Prison and Social Death
Joshua M. Price with Silvia Federici

February 15, 2016, 7PM
The Brooklyn Commons
388 Atlantic Avenue
Brooklyn, NY 11217

Sliding scale: $6 | $10 | $15

The United States imprisons more of its citizens than any other nation in the world. To be sentenced to prison is to face systematic violence, humiliation, and, perhaps worst of all, separation from family and community. It is, to borrow Orlando Patterson’s term for the utter isolation of slavery, to suffer “social death.” In Prison and Social Death, Joshua Price exposes the unexamined cost that prisoners pay while incarcerated and after release, drawing upon hundreds of often harrowing interviews conducted with people in prison, parolees, and their families.

Price argues that the prison separates prisoners from desperately needed communities of support from parents, spouses, and children. Moreover, this isolation of people in prison renders them highly vulnerable to other forms of violence, including sexual violence. Price stresses that the violence they face goes beyond physical abuse by prison guards and it involves institutionalized forms of mistreatment, ranging from abysmally poor health care to routine practices that are arguably abusive, such as pat-downs, cavity searches, and the shackling of pregnant women. And social death does not end with prison. The condition is permanent, following people after they are released from prison. Finding housing, employment, receiving social welfare benefits, and regaining voting rights are all hindered by various legal and other hurdles. The mechanisms of social death, Price shows, are also informal and cultural. Ex-prisoners face numerous forms of distrust and are permanently stigmatized by other citizens around them.

A compelling blend of solidarity, civil rights activism, and social research, Prison and Social Death offers a unique look at the American prison and the excessive and unnecessary damage it inflicts on prisoners and parolees.

​​ "The Student Movement and the Practice of Popular Politics in South Africa"
​A Conversation with Camalita Naicker

Sunday, Jan. 31, 2016 at 2:30pm​
The Commons, 388 Atlantic Ave, Brooklyn,NY

Camalita is a student, ​​activist and researcher from Grahamstown, South Africa .​ She has been involved in the student movement there and more recently in the "stop-all-fees" mobilization. She will speak about student struggles in South Africa, as well as the practice of popular politics, and in particular land and urban occupations.

More information here, then search for Camilita.

Class Wargames Book Launch London 25 October
Red Gallery 1-3 Rivington St, London EC2A 3DT

Richard Barbrook
Class Wargames: ludic subversion against spectacular capitalism

“In a world become ‘game-ified’ against its will, Class Wargames provides the field manual for the only game that matters – that of history.” – McKenzie Wark

5.00-7.00pm: collective games playing
7.00-7.30pm: screening of Ilze Black's 'The Game of War' film
7.30-9.00pm: talks by Richard Barbrook, Fabian Tompsett and Kimathi Donkor
9.00pm until late: KCC & the Rocking Crew and Toi-Toi featuring Claus Voigtmann

Requisite fb event page

There will also be a book event at the London Anarchist Bookfair, 18 October at 5PM

"Capital's Greek Cage" Book Party
Sherry Millner, Ernie Larsen, George Caffentzis
Bluestockings, 172 Allen Street, New York 7PM, April 6, 2014

Join us to discuss essays from four contributors to this new Autonomedia book on the financial crisis in Greece.

“If we are to understand molecular biopolitics then we must see it working in the participatory mechanism of fascism and today’s fascism from below… Führers and inspired leaders do not seem to be important anymore — the small fascist icons can be as many and as interchangeable as sitcom actors and second-rate soccer champions. Participation is virtual — but killing can be real; you can order a gun with the click of a mouse, but the bullet can blow you to pieces.’’ — Clandestina

What Three Midnight Notes Students Learned in the Zapatistas’ “Little School House”
George Caffentzis, Dan Coughlin, Peter Linebaugh

Date: February 8, 2014
Time: 7:00PM
Venue: The Base, 1302 Myrtle Ave. Brooklyn, NY

Closest subway station: Central Avenue on the “M” train
Website: www.thebasebk.org

Twenty years ago the Zapatistas emerged from the forests and mountains of Chiapas to occupy the major cities of that Mexican state and to recuperate for the landless hundreds of thousands of acres of land from the big landowners. During the 1990s the Zapatistas became known as the most effective example of the claim that “another world is possible.” Since then the Zapatistas have worked to turn that claim into a reality. Starting in August, 2013, they have invited thousands of people from all over the world to a program called “escuelita” allowing these visitors to learn from rank-and-file Zapatistas what freedom and autonomy mean to them in practice. To do this they have turned the state of Chiapas into a “little school house” or "escuelita" in Spanish.

