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Category: Long Read

The revolution will not be televised

Sudan’s long road to freedom


19/11/2025

A photograph of a street mural depicting Alaa Salah, whose image became a widespread symbol of the Sudanese revolution.

I would like to start this article by honouring the Sudanese revolutionaries, the unsung heroes of Sudan’s long road to freedom and democracy; the victims of the El Fasher massacre, the disappeared, the indigenous, the women, the children, the Kandakas, the Neighbourhood Resistance Committees (NRCs), the Sudanese Professionals Association (SPA), the Forces for Freedom and Change, the journalists, the doctors, the human rights defenders, the displaced, the boys in Greece and the Sudanese diaspora.

Just days after images captured in space recorded the blood spilled during the El Fasher massacre appeared on smartphones across the world, the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), responsible for the atrocities, called for a three-month ceasefire while the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) refuse to accept any deal recognising the RSF as an equal political actor.

The news from the RSF, that many see as tactical deception, will provide little respite for the Sudanese population who have fallen victim to a vicious landgrab of their resource-rich country once again.

‘For any kind of peaceful solution, the RSF has to disarm themselves. What we have seen is that you cannot trust the RSF with weapons. They kill civilians, they rape women. They loot and destroy food and crops,’ says Sudanese analyst Yasir Zaidan.

The war that has been widely and deliberately ignored for over two and a half years—while other more Eurocentric wars have taken centre stage—is the biggest humanitarian crisis of our age.

It has cost an estimated 150,000 people their lives, with some figures suggesting the death toll may be much higher. It has forced 14 million people to leave their homes, has pushed 24 million people into food insecurity and famine, and has left 30 million in urgent need of humanitarian assistance.

The paucity of coverage of the war, global aid cuts, political and ethnic elitism, racism and international interest in the country’s resources have forsaken the Sudanese population and have contributed to global inaction to prevent the escalation that has at long last put Sudan on the agenda.

Despite warnings of possible genocide, the UK opted for the ‘least ambitious’ plan to protect civilians and prevent atrocities due to aid cuts over a year ago. USAID cuts left 80% of emergency kitchens unfunded, forcing 1100 kitchens to close. Although the UK has recently pledged to allocate £120 million in aid, the Independent Commission for Aid Impact reports that aid budget reductions in previous years have damaged relationships with partners and ‘calls for the UK to increase direct funding to local organisations and simplify its complicated compliance procedures to better support Sudanese-led responses’.

To put the urgency of the situation into context, the country blighted by the 30-year dictatorship under Omar Al-Bashir until 2019 already had some 1.1 million refugees and 3 million internally displaced people in September 2021, prior to the start of the war in April 2023. The day the war broke out, telecommunication systems were damaged and still remain unusable for the vast majority of the population. This has contributed to the difficulty of getting information out, exacerbated the logistical challenges of getting aid in and compounded the vulnerability of the civilian population, many of whom feel attacked by both sides—the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) and the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF).

A great number of our Sudanese comrades here in Berlin fled Sudan between 2003-2008 when the Arab nomad militia group, the Janjaweed, committed genocide in Darfur. To quell an insurgency by the Sudan Liberation Movement/Army and the Justice and Equality Movement (led by indigenous ethnic groups in Darfur fighting structural inequality and economic marginalisation), the Janjaweed, under the al-Bashir government, killed 200,000–400,000 non-Arab Darfuri people.

As news of the thousands killed by the RSF in El-Fasher in recent weeks reach our shores, reports on social media frequently call for a boycott of the UAE over its support for the RSF militia group through the supply of weapons and mercenaries in exchange for gold.

Meanwhile, other reports accuse the national army—the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF)—of being the other side of the same coin, a claim that has been fiercely refuted by some Sudanese commentators on social media platforms.

So, what happened to the 2019 Sudanese Revolution, who are the RSF and the SAF and how did Sudanese civilians get trapped between them?

After years of economic discontent, ethnic and gender inequality, and decades of conservative Muslim Sharia law, when Omar Al-Bashir announced he was running for an unconstitutional third term, the protest movement organised by the Sudanese Professionals Association (SPA), an umbrella organization of doctors, lawyers and journalists, started to gather momentum.

A revolution led by women

Following popular protests demanding an end to the 30-year long dictatorship and its sexist and oppressive laws, in which an estimated 70% of protesters were women, the SAF toppled Omar Al-Bashir in a coup d’etat in April 2019.

Sudanese women’s rights activist Asha al-Karib remarked:

‘The world-admired Sudanese revolution is marked by unprecedented contribution and participation of women throughout the country, including women from all walks of life. The participation of women is not a by chance event, as Sudanese women own a strong history of resistance in the face of dictatorships and patriarchy.’

The old guard

The subsequent self-appointed head of state Lieutenant General Ahmed Awad Ibn Auf, having previously served as the Defense Minister and Vice President in the toppled Al-Bashir government, refused to extradite Al-Bashir to the ICC for crimes against humanity and war crimes, leading to continued widespread protests.

The Transitional Military Council (TMC), the military junta that was established on the same day to govern Sudan, was equally denounced by activists. Leading anti-government protesters, the SPA, stated ‘the regime has conducted a military coup to reproduce the same faces and entities that our great people have revolted against,’ continuing ‘those who destroyed the country and killed its people want to appropriate every drop of blood shed by the great people of Sudan during their revolution’.

Auf resigned the following day and on 12 April 2019 Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, the former Inspector General for the Al-Bashir army, was announced as head of state.

Al-Burhan formally headed the TMC following the resignation of Auf and Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, also known as Hemedti, was appointed the deputy head, promoting the commander of the RSF to a key position in Sudan’s political sphere.

