Categories
General

Angela Davis is a radlib

it would take a long biography to analyze the political trajectory of Angela Davis’s entire public career on the u.s. left to where she is today…but we don’t need all that rn. let’s just look at where she is now, in the 21st century.

on Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign

Angela Davis was quoted as saying Obama’s 2008 election was a “victory, not of an individual, but of…people who refused to believe that it was impossible to elect a person, a Black person, who identified with the Black radical tradition.” she said this in 2012; even if she had somehow missed Black radical criticism of Obama before 2008 (doubt it) she’d had nearly an entire presidency to examine just what was so “radical” about this dude. and that’s the take she was giving audiences? really?

on hillary clinton

fast forward to 2016. Angela Davis says she’s voting against donald trump (radlib speak for ‘voting for hillary clinton’). she even suggests it’s ‘narcissistic’ not to do so. thankfully, there are many of us who care more about what’s possible than what’s ‘narcissistic’.

on Afropessimism

in 2018, Angela Davis attempted to critique Afropessimism, with gayatri spivak acting as an enabler. here’s a transcript of her comments, with a key sentence bolded:

I want to use this opportunity to say something about the way in which the notion of ‘anti-blackness’ has travelled. I know this concept does do important work, but I’m very careful about the implications of this category that black people constitute the most important group that is subject to racism. Sometimes ‘anti-blackness’ is used as an implicit criticism of the category ‘people of colour’ and to point to ‘anti-blackness’ in communities of people of colour. Of course there is racism everywhere. And black people are not immune to either anti-black racism or racist-inspired ideological assaults against other people of colour. So it is important to be careful regarding assumptions that black people are always the primary targets of racism. Discussions of anti-blackness often centre on pain and injury, which although not unimportant, can create barriers to developing solidarity, to developing the kind of empathy we were talking about. And if, from where I stand, the importance of black people’s histories in the Americas resides precisely in the fact that there has been an ongoing freedom struggle for many centuries, the centrality of black struggles is much more about freedom than it is about blackness.

aren’t the “barriers to developing solidarity” the actual practices of antiblackness, rather than Black politics which highlight and critique those practices? in discussing politcal relations between Black and non-Black people, shouldn’t we be more concerned about “empathy”–or a lack of it–on the part of the oppressor group, non-Black people? one need not be an Afropessimist to realize this ‘critique’ is terrible. (it’s also one that’s been addressed repeatedly, at length, by a range of Black liberationists.) what’s really being attacked here is any politics which refuses to decenter Black people and Black liberation, even when the pressure to do so comes from leftists, radicals, and revolutionaries.

2020: take a wild guess

that’s right: she went up for joe biden. if you missed this in her comments on Obama, what really makes her a radlib isn’t just that she supported the democratic party, but that she attempted to convince leftists and radicals that doing so was in line with their politics. her comments on the selection of Kamala Harris as vice presidential candidate make this clear: she is critical of Harris, but nevertheless says “it’s a feminist approach to be able to work with those contradictions. And so, in that context, I can say that I’m very excited.”

she makes bank saying shit like this, btw

feel free to enter ‘angela davis speaking fees’ into a search engine of your choice for more on this point.

#StopCopCity

and now we come to the present. in march, the city of atlanta–a local extension of an illegitimate, slavery-enriched, invader-colonizing government–gave Davis an award and announced the institution of a local ‘Angela Davis Day’. here, we can sidestep entirely analysis of the fallout–how the crowd responded, how Davis responded immediately, what she said later, and so on. instead, anyone who’s read to the end of this could ask themselves why the atlanta city government feels that honoring Angela Davis is something it can even attempt to do. do you believe this honor would be extended to veterans of the Black Liberation Army? citizens of the Republic of New Afrika? any Black person anywhere who takes up arms against everything the united states of amerika stands for–and does so with pride?

