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{Audio presented during KPFA Fund Drives is not posted. Please support our work by pledging online during any Against the Grain program.}
What do you think of when May Day comes around? Aziz Choudry, Jodi Dean, Chris Dixon, Max Haiven, and Richard Peet weigh in with their reflections. Also featured are clips from a Pacifica Radio Archives documentary that explores the origins of International Workers' Day and the labor firebrands and struggles the day commemorates. It includes archival May Day reports from Vietnam, Africa, and elsewhere.
Judy Juanita, Virgin Soul Viking, 2013
Judy Juanita, “Five Comrades in the Black Panther Party, 1967-1970” Black Bird Press News & Review
C.S. gives a talk in SF this Friday
At a time when the world was changing, the Black Panther Party in Oakland came along to transform the US civil rights movement. How has the world changed (or not) since? What lessons can we learn from the Panthers' radical perspective on US society? Judy Juanita, a member of the party in its early days, describes in her debut novel those times and the people she knew.
John Holloway, Crack Capitalism Pluto, 2010
John Holloway, Change the World Without Taking Power Pluto, 2010 (new edition)
Anthropology and Social Change program at the California Institute of Integral Studies
How did anti-capitalist revolution fare in the twentieth century? John Holloway says it failed. The influential theorist and author believes we need to rethink revolution; we need to break the logic of capital in a different and distinctive way. Holloway believes that capitalism can be brought down only by the proliferation of "cracks," spaces in which people move "in the opposite direction."
Loyd, Mitchelson & Burridge, eds., Beyond Walls and Cages: Prisons, Borders, and Global CrisisU. of Georgia Press, 2012
Journal of Prisoners on Prisons
Tom Stoppard's The Coast of Utopia: Shipwreck at Shotgun Players
Prisons and jails seal people off from their communities; they are zones of isolation and containment. That's a common view, and one that Rashad Shabazz contests. He argues that prisons are in fact porous in a way that threatens the lives of many people living in poor neighborhoods and communities of color. Shabazz describes what he calls forced internal migration and the politics of HIV/AIDS.
In examining her own work and the work of others, Gish Jen has developed the notion that people from the US and Western Europe tend to view the self as an independent entity, whereas people from the rest of the world perceive the self as embedded in community. Jen uses that notion to examine her family history, her fiction, and the literature of Europe and the Far East.