Multilectical RSS Feed

Hello New World

Mon, 23 Jan 2023 22:12:03 GMT

It's a new site!

I'm picking up where I left off leaving the old version of multi.lectical.net rotting. And rot it had. Though this time around I've gone for different tech (this time gatsby js) and hopefully will get into ever weirder territory. I haven't been writing much lately, but hopefully this will be some incentive to do more. I'm still collecting my occasional bits I've put together from other places, so consider this project still loading.

The content on this site so far is old, but all of it in some way possibly still relevant or in my opinion still retaining value in some way.

Some thoughts have a certain sound

Fri, 25 Nov 2022 22:12:03 GMT

Some thoughts have a certain sound...

that being the equivalent to a form.

will be able to paralyze nerves, shatter bones, set fires, suffocate an enemy or burst his organs....

Autonomous Land Occupations in Brasil

Sun, 30 Oct 2016 22:12:03 GMT

by dave onion

On February 18th 2005, a contingent of anarchists from Rio's anarchist federation (FARJ or Federaco Anarquista do Rio de Janeiro) made our way to Olga Benario Prestes, a squatted piece of land on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro to participate in their 2nd year anniversary and victory celebration. It had been two years of occupation and there was much reason to celebrate. The celebration was taking pace just days after Brazilian military and pigs had brutally evicted hundreds of families (12,000 people in total) from squatted land in Goiania, in the north of Brasil, killing several and disappearing many.

To put the occupation in further context, Brasil, who`s boundaries boast the world's 8th largest economy also is home to some 12 million homeless and landless people who share little of the country's wealth. From these landless (called Sem Terras) and homeless (Sem Techos) springs an enormous squatter movement , mostly internationally known by news of the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Tera or MST. Who after 20 years claim some 2 million in its occupations. Tracts of abandoned or unused land is taken sometimes by thousands of landless families who immediately go about building new more stable communities, often in the face of severe repression.

I had tracked down activists of the FARJ, Rio's anarchist federation a few days before at their Cultural Centre. Located in a sleepy neighborhood of Rio at the foot of favelas on the hills from where regular machine gun fire exchanges between police and extra legal capitalists calmly added punctuation to traffic noises. The FARJ activists had been keeping up solidarity work with and some living in various squats and occupations in and around Rio, all of which where autonomous from the MST and thus in many ways left out of the solidarity work some of the other occupations enjoy. Olga Benario Prestes is one of these.

Olga Benario Prestes

After a long ride to Campo Grande on the periphery of Rio and a short walk, we found ourselves at the gates of the occupation, a sign proudly announcing themselves ?Ocupacao Olga Ben?rio Prestes?. Through the gates, a main road led through the occupation, past houses in various stages of completion and sturdiness, past sleeping dogs, playing kids and adults leaning out of windows and doors with looks of cautious interest. Andr?, a lawyer working with the occupations led us on a tour of the territory, explained some of their history.

OBP had been initially taken by about 115 families in February of 2003. According to Andr?, the land had been used previously for burying cadavers, drug trafficking and orgies. The families immediately started building shelters and improving the structures into more stable homes as more resources became available. Work and materials were supplied in part by some friendly unions such as Sinpro-Rio (a professors union in Rio). But self governed life was not without obstacles. Andr? cited 8 violent evictions within 2 years, during which pigs burnt down or otherwise destroyed homes and subjected the squatters to beatings and jail. Each time the families returned, refortified and rebuilt. Hearing this I immediately felt a ridiculousness thinking about the ease at which rebels in the US are prone to bend to usually much lighter repression. With Goiania's massacre fresh on everyone's mind (and as happened before elsewhere as no doubt every occupant at OBP knows well), murder by the state is of course a real life threat.

We walked down a road, crunching cinderblock debris underfoot. A deal had been made for trucks to dump construction debris at OBP to use as landfill, covering up a sewer system that the squatters had built on their own. And the electricity, "de gato" or stolen. A local walking with us smiled mischievously, proudly. I was immensely impressed, and there it was again the slightly foolish feeling. These people had built up an entire infrastructure impeded by 8 violent evictions, with kids, hardly any employment to speak of and no support by the state; running exclusively on solidarity and mutual support.

We made our way back through the ocupa to the party site where I chatted with some folks. One, a vegan, expressed his fear there would be nothing to eat but meat. His fears were well founded. Behind some tables, a small bovine community was slowly rotating over coals and flames. Squatters from the community served up generous, seemingly endless proportions of rice, beans, meat, beer and mango juice from the trees in whose shade we sat The program for the celebration started off with poetry stirring the still meager crowd to chuckles, yawns and sighs as only poets know to do. A moment of silence was held for those who?d died in Goiania as well as for those dead, tortured and disappeared from the landless and homeless and other struggles. Throughout the night musicians, dancers, a theatre group were interspersed with speeches and statements of solidarity from the various unions, individuals.

and groups that had shown up to share in the celebration. The visitors were especially appreciated. Numerous locals embraced me with heartfelt appreciation. And the feeling was mutual as I was inspired on a number of levels.

An old white haired old man approached me. He`d come along as part of the FARJ delegation. He introduced himself, an anarchist who had fled Portugal for Brazil only to have to live under the dictatorship here. He told me the story of Olga Benario Prestes, a communist troublemaker was arrested on politcal charges by dictatorship Get?lio Vargas' regime and was delivered more or less as a gift of goodwill to Hitler who had her killed in Auschwitz in 1942. The squatters took her name as their own ?in order not to forget?. He repeated the words "not to forget!" with insistence before diversions of the party had us both elsewhere.

As the meat kept coming, the beer kept flowing and economically poor rebels danced in those moments of solidarity, kids and adults alike danced lambada to the band. And just as OBP was starting to get into it, loosing the inhibition of being around us, it was us anarchists who were getting sleepy. We waited for cake cutting ceremony until the cake was most unceremoniously cut up and devoured before heading out.

Vila Conquista and Nelson Faria Marinho

I'd been invited to visit some occupations closer to Rio the next day. Other FARJists who also worked with the MEL (Movimento Educacao Libertario), a Paulo Freire inspired education collective were visiting to meet up with the community to discuss their first popular education project in the community. Entering the Vila Conquista, folks were relaxing and chatting in small groups. Some friendly faces from the FARJ called me over were I was introduced to Marcos, who immediately laid into me with a barrage of Portuguese. Not caring when I insisted I only speak Portunol, I made do with occasional translation breaks which Marcos reluctantly tolerated.

?We are libertarian! We don?t want anything to do with the state. We want self rule!?. Marcos was passionate to say the least. He stressed the communities refusal of leaders and horizontal intentions, the communities?resourcefullness in opposition to the state, their strong DIY ethics. Our conversation kept leading to education, though. The importance to teach people to read. With large numbers adult squatters illiterate, literacy is an important elemental need in all the occupations I visited. Unable to pass a basic literacy exam part of the basic entrance exam for schools in Brazil, people are kept out of schools, which for poor people with few resources is a catch 22 and nearly alwys, a systematic entrenchment of poverty. Vila Conquista and it?s neighbor occupation Nelson Faria Marinho had a total of one (1) teacher: Jonas, 13 years old and though quiet (beside Marcos at least) full of warmth and intelligent creativity radiating from his smile. Jonas took us around the corner to the school, a one room shack with a couple desks. At one, a girl practiced writing, while at the other a teenage kid sketched pieces in a notebook. ?Graffiti!?, Marcos boasted enthusiastically, pointing to the dance of contorted letters in the artists fingers. On a chalkboard, some basic elements of anarchist theory left over from an earlier day.

We left the classroom for the garden and compost pile still in experimental stages and then on to a recycling project started by a guy who?d started a similar project at the FARJ?s centre, making furniture for sale from used plastic bottles and other trashpickings. We were introduced to a shed loaded to the ceiling with empty tetra packs and bottles. The tetra packs were used as roofing tiles and insulation, Marcos explained. We were then introduced to an apparently wise and certainly crazy old man who took me aside for a whirlwind tour of his medicinal herbs.

I caught up with the rest of the MEL activists, as Marcos led us through both occupations, separated apparently more by theory than geography. Nelson Faria Marinho, which was also younger by several years was noticeably less together than Vila Conquista, with more trash and less built up structures. Later when I asked someone about political prisoners in Brazil, I learned a group from NFM had carried out an armed attack on a police station intending to spark off a general uprising. The spontaneous insurrection didn?t occur and all the militants were snatched up, in prison to this day.

Vila Conquista?s history, like those of many other Brazilian occupations was punctuated by evictions, violent repression and trashing of houses. And again countered by stubborn

resistance and persistence. The land, whose ownership was ambiguous from the start was squatted some 7 years ago by thirtysomething families. After five years and the aforementioned troubles, legal proceedings on part of the squatters gained them title to their land. Nelson had only been squatted for the last few years, but support from Vila Conquista has kept them stable.

We made our way to where I first met Marcos, under a tarp rescuing us from the relentless sun. A meeting was getting underway between the community and the MEL to flesh out plans for organizing classes in the communities. When the meeting wound down, the idea of expanding Jonas? literacy classes had grown into a number of other projects including health education, self defense workshops and a fund and foodraising benefit party for the squatters. We exchanged embraces and contacts and were off.

It was good to see that even in squatter occupations in Brazil, libertarian rebels finish their meetings with discussion on which bar to go to. Wee chose the only one we could find on the way to the bus. I caught up on bits filtered out via the language barrier. A woman from the MEL, reaffirmed what seemed glaringly obvious, that Villa Conquista though full of people with obvious drive and enthusiasm are more often than not stuck with nothing to work with.Unable to sometimes afford the very basics, such as nails or school supplies, many projects just stop despite extensive resourcefullness on their own part. One such project is a small social centre, a building which could hold basic meetings and events. At Olga Benares Prestes the situation was similar, with various education and building projects coming to a stop because of lack of resources. Also the folks at both occupations, specifically asked to tell others about their existence, their struggles and in the case of Vila Conquista, certainly welcomed visitors.

By the time our table ha filled to capcity with empoty beer bottles, conversations had shifted from solidarity to Michael Jackson`s trial and the sun had let up. Recharged with some inspiration and stories, we made our long bus ride back to the city of beaches, telenovela stars, surfers and favelas, and ghosts of past struggles forgotten and remembered.

To support the efforts of Olga Benaio Prestes or Vila Conquista, get in touch with onion via the defenestrator or write to the FARJ (farj (at) riseup.net).

STRUCTURE

Fri, 06 May 2016 23:46:37 GMT

Nine Twenty Nine

Mon, 30 Nov 2015 22:12:03 GMT

Among the most exciting of recent old friends reconnected with via facebook are my old band mates from Nine Twenty Nine from my stint in Colorado Springs. Our drummer Ken-e friended me and hit me with the link to most of our best recordings i remember. Nine Twenty Nine made some rough years in Colorado Springs pretty amazing. We were part of a small number of punk bands that helped revive a then dormant punk scene in the city. Our shows included typical basements, college shows, some great shows at the Annex and Underground (in pic) but also a birthday at the Air Force Academy and a battle of the bands turned riot at a bougie hotel.

We were all very different people, from different backgrounds, classes and life experiences. Somehow we clicked amazingly together and were able to put out some great music.

That's me on left with hair over my face. Nine twenty nine split up the night of the fall of the Berlin wall. By far my best days in that city over twenty years ago now.

The Difference

the first time i saw your face your clear blank eyes gave away anger filling you inside

you were very strange your words made little sense but i wanted to know our differences didn't stand in the way

your life was messed up then you had to go away it made me wonder what you had done

you've got to listen to yourself and realize your pain take a chance , never grow up if you know what you want go out and get it!

you wanted to meet me too you saw me in the right way i never thought that you and i would be the same you're better now than you were back then!

Never Before

The Difference:

Nothing to Do:

Corruption:

Security Illusion:

Live At 7:30

From some show at the Underground bar:

The Lamp.:

The Difference.:

Cardboard World.:

Disorder.:

Nothing To Do

Corruption.:

Napalm Beach.:

Security Illusion.:

Mindless Masses.:

Darkness.:

Friends vs Friends.:

Over the Edge.:

Freedom Limited.:

Download everything

Looking back on a decade of throwing power out the window

Mon, 30 Nov 2015 22:12:03 GMT

It’s now been ten years since we first started publishing this paper.

