Sylvia Wynter: No Humans Involved - An Open Letter to My Colleagues

No Humans Involved an Open Letter to My Colleagues by SYLVIA WYNTER by TigersEye99

What happens in Ferguson does not stay in Ferguson

Jerome Roos, ROAR Magazine

Last week, the Governor of Missouri declared a state of emergency and deployed the National Guard to the St Louis suburb of Ferguson to quell a fortnight of civil unrest following the police murder of the unarmed black teenager Michael Brown. It was the first time since the Los Angeles riots of 1992, after the severe police beating of another black man, Rodney King, and the Battle of Seattle during the WTO trade negotiations seven years later, that the army had been called in to restore public order within US borders.

The riotous underbelly of the new normal

by Richard Pithouse, The Daily Maverick

Here we are, almost 20 years after Apartheid and, from the prisons to the shack settlements and the farms, the riotous underbelly of our society is on television most nights. We’re not even a full month into the year and it’s been reported that the police have killed another protester in the Boland and, depending on which newspaper you read, three, four or six people in Zamdela in Sasolburg.

The new normal that we are being asked to accept after Mangaung has won consent in some quarters by replacing a demagogic populist with an oligarch and putting an end to the discussion about nationalisation.  Its basic logic – crony capitalism greased with corruption, wrapped in an escalating conflation of both the nation and the state with the ruling party and defended with growing authoritarianism – can work well enough for capital. In fact international capital often finds authoritarian states to be its most attractive destinations for investment. And it’s not unusual for the middle classes to be quite comfortable with forms of authoritarianism that restrict the basic democratic rights of the popular classes in defence of the domination of society by an alliance between business and political elites – after all, just look at how many South Africans think Dubai is a great place to live.

Crystal Bartolovich: A Natural History of 'Food Riots'

bartolovich food riots pdf

Found at ebookbrowse.com

Cato Manor, June 1959: Men, Women, Crowds, Politics and History

by Iain Edwards

The militant crowd challenging existing social order is no novelty in Durban. Crowds have often been responsible for forceful interventions in city politics.

Jasper Bernes and Joshua Clover on The Rebirth of History: Times of Riots and Uprisings

History and the Sphinx: Of Riots and Uprisings

The Los Angeles Review of Books, September 24th, 2012 

1.

Riots are the Sphinx of the left. Every soi disant radical intellectual feels compelled, it seems, to answer the riddle they hear posed by the riots of the present, in Bahrain or Asturias, Chile or Britain: Why now? Why here? Why riot? These answers generally come in a few simple varieties. First, if the riot seems to lack focus or present clears demands – that is, if it is illegible as “protest,” as in the case of the London riots of summer 2011 – the intellectual will paint them as a “meaningless outburst” (Slavoj Žižek), undertaken by “mindless rioters” (David Harvey). Invariably, attributions of unmeaning must find support in patronizing sociology, rendering the rioters mere side-effects of an unequal society, symptoms of neoliberalism, capitalist crisis and the ensuing austerity.

The Rebirth of History: Times of Riots & Uprisings

What is going on? Of what are we the half-fascinated, half-devastated witnesses? The continuation, at all costs, of a weary world? A salutary crisis of that world, racked by its victorious expansion? The end of that world? The advent of a different world? What is happening to us in the early years of the century - something that would appear not to have any clear name in any accepted language?

   

Let us consult our masters: discreet bankers; media stars; hesitant representatives of major commissions ; spokesmen of the ' international community ' ; busy presidents; new philosophers; factory and estate owners; stock market men and boards of directors; chattering opposition politicos; urban and provincial notables; economists of growth; sociologists of citizenship; experts on all sorts of crises; prophets of the 'clash of civilizations'; heads of the police, justice and 'penitentiary' systems; profit assessors; productivity calculators; the prim editorialists of serious newspapers; human resources directors; people who in their own view are of some account; people one would do well not to take for nobodies . What have they got to say about it, all these rulers, all these opinion-formers, all these leaders, all these thimble-rigging tyrants?

Of Illicit Appearance: The L.A. Riots/Rebellion as a Portent of Things to Come

By Lewis Gordon, Truthout 

In early spring 1994, I paid a visit to Los Angeles, where I was greeted in the airport at the arrival gate - that was still possible in those days - by my friend Mina Choi, who was a former babysitter to my eldest son when I was in graduate school. Having completed her studies at Yale, Mina was pursuing her writing career in Los Angeles. We embraced each other in a hearty hello, a mundane act expected of good friends, which, however, led to a halt and uncomfortable silence among our fellow travelers, their family and friends. Such was the response to a meeting of Northeast Asia and African America nearly two years after the 1992 Riots/Uprisings.[1] Although Rodney King famously pleaded, "Can we all get along?" there clearly continued to be much doubt.

Learning from urban revolt

by Yousuf Al-Bulushi, 2012

This paper brings into conversation two texts that were written 40 years apart—Society of the Spectacle in 1967 and The Coming Insurrection in 2007—and yet share great lines of continuity. Both texts are situated within their economic, cultural and political conjunctures in order to ground their theoretical contributions. The paper emphasizes the important influence that urban rebellions in Watts and the Parisian banlieues had upon both texts, and in so doing, highlights the over-looked debt these theoretical projects owe to marginalized and racialized populations in struggle. Henri Lefebvre’s theory of autogestion is developed as a mediator between the two books, and as a way to engage their theories through the eyes of a more obviously spatial and Marxist thinker.

