#but anarchist and anti displacement

[gayhenrycreel]

what about israel and palestine not as states but as regions in which people are allowed autonomy in their own land. what if Jerusalem as a sacred historical and cultural city. what if everyone was equal. what if this happened in america, australia and aotearoa as well, because everyone has a right to live where they wish, just as much as indigenous peoples deserve ownership of their lands.

[argyrocratie]

Solidarity among the Displaced

How Russian Anarchists in Exile Supported Armenian Refugee Squatters

(2023-09-19)

Throughout the world, mass displacement is accelerating as climate catastrophe, economic crisis, and war drive millions into exile, both within their own countries and across borders. These mass migrations are exacerbating gentrification, driving up housing costs just as real estate speculation is rendering more and more people homeless. How can displaced people continue to take political action in their new homes, establishing solidarity across ethnic lines in unfamiliar settings? In Armenia, Russian anarchists living in exile set one example, supporting Armenian refugees who had squatted the abandoned Ministry of Defense.

(...)

In the last decade, Yerevan saw several waves of protests. Do you see people building historical knowledge and experience from one struggle to the next?

With regards to the movement of the 2010s in Yerevan, there really was a street movement in which Armenian anarchists participated. There were protests against the increase in electricity prices, an anarchist bloc participated in a demonstration on human rights day, there was an action against the gentrification of Yerevan, and an action of anarcho-feminists. But unfortunately, all of the people from that generation have either left politics, joined political parties, or gone abroad to Russia or Europe.

Today, the anarchists in Armenia are mostly emigrants from the Russian Federation. In fact, I only know two Armenian anarchists: N—, a punk musician (who became an anarchist in the early 2020s), and S—, an anarcho-feminist who lectures in our space and occasionally publishes in left-wing and anarchist magazines (who also became anarchist around that time). Neither them, alas, was connected to the movements and affinity groups of the 2010s.

There is also an anarchist from Israel: Y—, a Jewish woman who gave birth in the Crimea, repatriated to Israel, lived there for 18 years in kibbutzim and participated in the anarchist movement there (including contact with “Anarchists Against the Wall”), married an Armenian and moved to Yerevan, and decided to establish a café here with anarchist and feminist themes. The café became a gathering place for the local Jewish community (for example, at Shabbat celebrations every Saturday), as well as for the creative intelligentsia, who held public readings there.

All this continued until Russia invaded Ukraine, after which the Russian authorities began to persecute their citizens even more, and hundreds of thousands of anti-war Russians (including anarchists) fled the country.

As a result, Armenia, which was mono-ethnic for almost all the years of its independence, is now more diverse.

The door of the Mama-jan café. The second sticker says “No war” in Russian.

That is how our small circle was formed, which now represents the entire anarchist movement in Armenia.

There are many different people among us. One is actively involved in veganism and even founded his own vegan cooperative (which I also joined). Others, like one friend who is a Christian anarchist, collect humanitarian aid for the victims of the war. There is a queer anarchist group that continues to engage in street activism.

How did you go about supporting the squatters?

As soon as we learned that they had been forcibly evicted, we decided to go and help them. We went to them several times and, despite some initial distrust, my friends managed to find a common language with them.

As a result, at the next weekly meeting, we discussed how to go about supporting them. One of the sympathizers of anarchist ideas, a visitor to our circle, arranged to supply firewood for using potbelly stoves to heat their tents. Also, as an anti-war activist with certain connections, I managed to invite a journalist friend there. During a subsequent visit, they met us very hospitably. We helped to unload the firewood and they fed us and taught us to play backgammon.

We made a report about the situation for emigrant Russian-language media, which later played a very important role. We also established contact with the charitable organization “Ethos,” which was founded by relocators in Yerevan and is engaged in helping both Ukrainian and Armenian refugees.

Thanks to the fact that news coverage appeared about the eviction and was reposted on our initiative via various publishing houses (for example, in “Doxa,” which actively covered the persecution of anarchists and anti-war protesters), we were able to initiate a collection for food, medicine, and fuel in Ethos. In the end, we collected 60,000 drams more than planned! [The equivalent of approximately $157, still a significant amount of money for some refugees in Armenia.]

Also, the squatters began to actively invite us to their protests: they held these every Thursday and every Monday near the government building and the State Expenditure Committee. My friends and I held a poster reading “State, why did you take away people’s housing” with anarchist symbols.

The squatters were very pleased with our support, and even invited us to barbecues—which was especially ironic in the case of our vegan friend.

What do anarchists have to offer to struggles for housing?

Anarchism, in principle, throughout its history, has been very interested in the housing issue. It is not for nothing that during the Paris Commune, one of the revolutionary decisions of the council was to settle homeless Parisians in the apartments of bourgeois emigrants who had fled to Versailles, and to establish a ban on evicting tenants for non-payment of rent. Housing insecurity is a significant aspect of modern society, a challenge to which anarchists must respond.

The example of this eviction is particularly striking. It shines a light on all the absurdity and immorality of a civilization based on private property.

_

The house was not built by its owner. It was erected, decorated, and furnished by innumerable workers—in the timber yard, the brick field, and the workshop, toiling for dear life at a minimum wage… Who, then, can appropriate to himself the tiniest plot of ground, or the meanest building, without committing a flagrant injustice? Who, then, has the right to sell to any bidder the smallest portion of the common heritage? On that point, as we have said, the workers are agreed. The idea of free dwellings showed its existence very plainly during the siege of Paris, when the cry was for an abatement pure and simple of the terms demanded by the landlords. It appeared again during the Commune of 1871, when the Paris workmen expected the Communal Council to decide boldly on the abolition of rent. And when the New Revolution comes, it will be the first question with which the poor will concern themselves. Whether in time of revolution or in time of peace, the worker must be housed somehow or other; he must have some sort of roof over his head. But, however tumble-down and squalid your dwelling may be, there is always a landlord who can evict you… Refusing uniforms and badges–those outward signs of authority and servitude–and remaining people among the people, the earnest revolutionists will work side by side with the masses, that the abolition of rent, the expropriation of houses, may become an accomplished fact. They will prepare the ground and encourage ideas to grow in this direction; and when the fruit of their labours is ripe, the people will proceed to expropriate the houses without giving heed to the theories which will certainly be thrust in their way–theories about paying compensation to landlords, and finding first the necessary funds. On the day that the expropriation of houses takes place, on that day, the exploited workers will have realized that the new times have come, that Labour will no longer have to bear the yoke of the rich and powerful, that Equality has been openly proclaimed, that this Revolution is a real fact, and not a theatrical make-believe, like so many others preceding it. -Peter Kropotkin, The Conquest of Bread

[girlactionfigure]

🔅Thu morning - ISRAEL REALTIME - Connecting to Israel in Realtime

🔻Air attacks on Israeli civilians… 

HEZBOLLAH ROCKETS - heavy today, multiple attacks

Goren, Gornot HaGalil, Rosh HaNikra, Goren, Gornot HaGalil, Betzet, Shlomi, Hanita, Shlomi, 

ANTI-TANK MISSILES - at border IDF post by Lebanon.

SUICIDE DRONES - Dishon, Iftach, Malkia, Mevuot Hermon Regional Council, Ramot Naftali 

‼️TERROR ATTACK.. A terrorist fireed on cars and school buses on road 90 near Ojah (Jordan Valley).  The buses were armored.  A 30-year-old man is in serious condition with wounds to the limbs, a 21-year-old man is in a light condition with a wound to the limbs and a 13-year-old boy is in a light condition with glass shard injuries in the face.

A local commentator: “It is impossible to make this up: the two wounded in the attack in the Jordan Valley are left-wing anarchists who came to act for the benefit of Arabs in the Jordan Valley.  I wish them a full recovery.”

❗️BLOOD NEEDED!  MDA's blood services are warning of a significant difficulty in raising the amount of blood required to treat the sick and wounded.  Give blood!  Visit the MDA website at http://www.mdais.org/dam  or call 03-5300400.

▪️PMO SAYS.. Contrary to the news, the Prime Minister did NOT approve the departure of a delegation to Washington.

▪️GAZA..

.. ANTI-AIRCRAFT FIRE.. Gazans report that the terrorists tried to fire a missile at an IDF helicopter in the northern area of ​​the Gaza Strip. Unsuccessful.

.. HAMAS SAYS.. "There are about one and a half million displaced people in Rafah and this helps us maintain stability in the continued production of the missiles for the next round.”

.. IDF BUILDING IN GAZA.. For the first time: temporary residences will be built for IDF forces, along with buildings for technological needs - in the central area of ​​the Gaza Strip and later in other areas.

.. KILLING CIVILIANS? (No) Al Jazeera published a document in which it was claimed that Israeli soldiers executed Gazan citizens. IDF spokesman in response: "The edited documentation does not show the context.”

▪️LEBANON..

.. ESCALATION.. (The Arab Desk) For the first time it is possible to write that the possibility of a real and tangible escalation with Lebanon has climbed several steps. Israel is escalating the attacks in intensity. Will Nasrallah blow a fuse and decide on his own to attack without permission from Iran?

.. DRONE PRODUCTION HIT.. One of the targets that was attacked last night was a site for storing logistical materials for the production of suicide drones, which the Iranian militias have recently begun to produce in Albukhamal, was attacked.

.. HEZBOLLAH SAYS.. in a fancy graphic video “DOOMSDAY HAS COME”, feeding into Shia Islam religious prophecies.

.. NEGOTIATIONS?  The Lebanese channel LBC reports that the talks conducted by the American mediator with all parties related to Lebanon are progressing in the right direction towards a diplomatic solution.  (( Rating: Fake or propaganda to slow Israel down. ))

.. APPROACH CHANGE.. policy change in the north - every attack by Hezbollah will be answered with a sharp attack by Israel. (N12)

.. RUMOR, EXPANDED TARGETING.. (this via a less reliable source) The IDF Chief ordered to expand the circle of targets in Lebanon.

▪️US SENATOR SAYS.. Republican Senator Lindsey Graham in a statement to the media after a meeting with senior Israeli officials: accusations that Israel is starving people as a weapon of war is "bullshit". It's a blood plot. The Israeli army and the Israeli government are making great efforts to take care of the basic needs of the Palestinians.

▪️HOUTHIS vs. US.. The US  Central Command: Houthis fired 4 suicide drones at a US Navy ship in the Red Sea.  Intercepted.

[dailyanarchistposts]

Four months into the assault on Gaza, the Israeli military has forced over a million refugees to the edge of the Egyptian border and is now bombing them while threatening to mount a ground assault against them. In the following text, Jonathan Pollak, a longtime participant in Anarchists Against the Wall and other anti-colonial solidarity efforts, explains why we should not look to international institutions or protest movements within Israeli society to put a stop to the genocide in Gaza and calls on ordinary people to take action.

A shorter version of this text was rejected by the liberal Israeli platform Haaretz—an indication of the diminishing space for dissent in Palestine and within Israeli society.

Human Rights Discourse Has Failed to Stop the Genocide in Gaza

We are now more than 120 days into the unprecedented Israeli assault on Gaza. Its horrific repercussions and our inability to bring it to an end should compel us to reevaluate our perspective on power, our understanding of it, and, most significantly, what we have to do to fight it.

Amid the spilled blood, the endless days of death and destruction, excruciating dearth, starvation, thirst, and despair, the ceaseless nights of fire and brimstone and white phosphors raining indiscriminately from the sky, we must grapple with the bare ugly facts of reality and reshape our strategies.

