Investigative journalist Naomi Klein speaking on “The Rise of Disaster Capitalism” is a PM Press DVD produced by Bonobo Films. It consists of a brilliant 65-minute talk Naomi gave on May 19, 2008 at the Friends Meeting House in London introducing the paperback edition of her book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (New York, 2007), plus a remarkably insightful 10-minute interview with Naomi done in London the next day.  Some sections of the talk are on youtube (1), but the whole is not, and is worth having in its entirety.

The talk was part of a fundraiser organized by the ‘Hands Off Iraqi Oil’ coalition (very active in 2007-2008, http://www.handsoffiraqioil.org/), along with activists from the Britain-based ‘War on Want’ associated with Hands Off Iraqi Oil, and many other anti-war and environmental groups. War on Want is a non-profit organization long committed to the struggle against neoliberal globalization, world poverty, Israeli apartheid and much more (www.waronwant.org).

Many of you will know Naomi’s book, and its thesis of how casino capitalism in its present phase is using ‘shock’ tactics — from 9/11 and the ‘war on terror,’ to natural disasters like the Dec. 2004 tsunami, Katrina, resource wars in West Asia, the serial disasters of climate change — as a platform for taking over markets, raking in spectacular profits, extending corporate control in the wake of disaster and its aftermath, and the “collective vertigo” it often leaves people in.  For Naomi, “The market is the disaster itself and the response to it,” emphasizing the utter bankruptcy of the current economic model, a “class war waged by the rich against the poor,” and the need for “deep democracy” and a people’s alternative.  In the states, she stresses, 9/11 is

key to understanding how we got to where we are […] People know they’ve been living the ‘shock doctrine’ since Sept. 11. That shock, that blow to the psyche of this country, was expertly harnessed by the administration to push through policies that they could not push through otherwise (2).

In the May 2008 interview on the DVD, Naomi emphasizes that she wrote the book:

precisely to make people more resistant to the shock doctrine I hope the book would be a kind of ‘shock shield’  in a way, because these tactics are all about lack of information and disorientation,  What we need to get out of shock is a story, a narrative that explains what is happening around you. 

The most ‘opportune time’ for deregulation and neoliberal restructuring, Naomi convincingly argues, is during severe crisis and its aftermath. And the architects of such free marketeering in the midst of chaos – the “privatization of disaster response” — know how to rationalize their greed full well, putting a ‘moral veneer’ on their rapaciousness. Naomi begins her talk with data from a 2008 empirical study on how corporate execs and conservatives are very good at ‘rationalizing’ inequality to justify their own actions, part of their own “ideological tranquillizer,” the psychology of guiltless greed.

The London talk centers more on theses and facts drawn from the Part 5 of the book: “Shocking Times: The Rise of the Disaster Capitalism Complex,” Part 6 “Iraq Full Circle; Overshock,”  Part 7 “The Movable Green Zone: Bugger Zones and Blast Walls,” and the conclusion “Shock Wears Off: The Rise of People’s Reconstruction.” Naomi also talks a lot about what’s happening in New Orleans by big capital developers, a “city that’s been stolen,” where public housing has been destroyed to make way for expensive new condos, and charter schools are enjoying a huge boom. Not in her book is a whole section in the London talk on crony capitalism in Burma and the push there in 2008 by the military junta to sell of much of the state-owned economy, and push privatization of prime agricultural land in the wake of the powerful cyclone that ravaged the coast, exemplifying what could be a neoliberal catchphrase across the crisis-ravaged planet: “the more people die, the more land there is to grab.”

These past months, the BP oil spill and its aftermath (3), the record heat and fires in western Russia and the incredible monsoon flooding across much of northwestern Pakistan are prime examples of serial crises of ‘extreme weather events’ multiplying under our eyes. What big bucks will be made off these crises, what new development projects railroaded through?  Naomi’s thesis will be reflected there too. As well as the idea that when most people respond to a disaster, it’s the expression of mutual aid, helping each other — not profiteering or looting. People show incredible resilience in the face of disasters. Disaster capitalists tend to see just the opposite of that: a blank slate, a clean sheet, an opportunity to invest and earn big profits.

The core idea for the book was sparked in part by the collapse of the Argentinian economy, which she experienced directly, and the “shock and awe” attack on  Iraq and what has ensued there since. Her concrete vision of people’s alternatives touched on in the book briefly and at the end of the London talk was shaped by “the movement of ‘recovered companies,’ two hundred bankrupt businesses that have been resuscitated by their workers, who have turned them into democratically run cooperatives” in Argentina.

She and Avi Lewis made a powerful documentary film The Take (2004) about this movement, though the film goes unmentioned in her book. You can download it cost-free and show widely, to students and activists (4). Naomi likes to see such indigenous responses by working people to the violent inroads of Capital as a form of what a New Orleans activist friend of hers calls “disaster collectivism,” the art of resilience in solidarity.

At the end of her talk and the very end of the book, Naomi highlights efforts by indigenous Thai ‘stateless’ fisher communities along the Andaman Sea coast, known as Moken or Chao Lay, who spearheaded a people’s movement to reclaim their own ‘undocumented’ land by direct action and rebuild their own settlements, a people’s resistance to the corporate developers poised to move in, She notes: “a manifesto drafted by a coalition of Thai tsunami survivor communities explains the philosophy: ‘The rebuilding work should be done by local communities themselves, as much as possible. Keep contractors out, let communities take responsibility for their own housing” (Klein, 2007, p. 465).  A year after Katrina, activists from New Orleans met with Thais in the grassroots reconstruction efforts, and told them: “In New Orleans, we’re waiting around on the government to do things for us, but here you all are doing by yourselves […] When we go back, your model is our new goal” (5).

