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if there is one thing radicals/progressives/liberals have failed to get right in the new age

navigatethestream:

its the notion of boycotts

you wanna know why the bus boycotts of the civil rights movement were so successful?

because an alternative black run transportation system was created for those who couldn’t walk to work or whatever they had to go

they didn’t just tell people “oh the bus enforces racist policies so don’t take it and FUCK if you can’t get to work on time or where you need to be!” 

they said “hey you’re paying to get on the bus and not even being given a seat let alone being ejected if a white passenger needs your seat. here’s a potentially better alternative where you pay to sit down and get to where you need to go” 

all this “boycott Target, Walmart, Monsanto owned companies” comes from a notion of boycott located in the politic of privileged white people

and that’s why they are largely unsuccessful

its why Obama just gave Monsanto the green light to commit even more fuckery to your food

its the reason why cooperation are considered people

its the reason why Walmart is allowed to usurp safety and labor regulations in their factories, and underpay their American workers

because you say “don’t spend your money there” and that’s the end of the story 

you expect people to locate their survival in a politic of “abstaining from unethical choices”

and then from there those unethical choices are somehow supposed to magically disappear. when really only a small percentage of people are able to boycott so many things

there wouldn’t be a movement located around the “99%” if 99% of people could really afford to stop shopping at the unethical places and stop buying the unethical brands

good luck with your hocus pocus activist logic 



So before I close I want to touch on a subject that has come up over and over again in radical circles and radical causes. It’s time to ask yourself some hard questions when thinking about taking direct action. Are you prepared to be locked up? Are you willing to stay locked up to protect your comrades and community? Solidarity is a gift and a responsibility. Please ask yourself and be honest. If you don’t believe you can commit to the safety of your comrades and community, take a different path. We can all use the skills we have in the ways we are comfortable. There is so much work to do. So many ways to push for the world we hope to see. Please be safe, think tactically, and keep standing for what you know to be right.

— april 2013 communique from jason sutherlin of the tinley park 5 (via no-vvolf)



TW: sexual assault, sexism
Angela Davis, Assata Shakur, and Elaine Brown, each at different points in their experiences organizing with the Black Panther Party (BPP), cited sexism and the exploitation of women (and their organizing labor) in the BPP as one of their primary reasons for either leaving the group (in the cases of Brown and Shakur) or refusing to ever formally join (in Davis’s case). Although women were often expected to make significant personal sacrifices to support the movement, when women found themselves victimized by male comrades there was no support for them or channels to seek redress. Whether it was BPP organizers ignoring the fact that Eldridge Cleaver beat his wife, noted activist Kathleen Cleaver, men coercing women into sex, or just men treating women organizers as subordinated sexual playthings, the BPP and similar organizations tended not to take seriously the corrosive effects of gender violence on liberation struggle. In many ways, Elaine Brown’s autobiography, A Taste of Power: A Black Woman’s Story, has gone the furthest in laying bare the ugly realities of misogyny in the movement and the various ways in which both men and women reproduced and reinforced male privilege and gender violence in these organizations. Her experience as the only woman to ever lead the BPP did not exempt her from the brutal misogyny of the organization. She recounts being assaulted by various male comrades (including Huey Newton) as well as being beaten and terrorized by Eldridge Cleaver, who threatened to “bury her in Algeria” during a delegation to China. Her biography demonstrates more explicitly than either Davis’s or Shakur’s how the masculinist posturing of the BPP (and by extension many radical organizations at the time) created a culture of violence and misogyny that ultimately proved to be the organization’s undoing.

— Why Misogynists Make Great Informants: How Gender Violence on the Left Enables State Violence in Radical Movements « INCITE! Blog (via mamma-wolf)



Only American audiences ask me, “What should I do?” I’m never asked this in third world. When you go to Turkey or Colombia or Brazil, they don’t ask you, “What should I do?” They tell you what they’re doing… These are poor, oppressed people, living under horrendous condition, and they would never dream of asking you what they should do. It’s only in high privileged cultures like ours that people ask this question… We can do anything. But people here are trained to believe that there are easy answers, and it doesn’t work that way. If you want to do something, you have to be dedicated and committed to it day after day. Educational programs, organizing, activism. That’s the way things change. You want a magic key, so you can go back to watching television tomorrow? It doesn’t exist.

— Noam Chomsky, Imperial Ambitions, p. 39-40 (via sgandhi)



USA LISTEN UP! The Palestine Solidarity Legal Support Initiative

stay-human:

Palestine solidarity activists now have the backing and support of major civil rights and legal organizations if they are harassed, intimidated, singled out, or pressured to shut down activism campaigns across the US. 

The Center for Constitutional Rights, in conjunction with the National Lawyers’ Guild and the Student Speech Working group coalition, has launched the Palestine Solidarity Legal Support Initiative (palestinelegalsupport.org) that is geared to “track incidents of repression and provide legal support to advocates facing legal and other challenges to their activism,” according to a press release.

The initiative urges Palestine solidarity activists to contact them to “request legal advice, to seek advocacy support, or to report incidents of repression” by going to the website, palestinelegalsupport.org, or calling them at (312) 212-0448.

They state:

Please contact us if you:

  • Face attempts to shut down, smear or hamper your activism
  • Believe your First Amendment rights to organize and protest have been violated
  • Need legal advice about BDS or other campaigns
  • Experience verbal or physical intimidation or assault
  • Experience different treatment than other groups on campus
  • Have questions about your rights to engage in activism
  • We are tracking incidents of repression — big and small.

We will help answer your legal questions, refer you to partners around the country, and provide you with resources to inform your work.

