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Beetham Gardens by Miquel Galofré
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“Institutionalised homophobia exposes the hollowness of our aspirations to “first world” status. It punctures the Trini delusion of cosmopolitan...”
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“There are various ways of dealing with the fact that all lives, including those of the people we love, have an end. The end of human life, which we...”
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Treated myself to a banana split for breakfast before my last day of school and oh my god it was too good - banana filled with...
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The question is how we react to this great prejudice against women. The rule of law and social activism certainly are crucial. But no matter how...
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“Be of service. You are taking your degree into a society dominated by concentrated poverty and a vulnerable middle class, a society where it is...”
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Word x 100 !!! Via @imanisublime #PR #cancer #truth #woc
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Homosexuality has a long history in Africa, says anthropologist Patrick Awondo, contrary...
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“I think marriage in general is not a healthy institution in our society. If people want civil rights, then that’s what I feel we should be fighting...”
“Universities and institutions of higher education across the globe are being impacted by structural change, guided by principles of the entrepreneurial university. The imposition of New Public Management principles means that universities are increasingly being managed like private enterprises. Resources are being allocated according to performance records and target agreements. Academic capitalism has entered Germany, and its main instruments are university department rankings and league tables. The downside is an academic routine biased towards quantitative performance indicators (research funding, number of doctorates and graduates) and a neglect of qualitative criteria. Work in academia has changed fundamentally in both design and content. Teaching and research are increasingly being obstructed by the growth of administrative responsibilities. There is a logic of escalation inherent in performance measurement exercises (“more and more and never enough”), resulting in work intensification, stress, and overload amongst all groups of the academic workforce. Negative effects on the quality of research and teaching are increasingly being felt.”
“Positioned by her race, Anita Hill had to deal with her harassment under constraints that white professional women do not face. She had to be a credit to her race. If her success came at a personal cost of enduring harassment, she had to weigh that cost against a more collective one: disappointing all those who counted on her success and who had supported her along the way. White feminists interpreted her long silence about the harassment as the consequence of the isolation and self-blame that many middle-class white women experience in similar situations. In so doing, they not only ignored the history of Black women’s understanding and awareness of their sexual vulnerability in the public world; they also minimized the particular dangers confronting Black women who publicly resist sexual exploitation. Black women’s representations in the dominant culture as sexually voracious and promiscuous threatened not only to discredit Anita Hill individually but to vitiate one very crucial purpose of her professional striving—to recuperate Black women’s image by refuting what everyone believes about the Black woman. Finally, her silence came out of a long history of racial solidarity. Thus, Anita Hill’s silence as well as her speaking out, the uses to which her speech was put by white feminists and the ways in which her speech was discounted by (mostly but not entirely) male spokespeople for the Black community, were emblematic of the difficulties as well as potentials of Black women’s location at the intersection of race and gender.”
Some revolutionary words
- revolution = revolución
- liberty = libertad
- change = cambio
- nation = nación
- action = acción
- resistance = resistencia
- solidarity = solidaridad
- hope = esperanza
- education = educación
- health = salud
- love = amor
- brotherhood/sisterhood = hermandad
- humanity = humanidad
(via awesomespanish)
“The key classes providing support for the revolution, for Fanon, are (1) the peasantry and (2) the lumpenproletariat, though for either class to struggle with success they must unite with “urban intellectuals”, a small number of whom “go to the people” in the countryside and begin to live and work among them. The revolution- ary struggle itself creates the political party. (Here the resemblance to Debray is close.) By contrast, bourgeois politics (before and after Independence) is something that takes place in the capital; the peasantry are treated as “incapable of governing themselves”; the bourgeoisie shun the country districts as if they were plague-zones; and the rural poor themselves also flock to the towns. Bourgeois parties, then, are imitations of urban European politics, and have no organic relationship to the culture of the society.
The strategy for the revolutionaries is the antithesis of this: to root themselves in the rural areas as equals, not superiors; to engage in armed struggle; and to establish a second social base among the lumpenproletariat. (This central requirement, if neglected, is paid for dearly, for the guerrillas cannot even find their way about a countryside with which they are unfamiliar unless the local peasants guide them. The blind wanderings of Guevara’s men in Bolivia are eloquent testimony.)
Fanon’s belief in the revolutionary potential of the peasantry today seems quite uncontroversial. But only twenty-five years ago it was rank heresy to orthodox Marxists, for example. Only the success of the Chinese Revolution made it acceptable. His notion of the revolutionary potential of the lumpenproletariat, however, is still largely ignored, partly because the idea is too novel for people with fixed ideas to absorb easily, and in part because it had long been declared wrong in the sacred texts they adhere to.
For the notion is not new. It was part of the stock-in-trade of nineteenth-century anarchists, nihilists and terrorists, who believed in the “cleansing” power of the lumpenproletarians, including the criminal elements among them, as a force which would destroy the social order. This was a major issue of contention between Marx and Bakunin, as was Bakunin’s converse belief that the proletariat were inherently a bureaucratized, non-revolutionary force. Because Marx excoriated the lumpenproletariat of his day, contemporary Marxists have usually been content to parrot his views as definitive.”
BOOM!!!
Friday, AntiSec continued their private war with law enforcement by releasing a staggering amount of information on law enforcement agencies across the country. AntiSec claims the recent leaks and dumps are made in solidarity with the Occupy Wall Street movement and motivated by a desire to retaliate against police for perceived acts of police brutality.
