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/?2jixg29el6x74ym

Excerpt: 

Our current mode of existence, noted for mass production and consumption, class stratification, urbanization, forced labor, scientific discovery, high culture and art, coercive government, and exponential expansion, is unrepresentative of humanity’s extensive history. For over 99% of our 3 million year existence, small autonomous communities of people would subsist by means of hunting, fishing, and gathering, and much later, through gardening and herding. This was not a line of toil, by any means, but largely one of leisure rarely requiring more than 2-4 hours daily to be spend engaged in subsistence activities. Small-scale societies not only tend to enjoy qualitatively more pleasant work and less of it, but also benefit from non-hierarchical face-to-face relationships, gender equality, individual autonomy, an open and living landscape, superior health and dental quality, and long-term ecological sustainability. This is not to say that conflict was non-existent either within r between communities- however, self-sufficiency combined with limited organizational scope allows small-scale societies to avoid the disaster of civilization, and the nightmarish realities that complement it, such as mass starvation and disease, enslavement of both humans and other species, mass imprisonment, and deadly large-scale wars.

Civilization prohibits people from surviving through direct relationship with the land. The rules and armies of early cities evicted and destroyed native inhabitants of the surrounding land, mandating that it be devoted to mass agricultural production for the purpose of feeding citizens and slaves. Landlords, corporations and states control land today, and regularly charge a rent or mortgage to its residents. To earn the right to occupy a space in the world, one must accept an income-generating position in an office, factory, industrial farm, mine, ect. Unlike hunting and fishing, such positions typically aren’t enjoyable or leisurely, but stressful, monotonous, exhausting, and injurious, while in the meantime objecting one to exploitive authority of overseers and bosses. Without the time, energy or land required to live self-sufficiently, people must pay for needed items and food through even greater toil while contributing to industry’s replacement of vibrant living landscapes with homogenous agricultural implications, unsightly cancer-causing industrial wastelands, and socially destructive urban sprawl, the surplus of goods and services created by conscription and employment also fuels an economy of rulers and specialists who take a vested interest in intensifying the exploitation of all life. 

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/?phumsr44na99cpr

Excerpt:

“Either you respect people’s capacities to think for themselves, to govern themselves, to creatively devise their own best ways to make decisions, to be accountable, to relate, problem solve, break-down isolation and commune in a thousand different ways… OR: you-disrespect them. You dis-respect ALL of us.” - Ashanti Alston

Many classical anarchist regard anarchism as a body of elemental truths that merely needed to be revealed to the world and believe people would become anarchists once exposed to the irresistible logic of the idea. This is one of the reasons they tended to be didactic.

Fortunately the lived practice of the anarchist movement is much richer than that. Few “convert” in such a way: it is much more common for people to embrace anarchism slowly, as they discover that it is relevant to their lived experience and amendable to their own insights and concerns. 

The richness of the anarchist tradition lay precisely in the long history of encounters between non-anarchist dissidents and the anarchist framework that we inherited from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Anarchism has grown through such encounters and now confronts social contradictions that were previously marginal to the movement. For example, a century ago the struggle against patriarchy was a relatively minor concern for most anarchists and yet it is now widely accepted as an integral part of our struggle against domination.

It is only within the last 10 or 15 years that anarchists in North America have begun to seriously explore what it means to develop an anarchism that can both fight white supremacy and articulate a positive vision of cultural diversity and cultural exchange. Comrades are working hard to identify the historical referents of such a task, how our movement must change to embrace it, and what a truly anti-racist anarchism might look like. 

The following piece by IAS board member Ashanti Alston explores some of these questions. Alston, who was a member of the Black Panther Party and the Black Liberation Army, describes his encounter(s) with anarchism (which began while he was incarcerated for activities related to the Black Liberation Army). He touches upon some of the limitations of older visions of anarchism, the contemporary relevance of anarchism to black people, and some of the principles necessary to build a new revolutionary movement. 

Print: http://www.mediafire.com/?2ocamvokevnirm9

Print Cover: http://www.mediafire.com/?5jxoo0701rfjq2d

Read Onscreen: http://www.lizardelement.com/unionism/unionisminsidewebread.pdf

Introduction:

The current crisis of capitalism confronts students with a rising cost of education and a drastic decrease in the real-world returns from a college degree. Not only is it harder to afford college, but we’re coming out if with more debt and fewer job opportunities. It seems like a four year degree only qualifies you to become management at Wendy’s instead of a fry cook.

Students are organizing on campuses across the country, but we are a divided movement at best. Since the collapse of the student movement in the 70s, most campus activism has taken the form of single issue groups. There are the environmentalists, the labor solidarity organizations, the identity based justice groups, feminist collectives, and a growing number of radical anti-capitalists, sometimes all organizing on one campus but rarely together supporting each other. While it’s great to see all this organizing, it’s disheartening to see our different organizations having such difficulty working together. Even when we do coordinate our work on a local level, our national networks are often very reluctant to do so. 

