January 2015 - P2P-Foundation - lists.ourproject.org

Fw: Fw: Info
by Natalie Golovin 10 Mar '26

10 Mar '26

Mark: You and your compatriots on P2P view the world from revisionism. Go ahead and keep looking through your microscope-provided by your "teachers." Or take the time and read some very old documented evidence available at a library near you= but you may need to stay there awhile on microfiche. -----Original Message----- From: Mark Janssen Sent: Sunday, October 23, 2011 4:39 PM To: P2P Foundation mailing list Subject: Re: [P2P-F] Fw: Info On Sun, Oct 23, 2011 at 10:32 AM, Natalie Golovin <10natalie(a)cox.net> wrote: > The European Tribes treated the Natives no worse than they treated each > other. Whoa. You should really stop talking. You have NO idea what you're talking about. How about forced acculturation, not allowing them to speak their own language (which hold the record of their own history), confined them under threat of violent force into reservations, among other things. But, really, that's probably not even the worst of it -- the worst of it is that for reasons they couldn't ever understand is why you were doing all of these cruel things when they were willing to share it it all with you. Why, when they handed out their hand to be friends, you chopped it off. Remember, they're the ones who gave us Thanksgiving which is still "celebrated" in this nation today. Read the reports made of making first contact with the Native peoples here. You really should read up before propagating the attitudes of conquest. Sorry.... marcos _______________________________________________ P2P Foundation - Mailing list http://www.p2pfoundation.net https://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation

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Fwd: Why Do Banks Want Our Deposits? Hint: It’s Not to Make Loans
by Michel Bauwens 06 Oct '15

06 Oct '15

---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Ellen Brown <ellenhbrown(a)gmail.com> Date: Mon, Oct 27, 2014 at 9:35 PM Subject: Why Do Banks Want Our Deposits? Hint: It’s Not to Make Loans To: michel(a)p2pfoundation.net Hi, here is my latest article, posted on Global Research -- Why Do Banks Want Our Deposits? Hint: It’s Not to Make Loans <http://wordpress.us7.list-manage2.com/track/click?u=8829ce026276832f7fc66a1…> Best wishes, Ellen http://EllenBrown.com http://PublicBankingInstitute.org <http://wordpress.us7.list-manage.com/track/click?u=8829ce026276832f7fc66a1a…> Unsubscribe <http://wordpress.us7.list-manage1.com/unsubscribe?u=8829ce026276832f7fc66a1…> michel(a)p2pfoundation.net from this list. Update your profile <http://wordpress.us7.list-manage.com/profile?u=8829ce026276832f7fc66a1a9&id…> -- Check out the Commons Transition Plan here at: http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net <http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation>Updates: http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens #82 on the (En)Rich list: http://enrichlist.org/the-complete-list/

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Fwd: [Networkedlabour] Fwd: [WSF-Discuss] Another Politics - From anti-colonial to Occupy
by P2P Foundation mailing list 09 Feb '15

