan Horse." Use your twitter account, blogs and fb to get the word out about these sad folks so they don't confuse more people and detract from our efforts to protect the unborn and those at the end of their lives. God have mercy, it's hard enough to stand up for life in this secular culture but now having to be attacked by a cult that believes they are the only Christians and we are satanic.

This would be almost funny if it weren't for some other antics of this zany group uncovered recently by the group known as the Cicada Collective which according to its own web page, 

...is an autonomous community-centered group of individual organizers located in North Texas. Working through a reproductive justice framework, we aim to address the barriers and lack of resources regarding reproductive health in our red state by providing a channel of access to the resources necessary for reproductive autonomy. We aim to focus on building accessibility for the communities most often restricted from these resources, with the understanding that people’s varied experiences with reproductive oppression and resistance shape the type of support they need. These communities include but are not limited to: working class people of color, people with both visible and invisible disabilities, undocumented, incarcerated, or criminalized people, sex workers, gender and sexual minorities (queer, trans, and gender non-conforming people), legal minors, and those individuals at the intersections of some or many of these marginalized identities. We strive to draw from our sense of place to act in solidarity with those in our area, hoping to strengthen these pathways of resistance.

One of the services they provide is, "... transportation/lodging possibilities for people in North Texas who are seeking abortions."

What they uncovered on the Abolish Human Abortion facebook page is not funny.

The following is from  THE FRISKY (of all the strange places I have cited, this one is right up there), but I happened to enjoy their write up about this more than the ones from my usual sources.  

Texas Religious Right Now Basically Advocates Kidnapping Women Who Seek Abortions

Jessica WakemanNovember 11, 2013

Fund Texas Women, a nonprofit that helps support women who seek abortions, has warned that anti-choicers are encouraging members of Christian groups in Texas — where abortion rights have just been gutted — to join an email list of volunteers to take women to abortion appointments. But instead of actually taking women to their abortions, the group Abolish Human Abortion warns, “it’s a wonderful opportunity to minister to an abortion-minded woman for an hour while you DON’T take her to her clinic.”

Or, you know, like, kidnapping.

Via the blog Daily Kos, Fund Texas Women pointed to the Facebook posting by the group, which reads:

Please share this email far and wide among Christian groups. Cicada.collective.ntx@gmail.com

It’s the email address being used by a group backed by Fund Texas Women and Lilith Fund looking for volunteers to shuttle TX women around for their abortion appointments. Consider volunteering yourself. I’m not suggeting you actually take a woman to an abortion clinic but it’s a wonderful opportunity to minister to an abortion minded woman for an hour while you DON’T take her to her clinic. And hey if you can’t change her mind by the time she gets out of your car and realizes she is at a church and not the clinic she’s missed her appointment anyway

Volunteering to help a woman and then lecturing her in your car, making her miss her appointment and bringing her to a strange location (some random church)? How on Earth do these people call themselves Christians when they treat other human beings so shitty?

Abolish Human Abortion has seemingly responded to media attention about their kidnapping tactic, posing on Facebook this afternoon:

All kidnapping is evil, especially when you take a child to a stranger against her will to mutilate her body.

Way to miss the point.  I’m going to donate money to Fund Texas Women tonight just to spite these people.

Maskobiya

Neveh Tirtzah

Nablus

Fighting back. . .

"Workers’ inquiry is an approach to and practice of knowledge production that seeks to understand the changing composition of labour and its role within processes of social transformation. It is the practice of turning the tools of the social sciences into tools for labour organizing. Historically workers’ inquiry developed in Italy in a context marked by rapid industrialization, mass migration, and the rise of industrial sociology. Workers’ inquiry was formulated within autonomist movements as a sort of parallel sociology, one based on a re-reading of Marx and Weber against established parties and unions."                        -A Workers' Inquiry Reader

Not a single government, whether monarchy or bourgeois republic, has yet ventured to undertake a serious inquiry into the position of the French working class. But what a number of investigations have been undertaken into crises — agricultural, financial, industrial, commercial, political!

The blackguardly features of capitalist exploitation which were exposed by the official investigation organized by the English government and the legislation which was necessitated there as a result of these revelations (legal limitation of the working day to 10 hours, the law concerning female and child labor, etc.), have forced the French bourgeoisie to tremble even more before the dangers which an impartial and systematic investigation might represent. In the hope that maybe we shall induce a republican government to follow the example of the monarchical government of England by likewise organizing a far reaching investigation into facts and crimes of capitalist exploitation, we shall attempt to initiate an inquiry of this kind with those poor resources which are at our disposal. We hope to meet in this work with the support of all workers in town and country who understand that they alone can describe with full knowledge the misfortunes form which they suffer and that only they, and not saviors sent by providence, can energetically apply the healing remedies for the social ills which they are prey. We also rely upon socialists of all schools who, being wishful for social reform, must wish for an exact and positive knowledge of the conditions in which the working class — the class to whom the future belongs -works and moves.

These statements of labor's grievances are the first act which socialist democracy must perform in order to prepare the way for social regeneration.

The following hundred questions are the most important. In replies the number of the corresponding question should be given. It is not essential to reply to every question, but our recommendation is that replies should be as detailed and comprehensive as possible. The name of the working man or woman who is replying will not be published without special permission but the name and address should be given so that if necessary we can send communication.

Replies should be sent to the Secretary of the Revue Socialiste, M.Lecluse, 28, rue royale, saint cloud, nr. Paris.

The replies will be classified and will serve as material for special studies, which will be published in the Revue and will later be reprinted as a separate volume."

Was work­ers’ inquiry a means of access­ing the pro­le­tar­ian view­point? Was it sim­ply the work­ers’ par­tic­i­pa­tion in gen­er­at­ing a uni­ver­sal knowledge?

What is abun­dantly clear is that Marx had a high esti­ma­tion of the autonomous activ­ity of the work­ing class. Not only would work­ers pro­vide knowl­edge about the nature of cap­i­tal­ism, they would be the only ones who could over­throw it: only the work­ers in town and coun­try, “and not sav­iors sent by prov­i­dence, can ener­get­i­cally apply the heal­ing reme­dies for the social ills which they are prey.” This prac­tice of work­ers’ inquiry, then, implied a cer­tain con­nec­tion between pro­le­tar­ian knowl­edge and pro­le­tar­ian pol­i­tics. Social­ists would begin by learn­ing from the work­ing class about its own mate­r­ial con­di­tions. Only then would they be able to artic­u­late strate­gies, com­pose the­o­ries, and draft pro­grams. Inquiry would there­fore be the nec­es­sary first step in artic­u­lat­ing a his­tor­i­cally appro­pri­ate social­ist project.

