Research

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The goal is not to create new categories to label people, but to show that the categorization of individuals is repressive and violent as such—most of all the dominant heterosexual binary of “male” and “female.”

In other words, a queer critique of capitalism based on an analysis of commodity fetishism would do the following: it would have to recognize that the heterosexual matrix based on the gendered division of labor is not so much an extension of patriarchy into capitalism but rather a genuine product of it. Capitalism does not only assign men and women different roles within its realm, it also creates the modern notion of ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine.’ This is done by splitting the circuit of value production and exchange from the social relations it is embedded in. Deconstructing gender from this perspective means a lot more than the individual subversion of traditional gender roles—it means the collective deconstruction of the heterosexual split that separates the “male” commodity economy from its “female” support system. The task at hand then is not to play one of these realms against the other, as do feminisms that want to either include women in the “male” sphere or emphasize the moral superiority of the “female”; it is to critique and actively subvert the binary as such. Not least in the light of the current and ongoing economic crisis, there are quite a number of attempts at doing precisely that, even if they do not always come from an explicitly queer or feminist background. One example—which I personally am particularly interested in—are the “free shops” that are popping up in an astonishing number of quite different locations. A free shop is a place (mostly DIY or volunteer-run) where people can deposit things they no longer need but that may still be useful for others. These things can then be taken by anyone who needs them, without this person having to give anything themselves. This principle has the potential to subvert the heterosexual economic matrix in a number of ways: it obviously challenges the logic of commodity exchange in its most basic assumption. The basic assumption is that one has first to have something in order to be able to get something. This is effectively addressed by a model that deliberately disconnects individual economic “input” and “output” and gets rid of the accounting in between. It takes the element of competition out of the equation (having to sell something ahead of others to be able to buy things one needs. This creates a system that does not exclude anyone on the basis of their ability to participate in market exchange.

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I felt it when I opened a textbook that purported to teach me how to teach the subject, or perused a sample syllabus lent to me by a colleague. There seemed to be a disconnect – between my experience of learning how to write fiction and what lay within these pages.

This is precisely what I felt when I started looking through the old syllabus that was left for me. It felt... off, wrong... It didn't feel like creativity, and it felt culturally cold.

For Cecilia Tan in “Let Me Tell You”, this rule, as with others touted by the literary establishment (mostly of the white, male, privileged kind), worked under the assumption that their experience was “universal.” The power to show, not tell, she explained, stemmed from writing for an audience that shared so many assumptions with them that readers would feel that those settings and stories were “universal” and familiar to all.

For Namrata Poddar in “Is ‘Show Don’t Tell’ a Universal Truth or a Colonial Relic?” the rule stemmed from a remnant of colonial infrastructure dismissive of non-western modes of storytelling. She wondered if 21st-century America was overvaluing a singularly sight-based approach to storytelling. Could this be, she asked, another case of cultural particularity masquerading itself as universal taste? In short, yes.

As Poddar noted, it’s often posited that oral, communal practices of storytelling organically evolved into modern modes of storytelling, consumed by a reader in “privacy” – but this is in fact the understanding of a Western history of storytelling as a universal one. For most non-Western countries this was not the case.

Not only was this not the case for non-Western countries, but this was also not inherently the case for many people of the lower classes (non-white and white alike) in Western countries. Oral stories have always held an importance, but the wealthier and white Western demographics enforced these views on everyone. (I'd dare say that schooling and academia was a huge aspect of this, too.)

In many formerly or currently colonised regions like South Asia, Africa, the Caribbean, the American South and Native America, there has always existed a rich, vibrant tradition of oral storytelling, one that was marginalised, often violently, through an imposition of an allegedly modern, white Western language and culture.

The creative-writing programme, I’d known, was an American invention, and recently had become an American export – not just to the UK, where the first master’s degree in creative writing was offered in 1970, but further to Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Israel, Mexico, South Korea, the Philippines, and yes, India.

I hadn’t yet asked though what it meant for us to inherit a creative writing pedagogy from elsewhere. It meant, I began to see, that we inherited a set of craft conventions that tended to dismiss anything outside their ambit as “bad” writing or (worse?) something “experimental”.

This was why when Morley spoke of the “double helix” of reading and writing fiction, I’d found myself asking, but what about listening? Worse, there I was, teaching creative writing in a classroom in the Indian subcontinent, a region where oral storytelling traditions, the epic, the folk, the mundane, have thrived for centuries. Were we going to toss them all away, unacknowledged, on our quest to become Writers? To me it seemed ridiculous, and a tragic waste.

