Greta Thunberg @GretaThunberg

#UsaElection #USA2024 #StopArminglsrael #FreePalestine #ClimateJusticeNow

This year we have seen many defining elections all over the world. On November 5th, It is time for one of the most powerful countries in the world — the USA — to go to the polls. It is probably Impossible to overestimate the consequences this specific election will have for the world and for the future of humanity.

There is no doubt that one of the candidates — Trump — is way more dangerous than the other. But no matter if Trump or Harris wins, the USA — a country built on stolen land and genocide on indigenous people -will soll be an imperialist hyper-capitalist world power that will ultimately continue to lead the world further into a racist, unequal world with an ever increasingly escalating climate- and environmental emergency.

With this in mind, my main message to Americans is to remember that you cannot only settle for the least worst option. Democracy is not only every four years on election day, but also every hour of every day in between. You cannot think you have done "enough' only by voting, especially when both those candidates have blood on their hands. Lets not forget that the genocide in Palestine is happening under the Biden and Harris administration, with American money and complicity. It is not in any way 'feminist." "progressive" or "humanitarian" to bomb innocent children and civilians — it is the opposite, even It it is a woman in charge. And this is of course one example among many of American imperialism. I cannot for my life understand how some can even pretend to talk about humanitarian values, without even questioning their own role In further deepening global oppression and massacres of entire countries.

So, Americans, you must do everything in your power to call out this extreme hypocrisy and the catastrophic consequences American Imperialism has on a global scale. Be uncomfortable, fill the streets, block, organise, boycott, occupy, explicitly call out those in power whose actions and Inaction lead to death and destruction. Join and support those who are resisting and leading the change. Nothing less will ever be acceptable.

In this article, we argue that a Slow Feminism, which evolves through the slow but consistent support of other women that is embedded in care, compassion and constructive challenge against patriarchal expectations, is essential for the future of feminist praxis within higher education. This work emerged from our coming together to reflect-on-action on our experiences as disabled, women, postgraduate researchers in different disciplines during the COVID-19 pandemic. Feeling ‘othered’ by and invisible to hierarchal structures, we sought to understand our individual challenges through a collective lens. Relational ethics and a praxis of care in line with feminist epistemology underpinned our systematic ‘feminist collaborative autoethnography’, whereby we critically engaged with individual reflections and together in online meetings to interpret shared social, emotional and structural challenges. In this article, we draw on our experiences sharing this data through poetry, during the stage of our collaborative project in which we utilised ‘poems’ to identify the challenges of being a disabled woman navigating higher education, and the resistance we employed individually, and collectively, in support of one another. Through this process, we challenged the neoliberal, patriarchal and oppressive systems that we are forced to engage with daily and our own complicity in them. Using our individual, collective and overlapping voices, whereby we recognise the tensions and supportive narratives created by and within our research conversations, we identify that feminist activism and feminist futures are not solely a response to extreme events.

The ideas of the Resistance Committees historically were explored as early as the 1990s. The idea was to provide the opposition with a closely knitted organizational front. The Communist Party had a long history of encouraging the idea of communes as a form of democracy based on the Soviet experience and as a response to the state’s excessive and violent crackdown on multiple forms of political representation. It was also part of a more inclusive democratization narrative where people sought to substitute politics from above and big man politics with micro governance systems where they redefined their relationship with the state and its institutions and tried to find ways to hold it accountable at a local level.

In 2013 and 2014 when the first uprisings took place, The National Consensus Front, of which the Communist Party was a member, sought to deal with popular detachment from politics through building political organization in the workplace for unions and neighborhood committees. They worried that the weakness of the two main coalitions active at the time – Sudan Call and the National Consensus Front – combined with the proliferation of liberal civic agendas funded by Western aid money would increase the rift between them and the popular masses. At that point the Resistance Committees were composed of members representing their political institutions and served as a dormant though extended group of the affiliated political bodies.

It was only in December 2018 and forward that the Resistance Committees emerged in their current form and organizational outlook, and started expressing political agendas and demands away from mainstream politics and politicians.

Gaza Strip, Palestine — With the war on Gaza being dubbed the first livestreamed genocide, gruesome images of Palestinian bodies shredded by Israeli bombings circulate the internet daily. More than 52,000 Palestinians have been confirmed killed, including those still buried under the rubble, with the actual death count likely as high as 186,000 or more. A third of those killed by Israel are children and around 100,000 Gazans have been injured. Of the 2.2 million Palestinians in the 25-mile long coastal enclave, [2 million](2 million) have been forcibly displaced at least once since in the last year. (...)

1. Participants know they are part of a group and what the group is about (Wilson, 2016).
2. Agreements for sharing and at times rotating labor/work and implementation of decisions as well as for sharing the fruits thereof (Kropotkin, 1906, Sixth Commission of the EZLN, 2016, Ostrom, 2021, Usufruct Collective, 2022). People can co-create a cornucopia where there is more than enough for all or otherwise agree to specific ways of distributing less abundant fruits of re/production according to needs.   
3. Direct collective decision making by participants through deliberation. For there to be self-management of each and all, there must also be mutual non-domination. By extension, community assemblies related to the commons should utilize direct, participatory, and non-hierarchical forms of democracy (Bookchin, 2005b).  
4. Organizational transparency that allows participants to mutually-monitor the commons (Atkins, Wilson, Hayes, 2019). This can happen through the process of co-managing and interacting with the commons, collective action, living in community with others, relevant accounting/calculation as needed, and availability of relevant information to participants. 
5. Graduated defense against domination and exploitation such as: informal social disapproval, self-defense and defense of others as needed, and recourse to expelling someone from a particular collective (through deliberation, assembly, and due process) in response to the most extreme violations of the commons and freedoms of persons (Boehm, 2001, Ostrom, 2021, Usufruct Collective, 2023).  
6. Good-enough conflict resolution such as: people talking directly to each other, mediation to find out how to move forward, dispute resolution to resolve disputes, restorative justice and transformative justice processes for people to repair harm and transform causes thereof, and organization-wide assembly when the conflict is in regards to organizational form and content. (Kaba, 2019, Usufruct Collective, 2023). 
7. Communities and participants need sufficient autonomy to organize. 
8. The use of co-federation and embedded councils. Community assemblies can co-manage inter-communal commons in a way where policy-making power is held by participants and assemblies directly (Bookchin, 1992, Ocalan, 2014). This enables self-management and mutual aid within and between communities as well as inter-communal management of the commons. Community assemblies can utilize mandated and recallable councils and rotating delegates to implement decisions within the bounds of policies made by community assemblies directly (Bookchin, 1992, 2007, 2018). 

France declares curfew as second overseas territory erupts with protests over failing services and high cost of living ~ From Contre Attaque ~

The squatters quickly declared the base in the middle of the city “a politically autonomous anarchist zone.” Or, in plainer English, a commune. Taking a cue from the surrounding “Christian’s Harbor” neighborhood, they called it “Christiania.”

Like many other communes, Christiania’s founders wanted the new world they made within the walls to be as free as possible from all the old world’s rules and customs and hierarchies. They drew up a mission statement, according to which the goal of the commune was quote “to create a self-governing society whereby each and every individual holds themselves responsible for the well-being of the entire community.”

Link to preprint (PDF) from the author’s website

Abstract: When a liberal-democratic state signs a treaty or wages a war, does its whole polity do those things? We approach this question via the recent social ontological literature on collective agency. We provide an argument for 'yes', alongside one for 'no.' The arguments are presented via three desiderata on a 'yes' answer: the polity’s control over what the state does; the polity’s unity; and the influence of individual polity-members. We suggest that the answer to our question differs for different liberal-democratic states, and depends upon two underlying considerations: (1) the amount of discretion held by the state’s office-holders; (2) the extent to which the democratic procedure is ‘deliberative’ rather than ‘aggregative.’

Throughout history, working class people have stood up and fought back against oppression and exploitation in the food system. Each month, Food Fight documents a timeline of historical labor struggles to inform and educate today’s workers on historical class struggle in the food industry. We commemorate their struggles each day of the month.

"The unexpected story of how Alfred Nobel’s invention of dynamite—designed to build the world—was co-opted by anarchists to bring about its destruction. From revolutionizing infrastructure to arming political radicals, dynamite shaped the rise of both terrorism and modern law enforcement."

