Book Reports

Essays on history, political theory, culture and art from a radical Marxist perspective.

[writerswritecompany]

Plotting by J.L. Bell

[nosuchthingasfiction-blog]

It’s so beautiful.

[korriganbleedingink-deactivated]

THIS

THIS IS MAGNIFICENT MY GODS

[signsoflifeonmars]

IMPORTANT!!!

[mumblingsage]

And when working on the pacing of the story, especially around those protagonist-planning stages, keep in mind the Unspoken Plan Guarantee (plus check out the Playing With Trope pages!)

[mostlysignssomeportents]

"Don't spy on a privacy lab" (and other career advice for university provosts)

This is a wild and hopeful story: grad students at Northeastern successfully pushed back against invasive digital surveillance in their workplace, through solidarity, fearlessness, and the bright light of publicity. It’s a tale of hand-to-hand, victorious combat with the “shitty technology adoption curve.”

What’s the “shitty tech adoption curve?” It’s the process by which oppressive technologies are normalized and spread. If you want to do something awful with tech — say, spy on people with a camera 24/7 — you need to start with the people who have the least social capital, the people whose objections are easily silenced or overridden.

That’s why all our worst technologies are first imposed on refugees -> prisoners -> kids -> mental patients -> poor people, etc. Then, these technologies climb the privilege gradient: blue collar workers -> white collar workers -> everyone. Following this pathway lets shitty tech peddlers knock the rough edges off their wares, inuring us all to their shock and offense.

https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/21/great-taylors-ghost/#solidarity-or-bust

20 years ago, if you ate dinner under the unblinking eye of a CCTV, it was because you were housed in a supermax prison. Today, it’s because you were unwise enough to pay hundreds or thousands of dollars for “home automation” from Google, Apple, Amazon or another “luxury surveillance” vendor.

Northeastern’s Interdisciplinary Science and Engineering Complex (ISEC) is home to the “Cybersecurity and Privacy Institute,” where grad students study the harms of surveillance and the means by which they may be reversed. If there’s one group of people who are prepared to stand athwart the shitty tech adoption curve, it is the CPI grad students.

Which makes it genuinely baffling that Northeastern Senior Vice Provost for Research David Luzzi decided to install under-desk heat sensors throughout ISEC, overnight, without notice or consultation. Luzzi signed the paperwork that brought the privacy institute into being.

Students throughout ISEC were alarmed by this move, but especially students on the sixth floor, home to the Privacy Institute. When they demanded an explanation, they were told that the university was conducting a study on “desk usage.” This rang hollow: students at the Privacy Institute have assigned desks, and they badge into each room when they enter it.

As Privacy Institute PhD candidate Max von Hippel wrote, “Reader, we have assigned desks, and we use a key-card to get into the room, so, they already know how and when we use our desks.”

https://twitter.com/maxvonhippel/status/1578048837746204672

So why was the university suddenly so interested in gathering fine-grained data on desk usage? I asked von Hippel and he told me: “They are proposing that grad students share desks, taking turns with a scheduling web-app, so administrators can take over some of the space currently used by grad students. Because as you know, research always works best when you have to schedule your thinking time.”

That’s von Hippel’s theory, and I’m going to go with it, because Luzzi didn’t offer a better one in the flurry of memos and “listening sessions” that took place after the ISEC students arrived at work one morning to discover sensors under their desks.

This is documented in often hilarious detail in von Hippel’s thread on the scandal, in which the university administrators commit a series of unforced errors and the grad students run circles around them, in a comedy of errors straight out of “Animal House.”

https://twitter.com/maxvonhippel/status/1578048652215431168

After the sensors were discovered, the students wrote to the administrators demanding their removal, on the grounds that there was no scientific purpose for them, that they intimidated students, that they were unnecessary, and that the university had failed to follow its own rules and ask the Institutional Review Board (IRB) to review the move as a human-subjects experiment.

The letter was delivered to Luzzi, who offered “an impromptu listening session” in which he alienated students by saying that if they trusted the university to “give” them a degree, they should trust it to surveil them. The students bristled at this characterization, noting that students deliver research (and grant money) to “make it tick.”

[Image ID: Sensors arrayed around a kitchen table at ISEC]

The students, believing Luzzi was not taking them seriously, unilaterally removed all the sensors, and stuck them to their kitchen table, annotating and decorating them with Sharpie. This prompted a second, scheduled “listening session” with Luzzi, but this session, while open to all students, was only announced to their professors (“Beware of the leopard”).

The students got wind of this, printed up fliers and made sure everyone knew about it. The meeting was packed. Luzzi explained to students that he didn’t need IRB approval for his sensors because they weren’t “monitoring people.” A student countered, what was being monitored, “if not people?” Luzzi replied that he was monitoring “heat sources.”

https://github.com/maxvonhippel/isec-sensors-scandal/blob/main/Oct_6_2022_Luzzi_town_hall.pdf

Remember, these are grad students. They asked the obvious question: which heat sources are under desks, if not humans (von Hippel: “rats or kangaroos?”). Luzzi fumbled for a while (“a service animal or something”) before admitting, “I guess, yeah, it’s a human.”

Having yielded the point, Luzzi pivoted, insisting that there was no privacy interest in the data, because “no individual data goes back to the server.” But these aren’t just grad students — they’re grad students who specialize in digital privacy. Few people on earth are better equipped to understand re-identification and de-aggregation attacks.

[Image ID: A window with a phrase written in marker, ‘We are not doing science here’ -Luzzi.]

A student told Luzzi, “This doesn’t matter. You are monitoring us, and collecting data for science.” Luzzi shot back, “we are not doing science here.” This ill-considered remark turned into an on-campus meme. I’m sure it was just blurted in the heat of the moment, but wow, was that the wrong thing to tell a bunch of angry scientists.

From the transcript, it’s clear that this is where Luzzi lost the crowd. He accused the students of “feeling emotion” and explaining that the data would be used for “different kinds of research. We want to see how students move around the lab.”

Now, as it happens, ISEC has an IoT lab where they take these kinds of measurements. When they do those experiments, students are required to go through IRB, get informed consent, all the stuff that Luzzi had bypassed. When this is pointed out, Luzzi says that they had been given an IRB waiver by the university’s Human Research Protection Program (HRPP).

Now a prof gets in on the action, asking, pointedly: “Is the only reason it doesn’t fall under IRB is that the data will not be published?” A student followed up by asking how the university could justify blowing $50,000 on surveillance gear when that money would have paid for a whole grad student stipend with money left over.

Luzzi’s answers veer into the surreal here. He points out that if he had to hire someone to monitor the students’ use of their desks, it would cost more than $50k, implying that the bill for the sensors represents a cost-savings. A student replies with the obvious rejoinder — just don’t monitor desk usage, then.

Finally, Luzzi started to hint at the underlying rationale for the sensors, discussing the cost of the facility to the university and dangling the possibility of improving utilization of “research assets.” A student replies, “If you want to understand how research is done, don’t piss off everyone in this building.”

Now that they have at least a vague explanation for what research question Luzzi is trying to answer, the students tear into his study design, explaining why he won’t learn what he’s hoping to learn. It’s really quite a good experimental design critique — these are good students! Within a few volleys, they’re pointing out how these sensors could be used to stalk researchers and put them in physical danger.

Luzzi turns the session over to an outside expert via a buggy Zoom connection that didn’t work. Finally, a student asks whether it’s possible that this meeting could lead to them having a desk without a sensor under it. Luzzi points out that their desk currently doesn’t have a sensor (remember, the students ripped them out). The student says, “I assume you’ll put one back.”

[Image ID: A ‘public art piece’ in the ISEC lobby — a table covered in sensors spelling out ‘NO!,’ surrounded by Sharpie annotations decrying the program.]

They run out of time and the meeting breaks up. Following this, the students arrange the sensors into a “public art piece” in the lobby — a table covered in sensors spelling out “NO!,” surrounded by Sharpie annotations decrying the program.

Meanwhile, students are still furious. It’s not just that the sensors are invasive, nor that they are scientifically incoherent, nor that they cost more than a year’s salary — they also emit lots of RF noise that interferes with the students’ own research. The discussion spills onto Reddit:

https://www.reddit.com/r/NEU/comments/xx7d7p/northeastern_graduate_students_privacy_is_being/

Yesterday, Luzzi capitulated, circulating a memo saying they would pull “all the desk occupancy sensors from the building,” due to “concerns voiced by a population of graduate students.”

https://twitter.com/maxvonhippel/status/1578101964960776192

The shitty technology adoption curve is relentless, but you can’t skip a step! Jumping straight to grad students (in a privacy lab) without first normalizing them by sticking them on the desks of poor kids in underfunded schools (perhaps after first laying off a computer science teacher to free up the budget!) was a huge tactical error.

A more tactically sound version of this is currently unfolding at CMU Computer Science, where grad students have found their offices bugged with sensors that detect movement and collect sound:

https://twitter.com/davidthewid/status/1387909329710366721

The CMU administration has wisely blamed the presence of these devices on the need to discipline low-waged cleaning staff by checking whether they’re really vacuuming the offices.

https://twitter.com/davidthewid/status/1387426812972646403

While it’s easier to put cleaners under digital surveillance than computer scientists, trying to do both at once is definitely a boss-level challenge. You might run into a scholar like David Gray Widder, who, observing that “this seems like algorithmic management of lowly paid employees to me,” unplugged the sensor in his office.

https://twitter.com/davidthewid/status/1387909329710366721

This is the kind of full-stack Luddism this present moment needs. These researchers aren’t opposed to sensors — they’re challenging the social relations of sensors, who gets sensed and who does the sensing.

https://locusmag.com/2022/01/cory-doctorow-science-fiction-is-a-luddite-literature/

[Image ID: A flier inviting ISEC grad students to attend an unadvertised ‘listening session’ with vice-provost David Luzzi. It is surmounted with a sensor that has been removed from beneath a desk and annotated in Sharpie to read: ‘If found by David Luzzi suck it.’]

[redbookreports]

you love to see it

[star-anise]

So what I’ve learned from the past couple months of being really loud about being a bi woman on Tumblr is: A lot of young/new LGBT+ people on this site do not understand that some of the stuff they’re saying comes across to other LGBT+ people as offensive, aggressive, or threatening. And when they actually find out the history and context, a lot of them go, “Oh my god, I’m so sorry, I never meant to say that.”

Like, “queer is a slur”: I get the impression that people saying this are like… oh, how I might react if I heard someone refer to all gay men as “f*gs”. Like, “Oh wow, that’s a super loaded word with a bunch of negative freight behind it, are you really sure you want to put that word on people who are still very raw and would be alarmed, upset, or offended if they heard you call them it, no matter what you intended?”

So they’re really surprised when self-described queers respond with a LOT of hostility to what feels like a well-intentioned reminder that some people might not like it. 

That’s because there’s a history of “political lesbians”, like Sheila Jeffreys, who believe that no matter their sexual orientation, women should cut off all social contact with men, who are fundamentally evil, and only date the “correct” sex, which is other women. Political lesbians claim that relationships between women, especially ones that don’t contain lust, are fundamentally pure, good, and  unproblematic. They therefore regard most of the LGBT community with deep suspicion, because its members are either way too into sex, into the wrong kind of sex, into sex with men, are men themselves, or somehow challenge the very definitions of sex and gender. 

When “queer theory” arrived in the 1980s and 1990s as an organized attempt by many diverse LGBT+ people in academia to sit down and talk about the social oppressions they face, political lesbians like Jeffreys attacked it harshly, publishing articles like “The Queer Disappearance of Lesbians”, arguing that because queer theory said it was okay to be a man or stop being a man or want to have sex with a man, it was fundamentally evil and destructive. And this attitude has echoed through the years; many LGBT+ people have experience being harshly criticized by radical feminists because being anything but a cis “gold star lesbian” (another phrase that gives me war flashbacks) was considered patriarchal, oppressive, and basically evil.

And when those arguments happened, “queer” was a good umbrella to shelter under, even when people didn’t know the intricacies of academic queer theory; people who identified as “queer” were more likely to be accepting and understanding, and “queer” was often the only label or community bisexual and nonbinary people didn’t get chased out of. If someone didn’t disagree that people got to call themselves queer, but didn’t want to be called queer themselves, they could just say “I don’t like being called queer” and that was that. Being “queer” was to being LGBT as being a “feminist” was to being a woman; it was opt-in.

But this history isn’t evident when these interactions happen. We don’t sit down and say, “Okay, so forty years ago there was this woman named Sheila, and…” Instead we queers go POP! like pufferfish, instantly on the defensive, a red haze descending over our vision, and bellow, “DO NOT TELL ME WHAT WORDS I CANNOT USE,” because we cannot find a way to say, “This word is so vital and precious to me, I wouldn’t be alive in the same way if I lost it.” And then the people who just pointed out that this word has a history, JEEZ, way to overreact, go away very confused and off-put, because they were just trying to say.

But I’ve found that once this is explained, a lot of people go, “Oh wow, okay, I did NOT mean to insinuate that, I didn’t realize that I was also saying something with a lot of painful freight to it.”

And that? That gives me hope for the future.

[star-anise]

Similarily: “Dyke/butch/femme are lesbian words, bisexual/pansexual women shouldn’t use them.”

When I speak to them, lesbians who say this seem to be under the impression that bisexuals must have our own history and culture and words that are all perfectly nice, so why can’t we just use those without poaching someone else’s?

And often, they’re really shocked when I tell them: We don’t. We can’t. I’d love to; it’s not possible.