This doesn’t just entail, as I’ve seen some “how to decolonise creative writing” guidelines suggest, including a diversity of texts in the reading list – it means to go beyond that, and critique how creative writing is taught. To interrogate the “rules of good writing” and ask of them first where they come from and whom they benefit.

This is also a huge reason why I don't think that diversity is a good goal. We need to be considering, alongside a range of voices, what those "rules" are that we're still focused on. This doesn't only mean writing, either; it really should be every rule and guideline. We shouldn't accept them without interrogating them.

Craft, Salesses made me see, is cultural. And in many textbooks, and workshops, the dominance of one tradition of craft, serving one particular audience, is essentially literary imperialism that poses – it isn’t hard to imagine – a threat to minority and marginalised voices. Instead we need to acknowledge the existence of many different craft conventions – with each being as valid as the other.

Slowly, I’ve mustered up the courage to include sessions on “listening” in my creative writing courses – we now open the semester with students gathered around a virtual bonfire (in these days of online teaching), telling stories to each other. We speak of silences, hesitations, circulatory, repetition, breath.

I love this.

But most importantly, no more quiet acceptance of craft conventions as handed down to us – rather, a quest to know where they come from and whom they serve, in order to know what and why and how to mean. The debate on whether writing can be taught still rages on, but while these courses exist, I would hope for them to discuss craft critically, with deeper cultural understanding and sensitivity. In this act itself lies the fiercest deconstruction, and dismantling, of colonial ways of telling and teaching.

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A contradiction emerges: in order to do this we need to activate the techniques they taught us with other ends in view. To read, write, analyze, discuss. But this time not to pass exams, get a job, acquire social status, cultivate the admiration of others. No, here the effort is exquisitely selfish. Not an accumulation of data, but ideas to stimulate other ideas, questions to contrast facts. Roads towards action to be explored. Paths to be forged or meandered along, as we learn to recognise monsters behind their disguise and experiment the best weapons to confront them with, those that enhance our indefatigable quest for freedom.

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Pursuing alternative means for access to learning spaces becomes fundamental when we understand copyright as a form of capitalist gatekeeping, one that – along with frequently increased tuition fees, skyrocketing rental prices, and, demands for certified linguistic skills – contributes to entrenching elitist class divides based almost purely on one’s capacity to pay. For anarchists and all those engaged in intersectional and class struggle, it’s no longer the old ad hominem of ‘educate to liberate’, but, in many cases, we’re waging a war to gain access to the very knowledge, methods, and tactics others spent decades researching. We must ‘liberate to educate’. So how, exactly, might we go about it?

This also reminds me of the arguments I've seen between using contemporary YA and classic literature in classes. People have put forth the desire that publishing houses selling YA are promoting the use of it to "make money" (which is probably true, as we can see that organisations like We Need Diverse Books are partnering with Scholastic) and that classics are "available for free or are very cheap to procure."

Which is sort of but not quite true. Schools will still purchase new copies of classics (which are still the same price as other contemporary YA). I think that there are publishers with ulterior motives who do use these spaces.

It's much the same way that JSTOR and the like will try to market themselves to universities (and even high schools), as it's "cheaper" than getting each article.

At the time of writing, Swartz’s Manifesto is offered in twenty-six languages demonstrating the reach work can have when texts are not confined into anglicised and privately controlled forms.

Inevitably, any concessions made from their 40% profit margins will be conveyed as a wonderful effort on the part of these publishers to make research ‘accessible’; in precisely the same way that banks are currently portraying themselves as providing the solution to homeless folk having been unable to open bank accounts without a fixed address without acknowledging that they imposed this condition in the first place.

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Anecdotally, there have been an abundance of punks employed in contract archaeology in the last forty years. Field archaeology traditionally relies on highly-skilled workers who accept low wages, unreliable hours and marginal living conditions who can also live and work communally (Morgan and Eddisford in press). While not all field archaeologists are punks, there is a relatively high acceptance of non-conformist dress and behavior in the commercial archaeological community.

The dress code part feels really superficial, especially for something written in 2015. Case in point, a lot of places that paid trash started relaxing dress codes. It's likely that a lot of them were doing so in order to "build solidarity" with the workers and "show them some autonomy" in spaces where it was decreasing.

