there's our catastrophe

May 4

lisafrankfurtschool:

This is how one pictures the unicorn of history. Its face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, it sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of its hooves. The unicorn would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in its wings with such violence that the unicorn can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels it into the future to which its back is turned, while the pile of debris before it grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.

This is how one pictures the unicorn of history. Its face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, it sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of its hooves. The unicorn would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in its wings with such violence that the unicorn can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels it into the future to which its back is turned, while the pile of debris before it grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.

May 1

The Meaning of May Day | Green Left Weekly

class-struggle-anarchism:

amodernmanifesto:

That first May Day expressed a conception of working-class struggle that intertwined three cardinal ideas.

First, that the struggle to free labour from capitalist exploitation can only be achieved through workers’ own, organised, self-activity.

Secondly, that for this organised self-activity to even begin to free labour from capitalist exploitation it must take the form of a movement that champions the interests of labour as a whole, as a class, against the interests of the capitalist class. That is, it must be a political movement, a movement against the political policies and the political power of the capitalists, against the governments and laws that protect the capitalist private-profit system.

And, thirdly, that the struggle to free labour from capitalist exploitation is not a national, but a social problem, embracing all countries that are dominated by the capitalist private-profit system, a system that is by its very nature an international system, and, therefore requires solidarity between the workers of all nationalities.

Oh fuck right off

An article on the meaning of May Day with absolutely no mention of Haymarket or the martyrs whatsoever. It mentions the strike, but not the riot - it mentions the decision to make may 1st international worker’s day at the second international, but not the fact that this day was chosen specifically to commemorate the martyrs.

It’s not like this is obscure or contested knowledge. Let’s go all the way to Wikipedia and search for “International Worker’s Day”

first sentence under the heading “History”:

International Workers’ Day is the commemoration of the 1886 Haymarket affair in Chicago.

Not so difficult. This isn’t an honest mistake, it’s a deliberate and shameful attempt to write anarchists out of working class history.

Trots - if you’re ever wondering why anarchists don’t like your newspapers - It’s this shit.

Apr 10

there was no “Australian Thatcher”, or rather, the same neoliberalising policies were carried out primarily by the 1980-1996 Labor governments. while the LNP 1975-1980 Fraser government did mark a shift to the right, they were much less thorough at union-smashing, privatisation, and for that matter the marginalisation of migrants than Labor PMs Hawke and Keating — both of whom are seen by large portions of the broad Left as lovable wags. never forget that the policy of mandatory detention of asylum seekers was instituted by Keating in 1992, that the union movement had the guts ripped out of it on purpose by Hawke’s amalgmations, and that they both sold everything they could get their hands on. the rhetoric was a lot nicer but the effects were the same. in other words, fucking stop loving on the ALP already, they’re a pack of treacherous neoliberal arseholes, you’ve been sucked in

Apr 8

screenshotsofdespair:

Marker at Perth Railway Station, Western Australia

Apr 5

lilacbootlaces:

jane-potter:

“Sylvia Rivera kicking ass on stage after some radfems & transphobes tried to refuse her the right to speak at the 1973 Christopher Street Liberation Day rally. Said radfems then had their own march in part protesting trans participation in Pride. A precursor to today’s Dyke March.”

Source: thespiritwas

It is women like Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson who started the Stonewall riots and queer liberation. 43 years later, trans women of color, the people who started the movement, are the people maligned and left behind by it.

In Sylvia’s words, “What the FUCK is wrong with you all?”

[[Trigger warning: suicide]]

Sylvia went home that night and attempted suicide.

Marsha Johnson came home and found her in time to save her life.

Sylvia left the movement after that day and didn’t come back for twenty years.

this is incredible, she is incredible, I highly recommend watching it

but I think the addendum re: the effect of this day on sylvia is really important

so often we valorise decontextualised moments of tough, articulate resistance and rage

and the suffering of the people who embodied them is not acknowledged, it’s uncomfortable, it’s not inspiring, we want them to stay tough and cool and stylish forever

which is particularly terrible when I think about how sylvia felt like that because of women like me — women who are now watching this video and feeling inspired and impressed and maybe a bit pleased with ourselves for finally having watched a speech by the famous and really cool to name-drop sylvia rivera

(via gabrieldreadnoughthoax)

Mar 25

ay-cono said: these days i just say ‘im like convict-level white’

I feel like white australians keep forgetting that we are literally here because giant prison island???? or the word “convict” is thrown around but we forget that it means something

the more anglo you are and the deeper your post-1788 roots are here, the more likely you are to be descended from members of a criminalised british underclass

the more secure your status in the national imaginary as an Australian, the more secure you’re likely to feel in your right to pontificate on the moral character and law-abidingness of migrants, the more likely it is that your own family wouldn’t meet your standards

I have not seen a lot of good discussions on what it means that Australian history is so deeply intertwined with criminalisation and incarceration

Mar 15

thesavagesalad:

shespeaksoflove:

I also don’t trust white people in this country because of the Pacific Islander slave trade that was going on in Australia from 1842-1904, which til this day is either ignored or in describing it, words like recruited, encouraged and employed are used. When in reality South Sea Islanders were coerced, kidnapped, forced, and sold. Slavery by any other name, is still slavery.

