Chimpanzees appear to have more hostile relationships between different groups. Even lethal aggression is not uncommon. This hostility has led researchers to assume that group conflict is an innate part of human nature.

Bonobos might be telling a different story about how social structures and communities have evolved over time.

“The ability to study how cooperation emerges in a species so closely related to humans challenges existing theory, or at least provides insights into the conditions that promote between-group cooperation over conflict,’ study co-author and German Primate Center evolutionary biologist Liran Samuni said in a statement.

The study looked at two groups of 31 wild adult bonobos in the Kokolopori Bonobo Reserve in the Democratic Republic of Congo over a period of two years. When the different groups of bonobos met up, they often fed, rested, and traveled together.

Pretty cool stuff

Luisa Capetillo, born on this day in 1879, was a Puerto Rican labor organizer, feminist, and Christian anarchist. Capetillo advocated for women's suffrage, was arrested for wearing pants in public, and helped raise the minimum wage.

As a labor activist, Capetillo organized workers throughout the United States, worked as a reporter for the FLT (Federacion Libre de Trabajadores), and traveled throughout Puerto Rico, educating and organizing women. Her hometown, Arecibo, became the most unionized area of the country.

Capetillo is considered to be one of Puerto Rico's first suffragists. In 1908, during the FLT convention, Capetillo asked the union to approve a policy for women's suffrage, insisting that all women should have the same right to vote as men. Along with other labor activists, she also helped pass a minimum wage law in the Puerto Rican Legislature.

Today, Capetillo is perhaps best known for being arrested for wearing pants in public, although the charges against her were later dropped.

In 2014, the Legislative Assembly of Puerto Rico honored Capetillo, along with eleven other women, with plaques in the "La Plaza en Honor a la Mujer Puertorriqueña" (Plaza in Honor of Puerto Rican Women).

Capetillo, Luisa - a biography

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Remember you deserve to be idle. You should be able to do things for their own sake.

I'm really curious to know these guys' position on Palestinian statehood.

Francisco Ferrer i Guàrdia (1859 - 1909) was a radical anarchist educator who was the founder of the Modern School and introduced pedagogical rationalism in Spain. Belonging to a well-to-do peasant family with Catholic roots, his academic training was self-taught. In 1873 he settled in Barcelona, where he worked in a trading house and was infected by the political atmosphere that at that time animated the Catalan cenacles. His free-thinking ideas soon led him to anarchism, a trend in which he developed a great activity as an agitator and revolutionary. In addition, he was always characterized by the vehemence with which he spread his anticlerical messages.

In 1878 he began to work as a conductor for the railway lines that linked Barcelona with France, which allowed him to become the courier that ensured the contact between the Spanish revolutionaries and the exiled president of the republican government Manuel Ruiz Zorrilla. In 1886 he participated in the attempt of a republican pronunciamiento in Santa Coloma de Farners, carried out by Brigadier Villacampa.

After the failed attempt, Ferrer i Guàrdia was able to evade justice and go into exile in Paris, where he discovered his pedagogical vocation and developed a brilliant career at the head of the secular school that he himself had founded, gaining international prestige as a free-thinking pedagogue and enemy of the obscurantism that dominated religious education in Spain at that time.

At the same time, he was in contact with the most prominent anarchist leaders of the time, such as Elisée Reclus, Charles Malato and Piotr Kropotkin, and was amassing a not diminished fortune that allowed him to lead a hectic love life -one more of the facets of his curious personality-.

Simultaneously, he nurtured from Paris a facet of revolutionary activist that, although it was not well considered by the most orthodox sectors of Spanish anarchism, materialized in the financial support he gave to the cause. In 1901, after receiving the inheritance left to him upon the death of Ernestine Mennier -a wealthy elderly Parisian woman to whom he had given Spanish classes since 1894-, he returned to Barcelona, where he settled and gave birth to some of his most ambitious projects. Thus, he created the Escuela Moderna, an institution from which he began to sow his fruitful secular and anticlerical seed, founded a publishing house closely linked to his educational project and was editor of the anarchist newspaper La Huelga General, work with which he contributed significantly to the strengthening of Catalan anarchist syndicalism.

