A Sense of Doubt blog post #3427 - Crimethinc: A World on the Brink: 2023-2024 Review

A Sense of Doubt blog post #3427 - Crimethinc: A World on the Brink: 2023-2024 Review

Just a quick share today.

Had to re-organize as all the blog posts I was working on for Friday 7/5 through Sunday 7/7 were not yet ready for publication.

That's why I am in charge. :-)

Thanks for tuning in.


https://mailchi.mp/crimethinc/a-world-on-the-brink-2023-in-review?e=5b54d57630

The Year in Review: A World on the Brink

This year, war spread around the world along with ecological and economic crisis, showing what the consequences will be if we are not able to change course on a planetary scale. At the same time, a variety of inspiring struggles continue to play out, showing the tremendous untapped potential of humanity. 2024 will probably be a roller coaster ride. In the United States, the election season is shaping up to be chaotic, and that will spill over into social conflict on the streets. It’s up to us to show that, rather than choosing between fascists and centrists determined to preserve a self-destructing system, people can come together in networks based in solidarity, mutual aid, and a more ambitious vision of what our lives could be. In our year in review report, we assess our own humble efforts over the past year, including the coverage we have provided from within social struggles and the projects we have contributed to them.

The Ongoing Catastrophe in Palestine

According to the United Nations "Children and Armed Conflict" report, in the year 2022—the year that Russia invaded Ukraine—a total of 2985 children were killed in the world's major conflict zones, including Sudan, Somalia, Syria, Ukraine, Afghanistan, and Yemen. Over the past three months, the Israeli military has killed three times that many children in the Gaza strip alone. Why are they doing this?   The Israeli military is one of the most sophisticated military forces in the world, equipped with cutting-edge technology. They could take a variety of measures to avoid killing children. They are intentionally choosing not to. Now that a ceasefire has come and gone, it appears that the only way to limit the number of casualties is for ordinary people to block the flow of arms and money to the Israeli government.   On December 17 and 18, demonstrators in Oregon and Washington shut down two Amazon warehouses and a construction site to impose consequences for Amazon’s complicity in the bloodbath in Gaza and the destruction that the company is wreaking on the natural world. This is the latest in a series of solidarity actions around the United States that show the effectiveness of decentralized direct action.

Continuing the Fight against Cop City

Over the past two years, the movement to #StopCopCity and defend Weelaunee Forest has become one of the fiercest struggles in North America. Opponents of a proposed police militarization facility known as Cop City have repeatedly destroyed equipment and forced contractors to withdraw from the construction. In retaliation, the authorities have killed one forest defender and pressed outlandish racketeering charges against 61 more, including the members of a legal support collective. The first of those defendants is scheduled to stand trial beginning in early January 2024.   In the latest installment of our comprehensive history of the movement, we trace its trajectory from the City Council vote in June 2023 to November's Block Cop City mobilization and its aftermath, exploring how the movement has sought to maintain a participatory and confrontational character even under tremendous pressure.

Argentina

Starting with the Brexit vote in 2016, far-right politicians have won a series of victories by falsely portraying themselves as rebels against the ruling elite, taking advantage of simmering discontent and the ways that liberals and leftists have associated themselves with the prevailing institutions. This explains why, at the end of November, self-proclaimed “anarcho”-capitalist Javier Milei was elected president of Argentina.   Mind you, there’s no such thing as “anarcho”-capitalism. It’s an oxymoron. It is fundamentally illogical to pretend to reconcile anarchism—the pursuit of a world without hierarchies—with capitalism, which is a way of creating and intensifying hierarchies. Milei's “anarcho”-capitalism involves no anarchism, but plenty of capitalism: immediately upon taking office, he mobilized the police in an attempt to crush dissent in Argentina.   In “Back to the Future,” our Argentine correspondent explains how this is just the latest chapter of a story that is very old in Argentina. In a follow-up interview, “So-Called Neoliberalism and Its False Critics,” other Argentinian anarchists discuss the decades of social struggle and economic restructuring that created the conditions in which Milei came to power.

If anyone has yet to be convinced that anarchism and capitalism are fundamentally irreconcilable, we prescribe this classic episode of our podcast. Speaking of which…

Audio

We’ve continued to release audio versions of our articles at a stiff clip. The new episodes include  “The Fight against Cop City Confronts Unprecedented Repression,” “The Return of the Ultraliberal Right in Argentina,” “How They Stopped Work at Raytheon,” “Shutting Down the Port of Tacoma,” and “In Memory of Dmitry Petrov.”

In Memoriam

On December 6, 2023, Alfredo Maria Bonanno passed away after more than half a century of anarchist activity. In his memory, we have released a short video titled “Let’s Be Done with Waiting.” It is a film adaptation of the final section of one of his best-known works, Armed Joy.   We also prepared a short history of Bonanno’s life, exploring the events that played a formative role in the development of his ideas.

Last spring, we published a biography of the Russian anarchist Dmitry Petrov after he was killed while fighting in Ukraine. Over the course of a decade and a half, Dmitry participated in revolutionary struggle in Russia, Belarus, Rojava, and Ukraine against a backdrop of intensifying tyranny. The story of his life offers insight into the recent history of the former Soviet Union; it is an inspiring example of all the things an anarchist can accomplish, even in adverse conditions. Active Distribution has published a small book collecting our biography alongside some of his writings and those of his comrades. PM Press is now distributing these books in the United States.

