mambabasa

What could be more indicative of a thirst for power and control than a perfectly level, uniform expanse of grass? Clearly, only someone with fascist tendencies would aspire to such impeccable orderliness, attempting to impose their oppressive standards on nature itself. Because nothing says "I want to dominate the world" quite like the pursuit of a weed-free lawn.

Consider the process of maintaining a lawn. It's essentially an exercise in subjugation. Mowing down innocent blades of grass week after week, enforcing a uniform height – it's like a tiny dictatorship being played out in your front yard. And let's not even mention the chemical warfare that goes on behind the scenes – those pesticides and fertilizers are the secret tools of aspiring autocrats, seeking to eliminate any form of diversity (read: weeds) in their quest for homogeneity.

But the plot thickens when we consider the boundary lines. The quintessential white picket fence, meticulously aligned with the driveway, serves as a clear metaphor for the barriers these so-called "lawn fascists" wish to erect between themselves and the rest of the world. Heaven forbid a dandelion or, heaven forbid, a clover should breach these sacred borders! It's not just a lawn, it's a fortified buffer zone against any hint of dissenting plant life.

And let's talk about the water consumption. While the rest of us worry about global water shortages and environmental sustainability, these lawn-loving authoritarians are apparently convinced that the well-being of their turf is of paramount importance. Are they hoarding water to fuel their nefarious plans for world domination? It wouldn't be surprising – every power-hungry despot needs a well-hydrated base of operations.

In conclusion, the evidence is irrefutable: anyone with a lawn is a fascist. The quest for a pristine lawn represents a disturbing desire for control, uniformity, and domination over the natural world. So, the next time you see a neatly trimmed yard, just remember – behind that innocent facade of green lies a potential dictator in the making, plotting to impose their authoritarian rule, one well-timed sprinkler cycle at a time.

The history of capitalism and the state is the history of attempts to abolish them and establish a free society without domination and exploitation. Revolutionary workers in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries believed that another world was possible. It is still possible today. One of the main social movements that attempted to overthrow capitalism and the state during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was anarchism. Members of the historical anarchist movement not only attempted to change the world but also produced an elaborate body of ideas that guided their actions. This book is concerned with explaining what their ideas were. Historians sometimes unearth old ideas from the past because they are an interesting way of gaining insight into a different time and place. This is not my principal motivation. I wrote this book because I want to live in a society in which everyone is free. I am convinced that, if we are to achieve this goal, it is important to know the history of previous attempts to do so. My hope is that, through learning about how workers in the past sought to emancipate themselves, workers alive today can learn valuable lessons and develop new ideas that build on the ideas of previous generations.

How to define anarchism is a contentious topic and will be discussed in depth in chapter 1. For the purposes of this book, it will be understood as a form of revolutionary antistate socialism that first emerged as a social movement in late nineteenth-century Europe within the International Workingmen’s Association between 1864 and 1872 and the subsequent Saint-Imier International between 1872 and 1878. During and after its birth as a social movement, it spread rapidly to North America, South America, Asia, Oceania, and parts of Africa through transnational networks, print media, and migration flows. I will focus exclusively on anarchist collectivists, anarchist communists, and anarchists without adjectives who were agnostic about the nature of the future society but advocated the same strategy as anarchist collectivists and anarchist communists. I do not claim that this is the one true form of anarchism. It is only the kind of anarchism I am focusing on.

These thoughts of acute grief inevitably give way to the broad and impersonal grief that is existing with any intentionality/awareness in this world of death machines. Every manifestation of genocide, every act of police brutality, every eviction, every encampment sweep, every person denied medical care, every hour of life sacrificed to work builds the grief in my blood towards toxicity. I open my mouth to scream but no sound comes out. I try to go through the motions of my day, but my brain is molten and leaking from my nose. I try to swallow the grief until it all but chokes me, threatens to burn me up from the inside out. I am afraid. I thrash against the waves until I am exhausted and I begin to drown.

