Revolutionary Thoughts

1990 -  When developers and the town of Oka wanted to start building a golf course on stolen land that belonged to them and that contained a sacred grove and a burial ground, the Mohawk tribe around Kanehsatake, Quebec, rose up and occupied the area. 

Ultimately the stand-off with the police and the Canadian army lasted 78 days before the warriors gave up the occupation. The building of the golf course was cancelled. 

Happy birthday, Lyudmila Pavlichenko! (July 12, 1916)

You can find a variety of studies on this topic, I'm going to link some here.

This study addresses the argument: "democracies are more environmentally friendly". "Democracy" in this context is referring to primarily wealthy liberal democracies. Although I have problems with essentially every mainstream method of calculating democracy (lol...) the study still proves the issue of pollution outsourcing:

We hypothesize that democracies can improve their record and become “greener” not only through genuinely domestic environmental protection, but also through outsourcing environmental impacts of their consumption to other countries. Analyzing data on greenhouse gas emissions, pollution offshoring, and democracy for more than 160 countries since the 1990s, we report evidence that the offshoring of environmental pollution contributes to the superior environmental record of democracies. The main policy implication is that democracies, per se, may not have a better environmental record than autocracies when considering global environmental impacts. This implies that democratic countries, in particular, should re-orient their environmental protection efforts from merely domestic to global environmental consequences of local economic activity.

For the record, the above study uses the V-Dem dataset for "democracy". If you choose to look that up, it looks about how you'd expect: US, UK, Western Europe, Australia, and Japan are perpetually in the freedom democracy zone for the most part each year.

The New York Times posted an article on pollution outsourcing in 2018 that includes some studies:

The United States, for its part, remains the world’s leading importer of what the researchers call “embodied carbon.” If the United States were held responsible for all the pollution worldwide that resulted from manufacturing the cars, clothing and other goods that Americans use, the nation’s carbon dioxide emissions would be 14 percent bigger than its domestic-only numbers suggest.

Between 1995 and 2015, the report found, as wealthier countries like Japan and Germany were cutting their own emissions, they were also doubling or tripling the amount of carbon dioxide they outsourced to China.

But when I say "pollution outsourcing" I am not exclusively referring to carbon emissions. I mean literally all forms of pollution are being outsourced. From Waste Colonialism: A Brief History:

Exporting trash involves more than just environmental harm; it reflects systemic inequality and a historical pattern of exploitation. The term draws a direct line between historical colonialism, where natural resources and labor were stripped from colonized regions, and the current waste trade, where the burden of environmental damage is once again pushed onto those least responsible for it.

The logic is elementary: when consumption – primarily of plastic – continues to rise, there are only two solutions to eliminate the waste: incineration or dumping. Incineration becomes the only plausible alternative if a country does not allow large-scale dumping within its borders. The problem? Incinerating plastic carries a significant carbon footprint, which most countries responsible for plastic waste are trying to reduce. As a result, some choose to avoid both options and instead export their waste elsewhere, preferably to a country with weaker waste regulations.

For years, high-income countries, especially across Europe, in the US, Japan, and Australia, have been exporting plastic waste abroad under the claim that it will be recycled, but the reality is far more complex. A report by the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA) published last year revealed that in 2023, the Netherlands, Germany, the UK, Belgium, France, Italy, the US, Japan, and Australia were among the top waste exporters to non-OECD countries.

For over 20 years, China was the world’s biggest importer of plastic and other waste. Since it lacked local resources, starting in the 1980s–90s, the country accepted trash from richer countries to use as raw materials for its industries. However, this mechanism led to serious pollution, health risks and illegal dumping in the country. In 2018 China banned the import of plastic waste with its National Sword Policy. Since then, Western countries have been redirecting their exports to other parts of Asia and Africa. Countries like Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand, and the Philippines have taken up much of the imports, many arriving illegally or misdeclared. As for Africa, Ghana is slowly becoming a dumping ground, and Mexico and Peru in Latin America are following its steps.

In case it's not clear to anyone, I'm using 'downstream' as a metaphor for 'occurring solely as a result of' or 'following the pattern of'. In this case, that would mean that patriarchy & misogyny are initially created in reference to, say, a class of people who are presumed capable of giving birth; transmisogyny would then target transfeminized people as a result of some combination of their [purported] resemblance to this class (roughly cis women), and their differences from this class. According to this reading, trans women encounter misogyny because of their similarity to cis women, and transphobia due to their differences from cis women. We could understand transmisogyny as being an equation of misogyny + transphobia.

I think we can see this isn't the case from a study of the historical processes that created the modern 'colonial gender binary' (following María Lugones). English, French, Spanish, Portuguese etc. colonizers in Africa, the Americas, and Oceania positioned Indigenous peoples as inadequately sexually dimorphic and inadequately disparate in gendered behaviour (through travel writing, legal systems, military violence, 'ethnographic' or 'anthropological' and medical practices including measurements of African people's genitals, economic intervention including paying only certain "genders" for certain kinds of work, etc.). The strategy here is both ideologically to justify colonial government, and to divide and conquer by disrupting Indigenous forms of government and social organisation (also per María Lugones iirc).

We recognise that the creation of sex is part of the same process as the creation of "gender": that is, the construction of binary "sex" where gamete production, chromosome type, hormone cycles, 'secondary sexual characteristics', and genitals all line up, is the biomedical justification for the construction of binary "gender," where moral qualities and social / economic roles fall into place along those same lines—rather than sex being "prior to" gender.

In the same way, a growing body of scholarship recognises "gender" (here read: "the modern colonial gender binary") and "race" as produced concomitantly. Indigenous societies are morally inferior, because Indigenous genders are not created and policed along the same lines as European ones, because Indigenous bodies are in-between and sexually indeterminate, because Indigenous peoples are racially inferior, because their societies are morally inferior, as evidenced by their genders being different... and so on and so forth. The idea that moral behaviours are heritable, that they create physical and thus racial difference over generational time, is the mechanism by which Europeans' (and some Europeans' more than others!) racial superiority is supposedly built.

On the flip side, Europeans are morally superior, and their civilisations more advanced (literally, more 'forward' in time than the atavistic Indigenous people's, closer to the apotheosis of human achievement), both as a result of and as evidenced by the fact that white "women" are supposedly cleanly differentiable from white "men" in body, in dress, in behaviour, in sexuality, etc. So policing the boundaries of "womanhood" or "femininity" is policing a gendered boundary, yes—but by the same token, it is policing a racial one (following Kyla Schuller).

So an idea that racial and moral inferiority is both caused and evidenced by a failure to neatly align "physical sex" with "social role", and an abjection of specific Indigenous social, sexual and economic roles (n.b. the point here is not that Indigenous gender systems are perforce perfect utopias or whatever), give us transfeminization and transmisogyny—but the same process also gives us the ideal of white, bourgeois, cisgender, heterosexual womanhood.

Things that we might take to be quintessential instantiations of misogyny—forced birthing or valuation primarily for one's 'utility' in giving birth, reproductive labour (which btw means 'all the work, including domestic work, required to produce the conditions necessary for the proletariat to persist', not 'reproduction' as in 'birth-giving'), division into a protected class that is spared the worst sorts of patriarchal violence in exchange for morally 'advancing the race', and an abjected class (some trans women, some sex workers) who are not under the same protective control—

—all of these things have race, imperialism, and transmisogyny already baked in.

See also:

/tagged/gender and colonialism

Members of the Mandalay People's Defense Forces head to the frontline amid clashes with the Myanmar military junta in northern Shan State, Dec. 10, 2023.

Ejercito Popular Revolucionario (EPR)

The only threat I could see is a flood of propaganda from captialists, but really, are the citzens of these countries, gullible enough to fall for propaganda? Are they really too stupid to see there own self interest. Come on.

I think this question starts from a liberal assumption I reject outright: that "free speech" exists outside of power. It doesn't.

Every society reproduces itself ideologically. Liberal capitalism does it. Socialism does it. Feudalism did it. The question isn't whether ideology exists. It's which historical order is reproducing itself through it.

Every hegemonic order rests on three mutually reinforcing pillars: material capabilities, institutions, and ideas. Ideas aren't decorations sitting on top of society. They're one of the things that holds society together. Schools, media, universities, films, NGOs, think tanks, even the language we use to describe politics, they all participate in reproducing a particular "common sense."

Which brings me to the United States.

People often say, "But America allows criticism!" Sure. You can call the President an idiot. You can complain about healthcare. You can say Congress is corrupt.

What you generally don't do is question the basic legitimacy of capitalist property relations themselves, because those assumptions have already become common sense. That's hegemony. The system doesn't need to silence every critic when most people already understand the world through concepts the system itself helped produce.

Socialist states came into existence under very different historical conditions. Civil wars. Coups. Sanctions. Invasions. Covert operations. Colour revolutions. Intelligence agencies funding opposition media. Whether one agrees with their policies or not, it's not irrational that they view information as another terrain of geopolitical struggle rather than some neutral marketplace of ideas.

"But if socialism is good, why would it fear criticism?"

I would probably flip the question around. Why assume criticism exists outside the struggle for hegemony?

Ideas don't descend from heaven. They come attached to institutions, funding, ownership structures, and international power. A newspaper isn't just a newspaper. A social media platform isn't just an app. They exist inside a historical structure dominated by particular states, corporations, and class interests.

Now, does that automatically justify censorship?

No. But I'm not in the business of handing out moral gold stars.

A genuinely confident historical bloc should ideally rely more on consent than coercion. If a state finds itself increasingly dependent on repression to preserve itself, that may indicate its hegemony is weakening rather than strengthening.

But the inverse liberal assumption, that information is naturally neutral until the evil state contaminates it, is just as ideological.

Finally, the point about people being "too smart to fall for propaganda" misunderstands how hegemony works. Hegemony doesn't require people to be stupid. It requires institutions that make one worldview feel so normal that alternatives stop looking like alternatives at all.

That's why I'm reminded of Robert Cox's most famous line: "theory is always for someone and for some purpose."