Equality is all we want @itspolitical - Tumblr Blog

We must draw a clear line between ourselves and the enemy. Mao I hold that it is bad as far as we are concerned if a person, a political par

imo anyone involved in the protest scene or student movements in the western liberal democracies over the past few years should read this if you havent already

kropotkindersurprise

This pamphlet pairs very well with that one, and goes more in-depth on the practical organizational aspects.

kropotkindersurprise

Hard times are coming.

prole-log

From #Ally, to #Accomplice, to #CoConspirators

Revolutionary Solidarity: A Critical Reader for Accomplices published on Sprout Distro

Accomplices Not Allies: Abolishing the Ally Industrial Complex by Indigenous Action

So You Call Yourself an Ally: 10 Things All ‘Allies’ Need to Know via Everyday Feminism

8 Ways Not To Be An “Ally”: A Non-Comprehensive List via BlackGirlDangerous.com

No More “Allies” (also via BGD)

The Differences Between Allies, Accomplices & Co-Conspirators May Surprise You: Allyship isn’t enough when the world is on fire

We Don’t Need Allies, We Need Abolitionists: Enough with playing it nice and safe in the fight against anti-Blackness

Further reading list on #Allyship & #Solidarity via The White Noise Collective

via Front Range Mutual Aid Network

effectiveresistance

A communiqué, also sometimes called a reportback or hit report, is a report on (typically) illegal direct actions that is shared online via counter-info sites or in print publications. Mainstream media may suppress reporting about certain tactics or the reason for choosing a target may be unclear, so submitting a communiqué is a way to share news, tactics, and political motivations directly. This guide describes how to securely submit an anonymous communiqué online.

anarchblr

in case y'all ain't seen this yet, it has resources on:

Prison Abolition

Police Abolition

Abolitionist Toolkits

Abolition and Coronavirus

Origin Stories

Criminalizing Blackness

Sexual Violence and Anti-Carceral Feminism

Restorative and Transformative Justice

Disability Justice

The Perils of Reform

Prison Organizing, Past and Present

Private Prisons and Prison Labor

Mutual Aid and/as Abolition

Child Welfare and Family Regulation

The Nonprofit Industrial Complex

Climate (In)Justice and Prisons

Crimmigration

LGBTQ Criminalization

Christianity and Prison Abolition

Abolition for Parents and Young People

Abolition, Surveillance, and “(Counter)Terrorism”

Should Killer Cops Go To Prison?

Abolition and Gun Violence/Control

“Sex Offenses” and Civil Commitment

Sex Work Decriminalization

Hate Crimes and White Supremacist Violence

Abolition and Universities

🏴ACAB WORLDWIDE BABEY🏴

This guide contains resources on the abolition of policing, prisons, and punishment. You can find another resource hub, created by Mariame K

wutheringheightsfilm

every day it just concerns me how little compassion people have. no compassion for those living in the global south. no compassion for immigrants. no compassion for disabled ppl. no compassion for addicts. no compassion for prisoners. no compassion for children. like holy shit ...

wutheringheightsfilm

at the end of the day che guevara said "At the risk of seeming ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love. It is impossible to think of a genuine revolutionary lacking this quality."

communistojousama

A question a lot of so-called "communists" on here need to answer for themselves is: is Marxism a scientific and falsifiable theory of economics and social change which verifies itself via social practice and is proven correct by tangible results? or is it an unfalsifiable moral philosophy revolving around decommodification and the worship of noble poverty; a replacement for the role religion may have once played in your life? If the answer for you is the latter, then you need to understand that you and I have nothing in common.

doe-eyed-disaster

it's exhausting to see constant TMA/TME discourse that fundamentally does not understand intersectionality. Transmisogyny affected, TMA, describes someone who cannot leverage your assigned gender to mitigate the oppressive force of transmisogyny. Transmisogyny exempt, TME, describes someone who is able to leverage their assigned gender in some way to mitigate the oppressive force of transmisogyny. They are not identity labels; they describe a person's relationship to transmisogyny.

doe-eyed-disaster

these labels also do not categorize people as ontologically "victims" or "oppressors". everyone, including TMA people, can wield transmisogyny and everyone can wield it most effectively against TMA people. just as cis women can perpetrate and enforce misogyny against other cis women, so too can trans women leverage transmisogyny against one another. however, given the relative lower social status of TMA people, we are less able to advance their own social standing by leveraging transmisogyny. Caitlin Jenner is both TMA and openly transmisogynistic, but she is less successful in advancing herself compared to TME people like Marjorie Taylor Green. this is similar to how cis women can wield misogyny against men (like suggesting that an fashionable man is inherently less masculine), but a similar criticism from another man will generally be a more potent attack.

