Tag: Commentary
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No Time for Patience: Fascism, Climate, and Capitalism
By Mark Bray, TruthOut We are living in ominous times. Every week something new: white supremacist murders in Kentucky and Pittsburgh; the continued rise of the far right in Europe; Trump’s attack on transgender rights; the election of aspiring tyrant Jair Bolsonaro to the Brazilian presidency; the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report that climate catastrophe is likely only about 20 years away. What’s next? At…
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Kali Akuno on Lenin’s Vanguard Party
The following is a transcript of a live Q&A session with Kali Akuno hosted on Twitter by Black Socialists of America (@BlackSocialists) on October 10, 2018. We found the discussion valuable and hope to offer more content like this. See below for the original tweets and videos. Q: What do you think of the Leninist idea that…
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Between Infoshops and Insurrection: U.S. Anarchism, Movement Building, and the Racial Order
This now classic essay by the late Joel Olson (1967-2012) reflects on the state of US anarchist milieu from the 1990’s through the 2000’s. Olson was a long time anarchist writer, organizer, political theorist and veteran of both Love & Rage Anarchist Federation and the anarchist influenced Bring the Ruckus organization. A major focus of his writing…
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Is Student Activism Enough?
By Patrick Berkman Freddie DeBoer has a blogpost up at Jacobin, titled “Student Activism Isn’t Enough.” It’s classic Freddie: write an entire essay shitting on student activism, then closing it by saying actually, student activism is pretty great and important, keep it up! DeBoer claims “the university can’t be the key site of left-wing (or any other)…
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My September Eleven
By Cí Melosa Originally published in El Coyote, translated from Portuguese by the author. The month? September. The day? Eleven. The year? Oh! The year. 1973. You thought I would say 2001, right? Yeah, this time we’ll talk about another September 11, the one that happened in 1973. I’m not afraid of backlash. I’m a writer.…
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Where Movements Go to Die: The Democrats are Draining the Resistance’s Life
By Eoin Higgins, Paste Magazine For a brief, fleeting moment, it seemed that this time it might be different. Donald Trump’s inauguration was followed by the largest one-day protest in American history. The next week, spontaneous actions broke out across the country’s airports in response to the administration’s travel ban. People started talking about a general…
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Criminalizing Dissent: “Unmasking Antifa” Bill Introduced
By BRRN Social Media Team In a move to expand the atmosphere of repression against the left, a bill specifically targeting anti-fascist or “Antifa” protesters was introduced to the Judiciary Committee in the House of Representatives in June. Titled the “Unmasking Antifa Act of 2018,” the bill is sponsored by Republican Rep. Daniel Donovan of…
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The State Against Climate Change: Response to Christian Parenti
A response to Christian Parenti’s assertion that the state is the only way to meet the challenge of the climate crisis. By BRRN Radical Ecology Committee (REC) In the concluding chapter of Tropic of Chaos: Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence (2012), author Christian Parenti suggests that those seeking to mitigate and adapt…
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On Magical Thinking VS Sober Analysis of the Ocasio-Cortez Victory in NY
We reprint this post as part of our ongoing efforts to critically look at left electoralism and to pose an alternative vision of movement building and popular power from below. In this piece Black Agenda Report editor Bruce Dixon gives a critical assessment of the primary victory of New York congressional candidate Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez which…
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Sure, We Can Elect The Occasional Democrat Progressive. Then What?
We reprint this post as part of our ongoing efforts to critically look at left electoralism and to pose an alternative vision of movement building and popular power from below. Here Black Agenda Report editor Bruce Dixon bravely pushes the logic of elections when he states: “What we rarely bother to think through is what…