For us as insurrectionary anarchists in North America the inevitable revolts to come as the crumbling Haitian state tries to save itself offers us a chance to on one hand chip away at our movements eurocentrism and on the other elaborate a practice of internationalism.
We do not find it surprising that the places and movements we tend to give our attention, material solidarity, and rage to are generally european, almost never anywhere with a black majority. We understand that, as A. G. Schwarz words it in the text The Spirit of December Spread ‘Round the World, “…solidarity is based on affective bonds.” Following this, it makes sense that an overwhelmingly white anarchist movement would find its inspiration and give most of its attention to explicitly anarchist forces (which is good) or other movements that look more like them.
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However, if our anarchism is to be internationalist, if we want to generalize insurrection across borders and across identities, we must actively be looking for and taking part in revolt outside of the usual places and identifying ourselves not just with anarchists but with anarchistic and ungovernable forces.
"Here is the solution to the famous problem, why no socialism in America? The kernel and meaning of the working-class movement were to be found in the activities of the black workers during slavery and Reconstruction. The labor radicals of that time, like their counterparts in later generations, were unable to recognize labor’s struggle when it appeared in a dark face. As Du Bois noted, “The main activity of the International was in the North; they seemed to have no dream that the place for its most successful rooting was in the new political power of the Southern worker” (360). An example of how what Du Bois called the American Blindspot (367) afflicted radicals was the eight-hour day parade in New York City on September 13, 1871. At least eight thousand marched behind the red flag bearing the slogan, “Workingmen of All Countries, Unite!” A company of Frenchmen carried a banner inscribed “Comite International” and were greeted with cries of “Vive la Commune!” A mass meeting following the march voted unanimously to throw off all allegiance to the Democratic Party in the Fall elections - but there was no mention of black grassroots political power in the South. The Herald called the demonstration “a fraternization of the laboring classes of this city with the great Internationale of Europe.” Apparently, American Internationalists were able to look across the ocean to the Paris Commune, but could not cast their eyes southward to the South Carolina Commune."
we limit ourselves so much when it comes to dinosaur media. tired of horror films about dinosaurs eating people and kids films about dinosaurs trying to get to a mythical predator free zone. do you know we could be writing zombie stories and high fantasy where all the main characters are dinosaurs
"It is imperative that the [Illinois Department of Corrections] fully embraces the reality that it is the largest provider of mental health care in the state of Illinois."
This is an absolutely brutal article about solitary confinement and mental illness in prison. This line stuck out for me as it’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot: how this country allocates resources to incarceration and not to care. How the policy response to mental illness and addiction is violence instead of care or treatment. How the worse off you are, the more likely the state’s approach to you will be based on punishment, bondage, and violence.
It’s everywhere. COs are not and will never be qualified to provide care. They can build mental health facilities in prisons, but the bottomline is we need to stop sending people into these facilities. They just radiate violence into our communities, compounding problems they ostensibly exist to solve.
I guess I would say that part of the reason it seems to me that the ties between feminists and social conservatives wrt the Satanic Panic are kinda underdiscussed when specifically talking abt historical synergy between these two groups is because it presents a troubling of the current narratives wrt sexual violence for both of those groups, and relates to an issue that is much more -at the heart- of feminism than some of the other examples!
Like, altho I do think that a lot of the people expressing like a newer leftish (‘materialist’, for example) feminism probably would have found themselves in the ‘radical feminist’ camp of the historical sex wars, the fealty to some of these granular topics aren’t as like… important to feminism as the question of sexual violence, and the current resurgence of the early 80’s shift towards theorizing heavily on the topics of child sexual abuse.
So! a historical moment when a substantial amount of feminist academics and mental health professionals were proposing that there was a large undercurrent of Satanic ritual abuse occurring, that should be believed because they were recovered during therapy, and which was largely found to be… not a thing that was happening at the scale the moral panic claimed, is a v threatening historical event to contend w as feminists! esp when the language around this specific situation ('believe women’) has remained basically unchanged in the interim decades.
At the same time, social conservatives aren’t in a place any more where like the sexual violence of women can be used as a form of moral panic in order to enforce a Moral majoritarian society, or expand the necessity for more expansive and draconian carceral frameworks. So they have found themselves suddenly against the ideas that they previously used to champion, esp as the face of the abuser has shifted from a fantastical representation of anti-christian evil to like… the average man.
It’s a complex situation but one that I think is extremely germane to the current political moment and the way that we focus on what ways that our championing against very real social violences and wrongs can become used in perhaps unintentional ways. Where does the line exist between like a v real excavation of fucked up social relations and moral panics liable to conservative opportunism and redirection? It’s a really difficult thing to think thru (esp if one has personal experience w these forms of abuse, i feel like)
Capitalists in the 70s: you know how we can make even greater profits? Get states around the globe to stop providing public goods and services, have them lower taxes on corporations, privatize those services so we can fill in the gap left by the state no longer providing these goods and services so we can make a profit like because that’s how the market works, and offer credit (debt) to states and consumers who can’t afford basic public goods and services or the infrastructure to provide them again so we can make a profit off the money that as taxes would’ve gone towards providing these. Let the free market do its thing baby!
Y'all: HERE’S HOW BABY BOOMER JOE AND HIS BUDDIES RUINED THE ECONOMY FOR MILLENNIALS WHEN THEY BOUGHT HOUSES WITH A 30 YEAR MORTGAGE
Is now a bad time to mention I actually don’t hate this site? I hate the owners. Hate the staff. Hate the incompetence of whoever is in charge here.
But I love the site, love the format, love my mutuals, my followers and all of the amazing content creators here. I don’t know what I’ll replace this with if anything.
another thought here is that the esp the past decade there has been kinda a trend in capitalist society towards the infantilization/adolescent-ization of all adults in order to capture them as the perfect mindset of consumers + dependents (here i’m thinking the concept of ‘adulting’, the use of college, the growth of children’s media/books/movies as All Media, the expansion of tools like facebook from simply college/teens to Everyone) and I’m interested in how the sort of … maybe not bowdlerization but the ‘family friendly’ language that is becoming more and more common among these sorts of corporations – specifically using arguments citing young people’s intellectual and moral protection – could be used to enforce this sort of arrested emotional development. perhaps the culmination of the disciplinary society (for the middle/upper class) isn’t the panopticonic prison (which is for the lower classes) but the daycare
i’m trying to hold the tension of like the idea that gendered power is basically relational in nature (and therefore not like just a static function...