The aforementioned Janjaweed, responsible for up to 400,000 deaths in the Darfur genocide of 2003–2008, is a direct predecessor of the RSF—the new name being a simple rebrand.

The SPA and other democratic opposition groups called for the TMC to step aside in favour of a civilian-led transitional government, resulting in many attempts to disperse sit-in protesters outside the military headquarters in Khartoum. The TMC worked to end the peaceful sit-in with excessive force and violence and several people, including a pregnant woman, were killed.

What followed was a pivotal moment in the fight for democracy and a sign of things to come. In what became known as the Khartoum Massacre, on 3 June 2019, 120 protesters outside the military headquarters in Khartoum were killed and hundreds more went missing, with actual figures concealed with the help of internet blockages and the deployment of brutal military forces across the capital.

Unrelenting protesters took to the streets again on 30 June, finally prompting the international community to pressure the military into sharing power with civilian politicians in August.

Hope on the horizon

The Forces of Freedom and Change, a committee that coordinated the nonviolent resistance movement, and the TMC agreed to a 39-month transition period in July. On 20 August 2019 the FFC-nominated Abdalla Hamdok, who was appointed Prime Minister of Sudan.

The high aspirations for Abdalla Hamdok to bring about democracy in Sudan, however, weren’t to last. Though described as a ‘diplomat, a humble man and a brilliant and disciplined mind’ by the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa who agreed to implement a peace deal hailed as an ‘historic achievement’ by the UN Secretary-General António Guterres, the senior Sudan analyst at the International Crisis Group think-tank, Jonas Horner warned, the ‘devil will be in the implementation’.

Horner noted that ‘Sudan’s economy is in freefall and there has been limited international assistance, and none pledged specifically to support the implementation of the [peace] agreement’.

Moreover, researcher Ahmed Soliman stated that offering government jobs to rebel chiefs could ‘lay the foundations for democratic transition and economic reform’. Soliman said: ‘This requires the forces of change to share responsibility for implementing peace above their own interests and will also necessitate a commitment to devolve genuine authority to communities and people at the local level.’

Apparently unable to do so, the RSF committed atrocities across Darfur as a reprisal for the 2019 uprisings and the TMC’s military chiefs ‘undermined and side-stepped’ Hamdok’s leadership.

‘The armed Arab groups—the RSF as well as many less organised militias—have seized lands, livestock, and goods and see these as payment for their military undertakings to the Khartoum regime,’ Eric Reeves, a professor at Smith College and a fellow of the Rift Valley Institute research group told Al Jazeera.

Another coup dashes hope for democracy

And so, it wasn’t long before the Sudanese military under General Abdel Fattah Al-Burhan led another coup and took over the government in October 2021.

The majority of the Hamdok cabinet as well as pro-government protesters were detained and the prime minister, who called for the Sudanese to ‘defend their revolution’ was besieged in his home and pressured to support the coup.

The Prime Minister’s Office, along with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Information, refused to recognise a transfer of power to the military. The African Union suspended Sudan’s membership, pending the reinstatement of Hamdok, while Western powers stated they continued to recognise the Hamdok cabinet as the constitutional leader of the transitional government.

The SPA, the FFC and the Sudanese resistance committees refused to cooperate with the military coup organisers, leading further protests and strikes which spanned the country. Security forces retaliated by killing 15 members of the Sudanese resistance committee on 17 November 2021.

On 21 November, Al-Burhan signed an agreement reinstating Hamdok to restore the transition to a civilian government. This was met by fierce opposition from pro-democracy protestors who now refused any deal involving the military.

After two more were killed in pro-democracy protests and the already weak Sudanese economy steeply declined, Hamdok resigned as prime minister in January 2022, dashing hopes for democracy in Sudan.

Two war criminals fighting for supremacy

Oscar Rickett explains both Al-Burhan and Hemedti were fierce, reliable lieutenants of the Al-Bashir regime that had ‘plundered the resources of Sudan for decades’. Fearing a shift of power from the military elite to a civilian-led government, both ‘had to’ carry out the coup in order to cling to power and prevent being investigated and charged with war crimes.

With the prospects of a civilian-led transition to democracy eliminated, Siddig Tower Kafi, a civilian member of the Sovereign Council, commented that ‘it was becoming clear that the plan of Al-Burhan was to restore the old regime of Omar al-Bashir to power.’

And while Al-Burhan sought to centre power back to the elite ethnic groups around Khartoum, Hemedti, a Darfuri Arab, had become the leader of a powerful and brutal paramilitary force and had built a vast business empire. He had taken control of Darfur’s biggest artisanal gold mine in Jebel Amir, and his family company, Al-Gunaid, became Sudan’s largest gold exporter.

Writing for Al Jazeera, Jérôme Tubiana explains:

‘This is not just a war for power between two generals, but rather one between the two heirs of the not-yet-defunct regime: the legitimate and illegitimate sons of one father, at the head of two fundamentally different forces. On one side, an army long headed by officers hailing from Sudan’s ethnic and political centre (the northern Nile Valley); on the other a paramilitary corps that is the latest avatar of Darfur’s Arab militias.’

Arabs and non-Arabs caught in the crossfire of supremacy

Omar, from the capital of Hemedti’s Mahariya tribe, Ghreir, an ‘old Arab settlement and stage post for nomadic camel herders’ where Arabs and non-Arabs long lived side-by-side, explains that the region became the heartland for Janjaweed recruitment in 2003.

Omar and some other members of the Arab tribes rejected joining the Janjaweed and joined the rebels instead. Feeling manipulated by the government and not wanting to be associated with the Janjaweed, he explains how students understood that ‘the government was instrumentalising their communities to kill their non-Arab neighbours.’