The defenestrator as a project initially grew from an informal conversation riding back to Philly from a Homes Not Jails conference in Boston. The conversation in the back of that van in retrospect bore a strange resemblance to more recent conversations I’ve been in on the way home from other inspiring conferences, essentially: “Why don’t we do that in Philly?” A few weeks later we had our first meeting to shape what was to become the paper you now hold. The first issue, number zero, was photocopied, laid out by hand and contained Philly news about the Kensington Welfare Rights Union, Philly Squatters Aid, an enthusiastic bit on Philly Freedom Summer for Mumia, the Atlantic Anarchist Circle, Wooden Shoe Books recovering from a fire, as well as updates from political prisoners and various international news bits. We printed issue zero on stolen paper using commandeered photocopiers at undisclosed locations.

Before long a number of new solid contributors came on board to help fill those commandeered photocopied pages. The path through the years reflects largely what these contributors and collective members had been working on or were connected to at the time: actions against police violence and the death penalty, support for various political prisoners (especially Philadelphian Mumia Abu Jamal), Radio Mutiny (our local pirate station), raids or evictions of various squats and ACT UP fighting to get needle exchanges funded were all part of those beginning days. The first issues looked lively and chaotic and from the beginning we ran our staple rebel calendar, something that before the prominence of the internet was a useful activist refrigerator adornment.

Along with the collective solidifying, by issue three we’d made it to newsprint, a big 11x17 inch 4 pager. We still hadn’t quite figured out how to get photos to come out looking right and most of our readers were just resigning themselves to our consistent violations of spelling or punctuation standards (no it wasn’t anarchy, we were just fucking up). Despite the bad pictures and lack-luster grammar, energy continued to flow and by issue 4 we added another 4 pages.

During this time, issues zero through four, I had been living in Squirrel Squat, a squatted building at 49th and Baltimore, borrowing resources liberally from our neighbors across the street: Not Squat (a former squat)which at the time was an informal neighborhood anarchist center of sorts. The building housed a pirate radio station and a heavily utilized computer lab in the attic. Before any protest or sizable direct action Not Squat’s attic was THE command center for making flyers, press calls, sending out faxes and press releases etc. Surrounded by all this activity (between the computer lab and the radio station) it was a great place to be working on the defenestrator.

After our eviction from Squirrel Squat in June of 98, a number of the former Squirrel residents opened up a small one room radical community space near 44th and Chestnut and dubbed it the Derailleur. It contained a small library, a darkroom, and a trash picked loft that housed our new tiny office. Perusing the issues from this stretch of time: the FCC had busted Radio Mutiny, Police shot and killed Phillip McCall at 40th and Market, and both the Love and Rage anarchist federation and the German Red Army Faction had split up for good.

Over the next year or so, though we didn’t quite know it, steam was building for a big year of resurgence in action. Our issues of that year, 1998-1999, featured police killings and brutality so consistently you’d think it was 2007. Our tenth issue ran a call for folks to go to Seattle to shut down the World Trade Organization. Though there was certainly a buzz around Philly about the WTO protests at the time, no-one really had expected such a successful massive action. By November that year some thirty thousand rabble rousers blocked Seattle’s streets, effectively leading to a collapse of dialogue intended to give the richest, most powerful corporations of the world unrestricted freedom to exploit poor people globally. Simultaneously an anarchist “black block” roved separately in a complementary action and trashed corporate and police property, a spectacular and rare black eye for capitalism. Philadelphians making their way back from Seattle were inspired and ready to ratchet up the fight another notch. The relative success of the WTO brought in a new wave of activists, both new faces and folks who had been politically dormant for years, sending new energy into the paper and the collective. Fortunately that summer (2000) the fight was coming right to Philly in the form of the Republican National Convention. How convenient, we thought.

A coalition of radical groups came together to form the Philadelphia Direct Action Group (PDAG). The idea was to disrupt business as usual as much as possible on August 1st 2000, the first day of the convention and bring attention to the Prison Industrial Complex, which we defined as everything from the cop terror on the streets, to America’s political prisoners, to the growth of the private prison industry, to the racist nature of all of the above. All of our collective members at the time took part in nearly all aspects of organizing for this ranging from legal support and outreach to direct action trainings to cooking food for arriving protesters. The process leading up to the RNC, especially with PDAG, represented a rare coming together of different organizing efforts. The lead up to August 1st was an exciting time of forging new connections and bonds especially overcoming some racial boundaries, political differences, but also a time of being harassed, infiltrated and surveilled by our attentive PD. We had come out with a special edition of the paper with maps of the city listing deserving local targets, important meeting spots and cheap eats, which we spent too many hot hours at excessively long protests handing out before August 1st.

When the day of action rolled around, we had joined with a kick ass coalition of NYers and essentially shut down center city. Despite a number of successful hits that day (shutting down traffic, defacing Lynn Abraham’s office and the Rizzo statue among the more spectacular), we took considerable blows ourselves. Aside from getting completely trashed in the media, nearly 500 of us were arrested, some of us getting severe beatings both in jail and on the streets. The arrests, which included a number of felony charges (including 3 of my own), took a lot of the organizational wind out of Philly’s sails as hundreds of radicals spent too much time dealing with court and legal situations. But August 1st also brought a whole new wave of Philadelphians in touch with radical politics, some of whom became important defcollective partisans.*

In the time since the RNC demonstrations, University City District and Upenn driven gentrification began to be felt much more acutely. Thus we began our Gentrification Watch column in order to keep Philadelphians up on developers’ schemings and some of the organized resistance to this process. Other matters we covered included: Mumia’s repeated defeats in racist courts, a campaign against DA Lynn Abraham’s systematic pursuit of the death penalty, a steady flow of R2K legal updates, accompanied by coverage of the uprisings around the world against capitalist globalization. From Prague to Australia massive direct actions against meetings of ruling elites filled streets with broken glass, smoke and teargas and the nagging persistence of anti-capitalists in the street began to shake the dominant narrative of capitalism as the inevitable and only way forward.

The attacks on New York on September 11th 2001, however threw much of this energy on its head. A fighting movement (of course still with tons of our own problems), drew back largely in fear as hundreds of Arabs were being rounded up in racist sweeps. By now we had lost the Derailleur, but together with Philly Indymedia and an assortment of other individuals, bought 4134 Lancaster Ave. in a post 9.11. real estate confusion. Years of construction followed (and are sure to follow), but the paper was the first organization to move in to what we now know as LAVA, the Lancaster Avenue Autonomous space. True to the changing times, we had DSL hooked up before plumbing or heat. While we continued to keep cranking out the issues, we organized against the inevitable invasion of Iraq, covered the uprisings that swept Argentina following an economic collapse, and issue 23 dispelled delusional White House claims the war was over ( if only they knew)... In the meantime, it seems like much of the longer term work has paid off. Sometimes it takes years to have the good results of one’s work to come back around. Often we hear good words in random conversations on the street, or are told about someone hooking up with an action, organization or community garden after reading about it in the defenestrator. It’s also been territory for discussion on theory and strategy for the radical left in general. Despite various small and gratifying gains as a result of the paper, we’ve also failed (along with the left in general) to help keep our world from spiraling quickly into an increasingly fucked up situation: A war that some people said early on we shouldn’t waste our time fighting is still going (badly from any perspective), Philly cops keep topping their records in murders of young black men, Mumia has taken several hard legal losses, a number of new political prisoners are making their way through the courts, and former Panthers are facing the rest of their lives behind bars for what never happened 30 years ago. All this makes the defenestrator’s work feel just that much more crucial.

No-one considered that we would have lasted ten years. Looking back at other comparable anarchist or radical Philly papers, we’ve done well. The various projects which preceded us locally, the Philly Free Press (an SDS paper based initially out of Temple) lasted some xx years, while the Schuylkill River Express, Plain Wrapper etc. cranked out impressive work during the height of the left in the late sixties and early seventies. Later specifically anarchist projects, like the Free Voice (1990s) and Life is Free, a small squatter newspaper, lasted only a handful of issues, while Talk is Cheap, a paper based in the punk scene, made it through the late 80s. In ways we came out of that tradition of documenting local radical community struggles while giving the movement as a whole some material to chew over. Adding to this intra movement communication was a desire to connect to the street as well as about what was going on politically. Over the 10 years, we managed to put out issues zero through 39, as well as some event specific publications: one for the Coalition Against the American Correctional Association (a trade fair for the prison industry), another for the Biodemocracy anti-genetic engineering convergence, both in Philly. Despite sporadic production we fell to several ultra low points which had us question whether to continue or not. But new people always fell into the collective as others wandered off and there was always that fresh spark to kick us back into production. It’s certainly understandable how a project like a radical paper can easily fold. The effort of raising the money to keep printing alone has at times been such a daunting prospect that withering away seemed the obvious next step. Same goes for the matter of constantly attempting to pull together all the disparate strands of what it takes to keep the paper together on an organizational level. Any paid coordinator was never even a matter of consideration, pretty much all attempts at gathering funds via grants were rejected (usually before even sending in an application), so the defenestrator throughout its decade was always a reflection of the creative and fiscal energy we had at that very moment. One can see this in the varying levels of quality in design and content over the years. And though it seems like we may be nearly an issue ahead of ourselves financially as of this issue, it’s never been that way yet. Looking through the archives, the numerous desperate pleas for funds attest to this (almost pathetically in retrospect).

The recent bankruptcies and collapses of other radical publications who seemed to have it so together compared to us, such as Clamor, in many ways were a surprise to hear about. We had always been just barely scraping by both in terms of having people work on the paper as well as financially. But in our situation it was just that much easier to pick ourselves back off the ground. Amongst the roughest times fiscally, it just meant we had to kick down a few hundred out of our own pockets to get an issue out. That’s certainly been a burden, but in my opinion, not nearly the burden of trying to maintain an engaged collective or sharing working more equally amongst each other. Looking at the relatively enormous fiscal reliance of other papers makes it now seem a blessing that we’d never gotten it together to expand to such a degree.

Over the years, though the collective has always been shifting, we’ve more or less maintained an affinity group style of working. A lot of the creative work happened informally over beers and our politics have often been largely undefined and subject to internal conversations and debates. This has been a consistent critique of the collective over the years. It’s meant that we’re less accessible, often because of our lack of a clearly defined set of politics. As a result, we’ve set ourselves up for some weird situations with more state oriented leftists. The paper has always been heavily influenced by anarchism and it’s notions of horizontal organizing, direct democracy, and direct action, but being stuck in a cultural anarchist ghetto, both in terms of what we report and who we talk to has never been our intention or desire.

The laid back affinity group style also made it rough to incorporate people from different political perspectives, especially when editorial issues to do with the state would emerge. At numerous points, in my opinion because we had no distinct political perspective spelled out, editorial discussions would break down into personal bitterness over political differences. Some of these disagreements pivoted on how to cover various union struggles, Chavez and Venezuela, pressuring the state for concessions versus self-organizing. Here especially a more defined politics could have been useful to avoid some of the personal aspects of our editorial arguments. These arguments however, while some people did leave, never managed to split the defcollective as much as other issues that are maybe more typical to groups of friends than they are to political collectives. Personal problems inside our collective have often had a much rougher impact on our work than did political disagreements or editorial issues. The issue of strong personalities dominating the visual or editorial slant of the defenestrator has recurred a number of times, as has an imbalance of who’s been doing the work. Like with countless other all volunteer projects with limited means, it often proved simply too frustrating to watch countless solid collective members wander off to pursue full time jobs or other more sustaining ventures both political and not.

Skimming through this decade of newsprint brings back a ton of memories not just of these collective members who have wandered away, but also friendships, triumphs, struggles, and even loses. Font choices and layout styles bring back faces of former collective members; reports of organizing attempts or actions that hadn’t crossed my mind in years have me full of pride that Philadelphians are always putting up a fight, and even though I should know better it remains stunning how many steps back we take in our path towards a better world. Reading backwards through the years, I’m also reminded of the pain that’s been part of the last decade: there have been deaths amongst contributors and the larger defenestrator family: Mary Cabrera, Sera, Marlon Solar and Brad Will among those vividly and heartily missed.