"...it is worthwhile paying special attention to the uses of the worker-survey employed by Italian operaismo (workerism a section of the Italian workers’ movement)9. The young operaisti, gathered in initially around the journal Quaderni Rossi10, attempted to explain the crisis of the workers’ movement during the fifties and the early sixties. For the operaisti, it was not possible to interpret this lived crisis merely as a result of either the theoretical errors, or betrayals by the leadership, of leftist parties (an argument repeated by those orthodox elements of the communist and anarcho-syndicalist sections of the workers’ movement). In contrast, the operaisti argued that the crisis had taken place because of the intense transformations, in the productive process and the composition of the labour force, introduced by the Scientific Organisation of Work. Thus, the use of the inquiry was intended to reveal a “new worker condition”. Looking at the condition of these new subjects, how they could reopen spaces of conflict and reinvigorate workers’ demands become a central theme for the operaisti’s practice and discourse." Well, enough of this.  On to this piece which I found at The Commune (one of my more favorite places these days). the workers’ inquiry: what’s the point? Joe Thorne looks at the history of the “workers’ inquiry” idea: from Marx, to Italy in the 1960s, to the present day.  This fairly long article touches on debates amongst those influenced by operaismo about how we should relate to the modern workplace. What can we learn from focussed investigations of contemporary working class reality? The point of these notes is: to understand what the term ‘workers’ inquiry means; to argue that it has come to mean at least two different things; to characterise the political objective of these different projects; and to evaluate both the importance of those objectives and how well they are met by the methods in question.  The point is to articulate what place I believe the inquiry ought to have in the ideas and practice of revolutionaries.  It will also say something about research into class composition more generally. Karl Marx The term “workers’ inquiry”, its basis in Marxist orthodoxy, and its association with lengthy surveys (100, questions, no less), originates in an 1880 proposal by Karl Marx. We hope to meet in this work with the support of all workers in town and country who understand that they alone can describe with full knowledge the misfortunes form which they suffer and that only they, and not saviors sent by providence, can energetically apply the healing remedies for the social ills which they are prey. We also rely upon socialists of all schools who, being wishful for social reform, must wish for an exact and positive knowledge of the conditions in which the working class — the class to whom the future belongs –works and moves.[1] The questions included: 15.  State the number of rooms in which the various branches of production are carried on. Describe the specialty in which you are engaged. Describe not only the technical side, but the muscular and nervous strain required, and its general effect on the health of the workers. 40.  Do schools exist for children and young people employed in your trade? If they exist, in what hours do the lessons take place? Who manages the schools? What is taught in them? 81.  Do any resistance associations exist in your trade and how are they led? Send us their rules and regulations The most obvious reason for caution about any plan drawing inspiration from Marx’s is that there is no record of any responses to his proposal, nor any suggestion that it lead anywhere.  This is reason for caution, no more than that: but as we shall see, it was not to be the first time. Quaderni Rossi The most important modern inspiration for the workers’ inquiry is dissident Italian Marxism in the 1960s and 1970s.  Originating in the Quaderni Rossi journal, the idea was taken up by elements in Potere Operaio, Autonomia and Lotta Continua. Within Quaderni Rossi there were disagreements about the method and purpose of the inquiry. On the one side, there was the faction of “sociologists” (lead by Vittorio Rieser), and at that time the most numerous. This section understood the inquiry as a cognitive tool in order to understand a transformed worker reality, and oriented towards provide the tools for producing a theoretical and political renovation of the worker movement’s official institutions. On the other side, we find Alquati and a few more (Soave and Gaparotto), who, based on factory experiences in the US and France, considered the inquiry as the basis for a political intervention oriented towards organising workers’ antagonism. It was a considerable difference from the point of view of the concrete goals of the survey. The distance was even greater though in terms of method: in fact, while the first faction was actualising Marxist theory with themes and methods from North American industrial sociology, Alquati was proposing a kind of strategic research in the study of the factory.[2] This latter tendency didn’t just have a research agenda.  They had a tactical agenda, part of which was that the inquiry needed to be a workers’ self-inquiry.  It implied that not only would the researcher be immersed (working, living) within the research context in question, other workers would be engaged in the process, not merely as objects of research (respondents to questionnaires), but co-researchers themselves. This version of the worker inquiry implied a further step from the simple questionnaire towards a process of co-research: one the one hand, inserting militant-intellectuals, who were pursuing research into the object-territory (almost always the factory, and some times, neighbourhoods), transforming them into additional subject-agents of that territory. On the other hand, actively implicating the subjects who inhabit that territory (mainly workers, and sometimes, students and homemakers) in the research process, at the same time, would transform them into subject-researchers (not merely objects). When this double movement worked well, the knowledge production emerging from the research process mutually nurtured a self-empowerment process and the production of a rebel subjectivity in the factory and neighbourhoods.[3] This (dialogical, organisational, tactical) aspect of the workers’ inquiry is also the one emphasised by Raniero Panzieri: The aims of inquiry can be schematically summarised thus: we have important instrumental goals driven by the character of inquiry as a correct, efficient and politically fertile method to establish contacts with singular and grouped workers. This is a crucial objective: not only is there no discrepancy, gap or contradiction between inquiry and the labour of building political relations; inquiry is also fundamental to such process. Moreover, the work needed for inquiry, the labour of theoretical discussion with comrades and workers, is one of serious political training, and inquiry is a great tool for this. Inquiry should also aim to decisively eliminate ambiguities that persist in our theoretical formation, that is the theory elaborated in Quaderni Rossi, because as other comrades have already pointed out many aspects of this draft of a theory are arrived at only by antithesis; they are drawn from a critique of official policies and of the theoretical developments of the workers’ movement, yet they are not positively grounded nor empirically based at the level of class.[4] Why inquiry?  Wasn’t it sufficient simply to develop the correct line, and hand out leaflets to the workers telling them what they should do?  What set the inquiry method apart from this approach was the recognition that beneath the official rhetoric of demands over pay and perhaps hours, workers had other concerns about their work. A historian of the period, Robert Lumley, gives an example of a woman worker who had been complaining “to Communist Party officials that they had not understood the problems on the shop-floor (tens of women had been suffering fainting fits and hysteria because of the pressure of work, but the union agreed to compensation rather than a reduction of line-speeds).”[5]  She recounts: they came back at me with ‘that’s what the Quaderni Rossi people say` and so on. I, poor thing, hadn’t a clue who these people were, so I went to find out.[6] Lumley continues: She described how, when she went to speak about working conditions at meetings, ‘an official was sent with me so that I bore witness to my experience, and he drew the political conclusions’. The Quaderni Rossi experiment, in other words, proposed an alternative method of political work which attempted to overcome this division of labour.[7] The Tribe of Moles Whilst we are discussing the Italian Marxism of that period, we would do well to mention Sergio Bologna’s text The Tribe of Moles, which seeks to explain the explosions in student militancy in 1977 as an expression of a specific process of class recomposition.  As far as I am aware, the text was never described as a workers’ inquiry: but it is nonetheless considered important and influential as a text which addresses the question of the relationship between class composition and struggle. Bologna’s objective was “to uncover the new class composition underlying these struggles, and to indicate the first elements of a programme to advance and further generalise the movement.”