The neoliberal austerity regime has left no shortage of opportunities for alternative and counter institutions to fill the gaps left by the state, and capital continues to chase exponential returns on worthless scams rather than providing for many basic human needs. Those gaps, along with the social alienation inherent to capitalism, are the lowest hanging fruit for a dual power approach.
well-reasoned materialist analysis of how dual power can work, looking at examples from social democratic Sweden and islamic nationalist Palestine. I appreciate very much how this keeps the grounding of dual power not as an endgoal but as a tactic.
Three weeks ago, I watched you walk off a stage at the Lambda Legal National Liberty Awards, and I thought: she already knows who she is. That’s the hardest thing. Most people spend their whole lives trying to figure it out. You’re sixteen, and you’ve got it.
With a bipartisan acceptance of innocent death as the cost of doing business in the Muslim and Arab world, it is not a surprise that a kind of casual contempt for its leaders and peoples oozes from the orifices of both Republican and Democratic administrations.
Excellent piece by Ta-Nehisi Coates about Kamala Harris' awful record on Gaza and her unceasing support of Israel. Naturally, it is the opinion of this author that Harris' stance on Gaza absolutely tanked her popularity among her own base, something that a functioning political party would probably take into account.
Muslim delegates and attendees hoping to participate in the state Republican convention were shunned and rejected by members as they espoused themes of party unity ahead of the November election.
Look, man. Come on. Come on, lmao
U.S. oligarchs desperately want to build the biggest right wing propaganda and infotainment machine ever constructed. One that pummels the misinformed plebs with soggy class warfare and divisive culture war agitprop. But they're all profoundly stupid, wildly overconfident, and drunk on sycophancy.
Good, stirring writing with only one head-scratching implication of Evil China, which I have to call out because it is stupid. Rest of the piece is good though. I appreciate the anger!
Voluntarism, programmatic idealism, and strategic moralism are typically treated as separate mistakes. This essay argues that there is one error in three domains—the substitution of an ideal political form for material analysis—and that only reversing the direction of determination can correct it.
Don't agree with 100% of this piece but found it an interesting, if deeply academic-brain written, read. Loved this little tidbit from the American analysis section:
The absence of an American labor party is not a contingent historical lacuna waiting to be filled by the right organizational initiative. It is a structural feature of American class politics that has shaped the forms in which class interests can be expressed and the terrains on which they can be contested. The two-party system is not simply an obstacle to socialist politics but a terrain through which class forces are organized. The question of what engagement with that terrain can produce is a strategic question requiring analysis, not a moral question requiring a verdict.
Where I principally break with the analysis is with takeaways like this:
The democratic and electoral terrain is not, as the abstentionist position maintains, simply a mechanism for reproducing ruling class hegemony without remainder. It is the primary terrain on which the political consciousness of tens of millions of American workers is being actively shaped, and the question of whether the left engages with that process or withdraws from it in principled disgust is not a moral question but a strategic one with determinate political consequences.
To which I would say: Is it? Did the Sanders campaign make actual waves in the American proletariat? Is Mamdani a win for socialists, or is he an absorption of New Deal liberalism into the Democratic Party program? From within the borders of the States, I don't think these are easily-answered questions. Working within the electoral frame has some advantages, but I truly doubt the easy answer of "a lot of people vote, therefore that is where power lies and where we must strive". American voting is a complete mess -- both in terms of participation as well as upper class capture. Not to mention the number of institutions in the American government that are not beholden to any mass politic (like the Supreme Court, or in a broader sense the American military). It's things like that that make me doubt the so-called "democratic route to socialism".
To condemn an anti-imperialist state that is actively improving the Global South and other oppressed peoples’ material conditions is to condemn internationalism itself. This is akin to tying a weight around your ankle before running from a predator. Iran has done more for Palestine and Sudan than any “nonviolent protest” ever could.
[The No Kings website] then goes on to cite the anti-China protests in Hong Kong, where demonstrators used yellow umbrellas and yellow ribbons used to represent resistance to Russia in Ukraine, as its two specific examples to align the movement with. Both of these examples are in line with the US foreign policy interests shared between the Democratic and Republican parties. In the case of the Hong Kong protests, in both 2014 and 2019, the US government was accused of directly interfering and helping to direct the demonstrations, especially through its CIA-linked soft-power projects like the National Endowment for Democracy (NED).
I have so much suspicion around No Kings and this article gets at one of the main reasons why.
A map of the 2026 Los Angeles mayoral primary through its political geographies: Conservative LA, Liberal LA, and Left LA.
Beautiful website with some claims I find a bit presumptive but still educational. I agree with the authors that there are effectively three cities voting in LA, I am not so sure about the projected turnout in races.
None of the three front-runners I believe will be substantively different than Bass in running Los Angeles -- Raman is a compromised candidate with a spotty voting record especially on public housing, Bass is a dyed-in-the-wool conservative liberal, and Pratt is a fascist. I have no faith that Raman will not fold immediately to conservative interests, Bass already has folded to conservative interests, and Pratt... is a fascist. The biggest scam in Los Angeles' city budget remains the LAPD, and I do not believe any of the three front-runners have the power to dismantle the funding apparatus of the LAPD.
