#and ''not knowing what a radical alternative future looks like'' (WHAT) while ignoring communism

[hussyknee]

@verycoolguy1917 the actual fuck are you talking about about. "The capitalists"— capitalism is a fucking system. I know Tankies think social justice is an MCU movie where you just gotta get rid of the Bad People, but also, that had nothing whatsoever to do with the post in the first place.

[justforbooks]

Perhaps the single most lucid, succinct, and profoundly terrifying analysis of social media ever created for mass consumption, Jeff Orlowski’s “The Social Dilemma” does for Facebook what his previous documentaries “Chasing Ice” and “Chasing Coral” did for climate change (read: bring compelling new insight to a familiar topic while also scaring the absolute shit out of you). And while the film covers — and somehow manages to contain — a staggering breadth of topics and ramifications, one little sentence is all it takes to lay out the means and ends of the crisis at hand: Russia didn’t hack Facebook, Russia used Facebook.

That may not be a mind-blowing idea for anyone who’s been raised on the internet, but it would be wrong to think that Orlowski’s film is only speaking to the back of the class. While “The Social Dilemma” is relevant to every person on the planet, and should be legible enough to even the most technologically oblivious types (the Amish, the U.S. Senate, and so forth), its target demographic is very online types who think they understand the information age too well to be taken advantage of. That’s zoomers, millennials, and screen junkies of any stripe who wouldn’t have the faintest interest in a finger-wagging documentary about how they should spend more time outside.

Taking a top-down, inside out approach to the basic nature of the social media experiment, Orlowski’s film doesn’t waste any time in proving its bonafides (and using them to strike fear into your heart). It begins with an ominous nugget of wisdom from Sophocles, who would have crushed it on Twitter: “Nothing vast enters the life of mortals without a curse.” From there, Orlowski introduces viewers to some of the most worried-looking white people you’re likely to find these days: The designers, engineers, and executives who invented social media, and then quit when they began to understand the existential threat it posed to all civilization. The guy who invented the “like” button. An ex-department head at Instagram. Even one of the techies responsible for Gmail and Google Drive. As annoying as it can be when someone tells you to quit Facebook, it’s hard to ignore someone who’s actually quit Facebook.

Orlowski’s star interviewee, however, is a guy who’s often referred to as “Silicon Valley’s conscience.” His name is Tristan Harris, he’s the co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology, and his measured alarmism serves as a worried voice of reason throughout the film as “The Social Dilemma” strives to bridge the gap between abstract threats and direct consequences. The most overarching of those macro concerns is a free-to-use business model that coerces people into betraying their own value. As the saying goes (and is quoted here): “If you’re not paying for the product, you are the product.”

With the help of articulate testimony, illuminating visual aids, and a well-crafted thesis that elegantly articulates the relationship between persuasive technology and human behavior, Orlowski fortifies the familiar argument that addiction isn’t a side effect of social media, but rather the industry’s business model. Our data is used as a currency for these companies, but our time is a far more precious commodity — how much of our lives can they get us to forfeit over to them?

The more time we spend on social media, the more valuable our human futures become; the more valuable our human futures become, the more that advertisers are willing to pay for them. And how does a company like Facebook or YouTube (which is technically Google) convince us to spend more time on their platforms? They change our fundamental perception of reality, as The Algorithm is designed to populate things into our feeds and queues that will excite/agitate us towards engagement, pull us deeper into our respective rabbit holes, and silo us all into our separate realities. It’s surveillance capitalism run amok, as well as a peerlessly effective recipe for extremism.

Orlowski, recognizing that diagnosing the problem on such a profound scale is enough to make even the most rational of people sound like they’re suffering from paranoid schizophrenia, devises a bold and semi-successful way of making these enormous concepts feel more life-sized. Every so often, Orlowski cuts away to the scripted tale of an average, middle-class American family in order to more practically illustrate the effect that social media has on our lives. And by “our lives,” this critic means to stress that “The Social Dilemma” is more interested in Facebook’s impact on the average teenager than it is in — say — Facebook’s impact on the genocidal violence against Muslim Rohyingas in Myanmar. But Orlowski knows his audience.

“Booksmart” actor Skyler Gisondo plays a high school kid named Ben who’s addicted to his phone, “Moonrise Kingdom” breakout Kara Hayward is his concerned older sister, and — in a touch of absolute genius — “Mad Men” star Vincent Kartheiser plays several human manifestations of The Algorithm itself, selling Ben reasons to stay on his phone like some kind of dystopian Pete Campbell. These sequences first arrive with the queasy awkwardness of an after school special, and seem determined to make teenagers roll their eyeballs right out of their heads. But if these dramatizations can be more than a bit too on the nose, they’re redeemed by an emergent — and very amusing — self-awareness that reflects our own; a certain level of irony is required to get through to people who regularly tweet about how much they hate Twitter (aka “this website” aka “this hellsite”).

The least effective of these moments can make it feel as though “The Social Dilemma” underestimates the persuasiveness of its own arguments, but the most valuable passages help to illustrate one particularly alarming sound byte from elsewhere in the film: “We’re so worried about tech overpowering human strength that we don’t pay attention to tech overpowering human weakness.” It’s helpful to see how social media can inflame our inherent need for approval, and discourage people from taking risks that might alienate the online community. It’s convincing to see The Algorithm alert Ben to his ex-girlfriend’s new relationship so that he’ll spend more time sifting through her photos, and — in a frustratingly reductive way — watch The Algorithm populate Ben’s feed with videos that radicalize him into the fold of a political movement called “The Extreme Center,” a cute touch that nevertheless draws a false equivalency between left and right.

Is “The Social Dilemma” persuasive enough to convince a MAGA zealot to stop binge-watching Ben Shapiro nonsense and buy a subscription to a newspaper? It’s hard to say. But the film will definitely make you more cognizant of your own behavior — not just of how you use the internet, but how the internet uses you. And it will do so in a way that feels less like an intervention than it does a wake-up call; Orlowski and his subjects recognize how the internet has created a simultaneous utopia and dystopia, and they aren’t under any delusions that we’re able to wish it away. Their documentary isn’t instructive so much as directional, and thereby most fascinating for the implications it leaves you to consider on your own time.

How has social media shaped the way we think about (overlapping) things like politics, race, and entertainment? What impact does siloing people into their own realities have on our faith in empathy, objective truth, and some kind of shared understanding? And does the isolated and algorithmically-programmed nature of streaming video make it less of an alternative to the theatrical experience than its antithesis? As human futures become human presents, these questions will only grow more urgent. In the meantime: Quit Facebook, don’t click on Instagram ads, and — for the love of God — make sure that your Twitter feed is set to chronological order instead of “showing you the best tweets first,” because the only hope we have left lies in the difference between what you and The Algorithm consider to be good content.

Daily inspiration. Discover more photos at http://justforbooks.tumblr.com

[modernabstractart3-blog]

Summary Art Painting Studios -- From Primitive Caves for you to Modern Lofts

Contemporary Painting Have anyone ever attempted to remember typically the first time when you actually discovered for yourself looking at a good abstract art work or a great abstract artwork? Do a person remember the ideas or even feelings you had by what you were looking with?

Contemporary Painting

This article is a mirrored image of some of the own personal along with opinion-based viewpoints and facts while an artist about summary art with certain personal references to facts that tend to be throughout agreement with precisely what I believe myself personally seeing that to the nature, delivery, expansion and the progression of the cut fine art outside the boundaries from the esoteric terms of often the art instituto.

To get a basic and requisite look at the topic, we should initial comprehend what the word fuzy indicates before we might tackle the actual understanding associated with "abstract art" on its own; in addition to we learn that subjective in this sense as well as as some sort of verb implies to extract or perhaps eliminate and surprisingly as being an form word means not easy to be aware of; abstruse. And as a new transitive verb it signifies to take apart, get rid of. It's origin is actually via Latin abstrahere 'draw away' or 'draw by. '

Thus, we can determine that abstract, is normally considered a form regarding art that does not necessarily depict any situation that resembled the particular objective or stuff globe; instead it showed brand-new creations that very subjectively were expressions of typically the inside substance and often the spirit in the artist and also often through a deep spontaneity that brings away the internal world of the actual artist.

Therefore abstract artwork, being the merchandise of this kind of very natural, unconstrained along with unpremeditated impulse within the lack of any external obama's stimulus, is intrinsic and is one of the very basic nature in addition to the comprise of the particular artist, as the real influence behind his designs.

As I evolved via my representational art as well as became far more acquainted using the history of skill, I learned that summary art work had its root beginnings inside the very early daybreak involving human history whenever man did start to draw upon the walls connected with their cave. These earlier cut arts, abstract images and also abstract paintings : often embellished with natural and organic fabric dyes - often attempted to help get the essential mother nature and the good quality associated with the objects rather when compared with the genuine appearance regarding them.

As the fine art historians and art pros formulated their opinions along with ideas into prints, considerably more esoteric terms spun over subject under " nonobjective art, " " nonrepresentational art, " and inch nonfigurative art. " With regards to aesthetics, since non-e on the principles of creating artwork are actually precisely formulated, that particular subset of humanities offers its pundits galore having many schools involving divergent opinions and feelings, exactly where esoteric lectures in addition to viewpoints are listened to along with open jaws in pays of cause, personal words and phrases suffers within the cloud connected with confusion.

Decades long ahead of the birth associated with fuzy expressionism in America, remarkably figurative arts had endured in the East, that is from the Islamic culture, everywhere calligraphy also as the nonfigurative skill is educated as a subject matter establishing sometimes as early because with primary schools, since excellent emphasis is located upon typically the pupils' purchasing and creating skills within calligraphy, for the reason that art regarding handwriting.

From the Western tradition, abstract patterns are identified in many forms. Nevertheless abstract arts are distinctly distinguished in composition application form in relation to pretty art as well as fine art work, where in subjective fine art, the results of development, are spontaneous snapshots with the artist's thoughts, emotions, and also the introspection by which this individual results in his work involving summary art.

Abstract Expressionism, we all know that it today, had been born in the us in often the mid 20th hundred years pursuing a massive exodus from the European avant- garde musicians to New York Town, making the area the actual center of the artwork planet; a title which had been held by Paris, france. Typically the contemporary American performers were being immensely influenced by simply the arrival of this particular new talent that will produced forth the very pleasant freedom of personal phrase throughout the vehicle of improvisation inside absence of typically the boundaries along with limitations connected with conventional types.

The introduction of summary expressionism throughout New York is the start of a new tranquil artistic revolution by which often the particular artist began to be able to rebel overloaded against typically the status quo. He started out the latest era where he or she could readily create to the future along with transform the existing scene for any better tomorrow.

Some involving the innovators in fuzy expressionism, for instance Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Willem fuente Kooning, grew to become synonymous together with New York Institution along with action painting while they enjoyed a significant role concerning how became deservedly known because avant-garde; a new region of independence for the actual artist to create in addition to construct with an ritual in which surmounted any sensible and also objective realm regarding purpose.

On the a lot more textural area, Jackson Pollock began to re-arrange the easel and coated since he pleased, conveying themselves by pouring the particular coloring from within unto typically the canvas, as he believed. Pollock, as one regarding the most mavericks involving the era, used likewise his body as a good device to paint together with, while he moved speedily all-around his large canvases on to the ground, spattering interlacing habits regarding paint, like a great emotional ride up and down, drawing often the viewer into their rhythmic movement of motions, apparently in to an infinitude, infiniteness of place.

In wonderful contrast to help Pollock, Barnett Newman's color-field paintings, are generally open career fields of substantial empty spots for the audience in order to step into all of them and also imagine what they would like to place in them.

At this point, in the interest of simplicity, we could possibly categorize fine art into just representational artwork and summary art. Representational art becoming what we instantaneously acknowledge in association to be able to recognizable objects, vs. cut art work that requires our considered to perceive the composition on the art and the contrast of each of our observation using the conclusions looking for built in the past, inside order to get to the actual immediate instance, where we live. Thus, in our declaration regarding abstract art, the particular profile or the deficiency of any psychological answers, brought about as the actual response to understanding the subjective art, elevates the problem of, what on earth is truly a abstract fine art and any time does it become productive.

Let's take a imagine that many of us are looking at the representational art, a landscape where it depicts any mossy wooded area cloaked in a low hole which has a cascading shallow steady flow working through it. Many of us can all trust exactly what we are looking in, appreciate the high quality associated with its beauty, and a few regarding us become awestricken through its magic, and possibly check out the mist in often the air and aroma the particular moss. We want to appear at it as some sort of pleasant encounter. We impression that it is restful, because it has typically the tendency to generate us really feel good. It helps all of us - even if the idea is for the brief time - ignore our issues, and converts our trouble into a brand new degree of calm, to the actual point which we could always be there, in our creativity. We walk away via the painting like a pro and seem at other artwork in which does not produce the particular same feelings and thoughts, and most of us turn and look from it again and yet again, wanting to have an overabundance of regarding the same pleasant knowledge. Delight is what all of us are experiencing.

This can be the mental reaction we sense in the direction of this very representational fine art that we fully know. The idea communicated to people a clear message within the particular boundaries connected with its techie expertise, through which it ended up being created. The complex competence wasn't the initial aesthetic attraction, however. It seemed to be typically the message that the item communicated for you to us how it looks, that fascinated us. The actual virtuosity with which it had been created becomes 2nd to help the significance of often the meaning and the good quality of the delivery. Though the message doesn't always have in order to have the same this means for every single viewer, it is usually the combination of each, the message and often the specialized expertise that gives about a comprehending that reasons the viewer as a better alternative sentimentally.

From sketching as well as chiselling with sharp rocks about the walls of their cave, to the beauty involving today's technology, male has journeyed through a incredible evolution within the artistry among many other mechanics of life. From whoever has accepted the boundaries with their culture and environmental variables, have remained true and also faithful to what that they were accepted and likely to create available as numerous representational and radical disciplines. But the more bright, who had an consciousness of higher sort of living and true probable, wished to move beyond numerous with no tolerance intended for reductions and entrapment. That they started to be the visionaries who have fled from and sought liberty regarding expression elsewhere, exactly where the achievement of which freedom was probable.

Some sort of great number of American artists along with teachers this sort of as Joseph Albers in addition to Hans Hofmann transferred in order to America in core the twentieth century and made New york city the new Art Facility of driving by leaving London right behind. They brought using them that all freedom involving spontaneity to make paintings that will became whatever you know right now as summary expressionism. While unique because our little finger prints, each appearance, evolved into a new aesthetic personal unsecured to reckon with.

Nonetheless the basic roots associated with the move from representational art to be able to abstract art work and expressionistic paintings possessed begun to build in typically the later part of often the nineteenth century in the actual form of impressionist along with neo-impressionists when art acquired begun to change their confront, while still holding onto a fantastic degree of similarity to what the idea intended to be; and by simply the time post-impressionism experienced arrived on the landscape, the field involving fine art had already been subject to some sort of noticeable change and effectively on its way to a major alteration.

Before to the arrival connected with this brand-new transformation, and also certainly prior to post-impressionism, the particular artist had been primarily interested in the organic representation of the landscape, rather then attempting to tap straight into the interesting depth of the own emotions by using his / her canvas, and get connected to typically the psyche of their market.

Nothing is more highly effective along with significant than the particular birth plus the power involving a new idea. Practically nothing can or is competent connected with stopping an concept. Once a notion is considered, it should not be stopped, diminished or utilized; because a good idea has no muscle size or form to sit on a physical space and turn subjected to the enemy pushes, and become insecure. A new thought, after conceived, takes on a lifetime of its own, by currently being nurtured from the powerful lofts of creative imagination and brought forward inside arms involving those who take hold of this.

Hans Huffman who else started to be recognized as the papa from the abstract expressionism possesses this particular to say: "An idea can simply be appeared with the help connected with the medium of phrase, typically the inherent qualities regarding which needs to be surely inquired about and comprehended in obtain to become the transporter associated with an idea. " Typically the idea of self-determinism, in order to permit oneself the control of freedom of reflection is a luxury which is not available for purchase, nevertheless to attain; a school innately available to any few, but obtainable through the masses. For a few that arrives quickly, along with the sleep come to be able to embrace it by way of hard knocks.

The evolution associated with art work from representational for you to fuzy expressionism required an enormous levels of liberalism and endorsement by those whose support and economic support had been instrumental in the tactical a higher level the abstract expressionist artists.

In an article, very unveiling of their philosophy connected with art, Johannes Itten states: "If brand new ideas are in order to think any artistic kinds, the actual physical, sensual, perceptive in addition to spiritual forces have to almost all be equally available as well as act in concert. very well Absolutely speaking, Itten claims what can be done to create the good artistic phrase within terms of the means necessary to broadcast a idea, which is a thing thought, felt or imagined from the mind, into the particular canvas being a successful function of art, which could be inquired about and realized by the person.

This kind of above criteria specified by simply Itten in the beginning 20th century was any major philosophical bite in which essential lots of gnawing and food digestion before making acceptance as well as support; and so the abstract musicians experienced to endure a quite lovely plight in generating and also preserving their income.

Prior to arrival of the actual European founders and their very own fortitude, in taking all their very precious reward involving abstract paintings, representational performers had no concept while to what freedom connected with imaginative expression really supposed to start the doorway into a new world of practicing art, that opened a new entrance in addition to an extension associated with their inner self applied.

Encountered with the sever visitors of the traditionalists who have refused change, the summary designers began to communicate their heart, on their very own new canvases, making use of their individual newly created regulations. Throughout the world of artwork, where skill is dealt as a extravagance and also not a necessity along with influenced by the discretionary dollars of any few, the entrance on the abstract art throughout general since particular cut expressionism endangered the axles on which typically the art work market was pivoted.

Transform became inevitable, as well as people who prefer the old ways broke rank along with futurists at the expense with the modern art; but often the subjective expressionists became busily linked to experimenting and looking for ways the several physical organizations and designed new instruments by which they are able to implement paint to their canvases.

Suddenly the conventional signifies by the fact that artist possessed painted became an constantly changing process of query, generation, experimentation, and more projects; each time giving birth and labor to a brand-new strategy. The canvases, chemicals as well as the studio tools lengthy far beyond the restrictions of the artist's business and also into the region of attachement and discovered objects.

Jackson Pollock ended up being the quintessential action electrician, who struggled badly using acceptance, began to utilize the body as the painting musical instrument around his / her vast canvases laid out and about on the floor along with danced with his information, drippings as well as spattering associated with paint; this individual developed and also mastered the method of action artwork and liked some regarding the sprouts of any fun new fame and good fortune ahead of he fell unwilling recipient on the demons of the traditions at the vine ripened age of 49. They left a great musical legacy behind, which continued in order to inspire many abstract music artists through the variety connected with great canvases which they left behind.

And this Pollock have said in aspect regarding his paintings: "It's most a big sport of structure, some along with a brush, a number of together with a shovel, some opt for a pen. The method regarding painting like a pro is the all-natural growth outside of need. My spouse and i want to express this feelings rather than show you these people. It doesn't subject how the paint is actually put on, as extended as something is explained. On the floor My partner and i am more content. We feel nearer, more an integral part of the painting, since this kind of technique I can wander around it, job through the four sides along with literally be in typically the art work. The modern performer is cooperating with space in addition to time and articulating their feelings rather than showing. When I'm painting, I am not aware of precisely what Now i'm doing. It's merely after the get acquainted interval that we see what We've been concerning. The artwork has a lifestyle involving its own. Every fine painter paints what they are. "

Another great designer as well as contemporary painter coming from the fuzy expressionists class is Robert Rauschenberg. Rauschenberg created influences with identified objects about the streets associated with New York Area and also defied every feasible traditionalist's rule as this individual grown through his occupation, which often became quite deservedly fulfilling, earning him excellent, prestige and financial good results within the past few generations. He after moved for you to, Florida to receive away from Brand-new York City, where he or she continue to create his or her art work on the peaceful and rich shores regarding Captiva Tropical island.

One involving the most inspiring approaches connected with Rauschenberg worth recollecting, will be his concept associated with leaving plenty of to probability for the cause regarding discovery, where the musician enjoys the serendipity involving unexpected happenstance.

The a pair of most important style of subjective expressionism, were being the motion painters having use connected with textures, spattering along with drippings of paint during, gesturing the mood on the artisan, and the color-field artists who expressed their process the unified fields regarding color and shapes, although other painters made employ of both equally styles inside their work.

[philosophyofpolitics]

Shoplifters of the World Unite

Slavoj Žižek on the meaning of the riots

Repetition, according to Hegel, plays a crucial role in history: when something happens just once, it may be dismissed as an accident, something that might have been avoided if the situation had been handled differently; but when the same event repeats itself, it is a sign that a deeper historical process is unfolding. When Napoleon lost at Leipzig in 1813, it looked like bad luck; when he lost again at Waterloo, it was clear that his time was over. The same holds for the continuing financial crisis. In September 2008, it was presented by some as an anomaly that could be corrected through better regulations etc; now that signs of a repeated financial meltdown are gathering it is clear that we are dealing with a structural phenomenon.

We are told again and again that we are living through a debt crisis, and that we all have to share the burden and tighten our belts. All, that is, except the (very) rich. The idea of taxing them more is taboo: if we did, the argument runs, the rich would have no incentive to invest, fewer jobs would be created and we would all suffer. The only way to save ourselves from hard times is for the poor to get poorer and the rich to get richer. What should the poor do? What can they do?

