DAMN SHE TORE IT UP
Clearly a straight white male outside agitator. Check your fucking privilege! Only privileged white people will call for any tactics other than navel-gazing!!
Black woman tears up Oakland City Council
(in response to May Day repression of Occupy Oakland and a newly proposed law that would make it illegal for revolutionaries to carry shields and barricades during marches)
“You’re asking why we need our shields for self defense? After a grenade went off behind my head at 12 in the afternoon and gave me something [PTSD] that soldiers coming back from Iraq have? …The policy don’t need to be changed. We’ve got reform crammed so far up our ass it’s clouding our judgement. The police need to be held accountable… and I’m not a nihilist, but I wish I could BURN EVERY FUCKING THING DOWN, except for the houses, so that people could begin to understand that we don’t need this system to survive… There are people being arrested for trying to start farms…!
DON’T SILENCE ME, don’t you fucking DARE. I am SO TIRED… and if you cut off this mic, I’ll still have a mouth…
As a black woman, I’m telling you… you’re not serving the people! You’re only serving capitalism. And if you take our shields, the only thing we have left is our second amendment rights— SO IF WE SHOOT BACK…!
YOU DON’T HAVE THE RIGHT TO ARREST ME!”
Source: angrybrownpeople
Between infoshops and insurrection: U.S. anarchism, movement building, and the racial order
Every serious anarchist should read this.
“Infoshops serve very important functions and any movement needs such spaces. Likewise, insurrection is a focal event in any revolution, for it turns the patient organizing of the movement and the boiling anger of the people into an explosive confrontation with the state. The problem is when infoshops and insurrection get taken as revolutionary strategies in themselves rather than as part of a broader revolutionary movement. In the infoshops model, autonomous spaces become the movement rather than serving it. In the insurrection model, spontaneous upheaval replaces the movement by equating insurrection with revolution rather than seeing it as but one part of the revolutionary process. The infoshops and insurrection models, in other words, both misunderstand the process of social transformation. Radical change may be initiated by spontaneous revolts that are supported by subterranean free spaces, but these revolts are almost always the product of movement building…
A revolution is not an infoshop, or an insurrection, or creating a temporary autonomous zone, or engaging in sabotage; it cannot be so easy, so “organic,” so absent of political struggle. A revolution is an actual historical event whereby one class overthrows another and (in the anarchist ideal) thereby makes it possible to abolish all forms of oppression. Such revolutions are the product of mass movements: a large group of people organized in struggle against the state and/or other institutions of power to achieve their ends. When movements become powerful enough, when they sufficiently weaken elites, and when fortune is on their side, they lead to an insurrection, and then perhaps a revolution. Yet in much of the anarchist scene today, building free spaces and/or creating disorder are regarded as the movement itself rather than components of one. Neither the infoshops nor insurrection models build movements that can express the organized power of the working class.”
Who Is Oakland: Anti-Oppression Activism, the Politics of Safety, and State Co-optation
One of the best essays I’ve ever read.
If you’re a revolutionary person of color, you really really gotta read this.
by CROATOAN, April 2012 (originally posted on escalatingidentity.wordpress.com)
Contents
Synopsis
I. The Non-Negotiable Necessity of Autonomous Organizing
II. Institutional Struggles Over the Meaning of Anti-Oppression Politics
a. On the Non-Profit Industrial Complex (NPIC), Again
b. Politicians and Police Who Are “Just Like Us”
c. Anticapitalism and the Material Reproduction of “Race” and “Gender”
d. The Racialization of Rape and the Erasure of Sexual ViolenceIII. The Limits of Contemporary Anti-Oppression Theory and Practice
a. Identity is not Solidarity
b. Protecting Vulnerable Communities of Color and “Our” Women and Children: The Endangered Species Theory of Minority Populations and Patriarchal White Conservationism
c. On Nonprofit Certified “White Allies” and Privilege TheoryIV. Occupy Oakland as Example
a. Occupy Oakland, “Outside Agitators,” and “White Occupy”
b. The Erasure of People of Color From Occupy OaklandV. Conclusion: Recuperating Decolonization and National Liberation Struggles; or, Revolution is Radically Unsafe
The other civil rights movement.
Synopsis
This pamphlet – written collaboratively by a group of people of color, women, and queers – is offered in deep solidarity and in the spirit of conversation with anyone committed to ending oppression and exploitation materially. It is a critique of how privilege theory and cultural essentialism have incapacitated antiracist, feminist, and queer organizing in this country by confusing identity categories with culture, and culture with solidarity. This conflation, we go on to argue, minimizes and misrepresents the severity and structural character of the violence and material deprivation faced by marginalized demographics.
