shit working class leftists and ppl in general don’t need to hear:
– you making fun of our schooling
– you belittling us for working actual jobs instead of going into higher education
– you complaining that we don’t “do enough about our situation”
– you looking down on us because we might not have the time or the patience to read heaps of irrelevant political theory
– again, these fucking jokes about us having no idea about politics when we’re the ones living them
– you patronizing us about health, parenting, and literally anything else
– you asking why our families didn’t just buy a house (that happened more often than you’d think)
– you making fun of our dialects and mannerisms
– you using a lack of education as an argument against your political opponents
– you pitying us like we can’t be proud of our roots
– you ignoring our self-organization and community work because it doesn’t live up to your ideological standards
– the fucking LEFT in general being classist as fuck which should be a paradox but isn’t
for real I’m just really fed up with the academic left sometimes and y’all should really look at yourselves first when you ask why the new left is so out of touch with working people.
We don’t have to read Marx to know that capitalism sucks. Believe us, we know.This has been a PSA.
Tag: always relevant
WHITE “ANARCHISTS” IN FERGUSON RIGHT NOW ARE #NOTMYCOMRADES
FUCK THIS MAKES ME SO MAD
To be honest, I’m not sure if they’re overzealous anarchists or counterintelligence. COINTELPRO never really ended.
I remember back in 2007, helios-venerari and I were in DC at an anti-war rally. There were half a million people in the main protest, but we joined up with the much smaller black bloc—about five hundred people, mostly leftists and left-anarchists. The police kept putting up barricades and forming walls of motorcycles. They kept hitting us in the shins, and they punched a (female) friend of ours in the chest when some of the kids up front were pushing through.
Eventually we made it to the Capitol steps. It was loud but peaceful (there’s video here, and you can see Spencer and I in the center of the frame starting about 1:30), but ultimately, we weren’t getting onto those steps. So we eventually backed off and regrouped.
While everyone was trying to figure out what to do, we found the friend who got punched trying to give a flower to a cop that turned out to be the chief of police in charge of keeping order that day. We chatted with the police for a little while.
After maybe twenty minutes of the various groups in the radical bloc sitting around trying to figure out what to do next, a white dude with dreads and a purple bandanna addressed the loose crowd. He started taking charge. Spencer and I and the people we were with were like, “Who is that clown?” but he got the majority of the crowd whipped up with the plan of storming a military recruitment center nearby.
As we marched through the streets, the cops kept cutting us off and Purple Bandanna would lead us running through side streets and back alleys. When we got to the recruitment center, the police formed a line between us and it. There were some chants, then someone threw a brick through the window.
The police extended their batons and aimed their pepper spray at us. The cop in the middle radioed the chief of police we’d been talking to earlier. He denied them the use of force.
I can’t say he was a good cop, but I can say he did a good thing that day. And I can say I think Purple Bandanna was intentionally leading us to a confrontation. Whether he was the Real Deal and wanted a confrontation so whatever particular cause he aligned himself with would gain the rhetorical advantage conveyed by police brutality or a plant trying to make the more radical wing of the protest look violent, he was using the crowd.
That’s why I don’t trust these random white dudes who always seem to step to the front of the crowd and try to take control in these situations, and who always incite violence, to which the police respond in kind. And like Purple Bandanna, I don’t know if this guy in Ferguson is the Real Deal or a plant, but I do know that he’s not to be trusted.
I think a lot of people in activism don’t realize the extent to which US intelligence personnel are used against activists.
The history of British slavery has been buried. The thousands of British families who grew rich on the slave trade, or from the sale of slave-produced sugar, in the 17th and 18th centuries, brushed those uncomfortable chapters of their dynastic stories under the carpet. Today, across the country, heritage plaques on Georgian townhouses describe former slave traders as “West India merchants”, while slave owners are hidden behind the equally euphemistic term “West India planter”. Thousands of biographies written in celebration of notable 17th and 18th-century Britons have reduced their ownership of human beings to the footnotes, or else expunged such unpleasant details altogether. The Dictionary of National Biography has been especially culpable in this respect. Few acts of collective forgetting have been as thorough and as successful as the erasing of slavery from the Britain’s “island story”.
The history of British slave ownership has been buried: now its scale can be revealed
(via
)
an interesting article. this tidbit though: “About 40% of the slave owners living in the colonies were women” – this is why I don’t trust white feminist analyses. Even in a time considered to be highly oppressive to “women” (note how that term is never racially designated), white women could and did hold the power of owning Black human lives, at a rate almost equal to white men.
(via sofriel)
Whereas the cotton plantations of the American south were established on the soil of the continental United States, British slavery took place 3,000 miles away in the Caribbean.
That is also very disingenuous. British slavery started in the 17th century in North American colonies, over 150 years before there was a “continental United States”. Virginia was the first permanent English colony in the “New World”, as they kept bragging about when I was in school there. Though, there they initially concentrated on tobacco and some other cash crops which were in high demand back home, rather than on cotton.
Unsurprisingly, there was tons of trade and movement back and forth between the Caribbean, the Chesapeake, and other convenient colonial ports like Charleston and Savannah. Including trade in slaves.
A settler revolt just created a new government entity, and changed who was in control on paper. (I.e., disgruntled wealthy British people starting out, who already had some political power–many of whom ran plantations.) They took over the systems set up under British colonial governance, and just went from there.
The same goes for genocidal policies toward indigenous peoples, after the attempts at “just” using them for slave labor didn’t work out so well. The new US government just took over existing inhumane systems, and ran with them.
The distinction is not that useful. There is no distinction to be made until about 1780. But, this is a popular separation in the UK. And it’s part of a larger pattern of denial.
As Robin Bunce and Paul Field point out:
They add that Britain is consistently portrayed by politicians as being “on the side of the angels” in race relations, and point to the 2007 celebrations of the abolition of the slave trade as an example of how Britain prefers to propagate a myth of itself as “the utopia of civilized fair play”.
I’m glad that the number of (often still-existing) British fortunes made through colonial exploitation and slavery is getting a little more attention recently. But, that didn’t just happen in the Caribbean colonies, and it’s very intellectually dishonest to act like that was the case. It’s frustrating when someone writing more honestly about some of this ugly history prefers to keep up the largely false distinction there.
(via clatterbane)
Reminded of this again, partly because there was indeed no honest distinction until about 1780. The abusive colonial systems that Jefferson and the others used to their benefit–and then took over to run for themselves–were already up and running for over 150 years at that point.
Chattel slavery in British North America went on for more years before the settler revolt than afterwards. That doesn’t get mentioned much anywhere.
(via clatterbane)
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 