[8]  In the conclusion to the text, he anticipated and replied to a particular line of criticism: Such a proposal cannot be simply written off as a step backwards in collective bargaining, that would prepare the ground for a new social contract between the Government and the unions. It would be absurd to reject it out of hand, for the simple reason that such new objectives would carry within them the representative weight of the infinite political creativity that has emerged in these past few years. Rather, the bigger problem is how we are going to find the point where such a project can be applied – in short, to choose the “new Mirafioris” out of all the various “driving sectors” of the so-called tertiary sector. More specifically, out of those sectors which function as a connecting link between the production of absolute surplus value and the production of relative surplus value – like, for example, the cycle of transportation. Moreoever, even in the simple extension of the rigidity of labour (even in its form as a system of trade union guarantism) to lavoro nero, subcontracted work etc, would have the effect of forcing the factory struggle to take a leap forward. In short, we are looking for the social channels whereby we could break the encirclement that is currently under way, and prevent the movement dispersing itself into a thousand decentralised moments of struggle – a new, long Purgatory of endemic struggles. We have to find something which can function in the same way as did the strikes over pensions and the strikes over wage-zones did, in relation to the workers’ cycle of struggles in 1968-69.[9] But there were no new ‘Mirafioris’, not then, and not yet.[10]  Over the next decade, the Italian revolutionary left dissolved its own organisations.  What informal organisation was left was smashed, and many of its best militants – Sofri, Negri – are still in prison. We should be clear about the logic of Bologna’s programme, and how it relates to subsequent historical developments.  Bologna’s idea was that the sort of research he was doing could help reorientate revolutionary activists to focus on those areas of the economy which were most capable of producing militancy and radicalism. It provided, was able to provide, no such assistance.  In general, this idea – that we can find and target the most important sectors with militant activity is, if not useless, problematic.  There are arguably cases when such orientation was effective, including the decision of the Russian Bolsheviks to concentrate their activity on urban factory workers.  But it is not very often possible to identify the next “mass vanguard”.  For example, it seems unlikely that it would have been possible, in early November 2010 (unless through an organisation with exceptionally deep roots), to identify 16-18 school and college students as the subjects of the next great upsurge.  Last summer, we asked Sheila Cohen to write an article for our paper “to look at the broader political sweep of how changes in class structure and composition interact – or don’t – with issues of consciousness and resistance.”  Her conclusion?  “Mostly the story is one of almost complete unpredictability.”[11] Decomposing the inquiry I: Wildcat Under the heading of the workers’ inquiry, a great diversity of approaches to research and writing have developed: the Wildcat group in Germany being the best known and most committed proponents of these techniques, research models, and political concerns.  It is possible to argue that these approaches tend more to Bologna’s, as discussed above, than they do to the original idea of the workers’ inquiry.  In any case, they include: An organisation basing itself on regular, systematic local reports, which seek to answer a defined series of questions relating to class composition, struggle, etc.  (The ongoing practice of Wildcat in Germany.) In depth interviews or personal description of experience in a single workplace, industry, or job.  M has written on his experience at Hackney street cleansing department.[12]  The ‘Call Centre Inquiry Communism’ (Kolinko) project, which resulted in a book-length write up on experience, class composition and capitalist accumulation in call centres is perhaps the most important product of this agenda.  The full text is available online.[13] Macro-level analysis of class composition and existing struggles in a borough[14], city[15], region, or nation state. It is obvious what these have to do with class-composition.  But it is not obvious that they should be discussed under the same category as the workers’ inquiry, which seems to be a very different sort of project – one in which revolutionaries not only investigate proletarian reality, but engage other proletarians in that process of collective evaluation, as part of a process of promoting communist ideas and workers’ struggle.  Nonetheless, as we will see, such projects are often promoted under the banner of the workers’ inquiry, and by those who do refer explicitly to the inquiry idea. But what are the functions claimed for these different techniques?  One is similar to that claimed by Bologna for his approach in The Tribe of Moles.  As the proposal which lead to Kolinko put it, “we want to attack the question of whether there is a broader tendency of capitalist development and the possibilities for communism behind this formation of a new type of worker.”[16]  Or as they said elsewhere, “Investigation means first of all to find out how we can fight against work and exploitation together with other workers in a particular place and how we can develop a form of power at the same time.”[17] I have explained above why I am sceptical about this approach, and if anything the scepticism seems validated by the Kolinko experience.  What more do we know, now, about the possibilities for communism?  What more do we know about how we can fight and develop a form of power?  Not much. Who’s listening? Ironically, I believe it is possible to argue that, while proponents of the modern workers’ inquiry officially emphasise the importance of listening to workers, and the importance of rigorously evaluating militant experience, these values are not present within their attitude to their own practice and theory of the workers’ enquiry.  A member of The Commune, a call centre worker, has reviewed Prol-Position’s Call-centre, inquiry, communism (Kolinko) publication.[18] Prol Position activists are constantly guarding against being seen to “represent” workers, but rather want to “promote” self-organisation, and so their leaflets and materials are of a largely descriptive character, while also making sharp criticisms of trade unions and pointing to the limits of different forms of struggle. They furthermore take part in activist initiatives set up with the aim of ‘supporting’ working class struggles, for example in the Call Centre Offensive outlined in the book. The chapter on trade unions, ‘base unions’, petitions and strikes has much of interest on the different means of resistance employed by workers, such as in the 1999 BT strike, “Large amounts of overseas phone calls were reportedly made, apparently totaling over £15,000. One call was claimed to have been made to the speaking clock in Zimbabwe with the receiver left off the hook overnight; as well as this, top of the range stock was sent out to householders with faulty BT equipment”. But this part of the study seems to have a somewhat artificial character: the Marxists get jobs in a call centre in order to find out what is going on and relay it back to the workforce, but stop short of giving any practical advice for how to advance struggles. To a limited extent, this seems to recreate a mirror image of the crude “Leninist” form of “intervening” in a workplace from the outside and giving lectures on the lessons of history: i.e. the revolutionaries see themselves as separate from the workforce and with different objectives, using their enquiry to inform their own theories, understand how the working class resists work and to help them(selves) reflect on the world, but not actually doing much to test the water of organizing tactics which could actually succeed. It is no surprise that they report that their materials about working conditions often meet with the response “OK, so what? We know that already. What can we do?” Indeed, the chapter on organizing initiatives concludes with the questions “how can we relate to strikes and conflicts and thus support some kind of learning process? What kind of means do we need to be able to hear about the important developments? What can we learn within strikes and other struggles? How can we participate in the discussions of the workers?…”, the Prol Position activists presenting themselves as outsiders. They hope to promote the values of self-organisation (solidarity, democracy, serious focus on the workers’ own most pressing concerns) within the class, but in fact the book tends towards merely discerning to what extent resistance is taking place already. . . . The workers’ enquiry is a useful tool in the early stages of such organizing work. Whether by deliberate “intervention” or not being able to get a better job, a worker who goes into a call centre already a revolutionary ought to understand the ins and outs of the workplace and the views of her/his colleague. But its value is premised not merely on sociological analysis and personal reflection on the results of the study, but rather as a means to an end. The working class understanding itself not merely in terms of the work it does and the conditions to which it is subject, but rather as an agent of transformative change which examines its force and rights all the better to change them. Workers’ self-inquiry, not an inquiry about workers.