FROM REVOLUTION AGAINST NATURE TO COMMUNISM WITH A NON-HUMAN FACE

Cultural Monday's is the weirdest day for me.  Sometimes I totally don't get what I am posting.  Sometimes I get it, but wonder if it worth paying anything.  Sometimes, I think it is really cool.  This long post could be all of the above.  I have read through it once and skimmed it a couple more times and I think, if you have the time, you might find it worth reading and even somewhat enjoyable.  I think you will also learn some things from it.  I'm not sure an understanding of what the author has to say is likely to push forward the revolution, end global capital, and build a new world, but then there wouldn't be too much to read if that was always a requirement, eh.

One thing I will say up front, the fact that Slavol Zizek is mentioned a few times in the post made me think twice about printing it.  I am not much of a fan these days.  However, that seems a bit much as far as a reason for turning off the whole piece, and, anyway, his comments here are not offensive.

Before today I was not particularly familiar with Andrei Platonov.  Seems like an interesting fellow.   Platonov (1899–1951) was the son of a railway worker.  The eldest of eleven children,  He worked as a train engineer's assistant, a caster at a pipe factory, and in a train repair shop. He later recalled:

I lived and languished because life had turned me straight away from a child into an adult, denying me a youth. Before the Revolution I was a child, and after it there was no time to be a youth, no time to grow up--one had to frown and struggle right away.

His literary career as a communist began with a flourish. 

Sovlit.net writes:

 Despite this literary success, Platonov, still infused with a sense of social obligation, was not ready to give up his practical work, particularly in light of the drought which afflicted the Voronezh region in 1921. As Platonov later put it:

"The drought of 1921 had an exceptionally strong effect on me, and, being a technician, I could not occupy myself with the contemplative occupation of literature."

Between 1921 and 1922, Platonov served as the chairman of the special local drought-fighting commission.

 The New York Review of books notes, " Between 1927 and 1932 he wrote his most politically controversial works, some of them first published in the Soviet Union only in the late 1980s."  

The New Left Review says:

The year 1934, his thirty-fifth, was a significant watershed in the life of Andrei Platonov. He had already written The Foundation Pit and Chevengur, the novels for which he is today best known, but neither had been published in full. Soviet readers knew him mainly for a few short stories and, above all, his semi-satirical account of collectivization, ‘For Future Use’, which had been met by a storm of official criticism when it appeared in 1931. For the next three years, Platonov was unable to publish anything. But in the spring of 1934, he was included in a brigade of writers sent to Turkmenistan to report on the progress of Sovietization, and the same year was asked to contribute to a series of almanachs. Under Gorky’s general editorship, these were to celebrate the completion of the second Five-Year Plan in 1937; but they never appeared. ... Within a few days Gorky had rejected Platonov’s text as ‘unsuitable’ and ‘pessimistic’; in early March the organizing secretary of the Writers’ Union publicly denounced the unpublished article as ‘reactionary’, ‘reflecting the philosophy of elements hostile to socialism’.

Yet,   Gorky told Platonov: "Don't be angry. Don't be bitter....All will pass, the truth alone will remain."   Well, maybe, maybe not.

 Later,  With his works unpublishable, Platonov, in 1933, wrote to Gorky: "Can I be a Soviet writer, or is this objectively impossible?"Gorky did not respond to the question.  He also wrote Stalin, who also did not answer.

Still, he did keep on writing and eventually managed to get some things published.

Sovlit writes;

Beginning in 1936, Platonov had written literary reviews for various papers and journals. A collection of these articles was to be published in 1939. Publication was stopped, however, when the articles became the subject of stinging attacks on the pages of the Party's theoretical journal Bolshevik.

Increasingly, the only literary work for which Platonov could get paid were his writings for children. But even here his works were not always welcome. A series of plays which he wrote for the Central Children's Theater were never staged during his lifetime.

When the Great Patriotic War came to the Soviet Union, Platonov became a front-line correspondent for the Army newspaper Krasnaya zvezda. During the war, four books by Platonov were published: Inspired People (Odukhotvorennye liudi, 1942), Stories of the Motherland (Rasskazy o rodine, 1943), Armour (Bronya, 1943), and V storonu zakata solntsiya, 1945.

After the war, Platonov's difficulty with publication resumed. Particular hostility was occasioned by his story The Family Ivanov (Sem'ya Ivanova). In 1947, critic V. Ermilov labeled the entire of Platonov's post-war work as a "slander against Soviet power." Again it was only his work for children which could be published, and again this only thanks to Mikhail Sholokhov. 

Andrei Platonov died in Moscow on 5 January 1951 of tuberculosis.

I have deviated however from the piece I will now share.  If you feel so inclined let me know what you think about it.  I also wouldn't mind hearing from people who have opinions on Platonov. 

The following is from E Flux.

Communism with a Nonhuman Face

Oxana Timofeeva

The title of this essay paraphrases the famous expression “Socialism with a human face,” which refers back to 1968, to the events in Czechoslovakia known as the Prague Spring, but also to the Soviet 1980s, the time of the late Soviet Union prior to perestroika, when the idea of changing the very nature of so-called “really existing socialism” from the inside according to human/democratic values was still popular among dissidents. Apparently, it was not a renewed and more refined socialism, but a good old capitalism which entered this space under the mask of the human. Apparently, something went wrong long before perestroika, when communism went in an unknown direction, like a strange animal that managed to escape from people and from the very really existing socialism. Here I would like to track this strange animal and read its traces as peculiar “signs from the future.”

I want to suggest not that something went wrong with socialism, but that something is wrong with the human face. Let me start from the argument, which sounds quite banal already, about the dialectical relationship between the ideology of democratic humanism and the racist social practices of neoliberalism.

_{Film still from Soviet director Valeri Rubinchik’s King Stakh from Savage Hunt of King Stakh (Дикая охота короля Стаха), 1979.}

Questions are posed here and there, in the entirety of Europe and further to the West, across first world countries and around: What happened to our nice and glorious multicultural world? How is it that our multiple identities, subjectivities, cultural diversities, and irreducible singularities are no longer taken into account? Where has our welfare paradise gone? Is it already lost? The enemy is easy to locate: the one percent, the rich, the bankers, the absolute capitalist minority that owns the world, together with far-right governments and politicians who provide this minority with silent support and hardcore austerity politics. Right-wing governments never defend the interests of people; they only pursue their own interests—the power of the rich over the poor, the power of capital over labor, the power of the one over the many.

