Donna St. Hill

Father of African cinema 🇸🇳 Ousmane Sembène on why narrative filmmaking is better than any other media for rapidly raising the critical consciousness of the masses Only Chinese drama rn is consistently demonstrating this transformational power of art and the artist - antithesis

In a socialist state, the security apparatus serves the people. In a capitalist state, it serves capital against the people.

The conditions Nkrumah warned us against, are still with us except that we have entered a new phase of late-stage neocolonialism, as a desperate capitalist imperialism is in its death throes Any leader wanting to pursue sovereign dev’mt today still must be willing to pay a price

@Sagacious_E Na so

@donnasthill They've gone from barbarism to decadence and now they're flirting with socialism and yet, they never once touched civilization.

They went from barbarism to socialism

“Fascism historically has been used to secure the interests of large capitalist interests against the demands of popular democracy. Then and now, fascism has made irrational mass appeals in order to secure the rational ends of class domination” A unity between capital and state

The🇺🇸Dream “is specifically designed to prevent the kind of thinking that would make the people at the bottom organize together rather than compete against each other for the approval of the people at the top the people it works on most effectively are the people it hurts most”

“The American left” and it’s just imperialists who want a bit of healthcare

There is a tendency in left liberal circles to be dismissive of processes of consciousness-formation within mass movements. "The crisis is now so we must act now. We cannot wait on movements to have their meetings and issue their statements." But what sits at the root of the crisis? What is the content of the proposed actions? What are their underlying strategies? And who will carry them out? The failure to contend with these questions historically and dialectically produces practices that are shallow in form and counterproductive in substance. In form, the tactics they deploy are not very different from the politics they criticise. They operate purely on the informational terrain, convening meetings, issuing statements, publishing op-eds that appear to respond to the urgency of the moment. They might have greater sheen than a movement meeting in a village hall, but the fundamental output is the same: information. But when we dig into the substance, we find a fundamentally different political methodology at work — and it is precisely here that the inability of the left liberal movement to respond to the crises it diagnoses as urgent becomes plain. I see that inability as having three principal sources. First, the sense of urgency requires the summoning of political forces perceived as having the capacity for immediate action — that is, individuals or organizations with a high degree of visibility and likely a significant amount of funding. Little thought is given to the political economy of knowledge production that elevates certain individuals over others, generating perceptions of power and influence in the process. This selection mechanism necessarily excludes most revolutionary formations. Second, the exclusion of revolutionary formations precludes the use of methodologies capable of assessing precisely the contradictions at play in any given moment. The failure to think dialectically and historically through politics produces agendas that claw hopelessly at surface-level phenomena — bad actors, acts of violence, democratic backsliding, etc. — without a vision for confronting them in their systemic totality. Third, because they are not rooted in revolutionary formations, the informational interventions produced within left liberal spaces are not metabolised into processes of movement building. No one becomes stronger, or more conscious, or strategically sharper as a result of the interventions produced — and, indeed, the lack of a Marxist analysis produces ideas that carry the grave risk of misdirection. Why build a revolutionary movement, for example, if we can rely on international law? In fact, the development of a correct political orientation in the context of an organized mass movement is the only method proven within history for overcoming the kinds of existential crises we see today. This work is necessarily patient. Those of us who are not on the frontlines of the war against imperialism are operating in the register of the battle of ideas. This battle is not insignificant. Ideas, as Marx taught us, acquire a material force once they are adopted by the masses. Then and only then do they carry the possibility of delivering systemic transformation on the scale required today. The task — the only task — of left forces is to organize the people in ways that create mass revolutionary consciousness and therefore the capacity for strategic, transformative political action. Anything that pulls us back or misdirects us in that struggle simply prolongs the crises that we all seek to overcome. It is not that the present moment is not urgent. But there is a reason why some of our most-repeated aphorisms have us think before we act. "The man who removes a mountain begins by carrying away small stones,” an old Confucian proverb says. Or, perhaps more harshly: "A blind horse always frightens itself."

they want us to believe it’s a national security emergency to fall behind china on Ai but falling behind china on high speed rail, renewable energy and childhood nutrition is a-OK.

So when France says they want to cooperate with Kenya, they necessarily want to continue and benefit from the political economy that is predicated on kenya not having any sovereignty - that is the ability to price labour, price resources at an equal rate.

New paper in Nature. The more a government controls its domestic media, the more it dominates AI training data, the more pro-regime outputs we get from AI. By scraping the open web, LLMs are unwittingly laundering state-coordinated narratives into seemingly objective answers.

Because India is a sovereign country, orr …

Updated: For release at 9:30 AM EAT. VICTORY ON THE RELEASE OF THE KENYAN COMRADES! RELEASE THE 5 PASAI INTERNATIONAL PROTESTERS!

YouTube has taken down our channel! Without prior warning, Google has removed the YouTube channel of Sovereign Media, based in Nairobi. Sovereign Media is part of an independent, anti-imperialist media coalition. It was launched to unite various alternative platforms (such as the Black Agenda Report and Orinoco Tribune) to report on global conflicts, resistance movements, and anti-war protests from an anti-colonial and socialist lens. The takedown of Sovereign Media's YouTube channel occurred on the same day as the first day of the "Forward Africa" French-African summit in Nairobi. Sovereign Media has covered protests and activities related to the Pan-African Summit Against Imperialism, which opposes Macron's visit. YouTube has a documented history of facing heavy criticism from digital rights advocates, journalists, and human rights organisations for systematically suppressing, deleting, and shadow-banning pro-Palestinian content and human rights documentation.

"Many do not think through their struggles historically. Many do not build organizations determined to win, or with the conviction that winning is possible. Many do not ground their theories in the lives of the oppressed. As a result, they succumb to frenetic activity that responds only to the here and now. But there are no shortcuts to building a mass political project. Much of that work is invisible. It will never be featured in the pages of The Guardian or The New York Times except as a target of derision. And yet it is necessary. When imperialism arrives at the doorstep — and it will — the path of building popular power is the only one capable of bending the arc of history from destruction towards progress."

"It is high time to carry out a critical assessment of the effects of the WTO. None of the ‘fine promises’ regarding a so-called ‘development round’ have been kept." Available in EN, ES and FR. buff.ly/16Mvaqt

The following comrades have been arrested for participating in a peaceful protest against French imperialism. Dimitiros Patelis Lee and Danbi Joti Brar Gacheke Gachihi Guy Bremond Sayialel Mankuyio Juliaus kamau John Kamau Brian mwanzi Derivk Opiyo Fredrik yara Colins otieno

ALERT🚨 Kenyan authorities have arrested several local and international delegates of the PASAI conference — including @progintl Council member @gacheke2011 — for opposing French neocolonialism in Africa. We demand their immediate release and an end to political repression.

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