My extended response to the developments in Greece over the past weeks, at least as they stand today.
"We develop new principles for the world out of the world’s own principles. We do not say to the world: Cease your struggles, they are foolish; we will give you the true slogan of struggle. We merely show the world what it is really fighting for, and consciousness is something that it has to acquire, even if it does not want to."
Karl Marx
Karl Marx
July 13, 2015
Needed in Greece: Social Transformation, Not Surrender
June 21, 2015
Lady Andrade socks Abby Wambach, 2012
April 29, 2015
Bibliography of Police Abolition Writings
[Note: to be updated as more come along.]
In 2014, I started to articulate more my longheld views that we do not need police and have alternatives. First, I presented a workshop at the Free University. Next, I ran through the topic with Molly and John Knefel on their Radio Dispatch podcast. By the end of the year, I had published my second piece in Rolling Stone online. In that widely shared piece (sin of vanity), I tried to link to some of the work that had been done on the topic by others. I forgot a bunch, and several people let me know about other great writings with the same or similar model. Since, there have been even more police abolitionist writings. So, I present a little bibliography below on some of what I’ve found. Please feel free to comment with anything I’ve forgotten.
Before Ferguson
Alternatives to Police - Rose City Copwatch - 2010 (PDF)
Alternatives to Policing - Chain Reaction - 2011
Not Calling Police - Prison Culture - 2012
3 Things About the Struggle for a Police-Free New York - Novara - April 2014
Police Should React Like Firemen - The Free Thought Project - June 2014
After the Eric Garner/Mike Brown killer cops were not indicted
We Don’t Just Need Nicer Cops. We Need Fewer Cops. - The Nation - December 4, 2014
6 Ideas for a Cop-Free World - Rolling Stone - December 16, 2014
What does it mean to be Anti-Police - The Nation - December 23, 2014
Passing through worlds beside worlds - Mask Magazine - December 2014
Leaving Cops Behind in 2015 - The Youngist - January 2015
In Order to End Police Brutality. We Need to End the Police - The Nation - February 2015
Racism in Ferguson PD is Policing Done Right, and that’s why it is so wrong - Fusion - March 2015
December 23, 2014
We Need Solidarity When We Are On The Offensive
I am typically one who calls for unity. I preach a gospel that seeks to remind y'all that solidarity is internal- it is something within movements or struggles, not between people. That is what solidarity forever means. It means we are in the same fight, and we will have each others’ back, come what may.
In the coming weeks, we need to prepare to stand together and have each other’s backs. Moves are being made once again for division, and they should be called out and told to step aside so we can march on. The people have been on the offensive, and now we have quite skillfully been placed on the defensive.
In recent days, we have seen attempts by progressive politicians to drive wedges in popular movements, condemnations and possible collaboration by celebrity-led non-profit organizations, the unpaid suspension of 32BJ unionist Rob Murray without due process for allegations made by cops and press in an incident wholly unrelated to his job (murderer-police at least get PAID leave before a Grand Jury treats them with impunity), public statements in support of cops, public statements against protestors.
How did this look in the past, when we were all far left, and not wishy-washy progressives? Did celebrities like Paul Robeson, painted in the halls of our unions, condemn violence and collude with the very police that tried to run him out of Peekskill? Did Marlon Brando call the Black Panthers too violent? Did the ILWU put its members on unpaid leave? Does the National Lawyers Guild cherry-pick who to support? Were anarchist immigrants fingered by police by the IWW for pushing more radical demands?
In most cases, no. In some cases, yes, and as those moments happen, we see how much we can trust some of today’s celebrity organizations, today’s Alinskyite non-profits, and unions. I want to be able to trust them at times. On principle, they are still not the enemies. But it will be a lot harder for me to want to show my face at their rallies or defend them as they once again act out traitorous behavior. We are watching the progressive left’s institutional failures before our eyes, and it has real costs for both militants in particular and the wider uprising in general. The progressive/social justice left has its place in the struggle, but it also has moments where it needs to shut the fuck up or reveal that we in the anti-capitalist left should have only trusted it so far. There is often place for all of us in the streets, but there is never place for even just one of us in a jail cell.