09 Feb '15

https://www.opendemocracy.net/transformation/andrew-willis-garc%C3%A 9s/another-politics%E2%80%94from-anticolonial-to-occupy *Another Politics-from anti-colonial to Occupy* *Chris Dixon's new book identifies four principles that underpin the success of transformative social movements.* Andrew Willis Garcés 7 January 2015 [This article originally appeared in* Waging Nonviolence*.] Seven years ago I worked at a tenant and worker organizing group in Washington, D.C. We referred to ourselves as a "movement-building" organization, but weren't always clear what we meant by that. One evening I was out door-knocking with one of our members, James, an African American man in his 50s. He asked me about a conference some of us had attended in Atlanta the previous week, the U.S. Social Forum. "What was the big theme there that stuck out to you?" he asked. It was a good question. At that moment, the DJ Unk song "Walk It Out" was booming from a nearby car. "Well, I was most impressed by the groups that really try to walk out their beliefs-connecting all the dots between racism, capitalism, even imperialism, and the inner work we have to do as people to overcome the things we've learned." I explained more about what that meant to me. He shook his head, amused. "That's a tall order!" He thought about it a little more. "When will we get time for all that?" That tall order is the subject of Chris Dixon's book* Another Politics,* newly released by University of California Press. The product of dozens of interviews conducted with community organizers over the last decade, the book is an excellent distillation of what Dixon calls "another politics," a shared political orientation that unites grassroots organizers working from similar principles in the United States and Canada across issue, movement, sector, strategy and identity. Through the interviews, he identifies four core principles that unite left "anti-authoritarian" organizers across different "strands" of struggle, transcending traditional notions of issue-based organization: . being against domination of all kinds; . prioritizing the development of new social relations and forms of social organization in the process of struggle; . linking struggles for improvements in people's lives to long-term transformative visions; and . grassroots organizing from the bottom-up. In regards to these different strands, he writes, "We braid them together as we work collectively and build relationships across politics, campaigns and movements: anarchist labor organizers draw on analytical frameworks from women of color feminism; radical queer activists use community-based models for dealing with violence, developed by anti-racist feminists and prison abolitionists." He explores how Occupy Wall Street, anti-colonial movements, and INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence, among other groups, have contributed to developing "another politics" across decades. Dixon digs even deeper, characterizing organizations practicing "another politics" as being explicit about their "collective refusal" of oppression-specifically, as incorporating "the four anti's" of : anti-authoritarianism; anti-capitalism; anti-oppression; and anti-imperialism, into their work. This left me wondering how some organizations might "fit" this taxonomy-what if your group has a handle on economic exploitation, for instance, but relies on charismatic leadership? But Dixon is nevertheless clear about organizations that he sees as practicing "another politics," and the book is most compelling when he recounts movement-building victories, like the story of Canada's multi-city immigrant rights group* No One is Illegal*: "In a stunning December 2007 action, some 2,000 people, largely South Asian, blockaded the Vancouver International Airport to stop Singh's impending deportation. And starting with an 'Education Not Deportation' campaign in 2006, NOII-Toronto launched a multi-year fight for Toronto to become a solidarity city, where all people can access city services regardless of immigration status. Organizing across sectors and services, they finally won in 2013." Dixon also uses the book to highlight "ideas rarely in writing," exploring dynamics of movement-building organization that don't get much print. For instance, he writes about the process of integrating not just issue lenses but our whole selves-creating community and organization that operates at the speed of the whole. As Dixon writes, "recognizing and deliberately fostering feelings and relationships as essential ingredients for transformative struggle" is still not a widespread practice, and he points out that this is not a new phenomenon, as the Black Panthers and Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee also sought "to develop common expectations about how people should treat one another." Continuing this thread, he also counts as emergent practices among "another politics" practitioners, forms of organizing that affirm families and domestic and reproductive work simultaneously with challenging systemic inequity, and moving beyond an individual-focused anti-oppression politics. Dixon and the people he interviews point out that the wounding through oppression that we all experience shows up in our organizing, and have permeated organizational culture except where the influence of feminists and others committed to transformational work has created a different way of creating structure, that prioritizes a strategy and collective struggle rooted in healing and wholeness. This increasing focus on wholeness and wellness, seen in the recent popularity of integrating somatics and other healing disciplines into community organizing, can only make us more adept at building a broader and more resilient web of movements. And Dixon helps unpack the challenges unique to movement-building organizations, which, he says, must move towards specific victories and goals, while also moving through a process that creates new ways of being, doing and relating, that avoid replicating oppressive practices. All while avoiding "ruts" common to anti-authoritarian groups, like knee-jerk non-hierarchy, and the "burn bright, burn out" cycle of organizations that rise and fall quickly. Dixon illustrates this point with a fantastic metaphor offered by Project South's Steph Guillioud, comparing different forms of organization to different kinds of cars suited to particular functions: "The variations in vehicles don't change the map, they don't change the road, they don't change the need for people to drive and people in the back or the people moving it. We will always have and need the people who can push it and the people that can work on the insides, the people who can never get a ride, et cetera." It's rare to find a book on social movements written explicitly for people with less academic credentials than its author. Dixon, who wrote the book for a PhD program, takes care to explain terms as they come up; he doesn't assume we know about ethnography ("analyzing lived culture while experiencing it"). And he gives his interviewees plenty of airtime to put their own spin on, for instance, "affective organizing," which becomes "not being a fucking asshole," in the wonderfully succinct words of Bay Area activist Harjit Singh Gill. Still, the number of concepts he introduces feels overwhelming at times, and I longed for a glossary or flow chart when concepts like "non-instrumental organizing" popped up (which, it's worth noting, refers to the analysis and strategies people can create when they come together in dialogue and struggle as peers, as opposed to treating people as instruments to be manipulated, or pieces on a figurative chess board to mobilize toward a predetermined end). "Anti-authoritarian," then, could be shorthand for "principled organizing"-organizing that gets down to the roots, that refuses to settle for electing a slightly better candidate, for selling out our potential allies to scoop up a superficial win, or that sees the path to victory as anything less than the destination itself. Towards the end of the book, I was reminded of my exchange that day with James. Clearly, as Dixon demonstrates, there are mixed-class organizations that make time for individual and collective healing practices, for skillshares and strategy seminars, for discussion groups, for intentionally developing and evaluating leadership, and for developing organizational structure. But increasingly, as people are forced to work longer hours for lower incomes, I have to wonder: How are organizations adapting to support their people to do more with less? I longed for more detail on what day-to-day life is like for an organizer in the six specifically-chosen cities from which Dixon chose his interview subjects. What does it look like to practice "another politics" in Atlanta, for instance? It's worth asking, given that the book is structured around questions like, "How can we most productively manifest our visions through our organizing work?" Like a good organizing mentor, Dixon (and his interviewees) gives us insight without "right" answers, helping to deepen our understanding of commonalities and remind us of the deep roots of the "another politics" leftist lineage. (((((( ))))) *Andrew Willis Garcés* works with Training for Change and has led trainings for immigrant activists in several US states on campaign strategy and civil disobedience. Read more of his work at www.porvida.org/. _______________________________________________ ** WSFDiscuss is an open and unmoderated forum for the exchange of information and views on the experience, practise, and theory of the World Social Forum at any level (local, national, regional, and global) and on related social and political movements and issues. Join in !** _______________________________________________ WSFDiscuss mailing list POST to LIST : Send email to WorldSocialForum-Discuss(a)openspaceforum.net SUBSCRIBE: Send empty email to worldsocialforum-discuss-subscribe(a)openspaceforum.net UNSUBSCRIBE: Send empty email to worldsocialforum-discuss-unsubscribe(a)openspaceforum.net LIST ARCHIVES: http://openspaceforum.net/pipermail/worldsocialforum-discuss_openspaceforum… LIST INFORMATION: http://openspaceforum.net/mailman/listinfo/worldsocialforum-discuss_openspa… ______________________________ Jai Sen jai.sen(a)cacim.net / jai(a)openword.in www.cacim.net / http://www.openword.in Now based in Ottawa, Canada (+1-613-282 2900), and New Delhi, India (+91-98189 11325) *RECENT PUBLICATIONS :* Jai Sen, ed, 2013 – *The Movements of Movements : Struggles for Other Worlds*, Part I*.* Volume 4 Part I in the *Challenging Empires* series. New Delhi : OpenWord. *Available @ http://www.into-ebooks.com/book/the_movements_of_movements/ <http://www.into-ebooks.com/book/the_movements_of_movements/>* *FORTHCOMING PUBLICATIONS :* Jai Sen and Peter Waterman, eds, forthcoming (2015) – *The Movements of Movements : Struggles for Other Worlds**,* Part 2. Volume 4 Part II in the *Challenging Empires* series. New Delhi : OpenWord *CHECK OUT* *CACIM* @ www.cacim.net, *OpenWord* @ http://www.openword.in, and *OpenSpaceForum* @ www.openspaceforum.net *AND SUBSCRIBE TO* *WSFDiscuss*, an open and unmoderated forum for the exchange of information and views on the experience, practice, and theory of social and political movement at any level (local, national, regional, and global), including the World Social Forum. *To subscribe, simply send an empty email to worldsocialforum-discuss-subscribe(a)openspaceforum.net <worldsocialforum-discuss-subscribe(a)openspaceforum.net>* _______________________________________________ ** WSFDiscuss is an open and unmoderated forum for the exchange of information and views on the experience, practise, and theory of the World Social Forum at any level (local, national, regional, and global) and on related social and political movements and issues. Join in !** _______________________________________________ WSFDiscuss mailing list POST to LIST : Send email to WorldSocialForum-Discuss(a)openspaceforum.net SUBSCRIBE: Send empty email to worldsocialforum-discuss-subscribe(a)openspaceforum.net UNSUBSCRIBE: Send empty email to worldsocialforum-discuss-unsubscribe(a)openspaceforum.net LIST ARCHIVES: http://openspaceforum.net/pipermail/worldsocialforum-discuss_openspaceforum… LIST INFORMATION: http://openspaceforum.net/mailman/listinfo/worldsocialforum-discuss_openspa… _______________________________________________ NetworkedLabour mailing list NetworkedLabour(a)lists.contrast.org http://lists.contrast.org/mailman/listinfo/networkedlabour -- Check out the Commons Transition Plan here at: http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net <http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation>Updates: http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens #82 on the (En)Rich list: http://enrichlist.org/the-complete-list/

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Re: [P2P-F] [NetworkedLabour] [Networkedlabour] Another Politics - After Syriza
by P2P Foundation mailing list 02 Feb '15

