Saturday, September 05, 2015

PAPER magazine’s Chelsea Manning interview

PAPER magazine’s Chelsea Manning interview

paper_title

September 1, 2015 by Holly Herndon, Mat Dryhurst, Metahaven and Jacob Appelbaum / Portrait by Heather Dewey-Hagborg
“We Are At the Very Beginning of a New Epoch:” Chelsea Manning On the Luxury of Privacy
PAPER is proud to present this conversation between an affiliation of artists and activists and Chelsea Manning. In the following exchange, conducted via US mail and encrypted web platforms, Manning takes questions from electronic-music artists Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst; design duo Metahaven, aka Daniel van der Velden and Vinca Kruk; and Web-activist Jacob Appelbaum. Together, they weigh the strictures and possibilities not just of government, but of technology, culture and gender.
Heather Dewey-Hagborg’s forensic DNA phenotype of Chelsea Manning. The sex parameter was left out of the process.
Jacob Appelbaum: This is Jacob. I am an American by birth and for the last two years, I have been living in exile in Berlin as a reward for my work with WikiLeaks and The Tor Project.
Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst: Hi, this is Holly and Mat. We are musicians who are interested in creating new fantasies for new realities.
Daniel van der Velden and Vinca Kruk: Hi, we are Daniel and Vinca of Metahaven, an Amsterdam-based group of designers who are interested in identifying radical aesthetics with progressive politics. We collaborate on numerous projects together. Most recently, we designed a “FREE CHELSEA MANNING” T-shirt that contained the slogan “INFILTRATE WITH LOVE.” We first sold the shirt at a packed concert in Berlin we played recently, and were able to deliver a speech in honor of those who have taken a stand for transparency and compassion. It was a beautiful evening. We have managed to raise thousands of euros so far, and all proceeds are being donated to your legal defense fund. As may be clear from our questions, we are interested in other ways we might help you in our capacities as public artists, designers, journalists and activists. 
Herndon & Dyhurst: We see our digital selves as emotionally integrated with our physical selves, which we try to represent through our work aesthetically. Has your relationship to your digital self or your avatar changed since your incarceration, in that your avatar is able to interact with the public through Twitter? 
My relationship with my digital self has changed a lot over the last few years of incarceration. I feel that my digital representation — my avatar, as you put it — has been restricted by the various filters that I’ve had imposed on it, first throughout my initial confinement at Quantico, Virginia, then through my court-martial, and now my time here at Fort Leavenworth. It  — or rather she — has been through several changes, including gender, voice, and frequency and intensity of interaction. Beyond the obvious physical disconnection with me, personally — she has been filtered through the administrative restrictions — mostly military-specific — imposed on what I can and can’t say through her. It can be frustrating, but the challenge is absolutely worth it.
Kruk & van der Velden: The American philosopher and activist Cornel West has said about whistle-blowing that “justice must be rescued by something deeper than justice, namely love”; “justice is what love looks like in public”; “you’re a militant for gentleness”; “a subversive for sweetness”; “a radical for tenderness.” This pretty much sums up how we feel about you! Do West’s words resonate with you?
I don’t consider myself a “radical.” In fact, none of Cornell West’s statements come across as radical to me. Radical in American society has, I think, become this buzzword that makes a lot of ideas and discussions seem foreign or new to people — whether for or against them. Is it radical to seek justice? Is it radical to be rescued by love? Is it subversive to be sweet? I think if you go around the country and ask people they will almost universally agree — at least in principle. Instead of trying to be “radical”; I just try to be true to myself! Is it radical to be true to yourself? Maybe it is? I don’t know, but it just makes sense to me, haha!
Appelbaum: The African National Congress and their allies struggled for nearly 100 earth years before they brought post-racial democracy to South Africa. The resistance movement against apartheid, just as apartheid itself, cost lives. Looking at Aaron Swartz, Barrett Brown, Jeremy Hammond, Edward Snowden, Sarah Harrison, Julian Assange and yourself, one asks oneself, Is our struggle of this magnitude? Is this only the start of things with darker times to come, or are things starting to turn around, where we can see the dark times as a matter of history?
I believe that we are just at the very beginning of a new epoch. I’ve believed this for a very longtime, probably starting around my early teens when I was really spending a lot of time online to “escape” my life — school, bullying, my awkward relationship with family, my gender identity — at night. I think that with ubiquitous and total access to highly connected information technology, and with ubiquitous digital and robotic automation, and with increasingly elegant and intuitive human/machine interfacing we are slowly beginning to blur the lines between the concepts that have seemed so separate for generations, such as the relationships between gender, sexuality, art and work. As we begin to ascend into a new era — which sometimes includes ideas of “transhumanism” and the information, economic and technological “singularity” — perhaps we are going to begin to slowly embrace, or fear, a post-human world? If it happens quickly enough, we might even find out ourselves!
Manning_Leavenworth
A Wikimedia image of the military prison at Fort Leavenworth
Kruk & van der Velden: In a push for a more just, less hierarchical social and political model, with more solidarity, maybe what we need are new and unexpected coalitions. Maybe there is such a coalition around you, consisting of people (including ourselves) who feel deeply inspired and touched by your work, who care about you and publicly support you. We also need new shared actions for a more horizontally democratic and thriving community embracing progress, crypto, complexity and beauty. What could a next chapter be, and who should meet and form coalitions?
