Economic Aspects of "Love"

[American Dream]

http://www.nytimes.com/books/00/12/17/s ... isons.html

August 5, 1975

Michel Foucault, on the Role of Prisons

By ROGER-POL DROIT

Following are excerpts from an interview with Michel Foucault, French philosopher, psychiatrist and historian, and author of "The Order of Things" and "Madness and Civilization." It first appeared in the Paris newspaper Le Monde, preceded by a commentary by the interviewer Roger-Pol Droit. This was translated by Leonard Mayhew.

Corporal punishment used to be carried out in a businesslike fashion. Bodies were branded, amputated, wrenched apart. From the stake to the scaffold, from the pillory to the gibbet, physical suffering was produced with elaborate theatricality as an example to all. Care was taken that no one should be unaware of it. All that came to a sudden end in the second half of the 18th century.

The monotonous tumbling of locks and the shadow of the cell block have replaced the grand ceremonial of flesh and blood. The condemned culprit's body is concealed rather than being placed on exhibition. We no longer want to cause the criminal pain; we want to train him; we want to reeducate his "spirit."

The change took place throughout Western civilization in less than a century. The Middle Ages had its prisons and jails but it was unfamiliar with anything resembling the rigid system of regimented, fastidious detention that developed between 1780 and 1820 as Europe and the New World became covered with penitentiaries.

It is not enough to say, with the 18th-century "reformers," that "humanization" and "progress" explained and justified this radical change in the penal system.

The shock of corporal punishment and the silence of reclusion are not simply two isolated and opposed phenomena; nor are their differences only on the surface. They stand for a change from one kind of justice to another, a profound change in the organization of authority.

Under absolute monarchy, the criminal defied the authority of the king, and the authority crushed him and dramatically reminded everybody of its unlimited power. For the theoreticians of the Enlightenment, someone who committed a crime broke the contract that bound him to his fellows. Society put him aside and reformed him by carefully regulating his every action and every moment of his life in prison.

Prison means a rigorous regulation of space, because the guard can and must see everything. It is also the rigid regulation of the use of time hour by hour. Finally, it involves regulation of the slightest bodily movements or change of position.

Prison is not unique. It is positioned within the disciplined society, the society of generalized surveillance in which we live. "What is so astonishing," Foucault asks, "about the fact that our prisons resemble our factories, schools, military bases, and hospitals-all of which in turn resemble prisons?"

Q. Prisons, in their contemporary form and functioning, may seem like an isolated invention that appeared suddenly at the end of the eighteenth century. But you show that, on the contrary, their origin should be traced to a much more profound social change.

A. When we read the great historians of the classic era, we can see that to a great degree the administrative monarchy-as centralized and bureaucratized as it could possible be-was, in spite of that, an irregular and discontinuing power structure that allowed individuals and groups a certain latitude to twist the law, to establish customs that suited them, to find a way of slipping around obligations, etc.

The Ancien Regime was loaded down with hundreds of thousands of ordinances, that were never enforced, rights that no one exercised, and regulations that masses of people ignored. For example, not only traditional fiscal fraud but also the most blatant smuggling was part and parcel of the economic life of the kingdom. In short, a perpetual give-and-take between legality and law-breaking was one of the conditions under which authority operated.

In the second half of the 18th century this system of tolerance changed. New economic conditions and the political fear of popular movements, which became chronic in France after the Revolution, demanded a different social arrangement.

The exercise of power had to become more refined, more clear-cut and between the centralized decision-making apparatus and the individual as continuous a connection as possible had to be formed. This occasioned the appearance of the police force, the administrative hierarchy, the bureaucratic pyramid of the Napoleonic state.

Long before 1789, jurists and "reformers" had dreamed of a society in which punishments would be uniform, where chastisements for law-breaking would be unavoidable and equal, with no exception or evasion possible.

Suddenly, corporal punishment, the grand ritual of chastisement designed to arouse fear and act as a deterrent-which, however, many criminals escaped-disappeared before the demand for a universality of punishment concretized in the prison system.

Q. But why prisons rather than some other systems? What is the central role of enclosing, cloistering, the "guilty" party?

A. You ask where prisons come from. My answer is "from practically everywhere." Something was "invented," to be sure, but it was an entire technique of surveillance: the control and identification of individuals, the regulation of their movements, activity, and effectiveness.

This took place in the 16th and 17th centuries in the army, colleges, schools, hospitals and work places. It boiled down to a technology that made possible exact, day-by-day power over bodies. Prison is the ultimate embodiment of that age of discipline.

The social role of internment is to be discovered in terms of a person who begins to emerge in the 19th century: the delinquent. This establishment of the criminal world is absolutely correlated with the existence of prisons. Within the masses, a small core of people became, so to speak, the privileged and exclusive licensees of criminal activity.

In the classic age, on the contrary, violence, petty thievery and embezzlement were extremely common and, in the long run, were tolerated by everyone. The malefactor, it seems, was able to melt very easily into society. If he happened to get caught, penal procedures were swift and definitive: death, life in the galleys, banishment.

The criminal world was not so closed in on itself, something that developed essentially out of the existence of prisons, out of the "marinade" of prison society that forms a microsociety in which men find real solidarity that will provide them, on their release, with mutual support.

Prison is a recruitment center for the army of crime. That is what it achieves. For 200 years everybody has been saying, "Prisons are failing; all they do is produce new criminals." I would say on the other hand, "They are a success, since that is what has been asked of them."

