#transnational solidarities

[luthienne]

Angela Davis, Freedom is a Constant Struggle

…we will have to do something quite extraordinary: We will have to go to great lengths. We cannot go on as usual. We cannot pivot the center. We cannot be moderate. We will have to be willing to stand up and say no with our combined spirits, our collective intellects, and our many bodies.

[icedsodapop]

It's so funny to see White people like Amy Schumer and writer Daniella Greenbaum Davis getting upset at Black Lives Matter for supporting Palestine and not Israel. African Americans have literally been a consistent ally of Palestinian liberation since the 60s starting with Black civil rights activists, what were y'all expecting???

[opencommunion]

"The story of  'John Doe 1' of the Democratic Republic of the Congo is tucked in a lawsuit filed five years ago against several U.S. tech companies, including Tesla, the world’s largest electric vehicle producer. In a country where the earth hides its treasures beneath its surface, those who chip away at its bounty pay an unfair price. As a pre-teen, his family could no longer afford to pay his $6 monthly school fee, leaving him with one option: a life working underground in a tunnel, digging for cobalt rocks.  But soon after he began working for roughly two U.S. dollars per day, the child was buried alive under the rubble of a collapsed mine tunnel. His body was never recovered. 

The nation, fractured by war, disease, and famine, has seen more than 6 million people die since the mid-1990s, making the conflict the deadliest since World War II. But, in recent years, the death and destruction have been aided by the growing number of electric vehicles humming down American streets. In 2022, the U.S., the world’s third-largest importer of cobalt, spent nearly $525 million on the mineral, much of which came from the Congo.

As America’s dependence on the Congo has grown, Black-led labor and environmental organizers here in the U.S. have worked to build a transnational solidarity movement. Activists also say that the inequities faced in the Congo relate to those that Black Americans experience. And thanks in part to social media, the desire to better understand what’s happening in the Congo has grown in the past 10 years. In some ways, the Black Lives Matter movement first took root in the Congo after the uprising in Ferguson in 2014, advocates say. And since the murder of George Floyd and the outrage over the Gaza war, there has been an uptick in Congolese and Black American groups working on solidarity campaigns.

Throughout it all, the inequities faced by Congolese people and Black Americans show how the supply chain highlights similar patterns of exploitation and disenfranchisement. ... While the American South has picked up about two-thirds of the electric vehicle production jobs, Black workers there are more likely to work in non-unionized warehouses, receiving less pay and protections. The White House has also failed to share data that definitively proves whether Black workers are receiving these jobs, rather than them just being placed near Black communities. 'Automakers are moving their EV manufacturing and operations to the South in hopes of exploiting low labor costs and making higher profits,' explained Yterenickia Bell, an at-large council member in Clarkston, Georgia, last year. While Georgia has been targeted for investment by the Biden administration, workers are 'refusing to stand idly by and let them repeat a cycle that harms Black communities and working families.'

... Of the 255,000 Congolese mining for cobalt, 40,000 are children. They are not only exposed to physical threats but environmental ones. Cobalt mining pollutes critical water sources, plus the air and land. It is linked to respiratory illnesses, food insecurity, and violence. Still, in March, a U.S. court ruled on the case, finding that American companies could not be held liable for child labor in the Congo, even as they helped intensify the prevalence. ... Recently, the push for mining in the Congo has reached new heights because of a rift in China-U.S. relations regarding EV production. Earlier this month, the Biden administration issued a 100% tariff on Chinese-produced EVs to deter their purchase in the U.S. Currently, China owns about 80% of the legal mines in the Congo, but tens of thousands of Congolese work in 'artisanal' mines outside these facilities, where there are no rules or regulations, and where the U.S. gets much of its cobalt imports.  'Cobalt mining is the slave farm perfected,' wrote Siddharth Kara last year in the award-winning investigative book Cobalt Red: How The Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives. 'It is a system of absolute exploitation for absolute profit.' While it is the world’s richest country in terms of wealth from natural resources, Congo is among the poorest in terms of life outcomes. Of the 201 countries recognized by the World Bank Group, it has the 191st lowest life expectancy."

[homonationalist]

The point that I’m making is that while racist police violence, particularly against Black people, has a very long history, going back to the era of slavery, the current context is absolutely decisive. And when one examines the ways in which racism has been further reproduced and complicated by the theories and practices of terrorism and counterterrorism, one begins to perhaps envision the possibility of political alliances that will move us in the direction of transnational solidarities. What was interesting during the protests in Ferguson last summer was that Palestinian activists noticed from the images they saw on social media and on television that tear-gas canisters that were being used in Ferguson were exactly the same tear-gas canisters that were used against them in occupied Palestine. As a matter of fact, a US company, which is called Combined Systems, Incorporated, stamps “CTS” (Combined Tactical Systems) on their tear-gas canisters. When Palestinian activists noticed these canisters in Ferguson, what they did was to tweet advice to Ferguson protesters on how to deal with the tear gas. They suggested, among other things: “Don’t keep much distance from the police. If you’re close to them, they can’t tear gas,” because they would be teargassing themselves. There was a whole series of really interesting comments for the young activists in Ferguson, who were probably confronting tear gas for the first time in their lives. They didn’t necessarily have the experience that some of us older activists have with tear gas. I’m trying to suggest that there are connections between the militarization of the police in the US, which provides a different context for us to analyze the continuing, ongoing proliferation of racist police violence, and the continuous assault on people in occupied Palestine, the West Bank, and especially in Gaza, given the military violence inflicted on people in Gaza this past summer.

