#social junk

[twothousandtapes]

Somebody Should've Told You, by Social Junk

7 track album

[flesh-hierarchy]

[shootingparty]

[theyearofselfeducation]

"Social junk" are those whose spirits and minds are shattered; they are the deinstitutionalized mentally ill, alcoholics, drug addicts, and cast-off impoverished seniors; the lonely, beaten drifters with no expectations of a future and little will to fight. This population - the collateral damage of unchecked market economics - is managed through spatial and social containment. They must be driven away from the beaches, malls, financial districts, and the pleasure zones of themepark cities. They are, as Mathiesen put it, "sand in the machine." They pose an ontological threat to market social relations but they rarely coalesce into an organized political threat. The other segment of the surplus population - "social dynamite" - are those who pose an actual or potential political challenge. They are that population which threatens to explode: the impoverished low-wage working class and unemployed youth who have fallen below the statistical radar, but whose spirits are not broken and whose expectations for a decent life and social inclusion are dangerously alive and well. They are the class that suffers from "relative deprivation." Their poverty is made all the more unjust because it is experienced in contrast to the spectacle of opulence and myths of social mobility and opportunity. This is the class from which the Black Panthers and the Young Lords arose in the sixties and from which sprang the gangs of the 1980s.

Lockdown America: Police and Prisons in the Age of Crisis (Christian Parenti)

[gointoexile]

Social Junk on Flickr.

[sobodi-blog]

Social Junk