02 Feb '15

Probably I am the worse in that sense. I mean tempering my fluctuating enthusiasms, is not my strong side, but I can be very agree with you Bob, and Anna on the points you make. May be there is also a phycological or personality wise labour division we are in need of, between femininity and masculinity, modesty and pride, ego and id.. What is certain though is that not everyone will reach at a certain level of wiseness, self- and general awareness, consciousness at the same time, and even one reach there it is hard to get it stabile -at least under this mode of production or for me :) but sure, this is something that was causing, from the agency side, so much trouble in terms of getting somewhere, understand in each other, and standing together. The worse thing is that is doesn't matter who is saying these words, like me myself, the same person can be the one loosing her his awareness-less at most. what makes difference is if he or she holding a point in power structure or network -like me moderating of this list (although i do not own the server where the list is hosted :)) can be the one bullying. And sometimes people doing this kinds of things can be ones doing this out of worry, they grow in their minds our of ignorance, so futile worries, for protective purpose. But sometimes these kind of behaviors are hard core elements established and there to stay. Anyway, there were at one point a reference to molecular, radical inner chance -as part of changing whole at community, societal, and global levels- may be what is happening or needs to get stronger these days is the emergence of new form of social labour division, distributed in a way it transcends artificial borders dividing social relations by identities like gender, class, geographies, ethnicities so on. those border that are built to reproduce disempowerment. p2p, cooperation, commons,... the more intensified and open the exchange between people is the more possible to realize such labour division. and to develop awareness of our awareness of how these borders being built, function, and overcome. > Anna, > > I appreciate when people temper their enthusiasm with experience. I see too many people being unwilling to critically reflect on their enthusiasms. > > Thank you, > Bob > >> On Thu, Jan 29, 2015 at 12:39 PM, Anna Harris <anna(a)shsh.co.uk> wrote: >> After my enthusiastic foray into Otto Scharma's U.Lab I have to report that I found it another liberal attempt to encourage people to become 'change makers', supporting them in a self blaming exercise, where fear and greed are seen as the problems of our social dis/ease, without linking this to social and economic pressures. >> >> Some good ideas of deep listening, connecting head, heart and will, moving from ego to Eco, focussing on what is emerging, but falling short of a radical critique which could reveal the enormity of the task in hand. >> >> Going beyond the shift in consciousness required to let go of old habits of thinking, takes us to an unexplored place on the edge of what we know. Few are willing to go there, because everywhere we judge, and we are judged, by what we know. In this culture ruled by science, there does not seem to be any room or any relevance for not knowing. Yet I persist in trying to bring it to the attention of those on this email list. >> >> Anna >> >> >> >> On 28 Jan 2015, at 10:57, Anna Harris <anna(a)shsh.co.uk> wrote: >> >> A very different answer to the same question from Otto Scharma : >> >> [–]rodneyrod 6 points 6 days ago >> Otto, as you have worked with change makers across the globe where have you seen the most resistance/discomfort in people as they attempt to enter the "presencing" stage of listening? How can those observations assist us as we open this journey to others? >> perma-link >> [–]OttoScharmer[S] 5 points 6 days ago >> i have found that most people who, regardless of their sector, are exposed to real world change, and have to hold the space for people related changes (or are exposed to the creative process one way or another) are already well prepared to drop to these deeper levels of operating. so where is it not the case? with people who are stuck in powerpoints worlds of headquarters and politics--sometimes also people that are just very remote of real reality, like old style academia... but overall i am VERY surprised how significant the readiness for these deeper levels are --although that readiness is usually not conscious (yet) >> perma-linkparent >> >> >>> On Mon, Jan 26, 2015 at 5:01 PM, P2P Foundation mailing list <p2p-foundation(a)lists.ourproject.org> wrote: >>> hi Anna, >>> >>> At the p2p foundation we stress personal and interpersonal change and facilitation, but at the same time, we have to be realistic in this, what is already possible but very difficult in small groups of committed people may not be possible for society at large ... For understanding this, and though I'm critical of the authoritarian interpretations of that tradition, the integral psychology of clare graves remains fundamental .. >>> >>> Detailed studies by Susan Cook-Greuters have determined that at most 2% of the population have integrative consciousness, with 30% more or less having this as a aspirational consciousness .. >>> >>> I take great comfort in the growth of participative culture and skills now evident in the new mutualized working spaces but this is far from being the general culture .. >>> >>> Again, referring to the scheme of John Heron, I would say that for the greater masses, we are at the potential change of stage 2 to 3, with significant minorities at four .. >>> >>> so here is how I see it: >>> >>> * develop fully participative cultures for mature peer producing communities >>> >>> * develop deeper participative potentialities for the aspirational parts of the population (active citizenship) >>> >>> * embed participative process in the general social technology of our time, to upgrade the general culture .. >>> >>> A lot then further depends on the relative positioning of scarcity vs abundance dynamics ... >>> >>> for abundance context, the generalization of peer governance is very realistic >>> >>> for scarcity contexts, the choice between hierarchical, democratic-representative, and market-driven allocation mechanisms remains entirely open >>> >>> see for example how the wikipedia re-introduced a rather toxic bureaucracy by re-introducing artificial scarcity ... (notability requirements to be decide by elite editors) >>> >>> just today, I am involved in a frustrating dialogue with a feminist activist who did not even want to share even excerpts of her book on 'moneyless living' .. in other words, she is creating a artificial scarcity of her own book, that is technically freely copyable, in order to 'swap' it in exchange for something else ... reproducing the artificial scarcities in so-called advanced milieus ... moneyless living for those that have the money to buy it .. >>> >>> I'm sure you can find similar contradictions in all of us, including me .. >>> >>> in conclusion, we are not ready to shed relative domination processes for any pure egalitarianism any time soon, >>> >>> Michel >>> >>>> On Mon, Jan 26, 2015 at 1:05 PM, Anna Harris <anna(a)shsh.co.uk> wrote: >>>> Amid all the euphoria in celebrating the Greek landslide, and following Michel's integrative approach, the points in the article below need to be emphasised. We all carry within us the wounds of oppression however much we feel we have cast them aside, and they will surface again in the new post capitalist structures unless we put some focus individually and collectively on healing ourselves and becoming whole. >>>> >>>> 'the wounding through oppression that we all experience shows up in our organizing, and have permeated organizational culture except where the influence of feminists and others committed to transformational work has created a different way of creating structure, that prioritizes a strategy and collective struggle rooted in healing and wholeness.' >>>> >>>> Pauli Friere spoke about this in his Pedagogy of the Oppressed. >>>> >>>> What does that mean? How do we do that? Often it seems there isn't time to go into this now, let's get into power first, then we can see to these issues. That's when the multitude becomes an instrument, and arguments between hierarchy and horizontality appear to be abstract concepts with no people involved. >>>> >>>> How do we become more fully human in our relationships with each other? What makes it particularly difficult is that there is no ready made formula - follow these steps and you will get there. No. This is a step into the unknown. But that also makes it an exciting exploration. >>>> >>>> Anna >>>> >>>> >>>> >>>>> On 25 Jan 2015, at 11:38, P2P Foundation mailing list <p2p-foundation(a)lists.ourproject.org> wrote: >>>>> >>>>> https://www.opendemocracy.net/transformation/andrew-willis-garc%C3%A9s/anot… >>>>> Another Politics-from anti-colonial to Occupy >>>>> Chris Dixon's new book identifies four principles that underpin the success of transformative social movements. >>>>> >>>>> Andrew Willis Garcés 7 January 2015 >>>>> >>>>> [This article originally appeared in Waging Nonviolence.] >>>>> >>>>> Seven years ago I worked at a tenant and worker organizing group in Washington, D.C. We referred to ourselves as a "movement-building" organization, but weren't always clear what we meant by that. One evening I was out door-knocking with one of our members, James, an African American man in his 50s. He asked me about a conference some of us had attended in Atlanta the previous week, the U.S. Social Forum. >>>>> >>>>> "What was the big theme there that stuck out to you?" he asked. >>>>> >>>>> It was a good question. At that moment, the DJ Unk song "Walk It Out" was booming from a nearby car. >>>>> >>>>> "Well, I was most impressed by the groups that really try to walk out their beliefs-connecting all the dots between racism, capitalism, even imperialism, and the inner work we have to do as people to overcome the things we've learned." >>>>> >>>>> I explained more about what that meant to me. >>>>> >>>>> He shook his head, amused. >>>>> >>>>> "That's a tall order!" He thought about it a little more. "When will we get time for all that?" >>>>> That tall order is the subject of Chris Dixon's book Another Politics, newly released by University of California Press. The product of dozens of interviews conducted with community organizers over the last decade, the book is an excellent distillation of what Dixon calls "another politics," a shared political orientation that unites grassroots organizers working from similar principles in the United States and Canada across issue, movement, sector, strategy and identity. >>>>> >>>>> Through the interviews, he identifies four core principles that unite left "anti-authoritarian" organizers across different "strands" of struggle, transcending traditional notions of issue-based organization: >>>>> . being against domination of all kinds; >>>>> . prioritizing the development of new social relations and forms of social organization in the process of struggle; >>>>> . linking struggles for improvements in people's lives to long-term transformative visions; and >>>>> . grassroots organizing from the bottom-up. >>>>> >>>>> In regards to these different strands, he writes, "We braid them together as we work collectively and build relationships across politics, campaigns and movements: anarchist labor organizers draw on analytical frameworks from women of color feminism; radical queer activists use community-based models for dealing with violence, developed by anti-racist feminists and prison abolitionists." >>>>> >>>>> He explores how Occupy Wall Street, anti-colonial movements, and INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence, among other groups, have contributed to developing "another politics" across decades. >>>>> >>>>> Dixon digs even deeper, characterizing organizations practicing "another politics" as being explicit about their "collective refusal" of oppression-specifically, as incorporating "the four anti's" of : anti-authoritarianism; anti-capitalism; anti-oppression; and anti-imperialism, into their work. This left me wondering how some organizations might "fit" this taxonomy-what if your group has a handle on economic exploitation, for instance, but relies on charismatic leadership? >>>>> >>>>> But Dixon is nevertheless clear about organizations that he sees as practicing "another politics," and the book is most compelling when he recounts movement-building victories, like the story of Canada's multi-city immigrant rights group No One is Illegal: >>>>> "In a stunning December 2007 action, some 2,000 people, largely South Asian, blockaded the Vancouver International Airport to stop Singh's impending deportation. And starting with an 'Education Not Deportation' campaign in 2006, NOII-Toronto launched a multi-year fight for Toronto to become a solidarity city, where all people can access city services regardless of immigration status. Organizing across sectors and services, they finally won in 2013." >>>>> >>>>> Dixon also uses the book to highlight "ideas rarely in writing," exploring dynamics of movement-building organization that don't get much print. For instance, he writes about the process of integrating not just issue lenses but our whole selves-creating community and organization that operates at the speed of the whole. >>>>> >>>>> As Dixon writes, "recognizing and deliberately fostering feelings and relationships as essential ingredients for transformative struggle" is still not a widespread practice, and he points out that this is not a new phenomenon, as the Black Panthers and Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee also sought "to develop common expectations about how people should treat one another." >>>>> >>>>> Continuing this thread, he also counts as emergent practices among "another politics" practitioners, forms of organizing that affirm families and domestic and reproductive work simultaneously with challenging systemic inequity, and moving beyond an individual-focused anti-oppression politics. >>>>> >>>>> Dixon and the people he interviews point out that the wounding through oppression that we all experience shows up in our organizing, and have permeated organizational culture except where the influence of feminists and others committed to transformational work has created a different way of creating structure, that prioritizes a strategy and collective struggle rooted in healing and wholeness. This increasing focus on wholeness and wellness, seen in the recent popularity of integrating somatics and other healing disciplines into community organizing, can only make us more adept at building a broader and more resilient web of movements. >>>>> >>>>> And Dixon helps unpack the challenges unique to movement-building organizations, which, he says, must move towards specific victories and goals, while also moving through a process that creates new ways of being, doing and relating, that avoid replicating oppressive practices. All while avoiding "ruts" common to anti-authoritarian groups, like knee-jerk non-hierarchy, and the "burn bright, burn out" cycle of organizations that rise and fall quickly. >>>>> >>>>> Dixon illustrates this point with a fantastic metaphor offered by Project South's Steph Guillioud, comparing different forms of organization to different kinds of cars suited to particular functions: >>>>> "The variations in vehicles don't change the map, they don't change the road, they don't change the need for people to drive and people in the back or the people moving it. We will always have and need the people who can push it and the people that can work on the insides, the people who can never get a ride, et cetera." >>>>> >>>>> It's rare to find a book on social movements written explicitly for people with less academic credentials than its author. Dixon, who wrote the book for a PhD program, takes care to explain terms as they come up; he doesn't assume we know about ethnography ("analyzing lived culture while experiencing it"). And he gives his interviewees plenty of airtime to put their own spin on, for instance, "affective organizing," which becomes "not being a fucking asshole," in the wonderfully succinct words of Bay Area activist Harjit Singh Gill. >>>>> >>>>> Still, the number of concepts he introduces feels overwhelming at times, and I longed for a glossary or flow chart when concepts like "non-instrumental organizing" popped up (which, it's worth noting, refers to the analysis and strategies people can create when they come together in dialogue and struggle as peers, as opposed to treating people as instruments to be manipulated, or pieces on a figurative chess board to mobilize toward a predetermined end). >>>>> >>>>> "Anti-authoritarian," then, could be shorthand for "principled organizing"-organizing that gets down to the roots, that refuses to settle for electing a slightly better candidate, for selling out our potential allies to scoop up a superficial win, or that sees the path to victory as anything less than the destination itself. >>>>> >>>>> Towards the end of the book, I was reminded of my exchange that day with James. Clearly, as Dixon demonstrates, there are mixed-class organizations that make time for individual and collective healing practices, for skillshares and strategy seminars, for discussion groups, for intentionally developing and evaluating leadership, and for developing organizational structure. But increasingly, as people are forced to work longer hours for lower incomes, I have to wonder: How are organizations adapting to support their people to do more with less? >>>>> >>>>> I longed for more detail on what day-to-day life is like for an organizer in the six specifically-chosen cities from which Dixon chose his interview subjects. What does it look like to practice "another politics" in Atlanta, for instance? It's worth asking, given that the book is structured around questions like, "How can we most productively manifest our visions through our organizing work?" Like a good organizing mentor, Dixon (and his interviewees) gives us insight without "right" answers, helping to deepen our understanding of commonalities and remind us of the deep roots of the "another politics" leftist lineage. >>>>> >>>>> (((((( ))))) >>>>> >>>>> Andrew Willis Garcés works with Training for Change and has led trainings for immigrant activists in several US states on campaign strategy and civil disobedience. Read more of his work at www.porvida.org/. >>>>> _______________________________________________ >>>> >>>> _______________________________________________ >>>> NetworkedLabour mailing list >>>> NetworkedLabour(a)lists.contrast.org >>>> http://lists.contrast.org/mailman/listinfo/networkedlabour >>> >>> >>> >>> -- >>> Check out the Commons Transition Plan here at: http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan >>> >>> P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net >>> >>> Updates: http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens >>> >>> #82 on the (En)Rich list: http://enrichlist.org/the-complete-list/ >>> >>> _______________________________________________ >>> P2P Foundation - Mailing list >>> http://www.p2pfoundation.net >>> https://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation >> >> >> _______________________________________________ >> NetworkedLabour mailing list >> NetworkedLabour(a)lists.contrast.org >> http://lists.contrast.org/mailman/listinfo/networkedlabour > > _______________________________________________ > NetworkedLabour mailing list > NetworkedLabour(a)lists.contrast.org > http://lists.contrast.org/mailman/listinfo/networkedlabour