When Hemedti, who attended school in Ghreir but dropped out of primary school to become a trader around the age of 8 or 9, rose to the ranks of leader of the RSF in 2013, he continued aggressively recruiting from his own tribe and taking rebel territory.

International vultures and hypocrisy

Foreign interests, extraction and colonialism—spanning over a hundred years, with Anglo-Egyptian control over Sudan spanning from 1899 to 1956—continue to this day.

The complex web of support for the two warring parties, as explained in this article include Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Qatar, Algeria, Libya, the UAE, Turkey, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Russia, China, Chad, and South Sudan, have further complicated peace talks and neglect the interests of Sudanese civilians.

Recent evidence showing UK manufactured weapons have surfaced in Sudan proves the UK’s complicity in the atrocities. In breach of its own arms trade rules the UK continued to sell weapons to the UAE, known for being a diversion hub for weapons to conflict zones.

The UK’s failure to invite any of the principal Sudanese actors or members of civilian society, while inviting the UAE to the ceasefire conference in April, is symptomatic of the wider neocolonial narrative. Such actions make the call for peace by UK Foreign Secretary David Lammy ring hollow:

‘The biggest obstacle is not a lack of funding or texts at the United Nations; it’s lack of political will. Very simply, we have got to persuade the warring parties to protect civilians, to let aid in and across the country, and to put peace first.’

While we all seek to differentiate between the ‘bad guys’ and the ‘good guys’, ultimately the horrors that are unfolding in Darfur reflect the story of centuries of colonialism, supremacy, capitalism and land appropriation.

Silencing the voices of the indigenous, peaceful resistance and of the ancestral owners of the land perpetuates the supremacist violence that has cost so many Sudanese people their lives and loved ones.

Their resilience untold.

We don’t need feminism because we have #girlbosses

On the neoliberal roots of girlboss feminism


05/11/2025

To all my male friends 

who try to convince me that we “achieved gender equality”

because women can work as CEOs.

To all women

who are a #girlboss and try to convince us 

that we are responsible for our own success.

To all those people

who are complicit in the perpetuation of 

the patriarchal, neoliberal, and racist capitalist agenda.

What does it mean to live a feminist life? If feminist ethics refer to the opposition of oppressive societal structures that privilege men over women, what does a daily embodiment of this opposition look like? Throughout conversations with my male friends and family members, I have often encountered the argument that there is no need for feminism in daily life anymore. We do not need to oppose structural oppression of women, because there is none. Women can work and they have the opportunity to become CEOs. And if women are not financially independent, it is not the patriarchy’s fault but instead, their own decision to stay at home. At least, that’s what they argue. If you agree, I have to tell you that you are living under a false illusion. This illusion is called neoliberal capitalism and is based on gendered and racist structural exclusion. However, I can see why you might believe this deceptive vision of reality. If I search for “female empowerment” on the internet, I am bombarded with the so-called #girlboss attitude. This ideological movement is promoted by financially successful women, portraying the narrative that any woman can live their dream of becoming a successful entrepreneur. She just needs to work hard enough, or to use the words of Kim Kardashian, she just needs to “get her fucking ass up and work”. This essay aims to deconstruct the illusion that the girlboss movement indicates gender equality. In the following, I will reveal to you why this logic operates within a patriarchal framework and further perpetuates interconnected systems of racist and classist oppression. Aiming to present you with an alternative conceptualization of how to approach collective women’s liberation, I will first explain the concepts of the girlboss ideology. Then, I will draw a connection between the girlboss narrative and the neoliberal agenda, highlighting that it operates within a patriarchal framework. Further, the racist and classist dimension of the narrative will be examined, arguing why privileged successful women continue to comply with systems of oppression. Throughout my analysis, I will draw upon different feminist scholars and elaborate on how their ideas play into the debate on girlboss feminism. 

To begin with, let us re-examine what the girlboss movement stands for. Sophia Amoruso described the movement for the first time in her 2014 book #Girlboss, where the word represents the idea that every woman can become financially successful if she works hard and takes responsibility for her life. The focus on individual “agency”, “self-responsibility” and “hard work” resembles the neoliberal ideology and creates a feminist subject who is occupied with her individual economic success, accepting full self-responsibility for her goals, as Catherine Rottenberg describes in her 2013 paper on neoliberal feminism.

If women’s empowerment is equated with female entrepreneurship or leadership, it seems that the proponents of that logic are influenced by Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963). Friedan critiques the cultural norms that push women into the domestic sphere (p.32). She argues that women are deeply dissatisfied with their condition and can only find true fulfillment when pursuing a professional career (p.32). Whilst Friedan criticized cultural and gendered norms for bringing women into this condition of dissatisfaction, girlboss entrepreneurs refrain from blaming patriarchal structures. Instead, they emphasize the individual responsibility of women to climb up the professional ladder and become satisfied with their lives. Either way, achieving financial or entrepreneurial success is posited as a realization of female liberation and gender equality. Consequently, the idea is that successful female entrepreneurs escape patriarchy by challenging gendered labor division.