[19] A review in Aufheben 12 (2004, not online) makes some similar points.  If the idea is that the workers’ inquiry is a qualitatively different and better way to engage with workers than the standard methods of the left, isn’t it a subject of some concern that workers don’t find the texts which are produced, or the process of research, more engaging, empowering, or useful?  Isn’t it of similar concern that the interviewees often find the interviews themselves disempowering, even didactic (through leading questions)?  Why haven’t young workers in the recomposing class been attracted to the workers’ inquiry?  Enough young workers must have come across the Prol-Position researchers in the course of producing the book to test this: was there any noticeable attraction toward involvement in Prol-Position, Wildcat, or workers’ inquiry in general.  Why has Wildcat, whilst promoting this approach – which allegedly brings it closer to the working class – been less good at attracting radical workers than Trotskyist organisations, or even spreading its ideas?  Could it be that workers are sometimes more interested in general political ideas, or practical ways to build their confidence in action, than microscopic accounts of empirical reality?  Is this wrong?  Who says?  Should the Prol-Position activists have tried to promote answers on the level of organisation?  Would those who participated be in favour of doing that another time?  If not, why not? Decomposing the inquiry II: no politics without inquiry? Ed Emery, a prominent partisan of the inquiry idea made a proposal in 1995 for a workers’ inquiry project in Britain, entitled No politics without inquiry!  The practical objective of Emery’s proposal was described as follows: To set up an intercommunicating network of militants doing more or less detailed work on class composition in their local areas; to meet as and when appropriate; and to circulate the results of our collective work.[20] The political need which this programme was supposed to meet was described as follows. The old class forces have been taken apart. World-wide. “Decomposed”. New class forces are emerging. New configurations. This is what we call a “new class composition”.  .  . The new class composition is more or less a mystery to us (and to capital, and to itself) because it is still in the process of formation. Eternally in flux, of course, but periodically consolidating nodes of class power.  Before we can make politics, we have to understand that class composition. This requires us to study it. Analyse it. We do this through a process of inquiry.[21] In other words, much like Bologna and Wildcat (whose approach he explicitly seeks to emulate), Emery is conceiving research, inquiry as an aid to a grand strategy for revolutionary militants.  Panzieri’s idea of the inquiry as an organising, project is absent from the proposal.  However, if Emery’s approach to the function of the inquiry seems somewhat derivative, his conception of its potential diversity of form and subject matter is creative and interesting.  He asks: why stop at the printed word? We could include song. Woody Guthrie, singing the lives and times of the migrant workers of Dust Bowl USA. Alan Lomax, collecting blues and prison work songs. Pete Seeger and Bob Reiser with their Carry It On: A History in Song and Picture of the Working Men and Women of America . . . And photography. For example, Sebastiao Salgado’s incredible Workers: An Archaeology of the Industrial Age, which he defines as a work of “militant photography”.  And Jo Spence, in Putting Myself in the Picture, where, among other things, she charts the process (a labour process, in the arena of reproduction) of her own death from cancer. Bringing the Inquiry right home into the front room, into the family . . .[22] The bibliography lists such luminaries as Tony Cliff and Mao Tse Tung as practitioners of the workers’ inquiry, each in their own way.  As far as I know, much like Marx’s proposal, and much like the proposal presented to the 2010 ‘Meltdown’ conference hosted by our organisation, this proposal didn’t get anywhere. Recomposing the inquiry: workers’ stories and faceless resistance Young militants of the Swedish group Kämpa Tillsammans have developed their own method of inquiry, which does not rely on the lengthy interviews typically used by Wildcat.  For the purpose of this review, their experience is worth quoting at length. While traditional workers’ inquiries tend to be quite formal, often involving questionnaires and formal interviews, the members of Kämpa Tillsammans chose instead to document their own (often humorous) work experiences, draw lessons from them and publish them on the internet. They deliberately chose the medium of story-telling because they wanted workers to engage with the stories in a way that is not possible with formal surveys. Kim Muller of Kämpa Tillsammans explains that they wanted to change the popular idea of what it was to be a worker; workers do not communicate with each other via “written pamphlets or leaflets but by talking and storytelling”, thus stories provide a far better way to develop a new workers’ discourse than dry analysis and documentation. This practice has since become popular in the Swedish workers movement, with many militants reporting on their workplaces online on sites such as forenadevardare.se (for health workers) or Arbetsförnedringen (for job seekers). The practice of workplace blogging can easily spread work experiences, showing the political dimensions in daily conflicts as well as giving clues about the changing composition of the working class. One such blog, ‘Postverket’ is written by Postal Service workers. They see it as a way of developing the discussions that start in the canteen or on the shopfloor and circulating them among other workers in different sections and in other parts of the country. In turn, the discussions on the blog can serve as the basis for further discussion and action within the workplace. The writers have found that, once introduced to the blog, their co-workers start to read it and discuss it with other workmates, helping to develop their ideas and sharpen their criticism of the bosses and the work. Thus for the Swedish movement, workplace blogging has a number of different functions. On the one hand, by publishing online, workers can transcend their individual workplace to connect their experiences and ideas with those of other workers on the other side of the country. It allows for the deepening of political arguments and critique. On the other hand, workplace blogs can create a new discourse of work, and help to form the basis of a new working class identity. For many people, the mention of ‘working class’ summons up a dozen grey clichés, none of which are relevant to their experiences. Stories and experiences from modern workplaces can help to popularise a more relevant conception of work and class, that can in turn help to propel working class mobilisations.[23] Perhaps, in this idea of workers’ stories, we can see a return to the Quaderni Rossi conception of the inquiry: workers’experience as a means to involve workers in general (not only revolutionary workers!) in the promotion of class consciousness, political organisation, and perhaps one day – struggle.  One implicit criticism of the Wildcat approach by Kämpa Tillsammans is that the formal interview process is somewhat alienating and boring.  This view is also expressed by a member of The Commune who has been interviewed as part of a Wildcat inquiry.[24] It would be interesting to know what a workplace intervention or organising drive based around stories and first person accounts would be like.  Although at least one member of our organisation is currently involved in such a project, the lack of access to materials from past interventions makes it difficult to ascertain the existence of such a project, and evaluate its relative impact.  We do have access to a bulletin and leaflets produced by Big Flame – a British group which drew on the influence of the Italian Marxist traditions we have discussed – but in fact they are fairly ‘political’ and ‘objective’ in their tone, although less so than the (admittedly, much shorter) bulletins  of Trotskyist groups such as Workers’ Fight.[25]  For an example of something a bit different, see page 11 of the Ford Halewood bulletin, which contains a letter and a poem.[26]  My impression is that the Big Flame interventions had a less didactic character, not because of the style of the texts, but because of how they were organised: with open editorial meetings, and because of the time which was put in at the factory gate listening to workers, and basing their politics faithfully on the submerged aspirations of the most militant layers.  It’s hard to imagine any effective organising based only on passively reflecting mass subjectivity, rather than by bringing to the fore particular elements. An intermission: The American worker Well before Quaderni Rossi, a young American factory worker wrote about his experiences at work.  What he and his fellow workers felt, smelled, saw, said, and thought.  It was published in 1947, the first half of The American Worker.  