“Lesbian” used to be a word that simply meant a woman who loved other women. And until feminism, very, very few women had the economic freedom to choose to live entirely away from men. Lesbian bars that began in the 1930s didn’t interrogate you about your history at the door; many of the women who went there seeking romantic or sexual relationships with other women were married to men at the time. When The Daughters of Bilitis formed in 1955 to work for the civil and political wellbeing of lesbians, the majority of its members were closeted, married women, and for those women, leaving their husbands and committing to lesbian partners was a risky and arduous process the organization helped them with. Women were admitted whether or not they’d at one point truly loved or desired their husbands or other men–the important thing was that they loved women and wanted to explore that desire.

Lesbian groups turned against bisexual and pansexual women as a class in the 1970s and 80s, when radical feminists began to teach that to escape the Patriarchy’s evil influence, women needed to cut themselves off from men entirely. Having relationships with men was “sleeping with the enemy” and colluding with oppression. Many lesbian radical feminists viewed, and still view, bisexuality as a fundamentally disordered condition that makes bisexuals unstable, abusive, anti-feminist, and untrustworthy.

(This despite the fact that radical feminists and political lesbians are actually a small fraction of lesbians and wlw, and lesbians do tend, overall, to have positive attitudes towards bisexuals.)

That process of expelling bi women from lesbian groups with immense prejudice continues to this day and leaves scars on a lot of bi/pan people. A lot of bisexuals, myself included, have an experience of “double discrimination”; we are made to feel unwelcome or invisible both in straight society, and in LGBT spaces. And part of this is because attempts to build a bisexual/pansexual community identity have met with strong resistance from gays and lesbians, so we have far fewer books, resources, histories, icons, organizations, events, and resources than gays and lesbians do, despite numerically outnumbering them..

So every time I hear that phrase, it’s another painful reminder for me of all the experiences I’ve had being rejected by the lesbian community. But bisexual experiences don’t get talked about or signalboosted much,so a lot of young/new lesbians literally haven’t learned this aspect of LGBT+ history.

And once I’ve explained it, I’ve had a heartening number of lesbians go, “That’s not what I wanted to happen, so I’m going to stop saying that.”

[jenniferrpovey]

Nothing I could add would improve this, so just leaving it here ;).

[forlornmelody]

Not to derail this post, because it has a LOT of good discussion points and history that I love, but: 

We bi/pan women do have our own terms–they’re just not as well circulated. But of course, we get accused of “copying” butch/femme labels. So, ya know, we can’t win when talking with biphobes. 

[star-anise]

Anyone who wants to use those new terms is perfectly free to! However, I really don’t think they should be proposed as a “peaceable alternative”. They are not good terms to put onto another person. Like, at an LGBT event I’d describe a stranger by saying, “Someone just walked by–a relatively butch looking person, 5′2?” but I would not describe an unknown person as a “stag”, “doe,” or “tomcat”.

The new terms were invented five years ago by two people on Tumblr who were caving to TERF/TIRF pressure, and don’t seem to have run them by many people before proposing them. Because now, a lot of bi/pan women/enbies who encounter them are opposed to them on multiple levels, including “I am not a deer,” “Stags and tomcats are wildly hypersexual male animals,” “My wife and I have called ourselves butch/femme for 30 years and I don’t see why I should have to stop just because I’m bi,” and “I’m a POC in a group that’s been historically dehumanized by calling us animals, so, no.”

[imfemalewarrior]

For context: This post and this post, as well as posts linked in those posts, help summarize and give context to the ongoing situation better than I ever will, and what I am about to say has probably been said by others and more eloquently than me, but I digress. 

I find that since it’s TERFs who have started this rhetoric and are working to isolate LGBT+/queer youth (especially young lesbians who don’t have access to IRL queer/LGBT+ spaces), and since they are the first person to really talk with these people (with the express purpose of indoctrinating them with TERF ideology and revisionist history) they become the authority to “educate” the youth they target. Then we have a bunch of teenagers who believe they know better than we do about the labels and identities we use and genuinely believe they are educating everyone; from young adults to elders to other LGBT+ youth who also don’t know any better. Then when we rightfully get angry at having someone else try to tell us what we can and can’t use as a label/identity (a major faux pas for any LGBT+/queer youth following me) then we just prove TERFs right in what they tell these youth they recruit, that we are hostile towards lesbians (we really aren’t, we get rightfully angry at being told what labels we can can can’t use, especially since our elders encourage everyone to use whatever labels work the best for us, and teach us to support and accept others’ labels and NOT telling others what to use and not use). 

This puts the burden of proof on those of us using the labels queer, butch, and femme; all of which have been used by pretty much everyone in the queer community since their inception. This also means we have to expend emotional labor and dedicate time to re-educating the youth and explaining an entire history to them that they think they already know, and we have to use trusted sources as well, and spend time pulling up those sources and linking them. And we have to do this for every. Single. Individual that has been indoctrinated like this and comments TERF rhetoric on our posts telling us what we can and can’t use for ourselves. 

That gets pretty exhausting after the first person; I’m tired from typing just this up. That’s why TERFs keep doing it, because they know nobody has unlimited emotional energy to expend on this front, and they also know labels are an intensely personal choice and it’s a way to instantly make us see red and get emotional (which we are within our rights to do). 

-FemaleWarrior, She/They 

[aftabkaran]

Help us by spreading information

[teashoesandhair]

Now that JK has proven herself to be the jk we always knew she was, here is a list of incredible fiction by trans authors, because the best way to tell JK to shove her bigotry where the sun don’t shine is to buy the work of authors who deserve her platform. 

The Tensorate Series - JY Yang: four fantasy novellas about the guild of Tensors, magic users who can control elemental forces known as the Slack. V political, v beautifully written. Gender is a key theme but also there are dragons (naga), so there’s something for everyone tbh. 

Love Beyond Body, Space And Time - anthology: a collection of indigenous sci-fi / spec fic stories with LGBTQ and two-spirit characters and themes. Stories include narratives of transition, love stories, and just good ol’ space romps. 

The Merry Spinster: Tales of Everyday Horror - Daniel M. Lavery: a collection of fairytale retellings with a spooky and disturbing twist. Some of these are darkly comic, and others are just plain dark. All are beautifully written, because Lavery is just That Writer. 

The Spirits Series - Jordan L Hawk: a very spicy paranormal romance trilogy about Henry Strauss, an inventor, and Vincent Night, a psychic, whose differing approaches to communing with the dead cause (I’m so sorry) friction. These ones ain’t for the kiddies, but they’re so good and spooky.

The Mechanical Universe - EE Ottoman: a romance series (w a trans male protag!) set in a sort of steampunk universe, where spellcraft and mechanical animation are vying for equal respect. Tbh, everything by EE Ottoman is Very Good And Trans - The Doctor’s Discretion is my personal fave. Recommend 100%.

Peter Darling - Austin Chant: a trans retelling of Peter Pan, where Peter returns to Neverland to find that his place there is now much less certain than it was before, and he no longer belongs anywhere. There is also a romance with Captain Hook, but it works! I promise! 

The Danielle Cain series - Margaret Killjoy: a duology of novellas following Danielle Cain, a queer punk rock nomad, as she solves spooky mysteries. The first book is set in an anarchist settlement, and the theme of found family + community is prevalent throughout. 

An Unkindness of Ghosts - Rivers Solomon: on board the spaceship HSS Matilda, the last of humanity make their journey towards the Promised Land. Conditions on board are akin to the Antebellum South, and protagonist Aster is driven to find her way off the ship - if she can. 

I Wish You All the Best - Mason Deaver: a non binary teen, Ben, comes out to their parents and is kicked out. Their sister takes them in and they start a new school, where their life begins to change for the better. This one is v sweet and deals well with mental illness. 

Resilience - anthology: a collection of poetry and prose by trans women and amab trans people, featuring work by Casey Plett, KOKUMO, Magpie Leibowitz and many more. 

Small Beauty - jia qing wilson-yang: a mixed race Chinese trans woman returns to her small town Canada home after the death of her cousin, and she deals with her trauma and grief. Beautiful and sad, and absolutely honest about grief. 

Little Fish - Casey Plett: a trans woman begins to believe that her late Mennonite grandfather may have been trans, and while her own life starts to cave in, she attempts to connect with him through those who knew him. This one is A Lot but it’s phenomenal.

A Boy Called Cin - Cecil Wilde: a romance novel (so it’s SPICY) about Cin, a young trans man, and Tom, an older genderqueer billionaire. This is not your typical billionaire romance AT ALL; healthy relationships are depicted beautifully here alongside the reality of transition.

Confessions of the Fox - Jordy Rosenberg: a retelling of Jack Sheppard, the famous jailbreaker and thief. It’s told as though a trans man has discovered a manuscript about Jack (who is trans) and Jack’s story unfolds alongside the personal narrative of the manuscript discoverer. 

Nameless Woman - anthology: a collection of fiction by trans women of colour. There’s something for everyone here - romance, sci fi, personal narratives and more. A lot of the topics covered are very heavy but they’re treated honestly and sensitively. 

Maiden, Mother, Crone - anthology: a collection of fantasy stories about trans women and femmes. You want a story about a dread trans chthonic goddess? Of course you do. It’s right here. Enjoy. 

Caroline’s Heart - Austin Chant: a romance between a trans man (a COWBOY nonetheless) and a trans woman (a WITCH). Cecily has been trying to bring her lover, Caroline, back from the dead via magic, but when Roy gives his life to save her, she has a choice to make. 

The Queen of Cups - Ren Basel: a novelette about Theo, who’s about to set sail on their first voyage. As per their village’s custom, they ask the Oracle to bless their voyage, and she agrees - if she can come along. A great treatise on bravery, loyalty and independence. 

Amateur - Thomas Page McBee: not fiction, but OH WELL!! You gotta read it!! The autobiography of a trans man who learns to box and asks questions about what kind of man he wants to be; can he avoid repeating the toxic masculinity he fears? 

Trans Power - Juno Roche: also not fiction! Oops! Take me to court!! Roche interviews multiple trans people about their relationships with their transness, their sexuality and their bodies, and the result is a super empowering and beautiful book. 

The Shape of My Name - Nino Cipri: a novelette about time travel. I really can’t say much about this one because it’s better to go in without knowing a lot, but the main theme is self discovery and acceptance, especially within the context of a neglectful / abusive family. 

Pet - Akwaeke Emezi: the children in the city of Lucille know that there are no more monsters. They’ve been told so. So when Jam meets Pet, who definitely seems to be a monster, she has to face the problem of saving the world from something that it refuses to admit exists. 

There are obviously many more trans fiction authors out there, but these are the ones I’ve read and can call to mind immediately. On my to read list are Juno Dawson (who writes YA primarily), Kai Cheng Thom (whose story in Maiden, Mother, Crone was my favourite), Meredith Russo (also writes YA), Leslie Feinberg, and Sybil Lamb.

I haven’t included trans poets here because I feel like that’s a separate list in and of itself, but if anyone wants to add any, please feel free!

[bisexualbaker]

Plugging Ana Mardoll: No Man of Woman Born (“[A] collection of seven fantasy stories in which transgender and nonbinary characters subvert and fulfill gendered prophecies. These prophecies recognize and acknowledge each character’s gender, even when others do not.”) and Survival Route (second book in the Earthside series, but can be read on its own; in the series humans are kidnapped by faeries and forced into slavery. This book involves a gladiator-combat-and-”reward” type situation, and the daring escape the humans make together) both feature trans main characters. Audio options are available for all of xer books!

Also plugging Xan West, who does a lot more character-centric work: I’ve read Nine of Swords Reversed (Two disabled genderfluid mages are having relationship problems, and get help from a third by way of a Tarot reading), and am about two-thirds of the way through Their Troublesome Crush (An autistic trans boy finds himself falling in love with one of his metamours). They just published a new Chanukah-themed story as well!

[seth-the-hobbit]

Just adding other responses:

The slice of life webcomic Rain by Jocelyn Samara is about a trans girl, Rain, trying to get through high school stealth.

I Am J by Cris Beam. I wasn’t a huge fan but it is by a trans author so may as well add it to the list.

[teashoesandhair]

Thank you for collating those responses!!

I’ll also add the following that I forgot to include before:

Jonny Appleseed - Joshua Whitehead: Jonny, a young two-spirit indigenous queer person, is living in the big city at last. When he has to return to the reservation he grew up on to attend his stepfather’s funeral, the conflict between his new and old lives comes to a head.

Nevada - Imogen Binnie: a trans woman is dumped by her girlfriend and goes on a sort of road trip of self discovery. It’s less inspirational and cheerful than it sounds; I’d say it’s mostly a black comedy.

Darkling - Brooklyn Ray: m/m romance with a trans protag! Witches! Necromancy! It’s all here! This is the first part in a series.

Lord of the Last Heartbeat - May Peterson: a high fantasy novel with a non binary protag. I’m not normally a huge fantasy fan but this one’s a good ‘un. There’s also… murder.

[teashoesandhair]

Some others I forgot!

Robins in the Night - Dajo Jago: an alt historical (i.e. not period authentic) retelling of Robin Hood from the perspective of Maid Marian, who is a trans woman. It’s not exactly a comedy, but also isn’t exactly… not. It’s hard to pin down. It’s funny except for where it’s tragic, and it’s tragic except for where it’s funny. There are also a lot of snails. If you like molluscs and trans heroines, then you’ll like this one.

Cemetery Boys - Aiden Thomas: this one isn’t out yet, but I’m recommending it purely based on how incredible it looks. It’s a YA novel about Yadriel, a trans Latinx boy who accidentally summons a ghost who won’t leave. Obviously, they fall in love. Because of course they do. I’m super excited for this one and preordered it as soon as the link was available, and I highly recommend you do too.

Who I Was With Her - Nita Tyndall: this is another one that’s not out yet, but US folk can preorder it from Barnes and Noble (us poor UK plebs must alas wait a while). Tyndall is bisexual and non binary, and this YA novel follows a closeted bisexual teenage girl whose secret girlfriend is killed in a car accident, and her journey with a grief she can’t talk about. It’s going to be phenomenal and I’m ridiculously excited for it. If you can, preorder it!