Austerity policy is another name for state racism, since its first targets are migrant workers, asylum seekers, and refugees. But it equally abuses artists, intellectuals, the precarious, the disabled, the sick, the poor, and the retired—all those whose very existence does not correspond to the holy land pictured by the perverse imagination of the right-wing. In brief, the far-right is the evil attacking the freedoms and rights won by the people in the course of twentieth-century class struggles, and then carefully guarded by social democrats.

My object of critique here, however, is not the evil of the right-wing, but rather the good of democratic universalism, since they both form part of one and the same dialectical chain. My argument is very simple: if humanism, often used as a slogan for struggles against racism and xenophobia, proceeds from the assumption that there is some exceptional dignity in human beings and some exceptional value to human life, then it is just one step away from putting into question the value of any nonhuman life.

The institution of human rights is based on recognition. Someone should be recognized in his or her human dignity. If this concrete biped is recognized as human, regardless of his or her gender, race, or ethnicity, then this individual must have documents and the right to vote, the right to life, the right to property, and so on. He or she pays taxes to the state to which he or she is attached as a citizen, so that this state will provide for his or her security. The rights of citizens are becoming practically equal to human rights. And there is a certain logic here. The state is a guarantor of human rights; therefore, a certain human can enjoy his human rights as a citizen of a certain state. Citizenship is becoming a legal condition for someone’s humanship, so to speak. Hence the enormous difficulties faced by those who have no citizenship at all, or who have the wrong citizenship.

Today, illegal migrant workers are the most vulnerable in terms of citizenship. They are being massacred in high numbers at the borders of welfare states while trying to enter illegally. If they have already entered, they are constantly trying to escape the police. They are living in the streets, in the basements of houses, and in slums, even as they enable the prosperity and economic growth of these glorious states through their low-paid or unpaid labor. The institutions of human rights and citizen rights are based on the exclusion of nonhumans and noncitizens.

However, my intention here is not to say that all we need to do is extend the realm of human rights to include animals, to bring them into the human universe—this is basically the agenda of animal rights defenders, which is totally fine. But if these changes were implemented within the existing capitalist regime, we would end up with something like animal citizenship, with related attributes like border control, dealing with illegal animals trying to reach happy European fields from forests on the global periphery, and so on.

I would rather like to claim that the class struggle has to be carried forward by those who appear as nonhumans, or even as unhuman monsters, like the Hollywood aliens that symbolized communism during the Cold War. Revolution does not have a human face. It goes beyond the human and human rights, towards animality. This idea was perfectly drawn by Russian poet Vladimir Mayakovsky in his “Ode to Revolution”: “You send sailors / To the sinking cruiser / there / where a forgotten kitten was mewing.”

This image of revolution is striking and powerful. It hits the mark. There is something absurd and irrational in the excessive generosity of the revolutionary gesture depicted by Mayakovsky—imagine how crazy an army commander would have to be to send a battalion of sailors, adult armed men, to risk their lives for the sake of some forgotten, tiny, politically insignificant creature. And yet, that’s precisely how the drama of revolutionary desire should be performed.

Almost like these sailors, I will now try to look back to the sinking cruiser of the Russian Revolution in search of, if not a proper animal, then at least for its traces, almost erased by history. First of all, let’s see how the Revolution dealt with animals and other nonhumans, or with those who were “not human enough.”

_{Ilya Kabakov, Heads, 1967.}

After the October Revolution of 1917, the idea of a “revolution in nature” and even of a “struggle against nature” was continuously advanced in all spheres of the nascent Soviet society. Nature was supposed to have changed—liberated from its reliance on necessity but also preserved from the precariousness of contingency. A diffuse avant-garde attitude unconditionally sustained the idea of a point of no return, a “giving up the ship,” a total transformation of the social and natural orders towards emancipation and equality. Nature was also considered a battlefield for class struggle. The central theme running through Soviet literature and poetry of the period is the potential or actual transformation of one species into another—of animals into humans, for example—accompanied by the acquisition of higher levels of consciousness and freedom.

Nature is not “nice”: the Russian Revolution sees nature, in a Hegelian-Marxist spirit, in terms of unfreedom, suffering, and exploitation, and the animal kingdom serves, in a way, as an example of society that should be transformed. It is not a matter of the predominance and superiority of one species over the other, but a matter of taking everything into account. As long as inequality remains untouched at the interspecies level, equality of people, too, can never be realized. Or, to put it in Adornian terms, history is the history of oppression, and the violent domination of humans over humans starts with the human domination over nature.¹

As the futurist poet Velimir Khlebnikov puts it, “I see the liberties of horses / and equal rights for cows.”² In his poem The Triumph of Agriculture, Nikolay Zabolotsky, one of the founders of the Russian avant-garde absurdist group OBERIU, describes nature as suffering under the old bourgeois regime. He compares animals to proletarians and creates a utopia of their progressive liberation facilitated by technology:

I saw a red glow in the window
Belonging to a rational ox.
The parliament of ponderous cows
Sat there engaged in problem-solving … 

Down below the temple of machinery
Manufactured oxygen pancakes.
There horses, friends of chemistry,
Had polymeric soup,
Some others sailed midair
Expecting visitors from the sky.
A cow in formulas and ribbons
Baked pie out of elements
And large chemical oats
Grew in protective coats.³

Andrey Platonov deserves special attention in this respect. Among the numerous intellectuals, artists, poets, and writers who were inspired by the Russian Revolution and invested a great deal of creative energy and work in it, Andrey Platonov is a unique figure. Coming from the industrial proletariat, he became a major Russian writer for whom the Revolution consisted in crafting a truly Marxist literary practice examining topics like community, sexuality, gender, labor, production, death, nature, utopianism, and the paradoxes of creating a new (better) future.

In his writings, not only humans, but all living creatures, including plants, are overwhelmed by thedesire for communism, a desire which, as Fredric Jameson pointed out, still has not found its Freud or Lacan.⁴ A passage from Platonov’s novel Chevengur (1928–1929) is emblematic in this regard:

Chepurny touched a burdock—it too wanted communism: the entire weed patch was a friendship of living plants … Just like the proletariat, this grass endures the life of heat and the death of deep snow.⁵

The desire for communism comes out of profound boredom (toska) in the face of the unbearableness of the existing order of things. “We should change the world as soon as possible,” proclaims one of the Bolshevik characters in The Sea of Youth. “Otherwise even animals are already getting insane.”⁶

Platonov’s expectations for communism go far beyond ideology and politics. The more depressive and tragic nature is, the stronger the hope for happiness and freedom. This hope is essential and it possesses all the force and passion of natural life. In animals, this hope consists in following their destiny without knowing any alternative besides death.

