A State of Mind Unbeknownst to Most

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[historicaltimes]

Mystery Black soldier who fought with the Abraham Lincoln Brigade in the Spanish Civil War photo taken by Agustí Centelles in 1937

IDontWantToKnowSir:

Guardian article on Spanish quest to identify black soldier who fought against fascism in civil war

[fuckyeahiww]

The African People’s Caucus in the streets once again in Minneapolis.

[thepeacockangel]

Some Of What We Will Need To Overcome Capitalism And Create A Functional Post-Capitalist System

We need to get out ideas out there, and heard.  Our ideas are ones respond to immensely positively if you don’t just say “communism” because then they think Stalinism and have no idea what you’re actually proposing.

For this we will need people with expertise and influence in PR and marketing, we will also need innovative marketing solutions, the kind underdog startups use to kickstart shit on a shoestring because we’ve had some very negative PR due to bourgeois propaganda and we need to rebrand.

I suggest simple, punchy, memorable messages that stick in your mind.  Broad anti-capitalist/labor theory of value inspired stuff like “What is your boss costing you?”

We need functional active visible mass organization so that the disillusioned, the enraged, the disaffected have a place to plug in, organizations that prove their value through tangible results.

We need money to fund projects like free schools, advertising campaigns, businesses to fund organizational activity (the FAU in Uruguay have no dues because they fund the organization with print shops, with industrial printers bought with money from bank robberies many years in the past), legal aid, strike funds, and the like.  I do not believe that bank robberies are profitable or wise in this era, but also it has been shown that the voluntary donations of an already impoverished proletariat do not provide enough capital to effectively build the infrastructure needed to build a mass movement.  I suggest we find another way to separate the bourgeois from their money (perhaps we could market some kind of cleanse, superfood or dietbook or perhaps even a motivational or management seminar of some sort, those all seem to be effective ways to get a few bucks from the rich)

We will also need information systems people, computer science people, behavioral psychology people and similar.  I believe that socialist experiments’ past failures in the realm of consumer goods are many ways IT problems.  With capitalism we have made money a mechanism for distributing goods and services roughly where they need to go but it works so poorly that people die because of it, while others due to its myriad flaws.  We need a better, smarter system for anticipating what goods will be desired, in what quantities and where.  We live in a society that produces far more than enough of everything, there is quite enough to go around, it’s simply a matter of working out a system that makes sure Anton gets his lemonade when he wants it and Laurel her violin and Peter a new living room rug as the old one wears out or becomes displeasing.  A system that allows for goods and services not to be given on the basis of exchange but intelligently directed to those that need or desire them.  

Basically, we’ll need a great IT department.

I believe we will also be deeply in need of dissent, I believe deeply in unity between many tendencies of the anti authoritarian left, and even (provided they’re small and kept well in check so that we don’t have Stalin problems) the more authoritarian left (but not too authoritarian so we don’t have Stalin problems).  None of us know exactly what will work in practice, the path to communism is as yet unbuilt, unpaved, and to get to our goal we will have to stop and adjust and stop and readjust repeatedly when elements of our program turn out not to work in practice.  We must be willing to rework, to tinker, to tweak until the system runs smoothly, no dogmatic clinging to a program that has proven itself a failure.  Do not execute or shun those of dissenting leftist tendencies, they are not our enemies but our friends, do we not, after all, share the goal of a bountiful society founded upon a belief in the innate value of human life, upon the need for a society where no one goes hungry, no one is left out in the cold, where no one is forgotten or ill used.  A society free from oppression and bigotry in all its forms, where each of us is more free for all this?

There’s more, but yeah.

[nowaronthepoor]

How Liberalism Infects Movement Building

It never fails. Every time there is critical resistance, an uprising and continued unrest people get dragged back to compliance (with permits) under the rhetoric of being peaceful or nonviolent. The movement gets dragged out of the street to sit attentively at the feet of the oppressors with speakers that tell us change will come if we are calm (and peaceful).  Nevermind the normalized police escort, or the “security team”. We are just following the rules, nothing to see here.

