HeavenlyPossum

https://kolektiva.social/@HeavenlyPossum

Anarchist, communist, opossum. But then, I repeat myself.

My Email: TheHeavenlyPossum@proton.me
My Thread of Threads: https://kolektiva.social/@HeavenlyPossum/110016655952719317
Support My Work: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/HeavenlyPossum
My Profile Picture: A painting of a reclining opposum, clutching its chest with one paw as if gasping with shock.

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heavenlypossum_at_kolektiva.social@momostr.pink

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Last Notes

2024-09-14 16:06:43

Watching the fascist right in the US auditioning various Internal Enemies during the last few years—migrants from Latin America, all queer people but then settling mostly for the transgender community, and now Haitian immigrants in Springfield Ohio of all places—makes clear how arbitrary and constructed this phenomenon is.

2024-08-14 14:19:33

I wish muting the shitbag boot lickers who infest my mentions didn’t also cause the posts by my mutuals to disappear from my feed.

2024-08-14 12:28:40

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“Enforcement” as the aggregate product of voluntary choices by many individuals who personally bear the costs of their own actions is materially different from enforcement by coercive hierarchies.

2024-08-14 12:04:04

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So 17,000 murders, of which the police represent the largest institutional perpetrators.

2024-08-14 10:12:22

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> “It might be shockingly new, but what came before it was (not necessarily, but potentially) arbitrary mob rule.”
Why do you believe this is the case? What about history informs this conclusion?
> “Or are you really assuming that policing predates anti-social and/or cruel behaviour? (I don't think you are)”
> “So, arbitrary violence by 'powers' (whatever they may be, police now, kings, knights and mobs before) is a given.”
No. Again, why do you believe this is the case?
> “I'd rather see that we try to pursue an institution that as much as possible tries to be non-arbitrary. In other words: rules-based.”
Non-arbitrary, rules based security does not require the police, the state, the mob, kings, or knights.

2024-08-14 09:55:00

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> “in every society, no matter its form, you'd need something that functions as the police.”
Policing is a shockingly modern invention. Do you imagine that society didn’t exist prior to a couple of centuries ago?
The question is not “what will replace the police?” but rather “how do we empower ourselves to protect ourselves and each other using whatever consensual and voluntary processes best meet local needs at this particular moment?”

2024-08-14 09:41:27

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> “Who's going to take over that work in a police free society? Because it is work: gathering evidence, due process -- all to hopefully keep arbitrariness at bay.”
In the US, only about half of murders result in an arrest and less than half in actual convictions, some unknown by obviously high percentage of which are false. Arrests rates for murder have declined even as budgets have soared for police, who—in the US at least—only spend about 4% of their time addressing violent crimes.
The answer to the question “who else?” is “literally anyone else.”

2024-08-14 08:53:39

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To the extent that the police perform socially useful tasks, they’re not doing that for our benefit. They are “keeping the king’s peace,” ie, suppressing disruptions to a status quo that benefits capitalist elites.
The police do not care about “murder” in the abstract; they care about making sure that murders don’t become so disruptive that capitalism stops functioning efficiently for the owning class.

2024-08-14 08:45:04

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The police do not exist to protect you. The police do not exist to “fight crime” in some abstract sense. We do not need them to protect ourselves from harm. They do not serve us.

2024-08-14 08:33:42

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No, I mean #abolish the police as a specialized institution of state violence that exists to sustain a coercive, oppressive status quo of capitalist privilege.
To the extent that the police perform “services” to the public, they a) only do so as an occasional, ancillary byproduct of their primary role and b) aren’t actually needed to perform those services

2024-08-14 07:44:04

If we abolish the police, who will protect us from being murdered by the police?
https://apnews.com/article/ohio-police-shooting-murder-shoplifting-5aeeaeff40fbad5dd85da1a77767bce6

2024-08-13 20:13:16

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Could you explain how?

2024-08-12 19:16:44

Love to see genocide bandied about as a “single issue” as if it lives in the same bin as “marijuana legalization” or “taxes on restaurant tipping.”

2024-08-12 09:25:57

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The archeologist David Wengrow made a fascinating observation: in the archeological record of stateless societies, art is everywhere and incorporated into every object, and there are as many styles as there are people. In constant, the diagnostic artifact from the earliest Mesopotamian states is the “bevel-rimmed bowl,” a plain, ugly, and utilitarian verse that was mass produced, probably told hold a standardized ration for wage-workers and slaves.
Art is something that we intrinsically, instinctively produce, constantly, unless we’re prevented from doing so.

2024-08-11 07:03:55

Dear liberals,
Both
“Donald Trump will enable genocide in Gaza for corrupt, venal, and racist reasons,”
and
“Joe Biden is enabling genocide in Gaza for structural, political reasons,”
result in genocide in Gaza.
Love,
Possum

2024-08-10 18:45:11

Considering how close Prighozin got to Moscow during the Wagner rebellion last year, let’s see if these Ukrainians can’t get even closer.