Despite the frustrations and downturns over the past decade, the defenestrator survived. Today new as well as old energies infuse the pages. These pages are still a reflection of the various struggles we’ve been part of or connected to for the past ten years, but also illuminate the paths that will lead us into our future. In many ways we stand in an exciting place, one where we have the history, the experiences to critically address both our success and our failures. As we stand here, at the cusp of another decade of defenestration, a Zapatista expression comes to mind: we walk, we do not run, because we have a very long way to go.

This piece appeared in an issue of the Philadelphia anticapitalist newspaper the defenestrator.

Interview with John Bell

Sun, 28 Apr 2013 22:40:32 GMT

Wow, John's spirit shines so vibrant here. I think everyone who knew John personally already know this, but I've never been able to really convey to folks who didn't know him just how he rolled. Maybe because of who he was, John crucially understood and was able to engage with so many subtleties of race and organizing unlike anyone else i've known. He's sorely missed, we need more like him in the struggle.

Cheers to Jessica Rodriguez and Pascal for this!!

Are prisons obsolete

Wed, 30 Nov 2011 22:12:03 GMT

The title of Angela Davis’ book Are Prisons Obsolete (2003) sounds nothing short of utopian. Here in the US, as Davis points out, prisons are integral to everyday life. In poor communities and communities of color, nearly everyone has family or friends who are among the 2.5 million plus doing time in this country. Television and pop culture in general (where pop culture = cop culture) reminds the rest of us that prisons are part of society. But for those of us actively seeking out ways of being and organizing society that don’t rely on coercion or institutional violence, some utopian imagination is necessary (can we create it, if we can’t even imagine it?). But APO isn’t exactly that. Davis delivers a short book of historical context for what is now a monstrous soul devouring industry, but one which she shows is a relatively recent development and one which we should be working our way beyond. Besides, the book is an excellent primer on prisons. APO uses some powerful statistics from Davis’ home state, California, to show how prisons have surged in the last decades. When she first became an anti-prison activist in the sixties she relates how she was “astounded to learn there were then close to two hundred thousand people in prison.” By the time this book was published in 2003 that number had grown to around 2.2 million.

Throughout the book, Davis shows the connections between the expansion of prisons to capitalism and slavery. While the emergence of penitentiaries near the beginning of the American Revolution initially appeared often as a progressive reform to previous forms of corporal and capital punishment inherited from the English, the reformers, mostly Quakers, disregarded many of the racist and authoritarian elements the new prisons inherited and reproduced. To many observing their emergence, the penitentiary looked a lot like slavery. Davis lays this out clearly, starting with the creation of the Black Codes, a set of laws which were imposed after the abolition of slavery to replace the former Slave Codes.

“The new Black Codes proscribed a range of actions- such as vagrancy, absence from work, breach of job contracts, the possession of firearms, and insulting gestures or acts - that were criminalized only when the person was black.” The Black Codes, combined with the clause in the Thirteenth Amendment which abolishes slavery “except as punishment for crime, whereof the party shall have been duly convicted,” created a legal situation where a newly freed slave could be returned to a new alternate slavery for anything ranging from an insult to broadly defined “vagrancy.”

Before emancipation, ninety-nine percent of prisoners were white. Within a short time after emancipation and as a result of the Black Codes, southern prisons quickly filled up with black prisoners. The accompanying public opinion held that because so many freed slaves were subsequently imprisoned “that African Americans were inherently criminal and particularly prone to larceny.” It sounds eerily familiar to todays criminalization and fear mongering of black youth.

The similarity in working conditions between prison labor and slave labor also show strong continuity from times of slavery through the 13th amendment transition , industrial capitalism to our present day corporatized world. Through convict leasing, prisons rented out convicts for alternative cheap labor. In Alabama coal mines, for instance, prisoners carried out dirty and dangerous work as miners, leased from prisons for as little as $18.50 per month. The profit in convict leasing was enormous and unlike slaves whose life had economic value for slaveholders, prisoners on lease could be worked to death and often were. According to contemporaries, leased convicts imprisoned under the Black Codes often fared worse than they had as slaves:

“The records of a Mississippi plantation in the Yazoo Delta during the late 1880s indicate that the prisoners ate and slept on bare ground without blankets or mattresses, and often without clothes. They were punished for “slow hoeing” (ten lashes), “sorry planting” (five lashes), and “being light with cotton” (five lashes). Some who attempted to escape were whipped “till the blood ran down their legs”; others had a metal spur riveted to their feet. Convicts dropped from exhaustion, pneumonia, malaria, frostbite, consumption, sunstroke, dysentery, gunshot wounds, and “shackle poisoning” (the constant rubbing of chains and leg irons against the bare flesh).”

The Road to Hell is Paved With Good Intentions

The emergence of penitentiaries, Davis explains, comes always in the context of social developments of the time. The French and American revolutions with the emergence of the bourgeoisie as an influential class, were introducing radical new ideas on the individual rights and sovereignty (at the time more or less only applicable to white men), rights which could then of course once realized be taken away. It was also at this time that labor began to be quantified and compensated with money.

“...the computability of state punishment in terms of time - days, months, years - resonates with the role of labor time as the basis of computing the value of capitalist commodities. Marxist theorists of punishment have noted that precisely the historical period during which the commodity form arose is the era during which penitentiary sentences emerged as the primary form of punishment.”

The Penitentiary was originally a Quaker vision of reforming some of the cruelest products of European and colonial imaginations. Punishment for crimes included drawing and quartering, burning at the stake, and confinement in jails which were disease ridden and filthy. The Quaker concept of the penitentiary characterized prisons as a place where instead of the filthy, immoral, alcohol and prostitute ridden British jails, the criminal would be confined to a room alone, maybe containing a bible, and atone for their crimes through a process of self-reflection and self-reform. A technological innovation introduced with the penitentiary was the panopticon, a form of prison architecture where guards can see all prisoners but no prisoner can see if the guard is watching them. Though reformist, these ideas were motivated by not so much the desire to help or improve the lives of prisoners, but because conditions inside the prison offended their sensibilities both aesthetic and religious. In fact some pre-penitentiary jails had some relatively high degrees of freedom. Alcohol passed freely among prisoners and prostitutes came and left as they wanted. In some cases prisoners would leave the jail for stretches of time.

Penitentiaries did have critics from day one, including Charles Dickens who was horrified by a visit to Eastern Penitentiary in 1842: “I believe that very few men are capable of estimating the immense amount of torture and agony that this dreadful punishment, prolonged for years , inflicts upon the sufferers...”

Dickens was talking about the isolation which prisoners today still experience today when confined to Administrative Segregation units (Ad Seg). Supermax prisons, invented as a one up on Maximum Security prisons put the entire prison population in lock own, resulting in entire prisons where many inmates have been so psychologically and emotionally damaged, often with explicit intentions to do so that any release or return to “normal” life will have them quickly returning to prison. Unlike the days when penitentiaries were considered a “reform”, todays Supermax and Ad Seg units make no pretense of rehabilitation.

Gender and Prisons

A chapter of the book is devoted to the gendered elements of prisons. While only accounting for about 5% of all prisoners, women are the fastest growing population in prisons and are, unlike most men, subject to intensely sexualized treatment and conditions. The roots of which Davis traces through the history of reform movements: Reformers like Quaker Elizabeth Fry pushed for a “female approach to punishment”. Reforms introduced an all female staff (to lessen sexual temptation considered to be the root of all female criminality) and “cottages” where women prisoners could learn domestic duties such as cooking, sewing and cleaning. Most of these changes again had less to do with human rights so much as they had the effect of systemically maintaining women’s roles and reform women who deviated from sexual norms to accept a submissive social position.

Not every woman’s place in society was considered worth saving. Black and Native American women were disproportionately sentenced to men’s prisons and black women in prison after the Civil War were put on chain gangs with men. Racism for women prisoners was further compounded by the influence of the eugenics movement (then a popular scientific theory) “which sought to have genetically inferior women removed from social circulation for as many of their child bearing years as possible.”

Starting with forced strip searches and vaginal/anal searches upon entering prison as recounted by Assata Shakur, Davis goes on to show how sexual assault continues systemically during incarceration. Guards make regular use of their “duties” to grope women’s breasts during pat downs, room and strip searches. Quoting a report on Sexual Abuse of Women in US Prisons: “We found that all male correctional employees have vaginally, anally and orally raped female prisoners and sexually assaulted and abused them. We found that in the course of committing such gross misconduct, male officers have not only used actual or threatened physical force, but have also used their near total authority to provide or deny goods or privileges to female prisoners to compel them to have sex...” Prison Industrial Complex As capitalist globalization has seen a rise in power of capital over people and human rights in the last decades, the prison industry too has joined the party. With the emergence of private prisons (and the profitability of prisons, prisoners and convictable crimes with long sentences), prisons in general have expanded incredibly. Hand in hand with for profit prisons run by corporations has come new prison labor at prices that rival developing world sweatshops. Davis calls this the “Prison Industrial Complex”. Having to think up post cold war marketing strategies, cold-war profiteers turned their creative energy toward social control, in particular profits which could be reaped off the criminal justice/punishment industry. The profits in the meantime roll in from subjects for medical studies, nearly free prison labor, prisoners and prisons as a market as themselves and from a slightly different vantage point, the avalanche of cop culture that fills the airwaves.

As a Norwegian criminologist is quoted in APO: “Companies that service the criminal justice system need sufficient quantities of raw materials to guarantee long term growth.... in the criminal justice system the raw material is prisoners, and industry will do what is necessary to guarantee a steady supply. For the supply of prisoners to grow, criminal justice policies must ensure a sufficient number of incarcerated Americans regardless of whether crime is rising or the incarceration is necessary.”

And as black prisoners are reaching a percentage of the population similar to that during the times of convict leasing, today’s prison policy is reaching into the future and across the world. Globally governments are taking cues from the US and signing contracts with the giant prison corporations. In Turkey prisoners held a “death fast” in response to the construction of US style prisons. South Africa recently introduced the Supermax, the most repressive form of US prisons, “just after initiating the project of initiating a democratic, non-racist, and non-sexist society”, a big step backward toward that goal.

Abolition

The final chapter of APO addresses the some of the questions that for prison abolitionists never cease. If not prisons, then what? The first part of the book already makes clear that prisons are a relatively recent thing. Knowing the history helps us to remember other forms of justice that predate our own model. Responses to violence and injustice has varied greatly over history. We also know that prisons have a racist history that so far it has only been able to compound. Even forms of punishment that had been reformed out of the system are now back, such as the death penalty and prison labor. Prisons as we know them as Davis explains are “a set of symbiotic relationships among correctional communities, transnational corporations, media conglomerates, guards unions and legislative and court agendas”.

Davis suggests an entirely different system of justice. She suggests looking beyond prison alternatives like house arrests or surveillance, and instead look towards a continuum of alternatives to imprisonment - demilitarization of schools, revitalization of education at all levels, a health system that provides free physical and mental care for all, and a justice system that is based on reparation and reconciliation rather than retribution, vengeance and profit.

To further develop strategies of decarceration, or ways to keep our people out of the system’s way: drug use should be decriminalized to counteract systemic racism in prisons. Free drug programs need to be available as a first resort to anyone. Decriminalizing all immigrants, another strategy for decarceration. Same goes for imprisoning women who fight back or escape from sexual violence. Developing strategies to minimize violence women face from both intimate relationships and relationships with the state. Decriminalizing entire classes targeted by the Prison Industrial Complex, another strategy to decarcerate.

But then aside from minimizing contact with the criminal injustice system, comes how to handle those who assault the rights and bodies of others. Here Davis tells the story of a successful case of restorative justice shortly after the fall of Apartheid in South Africa. The story is moving, but disappointing in that the situation took place so far away, and though inspirational and touching lacks some of what I was looking for in APO. Which is much more tactical. For instance, how does one take principled stands when confronting such things as assaults on our bodies and freedoms? Not in APO, there are some examples worth checking out. Projects like Critical Resistance NY's Harm Free Zone and Philly's Pissed work with sexual assaulters, just a couple examples off the top of my head. But that's raw material for a different article...

This piece appeared in an issue of the Philadelphia anticapitalist newspaper the defenestrator.