I absolutely believe that there is a coalition that is forming. I don’t think it’s new or unexpected at all though. It’s the coalition of humanity! We’ve been slowly acting and encouraging and inspiring and discovering for thousands of years, and we’re only just scratching the surface. I think that we’ve been realizing the existence of structural and institutional problems in our society for millennia, and challenging them and improving them — especially in the last five hundred years or so. As for our next chapter, it’s already starting to happen. We’re starting to realize that there are other people who don’t look like us or experience the world like us that actually think and feel the same way that we do. Its’ an incredible leap for humanity to start to break down the automatic factionalism that gender, race, sexuality, and culture have been the basis of since time immemorial. In America, we can see this with all the different vectors and factions that are starting to align with each other in a way that doesn’t fit into a “one size fits all” category. This will continue at an exponential rate, I hope.
Herndon & Dryhurst: Since your avatar plays such a vital role in your participation at the moment, how do you feel about platforms such as Facebook not allowing people to choose their own identities online, including name and gender? Is it liberating to use an illustration instead of a photograph to represent yourself online?
Facebook’s policies are a reflection of their unique history — first as a Boston/Cambridge area student social media site — and current business model. I think that their targeted advertising and “big data” search filters require taking discrete and “accurate” — from the perspective of their advertising clients — data for tracking and analysis. This is why they do what they do, and why such big institutions resist allowing us to define ourselves, because it takes away from their power — either directly, especially in the case of governments, or indirectly, as in social media’s advertising models.
Appelbaum: In a struggle for the Internet — which represents in a sense, a civil society in an ideal form — what are the actions each person might take, and what are the values that we should work to attain as realities? In the varied Cypherpunk communities, we see a trend of running Tor relays, of using encryption for communications, for writing and using Free Software for Freedom. What should we do to declare our independence from anti-democratic forces seeking to monitor, to censor, to tamper and even to eradicate other humans?
I think it’s an odd paradox that technology is providing for us. We are more diverse and open as a society — yet we also seem to be more homogenous and insecure than ever before. I think that today’s technology certainly provide tools that can be used to declare a kind of digital independence from institutional control through monitoring, censorship, and political — and physical — eradication. But, I don’t think these tools are any more necessary than they are without them. We can still be independent without technology. Some people might even find their independence in embracing the Luddite philosophy and shunning technology. Ultimately though, in this constant technological arms race, we are always only one breakthrough away from making our methods to get past such institutions irrelevant or unusable. We might wake up tomorrow and find out that the Riemann hypothesis has been solved by some brilliant person or group of people, suddenly making most of our encryption algorithms weak — or we might wake up tomorrow and find out that a six-to-ten-qubit quantum computer has been built, accomplishing the same thing! My point is, technology only takes us so far. For me, the most important element is the human one — let’s try not to forget that!
Appelbaum: Your situation is intolerable and beyond reason; you sit in prison for thirty-five years while those who carried out torture, murder and other war crimes walk American streets freely. While many fight to free you, the system is simply stacked against us all. Given these restraints, what are the specific things that we could do or rally around to improve your situation?
You can certainly work toward improving my situation by donating to my legal defense fund. We’re working on a lot of big issues in my case — which has the potential to become landmark precedent in the American jurisprudence system — that affect a lot of people in America. It’s so very important that they get help too. Paying the legal bills is the biggest logistical hurdle to that at this point. Ultimately though, keeping me motivated — because sometimes it can get pretty tough emotionally — and ensuring that people haven’t forgotten just how important this case is for our ensuring that our rights are protected in our society, will certainly work toward that end as well.
Herndon & Dyhurst: How might we, or others, use art to ensure that the things that you and others expose are not in vain? 
Read everything. Absorb everything that is out there and act as your own filter. Hunt down your own answers to questions. This is the only advice that is actually worth anything. If you don’t read these things yourself, then you can’t say that you truly understand what humanity has done, and where we are going. We can’t spend our lives getting spoon-fed all of our information every day and then expect to understand our world. Only then will you understand that people are still hurting and dying in the world around us.
Herndon & Dyhurst: London-based economist Guy Standing writes about the left’s collective need for paradisic alternatives to our contemporary conditions, something that the right has understood for some time. We see our art practice as an arena to develop and enact new fantasies — without relying on nostalgia or past ideals. What would be your idea of a paradise politics? What are your fantasies for the future? 
It’s difficult to say what my kind of political paradise or utopia would look like. I mean, given the fact that humanity has thus far managed to avoid it, yet still improve upon it, a practical and realistic vision of utopia is, I think, currently beyond our biologically imposed ability to construct or comprehend. I do believe that three things would likely contribute to a situation in which we might figure it out: an abundance-based economy where energy and matter are never scarce, virtually instant and infinite access to every other person and all the available information in such a society, and a wisdom or insight that allows such a society to act in harmony. Is it possible? I don’t know. I guess we’ll find out, won’t we?
For PAPER’s interview with artist Heather Dewey-Hagborg about the making of her Chelsea Manning portrait, click here.