Following this argumentation, there are feminist voices who would probably applaud the #girlboss we find online. One of which is Simone de Beauvoir. In The Second Sex (2009), de Beauvoir highlights that social and existential conditions constructed women as the “the other sex”, meaning that they have been socially placed in an inferior position to men (p.32). De Beauvoir argues that women submit to their constructed condition of inferiority and thus, emphasizes upon women’s responsibility to stop complying with that role (p.28). The girlboss mentality is focused on hard work and taking risks. This corresponds to the existentialist standpoint of de Beauvoir, who calls on women to transcend their socially ascribed inferiority. While one might think that female entrepreneurs transcend gendered labor division, they do not truly challenge patriarchy. Have you not wondered why there even is the need to call a successful woman a girlboss? Can she not just be a successful woman? Or even more simply, a successful entrepreneur? Certainly, this semantic superficiality already highlights the patriarchal and patronizing undertone of how women are perceived in the professional world. But if now you think that merely abolishing the word is enough to truly challenge the roots of patriarchal logic, you are mistaken. Girlboss women do not escape their role of the “other” (p.32). Instead, they strive towards resembling the “default norm”, and this norm continues to be the male entrepreneur, as Susan Marlow and Janine Swail examine in their 2014 paper, where they critique the manner in which gender influences are being studied in entrepreneurship research. De Beauvoir unfortunately falls into the same trap when thinking about female liberation. Hooks examines that de Beauvoir positioned herself as an exceptional woman who had the “mind of a man”. Thereby, de Beauvoir continues to operate within patriarchal paradigms, because she considers women to be capable of reaching the gendered, male ideal. Consequently, neither de Beauvoir, nor the girlboss challenge the patriarchal roots of gender inequality. 

Continuing to operate within patriarchal paradigms, the girlboss narrative devalues any work done outside the entrepreneurial or professional world. A 2022 policy brief by the Forum for Research on Gender Economics (FROGEE) outlined that all domestic and unpaid care work is predominantly done by women. Keeping this in mind, the girlboss narrative perpetuates and reinforces the patriarchal devaluation of housework. It is when financial and entrepreneurial achievements are equated with success and liberation that we must remember Silvia Federici’s call for Wages for Housework (1975). Federici emphasized that gendered labor division is part of the capitalist logic that devalues women’s labor in the domestic sphere and keeps capitalist exploitation running (p.78). One can draw a link to contemporary neoliberalism, which “has no lexicon that can recognize let alone value reproduction and care work”, as Caroline Rottenburg argues in her 2018 article, Women who work (p.8). 

While the girlboss movement partly transcends gendered work division, it overlooks that domestic work remains devalued and unpaid. Thereby, it continues to operate in capitalist patriarchal frameworks and fails to challenge systemic inequalities at its root. So, what if we wage housework and stop complying with the neoliberal logic that entrepreneurship equals success? What if we call mothers, cleaners, and all other women who are deemed to be “non-aspirational” girlbosses as well (p.1079)? Wouldn’t this perspective deconstruct the idea that only entrepreneurial success, a domain that is still predominantly occupied by men, is true success?

Having revealed why girlbosses operate within and thereby perpetuate patriarchy, let us unravel the mechanisms of how their success creates new and intensified forms of racialized and class-stratified exploitation. Or did you really think becoming a girlboss is attainable for all women? In reality, only a few privileged women can emerge as girlbosses because their success relies on the racist and classist domination of other female comrades (Rottenberg, 2013, p.434). When aiming to transgress gendered work divisions, girlboss feminists focus on sex as the only marker for female identity. In her 2013 essay, True Philosophers, Hooks emphasizes the need for a more nuanced understanding, highlighting that female identity and experience are “shaped by gender, race, and class, and never solely by sex”. She poses a question that entrepreneurial power women tend to ignore: Who will be called in to take care of the domestic sphere and housework if more women enter the domain of entrepreneurship, which is considered to be the male sphere, asks bell hooks, in her 1984 book, Feminist Theory – From Margin to Center. The reality is that, most often, women of color, poor, and immigrant women serve as unacknowledged care workers who enable professional women to strive towards „balance“ in their lives. Hence, when examining the success of girlboss women, we must not forget the racist exploitation that sustains it. 

What about women who can not afford to pay for a care worker while pursuing their professional career? What about single mothers who need to earn money and simultaneously raise a child and do the housework? When women are expected to continue their traditional role as mothers whilst becoming successful businesswomen, we must become suspicious. The idea that any woman has the opportunity to become a successful entrepreneur is an illusion and we must not forget that this opportunity is largely based on class privilege.

One might wonder why girlboss women comply with systemic classist and racist oppression of other women and thereby, obstruct collective women’s liberation. The paradox that individuals continue to be complicit with oppressive structures that they individually manage to “escape” from is not uncommon. Barbara Applebaum examined in her 2008 essay White privilege/white complicity: Connecting “benefitting from” to “contributing to”, how benefiting from a system of exclusion leads to one´s participation within it. Similarly, Audre Lorde emphasizes that white women are complicit with several mechanisms of systemic oppression, as they focus on their “oppression as women and ignore differences of race, sexual preference, class, and age”, in her 1984 essay, Age, Race, Class and Sex: Women Redefining Difference. Girlboss women focus on sex as the marker for exclusion from the male professional sphere and are heavily influenced by the neoliberal agenda of individualized success. Therefore, I argue that successful female entrepreneurs are being tokenized by the neoliberal agenda. I base my claim on Wendy Brown’s conceptualization of neoliberalism being not merely an economic system, but a certain mode of thinking that becomes deeply internalized in the “inner workings of the subject“. Thereby, neoliberal values of self-responsibility and individualization infiltrate the minds of those girlbosses, making them believe that they transgress patriarchy when in reality, they are deeply stuck within it. They are a token for the broader neoliberal agenda, as they perpetuate the illusion of female empowerment.   

When focusing on white, privileged middle-class women as the archetype for female lived experiences, successful girlbosses leave no space to address differences among women. Kimberle Crenshaw critiques this ignorance rampant in contemporary feminism, in her 1991 journal article Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color. According to her, those movements often fail to center intersectional identities which consequently leads to separation and tension amongst women. Rottenberg (2013) similarly concludes that women become increasingly separated rather than united in their actions. She draws the connection to the neoliberal agenda which frames the feminist social question in highly individualistic terms and consequently, erases the opportunity for genuine collective liberation (p. 419). I assume you agree that focusing on your individual success creates disregard for the interconnected struggles of other individuals. And this condition is highly problematic.

