Posted on October 13th, 2011 in AK Authors!, Events, Happenings
A panel on trans/queer folks, mass incarceration and the politics of abolition.
Pathologized, terrorized, and confined, trans/gender non-conforming and queer folks have always struggled against the enormity of the prison industrial complex. The first collection of its kind, Eric A. Stanley and Nat Smith bring together current and former prisoners, activists, and academics to offer new ways for understanding how race, gender, ability, and sexuality are lived under the crushing weight of captivity. Through a politic of gender self-determination, this collection argues that trans/queer liberation and prison abolition must be grown together. From rioting against police violence and critiquing hate crimes legislation to prisoners demanding access to HIV medications, and far beyond, Captive Genders is a challenge for us all to join the struggle.
Sponsored by the Center for Social Justice and LGBT Communities
Posted on October 13th, 2011 in AK Authors!, Current Events
A new piece by journalist Ben Dangl (author of Dancing with Dynamite and Price of Fire), exploring the relationship between the #Occupy movement and the politically-charged social movements of Latin America. Originally published on Toward Freedom, and appearing today on Counterpunch. Below, an image of one of Ben’s books at the People’s Library at Occupied Zuccotti Park in New York.
Argentina to Wall Street: Latin American Social Movements and the Occupation of Everything
Ben Dangl
Massive buildings tower over Wall Street, making the sidewalks feel like valleys in an urban mountain range. The incense, drum beats and chants of Occupy Wall Street echo down New York City’s financial district from Liberty Plaza, where thousands of activists have converged to protest economic injustice and fight for a better world.
As unemployment and poverty in the US reaches record levels, the protest is catching on, with hundreds of parallel occupations sprouting up across the country. It was a similar disparity in economic and political power that led people to the streets in the Arab Spring, and in Wisconsin, Greece, Spain and London. Occupy Wall Street is part of this global revolt. This new movement in the US also shares much in common with uprisings in another part of the world: Latin America.
This report from Liberty Plaza connects tactics and philosophies surrounding the Occupy Wall Street movement with similar movements in Latin America, from the popular assemblies and occupation of factories during Argentina’s economic crisis in 2001-2002, to grassroots struggles for land in Brazil.
Latin America: Economic Crisis and Grassroots Response
Almost overnight in late 2001, Argentina went from having one of the strongest economies in South America to one of the weakest. During this economic crash, the financial system collapsed like a house of cards and banks shut their doors. Faced with such immediate economic strife and unemployment, many Argentines banded together to create a new society out of the wreckage of the old. Poverty, homelessness, and unemployment were countered with barter systems, factory occupations, communally-run kitchens, and alternative currency. Neighborhood assemblies provided solidarity, support and vital spaces for discussion in communities across the country. Ongoing protests kicked out five presidents in two weeks, and the movements that emerged from this period transformed the social and political fabric of Argentina.
These activities reflect those taking place at Occupy Wall Street and in other actions around the US right now. Such events in Argentina and the US are marked by dissatisfaction with the political and economic system in the face of crisis, and involve people working together for solutions on a grassroots level. For many people in Argentina and the US, desperation pushed them toward taking matters into their own hands.
“We didn’t have any choice,” Manuel Rojas explained to me about the occupation of the ceramics factory he worked at outside the city of Mendoza, Argentina during the country’s crash. “If we didn’t take over the factory we would all be in the streets. The need to work pushed us to action.” This was one of hundreds of businesses that were taken over by workers facing unemployment during the Argentine crisis. After occupying these factories and businesses, many workers then ran them as cooperatives. They did so under the slogan, “Occupy, Resist, Produce,” a phrase borrowed from Brazil’s Landless Workers Movement (MST), which has settled hundreds of thousands of families on millions of acres of land through direct action.