To donate to Chelsea Manning’s defense fund, go here.

Many thanks to David E. Coombs, Madison Donzis and Melissa Keith [Chelsea Manning Support Network] for their logistical help with this story.

Chelsea Manning Defense Fund information

Chelsea Manning Defense Fund information

Your donation allows us to fight for Chelsea Manning
chelsea_logo_2
Now that Chelsea’s legal appeals are finally underway, your support is needed more than ever. Our legal team of Nancy Hollander and Vincent Ward are preparing to argue numerous issues before the military courts of appeal–issues that we fully expect can significantly reduce Manning’s 35 year prison sentence. However, it’s more challenging than ever to raise those needed funds without the high-profile media coverage of an upcoming trial. We are currently focusing on paying for Chelsea’s critical upcoming legal appeal hearing before the US Army Court of Criminal Appeals–we’re short about $40,000 (as of August 1, 2015)
How to donate to the Chelsea Manning Defense Fund
How to donate to Chelsea Manning’s legal expenses exclusively
  • Check or money order | sent via postal mail | not tax-deductible
    Payable to: “IOLTA/Manning”
    Mail to: Courage to Resist, 484 Lake Park Ave #41, Oakland CA 94610, USA
  • Online via the Freedom of the Press Foundation
    Limited time online campaign.


Fiscal reports


Background and the various ways to donate

The Chelsea (formerly Bradley) Manning Defense Fund is hosted by Courage to Resist (http://couragetoresist.org) in collaboration with the Chelsea Manning Support Network. Courage to Resist is a fiscally sponsored project of the Alliance for Global Justice (AfGJ) non-profit organization.
Funding Chelsea Manning’s chosen legal defense team has always been our top priority. In the wake of the outrageous 35 year prison sentence decreed by military judge Colonel Denise Lind, we believe that the final outcome will depend on not only on legal arguments, but on public opinion as we enter into pardon and clemency petitions, as well as the appeals process.
The majority of donations are made to the Chelsea Manning Defense Fund either online via our primary credit card gateway (https://co.clickandpledge.com/sp/d1/default.aspx?wid=38591), or postal mailed to us via check. In either of these situations, donors receive a tax-deduction for their contribution. However, when folks mail a check, we save credit card processing fees that amount to 2.75-4% of each online donation. Checks payable to “Courage to Resist/AFGJ” can be mailed to Courage to Resist, 484 Lake Park Ave #41, Oakland CA 94610, USA–please note “Chelsea Manning” on the check’s memo line.
PayPal
Some folks have problems with our primary donation gateway, especially friends trying to use credit cards outside of the USA. We encourage those folks to try donating via PayPal (https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_s-xclick&hosted_button_id=VDTDZV62A23KW). However, these PayPal transactions are not tax-deductible. Our relationship with PayPal has been “complicated” to put it mildly. On January 29, 2011, PayPal restricted access to our account based on the “need for additional information.” After a month of trying to find a possible resolution with senior PayPal staff, we issued a statement on February 24, 2011, regarding the situation. After thousands of supporters signed a petition and contacted PayPal in protest, our account was restored without explanation.
The Chelsea Manning legal trust account is managed by her lead appeals attorney Nancy Hollander, under regulation of the Interest on Lawyers Trust Accounts (IOLTA) Program and the American Bar Association. 100% of contributions directly offset Chelsea’s ongoing legal expenses. Any funds remaining at the end of her legal jeopardy would become hers with interest. However, these IOLTA contributions are not tax-deductible. Checks payable to “IOLTA / Manning” can be mailed to Courage to Resist, 484 Lake Park Ave #41, Oakland CA 94610, USA. These checks are deposited into Chelsea’s IOLTA account at the Dubuque Bank & Trust, Dubuque, Iowa. We can provide wire transfer information upon request for larger contributions.
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“Lay Around Mama And Put A Good Buzz On”-A Jonathan Edwards Interview


“Lay Around Mama And Put A Good Buzz On”-A Jonathan Edwards Interview




A while back, a few years ago now, I did a series of CD reviews of male folk singers from back in the day, back in that early 1960s folk minute who were “not Bob Dylan.” Guys like Dave Von Ronk, Tom Rush, Phil Ochs, Tom Paxton. The question I posed as part of the rationale for the series was why given their obvious talents as singers and song-writers did they not challenge Dylan for the king of folk “crown” and what happened to them later. We already know about Dylan and his never-ending tour so that is backdrop. (I also did a series for the distaff side, for the female folk-singer who were “not Joan Baez”). There were plenty of reasons why they did not challenge Dylan from burn-out to block as the folk minute faded.

The folksinger/songwriter, Jonathan Edwards,  whose interview I am linking to here did not face that problem, see he started performing at the very tail end of folk minute and is still performing forty years later. What is interesting is what he tells the interviewer about his trials and tribulations. So listen up. Oh yeah, for the record, we heard him a few years ago at Club Passim in Cambridge and like he mentioned in the interview about the way he performs “he left nothing on the floor.” See and hear him when he comes around your way.            

