Notices by ramonita :trantifa: (ramonita@todon.eu), page 4

10. We are reliable.

Our meetings happen regularly and we can trust ourselves to show up. We know we will show up, because we want to show up, we look forward to showing up, because our meetings build up, rather than grind down. We understand the power of ritual, of regularity, of rhythm, because it is in rhythm that we can dance.

11. We do not take these rules too seriously.

We will not forget that the human spirit cannot be predicted in words, theories, and systems. We bow to no authority, least of all the authority of the dead letter. We will never let an ideology trample a human heart. We are big kids and we can question ourselves.

Inspirations for this text / recommended reading (on a Tor browser)

Most of these can be found at the Anarchist Library or otherwise online.

- Malatesta, Let Us Be Of Good Cheer!
- The group formerly know as “Bash Back”, I Don’t Bash Back I Shoot First: On Queer Gangs
- Institute For The Study of Insurgent Warfare, Nine Theses On Insurgency
- Basically every communiqué from the EZLN but see especially the Fourth Declaration of the Lacandona Jungle
- adrienne maree brown, We Will Not Cancel Us ; and Pleasure Activism
- Aragorn!, Toward a non European Anarchism or Why a movement is the last thing that people of color need
- Margaret Killjoy, (podcast) Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff: Gay Resistance to Nazis, 2022-05-30 and 2022-06-01
- Kaneko Fumiko, A Work of My Own! (in: The Prison Memoirs of a Japanese Woman )
- Sylvia Rivera & Marsha P. Johnson’s interviews, quoted in the zine Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries: Survival, Revolt, and Queer Antagonist Struggle

Permanent / shareable URL for this manifesto: https://anarcholatina.blackblogs.org/11-easy-steps-to-politics-like-a-marginal/

*edit*: renamed the manifesto to something cooler

ok criticising is easy, building is hard. it's time to build our own political group, and supply the lacks I found in the groups around me. but before getting to that, I want to do a little manifesto of sorts not about *what* are our politics, but *how* to politics. what are the mechanics of a political group we want to find, and since we couldn't find, we want to build.

1. We don’t do demos.

We prioritise organisation over mobilisation. Most of our political energy goes to building autonomy from an injust world, not in perpetual reaction to punctual injustices.

2. We help one another.

Our core work is mutual aid. Our politics is the tangible, material, bodily politics of the every day. Our politics is to help one another with food, a job, a place to stay, emotional support, collective defence, access to hormones, abortions, handling bureaucracies, childcare, elder care, sickcare, we care.

3. We will not cancel us.

We reject all police, including the cop in our heads. We are calm and confident in our collective power to protect and heal the targets of harm while transforming the patterns of harm in the doer. We build this trust in our power by constant study and practice of transformative justice. We practice how to handle conflict, harm and abuse before they happen. We do not kick people out of our group only for them to do harm to other people, less equipped to deal with them. We handle our own messes because we are strong enough to take collective responsibility.

I never seen so much fury in the grafitti wars as the nazis have re: #LinaE. Where normal (toothless, widely discredited as innofensive) antifa symbology is ignored, Lina's name gets overwritten angrily with base misogynist threats; in one wall I've observed, someone actually broke the wall rather than let it stand.

Lina was singled retroactively as a "leader" of an autonomous scene without leaders and explicitly picked to be made an example of, no doubt due to her gender. In doing so, the State inadvertently created a bogeywoman. The idea of a young pretty white girl bashing nazi heads with hammers bothers them to no end. They whisper her name on Twitter with hate and paranoia, afraid that she represents the start of a left which fights with more than slogans, of antifaschistischen that, for a change, do in fact aktion.

Lina doesn't represent anything she's a living woman with her own life, dreams, inner complexity, severely punished for trying to protect her community and standing up to the worst. But the bogeywoman Lina, the Lina of whispers, is there living in their heads. We should encourage nazis to think that yes, any random girl can become a Lina, yes it's a trend now. And what better argument than the truth?

#wirSindAlleLina 🔨🔨🔨

Government means authority. Authority means rules coerced from above, obedience mandatory. Doesn't matter if the government is so-called "democratic" or "Communist", obedience necessarily implies punishment to infractors. Punishment entails a punishing force. Thus government means police.

The anarchist position is, if you need armed goons to force the people to obey your rules, your rules aren't worth obeying anyway, and your system isn't worth maintaining. Attempts to produce social order by force will always result in abuse from above and transgression from below. An imposed order is no order. No police force in history has ever been succesful at what they purport to do, and there's no reason to suppose the next one will be an unprecedented exception.

The reason for this is discussed in Malatesta's theory of action: action--doing things in the world--doesn't just change the world, it changes the doer. People sometimes try to explain police by claiming it's a job that attracts bullies, but it's much worse than that. The job *is* bullying; even the most bright-eyed detective-novel reader will be transformed into an abuser when they're required to be merciless.

(because being an abuser isn't "sociopathy" or "narcissism", it's not some bad essence: it's a thing you do.)

leftist spaces that regulate female-presenting nipples are acting purely out of puritanical feelings, masquerading as safe-space concern for sex-repulsed folk. (breasts are not inherently sexual, and going topless is not inherently an act of exhibitionism).

this message brought to you by I am forced to cover my trans body more in certain leftist events than the literal cops force me to cover it on the streets of Germany.

Goddamit I'm getting real burnout from the German scene, it's nigh impossible to get activists to do anything other than plenums and demos

aaaaa

I think I'll have to start my own group, innit?

None of the groups, orgs, and spaces I asked will give me the space or support I need to run a single tourniquet workshop. If I want to get out of the plenum-demo cycle and find mates to actually do things I'll need to start my own crew. If you're in the Ruhrgebiet and want to do things ping me for matrix

@dantescanline ok so do you know the improv theatre technique of "yes, and?" I present you the First World Left tehcnique of "yes, totally!"

it goes like this:
me: "I literally had my head bashed open and one month later nazis drew a gun on people at the squat. You have to understand, the chances that you or someone next to you end up stabbed or shot is only going to keep increasing. so what I want is to normalise in the German scene that people carry tourniquets and trauma kits and the knowledge of how to use them"

they: "yes, totally!"

me: "and for that I need help, I can give talks and workshops but only in English, and also I don't have a medical background. this org sounds like a great space for it, it would be great if your org could fundraise to send a German speaker to the stopthebleed.de course, then share this knowledge, and maybe advertise to find a paramedic willing to advise us..."

they: "yes, totally!"

me: (so, are we going to get down to it, or...?)

(cricket noises)

(tumbleweed rolls by)

then someone says that this is taking too much time and this is a plenum not a discussion round, three other people twinkle hands, and someone else complains that we have to work tomorrow and let's move on with the agenda