Juniper Lane - Dylan Morrison: important caveat: this book is only available under the author’s dead name, because the publisher is no longer active. I’m recommending it (after having sought advice on whether or not to do so!) because it’s genuinely a good book, following a young woman, Mim, who moves in with her wealthy, eccentric aunt after a breakup. In her new, affluent suburb, Mim meets Nadia, and the two of them become friends. And then more, obviously.

All the Birds in the Sky - Charlie Jane Anders: a world where science and magic are constantly at odds. The protagonists are a cynical scientist and a vigilante witch. It’s kind of weird as hell and hard to define - sci fi??? Dystopian??? Fantasy??? All of the above??? Yes, is the answer. Probably.

Bad Boy - Elliot Wake: Renard Grant is a famous trans YouTube celebrity, but he’s also secretly a vigilante who takes down abusers and oppressors. When he’s accused of being complicit in the thing he’s dedicated his life to shutting down, he has to clear his name and come to terms with his own actions. There’s a lot in here about transition, especially in the public eye, and although it’s a heavy book, it’s pacey.

River of Teeth - Sarah Gailey: Gailey has a few books out, but I’m only familiar with River of Teeth (which has a sequel that I’ve not read). And I’m going to give it to you straight: this book is about an alternative Louisiana in the 1890s where a government hippo-breeding programme has gone terribly wrong, and led to a pestilence of bloodthirsty hippopotami. The cast is gloriously diverse, and it’s a weirdly fluffy read (weird in an unexpected way, not a bad way) so if you’re looking for a serious dystopia, then this isn’t it, but it’s a fun ride.

Chasing a Ghost - DA Ravenscroft: a Les Mis sequel novel. In this version, some of Les Amis d’ABC survived the barricades, and went on to lead lives outside of their activism. Combeferre goes in search of Enjolras, whom he believes to be dead, and the story unspools from there. It definitely helps if you know a bit about Les Mis before you get into this one, but a. it’s not necessary (it works as a standalone because it’s all set up well enough) and b. you could just… watch the musical… like a heathen. (It’s me; I am the heathen). It also has Enjolras as a gay trans man, basically everyone is queer, and yes, this is ExR. You are so welcome.

[cypher386]

Tumblr’s very own @natalieironside “The Last Girl Scout”, adventures of a gender diverse crew in post apocalyptic America. Luckily, this was a book about people and their relationships, with an occasional bit of nod to genre or trope. Warning, this is not a light heated run the countryside. I had to stop reading a couple of times, because I didn’t want anything to happen to the characters. There is no drama without loss. No success without risk, no redemption without sin and no forgiveness without love. I can’t wait to read more.

[darlingsweetprince]

the author of the tensorate series now goes by Neon Yang (absolutely incredible chosen name)

also check out Rebecca Roanhorse’s Black Sun - it’s fantasy set in pre-contact mesoamerica, with an interesting magic system and some fascinating queer characters. the gods are engaged in a battle for control over the world which plays out through human avatars and there’s some really interesting politicking going on as a B plot

[teashoesandhair]

Reblogging this version for Neon Yang’s updated name! I don’t think any other authors on the list have changed names or pronouns but please let me know if anything is outdated as I don’t want to deadname or misgender anyone, even through the passage of time.

I also want to reblog this to remove my recommendation of Brooklyn Ray from the list above, as they were outed for being abusive to authors of colour, and then adopting a new penname and pretending to be Latinx after I made this post, and their books have all subsequently been withdrawn from publication. I don’t feel comfortable recommending their books for these reasons.

While I’m here, I might as well add a few new faves, as the original post is several years old by now and there are plenty of new ones:

People Change - Vivek Shraya - a book-length essay about the importance of change and the problems of stagnation, told through a trans-feminine lens.

Love and Other Disasters - Anita Kelly - a f/nb romance about two contestants on a Bake-Off style reality show. Kelly also has a bunch of other romances out, all with nonbinary characters. Thoroughly recommend them as they’re adorable.

The Deep - Rivers Solomon - a novella based on a song by clipping. about the descendants of enslaved African women who were thrown overboard. It’s all about the dual burden and privilege of memory, and it’s a beautiful, heavy book.

the Whyborne and Griffin series by Jordan L Hawke - an m/m horror romance series about a monster-hunter and an all-powerful sort-of-wizard-sort-of-monster who just wants a sit down and a nice cup of tea.

The Truth About Me - A. Revathi - the memoir of a trans woman / hijra (she uses both terms in the book) from a small village in India. This one is very heavy on potentially triggering content but it’s an enlightening read about what it’s like to be a trans woman in India.

Care Of - Ivan Coyote - a sort of self-care book told through letters, all about queer joy and queer comfort in times of upheaval. Very uplifting, very generous, very affirming.

Wrath Goddess Sing - Maya Deane - this one is coming out very very soon, but I’m preemptively recommending it because it’s a trans retelling of The Iliad, and therefore I think we can all agree: yes.

Tell Me I’m Worthless - Alison Rumfitt - a pastiche of the haunted house novel, in which Britain is the house and it’s haunted by fascism. Please read the trigger warnings available online for this one, because it’s a lot, but it’s also a really interesting queer take on an established genre.

Manhunt - Gretcher Falkner-Martin - as above, this one needs to be approached with an awareness of the potentially triggering content. It’s a dystopian novel and a trans take on the ‘gender plague’ genre that so often just totally ignores the existence of trans people.

Detransition, Baby - Torrey Peters - I mean, you’ve definitely heard of this one, but anyway: a novel about a detransitioned trans woman, his (the pronouns used in the book and by the character - no misgendering here) pregnant girlfriend, and his trans ex-girlfriend, who are all trying to navigate the prospect of motherhood on their own terms. Everyone under the sun called this one ‘whip-smart’ when it came out, which is the most pretentious adjective ever, but also very apt.

The Transgender Issue - Shon Faye - an analysis of the climate of transphobia in the UK, and a manifesto for trans justice. Incredibly incisive and timely.

The Subtweet - Vivek Shraya - a novella about two friends, both rising stars in the music industry, who experience a traumatic friend break-up after one of them subtweets the other. It sounds vapid, but it’s really not; it’s a great depiction of friendship, particularly between women, in the online age.

Please, Miss: A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Penis - Grace Lavery - sort of a memoir of trans womanhood, but also sort of the weirdest thing you’ll ever read? There are clowns? Robots? Lots and lots of sex? How does one even discuss this book.

Something That May Shock and Discredit You - Daniel Lavery - an essay collection which skirts between cultural criticism and transmasculine memoir. There is also William Shatner. Lavery used to edit The Toast, so the writing here is impeccable.

I Hope We Choose Love - Kai Cheng Thom - a short essay collection about transformative justice and queer community. This one really opened my braincells to new ways of holding people accountable and working together in a community. Everything Kai Cheng Thom writes is great - her autofiction novel Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars is also phenomenal.

Also, if I may, as OP, include a small plug for my Instagram account (ayearofreadingqueer,) where I collate various queer literature and review it - there might be some books by trans authors on there that I’ve forgotten to include here, because I’m a tit.

Sorry this post is so long, but it is at least long because of all the great, great books, and not just because of a photo of some clouds.

[somecunttookmyurl]

what addons do you use for firefox? i've just downloaded it to switch from chrome (derogatory)

firefox (affectionate)

UBlock Origin obviously. out-the-box works just fine but has a bunch of extra privacy/tracking/spam filters you can enable

Decentraleyes protects you against tracking through "free" curated content delivery and works alongside UBlock (or any of the other common adblocking addons)

I Don't Care About Cookies good for EU users where GDPR made it so every site ever in the universe asks you to accept cookies and privacy terms seventeen times a day. will just auto-accept for you. never see an annoying popup again! but only use in conjunction with...

Cookie Auto Delete does what it says on the tin. will automatically flush cookies, cache, and data when you close a tab. those cookies you just auto accepted? they're gone now. whitelist any sites you wanna stay logged in on and let the rest fucking perish

Don't Track Me Google removes that annoying link conversion when you copy google results. you know when it changes from "site.com" to "encrypted.google.com/randomnonsensefor200charactersblahblahblah"? yeah. this stops that happening. fuck off, google.

Don't Accept image/webp blocks sites from using the most useless file extension known to mankind so you can save as .jpg or .gif as god intended. fuck webp. seriously. what even is that.

Bypass Paywalls Clean exactly what you think it is

HTTPS Everywhere automatically adds ecrypted security to any site that supports https (you can do this manually by adding the s yourself to any url but... who can be fuckin bothere amirite? this does it for you)

New XKit ...duh

Google Search Filter allows you to remove domains from your searches forever. pinterest? gone. weheartit? nuked. also works on duckduckgo. never type "-pinterest" into a search again.

Simple Tab Groups allows you to group tabs together and shove them out of sight, which is nice if you're researching something and don't want 50 bajillion jstor tabs clogging up your normal browsing session

[crinoid]

One Tab is simple and great if you're tab hoarder!!

[dduane]

Re the .webp blocker/interferer: THANKYOUTHANKYOUTHANKYOUOHGOD. :)

[urparty]

tiny brain: brooklyn nine nine isnt cop propaganda

average brain: brooklyn nine nine IS cop propaganda and that means u cant watch it

giant brain: brooklyn nine nine is absolutely cop propaganda and 1 episode about the treatment of black people by cops in no way fixes that, however i still watch and enjoy it because i am a mature person with critical thinking skills who understands that boycotting every problematic piece of media is a fruitless endeavor. especially because boycotting b99 specifically would mean sacrificing the many other great things it brings to tv, including its humor, its diversity, its strong & well-rounded female characters, its presentation of healthy friendships & relationships, its subversion of harmful stereotypes, and its constant social commentary on political issues such as transphobia, gun control, flaws in the prison system etc which other shows wouldnt DARE touch

[seashellronan]

galaxy brain: BOOOooooOOoooNE!!

[actualmermaid]

Interdimensional Brain: B99 has had plots and subplots about the problems with the police as an institution since it started. The episode that was specifically about racial profiling wasn’t anything new for the show, which has consistently featured “good guys who are cops” as its protagonists instead of a simplistic “cops are the good guys” narrative, making it very much not propaganda. It isn’t “cop propaganda” any more than The Office is “capitalist propaganda” or Parks and Recreation is “state propaganda.” Let’s realize that a workplace comedy being set in an institution you disagree with doesn’t make it propaganda.

[redbookreports]

The idea that there could be good guys who are cops is already ideological in a way that is not true for paper sales reps or local government.

[anarcho-queer]

Huey Newton’s Thoughts On Gay Rights

This was a speech given August 15 1970 by Huey Newton co-founder of the Black Panther Party, here he addresses the issue of Gay Rights:

During the past few years strong movements have developed among women and among homosexuals seeking their liberation. There has been some uncertainty about how to relate to these movements.

Whatever your personal opinions and your insecurities about homosexuality and the various liberation movements among homosexuals and women (and I speak of the homosexuals and women as oppressed groups), we should try to unite with them in a revolutionary fashion. I say ” whatever your insecurities are” because as we very well know, sometimes our first instinct is to want to hit a homosexual in the mouth, and want a woman to be quiet. We want to hit a homosexual in the mouth because we are afraid that we might be homosexual; and we want to hit the women or shut her up because we are afraid that she might castrate us, or take the nuts that we might not have to start with.

We must gain security in ourselves and therefore have respect and feelings for all oppressed people. We must not use the racist attitude that the White racists use against our people because they are Black and poor. Many times the poorest White person is the most racist because he is afraid that he might lose something, or discover something that he does not have. So you’re some kind of a threat to him. This kind of psychology is in operation when we view oppressed people and we are angry with them because of their particular kind of behavior, or their particular kind of deviation from the established norm.

Remember, we have not established a revolutionary value system; we are only in the process of establishing it. I do not remember our ever constituting any value that said that a revolutionary must say offensive things towards homosexuals, or that a revolutionary should make sure that women do not speak out about their own particular kind of oppression. As a matter of fact, it is just the opposite: we say that we recognize the women’s right to be free. We have not said much about the homosexual at all, but we must relate to the homosexual movement because it is a real thing. And I know through reading, and through my life experience and observations that homosexuals are not given freedom and liberty by anyone in the society. They might be the most oppresed people in the society.

And what made them homosexual? Perhaps it’s a phenomenon that I don’t understand entirely. Some people say that it is the decadence of capitalism. I don’t know if that is the case; I rather doubt it. But whatever the case is, we know that homosexuality is a fact that exists, and we must understand it in its purest form: that is, a person should have the freedom to use his body in whatever way he wants.

That is not endorsing things in homosexuality that we wouldn’t view as revolutionary. But there is nothing to say that a homosexual cannot also be a revolutionary. And maybe I’m now injecting some of my prejudice by saying that “even a homosexual can be a revolutionary.” Quite the contrary, maybe a homosexual could be the most revolutionary.

When we have revolutionary conferences, rallies, and demonstrations, there should be full participation of the gay liberation movement and the women’s liberation movement. Some groups might be more revolutionary than others. We should not use the actions of a few to say that they are all reactionary or counterrevolutionary, because they are not.

We should deal with the factions just as we deal with any other group or party that claims to be revolutionary. We should try to judge, somehow, whether they are operating in a sincere revolutionary fashion and from a really oppressed situation. (And we will grant that if they are women they are probably oppressed.) If they do things that are unrevolutionary or counterrevolutionary, then criticize that action. If we feel that the group in spirit means to be revolutionary in practice, but they make mistakes in interpretation of the revolutionary philosophy, or they do not understand the dialectics of the social forces in operation, we should criticize that and not criticize them because they are women trying to be free. And the same is true for homosexuals. We should never say a whole movement is dishonest when in fact they are trying to be honest. They are just making honest mistakes. Friends are allowed to make mistakes. The enemy is not allowed to make mistakes because his whole existence is a mistake, and we suffer from it. But the women’s liberation front and gay liberation front are our friends, they are our potential allies, and we need as many allies as possible.

