Charmaine Chua 🇵🇸
@CharmaineSChua
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Organizer w @ucftp & Amazonians United; Prof @UCSBglobal ; Editor @SocietyandSpace , co-founder @Marxnetwork . Writing a book on the logistics counterrevolution.
Santa Barbara, CA
Joined November 2010
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Two autonomous collectives at UCSB & UC Davis have just simultaneously liberated two dining commons: De La Guerra @ UCSB & Latitude at Davis. Both are serving free meals to all until 3pm."Why it is that in the best public university system in the US, so many students are hungry?"
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Everyone is talking about the big ship getting stuck in the
#Suez
Canal. Here's a critical logistics reading list on the politics of how we got here -why ships are so huge, why there is a manmade canal cutting through a continent, why global supply chains seem so brittle, & more.
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So many academics with job security writing so many papers about how fucked the world is. So few academics with job security organizing towards making the world less fucked.
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p.s. the minimum wage in Mexico is $9USD per day.
So, yeah: the most valuable company on the planet, whose owner went to space for kicks, developing a facility on top of a slum in TJ, making use of superexploited labor & a USMCA clause to import goods tax & inspection free.. 9/
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Every time a strike has happened in my 2.5 short years at the UC, faculty's first worry is "We don't want to hurt the students' ability to learn." Strikes are meant to hurt. That's the point. Full stop. Cancel your classes.
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And now a breaking victory: the Society for Women Engineers at UCSB has now announced that they are ending their partnership with Northrop Grumman in light of last night’s Palestine solidarity protests.
Something is shifting in university movements for Justice in Palestine: first Santa Cruz workers pledge no cooperation with military funded research; now abolitionists and grad workers are breaking the uni to war machine internship pipeline.
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When 48,000 UAW Academic Workers go on strike on Monday, Nov 14, senate faculty at the University of California have a legally-protected right under the Higher Education Employment Relations Act (HEERA) to respect the picket line. Some reasons + resources for showing solidarity:
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In Mpls, in the face of organized abandonmt from police: community defense units hv bn organized by neighborhood; ppl pooling firefighting resources; going door2door to check in on neighbors. I need you to know that a world without police isn’t just possible. It’s already here.
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For Amazon, this duty-free clause, set against the increase in China-US tariffs, provides a loophole. They will ship Chinese goods into Mexico, bring them to the Tijuana facility to process and break apart, then truck them in tote-bag sized, sub-$800 bundles to Otay Mesa FC 7/
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You can follow Spencer Potiker's incredible research here:
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This thread is making the rounds so while I have you: if you’re a journalist or you research Amazon and want to write about this: Please do not steal from people’s hard won research! Support grad students, get in touch with, interview, and credit Spencer Potiker for his work.
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Singapore has just repealed s377a, the law that has criminalized sex between men since British colonization. Tears flowing over here for all the queers who grew up in this homophobic society, and so much gratitude to the activists have been fighting for this for decades.
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Lots of amazing folks have just started new faculty jobs, and it's prompted me to reflect on the last 5 years of my TT experience. So here are 15 lessons I wish I'd learned earlier as an academic:
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Read more about Amazon's workforce in Mexico here:
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In his brilliant dissertation research, Spencer Potiker (UCI Global Studies) is examining this US-Mexico logistics seam. Potiker notes that at the end of Obama's term in 2016, NAFTA Section 321 was extended to allow the duty-free import of goods up to $800. 6/
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A massive victory from UC Santa Cruz, whose grad worker organizers are constantly showing us the way forward. UCSCAstronomers pledge no cooperation with the war machine. Honestly tears at this.
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But the Amazon networks' epicenter is starting to shift. Since Trump's trade war, there has been a total increase of about $200 billion in tariffs from China. For e-commerce companies, this means direct China-US trade has become too expensive. The solution? Mexico. 4/
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I hope we grasp how huge this is. This is the return of the political strike. This is a fuck you to Taft-Hartley. This is rank and file struggle for Palestinian liberation. This is what international workers solidarity looks like.
We are holding a Strike Authorization vote May 13-15th. 🧵 (1/9)
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Activists have stopped work and shipments into the Raytheon facility in El Segundo, CA to "stand firm with Palestine and her people" and "to disrupt the cogs of war that churn beside us, propelling genocide." ✊✊✊
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After 17 years in the US on temp visas, many interrogation rooms at the border, many worries about taking arrestable risks at direct actions, and wayy too much paperwork, I received my green card in the mail today. Reader, the fucking card isn’t even green.