According to this politics, white supremacy is primarily a psychological attitude which individuals can simply choose to discard instead of a material infrastructure which reproduces race at key sites across society – from racially segmented labor markets to the militarization of the border. Even when this material infrastructure is named, more confrontational tactics which might involve the risk of arrest are deemed “white” and “privileged,” while the focus turns back to reforming the behavior and beliefs of individuals. Privilege politics is ultimately rooted in an idealist theory of power which maintains that psychological attitudes are the root cause of oppression and exploitation, and that vague alterations in consciousness will somehow remake oppressive structures.
This dominant form of anti-oppression politics also assumes that demographic categories are coherent, homogeneous “communities” or “cultures.” This pamphlet argues that identity categories do not indicate political unity or agreement. Identity is not solidarity. The violent domination and subordination we face on the basis of our race, gender, and sexuality do not immediately create a shared political vision. But the uneven impact of oppression across society creates the conditions for the diffuse emergence of autonomous groups organizing on the basis of common experiences, analysis, and tactics. There is a difference between a politics which places shared cultural identity at the center of its analysis of oppression, and autonomous organizing against forms of oppression which impact members of marginalized groups unevenly.
This pamphlet argues that demands for increased cultural sensitivity and recognition has utterly failed to stop a rising tide of bigotry and violence in an age of deep austerity. Anti-oppression, civil rights, and decolonization struggles repeatedly demonstrate that if resistance is even slightly effective, the people who struggle are in danger. The choice is not between danger and safety, but between the uncertain dangers of revolt and the certainty of continued violence, deprivation, and death. There is no middle ground.
Source: angrybrownpeople
I fucking love this character, I fucking love this movie. I almost died when all the undocumented immigrants/Chican@s went to war against the minute men.
Can that happen in real life please.
Some day. Some day.
Michelle Rodriguez in Machete
Source: reverieseuphorique
Activist prevents Israeli officer from arresting Palestinian child
During Sunday’s Jerusalem Day events, a Palestinian boy, perhaps 10 years old, was chased down an East Jerusalem street by a very angry officer of the Border Police. The boy tripped and fell, then picked himself up just as the Border Police officer reached him and tried to grab him. But a 22 year-old female Israeli activist prevented the boy’s arrest by throwing herself between the two, allowing the Palestinian boy to flee.
Jerusalem Day is meant to be a celebration of the city’s ‘reunification’ following Israel’s victory in the 1967 war. In practice, it is a day for Israeli nationalists, draped in flags, dancing in circles, singing and chanting (including the popular Israeli nationalist chant, ‘death to Arabs’) as they march through the streets of East Jerusalem and the Old City. Many of the Jewish demonstrators are bused in from right-wing yeshivas in Israel and the West Bank
This year, an Orthodox Jewish man grabbed the Palestinian flag from the hands of a 10 year-old boy and refused to return it. The boy, enraged, tried to prise it out of the Jewish man’s hands. A Border Police officer, seeing the struggle between a 10 year-old Palestinian boy and a fully grown Jewish man, chased the Palestinian boy rather than ordering the Jewish man to return the flag. Someone made a montage of the incident and posted it on Facebook, with commentary. Note the expression of rage in the Border Police officer’s eyes, as seen in the second photo.
In the end the boy got away, due to the intervention of a 22 year-old Israeli activist from Jerusalem named Sahar Vardi, who threw herself in front of the Border Police officer just as he was about to grab the child. Photojournalist Haim Schwarczenberg caught the incident.
The incident was also filmed and the clip posted on Youtube.
Source: +972mag
(via sancho108)
Source: israelfacts
PRISON UPRISING! Virginia Inmates Put Aside Gang Conflicts to "Unite as Revolutionaries"
“We’re tired of being treated like animals. There are only two classes at this prison: the oppressor and the oppressed. We, the oppressed, despite divisions of sexual preference, gang affiliation, race and religion, are coming together. We are rival gang members but now are united as revolutionaries.”
Natural indeed.
The most natural thing in the world.
A fucking slingshot, against an APC….
(via seanminianarchist)
Source: urbaneguerrilla
Endless Strike! Today marks 100 days of Quebec students’ strike.
“For years, May ‘68 was a dry, dusty thing other people theorized about in poor translations, but these last months, something like it has been happening in the crevices of our vie quotidienne. How strange that it is just there, between bus rides and doctor’s appointments and trips to the grocery store, a thing that is so extraordinary and so bizarrely normal at the same time. The metro has been shut down by smoke bombs? Oh well, I feel like a walk anyway.”
(via combat--wombat)
Source: fresh-arab