The officially reported fatalities—in addition to the many Palestinians who remain buried under the rubble and aren’t yet included in the official count—already amount to the annihilation of nearly 1.5% of all human life in the Gaza Strip. As Israel escalates its attacks on Rafah, it seems that there is no end in sight. Soon, the lives of one in every fifty people in Gaza will have been extinguished.

The Israeli military is inflicting an unprecedented toll of suffering and death on the 2.3 million people of Gaza, surpassing anything ever witnessed in Palestine—or elsewhere during the 21st century. Yet these staggering figures have not penetrated the thick layers of dissociation and disconnect that characterize Israeli society as well as Israel’s Western allies. If anything, the reduction of this tragedy to statistics seems to hinder rather than enhance our understanding. It presents a whole that obscures the specifics: the figures conceal the personhood of the countless individuals who have died painful, particular deaths.

At the same time, the unfathomable scale of the massacre in Gaza makes it impossible to comprehend through the stories of individual victims. Journalists, street cleaners, poets, homemakers, construction workers, mothers, doctors, and children, a multitude too vast to be narrated. We are left with faceless anonymous figures. Among them are more than 12,000 children. Probably a lot more.

Please pause and say this aloud, word by word: over twelve thousand children. Killed. Is there a way for us to take this in and move beyond the realm of statistics to grasp the horrific reality?

The cold blunt numbers also veil hundreds of obliterated families, many of them completely erased—sometimes three, even four generations, wiped off the face of the earth.

Overshadowed by these figures are more than 67,000 people who have been injured, thousands of whom will remain paralyzed for the rest of their lives. The medical system in Gaza has been almost completely destroyed; life-saving amputations are being carried out without anesthetics. The extent to which infrastructure in Gaza has been destroyed surpasses the Dresden bombings at the end of the Second World War. Nearly two million people—roughly 85% of the population of the Gaza Strip—have been displaced, their lives shattered by Israeli bombings as they shelter in the dangerously overcrowded south of the Strip, which the Israeli government falsely pronounced “safe,” yet continues to pummel with hundreds of 2000-pound bombs. The hunger in Gaza, which was created by Israeli state policy even before the war, is so severe that it amounts to famine. In their despair, people have resorted to eating fodder, but now even that is running out.

About a month ago, an acquaintance of mine who fled to Rafah from Gaza City after his home there was bombed told me that he and his family had already been forced to move from one temporary refuge to another six different times in their attempts to escape from the bombs. In despair, he said, “There is no food, no water, nowhere to sleep. We are constantly thirsty, hungry, and wet. I’ve already had to dig my children out from under the rubble twice—once in Gaza and once here in Rafah.”

These rivers of blood must breach the walls of our apathy. If only time could stop long enough for all of us to process our grief. But it will not. It continues passing as more bombs fall on Gaza.

Decades of injustice have paved the way for this. Some 75 years have passed since the Nakba—75 years of Israel’s settler-colonialism—yet its defenders continue to deny the facts. Even after the the International Court of Justice (ICJ) asserted that there is indeed cause to fear that genocide is being committed in Gaza, the US and many of Israel’s other Western allies have effectively remained silent.

Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, called the court’s mere willingness to discuss the case “a disgrace that will not be erased for generations.” Indeed, the ruling is a disgrace. Despite everything being laid bare in plain sight, the court did not order Israel to cease fire. This is a disgrace to the court itself and to the very idea that international law is supposed to protect the lives and rights of those being crushed by the military force of nations.

It will undoubtedly be said that the law, by nature, is meticulous and that it considers the forest not as a whole but as individual trees. To that, we must answer that reality, facts, common sense must be above the law, not beneath it. Israel dedicates considerable resources to a legalism of the battlefield, intended to give cover to its murderous acts. This approach involves carving reality into thin slices of independently legally-approved observations and actions. A military target was present in high-rise X, justifying the deaths of over two dozen uninvolved civilians; apartment tower Y was the home of a Hamas-employed firefighter, legitimizing, according to the principle of proportionality, the decision to wipe out three neighboring families. But this practice cannot turn genocidal water into legitimate wine. This is legal gaslighting that shreds reality to pieces in order to conceal a pattern of indiscriminate mass murder.

If the slaughter of 1.5% of the population in four months is not genocide; if Israel’s acts are not deemed grievous enough for the court to order it to immediately stop the killing, not even in light of open incitement to exterminate Palestinians by prominent Israeli politicians and members of the press, not to mention Israel’s president and Prime Minister; when lack of punishment for such incitements and such acts is accepted rather than branded as genocide in the simplest of terms—then the words we use to describe reality have lost all meaning and we are in dire need of new language beyond the confines of legalese.

Leaving the butcher’s knife in the butcher’s hand—leaving Israel unhindered, unimpeded—means letting the slaughter in Gaza continue. This is the absolute ongoing failure of international law and the institutions entrusted with keeping it.

This failure passes on the responsibility of forcing an end to the ongoing catastrophe, so that it falls on the shoulders of civil society. This ought to compel us to move beyond the empty liberal paradigms of human rights, which have replaced liberation as the dominant discourse in leftist politics.

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: David Bernstein

Published: 16 Oct, 2023

Before the blood had even dried on the pavement of the Nova music festival in southern Israel, where Hamas terrorists ruthlessly murdered 260 young people on 7 October 2023, the Coalition for Liberated Ethnic Studies (CLES) began posting Instagram memes in support of “Palestinian Liberation.” The CLES is a collection of educational organizations that design curricula for US high schools. They aim to teach students about “critical consciousness” and “intersectional forms of oppression.” One of the memes they posted advertised an upcoming “Long Live Palestinian Resistance” event and another gave a shout out to “The People’s Forum,” which organizes events in New York under the banner “From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be Free.” The academic activists of CLES are not first-generation immigrants from the Gaza Strip or the West Bank; they are largely home-grown ideologues who teach ethnic and gender studies at American universities and are now seeking to disseminate their ideas in US primary and secondary schools.

Even I—the jaded author of the book Woke Antisemitism and founder of a Jewish organization dedicated to countering this growing variant of the world’s oldest hatred—was stunned by their rhetoric. I would have thought that they would say that the murder of civilians was awful, but that Israel had it coming. But there was not even a token condemnation of Hamas’ violence on 7 October. Instead, the decolonizers publicly justified the bloodletting.

And then came the protests. Before a single Israeli bomb dropped in Gaza, the organizer of a gathering in New York’s Times Square celebrated the violent rampages in front of a cheering crowd. Alluding to the murdered festival-goers, he joked, “As you might have seen, there was some sort of rave or desert party. They were having a great time and then the resistance came in electrified hang gliders and took at least several dozen hipsters.”

At a massive rally on the steps of the Sydney Opera House three days after the massacre, protesters chanted “Gas the Jews.” And—among other calumnies on campuses across North America—thirty-one Harvard student groups issued a statement of solidarity with Hamas, pronouncing Israel “entirely responsible” for the terrorist group’s slaughter.

There are two distinct but overlapping camps of the social justice left. The radical decolonization camp is made up of extremist academics, anarchists, and Black Lives Matter activists. It is anti-Western, anti-American, and antisemitic to its core. It would be easy to dismiss these people as ideological quacks—if it were not for their outsized role in US educational institutions.

By “decolonization,” they don’t mean a colonial power extricating itself from a former colony; they mean the process of freeing institutions and spheres of activity from the cultural or social influences of what they perceive as the dominant white Western class. One early leader of the liberated ethnic studies movement, R. Tolteka Cuauhtin, has denounced the United States as a “Eurocentric, white supremacist, capitalist, patriarchal, hetero-patriarchal, and anthropocentric paradigm brought from Europe.” Influenced by decades of anti-Zionist Soviet propaganda, the decolonizers reserve special ire for the “settler-colonial state” of Israel, and call for the “liberation of Palestine,” by which they mean the displacement of the interloper Jews from their homeland. Witnessing the decolonisers’ zeal for obliterating the Jewish state, political scientist Wilfred Reilly quipped, “De-colonization is just ethnic cleansing, but woke.”

Those of us fighting the decolonizers have a golden opportunity to discredit them and undercut their influence in the days ahead. In their rationalizations of violence against Jews and Israelis, they’ve outed themselves as the extremists they are. School superintendents who might have seen them as credible educational partners in the new “diversity” initiatives will now have a hard time justifying their role to school boards and community members.

Then there’s the reformist, DEI camp, populated by people who have been deeply influenced by the same forms of neo-Manichaean postmodern thought, but who seek not to overthrow the capitalist system, but to reshuffle the deck of power. Unlike the decolonisers, their antisemitism tends to be latent. They insist that Jews are white, place them in white racial “affinity groups” and frequently downplay the validity of antisemitic claims as distractions from the important task of combating anti-blackness. They include mealy-mouthed university presidents and school superintendents, who see Muslims as a marginalized community and thus susceptible to “harm,” whereas Jews are a privileged minority and thus immune from such harm. These administrators are often held captive by the commitments and hires they made in the summer of 2020 during the great American racial reckoning. Some of them see Western cultural norms, such as being on time to work, as forms of white supremacy. They issue endless statements about racial justice and rightly condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, but they found themselves tongue-tied when Israelis were victims of a slaughter, and their Jewish students were in obvious pain. Suddenly, they rediscovered the merits of academic neutrality and free speech. They, too, stand to lose cultural clout in the intensifying anti-woke backlash.

Two and a half years ago, I left my job as CEO of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs (JCPA), the prestigious 75-year-old umbrella body of national and local Jewish advocacy organizations across the US. As a liberal lefty myself, I worried that a radical, illiberal ideology was gaining ground in my own ideological backyard, a phenomenon I first wrote about more than twenty years ago, in a 2003 article for Washington Jewish Week entitled “Consistent Moral Message Missing.” In the wake of the George Floyd murder, I watched with dismay as Jewish organizations in my field fell in line with anti-racist pieties, desperate to remain aligned with their civil rights partners, many of whom had long ditched their liberal principles. While still employed at the JCPA, I wrote articles for Areo Magazine and other publications, expressing my concern. As soon as my departure was official, I wrote a widely circulated article “My Cheshbon Hanefesh (accounting of the soul in Hebrew) for Cowardice in the Face of Wokeness,” which sparked much debate in the Jewish community.

In May 2021, I founded the Jewish Institute for Liberal Values to fight for viewpoint diversity and against the encroachment of radical social justice ideology in the Jewish world. That very month fighting broke out in Gaza between Israel and Hamas, and some of the responses to that conflict foretold our current reality. Media coverage of the ongoing conflict since it first broke out in June 2008, and of each subsequent conflict—in December 2008, November 2012, June 2014, and May 2018, and right up until May 2021—unfolded in a predictable pattern. The stories and editorials first acknowledged that Israel must have leeway to defend itself against Hamas rocket fire aimed at Israeli civilians. Then, as casualties mounted, the coverage turned against Israel, and, within a few days, the same outlets lambasted the Jewish state for using “disproportionate force.” In May 2021—when the last round occurred—Israel was not given the usual benefit of the doubt. In even the earliest stages of the conflict, Israel was demonized as the oppressor in some quarters. “If you've been paying attention to social media over the past week, you will have seen this same attempt to redefine the Israeli–Palestinian conflict as a racial power dynamic, casting Israel as infinitely powerful and Palestinians as completely without agency,” Batya Ungar-Sargon pointed out in a Newsweek editorial. I knew then that the fight against wokeness was not just about preserving free thought, but about combating a variant of antisemitism that grows out of the same ideological conditions that stifle free thought.