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Till now, the Inland Empire has been the most crucial site for Amazon's delivery network. Close to the ports of LA and LB -- which handle 40% of all container imports into the US -- the IE is a source of cheap land and cheap labor (see
@JuanD
's Inland Shift for more) 3/
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At Otay Mesa FC, workers (paid at minimum wage) will manage inventory for these tote bag-sized piece goods and prep them for further distribution inland. Trump's USMCA trade deal inked 2019 hastens this by lifting inspection requirements by the EPA and CPSC. 8/
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"...Our abolitionist message is that we want an entirely new and different structure. We want to free the resources that should be ours in the first place. Swipe-free, tuition-free, police-free, we are not joking about a free university."
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Late last night, the UCSB student senate became the last UC to pass a divestment resolution. 12 years in the making, the victory required months of work to flip a Zionist dominated senate. They did; final vote: 18 yes, 4 no, 2 abstentions. Absolutely incredible organizing by SJP.
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Oh, and it bears mentioning that not unrelated, Otay Mesa is also the site of the Otay Mesa Detention Center, run by private prison company CoreCivic, under lawsuit in 2017 for detainee forced labor:
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In a zine distributed at both sites, the groups write: "We are an autonomous collective of students fighting to transform the conditions of the university as we know it. We demand an education that centers our lives, not profit..."
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FIVE coordinated dining hall liberations went down today at UCSB, UCD, UCLA, UCSC, and UCR. Some were quickly shut down, others are still serving students free meals right now. "A free university starts with feeding the people," and undergrads are lined up by the dozens & dozens.
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Formal launch to follow, but I’m thrilled to announce that
@anniemcclanahan
, Joshua Clover, Colleen Lye, Chris Chen and I have secured seed funding to start a University of California-wide scholar network called the Marxist Institute of Research. You can follow us
@MarxNetwork
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and explore Good Jobs First's map of Amazon here:
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And also support and follow
@amazoniansunite
@AUchicagoland
@NYCAmazonians
@wwunite
@AmazonWorkersIn
and all the Amazon workers fighting for themselves.
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To think the right thing to do as a genocide unfolds is spend 80 paragraphs milquetoastly, vaguely, abstractly pontificating about grievability is horrifying, actually. I’m horrified. How many Gazan children died as they philosophized. My god.
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In his closing argument yesterday, the prosecution assured the jury that Chauvin was an exception, not the rule:"the MPD is not on trial. Policing is a noble profession." So no matter the verdict, abolitionists know this: The Whole Damn System Is Guilty As Hell.
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p.s. The UC's refusal to give lecturers a fair contract is what is hurting students' ability to learn. Lecturer churn hurts their ability to learn. Lecturer poverty hurts their ability to learn. Lecturers' teaching conditions are students' learning conditions. Rinse. repeat.
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Clarifying no official relation to UAW2865, they write: "We are in solidarity with the current strike and with academic workers' demand for a Cost of Living Adjustment, and for community safety demands that include the call to defund the university police..."
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3. There are likely hundreds of non-tenure track and adjunctified colleagues on your campus doing twice your workload. Your solidarity is with them, not endowed chairs or deans. Ask them what that solidarity entails, and fight for and with them.
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5. Academics are incredible at taking the most radical positions while doing nothing. Abolition & communism aren't things you say; they are things you do. If we claim any of those mantles we must learn what it means to enact those politics.We can actually win things. Act like it.
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15. An academic culture built around the fetish of celebrity cannot but incentivize narcissism & disincentivize collective action. Many 'radical' academic celebs are entitled and selfish in real life. Unlearn the desire for fame. Learn to be a bad academic. Always organize.
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This is perhaps the funniest "readers added context" sentence I've ever read. Just one way in which it profoundly misunderstands the role that public universities play in real estate accumulation and violent eviction:
When UC Berkeley is the largest landlord in the city, it's no secret which corporate interests this move will be serving. I stand with People's Park!
