#anarcho-socialist latina

[dailyanarchistposts]

Editor’s Note: Teodoro Antilli was active in the Argentine anarchist movement during a period of severe repression. In late 1909 a state of siege was imposed, many anarchists were imprisoned and their presses, offices and cultural centres were ransacked and closed. Antilli was involved in the publication of the anarchist paper, La Battala, but was arrested in May 1910 along with hundreds of others amid renewed attacks on the anarcho-syndicalist FORA (Selectiol1 58). In 1913, Alltilli was imprisoned for publishing an article accusing all assistant prison governor of raping an anarchist prisoner. He was involved in the general strike ofjanuary 1919, which was ruthlessly suppressed. Over 700 workers were killed, thousands more wounded, and over 50,000 imprisoned in what came to be known as the “Tragic Week.” All anarchist papers, including Antilli’s, were banned. In 1921, another 1,100 workers were massacred during the anarchist rebellion in Patagonia. Antilli and his next paper, La Antorcha, supported the actions of Severino Di Giovanni, a militant Italian anarchist refugee from fascism who began a campaign of illegal actions, including bank robberies and assassinations, in face of this brutal reaction. The following extracts, translated by Paul Sharkey, are taken from Antilli’s Salud a la Anarquia! [Here’s to Anarchy!] (Buenos Aires: La Antorcha, 1924, reprinted in El Anarquismo en America Latina, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1990)

WE SHOULD, IT OCCURS TO US, OFFER a full explanation of our notion of “social struggle” as opposed to “class struggle.” As we see it, they are a s different as n arrow is from wide and the eternal from the ephemeral. Suggesting actions of differing scopes. In fact, someone locked into the class struggle is ill equipped to understand comprehensive social struggle.... If I accept that there is only class struggle, success for me will b e enough. My quarrel is with the propertied and the capitalists. If I join forces with other workers like myself and set up, say, a cooperative, the class struggle will be over as far as we are concerned; we shall have won, as indeed the cooperators and socialists contend. Yet the state of society will not h ave been changed and the class struggle will be over a s far as we are concerned because we h ave made ourselves capitalists, the inner circle of a business that visits its exploitation on outsiders, making every one of us, in equal measure, an exploiter, instead of our being split into exploiters and exploited ... If I extend this to thinking about the entire social system as a “class struggle,” then all that is required is that my class should dictate to the other class, in which case I too shall have emerged the victor.

“Social struggle,” as we understand it, is not just setting a course for revolution and extinguishing the existence of the bourgeoisie; it is also, since we hold that the social also means the sociable, the elimination of all imposition, especially political imposition, by one man upon another; we see humanity as having fought for countless centuries past to achieve a genuinely free society; we plunge into these raging waters and, let there be no mistake about this, we accept all the consequences and, chiefly, the Revolution. Social struggle, therefore, is something humane and all-embracing; the aim is not merely to change society, but that society should be hospitable for men, and every source of oppression or tyranny banished, which is to say, a genuinely free society...

The term “social struggle,” as we employ it, i s that all-encompassing. And we want this borne in mind lest it be confused with class struggle carried through to Revolution. We bring into the Revolution a social struggle as well ... Class struggle carried through to Revolution has as its aim a “proletarian dictatorship.” Social struggle carried through to Revolution has as its object the freedom of Humanity and the ennobling of all of its members.

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We believe that black people will not be free until we are able to determine our destiny. "...the federal government is responsible and obligated to give every man employment or a guaranteed income...if the white America will not give full employment, the means of production should be taken...and placed in the community to employ all of its people and give a high standard of living. "...this racist government has robbed us and we are demanding our overdue debt...as restitution for slave labor and mass murder of black people...The American racist has...slaughtere[d] over fifty million black people...this is a modest demand. "...housing and land should be made into cooperatives so that our community...can build and make decent housing for its people. "...educational system that will give to our people a knowledge of self. "...black people should not be forced to fight in the military to defend a racist government...We will not fight and kill other people of color in the world who...are being victimized by the white racist government of America. "...end police brutality...by organizing black self-defense groups...all black people should arm themselves for self-defense. "...black people should be released from jails and prisons because they have not received a fair and impartial trial. "A peer is a person from a similar economic, social, religious, geographical, environmental, historical and racial background.