In the introduction, he gives us some idea of the power which dragging working class experience out of the shadows, and placing it in the light can have. The rough draft of this pamphlet was given to workers across the country. Their reaction was as one. They were surprised and gratified to see in print the experiences and thoughts which they have rarely put into words. Workers arrive home from the factory too exhausted to read more than the daily comics. Yet most of the workers who read the pamphlet stayed up well into the night to finish the reading once they had started. In direct contrast was the attitude of the intellectuals who are detached from the working class. To them it was a repetition of an oft-written story. They felt cheated. There was too much dirt and noise. They could not see the content for the words. The best expression of what they had to say was: “So what?” It was to be expected, for how could those so removed from the daily experiences of the laboring masses of the country expect to understand the life of the worker as only the worker can understand it. I am not writing in order to gain the approval or sympathy of these intellectuals for the workers’ actions. I want instead to illustrate to the workers themselves that sometimes when their conditions seem everlasting and hopeless, they are in actuality revealing by their every-day reactions and expressions that they are the road to a far-reaching change.[27] The whole pamphlet is worth reading.  It burns with working class life, and we can see why a factory worker at the time would have lost sleep to read it.  It doesn’t quite fit into the conception a of workers’ inquiry as a process through which to organise, but as a text it clearly has the potential to act as an organising or consciousness raising tool, just by dint of being hard hitting, raw, well written, and most importantly backed up by a clear intention to distribute it to relevant people by a political network (in this case the Johnson-Forest Tendency[28]) with the means to do so.  In our paper, we’ve carried a few reports from comrades on their work, or other aspects of their lives.  We should do more of this; but seek to take a leaf out of Paul Romano’s book: trying to find something in the experience of work which does point in the way of communism.  As for how he does it, I can’t detail that here, it’s necessary to read the text.  However, Ria Stone, who provides a sort of theoretical after-word, concludes like this: “Sure, we could do it better.” In these words, there is contained the workers’ recognition of the enormous scope of their natural and acquired powers, and the distorted and wasteful abuse of these powers within the existing society. In these words is contained also the overwhelming anger of the workers against the capitalist barriers stifling their energies and hence victimizing the whole world. Never has society so needed the direct intervention of the workers. Never have the workers been so ready to come to grips with the fundamental problems of society. The destinies of the two are indissolubly united. When the workers take their fate into their own hands, when they seize the power and begin their reconstruction of society, all of mankind will leap from the realm of necessity into the realm of freedom.[29] The inquiry in context: the contributions of organising and politics Quaderni Rossi’s inquiries, and those of their immediate political descendents, took place in a period of high and sustained class struggle.  This was not incidental to the context in which the inquiry had such relevance, but – in Panzieri’s account – fundamental to it. it is extremely important to remember the outcome of our previous discussion: inquiry needs to be carried out in the heat of the moment and on the spot, it must investigate a situation of great transformation and conflict, and investigate the relationship between conflict and antagonism within it. In other words, we need to investigate the manner in which the system of values expressed by the workers in normal circumstances changes, and detect those values that are substituted or disappear when the awareness of alternatives arises, because some of the values held by workers under normal circumstances are absent from moments of class conflict and vice versa.[30] Such a warning should give us cause to be wary about what we can expect from an inquiry in a period of low class struggle; and therefore some of its limits as an approach to communist activism. If we return to Robert Lumley’s account of the period, he argues that, alongside the emergence of previously submerged demands (assisted by Quaderni Rossi), an organising tradition based around politically educated militants was vital. The agitators within the factories in the period before 1968 were mainly drawn from, or had been within, the ranks of the Communist Party, and were the backbone of union organization. They were especially well qualified for this role for a number of reasons, which related mostly to their political rather than their trade union identities. Above all, these people resisted the pressures of everyday experience that seemed to say that nothing could really be changed.[31] The emphasis in the passage is mine.  The point is that it is necessary, in order to build a militant, working class communist movement, not mainly to enumerate the various reasons for our sense of disempowerment, which are many, but to assert that general truth: that the working class can, through its own action, change the world. This idea has a certain power to break through the fixed objectivity of the present moment.  An understanding of the world as it is must constantly be subjected to the countervailing pressure of working class self-confidence; which does not always have a real, objective manifestation, but which we can assert only on the level of politics, and of our general, abstract understanding of the world.  And indeed, that was the very point of the theory of proletarian autonomy, developed in Quaderni Rossi by Mario Tronti and others. According to one militant who left the Communist Party in 1967: it seemed that at a certain moment along the road something could happen that had never happened before . . . at one level, ingenuously, I believed that this society is not ours, and we must create a society of our own that is different. This is what the PCI taught and it did it well. It is not by chance that it took the best part of the working class because of its sense of responsibility the militant had to be very serious, honest, humble, conscientious, and present himself to the workers by putting himself at their service.[32] My emphasis again: political education is vital; and not all politics flows from analyses of experience or class composition, much of it is based on general and abstract conviction.  This is worth mentioning because is a tendency to see inquiry type politics as the crucial form of political activity: and that propaganda, political education, and agitation for action represent, in some sense, ideological and didactic diversions from the real business of politics.  But if we return to look at the context in which the modern idea of the workers’ inquiry emerged, we can see the importance, to what happened next (the ‘creeping May’ period of intense class struggle, 1969 – 1976) of these very things.  The explosive combination came when the new subjectivity broke through the limits of the old ways of doing things: but in that breaking through, militants took much of value with them: The Communist Party membership and background was . . . no automatic guarantee of a militant’s ability to represent and mobilize fellow workers. When ideology was separated out from, and even counter-posed to the ‘moral economies’ of groups of workers, then it could function repressively as seen in the instance of the response of PCI officials to emotional reactions to working conditions, which was regarded as an economic issue to be resolved by monetary agreement. In the mid to late sixties, a number of agitators found themselves in conflict with the party, which seemed incapable of organizing the intense feelings of resentment and outrage on the shop-floor, and which they felt had reneged on its promise to bring about radical change. For them, immersion in the daily realities of the factory was also an act of purification and a return to the roots of the Communist project. The role of these agitators was enhanced by their political connections, which linked them to outside networks, giving them additional resources of information and moral and intellectual support.[33] Therefore, analysing the period which gave birth to the workers’ inquiry, we can say that we need: not only attention to the subterranean elements of proletarian consciousness, but also, no less vitally, political education, and effective organisers.  We need to be interested in these elements as well. Inquiry, research, and building a working class communist movement The point of this text is to allow me to explain, coherently and in the context of the existing tradition, what competing strands I see in the idea of the “workers’ inquiry” (and, more generally, class-composition related research), and which of those strands I see as being valuable and important. I have argued that there are two principle strands within the idea of the workers’ enquiry: the activist, militant strand, which engages workers as the subjects of research and action; and the strand which seeks to analyse class composition as an aid to the orientation of revolutionary militants.  