Come to listen to and discuss what three students (George Caffentzis, Dan Coughlin and Peter Linebaugh of the Midnight Notes Collective), who went to the forests and mountains of Chiapas with thousands of others to be part of the experience, learned.

"Assault on the Impossible" Book Party
Bluestockings, 172 Allen Street, New York City
7 PM, January 23, 2014

On Thursday 23 January 2014 at 7 pm
Autonomedia and Bluestockings invite you to Jordan Zinovich’s
(profusely illustrated) NYC Launch of
Assault on the Impossible: Dutch Collective Imagination in the Sixties and Seventies

Assault on the Impossible is the second Autonomedia title to examine the Provo transformation of the Netherlands. The Provo movement is unique in the modern era for having radically reshaped the political foundations of an important Western nation virtually without violence and continues to be a source of inspirational ideas and impulses. While our first title (Provo: Amsterdam’s Anarchist Revolt) focused on the birth, fluorescence, and decline of the movement’s political trajectory, Assault on the Impossible investigates the aesthetic and ludic interventions that generated the group mind underlying the politics.

Social Struggles in South Arica
Zach Levenson

CUNY Grad Center, 34th and 5th Avenue, New York City
4PM, Sunday, Dec. 8, 2014

Insurgent Notes (http://insurgentnotes.com) is sponsoring a talk by Zach Levenson on recent struggles in South Africa’s townships, in which he was involved, both as a participant and an observer, for six months earlier this year.

He will speak on state and private land grabs and relocations, ethnic divisions, stratification within the casualized and unemployed work force, and some attempts by the township populations to self-organize. He will also discuss
the false dichotomy between “social democratic” and “neo-liberal” policies
at containment by the ruling African National Congress (ANC).

The talk will take place at the CUNY Graduate Center, at Fifth Avenue and 34th St., Manhattan, Room 5414, on Sunday Dec. 8th at 4 PM. Please bring photo ID to show at the main entrance.

Zachary Levenson is writing a dissertation on urban dispossession in South African cities after apartheid in UC Berkeley's Department of Sociology. He has been active in the student-worker movement at Berkeley, anti-austerity struggles in Oakland, and housing organizing in Cape Town. He returned last month from 6 months in South Africa, his second such stint in the past 2 years.

"States of Exception" Film Screenings, New York City, Nov. 12, 2013
Tuesday, November 12, 7:00pm @ Anthology Film Archives

States of Exception, Exceptional States: The Iron Grip of Nationalism
Filmmaker and author Ariella Azoulay and writer, activist and scholar Joel Kovel will be present for a post-screening discussion moderated by Benj Gerdes, political artist, writer and activist.

The Food Chain
The Food Chain
Israel, Palestine, Syria: the unending crisis in the Middle East, unstable states caught up in a state of exception…. These films militate against the militarized state and its ideology.

"The Dream of Anarchy and the Anarchy of Dreams:
Urgent Communiques From the Crossroads of Anarchy and Surrealism"
Ron Sakolsky

Friday, October 18th @ 7 pm
Bluestockings, 172 Allen, NYC

Ron Sakolsky will read from his twenty-first century anarcho-surrealist trilogy: Creating Anarchy (Fifth Estate, 2005/Ardent, 2013), Swift Winds (Eberhardt, 2012), and Scratching the Tiger's Belly (Eberhardt, 2012). Together these books comprise a radical mixtape of outrageous ideas-in-action, hidden histories, mutinous rants, rebel poems, razor sharp polemics, incendiary broadsides, slyly subversive stories, rollicking manifestos, impossible demands, utopian adventures, and provocative parables.

Sakolsky is the editor or co-editor of the Autonomedia anthologies Surrealist Subversions: Rants, Writings & Images by the Surrealist Movement in the United States; Sounding Off: Music as Resistance / Rebellion / Revolution; and Gone to Croatan: Origins of North American Dropout Culture.

Protest at South African Consulate in New York,
in Solidarity with the Shackdwellers Movement!

Date: Monday October 14th
Time: 11:30am-2:00pm
Where: South African Consulate, 333 E 38th St NYC

On Monday, members of New York City's social justice community led by Picture the Homeless will hold a solidarity rally in front of the South African Embassy to show support for our brothers and sisters facing state violence & repression in Durban. We hope you can join us. Please spread the word!

Our purpose is to show solidarity with the Abahlali baseMjondolo Movement in Durban and include messaging about World Zero Eviction Days.