Huey P. Newton

October 1966. Black Panther Party Platform and Program: What We Want, What We Believe

[motherfucker-teresa]

“Old News Is Still New News”

Album available on bandcamp now!!!

[thelaughinglamb]

anarcho-socialist-latina reblogged your post and added:

Reblogging with this addition because OP only wants to criticize rather than actually help us like the performative wokeness they seek to admonish in the original post.

I made an apology and agreed to try and phrase things more sensitively in the future, but rather than engage with that, you decided you’d rather antagonize me. 

If you think so little of me having read maybe two paragraphs of text, then I’m sorry to have given you a poor impression. That’s really all I can say.

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...We want land, we want bread, we want housing, we want education, we want clothing, we want justice, and we want some peace.

Huey P. Newton

The bare minimum of any organization that claims to help those in need should have these basic tenets as their guide. They should implement these basic tenets. They should ensure these basic tenets are met for the people they claim to represent. The organization that does this, necessarily creates a socialist movement. 

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.the people are going to relate to the fact that this is exactly what they want and they ain't going to settle for nothing else--they aint going to settle for a bunch of esoteric bullshit and a long essay.

Bobby Seale

Vanguardism is useless. You convince people to believe in socialist causes through action. That action must encompasses what these people need, not what you think they need. You don’t interpret what they want. They tell you what they want and you incorporate it. You practice it. The poor don’t give a flying fuck to be called “proletariat”, they don’t give a shit that the government is theirs to inherit. What they give a shit about is food on the table, tools for self-sustainability, stable environment, and a reliable shelter.

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Social Failures or State Failures? Community Members are Better Equipped to Address Struggles of Peers than the State and its Quasi-Fascist Institutions

Introduction | Part I: Origins of Surveillance, The Use of Police | State Violence through Sterilization and Forced Sexuality | Part II: International Law Insufficient to Address Inequalities, United Nations Discourages Policies to Combat Quasi-Fascism | Current Sterilization Policies | Prisons are a Social Failure | Part III: Alternatives to the State, The Coerced Sterilization and Compulsory Heterosexuality of Queer People

The Forced Sterilization and Surveillance of BIP/WOC

Although the queer solution required nuance in its determining future policy, this section requires a bit more evidence-based refutation against prisons. Many Americans rely all too much on the presence of prisons to curtail criminality, even when the numbers show that imprisonment does not discourage criminal activity. 

Americans have difficulty imagining an alternative solution to dealing with the “more than two million people who are currently being held in…jails, prisons, youth facilities, and immigration detention centers” (Davis, 2010). The prisons are intended to reinstate the dominant ideology of what is “right” and what is “wrong” simply by assigning harmful stereotypes and prejudices against the undesirable people who are disproportionately represented in the prison populations.

The categorization and division between certain sects of people illustrates the state’s inability to fully engage with the needs of its citizens (or non-citizens). Prisons ensure that people are “less and less adapted for life in society” (Kropotkin, 1887) because of the presence of massive discrimination, human rights violations, and clear violations of spirit of the law interpretations. Kropotkin argues that prisons do not “act in the direction of raising the intellectual and moral facilities” of inmates, and thus, means they are obsolete in solving the issues these populations face.

Shifting away from our reliance on prisons and punishment from the state, it becomes more obvious that communities must be the vanguard of rehabilitation for individuals. Communities are the only groups that understand how to rehabilitate their neighbors accordingly based on material conditions, necessities, and failures of the state that have manifested those issues for those individuals. Kropotkin suggest we must no longer employ policy from the state, but rather, that we should shape it from the positions adapted from anthropologists, historians, sociologists, and other professionals. I disagree. Many professionals do not have the advantage of understanding the root cause of many of the issues facing communities that are especially affected by massive imprisonment rates.