2024-08-09 23:16:33

Solidarity with the Russian civilians being bombed by the Russian government to protect the Putin regime from the consequences of a war of imperialist aggression he started.

2024-08-07 21:22:06

I’m old enough to remember when suggesting Joe Biden step down from the race was among the most treasonous things a person could do

2024-08-05 17:14:39

White privilege is knowing the Nazis operating checkpoints in the UK won’t immediately recognize you as an adversary or target.

2024-08-02 07:37:14

When someone advocates for reducing poverty and increasing education as non-genocidal options for lowering birth rates, out of concern for overpopulation, they’re tattling on themselves.
People living in poverty, lacking education, are disproportionately likely to be brown and live in the global south. People living with wealth and enjoying education are disproportionately likely to be white and live in the global north.
The former also tend to have much smaller environmental impacts than the latter:
“The richest 1% of the world’s population produced as much carbon pollution in 2019 as the five billion people who made up the poorest two-thirds of humanity, reveals a new report from Oxfam.”
If we identify the problem as “too many people,” we are equally indicting *all people,* most of whom contribute marginally to the destruction of the environment and have no say over the systems and institutions that coerce us into overconsumption. But not all people are equally responsible.
https://www.oxfamamerica.org/press/press-releases/richest-1-emit-as-much-planet-heating-pollution-as-two-thirds-of-humanity/

2024-08-01 12:23:35

“Humans are a virus” overpopulation rhetoric is inherently fascist, because it identifies other people’s mere existence as a threat to the speaker.
Other people are not a problem or threat by virtue of being alive.

2024-08-01 08:56:10

Statements like “there are too many people in the world” or “people are self-destructive” implicitly position the speaker as being outside the community of humans.
It’s a smug, self-satisfied way of saying “the problem is other people but not me.”
You’re not stuck in traffic; you *are* traffic.

2024-07-04 10:37:04

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I can read Hamilton’s own words. You’ve lied to yourself and now you’re trying to lie to me.

2024-07-04 10:32:08

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No one said it fucking did. You’re the only one bringing it up as a defense *of an explicit anti-democratic argument by aristocrats who hated democracy and designed an explicitly anti-democratic system.*

2024-07-04 10:23:01

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Then you should abandon this idea that democracy and freedom entail The Mob, because that’s aristocratic propaganda with no relationship to reality.
The excesses of the French Revolution didn’t happen in a vacuum. They were a reaction to *centuries* of constant, grinding violence by the aristocracy—barely 2% of the population—against the peasantry. *For centuries* it was peasants’ little boys who were tortured because of who their dead parents were. Reactionaries have relied *for centuries* on the myth that the revolution was an explosion of populist chaos against a stable, peaceful status quo. It wasn’t.
Hamilton did not say that he was opposed to “populism.” He said *democracy.* Hamilton, Madison, and other aristocratic founders were consistently and explicitly opposed to the idea of democracy, in the sense of people having a say over common affairs. They were *explicit* about their fears that the poor majority would—peacefully and democratically—vote aristocratic property owners like them out of their expropriated wealth and enclosed property.
You don’t need to put words in their mouths to make their propaganda case for them. People do not need to be constrained by undemocratic elites to prevent violence against those elites.

2024-07-04 09:47:45

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You’re regurgitating centuries-old, self-serving elite propaganda about the dangers of people being free to make voluntary, collaborative decisions. You’ve internalize the idea of The Mob.

2024-07-04 09:07:36

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You’re doing the bit. You’re literally doing the bit.

2024-07-04 08:56:09

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It’s hard to convey the enormity of the contempt that the US constitution’s framers held for democracy. Here’s Alexander Hamilton—the same guy that liberals have spent the last decade fellating because of that fucking musical—on democracy:
“All communities divide themselves into the few and the many. The first are the rich and well born, the other the mass of the people. The voice of the people has been said to be the voice of God; and however generally this maxim has been quoted and believed, it is not true in fact. The people are turbulent and changing; they seldom judge or determine right. Give therefore to the first class a distinct, permanent share in the government. They will check the unsteadiness of the second, and as they cannot receive any advantage by a change, they therefore will ever maintain good government. Can a democratic assembly who annually revolve in the mass of the people, be supposed steadily to pursue the public good? Nothing but a permanent body can check the imprudence of democracy. ... It is admitted that you cannot have a good executive upon a democratic plan."

2024-07-04 08:52:05

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Compare the process by which the US constitution originally directed the selection of justices on the Supreme Court—a tiny super-legislature with life tenure:
Free white adult male citizens, primarily property owners, would vote for electors, who would select the president. They would also vote for their state legislators, who would in turn select national senators. The president would then nominate candidates to the court and the senate would vote on those candidates, who would then enjoy life tenure.
Not quite as convoluted as the Venetian system, but the US republic was very explicitly modeled after this sort of aristocratic, slave-owning republican system from classical antiquity and the Middle Ages.
The whole point was to ensure sustained, cooperative aristocratic rule by attenuating both the power of any one aristocratic clique and, more critically, any kind of popular will.