I have never been entirely at ease making the case for the growth of “woke antisemitism” in liberal humanist circles. Liberal humanists like me are highly suspicious of promiscuous accusations of racism and bigotry, and oppose dogmatic declarations that only marginalized groups with “lived experience” of oppression are entitled to an opinion on social issues. Such political attitudes are the essence of cancel culture. Yet here I was arguing that the very ideology that produced cancel culture also fueled a new variant of antisemitism that sees Jews as white and privileged. In highlighting the threat of antisemitism, I was concerned that I might be engaging in the same tactics as the people I critique.

From the outset, however, I made it clear that I didn’t regard my analysis of antisemitism as beyond scrutiny. I reject the now oft-repeated claim among some Jews, who, echoing the assertions of minority political activists in other communities, argue that only Jews get to define antisemitism. I sought to discuss antisemitism in liberal, not postmodern terms, encouraging multiple viewpoints about the extent and nature of contemporary Jew hatred. But in the eyes of some fellow liberal humanists, I was still partaking in the identity politics of the day.

Now, in the aftermath of the massacre, I sense a shift. Awakened by the outpouring of Jew hatred in the wake of the massacre in Israel, many liberal humanist friends have expressed their shock. This magazine’s editor-in-chief Claire Lehmann has stated, “I don't think I ever really understood anti-Semitism until now. And it is frightening.” Skeptic Magazine editor Michael Shermer was exasperated by the hypocrisy of many:

When I left my perch at JCPA, I was immediately regarded as a heretic by a number of former colleagues. Some actively tried to prevent me from giving speeches about the topic in their Jewish communities. But, on this front, too, I sense movement. This past week, I received a surprise email from one of my chief antagonists on Twitter, Paul Hackner, a South African-born Jewish leftist who earlier excoriated me for using the term “woke” which, he insisted, “is about compassion and awareness AND you weaponized to express a fragile need to be comfortable when addressing racism.” After the massacre, he told me: “It's clear there is a revanchist left in North America that is allying with Hamas. The firestorm of hatred is raging. Hamas is a death cult. Sad to say you were right. Thanks for engaging with me. It helped me find moral clarity.”

Even among Israel’s most ardent Jewish critics, such as Joshua Leifer, a leftist writer and editor for Dissent Magazine, there’s indignation about moral callousness on the left. “There's also a deep sense that the left abroad has lost the values it was supposed to stand for,” he has stated:

I thought we were leftists because we wanted a world without war, torture, the killing of families and children in their beds I thought we were leftists because we abhor cruelty, detest violence, and believe in the inherent, even divine, worth of all human life. I thought we were leftists because our struggle was for all people to be able to live with freedom and dignity.

Leifer’s discontent might portend greater willingness among American Jews to take on their own political camp.

A local Jewish advocacy organization in my area, the Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Washington (JCRCGW), tore into the area school superintendent who originally failed to issue a statement of support for Israel and the Jewish community and later released only a tepid one. Much to my chagrin, the JCRCGW had previously actively participated in the school system’s yearlong “anti-racism audit” and subsequent implementation of DEI training and pedagogy. But when their partnership on anti-racism failed to elicit support for Jewish students in the schools in their time of need, the normally restrained JCRCGW lashed out:

We reserve our greatest anger and disappointment for Montgomery County Public Schools … [which has] consistently ignored our agencies’ urgent appeals over the last three days to respond appropriately and sensitively … if our schools can’t call out the brutal murder of Jews right before our eyes, of what use is the Holocaust education and cultural competency that we have worked together to advance?

I believe that this dogmatic version of “cultural competence,” which rigidly ties identity to privilege or oppression, is the source of the school system’s indifference to Jewish life in the first place. But given recent events, it seems unimaginable that mainstream Jewish leaders will continue to deny or ignore the role of ideology in the callousness toward the murder of Jews and the disregard for Jewish concerns. I, for one, will do everything in my power to place the topic on their agenda.

What could really turn the tide is if Jewish donors and trustees at major universities finally use the power of the purse. Marc Rowan, the chief executive officer of Apollo Global Management and the chair of the Board of Overseers of the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, has taken his own university to task. “While Hamas terrorists were slaughtering Israeli Jews, university administrators were figuring out how to spin it,” he writes in The Free Press:

The responsibility also rests with many of our alumni leaders and trustees, myself included, who have sat by quietly as the pursuit of truth—the ostensible mission of our elite institutions—was traded for a poorly organized pursuit of social justice and political correctness.

“It’s long past time,” he argues, “for donors to take notice.”

It’s long past time for all of us to take notice. Let us hope that the horrors of the moment will not only be a turning point in the battle against antisemitism, but in the larger fight against radicalism and illiberalism in the West.

==

This was the world's easiest moral question: celebrate or condemn far-right religious terrorists who dismembered babies alive? And they got the answer wrong.

Atheists who defend Hamas lose the right to criticize the god of the bible.

Exodus 12:29-30

And it came to pass, that at midnight the Lord smote all the firstborn in the land of Egypt, from the firstborn of Pharaoh that sat on his throne unto the firstborn of the captive that was in the dungeon; and all the firstborn of cattle. And Pharaoh rose up in the night, he, and all his servants, and all the Egyptians; and there was a great cry in Egypt; for there was not a house where there was not one dead.

Numbers 31:17-19

Now therefore kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman that hath known man by lying with him. But all the women children, that have not known a man by lying with him, keep alive for yourselves. And do ye abide without the camp seven days: whosoever hath killed any person, and whosoever hath touched any slain, purify both yourselves and your captives on the third day, and on the seventh day.

Psalm 137:8-9

O daughter of Babylon, who art to be destroyed; happy shall he be, that rewardeth thee as thou hast served us. Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones.

What bible-god did is what Hamas did. You don't get to criticize the morality of bible-god while defending a terrorist organization that did the same kind of thing.

[zaryathelaika]

The inflammatory tags on that blog post about the auction prices on working Kelpies is funny considering it's difficult to find traditional driving stock-dogs in North America.

When I was looking into adopting a Kelpie or a Heeler as a thru-hiking companion, the farmers just straight up told me the driving lines are being phased out in favour of chute-dogs because trucking cattle is easier (and cheaper) than driving livestock over long distances on horseback or with quads. In large part because the lands are fragmented and one requires permissions to cross locked off parcels of land. Especially with absentee landlords sitting in big cities (eg. New York City, Toronto) and notorious for not answering emails or phone calls. And becoming more difficult every year.

Trying to tie farm-dogs into labour politics of farmhands is nonsensical here.

If you really want to critique agricultural animals being commodified by capitalism, could at least brush up a bit on David Nibert or read any of the eco-Marxist, green anarchist and social ecologist critiques of consumerist animal liberation groups being incomplete in their analyses of animal exploitations.

Better yet bring up how the enclosure of the commons and industrialization of livestock created the modern Border Collie, at the detriment of tenant farmers (eg. the crofters) and the British landrace collies (eg. Welsh collie, Old-Time Scotch Collie, Patagonian Sheepdog) and abroad (in the case of the Swedish Vallhunds and other herding breeds after WW2); or the development of gundogs, leisure class and the landed gentry.

Or even touch on settler-colonialism, displacements of Indigenous people (and Indigenous dogs), loss of knowledge in land stewardships, as well as the effects of cattle and sheep on prairie ecosystems. Or even just the landlordism aspect of big agriculture or the petite bourgeois politics of the small landowners.

Sorry, even working dogs are losing their jobs. There are just so much better anti-capitalist critiques of animal exploitation, landownership, industrial agriculture and privatization of farming operations.

[the-final-straw-blog]

Mohammad Hureini of Youth of Sumud

This week, we're featuring a conversation with Mohammad Hureini (twitter / instagram), a young activist from Masafer Yatta, an area in the hills south of Hebron in the occupied West Bank in Palestine. Mohammad is a member of a non-violent group called Youth of Sumud that struggles to hold on to the sites and lives of Palestinian villages despite displacement by the Israeli military occupation as well as the illegal zionist settlements (like the neighboring Havat Ma’on) and their routine violence and impunity. For the hour, Mohammad speaks about the work of Youth of Sumud, their recent report co-published with The Good Shepherd on increased settler violence entitled Indigenous Erasure: How the zionist movement is using state sanctioned violence to eliminate the Palestinian communities of the West Bank, the South African genocide case against Israel in the International Court of Justice and other topics. A transcript of this interview will be available soon, a podcast version of this is available at our website.

Al-Addameer's recent publication on prisons and repression of Palestinians since October 7th, 2023: https://addameer.org/media/5262

Organizations Mohammad names doing on the ground support:

Defund Racism (https://defundracism.org/): follows NGO connections to settler projects

recently published a report on Regavim, a pro-settler organization that pulls funding from the US, Canada and elsewhere to displace Palestinians

Operation Dove /Operazione Colomba from Italy (https://www.operazionecolomba.it/)

International Solidarity Movement (https://palsolidarity.org/)

Community Peacemaker Teams (https://cpt.org/)

Recent interviews about the conflict in Palestine

Yuval Dag, Israeli anarchist military refuser

Joey Ayoub on the War in Gaza

Jewish anti-zionist Anarchist in Israel

Announcements

B(A)D News #75 is out!

Check out the January 2024 episode featuring updates on support for antifascists facing charges in Budapest from February 11, 2023; reflections from an Autonomist on the '80s-'90s journal "Radikal"; a portion of our interview with Israeli refuser Yuval Dag; and an interview from Solidarity Zones on the case of accused Russian war sabateur, Ruslan Siddiqui

. ... . ..

Featured Track:

Building Steam with a Grain of Salt by DJ Shadow from Entroducing....

Check out this episode!

[lonniemachin]

lonnie may be against voting, but here’s a few reasons why you should vote lonnie.

• created the anarky identity after losing his friend xuasus to imperialist violence; said friend was a civilian casualty in a US-backed foreign war. looking for answers, lonnie was radicalized towards left anarchism, and figured if he couldn’t help xuasus, he could at least help the people of his city. his entire identity as anarky — the most important thing to him — is meant to embody the principles of a leftist ideology. his entire gimmick is being a leftist radical.

• his initial MO was using the letter columns in the local newspaper to deal with the people’s complaints. one of his first targets as anarky was a chemical magnate in charge of a company who was polluting the water supply, who he made an example of on tv:

alongside this, he’s a staunch environmentalist who is against air pollution and donates to adjacent organizations.

• believes in principles of direct action. aids and acts to inspire gotham’s unhoused, demolishing a bank building over their cardboard city and giving his pocket change to help out where he can:

• siphoned funds from large corporations and redistributed them to impoverished farmers overseas:

• outlines his wishes for gotham city in an issue where he uses the power of eclipso to demonstrate that he means business to try to convince the mayor to yield to his demands; heightening public transit, doubling welfare payments, housing all unhoused, and abolishing the police, replacing them with a citizen’s committee:

• speaks for itself:

• his biggest fear, revealed when affected by fear toxin, is the death of the earth and the death of its people under the thumb of oppression. he attempts to kill azbats despite never acting to murder because he believes, for a short time, that if he gets rid of batman the rogues will leave with him, ensuring the safety of the city and its people.

