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ON THE COMMONS: AN INTERVIEW WITH MASSIMO DE ANGELIS AND STAVROS STAVRIDES

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It is Theoretical Weekends here at Scission, so as is often the case prepare yourself for a long read.  This week we take a look from the perpsective of Massimo De Angelis and Stavros Stavrides at the concept of the commons.  I will be reading it with you, so for now I will withold comment.  

The Bristol Radical History  Group describes Massimo De Angelis as an autonomist Marxist academic with a focus on value theory and social movements, Massimo De Angelis works at the University of East London. He is editor of The Commoner web journal (http://www.thecommoner.org) and author of The Beginning of History: Value Struggle and Global Capital published in 2007 by Pluto press. Autonomist Marxist academic with a focus on value theory and social movements, Massimo De Angelis works at the University of East London. He is editor of The Commoner web journal (http://www.thecommoner.org) and author of The Beginning of History: Value Struggle and Global Capital published in 2007 by Pluto press.

Stavros Stavrides is an architect and greek activist.  He is an associate professor at the School of Architecture, National Technical University of Athens Greece.

The following is from e-Flux.


On the Commons: A Public Interview with Massimo De Angelis and Stavros Stavrides

An Architektur: The term “commons” occurs in a variety of historical contexts. First of all, the term came up in relation to land enclosures during pre- or early capitalism in England; second, in relation to the Italian autonomia movement of the 1960s; and third, today, in the context of file-sharing networks, but also increasingly in the alter-globalization movement. Could you tell us more about your interest in the commons?
Massimo De Angelis: My interest in the commons is grounded in a desire for the conditionsnecessary to promote social justice, sustainability, and happy lives for all. As simple as that. These are topics addressed by a large variety of social movements across the world that neither states nor markets have been able to tackle, and for good reasons. State policies in support of capitalist growth are policies that create just the opposite conditions of those we seek, since they promote the working of capitalist markets. The latter in turn reproduce socio-economic injustices and hierarchical divisions of power, environmental catastrophes and stressed-out and alienated lives. Especially against the background of the many crises that we are facing today—starting from the recent global economic crisis, and moving to the energy and food crises, and the associated environmental crisis—thinking and practicing the commons becomes particularly urgent.

A New Political Discourse: From Movement to Society

Massimo De Angelis: Commons are a means of establishing a new political discourse that builds on and helps to articulate the many existing, often minor struggles, and recognizes their power to overcome capitalist society. One of the most important challenges we face today is, how do we move from movement to society? How do we dissolve the distinctions between inside and outside the movement and promote a social movement that addresses the real challenges that people face in reproducing their own lives? How do we recognize the real divisions of power within the “multitude” and produce new commons that seek to overcome them at different scales of social action? How can we reproduce our lives in new ways and at the same time set a limit to capital accumulation?
The discourse around the commons, for me, has the potential to do those things. The problem, however, is that capital, too, is promoting the commons in its own way, as coupled to the question of capitalist growth. Nowadays the mainstream paradigm that has governed the planet for the last thirty years—neoliberalism—is at an impasse, which may well be terminal. There are signs that a new governance of capitalism is taking shape, one in which the “commons” are important. Take for example the discourse of the environmental “global commons,” or that of the oxymoron called “sustainable development,” which is an oxymoron precisely because “development” understood as capitalist growth is just the opposite of what is required by “sustainability.” Here we clearly see the “smartest section of capital” at work, which regards the commons as the basis for new capitalist growth. Yet you cannot have capitalist growth without enclosures. We are at risk of getting pushed to become players in the drama of the years to come: capital will need the commons and capital will need enclosures, and the commoners at these two ends of capital will be reshuffled in new planetary hierarchies and divisions. 

The Three Elements Of The Commons: Pooled Resources, Community, And Commoning

Massimo De Angelis: Let me address the question of the definition of the commons. There is a vast literature that regards the commons as a resource that people do not need to pay for. What we share is what we have in common. The difficulty with this resource-based definition of the commons is that it is too limited, it does not go far enough. We need to open it up and bring in social relations in the definition of the commons.
Commons are not simply resources we share—conceptualizing the commons involves three things at the same time. First, all commons involve some sort of common pool of resources, understood as non-commodified means of fulfilling peoples needs. Second, the commons are necessarily created and sustained by communities—this of course is a very problematic term and topic, but nonetheless we have to think about it. Communities are sets of commoners who share these resources and who define for themselves the rules according to which they are accessed and used. Communities, however, do not necessarily have to be bound to a locality, they could also operate through translocal spaces. They also need not be understood as “homogeneous” in their cultural and material features. In addition to these two elements—the pool of resources and the set of communities—the third and most important element in terms of conceptualizing the commons is the verb “to common”—the social process that creates and reproduces the commons. This verb was recently brought up by the historian Peter Linebaugh, who wrote a fantastic book on the thirteenth-century Magna Carta, in which he points to the process of commoning, explaining how the English commoners took the matter of their lives into their own hands. They were able to maintain and develop certain customs in common—collecting wood in the forest, or setting up villages on the king’s land—which, in turn, forced the king to recognize these as rights. The important thing here is to stress that these rights were not “granted” by the sovereign, but that already-existing common customs were rather acknowledged as de facto rights.
The seal of Magna Carta.

Enclosures, Primitive Accumulation, and the Shortcomings of Orthodox Marxism

An Architektur: We would like to pick up on your remark on the commons as a new political discourse and practice. How would you relate this new political discourse to already existing social or political theory, namely Marxism? To us it seems as if at least your interpretation of the commons is based a lot on Marxist thinking. Where would you see the correspondences, where lie the differences?
Massimo De Angelis: The discourse on the commons relates to Marxist thinking in different ways. In the first place, there is the question of interpreting Marx’s theory of primitive accumulation. In one of the final chapters of volume one of Capital, Marx discusses the process of expropriation and dispossession of commoners, which he refers to as “primitive accumulation,” understood as the process that creates the precondition of capitalist development by separating people from their means of production. In sixteenth- to eighteenth-century England, this process became known as “enclosure”—the enclosure of common land by the landed nobility in order to use the land for wool production. The commons in these times, however, formed an essential basis for the livelihood of communities. They were fundamental elements for people’s reproduction, and this was the case not only in Britain, but all around the world. People had access to the forest to collect wood, which was crucial for cooking, for heating, for a variety of things. They also had access to common grassland to graze their own livestock. The process of enclosure meant fencing off those areas to prevent people from having access to these common resources. This contributed to mass poverty among the commoners, to mass migration and mass criminalization, especially of the migrants. These processes are pretty much the same today all over the world. Back then, this process created on the one hand the modern proletariat, with a high dependence on the wage for its reproduction, and the accumulation of capital necessary to fuel the industrial revolution on the other.
Marx has shown how, historically, primitive accumulation was a precondition of capitalist development. One of the key problems of the subsequent Marxist interpretations of primitive accumulation, however, is the meaning of “precondition.” The dominant understanding within the Marxist literature—apart from a few exceptions like Rosa Luxemburg—has always involved considering primitive accumulation as a precondition fixed in time: dispossession happens before capitalist accumulation takes place. After that, capitalist accumulation can proceed, exploiting people perhaps, but with no need to enclose commons since these enclosures have already been established. From the 1980s onwards, the profound limitations of this interpretation became obvious. Neoliberalism was rampaging around the world as an instrument of global capital. Structural adjustment policies, imposed by the IMF (International Monetary Fund), were promoting enclosures of “commons” everywhere: from community land and water resources to entitlements, to welfare benefits and education; from urban spaces subject to new pro-market urban design and developments to rural livelihoods threatened by the “externalities” of environmentally damaging industries, to development projects providing energy infrastructures to the export processing zones. These are the processes referred to by the group Midnight Notes Collective as “new enclosures.”

Image found on Wikicommons (searchword: IMF) “Monetary Fund Headquarters, Washington, DC.”
The identification of “new enclosures” in contemporary capitalist dynamics urged us to reconsider traditional Marxist discourse on this point. What the Marxist literature failed to understand is that primitive accumulation is a continuous process of capitalist development that is also necessary for the preservation of advanced forms of capitalism for two reasons. Firstly, because capital seeks boundless expansion, and therefore always needs new spheres and dimensions of life to turn into commodities. Secondly, because social conflict is at the heart of capitalist processes—this means that people do reconstitute commons anew, and they do it all the time. These commons help to re-weave the social fabric threatened by previous phases of deep commodification and at the same time provide potential new ground for the next phase of enclosures.
Thus, the orthodox Marxist approach—in which enclosure and primitive accumulation are something that only happens during the formation of a capitalist system in order to set up the initial basis for subsequent capitalist development—is misleading. It happens all the time; today as well people’s common resources are enclosed for capitalist utilization. For example, rivers are enclosed and taken from local commoners who rely on these resources, in order to build dams for fueling development projects for industrialization. In India there is the case of the Narmada Valley; in Central America there is the attempt to build a series of dams called the Puebla-Panama Plan. The privatization of public goods in the US and in Europe has to be seen in this way, too. To me, however, it is important to emphasize not only that enclosures happen all the time, but also that there is constant commoning. People again and again try to create and access the resources in a way that is different from the modalities of the market, which is the standard way for capital to access resources. Take for example the peer-to-peer production happening in cyberspace, or the activities in social centers, or simply the institutions people in struggle give themselves to sustain their struggle. One of the main shortcomings of orthodox Marxist literature is de-valuing or not seeing the struggles of the commoners. They used to be labeled as backwards, as something that belongs to an era long overcome. But to me, the greatest challenge we have in front of us is to articulate the struggles for commons in the wide range of planetary contexts, at different layers of the planetary wage hierarchy, as a way to overcome the hierarchy itself.

The Tragedy of the Commons

An Architektur: The notion of the commons as a pre-modern system that does not fit in a modern industrialized society is not only used by Marxists, but on the neoliberal side, too. It is central to neoliberal thinking that self-interest is dominant vis-à-vis common interests and that therefore the free market system is the best possible way to organize society. How can we make a claim for the commons against this very popular argument?
Massimo De Angelis: One of the early major pro-market critiques of the commons was the famous article “The Tragedy of the Commons” by Gerrit Hardin, from 1968. Hardin argued that common resources will inevitably lead to a sustainability tragedy because the individuals accessing them would always try to maximize their personal revenue and thereby destroy them. For example, a group of herders would try to get their own sheep to eat as much as possible. If every one did that then of course the resource would be depleted. The policy implications of this approach are clear: the best way to sustain the resource is either through privatization or direct state management. Historical and economic research, however, has shown that existing commons of that type rarely encountered these problems, because the commoners devise rules for accessing resources. Most of the time, developing methods of ensuring the sustainability of common resources has been an important part of the process of commoning.
There is yet a third way beyond markets or states, and this is community self-management and self-government. This is another reason why it is important to keep in mind that commons, the social dimension of the shared, are constituted by the three elements mentioned before: pooled resources, community, and commoning. Hardin could develop a “tragedy of the commons” argument because in his assumption there existed neither community nor commoning as a social praxis, there were only resources subject to open access.
Furthermore, it is important to note that the problem of the commons cannot be simply described as a question of self-interest versus common interests. Often, the key problem is how individual interests can be articulated in such a way as to constitute common interests. This is the question of commoning and of community formation, a big issue that leads to many open questions. Within Marxism, there is generally a standard way to consider the question of common interests: these are given by the “objective” conditions in which the “working class” finds itself vis-à-vis capital as the class of the exploited. A big limitation of this standard interpretation is that “objectivity” is always an inter-subjective agreement. The working class itself is fragmented into a hierarchy of powers, often in conflicts of interest with one another, conflicts materially reproduced by the workings of the market. This means that common interests cannot be postulated, they can only be constructed.

Comic strip of Marx’s Capital explaining “What is Society?”

Conceptualizing The Subject Of Change

An Architektur: This idea of the common interest that has to be constructed in the first place—what consequences does it have for conceptualizing possible subjects of change? Would this have to be everybody, a renewed form of an avant-garde or a regrouped working class?
Massimo De Angelis: It is of course not possible to name the subject of change. The usefulness of the usual generalizations—“working class,” “proletariat,” “multitude,” etc.—may vary depending on the situation, but generally has little analytical power apart from indicating crucial questions of “frontline.” This is precisely because common interests cannot be postulated but can only be constituted through processes of commoning, and this commoning, if of any value, must overcome current material divisions within the “working class,” “proletariat,” or “multitude.” From the perspective of the commons, the wage worker is not the emancipatory subject because capitalist relations also pass through the unwaged labor, is often feminized, invisible, and so on. It is not possible to rely on any “vanguard,” for two reasons. Firstly, because capitalist measures are pervasive within the stratified global field of production, which implies that it hits everybody. Secondly, because the most “advanced” sections of the global “working class”—whether in terms of the level of their wage or in terms of the type of their labor (it does not matter if these are called immaterial workers or symbolic analysts)—can materially reproduce themselves only on the basis of their interdependence with the “less advanced” sections of the global working class. It has always been this way in the history of capitalism and I have strong reasons to suspect it will always be like this as long as capitalism is a dominant system.
To put it in another way: the computer and the fiber optic cables necessary for cyber-commoning and peer-to-peer production together with my colleagues in India are predicated on huge water usage for the mass production of computers, on cheap wages paid in some export-processing zones, on the cheap labor of my Indian high-tech colleagues that I can purchase for my own reproduction, obtained through the devaluation of labor through ongoing enclosures. The subjects along this chain can all be “working class” in terms of their relation to capital, but their objective position and form of mutual dependency is structured in such a way that their interests are often mutually exclusive.

The Commons As Community Versus The Commons As Public Space

An Architektur: Stavros, what is your approach towards the commons? Would you agree with Massimo’s threefold definition and the demands for action he derives from that?
Stavros Stavrides: First, I would like to bring to the discussion a comparison between the concept of the commons based on the idea of a community and the concept of the public. The community refers to an entity, mainly to a homogeneous group of people, whereas the idea of the public puts an emphasis on the relation between different communities. The public realm can be considered as the actual or virtual space where strangers and different people or groups with diverging forms of life can meet.
The notion of the public urges our thinking about the commons to become more complex. The possibility of encounter in the realm of the public has an effect on how we conceptualize commoning and sharing. We have to acknowledge the difficulties of sharing as well as the contests and negotiations that are necessarily connected with the prospect of sharing. This is why I favor the idea of providing ground to build a public realm and give opportunities for discussing and negotiating what is good for all, rather than the idea of strengthening communities in their struggle to define their own commons. Relating commons to groups of “similar” people bears the danger of eventually creating closed communities. People may thus define themselves as commoners by excluding others from their milieu, from their own privileged commons. Conceptualizing commons on the basis of the public, however, does not focus on similarities or commonalities but on the very differences between people that can possibly meet on a purposefully instituted common ground.
We have to establish a ground of negotiation rather than a ground of affirmation of what is shared. We don’t simply have to raise the moral issues about what it means to share, but to discover procedures through which we can find out what and how to share. Who is this we? Who defines this sharing and decides how to share? What about those who don’t want to share with us or with whom we do not want to share? How can these relations with those “others” be regulated? For me, this aspect of negotiation and contest is crucial, and the ambiguous project of emancipation has to do with regulating relationships between differences rather than affirming commonalities based on similarities.

Emancipatory Struggles: The Relation Between Means And Ends

An Architektur: How does this move away from commons based on similarities, towards the notion of difference, influence your thinking about contemporary social movements or urban struggles?
Stavros Stavrides: For me, the task of emancipatory struggles or movements is not only what has to be done, but also how it will be done and who will do it. Or, in a more abstract way: how to relate the means to the ends. We have suffered a lot from the idea that the real changes only appear after the final fight, for which we have to prepare ourselves by building some kind of army-like structure that would be able to effectively accomplish a change in the power relations. Focused on these “duties” we tend to postpone any test of our values until after this final fight, as only then we will supposedly have the time to create this new world as a society of equals. But unfortunately, as we know and as we have seen far too often, this idea has turned out to be a nightmare. Societies and communities built through procedures directed by hierarchical organizations, unfortunately, exactly mirrored these organizations. The structure of the militant avant-garde tends to be reproduced as a structure of social relations in the new community.
Thus, an essential question within emancipatory projects is: can we as a group, as a community or as a collectivity reflect our ideas and values in the form that we choose to carry out our struggle? We have to be very suspicious about the idea of the avant-garde, of those elected (or self-selected) few, who know what has to be done and whom the others should follow. To me, this is of crucial importance. We can no longer follow the old concept of the avant-garde if we really want to achieve something different from today’s society.
Here are very important links to the discussion about the commons, especially in terms of problematizing the collectivity of the struggle. Do we intend to make a society of sharing by sharing, or do we intend to create this society after a certain period in which we do not share? Of course, there are specific power relations between us, but does this mean that some have to lead and others have to obey the instructors? Commons could be a way to understand not only what is at stake but also how to get there. I believe that we need to create forms of collective struggle that match collective emancipatory aims, forms that can also show us what is worthy of dreaming about an emancipated future.

Commoning Inside the Capitalist Structure

An Architektur: Massimo, you put much emphasis on the fact that commoning happens all the time, also under capitalist conditions. Can you give a current example? Where would you see this place of resistance? For Marx it was clearly the factory, based on the analysis of the exploitation of labor, which gave him a clear direction for a struggle.
Massimo De Angelis: The factory for Marx was a twofold space: it was the space of capitalist exploitation and discipline—this could of course also be the office, the school, or the university—but it was also the space in which social cooperation of labor occurred without the immediate mediation of money. Within the factory we have a non-commoditized space, which would fit our definition of the commons as the space of the “shared” at a very general level.
An Architektur: Why non-commoditized?
Massimo De Angelis: Because when I work in a capitalist enterprise, I may get a wage in exchange for my labor power, but in the moment of production I do not participate in any monetary transactions. If I need a tool, I ask you to pass me one. If I need a piece of information, I do not have to pay a copyright. In the factory—that we are using here as a metaphor for the place of capitalist production—we may produce commodities, but not by means of commodities, since goods stopped being commodities in the very moment they became inputs in the production process. I refer here to the classical Marxian distinction between labor power and labor. In the factory, labor power is sold as a commodity, and after the production process, products are sold. In the very moment of production, however, it is only labor that counts, and labor as a social process is a form of “commoning.” Of course, this happens within particular social relations of exploitation, so maybe we should not use the same word, commoning, so as not to confuse it with the commoning made by people “taking things into their own hands.” So, we perhaps should call it “distorted commoning,” where the measure of distortion is directly proportional to the degree of the subordination of commoning to social measures coming from outside the commoning, the one given by management, by the requirement of the market, etc. In spite of its distortions, I think, it is important to consider what goes on inside the factory as also a form of commoning. This is an important distinction that refers to the question of how capital uses the commons. I am making this point because the key issue is not really how we conceive of commoning within the spheres of commons, but how we reclaim the commons of our production that are distorted through the imposition of capital’s measure of things.

Image found on Wikicommons (searchword: commoners) “Wigpool Common.This was open land, grazed through commoner’s rights.”
This capitalist measure of things is also imposed across places of commoning. The market is a system that articulates social production at a tremendous scale, and we have to find ways to replace this mode of articulation. Today, most of what is produced in the common—whether in a distorted capitalist commons or alternative commons—has to be turned into money so that commoners can access other resources. This implies that commons can be pitted against one another in processes of market competition. Thus we might state as a guiding principle that whatever is produced in the common must stay in the common in order to expand, empower, and sustain the commons independently from capitalist circuits.
Stavros Stavrides: This topic of the non-commodified space within capitalist production is linked to the idea of immaterial labor, theorized, among others, by Negri and Hardt. Although I am not very much convinced by the whole theory of “empire” and “the multitude,” the idea that within the capitalist system the conditions of labor tend to produce commons, even though capitalism, as a system acts against commons and for enclosures, is very attractive to me. Negri and Hardt argue that with the emergence of immaterial labor—which is based on communicating and exchanging knowledge, not on commodified assets in the general sense, but rather on a practice of sharing—we have a strange new situation: the change in the capitalist production from material to immaterial labor provides the opportunity to think about commons that are produced in the system but can be extracted and potentially turned against the system. We can take the notion of immaterial labor as an example of a possible future beyond capitalism, where the conditions of labor produce opportunities for understanding what it means to work in common but also to produce commons.
Of course there are always attempts to control and enclose this sharing of knowledge, for example the enclosure acts aimed at controlling the internet, this huge machine of sharing knowledge and information. I do not want to overly praise the internet, but this spread of information to a certain degree always contains the seed of a different commoning against capitalism. There is always both, the enclosures, but also the opening of new possibilities of resistance. This idea is closely connected to those expressed in the anti-capitalist movement claiming that there is always the possibility of finding within the system the very means through which you can challenge it. Resistance is not about an absolute externality or the utopia of a good society. It is about becoming aware of opportunities occurring within the capitalist system and trying to turn them against it.
Massimo De Angelis: We must, however, also make the point that seizing the internal opportunities that capitalism creates can also become the object of co-optation. Take as an example the capitalist use of the commons in relation to seasonal workers. Here commons can be used to undermine wages or, depending on the specific circumstances, they can also constitute the basis for stronger resistance and greater working-class power. The first case could be seen, for example, in South African enclaves during the Apartheid regime, where lower-level wages could be paid because seasonal workers were returning to their homes and part of the reproduction was done within these enclaves, outside the circuits of capital. The second case is when migrant seasonal workers can sustain a strike precisely because, due to their access to common resources, their livelihoods are not completely dependent on the wage, something which happened, for example, in Northern Italy a few decades ago. Thus, the relation between capitalism and the commons is always a question of power relations in a specific historic context.

The Role And Reactions Of The State

An Architektur: How would you evaluate the importance of the commons today? Would you say that the current financial and economic crisis and the concomitant delegitimation of the neoliberal model brought forward, at least to a certain extent, the discussion and practice of the commons? And what are the respective reactions of the authorities and of capitalism?
Massimo De Angelis: In every moment of crisis we see an emergence of commons to address questions of livelihood in one way or the other. During the crisis of the 1980s in Britain there was the emergence of squatting, alternative markets, or so called Local Exchange Trading Systems, things that also came up in the crisis in Argentina in 2001.
Regarding the form in which capitalism reacts and reproduces itself in relation to the emergence of commoning, three main processes can be observed. First, the criminalization of alternatives in every process of enclosure, both historically and today. Second, a temptation of the subjects fragmented by the market to return to the market. And third, a specific mode of governance that ensures the subordination of individuals, groups and their values, needs and aspirations under the market process.
An Architektur: But then, how can we relate the commons and commoning to state power? Are the commons a means to overcome or fight the state or do you think they need the state to guarantee a societal structure? Would, at least in theory, the state finally be dissolved through commoning? Made useless, would it thus disappear? Stavros, could you elaborate on this?
Stavros Stavrides: Sometimes we tend to ignore the fact that what happens in the struggle for commons is always related to specific situations in specific states, with their respective antagonisms. One always has to put oneself in relation to other groups in the society. And of course social antagonisms take many forms including those produced by or channeled through different social institutions. The state is not simply an engine that is out there and regulates various aspects of production or various aspects of the distribution of power. The state, I believe, is part of every social relation. It is not only a regulating mechanism but also produces a structure of institutions that mold social life. To be able to resist these dominant forms of social life we have to eventually struggle against these forces which make the state a very dominant reality in our societies.
In today’s world, we often interpret the process of globalization as the withering away of states, so that states are no longer important. But actually the state is the guarantor of the necessary conditions for the reproduction of the system. It is a guarantor of violence, for example, which is not a small thing. Violence, not only co-optation, is a very important means of reproducing capitalism, because by no means do we live in societies of once-and-for-all legitimated capitalist values. Instead, these values must be continuously imposed, often by force. The state is also a guarantor of property and land rights, which are no small things either, because property rights establish forms of control on various aspects of our life. Claims of property rights concern specific places that belong to certain people or establishments, which might also be international corporations. The state, therefore, is not beyond globalization; it is in fact the most specific arrangement of powers against which we can struggle.

Building a Network of Resistance

Stavros Stavrides: I am thus very suspicious or reserved about the idea that we can build our own small enclaves of otherness, our small liberated strongholds that could protect us from the power of the state. I don’t mean that it is not important to build communities of resistance, but rather than framing them as isolated enclaves, we should attempt to see them as a potential network of resistance, collectively representing only a part of the struggle. If you tend to believe that a single community with its commons and its enclosed parameter could be a stronghold of liberated otherness, then you are bound to be defeated. You cannot avoid the destruction that comes from the power of the state and its mechanisms. Therefore, we need to produce collaborations between different communities as well as understand ourselves as belonging to not just one of these communities. We should rather understand ourselves as members of different communities in the process of emerging.
An Architektur: But how can it be organized? What could this finally look like?
Stavros Stavrides: The short answer is a federation of communities. The long answer is that it has to do with the conditions of the struggle. I think that we are not for the replacement of the capitalist state by another kind of state. We come from long traditions, both communist and anarchist, of striving for the destruction of the state. I think we should find ways in today’s struggles to reduce the presence of the state, to oblige the state to withdraw, to force the state to be less violent in its responses. To seek liberation from the jurisdiction of the state in all its forms, that are connected with economical, political, and social powers. But, for sure, the state will be there until something—not simply a collection of struggles, but something of a qualitatively different form—happens that produces a new social situation. Until then we cannot ignore the existence of the state because it is always forming its reactions in terms of what we choose to do.

Ongoing Negotiations: The Navarinou Park in Exarcheia, Athens

Massimo De Angelis: Yes, I agree that is crucial. The state is present in all these different processes, but it is also true that we have to find ways to disarticulate these powers. One example is the occupied park in Exarcheia, a parking lot that was turned into a park through an ongoing process of commoning. The presence of the state is very obvious, just fifty meters around the corner there is an entire bus full of riot police and rows of guards. One of the problems in relation to the park is the way in which the actions of the police could be legitimized by making use of complaints about the park by its neighbors. And there are of course reasons to complain. Some of the park’s organizers told me that apparently every night some youth hang out there, drinking and trashing the place, making noise and so on. The organizers approached them, asking them not to do that. And they replied “Oh, are you the police?” They were also invited to participate in the assembly during the week, but they showed no interest. According to some people I have interviewed, they were showing an individualistic attitude, one which we have internalized by living in this capitalist society; the idea that this is my space where I can do whatever I want—without, if you like, a process of commoning that would engage with all the issues of the community. But you have to somehow deal with this problem, you cannot simply exclude those youngsters, not only as a matter of principle, but also because it would be completely deleterious to do so. If you just exclude them from the park, you have failed to make the park an inclusive space. If you do not exclude them and they continue with their practices, it would further alienate the local community and provide an opening for the police and a legitimization of their actions. So in a situation like this you can see some practical answers to those crucial questions we have discussed—there are no golden rules.
Stavros Stavrides: I would interpret the situation slightly differently. Those people you refer to were not saying that they have a right as individual consumers to trash the park. They were saying that the park is a place for their community, a place for alternative living or for building alternative political realms. They certainly refer to some kind of commoning, but only to a very specific community of commoners. And this is the crucial point: they did not consider the neighbors, or at least the neighbors’ habitude, as part of their community. Certain people conceive of this area as a kind of liberated stronghold in which they don’t have to think about those others outside. Because, in the end, who are those others outside? They are those who “go to work everyday and do not resist the system.”
To me, these are cases through which we are tested, through which our own ideas about what it means to share or what it means to live in public are tested. We can discuss the park as a case of an emergent alternative public space. And this public space can be constituted only when it remains contestable in terms of its use. Public spaces which do not simply impose the values of a sovereign power are those spaces produced and inhabited through negotiating exchanges between different groups of people. As long as contesting the specific character and uses of alternative public spaces does not destroy the collective freedom to negotiate between equals, contesting should be welcome. You have to be able to produce places where different kinds of lives can coexist in terms of mutual respect. Therefore any such space cannot simply belong to a certain community that defines the rules; there has to be an ongoing, open process of rulemaking.
Massimo De Angelis: There are two issues here. First of all, I think this case shows that whenever we try to produce commons, what we also need is the production of the respective community and its forms of commoning. The Navarinou Park is a new commons and the community cannot simply consist of the organizers. The organizers I have talked to act pretty much as a sort of commons entrepreneurs, a group of people who are trying to facilitate the meeting of different communities in the park, to promote encounters possibly leading to more sustained forms of commoning. Thus, when we are talking about emergent commons like these ones, we are talking about spaces of negotiation across diverse communities, the bottom line of what Stavros referred to as “public space.” Yet, we also cannot talk about the park as being a “public space” in the usual sense, as a free-for-all space, one for which the individual does not have to take responsibility, like a park managed by the local authority.
The second point is that another fundamental aspect of commoning can be exemplified by the park—the role of reproduction. We have learned from feminists throughout the last few decades that for every visible work of production there is an invisible work of reproduction. The people who want to keep the park will have to work hard for its reproduction. This does not only mean cleaning the space continuously, but also reproducing the legitimacy to claim this space vis-à-vis the community, vis-à-vis the police and so on. Thinking about the work of reproduction is actually one of the most fundamental aspects of commoning. How will the diverse communities around this park come together to share the work of reproduction? That is a crucial test for any commons.

Beyond Representative Democracy: The Collective Self-Government Of The Zapatistas

An Architektur: But how can we imagine this constant process of negotiation other than on a rather small local level?
Stavros Stavrides: To me this is not primarily a question of scale, it is more a fundamental question of how to approach these issues. But if you want to talk about a larger-scale initiative, I would like to refer to the Zapatista movement. For the Zapatistas, the process of negotiation takes two forms: inter-community negotiation, which involves people participating in assemblies, and negotiations with the state, which involves the election of representatives. The second form was abruptly abandoned as the state chose to ignore any agreement reached. But the inter-community negotiation process has evolved into a truly alternative form of collective self-government. Zapatistas have established autonomous regions inside the area of the Mexican state in order to provide people with the opportunity to actually participate in self-governing those regions. To not simply participate in a kind of representative democracy but to actually get involved themselves. Autonomous communities established a rotation system that might look pretty strange to us, with a regular change every fifteen or thirty days. So, if you become some kind of local authority of a small municipality, then, just when you start to know what the problems are and how to tangle with them, you have to leave the position to another person. Is this logical? Does this system bring about results that are similar to other forms of governing, or does it simply produce chaos? The Zapatistas insist that it is more important that all the people come into these positions and get trained in a form of administration that expresses the idea of “governing by obeying the community” (mandar obedeciendo). The rotation system effectively prevents any form of accumulation of individual power. This system might not be the most effective in terms of administration but it is effective in terms of building and sustaining this idea of a community of negotiation and mutual respect.

