It's #BlackHistoryMonth, and in 2024 I'm reflecting on the fact that although I've known about Walter Rodney and his seminal work "How Europe Underdeveloped Africa" for years, it wasn't until I started reading it last year that I found out that Rodney was assassinated by his own Guyanese government in a car bombing. He was 38.

I'm obligated to point out to fellow white people, in case you missed it, the trend of white people lionizing a heroic Black person in a show of solidarity while studiously ignoring the vicious violence enacted against that person by the powers that be.

Also, Rodney was banned from Jamaica and from his teaching position at the University of the West Indies in Mona, Jamaica. This caused protests that escalated to riots in Kingston in 1968. Part of the wave of protests that swept the world from that year to the next.

Anyway, please read Rodney.
And/or about Rodney. https://web.archive.org/web/20041105060409/http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/%7Emarto/pbs/roberts.htm
#books #history #histodons #WalterRodney #Guyana #CaribbeanHistory #PanAfrican #Marxism @histodons

Leonard Peltier granted clemency

https://www.mprnews.org/story/2025/01/19/leonard-peltier-indigenous-activist-clemency-released-by-president-biden

#leonardpeltier #prison #clemency #biden #nativeamerican #indigenous #humanrights #fbi #racism #woundedknee #aim

Our bookstore is no stranger to unwanted government attention; we’ve been threatened by city officials, visited by the FBI, and surveilled by police. Historically, the investigation and prosecution of activists has aimed to disrupt our movements for change, sow fear and isolation among participants, break intergenerational bonds, and criminalize struggles for freedom. But we can overcome these attacks through principled action and uncompromising solidarity.

Firestorm has made the following commitments:
• We will minimize non-required collection and storage of information about customers, authors, event participants, and others who engage with our co-op.
• We will resist, and publicly disclose, any attempt to obtain such information when it exists.
• We will decline to answer questions from police and government agents.
• We will fight any court or government subpoena, process, or demand for records, testimony, or evidence.
• We will support those in our community who face state repression, regardless of “guilt” or “innocence.”
• We will retain legal counsel to defend our freedom to not cooperate with the State.

We know that these actions cannot guarantee safety for our members or community, but to cooperate in the face of our own repression, or the repression of others, would be a profoundly unsafe betrayal. Noncooperation is both the ethical and strategic position for those who want to build a new world, but must contend with the old one.

Find our entire statement, including linked references, at https://firestorm.coop/noncooperation.html.

#FreedomToRead #StateRepression #CoopsNotCops #Anarchism #FeministBookstore #FirestormCoop

📸: Daniel Barlow

@yianiris
Fediverse the ultimate neoliberal social engineering experiment

Where private ownership provides absolute freedom and lack there of is sentence to #slavery and submission to masters

Before you execute the messenger just consider a scenario then be as critical as you want, as long as criticism is based on rational arguments, not emotional metaphysics and characterizations!

Say you write a little book, you find a publisher that is cheap and quick and you only have enough to print 100 copies, and you sell them basically at cost. 100 people buy them, read them, pass them around, before you know it your ideas have been exposed to more than 1000 people. But lets also say the printer through some clause in the agreement can buy them all back, at face value, and then destroys them. In the fire all markings, comments, notes written by readers are also gone. Furthermore the printer can take legal action against anyone making reference to the ideas on the book.

#FEDIVERSE

No rules, but the servers’ owner’s discretion. No rights, just conditional access and entry to the guestrooms. Server owners are never accountable for material, ideas, arguments, documents, ever hosted, they can make them all vanish.

#Accountability #Federation Rules #Judicial System ? NONE.

To write a document, to explain an idea, to analyze a topic, to make a thesis public, or simply to express an opinion, take work, and work has some value, it can’t all be a waste of time. In physical world expressing an idea in public to whoever is listening is prohibited in the most oppressive and totalitarian regimes. Once an idea is shared it is no longer the property of the person that expressed it, it is shared by all those who have heard the idea. In #Fediverse “the owner” of the space where expression takes place is in the absolute discretion of the host. There are no repercussions for any owner removing a participant, blocking one’s access, even when shared expressions come from other servers, and deleting all content. And by deleting the initial content the rest of the participatns’ comments vanish as well.

#Fediverse, is the ultimate virtual simulation of an absolute and TOTAL neoliberal world. There is not a square millimeter that is public, it is all privately owned, and the rules are indicative, they must be obeyed by “guests”, but the owner is the ultimate authority that can decide whether you exist or you vanish, whether the material shared/published deserves to stay public or be destroyed.

Guests of fediverse servers may either kiss owners’ rear ends and self-restrict to owners’ ideas and perceptions, or risk being removed and all the content shared and exchanged be removed. So they behave accordingly, as subordinates to the dictators hosting the space they use to share ideas and information.

Somehow, very few people find all this disturbing, and in contrast to social media owned and operated by large corporations, many progressive, democratic, liberal minded people thing and act convinced that this is better. I have no clue what goes on in most corporate social media, long ago when I used twitter I don’t remember any post of mine being removed. As far as I can tell, as long as they can sell IDs, cookies, email accounts, and advertising they couldn’t care less what you think. Communists (authoritarian/totalitarian and libertarian/democractic), anarchists of all colors and flavors, never see so much restriction, sensitivity, and censorship as exercised in #Fediverse.

It is absurd, I have never seen or imagined that deleting and censoring people would have been so pervasive and extensive as seen on #Fediverse, primarily #Mastodon servers. #Diaspora owners seem much more respectful of guests and users, and less intrusive in their guests’ discussions.

So all I see here is a neoliberal social engineering experiment going well. If this cannibalism can be tolerated by the “left” minded people then this may actually work on the physical world as well. Absolutely NO PUBLIC SPACE AND NO HUMAN RIGHTS, just obedient respectful guests in private space.

Sad, very sad, unbelievable dystopia. And this is gradually becoming an isolated ghetto of the left that has little or no effect and affect to the remaining world. Just as in real political repression, you keep attacking what you want to neutralize, you force them to barricade and contain their collective being, till nobody can see or hear them.

So real social activists who want to affect and inspire “real people” will lark on corporate media among the many, while the self defined radicals will gather up in this private ghetto where they are under the illusion they are safe and away from fascists.

Smart fascists start and run #fediverse servers as concentration camps of progressive, left, radical, activists to self contain themselves away from society.

#fediverse #neoliberalism #public domain #progressive #alternative #left #chaotic #disorder

#libertarian #communism #anarchism #syndicalism #democracy #communalism

#totalitarianism #capitalism #fascism #private ownership #marxism #dictatorship

@([email protected])
@Acta Populi

Today in Labor History January 19, 1932: A General Strike turned into an anarchist insurrection in Alt Llobregat, near Barcelona, Spain. Armed miners and textile workers, members of the CNT, declared "Libertarian communism," including the abolition of money and property. The revolt quickly spread to other nearby towns. They cut telephone lines and replaced Republican flags with the red and black CNT flags. By January 27, the authorities had quashed the rebellion. They deported hundreds of rebels to African colonies. The detainees included Buenaventura Durruti, who would later lead the Durruti Column of anarchist soldiers against the fascist armies of Francisco Franco.

#workingclass #LaborHistory #anarchism #spain #civilwar #antifascism #fascim #generalstrike #cnt #durruti #revolt #rebellion #communism #antifa #antifascism #barcelona #miners #rebellion

As we reflect on the past year, remember the food industry workers who make it possible to have food on our plates, and their struggle against oppression and exploitation.

https://industrialworker.org/food-fight-january-edition/

#union #wobblies #iww #restaurantworkers #labor #restaurantlife #workers

Today in Labor History January 1, 1879: Ben Reitman was born on this day. Reitman was a comrade and one-time lover of Emma Goldman, a doctor to hobos and prostitutes, and an anarchist organizer. He wrote the novel, “Boxcar Bertha.” Scorsese later made a film based on this book. Reitman became a hobo at the age of ten, but returned to Chicago and got a job in a lab. In 1900, he started medical school. His first daughter founded the nudist Out-of-Door Club at Highland, New York. As a physician, Reitman performed many abortions when they were still illegal. In 1907 he founded the Hobo College for migrant education, political organizing and social services. The during San Diego Free Speech Fight in 1912-1913, vigilantes tarred and feathered him, burned “IWW” into his skin and raped him with a broom. In 1916, he served six-month in prison for breaking the Comstock Law by disseminating information on birth control.

#workingclass #LaborHistory #anarchism #benreitman #emmagoldman #IWW #freespeech #prostitution #sexwork #abortion #immigration #birthcontrol #prison #writer #author #books #novels #fiction @bookstadon