The ignorance of those “interlocking systems of domination”, to speak in hooksian terms, makes white, privileged, and successful women complicit in the domination of others (hooks, 2012, p.235). Thereby, girlbosses continue to coexist in patriarchal oppressive power structures, as they benefit from them. They seemingly made it out of gender-based oppression and universalize their individual experience to be achievable for all women. Girlboss culture operates within and thereby, reinforces the capitalist depiction of success in terms of finances and profession. Not only does it fail in challenging the neoliberal conceptualization of success, it also disregards differences within women and thereby, eliminates the opportunity for united female solidarity and liberation. Promoting girlboss feminism feeds into into patriarchal, racist, and capitalist systems of oppression. Therefore, I want to provide you with an alternative approach towards collective women’s liberation.

Drawing upon Lorde and Crenshaw, the denial of differences within groups leads to tension and separation among them (Lorde, 1984, p.115; Crenshaw, 2013, p.1242). Hence, we must acknowledge different female experiences and identities, and think about patriarchy as being interlocked with racist and capitalist modes of exploitation. This requires us to bring to attention other feminist movements that challenge neoliberal values and demand economic, cultural, and social change. The girlboss promotes the idea of women achieving success, within a patriarchal, classist, and racist logic. She prioritizes individual success within the system rather than changing the system itself. She ignores that this path is predominantly accessible to white, privileged, middle-class women and fails to address different lived experiences of less privileged and marginalized communities. But “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house”, as Lorde famously noted. In that sense “the master’s tools” are the patriarchal, neoliberal agendas of individualized success. And while I do not intend to blame girlbosses for wanting to achieve entrepreneurial success, I certainly intend to blame them for creating the illusion that this is the ultimate path to gender equality. I blame them for promoting a one-size-fits-all approach to female empowerment while ignoring that this approach is deeply hostile and exclusionary for women who do not fit this one-sized, privileged archetype. 

We need to find tools that are not the “master´s”. Hence, we need to find tools that do not repeat the patriarchal, neoliberal and racist agenda. This might include re-conceptualizing our societal views on what it means to be successful. It might include waging housework and refusing the narrative that female entrepreneurs are the ideal successful women. It might include creating a world in which all women, no matter whether they are mothers, housewives, care workers, or entrepreneurs, are being recognized and cherished for the work they do. In doing so, we must always work towards abolishing neoliberal blaming of individuals and publicly reveal the structural inequalities that allow for the success of the privileged few. Whilst this approach will certainly be uncomfortable for those of us who have the privilege to become a girlboss, we must dismantle the systemic oppression upon which this privilege builds. And most importantly, we must face our own complicity within those dynamics.  

Lee-Ann finished her Bachelor of Liberal Arts and Science, majoring in Politics, and is a certified teacher and student of holistic health. In her work, she aims to combine arts, culture, and politics to raise political awareness on a community level.

Yes, the German Democratic Republic was socialist—and we have much to learn from it

Response to ‘Red Flag: No, East Germany wasn’t socialist—and neither is “democratic socialism”’


27/09/2025

DDR stamp featuring the bust of Karl Marx with a colorful cityscape in the background.

In early September, Die Linke leader Heidi Reichinnek made headlines after claiming her party’s vision of “democratic socialism” had nothing to do with the German Democratic Republic (GDR): “What we had in the GDR wasn’t socialism. At least not the kind my party envisions.” Germany’s conservatives soon jumped in to disagree: “The GDR was pure socialism. It was an unjust state.” Rather than counter this narrative, Nathaniel Flakin recently wrote an article which—though critical of her party’s programme of “democratic socialism”—agrees with Reichinnek’s assessment of the GDR. According to Flakin, “a society can only be described as socialist if it meets Marx’s criteria of evolving towards the abolition of classes and the state” and the GDR “did anything but wither [away].”

Underlying both Reichinnek’s and Flakin’s arguments are the anti-GDR talking points that have long been propagated in the Federal Republic of Germany (formerly “West Germany”). The GDR is said to have been thoroughly undemocratic or, as Flakin puts it, a “Stalinist state” ruled by a “privileged bureaucracy, obsessed with control.” The lack of democracy and “suppression of all criticism” was not only “an insult to human dignity”, it also “produced constant inefficiencies” and prevented “good planning.” The GDR is presented as a caricature of bumbling, self-enriching bureaucrats who could only uphold their ailing system through mass surveillance. Rather than being a point of reference that progressives can learn from, the GDR should be written off as nothing more than a “footnote of history” (Stefan Heym). Reichinnek and Flakin assure us that their versions of socialism will be different.

Decontextualization and distortion

Such arguments against the GDR follow a similar pattern. First, a real and concrete problem in the GDR is identified. It is then taken out of its historical context and greatly exaggerated, before being generalized as a core, indefinite characteristic of the “Stalinist state.” Historical developments are distorted and decontextualized to create the impression that the GDR was broken and chronically ailing society. Flakin does exactly this when describing the East German economy. It is indeed true that the GDR faced significant challenges such as raising labour productivity or finding an adequate mechanism for price setting in the planned economy. However, blanket statements about “constant inefficiencies” are simply inaccurate and misleading.

The GDR economy proved itself to be robust and efficient over its 40-year existence. From 1949 until 1989, not a single year of stagnation or recession was recorded. In fact, in a paper published by Professor Gerhard Heske in 2009, East Germany’s annual growth rate (4.5%) is shown to have exceeded West Germany’s (4.3%) during the era of socialist planning (1951 to 1989). Data on the production and consumption of consumer goods confirms that the GDR was able to achieve the official objective of “meeting the growing material and cultural needs of the population” and thus progressively improving living standards.