Call PBA President Pat Lynch what we will, but that motherfucker knows solidarity. He knows how to back his soldiers, and fight for their interests against ours. Giuliani did too. Obama won’t prosecute Cheney because what? A little thing called solidarity.
If we are still on the march (e.g. 5th Ave and 59th St at 5pm today), let’s take a note from our enemies and from our ancestors-in-the-struggle. Let’s show true solidarity, and call out our alleged friends and ‘social justice’ leaders when they put people in danger. But most of all, let’s not let us divide us on the grander scale, because if we’re careful with each other, we can be dangerous together.
Addenda:
Another good statement
On a practical basis:
Do not tell law enforcement whether or not you were on a bridge or who might have been. Do not talk to police.
Do not believe a District Attorney or a cop when they say someone said something. They have been pulling that snitch-jacketing tactic since their jobs were created, and long before.
September 12, 2014
Kajieme Powell and why police are the wrong people to deal with the man with a knife
[Note: a piece I wrote the week Kajieme Powell was killed by St. Louis police. Nearly but didn’t get picked up by a few publications, so here it is.]
A man stands glaring at you with a knife in his hand. What do you do?
It sounds like a children’s choose-your-own-adventure book, but unfortunately, it is an all too real experience that many people are faced with. It’s hard to know what to do, and the survival instinct is supposed to be first and foremost in our minds. However, we have people in our society who volunteer and are trained to protect us from men with knives and to reduce their harm to others. We’re told that we can go to those people for protection.
When the police left their patrol car in north St. Louis to engage Kajieme Powell, a man people are saying was acting erratically, they made a choice to put themselves in harm’s way, the same as every police officer does when they go to the academy or put on their badge at the top of the shift. When they left their car with guns out, they made a choice, and they had fourteen seconds to decide on a course of action that might not have killed another young Black man, so soon after the death of Michael Brown just ten miles away in Ferguson.
Police are equipped with a series of incapacitating and “Less Lethal” weaponry, and especially in a Duty-to-Retreat state like Missouri (as opposed to Stand-Your-Ground states like Ohio), the law suggests they retreat if they if they could safely avoid risks that way. The police claim “he had a knife” is a typical attempt to dehumanize the victim of police violence, which avoids the officers’ responsibility to explain why pepperspray, tasers, batons, targeting legs, or dialogue was not an option. Typical police cowardice.
Police cowardice revealed itself again when dozens of police advanced for blocks on Darrius Kennedy, who was armed with a large knife, in midtown Manhattan in 2012, and finally gunned him down rather than using any of the array of “Less Lethal” weapons they have been equipped with. And again, they revealed it when officers stood back on a subway car as a man with a knife attacked Joe Lozito who suffered a series of injuries before fighting the man off and ending his stabbing spree. Police were able to hide behind the Supreme Court’s Castle Rock v. Gonzales decision, where the public again learned police do not have a duty to protect people.
This is not to say that no officer has done something reasonable when they saw someone with a knife threatening someone else. But the hundreds of killings by police every year that have been counted by watchdog groups, since no federal government agency files comprehensive numbers on killings or use of force by municipal and state police, prove to the public time and again that we cannot trust the official story in a system swollen with impunity. When we know the stories of John Crawford, Aaron Harrison, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Oscar Grant, and hundreds of others, and then listen to an official story that lays the groundwork for impunity, our skepticism becomes a reasonable first impulse.
I posited this opinion, that along with the unarmed casualties of countless police attacks, these wild gunmen shouldn’t be shooting down people who wield knives, and the immediate response by a typical police apologist was- who the hell am I to talk about what’s it like to face a man with a knife since I’ve never done it.
The thing is, I have. In my capacity as a Copwatch organizer who has been trying to empower communities to collectively resist police racism and violence, I have learned a hard lesson that was carried with me from the neighborhoods I grew up in. Along with police violence, our communities are plagued by anti-social violence from within. And just as I have learned to work up the courage to confront violent police, I have also stood in front of men and women wielding knives at least a dozen times. And in not a single one of those instances, I am proud to say, was anyone ever cut, stabbed, shot, or killed.
