Elijah

Its value proposition is so inscrutable that when it melts down, almost any narrative could be crafted to plausibly explain it. It was the Fed! The government! The leftists who hate entrepreneurialism! It was the dark and devious forces of the shadowy deep state! Anything will do.

It will enforce the priors of those who placed their faith in crypto as a good substitute for the American dream — a crowd of Barstool Sports readers and tech libertarians and the types of people who used to buy silver bars from Alex Jones before they turned to Bitcoin.

The crypto-evangelist population skews heavily towards a sort of New Age libertarian, anti-government right wing-ism, and when they see their financial dreams evaporate, they will likely set their sights for revenge on the things they already despise. The broad effect will lead to a large number of newly angry, bitter, disillusioned, hopeless people who are too steeped in the culture wars to turn towards working class solidarity, and instead turn towards hate.

This assumption that of all the hues of God whiteness alone is inherently and obviously better than brownness or tan leads to curious acts; even the sweeter souls of the dominant world as they discourse with me on weather, weal, and woe are continually playing above their actual words an obligato of tune and tone, saying:

“My poor, un-white thing! Weep not nor rage. I know, too well, that the curse of God lies heavy on you. Why? That is not for me to say, but be brave! Do your work in your lowly sphere, praying the good Lord that into heaven above, where all is love, you may, one day, be born— white!”

I do not laugh. I am quite straight-faced as I ask soberly:

“But what on earth is whiteness that one should so desire it?”

Then always, somehow, some way, silently but clearly, I am given to understand that whiteness is the ownership of the earth forever and ever, Amen!

We know for a fact that making abortions illegal doesn’t prevent them, it only makes them dangerous. 

Unsafe abortion is believed to result in at least 22,800 deaths and millions of injuries annually.

And does the US really need more complicated pregnancies while hundreds of women are still dying from pregnancy or childbirth related complications? 

Do you really believe that this 11 year old rape victim should carry her pregnancy to full term? Go tell her that yourself. Tell her that you believe her rapist has more rights than she does. Tell her that her suffering doesn’t matter and that because the fetus of her rapist now has a heartbeat  - hers doesn’t matter anymore.

Tell her that it is ‘gods will’ when she is dying from preventable birth related complications.

We are going to see a great increase in poverty, abuse, child neglect, suicide and more. Many, many, many preventable deaths…it really is a travesty of humanity. 

So, are these not innocent lives lost too, or do you stop caring once they exit the womb?

The CDC director says fuck disabled and chronically ill lives. I’m also going to point out that you’re significantly more likely to be disabled if you are Native American or Black so this is also racist. The CDC out here officially cheering our deaths is just the perfect way to start 2022.

So while it IS good news that Omicron is apparently less deadly than previous mutations, it is NOT in any way acceptable for the CDC or the press to throw literal millions of people under the COVID bus and just shrug it off like, "Welp, they were sick anyway."

Hi! Thanks for the ask!

I've been kind of wrestling with how to answer this since I saw it, because if I'm honest I don't think rigid definitions are especially useful to anti-imperialist action, but then I do very strongly advocate a robust theoretical grounding for any leftist praxis. But there are very real pitfalls in over-defining, or with identitarian politics; in addition to the disintegration of left unity, or simply petty bickering over a theoretical world which can never be realised if we succumb to the division utilised by the ruling class, we also need to perennially ask ourselves, and indeed each other, ‘who does this serve?’

I think my best advice - to take a cue from Kwame Ture - is to attempt to define different systems and ideologies oneself, do the reading, be willing to admit one's misconceptions, and adapt one's understanding accordingly, in perpetuity. None of us will ever have perfect clarity regarding either present or historical realities, and the moment we think we do, it's time to reassess. I also don't wanna give too much of my own biases on discussing these things (as if that were possible). I have many valued friends and comrades across the spectrum of leftist thought, and orthodoxy can often lead to schisms or exclusionary policies over immaterial concerns.