The same is true of teaching; a lot of schools have relaxed dress code standards (for teachers) and have started making it possible for people with visible tattoos and piercings (to an extent) to participate in the field.

This doesn't mean, of course, that these people are "non-conformist" with regards to common social structures, politics, or institutions. There are a number of, for example, tattooed people who are on the far-right.

Similarly, Theresa Kintz’s The Underground, a radical zine published in the 1990s identified key issues for archaeological excavators, particularly low pay and high turn-over, and the classification of archaeological field work as undisciplined, performed by an alcoholic, childlike, “field animal” (Underground 1995; McGuire and Walker 1999).

A current equivalent to these past zines is The Diggers Forum, a publication from a Special Interest Group of the Chartered Institute for Archaeologists with practical, yet political articles for “diggers” edited by London archaeologists. A recent issue of The Diggers Forum covered pay minimas for archaeologists (Harward 2014), how teeth are used in bioarchaeological analyses (Lanigan 2014), and the academic and professional divide and its impact on archaeological training (Everill 2014). While punks were generally accepted in developer-funded archaeology, a coherent, academic punk archaeology was not forthcoming until the 2013 “Punk Archaeology” conference organized by William Caraher in North Dakota. Even amidst other archaeologies of resistance and efforts to advance a more activist archaeology, punk archaeology is underutilized as a productive structure for bringing together disparate communities of practice in archaeology.

In the Punk Archaeology publication following the conference, William Caraher defines punk archaeology as a reflective mode of organizing archaeological experiences, one that celebrates DIY practices, reveals a deep commitment to place, embraces destruction as a creative process and is a form of spontaneous expression (2014:101-102).

There are many biographies, histories and ethnographies of punk rock (for some of these, see Laing 1985; Sabin 1999; Shank 1994), but the cultural legacies of punk rock and the mobilization of punk as a means of knowledge production has come only as punks have infiltrated the upper echelons of academia.

Sorry, what? No, I really have to disagree with this because most of the punk-to-academia pipeline has actually resulted in many former radicals becoming part of the institutions they originally rallied against. It's much the same as what happened with the student and youth movements, which had also been tied to many punk scenes. A lot of people in those spaces realised they could build careers from their movement work and did that instead.

Institutionalising knowledge (and allowing it to be institutionalised) has done nothing valuable for us, especially from people who understood DIY and punk scenes.

Other contributions to Punkademics note the friction of subscribing to an anti-authoritarian, punk ethos while operating within a hierarchical bureaucracy, yet also identify critical pedagogy as a means toward liberation from capitalism and corporate globalization (Miner and Torrez 2012; Haenfler 2012).

How... does this make sense, especially considering people within the realm of critical pedagogy have directly called out other so-called "critical educators" for applying a label to themselves to do nothing but careerism? Like... even if I may have some issues with Macedo, check his intros to the 50th anniversary edition of Pedagogy of the Oppressed and Pedagogy of Freedom.

The hierarchical bureaucracy pushes people out unless they toe the line, and they will even close down radical seminars in the event that someone passes away (Freire) instead of hold them in his honour and bring in other critical pedagogues.

Like, if you're a punk or anarchist in academia, you should be working on breaking down the walls, not hiding behind them.

Beyond a critical pedagogical stance, the attitude and sensibility of punk can be productively used to regenerate and energize academic research (Beer 2014).

It could be, but I'm not seeing these things in academia. In fact, we've been seeing the total opposite happening. There are only small pockets (usually of individuals) doing this kind of work.

I'd love to highlight the irony that this person is associated with the ARG in Loughborough University and while the group they're most associated with outside of both does small useful aid? The ARG does little, if anything, to break down the walls that exist within academia. (This is also still true, even if they participate in groups outside... unless they're expropriating resources and making all information free-to-access or helping build grants for students who want to make their work open access... but they're not.)

This inner paradox is playful, complex, and resists simple classification, a slipperiness that should be familiar to archaeologists.

Familiar to people who frequently classify things they don't understand as related to religion, even without evidence? Okay.

Jim Groom, frustrated by the limited capabilities of educational and professional software content management systems coined the term edupunk in May 2008 to encompass an alternative methodology of using social networking sites and other internet resources to build a distributed, interactive and flexible platform for teaching, research, and collaboration.

A lot of teachers and academics did this, especially as groups were provided. CMS started to build up "safe" platforms for students (such as Edmodo) as early as 2008, and it was one of the most flexible for corporate-promoted.