Finally, we are grieved to report the passing of Klee Benally early on December 31. Klee was a Diné land defender, organizer, author, and musician. A dedicated and demanding proponent of Indigenous liberation, Klee fought on a wide range of fronts, emphasizing the importance of both concrete and spiritual forms of resistance and critically exploring the possibility of an Indigenous anarchy. In his memory, we present an interview that we conducted in 2009 with Klee and his siblings in the punk band Blackfire.

Languages

Over the course of 2023, we published dozens of articles in Spanish; over a dozen in French, Italian, and Polish; and several articles each in Basque, Bulgarian, Chinese, Czech, German, Greek, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, and Turkish. We also added texts in Danish, Dutch, Japanese, and Kurdish. We’ve published posters and zines in many of those languages, as well. You can find a comprehensive guide to our non-English content here.   We’ve recently added a Turkish version of our introduction to anarchism, To Change Everything. It’s now available in a total of 34 languages.   We are grateful to all the translators around the world who have worked with us to help us make our work accessible to more people. If you can help us translate anything we have published into any language, please contact us!

Upcoming Events

Since you last heard from us here, we tabled and presented at the Amsterdam Anarchist Book Fair and some other events.   On January 26 and 27, 2024, at the first International Gathering of Anarchist and Anti-Authoritarian Practices against Borders in Tijuana, Mexico, the Ex-Worker Podcast will present a curated series of anarchist films from around the world. In addition to showing our own published shorts and debuting some new material, we will curate a series of anarchist features, dramas, and experiments.   If you hurry, there’s still time to submit your work!

Happy New Year!

Thank you so much for sticking with us through 2023. As always, everything we do is copyright free, produced and distributed by volunteer labor. You’ll notice that we rarely pester you with fundraising requests. If you wish to support us financially, you can do so here—but the very best thing you could do for us is to undertake your own projects in the same spirit, or volunteer some of your creativity to our efforts.   Finally, we invite you to enjoy this year’s edition of “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year,” a widely beloved holiday tradition.

Support Our Work

The Gaza Solidarity Movement Since you last heard from us here, a wave of protest activity has swept universities around the world, as students and their supporters have established encampments and building occupations in solidarity with Palestinians facing genocide at the hands of the Israeli military. As we said at the beginning, this is a generational clash between those who benefit from a world order founded on colonial violence and those who consider it unconscionable. Although the encampment movement peaked with the end of the semester on most campuses, the larger movement in solidarity with Palestine and against colonial violence worldwide continues. To support demonstrators, we offer this list of action resources covering security culture, digital security, phone safety, protective gear, direct action strategy, street tactics, jail support, and first aid. The Gaza Solidarity Encampments On April 17, students at Columbia University set up an encampment. On April 18, the university administration brought in massive numbers of police to arrest the demonstrators and crush the encampment; yet in response, students established a new encampment, bigger than the first, inspiring copycat actions around the country. Students at Cal Poly Humboldt campus in Arcata, California occupied a building in solidarity with people in Gaza, precipitating a clash in which they faced down police from around the region and ultimately drove them off campus. They defended their occupation for a full week. We published reports from participants in encampments at the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and an interview with participants in an encampment in Mexico City, along with an analysis of the challenges that the movement has confronted and what it would take to move beyond them. Hypocritical politicians have dishonestly alleged that this movement—which involves a large number of Jewish anti-Zionists—is motivated by anti-Semitism. Our coverage of the situation in Palestine has been directed by Israeli anarchists as well as Palestinians. This is not an ethnic or religious conflict; this is a situation in which a state military motivated by explicitly colonial values is carrying out a genocide. To offer more context for this movement, we published a history of the previous high-water mark of campus occupations, in 2008-2010. Meanwhile While reporting from within the encampments, we have also kept up with other fronts—most recently, publishing an essay by Peter Gelderloos debunking the idea that “green energy” could address the climate crisis. We also contributed the introduction to a book about the Russian anarchist and anti-fascist Aleksei Sutuga and published a report describing how popular resistance in the Kurdish province of Wan prevented the authoritarian Turkish government from imposing its preferred representatives in the municipal government despite their having lost the election. We also observed April Fool’s Day, Steal Something from Work Day, and May Day. Zines We’ve produced zine versions of many of the aforementioned articles about the encampments, including the initial report and subsequent statement from the occupation at Cal Poly Humboldt, the reports from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and the University of Texas at Austin, and our analysis, “Why the State Can’t Compromise with the Gaza Solidarity Movement”. We’ve also released a one-sheet handout, “This is About Stopping the Genocide in Palestine,” exploring the stakes of the movement. Languages In the past month and a half, we have added several of our articles in Japanese as well as Polish, Basque, Greek, Spanish, and French. If you can help us translate our work into any language, please contact us! What Drives Us As usual, everything we do is the fruit of volunteer effort. We don’t seek anything in return—we just want to do our part to create a future with less oppression and misery. All of our projects are copyright free. We distribute them for free, without advertisements of any kind, or else sell them for the costs of production and delivery alone. If you want us to be able to expand the scope of our efforts, you can support our projects financially—but the most important thing is that you undertake creative efforts of your own. For a world without capitalism, the state, or any other form of domination!

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 2407.06 - 10:10

- Days ago = 3291 days ago

- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I plan to continue Hey Mom posts at least twice per week but will continue to post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.