• heavily anti-gun and anti-weapon. gathers a group of survivors of gun violence together to hit arms dealers and blow up a munitions factory, giving the workers time to evacuate to ensure there are no civilian casualties. works with green arrow twice. in a BTAS comic, gathers together billionaires to frighten them with paint bombs and expose them for their crimes against humanity, including providing weapons of war to conflicts involving US interest, lending to dictators, and exploitation of impoverished workers:

• even in comics where he starts leaning differently from his original political sway, he is still very anti-war, anti-imperialist, and anti-eugenicist. here he is arguing passionately against the myth of overpopulation:

• here he is helping people displaced by the gotham cataclysm, despite threat of arrest:

these are only a few examples.

i’ll be the first to tell you lonnie has not always been a perfect anarchist; as a character meant to reflect the views of his creator, what exactly he’s stood for has shifted over time (when alan grant was still writing him, anyway), and he has plenty of flaws. however, one thing has always remained at the heart of him: a genuine desire for the common person to live totally free from oppression, and to destroy the systems that keep them suffering, rebuilding to make the world a better place for all.

DC LEFTIST INFIGHTING CAGE MATCH: ROUND ONE - SET 8

JOHN CONSTANTINE:

“His leftist working class background is essential to understand his character. The very first issues of Hellblazer show his hatred of Tatcher and the horror in the comic is intertwined with the political landscape of the era. He's more of an anarchist, clearly influenced by his connection with subcultures like hippie and mostly punk, and his distaste of establishments is pretty well known."

LONNIE MACHIN:

“she's lonnie machin what do you MEAN."

[mckitterick]

Hope for the future

This is what anti-fascism looks like.

transcript of the screenshot:

A bright spot from a friend in Philly:

The Proud Boys - a fascist, white supremacist group with a stupid name - planned a rally a block from my house today. The "belly of the beast" rally. Because apparently that's where I live - the belly of the antifa beast. Whatever the fuck that means.

2 hours before it was supposed to start, the park starts filling up with my neighbors. A drum line shows up. A brass band plays. The anarchists are giving away vegetables and nachos and some artists are selling jewelry. Black leaders give speeches. We chant Breonna Taylor's name. And all the other names.

No right-wing rally every coalesces. There was never room for a critical mass to congregate. A lost-looking man or two walks to the park, doesn't see their people, turns around. A right-wing vlogger trying to debate people is surrounded and walked to the edge of the park. Someone spotted with a handgun is chased through the park, to their car, by over 100 people. The ice cream truck music plays the whole time.

The usual guys sets their chess tables and start playing, the crowd of neighbors start to break up.

Nazis, we will replace you. We will displace you. We will louder and more numerous. We anti-fascists are full of music and love and nachos. We will always replace you.

source post: X

[rivetgoth]

I remember one time making a post about the way the modern commodification of “goth” is incredibly classist, and someone started angrily fighting in my notes about how I was being a gatekeeper, and specifically they said something like “Back in the 80s nobody CARED if you listened to the right music.” Now, this person was not fucking alive in the 80s, first of all, but it really made me think about WHY “goth is a music subculture” matters so much.

Like. Nobody NOW would care if you went to a goth club or concert and called yourself goth and you weren’t “really goth.” There is not a test you have to take and pass before you’re allowed to be goth and in general 99% of the people I met when I was a baby bat in the scene were super super sweet and encouraging and just excited to see a new face who was having fun and excited about the same things as them. The “if you’re a real fan of XYZ band prove it, name 5 of their songs and 3 of their limited edition EPs and 2 of their famous bootlegs-“ guys are annoying even to other goths, trust me.

“Goth is about the music” isn’t some attempt at being mean and pretentious or like… an attempt to fucking bully normies or whatever LMFAO, it’s a statement related to the fact that goth is a COMMUNITY. Like, an actual community, with a tangible real world history and IRL spaces, with history and culture. And the music is the driving connector. The musicians and artists in the scene are the founders who from their creative drive sprung a huge group of people who found solace and inspiration and connection through it.

I have spoken countless times about why the watered down megacorp fast fashion mass produced “goth” aesthetic is absolute shit but first and foremost it feels like it is just so blatantly spitting in the face of the poor & marginalized people that the goth community developed from, the REASON that goth fashion is based in DIY and thrifting. It goes against the anti-establishment, anti-mainstream history of the goth subculture, it absolutely displaces poor goth people from a subculture that was made for and by them, it erases the fact that goth was born of having independent and unique style and expressing oneself. Nobody gives a shit if you show up to a goth show in a stained tshirt.

Reiterating my own words from another post from awhile back: Goth fashion was born from poverty. From anti-capitalist, anti-establishment rebellion. From thrifting, recycling, DIY, shoplifting, meeting some cool artist at a club who will draw some cool shit on your battle jacket. You are sincerely 5000x more goth if you save up $30 to buy two $15 concert tickets to support some local darkwave bands in your area and showing up in a tshirt than saving up $30 to buy literally anything from Killstar or Hot Topic or wherever it is y’all get that cheap manufactured instagrammable garbage from.

And GOTH IS COMMUNITY! Goth is people hearing music that deals with dark concepts and imagery and experimental sounds that go against the preconceived notions of what music should be about or sound like and finding solace and comfort in it. It’s about going to the club or going out to shows and supporting local artists, DJs, designers, musicians, and meeting up with likeminded people who love the same things as you and have felt the same things as you and have also found solace in it. It’s about the solidarity of that. It’s about speaking up for yourself and your beliefs. It’s imperfect and messy, there are glaring issues that need to be addressed within it at points, but it’s also been the home of so many marginalized people who society never allowed a voice. It’s often political, many goth musicians took loud stances against war, were LGBT, outspoken during the AIDS crisis, communists or anarchists, anti-racism, anti-animal cruelty, anti fascist, etc.

“Goth is a music subculture” is not a controversial statement nor is it just evil mean trad goths trying to be cruel to the poor normies that just want to wear black lipstick and then tag it #gothgf. There are a million criticisms that can be made about the goth community from within, but at its core there is so much history and so much magic and the goths who go outside and connect with others within their community and have found solace and solidarity and family and connection within these spaces deserve to be “gatekeepers” when the mainstream tries to commodify it because its fucking cooler than anything any normie could come up with on their own and now they want to take it and make it increasingly cheapened, meaningless, and inaccessible, lol.

[antifainternational]

Philly Reportback

"The Proud Boys - a white supremacist group with a stupid name - planned a rally a block from my house today. The "belly of the beast" rally. Because apparently that's where I live - the belly of the antifa beast. Whatever the fuck that means. Two hours before it was supposed to start, the park starts filling up with my neighbors. A drum line shows up. A brass band plays. The anarchists are giving away vegetables and nachos and some artists are selling jewelry. Black leaders give speeches. We chant Breonna Taylor's name. And all the other names.

No right-wing rally every coalesces. There was never room for a critical mass to congregate. A lost-looking man or two walks to the park, doesn't see their people, turns around. A right-wing vlogger trying to debate people is surrounded and walked to the edge of the park.  Someone spotted with a handgun is chased through the park, to their car, by over 100 people. The ice cream truck music plays the whole time.The usual guys sets their chess tables and start playing, the crowd of neighbors start to break up. 

Nazis, we will replace you. We will displace you. We will be louder and more numerous. We anti-fascists are full of music and love and nachos. We will always replace you."

[vampire-cathedral]

Every Israeli should take a DNA test and see if it says they are middle eastern. This isn't land back. The concept of an ethnostate is inherently racist. I've seen white people from brooklyn shooting Palestinian kids, displace millions of innocent people who actually have lived there for the last thousand years. I've seen dead mangled children entombed in rubble. This is colonial violence backed by the USA who wants the oil under Gaza. Israel wants the land and plans on turning it into real estate. Palestine has been an open air prison since 1948.

25000 people, half of them kids have been murdered. This is state sanctioned violence trying to flatten Gaza to steal the land from them, the people who actually lived there the last thousand years. THEY are indigenous to that area and everyone who actually cares about land back is backing them. The state of Israel has been using bunker busters, white phosphorus and dumb bombs on kids and civilians. These are fucking war crimes. You can't wipe a people out so you can take their land, that's literally genocide.

And before you go calling me anti-semitic I am an anarchist who understands that peoples are not responsible for the actions of their governments. The world at large is not angry with the Jewish people but with the occupying state of Israel for it's a decades of colonization and harassment murder and imprisonment of the Palestinian people. Most of the loudest voices against these crimes have been Jewish people.

Tldr you can't flatten a place and kill all its people just so you can steal their land

I resent the narrative of "it is unfair when bad things are done or said to Jews living outside of Israel, because they didn't even do anything" because it has an implication of "as opposed to Jews inside of Israel, who are inherently guilty and deserve it."

If you are saying the same things about us as antisemites trying to cover their own asses ("nooo I love Jews. Good Jews.") then you may want to reevaluate how you speak about us.

[argyrocratie]

"What can the resolution to this grim situation be? What was the initial proposal of the Jewish left for Palestine?

Until 1948 the Hashomer Hatzair, the main leftist-Zionist force of the time, said they are for a bi-national State but on the condition that it will be dominated by Jews. Thus, we cannot speak of real equality. After ’48 they supported the taking of land from displaced Palestinians for the creation of more kibbutzes. Their leftism was more to deceive young Israelis born in the country, who were leaning to the left, to keep them within the Zionist frame. And the truth is that they succeeded for a while.

And then Matzpen comes in…

Matzpen is a whole different thing. It began as a small tendency within the Communist Party of Israel that opposed the party’s mainstream Zionist-Marxist orientation, its unquestionable support for the Soviet Union, and Stalinism. Because of these disagreements they were expelled from the party, and created Matzpen as an anti-Zionist and anti-capitalist organization. In the following years, due to the lack of other anti-Zionist organizations, other anti-Zionists joined Matzpen that belonged to different tendencies: Trotskyists, Maoists, anarchists. Thus, the organization obtained quite diverse and autonomous political character, which would later lead to a split by some of the Forth-Internationalists, Trotskyists and Maoists from Matzpen. But even after the split there were still some Trotskyists, that would remain in the organization along the rest of leftists and anarchists. Matzpen was the most radical leftist and anti-Zionist revolutionary organization in Israel during its existence.

What was the alternative that Matzpen offered to replace Zionism? Some sort of a confederalist alternative?

We proposed a revolution of the region (not confined within national borders), and that after this revolution the communities, without any government or national entity, would organize society from the bottom-up. We insisted that there is no place for national entities. The only viable alternative is one society for Palestinians and Jews (and other minorities) without any national entities to confederate.

But I personally prefer to use different term from confederalism, because when people speak of federations they either mean unions of nation-states, or of independent entities that are not part of a binding whole. I already made it clear that I reject the former, but I also have a problem with the latter, because it implies a loose way of organizing the world. But a society cannot be organized in a loose manner. It has to be organized in a real and cohesive libertarian-communist multi-leveled direct democracy - with various levels of committees, which coordinate things, while decision-making power always remains in the assemblies of the grassroots communities. This is my idea for an alternative to the present order, not because I experienced it in the kibbutz life, but because this is what it can be."

-Interview with Israeli anarchist Ilan Shalif

"Interview conducted by Greek libertarian journal Aftoleksi with Jewish anarchist Ilan Shalif. Born in 1937, Shalif can be described as the living history of anarchism in Israel. He was a member of the Israeli socialist organization Matzepn. After the breakup of Matzpen, Shalif continued his activities, participating in other initiatives in Israel, such as Anarchists Against the Wall and the now defunct anarchist federation Ahdut [Unity]. Despite his old age, he remains firm in his political ideas and continues his activism. He has authored numerous articles on direct democracy and antiauthoritarianism, as well as a fictional novel entitled 'Glimpses Into the Year 2100 (50 years after the revolution)' - a story about life in a future direct-democratic society."

