Beware of white collar men who fetishize blue collar masculinity.

Tensions in India and Pakistan continue to escalate as an official is accused of wrongfully releasing water. The canals in Punjab were built during British colonialism, as a method to displace pastoralists, encourage settled agriculture, buy off local power structures and co-opt leaders, and reward those who performed colonial military service. During partition, these waterways became divided between the two countries.

https://www.tribuneindia.com/news/punjab/bbmb-chairman-illegally-released-200-cusecs-of-water-to-haryana-alleges-punjab-cm-mann/

Pakistan and India blame each other for overnight drone attacks in Kashmir as tensions escalate

https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2025/may/08/india-pakistan-kashmir-latest-live-news

Fascism is imperialism come home. God help us.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=inckSgJcd_0

New song at my local open mic.

Haymarket 

As I went out walking the first day of May 
To join in the union and march on our way 
Our feet made a drum beat and over our heads 
The banners of struggle in black and in red 
My girl was humming along with the song 
She bobbed on my shoulder as we marched along 
She tapped on my head and this she did say 
Why do we march on the 1st day of May 

Chorus: 
Our sorrow is black and our rage it is red 
For the Haymarket Martyrs and all of our dead 
Who went with defiance into early graves 
And that’s why we march on the first day of May 

It was down in Chicago 1886 
A city cemented in blood and in bricks 
The anarchists worked to unfold our fate 
That workers could rise up and cast down the state 
For 8 hours of work, rest, and 8 as we like 
The harvest machine factory went out on strike 
And when the scan came they met them unbowed 
And Chicago police fired into the crowd 

Chorus 

The Chicago the cobbles in in life blood were drenched
As workers cried for Rache- revenge! 
And the crowd gathered in, their rage was a-poundin’ 
And the Chicago police like hounds were a prowlin’
But no room for mercy and no room for grace 
And a bomb that fell like a comet from space 
Was thrown at the cops and fell into the mud 
Exploded in shrapnel and fire and blood 

Chorus 

 Chicago police came and rounded them up 
Bunch of anarchists, immigrants, and that was enough 
The papers convicted them before the trial 
The jury complied and the hangin judge smiled 
The charge was conspiracy, sentence was death 
A rope and a scaffold to cut down their breath 
Someday our silence August spies did say 
Will be stronger than voices you strangle today 

Chorus

One of my least favorite leefty discourses is the "Christianity colonized Europe through a genocide of pagans" discourse.

The first problem is that it is wildly untrue. Early Christianity in the Roman Empire spread largely as a faith of the underclass, the colonized, women, slaves, and so forth before eventually being embraced and coopted by the emperors after a long period of repression. After this and for largely unrelated reasons, the Roman Empire fell into a cycle of invasion, infighting, and crisis it couldn't climb out of, and collapsed. Christianity was adopted by many pagan cultures through a process of osmosis and proselytization that is actually much more interesting than this idea that The Church just "stole" all the pagan Gods and Holidays and made them Christian.

The second problem, though, is that the whole narrative focuses on the adoption of Christianity as the root of the rise of authoritarianism, patriarchy, capitalism, environmental destruction, etc etc etc, in ways that are deeply ahistorical. Several of these systems pre-date European adoption of Christianity by millennia (particularly patriarchy, which is why Roman women found Christianity appealing). Others, like capitalism, didn't develop for a thousand and a half years under Christianity until joint stock companies, international trade routes, the enclosure of the commons, and a number of other historic processes began to converge.

I'm not a Christian and have no need to make apologist arguments, but if you need to go back beyond the premodern period for your arguments against Christianity... what are you even doing?

The strongest argument against the Zionist project, is to have a world in which no stateless people could be subjected to genocide without the whole world standing up to stop it. The dreams of the revolutionary Yiddish community went down in flames in the Holocaust, and the Zionist movement emerged from it triumphant. The state and the nation- whose logic had been central to the massacre of a people- was embraced as the only way to ensure it never happened again.

Of course, “never again” seemed so simple and has become, to some, so complicated. Did it mean, never again will we tolerate genocide? Or never again will Jewish people be left defenseless to massacre? If it is the latter, what lengths is the state willing to go to, to secure space for the nation to live, and security from its displaced enemies and internal critics? The logic of the nation state reasserts itself.

But, we are told, that logic must. It is the only way. After all- a genocide cannot be stopped without a state serving those targeted.

That is the challenge we are now called to, with Palestine- to show that a genocide of a people without any powerful state to protect them, can be stopped through international solidarity, through internal rebellion of the colonizer’s people, through refusal, and through the resistance of that stateless people.

