When your partner suggests that what you perceive as ‘objective reality’ is ontologically constituted by our symbolic activity, do not lose your temper or just flat out dismiss him. Pretend to listen to him, with an understanding but not condescending smile on your face, and then carefully suggest the possibility that he is using a false homology between discursive ‘production’ and material production and give him a copy of ‘Das Kapital’ for his next birthday.
LOL
OL
Art is not a mirror to hold up to society, but a hammer with which to shape it.Bertolt Brecht (via inside-illusion)
(via thesoviette)
Columbia students join West Harlem community members and the Coalition to Preserve Community to occupy a building seized under the university’s fraudulent use of eminent domain. From the CPC’s new blog:
“On March 22, 2012, members of the Coalition to Preserve Community, St. Mary’s Congregations for Justice and Peace, Harlem community members, and students of Columbia University, joined forces to march against Columbia University’s expansion plans and project of displacement. This march culminated in an occupation and opening up of the Tuck-it-Away storage building lobby, 655 West 125th St, as a center for mobilizing, organizing, and channeling resistance to Columbia’s racist, untransparent, and exploitative plans and actions.”
The occupation will culminate in an open forum on the expansion project this Monday, March 26. The forum will take place from 8-11 pm in 203 Math building on the Morningside campus. See http://www.facebook.com/events/304607396270424/
See this video for a brief history of Columbia’s role in racist, classist gentrification in Harlem.
Upon a recent Google search, I discovered that Michael Jackson once posed enthusiastically with Bal Thackeray, the founder and leader of the Shiv Sena, upon a visit to India in 1996. Apparently the occasion for Michael Jackson’s trip was a fundraiser for the urban poor coordinated by Thackeray. The Shiv Sena is a chauvinistic Hindu nationalist organization based in Bombay, which has fueled xenophobic anti-Muslim hatred and violence throughout Maharashtra and elsewhere in India for decades now. (To put this in perspective, Thackeray has repeatedly expressed admiration for Hitler.) The Shiv Sena was also the principal group responsible for the city’s name change, from “Bombay” to “Mumbai,” when they held power in Maharashtra in the late 1990s.
Ah, blissful ignorance…
On a warm, sticky winter morning, I waited nervously in a parking lot in Foshan, a city in southeastern China’s smog-choked Pearl River delta, for a man I’d never met. His name was Mr. Ou, and he ran the sprawling factory in front of me, a jumble of offices, low-slung buildings, and warehouses. Though the factory was teeming with workers, a Subaru SUV and BMW coupe were the only cars in the lot. Drab, gray worker dormitories loomed nearby, and between them ran a dusty road that led to the factory. At last a young man emerged from an office building. He motioned for me to follow him in…
Mother Jones’ (fiction-free) investigation of Walmart’s China factories.
Illustration by John Hendrix
Emma Goldman (1869 –1940)
Born into the Jewish community of what is now Kaunas, Lithuania (it was part of the Russian Empire back then), Emma Goldman immigrated to the United States when she was sixteen. There, she gained notoriety as a feminist, anarchist, pacifist, and anti-capitalist. She was a supporter of gay rights, almost unheard of for the time period. She ran her own magazine and went on speaking tours in between her multiple stays in jail.
In 1919, she was deported back to her homeland - which had gone through revolution in the interim, and was now the USSR. Emma was initially approving of the new communist government, but soon found herself disillusioned. She married a Scottish anarchist in order to gain British citizenship and find a way back to the west, where she continued to make herself unpopular by speaking out against the growing enmity against Nazi Germany. According to Emma Goldman, Britain, France, and the United States were no better than the Nazis - they were all Fascists in disguise.
But nothing fazed Emma Goldman: “The more opposition I encountered, the more I was in my element.”
Thanks to tramriot for suggesting her as a topic.
I was just in Kaunas today, wishing real hard that Emma Goldman had been there with me.
And You Wonder Why We’re Broke?
Check out this International Institute for Strategic Studies infographic on military spending.
Police used water cannons and tear gas to break up a march by thousands of Chilean students on Thursday, the first protest this year by student groups whose demonstrations demanding education reform paralyzed major cities in 2011. [READ MORE]
(via domesticterrorism)
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