Based on analysis of social networks, specifically Facebook and MeetUp, the map reveals the distribution of Occupy groups across the globe. Presently there are 826 Occupy groups organized in the United States and 352 organized in other parts of the world. Canada (50), Germany (48) and the United Kingdom (38) have the highest number of Occupy groups outside the United States; however, other countries, such as Albania, Bangladesh, Chile, Dominican Republic, Israel, Jordan, Malaysia, Namibia, Sri Lanka, Turkey and Taiwan, have also seen the rise of local OWS groups. The spread of OWS is continuing as activists make common cause and form bonds of solidarity with social protest movements at work in other parts of the world (e.g. anti-austerity movements in Greece, ‘Arab Spring’ movements in Tunisia, Libya and Egypt, social justice protests in Israel). While the final form, extent and impact of the OWS movement remains to be seen it is clear that OWS and similar social movements are redefining how we perceive, engage and understand activism in a contemporary context.
In response to Denver Mayor Michael Hancock’s insistence that Occupy Denver choose leadership to deal with City and State officials, and drawing inspiration from the notion that corporations are people, Occupy Denver’s General Assembly has elected a leader: Shelby, a three year old Border Collie. “Shelby is closer to a person than any corporation: She can bleed, she can breed, and she can show emotion. Either Shelby is a person, or corporations aren’t people,” said a Shelby supporter at the time of her election.
Occupy Denver reserves the right to alter leadership status, but for now, Shelby exhibits heart, warmth, and an appreciation for the group over personal ambition that Occupy Denver members feel are sorely lacking in the leaders some of them have voted for on national, state, and local levels. Accordingly, Occupy Denver looks forward to communication with Mayor Hancock and Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper sometime this week to introduce their leadership.
Newly-elected leader Shelby will be leading this Saturday’s Occupy Denver march against Corporate Personhood, and invites all other civic minded dogs (and their leash-holders) to join.
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(via socialuprooting)
According to Walter Benjamin (who himself is drawing from Georges Sorel), there are two essentially different kinds of strikes. In the political strike, partisans withhold labor, with the hope that their action—which interestingly is an omission of action—will cause an employer to make certain concessions that the strikers have specified beforehand. Because it is assumed that participants are ready to resume work once certain demands have been met, the strike can be thought of as the means to a determinate end (usually some form of material gain).
By contrast, the general strike is what Benjamin describes as “pure means.” Such an action differs from the paradigm of political activity that seeks only immediately practicable goals—like wage increases, health benefits, and certain modifications to the workplace. The premise of the general strike is this: work will not resume once this or that concession is made; instead, people will show their “determination to resume only awholly transformed work” [my italics]. In a characteristically wonderful phrase, Benjamin writes that the general strike “not so much causes as consummates.”….
The canon chancellor of St Paul’s Cathedral, the Reverend Giles Fraser, spoke on Thursday about his reasons for resigning over the cathedral’s stance towards the protest camp which has been established over the past two weeks.
“I cannot support using violence to ask people to clear off the land,” Fraser told the Guardian. “It is not about my sympathies or what I believe about the camp. I support the right to protest and in a perfect world we could have negotiated. But our legal advice was that this would have implied consent.”
Fraser said he decided to resign on Wednesday when he realised he could not reconcile his conscience with the possibility of the church and the Corporation of London combining to evict the protesters from the land outside the cathedral, some of which is jointly owned with the City.
“The church cannot answer peaceful protest with violence,” said Fraser, adding that it was apparent that the Corporation of London was clearer than the cathedral authorities about its desire to see the protesters moved on.
“I cannot countenance the idea that this would be about [the eviction of] Dale Farm on the steps of St Paul’s.
Direct action and more specifically nonviolent direct action coupled with a decentralized democratic, , “affinity group” model, is the antithesis of traditional Marxist-Leninist theory and practice.
Traditional socialist and Marxist-Leninst ideology believed that your needed a “vanguard party” to lead the revolution, enforce discipline and to engage in violent revolution. Any deviation from party doctrine, or questioning, strategy or tactics was forbidden, since the central committee had all the answers and the correct analysis. Democracy and nonviolence, are seen as “peti-bourgeoise deviations”. The capitalist class is violent so we must be violent.
The strength of the Occupy Wall Street and 99% movement is it’s committment to nonviolence and horizonal leadership and organizational structure. The establishment can’t deal with that. It is also disseminating it’s methods through manuals which you can download and then train and organize your own local support or local occupation. Streaming video, blogs and Tweating also spread “propaganda of the deed” of how it is done.
It is not a bunch of male dominated, ego tripping radicals, this is a diverse group of people building a democratic nonviolent movement for fundemental change. The MSM, (mainstream media) can no longer ignore it. This is not like it was in the 60’s and 70’s where we “acted our way into thinking”. It is more inclusive, creative, imaginative, flexible and adaptable. It is truely an evolutionary as it is revolutionary event unseen in human history. This is not “Hooverville”, “Woodstock”, LiveAid” or the occupation of the National Guard Armories after the mass arrest of occupiers of the Seabrook Nuclear Power Plant site in the 70’s. This is the start I hope of a nonviolent revolution to throw the “money changers” out of the government and putting “we, the people” and Main Street back in power.
“What do we perceive today as possible? Just follow the media. On the one hand, in technology and sexuality, everything seems to be possible. You can travel to the moon, you can become immortal by biogenetics, you can have sex with animals or whatever, but look at the field of society and economy. There, almost everything is considered impossible. You want to raise taxes by little bit for the rich. They tell you it’s impossible. We lose competitivity. You want more money for health care, they tell you, “Impossible, this means totalitarian state.” There’s something wrong in the world, where you are promised to be immortal but cannot spend a little bit more for healthcare. Maybe we need to set our priorities straight here. We don’t want higher standard of living. We want a better standard of living. The only sense in which we are Communists is that we care for the commons. The commons of nature. The commons of privatized by intellectual property. The commons of biogenetics. For this, and only for this, we should fight.”