Angela Davis from "Transnational Solidarities" in Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement (2016)

[eretzyisrael]

by Heidi Basch-Harod

Less than a week before Thanksgiving, Nada flew all the way from Oklahoma to show up next to me for a screening and panel discussion of Screams Before Silence and our film, Daughters of Abraham, at Southern California’s private, liberal arts Occidental College. Hosted by the Department of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies, our program was the final installment of the Friday Feminist Film Series focusing on the theme of sexual violence. Moderated by actress Esme Bianco, survivor of sexual assault at the hands of Marilyn Manson, and supported and attended by Victoria Valentino, who blew the whistle on Bill Cosby one decade ago, the series intended to elevate the ongoing, global issue of sexual violence against women and our need to support survivors who dare to speak up. Throughout the semester however, the screenings were sparsely attended despite the celebrity speakers and relevant topics to students of women, gender, and sexuality studies.

In the month leading up to the screening, Department Chair, Dr. Caroline Heldman, shared that the series had been boycotted because of the inclusion of Screams Before Silence, the film produced by Sheryl Sandberg, documenting the sexual violence that occurred on October 7 in Israel by Hamas terrorists, and the subsequent denial that it occurred. Wherever posters of the series appeared on campus, the part mentioning the November 22 event, were ripped off. In our pre-panel prep meeting, Nada noted it reminded her of the ripping down of hostage posters since they first appeared in the weeks following October 7.

Understanding the volatile climate on campus, Dr. Heldman agreed to add Daughters of Abraham, a short film following the journey of Palestinian-American, Nada Higuera, and myself, an Israeli-American. We thought our commitment to connecting and humanizing each other in the midst of violence and war, conveyed in the film, may positively influence others who showed up at the screening, even if they attended in protest.

Remaining hopeful for an opportunity to dialogue around the accusation of Sheryl Sandberg’s film being a propaganda piece, Nada and I prepared to share with a full room of passionate, enraged students about making space for the other side’s pain and suffering. Nada’s own journey of moving through the denial of the October 7 sexual violence, resulted in her realizing that denial did not help Palestinians in their just cause and pursuit of human dignity and self-determination. For the past year, she and I have been saying yes to interviews and sharing our film, with the earnest belief that showing up, together, can set an example for those who feel they must choose a side in this catastrophic time.

Dr. Heldman prepared us for disruption, for a handout requested by students to be disseminated with a list of “lies” presented in Screams Before Silence, but she assured us that the room would be full because the RSVPs were, in fact, coming in. What happened instead was unexpected.

Led by the chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace, they employed an alternative tactic to prevent and censor dialogue from taking place. Rather than protesting outside the building, or disrupting the event itself, supporting faculty organized a counter event at the same time, 6pm on a Friday night, on the theme of “Transnational Feminist Solidarities”. The subtext, that coming together in solidarity to witness the experience of Jewish women and sexual violence in the midst of war was not considered a discussion of transnational feminism, did not escape me. But that wasn’t enough. They managed to have one door of the building locked where our event took place. They assembled students throughout parts of the campus to redirect people to their event, under the guise that they were heading to the Friday Feminist Film Series. By the time the misguided realized they were in the wrong place, they felt it would be rude to come late to the screening and discussion. One event attendee, who managed to see through the ruse, shared that the woman she spoke to even had an earpiece through which she was coordinating with others to prevent people from getting to our event.

There were five students who did make it to the Friday Feminist Film Series. Four of them were Jewish. As though two films addressing sexual violence and war weren’t disturbing enough for one Friday evening, what the students had to share was equally unsettling. Through torrential tears, sobs and shudders, the freshmen shared their experience of being silenced and punished on campus for refusing to join Students for Justice in Palestine, for not putting “Free Palestine” stickers on their water bottles and laptop computers, for not donning keffiyehs in solidarity. For refusing to simplify a complex global conflict and rejecting their Jewish and Zionist identities, their college experience is fraught with tension and a sense of insecurity. According to them, this event was the first that took place acknowledging what actually happened on October 7.

In the midst of the 16 Days of Activism Against Gender-Based Violence, I ask us to bear witness to the continued silencing of those women and men who were brutally violated and murdered on October 7. To acknowledge that, as an international community, we continue to fall appallingly short on our commitment to human rights and dignity. Regardless, we must continue to speak out against the hypocrisy and the censorship, through the tears and the intimidation. We owe it to ourselves and to those whose lives were violently ended.

[the-garbanzo-annex-jr]

by Jonah Fried

MONTREAL – B’nai Brith Canada is greatly disturbed by the prospect of a “Youth Summer Program” planned by participants in the illegal anti-Israel encampment on McGill University’s property.

