Economic Aspects of "Love"

[American Dream]

For me, queer means radiant darkness, radical love, and a million and one ways to resist and decolonize. Queer is imbued with deep spirituality and sweetness.

—Edward Ndopu

[American Dream]

“ …the dependence of britons …not only on colonial labor, the enslaved, and the “free” who produced their everyday commodities from sugar and tea to calico and wool, whose blood, sweat, and tears made possible the “civilised” practices of respectable anglo-saxon households, but also the extent to which englishness itself depended on the figure of the racialised other. without the “savage” and the “barbarian” there was no “civilized” subject. constructions of “musselmen,” “hindoos,” and “hottentots” all provided the preconditions for imagining the rational white englishmen… so embedded were these notions of difference that it was unnecessary to enunciate them. they were the shadowy underside of the englishman.

Catherine Hall, Civilising Subjects

[American Dream]

[American Dream]

http://libcom.org/library/state-introduction

The state - an introduction



A brief introduction to what we at libcom.org mean when we refer to the state, or government, and how we think we should relate to it as workers.

States come in many shapes and sizes. Democracies and dictatorships, those that provide lots of social welfare, those that provide none at all, some that allow for a lot of individual freedom and others that don't.

But these categories are not set in stone. Democracies and dictatorships rise and fall, welfare systems are set up and taken apart while civil liberties can be expanded or eroded.

However, all states share key features, which essentially define them.

What is the state?

All states have the same basic functions in that they are an organisation of all the lawmaking and law enforcing institutions within a specific territory. And, most importantly, it is an organisation controlled and run by a small minority of people.

So sometimes, a state will consist of a parliament with elected politicians, a separate court system and a police force and military to enforce their decisions. At other times, all these functions are rolled into each other, like in military dictatorships for example.

But the ability within a given area to make political and legal decisions – and to enforce them, with violence if necessary – is the basic characteristic of all states. Crucially, the state claims a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence, within its territory and without. As such, the state is above the people it governs and all those within its territory are subject to it.

The state and capitalism

In a capitalist society, the success or failure of a state depends unsurprisingly on the success of capitalism within it.

Essentially, this means that within its territory profits are made so the economy can expand. The government can then take its share in taxation to fund its activities.

If businesses in a country are making healthy profits, investment will flow into profitable industries, companies will hire workers to turn their investment into more money. They and their workers will pay taxes on this money which keep the state running.

But if profits dip, investment will flow elsewhere to regions where profits will be higher. Companies will shut down, workers will be laid off, tax revenues will fall and local economies collapse.

So promoting profit and the growth of the economy is the key task of any state in capitalist society - including state capitalist economies which claim to be "socialist", like China or Cuba. Read our introduction to capitalism here.

The economy

As promoting the economy is a key task of the state, let's look at the fundamental building blocks of a healthy capitalist economy.

Workers

The primary need of a sound capitalist economy is the existence of a group of people able to work, to turn capitalists' money into more money: a working class. This requires the majority of the population to have been dispossessed from the land and means of survival, so that the only way they can survive is by selling their ability to work to those who can buy it.

This dispossession has taken place over the past few hundred years across the world. In the early days of capitalism, factory owners had a major problem in getting peasants, who could produce enough to live from the land, to go and work in the factories. To solve this, the state violently forced the peasants off common land, passed laws forbidding vagrancy and forced them to work in factories under threat of execution.

Today, this has already happened to the vast majority of people around the world. However, in some places in the so-called "developing" world, the state still plays this role of displacing people to open new markets for investors. Read our introduction to class here.

Property

A second fundamental requirement is the concept of private property. While many had to be dispossessed to create a working class, the ownership of land, buildings and factories by a small minority of the population could only be maintained by a body of organised violence - a state. This is rarely mentioned by capitalism's advocates today, however in its early days it was openly acknowledged. As the liberal political economist Adam Smith wrote:

Laws and government may be considered in this and indeed in every case as a combination of the rich to oppress the poor, and preserve to themselves the inequality of the goods which would otherwise be soon destroyed by the attacks of the poor, who if not hindered by the government would soon reduce the others to an equality with themselves by open violence.

This continues today, as laws deal primarily with protecting property rather than people. For example, it is not illegal for speculators to sit on food supplies, creating scarcity so prices go up while people starve to death, but it is illegal for starving people to steal food.

What does the state do?

Different states perform many different tasks, from providing free school meals to upholding religious orthodoxy. But as we mentioned above, the primary function of all states in a capitalist society is to protect and promote the economy and the making of profit.

However, as businesses are in constant competition with each other, they can only look after their own immediate financial interests – sometimes damaging the wider economy. As such, the state must sometimes step in to look after the long-term interests of the economy as a whole.

So states educate and train the future workforce of their country and build infrastructure (railways, public transport systems etc) to get us to work and transport goods easily. States sometimes protect national businesses from international competition by taxing their goods when they come into the country or expand their markets internationally through wars and diplomacy with other states. Other times they give tax breaks and subsidies to industries, or sometimes bail them out entirely if they are too important to fail.

These measures sometimes clash with the interests of individual businesses or industries. However, this doesn't change the fact that the state is acting in the interests of the economy as a whole. Indeed, it can be seen basically as a way to settle disputes among different capitalists about how to do it.

State welfare

Some states also provide many services which protect people from the worst effects of the economy. However, this has rarely, if ever, been the result of generosity from politicians but of pressure from below.

So for instance, after World War II, the UK saw the construction of the welfare state, providing healthcare, housing etc to those that needed it. However, this was because of fear amongst politicians that the end of the war would see the same revolutionary upheaval as after World War I with events like the Russian and German revolutions, the Biennio Rosso in Italy, the British army mutinies etc.