Sometimes partnering with groups doing street intervention and mediation work like Cure Violence (formerly CeaseFire), our work in Copwatch and simply as community members has placed us directly in front of people with knives, sometimes between them and the people they wanted to harm. Not all my methods were nonviolent- while I once struggled with a knife-wielding neo-nazi, my friend punched him in the head, where he dropped the knife. In another instance, I was able to get a drunk couple to walk down a few blocks from the people they wanted to stab, watch a Queen Latifah movie, and reflect on better ways to resolve the issue. It usually took simple dialogue, a little craziness on my part, and a bit of luck, to calm people down and pull them out of the conflict.
Groups like the Peace Institute, Anti-Violence Project, Sista II Sista, and others give trainings in deescalation and mediation work. People who do it, most of us on an unpaid basis, know that we’re entering into violent scenarios that often pose severe risks. But these types of interveners are not upheld as the heroes of society that primetime TV, parades, and disproportionate sentencing for assault on officers insist we believe police are. In fact, these programs get marginalized and defunded. Chicago’s level of street violence did not deter former Governor Rod Blagojevich from cutting Cure Violence’s state funding in 2007, or Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel from closing the last of the trauma centers on the city’s South Side, which sees much of the worst violence. They played directly into a neoliberal agenda that said that government should cut social services while militarizing police forces- and indeed State Troopers have been sent to Chicago to augment the police force. And they played into a racial agenda that says that brown lives don’t matter, brown trauma isn’t real, brown pain isn’t felt.
For those of us who have felt the pain of our communities for too long, we know that the police are not a solution to our societally-created problems. We know that self-determination in our neighborhoods can spring forth popular creativity, so that we can protect our communities from the man with the knife. And maybe, just maybe, recognize his humanity as well.
August 28, 2014
"
“In 1939, General Marshall and the US military authorities, aided by the government, organized fourteen million men and women. They washed them and dressed them and cleaned up their teeth and taught them to read, those who could not read. And then in two or three years they had them ready- for what? To go abroad, all over the world, fighting against people who had done the same thing on the opposite side. What is the purpose of these suicidal, these tremendous efforts on the part of human beings only to destroy one another?
"I believe it is possible to mobilize even more tens of millions of people for the work and the arts of peace. Properly encouraged and given a sense of history and a sense of destiny, they will do all they now do for war, for the sake of improving the normal life and relations of human beings. (applause) But this will come only when people are their own masters.
"That for me is what Marxism is, and we must not be afraid, we must not think because we are small and insignificant that we are not able to take part in all that is taking place. The first thing is to know. Anyone who tries to prevent you from knowing, from learning anything, is an enemy, an enemy of freedom, of equality, of democracy. Those ideas, and the desire to make them real, have inspired people for countless centuries. Marxism is the doctrine which believes that freedom, equality, democracy are today possible for all humankind.”
"— C.L.R. James, 1960 lectures in Trinidad.
April 18, 2014
A short goodbye I wrote yesterday to Gabriel García Márquez
If Gabriel García Márquez is not to blame for an important part of the wonder with which I look at the world, he at the least shares in the guilt of enabling that part of my relationship to the world to maintain for so long. He is an accessory in the murder of the cynicisms at their every approach to claim the property and the deed of my heart. He aids and abets my little whimsy, who authorities denounce a feisty little thug they simply cannot detain. Thank you, Gabriel García Márquez, for your crimes of heart and of hope.
Si Gabriel García Márquez no tiene la culpa de una parte importante de la maravilla con la que miro el mundo, por lo menos los acciones de la culpa de permitir que esa parte de mi relación con el mundo de mantener durante tanto tiempo. Él es un accesorio en el asesinato de los cinismos al acercarse cada reclamar la propiedad y la escritura de mi corazón. Él sea cómplice de mi poco banal, a quien las autoridades denuncian malhechor luchadora que simplemente no pueden detener. Gracias, Gabriel García Márquez, por sus crímenes del corazón y de la esperanza.
March 18, 2014
Reminder that Real Slavery is the only New Slavery
[This is an as yet unfinished little essay that I am writing for you to forward to people who want to claim this or that thing which is definitely not slavery is slavery.]
In a world burdened by a total lack of analysis and a total glut of messaging, people are drawn to engage in the the sensationalism of claiming humankind’s worst forms are now manifested in the injustices that have given us cause. We do not benefit from this. Let us talk about slavery.
