The US has selective amnesia for the violence of white supremacists, so the far Right won't be marginalized in the long term, but this half-assed MAGA riot will present Republicans an opportunity to distance themselves from Trump and clean up their image, wash away...
...their sins of the last 4 years and opt for reinventing their Party (and the Right). They'd still have to win a war for the rank-and-file. Or they may try hedge their bets, which would allow Trump to hold onto influence in the Party.
For a long time Republican pollsters have...
been saying the Party's been betting on a shrinking demographic. Now that they're in the minority across the board, they may decide on a shake up. The Democrats on the other hand will call for renewed centrist unity.
So the fascists are going to be more isolated but more extreme,
clashing again and again with their lack of organizing and experience, their fear of bad optics (post C'ville all over again), but still deadly.
And gov't and police will still be united in violently crushing continued antiracist and poor rebellions.
More important than this...
show in DC, what's happening in Kenosha tonight?
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Strategy notes.
If the Republicans decide today to remove Trump, Democrats will embrace them and the renewal of democracy will feature extreme centrism. Fascists will be left without electoral expression and will seek other avenues.
If Reps don't, Democrats will pursue...
Thread
legal action in 2 weeks. They will strongly differentiate themselves from Reps through some progressive policies and mostly symbolic action that includes repressive measures against all "extremists", Right and Left. Either way, they will find ways to increase repression against
antiracist & anticapitalist rebellion, with greater use of cooptation in 2nd scenario.
Trump is done for now, but if he and his principals aren't punished/banned, electoral Trumpism could come back in 2 years.
On the ground: important to thwart fascist attempts
I hope everyone is making a distinction between feeling worried about what these fascists might do after they leave the Capitol (legit), and being troubled by what they are doing at the Capitol. We're not here to defend politicians or symbols of power. And we shouldn't be...
surprised anymore that fascists get kiddy glove treatment from the cops and unarmed National Guards. Seriously.
Also, I hope anarchists aren't spreading the hyperbolic rhetoric that this is a coup. A real coup takes organization and strategy. It's not a coincidence that...
Republican politicians were some of the first to call this a coup. Because the antidote to a coup is a renewal of democracy. It's a chance for all these politicians to give themselves a face lift.
Remember, democracy has been doing genocide, repression, and immiseration for
#OtD in 1960, Catalan anarchist guerrilla Quico Sabaté was finally shot down by the fascists after thirty years of combat against capitalism. As a teenager he joined the CNT to organize his workplace (several factories, working as a mechanic), and with his brothers...
Read more
he created an affinity group within the FAI. In Jan 1933, he participated in the insurrection organized by the CNT, in 1935 his affinity group carried out their first expropriation to raise money for prisoners. When the Civil War broke out in 1936 he went with a FAI militia to
the Aragón front, he was accused of killing a communist commissar who was withholding armaments from the anarchist columns, allowing the fascists to take Teruel, was imprisoned, escaped, went back to the front to continue fighting the fascists, escaped to France
This visual aid helps demonstrate why "dictatorship of the proletariat" is such a nonsense idea.
The bourg in the blue triangle, after the rev: are they dead, totally expropriated? Then there's no more bourg, no blue, no one to dictate to.
Is there still a bourgeoisie...
...dominated by the State? Then capitalist relations and means of production still exist on some level and what you have is state capitalism. This is what Lenin did, it was great for economic growth, neither capitalism nor the state "withered away." This is a loss for specific...
...capitalists but a win for capitalism.
What about the red base? Are the means of subsistence communalized & alienation abolished? Then necessarily ALL the proletariat participates in the organization of society, relations are horizontal, reciprocal, there is no dictatorship.
#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.
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...