And the only reason this stopped is because of the ‘white Australia’ policy that was brought into place to try and keep Australia for white people. When thousands of the men and women who were stolen from their homes, were returned, some being returned to the wrong Island (because brown and black people are all the same to white people) and others dying on the journey home.

Also, to add on to this is that during the period of labour that was forced onto Pacific Islanders, many of those people did settle down and have families with Indigenous communities in the places that they were made to work.
They had already built new lives for themselves, with the means that were given to them- they had families and new identities, so when the white supremacist policy took place, not only were these people displaced AGAIN but they were FORCED to leave their families AGAIN there for harming their own community but also the Indigenous communities in those areas.

Australian history is a load of fuckery and so is the federation that this nation is founded upon and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise

(via theirriandjhiquishow-deactivate)

Feb 16

“I had coffee and three pieces of hazelnut torte — one with whipped cream, because I was starving — and I was filled with a desire for political knowledge. So I asked the navy-blue married man what the politicians had come here for. And in turn he told me that his wife was five years older than him. I asked why people were shouting for peace, because we have peace or at least no war. Him: “You have eyes like boysenberries.” I hope he means ripe ones. And so I was beginning to become afraid of my own stupidity and asked carefully why it was that those French politicians on the balcony had moved us so much and if this means that everyone agrees, when there’s so much enthusiasm, and whether there will never be another war. So the navy-blue married man tells me that he’s from Northern Germany and that’s why he’s so introverted. But in my experience those who tell you immediately “You know, I’m such an introvert” are anything but, and you can rest assured that they’re going to tell you everything that’s on their mind. And I noticed that the bell jar of fraternisation was starting to lift off and float away. I made one more attempt asking him if Frenchmen and Jews were the same thing, and why they were called a race and how come the nationalists didn’t like them because of their blood — and whether it was risky to talk about this since this could be the beginning of my political assassination. So he tells me that he gave his mother a carpet for Christmas and that he’s terribly good-natured, and that he was telling his wife that it was unfair of her to criticise him for having bought himself a new silk umbrella instead of having the easy chair reupholstered — which makes her too embarrassed to invite her lady friends over, one of whom is a professor — and that he had told his boss straight to his face that he didn’t know anything — and that I had feelings in me, which is what he needed, and he was a lonely man and always had to tell the truth. And I know for a fact that those who “always have to tell the truth” are definitely lying. I lost interest in the navy-blue married man, since I was heavy-hearted and excited and didn’t have the patience to flirt with a city official. So I said “Just a minute” and disappeared through the back door. And I was sad about not having gotten any political education. But I did have three pieces of hazelnut torte — which took care of my lunch, which couldn’t be said about a lesson in politics.” The Artificial Silk Girl, Irmgard Keun, 1932

Dec 11

“…even in the densely populated New Guinea highlands, and even after six or seven thousand years of intense agriculture, there were no really large languages. This is because it was only with the advent of centralised and then industrialised state societies that a few languages began to spread to the point where they counted hundreds of thousands and then millions of speakers. Unfortunately, few of these expansionist new societies had lany interest in recording anything about the languages of the peoples they subjugated… But we can get some idea of what the world was like as the first great empires emerged by looking at the Italian peninsula in the fifth and sixth centuries BC. There, under Greek influence, a number of different civilisations developed their own writing systems in time to leave some record of their languages before they were all sucked into the Latin-speaking vortex of the Romans.

Inscriptions in pre-Roman Italy attest between 12 and 15 different languages, quite different from one another, and belonging to between 5 and 10 branches of at least 4 distinct families — 3 branches of Indo-European (Celtic, Italic, and Greek) plus Etrucsan, which was non-European. The Romans did not actively try to stamp out other languages — indeed, the retention of other languages by non-Romans favoured the policy of “diuide et impera” (“divide and rule”). Umbrians, for example, continued to make inscriptions in their languages for centuries after Roman annexation. But eventually the power and status of Latin prevailed, particularly after all resident of Italy became Roman citizens in the middle of the last century BC. At first other groups would just have used Latin for “outside” purposes, but gradually the centralising power of Rome “relegated the local speech, just as it did political initiative and concerns, to a secondary, subordinate, and ever retreating position.” ” Nicholas Evans, in Dying Words: Endangered Languages and What They Have To Tell Us

Dec 7

“In South Africa, jealous white women decided that freed women, by their dress and manner, had become “unseemly and vexing to the public” and in 1765 they were forbidden to wear “colored silk clothing, hoopskirts, fine laces, adorned bonnets, curled hair or earrings.” One can understand the vexation over silks, but forbidding a mulatto to walk in public with her hair in curls a hundred fifty years before the invention of the straightening iron was an early and ominous indication of the white South African talent for fine-tuned racial sadism.” orlando patterson, “slavery and social death”

there's our catastrophe

work is its own cure. you have to like it better than being loved. ⚑ ♀

The Meaning of May Day | Green Left Weekly

work is its own cure. you have to like it better than being loved.

⚑ ♀