Detractors of the GDR invariably ignore the context in which this socialist state operated. Since Germany’s heavy industries had historically been concentrated in the western regions of the country and due to the heavy damage inflicted on eastern Germany during the end phase of the Second World War, the GDR was compelled to construct large-scale industries from scratch in the late 1940s. The means of investment for this endeavour had to be accumulated internally, for East Germany possessed neither overseas colonies nor foreign benefactors (in contrast to West Germany, which received massive capital inflows through the Marshall Plan). The GDR alone had to rectify the damage inflicted by Hitler’s war after the Western powers violated the Potsdam Agreement and suspended reparation payments to the Soviet Union in 1946. Western sanctions also meant that trade with the resource-rich Ruhr Area in the West was no longer possible. All in all, seventy percent of East Germany’s pre-war industrial capacity was no longer available after 1945, which meant that living standards and productivity in the East were only nearly half of what they were in the West.

Through the resolute effort of millions of workers and through the efficient socialist planning system, the GDR was able to increase the volume of investment more than three-fold during the decade of socialist construction in the 1950s. By 1989, industrial production had increased by a factor of 12.3, and the gross domestic product had quintupled. These achievements were made possible by socialist property relations and the scientifically grounded planning process: far from being syphoned off and consumed by an exploitative “privileged bureaucracy,” the GDR’s surplus product was accumulated in the public hand and consciously reinvested to accelerate industrialization and economic development. The intricate planning system was structured around the Leninist principle of democratic centralism: economists and planning specialists collected data and analysed international and technological developments to draft perspective plans for the GDR’s economy. Workers and mass organizations then collectively discussed and amended these plans at the factory and neighbourhood levels. These plans thus combined complex expertise with democratic legitimacy.

Flakin withholds the title of socialism from the GDR because it failed to fulfil Leon Trotsky’s pronouncement that “socialism must increase human productivity, or it has no historical justification.” Here again, Flakin not only ignores the disadvantageous starting conditions in East Germany, but he also distorts reality. The GDR was in fact able to achieve a permanent increase in labour productivity throughout its existence. Even during the 1970s, when foreign trade was greatly affected by global energy crises and the GDR struggled to balance domestic accumulation and consumption rates, labour productivity continued to rise, albeit at slower rates than in previous decades. Many factors contributed to this trend, including the serious shortage of workers (meaning that existing production capacities could not be maximally utilised) and the political decision to prioritize consumer goods over industrial investments after 1971. These factors did not, however, alter the socialist nature of the GDR. It would be prudent to learn from the challenges that previous socialist states faced rather than brush them aside with the claim that “next time will be different.”

It is important to emphasize that the aforementioned economic problems did not lead to the “collapse” of GDR. Despite unsettled questions around pricing policies, labour productivity, and accumulation rates, the GDR was able to meet its domestic and international obligations and pay all wages until its final days of existence. The infamous accusations of bankruptcy are part of the narrative that seeks to discredit socialist planned economies: in 1989, East Germany’s debt-to-GDP ratio (roughly 19 percent) was less than half of West Germany’s (42 percent). In truth, the GDR was able to fundamentally change the face of the formerly underdeveloped agricultural region of East Germany and—in the span of just 40 years—propel the country into the ranks of the top fifteen industrialised states in the world.

Undemocratic socialism?

Flakin and Reichinnek may disagree on Die Linke’s vision of “democratic socialism”, but they do agree on one thing: the GDR was certainly not democratic. This conclusion is easy to reach if one measures the GDR by the standards of bourgeois constitutionality: the separation of powers, the protection of private property, and equality before the law. Marxists have long argued that these principles were created by and for the capitalist class. Private property necessarily curtails democracy and limits popular rule over significant sectors of society. In a society divided into poor and rich, de jure equality can only lead to de facto inequality. Recognizing this reality, communists and social democrats in East Germany never sought to establish the GDR as a bourgeois constitutional state. They aimed to construct a fundamentally different type of democracy in which public ownership over the means of production would be enshrined in law and developed further by the people. The planning system was a core element of this idea: planning was understood as a social relation in which the people were to become increasingly active and conscious of their role as co-creators of society. Democracy was thus conceived of as a process, a continuous task to be deepened throughout the course of socialism.

 The foundation for the GDR’s socialist democracy was laid during the so-called “anti-fascist upheaval” of the late 1940s. The East German economy was radically democratized through a land reform that redistributed the aristocrats’ lands to the peasants and the expropriation of industrial monopolists, which led to the creation of Volkseigene Betriebe (“companies owned by the people”). Economic power was thereby devolved to the working masses. Far from being bureaucratic policies from above, these measures were carried out by the people themselves. The Soviet military administration made a point to entrust the German people with the task of identifying and investigating which companies and estates should be marked for expropriation. Tens of thousands of workers and peasants joined so-called Sequester Commissions and Land Reform Commissions to collectively scrutinize their employers’ participation in Hitler’s Third Reich. Suddenly, workers and landless farmers found themselves entitled to investigate secret business records and uncover the connection between capitalism and fascism. In West Germany, on the other hand, popular efforts to socialize industries and banks were quashed by the authorities, despite democratic referenda on the issue. The “anti-fascist upheaval” of the late 1940s and “socialist construction” of the 1950s were profoundly democratic in both content and form. The claim that such major social feats were achieved through oppression and coercion is nonsensical.