Yet, a lot of social media platforms got in on the game and started working to develop CMS/LMS. Google's best known for both creating Google Classroom and acquiring Blogspot.

What's fun, though, is how often academics overlook what primary and secondary teachers are doing; a lot of what they do in their classes actually starts with us, but they seem to ignore us entirely because they think we're not on their level.

Yet these engagements are limited—edupunk specifically addresses digital technology within a higher education classroom.

This limitation is both unnecessary and self-imposed, but sure. (Academics aren't very creative, even when engaging with creative structures.)

The investigation of punk spaces as anti-heritage, sites of rebellion, ruin, of temporal remixing and nostalgia reveals the productive, provocative, instability of a punk archaeology.

This would've been the more interesting area of discussion.

While experimental archaeology has long been a method of investigating the materiality of the remains of the past, it is rarely tied to a political archaeology. The more radical experiments, including James Deetz's re-envisioning of living history museum Plimoth Plantation as an archaeological laboratory, hinted at this potential—there were complaints of the barefoot hippies that replaced the prim pilgrim ladies surrounded by antiques (Snow 1993).

Excuse me, you think that Plimoth Plantation is radical? Like, they are the most sanitised version of colonisation, and... you call them radical? This news article came out in 2020, highlighting all the ways in which that statement is absolutely laughable.

It may have been experimental (especially for a museum), but it was most certainly not radical.

The basic principles of punk archaeology reflect an anarchist ethos: voluntary membership in a community and participation in this community. Building things–interpretations, sites, bonfires, earth ovens, Harris Matrices–together. Foregrounding political action and integrity in our work. It is the work of the punk archaeologist to “expose, subvert, and undermine structures of domination...in a democratic fashion” (Graeber 2004:7).

Here's a thing left unaddressed in any area of this article: Who is doing the "building" and "interpreting?" There is little discussion about the seeming lack of Indigenous people who are disproportionately impacted by modern archaeology (and anthropology), especially across the Americas. This is most certainly true with regards to the thousands of unmarked graves found only in Canada and the fact that there are going to be vultures dressed as "helpful excavation companies" looking to make profit on their suffering.

Where is that discussion? Why isn't it discussed? Why do you overlook that and not even mention it in a few of your sentences?

To realize this praxis we must engage in what Orton-Johnson (2014) terms “small-citizenship”--small-scale, local projects and their accompanying online spaces that enable participants to feel a sense of connection to their community and to the past, with especial attention to marginalized and disenfranchised peoples.

Oh, oops. I should've read to the end for the one whole afterthought sentence. Great work!

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Those experiments have followed different techniques. In reflecting on the Arab revolts underway I would like to propose three basic techniques of enlightenment. 1) An authoritarian technique, in which an enlightened elite, using the state, takes it upon itself to modernize an immobile, unruly mass presumed to be governed by arcane traditions; 2) a liberal technique, in which a modern state is seen to be crucial, but its elite is neither presumed to have monopoly over enlightenment nor power to make such a claim; 3) an anarchist technique, in which enlightenment is seen to come most reliably from below, through transformations of civic traditions rather than through state power or social engineering.

The common presumption that enlightenment has generated an alliance of knowledge and power describes in fact only one of those three techniques, namely the liberal technique, in which knowledge complements the otherwise partial power of the state. Knowledge here organizes a civic link between state and society, and in the process reduces for the liberal order the costs of policing and repressive needs. The two other techniques, by contrast, tend to set power and knowledge as substitutes rather than allies. The authoritarian techniques assume that having power furnishes the best means to accomplish any good, in which case there is less compelling need for knowledge, since power alone will do. Whereas in anarchist techniques, suspicion of the merit of power as means to ends, highlights the compensatory value of knowledge alone as the best means.

From a contemporary revolutionary perspective it is easy enough to recognize the two basic failures of the now exhausted authoritarian path to enlightenment: 1) that path has more magnified the authoritarian than the enlightened aspect of the state; 2) the authoritarian path hid from view a crucial social fact being asserted now openly in Arab streets everywhere, namely that enlightenment comes from below, not from above; that society has already become far more saturated with ethos of enlightenment than has its government.

But in the case of the Arab spring, we witness a rare likelihood that revolutions are reaching precisely their intentions: even governing orders now agree openly with virtually all revolutionary demands, except moving out of the way of the revolution.