Naomi also reminds us that resistance to neoliberalism has been led by indigenous groups in Latin America, like the Zapatistas. I think that her entire argument, and several strands of analysis on the broader left, would be strengthened by looking in depth at the work of political anthropologist James C. Scott, in particular his most recent study The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (2009), and his earlier path-breaking studies (6). Scott’s ideas on how simple people resist hegemony and the state are very relevant to what is going on, maybe even in working-class school classrooms. As is his critique of “high modernist ideology” and the failed mega-schemes of the authoritarian state.

Naomi ends both her book and talk on this upbeat note:

Such people’s reconstruction efforts represent the antithesis of the disaster capitalism complex’s ethos, with its perpetual quest for clean sheets and blank slates on which to build model states. […] local people’s renewal movements begin from the premise that there is no escape from the substantial messes we have created and that there has already been enough erasure—of history, of culture, of memory. […] As the corporatist crusade continues its violent decline, turning up the shock dial to blast through the mounting resistance it encounters, these projects point a way forward […]  Radical only in their intense practicality, rooted in the communities where they live […]  they are building in resilience—for when the next shock hits (p. 466).

As a social historian, Naomi also knows this disaster capitalism complex is another high-tech chapter in Western imperialism, and that the “shock doctrine” is nothing new. She notes in her London talk that in colonizing Massachusetts, the Puritans saw the spread of smallpox as a kind of “Divine plague” that helped cleanse the ‘Heathens’ from the land the settlers coveted. God was on the side of these ‘new Israelites,’ using disaster as murderous sickness to assist in the ‘conquest of New Canaan’ (7). And we are in deep denial about the history of this country, and the myths it was founded on. History, and understanding it better, is, Naomi reminds us, our “shock resistance.”

Buy the DVD. It is a lecture, the camera mainly on Naomi. But can serve as a good introduction to Naomi Klein’s ideas for students, local activist groups, and anyone interested in changing this System. She’s a remarkable speaker. There are other lectures of Naomi’s on youtube (8; see also [2]), but this one is special. Part of the proceeds from the sale of this first-rate DVD are being passed on by PM Press to War on Want.

Notes

1. London Talk, first 10 minutes: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5tFkMay6R2Q  ; excerpt on climate change: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LrQq8wGAA6I&feature=related ; excerpt on ecological debt, ‘the key idea of our time’: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kOuJv5cJ1-M&feature=related . 

2. Naomi Klein, Portland, 54-minute talk, April 28, 2008: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9zj0Qc0Yz2w&feature=related

3. See comments by Naomi on the BP oil spill, May 28, 2010:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lF5mrIU52S4 ; idem, Gulf Oil Spill; A Hole in the World, The Guardian, 19 June 2010 http://www.naomiklein.org/articles/2010/06/gulf-oil-spill-hole-world

4. See  http://tinyurl.com/2u8cnfx . The Take  (English subtitles).

5. Klein (The Shock Doctrine, 2007), p. 466. On the Moken/Chao Lay ‘sea gipsies’ struggle for reclaiming land and land rights, see http://www.seapabkk.org/newdesign/fellowshipsdetail.php?No=442 ; but Naomi probably knows this positive light she ends her book on is largely unresolved even today, and the current situation is full of uncertainty regarding the land claims of the ‘landless’ and ‘stateless’ Chao Lay, see http://speakupblog.typepad.com/speak_up/2009/12/chao-lay-update.html . Thailand remains awash with inequity, especially for its many indigenous minority peoples, largely in the northern hills, and the bottom 70% of its working families everywhere.

6. Scott, James C. (1987) Weapons of the Weak: Every Day Forms of Peasant Resistance (Yale UP); idem, (1992). Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (Yale UP); idem, (1999). Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed  (Yale UP).

7. See Templer, Bill (2006). The Political Sacralization of Imperial Genocide: Contextualizing Timothy Dwight’s The Conquest of Canaan, Postcolonial Studies 9(4), 358-391.

8.  See talk in Vancouver, Feb 27, 2007  http://tinyurl.com/266pkeh ,  6 parts.

It seems that the petty antagonisms that for so long characterized relations between competing animal activist and advocacy movements are dissipating. More and more frequently, the struggle for legitimacy between welfare, rights-based, and grassroots movements is being subsumed into a superstructural antagonism: a tension between those whose stock in trade consists of manufacturing internal contradictions (mostly welfare monoliths like HSUS) and those interested in inter-movement collaboration and cooperation. However, it is much too early to begin celebrating a new paradigm of animal activism, one that is inclusive and democratic, as too many of the most prominent and well-funded voices persist in promoting their means at the explicit exclusion of others. In this nebulous field, Dara Lovitz’s Muzzling a Movement makes an instructive key: too politically oriented and passionate to read as a rote law review yet too legalistic to pass as conventional ethics or activism, Lovitz’s text is at once an emblem and symptom of a coming animal politics.