In 2008 in Chicago, when hundreds of workers were laid off from the Republic Windows and Doors factory, they embraced similar direct action tactics used by their Argentine counterparts; they occupied the factory to demand the severance and vacation pay owed to them – and it worked. Mark Meinster, the international representative for United Electrical Workers, the union of the Republic workers, told me that the strategies applied by the workers specifically drew from Argentina. In deciding on labor tactics, “We drew on the Argentine factory occupations to the extent that they show that during an economic crisis, workers’ movements are afforded a wider array of tactical options,” Meinster said.
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Posted on October 13th, 2011 in AK Authors!, Events, Happenings
Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex
A panel on trans/queer folks, mass incarceration and the politics of abolition.
Pathologized, terrorized, and confined, trans/gender non-conforming and queer folks have always struggled against the enormity of the prison industrial complex. The first collection of its kind, Eric A. Stanley and Nat Smith bring together current and former prisoners, activists, and academics to offer new ways for understanding how race, gender, ability, and sexuality are lived under the crushing weight of captivity. Through a politic of gender self-determination, this collection argues that trans/queer liberation and prison abolition must be grown together. From rioting against police violence and critiquing hate crimes legislation to prisoners demanding access to HIV medications, and far beyond, Captive Genders is a challenge for us all to join the struggle.
with:
Eric A. Stanley works at the intersections of radical trans/queer politics, theories of state violence, and visual culture. Eric co-edited Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex (AK Press, 2011) and along with Chris Vargas, directed the films Homotopia (2006) and Criminal Queers (2011).
Ralowe T. Ampu is the seductive fragrance wafting through milieus of unbridled danger and intrigue. Yes, whether it be outing gay Castro realtors as AIDS profiteers with ACT UP and GAY SHAME or trying to free the New Jersey 4, or prevent the non-profit management company in her SRO from killing her neighbors, Ralowe is there.
Reina Gossett lives in Brooklyn & works at the Sylvia Rivera Law Project supporting SRLP’s membership and community organizing work. She believes creativity & imagination are crucial for growing strong communities and practicing self-determination.
Nadia Guidotto is a Contract Faculty at York University in Department of Political Science. Her current research analyzes intersex and how authoritative discourses like medicine and law support each another in maintaining a hierarchy of bodies.
Toshio Meronek is on the editorial collective for The Abolitionist, Critical Resistance’s newspaper and runs whereslulu.com, a website on disability and popular culture.
Michelle Potts is a PhD student in the department of Rhetoric at UC Berkeley. Her work looks at the intersections of labour, race and health. She lives in Oakland, CA.
Kimma Walker lives in East Orange, NJ and is the PROUD MOTHER of Terrain Dandridge who is one of the New Jersey 4. http://freenj4.wordpress.com/
Event cosponsored by Counterpublic NYC.
Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex, Eric A. Stanley, Nat Smith (eds.) Available now from AK Press and your local bookstore.
http://captivegenders.net/
This event is wheelchair accessible.
This event is FREE and open to the public!
Posted on October 13th, 2011 in AK Authors!, Events, Happenings
Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment & the Prison Industrial Complex Lecture
About the book:
Pathologized, terrorized, and confined, trans/gender non-conforming and queer folks have always struggled against the enormity of the prison industrial complex. The first collection of its kind, Eric A. Stanley and Nat Smith bring together current and former prisoners, activists, and academics to offer new ways for understanding how race, …gender, ability, and sexuality are lived under the crushing weight of captivity. Through a politic of gender self-determination, this collection argues that trans/queer liberation and prison abolition must be grown together. From rioting against police violence and critiquing hate crimes legislation to prisoners demanding access to HIV medications, and far beyond, Captive Genders is a challenge for us all to join the struggle.
SASD is please to present Captive Gender’s editor, Eric Stanley, for a lecture and book talk.
More Info soon! Mark out your calendars for the evening of Oct 19.
Posted on October 12th, 2011 in AK Authors!, Current Events, Recommended Reading, Uncategorized
A new piece by Franco “Bifo” Berardi (author of After the Future) and net critic Geert Lovink on the worldwide occupations and the fight against financial dictatorship.