Flyers promoting the “revolutionary summer program,” which organizers are framing as their answer to a “transnational student callout to #Revolt4Rafah,” feature images of keffiyeh-clad fighters brandishing submachine guns. Activities would be held from June 17 to July 12, 2024, on the lower field of McGill’s downtown campus, which has been unlawfully occupied by a coalition of radical anti-Israel groups since April 27.

“This is appalling,” said Henry Topas, Quebec Regional Director for B’nai Brith Canada. “Look at how they have moved the goalposts. First, they started holding demonstrations every week, despite their tendency to spout violent and antisemitic slogans. Then, they illegally occupied the campus, bullied Jewish students, harassed McGill administrators at their homes, and broke into university buildings.

“Now, we have a ‘summer camp’ openly being advertised with images of masked men holding weapons. Is McGill going to allow its campus to be used to brainwash youths into thinking that terrorism is acceptable?”

The announcement of the planned summer program comes only days after McGill offered amnesty to all students involved in the encampment and offered to accept some of the protesters’ “demands” – even as the university continues to seek a court order authorizing police to remove the illegal occupants.

In a social-media post, the McGill chapter of Students in Solidarity with Palestinian Human Rights (SPHR) promised to “redefine McGill’s ‘elite’ instutional [sic] legacy by transformining [sic] its space into one of revolutionary education.”

SPHR says in its literature that “physical activity” as well as “revolutionary lessons” will be included in the so-called “program.”

The signup sheet:

The sheet lists options such as classes on “Islamic Resistance,” “pan-Arabism,” and the so-called “Axis of Resistance” – an apparent reference to the Islamic Republic of Iran’s network of proxies dedicated to destroying Israel and the United States.

The launch of this alarming “youth program” follows a violent incident on June 6, when a group of radicals broke into and vandalized the James McGill administration building, occupying it for two hours. This marked the most extreme escalation on campus since the beginning of the Israel-Hamas war in October 2023. Police in riot gear used necessary force to disperse the crowd and access the building, which protesters had barricaded with construction fencing and other materials.

At least 15 people were ultimately arrested in connection with the clashes, some for throwing rocks at police officers.

“The situation at McGill is well out of control and has been for some time,” said Richard Robertson, B’nai Brith Canada’s Director of Research and Advocacy. “We call on McGill and the local authorities to ensure that the university’s property is not used as a forum to incite violence against Israel and Jews.

“The plan for this so-called program further disproves the myth that these illegal encampments are about democracy and peaceful protest. They are, in fact, a hypocritical assault on Canadian values and Western norms as a whole.”

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

"Ribu's anti-imperialist feminist discourse would later manifest in its solidarity protests against kisaeng tourism. This sex tourism involved Japanese businessmen traveling to South Korea to partake in the sexual services of young South Korean women who worked at clubs called kisaengs. Ribu's protests against kisaeng tourism represented how the liberation of sex combined with ribu's anti-imperialism and enabled new kinds of transnational feminist solidarity based on a concept of women's sexual exploitation and sexual oppression. From ribu's perspective, this form of tourism represented the reformation of Japanese economic imperialism in Asia. They were not against sex work by Japanese women, but opposed to the continued sexual exploitation of Korean women as a resurgence of the gendered violence of imperialism: Ribu activists hence connected imperialism and sexual oppression of colonized women to the continuing sexual exploitation of Korean women in the 1970s. In this way, they were able to expand the leftist critique of imperialism and, at the same time, point to the fault lines and inadequacies of the left.

In her critique of the left, Tanaka points to its failure to have a theory of the sexes.

Even in movements that are aiming towards human liberation, by not having a theory of struggle that includes the relation between the sexes. the struggle becomes thoroughly masculinist and male-centered (dansei-chushin shugi].

According to ribu activists, this male-centered condition infected not only the theory of the revolution and delimited its horizon, but it created a gendered concept of revolution that privileged masculinist hierarchies within the culture of the left. Ribu activists decried the hypocrisy of the left and what it deemed to be the all-too-frequent egotistical posturing of the "radical men" who "eloquently talked about solidarity, the inter national proletariat and unified will," but did not really consider women part of human liberation. Ribu activists rebelled against Marxist dogma and rejected these gendered hierarchies that valued knowledge of the proper revolutionary theory over lived experience and relationships. Moreover, ribu activists criticized what they experienced as masculinist forms of militancy that privileged participation in street battles with the riot police as the ultimate sign of an authentic revolutionary. While being trained to use weapons, activists like Mori Setsuko questioned whether engaging in such bodily violence was the way to make revolution. Ribu's rejection and criticism of a hierarchy that privileged violent confrontation forewarned of the impending self-destruction within the New Left.

...