Although the riots in the UK were triggered by the suspicious shooting of Mark Duggan, everyone agrees that they express a deeper unease – but of what kind? As with the car burnings in the Paris banlieues in 2005, the UK rioters had no message to deliver. (There is a clear contrast with the massive student demonstrations in November 2010, which also turned to violence. The students were making clear that they rejected the proposed reforms to higher education.) This is why it is difficult to conceive of the UK rioters in Marxist terms, as an instance of the emergence of the revolutionary subject; they fit much better the Hegelian notion of the ‘rabble’, those outside organised social space, who can express their discontent only through ‘irrational’ outbursts of destructive violence – what Hegel called ‘abstract negativity’.

There is an old story about a worker suspected of stealing: every evening, as he leaves the factory, the wheelbarrow he pushes in front of him is carefully inspected. The guards find nothing; it is always empty. Finally, the penny drops: what the worker is stealing are the wheelbarrows themselves. The guards were missing the obvious truth, just as the commentators on the riots have done. We are told that the disintegration of the Communist regimes in the early 1990s signalled the end of ideology: the time of large-scale ideological projects culminating in totalitarian catastrophe was over; we had entered a new era of rational, pragmatic politics. If the commonplace that we live in a post-ideological era is true in any sense, it can be seen in this recent outburst of violence. This was zero-degree protest, a violent action demanding nothing. In their desperate attempt to find meaning in the riots, the sociologists and editorial-writers obfuscated the enigma the riots presented.

The protesters, though underprivileged and de facto socially excluded, weren’t living on the edge of starvation. People in much worse material straits, let alone conditions of physical and ideological oppression, have been able to organise themselves into political forces with clear agendas. The fact that the rioters have no programme is therefore itself a fact to be interpreted: it tells us a great deal about our ideological-political predicament and about the kind of society we inhabit, a society which celebrates choice but in which the only available alternative to enforced democratic consensus is a blind acting out. Opposition to the system can no longer articulate itself in the form of a realistic alternative, or even as a utopian project, but can only take the shape of a meaningless outburst. What is the point of our celebrated freedom of choice when the only choice is between playing by the rules and (self-)destructive violence?

Alain Badiou has argued that we live in a social space which is increasingly experienced as ‘worldless’: in such a space, the only form protest can take is meaningless violence. Perhaps this is one of the main dangers of capitalism: although by virtue of being global it encompasses the whole world, it sustains a ‘worldless’ ideological constellation in which people are deprived of their ways of locating meaning. The fundamental lesson of globalisation is that capitalism can accommodate itself to all civilisations, from Christian to Hindu or Buddhist, from West to East: there is no global ‘capitalist worldview’, no ‘capitalist civilisation’ proper. The global dimension of capitalism represents truth without meaning.

The first conclusion to be drawn from the riots, therefore, is that both conservative and liberal reactions to the unrest are inadequate. The conservative reaction was predictable: there is no justification for such vandalism; one should use all necessary means to restore order; to prevent further explosions of this kind we need not more tolerance and social help but more discipline, hard work and a sense of responsibility. What’s wrong with this account is not only that it ignores the desperate social situation pushing young people towards violent outbursts but, perhaps more important, that it ignores the way these outbursts echo the hidden premises of conservative ideology itself. When, in the 1990s, the Conservatives launched their ‘back to basics’ campaign, its obscene complement was revealed by Norman Tebbit: ‘Man is not just a social but also a territorial animal; it must be part of our agenda to satisfy those basic instincts of tribalism and territoriality.’ This is what ‘back to basics’ was really about: the unleashing of the barbarian who lurked beneath our apparently civilised, bourgeois society, through the satisfying of the barbarian’s ‘basic instincts’. In the 1960s, Herbert Marcuse introduced the concept of ‘repressive desublimation’ to explain the ‘sexual revolution’: human drives could be desublimated, allowed free rein, and still be subject to capitalist control – viz, the porn industry. On British streets during the unrest, what we saw was not men reduced to ‘beasts’, but the stripped-down form of the ‘beast’ produced by capitalist ideology.

Meanwhile leftist liberals, no less predictably, stuck to their mantra about social programmes and integration initiatives, the neglect of which has deprived second and third-generation immigrants of their economic and social prospects: violent outbursts are the only means they have to articulate their dissatisfaction. Instead of indulging ourselves in revenge fantasies, we should make the effort to understand the deeper causes of the outbursts. Can we even imagine what it means to be a young man in a poor, racially mixed area, a priori suspected and harassed by the police, not only unemployed but often unemployable, with no hope of a future? The implication is that the conditions these people find themselves in make it inevitable that they will take to the streets. The problem with this account, though, is that it lists only the objective conditions for the riots. To riot is to make a subjective statement, implicitly to declare how one relates to one’s objective conditions.

We live in cynical times, and it’s easy to imagine a protester who, caught looting and burning a store and pressed for his reasons, would answer in the language used by social workers and sociologists, citing diminished social mobility, rising insecurity, the disintegration of paternal authority, the lack of maternal love in his early childhood. He knows what he is doing, then, but is doing it nonetheless.

It is meaningless to ponder which of these two reactions, conservative or liberal, is the worse: as Stalin would have put it, they are both worse, and that includes the warning given by both sides that the real danger of these outbursts resides in the predictable racist reaction of the ‘silent majority’. One of the forms this reaction took was the ‘tribal’ activity of the local (Turkish, Caribbean, Sikh) communities which quickly organised their own vigilante units to protect their property. Are the shopkeepers a small bourgeoisie defending their property against a genuine, if violent, protest against the system; or are they representatives of the working class, fighting the forces of social disintegration? Here too one should reject the demand to take sides. The truth is that the conflict was between two poles of the underprivileged: those who have succeeded in functioning within the system versus those who are too frustrated to go on trying. The rioters’ violence was almost exclusively directed against their own. The cars burned and the shops looted were not in rich neighbourhoods, but in the rioters’ own. The conflict is not between different parts of society; it is, at its most radical, the conflict between society and society, between those with everything, and those with nothing, to lose; between those with no stake in their community and those whose stakes are the highest.

Zygmunt Bauman characterised the riots as acts of ‘defective and disqualified consumers’: more than anything else, they were a manifestation of a consumerist desire violently enacted when unable to realise itself in the ‘proper’ way – by shopping. As such, they also contain a moment of genuine protest, in the form of an ironic response to consumerist ideology: ‘You call on us to consume while simultaneously depriving us of the means to do it properly – so here we are doing it the only way we can!’ The riots are a demonstration of the material force of ideology – so much, perhaps, for the ‘post-ideological society’. From a revolutionary point of view, the problem with the riots is not the violence as such, but the fact that the violence is not truly self-assertive. It is impotent rage and despair masked as a display of force; it is envy masked as triumphant carnival.

The riots should be situated in relation to another type of violence that the liberal majority today perceives as a threat to our way of life: terrorist attacks and suicide bombings. In both instances, violence and counter-violence are caught up in a vicious circle, each generating the forces it tries to combat. In both cases, we are dealing with blind passages à l’acte, in which violence is an implicit admission of impotence. The difference is that, in contrast to the riots in the UK or in Paris, terrorist attacks are carried out in service of the absolute Meaning provided by religion.

But weren’t the Arab uprisings a collective act of resistance that avoided the false alternative of self-destructive violence and religious fundamentalism? Unfortunately, the Egyptian summer of 2011 will be remembered as marking the end of revolution, a time when its emancipatory potential was suffocated. Its gravediggers are the army and the Islamists. The contours of the pact between the army (which is Mubarak’s army) and the Islamists (who were marginalised in the early months of the upheaval but are now gaining ground) are increasingly clear: the Islamists will tolerate the army’s material privileges and in exchange will secure ideological hegemony. The losers will be the pro-Western liberals, too weak – in spite of the CIA funding they are getting – to ‘promote democracy’, as well as the true agents of the spring events, the emerging secular left that has been trying to set up a network of civil society organisations, from trade unions to feminists. The rapidly worsening economic situation will sooner or later bring the poor, who were largely absent from the spring protests, onto the streets. There is likely to be a new explosion, and the difficult question for Egypt’s political subjects is who will succeed in directing the rage of the poor? Who will translate it into a political programme: the new secular left or the Islamists?

The predominant reaction of Western public opinion to the pact between Islamists and the army will no doubt be a triumphant display of cynical wisdom: we will be told that, as the case of (non-Arab) Iran made clear, popular upheavals in Arab countries always end in militant Islamism. Mubarak will appear as having been a much lesser evil – better to stick with the devil you know than to play around with emancipation. Against such cynicism, one should remain unconditionally faithful to the radical-emancipatory core of the Egypt uprising.

But one should also avoid the temptation of the narcissism of the lost cause: it’s too easy to admire the sublime beauty of uprisings doomed to fail. Today’s left faces the problem of ‘determinate negation’: what new order should replace the old one after the uprising, when the sublime enthusiasm of the first moment is over? In this context, the manifesto of the Spanish indignados, issued after their demonstrations in May, is revealing. The first thing that meets the eye is the pointedly apolitical tone: ‘Some of us consider ourselves progressive, others conservative. Some of us are believers, some not. Some of us have clearly defined ideologies, others are apolitical, but we are all concerned and angry about the political, economic and social outlook that we see around us: corruption among politicians, businessmen, bankers, leaving us helpless, without a voice.’ They make their protest on behalf of the ‘inalienable truths that we should abide by in our society: the right to housing, employment, culture, health, education, political participation, free personal development and consumer rights for a healthy and happy life.’ Rejecting violence, they call for an ‘ethical revolution. Instead of placing money above human beings, we shall put it back to our service. We are people, not products. I am not a product of what I buy, why I buy and who I buy from.’ Who will be the agents of this revolution? The indignados dismiss the entire political class, right and left, as corrupt and controlled by a lust for power, yet the manifesto nevertheless consists of a series of demands addressed at – whom? Not the people themselves: the indignados do not (yet) claim that no one else will do it for them, that they themselves have to be the change they want to see. And this is the fatal weakness of recent protests: they express an authentic rage which is not able to transform itself into a positive programme of sociopolitical change. They express a spirit of revolt without revolution.

The situation in Greece looks more promising, probably owing to the recent tradition of progressive self-organisation (which disappeared in Spain after the fall of the Franco regime). But even in Greece, the protest movement displays the limits of self-organisation: protesters sustain a space of egalitarian freedom with no central authority to regulate it, a public space where all are allotted the same amount of time to speak and so on. When the protesters started to debate what to do next, how to move beyond mere protest, the majority consensus was that what was needed was not a new party or a direct attempt to take state power, but a movement whose aim is to exert pressure on political parties. This is clearly not enough to impose a reorganisation of social life. To do that, one needs a strong body able to reach quick decisions and to implement them with all necessary harshness.

Slavoj Žižek

LRB onlike

[friend-clarity]

An Open Letter to Administrators at McGill, York, and U Toronto Take back control of your universities.

Mon Dec 9, 2019,  Richard L. Cravatts, PhD, President Emeritus of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East, is the author of Dispatches From the Campus War Against Israel and Jews.

As you are certainly aware, in recent weeks a series of troubling incidents has occurred on your respective campuses. While the events in question were distinct, they all shared a common impulse by a groups on your campuses who believe that they, and they alone, are able to set standards for free speech—in these particular cases, involving the debate about the Israeli/Palestinian conflict and how Jewish students and other Israel supporters are treated as part of the university community.

As you well know, the notion that a vocal minority of self-important ideologues can determine what views may or may not be expressed on a particular campus is not only antithetical to the purpose of a university, but is vaguely fascistic by purposely or carelessly relinquishing power to a few to decide what can be said and what speech is allowed and what must be suppressed; it is what former Yale University president Bartlett Giamatti characterized as the “tyranny of group self-righteousness.”

At McGill, Students in Solidarity for Palestinian Human Rights unilaterally decided to purge the student government of a Jewish student because she had accepted an educational trip to Israel, stating that it somehow created a conflict of interest. Also at McGill, The McGill Daily has a long-standing policy by which any pro-Israel articles or opinion pieces are intentionally excluded from the newspaper’s pages while pro-Palestinian views not only appear with regularity in the newspaper, but the Daily’s own board publishes editorials attacking Israel and Zionism and promoting Palestinianism. At the University of Toronto, the Graduate Student Union, the only student union in Canada with a committee dedicated to promoting the anti-Semitic Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement, outrageously rejected Hillel’s request to have kosher food offered on campus since, as the Union decided, Hillel is pro-Israel and therefore kosher food should not be allowed. And at York University, with its own decade-long history of anti-Israel extremism including violence towards Jewish students, Students Against Israeli Apartheid at York University (SAIA York) riotously disrupted a November event featuring Reservists on Duty, former IDF soldiers who would be discussing BDS and the particular challenges facing the IDF in its interaction with terrorism. That event culminated in 600 activists heckling speakers, chanting death threats to Jews through bull horns, and even physically assaulting other students—all aimed at shutting down the event and preventing attendees from hearing what the guests from the IDF had to say about negotiating for peace.

Apparently, however, the universal condemnation of SAIA’s behavior that evening went unheeded by the group and its supporters. The next week, York’s Federation of Students (YFS) passed a motion to create a policy of excluding any and all pro-Israel voices from campus in the future, that they will confront “representatives of the Israeli state or any other imperialist power [that are] invited [to campus] to gather support for war and occupation in Palestine and elsewhere [by organizing] mass mobilizations of students, workers, marginalized communities in opposition.”

Each of these is an outrageous example of how universities in Canada have been hijacked by anti-Israel activists whose default position is that there is something inherently wrong with supporting Israel, and that any pro-Zionist, pro-Israel, even pro-Jewish, speech, writing, or events should not even be allowed on campus. In addition to being contrary to the whole idea of what a university represents, with competing ideas and dialogue about different points of view, the notion that one group of students can decide who can be on campus and what people can and cannot say is breathtakingly wrong, not to mention, in these cases, bordering on anti-Semitic.

These campus activists couch their language and ideology in the language of human rights and social justice, which is their furtive way of promoting their corrosive agenda and which is why administrators are often hesitant to question their tactics and the toxic nature of their ideology. But if one scratches below the surface it is obvious that they are interested only in justice for one group—the Palestinians—at the expense of and to the detriment of Israel and its Jewish population. More sinisterly, they seek justice for the long-aggrieved Palestinians not through negotiation and compromise, the manner in which civilized nations arrive at diplomatic resolutions, but through terrorism and the murder of Jews, something they unashamedly declare in their public cries for intifada—exactly what occurred in the grotesque demonstration at York.

The sententious activists fueling this ideological bullying may well feel that they have access to all the truth and facts, but even if this were true—which it demonstrably and regularly is not—it certainly does not empower them with the right to have the only voice and to disrupt, shout down, or totally eliminate competing opinions in political or academic debates. No one individual or group has the moral authority or intellectual might to decide what may and may not be discussed, and especially young, sanctimonious students—whose expertise and knowledge about the Middle East, in particular, is frequently characterized by distortions, lies, lack of context, corrosive bias against Israel, and errors in history and fact.

This is a troubling pattern, not only in Canada but throughout the United States, as well. Increasingly, groups like Students Against Israeli Apartheid, Students in Solidarity for Palestinian Human Rights, and, in the U.S., Students for Justice in Palestine, have decided unilaterally what views may be expressed on campus and which ideas they have decided are unworthy of any recognition. What that has meant in practice is that pro-Israel speakers have been repeatedly heckled, disrupted, or driven off of campus by these radicals who feel that their view having to do with the Israeli- Palestinian debate is the only truthful and valid view, and they feel morally-empowered to not even allow for alternate views to be expressed, let alone views that are contrary to theirs.

Of course, this violates the very fundamental notion of academic free speech and the idea that the university is a place where competing views need to be aired so that people can come to a conclusion about which views are stronger and which should be rejected. When anti-Israel groups and individuals only allow one side of the story to be told, they are of course eliminating all debate, all nuance, all different ways of looking at an issue. They have no right to appoint themselves the thought police, and they do your universities at large a great disservice by setting themselves up as the arbiters of truth, particularly when, in fact, they are toxic extremists with a bigoted, libelous, and often historically and factually inaccurate view of the Middle East.

Each of your respective institutions has codes of conduct which proscribe the behavior of these campus extremists, and which should be strenuously enforced when violated. York's Community Standards for Student Conduct, for example, “prohibits: disruption of, or interference with, University activities, such as: causing a substantial disorder . . ; creating dangerous situations (intentional or not); making or causing excessive noise; disrupting classes, events or examinations . . ; [and] blocking exit routes,”  and by punishing students when they violate these regulations, the university is punishing behavior, not speech. These policies have to be clearly articulated to entering students at orientation and re-stressed every year thereafter. And when student organizations are recognized on campus, they have to be made aware that if they violate any of the university’s codes of conduct and participate in the disruption of school activities, they will be punished, including being suspended and de-funded. And all students have to realize that academic free speech gives them license to express whatever ideas they have and not be punished for expressing them; what it does not do is insulate them, once they have expressed themselves, from counter speech from others with opposing views, and they should expect that competing ideas will present themselves, and they must be heard without interference or suppression.

When members of the academic community ignore those values and violate regulations, there have to be swift and significant consequences, and these sanctions must be publicized in advance of any event. Students should not and cannot be allowed to take over a campus and hijack the robust exchange of ideas—even if they think they have the best intentions and are promoting what they believe is a virtuous, progressive agenda.

“If there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and fallacies, to avert the evil by the processes of education,” observed the champion of free speech, Justice Louis D. Brandeis, “the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence.”  

Richard L. Cravatts, PhD, President Emeritus of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East, is the author of Dispatches From the Campus War Against Israel and Jews.

[labourpress]

Tom Watson speech to Labour Party Conference

Tom Watson MP, Deputy Leader of the Labour Party and Shadow Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, speaking at the Labour Party Conference in Brighton today, said:

 ***CHECK AGAINST DELIVERY***

 Conference, thank you for being here. Thanks for your enthusiasm, for your passion,  for all your hard work on behalf of the Labour Party, on behalf of our country. I’m grateful to every one of you.

Last week, the Prime Minister made yet another speech to reboot, yet again, her Brexit strategy. She chose to deliver this latest oration in the great city of Florence, though no-one seems to know why. For politicians, Florence, even more than the city of Dante, the Medicis and Michelangelo, is the city of Niccolo Machiavelli.

 I can only assume Michael Gove picked the venue. Michael Gove, who undermined his own Tory leadership bid last year, by admitting he doesn’t have the right skills to be Prime Minster. For once in his life, he was right. Trouble is, none of the rest of them do either.

 So now he’s back. Machiavelli’s famous advice was that it’s better to be feared than to be loved. This mantra runs as deep in the Tory Party as blue through a stick of Brighton rock. Fear is how they win. Fear is how they govern.

It’s fear of strangers behind this Government’s callous treatment of EU citizens living here. It’s with the peddled fear of economic ruin that they justify their cruelty to our nurses and teachers, our armed forces and our police officers. It’s with fear that they hammer our poorest and most vulnerable, while turning a blind eye to their plutocrat friends.

I'm going to be honest with you, Conference: fear is a powerful force. It won the Conservative Party elections in 2010 and in 2015. But this year, something magical happened. The spell has been broken. Jeremy told this country that we don’t need to be afraid. That another way is possible. That living in fear is not inevitable: we can choose to live in love and hope instead.

 And this country, our great country, began to throw off the shackles.

Mrs May, the Tory Party was never loved. But you were happy to be feared. It worked for you. Well not any more. 15 months in, you still seem as dazed as on day one. Caught between your enemies and, even worse, your friends. Caught in the headlights. Living on Boris time.

 As Shadow Culture Secretary, I’ve got one of the best jobs there is. When I get invited to the theatre or to the cinema or,  yes, to Glastonbury, I get to say I'm only there for work. And one of the most surreal moments of my political life happened to me late at night, in a field, surrounded by people much younger and far more stylish than me.

 I realised something as the crowd at Glastonbury’s silent disco began to sing:

"Oh, Jeremy Corbyn...." And as they sang, I realised it’s actually better to be loved than to be feared. And Jeremy has shown us that it’s possible.

 Thank you Jeremy.

 There are some serious bits to my job, too, though. It's not all music festivals and opening nights. Digital, culture, media and sport are key battlegrounds in our fight against fear and despair.

 And alongside me in those battles I have the best Shadow DCMS team you could want: Kevin Brennan, my deputy, Rosena Allin-Khan, Liam Byrne, Steve Reed, Ruth Smeeth and Wilf Stevenson.

 And we’ve recently lost Louise Haigh, the finest mind of her generation, who was rightly promoted to join Diane’s team in the shadow Home Office.

 And we have a leader in Jeremy who stamped his leadership on culture policy when the two of us launched our innovative culture manifesto in Hull - deservedly the UK City of Culture.

 What a great job they’ve done this year. An early priority for our DCMS team in Government will be to finally confront problem gambling. Of course, gambling isn’t risk free. Even bets you think are absolute certainties can end up costing you a lot. Just ask Theresa May.

 That was a joke, by the way, but it’s a serious problem. The damage to the families of gambling addicts can be terrible. Yet some gambling firms, driven by greed, are deliberately targeting our poorest communities. We now know that when vulnerable people try to opt out of online gambling, companies don’t always block their accounts as they should.

 Gambling companies are even harvesting data to deliberately target low-income gamblers and people who’ve given up.

 As Mike Dixon, boss of mental health charity Addaction says, “gambling addiction tears lives and families apart. It’s outrageous that an industry with a £13bn revenue contributes less than £10m to treatment”.

 Well Mike, I can tell you that a Labour Government will introduce a compulsory levy.

