Articles observing and analyzing the basic mode of domination involving control, hoarding, concealment, and mystification of information, wealth, and power.
2018 saw a major backlash against human rights defenders advocating legal access to the asylum system in the EU. Volunteers and NGOs have been threatened, attacked, and legally prosecuted. Are You Syrious? (AYS) is one of them.
The Penza Remand Prison was at such pains to show that none of the suspects were being tortured anymore that every evening all ten were “inspected.”
We have to think much more carefully about the system, broadly understood, and whether this system is in any way equipped to get us out of this situation.
Art is not this pure thing that comes out of the romantic imagination, a spark from god. It has always emerged within and evolved out of capitalism. Maybe it has something to teach us about the system that gave birth to it.
“In Penza, the FSB does not even bother to hide what they are doing. Officers show up at the remand prison there, and take their man to another room, where they have a generator and electrical wires set up.”
Some converted happily. But many said things like, “We are being swept away by the torrent. We are men reduced to ashes. Everything has been turned on its head.” People were terrified.
Even those rights movements that promote economic and social rights are not talking about economic equality. But people are angry about the yawning wealth hierarchies that are increasing in most places.
Stop fighting for rights to things. Take the things.
We are witnessing a major crisis of the left. The most serious problem is not simply that the left has become bankrupt, but that it has hidden its bankruptcy from itself.
Ought we not at least entertain the possibility of something beyond ideologies, begin the work of thinking anew about the nature of politics, and push back against the troubling tendencies within the liberal order?