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Call ESA 2015 Conference: “Critical Media Sociology Today”
by P2P Foundation mailing list 01 Feb '15

01 Feb '15

Call: RN18 Panel “Critical Media Sociology Today” 12th Conference of the European Sociological Association August 25-28, 2015. Prague Abstract Submission Deadline: Feb 1 Submission: http://esa12thconference.eu/abstract-submission Call text: http://fuchs.uti.at/1338/ Critical Media Sociology Today We live in times of ongoing crisis, the extension and intensification of inequalities concerning class, gender, and race, a return of the importance of the economy and political economy, a lack of imaginations of alternatives to neo-liberalism and capitalism, an intensification of right-wing extremism and fascism all over Europe, a lack of visions and power of the political Left, an intensification and extension of extremely repressive forms of state power such as communications surveillance conducted by secret services, ideological scapegoating conducted by conservative and far-right parties, and law and order-politics. Left-wing movements and parties have in some countries emerged or been strengthened, but the crisis has overall brought a further political shift towards the right and an intensification of capitalism and inequality. We today require politically a renewal of the Left. For critical media sociology this means that it needs to ask questions, theorise, and conduct critical analysis of media and communications in the context of capitalism, class, ideologies, racism, fascism, right-wing extremism, gender, state power, activism and social movements, challenges for public service, media reforms, crisis, globalisation, the rise of China, digitalisation, consumer and advertising culture, information/cultural/media work, digital labour, the new international division of cultural and digital labour, warfare and military conflicts, the new imperialism, financialisation, etc. ESA RN 18 calls for contributions that shed new light on questions that Critical Media Sociology needs to ask today and on theoretical and analytical insights that help to shape Critical Media Sociology in the 21st Century. RN18’s panel at the ESA 2014 Prague Conference “Differences, Inequalities Sociological Imagination” and its contributions are organised in the form of specific session topics. ESA RN18 calls for contributions to the following sessions: RN18_1: Critical Media Sociology and Karl Marx Today: What is the role and legacy of Karl Marx’s works and Marxist theory for critical media sociology today? RN18_2: Critical Media Sociology and Capitalism Today: How does capitalism shape media and communications today? RN18_3: Critical Media Sociology and Critical Theory Today: What is a critical theory of 21st century society? What role do communication, media and culture play in such a theory? RN18_4: Critical Media Sociology and Stuart Hall Today: How do Stuart Hall’s works, projects, and collaborations matter for critical media sociology today? RN18_5: Critical Media Sociology and Cultural Materialism Today: How does Raymond Williams’ approach of cultural materialism matter today for understanding the sociology of media and communications? RN18_6: Critical Media Sociology, Patriarchy and Gender Today: What is the role of and relationship of identity politics and anti-capitalism for feminist media sociology today? RN18_7: Critical Media Sociology and the Critique of the Political Economy of the Internet and Social Media: How does capitalism shape the Internet and social media? RN18_8: Critical Media Sociology and Ideology Critique Today: What are the main forms of ideology today and how do they operate in the media? Which forms and approaches of ideology critique do we need to understand them? RN18_9: Critical Media Sociology, Right-Wing Extremism and Fascism Today: What is the relationship of far-right movements and parties, the media and communication? RN18_10: Critical Media Sociology and Digital Labour Today: What forms of digital labour and digital class struggles are there and how can they best be theorised, analysed, and understood? RN18_11: Critical Media Sociology and the Left: How could a 21st century Left best look like and what is the role of media and communications for such a Left? What is the historical, contemporary, and possible future relationship of critical media sociology to the Left? What is the role of media, communications, the Internet, and social media in left-wing movements? What problems do such movements face in relation to the media, communications, the Internet, and social media? RN18_12: Critical Media Sociology and China: How can critical media sociology understand the media in China and the role of China and Chinese media in global capitalism? What are differences and commonalities between European and Chinese media understood with the help of critical media sociology? RN18_13: Critical Media Sociology, Democracy and the Public Sphere Today: How can we best theorise and understand potentials and limits for the mediated public sphere in the 21st century? RN18_14: Critical Media Sociology, the Commons, and the Alternatives Today: What are the problems and post-capitalist potentials of alternative projects such as cultural and media co-operatives, left-wing and radical media projects, alternative social media, alternative online platforms, alternative media, community media projects, commons-based media, peer production projects, etc.? RN18_15: Critical Media Sociology and State Power Today: How does the relationship of media, communication and state power’s various forms of regulation, control, repression, violence and surveillance look like? RN18_16: Critical Media Sociology, the University and Academia Today: What are the challenges and problems for teaching and conducting research about the media and communication from a critical perspective? What can be done to overcome existing limits and problems? RN18_17: Critical Media Sociology and Cultural and Communication Labour: What are characteristics of cultural and communication labour in capitalism today? Are there potentials that they can transcend precarity? What is the role of alternative economic models such as co-operatives (self-managed companies) in this respect? RN18_18: Critical Media Sociology and Political Communication: What is the role of political communication for a critical sociology of the media? Notes Please submit only to one session. Abstracts should not exceed 250 words. Each paper session will have the duration of 1.5 hours. Normally sessions will include 4 papers. Abstracts must be submitted online to the submission platform, see below. Abstracts sent by email cannot be accepted. Abstracts will be peer-reviewed and selected for presentation by the Research Network; the letter of notification will be sent by the conference software system in early April 2015. http://esa12thconference.eu/abstract-submission Conference fee: http://esa12thconference.eu/fee ESA/RN18 membership: Paying members of ESA and RN18 have strongly reduced conference fees: http://www.europeansociology.org/membership.html Mailing list, Facebook: You can join RN18′s media sociology mailing list http://lists.jacobs-university.de/mailman/listinfo/esa-rn18 and follow RN18 on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/esarn18?ref=ts&fref=ts

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Fwd: [NetworkedLabour] The rise of peer to peer populisme - red papper
by P2P Foundation mailing list 29 Jan '15

29 Jan '15

---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Orsan Senalp <orsan1234(a)gmail.com> Date: Thu, Jan 29, 2015 at 10:01 PM Subject: [NetworkedLabour] The rise of peer to peer populisme - red papper To: "networkedlabour(a)lists.contrast.org" <networkedlabour(a)lists.contrast.org > http://www.redpepper.org.uk/the-rise-of-the-peer-to-peer-populists/ Paul Walsh <http://www.redpepper.org.uk/by/paul-walsh> argues that the success of Syriza has much in common with Spain's Podemos and Scotland's Radical Independence Campaign _______________________________________________ NetworkedLabour mailing list NetworkedLabour(a)lists.contrast.org http://lists.contrast.org/mailman/listinfo/networkedlabour -- Check out the Commons Transition Plan here at: http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net <http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation>Updates: http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens #82 on the (En)Rich list: http://enrichlist.org/the-complete-list/

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Class and capital in peer production
by P2P Foundation mailing list 29 Jan '15

29 Jan '15

-- Check out the Commons Transition Plan here at: http://en. <http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan> "Class and capital in peer production" <http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan> http://cnc.sagepub.com/content/33/1/121 The aim of this paper is to make the case that peer production offers a unique chance to transcend capitalism, and that peer-to-peer movements represent the succession of industrial-society based socialisms. The paper describes the salient characteristics of peer production before going on to explore whether it is ‘transcendent’ or ‘immanent’ to the market system, concluding that it is both in that it creates a new form of capitalism and also points out how that new form might be overcome. Following a review of the hybrid economic forms emerging today, I formulate the hypothesis that peer production is actually a hyperproductive mode, forcing for-profit entities to adapt to its characteristics, thereby further integrating it into the existing political economy, but not without the transformative effects of its market transcending aspects. After examining the possible expansion of peer-production modalities to physical manufacturing, I also examine the class aspects of commons and sharing-based platforms and hypothesise the emergence of a new section of capital, netarchical capitalists, who enable and empower participation, but also monetise it and attempt to control it. <http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan>. floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net <http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation>Updates: http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens #82 on the (En)Rich list: http://enrichlist.org/the-complete-list/

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Emergency fundraising, help if you can
by P2P Foundation mailing list 28 Jan '15