doe-eyed-disaster

oppressions can look similar: racialized women, particularly black women, are often degendered in ways which superficially resemble transmisogyny. for example, Michelle Obama was mocked for having supposedly "mannish" features. to the extent that transmisogyny might have impacted her, she was able to mitigate it by leveraging the fact that she was assigned and conformed to expectations of women. she was unable to leverage her race to deny the full extent of this public abuse because degendering is a tactic empowered by both racism and transmisogyny. a black trans woman who is similarly degendered cannot leverage TME privilege because of her gender assignment at birth. both people are targeted and harmed in some way by degendering, but one is more able to mitigate that harm due to being able to exempt herself from transmisogyny.

in a similar example, Imane Khelif was subject to simultaneous pressure from transmisogyny, racism, and intersexism. because she is TME, she could leverage her gender assignment and was not barred automatically from competing in women's events at the summer Olympics (an option unavailable to TMA athletes facing similar scrutiny). she also enjoyed an outpouring of public support in favor of her continued participation, whereas TMA athletes received little sympathy or support in the press (in fact, the event that prohibited them was hailed as especially inclusive for lgbtq+ athletes). however, she was still pressured sufficiently by racist and intersexist policies to undergo invasive medical procedures and to publicly reveal medical details that she might have preferred to keep private. the fact that Imane Khelif was subject to other systems of oppression in no way disproves the validity of transmisogyny because she was able to do the thing that defines being TME: she leveraged her assigned gender to exempt herself from transmisogyny.

doe-eyed-disaster

in Kimberlé Crenshaw's formulation of intersectionality, she describes the unique marginalization of black women. unlike white women, black women cannot leverage their race to mitigate the impacts of racism. unlike black men, black women cannot leverage their gender to mitigate the effects of misogyny. thus, black women are demonstrably subject to a unique synergy of white supremacy and misogyny (misogynoir) from which others are able to exempt themselves to varying degrees and by various means. the same formulation can be applied to TMA people, who are unable to leverage either their gender assignment or social identity, to mitigate oppositional and traditional sexism, thereby rendering us uniquely vulnerable to the synergistic oppression of those forces. (and of course, we cannot forget that TMA people can also be subject to other discrimination from which they cannot exempt themselves; TMA people can also be variously racialized, disabled, poor, intersex, and so on.)

doe-eyed-disaster

great tags from @futchlingg

doe-eyed-disaster

I'm glad the tone i struck was accessible to you. I'm going to continue to be very generous right now: this response is transmisogyny. one of the kinds of privilege that TME people experience is getting to be judged as individuals whereas TMA people are always judged collectively. TMA people should not have to be as precise, nonjudgmental, and even in tone as i was in this thread. i chose to put in the effort to explain things in these terms, but i did so because when TMA people like me aren't, we get taken with the worst possible faith.

if a cis woman wrote a post like mine about the ways in which men leverage misogyny against her, it would be obviously misogynistic for someone to reply "oh thank goodness. i never really got feminism because they're always just so bitchy about men". this would be the case regardless of who said it or what their proximity to misogyny is. the same is true here: i made a long post with very precisely chosen language, and this reply contrasts me against all those other, apparently uncouth trans women who don't haven't decency to be nice about our oppression. (if you know trans women like that, please send them my way. they sound based.).

TMA people do not owe any deference to TME people's feelings when talking about our oppression. y'all can get away with shit on the regular, usually against us, that is far crueler than incivility. TMA people shouldn't have to make posts that are hundreds of carefully chosen words long with step-by-step logical constructions from first principles and real-world illustrations whose relevance is spelled out on exacting detail. this was a high effort post and WE DON'T OWE THAT TO ANYONE. we shouldn't have to do that every time we want to talk about the fucked up things that happen to and around us, especially not to TME people who benefit from doing those fucked up things to us.