Zapatista “rebel” territory. Photo: Hajor, 2005
Yes, establishing rules and imposing them is more effective, but it is more important to collectively participate in the process of creating and checking the rules, if you intend to create a different society. We have to go beyond the idea of a democracy of “here is my view, there is yours—who wins?” We need to find ways of giving room to negotiate the differences. Perhaps I tend to overemphasize the means, the actual process, and not the effective part of it, its results. There are of course a lot of problems in the Zapatista administration system but all these municipalities are more like instances of a new world trying to emerge and not prototypes of what the world should become.
We can also take as an example the Oaxaca rebellion, which worked very well. Those people have actually produced a city-commune, which to me is even more important than the glorious commune of Paris. We had a very interesting presentation by someone from Oaxaca here in Athens, explaining how during those days they realized that “they could do without them”—them meaning the state, the power, the authorities. They could run the city collectively through communal means. They had schools, and they had captured the radio and TV station from the beginning. They ran the city facing all the complexities that characterize a society. Oaxaca is a rather small city of around 600,000 inhabitants and of course it is not Paris. But we had the chance to see these kind of experiments, new forms of self-management that can produce new forms of social life—and as we know, the Oaxaca rebellion was brutally suppressed. But, generally speaking, until we see these new forms of society emerging we don’t know what they could be like. And I believe we have to accept that!

About Principles: Connecting Discourse to Practice

An Architektur: Stavros, you mentioned that the administration and rotation system of the Zapatistas should not be taken as a prototype of what should come. Does this mean that you reject any kind of idea of or reflection about models for a future society?
Stavros Stavrides: I think it is not a question of a model. We cannot say that some kind of model exists, nor should we strive for it. But, yes, we need some kind of guiding principles. For me, however, it is important to emphasize that the commons cannot be treated only as an abstract idea, they are inextricably intertwined with existing power relations. The problem is, how can we develop principles through which we can judge which communities actually fight for commons? Or, the other way round, can struggles for commons also be against emancipatory struggles? How do we evaluate this? I think in certain historical periods, not simply contingencies, you can have principles by which you can judge. For example, middle-class neighborhoods that tend to preserve their enclave character will produce communities fighting for commons but against the idea of emancipation. Their notion of commons is based on a community of similar people, a community of exclusion and privilege.
Principles are however not only discursive gestures, they have to be seen in relation to the person or the collective subject who refers to these principles in certain discourses and actions. Therefore, reference to principles could be understood as a form of performative gesture. If I am saying that I am for or against those principles what does this mean for my practice? Principles are not only important in judging discursive contests but can also affect the way a kind of discourse is connected to practice. For example, if the prime minister of Greece says in a pre-election speech that he wants to eradicate all privileges we of course know he means only certain privileges for certain people. So, what is important is not only the stating of principles, but also the conditions under which this statement acquires its meaning. That is why I am talking about principles presuming that we belong to the same side. I am of course also assuming that we enter this discussion bearing some marks of certain struggles, otherwise it would be a merely academic discussion.

If We Were Left Alone, What Would We Do?

An Architektur: Let’s imagine that we were left alone, what would we do? Do we still need the state as an overall structure or opponent? Would we form a state ourselves, build communities based on commons or turn to egoistic ways of life? Maybe this exercise can bring us a little further . . .
Massimo De Angelis: I dare to say that “if we are left alone” we may end up doing pretty much the same things as we are now: keep the race going until we re-program ourselves to sustain different types of relations. In other words, you can assume that “we are left alone” and still work in auto-pilot because nobody knows what else to do. There is a lot of learning that needs to be done. There are a lot of prejudices we have built by becoming—at least to a large extent—homo economicus, with our cost-benefit calculus in terms of money. There is a lot of junk that needs to be shed, other things that need to be valorized, and others still that we need to just realize.
Yet auto-pilots cannot last forever. In order to grow, the capitalist system must enclose, but enclosures imply strategic agency on the part of capital. Lacking this under the assumption that “we are left alone,” the system would come to a standstill and millions of people would ask themselves: What now? How do we reproduce our livelihoods? The question that needs to be urgently problematized in our present context would come out naturally in the (pretty much absurd) proposition you are making. There is no easy answer that people could give. Among other things, it would depend a lot on power relations within existing hierarchies, because even if “we are left alone” people would still be divided into hierarchies of power. But one thing that is certain to me is that urban people, especially in the North, would have to begin to grow more food, reduce their pace of life, some begin to move back to the countryside, and look into each other’s eyes more often. This is because “being left alone” would imply the end of the type of interdependence that is constituted with current states’ policies. What new forms of interdependence would emerge? Who knows. But the real question is: what new forms of interdependence can emerge given the fact that we will never be left alone?

Image found on Wikicommons (searchword: money) “English ‘Money-tree’ near Bolton Abbey, North Yorkshire, Papa November (cc)”
Concerning the other part of your question, yes, we could envisage a “state,” but not necessarily in the tragic forms we have known. The rational kernel of “the state” is the realm of context—the setting for the daily operations of commoners. From the perspective of nested systems of commons at larger and larger scales, the state can be conceptualized as the bottom-up means through which the commoners establish, monitor, and enforce their basic collective and inter-commons rules. But of course the meaning of establishing, monitoring, and—especially—enforcing may well be different from what is meant today by it.
Stavros Stavrides: Let’s suppose that we have been left alone, which I don’t think will ever be the case. But anyway. Does that mean that we are in a situation where we can simply establish our own principles, our own forms of commons, that we are in a situation where we are equal? Of course not!
A good example is the case of the occupied factories in Argentina. There, the workers were left alone in a sense, without the management, the accountants, and engineers, and without professional knowledge of how to deal with various aspects of the production. They had to develop skills they did not have before. One woman, for example, said that her main problem in learning the necessary software programs to become an accountant for the occupied factory, was that she first had to learn how to read and write. So, imagine the distance that she had to bridge! And eventually, without wanting it, she became one of the newly educated workers that could lead the production and develop strategies for the factory. Although she would not impose them on the others, who continued to work in the assembly line and did not develop skills in the way she did, she became a kind of privileged person. Thus, no matter how egalitarian the assembly was, you finally develop the same problems you had before. You have a separation of people, which is a result of material circumstances. Therefore, you have to develop the means to fight this situation. In addition to producing the commons, you have to give the power to the people to have their own share in the production process of these commonsnot only in terms of the economic circumstances but in terms of the socialization of knowledge, too. You have to ensure that everybody is able to speak and think, to become informed, and to participate. All of these problems have erupted in an occupied factory in Argentina, not in a future society.
Anthropological research has proved that there have been and still exist societies of commoning and sharing and that these societieswhether they were food gatherers or hunters—do not only conceive of property in terms of community-owned goods, but that they have also developed a specific form of eliminating the accumulation of power. They have actively produced forms of regulating power relations through which they prevent someone from becoming a leader. They had to acknowledge the fact that people do not possess equal strength or abilities, and at the same time they had to develop the very means by which they would collectively prevent those differences from becoming separating barriers between people, barriers that would eventually create asymmetries of power. Here you see the idea of commons not only as a question of property relations but also as a question of power distribution.
So, coming back to your question, when we are left alone we have to deal with the fact that we are not equal in every aspect. In order to establish this equality, we have to make gestures—not only rules—but gestures which are not based on a zero-sum calculus. Sometimes somebody must offer more, not because anyone obliges him or her but because he or she chooses to do so. For example, I respect that you cannot speak like me, therefore I step back and I ask you to speak in this big assembly. I do this knowing that I possess this kind of privileged ability to talk because of my training or talents. This is not exactly a common, this is where the common ends and the gift begins—to share you have to be able to give gifts. To develop a society of equality does not mean leveling but sustaining the ability of everybody to participate in a community, and that is not something that happens without effort. Equality is a process not a state. Some may have to “yield” in order to allow others—those more severely underprivileged—to be able to express their own needs and dreams.
Massimo De Angelis: I think that the gift and the commons may not be two modalities outside one another. “Gift” may be a property of the commons, especially if we regard these not as fixed entities but as processes of commoning. Defining the “what,” “how,” and “who” of the commons also may include acts of gifts and generosity. In turn, these may well be given with no expectation of return. However, as we know, the gift, the act of generosity, is often part of an exchange, too, where you expect something in return.

Arenas for Constituting the Commons and Their Limitations

Massimo De Angelis: The occupied factory we just talked about exemplifies an arena in which we have the opportunity to produce commons, not only through making gift gestures but also by turning the creative iteration of these gestures into new institutions. And these arenas for commoning potentially exist everywhere. Yet every arena finds itself with particular boundaries—both internal and external ones. In the case of the occupied factory, the internal boundaries are given by the occupying community of workers, who have to consider their relation to the outside, the unemployed, the surrounding communities, and so on. The choices made here will also affect the type of relations to and articulation with other arenas of commoning.
Another boundary that comes up in all potential arenas of commoning, setting a limit to the endeavors of the commoners, is posited outside them, and is given by the pervasive character of capitalist measure and values. For example, the decision of workers to keep the production going implies to a certain extent accepting the measuring processes given by a capitalist market which puts certain constraints on workers such as the need for staying competitive, at least to some degree. All of a sudden they had to start to self-organize their own exploitation, and this is one of the major problems we face in these kind of initiatives, an issue that can only be tackled when a far higher number of commoning arenas arise and ingenuity is applied in their articulation.
But before we reach that limit posed by the outside, there is still a lot of scope for constitution, development, and articulation of subjectivities within arenas of commoning. This points to the question of where our own responsibility and opportunity lie. If the limit posed from the outside on an arena of commoning is the “no” that capital posits to the commons “yes,” to what extent can our constituent movement be a positive force that says no to capital’s no?
An Architektur: But then, when will a qualitative difference in society be achieved such that we are able to resist those mechanisms of criminalization, temptation, and governance Massimo spoke about before? What would happen if half of the factories were self-governed?
Stavros Stavrides: I don’t know when a qualitative difference will be achieved. 50% is a very wild guess! Obviously that would make a great difference. But I think a very small percentage makes a difference as well. Not in terms of producing enclaves of otherness surrounded by a capitalist market, but as cases of collective experimentation through which you can also convince people that another world is possible. And those people in the Argentinean factories have actually managed to produce such kind of experiments, not because they have ideologically agreed on the form of society they fight for, but because they were authentically producing their own forms of everyday resistance, out of the need to protect their jobs after a major crisis. Many times they had to rediscover the ground on which to build their collectively sustained autonomy. The power of this experiment, however, lies on its possibility to spread—if it keeps on enclosing itself in the well-defined perimeter of an “alternative enclave,” it is bound to fail.
I believe that if we see and experience such experiments, we can still hope for another world and have glimpses of this world today. It is important to test fragments of this future in our struggles, which is also part of how to judge them—and I think these collective experiences are quite different from the alternative movements of the 1970s. Do we still strive for developing different life environments that can be described as our own “Christianias”? To me, the difference lies in the porosity, in the fact that the areas of experiment spill over into society. If they are only imagined as liberated strongholds they are bound to lose. Again, there is something similar we could learn from the Zapatista movement that attempted to create a kind of hybrid society in the sense that it is both pre-industrial and post-industrial, both pre-capitalist and post-capitalist at the same time. To me, this, if you want, unclear situation, which of course is only unclear due to our frozen and limited perception of society, is very important.

Athens’ December Uprising

An Architektur: How would you describe Athens’ uprising last December in this relation? At least in Germany much focus was put on the outbreak of violence. What do you think about what has happened? Have things changed since then?
Stavros Stavrides: One of the things that I have observed is that at first both the leftists and the anarchists didn’t know what to do. They were not prepared for this kind of uprising which did not happen at the very bottom of the society. There were young kids from every type of school involved. Of course there were immigrants taking part but this was not an immigrant revolt. Of course there were many people suffering from deprivation and injustice who took part but this was not a “banlieue type” uprising either. This was a peculiar, somehow unprecedented, kind of uprising. No center, just a collective networking without a specific point from which activities radiated. Ideas simply criss-crossed all over Greece and you had initiatives you couldn’t imagine a few months ago, a lot of activities with no name or with improvised collective signatures. For example, in Syros, an island with a long tradition of working-class struggles, the local pupils surrounded the central police station and demanded that the police officers come outside, take off their hats and apologize for what happened. And they did it. They came out in full formation. This is something that is normally unimaginable.
This polycentric eruption of collective action, offering glimpses of a social movement, which uses means that correspond to emancipating “ends,” is, at least to my mind, what is new and what inspired so many people all over the world. I tend to be a bit optimistic about that. Let me not overestimate what is new, there were also some very unpleasantly familiar things happening. You could see a few “Bonapartist” groups behaving as if they were conducting the whole situation. But this was a lie, they simply believed that.

The Navarinou Park in Exarcheia, Athens
What is also important is that the spirit of collective, multifarious actions did not only prevail during the December days. Following the December uprising, something qualitatively new happened in various initiatives. Take the initiative of the Navarinou Park in Exarcheia. This would not have been possible without the experience of December. Of course, several anarchist and leftist projects around Exarcheia already existed and already produced alternative culture and politics, but never before did we have this kind of initiative involving such a variety of people in such different ways. And, I think, after December various urban movements gained a new momentum, understanding that we weren’t simply demanding something but that we had a right to it. Rejecting being governed and taking our lives into our own hands, no matter how ambiguous that may be, is a defining characteristic of a large array of “after December” urban movement actions.

The City of Thresholds: Conceptualizing the Relation Between Space and the Commons

An Architektur: We have discussed a large variety of different events, initiatives, and projects. Can we attempt to further relate our findings to their spatial and urban impacts, maybe by more generally trying to envision a city entirely based on the commons?
Stavros Stavrides: To think about a city based on commons we have to question and conceptualize the connection of space and the commons. It would be interesting to think of the production of space as an area of commons and then discuss how this production has to be differentiated from today’s capitalist production of space. First of all, it is important to conceive space and the city as not primarily quantities—which is the dominant perception—the quantified space of profit-making, where space always has a value and can easily be divided and sold. So, starting to think about space as related to the commons means to conceptualize it as a form of relations rather than as an entity, as a condition of comparisons instead of an established arrangement of positions. We have to conceive space not as a sum of defined places, which we should control or liberate but rather as a potential network of passages linking one open place to another. Space, thus, becomes important as a constitutive dimension of social action. Space indeed “happens” as different social actions literally produce different spatial qualities. With the prospect of claiming space as a form of commons, we have to oppose the idea that each community exists as a spatially defined entity, in favor of the idea of a network of communicating and negotiating social spaces that are not defined in terms of a fixed identity. Those spaces thus retain a “passage” character.
Once more, we have to reject the exclusionary gesture which understands space as belonging to a certain community. To think of space in the form of the commons means not to focus on its quantity, but to see it as a form of social relationality providing the ground for social encounters. I tend to see this kind of experiencing-with and creation of space as the prospect of the “city of thresholds.” Walter Benjamin, seeking to redeem the liberating potential of the modern city, developed the idea of the threshold as a revealing spatiotemporal experience. For him, the flaneur is a connoisseur of thresholds: someone who knows how to discover the city as the locus of unexpected new comparisons and encounters. And this awareness can start to unveil the prevailing urban phantasmagoria which has reduced modernity to a misfired collective dream of a liberated future. To me, the idea of an emancipating spatiality could look like a city of thresholds. A potentially liberating city can be conceived not as an agglomerate of liberated spaces but as a network of passages, as a network of spaces belonging to nobody and everybody at the same time, which are not defined by a fixed-power geometry but are open to a constant process of (re)definition.
There is a line of thinking that leads to Lefebvre and his notion of the “right to the city” as the right that includes and combines all rights. This right is not a matter of access to city spaces (although we should not underestimate specific struggles for free access to parks, etc.), it is not simply a matter of being able to have your own house and the assets that are needed to support your own life, it is something which includes all those demands but also goes beyond them by creating a higher level of the commons. For Lefebvre the right to the city is the right to create the city as a collective work of art. The city, thus, can be produced through encounters that make room for new meanings, new values, new dreams, new collective experiences. And this is indeed a way to transcend pure utility, a way to see commons beyond the utilitarian horizon.
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A RADIOACTIVE FOREST FIRE IN YOUR FUTURE, WHY THE HELL NOT

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I have been busy all day long and have no time to write anything here, but I ran across this scary title and thought...be good for Scission readers.  You know me, always the voice of doom and gloom...and let's hear it for the formerly "existing socialism" led by the vanguard party known as the CPSU.  It's all capital to me...

The following is from Scientific American.


At Chernobyl, Radioactive Danger Lurks in the Trees

By Jane Braxton Little


For 26 years, forests around Chernobyl have been absorbing radioactive elements but a fire would send them skyward again – a concern as summers grow longer, hotter and drier
These were to be the cooling towers for Chernobyl reactors #5 and #6. Construction on the #5 and #6 reactors continued after the Chernobyl disaster, but construction was finally abandoned in 1989, three years after the accident.

Chernobyl reactor Nos. 5 and 6 were under construction at the time of the No. 4 explosion and remain frozen in time. But forests in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone have been absorbing radioactive elements since the 1986 accident, and scientists fear a wildfire could trigger another release.Image: Flickr/Matt Shalvatis


CHERNOBYL, Ukraine – Most days Nikolay Ossienko patrols the forests surrounding the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, clearing brush and dead trees from the grid of fuel breaks that crisscross the 1,000-square-mile area. But on hot July afternoons, when black thunderheads loom on the horizon, he climbs a rusty ladder 75 feet up a rickety fire tower. When he spots smoke, he radios the six other towers to pinpoint the location, then trucks off to the blaze.


"Our number one job is to save the forest from fire," said Ossienko, a burly, blue-eyed Ukrainian whose warm smile winks with a missing tooth.


It’s a job with international consequences. For almost three decades the forests around the shuttered nuclear power plant have been absorbing contamination left from the 1986 reactor explosion. Now climate change and lack of management present a troubling predicament: If these forests burn, strontium 90, cesium 137, plutonium 238 and other radioactive elements would be released, according to an analysis of the human health impacts of wildfire in Chernobyl's exclusion zone conducted by scientists in Germany, Scotland, Ukraine and the United States.
This contamination would be carried aloft in the smoke as inhalable aerosols, that 2011 study concluded.


And instead of being emitted by a single reactor, the radioactive contamination would come from trees that cover some 660 square miles around the plant, said Sergiy Zibtsev, a Ukrainian forestry professor who has been studying these irradiated forests for 20 years.


"There's really no question," he added. "If Chernobyl forests burn, contaminants would migrate outside the immediate area. We know that."


Overcrowded pines


Combined with changes in climate, these overcrowded pines are a prescription for wildfire. In their assessment of the potential risks of a worst-case fire, Zibtsev and the team of international scientists concluded that much of the Chernobyl forest is "in high danger of burning."


Zibtsev has been worrying about catastrophic wildfire in Chernobyl since witnessing runaway wildland fires in the western United States while on a Fulbright Scholarship in 2005. He has watched the threat get worse each passing year. Rainfall in the region is decreasing and seasonal droughts are lasting longer, changes Zibtsev attributes to climate change. Scientists say these patterns of drier and longer summers are contributing to forest drying and increased insect attacks.


The predominantly pine forests themselves are part of the problem. After the explosion – the worst nuclear accident in human history – the area surrounding the power plant was evacuated, the fields and forests abandoned.


 To keep the contamination from moving beyond the area known as the "zone of alienation," the Ukraine government forbade all commercial activity. For forests, this meant a halt to logging, thinning and removing dead trees. While most of Ukraine boasts woodlands that are carefully manicured, the Chernobyl forests have grown into unmanaged thickets with dense brush below and lifeless canopies above.


The risk of fire in these forests has concerned scientists since 1992, a drought year when more than 65 square miles of forests burned. They know that these ecosystems are trapping radionuclides and slowly redistributing them in soil and vegetation, a process called "self-repair." In some places the contamination level is the same as it was in 1986, most of it in the top 10 centimeters of the soil. Absorbing cesium, plutonium and strontium helps contain radionuclides within the exclusion zone, but it dramatically heightens the alarm over wildfire.


Two-acre test fire


A 2002 test fire offers insight on the scope of the radioactive risk. Set to assess plume and radionuclide behavior, the two-acre ground fire near the failed power plant released up to five percent of the cesium and strontium in the biomass. A high-intensity crown fire would release much higher amounts than burning needles and leaf litter, said Vasyl Yoschenko, who set the fire and heads the radioecological monitoring laboratory at the Ukrainian Institute of Agricultural Radiology. Other studies predict that the fine particles emitted from a forest fire could be transported hundreds of miles away.


"Imagine going to bed at night knowing something like this could happen," said Chad Oliver, director of the Global Institute of Sustainable Forestry at Yale University, who has studied the region since 2005.
Oliver, Zibtsev and others began calling attention to the potential for another Chernobyl disaster at variety international and scientific conferences, but the issue drew little more than finger pointing. Until their 2011 study, no one had assessed the human health effects of a catastrophic wildfire in the exclusion zone.


A worst-case scenario


Led by Oliver and Zibtsev, scientists at several institutions in Europe and North America analyzed a worst-case scenario: A very hot fire that burns for five days, consumes everything in its path, and sends the smoke 60 miles south to Kiev. A separate worst-case study is underway looking at the risks for Sweden, Finland and other European countries heavily impacted by the 1986 explosion.


Women in their 20s living just outside the zone face the highest risk from exposure to radioactive smoke, the 2011 study found: 170 in 100,000 would have an increased chance of dying of cancer. Among men farther away in Kiev, 18 in 100,000 20-year-olds would be at increased risk of dying of cancer. These estimates pale in comparison to those from the 1986 Chernobyl explosion, which predict between 4,000 and over a million eventual deaths from radiation exposure.


Instead, the greatest danger from forest fire for most people would be consuming foods exposed to smoke. Milk, meat and other products would exceed safe levels, the 2011 study predicts. The Ukrainian government would almost certainly have to ban consumption of foodstuffs produced as far as 90 miles from the fire.


No need for evacuation


After years of anxiety, the results of the study surprised Oliver. People living outside the exclusion zone would not have to be evacuated. There would be no cause for panic in Kiev, he said.


But the predictions for Ossienko and his fellow firefighters are not so rosy. They would be exposed to radiation beyond all acceptable levels. In addition to "normal" external radiation, they would be inhaling radionuclides in the smoke they breathe – being irradiated both outside and inside.


On top of the significant health risks, these crews are utterly unequipped to fight large fires, Zibtsev said. At Ossienko's fire station near the Belarus border, four well-maintained fire trucks gleam inside a shed, all ready to roll. But the fire lanes designed to get them to a blaze quickly are untended, often blocked by fallen trees and brush. Ossienko is proud of the Soviet tank modified for firefighting with a 20-foot blade like a gigantic pointed cow-catcher. He says it can "crush trees and brush – anything." But reporting smokes by climbing fire towers is no one's idea of an early-warning system, and the lone helicopter occasionally available lacks even a bucket for dropping water on a fire.


'They're obviously not prepared'


The firefighters themselves are dedicated and hard working, Zibtsev added, but they don't have much professional training, protective suits or breathing apparatuses – standard equipment for American firefighters dealing with hazardous materials. "They're obviously not prepared for a major wildfire situation," he said.


The United Nations recently acknowledged the potential for another Chernobyl disaster and has mounted a $20 million sustainable development project designed to address wildfire and other environmental issues. 
The UN project recognizes – "finally!" said Zibtsev – that well-managed forests will contribute to the decrease of fire hazards within the region. Zibtsev, who is responsible for the program’s fire management system, and Oliver envision a four-pronged approach that starts with cutting trees out of the roads so firefighters have access. Modern firefighting and fire detection equipment should dramatically improve fire response time. And then? "Start thinning!" Zibtsev said.


All this will take time, said Oliver: "If we can live out 30 to 40 years and not have a big one, we might be a lot safer."


Meanwhile, Ossienko is at work in the heat of the Chernobyl summer, watching for smoke and, with the rest of the world, hoping for none.


This article originally appeared at The Daily Climate, the climate change news source published by Environmental Health Sciences, a nonprofit media company.

THE STATE IS SPYING ON YOU, DUH, WHAT ELSE IS NEW

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I never have been able to figure out what all the fuss is whenever we learn something "new" about  the State spying on its people, listening in on their phones, monitoring their emails, looking at their facebook pages, and on and on and on.  I ask myself where is the surprise in all this.  Spying on the people and much worse is the legacy of the USA and is a big part of its history (and is pretty much this case with every other State around as well).  I would be shocked if the government wasn't watching me.  I would feel kind of bad, like I wasn't worth the effort or something.  It is what THEY do.  

The State knows it is the enemy of its own people.  The State knows that some of those people some of the time might be up to "something."  So they listen and watch.  

Sometimes I think they let us know about this just to make us even more paranoid, to build fear in the people, to make the security state seems that much more necessary.  After all, what the State is saying is "you can't trust anyone."  Then they throw in either drugs, or crime or terrorists, or always "the other" and tell us you should all be very scared, you should all understand that the State is really here to protect you...and for those of you who mean the State ill, you should know we are just over your shoulder or just behind your computer screen.

Get over it my friends, the State is the State.

And then I realize that my life experiences are not the life experiences of most people and consequently every time a new revelation comes out,  it actually does seem NEW and not the sort of thing that went on YESTERDAY.  

White people, even white progressives seem to be as prone to fall into this nonsense as much as the next person...sometimes more so.   White people have not experienced the history that people of color have and do experience.  White people in America have grown up with this bizarre picture of a fair and just America.  White people have been taught all their lives to fear everyone that doesn't look and act like them.  

So I guess I shouldn't be surprised when they are surprised...and really shocked that even they might be the target of the State.

Even in the post below, Tim reports how this and that even happened in the 80s, that when he was doing solidarity work in the 80s he was shocked to discover they State was watching his group.  I wasn't, but then I had the experience of the 60s and the 70s already.  I'd already seen some of my FBI and other federal files via the Freedom of Information Act and through discovery at my trial.  But even all I saw then came as no surprise, I had already experienced it all, assumed it all, and seen it all.  I expected it.  I took a certain pleasure out of reading my files.  It felt a little good that THEY cared and they THEY exerted energy and resources on little old me.

The following is from the blog of Tim Wise.



Whiteness, NSA Spying and the Irony of Racial Privilege

It’s not that I’m not angry.

It’s not that I’m not disturbed, even horrified by the fact that my government thinks it appropriate to spy on people, monitoring their phone calls — to whom we speak and when — among other tactics, all in the supposed service of the national interest.

That any government thinks it legitimate to so closely monitor its people is indicative of the inherent sickness of nation-states, made worse in the modern era, where the power to intrude into the most private aspects of our lives is more possible than ever, thanks to the data-gathering techniques made feasible by technological advance.

That said, I also must admit to a certain nonchalance in the face of the recent revelations about the National Security Agency’s snooping into phone records, and the dust-up over the leaking of the NSA’s program by Ed Snowden. And as I tried to figure out why I wasn’t more animated upon hearing the revelations — and, likewise, why so many others were — it struck me. Those who are especially chapped about the program, about the very concept of their government keeping tabs on them — in effect profiling them as potential criminals, as terrorists — are almost entirely those for whom shit like this is new: people who have never before been presumed criminal, up to no good, or worthy of suspicion.

In short, they are mostly white. And male. And middle-class or above. And most assuredly not Muslim.

And although I too am those things, perhaps because I work mostly on issues of racism, white privilege and racial inequity — and because my mentors and teachers have principally been people of color, for whom things like this are distressingly familiar — the latest confirmation that the U.S. is far from the nation we were sold as children is hardly Earth-shattering. After all, it is only those who have had the relative luxury of remaining in a child-like, innocent state with regard to the empire in which they reside who can be driven to such distraction by something that, compared to what lots of folks deal with every day, seems pretty weak tea.

As Yasuragi, a blogger over at Daily Kos reminded us last week:

(This is) the nation that killed protesters at Jackson and Kent State Universities…The nation that executed Fred Hampton in his bed, without so much as a warrant. The nation that still, still, still holds Leonard Peltier in prison. The nation that supported Noriega, the Shah, Trujillo, and dozens of other fascist monsters who did nothing but fuck over their own people and their neighbors. The nation of Joseph McCarthy and his current-day descendants. The nation that allows stop-and-frisk.
Before all that: The nation that enforced Jim Crow laws. Before that, the nation that built itself on slavery and the slave trade. And before all of that, the nation that nearly succeeded in the genocide of this continent’s indigenous peoples.
So why are you so surprised that our government is gathering yottabytes of data on our phone calls?

Let’s be clear, it’s not that the NSA misdeeds, carried out by the last two administrations, are no big deal. They’re completely indefensible, no matter the efforts of the apologists for empire — from the corporate media to President Obama to Dick Cheney — to legitimize them. A free people should not stand for it.

Problem is, we are not a free people and never have been, and therein lies the rub.

The idea that with this NSA program there has been some unique blow struck against democracy, and that now our liberties are in jeopardy is the kind of thing one can only believe if one has had the luxury of thinking they were living in such a place, and were in possession of such shiny baubles to begin with. And this is, to be sure, a luxury enjoyed by painfully few folks of color, Muslims in a post-9/11 America, or poor people of any color. For the first, they have long known that their freedom was directly constrained by racial discrimination, in housing, the justice system and the job market; for the second, profiling and suspicion have circumscribed the boundaries of their liberties unceasingly for the past twelve years; and for the latter, freedom and democracy have been mostly an illusion, limited by economic privation in a class system that affords less opportunity for mobility than fifty years ago, and less than most other nations with which we like to compare ourselves.

In short, when people proclaim a desire to “take back our democracy” from the national security apparatus, or for that matter the plutocrats who have ostensibly hijacked it, they begin from a premise that is entirely untenable; namely, that there was ever a democracy to take back, and that the hijacking of said utopia has been a recent phenomenon. But there wasn’t and it hasn’t been.

Reaction to the most recent confirmation of this truth ranks right along with the way so many were stunned by the September 11 attacks. The shock in that instance also came from a place of naiveté, wrought by the luxury of believing that the rest of the world viewed us as we did: as a paragon of virtue, which had brought only light and happiness to the world, rather than military occupations, hellfire missiles, brutal and crippling economic sanctions, and support for dictators so long as they were serving our presumed interests. But some people — and again, they were mostly black and brown — were not stunned at all. Having long had no choice but to see the nation’s warts for what they were, and having never possessed the benefit of viewing America as most whites had, peoples of color, while horrified by that day’s events, were hardly likely to be knocked off stride by them. They had always known what it was like to be hated. And hunted. And solely because of who they were.

For myself, I long ago stopped being shocked by anything the empire did in the service of its continuity. Ever since I was in college, and it was revealed that the Central American solidarity group of which I was a member was being actively spied on by the FBI, I’ve taken it as a matter of faith that such things were probably happening, and that it would have been silly to the point of idiotic for me to assume such surveillance were a one-off thing, confined to the inner-workings of the Reagan Administration.

By 1988, at which point I was still a Democrat — hoping against hope to turn that party in a truly left direction — the realization that the government was actively spying on its citizens was fully concretized for me. It was then that I was disallowed from riding in a campaign motorcade for Michael Dukakis (despite being the head of the largest College Democrats chapter in the New Orleans area), because my activism against U.S. policy in Nicaragua and El Salvador had earned me an FBI file and caused me to fail a Secret Service background check.

So yeah, the government is spying on you precious. And now you’re pissed?

