“May you live in interesting times” was a curse the ancient Chinese hurled at their adversaries, wishing them strife, oppression, and struggle. It applies to us now because for all the uncertainties a Trump presidency holds, it will certainly be an interesting time, filled with opportunities for resistance and perhaps revolution.Continue reading HERE:
Big T’s pedal-to-the-metal exploitation of humanity and the planet will accelerate the vicious policies of his two predecessors, poisoning the environment, forcing our financial will around the world, killing thousands of people in imperialist wars, manipulating other nations, modernizing our nuclear weapons, and jailing dissenters at home. Fortress America will continue to expand globally as prison, sweatshop, and fire base.
After all our years trying to change this country, how could we end up with this?
To answer this question and avoid falling into catatonic despondency or self-destructive rage, we need an historical perspective. What we are experiencing now is the long war the ruling elite is fighting to maintain its grip on the world. The current phase began with the collapse of Keynesian capitalism, which flourished from the 1950s into the ’70s, when the primary consumer market was in the capitalist headquarter countries of North America and Western Europe. Corporations were able to stimulate domestic consumption and quell worker discontent there by acceding to labor’s demands for better wages and conditions. That led to a 30-year bubble of improvement for unionized workers, predominantly male and white, that began to collapse in the ’80s as capitalism gradually became globalized.
Then to maintain dominance Western corporations had to reduce labor costs in order to compete against emerging competition in low-wage countries such as China, India, and Brazil. Also international consumer markets became more important than the home market, but reaching them required low prices. So capitalist leaders reversed hard-won reforms, forcing paychecks and working conditions in the West down. And they tried to keep control of crucial Mideast oil resources by tightening their neo-imperialist hold on that region: overthrowing governments, installing dictators, undermining economies.
This aggression generated armed resistance: jihadist attacks against the West. Our response has been the current holy war against terror. All of this horrible suffering is just one campaign in capitalism’s long war for hegemony. Any dominator system — including capitalism, patriarchy, and religious fundamentalism — generates violence.
Continue reading HERE:The State exists because it territorializes itself. It builds itself through colonizing territorial expansion. This expansion comes about through the forced deterritorialization of the original inhabitants from the lands that the state has appropriated. This appropriation implies the mobilization of military force that the state can use to expand or maintain its territory. This has meant wars and genocide. But the state also has its experts to write history; they turn the facts around so as to justify their atrocities and obligate following generations to repeat the meaningless official litanies written by the experts.
Education, then, is nothing more than the institutionalization of disciplines of training and domestication, a training ground where children and adolescents are taught to perpetuate the dominant system. There they learn to give way to the dominant order and they begin the process of reification. On these parade grounds or schools of social indoctrination, the ideology that legitimates the system is reproduced. New members of society internalize a false consciousness, which inflates in them like a lung until everyone repeats with more or less success the same discourse. Its idea is that everyone says, dreams, and thinks that this is the best of all possible worlds. And if it has its faults, it doesn’t matter because they can be fixed. Thinking anything different is to be part of the anarchistic ranks, to go crazy or to call to insurrection. According to Adorno, standardization obliges the subject to choose between mercantilization or schizophrenia. There is no exit from this binary mold. In this society, preferring the garden to cement is seen with distrust. And depending on the political wind of the moment, this preference can cost one’s life. When the system breaks and sheep escape from the flock, prisons grow with criminal efficiency, as well as coups d’etat, raids, tear gas, repressive measures, war, etc. While all of this is occurring, the state rein forces its propaganda through radio, television and newspapers. And so the state materializes itself in the minds of individuals.
Nation states assemble their repressive apparati—police and military—to protect the transnationals and expand a lifestyle of standardization based on the reduction of humans into economic units of production and consumption. With this, a new kind of territorialization and labor slavery is produced. The technology and the goods that the global minority, dominant class uses are manufactured in sweatshops that operate with the logic of exploitation. Schools and factories are centers of control imposed by the state. In order to abolish the state, it is necessary to abolish factories and schools. The authoritarianism that the civilized order reproduces in these institutions is responsible for ethnic cleansing, political genocide, and social exploitation. In order to construct a work without hierarchies, jails, propaganda, or coups, it is necessary to sweep, away the state. And it depends on us to wipe it off the face of the earth.
