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michael Profile picture
michael
@Sisyphusa
Some kind of communist. Co-author of Fractured: Race, Class, Gender & the Hatred of Identity Politics, published by Pluto Press ⬇️ Part of @56aInfoshop. oy vey.
Aug 2 • 10 tweets • 4 min read
in the summer of 1919, anti-Black & brown pogroms spread across Britain's port towns. armed white mobs attacked small racialised communities in London, Liverpool, Glasgow, Salford, Hull, Newport, elsewhere. worker racism vs seamen spread as homes & communal spaces were targeted. in Cardiff & South Shields sizeable Muslim communities had lived & worked sometimes for several generations. mostly from present-day Yemen, Somalia, Egypt, Indian subcontinent. Islamophobia didn't appear as it has for the past 30/40 yrs. The racism was colonial and anti-migrant.
Jul 7, 2022 • 6 tweets • 1 min read
seeing a load of politicians, journalists, large institutions only now suddenly brave enough to ridicule Johnson the individual now that he's a diminished figure only underlines how effective the convergence of far right politics into the mainstream has been. 'Johnsonism', its discourses and policies and claims to power and legitimacy, has been widely supported and accommodated by powerful institutions across state, civil society, opposition forces because so many of its claims are the stuff of consensus
Jun 8, 2022 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
if you look through some of the British socialist publications around the time of the Boer War or in the lead-up to WWI they're full of nationalist conspiracy theories like Mason's about traitors to the left who show no allegiance, fears for national security and culture, etc. these attacks generally targeted Jews & anarchists (at certain times perceived to basically be the same thing). But the targets were at least genuinely autonomous actors, who proposed diff practical forms or who ideologically challenged or frightened existing workers orgs/leaders
Dec 19, 2021 • 9 tweets • 2 min read
on my run yesterday a saw wall-to-wall graffiti saying "covid1984" and i've been trying to figure out what bugs me about it so much i think it's that whole forms of "anti-establishment" politics in Britain, including a lot of Orwell and a lot of Covid-period movements, are convinced that attacks on freedom & individual liberty are essentially against British or English culture and tradition.
Nov 22, 2021 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
as you'd expect from Greenwald, someone who's made an entire career out of defending white supremacy and white supremacists, this much-repeated "gotcha" of recent days attempts to obfuscate the operations of white supremacy in US history. Image white supremacy has worked to reproduce white domination in wide-ranging contexts. to take the land of Native ppl, to control the labour and bodily autonomy of Black ppl, to make racialised ppl's lives less free and less valuable, under the power of the state.
May 16, 2021 • 10 tweets • 2 min read
my experience: i was in the thick of the march in London for ~5 hours yesterday. at one point i stood on a wall and watched its entire train pass by, 10s of 1000s of ppl, hearing the chants, seeing the signs & placards. i experienced one instance of antisemitism. i chose not to say anything onhere yesterday because i didn't want it to give a false impression of a huge march that was not characterised by antisemitism but by a desperate desire to see an end to the suffering, oppression and colonisation of Palestinian people.
May 15, 2021 • 5 tweets • 3 min read
huge turnout, this is about a quarter of the march on this road. London wants a #FreePalestine i was wrong, that wasn't even a tenth
Jan 13, 2021 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
this is absolutely true. but we underestimate the scale of our struggle if we overlook that it was *Labour* who introduced the voucher scheme for ppl seeking asylum. they introduced deportation targets & the reporting & dispersal systems. massively expanded immigration detention. we have to see this as immanent to the logics of both capital & British nationalism.

the longer view of both sees a common thread of obsessive monitoring by the capitalist class & the British state over the minutiae of the social reproduction of divided labouring classes
Jan 7, 2021 • 4 tweets • 3 min read
America is so much better than this! It doesn't ransack its own seat of government!

It massacres native peoples and occupies their land. It puts down the rebellions of the people it has enslaved for centuries. It steals territory from Mexico. America is not violent!

It just invades countries around the world. Putting down revolutions. Deposing elected governments, installing fascist ones in their place. Using military force to ensure and protect its own wealth and power.
Oct 30, 2020 • 6 tweets • 1 min read
my overwhelming feeling this morning is one of deep shame and embarrassment. i feel mortified at what my jewishness is used for in this society. i feel ashamed of how some jews have conducted themselves. i feel like i have to be apologetic about how i am racialised. i feel hopeless in the face of how philosemitism & zionism - both products of white European colonialism & racism - have constructed a Jewishness & an antisemitism that is used solely as a cudgel to gaslight other racialised people and to beat the political Left
Oct 29, 2020 • 7 tweets • 1 min read
In before the EHRC:

barely arms length state bodies, government and the courts can't be the arbiters of anti-racism. Such powers, in such a society as this, reproduce or reflect the racial order. Neither can the definition or "management" of racism (or antiracism) be a discussion bounded in one political party which, like the other parties, have been constructed and ruled through racist means and histories.
Oct 22, 2020 • 8 tweets • 4 min read
In "Late Victorian Holocausts", Mike Davis estimates that direct or indirect British control over India, China & Brazil led to the deaths of 30-50 million ppl from drought, famine & related disease. The British capitalist state has always been a world leader in starving children. As Davis puts it: Image
Oct 1, 2020 • 6 tweets • 1 min read
wild to me what journalists and some leftists are able to cram into the "culture war" formulation. this shit is reframing what we're living through in the most bullshit ways. this framing often takes things from street movements/social media & projects them (in unrecognisable or demeaning ways) from the dominant 1-to-many platforms into a mainstream discourse that has "BBC SAYS NO TO LAND OF HOPE & GLORY" as the extreme opposite pole to just fascism
Sep 30, 2020 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
"Racism Awareness Training plays at politics, it is a fake, a phoney - a con trick that makes ppl think that by moving pebbles they would start an avalanche, when all it does is to move pebbles, if that, so that the avalanche never comes."

A. Sivanandan, 1985 This is from Sivanandan's essay "RAT and the Degradation of Black Struggle" where he's at his scathing best exposing institutional attempts at recuperation of powerful anti-racist struggles and laying into sellouts.
Aug 29, 2020 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
seeing pics from "anti-lockdown" demo at Trafalgar Sq today, you can see how mobilisations cohered around conspiracy theory communities & discourses are able to bring convergence to seemingly far-flung constituencies: from hippy/new age Occupy-types to Right libertarians to Nazis ImageImageImageImage i know i'm a broken record on this but these are movements, by the very structure & form of their politics & worldview-building, for the reproduction of antisemitic violence. their platform speakers are world-renowned holocaust deniers, they're obsessed with secret "baby-killing" ImageImage
Aug 26, 2020 • 7 tweets • 3 min read
If Britannia had not grown rich off the superprofits of over two centuries of colonial racial slavery it would not have had such a strong navy would it...

And British capital continued to profit through slave regimes in the US, Cuba & Brazil (itself a quasi-colony of Britain) every single wave of abolitionism that worked its way thru Britain's metropolitan oligarchic institutions was always preceded by huge waves of slave rebellions in North & South America & the Caribbean, where Maroon communities had existed for centuries & revolutions were ignited.
Aug 24, 2020 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
it's not that we can't learn from specific histories for struggles today, or even that Nazism & the specific genocide of Jews & other targets are "off limits"

but why is this *always* the chosen comparator? it's not useful. it usually brings no clarity. it's Western moralism. years after the Shoah it became in Western discourse the stand-alone epitome of human evil. this was v useful for societies like Britain & the US because it cast frameworks of racism and human rights around Nazi genocide not centuries of European colonialism & slavery.
Aug 16, 2020 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
found myself in a fetid part of British political twitter, though it's a numerous one that is far less politically marginal than the one I'm part of. in the sense that we might interesting read this thread as fash whereas this person's 10k followers lap it up as "common sense". ImageImageImage i think the only really interesting thing about this is that literally every measure this person puts forward as a "solution to illegal immigration" is something the British state is already doing or has done at certain points in the past century.
Aug 11, 2020 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
"Corbynism" became the container, the momentum, for many ppl who genuinely hoped & believed an electoral project could cohere or at least be part of a movement that would "oppose" or be a shortcut around this society ⬇️

It should really be clear to ppl that this isn't possible. (ofc the "Corbynist" and broader LP coalition was broad and vague and inconsistent enough that it contained a lot of ppl who were more than happy to actively reproduce racist, nationalist talking points and policies and violence that are consistent with Labour Party history)
Aug 9, 2020 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
this can only be a surprise to you if you:

- think "race" is in any way stable in how it operates over time & space
- think ppl from racialised groups cannot themselves help to reproduce racial violence
- you take seriously many ppl's claims to care about antisemitism today. Image the OP mentions the Aliens Act 1905 to tell ppl who claim to care about AS today to learn from that history and ppl should. But it's for more than just the philosemites and any ppl who now use AS as a means to delegitimise and attack other struggles for liberation to learn from.
Aug 9, 2020 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
lol nope some labour left jews always have to just go all the way the other way on this thing when it just isn't necessary. i guess when you have no critique of the labour party or the british state, only a surface-level look at how antisemitism functions you can reach these conclusions