This fear was justified. Towards the end of the war, unrest amongst the working classes of the warring nations grew. Homeless returning soldiers took over empty houses while strikes and riots spread. Tory MP Quitin Hogg summed up the mood amongst politicians in 1943, saying “if we don't give them reforms, they will give us revolution.”

This does not mean reforms are 'counter-revolutionary'. It just means that the state is not the engine for reform; we, the working class – and more specifically, our struggles – are.

When our struggles get to a point where they cannot be ignored or repressed anymore, the state steps in to grant reforms. We then end up spending the next 100 years hearing people go on about what a 'great reformer' so-and-so was, even though it was our struggles which forced those reforms onto them.

When as a class we are organised and militant, social reforms are passed. But as militancy is repressed or fades away, our gains are chipped away at. Public services are cut and sold off bit-by-bit, welfare benefits are reduced, fees for services are introduced or increased and wages are cut.

As such, the amount of welfare and public service provision to the working class in a society basically marks the balance of power between bosses and workers. For example, the French working class has a higher level of organisation and militancy than the American working class. As a result, French workers also generally have better conditions at work, a shorter working week, earlier retirement and better social services (i.e. healthcare, education etc) -regardless of whether there is a right or left wing government in power.

A workers' state?

For decades, in addition to the struggle in workplaces and the streets, many workers have tried to improve their conditions through the state.

The precise methods have differed depending on location and historical context but primarily have taken two main forms: setting up or supporting political parties which run for election and are supposed to act in workers' interests, or more radically having the party seize political power and set up a workers' government through revolution. We will briefly examine two representative examples which demonstrate the futility of these tactics.

The Labour Party

The Labour Party in the UK was created by the trade unions in 1906. It soon adopted the stated aim of creating a socialist society.

However, faced with the realities of being in Parliament, and therefore the dependence on a healthy capitalist economy they quickly abandoned their principles and consistently supported anti-working class policies both in opposition and later in government .

From supporting the imperialist slaughter of World War I, to murdering workers abroad to maintain the British Empire, to slashing workers' wages to sending troops against striking dockers.

When the working class was on the offensive, Labour granted some reforms, as did the other parties. But, just like the other parties, when the working class retreated they eroded the reforms and attacked living standards. For example just a few years after the introduction of the free National Health Service Labour introduced prescription charges, then charges for glasses and false teeth.

As outlined, this was not because Labour Party members or officials were necessarily bad people but because at the end of the day they were politicians whose principle task was to keep the UK economy competitive in the global market.

The Bolsheviks

In Russia in 1917, when workers and peasants rose up and took over the factories and the land, the Bolsheviks argued for the setting up of a "revolutionary" workers' state. However, this state could not shake off its primary functions: as a violent defence of an elite, and attempting to develop and expand the economy to maintain itself.

The so-called "workers' state" turned against the working class: one-man management of factories was reinstated, strikes were outlawed and work became enforced at gunpoint. The state even liquidated those in its own quarters who disagreed with its new turn. Not long after the revolution, many of the original Bolsheviks had been executed by the government institutions they helped set up.

Against the state

This doesn't mean that our problems would be solved if the state disappeared tomorrow. It does mean, though, that the state is not detached from the basic conflict at the heart of capitalist society: that between employers and employees. Indeed, it is part of it and firmly on the side of employers.

Whenever workers have fought for improvements in our conditions, we have come into conflict not just with our bosses but also the state, who have used the police, the courts, the prisons and sometimes even the military to keep things as they were.

And where workers have attempted to use the state, or even take it over to further our interests, they have failed - because the very nature of the state is inherently opposed to the working class. They only succeeded in legitimising and strengthening the state which later turned against them.

It is our collective power and willingness to disrupt the economy that gives us the possibility of changing society. When we force the state to grant reforms we don't just win better conditions. Our actions point to a new society, based on a different set of principles. A society where our lives are more important than their 'economic growth'. A new type of society where there isn't a minority with wealth that need to be protected from those without; that is, a society where the state is unnecessary.

The state needs the economy to survive and so will always back those who control it. But the economy and the state are based on the work we do every day, and that gives us the power to disrupt them and eventually do away with them both.

[Hammer of Los]

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Praise Ananda Now, Then and Always!

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[American Dream]

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Praise Ananda Now, Then and Always!

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http://www.buddhistpeacefellowship.org/ ... come-home/

Ananda Come Home…
Posted by: Lisa D. Moore Posted date: May 30, 2013 In: Dhamma

I have always been fond of Ananda. Probably fonder of him than I am of the Buddha. I think of the two of them as a kind of Frodo Baggins/ Samwise Gangee buddy team. Frodo may have been the ring bearer, with all of the fame and gravitas that comes with the title, but he couldn’t have done any of it without his trusty Sam. Likewise the Buddha. Gotama may have been the millionth incarnation of greatness but without Ananda, who would know or care.



To put it even more sharply, is it more noble to be awake or to serve awakening? Is it more noble to be liberated or to serve the liberation of all beings? The best part of the Ananda story is the part after the Buddha died. All of his great students got together to figure out how to compile and transmit the teachings. Everybody freaked out because the realized that Ananda couldn’t be part of this, because he wasn’t enlightened. So whaddya know? He goes to sleep, gets the lightening bolt and becomes enlightened. Why bother unless it served the dharma? Because Ananda truly realized that it was never about him.