Muzzling a Movement takes as its primary problematic the necessary failures of the American legal system with regard to the systematic suffering of animals, whether in the struggle for the eradication of torture in factory farms or the enshrinement of biosovereignty. “Necessary” because, as Lovitz notes, the legislative and executive bodies are more than just complicit in the systematic exploitation of nonhumans: “lawmakers commit the error of promoting speciesism … such that humans can feel justified in denying nonhuman animals the right to be free from use, exploitation, and abuse” (23). How can one be expected to have faith in an apparatus that, even when ostensibly drafting legislation to protect the interests of animals, accomplishes nothing more than amplifying their suffering? “Our lawmakers commit the sin of omission by not passing laws that are written with the purpose of serving what’s in the best interest of the animal. All laws that pertain to animals are written with the underlying and fundamental premise that animals are our property to use and govern as we see fit” (23-24). Lovitz undertakes careful legal, critical, and anecdotal readings of the most significant meetings of law and animals in the US in recent years, including the Animal Enterprise Terrorism (née Protection) Act, recent revisions to the Animal Welfare Act, and the prosecution of the SHAC 7. What the text might lack in the presentation of unique material to the well-read activist (notwithstanding cursory glances at a handful of less familiar legal proceedings) it more than makes up for with Lovitz’s ability to demystify the functioning of the judiciary and subsequently highlight it’s systemic and operative failures vis-à-vis nonhuman animals. For the interstate activist, the book also serves the utilitarian function of synopsising state laws protecting animal enterprises.

As a practising lawyer, it is unsurprising that Lovitz, despite her (hopefully) uncontroversial claims that systemic animal abuse is foundational to liberal and neoliberal  policy, still pursues legal recourse as part of her advocacy work. This is where the book might strike some among the new guard as heretical, or at least symptomatic of centralized practices of animal advocacy. Lovitz devotes a great deal of the book to making the case for the illegitimacy of labelling any animal activist a terrorist, a category, she argues, that has become progressively more populated, proportionate to the obfuscating of the concept of terrorism: “animal activists simply do not fit any legitimate definition if terrorist. … The government and media (funded by businesses with a vested interest in maintaining nonhuman exploitation) have been exploiting the public’s fear of terrorism … to create universal (and unfounded) fear and dislike of animal advocates” (112). Lovitz is not simply coming to the defence of those activists who work through legal and legalistic avenues, but also those who are customarily accused of ‘taking the law into their own hands’: “animal activists do not condone attacks on innocents. All individuals targeted for protest, property damage, or other economic damage are directly or indirectly involved in the abuse of nonhuman animals” (111). Though she more than once blurs prescription with description (glossing the reconcilability of the work of activists such as Daniel San Diego within her broad definition of ‘animal activist’, ex. “Most animal advocacy groups … advocate only nonviolent methods of activism” [120]) which might otherwise complicate her assumed notions of animal advocacy, Lovitz works to disabuse her readers of their prejudices of the ‘effective’ activist as an adherent of this or that philosophy, a believer of this or that strategy. “Nonhuman animals obviously cannot unite on their own behalf,” Lovitz writes, so “[i]t then falls to humans with a conscience to advocate for them” (128) – and this advocacy must be a united movement, a decentralized operation that targets not only institutional and personal abusers, but the laws (too often written by the abusers themselves) that permit and promote such abusive practices.

An old saying goes that, until lions are the storytellers, hunters will always write history to favor themselves. Countering such understandings is a fundamental aspiration to ideas like popular education as advocated by Paulo Freire. When people are educated about the world around them, the belief is that they are more empowered individuals capable of challenging orthodoxy and seeing themselves as makers of the future.

A collection lent heft by the Justseeds Artists’ Cooperative, Firebrands: Portraits from the Americas is a beautifully illustrated sketchbook of nearly 80 key figures influencing social movements. The assortment featured herein is diverse, from W. E. B. DuBois to Rigoberta Menchu, Frida Kahlo to Paul Robeson. Contemporary activists like Yuri Kochiyama and Elizabeth Martinez are at home here beside long-revered radicals like Jose Marti and Emiliano Zapata. Each entry features a portrait or artistic rendering and simple, accessible biography. Why is Florynce Kennedy an important person? What made Simon Bolivar a preeminent insurgent in Latin America’s collective memory? Firebrands ambitiously attempts to tell all the stories in a brief way, one that is instantly accessible to everyone, to varying degrees of success. Nonetheless, editors Slifer and Young manage to tell the story in a dynamic, admirable and innovative fashion.

With books that try to present a variety of historical figures, there is always room to discuss and debate choices. At least a dozen different figures come to mind that might have deserved inclusion over the additions of those who made the cut such as Tupac Shakur and Comandante Ramona, including Claudia Jones, Che Guevara, Fidel Castro and others. The Chicano movement has surprisingly few inclusions, with icons like Corky Gonzales, Ruben Salazar, Ramsey Muniz and Reies Lopez Tijerina left out. Some, however, defy any reasonable logic. If one is picking critical figures of the Black Liberation movement, for example, why feature Kuwasi Balagoon (a noteworthy revolutionary somewhat of a darling among anarchists, but frankly a less prominent organizer than at least 20 other Black Liberation Army and Black Panther Party activists) while leaving out Huey Newton, Sundiata Acoli, Kathleen Cleaver and others? As Freire himself might have acknowledged, how one includes voices in history is as important as how one tells history. Still, the quibbles are relatively minor, and probably expected. Dozens of vital individuals are featured in Firebrands, and are certain to give organizers an understanding of important people in social movements’ histories, and a teaching tool as well.

Finally, it must be said the art featured in Firebrands is outstanding. Justseeds outdid itself with a cachet of movement artists, from Melanie Cervantes to Josh MacPhee to Favianna Rodriguez. Each of the renderings captures the power of the profile, whether it is a standard portrait or a creative cut at one. The imaginative design gives a lot of heart to a volume brimming with soul.