In Islamic history, for example, what would later be called "anarchism" or "liberalism" occasioned old realities in which a substantial part of the civic order either lived independently of the state or generated serious limits to the reach of the state in society.

The crumbling authoritarian enlightenment, with its vanguardist and paternalist propositions, lies in a number of dynamics: vanguardism, as we already knew from Frantz Fanon, often expressed lack of knowledge by the vanguard, who eventually become ruling elites, of their own society. In its later phase, vanguardism became pure paternalism: distance of governing elites from the people became lack of interest in knowing the people. Amidst this disinterest the old vanguardist authoritarianism is expunged of its anti-colonial, progressive, Third Worldist claims; and out of its ashes there emerges a cold, paternal authoritarianism, disinterested in any form of peoplehood, and governed openly by an avowed marriage of business and state elites.

Okay, I need to spend a lot more time with Frantz Fanon. He keeps coming up in so many things I'm reading.

Enlightenment as a goal could be approached using different techniques. In the grand revolutions of the Arab spring, the liberal interpretation of the enlightenment fights an authoritarian interpretation, with the aid of an anarchist method--that is to say, with the aid of familiar civic traditions, now discovered again to be natural venues for expressing the organic and embedded nature of the enlightenment. This is why these revolts are entirely against the authoritarian state, but not against any old cultural tradition.

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“In a colonized country, it’s quite difficult to convince people of non-authoritarian, non-state solutions. You encounter, pretty much, a strictly anticolonial – often narrowly nationalist – mentality,” laments Nimer.

In Palestine, elements of popular struggle have historically often been self-organized. Even if not explicitly identified as “anarchism” as such, “[p]eople have already done horizontal, or non-hierarchical, organizing all their lives,” says Beesan Ramadan, another local anarchist, who describes anarchism as a “tactic” yet questions the need to attach a label.

“It is already there in my culture and in the way Palestinian activism has worked. During the First Intifada, for instance, when someone’s home was demolished, people would organize to rebuild it, almost spontaneously. As a Palestinian anarchist I look forward to going back to the roots of the First Intifada. It did not come from a political decision. It came against the will of the PLO.” Yasser Arafat declared independence in November 1988, after the First Intifada began in December 1987, Ramadan says “…to hijack the efforts of the First Intifada.”

The Palestinian case has been further complicated in recent decades. The landscape of largely horizontal self-organization in the First Intifada, was displaced in 1993 with the signing of the Oslo Accords and the top-down Palestinian Authority (PA) they created. “Now here in Palestine,” Ramadan observes, “we don’t have the meaning of authority that other people defy…We have the PA and the occupation, and our priorities are always mixed up. The PA and the Israelis [are on] the same level because the PA is a tool for the Israelis to oppress the Palestinians.” Nimer also shares this view, arguing it has now spread much more widely and that many now see the PA as a “proxy-occupation.”

“Being an anarchist doesn’t mean having the black and red flag or going black bloc,” Ramadan points out, referring to the established anarchist protest tactic of wearing all-black clothing and covering faces. “I don’t want to imitate any western group in the way that they ‘do’ anarchism…it is not going to work here, because you need to create a whole consciousness of the people. People don’t understand this concept.”

Honestly, this extends far beyond Palestine. Way too many people assume there are certain ways to 'do' anarchism. The goals that anarchists share can often be done by a range of tactics and strategies, and we need to recognise which ones work and which ones don't. (We also need to spend some time on mundane building in order to build this consciousness.)

This lack of a unified anarchist movement in Palestine could come as a result of the fact Western anarchists never really focused on colonialism. “[Western writers] didn’t have to,” argues Budour Hassan, an activist and law student. “Their struggle was different.” Nimer also adds: “For an anarchist in the US, decolonization might be a part of anti-authoritarian struggle; for me, it’s simply what needs to happen.”

Importantly, Hassan extends her own understanding of anarchism beyond positions merely against state or colonial authoritarianism. She refers to Palestinian novelist and Arab nationalist Ghassan Kanafani, noting that although he challenged the occupation, “…he also challenged patriarchal relations and the bourgeois classes… This is why I think we Arabs – anarchists from Palestine, from Egypt, from Syria, from Bahrain – need to begin reformulating anarchism in a way that reflects our experiences of colonialism, our experiences as women in a patriarchal society, and so on.”

This matches a lot of the conversations I've been having with people who aren't white cis men. There are so many more people to look to beyond the handful that we engage with, especially throughout history. (There's a reason why people keep saying that white western anarchists are a problem and they don't want to work with us; this is merely one chunk of that.)