Even the militant resistance that is pooping up against budget cuts and tuition hikes is disconnected. The fiscal situation in California is not unique. States across the country are cutting funding to schools, and university administrators are using these budget cuts to hike up tuition (hikes that will remain long past the current depression) and to cut essential services and programs that students fought for in the past (African-American Studies, queer studies, sexual assault resources, to name a few.) While students in California are launching an amazing response to these hikes, there seems to be little connection with students engaged in the same fight over here on the east coast. Students at University of DC just lost a fight against a 100% tuition increase, making one of the most affordable colleges in the country out of reach for many. Students at the University of Maryland are fighting to keep their Office of Diversity afloat, and are gearing up to confront cuts to Women’s Studies and African American Studies programs. While all of these campuses are fighting nearly identical campaigns that spawn from the same “crisis”, there is almost zero coordination beyond individual campuses.

If we are to address our common crisis as students, as current and future workers, as people living on this planet, we need to focus on building our power. Students are fighting amazing campaigns, but if we want to hold onto these changes, we have to organize beyond individual policy changes at our respective schools. We must organize for institutional power over our universities and create a way of holding onto that power. Progressive policy changes are great thing on our campuses, and they should be fought for, but they should be fought in the context of building student power at our own school and across the country. Building student power means gaining more and more control over our colleges and the devisions that affect us as students. In the end, student power means a student-run educational system. It’s our education- we should control it.

To ensure that our local victories do not become isolated pockets of progress and resistance, to ensure that our work spreads, we must find ways to coordinate our campus efforts with other schools in our area. Movements grow not only by example, but when we actively engage people and share our resources and hard earned lessons. Becasue so many education policy decisions are made by state governments, we need to coordinate our work on a statewide level in a way that foster cross campus solidarity and still encourages local initiative. And if we ever want to seriously push for universal education, we have to have a student movement that coordinates on a national level. Coordinating efforts should never mean that local campus organizing becomes merely an extension of some larger campaign because this sort of strategy can’t support long haul organizing. We need coordination that is mutually beneficial to everyone involved.

If we want to create radical change at our colleges, change that addresses economic and cultural facets of our life, we need to move toward Student Unionism. We must move towards a Student Unionism that is run by the rank and file of students, that fights alongside of the faculty and workers, that acknowledges and seeks to empower the historically oppressed, and that seeks to revolutionize our educational system and the world. 

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. 

note: Digital Read

URL:

pt 1: http://www.mediafire.com/?zxfzyyyvtaz

pt 2: http://www.mediafire.com/?mjnuueuo1ml

by John Molyneux

URL: http://www.mediafire.com/?3vwggfmyyme

Note: Digital Read

Opening: 

The Antisocialist Argument

“Socialism is a good idea but it won’t work. You can’t change human nature!” This is the most common and influential of all the objections made to socialism. It is the first argument that comes up on the factory floor, in the cafeteria or in a bar or coffee shop. It is the argument that many politicians and intellectuals fall back on.

It is also an argument accepted by many people who would sincerely like to see a better society but can’t quiet believe it is possible. It is even accepted by some who consider themselves socialist. The effect is that they water down socialism to mean just tinkering with the present system rather than trying to change it fundamentally.

The human nature argument can seem very useful to those who oppose socialism. It is short, sharp and to the point, a one-line answer that seems to require little further thought. It relates to many other ideas that are widely held, for example: “there always have to be some people on top,” “people are basically selfish,” “some people always want to have more than others,” “revolutions always go wrong and lead to tyranny.”

The argument feeds on the old Christian idea that we are all born in original sin, handed down through the generations from Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. The notion that there is some basic flaw in human nature, which makes genuine equality and cooperation between people impossible, seems to provide a ready explanation for so many of the evils in the world- like racism and sexism. Specific political issues like the degeneration of the Russian Revolution into Stalinist dictatorship and the apparent failure of socialism in Eastern Europe and China are also put down to human nature.

These ideas seem to connect with virtually everyone’s person experience. After all, who hasn’t seen people ruthlessly competing for promotions or been let down by a friend or frustrated by people’s apathy and selfishness? These experiences have helped raise the human nature argument to “common sense.” Nevertheless, we shall see why is it completely false.

Note: Digital Read

URL: http://www.mediafire.com/?n3tmmmflny5

Opening:

Thanks for picking up the outlaws issue of the F-Word! Since our second print ish we’ve gotten picked up by a publisher (woot!), the brand new PM press, based out of Oakland, CA. Very exciting.

So, yay for romanticizing outlaws, misfits, and rebels! We certainly aren’t the first to fall for these dashing types who only fight outside of the law because the law itself is unjust.

Our very own Gender Outlaw Kate Bornstein is featured as feminist hottie in this issue along with Howard Zinn, Loretta Ross, and plenty of other feministy goodness. Enjoy! 

note: Digital Read

URL: http://www.mediafire.com/?52t52zxnknj

Description:

Clamor Magazine was a movement publication that existed between 2000 and 2006, covering radical politics, culture, and activism.

Clamor published 38 issues and over 1,00 different writers and artists, first as a bimonthly and then as a quarterly magazine and companion website. The mission was: Clamor is a quarterly print magazine and online community of radical thought, art, and action. An iconoclast among its peers, Clamor is an unabashed celebration of self-determination, creativity, and shit-stirring. Clamor publishes content of, by, for, and with marginalized communities. From kitchen table to shop floor, the barrio to the playground, the barbershop to the student center, it’s old school meets new school in a cattle for a better tomorrow. Clamor is a do-it-yourself guide to everyday revolution. 

This analysis is presented as a case study on how movement projects and organizations deal with vital but rarely discussed issues such as management, sustainability, ownership, structure, finance, decision making, power, diversity, and vision.