His risky financial operations -he even speculated in the stock market- were not well regarded by the revolutionary anarchist rank and file, although the profits obtained by Ferrer i Guàrdia were used to finance some important armed actions such as the attack in Paris against Alfonso XIII (1905) and the frustrated regicide carried out by Mateo Morral -teacher of the Modern School of Barcelona- in Madrid on April 12, 1906.

After Morral's suicide, and the subsequent police investigation, Francisco Ferrer was declared an accomplice to the attempted regicide and subsequently arrested, but was released in 1907, as no conclusive evidence was gathered against him. The Modern School, however, was closed by government order in 1907, which encouraged him to undertake a tour of several European cities, in which he embodied the victims of the furious Spanish ecclesiastical power, already marked as a dangerous man for the central government, for his increasingly radical attitude.

He moved to Paris to collaborate, in union with several relevant anarchists (Malato, Laissant, Carlos Albert and Eugenio Fourniére) in the foundation of the Ligue Internationale pour l'educatión rationale de l'enfance. The primary objective of the league was to continue in Europe the pedagogical work begun in Barcelona by Ferrer i Guàrdia, for which it promoted the creation of an International Committee, chaired by Ferrer i Guàrdia himself, as well as the founding of a magazine, La Escuela Laica, which was cut from the same ideological cloth as his previous publications. Due to his gradual proximity to the revolutionary syndicalist elements in Barcelona, he gradually distanced himself from Alejandro Lerroux, head of the radical republicans.

In June 1909, on his return to Spain, he decided to organize a general strike in defense of the prisoners of Alcalá del Valle; but the call did not have the desired effect when Antonio Maura granted amnesty to the condemned. When in July of that same year the one that later would be known as Tragic Week broke out, Ferrer i Guàrdia was immediately linked to it, and he was even held responsible for the violent events that took place during those days, although he had remained all the time at his estate in Montgat.

Arrested by the Somatenistas and tried by a military tribunal, he was found guilty of being the material author of the burning of the convent of Premiá, and condemned to capital punishment, without the procedural guarantees or the evidence brought against him leaving an unquestionable feeling that justice had been done. In the political class, terrified by the virulence of those who had arrogated to themselves the right to exercise repression, no voice was raised to cry out against the condemnation of the exalted anarchist, not even among the circles of the official left, where Ferrer was considered the most responsible for the acts of which he was accused.

However, the international left asked Maura's government to commute the sentence, a plea that was constantly ignored. The really painful part of the trial was the multiple false testimonies and full of rancor poured against him by his political enemies, who saw the opportunity to get rid of a political adversary. At the trial, all those who could prove his innocence were barred from appearing and testifying.

Thus, at dawn on October 13, 1909, Francisco Ferrer i Guàrdia was led to the scaffold and viciously shot in the name of a legality so dubious that it had not even been able to guarantee the cleanliness of his prosecution. It is said that he demanded that he not be blindfolded, and that, shortly before hearing the voice of "fire!", he addressed the soldiers in the firing squad, ordered them to aim well, reminded them that they were killing an innocent man, and exclaimed: "Viva la Escuela Moderna" (Long live the Modern School).

The shameful trial and subsequent execution of Ferrer i Guàrdia motivated an international campaign of rallies and mobilizations in all the main European capitals that caught the Spanish government by surprise, causing such a crisis that its prime minister, Antonio Maura, was forced to resign, which led to his definitive withdrawal from active politics.

Ferrer i Guàrdia left many books and articles, including titles such as L'espagnol practique (1895), Enseigné par la methode Ferrer (1895), Los pecados capitales (1900), Cuento ateo (1900) and Ferrer y la Huelga General (1909). After his death, the following posthumous publications were published: The Modern School (1910), Posthumous Explanation (1910) and Scope of Rationalist Teaching (1910).

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The law allows tickets of up to 500 dollars and 60 days in jail. Mutual aid activists have called it "war on the unhoused." West Palm Beach FnB has been ticketed over 25 times under this law.

This is the front line of the fight against fascism in Florida.

(San Antonio Eloxochitlán, Oaxaca, 1873 - Leavenworth, Kansas, 1922) Mexican politician and journalist who is considered a precursor of the Mexican Revolution. His figure has remained as that of one of the most upright fighters and consistent with the cause of the workers during the times of the Revolution. Indefatigable and indefatigable, his thought and his struggle inspired many of the workers' conquests and some rights that would be included in the Mexican constitution.