We must employ policy supported by those communities that are most affected. Victoria Law studied many different communities abroad that have employed their own version of this policy demand. Community organizing entails “storytelling…defending themselves and each other…anti-violence organizing” and recording “precedents and influences” of community changes and problem-solving (Law, 2011) that specifically focuses on modern practices of gender-based violence.

These tactics have been practiced by Taiwanese women in their communities, black women, and Latinx women. These challenges to the current system have provided a basis for self-reliance and accountability for other community members. Women have been able to address the root causes of many of the issues they face when they have been allowed the tools and authority to determine their own community-based policies when dealing with abusers, rapists, state agents, and other institutions that are interested in unhelpful, bureaucratic hierarchies that tend to protect perpetrators of violence. These approaches specifically highlight the importance of a community effort rather than an individualized plan of attack that the police state tends to employ (without positive outcomes) within prisons and other detainment institutions. We have seen these types of approaches work within activist movements as well, such as the AIDS movement (predominantly with the activism of the ACT UP organization), the Civil Rights Movement. Outside of the United States, Chinese villages with Women’s Associations presence have been able to curtail abuse and was able to control sexual predators (Law, 2011). Some communities, assisted by the Gulabi Gang, in India also use community activism to curtail sexual assault and rapists from committing these acts against women again.

Community involvement is of the utmost importance. The state wants to continue individualizing issues to discourage mass organization. Leftist radicals understand the sinister ulterior motives of the state. It is time we started encouraging others to organize together to combat the state’s continued abuse of human rights—not only within the United States, but many other UN-member states. Non-white women have been brutalized by the state for centuries and these instances of community organizing and activism have helped curtail the presence of male domination, both by the state as well as by community members. Women are not victims and do not need to be illustrated as victims—we need to discuss policy that places our autonomy and survival at the forefront of our solutions.

Davis, Angela (2010). Are prisons obsolete? Seven Stories Press.

Kropotkin, Petr (1887). Are prisons necessary? The Anarchist Library.

Law, Vikki (2011). Where abolition meets action: Women organizing against gender violence.

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Social Failures or State Failures? Community Members are Better Equipped to Address Struggles of Peers than the State and its Quasi-Fascist Institutions

Introduction | Part I: Origins of Surveillance, State Violence through Sterilization and Forced Sexuality | Part II: International Law Insufficient to Address Inequalities, United Nations Discourages Policies to Combat Quasi-Fascism | Current Sterilization Policies | Prisons are a Social Failure | Part III: Alternatives to the State, The Coerced Sterilization and Compulsory Heterosexuality of Queer People | The Forced Sterilization and Surveillance of BIP/WOC

Part I: Origins of Surveillance

The Use of Police

Historicizing the police and the institution of prison is an important endeavor when discussing the importance of punishment versus rehabilitation. Understanding that the police and its many tools to discourage criminal behavior are based in anti-“minority” ideology rather than a venture in seeking just retribution should signify the elite’s perceived importance of “law and order”. 

The origins of police were developed by feudalist landowners in Western Europe and New England to protect the private property rights against the serfs and slaves during that era. The streets have been, and always will be, the public forum for the poor and working-classes (which usually encompasses BIP/WOC and sometimes LGBT+ people). Restricting the poor’s presence and activism in public certainly suppresses their ability to educate themselves and others on their rights and liberties, and thus, restricts challenges to the elite. Collective action was the problem, not crime, that ruling elites wanted to combat; police were meant to respond to strikes, riots, and the “threat of slave insurrections” in England, the Northern United States, and the Southern United States (Whitehouse, 2014). The intention was to shape and manage the workforce and the public in a certain way so that discipline and punishment was at the forefront of everyone’s minds (if I do X activity, then Y punishment will ensue). David Whitehouse (2014) and Michel Foucault (1977), posit that governments expanded their welfare systems to better regulate the labor market and public education evolved to regulate workers minds. Regulation of peoples’ actions and mindsets was the top priority for the newly-created era of law and order.