Click on link:


https://hereandnow.wbur.org/2015/09/03/jonathan-edwards-tomorrows-child

Yeah, Sorry, Too Late Sorry-Barbara Stanwyck’s Sorry, Wrong Number


Yeah, Sorry, Too Late Sorry-Barbara Stanwyck’s Sorry, Wrong Number






DVD Review

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

Sorry, Wrong Number, starring Barbara Stanwyck, Burt Lancaster, 1948

Not all suspense films as is more and more the case these days have to depend of techno-gizmos, or weird plot shifts to throw you off the scent. Take the film under review, Sorry, Wrong Number, a black and white film from back in the 1940s. Most of the action, most serious action takes place in a well-kept bedroom, a bedroom with a single women beside a telephone, a telephone very useful to the plot line but also a hellish instrument when she overhears a seemingly unrelated to her telephone call about a murder to be carried out for unknown reasons that very night. And while flashbacks detail how things have come to this past the woman’s increasingly disturbed mental state, the woman’s bedroom which includes a panoramic view of passing trains, and its confines determine what is going on.

Maybe the operative lesson to be learned, a cautionary tale if you will, in this 1948 Anatole Litvak-directed film is that you should not marry the boss’ daughter, period (or if you are the boss’ daughter let your man find his own way in the world, period). Here Leona (played by a suitably fear-struck and frantic Barbara Stanwyck) as a very fragile and sickly young woman, although according to a confidential doctor’s report she is physically fine so the symptoms seem to be psychosomatic, whose father has doted on her all her life is attracted to rough-hewn Henry (played by Burt Lancaster). Now Henry is from nowhere, a working class guy whom Leona eyes at a dance (and “steals” away from another woman). They meet and she, used to getting her own way always, draws a bee-line for him. Being from nowhere Henry, whatever attractions she holds for him, is ambitious, has a million ideas about becoming his own man, can also see that she can through her father help him along in his ambitions to be somebody.

And that is where the boss’ daughter angle gets full play, and gets the story-line moving to its fateful end. Leona and Henry marry and settle down with her father. A big mistake. Henry desperately wants to be his own man at something and holding a job in the father’s company, a big time pharma operation and under his roof makes him edgy. Makes him want to get out on his own. Leona though, her father’s daughter to a tee, takes a fit when Henry proposes they move out on their own. That set her heart problems going full throttle until she had become so overwrought that she had become bedridden as we see from the opening scene.   

Henry though has decided, come hell or high water, to make it on his own by fair means or foul. He gets involved, gets involved way over his head, with some bad hombres to whom he sells stolen chemicals from his father-in law’s plant. They pressure him into signing an I.O.U. for big dough which he had not got when he tries to cut them out of the cycle. They, not the kind to be left standing with no dough, “suggest” that his sick wife has a big insurance policy issued on her life, a policy that should be come due very soon. Hence the conversation on the telephone that she had overheard as she pieces everything together is a plan to murder her, murder her that very night. As she learns more she gets more frantic, particularly when she hears a prowler downstairs whom she can’t do anything about (or won’t if you go by the doctor’s report). In the end despite a last minute call from Henry who tells her go to the window and yell bloody murder (almost literally) to save her life the villain’s work is done. Henry who had been under investigation about the stolen chemicals is as she is being murdered apprehended by the cops. Yeah, maybe it is best to just not marry the boss’ daughter and leave it at that. Sorry, Henry, sorry but your pleas were too late and you are going to take the big step-off on this one, no question.        

Lessons from 20th Century Alabama's Black Communists for Black Lives Matter

Lessons from 20th Century Alabama's Black Communists for Black Lives Matter




On the 25th anniversary of the groundbreaking history, Hammer and Hoe, author Robin D.G. Kelley discusses the lessons Alabama’s forgotten black communists can offer today’s activists.
Robin D.G. Kelley
August 31, 2015

A sharecropping family.
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/08/alabama-hammer-and-hoe-robin-kelley-communist-party/
When historian Robin D. G. Kelley began work in the 1980s on what would become his classic work of radical history, Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression, he was surrounded by activism. There was an uprising against police violence in Liberty City, Florida; multiracial coalitions propelled Harold Washington to the mayor’s office in Chicago; and the presidential campaign of Jesse Jackson was gathering steam. As a young activist and campus organizer, Kelley was part of the movement that pushed the University of California system to divest from its holdings in South Africa, but he was also discovering a tradition of black radical organizing closer to home—that of the Communist Party in Alabama.

Kelley’s dissertation on that subject became Hammer and Hoe, a book that explores what might have seemed to be a fairly esoteric topic yet offered lessons that activists have been drawing on for twenty-five years. Throughout that time, the book has remained in print, winning awards and, more important to Kelley, a place in the hearts and strategic thinking of decades of young organizers struggling with the questions of race, gender, class, and solidarity.

In Hammer and Hoe, Kelley details in wonderfully vivid prose how black workers in Alabama made communism their own, blending the teachings of Marx and Lenin with those of the black church and the lessons of decades of resistance to slavery, segregation, and racist terrorism. They were sharecroppers and domestic workers, relief recipients and factory workers. They were men and women who had been denied access to “skilled” positions so that white men could take the jobs instead, and, through those experiences, had found their way to a radicalism that was international in scope but deeply local in practice.

Those Alabama communists, Kelley notes, did not see their struggles for voting rights as separate from their struggles against economic exploitation by property owners, factory bosses, or the ostensibly progressive leaders of an unequal New Deal order. To be able to fight either of those struggles they had to challenge the racist terror of the Ku Klux Klan, often in collusion with the police, and to escape the clutches of a criminal legal system that locked up and executed black people based on the thinnest shreds of evidence. The trials of the Scottsboro Nine are in Hammer and Hoe, but so are the stories of many people who have been forgotten, who dared to stand up to injustice and paid with their lives.

