Teen Vogue out here quoting Kropotkin:
What is mutual aid?
Mutual aid is basically a fancy term for helping each other. For an intellectual perspective on it, we turn to the anarcho-communist writer and thinker Peter Kropotkin, who wrote in his 1902 text, Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution, that the concept is foundational to our systems of survival.
“It is not love and not even sympathy upon which society is based in mankind,” Kropotkin wrote. “It is the conscience — be it only at the stage of an instinct — of human solidarity.” Kropotkin went on to argue that society is based on “the close dependency of every one’s happiness upon the happiness of all” and “the sense of justice, or equity, which brings the individual to consider the rights of every other individual as equal to his own.”
The organizers we talked to seemed to agree that this moment of crisis is also a time when communities can come together and be stronger than ever.
“In times like these … it’s important to transform our relationships and practice community care via mutual aid,” Nehanda said. “Disabled people are often not thought about or valued, especially in times like a global pandemic, when we are the most vulnerable.”
Petty told Teen Vogue, “We have the ability to organize ourselves and build the infrastructure to get what we all need when the state and formal institutions fail to do so.”
Ratto pointed out that “secondary impacts,” like people being out of work, under quarantine, socially distant, and other social and economic disruptions, will be as much a part of the crisis as the health impacts.
“We can all start small,“ Ratto said, “with the people who live on the floor of our apartment, or the people who live next door and across the street from us on our streets, and check in and exchange contact information.”
“There’s nothing new in America about people not being able to work, being laid off or not having a job, or not having access to food, or not having access to reliable transportation, or facing any of those problems,” Ratto continued. “It’s important to keep the mindset moving forward, [and] that the lessons we learn from this about how communities can take care of each other and how neighbors can come together [are] a potential solution to some of the hardships of coronavirus, but also a potential solution to some of the hardships that will continue to exist.”
With all of the COVID-19 news and panic going on, the U.S. Government has been sneakily trying to pass the so called EARN IT Bill which would remove end-to-end encryption on messages and calls, and allow a scanning software to read all of them. Websites that don’t comply will lose protections. This would require any message you send with a US based service to have the messages scanned by the US govt, and punishes any company that keeps your messages private.
shared from @anarcblr via copy-paste because reblog was glitching.
I really didn’t think this could be legit but…after some googling, I’ve come to the conclusion that. It is. It’s legit. And it is every bit as horrifying as the article makes it out to be.
Call your senators. Do not sleep on this. This is patriot act tier bullshit.
Call. Your. Reps.
In 2013, information leaked by Edward Snowden showed that Skype had a backdoor which allowed Microsoft to hand over their users’ messages to the NSA despite the fact that those messages were officially declared end-to-end encrypted. This bill will force ALL communications platforms to provide this backdoor to the government or else be sued into bankruptcy.
Creating a backdoor to all forms of encryption is just a means for hackers to inevitably obtain access to the private conversations of whistleblowers and political dissidents.
In the worst case scenario, this even includes compromising the security of organizations obligated to protect your private information including your healthcare records or financial records like social security numbers.
On this day, 18 March 1834 the British Tolpuddle martyrs were sentenced to 7 years’ transportation to Australia for attempting to organise a union. They had been trying to fight pay cuts for agricultural workers, but were shipped to Australia in appalling conditions. However the draconian sentences provoked a public outcry, and a mass campaign in their support eventually forced the King to pardon them.
This is a history of the events: https://libcom.org/history/tolpuddle-martyrs-1834 https://www.facebook.com/workingclasshistory/photos/a.296224173896073/1377191582465988/?type=3