My knowledge and understanding of anarchism is perhaps somewhat fragmented, being informed mostly by Kropotkin, Bakunin, snatches of The Invisible Committee and Total Liberation, and conversations with self-identified anarchists. I do think these are good sources, but this may also give rise to reinforcing falsehoods about anarchist thought being unorganised. The basic point with anarchism from my perspective, which is where I personally sympathise most, is in the abolition of hierarchies, and the devolution to decentralised, grassroots communities.

As for communism, I do want to stress that a very central element of most communist theory is that its principles need to be adapted to widely varying and diverse contexts. Such was Mao's modulation away from the urbanised and industrial imperial core to 'pre-industrial' rural Chinese material conditions.

I do think an awareness of historical left political movements can be very informative, even inspirational, but I’m not sure our current neoliberal global capitalist hegemony lends itself to the same kind of socialist exceptionalism as those bygone days. Unless we wanna condemn DPRK or something, but I personally think there are far better uses of leftist energies.

Many different currents of leftist thought emerged from their own unique conditions, and I think one spectre that still haunts Europe is a presumption of primacy. Mutualism is a branch of anarchist thought (propounded e.g. by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon) which posits a free market with a socialised credit system. Syndicalism is a branch of labour economics which espouses practical action to ensure workers’ rights in existing material conditions, via strikes, lockouts, etc., calling for decentralised, federal workers’ councils. Council communism is functionally very similar thereto, but is perhaps more utopian in its imagining of (decentralised, horizontal) state custody. These latter two are worth considering as developing in response to the Russian Revolution and a contemporary need to critique Leninism while still espousing Marxist principles.

Similar could be said of the slightly later emergence of the ‘Western Marxism’ of the Frankfurt School, though my understanding thereof is that it is more abstract and theoretical than other currents of leftist thought, and this arguably has lead to it becoming the domain of an educated elite (I don’t encounter many discussions of Marcuse outside of university settings).

It’s also worth acknowledging African and Arab socialist theory, but I am not as familiar with them as I’d like. Léopold Senghor’s work in Senegal was I think very important in establishing socialist infrastructure that was actively decolonial, and consciously eschewed the European traditions of Marx et al, and I think there is a lesson to be learnt there. Namely, we do not need to treat theory as dogmatic, even when we take cues from it (and we should take cues from it). But among the greatest critiques of the Soviet Union or China is their elevation of proletarian heroes into demagogue-like elites.

I think also, an important principle of Trotskyism (which I am not going to pretend to understand) is the idea that the closer an ideology is to our own, the more critical we need to be of it. We might call this ‘permanent revolution’. Such criticisms need not be practical rejection or opposition, though they certainly may take that form.

Ultimately, whether we're talking about classical Leninist internationalism, or green anarchism and ecosocialism, I think a key defining characteristic of leftist thought is ceded authority and solidarity. In order to truly combat capitalism in its highest stage, we must recognise that, as immortal as our science may be, it is not universal, and one of the greatest evils we are faced with in both our enemies and our selves is imposed will from a position of power. That is to say, I believe very strongly that any anti-imperialist praxis must be ever ready to step back and defer.

A spectre that will always haunt us is the impetus to impose our own will, to presume that we know best. L'égalité veut d'autres lois, though, as the song goes. We would all of us do well to remember what it really means to stand in solidarity, forever.

Further reading:

V.I. Lenin - What Is To Be Done?

Total Liberation

The Coming Insurrection de l'Comité Invisible

Pyotr Kropotkin - The Conquest Of Bread

Mikhail Bakunin archive

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon archive

Leon Trotsky - Permanent Revolution

Mao Zedong's Little Red Book

Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels - The Communist Manifesto

Joel Kovel & Michael Löwy - An Ecosocialist Manifesto

Murray Bookchin - The Ecology Of Freedom: The Emergence And Dissolution Of Hierarchy

Herbert Marcuse - An Essay On Liberation

Fredric Jameson - Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic Of Late Capitalism

Recommended reading list for black revolutionaries via AssataShakur.org

you a bitch

Most non-Black Americans don’t have mastery of AAVE but we do use it regularly because it’s the basis of slang and Internet culture, and basically always has been.