This summer, the University of North Carolina press published an updated, 25th-anniversary edition of the book. With a nod to the present moment, this edition comes with a new preface and a dedication to the young activists of recent years, whose fights against austerity, racism, militarism, and capitalism itself have echoed, consciously or unconsciously, the struggles of Kelley’s subjects.
Kelley is currently the Gary B. Nash Professor of American History at UCLA. He sat for an interview with The Nation Sarah Jaffe over this summer. Their conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Sarah Jaffe: You write in the new preface that more people have reached out to you about this book than any other in the past few years. Why do you think that is?
Robin Kelley: The book does a few things that interest readers today. It is about a radical social movement that really was trying to shift the paradigm—it wasn’t about making better reforms, it wasn’t operating within the Democratic Party—in a very unlikely place like Alabama, where the conditions of repression were so enormous. [In doing so], it links two [contemporary] movements that we now think of as separate. One is anti-capitalism and its roots in the Occupy movement and elsewhere, the other is what has now been identified as Black Lives Matter, the struggle against police violence and the carceral state. It just so happens that the Communist party in Alabama focused on these two things directly. And for them these were inseparable.
SJ: You write about the end of the Cold War and how anti-capitalism has begun to rise again since the 2008 financial crisis. Do you think this country is finally ready to understand the contributions of socialists and Communists to its history and to its present?
RK: The Cold War has been so thoroughly suppressed in the public consciousness that there are whole generations of people who don’t have a clue. I have students who don’t even know what the Cold War is.
That kind of erasure creates a blank space. That’s the good news. The bad news is that the frame of reference has become so slim that the key debates even among some of the most vocal advocates for Occupy has been how to reform capitalism, and that really is about returning to the welfare state or imposing regulation, thinking capitalism is going to be with us forever, it’s just the way it is. But unless we can actually break paradigmatically with the structure of capitalism itself we’re not going to come up with good alternatives.
I think Naomi Klein’s book is important because she’s saying that capitalism itself is the problem. The question is, when can activists have the time and luxury to sit down and say, “How do we actually rebuild our new society?”
There’s a sense that we’re in a state of emergency. You’ve got home foreclosures and you’ve got death. You’ve got dispossession. You’ve got people who don’t have access to water. But then, to be honest, all those models of trying to create the alternative to capitalist living in indigenous communities, whether it’s the Zapatistas or elsewhere, have actually come out of states of emergency.
How does Hammer and Hoe relate to that? No one’s going to read that book and say the Communists of Alabama were able to create socialism. But they were functioning in a state of emergency and they were able to surmount differences that today, in today’s identity politics, people think are insurmountable. They got white people from the Klan to join their organization. Not all of them. But if you can get one, I’m applauding you!
The fact that they were able to make those leaps, that’s not tolerance of difference. That’s a transformational identity in a transformational movement that says we’re comrades.
SJ: You write about the way the Alabama communist party grew from the cultures and ideas of the people it served—particularly Alabama’s black working class—and the way that the white left has trouble sometimes seeing and understanding the black left. How are white progressives still misreading the black left?
RK: This is a mantra that has been repeated since the 19th century at least: that issues of race or issues of gender, that those issues are somehow a distraction from the real issues. But history has proven that these things are inseparable, because creating hierarchies of difference is essentially an ideological and economic project.
Slavery and dispossessing Indians and making sure that women are being paid wages that could allow them to buy hats, these are ideologies that actually structure capitalism. Anyone who’s serious about socialism, or some kind of non-capitalist path for development, must address them not as separate issues but as issues that help us have a deeper analysis of how political economy works. Again I come back to Hammer and Hoe, because part of the critique of the New Deal was to say this great welfare state expansion was built on a racial hierarchy in which they were allowed to pay black workers in public works programs less money, or pay southern workers less money than northern. In other words, it’s a hierarchy structured by race, by class, by gender. Unless we understand how the structure works we’ll never be able to address the economic problems.
Is making a revolution simply about having a fairer state? Making sure that everyone has decent housing? Or is it about changing our relationships to one another so that you don’t need state violence to keep the machine operating? How do you actually create a culture in which you can actually have something like a beloved community, where the struggle for the community is part of the project of making change?
That’s part of what I think the best elements of Occupy were trying to do, the best elements of Black Lives Matter: create new community.
SJ: You also wrote about the way white people’s fear of “social equality” for black people was a fear of interracial sex—a fear we heard echoed in Dylann Roof’s statement to his victims as he pulled the trigger in Charleston. Can you talk a bit about that, and the way the Alabama Communists organized against it?
RK: From the very inception of the Communist Party’s presence in the south, anticommunists used sex as a way to mobilize fear and opposition. “What Communists want to do is nationalize your daughters”—I love that line. It’s the combination of sexual depravity associated with Communism and the fact that black rights was a central position. This is one of the ways they were able to keep people away from the Party. It didn’t quite work because, of course, in the south, then and now, there’s never been any real barriers to interracial sex. Especially if you’re talking about white men and women of color. Ask Strom Thurmond about that.
The issue is ultimately about the white supremacy’s treatment of women as property. It’s about women as property, masked in the form of security. For Dylann Roof to make the statement and kill six black women, out of nine, is to also repeat the notion that white women are mere property and that his job is to protect that property from being sullied by black men. That black men are natural rapists is such an old but ingrained myth that I can’t imagine what it’s going to take to uproot it.
SJ: Hammer and Hoe takes place during the Great Depression; we’re still living with the effects of the Great Recession. Can you compare and contrast the organizing that was happening then around jobs and labor and the unemployed, and what’s happening now?
RK: Nothing in the New Deal was a gift, it was all struggled over and fought for. The best parts of the New Deal weren’t so much relief. It was Section 7 of the National Industrial Recovery Act that said workers have the right to organize. Then in 1935 it became stronger. The fact that in most places, industrial trade unions could organize with some limited protections from the state allowed unions to grow.
Strong community-based organizing really matters. Nowadays there’s so much mobility, so much displacement that the notion of an established community, those days are over. So what takes its place? Virtual organizing. And I’m not criticizing it at all because I think it’s played a very important role in being able to mobilize huge numbers of people for different events. The problem is that virtual organizing, while successful at mobilizing for events, it’s very hard to sustain the day-to-day organizational structure that is required for long-term struggles.
People are trying to figure out how we develop stronger organizations—not bigger organizations, because, even in the days of the New Deal, some of the most effective movements were never huge mass movements, but they were movements that were able to sustain themselves, and they were movements that were able to put forward what we think of as transformative demands.
Transformative demands are those demands that, on the one hand, attend to a particular crisis, whether it’s we need relief or we need housing, etc. But then those demands are ratcheted up and ultimately question the very logic of the prevailing system. If you say we need housing then the state could respond and say, “We’re going to have a market system providing housing,” and they’re like, “no, that’s not going to work, we’re going to demand something different than a market-based system.”