Firebrands is a valuable successor to works like the late Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States and deserves a wide audience.

Punk, hardcore and alternative rock music scenes have been for years the almost exclusive realm of teenagers and youth in their 20s. Not only have they been areas of creative expression, but such subcultures have given young people a place to challenge beauty standards, political boundaries and cultural norms.

In the book Sells Like Teen Spirit: Music, Youth Culture and Social Crisis (New York University Press, 2010), author Ryan Moore documents the music scenes of the 1980s and early 1990s, as well as their evolutions today. From metal to Riot Grrl, Moore talks about the players and the stories that made youth music cultures what they were during these times. Moore also delves into the sociopolitical moment to relate how the dominant cultural debates directly and indirectly shaped youth music cultures. Generations-old struggles such as sexism also played prominently in many subcultures.

Most notable in this book, Moore explores an interesting subtext in youth music cultures that other writers in the midst of feminist research and study on race further explore. Namely, a wave of ‘post’ approaches (‘post-racial,’ ‘post-feminist’) take a role in youth culture that, in spite of pretensions to the contrary, only replicates and supports traditional roles and power in white, patriarchal American society.

For instance, the alternative fashion model Suicide Girls trend of a few years ago presents women from youth subcultures (punk, goth, etc.) as different, empowered female pin-ups. Such images intended to impart a view of women as self-assured, independent, sexually liberated creatures. However, the essential conversation of this image — women fitting into a male perception of beauty presented primarily as objects for male consumption — remains intact.

Men, in virtually all alternative youth music cultures, assume a position that fundamentally affirms the patriarchal position: strong, individualistic characters navigating a world in which white male hegemony is crumbling amid globalization. Moore points out the revival of swing, ska and rockabilly imagery harkens back to times in which men were the makers of their fortunes whereas today corporate power and economic uncertainty dimmed hopes and dreams of millions.

Yet many outgrowths of youth music subcultures offered refreshing challenges to the worlds in which young people grew up. Bands like Bikini Kill and the women’s zine scene are explored in Sells Like Teen Spirit, to give another perspective of young people committed to challenging power, as others before them, through their talents and passion.

Though not as expansive as similarly themed books like There’s A Riot Going On or Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop, for those interested in intersections of youth culture, music and politics, Sells Like Teen Spirit is a good text to understand or reminisce about music subcultures that were special, though could not overcome the conundrum that stymied subcultures before them: how to use the youth music subculture make substantive political, cultural and social change.

See the original review here: Sells Like Teen Spirit: Music, Youth, Culture and Social Crisis

Derrick Jensen just won’t quit, that’s for sure. The word “prolific” doesn’t really do Jensen’s output justice; this guy is like an anarcho-primitivist version of Stephen King. And much like Stephen King, he’s constantly finding new ways to evoke a feeling of terror in his readers. While King is constantly giving his readers the willies by way of fictional monsters and horrifying situations, Jensen shocks his readers by asking them to look in the mirror and examine how their lifestyles effect the Earth. And the conclusion is always the same: industrial civilization is killing the planet. Scary.

In recent years, Jensen has begun soliciting other socially conscious individuals for their opinions and testimony on where we’re headed as a species. Resistance Against Empire is his third collection of interviews with a broad range of activists, teachers, organizers, and advocates. While most of these talks are almost ten years old, the content is still extremely relevant. Jensen’s interviewees tackle modern slavery, US food aid to foreign nations, consumerism, privacy issues, military spending, nuclear proliferation, the US prison industrial complex, and much of what exists in between these issues.

The book begins with economist J.W. Smith. Smith talks about the economic exploitation of other countries by the US: for labor, for resources, and for the general buoyancy of our culture of convenience. Jensen’s style of interview is effective in that he lets his subjects talk; his questions are simple, his comments are concise, and he plays the soft-pedaling devil’s advocate to explore each side of the issue, eliciting answers to the well-worn “Well, isn’t it good for their economy?” arguments and other old mainstream media chestnuts. J.W. Smith lays out our strategy for US land monopolization in other countries: “At first by conquest, and then by inequality continually being restructured into law.” This theme runs through the book; by dispossessing people of their land, and thus their ability to grow their own food and be self-sufficient, they are left with few choices but the ones we provide them.

Anuradha Mittal claims “Destroying local agricultural infrastructures is a central function of food aid”. International loan sharks such as the IMF and WTO effectively undercut local farmers in foreign nations in order to foist our cheap, imported food product on the population, who are then beholden to the economic will of these organizations. Author of The Politics of Heroin Alfred McCoy details the CIA’s role in enabling and supporting local warlords in Southeast Asia; the consequence of this support was the nurturing and expansion of the international drug trade by way of warlords turned drug lords. Subsequently, political power and gainful employment became entirely dependent on drug production and trafficking (again, the land and its people are co-opted by the “needs” of industrialized European and western nations). In essence, the drug war creates new, circuitous markets; as the myopic, media-savvy authorities stamp out one large drug trade for publicity’s sake, they’re blind to all the other resourceful drug lords springing up in the periphery. Prohibition increases production.

Modern slavery also thrives and depends on the needs and machinations of industrialized nations.  Countries with higher international debts have higher incidence of slavery, as gutted local economies are rife with desperate unemployed. The exploited are put in impossible situations, saddled with a debt they will never be able to pay (their work is merely collateral, and does not go towards lessening the initial debt), laboring in perpetuity under debts as small as $50 US dollars. Contract slaves sign a piece of paper they many times cannot read, which forgoes their rights and traps them in endless “jobs” (such as prostitution). According to Kevin Bales, due to a population explosion and economic and social vulnerability, 27 million slaves exist globally as of the year 2000. And currently, slaves are a lot cheaper: a slave in the 1850s was typically $50,000, while a slave today ranges from $50-60.