A call to the Army of Love and to the Army of Software
Franco “Bifo” Berardi and Geert Lovink
October 2011. The fight opposing financial dictatorship is erupting.
The so-called ‘financial markets’ and their cynical services are destroying the very foundations of social civilization. The legacy of the postwar compromise between the working class and progressive bourgeoisie has all but disappeared. Neoliberal policies are cutting back education and the public health system and is cancelling the right to a salary and a pension. The outcome will be impoverishment of large parts the population, a growing precarity of labor conditions (freelance, short-term contracts, periods of unemployment) and daily humiliation of workers. The yet to be seen effect of the financial crisis will be violence, as people conjure up scapegoats in order to vent their rage. Ethnic cleansing, civil war, obliteration of democracy. This is a system we call financial Nazism: FINAZISM.
Right now people are fighting back in many places, and in many ways. Occupy Wall Street inspired a mass mobilization in New York that is extending across the USA every day. In Greece workers and students are squatting Syntagma square and protesting against the blackmail by the European Central Bank, which is devastating the country. Cairo, Madrid, Tel Aviv, the list of the ‘movements of the squares’ is proliferating. On October 15 cities across the globe will amass with people protesting against the systemic robbery.
Will our demonstrations and occupations stop the Finazist machine? They will not. Resistance will not resist, and our fight will not stop the legal crimes. Let’s be frank, we will not persuade our enemies to end their predatory attacks (‘let’s make even more profit from the next downfall’) for the simple reason that our enemies are not human beings. They are machines. Yes, human beings – corporate managers, stock owners, traders – are cashing the money that we are losing, and prey upon resources that workers produce. Politicians sign laws that deliver the lives of millions of people to the Almighty God of the Market.
Bankers and investors are not the real decision makers, they are participants in an economy of gestural confusion. The real process of predatory power has become automated. The transfer of resources and wealth from those who produce to those who do nothing except oversee the abstract patterns of financial transactions is embedded in the machine, in the software that governs the machine. Forget about governments and party politics. Those puppets who pretend to be leaders are talking nonsense. The paternalistic options they offer around ‘austerity measures’ underscore a rampant cynicism internal to party politics: they all know they lost the power to model finance capitalism years ago. Needless to say, the political class are anxious to perform the act of control and sacrifice social resources of the future in the form of budget cuts in order to ‘satisfy the markets’. Stop listening to them, stop voting for them, stop hoping and cursing them. They are just pimps, and politics is dead.
(more…)
Posted on October 12th, 2011 in AK Authors!, Events, Happenings
Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex
Book reading and panel discussion
Wed October 26th 7-9pm
Bluestockings bookstore 172 Allen St.New York, NY 10002
Pathologized, terrorized, and confined, trans/gender non-conforming and queer folks have always struggled against the enormity of the prison industrial complex. The first collection of its kind, Eric A. Stanley and Nat Smith bring together current and former prisoners, activists, and academics to offer new ways for understanding how race, gender, ability, and sexuality are lived under the crushing weight of captivity. Through a politic of gender self-determination, this collection argues that trans/queer liberation and prison abolition must be grown together. From rioting against police violence and critiquing hate crimes legislation to prisoners demanding access to HIV medications, and far beyond, Captive Genders is a challenge for us all to join the struggle.
with:
Eric A. Stanley works at the intersections of radical trans/queer politics, theories of state violence, and visual culture. Eric edited Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex (AK Press, 2011) and along with Chris Vargas, directed the films Homotopia (2006) and Criminal Queers (2011).
Ralowe T. Ampu is the seductive fragrance wafting through milieus of unbridled danger and intrigue. Yes, whether it be outing gay Castro realtors as AIDS profiteers with ACT UP and GAY SHAME or trying to free the New Jersey 4, or prevent the non-profit management company in her SRO from killing her neighbors, Ralowe is there.
