“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”

I hope this is the appropriate community for this question, if there is a better community for this, I can post it there.

It's been a bit over a week and I've had time to accept what has happened and what will happen as a result of America's recent decision. Even though I am from Canada, the news has many direct and indirect consequences which still has me concerned for the near future.

I feel that right now is the time for me to start and build a local community. I just don't know how to do that or where to begin.

I'm not the most social person so networking and leading will be a huge hurdle for me. I'm not creative enough with drawing or writing so creating flyers or propaganda would also be a challenge for me. I've always been more comfortable working and building things with my hands and have a pretty deep interest in land management and sustainability.

I also have the additional issue of being a person of colour in a mainly white town. Lifted trucks, SUVs, unwelcoming stares and plenty of entitled behaviours. The population in this town is mostly young families with younger children or old white folks which I doubt have any care for the future ahead of us. There's not much in between.

Over the past couple years, I have been buying various types of seeds and collecting seeds from my garden as plants mature. I've been trying to create a seed library for myself. Lately I've been thinking of trying to start a local seed library as a way to start some sort of community. Maybe even use that as a way to teach more local, sustainable habits.

I just don't know where to begin and starting feels quite overwhelming for one person.

I'm hoping to start a discussion or even brainstorm some ideas on what people can do, how to begin and how to follow through with building local communities.

Any idea outside of a seed library is welcome. It would help to have a nice, broad spread of ideas to draw from. I believe that would help keep the progress of the local communities adaptable as time goes on.

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While the future, no matter who wins the upcoming election, doesn’t look rosy, at the same time there is still a lot of people who are looking for an anti-capitalist and anti-authoritarian alternative to the established political order and are searching for concrete ways to get involved in real life action.

In past installments of this column, we’ve fleshed out ideas about how to to go about forming a group and promoting events, but this time around, we wanted to talk about concrete ideas on starting more long-term projects in your community. While this list isn’t exhaustive, we do hope this presents you with some real ideas about how you might start to begin.

“Punitive grandstanding” is the most descriptive short phrase I could come up to describe the following concept:

A situation where someone pushes for extreme punitive measures against in immoral act, which in practice “virtue signals” moral superiority and implies people proposing lesser punishment are immoral. This behaviour often goes beyond what is proportionate or productive.

You probably know what I mean. Say there’s a new lemmy thread on a news community, it’s about someone having committed a horrible crime. All the comments end up being a sort of “jerk off contest” for who can propose the strongest punishment and thereby assert their moral superiority.

Instead of taking an approach to actually reduce the incident of said crime, looking at what problems might have led to it, how to care for the victim/family, and how to properly rehabilitate and treat someone who committed such an act, solely focusing on coming up with the most draconian punishment possible.

Anyone who comments something about the justice system ideally being rehabilitative gets accused of being no better than the criminal themselves or “helping” criminals.

I’ve just noticed this general trend which seems to be at odds with anarchist principles. I wonder what you think? Have you noticed this too? Do you think it’s a major problem? What can we do about it?

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.

Gaza Strip, Palestine — With the war on Gaza being dubbed the first livestreamed genocide, gruesome images of Palestinian bodies shredded by Israeli bombings circulate the internet daily. More than 52,000 Palestinians have been confirmed killed, including those still buried under the rubble, with the actual death count likely as high as 186,000 or more. A third of those killed by Israel are children and around 100,000 Gazans have been injured. Of the 2.2 million Palestinians in the 25-mile long coastal enclave, [2 million](2 million) have been forcibly displaced at least once since in the last year. (...)

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). 

France declares curfew as second overseas territory erupts with protests over failing services and high cost of living ~ From Contre Attaque ~

The squatters quickly declared the base in the middle of the city “a politically autonomous anarchist zone.” Or, in plainer English, a commune. Taking a cue from the surrounding “Christian’s Harbor” neighborhood, they called it “Christiania.”

Like many other communes, Christiania’s founders wanted the new world they made within the walls to be as free as possible from all the old world’s rules and customs and hierarchies. They drew up a mission statement, according to which the goal of the commune was quote “to create a self-governing society whereby each and every individual holds themselves responsible for the well-being of the entire community.”

Link to preprint (PDF) from the author’s website

Abstract: When a liberal-democratic state signs a treaty or wages a war, does its whole polity do those things? We approach this question via the recent social ontological literature on collective agency. We provide an argument for 'yes', alongside one for 'no.' The arguments are presented via three desiderata on a 'yes' answer: the polity’s control over what the state does; the polity’s unity; and the influence of individual polity-members. We suggest that the answer to our question differs for different liberal-democratic states, and depends upon two underlying considerations: (1) the amount of discretion held by the state’s office-holders; (2) the extent to which the democratic procedure is ‘deliberative’ rather than ‘aggregative.’