Flakin claims that the GDR “suppressed all criticism.” In countless interviews with former GDR citizens, we heard otherwise. The factory and neighbourhood committees were in fact places of heated and controversial debate. Whereas in capitalism, democracy stops as soon as you enter the workplace, democracy in the GDR began behind the door of the factory or office. As a “workers’ and peasants’ state”, the GDR guaranteed employees the right to participate in factory management as well as a long list of social rights such as health and childcare, company holiday resorts, and further education. Many of these rights were laid out in the Labour Law, which was passed in 1961 after some 7 million citizens discussed and suggested over 23,000 amendments to the original draft. These laws authorized the workers themselves to monitor company directors and ensure adherence to health protections and workplace democracy. Company directors did not own the factories and could not enrich themselves off the backs of the workers; they were de facto employees of the state and merely charged with the supervision of public property. Workers who felt mistreated could complain through their union or the popular Eingabensystem (“system of appeal”), which guaranteed citizens the right to a response within four weeks. The extension of democracy into the economy also impacted the countryside, where the creation of cooperative structures helped to not only democratize decision-making processes, but also offered farmers and peasants the previously unknown benefits of paid holidays, childcare, and cultural activities.

In the GDR, all areas of society were to be democratized by drawing the masses into everyday governing. Citizens had the right—and the means—to participate in decisions not only regarding the workplace, but also the education of children, the distribution of housing, the development of the neighbourhood, and legal mediation. A pioneering aspect of socialist democracy was the mass organisations, including the Free German Trade Union Federation, the Peasants Mutual Aid Association, the Democratic Women’s League of Germany, the Cultural Association of the GDR, and the Free German Youth. These organisations were connected and interwoven with all areas of society to ensure representation for different groups. The Women’s League, for example, was guaranteed representation in residential committees, schools, cultural centers, and parliament, where it helped advance women’s economic emancipation from men. In contrast to the unions and organizations in capitalist societies, the GDR’s mass organizations were not fragmented and treated as private lobby groups; they were political organizations empowered by the state to encourage the collective deliberation and implementation of socialist policies.

The judiciary, which in capitalist societies is typically far-removed from popular will, was also democratized in the GDR. So-called societal courts were set up in workplaces and residential areas to address conflicts and problems in direct and relatable ways. Members of the courts consisted of one’s peers, for they were elected by the people directly. Workers, teachers, scientists, craftsmen, and artists were all practicing law to help settle issues. Through the courts, the mass organizations, and the Eingabensystem, GDR citizens had many ways to bring about concrete changes in their everyday lives.

Recognizing these institutions as innovations of socialist democracy in no way precludes critical appraisal. It is clear when assessing GDR history that while certain periods were marked by rapid advances, others were characterized by stagnation. The latter phases should be analyzed in their historical context if we are to learn anything from them. It cannot be forgotten that the GDR was located on the frontline of the “Cold War,” with West German leaders openly declaring the intention “to do everything and to take every measure to retake [East Germany].” Nevertheless, socialist democracy is an evolving process in which citizens must increasingly recognize and use the means of production and the instruments of democracy as their own. This requires the consistent use and further development of established institutions. In the GDR, there are clear signs that this process slowed down towards the 1980s. But, again, such developments did not change the socialist character of the GDR. Rather, they point us to a problem that all post-capitalist states have faced in the past: how can revolutionary momentum be maintained in the long run to ensure that social relations continue to evolve? It is especially difficult when this necessity to open up institutions and broaden democracy comes into tension with the need to defend against counterrevolution and external threats. The GDR was by no means the only socialist state to face this challenge of balancing democracy with security, and it would be naïve to believe that future attempts to construct socialism will be free of it. As Lenin wrote in 1920: “The proletariat’s conquest of political power does not put a stop to its class struggle against the bourgeoisie; on the contrary, it renders that struggle most widespread, intense, and ruthless.” Praxis—not abstract speculation—is the criterion of truth. The idea that the state will immediately begin withering away under “true socialism” is a regression to the utopianism Marx and Engels criticized so sharply in their time. Instead of kow-towing to the ruling narrative and disowning the GDR, we must uphold it as Germany’s first socialist state. The collective efforts of millions of GDR citizens have given us four decades of praxis to learn from. By reclaiming this history as our own and investigating it on our own terms, we can gain a deeper perspective on the fundamental possibilities and difficulties that arise when constructing social, economic, and political models beyond capitalism.

Peace is not silence: Part 2

Continuing our conversation with voices from the Hiroshima Palestine Vigil and Nagasaki for Palestine


24/08/2025

A group of 17 people stand in front of the Hiroshima Atomic Bomb memorial holding various signs. There are candles and signs on the ground as well.

In the first part of our conversation, members of the Hiroshima Palestine Vigil reflected on the origins of their nightly gatherings, the reception they’ve received in the city, and their belief that peace must be redefined, not as the absence of war, but as a refusal to look away, wherever violence is taking place.

In this second part, the discussion turns to the deeper historical layers beneath Hiroshima’s “peace” narrative—layers formed not only by the memory of the atomic bombings, but also by Japan’s own history of imperialism and colonialism. Much of this history remains unspoken in official remembrance: Japan’s occupation of Korea, Taiwan, and much of Asia; its use of forced labor and sex slavery from across the region; and the discrimination that continued long after the Asia-Pacific War ended.

In Nagasaki, for example, tens of thousands of Koreans and Chinese were brought under colonial rule and forced to work in arms factories, mines, and shipyards. Many were killed in the atomic bombing, yet their stories remain marginal in national memory. Survivors were denied Japanese citizenship after the war, excluded from equal compensation, and often faced language barriers and bureaucratic hurdles that prevented them from receiving support. This selective remembrance—the centering of some victims while erasing others—shapes how Japan understands its past, and in turn, how it responds to violence in the present, most starkly the genocide in Gaza.

