thepermanentwave:

FB INVITE FOR PUSSY RIOT BENEFIT IS UP! click the photo or here. live sets from heliotropes, shady hawkins and tinvulva. DJ set from ad-rock of the beastie boys.

in case you don’t know what’s up with pussy riot, click here to read more them. here’s an official statement from their supporters’ website:

Three alleged members of the feminist punk band Pussy Riot, Maria Alekhina, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova and Ekaterina Samucevich, charged with “hooliganism”, have been remanded in jail, facing up to 7 years criminal punishment for allegedly participating in the punk-prayer Virgin Mary, Send Putin Away that publicly demonstrated for human rights and against the current oppressive regime under Putin. The case illustrates the gross level of violations against human rights in Russia and requires immediate attention. The detained activists now need the support of the world’s community. 

in other words: fuck this noise, GET THEM OUT!!!

(via rivertrash)

“Don’t Be Afraid, You’re Already Dead” by Akron/Family

Don’t be afraid, it’s only love

Love is simple

Don’t be afraid, you’re already dead

Love is simple

I am drunk and should not be trusted with the ability to send out thoughts out into the interwebs but I just wanted to tell you all that you are all rather swell, I wish we could be friends.

I’m here being shy and too afraid to talk to anyone because Tumblr keeps erasing my messages and unfollowing people without my approval because I follow roughly 1500+ blogs which is apparently unusual. I think I follow too many people.. may be messing up the system or something of other. For those of you I regularly creep out by contiuously “liking” everything you deem worthy of being splayed across your blog, I appreciate your existence and hope the best for your future endeavors.. you are lovely and brilliant.

I’m visiting San Francisco in July with my cousins! This will be the first time I ever leave the east coast and travel by airplane. I’m terrified though.. I have enough metal contraptions in me to build a small computer, but I don’t have medical verification cards for each individual piece due to hostilities with certain abusive surgeons. It should be fun getting sent through a scanner when my insides already look like a junk yard of scrap metal and oddly shaped organs. 

You are all beautiful, wonderful creatures who give me hope when I wallow in my shame over not being able to finish my semester in the standard alloted time as designated by capitalist production methods. What the hell am I doing with my life… what am I even saying?

I need to stop drinking while I’m alone and feeling sad. Let’s get this revolution started ASAP.

(Source: frozendepthsofaforgottenfjord, via hiphopcheerleader)

"

While jury makeup varies widely by jurisdiction, the organization, which studied eight Southern states — Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina and Tennessee — found areas in all of them where significant problems persist. In Alabama, courts have found racially discriminatory jury selection in 25 death penalty cases since 1987, and there are counties where more than 75 percent of black jury pool members have been struck in death penalty cases.

An analysis of Jefferson Parish, La., by the Louisiana Capital Assistance Center found that from 1999 to 2007, blacks were struck from juries at more than three times the rate of whites.

In North Carolina, at least 26 current death row defendants were sentenced by all-white juries. In South Carolina, a prosecutor said he struck a black potential juror because he “shucked and jived” when he walked.

Studies have shown that racially diverse juries deliberate longer, consider a wider variety of perspectives and make fewer factual errors than all-white juries, and that predominantly black juries are less likely to impose the death penalty.

"

— THE ALL BLACK JURY IS NOT A THING, NOT EVEN IN THE NORTH (via cosmopolitan-fascist)

(via arielnietzsche)

Before I end up typing the entirety of this book, here is a link to Silvia Federici’s Caliban and the Witch. I implore each and every one of you to read it, if you find the subject matter of interest. 

Caliban and the Witch is a history of the body in the transition to capitalism. Moving from the peasant revolts of the late Middle Ages to the witch-hunts and the rise of mechanical philosophy, Federici investigates the capitalist rationalization of social reproduction. She shows how the battle against the rebel body and the conflict between body and mind are essential conditions for the development of labor power and self-ownership, two central principles of modern social organization.