Rednecks with Guns and other anti-racist stories and strategies

Wed, 30 Nov 2011 22:12:03 GMT

Following the election of Obama, many folks involved with a spectrum of different anti-racist work were left dumbfounded by the rise of the aggressive and often explicitly racist white Tea Party movement. Though the Tea Party Movement had been funded in the millions, enjoyed the enthusiastic backing of Fox News and was being manipulated by powerful forces on the right, it was also clear that the right was comfortably engaging with a sector of the North American working class largely abandoned by the broader left. In the throes of economic crisis many formerly enfranchised whites were looking at serious setbacks. In response the left for the most part smugly responded by dismissing the crazy tea baggers while white supremacists and conservatives moved into largely uncontested territory. In looking for exceptions, I decided to check out the John Brown Gun Club, a group of white working class anarchists who before the emergence of the Tea Party movement, had been sowing class struggle and anti-racist solidarity amongst mostly white gun enthusiasts in Kansas. Here I interview long time anti-racist gun slinger Dave Strano.

You were part of the John Brown Gun Club in Kansas and now are involved with Redneck Revolt in Denver. What are these groups are about? What sort of folks were involved and are you coming from politically?

The John Brown Gun Club was a working group of Kansas Mutual Aid, an anarchist collective active in Northeast Kansas from 2002 until early 2009. Kansas Mutual Aid focused on a variety of organizing initiatives and social programs including free food distributions, support for political prisoners and prisoners of war, copwatch and legal support, anti-military recruitment, and firearms and self defense trainings.

The John Brown Gun Club focused on two main program points. We worked to provide skillshares and trainings in the tactical use of firearms within the radical community and also to distribute free anti-racist literature at gun shows in Kansas and Missouri. We managed to table at over 30 different gun shows in a three year period, and distribute hundreds of copies of anti-racist and anti-Minutemen literature during that time period. We even managed to make some close allies with several other gun show vendors, one of which quit the Minutemen. That connection would later prove very advantageous after my move to Denver, as that vendor helped provide some of the first tabling space for the Redneck Revolt project at gun shows in this area.

Kansas Mutual Aid was mostly comprised of working class anarchists, few of who seem to meet the normal demographic of ex-punk and ex-middle class backgrounds. The majority of the folks that made up the John Brown Gun Club working group even went as far as to openly identify as rednecks. Our shared experiences of growing up in poor or working class white communities, in trailer parks and run down apartment buildings, surrounded by redneck culture, made it easy to find commonality.

The term "redneck" started to become part of our political identity. We produced literature specifically targeted toward white working class people, urging them to abandon their kneejerk racism and allegiance to whiteness and to instead build alliances with working class brown and black folks. This effort culminated in a widely distributed piece of literature, "An Open Letter to Other White Working People..." The essay was distributed by the hundreds to attendees at gun shows and later at Ron Paul's "New Liberty Movement" rallies and events.

Kansas Mutual Aid disbanded in early 2009, and I moved to Denver in April of that same year. 2009 was a big year for the Tea Party and their efforts to mobilize and organize. I penned a new essay, "Of Tea Parties and Patriots" and launched a new organizing effort, Redneck Revolt.

Redneck Revolt never has really amounted to more than just my singular efforts at agitation and education, mostly due to the birth of my daughter and my large time commitments to the work of the Denver Anarchist Black Cross. It's a project I'd like to focus on more, especially as the worker's revolts in Wisconsin bring white working class supporters of the Tea Parties into the streets to back the horrific attacks on the broader working class. There is political affinity to be found in the Rocky Mountains with other radical rednecks, but the efforts have been put on hold for the last year.

Another reason that Redneck Revolt hasn't been developed as much as it could be, is that another project I am affiliated with already fulfills half of the mission of the original John Brown Gun Club. The Denver Armed Resistance Committee (DARC) is a working group of the Denver Anarchist Black Cross that focuses on firearms and tactical defense. The group offers a free monthly introductory class through the Denver Free School, as well as multiple live fire exercises throughout the year. DARC is much more formal and better organized than the John Brown Gun Club ever was, but only fulfills half the mission of the predecessor project.

As anti-racists, why would you ever identify as rednecks?

I'll first quote directly from the Redneck Revolt blog:

The history of the term redneck is long and complex. One of the earliest recorded uses of the term comes from the 1890s, and refers to rednecks as “poorer inhabitants of the rural districts…men who work in the field, as a matter of course, generally have their skin burned red by the sun, and especially is this true of the back of their necks”.

In 1921, the term became synonymous with armed insurrection against capitalists and the state, as members of the United Mine Workers of America tied red bandanas around their necks during the Battle of Blair Mountain, a two week long armed labor uprising in the coalfields of West Virginia.

Today, the term redneck has taken on a demeaning connotation, primarily among upper class urban liberals who have gone out of their way to dehumanize white working class and poor people. Terms like “white trash” have come to signify the view among these same upper class liberals of poor and rural whites.

To us, the term redneck is a term that signifies a pride in our class as well as a pride in resistance to bosses, politicians, and all those that protect domination and tyranny.

We're very upfront about our position of being not only opposed to white supremacy, but to the shared culture of whiteness being one that has only been defined by being an oppressor race. What unites white skinned people currently is a shared history of being the footsoldiers of oppression. We want to ensure that as many whites as possible reject this commonly understood idea of whiteness and instead join in a common struggle with workers of all skin colors in a struggle for total and real liberation.

We feel like it's important to understand our backgrounds and roots, to understand where we come from and organize within those communities. It has been stated over and over again from our comrades and allies within black and brown liberation struggles that only whites can help organize within white communities. We wish to step up and start to build a white, anti-racist working class element of the broader working class movements active in the U.S.

The call ourselves rednecks then, to celebrate the history of treason to whiteness and allegiance to the working class that this term once embodied.

We talked earlier about your work tabling at gun shows. What sort of reactions and dialog has come out of that work? What sort of materials did you use?

The efforts of the John Brown Gun Club were definitely more successful than the efforts in Colorado in this area of struggle. In Kansas and Missouri, we were on a first name basis with gun show organizers. After about a dozen shows, the Minutemen actually stopped tabling at shows. Of course, the Kansas Minutemen also almost entirely dissolved during that time period, certainly not solely from our efforts. We were able to build some alliances with gun dealers and other vendors, as I detailed just vaguely earlier in this interview.

However, I don't want to downplay how negative a lot of the reaction was either. We received death threats at more than one gun show. We had consistent moments of loud and explosive arguments during many shows.

There was a specific incident involving members of a Confederate Hammer Skin crew when we tabled in Kansas City that was particularly tense.

The reactions in Colorado, where the Minutemen have had a stronger foothold have been definitely more on the negative side. Unlike Kansas, where we had some direct confrontations, but never from actual members of the Minutemen, we've had Minutemen members threaten to break our arms or mob up on our table threatening to have us kicked out of the show. Despite these reactions, Colorado has a higher percentage of non-white gun show attendees, and the reactions from these gun owning black and brown folks has been amazingly positive.

Our typical table setup has been pretty consistent whether in Kansas or Colorado. We typically have several dozen literature titles, some focusing on firearms and tactical defense mechanics, but the vast majority are typically anti-white supremacy essays and pamphlets. Titles like David Gilbert's "Looking at the White Working Class Historically" and James Murray's "From Chiapas to Montana" have been among the more popular.

However, there isn't a whole lot of radical anti-racist literature out there that is specifically written towards the experiences of white working class people. Most anti-racist literature targeted toward whites is written for folks that already identify as radical, or written by folks that have no frame of reference for what it's like to be a redneck or white working class person. My experience has always been that it's easier and more effective for radical rednecks to craft these pieces ourselves, as we have the backgrounds and experiences to begin to reach folks from these communities.

Our tables usually include some sort of visually appealing graphic heavy display that gives an overview of who we view our real class enemies and allies as, and a small TV with a radical video on repeat. Typically our favorites have been anti-police state documentaries, old Black Panther films, IRA documentaries, or anything that is heavy on gun related imagery. It tends to play better to people than anything that may make us appear as anti-gun liberals.

We also definitely display weapons on the tables, to add some credibility to our organization and our views, and to yet again, illustrate that we're not some pro-gun control liberals. I can't overstate how important it is for us, as anti-racists trying to organize within the white working class, that we distance ourselves from upper-middle class democrats.

So many white anti-racists have been at a complete loss of how to approach the upswell in racist organizing we've seen most visibly inside the Tea Party movement. You've been to some of their gatherings. Can you talk about what sort of work you've done there ?

Throughout 2009 and 2010, I've distributed over 2,000 copies of my pamphlet "Of Tea Parties and Patriots", which is an over glorified open letter to working class whites that have been swept up in the Tea Party fervor. These have met mixed reactions at Tea Party events, but almost always have led to long, drawn out, productive conversations with folks in attendance. I've been to 5 or 6 Tea Party rallies, including a rally that specifically targeted the migrant community here in Denver.

While close comrades from local anti-capitalist migrant organizations have stood across the street holding signs against the Tea Party, I find myself on the other side, distributing literature, engaging in dialogue and causing trouble for the rally organizers.

I won't try to make some argument that my efforts have produced a whole lot, but I've made some interesting contacts, and definitely have seen some folks that were at the last Tea Party event come to support radical, and even pro-migrant events just several weeks later.

We've seen conservatives and fascists speak directly to (and often manipulate) some of the racialized fears of working class white folks who've either felt or fear the sting of the economic crisis. Why do you think anti-racists and voices from the left were so absent in these circles?

Let's be honest about this. The white working class has been completely abandoned to the right wing. The left has pushed white working class folks aside. Most liberals and progressives have very little activity with any sort of working class organizing, let alone white working class organizing.

Working class whites are more often the topic of jokes or ridicule than the target of any organizing efforts from our quarters. And I don't mean to say that the white working class hasn't earned a lot of that derision from the left. They have historically sided with the capitalists and the state and turned on non-white working people at nearly every opportunity.

But we also can't ignore the internal classism prevalent amongst many members of the Left, especially the institutional Left (non-profits, NGOs, etc). The folks in leadership positions are almost always white upper class liberals, and they have done much to cement their class leadership at the expense of working class people of all colors who may or may not be the perfectly educated political machines that the leaders of the liberal left yearn to be.

We, as radical and progressive movements are also quick to push anyone away who doesn't use the right words or does use the wrong words, or anyone that we're suspicious of being tainted by oppressive behaviors or thoughts. Of course, this means that 90% of the working class is automatically an enemy, and the ranks of the Left are instead filled with upper middle class educated academics that know what words are acceptable and anti-oppressive and have the time and resources to have attended a never ending series of anti-oppression workshops and classes.

This is not to downplay the need for these workshops, classes, and even attitudes toward oppression, but we need to be real. If we imagine a broad based people's movement that includes working class people, then we have to be able to meet people where they are at, and make these struggles relevant to their everyday lives.

The last thing a poor or working class redneck that is a paycheck away from being evicted from their rundown trailer wants to deal with is some upper or middle class college educated kid from the burbs talking down to them because they use an offensive word.

We also need to be honest, that the folks that can actually speak to the white working class (namely radical white working class people) are few and far between, and that many are actively silenced and ridiculed for their backgrounds by affluent white organizers. While much has been done to point out the inherently racist issues that plague many progressive and radical organizations, almost nothing has been done to point out the inherent classism that runs rampant on the left.

Folks seem to think that if they have a job as a union organizer, or have a friend that's a union member, or have attended a labor rally they are somehow not classist...

**In Philly, some folks on the left have been taking on gun control as an issue to tackle the violence in our neighborhoods. One recent series of actions was to shut down a gun shop linked to high numbers of straw purchases of hand guns, many involved in killings, mostly of black youth.

Do you see urban gun violence playing into what you do and how would you address concerns by folks who see stricter laws on guns as a way to stop the killings?**

I want to preface this with a disclaimer that I have never lived in an extremely violent urban center like Philadelphia, so it's hard for me to pass judgments on the organizing efforts of people that do live in those situations.

Having said that, however, I tend to feel that trying to solve the problems related to urban poverty by implementing gun control is like putting a band aid on a cancerous part of the body. It really misses the cause of the trauma, and honestly, will probably not do anything to stop the trauma.

I honestly feel that there are many racist implications to gun control campaigns specifically targeting black youth from having access to guns.

