In our final shareout, we dive into the types of politics, the importance of political alliances, and how we can “change everything.”

While thousands of miles apart in geographical distance, the Vietnam War and the ongoing genocide in Palestine share a legacy of Western intervention, colonialism, and imperialism. Student solidarity protests for Palestine demonstrate numerous similarities with the student anti-war movement.

In this piece, we contextualize the history of student activism in the United States during the Vietnam War and make comparisons to the Palestine student encampments to draw out lessons we can learn and apply to our current moment. Because our organization is primarily based in the Seattle area, we include examples of student protests from the University of Washington to situate our local political context.

In our last shareout, we made visible the problems with our capitalist food system, from the metabolic rift to the exploitation of land, the environment, and people. We also countered some popular capitalist arguments. But knowing the talking points and issues with a capitalist food system isn’t enough. We must also understand the system’s core components to grasp how they are fundamentally opposed to the well-being of people and the land.

In our last shareout from the book, A Foodie’s Guide to Capitalism by Eric Holt-Giménez, we learned about the historical emergence of our food system through centuries of land privatization, colonization, and imperialism. In this shareout, we clarify the numerous problems with our capitalist food system and counter some common capitalist talking points.

In the previous shareout, we expressed the importance of understanding our capitalist food system in order to change it. In this shareout, we tackle the question, “How did our capitalist food system come to be?”

Capitalism is the dominant global economic system we live in today. Capitalism affects nearly everything surrounding us, from the food we eat to our health and living conditions. Yet, how capitalism functions eludes most of us, even among activists who are aware of its harmful impacts. 

In 2023, we hosted a community conversation in collaboration with the Puget Sound Tenants Union (PSTU) and screened Push, a documentary on the global commodification of housing and the consequent lack of affordability. In this post, we share what we have learned.

We have come to the conclusion of Elite Capture. Now that radical identity politics has been co-opted, deference politics doesn’t cut it despite our good intentions, and identity-reductionism is deployed to uphold systems of uneven power— what can be done?

Throughout the book, Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò weaves in the history of the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde (PAIGC) and their anti-colonial fight as an example of constructive politics. Let’s see what that means.

Deference politics can be observed at all political orientations and levels today, due to the misuse, neutralization, and co-optation of the original revolutionary identity politics.

First, though, we’ll lay the context with his critique of a popular identity-based practice that is all too familiar to many of us, which he calls deference politics. This deference politics can be observed at all political orientations and levels today, due to the misuse, neutralization, and co-optation of the original revolutionary identity politics.

That original meaning of identity politics as a means of solidarity and to address the demands of Black lesbian feminist socialists has since been neutralized and co-opted—elite captured—for various non-liberatory purposes, even to uphold the very systems of capitalism and imperialism that the Collective was fighting against.

The CRC developed their stance, which they called identity politics, because they were sidelined both in the feminist movement and Black nationalist movement, and because their political priorities were devalued in the political organizations they participated in.

Combahee is the name of a river in South Carolina where Harriet Tubman led a military raid and freed more than 700 enslaved people during the U.S. Civil War in 1863. The CRC did not just want to fight for women’s rights in the U.S., they aspired to the overthrow of capitalism. The term identity politics was first used in their 1977 manifesto, establishing themselves as an organization of queer, Black feminist socialists.

The point of fighting elite capture, is the quest to achieve radical equality in the distribution of resources and power in our world.

For the long run, we need to sharpen our understanding and analysis, because our goodwill, good intention, and desire for change — even our marginalized identities and personal lived experiences and trauma — do not sufficiently give us a critical analysis of the structures and powers we are contending with.

Why did the U.S. Army come to Korea to establish a military government in 1945? Why are there two countries for Koreans, a people who have shared common histories and cultures for thousands of years? Why are they separated by a demilitarized zone considered the most heavily armed place and the most heavily militarized border on Earth?