File spoon-archives/aut-op-sy.archive/aut-op-sy_1997/aut-op-sy.9712, message 66


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



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