News of URA [United Red Army] lynchings, released in 1972, devastated the reputation of the New Left in Japan, and many across the left condemned these actions. This case of internalized violence within the left marked its demise. Although ribu activists were likewise horrified by such violence expressed against comrades, many ribu activists responded in a profoundly radical manner that I have theorized elsewhere as "critical solidarity." Ribu activists had already refused to lionize the tactics of violence; hence, they in no way supported the violent internal actions of the URA. However, rather than simply condemning the URA leaders and comrades as monsters and nonhumans [hi-ningen), they sought to comprehend the root of the problem. They recognized that every person possesses a capacity for violence, but that society prohibits women from expressing their violent potential. In response to the state's gendered criminalization of Nagata as an insurgent and violent woman, ribu activists practiced what I describe as feminist critical solidarity specifically for the women of the URA. Ribu activists went in support to the court hearings and wrote about their experience and critical observations of how URA members were being treated. By visiting the URA women at the detention centers, consequently, ribu activists came under police surveillance. Ribu activists enacted solidarity in ways that were tot politically pragmatic but instead philosophically motivated. Their response involved a capacity for radical self-recognition in the loathsome actions of the other. Activists wrote extensively about Nagata - for example, Tanaka described Nagata in her book Inochi no onna-tachi e [To Women with Spirit] as a kind of "ordinary" woman whom she could have admired, except for the tragedy of the lynching incidents. In 1973, Tanaka wrote a pamphlet titled "Your Short Cut Suits You, Nagata!" in response to the state's gendered criminalization of the URA's female leader, the deliberate publication of such humanizing discourse evinces ribu's efforts to express solidarity with the women who were arguably the most vilified females of their time. Hence, ribu engaged in actions that supported these criminalized others even when the URA'S misguided pursuit of revolution resulted in the unnecessary deaths of their own comrades. Through ribu's critical solidarity with the URA, they modeled the imperative of imperfect radical alliances, opening up a philosophically motivated relationality with abject subjects and a new horizon of counter-hegemonic alliances against the dominant logic of heteropatriarchal capitalist imperialism.

While the harsh criticism of the left was warranted and urgently needed given the deep sedimentation of pervasive forms of sexist practice, it should be noted that, at the outset of the movement, there were various ways in which ribu's intimate relationship with other leftist formations characterized its emergence. At ribu's first public protest, which was part of the October 21 anti-war day, some women carried bamboo poles and wooden staves as they marched in the street, jostling with the police." Ribu did not advocate pacifism; its newspapers regularly printed articles on topics such as "How to Punch a Man." During ribu protests from 1970-2, some ribu activists-as noted, with Yonezu and Mori - still wore helmets that were markers of one's political sect and a common student movement practice."

- Setsu Shigematsu, “'68 and the Japanese Women’s Liberation Movement,” in Gavin Walker, ed., The Red Years: Theory, Politics and Aesthetics in the Japanese ‘68. London and New York: Verso, 2020. p. 89-90, 91-92

[probablyasocialecologist]

Today’s unending “War on Terror” flows directly out of imperial policies promulgated in the wake of the energy crisis of the 1970s. For example, in the Carter Doctrine of 1980, famously mild-mannered President Jimmy Carter declared the Persian Gulf to be an area of “vital interest” to US “national security” and stated that the United States would use military force to defend those interests. This imperial ideology has unleashed decades of violent mayhem against people in the oil-producing regions of the world while dealing a devastating blow to efforts to build transnational solidarity against exploitation.

Ashley Dawson, People's Power: Reclaiming the Energy Commons

[gravedangerahead]

On Palestine, G4S, and the Prison-Industrial Complex Speech at SOAS in London

(Angela Davis, December 13, 2013)

Transcript from the book Freedom Is a Constant Struggle

When this event highlighting the importance of boycotting the transnational security corporation G4S was organized, we could not have known that it would coincide with the death and memorialization of Nelson Mandela.

As I reflect on the legacies of struggle we associate with Mandela, I cannot help but recall the struggles that helped to forge the victory of his freedom and thus the arena on which South African apartheid was dismantled. Therefore I remember Ruth First and Joe Slovo, Walter and Albertina Sisulu, Govan Mbeki, Oliver Tambo, Chris Hani, and so many others who are no longer with us. In keeping with Mandela’s insistence of always locating himself within a context of collective struggle, it is fitting to evoke the names of a few of his comrades who played pivotal roles in the elimination of apartheid.

While it is moving to witness the unanimous and continued outpouring of praise for Nelson Mandela, it is important to question the meaning of this sanctification. I know that he himself would have insisted on not being elevated, as a single individual, to a secular sainthood, but rather would have always claimed space for his comrades in the struggle and in this way would have seriously challenged the process of sanctification. He was indeed extraordinary, but as an individual he was especially remarkable because he railed against the individualism that would single him out at the expense of those who were always at his side. His profound individuality resided precisely in his critical refusal to embrace the individualism that is such a central ideological component of neoliberalism.

I therefore want to take the opportunity to thank the countless numbers of people here in the UK, including the many then-exiled members of the ANC and the South African Communist Party, who built a powerful and exemplary antiapartheid movement in this country. Having traveled here on numerous occasions during the 1970s and the 1980s to participate in antiapartheid events, I thank the women and men who were as unwavering in their commitment to freedom as was Nelson Mandela. Participation in such solidarity movements here in the UK was as central to my own political formation as were the movements that saved my life.

As I mourn the passing of Nelson Mandela I offer my deep gratitude to all of those who kept the antiapartheid struggle alive for so many decades, for all the decades that it took to finally rid the world of the racism and repression associated with the system of apartheid. And I evoke the spirit of the South African Constitution and its opposition to racism and anti-Semitism as well as to sexism and homophobia.

