FABRIC

thesoviette: stickyembraces: When your partner suggests that...

Wed, 06 Jun 2012 12:27:53 -0400

stickyembraces:

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

"Art is not a mirror to hold up to society, but a hammer with which to shape it."

Wed, 04 Apr 2012 07:45:47 -0400

“Art is not a mirror to hold up to society, but a hammer with which to shape it.”

- Bertolt Brecht (via inside-illusion)

Tonight! Open Forum on Columbia’s Expansion (Panel &...

Mon, 26 Mar 2012 10:26:00 -0400

Tonight! Open Forum on Columbia’s Expansion (Panel & Q&A)

8 pm in 203 Mathematics Hall, Columbia campus

more info

http://stopcolumbia.wordpress.com/

Fri, 23 Mar 2012 10:15:00 -0400

http://stopcolumbia.wordpress.com/:

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 125^th 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...

Wed, 21 Mar 2012 20:23:00 -0400

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…

motherjones: On a warm, sticky winter morning, I waited...

Wed, 21 Mar 2012 20:03:13 -0400

motherjones:

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

broletariat: fyeaheasterneurope: Emma...

Tue, 20 Mar 2012 22:42:13 -0400

broletariat:

fyeaheasterneurope:

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.

motherjones: And You Wonder Why We’re Broke? Check out this...

Mon, 19 Mar 2012 17:17:07 -0400

motherjones:

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...

Fri, 16 Mar 2012 16:54:11 -0400

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]

domesticterrorism: Union membership vs income inequality -...

Fri, 16 Mar 2012 16:52:53 -0400

domesticterrorism:

Union membership vs income inequality - 1917 - 2008

youdon’tsay.jpg

"Today, the University simultaneously touts nearing its fundraising goal of $5 billion for real..."

Fri, 09 Mar 2012 16:48:00 -0500

“Today, the University simultaneously touts nearing its fundraising goal of $5 billion for real estate acquisition and campus expansion into Manhattanville. The expansion, while in part in the name of research, has also been executed with the promise of local employment for West Harlem. While presenting itself as a job machine for New York City, Columbia must also demonstrate it is capable of producing jobs worth having.”

- Take a stand for Columbia’s workers

Unusually strong editorial in the Columbia Spectator, addressing Columbia’s recent attempts to cut benefits for unionized workers. By Elliott Grieco, published March 6.

Some footage from last Wednesday’s labor rally, March 7: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8LdoIMSEOCw&feature=youtu.be

Russia in color, a century ago

Thu, 08 Mar 2012 22:51:54 -0500

Russia in color, a century ago:

A switch operator poses on the Trans-Siberian Railroad, near the town of Ust Katav on the Yuryuzan River in 1910. Google Map, (Prokudin-Gorskii Collection/LOC) #

@broletariat

gregorpanpa: Paris Commune (1871)

Wed, 07 Mar 2012 18:41:27 -0500

gregorpanpa:

Paris Commune (1871)

"This form of deep democracy, the vertical fulcrum of a democracy without borders, cannot be assumed..."

Wed, 07 Mar 2012 11:54:00 -0500

“This form of deep democracy, the vertical fulcrum of a democracy without borders, cannot be assumed to be automatic, easy, or immune to setbacks. […] For those concerned with poverty and citizenship, we can begin by recalling that one crucial condition of possibility for deep democracy is the ability to meet emergency with patience.”

- Now reading Deep Democracy: Urban Governmentality and the Horizon of Politics by Arjun Appadurai. The essay examines an Alliance between three organizations led by Mumbai slum-dwellers, offering compelling reflections on federation, patience, the “politics of shit,” and other facets of urban resistance under a globalized economy. In Public Culture 14 (1), 2002. download pdf

Wonders of colonial knowledge production. First...

Tue, 06 Mar 2012 20:15:00 -0500

Wonders of colonial knowledge production. First installment.

Selections from the 1921 census of Bombay city: distribution of beggars and prostitutes. (click to zoom)

Iowa Moves to Keep its Factory Farms Shielded from View

Tue, 06 Mar 2012 10:06:29 -0500

Iowa Moves to Keep its Factory Farms Shielded from View:

via Mother Jones

myflagisblackandred: projectdom: Free Breakfast Program c/o...

Mon, 05 Mar 2012 10:10:15 -0500

myflagisblackandred:

projectdom:

Free Breakfast Program c/o the Black Panther Party

“… the greatest threat to the internal security of the country.”

An Inspiring Evening for a Student in Search of Her Studies

Mon, 05 Mar 2012 09:58:00 -0500

An Inspiring Evening for a Student in Search of Her Studies:

Lindsey Catherine Cornum reflects on the Colonizing Bodies panel held at Barnard, February 24. Also, check out Lindsey’s review of Arundhati Roy’s recent book—also on her blog—and her article on Anarcho-Indigenism in the first issue of Fabric! (Download pdf via mediafire.)

Indian Spring? Information and the Revolution in Land Rights

Sun, 04 Mar 2012 14:20:00 -0500

Prof. Sanjoy Chakravorty (Temple University)

Tuesday, March 6 from 1:15 - 2:30 p.m. in 114 Avery @ Columbia University

Land acquisition for industry and infrastructure has become a source of major conflict and political upheaval in the last half decade in India. Some believe this is the biggest problem in India’s development and growth path. A massive new land acquisition bill has been devised to handle the crisis. Why is this happening now, after six decades of independence and sixty million lives disrupted by land acquisition for development? The key is the price of land, which is determined by the land market and its underlying institutions: laws, norms, and information systems. Prof. Chakravorty argues that the ongoing conflicts signal fundamental changes in the land market, driven by fundamental institutional changes, especially in information systems. New information agents (civil society and political parties) and new media (TV in particular) have eroded the information asymmetries that sustained earlier land acquisition practices. The argument is illustrated with data on conflicts and land prices.

Light refreshments will be served.

"Whatever traces of vitality remained would have a wasteland as their only refuge."

Wed, 29 Feb 2012 11:45:39 -0500

“Whatever traces of vitality remained would have a wasteland as their only refuge.”

- Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith, p. 52.

c.f. mumbai slums