Fred Hampton, deputy chairman of the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party, was born on August 30, 1948 and raised in the Chicago suburb of Maywood, Illinois. In high school he excelled in academics and athletics. After Hampton graduated from high school, he enrolled in a pre-law program at Triton Junior College in River Grove, Illinois. Hampton also became involved in the civil rights movement, joining his local branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). His dynamic leadership and organizational skills in the branch enabled him to rise to the position of Youth Council President. Hampton mobilized a racially integrated group of five hundred young people who successfully lobbied city officials to create better academic services and recreational facilities for African American children.
In 1968, Hampton joined the Black Panther Party (BPP), headquartered in Oakland, California. Using his NAACP experience, he soon headed the Chicago chapter. During his brief BPP tenure, Hampton formed a “Rainbow Coalition” which included Students for a Democratic Society, the Blackstone Rangers, a street gang and the National Young Lords, a Puerto Rican organization. Hampton was also successful in negotiating a gang truce on local television.
In an effort to neutralize the Chicago BPP, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Chicago Police Department placed the chapter under heavy surveillance and conducted several harassment campaigns. In 1969, several BPP members and police officers were either injured or killed in shootouts, and over one hundred local members of the BPP were arrested.
During an early morning police raid of the BPP headquarters at 2337 W. Monroe Street on December 4, 1969, twelve officers opened fire, killing the 21-year-old Hampton and Peoria, Illinois Panther leader Mark Clark. Police also seriously wounded four other Panther members. Many in the Chicago African American community were outraged over the raid and what they saw as the unnecessary deaths of Hampton and Clark. Over 5,000 people attended Hampton’s funeral where Reverends Ralph Abernathy and Jesse Jackson of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference eulogized the slain activist. Years later, law enforcement officials admitted wrongdoing in the killing of Hampton and Clark. In 1990, and later in 2004, the Chicago City Council passed resolutions commemorating December 4 as Fred Hampton Day.
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Happy to chat!
CW: I just realized that I shouldn't quote you without honoring your CWs, too! So I'll also throw everything under one.
Supply chains are opaque when it comes to this. It is more or less obvious when certain animal products are in food and avoiding them has a direct impact in the industry. Vegan restaurants and foods marked as vegan would not exist without the establishment of a subcommunity to market stuff at.
If this were also possible with cobalt I would say we should also do that. But we also don't need to really convince anyone that child labor / slavery is bad. If a package said "child labor/slavery free" and others didn't people woild buy the former (mostly). The actual barrier there is not popularity, but the capitalist system itself. So we organize as socialists to overthrow it.
On top of the opacity, to actually free yourself from child exploitation re: electronics, you would need to basically boycott all of them. Not just smartphones, but every device with a chip in it. No computer, no television, no microwave, no oven, no audio system, no care at medical facilities, etc. It is possible to do this, but not particularly practicable, and again, the connection between your individual action and the desired outcome would be nebulous.
A lot of this is really about people getting mentally exhausted from anti-vegan sentiments, in addition to personally getting upset about the violence vs. how seemingly easy it would be for people to stop harming animals as we do. It is actually quite reminiscent of arguing with liberals and reactionaries from a socialist position, as vegans come from a position of empathy and trnd to have knowledge that non-vegans don't. There are anti-vegans that make posts just to "trigger" vegans (reactionary behavior) and there are people that repeat the same kinds of reasoning against going vegan that can eventually wear people down, particularly if they do not have a large amount of patience. To properly advocate for veganism you need basically the exact same thick skin as an organizer, there is a lot of overlap in experience with the work of socialist organizing at an individual level.
Another angle is to think about what distinguished our grandparents on this platform - the "dirtbag" left in the US. Some forms of effective advocacy are very different from the usual 1-on-1 organizer strategy. Instead, you shock and jostle and don't take the other person seriously. This can actually work very well to unseat people from a sense of complacency, as they were otherwise thinking of their position as a perfectly redpectable position that can be debated in the marketplace of ideas when really many ideas and defenses of ideas are not complicated or even justified, but are just socially entrenched. IMO this very community failed to live up to appreciatimg this idea when it banned dog-posting from the vegan circle-jerk subreddit lifeboat community. That's our bread-and-butter agitation style!
Out tastes can actually be fairly plastic. I didn't think I would ever dislike the appearance, smell, or taste of animal products but they do actually bother me now.