Privacy advocate Katherine Abrecht asks “How does our society get us to replace acute, healthy outrage with a chronic, there’s-nothing-we-can-do-about-it, soul-killing ache?” Resistance Against Empire  makes an attempt to enrage its readers into action through education, and will embolden sympathetic readers, while it probably will not change your average CEO’s mind (I wonder if Jensen has ever considering infiltrating CEO book clubs? Do CEOs read books? Or are they too busy eating babies?). However, there is a surfeit of viable solutions to alleviate the overwhelming amount of grim details, with each interview ending with a mere morsel of potential future progress. That said, Jensen has compiled an ambitious compendium of truly important issues, and the book is an eye-opening and educational read.

So the story goes, the original edition of The Politics of Protest was in fact a report commissioned by the Lyndon B. Johnson Administration in 1968. That year, Johnson created the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence. Its purpose was to explore the reasons for insurrectionary activism in the United States and ways of reducing it. Students of history will recall the United States was embroiled in a war, internal crises on issues of race, voting rights and equality.

Compiled in seven months of studying various social justice struggles, The Politics of Protest as a report became a guide of sorts for law enforcement. During this period of rebellions happening across the United States, police and lawmakers were seeking, frankly, to get the same answers they got from the Harlem and Kerner Commissions years before. Publishers contextualize a reissue of the report in this book as a means of understanding anti-globalization organizing, resurgent Black liberation activism and radical environmentalism. Skolnick goes so far as to state such explicitly in the new introduction. For those who are the ostensible targets of such field research by police, The Politics of Protest is nevertheless instructive in terms of messaging and political strategy.

Beyond their politics, India’s Naxalites receive a fair bit of criticism for wholesale rejection of construction and other development projects in poor communities. The Naxals, more than their North American counterparts it seems, long understood that when one’s struggle becomes about prosperity and opportunity, a state need only pitch a few sacks of money at people to extinguish the revolutionary fires within. The Politics of Protest artfully deconstructs community rage, outlining reasons people participated in rebellions during the Vietnam War and Civil Rights era. The damage to the public trust done by law enforcement groups, some founded as hybrid unions and lobbying groups for benefits, as carrying forward the political sentiments of cops, is also described. But, most tellingly, The Politics of Protest examines why people gravitate to radical activism and, indirectly for interested radical organizers in particular, what sorts of things can states do to turn aspiring revolutionaries into more reform-minded political advocates.

States shockingly have to do very little to win over large numbers of people, either in terms of capital, political or ethical investments. A jobs program. Social welfare initiatives. National planning that assumes the superiority of a particular political system that should remain, in spite of generations of failures. For organizers, Skolnick’s findings — redress of social grievances, de-emphasis of control mechanisms, rebellions are not simply expressions of rage but intrinsically political expressions of collective protest — are a primer on political ideology and approach. Even the most radical of movements demanded base needs be met. Most implicitly focused calls on changes to a system in favor of administration in a different fashion, but in character left in its current form. While The Politics of Protest concerns itself largely with protest phenomena such as riots, Skolnick acknowledges something that comes as no surprise to activists: uprisings are not isolated or simply the work of ruffians. They are, to quote the Last Poets, “a dress rehearsal for things yet to come.” (“Black Soldier”). How to respond when the state responds not with the iron fist but the velvet glove, however, remains a tantalizing question left to be resolved.

Ostensibly about the recent political strife in the Mexican state, Diario de Oaxaca will likely be far better known for its gorgeous visuals and packaging as a diary, complete with ribbon bookmark. The book, with bilingual versions of the story under the same cover, tells the story of artist Peter Kuper’s life in the community there. However, this book is much more than that.

The 2006 skirmishes and associated campaigns against the Ruiz Administration in Oaxaca are central to Diario de Oaxaca‘s story. The author traveled to Mexico in hopes of breaking away from North American political conflicts as Bush-era crimes continued to mount, and instead found himself in the middle of a mass movement. The document is a first-person account of the tumult from an observer’s standpoint. The historical roots of grievances, the day-to-day impact on Mexicans’ lives, and the determination for a better world are all presented here with compassion and humor. Though clearly partisan, Kuper is hardly an ideologue in the most doctrinaire sense. Stories of Oaxacan forests and bugs dot a theme of resistance, the environment an allegory for the tussle between the powerless and politicians. To hear Kuper tell a story told in dozens of international press writings, Diario de Oaxaca is far more vivid a tale than one might expect, as more than just communities organizing for their survival, but the many unique, creative ways such efforts pop up.

If you are familiar with the teacher’s strike, repression and uprising that is the underlying subject of Diario de Oaxaca, what is likely to keep your attention is Kuper’s fantastic artwork, where everything from drawings of protests and stenciled posters to insects and building interiors grace dozens of colorful pages. Lovingly translated, readers can follow the typeset-style text in English or Spanish. At a time when so many publishers are playing it safe, PM Press takes a tremendous risk offering up what must be a costly item to print at an affordable rate to consumers. Nevertheless, the stunning volume is a treat for readers.

