SCISSION

THE ON GOING GENOCIDE OF THE YEZIDI PEOPLE IN A WORLD THAT SIMPLY DOES NOT CARE

2012-01-30T17:15:00.000-06:00

How is it that someone like me who prides themselves on knowledge aboout such things knew nothing about the on going genocide of the Yezidi people until it was brought to my attention by a "facebook friend?" I should be ashamed...and I am.

The world that keeps saying never again, that keeps saying it won't turn its eyes away again, that keeps saying there will be no more genocides, that world has totally ignored a genocide that started centuries ago and continues today.

As is stated on the GeoCurrents site,

The situation of the Yezidis also gives the lie to humanitarian claims that the global community will “never again” sit by while entire ethnic groups are targeted for removal or extermination. When it comes to such politically inconvenient examples of ethnic cleansing as that suffered by the Yezidis, the typical reaction is to look the other way, or to dismiss the community as too small to merit consideration.

Yes, everyone has either participated or looked away. The Yezidi have been targeted by Muslims, by Turks, by Kurds, by Iraqis, by all of those around them. The West has looked away, the left has looked away, the right has looked away, the East has looked away, the capitalists have looked away, the communists have looked away.

Why?

Is it because the Yezidi refuse to compromise their beliefs, religion and culture? Is it because they are an inconvenient people in an inconvenient part of the globe?

Geo Currents writes:

On the rare occasion when the Yezidis are mentioned in the U.S. media, they are generally passed over as insignificant, forming as they do only a few percent of Iraq’s population. Such reporting is misleading: Yezidis number between 500,000 and 750,000 globally, with as many as 650,000 living in northern Iraq. Another 60,000 northern Iraqis follow the related Shabak faith, while as many as a million in Kurdish Iran adhere to a similar sect called Ahl-e Haqq (or Yârsân). Mehrdad Izady calls this complex of religions Yazdânism, which he regards as a survival of the pre-Islamic beliefs of the Kurdish people. He also includes the faith of the Alevis of eastern Turkey. The Alevis—heterodox Shiite Muslims who don’t worship in mosques and do drink alcohol—number some 15 million, on par with the global population of Mormons or Jews.

And Yezidi truth adds:

Even with all of their ostensible connections to other faiths, the Yezidis have for hundreds of years been under constant attack from Moslems who promulgate the idea that the Yezidi’s principle diety, Tawsy Melek, the “Peacock Angel”, is Satan. Moslems also contend that the Yezidis are not “People of the Book”, i.e., that they don’t have a sacred revealed scripture like the Holy Bible or the Koran at the center of their religion, so they claim justification in their massacre of them.

Or even worse, some Moslems have pronounced the Yezidis as heretics who were once orthodox Moslems – an allegation that puts them in the lowest rung of humanity. Over the course of 700 years, nearly 23 million Yezidi people have been murdered, thus bringing their civilization to the brink of extinction.

But really, who cares why? Who dares ask why? There are no "why's" when it comes to genocide.

Writes Yezidid Human Rights Org.

In the past 20 years to present, especially since the internet has become the easiest way to find information regarding whatever a person wishes to search for. We have seen that more than 99% of the writers accusing the innocent Yezidi as devil worshipers, this is absolutely pure fiction. During the Saddam’s era, the Yezidis were misclassified as Arab in ethnicity by his political force. Although Saddam has gone, but the KRG (Real Dictators) has come to power in Northern Iraq since 1991, and they also are forcing the innocent Yezidis to be misclassified as Kurdish; again this time under KRG’s brutal and dictatorial system. All these are misleading, untruth, and pure fiction information about the innocent Yezidis (Ezdae). Because of all these misunderstanding the truth about the Yezidis, we have been attacked more than 73 of times in the past 1000 years to present, therefore we (Ezdae) have lost millions of innocent Yezidis in those brutal and inhumane attacks against this most indigenous and peaceful nation in the world today.

It is the 21st century and we are accusing people of devil worship as an excuse to murder them.

Some are more political in their hatred.

A Journey Deep into Struggle writes:

In recent years the threats are mainly from militant Islamist groups, like Al Qaeda who views them as infidels. Terrorism has driven Yazidis from Mosul, where their numbers were once strong. Violence has even reached their smallest villages. In 2007 a set of bomb trucks killed hundreds of Yazidis This current situation affects the Yazidi’s rites and traditions preventing people from coming to Iraq for their required pilgrimage to Lalish.

Who are Yezidi?

Yezidi Truth explains:

The Yezidis or Yazidis are a Kurdish speaking people who live principally in northern Iraq. They number approximately 500,000 – 600,000 with another 200,000 settled in other parts of the world. They are mostly a poor and oppressed people, but they have a rich spiritual tradition that they contend is the world’s oldest. They were the first people to be created in the Garden of Eden, which they claim is the area now known as Lalish in Iraq. From Lalish they dispersed to many countries in Africa and Asia, including India, Afghanistan, Armenia, and Morocco, and continue to share numerous links with them.

Originally from India and therefore related to the Hindus, they also have close connections with many other cultures and traditions they have lived among during their gradual migration westward to the Middle East. For example, they have close ties with the Zoroastrian religion they encountered in Persia, and they reflect some of the doctrines and rites of Islam which were integrated into Yezidism by the faith’s Sufi reformer, Sheike Adi, during the 11th century. Well before this time, as far back as 2000 B.C., the Yezidis were living in the Middle East and playing a role in the Sumerian, Babylonian, Assyrian, and Jewish civilizations.
The Yezidis claim to have the oldest religion in the world, contending that the truth of this is reflected in the antiquity of their calendar. They can trace back their religious calendar 6756 years, thus making 2008 CE the Yezidi year of 6757. In relation to some of the other major religions, the Yezidi Calendar is 4,750 years older than the Christian or Gregorian Calendar, 990 years older than the Jewish Calender, and it is 5329 years older than the Muslim Calender.

Can anything be done, does anyone have an idea of what to do.

Lots of things can be done. The same things we on the left advocate for every other oppressed people everywhere should go for these people as well. I don't know why the left has ignored the Yezidi people although I can unfortunately think of some reasons which to me are quite distasteful.

The Yezidi Human Rights Organizations demands:

FOR THE YEZIDIS HUMAN RIGHTS

The Yezidis must have the rights of religion and ethnic identity completely separate from the Kurdish and Arabs, and both should respect and recognize this identity (Yezidi Identity)
The Yezidis' holy places such as Lalish must be under the UN protection, because the KRG is preventing those innocent Yezidis who are not accepting the "Kurdification" from visiting it (Holy Lalish )
The Security, Police, Military forces and Administration in the Yezidis regions must be formed from the Yezidis, so they can protect the regions from any “Terrorists” actions.
Both Men and Women have equal rights and responsibilities in the society
The Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) must end its use of militias force against the Yezidi civilians, including assimilations of Kurdification; attacks and bribes to the Kurdification involving behind the seen. Moreover, KRG must stop land seizures of Yezidis regions; agricultural farms; arbitrary arrests and imprisonment; torture; assassinations; expulsions; curfews; travel restrictions in Northern Iraq; abuse at checkpoints; raids; collective punishment; and other violations of human rights
The international community should be able to support the Yezidi efforts to promote democracy and Yezidis human rights, while understanding that this aim cannot be even partially achieved under occupation of KRG and its militia forces. They must get out of our regions…

Surely someone cares. Outside of the Yezidi themselves, frightfully few.

It took one lone women to call my attention to the genocide which is and has been taking place partially on my watch.

That is shameful.

I can only say I am sorry for my ignorance and I will try to open my eyes.

As should you.

The first article below is a bit of history is from Yezidi Truth. The second history is from AINA.

Yezidi Genocide

It has been estimated that 23 million Yezidis have been killed by Moslems and their other self-proclaimed enemies during the past 700 years. And the Yezidi population continues to decrease. Just 200 years ago was 2 million, but it is now estimated to be less than one million worldwide. A current “incentive” to the ongoing slaughter is a belief that states that if a Moslem slays a Yezidi great awards await him or her in Heaven. If a Moslem man slays a Yezidi he is told that he will be rewarded with 72 virgins in the next world. Unless such “incentives” cease and this senseless killing is stopped the Yezidis could face permanent extinction. If this happens, the world will not only loose a very peaceful and unbiased people, but an irreplaceable link to its past. The Yezidis, who originally migrated to Iraq from India, are currently the caretakers of the oldest religious tradition on Earth.

A slaughter of the Yezidis occurred in April, 2007, when 23 of them were murdered by Kurdish Moslems. But this is only the most recent attempt at Yezidi massacre by Moslem extremists. Beginning nearly twenty years ago Saddam Hussein instigated a pogrom of Yezidi extermination by labeling them “Devil Worshippers” and thereby triggered whole scale persecution by the Iraqi Moslems. Throughout the Middle East it was no secret that Saddam Hussein’s goal was systematic cultural genocide of the Yezidis. Under his savage regime the Yezidis were uprooted from their villages, their farmland taken, and they were denied both jobs and medical care. Approximately 250 Yezidi villages near Mosul in the Sinjar Mountains were destroyed, and the river Dejela, which supplies the Yezidi communities with drinking water, was contaminated with poisons. All the sacred sites of the Yezidis were vandalized and threatened. Although this pogrom was lifted briefly following the US invasion and Saddam’s capture, the harsh conditions appear to be returning. Kurdish Moslems are currently blocking food supplies to the Yezidi villages and they continue to prevent the Yezidis from cleaning up the poisons in their water supply. Yezidis can not visit their relatives in many villages which have become Moslem controlled, and those Yezidis moving between villages risk both torture and death. Within the mosques adjacent to the Yezidi villages mullahs continue to speak about the “Devil-worshipping Yezidis” and encourage their conversion to Islam or murder.

The following is a chronology of many of the 72 major attacks on their civilization that the Yezidis have endured since the seventh century A.D.:

630 AD. The Moslems started a series of wars against the Yezidis by killing and abducting many people.

637 AD A major war was instigated against the Yezidis, and then Moslems burned and destroyed much of their territory.

980-81 AD Islamic Kurdish armies surrounded the Yezidis living in the Hakkar region. They promised the Yezidis mercy if they surrendered to them but failed to keep their promise. Instead, most of the Yezidis were massacred. Those who survived were forced to convert to Islam.

1107 AD About 50,000 Yezidi families were destroyed during a period of Moslem expansionism.

1218 AD The Mongols under the leadership of Hulagu Khan reached the Yezidis and slaughtered many of them, but the Mongols met strong resistance from the Yezidi warriors and eventually retreated..

1245-52 AD Hulagu Khan’s armies resumed their battle against the Yezidis and slaughtered thousands of them.

1254 AD A conflict occurred between the Moslem Bader al-Din Lolo, the “Mayor of Mosul,” and a Yezidi leader named Sheikh Hassan. Bader al-Din’s men captured Sheikh Hassan, executed him, and then hung his naked body on a Mosul gate where it could be seen by many other Yezidis. This event led to a war which the Yezidis lost, forcing them to flee to the mountains and leave behind their lands, villages, and temples. Everything the Yezidis left behind was destroyed. Even their most sacred shrine at Lalish was desecrated, with the bones of their greatest saint, Sheikh Adi, being taken from his tomb and burned in front of the unbelieving Yezidis.

1414 AD A Persian leader named Jalal al-Din Mohammed bin izidin yousif al-Halawani led an armed force against the Yezidis who were living in the Hakkar Mountains. His raid was supported by Kurds in the area. Most of the Yezidis descended from Sheikh Adi’s followers were killed, and the remaining bones of Sheikh Adi were taken from his tomb and burned in front of Yezidi hostages.

1585 AD A Kurdish leader named Ali Saidi Beg from Botan province attacked Yezidis living in Sinjar and killed more than 600 of them. The Yezidi women were abducted and raped by the conquerors in front of the Yezidis’ captured soldiers.

1640-41 AD Yezidi villages near Mosul were looted and other Yezidi villages were attacked by Ahmed Pasha, a Turkish Moslem Ottoman governor, along with 70,000 armed soldiers. Hundreds of thousands of Yezidis were killed.

1648 AD The Yezidi Sheikh Merza revolted against the Ottomans controlling Mosul who had previously beheaded his two brothers. The Ottoman general Shamsi Pasha was then summoned from Turkey to attack the Yezidis. Many Yezidis lost their lives and Sheikh Merza was beheaded.

1715 AD Hassan Pasha, the Ottoman governor of Baghdad, attacked the Yezidis with a huge army in order to punish them. Those Yezidis who were not killed were forced to flee into Syria. Pasha made an alliance with the local Arabs and then continued to attack the Yezidi unmercifully.

1733 AD The Ottoman Ahmed Pasha destroyed the Yezidi villages in the Zab river area and committed mass killings. This raid was followed by one under the leadership of Hussein Pasha that completely destroyed the Yezidi villages and forced 3000 Yezidis to convert to Islam.

1743 AD The Persian leader Nadir Shah guided his troops into Yezidi territory near the Zab River, about 30 kms west of Mosul. They looted the villages and captured most of the Yezidis as hostages. Those that refused to obey were instantly killed.

1752 AD An Ottoman pasha named Sulaiman Pasha attacked the Yezidis in Sinjar. His campaign of killing and looting lasted two years. Three thousand Yezidis were killed and 500 women were taken as hostages.

1767 AD An Ottoman pasha and mayor of Mosul, Amin Pasha, had his son lead troops against the Yezidis living in Sinjar. He demanded the Yezidis to bring him 1000 sheep. When they brought only 800 he ordered his men to slay a large number of Yezidis.

1771 AD Bedagh Beg, one of the Yezidi leaders from Sheikhan, revolted against the Ottoman mayor of Mosul because he sought to convert the Yezidis to Islam. The Mosul Mayor allied with Bairam Beg, a Moslem Kurdish leader, to kill Bedagh Beg and most of his men.

1774 AD The Ottoman Mayor of Mosul, Sulaiman Oash, attacked the Yezidis in the Sinjar area. The Yezidi villages were looted and destroyed.

1779 AD The Ottoman Mayor of Mosul sent more military units into Yezidi territory of Sinjar. They looted and destroyed the villages and killed many Yezidi.

1785 AD The Ottoman Mayor of Mosul, Abdel Bagi, attacked the Yezidis in Sinjar to punish them. The Moslem soldiers were at first defeated, but then they allied with some Arab forces and routed the Yezidis.

1786-87 AD Yezidi ruler Cholo Beg and his forces went to war with the Moslem Kurdish leader of Imadiyah. Cholo Beg lost the battle and many Yezidis were killed.

1789-90 AD Ismael Beg, the Prince of Imadiyah, killed Cholo Beg and replaced him on the Yezidi throne with one of his relatives, Khanger Beg. When Khanger Beg retired soon afterwards, Hassan Beg, the son of Cholo Beg, was crowned in his stead. Hassan continued the rebellion of his father by revolting against the Imadiyah Prince Kifbad, during which soldiers from both sides were killed in great numbers.

1792-93 AD The Ottoman Mayor of Mosul, Mohammed Pasha Al-Jalili, destroyed and burned eight Yezidi villages in the Sinjar area.

1794 AD The Ottoman Mayor of Mosul resumed the attack on a village in Sinjar called Mehrcan to punish the Yezidis. But he failed and lost the ensuing battle.

1795 AD The Ottomans sent Sulaiman Pasha to Sinjar’s Yezidi villages. With the help of the Kurd Prince Abdullah Beg Kahin and the Abdulrahman Pasha Prince of the Sulaimania Kurdish government, he looted, incinerated, and completely destroyed the Yezidi villages. He also abducted and kidnapped 60 Yezidi women and 650 domestic animals.

1799-1800 AD The Mayor of Baghdad, Abdul Aziz Beg Al-Shawi, destroyed 25 Yezidi villages in the Sheikhan region. Both women and children were abducted and 45 Yezidis were executed. Their heads were then brought to Baghdad as symbols of victory.

1802-3 AD The Mayor of Mosul, Ali Pasha, brought the administration of the Yezidis in the Sinjar region under his strict control. In doing so he found it necessary to attack some rebellious Yezidis from the north while overseeing an Arab raid on them from the south. The attack lasted for several months, during which several Yezidi villages were razed. The surviving Yezidis agreed to accept the rule of Ali Pasha even though they were forced to convert to Islam. When more Yezidis rebelled in 1807 the battle was resumed and 50 Yezidi villages were destroyed.

1809-10 AD The Ottoman Mayor of Baghda attacked the Yezidis in Sinjar. His army looted Sinjar, Mehrkan, and other Yezidi villages. Many Yezidis lost their lives.

1832 AD Bader Khan Beg, the Moslem Kurdish Prince of Botan, tortured and killed the Yezidi leader Ali Beg. The Moslem Kurds then committed an unprecedented massacre of thousands of Yezidis while destroying their villages. Many Yezidis tried to escape by traveling across the Tigris River. Most of them could not swim and were either drowned or captured. Those that were captured were given the option of converting to Islam or dying as martyrs.

1833 AD The Kurdhis ruler of Rawandez attacked the Yezidis at Aqra in accordance with a religious mandate from Mulla Yahya Al-Muzuri, a Kurdish Moslem leader. Five hundred Yezidis were killed in the upper Zab region. The Sinjar area was also attacked with many Yezidi lives lost.

1838 AD The Otoman Mayor of Diarbeker attacked the Yezidis in the Sinjar region and killed many of them. In the same year, the Ottoman Mayor of Mosul Tayar Pasha attacked the Jaddala area of Sinjar and ordered the Yezidis to pay taxes. When Tayar Pash sent envoys to the Yezidis in Mehrkan village to hear the complaints of the Yezidis, the envoys were killed. Tayar Pasha sought vengeance and invaded the Yezidi villages. In order to protect themselves, the Yezidis withdrew to caves and tried to fight back by ambushing their enemy. Tayar Pasha had lost many men and he eventually retired back to Mosul. Peace was resumed in the Sinjar area.

1892 AD The Yezidis were attacked by the Ottoman leader Omer Wahbi Pasha. He gave the Yezidis the choice of converting to Islam or paying higher taxes, or death. The Yezidis resisted and Omar Pasha, in alliance with the Moslem Kurds, attacked the Yezidis in the Sinjar and Sheikhan regions. About 15,000 Yezidis were either killed or forced to accept Islam. The Pasha then attacked Lalish and the tomb of Sheikh Adi, carrying away to Mosul the sacred relics of the Yezidis. For seven years following this time the Lalish pilgrimage sanctuary was used as a Moslem school.

1906 AD The Mayor of Mezory, Mr. Saddeq Al-Dammalogi, received an order from the Mayor of Mosul to remove all Yezidis from Lalish and use the temple there as a Moslem school. The Yezidis were persuaded to leave Lalish for one year.