2024-07-04 08:45:06

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In the Venetian Republic, there were elections for the Doge—the Duke who ruled Venice for life. Here’s how those elections worked:
Hereditary members of aristocratic Venetian families met in the Great Council. Thirty of them were chosen by lot. Of those thirty, nine were then chosen by separate lot. Those nine chose forty others, who were then reduced by lot to twelve, who chose twenty-five. Those twenty-five were reduced by lot to nine, who then elected forty-five. Those forty-five were reduced by lot to eleven, who then selected forty-one (up from forty after a tied vote). Those forty-one aristocrats then voted on candidates for Doge.
The point of this cartoonishly complex system was to ensure that no faction among the elites, no wealthy family, could come to dominate the rest by, say, controlling the selection of the Doge or establishing a ducal dynasty.

2024-07-04 08:39:26

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Even if we set aside the centuries of restrictions on voting in places like the US—the property requirements, the racial requirements, the sex requirements, the age requirements, the citizenship requirements, etc—we still can’t pretend that *casting a ballot for someone else to make coercively-enforced decisions for you* constitutes democracy in the sense I outlined above.
Having some numerically insignificant say in which members of the elite class will rule you is not a synonym for democracy as consensual and voluntary community decision making.
The US is not a democracy in this sense. There never was a time when it was a democracy in this sense. Citizens United didn’t ruin US democracy. Lobbying and corruption didn’t ruin US democracy.

2024-07-04 08:33:43

If we define democracy along the lines of “people making voluntary and consensual decisions together as equals about the issues that affect them communally,” then we can dismiss the idea that the presence of *voting* is a sufficient indicator of democracy.
Classical Athenians had voting…among adult male free citizens. The Holy Roman Empire had voting…among the seven elector-princes.

2024-06-29 13:37:46

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All unhoused people need are the resources to relocate to a jurisdiction in which the authorities might not arrest them for having human bodies in public spaces. It’s so simple.

2024-06-29 13:08:23

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Whew! I was worried there for a second

2024-06-29 12:32:47

In the US, it is a crime not to participate in the capitalist labor and housing markets.
You *must* sell your labor to capitalists for wages, and you *must* pay some of those wages to capitalists who own housing or control access to credit.
If you do not, you could be arrested and imprisoned, during which time the state is free to force you to labor for yet other capitalists for their profit.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2024/jun/28/supreme-court-decision-unhoused-sleeping-outside

2024-06-28 06:42:19

The most important thing to understand about the US is that a faction of disgruntled elites staged, in essence, a revolt of the rich against the poor and imposed a system of unfettered exploitation, starting in the 1970s.
After the Second World War, US elites had implemented a system of programs and institutions designed to return to the working class a larger share of the wealth that class produced. They wanted to avoid the mistakes that had led to the rise of fascism and global destruction of the war; they wanted to give the working class fewer reasons to overthrow those elites.
But not everyone in the elite was happy about having to share wealth with the workers who produced it, and as the years passed the historical memory of the war faded from salience. So we had the neoliberal turn, launched first by Nixon and solidified by Reagan.
Americans are living in the crumbling ruins of that successful but ultimately catastrophic revolt of the rich.

2024-06-26 07:44:02

I’ve seen one estimate that the total global spending on militaries is $2.44 trillion. I can’t find a good estimate for total global spending on policing, but it’s probably at least another few hundred billion dollars.
Anyone who thinks that coercive hierarchies are the natural human default, and thinks that egalitarian freedom is an expensive aberration, needs to take even a cursory glance at how fucking expensive it is for our elites to maintain their power over us.

2024-06-21 05:35:26

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The proof that a source is biased is that it disagrees with what I already believe

2024-06-21 05:19:04

“You had better have sources to back up all those claims!” -> “I refuse to read your sources to back up all those claims”
https://mas.to/@TheEmpororHasNoClothes/112651291940628884

2024-06-20 07:17:33

UK comrades, what’s up with the Lib Dems? My understanding was that they were basically just libertarians but their party platform would seem to put them distinctly to the left of Labour.

2024-06-19 20:05:14

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Even if it were more complex and demanding than a kiln, the principle would remain the same:
I make pots. While I am making pots, a farmer grows food to feed me. While the farmer is growing food, she is clad by a garment worker. While the garment worker is weaving, he is shod by the shoemaker. While the shoemaker is cobbling, they cook their meals in a pot I made. Each worker delivers product to the next, expecting that each will in turn be supplied by those other workers, in a giant and never-ending network of credit.
Those relationships can be organized using money, but they don’t have to be, and even if they do involve money, they don’t have to look anything like capitalism. The capitalist does not produce but *interposes* themself into those networks of credit, skimming off the top by pretending to own the whole effort of all those workers. The “creditor” is similarly just a capitalist who has established a toll booth on the creation of credit itself—you can’t extend credit to other workers without first paying a fee to the creditor.