Categories
General

is the CEO of mastodon working with european police agencies?

it’s a fair question, considering some of the circumstances:

in november 2019, eugen rochko, CEO of mastodon gmbh & administrator of mastodon’s flagship instance, banned the assam police in india from mastodon.social, citing community saftey concerns. however, a dutch police account, registered in 2016, remains on the instance more than 3 years after the assam police account was suspended, despite user reports & public warnings.

on another level, eugen has been shown to have loose connections to the european policing apparatus through the project, which is conducting research for surveillance & social control online. he was paid €63,290.07 to work for this european union-supported initiative.

eugen’s team also suspended the accounts of two revolutionary colombian organizations, the FARC-EP (formerly here) & the ELN (formerly here) from the flagship instance without explanation. this also raises red flags, as these groups have been internationally targeted & isolated as “criminal” organizations & suspended from other social media sites at police request.

it would be relatively straightforward for eugen to issue a statement denying—or if necessary, detailing—any past, present, or intended future collaboration between mastodon & law enforcement agencies. to date, however, no such statement has been made.

Categories
General

Insurrectionary Clandestinity

In situations of political conflict, the underground is a name for a social structure that allows political actors (politicized people, from individuals all the way up to mass organizations) to operate secretly – without their methods being publicly known.

This is usually necessary if political actors pose a threat to the status quo, for a very simple reason: it’s typically the government’s job to protect the status quo. Since the government uses the law and its enforcement to do this, it will make threats to the status quo illegal as they appear – if it has not already done so.

Most governments make it illegal to fight them as a kind of “catch-all” rule for this, but they usually adopt more specific rules depending on both the general context (what kind of status quo do they defend?) and the specific context (who do they believe is – or may soon become – a threat their power?).

If a group which claims to oppose the status quo really means what they say, they will have to take steps to be able to function when they’re not allowed to. They will have to develop an underground. Another term for operating within the underground is operating in clandestinity.

Examples of Anti-Oppressive Underground Structures

In the u.s., a well-known example is the Underground Railroad, which helped legally enslaved Black people escape captivity into places where their risk of being caught and punished was much lower. It was, of course, very illegal. For the most part, however, it wasn’t insurrectionary; the purpose of the “railroad” was not to organize an armed uprising against the u.s. government.

Another well-studied example is from the russian empire of the late 19th and early 20th century. Up to 1917, basically the entire political left – narodniks, bolsheviks, mensheviks, anarchists, and so on – was illegal. All their organizations were banned, forbidden from having a public existence within the empire. By necessity, then, the political structures of their organizations were clandestine: to carry out workers’ strikes, propagandizing, assassinations, and eventually a revolution, they had to figure out how to keep functioning when they officially weren’t allowed to exist.

In more recent decades, pretty much every significant anti-colonial organization – even the ones dedicated to “peaceful” methods – were made illegal within the colonies they sought to liberate. Communist parties were also illegal in many countries (and still are in some). Simply being LGBTQIA+ is illegal in much of the world, as is creating militant LGBTQIA+ organizations. Yet all of these groupings have existed and continue to exist. Today, right now, nation-states worldwide have banned anti-oppressive organizations and happily seek excuses to ban more. Many of those organizations don’t simply stop functioning and wait until the government decides they’re allowed again – a “change of heart” that may never come. They move underground.

Practical Questions of Clandestinity

What does your organization do? How would it do that if it became illegal? You can think these questions through by breaking them into smaller ones:

  • Does a group need to hold meetings? How would you hold a meeting without anyone you don’t want to finding out?
  • Do people need to be fed, housed, clothed? Disguised? How do you buy, borrow, make, or take things without unwanted attention? How do you move things around quietly?
  • Do things need to be said publicly? How do you spread a message without giving away your location?

Some people can work these things out easier than others; that’s where collaboration comes in. You can play to your strengths while others play to theirs. Imagination is as important as expertise; with practice and education, many of us can become pretty good at things we may not be “naturally” good at. Sometimes flexibility helps; sometimes routine does. It depends on the goals and the circumstances.

Accidents, bad decisions, and simple bad luck are all pretty much inevitable. Having backup plans and preparing for “what if” scenarios is crucial. Hardships are guaranteed, but underground organizations can and do win struggles against institutional powers – because the powers that be have at least as many weaknesses as their adversaries do.

Being prepared to expose and take advantage of the weaknesses of established opponents is critical to a successful insurrectionary strategy, and few insurrections survive past their early stages without at least a few secretive conspirators – in other words, without an underground.