This is the context within which I join with you once more to intensify campaigns against another regime of apartheid and in solidarity with the struggles of the Palestinian people. As Nelson Mandela said, “We know too well that our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians.”

Mandela’s political emergence occurred within the context of an internationalism that always urged us to make connections among freedom struggles, between the Black struggle in the southern United States and the African liberation movements—conducted by the ANC in South Africa, the MPLA in Angola, SWAPO in Namibia, FRELIMO in Mozambique, and PAIGC in Guinea Bissau and Cape Verde. These international solidarities were not only among people of African descent but with Asian and Latin American struggles as well, including ongoing solidarity with the Cuban revolution and solidarity with the people struggling against US military aggression in Vietnam.

A half-century later we have inherited the legacies of those solidarities—however well or however badly specific struggles may have concluded—as what produced hope and inspiration and helped to create real conditions to move forward.

We are now confronted with the task of assisting our sisters and brothers in Palestine as they battle against Israeli apartheid today. Their struggles have many similarities with those against South African apartheid, one of the most salient being the ideological condemnation of their freedom efforts under the rubric of terrorism. I understand that there is evidence indicating historical collaboration between the CIA and the South African apartheid government—in fact, it appears that it was a CIA agent who gave SA authorities the location of Nelson Mandela’s whereabouts in 1962, leading directly to his capture and imprisonment.

Moreover, it was not until the year 2008—only five years ago—that Mandela’s name was taken off the terrorist watch list, when George W. Bush signed a bill that finally removed him and other members of the ANC from the list. In other words when Mandela visited the US after his release in 1990, and when he later visited as South Africa’s president, he was still on the terrorist list and the requirement that he be banned from the US had to be expressly waived.

The point I am making is that for a very long time, Mandela and his comrades shared the same status as numerous Palestinian leaders and activists today and that just as the US explicitly collaborated with the SA apartheid government, it continues to support the Israeli occupation of Palestine, currently in the form of over $8.5 million a day in military aid. We need to let the Obama administration know that the world knows how deeply the US is implicated in the occupation.

It is an honor to participate in this meeting, especially as one of the members of the International Political Prisoners Committee calling for the freedom of Palestinian political prisoners, recently formed in Cape Town, and also as a member of the jury of the Russell Tribunal on Palestine. I would like to thank War on Want for sponsoring this meeting and progressive students, faculty, and workers at SOAS, for making it possible for us to be here this evening.

This evening’s gathering specifically focuses on the importance of expanding the BDS movement—the boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement called for by Palestinian civil society—which has been crafted along the lines of the powerful model of the antiapartheid movement with respect to South Africa. While there numerous transnational corporations have been identified as targets of the boycott, Veolia for example, as well as Sodastream, Ahava, Caterpillar, Boeing, Hewlett Packard, and others, we are focusing our attention this evening on G4S.

G4S is especially important because it participates directly and blatantly in the maintenance and reproduction of repressive apparatuses in Palestine—prisons, checkpoints, the apartheid wall, to name only a few examples.

G4S represents the growing insistence on what is called “security” under the neoliberal state and ideologies of security that bolster not only the privatization of security but the privatization of imprisonment, the privatization of warfare, as well as the privatization of health care and education.

G4S is responsible for the repressive treatment of political prisoners inside Israel. Through Addameer, directed by Sahar Francis, we have learned about the terrifying universe of torture and imprisonment which is faced by so many Palestinians but also about their hunger strikes and other forms of resistance.

G4S is the third-largest private corporation in the world—behind Walmart, which is the largest, and Foxconn, the second largest.

On the G4S website, one discovers that the company represents itself as capable of providing protection for a broad range of “people and property,” from rock stars and sports stars to “ensuring that travelers have a safe and pleasant experience in ports and airports around the world to secure detention and escorting of people who are not lawfully entitled to remain in a country.”

“In more ways than you might realize,” the website reads, “G4S is securing your world.” We might add that in more ways that we realize, G4S has insinuated itself into our lives under the guise of security and the security state—from the Palestinian experience of political incarceration and torture to racist technologies of separation and apartheid; from the wall in Israel to prison-like schools in the US and the wall along the US-Mexico border. G4S-Israel has brought sophisticated technologies of control to HaSharon prison, which includes children among its detainees, and Damun prison, which incarcerates women.

Against this backdrop, let us explore the deep involvement of G4S in the global prison-industrial complex. I am not only referring to the fact that the company owns and operates private prisons all over the world, but that it is helping to blur the boundary between schools and jails. In the US schools in poor communities of color are thoroughly entangled with the security state, so much so that sometimes we have a hard time distinguishing between schools and jails. Schools look like jails; schools use the same technologies of detection as jails and they sometimes use the same law enforcement officials. In the US some elementary schools are actually patrolled by armed officers. As a matter of fact, a recent trend among school districts that cannot afford security companies like G4S has been to offer guns and target practice to teachers. I kid you not.