For decades, Ananda wandered around, watching the Buddha transmit enlightenment to kings, murderers, paupers, princesses and milkmaids. And he never was enlightened? Really? Or maybe it was just never about him and he knew it. If there is no unconditioned self, which self seeks and attains enlightenment anyway?

Which brings me to the deer. I am at retreat, doing retreat as I do it. I was meandering about when I should have been sitting. And I came across a deer and her fawn. As soon as she spied me, she stopped eating and stared at me. Not sure whether I was dangerous, whether to run with her fawn or not, she just froze. I felt badly… mostly that I was a predator and that she and her baby were prey. It wasn’t my intention, but my intention is irrelevant. So in a pathetic effort to control the uncontrollable, I sent her metta. She stared.

Then, for a millisecond, something broke it me. Something that kept the illusion of separation, that human ego container that we hold so dear that keeps our souls from sloshing out into the infinite. It broke and I murmured “I’m sorry” to her. She dropped her eyes and resumed eating.

So just as quickly the ego container reassembled. I was grinning while thinking “how cool is that?” Feeling like Dr Freakin’ Doolittle of the Dharma. Post cool. Completely missing the point. Missing my Ananda moment.

It was never about me. It was about us. All of us were in the joy and humility I felt for that precious infinite millisecond. But it was not about me. It can’t be about me. Sam Gamgee knew it when he stuck with Frodo until the Ring was dispatched. Ananda knew it when he waited until the time was right to join the ranks of the enlightened. WWAD? He would have gone to the kitchen to bring the deer carrots.



Lisa D. Moore is a teacher and activist in public health who has spent her entire life agitating (and being agitated) in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her work has been in the reduction of drug related harm. Her belief is that the main causes of ill health are inequity, injustice and unhealed suffering. So her practice and her work with the East Bay Meditation Center is an extension of her desire to support health and liberation.

[American Dream]

Everyday Eugenics

September 22, 2006
By Betsy Hartmann


"Eugenics is a scavenger ideology, exploiting and reinforcing anxieties over race, gender, sexuality and class and bringing them into the service of nationalism, white supremacy, and heterosexism. The verbiage of eugenics, the valor, neutrality, and redemptive power accorded science and its counterfeiters, has enabled it to extend itself not only to diverse demographic target groups, but to disparate political philosophies it is this very elusiveness that has endowed eugenics and its permutations with such resilience."

Nancy Ordover, American Eugenics, p. 207

Very few people today in the U.S. would openly identify as eugenicists, yet eugenic assumptions are widespread, interacting with and attaching to other biological determinisms that influence the fields of science, health, economics, politics and popular culture. Like many other powerful ideas, the power of eugenic ideology lies partly in its capacity to not draw attention to itself, to appear commonplace.

Today eugenics is typically framed in terms of debates over the promise and perils of new reproductive technologies, from fetal genetic screening to the cloning of human beings. While there is a pressing need for feminists and progressives to engage critically in these debates, we also should pay attention to more everyday manifestations of eugenics and how they affect movements all along the political spectrum.

In the U.S., conventional wisdom has it that eugenics disappeared with the exposure of Nazi atrocities. In reality, not only did eugenics survive, but eugenicists continued to occupy prominent positions in population, biology, and related fields. Moreover, eugenic sterilizations, mainly of poor people of color, continued in a number of states well into the latter half of the 20th century.

Eugenics was a particularly powerful force in the post-war population control establishment. For example, prominent eugenicists were influential in the founding and development of the Population Council. Frederick Osborn, the leader of the American Eugenics Society, served as both vice-president and president of the Population Council until 1959. The founders of the council debated whether to emphasize qualitative or quantitative aspects of population. In the end, because of Cold War fears of the 'population explosion' in the Third World, they reached the decision to focus on the quantitative dimension, i.e. reducing population growth, because of its supposed urgency.

However, the eugenic dimension of demography hardly disappeared. Edmund Ramsden argues that the term "population quality", by blurring the lines between social, economic, and genetic quality, allowed for eugenics to become more respectable. The council funded a number of eugenics research projects in the U.S. and its contraceptive research had a definite eugenic thrust. In 1968 Osborn wrote, "Eugenic goals are most likely to be attained under another name than eugenics." Today, as population growth rates decline around the would, demography is focusing once again on 'quality' concerns such as the differential fertility of competing ethnic groups and population aging, especially in Europe where a growing number of policymakers are urging white women to have more babies as an alternative to immigrant labor.

Eugenics also persisted in the biological sciences. In The Molecular Vision of Life Lily Kay describes how funding from the Rockefeller Foundation in the 1930s spawned a new molecular biology that by ignoring the role of environmental factors, laid the cognitive foundations for genetic engineering and the use of biology as a technocratic tool of social control. Rather than dying with Nazi eugenics, the eugenic dimensions of molecular biology gathered steam in the post-war period. Famous biologist Lionel Pauling, for example, argued for the purification of human germ plasm and population control to reduce the number of defective children born. Reminiscent of the Nazis' yellow star for Jews, he even went so far as to advocate tattooing the foreheads of young people with sickle-cell and other defective genes.

Thus, while eugenic ideologies and practices have changed over time, they have hardly gone away. Following are some key arenas where eugenic ideas continue to circulate today.

Environmentalism/immigration:

American environmentalism has had a long and strong relationship with eugenics. Many of the early conservationists were eugenicists who believed in maintaining the purity of both nature and the gene pool as well as the manifest destiny of the white Anglo-Saxon race to steward (and colonize) the environment. In California, Mexican immigrants in particular were identified as a threat to both society and the environment. (See Alexandra Stern).

