In 2000s Ukraine, Anatoli Ulyanov co-made online media dedicated to art, culture, and politics, and became recognized for his provocative writing style.
Author Archive for: Rupture.Capital
Socialists in the United States are stuck. How do we become masters of our own fate?
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Eminent domain has long been used to displace working-class people of color in Los Angeles, as in many cities. In a twist, a group of LA tenants is campaigning to use eminent domain to save themselves from eviction.
Hillside Villa tenants gather in front of their building in 2020. (Courtesy of Hillside Villa Tenants Association)
After trying to get an appointment for months, Rene AlexZander and four of his neighbors went to Los Angeles city councilmember Paul Krekorian’s office in December 2021. There, they met with Krekorian and members of his staff to discuss an unprecedented proposal: that the city acquire their building through eminent domain.
Krekorian heads up the committee that is currently reviewing the proposal. “I’ll never forget it,” AlexZander said of the meeting. Krekorian’s deputy chief of staff Matt Hale “looked at me and said, ‘We have to consider what’s best for the taxpayers.’ And I said, ‘We are the taxpayers!’ I called him out. I said, ‘What you’re saying right now is very insulting to us. You try to make us seem as if we’re not significant, when we really are.’”
AlexZander is a twenty-year tenant of Hillside Villa, a 124-unit affordable housing development in Chinatown, Los Angeles. The olive-green building with bright red wrought-iron balcony railings built in 1988 sits in view of several imposing new luxury apartment towers, a reminder of the recent wave of gentrification that has swept the area. For more than three years, AlexZander and his fellow tenants have waged an extraordinary fight to not only remain in their homes but to convince the city to purchase their building using eminent domain, a solution they argue would prevent displacement and create permanently affordable housing.
The thirty-year affordability covenant on the building (a condition of the tax credits and subsidized loans given to the developer in the 1980s) is set to expire, and the landlord, Tom Botz, has announced massive rent hikes that would mean de facto eviction of most tenants. Their fight for eminent domain offers a powerful template for other tenants looking to decommodify housing in hyper-financialized cities.
Eminent domain is a law that gives the government the right to seize, or expropriate, private property for public use, while compensating the property owner. The City of Los Angeles has a long, painful history of using eminent domain for highway expansion, stadium construction, and “urban renewal” efforts — usually displacing communities of color while benefiting corporate developers.
A glaring historical example is the Battle of Chavez Ravine, which resulted in the displacement of eighteen hundred families and the construction of Dodger Stadium. The land, previously held by Mexican-Americans who had gravitated there due to housing discrimination in other parts of the city, was acquired by the Los Angeles Housing Authority, primarily through eminent domain, in 1949.
The area was slated for public housing designed by modernist icon Richard Neutra that would hold thirty-six hundred units. However, with the 1953 election of conservative mayor Norris Poulson, who vehemently opposed public housing construction — and after years of the real estate lobby accusing the Los Angeles Housing Authority of communist infiltration, culminating in a referendum that banned public housing construction in the city altogether — the plans for public housing were abandoned, and City Council approved the sale of Chavez Ravine to Dodger owner Walter O’Malley in 1957.
LA County police removing resident Aurora Vargas from Chavez Ravine as she fights eviction. (Herald-Examiner Collection / Los Angeles Public Library Collection)
There’s also the case of Bunker Hill, a once-exclusive enclave of Victorian mansions (and home to Angel’s Flight, the 298-foot funicular known as the “world’s shortest railway”) that became a working-class neighborhood during the interwar period. When City Council voted to purchase the “blighted” land through eminent domain in 1959 and then sold it to private developers to spur a “renaissance” of Downtown, a total of 7,310 units were razed.
Today, Bunker Hill houses a collection of luxury residential buildings, concert venues, museums, gleaming office towers, and hotels (including John Portman’s postmodern landmark Bonaventure Hotel), and heavily policed privatized plazas. These are just two examples of the City of Los Angeles using eminent domain to benefit for-profit projects with little concern for people who lose their homes and are displaced as a result — all of which raises the question of what the city believes constitutes “public use.”
The Hillside Villa tenants argue that eminent domain, rather than being used to benefit corporate developers, should be used to ensure that tenants are able to remain in their homes in a city that is growing increasingly expensive and unsustainable for working-class residents like them. In Los Angeles County, which has an average median rent of $1,773 for a one-bedroom apartment, 75 percent of households were rent-burdened (spending more than 30 percent of their income on housing) even prior to COVID-19, while nearly half were severely rent-burdened. Meanwhile, the number of unhoused Angelenos continues to increase, reaching 66,436 in the 2020 Greater Los Angeles Homeless Count — a number that is expected to rise significantly when the eviction moratorium expires.
By fighting for the use of eminent domain to secure their right to stay put, Hillside Villa tenants are reclaiming the law in a system that is otherwise set up to protect and benefit private developers and landlords, enforced by the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) and the Sheriff’s Department who carry out evictions, police private property, and clear encampments. To confront the growing and intersecting homelessness and affordability crises, housing must be decommodified and reclaimed as a public good and human right, not a commodity for profit maximization — and eminent domain can help get us there.