1914-17 AD During the First World War the Yezidis assisted more than 20,000 Armenian people who fled from the Ottoman Turks.

With sincere thanks to Ali Seedo Rashi, President - Yezidi Cultural Association in Iraq for his source article: “The Yezidism”.

The Unknown Turkish Genocide Of Yezidis

Yerevan -- In 1915-1918 the upper circles of the Ottoman Empire, taking advantage of the conditions of the World War, organized and realized genocide of Turkey's national minorities. During a few years the Ottoman Empire actually completely slaughtered the native peoples of the country: Armenians, Assyrians, and Greeks. Nowadays the world is aware of numerous facts and details of these terrible atrocities committed by Turkey's authorities endowed with state power. The world's most progressive countries condemned the Armenian Genocide in the Ottoman Empire on the state level and mark mournful data of the Genocide's beginning together with Armenians, Greeks and Assyrians.

However, in this sorrowful list of peoples destroyed by Turks Yezidis, a distinctive and native nation on the territory of the Ottoman Empire, are actually never mentioned. Meanwhile, even an incomplete list of settlements of Yezdistan (a territory in the north of Iraq), where Turkish vandals slaughtered Yezidis, is quite and quite impressive: Sinjar, Sinoun, Gobal, Dgour, Gali Ali Bage, Dhok, Zorava, Karse and Bare, Siba, Tlizer, Tlzafe, Khrbade Kavala, Grzark, Rmbousi, Sharok, Tlkazar, Tlbanta, Kocho, Khotmi, Mosoul, Rndavan, Amadia. Over 200,000 Yezidis were slaughtered in these settlements.

Yezidis were also destroyed by Turkish soldiers on the territory of Western Armenia, where they had been living in harmony with Armenians for ages. Below is the mournful list: Van region -- 100,000 innocent victims; Moush region -- over 60,000 victims; Erzroum region -- 7,500 victims; Kars region -- 5,000 victims, Sourmalu -- 10,000 Yezidi victims… The list is never-ending and tragic.

Side by side with deportation and massacre the Turkish government forcibly turned Yezidis, who profess original religion connected with worship of the Sun, into Islam. The Turkish historiographer Katib Tchelebi states that in 1915-1918 about 300,000 Yezidis were massacred on the territory of the Ottoman Empire. However, according to verified data, those years over 500,000 Yezidis were slaughtered by Turkish and Kurd barbarians, and this sinister fact has not been condemned by the progressive countries of the world.

Undoubtedly, politicians and specialists must know how many Yezidis became the victims of the Turkish state in various settlements.
Before the beginning of the World War I, according to the sources, over 750,000 Yezidis resided on the territory of the Ottoman Empire, and over 500,000 of them were massacred by Turks. 250,000 more were forcibly deported and found shelter:

in Iraq, in the vicinity of Sinjar Mountain, 100,000.
in Turkey, in the regions of Batman and Diarbeqir, 12,000.
in Syria, in the settlement of El-Kamishli, 15,000.
in Armenia, 12,500.
in Georgia, 3,000.

Nowadays the Yezidi people scattered by the whole territory of Northern Asia and Near East require the reestablishment of justice and recognition of events of 1915-1918 as Genocide. We are convinced: defiance of historic crimes against mankind will inevitably result in a precedent for new crimes. Actually, it is already taking place. In August and September of 2007 over a thousand of innocent Yezidis, peaceful inhabitant of the region, were destroyed in the north of Iraq, in historical Yezdistan.

We appeal to the U. N., the U. N. Security Council, Presidents of the U. S. and Russia, heads of the European states, President of Turkey and urge:
To restore historical justice and condemn the genocide of Yezidi people, which took place in the Ottoman Empire in 1915-1918.
National Union Of Yezidis Of The World

THE POOR; A THREATENING AND INDISPENSABLE ENEMY BY ANTONIO NEGRI

2012-01-29T15:58:00.001-06:00

Today's contribution to theoretical weekends comes from the always fun and delightful Toni Negri. It is taken from Generations on Line.

The poor: a threatening and indispensable enemy.*

From the dangerous classes to the danger of the multitude.

Antonio Negri

The corsi e ricorsi of history are strange. It is renowned that throughout the history of capitalism the definition of ‘dangerous classes’ has been very flexible. In the era of manufacture the poor were the dangerous: the multitude of penniless and vagabonds agricultural workers and landless peasants forced to move towards cities and factories. In the era of large industry, the workers became the ‘dangerous class’: assembled en masse in the factory, they exercised a pressure that affected all social relations; the dangerous class had to be pushed on the path of poverty, unemployment, and the industrial reserve army. Today the poor is the enemy once again: in Postfordism, the flexible worker - mobile and precarious, capable of producing cognitive and intellectual surplus - is the enemy, threatened by means of exclusion, as if poverty was not enough. Precarious middle classes, taylorised intellectual labour and an immaterial labour force degraded through industrial instrumentalisation and the alienation of value: this is the fate of the new condition of poverty. However, never has the poor been in the condition of being as productive as he is now. In social production, since labour becomes cooperative, a concrete common realisation - and this common constitutes the core necessary condition for the production of commodities and services - exclusion would seem to be impossible. Despite the myriad of mechanisms of exclusion to which he is subjected, the poor expresses an enormous power of life and production. What is excluded through the legal and economic forms of capital is nevertheless included in the circuits of social and biopolitical production. Thus the poor, the unemployed, the homeless and wage less represent first of all a contradictory situation: they are excluded from a general social condition that conceives of value as built in community. This is the reason for the dangerousness of the poor, the substance of his ‘being foe’ to the actual form of capitalist command.

Despite its current crisis, the ideology of labour keeps producing negative effects. In the era of large manufacture, working class organisation never liked the poor: if the poor were excluded from the productive process, he was also excluded from any meaningful role in political organisation. Like the capitalists, the working class Left also conceived of the poor as dangerous, not only because the poor can appear to be unproductive social parasites (thieves, prostitutes, junkies etc.) but also because they seem politically unstable and basically irrational. In fact, at certain times in history fascists and reactionary populism used the poor as the social base and weapon against the working class, and counting on their disorganisation and resentment for their exclusion. The working class movement often imagined the poor to be part of the enemy, a full member of that industrial reserve army that could attack the wage relation and put workers’ employment in danger. Whilst communists certainly denounced labour aristocracies, the diffidence towards the poor would not cease so long as the ideology of labour hegemonised the minds of socialists.

In Postfordism the poor comes out of the picture into which he had been forced by large manufacture capitalism and the operaismo of that stage of social composition of labour. In many ways, the more the worker is positively inserted in social productive activity, the poorer he is today. The distinction between directly productive labour and unproductive labour has always been dubious, also in Marxian discourse. However, for Marx the poor were neither productive nor unproductive: they lied outside of production, as the savage lies outside of civilisation. But just as the savage fully resides inside globalisation today, so has the poor entirely re-entered social production. His productive capacity is not virtual - as it used to be when the vagabond was pushed from the countryside to new industrial cities. The labour capacity of the poor is now actual because the entire set of social relations is productive. However, the poor is still the enemy or has become again the enemy par excellence because he is necessary to production, rich in productive capacity and included in social production. All of this, just in the name of the need for inclusion, makes him dangerous and inimical. As it is always the case for the enemy of society, the poor must fight against poverty and thus recognise himself as his own enemy. Such was the case of the worker who, struggling against exploitation, had to conceive his own destruction. The suppression of poverty must then represent itself as the suppression of the poor. But the suppression of poverty is also a struggle against those who organise poverty as the basis of their wealth and of capitalist development.

If it is true that the poor is included in the biopolitical texture of social production, the struggle against poverty will be a constituent one. Poverty reveals the subversive content of the universal participation of the labour force to social production. In the era of large industry the struggles of the poor were always resistance struggles - whatever their outcome. In England, Germany, the United States in the 1920's, and again in Europe during the 1970's, the struggles of the poor were struggles for appropriation. Resistance and appropriation are the struggles of the excluded, but today, with the social inclusion of labour, the struggles of the poor merge and become entangled with those of the workers and they are constituent. They only become effective when they manage to halt the mechanisms of exploitation and hierarchisation of the global labour force. Because of this, citizenship income becomes the constituent political key of the struggles of the poor: it merges the political recognition of inclusion and the project of democratic management of globalisation. Thus the poor becomes the real enemy.

* Published on Global Magazine, Issue 2, May 2003. Translated by Arianna Bove

TEN THESES ON THE MULTITUDE AND POST-FORDIST CAPITALISM BY PAOLO VIRNO

2012-01-28T15:07:00.001-06:00

Theoretical weekend continues with this piece of theoretical ramblings by Paolo Virno (2004). Virno is an Italian autonomist Marxist who was falsely imprisoned for being involved with the Red Brigades.

Have fun.

By this way, this is taken from something called The Strickland Distribution.

Ten Theses on the Multitude and Post-Fordist Capitalism

6.1.

I have attempted to describe the nature of contemporary production, socalled post-Fordism, on the basis of categories drawn from political philosophy, ethics, epistemology, and the philosophy of language. I have done so not as a professional exercise, but because I am truly convinced that, in order for it to be described clearly, the mode of contemporary production demands this variety of analyses, this breadth of views. One cannot understand post- Fordism without having recourse to a cluster of ethical-linguistic concepts. As is obvious, moreover, this is where the matter of fact lies in the progressive identification between poiesis and language, production and communication.

In order to name with a unifying term the forms of life and the linguistic games which characterize our era, I have used the notion of "multitude." This notion, the polar opposite of that of "people," is defined by a complex of breaks, landslides, and innovations which I have tried to point out. Let me cite some of them here, in no particular order: the life of the stranger (bios xenikos) being experienced as an ordinary condition; the prevalence of "common places" in discourse over "special" places; the publicness of the intellect. as much an apotropaic device as a pillar of social production; activity without end product (that is, virtuosity); the centrality of the principle of individuation; the relation with the possible in as much as it is possible (opportunism); the hypertrophic development of the non-referential aspects of language (idle talk). In the multitude there is a full historical, phenomenological, empirical display of the ontological condition of the human animal: biological artlessness, the indefinite or potential character of its existence, lack of a determined envi- ronment, the linguistic intellect as "compensation" for the shortage of specialized instincts. It is as if the root has risen to the surface, finally revealing itself to the naked eye. That which has always been true, is only now unveiled. The multitude is this: a fundamental biological configuration which becomes a historically determined way of being, ontology revealing itself phenomenologically. One could even say that the postFordist multitude manifests anthropogenesis as such on a historical-empirical level; that is to say, the genesis itself of the human animal, its distinguishing characteristics. The multitude epitomizes this genesis, it sums it up. Upon reflection, these rather abstract considerations are only another way of saying that the primary productive resource of contemporary capitalism lies in the linguistic-relational abilities of humankind, in the complex of communicative and cognitive faculties (dynameis, powers) which distinguish humans.

Our seminar is now over. That which could be said, has been (either well or poorly) said. Now, at the end of our circumnavigation of the continent of the "multitude," we need only to insist upon a few qualifying

aspects of our analysis. Towards that end, I propose ten statements on the multitude and post-Fordist capitalism. I call these statements theses only for the sake of convenience. They do not claim to be exhaustive, nor do they seek to oppose other possible analyses or definitions of post-Fordism. They

1have only the apodiptic appearance, and (I hope) the precision of authentic theses. Some of these statements could possibly have converged. making of themselves one "thesis." Furthermore, the sequence is arbitrary: that which figures as "thesis x" would lose nothing if it figured as "thesis y" (and vice versa). Finally, it must be understood that often I affirm or deny with more precision, or less nuance, than what might be correct or (prudent) to do. In some cases I shall say more than I think.

6.2. Thesis 1

Post-Fordism (and with it the multitude) appeared, in Italy, with the social unrest which is generally remembered as the "movement of 1977"

Post-Fordism, in Italy arose from the tumults of labor-power which was educated. uncertain, mobile; one which hated the work ethic and opposed, at tunes head on. the tradition and the culture of the historical left. marking a clear discontinuity with respect to assembly-line workers, with their practices and customs, with their ways of life. Post-Fordism arose from conflicts centered upon social figures which, despite their apparent marginal status, were about to become the authentic fulcrum of the new cycle of capitalistic development. Besides, it had already happened before that a radical revolution in the manner of production was accompanied by premature political strife among those strata of labor-power. which, a little later, would make up the supporting axis of the production of surplus value. It is enough to recall the dangerousness attributed in the eighteenth century to the British vagabonds, already thrown out of the fields and on the verge of being let in to the first factories. Or think of the struggles of the unskilled American workers from 1910 to 1920, struggles which preceded the Henry Ford and Frederick Taylor turning point, a turning point based precisely on the systematic removal of skill from labor. Every drastic metamorphosis of productive organization is destined from the start, to conjure up the pangs of the "original accumulation," forcing, all over again, the transformation of a relationship among things (new technologies, a different allocation of investments, etc.) into a social relationship. It is exactly in this delicate interval that, at times, the subjective aspect, which will later become an irrefutable course of fact, reveals itself.

The masterpiece of Italian capitalism consists of having transformed into a productive resource precisely those modes of behavior which, at first, made their appearance under the semblance of radical conflict. The conversion of the collective propensities of the 1977 movement (exit from the factories, indifference to steady employment, familiarity with learning and communication networks) into a renewed concept of professionalism (opportunism, idle talk, virtuosity, etc.): this is the most precious result of the Italian counter-revolution ("counter-revolution" meaning not the simple restoration of a previous state of affairs, but, literally, a revolution to the contrary, that is, a drastic innovation of the economy and institutions in order to re-launch productivity and political domination).

The 1977 movement had the misfortune of being treated as if it were a movement of marginal people and parasites. However, marginal and

parasitical was the point of view adopted by those making these accusations. In fact, they identified themselves entirely with the Fordist paradigm, believing that only a secure job in factories making lasting consumer goods was "central" and "productive. Thus they identified with a production cycle already in decline. Looking at it closely, the 1977 movement anticipated certain traits of the post-Fordist multitude. As angry and coarse as it was, however. the virtuosity of this movement was not servile.

6.3. Thesis 2

Post-Fordism is the empirical realization of the "Fragment on Machines" by Marx.

Marx writes: "The theft of alien labour time, on which the present wealth is based, appears a miserable foundation in face of this new one [(the automated system of machines) Virno addition, trans.] created by large-scale industry itself. As soon as labour in the direct form has ceased to be the great well-spring of wealth, labour time ceases and must cease to be its measure, and hence exchange value [must cease to be the measure] of use value. (Italics and brackets from Nicolaus's English translation, trans.)" (Grundrisse: 705). In the "Fragment on Machines" from the Grundrisse, from which I drew that citation, Marx upholds a thesis that is hardly Marxist: abstract knowledge- scientific knowledge, first and foremost, but not only that-moves towards becoming nothing less than the principal productive force, relegating parceled and repetitive labor to a residual position. We know that Marx turns to a fairly suggestive image to indicate the complex of knowledge which makes up the epicenter of social production and at the same time prearranges its vital confines: general intellect. The tendential pre-eminence of knowledge makes of labor time a "miserable foundation." The so-called "law of value" (according to which the value of a product is determined by the amount of labor time that went into it), which Marx considers the keystone of modern social relations, is, however, shattered and refuted by capitalist development itself.

It is at this point that Marx proposes a hypothesis on surpassing the rate of dominant production which is very different from the more famous hypotheses presen'ted in his other works. In the "Fragment," the crisis of capitalism is no longer attributed to the disproportions inherent in a means of production truly based on labor time supplied by individuals (it is no longer attributed, therefore, to the imbalances connected to the full force of the law, for example, to the fall of the rate of profit). Instead, there comes to the foreground the splitting contradiction between a productive process which directly and exclusively calls upon science, and a unit of measurement of wealth which still coincides with the quantity of labor incorporated in the products. The progressive widening of this differential means, according to Marx, that "production based on exchange value breaks down" (Grundrisse: 705) and leads thus to communism.

What is most obvious in the post-Ford era is the full factual realization of the tendency described by Marx without, however, any emancipating consequences. The disproportion between the role accomplished by

knowledge␣and the decreasing importance of labor time has given rise to new and stable forms of power, rather than to a hotbed of crisis. The radical metamorphosis of the very concept of production belongs, as always, in the sphere of working under a boss. More than alluding to the overcoming of what already exists, the "Fragment" is a toolbox for the sociologist. It describes an empirical reality which lies in front of all our eyes: the empirical reality of the post-Fordist structure.

6.4. Thesis 3

The crisis of the society of labor is reflected in the multitude itself.

The crisis of the society of labor certainly does not coincide with a linear shrinking of labor time. Instead, the latter exhibits an unheard of pervasiveness in today's world. The positions of Gorz and Rifkin on the "end of work" (Gorz, Reclaiming Work; Rifkin, The End of Work) are mistaken; they spread misunderstandings of all kinds; and even worse, they prevent us from focusing on the very question they raise.

The crisis of the society of labor consists to the fact (brought up thesis 2) that social wealth is produced from science, from the general intellect, rather than from the work delivered by individuals. The work demanded seems reducible to a virtually negligible portion of a life. Science, information, knowledge in general, cooperation, these present themselves as the key support system of production — these, rather than labor time. Nevertheless, this labor time continues to be valid as a parameter of social development and of social wealth. Thus, the overflow of labor from society establishes a contradictory process, a theater of violent oppositions and disturbing paradoxes. Labor time is the unit of measurement in use, but no longer the true one unit of measurement. To ignore one or the other of the two sides — that is, to emphasize either the validity alone, or the lack of veracity alone — does not take us far: in the first case, one does not become aware of the crisis of the society of labor, in the second case one ends up guaranteeing conciliatory representations in the manner of Gorz or Rifkin.

The surpassing of the society of labor occurs in the forms prescribed by the social system based on wage labor. Overtime, which is a potential source of wealth, manifests itself as poverty: wages compensation, structural unemployment (brought on by investments. not by the lack thereof), unlimited flexibility in the use of labor-power, proliferation of hierarchies. re- establishment of archaic disciplinary, measures to control individuals no longer subject to the rules of the factory system. This is the magnetic storm which allows. on the phenomenological␣plane, for the "surpassing" which is paradoxical to the point of taking place upon the very foundation of that which was to be surpassed.

Let me repeat the key-phrase: the surpassing of the society of labor comes about in compliance with the rules of wage labor. This phrase can be applied to the post-Fordist situation in the same manner as Marx's observation regarding the first stock companies. Marx writes: "the joint-stock system is an

abolition of capitalist private industry on the basis of the capitalist system itself" (Capital, Volume 3: 570). That is to say: the stock companies assert the possibility of escaping the regime of private property, but this assertion always takes place within the realm of private property and, indeed, increases disproportionately the power of the latter. The difficulty, with reference to post- Fordism as well as to the stock companies, lies in considering simultaneously the two contradictory points of view, that is to say, subsistence and ending, validity and surmountability.

