Riot medicine is the practice of medicine in an adversarial environment. It exists outside of formal and State sanctioned medical services. Practitioners of riot medicine go by many names but at the end of the day, their goals are the same. They take to the streets as part of the diverse system of mutual aid that allows individuals to engage in protest.
The dichotomies between “anarchisms” evolve periodically. During the late 19th century it was between collectivists and communists, organisation and anti-organisation, individualists and syndicalists, pure syndicalists and anarcho-syndicalists, etc. Today this theoretical brawl, which seems to develop cyclically, has been established between insurrectionism and social anarchism.
Capitalism is global. States support one another at the global level. A revolution in one single place isn’t possible, at least not for the long term. An internationalist vision is essential in this time of pandemic, xenophobia, borders, and transnational corporations.
Every year, more than two million people worldwide are killed as the result of work-related accidents or diseases, more than the annual total of every person who is killed in every war across the world. This means that every fifteen seconds, a worker is killed.
The bastards laughed, clapped and cheered as they blocked a pay rise for nurses.
The language of the eco-fascist claims that human beings are the problem, and that with their self-isolation – that is, their removal from the system – has come ecological recovery. Such individualised and atomised analysis prevents the ever-important systematic approach; the real problem is capitalism, and it is with the interruptions and staggerings of capitalism that recovery has come along.
We anarchists are sceptical of authority itself. We do not think those in authority have our best interests at heart. We think they are there only to reproduce and expand their own power. After the crises passes, the state of emergency will be lifted, but the new powers and the new state of surveillance will stay.
The trouble is, I look just like everyone else. I'm in trainers with a bag on my back. I don't let off a visible radioactive glow the way I feel I should. I'm very aware that not only am I going to see patients who have virtually no chance of surviving covid- they won't even meet the new criteria for acute care- but that my patients are already starting to drop like flies.
To help raise funds to support this fantastic work, we are holding a design competition and will subsequently be selling T-shirts on a none profit basis to raise funds and keep these organisations in food, fuel and supplies in general.
There is open revolt in Iran and for some reason and no one seems to be talking about it.
So here is the situation.
I think one of the most important aspects of this book is the explanation that it isn’t just ‘bad’ people who are racist – we have all grew up in a white supremacist society and we are all guilty of being racist, sometimes overtly, but often in more subtle and subconscious ways and without realising, and we prop up and perpetuate the racist structures that are in place.
Make no mistake. In words of Adriana Guzman, leader of Feminists of Abya Yala “The coup d’etat in Bolivia is racist, patriarchal, ecclesiastic and oligarch” A very Latin American coup, then.