Self-interest isn't actually that effective of a thing to build on unless it leads to consciousness and the realization of power. The confluence of self-interest and the overthrow of capitalism, for example, is due to class conflict, the likelihood that workers can recognize that their bosses are short-changing them, that the system itself is unstable and leads to crisis that builds on how obvious class antagonism is, and, most importantly, the primacy of labor itself over the production process.
For example, it is not in the overall interest of the working class, even in the imperial core, to support capitalism. But time and time again, labor and the working class have become supporters of Imperialism and the wider capitalist system through (1) false consciousness and (2) the existence of an immediate self-interest in maintaining the status quo. For example, white workers myopically seeing an advantage for themselves by upholding the racist capitalist systems even though worldwide liberation would make their lives much better.
Following this line of thought too early or too heavily when organizing often leads to bad outcomes, even. If you yell an American that we are oppressed by the system but that Americans in particular receive the fruits of others' labor via unequal exchange, chauvinists will often double down with their new knowledge. A person must not just be self-interested, but be interested in mutual liberation and the liberation of others, expanding their empathy, in order to have real solidarity and internationalism.
Had to split my comment in two for it to be post-able!
vegan discussion just in case!
This may be logic dependent in alienation. At the end of the day, it is an animal dying for the purpose of capitalism and your personal eating of it. That latter part has been the case since domestication. But due to industrialized farming and advancea of science, it is possible to thrive without it and to know that it is possible to thrive without it. At our level of discussion it is of course just an individual thing and it takes into the system of production, but that is the case for all struggle.
Consider this: consumption, now, is just an act of buying what is sold under the capitalist system. It is amoral relative to that process and the humans involved in it. It will sell whatever it can relative to what is socially possible and its historical embedding. But this does not resolve the moral question, and it does not change the scale of personal involvement. Killing to eat an animal now is not lesser than killing to eat an animal 2000 years ago so far as the act against the animal is concerned. What has changed is the productive system that makes it even less necessary. As Marx noted, capitalism is itself a revolutionary evolution of class conflict, it has displaced older systems. We are embedded in it and can take stock of our current situation in it, in all its multitudes.
No doubt. In addition to your example, reducing one's own direct consumption overall is a good rule of thumb for slightly removing oneself from particupation in the horrors of the economic system. It is just one step removed, but focusing on second hand items is one way to do this, including re: cobalt. For this reason I usually thrift, yard sale, ebay, etc my things. Or go through Chinese sellers (or manufacturers) whose productive sources are reasonably determined. For example, a Chinese seller of a Titanium item is getting that thing sourced 100% through China except in the rare of cases. Being sourced from China is not an inherent good, it is a country with good and bad things, but it is a socialist project and I can be confident that Chinese titanium things is unlikely to involve child laboe and will contribute to the productive forces of China. I hope they will de-dollarize my dollars eventually, lol.
But to self-crit, I so not expecr everyone to so this and I don't think it is a something to build into any kind of movement at the moment. But veganism can be. It is simple enough to describe and attempt to follow. Sometimes, a concordance between what should be and what can be done now is empowering.
If it is relevant at all, I have a steam deck that I upgraded with an aftermarket SSD and I plan to use it for a long time so as to reduce my consumption while still enjoying my hobbies, which give me strength to organize and socialize. It offers a way to avoid building a gaming machine for dealing with graphics cards or an endless upgrade cycle. Though I am not overly invested in trying to navigate electronics supply chains, just avoiding new HP purchases due to BDS.
This can't be quantified. The two things aren't directly comparable and the computer stuff has murky supply chains. We can't make perfect or good consumption choices and shouldn't spend too much time worrying about them. I just think most vegan stuff is fairly practicable and changes one's relationship with animals for the better, and as we grow in number, communities' relationships with animals for the better, serving the cause of animal liberation.
Haha, this is basically the moral accounting system of a particular popular show that ended a few years ago. I think the question of being a good person is so poisoned by capitalism that I would avoid even thinking about it outside of ensuring one sticks to their principles as best they can while seeking knowledge and empathy.
But I can say that avoiding animal products is usually practicable, can be done in any way that is amenable to you and ensuring your well-being, and that upon adopting this you will find an additional level of moral consistency that can help ready you for further struggle.
Ye, exactly. Our modes of communication do not allow for a cohesive form of rhetoric that ticks all boxes, so we make do with people using different strategies simultaneously. Sitting down and reading books together is the way to be thorough. But nobody does that without agitation.
I don't think level of activity is something that changes morality or practicality. If sitting on a couch meant 2 million kids died we would just avoid sitting on couches. No real activity required, just a conscious choice based on understanding what the small action led to. Luckily it is straightforward to not sit in a couch and it is straightforward to avoid animal products.