But G4S, whose major proficiencies are related to security, is actually involved in the operation of schools. A website entitled “Great Schools” includes information on Central Pasco Girls Academy in Florida, which is represented as a small alternative public school. If you look at the facilities page of the G4S website you will discover this entry: “Central Pasco Girls Academy serves moderate-risk females, ages 13-18, who have been assessed as needing intensive mental health services.” G4S indicates that they use “gender-responsive services” and that they address sexual abuse and substance abuse, et cetera. While this may sound relatively innocuous, it is actually a striking example of the extent to which security has found its way into the educational system, and thus also of the way education and incarceration have been linked under the sign of capitalist profit. This example also demonstrates that the reach of the prison-industrial complex is far beyond the prison.

This company that provides “security” for numerous agencies as well as rehabilitation services for young girls “at risk” in the United States, while operating private prisons in Europe, Africa, and Australia, also provides equipment and services to Israeli checkpoints in the West Bank along the route of Israel’s apartheid wall as well as to the terminals from which Gaza is kept under continuous siege. G4S also provides goods and services to the Israeli police in the West Bank, while it offers security to private businesses and homes in illegal Israeli settlements in occupied Palestine.

As private prison companies have long recognized, the most profitable sector of the prison-industrial complex is immigrant detention and deportation. In the US, G4S provides transportation for deportees who are being ushered out of the US into Mexico, thus colluding with the increasingly repressive immigration practices inside the US. But it was here in the UK where one of the most egregious acts of repression took place in the course of the transportation of an undocumented person.

When I was in London during the month of October, speaking at Birkbeck School of Law, I spoke to Deborah Coles, codirector of the organization Inquest, about the case of Jimmy Mubenga, who died at the hands of G4S guards in the course of a deportation from the UK to Angola. On a British Airways plane, handcuffed behind his back, Mubenga was forcibly pushed by G4S agents against the seat in front of him in the prohibited “carpet karaoke” hold in order to prevent him from vocalizing his resistance. The use of such a term for a law enforcement hold, albeit illegal, is quite astonishing. It indicates that the person subject to the hold is compelled to “sing into the carpet”—or in the case of Mubenga—into the upholstered seat in front, thus rendering his protests muffled and incomprehensible. As Jimmy Mubenga was held for forty minutes, no one intervened. By the time there was finally an attempt to offer him first aid, he was dead.

This appalling treatment of undocumented immigrants from the UK to the US compels us to make connections with Palestinians who have been transformed into immigrants against their will, indeed into undocumented immigrants on their own ancestral lands. I repeat—on their own land. G4S and similar companies provide the technical means of forcibly transforming Palestinian into immigrants on their own land.

As we know, G4S is involved in the operation of private prisons all over the world. The Congress of South African Trade Unions (CO-SATU) recently spoke out against G4S, which runs the Mangaung Correctional Centre in the Free State. The occasion for their protest was the firing of approximately three hundred members of the police union for staging a strike. According to the COSATU statement:

G4S’s modus operandi is indicative of two of the most worrying aspects of neoliberal capitalism and Israeli apartheid: the ideology of “security” and the increasing privatization of what have been traditionally state run sectors. Security, in this context, does not imply security for everyone, but rather, when one looks at the major clients of G4S Security (banks, governments, corporations etc.) it becomes evident that when G4S says it is “Securing your World,” as the company slogan goes, it is referring to a world of exploitation, repression, occupation and racism.

When I traveled to Palestine two years ago with a delegation of indigenous and women-of-color scholar/activists, it was the first time the members of the delegation had actually visited Palestine. Most of us had been involved for many years in Palestine solidarity work, but we were all thoroughly shocked to discover that the repression associated with Israeli settler colonialism was so evident and so blatant. The Israeli military made no attempt to conceal or even mitigate the character of the violence they inflicted on the Palestinian people.

Gun-carrying military men and women—many extremely young—were everywhere. The wall, the concrete, the razor wire everywhere conveyed the impression that we were in prison. Before Palestinians are even arrested, they are already in prison. One misstep and one can be arrested and hauled off to prison; one can be transferred from an open-air prison to a closed prison.

G4S clearly represents these carceral trajectories that are so obvious in Palestine but that also increasingly characterize the profit-driven moves of transnational corporations associated with the rise of mass incarceration in the US and the world.

On any given day there are almost 2.5 million people in our country’s jails, prisons, and military prisons, as well as in jails in Indian country and immigrant detention centers. It is a daily census, so it doesn’t reflect the numbers of people who go through the system every week or every month or every year. The majority are people of color. The fastest-growing sector consists of women —women of color. Many are queer or trans. As a matter of fact, trans people of color constitute the group most likely to be arrested and imprisoned. Racism provides the fuel for maintenance, reproduction, and expansion of the prison-industrial complex.

And so if we say abolish the prison-industrial complex, as we do, we should also say abolish apartheid, and end the occupation of Palestine!

In the United States when we have described the segregation in occupied Palestine that so clearly mirrors the historical apartheid of racism in the southern United States of America—and especially before Black audiences—the response often is: “Why hasn’t anyone told us about this before? Why hasn’t anyone told us about the segregated highways leading from one settlement to another, about pedestrian segregation regulated by signs in Hebron—not entirely dissimilar from the signs associated with the Jim Crow South. Why hasn’t anyone told us this before?”

Boycott G4S! Support BDS!

Just as we say “never again” with respect to the fascism that produced the Holocaust, we should also say “never again” with respect to apartheid in South Africa, and in the southern US. That means, first and foremost, that we will have to expand and deepen our solidarity with the people of Palestine. People of all genders and sexualities. People inside and outside prison walls, inside and outside the apartheid wall.