Rhetoric about resistance and direct action becomes meaningless, lost in the symbolism of marching for civic change. Movement managers try to make the movement mainstream-popular, inviting celebrities and business leaders to come forward, while at the same time pushing out radical elements that released pressure valves to begin with. If not directly, through terrible tactical choices that alienate people (like working with the police who are critically engaged in counter insurgency and developing profiles on agitators to undermine the movement).

Never mind, that working with the city and police legitimizes those avenues, while making it easier for the police to knowingly divide and attack groups that take nonpermitted action or respond to their conditions without the permission of the state. Is this what solidarity looks like?

Instead of hearing about what groups are doing to sustain themselves during these uprisings, we hear more and more about demands. Police reforms that usually come with dangerous baggage, more technology and funding for the police. But the movement is so pressured by popular media and civic leaders to clarify its goals, policy change becomes a priority before much needed discussions can happen. Before policy change can be challenged not as a goal, but maybe a tactic to gain concessions in a larger fight to abolish the infrastructure that makes racial oppression profitable. 

But once the movement is focused on policy change, containment is practically complete.  And the agitators who were able to explore what it means to act autonomously for liberation, who were harassed and attacked by the police, are cast aside as unreasonable. Ungovernable.

Unity becomes language to gather behind and solidarity is reserved for those who will declare their nonviolence or tolerance for police collaboration. Never mind that nonviolence never actually was not violent- it just tolerates violence in the hopes of receiving change. It accepts violence as a means of determining justice- because if someone is constantly violated don’t they deserve to be saved? 

The cops are killing people, but pacifism will kill the movement every time. We say “first do no harm” but liberalism does harm to the movement every time. People pull permits in the name of pacifism, but invite the police. How does this make sense?

What is liberalism? There are many ways people might define or apply it. But for now i’ll start with, peace for the sake of appearing peaceful regardless of whether the conditions are peaceful or not. Appealing to and supporting state violence (the government) to restore “peace” whether the conditions are peaceful or not. Working with the enemy to minimize the affects of oppression, while never supporting those looking to prevent or abolish it.

Redirecting the outrage and energy of people away from their own communities and into organizations that work with and support the state (and it’s violence). Taking real anger and pain, and neutralizing it so that it does not actually threaten the economic and social conditions that produced it. Believing that the state is the only way we will be free. Controlling how other actors behave so that the state will make you free. And finally, using peace as a reason to dismiss and silence people seeking critical movement building dialogue to prevent the co-optation of the movement. Demanding peace without first acknowledging the conflict is dismissive and heartbreaking. Same with #notallcops rhetoric.

The popular media finds it much easier to latch onto movement building for reform because the hierarchical political structure wants people to resign power over to representatives and allow those representatives to determine clear goals. And just like that the movement becomes less about supporting black solidarity and more about appealing to the dominant white (and liberal) gaze for approval. 

But what if the goals aren’t clear? What if supporting black rage and insurrection means that all of it will have to fall? Especially the privileges and comforts gained by whites and non-black POC under the capitalist system built on genocide and slavery. The economy of wagery and servitude that makes (black) people poor and deprives them of resources. The system of governance and gender violence that pits (black) community against each other based on sexuality, gender and patriarchy power. The lack of empowerment and shared decision making.  The lack of access to resources for those who are disabled by society. The political system itself, who carries on war after war here and abroad without the consent of the governed. The way problems are handled, policed and result in mass imprisonment and violence for poor, brown and black communities of color.

It’s not simple. But to build this movement we cannot oversimplify it. We cannot ignore that non-black and white people benefit from seeing this movement silenced or neutralized. And we can’t pretend that it doesn’t make whites uncomfortable to think about a black revolution. This might be a large reason why people in the movement fall back on learned liberalism. Because people, particularly people of color, have been taught that to assimilate in Amerikan culture means to behave, which has become synonymous with being “reasonable” or deferring to white models of power. But this is not reasonable, co-optation will fail and the conditions will fall.

