Dérive

This is a piece by French artist Olivier de Sagazan from the movie Samsara . Olivier's scene is preceded by footage of highways, cityscapes, and office cubicle workers. This piece speaks to me as a commentary on the nature of labor and the general human condition under capitalism. Labor is, to use Marx's term, alienated. Alienated labor is not natural to humans, and it makes us sick in many different ways. We labor not because it is our human essence to change our world and in the process change ourselves, but only to acquire the bare minimum. Our life activity, and to that extent life itself, is profaned once it becomes a simple means of survival. Here, Olivier fights to rid himself of this filth, the pollution of a meaningless job and a inhuman existence that people try to escape (consciously and unconsciously) in all kinds of different ways. But first he applies the muck to himself. After all, the majority of us must 'choose' to labor in meaningless jobs in ord...

'Let America be America Again' by Langston Hugues, written in 1935. Let America be America again. Let it be the dream it used to be. Let it be the pioneer on the plain Seeking a home where he himself is free. (America never was America to me.) Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed— Let it be that great strong land of love Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme That any man be crushed by one above. (It never was America to me.) O, let my land be a land where Liberty Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath, But opportunity is real, and life is free, Equality is in the air we breathe. (There’s never been equality for me, Nor freedom in this “homeland of the free.”) Say, who are you that mumbles in the dark? And who are you that draws your veil across the stars? I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart, I am the Negro bearing slavery’s scars. I am the red man driven from the land, I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek— And finding only the same...

It's a strange time we live in. On one hand the need for action has never been more urgent. Yet, the majority of people continue on as if nothing is new under the sun. The contrast between what needs to be done and what is being done is striking! One has to fight every moment not to get lulled into this common consciousness of amnesia, this violence of organized forgetting . Tune in and tune out. Be tuned out, only to be jolted awake by next police murder, the next climate report, the next right-to-work law, the next bombing, the homeless person on the street. The struggle of a revolutionary really is the struggle for consciousness of the masses, to seize that momentary opening caused by a jolt and pull the shades back even further. The burst of light will be momentarily painful, but ultimately wonderful unlike anything we've been taught to imagine.

I don't remember the first time I learned the story of Mumia Abu-Jamal. I do remember a mural painted in the H building art classroom of Berkeley High with Mumia's face and a banner demanding his freedom, but I didn't mean anything to me at the time. In that same classroom was the icon 'by any means necessary' photo of Malcolm X - the one of Malcolm in a suit and tie, a rifle in hand, pulling back the shades looking out a window. Mumia is one of over 2 million people locked in cages in the U.S., and one of a smaller group serving life sentences. He is of that generation (if slightly younger) of fighters like Huey Newton, Fred Hampton, and Angela Davis. He was barely a teenager when Malcolm and Martin were murdered. When things really start to move in this country, will Mumia be free from his cage to march alongside us? He is further proof that nothing is of greater threat to the ruling class than a thinking man or woman, and that no cage can confine the human min...

"People who remember court madness through pain, the pain of the perpetually recurring death of their innocence; people who forget court another kind of madness, the madness of the denial of pain and the hatred of innocence"  - James Baldwin

Today, prisoners across the United States are striking to protest the brutality of the American incarceration system that shuffles threw millions of poor people each year and subjects them to slave labor and torture. Today also marks the 45th anniversary of the begging of the Attica Prison uprising, in which 33 prisoners were murdered by police by order of billionaire governor Nelson Rockefeller. Two weeks earlier the state successfully murdered George Jackson, who warned his captors that "The savage repression of blacks, which can be estimated by reading the obituary columns of the nation's dailies, Fred Hampton, etc., has not failed to register on the black inmates." 11 years later the state would succeed in convicting Black Panther Mumia Abu-Jamal on false charges. Last week Mumia was denied access to potentially lifesaving Hepatitis C medication, which is sold by the for-profit Gilead Sciences (another medical corporation that makes billions in profit...

Fred Hampton was born on this day in 1948, in Summit, Illinois. He would die 21 years young - assassinated by Chicago police with two point-blank shots to the back of his head - some 15 miles from where he first opened his eyes. Hampton's childbearing fiancée Deborah Johnson, who was lying next to her partner when police first fired through the bedroom door, recalled how the officers smiled and declared Hampton “good and dead" after the execution. At the time of his assassination Hampton was chairman of the Illinois Black Panther Party and reportedly working to strengthen ties between the BPP and white and Latino youth and workers - a move towards class solidarity in the  face of race divisions that terrified (as all such unity movements do) the ruling class state (at the time led by J. Edgar Hoover and Richard Nixon). The year of his death, Chairman Fred gave a speech – Power Anywhere Where There’s People - at Olivet Baptist Church in Chicago, in which he spoke...

On Friday, Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf told the media she is determined to "run a police department, not a frat house.” The mayor of 18 months continued, saying she wants to "root out a culture that tolerates unethical behavior," and that "At a time when communities across the country are questioning police culture, it is critical that our officers operate ethically. This is especially important in a community like Oakland, where trust between the police and the community has been broken in the past." The "frat house" in question is the Oakland Police Department (OPD), an institution known for its rapes, murders, racism, brutality, and general disregard for the vast majority of Oakland's poor, non-white, and/or politically active population. In short, the OPD is a police department like all the rest. Now, Oakland's men and women in black are scrambling following revelations of trafficking a minor and statutory rape engaged in by...

