Note: Digital Read

URL: http://www.mediafire.com/?21l3r9e1svl8h9v

Description:

Privilege, Power, and Difference… is a tool for people alike to examine systems of privilege and difference in our society. Written in an accessible, conversational style, Johnson links theory with engaging examples in ways hat enable readers to see the underlying nature and consequences of privilege and their connection to it. This… book was been used across the country.. to shed light on issues of power and privilege. 

Note: Digital Read

URL: http://www.mediafire.com/?opg167fachei183

Opening: 

“The police become necessary in human society only at that junction in human society where it is split between those who have and those who ain’t got.” -Chairman Omali Yeshitela

Why were the modern police created?

Is is generally assumed, among people who think about it at all, that the police were created to deal with rising levels of crime caused by urbanization and increasing numbers of immigrants. John Schneider describes the typical accounts:

The First studies were legal and administrative in their focus, confined mostly to narrative descriptions of the step-by-step demise of the old constabulary and the stead, but often controversial evolution of the professionals. Scholars seemed preoccupied with the politics of the politics of police reforms. IT causes, on the other hand, were considered only in cursory fashion, more often assumed than proved. Cities, it would seem, moved inevitably toward modern policing as a consequence of soaring levels of crime and disorder in an era of phenomenal grown and profound social change. [1]

I will refer to this as the “crime-and-disorder” theory.

Despite its initial plausibility, the idea that the police were invented in response to an epidemic of crime is, to be blunt, exactly wrong. Furthermore, it is not much of an explanation. It assumes that “when crime reaches a certain level, the ‘natural’ social response is to create a uniformed police force. This, of coarse, is not an explanation but an assertion of natural law for there is little evidence.”

Note: Printed Read -We’ve compiled a zine on our bodies within the context of our trans* and queer experiences. Check it out and distribute!

URL: https://docs.google.com/leaf?id=0B7AZf3-vugyKZDM2NzE2ZjctYzgxMC00YzVhLTlhMjAtZTU0MDgwMTJlYzMz&hl=en

Intro:

I have an awesome body

That’s not what you’d expect to hear from me, knowing that I’m trans and binary. We’re all supposed to want to switch our hormones over, get a mess of surgeries, and so on. And I do want those. But that’s not what this is about. I’m not here to talk about breaking down and crying, though I’ve done that. No, my body is awesome. Sure, it’s got its problems that need to be fixed, but, in the end, it’s my body. I live here. It’s perfectly serviceable, and we’ve been through a lot together. I just need to take charge of its growth now.

This body has done a lot for me. It gets met to class, I take it hiking whenever I go, I use it to ride my bike, I even us it it to control my computer and write my homework answers. More than that, it breathes and circulates blood and resists pathogens and all that other stuff I need it to do so that I can keep living.

Even beyond that, I can look in the mirror and see that I look good. On a good day, I can see a good-looking me in the mirror, and recognize myself in my own gender. It sometimes takes work to get there, work that I would rather not have to do (and will have more permanent solution too soon, I hope), but it can be done. It’s just a new thing to take care of, not only health and cleanliness, but also gendered appearance.

So, it’s a load of work, and has a few things that need to be brought back into control, but it’s still my own very awesome body, and I’m glad to have it. 

Note: 1) this is a digital copy. 2) please read and if possible buy her book, this is information that all people in the west should know.

URL:

part 1 (Intro-Chapter 6): http://www.mediafire.com/?quyqffqsxq4gw2c

part 2 (Chapter 6- end): http://www.mediafire.com/?m6g6v5yy3jjuv6w

Description:

Malalai Joya was named one of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people of 2010. An extraordinary young woman raised in the refugee camps of Iran and Pakistan, Joya became a teacher in secret girls’ schools, hiding her books under her burqa so the Taliban couldn’t find them; she helped establish a free medical clinic and orphanage in her impoverished home providence of Farah; and at a constitutional assembly in Kabul, Afghanistan, in 2003, she stood up and denounced her country’s powerful NATO-backed warlords. She was twenty-five years old. Two years later, she became the youngest person elected to Afghanistan’s new Parliament. In 2007, she was suspended from Parliament for her persistent criticism of the warlords and drug barons and their cronies. She was survived four assassination attempts to date, is accompanied at all times by armed guards, and sleeps only in safe houses. 