But despite the fear and exhaustion, there is something powerful to be found beneath the waves, as your mouth fills with sand and the water rushes into your lungs. Through the pain and despair there is a clarity that insurmountable grief opens up. Grief is not merely something that happens to us that we must swallow. It offers a framework, a logic against logic that seems to cut the world in two; what matters from what doesn’t, what we desire from what is forced upon us. Grief does not need to be a burden, or at least not only a burden, for us to bear.

Grief can be a weapon for us to wield.

Perhimpunan Merdeka (literally “freedom association”) is a specifically anarchist organisation being formed in Indonesia, the largest archipelagic country in the Global South. The Komite Pembentukan (Starting Committee) of Perhimpunan Merdeka has been organising for some years and is made of some of the most seasoned anarchist organisers in Indonesia.

Taken from the telegram linked below.

🔥Greta Thunberg meets with DEM Party co-mayor of Amed, North Kurdistan

Yesterday, climate justice activist Greta Thunberg, known for spearheading the Fridays4Future ecological youth movement, met with Serra Bucak co-mayor for the DEM Party on the city of Amed in North Kurdistan. During the meeting, views on the impact of climate change and global warming on nature were exchanged.

In recent years, Greta Thunberg has combined her ecological activism with the defence of the rights of oppressed peoples, such as Palestinians, Armenians and Kurds. This has cost her the support of most of mainstream media and political institutions, but despite that the young Swedish activist continues her struggle unabated.

❗️For updates follow: t.me/legerinmagazine

“the fascists call us ‘degenerates’, blaming us for all of society's woes, while the liberal ‘left’ throw us under the bus again and again, blaming anyone but themselves for their loss of state power.”

it’s scary but “we slowly build a future for ourselves by fostering communities of all kinds”

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Greta Thunberg @GretaThunberg

#UsaElection #USA2024 #StopArminglsrael #FreePalestine #ClimateJusticeNow

This year we have seen many defining elections all over the world. On November 5th, It is time for one of the most powerful countries in the world — the USA — to go to the polls. It is probably Impossible to overestimate the consequences this specific election will have for the world and for the future of humanity.

There is no doubt that one of the candidates — Trump — is way more dangerous than the other. But no matter if Trump or Harris wins, the USA — a country built on stolen land and genocide on indigenous people -will soll be an imperialist hyper-capitalist world power that will ultimately continue to lead the world further into a racist, unequal world with an ever increasingly escalating climate- and environmental emergency.

With this in mind, my main message to Americans is to remember that you cannot only settle for the least worst option. Democracy is not only every four years on election day, but also every hour of every day in between. You cannot think you have done "enough' only by voting, especially when both those candidates have blood on their hands. Lets not forget that the genocide in Palestine is happening under the Biden and Harris administration, with American money and complicity. It is not in any way 'feminist." "progressive" or "humanitarian" to bomb innocent children and civilians — it is the opposite, even It it is a woman in charge. And this is of course one example among many of American imperialism. I cannot for my life understand how some can even pretend to talk about humanitarian values, without even questioning their own role In further deepening global oppression and massacres of entire countries.

So, Americans, you must do everything in your power to call out this extreme hypocrisy and the catastrophic consequences American Imperialism has on a global scale. Be uncomfortable, fill the streets, block, organise, boycott, occupy, explicitly call out those in power whose actions and Inaction lead to death and destruction. Join and support those who are resisting and leading the change. Nothing less will ever be acceptable.