The crisis of the society of labor (if correctly understood) implies that all of post-Fordist labor-power can be described using the categories with which Marx analyzed the "industrial reserve army," that is, unemployment. Marx believed that the "industrial reserve army" was divisible into three types or figures: fluid (today we would speak of turn-over, early retirement, etc.), latent (where at any moment a technological innovation could intervene, reducing employment), stagnant (in current terms: working under the table, temporary work, atypical work). According to Marx, it is the mass of the unemployed which is fluid, latent or stagnant, certainly not the employed labor class; they are a marginal sector of labor-power, not its main sector. Yet, the crisis of the society of labor (with the complex characteristics which I tried to outline earlier) causes these three determining categories to apply, in effect, to all labor-power. Fluid, or latent, or stagnant, applies to the employed labor class as such. Each allocation of wage labor allows the nonnecessity of that labor and the excessive social cost inherent in that labor to leak out. But this non- necessity, as always, manifests itself as a perpetuation of wage labor in temporary or "flexible" forms,

6.5. Thesis 4

For the post-Fordist multitude every qualitative difference between labor time and non-labor time falls short.

Social time, in today's world, seems to have come unhinged because there is no longer anything which distinguishes labor from the rest of human activities. Therefore. since work ceases to constitute a special and seperate praxis, with distinctive criteria and procedures in effect at its center, completely different from those criteria and procedures which regulate non-labor time, there is not a clean, well-defined threshold separating labor time from non-labor time. In Fordism, according to Gramsci, the intellect remains outside of production; only when the work has been finished does the Fordist worker read the newspaper, go to the local party headquarters, think, have conversations. In post-Fordism, however, since the "life of the mind" is included fully within the time-space of production, en essential homogeneity prevails.

Labor and non-labor develop an identical form of productivity, based on the exercise of generic human faculties: language, memory, sociability, ethical and aesthetic inclinations, the capacity for abstraction and learning. From the point of view of "what" is done and "how" it is done, there is no substantial difference between employment and unemployment. It could be said that: unemployment is non-remunerated labor and labor, in turn, is remunerated

unemployment. Working endlessly can be justified with good reasons, and working less and less frequently can be equally justified. These paradoxical formulas, contradicting each other, when put together demonstrate how social time has come unhinged.

The old distinction between "labor" and "non-labor" ends up in the distinction between remunerated life and non-remunerated life. The bor-der between these two lives is arbitrary, changeable, subject to political decision making.

The productive cooperation in which labor-power participates is always larger and richer than the one put into play by the labor process. It includes also the world of non-labor, the experiences and knowledge matured out side of the factory and the office. Labor-power increases the value of capital only because it never loses its qualities of non-labor (that is, its inherent connection to a productive cooperation richer than the one implicit in the labor process in the strictest sense of the term).

Since social cooperation precedes end exceeds the work process, post- Fordist labor is always, also, hidden labor. This expression should not be taken here to mean labor which is un-contracted, "under the table." Hidden labor is, in the first place, non-remunerated life, that is to say the pert of human activity which, alike in every respect to the activity of labor, is not, however, calculated as productive force.

The crucial point here is to recognize that in the realm of labor, experiences which mature outside of labor bold predominant weight; et the same time, we must be aware that this more general sphere of experience, once included in the productive process, is subordinate to the rules of the mode of capitalistic production. Here also there is a double risk: either to deny the breadth of what is included in the mode of production, or, in the name of this breadth, to deny the existence of a specific mode of production.

6.6. Thesis 5

In post-Fordism there exists a permanent disproportion between "labor time" and the more ample "production time."

Marx distinguishes between "labor time" and "production time" in chapters XII and XIII of the second book of the Capital. Think of the cycle of sowing and harvesting. The farm laborer works for a month (labor time); then a long interval follows for the growing of the grain (production time, but no longer labor time); and at last, the period of harvesting arrives (once again, labor time). In agriculture and other sectors, production is more extensive than labor activity, in the proper sense of the term; the latter makes up hardly a fraction of the overall cycle. The pairing of the terms "labor time"/"production time" is an extraordinarily pertinent conceptual tool for understanding post-Fordist reality, that is to say, the modern expression of the social working day. Beyond the examples from agriculture adopted by Marx, the disproportion between "production" and "labor" fits fairly well the situation described in "Fragment on Machines"; in other words, it fits a situation in which labor time

presents itself as "miserable residue."

The disproportion takes on two different forms. In the first place, it is revealed within every single working day of every single worker. The worker oversees and coordinates (labor time) the automatic system of machines (whose function defines production time); the worker's activity often ends up being a sort of maintenance. It could be said that in the post-Fordist environment production time is interrupted only at intervals by labor time. While sowing is a necessary condition for the subsequent phase of the grain's growth, the modern activity of overseeing and coordinating is placed, from beginning to end, alongside the automated process.

There is a second, and more radical, way of conceiving this disproportion. In post-Fordism "production time" includes non-labor time, duringhich social cooperation takes its root (see thesis 4). Hence I define "production time" as that indissoluble unity of remunerated life and non-remunerated life, labor and non-labor, emerged social cooperation and Submerged social cooperation. "Labor time" is only one component, and not necessarily the most prominent one, of "production time" understood in this way. This evidence drives us to reformulate, in part or entirely, the theory of surplus-value. According to Marx, surplus-value springs from surplus-labor, that is, from the difference between necessary labor (which compensates the capitalist for the expense sustained in acquiring the laborpower) and the entirety of the working day. So then, one would have to say that in the post-Fordist era, surplus-value is determined above all by the gap between production time which is not calculated as labor time and labor time in the true sense of the term. What matters is not only the disproportion, inherent in labor time, between necessary labor and surplus- labor, but also, and perhaps even more, the disproportion between production time (which includes non-labor, its own distinctive productivity) and labor time.

6.7. Thesis 6

In one way, post-Fordism is characterized by the co-existence of the most diverse productive models and, in another way, by essentially homogeneous socialization which takes place outside of the workplace.

Differently from the Fordist organization of labor, today's organization of labor is always spotty. Technological innovation is not universal: more than determining an unequivocal and leading productive model, it keeps a myriad of different models alive, including the resuscitation of some outdated and anachronistic models. Post-Fordism re-edits the entire history of labor, from islands of mass labor to enclaves of professional workers, from re-inflated independent labor to reinstated forms of personal power. The production models which have followed one another during this long period re-present themselves synchronically, as if according to the standards of a World's Fair. The background and the hypothesis behind this proliferation of differences, this shattering of organizing forms, is established, however, by the general intellect, by computerized data communication technology, by productive cooperation which includes within itself the time of non-labor. Paradoxically, just when knowledge and language become the principal productive force,

there is an unrestrained multiplication of the models of labor organization, not to mention their eclectic co-existence.

We may well ask what the software engineer has in common with the Fiat worker, or with the temporary worker. We must have the courage to answer: precious little. with regard to job description, to professional skills, to the nature of the labor process. But we can also answer: everything, with regard to the make-up and contents of the socialization of single individuals outside of the work place. That is to say, these workers have in common emotional tonalities, interests, mentality, expectations. Except that, while in the advanced sectors this homogeneous ethos (opportunism, idle talk, etc.) is included in production and delineates professional profiles, this ethos strengthens, instead, the "world of life" for those who fall into the traditional sectors, as well as for the border-workers who swing between work and unemployment. To put it succinctly: the seam is to be found between the opportunism at work and the universal opportunism demanded by the urban experience. The essentially unitary character of socialization detached from the labor process stands in counterpoint to the fragmentation of productive models, to their World's Fair style co-existence.

6.8. Thesis 7

In Post-Fordism, the general intellect does not coincide with fixed capital, but manifests itself principally as a linguistic reiteration of living labor.

As was already said on the second day of our seminar, Marx, without reserve, equated the general intellect (that is, knowledge as principal productive force) with fixed capital, with the "objective scientific capacity" inherent in the system of machines. In this way he omitted the dimension, absolutely preeminent today, in which the general intellect presents itself as living labor. It is necessary to analyze post-Fordist production in order to support this criticism. In so-called "second-generation independent labor," but also in the operational procedures of a radically reformed factory such as the Fiat factory in Melfi, it is not difficult to recognize that the connection between knowledge and production is not at all exhausted within the system of machines; on the contrary, it articulates itself in the linguistic cooperation of men and women, in their actually acting in concert. In the Post-Fordist environment, a decisive role is played by the infinite variety of concepts and logical schemes which cannot ever be set within fixed capital, being inseparable from the reiteration of a plurality of living subjects. The general intellect includes, thus, formal and informal knowledge, imagination. ethical propensities, mindsets, and "linguistic games." In contemporary labor processes, there are thoughts and discourses which function as productive "machines," without having to adopt the form of a mechanical body or of an electronic valve.

The general intellect becomes an attribute of living labor when the activity of the latter consists increasingly of linguistic services. Here we touch upon the lack of foundation in Jürgen Habermas's position. Inspired by Hegel's teachings in Jena (Habermas, Arbeit and Interaktion), he contrasts labor with interaction, "instrumental or `strategic' action" with "communicative action." In

his judgment, the two spheres answer to standards that are mutually incommensurable: labor comes straight from the logic of means/ends, linguistic interaction rests upon exchange, upon reciprocal recognition, upon the sharing of an identical ethos. Today, however, wage labor (employed, surplus-value producing labor) is interaction. The labor process is no longer taciturn, but loquacious. "Communicative action" no longer holds its privileged, even exclusive, place within ethicalcultural relations or within politics, no longer lies outside the sphere of the material reproduction of life. To the contrary, the dialogical word is seated at the very heart of capitalistic production. In short: to understand fully the rules of post-Fordist labor, it is necessary to turn more and more to Saussure and Wittgenstein. It is true that these authors lost interest in the social relations of production; nevertheless, since they reflected so deeply on linguistic experience, they have more to teach us about the "loquacious factory" than do the professional economists.

It has already been stated that one part of the labor time of an individual is destined to enrich and strengthen productive cooperation itself, the mosaic in which the individual serves as one tessera. To put it more clearly: the task of a worker is that of rendering better and more varied the connection between individual labor and the services of others. It is this reflective character of labor activity which insists that in labor the linguistic-relational aspects assume an increasing importance; it also insists that opportunism and idle talk become tools of great importance. Hegel spoke of an "astuteness of labor," meaning by this expression the capacity to further natural causality, with the aim of utilizing its power in view of a determined goal. Accordingly, in the realm of post-Fordism, Hegel's "astuteness" has been supplanted by Heidegger's "idle talk."

6.9. Thesis 8

The whole of post-Fordist labor-power, even the most unskilled, is an intellectual labor-power, the "intellectuality of the masses."

I use the term "intellectuality of the masses" for the whole of post-Ford era living labor (not including certain specially qualified industries of the tertiary sector) in that it is a depository of cognitive and communicative skills which cannot be objectified within the system of machines. The intellectuality of the masses is the preeminent form in which, today, the general intellect reveals itself (see thesis 7). I hardly need to say that I do not refer in any way to any imaginary erudition of subordinate labor; I certainly do not think that today's workers are experts in the fields of molecular biology or classical philology. As was already mentioned in the preceding days, what stands out is rather the intellect in general, the most generic aptitudes of the mind: the faculty of language, the inclination to learn, memory, the ability to abstract and to correlate, the inclination toward self-reflection. The intellectuality of the masses has nothing to do with acts of thought (books, algebraic formulas, etc.) but with the simple faculty of thought and verbal communication. Language (like intellect or memory) is much more diffuse and less specialized than what has been thought. It is not the scientists, but the simple speakers who are a good example of the intellectuality of the masses. They have

nothing to do with the new "worker aristocracy"; rather, they stand at the opposite pole. Upon close reflection, the intellectuality of the masses does nothing less than prove completely true, for the first time, the Marxist definition of laborpower already cited: "the aggregate of those mental and physical capabilities existing in the physical form, the living personality, of a human being" (Capital, Volume 1: 270).

With regard to the intellectuality of the masses, it is necessary to avoid those deadly simplifications that befall those who are always searching for comfortable repetitions of past experiences. A way of being that has its fulcrum in knowledge and language cannot be defined according to economic- productive categories. In sum, we are not dealing here with the last link of that chain whose preceding links are, as far as I know, the worker by trade and the assembly-line worker. The characteristic aspects of the intellectuality of the masses, its identity, so to speak, cannot be found in relation to labor, but, above all, on the level of life forms, of cultural consumption, of linguistic practices. Nevertheless, and this is the other side of the coin, just when production is no longer in any way the specific locus of the formation of identity, exactly at that point does it project itself into every aspect of experience, subsuming linguistic competencies, ethical propensities, and the nuances of subjectivity.

The intellectuality of the masses lies at the heart of this dialectic. Because it is difficult to describe in economic-productive terms, for this reason exactly (and not in spite of this reason). it is a fundamental component of today's capitalistic accumulation, The intellectuality of the masses (another name for the multitude) is at the center of the post-Ford economy precisely because its mode of being completely avoids the concepts of the political economy,

6.10. Thesis 9

The multitude throws the "theory of proletarianization" out of the mix.

intelligence, even though they are not all specialized duties (we are not speaking of engineers or philologists here, but of ordinary workers). That which is not reducible to "simple" labor is, if you will, the cooperative quality of the concrete operations carried out by the intellectuality of the masses.

In Marxist theoretical discussion, the comparison between "complex" (intellectual, that is) labor and "simple" (unskilled) labor has provoked more than a few problems. What is the unit of measurement which permits this comparison? The prevalent answer is: the unit of measurement coincides with "simple" labor, along with the pure waste of psychophysical energy; "complex" labor is merely a multiple of "simple" labor. The ratio between one and the other can be determined by considering the different cost of education (school, varied specializations, etc.) for the intellectual labor-power as opposed to the unskilled labor-power. Little of this old and controversial question interests me; here I would like, however, to capitalize on the terminology used in its regard. I hold that the intellectuality of the masses (see thesis 8) in its totality is "complex" labor — but, note carefully — "complex" labor which is not reducible to "simple" labor. The complexity, as well as the irreducibility, comes from the fact that this labor-power mobilizes, in the fulfilling of its work duties, linguistic-cognitive competencies which are generically human. These competencies, or faculties, cause the duties of the individual to be characterized always by a high rate of sociability and

To say that all post-Ford era labor is complex labor, irreducible to simple labor, means also to confirm that today the "theory of proletarianization" is completely out of the mix. This theory had its peak of honor in signaling the potential comparability of intellectual labor to manual labor. Precisely for this reason, the theory ends up unsuited for accounting for the intellectuality of the masses or, and this is the same thing, for accounting for living labor as general intellect. The theory of proletarianization fails when intellectual (or complex) labor cannot be equated with a network of specialized knowledge, but becomes one with the use of the generic linguistic-cognitive faculties of the human animal. This is the conceptual (and practical) movement which modifies all the terms of the question.

The lack of proletarianization certainly does not mean that qualified workers retain privileged niches. Instead it means that the sort of homogeneity by subtraction which the concept of "proletariat" usually implies does not characterize all post-Fordist labor-power, as complex or intellectual as it may be. In other words, the lack of proletarianization means that post-Ford labor is multitude, not people.

6.11. Thesis 10

Post-Fordism is the "communism of capital."

The metamorphosis of social systems in the West, during the 1930's, has at times been designated with an expression as clear as it is apparently paradoxical: socialism of capital. With this term one alludes to the determining role taken on by the State within the economic cycle, to the end of the laissez- faire liberalist, to the processes of centralization and planning guided by public industry, to the politics of full employment, to the beginning of Welfare. The capitalistic response to the October Revolution and the crisis of 1929 was the gigantic socialization (or better, nationalization) of the means of production. To put it in the words of Marx which I cited a little while ago, there was "an abolition of the capitalist private industry on the basis of the capitalist system itself" (Capital, Volume 3: 570).

The metamorphosis of social systems in the West, during the 1980's and 1990's, can be synthesized in a more pertinent manner with the expression: communism of capital. This means that the capitalistic initiative orchestrates for its own benefit precisely those material and cultural conditions which would guarantee a calm version of realism for the potential communist. Think of the objectives which constitute the fulcrum of such a prospect: the abolition of that intolerable scandal, the persistence of wage labor; the extinction of the State as an industry of coercion and as a "monopoly of political decision-making"; the valorization of all that which renders the life of an individual unique. Yet, in the course of the last twenty years, an insidious and terrible interpretation of

these same objectives has been put forth. First of all, the irreversible shrinking of socially necessary labor time has taken place, with an increase in labor time for those on the "inside" and the alienation of those on the "outside." Even when squeezed by temporary workers, the entity of employed workers presents itself as "overpopulation" or as the "industrial reserve army." Secondly, the radical crisis, or actually the desegregation, of the national States expresses itself as the miniature reproduction, like a Chinese box, of the form-of-State. Thirdly. after the fall of a "universal equivalent" capable of operating effectively, we witness a fetishistic cult of differences — except that these differences, claiming a substantial surreptitious foundation. give rise to all sorts of domineering and discriminating hierarchies.

If we can say that Fordism incorporated, and rewrote in its own way, some aspects of the socialist experience, then post-Fordism has fundamentally dismissed both Keynesianism and socialism. Post-Fordism, hinging as it does upon the general intellect and the multitude, puts forth, in its own way, typical demands of communism (abolition of work, dissolution of the State, etc.). Post-Fordism is the communism of capital.

Following on the heels of the Ford era, there was the socialist revolution in Russia (and, even if defeated, an attempt at revolution in western Europe). It is appropriate to ask which experience of social unrest served as the prelude to post-Fordism. Well, I believe that during the 1960's and 1970's there was, in the West, a defeated revolution — the first revolution aimed not against poverty and backwardness, but specifically against the means of capitalistic production, thus, against wage labor. If I speak of a defeated revolution, it is not because a lot of people were blathering on about revolution. I am not referring to the circus of subjectivity, but to a sober fact: for a long period of time, both in the factories and in the lower income urban areas, in the schools as in certain fragile state institutions, two opposing powers confronted one another, resulting in the paralysis of political decision-making. From this point of view — objective, serious — it can be maintained that in Italy and in other Western countries there was a defeated revolution. Post-Fordism, or the "communism of capital," is the answer to this defeated revolution, so different from those of the 1920's. The quality of the "answer" is equal to and opposed to the quality of the "question." I believe that the social struggles of the 1960's and 1970's expressed non-socialist demands, indeed anti-socialist demands: radical criticism of labor; an accentuated taste for differences, or, if you prefer, a refining of the "principle of individuation"; no longer the desire to take possession of the State, but the aptitude (at times violent, certainly) for defending oneself from the State, for dissolving the bondage to the State as such. It is not difficult to recognize communist inspiration and orientation in the failed revolution of the 1960's and 1970's. For this reason, post-Fordism, which constitutes a response to that revolution, has given life to a sort of paradoxical "communism of capital."

