Vera Ivanovna Zasulich (1851 – 8 May 1919) was a Russian revolutionary. She was friends with the nihilist Sergei Nechaev, tried to kill the governor of St. Petersburg, and co-founded the first Russian Marxist group.
"To vote is to abdicate. To name one or several masters for a short or long period means renouncing one’s own sovereignty. Whether he becomes absolute monarch, constitutional prince or a simple elected representative bearing a small portion of royalty, the candidate you raise to the throne or the chair will be your superior. You name men who are above laws, since they write them and their mission is to make you obey."
"the immiserating orderings of society have never been voted away, but that electoralism—for all the plaintive promises that we can both rabble-rouse and ballot-box—has regularly served as a mechanism of capture for potentially transformative social movements."
Some history on the anarchist tradition of abstention candidates
"As to the anarchist position that universal suffrage did not legitimize authority, it is worth taking seriously. ... Even if we disagree that authority is never legitimate and Dewey’s self-aware public has been achieved, not all uses of authority — especially when it comes to state violence — can be justified by the vote. To do so would be to treat suffrage as a mythical unquestioned good rather than a reasonable choice."
The genesis of the Gadsden flag comes from a May 1751 editorial cartoon from Ben Franklin’s newspaper. It ran alongside a story calling for colonial governments to unify, act as one.
"To Trump, the Bible and the church are not symbols of faith; they are weapons of culture war. And to many of his Christian supporters watching at home, the pandering wasn’t an act of inauthenticity; it was a sign of allegiance—and shared dominance."
Just learned about August Willich who once challenged Marx to a duel (apparently because he thought Marx was too conservative to be a leader of international communism) before traveling to America to fight as a Union general in the civil war.
I started reading about his disagreements with Marx, but got bored.
The only social policy the Russian state pursues consistently is the policy of atomization. The state dehumanizes us in one another’s eyes. In the state’s own eyes, we stopped being human a long time ago.