Hillside Villa tenants at the Housing Not Cops March, April 8, 2021. (Courtesy of Hillside Villa Tenants Association)
Arriving at Eminent Domain
Initially, the Hillside Villa tenants weren’t pushing for eminent domain. They spent months trying to get their city councilmember, Gil Cedillo, involved, only to see their landlord, Tom Botz, renege on a deal with Cedillo where the city would forgive a loan worth millions of dollars in exchange for a ten-year extension of the affordability covenant. “After the whole 10-year deal went to trash, Cedillo completely shut us down,” said Leslie Hernandez, who moved to Hillside Villa as a young child and has lived there for thirty years. “He told us, ‘Well, there’s nothing else that we could do.’ But before that, we had begun working on eminent domain.” They began to tirelessly lobby a reluctant Cedillo to introduce the motion to City Council. He ultimately did in January 2020.
After receiving notice of the upcoming rent increase in 2018, the tenants, who organize in Cantonese, Spanish, and English, formed the Hillside Villa Tenants Association with support from Chinatown Community for Equitable Development and Los Angeles Tenants Union. They meet weekly in their courtyard (although currently on Zoom due to the Omicron surge), and describe each other as more like family members than neighbors.
Many have lived in the building for decades, including some tenants who were displaced when their apartments were seized through eminent domain in the 1980s to facilitate the Los Angeles Convention Center expansion. Some have lost their jobs during COVID-19, and others have passed away. Some accepted “cash for keys” deals from the landlord and moved out, fearing potential eviction.
Over the years, the tenants have staged countless protests, including in front of the homes of city councilmembers and in front of their landlord’s Malibu residence. They’ve also arranged sit-ins at City Hall and protested in front of Frank Gehry’s Walt Disney Concert Hall, which is built on land seized through eminent domain during the Bunker Hill clearing.
It has been an exhausting three-year effort, but as the tenants see it, they have no choice but to continue. Sonia Rodriguez, who has lived at Hillside Villa for nine years, said (in Spanish): “We’re fighting for affordable housing because, in my case, I have a daughter and also a grandson. And I just wonder what’s going to happen to them if this place stops being affordable.”
The upward of 200 percent rent hikes announced by Tom Botz, which would bring the rent to market rate, reflect both the catastrophic consequences of the financialization of housing that has made Los Angeles one of the least affordable cities in the United States and a center of the nation’s homelessness crisis, as well as the disastrous public-private partnership paradigm that has shaped affordable housing construction over recent decades.
Between 2010 and 2019, rents in Los Angeles County increased by a staggering 65 percent, while median household incomes went up by 36 percent — a significant discrepancy that doesn’t account for the economic devastation experienced by many renters as a result of COVID-19. Meanwhile, more than five thousand affordable units in Los Angeles County were converted from affordable to market rate between 1997 and 2018, and nearly nine thousand units have affordability covenants set to expire over the next eight years, putting even more pressure on renters as each lost affordable unit is accompanied by another low-income household in need of an affordable home.
The expiring affordability covenants stem from the government’s approach to affordable housing construction that relies on private developers to build or rehabilitate rental housing for low- and moderate-income tenants through subsidized programs like the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC). Under LIHTC, state governments are issued tax credits by the federal government and award them to private developers who must meet certain income and gross rent standards for a percentage of units. That percentage of units — for instance 20 percent of units that are occupied by tenants whose incomes are 50 percent or less of the area median income — must be made temporarily affordable, meaning the gross rent does not exceed 30 percent of their income. After a fixed period, the property owner is free to increase the rent to market rate, as Tom Botz wants to do with Hillside Villa. The tenants who cannot afford to pay market rate — with few places to go in a city in need of nearly five hundred thousand affordable homes — are kicked out, allowing landlords to increase their profits.
It’s worth mentioning that affordable housing landlords like Tom Botz often receive additional taxpayer money through the Section 8 voucher program, in which tenants pay 30 percent of their monthly adjusted gross income in rent, while the government covers the rest of their “fair market rent.” Both Section 8 and LIHTC, products of the neoliberal shift in federal housing policy, serve as vehicles for a massive transfer of money from the public sector into the private for-profit housing market (states must only award ten percent of LIHTCs to nonprofits). The annual budget for the LIHTC program alone is around $8 billion, while the Housing Choice Voucher Program budget for 2022 is $30.4 billion.
Privatized affordable housing is folded into for-profit developments and built when and where it suits developers. Yet the provision of housing is incompatible with a public-private approach in which profit accumulation outweighs consideration of housing need; the use value of a place to live (a basic human need) is fundamentally at odds with its hypothetical value as real estate, as Peter Marcuse and David Madden write in In Defense of Housing: The Politics of Crisis. To address the crises affecting housing in any meaningful way, housing must be decommodified and removed from the speculative market.
This can be accomplished through measures that include universal rent control and an expansion of the public housing stock. However, Nixon’s 1973 moratorium on public housing construction, which has essentially remained in place ever since — its current iteration is the Faircloth Amendment, which prohibits federal funding for projects that increase the number of units owned or operated by Public Housing Agencies as of October 1, 1999 — precludes such an expansion, making an appeal of the law paramount to any consequential housing policy proposal. (Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez had attempted to secure a limited exemption of the amendment in Biden’s faltering Build Back Better Act.)
In the meantime, eminent domain presents a unique opportunity for decommodification and for socialized housing governance structures, although in the case of Hillside Villa the post-expropriation management structure has yet to be determined. City Council would first have to pay market rate for the building, which is appraised at $46 million. As several organizers point out, that would amount to a mere fraction of the ever-increasing LAPD budget ($1.76 billion in the fiscal year 2021–2022). And, considering the price of privatized and temporarily affordable housing construction, preserving affordability is actually cheaper than building the same number of new units; $480,000 per unit (2019 figure, so likely even higher now) versus $370,000 per unit under the Hillside Villa proposal.
A delegation of Hillside Villa tenants trying to get a meeting with Paul Krekorian, October 15, 2021. (Courtesy of Hillside Villa Tenants Association)
The Potential of Eminent Domain
The Hillside Villa Tenants Association has shined a light on the inherent flaws of the privatized affordable housing program, while giving City Council an opportunity to break with the history of exploitative and dispossessive eminent domain use. They’ve also shown that organizing around eminent domain to decommodify and ensure permanent affordability has the potential to be a radical path forward for tenants at risk of displacement in Los Angeles and other cities, particularly in light of the moratorium on public housing construction in the United States. And they aren’t the only ones pursuing this path.
In Berlin, the Deutsche Wohnen & Co. enteignen campaign won a successful referendum to expropriate privatized housing from corporate landlords in September 2021, although so far, the new municipal government coalition, led by Social-Democratic Mayor Franziska Giffey, is refusing to implement it. There was also a proposal to expropriate vacant housing in California and make it affordable. And, in 2013, Green Party mayor Gayle McLaughlin pursued a strategy of acquiring and refinancing “troubled loans” through eminent domain to prevent another wave of foreclosures in the wake of the subprime mortgage crisis in Richmond, California, though ultimately the effort was unsuccessful. There are other examples of organizing to reverse the privatization and commodification of energy and water services after decades of neoliberalism, pointing to the possibility of a wider movement coalescing around reclaiming public infrastructure and provisions — including housing — through expropriation.
After a series of delays, requests for information, and dodging of tenants, the fate of Hillside Villa is currently in the hands of the Budget and Finance Committee under Paul Krekorian. If Krekorian’s committee decides to move forward with the proposal, and City Council votes to invoke eminent domain, the ramifications could extend beyond tenants securing the right to remain to potentially reshaping the way the city approaches expiring affordability covenants — but hopefully more fundamentally, how it approaches the provision of housing altogether.
While many critics, predictably, have argued that the proposal is too radical, too impractical, and too expensive, Leslie Hernandez says: “It’s just about keeping it affordable. We’re not asking for anything free.”
Pundits and historians are comparing President Joe Biden and the Democrats to the Social Democrats, the staunchest supporters of the short-lived German Weimar Republic which Adolf Hitler and the Nazis toppled in 1933.
I googled “Weimar and Joe Biden” and got a slew of hits.
The comparison between Weimar and today “is imperfect, but the cautionary tale is still clear,” Salon’s Matthew Rozsa wrote last year. He’s pursuing a Ph.D. in history.
Added Rozsa, “If Donald Trump’s movement is destined to be America’s answer to Nazism, then the Joe Biden administration is currently a rough equivalent of the Weimar Republic.”
Murray State University historians David Pizzo and Ken Wolf get the comparison.
“Biden and the Democrats are institutionalists like the Social Democrats, who were called the ‘Midwife of the Weimar Republic,” said Pizzo. “In other words, they had faith in the democratic system. So do the Democrats.”
The left-of-center Social Democrats were the main party throughout most of the Weimar period. The republic was founded in 1918 when Imperial Germany lost World War I. (Germany’s current chancellor is a Social Democrat; the Social Democrats are the main party in a three-party parliamentary coalition.)
To the end, most Social Democrats had faith that Germany’s parliamentary democracy, however fragile, would ultimately triumph over Nazism, even as the Nazis grew more popular and more violent.
“Biden has an institutionalist mindset, too,” said Wolf, an MSU professor emeritus. “He and the Democrats believe in the system.”
Hitler’s Brownshirts considered themselves patriots on a mission to destroy the Weimar Republic and “cleanse Germany from the Communists and the Jews.” The pro-Trump militias also see themselves as patriotic.
But Pizzo and Wolf fear Trumpian authoritarianism, largely rooted in white nationalism and tinged with violence, is a clear and present danger to our republic. “Biden should be shouting ‘five alarm fire!’ now,” Pizzo said.
He and Wolf agreed that the president’s forceful Jan. 6 address was a good start. But the two historians warn that Biden must back up his strong words with strong action. “The Social Democrats vowed to resist Hitler and the Nazis by burying guns in their back yard,” Wolf said. “You shouldn’t say things like that unless you mean it.”
Meanwhile, the Republican National Committee has unanimously resolved that the pro-Trump insurrectionists who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, were engaging in “legitimate political discourse.”
The mob, which aimed to overthrow the November, 2020, election and keep Trump in power, included members of white supremacist and white nationalist militia groups, QAnon cultists, and neo-Nazis.
“Many QAnon theories and violence chillingly mirror Nazi propaganda and terrorizing activity,” wrote Teri Schure in Worldpress.org shortly after the failed Trump coup, which was been likened to the Beer Hall Putsch, Hitler’s abortive 1923 coup.
While the pro-Trump militias are loosely organized, Hitler had the Brownshirts, a paramilitary group that guarded Nazi rallies and “threatened and terrorized opposing party members and violently intimidated [Romani, …trade unionists and] journalists who opposed Hitler,” Schure explained. “The Brownshirts were particularly cruel to the Jews and rabidly carried out unbridled and unchecked street violence against them.”
She added that the Brownshirts considered themselves patriots on a mission to destroy the Weimar Republic and “cleanse Germany from the Communists and the Jews.” The pro-Trump militias also see themselves as patriotic.
Rozsa warned that “there is an obvious risk that… Biden and the narrow Democratic majorities in Congress will fail, and that Trump or a successor will take over and then cement themselves into power for at least the next generation. Every American who wants to avoid this — especially Biden and the leading Democrats in Congress — needs to learn the right lessons from Germany in the 1920s and 1930s.”
Biden, Rozsa urged, “must recognize the gravity of the crisis and prioritize neutralizing it. That means making sure Republicans can’t cover up the truth about Trumpism’s anti-democratic agenda, and that voting rights are protected.”
Yet he wrote that “none of that will be possible as long as Republicans in the Senate can filibuster legislation to death.”
Rozsa proposed that if the president can’t convince Sens. Joe Manchin and Krysten Sinema to quit backing the filibuster and get behind his program, then they deserve to be effectively treated as Republicans even if they remain nominal Democrats.
He added that “Biden can still creatively use executive power to at least somewhat follow this next step. That step is to make sure that he adequately addresses the people’s legitimate needs. The Weimar Republic fell, in part, because of widespread economic hardships that the government simply could not fix. Biden needs to make sure that the vast majority of Americans feel economically secure, safe from threats foreign and domestic (like terrorists and pandemics), and protected from long-term existential crises like global warming, plastic pollution, and income inequality. Any legislation passed anywhere in the nation that limits citizens’ access to voting must be stricken from the books. Lies spread in bad faith to discourage voting, from Trump claiming he won in 2020 to myths about mail-in ballots, have to be proactively rebutted.”
Lastly, he argued, Biden must never let the public forget the attack on the Capitol. “Just as George W. Bush’s presidency was defined by his response to the 9/11 terrorist attack, so too will Joe Biden’s be defined by whether he can make 1/6 into a cornerstone of our political consciousness. If he can do that, he will be able to make sure that Trumpism’s anti-democratic philosophy — which poses a far more dangerous threat to America than Islamist terrorism — is known by all but its followers for what it is.”
Rozsa admitted, “This won’t be easy, but we don’t have a choice. A century ago one of the world’s great powers collapsed into authoritarian evil with astonishing rapidity: While monarchists and major capitalists believed Adolf Hitler was a clown they could control, the opponents were divided, confused, and ineffective. Aspects of that history are repeating themselves, and the question now is whether we have learned from the mistakes of the past to alter the outcome.”
Rozsa cited disturbing similarities between Hitler and Trump, notably their contempt for democracy. Trumpism, like Nazism, is based on the “big lie,” which Hitler defined in Mein Kampf as a lie so brazen and told so often that the public will believe it.
Hitler appealed to anti-Semitism and nationalism by falsely “claiming that Germany had actually won World War I but had been betrayed behind the scenes by socialists and Jews.” Trump, who panders to prejudice, especially racism, sexism, xenophobia, and religious bigotry, is still trotting out his Big Lie that Biden stole the election from him in 2020.
In addition, Pizzo said the behavior of Germany’s conservative establishment toward Hitler and the Nazis is remarkably similar to how America’s Old Right has reacted toward Trump and Trumpism.
After Hitler gained power in 1933, he outlawed all political parties but the Nazis. “The Social Democrats opposed him, but the conservative parties all went along with it just as McConnell and the Republicans have gone along with Trump,” Pizzo said.
Once in control, the Nazis launched a ruthless program of state-sponsored terrorism against Jews — the first step toward the Holocaust — and brutally suppressed Social Democrats, Communists, the anti-Nazi press, and other groups that opposed them. Many were killed, thrown into Dachau, Hitler’s first concentration camp, or forced to flee the country.
“It is fatal for conservatives to think that they can play with the fire of right-wing extremism without getting burned.” Robert Gerwarth wrote in Foreign Policy magazine. “Trump is no Hitler, but his deliberate mobilization of the far-right has made the Republican Party dependent on voters who include militant nationalists, Holocaust deniers, white supremacists, and conspiracy theorists — in short, people who want more than just a different government.”
Pizzo said that if the Republicans retake the House — and possibly the Senate — in November, and Trump or a Trumpian is elected president in 2024, American democracy will likely perish.
“The Republicans will systematically dismantle every circuit breaker, every firebreak, every levee – pick your analogy,” he said. “We are already closer to a fascist coup than we have ever been in our history.”
Berry Craig
The post Are the Brownshirts Back? appeared first on LA Progressive.
Over a year has passed since the January 6th insurrection in DC and, sadly, it’s unclear what we’ve learned. Shortly after that multifaceted coup attempt, sociologist Waldon Bello warned us as to what was coming. Reflecting on his own experiences of US-backed fascism in Chile and the Philippines, he pointed to their source. “America Has Entered the Weimar Era,” he said, that the insurrection “underlies the face of crises to come.”
Fast forward to today; Newsweek warns of the potential for a violent coup come 2024. Generals in the military warn of their own internal civil war, so their ability to “Choose Democracy,” like many hoped in the case that Trump refused to leave, is now off the table. Despite the chorus of warnings, our supposed left leadership chooses to put their heads in the sand. Instead, we must place revolution back on the table, one at the intersection of Clara Zetkin and Ella Baker.
The post Moving Beyond Settler Colonialism to Oppose Resurgent Fascism in Ameri(kkk)a appeared first on puntorojo.
The following essay is taken from “Wildpunk: Black against Civilization,” the first English-language translation of writings by Elany, a Black anarchist from Switzerland. The entire zine is hosted and readable/downloadable at 1312 Press.
Unfortunately, the Swiss government kidnapped Elany while “Wildpunk” was being translated. She has been incarcerated since January 9 of this year on suspicion of sabotage and arson. The state has denied her medication, restricted her contact with the outside world, and forced her from veganism onto a prison diet of meat and grains.
We urge solidarity with Elany and all incarcerated in the shared struggle against the oppression of civilization. Updates on Elany’s case and opportunities to aid her can be found at feralfire.noblogs.org and the hashtag #FreeElany on Twitter and Mastodon. There is also an email you can contact, freeelany@riseup.net
While one part of the Earth is ravaged by fires and the other part struggles against being flooded, we are threatened from another angle: Covid-19. But the still-ongoing Corona Pandemic is really just the beginning of a new Era of Pandemics.
As climate change and demands for environmental protection become ever more “Mainstream,” the urgency of pandemics has increased. The current situation has taught the people a clear lesson: deathly pathogens are an equally big and global threat to human and other beings.
Over 15 years ago, the sociologist Mike Davis pointed out that due to mass livestock farming we are on the way to a global age of pandemics and it will lead us to catastrophe. Industrial livestock production is a sort of particle accelerator. More bodies in less space means more chances for the emergence of mutations or hybrid viruses and for their spread, regardless which virus it is. Global supply chains of giant transnational corporations with branches in half a dozen countries and markets in a thousand cities, alongside urbanization, do the rest. The most threatening ones are the Bird Flue Viruses, and we know today that we are only a single mutation away from one of the deadliest strains of Bird Flu becoming pandemic. These epidemics, created and spread by agroindustry, finally strike with particular devastation in the places which have already sunk into poverty through colonialism and capitalism. The combination of a lack of healthcare and high urbanization eventually leads to serious distress, in which pandemics can wreak devastation with full force.
Speaking of devastation: the consequences of climate change are being felt with full force all around us. The toll of the devastation is endless. Forests are turned to lumber, after which greater and more intense heatwaves lead to a rise in forest fires, droughts, and desertification. Soil is eroded and farmland is turned into desert. Fertilizer, herbicides, fungicides, and pesticides contaminate the food supply. Landfills overflow with synthetic waste. Power plants fill air, land, and sea with cancerous particles. A chemical smog fills the streets in the cities and poisons human and other beings at every turn. Plastic waste breaks apart into billions of tiny microscopic pieces, infecting every living organism. Chemicals are dumped in the oceans, seas, and rivers. Toxic waste oozes into the ground water. The rise and warming of the seas leads to stronger rainfalls, more powerful floods, more frequent mega-storms, and the inundation of coastal regions.
In addition to warming, the ocean is experiencing acidification and a loss of oxygen. A deadly trio which is steering us towards a sixth mass extinction of life on our planet, one where the rate of species extinction is 1000 times faster than usual. As the oceanographer Sylvia Earle held: “Our lives depend on the living ocean – not just the rocks and the water, but stable, resilient, diverse living systems that hold the world on a steady course favorable to humankind.” The ocean covers some 70% of the Earth and is central to enabling life. Aquatic plants produce half of the breathable oxygen in the world. If the ocean dies, we die too.
Agroindustry doesn’t just destroy communities, it spreads into the wild, destroying the diversity and balance of the natural ecology and replacing it with vast monocultures. Half of the habitable land on Earth is today used for agriculture, joined every year by millions more hectares. A majority of this cultivated area is used to produce feed for hundreds of millions of pigs, cows, sheep, and poultry, fattening them up for the world-spanning logistics chains.
Alongside this come ever greater social, economic, and political aggravations. Famines and water shortages. Heat-sickness and death. Epidemics and the destruction of more vital habitats. Wars over disappearing resources and usable territories. Climate change destroys livelihoods, strengthens sickness, and scatters people. Together with the Era of Pandemics, a global cascade of suffering results.
Wherever we find ecological destruction, we find industry. Industry is not neutral and there can be no adequate solution for climate destruction so long as industry still exists. Ending the suffering requires the complete collapse of industry. Or as it was aptly expressed in 2019 in the 43rd issue of Revolte, an Anarchist newspaper in Vienna: “For the destruction of Industry, Work, and Exploitation! For Sabotage and Direct Attack!”
Sustainable, Green Industry?!
While habitat destruction strides onward, industry (which is responsible for all of this suffering) wants to sell us the answer: sustainable and renewable energy.
At this point of ecological, social, and bodily catastrophe we need to critically question green solutions like the falsely named Renewable Energy Revolution and identify them for what they really are: a perpetuation of the status quo. Supposedly green energy sustains ecological devastation and global inequalities.
The destruction of human and non-human habitats is implied in the mass-production infrastructure of “renewable energy,” whether solar, wind, bio-fuel, hydro, nuclear power, or other alleged renewable energies. One destructive norm is replaced by another. These energies, like fossil fuels, have their roots in colonial extractive raw material industries. Once again the “solution” is exactly the problem.
For battery technology we can look to Bolivia (Lithium) and Congo (Cobalt). With both resources, the ecological and humanitarian costs are inexcusable: the destruction of habitat, child slavery, and death through dangerous work. Naturally, the E-waste is scattered everywhere in South America, Africa, and Asia. Lithium is today called “white gold” and its extraction requires massive quantities of water, drastically shrinking the available supply for Indigenous communities and wildlife. Vast quantities of toxic tailing are also produced. Chemical leaks have poisoned rivers, and with them humans and non-humans, time and again.
Massive dams for hydroelectric power have in the past likewise had catastrophic consequences on Indigenous peoples and their lands.
Industrial wind-parks, whose blades hack up migratory birds in the sky, require colossal resources for their production and implementation. Not just for the wind turbines but also the infrastructure. They destroy migrating wildlife like bats and birds, which are important for a healthy ecosystem and some of which are endangered.
Solar energy requires the erection of massive solar industry complexes, which lay bare the land by clearing out human populations and the migration routes of animals and people for giant solar fields, substations, and access ways. All of these require unusually high-carbon concrete. Wind and solar energy as well as the production of bio-fuels all require 100–1000 times the land area as the production of fossil fuels.
Fuck the Chinese subsistence farmers who have carcinogenic industrial waste dumped on their lands everyday from those solar panel factories. They’re just not thinking ecologically enough. And forget the Ghanaians who complain when worn-out solar panels are piled into mountains in their backyards with the rest of the West’s obsolete tech. They are just impeding ecological progress.
Whether oil wells, coal power plants, or megalithic “green” projects – all are rooted in an unprecedented destruction of habitats for human and other beings. Therefore it cannot be the goal to replace one destructive technology with another. The goal should be a massive and radical reduction in energy consumption.
Anarchists who only struggle to free industry from capitalism must finally face the brutal reality. Down with industry, down with work. To use the words of the Indigenous Anarchist ziq: Seize the Means of Destruction! And fucking burn it to the ground…
What comes next depends on what we do. The necessity of getting active has never been so great as today.
A key spokesperson of the Alexis Vive Patriotic Force talks about the challenges of building an urban commune.
Earlier this week, a new Pew survey found that the share of Americans who believe Donald Trump was largely responsible for the violence of Jan. 6, 2021, has declined by nearly 10 percent over the past year, while the percentage of people who think he bears no responsibility has increased by almost as much. On Wednesday, the Freedom from Religion Foundation and the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty released a new report that helps explain that shift: The same Christian nationalism that served as the unifying principle behind the Jan. 6 insurrection is also driving efforts among the faithful to rewrite the history of that day.
As two of the report’s contributors, scholars Andrew Whitehead and Samuel Perry, co-authors of Taking America Back for God, noted in a launch event on Wednesday, Christian nationalist support for Jan. 6 rioters has doubled in the past year, while support for prosecuting those rioters has declined by 20 percent. That suggests, said Perry, “that this ideology is powerfully connected to a reinterpretation of these events” in a way that could become “a powerful motivator for future potential violence.”