Q. Nevertheless, over and over we hear that prison, at least ideally, should "cure" or "readapt" the criminal. It is-or should be, we say-more "therapeutic" than punitive.

A. Criminal psychiatry and psychology risk becoming the ultimate alibi behind which the prevailing system will hide in order to remain unchanged. They could not possibly suggest a serious alternative to the prison system for the simple reason that they owe their origins to it.

The prisons established immediately after the penal code presented themselves from the outset as an instrument of psychological correction. Prison was a medico-judicial remedy. Placing every single prisoner under the care of a psychotherapist would in no way change the power system built on generalized surveillance established at the beginning og the 19th century.

Q. There remains the question of what "benefit" the ruling class derives from the establishment of this army of crime of which you speak.

A. Well, to begin with, it makes it possible to break up the continuity of accepted lawbreaking. In effect, it isolates a small group who can be controlled, kept under surveillance, and thoroughly known. They become the object of hostility and distrust of the very classes from which they come. For the poor are the most frequent victims of most everyday crimes.

The result in the final analysis is gigantic economic and political profit: Economic profit from the fabulous sums derived from prostitution, drug traffic, etc. Political profit in that the more criminals there are the more readily the population will accept police controls.

Not to mention that this system provides a work force for the lowliest political jobs: putting up posters, poll-watching, strike-breaking. Under the Second Empire, the workers were quite aware that the "scabs," as well as Louis Napoleon's antiriot forces, were all ex-prisoners.

Q. Then, all the talk and activity about prison "reform" and "humanization" is just subterfuge?

A. It seems to me that whether the prisoners get an extra chocolate bar on Christmas or are let out to make their Easter Duty is not the real political issue. What we have to denounce is not so much the "human" side of life in prison but rather their real social function-that is, to serve as the instrument that creates a criminal milieu that the ruling classes can control. Q. How do you define this "managing" of lawbreaking? Doesn't the very phrase presuppose a strange conception of law and society?

A. It would be pure illusion to believe that laws are made to be respected, or that the police and courts are intended to make them respected. Only in disembodied theory could we pretend that we have once and for all subscribed to the laws of the society to which we belong. It is common knowledge that laws are made by certain people for other people to keep.

But we can go further. Lawbreaking is not an accident, a more or less unavoidable imperfection. Rather, it is a positive element of the functioning of society. Its role is part of a general strategy. Every legislative arrangement sets up privileged and profitable areas where the law can be violated, others where it can be ignored, and others where infractions are sanctioned.

[American Dream]

President Clinton was one of the worst presidents in history for black people. There are more people in jail because of these drug laws passed during his regime – drug laws aimed at blacks and Hispanics, but not at whites, who consume more dope than any other group in the hemisphere. More people in poverty because of welfare reform, even though black people are not the ones who are primarily dependent on welfare. More neighborhoods wiped out through foreclosures because the banks were allowed to speculate after the repeal of Glass-Steagall. My whole district has been ethnically-cleansed because of foreclosures. All thanks to the Democratic Party…

— Ishmael Reed

[American Dream]

http://rememberolivemorris.wordpress.co ... -movement/

brixton black panthers movement
By Ana Laura

Olive Morris was an active member of the Brixton Black Panther Movement until the group dissolved and reformed into a number of organisations working on specific aspects within the Black struggle.



Olive Morris speaking at a rally against police brutality outside Brixton Library
(ca. 1972)

The Black Panther and the Black Power Movements in the UK developed from the work of the Universal Coloured Peoples Association. Several American Black Panthers and radical activists visited the UK and gave lectures in London, including Malcom X (1965), Stokely Carmicheal and Angela Davis (both in 1967). Their message struck a chord in second generation Black youth, and gave impulse to the formation of a local Movement.

The British Black Panther Movement, although inspired by the ideology of the US Black Panther Party, was a different type of organisation that responded to the specific reality of Black people in the UK. As an organised movement it was short lived, and its main period of activity was from 1970-1973. Don Lett, a member of the Movement explains the difference in an interview by Greg Whitfield, published by http://www.punk77.co.uk

It all seems so easy now, the very word just rolls off your tongue, “Black British”, but for awhile back there, it wasn’t so simple you know? Fundamentally the Black British and the Black American experience was different, right from source. Black Americans were dragged, screaming and kicking, from the shores of Africa to an utterly hostile America, whilst my parents, they bought a ticket on the ‘The Windrush’ bound for London! So, right off, you have it there, a major fundamental difference. So even though I attended the Black Panther meetings, proudly wearing my Angela Davis badge, read “Soul on Ice”, there was still so much more that we needed to do. It’s true that we became aware, became conscious in many respects and that was partly due to those Panther ideologies, but the total relevance of that movement just didn’t translate into the Black British experience.

The Black Panther Movement in the UK organised itself in groups based around a particular location or area, and each group organised and run their work and activities independently but overseen by a common centre core. This central core – the intelectual leadership of the movement made up of university students – organised the setting up of local groups in areas whith a large Black population, and recruited local working class youth that constituted the local core.

Many members of the Brixton group went on to become inspiring community leaders and became notorious figures in their field of work. The Brixton Panthers had their headquarters at Shakespeare Road in a house that was bought with money donated by John Berger when he won the Bookers Prize.