This is the irony of privilege: the fact that some have for so long enjoyed it, in its largely unfettered state, is precisely why some of those those same persons are now so exorcised at the thought of potentially being treated like everyone else has been, forever; and it is also why the state was able to get away with it for such an extended period. So long as the only possible targets were racial and religious and class others, shock and outrage could be kept at a minimum. And so the apparatus of profiling and monitoring and snooping and data collection and even targeted assassination grew like mushrooms in the dark. And deep down, most of the same white folks who are now so unhinged by the mere possibility — and a remote one at that — that they will be treated like those others, knew what was going on.

And they said little or nothing. White liberals — with some notable exceptions — mostly clucked their tongues and expressed how unfortunate it was that certain people were being profiled, but they rarely spoke out publicly, or challenged those not-so-random searches at the airport, or dared to challenge cops when they saw them harassing, or even brutalizing the black and brown. Plenty of other issues were more pressing. The white conservatives, of course, largely applauded either or both of those.

And now, because they mostly ignored (or even in some cases cheered) the violations of Constitutional rights, so long as the violations fell upon someone other than themselves, they are being freshly confronted with the surly adolescent version of the infant to which they gave birth, at least indirectly. And they aren’t too happy with his insolence.

Yeah, well, tell it to pretty much every Arab American, every Persian American, every Afghan American, everyone with a so-called Middle Eastern name walking through an airport in this country for the past decade or more. Tell them how now you’re outraged by the idea that the government might consider you a potential terrorist.

Tell it to the hundreds of thousands of black men in New York, stopped and frisked by the NYPD over the past fifteen years, whose names and information were entered into police databases, even though they had committed no crime, but just as a precautionary measure, in case they ever decided to commit one. Tell them how tight it makes you to be thought of as a potential criminal, evidence be damned.

Tell it to brown folks in Arizona, who worry that the mere color of their skin might provoke a local official, operating on the basis of state law (or a bigoted little toad of a sheriff), to stop them and force them to prove they belong in the country. Explain to them how patently offensive and even hurtful it is to you to be presumed unlawful in such a way as to provoke official government suspicion.

Tell it to the veterans of the civil rights struggle whose activities — in the Black Panthers, SNCC, the Young Lords, the Brown Berets, and the American Indian Movement, among others — were routinely monitored (and more to the point actively disrupted and ripped apart) by government intelligence agencies and their operatives. Tell them how incredibly steamed you are that your government might find out what websites you surf, or that you placed a phone call last Wednesday to someone, somewhere. Make sure to explain how such activities are just a step away from outright tyranny and surely rank up there alongside the murder and imprisonment to which their members were subjected. Indeed.

And then maybe, just maybe, consider how privilege — being on the upside, most of the time, of systems of inequality — can (and has) let you down, even set you up for a fall. How maybe, justmaybe, all the apoplexy mustered up over the NSAs latest outrage, might have been conjured a long time ago, and over far greater outrages, the burdens of which were borne by only certain persons, and not others.

And yes, I know full well that some were speaking out, loudly and clearly from the start and have never stopped. I am not speaking to them (to you?), so relax (after all, if what I’m saying doesn’t apply to you, why so defensive, buttercup?) But so too, there are those who know (perhaps you?) if they are among those who, like Rand Paul or Glenn Beck or — for that matter — Edward Snowden had never before raised too much fuss about those other things, until it began to potentially affect them and people like them.

Or provide them an opportunity for some publicity. Hero worship. Perhaps (at least in their own minds) martyrdom?

Maybe it is time to remind ourselves that the only things worse than what this government and its various law enforcement agencies do in secret, are the things they’ve been doing blatantly, openly, but only to some for a long time now.

This nation’s government has killed hundreds of thousands in Iraq and Afghanistan, openly, in front of the world.

This nation’s sanctions on Iraq in the ’90s contributed to the deaths of hundreds of thousands more, by the admission of Secretary of State Albright. All of it, out in the open. No secrets.

This nation stood by and even helped propagate massacre after massacre — an attempted genocide even — in Guatemala throughout the 1980s; and not only did we not hide that we were doing it, President Reagan openly praised the architects of the slaughter while proclaiming they were committed to social justice.

We incarcerate 2.5 million people — and have roughly 7 million people under the control of the justice system in all — openly, and increasingly for non-violent offenses: more than any nation on Earth.

We have the highest child poverty rate in the developed world, and there is nothing secret about it. Our leaders don’t even care about covering it up. In fact, an awful lot of them just don’t care. At all.

These are the crimes of empire. These and a lot more. And it didn’t take Edward Snowden to tell you about them. They’ve been hiding in plain sight for a long time.

BRAZIL: ARE THE STREETS LEFT OR RIGHT?

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Last week, I think it was, I posted a couple of different pieces which analyzed the street uprisings in Brazil in very positive ways.  Yesterday, I found on a friends facebook page a very different interpretation in the way things are going.  The person who wrote the new piece is from Brazil and according to that person the people now in the streets have   lurched to the right and become basically a right wing populist movement who on top of everything else, including racist and homophobic actions, hope to end the "left leaning" Presidents term in office now.

I admit to not having done enough research to verify this latest conclusion.  I do know that there are many more middle class people in the streets of late than earlier in the uprising, so the possibility certainly does exist.  I am posting this new analysis in the hopes that people will read it and respond somewhere, if not here, and help to inform the rest of us as to what is going on.  My guess is that both are going on.  My guess is there is a right and a left and they are in struggle.  What I don't know is which side is more hegemonic at the moment.  What I obviously do not know is where it will all end up.

I don't know who to credit for this post, so I just will print it all with it's own introduction, which I believe was written by my friend in the first paragraph of the post.  I'll go ahead and give it a title of my own.

PS: take the translation issues in stride...

BRAZI:  ARE THE STREETS LEFT OR RIGHT?


This is a bit of a long analysis of events in Brazil taken from the Reddit Communism section and posted today to the marxism-request@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu blog site. It is interesting though.



I'm writing to you because I really can't think of anyone else to write,
and I (and my country) really need help. Right now, on the front page,
there is a post with 3000+ upvotes glorifying the protests occurring in
Brazil today. I need to tell someone, anyone, who's not in this country,
the real story behind what's really happening here. I figured, since you
people are in social justice movement, you'd be in a better position to
undestand.

I'm not sure if you have been following international news in the last two
weeks, so I'll summarise the facts. About two weeks ago, the major cities
in the country raised the bus and train fares to a value too high for the
average Brazilian (which does not speak English, does not visit Reddit and
in many cases doesn't even have Internet access) to afford. The rate of
this last increase was below inflation, but the accumulated rates of
increases in the last 10 to 15 years easily surpasses it.

MPL (Movimento Passe Livre, Free Fare Movement), an organization which
exists since the mid-2000s, and which is not affiliated to any political
party (although it does maintain communication with minority left-wing
parties), started calling for protests against the fare raise. The first
two protests didn't garner much mainstream media attention, but when the
third protest took over Avenida Paulista (Paulista Avenue), which is to S?o
Paulo what the Times Square is to New York, the newspapers started to
complain, painting protesters and the MPL as vandals and hooligans which
only were interested in destroying the city. They had, in fact, used public
trash bins as barricades against our violent PM (Pol?cia Militar or
Military Police, a direct heritage from our military dictatorship period),
which was using tear gas bombs, pepper spray and rubber ammunition on
protesters indiscriminately.

This third protest occurred on Tuesday the 18th. On Thursday, the day
scheduled for the fourth protest, two of the biggest newspapers in the
country printed heavily opinionated editorials calling for the PM to "take
action" and not be so "soft" on the protesters, and to defend the (mostly
middle-class's) right to cars to run on the city's streets. What happened,
then, was a massacre: the elite squad of the PM, Tropa de Choque,
transformed the fourth protest in a reign of terror. I wasn't there, but I
had close friends who were, and it was scary. The Tropa de Choque officers
managed to split the protest into various small groups, and stablished a
perimeter around the area so that no one could leave. They would surround
any small group they could and relentlessly throw tear gas bombs. A
journalist (and acquaintance of mine) was arrested on charges of carrying
VINEGAR (since it can be used to alleviate the effects of tear gas and
pepper spray). Two journalists were hit with rubber ammunition squarely on
their eyes, and one of them, a photographer, lost his vision (and most
likely his profession). Several journalists were arrested and injured, and
the mainstream media, mostly because some of their own were injured,
changed their discourse.

Since the disastrous procedure of the PM couldn't be buried under the rug
(mostly because the noise on social media was too high), the mainstream
media gave great exposure to this, instead. Throughout the weekend,
anticipation started to mount for the next protest, scheduled for this last
Monday. And that's when things started to get weird.

On Monday, the biggest (so far) protest occurred. At least 65 thousand
people were on the streets of S?o Paulo alone, although people who were
there were talking about figures of 200, 300 thousand. But it wasn't the
people, it was the middle/upper classes, and right-wing extremists.
Militants for small left-wing parties, who hold no political power
whatsoever, were openly harassed by "protesters". The protest agenda was
shifted right, mostly dropping the bus fare complaint to instead focus on
"corruption" (which, in Brazil, is a right-wing demand, since the party
holding the power is center-leftist), "high taxes", the "exploitation of
the middle-class", the excessive public spending for next year's World Cup
etc. The MPL and its demands were still present, but they were silenced by
the elitists' demands. The newspapers suddenly stared glorifying the
protests, and in the social networks memes like "O gigante acodou (the
giant has awakened)" started popping up, implying there has been no social
justice movement in Brazil before, which is a rampant lie - I can attest to
that, since I am part of left-wing and feminist movements myself.

On Tuesday, there was another protest. This time, people destroyed the
entrance to the City Hall in S?o Paulo. What's weird is that MPL, which
called for the protest, scheduled the date and set the rendezvous point,
did not go the City Hall's way. The rendezvous point was close to the City
Hall, but the route MPL set for the protest was exactly opposite of the
City Hall, and still a rather large group of people with national flags
(which, in Brazil, is usually a sign of far-right fascist movements) and
anti-taxes banners went that way. The PM, which was so ready to intervene
before, stood and watched as the same people who destroyed the City Hall
set a TV station van on fire on the middle of the street, according to
people I know personally and who were there. Less trustworthy, but
trustworthy (to me) nonetheless, rumours circulated on the social networks
implying the state governor (which holds authority over the PM) had
instructed the police -not to act- on any circumstances. The right-wing
agenda instead continued being broadcast by the mainstream media, specially
regarding the "impeachment" (lawful deposition, according to our
Constitution) of the legally elected president - who is herself hated by
the middle and upper classes, and adored by the lower classes. The
nationalism on this protest was so thick you could smell it, as the fascism
of it.

On Wednesday, S?o Paulo's mayor and the state governor (who are from rival
political parties) went on TV together to announce the bus fare increased
had been cancelled. The MPL scheduled another protest today, to celebrate
the decision, but is has been another disaster.

This time, there was confront between the protester themselves. Left-wing
protesters have been harassed. There are reports of anti-racism, feminist
and anti-homophobia activists being beaten by right-wing protesters.
Fascist skinheads have been spotted on the general surroundings of the
protests, looking for victims. And the media is now reporting all the
protests have been PACIFIC, which is an absurd lie. And the social justice
people, on the social networks, have been conjuring a theory that actually
makes sense, regarding our recent history.

In 1964, our country has suffered a coup d'?tat perpetrated by the military
and the establishment forces together. In the days preceding the coup,
there was uprising and political instability on the country, just as today.
There was a big protest, aptly named "Walk of the Family With God For
Liberty", which took place a mere two weeks before the coup, and on which
about half a million middle and upper class people took the streets to
protest against the center-left president Jo?o Goulart. What I mean is, we
have been there, we know the feeling in the air, and the anger of the
middle class against a president who has some pretty left wing policies is
boiling and ready to explode.

>From what I've seen, today's protest was very much akin to this 1964's
Walk. The MPL's protests have been hijacked by the right, and since the
left won't leave the streets to them, conflicts and confrontations are sure
to take place. And, what's more dangerous, the police is now ignoring it,
waiting for the popular clamor to call them back into action, so they can
take over, possibly together with the military. There are rumours of a
state of siege being prepared on the government dark corners.

I'm very worried, because these people who have "awakened" and who are now
on the streets are people who look back to a time when they had unlimited
and unchecked privileged, and who are so upset because that privilege has
been slowly being taken away from them. They are people who hates on
minorities, and who stand for exactly the opposite what I believe [you
stand] for. And, mostly worrying, they have the full cooperation of the
mainstream media, who had already shifted the protests' focus away from the
bus fare and towards their demands since Monday.

Their discourse is becoming hegemonic, and if that happens, it spells a
very dark future for my country. And that is happening on the mainstream
media on Brazil, and now, as I see, on Reddit too. So please, if you can do
anything to help shed a light on the OTHER side of those protests here,
being it a meta post on prime (I mean, you don't have to take my word for
it, Google Translator does an acceptable job on Portuguese to English
texts, and I can link you to non-mainstream media news sources that will
tell you the exact same story I've told), or anything really, I'd be really
thankful.

I'm sorry for my bad English and for wasting you time with our 3rd world
problems, but again, this is one of the only places I think I could be
heard on Reddit.

Thanks in advance.

YOU SHOULD KNOW ABOUT THE RACIST MURDER OF STEPHEN LAWRENCE, HIS FAMILY, AND THE BRITISH COPS

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Unless you live in Britain you probably never heard of Stephen Lawrence.  That is a shame.  What happened to Stephen, the courageous struggle by his family for some justice, and the actions of the police in this case are a lesson that should go far beyond the British Isles.

Twenty years ago this month Stephen was waiting with a friend for a bus when he was brutally murdered by racist thugs.  Some of those who were involved have been tried and convicted, but others remain free today.

What is amazing about this case is the lengths his family has gone to find some kind of justice. As Our Kingdom writes:

No family has campaigned as this one - taking their own evidence to the police, bringing a private prosecution against the alleged killers, demanding and getting a public inquiry which culminated in landmark changes to the law and the redefining of racial incidents.


Yet, since Stephen was killed more than 100 others in Britain have lost their lives as a result of racist assault

In the past few weeks what has been found out concerning the police is totally disgusting.  It seems that the London Metropolitan police has attempted to smear the family.  Socialist World.net reports:


A former undercover police officer, Peter Francis, says he was instructed in 1993 to find information that could discredit the family and anti-racism campaigners.


Peter Francis told the Guardian that he was instructed to ‘infiltrate’ Youth Against Racism in Europe (YRE), a campaign that was initiated by supporters of Militant Labour, the forerunner of the Socialist Party (CWI England and Wales).

The archibishop-cramer blogspot adds, 

...Francis, who says he posed for four years as an anti-racist campaigner. He was also asked to target one of the witnesses to the murder, Duwayne Brooks: "I had to get any information on what was happening in the Stephen Lawrence campaign," Mr Francis told the Guardian. "They wanted the campaign to stop. It was felt it was going to turn into an elephant. Throughout my deployment there was almost constant pressure on me personally to find out anything I could that would discredit these campaigns."
 Peter Francis has become a whistleblower. He has decided to reveal his identity to call for a public inquiry into undercover policing. "There are many things that I've seen that have been morally wrong, morally reprehensible," he said. "Should we, as police officers, have the power to basically undermine political campaigns? I think that the clear answer to that is no."


As a whistleblower, he will now become the victim of all manner of harassment, bullying and subtle forms of persecution. He will be systematically undermined, demoralised, and his mental health questioned. Just as he was tasked with spreading 'disinformation' about the Lawrences, so his superiors will seek to discredit and slander him. It is a sadly familiar tale.



Additional claims have been made that meetings between Stephen’s friend Duwayne Brooks – who was with him on the night that he was murdered by racists – his lawyers and police were bugged.
Stephen's mother, Doreen Lawrence is to meet with the  Metropolitan Police Commissioner to demand some answers.  In a statement to the media following a recent meeting with another British official , Ms. Lawrence said,


“I made my point quite clear. For the past 20 years the fact that we as a family have been talking about corruption and we have undercover officers trying to smear our family. I want answers. I want to know who was the senior officer who signed that off. We had no idea this was going on from 1993 until 1997.”


Amor magazine ask, "Why is the case important today," and then, the author of the piece, Elisha Rickett,  provides this answer:


The Stephen Lawrence case is a prominent example of the injustice of racial discrimination and the injustice and distrust within the police force.  However I would say that the Stephen Lawrence case and the family’s campaign for justice represents every single one of us and the ongoing fight for racial equality, It leads an example of Hope for unity within our communities and it is significantly important to today’s society and the way we move forward for the future.

The bravery that Stephen’s family have portrayed in their campaign is nothing but an inspiration to all. Not accepting defeat, staying strong and standing up for what they believe in.

Most of us have grown up knowing the story of Stephen Lawrence, whether you were born before, after or during the time of his murder – at some point you would have heard his name and the tragedy of events that took place all those years ago.

Stephen’s family have campaigned nonstop since 1993, in 1998 Stephen’s parents Doreen and Neville Lawrence set up a charitable trust (The Stephen Lawrence Charitable Trust) in their son’s name to help future generations of young people enjoy the opportunities that were denied to Stephen by his senseless murder.  The trust is committed to supporting young people from diverse and disadvantaged backgrounds

.
One of their most recent projects is a scheduled concert for Stephen Lawrence UNITY, held at London’s O2 Arena on the 29th September 2013, some of music’s biggest names unite for a special concert championing youth and social empowerment. The concert will raise funds for the Charitable trust.

As the enquiries into the Lawrence case continue, we hope for justice and Racial equality.

While nothing the police do anywhere should come as a surprise, as a facebook critic of mine has recently reminded me, not being surprised does not mean we should not be outraged and does not mean we should not act. 

The following is from Organized Rage.




Police spied on murdered  teenager Stephen Lawrence’s family as they tried to dig “dirt” to “smear” them, an ex-undercover cop has claimed.

Peter Francis said he took part in the operation to attack the reputations of Stephen’s parents, Doreen and Neville.

It was just one operation in a filthy, decades-long, plot to cover up the crimes and failings of the cops. Met bosses wanted Francis to find information that could be used against the Lawrences shortly after Stephen’s killing in April 1993 in South East London.

Corruption and racism infected the investigation into the murder.

Duwayne Brooks
Francis trawled through photo and video evidence of a demo against the Nazi British National Party (BNP) headquarters for days in order to find Stephen’s  friend Duwayne Brooks.

This led to him being arrested and charged in October 1993. A judge threw out the case.

Family liaison officers recorded details of every person visiting the Lawrence home. The information went to the spy cops.

The role of the spying operation wasn’t revealed to the 1998 Macpherson inquiry into the cops’ investigation into the death.

Francis was part of a covert unit known as the Special Demonstration Squad (SDS), which used the identities of dead children and formed sexual relationships with activists to get information.

He also monitored a number of campaigns involving relatives of those who died in police custody. 

For instance, Stoke Newington Police Station in Hackney, east London, was infamous in the 1980s and 1990s for police corruption and racism. 

The Hackney Community Defence Campaign uncovered 130 cases of police brutality there. It was then infiltrated by the cops.

The Newham Monitoring Project was spied on—as was the rest of the left.

With the blessing of senior commanders, undercover officers routinely adopted a tactic of “promiscuity” to boost their cover stories and gain information.

Undercover

One cop, Bob Lambert, went on to become a detective inspector in the SDS. He supervised other undercover police spies there. 

Jacqui, an activist who had a child with Lambert while he was spying on her, said, “I feel like I’ve got no foundations in my life.

“I was not consenting to sleeping with Bob Lambert, I didn’t know who Bob Lambert was.

“I had a spy living with me, sleeping with me, making a family with me, and I didn’t do anything to deserve that.”

It was the women who had been targetted who first exposed Lambert as an undercover cop. 

Francis said that Lambert advised him to wear a condom when sleeping with activists.

According to one cop, “The best way of stopping any liaison getting too heavy was to shag somebody else. It’s amazing how women don’t like you going to bed with someone else.” 

Paul Condon, who was head of the Met during most of the 1990s, coined the phrase “noble cause corruption”.According to this, police justifiably “bend the rules” to get a conviction when they “knew” the accused was guilty but had no proof.

Top cops from then and now deny significant knowledge and say they are shocked. 

But current Met boss Bernard Hogan-Howe claims spy cops are “a vital part of our armoury”.

The spy cops worked for the Association of Chief Police Officers—conveniently a private company—even though it was funded by the Home Office.

Scrutiny

This meant they were hidden from public scrutiny. 

Corporations use the information from the state spies and there is a revolving door between ex-cop spies and private security industry blacklists.

The SDS was wound up and replaced with the National Domestic Extremism Unit, which still oversees spy cops.

The whole spying operation is now controlled by the Metropolitan Police.

Cop scandals usually lead to closing ranks.

The odd scapegoat is charged, a larger number of officers are retired or transferred and an inquiry is set up that produces a whitewash. There have been countless corruption investigation into the cops. 

But enough—it is time to get rid of the filth.


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 The Police's Dirty Secret, the Channel 4Dispatches documentary which exposes how undercover officers reportedly used sex and lies to spy on members of the public can be found here..

The evidence of eight women taking a case against the Metropolitan Police because of the actions of undercover cops can be read at policespiesoutoflives.org.uk/our-stories  

SEXUAL ABUSE OF CHILDREN IN LOCK-UP MAKES ME SICK

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In the home of the free and the land of the brave, the State and the states enjoy locking up children...many as young as ten years old.  Putting ten year olds in jail, whew, now that is something.

They lock up these kids and claim they are going to get counseling, help, and, you know, rehabilitation...while locked up.

Yeah, like that is what's happening.

In any event, we spend a small fortune locking these kids up, but at the same time can't find any money to provide them any services when they aren't locked up.  Something wrong there, dudes and dudettes.

We find more jail cells and we close more schools...well not WE, but those others who call themselves us.

Most white Americans look the other way and kid themselves about these vicious little criminals who threaten all of our well being...and usually wlhen they think about those kids, they are thinking black.  You know they are.  They don't say they are, but you know they are.

Well, it ain't rehabilitation that our juvenile justice system is practicing.  No, too often it is rape and sexual abuse.

We think of jails as places where prisoners rape other prisoners, but that is  not what we are talking about here most of the time.  Here we are talking about prison staff raping children while everyone looks the other way.

A recent federal report found that, for one example, in Paulding County, Georgia 32% of kids in juvenile lockups reported being sexually assaulted by staff.  Just about one in three.

The Juvenile Justice Information Exchange reporting on a 2010 DOJ national survey of Youth in Custody writes:


The report was compiled by the Bureau of Justice Statistics in compliance with the Prison Rape Elimination Act. However, the DOJ review panel on prison rape downplayed the results, saying that it “indicated that sexual assault in juvenile facilities was relatively rare and facility staff, for the most part, did not victimize juvenile offenders.”

This was their position, despite the fact that of the 26,550 youths involved in the survey, about 10 percent, reported being victimized by staff. Another 2.6 percent reported being assaulted by other inmates. Of the alleged assaults by staff 95 percent were female, with 92 percent of the victims being male. These events are often minimized by administrators and categorized as consensual relationships. Even though sexual relations between staff and juvenile inmates is illegal across the United States, the male inmates who have sex with female staff are not seen as victims.

Meanwhile the McHenry County Blog reporting on a Bureau of Justice Statistics reports notes:

Just as in adult facilities, LGBT detainees were found to be especially vulnerable to abuse, as were all youth with a history of sexual victimization. LGBT youth were sexually abused by other inmates at nearly seven times the rate of straight youth (10.3 percent versus 1.5 percent). More than half (52.3 percent) of all youth who had been abused at a prior facility reported suffering yet more abuse at their current one.


Other key BJS findings include:

  • Once a youth was victimized by staff in their current facility, he or she was more likely to be assaulted by staff 11 times or more than to face no further abuse (20.4 versus 14.2 percent).

  • The size of the facility has a strong correlation with its levels of abuse. Youth detained in facilities holding at least 101 detainees were nearly five times as likely to report victimization as those in facilities holding fewer than 10 detainees (12 versus 2.5 percent).

  • The longer a youth was detained, the more likely he or she was to be sexually abused. Youth detained between 7-12 months faced rates of abuse more than one and a half times higher than those who were detained for less than five months (11.3 versus 6.8 percent).

  • State-run youth facilities had far higher rates of staff sexual misconduct than local or privately run facilities (8.2 versus 4.5 percent).

  • Black youth reported higher rates of staff sexual misconduct than white and Hispanic youth (9.6 versus 6.4 percent for both white and Hispanic youth). On the other hand, white youth were more likely to be abused by another inmate than black and Hispanic youth (4 versus 1.4 and 2.1 percent, respectively).




It's time for some real anger here.  It's time for marching in the streets.  It's time to shut em down.

The following post for Scission's Prison Friday comes from Prison Culture.



Rotten to the Core: Sexual Violence & Youth Incarceration in Illinois



In Illinois, like in every other state of the union, we cage children as young as 10 years old. They are locked in jails and prisons for transgressions that we’ve deemed must be ‘punished.’ We are told that those imprisoned are among “the worst offenders.” But a new study released last week finds that as of 2010:

“almost 60 percent of confined youth in the U.S. (41,877) were still detained and imprisoned for offenses that do not pose substantial threats to public safety. These include misdemeanors, drug use, non-criminal or status offenses (e.g., curfew violations, truancy, running away), failure to show up for parole meetings, and breaking school rules. Arguably, those 42,000 or so low-risk youth, who pose minimal public safety risks, face a fairly high risk of recidivating and losing their futures as productive citizens due to their incarceration experiences.”

prisonsexassault

In Illinois, there were five children incarcerated in youth prisons for murder in 2010. In 2011, that number was lower.

We are told that these cells will ‘rehabilitate’ children by providing them with counseling services that they lacked on the outside. We offer those services and others at an average cost of nearly $100,000 per incarcerated child per year in our prisons and over $225,000 a year if we want to jail/detain them. In our communities though, we plead poor and close their schools while also shuttering the mental health clinics that would have provided cost-effective services for these same children.

Then comes the ‘news’ that the youth we are supposed to be ‘reforming’ through incarceration are actually being sexually assaulted and abused within our prison walls. The U.S. Justice Departmentfound that based on their survey of 461 Illinois juvenile prisoners in 2012, more than 15% reported being sexually victimized (most often by staff members). Illinois youth prisoners are sexually assaulted and abused at a rate 35 percent higher than the national average which was under 10%.

The children were assaulted in showers, recreation areas, their cells, classrooms and even in kitchens. Some young people said that they had been given alcohol and drugs by staff before their assaults.

Prison administrators proclaimed themselves “extremely concerned and upset” at the findings as though these incidents were news to them. Some editorial boards have expressed their disgust at the revelations. Some advocates have called for oversight boards and ombudsmen to ensure ‘accountability’ for the prisoners. And there’s been no public outcry at these revelations. The general public shrugs its shoulders because it’s not their kids locked in those cages. So who cares?

While some reformers are busy yet again tinkering around the edges trying to duct tape the Titanic, more children continue to be harmed physically and emotionally while locked in cages. Everyone knows that no amount of “oversight” is going to end sexual violence in prisons. Prisons are violence incarnate and violence is endemic to prison. Sentencing children to jail and prisons is consigning them to “judicial rape.” This has been and continues to be clear. We know what we are doing: all of us. So we are accomplices in the systemic and systematic rape of children.

Youth incarceration is a failed experiment and it’s way past time to shut down all of our juvenile prisons and jails. Abolition NOW! Everyone who doesn’t understand that youth incarceration (especially in solitary confinement) is torture should watch the following time-lapsed video created by Richard Ross.


I am organizing along with others an action to bring attention to the sexual violence experienced by children behind bars on July 30th. This action will coincide with a hearing about this issue. If you are in Chicago and would like to participate in the action, contact jjinjustice1@gmail.com.

YOUTH OF AFRICA: STAND UP, GET UP! STAND UP FOR YOUR RIGHTS. DON'T GIVE UP THE FIGHT!

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It is Theoretical Weekend again at Scission.

Today the topic we will read about together relates to Pan Africanism, Walter Rodney, emancipation, liberation, and youth today (with a little Bob Marley thrown in for good measure).

The following is from our friends at Pambazuka News.


Get up stand up: Youths in the age of revolution

Horace G. Campbell





This week, as Pambazuka News celebrates the youth of Africa at the same moment that we remember the life and work of Walter Rodney, we seek the inspiration of Rodney and other freedom fighters as we stand up to be counted in the struggles for emancipation and transformation. Drawing from the lyrics of a prophet of emancipation Bob Marley, my message to the youths of Africa today is: stand up, get up! Stand up for your rights. Don’t give up the fight!

When the youths of Tahrir Square were chanting that "the people want to bring down the regime," something had already changed and the world was not anymore the same. It was the outset of a historic shift of human ideational system: ordinary people can make a huge change. This idea of the capabilities of ordinary people slipped through live video footage, and broke in the minds of people all over the world. One writer who had understood the historic importance of revolutionary moments stated that the Egyptian Revolution would change the world. And, two years on, we are still in the embryonic stages of this revolutionary process.

This African Awakening from North Africa, which had started from Tunisia, has inspired other insurrections – and most recently the youths of Turkey have impeded all of the planning of Israel, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the conservative elements within the imperial centers. Brazilian Youths are also registering their opposition to neo-liberalism as the organized and unorganized forces take to the streets to stand up for social justice. Youths from all corners of the planet are standing up for their rights and defying the planners who want to turn them into robotic and mindless consumers. In this process, the youths are divided between the children of the looters and the children of the sufferers. This divide on social lines is visible in the malls and public spaces where the children of the rich parade their consumerism. While the poor yearn for proper public transportation, the children of the rich drive by in their flashy cars. This crude consumerism of the 1 per cent of the youth can be distinguished from the majority of youths who are struggling for a decent life. The more the youths stand up, the more effective the efforts to disarm elements who want to divide, confuse and demobilize agents of transformation.

We are in a revolutionary moment, and as in every revolutionary moment, the whip of counter-revolution rears its head. But it is the self-organization and self-mobilization of the youths that have so far confounded the forward planners and militarists who want to derail the people-centered objectives of the moment. In Libya, the counter-revolutionary forces intervened and established a base for future intervention against the youths in Egypt, when the revolution matures. These plans which include arming youths to kill other youths in places such as Nigeria, Somalia and the Congo are being unmasked as the complicity of the imperial forces in terrorism is being exposed and there are now deep divisions between all the centers of imperial power.

EMANCIPATE YOURSELVES FROM MENTAL SLAVERY

As the real energy of Africa emerges out of the ashes of the current capitalist depression, the financial planners for international predators sharpen the planning to capture the minds of the youths. These planners seek to politicize regionalism, religion, ethnic differences, sexual differences and other contradictions among the people. The imperialist ideology of individualism and greed is today compounded by four other ideological deformities: (a) male chauvinism, (b) religious intolerance, (c) ethnic hatred and (d) fetishism, especially commodity fetishism. These deformities corrupt some of the youth and compound the physical and mental illnesses in our societies. Standing up for complete emancipation requires efforts to break loose from these social deformities. We cannot separate the discussion of these illnesses from the question of imperialism. This is a delicate issue – for while it is not possible to blame all illnesses in Africa on imperialism, it is also necessary to bring to the attention of the youths the reality of imperialist plunder and destruction. The term imperialism is no longer in use since it is now more fashionable to refer to ‘international partners’ and ‘donors’. However, the terms that we use must not disarm us and prevent us from teaching the youths.