Slavery predates American slavery, which is to say, it was always so wrong but seldom so cruel. It has existed in thousands of cultures for thousands of years. It is the conception of ownership of a human being by another human being for the inducement of forced labor, and it is followed by the material enforcement of that proclaimed relationship. A person claims they own a fellow person to exploit their labor, and will back that claim up with violence. Someone held in ownership but not made to labor is a captive; someone made to labor but not owned is a serf, a wage labor, an indentured servant. Slavery didn’t metamorphose in all of its manifestations during the Atlantic Slave Trade, because concurrently with newer forms of slavery, older slaveries of tribal and patriarchal sorts persisted. However, the world looks as it does today because of the racialized chattel slavery that benefited Europe and those descended from Europeans as a white elite were the predominant owners of enslaved indigenous people and Africans. This succeeded indentured servitude and other forms of forced labor as the preeminent form of wealth production and colonization for much of the Americas for most of the centuries since that fateful year of 1492.
Now let us look at things that are not slavery, a compendium which we can add to as more analogies are popularized.
Taxes are not slavery. The government does not claim to own its subjects. A state does not generally coerce its citizens into forced labor in order to pay taxes. It is part of the social contract that the state serves its citizens and the citizens have an obligation to the state. As a Marxist who consorts with anarcho-communists, I and Marx and many would agree that humankind should work towards an existence without a state, and that the promises of the state are disingenuous. But taxation is, if anything, a limiting of the servitude caused by capitalism, and at best a means of providing citizens with the basic needs so that they can take ownership over their own lives. A state, not owning its citizens, can be left for another state. A person has the free will, though they may not have the access, to lawfully leave their duties behind. Don’t like it? Then you had better not like the system of capitalism that it protects. However, taxes are not slavery.
Debt is not slavery. Many class relations exist inside of and out of slavery where the use of debt coerces people into labor. That is not debt, however. Debt peonage, or forced labor to pay off debts, is not in-and-of itself slavery unless there is a direct or state-sanctioned understanding that the debtor is owned by the creditor in lieu of payment. But debt does not place ownership of a person into the hands of the creditor otherwise, and the person is not induced to perform forced labor whose character is under the control of the creditor.
Regulation is not slavery. Coercive authority (or, in the case of US government regulation of businesses, flaccid authority) to not engage in activities that are against the public trust is not the ownership of a human being by another human being. A recognition that the general interests of the civil society or citizens will be irrevocably harmed by a corporate or institutional act is not an inducement to forced labor. And corporations are not people. That is, though rights are a bourgeois concept, corporations are not of flesh and blood.
Sex work is not slavery. Sex work is an area of labor for pay in the sex industry. The sex industry is capitalist, but that is not the same thing as saying it is slavery. There are tens of thousands of sex slaves around the world in the trafficking underworld, but that there is real slavery in an industry does not mean that that labor causes slavery. Capitalism causes slavery. There are also real slaves working in construction in Qatar, laboring for contractors at US military bases, in Congolese mines, and in sweatshops, but those who decry sex work when done as free labor do not demand people stop constructing buildings, serving war machines, mining for gems, or sewing shirts. Sex work can include crass exploitation and can allow considerable self-management and ownership by workers themselves. It is not the existence of sex work, but the existence of classes of exploiters and exploited that will keep slavery around for a long time to come.
Wage labor is not slavery. One of the cardinal concepts of political economy is that capitalism exploits free labor which it maintains is progress over the slaveowner’s exploitation of the slave. Marx knew very well that crass exploitation of wage labor in one place was often used by advocates of free trade to defend slavery elsewhere (for example, British press that condemned London sweatshops as a means to condone chattel slavery in the antebellum south). When Marx was writing about the Dickensian experience of wage laborers in Britain and Northern Europe in the 19th Century, he was writing about workers of all ages (as young as 6 as far as I can remember) working up to over 24-hour workdays, often forced to sleep in their workshops. The level of wage labor exploitation did rise to wage slavery at the time because there was indeed forced labor in the form of overtime (sometimes a multiple of the paid working day) and sometimes even temporary ownership of children for their labor. This wage slavery still exists, but not amongst Portland baristas, Brooklyn freelancers, or Teamsters. It can still be found in sweatshops, from Los Angeles to Honduras to Bangladesh. Conflating all wage labor as wage slavery does not help us understand the exploitation of wage labor just as it makes invisible the much more crass forms of forced labor existant under the wage system.