Joya takes us inside this massively important and insufficiently understood country, shows us the desperate day-to-day situations its remarkable people face at every turn, and recounts some of he many acts of rebellion that are helping to change it. A controversial political figure in one of the most dangerous places on earth, Malalai Joya is a hero of our times. 

Note: Printed and Digital Read

URL: http://www.mediafire.com/?ny8wjrhwaaiwh5n

Note: Digital and Printed Read

URL: http://www.mediafire.com/?qddsxqnxakysdga

Excerpt:

Note: Digital Read

URL: http://www.mediafire.com/?st27k8r2b2gy9sn

Excerpt:

Women have always been healers. They were the unlicensed doctors and anatomists of western history. They were abortionists, nurses and counsellors. They were pharmacists, cultivating healing herbs and exchanging the secrets of their uses. They were midwives, traveling from home to home and village to village. For centuries women were doctors without degrees, barred from books and lectures, learning from each other, and passing on experience from neighbor to neighbor and mother to daughter. They were called “wise women” by the people, witches or charlatans by the authorities. Medicine is part of our heritage as women, our history, our birthright.

Today, however, health care is the property of male professionals. Ninety-three percent of the doctors in the US are men, and almost all the top directors and administrators of health institutions. Women are still in the overall majority- 70 percent of health workers are women- but we have been incorporated as workers into an industry where the bosses are men. We are no longer independent practitioners, known by our own names, or for our own work. We are, for the most part, institutional fixtures, filling faceless job slots: clerk, dietary aide, technician, maid.

When we are allowed to participate in the healing process, we can do so only as nurses. And nurses of every rank from aide up are just “ancillary workers” in relation to the doctors (from the Latin ancilla, maid servant). From the nurses’ aide, whose menial tasks are spelled out with industrial precision, to the “professional” nurse, who translates the doctors’ orders into the aide’s tasks, nurses share the status of a uniformed maid service to the dominant male professionals.

Our subservience is reinforced by our ignorance, and our ignorance is enforced. Nurses are taught not to question, not to challenge. “The doctor knows best.” He is the shaman, in touch with the forbidden, mystically complex world of Science which we have been taught is beyond our grasp. Women health workers are alienated from the scientific substance of their work, restricted to the “womanly” business of nurturing and housekeeping- a passive, silent majority.

We are told that our subservience is biologically ordained: women are inherently nurse-like and not doctor-like. Sometimes we even try to console ourselves with the theory that we were defeated by anatomy before we were defeated by men, that women have been so trapped by the cycles of menstruation and reproduction that they have never been free and creative agents outside their homes. Another myth fostered by conventional medical histories, is that male professionals won out on the strength of their superior technology. According to these accounts, (male) science more or less automatically replaced (female) superstition- which from then on was called “old wives’ tales.”

But history belies these theories. Women have been autonomous healers, often the only healers for women and the poor. And we found, in the periods we have studied, that, if anything, it was the male professionals who clung to untested doctrines and ritualistic practices- and it was the women healers who represented a more humane, empirical approach to healing. 

note: This single file contains two zines.

Note: Printed Read

URL: http://www.mediafire.com/?ondiucl4c5mw56u

Excerpt:

“The police became necessary in human society only at that junction in human society where it is split between those who have and those who ain’t got.” -Chairman Omali Yeshitela

Why were the modern police created?

It is generally assumed, among people who think about it at all, that the police were created to deal with rising level of crime caused by urbanization and increasing numbers of immigrants. John Schneider describes the typical accounts: 

The first studies were legal and administrative in their focus, confined mostly to narrative descriptions of the step-by-step demise of the old constabulary and the stead, but often controversial evolution of the professionals. Scholars seemed preoccupied with the politics of the professionals. Scholars seemed preoccupied with the politics of police reform. Its causes, on the other hand, were considered only in cursory fashion, more often assumed than proved. Cities, it would seem, moved inevitably toward modern policing as a consequence of soaring levels of crime and disorder in an era of phenomenal growth and profound social change. 

I will refer to this as the “crime-and-disorder” theory.

Despite its initial plausibility, the idea that the police were invented in response to an epidemic of crime is, to be blunt, exactly wrong. Furthermore, it is not much of an explanation. It assumes that “when crime reaches a certain level, the ‘natural’ social response is to create a uniformed police force. This, of coarse, is not an explanation but an assertion of a natural law for which there is litter evidence.”