Can you imagine the uproar if the drinks industry started targeting Alcoholics Anonymous by selling drink outside AA meetings? We wouldn’t tolerate that - and we shouldn’t tolerate the same kind of behavior by some bookmakers. And addicts must be given the help they need. Gambling addiction is an illness and it’s about time it was taken seriously.

So I can announce today that, together with Jonathan Ashworth, our shadow Health Secretary, I’m launching a thorough review of gambling addiction in this country and current provision for treatment on the NHS. Jon Ashworth, by the way: what a sparkling star of Labour’s front bench. He’s going to be an outstanding Health Secretary in the next Labour Government.

Our review will look at how best to fund NHS treatment and help free problem gamblers from the destructive cycle of addiction. My message to gambling firms today is clear: stop targeting vulnerable people. Start acting properly. And meet your obligation to help those whose lives have been blighted by addiction.

You can do it now, because it’s the right thing to do. Or you can wait for the next Labour Government to do it for you.

Oh and by the way, the same applies to the organisations that run football in this country. If you won’t ban football clubs from signing shirt sponsorship deals with betting companies - Labour will.

 Conference, as I said, I know how lucky I am. I love my job. Serving my constituents in West Bromwich, serving the Party, serving each of you as Deputy Leader. There’s no better job - perhaps that’s why so many people want to do it.

 But I know not everyone’s as lucky as me. More and more are being left behind by an economy that serves the few, not the many.

 And the world’s changing in ways we can’t continue to ignore: the labour market’s polarising.Today’s choice for too many young people is precarious employment or no employment, a zero hours contract or no contract, shabby, dangerous, soul-destroying work, or no work at all.

 Income inequality in Britain is amongst the highest in the developed world. Inequality between those with fulfilment and security in work, and those without it is growing too.

 This is a stain on our country. But the Tories just shrug their shoulders and say there’s no alternative.

 Just like they did on low pay, before our party introduced the minimum wage. Just like they did on maternity rights, before we secured them. Just like they did on healthcare, before we created the NHS to treat the many, not just the few.

 And the Tories are still doing it now. Transport for London has told Uber it has to follow the same rules as everyone else. Nothing more. That it can run its mini-cab service, as long as they respect our rules.  Treat your customers with respect and keep them safe, like everyone else has to. And then you’ll be welcome to make money in London.

 Uber, you’re becoming the perfect picture of how the future gig economy must not look. You may think you’re immune because your friends in the Tory party run Britain and its newspapers. You know the Tories don't care about level playing fields and orderly markets. They don't care about consumer protection.  They certainly don't care about workers' rights. But they don’t run London - and that’s where you make your money.

 And, mark my words, they won’t be running Britain for much longer. Conservatives don’t have the imagination to embrace change. They never have. Theresa May summed it up in her now infamous line from the election:

 “Nothing has changed.

 Nothing. Has. Changed.”

 So: no lessons learned. No message received. It’s the same old Tories. No end to austerity. No change for public servants who deserve a pay rise. No change for the millions who desperately need something different. The truth is, the Tories don’t really want to change things.

 But Labour does. And when Jeremy forms the next Government, Labour will. A time for change is upon us. The old fear is gone. We’re ready for bold, transformative reform, hungry for it.

 That’s what Labour’s campaign showed - as hundreds of thousands knocked on doors, went to rallies, got out the vote and delivered stunning Labour victories in Tory strongholds like Canterbury. Like Kensington.

 This year’s election showed that real change is possible. We can and we will form a radical Government which does things differently.

 We have the imagination; we have the drive; we have the momentum. The fight is so important. Not just because we need to undo the damage of all these years of Tory rule. But because fresh challenges lie ahead.

 On the horizon - in sight, in the next few years - automation and artificial intelligence threatening jobs and wages on a scale the world has never seen. Digital platforms making access to work much more direct and immediate. But the quality of that work, the safeguards, the wages, the pensions - too often these are cast aside, disguised as innovation.

Whereas Labour believes that secure, high-quality work should be available to every adult who wants it. And in order to get it, in the digital age, the successful worker will need to be a creative worker. It’s the job of Government to make that happen. And that starts with education.

 In an age when every child has access to all the knowledge that has ever existed on a device that fits in the palm of their hand, just teaching them to memorise thousands of facts is missing the point. Michael Gove’s curriculum reforms were a useless return to the past - obsessed by what children can remember, instead of how they use the knowledge they have.

 We don’t yet know what the jobs of the future will be, so we’ve got to teach children not just what to learn but how to learn. And how to be. Self-awareness, emotional intelligence, social skills, creativity and collaborative learning. Transferable skills they can adapt as the new world swirls around them.

 Great schools are places of imagination, inspiration, love.They help our young people become great humans, constantly adjusting in a continually changing world. Such schools are as powerful as the creative imaginations they nurture. They’re fabulous places. And, let’s be clear, they do exist.

 But let’s be equally clear that they exist in spite of Michael Gove, Nicky Morgan and Justine Greening, and all the other names of Tory shame. If it was left up to them, our children would be totally ill equipped for the economy of now - let alone the economy of the future.

 Whereas Angela Rayner, our fantastic Shadow Education Secretary, will lead an education system that prepares our young people for a world we can’t yet see.

Angie’s talked about how a Labour Government helped her grow from teenage mom into Shadow Minister. Our education system failed her at first, but when she’s running it, she won’t let it fail the next generation.  We’re all so proud of her. So proud of what she’s going to do.

 The next Labour Government will educate and train a nation of workers that are the most creative and adaptive on the planet. We’ll give working people the tools to use technology to enhance their lives, rather than restricting them to a digital elite.

 The digital economy succeeds only when it gives each of us the means to realise our true potential. Which doesn’t stop in our schools. It must be threaded throughout our economy, throughout our lives.

 So let’s extend employment rights to all workers in the gig economy - the self-employed, agency workers and contractors as well as the traditionally employed. Let’s stop dancing on the head of a legalistic pin about when is a job not a job and when is self-employed not really self-employed. It’s a fake fight which big business always wins and Tory governments love to hide behind.

 So let’s put an end to all that and just give rights to people. Yes, in one of the richest countries in the world in the 21st century, let’s just make basic employment rights non-negotiable in all circumstances and give them to everybody.

 Anybody tells you it can’t be done, it’s because they don’t want to do it. They said it about the minimum wage. They said it about maternity rights. They said it about the NHS. Don’t let them frighten you out of the rights you deserve.

 We need to revolutionise our trade unions for the digital age, finding new ways to build solidarity and collectivism.

 And let’s not forget social enterprises: community-focused, people-oriented companies, that have thrived since the recession and will be vital to unlocking the future.

 At last year’s Conference, I announced an independent commission to look at the future of work. It will be reporting shortly, having done a tremendous job, and I’d like to thank the chair, Helen Mountfield, and all the Commissioners.

 This year, Conference, together, we rewrote the rules of politics. We overcame fear and we took the country with us. Using new digital platforms, instead of our biased media, we talked straight to the people and they heard our message.

 In contrast, last September Theresa May had a secret meeting with Rupert Murdoch in New York.  Nine months later, at the election, Murdoch’s papers did their best to start a Tory landslide. They threw the kitchen sink at Jeremy. But this time the dirty tricks didn’t work. This time it was not the Sun wot won it.

 And let me tell you, Conference: it never will be the Sun wot won it again.

 Winding up my speech last year, I predicted an early election. In which, I also said, we’re going to give the Tories the surprise of their lives.  Well conference, we did it.

Jeremy, you did it. So this year I’m going to go out on another limb.

 Yes, there’s hard work to do and no, we mustn’t be complacent, but Jeremy Corbyn has broken the spell of fear the Tories sought to cast on this country. He has helped us all to remember that politics should be about inspiring hope, not peddling despair. He has shown us again what a real alternative to Toryism looks like and what it can achieve.

And because of that, I tell you, Conference, Jeremy Corbyn will be our next Prime Minister.

 And in ten or twelve years’ time, this Conference will be celebrating the achievements of two transformative terms of Labour government:

 Abolishing tuition fees and reintroducing the education maintenance allowance;

Taking back our utilities into social ownership;

Re-nationalising our railways;

A £10/hour real living wage, and rising;

Hundreds of thousands of new council houses;

Waiting lists down by at least a million and A&E waiting times back to 4 hours;

No more Tory hospital closures;

Freezing the state pension age;

Free school meals for all primary school children and smaller class sizes;

Banning zero hours contracts and giving all workers full and equal rights from day one.

 That’s what a Labour Government looks like. That’s what we do. That’s who we are.

 Politics now is a fight between those who want to be feared and those who’re not frightened to love. Britain’s run out of patience with the tin-pot Machiavellis. Boris Johnson, Michael Gove, Liam Fox and the rest of you: your time is up.

 This country is ready for change. Ready to throw off the shackles, to turn back the tide; ready to do the right thing and to do the thing right. In place of fear, love.

 Conference, Britain is ready for Labour.

 Love wins and so will we.

 Thank you.

 ends

[birchleo1-blog]

Days of Future Past: Dystopian Comics and the Privatized City

This title page of Days of Future Past (1981) bears a striking resemblance to and advertisement of the film Escape from New York released that same year.

By Ryan Donovan Purcell

“The past: a New and uncertain world, a world of endless possibilities and infinite outcomes. Countless choices define our fate — each choice, each moment, a ripple in the river of time — Enough ripples and you change the tide, for the future is never truly set.” This is the lesson Dr. Xavier learns at the end of the Marvel film, X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014). It’s a science-fiction alternative history in which the X-Men send Logan (Wolverine) back to the year 1973 to change their fate. In order to prevent the sequence of events that leads to mutant annihilation Logan must break into the Pentagon, prevent a landmark arms deal at the Paris Peace Accords, and save Richard Nixon from mutant radicals (as one might expect). The comic on which the film was based, however, is a far different story.

Published in January 1981, the comic is set in the ruins of New York City. It is a dystopian future in which a privatized police state has supplanted the US government. Congress has outlawed all mutants and super-humans. Those who have not been hunted down and murdered by the state are sent to the South Bronx Interment Camp where they perform forced labor and wait for their eventual execution. In response, the mutants and super-humans form an underground resistance and find a way to travel back in time to change history.

At first glance this comic may seem like a wild aberration from the X-Men’s mildly political flavor. But in the context of American politics of the 1970s and 80s, we can see it full of sharp statements directly responding to the historical moment in which it was created. It critiques the converging trajectories of the New Right, and the carceral state at this time. It draws connections between the privatization of the public sector, and the unprecedented expansion of the prison-industrial-complex. And in making these claims, the comic engages with the radical activist tradition of prison abolition when it equates mass incarceration with racial cleansing, and moreover, suggests such radicalism as the only viable resistance to the carceral state.

Days of Future Past offers us a vividly reflective text through which we can understand recent urban history. It reads as a radical critique of politics and society at the dawn of the Reagan Era. Through fiction, this dystopian narrative renders political history of the right (and of the left) more terrifying than we could ever imagine. In the end, however, this is a story about citizenship and New York City during the late-1970s.

I. “This is New York, the ‘Big Apple,’” the comic begins. “Once upon a time, it was a nice place to live. It is no longer. The street is Park Avenue in the upper seventies. When Kate Pryde was a child, it was one of the swankiest neighborhoods in the city, if not the world. Now, it’s a slum, abandoned, derelict, dying — much like the city, the country, the planet around it. Welcome to the 21st century.”[1] The original 1981 comic version of Days of Future Past opened with a shattered cityscape set in the year 2013. Mutant Kate Pryde anxiously climbs over crumbling infrastructure of the Upper East Side. Broken street lamps, broken glass, a shredded chain-link fence, and sharp mattress springs, block her path. The splintered skull of a discarded mannequin mirrors the panic on the protagonist’s face as she makes her way uptown to the Bronx.

Distinctions between fiction and reality are sometimes blurred. In historical perspective New York City in this narrative looked something like the actual New York of the late-1970s and early-1980s, just as the city embarked on a similarly radical transformation. As infrastructure continued to decline among communities in the outlying boroughs, most acutely in the South Bronx, a new era of policing fundamentally altered New York’s crime policy. Increasingly aggressive police responses to misdemeanors, otherwise known as “quality-of-life offenses,” disproportionally impacted these same communities on the urban periphery. The resulting surge in arrest rates caused prison populations to rise through the 1980s and 1990s, contributing to what we now know as mass incarceration. During this time New York slowly developed some of the characteristics of the police state depicted in the comic.

These movies, along with Days of Future Past (1981), are part of a shared moment in popular culture which features dystopias set in future New York City. Evident from their advertisements alone, these narratives employ similar imagery and tropes regarding urban apocalypse including mass incarceration, state privatization, privatization, and genocide.   II. “I haven’t seen anything that looked like this since London after the World War II blitz.” That’s how Ronald Reagan then Republican Presidential nominee described the South Bronx in the summer of 1980. Reagan toured Charlotte Street in an effort to curry favor with Black and Latino voters months before his historic election. It was the same rubble-strewn lot President Jimmy Carter visited in 1977.

Photographers framed the candidate in front of a ruined brick building with bright orange graffiti that read, “Decay”; a building across nearby read “Broken Promises.” Down the street a busted, endlessly trickling hydrant bubbled away. Reagan addressed reporters with prepared statements about Carter’s failed plans to revitalize the South Bronx. He spoke squarely into the cameras, all but ignoring the dozens of local residents behind police barricades 25 feet away. The heat was intense.

“Yo, Reagan!” someone screamed from the restive crowd. “You ain’t gonna do nothing for the South Bronx!” The people shouted and demanded that Reagan speak to them directly. “Help us! Help us!” The governor could no longer ignore boos and jeers that bombarded him in front of cameras. Surrounded by a phalanx of reporters and police, he shuffled toward the crowd smiling nervously. “What are you going to do for us?” an elderly Latina woman asked Reagan repeatedly. He raised his hands, palms open to quiet the people, but they were too loud, too worked up. He finally raised his voice, and seemed to lose his temper. “Look if you listen—I can’t do a damn thing for you if I don’t get elected!” He continued to compete with the crowd, which grew more agitated by his lack of composure. “I am trying to tell you that there is no program or promise that a President or the government can make, to come in here and wave a magic wand,” Reagan shouted, his face running red. “It can’t be done!” At that moment Reagan’s security pulled him away into his limousine. “There we were, driving away,” Reagan later told reporters, “and you think of them back there in all the ugliness and they have no place to go. All that is before them is to sit and look at what we just saw.”[2]

Douglas E. Kneeland, “Reagan Urges Blacks to Look Past Labels and to Vote for Him,” New York Times, August 6, 1980.

The South Bronx has been a touchstone of Presidential politics from Carter to Clinton. It has been both a catalyst of power and source of political demise, in fact, at all levels of politics. Despite his humiliating attempt to politicize the South Bronx against Carter in 1980, Reagan’s presidential campaign was nonetheless victorious. The same could be said of Ed Koch’s use of the South Bronx in his 1981 gubernatorial campaign. Although unsuccessful, Koch ultimately was able to cultivate an image as an urban revitalizer that propelled his prosperous career as NYC mayor for three consecutive terms.

At the same time the South Bronx had long been a symbol of government negligence. Deteriorated infrastructure and corroded housing was a harsh reality for hundreds of families. This evidently accounted for the emotionally charged reception Reagan received in 1980. The South Bronx had been virtually abandoned by the government for decades. City services taken for granted elsewhere — such as police protection, garbage collection, and emergency services — could not be predicted with certainty, if they functioned at all in some sections of the South Bronx. A 1969 study conducted by the New York Times revealed that South Bronx residents had a 1 in 20 chance of dying a natural death. Most were dying in homicides or from drugs.[3]

New York City’s fiscal crisis in the mid-1970s compounded the damage inflicted on the South Bronx by deindustrialization, and the evaporation of a middle-class tax base due to suburbanization. And the city government had all but forgotten the South Bronx until its image and symbol became valuable political currency in the late-1970s. By the 1980s, with New York City leading the nation in rising incarceration rates, the South Bronx began to take on new meanings. While midtown-Manhattan became a testing ground for what came to be known as Broken Windows policing, the South Bronx began to exhibit many of its devastating consequences, namely aggressive policing tactics and mass incarceration. In popular culture Fort Apache, The Bronx (1981), set at the 41st Police Precinct, depicted the South Bronx as a criminal wasteland. Meanwhile the inmate population at Rikers Island, just south of Hunts Point, swelled. The Koch administration even proposed an 800-bed barge to accommodate the overflowing jail.[4] Much more than a political football, the South Bronx became symbolic of the emerging carceral state.

The symbolic uses of the South Bronx in political rhetoric, and popular culture have set it apart from the rest of the city. It has, as a result, become a dehumanized space in the American urban imaginary rendering its communities vulnerable to symptoms of the carceral state such as police acting as an occupying force, and the construction of prison barrages. At the root of this issue are problematic meanings associated with South Bronx’s symbolism.

Annual jail admissions in New York City, 1978-2014. Source: Vera Institute of Justice, 2015. Originally cited in Themis Chronopoulos, "The Making of the Orderly City: New York Since the 1980s." Journal of Urban History, May 2018.

III. Comics have a strange way of reflecting these silent histories. Like other forms of popular culture, they can heighten our sensitivity to changes underfoot. And they can enable us to project our sympathies, and attitudes publicly, by drawing our attention, and spurring conversations about who we are in a given historical moment. Days of Future Past does this well.

As the comic’s title suggests, this dystopian vision of New York City has its roots in the recent past. In the comic, Congress passed a body of legislation in the 1980s that systematically stripped citizenship from mutant Americans, following the assassination of U.S. Senator Robert Kelly by radical mutants. The Mutant Control Act of 1988 specifically created a racialized hierarchy of citizenship in which there are three classes identified by letters that must be worn on clothing. “H” class is for “baseline human,” a person who the state has determined to be “clean of mutant genes,” and are “allowed to breed.” Secondly, “A” is for “anomalous human,” a “normal person possessing mutant genetic potential” and it therefore forbidden to breed. “M,” the lowest class, is for mutants, who are made “pariahs and outcasts” of society.

It is 2013 and Kate Pryde embraces her husband Rasputin (Colossus) in the South Bronx Mutant Interment Camp before traveling back to 1980 in the comic Days of Future Past (1981).

According to this plot, Congress also commissioned a private arms manufacturer to construct an army of robots, Sentinels, to enforce the anti-mutant laws. The Sentinels imprisoned mutants in internment camps across the country (the South Bronx was designated one such camp). Urban America adopted more aggressive policing tactics in which mutants were summarily “hunted down and — with a few exceptions — killed without mercy.” Quickly, however, the Sentinels took their mission too far, and overthrow the U.S. government, conquer the rest of North America, and set their sites on the rest of the world, threatening a nuclear holocaust. In response, the X-Men who have not been killed off or imprisoned form an underground resistance group. And using their mutant abilities they find a way to travel back in time to 1980 to stop the assassination of the Senator, which triggered the sequence of events that led to their confinement and genocide.

Not unlike this fiction, the late-1970s and early-1980s was a moment of the radical transformation in the American political landscape. As in the comic, to some this was a dystopian unfolding. The rise of the Right during the late-1970s hinged on the decline of cities, and New York City’s fiscal crisis exposed the deep faults of urban liberalism. As Kim Phillips-Fein claims in Fear City (2017) “the fiscal crisis involved discarding a set of social hope, a vision of what the city could be… It proved that using government to combat social ills would end in collapse. It proved a spectacular repudiation of the Great Society, the War on Poverty, even the New Deal.” Moreover, for ordinary people this moment “marked a change in what it meant to be a New Yorker and a citizen.”[5]

IV. Days of Future Past vividly reflected this history and the implications of the South Bronx as symbol, countering its problematic meanings with a narrative of resistance and local agency. Its fictional description was reminiscent of the actual place, where prison and death were equally viable fates.

Kate Pryde arrives at the South Bronx Mutant Internment Camp. Immediately, she is subject to “an exhaustive — ​and intentionally humiliating” security screening to ensure that she is carrying no contraband. Pryde is then allowed to enter the camp, a place she and the remaining mutants must call home. The Mutant Control Act of 1988 gave the Sentinels an open-ended program, with fatally broad parameters, to eliminate the mutant presence from America. “By the turn of the century,” the comic explains, “virtually every mutant, superhero and super villain in the United States and Canada had been either slain or imprisoned.”

It is 2013 and Kate Pryde arrives at the South Bronx Mutant Interment Camp and is interrogated by robot guards in the comic Days of Future Past (1981).

Through this narrative authors Chris Claremont and David Byrne assert the place of comics in the canon of radical thought. Their story engages a rich body of literature critiquing the prison-industrial complex, echoing radicals from George Jackson to Angela Davis. Along these lines, the authors draw a direct correlation between mass incarceration and genocide, a framework in which police operate as instruments of state oppression. In the comic, however, Sentinel robots, produced and operated by Trask Industries (a private arms manufacturer), have superseded the role of the police and military. Their sole function is to hunt down mutants, a race that congressional legislation has set apart from the rest of society; Law and order becomes a means of policing this racial power dynamic, by imprisonment or murder if necessary. Through this lens, Days of Future Past emphasizes the role of the private sector not only in the militarization of police, and proliferation of prisons, but in what is tantamount to racial cleansing.

After traveling back from 2013 to 1980, Kate Pryde summarizes to the X-Men the political developments of the 1980s. The United States elects a xenophobic president, and passes laws restricting mutant citizenship in the comic Days of Future Past (1981).