Kanye West is not the new slave. This one should be apparent.
What is slavery today? There is very real human trafficking that is slavery, and there is much of it that simply borders on slavery but would literally be some other form of forced labor. The labor done in the Gulag was slavery, and the 13th Amendment has permitted the United States to constitutionally enslave people incarcerated in its prisons. The indentured servants from countries like Nepal and the Philippines that work across Arab countries are sometimes slaves. The workers locked in sweatshops in parts of Bangladesh and Cambodia are slaves. Those domestic workers who are locked in homes in Western Europe, Canada and the United States are slaves. We do nothing but marginalize them out of the public eye, the public mind, and the public heart, if we trivialize slavery.
February 5, 2014
The Parable of Don Quixote and the Wage-Theft of Andres
One of the great literary parables that should be known to all unionists, non-profit staffers, NGO staffers, organizers. The lesson of follow-through and being honest with the communities you are organizing should be clear.
Day was dawning when Don Quixote quitted the inn, so happy, so gay, so exhilarated at finding himself now dubbed a knight, that his joy was like to burst his horse-girths. However, recalling the advice of his host as to the requisites he ought to carry with him, especially that referring to money and shirts, he determined to go home and provide himself with all, and also with a squire, for he reckoned upon securing a farm-labourer, a neighbour of his, a poor man with a family, but very well qualified for the office of squire to a knight. With this object he turned his horse’s head towards his village, and Rocinante, thus reminded of his old quarters, stepped out so briskly that he hardly seemed to tread the earth.
He had not gone far, when out of a thicket on his right there seemed to come feeble cries as of some one in distress, and the instant he heard them he exclaimed, “Thanks be to heaven for the favour it accords me, that it so soon offers me an opportunity of fulfilling the obligation I have undertaken, and gathering the fruit of my ambition. These cries, no doubt, come from some man or woman in want of help, and needing my aid and protection;” and wheeling, he turned Rocinante in the direction whence the cries seemed to proceed. He had gone but a few paces into the wood, when he saw a mare tied to an oak, and tied to another, and stripped from the waist upwards, a youth of about fifteen years of age, from whom the cries came. Nor were they without cause, for a lusty farmer was flogging him with a belt and following up every blow with scoldings and commands, repeating, “Your mouth shut and your eyes open!” while the youth made answer, “I won’t do it again, master mine; by God’s passion I won’t do it again, and I’ll take more care of the flock another time.”
Seeing what was going on, Don Quixote said in an angry voice, “Discourteous knight, it ill becomes you to assail one who cannot defend himself; mount your steed and take your lance” (for there was a lance leaning against the oak to which the mare was tied), “and I will make you know that you are behaving as a coward.” The farmer, seeing before him this figure in full armour brandishing a lance over his head, gave himself up for dead, and made answer meekly, “Sir Knight, this youth that I am chastising is my servant, employed by me to watch a flock of sheep that I have hard by, and he is so careless that I lose one every day, and when I punish him for his carelessness and knavery he says I do it out of niggardliness, to escape paying him the wages I owe him, and before God, and on my soul, he lies.”
“Lies before me, base clown!” said Don Quixote. “By the sun that shines on us I have a mind to run you through with this lance. Pay him at once without another word; if not, by the God that rules us I will make an end of you, and annihilate you on the spot; release him instantly.”
The farmer hung his head, and without a word untied his servant, of whom Don Quixote asked how much his master owed him.
He replied, nine months at seven reals a month. Don Quixote added it up, found that it came to sixty-three reals, and told the farmer to pay it down immediately, if he did not want to die for it.
The trembling clown replied that as he lived and by the oath he had sworn (though he had not sworn any) it was not so much; for there were to be taken into account and deducted three pairs of shoes he had given him, and a real for two blood-lettings when he was sick.
“All that is very well,” said Don Quixote; “but let the shoes and the blood-lettings stand as a setoff against the blows you have given him without any cause; for if he spoiled the leather of the shoes you paid for, you have damaged that of his body, and if the barber took blood from him when he was sick, you have drawn it when he was sound; so on that score he owes you nothing.”