(and if you think my reply here is veering into incivility, let me invite you to examine why it is that you're feeling so defensive. let's internalize and practice those analytical skills which i described apparently so well in those first canonically non-bitchy posts.)

doe-eyed-disaster

a common (and exhausting) misconception seems to happen around the word "exempt". let's be clear: transmisogyny isn't just "misogyny that happens to trans women". transmisogyny is a social force which influences *all* people which posits that differently gendered people are intrinsically different in some meaningful way and that one gender is in some way socially superior to another. the ways that we construct, define, inscribe, navigate, and relate to gender are all influenced by transmisogyny. if getting to wield misogyny without consequence is the carrot of patriarchy, then the threat of faggotization for being too great a failure to one's assigned boyhood is the stick. I've seen transmisogyny described as the psychological lynchpin that holds patriarchy together. some people can leverage their gender in some way to mitigate the impact of this force, but it is a fundamental part very sea that we all must swim in.

the same can be said for other marginalizing forces. temporarily nondisabled people can experience negative consequences of ableism, but feeling burnt out from an excessive workload is a fundamentally different experience when not fully exposed to ableism. for instance, you might have your exhaustion taken more seriously by your doctor if you are not yet disabled and consequently receive better medical care. a straight man might be mistreated if others believe him to be gay, but he's dealing with one moment of interpersonal bigotry rather than an entire lifetime of being under threat (for example, his right to the social and financial benefits of marriage are far more guaranteed than they might be if he was gay). and so on.

TME people experience transmisogyny but they are not its primary targets and can exempt themselves from scrutiny and mistreatment by leveraging their gender in some way that TMA people cannot. one pernicious way that this happens is through a kind of affected incompetence, positioning themselves to always be seeking education from TMA people about transmisogyny and offering shallow rebuttals and critiques such as the images attached (which they may not even consciously recognize as such). this positions TMA people as bearing the expectation of answering and clarifying on demand and being held to account for all the other TMA people who have come before her.

like i just spent nearly a thousand words giving the piss easiest "intersectionality 101" and you're complaining that the language is unclear or flawed in some way that precludes your understanding or prevents you from internalizing what you've just read, complaints which would be irrelevant if you just read the first paragraph again in which the terms were defined in clear, simple language. if this is your response, you are exactly who i was complaining about from the beginning.

quixoticanarchy

i do not want to live in the fucking panopticon fuck the camera that blinks above me at work, the tv watching me at the store, the "smile you're on camera" signs, the ring cameras, the flock cameras, the apps to track your child or partner, the activist friends telling me "just assume everything you do in public is being recorded somewhere", the government building protester databases, the teslas recording every move all around them, the knowledge that everything i type or search or save is being tracked and logged, the ads and search suggestions that mysteriously know what i was just talking about, the way biometrics keep creeping into more places, the way my car spies on me, the way my phone spies on me, the way there is nowhere to go to get away from it!!! no wonder the internet is full of vindictive little stalkers and witchhunts when it's the water and the air of society from the culture to the infrastructure

aughwl

We can take control back! Community mapping projects using free open source software let you add where surveillance cameras are. I often take walks through new areas and observe the buildings to spot the bastards. When you do it, you find out there are more blind spots that you think. If you have a good map of public cameras you can avoid them or tell people about them. Or other things :)

Surveillance cameras and other means of surveillance

anarchopuppy

inksplattersandearlyhours

“When I was young, women were raped on the campus of a great university and the authorities responded by telling all the women students not to go out alone after dark or not to be out at all. Get in the house. (For women, confinement is always waiting to envelope you.) Some pranksters put up a poster announcing another remedy, that all men be excluded from campus after dark. It was an equally logical solution, but men were shocked at being asked to disappear, to lose their freedom to move and participate, all because of the violence of one man.”

— Rebecca Solnit, Grandmother Spider in Men Explain Things To Me and Other Essays

anarchopuppy

I’ve already reblogged a link to this entire article by @crimethinc, but I wanted to highlight the excellent ‘resources’ section on its own as we approach the election. For an anarchist take on the current climate, a list of upcoming actions, and a dope-ass poster to print and distribute, please do check out the full article as well

Trump’s term is ending as it began, with a likelihood of street conflict. The following guides offer a great deal of information about how to participate in effective protests while protecting yourself and your community.

Getting Connected

How to Form an Affinity Group

Find a Local Mutual Aid Network

Where to Find Your Local Medic Collective—This is not comprehensive, but offers a good starting point.

Security Culture

What Is Security Culture?

Bounty Hunters and Child Predators: Inside the FBI Entrapment Strategy

When the Police Knock on Your Door—Your rights and options: a legal guide

If the FBI Approaches You to Become an Informant—An FAQ

You can find a lot of important information about general security in protest situations here.