Unexplored in this and many writings on Oaxaca is a complete discourse on why the movement failed. Anarchist sensibilities seized on groups like APPO and the Oaxaca struggle as examples of organizing from below. While arguable at best, such a discourse ignores an important fact: though winning some moral victories, creating the political climate to necessitate the movement’s central demand, Ruiz’s resignation, never happened. Such is largely because organizers could not spark a mass movement that connected with the demand and united around it. Though approached in books like Teaching Rebellion, why it did not happen remains unresolved. Kuper appropriately lionizes the social moment itself in Diario de Oaxaca, but understanding where the movement went wrong remains elusive. As a result, like Kuper’s book, Oaxaca’s struggle is beautiful but ultimately stands as a look at a lost opportunity.

To be clear, Diario de Oaxaca is not an organizer’s manual by any stretch, and expecting a full exchange on movement strategy is perhaps too heady. Still, one cannot but help but wonder what could have been.

I have occasional conversations with associates about the unusual political and cultural space occupied by Latinos, and the challenges young Latinas in particular face. Often sexualized and objectified by mainstream white culture as exotic succubi, Latinas further occupy a racialized place of privilege that Black women are not permitted. Their access to white privilege, in varying degrees, creates a series of unique social questions that the broader Latina/o community struggles to address or simply avoids. As conceptions of race and gender shift, how mainstream society sees women of Latin or South American descent is an evolving area of study today. Pop culture, as with any instance of Othering, is especially harsh.

White Western sensibilities, notions of Latinidad and feminist aesthetics collide in Dangerous Curves: Latina Bodies in the Media by Isabel Molina-Guzman (New York University Press, 2010). While not fully addressing issues of Latina/o privilege related to whiteness and Blackness, it is nevertheless a thought-provoking book that reveals some insights into continental debates on Latina/o identity. If you are familiar with discussions of how mainstream media represents and misrepresents people of color, a lot in Dangerous Curves will not be new to you, but there are still plenty of diverse examples, from TV’s Ugly Betty to films like Spanglish. Molina-Guzman investigates how presumptions of conservative Latina/o politics (embodied in family-values cultural mores and religious faith) as well as Latina nubility contrasted with white beauty standards, cast Latinas into a position for white consumers that is at once more primal than traditional white images, but safer than Blackness, which is oftentimes far more scrutinized by mainstream media. More subtly, Dangerous Curves relates how the pressure to sell shapes key decisions in telling a story. Whether it is playing up Frida Kahlo’s sexual orientation over her socialist political beliefs via Salma Hayek’s portrayal in Frida or Jennifer Lopez as a diva, globalization and capital play a role here that cries out to be challenged more fully.

If there is a missing spot in Dangerous Curves, it is taking these observations beyond the academic and into the realm of affecting lives.

At times, I am skeptical of talking up reprehensible media images of people of color for fear of falling into similar traps. Are there negative images of people of color in mainstream media? Absolutely. Seen in the light of mass media’s penetration and ability to present images, Dangerous Curves is a necessary indictment for how the press and advertisers portray Latinas. But one cannot help but wonder, after completing the book, about possible organizing opportunities. An unexamined question is, how much would work with communities of color in both media and cultural literacy, as well as who we spend our money supporting, address many misgivings? A decade or more into the Internet and social media boom, is the overblown caricature approach of tabloids and gossip websites really the story, or is it the dereliction of duty among Latina/o intelligentsia to fortify communities, and the capitulation of alleged leadership to industry?

My overall critique of the approach exemplified somewhat in Dangerous Curves and elsewhere, which condemns (objectionable) media images, is that there is implicitly a belief that a solution lies in corporate America cleaning up its act. Latina stereotypes are indubitably pervasive, but aren’t we simply picking low-hanging fruit when the focus becomes how they represent members of our community? Without openly exploring corporate America’s history for coopting and opposing movements, including the Black liberation struggle, and not providing a systemic or otherwise institutional critique for how these tools of capitalist exchange — that being information and access — function, those drawing out a critique are reduced to wagging our fingers at the tabloids and corporations. Honestly saying these corporations are not friends of Latina/o communities is a bald contradiction of Latina/o assimilationist movements that have courted corporate acceptance at the cost of being in a politically unwinnable position. Such a position seeks better representation by businesses and media that are not actually politically aligned with or in solidarity with Latina/o cultural and political needs, views us primarily as customers or potential customers, or else serves interests that may use us as a wedge for white supremacy aimed at the Black community. After all, the discussion about Latinos displacing Blacks as the largest minority is a much more comfortable conversation for the powerful than how their society has failed people of African descent. Similarly, it is easy to say Shakira has whitened her image and how such resonates for many young Latinas, yet the larger media representation puzzle, alternatives, self-determination and who is responsible for addressing issues are not so clear.

Dangerous Curves is a good starting place to begin talking media justice, and offers a window to get into the more provocative conversation, which is not as excavated but gets a serviceable introduction.

See the original post here: women are not permitted. Their access to white privilege, in varying degrees, creates a series of unique social questions that the broader Latina/o community struggles to address or simply avoids. As conceptions of race and gender shift, how mainstream society sees women of Latin or South American descent is an evolving area of study today. Pop culture, as with any instance of Othering, is especially harsh.

