10/15/15
- What they mean when they say peace
- Real peace cannot be imposed; it can only emerge as a consequence of the resolution of conflict. hence the classic chant: no justice, no peace.
- That means you can’t have rich people and poor people without police to impose that unequal relation to resources. You can’t have whiteness, which infects and stabilizes that class divide, without a vast infrastructure of racist courts and prisons.
- The militarization of the police is not an aberration – it is the necessary condition of a society based on hierarchy and domination. it is not jus the police that have been militarized, but our entire way of life. Anyone who does not see this is not living on the business end of the guns. These are the forces of peace and justice, the mechanisms that “keep the peace” in a dramatically imbalanced social order.
- Peace now, justice later
- But real peace is impossible until we put an end to the violent imposition of inequalities.
- This is the only way forward, but its a daunting prospect. it is not surprising that people often blame those who stand up for themselves rather than coming to terms with how deep the divisions in our society run.
- They are not disturbing the peace; they are simply brining to light that there wasn’t any peace going on in the first palace.
- It takes courage to act as though one’s choices will influence the outcome for the better, without any guarantee that they can.
- Why we don’t make demands
- If we seek structural change, we need to set our agenda outside the scours of those who hold power, outside the structure of their institutions. we need to stop presenting demands and start setting objectives.
- That explains the ambiguous relations most leaders have with the movements they represent: to be of use to the authorities, they have to be capable of subduing their comrades, but their services would not be required at all if the movement did not pose some kind of threat
- Ferguson and beyond
- Property, the sanctity of which is asserted today by those who wring their hands about the looting in Ferguson, is revealed as a justification for robbing an entire people of their lives.
- The Dread Scott decision should make an anarchist out of any person of good conscience: for either one is bout to abide by the decisions of the Supreme Court, the highest law in the lad, or one is bound to abide one’s own conscience regardless of what any court rules.
- Police form the front line of capitalism and racism in every fight.
- It’s tempting to believe that the general public is becoming progressively disillusioned – with neoliberalism, with capitalism, with liberal notions of racial equality and “progress.” But just as Obama’s initial campaign re-mystified the disenchanted millions, we will likely see future political parties accomplish the same thing, as Syriza has in Greece. There’s a sucker born every minute, ready to fall for age-old tricks. As long as representational politics commands the hopes and imaginations of so many US citizens, electoral rhythms will modulate the pace of social movements – triggering them every so often, but suppressing them the rest of the time. We should be ready to seize the opportunities that arise when politicians fail to deliver on their promises, but in the long run we have to transform that disillusionment into a feeling of possibility outside the electoral system.
- I hear later that the first thing thrown was a bullhorn, which has all sorts of meaning if you think about it. We yelled at you for so long, this thing has proved useless! The time for talk is over!
- Prorate Confidant
- Sex work happens within a context of social control, but that is a result of capitalism, and is not unique to whoring. All economic exchange is coercive, and at the end of the day whores are neither more responsible for nor more exploited by patriarchy or capitalism than anybody else.
- I think it is worth asking why mutually consented acts between adults are so vilified to begin with.
- If the gender binary is a prison, it is one that few have managed to escape We are all both prisoners and guards, aren’t we?
- What if sex work is exploitative – not because selling sex is wrong or dirty, but because it is a form of economic exchange?
- High-end sex workers are like green capitalists: we exist to make people feel better about a consumer exchange that hasn’t really escaped the terms of the market but is supposed to feel like it has.
- Sometimes this industry hurts people, sometimes it heals them. Nothing is simple.
- Grin and Bare It All
- Statist feminists’ rhetoric of “fighting the sex industry” typically relies on State power in the form of legislative reform that criminalizes at least some aspects of sex work, increases the power of law enforcement, and regulates the sex industries. This regulation can have the unintended effect of farthing marginalizing the least privileged workers by making their safe participation in these economies prohibitively expensive or difficult.
- the problem is that (usually relatively privileged) non-sex-working feminists or former sex workers overwhelmingly take up space at the table where sex workers, especially marginalized and institutionally disenfranchised sex workers (such as street workers, drug users, trans women, single parents, and people of color) could be debating effective strategies for liberation, resistance, and survival. We should be finding ways to help each there avoid exploitation without contributing to a culture of stigma or perpetuating rhetoric that makes the criminalization of sex work a winning strategy for politicians and good PR for celebrities and CEOs.
- A prostitution arrest is effectively a scarlet letter, inextricably binding the offender to a life of indefinite systematic violence and exclusion.
- And article critiqued “enthusiastic consent” as a model that doesn’t accommodate the reality that many people have sex for other reasons beyond compelling erotic desire – for procreation, to please a partner, for an ego boost, for a sense of closeness, for practice, for money – and that none of these invalidate the fact that consent was given: “freely consenting to unwanted sex.” It left me wondering what sexual consent means in the context of an institution that is inherently exploitative and coercive, like all labor under capitalism and patriarchy?
- Perhaps consent can have very different parameters in different contexts – it feels futile to apply in my workplace the same standards I use in my romantic life to determine whether good consent was practiced.
- Syria can’t save Greece
- The euphoria of electoral victories swiftly fades, but it can take social movements decades to recover and reorient themselves on the new political terrain.
- Syria-style parties seem to be the logical structural answer: not to solve the crisis of capitalism, but rather to prolong it.
- Protestors had proclaimed “NO ONE REPRESENTS US” – not just as a complaint about the existing parties, but also as a rejection of representation and liberal democracy.
- Faced with so much unrest, the ruling order suddenly has a use for new radical political parties that promise to embody calls for “real democracy” within the existing system. Whatever the intentions of the participants, their structural role is to rebuild trust in electoral democracy, neutralize uncontrollable extra-parliamentary movements, and reestablish capitalism and the state as the only imaginable social order.
- In tumultuous times, those who benefit from the prevailing order are willing to risk small changes in order to avoid big ones.
- If all goes according to precedent, these parties will re-stabilize capitalism and state power, then pass from the stage of history, to be replaced by – or become – the next defenders of the status quo.
- Our dreams will never fit in their ballot boxes
- What seems pragmatic today will be an embarrassing mistake that everyone remembers with a headache tomorrow. Isn’t that always how it goes with parties?
- Once they are in office, they must act according to the logic of their post, not the logic of the movement.
- That’s why it’s so dangerous for parties like Syriza to legitimize the idea that the government could solve the problems of capitalism by implementing more socialistic policies. When they fail to deliver on their promises, some of those who believed in them will turn to far-right parties who claim to have a more pragmatic way to accomplish the same thing. This is already happening all around Europe.
- If Syriza style parties are the latest strategy for the preservation of stat and capital, we should answer with a renewed commitment to complete self-determination, opening new opportunities for others to imagine a world without capitalism or political parties. Whoever is elected, let us be ungovernable.
- Masters tools
- If someone in a black bloc smashes a window, the resulting monetary impact is as irrelevant as the motivating anger; what matters is the brief window of unpredictability that ensues. When we think of attack in this way, we can ask how much unpredictability an act will create, how long it will last, how accessible the gaps in projection will be to us or anyone else.