Note: The text that follows is an excerpt of an interview with Kelly Hayes that is featured in the anthology of antifascist writing No Pasarán! (AK Press, October 2022). “Kops and Klan go hand in hand!” This chant was shouted in street gatherings across the country during the 2020 uprising against white supremacy and police violence. The historic connection of white nationalist vigilante violence and the police became glaringly obvious in the disparity between the treatment of the Proud Boys and that of antiracist protesters, where police often refused to intervene while the far-right gangs leveled attacks on left-wing demonstrators.…
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Senators Are Optimistic That Marriage Equality Bill Will Pass This Month
Senate negotiators working on a bill to codify marriage equality protections have expressed optimism that the legislation could be passed by the end of this month. The Respect for Marriage Act passed earlier this summer in the House of Representatives, with just 47 Republicans voting in its favor. The bill faces greater obstacles in the Senate, however, where it needs 60 votes to overcome a filibuster so it can be passed. If the bill does pass in the Senate, President Joe Biden has said that he will sign it into law. Some Republicans have expressed a willingness to support the…
“The Earth Is Telling Us It’s Exhausted”: An Interview With Poet Natalie Diaz
This interview with poet Natalie Diaz is an excerpt from We Are the Middle of Forever: Indigenous Voices from Turtle Island on the Changing Earth, edited by Dahr Jamail and Stan Rushworth. Natalie Diaz (Mojave/Akimel O’odham) believes words have, quite literally, physical energy. This is one reason she continues to work to preserve the Mojave language with its last remaining speakers. To her, this is far more important than the fact she is a MacArthur Genius Award winner, has won a Pulitzer for her poetry, an American Book Award, and was the youngest poet ever elected a chancellor of the…
Many Nations Have Used COVID to Impose the Tyranny of Transnational Capital
The following is an excerpt from the Introduction to Global Civil War: Capitalism Post-Pandemic, which has just been released by PM Press. Not far from my home in Los Angeles are about a hundred houses that have been boarded up for years. The houses were bought up by the city in the late twentieth century through eminent domain in order to make way for an extension of the 710 freeway that dead ends into my El Sereno neighborhood. But opposition from affluent communities further east eventually killed the project, leaving the houses to lay vacant. Meanwhile, there were on any…
How Can We Organize in Ways That Challenge Boundaries and Defy Exclusion?
How do social movements convince people to identify with and take part in political struggle beyond a particular group or narrow economic interest? In this excerpt from Abolition Geography: Essays Toward Liberation, author Ruth Wilson Gilmore looks at how movements produced innovative answers to this question by taking their efforts across the boundaries of labor and community organizing, paid and unwaged labor, and the private and public spheres. Gilmore also theorizes the organizing practices of Mothers Reclaiming Our Children (ROC), a Los Angeles-based grassroots organization started in 1992 by mothers who fought against the intensified criminalization of their children under…
Violence of Settler Colonialism Stretches Across Generations of Native Families
The following is an excerpt from An Enemy Such as This: Larry Casuse and the Fight for Native Liberation in One Family on Two Continents over Three Centuries, out now from Haymarket Books. After Gallup, New Mexico police killed Larry Casuse on March 1, 1973, they dragged his body out of the sporting goods store where they’d shot him three times and onto the sidewalk along Route 66, where they took turns taking photos of themselves posing over his dead body. They framed one of those photos and hung it above the bar at the Gallup Fraternal Order of Police.…