Discover Top Posts Tagged with #antifascism

Here piggy piggy

#kip doodles #procreate #fuck ice #antifascism #release the UNREDACTED Epstein files

#freeblr #antifascism #liberal #politics #fuck trump and harris

#america #us politics #resistance #resistencia #resist #antifascism #antifascist #direct action #community defense #lgbtq #trans rights

Maybe it's just me as a Filipino who has lived through a murderous dictatorship and oligarchies in a queerphobic country controlled by the rich who brutalize grassroots pro worker movements all under the military abuse of US imperialism but...

You just gotta keep showing up. Support each other. Don't just fight for yourself. The work is hard, but you just gotta keep doing it. You'll always see results, even if they're not always the ones you want, or as big as you want them to be.

All your work always matters. Even if it doesn't feel like it at first. It always matters.

#🫶🏾#activism #antifascist #antifascism

Have you heard of GPN? Just saw this here

free maja here actually refers to the non-binary anti fascist activist Maja T., a german citizen who has been held in hungarian prison for almost two years now. they are currently on a hunger strike to protest the conditions and treatment they're experiencing in prison.

there is very little talk about this case outside german language media and anti fascist circles, but it's a really important case for antifas across europe and the world, so it's worth looking into!

not perfect but here's one thing i found about it in english:

Maja T., a 24-year-old non-binary antifascist from Germany, has begun a hunger strike from within a Hungarian prison, where they have been h

#free maja #maja t #antifascism

Someone in my networks was asking about a social media call they saw for a “30 day general strike” where people make no purchases and don’t go to work. They asked, “this would make me homeless but is it worth it as a tactic?” As a union organizer, I had this to say and I think it’s important enough to share with you all:

As a trade unionist, I would like to know what is being meant by “general strike” here because a lot of people are using that term but for things that have nothing to do with strikes or what a general strike has historically meant.

It’s not a boycott, it’s not a sick out, it’s a *strike* by workers at their workplaces aka refusals to work collectively as a unionized body of workers. A general strike would require dozens of unions to not merely tell some workers they gotta work anyways and tell others to call in sick - it requires a prolonged, structured, financially supportive struggle by unionized labor.

A 30 day general strike would achieve a lot but I’m not hearing any trade unions say they are directing their members to do this (which under current labor law and many of our union contracts, would be illegal but that’s not my issue, just a barrier towards success). I’ve not heard of any strike funds put into place so workers don’t lose their housing and can afford groceries. Factually it just isn’t a strike let alone a general strike. It’s a consumer boycott meets individual sick outs and while you can do that tactic in short bursts, you can’t do it for a month without a strike fund and unions actually declaring strikes.

I fear “general strike” is becoming hallowed out of meaning by liberals. It’s a powerful tactic and that just isn’t what we’re seeing. It’s gonna leave people with a bad taste in their mouth about the prospect of an actual general strike when these fake “general strikes” don’t pan out because they aren’t leveraging our power as the people who actually run society with our labor but asking individuals to call out alone or as individuals not purchase goods.

Kinda reminds me of when people tried to define “mutual aid” as giving donations to nonprofits instead of building community networks of resiliency and support outside of capitalism and its charity arms. Pretty much every time there’s a big upswing in radicalism, terms get immediately bastardized by people outside of the work to describe tactics that don’t even share the same goals. It’s a deradicalization tactic.

You can’t just say “general strike!” and then it happens. General strikes in the past have been because unionized workers across different industries solidarity strike, which since the heyday of general strikes has been made illegal so if we want to actually do that as organized labor then we have to be prepared to have no legal protections around such a strike. That’s not the level of preparation or thought we’re seeing.

If you want to see what an actual general strike in Portland looks like, this PBS documentary on the founding of the ILWU and the 1934 Waterfront Strike which was attacked by police and vigilantes leading to the entire towns workers joining the strike, is important. These were very organized, structured affairs that didn’t rely on individualist volunteerism.

United Auto Workers declared May 1st, 2028 to be a national general strike. He (Shaun Fein) wants unions to align the end of their contracts with May Day so we are not beholden to no strike clauses. They’re building a strike fund. That’s actually a plan and that gives us enough time to energize our coworkers about it.

This “general strike” stuff coming out of Minneapolis will just get you fired and because you’re not doing it with a union, you’ll have zero protections and no strike fund to rely on.

It’s a bad idea. Don’t leverage your purchasing power, you’re poor. Leverage your labor, because that’s what makes them rich. And don’t do it alone, you’ll suffer alone.