Name: Ghassan Kanafani

“As Palestinians, we need to establish the connection with Arab anarchists,” Ramadan says influenced by her reading of material from anarchists in Egypt and Syria. “We have so much in common and, because of the isolation, we end up meeting international anarchists who sometimes, as good as their politics are, remain stuck within their misconceptions and Islamophobia.”

For Ramadan, nationalism also represents a significant problem. “People need nationalism in times of struggle,” she concedes, “[But] it sometimes becomes an obstacle… You know what the negative sense of nationalism means? It means you only think as Palestinians, that Palestinians are the only ones who are suffering in the world.” Nimer also adds, “You’re talking about sixty years of occupation and ethnic cleansing, and sixty years of resisting that through nationalism. That’s too long, it’s unhealthy. People can go from nationalist to fascist, quite quickly.”

Back in Ramallah, Nimer reflects: “I’m often pessimistic, but you can’t discount Palestinians. We could break out at any moment. The First Intifada began with a car accident.”

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1.) We denounce any embargo on the Cuban people, whether imposed from abroad or from within, by any states, United or otherwise. We radically support the full deployment of our people’s creative capacities—their self-organization, self-subsistence, and self-liberation—in a world that needs more solidarity and cooperation.

This is just really beautifully written.

To make geopolitical arguments right now about the place of Cuba in imperial global strategy, to argue that the anti-government protests in Cuba are inevitably paid for by the Cuban right wing in Miami, that the protesters are simple criminals looking to loot, that the true revolutionaries are with the government—these are all arguments that describe a significant part of reality, but they miss it on one point. The people of Cuba have just as much right to protest as those of Colombia and Chile. What’s the difference? That they are oligarchies with different origins? With more or less brutal practices? More or less distinguishable camouflage? More or less servile postures towards the US government? More or less sublime ideas to justify their privileges? All of these immense differences among the Colombian, Chilean, and Cuban oligarchies are reduced to zero when on a beautiful Sunday morning you discover that, in addition to the mafioso oligarchies in Colombia and Chile, the Cuban oligarchy is also—before an unarmed populace—armed to the teeth. A little more or a little less, to crush you and your brothers, your body and your mind, if it merely occurs to you to question the normality that they manage.

“If you protest, an even worse government will come to power.” This is a pretext that any government can employ to justify suppressing opposition—and practically every government has. If we legitimize this excuse, we are siding with a section of the ruling class against ordinary people like ourselves, denying that they know what is best for themselves. If we refuse to extend solidarity to exploited and oppressed, they will inevitably gravitate to the right—as they have across the former Eastern Bloc. To abandon rank-and-file protesters in places like Cuba is to give the far right a golden recruiting opportunity.

In some ways, I feel like the second bolded statement is an excuse that a lot of people outside the Eastern Bloc have had for not having solidarity with a lot of people or organisations here.

There are legitimate concerns (we do have "anarchists" who align with questionable people, including nationalists), but there are also a lot of people pushing back against that and trying to organise better organisations and networks. (And it feels like a lot of people who aren't in this region just... are trying to force us to "get our house in order" before they even deem it fit to stand with us in solidarity, and that's... not helpful.)

But yes, I agree. If we rationalise this view, we're going to be abandoning people and provide the far-right recruitment opportunities.

We should understand what is happening in Cuba in a global context. People are not simply protesting in one nation. People have been protesting in France, in Hong Kong, in Catalunya, in Lebanon, in Ecuador, in Chile, in the United States, in Belarus, in Russia, in Tunisia, in Brazil, in Colombia. Countless people in dramatically different geopolitical contexts, under dramatically different regimes, have been adopting similar tactics to express similar grievances. This suggests that what is going on here is deeper than the failures of the Cuban government or the manipulations of the US government.

Though the protests in Cuba were triggered by specific economic developments, we can identify a few common threads that connect practically all of the aforementioned examples. First, everywhere across the board, we see increasing wealth disparities and austerity measures—from the barefaced capitalism of the United States to the democratic socialist countries of northern Europe to authoritarian socialist countries like China and Nicaragua. Second, at the same time that they are cutting social programs and protections, all of these governments are investing considerable resources in intensifying state violence and surveillance. Consequently, practically all of them are facing crises of legitimacy, whether those take the form of national independence struggles, populist movements, demands for “more democracy,” or bona fide horizontal social movements.