We should be willing to discuss the insecurities that many people have about homosexuality. When I say “insecurities,” I mean the fear that they are some kind of threat to our manhood. I can understand this fear. Because of the long conditioning process which builds insecurity in the American male, homosexuality might produce certain hang-ups in us. I have hang-ups myself about male homosexuality. But on the other hand, I have no hang-up about female homosexuality. And that is a phenomenon in itself. I think it is probably because male homosexuality is a threat to me and female homosexuality is not.

We should be careful about using those terms that might turn our friends off. The terms “faggot” and “punk” should be deleted from our vocabulary, and especially we should not attach names normally designed for homosexuals to men who are enemies of the people, such as Nixon or Mitchell. Homosexuals are not enemies of the people.

We should try to form a working coalition with the gay liberation and women’s liberation groups. We must always handle social forces in the most appropriate manner.

[swanjolras-blog-archive-deactiv]

okay jesus fuck this conversation has gone far enough so:

hey, so you like bernie sanders! i like bernie sanders too! i agree with his politics! he is doing better than people expected in the democratic primaries, which is cool!

what are you going to do if he loses?

because given the tone of the conversations i hear on this website right now– given the sheer hatred of hillary that’s emerging, given the overwhelming feeling that bernie sanders is amazing and the messiah and the only candidate that’s worth voting for in america– here’s what i see happening in mid-2016:

bernie sanders, who despite his better-than-expected performance still has an unbelievably low chance of winning the primaries, loses the primaries to hillary clinton

the leftist wing of the democratic party (that’s us– tumblr, yeah, but also the whole occupy-black lives matter-third wave feminist-young educated millennials crowd), having spent the past 10 months campaigning against hillary clinton, is overwhelmingly disappointed

while a few people are willing to bite the bullet and campaign for hillary, energy is low, disillusionment is high, and many leftist americans don’t campaign, don’t donate, and don’t vote (or vote for third-party candidates, like the green party or the peace and freedom party)

the republican party wins the presidential election.

(i literally shivered as i typed that last bullet point, btw– i know there are people voting in 2016 who were ten years old when obama was elected, and y’all may not remember much of the bush years. i was only 13 when bush left, but jesus christ– remember when hurricane katrina was overwhelmingly badly handled? remember when the patriot act passed? remember when the housing bubble collapsed? remember when the president said god told him to invade iraq? y’all wanna do that again?)

so what are you going to do if bernie sanders loses?

i need you to think about that now. i need you to not be surprised when it happens. i need you to not put all your hopes in one basket.

you think the gop won’t be pouring all their resources into this election? you think the superpacs and the koch brothers and the oil lobbyists won’t be throwing their money at ballot boxes until they spit out the result they want? you think the rich and powerful and conservative won’t be bringing their best game? 

they will, and if we don’t work twice as hard as they do– no matter who the democratic nominee is– we are fucked.

i need you to be okay with the idea of hillary clinton being president of the united states, and i need you to make peace with that before she wins the primaries, so that you’re prepared and ready to campaign for her with all your might if she’s the democratic nominee.

because i honest-to-god believe this country will not survive another four, eight, twelve years of a republican administration.

[endquestionmark]

#remember ralph nader? #I FUCKING WELL REMEMBER RALPH NADER #WE’RE NOT DOING THAT AGAIN. (via swanjolras)

my hand to god i have seen so many posts on my dash that have been both heartbreakingly optimistic and absolutely mind-bogglingly uninformed (and naive, but that comes with time; information comes with googling the way the government of your own country works. fun fact: not all primaries are open primaries! i know! this is inconsistent! it is also the world that we live in and i don’t think we’re going to get around to redesigning the electoral system before november 2016. just saying) and, like every election year, i have sat down and thought, albeit briefly, about this possibility:

the republican party wins the presidential election.

that is not a possibility that i can or will accept. i know we like to mythologize our figures here and put them on can-do-no-wrong pedestals, but, for god’s sake, to paraphrase: can we live in the real fucking world here, please? by all means, know that we can do better. by all means, know that we should. but here are some facts:

the us electoral system is not going to change by november 2016.

the notes on your tumblr post about bernie sanders’ ideology are not going to translate to votes.

those votes are not as big a percentage of the voting population as you think they are.

even if they were, bernie sanders is not going to be able to wave a magic wand and:

turn those ideas into policies

get those policies signed into law

get those laws implemented

they aren’t going to be perfect anyway.

can you imagine the reactionary voting in the election immediately following that anyway.

this is not how politics works. you don’t vote a politician into office and then stand back and watch the world fix itself! you don’t get to do that. it takes work and it takes time and it takes, sometimes, the willingness to accept and keep pushing through lowered expectations. i’m happy for your optimism and i’m happy for your energy. we need those! don’t lose them. do, however, remember that there is context to this, because we live, again, in the real fucking world.

[swanjolras-blog-archive-deactiv]

#i have read posts calling hillary clinton problematic.#i fully expect an edit of bernie sanders in a flower crown to cross my dash sooner or later.#real. world. (via endquestionmark)

[kata-chthonia]

THIS.

FUCKING THIS.

FUCKING EVERYTHING ABOUT THIS.

And this has an embarrassingly low number of notes.

I know how a lot of people here feel about Hilary. If I had my druthers, I would MUCH rather have Bernie Sanders as president because his politics so closely align with my own. Like, stunningly close. A-breath-of-fresh-air close.

But consider these words from an ancient, jaded, 34 year old fuck who voted for Ralph Nader in 2000…

NONE OF US agreed with Gore. I mean, not really, at least. He was Republican-lite. First off, his wife Tipper was a friggin’ censorship Nazi, Gore was a Southern Baptist who was mum on gay rights, and while he gave lip service to climate change, please note that An Inconvenient Truth had not been produced or filmed, and there wasn’t much in the way of supporting the Kyoto protocols in his platform. He supported the limited military action in Iraq, supported NAFTA, and supported driving our production overseas. There wasn’t much to his platform other than “less scary alternative to Bush”. In other words, he was problematic as hell.

Then there was Ralph Nader, a consumer rights advocate, a proponent of gay marriage before it became a mainstream cause to champion, against NAFTA, spoke out against the military industrial complex, was pro-union, and anti-corporate.

And I voted for him. Proudly. In the general election. My reasoning was that nearly everyone I knew was voting for him (and everyone I knew were fellow college age leftists) so if enough of us got together and enough of us wanted that change to happen, then it would, right?

“Well, we’re talking about the primaries,” I can already hear you say. And yes, we are. But consider this: if Bernie ends up not winning the primaries, and no one turns out to the polls to vote for Hilary so they can “make a statement” or because she’s “problematic”, or turns out and votes Green or some other third Party for those same reasons, then history will repeat itself with disastrous consequences.

Here’s what happened on election night, November 7, 2000:

We waited.  We watched Gore lose in battleground state after battleground state by just about the same number of votes that went to Ralph fucking Nader. Bush took all the dip shits who thought he’d be a swell feller to have a beer with. And then Florida and the recount and the Republican Party-led coup that stormed the voting recount, triggered the Supreme Court ruling and handed George W. Bush control of the country.

The first thing Bush did was reverse each and every executive order Clinton had put in place over the protestations of a crybaby Republican Congress, and most of those executive orders were designed to protect the middle class from corporate America and protect our budget surplus from the military industrial complex. Then Bush instituted legalized class warfare: the tax cuts that benefited the wealthy and still do to this day.

Then 9/11 happened.

If you’re 22 right now, then in 2001 you were 8 years old. In 2001, I was 20. I watched friends of mine who had joined the military because there were few other opportunities for them after high school get shipped to Iraq and Afghanistan and get their limbs blown off by IUDs. There are people I knew, people I ate lunch with every day, who are FUCKING DEAD right now.

This country was an unchecked fascist dictatorship for six years. Don’t believe me? Here’s the dictionary definition of fascism. And here’s what happened during the Bush regime.

Torture. Suppression of the press. Siphoning the nation’s wealth to the upper 1%, creating our current aristocracy. Investments made by principle members of the Bush regime in for-profit military-industrial corporations that were tasked with murdering hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. Sunsetting the assault weapons ban. The Defense of Marriage Act. The creation of the Department of Homeland Security. The loss of an entire city and fucking nothing done about it as people were drowning and starving to death in New Orleans. No Child Left UnTested Behind. A color coded number system on every day of the news telling Americans how frightened they needed to be that day that hilariously enough coincided with how far Bush dipped in the polls that week. He dipped, we went up to terror threat: orange. His poll numbers went back up. Like clockwork.

Between 2001 and 2005 us leftists who thought that there was no different than center-left Democrats and right wing Republicans got hit by a giant clue by four and watched the fucking Republicans dismantle our safety, economic security, and our entire way of life. No, the centrists are not the same. THE DEMOCRATS AND REPUBLICANS ARE NOT THE SAME. One faction sort of listens to us. The other doesn’t give a shit about us and actively promotes policies designed to kill and silence us.

…

So for all the “problematic” that you imagine a Hilary Clinton presidency could be, I want you to imagine a Republican presidency (pick one) in which they want people like us fucking dead as pawns in their war games or fucking dying because they’ve stripped away the Affordable Healthcare Act.

So please Support Bernie Sanders. Support him because if enough leftists make their voices known through his candidacy, then NO MATTER WHAT it will influence the DNC platform next summer. Support him because we’re all passionate about returning America to a thriving, working democracy and flushing out the corporate lobbyist corruption that has held our entire government hostage for a decade.

But if he doesn’t win the primaries then you need to support Hilary Clinton. And I’m not kidding, I’m not being hyperbolic.  If the Republicans win, then you need to start preparing yourself for life under a fascist state.

Hint: it will help if you’re fundamentalist Christian, wealthy, white, straight, male, and cisgender. 

Otherwise, you’re fucked.

[artielu]

All of this. Read it. I also lived through the Nader debacle. Vote for Bernie in the primaries if you agree with him. I like a lot of his politics too. But then you MUST SHOW UP FOR HILLARY IN THE GENERAL ELECTION OR WE WILL END UP WITH A THIRD PRESIDENT BUSH.

Three Supreme Court Justices are very old and may die in the next Presidential term.

www.rockthevote.com

[jackafz]

#RockTheVote

[redbookreports]

I'm not from the U.S., my understanding of this is second hand, but as far as I know most people involved in the Nader campaign knew his chances of winning were nonexistent. They got involved out of a political calculation that an alternative had to be built in the long term so that the choice would stop being (1) let the republicans win (2) let this cheap knock off of the republicans win. Many of the organizations and activists involved in the Nader campaign, plus all the young lefties they spoke to, convinced, and helped politicized are still active politically today. Public opinion in the U.S. is moving leftwards, but only because people have been organizing and fighting back on the ground. It is possible that the lessons and experiences gained from the Nader campaign were a small part of that process. Voting for Clinton sends a message to the Democratic Party that liberals and lefties will vote for them purely on the grounds that they are not republicans even if on almost anything that matters their policies and actions are basically identical. Truth be told, sanders functions as a kind of sheepdog for lefties keeping them within the ambit of the Democratic Party and hence preventing them from doing the long hard work of building some kind of alternative (electoral or otherwise). Things could get more complicated if he wins the primaries, which he probably will not, but strategic voting keeps Americans on the same dull round of oscillating between two parties that are in effect the twin heads of American capitalism. Don't vote for Hillary (or do) either way the key task is building the fight back. And the resistance AGAINST your struggles will be lead by the Oval Office no matter which party gets into it.

[revolutionaryeye]

When gays and Panthers were united

In the late 1960s the Black Panthers and the early gay liberation movement fought against different forms of oppression. But, as Noel Halifax explains, they could find common ground.

In August 1970 in the Black Panthers’ paper Huey Newton wrote “A letter to the Revolutionary Brothers and Sisters about Women’s Liberation and Gay Liberation” arguing that they were fellow revolutionary movements and pledging the Panthers to support gay liberation.

This was unusual for the time as in the 1970s Stalinism and Maoism dominated the left, especially in the US, and they both viewed homosexuality as a bourgeois deviancy — a pastime for the decadent upper classes. So how did this come about?

In the spring of 1970 the Black Panthers were in trouble. They had formed in 1966 in the black neighbourhoods. Following the political explosions of 1968 the US state and the FBI in particular decided to take them out.

They were gunned down, prosecuted and harassed to the point where they were in danger of collapse. Bobby Seale, imprisoned since 1968, was awaiting his second trial. Twenty panthers were arrested in New York for conspiracy against their country (including Erica Huggins who was to give birth in jail to Tupac Shakur the rapper) with bail set at $2.1 million.

Eldridge Cleaver, fearing assassination or arrest, had fled to Cuba and then Algeria. The Panthers faced huge legal fees while at the same time much of their previous left support dried up. It was against this background that the French writer Jean Genet received a phone call. Black Panther David Hilliard rang Genet to ask for his help and support.

Genet’s response was immediate: he asked what he could do and within a week was in the US touring campuses and major cities to raise money. He also castigated the left, and especially the SDS (Students for a Democratic Society, the main student left organisation), for not being more forthcoming in their solidarity with the Panthers.

The three-month tour was remarkable, not least because Genet was in the US illegally. He was refused a visa to enter the US because he was a many times convicted felon and infamous as the world’s most notorious homosexual, not to mention his association with the revolutionary left in France. So he travelled to Canada, slipped over the border and appeared on this grand speaking tour monitored all the way by the FBI. Such was his fame that he was never arrested.

