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This paper describes ORGANIZE Training Center’s approach to transforming union locals. The Project for Labor Renewal worked intensely with two San Francisco Bay Area union locals. The article describes and analyzes the organization’s development process, successes, difficulties, and lessons from this experience, arguing for an extension of current understanding of organizing to include a number of community-building activities.
Throughout human history, many societies and groups have sought to eject certain groups from the politically human; this dehumanising of certain others serves to create a sphere of biological humans which are outside of society; one which can be either exterminated or utilised for the greater good. This is particularly evident in the work of Nietzsche, who argued that the common humanity is fit only for slavery; they are fodder for the Übermensch who constitute the truly human. Utilising in this context the work of musician and writer Michael Gira, this chapter will examine the idea of the monstrous subhuman as a mechanism of both exclusion from society, and the tighter integration of that society as a whole. Gira presents a degraded and uncanny form of humanity which exists outside of the usual social conventions; one brutalised, ill-defined and lacking in personal boundaries. I will argue that there is a nominal element to the subhuman; the subhuman in Gira’s work is never bestowed with a personal name, that element which assures individuality and autonomy; it is via the removal of concrete personhood, embodied in the name, that the subhuman is excluded from the social sphere of morality, and established as an object to be abused, without the will or strength to protect itself; it then exists within a mechanised cosmos, one in which it has no power of assertion or autonomy, and is always subject to the will of another. With the removal of the name, the subject disintegrates to the extent that it is no longer subject to morality, either in its own actions, or in those imposed on it.
Abstract
This paper takes a new approach to the contentious area of the etymology of Metatron, applying the lessons learnt from biblical folk-etymologies which have been shown to actively influence the writing of narratives. In the first section one such possible folk-etymology is proposed, based around the sequence TTR as a divine name in Metatron, along with some suggestions of how this could have influenced the narratives around the angel, and how this could have become part of the perceived nature of the angel. In the second section, texts from the Hekhalot literature are analysed to show that similar angelic etymologies which integrate a divine name into the angel’s name are commonplace during this period.
Abstract
This article will look at the ideology of veganism in the AHIJ. Since the early 1970s their diet has been a core part of their ideology and of their message to the world. Acknowledging that a black/Jewish meat-free diet is far from the exclusive property of the group, let alone a new development on their part, I will argue that it is an expression of the syncretic “bricoleur” nature of Black Israelite thought (Dorman 2013), reflecting, drawing on, and transforming traditions existing in both African American and Jewish thought in and before the twentieth century – principally articulated as a concern for health in the former and a messianic return to the peaceful Edenic existence in the latter. However, Ben Ammi skillfully intertwines it into their theology by arguing that a return to the veganism of the Garden of Eden is part of the community’s redemption of humanity from primordial sin and ultimate overcoming of the curse of death.