The dance of revolution is a continuous project, floating free, perpetually changing, always focused. The music it moves to is pure energy, weaving three interdependent melodies: participation, founded on the passion of play; communication, founded on the passion of love; and realization, founded on the passion to create. Refusing the value of appearances, the dance makes itself invisible to those who see only appearances; the spectacle of the commodity cannot defend itself. The dance can never be a closed system, it never mystifies itself; rather, it realizes itself in its own supersession, in the sublime movement of subversion, where a pirouette returns to itself not as itself, not as it was born, but changed, reconceived in a limitless perspective. Subversion devalues each fragmented element in the hierarchy of appearances; each isolated commodity — whether it be inanimate objects or objectified human beings selling themselves in the marketplace — is projected into the significance of the WHOLE, all possible connections are made as we dance closer to the totality of our lives. Subversion is the only language, the only gesture, that bears within it its own critique. Its force is pleasure seeking itself. In the language of subversion we begin to sing, our whole lives begin to move in the rhythm of the song: thus we create the dance: thus the revolution becomes our daily life.
[February 1970]
Read the full article HERE:A pipeline just two and half hours’ drive from the Indigenous water protectors’ ongoing stand against the Dakota Access Pipeline has leaked over 170,000 gallons of crude oil into a tributary of the Little Missouri River and into a hillside, it was reported late Monday.
Monitoring equipment failed to detect the leak, and it is unknown how long the spill near Belfield, North Dakota had gone on before a local landowner discovered it on December 5.
At least two cows have been confirmed dead near the site of the spill, reports the Pioneer Press.
The Belle Fourche pipeline is operated by the Wyoming-based True Companies, which is the same company behind the 2015 pipeline rupture in Montana that sent over 40,000 barrels of crude into Yellowstone River. Indeed, at that time it was reported that the operator had a “checkered environmental history,” with 30 recorded pipeline leaks and multiple federal fines on its record.
Anarchist texts on the Calais JungleRead the full article HERE:
Although by now the Jungle of Calais has been destroyed, these two texts by Paris Sous Tension are still very relevant for understanding the situation of migrants in France today from an anarchist perspective. Many of the migrants were moved from the Jungle to various detention or housing centres, but all of those spaces are temporary and they will soon be back with the others in the camps that appeared or grew following the Calais eviction. In November, several thousand people were evicted from the Stalingrad neighbhourhood of Paris, where a camp had grown on the grassy medians of busy commercial streets. With right-wing politics ascendant here in the lead-up to presidential election in the spring, it is likely that the attitude of the state towards the migrants will harden and that the two strategies described in these articles, repression and management, will take on an increasingly violent character.
“I don’t want to go there. That camp is a prison, a sneaky way of imprisoning us.” from Paris Sous Tension, January 2016
In Calais, the year 2016 begins in the same way the previous ended: by further repressive measures against the undersireables (undocumented people, outlaws, rebels…), by declarations of war against them by the government and its police. All with the explicit support of the most despicable segment of the population, those who have turned to xenophobia to soothe their miserable existence and who rejoice to see the government — who, in their opinion, never does enough — go all out and resort to drastic measures. Those who, when things get serious, always line up behind the state and demand as the price of their passive adherence that the order be restored. Their only concern is to preserve their small comforts, their precious bank balance, their precious car and daily routine, their precious space of mental peace that all allows them to live their lives without paying attention to the world around them.