2024-06-19 18:41:42

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Yes, both are capitalism, which is bad. Both reflect hierarchical structures of “business” that only exist because of structural violence.

2024-06-19 18:02:26

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Owning shares is a synonym for owning someone else’s labor. Just because it can provide some benefits to some people *in the context of capitalism* doesn’t mean it’s actually good or desirable *in general.*

2024-06-19 11:29:48

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And yet, every step of the way, there are leftists who are willing and eager to credulously accept any Russian state lie and dutifully apologize for any Russian state atrocity because they’ve decided that an antagonistic relationship with the US puts the Russian state on some “good team.”
A settler colonial state that commits imperialist interventions on a global scale, ruled by a mafia clique of ultra-rich capitalist oligarchs, is not and cannot be your friend. Cheering for the US against Russia or Russia against the US makes as much sense as medieval peasants cheering for rival lords to come slaughter them, or a beef cow at auction cheering for rival butchers to place the winning bid.
4/

2024-06-19 11:22:26

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When Russia sold Alaska to the US in 1867, it did so as a colonial power, a peer of the US imperialist project. It was not transferring “Russian” territory but rather the lands and indigenous peoples of Alaska, whom Moscow had conquered, as chattel.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Territorial_evolution_of_Russia
2/

2024-06-19 11:22:26

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It is in this context that we can understand much of Russia’s recent behavior on the international stage—its invasion and dismemberment of Georgia; its invasion of Syria and transformation of the Asad regime into a client; its mercenary adventures in Africa’s Sahel region; its pursuit of a naval port in Sudan; and, most saliently, its war of conquest in Ukraine.
Yes, Russia claims pretexts for its imperialist aggression in each of these cases. But just as we’re able to see through those pretexts when other actors claim them—is the IDF really “the most moral army in the world”?—we’re smart enough to see through Moscow’s pretexts as well.
https://www.statista.com/chart/amp/30269/wagner-group-countries-of-operation/
3/

2024-06-19 11:22:25

Russia is an imperialist, settler-colonial state.
There is a reason there are Russians living from Kaliningrad to Vladivostok, more than seven thousand kilometers away: successive iterations of the Russian state ruled from Moscow have invaded, conquered, settled, and ruled vast areas of the Eurasian continent. This was always an explicitly imperialist project replete with frequent genocides against indigenous communities.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circassian_genocide
1/

2024-06-17 14:16:14

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What does Ukraine’s status as a former colonial subject of Moscow have to do with Russia’s current relationship with Ukraine?

2024-06-17 13:49:06

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From an anarchist perspective, what do you consider Russia’s valid concerns to be?

2024-06-16 12:26:19

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I’m very familiar with what the Russian state has identified as its grievances, and also what the Russian state’s apologists have identified as its grievances.
I’m asking you, as someone on an anarchist instance who presumably holds anarchist beliefs—such as the foundational rejection of the state as illegitimate—what you believe are the Russian state’s “legitimate” gripes.

2024-06-16 08:33:17

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$25 million for funding a designated terrorist group. Chiquita was sold in 2014 for $1.3 billion. It’s a rounding error. Chiquita has that in loose change in its couch.

2024-06-16 08:30:59

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Since you’re on an anarchist and anti-colonial instance, I’m curious about what gripes you believe the Russian state legitimately holds at all, but especially outside its borders in Ukraine?

2024-06-16 08:23:59

By now, many of you have undoubtedly heard that a Florida court has ruled against Chiquita, ordering the company to pay $38 million to the families of people murdered by right-wing death squads that Chiquita funded in Colombia in the early 2000s.
This is of course a pittance, but still a positive step.
I haven’t dug into the details of the case but two things leap out at me:
- First, the group that Chiquita funded—the AUC—was a US-designated terrorist group at the time. Chiquita was separately fined $25 million a few years ago for that, but it’s wild to imagine how different the reaction would be if the terrorists Chiquita funded were Muslims.
- Second, my many thanks go to Chiquita for once again illustrating the impossibility of capitalism in the absence of state violence, contrary to the claims of ancaps. If powerful and wealthy firms lack state support, they’ll simply hire state-like violence on the market.
https://www.aljazeera.com/amp/news/2024/6/11/us-court-says-banana-giant-chiquita-funded-colombian-paramilitary-group

2024-06-16 07:56:38

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Right—that was Minsk II, I think, which for some reason included Russia as a party to talks regarding a dispute among Ukrainians. Russia subsequently conducted a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, so I’m wondering how you envision those talks unfolding, ie, what concessions should the Ukrainian people offer to appease Russia to end its aggression?