We cannot lose sight of the fact that this is very much an American story, with New York City at the center. The two-part comic was published in January-February 1981, directly following President Ronald Reagan taking office. We might see this reflected in comic where in 1984 a “rabid anti-mutant candidate was elected president,” riding on a wave of “hysterical paranoid” (a possible reference to the surge of right wing populism during the 1970s). But in the narrative it’s 1980, when Senator Kelly is assassinated triggers the rise in mass incarceration — ​coincidentally, the same year Reagan was elected. “Once confident symbols of hope,” cultural historian Bradford Wright reminds us, many comic books by the 1980s, “now spoke to the paranoia and psychosis lurking behind the rosy veneer of Reagan’s America.”[6] Claremont and Byrne’s Days of Future Past is no exception as it repeatedly makes thinly veiled references to Reagan’s election and regressive social ideals.  The plot jumps back and forth between 1980 and 2013 to establish a causal relationship between anti-mutant legislation and the carceral state that virtual eliminates all mutants. Ed Koch was elected mayor in New York City just two years prior to the publication of Claremont and Byrne’s comic. Koch ran on a platform to “clean up” the city, and once in office quickly called for a police crackdown on “quality-of-life offenses” with draconian penalties for minor transgressions. The historical immediacy of these politics and the publication of this comic is any thing but coincidental.    Comic books, cultural historian Bradford Wright reminds us, are history. “Emerging from the shifting interaction of politics, culture, audience tastes, and the economics of publishing, comic books have helped frame a world view and define a sense of self for the generations who have grown up with them.”[7] So how did comic books shape the minds of readers in the 1980s? Did readers pick up on those that subtly critiqued their world? Did they inform political outlooks? Was this true of Days of Future Past? This was not necessarily the case in regard to its critiques of policing in cities and mass incarceration. Prison populations continued to rise to unprecedented levels through the 1980s and 90s. Policing in New York City under the Giuliani and Bloomberg administrations became even more draconian and aggressive than under Koch. Reagan served two terms as President, and the American political landscape has only become more radically conservative.

So what takeaways can we pull from this dystopian narrative? For one, we can say that Days of Future Past is a shining example of what Wright means when he says that comics are history. As cultural texts, not unlike novels, newspapers, paintings, or poems, comics too are impressed with a host of dynamic historical forces that surround their creation. They are no less historically significant than any other document. Days of Future Past demonstrates the interplay between politics and popular culture, and the illuminating effects that result when they are brought into dialogue. Often the political context and cultural text reveal aspects of each other not easily rendered by themselves. The most pressing meaning we can take away from this story, however, comes through the mechanics of the narrative itself. In order to resist oppression the X-Men must travel back in time to change to history. They are, in a sense, performing a kind of historical work that exposes the roots of the power structure that dominates them. In this way, the authors suggest that history and writing as a way of resisting the carceral state.

The ending of the film version of Days of Future Past is perhaps truest to the sentiment expressed in the 1981 comic. Logan’s consciousness wakes into his future body after going back in time. He discovers that he is a history professor at Charles Xavier’s academy. “Don’t you have a history class to teach?” Xavier asks smiling at Logan who is deeply confused. “Actually I could use some help with that,” Logan responds. “Help with what?” the doctor asks. “Pretty much everything after 1973,” says Logan, “I think the history I know is a little different.”

Ryan Donovan Purcell is a PhD candidate in History at Cornell University, where he studies modern American popular culture and urban history. His work has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, College Art Association, and Hyperallergic. ​ [1] Chris Claremont, John Byrne, et. al., The Uncanny X-Men: “Days of Future Past” (Marvel Comics, January-February, 1981).

[2] Douglas E. Kneeland, “Reagan Urges Blacks to Look Past Labels and to Vote for Him,” NYT, August 6, 1980; “Reagan, in South Bronx, Says Carter Broke Vow: Raises Voice Above Chants,” NYT, August 6, 1980; Steve Neal and Monroe Anderson, “Reagan Heckled in South Bronx,” Chicago Tribune August 6, 1980; “Reagan Booed in Bronx Slum,” Los Angeles Times, August 5, 1980; “Reagan courts blacks, urban areas; Argues with protesters in visit to South Bronx,” The Baltimore Sun, August 6, 1980. See also: Allen Jones, The Rat the Got Away: A Bronx Memoir (Empire State Editions, 2009); Evelyn Gonzalez, The Bronx (Columbia University Press, 2006).

[3] Richard Severo, “Bronx ad Symbol of America’s Woes,” NYT, October 6, 1977.

[4] The prison barge plan, was ultimately realized under Mayor Dinkins, and was called Vernon C. Bain Correction Center docked on the south end of Hunts Point; “Rikers Island timeline: Jail’s origins and Controversies,” March 18, 2017--http://www.nydailynews.com/news/crime/rikers-island-timeline-jail-origins-controversies-article-1.3001976.

[5] Kim Phillips-Fein, Fear City: New York’s Fiscal Crisis and the Rise of Austerity Politics (Metropolitan Books, 2017): pp.s 3-5.

[6] Wright, Comic Book Nation: The Transformation of Youth Culture in America (John Hopkins University Press, 2003): pp. 266.

[7] Wright, Comic Book Nation: pp. xv.

Source: https://www.gothamcenter.org/blog/days-of-future-past-dystopian-comics-and-the-privatized-city

[eichy815]

‘Morning-Before’ Mortifiers

Originally Published on November 30, 2016 on Eichy Says

Since the “Sexual Revolution of the 1960s,” American women have had a variety of birth control options available to them.  Oral pills.  CICs.  Vaginal rings.  Contraceptive patches.  Intrauterine devices.

The more enlightened health care providers in modern society offer these resources to female employees as part of health care plans, often at lower costs than if they were to purchase them over-the-counter.  One of the larger concerns about the prospect of Republicans in Congress repealing “Obamacare” is that it could severely limit women’s access to affordable birth control methods.

But what about the dudes? Aside from condoms or vasectomies, American men have very few options aside from abstinence.  If a heterosexual couple is trying to prevent a pregnancy, shouldn’t men have equal responsibility – or be able to put in equal effort – when it comes to ensuring those precautions are taken?

Earlier this month, a U.N. study based out of Switzerland rattled the blogosphere...in both positive and negative ways.  The World Health Organization funded research into a “male birth control” product – a synthetic cocktail of testosterone and norethisterone enanthate.  Designed to shut down production of testosterone and sperm within the testicles, its trials have been conducted on a rolling basis since 2008.  The test subjects have been men ranging in age from 18 to 45.

Males participating in this medical research were monitored for the controlled lowering and subsequent raising of their sperm counts.  The encouraging news:  it has had a 96% effectiveness rate, with no apparent signs of birth defects.

The bad news:  these trials have been discontinued early, after twenty men dropped out of the study due to side effects such as acne, mood swings, muscle pain, and increased libido.   Researchers estimate that these side effects resulted approximately 60% of the time from the experimental shots themselves.

Many commentators and observers (usually females) have scoffed and sneered that the men who’d complained of these side effects were acting like “babies.”  Their assessment:

“Oh, women have had to put up with menstrual pain, pregnancy symptoms, and the discomfort of female birth control for centuries.  I guess men can’t handle it, because they’re inherently weaker.”

Again, this goes to show how gynocentrism and neofeminism rear their ugly heads.  Those dismissive reactions from self-proclaimed “feminists” only prove how forms of cultural sexism and social sexism against males are alive and well in our modern era.

Let’s look at the facts from the U.N.’s medical tribal.  A majority of participants in the “male birth control” study had recovery periods (of regaining fertility) that lasted anywhere from 12 to 26 weeks.  However, a minority of those participants took more than double that time to regain fertility.  And, one participant’s level of recovery is still inconclusive; so there is a risk (however small) of permanent infertility in those who were to be administered the drug in its current form.

This would indicate how, as with women’s health issues, not all male bodies are going to respond identically to the same medical innovations.

Experts involved with monitoring the test subjects also don’t believe these methods of “male birth control” will run the risk of fatalities from blood clots or strokes as found in female contraception; but, again, since male hormone manipulation is still in its earliest stages of research, nothing is conclusive.

Since there is a scientific link, in females, between taking hormonal birth control and suffering from depression when consuming those contraceptives – any corresponding dynamics should certainly be considered before mass-marketing a parallel birth control product for men.

Mario Philip Reyes Festin, MD – from the World Health Organization in Geneva – says that the rate of pregnancy in the participants’ sexual relationships was successfully controlled a majority of the time.  Despite that, there remained lingering uncertainty over safety and efficacy.

The Swiss researchers used 320 male participants who were in monogamous heterosexual relationships.  Their progestrogen/androgen injections were administered to them at eight-week intervals over a 56-week period.  Because the study itself didn’t exceed four years, there are still unresolved questions about the drug’s longevity over a more extensive multi-year time frame.

National Public Radio science correspondent Rob Stein, who evaluated the results of the limited study, observes how the acne, mood swings, and cases of depression that did occur got to be pretty severe; one participant even attempted to commit suicide.  Stein makes the distinction that these physiological and emotional problems were much more severe than side effects that have been witnessed in consumers of female birth control.

According to Stein, it’s also logistically easier for birth control to target the monthly ovular cycles of women, compared to continuous sperm production in men.  This doesn’t mean “male birth control” shouldn’t be pursued; it simply means that the path to get there will be, scientifically, more time-consuming for the medical community to achieve.  He predicts we’ll need at least another decade to fully develop safe and marketable forms of new contraception for men; fertility scientists may have to adjust the formulas, or possibly administer them in alternative forms such as gels or implants.

As the medical research itself advances, new social dynamics will also be in play.  There are a number of variables to consider, here.

Toronto-based writer Emma Healey points out how a lot of women probably wouldn’t trust their male partners to be reliable in terms of keeping up with the injections.  This attitude is a byproduct of bitterness from women over having been historically forced into the gender role of being the “pragmatic” and “responsible” one in an intimate heterosexual relationship.

Healey concludes by acknowledging that gender roles – trust and faith in one’s partner – will need to shift if we’re going to be able to evolve to a point where men are held more accountable for sexual decisions involving contraception.

The IDS News Editorial Board, amid a satirical piece last year that commented on the viability of “male birth control,” also acknowledges that now the tables may turn – as birth control designed specifically for men could render males into the ones who find themselves “not in the mood” for spontaneous sex. 

Women will have to be as understanding and compassionate about such a scenario as men are currently lectured into being.  Also, if women believe that their male companions aren’t comparably as organized or reliable (gender-wise) when taking pills or injections, then those women will be assuming the same risk that men presently assume whenever heterosexual males take it on blind faith that their female partners are truthfully using birth control.

The very concept of “male birth control” (including potential coverage of it through health care plans) will also undoubtedly rankle the morality-obsessed traditionalists who loathe the mere idea of promiscuity or monogamous premarital sex from younger generations...but, hypocritically, many of those same cultural warriors (usually men) often feel that they themselves should be exempt from such standards.

So, I believe we must simply ignore that radical fringe on the Far Right, and, instead, focus on science and sensible R&D.

Michelle DeShon – opinion editor of The Buchtelite at the University of Akron – expresses the view that the burden of safe sex should no longer be primarily the woman’s to bear, within a heterosexual relationship.  I agree with her on that – but she also, pointedly, reminds us that as many as 75% of the male participants from the Swiss-based U.N. study claimed they would be open to regularly using these shots in an actual relationship, in spite of the side effects.

Therefore, DeShon emphasizes, undergoing the specific risks of these side effects really comes down to an individual choice:  does the person using the birth control feel it’s worth the trade-off of freer, less-inhibited bodily sexual contact?

Science journalist Emily Mullin reacts to the results of the study by acknowledging that birth control methods for men, other than condoms and vasectomies, are very new and unexplored within the scientific community.  This unfortunate reality, she reminds us, is due to the slowness (and lack) of R&D for new “male birth control” products.  Much of the green-lit research endeavors into male fertility technology end up falling by the wayside.  The World Health Organization apparently doesn’t have the funding to continue this aborted study from 2012, while the National Institute of Health generally prefers to fund female contraception studies.

Mullin echoes an earlier point highlighted by Stein:  this type of scientific research is also, biologically, a tougher numbers game when we compare sperm production to egg production. 

So, it becomes a vicious cycle where pharmaceutical companies haven’t had much success with past trials...and that makes them unwilling to invest in new ones.  I’d say it’s sort of parallel to how we, as a nation, haven’t divested ourselves of gas and oil since our society isn’t at a point where we can feasibly transition to full use of renewable energy...yet, a big part of the reason why we’re not at that point is because so few companies are willing to take the initiative to invest in alternative energy research, in the first place.

Still, Mullin cites some drugs that could hold promise when it comes to R&D escalation:  Gamendazole, Phenoxybenzamine, Gendarussa compounds, JQ1, and Vasalgel are being considered as options for future testing.  RISUG, tested in India, already comes with concerns of causing permanent infertility in men.

We have to think beyond what we already have – and what we already know.  Condoms do have a 98% effectiveness rate, if correctly used.  Their failure rate, on the other hand, can be as high as 14%-15% when improperly used.  Additionally, an oral pill or injection that’s intended for birth control still does nothing to prevent STDs.

Another factor to consider:  would a male birth control pill be free of financial cost, for men, under specific health care services – the same way health care providers sometimes cover the expense of contraceptives for women?  If not, then why are we so willing to cover Viagra under some of these same hypothetical health plans? 

Obviously, as a gay dude, I’m not a direct stakeholder in this debate:  I’ll never find myself in a scenario where I have to worry about the risk of getting a woman pregnant.  But as someone who has dealt with chronic acne, anxiety, depression, and copious other body image issues throughout my life, these potential side effects uncovered by the Swiss research are like a raw nerve popping out of my dental gums.

On the other hand, I do have a difficult time sympathizing with my fellow dudes who feel this incessant need to habitually engage in sexual intercourse with another person at their whims.  Since I don’t currently have a long-term mate (and haven’t had one for awhile, now) of my own, perhaps that explains why it’s so difficult for me to understand why my heterosexual brothers can’t be content with masturbation or getting a “bro-job,” in the absence of a steady relationship.

Either way, if an effective “male birth control” pill or injection were to become ubiquitously available, would that not increase the frequency of promiscuity amongst heterosexuals?  Even if the risk of unplanned pregnancy becomes drastically reduced...a rapid rise in STDs would seem poised to become a newfound consequence of reinvigorated sexual activity (especially if it gives straight guys an excuse to go “condom-less”).

The shaming of male appetites for sex needs to stop.  That doesn’t give men free license to engage in rape or predatory sexual aggression, of course.  But a sexual orgasm must be viewed as a natural part of the male existence...and women who refuse to be sensitive to that are deluding themselves.

Until we de-stigmatize the male desire for satisfaction of one’s libido, socioeconomic realities will bring social progress to a standstill.  Male contraception research will continue to be underfunded, and we’ll be enabling a “culture of complainers” (usually female complainers).

Ask yourselves:  is it better to fast-track male contraceptives onto the free market simply out of some self-righteous desire for karmic justice?  Or should such male contraception products be released once their hypothetical safety and longevity have been proven?

Do you want it safe...or do you want it quick?

Why are we trying to hold men to the same analytical standards of pain and discomfort as women, when there are massive biological differences between males and females in the first place?  Sperm and eggs are entirely different beasts.  And so are the respective male and female reproductive and urinary systems.

The quest for a sustainable “male birth control” innovation should be done for the right reasons:  to maximize mutual pleasure and economic stability for all parties involved.

*NOT* to “spread the suffering” just for the sake of indoctrinating future generations with some neofeminist “point” where our society gets to boast how turnabout is fair play.

[a-wandering-fool]

From the article:

==================

Apparently I’m not the only one who has noticed that social media platforms only escape direct legal responsibility for the content published on their web sites if they act as completely neutral parties who take no editorial action against content published on their web sites unless prompted to by a formal complaint.

When Digital Platforms Become Censors: Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and other tech giants say that they’re open forums. What happens when they start to shut down voices they consider beyond the pale?

If you rely on someone else’s platform to express unpopular ideas, especially ideas on the right, you’re now at risk. This raises troubling questions, not only for free speech but for the future of American politics and media. …

Now these companies are trying to have it both ways. They take advantage of the fact that they are not publishers to escape responsibility for the endless amounts of problematic material on their sites, from libel to revenge porn. But at the same time, they are increasingly acting like publishers in deciding which views and people are permitted on their platforms and which are not.

The thing is, it may pass First Amendment muster–as has rightly been pointed out by others, the First Amendment does not apply to corporations. (Though I find it deeply ironic how hard the Left is relying on corporations–for whom they have historic deep distrust–to censor messages for them.)

But that does not mean it necessarily passes muster with certain other laws–specifically Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which acts as a safe harbor for “information content providers” from the content published on their platforms, but only so long as those providers do not actively censor content on their platforms. Otherwise, those platforms are not “information content providers”, but “publishers” who are liable for all the content on their sites.

Nor does it pass anti-trust laws, which is the angle provided in the above article. After all, Alex Jones’ “InfoWars” is itself a media operation–and in competition with companies such as Facebook and YouTube, with CNN and MSNBC. And when one set of media companies shuts down another from the public square–that could be considered prior restraint of trade.

And while one could answer “well, if he really wants to be in the public square, he should do the same heavy lifting internet companies like Facebook has done”–that is a problematic answer itself. Because it suggests for any of us to want to speak our minds on the Internet, if what we want to say is unpopular or seen as hateful, only the extremely wealthy–those who can afford the thousands and thousands of dollars to set up an Internet trunk line and massive servers on multiple coasts–can speak.

I mean, this is the very argument the Left has been using for a while now in its opposition to Citizens United: that it permits a handful of very wealthy individuals and large corporations to monopolize the public square–and to drown out or eliminate alternate political viewpoints.

Or is it the Left only care about such things when it’s their voices who are not in ascendency?

And does this mean to the Left, freedom is like a trolly car: you keep riding it until you get to your stop–then you get off?

Worse–the Internet is corporations all the way down. After all, even if you can afford to spend the thousands of dollars a month for a dedicated trunk line–you still have to buy the trunk line from a Tier 1, 2 or 3 provider. And who is to say that a Tier 2 provider (such as Comcast) or a Tier 1 provider (such as AT&T) won’t be pressured to cut you off from the Internet for saying something people don’t like?

After all, that’s what happened to Pirate Bay, though they were cut off because they were clearly violating the law by pirating music, movies and software.

Without access to a Tier 1 or a Tier 2 provider, you’re left with… what? Running your own fiberoptic cables under the ocean and becoming a Tier 1 provider yourself?

Isn’t that the essence of the Left’s objection to “Citizens United” on steroids?

In the Left’s long march through the institutions a lot of wreckage has been left behind. We’re seeing colleges become jokes. We’re seeing newspapers and television news falling ratings and revenues. We’re watching many other institutions disintegrate–and the latest is seeing a lot of powerful Internet companies, protected by Sarbanes-Oxley from competition from young upstarts (to the point where to make money in technology today, you can’t just create a new idea–you must create an idea that one of Facebook, Apple, Google or Amazon will buy) sow the seeds of their own destruction.

And the reason why this “long march” simply does not work in the United States is because unlike Western Europe, whom the Marxists saw as an impediment to the socialist state they saw as the precursor to true communismand whose culture (of Christianity, authority, family tradition, sexual restraint and patriotism) needed to be destroyed–the United States was founded on the philosophical principles of the Freedom of Man:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

And any agenda of “radical egalitarianism” proposed by the Left in the United States must deal with the real, fundamental and existential question “how is your ‘radical egalitarianism’ better than our devotion to individual liberty?”

As Calvin Coolidge noted in 1926 on the 150th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence:

About the Declaration there is a finality that is exceedingly restful. It is often asserted that the world has made a great deal of progress since 1776, that we have had new thoughts and new experiences which have given us a great advance over the people of that day, and that we may therefore very well discard their conclusions for something more modern. But that reasoning can not be applied to this great charter. If all men are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final. No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions. If anyone wishes to deny their truth or their soundness, the only direction in which he can proceed historically is not forward, but backward toward the time when there was no equality, no rights of the individual, no rule of the people. Those who wish to proceed in that direction can not lay claim to progress. They are reactionary. Their ideas are not more modern, but more ancient, than those of the Revolutionary fathers.

It’s no wonder those who best embrace the Left’s assertions of “radical egalitarianism” in this country–the fools who join Antifa incorrectly believing–as the (Marxist) Frankfurt School believed–that the United States (having embraced Christianity, authority, family tradition, sexual restraint and patriotism) was ripe for a Fascist uprising similar to the National-Socialists of Germany in the run-up to World War II–are often historically ignorant and culturally blind.

Because unlike the rest of Western Europe, we have already embraced “radical egalitarianism.” Our Declaration of Independence is a declaration to the world of our belief in “radical egalitarianism”, in individualism, and in the supremacy of individualism over the State. Ours is already a country where cultures and governments bend to the needs of the individual, rather than the other way around.

Our governments print voting pamphlets in every native language spoken by the voting population rather than demands our populations learn English to participate in government. Our governments provide reasonable religious accommodation for all faiths and religions–permitting women to wear hijabs in their drivers licenses, for example–rather than going to war against women for wearing the wrong style of dress.

Our history is full of individuals practicing all lifestyles: a century ago we went through a “Christian Perfectionism” phase, where “Perfectionists” of all sorts created great communes to practice odd and interesting lifestyles. One of these “Christian Perfectionist” communities was the Oneida Community, who practiced “free love” (in fact, that’s where we get the term), and started a small company to fund their community which still exists today.

