This is Bunes. She is 4, her birthday is August 1st. She goes by many names, Bunes, Bun Bun, Bun, and Baby Cakes. She was rescued from being a stray at 5 weeks old and now lives her life in luxury. She spends her days snuggling, sleeping, and playing safely inside. She is pampered and spoiled.

guys, my friends beans and bunes are on bluesky now! be nice and say hi! they are good cats and they're human is lovely!

i am sorry you got the wrong pieces and sconces, kt. was guinness able to help at all?

i highly recommend this technique for eating a gaouegueort.

If one person starts yelling, it’s easy from there. Don’t be afraid to be the first person to start yelling at a Nazi

lucky cheddar! it's been raining all the time over here!

i think he's hiding something!

that's all for this week, and i don't know what next week will be about. maybe Kropotkin and mutual aid? maybe Tolstoy and anarcho-christianity? we'll see. until then, comrades, remember you could be doing a dual power right now! and I hope you do!

meow for #anarchy!

the point being, it's becoming ever more obvious the government isn't going to save us. infact it seems determined to hurt vast swathes of us. these organizations of dual power, these communities we form, they are what WILL save us! they are the seeds that will grow out of the ashes of capitalism!

And that's the great thing about building dual power! you can go do it now! if your workplace has a union, join it! If your city has a mutual aid network or Food Not Bombs chapter, go help them feed people! heck, if there's an animal shelter, you can volunteer! Go help put on Pride! or garden!

let's try not to go on too much longer, but i wanted to also say how lynd talks about helping to organize the "Freedom Schools" for black students in 1964 bore fruit down the line for the civil rights movement. building dual power is the lifeblood of social movements.

so yes, there's the whole "no gods, no masters" thing if you want to be a trendy anarchist, but we cannot deny the importance of religious institutions in building dual power, because tonignore it is to hand a tool to our enemies. the modern church obviously is nothing like the church of MLK.

Lynd continues, "In the Southern civil rights movement, Baptist congregations were institutions of dual power in a very real way. That is where protest marches would originate, where discouraged demonstrators would gather to lick their wounds and repair their spirits."

..."so as to take into account the changing size of different family units."

that certainly flies in the face of our western conceptions of ownership! so you see, these people were creating a system of dual power to support their own community in the face of uncaring or hostile rulers.

"I was fascinated in the Golan Heights when the remaining Arab villagers explained that they resisted Israelis' conception of absolute property boundaries. We prefer, they explained, to adjust the boundaries of family farms from generation to generation...

Dual power has been withbus for centuries. Lynd says, "Peasant communities have such an institution (referring to dual power), with it's necessary decisions about plougland and commons, rotation of crops, and the like.

Jonathan, my human has some experience with this, though he won't claim to be any sort of hero. He has however worked with his local mutual aid network to provide help to the unhoused. and that's the beautiful thing about dual power: it doesn't have to be complicated. you can build it!

..., and on the other hand, the new self-acting popular committees-confront one another."

So think of industrial unions organizing workplaces against unfair treatment by the bosses, or mutual aid networks assisting the unhoused and financially desperate. (mutual aid is one we'll have to cover).

... but for now we have to give him his due as a political theorist. Lynd explains Trotsky's term as "to characterize the historical moment when the two powers-on the one hand, the official, traditional state dominated by the possessing classes...

Lynd tells us in this collection of essays that dual power is a term introduced by Trotsky in his "History of the Russian Revolution." Now we are not fans of Trotsky around here, and maybe someday we'll dig into the drama of everything to do with the suppression of Kronstadt and the Black Army...

Staughton Lynd is, among other things, a movement lawyer and radical writer.

Andrej Grubacic is a dissident from the Balkans and radical sociologist.

Ok, with that out of the way, let's dig into the concept of "dual power" a very important thing for anarchists!

the Zapatistas are the peoples, largely indigenous, of Chiapas Mexico who turned their region into an autonomous area absent of direct rule of thr Mexican government.

for this one we're going to be using "Wobblies and Zapatistas" by Staughton Lynd and Andrej Grubacic. for those not in the know wobbly is a nickname for the industrial unionists of the Industrial Workers of the World.

hello everyone! it was a busy day for the human, and he took a big nap when he should have been using his thumbs to help me write #theorythursday. that's no excuse though! so he's helping me now to put out a delayed theory thursday for friday morning.