Note: Digital Read

URL: http://www.mediafire.com/?25dyiavqyheyede

Summery:

In this interview, he (M-1) shares his thoughts on where hip hop is today, and it’s potential use as a tool for resistance and liberation; his recent trips to Palestine; he election of Barrack Obama; and why dead prez considers Olympia, “one of [their] revolutionary homes.” 

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: 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: Digital Read

URL: http://www.mediafire.com/?mflvvqy6yezzmkv

Excerpt:

The everyday practical activity of tribesmen reproduces, or perpetuates, a tribe. This reproduction is not merely physical, but social as well. Through their daily activities the tribesmen do not merely reproduce a group of human beings; they reproduce a tribe, namely a particular social form within which this group of human beings performs specific activities in a specific manner. The speciic activities of the tribesmen are not the outcome of “natural” characteristics of the men who perform them, the way the production of honey is an outcome of the of the “nature” of a bee. The daily life enacted and perpetuated by the tribesman is a specific social response to particular material and historical conditions.

The everyday activity of slaves reproduces slavery. Through their daily activities, slaves do not merely reproduce themselves and their masters physically; they also reproduce the instruments with which the master represses them, and their own habits of submission to the master’s authority. To men who lie in a slave society, the master-slave relation seems like a natural and eternal relation. However, men are not born masters or slaves. Slavery is a specific social form and men submit to it only in very particular material and historical conditions.

The practical every day activity of wage-workers reproduces wage labor and capital. Through their daily activities, “modern” men, like tribesmen and slaves, reproduce inhabitants, the social relations and the ideas of their society; they reproduce the social form of daily life. Like the tribe and the slave system, the capitalist system is neither the natural nor the final form of human society; like the earlier social forms, capitalism is a specific response to material and historical conditions.

Unlike earlier forms of social activity, everyday life in capitalist society systematically transforms the material conditions to which capitalism originally responded. Some of the material limits to human activity come gradually under human control. At a high level of industrialization, practical activity creates its own material conditions as well as its social form. Thus the subject of analysis is not only how practical activity in capitalist society reproduces capitalist society, but also how this activity itself eliminates the material conditions to which capitalism is a response. 

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/?bb5ud1jhf52qun2

Excerpt:

Caught In the Web of Deception

The technological system for the dissemination of ideology, the media (I use the word media to refer specifically to this system in its totality, not to refer to specific tools it used to carry out its function, since some of these tools can be used in different manner, even against this function), is an inherent part of the power structure and, therefore, an enemy of all rebellion and of every attempt to create free life.

Th media plays a specific role in the power structure, a role that, in a democratic state, becomes not only essential, but also central to the functioning of power. But before continuing, it is necessary to confront the illusions many have about democracy. While it is true democracy can merely mean a decision making process which offers all involved a say or a vote in each decision (why this is incompatible with anarchy is a subject best dealt with at another time fore the sake of brevity), in the present era, democracy is also and more essentially a system of state and social power which maintains social peace by allowing the expression of the broadest possible spectrum of opinion precisely because opinions are basically substances. Opinions are ideas that have been drained of all vitality. Separated from life and from any projectile basis, they have become harmless blathering that ultimately strengthens the democratic state by making it appear tolerant and open as compared to feudal or dictatorial states. 

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. 

Note: 1) A Digital Read 2) in comic book form

URL: http://www.mediafire.com/?wa3b010b79b74s6

Excerpt: