Addendum to COLLECTIVE Recommendations
Dear Reader:
Hope this finds you well. Here is a list of what we are reading and watching and listening to this week. We hope you enjoy them as much as we do.
Volume 1 - Issue 2 will be published on Monday, June 15th, 2020.
We don't have a staff. Our criteria is our editorial guidelines(we will provide them upon request) and we encourage contributions from Bernie Sanders volunteers and supporters. Reach us at CollectiveNotes2020@gmail.com to learn more.
An Interview with Stuart Schrader about the History of Modern Policing
Dimitry Lukashov: As a guest on the podcast historic.ly, sociologist Stuart Schrader, discusses how US started exporting police equipment and tactics for counterinsurgency operations starting in the 1950s and how many of those tactics have since been re-imported back into the United States. Includes an excerpt from his book.
Particularly striking is the quote at the 47:30 minute mark: "We have decades and decades and decades of evidence suggesting that police reform does not eradicate [police brutality]. The response has to be that we cannot expect the police to reform their way out these perpetually unjust situations. The alternative, in my view, is to constrain the reach of police. This means shrinking police budgets, shrinking the size of police forces, and it means building up new types of institutions that will take on the types of social roles that you find police taking on."
The same author recently wrote an op-ed about the military's guiding counterinsurgency philosophy. And eery similarity between the current situation across the country and the experience of the American millitary in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Lastly, an example of a counterinsurgency tactic developed in Iraq applied in the US:
Raoul Peck’s I Am Not Your Negro
Abby Horton: I re-watched this documentary last week, which is based on James Baldwin's unfinished writngs "Remember This House," and was reminded how brilliant it is. Baldwin was writing about his friends Medgar Evers, Malcom X, and Martin Luther King Jr., and the doc weaves historical and recent footage together, tying it all into one feeling. Through Baldwin's words, it puts the moral and human deficits of the white American front and center. It shows a lot of white movies and music, contrasting them with the reality of oppression all around, and in doing so holds up a mirror to America to see itself as it is.
The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power by Shoshana Zuboff
Mark Redling: It's going to be critical for the left, in my opinion, to be fluent in the language of technology for many reasons. Since corporations have essentially merged with the state, I think that understanding how new technologies such as AR that get tested in marketing (Pokemon Go) can end up being used by the state to observe, predict, and determine behavior is important. This book is helpful to that end. (So is the writing of Yuval Noah Harari, especially Homo Deus and A Brief History of Tommorow)
Harlan County, USA (Documentary)
Andy Bowling: The coal miners of Harlan County, Kentucky want to unionize and fight for better wages. What happens next is a 13 month long strike that includes violent confrontations between striking workers, scabs, and management. It's a simultaneously inspiring and heartbreaking tale of worker and community solidarity.