Palestine will be free!

Thank you.

[argyrocratie]

(...)

"To describe this situation we, the Permanent Assembly Against the War, have spoken of a Third World War. We repeat it. This means not only that the war is spreading, but also that its effects and logics go beyond the spaces where it is fought, affecting also social struggles. Even admitting that a new multipolar world is emerging from this scenario, we do not believe that more and new political managers of the capitalist social order will be favourable for social justice, or that they will renounce the logic of war. On the contrary, an even greater expansion of the logic of war could result.

Even in a multipolar world, we don’t believe that an autonomous antiwar position could emerge when workers struggles and social movements are buried under the weight of geopolitics, or reduced to supporters of authoritarian regimes, confessional political projects, or national politics. As long as we remain passive or take positions in favour of one or the other belligerent side, we are digging our graves with our own hands. It is more urgent than ever to form some clear positions and work collectively for the practice of a transnational politics of peace, finding our resources in the ongoing struggles and manifold acts of refusal which today fuel an expanding and long-lasting opposition to the war.

From the very beginning of the war in Ukraine, we have witnessed the lack of a strong, transnational movement against the war. We have been galvanized, in the first weeks of the Israeli blind revenge and politics of death and ethnic cleansing in Gaza, by the people who protested massively on the streets of the world demanding a ceasefire. This massive and spontaneous opposition to militarist horror is crucial, and, beyond humanitarian sentiments, it expresses a claim for justice voiced by a multitude of subjects, workers, migrants, women and lgbtqi+ people, who do not want to be oppressed and exploited any longer.

Yet, denouncing massacres is not enough if we want to fight against the war and its reproduction. This is why we need to support the claim for freedom for Palestine and the call for an immediate ceasefire by strengthening our transnational connections. We shouldn’t perceive the atrocities committed by the IDF in Gaza as a mere continuation of the 75 years of occupation, nor the ones committed during the Hamas’ attacks as an inevitable continuation of the Palestinian Resistance. The Third world war scenario connects Palestine, Ukraine, Yemen, and is more than the mere sum of many local wars: it is reshaping what is happening in Palestine beyond the history of a long-lasting experience of colonial oppression.

It is up to us to reshape also our solidarity with Israeli war resisters and the Palestinians who are killed, exploited and oppressed, as part of a stronger, transnational opposition to the war, fuelled by the force of collective struggles against racism, exploitation, and patriarchy which could not be reduced to nationalist claims, State politics or authoritarian religious projects.

(...)

A shift towards the right is also happening at the other end of the political spectrum: ”democratic”’ forces embrace militarism as an unavoidable choice while pushing for racist policies in the name of national security; as authoritarian and oppressive regimes present themselves as leaders of an emerging “multipolar” world, sections of the left advocate that tyrannical, authoritarian, and reactionary forces and regimes represent a progressive resistance to “Western imperialism”. Many of those who one year ago supported Iranian women shouting “Woman, Life, Freedom” are now supporting the so-called Axis of Resistance, thus legitimising a political Islam which is not a rival of capitalism and makes patriarchy a foundation of its projects.

Nationalism ends up being the language of those who fight for the end of oppression, whether this oppression is represented by the Russian invasion of Ukraine, by the West, or by the unbearable ethnic cleansing of the Israeli State against Palestinians. We take a firm stand against people being exploited and oppressed because of their nationality, since we know that all nationalisms are exclusionary and oppressive. For building a transnational politics of peace, we must confront all these contradictions: as Iranian feminists clearly stated, we will not pursue a collective liberation by choosing between national fronts, we refuse that our only chance is that to choose between the “bad and the worse”. A transnational politics of peace begins by refusing the imposition of belligerent fronts as part of the war logic, and to organize our side: together with workers, women and queer people, migrants who are challenging that logic beyond the war fronts.

As we clearly stated right after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the war is limiting our possibilities of struggle, deploying its consequences beyond the horror of the battlefields. Movements for climate justice are increasingly repressed; war and militarism reinforce patriarchy and patriarchal societies reinforce a culture where violence against women and Lgbtq* persons are normalised. The ordinary disagreements of the European Union disappear when the war on migrants is to be fought. To practice a transnational politics of peace, we need to recognize that the war on workers, the war on women, the war on migrants are not side-effects but rather the everyday reality of the ongoing world war, which we must fight back.

This is why on February 24th, we will organise an on-line public meeting where voices from the different fronts of war can speak against the war, but also voices of those who, aware of its consequences, have taken a stance against the war. Together with class struggle organisations and social movements, together with war resisters and deserters from the various war fronts, together with feminists, migrants, precarious workers and environmental activists we aim to create an autonomous anti-war movement against the capitalist machine of death and despair. This event will hopefully also serve as a bridge towards the mobilization of March 8th, when we need to support the speaking out against the war in all the initiatives that are going to take place. We express our solidarity with our comrades in Kazakhstan, where the protests for March 8 have been prohibited."

[ot3]

for the ask game, 20 and 25!