Yep. I also feel like there's a lot of conversation that focuses on the "improved standards of living" for countries like Cuba and China that don't consider whether those "improved standards" have actually improved life for people there and in what ways. (In many ways, the "democratic socialist" countries that saw "improved standards of living" also neglected that same question. If we presume the "improved standards" are enabling people to have lives they're content with, why are they unhappy and protesting? Certainly something deeper must be happening.)

It is not within the power of anarchists to prop up authoritarian regimes from the 20th century, nor should we seek to. To tie our hopes to the receding prospects of a state project, associating our aspirations for liberation with its shortfalls, will only discredit us, the same way that the collapse of the USSR discredited socialism in Russia and the failures of Syriza paved the way for the far-right New Democracy party in Greece. We have to build a new generation of movements based in contemporary grassroots struggles, in order to grapple with the problems that capitalism poses on a global scale. Our responsibility is to the ordinary people in Cuba, not to those who rule them. We should make contact with those who are experimenting with principled forms of self-defense and self-determination in order to act in solidarity with them—under the regimes that prevail today and under whatever regimes may succeed those tomorrow.

ALLW: We haven’t been spared harassment and intimidation in this process, since in Cuba university reform ended up being taken over by the state, which dominates the university administration and student organization (the Federation of University Students, Federación de Estudiantes Universitarios, FEU) together with the Communist Party. In intimidating students out of organizing, the state has employed the same pretext used to discredit the protests: that we are confused.

ALLW: Apart from my role in university circles, I’ve also done what I can to support the gestures of solidarity that have been taking place since before the protests to confront the health crisis gripping the country. These days, it’s one of the most relevant self-organized processes in Cuba, and our collective agrees that it’s important to participate in. Connecting this with other current movements will also be an important step towards overcoming conditional solidarity that ends up disappearing or being swallowed up by the state.

This reminds me, but I think more work needs to be done in activist circles that understands how co-option works. It's something that we need to better understand, both in terms of the state and people who seek to build a career on their activism.

Another aspect we need to explore in conjunction to this is that sometimes things are temporary; while some things have longevity (and that's not bad), we also need to recognise that things can be temporary and that we can move on from them to other work. We need to be aware that this temporary nature is neutral. Sometimes things are temporary because we simply no longer need them, and they have served their purpose; other things may be temporary because they are causing harm and are seeking to do harm, which can also include trying to obtain control and power over others.

The protests began due to the failure of the hospitals in Matanzas and the lack of medication. Through social media, reports began to give spiritual strength to the province. Other provinces had the same problems, just less severe, and would soon find themselves in the same situation. It was an impulse, from this situation and others, that provoked an explosion from people, not simply on social media but out in the street.

They were cutting off the electricity for six hours a day because a thermoelectric plant was having problems. On Sunday, July 11, through social media like Facebook, you could see the people who decided to take to the streets in the provinces calling out to the world for humanitarian aid to help with the situation on the island.

This parallels well even with places that do not have a US embargo placed on them and are supported (in order to manipulate people in their own country) by US politicians. Hong Kong is a great example of this. Promise Li has discussed this quite a lot, including in this episode of China and the Left. (This isn't to say that the embargo "isn't harmful" because it is.)

When people are struggling and are seeing how impossible it is to get what they need from where they are, they do often turn to the structures that many so-called superpowers and their allies have created and used in order to manipulate them and find access points to invade (in a multitude of ways): aid.

The same Cuban state that, to confront Yankee imperialism, created an omnipresent political police force to combat the society under its control. The same Cuban state that, in the name of socialism, destroyed all the working-class organizations that, with their histories of struggle, would have made socialism’s declared victories into an everyday reality. That same Cuban state that has turned solidarity into an international brand identity while keeping us submerged in distrust and fear between neighbors. The same Cuban state that—in the middle of the intensified Yankee embargo—builds more hotels for foreign tourists than infrastructure to produce food, fruit, and milk. The same Cuban state that has produced the only vaccines against COVID-19 in Latin America, but makes its health personnel function essentially as unpaid members of the political police.

Both neoliberal capitalism and the socialist administrations that answer to it leave all of us increasingly vulnerable to the vicissitudes of markets and global supply chains. In an agriculturally productive country like Cuba, a lack of affordable food is an absurdity produced by capitalism, mediated through a socialist government that has prioritized integration into the global economy over sustainable food production.