28 Jan '15

Dear P2P friends, It has been a long time that I needed to do such an appeal, but a combination of unforeseen circumstances means I need to ask for assistance. Administrative changes in 2 of the foundations that used to support us, means that 2015 will be rather problematic. I have a good agenda of lectures, but these were never enough to pay the bills. The problem is rather acute right now. I am leaving for a 4 day belgian trip with about 50 Euro on my picket,but more seriously , I am leaving to Wisconsin on February 8 for 3 weeks without any short-term prospect of getting paid and thus of taking any money with me there. The necessity to replace a pair of broken glasses also looms large <g>. If you are on this mailing list, you know my work, you know that I have consistently worked on expanding and catalysing p2p and commons practices, as well as their understanding. If you find this work important and appreciate it, now is a good time to show solidarity and to assist me in continuing it. This gives you a good record of my activities in the context of the P2P Foundation, see part 1 of http://p2pfoundation.net/What_the_P2P_Foundation_Did_in_2014 There are two things you can do. One is the emergency funding. There is no easy way to do this as my Paypal account has been blocked for a number of years, so I can only give my Belgian account at the Belfius bank, BE91 0682 2166 9376 Kevin in cc has the full details if you want to transfer money this way. I am looking for minimally EUR 2,000 but if possible, I am aiming for 6,000 so that I have a buffer. I am looking for gifts, but if you can give a loan, that is fine. I must be honest however, in that, always living with moderate and usually insufficient means, I have a bad record now of repaying loans on time. I am also launching at the same time a longer term solution, i.e. through gratipay. The aim of gratipay is to create a minimum basic income that will allow me to brave the insecurity and irregularity of the income flow. Gratipay allows you to declare a regular support, per week or per month. My aim there is to achieve $300 per week, giving me a basic income of $1,200 per month My gratipay URL is here: https://gratipay.com/mbauwens/ So if you are motivated to assist me with my work for the P2P Foundation, and in particular with the more short-term emergency, please do the following: * send a preferable round sum of support to my belgian account, say EUR 100 or EUR 250 * declare any small regular sum that you willing to give, through my gratipay account, I needed to launch this fast and without much preparation due to the emergency, thanks for your understanding. Michel Bauwens -- Check out the Commons Transition Plan here at: http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net <http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation>Updates: http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens #82 on the (En)Rich list: http://enrichlist.org/the-complete-list/

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Fwd: American Sniper--the movie, responded to by Chris Hedges
by P2P Foundation mailing list 28 Jan '15