Often, even well-meaning non-Black people slip into it because the colonization of language makes it ubiquitous and there is no SAE equivalent.

So meme language is written like “when you home alone and…” or “we out here”, along with terminology and spelling (“when u home”) not just to save time but to capture a different mood; “thicc” means something different than “thick” just like “phat” used to till colonizers turned it into purely a joke.

And the thing is, some ideas you cannot express easily the same using SAE. “Bread” is a concept not of money but of future money, specifically, distinct from “dough”, which can be possessed. And structurally the stressed BIN is something that is immediately intelligible in AAVE but explaining in SAE takes a lot more work.

“The police BIN abusing” is roughly “the police are abusing people and have been for a long time”. Because this is so useful to express that specific idea, white people will sometimes use it, too.

But! Only in attempts to seem hip, casual, or with ironic mocking. AAVE remains fundamentally disrespected and not suitable for your written papers, work emails (as a serious thing), or in white spaces generally without that minstrel distance that assures, “A character is saying this, but I would never say it.”

Hi! Thanks for the ask!

I've been kind of wrestling with how to answer this since I saw it, because if I'm honest I don't think rigid definitions are especially useful to anti-imperialist action, but then I do very strongly advocate a robust theoretical grounding for any leftist praxis. But there are very real pitfalls in over-defining, or with identitarian politics; in addition to the disintegration of left unity, or simply petty bickering over a theoretical world which can never be realised if we succumb to the division utilised by the ruling class, we also need to perennially ask ourselves, and indeed each other, ‘who does this serve?’

I think my best advice - to take a cue from Kwame Ture - is to attempt to define different systems and ideologies oneself, do the reading, be willing to admit one's misconceptions, and adapt one's understanding accordingly, in perpetuity. None of us will ever have perfect clarity regarding either present or historical realities, and the moment we think we do, it's time to reassess. I also don't wanna give too much of my own biases on discussing these things (as if that were possible). I have many valued friends and comrades across the spectrum of leftist thought, and orthodoxy can often lead to schisms or exclusionary policies over immaterial concerns.

My knowledge and understanding of anarchism is perhaps somewhat fragmented, being informed mostly by Kropotkin, Bakunin, snatches of The Invisible Committee and Total Liberation, and conversations with self-identified anarchists. I do think these are good sources, but this may also give rise to reinforcing falsehoods about anarchist thought being unorganised. The basic point with anarchism from my perspective, which is where I personally sympathise most, is in the abolition of hierarchies, and the devolution to decentralised, grassroots communities.

As for communism, I do want to stress that a very central element of most communist theory is that its principles need to be adapted to widely varying and diverse contexts. Such was Mao's modulation away from the urbanised and industrial imperial core to 'pre-industrial' rural Chinese material conditions.

I do think an awareness of historical left political movements can be very informative, even inspirational, but I’m not sure our current neoliberal global capitalist hegemony lends itself to the same kind of socialist exceptionalism as those bygone days. Unless we wanna condemn DPRK or something, but I personally think there are far better uses of leftist energies.

Many different currents of leftist thought emerged from their own unique conditions, and I think one spectre that still haunts Europe is a presumption of primacy. Mutualism is a branch of anarchist thought (propounded e.g. by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon) which posits a free market with a socialised credit system. Syndicalism is a branch of labour economics which espouses practical action to ensure workers’ rights in existing material conditions, via strikes, lockouts, etc., calling for decentralised, federal workers’ councils. Council communism is functionally very similar thereto, but is perhaps more utopian in its imagining of (decentralised, horizontal) state custody. These latter two are worth considering as developing in response to the Russian Revolution and a contemporary need to critique Leninism while still espousing Marxist principles.

Similar could be said of the slightly later emergence of the ‘Western Marxism’ of the Frankfurt School, though my understanding thereof is that it is more abstract and theoretical than other currents of leftist thought, and this arguably has lead to it becoming the domain of an educated elite (I don’t encounter many discussions of Marcuse outside of university settings).

It’s also worth acknowledging African and Arab socialist theory, but I am not as familiar with them as I’d like. Léopold Senghor’s work in Senegal was I think very important in establishing socialist infrastructure that was actively decolonial, and consciously eschewed the European traditions of Marx et al, and I think there is a lesson to be learnt there. Namely, we do not need to treat theory as dogmatic, even when we take cues from it (and we should take cues from it). But among the greatest critiques of the Soviet Union or China is their elevation of proletarian heroes into demagogue-like elites.

I think also, an important principle of Trotskyism (which I am not going to pretend to understand) is the idea that the closer an ideology is to our own, the more critical we need to be of it. We might call this ‘permanent revolution’. Such criticisms need not be practical rejection or opposition, though they certainly may take that form.

Ultimately, whether we're talking about classical Leninist internationalism, or green anarchism and ecosocialism, I think a key defining characteristic of leftist thought is ceded authority and solidarity. In order to truly combat capitalism in its highest stage, we must recognise that, as immortal as our science may be, it is not universal, and one of the greatest evils we are faced with in both our enemies and our selves is imposed will from a position of power. That is to say, I believe very strongly that any anti-imperialist praxis must be ever ready to step back and defer.

A spectre that will always haunt us is the impetus to impose our own will, to presume that we know best. L'égalité veut d'autres lois, though, as the song goes. We would all of us do well to remember what it really means to stand in solidarity, forever.

Further reading:

V.I. Lenin - What Is To Be Done?

Total Liberation

The Coming Insurrection de l'Comité Invisible

Pyotr Kropotkin - The Conquest Of Bread

Mikhail Bakunin archive

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon archive

Leon Trotsky - Permanent Revolution

Mao Zedong's Little Red Book

Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels - The Communist Manifesto

Joel Kovel & Michael Löwy - An Ecosocialist Manifesto

Murray Bookchin - The Ecology Of Freedom: The Emergence And Dissolution Of Hierarchy

Herbert Marcuse - An Essay On Liberation

Fredric Jameson - Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic Of Late Capitalism

Recommended reading list for black revolutionaries via AssataShakur.org

More people need to understand Israel’s role in the growth and development of Hamas.

Hamas simply would not exist in the state we see today had it not been for Israeli involvement. Those interested can read the full text at the link, but in summary:

Israel viewed Hamas and Islamic militant forces as a counterweight to the overwhelmingly secular Palestinian resistance movements of the late 80′s and 90′s

Israel carried out massive campaigns of arrest and assassination against Palestinian leaders and intellectuals leading the secular charge, while largely ignoring Islamic forces that were slowly organizing and stockpiling weaponry

Israel at one point even arrested the eventual founder of Hamas, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, for stockpiling weapons. Yassin told Israeli intelligence that the weapons were to be used only against rival PLO (Palestinian Liberation Organization, a secular Umbrella Palestinian Organization that other groups operated beneath) and communists in Gaza. Israel released him not long after.

Israeli Brigadier General Yitzhak Segev confessed to Israel’s financing of the Hamas movement as a counterweight to the PLO & Marxist Palestinian movements: “The Israeli Government gave me a budget and the military government gives to the mosques.” referring to the mosques that Hamas forces used to organize in the early days

Israel is responsible for Hamas in more ways than one:

- They rose as a response to Israel’s settler colonialism

- Israel both actively and passively allowed them to flourish

- Israel actively targeted and crippled Palestinian forces that could’ve challenged Hamas

Hamas is, in every conceivable way, the fault of Israel. That we as Palestinians are left with nobody but an Islamic Militant Organization to fight against Israel is not of our choosing, but of Israel’s.