Hey folx. I'm writing a free book called Riot Medicine to help teach people first aid for protests, riots, and insurrections. Ⓐ 🏴 ⚕️
Some volunteers have already completed illustrations, but there's still many more that are needed before this can be distributed. If you're able to help out (even with just a single illustration!) get in touch.
You can find out more at https://riotmedicine.net
Examples of content (including illustrations) are provided below.
@mooncake dunno if you saw that the new Chuang is finally out! http://chuangcn.org/journal/two/red-dust/
What this misses of course, is that hierarchy inordinately restricts efficiency. The call to power more often than not obstructs, rather than incites, innovation, creativity, and even productivity.
This is true across economic, political, ethical, scientific, military, cultural, etc. structures. In each system, hierarchy is highlighted as being more efficient than the alternatives, a presumption that also relies on the belief that humans must be compelled to act/order
In sum, capital retains what it has always mutated to retain, a control of access to itself, whether that has come in the form of raw materials, crops, machinery, tech, IP, land, currency, or even the networks that preserve its ideological and material reign.
On a more macro level, offloading the incessant drive for productivity into the realms of networked capital (social media, data agg, etc.) reinvigorates the neoliberal logic of capital all while its material production wanes.
Jasbir Puar makes this a central claim in her interrogation of debility and capacity in “The Right to Maim”
And this returns me to my original point about social capital. If neoliberalism privileges a particular kind of networked productivity as a mechanism of identification (and also an implied control) who you know, identify, and affiliate with becomes paramount.
These are not benign coagulations, but newly routed assemblages of capital in which wealth and power are incited to flow in a “depoliticized” manner.
If the move to modernity signaled a transition from action to identity, the contemporary moment is traced by a similar move from identity to affiliation. The question is no longer ‘who you are’ but ‘who you are with’
These complex and hyper specific forms of dynamic identity (political or otherwise) act to make sense of a realm overwrought with endless information as well as to signal one’s potential collective attachments to others.
This is exactly why contemporary online identities necessitate the interpellation of flags, avis, political compasses and other means of announcing one’s affiliations.
"The absence of the workers’ movement is not a weakness, then, but in fact an opening. When it becomes too expensive to sustain and affirm the lives of workers as workers, this signals that the mutually reinforcing cycle between labor and capital has begun to decay, and the possibility of breaking that cycle altogether emerges."
- "No Way Forward, No Way Back," Chuang 1
Thus, alignment charts, symbols, flags, become the ultimate mobilization of politics. One must only announce their allegiance to be a leftist. By ceding the territory of everything but representation we are doomed to be forever captured by the forces of capital.
Queer - Ancom - Useless PhD
Animal Liberation / Antifascista