mambabasa

cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/1334348

cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/1392374

From the 2019 game, Disco Elysium

The Deserter: (he opens his eyes and stares right through you) “It was real. I'd seen it. I'd seen it in reality.”

Half-Light: Some kind of great terror. Worse than what you've seen.

You: “Seen what?”

The Deserter: “The mask of humanity fall from capital. It has to take it off to kill everyone — everything you love; all the hope and tenderness in the world. It has to take it off, just for one second. To do the deed.

And then you see it. As it strangles and beats your friends to death... the sweetest, most courageous people in the world...” (he's silent for a second) You see the fear and power in its eyes. “Then you know.”

You: “What?”

The Deserter: “That the bourgeois are not human.”

This is quite a long text, but you don’t need to read the chapters in order and each chapter is on a different urban experiment. It looks at “radical municipalism” or a communities taking back power of their city and rebuilding it into what they want to make of it. The rebel cities are:

1. Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
2. Rojava, Northern Syria
3. Chiapas, Mexico
4. Warsaw, Poland
5. Bologna, Italy
6. Jackson, Mississippi
7. Athens, Greece
8. New York City, New York & Warsaw, Poland
9. Reykjavík, Iceland
10. Rosario, Argentina
11. Newham, UK
12. Valparaiso, Chile
13. Porto Alegre, Brazil; Greensboro, North Carolina
14. Montevideo, Uruguay
15. Communes, Venezuela
16. Cape Town, South Africa
17. Goma, DR Congo
18. Jemna, Tunisia
19. Gdansk, Poland
20. Dakur, Senegal
21. Mumbai, India
22. Phan Ri Cua & Binh Thuan, Vietnam
23. Seikatsu, Japan
24. Catalonia, Spain
25. Barcelona, Spain
26. Denmark and Scotland

Today, more than ever, it remains crucial to center any discussion about Palestinian liberation through the lens of abolition and a complete rejection of carcerality. In this context, Incarceration is not only related to prisons and prisoners, but touches upon every aspect of our life. From the moment of birth, Palestinians must contend with being criminalized for existing. We are surveilled and censored, our oppression normalized, and our bodies corralled into various open-air and closed prisons.

I’ve been thinking of how to combine electrified reefs with open ocean aquaculture as a way of helping indigent and at-risk fisher communities to deal with climate change. Of course, there’s no technological solution to social problems, so I still have to consider the social and organizational aspects of using these technologies in indigent fisher communities.

How would you think these technologies could help coastal communities?

Heya folks, let’s try something new. I liked that people asked questions about anarchism in the David Graeber post. Every now and then I’ll be posting these meta threads where people are free to ask questions on anarchism or social ecology and hopefully people knowledgeable can answer.

Millett argues that state welfare is a function of social control and that social welfare can only be considered as a function of empowerment. Their proposed anarchist alternative is mutual aid.

In this chapter I outline briefly the development of the Welfare State in Britain, stressing the importance of social control in its evolution. I then look at the evidence regarding the issue of who benefits from the State provision of welfare. I suggest that welfare can only be considered as a function of empowerment, and conclude that not only are participatory alternatives separate from the State a necessity, but that these alternatives offer a possible starting-point for the creation of a Stateless society.

If there’s a line to get on a crowded bus, do you wait your turn and refrain from elbowing your way past others even in the absence of police?

If you answered “yes”, then you are used to acting like an anarchist!

Are you a member of a club or sports team or any other voluntary organization where decisions are not imposed by one leader but made on the basis of general consent?

If you answered “yes”, then you belong to an organization which works on anarchist principles!

Do you believe that most politicians are selfish, egotistical swine who don’t really care about the public interest? Do you think we live in an economic system which is stupid and unfair?

If you answered “yes”, then you subscribe to the anarchist critique of today’s society — at least, in its broadest outlines.

Do you really believe those things you tell your children (or that your parents told you)?

“It doesn’t matter who started it.” “Two wrongs don’t make a right.” “Clean up your own mess.” “Do unto others...” “Don’t be mean to people just because they’re different.” Perhaps we should decide whether we’re lying to our children when we tell them about right and wrong, or whether we’re willing to take our own injunctions seriously. Because if you take these moral principles to their logical conclusions, you arrive at anarchism.

Do you believe that human beings are fundamentally corrupt and evil, or that certain sorts of people (women, people of color, ordinary folk who are not rich or highly educated) are inferior specimens, destined to be ruled by their betters?

If you answered “yes”, then, well, it looks like you aren’t an anarchist after all. But if you answered “no”, then chances are you already subscribe to 90% of anarchist principles, and, likely as not, are living your life largely in accord with them.

While not natural structures, their platforms have been embedded into the muddy seabed long enough to become part of the ocean environment, providing a home for creatures like mussels and barnacles, which in turn attract larger fish and sea lions that find safety and food there.

After two and a half decades of studying the rigs, Bull says it’s clear to her: “These places are extremely productive, both for commercial and recreational fisheries and for invertebrates.”