As we celebrate the youths, there will be immediate recognition of the sacrifices of the youths of Soweto who set in motion the mass democratic struggles against apartheid. The name Hector Peterson is now remembered by many across the globe to commemorate the bravery of the 13-year-old who had joined with others to oppose the apartheid imposition of the Afrikaans language and culture. These youths wanted total emancipation and their sacrifices from June 16, 1976 paved the way for the end of apartheid. Today, the vanguardists of South Africa seek to control the memory of the youths because they fear the revolutionary spirit of the youths. Violators of women and corrupt leaders emerge from the ranks of those who seek to hijack the revolutionary traditions of the youth as they enrich themselves. The current leaders of South Africa who have been willing and able to shoot down mine workers do not want the majority of the youths in Africa to remember the inspiration of the youths of Soweto 1976. These youths of South Africa inspired a generation of young people right up to the youths of Tahrir square.

At revolutionary moments – such as this one – the old ideas, old forces, and old modus operandi can no longer hold together all the centers of domination and oppression. At such moments, the planning for divisiveness and confusion comes up against a greater thrust, that of youths in other parts of the world who come forward to expose imperial planning for surveillance and mind control.

The recent revelations by Edward Snowden, the former CIA information technology employee and contractor for the National Security Agency (NSA), has exposed the massive operations of the US military and intelligence against all peoples of the world. Snowden revealed the fact that the US government has gathered, on a permanent basis, data from everyone: “You simply have to eventually fall under suspicion from somebody, even by a wrong call. And then they can use this system to go back in time and scrutinize every decision you’ve ever made, every friend you’ve ever discussed something with.”

The reality was that these capabilities were not just used inside the United States. With the information it assembled, the US government can readily construct a detailed social and political profile of individuals near and far. According to the “Boundless Informant” data-mining tool, some 97 billion pieces of intelligence were gathered worldwide from one NSA spying program in March 2013 alone. In addition to the 3 billion pieces of intelligence from within the US, there were 14 billion from Iran, 13.5 billion from Pakistan, 12.7 billion from Jordan, 7.6 billion from Egypt, 6.3 billion from India, and 3 billion from Europe. It is now also known that “Kenya is the most watched African country on the US spy network.” [1]

This information is coming one year after an American with links to the military and intelligence forces, under the guise of a humanitarian agency, produced the YouTube video Kony 2012. [2] This pseudo-cum-militaristic humanitarianism gives a clear indication of the level of sophistication and subtlety behind the planning against the people that want to mobilize for genuine transformation of their society, especially the youths. Having failed to provide direct military assistance to the beleaguered Yoweri Museveni government through the mobilization of youth internationally, the US Senate this week authorized the expenditure of US $90m to provide logistical support to the national military forces of Uganda to mitigate or eliminate the threat posed by the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA).

The US militarists had to find another way to provide support for the Museveni government at a moment when the military command structure is torn asunder because some Generals are opposed to the creation of a monarchy in Uganda. Every effort to confuse and dominate the new generation comes up against new forces of strength. In eastern Africa, the forces of division are exposed as people yearn for peace and democratic participation.

After the youths of the Occupy Wall Street registered their opposition to the 1 percent and created the clarity that society must organize for the 99 percent, the purveyors of neo-liberal capitalism continue to use the corporate media as a weapon against the minds of the young. Added to the mainstream media are those mindless violent video games produced by the military-information-entertainment complex, which seem to distract and demobilize the minds of young people away from reality into a virtual world of militarism where killing and violence are supposed to be normal.

Yet, as the gaming industry rolls out new products (as they did last week), the youths who are in the majority in Africa, Asia and Latin America are searching for new forms of intervention to break the monopoly of the media. As they come out with new ideas, we must continue to urge that the youths revert to Bob Marley and all of the prophets of liberation to seek inspiration and to grow from one level of consciousness to the next.

Young people are being inspired by the idea of emancipation from mental slavery. The idea of fundamental change and the unification of the working class for a better society are still percolating all over Africa (and the world), countering and challenging hegemonic ideas. These were the ideas that Africa’s freedom fighters such as Kwame Nkrumah, Patrice Lumumba, and Walter Rodney stood for.

LUMUMBA, FANON, WALTER RODNEY AND THE YOUTHS

Ideas are not material objects that are vulnerable to physical destruction. Despite efforts by western hegemons and their collaborators to discredit the revolutionary Pan African ideas, these ideas – emancipation, dignity, unity, and rights for ordinary people – survived and are being carried on by the youths who are innovating new ways to “stand up, get up, don’t give up the fight,” in the defense of these ideas until they become reality.

Walter Rodney had written extensively about colonialism, war and revolution. His book, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, continues to inspire millions all around the world. Walter Rodney, the Pan African historian, was assassinated on June 13, 1980. Those who assassinated him physically are now seeking to assassinate him intellectually. Even those who write books about Rodney and quote from him seek his ideas for academic positions and seek to divorce the work of Walter Rodney from active revolutionary change. This has been the case in the home of Walter Rodney, Guyana, where the ethnic and racial chauvinists have now sought to drive a wedge between youths of African and Indian descent. Even within the Global Pan African movement there are those who want to drive a wedge between youths of Tunisia and youths of Mali (between Arabs and Africans). These elements promote Pan Africanism on the basis of politics of exclusion. Walter Rodney had opposed racial chauvinists and he opposed those Pan Africanists who wanted to divide Africa using the Sahara or religious differences to support imperial divisions. Rodney had clarified the importance of the youth for the African Revolution. In writing about C.L.R James, Rodney had stated that “Most youth in Africa will have heard the axiom that each generation rewrites its own history. It does so not merely for giving different answers to the same questions but by posing entirely different questions based on the stage of development that a particular society has reached. Certain scholars will be among the first to raise the new and meaningful issues because of their sensitivity and connection with the most dynamic group in society. Thus when African peoples were mounting the struggle for political independence and as they continued that struggle through military means in Southern Africa and political economic means elsewhere, they automatically became interested in recalling previous resistance.”

Rodney would be dismayed today that many youths in Africa have not heard of Hector Peterson and the hundreds of thousands of youths who fought colonialism and apartheid. Silencing the history of the true heroes and heroines of the freedom struggle falls within the same category as the assassination of the freedom fighters of Africa. The assassination of Walter Rodney (like that of other Pan Africanists like Patrice Lumumba) as well as the overthrow of Pan African visionaries like Kwame Nkrumah, was meant to blunt the spirit of freedom, but certain ideas are indestructible.

We urge African youths to call on all previous resistance as they seek to develop a common ground to enrich the revolutionary processes that are now erupting.

Patrice Lumumba had understood the need for African liberation. He had written, “United as the children of one family, we shall defend the honor and freedom of Africa.” These were the words of a Pan Africanist who also understood the centrality of the Congo to the African Revolution. Lumumba was silenced. But his words echo on and are reinforced in the mission for the African Revolution – from generation to generation.

It was Frantz Fanon who argued that “every generation must, out of relative obscurity, discover its mission, fulfill it, or betray it.” Fanon, a medical doctor, internationalist and freedom fighter from the Caribbean island of Martinique was calling on the generation of the period of anti-colonialism to fulfill its mission in bringing an end to overt colonial domination. The generation of youths after 1945 took up the task of confronting colonial rule. From every part of the continent there were organized and spontaneous acts of opposition to colonial racism, exploitation and plunder.

One of the tasks of the freedom movement after 1945 was to liberate all Africans from colonial rule. This task is still incomplete (Western Sahara, Mayotte, Cayenne, Guadeloupe, Puerto Rico, Martinique and over 50 other colonies) and we have to remind ourselves that as long as one part of the world remains under colonial rule, others parts of the world will be threatened by the same colonial forces. It can now be said that despite the sacrifices of the youth in Africa manifest in the major struggles to eradicate colonialism and apartheid, the tasks of ending violation and exploitation is still incomplete. Youth and their role in previous revolutionary struggles in Africa must be studied to inspire those who were too young to be part of the great struggle to defeat apartheid.

AFRICAN YOUTHS AND EMANCIPATION IN THE ERA OF NGOS AND DATA MINING

What are the new questions for the 21st century? There are many contemporary questions regarding emancipation, transformation, unity, and rights for which today’s youths have to seek answers, taking inspirations from the struggles of previous generations. Numerous imperial organizations sponsored by the friends and enemies of Africa and enemies of the youth, under the guise of the so called international non-governmental organizations, seek to cream off the brightest of the youths of Africa and employ them as consultants to support the data mining that is going on at the imperial centers. Some of these international NGOs which operate under the pretext of providing education, health, and social welfare services, are seeking to collect all forms of intelligence information. And as they failed in Egypt, so imperialism has redoubled its efforts to invest in divisive formations in all parts of the world. African youths must become more conscious of these ploys and become even more active in sites where there are efforts to unearth the activities of looters who use tax havens and offshore companies/accounts to rob the society of money that could be used for reconstruction, health, education, and environmental repair.

Wangari Maathai left a message for the youths. This message is that the youths must replenish the earth and must save the planet. This message joins with the message and ideas of the indigenous peoples of Latin America and Asia. These peoples are pointing to the youths of the world the folly of the ideas of dominion over nature. We have seen that nature will take its revenge. Global warming is real and there must be system change in order to reverse global warming. Instinctively, people everywhere are grasping this basic fact. The more people grasp these facts, the more imperialism redoubles efforts to sabotage global initiatives from the environmental justice forces.

The youths must demand that they are not mobilized for war. The international nonprofit and non-governmental organization learnt in Latin America that the more there are international instruments to protect the rights of the youth, the more it is necessary to create organizations that will divert the energies of the youth away from direct action to defend their interests. This became very clear at the youth conference prior to the World Conference against Racism (WCAR) in Durban.

It was the clarity of this moment of reparative justice and the global call for reparations that pressured some so called leaders in Africa to come up with NEPAD. Ten years after NEPAD and the New Africa Initiative, the people are now returning to the ideas that came out of Durban 2001. Our brothers and sisters from Brazil, Uruguay, Venezuela and other parts of the Global African Family are reminding us that there can be no business as usual until there are clear apologies for slavery.

Only recently the British government for the first time acknowledged that crimes were committed in Kenya by British imperial forces. The same relentless campaign that had been carried out by the surviving members of the Land and Freedom Army (of Kenya) must be carried out by the Global Movement for Reparations for the slave trade and slavery.

The issue of reparations is urgent in identifying those who carried out crimes. This includes the identification of the social forces in Africa that facilitated these crimes of enslavement. Africa never recovered from the criminal destruction that had been unleashed during the warren to procure enslaved beings. It was this destruction that paved the way for the partitioning of Africa. The fact that a society such as Belgium murdered over ten million Africans after the partitioning of Africa should be general knowledge.

Today, there are many discussions about the potential of the African youth. We agree that there is great potential for revolutionary change. The world is going through a major technological revolution and the youths can arm themselves with knowledge of previous revolutionary moments to arm themselves with the ideas and forms of political organization that can make a decisive difference in this period. Kenyan youths have shown remarkable creativity with social media and have pioneered new products such as M-Pesa and Ushaidi. Youths in that society are holding the line against those who want to manipulate ethnic differences so that youths kill each other. It is in Nigeria where the backward elements have mobilized disaffected youths in the so-called Boko Haram to carry out mindless violence. Other youths in that large and populous country seek new ways of mobilizing and are holding the line against absolute barbarism of the corrupt elements

It is important to locate peace, reparations, and reconstruction as a process that breaks old patriarchal ideas and attitudes. The reformulation of peace and the harnessing of the creative energies of the youth is emerging in a situation where it is becoming clear that peace cannot be an imported commodity based on the landing of troops from international peacekeepers. The experience of the role of the United Nations from the assassination of Patrice Lumumba down to the recent intervention in Libya demonstrated the reality that the concept of peace that is widely circulated (and associated with the US Africa Command) does not value Africans or the self-determination of African societies. Most of the peace agreements that have been made in Africa have been platforms for more war and violence. It is this violent history of war as peace that is forging the conceptual break with realist principles of politics and the view that might is right.

An alternative vision of peace that brings back the Pan African principle that, “the African is responsible for the wellbeing of his brother and sister and that every African should carry this responsibility” should be enshrined in the streets and villages all over Africa. The Constitutive Act of the Union seeks to move from the idea of “noninterference in the internal affairs of states” to one that spells out the necessity to prevent genocide, crimes against humanity and unconstitutional military interventions. This change that was manifest in the call for non-recognition of governments that came to power by military coups (after 1999) was a significant step in the demilitarization of Africa. African women from the grassroots who have been campaigning for peace have been the strongest and most resilient forces championing new concepts of politics, citizenship and peace. The implicit ideal that is now on the agenda is the philosophy that defends human life and defends the quality of the lives of the workers and ordinary people.

As the African youths move to defend this philosophy and the ideas that Pan Africanists such as Walter Rodney stood for, it is my wish that they draw on the inspirations and traditions of the previous generations. African Youths will move from strength to strength, and as they move they will be singing the words of Bob Marley. Get up stand up, stand up for your rights/ don’t give up the fight.

And May Walter Rodney and his spirit live on among the revolutionary youths of Africa.

* Horace Campbell is Professor of African American Studies and Political Science at Syracuse University. He is also a Special invited Professor at Tsinghua University, Beijing. He is the author of the book, ‘Global NATO and the catastrophic failure in Libya: Lessons for Africa in the Forging of African Unity published by Monthly Review Press.http://monthlyreview.org/press/books/pb4123/ The book is distributed in the UK and in Africa by Pambazuka Press.

END NOTES

1. “Kenya is The Most Watched African Country on The US Spy Network” AllAfrica.com, June 11, 2013. http://allafrica.com/view/resource/main/main/id/00061936.html
2. See Horace Campbell, “Kony2012: militarization and disinformation blowback,” Pambazuka News, March 22, 2012. http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/80989


GEORGE ZIMMERMAN IS A CREEPY ASS CRACKER

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I seldom watch any trials on TV and the trial of George Zimmerman for the murder of Trayvon Martin is really no exception.  I have caught a few blurbs on the news but not much more.  I do know how people tried to mock and savage  the testimony of Rachel Jeantel.  Typical of white America.   

Then, in the background one day last week, while I was washing dishes, I heard someone refer to Zimmerman as the victim of reverse racism.  What?  I went out to see how anyone came up with that concept.  The news head explained to me that Trayvon had apparently referred to Zimmerman as a "creepy ass cracker," or something to that affect.  I had to chuckle at that.  Then I caught myself and realized they were serious.  They were actually equating this to the use of the N word.  They were equating this to the shooting of Treyvon by that creepy cracker.  There were people actually pushing this dreadful line.  

Unreal, I thought.

Then I remembered that I was in America and it was 2013 and I sighed.

The following is from We Are Respectable Negroes.



Yes, George Zimmerman is in Fact a "Creepy Cracker"


A trial should be a crucible for the truth. While the legal outcome remains much in doubt, George Zimmerman’s murder trial is a reminder of the semi-permanence of race and the reality of the color line in post civil rights America.


The Zimmerman trial has revealed several truths so far. Young, dark-skinned, black women testifying in court about life and death matters--and who happen to be “working class” or “poor”--are to be savaged and mocked. The myth of the welfare queen lives on; black, female, and “poor” is to be less than a human being. She is most certainly not due the most basic amount of human respect or dignity.


White America is fascinated by black vernacular speech and how people of color talk in private spaces and among ourselves, as opposed to in public spaces or other interactions where we are subjected to the White Gaze.  


The comments on Twitter, other social media, and the Internet at large, have revealed how one’s relationship to the truth is also very much a function of racial attitudes and political orientation.


Zimmerman’s supporters believe that he is a “victim” and black folks are existentially obligated to submit to white people (and those who identity with White Authority) at all times and in every situation. Most of Zimmerman’s supporters do not know about America’s long history of slave passes, white slave patrollers, or Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger Taney’s infamous ruling in the Dred Scott case that black people have no rights that whites are obligated to respect. Yet, they echo such sentiments across time and space with ease.


Trayvon Martin’s advocates see in his killing one more example (among many thousands) where in the United States, black life is deemed to be cheap and expendable; African-Americans are presumed guilty until proven innocent—even while walking down the street and minding their own business.

While ostensibly a means of getting at the truth of what happened that rainy and dark evening, Zimmerman’s trial has also been a spectacle and a carnival sideshow in America’s centuries-long racial theater.


While talking on the phone to his friend Rachel Jaentel, Trayvon Martin apparently called George Zimmerman, the man who followed him in a vehicle, exited it with a gun, and pursued him against police instructions, a “creepy ass cracker.” In a twist of thinking, and an inversion of what studied, learned, and reasonable people understand about the realities of race and power in America, for colorblind conservative racists, George Zimmerman has been magically transformed into a victim of  “reverse racism.”


Such a troubled relationship to the truth would be the stuff of a great comedy sketch if these serious matters did not involve a young person shot dead by a wannabe cop who imagined himself as possessing a license to kill.

  
The truth can also be inconvenient: by virtue of his actions and character, George Zimmerman is in fact a "creepy cracker."



The origins of the word cracker are uncertain. What we do know is that Trayvon’s use of “cracker” drew on a long history of mass racial violence by whites against African-Americans that began with the transatlantic slave trade and the plantation system in the “New World.”


 “Cracker” is evocative of the sound of the whip, wielded by a white overseer or slave owner, as it lashes and tears black flesh. Cracker is a word that embodies white on black racial violence and tyranny.


Cracker is in no way equivalent to the word nigger.


Were millions of white people killed and enslaved by blacks holding the lash and calling them “crackers?” Were there signs that segregated whites from blacks that read “no crackers need apply” or “crackers sit in the back of the bus”? Were white people burned alive, their bodies defiled, postcards taken of their corpses, and public gatherings where blacks killed “crackers” by the thousands? Were there racial pogroms where blacks running amok, pillaging, raping, murdering and destroying property at will, yelled out for the blood of “crackers” in places like Tulsa,East St. LouisChicago, and Rosewood? Were there sundown towns that had signs on their outskirts which told "crackers" “not to let the sun set on them here” or they will be killed?


No. To suggest that the words "cracker" and "nigger" are at all similar is an act which is both intellectually dishonest and a lie.


History is rife with cruel coincidences and ironies. For decades,SanfordFlorida was a sundown town. Blacks were not welcome in its city limits. White racism was so potent in SanfordFloridathat Jackie Robinson, the trailblazing hero who broke the color line in baseball, was not allowed to train there.


When Trayvon Martin called George Zimmerman a cracker he was channeling a sense of existential dread and fear of white racial violence. Trayon’s worries were prescient. George Zimmerman would later shoot and kill Trayvon after racially profiling him.


George Zimmerman is also a creep.


George Zimmerman stalked and followed an innocent person on a rainy night.  Strangers with loaded guns following innocent people around in the dark are almost by definition “creepy.” George Zimmerman has been accused of sexually molesting a relative. He has been visited with a restraining order for domestic battery.Zimmerman has also been in fights with the police. On the evening he shot and killed Trayon Martin, he was taking a medication which can cause anxiety, violent impulses, aggression, and hallucinations.


As demonstrated by his many phone calls to the police, George Zimmerman is obsessed with harassing and confronting black people who he feels do not “belong” in his neighborhood.Zimmerman is such an extreme Negrophobe that he has even called the police on a black child who was walking down the street.


The throaty rasps of his call to the police and anger that “fucking punks. those assholes they always get away” was that of an obsessive, one whose exhalations were more suited for a phone sex line than a 911 call. George Zimmerman’s obsession with black people and vigilante-ways were that of a deviant, and yes, a creep.


The efforts by colorblind racists, the White Right, and Zimmerman’s defenders to invert reality so that he is a “victim” of “black racism” in the guise of the word “cracker” is part of a larger social dynamic in the Age of Obama. Recent public opinion research has revealed how white folks now believe that “anti-white” "racism" is a bigger problem than systematic discrimination against people of color in the United States.


Fantasies of white oppression are not just the product of disinformation circulated by the Right-wing media. They do serious political work by legitimating the gutting of the Voting Rights Act and affirmative action, as well as distracting the public from how white racism and white privilege continue to systematically disadvantage people of color to the detriment of the country’s economy.


A yearning for a belief in the lie of “white oppression” also fuels the rise of the militia movement and domestic terrorists who believe that Obama is not a legitimate and democratically elected President. The logic which tries to falsely equate “cracker” and “nigger” is also operative in the Herrenvolk dreams of the Tea Party and the Republican Party’s efforts to resuscitate the Confederacy and Civil War era controversies about secession, nullification, and “states rights”. Ultimately, the lie of “reverse racism” and “white oppression” is a means to rewrite history in order to legitimate White power and dominance.


The simplest definition of racism is that it consists of power plus prejudice. On the night when George Zimmerman killed Trayvon Martin, it was Zimmerman with both the power of the gun and who prejudged an innocent person walking down the street by virtue of their skin color as a threat.


Such behavior has been the modus operandi and habit of “creepy ass crackers” in the United States for centuries.

CAPITAL'S ATROCITY GOES VIRTUALLY UNPUNISHED IN BHOPAL

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Capital's mass murder at Bhopal happened almost 30 years ago.  Actually, that is not correct, the murders and the horrors are continuing today and those responsible walk around on this planet free, as if nothing happened.

The official immediate death toll was 2,259. The government of Madhya Pradesh confirmed a total of 3,787 deaths related to the gas release. Others estimate 8,000 died within two weeks and another 8,000 or more have since died from gas-related diseases. A government affidavit in 2006 stated the leak caused 558,125 injuries including 38,478 temporary partial injuries and approximately 3,900 severely and permanently disabling injuries.

The British press recently was full of full page advertisements recently pointing out that birth defects, which showed a huge uptick, after the disaster, are rising again.  Children are now being born dead and malformed in numbers not seen since the early days.

The ads were placed by the British charity, The Bhopal Medical Appeal. UCA News reports:


The advertisements show pictures of severely malformed or brain damaged children and the text says: “Some injuries are too harrowing to show, like the eye engulfed by a raw tumour that left a small girl in agony until it finally killed her.”

The charity, which funds two clinics in Bhopal, has also funded a “huge, rigorous study covering more than 100,000 people exposed to gas, to poisoned water, and to both.

“The work is almost finished. Results have to be confirmed and analysed but indications are that many families have been poisoned twice, first by Carbide’s gases, then by contaminated water.
“In poisoned areas birth defects are occurring at rates many times the Indian average.”

The advertisements say that after the gas leak, the Union Carbide plant was abandoned with the lethal pesticides still inside, while nearby were lakes of toxic waste, despite fears that local water supplies would be affected.

As early as 1999, a Greenpeace study found many wells contaminated with heavy metals and chemicals. The same contaminants were in the blood and breast milk of women living downstream from the factory.

In 2006 doctors visiting the affected areas found almost half the children they examined were brain damaged. Since then, the charity says, the situation has worsened.


As the Economic Times writes: 

The government of India initially sued Union Carbide for $3 billion, and settled for $370 million, and obtained the stamp of the Supreme Court of India on that settlement, discharging Union Carbide of any further obligation in the matter. This sell-out was in 1989.


The number of victims was far in excess of initial estimates, but the compensation amount remained the same. Only depreciation of the rupee and the interest accrued on the original deposit, as the courts decided to whom and how the money would be disbursed, enhanced the corpus.

But the compensation received by the victims from the sum obtained from Union Carbide was paltry.


In June of this year,  The Business Standard Reports:

Janki Bai Sahu, a survivor of the 1984 , who filed a case in a  on behalf of herself and her family and sought damages from  (UCC), has had her appeal petition dismissed on several grounds, including the statute of limitations.


She and others had their petitioned dismissed last year and had appealed before a higher court. The case was originally filed in 2004. The petition was on the pollution of soil and groundwater by hazardous waste generated in the factory, site of what is considered the world's worst industrial disaster, when toxic gas leaked from it in December 1984, killing thousands then and many more from the after-effects in later years.


Capital gets away with mass murder.  Capitalists make billions and walk away scott free while thousands suffer.  Global capital rules all, some would say, and they would be pretty correct.  The multitudes and in this case the victims have fought a long and hard battle and they are not giving up.  We need to be there with them.  Their fight is our fight.  The Empire which has wrecked havoc on them, is the same Empire we face in our own backyard.  The people of Bhopal were casualties of the war the Empire wages on us all.  They are some of the most horrible examples of the disregard of Capital for the people of the planet, and for the planet itself.  

There are two posts below.  The first from the International Campaign for Justice in Bhopal is a reaction to the recent US court ruling.  The second from Bhopal.net contains information and a petition about the chief henchmen in all this and the on going attempt to bring him to some kind of justice. 




A Sad Day for Bhopalis and The World


After a 9 year Battle, the US Federal Court this month dismissed an appeal to hold Union Carbide liable for the pollution of soil and groundwater by hazardous waste generated by the abandoned factory.  Survivors Groups are indignant, but not defeated.  Please read the following Press Statement:




June 29 2013. Five Bhopal based organizations active on the issue of ongoing toxic contamination in and around the abandoned Union Carbide factory in Bhopal today condemned the recent decision of the US Federal court that dismissed an appeal filed by a group of plaintiffs last year.

The organizations said that the decision of the Appellate court was a gross miscarriage of justice as it deliberately ignored the documentary evidence presented in court in the last nine years. The organizations said that they would now persuade the Indian government, owner of the contaminated lands, to intervene in the case pending before the US court.

Rachna Dhingra of the Bhopal Group for Information and Action said that internal corporate documents presented before the three Appellate court “unambiguously demonstrates that Union Carbide Corporation, USA, and not its Indian subsidiary, had designed the waste disposal system in the Bhopal plant as well as supervised its operation and monitored the harmful consequences of the hazardous design.” She alleged that the judges turned a blind eye to the facts on record simply in order to avoid making American corporations accountable for crimes committed outside the U.S.

Nawab Khan, President of the Bhopal Gas Peedit Mahila Purush Sangharsh Morcha said that the original case seeking clean up of the contamination by the US corporation and its former chairman remained within the New York court system and lawyers representing Bhopali plaintiffs were “exploring all options” to continue the legal fight. “It took survivors of the Nazi holocaust 50 years to obtain redress through the courts,” Mr. Khan said. “Like them, we will not give up until we receive complete justice for the wrongs done to our families.”

Balkrishna Namdeo, President of the Bhopal Gas Peedit Nirashrit Pension Bhogi Sangharsh Morcha pointed out that the U.S. judges have clarified that the decision to absolve the parent corporation, a majority partner in the Indian subsidiary, could not be cited as a precedent for other cases. “That is the best illustration of how unsure the judges themselves are about the legal validity of their decision.” he said.

The case in the U.S. Federal court concerns the pollution of soil and groundwater by hazardous waste generated in the factory that was the site of the world's worst industrial disaster when toxic gases leaked from it in December 1984.

Louise Christian, world renowned British human rights lawyer expressing solidarity with the survivors, said "This decision to deny justice to poor and vulnerable people caused irreparable harm by big business should shame the world. The United States Appeal Court has ignored compelling evidence about the central role played by the Union Carbon Corporation based in the US in equipping overseeing and enabling the Indian offshoot of the company to produce UCC's own product, the insecticide Sevin. UCC failed to give advice which would have ensured not only that the leak of gas itself did not happen but also prevented the contamination which has poisoned the drinking water in a large area around where the plant was.

Those who run multinational corporations should not be allowed to escape liability for grievous harm by creating complex corporate structures and hiding behind them. The paltry compensation paid in India to the victims and the failure to prosecute anyone over Bhopal is a disgrace.
The history should be reviewed by the United Nations with a view to introducing international law mechanisms for securing justice in this and other cases".





Sign the Petition to Extradite former Chairman of Union Carbide Corporation, Warren Anderson for his crimes in Bhopal



Dear Sisters and Brothers of USA,


We, the survivors of the world’s worst industrial disaster in Bhopal ask your help in extraditing Warren Anderson, former Chairman of Union Carbide Corporation who has  jumped bail and refuses to face criminal charges related to  thousands of deaths.


SIGN THIS PETITION  http://wh.gov/l3cJi


You need to be have a address in US.
If the petition gets 100,000 American signatures by 13th July 2013 then the White House will respond.


 Extradite Warren Anderson, fugitive and bail-jumper, to India to face charges related to thousands of deaths
Former Union Carbide Chairman / CEO Warren Anderson skipped bail in India and fled to the US more than 28 years ago. In 1992 and again in 2009 the Indian courts  issued warrants for Anderson’s arrest for manslaughter. The 1984 Bhopal disaster has killed as many as 25,000 people and 120,000 continue to battle chronic illnesses. Cancer and Tuberculosis are rampant and next generation is also marked by Carbide poisons. There is abundant evidence that shows that the disaster in Bhopal was foreseeable and preventable and that it occurred because of deliberate criminal negligence by Anderson and his colleagues. Anderson lives comfortably in his three homes in the Hamptons, Florida and Connecticut. The president of USA and the US Departments of State and Justice need to stop harboring one of the world’s most wanted criminals. Extradite Anderson before he dies of old age.


ANDERSON CRIMES IN BHOPAL

Union Carbide Factory, Bhopal, India

Anderson was part of the 11 member managerial committee that approved untested technology in the Bhopal plant to cut cost by 25%.





TIMELINE


On 7th December 1984, Warren Anderson along with Indian officials was arrested in Bhopal and released on bail. He promised to return back in his  Bail Bond.


On 1 December 1987, Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) filed charge sheet against Warren Anderson, chairman of UCC, and eleven other accused individuals and corporations. Warren Anderson is charged under Indian Penal Code sections 304 [culpable homicide, punishable by 10 years to life imprisonment and fine], 320 [causing grievous hurt punishable by 10 years to life imprisonment and fine], 324 [causing hurt, punishable by 3 years imprisonment and/or fine] and 429 [causing death and poisoning of animals, punishable by 3 years imprisonment and/or fine]

Anderson has not shown up in Bhopal Court despite several summons through Interpol.


On 10th  April 1992 CJM, Bhopal issues Non-Bailable Warrant of arrest against Warren Anderson and orders the Government of India to seek extradition of Anderson from the United States.


May 2003:  Ministry of External Affairs sends request for extradition of Warren Anderson to Department of State and Department of Justice, USA.


On 24th  July 2003, the Department of State, United States rejects the application for Warren Anderson’s extradition. Copy of  rejection of Anderson’s extradition obtained under Freedom of Information Act.


In 2004, 2005 and 2008 Government of India took up the matter again with the US Government to reconsider its decision on the basis of additional inputs. However all the requests were turned down.