20. What’s something you learned this year?

this year i learned about the existence of the tupamaros, a leftist guerilla group in uruguay that former president jose mujica used to be a part of. i havent dug into it yet but i nabbed a pdf of 'becoming the tupamaros - solidarity and transnational revolutionaries in uruguay and the united states' by lindsey churchill because it sounded super interesting.

25. Did you create any characters (in games, art, or writing) this year? Describe one

not really... i'm not an oc person for the most part. i enjoy character analysis but i often feel like im fundamentally incapable of Making Up A Guy that's anything more than just a cardboard cutout. maybe someday.

[teachingrounds]

Take a seat and let Vilissa Thompson school you from her positionality as a Black Woman Radical.

[orchidreign]

Reading the book Seven Fallen Feathers ...

I'm thinking about Angela Davis and how she advocates for transnational solidarity.

If you want to focus on decolonization around the world, look where you live now as well at its systems and history.

[toadstool-records]

For Palestine is a collection of recordings from 53 artists in solidarity with Palestinian liberation. 

100% of donations of For Palestine will support Palestinian organizing efforts worldwide and relief in Gaza, splitting between the Palestinian Youth Movement — a transnational grassroots and independent movement of Palestinian and Arab youth struggling toward the liberation of Palestine, and Anera’s rapid response relief aid: distributing hygiene kits, food, and blood donations in Gaza. Read More about Anera's efforts here.

Organized by GUNK (@hanapruz and @cecilianarose).

substack.com/@gunkyard

Photograph taken by Felix Walworth.

Incredibly proud to have some Toadstool Records artists be a part of this compilation ˗ˋˏ ♡ ˎˊ˗

🇵🇸 🍉

[rf-times]

Hello, I'd like to share with you this article I read about imperialist feminism.

https://redsails.org/imperialist-feminism/

You're one of the only radical feminists out here who speak out against imperialism so I thought this might be of interest to you. It touches on a lot of things like criticizing “Beauty without Borders” campaign in Afghanistan and also about how Iraqi women were forced into prostitution due to US imperialism and many other such things.

I hope you enjoy reading this and sorry if you already read this before. Thanks!

Thank you for this brilliant article, I hadn't seen it before! Sorry for the very delayed response: this is very insightful and highlights the exact issues that come with an imperialist feminism: I recommend everyone has a read of it as it an angle that is rarely addressed here on tumblr. I especially think the analysis of NGOs is very pertinent. And a very good outline of colonial feminism, how it is cannibalising and an acknowledgement of how women in imperial centres have leveraged imperialism believing it to empower them and other women without denouncing feminism as a whole.

"The question we might ask is why this campaign is called “India’s Daughter” rather than “America���s Daughter” or “The American Problem” because, after all, not only is sexual violence against women a massive issue in this country but also, around the same time as the Delhi rape, in Steubenville, Ohio, a sixteen-year-old girl was gang raped and sexually assaulted by a group of men. Why didn’t this case become the focus of a documentary and global campaign?"

"the message is that rape, sexual violence, and other forms of female oppression take place elsewhere: in the Global South, in cultures that the West considers backward and barbaric, and not only is it not a problem here, but it the responsibility of women in the West to wage a moral crusade to rescue their Brown and Black sisters. This then is the logic of imperialist feminism in the twenty-first century, shaped by the deeply racist framework of the “clash of civilizations,” which is based on the idea that the West is a superior culture because it believes in democracy, human rights, secularism, women’s rights, gay rights, freedom of speech, and a whole host of other liberal values, whereas the Global South is barbaric, misogynistic, driven by religion, and illiberal. From this follows the “white man’s burden” and the “white woman’s burden” to intervene through any means necessary, including wars of colonization, to “liberate” less fortunate women in other parts of the world."

"It is not enough to simply talk about rape culture and misogyny here and “backward cultures” there, but instead to ground our analysis of sexual violence within the structural context of neoliberal capitalism and the ways in which it is restructuring people’s lives in various locations in the twenty-first century. When our feminism is based in an anticapitalist and anti-imperialist politics, we have a real basis for solidarity, one, moreover, that is rooted in material interests rather than morality and charity. At the end of the day, it is not beauty campaigns that are going to liberate women but their own self-activity and a politics of transnational solidarity based on a rejection of neoliberalism and empire."

More of my favourite passages from this essay to come!

[dailyanarchistposts]

MAY DAY TODAY: GLOBALISE FROM BELOW

The working class in Malayasia is part of the global proletariat and shares its pain and power. Working class challenges become ever more global the more capital and states globalize. Hence, labour internationalism and transnational solidarities become inevitable for meeting the challenges of building a counter-hegemonic bloc that taps its energy both from the shop floor, in the working class districts, and among the peasantry, poor and unemployed.

The MTUC together with civil society groups in Malaysia need to form a formidable organisation (a counter-power) for addressing the social holocaust. As capital and states globalise, popular organisations must globalise, with a programme for democratic unions, unity among the people, social justice and struggle against the bosses and politicians. The alternative is grim, deeper inequality, and deep national and racial divisions in the class of the dispossessed.

Economic growth should only be celebrated if embedded in rights protection, a shifting balance of power to ordinary people, environmental sustainability, improved conditions, and the creation from below of a new and better order.