Here are some of the members of the Brixton Black Panthers:

Althea Jones – medical doctor
Farukh Dhondi – broadcaster and writer
David Udah – church minister
Darcus Howe – broadcaster
Keith Spencer – community activist
Leila Hussain – community activist
Olive Morris – community activist
Liz Turnbull – community activist
Mala Sen – author
Beverly Bryan – academic and writer
Linton Kwesi Johnson – writer and musician
Neil Kenlock – photographer and founder of Choice FM London

This quote from an interview with Linton Kwesi Johnson published in 1998 by Classical Reggae Interviews, describes the work and ethos of the Brixton Black Panthers:

It was an organization that came in to combat racial oppression, to combat police brutality, to combat injustices in the courts against black people, to combat discrimination at the place of work, to combat the mis-education of black youths and black young people.

The Black Panther movement was not a separatist organization like Louis Farrakhan’s ‘Nation Of Islam’. We didn’t believe in anything like that. Our slogan was ‘Black Power – People’s Power’…

…and we also realized that we had to live in the same world as white people and that if we wanted to make some changes we had to win some support from the progressive section of the white population.

We published a newspaper which we would sell on the streets. I used to do that myself. Every Saturday morning I had to go to Brixton Market, Croydon Market, Ballem Market, wherever…(…).

…We would organize campaigns around specific incidents where there was some racial injustice involving the police and so on. We had educational classes for the Youth Section (I was member of the Youth Section) where we studied Black History, Politics and Culture.

And as a matter of fact it was through my involvement with the Black Panther movement I discovered Black Literature read a book called ‘The Souls Of Black Folk’ by W.E.B. Dubois and got inspired to write poetry.


When in time the Black Workers Movement dissolved, its members used the experience they have gained to set up new organisations, such as Black Workers Movement, the Race Today Collective and the Brixton Black Women’s Group. Olive Morris was a founding member of the BWG and OWAAD, and maintained close ties to both organisations throughout her life, even while she was based in Manchester.

If you or someone you know was involved with the Brixton Black Panthers and have stories or pictures of that time that you are willing to share, please use the comments box below to get in touch, in particular if you have any memories of Olive Morris work in the Movement.

[American Dream]

Marsha P. Johnson, Albany, 1971. Read about Marsha’s group S.T.A.R. here.

[American Dream]

http://uppingtheanti.org/journal/article/14-dean-spade/

Toward a Critical Trans Politics: An Interview with Dean Spade

Rob Nichols


Dean Spade is an associate professor at the Seattle University School of Law. In 2002 he founded the Sylvia Rivera Law Project, a non-profit collective that provides free legal help to low-income people and people of colour who are trans, intersex, and/or gender non-conforming and works to build trans resistance rooted in racial and economic justice. He is the author of Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics and the Limits of Law, published by South End Press in 2011.


How did you become politicized? What was that process like for you?


I developed an “outsider identity” as a kid because I was living in the South, I had a single mom, we weren’t Christian, and we were poor. I was aware of being different and I struggled to pass in various ways. I organized my first protest when I was 11 and I experienced the thrill of standing up for something with others. During high school I became more aware of sexism and found feminism through the lyrics of Salt-N-Pepa.

When I went to college, I met queer people and learned about queer politics. In the mid-’90s I was living in New York City and I started interning at the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, Lambda, and other large gay organizations. They were doing a lot of marriage work and I often assisted with those projects. But I also worked at the gay bookstore A Different Light, where I met trans people, drag queens, nightlife people, and people who had been in ACT UP. They had a critique of marriage and military-focused gay organizations and offered me a frame for my own observations about how the organizations I interned with were not taking a stand against the horrifying changes to national welfare and immigration policy. As I found alternative forms of queer resistance that matched my anti-capitalist and feminist values, I started to understand the divides in queer politics and dis-identify with the increasingly visible white gay agenda of marriage, military, and hate crimes law reform.

The period between 1995 and 1998 was especially important for my political development. I worked with a broad coalition of activists to stand up to the attacks that Mayor Giuliani was unleashing on vulnerable communities in New York City. We articulated a different queer politics than the marriage/military/hate crime agenda. We wanted to centre welfare, immigration, and resistance to criminalization, seek housing for people with AIDS, and increase access to public space. In 1998, I was part of a group of young people who created an event called Gay Shame at a queer space called Dumba in Brooklyn. The goal of Gay Shame was to expose and contest white, rich gay politics and provide an alternative to Gay Pride. Along with the event, we started a zine called Swallow Your Pride that was full of articles about anti-racist, feminist, anti-Giuliani, and DIY queer politics. It was an important time for me; I learned about grassroots queer political work, began to understand a critique of non-profits and what we now call homonormative and homonationalist gay politics, and discovered the kind of queer politics that I really wanted to be a part of.


A lot of your work is highly critical of the law and official legal institutions as mechanisms for progressive social struggle and change. For instance, the subtitle of your book makes reference to “the limits of law.” What do you mean by this?


There is an idea in the US that liberation should be sought through legal change. It is especially grounded in a white supremacist national story about how Black people were liberated from slavery and apartheid by legal reform and how racism is now over. This story tells us that American law and the Constitution are neutral and colourblind; as long as we interpret them correctly, justice and freedom will prevail.


Many important critical intellectual traditions and social movements have exposed how the US was actually founded on genocide, land theft, and slavery, and how US law exists to codify and enforce colonization, racism, capitalism, and patriarchy. We can see the methods of enforcement changing over time: from slavery to apartheid to criminalization, for example. Legal reforms have, at times, changed the surface of the operations of colonization, white supremacy, and patriarchy, but they have not actually abolished them. These surface changes are cited as progress as the US declares “inequality” a thing of the past. Groups experiencing violence and marginalization today are encouraged to seek “equality” under the law to win liberation. As a result, we see a range of emergent movement formations like trans politics take up narrow demands for legal reform and for legislative declarations of inclusion and recognition. A central argument in my book is that the focus on law reform reduces our demands such that we cannot actually get relief from the conditions we experience. Law reform demands often shift movements away from constituents’ needs for housing, health care, and relief from state violence, and toward demands for symbolic inclusion in the most violent institutions of governance: the military, policing and prisons, and the normative family.