In this article, we argue that a Slow Feminism, which evolves through the slow but consistent support of other women that is embedded in care, compassion and constructive challenge against patriarchal expectations, is essential for the future of feminist praxis within higher education. This work emerged from our coming together to reflect-on-action on our experiences as disabled, women, postgraduate researchers in different disciplines during the COVID-19 pandemic. Feeling ‘othered’ by and invisible to hierarchal structures, we sought to understand our individual challenges through a collective lens. Relational ethics and a praxis of care in line with feminist epistemology underpinned our systematic ‘feminist collaborative autoethnography’, whereby we critically engaged with individual reflections and together in online meetings to interpret shared social, emotional and structural challenges. In this article, we draw on our experiences sharing this data through poetry, during the stage of our collaborative project in which we utilised ‘poems’ to identify the challenges of being a disabled woman navigating higher education, and the resistance we employed individually, and collectively, in support of one another. Through this process, we challenged the neoliberal, patriarchal and oppressive systems that we are forced to engage with daily and our own complicity in them. Using our individual, collective and overlapping voices, whereby we recognise the tensions and supportive narratives created by and within our research conversations, we identify that feminist activism and feminist futures are not solely a response to extreme events.

The ideas of the Resistance Committees historically were explored as early as the 1990s. The idea was to provide the opposition with a closely knitted organizational front. The Communist Party had a long history of encouraging the idea of communes as a form of democracy based on the Soviet experience and as a response to the state’s excessive and violent crackdown on multiple forms of political representation. It was also part of a more inclusive democratization narrative where people sought to substitute politics from above and big man politics with micro governance systems where they redefined their relationship with the state and its institutions and tried to find ways to hold it accountable at a local level.

In 2013 and 2014 when the first uprisings took place, The National Consensus Front, of which the Communist Party was a member, sought to deal with popular detachment from politics through building political organization in the workplace for unions and neighborhood committees. They worried that the weakness of the two main coalitions active at the time – Sudan Call and the National Consensus Front – combined with the proliferation of liberal civic agendas funded by Western aid money would increase the rift between them and the popular masses. At that point the Resistance Committees were composed of members representing their political institutions and served as a dormant though extended group of the affiliated political bodies.

It was only in December 2018 and forward that the Resistance Committees emerged in their current form and organizational outlook, and started expressing political agendas and demands away from mainstream politics and politicians.

1. Participants know they are part of a group and what the group is about (Wilson, 2016).
2. Agreements for sharing and at times rotating labor/work and implementation of decisions as well as for sharing the fruits thereof (Kropotkin, 1906, Sixth Commission of the EZLN, 2016, Ostrom, 2021, Usufruct Collective, 2022). People can co-create a cornucopia where there is more than enough for all or otherwise agree to specific ways of distributing less abundant fruits of re/production according to needs.   
3. Direct collective decision making by participants through deliberation. For there to be self-management of each and all, there must also be mutual non-domination. By extension, community assemblies related to the commons should utilize direct, participatory, and non-hierarchical forms of democracy (Bookchin, 2005b).  
4. Organizational transparency that allows participants to mutually-monitor the commons (Atkins, Wilson, Hayes, 2019). This can happen through the process of co-managing and interacting with the commons, collective action, living in community with others, relevant accounting/calculation as needed, and availability of relevant information to participants. 
5. Graduated defense against domination and exploitation such as: informal social disapproval, self-defense and defense of others as needed, and recourse to expelling someone from a particular collective (through deliberation, assembly, and due process) in response to the most extreme violations of the commons and freedoms of persons (Boehm, 2001, Ostrom, 2021, Usufruct Collective, 2023).  
6. Good-enough conflict resolution such as: people talking directly to each other, mediation to find out how to move forward, dispute resolution to resolve disputes, restorative justice and transformative justice processes for people to repair harm and transform causes thereof, and organization-wide assembly when the conflict is in regards to organizational form and content. (Kaba, 2019, Usufruct Collective, 2023). 
7. Communities and participants need sufficient autonomy to organize. 
8. The use of co-federation and embedded councils. Community assemblies can co-manage inter-communal commons in a way where policy-making power is held by participants and assemblies directly (Bookchin, 1992, Ocalan, 2014). This enables self-management and mutual aid within and between communities as well as inter-communal management of the commons. Community assemblies can utilize mandated and recallable councils and rotating delegates to implement decisions within the bounds of policies made by community assemblies directly (Bookchin, 1992, 2007, 2018).