“The difficulty is, Sir Knight, that I have no money here; let Andres come home with me, and I will pay him all, real by real.”
“I go with him!” said the youth. “Nay, God forbid! No, senor, not for the world; for once alone with me, he would ray me like a Saint Bartholomew.”
“He will do nothing of the kind,” said Don Quixote; “I have only to command, and he will obey me; and as he has sworn to me by the order of knighthood which he has received, I leave him free, and I guarantee the payment.”
“Consider what you are saying, senor,” said the youth; “this master of mine is not a knight, nor has he received any order of knighthood; for he is Juan Haldudo the Rich, of Quintanar.”
“That matters little,” replied Don Quixote; “there may be Haldudos knights; moreover, everyone is the son of his works.”
“That is true,” said Andres; “but this master of mine- of what works is he the son, when he refuses me the wages of my sweat and labour?”
“I do not refuse, brother Andres,” said the farmer, “be good enough to come along with me, and I swear by all the orders of knighthood there are in the world to pay you as I have agreed, real by real, and perfumed.”
“For the perfumery I excuse you,” said Don Quixote; “give it to him in reals, and I shall be satisfied; and see that you do as you have sworn; if not, by the same oath I swear to come back and hunt you out and punish you; and I shall find you though you should lie closer than a lizard. And if you desire to know who it is lays this command upon you, that you be more firmly bound to obey it, know that I am the valorous Don Quixote of La Mancha, the undoer of wrongs and injustices; and so, God be with you, and keep in mind what you have promised and sworn under those penalties that have been already declared to you.”
So saying, he gave Rocinante the spur and was soon out of reach. The farmer followed him with his eyes, and when he saw that he had cleared the wood and was no longer in sight, he turned to his boy Andres, and said, “Come here, my son, I want to pay you what I owe you, as that undoer of wrongs has commanded me.”
“My oath on it,” said Andres, “your worship will be well advised to obey the command of that good knight- may he live a thousand years- for, as he is a valiant and just judge, by Roque, if you do not pay me, he will come back and do as he said.”
“My oath on it, too,” said the farmer; “but as I have a strong affection for you, I want to add to the debt in order to add to the payment;” and seizing him by the arm, he tied him up again, and gave him such a flogging that he left him for dead.
“Now, Master Andres,” said the farmer, “call on the undoer of wrongs; you will find he won’t undo that, though I am not sure that I have quite done with you, for I have a good mind to flay you alive.” But at last he untied him, and gave him leave to go look for his judge in order to put the sentence pronounced into execution.
Andres went off rather down in the mouth, swearing he would go to look for the valiant Don Quixote of La Mancha and tell him exactly what had happened, and that all would have to be repaid him sevenfold; but for all that, he went off weeping, while his master stood laughing.
Thus did the valiant Don Quixote right that wrong, and, thoroughly satisfied with what had taken place, as he considered he had made a very happy and noble beginning with his knighthood, he took the road towards his village in perfect self-content, saying in a low voice, “Well mayest thou this day call thyself fortunate above all on earth, O Dulcinea del Toboso, fairest of the fair! since it has fallen to thy lot to hold subject and submissive to thy full will and pleasure a knight so renowned as is and will be Don Quixote of La Mancha, who, as all the world knows, yesterday received the order of knighthood, and hath to-day righted the greatest wrong and grievance that ever injustice conceived and cruelty perpetrated: who hath to-day plucked the rod from the hand of yonder ruthless oppressor so wantonly lashing that tender child.”
There is a part II to this incident, but it only drives the point home further.
January 26, 2014
On cynicism, calling out, and creating movements that don’t leave our people behind
One of several excellent pieces from late 2013 that I think helped break with the critical theory cottage industry, an increasing insularity within the confines of which a poor use of identity politics is rewarded and revolutionary identity politics decreasingly have a space to develop.
RSS feed: http://sabokitty.tumblr.com/rss
1 of 4
Next page
JoaquÃn Torres GarcÃa, América Invertida (1943)
-
Some Silvia Federici Links
�The Celtic Revolution - A Study in Anti-Imperialism’, Peter Berresford Ellis, Y Lolfa, Wales, 1985.
Stop. #Decolonize. All Ways. #streetart #NYC