The propertied class wanted a subservient working class—you could ensure subservience if the state-sanctioned education formed children from an early age of what the most moral way to think and to act is to appeal to authorities and their desires (Foucault, 1977).[1] Elites were grateful that they finally had a police force to “protect the new form of wage-labor...from the threat posed by…the working class” (Mitrani, 2014) and the communities that the working-class encompassed. New laws during the 1800s outlawed congregations of more than 50 people (Whitehouse, 2014), which disrupted new possibilities of slaves and serfs planning a revolt against their masters or other merchants. Slaves and serfs could not strike for better protection of rights and liberties, such as anti-discrimination laws, providing livable wages, or working fewer hours. Simply put, their lives were regulated by the financial-growth desires of the ruling elite. The police force working under the guise of “law and order” was created specifically to legitimately manage communities that were specifically non-elite or propertied. This form of labor control with little to no accountability specifically denotes the police and any supportive industries as quasi-fascist regimes. The police and the prison industry are “isolated from democratic control,” has its “own hierarchies, systems of governance, and rules of behavior” (Mitrani, 2014). Police are not neutral arbiters of the law, but rather, they are supportive of an increasingly unequal system of powers between ruling elites and the working-class.[2] Racism and the structures that support white supremacy through policing are not simply going away. Tools of oppression and the supportive structures simply adapt to the context of the times to ensure further exploitation and suppression of marginalized communities, predominantly BIP/WOC, LGBT+, and the overlap between them. 

[1] Foucault is a political theorist who frequently wrote about the individualization of issues. Schools, hospitals, the military, how the government is structured, are all positive reinforcements of the police state. Prisons are structure to divide individuals and encourage the surveillance of each other through the panopticon to discourage community organizing and consciousness-raising among inmates. Other institutions are structured this way to create a culture of individuality rather than of community. This allows the police state to grow ever stronger and furthers the possibilities of repression (politically, economically, socially, and culturally).

[2] Which is often increasingly populated by BIPOC

Foucault, Michel (1977). Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison. Vintage Books.

Mitrani, Sam (2014). Stop kidding yourself: The police were created to control working class and poor people. The Labor and Working-Class History Association.

Whitehouse, David (2014). Origins of the police. Works in Theory.

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Social Failures or State Failures? Community Members are Better Equipped to Address Struggles of Peers than the State and its Quasi-Fascist Institutions

Introduction | Part I: Origins of Surveillance, The Use of Police | State Violence through Sterilization and Forced Sexuality | Part II: International Law Insufficient to Address Inequalities, Current Sterilization Policies | Prisons are a Social Failure | Part III: Alternatives to the State, The Coerced Sterilization and Compulsory Heterosexuality of Queer People | The Forced Sterilization and Surveillance of BIP/WOC

Part II: International Law Insufficient to Address Inequalities

United Nations Discourages Policies to Combat Quasi-Fascism

In the interest of combatting quasi-fascist policies the world-over, the UN has dedicated itself to passing resolutions and international instruments to discourage states and keep them accountable to their actions. The European Convention on Human Rights dictates that individuals have a right to respect for private and family life, which ensures there be “no interference by a public authority…except in the interest of national security, public safety, or the economic well-being of the country” (Article 8).

This convention implies family planning, child spacing, use of birth control, sterilization, abstinence, sexual activities and other activities related to procreation cannot be forced or coerced onto individuals at the hands of the state. On an international scale, the ICCPR provision states there shall be no “unlawful interference with [their] privacy, family, home…” (Article 17). This stipulates that those spheres are entirely up to the autonomy of individuals and the state or others may not infringe upon those rights, especially regarding family, family-planning, and one’s own bodily autonomy and choices for themselves.

