J-Town Action と Solidarity

Grassroots collective dedicated to revolutionary organizing & building community power in Little Tokyo — Weekly mutual aid Power Up w/ @WeTheUnhoused

[J-Town Action と Solidarity @JTOWNACTION]

The Palestinian people are rising up after 75+ years of occupation & ethnic cleansing by the apartheid state of Israel.

Now is not the time for “progressive” liberals & armchair “revolutionaries” to make demands for “peaceful resolution” from the comfort of the imperial core.

[LA Street Care @lastreetcare]

Despite 100° temperatures, people began moving their belongings before 6am, the time on the posted notices. Everyone waited in the blazing sun until Hugo's CARE+ sweep began around 3pm. "We were waiting a long ass time. Cops were out here, but the sweep started eight hours late."

[Helyeh Doutaghi | حليا دوطاقي @Helyeh_Doutaghi]

Moving beyond the critique of the letter itself which has been already addressed by colleagues/friends, what has become visible over the past few days goes beyond the failure of one letter or the outrage surrounding it. It reveals something deeper about the political and intellectual order that produced it.

I. The decay of western left intellectual authority

For decades, prominent Western left intellectuals have spoken with an authority that assumed their analyses could shape movements and political/public consciousness. The extensive scrutiny and rejection this letter has received shows how such authority is eroding.

The Guardian and the wider mainstream media, even when furnished with left cover, increasingly struggle to manufacture the moral consensus they once could. Humanitarian language, progressive/abolitionist credentials, calibrated condemnations and declarations of solidarity remain available, but their power to confuse or persuade the masses is diminishing.

The empire is experiencing a crisis of hegemony (owed to historic defeat of US by Iran and Resistance by anti-colonial forces in West Asia) and its intellectual institutions are decaying with it.

II. Condemnation is not politics

There is also a question for those, including comrades, who have rightly condemned the letter: what does condemnation actually accomplish?

It can provide the feeling of opposition without confronting the structures producing the violence. It allows people to distinguish themselves from the most vulgar representatives of imperial power while remaining embedded in the society that sustains and benefits from it.

Thinking, analyzing and denouncing matter. But they cannot become substitutes for political transformation.

The harder question is therefore: what kind of movement continues to reproduce intellectual authorities so detached from the material anti-colonial struggles of the people they claim to stand beside?

And how have Western left intellectuals who took disastrous positions on Syria retained legitimacy and institutional authority with so little accountability for the violence to which they contributed?

III. The letter’s irrelevance to Iranian political life

Perhaps the most revealing fact is what has *not* happened.

I have been closely following Iranian spaces from inside Iran; universities, classrooms, women’s collectives, labour spaces and political discussions. I have seen no meaningful engagement with this letter.

Its circulation has been overwhelmingly concentrated in English-language media and Western political spaces. A letter that appears enormously important in the West has little discernible significance among the people whose lives it claims to address.

That gap exposes the distance between the political imagination of the imperial centre and the material reality of those living under its consequences.

Western subjects may be surprised to discover how irrelevant they have become to the anti-colonial and anti-imperial struggles unfolding beyond the imperial centre.

Finally

After everything i have lived through over the past two years, and specially after talking to Minab families, I refuse to extend the language of “good intentions” to those who signed this letter. They had decades of history, scholarship, testimony, war, sanctions, intervention and resistance from which to learn.

The future is being made by those who have proved capable of changing the balance of power in fav of the masses of the periphery. History is being made by the Resistance forces across West Asia led by the Islamic Republic of Iran, not through the increasingly irrelevant/saviour takes of the imperial intellectual class.

//
Let Iran’s beauty bless your day

[Vijay Prashad @vijayprashad]

Mumia Abu-Jamal sent a message about his actual feelings about the US-Israeli war of aggression against Iran. He wrote it on two paper plates. It is more eloquent than the Guardian letter, whose right to put his name down needs to be questioned. Who signed for Mumia?

A transcription of the text on the plates:

‘My young friends,

Iran is showing the world (especially the 3rd world) how to fight against the Empire. Their drones are rewriting the rules of war. And countries across the Global South are studying this phase of the war for that use!

They remind me of Vietnam poor country that whipped the most powerful army on earth... That's where we are today.

