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The Poor People's Campaign was a march on Washington D.C. to gain economic justice for poor people in the United States that began on this day in 1968, just one month after the assassination of one of its key organizers, MLK Jr.

The protest was also organized by Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and carried out under the leadership of Ralph Abernathy in the wake of King's assassination.

After presenting an organized set of demands to Congress and executive agencies, participants set up a 3,000-person protest camp on the Washington Mall, where they stayed for six weeks in the spring of 1968.

Among those demands was a proposal for an "economic bill of rights" that included a commitment to full employment, a guaranteed annual income measure, and more low-income housing for poor Americans of all races.

"I think it is necessary for us to realize that we have moved from the era of civil rights to the era of human rights…

When we see that there must be a radical redistribution of economic and political power, then we see that for the last twelve years we have been in a reform movement…

That after Selma and the Voting Rights Bill, we moved into a new era, which must be an era of revolution…"

-MLK Jr., in a 1967 planning meeting

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604 comments

  • Media: The last Israeli-American hostage was released.

    Me: Hmm, wonder what they were doing in Israel at the time.

    Media: He was serving in the IDF at the time.

    Me: That's not a hostage, that's a prisoner of war

  • I finished blackshirts and reds in full!

    US car culture is an ideology manufactured by the capitalist class who are shielded from its negative externalities.

    The former USSR had a lot of brainworms about what capitalism was like.

    ABC (anything but class) performative progressivism that gets outflanked by neo-cons and Donald Trump who use class rhetoric to their own ends.

    The illegal dissolution of the USSR was one of the worst disasters in human history. Millions perished as the social safety net provided by socialism was carved up while communists of all stripes were persecuted.

    This is part of my new summer goal to read theory by touching grass (audio books). I hope to be down Cowbee's list by the end of summer and some more as well as produce writings of my own from it on how class and capital relations intersect with the field of computer science and engineering.

    Next up: Georges Politzer’s Elementary Principles of Philosophy.

  • Inside me there are two wolves

    "Don't be nice, be predictable" pedestrian

    vs.

    "I am God's chosen, give me every right of way imaginable you metal demons" pedestrian

  • Everything about academia is fucked up. wdym you need to be currently attending a university to access JSTOR. Why can't people be trusted with the largest resource for all of human knowledge without currently going to school. I think all workers regardless of education should be able to go on JSTOR. Also I should be able to go on JSTOR after I leave this fucking place. Yeah I know this is all pirateable but it's less convenient. Also I should be able to get a print subscription to The American Historical Review just because I think it would be cool without it costing 600 fucking dollars a year

  • my friend texted me "i have forgotten to tell you something important" at 6:30 am today and she has not followed up. zero idea what that means. not fun for anxiety

  • cool botanist pulls up a chair and sits on it backwards

    Hey kids you know what's cooler than watching dbz epic fight compilations on the YouTube?

    Checking out these epi phytes in the canopy above us

  • Hot take: If their take isn't explicitly leftist, people should stop talking about fascists (Republicans) "outflanking" other fascists (Democrats) to the "left"

    Saw a social media post saying that Marjorie Taylor Green "outflanked" Bernie to the left because she said that the US shouldn't fight wars for Israel. There's nothing leftist about that take especially coming from someone who has a history of being antisemitic. And she's obviously not saying that because she believes in Palestinian liberation.

  • There's a big chinese wisteria hanging over a fence nearby, and it's about to be peak cloning season. I'm gonna take some cuttings and share them.with everyone i can

    It's so pretty, it's one invasive species I wish would do more invading. Interestingly, the big native carpenter bees go crazy for them

    Apparently cutting is the better method for reproducing them, and they're voracious growers once established. I shouldn't have to wait too long.

  • "Lol, we don't really read resumes. Never your's especially! It's just toooo hard!"

    Oh my God, can corpos stop pretending their gross and utter incompetence is cute and quirky? Gen Z can't start their lives because we're all forced to wait in line for porky to eventually decide to get off his lazy butt and maybe consider hiring.

  • Had a comment removed on a federated comm (for "fascist Russian propaganda") because I said that Ukrainians want peace and should have their voices heard by holding elections once again.

  • Want to hear something cursed? In my new job I’m working with this older hippie lady who likes to work to keep her mind sharp, and the job is a non-profit so she also feels like she’s lining up with her conscience.

    We were talking and she flat out told me that the 70s environmentalist movement was one of the best things to ever happen to the country because it normalized the idea of eating fruits and vegetables. People unironically looked at carrots weird because “ugh, it comes from the ground”.

    Nowadays, life like that is being quickly walled off for only the rich to enjoy and us poors are told to eat the McProleslop and we have to like it.

    Sure, confirmation bias and all, but progressivism has never been bolstered and I will gladly drag anglos kicking and screaming to living decently.

  • Oh noes, someone dropped Western chauvinism in my local activist movement. I don’t get how supposed anticapitalists still believe in so called ‘Western values’.

    They must not have a space like hexbear to deprogram them. Joining hexbear was great for my political development. Before I only read the news from Western mainstream media and hexbear basically showed me a lot of things that were omitted in the stories from these media.

  • Been learning Japanese, and I have reached the early point where I can read all characters of Hiragana and Katakana. So, I'm gonna do what I did when I was solidifying my reading skills in English as a kid - play Pokemon Red, but in Japanese! The intent is that it will get me a little further than just slowly reading out loud each individual character, towards recognizing many words immediately.

  • Goddamn I got a colleague to watch the Louis Theoreux film and he said, effectively "wow, I had no idea it was so bad, 50,000 dead. I feel like I'm changing my opnion. It just reminds me of what Russians are doing to Crimeans and what Chinese are doing to Tibet" and that pissed me off so goddamn much. It fucking hurts to hear that someone can be so goddamn racist, ignorant, empire-loving. I fucking hate him right now. I went off about how he knows absolutely nothing about any of this and should be ashamed, about how 50,000 is such an underestimate and comparisons to anything except the holocaust, genocide of indigenous people in the America's, or any other colonialist genocide are offensively demeaning. I have no idea where to begin and can't stand living with people like this. He said "isn't learning good?" and I can't imagine any way he could learn except being shamed and ashamed. Jesus christ I'm fuming. Liberals deserve the boomerang that will inevitably return, however long that takes.

  • I hear Sting got his name as a teenager because he wore a sweater with black and yellow stripes. But that's absolute bullshit. Nobody in Newcastle would have given him a cool nickname. They probably called him "The Twat in the Bumblebee Jumper" or some shit.

  • serious question, we always say 'x elected official' ought to purge and appoint loyalists, and yeah as general advice its cogent but irl?

    who are you putting in charge of militaries and police that can be relied on and can command their subordinates' loyalty? unless there's a military-led coup ot seems difficult to find personnel that could actually do this.

    tldr i don't think Allende and other electorally empoweref leftists have a very good opportunity to protect against reaction.

    the only counterexample i know about was the Spanish Republic and the socialists infiltrated the police forces for years prior to the civil war. and they lost anyway.

604 comments