The message that is being sent is that police forces and white rural communities can responsibly own guns, but not black youth. We're saying that black youth are inherently more irresponsible, are incapable of making good decisions, that they need to be coddled and controlled in ways that are not necessary for white folks.

I would also openly ask if the folks that are targeting gun shops are also targeting drug dealers, liquor stores, and other legal or non-legal institutions that are profiting off of the misery of urban communities of color. It seems that these issues may destroy the lives of more youth of color than gun shops ever could.

Of course, the folks organizing these campaigns may very well being doing all these things... but I honestly don't think that closing down individual gun shops, or making guns illegal will stop gun or other violence in these settings.

In my opinion, a better, but much more controversial strategy, would be for organizers to do the hard work of organizing gun safety trainings in their communities, of having real and honest conversations and classes about guns, their effects on the communities, and maybe even some more liberatory uses of firearms.

Many progressives, especially pacifists, will scoff at this idea, but what if we started to actually talk openly about turning the guns that are already present in urban cores against the people that make these horrible conditions a reality. As former members of the BLA have repeatedly said, if black youth have guns anyway, why not build a culture where those guns are used for liberation? Why use guns to rob folks in the hood if you can rob a bank? Why turn your guns on other youth of color when you can turn them on murderous police officers?

These questions are hard, and controversial for sure. They make us feel uncomfortable. But if we're real about ending the actual causes of gun violence and the greater misery and poverty in the urban centers, then we must be asking these questions. We have to create a culture where kids who rob banks for their hoods are glorified and treated as heroes and not gangsters that target the members of their own communities. We have to compete to create a new culture against that of the dominant culture.

In LA, during the rebellion in 1992, the Crips and Bloods formed a truce and decided to no longer gun down each other, but to turn their guns against the cops and capitalists. If that effort happened across the country, it could be the action that finally ends these horrific and predatory social, political and economic systems. That's a concept that is sure to enrage many a liberal, but it's also hard to argue with.

A firearm is just a tool, and it can be used to do many different things and inflict very many different outcomes. If the guns already exist, and our efforts at this moment in time to control them have done nothing to stop gun violence by poor folks against other poor folks, why not try to develop a different strategy?

If rednecks turned their guns on politicians and not migrants, if Crips turned their guns on CEOs and not Bloods, if poor folks turned their guns that they currently point at each other against our common class enemy, we may not have to live in a world of capitalist, statist, and racist exploitation and oppression.

Check out Redneck Revolt online at https://www.redneckrevolt.org/

Max Rameau from Take Back the Land

Fri, 25 Nov 2011 22:12:03 GMT

Cheers to my compas for pulling together another solid speaking event last night. Luckily I caught some of it on my "tape", albeit with less than exciting sound quality. It's going to be an exciting month coming up with housing and land takeovers across the US.

First Galen from KWRU and PPEHRC breaks down what housing crisis and some of the work his organizations have been doing, including their caravan to the United States Social Forum and their ongoing housing takeovers in North Philly:

Max Rameau from Take Back the Land eloquently breaks down why he thinks land is the root issue. If you've seen him speak before, you'll know he loves to break down the dialectical clash:

Finally some folks in the audience engage the speakers verballly:

ps: I recommend you crank up the volume with these

The Life and Family of William Penn ~ Over 260 Years Of Bloody Colonialism

Sun, 30 Oct 2011 22:12:03 GMT

Recently a small mob from Bristol, UK made their way through Philly to help remind us of , yes, the bloody colonial history of the William Penn family. Jim McNeil dropped some interesting historical gems about the role of certain counter-revolutionary sectors of the quakers in the banking industry, the Penn family's involvement in the slave trade and their general existence as rich, monarchy fetishising, exploiting, capitalist wankers who hardly lived around here anyway (well William anyway). Bristol and Philly as it turns out share a good deal of familiar street names, architecture and other Penn family celebrating landmarks. Be sure and check out their site and a pamphlet that breaks down the whole story!

More info on the Bristol Radical History Group https://www.brh.org.uk/

The Mayor and The Police Are Not Our Friends

Sun, 30 Oct 2011 22:12:03 GMT

The following was the contents of a little pamphlet we handed out at the beginning of Occupy Philly after some star struck occupiers cozied up with mayor Nutter.

As organizers and activists in the city of Philadelphia, we’re excited to find ourselves caught up in this vibrant new movement. Few things have happened in Philly since we can remember that have looked so much like a genuine expression of popular power and direct democracy on a large scale. In this movement, we see an opportunity to truly challenge a system controlled by and serving elites. We love this and are full-heartedly engaging in this insurrection!

At the same time, we’ve found some of the dialogue regarding Occupy Philly’s relationship to Mayor Nutter and the police deeply disturbing and detrimental to fighting this system controlled by profit, greed and exploitation. Nutter has come out embracing the occupation that is on the doorsteps of his offices, claiming he too is part of the 99%. During the first night of the occupation, Nutter even received warm embraces by Occupy Philly campers. At the General Assembly, numerous voices stressed that Nutter and the police have come out as our allies. While the mayor has some clear political aspirations and obligations in regards to our occupation, we feel he’s already exposed himself over and over as an enemy of struggling communities in Philadelphia and has always worked in favor of the 1%. The mayor has chosen a strategy of appearing to embrace the protests in an effort to ensure that he and his bad policies do not become a target.

Both Mayor Nutter and police chief Ramsey have made careers for themselves by catering to and doing the work of the rich and powerful in ways that have pitted organizers for social justice against him time and time again. Both Ramsey and Nutter have consistently made decisions with brutal (even deadly) impacts on the lives of struggling Philadelphians while giving elites and powerful corporations massive tax breaks, protection and preferential treatment.

This of course may not be apparent to folks who have not followed some of these movements. So here is a quick roundup of just a few of these recent fights:

The Mayor

Nutter Blocks Paid Sick Days Bill

Community organizers and workers in Philadelphia have been fighting for the past year for a bill that would allow workers in businesses with eleven or more employees to earn up to seven paid sick days a year. In a major victory for workers and families, advocated convinced City Council to pass the bill. Mayor Nutter, however, ignoring the views of 71% of Philadelphians, bowed to business lobbyists and vetoed the bill.

Nutter’s veto leaves over 200,000 wage-workers in the city in the precarious situation of having to choose between their job and the health of their families and themselves. Mayor Nutter has certainly demonstrated his willingness to sacrifice the rights and health of hard working Philadelphians in order to secure the interests of the business elite. Education Cuts

In this moment of budget cuts and massive teacher and staff lay-offs, the Philadelphia School District continues to make decisions to dismantle our public schools — eliminating vital school-based programs, increasing class sizes, and putting forth proposals for ongoing school closures. For the 2011-2012 school year, more than 1,300 Philadelphia public school teachers were laid off and a confidential draft District document (published on June 25, in the Notebook) identifies more than two dozen Philadelphia schools as possible targets for closure. Students, teachers, and concerned Philadelphians have voiced their refusal to let the District, city and state sell-out students, teachers and communities to the highest bidder in order to “balance their budget.” [Source: http://bit.ly/schoolclosingannouncement ]

Library, Pool and Rec Center Closures

At the start of the economic crisis the urgency to act became pressing to government officials. Balancing the budget on the backs of poor and working people became the favorite strategy of many of them, included our Mayor in Philadelphia. On November 6, 2008, Mayor Nutter put forth his plan to make drastic cuts to public services in the city. Nutter’s plan included the closure of 11 public libraries and 68 public pools. Also on the chopping block were fire stations, drug and violence prevention programs, and hundreds of city jobs.

Communities organized and fought back, protesting at city council budget hearings and at the Mayor’s community meetings. After a hard fought struggle, Nutter was forced to give in to public pressure and back down from some the cuts. Nevertheless, his proposed budget made his priorities crystal clear -- balance the budget on the backs of the city’s poor and working class residents as mega-corporations post recession defying profits. [Sources: http://defenestrator.org/the_budget_we_got and http://bit.ly/r2BZST ]

Fire Station Brownouts

In 2010, Mayor Nutter passed a budget that ordered rolling brownouts for neighborhood fire stations. This means that on certain days, neighborhood fire stations are not open. The mayor claimed that this decision was necessary to close a budget gap, but left corporate tax loopholes and funding for police intact. Already at least 3 children have died because of these brownouts, and scores of others have been injured. Clearly the mayor cares more about maintaining a cozy relationship with big business than protecting the lives of families in Philadelphia. Workers’ Rights in the Public Sector

Mayor Nutter has illegally refused to engage in bargaining with public sector workers. Nutter has forced city workers to operate without a contract for the past two years, and has repeatedly attempted to eradicate or privatize family-sustaining public sector jobs.

AIDS and Housing

People with AIDS have died in Philly because they sleep on the street or are crammed into homeless shelters. Though city currently has a waiting list for housing people living with AIDS- it is two years long and despite meetings, marches and actions by ACT UP targeting the mayor, he has refused to move money in the budget to put people in housing that he knows could save their lives. Nutter knows well that people with AIDS have died waiting for housing on the streets and in the shelters of Philadelphia.

Tax Abatements

In Philadelphia there is a 10 year tax abatement on all new or substantially renovated properties. This means that the huge corporations building new condo developments and the wealthy people who buy those condos don’t have to pay any property taxes for the first ten years that they live there. New development drives up property taxes for existing residents, often displacing them from their own neighborhoods while wealthy gentrifiers pay nothing.

Ramsey and the Phila PD

ICE and PPD database integration/cooperation

In 2009, discovery in an immigration lawsuit leaked that the Philadelphia Police Department had been secretly been sharing their databases with that of Homeland Security’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Philly had previously been a city where police were barred from communicating arrest information to immigration officials, somewhat protecting the many immigrants who live here from deportation. Upon their arrival Nutter and Ramsey cooperated to quietly integrate the databases resulting in ICE raids and deportations attacking and tearing apart families and lives of some of Philadelphia’s most vulnerable residents. Police Violence

Police in Philly have killed scores of mostly young blacks with impunity under Ramsey’s watch. While Ramsey has made public shows of attempting to discipline out of control cops, he’s overwhelmingly defended killer cops on his force. Those killed by police with few exceptions are young black men who already live in economically devastated neighborhoods.

Last October a West Philly activist Askia Sabur was jumped and beaten by a gang of cops who cracked his skull and broke his arm. Hundreds took to the streets to protest the beating and demand accountability for the cops who nearly killed Askia. Streets of West Philly were taken over by an impromptu people’s court where for hours, residents testified of killings and beatings at the hands of the PPD. We see the violence against the poorest Philadelphians by the PPD as a significant part of a racist war on the poor. [Source: http://www.defenestrator.org/west_philly_uprising ] Ramsey and political repression

Many of us know police chief Ramsey from previous encounters. As police chief in Washington DC, Ramsey oversaw and ordered numerous raids, beatings and mass arrests of activists, including a mass arrest of over 600 people at a permitted rally against the war in a Freedom Plaza in 2001. Ramsey also ordered mass arrests of Mumia Abu Jamal (a political prisoner from Philadelphia) supporters, as well as opponents of the World Bank’s economic policies. Before DC, Ramsey headed up Chicago’s PD and engaged in “spying, illegal raids on gathering sites, routine harassment and arrest of suspected protesters in public spaces, destruction of activists’ video and film” as well as instituting youth curfews, extensive snitching and infiltration programs and expanding CCTV surveillance in poor neighborhoods, all things the PPD has done in Philly as well under his watch. [Source: http://defenestrator.org/ramsey ]

Surveillance and Repression in Philly

A major element of Nutter’s campaign for mayor was to increase police and surveillance in Philadelphia’s poorest neighborhoods and institute a dramatic increase in stop and frisk searches. According to the Philadelphia Inquirer: “In 2009, police stopped 253,333 pedestrians, 72 percent of whom were African American. Only 8 percent of the stops led to an arrest.”

In response to the recent “flash mobs,” Nutter imposed a youth curfew in wealthy mostly white areas of Philly, clearly targeting the black youth. Dozens are facing charges already under Nutter’s response.

Instead of pursuing innovative ways to funnel resources, housing and opportunities to where it’s needed most, Nutter chose to increase repression of a black population already severely under the gun of state repression, police violence and incarceration.

