“Here I’ve collected links to several texts by Sicilian anarchist Alfredo Maria Bonanno, originally translated into English from the Italian and published by his Scottish anarchist comrade Jean Weir as separate pamphlets or booklets, but now presented together in one convenient location.

These words aren’t presented chronologically according to when Bonanno wrote them, but logically, according to style and content, as a way to introduce the reader to the diversity and tenacity of the author’s thought.”

https://mgouldhawke.wordpress.com/2022/12/17/intro-to-insurrectionary-anarchism/

Jasper Bernes' talk for The Workers' Council: From the Commune to Autonomy (session 3):

https://jasperbernes.substack.com/p/the-kapds-theory-of-the-party

𝘈𝘳𝘵𝘪𝘤𝘭𝘦 𝘸𝘳𝘪𝘵𝘵𝘦𝘯 𝘣𝘺 𝘤𝘰𝘮𝘳𝘢𝘥𝘦𝘴 𝘧𝘳𝘰𝘮 𝘞𝘪𝘭𝘥𝘤𝘢𝘵 (𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘵𝘳𝘢𝘯𝘴𝘭𝘢𝘵𝘦𝘥 𝘣𝘺 Angry Workers) 𝘱𝘳𝘰𝘷𝘪𝘥𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘮𝘰𝘳𝘦 𝘣𝘢𝘤𝘬𝘨𝘳𝘰𝘶𝘯𝘥 𝘵𝘰 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘥𝘦𝘣𝘢𝘵𝘦 𝘢𝘣𝘰𝘶𝘵 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘳𝘰𝘭𝘦 𝘰𝘧 𝘤𝘦𝘯𝘵𝘳𝘢𝘭 𝘣𝘢𝘯𝘬𝘴 𝘪𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘨𝘭𝘰𝘣𝘢𝘭 𝘤𝘭𝘢𝘴𝘴 𝘸𝘢𝘳:

“Central banks want to shift the balance of power between capital and labour – and are balancing on a tightrope in the process: they want a severe recession to occur, but not a financial system crash. Back in 1979, the ‘Volcker shock’ was clearly a politically intended attack on the working class via means of recession. Back then, Paul Volcker, head of the Federal Reserve, boosted the interest rate from about 11 to over 20%, triggering a global surge in mass unemployment. Mexico went bankrupt, other emerging markets followed. Since then, according to the IMF, private household and state debt has tripled to over 150% of world GDP.”

https://www.angryworkers.org/2022/12/16/the-role-of-central-banks-wildcat-magazine-autumn-2022/

On police as the condition for the existence of the workplace & of the worker/surplus divide:

“Police are not only a workplace condition, they are a necessary condition for the existence of the workplace itself. Police exist to enforce the capital labor relation. Where the silent compulsions of economics are insufficient to maintain that relation, the police step in to do so by force. This function of policing is maybe most evident when the cops are called in to break strikes or protests, forcing workers back to work and ensuring the smooth circulation of capital; we have not forgotten the $300,000 per day spent to police the COLA strikes at UC Santa Cruz. But the police’s role as the guardians of capital manifests in nearly everything they do. They exist to protect private property and thus maintain the dispossession that defines the proletarian condition and forces proles to work for a wage in order to live. And perhaps most importantly, they discipline those racialized and gendered populations who are expelled from the workforce and whose exclusion constitutes the world of work: the lumpen and the surplus. Just as campus police separate the borders of campus from its outsides, so does policing delineate the workplace and uphold it.”

https://cryptpad.fr/file/#/2/file/j2vN9e+Xuoh7rxJLhJUn8LDi/

/// Maya Gonzalez in this month's FIELD NOTES ///

“Today we are witnessing a transformation within the metaphoric significance of the Post-Islamic performative in veiling. Ripping off the veil exposes the emptiness of that signifier. Behind the Post-Islamic feminine signifier is a void of authenticity, much less a national identity rooted in the real Islamic community. It signifies nothing more than a technology of domination. Today, the veil and women’s own unveiling signify another unknown future, after the Post-Islamic. At the very least it will lead somewhere else. And this somewhere else may not be recognizable according to the old images of revolution, led by charismatic charlatans.”

https://brooklynrail.org/2023/12/field-notes/What-We-Are-Saying-is-Freedom-Not-the-Veil

“The Aldhani heist is lifted from an episode in the life of young Stalin, and Nemik is, in some sense, meant to be a “young Trotsky.” But does basing science fiction on real world events reflect back on the real world in any meaningful way? Or does it just strip them of context and turn them into blank, congenial abstractions (the way Lucas turned the National Liberation Front for South Vietnam into teddy bears with spears)? One might venture to ask, after all, just how continuous the last 3,000 years of “slavery, oppression, colonialism, bad behavior, betrayal, heroism” really are, and whether the Irgun, Continental Congress, Montagnard, and Bolsheviks have as much in common as Gilroy seems to suggest? One might even suggest that the things they precisely don’t have in common — specific attitudes towards capitalism and race, for example — might actually be somewhat important things. After all, weren’t the Irgun and the Continental Congress fighting to build the kinds of racist settler regimes that the Haitian revolutionaries and the ANC were fighting against? The Bolsheviks understood “revolution” in quite a bit more specific way than “shoot the bad guys,” and the Montagnard are as peculiar and specific a group of guerrillas for Gilroy to focus on as the Irgun are.