One of the problems with so many exciting movements today is this tendency not to make transformative demands, not to make any demands, because somehow making a demand would formalize an organization in such a way where it would undermine democracy, it could be co-opted by the Democratic party or co-opted by the trade unions or whatever. So without those demands you don’t have a space or a platform in which to have a debate over what the future looks like.
I’m not saying it’s fixed like that. There are lots of organizations today that are making transformative demands, I name some in the book. But whatever we think about the problems of the Communist Party, and there are many, it was an international organization that was well-organized and put forward transformative demands.
I don’t know whether the refusal to make demands can lead to something even better. But one of the consequences is that you end up having a segment of the movement embrace the Obama administration’s agenda, which is that racial profiling is bad policing so we need more effective policing, body cameras for cops, better officer training, this sort of thing. We know from the history that none of that stuff really makes a difference. What we’re looking for is transformative changes, eventually the elimination of state violence and the police force itself.
SJ: In Hammer and Hoe, there’s a lot about the way violence was used specifically to quell labor and left organizing by black people in Alabama. You write, “Most scholars have underestimated the Southern Left and have underrated the role violence played in quashing radical movements…”
RK: State violence was necessary to suppress labor-based movements, any social justice movements. It was necessary to intimidate whole groups of people from even thinking about coming together. It was so embedded in the structure of everyday life that it became second nature. There was a constant distrust of working people who spoke up. A constant distrust of black people. And a capacity to transfer that distrust to white working people who gave up cooperation for the sake of security.
The security of whiteness is a very fragile security. You have these systems operating, and at the base of them all is violence. Violence also becomes endemic in the culture in which men and women and children and parents inside their own households embrace that violence as a way to maintain hierarchy within those structures. They mirror the violence of the state. Private violence is tied directly to public violence.
Violence is everywhere, so unless we see that and understand its relationship to the maintenance of the current political economy we’re going to treat public violence separate from private violence, gendered private violence as a separate thing. You’ve got police violence, which is very much tied to economic justice issues, because where does that police violence take place for the most part? In places like Baltimore where you can have a black regime running a city but people whose lives depend on the good graces of their neighbors, on very low wages, whatever’s left of the welfare state. People who live precarious lives are the ones who are most likely to experience that state violence.
That’s why whenever we have exceptional cases, people who actually are not living precarious lives, they just happen to be black, those are the stories that are raised up. They are important, but to raise them up above all other stories of state violence is to basically produce an analysis that’s devoid of class and that separates out the political economy from state violence.
We have to go back and make sure that we understand the relationship between all these forms of violence and their relationship to the economy, and not think of the economy as simply wages, housing, working conditions, consumerism, trade—economy is so much more than that. Economy is access to resources. Economy is being able to live a life that’s not precarious. Economy is racial. Economy is gendered. Economy is not a separate category from race or gender.
SJ: You write about how law enforcement and the state were complicit in extralegal violence and lynching, how law enforcement would arrest some organizer and turn him over to the Klan. How should that inform our understanding of situations like the killing of Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman?
RK: One of the ways, at least in the 1930s and before that, that the state was able to avoid the expense of prosecution, the expense of detention and also allow for the reproduction of white supremacy on a mass basis was lynching. You think of lynching as terrorizing black communities, terrorizing Mexican communities, it definitely does that. But what it also does is consolidate a white working class investment in a notion of security in a juridical structure that allows them some semblance of citizenship. These are people who, when you really look at their daily life, barely have the privileges of citizenship except in lynching. They could participate even if it’s just as observer.
Naomi Murakawa has this really important book called The First Civil Right, and she shows we had some changes: The Truman administration pushed forward civil rights legislation, more resources for policing to try to stop these kinds of acts of violence. Those resources then fed into a growing criminal justice system. What we end up getting is fewer lynchings—police shooting someone in the back isn’t exactly a lynching, it doesn’t function in the same way. Is it murder? Absolutely. Is it extrajudicial? Yes.
So the reduction of lynchings also means the expansion of a criminal justice system, which actually does detain live bodies and contain them and corrals them. It burgeons and burgeons. It also means that these extrajudicial killings take place with the sanction of the state. Now it’s with police officers who are better armed than they ever were. What hasn’t changed is the basic racial structure of the criminal justice process. The mechanisms change, the processes change, and those processes have enormous consequences, but the basic ideology over time, it’s tweaked.
SJ: Related to both of those, what about the use of armed self-defense among the people you researched? What can we learn from them to apply to today’s conversations about “riots” and how we’re obsessed with particularly black resistance being nonviolent?
RK: One of the biggest myths that is still perpetuated today is that somehow the only natural and legitimate forms of black politics have to embrace nonviolence. No other political agenda or movement has to do the same.
Nonviolence as a political strategy was pretty common among progressive forces in the postwar period, for good reason. However, if you take the history of black freedom struggles, self-defense has been the first principle. It had to be—during Reconstruction something like 58,000 black people were killed. Akinyele Omowale Umoja has this great book called We Will Shoot Back where he proves that in every county in Mississippi where you had organized armed self-defense they had less violence, fewer killings.
Now there’s a difference between armed self-defense and violence as a strategy of resistance. Riots are not necessarily violent strategies of resistance. Riots are oftentimes attacks on property. If you look at the body count of who dies in riots, it’s mostly the people who live in the ghettos. If we look at the body count of the history of riots, even going back to the late 19th and early 20th century, Tulsa, these are racial pogroms where, again, it’s mobs of white people reinforcing their citizenship and white privilege through the violence against the black bodies. Black people have been more the victims of violence than perpetrators of violence against the state.
These are the kind of mythologies that we have to contend with. The amazing thing about the Communist Party in Alabama is that they had dramatic moments and shootouts, yes, in the rural areas in particular you had these moments of militancy, but most of the activists, their strategy was more tricksterism, they wanted to avoid violence to live another day. They knew that they were outnumbered and they were outgunned and so they had to find strategies that were not nonviolent or proviolent but ones that were self-preserving and sustainable.
That’s why every time the question is raised or people have to pronounce their nonviolent intent, that’s about projecting the violence of the state onto the bodies of the very people who are the victims of violence. I am a supporter of nonviolence, but that’s another story.
SJ: Why do you think all of this is happening now?
RK: I think that these movements had been bubbling under the surface, especially with the Clinton administration. Clinton was such a disappointment that a lot of the oppositional movements that have laid the foundation for Occupy were established in the ’90s under Clinton, against welfare deform and all that. To me, the level of organization in preparation for Occupy means that Occupy wasn’t spontaneous. It was an opportunity. The crisis of 2008 was an opportunity, the mobilization around Trayvon Martin and the wave of deaths and social media create opportunities for existing organizations to become visible. If we did not have organization, we wouldn’t have this, that’s my argument. It goes against some of the prevailing wisdom, which is that the conditions just made people so angry and so frustrated that they came out. There’s some of that, but you can’t get people out without organization. That’s why, if there’s a lesson in here, it’s that you’ve got to always organize—whether it’s the optimal time or the non-optimal time, you’ve got to be ready, always.