We know that city governments are strapped for cash and that elected officials have to make tough choices. And we also know that in our experience every time Nutter has been faced with those choices, he has made the wrong one.

Because the mayor has reached out to Occupy Philly, we now have the opportunity to make concrete demands of him. We should use this opportunity (and create more!) to push for the changes that 99% of struggling Philadelphians need. This is not a new struggle. There are existing organizations and communities in this city that have already been working, organizing and calling for these changes for decades.

We can use the space and political pressure created by Occupy Philly to amplify the demands that groups are already making on the city to:

Fully Fund Our Schools

End Stop & Frisk Policies and the Curfew on Youth

End Police Violence

Stop Attacks on Immigrants

Let’s do it!!

Autonomous Communities

Sun, 30 Oct 2011 22:12:03 GMT

The aspiration for autonomy is above all the struggle against political and moral alienation from life and work - against the functionalization of outside interests, against the internalization of the morals of our foes ... This aspiration is concretized when houses are squatted to live humanely or not to have to pay high rents, when workers call in sick in order to party because they can’t take the alienation at work, when unemployed people plunder supermarkets ... because they don’t agree with absurd demands of unions for more jobs that only integrate people into oppression and exploitation. Everywhere that people begin to sabotage, to change the political, moral and technical structures of domination is a step toward a self-determined life.

from a 1983 meeting of Autonomen in Hamburg

Back in the day, LAVA, the space where defenestrator keeps its office chose to call itself the Lancaster AVenue Autonomous space. At the time the name LAVA and the autonomous label seemed like a good fit. To some of us it contained enough meaning to show our general political motivations, while being inclusive enough to allow for a pretty wide spectrum of voices and ways. But after having to explain the meaning of that word over and over again to people who’ve come in to visit the space, it became apparent that even many who were members of the groups using the space probably couldn’t explain why we were called that or where our name even came from. So it seemed like we needed to maybe revisit what that second A in LAVA was all about. ...

Autonomy as a movement seems to first have developed out of study groups inside of the the Italian labour movement. Groups like Potere Operaio (Workers’ Power), Lotta Continua (the Struggle Continues) and later Autonomia Operaia (Workers’ Autonomy) began challenging the role labor unions and political parties had in revolutionary struggle, rejecting some of the institutional and hierarchical Communist ideas at the time in favor of a horizontal, radically democratic form of struggle. Before long this translated into combative worker run organizations in car factories and subsequent wildcat strikes outside of union control. Their ideas often directly clashed with the Leninist dominated paths many anti-capitalist radicals were taking at the time. These groups and the larger social movement from which they sprang became loosely known as Autonomia (or Autonomy in English).

Theoretically, these autonomous thinkers also dug much deeper than many others on the left. Autonomous groups that began in factories looked at the dehumanizing aspects of commodity society and work itself. Essentially, what made up autonomous politics was a rejection of capitalist logic (like working for wages, private property etc.) and a rejection of hierarchical institutions including those on the left. The bulk of politics developed out of lived experience and experiments in how to live outside of and fight powers of capitalism. Folks began attacking ideas of private property and waged work itself, which eventually inspired takeovers of abandoned buildings in Italy’s big cities - both for living spaces and to create spaces where autonomous politics and ways of being could flourish.

And flourish they did. Squatted social centers popped up across Italy, and then the rest of Europe, transforming abandoned industrial spaces and housing into vibrant rebel social centers. Between 1969 and 1975 some 20000 buildings were squatted in Italy as part of this movement. Just after the collapse of the Berlin Wall, squatters who had already been active in the West took over hundreds of abandoned buildings on the East Side, also creating free social spaces by the hundreds. Evictions and attacks on the squats were met with riots and attacks on capital, targets including supermarkets, shopping centers, offices of developers and speculators, and always police. Across Western Europe, the politics in these spaces usually spelled out a distinct alternative to the Cold War binary politics that were prevalent. In most of these spaces decisions and work are carried out explicitly without bosses or leaders.

In the mainstream media across Europe, Autonomy was often smeared as violent or sometimes terroristic. Squatters often took on police in street battles defending houses from eviction, or defending themselves from police attacks during demonstrations. Guerilla struggles in the global south were definitely an influence tactically at least, but the autonomous riots, defense of spaces, and attacks against capitalist institutions using weapons like molotov cocktails and rocks though hardly non-violent were always a far cry from the armed struggles of the day. And even the armed actions of the left never could compare to the violence of the state whether in the form of police repression or the economic devastation that it feeds off.

Autonomy isn’t by any means a European phenomenon. Shortly after the EZLN (Zapatista Army for Nation Liberation) an army of mostly poor indigenous Mexicans, took over San Cristobal, Chiapas’ City Hall in 1994, the declarations and work which followed the initial government massacres in the South of Mexico had a distinctly different quality. As some of the most influential Latin American guerilla movements were well on their way out, the Zapatistas were talking about horizontal structures, production collectives, autonomous education and seized large swaths of hoarded land from landowners. Though identifying as autonomous, the bulk of Zapatista ideas were not eurocentric but had roots in indigenous “ways and customs”: forms of direct democracy which had been integral to Mayan life for centuries predating any European contact.

zapatista mural with kidAnd immediacy is important here too. Along with demands for Indigenous Rights from the government, from the start the rebel communities re-organized their lives to be revolutionary and egalitarian and continue to do so. Co-operative farming and other economic work have been a big part of the work as has taking back the political space where these transformations could happen.

The uprising in southern Mexico helped reinvigorate and enrich movements around the world. Notably, a couple years after the uprising, the Zapatistas hosted the “National Democratic Convention” (or CND), a gathering of thousands of organizers and organizations from across the left, to gather ideas on how to move forward. Out of the CND was born, among other projects, “People’s Global Action”, a global co-ordination of radical social movements, grassroots campaigns and direct actions. It was the PGA who put out the initial calls for the global days of action that reinvigorated the North American anti-capitalist movement, notably in November of 99 when massive direct actions disrupted World Trade Organization meetings in Seattle and gave strength and inspiration to anti-capitalist struggles around the world.

If the more recent uprising and subsequent repression in Oaxaca seemed influenced by the Zapatistas one state over, it’s because it was. The Oaxacan People’s Popular Assembly (APPO) also pulled direct action, grassroots direct democracy and rejection of political parties to the center of their struggle. Like the Zapatistas, the Oaxacan struggles also had a strong internal indigenous element informing it politics from the beginning.

Further south, we find active autonomous groups in Venezuelan shanty towns around Caracas, thousands of families claiming land and the political space that comes along with it across Brazil, in Argentina’s occupied factories, unemployed workers groups and neighborhood assemblies. In India groups like the Karnataka State Farmers Association who have destroyed genetically modified crops and the Narmada Bachao Andolan who’ve resisted dams being built on their land are just a few more examples of such movements.

Theoretically, autonomy has often been expressed as a healthy mix of anarchism and marxism, drawing the best from each, ditching authoritarian or dogmatic strains , but learning mostly from applying an anti-capitalist desire for freedom to life directly. And though the learning experiences that have come from squatting, the social centers, building non-capitalist alternative economies and from direct actions of various scopes have been a tremendous learning experience stretching over decades, autonomy has also had some thinkers who’ve shaken up radical theory. Toni Negri took on the rigid communist parties of Italy and, together with Michael Hardt, shook up discussions on class and globalization over the last few years. Sylvia Frederici of the Midnight Notes Collective has shared invaluable insights into women’s unacknowledged exploitation by capitalism. The EZLN’s Subcommander Marcos and his sidekick the beetle Durito brought indigenous democracy into the foreground of rebel movements around the world. The discussions in papers, on the internet and in our movements has never been less static.

And in the spirit of things not static a small group has been discussing autonomous ideas at LAVA in West Philly. A discussion on autonomous communities at LAVA began what will hopefully become a series of rich and fruitful exchanges. Keep your eyes peeled for future get togethers!

Public Private Commons

Sat, 22 Oct 2011 22:40:32 GMT

From the first weeks of Occupy Philly an announcement for a workshop I helped pull together:

In the past weeks we’ve seen Dilworth Plaza transformed from public, state administered land into what we could call Commons, a dynamic self organized space ruled and governed by ourselves. By November 15 the City wants to begin the transformation of Dilworth Plaza into what many understand will be a privately administered park and seize popular control of land we’ve taken. With starting point of our relationship with Dilworth Plaza, we’ll hear from the experiences of organizers who helped fight for the preservation of public resources like our Rec Centers and Libraries and how the dynamic of public space can shift when people engage in struggle over them. We’ll also look at other fights for control over resources both public and private around the world such as factory takeovers in Argentina, land occupations in Brazil and how workers took over ownership of public transportation and telephone exchanges in revolutionary Spain. And finally we’ll collectively reimagine Philadelphia as commons.

The workshop went well. Some audio from the presentation:

Buried Alive The Abu Ghraibs in Our Back Yard

Tue, 30 Mar 2010 22:12:03 GMT

On May 20th the Human Rights Coalition, a group comprised of prisoners’ families and supporters held an event both to celebrate the release of their new pamphlet “BURIED ALIVE!” (see Rob X’ article Control units: High Tech Brutality elsewhere in this issue) as well as a public kick off of a new campaign to fight the use of solitary confinement in US prisons.

After screening a powerful documentary contrasting life in a Control Unit with that of prisoners in a therapy-centric prison experiment, a panel discussion convened. Former political prisoner Masai Ehehosi spoke first, addressing some of the gradual steps necessary towards prison abolition: “it’s not just about opening the prison gates.”, we need to create a place to live where we don’t need prisons or control. Masai’s group Critical Resistance walks the talk of prison abolition. The New York chapter of CR has been actively working on building alternatives to police and prisons in the Brooklyn neighborhood where their office is.

To put prisons themselves into some context historically, Carlton Payne, a psychologist ran down some statistics on the growth of prisons in the US. From the first prison in 1683, it took till 1995 for the prison population to reach a million. Just ten years later that number has doubled and still grows. Today US prisons hold 2.3 million prisoners, a number higher than any other country in the world. Prison lawyer Angus Love filled in with more history. The Eastern State Penitentiary was built in Philly as a humanitarian experiment by Quakers and the Pennsylvania Prison Society (ironic in that both groups were representing at the forum as opponents of the same Quaker inspired hells). When Eastern State turned out to be a living hell, it yielded to the “NY System” and subsequent, all systems deemed failures only to be replaced by units even more repressive than the previous. The construction of the Supermax (short for Super Maximum security) prison in Marion, IL in 1983 gave birth to a new form of prison, the Control Unit. The Supermax attempts to create a system of total control over every microcosm of life. Marion, from it’s inception as a Supermax, housed a number of captured anti-imperialist US Prisoners of War and Political Prisoners (most of whom had not shown themselves to be any significant threat to the prison order). It was clear that political repression was part of this package. Today new Control Units are springing up across the country, many run by for profit corporations. In Administrative Segregation (Ad Seg), one of the most severe forms of isolation in US prisons, Payne saw serious psychological impacts on prisoners. Loosing all power over one’s environment and self, in desperation prisoners instinctively use violence as a way to regain some semblance of control. With virtually no stimulus, prisoners in isolation find themselves turning apathetic, their cognitive functions clinically decreasing and lacking stimulation become delusional, hallucinating. And with usually no target for the resulting rage, the violence often turns inward resulting in severe depression. “We are creating monsters”. Payne stressed. (see Belly of the Beast column next page) Another panelist, Luqman Abdullah, spent 5 years of his prison time in solitary confinement. His presentation was a needed jolt of rage for the often sleepy radical community in Philadelphia. Luqman put emphasis on urgency of the situation. “We need to organize and get our brothers and sisters out!” Prisoners ,including Luqman, in his days at Greene, are sent to the hole regularly for crimes as basic as having being recognized as possessing leadership skills, helping other inmates out with legal issues or attempting to teach other prisoners to read and write. Luqman himself spent time in the hole for crimes as trivial as teaching another prisoner elementary geography. Teresa, the daughter of Black Liberation Army prisoner Russell Maroon Shoatz, stood on a chair as she gave an update on her father. Clearly recognized as dangerous by the state, Maroon has been in prison for the last twenty years following a shootout with police in Cobbs Creek park. Despite never having had write ups for bad behaviour while in prison, Maroon is still kept segregated from other prisoners. After suffering from severe harassment by a particularly abusive guard (see Maroon’s article last issue), a campaign by family and supporters led not to the removal or disciplining of the guard, but to his transfer out of the Control Unit to, of all places, a cell on death row, a place where he apparently feels better off. Further pounding home the level of brutality in US prisons, was HRC member Dwayne Howard. Having spent time in the hole for petty infractions like making wine, Dwayne testified from his own experience in lockdown to the conditions laid out by Payne: depression, loss of memory, spiritual and emotional breakdown. Threats made to other prisoners while in the hole never amounted to anything once prisoners were back in general population. Everyone knew those in lockdown were losing their minds. One of Love’s clients at SCI Greene, who was paralyzed, couldn’t make it to eat or leave his cell. Guards punished him by collaring him with a dog leash. Greene, by the way, is by no coincidence the same prison where Abu Ghraib torturer Charles Grainer worked and apparently practiced before torturing Iraqis overseas. Another client of Love’s was strapped naked to a chair in isolation, another visual that we may find more familiar in the Iraqi context than locally. Once the panel opened up for questions, by far the most to the point was by a man from Sierra Leone who asked what the left, the NGOs and Civil Society are doing; why are people in this country so blind when there are these Abu Ghraib’s right here? Questions the entire room, mostly radicals either supporting prisoners or working against prisons no doubt have asked themselves too. Luqman responded angrily and pointedly: ”Every time I hear about Abu Ghraib, it burns me up!” The media had covered abuses at SCI Greene back in 96. Amnesty International included it in reports, the New York Times has covered it, but the left for the most part wasn’t bothered. “In Rockview prisoners were chained to their beds naked. Why are we talking about Abu Ghraib when guards are abusing our brothers at SCI Fayette. It’s the same guards abusing people in America! They don’t want the truth, even some of those activists who come in there don’t want the truth!”