Eugenic ideas and actors have continued to influence the environmental movement. In the 'greening of hate', anti-immigrant groups masquerading as environmentalists (with names like Carrying Capacity Network, Population-Environment Balance, etc.) have tried to penetrate and take over liberal environmental groups, particularly the country's largest member-based environmental organization, the Sierra Club. Anti-immigrant groups blame pollution and urban sprawl on immigrant-induced population growth and use billboards of pristine landscapes ("amber waves of grain") under threat from immigration to build popular support for anti-immigration ballot initiatives.

Fortunately, groups that monitor the right are now exposing the links between these so-called environmentalists and white supremacist organizations. For example, we know now that Virginia Abernethy, once a popular and 'respectable' spokeswoman on the population-environment circuit, is a member of the white supremacist Council of Conservative Citizens. She has publicly stated that races shouldn't mix.

With the increased exposure of the 'greening of hate', environmental groups are growing more wary of right-wing attempts at penetration. Yet much remains to be done to challenge the problematic assumptions, language and images that make American environmentalism particularly susceptible to eugenic influences. These include persistent beliefs in 'pure' nature, pristine wilderness and a clear division between native and non-native species.

For example, as feminist biologist Banu Subramaniam points out, the same xenophobic metaphors about invasions of hyper-breeding illegal aliens are applied to non-native plant and animal species and human immigrants, stoking fears of the foreign in both nature and culture. Indeed, as Subramaniam notes, we need to keep close attention to the traffic between the worlds of nature and culture at a moment when heightened fears of globalization (and now terrorism) are leading to a resurgence of nativism and romanticizing of the local. Notions of natural purity and cultural purity blend into and reinforce each other, making racism and ethnic prejudice more acceptable in the process.

Gender, sexualities, bodies:

Biological determinism is much in vogue these days as the media bombards us with messages that we are, in the end, mainly a function of our genes or hormones. In the process, gender and sexuality are being re-centered in the body rather than in social relations. Biology is becoming the legitimizing script, providing fertile feeding grounds for the scavenger ideology of eugenics.

For example, queer rights activists find themselves on tricky ground when it comes to the search for a genetic basis of homosexuality. "Of all the groups targeted by biological determinism," writes Nancy Ordover, "queers seem to be the only ones who have looked to eugenics to deliver us from marginalization." Ordover is referring to the push by several gay male scientists in the 1990s to locate a "gay gene," partly as a strategy to win greater social acceptance and legal rights for homosexuals. If homosexuality is hereditary or congenital, the logic goes, then lesbians and gays have protected minority status and cannot be discriminated against on the basis of their biology. The search for a gay gene is not only scientifically flawed, Ordover argues, but politically flawed, reinforcing eugenic thinking in other arenas (race, crime, urbanization and class) and posing no substantive challenge to homophobia. She urges queers "to opt out of nature versus nurture arguments altogether." The transgender movement too faces issues of biological determinism, particularly the question of how to make sure hormonal treatments for becoming more male or female do not reinforce problematic gender ideologies and binaries.

In relation to the body, perhaps the most everyday -- and often unexamined -- manifestation of eugenics is in aesthetics. In the heyday of eugenics in the 1930s, the promotion of ideal body types took place in racist research on phenotypes, state fair contests to find the fittest (white) families, and graphic and sculptured representations of the ideal Nordic male and female. The perfect man and woman of the future would not only be geniuses, but have beautiful, efficient and controlled bodies.

This aesthetic survives today, taking a variety of forms from paying blond, blue-eyed Ivy League women to be egg donors to the pages of fashion magazines. Where it may be most insidious is in the growing prevalence of eating disorders such as anorexia and bulimia among young women searching for an elusive physical perfection, sense of control and in some cases hyper-athletic physical efficiency. Although eating disorders have complex causes, we should not underestimate the legacy of eugenics in breeding the psychological monster of perfectionism that terrorizes so many women. The current mass marketing of hormonal birth control pills like Seasonale that have the 'liberating' side effect of stopping your periods also plays on the eugenic aesthetic of a clean, efficient female body.

Race:

One of the great ironies of the present moment in the U.S. is the resurgence of race-based biological and genetic determinism at a time when scientific research is exploding myths about the biological basis of race. For example, research has shown that genetic variation within a group is much greater than variation among "races" and that geographic proximity is a much better marker for genetic similarity than skin color.

As anthropologist Alan Goodman notes, another frequent error is the assumption that racial differences in disease are due to genetic differences among races. Not only does this over-emphasize and simplify the role of genes as a causal agent of disease, but it diverts attention from the social, economic and environmental determinants of illness, including the negative effects of racism. Native Americans, for example, may indeed suffer a higher rate of Type II diabetes, but poverty, discrimination, poor diet and reservation culture may explain this higher incidence much more than any genetic predisposition. Racism more than race is inscribed in the body.

The social forces which perpetuate the biologizing and geneticizing of race can be found at varying points along the political spectrum. Pharmaceutical interests profit on these myths; the Washington Post, for example, recently published an article about the GenSpec brand of dietary supplements with the title, "Maker of race-based vitamins says they are targeting real biological differences" Racist social conservatives are still fond of blaming inequality and poverty on the inferior intelligence of black people and the liberal press has proved all too willing to go along. A current example is the attention paid to Donohue and Levitt's theory that the drop in crime in the 1990s is due to the 1973 legalization of abortion which kept potential criminal offspring from teenage, single and African American mothers from being born.