 
- See more at: http://portside.org/2015-09-02/lessons-20th-century-alabamas-black-communists-black-lives-matter#sthash.VSLWZvTm.dpuf

The Latest From The Justice For Lynne Stewart Website

The Latest From The Justice For Lynne Stewart Website

 

 

 Click below to link to the Justice For Lynne Stewart website

http://lynnestewart.org/

Although Lynne Stewart has been released by “Uncle” on medical grounds since the winter of 2014  after an international campaign to get her adequate medical attention her case should still be looked at as an especially vindictive ploy on the part of the American government in post-9/11 America to tamp down on attorneys (and others concerned about the fate of "los olvidados," the forgotten ones, the forgotten political prisoners)  who  have been zealously defending their unpopular clients (and political prisoners). A very chilling effect on the legal profession and elsewhere as I have witnessed on too many occasions when legal assistance is desperately needed. As a person who is committed to doing political prisoner defense work I have noted how few such “people’s lawyers” there around to defend the voiceless, the framed and “the forgotten ones.” There are not enough, there are never enough such lawyers around and her disbarment by the New York bar is an added travesty of justice surrounding the case. 

Back in the 1960s and early 1970s there were, relatively speaking, many Lynne Stewarts. Some of this reflecting the radicalization of some old-time lawyers who hated what was going in America with its prison camp mentality and it’s seeking out of every radical, black or white but as usual especially black revolutionaries, it could get its hands on.  Hell, old time lawyers who hated that in many cases their sons and daughters were being sent to the bastinado. But mostly it was younger lawyers, lawyers like Lynne Stewart, who took on the Panther cases, the Chicago Democratic Convention cases, the Washington May Day 1971 cases, the military resister cases (which is where I came to respect such “people’s lawyers” as I was working with anti-war GIs at the time and we needed, desperately needed, legal help to work our way in the arcane military “justice” system then, and now witness the Chelsea Manning travesty of justice case) who learned about the class-based nature of the justice system.

