To see things clearly, one needn't read Galeano, Vine Deloria Jr, Howard Zinn. Colombo supported mutilations, land theft, total slavery, and sex slavery for children in his f*cking diary. #NothingtoCelebrate
This demonstrates the limits of debate.
Anyone who negates the genocidal reality of Columbus, the US, whiteness, the bourgeoisie: those aren't beliefs that deserve respect. They're alibis to facilitate life in a world constructed by mass murderers like Columbus (and George Washington)
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and to justify receiving some of the bloody profits.
It's good to have the books and studies, but unless we constitute ourselves as a force to destroy this world, the white supremacist histories and identities won't disappear.
(And yeah, over here they celebrate Columbus Day or the "Day of Spanishness" on the anniversary of the invasion, which is why this is coming a day late for statesiders.)
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Obviously, abolishing prisons and police would be a wonderful thing, but I'm finding certain problems in the framework of "abolition" that are setting us up for failure.
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Reading the following from Saidiya Hartman crystallized it for me. The 19th century abolitionist movement was controlled by white progressives. They didn't want to talk about taking the war to the bankers, merchants, & landowners nor to center armed resistance by enslaved people.
They wanted to use morally exemplary individuals, some sacrificed victim as posterchild, to appeal to their compatriots' conscience and allow the State to enact a change.
But slavery had become essential to the new economies of Africa and the Americas,
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When I got to one thousand followers, I sent out a booty shot. I don't know what you're supposed to do at 10k, so I'm going to send out
*Kill Anarchist Idols*
A Thread:
If we're on here to spread anarchist ideas (is that why we're on here?), it helps to have some larger accounts because of the way Twitter is structured. But it's probably not a great idea for those accounts to be in the hands of a few individuals.
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At the bottom of the thread, I'm going to send out a list of collective accounts to follow, but first I want to problematize certain ideas of power.
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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.
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.
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.