Reina Gossett lives in Brooklyn & works at the Sylvia Rivera Law Project supporting SRLP’s membership and community organizing work. She believes creativity & imagination are crucial for growing strong communities and practicing self-determination.
Toshio Meronek is on the editorial collective for The Abolitionist, Critical Resistance’s newspaper and runs whereslulu.com, a website on disability and popular culture.
Kimma Walker lives in East Orange, NJ and is the PROUD MOTHER of Terrain Dandridge who is one of the New Jersey 4. http://freenj4.wordpress.com/
Event cosponsored by Counterpublic NYC and the Sylvia Rivera Law Project
captivegenders.net
Posted on October 11th, 2011 in AK Authors!, Events
David Price presents Weaponizing Anthropology: Social Science in Service of the Militarized State
David Price, Professor of Anthropology at St. Martin’s University, will discuss his new book, which shows how anthropological knowledge is being harnessed by military and intelligence agencies to placate hostile foreign populations, particularly in the military operations of Iraq and Afghanistan. Price’s inquiry into past relationships between anthropologists and the CIA and Pentagon provides the historical base for this exposé of the current abuses of anthropology by these agencies.
Posted on October 5th, 2011 in AK Allies, Happenings, Spanish
The 3rd annual conference of the North American Anarchist Studies Association is happening in Puerto Rico this year. Here’s the call for papers:
LLAMADO PARA PONENCIAS
Conferencia de la Red de Estudios Anarquistas de América del Norte
San Juan, Puerto Rico
7 y 8 de enero de 2012
Fecha límite para las propuestas: 15 de noviembre de 2011
La Red de Estudios Anarquistas de América del Norte (North American Anarchist Studies Network) está actualmente buscando participantes para nuestra tercera conferencia anual la cual tendrá lugar en el Ateneo Puertorriqueño en San Juan, Puerto Rico. Invitamos a todas las personas envueltas en trabajo intelectual dentro de las instituciones existentes, como el caso de las universidades, pero también a los que están comprometidos con la producción de conocimiento fuera de las aulas académicas para que compartan su trabajo. Fomentamos la participación de todos los interesados en el estudio del anarquismo a someter una propuesta. Más allá de una conferencia académica pretendemos crear un dialogo amistoso en donde se puedan discutir temas que nos ayuden a expandir el conocimiento del anarquismo y cómo crear una sociedad más equitativa.
Para mantener la fluidez y la libertad que promueve el espíritu del anarquismo, no estamos llamando a tópicos específicos de discusión sino que estamos fomentando a los participantes a presentar una gama muy diversa de temas que vayan desde lo histórico hasta lo contemporáneo hasta lo utópico.
Es nuestra esperanza más sincera que esta conferencia pueda, hasta la medida que sea posible, representar la diversidad del pensamiento y la política anarquista dentro de América del Norte y el ámbito internacional; es por esto que fomentamos la sumisiones en español, inglés, francés, portugués y cualquier otro idioma o tema relevante a ésta experiencia y comunidad.
Envía un abstracto corto junto a tu propuesta incluyendo un título en proceso y tres palabras claves que describan tu proyecto al comité del NAASN en Puerto Rico: naasnpuertorico@gmail.com
– Por favor distribuir ampliamente –
www.naasnpr.org
Posted on October 3rd, 2011 in AK Allies, Happenings
Last night, October 2nd, 2011, Baltimore joined a slew of other US cities in gathering together to begin organization for a local Occupy Baltimore action. Somewhere between 150-200 familiar faces and new allies packed the 2640 space in Charles Village for the first discussions on what a Baltimore-specific solidarity occupation would look like. I could say more, but Umar Farooq of the Baltimore Indypendent Reader says it all so much better in this fantastic piece.
Check out Indyreader.org for the original posting, and to keep up with all of their amazing coverage of local and national issues that the big media miss because they’re too busy being shmucks.
Activists gather to plan Occupy Baltimore movement
Monday October 3rd, 2011
“Banks Got Bailed Out, We Got Sold Out!” chanted the crowd.