The son of Indigenous parents, Ricardo Flores Magón studied law at the University of Mexico. In 1892 he was arrested along with his brother Jesús de him during a student protest against the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz. After collaborating with the short-lived daily El Demócrata, he founded with his brother the newspaper Regeneración, whose first issue appeared on August 7, 1900 and from whose pages the Porfiriato was permanently lashed out.

Harassed by the government, he had to go into exile in the United States in 1904. In the city of Saint Louis (Missouri), he founded in 1906 the Mexican Liberal Party, of socialist/anarchist ideology, claiming a revolutionary program of state interventionism. He demanded the eight-hour day, Sunday rest and the distribution of land to the peasants, with which his ideas had repercussions on the Mexican labor movement. Closer and closer to anarchist socialism, his party was behind the strikes in the mining town of Cananea and the Rio Blanco industrial zone in Veracruz (1906-1907), violently repressed by the Díaz regime.

After the outbreak in 1910 of the revolution that would force Porfirio Díaz to resign, in 1911 he promoted the insurrection in Baja California with his brother Enrique. They came to take the cities of Mexicali and Tijuana and tried, without success, to found a socialist republic. Lacking aid, they were defeated by government troops and had to retreat to the United States. Convinced that the governments were to blame for the oppression of the working class, they continued to fight the rulers who, during the turbulent period of the Mexican Revolution, succeeded Díaz: Francisco I. Madero and Venustiano Carranza.

President Francisco Madero sought his help, but Flores refused to collaborate with the bourgeois revolution. Many of his claims were admitted in the Congress of Querétaro (1917). In 1918 he drew up a manifesto addressed to anarchists around the world, for which he was sentenced to twenty years in prison by the American authorities. After suffering a cruel and ruthless prison regime, he died almost blind on November 20, 1922, in Leavenworth (Kansas) penitentiary.

-- Anarchism in Latin America :meow-anarchist:

-- Anarchism and Syndicalism in the Colonial and Postcolonial World, 1870–1940 :anarchy-heart:

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now all fediverse discussion will be considered a current struggle session discussion and all comment about it are subject to be removed and even banning from the comm.

have all of you a good day/night

Born 1904 - Kilifarevo, Bulgaria, died May 28th 1925 - Belovo, Bulgaria.

Born in Kilifarevo, Bulgaria on 14th August 1904, the student-actress Mariola Sirakova belonged to a well-off family. She revolted from an early age against her social background and became an anarchist communist when she went to the Girls High School at Tarnovo in 1919.

She regularly took part in secret anarchist meetings.

She began a relationship with another Bulgarian anarchist, Gueorgui Cheitanov. She associated with other important anarchists like Petar Maznev, Georgi Simeonov Popov, and others. In her frre time, she acted in the Orpheus Theatre Company in Kilifarevo. In 1922-23 she studied in Pleven. She often hid wanted anarchists like Vassil Popov and Valko Shankov

In 1923 a military coup led to the butchery of 35,000 workers and peasants. The armed resistance that followed ended with the bomb attack by the Communist Party on Sofia cathedral which was aimed at the country's elite. A massive campaign of repression was then unleashed by the fascists and military against the revolutionary movement.

Mariola was arrested by the police, and brutally beaten. In June 1924 she returned to Kilifarevo. She was arrested again, but soon released. She gave support to the Kilifarevo cheta (armed guerilla unit), bringing them food, medicine and clothes and caring for the wounded.

Special police detachments were set up to hunt Cheitanov down. All the guerrillas united into a single detachment, being forced to disperse towards the end of May. Cheitanov and Mariola Sirakova, were caught in an ambush and arrested. They were taken to Belovo railway station and shot with 12 other prisoners on May 28th June 1925.

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Anti-anarchists sometimes like to accuse "anarchists" of having terrible opinions, and then if you're like "I'm an anarchist and that's not true" they say "Oh, I mean internet anarchists."

I've seen some of you mirroring this rhetoric and complaining about "internet anarchists." This is playing into anti-anarchist rhetoric that discredits anarchism and divides the movement. You don't have to prove you're one of the good ones.