So when the “Antifa” shows up, to Americans they look like NAZI brownshirts but in another guise. We may look at a President Trump with trepidation–after all, every 4 to 8 years we replace the most powerful man in the free world with some inexperienced noob, and Lord knows what sort of chaos that may give rise to. But as radical individualists, the sort of “anti-fascism” being sold by a bunch of often aging radical Leftists does not look like progress.

It looks reactionary, not progress–like proceeding backwards to feudalism (the precursor of socialism), to a time when the world was organized as surfs under the thumb of their (Antifa) manor Lords.

So let the Left continue its long march through the institutions.

Some of these institutions desperately need tearing down and rethinking anyway.

Certainly Facebook has exceeded its usefulness, as has Twitter, and I welcome the next iteration.

Perhaps a more democratic solution based on a common protocol such as RSS,with a search directory that allows us to find our friends and subscribe to their individual feeds without the filtering of a profit-oriented Facebook who wants to rearrange our timelines and insert ads as they see fit.

I mean, hell; all you need is a discovery mechanism associated with RSS which allows an RSS publisher to automatically publish a directory of the RSS feeds of the people they’re subscribed to–and you’ve pretty much replicated Facebook’s “friending” process.

Hoist this on top of a peer to peer networking system with cryptographic handshaking to prevent governments and corporations from intercepting (and censoring) wire messages, and you now have a completely distributed replacement for Facebook–all built on open protocols, that can conceivably then allow individual developers to produce their own clients.

But I am not worried at all about our dedication to Individualism.

The world is moving towards individualism, after all–not away. Unless there is a very powerful authoritarian government on the doorstep of a weaker government, such as Russia chipping away at Ukraine or at Georgia, for most people we are moving towards greater individualism, towards greater individual responsibility and towards greater individual freedom.

Because everyone yearns to breathe free.

Even the Antifa folks yearn to breathe free. They only take the path they do because they’ve been taught that their brand of socialist-communist double-think is a freer path to greater individual autonomy than the alternatives they completely misunderstand. But then, it takes an academic (or a student of that academic) in order to be that fucking stupid.

==================

[vhalyria]

Adolf Hitler and Donald Trump - a dangerous parity?

I’m worried. I’m so worried that I can barely sleep at night, and it’s giving me stomach cramps. Because we’ve been here before, and we need to talk about this. 

So, my unprofessional, biased ass sat down for a few hours and tried to collect everything it knew about Hitler and Trump, in order to see if it’s just a bad feeling that I’m having, or if my fear is justified.

As I said, I am not a journalist or anything else, I simply did some research alongside the stuff I still remembered from my history classes and books. Sources can be seen at the end, although many of them are in german, sorry.

I won’t go much into the reasons behind Hitler’s and Trump’s behavior, because I don’t care what turned them into the people they were/are. Also, I tried to keep this as neutral as possible, only relying on facts (and no, those aren’t alternative). There are probably a few things I’ve forgotten about, but feel free to add them!

1.) Where did they come from?

Hitler: Adolf Hitler was the oldest of three siblings, born in Austria in 1889. Growing up, he started to care less and less about school and eventually dropped out without graduation. After that, he applied for a place at an art school, multiple times, but got rejected every time. He has spent a few years in poverty until he joined the army in WWI. After that, he joined the NSDAP and eventually became their leader. The rest should be known.

Trump: Donald Trump was born in 1976, as the fourth of five children. His father, the son of german immigrants, was a real estate businessman. After graduating from High School, Trump studied economics and eventually took on his father’s business. He joined the Republicans in 1987, and became their candidate for the election in 2015.

2.) How was it possible for them to become so popular/get voted?

Hitler: Hitler made the people like him because he was using their anger and their fears for his own means. After WWI, Germany was financially and socially destroyed. The Treaty of Versaille asked them to pay a lot of money for reparation, they had to reduce their military force to an absolute minimum and due to the high sanctions and the new yorker stock crash, an inflation came over the country, causing many people to lose their homes and all their savings. The people were scared about their future and felt betrayed by the government, because it was them who had to pay for everything. Radical groups arised and Hitler not only recognized those fears; he built his policy on them. He promised to create many new jobs, that the countries that won the war will pay them back because they were the guilty ones in his eyes, that no one will have to be homeless and hungry anymore. He promised to take revenge on those countries, even if that meant starting another war. Hitler promised to “give Germany its pride back”, and people believed him.

Trump: The rich are getting richer, the poor are losing what little they have left. That’s how people in the US felt when Trump got voted. They didn’t trust their government, even having multiple jobs wasn’t enough to pay the rent anymore and on top of that, terrorists kill people all over the world. The citizens were afraid and worried, they wanted to find a way out of their misery and feel safe. And that’s what Trump promised to provide them; he promised to make “America great again”, to create work for the american people so that no one has to be poor anymore. He said he would lead the fight against terrorism, and his people wouldn’t have to be scared anymore. Trump promised “America comes first”, and the people believed him. 

3.) Personality traits that made people like them 

Hitler: The one thing that every history book and every documentation about Hitler never leave out; he was a great rhetoritian. He was able to inspire to people, to make them believe everything, to cheer for anything he says. He was confident and determined.

Another thing that made him popular, was that he gave his people someone else to blame for their misery than themselves or the government; the jews. According to Hitler, they were at fault for everything bad that has ever happened in Germany, and people felt comforted by that thought. It takes the blame from them by assigning it to someone else; it made living easier.

By that, Hitler also managed to make the germans feel like a community; united by hate towards a minority, but united, still. He fed them the illusion that he would lead them to wealth and happiness, and that everything will be turning out greatly for them, as long as they’re supporting him.

Trump: Trump is a rich man, someone who calls himself a successful businessman. He made it to the top, and that inspired the people. He makes the American Dream seem still alive, and on top of that, he promises that he will be the one to lead the United States into a bright future, with lots of work, wealth and unity. He is a confident person and by talking like the common people, he makes them feel like they could relate to him. Like Hitler, he uses the fear of the people and unites them in hate towards minorities; the mexicans are to blame, the people of color and the muslims. They are the reason for misery in the US, but he can change that, he can throw these people out of the country and “make America great again”.

4.) A list of the exact things they promised:

Hitler: 

- “Deutschland über alles” (”Germany above everything”)

- to overturn the Treaty of Versailles and stop reparation payment

- to “give Germany its pride back”

- to re-arm Germany and to enlarge their military force

- to create jobs (by expanding the army)

- a strong government and stability

- a better life for the lower and the middle class

- to make Germany “a power country” again

Trump:

- “America First”

- “Make America great again”

- to cancel Obamacare to reduce costs

- to build a wall to Mexico

- to send immigrants back to their countries so that american citizens can have their jobs

- to send troops back into war zones and to enlarge the military force

- banishment of muslims

- tax reduction

- to bring back manufacturing jobs

- to step back from several international trading agreements

- to lead the fight against ISIS

5.) Foreign policy

Hitler: Hitler wanted Germany to become a global leading power again and to expand the german territory. He worked on an intense connection to fascist Italy, while he had an anti-russia policy. Promised other countries freedom while already planning to take over Europe, Hitler eventually declared war to Poland, which led to WWII.

Trump: Trumps goals when it comes to foreign policy are to work together closely with Russia, to step back from several international trade agreements, to impose penalties on several branches of import, to fight against ISIS and to support Israel in their conflict with Palestine, to name a few of the endless plans he talked about

6.) The role and value of women

Hitler: Hitlers policy understood women as barely more than birth machines. His propaganda made it look like being mother to (the more, the better) aryan children is the best thing to ever happen to a woman. It was socially unacceptable for a woman to go to work, they needed to stay at home to look after the children and to keep the house clean for their husbands. Women were a thing to be owned, their opinion didn’t matter. Emancipation was seen as something “evil” that the jews brought into Germany.

Trump: Trump treats woman without respect and like a thing to be owned. According to him, a woman’s worth it determined by her attractiveness and they should feel honored when he gropes them or makes obscene comments about them. Trumps policy is anti-abortion, he wants to take the right to decide over their bodies and lives away from american women. 

7.) The treatment of minorities

Hitler: Hitler used the jews as scapegoats for everything bad that happened. It was their fault that people lived in poverty, that women wanted to have a say about their lives, that germany lost the war etc. His party supported and encouraged violence against jewish people (the ”Kristallnacht”, for example), and they got socially seperated from the rest of the society. Sad peek of Hitler’s anti semitism was the torture and killing of millions of jews, within Germany and from other countries, in concentration camps. Over six million jews had to die. 

Homosexuals and people with disabilities often got the same treatment.

Trump: Not only once did Trump say what he thinks about Mexicans; they are rapists, criminals, they’re bringing drugs and misery into his country. “Some sure are nice, though.”, he says. He’s using them the same way Hitler used the jews; he blames them for everything. They are stealing jobs from americans, they are endangering the public safety, all they do is create chaos and crimes.

 His opinion about people of color isn’t better; he stated that he doesn’t support the Black Lives Matter Movement. “If Black lives matter, go back to Africa”, is what he said. He also believes that racism would not exist anymore. On several occasions he has encouraged his supporters to verbal and physical attacks towards people of color. He also claims that the era of slavery was a good time for the US and ignores police brutality towards poc’s.

Trump wants to ban muslims from entering/staying in the US. As we all know he already tried to do that a few days ago, but fortunately, a court declared his action to not be legal. Trump also made fun of people with disabilities.

8.) How they deal with the media

Hitler: Adolf Hitler knew how to use the media for himself. “The press is an instrument for education to bring 70 million people to an unified world view”, is one of the things he said. The principle was easy; every newspaper or radio station that wasn’t supporting him by reporting what he wanted them to report about, got banned. Resisting journalists and leader of companies got fired and also arrested in some cases. Hitlers party used the media for their propaganda, freedom of speech and press didn’t mean anything anymore.

Trump: Trump hates the media. While he enjoys the attention given to him, he can’t deal with negative reports. He calls those journalists “liars”, claims that they are spreading “alternate facts”, that only his point of view is the truth. Trumps party sees journalists as “part of the opposition”, and says they should “just shut up and listen”. Apparently, there were already plans made to ban the press from the White House. During Trump’s inauguration, the first journalists already got arrested.

(Personal) Conclusion:

Their differences:

- Hitler knew how to make the media work for him, Trump doesn’t (yet)

- Trump grew up wealthy and with academic success, Hitler grew up poorly and dropped out of school without graduation

- Trump’s politic is pro-russia, Hitler’s was anti-russia

- Hitler wanted to expand the german territory while Trump want to build a wall

- Hitler’s policy aimed to start a war

And, most importantly:

Their similarities:

- Power hungry, radical, racist, misogynistic

- use prejudices against minorities, support violence against them

- “America First” and “Germany above everything” are the same damn thing

- Unite people through hate

- mainly voted by people who aren’t wealthy, scared for their future

- creating jobs by extending the military, taking “stolen” jobs “back” from immigrants/women

- wanting their countries to be the first in everything, don’t care what it takes

- against freedom of speech and press

- enforcement of military power, getting ready for war

- give their people a minority to blame for all the existing misery

- aggressive, short tempered, determined

- no respect for human life

I don’t know about you, but I think this is terrifying.

Like I said, I have probably forgotten about a lot. Feel free to add!

Sources: x, x, x, x, x, x, x, x, x, x, x, x, x, x, x, x, x, x, x, x, x, x, x, x, x, x

[mountlandme]

RANT AHOY

In short I have a lot of feelinsg about older generations and their views on younger generations

Today my landlady who lives in a 6 storey house (3 bedrooms, an office, two bathrooms, a kitchen, garden, two sitting rooms and a dinning room) in London zone 2 told me her house was small, that things were difficult in the 80s too (she had to get a mortgage while some friends married into money or inherited) and she was from the ‘get up and do it’ generation and hated all the negativity of my generation. That it didn’t matter if people have to move out of london (though was saying yesterday how she would never want to move out of London herself and would hate to be elsewhere).

Its so frustrating to hear how ignorant people can be when they live in little tiny bubbles of people just like them. I’m not saying that people had it easy or didn’t work hard in the past - ofcourse people did, they worked hard and that is how she has what she has now, she and her husband worked hard in jobs that weren’t exactly high earning jobs, they worked hard for many years to have a house which would be a secure place to bring up a family and pay for their retirement. Im not belittling that.

 I’m just saying that no matter how hard you work now if you don’t have parents who have a house, or become mega rich yourself, you aren’t ever going to get a house, and so have no security and no investment for the future. And yes I know that renting is more common in other countries but their rent always seems affordable. My generation are often paying around 70% of what they earn to live in tiny, badly build accommodation with bad facilities that aren’t suited to community or family - this leaves no money to save and everyone is always broke. There is a lack of social housing so there isnt an alternative if you cant make the rent. Thats also a big culture change, and my generation is the one having to go through that trauma of complete change of our reality to the expectations we were given as children.

She did say that it could be that we start trying to see a different type of people on the streets beyond the normal lot. Look out the window, its already happened - people are on the streets already just because they simply dont have the money to live indoors, and what is the normal lot, no one deserves to be homeless ever! Squatting is becoming heavily criminalised so you can’t even get off the streets and into somewhere sheltered, while the streets are being covered in spikes, like humans are pigeons to keep away from your precious walls.

People are being forced away from their support networks and employment opportunities because they can’t afford to live in London (and hell its not much better anywhere else). And yes that is bad to remove people from their family and friends, its easy to say its not a big deal when you own your own house that you can live in until you chose not to. Complete insecurity and being at the mercy of whatever whim may take the person who decides where you live is traumatic!!!!

Oh it will all even out. will it?? If it does it will because people fought to change it, it may look like things just sort themselves out when you dont go outside your own small bubble, but if you did you’d see all the people fighting hard to make the changes. But it might not, and even if it does its destroying lives now!!

How sensitive can people be that they can’t even bare to hear that something might be harder for someone else. It doesn’t diminish the hard work they went through in the past to admit that people work just as hard now, sometimes even harder, for a lot less and that isn’t acceptable!!!

I know doctors who work second jobs to be able to make rent, DOCTORS. I know a nurse who has just been able to get her first mortgage on a property a TWO AND A HALF HOUR commute away from where she works. Shift work is difficult enough without adding 5 hours travelling a day on top of it just for the chance of investing in a home for her future. 

Im not being entitled, it is a failure of society that young people can work themselves to the bone and do ridiculous things just to be able to have a roof over their heads - and some people will do all that and still not have a roof, others wont be able to, they deserve safety and security too, a basic function of society should be that everyone has the means to live safely and in comfort. My generation spend all their time working, and this totally benefits people in power as we dont have any energy or time left to do anything, all the creativity and community movements I do see amaze me as people are doing super human things to achieve them while still affording to live. Its an atrocity that I have multiple friends and their mothers that have to stay with abusive fathers because they can’t afford to leave, that I have friends who have had to submit appeals to show that as disabled, queer, trans teens and young adults of colour they are ‘more vulnerable’ than other homeless youth as all homeless youth a vulnerable so only the most vulnerable can be housed.

Fuck everything. I know I am SO lucky to have parents who own a big house due to my grandad building a good business for himself and his family. Why is it so radical to think that everyone should have that! A house, security, community, stability. And I don’t mean everyone has a change to work hard and build a company that could fund a nice house. I mean .everyone.should.have.a.house. EVERYONE. There should be no one homeless, there should be no one in inadequate, dirty, crowded or too small homes. You shouldnt have to be exceptionally lucky and build a business to have a house, because my grandad worked no harder than others, infact I am 100% sure that others worked harder and have nothing to show for it. If you rely on everyone having a chance to work towards having a reasonable home, then you are sanctioning random selection of who gets homes and who doesn’t, you are saying its okay that some people wont and thats never okay. Everyone deserves a space they can be safe in, be healthy in, build a family and community in. EVERYONE regardless of what they do or dont do, being able to work is not a pre-requisite for being valued, a person may never ‘work’ in the way our government sees work but everyone has something to give, everyone contributes to something bigger than themselves - like family or community. 

[jamesstegall]

Inside the fight to reclaim AI from Big Tech’s control

Timnit Gebru never thought a scientific paper would cause her so much trouble. 

In 2020, as the co-lead of Google’s ethical AI team, Gebru had reached out to Emily Bender, a linguistics professor at the University of Washington, and asked to collaborate on research about the troubling direction of artificial intelligence. Gebru wanted to identify the risks posed by large language models, one of the most stunning recent breakthroughs in AI research. The models are algorithms trained on staggering amounts of text. Under the right conditions, they can compose what look like convincing passages of prose.

For a few years, tech companies had been racing to build bigger versions and integrate them into consumer products. Google, which invented the technique, was already using one to improve the relevance of search results. OpenAI announced the largest one, called GPT-3, in June 2020 and licensed it exclusively to Microsoft a few months later.

Gebru worried about how fast the technology was being deployed. In the paper she wound up writing with Bender and five others, she detailed the possible dangers. The models were enormously costly to create—both environmentally (they require huge amounts of computational power) and financially; they were often trained on the toxic and abusive language of the internet; and they’d come to dominate research in language AI, elbowing out promising alternatives. 

Like other existing AI techniques, the models don’t actually understand language. But because they can manipulate it to retrieve text-based information for users or generate natural conversation, they can be packaged into products and services that make tech companies lots of money.

That November, Gebru submitted the paper to a conference. Soon after, Google executives asked her to retract it, and when she refused, they fired her. Two months later, they also fired her coauthor Margaret Mitchell, the other leader of the ethical AI team.

The dismantling of that team sparked one of the largest controversies within the AI world in recent memory. Defenders of Google argued that the company has the right to supervise its own researchers. But for many others, it solidified fears about the degree of control that tech giants now have over the field. Big Tech is now the primary employer and funder of AI researchers, including, somewhat ironically, many of those who assess its social impacts.

Among the world’s richest and most powerful companies, Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, and Apple have made AI core parts of their business. Advances over the last decade, particularly in an AI technique called deep learning, have allowed them to monitor users’ behavior; recommend news, information, and products to them; and most of all, target them with ads. Last year Google’s advertising apparatus generated over $140 billion in revenue. Facebook’s generated $84 billion.

The companies have invested heavily in the technology that has brought them such vast wealth. Google’s parent company, Alphabet, acquired the London-based AI lab DeepMind for $600 million in 2014 and spends hundreds of millions a year to support its research. Microsoft signed a $1 billion deal with OpenAI in 2019 for commercialization rights to its algorithms.

At the same time, tech giants have become large investors in university-based AI research, heavily influencing its scientific priorities. Over the years, more and more ambitious scientists have transitioned to working for tech giants full time or adopted a dual affiliation. From 2018 to 2019, 58% of the most cited papers at the top two AI conferences had at least one author affiliated with a tech giant, compared with only 11% a decade earlier, according to a study by researchers in the Radical AI Network, a group that seeks to challenge power dynamics in AI.

The problem is that the corporate agenda for AI has focused on techniques with commercial potential, largely ignoring research that could help address challenges like economic inequality and climate change. In fact, it has made these challenges worse. The drive to automate tasks has cost jobs and led to the rise of tedious labor like data cleaning and content moderation. The push to create ever larger models has caused AI’s energy consumption to explode. Deep learning has also created a culture in which our data is constantly scraped, often without consent, to train products like facial recognition systems. And recommendation algorithms have exacerbated political polarization, while large language models have failed to clean up misinformation. 

It’s this situation that Gebru and a growing movement of like-minded scholars want to change. Over the last five years, they’ve sought to shift the field’s priorities away from simply enriching tech companies, by expanding who gets to participate in developing the technology. Their goal is not only to mitigate the harms caused by existing systems but to create a new, more equitable and democratic AI. 

“Hello from Timnit”

In December 2015, Gebru sat down to pen an open letter. Halfway through her PhD at Stanford, she’d attended the Neural Information Processing Systems conference, the largest annual AI research gathering. Of the more than 3,700 researchers there, Gebru counted only five who were Black.

Once a small meeting about a niche academic subject, NeurIPS (as it’s now known) was quickly becoming the biggest annual AI job bonanza. The world’s wealthiest companies were coming to show off demos, throw extravagant parties, and write hefty checks for the rarest people in Silicon Valley: skillful AI researchers.

That year Elon Musk arrived to announce the nonprofit venture OpenAI. He, Y Combinator’s then president Sam Altman, and PayPal cofounder Peter Thiel had put up $1 billion to solve what they believed to be an existential problem: the prospect that a superintelligence could one day take over the world. Their solution: build an even better superintelligence. Of the 14 advisors or technical team members he anointed, 11 were white men.

RICARDO SANTOS | COURTESY PHOTO

While Musk was being lionized, Gebru was dealing with humiliation and harassment. At a conference party, a group of drunk guys in Google Research T-shirts circled her and subjected her to unwanted hugs, a kiss on the cheek, and a photo.

Gebru typed out a scathing critique of what she had observed: the spectacle, the cult-like worship of AI celebrities, and most of all, the overwhelming homogeneity. This boy’s club culture, she wrote, had already pushed talented women out of the field. It was also leading the entire community toward a dangerously narrow conception of artificial intelligence and its impact on the world.

Google had already deployed a computer-vision algorithm that classified Black people as gorillas, she noted. And the increasing sophistication of unmanned drones was putting the US military on a path toward lethal autonomous weapons. But there was no mention of these issues in Musk’s grand plan to stop AI from taking over the world in some theoretical future scenario. “We don’t have to project into the future to see AI’s potential adverse effects,” Gebru wrote. “It is already happening.”

