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We’re under fire now
Israeli tanks are shooting at our tents, displacement camps and homes in Al Zaytoun neighbourhood of the Gaza City..
Bullets are everywhere over our heads..
Massacres all over Gaza today. Deadliest day in months and months.
Nearly 50 Palestinians, mainly women and children and elders, as always, were killed.
I can’t even bring myself to show it to you anymore. Kids blown to pieces, mothers blown apart by bombs. Babies.
A big drop in donations over the last 3 weeks meant that we had to reduce water distributions by 50%, pause the grocery voucher for 110 families in our camps and stop all our music classes!
If donations don’t increase soon, we will have to reduce our food distributions as well. Please donate & share: https://t.co/1j2S3RoAgU
It is tragic that Sameer Project is having to cut down on its services due to a lack of donations, please help reverse this awful trend. Donate, share and support:
In light of the recent attacks on 'campism', I want to offer a few thoughts on internationalism. However shrivelled in practice and withered in theory, internationalism is not about 'solidarity' in the abstract. It is not about standing against 'bad actors', whatever that might mean. It is not even about opposing 'state repression' or 'violence' or 'war' — not when our conceptions of these things are abstracted from an assessment of the contradictions both domestic and international that give them shape. Internationalism is not a moral category. Nor is it a set of cookie-cutter principles against which political forces and social formations can be measured and judged.
Instead, internationalism is an extended historical tradition whose key pivot occurred with the October Revolution and the subsequent boom in anti-colonial nationalism across the Third World. The theories that took shape in this process reveal three key things. One, that the division of the world among the major capitalist powers means that the main contradiction within capitalism is not between the workers and factory owners in Manchester, but between the imperialists and the oppressed globally. Two, that the super-profits produced by the exploitation of the global periphery enable the imperialists to buy the consent of their working class and sustain the imperialist project. And therefore, three, that the motor force of the global liberation struggle is to be found in the global periphery. It is by severing the arteries of imperial plunder at the source of exploitation — in the colonies and neo-colonies — that capitalism can finally be defeated at the global scale.
These are material categories. They do not adjudicate — as many post-colonial thinkers are wont to do — between 'good' anti-colonial struggles and 'bad' anti-colonial struggles. They do not even attempt to make the moral claim that, whether you are 'good' or 'bad', you should not be colonized, starved, or bombed — apparently a controversial position among 'campism's' most ardent adversaries. Instead, they concern the structure of the international system. They make a set of historical and dialectical claims about the nature of imperialism in the present conjuncture. First, that imperialism operates through mechanisms — from sanctions to debt to war to genocide — designed to deflate incomes, shorten lives, fragment states, and weaken anti-hegemonic forces in the Global South, policies that eventually find their way back to the working people of the Global North. Second, that preventing the expansion of that agenda is a historical necessity and a question of our collective survival, something that the genocide in Palestine has made abundantly clear. Third, that the internal contradictions within spaces resisting that agenda are shaped and distorted by the external pressures they face — and should not be overemphasized.
Indeed, no one says that the actions of the anti-hegemonic front is immune from critique. To be sure, the national class struggle threads in millions of ways through the international anti-imperialist struggle. But is it useful for the Cuban revolutionary project that Steve in North Carolina thinks its government arrested too many people? Is it useful for Iran that Ulrich from Baden-Württemberg thinks its security forces should have handed out roses to armed rioters ransacking shops, mosques and hospitals across the country? There is an ideological front to the imperialist war, and 'critiques' cannot be abstracted from the broader propaganda apparatus that wields them to throttle solidarities with countries facing assault.
People must be given the space to settle their own contradictions. The state, while it undoubtedly exists as an instrument of oppression, also happens to be a vehicle for consensus-formation and collective decision-making. For this, sovereignty and stability are a precondition. A state's oppressive functions heighten in a time of war. Indeed, that is one of the strategies of contemporary imperialist hybrid war: to delegitimize the state, challenge its monopoly on violence, and foreclose avenues for the peaceful resolution of its internal contradictions. It is immeasurably more difficult to demand more bread and higher wages of a state under suffocating sanctions that privilege its capitalist class. And it is all but impossible to take to the streets in protest when your protest faces sabotage by armed reactionaries cooked up in Washington's death factory.