Parts of the left, through some forms of rigid race-based identity politics, have also played a role. The more didactic approaches to anti-racism education can ironically serve to reify and consolidate the black/white binary while undermining possibilities for solidarity on the basis of class, gender, or a shared political perspective. The challenge remains how to address very real white racism and privilege without buying into biological constructs of race based on having the right genes, skin color and 'blood.' The recent attempt of several famous black intellectuals to trace their African heritage through DNA testing is ringing alarm bells in progressive African American circles.

Neoliberalism:

Current forms of eugenics are complementary to, if not the product of, neoliberal ideologies and policies. These complementarities include:

Concepts of burden - Competitive capitalism has long required rationales for why people are poor and expendable. Under neoliberalism, the shrinking of the welfare state (which never truly existed in the U.S. in any case) casts more and more people as drains on the economy and the state -- not just the poor and people of color, but also elderly people and people with disabilities. It is not surprising then that one can hear echoes of negative eugenics in population control measures and technologies targeted at poor women (welfare 'reform' family caps, the Project Prevention organization that gives incentives to drug users to use long-term contraception or be sterilized, recent FDA approval of quinacrine chemical sterilization trials) and in genetic screening for fetal disability.

Consumer choice - Just as the concept of burden is intrinsic to negative eugenics, so is the concept of individual choice to 'positive' eugenics and new reproductive technologies. These technologies are often promoted to well-off women in terms of consumer choice and 'designer babies.' In a sense, burden and choice are two sides of the same coin as both impose reproductive duties on women. (See Dorothy Roberts.) Eugenics, past and present, is also intricately linked to industrial mass production through the design and marketing of ever more standardized 'ideal' consumer goods and the associated rise in social expectations and conformity, faith in technological progress, and belief in consumer rights as the foundation of free enterprise and democracy. (See Christina Cogdell.)

Globalization - Here we need to look more carefully at both ideologies and practices of global out-sourcing when it comes to genetic engineering and assisted reproduction. In addition, stem cell and cloning research is becoming the latest marker of which country is 'out front' in the competitive race to the new technological frontier.

Efficiency - Linked to all of the above is the heightened focus on 'efficiency' as privatization, competition, the information technology speed-up and the time/space compression of globalization put ever more demands on the human body and body politic to make more 'efficient' use of resources. Just as at the beginning of the last century, eugenics is linked to the mad drive for efficiency. Nowhere is this clearer than in health policy where the priority given to finding, treating and preventing the genetic causes of both physical and mental disease is touted as more efficient than, for example, identifying and ameliorating environmental and social causes. Most disorders are blamed on genes today, and the quick-fix solution is pharmaceutical. Genetic screening, meanwhile, threatens to become a means by which health insurance companies, in their 'efficient' search for higher profits, can deny people coverage.

The national security state:

Any discussion of eugenics must also take on the escalating role of the prison-military-industrial complex. It is no exaggeration to say that the reproductive capacities and family-making possibilities of poor black men and women are being seriously curtailed with their extremely high rates of incarceration, often with long sentences that extend through their reproductive years. In addition, poor women of color are being imprisoned for supposed reproductive crimes, such as 'fetal abuse' for taking drugs during pregnancy.

Coupled with tax cuts for the rich, the diversion of billions of dollars toward the 'war on terror' and war in Iraq, meanwhile, is creating very real budget deficits, with social programs increasingly cut to support national defense. In the hands of conservative ideologues, fears of scarcity are manipulated in order to cast more and more poor people as burdens and to foment racist assaults on immigrants and people of color. This climate helps foster and legitimize eugenic thinking. A more speculative issue is whether there is a relationship between the widespread use of surveillance technologies in the national security state and increased acceptance of the surveillance mechanisms of genetic screening.

Last but not least, we also have to ask just who is being used as cannon fodder in the war in Iraq, who is viewed as more expendable, more fit to die. Not eugenics exactly, but related. And the answer, yet again, is poor people and people of color.

How to respond?

In order to understand the workings of eugenics in the present, we need to read up on history and learn from past resistance. It wasn't the horrors of Nazism that brought the era of compulsory sterilization to a close in the U.S., for example, but the political actions of feminist, civil rights and immigrant rights advocates.

Secondly, we need to look critically at how eugenics thinking penetrates and permeates a wide array of social, economic, political and scientific arenas. As part of that endeavor, we need to look critically at the left as well as the right. We also need to challenge totalizing and naturalizing discourses, even if they seem in the short term to converge with our own political interests, e.g. the defense of pure nature and native place in environmental and anti-globalization movements.

Thirdly, in terms of genetic research and the new reproductive technologies, we have to become literate in both their science and political economy in order to make informed judgments about what we are for and what we are against.

And finally, we need to use our political imaginations to create a more powerful vision of a non-eugenic future that celebrates diversity, creativity and difference, challenges neoliberal notions of efficiency and the national security state, harnesses scientific research for the real benefit of humanity and the environment, and does away once and for all with the false and dangerous categories of fit and unfit.



-- Betsy Hartmann is the director of the Population and Development Program at Hampshire College in Amherst, MA and a longstanding activist in the international women's health movement. She is co-editor with Banu Subramaniam and Charles Zerner of the recent anthology, Making Threats: Biofears and Environmental Anxieties and author of a political thriller about the Far Right, The Truth about Fire.


Resources and References

Groups that do progressive analysis and campaigning on eugenics issues include Center for Genetics and Society (http://www.genetics-and-society.org), Council for Responsible Genetics (http://www.gene-watch.org), Committee on Women, Population and the Environment (http://www.cwpe.org), and the Corner House (http://www.thecornerhouse.org.uk).

Cogdell, Christina. 2004. Eugenic Design: Streamlining America in the 1930s. Philadelphia: University of California Press.

