Statement in Defense of the Abahlali BaseMjondolo members

To: James Nxumalo, Mayor, eThekwini Municipality, Durban, South Africa Senzo Mchunu, Premier, KwaZulu-Natal Jacob Zuma, President, Republic of South Africa

Since 2005, the ABAHLALI BASEMJONDOLO (Shack Dwellers) movement has mobilized to fulfill the needs of a large number of inhabitants in the city of Durban who live without access to land, housing, food, education and basic services such as clean water, sanitation, electricity and health care.

In response to this mobilization, the South African Police Service, the Ethekwini Municipality and the ruling political party (ANC) have attempted to criminalize the actions of this movement.

In particular, we have observed:
The continued intimidation, beatings and unlawful detention of activists.
The torture of individuals held in detention.
The demolition and bulldozing of thousands of homes.
The use of the press to slander the movement and its various leaders.

RIP Thomas McEvilley, Radical Art Historian, Classicist Scholar
Charles Bernstein

Scholar, poet, novelist, art historian, critic, and translator Thomas McEvilley died March 2, 2013 at Memorial Sloan-Kettering hospital in New York. He was 73 years old. He is survived by his wife, Joyce Burstein and two sons, Thomas and Monte (his middle son, Alexander, died some years earlier). His death was the result of complications from cancer, according to his wife.

Living Theatre Closes NYC Space, Judith Malina Retires
Jon Kalish, New York Daily News

Clinton St. theater was behind on its rent. Anarchism and Utopian views have cut down on grants.

A lower East Side theater that championed anarchism, Utopian experimentalism for 66 years will close for good this week — and its fiery founder will spend her remaining days in an unhappy retirement.

Judith Malina will move Thursday to the Lillian Booth home for retired artists in New Jersey after losing her lease on Clinton Street's Living Theatre, where she produced cutting-edge theater for six decades.

"I'm in the theater because I'm a revolutionary and I'm very unhappy about having to give this place up," Malina told The News.

The EZLN Announces Upcoming Meetings in its Territory
Desinformémonos

The Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) ended "a phase on the
path" of the Sixth Declaration of the Lacandon Jungle and announced the
start of its next political steps, which include upcoming meetings
(encuentros) in its territory and the explicit selection of those who
will accompany future initiatives, that will have as its main objective:
"to be in direct contact with the Zapatista support bases in the way
that, in my long and humble experience, is the best: as students," said
Subcomandante Marcos.

London's Freedom Bookshop Firebombed
International Times

FREEDOM BOOKSHOP, London’s most famous anarchist press and bookshop, has been firebombed. The attack on the Whitechapel premises took place on Friday morning in the small hours. Police were alerted by the Fire Brigade at 5.30am. The downstairs section of the shop is badly damaged. Electrics are damaged. Many books are burnt or charred. Upstairs is untouched. No one was hurt.

Sol Yurick, 1925–2013

Sol Yurick was born in the Bronx, New York in 1925 to a working class family of politically active Jewish immigrants. At the age of 14, Yurick became disillusioned with politics after the Hitler-Stalin pact. He enlisted during World War II, where he trained as a surgical technician. He studied at New York University after the war, majoring in literature. After graduation, he took a job with the welfare department as a social investigator, a job he held until the early 1960s, when he took up writing full time.

Yurick was involved in Students for a Democratic Society and the anti-war movement at this time. In 1968, he signed the “Writers and Editors War Tax Protest” pledge, vowing to refuse tax payments in protest against the Vietnam War.

In 1972, Yurick was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship.

His first novel, The Warriors, appeared in 1965. It combined a classical Greek story, Anabasis, with a fictional account of gang wars in New York City. It inspired the 1979 film of the same name.

His other works include: Fertig (1966), The Bag (1968), Someone Just Like You (1972), An Island Death (1976), Richard A (1981), Behold Metatron, the Recording Angel (1985), Confession (1999). Yurick was still an active writer until his death on January 5, 2013.

FBI Documents Reveal Secret Nationwide Occupy Monitoring Issue:
Free Speech Gov't Transparency Case
Occupy Crackdown FOIA Requests
Partnership for Civil Justice Fund

FBI documents just obtained by the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund
(PCJF) pursuant to the PCJF’s Freedom of Information Act demands reveal
that from its inception, the FBI treated the Occupy movement as a
potential criminal and terrorist threat even though the agency
acknowledges in documents that organizers explicitly called for peaceful
protest and did “not condone the use of violence” at occupy protests.

The PCJF has obtained heavily redacted documents showing that FBI
offices and agents around the country were in high gear conducting
surveillance against the movement even as early as August 2011, a month
prior to the establishment of the OWS encampment in Zuccotti Park and
other Occupy actions around the country.

Mark Poster, 1941–2012

Mark Poster, Emeritus Professor of History and Film & Media Studies at UC Irvine, passed away in the hospital earlier this morning. Mark Poster was a vital member of the School of Humanities, and for decades one of its most widely read and cited researchers. He made crucial contributions to two different departments, History and Film & Media Studies, and played a central role in UCI's emergence as a leading center for work in Critical Theory.

In the first part of his career, when his focus was on modern European intellectual history, his path-breaking publications included the influential book *Existential Marxism in Postwar France* (Princeton University Press 1975), a study of the intellectual world around Jean-Paul Sartre. When the theory boom hit the U.S., thanks in part to this book, he became a widely sought-after authority on French critical thought, especially the writing of Michel Foucault, whose work he helped introduce to American audiences. He played a crucial role in setting the History Department on its current course, as one of the first departments--if not the first department--in the discipline with a required graduate sequence in theory. In that sequence Mark taught a Foucault seminar that became legendary.

Neil Smith, 1954-2012
Bill Roberts and Hector Agredano

A Passionate Scholar and Socialist

Bill Roberts, a founding member of the ISO, and Hector
Agredano, a doctoral student at the CUNY Graduate
Center, remember the life of a determined activist.

Neil Smith, the renowned scholar, beloved teacher and
devoted activist, died on September 29 at the age of
58.

Neil is best known for his academic work. He was a
professor of anthropology and geography at City
University of New York. In particular, his writings on
the patterns of social development in cities--drawing
on history, economics, political and social theory, and
ecological studies--are among the most prominent left-
wing views on the subject.

Michael Wreszin, Biographer of American Radicals, Dies at 85
Paul Vitello

Michael Wreszin, a biographer of radical 20th-century American intellectuals who were prominent antiwar activists, among them the social critic Dwight Macdonald, died on Aug. 12 in Manhattan. He was 85. His son, Dan, announced his death this week.

Mr. Wreszin, a history professor at Queens College and an antiwar activist himself, was a student of the American left and the many ideological movements competing for dominance of it between the 1920s and 1960s, including socialism, communism, libertarianism and anarchism.

His subjects were cosmopolitan, humanist thinkers who saw a growing militarism in American political culture but whose scrupulous habits of mind could make them misfits in the ideological camps they joined.