#Expropriation

[anarchistin]

White people deploy the idea of looting in a way that implies people of color are greedy and lazy, but it is just the opposite: looting is a hard-won and dangerous act with potentially terrible consequences, and looters are only stealing from the rich owners’ profit margins.

Those owners, meanwhile, especially if they own a chain like QuikTrip, steal forty hours every week from thousands of employees who in return get the privilege of not dying for another seven days.

— Vicky Osterweil, In Defense of Looting

[kropotkindersurprise]

June 28, 2023 - French youth open up ATM's during riots after police murdered 17-year old Naël M. during a traffic stop. [video]

[theanarchistscookbook]

[book51ut]

Review of Decolonial Marxism by Walter Rodney

A wonderfully modern revolutionary read. I think the main problem that most of the people i know see with communism is that it was supported by a bunch of stuffy old european men in a time before many of us had rights- rights that the communists barely addressed, if they did at all. Their words don’t squarely fit into our 21st century American perspective. Rodney points out that they don’t need to. The idea that marxism and communism are white western european ideologies are simply false unless you want them to be true, if that makes sense. Places that have adopted Marxism in some form, many of which were not white at all, took the theory and adapted it to their cultural and historical contexts. Of course Marx doesn’t make sense in 21st century USA: it was never meant to. That doesn’t mean that it can’t be taken and adapted to our needs. Saying Marx doesn’t work for us is the easy way out. The hard task we have is to implement a communist reality within the American historical context. That’s certainly not easy, but also not impossible.

Another thing that really stood out to me was Rodney’s strong criticism of “riding the line” He used the example of Senegal under Leopold Senghor - a man that decided the economy into three sectors (foreign, joint ownership, and a fully publicly owned sector). This is not communism and cannot even approximate communism because it still operates within and benefits from the white supremacist heteronormative ableist capitalist system. While when we try to play the world game, we do exactly what we are trying to avoid. To build something that genuinely functions as a communist society, we need to move past any dependence on capitalism in any form. In order to decolonize our societies, we need to move past any dependence on capitalism in any form.

I’ve had a realization similar in my own journey with theory which is as ive become more political i’ve given less of a shit about party politics. The movement is really happening on the ground in community building and what we are doing for each other. It’s also about making this theory more accessible (another criticism of Marx and stuffy old european men who can go fuck themselves). I just moved back to the US from spain and i was really weirded out by their government. They have a thriving communist party in the government. This was weird because communism is super persecuted in the US and is literally a prohibiting factor to enter the US as an immigrant and i had a very american perspective that governments everywhere felt that way BUT also. While spain is a relatively left ish country, it still participates in this colonial capitalist society. To me, it feels like a waste of time to send communists to work in the government when they could be directly helping people. Changing the working hours from 40 to 37 a week is great but if you believe in the fall of capitalism there’s more to do than that. Let the government fall into disarray around you and don’t lose sight of the goal with the piece of candy capitalism places in your mouth every once and awhile. We want to exist outside of it, not within it.

[postcard-from-the-past]

"Expropriation of the Polish by the Prussians", painting by Gorski

French vintage postcard, mailed in 1919

[2t2r]

Une étoile de mer tente d'exproprier un gobie [vidéo]

Nouvel article publié sur https://www.2tout2rien.fr/une-etoile-de-mer-tente-dexproprier-un-gobie-video/

Une étoile de mer tente d'exproprier un gobie [vidéo]

[russia-libertaire]

1917 peasants' revolt

'Peasants underwent the same political evolution as the soldiers and workers: at first watchful cooperation with the Provisional Government, then growing disillusion followed by the assumption of direct power over their own lives. ... During the summer and autumn village and volost assemblies proceeded to direct action, in a manner reminiscent of 1905. This time the peasant tide was swelled by soldier deserters beginning to return from the front in large numbers, armed and ready to fight if their should be any resistance. But it was not only soldiers. All households were involved: joint responsibility ruled, as always. Typically, peasants would assemble with their carts and improvised weapons on the village square, then move off toward the manor. The squire was forced to sign a document transferring the property of the estate to the village assembly. Then the peasants would load what they could carry onto their carts and lead away the cattle, leaving behind a subsistence allowance for the landowner and his family. ... After the expropriations, village assemblies redistributed the land as far as possible equitably, either "by eaters" (according to the number of mouths a household had to feed) or "by labor" (according to the number of working hands available in it). "Stolypin peasants" and even former landlords were drawn into the process: each was allowed his norm and no more. Everyone had the right to subsistence. In crisis the old peasant values reasserted themselves.'

Russia and the Russians, by Geoffrey Hosking

[perestroika-hilton]

This is insane of me to say but the phenomenon of the twink proves that in a world without women men would still invent women

[dead-generations]

It's so funny that we have "White guy born in Zimbabwe/South Africa in 1988 whose family farm was expropriated who became a vocally woke rugby player who refused to get married until the gays could who goes on to become a successful and well regarded climate change activist and independent left-wing politician."

[misterbitches]

[rgr-pop]

i’m a bit soft on the irrational and hope we can keep some of it. my plan is to take down institutions one at a time maybe in order of how much people hate them in order to like inoculate and build the spirit of anti-religion, then as we get rid of the bad stuff we kinda take the temperature. see how everyone is feeling about religion

[majoficial05]

“Tomaste un pedazo de mi alma y luego te fuiste. Como si yo no fuera nada”. 🥀🩹

[liefallow]

steve just HAD to log on right after we swept the phils to say “mean reversion comes for us all” and now look at us. MEAN REVERSED.

[msnihilist]

MacReady:

Also MacReady:

[russia-libertaire]

Peasants' revolt

'Peasants, though not directly affected by Bloody Sunday, were nevertheless profoundly stirred and outraged by the spectacle of the autocracy acting in a way which was both ineffective (the Japanese war) and in breach of God's law. The "little father" had proved to be not only impotent but also evil: both pravda and vlast (authority) had been undermined. They felt that it should be both possible and right to make the political system more responsive to them. Over the next couple of years they tried various devices: petitioning the authorities, withholding their labor from landlord estates, electing delegates first of all to a Peasant Congress, then to the State Duma, and even taking the law completely into their own hands, seizing the landlord's animals, tools, and seeds, driving him out of the manor house, and burning it down. Different tactics were employed at different times and places according to circumstance. Peasants seem to have been completely pragmatic about the means they used: their paramount concern was to put into effect their own concept of how land should be owned and villages governed.'

Russia and the Russians, by Geoffrey Hosking