Digital Communications and Security

Your Phone Is a Cop—An OpSec/InfoSec primer for the dystopian present.

Communications Equipment for Rebels

Burner Phone Best Practices—A user’s guide

Doxcare—Prevention and aftercare for those targeted by doxxing and political harassment

This thread spells out how to protect your privacy via proper phone safety at demonstrations—before, during, and after the protest.

Dressing for Success and Security

Fashion Tips for the Brave

The Femme’s Guide to Riot Fashion—This season’s hottest looks for the discerning femme.

Staying Safe in the Streets

Blocs, Black and Otherwise

Safety Gear

A Demonstrator’s Guide to Helmets

A Demonstrator’s Guide to Gas Masks and Goggles—Everything you need to know to protect your eyes and lungs from gas and projectiles.

You can read some more tips about protest gear from protesters in Hong Kong here.

Strategy, Planning, and Tactics

A Step-by-Step Guide to Direct Action—What It Is, What It’s Good for, How It Works

Tools and Tactics in the Portland Protests—This text offers an overview of a wide range of options from leaf blowers and umbrellas to shields and lasers.

Creative Direct Action Visuals—Making banners and more.

Blockade Tactics—courtesy of the Ruckus Society

Tips about Blockading—from Beautiful Trouble

Lock Boxes—How to blockade with

Jail Support

Jail Support form from Rosehip Collective—Fill this out in advance of any event at which you might be arrested and leave it with your attorney or a support contact.

NLG National Support Hotlines and Other Resources

When Things Go Badly

Making the Best of Mass Arrests

How to Survive a Felony Trial—Keeping your head up through the worst of it

I Was a J20 Street Medic and Defendant—How we survived the first J20 trial and what we learned along the way.

Basic First Aid in the Streets

First Aid for Protestors

Eye safety at protests—You can read more on how to do an eye flush here

How to Protect Yourself from Audio Attacks—LRAD, sirens, etc.

COVID-19 Safety at Protests

You can obtain more graphics on this subject here.

For Experienced Medics

Protocols for Common Injuries from Police Weapons—For street medics and medical professionals treating demonstrators.

A Demonstrator’s Guide to Responding to Gunshot Wounds—It can also be useful to read these accounts from people who have experienced gunfire at demonstrations.

These four zines from the Rosehip Medic Collective include a range of useful information.

This collection of resources that appeared shortly before Trump took office includes more topical material, addressing non-violence, solidarity, white supremacy, colonialism, patriarchy, capitalism, and more.

dagwolf

“Martin Luther King Jr. made the forbidden connections between Capitalism, Imperialism, Racism, and the Vietnam War. As a result, after he was assassinated even his memory became toxic, a threat to public order. Foundations and corporations worked hard to remodel his legacy to fit a market-friendly format. The Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change, with an operational grant of $2 million, was set up by, among others, the Ford Motor Company, General Motors, Mobil, Western Electric, Proctor and Gamble, US Steel, and Monsanto. The center maintains the King Library and Archives of the Civil Rights Movement. Among the many programs the King Center runs have been projects that “work closely with the United States Department of Defense, the Armed Forces Chaplains Board and others.” It cosponsored the Martin Luther King Jr. Lecture Series called “The Free Enterprise System: An Agent for Nonviolent Social Change.”

— Capitalism: A Ghost Story by Arundhati Roy (via rikodeine)

redmapache

“During the lifetime of great revolutionaries, the oppressing classes constantly hounded them, received their theories with the most savage malice, the most furious hatred and the most unscrupulous campaigns of lies and slander. After their death, attempts are made to convert them into harmless icons, to canonize them, so to say, and to hallow their names to a certain extent for the “consolation” of the oppressed classes and with the object of duping the latter, while at the same time robbing the revolutionary theory of its substance, blunting its revolutionary edge and vulgarizing it.”

— The State and Revolution by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

collectorsweekly

Previously unpublished photographs of the Native American occupation of Alcatraz, 1969.

itswaow

Now would be a good time for everyone to understand how the US dollar hegemony works, and how oil was leveraged to turn the dollar into a weapon. Here, it goes like this:

1. The United States creates dollars, which costs them essentially nothing.

2. Over time, US military power compelled the biggest oil producers (starting with Saudi Arabia in 1974) to trade exclusively in dollars.