IMMIGRANTS AS POLITICAL PRISONERS: THE STORY OF "PEDRO"

2012-01-27T16:51:00.002-06:00

As regular readers of Scission are aware on Friday, I report on political prisoners. Today will be no different, well, a wee bit different as you will see. I report to you today the all to common story of "Pedro." Following his story is one that explains, if it needs explaining, why Pedro's case belongs here, on Friday, with all the other political prisoners held in the USA.

The first story below is from Detention Watch Network. Following that is a piece from Un Pueblo Sin Fronteras.

EMILY'S STRUGGLE: A HUSBAND AND FATHER REMOVED FROM HIS FAMILY

Posted: July 13, 2010

Pedro’s Story:

Pedro was only 8 years old when he entered the United States. This is his story told by his wife, Emily Guzman.

How it all began…

Approximately 3 years ago, Pedro's mother went in to the immigration office for her permanent residency interview. Our biggest mistake, in hindsight, was not sending a lawyer with her. She is older and her memory is not great. In the interview, she made a mistake and was denied permanent residency. Pedro was then sent a Notice to Appear in Court by immigration authorities. The problem occurred when they sent the Notice to Appear to the wrong address even though they had the correct address. They had sent him his work visa and other paperwork to his correct address earlier that same year. When he did not appear to the court date, because he did not receive the order to appear in court, he was issued an order of deportation.

Our thoughts upon receiving the letter of deportation:

After he was issued an order of deportation, we consulted a lawyer. Unfortunately, we did not have the money at the time to hire him. I was also under the naive assumption that because I am a United States citizen and we have an American born son, that Pedro would be protected.

Everything happened so fast, Pedro was gone in just a moment…

On Friday September 25, 2009, at 4am in the morning, there was a loud banging on the door and someone shouting, "Police! Open up!" I knew it was immigration. I also knew it was better not to open the door. They banged and yelled and shined flashlights into our windows. We were terrified! After about 30 minutes of banging and fear, they left. Logan, our 3 year old son, was terrified and traumatized. So were we. We called the lawyer that day and the lawyer did not call us back. We spent the weekend on edge. On Monday September 28, 2009 at 8am, Pedro, Logan and I walked out of the house. Pedro was carrying bags to take to Goodwill and load up into the car. Logan and I were going to have breakfast.

Suddenly, an SUV drove up and two men jumped out and grabbed Pedro. They handcuffed him and told us that they were from ICE and they would be detaining him because of an order of deportation. I told them that my son was only 3 years old and did not understand what was going on. I asked them if he could say goodbye to his father. To my surprise, after several requests, they agreed to let them say goodbye. Pedro was still handcuffed so they could not hug. Pedro was able to give Logan one kiss and say goodbye.

Pedro’s detention history:

Pedro was first detained in Wake County jail. After one day, he was transferred to Alamance County jail, a local jail, in North Carolina run by the Sheriff that ICE rents bed space from. We hired the lawyer with the help of my mother and grandmother that week. He was in Alamance for about a month.

During this stay, we made one attempt at visiting Pedro with Logan. It was a disaster. Alamance County Jail has visitation through video camera. Logan did not understand why his dad was on TV and had a complete meltdown. I visited him alone 3 more times.
At the beginning of October, Pedro was transferred to North Georgia Detention Center in Gainesville Georgia. I drove 5 hours there for a 1 hour visit through glass and then I drove five hours back, all in one day.

Six weeks later immigration authorities admitted their mistake (sending vital information to the wrong address) and agreed to reopen the case and stay his deportation temporarily until a final decision about the case. We were optimistic.

On November 12, 2009, Pedro was transferred to Stewart Detention Center in Lumpkin, Georgia (9 hours from where we live.) During the month of December, there were three different court dates that were scheduled and cancelled by the judge. He eventually had a bond hearing on December 9th and a Master Calendar hearing on December 21st. That month the judge asked for tax documents and I immediately got tax documents for 2000-2008. The lawyer submitted them. Judge Cassidy had stated that filing taxes proves good moral character. The weekend of the 11th, Logan and I went to visit Pedro driving 20 hours in one weekend. The visit went well but it was also heartbreaking to see Pedro and Logan playing "hide and seek" through glass.

On December 15, 2009, the judge stated that he did not believe that Pedro was eligible for relief under Nicaraguan Adjustment and Central Relief Act (NACARA), did not want to entertain Pedro’s case for immigration relief, and denied him bond. There was another master calendar hearing set for January 4, 2010. Pedro decided to write a letter and read it to the judge. Judge Cassidy refused to hear the letter read.

On January 4, 2010, there was miscommunication between the lawyer and the judge and they continued the Master Calendar hearing to January 25, 2010. We began to consult second opinions. On January 8, 2010, we decided to hire a new lawyer because he had experience with Judge Cassidy. On January 15, 2010, the appeal for the bond decision was filed. On January 25, 2010, Judge Cassidy still stated that Pedro was not eligible for NACARA relief.

On February 16th, Pedro was finally granted a court date to present his case, which was scheduled for March 18, 2010. We began to prepare witnesses and make travel plans in order to prove extreme hardship if he was deported and also that he has good moral character.

On March 18, 2010, two of my friends drove 10 hours and my mother, Logan, my sister-in-law, and I drove 9 hours to attend the court date. Shortly after we arrived, we spoke with the attorney who stated that the Judge still did not believe that Pedro was eligible for NACARA. As we waited to hear the judge explain to us why he was not going to give Pedro a court date, the attorney showed me the statute in the immigration law that clearly stated that Pedro was eligible. When we entered the courtroom and sat down, Pedro also entered the courtroom. At that moment I quickly touched his hand. It has been the only time in 8 months we have been able to touch each other and it lasted about 5 seconds. The judge then proceeded to tell us that he still did not believe that Pedro was eligible for NACARA and that his final decision was to deport Pedro. He also said that we could appeal his decision.

After the terrible mishap of a "court date" we problem solved with the attorney. Under NACARA, an applicant is disqualified if they have an “aggravated felony” conviction, which Pedro does not have. Pedro had two misdemeanor marijuana charges (possession of less than a packet of sugar in size) in winter 1998 when he was a teenager. Under the immigration law, “aggravated felonies” do not, in fact, have to be felonies. One of Judge Cassidy's justifications for deciding ineligibility was that these two nonviolent misdemeanors constituted an aggravated felony, thus warranting Pedro’s mandatory detention without the possibility of bond and taking away his ability to stay in the United States. Our lawyer stated that it could help if we had the two misdemeanor marijuana convictions vacated. We contacted a lawyer in California.

At the beginning of April we received notice that the bond appeal (that we filed in January) was granted!! We were so excited!! Surely it meant he could get out! Our hearts fell when we found out that the Immigration Board of Appeals still had to make a recommendation, which would then be sent to Judge Cassidy, who still makes the final decision. On April 7, 2010, Judge Cassidy ignored the Board of Appeals’ recommendation and denied Pedro bond. In the document denying Pedro's bond, Judge Cassidy made statements that were completely untrue about Pedro as if he never read his file.

On May 6, 2010, one of the convictions was vacated because the lawyer argued effectively that Pedro was not properly informed that the conviction could affect his immigration status. On May 9, 2010, the appeal for the final decision on Pedro’s eligibility to stay in the U.S. was filed to the Board of Immigration Appeals. Additionally, on May 18, 2010, a motion to reopen the case was filed, due to new information (new information being the vacated conviction).

Where is the case now?

Currently, we are awaiting the decision for the motion to reopen and if the Judge agrees to reopen the case, we can file a request for bond again. We are also waiting for the decision about the appeal of the final decision to deport Pedro.

I AM HAPPY TO REPORT THAT PEDRO IS NOW FREE. ALL IT TOOK WAS A HUGE CAMPAIGN, FAMILY, FRIENDS, AND MONTHS AND MONTHS IN DETENTION TO GET THE GOVERNMENT TO GIVE BACK PEDRO'S LIFE.

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

32,000 Migrant Political Prisoners in the U.S.A

By Raúl Alcaraz Ochoa // www.antifronteras.com

November 11, 2011

Cuba. Nigeria. Mexico. Panama. Guatemala. The Philippines. El Salvador. Honduras. Iran. Cameroon. India. Haiti. Colombia. Brazil. Fiji. Vietnam. Pakistan. Barbados. Ecuador. Ghana. Iraq. Guinea. Afghanistan.

These are some of the many countries of origin of the more than 32,000 migrants from all over the world held prisoners in immigration detention centers on any given day throughout the United States.

Their crime? Being born poor, wanting a better life and/or being political or economic refugees and asylum seekers. In many countries, the U.S. has caused either the political conditions that force people to migrate (such as Afghanistan or Haiti) or the economic policies that impoverish people in that country (such as Mexico or Honduras).

Many have been forced to migrate to the United States to improve their chances at survival and sustainability. Feeling the political threat of a migrant population, largely non-white, what does the U.S. government do?

The so-called ‘nation of immigrants’ spends billions of dollars criminalizing, persecuting, targeting, detaining, arresting and deporting the migrant population so highly regarded as a political threat to the national security of this state. Thus, the detention and deportation system is massive.

The ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) detention system is made up of detention beds, located in about 350 facilities nationwide. Only a few facilities are operated by the Department of Homeland Security/I.C.E. Most are actually state and county lock-ups and for-profit prisons—like Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) and Geo Group—where migrants are detained under federal contracts.

Militarizing the border and persecuting and detaining migrants seem to be key national security priorities. The Homeland Security 2011 budget includes:

$4.6 billion to support 20,000 Border Patrol agents and complete the first segment of Customs and Border Protection’s (CBP) virtual border fence.
Includes $94 million for 300 new CBP Officers for passenger and cargo screening at ports of entry as well as expansion of pre-screening operations at foreign airports and land ports of entry.
More than $1.6 billion for Immigration and Customs Enforcement programs to expeditiously identify and remove from the United States undocumented people. Included in this total is continued support for the Secure Communities program.
$137 million for enhancements and expansion of immigration related verification programs (E-Verify) at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.

In fiscal year 2011 over 396,906 people went through immigration custody and were eventually deported.
Over 32,000 immigration detainees are in custody on any given day
The ACLU and other national groups and reports have documented systematic cases of physical and sexual abuse and medical negligence, among other inhumane conditions, in detention centers. http://www.acluaz.org/detention-report-2011
The immigration detention system costs taxpayers $166 per day, per detainee (that’s $60,590/year).

For fiscal year 2012, DHS proposes the following:

Detention Beds: The FY 2012 Budget increases U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Custody Operations funding by $157.7 million to support 33,400 detention beds and remove more than 200,000 criminal aliens in FY 2012.

These statistics speak to how politically and financially invested the U.S. government is to detain and remove as many “removable aliens” as possible.

One point to make clear is that the 32,000 people incarcerated are not detainees. They are political prisoners.

According to Random House Word Menu, a political prisoner is “a person deemed politically dangerous by state and falsely imprisoned for supposed crimes.”

In the past I have had family members held in detention. My mom, dad and myself got a nice, big welcoming by Border Patrol agents–we were placed in detention. I was a baby. I was practically almost born in a detention custody. And currently I have friends in immigration detention. They are political prisoners because their very existence is considered subversive and a threat to the political and economic/capitalist structures of the U.S. nation state. Migrants, by in large, defy border lines, undermine legal structures, reject law enforcement authority, work outside the formal capitalist economy, rarely depend on state institutions, and are mostly non-traceable by the state. In short, migrants represent a defiance to U.S. power, authority and control.

Now a migrant coming to the U.S. to work to feed her family may or may not recognize her actions as political. But the U.S. views them as such and therefore politically imprisons hundreds of thousands (more like millions if you count the larger U.S. prison population). This is the basis of migrant imprisonment, even though it is masked in law and order rhetoric.

By regarding migrants in detention centers as political prisoners rather than detainees we in effect reject the legitimacy of their imprisonment and by extension the entire system of detention, deportation and incarceration.

Prior to 1890 there were no detention centers anywhere.

A world without detentions and prisons is possible.

Please check out the following links:

ACLU Report “In their Own Words” http://www.acluaz.org/detention-report-2011

“Immigration Detention: The Case for Abolition” http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jane-guskin/immigration-detention-the_b_121374.html

Detention Watch Network http://www.detentionwatchnetwork.org/aboutdetention

Critical Resistance http://criticalresistance.org/

NMD Report: “A Culture of Cruelty” http://www.nomoredeaths.org/cultureofcruelty.html

THE SHORT WALK FROM SCHOOL TO PRISON

2012-01-26T16:08:00.000-06:00

SCHOOL DAYS

Often we have discussed here the mass incarceration of African American males going on in this countries. One of the gateways to prison it turns out are schools. We have filled our schools with cops, turned them into little police states, and used them to shuffle off black kids to the injustice system in this country. It is shocking when you actually bother to look into what is happening. Shocking, but not particularly surprising.

Mariame Kaba, whose blog Prison Culture is one of my favorites, writes,

In Chicago, where I live, each public high school is assigned two police officers at a cost of $75,000 a year each. This is in addition to security staff that already work in our schools. In Chicago and other cities across the country, the police serve as a gateway to the school-to-prison pipeline. I believe that a lack of data transparency contributes to the invisibility of this pipeline for most parents and community members.

Kaba and and a fellow named Frank Edwards have done something to rip the veil off the pipeline, and have co-authored the report you will find below. I will print a short description of the report and an excerpt from the introduction, but I would recommend you all go to Policing Chicago Public Schools and read it in full...OR JUST CLICK ON THE LINK AT THE BOTTOM OF THIS POST.

About This Report…

“Our schools have become almost like satellite police stations.” – Steve Drizin

From Representing the Pipeline (7/31/10)

“Policing Chicago Public Schools: A Gateway to the School-to-Prison Pipeline” written by Mariame Kaba &Frank Edwards relies on data from the Chicago Police Department (CPD) to show (for the first time in seven years) the type of offenses and the demographics (gender, age and race) of the juveniles arrested on CPS property in calendar year 2010. We are limited because CPD reports data by police district rather than by individual school. A FOIA request filed by First Defense Legal Aid to the Chicago Public Schools requesting school-level arrest data has gone unfulfilled even after several months.

In the 2003-2004 academic year, CPS had about 1,700 security staff, nearly tripling in number in five years. We were unable to obtain the current number of security guards in CPS despite repeated requests. We are sure that this number exceeds the 1,700 from the 2003-2004 academic year. The presence of so many security staff and especially police officers in schools means that school discipline issues quickly turn into police records.

In our discussions about the school-to-prison pipeline, we need concrete examples of how the process works. As such, it is important to understand the role that police and security staff play in our schools. Yet reports about police involvement in CPS have unfortunately not been readily available to the public. There is no easily accessible citywide or statewide data that illustrate how many students are arrested in schools each year. The last report that was written about the role of police in Chicago Public Schools was published in 2005 by the Advancement Project. That report, “Education on Lockdown,” found that Chicago Public Schools (CPS) referred over 8,000 students to law enforcement in 2003. Forty percent of these referrals were for simple assault or battery with no serious injuries. Most of these cases were dismissed.

Our purpose in writing this report is to ensure that the public is informed about the scope and extent of policing in Chicago Public Schools. We hope that this will galvanize educators, parents, students, policymakers and community members to advocate for a dramatic decrease of CPS’s reliance on law enforcement to address school discipline issues. Instead, we would like to see an increase in the use of restorative justice, which is an effective approach, to respond to student misbehavior in our schools.

In light of a push for budget austerity, limited resources should be re-directed away from policing and into affirming programs and opportunities for students. This, we believe, will improve the overall well-being of all stakeholders in the educational system (most especially students). We also call on our city council to improve data transparency by passing an ordinance requiring CPS and CPD to report quarterly on the numbers of students arrested in the district. Having timely and reliable information will support efforts to hold CPS and CPD accountable. Finally, we believe that student privacy should be protected rather than further eroded. Current reporting practices between schools and law enforcement do not need to be reformed to increase the exchange of student information between these parties.

The key findings in this report include that:

There were 6,430 total arrests on Chicago Public School properties in 2010;
Of these, 5,574 were juvenile (under 18 years old) arrests on Chicago Public School properties. School-based arrests of youth accounted for 20 percent of all juvenile arrests (27,563) in the city of Chicago in 2010.
Black youth accounted for 74 percent of juvenile school-based arrests in 2010; while Latino youth represented 22.5 percent of these arrests. 45 percent of CPS students are African American while 41 percent are Latino (CPS, 2009). This suggests that black students are disproportionately targeted for arrest in CPS.
Nearly a third (27%) of juvenile school-based arrest offenses issimple battery. This suggests that a significant number of CPS students are probably being arrested for fighting.
The highest aggregate numbers of juvenile school-based arrests are in the 4^th, 6^th, 8^th, 22^nd, and 5^th police districts. Together these five districts account for 39% of total juvenile school-based arrests on CPS property.

For any questions about this report, please contact Project NIA atprojectnia@hotmail.com.

Download “Policing Chicago Public Schools .”

Introduction (Excerpt)

Last summer, Chicago Public Schools (CPS) proposed purchasing new surveillance cameras for fourteen (14) high schools at a cost of $7 million dollars. The Chicago Tribune reported that:

“Footage from up to 80 high-definition cameras could be monitored by CPS and will be fed to a nearby police station, then linked into the citywide network of surveillance cameras. That network includes cameras operated by the Chicago Police Department, Office of Emergency Management and Communications and Chicago Transit Authority. Images from the cameras can also be viewed on officials’ cellphones[1].”

When news of this proposal surfaced, some critics suggested that at a time when CPS is facing a budget deficit of over $600 million dollars, such an investment in new surveillance equipment was questionable at best. Some supporters argued that the district would eventually save money because the cameras would reduce the need for police officers in schools. It fell to student Alan Zavala quoted in the Tribune article to point out the obvious: “They’re criminalizing us,” Zavala said. “They’re treating us like we’re in prison.” The preoccupation in many urban public schools with security — driven by fear and the obligation to keep our children relatively safe — has unfortunately engendered an explicit school-to-prison connection.

In the 21^st century, it is verboten to question whether cops should even be in schools. Police officers in our schools have become synonymous with “safety.” It is taken for granted that they belong in our classrooms. In an interview about his school discipline research, sociologist Aaron Kupchick (2010) gives voice to this reality:

As part of my research, I interviewed students, and one of the questions that seemed like a good idea at the start was asking them whether they liked having the SROs [school resource officers] in their schools. For me, having gone to public schools without cops, this really seemed odd to me, to put police officers in peaceful schools. And the students were puzzled by this question, and I quickly realized that it makes no sense to them because it’s all they’ve ever known. It’s completely normal. It makes about as much sense as if you asked them, “Should your school have a principal[2]?”