...

that was a bit of a surprise because i had read "Glimpses Into the Year 2100" a few years back, i once described it as " a bit too formalist (but that’s the utopian genre for you) and from a standpoint of highly coordinate society but pretty interesting", and for some reason i didn't expect to see author pop up again

but an other bit of the interview i would like to highlight is this one:

"Do you know of any anarchist group in the West Bank or in Gaza? I know that there are some Palestinians that abide to anarchism, but they are afraid to organize, because it is too dangerous. When the anarchist federation Ahdut was still active we met some Palestinian activists in some of the villages in the occupied territories who regard positively our activity. When we printed (and translated) our opinion about the conflict in the region and gave copies of it to activists of the Palestinian village Bil'in and to activists of the joint struggle from other places, nearly all of them expressed their agreement with our anarchist-communist position. In general, I think that most Palestinians agree on some form of coexistence with the Jews, not because they like us too much or anything, but because this is the reality now. They don’t agree with the proposal of the radical islamists to expel all the Jews. It was to those people, that are in favor of a common future, that we tried to transmit our message of one society based on direct democracy. There was a survey in Gaza before the October attack that showed that approximately one third of its inhabitants were in favor of one society with Jews remaining in it. There is, however, one group that pretends to be anarchist – Fauda. But they are not anarchist. They speak, for example, about God. And neither are they Palestinian. They are fake. They are a group that pretends to be both Palestinian and anarchist. There are too many things about them that point in this direction. I don’t know if they are just a bunch of crazy people from abroad, or a creation of the secret services. I honestly don’t know."

...

the lack of precision in the accusation make me think it's mostly based on reading the FAUDA issues and i can understand the suspission but having notably read the interview with 3 of their members i believe it's way more likely that they're a genuine group but that the anarchism play second fidel to the national liberation project and that there is clear indication that to be in good standing with the other force of the resistance the anarchism might in fact have been quite subdue, it's not like it's unprecedented in anarchism history

[dailyanarchistposts]

I.4.9 Should technological advance be seen as anti-anarchistic?

Not necessarily. This is because technology can allow us to “do more with less,” technological progress can improve standards of living for all people, and technologies can be used to increase personal freedom: medical technology, for instance, can free people from the scourges of pain, illness, and a “naturally” short life span; technology can be used to free labour from mundane chores associated with production; advanced communications technology can enhance our ability to freely associate. The list is endless. So the vast majority of anarchists agree with Kropotkin’s comment that the “development of [the industrial] technique at last gives man [sic!] the opportunity to free himself from slavish toil.” [Ethics, p. 2]

For example, increased productivity under capitalism usually leads to further exploitation and domination, displaced workers, economic crisis, etc. However, it does not have to so in an anarchist world. By way of example, consider a commune in which 5 people desire to be bakers (or 5 people are needed to work the communal bakery) and 20 hours of production per person, per week is spent on baking bread. Now, what happens if the introduction of automation, as desired, planned and organised by the workers themselves, reduces the amount of labour required for bread production to 15 person-hours per week? Clearly, no one stands to lose — even if someone’s work is “displaced” that person will continue to receive the same access to the means of life as before — and they might even gain. This last is due to the fact that 5 person-hours have been freed up from the task of bread production, and those person-hours may now be used elsewhere or converted to leisure, either way increasing each person’s standard of living.

Obviously, this happy outcome derives not only from the technology used, but also (and critically) from its use in an equitable economic and social system: in the end, there is no reason why the use of technology cannot be used to empower people and increase their freedom!

Of course technology can be used for oppressive ends. Human knowledge, like all things, can be used to increase freedom or to decrease it, to promote inequality or reduce it, to aid the worker or to subjugate them, and so on. Technology, as we argued in section D.10, cannot be considered in isolation from the society it is created and used in. Most anarchists are aware that, to quote expert David Noble, “Capital invested in machines that would re-enforce the system of domination [within the capitalist workplace], and this decision to invest, which might in the long run render the chosen technology economical, was not itself an economical decision but a political one, with cultural sanction.” [Progress Without People, p. 6] In a hierarchical society, technology will be introduced that serves the interests of the powerful and helps marginalise and disempower the majority (“technology is political,” to use Noble’s expression). It does not evolve in isolation from human beings and the social relationships and power structures between them.

It is for these reasons that anarchists have held a wide range of opinions concerning the relationship between human knowledge and anarchism. Some, such as Peter Kropotkin, were themselves scientists and saw great potential for the use of advanced technology to expand human freedom. Others have held technology at arm’s length, concerned about its oppressive uses, and a few have rejected science and technology completely. All of these are, of course, possible anarchist positions. But most anarchists support Kropotkin’s viewpoint, but with a healthy dose of practical Luddism when viewing how technology is (ab)used in capitalism (“The worker will only respect machinery in the day when it becomes his friend, shortening his work, rather than as today, his enemy, taking away jobs, killing workers.” [Emile Pouget quoted by David Noble, Op. Cit., p. 15]). Vernon Richards stated the obvious:

“We maintain that the term ‘productivity’ has meaning, or is socially important, only when all production serves a public need … “Productivity has meaning if it results both in a raising of living standards and an increase of leisure for all. ”‘Productivity’ in the society we live in, because it is not a means to a social end, but is the means whereby industrialists hope to make greater profits for themselves and their shareholders, should be resolutely resisted by the working people, for it brings them neither greater leisure nor liberation from wage-slavery. Indeed for many it means unemployment … “The attempts by managers and the technocrats to streamline industry are resisted intuitively by most work people even if they haven’t two political ideas in their heads to knock together, not because they are resistant to change per se but because they cannot see that ‘change’ will do them any good. And of course they are right! Such an attitude is nevertheless a negative one, and the task of anarchist propagandists should be to make them aware of this and point to the only alternative, which, in broad terms, is that the producers of wealth must control it for the benefit of all.” [Why Work?, Vernon Richards (ed.), p. 206]

This means that in an anarchist society, technology would have to be transformed and/or developed which empowered those who used it, so reducing any oppressive aspects associated with it. As Kropotkin argued, we are (potentially) in a good position, because ”[f]or the first time in the history of civilisation, mankind has reached a point where the means of satisfying its needs are in excess of the needs themselves. To impose, therefore, as hitherto been done, the curse of misery and degradation upon vast divisions of mankind, in order to secure well-being and further development for the few, is needed no more: well-being can be secured for all, without placing on anyone the burden of oppressive, degrading toil and humanity can at last build its entire social life on the basis of justice.” [Op. Cit., p. 2] The question is, for most anarchists, how can we humanise and modify this technology and make it socially and individually liberatory, rather than destroying it (where applicable, of course, certain forms of technology and industry will be eliminated due to their inherently destructive nature).

For Kropotkin, like most anarchists, the way to humanise technology and industry was for “the workers [to] lay hands on factories, houses and banks” and so “present production would be completely revolutionised by this simple fact.” This would be the start of a process which would integrate industry and agriculture, as it was “essential that work-shops, foundries and factories develop within the reach of the fields.” [The Conquest of Bread, p. 190] Such a process would obviously involve the transformation of both the structure and technology of capitalism rather than its simple and unthinking application. As discussed in section A.3.9, while a few anarchists do seek to eliminate all forms of technology, most would agree with Bakunin when he argued that “to destroy … all the instruments of labour … would be to condemn all humanity — which is infinity too numerous today to exist … on the simple gifts of nature … — to … death by starvation.” His solution to the question of technology was, like Kropotkin’s, to place it at the service of those who use it, to create “the intimate and complete union of capital and labour” so that it would “not … remain concentrated in the hands of a separate, exploiting class.” Only this could “smash the tyranny of capital.” [The Basic Bakunin, pp. 90–1] So most anarchists seek to transform rather then eliminate technology and to do that we need to be in possession of the means of production before we can decide what to keep, what to change and what to throw away as inhuman. In other words, it is not enough to get rid of the boss, although this is a necessary first step!

Anarchists of all types recognise the importance of critically evaluating technology, industry and so on. The first step of any revolution will be the seizing of the means of production. The second immediate step will be the start of their radical transformation by those who use them and are affected by them (i.e. communities, those who use the products they produce and so on). Few, if any, anarchists seek to maintain the current industrial set-up or apply, unchanged, capitalist technology. We doubt that many of the workers who use that technology and work in industry will leave either unchanged. Rather, they will seek to liberate the technology they use from the influences of capitalism, just as they liberated themselves.

This will, of course, involve the shutting down (perhaps instantly or over a period of time) of many branches of industry and the abandonment of such technology which cannot be transformed into something more suitable for use by free individuals. And, of course, many workplaces will be transformed to produce new goods required to meet the needs of the revolutionary people or close due to necessity as a social revolution will disrupt the market for their goods — such as producers of luxury export goods or suppliers of repressive equipment for state security forces. Altogether, a social revolution implies the transformation of technology and industry, just as it implies the transformation of society.

This process of transforming work can be seen from the Spanish Revolution. Immediately after taking over the means of production, the Spanish workers started to transform it. They eliminated unsafe and unhygienic working conditions and workplaces and created new workplaces based on safe and hygienic working conditions. Working practices were transformed as those who did the work (and so understood it) managed it. Many workplaces were transformed to create products required by the war effort (such as weapons, ammunition, tanks and so on) and to produce consumer goods to meet the needs of the local population as the normal sources of such goods, as Kropotkin predicted, were unavailable due to economic disruption and isolation. Needless to say, these were only the beginnings of the process but they clearly point the way any libertarian social revolution would progress, namely the total transformation of work, industry and technology. Technological change would develop along new lines, ones which will take into account human and ecological needs rather the power and profits of a minority.

Explicit in anarchism is the believe that capitalist and statist methods cannot be used for socialist and libertarian ends. In our struggle for workers’ and community self-management is the awareness that workplaces are not merely sites of production — they are also sites of reproduction, the reproduction of certain social relationships based on specific relations of authority between those who give orders and those who take them. The battle to democratise the workplace, to place the collective initiative of the direct producers at the centre of any productive activity, is clearly a battle to transform the workplace, the nature of work and, by necessity, technology as well. As Kropotkin argued:

“revolution is more than a mere change of the prevailing political system. It implies the awakening of human intelligence, the increasing of the inventive spirit tenfold, a hundredfold; it is the dawn of a new science … It is a revolution in the minds of men, as deep, and deeper still, than in their institutions … the sole fact of having laid hands on middle-class property will imply the necessity of completely re-organising the whole of economic life in the workplaces, the dockyards, the factories.” [Op. Cit., p. 192]

And some think that industry and technology will remain unchanged by such a process and that workers will continue doing the same sort of work, in the same way, using the same methods!

For Kropotkin “all production has taken a wrong direction, as it is not carried on with a view to securing well-being for all” under capitalism. [Op. Cit., p. 101] Well-being for all obviously includes those who do the producing and so covers the structure of industry and the technological processes used. Similarly, well-being also includes a person’s environment and surroundings and so technology and industry must be evaluated on an ecological basis. Technological progress in an anarchist society, needless to say, will have to take into account these factors as well as others people think are relevant, otherwise the ideal of “well-being for all” is rejected (see section I.4.15 for a discussion of what the workplace of the future could look like).