3. When a company needs oil, it needs dollars to buy it. You can obtain dollars in a number of ways: you can take a loan or you can sell shoes to the US or teacups to Europe. Notice that the factory has to ship actual shoes to the US or to third markets in order to obtain, basically, a bookkeeping entry that took the US microseconds to create.

4. The oil company receives the shoe factory's dollars in exchange for oil. It invests these dollars into US treasury bonds or securities, which is really the only sensible thing they can do --cash deprecates in value over time, and there are virtually no other risk-free places to park your billions of dollars worth of oil earnings.

5. The US puts part of the investment it received into military use, so that it can keep anyone who would dare to detach from this dollar hegemony in check. The rest goes to enrich the US. Return to step 1.

Note that this mechanism is essentially an obfuscated tax on the rest of the world. An Iranian shoe factory has to obtain dollars if it wants to buy oil, and the oil company is incentivized to store its dollars in the US treasury. This means that part of the value that foreign capitalists would otherwise pocket actually ends up in the United States.

To obtain a million dollars, the US government pushes a button; to obtain the same million a Bangladeshi factory has to sew 500 000 T-shirts.

Because the oil bill comes in dollars and the only deep, liquid, politically safe asset is a US Treasury bond, value flows to Wall Street.

In other words: The US creates money, manufactures a need for everyone to hold some of that money, and then incentivizes them to return that money to the US.

The petrodollar was only ever the beginning. Many things are gated behind the dollar: Shipping, aviation, SWIFT transactions, etc. Everyone needs dollars; if you can't get any you're going to struggle in the global capitalist economy. This is why the US gets to create seemingly endless dollars and have them still hold value, it's why the US can bend anyone reliant on the dollar to their will via sanctions; the dollar itself acts as a weapon. Of course, the status quo is maintained at gunpoint, and the dollar's value is ultimately backed by US military might. The United States exports death.

Because of all of this, the US has an enormous material incentive to keep oil flowing, to keep its military spending high, and to topple any and all projects that would endanger this system. To stop the flow of unequal exchange, to stop the coercive taxation over the rest of the world, would be to destabilize the US empire. Anyone who would provide an alternative must necessarily be seen as an adversary.

Want to nationalize your oil? Want to deal in another currency? Are you another military superpower? No? Too bad, here's one million drone strikes and a new *democratic* government for you.

This is why shifting to renewables has been such a struggle in the west, this is why the planet is warming, this is why the US is engaged in endless wars, this is why most of the world is poor, this is why millions have died. This is imperialism and it must be dismantled.

luulapants

Might fuck around and paper my town with these. Feel free to join me.

c4bl3fl4m3

Would you be willing to post the files for these so we can have the best quality copy for printing purposes?

luulapants

Here's a folder with the files! I couldn't get the last one to PDF correctly with the image, so it's still text.

luulapants

If you're in the US, now is a great time to talk to the young people in your life about the US military:

The recruiter is not your friend. The military employs child psychologists to learn how to make you think the recruiter is your friend.

The recruiter is allowed to lie to you and makes more money if they do.

The recruiter is paid a commission to groom children into cannon fodder.

The recruiter will tell you you're special and will go into special smart soldier programs instead of combat. They're lying.

The recruiter may tell you they can tell if someone can get PTSD or not and only recruit people like you, who won't. They're lying.

The recruiter may tell you you'll be too busy attending free college (!!) to go overseas. They're lying.

The recruiter may ask what countries you want to travel to and promise you bougie placements on military bases in those countries. They're lying.

Even "It's just four years!" is a lie - the government is allowed to hold you past your enlistment period with a stop-loss order.

The recruiter actually has zero power to decide anything that happens to you after you enlist and they more importantly don't care what happens to you.

If you enlist, you will be brainwashed to make you willing to do things to other humans that you would never be willing to do today.

You will be ordered to do things that will kill children. And you'll do them.

The military is not the only way or even the best way for you to go to college or start a career.

Military brainwashing will actually make you into a terrible university student because it degrades your ability to think critically and question your sources.

Having PTSD and/or a TBI will make it harder to be a student and keep a job.

Veterans' benefits suck these days.

Being a veteran drastically increases your risk of homelessness, suicide, alcohol and drug dependence, prison time, and becoming an abuser to your loved ones.

The military will expose you to chemicals that will drastically increase your chances of developing cancer.

The military will withhold information about your rights to conscientiously object after enlisting.

A lot can change in four years.

thererisesaredstar

U.S. Imperialism Get Out

Emory Douglas (1960s)

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Equality is all we want