[lostcoherence]

It is with the proletarian revolutionists of the world that my whole spirit revolts. It matters not that I am pitied, even by my white fellow-workers who are conscious of the fact that besides being an economic slave as they, I am what they are not—a social leper, of a race outcast from an outcast class. Theirs is a class, which though circumscribed in its sphere, yet has a freedom of movement—a right to satisfy the simple cravings of the body—which is denied to me. Yet I see no other way of upward struggle for colored peoples, but the way of the working-class movement, ugly and harsh though some of its phases may be. None can be uglier and harsher than the routine existence of the average modern worker. The yearning of the American Negro especially, can only find expression and realization in the class struggle. Therein lies his hope. For the Negro is in a peculiar position in America. In spite of a professional here and a business man there, the maintenance of an all-white supremacy in the industrial and social life, as well as the governing bodies of the nation, places the entire Negro race alongside the lowest section of the white working class. They are struggling for identical things. They fight along different lines simply because they are not as class-conscious and intelligent as the ruling classes they are fighting. Both need to be awakened. When a Negro is proscribed on account of his color, when the lynching fever seizes the South and begins to break out even in the North, the black race feels and thinks as a unit. But it has no sense of its unity as a class—or as a part, rather, of the American working-class, and so it is powerless. The Negro must acquire class-consciousness. And the white workers must accept him and work with him, whether they object to his color and morals or not. For his presence is to them a menacing reality.

Claude McKay, How Black Sees Green and Red. The Liberator, June 1921 (via lostcoherence)

[x7s018y3fhigoxg]

[thepeacockangel]

@Sisyphus

[quick-nip]

(via Saturday Morning Cartoons: Baopu #15) by Yao Xiao

words to remember

[bimbilinaful]

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[fuckyeahanarchistposters]

[micdotcom]

Rapper Vic Mensa was among those protesting in Chicago last night

Hundreds of protesters took to Chicago’s streets Tuesday night to stand for Laquan McDonald. Among them was Chicago rapper Vic Mensa. Mensa was seen by CBS in a tense physical moment with police and later on, on social media, marching in the streets. But he wasn’t the only Chicago rapper who lent his voice to the protest.

[themaninthegreenshirt]

“It was so interesting, when John Coltrane created A Love Supreme. He had meditated that week. I almost didn’t see him downstairs. And it was so quiet! There was no sound, no practice! He was up there meditating, and when he came down he said, “I have a whole new music!” He said, “There is a new recording that I will do, I have it all, everything.” And it was so beautiful! He was like Moses coming down from the mountain. And when he recorded it, he knew everything, everything. He said this was the first time that he had all the music in his head at once to record.“ - Alice Coltrane, pictured with John Coltrane

[notesofanativesister]

That was his sermon.

[virginia-werewolf]

“if you’re so stressed out from school why don’t you just study more or take fewer classes??”

[rksimonphoto]

Providence, RI

Ferguson Solidarity Protest, November 25th, 2014.

[requiemforascreen]

[lostcoherence]

The key problem is that whites on the left don’t want to confront complexity, tension, and ambivalence in black politics. In general, they simply do not see political differences among black people. They do not see that blacks are linked to social, political, and economic institutions in a variety of different ways, and that those different links, and the networks that flow from them, shape interests and ideological perception no less, and no less subtly, than among whites.

Adolph Reed, Tokens of the White Left (via lostcoherence)

[blacklivesmatterdavis]

Imprisonment is a process of “disappearing” whole segments of a population.

[hiiilife20]

Please pray for the black students at The University of Missouri.

[blackourstory]

I pray that there are some Black men who live near that school with guns and heart willing to go up on that campus and protect those students. As we saw in Charleston, prayers don’t stop real racist crackers from murdering Black folks even while in a prayer circle. We can’t stop real physical violence with metaphysical well-wishing.