We used to call those people "baby anarchists." They weren't pretenders who we had to distance ourselves from, they were uneducated people who needed some pointers on things like cooption, anti-imperialism, lesser evilism and the non-profit industrial complex.

Don't distance yourself from internet anarchists, educate baby anarchists.

Know that there is a good chance that this will be arrestable

Saw that these protests are still going on (as of yesterday) and have seen news die down even around leftist areas so this libcom article was a nice resource to see what the deal was and what has been going on.

I'm going to give a Marxist economic explanation for why Communist countries don't implement basic things like direct democracy at all levels, freedom of speech, freedom of association/assembly etc.

It's important to have a scientific understanding of why these countries are the way they are. Blanket denunciation of authoritarianism is not enlightening and won't prevent us from repeating the mistakes.

So basically, socialism is about abolishing money and commodity-production. As long as money exists, you can use money to command labour. As long as the state is the source of money, the state can simply print money and exploit people by taking their labour using the free printed money. All communist countries do/did this.

Another source of exploitation is subjective prices. As long as prices are subjectively set by the state through price controls (rather than objectively calculated using labor-time), it's very easy to set up imaginary prices that don't reflect the true amount of work put in by the workers. All communist countries do/did this.

As long as money exists, the salaries are also subjective. Unproductive bureaucrats can pay themselves well without doing any productive labor. The bureaucrats form a pseudo-class that protects its own material interests, which are now directly opposed to the working class.

As long as money exists, you will have a black market. The capitalist mode of exchange can be reintroduced very easily, by simply stealing from factories or shops and reselling. By the 1980s, the USSR had a gigantic shadow economy run by secret black market millionaires who paid off the bureaucrats.

As long as subjective prices are used, it is very difficult to accurately and efficiently plan the economy. If prices do not reflect their labor content as they do in capitalist economies, then it's not possible to decide which investment is truly cheaper. Hence, plans were based on crude quantitative planning of "this many cars" or "that many shirts", rather than financial planning that minimized total labor cost. Financial planning is only possible with objective prices.

The suppression of wages ( made possible as no objective measure of value is used) turns the Communist countries into "sweatshop economies" like those in Africa or Asia. Cheap labor provides an incentive to hoard labor for production rather than removing labor through mechanization, which is what would happen if labor is expensive. This removed a major incentive for economic growth.

Lessons learnt :

1. Communist countries did not abolish exploitation. DRILL this into the head of every single ML or Tankie. They did NOT end exploitation. This is an objective fact.

2. The economic base (exploitation) creates the superstructure ( police state, suppression). There is no practical reason to maintain a police state when exploitation doesn't exist.

3. Ideally you must abolish money and commodity-production. Replace with labor-vouchers.

4. If step 1 is not yet possible/feasible, at least still ensure that prices are objectively calculated based on labor-time, rather than subjectively set through price controls or subsidies. This can be done either by markets("market socialism"), parecon, Lange model etc.

5. The authoritarianism is officially justified through the siege mentality of capitalist oppression and counterrevolution. This is a bad faith argument especially for nuclear armed USSR and NK, who will ever invade a nuclear armed state?

6. Communist countries implemented gun control. This is best and clearest sign of the nature of these states. If there was no exploitation and no classes, why was the state afraid of arming the people?

7. However, it is still a real fact that capturing and retaining power is not an easy task, and that hierarchical organizations have been more successful at this. Anarchists have not yet proven by practice that they are capable of capturing and holding power.

I don't mean to call anyone out - I despise conflict, especially of the sectarian variety.
I wrote the following in response to someone's assertion that all anarchism is, amounts solely to fighting in the streets, but it is a more general response to how I feel about the community in general - vis-a-vis Marxist-Leninists in particular. Since this comm. is fairly quiet, I figured I'd put it here as I spent a lot of time writing it and it would be a shame if no one saw it. 😑

I am becoming more and more convinced that the ML crowds that are the loudest proponents of 'read history' and 'read theory' do absolutely neither.
Anarchism is one of the prestige forms of socialism - it was half of the First International, and, just like Marxism, was disseminated and adopted throughout the world during the 19th and 20th centuries.