Then like a puff those hearty lawyers headed for careers and such and it was left for the few Lynne Stewarts to shoulder on. Probably the clearest case of that shift was with the Ohio Seven (two, Jann Laamann and Tom Manning, who are still imprisoned) in the 1980s, working-class radicals who would have been left out to dry without Lynne Stewart. Guys and gals who a few years before would have been heralded as front-line anti-imperialist fighters like thousands of others were then left out to dry. Damn.      

******

The following paragraph is a short description of the Lynne Stewart case from the Partisan Defense Committee 2013 Holiday Appeal  when she was a recipient of a stipend by the class-war prisoners’ defense organization, the Partisan Defense Committee, as part of their solicitation for funds to continue their work of seeing those of our people behind bars are not forgotten.

“Lynne Stewart is a lawyer imprisoned in 2009 for defending her client, a blind Egyptian cleric convicted for an alleged plot to blow up New York City landmarks in the early 1990s. Stewart is a well-known advocate who defended Black Panthers, radical leftists and others reviled by the capitalist state. She was originally sentenced to 28 months; a resentencing pursued by the Obama administration more than quadrupled her prison time to ten years. As she is 74 years old and suffers from Stage IV breast cancer that has spread to her lungs and back, this may well be a death sentence. Stewart qualifies for immediate compassionate release, but Obama’s Justice Department refuses to make such a motion before the resentencing judge, who has all but stated that he would grant her release!”

*********

Update 2015: Lynne Stewart still fighting the good fight since her release still has pressing continuing medical needs and the need for funds to get that attention is also of continuing concern so click on to the link on the site where you can help defray her medical expenses.

Friday, September 04, 2015

Mumia: Urgent action needed for lifesaving medical treatment

Mumia: Urgent action needed for lifesaving  medical treatment

Dear Friends:

Please see email below from Prison Radio.  Mumia is still being denied life-saving health care by prison authorities, and his situation is increasingly grave.  Action is needed to keep up the pressure to save Mumia’s life.  Please see Prison Radio’s
Action Guide below for ways you can help.  Share with friends and urge people in your networks to support.
Watch the video appeal below
here.


PAYDAY



  Mumia Abu Jamal

 
We are in court demanding immediate lifesaving medical treatment for Mumia Abu-Jamal, and we are going to win.

Yesterday, Mumia's lawyers Bret Grote, Legal Director of the Abolitionist Law Center, and co-counsel Robert Boyle filed a preliminary injunction in Abu-Jamal v. Kerestes with Judge Robert Mariani of the Middle District Federal U.S. Court (see link below).

The injunction seeks a federal court order to ensure that prison medical staff provide immediate lifesaving treatment to Mumia.
Hear from Emory Douglas on how you can fight for Mumia.
The prison administration is simply denying Mumia all treatment. Let me be clear: Mumia is weak, his lower extremities still swollen, his skin still severely compromised and raw, and his hepatitis C active and damaging his organs.

Given the severity of Mumia's organ failure (his skin) and indications of additional potential organ damage, our legal action states that withholding treatment is causing immediate and irreparable harm.
Prison officials have refused to conduct additional viral load blood panels, reveal or conduct additional organ damage assessments, and they are refusing to prescribe simple medications to reduce Mumia's painful and dangerous skin eruptions.  

And in an effort to further delay treatment, attorneys for the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections have filed briefs opposing the class action lawsuit for hepatitis C treatment filed in June. We expect they will oppose our injunction filed yesterday as well.

Treatment for hep C has a 95% cure rate.

By withholding medication, the DOC would like to see this become a death sentence. 

In addition to the hepatitis C antiviral cure, we are demanding that prison medical personnel re-proscribe Protopic ointment and the mineral supplement  Zinc (220 mlligrams per day) as recommended by his physicians to provide immediate relief to Mumia's skin rashes- which have become open wounds.

As Mumia's legal team fights tirelessly for Mumia's life, we more than ever need your assistance. We need to raise $5,317 in the next 5 days to make it half-way to our goal for this stage of Mumia's legal and political campaign. 
We are amplifying the call for:

1. Immediate treatment of Hep C with the latest Anti-viral drugs that have a 95% cure rate.
2. Treatment of Mumia's skin condition by re-proscribing protopic cream and zinc supplements.
3. In-person medical exams by Mumia's independent physicians.

Help us make these demands reality by giving to Mumia's medical and legal fund now, and by calling the numbers listed in our Action Guide.

Every action and every gift makes a difference.
bit.ly/fight4mumia
See the preliminary injunction filed yesterday here.
Facebook
Twitter
Website
You can also give to Mumia's fund through our websitePaypal,
or check: 
PO Box 411074 | San Francisco, CA 94141
Luchando por la justicia y la libertad,


Noelle Hanrahan
Director

To give by check: 
PO Box 411074
San Francisco, CA
94141

Stock or legacy gifts:
Noelle Hanrahan
(415) 706 - 5222