Awesome.



Idle No More ain’t Occupy. It’s all those voices rising up that many in the Occupy movement resisted when they/we called on Occupy to decolonize, learn anti-oppression, and understand the systemic differences of inequality amongst the ‘99%’. Idle No More is what Occupy perhaps aspired to be, but couldn’t fully be (in many, though not all places) because of it’s lack of grounding in the lived experiences of those communities most marginalized. Humble request to Occupy - join and support Idle No More - don’t co-opt or attempt to assimilate it. PS: Idle No More also isn’t just a movement; it’s more than that. It is about Indigenous nationhood, based on centuries of resistance to colonialism and an affirmation of inherent rights to self-determination.

—

Harsha Walia (via unpoliceyourmind)

For real. Occupy wants to get all over Idle No More, I guess they see it as sexy somehow? Or easily co-optable? (Won’t be.) Cause at least in my experience & many, many others, the LAST thing they wanted was POC voices, let alone POC leadership.

(via readnfight)



lakotapeopleslawproject: BREAKING NEWS: This morning Judge Gene Paul Kean of the 5th Circuit Court in Aberdeen, SD dismissed ALL charges in the trial against Brandon Taliaferro and Shirley Schwab. This is a huge victory for these two child advocates, who were targeted by the state for speaking out on behalf of sexually molested Lakota foster girls and accusing the DSS of protecting the abusive father. We are grateful to our research and investigative team, which helped expose the state’s actions in a special report last year. And we’re so grateful to our allies and supporters—especially those who made it to Aberdeen for the trial! You can read about Judge Kean’s decision here: http://lakota.cc/U8HK4c

lakotapeopleslawproject:

BREAKING NEWS: This morning Judge Gene Paul Kean of the 5th Circuit Court in Aberdeen, SD dismissed ALL charges in the trial against Brandon Taliaferro and Shirley Schwab. This is a huge victory for these two child advocates, who were targeted by the state for speaking out on behalf of sexually molested Lakota foster girls and accusing the DSS of protecting the abusive father. We are grateful to our research and investigative team, which helped expose the state’s actions in a special report last year. And we’re so grateful to our allies and supporters—especially those who made it to Aberdeen for the trial! You can read about Judge Kean’s decision here: http://lakota.cc/U8HK4c



Our strategy should be not only to confront empire, but to lay siege to it. To deprive it of oxygen. To shame it. To mock it. With our art, our music, our literature, our stubbornness, our joy, our brilliance, our sheer relentlessness – and our ability to tell our own stories. Stories that are different from the ones we’re being brainwashed to believe.

The corporate revolution will collapse if we refuse to buy what they are selling – their ideas, their version of history, their wars, their weapons, their notion of inevitability.

Remember this: We be many and they be few. They need us more than we need them.

Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.


—

Arundhati Roy, War Talk (h/t Eman)

This is everything.
This is everything this is everything this is everything we mean when we say friendship is political and storytelling and listening and teaching are political. Reclaiming space little by little through small acts of creativity and love in order to spark resistance

(via gole-yas)



tansheer:

carpe-pm:

“intellectualism” kind of turns me off. it’s like the $50 vocabulary only serves fellow “intellectuals”…like they cloak their language in enough scholarly morse code that only they can understand it and muse about the world’s ill’s over tea. it makes me think you don’t really care about solutions, just sounding like you might know them. like you don’t care to translate your ideas into terminology the average person can really understand and take heed to….basically like the downtrodden are one big science experiment you observe from suburbia. that’s why something like”fight the power” still resonates more than all the essays in the world. after a certain point it’s just say what the fuck you mean, you’re not getting graded anymore.

300% agree. Most self-proclaimed intellectuals write/research only to inflate their own egos and feel “smart” to themselves and their equally intellectual peers. Creating change isn’t usually on their agenda. It’s like, what’s the point of acquiring all that knowledge if you’re not actually planning on going out in the world and using it for the betterment of others?



Palestinian Queers for BDS Call upon all Queer groups, organizations and individuals around the world to Boycott the Apartheid State of Israel

politicalnighties:

masculinetoast:

By Palestinian Queers for BDS

“As Palestinian Queers, we see the Queer movements as political in their nature; and ones that analyze the intersections between different struggles, evaluate relations of power and try to challenge them. We firmly believe that fighting for the rights of oppressed and marginalized queer minorities cannot be separated from fighting against all forms of oppression around the world This is evident in the proud history of the queer movement worldwide, which has joined numerous global socio-political struggles against manifestations of oppression, imperialism, injustice, and discrimination wherever they exist. In continuation to this proud history, we Palestinian Queer activists, call upon the LGBTQI communities around the globe to stand for justice in Palestine through adopting and implementing broad boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) against Israel until the latter has ended its multi-tiered oppression of the Palestinian people, in line with the 2005 Palestinian civil society call for BDS [1]”

….

“Thus, we Palestinian queer activists call on Queer groups, organizations and individuals around the world to stand for justice and in the face of Israel’s pinkwashing efforts through joining the global campaign for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) against Israel until it fully complies with international law, and ends its occupation, colonization and apartheid. We call on you to:

  • Endorse the 2005 Palestinian civil society call for BDS, spread it in your Queer community.
  • Reject all invitations to speak at and collaborate with Israeli universities and institutions, in accordance with the guidelines for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel set by PACBI [2]
  • Campaign against all activities aiming to Pinkwash Israel’s crimes and oppression of the Palestinian people.
  • Organize in your respective communities to initiate BDS campaigns, or join existing ones.”