Love...
Mumia’

[People's City Council - Los Angeles @PplsCityCouncil]

$1312 (nice) raised as of last night... Please consider donating and help us fight this repression. Share if you're able!

Link here: https://t.co/CmLPgPABaL

[LA Street Care @lastreetcare]

In April 2025, the Abolish 41.18 Campaign demanded that Councilmember Hugo Soto-Martinez repeal all 41.18 criminalization zones created by the Mitch O'Farrell. LAMC 41.18 criminalizes sitting, lying, sleeping and having personal property in countless public zones across the city.

[LA Street Care @lastreetcare]

Electoral politics is a dead end. When so-called "progressives" take office, they undermine movements and whitewash state violence instead of fighting it.

[People's City Council - Los Angeles @PplsCityCouncil]

LAPD seen here providing support for federal agents raid of MacArthur Park earlier today.

Public officials keep lying about the city's involvement with federal operations in Los Angeles. Expect this to continue to increase leading up to the 2028 Olympics.

[Wetheunhoused @TheoHen95302259]

A new episode of We the Unhoused has dropped. Take a listen!

https://t.co/NcPv5M9AVL

[Workshops4Gaza @Workshops4Gaza]

In Blood In My Eye (1972), George Jackson said that the aim of a united left in the united states should be "the defense of political prisoners, and prisoners in general." Why?

[jamie loftus 🌭 @jamieloftusHELP]

We the Unhoused is nominated for a Webby (again!) and the team and @TheoHen95302259 need your votes! if you have a second it means the world.

https://t.co/mmsRPiFdL1

[MintPress News @MintPressNews]

“We Are Terrorists” Says US Army Veteran Josephine Guilbeau

As a former counter-terrorism officer, Guilbeau breaks down the process by which the Minab school bombing in Iran had to occur & expresses her outrage about the lack of any accountability.

[LA Street Care @lastreetcare]

"When you remove the people from a location, you're not just separating people. You are taking the heart and soul of the place. You are taking the community, which is the essence of any place. My answer to that violence is, see what people will do to get that back.
Queen Mendez

[LA Street Care @lastreetcare]

On March 24 and 25, 2021, Councilmember Mitch O'Farrell ordered the militarized eviction of the community that lived at Echo Park Lake for 18 months.

O'Farrell is gone, but the eviction's legacy of criminalization and displacement continues in his former district and beyond.

[Los Angeles Journalist 📸 @slausongirlnews]

The family of Bryan Bostic are organizing a march and rally for this Sunday March 22nd after he was found dead in police custody March 10th 🙏🏾

📍 400 Block of E. Hillcrest Blvd Inglewood, CA

⏰ 3:00 pm

[People's City Council - Los Angeles @PplsCityCouncil]

Inglewood PD murdered 37 y/o Black father Brian Bostic last week. "Bryan leaves behind his beautiful daughter — his heart & soul, his purpose, his everything. Everything he did was for her."

The post below has 1k+ likes but GFM is at $696. Share & donate: https://t.co/fGoqCallya

[LA Street Care @lastreetcare]

The struggles of unhoused and undocumented people are more interconnected than you know.
An estimated 10% of unhoused Angelenos are undocumented.
While ICE kidnaps people off our streets every day, city officials continue to sweep encampments and enforce anti-camping laws.

[dr. local angry blk man @afropessimistic]

On March 10th Inglewood PD killed a Black man down the street from SoFi Stadium. His family has still not received any answers from police about what happened, please spread the word. RIP Bryan Bostic. https://t.co/q9e4pYUKkk

[LA Street Care @lastreetcare]

Our coalition of 50+ mutual aid, tenant, community self defense, and abolitionist organizations made a simple demand to @hugoforcd13:
Repeal Mitch O'Farrell's 41.18 zones.
Hugo continues to refuse to commit to this demand. We will continue to take action until he does.

[LA Street Care @lastreetcare]

Yesterday, organizers representing 50 community groups, including several Community Self Defense Coalition member groups, presented an urgent and simple demand to Councilmember Hugo Soto-Martinez:

Repeal Mitch O’Farrell’s 41.18 criminalization zones.

[Ramy Abdu| رامي عبده @RamAbdu]

.@turaani: The world's largest skin bank is in Israel, stocked from Palestinian bodies

Israel is skinning dead bodies of Palestinians