Jean Genet was an orphan left by his prostitute mother, father unknown, and raised in the awful semi-military orphanage system of France in the 1910s. He grew into a thief, a transvestite prostitute, burglar and tramp, living in the gutters of the cities of France and Spain in the 1930s. He loathed respectable French society.

Prison

In 1948 he was in prison with an unlimited sentence. He wrote under the most awful conditions, often on toilet paper. His writings were seen by the French left wing philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre and others, and his case was taken up. Following a campaign he was pardoned and released. His first novel was published just after the war with many to follow in the 1950s and 60s, as well as plays.

He was the epitome of the French existential writer and he was unashamed about his homosexuality. He wrote detailed descriptions of and emotional dramas about gay sex at a time when homosexuality was illegal and at best thought of as an illness except in the fringes of bohemia.

Genet took a keen interest in the Panthers and supported them from the beginning. In 1958 he had written the play Les Negres, translated in 1960 to The Blacks: A Clownshow, a play with an all-black cast and a theme of revenge against the oppressors.

It opened in New York in 1961 and was to run till 1963 when it moved to Montreal. It was a pivotal play for the development of black theatre in America and starred what was to become the cream of black American acting, including James Earl Jones and Maya Angelou.

It was because of this play that Genet had clout within black America. As Angela Davis put it, because of this play we considered him an ally. He was also famous for supporting Algeria against his own country and denouncing French and US imperialism. The only other time Genet had been to the US was in August 1968 when he took part in the gathering of the left and the great riot at the Democratic Convention in Chicago. He witnessed the events, and it was here that he spoke alongside writers William Burroughs and Allan Ginsberg, and first met Black Panthers.

Angela Davis was Genet’s translator on the tour in 1970, and she describes the problems the Panthers faced convincing reluctant white radicals to support them. At UCLA it was advertised that Genet was coming to speak but did not mention he would be there to support the Panthers. A huge, largely white crowd turned up, but when it was clear Genet would not talk about his work, only the Panthers, over half of the audience left.

Davis also remembers that during his tour not only did he not make any secret of his homosexuality, but he deliberately provoked debate — on one occasion by wearing drag — and argued with the Panthers about their homophobia and use of words such as faggot. She believes it was these arguments that later led to Huey Newton’s article in the Panthers’ paper arguing to support gay liberation.

Today the LGBT movement is highly respectable, dominated by the white middle class, with the annual Pride marches in the control of corporations with most of the politics bleached out. This has not always been the case. Neither are the gallant efforts of Genet the only reason the Panthers supported gay liberation.

Movement

A key person at the centre of the riot at the Stonewall Inn in 1969 was Sylvia Rivera. As she describes it, you get the flavour of who made up the gay movement that the Panthers were relating to:

We were led out of the bar and they [the police] cattled us all up against the police vans. The cops pushed us up against the grates and the fences. People started throwing pennies, nickels, and quarters at the cops. And then the bottles started… We were not taking any more of this shit.

It was street gay people from the Village out front — homeless people who lived in the park in Sheridan Square outside the bar — and then drag queens behind them and everybody behind us. The Stonewall Inn telephone lines were cut and they were left in the dark.

It is clear that many of the rioters were Latino like Sylvia Rivera or black like her friend and comrade Marsha P Johnson. From the riot the Gay Liberation Front (GLF) was formed with its own programme and calls for revolution. Sylvia and Marsha also helped to form STAR — Street Transvestites Action Revolutionaries — taking over an empty building to make it a base for the young homeless transvestite street people.

At the People’s Revolutionary Convention in Philadelphia in 1971 Sylvia met with Huey Newton. She says he agreed that such groups as GLF and STAR were revolutionary peoples.

While the Panthers were being won over to support for gay liberation many other left groups coming from a Stalinist or Maoist background still saw the gay movement as “decadent”. But the liberal left also lampooned GLF. The Village Voice, at the time a radical and left paper, joked that the Stonewall riot probably happened because the queens were upset at the death of Judy Garland.

The fact was that the Panthers and the early gay movement were movements from the same class, both from the street, and often the same streets and bars. Before Malcolm X was Malcolm X he was the street hustler and dealer Malcolm Little, hanging out in bars in Boston similar to the Stonewall Inn in New York, mixing with the drag queens and drug dealers and street people and, it seems, having gay lovers and a rich white boyfriend.

The revolutionary black movement of the 1960s and the gay movement had one big thing in common — class, not the industrial organised working class but the disorganised street working class. Both movements came from the streets and their respective ghettoes, which Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P Johnson show were not closed boxes. Sylvia was active in downtown gay Greenwich Village and in Spanish Harlem, being a member of STAR, GLF and Puerto Rican nationalist movement the Young Lords.

On the surface they were very different organisations of the oppressed, relating to the oppressed group as an oppressed group, but organised from the same streets and neighbourhoods. Similarly Marsha was active in GLF and STAR but also in Harlem. Behind the difference of varying oppressions was the similarity of class.

Homeless

These movements were built from and on the streets — out of the closets and onto the streets, as the slogan went. The homeless and drifters, the young people who flee oppressive backgrounds, were joined by a vast number of draft dodgers.

At the time the US had the military draft and for hundreds of thousands of the poor who couldn’t afford to avoid it they fled, going underground. Here was a potential army of disaffected young men and women in the major cities alienated from mainstream society because of the draft and open to revolutionary politics.

The politics of the LGBT and black movements have long moved away from their original base in the politics of this revolutionary but unstable class. The pink economy and the black middle class have ruled their respective roosts for decades.

Recently, however, there have been some stirrings of their revolutionary roots with the unrest in the US over the police killings of young black men and the arguments within this year’s London Pride.

Source:- http://socialistreview.org.uk/404/when-gays-and-panthers-were-united

[redbookreports]

Nice

[justice4mikebrown]

As of June 11, 2015, there have only been 9 days this year when the police did not kill somebody.

mappingpoliceviolence.org

wetheprotesters.org

[myprofisproblematic]

[prettyboyshyflizzy]

Yoooo I’ve watched this man be politically correct and respectful on this issue for years he finally snapped and had his fuck this job moment ✊😄

[stringerbells-deactivated202105]

HOLY SHIT

[alstr0emeriax-blog]

BLESS

[redbookreports]

Holy shit

[redbookreports]

Racism and Resistance in Canada and the US

these are speaking notes for along talk I gave at the start of the year in reaction to the events in Ferguson and New York on how racism works. It covers the invention of anti-black racism in particular and its contemporary basis -- as well as some observations on the struggle against it. I wrote this in Canada for a Canadian audience, so my experience of that struggle is indirect: apart from the historical research, I’m attempting to transfer lessons learned from my side of the border.

I thought that with everything going on in Baltimore right now, some people might be interested.

..............................

The word 'capitalism' describes a society (such as ours) in which the capitalist class owns and controls the means of production and uses this to dominate the rest of us who one way or another are forced to serve their needs, usually as a result of trying to meet our own needs. The needs of the capitalist class as a ruling class are different from the needs of Feudal lords and nobles, from Chinese Emperors and their state functionaries, and from the needs of Greek or Roman warlords. They are forced to find strategies of rule specifically suited to the kind of control and power that they as capitalists wield. My claim is that racism is one such strategy.

This is not to claim that nothing like racial oppression existed in other class societies. The English word 'slave,' for example, comes from the word Slav because when the word emerged in the late 13th century the chief source of bonded chattel labour were people of Slavic descent. On the other hand, members of the Slavic ruling classes also frequently had Slavic slaves. But there isn't some continuous genealogical line between this practice and the trans-Atlantic slave trade that developed in the mid 15th century at the dawn of capitalism. 'Racism' as a form of oppression specifically based upon race is a capitalist invention. When capitalism first emerged it may have found to hand broadly similar kinds of oppression – what we today call anti-Semitism, for example – but in order to make use of such oppressions it was necessary to put them onto a new, capitalist, basis and therefore to transform them. Most of the time, however, it had to go out of its way to create racism more or less from scratch.

This is a process that happened in somewhat different ways across the colonial world. For our purposes, the most important and also, unsurprisingly, the best studied is the invention of race in North America.

The invention of race in North America has 2 key related moments: the genocide and dispossession of the native population by the settlers, and the adoption of slavery as the principle source of labour in large parts of the colonies.

The Native population was imagined by the settlers as a people apart, backwards, in turns barbaric and romantic, and ultimately doomed. Still, for much of colonial history this was not thought of in terms of biological difference. Laws about blood quanta and policies of cultural and biological assimilation developed later.

The same is true of blacks. It is often forgotten that for much of the time that slavery was employed in the US, black slaves worked along side white chattel labour from Ireland, Scotland, and England. White indentured labour was a form of temporary slavery – temporary, that is, if you survived or did not acquire too much accumulating debt. Ideally, such labourers were bonded to planters for 4-7 years during which time they could not quit, could only work for another master if they were given to them by their original one, were given room and board but no wage. Most importantly, they worked side by side with black workers, doing much the same work. Such indentured labour was actually the dominant form of labour among the plantations until just about the end of the 17th century.

During this time, blacks were not imagined as slaves by nature. Like the Slavs of the 13th century, slaves just happened to come from Africa. In fact, “Blacks lived in the colonies in a variety of statuses—some were free, some were slaves, some were servants. The law in Virginia didn’t establish the condition of lifetime, perpetual slavery or even recognize African servants as a group different from white servants until 1661. Blacks could serve on juries, own property, and exercise other rights. Northampton County, Virginia, recognized interracial marriages and, in one case, assigned a free Black couple to act as foster parents for an abandoned white child. There were even a few examples of Black freemen who owned white servants. Free Blacks in North Carolina had voting rights.” [x]

The result of such free and easy association was that when indentured labourers and slaves rebelled against their bondage, they did so together. Such rebellions could often rely on a degree of sympathy from the surrounding free population (many of whom after all had their own experiences of bondage) in a way that future, exclusively black, slave rebellions could not. The most significant such rebellion was Bacon's Rebellion in 1676. “Several hundred farmers, servants, and slaves initiated a protest to press the colonial government to seize Indian land for distribution. The conflict spilled over into demands for tax relief and resentment of the Jamestown establishment. Planter Nathaniel Bacon helped organize an army of whites and Blacks that sacked Jamestown and forced the governor to flee. The rebel army held out for eight months before the Crown managed to defeat and disarm it.” [x]

Such rebellions were often emboldened by the increasing militancy of the class struggle in England which was making it harder and harder to trap citizens in indentured service and encouraging indentured servants in the colonies to assert their rights as Englishmen. It is in this context that plantation masters begin to rely almost exclusively on slave labour from Africa. This lead to a policy of subverting White and Black solidarity by making limited concessions to whites. Especially white freemen whose ranks indentured servants could aspire to join. This is the point at which race is invented. The political supremacy of the planters is now defined as a specifically white supremacy to which poor whites are formally (if not in reality) invited, and Blacks are legally constituted as slaves for life.

This does not begin as an ideology of any sort of moral or biological imperative, but rather as a way of protecting the wealth and power of property owners who happened to have been white. Only after the fact are scientists, philosophers, and preachers engaged to give ideological justification to the arrangement. Thinkers such as Thomas Jefferson write long tracts proving the inferiority of blacks. Tests are administered, measures are taken, armies of amateur historians, biologists, jurists, and thinkers begin to construct in their minds a hierarchy of races, and even hierarchies within hierarchies so that some whites are better than others, some Asians better than other Asians, etc. This ideological construction would be marshalled to justify the conditions of the Welsh, poor Anglos, the Irish, Jews, as well as virtually every subsequent imperialist venture from the late 1600s onwards.

By the time the American Revolution comes in 1776, white supremacy is so well fortified that such stirring claims as “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” simply don't stand a chance. Women, of course, are basically invisible, but uppity Blacks who fought along side American revolutionaries would soon be disabused of any idea that they counted among these self-evidently equal men. What was self evident was the biological fact that every literate schoolboy knew – being black made one a slave.

Self evident to whites, yes. Especially to those very powerful whites who actually owned slaves. Less self-evident to blacks. During the period of American slavery there were approximately 150 different slave rebellions. This does not count what is probably the single largest slave rebellion in history: the American Civil War. What many historians now think of as the second American revolution was also the closest the US ever came to dismantling the system of white supremacy. It is an intensely interesting historical episode involving international solidarity from European workers, among others, as well the most heroic actions of African Americans in both the North and the South. It is a story cowardice and hesitation on the part of the Northern white establishment who are pushed against their own judgement into declaring emancipation by the mass mutinies of the slaves who would simply volunteer at the footsteps of Northern encampments. It is a story of valour, and intrigue, and of the epic struggle for the highest human ideals. And it is a story, of course, which we are going to have to skip.

The immediate aftermath of the Civil War is the period of the “Reconstruction” and it occurs in 2 phases. First there is the Presidential Phase lead my Lincoln's successor, President Andrew Johnson. In this period 'equality' is certainly not on the agenda, cozying up to angry but still very rich and economically important cotton growers is. The second phase is the period of Radical Reconstruction from 1867-1877. “... despite the systematic terror directed at them by the planters in the newly created Ku Klux Klan, … [freed Black men] exercised their hard-won voting rights enthusiastically and with impressive results. According to estimates, around 2,000 African Americans held political office during this period, including members of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives.

“Under the Radical Reconstruction governments elected by Southern Blacks and poor whites, the South for the first time democratized its state constitutions, created a system of free and universal public education, enacted penal reforms, extended greater rights to women, and built some public welfare institutions. These were democratic achievements without precedent in the South.” Benefits which accrued not only to blacks, but to poor whites as well.