Anyway, that's my opinions. I recommend reading the piece regardless -- my commie griping aside, I do think this is a well-argued article with some really lovely data visualization work. Where I am fully in agreement with the authors is the fact that this sort of power mapping is crucial to understanding how and why LA is the way it is.
The NYPD plans to hire 580 additional uniformed officers by the end of the year, NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch said Monday, revealing an unexpected staffing increase given Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s vow to keep police headcount flat.
I feel like I am simultaneously more critical of Mamdani and more sympathetic these days. Of course he's making these concessions, they are concessions that (unlike most DNC representatives) actually are allowing him to get things done in other ways. But that doesn't excuse the fact that since he is working within the current system, the compromises he makes will be to the fascist elements of our ruling class.
The police in America I think functionally act as an arm of the ruling capitalist-fascist class. The desire of the capitalist-fascist class is to maintain stable rule over the populace and they see the expansion of the police forces as the way to do that. That is not going to change unless those class elements are purged from power in America, which is not going to happen without a comprehensive revolution.
So like, yeah I mean, I get it. Mamdani is able to execute quite well in his office -- better than many other Democratic representatives -- and that's praiseworthy! It's understandable for him to make these sort of concessions/compromises. Also, these compromises fucking suck and I wish he was not in this position, because the sort of charisma that he has could really be useful to an actually revolutionary organization/position.
The balance of power has shifted, and nations of the Middle East will no longer accept a regional order dictated by the US and Israel.
History continues apace!
There is a quiet competence that comes from this. You stop asking "Is the internet down?" and start asking "Is my links up?" You stop waiting for a technician and start checking the logs. This is a form of strength. To understand the system that carries your words is to be free from the mystery that keeps you dependent.
I am very interested in this project, as a noted fan of meshtastic, a similar but much less security-focused approach to meshnet communication over LoRa. I am specifically linking this page though (the "Zen of Reticulum" page) because I find it a fascinating peek into the anarcho-libertarian ethos at the heart of so much modern computing projects, even those that I think are generally good projects (like this one, to be clear).
The overwhelmingly centralized nature of the modern internet leaves it incredibly vulnerable to attack, from a million different vectors. One could theoretically cut all the wires carrying internet across the Atlantic and cause massive disruptions to the global internet. Not unfixable problems, to be sure, but massive disruptions nonetheless.
Various mesh projects have sprung up meant to combat this threat, or other similar threats caused by centralization. Federated tools, like Mastodon, are an attempt at this, as are even more trojan horse options like Bluesky. The threats that they are reacting to are real, to be sure -- but the solve being proposed is a greater reliance not on shared resources controlled by the public but increasingly privatized backbones of social communication.
This is, I think, an odd quirk of the modern technological landscape. The modern digital individual is constant predated upon by capitalist entities, so a rational response is to make oneself untraceable, untrackable, as much as reasonably possible.
Because your identity is portable, your connectivity can be fluid. You can be sitting at a desk connected to a fiber backbone one moment, and walking through a field connected only to a long-range LoRa mesh the next. To the rest of the network, nothing has changed. Your friends do not need to update your contact info. The messages they send do not bounce back. The network senses the shift in the medium and reroutes the flow of data automatically.
You are no longer a stationary node in a fixed grid. You are a wanderer in a fluid medium.
The goal sounds a lot like leaving the social fabric entirely, which relies on stability and fixed nodes. If I am a constant wanderer, I have no home. If I have no home, I have no neighbors. If I have no neighbors, I have no community.
I think anarchist solutions have a real purpose. I think this one is cool as hell and I will probably look into it as a fun option to have, for either serious or fun reasons. But I often glance twice when these ideologies are picked apart by their creators, because I think the takeaways are often driven by not a desire for community but a sense of fear.
Let us be clear: workers are being displaced by AI in the workplace, but that displacement is not due to the actual ability of AI technology doing the jobs of workers to the same quality, or even to a sufficient quality. It is a market-oriented move by firms to brag about becoming AI-first, while finding cost-savings by laying off employees. And the workers who do remain in their jobs are left to deal with labor intensification, that is, a combination of doing more work with less time, the addition of other work tasks as a result either new technological processes, or taking on the task of other people who have been laid off. As one of us wrote in a recent book, “AI is not going to replace your job. But it will make your job a lot shittier.”
The nature of AI is that it is almost entirely a fascist project, not in a moral sense per se (though I think you could make that argument and I would if pressed) but in the sense that it is a tool meant to empower greater private corporate control over various spheres of life. It creates a worse environment for workers and a better environment for bosses, and in turn it empowers firms to take over more aspects of public life.
The balance of American experience is between public and private infrastructure. Public infrastructure principally serves a purpose for the public, private infrastructure serves a purpose to the shareholders and owners in the form of profit.
I have yet to see a way that largescale "AI" can be used for a public, pro-social end. I think that when we talk about fighting fascism, we have to understand that at least at this time, in this moment, the generative AI 'project' is undoubtedly a fascist one.