The correlation is that a person does actively buy and personally eat an animal product when they could just not, just like a person does actively "buy" the house and fo live in it when they could not. Cheap housing is even an incentive! But the cost...
In a way, these things are only really different through capitalist alienation. If you knew that Bob from down the street did it at your request it wouldn't change very much about the equation, and would depersonalize it less. The decision to kill and eat the animal is the same but its comodification through a market has made appear as something else, socially.
In my example the person had already been kicked out by the Zionist entity, ghus completing the analogy of depersonalization even though everyone knows it is, in reality, incredibly personal and a form of disposession.
Let me counter with this: personal organizing efforts also do not matter much compared to what is necessary. It is only in aggregate and by following a correct course that we reach viable methods of liberation. If we value our own contributions at all, then these kinds of things do become comparable. Because we know what is necessary, we dedicate our lives to revolution, even knowing we are just a part of a whole.
Yes, this is basically describing one-person PR. It is why I vote. I don't really care about bourgeois electoralism on a personal level bit the liberals I interact with cannot understand my meanings unless I can viably relate.
I think it is more likely that they don't think about it at all. Or that they adopt the predominant social view of it. Veganism is not strong enough to elicit any kind of response from a political class.
But veganism is a moralistic position that does not have a strong social movement in any country, so it would be an imposition without justification. Naturally, countries promote what is foreseeably practicable in their current social context. More efficient animal ag, an expansion of plant-based foods that are more efficient (soy is ubiquitous!), questions of how to make industrialized agriculture sustainable, etc. I can tell you, definitively, that at least one socialist country advances by promoting conferences and research around these kinda of things and lets the nerds sort it out.
Comrades too comrade telepathy, lol. I did think about neuralink at one point while writing that. Though unflrtun even the most boring run-of-the-mill NIH stuff also falls into this category.
etc
It has mostly just increased the scale. Animals were killed after about 1/10th of their lifespan, medical care was non-existent, calves were removed early from mothers and raised for slaughter months later, veal was just this but with less mobility, chickens fought each other in cramped conditions, pigs were fed garbage, etc etc.
Alienation changes the social relation, making one have a relationship to commodities rather than their own or others' production. You know Bob that has chickens. You don't know basically anything about the decontextualized off-white slabs in the refrigerator section, only that it is basically fungible with the other slabs and how much it costs.
Re: using one's labor to do bad things, being the paid animal torturer is just one step removed from the supermarket slab. The conditions and lives of livestock are usually torturous and slaughter isn't exactly kind. As stated earlier, you're effectively just paying someone to do the deed for you. Capitalism helps by making it so you don't have to know their name or directly interact with them and ensures they get paid as little as possible. Being a laborer for the imperial machine is bad, but can be hard to quantify for comparisons. For example, what does one thing of the precarious immigrant workforce that gets stuck with jobs like janitorial work at the bombs sales department? How do we consider the personal complicity of the person clearing the waste bin of someone that just got a big bonus for being part of a successful big bid contract? What if they are employed by that person to clean their personal home instead? What if they are a professor that taught them skills for that job? There is a network with degrees of proximity and we should do our best to remove ourselves from the closest ones in the ways practicable.
It's a spoiler for the show so I won't say unless you want a spoiler!
It is different in experience, in the social relation. But not the outcome. "It would already be produced" is an argument that always pops up in conversations about consumption and production. Its logic applies just as well to every commodity consumed and produced. The Cobalt would be mined. The animal would be dead. The bomb would get sold. Paying someone to do it for you via commoditization doesn't remove one's culpability, but it can change the calculus on whether it is practicable to abstain and have that translate into decreased demand for the bad thing. For Cobalt, we can't specifically target child labor via consumption choices. For animal products, we can.
In my opinion, personally killing the animal is identically bad for a person to do as paying someone to do it, only maybe a bit worse in that now another worker is roped into the deed. It all also feeds into the normalization if animals as food, materials, commodities, rather than thinking, feeling beings.
If nobody wanted to move into the house there would be no settlers there. It is an essential part of settler-colonialism. The "less bad" option is really just a division of labor for the bad deed, but the total act requires both, they are part of the same whole. The American moving in us complicit and is a very important part of the expulsion.
They understand politics through bourgeouis electoralism and will stop listening if you tell them you don't vote.
Personally I'm enjoying his fall from grace among the wider population because I can really rub IRL libs' faces in it. Tesls owners that believed "smartest man in the world" nonsense lol