towerofsleep:Image: Kasimir Malevich, Red Square, 1915JUNE MIX: RED SQUARE (click to DL)1. Bullion -
towerofsleep:Image: Kasimir Malevich, Red Square, 1915JUNE MIX: RED SQUARE (click to DL)1. Bullion - the age of self (Robert Wyatt)2. Here We Go Magic - make up your mind3. King Tuff - bad thing4. Neneh Cherry & The Thing - dream baby dream (Four Tet remix)5. Major Lazer ft. Collie Buddz & Lindi Ortega - good enough6. Santigold - the keepers7. d’Eon - #1098. Fatima Al-Qadiri - d-medley (Ikonika remix)9. How to Dress Well - ocean floor for everything10. A$AP Rocky - goldie11. Killer Mike ft. El-P - butane (champion’s anthem)12. Le1f - ☼‿☼13. Inga Copeland & Dean Blunt - 214. Just Friends - avalanche15. Valentin Stip - gravels I & II16. Liars - a ring on every finger17. Grass Widow - spock on MUNI18. The Walkmen - we can’t be beatOkay, so an mp3 mix isn’t exactly the most stunning gesture of solidarity, but I’m working with what I’ve got, here. This one kicks off with Bullion’s cover of Robert Wyatt’s anti-neoliberalization anthem from 1985 and ends with The Walkmen’s proclamation that “We can’t be beat/We’ll never leave/The world is ours.” Everything in between is just good new music.Also, while I’m on the subject, I want to address this terrible editorial from The Toronto Standard which argues that comparing the Quebec student struggle to the Arab Spring is “embarassing and repulsive”. I disagree on two accounts. Firstly, any invalidation of an argument that rests on, “They have it so much worse than you, don’t make such a fuss” is flawed, because it only goes one way. By that logic, why protest any raise of tuition fees if other people are already paying more? Or turn it around: labourers in China will work for far less than you, so you should take a pay cut. Or to workers in the global south: you’re lucky to be working for pennies an hour, you could have no job at all! That kind of logic impoverishes everyone.My second problem with this article is that it makes the extremely common mistake of assuming that the student protest is about a specific amount of money, or in fact, about money at all, when the true significance of the movement is on the symbolic level, as a struggle against austerity politics and the neoliberalization of Canada. It’s about a social-democratic vision of education and Canadian society at large that’s been entrenched in Quebec since the Quiet Revolution; education is not a product but a public good, and the university is not a factory that produces workers but an institution for the production and preservation of knowledge that enriches society. Which is why it shouldn’t be pay-per-use, it should be funded as part of a progressive taxation scheme. (Though reforming the educational institution itself should also be a priority).At an even larger level, the student protests represent the first step in a war against Harper’s radical restructuring of Canada’s institutions. The fight here is not just for cheaper tuition or even accessible education generally, but against the entire agenda of privatization. If tuition is raised in Quebec, it’s another step in the long neoliberal process of shifting costs down to the lower income brackets and profits up to the higher. To protest now is to say, “We’re going to fight this every step of the way, because this isn’t the society we want to live in.” We’re not just going to roll over until we can mark another ballot in three years, because too much damage will already have been done by then.In that sense, this movement is comparable to Occupy and the Arab Spring because (one hopes) it involves a politicization and radicalization of a huge section of the population that wasn’t having this discussion before, and a movement into the streets of people who have realized that it’s the only way for their voices to be heard. It’s a big deal. -- source link