Nagarjuna [he/him]

We have a duty to fight for our freedom. We have a duty to win.

  • 16 Posts
  • 32 Comments
Joined 4 years ago
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Cake day: August 8th, 2020

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  • Moreover, the natural development of economic antagonisms, the waking consciousness of an important fraction of the proletariat, the constantly increasing number of unemployed, the blind resistance of the ruling classes, in short contemporary evolution as a whole, is conducting us inevitably towards the outbreak of a great revolution, which will overthrow everything by its violence, and the fore-running signs of which are already visible. This revolution will happen, with us or without us; and the existence of a revolutionary party, conscious of the end to be attained, will serve to give a useful direction to the violence, and to moderate its excesses by the influence of a lofty ideal.

    –Ericco Malatesta, Anarchy and Violence


  • I was comparing more or less heavy handed ways of doing it. I’m advocating for as light a touch as possible. I’m trying to say that authority is a meaningful concept and that we should engage with it because it’s actually very important.

    It’s like how some US cities put you on a payment plan for debts, while others put you in jail. They’re both situations of capitalist class rule, but it’s fair to call the latter authoritarian.



  • I mean, there’s pretty clearly a difference between the Cuban approach of letting capitalists leave vs the Russian approach of imprisoning them.

    There’s also a difference between the Bolivian approach of arming and training the peasantry and the GDR approach of maintaining an armed military police into peace time.

    There is a meaningful difference between methods of protecting working class power, and pretending there isn’t serves more heavy handed approaches.

    For those of us who are abolitionists, this is a central question.











  • It’s worth looking at how that environment is produced too. There’s a need for cheap labor in agriculture, laundry, hospitality and textile industries that dovetails well with the US’s history of anti-mexican racism (grounded in the need to dehumanizing indigenous people to steal their land as well as the US-Mexico war).

    By controlling people’s movement through the border regime, we can make them willing to take sub-minimum wage jobs, while also keeping Mexico poor through lopsided trade agreements like NAFTA and low level insurgency achieved by escalating the drug war and flooding the country with weapons.

    In this context of US oppression of Mexicans, it becomes necessary to dehumanize them to justify the violence. This is where fox news comes in. Hell, even CNN plays a role by creating categories of migrants some good and some bad, and playing them against each other while justifying border control (think about the rhetoric about dreamers vs drug smugglers).

    To change this environment, we either need to undercut this propaganda by organizing white and brown workers together, or either take back control of media from big business or make our own media with similar reach.