“But there was one measure that failed to pass. This was the proposal to give each freedman '40 acres and a mule.'” [x]

This would have broken up the cotton industry – an industry in which many Blacks pointedly refused to keep working! This was obviously unacceptable. Sticking it to your conquered foes is one thing, but actually letting the working class make a social revolution is quite another. The South needed to be opened up for industrialisation, not turned into some rainbow coalition of socialists and anarchists. Worse, some radical republicans (say that with a straight face!) were beginning to mutter that after all perhaps the North could do with a little wealth redistribution as well! Remember, this is the period of the Haymarket martyrs and the demand for the 8 hour day: the working class, North and South were beginning to threaten open insurrection. Against this dangerous coming together of poor whites and freed Blacks, an alliance was struck between the wealthy of both the North and the South.

In 1877 the US government withdrew the federal troops from the South and looked the other way while the former slave-owners, now in the form of the KKK, made their counter revolution. A crucial aspect of Reconstruction is that it was largely an officially state-sanctioned process. Blacks and poor whites were participating in re-creating the Southern state structure, which was tied in many ways (including by funding) to the rest of the federal government. The effect of their programme was revolutionary, but their means were reformist. When support from the Northern Republicans dried up they were unprepared for what came next. By contrast, the rich whites make their comeback via revolutionary means. By sheer force, they rewrite the new constitutions, they institute a regime of paramilitary terror, they take over the electoral system. In the end they disqualify most Blacks as well as most poor whites from voting and utterly destroy what fragile organizations they had managed to form since the end of the Civil War. In the context of a strategy based on government participation, this coup has the effect of totally knocking them off their feet.

The most important ideological tool in cementing the return of the old familiar order is also familiar. Divide and rule. Racism once again secures their victory. In the face of the utter defeat, demoralisation, and outright destruction of those who fought for Reconstruction, poor whites sunk back into their centuries old chauvinism.  Probably the most brilliant historian of this period is the renowned black scholar and activist, W.E.B. du Bois. I will just quote him at length on the results:

'The political success of the doctrine of racial separation, which overthrew Reconstruction by uniting the planter and the poor white, was far exceeded by its astonishing economic results. The theory of laboring class unity rests upon the assumption that laborers, despite internal jealousies, will unite because of their opposition to exploitation by the capitalists. ... This would throw white and black labor into one class, and precipitate a united fight for higher wage and better working conditions.

'Most persons do not realize how far this failed to work in the South, and it failed to work because the theory of race was supplemented by a carefully planned and slowly evolved method, which drove such a wedge between the white and black workers that there probably are not today in the world two groups of workers with practically identical interests who hate and fear each other so deeply and persistently and who are kept so far apart that neither sees anything of common interest.

It must be remembered that the white group of laborers, while they received a low wage, were compensated in part by a sort of public and psychological wage. They were given public deference and tides of courtesy because they were white. They were admitted freely with all classes of white people to public functions, public parks, and the best schools. The police were drawn from their ranks, and the courts, dependent upon their votes, treated them with such leniency as to encourage lawlessness. Their vote selected public officials, and while this had small effect upon the economic situation, it had great effect upon their personal treatment and the deference shown them. White schoolhouses were the best in the community, and conspicuously placed, and they cost anywhere from twice to ten times as much per capita as the colored schools. The newspapers specialized on news that flattered the poor whites and almost utterly ignored the Negro except in crime and ridicule.

'On the other hand, in the same way, the Negro was subject to public insult; was afraid of mobs; was liable to the jibes of children and the unreasoning fears of white women; and was compelled almost continuously to submit to various badges of inferiority. The result of this was that the wages of both classes could be kept low, the whites fearing to be supplanted by Negro labor, the Negroes always being threatened by the substitution of white labor.

'Mob violence and lynching were the inevitable result of the attitude of these two classes and for a time were a sort of permissible Roman holiday for the entertainment of vicious whites. One can see for these reasons why labor organizers and labor agitators made such small headway in the South. They were, for the most part, appealing to laborers who would rather have low wages upon which they could eke out an existence than see colored labor with a decent wage. White labor saw in every advance of Negroes a threat to their racial prerogatives, so that in many districts Negroes were afraid to build decent homes or dress well, or own carriages, bicycles or automobiles, because of possible retaliation on the part of the whites.

'Thus every problem of labor advance in the South was skillfully turned by demagogues into a matter of inter-racial jealousy.'

Speaking frankly, with only a little editing, that could have been written today, and most of it would still be true. One key difference, of course, is that mob lynching is less common. The police have very officially taken over that particular task.

My point is that racism was deliberately developed, fomented, and deployed by the ruling class in order to weaken the ability of workers to challenge their power. This is what I mean when I say that racism is a strategy of rule. It is a strategy which the capitalist class frequently deploys wherever racial divisions make it possible. In the South, it defeated social revolution, but it doesn't need to be so dramatic. In the early 1900s Hawaiian plantation managers were advised to, “Keep a variety of laborers, that is different nationalities, and thus prevent any concerted action in case of strikes, for there are few, if any, cases of Laps, Chinese, and Portuguese entering into a strike as a unit.” [x]

This kind of logic is just as applicable today. In 2009, Tom Flanagan, one of Harper's leading political advisors wrote that “The rapid expansion of natural-resource industries in northern Alberta, accompanied by growing environmentalist and aboriginal-rights movements, raises issues of possible extra-legal and even violent resistance to industrial development. Five potential sources of opposition can be identified: individual saboteurs, eco-terrorists, mainstream environmentalists, First Nations, and the Métis people. … If two or more of the five categories of people described above … came together in a single movement, they could become a serious obstacle to development….” [x] This horrifying and notorious essay is in essence a threat assessment. It documents the strength of these various groups and the divisions that exist between and within them – divisions which the Harper government has made its mission to deepen and take advantage of. In fact we are seeing unity between these groups, a unity which is often lead by First Nations activists. This is an extremely dangerous development for the Harper government because the very existence of the First Nations is a scandal to his plan for Canadian development. Harper wants indigenous peoples as weak, fearful, and isolated as possible – it is no surprise, for example, that when asked if his government would investigate the issue of murdered and missing aboriginal women, Harper responded, “it isn’t really high on our radar, to be honest,” and then proceeded to blame indigenous communities. The truth of the matter is that no one stands to benefit more from the genocide of indigenous peoples than Harper and the Canadian capitalism which he leads.

This is one way that racism gets deployed: self-consciously by a ruling class that understands it is using race or attacking a racialised group. But, especially after the civil rights movement, and the discrediting of racism as an official, explicit ideology, it often has to get deployed in other ways. One way is to use code words. Culture, for example, is one, religion is another. We don't bomb Muslims because they're brown, we bomb them because they have a culture of death, their culture teaches them to hate our freedoms, or because we need to drop some democracy on their Islamo-fascist heads. Black people are never the subject of police violence; thugs are. The media, the police, and every bigot with a mouth assures us that Eric Garner, Michael Brown, even 12 year old Tamir Rice were not shot because they were black. They deserved to die because they were thugs. Code such as this is pretty transparent, but it puts just the thinnest veil over outright racism and allows bigots to say the unsayable, and to think the unthinkable. There isn't a war on blacks, there's a war on drugs. The heavy handed policing of poor, predominantly black and hispanic neighbourhoods is not racism, it's being tough on crime. It's three strikes and the broken window policy.

This coding means that there is a bit of a spectrum between the explicit so-called conservative racism of the right and the liberal 'colour blind' racism of the Democratic party and mainstream public opinion. What do I mean by colour blind racism? Often, racism can keep going even without the conscious intervention of racists. It has its own momentum, a logic that renders it self-perpetuating. The state in New Orleans did not have to try very hard to make the Black community the worst hit by Hurricane Katrina. They were already made vulnerable by poverty, by the terrible state of the infrastructure in their communities, etc. But conservative racism and liberal colour blind racism work together hand in glove. They are mutually reinforcing, they make each other possible. Why was the rescue response so tepid? Why were white people taking goods from shops called 'survivors' when Blacks were called 'looters'? Why were looters shot by cops and not survivors?

Just one more example. Consider the subprime mortgage crisis in 2008. The whole thing was built on racism. Banks were speculating on the property values of homes by lending desperate home owners mortgages with terrible conditions. If they could pay their interests, great, if they defaulted and the bank foreclosed – housing prices were rising anyway, so that was even better. Guess who the majority of home-owners with subprime loans were? Blacks, naturally. Was there a law saying banks had to sell subprime loans to Black people? No, of course not: it was enough that for reasons of very recent history it was people of colour, especially blacks, who were most in need of such loans. And so when the market bottomed out on the housing market and banks stopped writing extensions and went right on ahead to forclosures, who do you think suffered the most? White people, of course! Nope, just kidding. It was Blacks. Poverty already segregated people more or less by race, the aftermath of 2008 saw whole communities of Black people utterly decimated. Just think of Detroit. But this is part of what I mean when I say that the reproductive logic of colour blind racism works in partnership with more explicit forms of racist ideology. Because if the majority of people devastated in Detroit had been white, I have to wonder if the city would have been so quick to cut off their water.

So far I've been speaking historically. What are the origins of racism? Why are Black communities historically vulnerable to victimisation and neglect? But as Ferguson and New York are reminding us, racism costs something to the ruling class – it comes with a certain political risk. And yet, whenever racism is challenged, the ruling class reacts as though their whole world is being threatened with collapse. Wouldn't it have been easier just to indict Darren Wilson, or at least to make some kind of pretence of investigating the shooting fairly – how much money, time, and political capital was wasted on militarising the police in Ferguson, letting fires burn, letting more black people be murdered? Of course they're all a bunch of racists (half of them seem to be members of the Klan!), but that doesn't explain enough. In New York, the second highest ranking police officer is black, so are many of the middle tier, and a very sizeable proportion of the boots on the ground. Perhaps some of them understand how racist police practices are, especially in New York – and yet they all participated in their farcical slowdown, they all watch each other's back, they all toe the thin blue line.

And they've told us why: because the protests and the challenge to police racism is making it difficult for the pigs to police us. To maintain 'law and order.' but whose law and order if not the law and order of the 1% – of the ruling class? The cops, especially ranking officers are members of the ruling class, in fact they are often a fairly powerful section of it. The response of the police, whether it be in New York or Ferguson is simply how they think that their rule can best be maintained. The whole of the ruling class is not required to agree of course, some will cavil occasionally at covering a whole city in tear gas or employing weapons that are barely permissible in a war zone – some will even wonder if such an extreme response will not weaken the ability of the police to do their job in the long run.

But when push comes to shove, the class as a whole relies on racism to solve the very many problems that come with maintaining a highly unequal oligarchy. Just two examples.

“In the United States, ... minorities are almost 80% more likely to live in neighborhoods where industrial pollution poses an extreme threat to human health (x). ... 56% of the people living within a 3 mile radius of [the US]’s hazardous waste facilities are people of color, and only 30% of the people living outside of those radii are people of color (x). … even in big cities, poor white people still inhale less nitrogen-dioxide (NO2) from car and power plant pollution than affluent people of color(x). Race, it turns out, is a better predictor of the location of hazardous waste facilities than education or income, and is also a better predictor of dangerous exposure to air pollution than income (x)(x).” [x]

As I've argued elsewhere: 'Capitalism is a ridiculously, obscenely wasteful and ecologically toxic system. For the ruling class, the problem of what to do with all that filth is not a scientific question, it is a political one. The distribution of waste, as with the distribution of wealth, is determined by the balance of power that holds between oppressor and oppressed. …  this kind of dumping is a survival tactic used by the capitalists. The ruling class creates communities of people that they can dump on. They can be Indigenous people, black people whatever The point is that capitalism has to dump the toxic filth it refuses to stop generating. It is easier for them to do that if a segment of the population can be rendered both hopeless and invisible. The whole working class suffers from this arrangement. It is in all of our interests to overthrow the invisibility of the oppressed communities because this invisibility makes it easier for the capitalists to go on doing what they do.' [x]

Another example has to do with wages. In 1974 the radical sociologist Michael Reich conducted a seminal study which has since been repeated multiple times with similar results. He wanted to study the effect of racism on white wages. He took the ratio of the median household income of black families to that of white families. A low value indicates that white median household income is high relative to black income – he called this value the racism index. What he found was that cities where the racism index showed relatively high levels of inequality between blacks and whites, also showed a high levels of inequality between rich whites and poor whites compared to areas with relatively better racism indexes. He concluded that racism was actually a disequalising force on white income distribution. “ A 1 percent increase in the ratio of black to white median incomes (that is, a 1 percent decrease in racism) was associated with a .2 percent decrease in white inequality … The corresponding effect on top 1 percent share of white income was two and a half times as large, indicating that most of the inequality among whites generated by racism was associated with increased income for the richest 1 percent of white families.” In other words, in monetary terms at least, the 1% benefit from racism, not the 99%. In fact, “Further statistical investigation reveals that increases in the racism variable … resulted in a decrease in the income share of the whites in the middle income brackets.” and had no effect on the incomes of whites in the lowest income brackets.

His conclusion is exactly the one that I have been attempting to drive at here. Racism weakens the ability of both black and white workers to come together and fight for their common interests. The prevalence of racism is actually one of the strongest defences the American ruling class has against the resistance of the exploited, and it is part of why they are just about the most successful ruling class in the world. To be clear, I am not arguing that the US ruling class uses racism just to keep wages down. Rule is about a great deal more than pay checks – but the wage question is a good indication of the working class' ability to come together and defend its class interests against our rulers. It can be used to try and measure the success of the ruling class at ruling.

The more successfully sections of the working class can be made to hate the others the better. The more distracted they are by welfare queens, the less they notice how much of their taxes actually go to war or fat bailouts for the rich. The more they worry about Mexicans stealing their jobs or black parasites taking their taxes, the less they notice the real parasites on top.

So – where do we go form here? Normally with a talk like this wishful references will be made to the possibility of future struggles against oppression, a list of past struggle will be marshalled to bolster the claim, etc. We don't need to do that. On our side of the border, the First Nations people continue their blockades, they continue to put themselves in the way of fracking and the pipelines. We can look at New York, which, just 3 days ago had another major protest. Or we can look back to the events of Ferguson, which has quieted down, but I would gamble, only temporarily. We can look to the solidarity rallies that occurred all over America. This is what the class struggle looks like. We are living it, right now.

