"My Entry into Aboriginal Understanding" is a collection of eight articles written by Common Cause member Greg Macdougall, also a member of IPSMO - Indigenous Peoples Solidarity Movement Ottawa.

The articles cover a range of topics from culture and language to sovereignty and activism.

The booklet has just been released online as a PDF (16 pgs, or 8 pgs when printed doublesided) in two formats:
* one, a 'front-to-back' version that can be read online (or printed)
* two, a 'print-formatted' version that folds/staples into a booklet when printed.

IPSMO has handed out a couple hundred of these booklets in print form over the past year, but now it is also available online: http://equitableeducation.ca/2011/aboriginal-understanding-booklet

Please take a look, and also feel free to print multiple copies for distribution or for use in schools or other educational settings.

Elio Petri's The Working Class Goes to Heaven (La Classe Operaia Va In Paradiso) is a grim look at the psychological wounds imposed by the factory regime on its chief character, Ludovico Massa. Cruelly nicknamed Lulù the Tool by his pissed off and contrary co-workers, in a factory where he operates a lathe, his obsessive output making him the measure management use to gauge everyone else's work rate.

You won't get any Starbucks coffee at Exile Info- shop, Ottawa's first anarchist bookstore. And don't try to pay with your capitalist credit cards, either.

Chapters, this is not.

The new Ottawa bookstore opened this week to "provide access to alternative media and resources."

Read on..

The headline in today's Toronto Star declares it's 'A very dark day' as NLL cancels season.

According to a Players Association news release

"This past Sunday morning in New York, around 11:00 am, the League representatives received a counter proposal from the PLPA negotiating Team. After about a 30 minute review, we were invited back in to the room. The League’s Committee members informed us that they were rejecting our proposal and that the proposal that we had just countered was their final offer...

After reading a list of hip hop provided by one of our other members here on the blog I'm reminded of discovering the wonderful BBC 4 recently and a documentary on the role of hip hop as a networked form of communication in the suburbs.

I've been ridiculously into hip hop in the last little while; so much so, I have actually incorporated it into my academic work.

So here are some of my recommendations, if you have some not on this list, shout em out.

Hip Hop from the US

Paris - straight up political anti-cop/ anti-drug fairly pro-woman for rap.

Dead Prez - the original RBG badasses

Tupac - some of his tracks are bang on with explaining the life of the poor, original Thug.

Talib Kweli - decent rap, black consciousness not so anti-capitalist as Paris or DP

Immortal Technique - Probably most ego in revolutionary hip hop.

the Coup - fairly cheesy, but right on funky marxist hip hop.

Nas - sometimes east coast gangsta, other times some of the best consciousness around.

Public Enemy - damn the OG's of real hip hop.

Big L - straight up Harlem gangsta hardcore.

Eric B. and Rakim - they kick it oldschool, but pretty much created alternative hip hop.

I'm doing a course called US! A Course On Working Class Fictions at the Toronto Anarchist U this fall....

INTRO

Class is a constant process of formation, it is how they eye us up and how we eye them up in an endless unfolding of power balances, institutional forms, desires, fears and fantasies. Hence this course runs from Charterism and socialism to the mass worker, then beyond to class displacement and what may be germs of wholly new class experiences in the slums of the south and the knowledge industries of the North.

Tearing down the fourth wall of the home, dramatists and novelists like John Osbourne documented the confusion of class identiy in the "pretty dreary...American age," with nothing to do but wait bored for the great bang of the H-bomb. In re-forging the nation's social contract, post war Britain and the "craddle to grave" schema of the welfare state saw political narratives rocket from traditional community relations of solidarity and struggle to an individuated relationship to the state, and then state blocs against state blocs, literature spilled into the micro cultures of the kitchen and family, and characters left with only new interior comforts in the artificial desires of consumerism and the rat race of social mobility.