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Years ago, I rode on an Evergreen container ship going from the Port of LA to KaoHsiung, Taiwan for 48 days. A series of five posts written onboard explores the everyday life of transoceanic shipping and its banal cruelties. (read from the bottom to top)
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What do you recommend as a short primer & intro to Marxist thought that is accessible, introduces core concepts & why one should care, appeals to both big Marx nerds and total newbies, 20pp. chapters, good for a public reading group w/ a wide spread of experience w/ left thought?
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2. Most faculty think of themselves more as artists & philosophers than as workers or political actors. It's our collective job to organize towards understanding ourselves as the latter, and to do the collective political work those class categories demand.
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On the rise of the logistics revolution that shaped the martial politics of global trade from the 1960s to present, read
@debcowen
's seminal The Deadly Life of Logistics
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1. When you start a TT job the self-help academic industry will tell you to protect your time. Fine; yes, write your book. But it's the polycrisis and there's a gen0cide. The only way through is with others. Learn who is organizing & join in. We can't afford to just write.
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UCSB: "We love our undergrads, we love our service workers, we want a world in which both don't go hungry. We will be here serving food and cleaning up after ourselves until 3pm today"
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Davis: "This dining commons belongs to you (it’s right in the name: commons, something held in common by a community). This university belongs to you. For as long as it shall last, it belongs to everyone."
A message from a free Latitude dining commons!
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7. Teaching is a joy. Don't let your most well-published colleagues let you believe it doesn't matter and shouldn't be prioritized. What else are we here for?
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The UC just sent faculty word they are disciplining UAW members. This on top of heavy police repression, threatening faculty w dismissal, jurisdiction-shopping to break a strike. Don't tell me this isn't the Zionist lobby hard at work.Don't tell me Palestine is not a labor issue.
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Honestly, why would you voluntarily embarrass yourselves like this?
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11. Beware of white women faculty who dislike women of color who don't want to be saved. Many senior colleagues who had a hard time want you to suffer like they did, rather than to abolish those conditions. You don't have to submit to abusive workplace relations. Walk away.
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Very excited to share the publication of “Battling the Behemoth: Amazon and the rise of America’s New Working Class” by Spencer Cox & myself in the Socialist Register 2023 - a condensation of years of research & organizing with Amazon workers. 1/
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4. Remember that every demand on your time from the university is an intensification of your workload. Remember that the university is not 'your family'. Remember you have actual and chosen family, and be good to them.
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We shouldn't forget that the only people who are driving across or on a bridge at 1:30am on a Monday night in Baltimore are either trying to get home from a late night shift, or they're on one. The immigrant working class always bears the brunt.
The missing men are from El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras & Mexico, and live in Dundalk & Highlandtown. They are in their 30s and 40s, he said, w spouses & children.
All of them came to the city for a better life.
“They are all hard-working, humble men"
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Something is shifting in university movements for Justice in Palestine: first Santa Cruz workers pledge no cooperation with military funded research; now abolitionists and grad workers are breaking the uni to war machine internship pipeline.
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9. Yes, you can sign that letter saying I3rael is a genoc1dal state. Yes, you can cancel classes during a wildcat strike. Yes, you can chant "eat the regents." Yes, there is more to academia outside being a productivist robot. Yes, there is life & joy in cultivating the outsides
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on the menu today: Salads, salami pizza, chicken broccoli bake, veggie medley, and more. Visiting parents seem very confused at what is happening. The mood inside, from reports, is joyful: undergrads are chanting "all smiles, no swipes!"
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The UC has begun to lay off lecturers to shoulder the "costs" of wage raises won by the UC-UAW strike. Some colleagues rationalized their lack of support for the strike by claiming its demands would strain the UC budget. And now that the anticipated austerity is here? Crickets.
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10. Courage is a discipline. Go to the rally. Face down the cops. Disagree with counterinsurgent senior colleagues. Shut bullies down. There are many and they will keep coming for you, grad workers, & undergrads. You learn to overcome fears of repression through experience.
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6. Faced with what is to be done, many faculty will invoke "political education" as a substitute for actual organizing. Pol ed is most meaningful when it plugs into an actually existing political project, builds a base, clarifies tactics & strategy, and moves people to get free.
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A very late delivery on the promise to share this graduate syllabus on Theories of Imperialism. I had lots of fun with this & was blown away by the brilliant, committed students who took it. Many thanks to the excellent suggestions in the earlier thread.