Gebru never published her reflection. But she realized that something needed to change. On January 28, 2016, she sent an email with the subject line “Hello from Timnit” to five other Black AI researchers. “I’ve always been sad by the lack of color in AI,” she wrote. “But now I have seen 5 of you

and thought that it would be cool if we started a black in AI group or at least know of each other.”

The email prompted a discussion. What was it about being Black that informed their research? For Gebru, her work was very much a product of her identity; for others, it was not. But after meeting they agreed: If AI was going to play a bigger role in society, they needed more Black researchers. Otherwise, the field would produce weaker science—and its adverse consequences could get far worse.

A profit-driven agenda

As Black in AI was just beginning to coalesce, AI was hitting its commercial stride. That year, 2016, tech giants spent an estimated $20 to $30 billion on developing the technology, according to the McKinsey Global Institute.

Heated by corporate investment, the field warped. Thousands more researchers began studying AI, but they mostly wanted to work on deep-learning algorithms, such as the ones behind large language models. “As a young PhD student who wants to get a job at a tech company, you realize that tech companies are all about deep learning,” says Suresh Venkatasubramanian, a computer science professor who now serves at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. “So you shift all your research to deep learning. Then the next PhD student coming in looks around and says, ‘Everyone’s doing deep learning. I should probably do it too.’”

But deep learning isn’t the only technique in the field. Before its boom, there was a different AI approach known as symbolic reasoning. Whereas deep learning uses massive amounts of data to teach algorithms about meaningful relationships in information, symbolic reasoning focuses on explicitly encoding knowledge and logic based on human expertise. 

Some researchers now believe those techniques should be combined. The hybrid approach would make AI more efficient in its use of data and energy, and give it the knowledge and reasoning abilities of an expert as well as the capacity to update itself with new information. But companies have little incentive to explore alternative approaches when the surest way to maximize their profits is to build ever bigger models. 

In their paper, Gebru and Bender alluded to a basic cost of this tendency to stick with deep learning: the more advanced AI systems we need are not being developed, and similar problems keep recurring. Facebook, for example, relies heavily on large language models for automated content moderation. But without really understanding the meaning behind text, those models often fail. They regularly take down innocuous posts while giving hate speech and misinformation a pass.

AI-based facial recognition systems suffer from the same issue. They’re trained on massive amounts of data but see only pixel patterns—they do not have a grasp of visual concepts like eyes, mouths, and noses. That can trip these systems up when they’re used on individuals with a different skin tone from the people they were shown during training. Nonetheless, Amazon and other companies have sold these systems to law enforcement. In the US, they have caused three known cases of police jailing the wrong person—all Black men—in the last year.

For years, many in the AI community largely acquiesced to Big Tech’s role in shaping the development and impact of these technologies. While some expressed discomfort with the corporate takeover, many more welcomed the industry’s deep well of funding. 

But as the shortcomings of today’s AI have become more evident—both its failure to solve social problems and the mounting examples that it can exacerbate them—faith in Big Tech has weakened. Google’s ousting of Gebru and Mitchell further stoked the discussion by revealing just how much companies will prioritize profit over self-policing.

In the immediate aftermath, over 2,600 Google employees and 4,300 others signed a petition denouncing Gebru’s dismissal as “unprecedented research censorship.” Half a year later, research groups are still rejecting the company’s funding, researchers refuse to participate in its conference workshops, and employees are leaving in protest.

Unlike five years ago, when Gebru began raising these questions, there’s now a well-established movement questioning what AI should be and who it should serve. This isn’t a coincidence. It’s very much a product of Gebru’s own initiative, which began with the simple act of inviting more Black researchers into the field.

It takes a conference

In December 2017, the new Black in AI group hosted its first workshop at NeurIPS. While organizing the workshop, Gebru approached Joy Buolamwini, an MIT Media Lab researcher who was studying commercial facial recognition systems for possible bias. Buolamwini had begun testing these systems after one failed to detect her own face unless she donned a white mask. She submitted her preliminary results to the workshop.

Deborah Raji, then an undergraduate researcher, was another early participant. Raji was appalled by the culture she’d observed at NeurIPS. The workshop became her respite. “To go from four or five days of that to a full day of people that look like me talking about succeeding in this space—it was such important encouragement for me,” she says.

Buolamwini, Raji, and Gebru would go on to work together on a pair of groundbreaking studies about discriminatory computer-vision systems. Buolamwini and Gebru coauthored Gender Shades, which showed that the facial recognition systems sold by Microsoft, IBM, and Chinese tech giant Megvii had remarkably high failure rates on Black women despite near-perfect performance on white men. Raji and Buolamwini then collaborated on a follow-up called Actionable Auditing, which found the same to be true for Amazon’s Rekognition. In 2020, Amazon would agree to a one-year moratorium on police sales of its product, in part because of that work.

At the very first Black in AI workshop, though, these successes were distant possibilities. There was no agenda other than to build community and produce research based on their sorely lacking perspectives. Many onlookers didn’t understand why such a group needed to exist. Gebru remembers dismissive comments from some in the AI community. But for others, Black in AI pointed a new way forward.

This was true for William Agnew and Raphael Gontijo Lopes, both queer men conducting research in computer science, who realized they could form a Queer in AI group. (Other groups that took shape include Latinx in AI, {Dis}Ability in AI, and Muslim in ML.) For Agnew, in particular, having such a community felt like an urgent need. “It was hard to even imagine myself having a happy life,” he says, reflecting on the lack of queer role models in the field. “There’s Turing, but he committed suicide. So that’s depressing. And the queer part of him is just ignored.”

Not all affinity group members see a connection between their identity and their research. Still, each group has established particular expertise. Black in AI has become the intellectual center for exposing algorithmic discrimination, critiquing surveillance, and developing data-efficient AI techniques. Queer in AI has become a center for contesting the ways algorithms infringe on people’s privacy and classify them into bounded categories by default.

Venkatasubramanian and Gebru also helped create the Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAccT) conference to create a forum for research on the social and political implications of AI. Ideas and draft papers discussed at NeurIPS affinity group workshops often become the basis for papers published at FAccT, which then showcases that research to broader audiences.

It was after Buolamwini presented at the first Black in AI workshop, for example, that FAccT published Gender Shades. Along with Actionable Auditing, it then fueled several major education and advocacy campaigns to limit government use of facial recognition. When Amazon attempted to undermine the legitimacy of Buolamwini’s and Raji’s research, dozens of AI researchers and civil society organizations banded together to defend them, foreshadowing what they would later do for Gebru. Those efforts eventually contributed to Amazon’s moratorium, which in May the company announced it would extend indefinitely.

The research also set off a cascade of regulation. More than a dozen cities have banned police use of facial recognition, and Massachusetts now requires police to get a judge’s permission to use it. Both the US and the European Commission have proposed additional regulation.

“First we had to just be there,” says Gebru. “And at some point, what Black in AI says starts to become important. And what all of these groups together say becomes important. You have to listen to us now.”

Follow the money

After Gebru and Mitchell’s firing, the field is grappling anew with an age-old question: Is it possible to change the status quo while working from within? Gebru still believes working with tech giants is the best way to identify the problems. But she also believes that corporate researchers need stronger legal protections. If they see risky practices, they should be able to publicly share their observations without jeopardizing their careers.

Then there’s the question of funding. Many researchers want more investment from the US government to support work that is critical of commercial AI development and advances the public welfare. Last year, it committed a measly $1 billion to non-defense-related AI research. The Biden administration is now asking Congress to invest an additional $180 billion in emerging technologies, with AI as a top priority.

Such funding could help people like Rediet Abebe, an assistant professor of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley. Abebe came into AI with ideas of using it to advance social equity. But when she started her PhD at Cornell, no one was focused on doing such research. 

In the fall of 2016, as a PhD student, she began a small Cornell reading group with a fellow graduate student to study topics like housing instability, health-care access, and inequality. She then embarked on a new project to see whether her computational skills could support efforts to alleviate poverty.

Eventually, she found the Poverty Tracker study, a detailed data set on the financial shocks—unexpected expenses like medical bills or parking tickets—experienced by more than 2,000 New York families. Over many conversations with the study’s authors, social workers, and nonprofits serving marginalized communities, she learned about their needs and told them how she could help. Abebe then developed a model that showed how the frequency and type of shocks affected a family’s economic status. 

Five years later, the project is still ongoing. She’s now collaborating with nonprofits to improve her model and working with policymakers through the California Policy Lab to use it as a tool for preventing homelessness. Her reading group has also since grown into a 2,000-person community and is holding its inaugural conference later this year. 

Abebe sees it as a way to incentivize more researchers to flip the norms of AI. While traditional computer science conferences emphasize advancing computational techniques for the sake of doing so, the new one will publish work that first seeks to deeply understand a social issue. The work is no less technical, but it builds the foundation for more socially meaningful AI to emerge. 

“These changes that we’re fighting for—it’s not just for marginalized groups,” she says. “It’s actually for everyone.”

from MIT Technology Review https://ift.tt/3vgRXl2 via IFTTT

[khalilhumam]

The healing effects of bush tea: A conversation with Barbadian visual artist Annalee Davis

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The healing effects of bush tea: A conversation with Barbadian visual artist Annalee Davis

“Art is pivotal in the curative space”; Part 1 of 2

Cerasee bush, just one of the many medicinal plants that can be used to make bush tea, drying. Photo by Sammy Davis, courtesy of Annalee Davis, used with permission.

Bush tea — infusions of indigenous plants and herbs deemed to have medicinal properties — is still fairly well-consumed in the Caribbean. Barbadian visual artist and cultural activist Annalee Davis is taking the concept to a new level through her work around the well-known drink. In a region still grappling with the fallout from colonialism and slavery — trauma that is rooted to the land — Davis’ project, “Bush Tea Plots,” seeks to develop post-plantation regenerative strategies. The result is a progressive interweaving of agriculture, economics, art and history that has the potential to not only make Caribbean people reframe the past but build on that resilience to create a hopeful future, tackling challenges like climate mitigation and COVID-19 head-on. The fact that Davis’ studio is located on a dairy farm that used to be a 17th-century sugar plantation makes her discoveries even more tangible, as her art and writing literally engage with the shards of that history.

A Flamboyant tree at Walkers Dairy, St. George, Barbados, site of the artist’s home and studio. Photo (2019) by Annalee Davis, used with permission.

Via a YouTube livestream on May 14, 2020, Davis spoke with Keisha Farnum, the managing director of Walkers Institute for Regeneration Research Education and Design (WIRRED), about some of these concepts, and engaged with me right afterward via email and WhatsApp, where we further examined some intriguing questions.

Barbadian visual artist Annalee Davis discusses her work. Photo courtesy Davis, used with permission.

Janine Mendes-Franco (JMF): Bush tea provides a non-threatening way to bridge the chasm between the shared history of our region and its collective future. Did you consciously choose an approach that turned the drink of our former colonisers on its head, or did it emerge organically?

Annalee Davis (AD): This particular landscape and the context of the plantation have formed the baseline of my work for decades. I tend to ruminate on an idea for quite some time, maybe years, until it coalesces into something more tangible. (Bush) Tea Services [a related project] evolved from the Wild Plant drawings on ledger pages and from the land in an organic way. Walking the fields, as Rebecca Solnit suggests, is a way to measure our bodies against the land and I am constantly measuring my body against this land during my roaming dawn ritual where ideas reveal themselves and later manifest in the studio.

JMF: As Caribbean people take control of our historical narrative, how important is it to talk about the trauma in order for collective healing to take place — and how critical is art to that cure?

AD: I have been concerned with how shared historical suffering reveals itself communally and how individuals and nations manage trauma and the desire for self-fulfilment in small places like Barbados, where social life and kinship are predominantly experienced in separate social spheres. Art is pivotal in the curative space because it registers beyond the intellect at a sensorial level. However, before we heal, difficult conversations analysing the past, facilitating opportunities to broaden identities, and expressing solidarities to shape the future are essential. A virtual slaughterhouse sits beneath our soil, sowing the seeds of contemporary issues with which we grapple today. These legacies emanate from the subterranean layers of this land as living ghosts from our collective past. There is so much work to do and artists are critical to the conversations as we have the power to envision alternative futures for us all.

JMF: I was recently explaining to someone outside of the region that Barbados, highly reliant on tourism, is perhaps the most manicured of all the Caribbean territories. Bush, on the other hand, is wild. How has this project helped you reconcile the two?

AD: I’m not sure I have. If anything, bush reminds me how fake the polished tourist environment is — from which I’m quite removed. Bush is wild and has taught me so much more about myself and the way in which I was (mis)educated. As a young child I learned that ‘weeds’ were not valued and were removed manually or eradicated chemically. Much later, I understood the importance of bush, and the significant role played by wild botanicals in regenerating the soil.

An exhibit of Annalee Davis’ “Wild Plant Series,”2015. Latex on Plantation Ledger Pages, 22” x 13″. Photo by Mark Doroba. Image courtesy Davis, used with permission.

JMF: I know you’re concerned about the region’s soil degradation and biodiversity loss as a result of extractive industries like monocropping — whether it was sugar cane in the 17th century, or tourism now. Can you explain how your “Wild Plants” series has helped create a shift from degradation to phytoremediation — from bush as weeds to bush as a precious resource?

AD: I now see wild plants as active agents in the process of decolonising fields, performing quiet revolutions by asserting themselves against an imperial, monocrop landscape. A proliferation of wild plants and trees growing in abandoned sugar cane fields now contribute to greater biodiversity in Barbados since the late 17th century. Walking these fields at Walkers and directing my attention toward plants often ignored, reorients my understanding of this land and our history away from dominant narratives. Phytoremediation — the capacity of some plants to remove toxins from the soil through their roots — has become a conceptual springboard for this series of drawings and a powerful way to instrumentalise the bush.

Annalee Davis’ “Wild Plant Series” (Detail): Leucaena leucocephela/Myamosee, River Tamarind. Image courtesy Davi, used with permission.

JMF: When you were working on the series, drawing the images on actual plantation ledger pages — an accounting methodology used by the British Empire — two things struck you: the Victorian rose colour of the pages, which led you to think about gender, and the orderliness with which all sorts of information was fastidiously recorded, disguising the underlying chaos and trauma of the plantation system. How does your art offer an alternative story?

AD: My inscription of other images, like delicate shards, the Queen Anne’s Lace pattern, botanicals or the woman’s body, encourages us to think differently about this loaded context. I decolonise the ledger by repopulating and complicating these fiscal substrates as a kind of civic negotiation, exposing gaps in Barbados’ plantation history buried in the soil, in the public imagination and inadequately documented in the archives. This complicates the single story written through the voice of the white male planter about the economics of the sugar industry. Black, white, and biracial women also lived and worked on the plantation, lands previously inhabited by the indigenous. What was their relationship to wild plants, I wonder?

Annalee Davis’ “Bush Tea Plots – A Decolonial Patch”, 2019. Photo by Dondré Trotman. Image courtesy Davis, used with permission.

JMF: Your work “Bush Tea Plots – A Decolonial Patch,” incorporates art, landscape architecture and spiritual healing. Can you explain how this is a living testimony to regional resilience?

AD: Commissioned by the World Bank Group for their Risk and Resilience conference at a conference at [The University of the West Indies] Cave Hill campus, I collaborated with Kevin Talma and Ras Ils, linking art practice, landscape architecture, and botany for this permanent installation at the Errol Barrow Centre for Creative Imagination. Thinking about forming new relationships with the land, I envisaged this work as a living restorative plot or apothecary of resistance confronting the historical imposition of Barbados’ monocrop, sugarcane, recognising nature as a radical agent of resistance against the model of the plantation. Observing how the natural world is threatened and degraded, the work looks to nature as a regenerative biosphere with tools for healing at the agricultural, botanical and psychological and spiritual levels. Comprising a glass planter showing the soil profile and a specially curated selection of 12 medicinal plants with healing properties, it increases knowledge of medicinal plants through a dedicated website while teaching resilience by using what’s readily available in our environment rather than only relying on imported pharmaceuticals.

Look out for the second installment, in which Annalee discusses another bush tea concept, “Bush Tea Services,” and explains how her theories are relevant to pressing global issues like the climate crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic.

Written by Janine Mendes-Franco · comments (0) Donate · Share this: twitter facebook reddit

[gethealthy18-blog]

Pyaar Kiya Toh Darna Kya: 27 Years Of LGBTQ Pride

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Pyaar Kiya Toh Darna Kya: 27 Years Of LGBTQ Pride

Saumya Gaur Hyderabd040-395603080 June 28, 2019

Love knows no bounds — this thought, while deeply philosophical and poignant, is also quite removed from reality. For the world which we inhabit, this abstract idea of love is chained and governed by cold, material reality. The reality of class, caste, religion, and yes, gender too.

But the heart wants what it wants, right?

The month of June is celebrated as the Pride Month in the memory of the Stonewall Riots that took place in New York, USA, in June 1969. These riots sprung from a spontaneous act of rebellion against the systemic harassment of the members of the gay, and lesbian community, by the police. Till then, the LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender) community remained divided into factions and lived in relative obscurity. But these riots helped them unite as a cohesive unit and thus, was born the active current of LGBTQ activism (where Q stands for queer). In many official and unofficial historical accounts of the LGBTQ movement, this moment is seen as the one where the gay and lesbian community gained a political identity (1).

thestonewallinn / Instagram

This alternative bit of history is still a part of mainstream considering it happened in a developed nation, but what about the 2nd most populous nation in the world, India? As we mark the end of the Pride Month, let us take a look at India’s own coming out of the closet.

India’s Rainbow: Existing In The Imaginative

rupinderkw_ / Instagram

Since the early days of the Indian society, ordinary Indian citizens who identified as homosexuals or those who acknowledged them to exist, tried their best to remain in the shadows, but every now and then, they would venture into the collective imagination through a mention in books, or poetry.

In 1942, the publication of Urdu writer Ismat Chughtai’s short story, Lihaaf, led to an obscenity trial wherein Chughtai was asked to apologize for her depiction of a relationship between two women as seen through the eyes of a young girl (2). Though she did end up winning the case, the story made her (in) famous as a provocative writer of corrupt books.

micandmanch / Instagram

From then, till the early 90s, depictions of homosexuality were attempted by a few brave writers, still the society at large remained uncomfortable talking about the issue, branding it immoral and corrupt (3).

The Opening Of The Closet

feminismismagic / Instagram

India’s own Stonewall moment came almost two decades after the original one. On August 11, 1992, a few protesters from an organization called AIDS Bhedbhav Virodhi Andolan, (ABVA), decided to block the entrance of Police Headquarters in Delhi to protest the arrest of several men on the suspicion of homosexuality (4).

The organization also laid the foundation for the repeal of the outmoded Section 377, which punished anyone who had voluntary carnal intercourse against the order of man with any man, woman, or animal.

Not only was this law used as a tool to oppress and terrorize members of the LGBTQ community, but its archaic phrasing also rendered certain sexual acts between consenting heteronormative couples as illegal! Needless to say, it had no place in modern India.

In 2001, the NGO Naz Foundation filed a Public Interest Litigation (PIL) in Delhi High Court to make homosexual intercourse legal. After a prolonged legal battle of 8 years, in 2009, Delhi High Court decriminalized homosexual acts, terming the section 377 as violative of the basic rights as given in the Constitution, but this decision was overruled by the Supreme Court in 2013 (5). Finally, after a number of walk-backs and debates on the constitutionality of the law, the Supreme Court finally legalized homosexual acts by partially striking down section 377, in September 2018 (6).

bhopalpride / Instagram

Though the credit for this landmark victory goes to these foundations, and a few eminent private citizens who mobilized support to fight the good fight, one can’t ignore those countless ordinary individuals who braved moral policing and contempt of the society by participating in freedom marches and pride parades. India’s first pride parade was held as early as 1999, in Kolkata, when 15 LGBTQ activists took part in Kolkata Friendship Walk (7). This tradition was adopted by other cities of the country which soon went on to host their own Pride parades.

Abolition Of Article 377: Towards A More Inclusive Future

officialhumansofbombay / Instagram

Though its neighbors like Taiwan have taken more radical steps such as legalizing same-sex marriage, India’s still testing the waters. But one thing is sure, the change is coming and for a lot of members of the LGBTQ community, there’s a rainbow at the end of the tunnel.

This can be evident from the fact that public personages like the athlete Duttee Chand, had no inhibition in announcing her sexual orientation to the world. And why would she, when she had such a strong community to support her (8).

More and more, acceptance is becoming the norm. It’s true that society fears what it does not understand, and now, the Indian society is collectively making an effort to understand its much-maligned faction. Stories of individuals who were accepted by their families, who are encouraged to be themselves unapologetically are increasing in numbers. Social media projects like Humans of Bombay are replete with them.

Popular media too has left behind its crude, mocking ways and is trying to portray the rich inner life of this section of the society without reducing them to cruel stereotypes.

It wouldn’t be right to say that everyone is free to love in this, post-377 India, but yes, they are no longer deemed criminals for loving someone who is of the same sex.

So, yes, with each passing day, India is surely but certainly making its way out of the closet.