2024-06-15 20:38:59

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Thanks for your answer, but I was specifically asking about this
“There could have been a peaceful resolution to this conflict a long time ago by the “permanent war” enthusiasts vetoed any dialogue between Ru & Ukr so here we are”
I should have been more specific

2024-06-15 14:39:41

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What kind of peaceful resolution do you think should or could be achieved through dialogue?
@npub1lx7…usf8 @npub16uh…lsxe

2024-06-15 09:48:25

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There is a certain kind of crass genocide denialist who will insist that this or that genocide can’t possibly be happening because the perpetrator has not killed enough victims yet, or hasn’t been killing them quickly enough, to meet some arbitrary model of genocide they hold in their head.
But genocide is not merely *mass murder.* Rather, genocide is the process of destroying a group of people as a distinct community. It certainly does involve mass murder, but it encompasses many other kinds of related crimes—including efforts to stop that community from being able to have children and forcible assimilation of members of that community.
4/4
#genocide #ukraine #russia #palestine #israel #gaza

2024-06-15 09:48:25

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Since its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Russia has kidnapped and deported possibly *hundreds of thousands* of Ukrainian children. It has subjected these children to forced Russification and adopted them out to Russian families, on a scale that potentially dwarfs the comparable Nazi program that operated over a much vaster area for many more years.
https://www.hrw.org/news/2023/05/25/fresh-details-russias-forcible-transfer-ukrainian-children
3/4

2024-06-15 09:48:25

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In December, Israeli forces destroyed Gaza’s largest fertility clinic, destroying thousands of frozen embryos and denying hundreds of Palestinians experiencing fertility.
These people—those who haven’t already been murdered—have been denied the possibility of ever becoming parents because of this destruction of yet another medical facility in Gaza.
https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/5000-lives-one-shell-gazas-ivf-embryos-destroyed-by-israeli-strike-2024-04-17/
2/4

2024-06-15 09:48:24

During its reign of terror, Nazi Germany implemented an effort to encourage reproduction by “racially pure” Germans called the “Lebensborn” program.
Part of this program included the kidnapping of children from conquered territories who met the Nazis’ arbitrary phenotypical qualifications for racial superiority—things blue-eyed and blond-haired. Unlike other members of their communities, who were destined for enslavement or mass murder, the Nazis believed these children could be adopted out to German parents and incorporated into German society.
(Few things emphasize the nonsensical bullshit of Nazi racial theories than this sort of arbitrary selection of “pure” children from “subhuman” communities.)
The Nazis kidnapped tens of thousands of children, and perhaps hundreds of thousands, from communities they conquered—Czechia, Poland, Russia, etc. They deliberately destroyed records at the end of the war, so many of the children who survived were never identified.
After the war, during the Nürenberg Trials, this action was correctly identified as an *act of genocide.*
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lebensborn
1/4

2024-06-15 06:36:49

If you look straight down at a political map of the world, you of course see states crammed together like puzzle pieces, filling every inch of the world. It’s easy to conclude from this mundane and omnipresent depiction that the world really does consist of a patchwork of competing national teams.
But if you tilt that map ever so slightly, you’ll see that those states are really just a very thin layer hovering above a borderless world of all different kinds of people, most of them toiling endlessly to support the goals and interests of those states—that superstructure—floating just above, but separate from, the people.
It’s a fun trick you should try it sometime.

2024-06-14 20:22:07

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Here are what I think are the most *telling* parts:
‘“We weren’t looking at this from a public health perspective,” said a senior military officer involved in the program. “We were looking at how we could drag China through the mud.”’
…
‘China’s growing influence fueled efforts by U.S. military leaders to launch the secret propaganda operation Reuters uncovered.
“We didn’t do a good job sharing vaccines with partners,” a senior U.S. military officer directly involved in the campaign in Southeast Asia told Reuters. “So what was left to us was to throw shade on China’s.”’
What an incredible admission that the US has nothing left to offer, materially, to compete for influence. The richest country that is or ever was and it’s not even trying to bribe or induce or ingratiate with a potential partner like the Philippines.
It’s just left with the pettiest, cattiest, most tweenage gossipy bullshit imaginable: shit-talking its geopolitical rival behind its back.

2024-06-14 20:14:16

This is an absolutely bombshell report from Reuters:
“At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, the U.S. military launched a secret campaign to counter what it perceived as China’s growing influence in the Philippines, a nation hit especially hard by the deadly virus.
It aimed to sow doubt about the safety and efficacy of vaccines and other life-saving aid that was being supplied by China, a Reuters investigation found. Through phony internet accounts meant to impersonate Filipinos, the military’s propaganda efforts morphed into an anti-vax campaign. Social media posts decried the quality of face masks, test kits and the first vaccine that would become available in the Philippines – China’s Sinovac inoculation.”
https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-covid-propaganda/

2024-06-14 19:13:17

Believing “Russia was provoked into invading Ukraine by the US” is a bit like believing “Chiquita was provoked into hiring death squads to murder Colombian labor organizers by rival fruit companies.”
It makes a certain sort of sense, from a structural perspective, but it also assumes that any of these actors—capitalists or the states that work for those capitalists, these systems of competitive power politics/profit-seeking—should even exist in the first place. Chiquita was only in a position to be provoked by capitalist competitors because its owners chose to be capitalists. Russia was only in a position to be provoked by the US because its owners chose to be rulers of a great power.
We don’t have to naturalize the effects of terrible systems.