This piece appeared in an issue of the Philadelphia anticapitalist newspaper the defenestrator.

Abuse and Deaths at SCI Smithfield

Thu, 30 Apr 2009 22:12:03 GMT

3 prisoners who forecast their own "suicides"

by dave onion with reporting by Andalusia Knoll

On April 7th this year a small crowd gathered in the Rotunda of the Harrisburg State Capitol to protest recent deaths in Pennsylvania prisons. Most of the demonstrators, who presented a list of demands to law makers were family or friends of the deceased. Some prison advocates and activists were also present from the Fight for Lifers West, STOPMAX Campaign, Prison Society, New Vision Organization, defenestrator and Friends and Family of Prisoners Emergency Response Network. With one of the key organizers stuck in traffic, the protest self organized and relatives of the deceased spoke on the loss of their loved ones.

According to the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections (PA DOC) nine prisoners committed suicide in PA prisons in 2007. That conditions of prison life have led many inmates to suicide is relatively common knowledge, but relatives of the prisoners immediately sensed something was wrong. Of the nine so-called “suicides,” three took place at SCI Smithfield in Huntington, PA. All of them happened to take place in the prison’s dreaded RHU or Restricted Housing Unit, commonly known as “the hole”, where prisoners are sent to solitary confinement as punishment. Prisoners regularly suffer severe mental breakdowns while in the hole, and cases of food tampering, increased general restrictions and beatings have made the experience even more severe for many.

Relatives of the deceased pulled together and compared notes. All three, it turned out had communicated to their people warning them that Correctional Officers were out for their lives and not to believe any stories of suicides, if they were to suddenly turn up dead.

Among the 3, Joe Kapa was the first to die on the June 25, 2007. His father, Joe Kapa Sr., who was present at the protest expressed disbelief about his son’s death being labeled a suicide. “Like I said,” Joe explained, “he was in for sixteen years, he took his life allegedly on the 25 of June 07 and he was supposed to get out in September, which was only three months away.”

Another inmate, Joe Holguin, was found dead hanging in his cell on October 29th after telling his sister Angie Zheng of similar concerns during a visit: “He told me if anything ever happens to him, don’t let them get away with it! He did seven out of nine years. He was on his way home and went through hell.”

On December 2 of last year, just weeks after sending one of these letters, Clifford Finney of North Philly was found hanging in his cell, also shortly before his scheduled release. In a letter to his family Clifford wrote: “If something happens to me remember: it was the C.O.’s doing. They hung me.”. In another letter from a week before his death, he wrote that he feared for his life:”It was a murder, not just suicide. Get an autopsy! Check my belly. I will swallow info leading up to the death for real clues that will show I’ve been murdered. I love you, I miss you, I need you! I’m going to maybe make it home.”

Finney had already completed his full sentence years ago, but was hit with new charges by guards just before his release, resulting in several extra years of incarceration, numerous beat-downs and stints in the hole. “Even after his death, they wanted to charge him with another one,” said his mother, Carolyn Finney.

“We’re trying to push for an independent investigation into these deaths . We’ve been trying to contact our local representative to no avail. No one is helping us and we need help. Not just for Joe Kapa, not just for Joe Holguin and not just for Clifford Finney, but also for the inmates that are still being abused in those prisons, “ said Zheng.

Zheng is frustrated with a complete lack of response or even interest in the deaths by politicians who she says treated her as if she were a criminal.

The small coalition demands the establishment of an independent oversight committee with full prison access, adherence of the PA DOC to the Geneva Convention, limiting the use of isolation strictly for prisoners’ safety and independent, unmonitored tip lines accessible to all prisoners so they can report abuses.

Though small, the spirit in Harrisburg was hopeful and combative, an inspiring example in a growing network of small grassroots prison support groups, many of which consist of little more than a few relatives enraged at the treatment of their loved one. With this years STOPMAX organizing conference about solitary confinement and torture in US prisons in Philly this May and the prison abolitionist Critical Resistance conference in Oakland, CA coming up in September, let’s hope we can reconsolidate, strategize and seriously raise hell against the living hell too many of our people know as prisons.

This piece appeared in an issue of the Philadelphia anticapitalist newspaper the defenestrator.

Raid On Gilbert’s Shoes Demystified

Sun, 30 Nov 2008 22:12:03 GMT

On the morning of Friday, June 13th, 2008, Philadelphia police entered a Ridge Avenue home without a warrant and arrested four Philadelphia community members and dear friends – Daniel Moffat, Trevor Burgess, Andrea, and Jennifer Rock. These residents were pulled from their home at 1652 Ridge Avenue, arrested, and detained without charges at the Ninth District for over twelve hours.

During their detention, Philadelphia Police called in the City’s Licenses and Inspections Agency, who deemed the house uninhabitable, and sealed the doors. Despite an extraordinary output of community support in response to the raid, the residents of the affectionately named Shoe Store are still facing an arduous struggle to reclaim their home. As we continue to support the displaced family of the Ridge Avenue Shoe Store, we seek to put their situation in the context of policing and displacement happening city, nation and world wide. We send this letter with two-fold intention: to respond to all the comrades who have asked how they can help, as well as to activate our support for those affected by these policies in the context of a diverse movement with wide and varied experience.

The Ridge Avenue Shoe Store is located in North Philadelphia’s Francisville neighborhood. Like many Philly neighborhoods, Francisville is a poor, black, neglected and economically marginalized part of the city. It is neighbored, however, by the newly affluent, mostly white, Spring Garden and Fairmount, making it a recent prime site of real estate speculation. The Francisville Community Development plan discusses a “Ridge Avenue Corridor;” the main artery of the neighborhood to become a pedestrian friendly commercial center replacing homes with businesses and parking lots. The Shoe Store residents identify Francisville in the early processes of urban gentrification (here, the process of poor people, mostly of color, being displaced by those with more resources and economic power). The forces of gentrification in Francisville look similar to the same process in other parts of the United States: further policing and surveillance, police harassment of homeless and youth, evictions of squatters, early developers purchasing abandoned buildings, increased city attention on the historically ignored “quality” of the neighborhood buildings and property tax increases up to 1000% (700% in the case of the Shoe Store).

The new mayor of Philadelphia Michael Nutter ran on a platform of crime reduction in the nationally renowned “Killadelphia.” He was elected promising to implement “stop and frisk” policing, a vague policy modeled after a New York City initiative with results of legalized racial profiling. Nutter appointed Charles Ramsey as police chief to partner with him in the crime crackdown. In his first months as police chief, Ramsey, well known in Chicago and DC for his political repression and extensive infiltration and snitch programs, ran a police force which experienced a number of on-duty deaths recently, and has, in response, become fearful and angry.

Poor neighborhoods and people of color, particularly young black men, have felt increased policing and harassment since Nutter’s inauguration. In early May, Fox News caught the Rodney King style beating of 3 black men by a mob of cops on camera. The situation here looks bleak. The city has not seen a dramatic decline in violence. School funding and employment opportunities remain at some of the lowest levels in the country. But some have started organizing. A fledgling coalition against police brutality had been circulating petitions to pressure the District Attorney Lynn Abraham to hold police accountable for their savage treatment of Philadelphians recently. Francisville has experienced this “crack-down on crime” first hand, mainly in the form of increased targeting of black youth. Police brutality and harassment is a frequent experience of Francisville residents.

Surveillance cameras have been introduced into “high crime” communities all across the city, a program left over from the former Mayor Street. Francisville is reportedly among the first neighborhoods to have surveillance cameras installed. It’s now impossible to enter or exit the neighborhood without passing a police camera. Among the five new cameras in Francisville, one appeared on the block of the Shoe Store, another just down the street on Ridge Avenue. A few days before the raid, this camera had been painted with yellow spray-paint, effectively putting it out of commission. 2500 more cameras are planned for the rest of Philly. Funded by Federal dollars, almost all these cameras are destined for communities of color and around high schools with large black populations.

Some of our readers may know the residents of the Shoe Store first hand. For those who don’t, living at the Shoe Store was a group of young folks, who are committed to principled political and community work for social change. Shoe store residents have done anti-war, anti-imperialist and international solidarity work; they work in shelters, mobilize against sexual assault, are engaged in prison activism, run a free food distribution, and are community gardeners.

Residents of the Shoe Store, in conjunction with members of their community, began to ask why Francisville, in particular, was feeling such increased police presence, and why now. In the week leading up to the raid, they gathered signatures on a petition requesting a community consultation on the new surveillance cameras as well as on the petition on the police violence.

At 11 AM plainclothes detectives and the Police Captain of the Ninth Precinct came to the door of the Shoe Store. Daniel Moffat aka Wiley, the legal owner of the building came to the door, and was immediately threatened by the officers who claimed to be checking out a complaint of trespassing in an abandoned property. Wiley locked the front gate and tossed the keys to the house through the gate, when the police produced no warrant to enter or search the building. He was handcuffed. He then watched the police force entry to the building. The three other residents home at the time were on the roof of the building. They too demanded that the police produce a warrant, but were instead offered handcuffs and the back of police cars.

Word had spread about the illegal entry of police into the house, and friends from the neighborhood and other parts of the city gathered to observe and document. The presence of observers made the police clearly uncomfortable. While support arrived on the corner across from the Shoe Store, so did nearly a dozen other law enforcement agencies. With no warrant, the police went in and out of the house, ostensibly looking for something to charge the residents with. Captain Wilson, of the Ninth District and among the first to arrive at the Shoe Store, told a City Paper reporter: “We’re trying to drum up charges against them, but, unfortunately, we’ll probably have to let them go.

”While still waiting in the squad cars, Police called the the City’s Department of Licenses and Inspections (L&I) to come to the house. Since large parts of the house are being rehabbed, numerous inspectors, with free reign and no time limits, ordered that the house be cleared and sealed. This is not the first time L&I inspections have been used for politically motivated evictions. Especially in the gentrification climate today, more and more Philadelphians are feeling the heat of L&I, apparently more motivated by police or speculators than any pretense of public safety. during the course of the raid a number of other agencies showed up including PA State Police, Fire Marshalls, captains from other districts, various higher up police bureaucrats and a fair number of plain clothes detectives. Homeland Security was called to the scene, after which an observer overheard her expressing anger at having been called unnecessarily.