White Western sensibilities, notions of Latinidad and feminist aesthetics collide in Dangerous Curves: Latina Bodies in the Media by Isabel Molina-Guzman (New York University Press, 2010). While not fully addressing issues of Latina/o privilege related to whiteness and Blackness, it is nevertheless a thought-provoking book that reveals some insights into continental debates on Latina/o identity. If you are familiar with discussions of how mainstream media represents and misrepresents people of color, a lot in Dangerous Curves will not be new to you, but there are still plenty of diverse examples, from TV’s Ugly Betty to films like Spanglish. Molina-Guzman investigates how presumptions of conservative Latina/o politics (embodied in family-values cultural mores and religious faith) as well as Latina nubility contrasted with white beauty standards, cast Latinas into a position for white consumers that is at once more primal than traditional white images, but safer than Blackness, which is oftentimes far more scrutinized by mainstream media. More subtly, Dangerous Curves relates how the pressure to sell shapes key decisions in telling a story. Whether it is playing up Frida Kahlo’s sexual orientation over her socialist political beliefs via Salma Hayek’s portrayal in Frida or Jennifer Lopez as a diva, globalization and capital play a role here that cries out to be challenged more fully.

If there is a missing spot in Dangerous Curves, it is taking these observations beyond the academic and into the realm of affecting lives.

At times, I am skeptical of talking up reprehensible media images of people of color for fear of falling into similar traps. Are there negative images of people of color in mainstream media? Absolutely. Seen in the light of mass media’s penetration and ability to present images, Dangerous Curves is a necessary indictment for how the press and advertisers portray Latinas. But one cannot help but wonder, after completing the book, about possible organizing opportunities. An unexamined question is, how much would work with communities of color in both media and cultural literacy, as well as who we spend our money supporting, address many misgivings? A decade or more into the Internet and social media boom, is the overblown caricature approach of tabloids and gossip websites really the story, or is it the dereliction of duty among Latina/o intelligentsia to fortify communities, and the capitulation of alleged leadership to industry?

My overall critique of the approach exemplified somewhat in Dangerous Curves and elsewhere, which condemns (objectionable) media images, is that there is implicitly a belief that a solution lies in corporate America cleaning up its act. Latina stereotypes are indubitably pervasive, but aren’t we simply picking low-hanging fruit when the focus becomes how they represent members of our community? Without openly exploring corporate America’s history for coopting and opposing movements, including the Black liberation struggle, and not providing a systemic or otherwise institutional critique for how these tools of capitalist exchange — that being information and access — function, those drawing out a critique are reduced to wagging our fingers at the tabloids and corporations. Honestly saying these corporations are not friends of Latina/o communities is a bald contradiction of Latina/o assimilationist movements that have courted corporate acceptance at the cost of being in a politically unwinnable position. Such a position seeks better representation by businesses and media that are not actually politically aligned with or in solidarity with Latina/o cultural and political needs, views us primarily as customers or potential customers, or else serves interests that may use us as a wedge for white supremacy aimed at the Black community. After all, the discussion about Latinos displacing Blacks as the largest minority is a much more comfortable conversation for the powerful than how their society has failed people of African descent. Similarly, it is easy to say Shakira has whitened her image and how such resonates for many young Latinas, yet the larger media representation puzzle, alternatives, self-determination and who is responsible for addressing issues are not so clear.

Dangerous Curves is a good starting place to begin talking media justice, and offers a window to get into the more provocative conversation, which is not as excavated but gets a serviceable introduction.

See the original post here: Dangerous Curves: Latina Bodies in the Media

An old friend and comrade, Hitaji Aziz, once told me men of color have some of the biggest struggles to confront. Stereotyped and feared, men of color at once must wrestle with their own insecurities, self-perceptions and the necessity to feel human in a world that often denies men of color the right to feel much of anything beyond objectification and playing that part.

As I read Robert Garot’s Who You Claim: Performing Gang Identity in School and on the Streets (New York University Press, 2010), I was reminded of those conversations. For the book, Garot lived among and became intimately knowledgeable about the lives of young Black and Latino men in an urban community. In these areas, young men often face intense pressure to join or support gangs. They must also figure out how to operate in a society in which they already face disadvantages. Within the gang lifestyle, there is ritual, performance and rule of law, to be sure. In addition, the subculture holds elements that make for a more fascinating story. What Garot discovers is Byzantine space filled with nuance, shifting loyalties, and how male youth of color must often artfully navigate the very act of being to stay alive and respected by their peers. In this sense, Who You Claim is more than gangs, but the complex lives young men of color are confronted with.

How white society perceives gang members and the actual realities of gang life for those exposed to it are often at odds. Films portray gang members as soldiers in the war against whiteness, eroding the very fabric of a democracy whites to hear some tell it worked centuries to build, and whose very existence requires psychological warfare to discourage and physical force in the frame of law enforcement to contain. A facet of power is being able to tell the story of the less powerful to one’s own advantage. The truth is that, as Who You Claim outlines, gang membership for young men of color is as much about staying out of trouble and trying to live a full life of a teen male as it is about fidelity to one’s allies. In TV-land, ranking out (disassociating gang identity) is a capital offense. On the street, being outnumbered, losing one’s job for getting in a fight and any number of scenarios take precedence to claiming affiliation the youth of color with whom Garot talks. These young men, he points out, want to enjoy nights out with their dates, keep jobs and have futures. However, Who You Claim avoids misty assimilationist rhetoric and pedestrian American Dreams for more complicated dialog.

“Whiteness,” Garot writes, “became relevant in a context where race was not escapable for anyone and was therefore accountable by everyone.” Outside communities of color, it is easy for whites to obscure race, to pretend that whiteness, as George Lipsitz put it, “never has to speak its name [amd] never has to acknowledge its role as an organizing principle in social and cultural relations.” Among areas where Blacks and Latinos are the majority population, whites cannot avoid race. As such, the double standards young men of color cope with and must shape their lives to function within and without are matters Garot openly looks at. Who You Claim is plainly a sociology book that examines group behavior and how individuals within the group accept their roles. However, the important discussions underneath prove most intriguing.