We cannot rule to the possibility that slave revolts, riots, and other instances of collective violence precipitated the creation of modern police, but we should remember that neither crime nor disorder were unique to nineteenth-century cities, and therefore cannot on their own account for a change like the rise of a new institution. Riotous mobs controlled much of London during the summer of 1780, but the Metropolitan Police did not appear until 1829-almost fifty years later. Public drunkenness was a serious problem in Boston as early as 1775, but a modern police force was not created until 1838. So the crime-and-disorder theory fails to explain why crime in the nineteenth century led to policing, and not to some other system.

Furthermore, it is not at all clear that crime was on the rise prior to the creation of the modern police. In Boston, for example, crime went down between 1820 and 1830, and continued to drop for the rest of the nineteenth century. IN fact, crime was such a minor concern that it was not even mentioned in the City Marshal’s report of 1824. And the city suffered only a single murder between 1822 and 1834.

Note: Digital Read

URL: above

Excerpt:

The Difference Between Mass and Class

Why is it important to know the difference between mass and class? The chances are that there can be no conscious revolutionary practice without making this distinction. We are not playing around with words. Look. We are living in a mass society. We didn’t get that way by accident. The mass is a specific form of organization. The reason is clear. Consumption is organized by corporations. Their products define the mass. The mass is not a cliche- ‘the masses’- but a routine with dominates your daily life. Understanding the structure of the mass market is the first step toward understanding what happened to the class struggle.

What is the mass? Most people think of the mass in terms of numbers- like a crowded street or stadium. But it is actually structure which dominates its character. the mass is an aggregate of couples who are separate, detached and anonymous. They live in cities physically close yet socially apart. Their lives are privatized and depraved. Coca-cola and loneliness. The social existence of the mass- its rules and regulations, the structuring of its status, roles and leadership- are organized through consumption (the mass market). They are all products of a specific social organization. Ours.

Of coarse, no one sees themselves as part of the mass. It’s always others who are the masses. the trouble is that it is not only the corporations which organize us into the mass. The ‘movement’ itself behaves as a mass and its organizers reproduce the hierarchy of the mass. 

Really, how do you fight fire? With water, of coarse. The same goes for revolution. We don’t fight the mass (market) with a mass (movement). We fight mass with class. Our aim should be not to create a mass movement but a class force.

What is a class? A class is conscious and acts collectively to organize not only itself, but also the people (mass) it rules. The corporation is the self-conscious collective power of the ruling class. We are not saying that class relations do not exist in the rest of society. But they remain passive so long as they are shaped solely by objective conditions (i.e. work situations). What is necessary is the active (subjective) participation of the class itself. Class prejudice is not class consciousness. The Class is conscious of its social existance because it seeks to organize itself. The mass is unconscious of its social existence because it is organized by Coca-Cola and IBM.

The moral of the story is: the mass is a mass because it is organized as a mass. Don’t be fooled by the branded name. Mass is thinking with your ass. 

Note: Digital Read

URL: http://www.mediafire.com/?qwdjq7n24ltjdxq

Excerpt:

The spread of sabotage, its increasing practice, on a greater or lesser scale, far and wide against the domination of the market is a given fact. Burning ATM booths, disabling locks at shopping centers, smashing shop windows, setting fire to the offices of temp agencies and employment offices, the sabotage of the infrastructure of capitalism (high-speed railroads, dams, expressways, construction projects) … are offensive practices against colonization of our lives by the most advanced form of colonialism- the integrated spectacle.

All this is put into practice by individuals bored with survival as commodities (life reduced to economic imperatives and disillusioned with false opposition (more false and less oppositional with each day that goes by), parties and unions that want to manage our misery and integrate us into a mod of production that prevents us from any participation in the devisions that relate directly to us and that assist in enslaving us, mutilating every gesture of negation of the existent.

The spectacle writes the scenario and distributes the roles: worker, professor, student, housewife, mother, father, son, daughter, unemployed, police, soldier, artist, humanitarian, intellectual… the majority, individuals who assume different roles in the coarse of 24 hours, see their existence as still more terrible, assuming this is possible. Everyone with his neurotic-schizoid viewpoint will react to the stimuli launched by power in the way that was already expected. 

All social activity is planned in order to reinforce the spectacle, thus slowing down its unstoppable process of decomposition. Though we don’t want to hear the shrieking of militants of whatever organization, clearly we are not against the concept of “organization” as such, but against “organization” conceived as an end in itself, as the crystallization of any ideology, and as a separated organ, representing a class.