Heresy was as much a critique of the social hierarchies and economic exploitation as it was a denunciation of clerical corruption. As Gioacchino Volpe points out, the rejection of all forms of authority and a strong anti-commercial sentiment were common elements among the sects. Many heretics shared the ideal of apostolic poverty and the desire to return to the simple communal life that had characterized the primitive church. Some, like the Poor of Lyon and the Brethren of the Free Spirit, lived on donated alms. Others supported themselves by manual labor. Still others experimented with “communism” like the early Taborites in Bohemia, for whom the establishment of equality and communal ownership were as important as religious reform. Of the Waldenses too an Inquisitor reported that “they avoid all forms of commerce to avoid lies, frauds, and oaths” and he described them as walking barefoot, clad in woolen garments, owning nothing and, like apostles, holding all things in common (Lambert, 1992: 64). The social content of heresy, however, is best expressed in the words of John Ball, the intellectual leader of the English Peasant Rising of 1381, who denounced that “we are made in the image of God, but we are treated like beasts” and added, “Nothing will go well in England… as long as there will be gentlemen and villeins” (Dobson 1983: 371).

The most influential among the heretical sects, the Cathars, also stand out as unique in the history of European social movements because of their abhorrence for war (including the Crusades), their condemnation of capital punishment (which provoked the Church’s first explicit pronouncement in support of the death penalty) and their tolerance for other religions. Southern France, their stronghold before the crusade against the Albigensians, “was a safe haven for Jews when anti-semitism in Europe was mounting; [here] a fusion of Cathar and Jewish thought produced the Cabbala, the tradition of Jewish mysticism” (Spencer, 1995b: 171). The Cathars also rejected marriage and procreation and were strict vegetarians, both because they refused to kill animals and because they wished to avoid any food, like eggs and meats, resulting from sexual generation.

This negative attitude towards natality has been attributed to the influence exerted on the Cathars by Eastern dualist sects like the Paulicians - a sect of iconoclasts who rejected procreation as the act by which the soul is entrapped in the material world (Erbstrosser 1984: 13-14) - and, above all, the Bogomils, who proselytized in the 10th century among the peasantry of the Balkans. A popular movement “born amidst peasants whose physical misery made conscious the wickedness of things” (Spencer 1995b: 15), the Bogomils preached that the visible world is the work of the devil (for in the world of God the good would be the first), and they refused to have children not to bring new slaves into this “land of tribulations,” as life on earth was called in one of their tracts (Wakefield and Evans 1991: 457).

- Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation by Silvia Federici, pg. 34

At the root of popular heresy was the belief that god no longer spoke through the clergy, because of its greed, corruption and scandalous behavior. Thus the two major sects presented themselves as the “true churches”. However, the heretics’ challenge was primarily a political one, since to challenge the Church was to confront at once the ideological pillar of feudal power, the biggest landowners in Europe, and one of the institutions most responsible for the daily exploitation of the peasantry. By the 11th century, the Church had become a despotic power that used its alleged divine investiture to govern with an iron fist and fill its coffers by endless means of extortion. Selling absolutions, indulgences and religious offices, calling the faithful to church only to preach to them the sanctity of the tithes, and making of all sacraments a market, were common practices from the pope to the village priest, so much so that the corruption of the clergy became proverbial throughout Christianity. Things degenerated to the point that the clergy would not bury the dead, baptize or grant absolution from sin unless it received some compensation. Even the communion became an occasion for a bargain, and “[i]f an unjust demand was resisted the recalcitrant was excommunicated, and then had to pay for reconciliation in addition to the original sum” (Lea, 1961: 11).

In this context, the propagation of the heretical doctrines not only channeled the contempt that people felt for the clergy; it gave them confidence in their views and instigated resistance to clerical exploitation. Taking the lead from the New Testament, the heretics taught that Christ had no property, and that if the Church wanted to regain its spiritual power it should divest itself from all its possessions. They also taught that the sacraments were not valid when administered by sinful priests, that the exterior forms of worship - buildings, images, symbols - should be discarded only because inner belief mattered. They also exhorted people not to pay the tithes, and denied the existence of Purgatory, whose invention had been for the clergy a source of lucre through paid masses and the sales of indulgences.

