Bourgeois is a power relation based on material conditions, not a fixed identity. If you have to “suppress the bourgeoisie” after the revolution then you have not actually had a revolution bc a revolution would deconstruct those power relations & reconfigure material conditions.
Images and theories like this reveal such a profound ignorance of how power relations are created and function that it’s honestly stunning.
You cannot have a working class without a ruling class; the bourgeois can only exist as a class by virtue of the existence of a working class to sustain it, and a working class must always be constructed and suppressed in order to continue to be a working class.
Prisons aren’t meant to address or even punish harm; they’re meant to disappear people who do not play the role of the ideal state subject and the State just uses the public’s very real concerns about harm to obfuscate that reality.
This shows up in who ends up in prison: many people who have truly done harm, but almost all of them are marginalized people who fall outside of the State’s narrative of who is considered a true citizen/subject and are instead defined as Other, noncitizen, and object.
The State is an entity of social relations that work together (in a system) to create & defend the narrative of who is “us” & who is “them.” Nationalities are only made meaningful & real by the organized violence constantly deployed against perceived threats to that narrative.
I think the first step to meaningfully engaging in disability justice is to first recognize the difficulty inherent in understanding embodied experiences that are different from your own, and to keep this limitation in mind whenever you make judgments about disability.
One of the things I’ve learned through being disabled by chronic pain for the last few years is that people genuinely seem to have an easier time wrapping their minds around different social experiences than different embodied/mental/physical experiences.
(And we have a notoriously bad time empathizing with others who experience the social world different than we do.)
Everyone is not dependent on the State for food and shelter. The State is an apparatus that places boundaries around resources necessary for life to keep people from accessing them unless they preform whatever State imposed ritual demanded of them.
Were that apparatus to disappear, the resources would, in fact, still be there. People would just be able to access them without preforming the rituals previously required. The State creates nothing, it only takes.
Clearly bad-faith outliers aside: when disabled people voice an accessibility issue related to a strike/boycott, we should be seeing that as a problem that we need to creatively address to strengthen collective solidarity rather than immediately jumping into dismissal or mockery.
Actually, I feel that I should add that you really should not trust your own ability to determine which issues raised are in bad-faith or not. What might seem trivial or petty to you may in fact be very real and important to someone with a disability pertaining to it.
It’d be totally nonsensical to use butch— which is an individual identity with a specific history— as a catch-all for gnc women, trans men, masculine presenting non-binary people, and masculine cis men, so idk why people are still using femme that way. I’m begging y’all to stop.
Also, not all feminine trans women, feminine cis women, feminine men, & feminine non-binary people are femmes, & all of those people do not have the same experiences in the world. Femme is not a cohesive social category from which to launch an analysis of patriarchal violence.
To reduce patriarchy to being simply against “femmes” is just a liberalized version of saying that sexual violence occurs only in reaction to what someone is wearing, rather than understanding it as a system of control over ALL people who are not cis men.
Politicians take and wield power to determine the conditions of other people's lives through the use of police and military violence.
Anyone who decides to do that should not have a single moment of peace from the consequences of that choice.
If you participate in the theft of people's political power and agency in order to bolster your own it should come as no surprise when they come calling on you to answer for it.
I have no sympathy for anyone who complains of harsh words at inconvenient times when the position they hold only exists because of the constant organized violence carried out in their name. They ought to be thankful the response to that is thus far limited to words.
Perhaps allowing critical and international communication infrastructure to be controlled by a singular company motivated only by profit was not such a good idea.
Pour one out for all the central-planning stans today.
I'd like to invite all the repliers who scoff at the idea that any of this is "critical infrastructure" to understand that their ability to access alternatives might be different than other people's.
When harm happens in our communities, we must not only hold the individual who did the harm accountable, but honestly reflect on how our community helped create the conditions for that harm to be possible.
Harm, especially patterns of harm, do not happen in a vacuum. They do not happen on their own. They are conditioned by networks of social relations and communal values (or lack thereof.)
Science is not apolitical nor objective. What science gets preformed, what science sees the light of day, what science is suppressed, who gets to practice science, what forms of knowledge are considered scientific, are all the result of political factors & social values.
Science is one of many tools with which we try to understand the world, & while it is certainly useful, it is not nor ever has been infallible. It is a social practice, it cannot be ripped from its context nor its history. Much of which is profoundly white supremacist & colonial.
It tells us truths, truths we cannot ignore (like the science of climate crisis or pandemic)! But even those truths shift over time as we gather more information, as the practices of sciences change. It is a pathway, a guide, not immutable nor free from political influence.
Spent last night talking to the amazing human I hope to one day become a parent with about family abolition and how we hope to relate to the future children in our lives in a value centered way and I feel so deeply lucky to be traveling this life with her.
In the past my radicality, my values, my politics have been a point of tension with partners and it is constantly so liberating, so joyous, to bring up these topics and have the person I’m with say “Yes! How do we make that happen?” rather than be threatened by the task.
We explored the reality that being a parent in this society (should it still exist as is by that time) would automatically give us structural power, and what we could do to be responsible with that power, how we could best reject it rather than reach for justifications for it.