I don’t think there’s anything really novel about this argument; it just warrants repeating. The seduction of legal equality appears to be very significant in certain strains of LGBT politics, regardless of the availability of critical understandings of its limits.


I want to de-centre law reform as a goal of trans resistance without ignoring the law or legal systems. My experience as a poverty lawyer underscored the violence that legal systems like criminal and immigration enforcement and welfare or disability benefit eligibility verification processes inflict on vulnerable people. Trans resistance needs a legal strategy, but not one focused on passing legislation that declares us equal but that does not address the daily violence and poverty produced by transphobia. Trans politics must contend with legal systems, since they violently enforce racialized gender norms and shorten trans people’s lives every day. However, there is a difference between law reform as our goal – assuming that we can get the law to say “good” things about us and that this will bring relief – and understanding that we need to use law reform as a tactic to dismantle systems of state violence. Instead of focusing on passing hate crime legislation and holding onto the fantasy of getting law enforcement to protect trans people, we need to launch campaigns to close prisons and jails, to decriminalize sex work and drugs, and to prioritize other strategic engagements aimed at disrupting the pathways to criminalization that are devouring trans populations. Legal advocacy and reform are tactics that can be used to help people survive and to dismantle apparatuses of state violence, but law reform work also risks neutralizing transformative demands, co-opting movement messages and aims, and dividing constituencies between those who can benefit from an incremental reform and those who continue to be left out. I want to shift our focus away from law reform interventions sold under the rubric of “equality law” – hate crime laws and anti-discrimination laws – and towards the legal and administrative systems that actually operate in extremely violent and targeted ways. What the law says about us is far less important than what it is doing to us.


Critical race theorist and prison abolitionist Ruth Wilson Gilmore defines racism in terms of “the state sanctioned and/or extra-legal production of group differentiated vulnerability to premature death.” Can you explain why you think Gilmore is so instructive here and how you use her analysis of “premature death?”


I like that definition because it draws our attention to conditions and systems of distribution rather than intentions. We think about racism far too frequently as a question of intentions – whether or not somebody intentionally left someone out or did something harmful because of their biased racist beliefs. The focus on individual racists with bad ideas hides the reality that racism exists wherever conditions of racialized maldistribution exist. Law reforms in the US, ostensibly enacted to prohibit racism, have proven ineffective because they focus on bad intentions of individuals and fail to comprehend population-level conditions. When we are forced to find an individual who is responsible and prove their discriminatory intent, it becomes very difficult to prove that racism has actually happened. This is part of why Civil Rights law reforms have not eradicated racism, and why, during the period when racism has apparently been prohibited in the US, we’ve seen a growing racial wealth divide and drastically growing apparatuses of state violence targeted at people of colour.


We cannot address broad conditions of racialized maldistribution with laws focused on finding bad individuals with racist intentions. The story about racism that legal discrimination frameworks establish justifies these conditions and declares them neutral. It names attempts to remedy them, like affirmative action programs, as “racist” because taking race into account is forbidden. Having wildly racially segregated school systems in the US with drastically lower resources in schools with students of colour does not violate the law, but creating a program that considers students’ race for purposes of placement in order to desegregate is illegal. This absurd and perverse “colourblindness” has been heavily critiqued by critical race theorists.


This narrow way of thinking about racism through the “discrimination principle” justifies the national story that racism is over and any people or groups who experience poverty, criminalization, or other marginalization have only themselves to blame. Gilmore’s approach turns this entire framework on its head. In order to prove racism’s existence, we need not identify an individual racist perpetrator and prove hir racist intent – we need only identify that conditions of racialized maldistribution are shortening some people’s lives. People of colour have less access to health care, education, income, healthy food, and housing. They are disproportionately exposed to police violence, criminalization, immigration enforcement, pollution, and the most dangerous forms of labour. We need not find a mastermind behind each of these conditions to identify racism or justify intervention.


Can you explain and expand upon what you mean by administrative violence?


The term “administrative violence” draws attention to the ways in which systems that organize our lives in seemingly ordinary ways – determining what ID we carry, what government records exist about us, how roads or schools or garbage pick-up are organized – produce and distribute life chances based on violent forms of categorization. The entire framework of US administrative law is that we have agencies – whether it’s the Department of Homeland Security or the Food and Drug Administration or the Environmental Protection Agency or the Bureau of Indian Affairs – run by experts. These experts invent and deploy categories that manage and sort people, substances, buildings, curricula, human capacities, diseases, financial instruments, streets, soils, vehicles, and more. These administrators need not be elected; the basis of their authority, and thus the authority of the administrative system, is neutral expertise. Critical movements have questioned the neutrality of those ways of knowing and the categories they produce, identifying white supremacist, ableist, colonial, and patriarchal norms. Critiques of the racially disparate impact of drug sentencing laws regarding crack and powder cocaine are a popular example of this kind of intervention. I am interested in paying attention to systems of explicit state violence, like criminal and immigration enforcement systems, as well as systems that many consider benign, such as those that determine and record the “facts” about people’s births. Distinctions and norms produced by these systems assign categorizations such as gender and produce deadly consequences for those who fail to conform to their assigned category. My work has looked specifically at the interactions between sex classifications on documents and records like driver’s licenses, birth certificates, and in social security programs, as well as the sex segregation used in criminal and immigration prisons, juvenile punishment facilities, and homeless shelters.