I argued, broadly, for a positive attitude toward the former (as one element in a broader agitational strategy), and a sceptical attitude toward the latter. To be clear: the conception of the militant workers’ self-inquiry, articulated in the comments of Panzieri quoted above, I think is of tremendous political importance.  It suggests a means of engaging with workers which is more dialogic than didactic.  But how we integrate that dialogic intention into our organising will differ from time to time and place to place.  I think that the workers’ stories idea of Kämpa Tillsammans is probably the most interesting, clearly articulated contemporary idea about how to approach that practically (and the aspect ofhumour is important!).  I think that an inquiry which does not involve others – outside the existing communist layer – as active participants in setting the research agenda, and which does not integrate that with a project to promote militancy, will be of little usefulness; amounting to freelance academia, whether or not that is the intention.  But this means we have to prioritise the question: in what forms, now, are workers interested in sharing their experiences?  Or if they are not, most of all, interested in that, what are they interested in? For these reasons, I am much more sceptical about the model of the very different “workers’ inquiry” promoted by Wildcat, which draws (as I see it) on a wholly different set of objectives, which I have suggested are drawn from Sergio Bologna’s interest in the changing structure of class composition as a potential guide to revolutionary orientation.  So, I think when we talk about inquiry proposals, it is best we talk in very definite terms, and try to answer the question, first: how does it engage people beyond our organisation (and beyond the ranks of organised politicos) as active participants?  (If it can’t, then isn’t that a sign that we ought to be doing something else instead, which can?)  And second: what is its militant content?  That is, what does it try to do on the level of political organisation? So much for the workers’ inquiry.  Is all research which does not fit this conception useless?  No!  As it happens, I find the idea of a study into the class-composition (and capitalist functioning) of a city such as Bristol fascinating, and I would be interested in working with others to develop a fairly full account of changing patterns of work and industry in Britain, as well as the British economy’s connection to the wider global one.  My political motivation for this is that I want to understand the world that I live in, and I want other people to as well, although I’m not convinced either project would end up being able to inform anything on the level of strategy or propaganda.  For this reason, I don’t grant any overwhelming priority to such projects. For example, let’s take the proposal – currently being considered by some comrades – for an enquiry into the capitalism and class composition in Bristol.  If the idea of the Bristol study got to the point of talking to workers, it could have real organising implications, which would be fantastic.  But this sort of research does not begin from working class experience – in the case of Bristol, for instance, it begins with asking questions such as: what industries are where?  Where do workers live?  What is the relation of those companies to global supply chains? So what importance do I think this sort of research has?  I think it does have some importance, but not such importance that I think it ought to be a major drain on time, certainly not to the extent that it competes with workplace activity, in which collective self-inquiry and the promotion of militant activity ought to seamlessly merge.  Unlike the self-inquiry proper, I don’t think this ‘objective’ analysis of changing class structure is even necessarily more of a priority than answering questions such as – what is the function of trade unions in Britain today?  Or – what is the function of ‘humanitarian intervention’ in the modern world system?  Ultimately, I think any serious organisation must be able to address these ‘big’ political questions, as well as know about the structure of employment on the docks.  They are both necessary. Postscript: the inquiry and our organisation How do these attitudes relate to the recent proposals a number of London comrades have made about our paper and organisation?  In a number of ways.  First of all, because if we want to promote any method at all – whether it’s the workers’ inquiry or armed struggle – it’s necessary to organise to grow as a method of, and with the aim of, doing so.  There’s no point having a great idea such as the inquiry, if there’s no attempt to promote it.  Secondly, because having such a small organisation and such a small circulation paper doesn’t provide the basis for having a genuine class conversation, which would imply a certain diversity of experiential input, and ideally a certain plurality of involvement in certain industries, areas and job types – such that one can expect a reply from others informed by their own experience.  Thirdly, because, to return to the original point of the workers’ inquiry – building a communist movement amongst workers’ – the workers’ inquiry isn’t the only way to do that.  There are other methods, and neither Marx nor the Quaderni Rossi researchers pretended otherwise.  Diffuse propaganda, political education, agitation for direct action and solidarity, as well as other forms of activity, also have a role.  They have had for every remotely successful organisation in the past, and no doubt will in the future too. [1] http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1880/04/20.htm [2] http://eipcp.net/transversal/0406/malo/en [3] Ibid. [4] http://www.generation-online.org/t/tpanzieri.htm  Note than insofar as the inquiry is meant to lead to a superior “theoretical formation”, it is by addressing “ambiguities” – or presumably, errors – in existing theory.  The point is not to come up with theories about class composition in order to prove or disprove them.  The point is to use studies of class composition or working class experience to address the questions which workers and revolutionaries are already asking, because they are implied by the political challenges of the moment. [5] http://libcom.org/library/03-agitators-moral-outrage [6] http://libcom.org/library/03-agitators-moral-outrage [7] http://libcom.org/library/03-agitators-moral-outrage [8] http://libcom.org/library/tribe-of-moles-sergio-bologna [9] Ibid. [10] Fiat Mirafiori in Turin was the most important factory in developing  the practice of workers’ autonomy, and hosted the most important of the worker-student assemblies, the movement around which produced Lotta Continua in 1969.  What about now?http://cachef.ft.com/cms/s/0/3d897c94-1dce-11e0-badd-00144feab49a.html#axzz1MSZ9KC3D   http://www.leftcom.org/en/articles/2011-01-15/open-letter-from-the-workers-of-fiat-mirafiori Contra Bologna, the small factories didn’t turn out to be the next major site of struggle either. [11] http://thecommune.co.uk/2010/06/18/to-act-in-union/ [12] http://thecommune.co.uk/2010/08/05/workers-report-general-conditions-and-the-conditions-for-generalisation-at-hackney-street-cleansing-department/ [13] http://libcom.org/library/hotlines-call-centre-inquiry-communism [14] http://thecommune.co.uk/2010/08/12/local-report-from-hackney-london-crisis-in-the-citys-ripped-back-yard/ [15] As I believe the comrades in Bristol are considering. . . [16] http://libcom.org/library/proposal-inquiry-call-centers-kolinko [17] http://libcom.org/library/kolinko-interview-direkte-aktion-2001 [18] http://libcom.org/library/hotlines-call-centre-inquiry-communism [19] http://thecommune.co.uk/2008/12/27/the-workers-enquiry-and-call-centre-communism/ [20] http://libcom.org/library/no-politics-inquiry [21] http://libcom.org/library/no-politics-inquiry [22] http://libcom.org/library/no-politics-inquiry [23] http://www.wsm.ie/content/faceless-resistance [24] A personal aside.  I previously proposed that we base a pamphlet on student occupations around asking participants to give their own accounts of the occupations, and draw out what seemed important to them.  Comrade L argued that we shouldn’t bother “scratching the issue” unless we use proper “research methods”.  I think we should be prepared to see an approach based on soliciting stories as a method as worthwhile as a 100 question survey.  It has some flaws, sure, but it also has the strength of recognising the subjectivity – in the jargon of 1960s Italian Marxism ‘encouraging the self-valorisation’ – of the participants, and their more equal agency in the inquiry process.  At any rate, it isn’t a more eclectic approach than that proposed by Ed Emery, who wants to use photography and folk song! [25] http://bigflameuk.wordpress.com/2010/05/31/ford-halewood-leaflets-and-bulletin/ [26] http://bigflameuk.files.wordpress.com/2010/05/halewood-bulletin-2.pdf [27] http://libcom.org/history/american-worker-paul-romano-ria-stone [28] The Johnson-Forest Tendency was a split from Trotskyism in the US (at different times, both the Socialist Workers’ Party and the Workers’ Party) lead by C.L.R. James, Raya Dunayevskaya and Grace Lee Boggs: its orientation can be identified as roughly ‘Marxist humanist’. [29] http://libcom.org/history/american-worker-paul-romano-ria-stone [30] http://www.generation-online.org/t/tpanzieri.htm [31] http://libcom.org/library/03-agitators-moral-outrage [32] Ibid. [33] Ibid .