So, technology always partakes of and expresses the basic values of the social system in which it is embedded. If you have a system (capitalism) that alienates everything, it will naturally produce alienated forms of technology and it will orient those technologies so as to reinforce itself. Capitalists will select technology which re-enforces their power and profits and skew technological change in that direction rather than in those which empower individuals and make the workplace more egalitarian.

All this suggests that technological progress is not neutral but dependent on who makes the decisions. As David Noble argues, ”[t]echnological determinism, the view that machines make history rather than people, is not correct … If social changes now upon us seem necessary, it is because they follow not from any disembodied technological logic, but form a social logic.” Technology conforms to “the interests of power” but as “technological process is a social process” then “it is, like all social processes, marked by conflict and struggle, and the outcome, therefore, is always ultimately indeterminate.” Viewing technological development “as a social process rather than as an autonomous, transcendent, and deterministic force can be liberating … because it opens up a realm of freedom too long denied. It restores people once again to their proper role as subjects of the story, rather than mere pawns of technology … And technological development itself, now seen as a social construct, becomes a new variable rather than a first cause, consisting of a range of possibilities and promising a multiplicity of futures.” [Forces of Production, pp. 324–5]

This does not mean that we have to reject all technology and industry because it has been shaped by, or developed within, class society. Certain technologies are, of course, so insanely dangerous that they will no doubt be brought to a prompt halt in any sane society. Similarly, certain forms of technology and industrial process will be impossible to transform as they are inherently designed for oppressive ends. Many other industries which produce absurd, obsolete or superfluous commodities will, of course, cease automatically with the disappearance of their commercial or social rationales. But many technologies, however they may presently be misused, have few if any inherent drawbacks. They could be easily adapted to other uses. When people free themselves from domination, they will have no trouble rejecting those technologies that are harmful while adapting others to beneficial uses.

Change society and the technology introduced and utilised will likewise change. By viewing technological progress as a new variable, dependent on those who make the decisions and the type of society they live in, allows us to see that technological development is not inherently anti-anarchist. A non-oppressive, non-exploitative, ecological society will develop non-oppressive, non-exploitative, ecological technology just as capitalism has developed technology which facilitates exploitation, oppression and environmental destruction. Thus an anarchist questions technology: The best technology? Best for whom? Best for what? Best according to what criteria, what visions, according to whose criteria and whose visions?

Needless to say, different communities and different regions would choose different priorities and different lifestyles. As the CNT’s Zaragoza resolution on libertarian communism made clear, “those communes which reject industrialisation … may agree upon a different model of co-existence.” Using the example of “naturists and nudists,” it argued that they “will be entitled to an autonomous administration released from the general commitments” agreed by the communes and their federations and “their delegates to congresses of the … Confederation of Autonomous Libertarian Communes will be empowered to enter into economic contacts with other agricultural and industrial Communes.” [quoted by Jose Peirats, The CNT in the Spanish Revolution, vol. 1, p. 106]

For most anarchists, though, technological advancement is important in a free society in order to maximise the free time available for everyone and replace mindless toil with meaningful work. The means of doing so is the use of appropriate technology (and not the worship of technology as such). Only by critically evaluating technology and introducing such forms which empower, are understandable and are controllable by individuals and communities as well as minimising ecological distribution can this be achieved. Only this critical approach to technology can do justice to the power of the human mind and reflect the creative powers which developed the technology in the first place. Unquestioning acceptance of technological progress is just as bad as being unquestioningly anti-technology.

[drapeau-rouge]

Some Matters Concerning Socialist Democracy in Cuba

Olga Fernandez Rios with Thalia M. Fung Riveron, Miguel Limia David, and Ramon Rodriguez Salgado

Institute of Philosophy Cuban Academy of Sciences

One of the political questions attacked most systematically by bourgeois and petty-bourgeois ideologists is the practice of democracy in socialist countries, including the consideration of whether democracy even exists in socialist countries. Because of the breadth and depth of the subject, we will only deal with problems related to the state and some manifestations of socialist democracy in Cuba.

For many intellectuals, particularly political philosophers, democracy and dictatorship are two mutually eclusive terms. Moreover, anarchist thinkers maintain that as long as the state exists, authentic democracy cannot exist. This concept, which is often carried to absurd extremes, does not take into consideration that democracy is a form of state, and in the highest stage of the communist socioeconomic formation, when the state withers away, democracy also withers away with it. Democracy is a historically transitory phenomenon in the development of humanity; its forms have changed as one dominant class replaces another. Lenin said "Democracy is also a state and, as a consequence, it will disappear when the state disappears."

But as the extinction of the state is achieved through broadening and strengthening the socialist state and through increasingly active participation of the masses, so is socialist democracy broadened and strengthened. This dialectical approach to the question is repeatedly set forth in the works of Lenin and was put into practice from the first days of Soviet power. Socialist democracy not only constitutes a broadening of democratic rights and freedoms, it is not only quantitative change, it is also a qualitative change in the historical development of democratic forms.

Socialist democracy is not simply the democratization of the state mechanism, nor is it simply the perfecting of the electoral system and the development of democratic rights and freedoms of citizens; the principal aspect of socialist democracy consists, as Lenin has repeatedly expounded, in incorporating all citizens without exception into the carrying out of the state functions. II

In Cuba, the dictatorship of the proletariat had as its direct and immediate antecedent the democratic-revolutionary dictatorship of the popular masses, a transitory and transitional state that was formed at the triump of the revolution [1 January 1959] with the defeat of the troops of the tyranny [troops of dictator Fulgencio Batista] by the Rebel Army, under the military, political, and ideological direction of Fidel. This state, which was pecular in that it lacked an economic base, was the principal motor of the political and economic transformations necessary to establish the dictatorship of the proletariat.

The democratic-revolutionary dictatorship of the popular masses had its origin in the Rebel Army, which not only carried out the political-state functions such as war, but also took on the tasks of the education, legal proceedings, tax collection, public services, etc. This policy, established in the First Front, was implemented on a larger scale in the Second Front, and in those that later followed. [Each front refers, chronologically, beginning in December 1956, to a phase in the war for the liberation of Cuba.] In the Second Front, the nucleus of what would be the democratic-revolutionary dictatorship of the popular masses was formed. A state nucleus dictatorship of the popular masses was formed. A state nucleus within another state emerged with fully functioning departments and covering a free territory comprising more than a half-million people. Participation in state tasks extended not only to soldiers of the Rebel Army but to their collaborators as well. Participation in the carrying out of different state functions was thereby expanded to include citizens who until that time had been excluded from political participation. There then emerged a superior state form, a democracy that broke with traditional framework and incorporated into political activity those who were summoned to be the "new makers of history." In the Second Front, we encountered the most mature form in the insurrectional phase of what was to be the new transitory and transitional state: the democratic-revolutionary dictatorship of the popular masses. The political principles upon which the democracy of the new state was founded differed from the political foundations of bourgeois democracy. And it had to be that way, since the two systems had qualitatively different objectives, and the standard-bearers of bourgeois democracy and those of revolutionary democracy were, by their very natures, different. Equality before the law ceased to have a merely formal character as the as the socio-political conditions necessary for its realization were being created. The people themselves were the wellspring and foundation of the democratic-revolutionary dictatorship of the popular masses, as Fidel had specified in the planning document, History Will Absolve Me. It is necessary to emphasize that the working class played a leading role in the popular masses, as well as in the CTC [Confederation of Cuban Workers] and its unions as a united mass organization during practically the entire period of operation of said state. Democracy of the popular masses intercedes as a sociopolitical premise for the transition towards a superior democracy, the form corresponding to the dictatorship of the proletariat. Democracy of the popular masses encompasses (1) the necessity of providing an economic base for the sociopolitical rights that are won, and (2) the urgency of deepening democracy, according to the principles of the working class, the only class capable of representing the interests of all of society without neglecting its strategic objectives, according to the laws of social development. The principal organizational-functional characteristics of the political system, created as a result of the objective and subjective conditions existing at this stage, are as follows:

1. The making and carrying out of laws were brought together in one single organ, by which the Lockean-Montesquian formal tripartite division of powers disappeared.

2. First the Rebel Army and then the Revolutionary Armed Forces constituted the military and at the same time the coercieve and educative apparatus of the new state, and in this way, the popular masses saw their interests most faithfully represented.

3. A profound transformation of content came about in the administration of justice. So-called judicial power lost its pretended autonomy and became, in its capacity as administrator of justice, an organ of revolutionary power as it shed its character of sustainer-reproduced of the bourgeois system. Of course, this transofrmation to first poppular, then socialist, content did not come about rapidly but after years of constant political work.

4. The bourgeois state's bureaucratic apparatus was destroyed just as the military apparatus defending it ceased to exist. In carrying out its national liberation duties, the proletariat acquired greater power through its increased participation, a veritable schooling in the exercise of real participatory democracy, of proletarian democracy. As Lenin says in A Great Beginning,

In order to achieve victory, in order to build and consolidate socialism, the proletariat must fulfill a twofold or dual task: first, it must, by its supreme heroism in the revolutionary struggle against capital, win over the entire mass of the working and exploited people; it must win them over, organize them and lead them in the struggle to overthrow the borugeoisie and utterly suppres their resistance. Secondly, it must lead the whole mass of the working and exploited people, as well as all the petty-bourgeois groups, on to the road of new economic development, towards the creation of a new social bond, a new labour discipline, a new organization of l abour, which will combine the last word in science and capitalist technology with the mass association of class-conscious workers and large-scale socialist industry.

In the popular-democratic, agrarian, national-liberation and anti-imperialis state of the revolution, the first Agrarian Reform Law was decreed - 17 May 1959 - a measure initiating radical change in the old agrarian relations that existed in the countryside. This law intensified the class struggle and contributed decisively to clarifying the intimate union that exists between national and social liberation. Moreover, by bringing to its defense not only farmers, but primarily workers from all sectors, and encouraging their response to this law that underlined the displacement of the classes in power in favour of the popular masses, it brought about their active political participation. Consciously carrying out this law demonstrated democracy for the majority.

Likewise in this period the foundations for cultural revolution were established, but again on the basis of active broad participation of the popular masses. Participation was extended not only to educators and educated adulots, but also to young people twelve years of age, who had acquired an extraordinary ideological maturity for their age, and who at this stage had effectively learned to defend their rights and carry out their political duties. At the same time, the essential limiting factor was destroyed: that is, there can be no parity between the illiterate and the educated person before the law, by virtue of their unequal condition, a factor which the bourgeoisie does not take into consideration in proclaiming "their" equality.

The creation on 23 August and 28 September 1960 of the Federation fo Cuban Women and the Committees for the Defense of the Popular Revolution, respectively, further integrated the popular masses into state functions. Women, especially housewives, began to carry out tasks related to public health, education, and ideology. From their inception, the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution carried out their assignment of revolutionary vigilance, right down to a scale of block by city block. At the same time as they contributed to defending the revolution, the CDRs carried on political education and therefore were able to increase democratic participation by the ever-growing masses. [The CDR could roughly be called block associations or "neighbourhood watch" organizations. But their functions go far beyond what we in the United States associated with such groups, to seeing that women in the neighbourhood get period Pap smears and health checkups, cleaning up the neighbourhood, getting rid of mosquito-breeding areas, collectively empty bottles, cans, newspapers, and used postage stamps, etc. They began as guard duty units against counterrevolutionary activity on a block-by-block basis, but their functions have broadened to other aspects of socialist vigilance.]

With the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat in Cuba in October 1960, forms of direct democracy practiced in the period of the democratic-revolutionary dictatorship of the popular masses continued and developed their own peculiarities.