There is nothing in the world that does more to combat racism than the open resistance of people of colour. When black people say “Black lives matter,” “We can't breath,” “No more Michael Browns,” they force the rest of us to take a side. With the oppressors or the oppressed? When they fight back, it becomes nearly impossible to remain neutral.

Of course, many will respond by burying their heads right up their own asses just as deeply as it will go. But many more will show solidarity. They will do so for good moral reasons – because black lives do matter – but they will also do so for their own sakes. When the governor of Missouri declared a curfew, when the cops choked the city in tear gas, invaded their streets, pacified them like an occupied people white people had to decide. March with the black protesters, or watch as what tattered semblance of democracy America could still hold on to was replaces by an open and unapologetic police state. When the cops in New York threatened a coup against city hall, what sense was there in claiming that this was just an issue for blacks and no one else's business?

Long ago Leon Trotsky predicted that the vanguard of the US working class would come from the Black community. That while the racism of white workers rendered their organisations impotent, Black communities would develop the best revolutionaries. And as the rise of Black power, the Civil Rights movement, MLK, Malcolm X, and the panthers showed, he was right. And he is still right. And just as the civil rights movement gave the occasion for fantastic acts of solidarity from people of every race, the protests around Ferguson and New York have as well.

Here in Canada, the First Nations' struggle for sovereignty has begun to lead the environmental struggle as the logics of both become more and more intertwined.

Capitalism creates racism. It feeds off of it. But this fucked up, bigoted, self destructive world also breeds resistance, cooperation, solidarity. It does not just force us to take a stand: it forces us to stand together.

[undressedanthology-deactivated2]

[redbookreports]

This is argument by anecdote. And as with most kinds of anecdotal arguments a contrary anecdote can be found. Or 70. This test case in the link found that: 

 after cameras were introduced in February 2012, public complaints against officers plunged 88% compared with the previous 12 months. Officers' use of force fell by 60%.

But of course, this is hardly conclusive. In fact, it's probably true to say that body cams will not in and of themselves make a huge difference in police brutality -- particularly in regard to violence against blacks and other persons of colour. Are we really going to conclude from this that body cams are a bad idea? 

When civilians record police brutality, reminding them that they are being filmed, it often makes no difference to the immediate outcome of events. It doesn't follow that recording them is a bad idea.

Why? Because the recording provides us with a resource to use after the fact. A way of showing some of what actually happened. I think it is important that these records exist and are made available. Just as the work of citizens with camera phones has been tremendously important in getting the word out about police violence, if the cops put themselves under surveillance and if we can access these recordings that this would also be a good thing. Not merely because it would make it slightly more difficult to exonerate the officers in court, but because of what putting the recordings out into the public can do for the movement against police violence.

The idea that 'more cameras on them means more cameras on you' is just not useful. The testimony of cops, fabricated or not, is already believed. I'm sure that cams might prove useful here and there for 'evidence gathering' and may marginally improve their ability to 'police' us -- but that evidence gathering cuts both ways. And frankly, the advantage they may gain from it seems marginal compared to what we gain.

[void24779578359]

also, the SWP threatened London Black Revs over their protest tonight, including threatening to snitch on them. grassing is par for the course from this organisation, but you can now add ‘trying to place themselves at the forefront of movements instead...

[redbookreports]

I am so beyond sick of your shit, @SWP!

[antoine-roquentin]

What 'Democracy' Really Means in U.S. and New York Times Jargon: Latin America Edition - The Intercept

[redbookreports]

One of the most accidentally revealing media accounts highlighting the real meaning of “democracy” in U.S. discourse is a still-remarkable 2002 New York Times Editorial on the U.S.-backed military coup in Venezuela, which temporarily removed that country’s democratically elected (and very popular) president, Hugo Chávez. Rather than describe that coup as what it was by definition - a direct attack on democracy by a foreign power and domestic military which disliked the popularly elected president – the Times, in the most Orwellian fashion imaginable, literally celebrated the coup as a victory for democracy:

With yesterday’s resignation of President Hugo Chávez, Venezuelan democracy is no longer threatened by a would-be dictator. Mr. Chávez, a ruinous demagogue, stepped down after the military intervened and handed power to a respected business leader, Pedro Carmona. 

Thankfully, said the NYT, democracy in Venezuela was no longer in danger … because the democratically-elected leader was forcibly removed by the military and replaced by an unelected, pro-U.S. “business leader.” The Champions of Democracy at the NYT then demanded a ruler more to their liking: “Venezuela urgently needs a leader with a strong democratic mandate to clean up the mess, encourage entrepreneurial freedom and slim down and professionalize the bureaucracy.”

More amazingly still, the Times editors told their readers that Chávez’s “removal was a purely Venezuelan affair,” even though it was quickly and predictably revealed that neocon officials in the Bush administration played a central role. Eleven years later, upon Chávez’s death, the Times editors admitted that “the Bush administration badly damaged Washington’s reputation throughout Latin America when it unwisely blessed a failed 2002 military coup attempt against Mr. Chávez” [the paper forgot to mention that it, too, blessed (and misled its readers about) that coup]. The editors then also acknowledged the rather significant facts that Chávez’s “redistributionist policies brought better living conditions to millions of poor Venezuelans” and “there is no denying his popularity among Venezuela’s impoverished majority.”

If you think The New York Timeseditorial page has learned any lessons from that debacle, you’d be mistaken. Today they published an editorial expressing grave concern about the state of democracy in Latin America generally and Bolivia specifically. The proximate cause of this concern? The overwhelming election victory of Bolivian President Evo Morales (pictured above), who, as The Guardian put it, “is widely popular at home for a pragmatic economic stewardship that spread Bolivia’s natural gas and mineral wealth among the masses.”

The Times editors nonetheless see Morales’ election to a third term not as a vindication of democracy but as a threat to it, linking his election victory to the way in which “the strength of democratic values in the region has been undermined in past years by coups and electoral irregularities.” Even as they admit that “it is easy to see why many Bolivians would want to see Mr. Morales, the country’s first president with indigenous roots, remain at the helm” – because “during his tenure, the economy of the country, one of the least developed in the hemisphere, grew at a healthy rate, the level of inequality shrank and the number of people living in poverty dropped significantly” - they nonetheless chide Bolivia’s neighbors for endorsing his ongoing rule: “it is troubling that the stronger democracies in Latin America seem happy to condone it.”

The Editors depict their concern as grounded in the lengthy tenure of Morales as well as the democratically elected leaders of Ecuador and Venezuela: “perhaps the most disquieting trend is that protégés of Mr. Chávez seem inclined to emulate his reluctance to cede power.” But the real reason the NYT so vehemently dislikes these elected leaders and ironically views them as threats to “democracy” becomes crystal clear toward the end of the editorial (emphasis added):

This regional dynamic has been dismal for Washington’s influence in the region. In Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador, the new generation of caudillos [sic] have staked out anti-American policies and limited the scope of engagement on development, military cooperation and drug enforcement efforts. This has damaged the prospects for trade and security cooperation.

You can’t get much more blatant than that. The democratically elected leaders of these sovereign countries fail to submit to U.S. dictates, impede American imperialism, and subvert U.S. industry’s neoliberal designs on the region’s resources. Therefore, despite how popular they are with their own citizens and how much they’ve improved the lives of millions of their nations’ long-oppressed and impoverished minorities, they are depicted as grave threats to “democracy.”

It is, of course, true that democratically elected leaders are capable of authoritarian measures. It is, for instance, democratically elected U.S. leaders who imprison people without charges for years, build secret domestic spying systems, and even assert the power to assassinate their own citizens without due process. Elections are no guarantee against tyranny. There are legitimate criticisms to be made of each of these leaders with regard to domestic measures and civic freedoms, as there is for virtually every government on the planet.

But the very idea that the U.S. government and its media allies are motivated by those flaws is nothing short of laughable. Many of the U.S. government’s closest allies are the world’s worst regimes, beginning with the uniquely oppressive Saudi kingdom (which just yesterday sentenced a popular Shiite dissident to death) and the brutal military coup regime in Egypt, which, as my colleague Murtaza Hussain reports today, gets more popular in Washington as it becomes even more oppressive. And, of course, the U.S. supports Israel in every way imaginable even as its Secretary of State expressly recognizes the “apartheid” nature of its policy path.

Just as the NYT did with the Venezuelan coup regime of 2002, the U.S. government hails the Egyptian coup regime as saviors of democracy. That’s because “democracy” in U.S. discourse means: “serving U.S. interests” and “obeying U.S. dictates,” regardless how how the leaders gain and maintain power. Conversely, “tyranny” means “opposing the U.S. agenda” and “refusing U.S. commands,” no matter how fair and free the elections are that empower the government. The most tyrannical regimes are celebrated as long as they remain subservient, while the most popular and democratic governments are condemned as despots to the extent that they exercise independence.

To see how true that is, just imagine the orgies of denunciation that would rain down if a U.S. adversary (say, Iran, or Venezuela) rather than a key U.S. ally like Saudi Arabia had just sentenced a popular dissident to death. Instead, the NYT just weeks ago uncritically quotes an Emirates ambassador lauding Saudi Arabia as one of the region’s “moderate” allies because of its service to the U.S. bombing campaign in Syria. Meanwhile, the very popular, democratically elected leader of Bolivia is a grave menace to democratic values – because he’s “dismal for Washington’s influence in the region.”

[redbookreports]

What Could Socialism Look Like?

The following are speaking notes I gave for a talk I gave at a one day forum on socialism at Langara. Some references depend on other talks, but I think most of it is still intelligible.

The richest 8.4% own more than 83% of the world's wealth = this does not exactly mean that they own 83% of the world's things, because we measure wealth not in things but in money. They don't own the atmosphere, but that doesn't stop them from choking it in smoke. They don't own ALL the forests (just yet), but that doesn't stop them from spilling oil all over them. To say that the richest 8% own 83% of the world's wealth is to say that they own 83% of the value of things that have already been assigned a value, that have already been commodified and monetized. As Bradley has already shown, nature is a 'free gift' to the capitalist accounts: money is an expression of value, that is to say of labour time. To the extent that capitalist's measure their wealth in money, they are measuring the amount of our labour that they have appropriated. In other words, if capitalists own, say, 83% of the world's wealth, that means that 83% of all working hours have gone towards enriching the world's wealthiest 8.4% – just 393 million people. To put that in perspective, the rest of the population (just under 7 billion people) is supported by just 17% of all labour. (This does not account for the 'free labour' of home makers or interns.)

The question “what would socialism look like?” is first and foremost a question of what might be done if that tremendous productive energy were redirected for the benefit of humanity in general rather than for this tiny minority.

But I do not want to jump the gun. The question is inherently speculative and tends to lead in the direction of fantasy rather than solid analysis. The only way to avoid utopianism is to treat socialism as emerging from capitalism itself and the characteristics it forces upon those who struggle against it.

The richest 8.4% own 83% of the wealth. But the rest of us don't just build their houses and catch their caviar. We also build the factories, the equipment, mine the coal, dig the wells, etc. We not only work the means of production, we also produce the means of production. We produce them, the bosses own them. Which supposedly is what gives them the right to the things we produce using the machines that we also produced. Private property in the means of production also means private property in the products themselves: the bosses have the 'right' to sell them, dump them, or hoard them just as they please. These are what Marxists refer to as the “social relations of production” under capitalism.

Engels argued “that the production of the means to support human life and, next to production, the exchange of things produced, is the basis of all social structure; ... in every society that has appeared in history, the manner in which wealth is distributed and society divided into classes or orders is dependent upon what is produced, how it is produced, and how the products are exchanged.” In other words, that the relations of production play a strongly determining role in the shape and structure of society. To change society, therefore, necessarily means changing the social relations of production.

The relations of production under capitalism means that we are forced to spend the majority of our waking hours working for bosses we dislike in jobs that we hate – even our sleep belongs to the bosses: how often do we say “I gotta get to bed early tonight, I have lots of work to do in the morning!” Fairly often we work to produce, move, or sell shit that we don't even want. But we do it to get paid a wage so that we can buy things we need: food, clothes, entertainment, etc. Often enough these things are shit too, but we learn to get by. But we “get by” as private consumers. Of course, because the things we need are not part of the general wealth of society, we acquire them as private individuals from other private individuals. And as such, we are privately responsible for becoming successful private consumers.

Perhaps the best example of the kind of ideology this system encourages comes from Margaret Thatcher, who famously claimed: “I think we've been through a period where too many people have been given to understand that if they have a problem, it's the government's job to cope with it. 'I have a problem, I'll get a grant.' 'I'm homeless, the government must house me.' They're casting their problem on society. And, you know, there is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families.”

Its a familiar attitude: people who need help are sovereign individuals and have no right to expect us to bail them out. The idea that even outside of emergency situations, we might share in each others' lives, take responsibility for and with each other is totally foreign to this kind of thought. For such people, even families are really just a kind of super-individual; a consuming household with 4.5 mouths. The result is a society more atomised – more anti-social – than any other historical formation. One of the results of this, historically, is a fairly strict division of labour within families. The one with the mammaries and uterus probably has a job, but also raises the kids, cooks and cleans and in general works to reproduce not only the labour power of the next generation, but also that of the current one embodied in their spouse (the primary bread winner). The effectiveness of this set-up is maximised if a norm of heterosexuality is enforced.

Forms of oppression like sexism, homophobia, trans-phobia, racism, abelism – all in one way or another, allows the ruling class to exploit this section or that more than the average, to pay the oppressed poorer wages, in worse working environments, perhaps ghettoise them in the worst parts of the cities, places where the ruling class can pollute or dump with greater impunity. But these ideologies also set worker against worker, one section of the oppressed against another, one section of the exploited against another. The goal that we should ultimately set ourselves is full human liberation – that ought to mean a world free of oppression.