Carnival to Commons: Pussy Riot Punk Protest and the Exercise of Democratic Culture

The world will be saved by the balagan (street theater playing farce).” In this carnivalesque paraphrase of the famous dictum by Dostoevsky, Lev Rubinstein, truly the brain and the tongue of Moscow’s recent political protests, and the one who currently occupies the position of “the Sun of Russian Poetry,” sums up the results of the political season that is swiftly moving to its end in the presidential election on March 4th.³

_{Illustration by Nicholas Blechmann for the New York Times. See →}

1. Post-feminist Masquerade

_{Pussy Riot performance at Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Saviour on February 21, 2012. See video here →}

Masks are our visual style and a core principle of the group. We don’t want people to focus on us as individuals or biographies. We want people to look at us as an idea. It’s a principal [sic] of universality. We want people to think that anyone you see walking down the street can be a member of Pussy Riot.⁶

2. Mock De-Crowning

_{Supporters of opposition punk band Pussy Riot participating in a music video shot in Berlin for Canadian electro-pop artist Peaches. Photo: AP.}

3. Aesthetic for Democracy

We cannot fully explain how these militants achieved such a state of fearlessness, which must have been due, in large part, to their being together, but we can easily recognize its physical power and importance. Power cannot survive when its subjects free themselves from fear.¹⁷

_{Pussy Riot supporters place masks on a monument to WWII heroes at an underground station in Moscow. Photo: Yevgeny Feldman Novaya Gazeta/AP.}

The democratization of social life is more than ideology; it cannot be reduced to the homage that every secular political movement pays to the authority of the people. A national vernacular, a mass electronic communications network, a system of population-wide formal education, and techniques for the mobilization of crowds in public spaces are facts embedded in modern ethical life, not mere constraints or tools, but realities that shape contemporary social relations. They may be politically mobile, and they are by no means either universal realities or ones destined to last forever, but for a large part of the world they represent a level of popular mobilization and power no political movement can ignore.²⁰

_{Jacques Callot, Farnos, the Red Nose, 17th century. Russian humorous woodcut, depicting a pig-riding jester. Farnos was the prototype of the Russian folk theater’s Petrushka, a source of inspiration for the Russian composer Igor Stravinsky.}

4. Return of the Balagan

Immediately. Not six weeks later.

Immediately, for pointing a gun at someone. Not for murdering an unarmed person.

Immediately. He was arrested, taken to jail, forced to spend the night, and is waiting on a bail hearing this afternoon where he may be forced to wear an electronic monitoring device.  

Maybe if he had just pointed a gun at Trayvon Martin, he would’ve been convicted of an actual charge.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but weren’t police called to the scene when Zimmerman was moving out of his wife’s house in September?  I think I see what’s going on here; the pattern is so clear.

Zimmerman isn’t a violent man with control issues at all.  He just doesn’t like when women tell him to get out of their house.  If he would get an actual job, he might be able to pay his own rent, but that’s beside the point.  The lesson here is, if you want to preserve your safety and keep your name out of the news, don’t kick George Zimmerman’s freeloading ass off your couch, or he will probably break something and pull a gun on you.

Another thing: Zimmerman isn’t violent…he just has a lot of feelings and it’s hard for him to contain them all.  He doesn’t react to situations the way normal people do.

Tell him to get out of your house?  He pulls a gun on you.

Walk around carrying corner store snacks?  He shoots you.

George Zimmerman was arrested today for “felony aggravated assault with a weapon, misdemeanor battery-domestic violence and criminal mischief.” 

Why?

He pointed a gun at a white woman.

Let me be REALLY clear here: I am white, and I am a woman. I am not, in any way, shape, or form, saying that domestic violence isn’t a massive fucking problem. I am not saying that Samantha Scheibe wasn’t absolutely right to fear for her life, call the police, and press charges. I am 100% on Samantha Scheibe’s side—but the point I am making is not about her.

This is a man who, as I’m sure you can all *recite* by now, saw a black teenage boy named Trayvon Martin walking down the street, at which point Zimmerman the police, followed Martin in his car, stopped his car and got out, taking his loaded gun with him, to follow Martin, and shot him to death. Martin was walking home from the store with Skittles and an iced tea.

Shot him to death. Police couldn’t give a shit. They let him go. You all know the rest of the disgusting story, racist story.

The guy points a gun at a white woman? He’s arrested, booked, and held without bail.

After that menace, George Zimmerman, lynched our brother Trayvon Martin, white conservatives and their negro puppets like Crystal Wright rationalized and justified Zimmerman's actions. They painted Trayvon as the aggressor, as the violent one, as the thug, as the hooligan, as the troublemaker, as the nigger. 