CERD, in general, promotes the equality of racial/ethnic minorities in the presence of the law with the ability to have the right “to marriage and choice of spouse” and to “economic, social and cultural rights” and access to “public health, medical care…and social services” (Article 5). This outline maintains that no person based on race, may be denied familial care, choice in providing that familial care, or freedom to choose who to do these activities with. CESCR declares that racial/ethnic and linguistic minorities have the right to “participate effectively in cultural, religious, social, economic, and public life” (Article 2(2)) so that segregation de jure may not persist. They are allowed potency in “decisions on the national and…regional level concerning the minority” (Article 2(3)) to ensure their continued participation and recognition of the future of the race/ethnicity and linguistic use. These provisions then promote their ability to “create favourable conditions…to express their characteristics and to develop their culture, language, religion, traditions and customs” (Article 4(2)) without interference and regulation by the state. This (hopefully) circumvents state suppression of these minorities who otherwise would have no protection[1].  CEDAW declares that women have the rights and obligations of “women and men with regard to choice of spouse, parenthood, personal rights and command over property” and “namely their reproductive rights” (introduction) without intrusion of the state and required access to “educational information” and “advice on family planning” (Article 10(h)) as a way to promote informed consent on medical procedures, expectations, and the health and well-being of the child. 

As for duties on behalf of institutions and the state, many are outlined in the CoT. The definition of torture is “any act severe pain or suffering…is intentionally inflicted” to obtain information, punish for an act, or “intimidating or coercing…for any reason” when such pain or suffering is inflicted (Article 1). Policies which directly coerce individuals to give up their right to reproduced, or forcibly sterilize them “based on discrimination of any kind[2]” (Article 1) are torturous. 

[1]  As we have witnessed historically, states are all too eager to discourage racial/ethnic and linguistic minorities from practicing and ensuring the survival of their cultural aspects. 

[2]  Whether it be based on incarceration status, mental abilities, physical abilities, gender identity, class, or any number of subversive forms of discrimination. This article does not specify only statuses that have been outlined in international instruments, so I’ll assume it means on any number of applications of discrimination.

European Court of Human Rights (21 September 1970). European Convention on Human Rights Council of Europe.

UN General Assembly (10 December 1984). Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment. United Nations | Treaty Series.

UN General Assembly (16 December 1966). International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. United Nations | Treaty Series.

UN General Assembly (18 December 1979). Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women. United Nations | Treaty Series.

UN General Assembly (21 December 1965). International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination. United Nations | Treaty Series.

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Anti-Capitalism Music Monday: Ruby Ibarra “Dance (The Movement)” feat. BAMBU

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...we should not assume that experts are the only ones who have a right to express themselves on questions affecting the organization of society

Albert Einstein

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I just wanna point something out real quick. Sooo. From this image the context clues I get are you need a college degree, but paid a not-livable wage. Meaning a degree is interpreted to be worth more than what is offered. This information can then be used to ask “so who is worth the suggested wage?” People who don’t have a college degree or higher. This is a rhetorical strategy to put workers against workers. I’m not saying OP did that deliberately. But that’s the interpretation I get when looking at this meme. Instead we should be saying “ANY person is worth more than that wage.” And that’s when we move into rhetoric that practices solidarity with others who are not valued in this capitalist economy.

this is an insult

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Happy Pride, my little queers ❤️

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I just thought I should make this very clear since I’ve been getting a lot of requests to reblog donation posts. 

I only do that for POC. 

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The profit motive, in conjunction with competititon among capitalists, is responsible for an instability in the accumulation and utilization of capital which leads to increasingly severe depressions.

Albert Einstein

Capitalists are only interested in accumulating more wealth--they’re more interested in the number they can brag about than actually spending in the economy or helping the destitute and the poor. There are only so many useful things a capitalist can buy and once they have bought all they can to give the economy a boost, they continue to save, save, save or “invest” to accumulate a net worth that means nearly nothing in the real world. Investments are fake money and the only value in them is the value we place on the number associated with net worth. That money attached to net worth doesn’t exist and its not being circulated in the economy. It helps no one other than the status of the capitalist. 

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...ing eat the rich. Haha! Fooled you, didn’t I.

anyway. I wanna fuck