On May 28, Paula Cooper shot herself in the head at the age of 45. In 1986, age the age of 16, Cooper had become the youngest person ever to be sentenced to death. Her life was sparred after her case drew attention worldwide, and she was released two years ago. When she died in May, copper had spent 28 of her life in prison. Cooper had been tried and convicted for the murder of Ruth Pelke, an elderly Bible teacher. Since 1986, the Supreme Court has ruled that juveniles cannot be sentenced to death or life in prison (though many in prison convicted to life sentences as juveniles are still fighting to have the rulings applied retroactively). I thought of Paula Cooper when I heard that Kalief Browder had taken his own life. Kalief was 16 when he was arrested for a crime he did not commit, and spent the next 3 years of his life in the notorious Rikers Island being repeated abused, assaulted , and psychologically tortured - while never once standing trial. Last year, Jennif...

"Once you come to realize that the co-ordinates in these records represent real places, that the dates are our recent history and that the numbers represent actual human lives — with all of the love, hope, dreams, hate, fear and nightmares with which we all live — then you cannot help but be reminded just how important it is for us to understand and, hopefully, prevent such tragedies in the future." - Chelsea Manning, describing U.S. killings in Iraq and Afghanistan

While looking for more information about the death of Freddie Gray , I stumbled upon a list of people of color killed by police from 1999-2014. Freddie’s names isn’t on the list - he died just five days ago - but no doubt it will appear alongside many other new names whenever the next “update” of the list appears. I’m sure it’s not the only list of its kind available on the web, and I can’t say if it’s the most truthful or comprehensive. But I don’t have any reason to doubt its validity. There are several recognizable names on the list (Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Akai Gurley, Jordan Crawford III), and several names that I don’t recognize (Rumain Brisbon, Victor White III, Jonahthan Ferrell). There is a 7-year-old girl named Aiyana Jones (killed by Detroit police officer Joseph Weekly ), and a 68-year-old man named Kenneth Chamberlain (killed by New York officer Anthony Carelli ). There are many commonalities besides skin color that tie these names together: mistaking a ha...

America has become amnesiac - a country in which forms of historical, political, and moral forgetting are not only willfully practiced but celebrated. The United States has degenerated into a social order that is awash in public stupidity and views critical thought as both a liability and a threat. Not only is this obvious in the presence of a celebrity culture that embraces the banal and idiotic, but also in the prevailing discourses and policies of a range of politicians and anti-public intellectuals who believe that the legacy of the Enlightenment needs to be reversed...Under a neoliberal regime, the language of authority, power and command is divorced from ethics, social responsibility, critical analysis and social costs.    - Henry A. Giroux, 'The Violence of Organized Forgetting' It's Memorial Day, 2015, and once again I am drowning in a sea of willful ignorance, blind stupidity, and sickening hypocrisy: #MemorialDay is trending on Facebo...

"May 13th at 30, why should we care what happened on May 13th, 1985? I mean, seriously, that was 30 years ago, a long time ago, way back when. Know what I mean? Most people won’t say that, but they think that. Why, indeed? I’ll tell you why. Because what happened then is a harbinger of what’s happening now all across America. I don’t mean bombing people—not yet, that is. I mean the visceral hatreds and violent contempt once held for MOVE is now visited upon average people, not just radicals and revolutionaries like MOVE . In May 1985, police officials justified the vicious attacks on MOVE children by saying they, too, were combatants. In Ferguson, Missouri, as police and National Guard confronted citizens, guess how cops described them in their own files. "Enemies." Enemy combatants, anyone? Then look at 12-year-old Tamir Rice of Cleveland. Boys, men, girls, women—it doesn’t matter. When many people stood in silence, or worse, in bitter acquiescence, to t...

"Such is the task of man: it is inexhaustible, it is infinite, and quite sufficient to satisfy the heart and spirit of the most ambitious men. A transient and imperceptible being lost in the midst of a shoreless ocean of universal mutability, having an unknown eternity behind him and an eternity just as unknown ahead of him, the thinking, active man, the man who is conscious of his human mission, remains proud and calm in the awareness of his liberty which he is won by freeing himself through work and science and by liberating, through revolt when necessary, the men around him - his equals and brothers. This is his consolation, his reward, his only paradise"  - Mikhail Bakunin

There are places in the United States where, in the words of Bernie Sanders, the race to the bottom is displayed naked for all who dare to look. In reality, not many people do dare to look. Chris Hedges calls these places "sacrifice zones," and he describes four of them in his book: Pine Ridges, South Dakota; Camden, New Jersey; Welch, West Virginia; Immokalee, Florida. These places are the carcasses that unfettered capitalism leaves behind when jobs are shipped oversees, inhabited by the people who make up the reserve pool labor (those who many of us, especially those in power, choose to forget about). These are places where nearly all measures well-being match those of third world countries, places where the scars of history - slavery, genocide, discrimination, and manifest destiny - are still visible. These are places inhabited by people whom the law is meant to control and subordinate, not empower or protect. Here, the police beat you when you step out of li...

The work of Theodore Allen ( The Invention of the White Race, 1994 & 1997) presents a powerful argument for class as the underlying unifier in capitalist society and against ‘race’ as an inherent division amongst working class people. Allen’s work – to which he devoted the majority of his 85 years of life – describes how and why the colonial ruling class in American taught European-Americans workers to love their skin as “whites” and turn against their class brothers and sisters from Africa. Today, says Allen, the capitalist ruling class continues to crush working class movements by appealing to an “all-class” invention of their own making – “white supremacy.” Allen’s work on the creation of “white supremacy” as a social control formation and its use by the ruling class today fits nicely with the work of Lerone Bennett ( The Shaping of Black America , 1975). In 1607 the first European settlement is proclaimed in Jamestown, Virginia. The Europeans were not identified...