#general strike #labor unions #trade unions #trade unionism #Minneapolis #Portland #Minnesota #Oregon #socialism #Marxism #communism #anarchism #antifascism #anti work #Youtube

The discussions around whether or not to vote for Kamala keep being dominated by very loud voices shouting that anyone who advocates for her “just doesn't care about Palestine!” and “is willing to overlook genocide!” and “has no moral backbone at all!” And while some of these voices will be bots, trolls, psyops - we know that this happens; we know that trying to persuade progressives to split the vote or not vote at all is a strategy employed by hostile actors - of course many of them won't be. But what this rhetoric does is continually force the “you should vote for her” crowd onto the back foot of having to go to great lengths writing entire essays justifying their choice, while the “don't vote/vote third party” crowd is basically never asked to justify their choice. It frames voting for Kamala as a deeply morally compromised position that requires extensive justification while framing not voting or voting third party as the neutral and morally clean stance.

So here's another way of looking at it. How much are you willing to accept in order to feel like you're not compromising your morals on one issue?

Are you willing to accept the 24% rise in maternal deaths - and 39% increase for Black women - that is expected under a federal abortion ban, according to the Centre for American Progress? Those percentages represent real people who are alive now who would die if the folks behind Project 2025 get their way with reproductive healthcare.

Are you willing to accept the massive acceleration of climate change that would result from the scrapping of all climate legislation? We don't have time to fuck around with the environment. A gutting of climate policy and a prioritisation of fossil fuel profits, which is explicitly promised by Trump, would set the entire world back years - years that we don't have.

Are you willing to accept the classification of transgender visibility as inherently “pornographic” and thus the removal of trans people from public life? Are you willing to accept the total elimination of legal routes for gender-affirming care? The people behind the Trump campaign want to drive queer and trans people back underground, back into the closet, back into “criminality”. This will kill people. And it's maddening that caring about this gets called “prioritising white gays over brown people abroad” as if it's not BIPOC queer and trans Americans who will suffer the most from legislative queer- and transphobia, as they always do.

Are you willing to accept the domestic deployment of the military to crack down on protests and enforce racist immigration policy? I'm sure it's going to be very easy to convince huge numbers of normal people to turn up to protests and get involved in political organising when doing so may well involve facing down an army deployed by a hardcore authoritarian operating under the precedent that nothing he does as president can ever be illegal.

Are you willing to accept a president who openly talks about wanting to be a dictator, plans on massively expanding presidential powers, dehumanises his political enemies and wants the DOJ to “go after them”, and assures his supporters they won't have to vote again? If you can't see the danger of this staring you right in the face, I don't know what to tell you. Allowing a wannabe dictator to take control of the most powerful country on earth would be absolutely disastrous for the entire world.

Are you willing to accept an enormous uptick in fascism and far-right authoritarianism worldwide? The far right in America has huge influence over an entire international network of “anti-globalists”, hardcore anti-immigrant xenophobes, transphobic extremists, and straight-up fascists. Success in America aids and emboldens these people everywhere.

Are you willing to accept an enormous number of preventable deaths if America faces a crisis in the next four years: a public health emergency, a natural disaster, an ecological catastrophe? We all saw how Trump handled Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico. We all saw how Trump handled Covid-19. He fanned the flames of disaster with a constant flow of medical misinformation and an unspeakably dangerous undermining of public health experts. It's estimated that 40% of US pandemic deaths could have been avoided if the death rates had corresponded to those in other high-income countries. That amounts to nearly half a million people. One study from January 2021 estimated between around 4,200 and 12,200 preventable deaths attributable purely to Trump's statements about masks. We're highly unlikely to face another global pandemic in the next few years but who knows what crises are coming down the pipeline?

Are you willing to accept the attempted deportation of millions - millions - of undocumented people? This is “rounding people up and throwing them into camps where no one ever hears from them again” territory. That's a blueprint for genocide right there and it's a core tenet of both Trump's personal policy and Project 2025. And of course they wouldn't be going after white people. They most likely wouldn't even restrict their tyranny to people who are actually undocumented. Anyone racially othered as an “immigrant” would be at risk from this.

Are you willing to accept not just the continuation of the current situation in Palestine, but the absolute annihilation of Gaza and the obliteration of any hope for imminent peace? There is no way that Trump and the people behind him would not be catastrophically worse for Gaza than Kamala or even Biden. Only recently he was telling donors behind closed doors that he wanted to “set the [Palestinian] movement back 25 or 30 years” and that “any student that protests, I throw them out of the country”. This is not a man who can be pushed in a direction more conducive to peace and justice. This is a man who listens to his wealthy donors, his Christian nationalist Republican allies, and himself.