_{Laika, the first dog in space. Photo: Marc Garanger/Corbis}

Platonov’s communists and Bolsheviks are revolutionary animals. They literally recognize themselves in animals’ faces and project onto animals their own revolutionary passion. And if, as human beings, they are ascetic and refuse the immediate gratification of bodily desires, they do so because their greater desire, or their unbearable desire, is the desire for communism. They are moved by their passion for the realization of happiness for everyone, including the smallest animals.

The necessity and urgency of revolution as a planetary change is already inscribed in unconscious animal nature, which seems to expect from humans, from communists, from us, a kind of salvation. Platonov’s historical materialism is animated by the force of an anxious animal’s intolerance against all that is and towards the happy anticipation of all that should be:

The desert’s deserted emptiness, the camel, even the pitiful wandering grass—all this ought to be serious, grand, and triumphant. Inside every poor creature was a sense of some other happy destiny, a destiny that was necessary and inevitable—why, then, did they find their lives such a burden and why were they always waiting for something?⁷

From this perspective, revolution is not so much a move forward, but an absurd gesture of turning “back”—towards these weak forgotten creatures who are awaiting help, towards Mayakovsky’s kittens, but also towards ourselves as those unhappy animals. The only problem is that it is always already too late. The tragedy of animality consists in the fact that an impossible catastrophe happens at every moment. The animal (or the slave, or the poor) dies of sorrow and misery without achieving its long-awaited happiness.

Mourning functions as an internalization or preservation of what is lost. Memory is a faithful thought: by preserving what is lost, the one who remembers saves it from the emptiness of oblivion. Memory is a fidelity to what is no longer there, but what nevertheless endows us, as Walter Benjamin would say, with “weak Messianic power”:

The past carries with it a temporal index by which it is referred to redemption. There is a secret agreement between past generations and the present one. Our coming was expected on earth. Like every generation that preceded us, we have been endowed with a weak Messianic power, a power to which the past has a claim.⁸

The claim of the Benjaminian past is that it affects the present and relates it to the urgency of revolutionary action, which can answer to the hope of those whose lives were interrupted by death. If the chance of life was lost, if the creature, in whose heart unknown happiness throbbed, died in poverty, sadness, and slavery, then only those who are alive can live up to its expectations. Platonov shares with Benjamin this paradoxical view of the materialist dialectics of history, when, for example, he writes about the responsibility of living people to those who died during the war:

The dead have no one to trust except the living—and we should live now in such a way, that the death of our people was justified and redeemed through the happy and free destiny of our nation.⁹

In these lines, Platonov identifies himself with a certain nation, and the dead, too, are part of this nation. However, in his prose he does not describe some actual, existing nation, but rather, to put it in Deleuzian terms, he “invents a people.”¹⁰ (This is similar to Kafka, who invents a Mouse Folk.) Deleuze describes this invented people as follows:

This is not exactly a people called upon to dominate the world. It is a minor people, eternally minor, taken up in a becoming-revolutionary. Perhaps it exists only in the atoms of the writer, a bastard people, inferior, dominated, always in becoming, always incomplete. Bastard no longer designates a familial state, but the process or drift of the races. I am a beast, a Negro of an inferior race for all eternity.¹¹

It is precisely to this kind of bastard people that Platonov dedicates his novel Soul. Its protagonist, Nazar Chagataev, who was trained as an economist in Stalinist Moscow, is instructed by the Party to go to the desert and find a small nation in order “to teach it socialism.” His novel Soul (Dzhan) is a generalized personification of the Soviet people, as well as an unexpected metaphor for the Jews (wandering around the desert in search of freedom). It is also a literary figure that gathers under the name of “nation” all the unhappy and lost humans and animals:

Seven days later, after taking the most direct footpath, Chagataev reached Tashkent. He went straight to the Central Committee, where he had been expected for a long time. The secretary of the Committee told Chagataev that somewhere in the region of Sary-Kamysh, the Ust-Yurt and the Amu-Darya delta there lived a small nomadic nation, drawn from different peoples and wandering about in poverty. The nation included Turkmen, Karakalpaks, a few Uzbeks, Kazakhs, Persians, Kurds, Baluchis, and people who had forgotten who they were … The poverty and despair of the nation was so great that it looked on this work, which lasted for only few weeks in the year, as a blessing, since during these weeks it was given nan bread and even rice. At the pumps the people did the work of donkeys, using their bodies to turn the wooden wheel that brings water to the irrigation channels. A donkey has to be fed all through the year, whereas the workforce from Sary-Kamysh ate only for a brief period and would then up and leave. And it did not die off entirely; and the following year it would come back again, after languishing somewhere in the lower depth of the desert. 

“I know this nation,” said Chagataev. “I was born in Sary-Kamysh.” 

“That’s why you’re being sent there,” the secretary explained. “What was the name of the nation—do you remember?” 

“It wasn’t called anything,” said Chagataev, “though it did give itself a little name.” 

“What was this name?” 

“Dzhan. It means ‘soul,’ or ‘dear life.’ The nation possessed nothing except the soul and dear life given to it by mothers, because it’s mothers who give birth to the nation.” 

The secretary frowned, and looked sad. “So there’s nothing they can call their own except the hearts in their chests—and even that’s only for as long as the hearts keep on beating.” 

“Only their hearts,” Chagataev agreed. “Only life itself. Nothing belonged to them beyond the confines of their bodies. But even life wasn’t really their own—it was just something they dreamed.” 

“Did your mother ever tell you who the Dzhan are?” 

“She did. She said they were runaways and orphans from everywhere, and old, exhausted slaves who had been cast out. There were women who had betrayed their husbands and then vanished, fleeing to Sary-Kamysh in fear. There were young girls who came and never left because they loved men who had suddenly died and they didn’t want to marry anyone else. And people who didn’t know God, people who mocked the world. There were criminals. But I was only a little boy—I can’t remember them all.” 

“Go back there now. Find this lost nation. The Sary-Kamysh hollow is empty.” 

“I’ll go,” said Chagataev. “But what will I do there? Build socialism?” 

“What else?” said the secretary. “Your nation has already been in hell. Now let it live in paradise for a while—and we’ll help it with all our strength.”¹²

Nation here is a kind of “substance,” matter which can build communism out of itself, but which can also exhaust itself as a natural resource, since the poorer the life of a people is, the more greed it provokes. Nothing prevents the reduction of the substance of nation to pure labor force.

The life of this small population is disappearing; it literally disappears in the sands of the desert, together with the naked or almost naked people in rags. The reader of Agamben will immediately recognize here the idea of bare life. Platonov starts the history of his people from this zero-level of life, or as Agamben would put it, from the grey zone in between life and death. This life is not properly human; it is deprived of symbolic, real, and cultural wealth. It has nothing to identify with and nothing to defend itself against exploitation, which, according to Platonov, exhausts the living soul:

Chagataev knew from childhood memory, and from his education in Moscow, that any exploitation of a human being begins with the distortion of that person’s soul, with getting their soul so used to death that it can be subjugated; without this subjugation, a slave is not a slave. And this forced mutilation of the soul continues, growing more and more violent, until reason in the slave turns to mad and empty mindlessness.¹³

This is how Platonov inverts the dialectic that, from Hegel to Marx, claimed that labor transformed an animal into a man and a slave into a master. The Hegelian slave changes the world with his labor and acquires self-consciousness, whereas Platonov’s human-animal works to maintain its life and hopes for a better world, but finally exhausts himself and falls into despair, paradoxically finding his last refuge in the dumb body of an animal.

_{Illustration from L. Davidichev’s Hands Up! or Enemy No. 1, A Novel for Young Adults (1971).
Illustrations and typography by R. Bagautdinov.}

Platonov’s escape route from the human is described in his story “Rubbish Wind,” written in 1934. Its main character, Albert Lichtenberg, a physician of cosmic space, transforms little by little into an indefinite animal because he is unable to stay human in fascist Germany. He finds his last refuge in this animal body, which no one can recognize any more. And if in The Sea of Youth the zoo technician Visokovsky dreams that “the evolution of the animal kingdom, stopped in former times, will recommence, and all poor creatures, being covered with hair, who are now living in distemper, will finally achieve the fate of a conscious life,”¹⁴ in “Rubbish Wind” we see the inverse process:¹⁵ a man becomes covered with hair and loses his sanity, so he is put in a concentration camp because he is no longer human enough:

The judge announced to Lichtenberg that he was sentenced to be shot—on account of the failure of his body and mind to develop in accordance with the theories of German racism and the level of State philosophy, and with the aim of rigorously cleansing the organism of the people from individuals who had fallen into the condition of an animal, so protecting the race from infection by mongrels.¹⁶

Paradoxically, this unrecognized animal, or animalized man—or, to put it in Agambenian terms, this Muselmann¹⁷—performs a feat at the end of the story: he saves a Jewish communist woman and helps her escape from the camp, and then finally sacrifices himself in vain when he tries to use his own flesh to feed an insane woman who lost her child. He exhausts himself to the extent that when his wife, who is searching for him with a police officer, finds his dead body, she cannot recognize it as human.

Rubbish Wind is one of the most hopeless of Platonov’s works. In it, he inverts the entire picture and opens up—for a moment—the secret world of a human being “in distemper,” a human hidden in an animal body. He writes for this dying creature—as Deleuze would put it, “one writes for dying calves”—in order to fix the possibility that was not recognized and is already lost. The human becomes animal and then finally becomes waste, similar to Kafka’s Gregor Samsa in The Metamorphosis. What is recognized is the animal. “Like a dog”—these are the last words of K. in The Trial. When someone puts a knife in his heart, he says: “Like a dog.” To this Kafka adds: “It was as if the shame of it was to outlive him.”

Commenting on this passage, Walter Benjamin relates this shame to Kafka’s “unknown family, which is composed of human beings and animals,” and under the constraint of which Kafka “moves cosmic ages in his writings.” According to Benjamin,

To Kafka, the world of his ancestors was as unfathomable as the world of realities was important for him, and, we may be sure that, like the totem poles of primitive peoples, the world of ancestors took him down to the animals. Incidentally, Kafka is not the only writer for whom animals are the receptacles of the forgotten.¹⁸

Thus, Kafka’s animal is the “receptacle of the forgotten.” Not of the being as forgotten, but rather of the forgotten as such, as a meaningful nothingness, around which our being constitutes itself as negativity, desire, and memory. Does that oblivion not come from the fact that “I am the other,” which points to, among other things, what Žižek calls “the un-human core of humanity”? Memory is restlessly lurking through the forgotten. The self-relation of the human cannot but confront this paradox—the unhappy animal which we retrospectively produce out of our own despair dies ingloriously before we manage to fulfill its anticipation of freedom. The gates of terra utopia, where we might realize the last hope of our desperate animality, are always already closed. And on these gates, it is written: “Animals are not allowed.”

_{Russian director Sergei Eisenstein with a mexican candy skull.}

However, as Žižek notes, it is precisely and only among animals that Kafka was able to imagine a utopian society.¹⁹ His last story—the one he wrote in March 1924, just a few months before his death, when he already knew he was dying—was “Josephine the Singer, or The Mouse Folk.” At least three contemporary philosophers—Fredric Jameson, Slavoj Žižek, and Mladen Dolar—have written about this story, in which there are basically two protagonists: Josephine the singer and her fellow “mouse folk.” Of course, the mouse folk here constitute the kind of small “subhuman” nation which, in Deleuze, is invented by literature. The first-person protagonist in the story is one of the mouse folk. They wonder to themselves about Josephine’s posture, her role in the society of mice, and her historical fate. One of the mice asks how it is possible that Josephine’s voice is so attractive to her fellow mice. There is nothing special about her voice; she does not possess any talent as a singer; she is not an outstanding person. Apparently, she is just piping, like all mice do, except that the other mice don’t pay so much attention to their own piping and sometimes are not even conscious of it. But when Josephine sings, they stay silent. The secret is probably in her special posture—she is an artist, an exceptional individual, she maintains an exceptional and marginal position in relation to the whole of the mice people. It is precisely this marginal position which makes the immanence and heterogeneity of the mice people possible.

This, claims Dolar, is the position of the artist, who produces a readymade, an artwork as the “non-exceptional exception, which can arise anywhere, at any moment, and is made of anything—of ready-made objects—as long as it can provide them with a gap, make them make a break, it is the art of a minimal difference.”