28 Jan '15

---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Tikkun <magazine(a)tikkun.org> Date: Wed, Jan 28, 2015 at 10:41 PM Subject: American Sniper--the movie, responded to by Chris Hedges To: Michelsub2004(a)gmail.com Editor's note: While we at Tikkun do not feel it fair to blame Christianity or imply that all Christians somehow implicitly support the kind of Christianity that leads some American Christians to feel that their murdering of Arabs or Muslims is doing Jesus' work, and want to remind our readers (before reading Chris Hedges piece below) of the many progressive Christians who join the Network of Spiritual Progressives and other organization that oppose the US "Strategy of Domination" and instead identify with Tikkun's Strategy of Generosity (as manifested in our proposed Domestic and Global Marshall Plan (please re-read it by downloading the full version at www.tikkun.org/gmp <http://org.salsalabs.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=9d47590MkAOAFrKKbl8IAicKI3tR9d…>), we do think that Hedges' powerful critique of the move American Sniper should be read by those who are too willing to forgive the American media for its implicit and sometimes explicit glorification of the US military. And shame on President Obama and liberal Democrats for not having stopped (what was at first just Bush's) war in Iraq when they had control of both houses of Congress and the presidency 2009 and 2010, instead backing a "surge" and providing the background and equipment that eventually led to ISIS and all its cruel perversions and murderous ruthlessness. --Rabbi Michael Lerner rabbilerner.tikkun(a)gmail.com *Killing Ragheads for Jesus* *By Chris Hedges* January 26, 2015 "ICH <http://org.salsalabs.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=2sv2Q2cMCCH3qaepinhmAycKI3tR9d…>" - “American Sniper” <http://org.salsalabs.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=ZpD6gNxe2d9aHASSBy%2BQrCcKI3tR…> lionizes the most despicable aspects of U.S. society—the gun culture, the blind adoration of the military, the belief that we have an innate right as a “Christian” nation to exterminate the “lesser breeds” of the earth, a grotesque hypermasculinity that banishes compassion and pity, a denial of inconvenient facts and historical truth, and a belittling of critical thinking and artistic expression. Many Americans, especially white Americans trapped in a stagnant economy and a dysfunctional political system, yearn for the supposed moral renewal and rigid, militarized control the movie venerates. These passions, if realized, will extinguish what is left of our now-anemic open society. The movie opens with a father and his young son hunting a deer. The boy shoots the animal, drops his rifle and runs to see his kill. “Get back here,” his father yells. “You don’t ever leave your rifle in the dirt.” “Yes, sir,” the boy answers. “That was a helluva shot, son,” the father says. “You got a gift. You gonna make a fine hunter some day.” The camera cuts to a church interior where a congregation of white Christians—blacks appear in this film as often as in a Woody Allen movie—are listening to a sermon about God’s plan for American Christians. The film’s title character, based on Chris Kyle, who would become the most lethal sniper in U.S. military history, will, it appears from the sermon, be called upon by God to use his “gift” to kill evildoers. The scene shifts to the Kyle family dining room table as the father intones in a Texas twang: “There are three types of people in this world: sheep, wolves and sheepdogs. Some people prefer to believe evil doesn’t exist in the world. And if it ever darkened their doorstep they wouldn’t know how to protect themselves. Those are the sheep. And then you got predators.” The camera cuts to a schoolyard bully beating a smaller boy. “They use violence to prey on people,” the father goes on. “They’re the wolves. Then there are those blessed with the gift of aggression and an overpowering need to protect the flock. They are a rare breed who live to confront the wolf. They are the sheepdog. We’re not raising any sheep in this family.” The father lashes his belt against the dining room table. “I will whup your ass if you turn into a wolf,” he says to his two sons. “We protect our own. If someone tries to fight you, tries to bully your little brother, you have my permission to finish it.” There is no shortage of simpletons whose minds are warped by this belief system. We elected one of them, George W. Bush, as president. They populate the armed forces and the Christian right. They watch Fox News and believe it. They have little understanding or curiosity about the world outside their insular communities. They are proud of their ignorance and anti-intellectualism. They prefer drinking beer and watching football to reading a book. And when they get into power—they already control the Congress, the corporate world, most of the media and the war machine—their binary vision of good and evil and their myopic self-adulation cause severe trouble for their country. “American Sniper,” like the big-budget feature films pumped out in Germany during the Nazi era to exalt deformed values of militarism, racial self-glorification and state violence, is a piece of propaganda, a tawdry commercial for the crimes of empire. That it made a record-breaking <http://org.salsalabs.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=Ta7N8k7Dt9wjdaRO30PlW6thBVg6%2…>$105.3 million over the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday long weekend is a symptom of the United States’ dark malaise. “The movie never asks the seminal question as to why the people of Iraq are fighting back against us in the very first place,” said Mikey Weinstein, whom I reached by phone in New Mexico. Weinstein, who worked in the Reagan White House and is a former Air Force officer, is the head of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, which challenges the growing Christian fundamentalism within the U.S. military. “It made me physically ill with its twisted, totally one-sided distortions of wartime combat ethics and justice woven into the fabric of Chris Kyle’s personal and primal justification mantra of ‘God-Country-Family.’ It is nothing less than an odious homage, indeed a literal horrific hagiography to wholesale slaughter.” Weinstein noted that the embrace of extreme right-wing Christian chauvinism, or Dominionism, which calls for the creation of a theocratic “Christian” America, is especially acute among elite units such as the SEALs <http://org.salsalabs.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=I%2Bqg1A%2FMMGnuCI5Sgmk6dycKI3…> and the Army Special Forces. The evildoers don’t take long to make an appearance in the film. This happens when television—the only way the movie’s characters get news—announces the1998 truck bombings <http://org.salsalabs.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=F6ki4wCl8ke3eyxh2jDsACcKI3tR9d…> of the American embassies in Dar es Salaam and Nairobi in which hundreds of people were killed. Chris, now grown, and his brother, aspiring rodeo riders, watch the news reports with outrage. Ted Koppel talks on the screen about a “war” against the United States. “Look what they did to us,” Chris whispers. He heads down to the recruiter to sign up to be a Navy SEAL. We get the usual boot camp scenes of green recruits subjected to punishing ordeals to make them become real men. In a bar scene, an aspiring SEAL has painted a target on his back and comrades throw darts into his skin. What little individuality these recruits have—and they don’t appear to have much—is sucked out of them until they are part of the military mass. They are unquestioningly obedient to authority, which means, of course, they are sheep. We get a love story too. Chris meets Taya in a bar. They do shots. The movie slips, as it often does, into clichéd dialogue. She tells him Navy SEALs are “arrogant, self-centered pricks who think you can lie and cheat and do whatever the fuck you want. I’d never date a SEAL.” “Why would you say I’m self-centered?” Kyle asks. “I’d lay down my life for my country.” “Why?” “Because it’s the greatest country on earth and I’d do everything I can to protect it,” he says. She drinks too much. She vomits. He is gallant. He helps her home. They fall in love. Taya is later shown watching television. She yells to Chris in the next room. “Oh, my God, Chris,” she says. “What’s wrong?” he asks. “No!” she yells. Then we hear the television announcer: “You see the first plane coming in at what looks like the east side. … Chris and Taya watch in horror. Ominous music fills the movie’s soundtrack. The evildoers have asked for it. Kyle will go to Iraq to extract vengeance. He will go to fight in a country that had nothing to do with 9/11, a country that columnist Thomas Friedman once said we attacked “because we could.” The historical record and the reality of the Middle East don’t matter. Muslims are Muslims. And Muslims are evildoers or, as Kyle calls them, “savages.” Evildoers have to be eradicated. Chris and Taya marry. He wears his gold Navy SEAL trident on the white shirt under his tuxedo at the wedding. His SEAL comrades are at the ceremony. “Just got the call, boys—it’s on,” an officer says at the wedding reception. The Navy SEALs cheer. They drink. And then we switch to Fallujah. It is Tour One. Kyle, now a sniper, is told Fallujah is “the new Wild West.” This may be the only accurate analogy in the film, given the genocide we carried out against Native Americans. He hears about an enemy sniper who can do “head shots from 500 yards out. They call him Mustafa. He was in the Olympics.” Kyle’s first kill is a boy who is handed an anti-tank grenade by a young woman in a black chador. The woman, who expresses no emotion over the boy’s death, picks up the grenade after the boy is shot and moves toward U.S. Marines on patrol. Kyle kills her too. And here we have the template for the film and Kyle’s best-selling autobiography, “American Sniper.” Mothers and sisters in Iraq don’t love their sons or their brothers. Iraqi women breed to make little suicide bombers. Children are miniature Osama bin Ladens. Not one of the Muslim evildoers can be trusted—man, woman or child. They are beasts. They are shown in the film identifying U.S. positions to insurgents on their cellphones, hiding weapons under trapdoors in their floors, planting improvised explosive devices in roads or strapping explosives onto themselves in order to be suicide bombers. They are devoid of human qualities. “There was a kid who barely had any hair on his balls,” Kyle says nonchalantly after shooting the child and the woman. He is resting on his cot with a big Texas flag behind him on the wall. “Mother gives him a grenade, sends him out there to kill Marines.” Enter The Butcher—a fictional Iraqi character created for the film. Here we get the most evil of the evildoers. He is dressed in a long black leather jacket and dispatches his victims with an electric drill. He mutilates children—we see an arm he cut from a child. A local sheik offers to betray The Butcher for $100,000. The Butcher kills the sheik. He murders the sheik’s small son in front of his mother with his electric drill. The Butcher shouts: “You talk to them, you die with them.” Kyle moves on to Tour Two after time at home with Taya, whose chief role in the film is to complain through tears and expletives about her husband being away. Kyle says before he leaves: “They’re savages. Babe, they’re fuckin’ savages.” He and his fellow platoon members spray-paint the white skull of the Punisher from Marvel Comics on their vehicles, body armor, weapons and helmets. The motto they paint in a circle around the skull reads: “Despite what your momma told you … violence does solve problems.” “And we spray-painted it on every building and walls we could,” Kyle wrote in his memoir, “American Sniper.” “We wanted people to know, *we’re here and we want to fuck with you. …You see us? We’re the people kicking your ass. Fear us because we will kill you, motherfucker.