Like many places around the world, people have been flocking to Calais for years now in hopes of crossing to England, crossing a border that is closed to them because they don’t have the required documents, because they don’t meet the legal requirements , because they don’t have a degree or a resume to help them sell themselves on the labour market, or rather because keeping this cheap labour pool living day to day and in fear is a good way to domesticate them and keep them readily exploitable. For years, these people have been organizing among themselves for survival, in hopes of managing to slip across the border illegally, of overcoming the many obstacles that separate one bit of territory from another for those who are seen as undesireable by the state and the market. And as is often the case in hostile situations, there is strength in numbers and so they’ve come here by the thousands (between 4500 and 6000 [1]) in an informal camp in an area now known as “the Jungle”. The cops, who used to simply destroy cabins and tents back when they were isolated from each other, don’t dare to enter “the Jungle” to evict the inhabitants. And these inhabitants, no longer being chased off every few days, are now able to organize themselves in small groups to sneak into cargo trucks in order to enter the tunnel under the English channel or to enter the port.
And so we see in the past few months that companies like Eurotunnel and the SNCF rail network have restricted access to the tunnel and drastically increased security — the former by hiring a hundred dog handlers and the latter by erecting barriers along the roadways that are several metres tall and topped with barbed wire. As for the cops, more numerous and recently equipped with drones, they are happy to take advantage of a decree (a gift for the cops as part of the state of emergency) allowing them to stop any pedestrian on the road leading to the port and to pass them on to their friends, the judges, who can then condemn them to six months in prison. Oh joy, proclaim the the president of the region (who is calling for the support of the army to main-tain or-der!), the mayor of Calais, and the police chief as they demand the deportation or imprisonment of every migrant found guilty of: trespassing around the port or near the Eurotunnel (which is necessary, considering the absence of a space-time portal to cross the border); conflict with the police (which has become necessary in order to access the sites in question, in addition to its general value); vandalism; or “by-law violations” (healthy reactions in the face of frustration, disappointment, anger, despair, rage…). It’s a way of oiling the judicial meat grinder, to wave the cleaver of prison or expulsion (which means, at the very least, starting again) over the heads of those migrants who don’t act the way the bureaucrats, functionaries, judges, and politicians expect: as victims.
Governments of all stripes dream of order and pacification, but this isn’t in the cards for the near future. As proof, on December 17, about a thousand people set out along the highway towards the tunnel. With Christmas approaching and big traffic jams all around the commercial centres, they figured there would be more chances to sneak onto a truck. But the police didn’t agree, which lead to hours of confrontation. Same thing on December 25, 2500 people passed through the centre of Calais to reach the tunnel under the channel, but the police pushed them back. On their return trip, cars payed the price of their frustration and rage: rear view mirrors and windshields smashed, wipers bent back. A few uniformed goons were hurt. In these dark days, the blindest hatred meets the pettiest arrogance and cowardly submission prospers in the absence of any broader hope for a radically different life. We didn’t have to wait long to hear the half self-interested, half indignant grumbles and squeals of the peaceful and hardworking population as they lined up on the side of order.
 
We all know that the state's "secret services" work in secret, that goes without saying, so we the people never know what they are up to, what we can be sure of is that they are not working for the public at large, but working to maintain the established power structure. So the various laws covering their actions are not laid down to tell them how they will work, but to protect them should they get caught snooping where we don't believe they should. Therefore legislation covering the "secret service" will always get ever more invasive as technical abilities allow ever great surveillance, Stingray, for example. Keep the state and you keep the cancer of "secret services" For this reason I'm not a great lover of petitions as they never remove the real threat, the state, but what they can do is help highlight the murky details and intrusive nature of the state and its cavalier attitude to our liberties.
So I sign this petition and help broadcast it, not because I think it will sort the problem of state mass surveillance, but hoping it will alert more people to the truth about the illusion of democracy and the type of secret surveillance society we live under.
This from Care 2:
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Read the full article HERE:Danny Weatherson was 19 years old when he was given a 13-month IPP for robbery. More than nine years later, he is still in prison. In February, a parole board said his re-offending risk had reduced sufficiently to be moved to an open prison.