On 28th April 2011 Indian Government through Ministry of External Affairs sent another request for extradition of Warren Anderson.


This request is still pending with the US Department of Justice and till today (March 2013)  no decision has been taken by them regarding extradition of Warren Anderson.Updated presented by Indian Govt to the CJM, Bhopal.


Warren Anderson is currently 92 years old.

  

EGYPT'S WOMEN FIGHTING FOR THE FUTURE

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It appears we have seen stage two of the Revolution in Egypt and the Muslim Brotherhood and President Morsi are out of power.  Who is in power?  Hard to say exactly, but my guess in Egypt we have not seen the end of people in the streets.  I mean, even when the next group comes to power, I don't think we are done.  Representative democracy with ties to global capital is not an answer to the millions in the streets.  What the multitudes in Egypt want, no one can give them.  They will have to eventually give it to themselves.

Meanwhile, I will leave the early morning quarterback stories to other and instead bring you up to date on the on going struggle of the women in Egypt.  This is a revolution in the midst of a revolution.  Women are not interested in going backwards.  They are not interested in standing in place.  They are interested in creating the future and destroying all types of patriarchy.

The following comes from Open Democracy.



Egypt: the politics of sexual violence in protest spaces


There is a new wave of sexual assault against women being witnessed in Tahrir Square, but women are refusing to let anyone take away their voices by assaulting their bodies. These attacks are commensurate with the pattern of politically motivated sexual violence that has emerged, and grown, under the Muslim Brotherhood’s reign, argues Mariz Tadros



When Tamarod “Rebel”, a youth led initiative called for a mass revolt against the Egyptian government on the 30th of June to impeach the president and declare early elections, some were worried that half the population- women- would not turn up. Since the informal political ascendency of the Muslim Brotherhood in 2011, and the coming to power of President Morsi on the 1st of July 2012, a pattern emerged of organized, targeted sexual assault on women in protest spaces.  It is believed that these acts of sexual violence are neither random nor of the same nature as social forms of sexual harassment prevalent in society. It is believed that the ultimate aim of these targeted assaults ispolitical: to intimidate the women and their families from allowing them to join protests against the status quo. Though the army and the former Mubarak regime were both responsible for using sexual assault to oppress the dissenters, the use of sexual assault increased both in number and intensity after the Brotherhood became politically empowered.

If the intention of these politically motivated acts of sexual assault was to compel women to stay at home, it did not work. Out of the roughly 17 million or so who revolted on the 30th of June, no less than half of them were women. The presence of women of all ages, and backgrounds in these protests excelled that of the Egyptian revolution of January 2011. Rural women and women from the Delta and Upper Egypt who had a very low level of participation in the 25th of January revolts of 2011 were the first to take to the streets on the 30th of June. Coptic women who have conventionally been the top target of the Islamists in assault [partly because they represent disproportionately the highest percentage of non-veiled women) had transformed their choir hymns into subversive songs about the men in beards who gaze at the nakedness of their “exposed toe nails”.

But weeks before the 30th of June, anti-sexual harassment groups had started to plan for the protests, predicting that opponents of the revolt [read the Brotherhood and their Islamist allies] would strike again, using sexual violence to clear the protest spaces.

And it happened. On Friday the 28th June as protestors filled Tahrir Square, there were five cases of sexual assault, the women were transferred to hospital unconscious What was striking about these assaults was that they followed exactly the same pattern followed in previous incidents of sexual violence in protest spaces. For one, they happened by encircling these women, blocking outsiders from getting through to save them, and collectively assaulting them using extreme violence and sustaining the attacks over a long duration of time. A Dutch journalist was gang raped and suffered severe injuries that required hospitalization. Two days late, on the day of the biggest protest ever,  OpantiSh ( Operation Anti-sexual assault ) documented 46 cases of sexual assault against women protestors in Tahrir, some involving their violation with sharp objects.

On the 30th June, Essam el Haddad, the presidential advisor stated in a press conference that the incidents of sexual assault in Tahrir Square were regrettable and he blamed the protestors who were “out of control”. Immediately thereafter the Muslim Brotherhood channel, Misr 25 and other Islamist channels began a smear campaign against the protestors, shaming the way they treat women and contrasting that with the way the Islamists that have congregated in Rab’a el Adaweya square in Cairo treat their women- not a single case of harassment there, they argue. This discourse is very much in tune with the narrative of sexual assault that was widely disseminated and believed by supporters of the Islamist movements is that the revolutionaries are the ones that assault their women, the latter going to protest because they have no morals and want to be assaulted. 

OpantiSh responded by issuing a statement condemning the government’s attempt to make political gains out of these assaults.  The statement pointed to the disconnect between Hadad’s discourse of concern for women who have been assaulted with the absence of any genuine measures to treat the assaulted in a humane way by his public officials, including the Minister of Health himself. The government’s stance on women’s exposure to politically motivated sexual assault was loud and clear in February when the Muslim Brotherhood MPs in the Shura Council [acting parliament in the past six months] were asked about the incidents of sexual assault against women in Tahrir Square on the 25th of January. Reda Al-Hefnawy, a Freedom and Justice Party (FJP) membe,r had blamed women protestors for the sexual violence they experienced.  “Women should not mingle with men during protests.....How can the Ministry of Interior be tasked with protecting a lady who stands among a group of men?” 

However, there are a series of indicators to suggest the Muslim Brotherhood, other Islamist allies and the government are implicated in these acts of assault. First, in all of these incidents, it was always demonstrators who tried to save women from the hands of organized groups that orchestrate attacks through highly organized and planned operations of assault in exactly the same spaces in Tahrir Square. Women and men demonstrators who tried to save the assaulted women were often subjected to sexual violence and assault themselves. The response of the Muslim Brotherhood-led government in condoning these acts as a natural consequence of women not taking the necessary precautions to protect themselves suggests a governmental complicity in doing nothing to bring to justice the perpetrators of such acts. 

Second, as early as November 2011, Islamists were directly involved in acts of sexual assault on women and men who were protesting the army’s rule.  One young man's  account explains how he and other protestors, women and men,  were sexually assaulted by the Islamists in Tahrir Square during that time. 

Perhaps the most blatant acts of assault instigated by the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamists directly on women and men in protest spaces occurred at el Ettehadeya on the 5th of December 2012. Ola Shehab, a young political leader in the Popular Socialist Front was there on the 5th of December when she was captured by followers of the Muslim Brotherhood and Salafis. She recounts that she was wearing a loose jacket and trousers, had her face covered to protect against tear gas, and had a helmet on to protect against attacks. “I realized they could not see I am a woman. They started sexually harassing me from behind when they were thinking I am a man.” When they removed Ola’s helmet and realized she was a woman, “another wave of sexual harassment continued...grabbing me from the front”. While Ola was retained the Muslim Brothers who came to “interrogate” her would introduce themselves, their ranks within the movement and where they came from, a gesture which Ola believes emanated from their belief that they would not be held accountable for their actions. Plus they believed that she would not live to tell anyway, given that they had made up stories to the Salafis that Ola was in possession of Molotov cocktails and that she had killed ten Salafis. Lina Megahed was also kidnapped and sexually assaulted- until a Salafi man had compassion on her and helped her escape.

Not surprisingly, though women and men filed lawsuits and named their perpetrators at el Ettehadeya, none of them were brought to justice- sending a clear signal from the regime of where its allegiances lie. Yet through it all, women continue to go out to the street in droves- refusing to let anyone take away their voices by assaulting their bodies.


A TRUE STRUGGLE FOR INDEPENDENCE AND FREEDOM: THE SLAVE REVOLT OF 1811

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Today is Independence Day in the USA.

I will however talk to you today about a different struggle for Independence which took place in 1811 down in what became the state of Louisiana.  This is a story of a little known slave rebellion whose aim was the establishment of an independent Black Republic.  This was the largest slave rebellion in US history.

The Slave Rebellion Web Site writes:


During this revolt about 500 enslaved Africans, armed with pikes, hoes, axes and a few firearms, marched on the city of New Orleans with flags flying and drums beating.  Many of the slaves had participated in the Haitian Revolution.  This revolt was led by Charles Deslondes, a mulatto from Saint Dominique, Haiti.  They were well-organized and used military formation dividing themselves into companies commanded by various officers.


In his book on the revolt, historian Daniel Rasmussen wrote: 



"I realized that the revolt had been much larger -- and come much closer to succeeding -- than the planters and American officials let on. Contrary to their letters, which are the basis for most accounts of the revolt, the slave army posed an existential threat to white control over the city of New Orleans," he said. "My biggest surprise as I dug into the sources was . . . . just how close they came to conquering New Orleans and establishing a black Republic on the shores of the Mississippi."



The revolt was inspired by the 1791 events in Haiti where the enslaved population took over that island nation and abolished slavery. These revolutionists had similar dreams as they marched to the beat of drums and under waving banners toward New Orleans.  Rasmussen writes some of the leaders of the revolt:

These three men, each with different insights and abilities, had planned their insurrection and spread word of the uprising through small insurrectionary cells distributed up and down the coast, especially at James Brown's plantation, the Meuillion plantation, and the Kenner and Henderson plantation.

Eventually the rebels were defeated by Federal trooops, the leaders were put before a tribunal of slave owners and executed.  The Kasama project reports:


Their heads were stuck on poles and placed along the river levee from New Orleans to LaPlace in an attempt to discourage similar rebellions.


""It was really brutally put down," said Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, a New Orleans author and historian who is now an adjunct history professor at Michigan State University. "It was incredibly bloodthirsty in the way the elite put it down, cutting people into little pieces, displaying body parts."

The heroic struggle for freedom of these slaves is a chapter of history which we much remember and we must never forget.  This isn't easy since most people have, of course, never even heard of it.  Today many groups are doing what they can to overcome the concerted attempt to make the facts of the many slave revolts disappear from our history.  The following is from the San Francisco Bay View.


New Orleans 1811 Slave Revolt tour raises funds to rebuild libraries in Haiti



by Leon A. Waters



A New Orleans based non-profit is working to rebuild libraries in Haiti. The organization is called Bibliotheque Parrainage (BP). It means Library Patronage. Bibliotheque Parrainage assists libraries in Haiti through the country’s National Library, Bibliotheque Nationale. Founded in 2011, the goal of Bibliotheque Parrainage is to provide resources to the National Library that will be of assistance to public libraries across the country.

Libraries in Haiti have operational challenges. Some of them do not have stable electricity to operate; some have unstable solar power; and others function in the evening when bursts of electricity become available. Besides the challenges of structural repair, which includes roof renovations, many of Haiti’s libraries are seeking fraternal assistance inside and outside the country.

Charles Deslonde
Charles Deslonde, leader of the 1811 slave revolt, the largest slave rebellion in U.S. history
This includes opportunities to partner with the National Library in areas such as the sharing of periodical databases for use by all Bibliotheque Nationale patrons. This also includes partnership opportunities to enhance and upgrade staff and students in advanced librarian science, utilizing advance technological training and study. Creating the opportunity to bring staff and students to the United States to receive such training and study is critical to revolutionize the role that libraries can play in Haiti’s future.During the July 4th weekend in New Orleans, Bibliotheque Parrainage is hosting a fundraising bus tour of the Louisiana 1811 Slave Revolt, the largest slave revolt in the United States.

Inspired by the Haitian Revolution, the revolt occurred in the parishes of St. John the Baptist, St. Charles and Orleans. The revolt was led by a former enslaved man named Charles Deslonde. The aim of the revolt was to abolish slavery and establish a free republic to be governed by the former enslaved people.

This educational adventure will retrace the route of the former enslaved rebels. The tour will enlighten the visitors on how Deslonde’s rebels carried out the revolt. The visitors will visit some of the locations where the slave rebels fought U.S. troops and militia and other locations related to the revolt.

The visitors will learn what happened, discover the gains made and the foundation laid for further revolts. A descendant of the rebels will escort the visitors to numerous stops where significant actions occurred.

Funds raised from this July 4th weekend adventure will be used for assistance to the Nationale Bibliotheque in Haiti. In this way, we who reside in the United States will extend a supporting hand to the Haitian people.

Schedule for the 1811 Slave Revolt Bus Tour


Join the 1811 Slave Revolt Bus Tour on Friday, Saturday or Sunday, July 5-7. Departure is at 9 a.m. with boarding time at 8:45 a.m. at 500 Canal St., in front of the New Orleans Sheraton Hotel. Visitors are encouraged to wear comfortable clothing and no sandals. The tour is approximately three and a half hours; tickets are $50 per person. Participants may go online to purchase tickets: www.bibliothequeparrainage.eventbrite.com. For more tour information, call (504) 432-9901.

'Deslonde Revolt 1811'
“Deslonde Revolt 1811” – artist unknown
The president of Bibliotheque Parrainage is Ms. Valencia Hawkins, who is a recent retired librarian of 26 years of service from the New Orleans Public Library. Ms. Hawkins served the citizens of New Orleans in the official post as associate director of Central Public Services, Outreach and Programming.


Those in New Orleans know very well the role libraries can play after a natural disaster. Their natural disaster was Hurricane Katrina. The main library located in downtown New Orleans was mostly spared from the horrific damage that impacted most of New Orleans. Hence, the main library played a real critical role in the restoration of New Orleans. The library was a center for information, disaster relief assistance that included medical-health resources, housing-shelter resources and food-financial resources.

Funds raised from this July 4th weekend adventure will be used for assistance to the Nationale Bibliotheque in Haiti. In this way, we who reside in the United States will extend a supporting hand to the Haitian people.


Despite the living conditions of most of Haiti’s people, the Haiti people sent $40,000 to assist New Orleanians to rebuild and recover. Such a very poor country made such a humble sacrifice. Bibliotheque Parrainage feels that libraries assist in the building of communities; certainly, as Bibliotheque Parrainage expounds, those of us who reside in the United States can do more.

Louisiana’s heroic 1811 Slave Revolt


One of the most suppressed and hidden stories of African and African American history is the story of the 1811 Slave Revolt. The aim of the revolt was the establishment of an independent republic, a Black republic. Over 500 Africans, from 50 different nations with 50 different languages, would wage a fight against U.S. troops and the territorial militias.

1811 slave revolt
1811 Slave Revolt – artist unknown
This revolt would get started in St. John the Baptist and St. Charles parishes, about 30 miles upriver from New Orleans. At that time, New Orleans was the capital of what was called the Orleans Territory. The revolt sought to capture the city of New Orleans and make New Orleans the capital of the new republic.


The principal organizer and leader of this revolt was a man named Charles, a laborer on the Deslonde plantation. The Deslonde family had been one of the many San Domingo slave holding families that fled the Haitian Revolution (1790-1802). The Deslonde family fled to Louisiana for refuge. In their escape, the Deslonde family brought their chattel property, Charles and others, with them.

The Deslonde family acquired land and restarted their slave holding sugarcane operations in St. John the Baptist parish. The ideas of slave rebellion had been inspired by the Haitians’ defeat of Napoleon and his allies, who included President George Washington. The victory of Africans in gaining their freedom in Haiti had a powerful and stimulating effect on Africans held in bondage all over the world, especially in the Western Hemisphere. It gave enormous encouragement to the Africans on plantations in Louisiana. To capture the city of New Orleans, Charles Deslonde’s strategy consisted of a two-pronged military assault.

One prong of the attack would be to march down the River Road to New Orleans. The rebels would gain in number as they moved from plantation to plantation on the East Bank of the Mississippi River from St. John the Baptist parish to New Orleans. They were intent on creating a slave army, capturing the city of New Orleans and liberating the tens of thousands of slaves held in bondage in the territory of Louisiana.

The other prong of attack was to involve the enslaved Africans inside the city of New Orleans in a simultaneous uprising. Here the rebels would seize the arsenal at Fort St. Charles and distribute the weapons to the arriving slave army. The two-pronged attack would then merge as one and proceed to capture the strategic targets in the city.
On the evening of Jan. 8, 1811, Charles and his lieutenants would start the revolt. The rebels would elect their leaders to lead them into battle. They elected women and men. The leaders were on horseback. Several young warriors marched ahead of them with drums and flags. Men and women assembled in columns of four behind those on horseback.

Leon Waters speaks on 1811 slave revolt, largest in US 2011
Author and historian Leon Waters speaks on the 1811 Slave Revolt, the largest in the U.S. He is descended from the rebels.
The rebels rose up on the plantation of Col. Manuel Andry (today the city of LaPlace) in St. John the Baptist Parish. They overwhelmed their oppressors. Armed with cane knives, hoes, clubs and a few guns, the rebels marched down the River Road toward New Orleans. Their slogan was “On to New Orleans” and “Freedom or Death,” which they shouted as they marched to New Orleans.

However, despite their best efforts, they were not able to succeed. The revolt was put down by Jan. 11 and many of the leaders and participants were killed by the slave owners’ militia and U.S. federal troops. Some of the leaders were captured, placed on trial and later executed. Their heads were cut off and placed on poles along the river in order to frighten and intimidate the other slaves. This display of heads placed on spikes stretched over 60 miles.

The sacrifices of these brave women and men were not in vain. The revolt reasserted the humanity and redeemed the honor of the people. The uprising weakened the system of chattel slavery, stimulated more revolts in the following years and set the stage for the final battle, the Civil War (1861-1865) that put an end to this horrible system. The children and the grandchildren of the rebels of 1811 finished the job in the Civil War. Louisiana contributed more soldiers – over 28,000 – to the Union Army than any other state.

These women and men of 1811 represented the best qualities of people of African descent. They were people of exceptional courage, valor and dedication. These were women and men who put the interest and welfare of the masses above their own personal desires. These were people who understood that the emancipation of the masses is a precondition for the emancipation of the individual.

The sacrifices of these brave women and men were not in vain. The revolt reasserted the humanity and redeemed the honor of the people.


Remember the Ancestors! Remember the women and men who carried out the largest African uprising on American soil.

Author and historian Leon A. Waters, publisher and manager of Hidden History Tours, chairman of the Louisiana Museum of African American History and descendant of the 1811 rebels, can be reached atleonawaters8@gmail.com. Bibliotheque Parrainage can be reached at bparrainage@gmail.com.


A FEMINIST CRITIQUE OF MARX BY SILVIA FEDERICI

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Theoretical weekends is here.  Today we plow ahead with an analysis by Silvia Federici concerning the relationship between "women's work" and capitalism.  In this work Federici herself writes, 


...is the argument that Marx’s analysis of capitalism has been hampered by his inability to conceive of value-producing work other than in the form of commodity production and his consequent blindness to the significance of women’s unpaid reproductive work in the process of capitalist accumulation. Ignoring this work has limited Marx’s understanding of the true extent of the capitalist exploitation of labor and the function of the wage in the creation of divisions within the working class, starting with the relation between women and men.

With this work, then, Federici elaborates upon her feminist anti-capitalist vision which takes her through and beyond, in some ways, in many ways, orthodox Marxism.  

The following is from End of Capitalism.  Read it with me...



A Feminist Critique of Marx by Silvia Federici



Silvia Federici is one of the most important political theorists alive today. Her landmark book Caliban and the Witch demonstrated the inextricable link between anti-capitalism and radical feminist politics by digging deep into the actual history of capital’s centuries-long attack on women and the body.

In this essay, originally written in 2008, she follows up on that revelation by laying out her feminist anti-capitalist vision, and how it extends beyond traditional Marxism. This piece is comprehensive – long but far-reaching. At times seeing the truth requires seeing in the dark – acknowledging the true horrors of the world as it currently is manifest.
This essay was updated and published in Silvia’s new anthology Revolution at Point Zero, and I have made a few small additional edits.  Enjoy! [alex]
The Reproduction of Labor Power in the Global Economy and the Unfinished Feminist Revolution (2011 edition)
“Women’s work and women’s labor are buried deeply in the heart of the capitalist social and economic structure.” – David Staples, No Place Like Home (2006)
“It is clear that capitalism has led to the super-exploitation of women. This would not offer much consolation if it had only meant heightened misery and oppression, but fortunately it has also provoked resistance. And capitalism has become aware that if it completely ignores or suppresses this resistance it might become more and more radical, eventually turning into a movement for self-reliance and perhaps even the nucleus of a new social order.” – Robert Biel, The New Imperialism (2000)
“The emerging liberative agent in the Third World is the unwaged force of women who are not yet disconnected from the life economy by their work. They serve life not commodity production. They are the hidden underpinning of the world economy and the wage equivalent of their life-serving work is estimated at $16 trillion.” – John McMurtry, The Cancer State of Capitalism (1999)
“The pestle has snapped because of so much pounding. Tomorrow I will go home. Until tomorrow Until tomorrow… Because of so much pounding, tomorrow I will go home.” – Hausa women’s song from Nigeria

INTRODUCTION

wagesagainsthouseworkThis essay is a political reading of the restructuring of the (re)production of labor-power in the global economy, but it is also a feminist critique of Marx that, in different ways, has been developing since the 1970s. This critique was first articulated by activists in the Campaign for Wages For Housework, especially Mariarosa Dalla Costa, Selma James, Leopoldina Fortunati, among others, and later by Ariel Salleh in Australia and the feminists of the Bielefeld school, Maria Mies, Claudia Von Werlhof, Veronica Benholdt-Thomsen.
At the center of this critique is the argument that Marx’s analysis of capitalism has been hampered by his inability to conceive of value-producing work other than in the form of commodity production and his consequent blindness to the significance of women’s unpaid reproductive work in the process of capitalist accumulation. Ignoring this work has limited Marx’s understanding of the true extent of the capitalist exploitation of labor and the function of the wage in the creation of divisions within the working class, starting with the relation between women and men.
Had Marx recognized that capitalism must rely on both an immense amount of unpaid domestic labor for the reproduction of the workforce, and the devaluation of these reproductive activities in order to cut the cost of labor power, he may have been less inclined to consider capitalist development as inevitable and progressive.
As for us, a century and a half after the publication of Capitalwe must challenge the assumption of the necessity and progressivity of capitalism for at least three reasons.
First, five centuries of capitalist development have depleted the resources of the planet rather than creating the “material conditions” for the transition to “communism” (as Marx anticipated) through the expansion of the “forces of production” in the form of large scale industrialization. They have not made “scarcity” – according to Marx a major obstacle to human liberation – obsolete. On the contrary, scarcity on a world scale is today directly a product of capitalist production.
Second, while capitalism seems to enhance the cooperation among workers in the organization of commodity production, in reality it divides workers in many ways: through an unequal division of labor, through the use of the wage, giving the waged power over the wageless, and through the institutionalization of sexism and racism, that naturalize and mystify through the presumption of different personalities the organization of differentiated labor regimes.
Third, starting with the Mexican and the Chinese Revolution, the most anti-systemic struggles of the last century have not been fought only or primarily by waged industrial workers, Marx’ projected revolutionary subjects, but have been fought by rural, indigenous, anticolonial, antiapartheid, feminist movements. Today as well, they are fought by subsistence farmers, urban squatters, undocumented migrants, as well as industrial workers in Africa, India, Latin America, and China. Most important, these struggles are fought by women who, against all odds, are reproducing their families regardless of the value the market places on their lives, valorizing their existence, reproducing them for their own sake, even when the capitalists declare their uselessness as labor power.
What are the prospects, then, that Marxist theory may serve as a guide to “revolution” in our time? I ask this question by analyzing the restructuring of reproduction in the global economy. My claim is that if Marxist theory is to speak to 21st century anti-capitalist movements, it must rethink the question of “reproduction” from a planetary perspective.
Reflecting on the activities that reproduce our life dispels the illusion that the automation of production may create the material conditions for a non-exploitative society, showing that the obstacle to revolution is not the lack of technological know-how, but the divisions that capitalist development reproduces in the working class. Indeed, the danger today is that besides devouring the earth, capitalism unleashes more wars of the kind the United States has launched in Afghanistan and Iraq, sparked by the corporate determination to appropriate all the planet’s natural resources and control the world economy.

SECTION 1. MARX AND THE REPRODUCTION OF THE WORK-FORCE

Mujeres Libres (Free Women) were a group of women in Spain during the 1936 revolution fighting against fascism and for equality.
Mujeres Libres were an organization of women in Spain during the 1936 revolution fighting against fascism and for equality.
Surprisingly, given his theoretical sophistication, Marx ignored the existence of women’s reproductive work. He acknowledged that, no less than every other commodity, labor power must be produced and, insofar as it has monetary value, it represents “a definite quantity of the average social labor objectified in it.” (Marx 1990, Vol. 1: 274)
But while meticulously exploring the dynamics of yarn production and capitalist valorization, he was succinct when tackling reproductive work, reducing it to the workers’ consumption of the commodities their wages can buy and the work the production of these commodities requires.
In other words, as in the neoliberal scheme, in Marx’s account too, all that is needed to (re)produce labor-power is commodity production and the market. No other work intervenes to prepare the goods the workers consume or to restore physically and emotionally their capacity to work. No difference is made between commodity production and the production of the work-force. (ibid.) One assembly-line produces both. Accordingly, the value of labor-power is measured by the value of the commodities (food, clothing, housing) that have to be supplied to the worker, to “the man, so that he can renew his life-process,” that is, they are measured on the labor-time socially necessary for their production (Marx 1990, Vol. 1: 276-7).
Even when he discusses the reproduction of the workers on a generational basis, Marx is extremely brief. He tells us that wages must be sufficiently high to ensure “the worker’s replacements,” his children, so that labor-power may perpetuate its presence on the market. (Marx, ibid.: 275) But, once again, the only relevant agents he recognizes in this process are the male, self-reproducing workers, their wages and their means of subsistence. The production of workers is by means of commodities. Nothing is said about women, domestic labor, sexuality and procreation. In the few instances in which he refers to biological reproduction, he treats it as a natural phenomenon, arguing that is through the changes in the organization of production that a surplus population is periodically created to satisfy the changing needs of the labor market.
Why did Marx so persistently ignore women’s reproductive work? Why for instance, did he not ask what transformations the raw materials involved in the process of reproduction of labor-power must undergo in order for their value to be transferred into their products (as he did in the case of other commodities)?
I suggest that the conditions of the working class in England – Marx’s and Engel’s point of reference – partly account for this omission. (Federici 2004) Marx described the condition of the industrial proletariat of his time as he saw it, and women’s domestic labor was hardly part of it. Housework, as a specific branch of capitalist production, was below Marx’s historic and political horizon at least in the industrial working class. Although from the first phase of capitalist development, and especially in the mercantilist period, reproductive work was formally subsumed to capitalist accumulation, it was only in the late 19th century that domestic work emerged as the key engine for the reproduction of the industrial workforce, organized by capital for capital, according to the requirements of factory production.
Until the 1870s, consistently with a policy tending to the “unlimited extension of the working day” and the utmost compression of the cost of labor-power production, reproductive work was reduced to a minimum, resulting in the situation powerfully described in Capital Vol.1, in the chapter on the Working Day, and in Engels’ Conditions of the Working Class in England (1845): that is, the situation of a working class almost unable to reproduce itself, averaging a life expectancy of 20 years of age, dying in its youth of overwork.
Only at the end of the 19th century did the capitalist class begin to invest in the reproduction of labor, in conjunction with a shift in the form of accumulation, from light to heavy industry, requiring a more intensive labor-discipline and a less emaciated type of worker. In Marxian terms, we can say that the development of reproductive work and the consequent emergence of the full-time housewife were the products of the transition from “absolute” to “relative surplus” value extraction as a mode of exploitation of labor.
Not surprisingly, while acknowledging that “the maintenance and reproduction of the working class remains a necessary condition for the reproduction of capital,” Marx could immediately add: “But the capitalist may safely leave this to the worker’s drives for self-preservation and propagation. All the capitalist cares for is to reduce the worker’s individual consumption to the necessary minimum…” (Capital Vol.1, chapter 23: 718).
We can also presume that the difficulties posed by the classification of a labor not subject to monetary valuation further motivated Marx to remain silent on this matter. But there is a further reason, more indicative of the limits of Marxism as a political theory, that we must take into account, if we are to explain why not just Marx, but generations of Marxists, raised in epochs in which housework and domesticity were triumphant, have continued to be blind to this work.
I suggest that Marx ignored women’s reproductive labor because he remained wedded to a technologistic concept of revolution, where freedom comes through the machine, where the increase in the productivity of labor is assumed to be the material foundation for communism, and where the capitalist organization of work is viewed as the highest model of historical rationality, held up for every other form of production, including the reproduction of the work-force. In other words, Marx failed to recognized the importance of reproductive work because he accepted the capitalist criteria for what constitutes work, and he believed that waged industrial work was the stage on which the battle for humanity’s emancipation would be played.
With few exceptions, Marx’s followers have reproduced the same assumptions, (witness the continuing love affair with the famous “Fragment on Machines” in theGrundrisse [1857-8]), demonstrating that the idealization of science and technology as liberating forces has continued to be an essential component of the Marxian view of history and revolution to our day. Even Socialist Feminists, while acknowledging the existence of women’s reproductive work in capitalism, have in the past tended to stress its presumably antiquated, backward, pre-capitalist character and imagined the socialist reconstruction of it in the form of a rationalization process, raising its productivity level to that achieved by the leading sectors of capitalist production.
One consequence of this blind spot in modern times has been that Marxist theorists have been unable to grasp the historic importance of the post-World War II women’s revolt against reproductive work, as expressed in the Women’s Liberation Movement, and ignored its practical redefinition of what constitutes work, who is the working class, and what is the nature of the class struggle. Only when women left the organizations of the Left did Marxists recognize the political importance of the Women’s Liberation Movement.
To this day, many Marxists do not acknowledge the gendered character of much reproductive work, as it is the case even with an eco-Marxist like Peter Burkett, or pay lip service to it, as in Negri’s and Hardt’s conception of “affective labor.” Indeed, Marxist theorists are generally more indifferent to the question of reproduction than Marx himself, who devoted pages to the conditions of factory children, whereas today it would be a challenge to find any reference to children in most Marxist texts.
I’ll return later to the limits of contemporary Marxism, to notice its inability to grasp the significance of the neoliberal turn and the globalization process. For the moment suffice to say that by the 1960s, under the impact of the anti-colonial struggle and the struggle against apartheid in the United States, Marx’s account of capitalism and class relations was subjected to a radical critique by Third Worldist political writers like Samir Amin and Gunder Frank who criticized its Eurocentrism and his privileging the waged industrial proletariat as the main contributor to capitalist accumulation and revolutionary subject. However, it was the revolt of women against housework, in Europe and the US, and later the rise of feminist movements across the planet, in the 1980s and 1990s, that triggered the most radical rethinking of Marxism.