At more than 60 pages and drawing on the work of a number of academics, journalists and researchers, “Christian Nationalism and the January 6 Insurrection” is the most comprehensive account to date of the role of the movement in the attack. Within the political and cultural universe of Christian nationalism, America is a special place: It was created as a Christian nation and its founding documents were divinely inspired. Christianity should and must have a privileged position in public life, and “true Americans” are understood to be “white, culturally conservative, natural-born citizens.”
That ideology, argues the report, served both as the unifying theme for the various factions that joined in the assault on the Capitol as well as the “permission structure” that allowed participants to justify their violence. To call those fringe ideas is misleading: Surveys repeatedly find that close to half of the country supports the idea of fusing Christianity and civic life.
Christian nationalism also lends itself to a number of other convictions, notes the report. Surveys in early 2021 found strong associations between Christian nationalist views, such as the proposition that the federal government should declare America a Christian nation, and a whole range of far-right beliefs not directly connected to faith. Those include the disproved claim that Antifa or Black Lives Matter caused the violence on Jan. 6, while Donald Trump was blameless; support for various white supremacist and antisemitic beliefs; and even a willingness to accept the outlandish premises of QAnon.
Two-thirds of white Americans who strongly support Christian nationalist ideology believe that the 2020 election was rigged; 40 percent of them think that violence from patriotic Americans might be necessary to save the country; and more than 40 percent are convinced that Democrats are engaged in “elite child trafficking,” said Whitehead.
The report includes some meditations on the movement’s origins as well. Penn religion scholar Anthea Butler, the author of White Evangelical Racism, writes that white Christian nationalism began moving more firmly into the mainstream after 9/11, as the “Holy War” coding of the “War on Terror” helped popularize its ideology, laying the groundwork for Trump’s rise. The seemingly contradictory beliefs of Christian nationalism — that America is the greatest nation on earth thanks to its foundation in Christianity, and also that America has been overtaken by alien and even demonic enemies — only serves to keep the movement in a state of tense mobilization, observed journalist Katherine Stewart, author of The Power Worshippers.
“It’s astonishing to so many of us that the leaders of the Jan. 6 attack styled themselves as patriots,” Stewart added at Wednesday’s event. “But it makes a glimmer of sense once we start to understand that their allegiance is to a belief in blood, earth and religion, rather than to the mere idea of a government of the people, by the people and for the people.”
Most of the report was written by Andrew Seidel, a constitutional attorney at the Freedom from Religion Foundation and author of The Founding Myth. It consists of a meticulous accounting, drawing on hundreds of hours of video footage, of Christian nationalism’s ubiquitous role in the lead-up to Jan. 6 and its execution. There are the flags, the signs, the cross and gallows that we’ve all seen.
There are also some less familiar pieces of evidence, such as the 50-person Christian choir singing about swords and taking possession of the land while the attack was underway. Multiple rioters recounted how God’s hand or voice had urged them to enter the capital. One avowed white supremacist had convinced his parole officer to let him travel to Washington that week to hand out Bibles. And then there’s the man who broke down Nancy Pelosi’s office door, believing that “the crowd would tear her ‘into little pieces,’” and later testified in court that God had been on Trump’s side: “And if patriots have to kill 60 million of these communists, it’s God’s will.”
Seidel also describes how the events of the previous two months — including the Million MAGA March in November, and the Jericho March events on Dec. 12 and Jan. 5 — served as test runs for Jan. 6 and a broader “permission structure that gave the insurrectionists the moral and mental license that they needed,” through the promise that they were doing the Lord’s work.
There’s an exhaustive list of such examples. Paula White, “faith adviser” to the Trump White House, recorded nightly prayer videos calling on God to smite Trump’s enemies. The Proud Boys prayed in the street and were “hailed as God’s warriors.” Evangelical speaker Lance Wallnau told his massive following, “Fighting with Trump is fighting with God,” and said that angels were looking for some “risk takers” and “wild cards that are gonna go start something up.”
“They marched around government buildings in state capitals and in D.C., including the Capitol and the Supreme Court, blowing on shofars and claiming to know God’s will,” said Seidel. “Sometimes I wonder how could we possibly have been surprised by the violence that day.”
More than a year later, said the panelists, Christian nationalists continue to march under slightly new banners, leading efforts to suppress voting rights through gerrymandering and new legislation that would require everything from lifetime disenfranchisement of convicted felons to Jim Crow-style civics tests for would-be voters. Jemar Tisby, president of the Black Christian organization The Witness and author of The Color of Compromise, said Christian nationalism is also animating numerous state and local fights, including culture-war battles like the manufactured debate over critical race theory, as well as efforts to silence dissenting Christians.
“Even the religious voices within the church are being labeled as critical race theory, as too liberal or progressive to be trusted, and even the communist and Marxist labels are being used,” said Tisby.
Perry noted the mixed blessing found in recent polling that suggests Christian nationalist ideas as a whole have lost some support nationwide since Jan. 6. The other side of that, he added, is that groups that become more isolated also tend to become more militant. Indeed, added Seidel, researchers have seen an uptick in Christian nationalist pastors proudly and openly embracing the label.