The last of the residents were released from police custody at 3:30 am on Saturday morning. None were ever charged. They then received notice that they would have 2 hours to remove all their belongings from the building, starting at 10 am the same day. Friends mobilized to help, but the residents were only able to take out what they could carry. Allowed in one at a time, and with police presence, they found their papers and photos strewn about their rooms. As Andrea, the only African American resident, struggled to carry her guitar out with other belongings, police snidely insinuated she had stolen it and refused to allow her to re-enter. During the illegal search of the house the day before, police took into custody a laptop computer, the paper trail to which leads to PA State Police Bureau of Criminal Investigation, Intelligence Division - which is part of the Joint Anti-Terrorist? Task Force(JATTF). Also missing from the house were a house phone list posted on the wall, notebooks, photos, and phone books.

The Shoe Store residents received an unbelievable outpouring of support from their friends. On Saturday evening, a community meeting was held in West Philadelphia to provide testimony on exactly what happened. Over 100 people gathered creating a room privileged with resources and know-how to begin organizing on behalf of the residents immediately. Large media, legal and fund raising work-in groups formed.

Of crucial importance to the Shoe Store residents is that the raid on their building be put into the context of the development, surveillance, and organizing happening in their community. On Monday afternoon the residents participated in a Francisville community meeting. Over 50 people came and discussed police harassment and gentrification in their neighborhood. Numerous neighborhood residents voiced concerns about police harassment, including having cars impounded for no obvious reason, things being stolen from houses by police during searches and police breaking into buildings with warrants for other addresses.

The Shoe Store residents are committed to remain an active part of their Francisville community, and continue the dialogue from this community meeting.

On June 17th, the Shoe Store in exile held a press conference outside of City Hall. The event was well attended by press, supporters, and police. See below for links of what was for the most part sympathetic media coverage.

Police tried to paint the Shoe Store residents as a hate-group, as dangerous troublemakers. They have attempted to call the greenhouse on the roof a “bunker” referring to possibly the most notoriously shameful piece of institutional racism in Philadelphia’s police history: the police bombing of the MOVE Organization’s West Philadelphia home which burned down an entire city block and killed 11 people. Police also claimed there was anti-police graffiti and “propaganda” inside the house, apparently aggravated by the petitions mentioned earlier.

After demands from the residents, L&I did a walk through with a structural engineer who jointly determined the house was safe and the owner would be allowed back in, in effect forcing them to unseal the building and return the keys. So the threat of the building being cleaned and sealed (ie. losing all their stuff) has blown over. The pressure necessary to make that happen came from a mix of grassroots Francisville support, media pressure, some legal pressure and working some folks’ personal relationships with politicians and bureaucrats. Unfortunately, the rest of the house can’t live there legally and have been crashing at friend’s houses since the raid. They are considering legal proceedings against the city.

If it were not for the Shoe Store’s personal connections to a loose network of friends, organizers and activists, such access to media, lawyers and politicians would not have been possible. Also, if it were not for the years of work meeting people and building personal relationships in Francisville, it would not have been possible for the Shoe Store to mobilize such widespread support in their community and put pressure on the politicians from the grassroots of the district.

It is of deep concern to the Shoe Store that people understand this raid in the context of gentrification and police brutality in Francisville, and in the city of Philadelphia. And that it’s not just the Shoe Store feeling this sort of pressure, the rest of the neighborhood has felt it much more consistently. As organizers and radicals, it’s imperative we extend that sort of solidarity to others as well, to people beyond our direct communities of friends who feel the brunt of displacement and state violence, but may not have access to this kind of political network.

SUPPORT

People continue to pour in with questions of how to support. Following is a list to answer that question, including media support, as well as some links to some resources focusing on gentrification and media coverage of the raid.

Licensed Contractors

The Shoe Store has been ordered to bring the building up to code, a massive and expensive project. Though they have the skills and knowledge to do this themselves, it needs to be done by licensed contractors. So they’re especially looking for licensed electricians. But also licensed plumbers, carpenters etc., if you know one or are one, please pass on the word!

Funds

The fund raising crew has put together an appeal for funds ( http://defenestrator.org/shoe_store_funds ). Essentially they are looking for funds to help them cover the roughly $1000 of costs from the raid, though they may have future appeals when costs come up. If you’d like to make a donation, you may do so in cash or check (made out to Jennifer Rock). We can pick these up from you, or you can drop them off at LAVA or 4722 Baltimore (the mail-slot to the left of the A-SPACE). Mark them “SHOE STORE” in big letters. For those out of town, send them to LAVA, attn. Gilbert’s Shoes, 4134 Lancaster Ave., Philadelphia, PA 19143

Media

It’s useful to keep the media buzz going about the raid, so write letters to editors of Philly Papers letting them know that you think L&I is being used to mess with people who are critical of police. It is important to make the links to ongoing issues of police violence, surveillance and gentrification too! Commenting on the current stories in the papers and blogs will help keep these stories alive as well! you can use this handy tool to fire off a number of letters to editors at once: http://wilpf.org/letter-editor/

You can be in touch directly: Shoe Store, 1652 Ridge Ave, Philadelphia PA 19130-2135

Philadelphia Combat Zones

Wed, 30 Jan 2008 22:12:03 GMT

All over the news end of November last year was the murder of Sean Bell by the NYPD. It was his wedding night and the unarmed Bell was gunned down by 50 shots from plainclothes police. But as the year (which was one of Philadelphia’s deadliest) was coming to a close, Philly cops had already put an end to the lives of 20 Philadelphians. 2006 marked the deadliest year at the hands of cops since 1980. We currently boast the deadliest police force of all big cities in the US with more killings than New York City, which has 13 times the population. Just minutes into 2007, as firecrackers and celebratory (for once) gunshots thundered through our neighborhoods, Philly cops took another life. 20 year old Bryan Jones was shot dead by cops in Overbrook, reportedly responding to New Years revelers who had shot at a cruiser. Jones was unarmed and by all accounts not in any way involved in the gunfire.

At 2am on January 14th, a man with a knife on 9th and Market was shot and killed after allegedly yelling "Kill Me!" at police. Though the number of bullets weren’t reported, there was no doubt a plentiful barrage. A man in a parked car nearby was also hit and wounded, but survived. Seemingly without a trace of irony our local news outlets featured experts discussing "Suicide by Cop" as a mental health disorder.

January 17 another man was killed by police after an armed robbery.

January 20th, cops killed unarmed 16 year old Tyron Sparks while responding to a robbery in northeast Philadelphia. Police later told press that Sparks had first pulled a sawed off shotgun, but no gun was found on him. It turned out that Sparks also had nothing to do with the robbery.

State violence aside, last year’s violence, measuring over 400 in murders in Philadelphia was itself a powerful resonator of a more generalized violence. The popular violence on Philly streets coincides with an increase of spectacular violence (violence portrayed on the media), a continuing increase in prison population (still disproportionately high compared to increases in anti-social violence or legal crime, still racially disproportionate to crimes committed). It happens to coincide with the continuing polarization of already disparate wealth and resources. And it’s virtually impossible to ignore the increase in the systemic globalization of state violence as we see it devastate Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia and elsewhere.

Predictably, the violence also coincides with numerous opportunistic proposals by politicians for alarming increases in repression and social control. The Day after MLK Day, Ex-City? Councilman Michael Nutter, presumably as part of his mayoral campaign, proposed declaring a "State of Emergency" in order to allow police to randomly search and frisk in areas with high-crime. Read poor neighborhoods; in Philly read black and poor neighborhoods. Nutter even defended himself in the press by using Bush’s post 911 retractions of basic freedoms as acceptable precedents for his own mini version of the Patriot Act.

State Rep Chakka Fattah, another mayoral candidate goes even farther. In addition to providing the funds for police to increase their numbers as much as THEY (yes the police) feel is necessary, he suggests the city should install 1,000 surveillance cameras in hotspots and communities with high crime rates, something current mayor Street is already implementing on a smaller scale. This would include "forensic imaging technology", ie. cameras equipped with computer software to identify people in public based on their facial structure and could identify whether someone is carrying a gun from their posture. Another part of Fattah’s proposal is to "Collaborate with Businesses to Make Their Surveillance Camera Footage Available to the Philadelphia Police Department."

Fattah’s plan sounds conspicuously inspired by that of DARPA’s Combat Zones That See (CTS), a project intended to be implemented in Baghdad and other urban combat zones. CTS is a network of thousands of surveillance cameras, which like the Fattah proposal are plugged into a computer system capable of reading license plates, recognizing faces and matching them with information already in their "terrorist databases". CTS uses software which can also trace the paths of individuals and cars throughout a city. DARPA’s budget estimate for 2007 puts aside almost nine million dollars specifically for developing and testing CTS.

Ironically CTS doesn’t seem to have been implemented in Baghdad so far. Here in our own combat zone, Philly would be among the trailblazers in such social control. Philly’s deadliest year in recent history is just the sort of local September 11th needed to make social control nightmares like these real.

Other mayoral candidates are more or less in the same boat. State rep Dwight Evans wants to bring back John Timoney (Phila police comissioner when Philly cops beat and arrested over 400 anti-Bush and anti-prison protesters) to deal with the violence in his own famous style. Tom Knox also sees flooding Philly with cops as a good thing for our city. Of course there’s been some lip service to social causes of crime amongst appeals for increasing fascism, but these are in essence just asides; none of the plans have any serious positive social component.

There’s no doubt that there is a crisis. On top of last years victims of the decentered generalized street warfare thousands of mostly young black men were locked up in a prison system which has no apparent effect in controlling anti-social violence while police killed a record number of poor Philadelphians. There are of course connections between all of this. Even Mayor Street commented on the connections between the Philly and Iraq combat zones earlier this month. But I’m standing here on Lancaster Ave. Here where commodity culture, neglect, racism and class war have for years sowed seeds of human devaluation, desperation, poverty; where opportunity and capital dangles lures of comfort and wealth out of reach just blocks away; where prison is just a fact of life, it’s not hard to see this violence as part of an overarching network.

Let’s face it, violence is being increasingly normalized. Fear and violence is valuable official currency and it’s increasingly accepted. And this makes for some hard questions. For one, how does one go about stopping a war waged by a state against a people. We have the war as waged by the Pentagon in the middle east and we have our combat zones right here in the form of poverty, the criminal injustice system here at home.. In the case of our government’s global wars, we have faces, institutions where we can point fingers; perhaps wage our own war against wars. But it’s a different matter with a generalized social spread of violence. One could see our Philly combat zones as product of cultural virus, brought to poor neighborhoods like the smallpox infested blankets offered to Native Americans by white settlers. Instead of smallpox we have a capitalist infested culture that spreads dehumanization and cravings for a blinding vast poverty of products and capitalist status symbols. It’s a culture that turns potential social creativity into profit for elites , turns rebellion into vicious competition (that often openly mimics the competition we see in "legitimate" capitalism).

It will take a creative struggle to turn this around. And though often drowned out by politicians visions for social control or religious tunnel vision, we’ve also seen a year of community action from across the political spectrum. In November anti-war and anti-poverty groups joined forces for a "March Under the El" to bring the wasted resources from the war to light as well as make solid connections between the Iraq war and the poverty which fuels a good deal of the violence in Philly. Uhuru has consistently called attention to killings by police. Groups like Men United for a Better Philadelphia have taken to the streets offering some alternatives in their neighborhoods. We’ve seen Stop the Violence dance parties and Hip Hop events, the Spiral Q puppet theater brought the message to last year’s Peoplehood parade. Among the most interesting events to read about was largely organized by the Lifers United Community Action Network, a group of Lifers at Graterford prison. The group managed to hold a live Satellite broadcast event " dubbed the Return of the Missing Men, where prisoners addressed Philly teens gathered at a Union Hall about the need to create communities that are safe. We should see this struggle as a social struggle that goes beyond any sort of politics we see descend on us from city hall (or the Pentagon).

It definitely takes all sorts to to get out of a mess like this. But it will also take more than "educational opportunities" or other methods of assimilating so much street rage into more legitimate forms of mutual abuse. No mayor can snuff out Philly rage with any sort of social control program. If a real alternative could be derailing this rage from its current capitalist forms into a rich social rebellion; a transformation of competitive capitalist logic into social solidarity and mutual aid; guns keeping cops from dragging off our brothers and sisters to prison instead of being used for the current collective suicide...

... well that’s any mayors biggest nightmare. Let’s bring it on.