When someone responds to criticisms of industrialism with cries of "primitivist" it's a safe bet they won't engage in good faith and they don't have a nuanced critique.
In this case, I don't think they're even anticapitalist if they think:
industrialism "lift[s] people out of extreme poverty", that you can't provide universal public housing without concrete, and that "rural poverty" is something that exists naturally rather than being a feature of industrialization itself.
And then there's the bizarre take that "all" nuclear waste could fit in a single room and can be "disposed" of safely.
And we can bet this proponent of mining wouldn't volunteer to live downriver from a mine.
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
There's a great morass of misinformation around yesterday's "anarchist gulags in Catalunya" crap, which is not surprising, given it came from authoritarian socialists deflecting from their history of systematic repression and murder.
Thread: Repression in an anarchist revolution
The most true thing about the shitposting is that anarchists generally responded: if anarchists really did set up gulags in 1936, that was wrong of them;
whereas the authoritarian socialists could neither offer a self-critique of their own history nor an honest critique of their opponents. This openness to analysis and self-critique, the insistence on uniting means and ends, is why I am an anarchist.
Thread:
This excellent book looks at the impact of European slaving in Africa, the loss of the past for enslaved people, the predation of African states against stateless peoples, the limitations of independence in West Africa, and the fate of Pan-Africanism.
West African states and aristocracies attained immense power and wealth through the slave trade, but all of this was wiped out by the way Africa was forcibly integrated into the "global" (colonial/neocolonial) economy,
with the most widespread African currency being stripped of its value then illegalized by European colonizers almost overnight.
In effect, European colonizers produced wealth through the slave trade that they used to fuel further wealth production, state-building, and war-making,
So: there is a high possibility of a global economic collapse in the next 10 years (or weeks). There are more and more fronts of systemic instability, and global supply chains are simultaneously very very long and very very skinny (without the redundancies of healthy networks).
If it happens, national govts will have to intervene in some capacity. This could be as extreme as a full mobilization of the emergency management paradigm, w/ military in the streets and govt distribution of essential supplies/direction of production & distribution.
In most places, we're not currently strong enough to oppose this directly, although experiences show we will have a great capacity to develop mutual aid initiatives more effective than the govt survival infrastructure.
Just a reminder that the Communist Party of China are highly effective managers of capital, and global investors, in particular US capitalists since the Nixon years, rely on them to play that role.
One of the big flaws in statist anti-imperialist narratives is how they seemed to miss one of the most important dramas of the 20th century, the split between the USSR and China, triggered in large part by USSR's imperialist treatment of China.
However, framing China as the anti-imperialist hero erases their imperialist behavior towards Vietnam, continuing w/out interruption the behavior of imperial (pre-socialist) China towards SE Asia
Brief (late) suggestion for an anarchist positionality in the pandemic.
*The line of conflict runs through the lives of people who are being hurt by the capitalist and statist response.*
That seems obvious, but we often don't stop to trace that line before acting.
A THREAD
Our battlefield is in the workplaces where workers don't have healthcare or sick days or safe conditions; in the hospitals neglected by the state; in the streets when people are punished for organizing on the job.
We should defend the survival of an expansive "we" through strike actions and mutual aid initiatives. The strike actions may temporarily rely on union structures, but they should point to a path of worker self-organization leading to a world without bosses or alienated consumers
The State is not a viable instrument for protecting the planet.
Direct action, anti-state, and anti-colonial struggles have been doing the real work.
The State has just given us broken promises and repression.
Palm oil plantations blocked in Borneo. Pipelines stopped in North America. An airport cancelled in France. Coal mining slowed in Germany. Drag net fishing sabotaged in the Adriatic. Urban gardening and food sovereignty built up in racist food deserts from Durban to Atlanta.
Indigenous land recovered, restored, and reforested, and food sovereignty achieved in territory nominally occupied by the Brazilian, Chilean, and Venezuelan states. Forest gardens protected from greenwashed nature preserves and monocrop commercial forests in India.