2024-06-13 19:45:48

Tankies are testing out “the rise of the far right is good because they’re nationalists who will realign Europe with Russia instead of the US” in response to the EU election results.

2024-06-13 17:32:50

The idea that “all people who belong to some demographic group—all the people of a national group, or a religion, or speakers of the same language—belong under the rule of the same state” emerged out of 19th century liberal nationalism.
It reached its abysmal conclusion with Nazi Germany and its “ein Volk, ein Reich” bullshit.
No, people do not automatically belong to some state because they are members of some arbitrary group. No, not state has the right to invade and annex people because they share some arbitrary quality with the rulers of that state.

2024-06-12 19:47:46

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Putin is not concerned about *Russian* security any more than a butcher is concerned about *cattle* security. Putin is concerned about himself, his class allies, and his continued rule over the Russian people.
To take seriously his concerns is to internalize the logic of the ruling class and mistake it for your own. He has no right to rule and thus no right to self-defense. Neither do any of his class rivals ruling over any other state.
You know how it became quite popular to point out that an occupying power has no right to self-defense against resistance by an occupied community, because the occupation itself is the initial act of aggression? All states, all capitalists, are our occupiers.

2024-06-12 19:42:21

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Oh no, NATO did Vladimir Putin a fright? I don’t fucking care! States don’t have rights and they don’t have legitimate interests, least of all capitalist oligarchs ruling fascist entho-states.
It absolutely boggles my fucking mind how many leftists feel the need to white knight for their class antagonists.

2024-06-12 19:39:38

Of course Russia invaded Ukraine. It was provoked.
Of course the US invaded Iraq. It was provoked.
Of course Israel invaded Gaza. It was provoked.
Of course Germany invaded Poland. It was provoked.
Of course Baron Fuckwad invaded the lands of Duke Horseshit and slaughtered his peasants. He was provoked.

2024-06-11 06:27:31

The presence of actual fascists in the Ukrainian military, like Azov, no more invalidates the legitimacy of Ukrainian resistance to Russian aggression than the presence of Hamas invalidates the legitimacy of Palestinian resistance to Israeli aggression.

2024-06-10 05:36:31

Ideologies that have failed and are collapsing tend to produce radical and extreme reactions as they die.
Industrial capitalism produced the Nazis. Authoritarian communism produced the Khmer Rouge. Political Islam produced ISIS.
Super excited to see what further horrors neoliberal capitalism has in store for us as it, too, fails.

2024-06-08 12:37:29

For some reason, “left unity” in practice always means anarchists aligning with and subordinating themselves to authoritarians, and never authoritarians adopting the practice of anarchism.

2024-06-08 06:44:32

Praising a state like China or the Soviet Union for its “development” is like praising Israel for “turning the desert green” or the US for putting a tv in every person’s home.
It misses the immense violence and unfreedom involved and the inequality of results.

2024-06-07 11:45:08

“The central point that emerges from our research is that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while mass-based interest groups and average citizens have little or no independent influence.”
- Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page, “Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens”
“Before her eleventh-hour decision to reverse course and ‘indefinitely pause’ a landmark plan to charge drivers higher prices for clogging up Manhattan streets, Democratic New York governor Kathy Hochul received $36,000 from lobbyists for state automobile dealers. Half of that money came from a lobbying group that opposed congestion pricing, citing ‘consequences for dealers and the thousands of people they employ.’”
https://jacobin.com/2024/06/kathy-hochul-congestion-pricing-nyc

2024-06-06 17:02:25

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I owe this understanding of the economy to the brilliant @npub1glr…8qmc who, in the essay below, argued compellingly that credit was and should be a commons. Anyone can supply anyone else, with the expectation that they will be supplied in turn—a giant network of constantly-turning over credit.
*Financial* investment is, then, a reflection of the state’s enclosure of credit. The state monopolizes the production of money with its capitalist partners, banks and other financial institutions. If you want to access the money you need to invest—to access that network of workers advancing product to each other—you have to first agree to pay interest to banks on loans, ie, rents on their control of credit.
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/kevin-carson-credit-as-an-enclosed-commons

2024-06-06 16:54:55

Investment is something of a myth.
I *don’t* mean that people can’t or don’t work to expand economic production. I do mean the idea that people frugally and virtuously defer consumption, forgoing now to create stockpiles they can use to greater use in the future, doesn’t actually reflect material reality.
In reality, all of this work is both social and current. If I decide to work to expand production—build a factory, plow and manure a field, whatever—I can’t also be producing the food I need to eat or the clothes I need to wear. Someone else has to be doing that work while I do mine, in addition to anyone supplying me with the tools and raw materials I might need to do my work.
And they’re almost certainly not doing it from stockpiles reflecting past work. They’re doing it from *current production.* No one first stockpiles all the food a team of workers needs to eat for a month or a year before those workers start to build a factory. *They feed them as food becomes available,* out of constant current production, just like anyone else.
So when that field or factory is done and can start producing more stuff than was possible before, those new products will in turn go to those original workers who supplied me while I was doing my work, or to yet some other worker making something entirely different, who will in turn supply my original benefactor.
That’s all the economy is—a giant network of workers constantly doing useful work, making things of value for each other, advancing their product to each other with the understanding that others’ products will be advanced to them.