In turn, the Church used the charge of heresy to attack every form of social and political insubordination. In 1377, when the cloth workers in Ypres (Flanders) took arms against their employers, they were not only hanged as rebels but were burned by the Inquisition as heretics (N. Cohn 1970: 105). There are also records of female weavers being threatened with excommunication for not having delivered promptly the product of their work to the merchants or not having properly done their work (Volpe, 1971: 31). In 1234, to punish his peasant tenants who refused to pay the tithes, the Bishop of Bremen called a crusade against them “as though they were heretics” (Lambert 1992: 98). But heretics were persecuted also by the secular authorities, from the Emperor to the urban patricians, who realized that the heretic appeal to the “true religion” had subversive implications and questioned the foundations of their power.

-  Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation by Silvia Federici, pg. 33-34

Today, little is known about the many heretic sects (Cathars, Waldenses, The Poor of Lyon, Spirituals, Apostolics) that for more than three centuries flourished among the “lower classes” in Italy, France, the Flanders, and Germany, in what undoubtedly was the most important opposition movement of the Middle Ages (Werner 1974; Lambert 1977). This is largely due to the ferocity with which they were persecuted by the Church, which spared no effort to erase every trace of their doctrines. Crusades - like the one moved against the Albigensians - were called against the heretics, as they were called to liberate the Holy Land from the “infidels”. By the thousands, heretics were burned at the stake, and to eradicate their presence the Pope created one of the most perverse institutions ever recorded in the history of state repression: the Holy Inquistion (Vauchez, 1990: 162-70).

Nevertheless, as Charles H. Lea (among others) has shown, in his monumental history of the persecution of heresy, even on the basis of the limited records available to us, we can form an impressive picture of their activities and creeds and the role of heretical resistance in the anti-feudal struggle (Lea 1888).

Although influenced by Eastern religions brought to Europe by merchants and crusaders, popular heresy was less a deviation from the orthodox doctrine than a protest movement, aspiring to a radical democratization of social life. Heresy was the equivalent of “liberation theology” for the medieval proletariat. It gave a frame to peoples’ demands for spiritual renewal and social justice, challenging both the Church and the secular authority by appeal to a higher truth. It denounced social hierarchies, private property and the accumulation of wealth, and it disseminated among the people a new, revolutionary concept of society that, for the first time in the Middle Ages, redefined every aspect of daily life (work, property, sexual reproduction, and the position of women), posing the question of emancipation in truly universal terms.

The heretic movement also provided an alternative community structure that had an international dimension, enabling the members of the sects to lead a more autonomous life, and to benefit from a wide support network made of contacts, schools, and safe-houses upon which they could rely for help and inspiration in times of need. Indeed, it is no exaggeration to say that the heretic movement was the first “proletarian international” - such was the reach of the sects (particularly the Cathars and Waldenses) and the links they established among themselves with the help of commercial fairs, pilgrimages, and the constant border-crossing of refugees generated by the persecution.

- Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation by Silvia Federici, pg. 33

"

My first criticism is that this theory is built on a faulty understanding of how capitalism works. It sees capitalist development as moving towards higher forms of production and labor. In Multitude, Negri and Hardt actually write that labor is becoming more “intelligent.” The assumption is that the capitalist organization of work and capitalist development are already creating the conditions for the overcoming of exploitation. Presumably, at one point, capitalism, the shell that keeps society going will break up and the potentialities that have grown within it will be liberated. There is an assumption that that process is already at work in the present organization of production. In my view, this is a misunderstanding of the effects of the restructuring produced by capitalist globalization and the neo-liberal turn.

What Negri and Hardt do not see is that the tremendous leap in technology required by the computerization of work and the integration of information into the work process has been paid at the cost of a tremendous increase of exploitation at the other end of the process. There is a continuum between the computer worker and the worker in the Congo who digs coltan with his hands trying to seek out a living after being expropriated, pauperized, by repeated rounds of structural adjustment and repeated theft of his community’s land and natural sources.

"

— Silvia Federici, Precarious Labor: A Feminist Viewpoint (via spectaculardistractions)