The work of identifying violence in the administration of systems that declare themselves race and gender neutral but are actually sites of extreme racial and gender violence is central to many social movements.

Dorothy Roberts’ work, for example, analyzes the child welfare system in the US and how it targets Black families. She argues that the system is a continuation of the natal alienation enforced during slavery. A lot of prison abolitionist scholarship also critiques the purported scientific neutrality of policing, criminal trials, sentencing, and rehabilitation schemes that actually constitute ongoing anti-Black terror.


How do you conceive of a distinctive intervention of critical trans politics?


In the 1990s, trans resistance became increasingly visible, but it obviously wasn’t new: there’s been resistance to gender norms by various kinds of gender rule breakers wherever and whenever there have been gender norms. The contemporary moment of trans resistance is often expected to follow in the footsteps of the gay and lesbian rights framework and make some of the same demands. At the most basic level, identifying critical trans politics is about finding a way to talk about a trans politics that isn’t interested in military service, marriage, hate crime legislation, or other elements of today’s nightmarishly conservative gay and lesbian rights agenda. Instead, it centres transformative resistance to systems that are the most harmful to trans people. It is part of critical political resistance that raises demands like an end to wealth and poverty, an end to immigration enforcement, and the abolition of all forms of imprisonment (immigration, criminal punishment, medical, and psychiatric). What critical trans politics has to offer left social movements more broadly is a particular frame for understanding how processes of gendered racialization are congealed in violent institutions. This line of thinking and organizing is informed by critical race theory’s critiques of legal reform and specifically anti-discrimination law and has important links to analyses developed by fat politics and disability politics, where norms about body and health are identified and critiqued.


What does it mean that gender segregation is utilized as a method of control in prisons, juvenile punishment facilities, shelters, and psychiatric institutions – where poor people and people of colour are concentrated? In these places, people who are difficult to classify, who contest their classification, or who live at edges of the classification system are targets of particular forms of violence. Trans politics has, in some ways, extended feminist analysis about the gender enforcement that takes place in these spaces and institutions by examining the problems with gender binarism itself. Trans peoples’ experience and our articulation of resistance can be a location for articulating the political implications of classification processes. Exposing the complexity of gender category enforcement and the relationship of various forms of gender identification and surveillance to state projects of identity surveillance that have expanded under the “War on Terror” has been an important contribution of trans studies and trans activism.


Earlier we were talking about violence and how transphobic violence is often imagined as individual “hate crimes” against trans people. However, conceptualizing “hate violence” as the biggest singular threat to trans life dangerously misunderstands early death among trans people. Trans people are dying from the daily violence of not being able to get basic necessities because systems are organized in ways that require everyone to be gendered in a particular way. Trans people die because of exposure to police violence and criminalization. Trans people die early because we often live with serious untreated health conditions when health care systems won’t treat people whose gender makes them incomprehensible to that system. Transphobic violence isn’t constituted only in individual acts by intentional perpetrators, but in the enforcement of gender norms broadly on everyone, shaping everyone’s field of action, existence, and self-understanding. Trans studies and trans activism makes these purportedly neutral and sometimes invisible systems of control visible and political. It also helps us consider why, if we wanted to stop the murders of trans women of colour, we wouldn’t waste our time trying to enhance policing and prosecution with hate crime laws; we would make sure that trans women in poverty had safe housing and income and abolish the immigration and criminal laws that make their lives particularly dangerous.


Critical trans politics relies heavily on tools developed by different strains of women of colour feminism that question the racialized deployment of the category “woman” and developed critical reflective anti-hierarchical and solidarity-based practices and processes for resistance. Trans politics has raised critical analyses of things like gender markers on ID and gender segregation in jails and prisons, but also things like “women-only” spaces in feminist communities. Like women of colour feminisms, it provides a chance to look at the enforcement and deployment of certain kinds of norms in the broader harmful systems that currently distribute well-being, but also in the alternative spaces we create to cultivate our resistance and survival. What does it mean to try to produce resistance practices that contend with norm enforcement not only in government agencies, schools, welfare offices, prisons, and health departments, but also in our own resistance formations? As activists seeking transformative change, we also produce norms about health and the body that perpetuate an inability to deal with difference, and a desire for standardization. It’s a mistake to assume that the problems of normalization and population management are only “out there” in the apparatuses of state violence that activists are struggling with and working to dismantle. In fact, because we are producing alternative systems of distribution, we also deploy categories of identity, narratives of authenticity and deservingness, and notions of enemies, threat, and danger. Trans politics has critiqued these conditions in certain feminist formations that have produced trans people as enemies – traitors, dupes, or invaders – drawing harsh and violent gender lines to create supposedly “safe” spaces. This kind of analysis draws our attention to issues of intra-group difference, enemy production, and normalization that, in my opinion, all activists must perpetually engage with. Women of colour feminisms show how rigorous, continuous processes of critical reflection are warranted in response to these patterns.


Can you explain what you mean by “gendered racialization?”


A basic point in my work is that nations constitute themselves through processes of creating and deploying gendered racial categories and racialized gender categories. The reason I say those two terms together is because they’re always operating together. There aren’t universal gender categories – they are enforced differently on differently racialized people.