2024-06-02 07:51:11

Capitalism is a system of rule by capital owners.
Capital is an abstracted, commodified, tradable right to command the labor of other people.
That’s it.

2024-05-31 21:49:09

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If the stock market vanished and workers’ collaborative effort was no longer owned or ownable by capitalists, most of them would very suddenly be much better off.

2024-05-31 21:42:23

If you’re worried that getting rid of capitalism would be too disruptive to people’s lives, just wait until you hear about capitalism and how disruptive it is to people’s lives.
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/the-sharp-sudden-decline-of-americas-middle-class-234917/

2024-05-30 16:39:59

Jerry Seinfeld, who is a billionaire because he owns government-issued copyrights to intellectual property, believes we had an “an agreed upon hierarchy” in the 1960s, which we no longer have, causing all kinds of modern problems because “we have no sense of hierarchy” and humans apparently need to know their place.
It’s just absolutely fascinating how our elites (take note, Noah Smith) justify their power and privilege to themselves.
“The lessers long to be ruled by their betters.” Not thanks, get fucked Jerry.
https://variety.com/2024/film/news/jerry-seinfeld-dominant-masculinity-laughs-bad-reviews-1236018889/amp/

2024-05-27 12:55:09

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There is a direct line from this map to the band of coups and civil wars across Northern Africa to the refugee crisis that fascists across Europe have been exploiting to gain power.

2024-05-24 08:55:44

Earlier this month, Charles Littlejohn began serving a five-year prison sentence for the crime of making public the tax returns of Donald Trump and thousands of other wealthy Americans.
Littlejohn is the reason the public knows the effective tax rates of rich Americans, which is lower than the tax rate paid by everyone else.
Littlejohn is, in short, a hero.
Under sentencing guidelines, the maximum penalty for the crime of disclosing tax returns is 10 months. The federal judge who sentenced him—a Biden appointee—gave him six times the maximum sentence.
If you ever wonder why Biden has been so reluctant to address Trump’s many, many crimes, Littlejohn’s case serves as a clear answer: preserving the status quo, including the secrecy and prerogatives of the ultra-rich, is by far more important than addressing the crimes of one of those ultra-rich, even one who attempted a coup.
Our elites would rather take the risk of Donald Trump blowing up their system than knowingly help plebeians like Littlejohn threaten the whole edifice.
https://www.propublica.org/article/the-secret-irs-files-trove-of-never-before-seen-records-reveal-how-the-wealthiest-avoid-income-tax

2024-05-23 15:46:12

Paul Parkman died earlier this month. He was the first person to isolate the measles virus and helped develop the vaccine against it that’s still in use today.
He purposefully gave away his patent rights so the vaccine could be distributed as cheaply as possible. He saved countless lives. A tremendous hero.
The next time someone insists that capitalist greed is human nature, that no one will ever labor “for free,” remember Dr. Parkman and the countless other scientists and doctors who have saved so many of us.
https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/auburnpub/name/paul-parkman-obituary?id=55136675

2024-05-21 20:40:08

During apartheid, the South African government established “homelands” for Black South Africans that were ostensibly independent states—though no other country recognized them—so the regime could pretend Black South Africans were foreigners ineligible for rights in South Africa.
I used to think that this was purely for international consumption, a weak pretense to avoid sanctions and stay on the good side of allies.
But, having heard from Israelis who genuinely believe things like “there is no occupation” and “there is no apartheid” and “there is no ethnic cleansing” I now realize that white South Africans were the primary audience for the ruse and they probably ate that shit up.

2024-05-21 05:50:04

Just got a
“Unless you have a decisive plan to liberate Palestine proven to be 100% infalible, you have *no right* to criticize no Palestinian.”
Which is the mirror image of the
“You can’t criticize Israel’s actions in Gaza unless you have a decisive plan to defend against Hamas proven to be 100% infallible”
that I routinely hear from apologists for Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
And, no. That’s not how morality works. You don’t have to be a military strategist to object to the mass murder of children. Some things are simply ok to oppose.

2024-05-20 20:20:04

“You can’t criticize Hamas for committing atrocities because that sounds like something a Zionist would say”
Comrades, if you have to self-censor because you’re afraid that stating obvious and banal truths will help an oppressor, then you have no faith in soundness of your own position. Genocide by Israel doesn’t become good because Hamas is a bad actor. Opposing genocide stands on its own merits. Liberation stands on its own merits.
You’ve got to kill the idea that life is a series of team sports and you’re a cheerleader who’s going to help the home team score the winning goal.