At some point in your life in South Minneapolis you may finding yourself in one of our many cafes and diners run by and catering to upper middle class progressive white people. You may be tempted, there, to order something Mexican off of the menu, such as the tacos or burrito or huevos rancheros.

Don’t.

Whatever spice-deprived abomination on an uncooked flour tortilla you’re about to receive is not worth the 150% markup over getting the actual dish from a Latino restaurant.

Go to Lake Street instead.

New libretto

Tax Cut Spend

This unelected trillionaire
And all his boys claim laissez faire
While whipping out the chainsaw of the state
Like Mario they smash and grab
I Prefer Luigi, but these scabs
Need money to deport the ones they hate
First they dig their razors in
Let you bleed, then circle in
They’ll eat you once they slash you to the bone
These corporate goons ain’t anarchists
And us who are fucking pissed
They’re buying up this last frontier that they don’t own

Chorus:
You tax the food, tax the clothes
Tax what comes and tax what goes
Every buck I work to make, you take your share
You cut the parks, you cut the schools
Cut on the poor, just to be cruel
But for borders, cops, and wars there’s cash to spare

They want to privatize the mail, just gut it ‘til it fails,
Then sell it to their friends at Amazon,
They wanna privatize the schools to raise soldiers, drones, and fools
And starve SNAB/EBT until it’s gone
Already planned a spending spree, killing social security
Turned the park service into their whipping boy
Now I’ve heard the nurses say they’ll privatize the old VA
So guardsman, think on that if you’re deployed.

Chorus

What they’re cutting with their knives, we paid for with our lives
A concession to our class from the elites
They were not given, they were won, on the picket ‘gainst the gun
When our great grandfathers fought them in the streets
In the mills and in the mines, bought in blood and held the line
When you pick a fight with power, better win it
Now they want to claw them back, another corporate attack
Bet get used to class war, son, you’re living in it.

Chorus

The boys who make up DOGE were frat bros a few years ago and will have hedge fund jobs or right wing political operator positions in a few years if they don’t goof up enough to be given a golden parachute. They have never experienced risk in their lives. Isn’t it time they did?

@ciggysmokebringer Right. They think that they hit this 3.5% and then the government…. goes blue, I guess?

I thought it was frustrating, but rewarding, struggling alongside the newly radicalized folks of 2020, who often had ambitions in excess of their means, a great sense of self-confidence born from the successes of the first week of that uprising, a sort of hodgepodge radicalism, and a sense of security culture that often put the emphasis on completely the wrong thing.

It is so much more frustrating to work with people who are involved in the 50501 movement. Not only are many of these folks completely inexperienced at any sort of protest, but many of them come to the struggle with the attitude that finally, the reasonable liberal centrists are coming out and will show the radicals how to "properly" protest. As if being completely respectable, nondisruptive, and ignorable is a genius strategy that the radicals just never considered.

Peak liberalism is thinking that if you and enough people to total 3.5% of the population show up at state capitols and hold signs, that this will topple the regime because you read a study from Harvard that said that's how protesting works.

The essence of Irish revolutionary music is an international group of immigrants in a textile factory unfolding a earthquake of a strike with the IWW in which Andy Irvine specifically dedicates bars to praising organizers and condemning the Irish-American bishop who sided with the bosses.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9rYPCLfIetM

Let it be rage, then, that gives us a light to follow, and not the cold sleep of despair.

To be awake and alive is to be in mourning.

From a ruling class perspective, one of the most valuable things you can have is an active civil society, competitive "market of ideas", and active but nonviolent fairly nondisruptive protest movements.

That's the ideal governing position for a competent group of rulers exercising power. It allows them to identify points of social tension and resolve them-- through repression or concession.

This was the strategy of the American state from the 1950s through the 1980s or so. Protests were no longer machine gunned like strikes were back in the day, but they were brutalized with tear gas and dogs and fire hoses, until public pressure built so much that people had to cave. Violence was still there, but was more underground- the assassination of Black Panthers dressed up as a shootout, the shooting of Kent State protestors shrouded in the chaos of combat (rifles against chants). Concessions were made, at the same time, through struggle. The ruling class had a strategy of both repression and concession.

There is a whole layer of soft power being stripped away now, making social conflict bare.

Hey check this oud player out.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sGUQyh-JdOI

Join us in St Paul on May 17 to get down to brass tacks- what will it actually take to organize a general strike? How can we as workers directly resist the attacks on our class?

CZM on strikes as a force that builds worker democracy

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/it-could-happen-here/id1449762156?i=1000703817015