Goodman, Alan. 2005. "Reflections - Impure Biology: The Deadly Synergy of Racialization and Geneticization," in Hartmann et al., eds., Making Threats, 149-158.

Hartmann, Betsy, Subramaniam, Banu, and Zerner, Charles, eds. 2005. Making Threats: Biofears and Environmental Anxieties. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.

Ordover, Nancy. 2003. American Eugenics: Race, Queer Anatomy, and the Science of Nationalism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Ramsden, Edmund. 2001. "Between Quality and Quantity: The Population Council and the Politics of 'Science-making' in Eugenics and Demography, 1952-1965." Rockefeller Archive Center Research Reports Online.

Roberts, Dorothy. 2005. "Population Control and Reprogenetics in U.S. Neoliberalism." Speech for the plenary on The Politics and Resurgence of Population Policies, 10th International Women and Health Meeting, New Delhi, India, September 23.

Stern, Alexandra Minna. 2005. Eugenic Nation: Faults and Frontiers of Better Breeding in Modern America. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Subramaniam, Banu. 2005. "The Aliens Have Landed! Reflections on the Rhetoric of Biological Invasions," in Hartmann et al, eds., Making Threats, 135-148.



From: Z Net - The Spirit Of Resistance Lives
URL: http://www.zcommunications.org/everyday ... y-hartmann

[American Dream]

Image inspired by something my comadre Yosimar Reyes said in Chicago about the way our migrant labor is deemed low-skilled. It takes a lot of skills to work in the fields. To serve entitled people their food. To make your clothes. To take yo’ shit. And all the while trying to keep our sanity. That’s some skills.


http://juliosalgado83.tumblr.com/post/5 ... re-yosimar

[American Dream]

“Awaz Ki Shakti” Power of the Voice
Undocumented & Unafraid poster
December 2012
by Khushboo Gulati/ Kalisherni

“South Asian Americans make up one-sixth of the undocumented population in the United States. They become undocumented in many different ways:

Overstaying visas to stay with family
Losing their H-1B jobs
Leaving an abusive marriage with a H-1B holder
Being exploited as a domestic worker or sex trafficking
Aging out
Losing their asylum cases and overstaying due to family ties here
Crossing the border through Mexico
We need to have these hard and awkward conversations within our communities. We need to ensure that the most vulnerable parts of our population get the support and services they need.”
-India Currents March 2012 Article

To read more stories by undocumented South Asian folks, visit http://southasiandiaspora.tumblr.com/

been thinking about what it means for me to make solidarity art, especially art related to immigration with regards to my desiness, queerness, family immigration story, class, citizenship.
also been thinking about the butterfly symbol—-the pain behind immigration, the violence in the immigration process & in this country, colonialism, imperialism, racism/all the -isms/phobias, patriarchy & capitalism
things are funky and complicated
trying to be intentional and careful


http://kalisherni.tumblr.com/post/52177 ... documented

[American Dream]

"MALCOLM SAID IT"

[American Dream]

janetmock:

This little seen documentary (sacrilege that there’s only 7,321 views!) is a testament to a legend, someone who has left an indelible mark on those she touched, entertained, loved, gave to, received from, crashed with, said hello to, babysat and fought for.

Marsha P. Johnson, how you inspire me everyday to step even further into who I am and find that slice of freedom we all deserve. Thank you for always coming from a place of compassion, kindness, love, and yes glitter and flowers.

Pay It No Mind - The Life and Times of Marsha P. Johnson

[Hammer of Los]

...

JD

COULD YOU PUT DA USER DETAILS BACK ON THESE YOUTUBE POSTS

THANK YOU KIND SIR

ARE YOU GOOD BOY?

AND EVERYONE TAKE A BACKUP AND DISTRIBUTE

THANK YOU.

...

[Hammer of Los]

...

TURN IT UP!



TURN IT UP!

...

[American Dream]

http://rocredandblack.org/platform/



Platform


Capitalism

Fundamentally, we oppose capitalism and all forms of exploitation. Capitalism is an imposed socially constructed system, not a product of human nature. It is founded on exploitation, which extracts profits from the labor of the workers. This creates an uneven class system, where lower classes continue to be the source of profit for those on top. Through this an entire matrix of inequality is initiated, creating divisions and hierarchies between people based on race, sex, gender orientation, and an array of other elements of identity. These inequalities are inherent to capitalism’s drive to create competition between people rather than cooperation, and therefore perpetuate inequality. Capitalism drives all elements of social and natural life into a form of commodity: resources, nature, individuals and even the basic experiences of life. In an economic sense, capitalism’s brutal class system requires institutionalized poverty at the bottom. This is perpetuated with a series of myths, such as the idea that capitalism is a natural form of human evolution and the concept of the necessary nature of meritocracy, which says that the wealth people own comes from their own merit.

The State

Class society requires a mechanism to protect the interests of the minority that control wealth and power. That mechanism is the state. The state is not a neutral instrument that the working class can take control of for its own interest. The state holds a monopoly on “legitimate” violence within society, meant to ensure “order” despite injustice and inequality. Whether dictatorships, “representational democracies”, or state communism, all states act as defenders of that inequality. When American capitalists have interests that extend beyond theUSborders, the state creates the illusion of a national interest to create the legitimacy necessary to wage war. These wars are clearly in service of the interests of the capitalist class and are ultimately not in the interest of the working classes of either land. The tool by which the state maintains its control either at home or abroad is coercion.