Oppression is constantly being produced by capitalism, so a different society offers at least the possibility for such ideologies along with the structures and institutions that enforce them to at last be completely dismantled. But if people are as bigoted and debased as all that, how can we ever make a better society? As Marx pointed out ages ago: “for the production on a mass scale of this communist consciousness, and for the success of the cause itself, the alteration of [people] on a mass scale is, necessary.”

The question, therefore, is: “how is this transformation to take place?” The Marxist answer to this is that the struggle for a better world itself transforms people. I think all of us have seen this lately. Active struggle against oppression creates the best opportunities for the development of solidarity. Radicalisation and anti-oppression sentiments are contagious. Think about the occupation of Tahrir. Or think of Occupy – it began as a protest against corporate greed, how quickly did it turn into a breeding ground for resistance against every kind of oppression? Here in Canada, the struggle for native sovereignty has immediately been involved with struggles for environmental justice, the social position of women, especially indigenous women, and even how we should relate to migrant labourers. And perhaps the greatest period of radicalisation in living memory – the late 60s – involved struggles against racism, sexism, imperialism, colonialism, and gave birth to the Queer Rights movement; as well as lines of solidarity forged between all of these. Consider the Black Panther Party, a group which when it first started was notorious for its sexism and homophobia but which ended with women's liberation and anti-homophobia as basic principles. The Black Power movement is often caricatured as super macho, typified by the foolish claim of Stokely Carmichael in 1964 that “The only position for women in [the struggle] is prone.” But if that sort of thing was tolerated in 1964, by 1969, two thirds of the black panthers were women and they had developed a close relationship with one of the greatest black feminists still living: Angela Davis.

There are several pressures which lead to the development of this kind of consciousness. The most basic is that when one group of people struggle against their oppression, it can inspire other groups to do the same. More importantly, almost every form of oppression intersects with others. Just as black oppression necessarily includes the oppression of black women, or black queer people, so the struggle against black oppression necessarily also mobilised more than just straight black men. The mobilisation of the black community was also the occasion for an internal development in which black women and queers demanded to be recognised and won their right to participate in the struggle. The success of this internal struggle was a necessity for the movement as a whole – which could not possibly have won anything if it had excluded the majority of the black community. Black people who had absorbed not only a degree of self hatred, but also the rest of the bigotries that our society teaches nevertheless were capable of change. Their ideas were being shaken by the world that they were changing and they were often convinced of the rightness of the claims of black women and queer people.

There is only one social position whose struggles are expansive enough to include the struggles of people of colour, of women, queer people, the disabled, etc. and that is the working class. The working class is divided by these bigotries – and the division helps the capitalist class maintain their rule. The working class therefore must overcome these divisions in order to win anything. The working class contains much more than just straight, white, cis- dudebros. It includes all those doubly oppressed by capitalist bigotry. The struggles of the class are therefore subject to the same pressures which were so transformative for the Black Panther Party. This is why the struggle for the economic emancipation of the working class is coterminous with the struggle for human liberation generally. As Marx and Engels wrote in the Communist Manifesto: “All previous historical movements were movements of minorities, or in the interest of minorities. The proletarian movement is the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, in the interest of the immense majority. The proletariat, the lowest stratum of our present society, cannot stir, cannot raise itself up, without the whole superincumbent strata of official society being sprung into the air.”

More importantly:

“Both for the production on a mass scale of this communist consciousness, and for the success of the cause itself, the alteration of [people] on a mass scale is, necessary, an alteration which can only take place in a practical movement, a revolution; this revolution is necessary, therefore, not only because the ruling class cannot be overthrown in any other way, but also because the class overthrowing it can only in a revolution succeed in ridding itself of all the [shit] of ages and become fitted to found society anew.”

The struggle for socialism cannot be won without also being, for example, anti-sexist – it follows that a socialist world would be that much LESS sexist right from the get-go, and creates the conditions for sexism and the patriarchy to finally be dismantled. So the struggle for socialism lays the basis for a world free of bigotry and oppression. But what about economic emancipation, what does that mean?

When people think about socialism two images come to mind. The first is this kind of impoverished world where everyone wears blue-gray jumpsuits, has one child, and drives a tractor. The second, more optimistic one, involves a world with a better social safety net and less income inequality. The vision of socialism which I want to give is much grander than either of these. By socialism I mean a world without classes, where everyone controls the means of production collectively and therefore also shares in the fruits of social production collectively.

Once again, to get a glimpse of what such a world would look like, we have to first look at capitalism. Any society that is sufficiently complex will involve certain divisions of labour – simply because we can't all be doing everything all of the time. At any given moment, somebody has to be producing crops, somebody has to be preparing food, writing songs, designing buildings, constructing them, somebody has to be minding the children, etc. We live in the kind of society where such divisions are relatively permanent: someone who farms is a farmer, anything else that she does is just a hobby. The reason that capitalism makes such roles relatively permanent is because we have to pay to gain new skills, and typically while we are learning new skills we are earning a smaller income. Nevertheless it is at least possible to imagine a society where this wasn't the case. As Marx wrote, under capitalism, “each man has a particular, exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape. He is a hunter, a fisherman, a herdsman, or a critical critic, and must remain so if he does not want to lose his means of livelihood; while in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.”

But there is one division of labour which exists only in class societies. In class societies one group of people produce the goods while another class – the ruling class – administers over the production process. The ruling class decides how we work, what we produce and how surpluses are invested. Marx called this division (somewhat imprecisely, I admit) the division between manual and mental labour. On the side of the producers, capitalism has socialised the labour process to an unprecedented degree. The production of goods actually involves a staggering degree of cooperation and coordination. What that means is that production comes to included greater and greater interconnectedness and dependencies within the whole of society. Contrary to the opinion of Margaret Thatcher, capitalism is unique in that it has drawn the majority of the species into a single massive directly interdependent society. Nevertheless, because the working class produces and the ruling class oversees, workers do not have a good view of the total production process.

But from the perspective of overseeing that production, on the other hand, the capitalist class, which, together with its managerial assistants, is meant to oversee the administration of this great division of labour has next to no understanding of the actual concrete requirements of the labour process, and, because of competition, conspires to horde information, actively preventing itself as a class from fully accessing the knowledge which is really available to it. In fact, because there is very little centralised planning and companies (largely) confront each other as hostile competitors the precise nature of the social relations that make up ‘the economy’ is inherently mysterious. A market economy is made up of so many complex interactions that it’s not possible to understand exactly what’s going on, even though a great many economists, investment banks etc. devote a lot of energy to doing so and risk a lot of money on bets about what is likely to happen.

The resulting chaos is what is typically referred to as the “genius of the market.”

In 2008, for example, at the start of the last financial crisis, the US government spent approximately 3 metric fuck-tonnes of money bailing out the financial sector by basically throwing money at the major banks. The hope was that this would get banks to start lending again. It didn't. Years and years of skeevy lending practices had left all the banks with toxic debts – they all knew that much. What they didn't know was exactly HOW MUCH toxic debt each of their rivals were left with. Without this knowledge, they would not risk lending.

Such corporate secrecy and competition are the stock and trade of capitalism. Imagine the world we might live in if pharmaceutical companies pooled their research and data together rather than hid it behind copyright and intellectual property laws. Imagine how much could be saved if food producers weren't all trying to swipe market share from one another, but were instead coordinating rationally to produce the best food in the amounts that were actually needed. We moan a lot about food wasted at homes or restaurants – that is by private consumers – but the vast majority of food is wasted because too much is produced to be sold in the first place. Too much is produced to be profitably sold, but people go hungry.

The ideologues of the ruling class like to tell us that the market is the most efficient form of economic coordination. In fact capitalism is the most wasteful society in history. Not only in the terms of the staggering amounts of stuff it produces that never gets consumed, but also in terms of the staggering amount of resources thrown at stupid bullshit like war, paying CEOs, the elaborate and bloated system of brutal repression that keeps us all in our place, and Jersey Shore. Think about how much money is spent “rationalising” production – that is, in forcing workers to labour at the maximum pace, like robots or machines. Think about how much research goes into this kind of 'managerial science,' how much 'consultants' are paid to 'restructure' workplaces – maximising the output of single factories, throwing workers out of jobs, sucking the joy out of labour from those who keep their jobs – all for what? So that companies like McDonalds can turn a 646% profit on a filet-o-fish while paying their workers starvation wages. They tell us that they need to exploit us so heavily to keep the economy running – but they cannot even keep that promise. No ruling class in the developed world has been as successful in keeping wages down than the American ruling class – that did not stop the recession in 2008, and it hasn't prevented the current 'recovery' from being the slowest and shallowest since the second world war.

In place of this conspiracy of chaos, socialism offers rational, democratic planning. In the place of the sham democracy offered by capitalism which maintains the dictatorship of the bosses over all of the most vital aspects, socialism demands the complete democratization of social production. To paraphrase Engels, in place of the domination of persons, socialism offers the administration of things, and the conduct of processes of production. We see the beginnings of such democratic and collective planning more often then you might think. To use Egypt again, think about the way the demonstrators more or less spontaneously organised for food, security, first aid, and the like. Or think about factory occupations. Or even co-ops. In these situations people get what they need not because they can pay for it, but because their fellows have organized to make what they need available. How simple this is. The economy of such a set up is completely transparent. Compare this to 2008 where more homes stood empty than there were homeless people, but nobody was housed -- why? Certainly not because the police were throwing people out of their homes, chalk it up to the mysteries of the market. To the problem of homelessness, socialists propose a radical solution: put the homeless into the homes. How many people lost their job while factories stood idle and raw materials were dumped or allowed to rust? Another extremist solution: open the factories, let the workers in. Let them make the things that people need, let the people who need them acquire them -- a child would think this obvious, but to capitalism, if a profit cannot be made then let people and materials just rot. Perhaps what I am proposing sounds impossible, but we manage such miracles everyday. Most major corporations are massive economies unto themselves, involving the distribution of parts, the movement of materials, the coordination of extensive networks of labour: does one side of a factory sell to another? Does one Ford plant sell to another? Of course not: they manage production BEFORE their cars get to the market the same way a household does -- by figuring out what supplies are needed, what tasks have to be done and by when and then getting them done. A capitalist enterprise is like a family with an abusive and dictatorial patriarch forcing everyone else to do his bidding -- we should do to the bosses what we should do to abusive husbands or fathers: kick em to the curb, and organise our lives along loving and practical cooperation.

My proposal depends primarily upon the struggle of the working class for self-emancipation. One of the reasons that the working class is in a position to wage and to win such a struggle is that the things that they do their work on are not easily divided for personal use. You can't just cut up a modern workplace into self sustaining bits. So their labour is inescapably cooperative. Like any exploited class, the proletariat have an interest in first improving the conditions of their exploitation and finally of ending it completely. Their individual weakness and their shared class interests also make their forms of resistance spontaneously cooperative in a uniquely democratic way.

Several things can get in the way of this spontaneous democratic impulse, union bureaucracy for example. Nevertheless, this kind of democracy has been a feature of almost every major social convulsion that workers have been involved in. This is because when workers organise independently for their own interests they can only do so as equals (that is they are equally dispossessed of the means of production). Workers' councils have therefore, historically, been the characteristic form of such independent self-organisation. These councils, arising more or less spontaneously from the practical requirements of the struggle are what workers use to coordinate that struggle, to deliberate and make political decisions, and to share information but also simply to keep themselves fed, to organise the defence against the police and strike breakers, or even the military. We’ve seen such councils arise in France, Russia, Germany, Chile, Poland, Hungary, Portugal, Spain, Finland, Iran, The United State, and in embryo, in Egypt.

The capitalist organisation of production has meant that workers must struggle together, not only within a workplace, but across workplaces. Capitalism frequently makes it both necessary and possible for the working class to offer a single united front against the ruling class. Workers councils therefore become the instrument of working class power and an alternative structure by which to manage society – democratically, and from below.

In the course of this, we often see capitalist use lock-outs against workers. But this is a double edged sword. Occasionally, workers respond to lockouts by taking over the factories and running it themselves. Workers control – organised through such councils – cuts against the division of material and intellectual labour and makes the workers both producers and overseers of the production process. And this potential is ultimately the basis of socialism.

This kind of thoroughgoing democracy is what socialism offers in place of capitalism. The question, “what would socialism look like?” is unanswerable concretely because people will for the first time be empowered to freely, collectively, and consciously shape society – socialism will look like, whatever a liberated humanity wants it too look like.

But, wait! There's more. So far, we've only talked about taking over the means of production from the capitalists. But it has to be understood that these are not simply neutral instruments. Most of the time they are designed to reduce the part played by the worker to the most minimal contribution. To reduce the actions of the worker to the most robotic, repetitive, movements set at an inhuman pace. We have already seen that most of the 83% of the world's production has gone to enriching the very rich. If we got rid of those parasites and redirected all that time and resources towards meeting the needs of everyone generally, we could all work far less. There could be so much more time for play, self development, and leisure. But with the democratic control of the means of production comes the opportunity to transform labour processes. To maximise the satisfaction we get out of making things, interacting with people, feeding people, caring for people. The sorts of rewards that prevail in art and craft: the sense of concretely expressing your creative powers, of collaborating productively with people who share your interests, and of making things that you yourself value and feel proud of – that could become true for all production.

Imagine a world where labour has become not only a means of life but life's prime want – not only a means of gaining satisfying goods, but satisfying in its own right. Under capitalism, we waste half our waking day frustrating our creative powers, degrading our abilities, and just plain bored. All our lives are spent shackled to the profits of others. Imagine a world dedicated instead to human joy.