The LA rebellion, 20 years later

by Nigel C. Gibson

Paper presented at the conference on 'The LA Riots, Twenty Years Later', Harvard, April 2012, Published at Truthout

1. Letter From a Friend

I asked a friend who lives in South Central to send me his thoughts about Los Angeles 20 years after the rebellion. The following is part of what he had to say:

Twenty years after the L.A. rebellion finds most of the Black community in a state of shock because conditions are not better and the conditions which created the rebellion have only become more invisible to the outside world. The strait jacket of economics confines us all. The rock bottom conditions of poverty are suffocating the voice of protest in South Central L.A. Even the name South Central was changed to South L.A. by the politicians in an attempt to forget in their view the "negative" impact of the revolt.

Riots as Political Action

by Benjamin Fogel

Black people gotta lot a problems
But they don't mind throwing a brick
White people go to school
Where they teach you how to be thick

An' everybody's doing
Just what they're told to
An' nobody wants
To go to jail!
White riot - I wanna riot
White riot - a riot of my own
White riot - I wanna riot
White riot - a riot of my own
All the power's in the hands
Of people rich enough to buy it
While we walk the street
Too chicken to even try it “

The Clash, White Riot

Alain Badiou on Tunisia, riots & revolution

by Jonathan Collerson, Wrong + Arithmetic

N.B. This is a rough translation of Daniel Fischer’s transcription of the 19 January 2011 session of Alain Badiou’s seminar What does “change the world” mean?. It is not something Badiou has written out. Nevertheless, it gets across his, apparently, impromptu comments on Tunisia, riots and revolution. It appears that Badiou correctly places the riot at the gateway of revolution and, in calling Tunisia “the weakest link” (Lenin re. Russia 1917), correctly notes the beginning of massive change in the Middle East. Daniel Fischer’s excellent notes are great resource on Badiou’s developing thought.

Flashmob Hysteria

by George Ciccariello-Maher, CounterPunch

The character of our present moment is undeniable, and the tangled web of causes and consequences is the same from London to Cairo to Santiago: budget cuts in the name of “austerity,” rising unemployment, increasing popular resistance, and an upsurge in racist violence and policing measures like “stop-and-frisk.” The failure of an economic system in the short and long term has generated an entire class of undesirables, living proof of that failure who must be contained, controlled, and silenced.

Daily Humiliation

'Daily Humiliation' is from Alain Badiou's Polemics, first published in Le Monde following the riots in Parisian banlieues and throughout France in November 2005 - from Verso.

'Constant identity checks and questioning by police.' Of all the complaints made by the youth of this country in revolt, the omnipresence of police checks and being arrested in their everyday lives, this harassment without respite, is the most constant, the most widely shared. Do we really realize what this grievance means? The dose of humiliation and violence it implies?

London Calling: Fanon, Spontaneity and the English insurrections

Nigel C. Gibson

Every time a man has contributed to the victory of the spirit, every time a man says no to an attempt to subjugate his fellows, I have felt solidarity with his act … Yes to life. Yes to love. Yes to generosity … No to the contempt … No to degradation… No to exploitation … No to the butchery of what is most human … freedom.

Fanon

Silence the Criminal

by Simone Arielle Levy

Fifty years later, Frantz Fanon, the Martinican revolutionary who inspired Steve Biko, lives on. His writings, and the conversations that they continue to inspire, reach beyond skin colour into the deeper politics of the human mind in Fanon's questioning of what it is to be human. In ‘Black Skin, White Masks’, Fanon looks at what he calls the cognitive dissonance that emerges when people are presented with new evidence that contradicts their core beliefs. Fanon says that “because it is so important to protect the core belief, they will rationalize, ignore and even deny anything that doesn't fit in with the core belief."

Planet of Slums, Age of Riots

by George Ciccariello-Maher, CounterPunch

Tottenham, Chile, Tunis…

There are too many to count

Oakland, Brixton, Taybat al-Imam…

The London Hanged: Crime And Civil Society In The Eighteenth Century

This groundbreaking history aids any understanding of the rise of capitalism.

Peter Linebaugh’s groundbreaking history has become an inescapable part of any understanding of the rise of capitalism. In eighteenth-century London the spectacle of a hanging was not simply a form of punishing transgressors.

Rather it evidently served the most sinister purpose—for a prvileged ruling class—of forcing the poor population of London to accept the criminalization of customary rights and the new forms of private property. Necessity drove the city's poor into inevitable conflict with the changing property laws, such that all the working-class men and women of London had good reason to fear the example of Tyburn's Triple Tree.

The Crowd in History: A Study of Popular Disturbances in France And England, 1730-1848

'He put the mind back into history and restored the dignity of man.' --A J P Taylor

'It may seem incredible that nobody tried before to discover what sort of people actually stormed the Bastille, but Rude was the first to have done so....Like all his work, this book is concentrated, simple and clear, and admirably suited to the non-specialist reader.' --Eric Hobsbawm, New York Review of Books 

George Rudé was a prolific researcher and writer. Although he began his academic career at the age of fifty, he wrote some 15 books and edited several others. He was one of the leading practitioners of ‘history from below’ and his work influenced an entire generation of historians of the French Revolution. 

Linton Kwesi Johnson: The Great Insurrection