Relegating Christian nationalism back to the margins, say the report’s authors, will not be easy. That would require a national recommitment to the separation of church and state, countering the historical myths propping up Christian nationalist ideology, and coalition work between secular and religious allies.
“I don’t really know if people understand how close we were to losing America that day,” said Seidel. “If they decide to get a little more serious next time, we are in big trouble.”
“America is really a shared ideal, and Christian nationalism refuses to share,” said Seidel. “That’s the choice we face: Christian nationalism or America. Because we can’t have both.”
Updated at 6:50 p.m. ET on February 11, 2022.
Within a week of the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, demonstrators were marching in the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Canada, Australia, and many other countries. The European and Asian protesters mimicked the style and symbolism of the protests in the United States: taking a knee, pulling down statues. In the social-media age, all protests are potentially global.
So it is now, with this month’s protests in Canada, in which truckers opposed to that country’s vaccination requirements have besieged the national capital and blockaded international crossings crucial to Canada’s economy. The truck-blockade movement that started in Canada is being mimicked in New Zealand, France, and Belgium. U.S. law enforcement is bracing for somebody to try something similar south of the border on Super Bowl Sunday, of all holy days. Much of the money donated in support of the Canadian protests has been raised internationally, especially in the United States. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, and presidential son Donald Trump Jr. are only some of the Republicans who have voiced support for the protesters. The style and symbolism of this event, too, seem strangely nonlocal. One of the most photographed movements of the protests has been a man on horseback hoisting a Trump 2024 flag in downtown Ottawa. Confederate flags and MAGA hats have been adopted into a global library of anti-establishment iconography.
[Read: How will we remember the protests?]
The effects of the protests are becoming global too. Trucks are obstructing the Ambassador Bridge between Windsor, Ontario, and Detroit. That’s the busiest of all the border crossings between the United States and Canada, crucial to moving auto parts. Obstructions have been reported at border crossings in Alberta and Manitoba as well. Another convoy is trying to impede the main road from Manitoba to Ontario. Yesterday, protesters attempted to block access to Ottawa’s airport.
The blockades are very much a rogue movement. They have been condemned by the Canadian Trucking Alliance and Canada’s Teamsters Union. About 90 percent of Canadian truck drivers are vaccinated; comparatively few of those protesting are professional truck drivers. The protesters are not anti-lockdown. They are anti-vaccination. The spark for the protests was a requirement that truckers be vaccinated to cross the U.S.-Canada border. This is not a movement of “working class” protesters against remote, affluent elites. The burden of the protests has fallen on Ottawa residents, whose streets have been paralyzed, and Canadian autoworkers, who face factory shutdowns because of cross-border disruptions.
About 32 percent of Canadians express broad sympathy with the protests. That’s not popularity, but it’s not crippling unpopularity either. Justin Trudeau is Canada’s prime minister on the strength of 32.6 percent of the votes cast in the 2021 federal election. And although the most obnoxious acts of the protesters have provoked almost universal revulsion, it’s by no means clear that they will ultimately lose this trial of political strength. Voters everywhere expect governments to keep order, and if governments cannot or will not do the job, the people in charge of those governments will pay the political price. There may not be a lot of room for the truckers’ popularity to rise. There’s a lot of room for Trudeau’s popularity to fall. This drama is unfolding on Ottawa streets, framed on television screens by the skyline of the Canadian federal Parliament. Canadians will not blame the chief of the Ottawa police force if the blockades continue. They will not blame the Ontario provincial police, or the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, or the provincial premiers. It’s the authority of the national government that is being challenged—it is the national economy that is being disrupted—and it’s the head of the national government to whom Canadians will look for a resolution. If Trudeau does not or cannot deliver that resolution, he will pay the price.
This crisis may be building to something truly dangerous. Trudeau has to act, but Canada may lack the means to act effectively and decisively enough to end the protests without harm to protesters or police. A big show of force may persuade protesters to return home quietly. A not-so-big show may tempt them to resist and see what happens. The province of Ontario will reportedly introduce emergency legislation today. That could test the issue.
If a crackdown goes bad in Canada, the negative consequences may not be confined to the country. The truck disruptions have shocked Canadians because Canada is generally an extremely law-abiding place. To a great extent, Canada still is law-abiding: When a court ordered the truck protesters to cease blaring their horns, the horn-blaring ceased. If the practice of using trucks as rolling fortifications were to spread south of the border, however, it could mobilize American protesters, who are less law-compliant than their Canadian counterparts.
Politically motivated violence in America has been on the rise in the past half-dozen years: the riots and looting in U.S. cities after Floyd’s murder; the takeover of a portion of Portland, Oregon, by left-wing militants; the attempted kidnapping of Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer by anti-pandemic-restrictions extremists, all preceding the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol—and whatever comes next.
Maybe this latest form of performative intimidation is only being road tested in Ottawa. It could be coming to American cities soon.
This article previously misstated the kind of extremists involved in Gretchen Whitmer’s attempted kidnapping.