Bookmarked Animal Resistance in the Global Capitalist Era by .
Reading
Bookmarks and snippets from books and articles I’m reading.
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“The site was the I-11 katchi abadi, one of Islamabad’s largest and oldest informal squatter settlements, which had been earmarked for demolition by the capital’s bureaucratic managers in the CDA, as part of a wider ‘anti-encroachment’ drive targeting other residential settlements and roadside vending stalls.
15,000 residents of I-11 abadi were given one week’s notice to vacate their homes of decades, following which they were besieged militarily for days. Eventually, their homes were forcibly demolished and dozens of residents were arrested under the Anti-Terrorist Act for their attempts to resist.”
They razed our homes — Hassan Turi on the demolition of katchi abadis in I-11 Islamabad in 2015
Accumulation by dispossession is a concept presented by the Marxist geographer David Harvey. It defines neoliberal capitalist policies that result in a centralization of wealth and power in the hands of a few by dispossessing the public and private entities of their wealth or land.
Wikipedia
Katchi abadis are home to nearly 50% of Pakistan’s population.
Urban indicators 1996 2006 2013 Percentage of urban population living in slums 24 30 50 Percentage of urban population with access to adequate housing 50 60 60 Percentage of people residing in urban areas with access to improved drinking water 85 – 91 Percentage people residing in urban areas with access to adequate sanitation 60 65 72 Percentage people residing in urban areas with access to regular waste collection 30 50 5
Table from a Ministry of Climate Change report.
“The political economy of war and ‘counterterrorism’ — the vast majority of the abadi’s residents were Pashtuns who out-migrated from war-weary north-west Pak–Afghan border zones into cities like Islamabad, Lahore and Karachi over the past three to four decades.
Military personnel, civil administrators, mainstream politicians and the corporate media regularly invoke threats to the ‘development’ of Pakistan’s cities from this growing underclass.
As the demand for real estate, malls and roads on the part of the city’s upwardly mobile segments grows, the latter buy into tropes of ‘security’ and ‘rule of law’ peddled in statist and dominant media narratives.
In short, a distinctly urbane, middle-class aspiration to partake of more ‘development’ translates into support for military-style operations to cleanse the city of undesirable elements
“The dialectical other of the military’s real estate adventures in the 80s was the massive influx of refugees from both Afghanistan and the Pakistan side of the Pak–Afghan border into cities like Karachi and Quetta, as well as Islamabad. Later characterised by the epithet ‘internally displaced persons’ (IDPs), this perpetually dispossessed mass would settle on city outskirts in what were effectively refugee camps, slowly but surely building shanty homes whilst generating precarious incomes, mostly in the service sector. I-11 katchi abadi was one such settlement.
“In contrast to propertied classes, the toiling classes do not enjoy security of tenure, the threat of coercion against their ‘illegal’ occupation of notionally ‘public’ land hanging like the proverbial sword of Damocles over their heads.
At particular conjunctures, this threat materialises into reality, dispossession and development hence forming dialectical parts of a contradictory social totality, the systemic and systematic processes inherent to capitalist accumulation playing out dramatically for all the world to see.”
“In the aftermath of the I-11 abadi demolition, the Pashtun evictees suffered the ignominy of being denied rental accommodations in the wider Islamabad-Rawalpindi metropolitan area following a widespread propaganda campaign led by the CDA and ICT administration to warn landlords against taking on Pashtuns as tenants.”
“We made these homes through hard toil, working day and night to supply Islamabad’s elite with basic needs. This city cannot function without our labour, rich people’s homes and offices cannot survive. But they don’t care. The only thing they care about is the land. Who cares about working people like us?”
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The Real-World Costs of the Digital Race for …
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What Twitter Does to Our Sense of Time
Bookmarked What Twitter Does to Our Sense of Time by .
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Basic HTML Competency Is the New Punk Folk …
Bookmarked Basic HTML Competency Is the New Punk Folk Explosion! by .
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Attending a study circle about toxic masculinity, with a random assortment of left-leaning friends in Frere Hall
Reading: The crisis in modern masculinity by Pankaj Mishra“Morbid visions of castration and emasculation, civilisational decline and decay, connect Godse and Schlesinger to Bin Laden and Trump, and many other exponents of a rear-guard machismo today. They are susceptible to cliched metaphors of “soft” and “passive” femininity, “hard” and “active” masculinity; they are nostalgic for a time when men did not have to think twice about being men. And whether Hindu chauvinist, radical Islamist or white nationalist, their self-image depends on despising and excluding women. It is as though the fantasy of male strength measures itself most gratifyingly against the fantasy of female weakness. Equating women with impotence and seized by panic about becoming cucks, these rancorously angry men are symptoms of an endemic and seemingly unresolvable crisis of masculinity.”
“When did this crisis begin? And why does it seem so inescapably global? Writing Age of Anger: A History of the Present, I began to think that a perpetual crisis stalks the modern world. It began in the 19th century, with the most radical shift in human history: the replacement of agrarian and rural societies by a volatile socio-economic order, which, defined by industrial capitalism, came to be rigidly organised through new sexual and racial divisions of labour. And the crisis seems universal today because a web of restrictive gender norms, spun in modernising western Europe and America, has come to cover the remotest corners of the earth as they undergo their own socio-economic revolutions.”
“These unselfconscious traditions began to come under unprecedented assault in the 19th century, when societies constituted by exploitation and exclusion, and stratified along gender and racial lines, emerged as the world’s most powerful; and when such profound shocks of modernity as nation-building, rural-urban migration, imperial expansion and industrialisation drastically changed all modes of human perception. A hierarchy of manly and unmanly human beings had long existed in many societies without being central in them. During the 19th century, it came to be universally imposed, with men and women straitjacketed into specific roles.” -
Organized a study circle on surveillance capitalism with comrades in the Student Workers’ Study Group
Reference texts:
- The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Soshanna Zuboff
- Interview: The Universal Declaration of Cyborg Rights, Aral Balkan
- The Telekomunist Manifesto, Dmytri Kleiner