Police officers are considered so essential that when CPS gave high schools the opportunity this summer to exchange their police officers for $25,000 in return, only four (4) schools gave up both of their assigned officers while a dozen (12) gave up one of their cops[3]. In 2010, there were 122 high schools in the CPS system. This means that only 3 percent of schools were interested in giving up both of their assigned officers while another 10 percent were willing to part with only one.

The Chicago Police Department (CPD) charges CPS $25 million a year for two police officers at each high school. But because the district hasn’t paid the full amount in previous years, it will have to pay $70 million in the 2011 school year. CPS estimates that it costs $75,000 a year to have a police officer stationed at a school for daily 8 hour shifts. A coalition of student researchers, called Voices of Youth in Chicago Education (VOYCE), found that: “In 2010, Chicago Public Schools spent$51.4 million on school-based security guards, about 15 times more than the $3.5 million it spent on college and career coaches.[4]” As education budgets shrink, it makes sense to question schools’ heavy investment in policing, surveillance and security

By Rachel-Marie Carson Williams

Though school police officers date back to the 1950s, they did not become prevalent until the 1990s. A spate of school shootings in the 90s convinced the Federal government to allocate resources to local school districts for the hiring of law enforcement officials. Today about 35 percent of elementary, middle and high schools have police officers.[5] As a result, many of our schools have become the gateway for young people’s involvement in the juvenile and adult criminal legal systems.

In the last 15 years, advocates, students, educators, and researchers have pointed out the existence of a school-to-prison pipeline[6] (STPP). The STPP describes how harsh school discipline policies and law enforcement policies intersect to feed young people into the prison system. Police officers play a critical role in this pipeline and many of them seem to recognize this fact. A school police officers’ union in California recently created an uproar by designing and selling t-shirts depicting a young boy behind prison bars with the words: “U Raise Em, We Cage Em[7].” The local community was rightly incensed by this; yet it should not have come as a surprise that cops see their role in schools as arresting and incarcerating young people.

Youth Art from Suspension Stories

We can be fooled into believing that schools with metal detectors, surveillance cameras, and police officers feel safe to students, teachers, and staff. However, data from the Consortium on Chicago School Research (CCSR) suggests something different:

“it is the quality of relationships between staff and students and between staff and parents that most strongly defines safe schools. Indeed, disadvantaged schools with high-quality relationships actually feel safer than advantaged schools with low-quality relationships[8].”

In addition, the presence of police officers in our schools often has negative ramifications for students. A new national study by the Justice Policy Institute titled “Education Under Arrest” makes a convincing case that:

“…when schools have law enforcement on site, students are more likely to get arrested by police instead of having discipline handled by school officials. This leads to more kids being funneled into the juvenile justice system, which is both expensive and associated with a host of negative impacts on youth[9].”

[1] Chicago Tribune (7/24/11) – http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2011-07-24/news/ct-met-cps-security-cameras-0724-20110724_1_security-cameras-surveillance-cameras-surveillance-network

[2] Sullivan, J (8/29/10) – America’s real school safety problem.http://www.salon.com/2010/08/29/homeroom_security_ext2010/

[3] Karp, Sarah. “Citing Safety, Most High Schools Keeping Police.” Catalyst Chicago (10/28/11) – http://www.catalyst-chicago.org/notebook/2011/10/28/citing-safety-most-high-schools-keeping-police

[4] Voices of Youth in Chicago Education (2011). “Failed Policies, Broken Futures: The True Cost of Zero Tolerance in Chicago.http://www.voyceproject.org/sites/default/files/VOYCE%20report%202011.pdf

[5] Ramirez, Rosa (Nov 2011). “Some Oakland parents question need for school police.” http://www.healthycal.org/archives/6062

[6] The “School to Prison Pipeline” describes the reality that many young people are being pushed out of school and into the juvenile and adult legal systems because of harsh discipline policies, high stakes testing, and social oppression.

[7] Sacramento Bee (11/15/11). Twin Rivers Police Association stops sales of controversial T-shirts. http://www.sacbee.com/2011/11/01/4020655/twin-rivers-police-association.html#ixzz1ceD29OXC

[8] Steinberg, M., Allensworth, E. and David W. Johnson (May, 2011). Student and Teacher Safety in Chicago Public Schools: The Roles of Community Context and School Social Organization.http://ccsr.uchicago.edu/publications/SAFETY%20IN%20CPS.pdf

[9] Petteruti, Amanda (Nov 2011). Education Under Arrest: The Case Against Police in Schools. http://www.justicepolicy.org/research/3177

THE FULL REPORT CAN BE FOUND HERE

MEXICO AND EMPIRE, MEXICO AND RESISTANCE

2012-01-25T15:55:00.003-06:00

MEXICO. It has always seemed that Mexico has a special spot in the Empire. Some many things that seem representative of globalization and Empire seem to converge there...as does the autonomous resistance. The Zapatistas are probably the best known example of the new forms of resistance, but they aren't alone. In Mexico, campesinos fight the Mexican state, the multinationals and all the rest...for their land. In Mexico, communities rise up against huge mining companies and the local police, acting as the company cops, shoot them dead. In Mexico, poverty, Empire, neo-liberalism, globalization, repression and narco cartels combine into a swirling mass of subjective history and objective chaos. MEXICO.

I am posting three articles below, all of them from Upside Down World which sort of say it all.

The Aguán River Valley in the department of Colón, Honduras, is a site of both an ongoing conflict and a powerful social movement. In a struggle for land that greatly predates, but was also further exacerbated by, the 2009 military coup in Honduras, campesinos in the Aguán are constantly subject to human rights abuses, repression and injustice. But, as witnessed during my recent participation in an Alliance for Global Justice accompaniment delegation, these communities are also unfailingly resilient. Poor, vulnerable, and landless, the Aguán campesinos truly represent and embody the Resistance movement in Honduras.

The land in the Aguán Valley is rich, fertile, and highly coveted. As a result of the Agrarian Reforms of the 1960's and 1970's, Honduran campesinos received farmland in the Aguán and proceeded to clear, prepare, and develop the once-rainforest Valley into an agricultural region. Subsequent abolishment of the Agrarian Reform legislation in the early 1990's led to growing privatization and changing agricultural tariffs, while structural adjustment policies and trade liberalization hit small farmers the hardest, increasing their vulnerability to global markets. Deceitful land grabs and state policies supporting large landowners, corporate agriculture, and systematic repression of the peasantry battered campesinos, robbing them of their land and their rights while leaving agribusiness and the oligarchy intact.

Threats, intimidation, manipulation, and dire economic straits pressured many campesino cooperatives to sell their land, resulting in a gross re-concentration of land ownership in the region, primarily in the hands of agribusiness moguls Miguel Faccusé, René Morales, and Reynaldo Canales. Even campesino communities that never voluntarily surrendered their titles have been forced from their land through repressive means, such as illegal evictions. Today, campesinos continue to grapple with the challenges of landlessness and clashes against large landowners and paramilitary forces in their ongoing fight for land titles and for justice. Their struggles are many, but their common demand and essential need for land unites the campesino movement.

The situation in the Aguán is highly complex, intertwined in a context of political weakness, widespread corruption, narcotrafficking, and systematic displacement of poor populations for the benefit of wealthy "developers." Former President Manuel Zelaya initiated agrarian legislation to grant title to certain campesino organizations, but these agreements were halted prior to their realization when Zelaya was overthrown in June 2009. Violence against campesinos has escalated in the wake of the coup, and current President Pepe Lobo has responded to discontent in the Aguán with heavy militarization of the region and state-led repression of campesinos. The movement in the Aguán reports that 55 campesinos have been killed at the hands of private security guards of large landowners, in cooperation with police and military forces, since the coup in 2009. Many others have been captured and tortured, and regular, targeted threats of disappearance, eviction, and death psychologically torture campesinos and function as a constant reminder of the insecurity and vulnerability of their livelihoods.

Despite this regime of systematic, structural, state-funded violence, campesinos of the Aguán have organized their communities to resist the repression, fight for land rights, and work toward viable alternatives. The campesino movements have recently established the Observatorio de los Derechos Humanos en el Bajo Aguan, a Human Rights Observatory with representation from local organizations, including each Aguán campesino community. The Observatorio also invites international human rights observers to join in solidarity with the movement through long term accompaniment in Honduras. Campesinos throughout the Aguan Valley are hopeful that the inauguration of the Observatorio will aid in denouncing repression and violence and will bring heightened international attention to the violations of human rights and impunity occurring in the Aguan Valley.

Campesinos have been deprived of their land and are suffering grave violations of human rights to fuel the prosperity of capitalist agribusiness. Nevertheless, they continue to occupy and fight for land in the Aguán Valley and to mobilize their communities as part of a larger national popular resistance struggle for democracy and justice in Honduras.

Via Grain.

For more information:

Alliance for Global Justice: www.afgj.org; afgj@afgj.org

Rights Action: www.rightsaction.org; info@rightsaction.org

Food First: www.foodfirst.org

Zapotec Protesters Shot On Behalf Of Canadian Mining Company

BY AHNI JAN 23, 2012

Photo Credit: noticiasnet.mx

One Zapotec has died and another is in recovery after a group of municipal police officers and other armed men opened fire on a crowd of protesters in the municipality of San José del Progreso, Ocotlán, Oaxaca, Mexico.

On 18 January, members from the community of San José del Progreso had gathered to speak out against a pipeline that the mining company Cuzcatlán wants so it can exploit the community's water resources.

Cuzcatlán, a subsidiary of the Canadian mining company Fortuna Silver has already received a permit to build the pipeline. Opponents of the mine maintain that the permit should not have been issued because the municipal government failed to obtain the community's free, prior and informed consent.

According to an initial report by El Colectivo Oaxaqueño en Defensa de los Territorios, there was a bitter confrontation during the protest between community members who oppose the mine and others who support it (Ever since Fortuna Silver arrived on the scene, there has been a great deal of tension in the community.)

During the confrontation, a group of police and plain-clothed men suddenly and unexpectedly opened fire on the protesters, seriously injuring two people: Bernardo Mendez Vazquez and Abigail Vasquez Sanchez. Abigail Vazquez is in stable condition and is now recovering from an injury to one leg; however, Bernardo Mendez Vazquez has since passed away as a result of multiple injuries to the stomach, chest and leg.

Thus far, no arrests have been made; however, the accusations are flying. Opponents of the mine insist that the mayor of San José del Progreso gave the order to open fire; while others have claimed that he was one of the gunmen.

In any case one thing is clear: Bernardo Mendez Vazquez and Abigail Vasquez Sanchez were ultimately shot on behalf a Canadian mining company.

El Colectivo Oaxaqueño en Defensa de los Territorios is calling for:

A thorough investigation and punishment of the masterminds and perpetrators who opened fire on the people of San José del Progreso.
The government to provide security within the community, which has been immersed in social tension ever since the mining company came into the picture in 2006.
The three branches of government address the legitimate demands and concerns of the community and the institutional mechanisms that generate conflict
Respect for the main demand of the United Peoples Coordinator Ocotlán Valley (CPUVO) concerning the immediate withdrawal of the mining company, because it is generating clashes in the community.

What You Can Do

Please send appeals to the following officials. A Sample letter (in Spanish) which you can sign is available here:http://www.educaoaxaca.org/images/120118_au_san_jose_del_progreso%20final.doc

Contacts
1) Lic. Manuel de Jesús López López, Procuraduría General de Justicia del Estado de Oaxaca.
Official Address: Centro Administrativo del Poder Ejecutivo y Judicial _Gral. Porfirio Díaz, Soldado de la Patria_.
Colonia : Edificio Jesús _Chu_ Rasgado. Segundo Nivel. Reyes Mantecón, San Bartolo Coyotepec Oaxaca.
Official Phone: (951) 501 69 00 ext. 20769 / 20602
Official Email: contacto@pgjoaxaca.gob.mx

2) Lic. Oscar Cruz López, subsecretario de gobierno y desarrollo político.
Official Phone: 5015000 EXT. 13889
Official Email: oscarcruz@oaxaca.gob.mx
Official Address: Carret. Int. Oaxaca-Istmo Km. 11.5, Cd. Administrativa, Edificios 4 y 8
Colonia : Tlalixtac de Cabrera
C.P : 68270

3) Lic. Manuel de Jesús López López, Procuraduría General de Justicia del Estado de Oaxaca.
Official Address: Centro Administrativo del Poder Ejecutivo y Judicial _Gral. Porfirio Díaz, Soldado de la Patria_.
Colonia : Edificio Jesús _Chu_ Rasgado. Segundo Nivel. Reyes Mantecón, San Bartolo Coyotepec Oaxaca.
Official Phone: (951) 501 69 00 ext. 20769 / 20602
Official Email: contacto@pgjoaxaca.gob.mx

4) Lic. Emanuel Castillo Ruiz. Coordinador General de Asuntos jurídicos
Official Phone: 951 5020800
Official Email: enlace.seguridadpublica@gmail.com
Official Address: Heroico Colegio Militar No. 317
Colonia : Reforma
C.P : 68050

5) Mtra. Eréndira Cruzvillegas, Comisionada para los Derechos Humanos del Poder Ejecutivo del Estado de Oaxaca.
Official Phone: (951) 501 5000 Ext. 40056
Official Email: erendiracruz@oaxaca.gob.mx
Official Address: Palacio de Gobierno, Bustamante esquina con Guerrero S/N, Colonia Centro.

6) Dr. Heriberto Antonio García, Defensor de los Derechos Humanos del Pueblo de Oaxaca.
Calle de los Derechos Humanos No 210, Col América
C.P.68050
Oaxaca Oax
Official Phone: (951) 50 30 52 00
Official Email: correo@derechoshumanosoaxaca.org

Originally from Intercontinental Cry

The Rarámuri Crisis: Extreme Poverty (Briefly) to the Fore in Mexico

Written by Paul Imison

Tuesday, 24 January 2012 17:34

In the midst of Mexico’s senseless “Drug War” and the erroneous belief that drug-trafficking is the root of the country’s evils, Mexicans were given a powerful reminder last week of the deeper crisis affecting their fellow citizens. A video posted on social media sites concerning a severe drought in the state of Chihuahua saw the extreme poverty and malnutrition afflicting the region’s indigenous population highlighted in the media for a brief few days.

Chihuahua, a vast, dry and mountainous state bordering Texas and New Mexico, is home to several indigenous groups, the largest of which, the Rarámuri (or Tarahumara), inhabit the region surrounding one of Mexico’s most spectacular natural wonders, the Barranca del Cobre, or Copper Canyon. The Rarámuri – whose name means “those who run fast”, for their famed bare-footed running ability – number some 60,000 in the eponymous Sierra Tarahumara where they took refuge after the Spanish conquest.

On January 15, a video was posted on Twitter of a local official claiming that as many as 50 Rarámuri had committed suicide because of famine. The Mexican media immediately jumped on the story, portraying the isolated Tarahumara region as “our Somalia”. While the mass suicide is now believed to be an exaggeration (no evidence exists that it took place), state authorities have since confirmed that 28 Rarámuri died from malnutrition last year, with a further 47 victims in 2010.

The hambruna, or famine, afflicting the Rarámuri has been attributed to a brutal winter and the worst drought in the region for 71 years. But the media coverage brought attention to the wider conditions of extreme poverty in which some 12 million Mexicans live. Last year, the Hospital Teresita in the Tarahumara town of Creel (a popular stop on the famous Copper Canyon Railway) treated 250 children for malnutrition, including 25 severe cases.

The state of Chihuahua is also a key battlefield in Mexico’s “drug wars”. The notorious El Chapo Guzmán’s Sinaloa Cartel rules the roost in much of the state, although its rivalry with the Vicente Carrillo Fuentes Organization (or Juárez Cartel) has unleashed the heaviest of the country’s gang violence.

Gulf of Inequality

Despite the fact that some 60% of Mexicans are classed as mestizo (a mix of European and indigenous blood), racism and sheer ignorance of the country’s indigenous population is no less common than in former white-settler colonies like the US and Canada.

As the crisis in Chihuahua was co-opted by mainstream media outlets, most described the affected population as Tarahumara – after the Sierra Tarahumara where the majority of them live. But the name actually has racist connotations for the group itself, which prefers to be known as Rarámuri. Spanish invaders had struggled with the pronunciation of the original name.

Over the years, the Rarámuri have repeatedly suffered drought, famine and other environmental crises without the blitz of media attention seen in recent days. According to a UN report on indigenous peoples in Latin America, the six most deprived municipalities in Mexico are all to be found in the mountains of Chihuahua. The region has an infant mortality rate of 12.5 per thousand live births; 8.3 of whom die of malnutrition.

The federal government initially denied the reports that a “famine” was taking place. But as political rivals rushed to demand aid relief and the Mexican Red Cross confirmed it had expanded its expeditions to the region this winter, the Felipe Calderón administration announced the provision of 14,000 emergency food packets and a collection point for donations in Mexico City’s Zócalo square.

Governor César Duarte, whose Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) is currently favorite to take the Mexican presidency in July, quickly moved to take political advantage of the crisis. Duarte appeared at aid distribution sites to tell Rarámuri queuing for food and blankets that they are a “proud and strong” people and, after all, “the owners of this land”; the latter a gross statement of ignorance.

Chihuahua is a state rich in natural resources – from gold and silver to forests and rivers – but the massive investment by US and Canada-based corporations through the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) has done nothing to benefit the communities that have dwelled in the region for centuries. At the same time, subsidized US agricultural imports have devastated the livelihood of local farmers, who have been increasingly driven to produce illicit crops like marijuana and opium poppies.

The Calderón administration, which has very close ties to the US, remains fully committed to the neoliberal model, and its weak social welfare programs – such as the much-touted Oportunidades scheme – don’t address the fundamental economic injustices at the heart of the NAFTA agreement. The right-wing National Action Party (PAN) has gambled its legacy on the militarization of the war on drugs while largely ignoring the systemic inequality at the root of the illegal trade.

According to recent figures by the National Council of the Evaluation of Social Development Policy (CONEVAL), some 52 million Mexicans (or 46.2% of the population) live in poverty, of which some 12 million are in extreme poverty; an increase of nearly 2%, or three million people, from recent years. What’s more, these figures are widely questioned because of the government’s very low measure of what constitutes poverty.

