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Cake day: June 2nd, 2023

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  • Sure, in some instances that was the case, but it’s wrong to assume that indigenous north Americans didn’t have cities or large scale agriculture.

    Agricultural practices in Cahokia for instance, wasn’t a European style monocrop. Rather, “Farming at Cahokia was biologically diverse and, as such, less prone to risk than was maize-dominated agriculture” ^(see link above)^

    And Cahokia was, for a time, the political and economic center of much of indigenous north American, with the city itself being of comparable size to many European cities in the same period.


  • So, there were indigenous societies that were highly class stratified, or did bad things to the environment. No one is denying that.

    But generally speaking, indigenous peoples in say, the Americas, developed methods of agriculture and other forms of production that were more ecologically sustainable for their respective continent, than the European methods that settlers brought, and then revised to be more extractive.

    The dust bowl, for example, didn’t just happen. It was a product of Colonialism. A region which was relatively recently colonized, had its forests and grasslands ripped up, in favor of shallow rooted monocultures that couldn’t sustain drought conditions.

    There weren’t dustbowls for the millennia prior to colonization, but a sudden shift in the mode of production, to a highly extractive one, artificially produced an ecological disaster


  • There’s another layer of complexity here that you’re glossing over, I think, and that’s class dynamics within the Maori population.

    It could both be true that traditional Maori lifeways were more sustainable, and that modern, Maori owned fishing companies are over fishing. Let’s assume all of that is correct for a minute

    The coming of the white man didn’t ruin the sustainability of fishing, because of something ontologically bad with white people, but because they enforced an extractive, capitalist, economic system onto the region.

    Colonialism pulled the Maori into a broader world system which generated a group of Maori with enough capital to, say, found fishing companies, and a wide swathe of Maori who can’t.

    And paradoxically, that capital generation from unsustainable, capitalist, fishing practices is probably one of the things that allows Maori communities to have a degree of sovereignty, all the while said fishing practices are undermining their ability to continue to sustain themselves.





  • That’s because France has a highly unionized workforce, and a population that will riot in the streets of the president so much as sneezes wrong.

    It’s not about principles or morals, it’s that the material realities for labor in the US are very different. Not to mention, this general strike date was chosen in 2023.

    Plus, it’s not like nothing is happening. The lead up to the 2028 general strike necessarily involves a ton of organizing. I’m in an org that’s currently seeding strategic industries in the area, in preparation for 2028.

    Beyond labor, the No Kings protests were, numerically, some of the largest in US history. They didn’t do much, on their own, but things like that are great for networking and pulling people into more granular organizing.

    Not to mention that, beyond your average suburban liberal mom, peripheral parts of the American population (ie. Black, indigenous, immigrant, and queer communities) are very active, via various mutual aid campaigns, resistance to ICE etc.





  • Oh, we’re declaring random general strikes on social media again, are we?

    This shit takes a very high level of labor organization, class consciousness, and coordination.

    The UAW is already pushing other Unions in the US to align their contract negotiations in 2028, to instigate a kind of general strike. Are you helping organize that? Because you sould be