During a brief period, the political vanguard composed of the July 26 Movement, the Popular Socialist Party, and the March 13 Revolutionary Directorate, assumed the leading political role in guiding the proletarian state and the mass organizations. [The July 26 Movement, led by Fidel Castro, carried out the armed struggle against the Batista forces int he Sierra. It was named for the 26 July 1953 attack on the Moncada garrison. The March 13 Revolutionary Directorate was a militant student organization led by Jose Antonio Echeverria. It was named for its 13 March 1957 attack on Batista's presidential palace.] With Fidel, the existing communication between leader and the people was reproduced and amplifiedm a decisive influence on the progressively active participation of the popular masses in state tasks. Cuba is distinguished from other socialist countries by its Party having been set up only after the dictatorship of the proletariat had been installed: that is, the latter precedes the former. From the time of its founding, the Party has taken on the guiding role in the dictatorship of the proletariat and has become the guarantor of continued growth and development of socialist democracy in teh country. Another characteristic which has been maintained throughout the two stages of dictatorship of the proletariat is direct, popular consultation with social groups and with the masses in general.

Nevertheless, with the socialist revolution, democracy takes on a qualitatively new form. It now exists not only in the political order, but mainly in the participation of workers in state economic management, necessarily mediated by politics. Democracy is effectively extended, because the relation to the means of production of one class or another makes the exercise of political rights effective and real, even though these may be codified in fundamental laws.

The mass organizations - the Confederation of Cuban Workers and their trade unions, the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution, the Federation of Cuban Women, the National Association of Small Farmers, the University Students' Federation, the Federation of Students in Secondary Education, the Organization of Pioneers in Cuba [a children's mass organization], and social organizations like the Union of Writers and Artists of Cuba (UNEAC), and other professional societies - incorporate classes, sectors, and social groups into solving fundamental problems, especially the defense of the country, that faced the society. The Bay of Pigs, counterrevolution in the Escambray mountains, and the October 1962 missile crisis caused the entire country to rise up against the aggressor, inasmuch as it was not only those on the frontlines who fought, but also those who were mobilized in support of the victory.

These mobilizations in defense of the homeland, which have been very numerous throughout the dictatorship of the proletariat, are of men and women. They represent simultaneously a duty and a valued right of each citizen of the country, since only an armed people can defend the gains of the revolution. In such mobilization, mnen and women - not only those who belong to the Revolutionary Armed Forces - exercise, in a voluntary and conscious way, the right and the duty of defending the socialist homeland.

Thousands of citizens are trained as command cadres, in addition to their regular roles as workers or professionals. This form of the exercise of the democracy in Cuba throughout the system of the dictatorship of the proletariat, even though in this period, with the creation of the Territorial Troops Militia, defense has been more directly linked to the representative organs of the state, such as People's Power.

Socialist democracy in Cuba has developed in two basic stages - with a logical transition - which correspond to two periods in the construction of socialism in the country. The political content of both stages of this development is ruled by the dictatorship of the proletariat. Nevertheless, the stages are differentiated by the form of political organization of society, by the interaction and specific forms of direct and indirect democracy, by the degree of participation of the popular masses in guiding society and in state tasks, and so on.

These two stages are divied into the following two periods. The first extends from the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat to the creation of People's Power in 1976, and the second stage from 1976 to the present. Between these stages is a transition that, although it prolongs the first stage, experiments with what will be the content of the representative power in the second stage. During this transition, People's Power is tried out in Matanzas Province.

Socialist democracy manifests itself in the activities of the political system through the nonantagonistic, dialectical contradiction of direct democracy vs. indirect democracy. Both forms of manifesting socialist demcoacy constitute different expressions of the people's will, led by the working class and its party, through decision making and control of policies that correspond to their interests. Their interaction - always historically concrete - is materialized in the institutions of the political system. More precisely, the essential difference between both the historical stages of development of scoailist democracy in Cuba is shown by the specific historical manner in which direct and indirect democracy interact. Thus, the first period is marked by the absence of sepcialized organs of state representation, without use of the electoral process. However, by putting into systematic practice sustained, integrated and sui generis forms of direct democracy, forms that sanctioned, enriched, controlled, or advanced the political activity of the socialsit state, the existence of representative state democracy - in a singular, historically conditioned form - was felt during this period.

Both stages exhibit the perfecting of the system of the dictatorship of the proletariat, it was first necessary to introduce and improve a new system for guiding the economy. It was also necessary to create a new political-administrative divison of the country, on which would correspond to the area, population, geography, history, and economic and social development possibilities of each region. Greater territorial stability of the labour force also had to be recognized as an instrument of socialism, since they had become farces under the bourgeois republic, especially during the tyrannical government of Batista.

These changes guaranteed an increase in mass participation in social processes, both through forms of direct democracy - which became permanent under the democratic-revolutionary dictatorship of the popular masses - and through representative democracy. Representative democracy had been carried out through political and social mass organizations, but it now had acquired a state character through the local, provincial, and national branches of People's Power.

III

With the instituionalization of the socialist state in Cuba, solid foundations were laid for the perfecting of socialist democracy. The Planning Platform of the PCC (Communist Party of Cuba), referring to our state, says: "It has a profoundly democratic character, institutionally guaranteeing the participation of the working class and all workers in the exercise of the dictatorship of the absolute majority of the population over the minority of former exploiters and their agents." The concept of political institionalization articulated in the documents of the First Congress of the Party reflects with precision the changes that will have to take place in the political system, by modifying some laws and creating others, in this new stage of the dictatorship of the proletariat.

State, political, and mass institutions and organizations together constituted the system of the dictatorship of the proletariat under the direction of the Communist Party of Cuba. Beginning in 1976, this system became perfected, especially with respect to its most direct instrument, the state of the dictatorship of the proletariat, which became more systematizaed through its representative organs.

The Platform of the Communist Party of Cuba speaks to the profoundly democratic character of the revolutionary process in Cuba and to the prospects of this new stage:

This system represents the most ample democracy for workers, farmers, and other working people, who are now owners of the country's means of production and of the end results of their work; who have the opportunity to participate directly, for the first time in our history, in governing society, in discussing and approving its constitution, in shaping the principal laws through which they will be governed, and the principal planning directives that will orient the country's progress in the coming years; in forming the production plans of its enterprises and later in actively carrying out these plans and seeing to their completion, through the Assemblies of Production, their trade unions, and other organizations through which they participate in the revolutionary process, and through which they have the possibility of expressing in each moment their specific interests.

This key document of the Communist Party of Cuba accepst the principle set forth by Lenin, that socialist democracy is the incorporation of all citizens without exception into the carrying out of state functions.

This process of political institutionalization is the result of conscious, planned, scientific direction. It has not taken place without difficulties, especially with the peculiar conditions under which our country has lived - constantly threatened by US imperialism, often requiring huge mobilizations of men and women, depending on the circumstances - and all of this has conspired against the establishment of a territorial electoral system. In the first stage, tehre was a correlation between the spontaneous and the conscious, in which the latter struggled to get a foothold, not at the level of highest leadership, but at the intermediate and base levels. In the second stage, the mechanisms established favoured the development of the conscious factor. More and more, subjective consciousness plays an important role in the exercise of socialist democracy. It manifests itself in diverse state tasks and has expressed itself historically in the constitutional referendum, in the discussion of the most important laws and codes, in the congresses of social and mass organizations, in the discussion of planning data and the budgets of organizations and enterprises, in the nomination and election of candidates to People's Power. The political-ideological activity of the Communist Party of Cuba plays a decisive role in the formation and development of a conscientious attitude in confronting each of one of these tasks.

With the creation of representative organs of the dictatorship of the proletariat in Cuba, the sociopolitical tendency to approximate fundamental features of the political systems of socialist countries was validated.

Socialist democracy in Cuba, developed during the entire process of the construction of socialsim, reached - beginning in 1976 - a superior stage that demonstrated the integrity of People's Power with itself as a state, and with the society that built it. This integrity is obvious in: (a) the harmony between different organs that form the Cuban state apparatus and between the levels on which they themselves are organized; (b) the democratic nature of the Cuban electoral system; and (c) the control of the masses over all social life through the state and through the other subgroups that make up - with the state - the system of the dictatorship of the proletariat.

The Cuban electoral system, in each of its stages and in all respects, effectively guarantees a very large degree of freedom and initiative to citizens, from the open nomination of candidates and their election or recall, to possibilities for channeling concerns and claims, including appeal to government bodies. The right to vote is practically universal; only those imprisoned or mentally ill are excluded. The high degree of political maturity of young Cubans and their broad participation in state tasks has won them the right to vote at age sixteen and to be elected at age eighteen. Voting is free, equal, and secret, and since citizens are not compelled to exercise it, voting is considered a right, not a legal obligation.

The divison of the country into electoral districts facilitates massive participation in the election of representatives to the Municipal Assembly of People's Power, from which delegates and representatives to the Provincial Assemblies and the National Assembly of People's Power are elected.

Based on size and other characteristics, the electoral districts assure direct, proportional participation of citizens in the affairs of state, and they offer real possibilities for linking the delegates with the popular masses and for channeling information concerning existing problems and opinions toward the higher representative levels.

In the electoral district a very important link is established, at the base level, between the state organs and a mass organization: the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution, which are charged with guaranteeing the popular character of nominations, and the exercise of citizens' right to vote. Candidates for delegates to the Municipal Assembly are nominated by majority vote in neighbourhood meetings. In each district two or more candidates are presented for public consideration. This demonstrates the democratic character of socialist elections as an integral element of mass participation in the affairs of state.

All of this notwithstanding, the direct process does not end with the election of a delegate to the Municipal Popular Assembly. Since the Paris Commune, the masses have not only the right but the duty to be familiar with and periodically check the performance of their representatives. If they are dissatsified, they can recall them at any time during the period of office for which they were elected. Both the periodic rendition of accountability of delegates before those who elected them and the right of the electors to recall their representatives are ways of directly incorporating the masses into the conduct of the state. By the same token, the subordination and accountability by all the organs and levels of People's Power to the National Assembly is another way of guaranteeing the exercise of socialist democracy, since it ensures that the interests of electoral districts and municipalities coincide with more general interests, such as provincial and national interests.

The representative institutions appropriately combine the participation of the masses in the administration, direction, and control of the state; the necessity for each link of the process of state management to be controlled by the popular masses; and the incorporation of each citizen into participation in one form or another of state control, at the same time that the quality and required specialization of the leaders at each level is assured.

The Communist Party of Cuba's guiding role in the system of the dictatorship of the proletariat guarantees the growth of the political consciousness factor in the exercise of socialist democracy. Together with the socialist state, through the full materialization of socialist democracy, the social and mass organizations play an increasingly active and significant role.

One could not conceive of socialist democracy without political liberties, or without social rights such as the right to a job, vacation, free education, and free medical care, to economic assistance in old age and in case of diminished capacity to work, without equal rights for men and women, and without the absence of raical and ethnic discrimination. All of these rights are guaranteed in the constitutions of socialist countries. In the constitution of the Republic of Cuba they appear in article eight and chapters four, five, and six. Socialist democratization is apparent in all spheres. In science, it makes possible the flourishing of intellectual capacities, not just for a group of individuals, but for all citizens, by creating the necessary conditions. Artistic creation becomes freer as a larger and larger group finds itself in conditions cultivating esthetic forms, and artists are more conscious of the importance and responsbility of their social role as participants in the first historically conscious socio-economic formation.

Some examples of socialist democracy in our country are the formation of the militias, the Declaration of Havana and Santiago de Cuba, the mobilized response of the people in the face of imperialist aggressions, the Assemblies of the different levels of People's Power, the volunteer work that Cubans have performed for more than twenty years, and the revolutionary and proletarian internationalism extended to another nations. There are thousands of examples, some of which are entirely novel, like the massive marches and demonstrations of our combative people in response to the 1980 Mariel emigration. According to Lenin, all these revolutionary ways constitute a higher form of democracy, because revolution is the referendum of fact, as opposed to the referendum of words.

The outlook for the development of socialist democracy is conditioned, in the first place, by the consolidation and extension of socialist property, by the progress of socialist relations of production, by the transition from production by the independent farmer to socialist forms of proeprty, and then by the affirmation of the relations of collectivism, collaboration, and mutual aid. A very powerful weapon for the elevating mass activity in the functioning and development of socialist democracy is the political-ideological training of the masses, their legal and political cultivation, which will facilitate their understanding of complex social phenomena and the nonantagonistic contradictions  that arise in the bosom of Cuban society, as well as those that originate in capitalist countries. This training will permit the masses to consciously put to use all of the possibilities that the political system of socialist society offers.

Upon anlayzing the tendencies and perspectives for the subsequent development of democracy in Cuba, we find the following requisites for the exercise of direct and indirect democracy:

1. Perfecting the function of the organs of People's Power and the transition to a qualitatively new level for their role in social life; 2. Optimizing the activity of government at all levels, and perfecting the connections between different levels of leadership in order to increase their effectiveness; 3. Elevating the role of social organizations; 4. Expanding the social role of the work collective, above all, of functions related to production.

As was set forth in the Main Report to the First Congress of the Communist Party of Cuba,

Today we need a socialist constitution which corresponds to the characteristics of our society, with the social consciousness, the ideological convictions, and the aspirations of our people. A constitution that reflects the general laws of the society we constructed, the profound economic, social, and practical transformations brought about by the revolution, and the historic achievements won by our people. A constitution, in short, that consolidates what we are today and helps us to reach what we want to be tomorrow.

And this proposal of the First Congress of our Party was accomplished effectively in our constitution. Its profoundly democratic content was complemented by its profoundly democratic procecss of approval by referendum. The referendum followed a study of the constitution by the entire population over fourteen years of age. During this process, suggestions became proposals for modification which were voted on by more than 600,000 persons. More than six million citizens participated in the debates. This constitutes an extraordinary example of direct socialist democracy.

Corresponding to Leninist principles of proletarian and socialist democracy, Communist parties have worked for constant progress in what is their main thrust, that is, toward the wider and wider incorporation of the masses in matters of the state, social production, and cultural fulfilmment. Along this road, workers, farmers, intellectuals, and other working men and women must resolve multiple contradictions, from antagonistic ones with the national and international bourgeoisie to nonantagonistic and internal ones of the system of dictatorship of the proletariat. And in each one of these activities, they must demonstrate their will for a more conscious, and therefore progressively freer, participation in socialism.

Since the founding of the Rebel Army, when the unity of workers, farmers, and other social groups was key, the incorporation of our people into state functions has developed to a high degree. This has been reflected over twenty-five years in the active and direct response of our people in confronting often heroic and increasingly complex tasks given them by the revolution, mainly in their united decision to defend at whatever price our homeland and its socialist democracy.

[mudaship39]

The info I need for the current and upcoming native characters and characters of color are:

What is their name? Full name? Nickname?

Do they have a separate Indigenous name and nickname? 

What is their racial identity?

What is their cultural identity? What clan are they from? What bands or tribes are they? What nation are they from? 

Are they connected or are they displaced disconnected diaspora?

Do they wear any regalia?

Do they wear Indigenous jewelry?

Do they have any Indigenous traditional tattoos? 

What is their role in their community? What is their duty in their clan, tribe, & nation?

Are they white Natives, Asian Natives, ME Natives, Black Natives, or Latinx Natives? 

What is their sex gender gender identity and sexuality?

Are they two spirit of Turtle Island or mahu/fakaleiti/fa’afafine/maohi of Oceania? 

What are their pronouns? He/him, she/her, they/them, and, or xer/xers?

Are they monogamous or polyamorous?

Are they disabled? Are they autistic? Are they nuerodivergent? Are they chronically ill? Do they have mental illnesses? 

Are they abled bodied? Are they allistic? Are they neurotypical?

What is their religion and spirituality?

What languages do they speak?

How tall are they?

How much do they weigh?

What is their hairstyle?

What is their eye color, hair color, & skin tone?

How old are they? By our standards since this is afro futurism, native, & poc futurism about poc coded and native coded metahuman and superhuman characters living from the ancient past to the far future 

When is their birthdate? Month day and year?

Whats their Chinese zodiac and western astrology sign 

Do they have tattoos or piercings? 

What kind of piercings? 

What kind of ear piercings do they have?

This can be a tragus ear piercing, a conch ear piercing, a helix ear piercing, a daith ear piercing, a snug ear piercing, a lobe ear piercing, an anti tragus ear piercing, a rook ear piercing, an anti helix ear piercing, a forward helix piercing, a lobe transversal ear piercing.

It can be high lobe, barbell, helix stud lobe, or upper lobe piercings on their ear

What kind of body piercings do they have?

It can be vertical or horizontal eyebrow piercing spiked barbells on their eyebrow. It can be Medusa diamond stud piercing above their lip, it can be dimple studs in their cheeks, it can be a spiked labret on their chin, it can be a septum ring piercing that goes through their nose, it can be a barbell bridge piercing between their eyes on top of their nose, it can be a rhino barbell nose ring piercing on the top of their nose, it can be nasallang piercings on the left and right side of their nose, it can be a third eye stud piercing on their forehead, it can be a barbell piercing in their navel, or even a barbell piercing on their chest.

What do they have tattoos of? What kind of tattoos? Retro by their standards and modern by ours or futuristic by ours and contemporary by theirs in the form of holographic tattoos. Do they have magical tattoos?

Where are they from Where do they live now? List of possible locations are in the location glossary of the google doc. 

Which city, county, state, & or country do they live in? 

Do they live on Earth? Or off world since humanity and aliens left Earth and colonized the rest of space? 

Which colonized and terraformed planet, moon, comet, asteroid, or planetoid do they live on? Where in the planet, star system, & galaxy do they reside? 

What is their personality?

What are their virtues? What are their vices? What are their strengths? What are their flaws?

What kind of clothes do they wear?

What are their favorite foods?

What is their favorite drink?

What are their hobbies and interests?

What is their economic class?

What is their political party affiliation?

Are they conservative, liberal, progressive leftist, green party, third party voter, no party affiliation, non voter? 

Story is post land back. So this can include voting in Indigenous tribes/clans and nations 

Are they communist, anarchist, radical, & or militant.

What is their backstory?

What is their occupation?

Are they a high school dropout, a high school graduate, a college dropout, or a college graduate?

Are they a graduate of a two year community college, a four year university, an Ivy League university or military academy?

Did they graduate from a vocational or trade school?

What degrees do they have? Associates bachelors masters or doctorates? In what field or fields? Do they have a minor, major, or dual major?

Tell me about their parents, aunts and uncles?

How many siblings do they have? Are they the oldest, youngest, or middle child? Or are they an only child? Do they have any cousins?

Are they an BIPOC ex of the queer and trans Asian Pasifika and Latine Native superhero/superheroine main character Kana’i Makoa Latu/Ataahua Kamalani Latu?

Are they single, dating, widowed, divorced, or married? Tell me about their spouse(s) or partner(s)?

Are they in a monogamous or polyamorous relationship or marriage?

How many children do they have? Are these children adopted or biological? Tell me about their children.

What kind of pets do they have? Do they have regular pets, magical pets, or alien pets?

What is their mode of transportation? List of transportation are in the modes of transportation glossary of the google doc. 

Do they use a hoverboard, hover bus, hover bike, hover motorbike, hover quad, hover motorcycle, hover sport bike, or hover vehicle (car, truck, SUV, etc)

What kind of weapons do they use? List of weapons are in the weapon glossary of the google doc.

Do they use a power armor suit or a mech suit?

Questions for native coded characters and poc coded characters of Warring Kingdoms:

What species are they? 

What humanoid race are they?

Are they a hybrid with a humanoid race?

What is their variant or subrace?

Are they human?

Are they magical human (poc coded human)? 

Are they Indigenous magical human (Indigenous coded human)

Are they non magical human? 

Are they Homo magi (non native and white coded human)?

What is their class? Are they a fighter, warrior, barbarian, ranger, druid, bard, wizard, witch, warlock, sorcerer, or paladin?

Are they a hybrid class?

Are they a special class?

What is their subclass

What is their rank? 

Are they F class, E class, D Class, C class, B class, A class, or S rank?

What is their background

What class are they?

What is their alignment?

What magical tools do they use

List of magical tools in the google doc

Do they use a wand, a mage staff, a magical baton, or a broomstick?

Which village, town, city, kingdom, empire do they live in?

Do they have magical powers?

Are they part of a guild?

What faction are they a part of?

List of factions in the google doc

What guild are they a part of

Are they part of a knight and or paladin order?

What kind of mount do they use?

What kind of familiar do they use?

Do they have an animal companion?

Are they an adventurer? Are they a guild member?

If so why do they dungeon dive as an adventurer? 

Why do they go on quests or guild missions as a guild member?

If they are a warlock who is their patron?

Are they demigods? Are the the child, grandchild, or descendant of a god or goddess? If so from which pantheon? 

Are they Atlantean, Amazonian, Vanir, or Asgardian hybrids?

Are they half elves, half orcs, half trolls, half goblins, or half dwarves, etc?

Are they missing any body parts as someone disfigured? Did they have these part or parts replaced with prosthetic limbs?

Do they have an electrical, steam, & gas powered automotive armored prosthetic arm or leg?

Are they an ex of the queer and trans poc coded and native coded Indigenous magical human, magical huma, & homo magi hybrid S rank adventurer and guild member Afro Asian native coded main character Lysander/Luciana Norwood or Kittsak/Kaeo Pramoj

Questions for native characters and characters of color of Alpha Centurion War:

Are they a superhero, antihero, or supervillain?

What is their superhero antihero or supervillain name? 

What is their superhero antihero or supervillain costume? 

What superpowers do they have?

How exactly did they get their powers?

Are they a metahuman or superhuman?

What is their lair? Where is their home base? Is it stationary or mobile.  

What superhero, antihero, or supervillain team are they a part of?

What is their role in these teams?

Are they part of the superhero conglomerates the Elites, the Paragons, or the Sentinels?

Are they alien hybrids? 

Are they demigods? Are the the child, grandchild, or descendant of a god or goddess? If so from which pantheon? The Egyptian, Mayan, Norse, Greco-Roman, Celtic, Hindu, Japanese, Chinese, African, or Oceanic/Pasifika pantheon?

Are they cyborgs or bionics? 

Are they Atlantean, Amazonian, Vanir, or Asgardian hybrids?

Are they half elves, half orcs, half trolls, half goblins, or half dwarves, etc?

Are they missing any body parts as someone disfigured? Did they have these part or parts replaced with bionic or cybernetic limbs. 

Do they have cybernetic implants or bionic enhancements? 

Are they an BIPOC ex of the queer and trans Asian Pasifika and Latine Native superhero/superheroine main character Kana’i Makoa Latu/Ataahua Kamalani Latu?