Book/article recs please: Teaching a 10-week grad seminar on Marxist Theories of Imperialism in the spring puzzling through what is / what is not imperialism & its relation to hegemony, racism, the state, territorial vs. capitalist logics of power. What readings come to mind?
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12. Graduate workers will teach you everything about meaningfully organizing within & outside the university. Find the serious comrades & learn from them. Then put times towards helping them publish, edit their cover letters, & help them get jobs. We need more faculty like them.
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It's finals week at the UCs, which means the UAW strike is at a moment of peak leverage. Sadly, some faculty are tempering their support on acct of the 'inconvenience' it is causing, forgetting tt disruption is not a mark of the strike's failure to 'convince', but its success.🧵:
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Yes, the losing vote in Bessemer is a sign of a failed campaign. But it's also confirmation that workers are up against one of the most voracious corporate giants in the world & their strategies have to exceed relying on a business union to run elections warehouse-by-warehouse:
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Calling all UC faculty! Tomorrow, Monday 11/21 @ Noon, faculty allies will hold coordinated solidarity rallies on NINE out of 10 UC campuses. Join us faculty, students, staff, workers, community - all out to show the UC that we are united in solidarity with workers on strike!
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If you had told me 5 years ago that I would one day get to teach Marx and do communism in the California woods w some of my intellectual heroes and the most incredible student comrades, I might have cried. Inaugural Marx camp complete - can’t believe we pulled this dream off!
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Sometimes my comrades be like "fuck work" and then they publish 12 articles in 2 weeks run a marathon and give birth to triplets, like wtf calm down
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13. Join an organization outside the university. None are perfect. All build your muscles for practicing accountability to a collective. You can find or build a political life within the local community, wherever it is. Small towns and cities can be strategic hamlets.
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This talk I gave at
@SonicActs
, also the partial subject of of my book manuscript, thinks through the irrational rationalities of obsessions with monstrous ships in the logistics industry, and the corresponding effects on global infrastructure
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Bit nuts that this is happening, but Harney & Moten and… me (!?$&@) will be in conversation about logistics, labor, and more at the RCA in London, May 13. Zoom Live stream available at the link below:
Fred Moten, Stefano Harney and Charmaine Chua in conversation for the first time to discuss logistics, labour, learning and organising under racial capitalism. At an in-person lecture at the Royal College of Art. Also live on zoom.
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At 1:30am last night, 75-90 police from multiple departments swept the last standing UC encampment at UCSB and arrested 5 students. Chancellor Yang seems to have flipped suddenly under UC Regent pressure, siccing cops on students just as negotiations were making headway. Shame.
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@LalehKhalili
's wonderful Sinews of War and Trade is a tour de force history of the making or ports & shipping infrastructure in the Arabian Peninsula and beyond. Ch. 1, "route-making" has an important section on the Suez Canal
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I'm in a Discord chat rn with Amazon workers having a big debate over Capital Vol. 2, the PMC, and whether transportation is productive, and phew, mates, if we ever forget, please never ever under-estimate the brilliance of working class auto-didacticism
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This is FIFTY years in the making. Every single unionization campaign at the U of Minnesota - 5 since 1974 - has lost. The closest we came in 2012 was 46% yes, 54% no. 97%. 97. Wow. Tears, joy & congrats, comrades, from an alum who fought & never thought they’d see this moment.
IT'S THE POST YOU'VE BEEN WAITING FOR: UMN GRADUATE WORKERS HAVE A UNION! We won 2487 yes votes to 70 no- that's 97% in favor of a union! The hard work of countless graduate workers pays off!
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8. Understand what checks & balances for getting tenure look like. How democratic is the committee structure? How many layers of review? Can they actually deny tenure if they hate your political positions? You can push boundaries more than you think. Push them to their limit.
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I am incredibly honored to have been selected as a 2023 Freedom Scholar. I'm very grateful to the Casey Foundation and to my colleagues for choosing me. And I feel emboldened and energized to continue building toward our collective liberation. It means the world. Thank you.
BREAKING: 2023 Marguerite Casey Foundation FREEDOM SCHOLARS are here!
Welcome to the
#FreedomScholar
community Adom Getachew,
@dfgore1
,
@CharmaineSChua
,
@CIToolkit
,
@seaready
, and
@premillanadasen
!
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On Barak's "Powering Empire" is a powerful (literally) account of how the age of empire was driven by coal-powered steamships, leading to the globalization of carbon energy today.
