Date: Thu, 25 Dec 1997 21:32:25 -0500 (EST) From: Cornell C Womack <ccwst7+-AT-pitt.edu> Subject: AUT: joining discussion list I've just joined the discussion list so allow me to introduce myself. I am an organizer against police brutality in Pittsburgh. I am also buying some time as a grad student in the University of Pitt history department. I have been very active in the fight for justice for Jonny Gammage, a young brother killed on October 12, 1995. So far all the cops have gone free and the last tial ended in a mistrial last week. We plan to go to Washington for the second time on the birthday of Malcolm X, where last year we had a meeting with the justice department and a hell of a lot a good that did. But The Gammages want to take this to D.C. again and their suffering speaks in any organizing we do. I also work with Pam Africa in the struggle to free Mumia Abu Jamal. I have been reading much of the autonomous tradition and find in it a good antidote to the bullshit abstraction of the academic left. I have been writing on slave rebellions recently and the way in which interracial cooperation in the informal economy helped in their planning and execution in the 18th century. I study American history in Atlantic context and look at both the cycles and the circulations of resistance to the imposition of capitalist realtions of production, as an outcome of a new mobilization and socialization of an international proletariat, and of course with the African slave being ground zero in the process of diposession and primitive accumulation. It has been helpful to keep in mind that capital is a social relationship, which , for all of us who have read any early American history, is definitley treated as a thing, as John Holloway understands it in his essay Capital Moves. "Globalization," therefore, is nothing new, nor is the manner in which it is spoken of as a given and achieved fact. I hope to exchange ideas on the nature of class composition, on the relation between ideological formulations and class struggle, as well as seeing how this knowledge can be used in practical ways in trying to stop these pigs from killing us in the streets. Well, that's my introduction and let me leave everybody with two thoughts one from the Italian New Left. "When even shit becomes a marketable commodity, then the poor will be born without an ass!" The other from Rosa Luxemborg which I found at the end of one of the radical websites. "Revolution is the only form of organization that is prepared by a series of defeats." That's deep. Peace, Cornell Womack ccwst7+-AT-pitt.edu --- from list aut-op-sy-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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