In an effort to preserve their legitimacy, and as a result of class struggle, some states maintain programs with important positive social impact like Social Security and Medicare. These programs are ultimately unsustainable, as they are counter to the interests of the capitalists that the state actually represents. Therefore these programs are distorted and weakened over time to ensure that business interests are satisfied. To organize a revolutionary society, we must have popular and democratic institutions that replace the positive functions of the state. We believe in community self-management of society and the economy rather than state and capitalist control.

Anarchist Communism

In place of the present capitalist system we seek to establish a society of free producers, where the now-oppressed masses make all the fundamental decisions of social life directly through organizations of their own choice with which they identify themselves completely and can exert control. This means a society run through popular, democratic institutions, where all are able to participate in the decisions that affect their lives. A free society, we contend, can only be based on the notion of “from each according to their abilities, to each according to their need,” since only under conditions of social and economic equality can freedom – real freedom – truly develop. Likewise, a society based on the ideas of liberty, equality and solidarity is the only social arrangement where both the individual and collective elements of society can be recognized and cherished without one subsuming the other- where all human potential that is restrained by the present economic and social order can be allowed to flourish. Such a society we call Anarchist Communism.

Class Struggle

While we hope for a future where all of humanity is united and working towards common goals of justice and fulfillment for all, we recognize that there are currently many barriers to that future. Humanity is not one big happy family. We are divided primarily into two conflicting classes, a working class that survives by selling its time and labor, and a capitalist class that profits from the exploitation of the working class. While a parasitic capitalist class lives in luxury through its exploitation of the masses of people, a unified humanity remains impossible.

In the process of building a class that can only survive through selling its time and labor, capitalism locks some people out of the work force. Some are held in near permanent unemployment and others, like housewives, help to contribute to society’s wealth but aren’t paid for it. Others, like farm workers in theUnited States, are not considered workers legally. This is absurd, since the industrial and business nature of agriculture today makes farm workers – just like housewives and the unemployed – an integral part of the working class.

Not everyone who is in a class knows that they are in the class. There is frequently a difference between the class that people perceive themselves to be in and the class that they actually are in objectively. In theUnited States, huge numbers of people believe themselves to be part of the middle class. In terms of the relationship that they hold to power and wealth, these same people are almost always a part of the working class, but for a variety of reasons have begun to identify as a “middle class” that sees itself as separate from the working class. When we choose to identify as separate classes, we ultimately weaken the ability of the broad working class to resist the deterioration of their standard of living.

Different sectors of the working class are made to believe that their interests are contrary to each other. Nothing can be further from the truth. When one sector of workers faces a loss, a ripple effect will ultimately impact others as the standard of living that the capitalist class is expected to provide the working class declines. This is also true when workers win. If wages and benefits in one sector rise, other businesses are forced to raise their wages and benefits to compete and attract workers.

We organize to build working class unity through struggle and build a united working class movement for the abolition of classes altogether. Because the working class creates all wealth in the world, they not only have a right to that wealth, but also have the power to stop the production of all wealth in the world. This ultimately means that the working class has the power to rid itself of the ruling class which survives on the profits created by the working class.

In the short term, this means that the working class has the power through direct action and class struggle to create immediate change. In a struggle for universal health care, there is great power in an organized body of health care workers refusing to deny services. In a struggle against the privatization of public utilities, there is great power in organized utility workers refusing to turn off people’s power. In the struggle against war, there is great power in dock workers refusing to ship arms. Ultimately it is within the grasp of the unified working class to bring the capitalist system of inequality and exploitation to a grinding halt through mass class struggle.

Role of the Anarchist Organization

In spite of its commitment to revolutionary values, anarchism has often played only a minor role in the history of revolutions worldwide. Its internal disconnection and lack of coordination have reduced its impact. To remedy this situation, we seek to create an anarchist organization that can bring local anarchists together to develop our ideas and theories which can then be brought back into the social movements of which we are a part. It is these social movements, not the anarchist organization, which are the revolutionary actors. The role of the anarchist organization is to draw from the ideas and experiences gained from those social movements and to offer our own ideas to them. We reject Leninist vanguardism and the idea of attempting to capture the leadership of social movements in order to force our beliefs on those involved. Where social movements do not exist, the role of organized anarchists should be to catalyze them and attempt to move them in a more radical militant direction.

Direct Action

Direct action simply means to act directly for yourself rather than having an intermediate perform the task for you, such as in the representative state. This will ultimately mean the expropriation of the current capitalist forms of property and government, and restructuring and redistributing resources based on the direct decision making of the people. In the present moment, direct action can take the form of boycotting, civil disobedience, disruption of ecological destruction, eviction blockades, university or workplace occupations and active resistance to unjust policy. We believe that direct action is the most potent force for social change as it bypasses institutional barriers and allows participants to take active control over their lives and communities, which genuinely empowers people and foreshadows the way in which a positive society will function. In this way we are opposed to electoral politics in principle as they maintain convention and class domination and do not inhabit the spirit of direct democracy.

Our position on direct action does not mean that we will not take on other tactics, or be accountable to other groups with whom we are working, but it does mean that we believe direct action is the most effective form of action and fundamental to the transformation of society and those involved.

Patriarchy and Queer Liberation

We reject patriarchy: the system of male domination, heteronormity, and gender oppression. Through our rejection of patriarchy we also reject the gender binary as well as any biological or social basis for sexism. We intend to fight sexism both when it takes economic and non-economic form, such as through familial roles, rape culture, and unwaged labor such as childcare. Systems of hierarchy reinforced through capitalism and the state make gender liberation impossible, and therefore we see issues of patriarchy as taking part in a larger system of socio-economic oppression. Both institutions require strict adherence to prescribed roles and inequality within those roles, and they include set gender, sexual, and behavioral norms.