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The UCSB Library has acquired the archives of Cedric and Elizabeth Robinson, a treasure of their life’s work. An inaugural conference commemorating the Robinsons’ work will be held May 31-June 2 — public announcement and registration coming soon.
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14. Use any platform you have to actually move people towards getting free, not just write another statement or make another fiery speech. Sometimes this means a 1-1. You must do the spade work too. We need you in the actual fight. Pull up. Throw down. Ask if you don't know how.
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UC senate faculty please RT and spread word: There is a common misconception that the UAW tentative agreements mean the strike is over. The strike isn’t over until and IF the majority of members vote to ratify - voting closes Dec 23. Please hold the line & don’t submit grades!
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If you're worried about ships hijacked by pirates as they reroute around the Cape of Good Hope, Jatin Dua's "Captured by Sea" is essential reading; an account of the entanglements of insurance regimes and global capital with the history of Somali Piracy:
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Real question: what does organizing a mass demand for the US to waive vaccine patents look like? Where do we show up? Because this too is the ‘state-sanctioned production of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death,’ racism on a world genocidal scale.
Dear comrades in the US left sphere. Please, organise to force your govt to release raw materials for Indian vaccine production, to waive vaccine patents. We face an unprecedented crisis which will snowball into something unsolvable without internationalist solidarity
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@outsidadgitator
's classic and crucial
@Endnotes
essay is a must-read on "counterlogistics" and the possibilities of repurposing global logistical circuits for the communist prospect;
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Book/article recs please: Teaching a 10-week grad seminar on Marxist Theories of Imperialism in the spring puzzling through what is / what is not imperialism & its relation to hegemony, racism, the state, territorial vs. capitalist logics of power. What readings come to mind?
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Wow, this really blew up.😯Hate Amazon? Here are some ways you can take action:
1) If this moved you to unsubscribe from your prime membership, send your monthly or yearly prime membership fee to support Amazon worker organizing:
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The brilliant comrade
@kaibosworth
and I have a new article out in
@antipodeonline
: "The Countersovereignty of Critical Infrastructure Security." In it, we ask why the state is so invested in criminalizing Indigenous blockades. 1/
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You really have to rethink what the “political” in political science means when soccer players have better politics than your entire discipline
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Undergraduate education is harmed when TAs are tired, hungry, rent-burdened, and unable to afford medical care. We can help amplify workers' essential role in the UC by not crossing the picket line. That's how we can lessen harm on our students' ability to learn.
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My co-advisor Joan Tronto sets an example with this incredible letter. It has all the clarity, conviction, and solidarity that APSA has utterly lacked. What a banger. What a mensch.
From a letter sent by Joan Tronto to APSA leadership explaining why she will not be attending APSA in Los Angeles, shared on the University of Minnesota listserv.
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UCSB Global Studies Colloquium is proud to present "Empire and Capital," our winter quarter speaker series with an absolutely 🔥🔥🔥lineup. Opening on Jan 10 is
@stschrader1
w/ "Imperial Entanglements: New Approaches to the Critique of Police Power" Attendance by zoom welcome.
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What
@uaw_4811
workers show with their strike is no less than the future of anti-war labor internationalism in the US. What the UC reveals by judge-shopping in the OC to subvert labor law is they are terrified and flailing. Workers have the power. This is class war. It's go time.
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Teamsters refusing to deliver Amazon packages to the UCs has been essential for worker solidarity; much more can be done to attack and sever these links between the capitalist university and the merchant capitalist corporation.
UPDATE: Nearly all UPS drivers in southern and northern CA have been informed by the Teamsters that they can refuse to deliver packages to the U of California during the strike.
Teamsters confirmed. This will likely to have some impact on the U.C. system
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In a study of the Panama Canal,
@martindanyluk
interrogates the interspatial global competition premised on attracting cargo traffic to ports and canals, representing capital's tendency to produce "fungible space":
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If the UC meets UAW 2865's demand to raise salaries from $24k to $54k that would bring workers out of rent burden, the total cost of doing so would cost less than 2% of the UC's yearly operating budget, which is $46 billion for AY22-23. The university can more than afford it.
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Hey UCSB, given that the streets are rivers, and the UC-created housing crisis means students and employees commute up to 3 hours to work, maybe an email canceling classes on the first day of the quarter might help?
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