The growing nationwide “Occupy” movement may be coming to Baltimore. More than two hundred activists gathered at St. Johns Church in Charles Village Sunday night for more than three hours, planning a response to calls for public action by their counterparts in New York.
The Occupy Wall Street actions have attracted international attention, drawing an array of mostly young participants, and sparking hundreds of arrests. Dozens of other cities have taken the same approach in the last few weeks, with hundreds of activists taking to public spaces to express their outrage at the disenfranchisement of “99%” of Americans in favor of the wealthy.
The Occupy Baltimore movement began as a Facebook page and Google group, both with hundreds of members. Sunday’s meeting was meant to decide on a number of issues, including what the movement’s goals should be, and how it should go about achieving them. But one of the distinguishing themes of the Occupy movement has been the intentional lack of specific demands, as participants have opted instead to use the opportunity for shared education and discussion. The Occupy Baltimore movement chose the same route Sunday, with a number of participants expressing dismay not only at the system of government they deal with, but also with the lack of mechanisms available for changing it. One participant said they would like to educate themselves and “offer something instead of demand something.” There were however, a minority that felt the goals of the movement should have been discussed in more detail, and that Baltimore’s largest demographic, poor African Americans, were not adequately represented at the meeting.
The Occupy Baltimore movement is aiming to follow consensus-based decision making, and for the most part seemed to adhere to the system. On occasion, a few participants “blocked” decisions, signalling that they felt if the group disregarded their position, they would leave it, but it did not appear anyone felt sidelined enough to actually bring their participation to an end. A mainstream reporter who asked for permission from the group to report on the decision making process was asked to leave, due to the strong objections of a small minority, highlighting the degree of adherence to the consensus process.
Baltimore activists are particularly weary of law enforcement, having been the target of extensive illegal surveillance by undercover state and local agents, leading to a congressional investigation and a number of lawsuits.
The discussion on where any action or occupation would occur touched on the kind of message the movement hopes to send to the public. A number of locations were discussed, but in the end a presence around the financial district and the Inner Harbor was settled upon, as a number of participants pointed out the nature of the area: a publicly funded development that provides little benefit for working class locals. The Inner Harbor has been in the spotlight recently, drawing criticism for the lack of public space there, and the labor practices of some of the businesses there, many of them national franchises.
The list of grievances included the epidemic of foreclosures in Baltimore, the incentives given to developers, the lack of jobs paying a living wage, the lack of funding for schools, the lack of health care, and the continuing wars overseas.
The group plans on meeting again Monday, and will begin public actions Tuesday at noon at the McKeldin Fountains at Pratt and Light streets, a public park. Almost all of the participants also pledged to march in support of a previously planned action being organized Tuesday evening by more than 30 community groups to denounce a planned $100 million juvenile detention facility downtown.
Posted on October 3rd, 2011 in Uncategorized
Close friends of ours have been working hard the last couple years to push back on the City of Oakland’s proposed gang injunctions. They have been working with Stop the Injunctions in Oakland and have dealt some serious blows to the city’s intentions, but things have heated back up.
Stop the Injunctions is having a showdown at the October 4th City Council Meeting at 5:30 at City Hall in Frank Ogawa Plaza to once again show that these measures have not worked in the past and will not address the violence that exists in East Bay communities. The Oakland City Council, disregarding decisions they made on May 17th to conduct an independent review of the North and Fruitvale gang injunctions prior to moving on any additional injunctions, has decided to try to implement a package deal. They are proposing in addition to injunctions in both the west and deep east, a loitering ordinance and a youth curfew (possibly also a daytime curfew ostensibly to deal with truancy). The City Council continues to try to implement costly and ineffective policies that target poor and working class communities of color.
For more info on the background of the injunctions or to get involved, check out:
Stop the Injunctions
Critical Resistance’s Gang Injunction Report
And for more on anarchism and the abolition of the prison industrial complex, click here and here.