Through this we challenge heteronormity and the assumption of standardized expressions of sexuality and gender, and support the free development of people’s identity and relationships. Both queer and women’s oppression are part of the same system of male dominance, and as such we oppose the oppression of queer and transsexual people.

Anti-Racism

We know that race is a biological fiction for which there is no scientific basis, but that racist oppression is a social reality. American racism is not just made up of racist attitudes of individuals, but also of massive systemic and institutional forces that reinforce and reproduce the oppression of workers of color.

We know that white privilege is real and that it benefits so-called white workers relative to workers of color in ways both big and small, but because these privileges divide white workers against workers of color (critically damaging the ability of the whole working class to struggle for justice) it is contrary to the interest of white workers to defend these privileges and in the interest of the entire working class to dismantle them.

We believe that in order to fight for justice and win revolution the working class must be truly united. In order to really unite and not just brush aside the issues that divide the large and multiracial working class, it is crucial that we build deep and genuine anti-racism within the class. We also believe that the single best way to do this is to grow real solidarity over the course of common struggle. We utterly reject the idea that people are inherently racist, and we believe that just as racism is socially learned, it can be socially unlearned. Within our organizations, we should be actively working to break down the barriers that racism has created.

As anarchists, we encourage all people to fight their oppression in ways they think best, but we also specifically seek to build multiracial mass movements of the working class because we think that only such movements are truly capable of winning. We reject the idea that racism can be destroyed by a cross-class alliance of all people of color. Racism can best be smashed by an anti-racist working class revolution.

Ability, Disability and Ableism

We oppose hierarchies and judgments of human worth based upon differences in physical or mental ability, structure or functioning. We reject the idea of a single “ideal” type of human, and oppose and condemn the ideas of eugenics and social Darwinism. Everyone has the right to be accepted and understood on their own terms, and should not have to live with the labels imposed externally by others.

As capitalism only values those who can help create a profit, those who cannot help make a profit due to physical or mental differences often are stigmatized, locked out of the workforce, impoverished, denied care and made homeless. We seek an Anarchist-Communist society where everyone is fully materially supported and free to contribute to society in their own way.

In relation to mental ability, we support the idea of mental diversity, and strongly suspect that many individuals diagnosed with “mental illnesses” are simply labeled such because an authoritarian society is unable to tolerate diversity. However, we also recognize that many of these differences can clearly cause significant impairment of life functioning and are experienced as illness, and we support full availability of mental health services (including early childhood intervention) free of charge. These services should be able to be provided without causing fear of stigma, which stems from the implicit hierarchical models of ability and disability embedded in our culture. To the extent that individuals or groups feel that the labels implicit in mental health treatment are dehumanizing, disempowering, and disrespectful of their autonomy, then the mental health profession serves as an instrument of social control rather than as healing. We seek a society in which those with special needs are cared for in a manner which respects their dignity.

As “disability” and “ability” are often designations which can change depending on social context, we strive to make Rochester Red and Black and the other organizations with which we work maximally accessible for all people. We work to avoid ableist language which privileges those with certain kinds of health and ability by implicitly putting down those who are different.

Nationalism

We oppose all forms of nationalism, which we define as movements based on a common identity advocating separatism, supremacy, or the formation of a nation or nation-state that enforces that identity on the population. This can take the form of ethnic, religious, or cultural separatism, whether used in terms of modern governmental bodies or alternative groupings of peoples. We do support the necessity of the full expression of the multiplicity of cultural identity, and believe that this richness is inherent to diversity internationally. We do not support national liberation movements that identify with the nation state or employ class collaboration, but instead support self-determination for oppressed peoples, the defeat of imperialism, freedom from oppression for people on occupied lands, and solidarity between the international working class. Through this we support the elimination of all political borders, amnesty for “illegal” peoples residing in countries that do not recognize their legal status, and an internationalist tendency that sees the importance for working class unity across the globe without divisions based on national identity.

Ecology

Our view on the environment is biocentrism: the idea that our natural world is more than just itemized resource extraction and that it has the right and necessity to exist on its own. Humanity should not attempt to dominate the environment, as the industrial capitalist mode of production dictates, and it is not simply for our utility. Capitalism alienates us from the natural world and how our institutions are actively destroying it. This remains a crisis of capitalism, where its principles of perpetual growth cannot be in line with sustainability and a connection to the Earth. Just as with poverty and war, capitalism requires environmental devastation to function. Within this system of environmental attack, working class populations, indigenous groups, and people of color experience a greater immediate impact from this catastrophe because of their forced marginalization. We understand that social transformation is crucial for moving toward a true ecological balance, and this cannot be regulated purely toward any type of lifestyle changes, technological innovation, or broad attacks on technology.

Federalism

We are committed to the organizational principles of federalism in that we support the free association of individuals and organizations, as well as the balance between autonomy and unity. This freedom to associate between individuals and groups will also mean the freedom to disassociate at will, allowing communities and organizations to understand their own needs and meet these according to their own character. This is different than organizations that use centralism, where a centralized groups dictates for a range of regional organization ideology and practices. We see this as unable to meet the needs of the community or represent the diversity that those communities may hold, and therefore centralism takes on authoritarian modes that we identify with statist politics. Instead we support direct democracy and decentralism in an effort to keep people as directly involved in the decision making process both in the organization and the larger socio-political landscape. Through this we work with other groups and federations through commonalities, yet reserve our own distinctive group dynamic.

[rose.irene]

Yes, end medicare and social security. And due process. Only statists support medicare and social security. And due process.