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[springfield-babeuf]

The Communist Necessity（1）

The Communist Necessity

Prolegomena To Any Future Radical Theory

J. Moufawad-Paul

The Communist Necessity: prolegomena to any future radical theory by J. Moufawad-Paul

ISBN: 978-1-894946-63-6

Copyright 2014 J. Moufawad-Paul

This edition copyright 2014 Kersplebedeb

first KINDLE edition 2014

Kersplebedeb Publishing and Distribution CP 63560 CCCP Van Horne Montreal, Quebec Canada H3W 3H8

email: info@kersplebedeb.com web: www.kersplebedeb.com

     www.leftwingbooks.net

contents

overture

chapter one:  twenty-first century communism

chapter two:  collaboration & contingency

chapter three:  new returns

coda

acknowledgments

about the author

about the kalikot book series

about kersplebedeb publishing

more kindle books from kersplebedeb

COMMUNISM. We know it is a word to be used with caution. Not because, in the grand parade of words, it may no longer be very fashionable. But because our worst enemies have used it, and continue to do so. We insist. Certain words are like battlegrounds: their meaning, revolutionary or reactionary, is a victory, to be torn from the jaws of struggle.

The Invisible Committee

Yesterday we had nothing. Today we have two great historical experiences rich in lessons, experiences which are present, which are alive in us... We must insist that the fact that there have been two restorations does not deny that the revolution is the main trend. To deny this fact is a pipe dream of reactionaries because the world proletarian revolution continues to advance and we are a part of that advance. It is undeniable that the world proletarian revolution will demand the cost of bloodshed, but what does not demand the cost of blood in this world? We ourselves would not be here without the lives sacrificed by so many communists and revolutionaries.

Peruvian Communist Party

Overture

The leftist milieu in North America and Europe has now reached a point where the movementism of the late 1990s is approaching its limits.  Following the collapse of the Eastern Bloc, China’s descent into state capitalism, and the degeneration of abandoned and small socialist satellite states such as Cuba, the left at the privileged centres of global capitalism entered an era of chaos.  Unwilling to accept that capitalism was the end of history, while at the same time believing that communism was a failed project, leftist organizations dealt with their confusion by either disintegrating or distancing themselves from the past.  If the history of actually existing socialism had indeed proved itself to be a grand failure, then the only hope for the activist of the 1990s was to discover a new way of making revolution.

In those days, when fragile affinity groups embraced contingency and chaos in the hope that this disorganized method would somehow produce revolution, we imagined we were building something new.  We were incapable of understanding that all we were doing was uncritically replicating past methods of organization that had already revealed their ineffectiveness prior to the spectacular failure of communism.  We returned to anarchism without reflecting on the anarchist limits of the Spanish Revolution.  We returned to disorganization without understanding all of those incoherent currents of socialism that had failed to build anything beyond utopian speculation.  We refused to think through the problem of the state, forgetting the limits encountered by the communards in Paris.  Incapable of understanding the precise meaning of the communist failure, we ended up repeating the past while imagining we were building something new.

The 1999 protests against the World Trade Organization in Seattle.  The mobilization against the 2001 Free Trade Areas of the Americas Summit in Quebec City.  The 2001 G8 protests in Genoa.  These were the high-points of the anti-globalization movement.  Together, along with other explosive moments of angry first world resistance, these struggles demonstrated a belief that innumerable and disconnected movements could topple capitalism, that their fractured efforts would intersect and amount to a critical breaking point.  Eventually this practice would collide with the fact of highly organized and militarized states that, unlike the chaotic activists challenging the power of capitalism, were more than capable of pacifying discontent.  This was movementism: the assumption that specific social movements, sometimes divided along lines of identity or interest, could reach a critical mass and together, without any of that Leninist nonsense, end capitalism.  

By the time of the 2010 G20 Summit in Toronto this anti-capitalist methodology had already become a caricature of itself.  The confrontations were echoed as tragedy or farce, there was a tired recognition that nothing would be accomplished, and the militants arrested were guilty only of demanding the right to protest.  All of the high-points, if they were indeed high-points, of 1999 and 2001 were repeated in a tired and banal manner; the state remained unharmed, the activists resisting the state were punished.  Before this farce, the coordinating committee of the 2010 demonstrations would absurdly maintain, on multiple email list-serves, that we were winning, and yet it could never explain what itmeant by “we” nor did its claim about “winning” make very much sense when it was patently clear that a victory against the G20 would have to be more than a weekend of protests.  Had we truly reached a point where victory was nothing more than a successful demonstration, where we simply succeeded in defending the liberal right to assembly?  After all, it would be bizarre to assume that the people responsible for this triumphalist language actually believed that world imperialism would be defeated that weekend.  They had already dampened their expectations, and when they spoke of winning they were simply demonstrating a defeatist acceptance of lowered stakes.

Those who refuse to recognize 2010 as a caricature, who continue to argue that this organizational form and strategy is the only way forward, are like the hippies of the 1960s: behind the times, focused on their “glory days” in the late 1990s and early 2000s, myopic in their inability to look beyond the boundaries of their time and space.  They refuse to examine the past revolutions just as they refuse to examine the revolutionary movements of today, in those zones that they claim to defend against imperialism, that had never been enamoured with this movementist praxis.  They are willing to settle for reformism and pretend that it is revolution, acting as if a successful defense of the right to assembly and the ability to make one’s complaint heard are the only victories the movement can achieve.

In order to make sense of our impasse, we adopted new theories of organization, anything that did not resemble the failures of the past, desperately hoping we would find the holy grail that would make another world possible.  We ventured out into theoretical terrains we believed were exciting because of the whirlwind jargon some theorists employed.  We spoke of rhizomes, of bloom, of deterritorialization, of the multitude, of anything that did not completely resemble the old-fashioned jargon that stank of failure.

And yet our failures were not even world historical; we failed long before reaching those moments of grand failure that had disciplined us into adopting these alternative practices of rebellion.  We were not even capable of replicating the failure of the Paris Commune, let alone the failures in Russia and China.  We did nothing but protest, sometimes militantly agitating without any long-term plans, and fantasized that our activism was synonymous with revolution.

Meanwhile, even before we embarked upon this confused path of social movementism, people’s wars were being launched in those zones we claimed to represent under the auspices of a theory we had assumed was dead.  Incapable of looking beyond the boundaries of our own practice, we often refused to recognize these movements, cherry-picking those moments of resistance that resembled our own practices.  Instead of the Sendero Luminoso we championed a particular narrative of the Zapatistas; instead of Nepal we focused on Venezuela; instead of the Naxalites we lauded the Arab Spring.  Possessing the privilege to ignore everything that did not resemble our supposedly new way of seeing the world, we dismissed anything that could teach us otherwise.

But now some of us—whose experiences of this banal failure have taught us that if another world is possible it is only possible by abandoning the methods promoted by the anti-globalization movement—are beginning to question the normative anarchism and movementism that we once treated as common sense.  The movementist dream is crumbling; we are beginning to peer through its cracks.  We are glimpsing the problem of revolutionary necessity: the need to organize in a manner that goes beyond the infantile methods of movementism.

Finally the name communism is being revived at the centres of capitalism as part of an effort to reclaim the revolutionary heritage we abandoned, although the revival is incomplete: there is a gap between name and concept; there is a refusal to recognize the communist revolutionary struggles that persisted in the global peripheries; there is an inability to grasp the dialectic of failure and success.

First, the gap between name and concept.  While there is an ongoing project, amongst first world intellectuals and activists, to reclaim the name “communism” there are still only a few small steps made to reclaim the concepts this name once mobilized. This gap might demonstrate some confusion on the part of those who are dissatisfied with the anti-globalization variant of movementism but are still uncertain of how to free themselves from this morass.  This gap is in part due to the way in which our understanding of communism is filtered through a first world experience of history and social struggle.  Most importantly, however, this gap intersects with a gap between theory and practice.

Second, the refusal to recognize contemporary communist revolutions.  Perhaps because of the first problem, we have a veritable lacuna of radical academic analysis when it comes to the experience of contemporary people’s wars that have erupted and are still erupting outside of the imperialist centres.  When we do not denounce these revolutionary movements according to various conservative or liberal narratives—they are “terrorists”, “adventurists”, “murderers”, “nihilists”, etc.—we simply pretend that they do not exist.

Third, the inability to grasp the dialectic of failure and success.  As noted, common sense ideology has succeeded in presenting communism as a grand failure.  Although we cannot escape the fact that past communist movements ultimately failed, this does not mean that they were not, at the same time, earth-shaking successes.  If we can succeed in steering our way through the narrative of failure we will be able to understand the revolutionary truths hard-won by the successes that may transcend these failures—and it is here where communism’s necessity will be discovered.

Those of us who have struggled without communist ideology for decades are only beginning to make sense of the meaning of the name we had once rejected; we are still trying to recapture our heritage.

Chapter one:twenty-first century communism

Finally, after decades of post-modernism and capitalist triumphalism, it is no longer considered impolite for academics and popular intellectuals to speak the word communism.  For there was a time, not long ago, when we would have been seen as uncouth, or at least anachronistic, if we were to declare fidelity to a term that certain intellectual fads had declared old-fashioned, totalizing, violent.  Until recently, we could escape by referring to ourselves as marxist instead of communist, but only so long as we did not hyphenate our marxism with any of those suspicious names such as Lenin or Mao, those people and movements responsible for applying marxism and, in this application, declaring the word communism.  

Marxism, though passé, was considered toothless because it was only a theory, whereas communism was its possibly catastrophic application.  And those who preserved this theory in the academic universe were often those who would never dare bridge the gap between theory and practice, content only to teach and sing the praises of marxism but never speak of communism except when they spoke of failure.  As it turned out, very little was needed to convince many academics and intellectuals to be marxists in theory rather than practice: the job security of tenure, liberal rights such as freedom of speech, and publication contracts.

In this context, those intellectuals who refused to abandon political practice but who could not stomach the failed name of communism would fall back onto the more innocuous-sounding socialism when they sought a label for their activities.  A term that was once synonymous with communism, but that through the experience of the great revolutions of the 20th century had come to mean something altogether different, became a fall-back definition for those marxists who would not remain content with inaction.  This was a retreat, of sorts, back into a “pure” marxism—before Lenin—where concepts that should have been irrevocably transformed by world historical revolutions were reordered to resume their germinal status; a retreat from history, a retreat from the development of revolutionary concepts won through class struggle.

By the dawn of the 21st century it had become vogue for the more daring first world marxist academics and intellectual partisans to speak of a “21st Century Socialism” as if they were identifying a new revolutionary moment.  More than one book was written with this catch-phrase embedded somewhere in its title or subtitle, more than one speaker at a mainstream demonstration bandied it about, and yet there was generally no consensus regarding its meaning.  Some imagined that this new socialism was emerging in the movementist tides of the anti-globalization protests that began in Seattle; others thought it was happening in the jungles of Mexico with the Zapatistas [EZLN]; others would eventually ascribe it to Chavez’s Venezuela or some other left populist phenomenon in the Americas.  Just what made this “21st Century Socialism” new or a product of the 21st century, though, was rather unclear despite all attempts to make it seem apparent; it was more of a branding than anything else, an attempt to mobilize other and successive maxims—“another world is possible,” “we are everywhere,” “the coming insurrection”—that were always little more than slogans.  And this nebulous fad avoided speaking of communism, of anything that would remind us of those significant decades in the 20th century that were seen as abject failure.  This was the 21st century, after all, and we would be old-fashioned and out of touch if we spoke of those moments without melancholia.

But now, in the past three or four years, there has been a resurgence of the name that was banned, the name we were told was obsolete, from the same quarters where it had been declared anathema.  Now we have academics and popular intellectuals speaking of communist hypotheses, communist horizons, and communist possibilities.  What was once taboo in these spaces is now being pronounced openly and these pronouncements are not destroying the careers of those who make them.  Quite the opposite, in fact: now some careers are being made by declaring fidelity to the name that was once banned.

At the same time, however, this new intellectual trend of declaring the name communism cannot break from the previous period of fearfulness and so shares all of the defects and nebulous speculations of the screeds to 21st Century Socialism.  In many ways this is just a substitution of one term for another, apparently more edgy because it now chooses to speak the name that was once forbidden.  While it is true that there is an excitement in reclaiming a word that once frightened the capitalist order, this truth is toothless if it is nothing more than a name.

Some would speak of communism as an idea or hypothesis that existed for thousands of years, nearly wrenching it from those generations who died in innumerable brave attempts to make it the watch-word of the oppressed in the 20th century.  In this sense the word was dehistoricized, transformed into a Platonic form, and those instances of fear and trembling where it was elevated to great heights—heights, true, from which it would fall—were treated as ruptured moments to be remembered only for their nostalgic importance.[1]

Others would speak of communism as a far-off horizon, some distant point we could only glimpse, and thus more of an inborn desire for another and possible world.  A dream communism, something we might approach if we only have enough faith in disorganized and rebellious movements to take us there on directionless tides.  A communism across a great ocean, hiding like the lost island of Atlantis.[2]

Still others speak of the word as a name that must be reclaimed because it makes the ruling classes tremble.  We must renew this name, we are told, because it is correct to veil ourselves in the terminology our enemy despises—as if revolutionary action is a monstrous mask that will scare capitalism into retreat.  At the same time we are also told that renewing those traditions that provided us with this name, that handed us an important concept through great sacrifice, should be avoided.  “Communization” rather than the revolutionary communism of the past is the goal.[3]  Again, this is the 21st century and we are supposed to find a new method; even if it must share its name with past movements, we are told that we cannot take anything from this past because this past was only, and can only ever be, tragic.

Despite a return to the name communism there still appears to be a refusal to accept everything this name was supposed to mean—because we were told it meant mass murder, totalitarianism, and most importantly failure.  We want to reclaim it, we might even want to argue against the cold war discourse that speaks of mass murder and totalitarianism just to set the record straight, but we have been convinced that the catastrophe of 20th century communism means we must start anew, that we can learn nothing from the past except to ignore this past altogether.

Perhaps this refusal to reclaim communism in more than name is due to the “end of history” proclaimed when the Soviet Union collapsed, when capitalists imagined they were finally triumphant and wanted to convince us that class struggle was antiquated.  Here began a discourse about communism—a discourse evinced by the rise of post-modern theory—where we were taught that to even speak the name communism was backwards, and that we should just accept that capitalism was “the best of the worst.”  In this context, it is not surprising that the first academic attempts to reclaim the word are tentative.  Better to hedge our bets and remake communism than speak more precisely of a theoretical tradition supposedly concluded when capitalist victory closed that historical chapter.

And yet, despite this supposed “end of history”, communism as a revolutionary tradition never did go away.  For though it might seem daring for academics and popular intellectuals at the centres of global capitalism to reclaim the word, communism has remained a vital necessity for individuals and movements living at the margins of both the world system and acceptable discourse.  At the global centres communists generally hid themselves within the labour and student movements, grudgingly accepted the terminology of socialism, and often practiced a fearful blanquism.  At the peripheries, however, there are communists who have openly proclaimed a revolutionary communism from the very moment capitalism was declaring itself victorious: the Peruvian Communist Party [PCP] launched a people’s war in the 1980s; the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) [CPN(Maoist)] launched a people’s war in the late 1990s; the Communist Party of India (Maoist) [CPI(Maoist)] is engaged in a people’s war now; the Communist (Maoist) Party of Afghanistan [CmPA] is planning on launching its own people’s war in the near future; the Communist Party of the Philippines [CPP] has been carrying out its people’s war, with setbacks and re-initiations, for some time now. In these spaces outside of the academic and intellectual arena—an arena where our daringness is measured by reclaiming only a name—communism remains a live option in the most forceful and momentous sense.  It has not gone away, it is not just a name upon which a radical academic career can be built.

So while it might seem, for those of us who live at the centres of capitalism, as if communism has been absent for decades and is only now being reclaimed by our daring new theorists, the fact is that this is simply a mirage: communism did not bow off the historical stage, it is not only now being renewed by Slavoj Zizek, Alain Badiou, Jodi Dean, and whoever else has re-pronounced the word here at the centres of capitalism.  The fact is that it renewed itself again, in a revolutionary sense, in the 1980s just when capitalism was proclaiming the death of communism and the end of history.  But many of us who live in the global metropoles missed this event, or even continue to plead ignorance, content to imagine that we can remake history here.  That we can reinvent the meaning of communism as we please, ignoring those revolutionary movements that, if we have learned anything from Marx, are responsible for making history.  Movements that have the most obvious fidelity to the name and that express this name, even in failed revolutions, are better than our tentative attempts to merely reclaim and rearticulate a word.

The word communism remains and will always be re-proclaimed and reasserted as long as capitalism remains.  More than a hypothesis or horizon, communism is a necessity that will never cease being a necessity for the duration of capitalism’s hegemony; all successes and failures need to be appreciated and even claimed in this context.  If we understand communism as a necessity we can comprehend not only the need for its renewal and re-proclamation, but why it cannot simply actualize itself outside of history according to transhistorical hypotheses and nebulous future horizons.  We must speak of a necessary communism grounded in the unfolding of history, a communism that is simultaneously in continuity with and in rupture from the past, a communism that is always a new return.

Against utopianism

To speak of renewing communism as a necessity is to begin from that point, first opened by Marx and Engels, where the tradition of anti-capitalism was torn from its utopian basis.  As Engels wrote in Anti-Duhring, that diatribe which Marx believed was the best summation of their theory to date:

if the whole of modern society is not to perish, a revolution in the mode of production and distribution must take place, a revolution which will put an end to all class distinctions.  On this tangible, material fact, which is impressing itself in a more or less clear form, but with insuperable necessity, on the minds of the exploited proletarians—on this fact, and not on the conceptions of justice and injustice held by an armchair philosopher, is modern socialism’s confidence in victory founded.[4]

Engels’ argument would later be simplified, by Rosa Luxemburg, to mean socialism or barbarism.  That is: either we embrace the possibility of a socialist revolution that could establish communism or we accept that capitalism is the end of history and thus the fact of barbarism—that “modern society is to perish.”  Communism, then, is a necessity because otherwise capitalism, due to its intrinsic logic, will devour existence.

And it is senseless to speak of communist horizons in any other way.  For what other reason is there to desire a better world beyond the limits of capitalism?  Because capitalism is mean, evil, immoral—because we don’t like it?  These are, as Engels was quick to note at the end of the nineteenth century, the complaints of armchair philosophers: abstract moral theorizing cannot escape the problem of competing class morality, and those who attempt to establish a concrete morality that is universal, even when they are not pulled back into the terrain of abstract morality, are still incapable of producing revolution.  Such justifications do not provide a reason to transcend capitalism—to speak of any horizon—for they are most often caught within a dialogue of competing moralities: the morality of the oppressor is to continue oppressing; the morality of the oppressed is to revolt.  The only reason why the latter is superior to the former is a reason that must come from outside of this debate: the necessity of revolution due to the fact that theposition of the former is, in the last instance, contingent upon the annihilation of the basis of existence.  And that the latter—the exploited, the oppressed, the wretched of the earth—make history.  Communism, then, is more than an ethical necessity: it is an historical and material necessity.

But it is precisely this point of necessity that recent talk of communism, which speaks of hypotheses and horizons, seems to evade.  To claim that “another world is possible,” after all, is not the same as claiming that another world is necessary.  (Or, more accurately, that even this world is unsustainable as it exists now; another world, then, becomes necessary if we are to survive and flourish as a species.)  Instead we speak of the importance of a transhistorical hypothesis, or the theoretical significance of a world somewhere over the rainbow.  Hence the immediacy of the communist project—that which speaks to the immanence of revolution—is often ignored.

To speak of a communist necessity is to speak precisely of the need for revolution: if we claim that communism is an immediate need—a necessity produced by the logic of capitalism as Engels suggests—then we should be led to thinking through the necessary steps that would end capitalism and bring communism into being.  A hypothesis is simply a philosophical quandary, a horizon is little more than a fantasy, a possibility is a useful way of recognizing that the current reality may not be eternal, but a necessity is so much more.  Communism is necessary, a material need; this tells us what it means to declare fidelity to the name communism.

To dodge the question of necessity is to dodge the need for revolution.  To take the question of communism and place it in the stark framework Engels emphasized in Anti-Duhring, though, might not seem as sexy as to speak of hypotheses and horizons.  Why bother returning to a supposedly “scientific” statement made by Engels at the end of the 19th century, after all, when the 21st century is upon us and we need to repopularize communism without recourse to some stodgy and apparently old-fashioned way of looking at the world?  But now, with the annihilation of the entire ecosystem an immediate possibility because of the logic of capitalism, Engels’ framing of the question of necessity should be even more striking.  The question socialism or barbarism? is not a philosophical thought experiment but a momentous demand.

The dream of a possible horizon does nothing to answer the immediacy of this question because it fails to address the problem of necessity.  Dreams are like this: fantasies projected upon the future that tend to side-step those messy real world events where there were significant attempts to build the content of these dreams.  The thing about real life, unfortunately, is that it never identically resembles the dream.  Thus, instead of dreaming about horizons it is better to recognize that we are currently caught in the dream of capitalism as lucid dreamers in a terrible nightmare; when we recognize that we are in a nightmare, it is waking that becomes a necessity rather than subordinating ourselves to another fantasy.

And yet to speak of communism as something other than a necessity is an easy way to reclaim the word without reclaiming anything but a vague idea behind the word.  It is to intentionally ignore what is needed, in a very concrete and material sense, to bring communism into being.  Hypotheses are things that can be worked out, that require academic investigation; horizons are points of existence out of sight; possibilities are open questions.  Necessities, however, demand our immediate attention and mobilize practice.  When the movements behind the two great but unsuccessful world historical revolutions of the 20th century recognized that communism was a visceral necessity, they developed theories that spoke to this necessity and that, despite their eventual failures, brought us closer to the possibility, to recognizing the hypothesis, to breaching the horizon.