2024-05-19 16:23:51

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Sorry, which one are you asking for a citation? Or both?

2024-05-19 16:20:56

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It strikes me as an odd position to take when we know that Hamas a) routinely violates the laws of war and b) routinely oppresses the same Palestinians it’s ostensibly defending. ie, why would they be fine with indiscriminate rocket attacks against civilians but not shooting down IDF medivac helicopters? Why would the Palestinian public be so precious to them as to prompt Hamas to take action to protect them?

2024-05-19 16:16:22

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Immoral acts don’t become moral just because they’re done for a good reason. “Our adversary is so terrible they warrant any response” is also how the IDF justifies its own atrocities.

2024-05-19 16:11:39

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Just to check: you think it would be morally ok for Hamas to do it, but it’s morally virtuous for Hamas not to do it, and Hamas refrains from doing it because it’s too morally virtuous to do it?

2024-05-19 08:54:50

A lot of people seem to have adopted the erroneous belief that liberation involves the oppressed switching places with their oppressors.
Freedom is not revenge and it’s not getting a turn to exploit and oppress.

2024-05-19 08:29:07

Russia and China are both imperialist settler colonial states and they don’t magically become the good-guy team by antagonistically opposing other imperialist settler colonial states.

2024-05-18 16:56:59

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It’s just banal power politics masquerading as some interesting or unique insight. Boooooring

2024-05-18 11:31:25

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I don’t know what relation your question has to anything I wrote

2024-05-18 09:30:40

Capitalism is the state enclosing a common resource, water, so private owners can serve the public literal shit water and still collect rents from the public like feudal lords while we grovel and say thanks for the sewage.
I fucking hate hate hate hate capitalism.
https://www.thesun.co.uk/health/27970119/devon-water-bug-symptoms-spread-lates-news/amp/

2024-05-18 06:49:29

I’ve encountered more than one US liberal who a) believes that Americans will be subject to fascist dystopia if they do not re-elect Joe Biden and b) refuses to engage in even the slightest effort to persuade people to vote for Joe Biden, preferring to rage and insult instead.
I can’t help but notice this discrepancy and conclude that, on some level, they don’t actually believe (a). Either they’re not as worried about fascism as they claim, or they’re not as confident in the effects of voting as they assert.
So (b) seems more like a pressure-release valve for them, or perhaps a pre-emptive scapegoating, for when voting fails and they end up with fascism anyway.
It can’t be the *system* that fails them; the system can only be failed by unbelievers who don’t vote hard enough.

2024-05-17 05:07:21

The failure of liberalism, at least as a mode of analysis, is its utter inability (or unwillingness) to consider systems as systems.
To liberalism, an institution is, at worst, a neutral tool that can be wielded by anyone for any purpose. Problems emerge not from the system itself, but rather from the personalities of the people in charge of the system.
It does not occur to them that systems produce the results that they do systemically.
“If we just elect the right person to run the worker-crushing machine, we will soon be able to use the worker-crushing machine to help workers!”

2024-05-14 18:56:32

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There’s no intrinsic obstacle to Jewish people and Palestinian people living side-by-side with each other in their shared ancestral homeland or literally anywhere else in the world. That’s called “anarchism.”
But there is a *political* obstacle, a state claiming exclusionary sovereignty, which assigns some kinds of rights to some classes of people and fewer or no rights to other classes of people.
Palestinians get no rights, as victims of occupation, or substandard rights, as second-class citizens of Israel. Jews get a suite of rights,* unless they protest the state, in which case they’re likely to be treated like Palestinians and catch a cop’s fist to their jaw.
This is not self-determination. This is state sovereignty “in the name of” the Jewish people.
* I originally said “full rights” but since those are still the constrained rights granted by state authorities, and not the full rights of actually free people engaged in genuine self-determination, I corrected myself.

2024-05-14 18:27:11

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Over and over I hear critics of anarchism fret about the possibility of violence in the absence of the state, when the violence of the state is right in front of them, every day, everywhere in the world.

2024-05-14 18:25:36

I saw someone describe Zionism as
“the right of self-determination of the Jewish people in their historic homeland”
and yeah! That doesn’t sound bad! I would like Jewish people to enjoy self-determination in Israel/Palestine and, you know, everywhere else too! I want that for everyone everywhere!
The problem, though, is that “self-determination” isn’t being used here to describe actual individual freedom or free communities. Baked into this definition is *exclusionary sovereignty* that is embodied not in individual and autonomous people, but in “THE Jewish people” as a corporate body.
And this, more than anything else, is why there is endless violence: because while self-determination is inherently pluralistic—we are most free when we cooperate voluntarily in communities of equally free people—sovereignty is exclusionary. For “the Jewish people” to have their own state, the Palestinian people had to be excluded from their homes or reduced to subordinate and inferior status within Israel.
State sovereignty, like the private property model that is the other side of its coin, doesn’t allow for overlapping rights or shared ownership. You’re an owner or you’re not; you’re a full citizen or you’re not.