For example, there is no singular norm of femininity or womanhood in the US, but rather particular norms that are enforced on particular people based on race, class, nationality, ability, and other social positions. So processes of racialization and gendering – processes of creating those categories and enforcing them – always happen together. Processes of racialization always include gendering and invent and enforce gender categories while inventing and enforcing racial categories. These processes are fundamental to producing the nation state itself, so they are critical for us to study and understand. A great example of work that exposes these processes is Andrea Smith’s scholarship about the enforcement of heteropatriarchal norms as part of North American colonization. Thinking about race and gender categorization together helps keep our attention on simultaneity and avoids the kind of single-vector analysis that falsely universalizes the experiences of white people or men.


Tell me a little bit about the Sylvia Rivera Law Project (SRLP) and how your work there fits into a larger picture of radical social movements, law, and trans activism.


SRLP is a law collective in New York City and it provides free legal help to intersex, trans, and gender non-conforming people who are low-income and/or people of colour. We’re trying to approach trans politics and law in a way that centres the day-to-day harmful interactions with law enforcement and administrative systems faced by people who break certain gender norms, particularly those who face the most violent enforcement of gender norms because they have the most contact with apparatuses of state violence. In order to be politically engaged and build the movements we want, we also need to survive; it’s about trying to provide people the basic things they need and advocating for people in danger as part of a pathway to survival and political action.


The organization is committed to the idea that survival services should be provided by and for populations being served, and should be governed by people who are receiving the services. The organization operates collectively and has a structure that centres people of colour governance and governance by intersex, trans, non-conforming, and low-income people. It operates very differently than most legal services, where disproportionately white, upper class professional lawyers provide services to low-income people and people of colour, under the supervision of a white, wealthy board of directors. SRLP sees service provision as a pathway to mobilization – survival services should help people get together to make transformative change. Too often they are instead a means of maintaining the status quo by providing limited, temporary, pathologizing help for a few people deemed “deserving.”


If we are actually going to see change we want, it will be because there are significant social movements that attack the root causes of the violence and exploitation that characterize contemporary life. Trans people who come to SRLP for help are extremely marginalized and endangered and need direct advocacy when they’re facing police harassment, sexual violence in prison, deportation, homelessness, and/or denial of health care and welfare benefits. Our work is driven by a belief that we should centre highly vulnerable people and do politicized and politicizing survival work, building social movement infrastructure that’s accountable to the people who are at the centre of the impacted communities.


We were heavily influenced by INCITE!’s conference and anthology, The Revolution Will Not be Funded. When we started SRLP, we researched collectives throughout the US and Canada, especially women of colour organizations, many of which work with survivors of domestic violence. We found models for groups who politicize service provision and build their organizations horizontally instead of having an executive director who tells everyone what to do. Building our collective in this way allows us to imagine the kinds of conditions we want to produce in the world as we go. It centres the needs and leadership of people facing some of the most life-threatening conditions of transphobia and racism, recognizing that our work must include survival services, political education, leadership development, and horizontal infrastructure.


INCITE!’s work has sparked important conversations in activist movements in the US about the impact of non-profitization and the influence of philanthropists on organizations. SRLP is influenced by this work and it maintains an ongoing critical dialogue about funding sources; we pour immense energy into developing grassroots funding strategies that we believe are more sustainable and accountable to communities. Our funding includes grants from foundations and we operate as a non-profit, but we believe we have also created an organizational infrastructure focused on defying the norms that non-profitization and philanthropy create. Refusing to structure our organization hierarchically, having a flat payscale, focusing on governance by trans people of colour, and focusing on grassroots fundraising are part of this. Our work is very experimental and our collective is engaged in constant critique, revision, and reinvention. It is complicated to try to create something so drastically different from what poverty legal service organizations typically look like, to serve populations facing severe and mounting crises, and to build structures that seek to dismantle deep cultural and structural hierarchies. We have been doing it for 10 years now and we are still experimenting and reinventing as we learn.


In some of your writing on social justice you use the metaphor of trickle up and trickle down. What does this mean to you in practical terms?


I use these terms to criticize some key problematic assumptions and arguments often made by supposedly social justice-oriented organizations. The first assumption is that we should win rights for the people who are the easiest for the (fictional/imagined/conservative) public to believe deserve rights – in other words, the whitest, richest, non-criminalized citizens. This assumption tells us that we need to find the “best spokespeople,” which means the people most assimilable to violent norms; everyone else is “too complicated.” According to this line of thinking, it’s a good strategy to talk about queer and trans issues by using the stories of white gay and lesbian professionals who face discrimination at work; or gay and lesbian couples who want marital recognition because they love weddings, tax breaks, real estate, and raising kids in a monogamous home; or trans people who are white and wealthy former military or law enforcement leaders. These organizations anchor their talking points in representations of deserving “hard workers,” “patriots,” and “tax-paying citizens.” They thus participate in reproducing the shadow images of these figures, those who are perpetually cast outside as “undeserving.”


The second assumption is that the best way to win gains for queer and trans people is through legislation reform lawsuits that, at best, will provide increased access to harmful institutions (marriage, military, police) for a small sector of least-vulnerable people in the constituency. These assumptions tell us who to centre in the work (start at the top and hope for a trickle down) and how to do the work (with white lawyers, lobbyists, and corporate media professionals at the centre framing the issues). They tell us that grassroots work, the leadership and demands of people of colour, poor people, people with disabilities, criminalized people, and immigrants is idealistic, unrealistic, not politically viable, and far too complicated.