*” The book is even more disturbing than the film. In the film Kyle is a reluctant warrior, one forced to do his duty. In the book he relishes killing and war. He is consumed by hatred of all Iraqis. He is intoxicated by violence. He is credited with 160 confirmed kills, but he notes that to be confirmed a kill had to be witnessed, “so if I shot someone in the stomach and he managed to crawl around where we couldn’t see him before he bled out he didn’t count.” Kyle insisted that every person he shot deserved to die. His inability to be self-reflective allowed him to deny the fact that during the U.S. occupation many, many innocent Iraqis were killed, including some shot by snipers. Snipers are used primarily to sow terror and fear among enemy combatants. And in his denial of reality, something former slaveholders and former Nazis perfected to an art after overseeing their own atrocities, Kyle was able to cling to childish myth rather than examine the darkness of his own soul and his contribution to the war crimes we carried out in Iraq. He justified his killing with a cloying sentimentality about his family, his Christian faith, his fellow SEALs and his nation. But sentimentality is not love. It is not empathy. It is, at its core, about self-pity and self-adulation. That the film, like the book, swings between cruelty and sentimentality is not accidental. “Sentimentality, the ostentatious parading of excessive and spurious emotion, is the mark of dishonesty, the inability to feel,” James Baldwin <http://org.salsalabs.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=AkPPvwsv4iSkiH%2F1Y%2FKgyCcKI3…> reminded us. “The wet eyes of the sentimentalist betray his aversion to experience, his fear of life, his arid heart; and it is always, therefore, the signal of secret and violent inhumanity, the mask of cruelty.” “Savage, despicable evil,” Kyle wrote of those he was killing from rooftops and windows. “That’s what we were fighting in Iraq. That’s why a lot of people, myself included, called the enemy ‘savages.’… I only wish I had killed more.” At another point he writes: “I loved killing bad guys. … I loved what I did. I still do … it was fun. I had the time of my life being a SEAL.” He labels Iraqis “fanatics” and writes “they hated us because we weren’t Muslims.” He claims “the fanatics we fought valued nothing but their twisted interpretation of religion.” “I never once fought for the Iraqis,” he wrote of our Iraqi allies. “I could give a flying fuck about them.” He killed an Iraqi teenager he claimed was an insurgent. He watched as the boy’s mother found his body, tore her clothes and wept. He was unmoved. He wrote: “*If you loved them [the sons], you should have kept them away from the war. You should have kept them from joining the insurgency. You let them try and kill us—what did you think would happen to them?*” “People back home [in the U.S.], people who haven’t been in war, at least not that war, sometimes don’t seem to understand how the troops in Iraq acted,” he went on. “They’re surprised—shocked—to discover we often joked about death, about things we saw.” He was investigated by the Army for killing an unarmed civilian. According to his memoir, Kyle, who viewed all Iraqis as the enemy, told an Army colonel: “I don’t shoot people with Korans. I’d like to, but I don’t.” The investigation went nowhere. Kyle was given the nickname “Legend.” He got a tattoo of a Crusader cross on his arm. “I wanted everyone to know I was a Christian. I had it put in red, for blood. I hated the damn savages I’d been fighting,” he wrote. “I always will.” Following a day of sniping, after killing perhaps as many as six people, he would go back to his barracks to spent his time smoking Cuban Romeo y Julieta No. 3 cigars and “playing video games, watching porn and working out.” On leave, something omitted in the movie, he was frequently arrested for drunken bar fights. He dismissed politicians, hated the press and disdained superior officers, exalting only the comradeship of warriors. His memoir glorifies white, “Christian” supremacy and war. It is an angry tirade directed against anyone who questions the military’s elite, professional killers. “For some reason, a lot of people back home—not all people—didn’t accept that we were at war,” he wrote. “They didn’t accept that war means death, violent death, most times. A lot of people, not just politicians, wanted to impose ridiculous fantasies on us, hold us to some standard of behavior that no human being could maintain.” The enemy sniper Mustafa, portrayed in the film as if he was a serial killer, fatally wounds Kyle’s comrade Ryan “Biggles” Job. In the movie Kyle returns to Iraq—his fourth tour—to extract revenge for Biggles’ death. This final tour, at least in the film, centered on the killing of The Butcher and the enemy sniper, also a fictional character. As it focuses on the dramatic duel between hero Kyle and villain Mustafa the movie becomes ridiculously cartoonish. Kyle gets Mustafa in his sights and pulls the trigger. The bullet is shown leaving the rifle in slow motion. “Do it for Biggles,” someone says. The enemy sniper’s head turns into a puff of blood. “Biggles would be proud of you,” a soldier says. “You did it, man.” His final tour over, Kyle leaves the Navy. As a civilian he struggles with the demons of war and becomes, at least in the film, a model father and husband and works with veterans who were maimed in Iraq and Afghanistan. He trades his combat boots for cowboy boots. The real-life Kyle, as the film was in production, was shot dead at a shooting range near Dallas on Feb. 2, 2013, along with a friend, Chad Littlefield. A former Marine, Eddie Ray Routh, who had been suffering from PTSD and severe psychological episodes, allegedly killed the two men and then stole Kyle’s pickup truck. Routh will go on trial next month <http://org.salsalabs.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=ehnfRwCS3fwYO%2BXnX7CJUCcKI3tR…>. The film ends with scenes of Kyle’s funeral procession—thousands lined the roads waving flags—and the memorial service at the Dallas Cowboys’ home stadium. It shows fellow SEALs pounding their tridents into the top of his coffin, a custom for fallen comrades. Kyle was shot in the back and the back of his head. Like so many people he dispatched, he never saw his killer when the fatal shots were fired. The culture of war banishes the capacity for pity. It glorifies self-sacrifice and death. It sees pain, ritual humiliation and violence as part of an initiation into manhood. Brutal hazing, as Kyle noted in his book, was an integral part of becoming a Navy SEAL. New SEALs would be held down and choked by senior members of the platoon until they passed out. The culture of war idealizes only the warrior. It belittles those who do not exhibit the warrior’s “manly” virtues. It places a premium on obedience and loyalty. It punishes those who engage in independent thought and demands total conformity. It elevates cruelty and killing to a virtue. This culture, once it infects wider society, destroys all that makes the heights of human civilization and democracy possible. The capacity for empathy, the cultivation of wisdom and understanding, the tolerance and respect for difference and even love are ruthlessly crushed. The innate barbarity that war and violence breed is justified by a saccharine sentimentality about the nation, the flag and a perverted Christianity that blesses its armed crusaders. This sentimentality, as Baldwin wrote, masks a terrifying numbness. It fosters an unchecked narcissism. Facts and historical truths, when they do not fit into the mythic vision of the nation and the tribe, are discarded. Dissent becomes treason. All opponents are godless and subhuman. “American Sniper” caters to a deep sickness rippling through our society. It holds up the dangerous belief that we can recover our equilibrium and our lost glory by embracing an American fascism. *Chris Hedges previously spent nearly two decades as a foreign correspondent in Central America, the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. He has reported from more than 50 countries and has worked for The Christian Science Monitor, National Public Radio, The Dallas Morning News and The New York Times, for which he was a foreign correspondent for 15 years.* ------------------------------ Click here to unsubscribe <http://org.salsalabs.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=2Z6jvvamKN7ZoGWjXjtHYycKI3tR9d…> if you are having trouble unsubscribing Click here <kay(a)tikkun.org> Copyright 2014 Tikkun Magazine. Tikkun is a registered trademark. 2342 Shattuck Avenue, #1200 Berkeley, CA 94704 510-644-1200 Fax 510-644-1255 [image: empowered by Salsa] <http://www.salsalabs.com/?email> -- Check out the Commons Transition Plan here at: http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net <http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation>Updates: http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens #82 on the (En)Rich list: http://enrichlist.org/the-complete-list/