First, we need to have a basic understanding of how structural power works in our society.
This is what a lot of people believe structural power to look like: the State is the circle of power that encloses everyone without State power. Power lies in the hands of elites alone.
This is what makes conspiratorial thinking proliferate. The idea that power *only* exists in the hands of those who hold office or a throne, and that every single thing about our lives is dictated by a handful of elites who pull ALL of the strings.
My copy of @NoBonzo’s illustrated edition of Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid just arrived and I cannot put into words how much I adore it. It’s goddamn beautiful and they did an incredible job! You can just feel how much love and intention went into this ❤️🔥
1st Image: Cover of Kropotkin’s book Mutual Aid: A factor of evolution illustrated by No Bonzo. The central image on the cover is a black and white illustration of two people, one with a scythe and the other with a rake standing and shaking hands in front of a large bundle of
wheat, with vines and other plants surrounding them. Surrounding that central image is a thick red and black border with more leaves and vines illustrated in red on a black background.
Never ceases to amaze me when folks respond to calls for the abolition of institutions and practices that have resulted in truly unfathomable levels of violence and abuse by saying shit like “yeah you only want this bc you were abused” as if that is some kind of counter point.
Like yeah people who have been abused by those social practices and institutions are typically the most likely to call for their abolition. That’s not anything new. You bragging about how much they served you personally isn’t a counter argument, it’s just shitty lol.
Yeah, the compulsory institution of the family did not work out for me! I was sexually abused by a parent, subject to endless emotional abuse, ran away from home twice, etc. I take that trauma & choose to turn it to a politics that fight to protect others from that experience.
It is my (at this point desperate) plea that when you all hear “abolish X” and that X is something that may have different meanings in different contexts (work, the family, etc.) that you understand it as a call to abolish the compulsory institutional form of that X.
None of these calls are at all new to leftist thought. Principled anti-capitalists have been using these phrases, articulating these exact demands, for generations. You reveal your own ignorance when you act like they are arbitrary slogans born out of twitter dot com.
That ignorance itself is fine, we all gotta start somewhere, but demanding that everyone’s message—esp if that message be one with decades of history and theory behind it— be catered to your personal level of ignorance is pretty entitled imo.
REALLY hate that people are taught about bias as if it can be avoided by engaging in relentless & shallow bothsidesism rather than it being something that requires developing a historical analysis of one’s context & reflecting on how that context effects one’s values & judgment.
I learned about bias in school like: “well, you’re inherently biased (don’t think too hard about how you got that way) and there’s nothing you can do about it so better weigh ‘both sides’ of the conversation equally to avoid it!” And that??? Is not helpful for anyone!
What actual conversations about bias should include:
-your biases do not come from nowhere, and to understand them you should seek to understand to social conditions that gave you those biases.
If you personally cannot conceptualize a way to relate to children that isn’t based in domination, control, and ownership that is a reflection of your own insecurities and weaknesses, not a sign of some universal and fundamental truth about what is actually possible.
“There’s no way for me to get a child the things and skills they need to survive in life without utterly stripping them of their personal autonomy” Is a statement about YOU. About your skills, your imagination, and your values. It is not a statement about nature or possibility.
What you mean to say is “I have been raised to see children as the rightful property of adults, and I have difficulty in imagining possibilities of connecting with them outside of a socially constructed property relationship that makes me feel inherently powerful and in control.”
It’s not that the individual people who choose to try to change the system from within just uniformly have bad intentions from the start, it’s that the nature of the SYSTEM is to require a thousand compromises on any counter-hegemonic values to succeed within it at all.
People who go in the political system with good intentions are either spat back out disillusioned, kept in minor bureaucratic positions with no real power, or so completely compromise on their initial values in order to succeed that they totally betray those intentions.
This is what makes it a system! It’s not about bad individuals, it’s the very nature of centralized power to organize itself in a way that protects its existence as centralized power. It’s a network of social relations that require a new level of buy-in for each level of power.
Tbh y’all should be careful how quickly you default to the wishes of the family when someone is seriously hurt or dies because a lot of us have shitty fuckin families who would not truthfully represent our wishes or our values.
Also even if I personally didn’t distrust my family to carry out my wishes or act in my values, I just outright refuse any logic that dictates that they have some privileged or superior claim over my life and memory than the other people who care for me.
Not saying that families should be ignored or dismissed because many people also have lovely relationships with their families I’m just saying defaulting to that stance isn’t as simple or as consistently just and respectful as a lot of people like to think it is.
If a State criminalizes border crossing while at the same time creating conditions where border crossing is unavoidable for many people, that means border crossing—and the punishment of it—is a FUNCTION (not a byproduct) of that State.
Capitalism and the Modern State (with all its borders, internal and external) are irrevocably intertwined. Capital crosses borders freely, and the State ensures that labor struggles to do the same.
It is a method of accumulation: States destabilize entire regions, allow capital total access and control over the stationary labor power there, and take the resources produced from that labor out of those regions and into imperial centers where labor cannot easily follow.
6 added to My Authors