The premise of the so-called 'campist' is simple. States that find themselves structurally opposed to imperialism face a full-blown assault by a war machine whose agenda is balkanization, privatization, immiseration, extraction, exploitation, dislocation, and ultimately mass death — policies shrouded and whitewashed through a comprehensive ideological and propaganda apparatus designed to secure our consent. Those of us sitting in North Carolina or Baden-Württemberg would do well to oppose our states' role in that agenda rather than fixating on the shortcomings and contradictions of the forces seeking to defend themselves and, by extension, all of humanity against that assault.
Donations to the @sameerproject are down 50% since the "ceasefire" but the need remains as high as ever, with the criminal blockade still intact. Now is the time to redouble our efforts and donations so Palestinians can rebuild what the genocidal entity has destroyed. Give!
going to @TWT_NOW with @palyouthmvmt in conversation with @amalsaad_lb@taraalami and @kmatbb on Zionism as Imperialism in the region. would be great to see some of you!
https://t.co/GqmvzWzt8g
"I wasn’t against communism, but i can’t say i was for it either. At first, i viewed it suspiciously, as some kind of white man’s concoction, until i read works by African revolutionaries and studied the African liberation movements. Revolutionaries in Africa understood that the question of African liberation was not just a question of race, that even if they managed to get rid of the white colonialists, if they didn’t rid themselves of the capitalistic economic structure, the white colonialists would simply be replaced by Black neocolonialists. There was not a single liberation movement in Africa that was not fighting for socialism.
The whole thing boiled down to a simple equation: anything that has any kind of value is made, mined, grown, produced, and processed by working people. So why shouldn’t working people collectively own that wealth? Why shouldn’t working people own and control their own resources? Capitalism meant that rich businessmen owned the wealth, while socialism meant that the people who made the wealth owned it.
I got into heated arguments with sisters or brothers who claimed that the oppression of Black people was only a question of race. I argued that there were Black oppressors as well as white ones. That’s why you’ve got Blacks who support Nixon or Reagan or other conservatives. Black folks with money have always tended to support candidates who they believed would protect their financial interests. As far as i was concerned, it didn’t take too much brains to figure out that Black people are oppressed because of class as well as race, because we are poor and because we are Black. …
[Earlier in my life] When someone asked me what communism was, i opened my mouth to answer, then realized i didn’t have the faintest idea. My image of a communist came from a cartoon. It was a spy with a black trench coat and a black hat pulled down over his face, slinking around corners …
I never forgot that day. We’re taught at such an early age to be against the communists, yet most of us don’t have the faintest idea what communism is. Only a fool lets somebody else tell him who his enemy is… It’s got to be one of the most basic principles of living: always decide who your enemies are for yourself, and never let your enemies choose your enemies for you."
I know this is insane but I think there's a parasocial survivor's guilt that has developed from mass death being broadcast onto our phones every day for the past two years, as if we've failed as witnesses, and through this, as humans. I feel ashamed I have anything at all
We shouldn’t walk away from the project. The task now is to mobilise behind the September 15 new party founding convention plan. There’s huge potential here and a few egos or legal threats won’t stop it. The proposals released last Monday are bold and democratic, setting the stage for something real.
Zarah and others should run for leadership when the new party launches. Both sides need to stop the sabotage and drop the legal letters.
We also cannot allow Jeremy’s same old staffers to end up running the new party after the launch.
This can be done. It has to be. A broad left party is essential right now, and we cannot give it up.
After yesterday’s “double-tap” strike on Gaza’s last southern hospital, every hospital in Gaza is not operational. It began with Al Ahli, where 471 were killed. Israel blamed “a Palestinian rocket,” and the Guardian green-lit the destruction that followed. Blood on their hands
Syria officially abandons the Palestinians and opens direct talks with Israel for the first time in 25 years. Those of us who warned this would happen were denounced as “Stalinists,” “Assadists,” or even “Islamophobic” (apparently opposing ISIS was bigotry).
A bitter betrayal.
BREAKING: Entrance to Leonardo Edinburgh factory is BLOCKADED by two action takers locked onto a van.
They're halting the production of laser targeting systems for Israel's F-35 fighter jets.