• Even during Marx's time, one of the most informative experiences of the era was that of the Paris Commune - heavily contributed to by anarchists.
• The Russian revolution was not undertaken solely by a cadre of intellectual vanguardists - it was facilitated by the formation of the proletariat and peasantry into trade unions, factory committees and worker's soviets - at this time, Lenin et al weren't even in the country due to exile.
• Even Lenin on his deathbed spoke of 'witnessing the resurrection of the tsarist bureaucracy to which the Bolsheviks had only given a Soviet veneer'; after the civil war rejecting the popular demand for socialism via worker-control and disbanding organisations like parties, committees and soviets - not to mention utilising force when necessary such as at Kronstadt. This is not a blunt stab at the Bolsheviks - it is important to note the Marxist Contradiction: That the Bolshevik state was established to achieve socialism and to represent the interests of the proletariat - yet, at the opportunistic post-Civil War moment to do so, they declined, instead favouring the opposite.
• Mao himself read anarchist theory and was inspired by it - beyond being a passing interest as a young man, it likely fed the basis of his later departures from Marxist-Leninism and criticisms of state bureaucracy.
• In Korea, anarchists established the Korean People's Association - an autonomous confederation of 2 million people, operating on a mutual aid based economy.
• It would be folly to discount entirely the efforts of the Spanish anarchists in establishing 'actually existing socialism' in Catalonia and Andalusia - money was abolished, productivity increased, and thousands took up arms in horizontal armies to fight the fascists. Putting aside issues of ideological supremacy, these are real, material impacts that in some cases have lasting effects - even today the municipality of Marinaleda maintains a system of mutual aid, collective ownership and autonomy.
• In Cuba, anarchists lent their support to the revolution wholeheartedly - joining the guerilla groups fighting Batista directly.
• Edit: Of course, how could I forget the Zapatistas? They currently control a sizeable territory in Mexico, and have been directly addressing the needs of their largely rural and underprivileged citizens for over 25 years.
  etc.

In many of these cases, anarchists have repeatedly facilitated revolution, and even established instances of real, tangible socialism. That they did not survive suppression and encirclement is not proof of their lack of capacity for success - if such a thing was true, the Soviet Union would never have been established (on the basis of historical revolutionary suppression and exile) nor should there be Marxist-Leninists left now that it has been dismantled.

The assertion that anarchist movements are prone to corruption and co-option by reactionaries is also flawed - the same applies to Marxist-Leninist parties too. There is no shortage of ML parties in various countries extolling reactionary views today, and the conditions that led to the dismantling of the USSR can be seen as exactly this phenomenon - the undermining of public trust in the party by propaganda and the infiltration of the party itself by opportunists and yes-men for the purpose of usurping it.
How can Marxist-Leninists say with confidence that their method is the only scientific application of Marxism; lambasting others for their perceived vulnerabilities to Western capital; when not even their prestige test-case itself was immune? How can we be expected to fall in line with the logic "The Marxist-Leninist state was undermined and dismantled. The solution is Marxist-Leninism."

Finally, why is it that calls for 'Left Unity' apply solely to Marxist-Leninism - that we should overlook our differences in their favour in the interest of the bigger picture, yet you will find nothing in kind from them?
I have spent years carrying water for ML ideologies - for the USSR, for China, etc. - against my personal beliefs and better judgment in the interest of internationalism and anti-imperialism. The least I expect, is to be treated like a communistic equal, fighting in the same struggle. Instead, our communities are filled with Marxist-Leninists quotebombing dissenters with Lenin and stamping on anarchists at every possible opportunity - only occasionally moderating themselves with a token "I have many anarchist friends, but..." or "I support left unity, but..."

Put aside your wretched egos for once in your lives. Consider the fundamentals of our theory and praxis - that material conditions around the world and throughout history are not uniform. There may indeed be cases where Marxist-Leninism is the most effective - I claim that in earnest.
Will you be able to acknowledge the possibility of cases where anarchism is the most viable? Especially when anarchism spans such a range of approaches and theories - from syndicalism to mutualism to synthesism.
You need to be aware, that for many people, the barrier to the adoption of Marxist-Leninism is not simply the influence of Western propaganda, or the the lack of 'reading theory' - it is our diametric opposition to hierarchy in any form. That does not preclude our contributions to your causes - it means that they are done voluntarily.

The truest demonstration of Left Unity for me, will be when I don't feel like an outsider, as a communist within the communist community.
:left-unity-2: