But normal has nothing to do with us

Haiti have agreed to change both their home and away World Cup kits after they were told by FIFA that the Caribbean nation’s shirt had been deemed “political”.

The design contained an image of several freedom fighters raising the country’s flag, based on the final battle of the Haitian Revolution, which freed the island’s inhabitants from slavery under French rule. [...]

“Vertières is the site of the last battle leading to our independence, fought on November 18, 1803. Ironically, the team qualified for the 2025 World Cup on November 18, 2025. The federation has not issued any (further) statement on the matter; they simply asked Saeta to change it.”

Colombian kit manufacturer Saeta released their own statement on social media late on Tuesday evening, in which they insisted the design was intended to demonstrate “the pride, resilience and spirit of the Haitian people.” [...]

The Haitian Revolution, led by ex-slave Toussaint Louverture, has been recognised as the only successful slave revolution in recorded human history to have resulted in a nation governed by its former captives.

However, this is not the first time that Haiti have been forced to amend a design last-minute. During this February’s Winter Olympics, the IOC deemed an image of Louverture on the nation’s ski-suits to not comply with regulations governing athlete expression, with designer Stella Jean forced to hand sew over the revolutionary’s face.

Decisively securing my place as the Queen of banana discourse by going to a collective farm and hacking down some of the darn things myself with a big machete. It fucking ruled

This is a bungkalan, a collective farm, in San Jose Del Monte, less than an hour outside Manila. The farm was created by the Bulacan Farmers Association, which is affiliated to the Kilusung Magbubukid ng Philipinas (Peasant Movement of the Philippines, the main peasant union in the country). A bungkalan is a collective assertion to the peasants' rights to till the land, a demonstration that they are developing and cultivating the land and therefore it should belong to them. The bananas sell for 18 pesos a kilo, and our motley crew of trade unionists helped harvest around 1500kg. They harvest once a month. The proceeds are split 50:50 between the peasants who work the land and inputs for the farm. They also successfully campaigned for a school to be built in the area for their children.

The Association formed in 1995, and in 1997 secured land titles to land belonging formerly to the Araneta family, a huge landowning clan directly descended from Spanish settlers. They own huge tracts of land in Negros, where sugar workers are paid around 200 pesos a day (£2.43) to work their lands. The Aranetas have been trying to get the land back ever since, hiring security guards to destroy their crops. Bananas have deep roots and are hard to pull up - hence their use in the bungkalan. They are also fighting off the Viller and Ayala families, along with Japanese corporations, who want to turn the area into a speculative development and financial hub. The fight of the Bulacan farmers is against some of the largest and most vicious actors in the Philippines semi feudal, semi colonial system.

I was lucky enough to sit down for a long time with the KMP organisers for the area to plan out some solidarity efforts we can do from the UK to support the struggle of the Bulacan farmers. One of the efforts we arrived at is raising money for a solar powered water pump. Their petrol one is too expensive to run due to the runaway cost of fuel resulting from the Iran War. As well as increasing production, irrigation also increases the claim that the peasants have to the land (lands without irrigation are exempted from land reform programmes). I'm waiting for them to send me the exact model and costings, but even the high end ones while unaffordable for peasant farmers on their own are easily within reach of people with access to hard currencies. So watch this space.

To read more about the struggle of farmers in San Jose Del Monte (as well as the extreme political repression they have endured which I'll write about separately tomorrow), see here:

Every year on the eleventh of July, enormous bonfires are built across Northern Ireland and adorned with Irish flags, along with photographs and effigies of Irish politicians or people from Northern Ireland who vocally identify as Irish in public life more generally, along with the flags of groups British loyalists perceive as being connected to Ireland; Palestinian flags have been a common sight on loyalist bonfires for decades.

The "KAT" acronym crudely scrawled on the Irish flag at the centre of the image stands for "Kill All Taigs", with "taig" being a slur for Irish people derived from the given name "Tadhg". The "Stop the Boats" rhetoric of the broader British far-right is present too, but it takes a backseat to the age old bigotry which sees Belfast divided by literal walls on lines of ethnic cleansing and pogroms perpetrated by the grandparents of, parents of, and, in many cases, the same people who participated in Monday night's pogrom.

Gazbia Sirry (Egyptian, 1925-2021)

So it is not enough to simply be against capitalism, and to act in that opposition. What's crucial and what sets all of these ideologies apart is their program, what they wish to accomplish and maintain. If you don't have those goals, defined by affirmatives instead of negatives, you're not insignificantly likely to functionally align yourself with reactionary tendencies. Anti-capitalism by itself is not a step, it's raising your foot, and deciding a defined program is actually putting your foot down, taking the first step and setting a direction. What sets marxism apart is that its opposition to capitalism is not only total and aimed at its foundations (this by itself is not unique!), its program of change is also total and aimed at completely replacing the infrastructure of the capitalist mode of production, it identifies why it must be overcome using non-capitalistic frameworks, and from that builds a specific, total, and materialist program for what should come after. Non-revolutionary and non-marxist currents seek a set of reforms and transformations, of varying intensity and depth. Revolutionary and non-marxist currents construct programs that are entelechies*, such as returns to pre-capitalist modes of production, unable to actually exist and sustain itself, but nevertheless seeking as similarly a profound destruction and rebuilding as marxism.

Les Femmes Palestiniennes (1974, Jocelyne Saab)

youtube (eng subs). vimeo (spanish subs) / runtime: 10mins

the bar for "passing" as a woman as a brown or black person is much higher, black and brown people are consistently expected to modify their bodies in "unnatural" ways to a much greater degree to emphasize their femininity, whether it's straightening their hair, silicone pads, wearing more makeup, more revealing clothing, undergoing cosmetic surgeries to shift fat around their body, etc

similarly, most of the practices and procedures decried as "mocking" and "misogynistic", as "defiling" womanhood, in so many posts by white transfeminists on this website are the same fucking practices used by women, cis and trans, who are not white, trying to make their womanhood more legible in societies that associate femininity with whiteness

when you decry the prevalence of "obviously fake tits and thighs and garish makeup" in drag, often paired with the assertion that the intent is simply to ridicule womanhood and no one could genuinely derive gendered actualization from it, it echoes much of the criticism levied at travestis and the prevalence of silicone injections among predominantly black transfeminine people in Brazil, who wished to emphasize a particular standard of beauty that may not be considered "natural" to white cis women in America.

this, the travesti's beautification practices being contrasted negatively with the emerging field of transsexuality, the push by medical institutions to make existing embodiments of what we now call transfemininity conform to the transsexual patient's more "natural" and "dignified" womanhood, which more closely resembles the eurocentric beauty standards set by American sexologists and captured by the Brazilian clinic, is intrinsically tied to the travesti's greater marginalization from cis society

Ellen Meiksins Wood, Empire of Capitalism

Tony Norfield, The City

Before getting his green card, husband spent several months with a letter that said "you have permission to stay here and have broken no laws but also this doesn't count as a visa and anybody in DHS or ICE can at any time decide to throw you out of the country for no reason." Does that count as having legal status? I have no idea! All his forms were approved, and everything was done by the book, but at the same time if his application had been turned down, then he retroactively would have been overstaying a visa, and been penalized accordingly. He was a quantum il/legal immigrant until DHS collapsed the legality wave function by issuing him a green card.