Abstract:

In the early 1960s, a number of anarchist writers showed an interest in cybernetics, in which they saw the tools for better articulating radical forms of self-organisation. Discussions on the connections between anarchism and cybernetics did not advance very far, however, and by the 1970s the topic seems to have fallen off the anarchist radar. With an increase in interest in cybernetics over the last few years, this paper picks up where these debates left off and highlights some key points of contact between cybernetics and anarchism that have the potential to advance radical accounts of self-organisation. Based on a theoretical appraisal of the core texts and arguments in the debate around anarchism and cybernetics, the paper shows that the way in which hierarchy is formulated in cybernetic thought has a crucial impact on anarchist theory and practice and aids both academic approaches to social movements and, importantly, anarchist and radical left praxis. In addition, it provides a response to the critique of cybernetics in critical management studies that stands as a barrier to taking cybernetics seriously as a contribution to radical understandings of organization.

radicalsundayschool.noblogs.org

From their website:

Radical Sunday School is an anarchist (anti-authoritarian socialist) educational collective based in Amsterdam. We want to help our communities learn like they’re already free: free as in without charging money, free as in choosing for yourself what classes are about, free as in learning to free ourselves from bosses and bureaucrats. We also work to challenge the more subtle hierarchies of the classroom, like the rule of the expert over the amateur. In our classes, everyone has something to learn, and everyone has something to contribute.

We anarchists are generally averse to cooperating with the police, for very good reasons. However, as I understand it, at times the only real way to protect the community in the society we currently live in seems to be talking with the pigs.

Suppose you believe yourself to have evidence incriminating a serial killer. In an anarchistic society the serial killer could be sent to the psych ward and dealt with humanely. But what about the modern day? Do you turn over the evidence to the police?

This question has been bothering me for about 3 days now. It was provoked by learning about Aufhebengate. It made me wonder under what circumstances snitching is justifiable.

The Core Issues Driving the Protests

1. Election Law Changes: The protests have been significantly fueled by recent amendments to Indonesia’s election laws. Many Indonesians view these changes as undermining democratic principles and increasing the influence of entrenched political elites. Some see the amendments as facilitating the manipulation of electoral outcomes, which has raised concerns about fairness and transparency in the democratic process.

2. Political Corruption: Corruption remains a longstanding issue in Indonesian politics. The perception of widespread corruption among political elites, including members of powerful political dynasties, has contributed to popular frustration. Many protesters are demanding a fair trial and punishment for the offenders, as well as greater accountability and transparency from relevant institutions such as the Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK).

Additional Factors

1. Historical Grievances: Indonesia has a history of political turbulence, and recent protests are influenced by historical grievances, including previous movements against authoritarian rule and corruption. The legacy of the Suharto era and the 1998 Reformasi (“Reformation”) movement continues to impact people sentiment and activism to this day.

2. Economic Discontent: Economic issues also play a significant role. Rising inequality, unemployment, and dissatisfaction with economic policies have fueled discontent. Many Indonesians feel that the benefits of economic growth have not been evenly distributed, exacerbating social and economic tensions.

3. Social Media and Activism: The role of social media in organizing and amplifying dissent cannot be overlooked. Social media platforms have enabled activists to mobilize and spread information rapidly, contributing to the scale and intensity of the protests. This led to increased popular oversight of their performance and any crimes they commit. Hashtag movements have also expanded, with the term “no viral, no justice” emerging in response to ongoing issues.

4. Current Leadership: President Jokowi has faced criticism for failures in handling corruption and political reforms and issuing unpopular draft laws. Over the ten years he has been in power, Jokowi’s administration has been accused of not doing enough to address the systemic issues that contribute to popular disillusionment. Jokowi’s focus during his presidency has been to promote forms of development that have been detrimental to society and the environment. This has generated significant criticism and conflict at the grassroots level, where communities are directly affected by his policies.

5. Police Brutality: There is anger about police violence against protesters, arbitrary arrests, mistreatment of detainees, abuse of power, corruption, the increase in the national budget for armaments, the use of tear gas in demonstrations, professional misconduct, and police involvement in the “protection” of illegal online gambling, human trafficking, drug trafficking, and the “security” of mining and palm oil plantation areas in conflict with local communities. Critics argue that this reflects systemic issues within the police force, such as lack of accountability, inadequate oversight, and a tendency toward authoritarian practices. Human rights organizations, activists, and other people often call for reforms to improve policing practices, ensure greater transparency, and protect civil liberties. Anarchists call to end the institution and fight them.

think of antifascism, queer feminism and anti discrimination as the sprinkles on top

(not mine, saw this at a recent workshop)