A Texas councilmember will propose “a total ban on all cellular and GPS-capable devices for all operations within city limits" and "a total termination of all internet services."
Fascist crashout. #BANDERAMELTDOWN
The endorsements by Hernandez, Jurado and Soto-Martínez are aimed at denting left-wing support for Nithya Raman, who polls show is battling Spencer Pratt for a runoff spot against Mayor Bass.
Archive here.
Really odd moves here from some local candidates running on a DSA-LA slate. It's things like this that make me skeptical of electoral strategies by Left organizations like the DSA -- there's a worrying lack of discipline around these individuals.
I don't think that there is any guarantee of individual actions hewing to the Party line unless the Party is sufficiently fierce about discipline and political education. I'm not even a Nithya fan by any means, but this just looks sloppy and disappointing.
I don’t think I was supposed to get these emails in full. The city had just gotten a new public records officer, and the folder I received in response to my right to know request had both redacted and unredacted copies. I’m pleased to have the unredacted versions, though, because they narrate the push to clean up Downtown succinctly and honestly, spelling out the true drivers of policy: the unbridled revulsion of much of the propertied class for people who have the audacity to exist as poor in public.
Truly wild post here about the insanity of the petit bourgeois in America. I think people who have not experienced "local politics" may not be aware just how fucking evil the average small business-owner is as soon as you mention "the homeless". This is a good article to illuminate how much these people do not need to be listened to.
I think a lot about how the path after whatever This is has to involve a conscious disciplining of the petit bourgeois. Sorry if that's too straightforward of a way to put i, but it's just important to remember that you don't have to listen to these people. Not 'you', reader, necessarily — I have to hope you-the-reader are already not listening to the woes of the Small Businessowners in your neighborhood on homelessness issues — but 'you', the potential ruling majorities of the future.
I would say that the ruling majorities of the present should also keep this in mind, but as it stands the Businessowner class basically already rules, and they don't give a shit about the homeless. Sure would be great if that wasn't the case!
No one can match Third Way’s dedication to keeping the corporate wing of the party punching left.
As always, it's a good reminder that the Third Way -- whether we're talking about an organization or the political concept of a 'third way' between communism and fascism -- is itself a project of liberalism, the moderate wing of fascism.
It seems as though only when we list out all that is happening around us, can we, for a moment, summon the vertiginous feelings of overwhelm and dread we seemingly do everything in our power to suppress. Three years of a genocide transpiring in plain sight — one by which we increasingly scroll with the flick of a thumb; a new, stupid and brutal war whose consequences include an impending economic and energy crisis unlike anything the world has ever seen before; the accelerating destruction of the planet; the dismantling or elimination of the institutions that protect and enrich us; the wanton targeting of things that many of us love — the earth, the birds, learning, reading, the arts, one another; an emerging global consensus in which children are increasingly viewed as disposable, the terrifying erosion of the rights of women, trans people, immigrants, the mentally ill, the poor, and the persecution of those on the Left — I can name more, but there is no point, save for perpetuating this mounting discomfort. To consider even a single one of these elements in its entirety is already too much for the ordinary mind to to bear, and yet we are asked to bear all of them simultaneously every single day.
Impossible to talk enough about the memorable quotes in this piece. Kate Wagner once again knocks it out of the park with this, combining the psychological with the social (the psychosocial, some might say) into a rumination, a paean about grief and perserverance.
I don't know where "we" go from here, but I also can recognize that "we" are situated in a moment that I would call 'imperial collapse' (as Kate also aptly puts it), and that things feel incredibly disoriented. Systems that once worked no longer work, horrors beyond measure are commonplace, even intrusive, even in the lives of those who do not directly see them.
I have become transfixed, these days, on trying to figure out how we got this way. I'm not a scholar, I'm not an academic, I'm just kind of an armchair history dork who is finally getting to the modern era, the 19th century and onward, and realizing that all that shit that Lenin was talking about re: the systems of capitalism building up and up and up and creating their own gravediggers might have something to it. There's a lot that I think you can point to the end of WW2 and say "ah, here is where things started getting really bad" and that might be true, but you could also point to a million other times. As Kate points out in the footnotes, the American Reconstruction era is another good touchpoint.
Because we members of Western society are not socially permitted to express despair in everyday life, we are more often than not forced into a kind of cruel and unsustainable quiescence. We learn as children that the suppression of our emotions is integral to social equilibrium within the family, something which is then extrapolated onto public life at the high, high cost of the subconscious belief that our emotional needs do not ultimately matter beyond ourselves. The despair of others frightens us in part because it forces us to reckon with that same bargain. What makes you so special? What gives you the right to cry?
My therapist would chastise me (politely) for agreeing with these feelings, and she would be correct to do so. I grew up a man, I grew up in America. These two things have instilled in me a pathological distaste for expressing tender emotion. It's not a good thing.
The breakdown of the society in which we were born and raised has, in fact, already happened. It has happened and continues to happen by way of several concurrent historical processes from which one can cherrypick their best narratives about how precisely it all came to pass.