Are you willing to accept a much heightened risk of nuclear war? Obviously this is hardly a Trump policy promise. But I can't think of a single president since the Cold War who is more likely to deploy nuclear weapons, given how casually he talks about wanting to use them and how erratic and unstable he can be in his dealings with foreign leaders. To quote Foreign Policy only this year, “Trump told a crowd in January that one of the reasons he needed immunity was so that he couldn’t be indicted for using nuclear weapons on a city.” That's reassuring. I'm not even in the US and I remember four years of constant background low-level terror that Trump would take offence at something some foreign leader said or think that he needs to personally intervene in some military situation to “sort it out” and decide to launch the entire world into nuclear war. No one sane on earth wants the most powerful person on the planet to be as trigger-happy and careless with human life as he is, especially if he's running the White House like a dictator with no one ever telling him no. But depending on what Americans do in November, he may well be inflicted again on all of us, and I guess we'll all just have to hope that he doesn't do the worst thing imaginable.

“But I don't want those things! Stop accusing me of supporting things I don't support!” Yes, of course you don't want those things. None of us does. No one's saying that you actively support them. No one's accusing you of wanting Black women to die from ectopic pregnancies or of wanting to throw Hispanic people in immigrant detention centres or of wanting trans people to be outlawed (unlike, I must point out, the extremely emotive and personal accusations that get thrown around about “wanting Palestinian children to die” if you encourage people to vote for Kamala).

But if you're advocating against voting for Kamala, you are clearly willing to accept them as possible consequences of your actions. That is the deal you're making. If a terrible thing happening is the clear and easily foreseeable outcome of your action (or in the case of not voting, inaction), in a way that could have been prevented by taking a different and just as easy action, you are partly responsible for that consequence. (And no, it's not “a fear campaign” to warn people about things he's said, things he wants to do, and plans drawn up by his close allies. This is not “oooh the Democrats are trying to bully you into voting for them by making him out to be really bad so you'll feel scared and vote for Kamala!” He is really bad, in obvious and documented and irrefutable ways.)

And if you believe that “both parties are the same on Gaza” (which, you know, they really aren't, but let's just pretend that they are) then presumably you accept that the horrors being committed there will continue, in the immediate term anyway, regardless of who wins the presidency. Because there really isn't some third option that will appear and do everything we want. It's going to be one of those two. And we can talk all day about wanting a better system or how unfair it is that every presidential election only ever has two viable candidates and how small the Overton window is and all that but hell, we are less than eighty days out from the election; none of that is going to get fixed between now and November. Electoral reform is a long-term (but important!) goal, not something that can be effected in the span of a couple of months by telling people online to vote third party. There is no “instant ceasefire and peace negotiation” button that we're callously overlooking by encouraging people to vote for Kamala. (My god, if there was, we would all be pressing it.)

If we're suggesting people vote for her, it's not that we “are willing to overlook genocide” or “don't care about sacrificing brown people abroad” or whatever. Nothing is being “overlooked” here. It's that we're simply not willing to accept everything else in this post and more on top of continued atrocities in Gaza. We're not willing to take Trump and his godawful far-right authoritarian agenda as an acceptable consequence of feeling like we have the moral high ground on Palestine. I cannot stress enough that if Kamala doesn't win, we - we all, in the whole world - get Trump. Are you willing to accept that?

And one more point to address: I've seen too many people act frighteningly flippant and naïve about terrible things Trump or his campaign want to do, with the idea that people will simply be able to prevent all these bad things by “organising” and “protesting” and “collective action”. “I'm not willing to accept these things; that's why I'll fight them tooth and nail every day of their administration” - OK but if you're not even willing to cast a vote then I have doubts about your ability to form “the Resistance”, which by the way would have to involve cooperation with people of lots of progressive political stripes in order to have the manpower to be effective, and if you're so committed to political purity that you view temporarily lending your support to Kamala at the ballot box as an untenable betrayal of everything you stand for then forgive me for also doubting your ability to productively cooperate with allies on the ground with whom you don't 100% agree. Plus, if the Trump campaign gets its way, American progressives would be kept so busy trying to put out about twenty different fires at once that you'd be able to accomplish very little. Maybe you get them to soften their stance on trans healthcare but oh shit, the climate policies are still in place. But more importantly, how many people do you think will protest for abortion rights if doing so means staring down a gun? Or organise to protect their neighbours from deportation if doing so means being thrown in prison yourself? And OK, maybe you're sure that you will, but history has shown us time and time again that most people won't. Most people aren't willing to face that kind of personal risk. And a tiny number of lefties willing to risk incarceration or death to protect undocumented people or trans people or whatever other groups are targeted is sadly not enough to prevent the horrors from happening. That is small fry compared to the full might of a determined state. Of course if the worst happens and Trump wins then you should do what you can to mitigate the harm; I'm not saying you shouldn't. But really the time to act is now. You have an opportunity right here to mitigate the harm and it's called “not letting him get elected”. Act now to prevent that kind of horrific authoritarian situation from developing in the first place; don't sit this one out under the naïve belief that “we'll be able to stop it if it happens”. You won't.