This piece is excellent. It historically situates the movement as a workers movement, recognizing internal contradictions, and counters the framework of both apologists for the repression & liberal cheerleaders of the student movement on how we should understand the consequences
Pulling out sections I especially feel are worth highlighting:
This one is less centrally important to Tiananmen but it highlights the contradictions in the tendency within the socialist movement which has substituted workers control for party domination
Been told I need to read state and rev, when I did this quote jumped the fuck out to me
This is an incredibly conscise summary of what is really the main contradiction within the workers movement:
Important framing of the class nature of the cultural revolution and its repression:
What I take from this is that one need not be an anarchist to assert the necessity of workers control and autonomy for workers. Dispossession, alienation, and disempowerment produce their own dissenters and assert those necessities.
First they kill the workers then they kill their ideas, as such they die two deaths. The counter revolution continues every time they are socially killed again.
On Tiananmen as the transition between different forms of workers struggle, the shift in the site of social struggle from the factory to the street, and the challenges that emerge from this particularly in the lack of ability to assert collective power.
There are no easy answers for this as the article suggests this struggle and others like it were in a sense a response to the reorganization of the world economy to make such struggles impossible (we cannot go back) but there are glimmers of hope to be found.
There are examples like autogestion in Argentina of workers democracy asserted after this but unlike Tiananmen Hungary, Spain, Italy, Russia as mentioned these have been largely filling gaps left by capitalist reshuffling not a direct challenge to capitalist production writ large
The ability to assert collective power as workers or in resistance to capital seems to be shifting from the point of production to crucial nodes along the supply chain. They can now easily move a factory whose workers strike but they cannot as easily change global geography.
The port blockades against Israeli ships, the barricades of Canadian railroads in solidarity with Unistʼotʼen Camp, the blocking of the pipeline itself, even that accidental blocking of the Suez show what might be an alternative.
Missed the alt text for these but don’t want to break the thread so here they are if you need them:
My family is has a lot of artists including painters, musicians, a poet etc. all of them seem to immediately recognize the suit against internet archive as an attack on culture not a defense of it. So it’s bizarre for me to see some artists threat IA as some existential threat.
Copyright laws hurt far more artists than they help, especially in an era of digital production, sampling, etc. they present a barrier to entry, while only really benefiting a handful of celebrity artists and primarily large corporate entertainment conglomerates.
Why have seemingly a sizable number of artists on here become convinced that rather than a capitalism exploiting labor of all kinds, the threat to their livelihood is people who can’t afford exorbitant fees that go to publishers, & private companies who exist to restrict access?
Potentially losing one of the largest archives of human knowledge, and a freely accessible one at that, because of a copyright really shows how much copyright laws are a threat to human knowledge and culture.
The internet archive hosts so much, and so many different kinds of things, art, music, and films, primary documents, books, and research journals, audio and visual recordings, and website backups.
The focus of the lawsuit is on the books, a major blow in itself as there are so many books I can only find there or can only find not for hundreds of dollars there, but would likely also threaten everything else.
I think it’s really telling that some leftists on here who seem to be exclusively posting content about fascists in Ukraine totally ignore shit like Neo-Nazi paramilitary leader Vladimir Zhoga fighting for and being honored by the Russian state:
People who definitely understand why constantly saying shit like “free Gaza from Hamas” is fucked up for ignoring the occupation, & that Israel is its main source of legitimacy, even if they recognize Hamas as being reactionary, clearly cannot apply that same analysis to Ukraine.
I have no idea who is winning the war, nor do I think it is worth speculating on as I do not have reliable information on what is happening behind the scenes on either side and neither do most of the people making confident proclamations about who is winning.
A lot of people seem to be making assumptions based on who they want to win and as such many people who generally back Ukraine are pretty confident Russian supply lines are about to collapse. While many who generally back Russia highlight territorial losses for Ukraine.
It is especially difficult to say who is winning a battle of occupation. Even if the flag changes in the center of town, or even say the capital, do the occupied accept the rule of the occupier? Remember the US occupied Afghanistan for decades and still lost.
Abolish the death penalty. Even for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.
Shows the hollowness of the whole idea of a “progressive DA” that Rollins is supporting using it here. And so much for Biden claiming to want to end the death penalty but still appealing this case to kill a man.
To be clear Rollins is not the DA anymore, she is now a US attorney for MA but she made her name for herself as a “progressive DA” in Suffolk county (which includes Boston) despite calling to end cash bail in elections only to raise bail on people about to be bailed out by MBF.
From what I’ve seen so far the solidarity and anti-war statements from leftists in Russia and in Russia’s periphery (Lithuania, Georgia, Finland, etc) and of course in Ukraine are so much clearer about what is actually happening and the stakes than statements from the US/west EU
I think the underlying difference is that for those whose people have been subjected to versions of Russian imperialism directly Russian expansion is not an abstract force that is seen as a counter balance to western imperialism but a genuine & material threat to freedom itself.
Russians are also writing from the same position as Liebknecht in his essay “The Main Enemy Is At Home!” Their state is the clear imperial aggressor
What is often left out of the essay, is that he also says “Down with the war instigators here and abroad!” marxists.org/archive/liebkn…