SECTION 2. WOMEN’S REVOLT AGAINST HOUSEWORK AND THE FEMINIST REDEFINITION OF WORK, CLASS STRUGGLE AND THE CAPITALIST CRISIS.

women-uniteIt seems to be a social law that the value of labor is proven and perhaps created by its refusal. This was certainly the case of housework which remained invisible and unvalued until a movement of women emerged who refused to accept reproduction work as their natural destiny. It was women’s revolt against this work in the ’60s and ’70s that disclosed the centrality of unpaid domestic labor in capitalist economy, reconfiguring our image of society as an immense circuit of domestic plantations and assembly lines where the production of workers is articulated on a daily and generational basis.
Not only did feminists establish that the reproduction of labor-power involves a far broader range of activities than the consumption of commodities, since food must be prepared, clothes have to be washed, bodies have to be stroked and cared for. Their recognition of the importance of reproduction and women’s domestic labor for capital accumulation led to a rethinking of Marx’s categories, and a new understanding of the history and fundamentals of capitalist development and the class struggle.
Starting in the early 1970s, a feminist theory took shape that radicalized the theoretical shift which the Third Worldist critiques of Marx had inaugurated, confirming that capitalism is not identifiable with waged, contractual work, arguing that, in essence, it is un-free labor, and revealing the umbilical connection between the devaluation of reproductive work and the devaluation of women’s social position.
This paradigm shift also had political consequences. The most immediate was the refusal of the slogans of the Marxist left, such as the ideas of the “general strike” or “refusal of work,” both of which were never inclusive of house-workers. Over time, the realization has grown that Marxism, filtered through Leninism and social-democracy, has expressed the interests of a limited sector of the world proletariat, that of white, adult, male workers, largely drawing their power from the fact that they work in the leading sectors of capital industrial production, at the highest levels of technological development.
On the positive side, the discovery of reproductive work has made it possible to understand that capitalist production relies on the production of a particular type of worker, and therefore a particular type of family, sexuality, procreation, and thus to redefine the private sphere as a sphere of relations of production and a terrain of anti-capitalist struggle. In this context, policies forbidding abortion could be decoded as devices for the regulation of the labor supply, the collapse of the birth rate and increase in the number of divorces could be read as instances of resistance to the capitalist discipline of work. The personal became political and capital and the state were found to have subsumed our lives and reproduction down to the bedroom.
On the basis of this analysis, by the mid 1970s – a crucial era in capitalist policy-making, during which the first steps were taken towards a neo-liberal restructuring of the world economy – many feminists could see that the unfolding capitalist crisis was a response not only to factory struggles but to women’s refusal of housework, as well as to the increasing resistance of new generations of Africans, Asians, Latin Americans, Caribbeans to the legacy of colonialism. Key contributors to this perspective were activists in the Wages for Housework Movement, like Mariarosa Dalla Costa, Selma James, Leopoldina Fortunati, who showed that women’s invisible struggles against domestic discipline were subverting the model of reproduction that had been the pillar of the Fordist deal.
Dalla Costa, for instance, in “Emigrazione e Riproduzione” (1974) pointed out that, since the end of WWII, women in Europe had been engaged in a silent strike against procreation, as evinced by the collapse of the birth rate and governments’ promotion of immigration. Fortunati in Brutto Ciao (1976) examined the motivations behind Italian women’s post-WWII exodus from the rural areas, their re-orientation of the family wage towards the reproduction of the new generations, and the connections between women’s post-war quest for independence, their increased investment in their children, and the increased combativeness of the new generations of workers. Selma James in “Sex, Race and Class” (1975) showed that women’s “cultural” behavior and social “roles” should be read as a “response and rebellion against” the totality of their capitalist lives.
By the mid 1970s women’s struggles were no longer “invisible”, but had become an open repudiation of the sexual division of labor, with all its corollaries: economic dependence on men, social subordination, confinement to an unpaid, naturalized form of labor, a state-controlled sexuality and procreation. Contrary to a widespread misconception, the crisis was not confined to white middle class women. On the contrary, the first women’s liberation movement in the US was arguably a movement formed by black women. It was the Welfare Mothers Movement that, inspired by the Civil Rights Movement, led the first campaign for state-funded “wages for housework” (under the guise of Aid to Dependent Children) that women have fought for in the country, asserting the economic value of women’s reproductive work, and declaring “welfare” a women’s right.
Women were on the move also across Africa, Asia, Latin America, as the decision by the United Nations to intervene in the field of feminist politics as the sponsor of women’s rights, starting with the Global Conference on Women held in Mexico City in 1975, demonstrated. Elsewhere I have suggested that the UN played the same role, with respect to the spreading international women’s movements, that it had already played, in the 1960s, in relation to the anti-colonial struggle. As in the case of its (selective) sponsorship of “decolonization,” its self-appointment as the agency in charge of promoting women’s rights enabled it to channel the politics of women’s liberation within a frame compatible with the needs and plans of international capital and the developing neoliberal agenda.
Indeed, the Mexico City conference and those that followed stemmed in part from a realization that women’s struggles over reproduction were redirecting post-colonial economies toward increased investment in the domestic workforce and were the most important factor in the failure of the World Bank’s development plans for the commercialization of agriculture.
In Africa, women had consistently refused being recruited to work on their husbands’ cash crops, and had instead defended subsistence-oriented agriculture, transforming their villages from sites for the reproduction of cheap labor (Meillassoux) into sites of resistance to exploitation. By the 1980s, this resistance was recognized as the main factor in the crisis of the World Bank’s agricultural development projects, prompting a flood of articles on “women’s contribution to development,” and later, initiatives aimed at integrating them into the money economy such as NGO-sponsored “income-generating projects” and microcredit lending schemes. Given these events, it is not surprising that the restructuring produced by the globalization of the world economy has led to a major reorganization of reproduction, as well as a campaign against women in the name of “population control.”
In what follows, I outline the modalities of this restructuring, identify the main trends, its social consequences, and its impact on class relations. First, however, I should explain why I continue to use the concept of labor-power, even though some feminists have criticized it as reductive, pointing out that women produce living individuals –children, relatives, friends – not labor-power.
The critique is well taken. Labor-power is an abstraction. As Marx tells us, echoing Sismondi, labor-power “is nothing unless it is sold,” and utilized. (1990: 277) I maintain this concept, however, for various reasons. First, in order to highlight the fact that in capitalist society reproductive work is not the free reproduction of ourselves or others according to our and their desires. To the extent that directly or indirectly it is exchanged for a wage, reproduction work is, at all points, subjected to the conditions imposed on it by the capitalist organization of work and relations of production. In other words, housework is not a free activity. It is “the production and reproduction of the capitalist most indispensable means of production: the worker” (ibid.) As such, it is subject to all the constraints that derive from the fact that its product must satisfy the requirements of the labor market.
Second, highlighting the reproduction of “labor-power” reveals the dual character and the contradiction inherent in reproductive labor and, therefore, the unstable, potentially disruptive character of this work. To the extent that labor-power can only exist in the living individual, its reproduction must simultaneously be a process of creation and valorization of desired human qualities and capacities, and an accommodation to the externally imposed standards of the labor market.
As impossible as it is, then, to draw a line between the living individual and its labor-power, it is equally impossible to draw a line between the two corresponding aspects of reproductive work. Nevertheless, maintaining the concept brings out the tension, the potential separation, and it suggests a world of conflicts, resistances, contradictions that have political significance. Among other things (an understanding that was crucial for the women’s liberation movement) it tells us that we can struggle against housework without having to fear that we will ruin our communities, for this work imprisons the producers as well as those reproduced by it.
I also want to defend my continuing to maintain, against postmodern trends, the separation between production and reproduction. There is certainly one important sense in which the difference between the two has become blurred. The struggles of the 1960s in Europe and the US, especially the student and feminist movements, have taught the capitalist class that investing in the reproduction of the future generation of workers “does not pay.” It is no guarantee of an increase in the productivity of labor. Thus, not only has state investment in the work-force drastically reduced, but reproductive activities have been reorganized as value-producing services that workers must purchase and pay for. In this way, the value which reproductive activities produce is immediately realized, rather than being made conditional on the performance of the workers they reproduce.
But the expansion of the service sector has by no means eliminated home-based, unpaid reproductive work, nor has it abolished the sexual division of labor in which it is embedded, which still divides production and reproduction in terms of the subjects of these activities and the discriminating function of the wage and lack of it.
Lastly, I speak of “reproductive,” rather than “affective” labor because in its dominant characterization, the latter describes only a limited part of the work that the reproduction of human beings requires and erases the subversive potential of the feminist concept of reproductive work. By highlighting its function in the production of labor-power, and thus unveiling the contradictions inherent in this work, the concept of “reproductive labor” recognizes the possibility of crucial alliances and forms of cooperation between producers and the reproduced: mothers and children, teachers and students, nurses and patients.
Keeping this particular character of reproductive work in mind, let us ask then: how has economic globalization restructured the reproduction of the workforce? And what have been the effects of this restructuring on workers and especially on women, traditionally the main subjects of reproductive work? Finally, what do we learn from this restructuring concerning capitalist development and the place of Marxist theory in the anti-capitalist struggles of our time?
My answer to these questions is in two parts. First, I will discuss briefly the main changes globalization has produced in the general process of social reproduction and the class relation, and then I will discuss more extensively the restructuring of reproductive work.

SECTION 3. NAMING OF THE INTOLERABLE: PRIMITIVE ACCUMULATION AND THE RESTRUCTURING OF REPRODUCTION

chinese-womenThere are four major ways in which the restructuring of the world economy has responded to the cycle of struggles of the 1960 and 1970s and transformed the organization of reproduction and class relations.
First, has been the expansion of the labor market. Globalization has produced a historic leap in the size of the world proletariat, both through a global process of “enclosures” that has separated millions from their lands, their jobs, their “customary rights” and through the increased employment of women. Not surprisingly, globalization has presented itself as a process of Primitive Accumulation, which has taken many forms:
  1. in the North, globalization has taken the form of industrial deconcentration and relocation, as well as the flexibilization and precarization of work, and just-in-time production;
  2. in the former Socialist countries, there has been the de-statalization of industry, the de-collectivization of agriculture and privatization of social wealth;
  3. in the South, we have witnessed the maquilization of production, import liberalization, currency devaluation, “structural adjustment” and land privatization.
The objective, however, has everywhere been the same.
By destroying subsistence economies, by separating producers from the means of subsistence and making millions dependent on monetary incomes, even when unable to access waged employment, the capitalist class has re-launched the accumulation process and cut the cost of labor-production. Two billion people have been added to the labor market. This demonstrates the fallacy of theories [see Negri and Hardt inMultitude and Empire] arguing that capitalism no longer requires massive amounts of living labor, because it presumably relies on the increasing automation of work.
Second, the de-territorialization of capital and financialization of economic activities, which the “computer revolution” has made possible, have created the conditions whereby primitive accumulation has become a permanent process, through the almost instantaneous movement of capital across the world, breaking over and over the constraints placed on capital by workers’ resistance to exploitation.
Third, we have witnessed the systematic disinvestment by the state in the reproduction of the work-force, implemented through Structural Adjustment Programs and the dismantling of the “welfare state.” As already mentioned, the struggles of the 1960s have taught capital that investing in the reproduction of labor-power does not necessarily translate into a higher productivity of work. As a result, a policy and ideology have emerged that recast workers as micro-entrepreneurs, responsible for their self-investment, being presumably the exclusive beneficiaries of the reproductive activities expended on them.
Accordingly a shift has occurred in the temporal fix between reproduction and accumulation. As subsidies to healthcare, education, pensions, and public transport have all been cut, as high fees have been placed upon them, and workers have been forced to take on the cost of their reproduction, every articulation of the reproduction of labor power has been turned into an immediate point of accumulation.
Fourth, the corporate appropriation and destruction of forests, oceans, waters, fisheries, coral reefs, animal and vegetable species has reached an historic peak. In country after country, from Africa to the Pacific Islands, immense tracts of crop lands, and coastal waters – home and sources of livelihood for large populations – have been privatized and made available for agribusiness, mineral extraction, or industrial fishing.
Globalization has so unmistakably revealed the cost of capitalist production and technology that it has become inconceivable to speak, as Marx did in the Grundrisse, of the “civilizing influence of capital,” issuing from its “universal appropriation of nature” and “its production of a stage of society [where] nature becomes simply an object for mankind, purely a matter of utility, [where] it ceases to be recognized as a power in its own right; and the theoretical acknowledgement of its independent laws appears only as a stratagem designed to subdue it to human requirements, either as an object of consumption or a means of production” (Karl Marx: Selected Writings, 363-4).
In 2011, after the BP spill and Fukushima – among other corporate-made disasters – as the oceans are dying, imprisoned by islands of trash, as space is becoming a junkyard as well as an army depot, such words can have for us only ominous reverberations.
In different degrees, these developments have affected all populations across the planet. Yet, the New World Order is best described as a process of recolonization. Far from flattening the world into a network of interdependent circuits, it has reconstructed it as a pyramidal structure, increasing inequalities and social/economic polarization, and deepening the hierarchies that have historically characterized the sexual and international division of labor, which the anti-colonial and the women’s liberation movements had undermined.
The strategic center of primitive accumulation has been the former colonial world, historically the underbelly of the capitalist system, the place of slavery and plantations. I call it the “strategic center” because its restructuring has been the foundation and precondition for the global reorganization of production and the world labor market. It is here, in fact, that we have witnessed the first and most radical processes of expropriation and pauperization and the most radical disinvestment by the state in the reproduction of the labor force. These processes are well documented.
Starting in the early 1980s, as a consequence of structural adjustment, unemployment in most “Third World” countries has soared so high that USAID could recruit workers offering nothing more than “Food for Work.” Wages have fallen so low that womenmaquila workers have been reported buying milk by the glass and eggs or tomatoes one at a time. Entire populations have been demonetized, while their lands have been taken away for government projects or given to foreign investors.
Currently, half the African continent is on emergency food aid. In West Africa, from Niger, to Nigeria, to Ghana, the electricity has been turned off, national grids have been disabled, forcing those who can afford them to buy individual generators whose buzzing sound fills the nights, making it difficult for people to sleep. Governmental health and education budgets, subsidies to farmers, support for basic necessities, all have been gutted, slashed, and axed.
As a consequence, life expectancy is falling and phenomena have reappeared that capitalism’s “civiling influence” was supposed to have erased from the face of the earth long ago: famines, starvation, recurrent epidemics, even witch-hunts. Where “austerity” programs and land grabbing could not reach, war has completed the task, opening new grounds for oil drilling and the harvesting of diamonds or coltan.
As for the targets of these clearances, they have become the subjects of a new diaspora, siphoning millions of people from the land to the towns, which more and more resemble encampments. Mike Davis has used the phrase “Planet of Slums” in referring to this situation, but a more correct and vivid description would speak of a planet of ghettos and a regime of global apartheid.
If we further consider that, through the debt crisis and structural adjustment, “Third World” countries have been forced to divert food production from the domestic to the export-market, to turn arable land from cultivation of edible crops to mineral extraction and bio-fuel production, to clearcut their forests, and become dumping grounds for all types of waste, as well as grounds of predation for pharmaceutical gene hunters, then, we must conclude that, in international capital’s plans there are now world regions marked for “near-zero-reproduction.” Indeed, the destruction of life in all its forms is today as important as the productive force of biopower in the shaping of capitalist relations, as a means to acquire raw materials, dis-accumulate unwanted workers, blunt resistances, and cut the cost of labor production.
It is a measure of the degree to which the reproduction of the work force has been underdeveloped that worldwide, millions are facing untold hardships and the prospect of death and incarceration in order to migrate. Certainly migration is not just a necessity but an exodus toward higher levels of struggle, a means to reappropriate the stolen wealth, as argued by Yann Moulier Boutang and Dimitris Papadopoulos, among others. This is why migration has acquired an autonomous character that makes it difficult to use it as a regulatory mechanism for the structuring of the labor market.
But there is no doubt that, if millions of people leave their countries for an uncertain destiny, thousands of miles away from their homes, it is because they cannot reproduce themselves, not at least under adequate living conditions. This is especially evident when we consider that half of the migrants are women, many married with children they must leave behind.
From a historical viewpoint this practice is highly unusual. Women are usually those who stay, not due to lack of initiative or traditional restraints, but because they are those who have been made to feel most responsible for the reproduction of their families. They are the ones who have to make sure that the children have food, often themselves going without it, and who make sure that the elderly or the sick are cared for. Thus, when hundreds of thousands leave their homes to face years of humiliation and isolation, living with the anguish of not being able give to the people they love the same care they give to strangers across the world, we know that something quite dramatic is happening in the organization of world reproduction.
We must reject, however, the conclusion that the indifference of the international capitalist class to the loss of life which globalization is producing is proof that capital no longer needs living labor. In reality the destruction of human life on a large scale has been structural component of capitalism from its inception, as the necessary counterpart of the accumulation of workers, which is inevitably a violent process. The recurrent “reproduction crises” we have witnessed in Africa over the last decades are rooted in this dialectic of labor accumulation and destruction. Also the expansion of non-contractual labor and of other phenomena that may seem like abominations in a “modern world” – such as mass incarceration, the traffic in blood, organs, and other human parts – should be understood in this context.
Capitalism fosters a permanent reproduction crisis. If it has not been more apparent in our lifetimes, at least in many parts of the Global North, it is because the “human catastrophes” it has caused have been most often externalized, confined to the colonies, and rationalized as effects of cultural backwardness or attachment to misguided traditions and “tribalism.” For most of the ’80s and ’90s, moreover, the effects of the global restructuring in the North were hardly felt except in communities of color, or could appear in some cases (e.g., the flexibilization and precarization of work) as liberating alternatives to the regimentation of the 9-to-5 routine, if not anticipations of a workerless society.
But seen from the viewpoint of the totality of worker-capital relations, these developments demonstrate capital’s continuing power to de-concentrate workers and undermine workers’ organizational efforts in the waged workplace. Combined, these trends have abrogated social contracts, deregulated labor relations, reintroduced noncontractual forms of labor not only destroying the pockets of communism a century of workers’ struggle had won but threatening the production of new “commons.”
In the North as well, real incomes and employment have fallen, access to land and urban spaces has been reduced, and impoverishment and even hunger have become widespread. Thirty-seven million are going hungry in the United States, according to a recent report, while 50 percent of the population, by estimates conducted in 2011, is considered “low income.” Add that the introduction of labor saving technologies far from reducing the length of the working day has greatly extended it, to the point that (in Japan) we have seen people dying from work, while “leisure time” and retirement have become a luxury.
Moonlighting is now a necessity for many workers in the United States while, stripped of their pensions, many sixty-to-seventy years old are returning to the labor market. Most significantly, we are witnessing the development of a homeless, itinerant workforce, compelled to nomadism, always on the move, on trucks, trailers, buses, looking for work wherever an opportunity appears, a destiny once reserved in the US to seasonal agricultural workers chasing crops, like birds of passage, across the country.
Along with impoverishment, unemployment, overwork, homelessness, and debt has gone the increasing criminalization of the working class, through a mass incarceration policy recalling the 17th century Grand Confinement, and the formation of an ex-lege proletariat made of undocumented immigrant workers, students defaulting on their loans, producers or sellers of illicit goods, sex workers. It is a multitude of proletarians, existing and laboring in the shadow, reminding us that the production of populations without rights — slaves, indentured servants, peons, convicts, sans papiers – remains a structural necessity of capital accumulation.
Especially harsh has been the attack on youth, particularly working class black youth, the potential heirs of the legacy of Black Power, to whom nothing has been conceded, neither the possibility of secure employment nor access to education. But for many middle class youth as well the future is in question. Studying comes at a high cost, causing indebtedness and the likely default on student loans repayment. Competition for employment is stiff, and social relations are increasingly sterile as instability prevents community building. Not surprisingly, but very telling, among the social consequences of the restructuring of reproduction, there has been an increase in youth suicide, as well as an increase in violence against women and children including infanticide.
In sum, from the viewpoint of social reproduction we can see that the technological leap achieved through the computerization of production has been premised on an immense destruction of social, economic, and ecological wealth, an immense leap in the exploitation and devaluation of labor, and the deepening of divisions within the world proletariat.
From this viewpoint, it is impossible to share the optimism of Hardt and Negri, who argue that with the computerization of work and the information revolution we are entering that phase of total automation anticipated by Marx in Grundrisse, when capitalist production no longer requires living labor, when labor-time is no longer the measure of value, and the end of work is at hand, only depending on a change in property relations.
Just as with steel plants, computers too – their materials, their fabrication, and their operation – have a major polluting effect on the environment. The old as well as the new machines are already destroying the Earth, so much that as the recent conference in Poland demonstrates “survivability” has become a political demand. But the unwillingness/inability of policy makers to change capital’s course, in the face of accumulating evidence of global warming and other catastrophes in the make, demonstrates not only that “capitalism is unsustainable” but any dream of technological exodus from it is preposterous.
The assault on our reproduction has not gone unchallenged, however. Resistance has taken many forms, some remaining invisible until they are recognized as mass phenomena. This financialization of everyday reproduction through the use of credit cards, loans, indebtedness, especially in the United States, should be also seen in this perspective, as a response to the decline in wages and a refusal to the austerity imposed by it, rather than simply a product of financial manipulation. Across the world, a movement of movements has also grown that, since the ’90s, has challenged every aspect of globalization – through mass demonstrations, land occupations, the construction of solidarity economies and other forms of commons building.
Most important, the recent spread of prolonged mass uprisings and “Occupy” movements that over the last year has swept much of the world, from Tunisia, to Egypt, through most of the Middle East, to Spain, and the United States have opened a space where the vision of a major social transformation again becomes possible. After years of apparent closure, where nothing seemed capable of stopping the destructive powers of a declining capitalist order, the “Arab Spring” and the sprawling of tents across the American landscape, joining the many already set in place by the growing population of homeless, show the bottom is once again rising, and a new generation is walking the squares determined to reclaim their future, and choosing forms of struggle that potentially can begin to build a bridge across some of the main social divides.

SECTION IV. REPRODUCTIVE LABOR, WOMEN WORK AND GENDER RELATIONS IN THE GLOBAL ECONOMY

HTubmanAgainst this background, we must now ask how reproductive work has fared in the global economy, and how the changes it has undergone have shaped the sexual division of labor and the relations between women and men. Here as well, the substantive difference between production and reproduction stands out.
The first difference to be noticed is that while production has been restructured through a technological leap in key areas of the world economy, no technological leap has occurred in the sphere of domestic work, significantly reducing the labor socially necessary for the reproduction of the workforce. In the North, the personal computer has entered the reproduction of a large part of the population, so that shopping, socializing, acquiring information, and even some forms of sex-work can now be done online. Japanese companies are promoting the robotization of companionship and mating. Among their inventions are “nursebots” that gives baths to the elderly and the interactive lover to be assembled by the customer, crafted according to his fantasies and desires. But even in the most technologically developed countries, housework has not been significantly reduced. Instead, it has been marketized, redistributed, mostly on the shoulders of immigrant women from the South and former socialist countries. And women continue to perform the bulk of it.
Unlike commodity production, the reproduction of human beings is to a great extent irreducible to mechanization, requiring a high degree of human interaction and the satisfaction of complex needs, in which physical and affective elements are inextricably combined. That reproductive work is a labor-intensive process is most evident in the care of children and the elderly that, even in its most physical components, involves providing a sense of security, consoling, anticipating fears and desires. None of these activities is purely “material” or “immaterial,” nor can they be broken down in ways making it possible for them to be mechanized or replaced by the virtual flow of online communication.
This is why, rather than being technologized, housework and care work have been redistributed on the shoulders of different subjects, through commercialization and globalization. As women’s increased participation in waged work has immensely increased, especially in the North, large quotas of housework have been taken out of the home and reorganized on a market basis through the virtual boom of the service industry, which now constitutes the dominant economic sector from the viewpoint of wage employment. This means that more meals eaten out of the home, more clothes are washed in laundromats or by dry-cleaners, and more food is bought already prepared for consumption.
There has also been a reduction of reproductive activities as a result of women’s refusal of the discipline involved in marriage and child-raising. In the US, the number of births has fallen from 118 per 1000 women in the 1960s to 66.7 in 2006, resulting in an increase in the median age of the population from 30 in 1980 to 36.4 in 2006. The drop in the demographic growth has been especially high in Western and Eastern Europe, where in some countries (e.g., Italy and Greece) the women’s “strike” against procreation continues, resulting in a zero growth demographic regime that is raising much concern among policy makers, and is the main factor behind the growing call for an expansion of immigration. There has also been a decline in the number of marriages and married couples, in the US from 56% of all households in 1990 to 51% in 2006, and a simultaneous increase in the number of people living alone – in the US by seven and a half million, from twenty three to thirty and a half million – amounting to a 30% increase.
Most important, in the aftermath of structural adjustment and economic reconversion, a restructuring of reproduction work has taken place internationally, whereby much of the reproduction of the metropolitan work-force is now performed by immigrant women coming from the Global South, especially providing care to children and the elderly and for the sexual reproduction of male workers.
This has been an extremely important development from many viewpoints. Nevertheless its political implications are not yet sufficiently understood among feminists from the viewpoint of the new power relations it has produced among women, and the limits of the commercialization of reproduction it has exposed. While governments celebrate the “globalization of care,” which enables them to reduce the investment in reproduction, it is clear that this “solution” has a tremendous social cost, not only for the individual immigrant women but for the communities from which they originate.
Neither the reorganization of reproductive work on a market basis, nor the “globalization of care,” much less the technologization of reproductive work, have “liberated women” or eliminated the exploitation inherent to reproductive work in its present form. If we take a global perspective we see that not only do women still do most of the unpaid domestic work in every country, but due to cuts in social services and the de-centralization of industrial production, the amount of domestic work, paid and unpaid, that women perform may have actually increased, even when they have had a extradomestic job.
Three factors have lengthened women’s workday and returned work to the home.
First, women have been the shock absorbers of economic globalization, having had to compensate with their work for the deteriorating economic conditions produced by the liberalization of the world economy and the states’ increasing dis-investment in the reproduction of the workforce. This has been especially true in the countries subjected to Structural Adjustment where the state has completely cut spending for healthcare, education, infrastructure and basic necessities. As a consequence of these cuts, in most of Africa and South America, women must now spend more time fetching water, obtaining and preparing food, and dealing with illnesses that are far more frequent at a time when the privatization of healthcare has made visits to clinics unaffordable for most, while malnutrition and environmental destruction have increased people’s vulnerability to disease.
In the United States, too, due to budget cuts, much of the work that hospitals and other public agencies have traditionally done has been privatized and transferred to the home, tapping women’s unpaid labor. Currently, for instance, patients are dismissed almost immediately after surgery and the home must absorb a variety of post-operative and other therapeutic medical tasks (e.g., for the chronically ill) that in the past would have been done by doctors and professional nurses. Public assistance to the elderly (with housekeeping, personal care) has also been cut, house visits have been much shortened, and the services provided reduced.
The second factor that has re-centered reproductive labor in the home has been the expansion of “homework,” partly due to the de-concentration of industrial production, partly to the spread of informal work. As David Staples writes in No Place Like Home(2006), far from being an anachronistic form of work, home-based labor has demonstrated to be a long-term capitalist strategy, which today occupies millions of women and children worldwide, in towns, villages, and suburbs. Staples correctly points out that work is inexorably drawn to the home by the pull of unpaid domestic labor, in the sense that by organizing work on a home basis, employers can make it invisible, can undermine workers’ efforts to unionize, and drive wages down to a minimum. Many women choose this work in the attempt to reconcile earning an income with caring for their families; but the result is enslavement to a job that earns wages “far below the median wage it would pay if performed in a formal setting, and [which] reproduces a sexual division of labor that fixes women more deeply to housework.” (Staples 1-5)
Lastly, the growth of female employment and restructuring of reproduction has not eliminated gender labor hierarchies. Despite growing male unemployment, women still earn a fraction of male wages. We have also witnessed an increase of male violence against women, triggered in part by fear of economic competition, in part by the frustration men experience not being able to fulfill their role as family providers, and most important, triggered by the fact that men now have less control over women’s bodies and work, as more women have some money of their own and spend more time outside the home. In a context of falling wages and widespread unemployment that makes it difficult for them to have a family, many men also use women’s bodies as a means of exchange and access to the world market, through the organization of pornography or prostitution.
This rise of violence against women is hard to quantify and its significance is better appreciated when considered in qualitative terms, from the viewpoint of the new forms it has taken. In several countries, under the impact of Structural Adjustment, the family has all but disintegrated. Often this occurs out of mutual consent – as one or both partners migrate(s) or both separate in search of some form of income. But many times, it is a more traumatic event, when husbands desert their wives and children, for instance, in the face of pauperization.
In parts of Africa and India, there have also been attacks on older women, who have been expelled from their homes and even murdered after being charged with witchcraft or possession by the devil. This phenomenon most likely reflects a larger crisis in family support for members who are seen as no longer productive in the face of diminishing resources. Significantly, it has also been associated with the ongoing dismantling of communal land systems. But it is also a manifestation of the devaluation that reproductive work and the subjects of this work have undergone in the face of the expansion of monetary relations.
Other examples of violence traceable to the globalization process have been the rise of dowry murder in India, the increase in trafficking and other forms of coerced sex work, and the sheer increase in the number of women murdered or disappeared. Hundreds of young women, mostly maquila workers, have been murdered in Ciudad Jaurez and other Mexican towns in the borderlands with the USA, apparently victims of rape or criminal networks producing pornography and “snuff.” A ghastly increase in the number of women murder victims has also been registered in Guatemala. But it is above all institutional violence that has escalated. This is the violence of absolute pauperization, of inhuman work conditions, of migration in clandestine conditions. That migration can also be viewed as a struggle for increased autonomy and self-determination through flight, as a search for more favorable power relations, cannot obliterate this fact.
Several conclusions are to be drawn from this analysis. First, fighting for waged work or fighting to “join the working class in the workplace,” as some Marxist feminists liked to put it, cannot be a path to liberation. Wage employment may be a necessity but it cannot be a coherent political strategy. As long as reproductive work is devalued, as long as it is considered a private matter and women’s responsibility, women will always confront capital and the state with less power than men, and in conditions of extreme social and economic vulnerability.
It is also important to recognize that there are serious limits to the extent to which reproductive work can be reduced or reorganized on a market basis. How far, for example, can we reduce or commercialize the care for children, the elderly, the sick, without imposing a great cost on those in need of care? The degree to which the marketization of food production has contributed to the deterioration of our health (leading, for example, to the rise of obesity even among children) is instructive. As for the commercialization of reproductive work through its redistribution on the shoulders of other women, this “solution” only extends the housework crisis, now displaced to the families of the paid care providers, and creates new inequalities among women.
What is needed is the re-opening of a collective struggle over reproduction, reclaiming control over the material conditions of our reproduction and creating new forms of cooperation around this work outside of the logic of capital and the market. This is not a utopia, but a process already underway in many parts of the world and likely to expand in the face of a collapse of the world financial system. Governments are now attempting to use the crisis to impose stiff austerity regimes on us for years to come.
But through land takeovers, urban farming, community-supported agriculture, through squats, the creation of various forms of barter, mutual aid, alternative forms of healthcare – to name some of the terrains on which this reorganization of reproduction is more developed – a new economy is beginning to emerge that may turn reproductive work from a stifling, discriminating activity into the most liberating and creative ground of experimentation in human relations.
As I stated, this is not a utopia. The consequences of the globalization of the world economy would certainly have been far more nefarious except for the efforts that millions of women have made to ensure that their families would be supported, regardless of their value on the capitalist labor market. Through their subsistence activities, as well as various forms of direct action (from squatting on public land to urban farming) women have helped their communities to avoid total dispossession, to extend budgets and add food to the kitchen pots.
Amid wars, economic crises, devaluations, as the world around them was falling apart, they have planted corn on abandoned town plots, cooked food to sell on the side of the streets, created communal kitchens – ola communes, as in Chile and Peru – thusstanding in the way of a total commodification of life and beginning a process of re-appropriation and re-collectivization of reproduction that is indispensable if we are to regain control over our lives.
The festive squares and “occupy” movements of 2011 are in a way a continuation of this process as the “multitudes” have understood that no movement is sustainable that does not place at its center the reproduction of those participating in it, thus also transforming the protest demonstrations into moments of collective reproduction and cooperation.