They conveniently ignored George Zimmerman's relevant, violent and racist past. (Source: George Zimmerman's relevant past by Jonathan Capehart). They ignored his 2005 arrest for resisting an officer with violence. They ignored the 2005 restraining order entered against him for domestic violence. They ignored the fact he made 46 calls to police to report on "suspicious" black people. They ignored his cousin, Witness No. 9, when she said that Zimmerman "does not like black people". They ignored Witness No. 9 when she said that Zimmerman "is a very confrontational person".

Now that Zimmerman has threatened two precious, lilly white women with guns, maybe his defenders will finally realize that George Zimmerman is a menace to society.

Maybe the jurors will finally realize that they released murderer. Maybe they will realize that Trayvon Martin's blood is on their hands. 

How many more people must he threaten before he is finally imprisoned?  How many more people must he harm before he is finally imprisoned?  How many more people must he kill before he is finally imprisoned? 

From the air, Tern Island looks like no more than a gleaming white runway in a dreamy turquoise sea. For those with a little more imagination, the 34-acre island, with buildings on its west end and waves breaking on its east end, looks like an aircraft carrier going at full speed.

But if the island is a ship, it's no military vessel. As the main biological field station of the Hawaiian Islands National Wildlife Refuge, Tern Island is more of a Noah's Ark. This 34-acre strip of land is the heart and soul of Hawaii's protected marine animals.

The Center for Biological Diversity, a mainland conservation group, has taken the unusual step of pushing the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to designate the Northwestern Hawaiian islands and parts of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch as a Superfund cleanup site.

“We think that plastic pollution is an increasing threat to our nation’s wildlife and particularly the wildlife in the northwest Hawaiian islands where you would hope, as a marine monument, it would have extra protections,” said Emily Jeffers, an attorney for the Center for Biological Diversity.

 She said 267 species have been documented to have been affected by plastics, through entanglements or ingestion.

“It’s a problem that’s getting worse and worse as we use more disposable plastic," Jeffers said.

“The EPA intends to evaluate potential and observed releases of hazardous substances from Tern Island, including hazardous substances that absorb to plastic marine debris in the surrounding surface water,” EPA Regional Administrator Jared Blumenfeld wrote in a Nov. 14 letter to the group.

Blumenfeld wrote that the area also “presents a scientifically meaningful opportunity to evaluate the potential toxicological impact of plastic marine debris ingestion on highly sensitive receptors.”

The use of disposable, single-use plastic items has effectively turned our oceans into plastic soup.  While it is true that not all marine garbage is plastic, current peer-reviewed research clearly indicates that plastic is the dominant material littering the ocean, and its proportion consistently varies between 60% and 80% of the total garbage in the ocean.

In addition to the plastic pollution found in the ocean, researchers are finding more and more plastic washing up on the shores of remote islands, and in the bellies of dead sea birds and marine mammals. In its August 2006 Pollution Bulletin, the Marine Mammal Commission wrote, "The accumulating debris poses increasingly significant threats to marine mammals, seabirds, turtles, fish, and crustaceans. The threats are straightforward and primarily mechanical. Individual animals may become entangled in loops or openings of floating or submerged debrijs or they may ingest plastic materials. Animals that become entangled may drown, have their ability to catch food or avoid predators impaired, or incur wounds from abrasive or cutting action of attached debris. Ingested plastics may block digestive tracts, damage stomach linings, or lessen feeding drives. The deceptively simple nature of the threat, the perceived abundance of marine life, and the size of the oceans have, until recently, caused resource managers to overlook or dismiss the proliferation of potentially harmful plastic debris as being insignificant. However, developing information suggests that the mechanical effects of these materials affect many marine species in many ocean areas, and that these effects justify recognition of persistent plastic debris as a major form of ocean pollution."

There’s so much plastic crap floating in the Pacific Ocean and washing up on shorelines that one atoll in the midst of the mess could be declared a Superfund site.

Tern Island is the largest island in the French Frigate Shoals, a coral archipelago 550 miles northwest of Honolulu, part of the Hawaiian Islands National Wildlife Refuge. Replete with lagoons, wildlife, and alluring white sands, the island should be a paradise on Earth. But it’s not. Plastic pollution there is so bad that a year ago the Center for Biological Diversity asked the feds to consider adding Tern Island and the rest of the Northwest Hawaiian Islands, plus a part of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch that’s in federal waters, to itsSuperfund list — a list of the nation’s most polluted places. From the petition [PDF]:

The reefs and shores of the Northwest Hawaiian Islands are littered with hundreds of thousands of pounds of plastic garbage. Derelict fishing gear and debris entangles innumerable fish, sea birds, and marine mammals, often resulting in injury and death. Plastic pollution harms wildlife via entanglement, ingestion, and toxic contamination, causes substantial economic impacts, and is a principal threat to the quality of the environment.

A Superfund designation would help mobilize federal efforts to clean up the area. But it would be unprecedented — out of the hundreds of sites on the Superfund list, none was put there because of plastic pollution. “It’s not really common for people to make petitions like this,” an EPA spokesman said after the petition was filed.

But after giving the unusual request some consideration, the feds are on board with a preliminary study that will help decide whether such a listing is warranted.

Well, they’re kind of on board.

The EPA and U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service don’t plan to study the whole region as requested, but they have committed to assessing whether Tern Island, which at 25 acres is the area’s biggest island, should be added to the Superfund list. From Honolulu Civil Beat:

[W]hat has distinguished Tern Island from the other islands, and piqued the EPA’s interest, is that the island’s monk seals are showing elevated levels of PCB’s. The toxic, cancer-causing chemicals may be entering the marine food chain through tiny plastics, said Dean Higuchi, a spokesman for the EPA. …

The environmental study will focus on whether toxic substances are entering the marine food chain through micro-plastics and potentially accumulating at increasing levels, as well as the general effects of micro-plastics on marine creatures and wildlife.

The EPA is also concerned about old landfill sites with buried electrical equipment on the island, which may be releasing PCBs and other hazardous contaminants. Tern Island was the site of a U.S. Naval Station during World War II. 

The federal study could ultimately affect an area larger than the 25-acre island. Improving the government’s understanding of micro-plastics in the environment could lead to more stringent controls on pollution from storm-water drains and water-treatment plants.

The first “postmodern revolution” presented itself to the world through a complex web of propaganda in every available medium: the colorful communiqués of Subcomandante Marcos, the ski masks, uniforms, dolls, murals, songs, and weapons both symbolic and real. By proliferating a profound and resonant set of myths, symbols, and grand historical gestures calculated to reflect their ideologies, organizing methodologies, and cultural values, the Zapatistas helped set into motion a global uprising, and the awareness that behind this uprising is a renewed vision of history.