My hope for queer and trans resistance is that we can take the model I’ve just discussed and turn it upside down, which means prioritizing people who face the most dangerous manifestations of transphobia and homophobia first. This is an ethical stance – in the face of enormous violence it is only right to start with those under the worst and most dangerous conditions. It is also strategic. We have seen again and again that when those who are the least vulnerable of the targeted constituency are prioritized, the declared victories do not trickle down. Winning policy reform that allows a gay person with a high-level corporate job to share their health insurance plan and pass their inheritance to their partner does absolutely nothing to address the experience of trans women being denied adequate food and medicine as they face daily sexual violence in immigration and criminal punishment prisons. In fact, slight alterations to include and recognize the least impacted of the impacted tend to legitimize and shore up existing conditions – a stamp of “equality” is placed on harmful systems, even as those systems continue their murderous work.

On the other hand, if we solved the problems facing people who are experiencing the worst manifestations of violence, it would inevitably solve the problems of those at the top.


We also turn this model upside down when we recognize that justice is never going to come from courtrooms, legislatures, or the corporate media. All we get from them, at best, is new window dressing to shut us up. Meaningful change is built from the bottom up and requires us to do three things: help people survive existing conditions, dismantle harmful institutions and systems, and build alternatives to create the world we want to live in. We have to do all three at the same time. What’s liberating is that we don’t have to hire lobbyists or convert our messages into something that corporate media outlets are willing to publish – we just need to start where we are. Our work can be very local and can accomplish real change that helps the people we love survive. I see trans activists working to address the violence and transphobia occurring in homeless shelters in their towns, working in coalitions to stop their local criminal punishment systems from adopting new federal programs designed to enhance immigration enforcement, working to decriminalize sex work, or to build meaningful access to health care. These kinds of local projects can build relationships and facilitate leadership by the people most directly impacted by these systems. These projects give us a chance to create models of how we want to work together: horizontally, thoughtfully, and reflectively, while prioritizing the leadership of people of colour, immigrants, people with disabilities, and poor people. And they can provide actual relief from violent conditions, rather than veneers for harmful systems.


Let me describe two models of large-scale social transformation. I’ll call the first a traditional revolutionary model. This model aims at overturning a system of power by seizing the main apparatus of power and replacing it.

The second model, an immanent one, is more resonant with certain anarchist communities who frequently talk about trying to “starve the state” or displace it internally. These visions can be antagonistic, both at the level of theory and also in terms of activism. Historically, they have often hinged on a means/ends distinction and debates about violence, democracy, and hierarchy. How do you position yourself in this debate?


I have been trying to figure out whether that distinction is as real as we think it is. When we look at problems inherent in the idea of taking over the state, we could argue that the state is a problem regardless of who is running it. If the contemporary nation-state form relies on border enforcement and imprisonment, then I don’t want it – no matter who is running it. We need to attend to forms of governance and organization that we believe are irredeemable. Having said that, it’s important for us to consider how many of the features of government that we complain about are reproduced in our resistance spaces. If I’m working with a shelter or an activist group that kicks people out – that uses exile as a solution to behavioral or political differences – I’m reproducing the logics of deportation and imprisonment. Our spaces of resistance are full of normalization and domination processes; the dangerous capacities of stateness can exist in institutional forms, even if they are run by people who identify as anarchists. What I think we’re really trying to do is build political practices that attend to questions of participation, normalization, and the production of a falsely universal citizen subject.


It seems like people all over are taking up various strategies that try to facilitate increased participatory governance within existing state forms and build alternatives to those forms. Right now I’m focused on studying these different approaches: what they accomplish under various circumstances, what happens when people are taking them up at the same time in the same place, and whether or not autonomous groups hold those seizing state power accountable. In the Law and Social Movements class I teach, we spend time talking about the people’s budget process in Porto Alegre the same week that we study how the Zapatistas have created independent municipalities. Putting these strategies, both of which aim for greater transparency and participation in decision-making using very different approaches and levels of engagement with existing recognized government structures, side by side is useful. It allows us to consider what kinds of strategies might be useful in a particular location, or on a particular issue, when we are trying to increase people’s ability to determine what happens in their lives. I am not interested in absolutes, but rather experimentation and analysis.


I’m also trying to think through the extent to which the dichotomy between seizing state power and starving the state is possibly false. We often build organizations with administrative capacities that resemble stateness. I wonder whether that administrative capacity, the quality we might call stateness, which seems to require the production and administration of certain kinds of categories, is inherent to any activity that seeks to redistribute things (land, money, food, services, care). Another way I think about this question is to consider whether, when we do redistributive projects, we are always engaged in what Foucault would call “state racism” because we are trying to cultivate the life of the population. To do that, we have to conceptualize the population and determine the administrative categories through which we will redistribute. We create ideas of deservingness and undeservingness, of safety and threat, and end up producing processes of normalization. For me, being part of SLRP brings up questions about our attempts to really be horizontal while constantly recognizing the existing power dynamics within any group of people. SRLP, like many other organizations working for deep transformation, tries to produce a different way of being together – ways of relating that differ from our training as consumers, competitors, and people at various places in various hierarchies. We are trying to be people who we were never trained to be after socialization in violent spaces like families, schools, health care systems, and police states – all under white supremacy and colonialism. We attempt this very imperfect and sometimes bewildering experimentation because we want to connect and help each other survive.

We have no alternative but to create something new because the current conditions are intolerable. However, unlike some movements and activists who have a very clear picture of their future revolutionary society, we are critical of the limits of our current imaginings, more interested in creating maximally participatory processes in hopes that our many brains and experiences will be more critical and creative than any of us can be on our own, assuming consistent failures, setbacks, and reorientations.