According to Jameson, the mice people praising Josephine is a paradoxical example of the utopia of radical democracy: Josephine’s singing is a kind of excessive sacral performance that allows the mice people, through abandoning their individual identity, to finally become who they are. The essence of people appear in the essential indifference of the anonymous. “She constitutes the necessary element of exteriority that alone permits immanence to come into being.”²⁰

Žižek further radicalizes Jameson’s statement and claims that this is an example of what communist culture should look like. “The mouse community is not an hierarchic community with a Master, but rather a radically egalitarian ‘communist’ community.” Žižek calls Josephine “the People’s Artist of the Soviet Mouse Republic,” and asks: “What would a communist culture look like?”²¹ He even provides an answer to his question—but I will not do that. Instead, my claim is that in order to answer this question, which is the question of both theory and art praxis, one needs, as Kafka’s famous dog would say, more philosophy—more interpretation of what precisely an artist can and should borrow from the beast.

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LEIL-ZAHRA: THE SYRIAN DOUBLE REVOLUTION AND THE EURO-LEFTIST DOUBLE IMPOTENCY

Theoretical weekends at Scission  turns to a woman I "met" recently.  Leil-Zahra Mortada is "just a blogger" to some, but she seems more than that to me.

So today Scission turns to her for a much needed look at Syria.  The left can't seem to get its act together on how it should relate to the civil war and revolution taking place there.  Much of the left, clouded by its Euro-Centric, Western outlook, has an analysis which is confused at best, and downright warped at worst. It is paralyzed into inaction.  Part of the Euro-American left says we should support Assad the Butcher because the USA does not.  Another part says, well, it seems its either Assad or the Islamist militias.  Some see this or that revolutionary grouping to support (as long as it has the "correct" line).  Many western radicals just can't find the proper revolutionaries at all. Bullshit, rhetoric, and dogma reign.

Last week or so I read something by this young woman about the patronizing attitude of some  "marxist" academic types in regards to the Syrian uprising, in particular that of a certain Mr. Zizek.  It was punishing to say the least.  Today, I give you another.  

I am not sure this is theoretical at all...seems like real life stuff to me...probably a bit of both.  

This comes from the blog of Leil Zahra Mortanda.

The Syrian Double Revolution and the Euro-Leftist Double Impotency

 Leil-Zahra

Since the beginning of the Syrian Revolution many radical Leftist groups and networks, both on the international and local levels in Europe and around the world, have engaged in a heated debate on wether to support the revolution or not, on wether it was a revolution or an imperialist conspiracy. The European counterargument against the revolution had a quite-telling approach that was different from many in the rest of the world. It wasn´t just the usual claim that the Assad regime is one of the last-standing anti-imperialist forces. That claim became weaker in Europe after the aggravation of the regime crimes accompanied with hard-to-deny evidence on its brutality continuously coming out from Syria. Many within the European Left over and over affirmed that they will not support what is happening in Syria until they find revolutionary forces worthy of their support. The difference in approach was in the claim that there was no third option that is “revolutionary” and that poses a substitute to both the Assad regime and the Islamist militias. This approach wasn´t only problematic in its privileged laziness in not doing the needed effort to find these networks in Syria, but also in its White-tailored presets for what is a “better future” for the Syrians. It is the cliché and banal dichotomy of Secular vs. Islamist, something very reminiscent of Huntington´s “Clash of Civilizations”. It also bears a certain condescending patronization on who is worthy of demanding an end to a certain terrorist regime and who is not. This is a very dangerous approach. It is a clear double-standard in the alleged radical Leftist agenda, and a quite revoking one. Any people, whether we agree with them or not, who are living under such an oppressive and violent regime, has the right to overthrow it. Whether they have a plan that meets our aspirations on what is to come next, or not, it is their full right and own choice to rebel. We can be critical and actively disagree with their agenda, but we should never justify or whitewash the crimes of the regime against them. Refusing to support certain anti-regime actions or groups that do not meet our politics is needed and important, but this should not be mistaken for a support to the regime forces or undermining rebellious efforts of other groups and individuals. This is not problematic on the Syrian question only. It is a clear call for reflection on the mentality and approach of a big section of the European Left. This is where the debate is urgently needed. The strictly Eurocentric definition of the world, of politics, and even of revolution itself. The European Left has made a brand out of Revolution. It was taken under a European copyright and it gets bestowed on some and denied to others. It is given and could be taken away. Alas!

With over 170 days of siege on the El-Yarmouk Palestinian refugee camp in Syria, and over 30 people there murdered by the regime forces with the weapon of starvation, Assad´s credibility as a pro-Palestine leader crumbled. It is no longer easy to justify his crimes against El-Yarmouk, nor paint him as the Palestine-loving fairy. It became harder and harder for people to look the other way. The humanitarian approach was gaining grounds before the revolutionary agenda. While El-Yarmouk suffered for a pretty long time, and its rebellious residents joined the revolution very early on, it took starvation and the usual postcard of dying children to get the world´s attention; especially the world of Palestine-solidarity networks in Europe and beyond.  Starvation can´t be justified as a bomb that allegedly took a wrong turn, nor it could be blamed on certain anti-regime militias. It was no longer easy to keep the eyes closed! Though this only undermined one of Assad´s PR points, it still didn´t provoke the needed reaction. The Palestinian refugees in the El-Yarmouk camp, like many Syrians, are dying of hunger. The regime is using starvation as a weapon. Clear? Now action is needed!

The denial of life-saving medicines and vaccines is also being used as a weapon. For example, Polio vaccines are denied or given in amounts much less than the needed ones to zones out of the regime control. This is not a matter of a UNICEF-style activism of sick children on a postcard like some claim. And it is not a matter of the World Health Organization taking its responsibilities and duties seriously, plus putting the funds it has into action. This is another evidence, just like the refugee question, on the corruption of the international relief agencies. On the amount of money wasted and on diplomatic and bureaucratic protocols that are respected more than life itself. Health is being used as a weapon, as a repressive measure that is destroying the lives of many and will most probably leave life-long life-devestating impacts. There is a revolutionary obligation to actively put an end to this and as soon as possible. This is in no way different than fighting against a nuclear-power facility or a multinational that endangers the lives of many and that of the future generations, except maybe in its pressing urgency.