The recognition of the necessity for communist revolution, first in Russia and then in China, produced a certain level of revolutionary success that could only lead to the encounter of other necessities.  If anything, these moments, whatever their short-comings, should remind us of the importance of communism and its necessity; we should not hide from these failures, attempt to side-step them by a vague rearticulation of the terminology, or refuse to grasp that they were also successes.  If we are to learn from the past through the lens of the necessity of making revolution, then we need to do so with an honesty that treats the practice of making communism as an historical argument.

The problem of movementism

All of this new talk about communism that avoids the necessity of actually bringing communism into being demonstrates a fear of the very name communism.  In this context one can be a communist in theory but not necessarily a communist in practice.  When communism becomes a philosophical problem, or even a significant dream, it is no longer vital and the people speaking of its vitality are refusing to ask the crucial questions that would make communism apparent.

The unfocused rebellions that are emerging globally do indeed prove the importance of communism by revealing the limits of the capitalist reality.  However, we demonstrate a certain measure of fearfulness over the importance of these rebellions if our suggestions, when we bother to make them, result in tailing the masses—those masses whose rebellions are vague enough to be fantastical—and hoping they will magically bring communism into being.  The Arab Spring, Occupy, the next uprising: why do we look to these examples as expressions of communism instead of looking to those movements, organized militantly under a communist ideology, that are making more coherent and revolutionary demands?  These are movements that have not forgotten that communism is a necessity, that are not enamoured by the rediscovery of a name that only fell out of favour in the centres of global capitalism.

Those who understand communism as only an hypothesis, a horizon, a possibility are also those who are incapable of bridging the gap between theory and practice.  The act of making communism a reality is generally unpleasant—but so is reality.  If we have learned anything from the last two earth-shaking revolutions, it is that bringing communism into being is a messy business.  Here we must remember Mao’s aphorism that revolution is not a dinner party but a tragically violent upheaval in which one class seeks to displace another—and the ruling classes we seek to displace will not easily abdicate the historical stage.

To speak of communism as a necessity, then, is to focus on the concrete world and ask what steps are necessary to make it a reality.  If the point of necessity is also, as Engels wagered, a scientific axiom, then perhaps it makes sense to treat the process of revolution in the manner of a science: something that is open to the future, that is still in development, while at the same time possessing moments of universalization that have been established through world historical victories.

Intellectuals at the centres of capitalism who are attempting to reclaim the name might give lip-service to Luxemburg’s maxim “socialism or barbarism”, but what the application of this maxim would mean in practice—that is, the question of how to make the necessity of communism a reality—is generally avoided.  And so we must ask why these re-popularizations of communism contain no significant attempt to adequately theorize the steps necessary, in any particular context, for making communism.

If anything, those first world intellectuals engaged in repopularizing communism tend to make movementist strategies and tactics their default practice.  Placing their faith in disorganized rebellions, they argue either explicitly or implicitly that we must tail every unfocused mass protest that erupts in response to global capitalism.  The argument, though not always stated, is that these protests will, through some inexplicable mechanism of combination, produce a revolutionary critical mass, at some point on the distant horizon, that will finally resolve the communist hypothesis—this is precisely what is now called movementism.

There was a time, in the late 1990s and early 2000s, where most of us believed this movementist strategy was synonymous with revolutionary praxis.  We went to Seattle to protest the World Trade Organization; we assembled in Quebec City to challenge the Free Trade Agreement of the Americas; we proclaimed that we were part of a beautiful and fragmented chaos of affinity groups, conflicted organizations, disorganized rebels, all of whom were somehow part of the same social movement that was greater than the sum of its parts.  We believed ourselves to be raindrops that would produce a flood capable of sweeping away capitalism, unwilling to recognize that this was perhaps a false analogy and that we were more accurately, in very concrete terms, a disorganized mob of enraged plebeians shaking our fists at a disciplined imperial army.  Years ago we spoke of “social movementism” but now it only makes sense to drop the “social” since this phase of confusion was incapable of understanding the social terrain.

So while we should endorse every rebellion against capitalism and imperialism, no matter how desperate (as Frantz Fanon once put it), we should also realize that the unfocused nature of these rebellions is intrinsically incapable of responding to the problem of necessity.  As the Parti Communiste Révolutionnaire [PCR-RCP] argued in its 2006 document, How We Intend To Fight:

the ruling [political] tendency… has totally assimilated the idea that there is no more unity. For them, social facts are like a bag of marbles that fall on the ground in all directions and with no common trajectory, and they want everybody to think of this as being a normal fact. […] As a matter of fact, the current situation tells us that many movements “tumble,” like Mao said (or they will stumble in the following period), because they refuse to see things in their entirety. They preserve this concept of a bag of marbles and like to see multiplication of trajectories, solutions, possibilities, alternatives and reform projects. It is a rather accommodating, yet ineffective diversity.[5]

This passage concludes, a few paragraphs later, that “[t]his path goes nowhere and will literally be punctured by the facts of the decades to come. Will we overcome this division, or will the bourgeoisie completely crush us?”  It goes nowhere because, due to its very nature, it cannot approach the point of unity—the point of theoretical and practical totality that the post-modernists warned us to avoid—that should emanate from the understanding that communism is a necessity.  For when we speak of necessities we also have to speak of building a unified movement that, due to this unity, will possess the intention of making what is necessary a reality.  Disparate, unfocused, and divided movements lack a unified intentionality; they have proved themselves incapable of pursuing the necessity of communism.

The all-too-easy movementist solution, either implicit or explicit in these new endorsements of communism, should be understood as an assimilation of an idea of disunity that has, indeed, become “a normal fact” at the centres of capitalism.  In 2003, the anti-globalization editorial collective, “Notes from Nowhere”, put together a book called We Are Everywhere that argued:

different movements around the world are busy strengthening their networks, developing their autonomy, taking to the streets in huge carnivals against capital, resisting brutal repression and growing stronger as a result, and exploring new notions of sharing power rather than wielding it.  Our voices are mingling in the fields and on the streets across the planet, where seemingly separate movements converge and the wave of global resistance becomes a tsunami causing turbulence thousands of miles away, and simultaneously creating ripples which lap at our doorstep.[6]

Lovely words, to be sure, but what happened to the movements this book documented—movements that were meant to converge, without taking power, in a “movement of movements”[7] and end capitalism?  From movements as disparate as the EZLN in Mexico to the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty [OCAP] in Toronto, the disunified terrain in which this book placed its hope evaporated within a few years of the book’s publication.  For it was never really united with a focused intention dedicated to the necessary end of capitalism.  Dream-like and carnivalesque, these were movements that might or might not have been important rebellions but could never produce revolution.  

It is significant, perhaps, that We Are Everywhere concludes with a poetic excerpt from Arundhati Roy’s Come September speech: “Another world is not only possible, she is on her way.  On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.”  But Roy has transgressed the boundaries of movementism—today she spends a great deal of time defending the people’s war in India, a revolutionary movement that would have greatly offended the editors of this book and their idealist proclamations of making revolution without taking power.  Roy’s shift in strategy is significant because, if read in historical context, this chronicle of the previous and failed movementist approach to revolution is an opening, an invitation, to a new return to the communist necessity it refused to address.

Another downfall of the movementist approach to revolution is that it is incapable, due to the very fact of its disorganization, of producing consistent historical memory—for how can we have such a memory if we are focused on incoherence and thus, ultimately, forgetting?  As such, it is only natural that last decade’s movementism would be echoed by the still popular movementism of this decade.  Perhaps it makes sense that the proudly edited and published collection of today’s movementism would also echo the collection of the past movementism: now we have a book called We Are Many that is focused on the so-called “Arab Spring” and the “Occupy Movement” and, generally amnesiatic about the fate of the movements in We Are Everywhere, recycles the same tropes.  And it is in this general context where we find the odd intellectual speaking of communist hypotheses, possibilities, horizons—a context that remains ignorant of the preceding context which established nothing because it was incapable of accomplishing anything.

So why, then, do those who now speak of communism desire a continuation of this ineffective practice that, at least in the period documented by the “Notes from Nowhere” collective, was wary of uttering this banned name?  To go further than simply speak the name is an act of fear and trembling, a terrified remembering of a past experience that we have been told was cataclysmic.  

Here, at the centres of capitalism, we have inherited a suspicion of a project we have been socialized into believing was nothing more than totalitarianism, a brutal “Animal Farm” that can teach us nothing.  So when only the name, and not the necessity behind the name, is reclaimed, this deficient way of seeing the world is inherited.  And from this inheritance, because we do not want to conceptualize a return that will both continue and rupture from these past revolutions, the only praxis we can imagine is another articulation of the same movementism that, once upon a time, was even suspicious of communism.

For it is a fearful thing to direct oneself towards actually making communism.  Talk is cheap in the face of necessity; talk that avoids necessity will only lead to failure because, refusing to conceptualize praxis as something more than a philosophical problem (and in this refusal remobilizing the same movementist categories), we will remain trapped on the abstract level of appearance rather than descending to the concrete realm of necessity:

By only sticking to the appearance and subjectivity born out of any given situation, by remaining blind to the totality of the movement in denying the links and mediations, we give rise to a practice which moves far from the true power of the struggle. It is a waste; it is as if we refuse the immense and superb capabilities of the revolutionary struggle. The petty-bourgeoisie may be able to ignore and go without this potential but the proletariat cannot. […] That is why we say that in the current situation… nothing is more right, useful and constructive than to struggle for developing a genuine and ‘common class’ project. Therefore, we mean to conceive our tools, our methods and our objectives under the terms and conditions of totality and unity. We have a great need for conceiving this revolutionary struggle. We must carry out ‘the interests of the movement as a whole.’[8]

nd carrying out the interests of the movement as a whole, a demand produced by the intentionality of necessity, is something no errant hypothesis and no imagined horizon, still land-locked within the movementist terrain, can produce.

Science and necessity

Before examining the phenomenon of movementism in more detail, however, it is worth pausing to think about the word science that, from its very first utterance, places us beyond the pale of polite activist discourse.  We now live in a time where this word is treated as suspect by many involved in anti-capitalist projects; woe betide those who would connect it to the word revolutionary and speak of a scientific assessment of struggle!

There are, of course, laudable reasons behind this suspicion.  We know how the scientific method and scientific labour have been used by capitalism.  We understand the horrors of technologies adapted to military logic, of the vicious and exclusionary nature of the medical-industrial complex, of the sciences harnessed by colonial and imperial projects to categorize, control, and dehumanize subject populations, of the ways in which science has acted as a discourse to promote the interests of the ruling classes.  We rightly mock the “scientific” gibberish of evolutionary psychology and other bio-determinist nonsense.  Decades of critical theory and philosophy has made us cynical.

But what has this totalizing cynicism produced?  On the one hand, a scornful mistrust of the word science when it is used to speak of history and social change on the part of those who benefit, by living at the centres of global capitalism, from a monopoly of scientific advancement.  On the other hand, a conscious anti-scientism and flight back into mysticism that was not only evident in the US hippy movement of the 1960s, but in every contemporary collaboration with religious obscurantism.

Both rejections of science combine and diverge in every movementist space.  Often we encounter a suspicion of science premised on the assumption that it is a European dogma, not different from a religion, that suppresses the world-views of those who were Europe’s victims.  While we should be aware that colonial conquest was, in part, achieved through a cultural suppression where the spirituality of the colonizer (i.e. Judeo-Christianity) was treated as “rational” (and perhaps even, though wrongly, scientific) in comparison to the supposed “barbaric” spirituality of the colonized, there is a problem with “europeanizing” science as a whole.  Here, science is treated as a colonial practice and spirituality the business of the colonized; the latter may even be fetishized and, in this fetishism, appropriated in the most racist, though implicit, sense of the term.  Assuming that science is something “invented” by Europeans, however, is to erase all of the scientific practices and discoveries of those peoples European colonialism genocided and colonized, stealing and claiming scientific discoveries in the process.

If we are to reclaim the immediacy of communism-as-necessity then we must also reclaim the conceptual meaning of science.  In the crudest sense of scientific advancement—of technological instruments—this fact should be obvious.  Capitalism possesses a monopoly over those technologies that are capable of maintaining social control: guns, tanks, drones, etc.  We will not topple this brutal system through meditation of any sort, let alone our moral and spontaneous will to “speak truth to power” in innumerable demonstrations where the state’s police and military are better prepared than the average protestor.  Movementism has already produced a mythology of struggle that would lead us to believe otherwise, a moralism that runs counter to reality—wishful thinking that if we are all out in the streets, all spontaneously producing an insurrection, the state’s technological machines will refuse to initiate a blood bath.

Let us go deeper into this problem, though, so as to think the possibility of scientific thought.  To reclaim the concept of science is more than simply recognizing the efficacy of instruments; it concerns anti-capitalist theory itself.  And to argue that there is such a thing as a revolutionary science is even bolder than arguing for the necessary recognition of the scientific instruments monopolized by the ruling classes.  Here is a totalizing assumption: science should find its home at the heart of theories of organization and strategy because science, the only thing capable of generating facts and truths, is superior to non-science.

What do we mean, then, by science?  In the previous section I briefly discussed how science is open to the future, a process in development that produces, through historical struggle, universal truths (that is, facts that are applicable in every particular context, though also mediated by these contexts).  Although science is often defined in popular discourse as the empirical method utilized by those disciplines that we are educated to understand as “properly” scientific, such a definition is about as useful as saying “biology is biology” or “chemistry is chemistry” and ignores the logical basis that makes these disciplines different from non-scientific theoretical terrains.  The empirical method is indeed important, and is a significant tool for establishing truths in particular scientific disciplines, but to reduce the definition of science to “empiricism” results in positivism—which is precisely what many of us have learned to suspect whenever the word science is spoken.

Science is that which speaks to material conditions without mystification; science provides a natural explanation of natural phenomena.  Physics is a physical explanation of physical phenomena; biology is a biological explanation of biological phenomena; chemistry is a chemical explanation of chemical phenomena; and historical materialism is an historical/social explanation of historical/social phenomena.  Why, then, is historical materialism a revolutionary science?  Because the historical/social explanation of historical/social phenomena is the very mechanism of class struggle, of revolution.  And this scientific hypothesis is that which is capable of demystifying the whole of history and myriad societies, a way in which to gauge any and every social struggle capable of producing historical change.

Hence, without a scientific understanding of social struggle we are incapable of recognizing when and where failed theories manifest.  The physicist has no problem banning Newtonian speculation to the past where it belongs; s/he possesses a method of assessment based on the development of a specific scientific terrain.  If we resist a similar scientific engagement with social struggle we have no method of making sense of the ways in which revolutionary hypotheses have been disproven in the historical crucible due to historical “experiments” of class struggle.  To reject a scientific understanding of struggle is to assert that these past experiments—the complete failures, the half-successes, the half-failures—have failed to establish anything significant, and so we are doomed to successive attempts at directionless reinvention.

A scientific understanding of struggle, however, teaches us about the theoretical terrain of struggle that has been presented by history, through humanity’s past endeavours, and is still open to the future.  Which social struggles established new truths due to marginal, but universalizable successes?  Which successive social struggles learned from these past establishments of truth and went a little further before also meeting failure?  How, then, do we apply what has been scientifically proven in these social experiments to our particular circumstances so as to go even further?  These are questions that can only be asked if we have the meter of science to gauge our practice thus demanding, at every moment of struggle, an attention to necessity.  Without such an understanding of reality, we have no way of making sense of our practice; we might as well forget the past, act as if everything is particularly unique, and ignore every moment when the repetition of failure ought to be treated as obvious.

Movementism receives its strength in this grand project of forgetting.

[mediacalling]

Should We Be Worried about the Facebook Explore Feed?

Could the new Facebook Explore feed be the end of organic reach? Are we close to Facebook “Reach Zero”?

If you’re curious if this is all a big to-do-about-nothing or something to really get concerned about, let’s investigate.

What on Earth is the Explore feed?

The Explore feed is a new tab on Facebook. It’s been on the mobile app for a while but it was recently launched on Desktop.

The Facebook Explore feed shows you posts from pages and people similar to those you follow.

Click on it and you get an alternative newsfeed filled with viral posts from pages and people similar to those you Follow and Like. I’ve been dipping into the mobile version to find content examples to show students in training sessions.

It was when the feed was officially launched on Desktop that the trouble started.

Why are people freaking out?

This October, page admins in six countries  — namely, Sri Lanka, Bolivia, Slovakia, Serbia, Guatemala, and Cambodia — saw a sudden and massive decline in their organic reach.

All posts from pages had been moved to the new Explore feed leaving the main Facebook feed for posts from friends, groups and adverts.

In a statement, Facebook later called this “an experiment.”

What happened in Slovakia?

I spoke to Mike Vlkovic who lives in Slovakia. He works for Agorapulse and runs a Facebook page for his metal band Morna.

The page has just 950 likes but they were getting great reach before the Facebook experiment. Posts were reaching between 500 and 1k people on average.

Before Facebook Explore, Mike’s page had been doing well.

On October 19, the day Facebook moved the posts to Explore, these numbers plummeted. Facebook gave no notification to page admins but Mike noticed that something different was going on when he logged into Facebook.

A quick comparison of the organic reach numbers between the following chart and the one above is striking.

Organic reach on posts plummeted after Facebook Explore was launched.

“..as you can see (below), the page previews also dropped radically. The posts aren’t shown in the main feed and people are aren’t really scrolling through the Explore feed.”

Page views as well as reach dropped dramatically after the Facebook Explore feed was introduced.

There was some good news…

“When we paid to promote our latest video, we got reach over 3K. Not bad.”

So it seems once you promote your post, it goes into the feed and the organic reach goes up along with the paid reach. Not surprising really when you think how little content users are seeing from pages.

Promoting a post saw a massive increase in organic as well as paid reach.

Facebook has stated that this is a test in the six affected countries:

“The goal of this test is to understand if people prefer to have separate places for personal and public content. We will hear what people say about the experience to understand if it’s an idea worth pursuing any further. There is no current plan to roll this out beyond these test countries or to charge pages on Facebook to pay for all their distribution in News Feed or Explore. “

But I imagine this is of little solace to page admins like Mike.

I asked him if he honestly thought the feed was better without the posts from pages:

“Absolutely not. Now I’m checking both both my regular and my Explore feed, so I’m scanning more and paying less attention to posts.”

Should you be worried about the Facebook Explore feed?

Facebook’s clarifying statement says it’s not going to roll this text out beyond the six test countries right now. If you are in Sri Lanka, Bolivia, Slovakia, Serbia, Guatemala or Cambodia, unfortunately, you’ll have to wait and see if they decide to roll it out fully in your area.

For the rest of us, we can breathe a sigh of relief for now. But no doubt this is a sign that in the future we are likely to reach Facebook Reach Zero, when something like the Explore feed will rob us of virtually all our reach.

It’s a reminder that business page owners, particularly those who rely on it for the majority of their income, exposure, or website traffic are at the mercy of Facebook and the algorithm.

Preparing for Facebook Reach Zero

If the test proved positive in the selected countries it can’t be long before they look at rolling it out worldwide. As businesses, we need to be prepared for this.

Here are a few things you should consider:

1. Focusing on Facebook groups

Facebook is invested in Facebook groups. Back in June of 2017, they held their first-ever Communities Summit bringing together hundreds of group admins. They’ve been rolling out new tools for groups. Clearly, this is a space they want to grow.

Of course it’s likely that group posts will eventually see declining reach too. For now, they have become a space that both Facebook and its users like. You can create your own group and link it to your page but if you are happy to network as an individual you will also find traction within groups you are just a member of.

Spend time getting to know other group members and offer help when you can.

Groups are different to pages not just because they are enclosed spaces usually centering around one specific topic but because unlike pages, they foster conversation between group members — not just between the business and individual members. They are a hive of information, research and community.

2. Using personal profiles for business

According to Facebook’s terms and conditions, you are not permitted to use your profile to represent a business. However, over the last few years, I’ve noticed that business owners and leaders have started using their personal Facebook account for networking. Connecting with people on a one-on-one basis and building on these relationships on Facebook is as valuable as doing so on your LinkedIn profile. But maybe delete that picture of you beer bombing from your profile first.

3. The value of Messenger bots

There has been a trend in social media marketing towards private communications. We use Snapchat, WhatsApp, Messenger, and Skype to chat with friends, family and increasingly, businesses.

Using chatbots businesses can delight their customers and become part of the conversation without being too intrusive. Here are some examples.

Chatbots are now simple to create using tools like ManyChat and if you are creative you will have a chance as an early adopter to stand out.

4. Running Facebook Ads

Mike’s band page reach recovered when he boosted a post. It’s unrealistic to think even before Facebook Zero that you will be able to achieve the results you want on any social network without allocating a social ads budget. Facebook may steal our reach but as a social network, it’s not going away. Ads will still be an effective way to reach the right audience.

5. Putting all your eggs in one basket

The people who suffer the most from Facebook algorithm changes are those who rely on it exclusively for business. A website is still an essential part of your digital marketing in 2017 but you should also build a presence on other social networks. LinkedIn has bloomed recently but don’t ignore Twitter, Instagram or even Pinterest, these could be the lifelines you need after Facebook Reach Zero.

So should you be worried about the Facebook Explore feed?

If you are in one of the six test countries, absolutely. If Facebook feels that users prefer the feed this way, you could be stuck with it.

For everyone else, not yet — but be prepared for the day that Facebook Reach Zero becomes a reality.

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