See the originial post here: Who You Claim

AAARRRGGGGHHHH, Matey!

I was one of the kids who grew up thinking that pirates were, well, cool as shit. Swashbucklers had evil-looking flags and tattoos, they wore eyepatches, they were fearless bandits, hedonistic drunks, and nationless nomads. No merchant vessel was safe from their ire, and their scorn for laws and the norms of a hierarchical society made it easy to want to emulate them (particularly on Halloweens, when children get to roleplay some of their favorite heroes, villains, freaks, and monstrosities). Given this background, I was excited to pick up a history of piracy since I’ve really never read any—particularly one written with a radical lens.

On this point (that the book is written from a radical perspective), Kuhn (p. 5) is explicit, “While I sincerely hope that this book can arouse the interest of a broad spectrum of readers…it would make little sense to deny that it was written from what has been called a radical perspective.” And from this perspective, he begins his reflections taking issue with two common narratives of pirates, split by ideological readings of pirate histories. That is, more conservative histories would condemn pirates as bandits, common criminals, brutish murderers, and the like. For radical historians, a certain romanticization took place that painted pirates as daring revolutionaries who lived outside the law, abolished the wage system in their communities, and transgressed normative (and hierarchical) assumptions about nation, race, gender, ability, etc.

Kuhn’s position on these two, varied readings seems to be, “Does it really matter?”

After all, what he’s done with this book is try to give us a balanced historical view of piracy (in a brief sense) in terms of what probably happened. But more important to this book is the use of the narrative of piracy to inspire us with stories for contemporary radical political theory and practice. And that’s the hook (sorry, pun intended and I might not be able to stop)—I mean there’s a lot there to be folded into fascinating and entertaining stories, allegories that give us hints at how we might change our world and ourselves.

Take, for example, the idea of the pirate as the “enemy of his own civilization” (taken from Chapter 2’s title). Kuhn borrows from Foucault’s work on a disciplinary society here, implicitly asking the reader, “What will it take for people to disobey in a society such as ours?”:

“…the decisive war is the one waged between two categories of people who are defined as ‘civilized’ and ‘savage.’ It is not coincidental that this shift in discourse correlates with the onset of the colonial European enterprise. Certain people needed to be ‘dehumanized.’ This meant non-Europeans as much as Europeans who fell outside the norms of their own society. As Rediker reports, pirates were ‘denounced…as sea monsters, vicious beasts, and a many-headed hydra–all creatures that…lived beyond the bounds of human society.’ Indeed, as late as in the early 20th century, some would call pirates ‘monsters in human form,’ or ‘an odd mixture of human trash’.” (p. 97)

There is a similar popular discourse used to describe anarchists as bandits, thieves, declassed workers who refuse to work—and there is a grain of truth in those criticisms. But what might happen if more people embraced that kind of uncivilized, “monstrous” subject position? What might happen if the ideological controls set around notions of “normalcy” were disrupted? How might people react if they were not held back by the obedient domestication that is part and parcel of much of human social existence? And how do we reach a state of generalized revolt against the existing order if people don’t break with those civilized pretensions?

And after his introduction, Kuhn goes through some of the worst pretensions of our civilization and shows counter-narratives based on pirate stories (even while dispelling some of the more egregious myths that romanticize the pirate as a sort of “noble savage”). Kuhn describes nationlessness, and by extension, statelessness in pirate communities. He analyzes their methods of organization, both in leadership and resource distribution (pirate economics!). He discusses the story of women pirates, who transgressed the gender roles of their time, even while balancing this narrative with histories of pirate sexism and, sometimes, contempt for women. He writes about pirates and sexuality (and, honestly, who couldn’t wonder about what all those sweaty folks in tight pants and tattoos stuck aboard those lonely ships together were doing?). And (surprised I’d never really thought of this myself) Kuhn talks a bit about pirates and disability (indeed, rogues with peg legs and eye patches do make for interesting anti-heros). He takes note here to point out these stories, but he balances it with historical guesses on what pirates probably were—often times not the noble savages recounted in many histories. But again, the story’s good, it inspires, and it can serve as a jumping off point to discuss all kinds of political ideas (the best stories do, after all).

And with the deftness and agility of the meanest swashbuckler, Kuhn then turns his attention to radical political theories. Kuhn discusses anarchy, and the implications hidden within varying definitions. He uses the band of pirates roaming the seas as a metaphor for Deleuze and Guattari’s “nomadic war machine.” He discusses the legend of Libertalia—surely a mythic story of a pirate utopia—but presents it as a tale about prefigurative political practice. He reads into the proletarian origins, and politics, of pirate communities; their use of guerrilla techniques; and, of course, their sailing under the black flag.

We all relate differently to various kinds of stories. I typically enjoy reading what many others consider dry and boring political theory. One of my closest friends swears by pop conspiracy novels (I’ll likely never understand this). My brother just recently tried to get me into a sophisticated spy novel he read (not into it).

If we want radical ideas to matter, and to matter to a lot of people, we need many different kinds of stories. We need dry, jargony political theory for people like me (and the rest of the world’s junkies, addicted to Proudhon, Bakunin, Kropotkin, or their modern forebears). We need mystery novels and romances. We need the Le Guin’s, who write science fiction with an eye towards communicating radical values. And we need stories about pirates. What better combo for a kid who grew up on pirates and fell in love with radical politics later in life? Win/win, really.