Much of the European Left´s counterargument against the revolution was demanding proof from the Syrians on their worthiness of support, asking them to demonstrate that they are “revolutionary enough”. Maybe it was never put so bluntly, but that is the essence of it. It was never enough that there are people dying, and that there are thousands in detention camps; it was never enough that the population is being forced into murderous exodus or being deprived of basic needs. The European Left wanted its “revolutionaries”. They continuously negated the presence of any substantial forces fighting the regime and posing an option other than religious fundamentalism.

From the rebellious city of Kafranbel that became famous for its revolutionary banners & the messages coming out for there.

Now news is hitting international fronts on Syrian activists kidnapped by Islamist forces. There is no more hiding of the division between the Islamist militias and the revolutionary groups in the anti-Assad camp. This division made it crystal clear that there are voices who are fighting both, that there are people who are a threat to Assad and to the Islamists. The threats-turned-attacks of the Islamists against many activists within the anti-Assad camp undermines the oversimplified binary of Assad vs. Islamists. The “third option” paid for the spotlight dearly, with threats to their lives. The voices from local committees and grassroots networks denouncing both the Assad regime and the Islamists trying to hijack the revolution intensified in the recent period. It is now much harder to ignore and marginalize them, let alone claim they don´t exist and that it is only Al-Qaeda militias in the horizon.

They have names and their photos are circulating the Internet, activists who are either detained/kidnapped by the regime or by the Islamists. The press releases and communiques of grassroots organizations concerning these detentions/kidnappings, and the violations of both the regime and the Islamists are available, and are either translated or awaiting translation (hint hint). The European Left is as always invited to email these networks and communicate with them. It is a chance to get to know them, to hear their stories, and to listen to what they have to say… then decide! Once again, it is not the duty nor the obligation of the Syrians to explain themselves to the world. They have enough on their hands to deal with, they are leading a double-revolution. A revolution against the Assad regime, and a revolution against the Islamists attempting to take over. A revolution to overthrow a regime, and a revolution to fight another repressive regime in the make. A double revolution with all what it entails of fighting sieges, lack of basic needs, its injured, its refugees, bombs, armed militias, detentions, torture, kidnappings, lack of freedom of movement, crackdown on freedoms in both the regime areas and the Islamist-controlled ones, desperation.. etc. Individuals who don´t only have to worry about what is happening in Syria and their own lives but carry the weight of what is happening to Syrian refugees all over. The Syrian people are not only being killed in Syria! They are being devastated, sometimes to death, in Jordan and in Egypt, hunted down in Lebanon, drowning at the shores of Italy and Greece, and suffering at the Moroccan borders with the Spanish State.

From the rebellious city of Kafranbel, the Aliens threatening the revolution: the Assad regime and the Islamist militias, or what is known as ISIS – the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (Sham)

Here is your proof, signed with detention reports and kidnapping news. Here is the list of names for your revolutionary talent show. Here are your revolutionaries denouncing and criticizing both Assad and the religious fundamentalists. Here are the people who you claimed over and over do not exist, the attacks they are now suffering took them into a whole new level of attention. You can no longer hide in your weakness claiming there is no one to talk to and no one to work with. Not that this lame excuse ever stood ground! Even if this was not a revolution, even if this was “just a civil war”, there is still much to do. Even if this was “just a Syrian issue”, something “for them to work out”, there is still much to do. Syrians are at the borders of Europe. Syrians are dragging their injured and waiting with bleeding bodies at the borders of Europe. The last phrase is not an attempt at a poetic sentence. It is the crude and graphic reality! Syrian families are with their injured awaiting access into Europe with literally open and bleeding wounds that require urgent medical attention. Syrians are freezing to death in refugee camps, while international relief agencies organize endless conferences, and while governments make one useless PR maneuver after the other. This is not a “Syrian issue”, this is Fortress Europe and the dominant North at its best. This is no longer about Syria only, this is about the system we repeatedly claim to fight.

There is so much to be done. And it is not charity we are talking about, nor the corrupting relief mentality. It is radical and revolutionary work that is needed. It is stepping out of the narrow Eurocentric vision of semantics into political action. It is not only Assad and the Islamists who are killing the Syrian people, it is international systems like the EU border regime and the international relief mafias to name but a few. This is not about Syria, and this is not “just a faraway civil war”. They are dying right here, on EU borders, and they are in EU immigrant detention camps. If it is not for Syria, and out of belief in the Syrian revolution, or even in the right for every people, wether they meet our shades of color or not, to rebel, it should be out of coherence with our political beliefs. Our fight on the EU front is needed. This is a people who has risen against a brutal dictatorship, only to see that they have a whole world to overcome. A world of international meddling, whether in the form of Islamist militias, or international relief, or leftist patronization. A world of closed borders and complicit governments that once again put their profit over life. A world of apathy. This is what the Syrians and the Palestinians in Syria are facing. Questions that are not only related to Syria, but related to international and intertwined local struggles.

Today it is harder than ever for the European Left to claim that the anti-Assad camp is void of people who fit the Eurocentric and classist definition of people worthy of solidarity. They are there, and there names and faces are all over the place. It is also hard to deny that there is a force seen as a threat by both Assad and the Islamists. It also became hard to push Syria into faraway geographic oblivion since Syria is now right here drowning at EU borders. What is left to see is how the European Left will react now that it has less and less excuses to justify its revolutionary impotence not just on Syria, but on its own fronts that are also implicated in the Syrian question.

WOMEN IN SOLITARY: IT IS CRIMINAL

It is Prison friday here at Scission.  I've written about the horrors of solitary confinement before.  Usually when we think about it, we think of some lone guy stuck in a hole somewhere forever.  Today, let's think about women.  

Much less is known or discussed about women in such places.

Victoria Law, author of the book "Resistance Behind Bars:  The Struggles of Incarcerated Women" said during an interview:

Solitary confinement makes women more vulnerable to staff sexual assault since no one can see what is happening. In my book, I write about the experience of Christina Madrazo, a transsexual immigrant who was placed in INS detention. Originally, the INS (now called ICE) did not know what to do with her since her assigned gender at birth was male, but she identified (and was seeking asylum status) as a transgendered female. Madrazo was placed in solitary confinement where she was raped twice by a prison guard. 

Even when they are not being physically assaulted, the women have no privacy—toilets are in full view of the cell door windows, guards can look through those windows at any time and, in many prisons, male guards can watch the women in the showers, on the toilet or when they are trying to dress or undress. 