Armed Capitalism and the Drug Trade

State authorities and the Catholic Church in Chihuahua have largely blamed the food crisis and ongoing displacement of the Rarámuri on the country’s drug-trafficking gangs. Héctor Fernando Martínez, the parish priest of Creel, told national daily La Jornada: “Narco, not lack of food, is the biggest problem in the mountains [of Chihuahua]... They arrive and displace people from their lands, take their houses, and through fear leave them to either grow [marijuana or poppies] or get out of their villages.”

While it’s true that criminal groups have tormented the Rarámuri and other local communities for years, many of the state’s rural inhabitants have had little choice but to produce drug crops in the face of subsidized imports. Furthermore, while farmers receive a higher price for growing marijuana or poppies than their now-redundant traditional crops, the rewards are miniscule in comparison to the profits made by organized crime lords, and the threat of violent reprisals is an ever-present reality.

The government of Chihuahua has been repeatedly accused of supporting the locally-based Juárez Cartel in its turf war with the Sinaloa organization. In October, Governor Duarte unbelievably claimed that all kidnapping cases in the state had been solved and vastly exaggerated the number of arrests and prosecutions made by state authorities.

While most of the violence in Mexico today is blamed on warring drug gangs, well-documented human rights violations by state forces and private security companies are widely ignored. The reality is that the lines between drug gangs, police, the military, paramilitary groups and corporate security firms have been profoundly blurred in parts of the country like Chihuahua, where official impunity allows abuses to go unpunished.

Upside Down World contributor Dawn Paley recently reported on the controversy surrounding Canadian corporation Minefinders, which opened a gold and silver mine near the mountain town of Madera four years ago, displacing more than 60 families in the process. Protesters involved in a blockade of the site were threatened by armed men in civilian clothes, while one of the organizers, Dante Valdez Jiménez – an elementary school teacher – was later attacked and beaten in front of his students by anonymous assailants. None of which ever makes headlines in the mainstream media.

Meanwhile, the struggle for rural workers’ rights continues. A march organized by the National Peasant Confederation (CNC) is currently underway from Chihuahua to Mexico City, protesting the lack of support by the federal government for twenty areas of Mexico affected by drought and demanding long-lasting solutions to the neglected effects of climate change.

The National Committee of Rural & Fishing Unions (CONORP), one of the organizations participating in the march, has warned of an “Arab Spring”-like effect should the government not act – referring to the food shortages that sparked uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt. In this big election year, watch for the peasant struggle to become a political football as poverty briefly overtakes the “Drug War” as the crisis du jour.

Contract the author at paulimison@hotmail.com

WITH IRAN AND ISRAEL VOTING AGAINST NAZISM, HOW COME THE U.S. VOTED FOR THE NAZIS

2012-01-24T16:24:00.000-06:00

"Well, boys, we have a spot for you in the USA"

Who can forget the headlines last month trumpeting the amazing development of Israel and Iran joining together to support Uninted Nations General Assembly Resolution A/66/460 on "Inadmissibility of Certain Practices that Contribute to Fueling Contemporary Forms of Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance"?

Who can forget Wolfe Blitzer wondering aloud why the United States and certain of its European allies voted against the resolution whuch targeted nazism and neo-nazism?

Don't we all remember the in depth stories in our local newspapers and the drive by reports on our local TV news trying to explain the resolution and the vote?

Unless you live in a different dimension from the one in which I reside, you missed all of that.

Well, if you did miss it, like me, here is the story from the Center for Research on Globalization.

Neo-Nazism: United Nations Anti-Nazi Resolution and Falsification of History

On December 19, 2011, in an extraordinary vote, Iran, Israel and Syria united in support of United Nations General Assembly Resolution A/66/460 on “Inadmissibility of Certain Practices That Contribute to Fuelling Contemporary Forms of Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance.” The resolution was adopted by a majority vote of 134, with 24 opposed and 31 abstentions. Among the 32 co-sponsors of the Resolution were, notably, Iran, Syria, Belarus, the Russian Federation, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, India, Venezuela, Viet Nam. The resolution states:

4. “Expresses deep concern about the glorification of the Nazi movement and former members of the Waffen SS organization, including by erecting monuments and memorials and holding public demonstrations in the name of the glorification of the Nazi past, the Nazi movement and neo-Nazism, as well as by declaring or attempting to declare such members and those who fought against the anti-Hitler Coalition and collaborated with the Nazi movement participants in national liberation movements.

5. “Expresses concern at recurring attempts to desecrate or demolish monuments erected in remembrance of those who fought against Nazism during the Second World War, as well as to unlawfully exhume or remove the remains of such persons, and in this regard urges States to fully comply with their relevant obligations, inter alia, under Article 34 of Additional Protocol 1 to the Geneva Conventions of 1949.

8. Stresses that the practices described above do injustice to the memory of the countless victims of crimes against humanity committed in the Second World War, in particular those committed by the SS organizations and those who fought against the anti-Hitler coalition and collaborated with the Nazi movement, and poison the minds of young people, and that failure by States to effectively address such practices is incompatible with the obligation of States members of the United Nations under its Charter and is incompatible with the purposes and principles of the Organization.”

In 1945 George Braziller published Michael Sayers and Albert E. Kahn’s “The Plot Against the Peace,” which documents, in chapter 6, the nazi doctrine’s explicitly defined policy of xenophobia and racial genocide against the Slavic peoples and the Jews:

“Immediately after Hitler came to power, the Nazi government launched a systematic campaign aimed at the ultimate extermination of the Jewish population of the Third Reich…” But “It was against the Slav peoples, the traditional enemy of Pan-Germanism, that the policy of genocide was most extensively applied…’It will be one of the chief tasks of German statesmanship,’ Hitler told Hermann Rauschning, ‘for all time to prevent, by every means in our power, the further increase of the Slav races.’” (From “The Plot Against the Peace,” by Sayers and Kahn, 1945).

By the end of World War II, in addition to the six million Jews exterminated by the Nazis, approximately 30 million Soviet citizens had been exterminated, only one third of whom had been soldiers.

Former United States Justice Department Attorney John Loftus, in “America’s Nazi Secret,” ( Trine Day Press, 2010), describes this process in the town of Borissow, near Minsk, typical of the genocidal policies executed throughout Nazi occupied Europe, and throughout the Soviet Union. On page 27 he writes:

“The roundup of Jews began at 3AM… The local police, bolstered by reinforcements from the neighboring town of Zembin, surrounded the ghetto… The killing went on throughout the day…Some of the guards raped the younger women before forcing them into the pits. Heads were smashed by rifle butts, and bodies were mutilated. Autopsies conducted after the war showed that some babies, out of sheer savagery or to save ammunition, had been thrown into the pits and buried alive….children were thrown into wells and hand grenades dropped down upon them, and Byelorussian policeman commanded by SS General Franz Kushel, swung infants by the heels and smashed their heads against rocks…..The SS claimed they were killing ten thousand Jews per week. …In all, about two thirds of the approximately 375,000 Jews who lived in Byelorussia before the Nazi invasion were swallowed up by the Holocaust…..Solomon Schiadow, one of the few inmates who escaped Koldichevo, later described conditions there: One day a Byelorussian caught a youngster looking at the sky as planes flew overhead, and accused the prisoner of attempting to signal enemy aircraft. The guard ordered several other Jews to hold the youth down over a table. He warned them that anyone who let go would replace the man at the table. He took out his knife and began to carve large steaks out of the living flesh of the young man, as if he were a butcher calmly working on a side of beef.” (Loftus, “America’s Nazi Secret”)

The events described above, replicated throughout Europe, in the murders of more than 30 million people, describe Nazism, a doctrine so abhorrent that any attempt to legitimize it is to legalize slavery and genocide. Yet, this year, 2011, twenty-two members of the United Nations, including the United Kingdom, the United States, Netherlands, Poland, Romania, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, France, Georgia, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Albania, Belgium, Slovakia, Spain, Sweden, voted to legalize the Nazi doctrine that perpetrated mass slavery and genocide of Jews and Slavs and numerous other groups the Nazis deemed inferior races.

Even more remarkable in the voting record, is the consistency with which Iran, Syria and the Democratic Republic of Korea have voted together with Israel, year after year, after year to oppose the rehabilitation and glorification of Nazism, the Nazi past and neo-Nazism.

It is indeed remarkable that the very same states that voted to permit the restoration of Nazism voted the following week to condemn Syria for human rights abuses. The appalling and willful indifference of 22 “developed” countries – indeed their condoning the horrors of Nazism, probably the worst scourge of atrocities in the history of the human species, must be considered the grossest hypocrisy when these same 22 countries sanctimoniously condemn Syria for human rights violations. If these 22 states tolerate the revival of Nazism, by what standard do they condemn Syria? Further, together with Israel, Iran voted to support A/66/460, prohibiting the resurrection of Nazi doctrine. Iran voted to oppose that very same Nazism which exterminated the entire population of Jews in Europe and the Soviet Union.

But this is just the beginning of the disconnect. According to John Loftus (“America’s Nazi Secret”, page 83):

“The United States Counter-Intelligence Corps’ primary task was to identify and arrest Nazi war criminals and key officials. But the denazification program was the responsibility of area military commanders… The Pentagon began smuggling top Nazi scientists into the United States under ‘Operation Paperclip,’ fraudulently identifying them… The recruitment of Nazi war criminals into the United States vastly expanded, and DP camps were scoured by the Operations Research Office of the Pentagon interested in the use of Nazi collaborators ‘in the hope of obtaining information of value in the event of an American invasion of Russia” (Loftus, 117). Harvard University was linked to this program. “The Harvard Institute for Russian Research was funded by OPC (Office of Poly Coordination)… The B-6 series of interviews, for example, covered such non-academic topics as the best method for dropping paratroopers, the utility of Nazi anti-partisan operations, the popularity of Nazi sponsored political organizations….Several of those interviewed candidly acknowledged that they had held positions in Nazi police or intelligence organization. One even admitted that he was hiding out because he was wanted as a major war criminal. Apparently they were more than willing to confess participation in criminal activities because they suspected that the person conducting the interview was more than just another Harvard researcher.” (Loftus, p. 118)

Following the CIA overthrow of Premier Mohammed Mossadegh in Iran in 1953, and the military coup against democratically elected President Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala, the intelligence community “waited for a signal to begin making serious trouble for the Soviet Union, especially in the occupied countries of Eastern Europe.”

“In 1955 the National Security Council issued NSC 5412/1 which stated: ‘In accordance with established policies, in areas dominated or threatened by international communism, develop underground resistance and facilitate covert and guerrilla operations…Specifically, such operations shall include any covert activities related to: propaganda, political action, economic warfare, direct action, including sabotage, antisabotage, demolition, escape and evasion and evacuation measures; assistance to underground resistance movements, guerrillas and refugee liberation groups; support of indigenous and anti-communist elements in threatened countries of the free world, deception plans and operations and all compatible activities necessary to accomplish the foregoing……The OPC authorized an operation designed to incite simultaneous revolts against Soviet authority in each of the major cities of Eastern Europe, which were to be followed by a civil war among the ethnic and religious minorities within the Soviet Union…. The OPC Nazi ‘liberation armies’ would be dropped in to attack the scattered Soviet garrisons. Roads, bridges and rail lines would be blown up or blocked to prevent the movement of Russian reinforcements. After the Soviets had been sufficiently weakened, NATO troops would be dispatched as a peacekeeping force with the declaration that they would remain only long enough to restore order and conduct democratic elections….A few years before President Truman had ordered a study prepared for an invasion of the Soviet Union.” (Loftus, p. 131).

Among the most high ranking Nazi war criminals brought into the United States were Radoslaw Ostrowsky, Emanuel Jasiuk and SS General Kushel.

“By 1951 CIC investigators realized that Jasiuk was the central figure in a Nazi underground railroad that assisted war criminals to come to the United States…. To prevent the cancellation of any more of its prosecutions, the CIC submitted a formal complaint up the chain of command on the handling of Jasiuk…..The protest finally reached General John Weckerling, Chief of Military Intelligence at the Pentagon, who agreed that the Nazi smuggling operation was deplorable… He told J. Edgar Hoover on January 2, 1951 that the Air Force had apparently used a Nazi war criminal as an informant and that the State Department had permitted him to enter the United States. Hoover expressed an interest in the case, for it seemed likely to fit in with his plan to expand the FBI’s domestic intelligence capabilities. When FBI agents went to visit Jasiuk, it was not to arrest him but to recruit him…..Jasiuk and other Nazis had found their ultimate protector, the Federal Bureau of Investigation of the U.S. Department of Justice.” (Loftus, P. 190)

Following World War II, innumerable Nazi war criminals were comfortably and illegally settled in countries of Europe and throughout the United States, where at least some of their children and grandchildren may well have been educated in the Nazi doctrine of racial supremacy that required the extermination or enslavement of all races deemed inferior to “Aryans.” This may help explain why, since 2006, members of the European Union abstained on this United Nations resolution “expressing deep concern at the glorification of the Nazi movement,” while in all preceding years the United States, in virtual isolation actually opposed the Resolution A/66/460. This year, a year which is exposing the failure of the capitalist system in Europe and the USA, the members of the European Union for the first time actually opposed Resolution A/66/460 together with the United States. Iran, Syria, Israel, the Democratic Republic of Korea, together all supporters of A/66/460 revealed their revulsion at the nazi resurgence. One can only wonder by what moral authority nazi-condoning Europe condemns anti-nazi Iran, Syria and the Democratic Republic of Korea.

And, indeed, the blueprint elaborated in 1955 in NSC 5412/1 seems to have been retained, and enacted in recent US/NATO actions against the former Yugoslavia, Libya, and numerous other countries too independent of US/NATO control.

The current European Union attempt to equate the crimes of nazism with communism, an obfuscation formulated in the recent “Prague Declaration on European Conscience and Communism” is an insidious form of Holocaust denial, intended to camouflage the explicitly racist and genocidal character of Nazism, and intended to desecrate the heroic legacy of the Soviet Union’s victory over the psychotic racist and xenophobic nazi assault against humanity in World War II. This Orwellian falsification of history is bringing us to the brink of World War III.

DON'T TELL THESE WOMEN THE SLAVE TRADE ENDED

2012-01-23T17:09:00.004-06:00

THE BEGINNING OF A BAD JOURNEY

It never ended. Tell the women of Ethiopia that what amounts to the slave trade ended and you will likely receive a silent state.

From Ethiopia they come, women with little knowledge of the outside world or outside languages, shipped off as migrant workers as maids throughout the mideast where they find nothing but work, work, work, abuse, abuse, abuse.

The "recruiting offices" could care less what happens to the women. It is all about money to them. They are good small time capitalists. Their new "employers" treat them like chattel...and no one much cares.

Speaking of what some of these women face,International Organization for Migration spokesperson Jemini Pandya says on the blog Migrant Rights,

“Their exhausting ordeal, their exposure to the elements without adequate nutrition and sanitation and their exposure to violence means that many migrants are suffering from diseases and illnesses, from snake bites and are showing signs of mistreatment from smugglers and traffickers. And these include severe burns, broken limbs, gunshot wounds and other physical and sexual assaults.”

The IOM’s Chief of Mission in Yemen explains on the same blog the critical nature of the situation in Yemen:

“This is an extremely difficult situation. Many of the migrants are in danger from violence and intimidation from smugglers. We’ve had bodies of migrants thrown into the IOM compound – killed by smugglers or in accidents for which the perpetrators are rarely held accountable. Their anger and frustration is understandable. They want to go home. IOM wants to be able to do more to help and evacuate them from the country, but we simply don’t have the money to carry out an operation of this scale.”H

However, these comments do not even begin to describe the everyday "violence" women face as they are hussled across borders and into servitude.

Read the following from Pambazuka News and be outraged.

Ethiopia: Middle Passage to the Middle East

From the International Slave Trade to the International Maid Trade

Alemayehu G. Mariam

In the days of the Atlantic slave trade, the Middle Passage was the journey of slave trading ships from the west coast of Africa to the New World. Portuguese, British, French, Spanish, Dutch and other slave traders maintained outposts along the African coast to transact their business with their local slave raiding partners. Millions of African slaves were sold or traded for manufactured goods or raw materials. In the gruelling journey, the slaves were often shackled and chained to the floor to gain maximum cargo capacity. Many died from disease, starvation, dehydration and suffocation. Many also committed suicide by jumping overboard. Those who resisted their masters were beaten and even killed. Plantation owners treated the slaves like cattle; and those working in the fields were often flogged and beaten. Female slaves were the objects of sexual desire and abuse by their masters. The law required runaway slaves (‘fugitive slaves’) who escaped their bondage to be returned to their masters who punished them severely.

There is a Middle Passage of sorts taking place today from Ethiopia to the Middle East. It is what lawyer Khaled Ali Beydoun and others have described as the Ethiopian ‘Maid Trade’. Today a network of unscrupulous modern-day slave-traffickers (‘human traffickers’) and ‘private labour employment agencies’ operating under license by the ruling regime in Ethiopia ship thousands of young Ethiopian women to various parts of the Middle East to work as domestic servants in what amounts to ‘contract slavery’ with little follow up and monitoring to ensure their well-being and welfare in their host countries.

The plight of Ethiopian women domestic workers in the Middle East has been documented in Bina Fernandez’s survey research (Ch. 7). In 2009, ‘over 74,000 people risked their lives to enter Yemen en route to Saudi Arabia, of which 42,000 were Ethiopians.’ According to official data, 91 per cent of Ethiopian domestic workers in the Middle East were single women, 83 per cent were between the age of 20–30 , 63 per cent had some secondary education, 26 per cent were illiterate, 71 per cent were Muslim and 93 per cent earned US$100–150 per month. Some of these women ‘officially registered with the government as a migrant worker’. Others ‘worked through illegal brokers who are viciously exploitative [and] often take the women’s money and sometimes abandon them in the desert before they even reach Somalia.’

The ‘Middle Passage’ of Middle East ‘contract slavery’ for the young Ethiopian women is unspeakably harrowing. Their working conditions are described as slave-like, except, as Beydoun argues, ‘Shackles and whips have been replaced by more inventive designs to dehumanize, suppress, and subsequently enslave persons for economic or sexual purposes.’ Fernandez reported that the women live-in domestic workers she interviewed were ‘on-call 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and working between 10 and 20 hours daily.’ Some of the women pulled ‘double duty - that is, cleaning or doing laundry for a second household, usually a relative of their employer.’ Most of these women got ‘only one day off a month, or no break at all.’ Many of these women experienced ‘complete physical exhaustion’ and often suffered ‘mental breakdown’ unable to ‘tell what day of the week it was, or what time it was.’ They faced extreme physical, mental and sexual abuse..

