AK Press is in the Blogosphere

From the anarchist publisher, AK Press, based in Oakland, CA…

We’re pleased to announce the launch of the AK Press Blog, REVOLUTION BY THE BOOK!

Visit such exciting posts as interviews with AK authors, reviews of and excerpts from AK books, and reports on the events at AK. We will also post news about other anarchist publishers and booksellers, translations, interviews with activists behind other projects, and lists of relevant conferences. Be sure to look out for video and audio clips as well!

Initially, we will post new material three times per week, although we hope to publish with greater frequency in the near future. We encourage anyone interested to subscribe to our RSS feed and stop by as often as possible.
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Food Chains

A food chain, according to Wikipedia, is the flow of energy from one organism to the next and to the next and so on.  You start with what’s called a primary producer, usually a being that rates low in terms of evolutionary development and differentiation, and go successively through various trophic levels of predators feeding on prey, till you end with the top consumer, usually a carnivore.

In our domestic universe, this web of energy flow was replicated in our caravan that steadily made its way from New York City to the Bay Area.  The animals were not represented, in our case, two by two other than the felines, but our food chain was complete with primary producer – a friend’s son’s hamster – and larger consumers, including said felines and large white dog.  No one was hurt, except one busted tire on the Interstate 80 two miles outside of Salt Lake City, no bodily part was missing nor eaten.  We all emerged, weary but unscathed, on the other side of the country after six days of journeying across the highways and rest stations of America.

Some random observations from our six-day trip:

  • Driving sucks.
  • Driving a 15-year old Volvo doubly sucks.
  • Driving with a hamster entrusted in your care, two felines, and a large white dog makes for an, erm, interesting trip.
  • Cheyenne, WY is worth a closer look.
  • As well as Salt Lake City, UT. Never knew there were so many tattooed ski bums there.
  • A good balanced meal filled with primary producers can be had, if one must, at Taco Bell.

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Posted in observed, race, subbaculture | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

Equal Rights for All Workers

MARCH on MAY 1, 2008
International Workers’ Day

Join us in a May Day march to unite ALL workers!

2:00pm
RALLY at ROOSEVELT PARK in CHINATOWN
(Grand St. between Forsyth and Chrystie St.)
(B/D Train to Grand St. Station)

3:00pm
MARCH to UNION SQUARE

JOIN US TO DEMAND:
Repeal of the Employer Sanctions Provision
Legislate Equal Rights for All Workers
Establish a genuine path to citizenship for the undocumented

EQUAL RIGHTS FOR ALL WORKERS!
DON’T CRIMINALIZE IMMIGRANTS!

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The Chinese Self and Tibetan Other

I have been trying to understand Tibet. Specifically, the Tibetan struggle for self-determination. There’s the national question within China and the story China tells herself. Then, there’s the world stage and the narratives spun by the media, woven according to the ideological bias of its audience.

I will write more about the story being looped in the left wing press.
Free Tibet

Today, I want to think about the story China tells herself. The story begins with the Han identity, a historical construction that dates (like most things) to the early twentieth century as the nation shifted from empire to state. The notion of Han existed for many centuries – the Han dynasty ruled the Wei river valley in central China from 206 BC to 220 AD – but was not considered an ethnic identity until shortly after the foundation of the People’s Republic of China in 1949.

The nation, proposed Prasenjit Duara in Rescuing History from the Nation: Questioning Narratives of Modern China (1995), can be understood as “a provisional relationship, a historical configuration in which the national ‘self’ is defined in relation to the Other”. Two subjects were created in the nation, including the Self who was defined in terms of who was excluded from national membership. The Self contained several different others, people objectified as being essentially different from the aims of the national community. Han nationalism can be understood using Duara’s definition of nationalism as a relational identity between the Self who was included in the national community, and the exclusion of others. The Han were constructed as an indigenous and homogenous identity that was essential to being “Chinese”.
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All Your Marbles Are Belong To Us

$2 Bear SternsWe’re all subprime now, so says the general consensus by economists while the Fed bails out Bear Stearns and provides corporate welfare to the tune of over $13 billion daily $28 billion in just three days.

How did this happen, I and David Leonhardt ask?

Steve Randy Waldman tries to explain it to us:

Alice, Bob, and Sue have ten marbles between them. Whenever one kid wants another kid to take over a chore, she promises a marble in exchange. Alice doesn’t like setting the table, so she promises Bob a marble if he will do it for her. Bob hates mowing the lawn, but Sue will do it for a marble. Sue doesn’t like broccoli, but if she says pretty please and promises a marble, Bob will eat it off her plate when Mom isn’t looking.
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I Am Not A Hegelian

I am not happy with my last post. I don’t really understand Buckley and his ilk, or his detractors, and I think I resorted to general abstractions to dismiss — “fascist” — rather than play with who he was and what he contributed to the neocon movement. I conflated neocons with neoliberals without explaining why. And, I didn’t speak to his irresistible attraction, now written about by tons of pundits, his affected speech, his flickering tongue, and his sibilant pronunciation of consonants. His preferred mode of transportation was motorbike in NYC, he knew he was privileged and still chose to write about the disadvantaged, and he referred to the Christian Right post-1980s as “accretions” in an interview on public radio.

Georg HegelFor all of those reasons and one more, I am not satisfied with the conclusions of my last post. The other basis of my frustration? I am not a Hegelian. He of the awful master-slave dialectic, and that terrible “p” word pomos abhor: progress.

Hegel saw the slow, steady rise of mankind as a struggle for freedom — a process that liberated the human spirit and drew the human race forward. This struggle was unavoidable, even as the object was always unattainable-an ideal to be approached, but never achieved.