In addition, solitary confinement is used to punish women who have either reported being sexually assaulted by staff, or who have been discovered to have “consensual relationships” with staff members. I put “consensual” in quotation marks because, given the power dynamics in prison, especially the ability of guards and staff members to withhold services and/or provide small amenities, the relationship can never truly be consensual. I recently received a letter from a woman incarcerated in Colorado whose cellmate was accused of having a “consensual” relationship with a staff member. While the accusation was being investigated, the staff member was allowed to continue working in the prison. The woman was placed in solitary confinement for the duration of the investigation and only released once the charge was found to be unwarranted. 

Also, with women, there’s the prevailing notion that women need to be “good girls” and “to behave.” Thus, women are punished for behaviors that violate gender norms, behaviors such as spitting or cursing or not following orders, behaviors that men are not punished for. This is also why women are sent to segregation when they report sexual misconduct or engage in sexual activity; they’re violating what we, as a society, see as “good girl behavior.” 

It may seem totally absurd to put women in solitary for reporting rape and other forms of sexual assault, but that is exactly what often happens.  Think it's rare.  Think again.  Law points out at Solitary Watch:

 In 1996, Human Rights Watch found that, in Michigan, incarcerated women who report staff sexual misconduct are placed in segregation pending the institution’s investigation of their cases. The placement is allegedly for the woman’s own protection. The five other states investigated also had similar practices of placing women in segregation after they reported abuse.

 Not much has changed in the thirteen years since Human Rights Watch chronicled the pervasive and persistent sexual abuse and use of retaliatory segregation in eleven women’s prisons. Former staff at Ohio’s Reformatory for Women have stated that women who reported sexual abuse are subjected to lengthy periods of time in solitary confinement where cells often had feces and blood smeared on the wall. In Kentucky, a woman who saved evidence from her sexual assault was placed in segregation for fifty days. In Illinois, a prison administrator threatened to add a year onto the sentence of a woman who attempted to report repeated sexual assaults. She was then placed in solitary confinement.

In 2003, the Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA) became law, ostensibly to address the widespread sexual abuse in the nation’s jails and prisons. Among its recommendations was “the timely and comprehensive investigation of staff sexual misconduct involving rape or other sexual assault on inmates.” However, this has not stopped the widespread practice of utilizing solitary to punish those who speak out. An investigation into sexual abuse at Alabama’s Tutwiler Prison for Women found that women who report sexual abuse “are routinely placed in segregation by the warden.”  Some prison systems have also created new rules to continue discouraging reports of staff sexual assault. At Denver Women’s Correctional Facility, a woman reported that prison officials responded to PREA by creating a rule called “False Reporting to Authorities.”

“A lot of us do not report any kind of staff misconduct because history has proven that any kind of reports true or false are found [by the administration] to be false,” she stated. “When it was found to be false, the people were immediately found guilty and sent to administrative segregation.” In some cases, a woman may not even file an official complaint, but may only be speaking within earshot of another staff member.

Under PREA, those accused of sexual assault are sent to solitary confinement even before the charges are proven. In California, Amy Preasmyer was placed in solitary confinement after being accused of sexual assault by another woman. “I was abruptly removed from my bed late in the evening to face an extended wait and then a transfer to Ad-Seg,” she reported. “Upon entering my newly assigned chambers at 3 a.m., I found the toilet was backed up and a DD3 (EOP) [person with a disability] had urinated everywhere prior to me, leaving extremely unsanitary conditions and aromas.” She was not allowed to access supplies that would allow her to clean or disinfect her cell. Although she was eventually cleared of all charges, being in Ad Seg forced her to miss her final examinations for college. During that time, she also lost the privilege to shop, walk outside or even call home.

Don't think this only happens in the States.  The Independent reported in August that during a surprise inspection of the women's prison near Ashford (in Britain) it was found that the prison had been detaining a female prisoner in segregation in a "squalid" cell for more than five years.  Chief inspector of prisons, Nick Hardwick told the newspaper, "We were dismayed that the woman who had already been in the segregation unit for three years in 2010 was still there in 2013. Her cell was unkempt and squalid and she seldom left it."  Hardwick said her prolonged detention in the segregation unit amounted to "cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment - and we use these words advisedly".

Frances Crook, chief executive of the Howard League for Penal Reform, described the case to the Independent  as "shocking" and said the woman's treatment "appears to amount to torture". Cases such as this happening in an English prison "should shame ministers who tolerate the over-use of custody for women and consequent poor treatment," they added.

In Canada, the BC Civil Liberties Association says it has resolved a lawsuit against the government of Canada filed on behalf of a 26-year-old aboriginal woman from Saskatchewan who was held in solitary confinement in a federal prison for more than 3½ years.

The BCCLA filed the lawsuit in March 2011, on behalf of Bobby Lee Worm, who was 24 years old at the time, saying it was seeking to end the practice of holding women in solitary confinement for months and years at a time in federal prisons.

"Since the start of her incarceration in 2006, Ms. Worm, who suffered extreme physical, emotional and sexual abuse throughout her childhood and adolescence, has been subjected to extensive periods of solitary confinement, much of it while on a program called the management protocol," said a statement issued by the BCCLA in 2011.

Worms told the CBC:

"Solitary confinement does one thing. It breaks a person's will to live. Being locked up like that you feel like you're losing your mind. The only contact with another human is through a food slot. Days turn into nights and into days and you don't know if you'll ever get out."

It is 2014...

The following is from Action Committee for Women in Prison. 

Solitary Confinement for women

Women in Solitary Confinement: “The Isolation Degenerates Us Into Madness”

 By Victoria Law 

A mass prisoner hunger strike rocked California’s prison system this past summer, drawing international attention to the extensive use of solitary confinement in the United States. Increasingly, solitary is finding its way into the mainstream media and onto activist agendas. Nearly all of the attention, however, has focused on solitary confinement in men’s prisons; much less is known about the conditions and experiences inside women’s prisons.

During October’s legislative hearing on solitary confinement in California, lawmakers asked prison officials about women in solitary confinement. Officials from the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) stated that 74 women were held in the Security Housing Unit at the California Institution for Women (CIW) and a handful of women were awaiting transfer from the Central California Women’s Facility (CCWF). CDCR does not separate people in the SHU with mental illness from those without mental illness. CDCR officials did not address the number of people in the Administrative Segregation (or Ad Seg) Unit.

According to CDCR statistics, as of September 2013, 107 women were held in Ad Seg at CCWF, which has a budgeted capacity of 38. The average stay was 131 days. Twenty women had been there longer than 200 days, two had exceeded 400 days, and another two women had exceeded 800 days. At CIW, 34 women were in Ad Seg with an average stay of 73 days. Two women have exceeded 200 days.

Lawmakers’ inquiry prompted advocacy group California Coalition for Women Prisoners to send an open letter to Assemblywoman Nancy Skinner requesting that she investigate conditions of solitary confinement in women’s prisons. The group noted that, with the conversion of Valley State Prison for Women to a men’s prison and the transfer of several hundred women to California’s other two women’s prisons, the use of solitary confinement has dramatically increased.

To justify the increase, CDCR has cited “enemy concerns” or a documented disagreement between people that may have led to threats or violence. Those designated as having “enemy concerns” are locked in their cells 22 to 24 hours a day and lose all privileges. CDCR reports do not separate the number of people in Ad Seg or the SHU for rules violations versus those confined because of “enemy concerns.” The California Coalition for Women Prisoners has noted that many of these “enemy concerns” are based on incidents that happened years ago and may not be valid today.

Dolores Canales has a son who has spent thirteen years in Pelican Bay’s SHU. Canales has also had firsthand experience with solitary confinement. While imprisoned at CIW, she spent nine months in Ad Seg, where she was confined to her cell twenty-two hours a day. “There, I had a window. The guards would take me out to the yard every day. I’d get to go out to the yard with other people,” she recalled. But the isolation still took its toll: “There’s an anxiety that overcomes you in the middle of the night because you’re so locked in,” she described. Even after being released from segregation, Canales was unable to shake that anxiety. She broke into a sweat and panicked each time she saw a group of officers even though she had broken no rules. “I just can’t forget,” she stated years after her release from prison.

Although the spotlight on solitary has focused largely on California, every women’s prison has a solitary confinement unit. Florida’s Lowell Correctional Institution for Women has a Closed Management Special Housing Unit (CM SHU) where women are confined to their cells 23 to 24 hours a day. “There is no free movement or social interaction,” reported one woman. “We just sit locked in a concrete and steel room the size of a small residential bathroom.”

In Indiana, Sarah Jo Pender has spent nearly five years in solitary. “My cell is approximately 68 square feet of concrete with a heavy steel door at the front and a heavily barred window at the back that does not open,” she described. “Walls are covered in white; the paint chipped off by bored prisoners reveals another layer of primer white. No family photos or art or reminder notes are allowed to be taped to the walls; they must remain bare. Our windowsills would be a great place to display greeting cards and pictures, but those are off-limits, too… There is a concrete platform and thin plastic mat, a fourteen-by-twenty inch shelf and round stool mounted to the floor, and a steel toilet/sink combo unit. We get no boxes to contain our few personal items. Everything must fit on the shelf, bed or end up on the floor.”

Her cell is searched daily by guards although, like everyone else in the prison, she is strip searched any time she leaves the unit for a doctor’s appointment or a no-contact visit. When she is taken to the showers, she is handcuffed, then locked into a 3 foot by 3 foot shower stall with a steel cage door for a 15-minute shower. As is the case across the country, visits are conducted behind glass.

Pender was placed in solitary confinement after successfully escaping from prison in 2008. With the assistance of a guard, who had been having sex with her and several other women in the prison, she escaped. After 136 days, she was found, re-arrested and returned to prison, where she began her unending stint in solitary confinement. Because Pender is considered a high escape risk, the administration has taken steps to isolate her even within the segregation unit. “Other women could talk to each other through their doors, but they were instructed to never talk to me or else they’d be punished,” she recounted. “The male guards were never to speak to me unless there was a second guard present, and only to give me orders. Female guards only spoke when absolutely necessary, per orders, except they chatted freely with any other prisoner.”

As in many jails and prisons, those with mental health concerns are often placed in segregation. “One of them is going to be released to society this month,” Pender wrote. “She has been in solitary for six or eight months because she has repeatedly cut herself with razors, including her throat, several times. Their solution: lock her in a room and don’t give her a razor.” Another woman spent 2 ½ years in segregation, originally for disruptive behavior. Her stay was extended each time she hurt herself. “She cut her wrists in the shower, they found her, took her to the hospital, stitched her up, put her back in lock and wrote her up for self-mutilation. She ripped the stitches out and got another battery write-up. Threw a mop bucket at the sergeant for another assault write-up and was completely maxed out on her sentence, so they let her go home from solitary. She returned that same year with new charges. She never got therapy while here—or any mental health care that she obviously needed.”

While Pender did not enter with preexisting mental health concerns, years of little to no human contact has taken its toll. At times she feels lethargic and depressed. In 2010, she had a psychotic break, which lasted nine months. Since then, she has been on and off half a dozen kinds of psychotropic medications. “I didn’t need the meds for the two years I spent in godawful Marion County Jail, and didn’t need them for five years at Rockville prison,” she recalled. “But when you lock people in rooms for long periods of time, the isolation degenerates us into madness, or at least depression.”

Others with no preexisting mental health conditions have also been affected. “I watched a woman claw chunks out of her cheeks and nose and write on the window with her blood,” Pender said. “My neighbor bashed her head against the concrete until officers dragged her out to a padded cell. Two other women tried to asphyxiate themselves with shoestrings and bras.” In Florida, faced with the prospect of ten months in CM SHU, a woman attempted suicide. “I had hung myself and was quite dead when the guards cut me down. My heart must’ve stopped because of the loss of involuntary functions, but still they wrapped me in a sheet and rushed me to medical and succeeded in reviving me,” she recalled.

Despite being locked in a cell the size of a bathroom for the foreseeable future, Pender hopes the increased outrage about solitary confinement leads to concrete changes. What would she ask people to do?

They can help by contacting their legislators and judges about their views on long-term solitary confinement. They can help by supporting small groups of activists and organizations who are passionate about this topic. Many people don’t have the desire to donate two hours of their week or month to a group, but what about two hours of their monthly wages? Or the book of stamps and box of envelopes that has been collecting dust since email was invented? There are lots of ways to help change the system. Whatever you choose to do, just DO something. Just having conversations with others about the subject is doing something. Someone else might volunteer to type up and format a newsletter. Help design a website. Circulate the info. Make phone calls to organize events. Anything is better than turning the page to the next article and forgetting about us, leaving us alone in our cells.