Fernadez further found that that ‘verbal abuse by employers is commonplace’ including ‘racial insults and discriminatory behaviour (such as separate food and dishes for them) as is non-payment or underpayment of wages. To escape their conditions, some are forced to become ‘runaways’. They end up doing ‘live-out domestic workers, brewing and selling illicit liquor, or engaging in sex work.’ But they are trapped. Fernandez explains, ‘Their lack of legal status makes them vulnerable to greater exploitation if they are detected, as they risk blackmail, imprisonment, and/or deportation. If they wish to leave voluntarily, they often have to pay high fines for exit visas.’

TEARS OF THE ETHIOPIAN MAIDS

In a recent Youtube video, an unnamed Ethiopian woman confronts a representative of the regime of Meles Zenawi in a meeting hall in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). She complains about the mistreatment and dehumanisation she and other maids continue to face in life and in death in the UAE, and laments the depraved indifference of her ‘government’ to speak up, defend and protect them from gross abuses of human rights.

‘…If we run away from [our abusive employers], there is a chance we can die. There is a woman who tells us to run away. But they don’t help us. If [we] run away, we need money to pay for rent and food. [We] don’t have to run away. As much as possible, it is better to help [us]. When we live in this country [UAE], sometimes we die. Many of us are buried here. Why must an Ethiopian be buried in the Emirates? Why is that our government does not check on us, follow up on our conditions, ask about us? Why should I be buried in a foreign country? It does not matter if we are Christian or Muslim. This question has deprived me sleep. When I bow to pray, I have not been able to do so properly. Only God knows. All I do is cry. Even our dead bodies must not be buried in this country. [There was a domestic worker accused of killing her employer.] It is possible she may have done something wrong. Her government should stand and defend her and advocate for her. She should be punished as appropriate [if she is guilty] by her family or the law…We learned [within a few days of her arrest] that she was killed by the authorities [in the Emirates].’

As she concluded her statement, this young woman cries out in pain, her voice quivering, tears in her eyes and pleading for an answer from someone, anyone:

‘Where is Ethiopia’s flag? I can’t take it anymore. I can’t take it anymore…’

THE RESPONSE OF ZENAWI’S REGIME – BLAME THE MAIDS

The response of Zenawi’s regime to the plight of these women is morally calloused and depraved. Fernandez reported: ‘The term “runaway” was used in a pejorative sense by one Ethiopian government official and several of the PEA [private employment agency] representatives during interviews, to describe these women as delinquents who abandon their contractual responsibilities because they do not want to work hard, and want an easy life.’ Beydoun argues that the ruling regime’s efforts to combat trafficking in Lebanon were symbolic and ineffective despite the fact that an inter-agency anti-trafficking task force had been established to deal with the problem. He concluded, ‘Trafficked women are particularly vulnerable where their own governments fail to adequately protect them.’

Since 1998, Zenawi’s regime has put in place a ‘Private Employment Agency Proclamation No. 104/1998’, which provided for licensing of private employment agencies and the prosecution of illegal brokers. In 2009, this Proclamation was repealed and updated by the ‘Employment Exchange Services Proclamation No. 632/2009’, which required private employment agencies, among other things, ‘not to recruit a job seeker below the age of 18 years; not to terminate the contract of employment before acquiring the consent of the worker in writing; get approval from the Ethiopian embassy or consular office to form a new contract or to modify the existing one; register a worker sent abroad, within fifteen days, with the nearest Ethiopian embassy or consular office.’ The ‘private employment agency which sends workers abroad’ is mandated to ensure that the working conditions in the host country not ‘be less favorable to an Ethiopian than the rights and benefits of those who work in a similar type and level of work in the country of employment.’ The foreign employer is required to pay the ‘visa fee of the country of destination, round trip ticket, residence and work permit fees and insurance coverage’ for the worker. Moreover, ‘any private employment agency which sends a worker abroad for work’ must deposit cash or post bond in the minimum amount of USD$30,000 for up to 500 workers ‘for the protection and enforcement of the rights of the worker.’

The real penalty for violation of the Proclamation No. 632 is suspension, revocation or cancellation of license of the employment agency. Though various stiff criminal penalties are provided in Article 40, there is little evidence of serious prosecution of human traffickers. According to a 2010 State Department report, ‘Between March and October 2009, the Federal High Court’s 11th Criminal] bench heard 15 cases related to transnational labor trafficking, resulting in five convictions, nine acquittals, and one withdrawal due to missing witnesses. Of the five convictions, three offenders received suspended sentences of five years’ imprisonment, two co-defendants were fined, and one offender is serving a sentence of five years’ imprisonment.’

Similarly, according to a 2011 UNHCR report, ‘The [Ethiopian] government showed only nascent signs of engaging destination country governments in an effort to improve protections for Ethiopian workers and obtain protective services for victims.’ Moreover, ‘although licensed employment agencies must place funds in escrow in the event a worker's contract is broken, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs has never used these deposits to pay for victims' transportation back to Ethiopia.’ But the regime has readily come to the rescue of other victims of human traffickers according to the same UNHCR report: ‘In 2010, Ethiopia granted asylum to 1,383 Eritrean refugees deported from Egypt, many of whom claim to have been brutalized by Rashaida smugglers operating in the Sinai - including conditions of forced construction labor - or have fled Eritrea to escape situations of forced labor associated with the implementation of the country's national service program.’ While it is noble and morally commendable to assist any victim of human trafficking and human rights abuse, it is also true that charity begins at home.

WHAT CAN BE DONE?

The international movement of labour is a fact of international life. For a poor country such as Ethiopia where unemployment is high, workers who migrate abroad are a source of much needed financial support for their families, and a source of remittances for the country in the hundreds of millions of dollars annually. But slavery, including contract slavery, is still slavery. It is just as cruel, oppressive, exploitive, dehumanising and degrading. These women are extremely vulnerable and have no rights and no means of support to vindicate their rights. Various commentators have argued that the demand for Ethiopian domestic workers will continue as they are considered cheaper and more obedient. In other words, they are considered ‘model maids’ who put up with a lot of abuse in quiet desperation.

One can point to international legal and moral obligations to help out these women and effectively combat human trafficking camouflaged as migrant labour. But discussion of legal and moral state obligations under these obligations would be an exercise in futility. Talking law or morality to those who thumb their noses at the rule of law is a waste of time.

If the problem of ‘contract slavery’ in the Ethiopian ‘maid trade’ is going to be addressed effectively, serious criminal investigations and prosecutions must be pursued against violators. The aggressive crackdown that has long been directed at the independent press in Ethiopia should be re-directed to the gangs of criminal human traffickers.

Various scholars and researchers have offered other effective recommendations to deal with the problem, including domestic skills training to Ethiopian women in an attempt to lessen their vulnerability, working with NGOs as partner organisations to monitor their working conditions and working with host countries to make it easy for these workers to use the banking institutions. Some have suggested ways of improving access to the criminal justice system of the host country by providing a confidential complaint reporting process for abuse and wage payment related issues and legal assistance; expanding victim services such as shelters and hotlines; and engaging civil society and faith-based groups to offer assistance.

SLAVERY BY ANY OTHER NAME

Slavery was not abolished in Saudi Arabia and Yemen until 1962. A year later it was abolished in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). In the 1950s, Saudi Arabia had an estimated 450,000 slaves, nearly 20 percent of the population. Perhaps it should come as no surprise that ‘contract slavery’ of domestic servants continues in these countries. The deep tracks of slavery do not vanish easily in the desert sand in a mere 50 years. The vast majority of the Ethiopian domestic workers end up in these three countries. In 2009, ‘over 74,000 people risked their lives to enter Yemen en route to Saudi Arabia, of which 42,000 were Ethiopians.’ The ‘kafala’ or sponsorship system in the Gulf States gives disproportionate power to the sponsor (employer) in the ‘contract’ relationship. If the worker breaks her contract, she bears the cost of her return ticket and will likely pay fines and pay debts to the employment agency that arranged the sponsorship. There is no running away from ‘contract slavery’ particularly since the migrant worker is required to surrender her passport (if legally in the country) to the employer. Through the maids may be able to run away from their cruel employers, they cannot hide. They are frequently arrested as fugitive workers, not unlike fugitive slaves of yesteryears. Unable to change their circumstances, these women endure in quiet desperation often for years.

Slavery by any other name is still slavery. In truth, there can be no ‘contract slavery’ since only free men and free women can enter into any contracts, which leaves many of Ethiopian domestic workers as nothing but slaves and at best indentured servants. Article 4 of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights guarantees that ‘No one shall be held in slavery or servitude, slavery and the slave trade shall be prohibited in all their forms.’ We must all do what we can to help our Ethiopian sisters to rise up from ‘contract slavery’.

BROUGHT TO YOU BY PAMBAZUKA NEWS.

* Alemayehu G. Mariam is professor of political science at California State University, San Bernardino.
* Please send comments to editor[at]pambazuka[dot]org or comment online at Pambazuka News

IWW: AN ECONOMIC INTERPRETATION OF THE JOB

2012-01-22T16:07:00.000-06:00

Theoretical weekends takes a little turn and for a change of pace presents this old pamphlet from the IWW. Thanks to the MARXIST INTERNET ARCHIVE AND THE IWW.

An Economic Interpretation of the Job

JUNE, 1922
Published by
DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION
of
AGRICULTURAL WORKERS INDUSTRIAL UNION No. 110
of
THE INDUSTRIAL WORKERS OF THE WORLD
Headquarters
1001 W. Madison St., Chicago, Ill.

CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
CHAPTER I. Labor Power
Selling labor-power.
Labor-power, a commodity.
Market relationship of capitalist and laborer.
CHAPTER II. Exchange Value
Value and Technology.
Socially Necessary Labor Time.
CHAPTER III. Surplus Value
Paid and Unpaid Labor Time.
CHAPTER IV. The Source of Profit
The Profit System.
The Class Struggle.
Capitalist Enslavement.
CHAPTER V. Prices of Commodities
Wages and Prices.
Causes of Price Rises.
"The American Plan.”
CHAPTER VI. Price Regulation
High Wages Do Not Make High Prices.
Low Wages Do Not Mean High Prices.
Increased Demand Temporarily Increases Prices.
What are “High", “Fair ”and “Low ”Wages?
CHAPTER VII. The Standard of Living
The Hours of Labor.
CHAPTER VIII. Piece Work
The Bonus System.
Profit Sharing.
Family Pressure.
CHAPTER IX. Origin of New Capital
Accumulation of Capital.
The Migratory Worker.
Capital and Investment.
American Labor Poorest Paid
What Capital is
CHAPTER X. The Market Law
Panics.
The Lesson.
Consular Service Aid.
One Regulator.
The Workers’ Lesson
Shorter Workday.
The I. W. W.
CHAPTER XI. In Conclusion
Capital, an acquired character.
Labor Objective.
Working Class Unionism.
The Industry the organizing unit.

Introduction

IN THE following pages the reader must be aware that, wherever a worker’s activity has been selected for the purpose of illustration, both the worker and his process typify the working class and social production; for the exploitation of wage labor is the exploitation of one class by another class—the working class by the capitalist class—and is not necessarily the exploitation of the individual worker by his employer. Unless we understand this the class struggle is only a meaningless phrase.

The Interdependence of Labor

When in this booklet a worker or a working group is referred to, as producing some article or commodity, it is necessary to understand that such reference is merely to illustrate a point. Production of any article is impossible to any worker under the capitalist arrangement of industry; the simplest article as well as the most complicated machine is the product of the entire working class. From the sulphur match to the aggregate of the world’s commodities there cannot be eliminated any classification of labor, and have the match, or the world’s wealth.

We say of the miner that he produces coal, of the baker that he produces bread, but such is not the case. They assist each other in the production of coal and bread and are at the same time dependent upon the balance of the workers for their equipment and materials. Before the miner goes down into the earth his fellow workers in every line of human endeavor have co-operatively labored to supply him with house, food, furniture, clothing, tools, powder, etc.; so that in the mining of coal all of the workers assist him. They do not go to the coal-face, but he could not go there without them. The mining of coal is therefore a social function in which all the workers participate. What the miner does is to perform the last social act necessary to transform the natural deposit into usable shape. But the coal is not yet produced—coal is not mined to be used by the miners, it is intended to warm some home or furnish power to some industry—other workers follow the miner to complete production of the coal. For no commodity is produced until it reaches the purchaser who consumes it. Only when this has happened is the objective which inspired its production attained—the satisfaction of an individual or social need.

The Miner, a Typical Illustration Only

The miner has been used for illustration here, but you can substitute for him the farmer, logger, sawyer, bricklayer, teamster, etc., and no matter which of these you select a study of his activities will show that he works in conjunction with and cannot function without the balance of the working class. Capitalist industry has so organized the workers that their mutual inter-dependence is its outstanding feature. There is no independence for either the individual or the group. As a class they labor and produce; as a class they are exploited, and as a class they must organize, and through a class organization only will they be enabled to achieve any betterment in the present or emancipation finally.

DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION.

A. W. I. U. No. 110

To read on click HERE

THE POINT IS NOT TO INTERPRET WHITENESS BUT TO ABOLISH IT BY NOEL IGNATIEV

2012-01-21T16:15:00.002-06:00

JOHN BROWN AT HARPERS FERRY TRYING TO DO WHAT NEEDED TO BE DONE...
AND STILL DOES

Theoretical weekends continues with this from Noel Ignatiev.

The Point Is Not To Interpret Whiteness But To Abolish ItNoel Ignatiev

Talk given at the conference "The Making and Unmaking of Whiteness" Berkeley, California, April 11-13, 1997.

Also available as a PDF file.

Now that White Studies has become an academic industry, with its own dissertation mill, conference, publications, and no doubt soon its junior faculty, it is time for the abolitionists to declare where they stand in relation to it. Abolitionism is first of all a political project: the abolitionists study whiteness in order to abolish it.

Whiteness is not a culture... Whiteness has nothing to do with culture and everything to do with social position. It is nothing but a reflection of privilege, and exists for no reason other than to defend it.

Various commentators have stated that their aim is to identify and preserve a positive white identity. Abolitionists deny the existence of a positive white identity. We at Race Traitor, the journal with which I am associated, have asked some of those who think whiteness contains positive elements to indicate what they are. We are still waiting for an answer. Until we get one, we will take our stand with David Roediger, who has insisted that whiteness is not merely oppressive and false, it is nothing but oppressive and false. As James Baldwin said, "So long as you think you are white, there is no hope for you."

Whiteness is not a culture. There is Irish culture and Italian culture and American culture - the latter, as Albert Murray pointed out, a mixture of the Yankee, the Indian, and the Negro (with a pinch of ethnic salt); there is youth culture and drug culture and queer culture; but there is no such thing as white culture. Whiteness has nothing to do with culture and everything to do with social position. It is nothing but a reflection of privilege, and exists for no reason other than to defend it. Without the privileges attached to it, the white race would not exist, and the white skin would have no more social significance than big feet.

Before the advocates of positive whiteness remind us of the oppression of the white poor, let me say that we have never denied it. The United States, like every capitalist society, is composed of masters and slaves. The problem is that many of the slaves think they are part of the master class because they partake of the privileges of the white skin. We cannot say it too often: whiteness does not exempt people from exploitation, it reconciles them to it. It is for those who have nothing else.

Either America is a very democratic country, where cab drivers beat up city councilmen with impunity, or the privileges of whiteness reach far down into the ranks of the laboring class.

However exploited the poor whites of this country, they are not direct victims of racial oppression, and "white trash" is not a term of racial degradation analogous to the various epithets commonly applied to black people; in fact, the poor whites are the objects of race privilege, which ties them to their masters more firmly than did the arrows of Vulcan bind Prometheus to the rock. Not long ago there was an incident in Boston in which a well-dressed black man hailed a taxi and directed the driver to take him to Roxbury, a black district. The white cab driver refused, and when the man insisted she take him or call someone who would, as the law provided, she called her boyfriend, also a cabdriver, on the car radio, who showed up, dragged the black man out of the cab and called him a "nigger." The black man turned out to be a city councilman. The case was unusual only in that it made the papers. Either America is a very democratic country, where cab drivers beat up city councilmen with impunity, or the privileges of whiteness reach far down into the ranks of the laboring class.

We are anti-white, but we are not in general against the people who are called white. Those for whom the distinction is too subtle are advised to read the speeches of Malcolm X. No one ever spoke more harshly and critically to black people, and no one ever loved them more. It is no part of love to flatter and withhold from people what they need to know. President Samora Machel of Mozambique pointed out that his people had to die as tribes in order to be born as a nation. Similar things were said at the time Afro-Americans in mass rejected the term "Negro" in favor of "black." We seek to draw upon that tradition, as well as - we do not deny it - an even older tradition, which declares that a person must die so that he or she can be born again. We hold that so-called whites must cease to exist as whites in order to realize themselves as something else; to put it another way: white people must commit suicide as whites in order to come alive as workers, or youth, or women, or whatever other identity can induce them to change from the miserable, petulant, subordinated creatures they now are into freely associated, fully developed human subjects.

If abolitionism is distinct from White Studies, it is also distinct from what is called "anti-racism."

The white race is neither a biological nor a cultural formation; it is a strategy for securing to some an advantage in a competitive society. It has held down more whites than blacks. Abolitionism is also a strategy: its aim is not racial harmony but class war. By attacking whiteness, the abolitionists seek to undermine the main pillar of capitalist rule in this country.

If abolitionism is distinct from White Studies, it is also distinct from what is called "anti-racism." There now exist a number of publications, organizing programs and research centers that focus their energies on identifying and opposing individuals and groups they call "racist." Sometimes they share information and collaborate with official state agencies. We stand apart from that tendency. In our view, any "anti-racist" work that does not entail opposition to the state reinforces the authority of the state, which is the most important agency in maintaining racial oppression.

The simple fact is that the public schools and the welfare departments are doing more harm to black children than all the "racist" groups combined.

Just as the capitalist system is not a capitalist plot, so racial oppression is not the work of "racists." It is maintained by the principal institutions of society, including the schools (which define "excellence"), the labor market (which defines "employment"), the legal system (which defines "crime"), the welfare system (which defines "poverty"), the medical industry (which defines "health"), and the family (which defines "kinship"). Many of these institutions are administered by people who would be offended if accused of complicity with racial oppression. It is reinforced by reform programs that address problems traditionally of concern to the "left" - for example, federal housing loan guarantees. The simple fact is that the public schools and the welfare departments are doing more harm to black children than all the "racist" groups combined.

The abolitionists seek to abolish the white race. How can this be done? We must admit that we do not know exactly, but a look at history will be instructive.

When William Lloyd Garrison and the original abolitionists began their work, slavery was the law of the land, and behind the law stood the entire machinery of government, including the courts, the army, and even the post office, which banned anti- slavery literature from Southern mail. The slave states controlled the Senate and Presidency, and Congress refused even to accept petitions relating to slavery. Most northerners considered slavery unjust, but their opposition to it was purely nominal. However much they disapproved of it, the majority "went along," as majorities normally do, rather than risk the ordinary comforts of their lives, meager as they were.