Hegel thought the old world would be destroyed, and on the ruins would be built the new. This is not dual power or reformism, this is apocalypse followed by transcendence and immanence, then mutation into a different species. It’s like punctuated equilibrium instead of evolution.* Read More »

Posted in dead white men, realpolitik | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments

Sesquipedalian Obscurantism

The NY Times today pays way too much respect for a man that does the world a whole lot of good dead than alive.
William F. Buckley

William F. Buckley Jr., who marshaled polysyllabic exuberance and a refined, perspicacious mind to elevate
conservatism to the center of American political discourse, died at 82.

Breathes the first sentence of Buckley’s obituary. Described as the “sesquipedalian spark of the right”, Douglas Martin credits Buckley as the architect of U.S. conservatism, the one that transcended and dominated this country’s political discourse post-WW II.

Liberals ruled this country since the FDR’s New Deal, so that,

Lionel Trilling, one of America’s leading intellectuals, wrote in 1950: “In the United States at this time liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition. For it is the plain fact that there are no conservative or reactionary ideas in general circulation.”

Thanks to Buckley, neoliberals had an ideology that married right wing libertarianism, free market economy, and anti-communism. How did the bourgeois scion of an oil tycoon author an ideology that was to so captivate the white working class, and usher Reagan and the Bush family into the White House? Read More »

Posted in dead white men | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

NYC Anarchist Bookfair

NYC ANARCHIST BOOKFAIR
http://anarchistbookfair.net

February 19, 2008

Contact: Eric Laursen, (917) 806-6452

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

“New York Is Anarchist Country”: 2008 NYC Anarchist Bookfair Scheduled for Sat., April 12

NEW YORK – Following up its very successful debut last year, the 2nd Annual NYC Anarchist Bookfair is scheduled to be held on Sat., April 12, again at Judson Memorial Church in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village. Last year’s Bookfair attracted over 1,500 visitors and featured 60 independent publishers, booksellers, infoshops, zines, record labels, media creators, and labor and other activist groups, plus an art show, live performance, and 12 panels, presentations, and workshops over two days.

NYC Anarchist Bookfair

This year’s Bookfair will be an even bigger event, with more panels, workshops, and skillshares extending over both Saturday and Sunday at Judson Memorial Church and a second venue to be announced shortly. Topics will include the ABCs of anarchist theory and practice, anarcha-feminism, anarchist publishing, anarchist education, urban and indigenous social movements, and anarchist/queer activism.

Alongside Saturday’s exhibitors will be an expanded show of Anarchist Art. An Anarchist Film Festival and an Anarchist Cabaret are planned for the afternoon and evening of Fri., April 11. Read More »

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Human Geography: A New Journal

Human Geography: A New Journal

Published by the Institute for Human Geography Inc, a non-profit charitable foundation incorporated in the State of Massachusetts, US. Mass ID number 000971232
Address: P.O. Box 307, Bolton, Massachusetts, 01740-0307 US
Email Address: insthugeog at gmail.com

Call for submissions and donations

Human Geography

We are starting a new journal in Human Geography broadly conceived to cover topics ranging from geopolitics, through cultural and economic issues, to political ecology. We envisage a well written, critical, intellectual journal, not full of empirical detail, and not encumbered by too many citations, a journal that can be read in its entirety. The journal will be peer reviewed -but we want to give positive, helpful reviews of papers, and not savage them or decline to publish based on minor points made by reviewers who hide behind anonymity. We plan a mix of longer papers up to 7500 words and shorter papers of up to 3000 words, with timely opinion pieces and book review essays interspersed within the body of the main text of the journal. We plan a paper version of the journal for the moment, followed soon after by a web site with multi-media content.
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Posted in urban studies | Tagged , , , , , , | 1 Comment

The Nacirema Dream

The Godfather is the I Ching. The Godfather is the sum of all wisdom. The Godfather is the answer to any question. What should I pack for my summer vacation? “Leave the gun, take the cannoli.” What day of the week is it? “Maunday, Tuesday, Thursday, Wednesday.” And the answer to your question is “Go to the mattresses.”

— Joe in “You’ve Got Mail” (1998)

The Godfather

What is so American about the mob?

I have two random things that are tenuously linked that lead me to this question: Nacirema and Nicholas Calvo. The former being the subject of anthropologist Horace Miner in his 1956 ethnography, and the latter is a subcontractor hauling debris out of Ground Zero as part of Port Authority’s $250 million effort to rebuild the so-called east bathtub at Ground Zero.

So what, you ask.

So, Calvo was a “mob associate” of the Genovese crime family. He was arrested last week in the roundup of 87 people on state and federal indictments, ranging from a 1976 murder, to extortion of monies from a Nascar construction site in Staten Island, to bribery of labor officials.

La Cosa Nostra
According to the NYT, the mob is still deeply entrenched in the construction industry. New York’s five families – Bonanno, Colombo, Gambino, Genovese, and Lucchese — still rack up huge profits from ventures such as loan sharking, labor racketeering, securities fraud, gambling, and drugs. They were once bigger, 26 families ruled the country, with their fingers in everything from labor unions to presidential elections. Now, they’ve merged and consolidated into five.

Similar to U.S. corporations post-1970s. Read More »

Posted in capital | Tagged , , | 2 Comments
  • About

    Yvonne lives in Berkeley, California with her partner and their four-legged family. During the day, she works at a racial justice think tank, crunching numbers to eradicate white supremacy. At night and sometimes weekends, she sits at her computer, trying to make sense of the world.

    These are the fruits of her attempts. Apologies in advance if they are sometimes sour, not always sweet, unripe or not fully ready to launch. Yvonne is working on her craft of writing and playing with using all five senses.

    Yvonne tweets, shares what she reads, makes friends, takes pictures, and watches video. Occasionally, she chats and talks on the phone. She loves hearing from you at yvonnegrapher at gmail dot com.