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STERILIZATIONS AND EUGENICS: WE'RE TALKING CALIFORNIA PRISONS TODAY

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WE FOUGHT THIS BATTLE BEFORE
TIME TO FIGHT IT AGAIN


Lots of people are covering the sterilization abuse of female prisoners in California today, and so am I.   I usually leave the heavily covered stories to others, but this is too much.

It seems that doctors sterilized nearly 150 inmates between 2006 and 2010 in California prisons.  Going back into the 1990s we may be talking about more than 250 tubal ligations.

There is a history of this sort of crap in this country and every time you think it is just that, history, it turns out it isn't over.  

The Center for Investigative Reporting (CIR) says:


Federal and state laws ban inmate sterilizations if federal funds are used, reflecting concerns that prisoners might feel pressured to comply. California used state funds instead, but since 1994 the procedure has required approval from top medical officials in Sacramento on a case-by-case basis.

Yet no tubal ligation requests have come before the health care committee responsible for approving such restricted surgeries, said Dr. Ricki Barnett, who tracks medical services and costs for the California Prison Health Care Receivership Corp.

The receiver has overseen medical care in all 33 of the state’s prisons since 2006, when U.S. District Judge Thelton Henderson ruled that the system’s health care violated the constitutional ban on cruel and unusual punishment.

The receiver’s office was aware that sterilizations were happening, records show…


One doctor let the cat out of the bag as to what was on the mind of prison medical authorities.  As reported at Canada Now:



The 69-year-old Bay Area physician denied pressuring anyone and expressed surprise that local contract doctors had charged for the surgeries. He described the $147,460 total as minimal.



“Over a 10-year period, that isn’t a huge amount of money,” Heinrich said, “compared to what you save in welfare paying for these unwanted children – as they procreated more.”


Numerous nurses testified that they overheard conversation between doctors and patients where the women would be asked to sign forms allowing the sterilization proceeders.  Numerous inmates added that they felt pressured to sign the documents.  

Again from Canada Now,



Crystal Nguyen, a former Valley State Prison inmate who worked in the prison’s infirmary during 2007, said she often overheard medical staff asking inmates who had served multiple prison terms to agree to be sterilized.

“I was like, ‘Oh my God, that’s not right,’ ” said Nguyen, 28. “Do they think they’re animals, and they don’t want them to breed anymore?”

The news raise memories of California's dark history of eugenics where  where some 20,000 people were sterilized against their will from 1904 until 1964.  California, like several other states, targeted "undesirable people" such as the mentally ill, criminals, women deemed to "promiscuous" or simply...the wrong race.



The CIR found that doctors targeted pregnant inmates who already had multiple children and were seen as being likely to wind up back in prison after their release.




The Mail On Line reports this shocking story:


Kimberly Jeffrey, 43, says she was strapped to a hospital table and under the influence of medication - preparing to have a C-section in 2010, when the doctor all but demanded she agree to sterilization surgery. 


'He said, "So we’re going to be doing this tubal ligation, right?"


'I’m like, "Tubal ligation? What are you talking about? I don’t want any procedure. I just want to have my baby." I went into a straight panic.'


Prison records from Valley State show that Jeffrey, who was imprisoned for a probation violation, had rejected requests she undergo sterilization surgery twice before.


'Being treated like I was less than human produced in me a despair,' she said.

Women were not give medical reasons for why they should undergo such a procedure.  They were just encouraged/pressured/told to do so. 


Let me tell you something.  When you are in prison under almost the complete control of the State, there is no difference between being "encouraged/pressured/told."

The following story is from Medical Daily.



Nearly 150 Female Inmates Sterilized In California Prison 

System, Raising Questions Of Eugenics And Consent


Nearly 150 women in California prisons were sterilized without state approval following pregnancies between 2006 and 2010, new research finds.

BY CHRIS WELLER | JUL 08, 2013 11:09 AM EDT
 
Over a five-year period between 2006 and 2010, doctors under contract with the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation sterilized nearly 150 female inmates without the required state approval.
  • (Photo : Noah Berger, The Center for Investigative Reporting) Crystal Nguyen, with her six-year-old son, Neiko, in Pittsburg, Calif., is a former Valley State Prison for Women inmate. Nearly 150 women in California prisons were sterilized without state approval following pregnancies between 2006 and 2010, new research finds.
(Photo : Noah Berger, The Center for Investigative Reporting) Crystal Nguyen, with her six-year-old son, Neiko, in Pittsburg, Calif., is a former Valley State Prison for Women inmate. Nearly 150 women in California prisons were sterilized without state approval following pregnancies between 2006 and 2010, new research finds.
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The series of tubal ligations over the five-year period compound some 250 surgeries dating back to the late 1990s, the Center for Investigative Reporting (CIR) has found. While doctors involved with the surgeries claim each patient was offered the choice to undergo the procedure, some inmates claim they were only asked while on the operating table and sedated, a behavior the CIR states has been illegal since the late 1970s.

One of the primary concerns falls on the issue of intent, according to Dr. Ricki Barnett, who tracks medical services and costs for the California Prison Health Care Receivership Corp. and has led the Health Care Review Committee since joining the prison receiver's office in 2008.

"When we heard about the tubal ligations, it made us all feel slightly queasy," Barnett said. "It wasn't so much that people were conspiratorial or coercive or sloppy. It concerns me that people never took a step back to project what they would feel if they were in the inmate's shoes and what the inmate's future might hold should they do this."

Dr. James Heinrich, an OB-GYN at California's Valley State Prison, has received considerable flak in the matter, as he believed the surgeries were products of emergency situations. The 69-year-old Bay Area physician denied pressuring anyone and expressed surprise that local contract doctors had charged for the surgeries, he told the CIR. The state paid doctors $147,460 to perform the surgeries over the 10 years. Heinrich described the $147,460 total as minimal. 

"Over a 10-year period, that isn't a huge amount of money," Heinrich said, "compared to what you save in welfare paying for these unwanted children - as they procreated more."

DOCTORS VS. INMATES

Still, many women claim Heinrich coerced them into having the tubal ligation carried out.

Christine Cordero, 34, says the doctor pressured her into having the surgery following the 2006 birth of her son.

"As soon as he found out that I had five kids, he suggested that I look into getting it done. The closer I got to my due date, the more he talked about it," said Cordero, who spent two years in prison for auto theft. "He made me feel like a bad mother if I didn't do it."

Cordero eventually agreed to the surgery, but admits that "today, I wish I would have never had it done."

Kimberly Jeffrey reports a similar story from 2010, when a doctor asked her while she was about to have a C-section whether she wanted a tubal ligation after the birth.

"He said, 'So we're going to be doing this tubal ligation, right?' " Jeffrey said. "I'm like, 'Tubal ligation? What are you talking about? I don't want any procedure. I just want to have my baby.' I went into a straight panic."

Jeffrey's records show she rejected a tubal ligation offer during a December 2009 prenatal checkup at Heinrich's office, and then a month later she refused a tubal ligation request made after she arrived at Madera Community Hospital.

University of Pennsylvania law professor and expert on sterilization, Dorothy Roberts says courts have deemed these sorts of requests illegal because they come at a time when a woman is experiencing discomfort and pain, and so she cannot make a reasonable decision.

"If this was happening in a federal prison, it would be illegal," Roberts said. "There are specific situations where you cannot say it's informed consent, and one of them is during childbirth or labor. No woman should give consent on the operating table."

Meanwhile, Heinrich maintains that his medical care was necessary and appreciated, and that those who criticized the sterilizations were unjustly dissatisfied later on.

"They all wanted it done," he said of the sterilizations. "If they come a year or two later saying, 'Somebody forced me to have this done,' that's a lie. That's somebody looking for the state to give them a handout.

"My guess is that the only reason you do that is not because you feel wronged, but that you want to stay on the state's dole somehow," he added.

Tubal ligations currently require state funds in order to be performed. Federal funds cannot be used toward the surgery. Since 1994, all tubal ligation requests have needed approval from top medical officials in Sacramento on a case-by-case basis. However, Barnett said no requests have come before the health care committee responsible for approving the procedure.

THE TIMELINE

The first glimmers of foul play came in 2008, when the receiver's office for all 33 of California's prisons sent back a letter to the prison activist group Justice Now, which asked whether pregnant inmates were offered sterilization. The receiver's office said they did.

It wasn't until 2010 that Justice Now filed a public records request and complained to the office of state Sen. Carol Liu, D-Glendale, who, at the time, was the chairwoman of the Select Committee on Women and Children in the Criminal Justice System.

According to CIR, prompted by a phone call from Liu's staff, Barnett said the receiver's top medical officer asked her to research the matter. After analyzing medical and cost records, Barnett met in 2010 with officials at both women's prisons and contract health professionals affiliated with nearby hospitals.

Barnett told them to stop sterilization surgeries immediately.

According to her, the 16-year-old restriction on the procedure struck the doctors as news. None of them thought they needed permission in order to follow through with the tubal ligations.

"Everybody was operating on the fact that this was a perfectly reasonable thing to do," she said.

These assumptions characterize a long, unsightly history of unauthorized sterilization in California and around the country. Between 1909 and 1964, about 20,000 women and men in California were stripped of the ability to reproduce, making the state the nation's most prolific sterilizer. Historians say Nazi Germany sought the advice of the state's eugenics leaders in the 1930s.

As Heinrich noted above, the issue of sterilization often comes as one of health risks and future cost. Heinrich states that women who have had C-sections in the past face greater health risks later in life, and that minimizing the state's welfare cost can be accomplished through consensual sterilization.

"One of the goals ... and this is critical to understanding the history of eugenics in California - was to save money: how to limit welfare and relief," said Alexandra Minna Stern, a professor at the University of Michigan and leading expert on California sterilization, according to a transcript of her presentation at a 2003 Senate hearing on the state's spotty history. "And sterilization is very much tied up in this."

Barnett, for her part, does not hope to investigate prior cases of sterilization. Her greatest aim now is to prevent future surgeries from taking place, and to repair a system she believes has components that are seriously broken.

"Did Dr. Heinrich say improper things? I can't say. Is our process sufficiently draconian enough to weed out bad actors? We have a lot of civil service processes. Is it 100 percent effective? Is it the best process we can come up with?" she asked. "No, of course not.






THE ARREST OF NARIMAN TAMIMI, OCCUPATION, AND CONTROL

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JUST ON THEIR WAY TO WORK...
WHAT IF IT WERE YOU?


Most of the left and many of my friends love to accuse Israel of genocide, ethnic cleansing, and being a pack of nazis.  I don't buy that, okay?

Don't get me wrong, the zionist state is racist, it is oppressive, it is an occupation force, it is brutal, it is bad news.  If you are a Palestinian, the old "Zionist entity" has displaced you, jailed you, killed you, and uses all that it has to make your life miserable.  I get that...and you have a perfect right to refer to those who do such things to you any way you want.  I get it.

Still, the Israel government, the Israeli State is simply not marching people into the ovens.  They are simply not doing that...period.  

There is no need identify the Israelis with the nazis.  It isn't necessary.  What the State has done is plenty bad enough and deserves universal condemnation...and I condemn it...

Me, back in the 80s I started pushing the two state line and got in trouble for it.  Then the two state position became sort of accepted.  

Today I do not believe in two states.  I believe in a one state solution, a federation state solution, democratic, secular, and a state of all its peoples.

Well, I believe in that if there has to be a state.  I guess ultimately I believe in a no state solution.

Meanwhile, back in the non theoretical and non rhetorical world,  Amnesty International has condemned Israeli authorities   for "bullying and judicial harassment" of Palestinian rights activist Nariman Tamimi, her family, and those who live in her village.  

Tamimi was arrested by the Israelis as she and others walked non violently toward a nearby spring in protest against the loss of their land.  Tamimi was charged with being in a closed military zone.  Rana Hamadah  was also charged with obstructing a soldier in the execution of his duty.  A foreign national arrested along with the two Palestinian women was released later the same night and barred from entering the village for 15 days.

I should point out that  her brother Rushdi Tamimi was shot in the back with live ammunition by Israeli soldiers during a demonstration last year. He died two days later in hospital. Video evidence shows that Israeli soldiers delayed his family’s attempts to take him to hospital.


On its website, Amnesty International reports:

“This is an unrelenting campaign of harassment, the latest in a litany of human rights violations against Nariman Tamimi, her family, and her fellow villagers.  These arbitrary restrictions should be lifted immediately and the charges should be dropped,” said Philip Luther, Middle East and North Africa Director at Amnesty International.


Following their release on bail on Monday, the court has now put them under partial house arrest. They are not allowed to leave their family homes between 9am to 5pm on Fridays when the weekly protest takes place.

“They have been denied the basic human right to peacefully protest over land illegally seized by Israeli settlers, and the Israeli judiciary has used spurious legal tools to punish them for exercising their basic human right to peaceful protest,” said Philip Luther.


The Israeli human rights organization organization B'Tselem writes:


 The legal proceedings since a-Tamimi and Hamada were arrested are unprecedented, given the minor nature of the offense: the indictment does not claim that the two women acted violently. Furthermore, two military judges who watched video footage of the women’s arrest stated that they had found no evidence of violent or menacing behavior on their part. During the court sessions, Military Prosecutor Maj. Gilad Peretz even acknowledged that one reason for requesting continued remand was to keep the women from participating in demonstrations – unacceptable grounds that cannot possibly warrant detention. The fact that Judea and Samaria Attorney Lieut. Col. Maurice Hirsch himself represented the prosecution at one of the court sessions further demonstrates the military prosecution’s determination to keeping the two women behind bars.



Hamadah told +972 that during her arrest she asked the IDF soldier why she was being handcuffed, to which he replied: “Because I feel like it.” Hamadah said the pair were left handcuffed and blindfolded for nine hours, and were driven around in a vehicle with two male soldiers for seven more hours before being booked in Sharon Prison.
“Seeing the prisoners’ struggle from the inside gives an incredible urgency to their cause,” she said, adding that, “what we don’t see, and easily forget, is that the prisoners really must struggle for every passing minute.”

The following post is from +972.  The post makes the point that what all this is about, what the occupation itself is all about is CONTROL.

The logic of the occupation

As revealed by the arrest of the wife of a well-known Palestinian activist.

IDF arrests Nariman Tamimi at Nabi Saleh weekly protest June 28, 2013 (Activestills)

Nariman Tamimi was due to stand trial today at Ofer Military Prison for a rare charge: violating a closed military zone order. Nariman was arrested in her own village during an unarmed protest, in which not even one stone was thrown. When she was brought before a military judge, it was proved – through video evidence – that she never even resisted her arrest as the army previously claimed. Yet the military prosecution insisted on proceeding with the case.

You can read Mairav Zonszein’s report of the affair here. Despite the light and even absurd charges against Nariman – violating a closed military zone order in one’s own land – the regional military prosecutor himself, Lt.-Col. Maurice Hirsch, represented the prosecution at one of the court sessions, highlighting the gravity the IDF attached to this matter.

What’s the special interest for the army in this case? The definition of a closed military zone in the West Bank is pretty arbitrary and people violate the orders every day. But Nariman is the wife of a well-known Palestinian activist, and one possible explanation has to do with the unifying logic of the IDF’s actions vis-à-vis the Palestinian population in the occupied territory.

The occupation is about control. People often miss that. There are many barbaric and violent moments in the West Bank and even more so in Gaza, but as a whole, Israel is not attempting to exterminate the entire Palestinian population, nor does it currently seek to drive them all out of the territory it controls. Such actions would not be tolerated by the international community, and many Israelis would object them too.

Instead, all of the agencies who deal with the Palestinian population, primarily the army and the internal security services, are looking for the most effective ways to control the population and prevent all forms of resistance.

The methods they use are extremely diverse and they change from place to place and from one period of time to another. Checkpoints or crowd control measures are the most obvious ways. A network of informers and collaborators is another. Handing some privileges to a local and national leadership is another such method. Israeli representatives often take pride in the asylum Israel has granted to some Palestinian gays, but sexual orientation is also used for control, and internal security operatives have been known to blackmail Palestinian gays, threatening that they will expose their identity if they don’t provide information. And so on.

One of the most important aspects of control, which is hardly ever discussed, is the complicated system of permits Israel uses. You need an army permit to travel outside the West Bank, to cross the border to Jordan, to export and import certain goods, to build roads and plant trees, to dig water wells in certain areas, to work in a settlement, to work in Israel, to study abroad, to visit relatives in Gaza, and so on (check out this visual presentation of permit system). Recently, I went with another Israeli friend to cover the weekly protest in a Palestinian village. Not many of the villagers participated in it. In the village square, my friend met a local carpenter he knew. The carpenter is very careful not to be spotted protesting. He has a work permit in a settlement – the very same one that sits on the village’s land, and which is the cause of the weekly demonstration.

The system of control later becomes that ultimate justification for whatever violent action Israel takes against the Palestinians because Israel always gets to operate as the force of peace and order, while the Palestinians become the instigators of chaos and violence. This way, the debate on the occupation is always construed in a way that serves the Israeli interest.

Whatever violent action Israel undertakes against the Palestinian population is justified with something “they did” – a protest, a terror plot, a road block and so on. In the 70s and 80s, when general strikes where a common feature in the Palestinian opposition to the occupation, the army imprisoned local leaders for years under administrative detention, expelled activists and forced merchants to open their shops. When schools and universities mobilized, the army shut them down. Later the IDF moved to act with the same degree of resilience and determination against the mass demonstrations, stone throwing, suicide bombings, rocket launching, and whatever other acts the Palestinian used in their attempt to defeat the occupation. The bottom line is that every opposition to the occupation is forbidden, in the name of peace and stability.

The same logic, by the way, is used against the Palestinians’ diplomatic moves – what Israel now calls “diplomatic terrorism” – and civil society boycott campaign. Effective resistance is always forbidden. Politicians and activists are always viewed as “a threat to peace“ or “instigators,” and they are always blamed with “harming the interests of their own people” due to the catastrophes they bring upon them, in the form of IDF retaliation, of course. The international community, it should be noted, is extremely welcoming to such arguments, since order is always viewed as preferable to chaos, especially in the Middle East, and especially these days.

In Nariman Tamimi’s village, Nabi Saleh, a couple of Palestinians already died during the protests. The army blames the protesters for their own deaths.

Tamimi’s own arrest was the fifth time she has been taken into custody. A mother of four and and a known activist herself, she was held blindfolded and handcuffed for nine hours – standard procedure – before spending nearly four days in prison. When she was finally brought before a (military) judge, Military Prosecutor Maj. Gilad Peretz acknowledged that one reason for requesting her continued remand was to keep her from participating in the weekly demonstrations at her village.

Nariman was lucky. The court decided to put her under house arrest on Fridays instead, thus releasing her from prison but still preventing her from participating in the protests.


WHY YOU SHOULD BOYCOTT ENDER'S GAME AND ORSON SCOTT CARD

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If you are a fan of science fiction, you have likely heard of Orson Scott Card.  Card is the author of Ender's Game and a lot of follow ups to it, as well as a gazillion other books and stories.  Card is also a right wing homophobic, climate change denier.  Wikipedia adds, 

Card has also said that opposition to intelligent design is based on scientific dogma rather than a substantive assessment of the evidence. He also stated he believed the intelligent design movement will never be supported by genuine scientific evidence.

Card's immersion in the LDS faith has been an important facet of his life from early on. His great-great-grandfather was Brigham Young, an important leader in the Latter Day Saint movement, and all of Card's ancestors from at least three generations have been members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church). His ancestors include several other figures notable in the LDS Church, including the Cardston colony founder Charles Ora Card. As such, his faith has been a source of inspiration and influence for both his writing and his personal views.

You get the picture.

 In November, an all-star film production of Ender’s Game is hitting theaters.  Millions will rush off to see it and help to finance this creep.

Salon writing on Card's homophobia points out:


In 2008, Card lamented that he had for so long been labeled a “homophobe” because of his stated positions on homosexuality. Here’s a run-down on what he said. Notably, he’s become far more vocal and politically active in the fight against gay marriage in recent years.

1990: Card argued that states should keep sodomy laws on the books in order to punish unruly gays–presumably implying that the fear of breaking the law ought to keep most gay men in the closet where they belonged.

2004: He claimed that most homosexuals are the self-loathing victims of child abuse, who became gay “through a disturbing seduction or rape or molestation or abuse.”

2008: In 2008, Card published his most controversial anti-gay screed yet, in the Mormon Times, where he argued that gay marriage “marks the end of democracy in America,” that homosexuality was a “tragic genetic mixup,” and that allowing courts to redefine marriage was a slippery slope towards total homosexual political rule and the classifying of anyone who disagreed as “mentally ill:”

Card went on to advocate for, literally, a straight people’s insurrection against a pro-gay government:

[W]hen government is the enemy of marriage, then the people who are actually creating successful marriages have no choice but to change governments, by whatever means is made possible or necessary… Regardless of law, marriage has only one definition, and any government that attempts to change it is my mortal enemy. I will act to destroy that government and bring it down….

2009: He joined the board for anti-gay lobby The National Organization for Marriage, which was created to pass California’s notorious Proposition 8, banning gay marriage.

2012: He supported his home state North Carolina’s constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage by arguingthat gay marriage “will be the bludgeon [The Left] use to make sure that it becomes illegal to teach traditional values in the schools.”

I suggest you skip the movie.

Orson, though, says you should be tolerant of his intolerance and not join in any boycott of his movies or his books.  His supporters also claim that a boycott will hurt innocent workers.  Raw Story says this is:

...an argument that seemingly ignores the fact that production crews are paid while the movie is being made, which is not impacted by how it performs at the box office.

What do I think?

I'm down with the comment I found on Joe.My. God. blog,

Yes, folks, the man who swore to "destroy the government and bring it down" over gay marriage and who declared himself to be your "mortal enemy" now wants YOU to be all noble and forgiving and shit. FUCK THAT.

It is time we quit pretending that we can all live in little cubbyholes, that some can be bigots sometimes but not at other times, that somehow being a bigoted, intolerant,fool is a protected status.  It's time we make bigoted, intolerant, fools an endangered species instead.  It's time we realize that some guy who writes books and  includes in his books his thoughts and his hate and by which overtly or subtly readers are influenced by such...by movies...by TV.  

I'm not calling for censorship of the arts, although, well, I won't go there right now.  However, we have the right and the obligation in fact to educate, organize, take action to expose and to fight back against those like Orson Scott Card who enjoy the money in their wallets, that millions of unsuspecting "fans" put there, while hiding behind their supposed "intellectual" freedoms.  For some reason, the Scott Cards of the world always think it is okay to oppress others, but we have no right to fight back.

The following is from  GeeksOut.



GEEKS OUT RESPONDS TO ORSON SCOTT CARD, STILL PLANS TO SKIP ENDER'S GAME



The Bill of Rights protects your freedom of speech but it does not protect your right to a blockbuster opening weekend.

NOM Board Member and Ender’s Game author Orson Scott Card’s tone-deaf plea for “tolerance” from pro-gay marriage forces, first given to Entertainment Weeklystruck such a sour note with so manybecause it seems to miss the point entirely.

This is not and has never been about a much beloved sci-fi novel. Leaving aside the fact that Card thinks gay civil rights didn’t exist in the mid-80s, which is pretty insulting to the post-Stonewall generation frontline against a little something called AIDS—this is about us, here and now. This is about our community refusing to financially support an extreme anti-gay activist. We didn’t read his diary, and we’re not taking dinner table conversation out of context—Orson Scott Card has a very public record of far-right comments against marriage equality as a concept and LGBT folk as human beings, such as:

“But homosexual "marriage" is an act of intolerance. It is an attempt to eliminate any special preference for marriage in society—to erase the protected status of marriage in the constant balancing act between civilization and individual reproduction.

So if my friends insist on calling what they do "marriage," they are not turning their relationship into what my wife and I have created, because no court has the power to change what their relationship actually is.

Instead they are attempting to strike a death blow against the well-earned protected status of our, and every other, real marriage.

They steal from me what I treasure most, and gain for themselves nothing at all. They won't be married. They'll just be playing dress-up in their parents’ clothes.

The dark secret of homosexual society—the one that dares not speak its name—is how many homosexuals first entered into that world through a disturbing seduction or rape or molestation or abuse, and how many of them yearn to get out of the homosexual community and live normally.”

—Orson Scott Card, “Homosexual ‘Marriage’ and Civilization,” 2004

Tell families in 37 states where gay marriage is still illegal that it’s a “moot issue.” Tell citizens in Indiana, where it’s now a criminal act for same-sex couples even to apply for a marriage license. Tell that to the Virginians whose governor wants to recriminalize sodomy. I doubt very much children delegitimized and stigmatized by red-state legislatures across the country are kickin’ back with a cold drink to let historical inevitability do the work now that the Supreme Court has ruled on DOMA. That’s a bizarrely dismissive and defeatist attitude from the same man who swore,

“W]hen government is the enemy of marriage, then the people who are actually creating successful marriages have no choice but to change governments, by whatever means is made possible or necessary… Regardless of law, marriage has only one definition, and any government that attempts to change it is my mortal enemy. I will act to destroy that government and bring it down….”

—Orson Scott Card, The Mormon Times, 2008

Does this look "moot" to anyone? 

This plea for tolerance is perhaps a bridge too far, especially from someone who characterized gay marriage as “the bludgeon [The Left] use to make sure that it becomes illegal to teach traditional values in the schools,” (2012). There’s nothing more democratic and tolerant than a consumer boycott, rooted in the ideas of free market accountability. Skip Ender’s Game is about doing what all of us do every day—use facts to determine who and what to support with our money.

Orson Scott Card, we can tolerate your anti-gay activism, your right-wing extremism, your campaign of fear-mongering and insults, but we’re not going to pay you for it. You’ve got the right to express your opinions and beliefs any way you choose—but you don’t have a right to our money.

How many homophobic billboards and absurd “Gathering Storm” ads would a new fortune built off ofEnder’s Game lunchboxes buy for NOM?  


Now would be an ideal time to hear from Lionsgate, as we know them to be a company of open hearts and allies of LGBT families. Now would be a great time, too, to hear from the cast and creative team behind Ender’s Game who have no connection to the author’s anti-gay activities and who’ve been vocal supporters of gay rights in the past. How do you cut this guy a check?

No matter what happens with Skip Ender’s Game, American voters have already rejected Orson Scott Card's and NOM’s extreme anti-gay agenda. Whether they’ll continue to fund it at the box office remains to be seen.  
—Geeks OUT



CAPITAL'S BOMBING OF LAC-MEGANTIC

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By now every one of you have heard "all" about the train explosion that ripped a small Canadian town apart over the weekend.

The media has described it in all kinds of ways, has reported on all sorts of theories as to what went wrong.  They have failed to mention one thing - Capitalism.

I am actually going to reprint right here and now (as prelude to the actual post below) an article which I think catches the true spirit of what we can learn, of what we already know as to the Lac_Megantic bombing by global capital.  The article from Ml FireDogLake is authored by someone going by the handle of Knut.  It reads like this:



The appropriate subtitle is ‘Bhopal Coming to Your Hometown Soon.’

The train wreck (this time literal as well as figurative) at Lac-Mégantic hasn’t got much play here, but it is important enough to deserve attention, as it perfectly illustrates the principle of regulatory capture, like the non-incendiary financial meltdown in 2008. Here’s the story.

In 2003 the Canadian Pacific Railway sold off the portion of its line that runs east of Montreal through northern Maine to Portland to a private company headquartered in Chicago known as the Montreal, Maine and Atlantic Railway. The enterprise (like all well-run American enterprises headed by MBA types) was almost completely levered, which meant after paying interest, bribes and executive salaries didn’t have much left over to maintain the tracks. I can testify to this, as the tracks run close to our country house, and we sometimes walk on them. The wood is rotten, the rails in bad shape, and there is grass where there should be gravel in the road bed. They also use inferior equipment. In the particular case in question, they used tank cars for explosive material (it could just as well been something toxic like sulphuric acid) that are no longer permitted because the walls are not at least one inch thick. But they got a variance which allowed the company to ship oil in them until they were replaced, which in the case of this company would have been never. Not surprisingly, when the train derailed in the middle of a small town (which could have been Montreal or Portland, Maine for that matter), they exploded.

The train, composed of 70 tank cars and five engines to draw them, had only one engineer. This is also a variance, which they got from the Canadian regulatory agency last year. I’d like you to imagine a heavily loaded train carrying explosive or toxic materials going through your town with only one person to make sure it gets through safely. At Nantes, QC, the engineer got off the train to take a nap. He would be replaced by an American crew (of one!) to take the train through Maine. The locomotive motors were left running to maintain pressure in the air brake system. While he was napping one of the engines caught on fire. A local noticed, and called the fire department, which put the fire out. The breaks having failed, the train moved out of the station on a grade that fell some 350 feet in 12 kilometers. By the time it reached the town it was going close to 50 miles an hour into a curve that it had to take at 5 miles. The rest is history. It is hardly worth mentioning that the Company President blamed the Nantes fire department.

The whole episode seems to me to sum up what has become of American capitalism. Over-leveraged, shoddy product and performance, milking the enterprise of its capital, and capturing regulators to get away with it. It is the banking disaster writ small. In the mean time the investigators have found only 5 bodies of the 60 to 80 that were incinerated in the center of town when the train exploded.

Rabble has reported that Montreal, Maine and Atlantic Railway is owned by Rail World which describes itself thusly:



A railway management, consulting and investment corporation specializing in privatizations and restructurings. Its purpose is to promote rail industry privatization by bringing together government bodies wishing to sell their stakes with investment capital and management skills. Rail World was incorporated in July 1999 by Edward A. Burkhardt, who is the President and Chief Executive Officer. 

Rabble says that the MMAR network is a cobbling together of old and secondary lines, up to a century old as a matter of fact, gathered in from larger companies over the past decades in an endless quest for profits.  Rail World, Rabble reports:


...operates former state-owned rail lines in Poland, Finland, The Ukraine and the Baltic states. Edward Burkhardt oversaw the privatization of the rail and ferry networks in New Zealand during the 1990s. He serves as the honorary-consul for New Zealand in Chicago.

 Meanwhile Edward Burkhardt has pointed the finger of blame at everyone but himself.  First he blamed the local firefighters and then he blamed the workers at his company.

Dirt Diggers Digest points a flashlight beam directly at Burkhardt,


Burkhardt is a living symbol of the pitfalls of deregulation, deunionization, privatization and the other features of laissez-faire capitalism. He first made his mark in the late 1980s, when his Wisconsin Central Railroad took advantage of federal railroad deregulation, via the 1980 Staggers Rail Act, to purchase 2,700 miles of track from the Soo Line and remake it into a supposedly dynamic and efficient carrier. That efficiency came largely from operating non-union and thus eliminating work rules that had promoted safety.


Wisconsin Central — which also took advantage of privatization to acquire rail operations in countries such as Britain, Australia and New Zealand — racked up a questionable safety record. Burkhardt was forced out of Wisconsin Central in a boardroom dispute in 2001, but he continued his risky practices after his new company, Rail World, took over the Bangor and Aroostook line in 2003 and renamed it MMA.


Faced with operating losses, Burkhardt and his colleague Robert Grindrod targeted labor costs with little concern about the safety consequences. In 2010 the Bangor Daily News reported that MMA was planning to reduce its crews to one person in Maine, which, amazingly, was allowed by state officials. Grindrod blithely told the newspaper: “Obviously, if you are running two men on a crew and switch to one man, you’re saving 50 percent of your labor component.” The company also succeeded in getting permission for one-man crews in Canada.


Inadequate staffing may have also played a role in a 2009 incident at an MMA maintenance facility in Maine in which more than 100,000 gallons of oil were spilled during a transfer in the facility’s boiler room. In 2011 the EPA fined the company $30,000 for Clean Water Act violations.


MMA’s continued to have safety problems even before the Lac-Megantic disaster. The Wall Street Journal reported that MMA had 23 accidents, injuries or other reportable mishaps from 2010 to 2012 and that on a per-mile basis the company’s rate was much higher than the U.S. national average.

Capital has one goal, one reason for its existence, to accumulate more capital, to produce what we commonly call capital.  That's it.  Nothing else matters.  Nothing else can get in the way.

And then there is all that oil and the whole Tar Sands situation...pipelines aren't the only way to transport oil, you know.  As reported in the Globe and Mail, Peter Tertzakian, an energy economist with ARC Financial Corporation in Calgary points out, "One has to keep in mind that 10 unit trains is equal to one Keystone XL.  And 10 trains isn't that many.


Russ Girling, CEO of TransCanada agrees, " Rail, obviously, has become a very important option." 



Isn't it interesting how so many things come together when you dig a little.

Meanwhile, there is the question as to whether the train explosion even took place in Canada.

Say what?

The following is from  Mohawk Nation News.





MURDER AT MEGANTIC



mnnlogo1


MNN. 8 July 2013. On Saturday morning, July 6th, a bomb wiped out the center of the town of Lac-Megantic [Quebec] on Mohawk Territory. Over 60 of the French settlers for whom we are responsible were murdered and ‘disappeared”.
War zone on Mohawk land.
Bomb blast on Indigenous land.
  
According to the Great Peace of Montreal 1701 is under the protection of the Constitution of the Council of the Great Peace. We have a duty to protect all living things. We demand a full investigation of this criminal act of the multinational corporations. Montreal, Mine & Atlantic Railway Ltd., was hauling 73 substandard tankers and locomotives carrying toxic crude to Irving Oil in Saint Johns New Brunswick for the US market. Every train that goes through our towns and villages is loaded with enough ammunition to create a “war zone”. 

The train was parked in Nantes. Nobody was in the locomotive. The engineer had locked up and gone to sleep at a nearby hotel. At 11:30 the brakes of one locomotive was mysteriously released. It caught fire and billowed smoke. The fire department was called to put it out. The remaining cars were not checked. At 1:00 am. the remaining cars started moving directly downhill into the Lac-Megantic town center, about 11kilometers away. A a social gathering was taking place. The train sped toward them, careened off the track, came to a stop near the middle of town and blew up like an atom bomb. The people and town centre were incinerated. The poisons ran into the lake. 

This is war in Quebec!
War on Mother Earth in Quebec and elsewhere!
Canada ships $73 billion in oil to the US every year, passing them through our towns and villages. Environmental regulations are constantly being removed and/or sidestepped. Moreshipping of crude oil is planned for the east and west coasts. 

The railroad tankers used in US and Canada are old and dangerous. By deregulation they don’t have to be replaced. Even more unsafe pipelines are being planned. Someone would have a strong motive for releasing those brakes. We Indigenous people should oversee any investigation of such criminal acts on our land. 

Foreign corporations normally cover their criminality by paying off all the corrupt politicians and law makers. They look for perpetrators before picking their “patsy”. The victims are forgotten. We will stop the destruction of Mother Earth caused by their toxic economy. These railroads, pipelines, roads and waterways are creating ecological destruction on our land. We are all at risk.   

There must be an immediate ban on transporting all war materials across Onowaregeh/Great Turtle Island. It violates the Council of the Great Peace, the law of the land. As Jimi sang in “House Burning Down”: “Look at the sky/turn a hellfire red. Somebody’s house in burning/down, down, down, down. I say, O, baby, why’d you burn your brother’s house down?” House burning down 

megantic map

MNN Mohawk Nation 


Newskahentinetha2@yahoo.comThahoketoteh@hotmail.com For more news, books, workshops, to donate and sign up for MNN newsletters, go towww.mohawknationnews.com  More stories at MNN Archives.  Address:  Box 991, Kahnawake [Quebec, Canada] J0L 1B0  For free download of Mohawk music thahoketoteh.ws





"THIS PLACE IS NOTHING MORE THAN A TORTURE CHAMBER"/SOLIDARITY WITH PRISON HUNGER STRIKERS

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It's prison friday here at Scission and as you know the story has to be about the historic hunger strikes taking place on the West Coast, centered in California, but spreading beyond.  I think rather then waste space and time with my own comments, I will instead post two separate pieces.  The first from Prison Culture and the second from Solitary Watch. 


WHY A HUNGER STRIKE


Death Row prisoners in the Adjustment Center (A/C) Unit at San Quentin State Prison are organized and united in planning and executing a Hunger Strike this summer of 2013 to protest inhumane conditions of isolation and long-term confinement of prisoners in the A/C:
·         the lack of law library access
·          the lack of exercise and yard equipment
·         the unfair administration and classification committee practices
·         the controversial and unfair practice of using inmate informants, anonymous informants and confidential information
·         to retain prisoners in the A/C for years
·         the unlawful and under the table use of labeling a prisoner as an alleged prison gang member, associate or affiliate
·         using prisoners alleged gang status, validation, confirmation and documents (such as 130s, 128 A/B, staff information) to hold them in the A/C as grade B prisoners, yet treating them as S.H.U. / ad-seg –grade D prisoners for an indeterminate amount of time
·         the unlawful practice of group punishment tactics and lockdowns
·         the unlawful practice policy of “interviewing” / forced interrogation
·         the illegal use and excessive practice of property restriction or “property control”
·         the degrading practice and policy of “shower shoes only”, stripping prisoners at yard in front of everyone, and not allowing prisoners to be fully dressed in state blues when going to Law Library
·         the denial of religious, hobby craft, library books and educational programs or materials
·         the unlawful practice of withholding, censoring, denying and returning prisoners´mail without notification or legitimate reasons to do so
·         the denial of contact visits, phone calls, participation in food charity drives, nutritional items, honoring medical chromos and legal books or materials
·         the excessive abuse of power and authority by Warden, his administration and staff to do as they wish with condemned, S.H.U./ ad-seg prisoners in the A/C
In spite of the ongoing negotiations between the Pelican Bay Human Rights Movement and top CDCR administrators, the San Quentin administration is resisting any attempt to improve the plight of death row prisoners housed in the A/C. Unlike the Title 15- California´s Code of Regulation for all California State prisoners- San Quentin top officials have concocted and enacted an exclusive code of regulations called the O.P.608., which mandates that death row prisoners are under the control of the Warden of San Quentin. It is this illegal and repressive code of regulations that A/C death row prisoners are vigorously challenging as well.
Some may know about the A/C, but for those that don´t, it´s a prison within a prison and S.H.U. unit, housing 102 prisoners with over 90% of it being condemned prisoners. Many of us have been housed here since our arrival into the prison system as condemned men. The majority hasn´t have a disciplinary infraction and for those that have, have exceeded the time limitations triple the max set to be served for them. It´s a punishment unit and a psychologically torturous dungeon. We hardly ever leave the unit unless it is to see medical specialists. We´re fed and shit in our cells. We´re kept confined to our cells 22-24 hours a day, only to come out for five purposes:
1.      yard, which is held three times a week for 2-3 hours
2.      showers, which are done three times a week
3.      medical sick calls
4.      visiting (that is behind a dirty plexiglass window, through a 25 year old 2way intercom that interferes with and shares everyone´s conversations, leading everyone to shout over one another for an hour. You hardly ever get extended visits, even when it´s possible, or a courteous staff.)
5.      Law library, which takes up to three months to physically access it
Prisoners here are constantly deprived, harassed, ridiculed, psychologically tortured and have our only form of communication (mail) withheld for weeks and months –both incoming and outgoing. Often times we will learn of the death /passing of a family member or friend three months after the fact. Not allowing us to send our condolences, or what we would like to have shared in our absence at their burials, causing our family and friends to worry about us and not allowing us to pay our last respects to the dearly departed. All with the purpose of intimidating and breaking a prisoner´s spirit. In order to have them submit and fabricate information on fellow prisoners to be released from this torturous dungeon and gain better privileges for themselves and their loved ones.
Our Hunger Strike begins July 2013 in solidarity with the National Strike. Our demands are fair, reasonable, create no serious threat to the safety and security of the A/C, and are all within the power of authority of the San Quentin Warden to order the following immediate changes without delay. It´ll create a more positive and productive environment because it will ensure that prisoners be treated with human dignity and fairly.
We ask you for your support as we place our health, bodies and lives on the line in order to bring about a positive change –peacefully. None of us want to die, but due to our deteriorating circumstances, having been sentenced to death and now the administration has unjustly sentenced us all to an unlawful and indeterminate S.H.U./ grade B program. A “civil” and psychologically torturous death in the A/C as well as their abuse of power and authority and abuse of discretion has left us with no other alternative but to place what we value most at stake – our lives, for positive change and human dignity. We would truly appreciate and welcome your support. Your help will give us strength and will nourish our starving bodies.

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Voices from Solitary: This Place Is Nothing More Than A Torture Chamber

Pelican Bay State Prison
Pelican Bay State Prison
The following was written by Tony, 35, who is engaged in the statewide hunger strike against long-term solitary confinement and related issues at Pelican Bay State Prison in Crescent City, California. Incarcerated sine he was nineteen years old, he has been in the Security Housing Units (SHU) for over nine years, longer than the average term of 6.8 years. He writes about the mental challenges that he faces while locked in what he calls a “tomb box,” and makes an important, practical appeal to the reader: “Ask yourselves do we want a rehabilitated person with an education and job skills who can contribute to society?  Or do we want an angrily, hateful, uneducated, and unskilled person who was mentally tortured back on the street?”

–Sal Rodriguez

My letter to family and friends………

I am a prisoner, have been since the age of nineteen. I am now thirty-five years of age. I was placed in the S.H.U without Due Process, originally. Not for infractions of rules and regulations. Rather hearsay and embellishments. The California Department of Corrections, rather than provide me educational/ rehabilitation programs, instead simply warehouse me in a tomb box, windowless cell, with no human contact, I am basically sensory deprived. I live in the worlds infamous security housing unit at Pelican Bay State Prison. For us in the Security Housing Units (SHU) this place is nothing more than a torture chamber.

I have been in the S.H.U. for over nine (9) years . I was placed in Ad–Seg. in 2003, and I haven’t been able to touch or hug my loved one’s since then. Every single minute feels like being under water trying to gasp for air. Day in and day out, confined , isolated within a concrete box. The space is the size of a large bathroom. This is my daily existence. Isolation gnaws at the brain. Imagine yourself in your own windowless bathroom, day after day, with no human touch or able to see the sun, much less feel it. I am keenly aware of every single minute. Time weighs heavy. What is at stake?  My sanity.

Who invented this type of punishment? Who thought it was a good idea to place a human being in a confined space, deeply isolated. Until, to the point, a human breaks and becomes mentally unraveled. Who?   Only in an institution or group of people that have lost their humanness.

The use of isolation as a tactic to break humans was practiced by the once Soviet Union KGB and the North Korean government and Vietnam Government as a torture method. More recently, The United States of America on terrorist at Guantanamo Bay.  P.O.W’s from the United States, would attest to the fact that this was a tactic to break a soldier who were prisoners  of war. Senator John McCain of Arizona was subjected to this tactic for four years, as a P.O.W, in the Vietnam War. Is isolation torture?  YES…

Long term isolation may not leave physical scars, but it scars the mind. With its timed, methodic, sinister, daily isolation, to break

Mental torture methods are being practiced everyday within our nation’s borders! You might say, “WHAT?!”  Yes, everyday imprisoned humans, just like myself , all across civilized America are being subjected to long term isolation.  NOT just in the state of California, but also, Colorado, Chicago, Ohio, New York, etc.  Which most American people do not even know. Within the walls of the prison, I am in their:  Security Housing Units.  This is a cover up name for what is more suitable and should be called:

Mental  Torture Chambers.

Many people think that it’s okay to torture prisoner’s because we have been dehumanized by the system. That we are nothing more than criminals. Worst of the worst. That we are monsters. That we are shot-callers, violent to the core. We have been called this and that long enough. They have conveniently convinced themselves and everyone else that this is to be true.  for that, now, they can treat us anyway that they want. We are less than human to them.

It’s understandable that in a civil society there is a rule of law and justice must be served, but where within the functions of justice did it become acceptable to inflict the injustice of mental torture.  Prisoner’s, criminals, convicts, we are still human.  Are we not?  We feel.  We love and are loved.  We have hope.  Goals.  We even dream…..  We eagerly ask for rehabilitative programs, to be taught skills, to better ourselves, and to be educated.  It’s a proven fact that prisoner’s who are provided such programs, have a greater chance of not returning to prison.  That is a good thing for everyone.  Even with the fact, prison administrations still fit to spend tax dollars not on rehabilitation programs, but rather to simply isolate us in a windowless concrete box.  We are placed in long term isolation where we either develop a mental health condition, or naturally begin to hate our captors.

Our prison system has simply boiled down to a policy of:  LOCK THEM UP AND THROW AWAY THE KEY.   This, however, only works against the interests of society.  Because the reality is simple; a large percentage of all people imprisoned will someday be released.  Ask yourselves do we want a rehabilitated person with an education and job skills who can contribute to society?  Or do we want an angrily, hateful, uneducated, and unskilled person who was mentally tortured back on the street?  Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (P.T.S.D.) is badly enough.  Now, imagine some-thing equal or greater than that.   The answer is quite simple.  We can achieve this.  It’s not impossible:  all that needs to be done is to employ the human element of treating prisoner’s like human beings.  That is all have ever requested.

It is up to us all to demand that the prison system spend tax dollars on rehabilitation programs,Not  on employing long term isolation.  Call and or write your Governor, Senators, Congressman, Congresswoman, and stress to them the importance to end long term isolation.  They have your vote(s) and best of interest to listen.  It’s been said that the humanness of a civilized society is measured in how it treats its prisoner’s.

The Security Housing Unit with its current policies and practices is an entity that does nothing else but breeds hate and despair.  the Security Housing Units should be shut down.  Nothing good is gained from long term isolation.

Every human being imprisoned within the confines of SHU wants nothing more than to achieve the complete closure of the “mental torture chambers”.  It is why on July 8th, 2013 inmates who want better treatment of our human rights will be participating in a state wide, peaceful, non-violent, hunger strike.  Others in other states similar to our situation are encouraged to participate.  We will be demanding that the human element  be the governing part of how prison’s are run.  We will sacrifice our health and or lives for this belief.  The frightening part of it all is, that we the so-called “MONSTERS”. and not our captors, demand this.  We are on the side of human rights.

When you the readers out there hear about our peaceful protest don’t think, “SHIT, IT’S JUST A BUNCH OF SNIVELING PRISONER’S “.   Rather know, get informed, and realize , it’s a group of human beings, from all races:  Black, Brown, White, and Red, within a concrete box risking their health and lives to end the inhumane treatment being inflicted upon us.  Especially to my younger cousins and younger family members whose support I didn’t have in the two hunger strikes in 2011.  Hope this letter to you has opened your eyes and mind.  It is one my reasons to write this letter.  Therefore, we don’t want to spend another minute that feels like a year in mental torture chamber.  We hope.  We believe that justice and humane treatment should go hand in hand.

Tony     Date:  6/16/13
Imprisoned now for 17 years and still full of hope.

DOES GEORGE ZIMMERMAN HAVE A LINE HE WOULDN'T CROSS? / A POEM BY BILL BERKOWITZ

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It is supposed to be theoretical weekends at Scission.  Unfortunately there is nothing theoretical about yesterday's ending to the George Zimmerman trial which completed the "legal" lynching of Trayvon Martin.  I have not felt such a visceral  sense of sadness, anger, and outrage in a long, long time as when I heard the verdict of "not guilty."  Was I shocked that such a thing could transpire in this country?  Not really, but still I listened with a sense of disbelief which grew as I watched the smiling reaction of the "special prosecutor," as I heard her colleagues on the prosecution team thank the jury and actually comment that their prayers had been answered.  I had to turn off the television.  When I turned it back on, I found myself watching the loathsome defense team gloating and actually commenting that it had taken too long for justice to be found for George Zimmerman.  They and Zimmerman's brother added that if Zimmerman had been black there never would have been a trial.  I felt like I was living in some alternate universe.  

I lay awake last night knowing that I had to say something here, but the words to use failed me.  How could I express anything near what I was feeling?  I awoke this morning to an email from my old friend Bill Berkowitz and to a poem which he had written which took care of that for me.  I will share that with you now.





Does George Zimmerman Have a Line He Wouldn't Cross?


Does George Zimmerman have a line he wouldn't cross?
If he does, would it be a 15 year-old black boy
or girl?
Would it be a child of 13, 11, 9, 7, or 3?
Would the black child have to be taller than five feet ten inches?
What if that child was five feet eight inches or five feet three inches or barely five feet?
Would he still have attacked if it was a five feet two inch six year-old girl
carrying a soda and a bag of skittles?
Would his defense attorney still be so smug and disrespectful?
What if our five feet two inch girl walking home carrying a soda and a bag of skittles 
wore a hoodless sweatshirt?
Would Zimmerman have accosted her?
Would he have shot her dead?
Is another self-declared neighborhood-watch armed-vigilante
setting his sights on another black child?  


Bill Berkowitz, July 14, 2013

TRAYVON MARTIN, MARISSA ALEXANDER: THE SYSTEM WORKED JUST AS DESIGNED

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It's Monday and I can't quite let it go yet, won't ever really let it go.  I am compelled to once again return to the inglorious injustice done this weekend by what the defense and the prosecution in the Trayvon Martin case call the best legal system in the world.  Such arrogance.  How often does someone describe something, anything about the USA the best in the world.  Ask them why they think that and they will stutter and say it just is.  The USA is the best at everything and that's the way it goes.

Such crap.

What is important to keep in mind is that the US judicial system WORKED exactly as it is designed to work in the case of Trayvon Martin.  It WORKED again exactly as it is designed to work in the case of Marissa Alexander.  Many see a contradiction.  There is none.  

One can't possibly take an honest read of US history, of the founding papers, of the founding fathers, of a few centuries of Supreme Court decisions, at a history of slavery, Jim Crow, and mass incarceration...at a foundation of white supremacy, of murders of civil rights activists and those struggling for liberation of the African American People, of the every day bits of racism that blacks in America face always...and on and on and reach any conclusion other than the system worked just fine in both cases.

The system needs to go.

It ain't broken.  It was never otherwise.  All the white liberal media pundits, all the good white  liberal folks who honestly are outraged by the verdict in one or both of these cases miss the point entirely.  You want to be outraged, be outraged at America, be outraged at the pillars upon which this "greatest country" in the world is built.  

And don't just be "outraged" and then head home to your own gated communities, to your own private schools, to your own pieces of heaven and go back to sleep.  GET IT! DO SOMETHING!

It is time for white working people to GET IT, too.  Get that you are the recipient of all sorts of privileges just because you are a member of the white club.  Get that those who do exploit and steal from you, who keep you down are sitting at the top of a white power structure laughing at you, but happy to have you aboard.  GROW UP and smell the roses already.  Sometimes I grow weary of making excuses for you and talking about how white supremacy is all mystified and hidden behind a mountain of material advantages.  You aren't blind and you aren't idiots.  Quit pretending you don't see what is going on.  Figure it out already.  This white skin privilege thing has been going on for a long time now.  It is hard to miss.

Yes, I should come down harder on the out and out racists, white supremacist scum, profiling murders, and the like, but that is too easy.  It is too easy to blame a few white sheets for all the dirty laundry that makes up this brave and free and land of ours.

Am I pissed.  Yes, I am pissed.  Walking around pissed all the time is not the way I want to live, but boy is it hard not to do just that.  Of course, like everyone else I find many moments of joy and good feelings, even sometimes of hope.

This is not one of those moments.

The following is from The Frenzy.


Trayvon Martin, Marissa Alexander, and 

the founding of the US

The murder of Trayvon Martin and jailing of Marissa Alexander aren’t just about racism —they’re about slavery.

Many groups of people face racist violence and discrimination in the US, but what African Americans, or any other people deemed to be “Black” face runs even deeper. This whole damn country was founded on these principles: Black people are the property of white people, and Black people count only as 3/5 of a human.

And these rules aren’t just legacy, but are still our lived realities, every day. White people get away with murdering Black people, every day, every day, every day. And Black and Brown men, imprisoned in large numbers in rural parts of many states (and hey, I’m talking up North here —stop blaming this on “the South”!) count as “population” to determine local congressional seats in the counties where they are imprisoned, not in their homes, yet aren’t allowed to vote for those seats. I think that’s pretty damn close to counting as only 3/5 of a human, don’t you?

Some days I think that if there weren’t for-profit prisons and strong prison guard unions the State wouldn’t even pretend to care about Black-on-Black crime; they don’t actually care about those killed. They only care about two motives: making profit, and maintaining white supremacy. Imprisoning people for Black-on-Black violence serves both of these, the latter by the myriad ways having been imprisoned destroys lives by making employment impossible, breaking up families, destroying education, denying the right vote and on and ugly ugly on.

Imprisoning white people for killing Black people might serve the profit motive, but maintaining white supremacy trumps profit, every time. To have found Zimmerman guilty of murder would be to say that Trayvon Martin was fully, legally, human, and that’s not how this country was set up.

Imprisoning Marissa Alexander definitely serves both profit and supremacy. What in the world would the US do if Black folks thought they had the right to take up arms to defend themselves? And this question goes to the heart of how the US was established to protect a slave-holding social system, for the deepest fear of that system was that the enslaved, who outnumbered the owners so greatly, would rise up.

I’ve already seen many many comments about how “The system is broken” or how this was a “travesty against justice.” But THIS IS HOW THE SYSTEM WAS SET UP TO WORK. And while the acquittal is a travesty against the abstract concept of Justice, it is exactly what the US justice system was set up to do —maintain the vision of the founding fathers. Who held generations captive in violently enforced slavery, raped women held in slavery, and sold their own children from these rapes as slaves.

Where, in those founding principles, does anyone possibly think Trayvon Martin’s murder would matter?

And, finally, because I found this on Facebook this morning and it so brilliantly sums up the situation, a quotation from Frederick Douglass’ My Bondage and My Freedom:

The slaveholders, with a craftiness peculiar to themselves, by encouraging the enmity of the poor laboring white man against the blacks, succeeded in making the said white man almost as much a slave as the black slave himself. The difference between the white slave and the black slave was this: the latter belonged to one slaveholder, while the former belonged to the slaveholders collectively. The white slave had taken from him by indirection what the black slave had taken from him directly and without ceremony. Both were plundered, and by the same plunderers. The slave was robbed by his master of all his earnings, above what was required for his bare physical necessities, and the white laboring man was robbed by the slave system of the just results of his labor, because he was flung into competition with a class of laborers who worked without wages. The slaveholders blinded them to this competition by keeping alive their prejudice against the slaves as men, not against them as slaves. They appealed to their pride, often denouncing emancipation as tending to place the white working man on an equality with negroes, and by this means they succeeded in drawing off the minds of the poor whites from the real fact, that by the rich slave master they were already regarded as but a single remove from equality with the slave. The impression was cunningly made that slavery was the only power that could prevent the laboring white man from falling to the level of the slave’s poverty and degradation. To make this enmity deep and broad between the slave and the poor white man, the latter was allowed to abuse and whip the former without hindrance.

DEATH AND RESISTANCE IN HONDURAS / INDIGENOUS VERSUS THE EMPIRE

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Tomas Garcia, a leader of the indigenous Lenca community in Honduras has been murdered.  Garcia died from a bullet fired by a member of the Honduran armed forces.  His son Allan was severly wounded.  Radio Resistencia reports:


Allan García, 17 year-old Lenca boy, was checked in to the Santa Barbara hospital this Monday at 1:00pm, injured by the Honduran military in the community of Río Blanco, Intibucá. The medical diagnosis is that a high-caliber bullet went through his thorax and that he requires urgent medical intervention. He was sent via emergency transfer this afternoon to Hospital Mario Rivas in San Pedro Sula. In the same attack, his father —Tomás García Domínguez, Lenca community organizer—was murdered around noon, also by the army which is guarding the DESA Company of the Chinese state firm SYNOHIDRO, which plans to build a dam on the Gualcarque River against the will of the indigenous community.


The dam being built by the Chinese firm is widely opposed by the indigenous people in the area.  Honduran Culture and Politics tells us: 


That company, SYNOHIDRO, is well known as the contractor for controversial dams proposed on the Patuca River in Olancho, in eastern Honduras, expected to cause major environmental damage in the Rio Platano Biosphere, and protested by indigenous people in eastern Honduras as prejudicial to their livelihoods.


This company, representing global capital in this situation,  has paid little regard to the desires of the people of the region.  As SOA Watch has stated:


In clear violation of ILO Convention 169 on the rights of Indigenous Peoples, the Lenca community of Rio Blanco was not consulted on whether they wanted this project or not. And when the Municipal Mayor finally did hold a town hall meeting about the project, he got up and left the meeting when the community voted against the project, refusing to sign the acta in an attempt to invalidate the meeting.


Well, sometimes the multitude decides consulted or not they have something to say.  The indigenous people of Honduras have been battling the Empire over this dam ever since the idea came along. 

The fight of the Lenca people is part of a much larger struggle against the seizure of indigenous lands by international capital and its state representatives that started over 500 years ago, and continues to this day.  
Berta Caceres, Director of the Council of Indigenous and Popular Organizations of Honduras (COPINH), who was himself arrested protesting the site in May says on Indian Country Today:

There is a displacement of the population that has traditionally lived on those lands, practically an eviction...DESA [of Honduras] and SINOHYDRO (a transnational Chinese hydroelectric project builder) have exerted brutal pressure against the communities, with maneuvers such as co-opting leaders and the offering of bribes, and on the other hand repression, systematic harassment, and the occupation of the territory by the army, the police and security guards and gang members.

The Rio Blanco case is very important and emblematic  because it is a struggle against a very strong transnational power such as SINOHYDRO and it represents the opening of the doors to big capital for the creation of mega projects through the Law of Special Regimes or better known as the Law of Model Cities that gave a chance to not only this transnational, but to large investments in the north.

Because of these facts, it's important to fight against the Agua Zarca project which is the beginning of the plunder and eviction through the Model City projects which is a laboratory for what is being executed in Honduras, within what is perversely known as the Transpacific Treaty.


The Company and the State blame the indigenous for the death.  El Heraldo writes:


Their story goes that "owing to the violent intervention of the demonstrators of COPINH Tomás García died, and Allan García Domínguez also was injured", leaving a bizarre impression that it was the protesters, not the military, who resorted to firing on the crowd.


How many times have we heard such nosnsense, whereby those killed by the Empire are at fault for being killed by the Empire.  The Empire, of course, is never responsible and the multitudes are just resisting whatever, I guess, becasue they have nothing better to do.

The following is from Intercontinental Cry.



Honduran Army Kills Indigenous Leader of COPINH Who Resisted Dam in Rio Blanco

BY  • JUL 16, 2013

Photo: Alan García, Tomas’s son, shows the injuries inflicted by the Army (COPINH)
On Monday July 15th, while the Lenca community of Rio Blanco, in Honduras, marked 106 days of resistance to the building of Agua Zarca hydroelectric dam, the Army indiscriminately shot at the demonstrators killing one of the leaders of the resistance, Tomas Garcia, and seriously injuring his son (photo).

Tomas was a Lenca indigenous leader who was part of his community’s Indigenous and Auxiliary Council and of the National Council of the Civic Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras (COPINH).

The Honduran activist was shot dead while he was walking with other community members to the project’s facilities owned by Desa and Sinohydro companies, while his son, who was seriously injured by a high-calibre bullet, is in hospital and his life is in danger, Berta Caceres, leader of COPINH, told Real World Radio.

Berta described the act as “a desperate and criminal reaction” by the companies that want to build a dam on River Gualcaeque, seriously affecting the communities living there. The Honduran army supports the companies, said Berta, and they even pay for the transportation and maintenance of troops deployed by the Honduran government in Tegucigalpa in Rio Blanco.

On Monday night, COPINH reported of more military troops being deployed in Zacapa, Santa Barbara, and there were fears of new shootings against civilians during the wake of the murdered indigenous leader.

“The community is outraged. We are in great sorrow, also because we believe we have to continue our struggle”, said Berta during a phone interview. “As the elections approach (in November) they want to teach COPINH a lesson”, she explained and said the community decided to continue occupying the access to the dam.

A few hours after the incidents, COPINH had reported that since Friday 12, top executives of the company Desarrollo Energético Sociedad Anónima (DESA)- which is in charge of the project together with the original group Sinohydro – travelled to meet with local hitmen, who are responsible for direct threats against several members of the indigenous council, including Tomas Garcia.

Before they started shooting at civilians, the military made no attempt to talk with the activists, said Berta.

The leader of COPINH was illegally arrested in May and submitted to a trial for purportedly having an illegal weapon, something that the court could not prove and the case was finally dismissed.

The leader highlighted that in the new cases of repression against residents of the community of Rio Blanco, we urgently need international solidarity to report the civic and military authorities and both companies for murder.

“We are aware that we are confronted with an impunity strategy in a context that seems to be worsening”, said Berta. She said the communities’ determination to defend their territory is strengthened in these situations of state and private violence.

In fact, river Gualcarque is considered an essential part of the Lenca spirituality and the communities are confronting the business projects as a tribute to their culture’s symbolic figure: Lempira.

“We continue fighting, we are not afraid, we will not be prey to fear and we will continue this peaceful but strong battle for life”, she concluded.







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