The weak point of the slave system was that it required the collaboration of the entire country, for without the support of the "loyal citizens" of Massachusetts, the slaveholders of South Carolina could not keep their laborers in bondage (just as today without the support of the law-abiding, race discrimination could not be enforced). The abolitionists set to work to break up the national consensus. Wendell Phillips declared that if he could establish Massachusetts as a sanctuary for the fugitive, he could bring down slavery. They sought to nullify the fugitive slave law, which enlisted the northern population directly in enforcing slavery. They encouraged and took part in attempts to rescue fugitives - not, it must be pointed out, from the slaveholders, but from the Law. In all of this activity, the black population took the lead. The concentrated expression of the abolitionist strategy was the slogan, "No Union with Slaveholders," which was not, as has often been charged, an attempt to maintain their moral purity but an effort to break up the Union in order to establish a liberated zone adjacent to the slave states. It was a strategy that would later come to be known as dual power, and neither Garrison's pacifism nor his failure to develop a general critique of the capitalist system should blind us to its revolutionary character.

John Brown's attack on Harpers Ferry was not an aberration but the logical application of the abolitionist strategy. The slaveholders retaliated for it by demanding new guarantees of loyalty from the federal government, including a stronger fugitive slave law, reopening of the slave trade, and especially the expansion of slavery into the territories.

The white race is a club. Certain people are enrolled in it at birth, without their consent, and brought up according to its rules. For the most part they go through life accepting the privileges of membership, without reflecting on the costs.

As Phillips said, Brown "startled the South into madness," precipitating a situation where people were forced to choose between abolition and the domination of the country as a whole by the slaveholders. It was not the abolitionists but the slaveholders who, by the arrogance of their demands, compelled the north to resist. From Harpers' Ferry, each step led inexorably to the next: Southern bullying, Lincoln's election, secession, war, blacks as laborers, soldiers, citizens, voters. The war that began with not one person in a hundred foreseeing the end of slavery was transformed within two years into an anti-slavery war, and a great army marched through the land singing, "As He died to make men holy, let us fight to make men free."

The course of events can never be predicted in other than the broadest outline, but in the essentials, history followed the path charted by the abolitionists. As they foresaw, it was necessary to break up the Union in order to reconstitute it without slavery. When South Carolina announced its secession, Wendell Phillips was forced into hiding to escape the Boston mob that blamed him; two years later he was invited to address Congress on how to win the war. He recommended two measures, both of which were soon implemented: (1) declare the war an anti-slavery war; (2) enlist black soldiers. Has ever a revolutionary been more thoroughly vindicated by history?

The hostility of white laborers toward abolitionism, and their failure to develop a labor abolitionism, was not, as some have claimed, an expression of working-class resentment of bourgeois philanthropists but the reflection of their refusal to view themselves as part of a class with the slaves - just as a century later white labor opposition to school integration showed that the laborers viewed themselves more as whites than as proletarians.

The white race is a club. Certain people are enrolled in it at birth, without their consent, and brought up according to its rules. For the most part they go through life accepting the privileges of membership, without reflecting on the costs. Others, usually new arrivals in the country, pass through a probationary period before "earning" membership; they are necessarily more conscious of their racial standing.

The white club does not require that all members be strong advocates of white supremacy, merely that they defer to the prejudices of others. It is based on one huge assumption: that all those who look white are, whatever their reservations, fundamentally loyal to it.

For an example of how the club works, take the cops. The natural attitude of the police toward the exploited is hostility. All over the world cops beat up poor people; that is their job, and it has nothing to do with color. What is unusual and has to be accounted for is not why they beat up black people but why they don't normally beat up propertyless whites. It works this way: the cops look at a person and then decide on the basis of color whether that person is loyal to the system they are sworn to serve and protect. They don't stop to think if the black person whose head they are whipping is an enemy; they assume it. It does not matter if the victim goes to work every day, pays his taxes and crosses only on the green. Occasionally they bust an outstanding and prominent black person, and the poor whites cheer the event, because it confirms them in their conviction that they are superior to any black person who walks the earth.

On the other hand, the cops don't know for sure if the white person to whom they give a break is loyal to them; they assume it. The non-beating of poor whites is time off for good behavior and an assurance of future cooperation. Their color exempts them to some degree from the criminal class - which is how the entire working class was defined before the invention of race and is still treated in those parts of the world where race, or some functional equivalent, does not exist as a social category. It is a cheap way of buying some people's loyalty to a social system that exploits them.

When it comes to abolishing the white race, the task is not to win over more whites to oppose "racism"; there are "anti-racists" enough already to do the job.

What if the police couldn't tell a loyal person just by color? What if there were enough people around who looked white but were really enemies of official society so that the cops couldn't tell whom to beat and whom to let off? What would they do then? They would begin to "enforce the law impartially," as the liberals say, beating only those who "deserve" it. But, as Anatole France noted, the law, in its majestic equality, forbids both rich and poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread. The standard that normally governs police behavior is wealth and its external manifestations - dress, speech, etc. At the present time, the class bias of the law is partially repressed by racial considerations; the removal of those considerations would give it free rein. Whites who are poor would find themselves on the receiving end of police justice as black people now do.

The effect on their consciousness and behavior is predictable. That is not to say that everyone now regarded as "white" would suddenly become a progressive, any more than everyone now "black" is. But with color no longer serving as a handy guide for the distribution of penalties and rewards, European-Americans of the downtrodden class would at last be compelled to face with sober senses their real condition of life and their relations with humankind. It would be the end of race.

When it comes to abolishing the white race, the task is not to win over more whites to oppose "racism"; there are "anti- racists" enough already to do the job. The task is to gather together a minority determined to make it impossible for anyone to be white. It is a strategy of creative provocation, like Wendell Phillips advocated and John Brown carried out.

A traitor to the white race is someone who is nominally classified as white but who defies white rules so strenuously as to jeopardize his or her ability to draw upon the privileges of whiteness.

What would the determined minority have to do? They would have to break the laws of whiteness so flagrantly as to destroy the myth of white unanimity. What would it mean to break the rules of whiteness? It would mean responding to every manifestation of white supremacy as if it were directed against them. On the individual level, it would mean, for instance, responding to an anti-black remark by asking, What makes you think I'm white? On the collective level, it would mean confronting the institutions that reproduce race.

The abolitionists oppose all forms of segregation in the schools, including tracking by "merit," they oppose all mechanisms that favor whites in the job market, including labor unions when necessary, and they oppose the police and courts, which define black people as a criminal class. They not merely oppose these things, but seek to disrupt their functioning. They reject in advance no means of attaining their goal; even when combating "racist" groups, they act in ways that are offensive to official institutions. The willingness to go beyond socially acceptable "anti-racism" is the dividing line between "good whites" and traitors to the white race.

A traitor to the white race is someone who is nominally classified as white but who defies white rules so strenuously as to jeopardize his or her ability to draw upon the privileges of whiteness. The abolitionists recognize that no "white" can individually escape from the privileges of whiteness. The white club does not like to surrender a single member, so that even those who step out of it in one situation can hardly avoid stepping back in later, if for no other reason than the assumptions of others - unless, like John Brown, they have the good fortune to be hanged before that can happen. But they also understand that when there comes into being a critical mass of people who look white but do not act white - people who might be called "reverse oreos" - the white race will undergo fission, and former whites, born again, will be able to take part, together with others, in building a new human community.

For the most part, the following is from PM press:

Noel Ignatiev has been trying for over fifty years, without apparent success, to make a revolution. Noel has not just been some academic Marxian activist. He has been active out in the real world. (Note: I once was a member of the same organization of Noel, and learned much from him) In addition to contributing to A New Notion, he wrote How the Irish Became White, co-founded and co-edited Race Traitor (American Book Award winner), and edited Lesson of the Hour: Wendell Phillips on Abolition and Strategy. He has written countless articles, leaflets and pamphlets, and lectures widely to both popular and scholarly audiences. He is now back at his day job at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design, having recently returned from Lebanon, where he was Edward Said Visiting Professor of American Studies at the American University of Beirut. Rolling Stone magazine named him a “dangerous mind." Before entering the academy he worked for over twenty years in steel mills, farm equipment plants and machine-tool factories. He has two children, Rachel and John Henry.

SUPPORT ECO WARRIOR AND POLITICAL PRISONER ERIC MCDAVID

2012-01-20T16:40:00.001-06:00

ERIC McDAVID

Today is Political Prisoner Friday. Every Friday, Scission features the story of a different political prisoner or POW languishing in America's prisons.

Eric McDavid is a political prisoner serving a whole lot of time currently at Terminal Island in California. Eric is one of those caught up in the infamous Green Scare and the Patriot Act. He is serving a 20-year sentence in federal prison for "thought crime," encarcerated for his political beliefs, targeted by an FBI undercover informant who entrapped him unjustly.

All of his appeals have been exhausted and he faces another fourteen years behind bars at this time.

Of Eric, Support Eric McDavid writes:

Eric McDavid is a political prisoner, currently serving a 20 year sentence in federal prison for “thought crime.” He was arrested in January 2006 (as part of the government's ongoing "Green Scare" campaign against environmental and animal rights activists)...

Eric was arrested along with Zachary Jenson and Lauren Weiner .The Denver Anarchist Black Cross reports,

All three were charged with “Conspiracy to damage and destroy property by fire and an explosive.” His arrest was the direct result of a government informant – known only as “Anna” – who spent a year and a half drawing him in and working with the FBI to fabricate a crime and implicate Eric in it. Anna was paid over $65,000 for her work with the FBI. Eric was imprisoned for what amounts to thought-crime – no actions were ever carried out.

Eric McDavid 16209-097
FCI TERMINAL ISLAND
FEDERAL CORRECTIONAL INSTITUTION
PO BOX 3007
SAN PEDRO, CA 90731

The following is from Break the Chains.

6 Years - A Note from Eric McDavid's Partner

From: sacprisonersupport@riseup.net
Date: Fri, January 13, 2012

Dear friends,

Today marks the 6th year of Eric’s arrest and incarceration. I’m not quite sure why I always feel compelled to commemorate this day – the memories it awakens bring so much pain, anger and frustration. It is not something I eally want to remember. It is also something I can never forget. That day forever altered the course of Eric’s life – and the lives of all his loved ones.

But I also know that it is our responsibility to remember. To remember why Eric was arrested in the first place – not because anything burned down or was damaged, but because he dared to think he could change things. And that he didn’t have to wait for permission from those who would never give it. Eric was arrested – and sentenced to an inordinate amount of time – because of his politics

We also must remember what it really means to show solidarity – with Eric and all of our other comrades behind bars. We must remember that they are still here. They are all still a part of our movements and we need to act – every day – to include them. And, most importantly, we must carry on the struggles for which they have given so much.

And we need to remember that sometimes things do change overnight. Sometimes our loved ones are ripped from us. There is no way to really prepare for such a heartwrenching experience, but what we can do is remember to use the time we have now to be good to each other. Love fearlessly. Never take for granted the time we share with each other. It is a precious gift.

Recently, Eric and I had something returned to us that was taken 6 years ago. I have no one to thank. It should never have been taken in the first place. But I cannot tell you how overjoyed I was at its return. On November 21st, during our visit at Terminal Island, Eric reached across the “coffee table” sitting between us and grabbed my hands. Eric and I had not been allowed to sit and hold hands in almost 6 years. Human touch is such an integral part of leading a healthy, happy life. Not being able to touch the people you love is tortuous. It is cruel and inhumane. (Imagine watching a loved one cry and not being able to wipe away their tears, or hold their hand…) Touch deepens our connections with each other – it moves beyond language into a realm that words cannot contain or explain. Of course, the powers that be know all of this, which is probably why it was denied us for so long. We are acutely aware that it could be taken away again at any moment. But for now we are reveling in every second of it.

And so I remind myself of this, too – don’t ever take these things for granted.

Eric and I both would like to express our heartfelt thanks to all of you. It is abundantly clear that so many people have not forgotten. Eric continues to get mail from people all across the globe – please keep it coming! He loves hearing from you. You are his connection to the outside world – to the movements and places and ideas he cares about. Keeping those connections is incredibly important to him.

And to all of you who have donated to Eric’s support fund – you have no idea how grateful we are. These donations not only help Eric with things like stamps, food and personal items from commissary and time on the telephone – they also help fund visits for him and his loved ones. These visits are key to keeping everyone sane. It would be impossible for us to visit as often as we do without your help.

Eric and I feel your support on a daily basis. “Thank you” could never be enough…

Eric is 6 years into an almost 20 year sentence. Sometimes that thought is almost overwhelming. But then I remember. I remember Eric and who he is and how he has held onto that throughout this whole ordeal. I remember all of you and how much love and support we have felt coming from all directions. And I remember that we can do this.

With so much love,
jenny (eric’s partner)

PS
Please remember our other friends, too! Marie Mason is turning 50 this month. Visit her website: www.supportmariemason.org for more details on how to send her a birthday card or a note of support.

GUANTANAMO IS STILL IN BUSINESS AND ONE MAN WANTS YOU KNOW WHAT LIFE THERE IS LIKE

2012-01-19T16:43:00.002-06:00

If I remember correctly, Obama promised that if elected the first thing he would do was close down the detention center at Guantanamo. I don't think that has happened. Maybe he will promise if re-elected he will figure out how to get that taken care of in his second term.

I wouldn't hold my breath.

Talking about the U.S. prison camp at Guantanamo Bay has sort of gone out of style. It should be brought right back in style.

Now, sure, we all know and have heard it a million times, there are some really bad guys there. That is probably true, but you know what there are some not really bad guys who get stuck there, too.

One of those not really bad guys is a fellow named Moazzam Begg. He is out talking about his experiences there. Not only that but he is pointing to all the other rendition issues, all the other torture, all the other stuff being carried on in your name by some really bad guys.

When Moazzam talks, you should listen.

I thank CagedPrisoners for the following.

Guantanamo remembered: A personal perspective

Written by Moazzam Begg

Moazzam Begg (right, with his father) has campaigned for those left behind in Guantanamo [GALLO/GETTY]

“You are now the property of the United States and you have no rights.” These were the first words to greet me and other prisoners held in the US prison camp at Guantanamo Bay. Ten years on little has changed.

My life changed irretrievably on the night of 31st January 2002 when Pakistani and US intelligence agents abducted me from my Islamabad house in the middle of the night, in front of my family, at gunpoint, and took me to a series of secret and military prisons that included Kandahar, Bagram and Guantanamo Bay

After three years of an ordeal that included being, punched and kicked, forcibly stripped, shaved, violated, spat upon; enduring racial and religious abuse, incommunicado incarceration in a cell smaller than an average house toilet; being subjected to over 300 interrogations, sometimes with my wrists shackled to my ankles from behind my back; watching the Quran being desecrated; being threatened with torture in Syria or Egypt; being subjected to the sounds of screams I was lead to believe were members of my family and, watching two prisoners being beaten to death, I was finally returned to the UK and my family – which included a 3-year old son I’d never seen.

Like the overwhelming majority of the prisoners there I was interrogated by the world’s most powerful law enforcement and intelligence agencies: CIA, FBI, MI5, CITF, US military intelligence and many others. I have learned too – since my release – that many other nations were allowed to use the Guantanamo experiment to interrogate dissidents from their own countries, such as Libyan intelligence under Colonel Gaddafi. But, despite the arsenal of weapons – both metaphoric and real – there were never any charges or trial for me.

Shortly after my return I joined the human rights NGO Cageprsioners and found myself establishing strong links with former Guantanamo prisoners all around the world, in addition to their lawyers and the families of those awaiting the return of their loved ones.

What became evident to me early on was that I was facing an internal struggle based on my faith, survivor’s guiltand the quest for natural justice, which has become my resolute aim to date.

Since then and now I have, by the grace of God, travelled the world to campaign for those left behind in Guantanamo. I have toured with former US soldiers who were once Guantanamo prison guards, speaking about the evils of US foreign adventures and have sat with world leaders asking them to take in prisoners unable to return to their countries of origin for fears, ironically, of imprisonment and torture.

I’ve met prisoners from different suspect communities who once faced similar experiences to mine – and worse; I’ve met with victims of British and American rendition who have become leaders of the their country after the Arab spring and, I’ve returned to the house where I was abducted from in Pakistan to record the scene of the crime and, I’ve met with the family of a woman whose screams once echoed through Bagram’s soulless prison.

I’ve earned descriptions as that range from being ‘Mandela-like’ in my lack of bitterness towards my captors to being called a terrorist sympathiser (notwithstanding the little detail that Nelson Mandela’s 27- year imprisonment was as a terrorist under apartheid South Africa) because I advocate dialogue with Al-Qaeda and the Taliban well before deals were being brokered in Qatar to accommodate the latter.

Whatever I’ve seen or done in these years the one thing I’ve not been able to recover is the one thing I’ve been fighting to get back: normality. There’s no such thing any more. After all, what’s normal about expecting your family to understand all that has transpired in the world’s most secret prisons to terrorism suspects, when that is not even possible for ‘ordinary decent criminals’? In addition to the irrepressible sense of camaraderie that exists between us all, this is one of resonating features that unite the former prisoners together: a hushed recognition of one another’s pain.

When men are eventually released how are they supposed to renew their familial relationships when their internal survival mechanism told them to stop believing they were fathers, husbands and sons? How can they rebuild their lives and be part of society again once the world’s most powerful men (and media) have described them as the “worst of the worst” terrorist scumbags who are bent on destroying rather than building?

How do children whose fathers are in Guantanamo explain to their friends that “daddy is in prison” when society by default maintains that prisoners are bad men?

And what of those poor, innocent children whose lost childhoods without a father for so long can never be reclaimed? What can fill the chasm created when the child needed the father most – and he wasn’t there to help?

Speaking of children, the past decade in Guantanamo has witnessed has numerous child-prisoners who have grown into adults behind the razor wire, able-bodied men’s once healthy limbs amputated, perfectly sane men losing their minds and, freedom gained at last, for some, in a coffin.

To mark the tenth anniversary since the first prisoners were sent to Guantanamo, as pictures of men kneeling in orange jumpsuits, masked and goggled – looking like the extra-terrestrial beings we were told they were - shocked the world we will be hosting several events in the UK.

The171 remaining Guantanamo prisoners, however, will be protesting their innocence via one of the few methods available to them: hunger-strike. Even if that means being forcibly restrained in a chair and pumped with liquid food through the nostril to keep them alive – as the living dead men they’ve become in the world’s most notorious prison – which is capable of destroying lives both inside and out - that we, and history, will never forget.

This article also appears on Al Jazeera to coincide with their screenings of the documentary film Four Days in Guantanamo