But he cut his own throat last month and the move has been postponed. He is currently recovering in the prison's hospital wing.
His solicitor, Shirley Noble, says self-harming has become his way of coping with not having a release date. But she is worried it could also hurt his chances of ever being let out.
This may help to explain a lot of what is happening in the world right now. The Global Risks Report 2016 details a worldwide rise in catastrophic events, ranging from involuntary migration to natural disasters. When such crises occur, people look for someone to blame, and often immigration and minorities become an easy scapegoat for a problem that is far less visible in origin – as is the case with financial crises.
Immigration itself has been shown to have an effect on right-wing views – but not in the direction you might expect. The two show a negative correlation: in the places where immigration is the highest, support for right-wing parties is lowest. For example, it has been shown that it is the perception of immigration levels in a local area, rather than the actual change in numbers, that is linked to votes for UKIP.
On December 10th, 2016 the ‘German Turkish Federation’ (ATF) organized a cultural day with the slogan ‘Feast of the Flags’ in the Neumünster town hall. The ‘ATF’ is the umbrella organization of the ‘Gray Wolves’ and represents the fascist nationalist MHP party in Germany. It is a scandal that the city of Neumünster allows its premises to be used by fascist organizations who openly display their fascist-nationalist ideology. The flags with the three crescents were openly on display, the ‘Gray Wolves’ hand signal was openly used and fascist literature was sold.
The ‘Turkish Federation’ is responsible not only for propaganda work in the FRG to spread its fascist agitation but is also closely linked to the MHP party in Turkey. The fascists played a decisive role in the massacres in Cizre, Sur and many other regions while the fascist forces within the Turkish army are currently participating in the invasion of Bakur and Rojava. The MHP is working with the AKP on the reintroduction of the death penalty in Turkey. Their objective is the murder of Serok APO (Abdullah Öcalan) by the Turkish state.
In protest against the fascist event we simultaneously attacked the ATF building on Joachim street with graffiti and sabotaged several cars of the participants.
We will attack you wherever you are.
Revenge Team Sehid Lecwan Munzur of the Apoist Youth Initiative.
(via Linksunten Indymedia, translated by Insurrection News)
Sebastián Oversluij, we demand your memory in every direct action.* This December 11 is already 3 years since your death in combat, with fire we remember every fallen compañerx.Freedom for the PDI case compañerxs, Tamara Sol and all other compas who have been kidnapped and imprisoned by the Police State.Fire to the prisons! We do not forget, we do not forgive! The struggle continues, stronger than ever!*Barricades, banners, pamphlets and attacks with Molotovs against the police in memory of Sebastián ‘Angry’ Oversluij and for the political prisoners outside UMCE (Metropolitan University of Educational Sciences). There were also clashes outside Campus Juan Gómez Millas (University of Chile). 07.12.2016
WOMENS HEALTH PROJECTS AND AUTONOMOUS HEALTH CARE IN CHIAPAS, MEXICO6pm Monday 12th DecemberAt Autonomous Centre of EdinburghJoin us for a talk and discussion on Womens Health Projects and Zapatista autonomous health care in Chiapas, Mexico. Lisa Sanderson-Fox, who worked in the Zapatista Autonomous Zones of Chiapas from 2000-2004 and has made numerous trips since, will be speaking about community health worker projects with an emphasis on Women's health. Community Health Workers are an essential part of insuring dignified health care in remote indigenous communities. Come hear stories and participate in a discussion about the role of international solidarity in developing sustainable health care access in revolutionary Mayan commmunities of Chiapas.Lisa has worked with Community Health Workers in Chiapas since 2000, providing trainings for hundreds of people and accompanying multiple clinics in the process of developing autonomous health services appropriate for their communities and culture.Organised, in conjunction with ACE, by Edinburgh Chiapas SolidarityGroup