We are for the autonomous self-organization of the exploited. History has shown through two clear examples that the traditional form of the party (Russian revolution) and union (Spanish revolution) were nothing more than two attempts to manage capitalism and not to overcome it, and this is something that, consciously or unconsciously, everybody knows. In the seizure of power, it is not destroyed, but exercised: in the first case, the class of bureaucrats replaced the bourgeoisie, and in the other case, the anarcho-syndicalist leaders participated in bourgeois power, calling for the self-management of exploitation and alienation, while the base tried to overcome the relationships of production and social relationships in practice through the direct management of every aspect of their lives and not just work.

Note: Digital Read

URL: http://www.mediafire.com/?tyynmokyomy

Opening: 

“I do not believe our wants have made all our lies holy.” -Audre Lorde

What lies between the lines are the things that women of color do not tell each other. There are reasons for our silences: the change in generation between mother and daughter, the language barriers between us, or sexual identity, the educational opportunities we had or missed, the specific cultural history of our race, the physical conditions of our bodies and our labor. 

As Audre Lorde states in the closing piece of the preceding section, “Difference is the raw and powerful connection from which our personal power is forged.” It is critical now that Third World feminists begin to speak directly to the specific issues that separate us. We cannot afford to throw ourselves haphazardly under the rubric of “Third World Feminism” only to discover later that there are serious differences between us which could collapse our dreams, rather than fuse alliances.

As Third World women, we understand the importance, yet limitations of race ideology to describe our total experience. Cultural differences get subsumed when we speak of “race” as an isolated issue: where does the Black Puerto Rican sister stake out her alliance in this country, with the Black community or the Latin? And color alone cannot define her status in society- How do we compare the struggles of the middle class Black woman with those of the light-skinned Latina welfare mother? Further, how each of us perceives our ability to be radical against this oppressive state is largely affected by our economic privilege and our specific history of colonization in the U.S. Some of us were brought here centuries ago as slaves, others had our birthright taken away from us, some of us are daughters and granddaughters of immigrants, others of us are newly immigrated to the U.S.

Repeated throughout this section is each woman’s desire to have all her sisters of color actively identified and involved as feminists. One of the biggest sources of separation among women of color in terms of feminism has been homophobia. This fear that we [whatever our sexuality] breathe in every day in our communities never fully allows us to feel invulnerable to attack on our own streets, and sometimes even in the homes we grew up in (let alone in the white man’s world). So often it is the fear of lesbianism which causes many of us to feel our politics and passion are being ignored or discounted by other Third World people. “There’s nothing to be compared with how you feel when you’re cut cold by your own…” (Barbra Smith). But we refuse to make a choice between our cultural identity and sexual identity, between our race and our femaleness. We are not turning our backs on our people nor on our selves. We even claim lesbianism as an “act of resistance” (Clarke) against the same forces that silence us as people of color.

We write letters home to Ma. 

Surfacing from these pages again and again is the genuine sense of loss and pain we feel when we are denied our home because of our desire to free ourselves as specifically female persons. So, we turn to each other for strength and sustenance. We write letters to each other incessantly. Across a kitchen table, Third World feminist strategy is plotted. We talk long hours into the night. It is when this midnight oil is burning that we secretly reclaim our goddesses and our female identified cultural tradition. Here we put Billie Holiday back into the hands and hearts of the women who understand her.

The difference that we have feared to mention because of our urgent need for solidarity with each other begins to be spoken to on these pages, but also the similarities that so often go unrecognized- that a light-skinned Latin woman can feel “at home” and “safe” (Morales) among her Afro-American sisters- that among many of us there is a deep-rooted identification and affinity which we were not, logically, supposed to feel towards each other living in segregated white-america. 

We turn to each other to make family and even there, after the exhilaration of our fist discovery of each other subsides, we are forced to confront our own lack of resources as Third World women living in the U.S. Without money, without institutions, without one community center to call our own we so often never get as far as dreamed while plotting in our kitchens. We disappoint each other. Sometimes we even die on each other. How to reconcile with the death of a friend the death of a spirit? 

We begin by speaking directly to the deaths and disappointments. Here we begin to fill in the spaces of silence between us. For it is between these seemingly irreconcilable lines- the class lines, the political correct lines, the daily lines we run down to each other to keep difference and desire at a distance- that the truth of our connection lives.