Now, as California and the US shift away from offshore drilling and toward greener energy, a debate is mounting over their future. On one side are those who argue disused rigs are an environmental blight and should be removed entirely. On the other side are people, many of them scientists, who say we should embrace these accidental oases and that removing the structures is morally wrong. In other parts of the world, oil rigs have successfully become artificial reefs, in a policy known as rigs to reefs.

No one can understand what is happening in the land of Palestine, not even those who have followed the sanguinary vicissitudes of the peoples who have lived down there for so long. They face each other with hatred and suspicion, not just men and women, children and old people, but the very dust of the roads and the mud that covers them on rainy days, the asphyxiating heat and the stench of the sultriness.

The ‘official’ terms of the controversy are well known. The Israelis chased the Palestinians off their land, but this happened so long ago that some of the people born in huts in the camps are now fifty years old. Ridiculous arguments between States have resulted in pieces of land being returned to the people who were driven away, but it is impossible to live in them. In Israel if you don’t work you go hungry. The colons of the second Zionist wave got rich through the exploitation of a cheap Palestinian work force and the free use of fields in territories that should now constitute the new State of Palestine. But not only does all that fail to grasp the essence of the problem, it does not even begin to describe it. Perhaps it made sense at the time of the first popular insurrection of the people of the ‘territories’, that of the stones. Now things are moving towards an increasingly ferocious ‘Lebanisation’.

Neither party wants to retreat as this would lead to internal conflict, a destructive civil war that would almost certainly give the adversary victory on a military level.

And so they continue to attack each other in a never-ending cycle. Each side uses the weapons they have at their disposal: the Palestinians blow themselves up with their own bombs; the Israelis bomb houses in the territories from planes. There are the pacification maps, the internal agreements, the UN guarantees and Bush’s empty ‘sorrow’.

The problem is developing at its own pace, one that can only be grasped by someone who has familiarity with such situations, and it is becoming chronic. Hatred becomes acute when one lives in conditions such as those of the Palestinians, with prospects like theirs, i.e., none at all. There is no hope for their children or for the future of the place where they were born. And it is not true that this hatred, so ferocious and incomprehensible to us, is nourished by integralist extremism. How is it that most of the young people who blow themselves up with their own bombs have completed their studies, have a degree or diploma — sometimes obtained abroad — are family people, have children. What they don’t have is hope. They realize that there is nothing for them but a prospect of hatred of an enemy that imprisons, bombs and tortures. On the other side everyone lives in fear of being blown up as they go to work, dance in a disco, lie asleep in their beds. Here again, blind hatred that sees no alternative is pushing people to demand that the government use more force in the repression. Even the most illuminated of the Israeli labour party formed in Mapai in 1968, (one of the Zionist forces to support the first settlements) have kept quiet for fear of losing their electoral base. Many see the Likud (right wing party which means literally ‘consolidation’) as the only force capable of leading the country against the Palestinians.

To speak of peace under such conditions is just another way to wriggle out of things with clean hands and a dirty conscience.

Organised massacres of Palestinians such as those by the Christian-Maronites at Sabra and Chatila in September 1982, or (Black) September 1970 organised by King Hussein of Jordan which lasted until April 1971 resulting in 4,600 dead and 10,000 wounded, are still possible. However, if carried out by Israel or one of its armed intermedieries they would lead to a complete destabilisation of the area. As I write, Israel has attacked some presumed Palestinian posting in Syria; the present time is one of the worst.

There is no prospect of peace in sight. The ideal solution, at least as far as all those who have the freedom of peoples at heart can see, would be generalised insurrection. In other words, an intifada starting from the Israeli people that is capable of destroying the institutions that govern them and of proposing peace based on collaboration and mutual respect to the Palestinian people directly, without intermedieries. But for the time being this perspective is only a dream. We must prepare for the worst.

Alfredo M. Bonanno

In this new, even more horrifying phase of the 75 year long occupation of Palestine by Israel, it is important to give a platform to Palestinians struggling against ethnic cleansing.

Black Rose / Rosa Negra (BRRN) reached out to Fauda, a small group centered in the West Bank that identifies itself as a Palestinian anarchist organization, to get their perspective on the current struggle. Fauda is a group that is new to us, and which we don’t have more information about beyond the interview presented here and what can be found in their public channels. Because of our own limited understanding of Fauda’s politics, strategy and activity, publishing this interview cannot be a complete endorsement of them. But we hope that this interview will be a step in creating more connections between revolutionaries in the US and the militant youth in Palestine, and more knowledge and understanding of each other.

Regardless of any similarities or differences in our politics, we believe that we need to be listening to the perspectives of militants on the ground resisting the violence of US-funded ethnic cleansing. We hope that this short interview can be a contribution to strengthening our own work here of undermining imperialism and settler-colonialism.

Other than edits for clarity across translation, the content of this interview is presented unaltered. We want to thank our Palestinian and Arabic-speaking friends for their help with conducting and translating this interview. We also want to extend our gratitude to the representative of Fauda who thoughtfully engaged with our questions during a moment of extreme uncertainty and violence.