We should dig a bit deeper, then. Andor begins with a parable about how all cops are bastards and ends with a glorious brick-smashing and bomb-throwing riot. But if the Star Wars universe has cops and fascists — and if it knows that the thing good people do is fight them — does it know that the reason is race and capitalism? Andor is twice described as “a human with dark features” — by a police supervisor speculating as to why the corpos hassled him — but does Star Wars believe that Dark Featured Lives Matter? If Luthen is a Lenin figure, does he believe that the Empire is the highest stage of capitalism?

These are better questions than “is this show political?” For one thing, a kind of racial capitalism is threaded throughout the Empire as we see it in Andor: Narkina 5 and Kenari are clearly sacrifice zones, with racially marked inhabitants, while the Empire has a genocidal contempt for Aldhani’s pastoral highland residents, damming their sacred river and forcing them into “an Enterprise Zone [with] factories, new towns, Imperial housing.” While Skeen is not racially marked (as far as we know), the Imperial prefect that floods his brother’s pepper trees just reinforces the sense that the Empire is a destructively modernizing capitalist entity that steals people’s means of production: Preox-Morlana is the kind of corporate entity nestled into the imperial system that will be familiar to historians of European empire and American privatization alike. Finally, the show takes great care to demonstrate that Imperial prisons are productive complexes, factories for slave labor, and that when law enforcement is mandated to round up specific quotas of workers to fill them — Imperial Security Bureau CompStat appears to be mostly about maximizing detentions, and Dedra’s “numbers from Sev Tok” are reported to be good — the point is to clarify what the “order” was that Darth Vader proposed to bring to the galaxy in Empire Strikes Back.”

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/police-and-thieves-on-tony-gilroys-andor/

On the current conditions of the working class in Russia:

“The second decade of Putin’s rule was associated with increasing economic difficulties. The Russian economy and hydrocarbon exports were first hit by the crisis of 2008, which led to a short-lived rise in unemployment (from 5.5% to around 9%). The recession reduced demand for fuel, so fuel prices fell. When they started to rise again (although there were also large fluctuations), the situation improved, but most analysts agree that the Russian economy has been gripped by stagnation ever since. Pressure for restrictions in the social sphere intensified, which triggered mass social protests. There were increasing demands for political reforms.

Already in 2004-2005, there were protests against the restrictions on certain social benefits (so-called monetarisation), and in 2006 there were protests against the increase in the price of communal services. However, this was only the beginning of a great wave of discontent that began to grow from the 2008 protests in response to the worsening economic situation in the country. Added to this were protests of a strictly political nature (2011-2012) against election rigging, corruption and demanding the release of political prisoners. Finally, a particular source of conflict was the issue of raising the retirement age. Mass protests on this issue took place between 2017 and 2019. It was finally decided that the retirement age would increase in stages: for women from 55 to 60 and for men from 60 to 65. Incidentally, FNPR MPs voted in favour of this law and against the interests of the working-class world.

Faced with concerns about support for Putin’s rule and uncertainty about further hydrocarbon exports (decarbonisation) and growing socio-economic tensions, the Russian elite took a course towards nationalist politics, supporting the Donetsk and Luhansk separatists in Ukraine and the annexing of Crimea in 2014. By appealing to Great-Russian resentments and through propaganda, they managed to keep Putin’s ratings relatively high in the polls, but the economic difficulties – especially in view of the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 – could not be overcome. Incidentally, more than 390,000 people have so far died from coronavirus in Russia (in laboratory and clinically confirmed cases), although the real number of deaths is at least three times higher. By launching a full-scale war on 24 February 2022, Russia also hoped to strengthen its bargaining position in economic relations with Europe and the rest of the world. However, success was not achieved and the easy victory of 2014 was not repeated. Instead, the prolonged armed conflict exacerbated all the already existing socio-economic difficulties, and created new ones.”

https://www.angryworkers.org/2022/12/05/workers-and-the-labour-market-in-russia-in-an-era-of-war-and-sanctions/

“What I think is happening is we have opposition to the lockdown as this kind of umbrella. It’s this category that has affected nearly all Chinese people in one way or another. Within that, people are raising all kinds of other demands. The workers at Foxconn were concerned with pay. The people in Xinjiang, to the extent that Uyghurs are able to openly speak, have big concerns about the broader repression of Muslim minorities. You have the students who are holding up the white pieces of paper, and that’s an expression of opposition to censorship and demands for free speech.

[...] There are a lot of protests in China, and there has been, for the last generation, protests among workers, among peasants who are having their land taken, some smaller-scale things among students, among feminist activists. Environmental issues have generated some big protests, as well as ethnic minorities. Tibetans have also had some major protest movements. But almost all of these cases have been very localized, in response to some specific local grievance.

What’s really unique about what we’re seeing now is that it is nationwide, that it is responding to a policy not just of some corrupt local officials or some bad boss, but quite specifically to a policy of the central government. Even more specifically, to a policy that Xi Jinping himself has taken responsibility for.”

https://www.vox.com/world/2022/11/30/23484801/china-protests-covid-lockdown-xi-jinping