It’s easy to look at the political forces today in the Middle East and assume that political Islam has always been dominant, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. In the 1940s and 1950s, the Iraqi Communist Party was one of the most powerful actors in Iraqi politics; at its height, it was a cross-sectarian party with tens of thousands of members. The rising Ba‘ath Party eventually crushed it — possibly with help from the CIA.

Finally, degrowthers recognize that the most fundamental human need is for a habitable planet. They are more sober, more clear-eyed than most on the Left in recognizing that facing up to the multiple environmental crises will require much more than nationalization of the energy sector and investments in renewable energy and electric vehicles (EVs). It requires an extreme reduction in energy use and material throughput, at least in the rich world, a reduction that, while focused on the highest energy users, will affect working people, too, above all in consumption of such goods as flights and beef. Their pitch is that a world of “public luxury and private sufficiency,” with greater equality and democracy, less hierarchy, and much more free time, would enable the quality of life for the masses to improve immeasurably, even if some consumer goods disappear from the menu. The technocratic myth is that decarbonization must center on the invention and deployment of new technologies. … [T]hey lull us into the belief that new tech can simply be scaled up and plugged in. It’s a state of mind that reflects our own condition of alienation.

On Tuesday, April 18, 2023, the dominant corporal expression of white power in the world, known collectively as the United States of America, made a formal declaration of war against one important expression of the collective will of Africa and African people to be free when it attacked three members of the Uhuru Movement. (...)

On July 25, a news conference was held that included a formerly publicly unknown eyewitness to the assassination, Mustafa Hassan, as well as Malcolm’s daughter Ilyasah Shabazz, and civil right attorney Ben Crump, concerning the lawsuit. Hassan provided new information about the police role in the assassination.  At the time of the assassination Hassan was a young member of the Organization of African American Unity (OAAU), one of the organizations Malcolm established after he broke with the Nation of Islam a year before. He was part of Malcolm’s security detail.

t would be strange if today the Gold’s Gym franchise began training paramilitary units across the United States — and even stranger if they were fighting for the Left instead of the Right. But at the beginning of the Civil War, the German Turner gyms did precisely that.

The ally industrial complex has been established by activists whose careers depend on the “issues” they work to address. These nonprofit capitalists advance their careers off  the struggles they ostensibly support. They often work in the guise of “grassroots” or “community-based” and are not necessarily tied to any organization.
They build organizational or individual capacity and power, establishing themselves comfortably among the top ranks in their hierarchy of oppression as they strive to become the ally “champions” of the most oppressed. While the exploitation of solidarity and support is nothing new, the commodification and exploitation of allyship is a growing trend in the activism industry.