[American Dream]

http://zinelibrary.info/destroy-prison-society

[American Dream]

http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/13 ... ht-is-long

Mahmoud Darwish: Iraq's Night is Long

Aug 09 2013
by Sinan Antoon سنان انطون


[Today marks the fifth anniversary of Mahmoud Darwish’s death.]



Iraq’s Night is Long

Mahmoud Darwish

[For Saadi Youssef]



Iraq, Iraq is blood the sun cannot dry

The sun is God’s widow above Iraq

The murdered Iraqi says to those standing at the bridge:

Good Morning, I am still alive.

They say: You are still a dead man searching for his grave

in the corners of cooing



Iraq, Iraq . . . Iraq’s night is long

Dawn breaks only to the murdered

praying half a prayer and never finishing a greeting to anyone

For the Mongols are coming

from the gate of the Caliph’s palace

at the river’s shoulder

The river runs south and carries our dead who stay up,

carries them to the palm trees’ relatives.



Iraq, Iraq is cemeteries that are open, like schools,

to everyone:

Armenian, Turkmen, and Arab. We are all equal in eschatology

There must be a poet who wonders:

Baghdad; How many times will you disappoint myths?

How many times will you make statues for tomorrow?

How many times will you seek to marry the impossible?



Iraq, Iraq, here prophets stand

unable to utter the sky’s name

Who is killing whom in Iraq now?

Victims are shards on the roads and in words

Their names, like their bodies, are bits of disfigured letters

Here prophets stand together unable to utter

the sky’s name and the name of the murdered



Iraq, Iraq. So who are you in the presence of suicide?

I am not I in Iraq. Nor are you you

He is none but another

God has abandoned the perplexed, so who are we?

Who are we? We are nothing but a predicate in the poem:

Iraq’s night is long

Long!



[Translated from the Arabic by Sinan Antoon from Athar al-Farasha (Beirut: Riyad El-Rayyes, 2008)]

[American Dream]

[American Dream]

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/08/08/a ... a-partier/

Australian far-right candidate is even dumber than a tea partier

By David Ferguson
Thursday, August 8, 2013



While the United States may have some truly awe-inspiringly stupid elected officials and wanna-be elected officials — from Rep. Louis “Don’t Cast Aspersions on my Asparagus” Gohmert (R-TX) to Christine “I’m Not a Witch” O’Donnell to Congressional Republicans who have voted three times to de-fund ACORN, an aid organization that hasn’t existed since 2010 — it appears that we may have a challenger to U.S. hegemony in the field of “dumbest politicians speaking English” in the form of Australia’s Stephanie Banister.

Banister, who is currently facing criminal charges for engaging in anti-Muslim hate-based acts of vandalism, is running to represent her native Queensland in the Australian Parliament. She is representing the far-right One Nation party and hopes to make Australia an overtly hostile environment to Muslims.

The 27-year-old mother of two told Australia’s Channel Seven, “I don’t oppose Islam as a country, but I do feel that their laws should not be welcome here in Australia.”

The woman who some are calling “Australia’s Sarah Palin” went on to say that she supports “the Jews” because “they follow Jesus Christ” (they don’t) and that while she would outlaw halal food — which she repeatedly referred to as “haram food” — she would allow kosher food to remain in stores because it doesn’t carry a tax like “haram food.” (It does.)

She also said that she would outlaw the Quran.

Watch video of Banister’s interview with Channel Seven, embedded via Channel Seven News, below:

[Hammer of Los]

...

I love this thread.

Ananda great teacher.

...

[American Dream]

(Thanks, HoL!)


Trigger Warning

Texas man sues GOP lawmaker and husband over months of workplace stun gun attacks



"A 45-year-old Texas man is suing an arch-conservative Republican state lawmaker [Patricia Harless] and her husband over what he calls months of attacks with a Taser while working for them that left him paranoid in his private life."

[American Dream]

Did you ever think of the utter absurdity and strangeness of the fact that, all over the civilized world, the working classes are the poor classes? Go into any city in the world, and get into a cab and ask the man to drive you where the working people live. He won’t take you to where the fine houses are. He will take you, on the contrary, into the squalid quarters, the poorer quarters. Did you ever think how curious that is? Think for a moment how it would strike a rational being who had never been on the earth before, if such an intelligence could come down, and you were to explain to him how we live on earth, how houses and food and clothing, and all the many things we need were all produced by work, would he not think that the working people would be the people who lived in the finest houses and had most of everything that work produces? Yet, whether you took him to London or Paris or New York, or even to Burlington, he would find that those called the working people were the people who live in the poorest houses.

— Henry George, “The Crime of Poverty” (April 1, 1885)

[American Dream]

I am an anarchist not because I believe anarchism is the final goal, but because I believe there is no such thing as a final goal. Freedom will lead us to continually wider and expanding understanding and to new forms of social life

— Rudolph Rocker

[American Dream]

[American Dream]

It is not enough to destroy. We must also know how to build … That is why anarchism, when it works to destroy authority in all its aspects, when it demands the abrogation of laws and the abolition of the mechanism that serves to impose them, when it refuses all hierarchical organization and preaches free agreement, at the same time strives to maintain and enlarge the precious kernel of social customs without which no human or animal society can exist.

Communist customs and institutions are of absolute necessity for society, not only to solve economic difficulties, but also to maintain and develop social customs that bring men [sic] in contact with one another. They must be looked to for establishing such relations between men that the interest of each should be the interest of all; and this alone can unite men instead of dividing them.

— Kropotkin