Followed by talk and discussion on Detroit:DETROIT: FUTURE CITY?8pm Monday 12th DecemberAt Autonomous Centre of Edinburgh.Join us for a talk and discussion on Detroit: Future City?The US city of Detroit had a population in the region of 1.8 million in the 1950s but automation and the flight of big business, particularly in the automotive industry, led to massive redundancies, foreclosures and the displacement of millions. The population now stands at less than 700,000, the lowest it has been for a century. In the midst of this neo-liberal catastrophe and the associated withdrawal of public services, residents have banded together to create their own solutions including food networks, community safety patrols, free schools and neighbourhood housing projects. However, these pioneering Detroiters are faced with an onslaught of further privatisation, dissolution of democratic control of local government, the removal collective bargaining and raids on pension funds. These competing models of the 'future city' will have ramifications not just in the US but worldwide. Sarah Coffey, a longtime Detroit resident, community organiser and a co-founder of the Midnight Special Law Collective has been closely involved with autonomous communities in the city.Organised by ACEACE MONTHLY MEETINGTuesday 13 December 6pmAll welcomeWe hope all groups involved with ACE will send at least one delegate The monthly meetings are now the second Tuesday each month at 6pmEDINBURGH COALITION AGAINST POVERTY WORKING SESSIONThursday 15 December 6pm - 8pmUpdating our website, writing new articles, leaflets etcAll interested very welcomeECAP www.edinburghagainstpoverty.org.ukEDINBURGH COALITION AGAINST POVERTY TRAININGFriday 16 December 11am - 1pm/1.30pmInformal training for supporting people over benefits problemsAt ACE No experience necessary - all interested very welcomeTHE BLACK PANTHERS IN LONDONTalk and discussion at ACE with Carlus HudsonSaturday 17 December 7pmThe Black Panthers are one of the most pivotal organisations in the histories of radicalism and anti-racism in the United States, and their ideas have had an enormous impact on activists who have come after them. Far less famous, but by no means less significant, was the Black Panther Movement in Britain. Active in the late 60s and early 70s, its history touches on the fight within the anti-racist movement in Britain between its liberal and radical wings, and the internationalisation of struggles against colonialism, neo-colonialism and the Vietnam War. Focusing on the Black Panthers based in London, this talk will tell their story before delving deeper into the development of the movement’s culture and organisational models. The talk will examine the Black Panthers from the perspective of intersectional anarchism, and show its shortcomings in terms of gender, class, and political hierarchy. Carlus Hudson is a PhD student at the University of Portsmouth researching student anti-racism in the UK in the 1970s'
Autonomous Centre of Edinburgh, 17 West Montgomery Place EH7 5HAACE is open Sats 12-4pm, Tues 12-3pm, Thursday 6 - 8pmAdvice and solidarity on benefits, debt, housing etc on Tuesdays. The Info Shop, Scottish Radical Library and free broadband available all 3 days. Open monthly meetings second Tuesday of the month, 6pm at ACE 0131 557 6242 ace@autonomous.org.ukwww.autonomous.org.uk On Facebook To receive more frequent notifications of ACE events and other news of interest email mike92@riseup.net with header SUBSCRIBE ACE TALK LISTAce mailing list
In the early hours of December 2nd 2016, in Exarcheia, on the corner of Akadimias and Themistokleous St. a bulldozer at the service of DEI electricity company couldn’t take it anymore and decided to give an end to its automatized routine. Before its self-immolation the poor machine reportedly said:
“Solidarity with the comrades Siao, Hodey and Maya, recently arrested in Germany for defending the Hambach forest!
Strength to the anarchist Natalia Collado, imprisoned in Chile because she liberated a Transantiago bus with fire!”
Electoral politics feeds off of grassroots social movements and struggles, not into them.
[E]lectoral activism feeds into electoral activism. It relies on itself to further itself. It attracts people who are attracted to electoral politics and generally does not attract people engaging in class struggle. It does not need, nor does it feed class struggle, except to the extent that it might be able to take advantage of the sacrifices of militants in order to declare itself a proper representative of a social movement it did not create.