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Marisol Sandoval: From Corporate to Social Media (CAMRI Seminar Feb 4)
by P2P Foundation mailing list 27 Jan '15

27 Jan '15

CAMRI Seminar Marisol Sandoval From Corporate to Social Media: Critical Perspectives on Corporate Social Responsibility in Media and Communication Industries Univ of Westminster Wed, Feb 4, 2015 14:00 Harrow Campus, room A7.1 Launch of the paperback edition of the corresponding book Registration per e-mail to christian.fuchs(a)uti.at http://www.westminster.ac.uk/camri/research-seminars/marisol-sandoval-from-… In this talk, Marisol Sandoval presents her recent book “From Corporate to Social Media: Critical Perspectives on Corporate Social Responsibility in Media and Communication Industries”, Routledge 2014, http://www.routledge.com/books/details/9780415722568/ The corporate and the social are crucial themes of our times. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, both individual lives and society were shaped by capitalist crisis and the rise of social media. But what marks the distinctively social character of "social media"? And how does it relate to the wider social and economic context of contemporary capitalism? The concept of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) is based on the idea that a socially responsible capitalism is possible; this suggests that capitalist media corporations can not only enable social interaction and cooperation but also be socially responsible.  This presentation provides a critical and provocative perspective on Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) in media and communication industries. It examines both the academic discourse on CSR and actual corporate practices in the media sector, offering a double critique that reveals contradictions between corporate interests and social responsibilities. Marisol Sandoval’s political economic analysis of Apple, AT&T, Google, HP, Microsoft, News Corp, The Walt Disney Company and Vivendi shows that media and communication in the twenty-first century are confronted with fundamental social responsibility challenges.  From software patents and intellectual property rights to privacy on the Internet, from working conditions in electronics manufacturing to hidden flows of eWaste – Marisol Sandoval’s book encourages the reader to explore the multifaceted social (ir)responsibilities that shape commercial media landscapes today. It makes a compelling argument for thinking beyond the corporate in order to envision and bring about truly social media. Marisol Sandoval is a lecturer at City University London’s Department of Culture and Creative Industries. Her research critically deals with questions of power, responsibility, commodification, exploitation, ideology and resistance in the global culture industries. She is co-editor of the collected volumes Internet and Surveillance (2012, http://www.routledge.com/books/details/9780415633642/) Critique, Social Media and the Information Society (2013, http://www.routledge.com/books/details/9780415841856/) and of the tripleC-special issue “Philosophers of the World Unite! Theorising Digital Labour and Virtual Work - Definitions, Dimensions and Forms” (http://www.triple-c.at/index.php/tripleC/issue/view/29) She is co-editor of the open access online journal tripleC: Communication, Capitalism & Critique (http://www.triple-c.at) Her book From Corporate to Social Media? (Routledge, 2014, http://www.routledge.com/books/details/9780415722568/) looks beyond common understandings of the term social media by providing a critical analysis of corporate social (ir)responsibility in the global media and communication industries. Forthcoming talk (open for registration): Feb 11: Justin Lewis - Beyond Consumer Capitalism: A Movie Screening and Q&A with Justin Lewis http://www.westminster.ac.uk/camri/research-seminars/justin-lewis-beyond-co…

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