#OtD in 1936, Buenaventura Durruti died on the Madrid front of the Spanish Civil War. He had been a lifelong anarchist expropriator, assassin, union organizer, and at the end, militia leader, advancing a revolutionary, working class methodology for fighting fascism.
For propaganda reasons, it was said he was felled by a fascist bullet, though this is contradicted by eyewitness reports and the forensic examination. The actual cause was either a hit organized by Stalinists or the accidental discharge of a comrade's firearm.
Whatever the case,
Stalinists wasted no time in taking advantage of his death to force the "regularization" of the militias, meaning the disarmament of the working class, the ascendance of a standard, aristocratic, hierarchical military, and the end of the revolution.
"We are not afraid of ruins. We know that is all we will inherit, because the bourgeoisie will try to ruin the world in the last phase of their history. But we are not afraid of ruins because we carry a new world in our hearts. And that world is growing right now."
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The Invention of Whiteness: the Spanish Laboratory
a thread
To mourn the first day of the Invasion, I'm sharing thoughts from a future book.
Much has been written on British colonization of Ireland as a laboratory for creating whiteness in the anglo world. Much less has been...
...written on the equally important Spanish experience, owing in part to anglocentric historiography and to a simplistic anti-imperialism only capable of focusing on the evils of Anglo-US dominance, and denying the centrality of whiteness to Iberian and Latin American societies.
In fact, Spain itself was invented as an integral part of this process of colonization and the creation of whiteness.
It's the year 1000. The concepts of Spain or a white race do not yet exist. Most of the Iberian peninsula is inhabited by a diverse Muslim society. The western...
Liberals like Peter Coffin and pop philosophers like Ken Wilbur think they've come up with an answer to anarchism when they conflate expertise and hierarchy. Would you let your neighbor perform brain surgery on you? Hierarchy must be good.
That's like going up to a mathematician before you've even gotten to negative numbers, thinking you can disprove their system because 2 - 3 just doesn't make any sense to you. Must be broken. Math sux. On to magnets.
Psychologists w/ an individualist framework and animal behavioralists who created simplified schema by studying animals in captivity have also muddied the waters, making it hard to apply the concept of hierarchy to human society, which was in fact the concept's original purpose.
Taking a page from ISIS, fascists, citizens, and cops have increasingly been using their vehicles as weapons to run people over in crowds.
Introducing, rebar caltrops.
A brief DIY thread.
You will need:
rebar (free in most construction sites)
bench vise
angle grinder (with a disc for cutting metal, important)
arc welder
(These last 3 are a must have for any radical community anyway for your standard metal working needs)
-With the angle grinder and bench vise, cut the rebar into lengths of approximately 4 inches, cutting at 45°! (to leave pointed ends)
-W/ vise and wrench, bend each length of rebar 90°
-Place 2 pieces of bent rebar together (see photo)
-Weld
You don't even have to be a good...
A fair model for what's happening now is the "Strategy of Tension" in Italy in the '60s and '70s. Police used the far Right to attack the struggle, killing people and exhausting the movement, media and politicians portrayed it all as a clash between equally violent and...
unreasonable "extremists," the Communists kept encouraging ppl to engage in peaceful, legal reform. The end result was to neutralize the revolutionary movement and present centrist democracy as the only legitimate form of politics. Though hundreds were killed and thousands...
...arrested, tortured, or exiled, the "Years of Lead" produced a middle class society immersed in consumerism, in which politics was little more than a soap opera. Never underestimate how many murders a democracy is willing to carry out in order to maintain its illusions.
Bullsh*t that happens when you criticize scientists.
A thread.
There is no system of oppression in the world today that functions w/out the complicity of scientists. Scientific institutions are a crucial part of capitalism, colonialism, patriarchy, etc.
When an oppression...
...is systematic, generalized criticism is justified, even though generalization always leaves things out.
Yet criticisms of oppressive tendencies of scientists are always met with the same formula: 1) Most scientists are good people who are actually working to solve x problem
...2) Actually, scientists are ALREADY aware of this problem, they're way ahead of you (without ever acknowledging the struggles of common people who forced them to admit their errors or the marginalized who are the true creators of knowledge).
So I guess we just dreamed up
When anarchists talk about abolishing hierarchy.
A short thread.
Hierarchy is one of those words whose meaning has slipped significantly over the years.
Its original meaning is "rule by priests".
It is NOT the same as ranking, status, or inequality. akpress.org/worshipingpowe…
Maslow should have described a "flow chart of needs," wolves and primates don't have hierarchies but relational systems, sometimes with limited ranking (many animal behavioral studies were corrupted by the observer's cultural projections & the stress of captivity)
A hierarchy is a self-reproducing system in which power is distributed unequally across a linear scale, and those in the top tier or tiers predominantly decide on the common values and norms for the system, including how people may move up or down on the scale.