Join comrades from Seattle, Portland, and (via Skype) Oakland to discuss together the current confrontations with patriarchy within the movement. The dialogue around patriarchy in the movement has fired up recently on the west coast, myriad anti-patriarchy groups have formed, feminists have written several statements in the post-occupy climate, and
Continue readingAuthor: kersplebedeb
Sketchy Thoughts: Oregon DOC Attempting to Kill Kevin Rashid Johnson!
Kevin “Rashid” Johnson is a New Afrikan Communist prison organizer and intellectual in the United States and one of the founders of the NABPP-PC (New Afrikan Black Panther Party-Prison Chapter). He has spent most of his adult life in the prison system and continually been subjected to political repression and
Continue readingSketchy Thoughts: Comments on a Divided World, from Don Hamerquist
In the text that follows, Don Hamerquist addresses the current salience of imperialism, territory, and revolutionary organizing in the First World. This essay is prompted by the review of Zak Cope’s Divided World Divided Class by Matthijs Krul, which was reposted to Sketchy Thoughts a few weeks ago. Don explains
Continue readingSketchy Thoughts: An Open Response Letter to the New Afrikan Black Panther Party with regard to it’s Position Paper titled: Black Liberation in the 21st Century: A Revolutionary Reassessment of Black Nationalism
An Open Response Letter to the New Afrikan Black Panther Party with regard to it’s Position Paper titled: Black Liberation in the 21st Century: A Revolutionary Reassessment of Black Nationalism (from The Amazons-August Third Collective; NAPLA) Revolutionary Greetings! We are aware of no less than ten (10) responses already written
Continue readingSketchy Thoughts: Rape and canadian colonialism
Human Rights Watch has accused Canada’s federal police of intimidating and even sexually assaulting aboriginal women and girls in the province of British Columbia. In a scathing report, which was released on Wednesday, the rights organization documented numerous accounts of women and girls in the province’s indigenous communities finding themselves
Continue readingSketchy Thoughts: Video Interview with Sanyika Shakur
In this interview, New Afrikan Communist Sanyika Shakur discusses his personal social development, his time in Pelican Bay-SHU, the 2011 California prisoners’ hunger strikes, the effects of long-term isolation torture, New Afrikan nationalism, communism, and the struggle against gender oppression. In a biographical note written while in PB-SHU, Shakur explained:
Continue readingSketchy Thoughts: Arm the Spirit Archive
For those of you unfamiliar with Arm the Spirit, it was one of the only publications devoted to reporting on the armed resistance movements in the 1990s. There were a very few magazines and newspapers with this purview at the time, and yet in the days before the internet they
Continue readingSketchy Thoughts: Vision of Fire #1: Maoism
i received a surprise in my mailbox last week, a zine entitled Visions of Fire, this first issue being devoted to Maoism. The editor has assembled some pieces both sympathetic and critical of maoism, as well as an introductory editorial situating their own position.The editor is more critical of Maoism
Continue readingSketchy Thoughts: Pathology of Patriarchy: A Search for Clues at the Scene of the Crime
Another excellent essay by Sanyika Shakur, who was released from Pelican Bay SHU last August. As he wrote before his release: i was born Nov 13, 1963. Raised in South Central Los Angeles, by a phenomenal single, working-class, mother. Cut my teeth in the hostile gang culture in South Central
Continue readingSketchy Thoughts: Rock Vol.2 #2
The latest issue of Rock is out; this is a newsletter produced by former political prisoner Ed Mead with content for and by prisoners at Pelican Bay. Pelican Bay’s SHU is an isolation torture unit where people spend years and even decades in solitary confinement, deprived of all human contact.
Continue readingSketchy Thoughts: Two Aspects of Power: Consciousness and Physical Force
Left: A Freedmen’s school, a place of learning established by New Afrikans who had escaped the slave-system in the south of the united states. Right: a mob of euro-americans burns a Freedmen’s school to the ground. It is necessary, first, to overcome the opposition between a physicalist vision of the
Continue readingSketchy Thoughts: The Gendered Body Public: Egypt, Sexual Violence and Revolution
Politically, sexual violence constitutes both a form of terrorism against its target, and an act of affirmation for the rapists and those who identify with them. It is not normally a form of “horizontal violence” – that would imply that other than this unfortunate slip-up, perpetrator and target would both
Continue readingSketchy Thoughts: Divided World Divided Class Reviewed and Discussed by Matthijs Krul and others
Divided World Divided Class: Global Political Economy and the Stratification of Labour Under Capitalism is a book published by Kersplebedeb (and available from leftwingbooks.net) back in September of last year.Divided World Divided Class charts the history of the ‘labour aristocracy’ in the capitalist world system, from its roots in colonialism to its
Continue readingSketchy Thoughts: Transsexual and transgender women denied access to shelters as temperatures drop in Montréal
The following press release from ASTT(e)Q (Action Santé Travesti(e)s et Transsexuel(le)s du Québec): Transsexual and transgender women denied access to shelters as temperatures drop in MontréalASTT(e)Q urges Québec shelters to change discriminatory practices 25 January, 2013 – As temperatures drop to extreme lows, transsexual and transgender women in Montréal continue
Continue readingSketchy Thoughts: Zig Zag on Idle No More: "In any liberation movement there are internal and external struggles"
We are living in exciting times, with large numbers of people clearly fed up and taking action, no longer content to wait for the right moment or the right ideas or the right leadership to tell them what to do. Whether we think of Occupy, the Arab Spring, or the
Continue readingSketchy Thoughts: Eight Years of Sketchy Thoughts
It has been eight years since i started this blog, basically as a way of trying to figure out how to develop and explore some political ideas and perhaps also deal with a period of political and personal isolation i was going through. It “worked”, and provided a space not
Continue readingSketchy Thoughts: Sexual Violence Against Indigenous Women
i am reposting this horrific news, without commentary except to say that obviously i do not share the authors’ insistence on nonviolence, but equally obviously that is not the most important thing here in this post. Sexual violence, from India to Turtle Island, has always been used by the powerful
Continue readingSketchy Thoughts: New Interview by David Gilbert
This interview originally appeared in Sixties: A Journal of History, Politics and Culture, 5:2, 259-270. For a PDF of the interview, go here. It is also mirrored on the Kersplebedeb site here. In the 1960s and 1970s, many activists looked to the prisons for political leadership, while viewing prisons themselves
Continue readingSketchy Thoughts: at a loss of words but immersed in fury
It was a cold wintery Montreal Sunday last week, when sixty or so people joined a Solidarity Across Borders (SAB) caravan/roaming demo, starting at Rosemont metro and making its way to the Immigration Prevention Center in Laval. As SAB had explained in its callout: For over a decade, Mohammad Mahjoub,
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