Here, the Vigil’s members—Rebecca Maria Goldschmidt, a Jewish and Filipino anti-Zionist artist and Sailor Kannako, an artist and clothing store clerk from Hiroshima; are joined by Lisa and another member of Nagasaki for Palestine (NFP). Together they draw parallels between the forgotten victims of Nagasaki and the silenced voices in Gaza, reflecting on how histories of both victimhood and perpetration must shape solidarity today.

Do you see similarities between what happened in Hiroshima and Nagasaki and what’s happening in Gaza, not only in the destruction, but also in how the victims are spoken about or potentially even forgotten?

Rebecca: There are many parallels simply in the everyday, desperate reality of the situation of Gaza and the aftermath of the bombs: the mass death, the lack of food, thousands of orphaned children, contamination, cultural and societal collapse, psychological and physical illness and disease, no work, the terrorization of civilian communities and the crushing of morale to force defeat. 

Additionally, even though they were used during wartime, the atomic bombs were part of the US weapons development and testing program and part of the 2,000+ nuclear weapons tests that were done worldwide. The US and Japanese governments also relentlessly studied the hibakusha up until this day. The data they gleaned from the effects of the bomb on the human body (and still do, as the studies continue) provides them with priceless data that continues to inform technological “progress”.

Palestine, as we know, is also a laboratory to develop and improve “battle-ready” weapons on a human population and document their impacts. What connects Hiroshima, Nagasaki and Gaza is not the fact that they are all “locations of bombings”, but the context of their destruction as part of a legacy of weapons technology development and testing, and the ideology of white supremacy that necessitates, designs, and enacts these horrors.

Japan’s own imperialism and settler-colonial endeavors during the war also parallel the occupation of Palestine. Japan has more in common with Israel than it wants to admit—the overt massacre of babies and children, intentional starvation, sexual violence, prisoner torture, etc. I don’t see the Hiroshima-Nagasaki victims as being forgotten at all, I see them as being deified and their stories utilized to justify re-militarization, despite struggling for decades to be seen and heard. I see the millions of victims of Japanese imperialism—1 million Filipinos, 2 million Vietnamese, 10–20 million Chinese, etc.— also being eclipsed by the stories of Hiroshima-Nagasaki victims. Even the Korean and Chinese hibakusha are erased by the Japanese victimhood narrative.

Most people in Japan don’t know the details of their own family’s participation in imperial war crimes, and the government actively advances historical revisionism. This is just one reason why we have seen such a rapid rise in anti-foreigner hatred and open xenophobia during Japan’s recent elections. 

Do you think confronting these erased histories could change how Japan responds to the genocide in Gaza or other struggles for justice today?

Rebecca: Japan has cultivated both a self and public image of pacifism, but with the 80th anniversary of the bombs, a lot of hidden stories are coming to light that are challenging this “nation of peace”.

I came to Japan to better understand the Japanese military occupation of the Philippines that I had heard about from my grandmother. Why was it that no one talked about it even if it was the most violent period in Filipino history? Most Japanese people I talked to had no idea there even was an occupation in the Philippines. That was shocking to me, so when the Gaza genocide started, it made sense that people ignored it. Of course within the anti-war movement there are many Japanese people who are confronting these issues head-on, whether around Okinawa or the sex slavery issue. I have a lot of respect for them as I also take responsibility for the shameful actions in my own zionist family history. I can see the overlap between people who acknowledge Japanese historical atrocity and can draw parallels to what is happening again in Gaza and in other colonial contexts.

Recently in Japan, politicians or famous people have been making revisionist comments, like the Battle of Okinawa “wasn’t that bad”, or that the rape of Nanking never happened. I think in order for any society—Israel, Japan or Germany—the first step toward “atonement” is acknowledging that these crimes are real. In the case of Gaza, however, denial continues, despite this being the most documented genocide in history.

Clearly both “Peace education” and “Holocaust education” systems have failed miserably. Even if people do know what happened, no one was taught what to do when it starts happening again—just look at the ICE kidnappings in the US or the poor treatment of migrant workers in Japanese detention.

In all these contexts, political education around state power, the roots of racism and ethno-supremacy, how “victimhood” is weaponized, necrocapitalism, the list goes on—all of this must be exposed alongside the images we see, otherwise we really are just on a carousel of repeated atrocities with more efficient technology every time. Just “knowing” is not enough for people to take action. There has to also be a sense of political agency and a culture of caring for other people who might not look or act like you, but whose lives are still inherently valuable.

Nagasaki’s victims included many Korean and Chinese forced laborers whose suffering is rarely centered in the city’s memorials. What do you think this says about whose suffering is recognized, and whose is left out, in Japan’s culture of remembrance?

Lisa from NFP: In Nagasaki, it is believed that around 20,000 Koreans and about 650 Chinese laborers were exposed to the atomic bomb. My grandmother recalled that Korean laborers also worked outside the weapons factory she was in, but she had no idea what became of them after the bombing.

At the same time, the hypocenter of the atomic bombing in Nagasaki, Urakami, was located about 3km from the center of Nagasaki city. It was home to many Kakure Kirisitan, hidden Christians, who had preserved their faith in secret through over 250 years of persecution. However, as reconstruction efforts prioritized the city center, many of them were left behind, unable to receive adequate medical care or compensation due to poverty, social discrimination, and isolation. 

In Nagasaki, there are relatively few testimonies from Christians in Urakami who survived the atomic bombing. Testimony collection and oral history projects have often focused on survivors living in the city center or those who were more socially visible, leaving many marginalized voices unheard. I believe this represents a significant difference in the culture of memory between Hiroshima, where the city center was the hypocenter, and Nagasaki.

Anonymous from NFP: Many Chinese and Korean people who were forced to work in Mitsubishi’s arms factories and related facilities in Nagasaki had been kidnapped by the Japanese army during the occupation. I can only imagine how difficult it must have been for their families to find out about their situation after the bombing.

There are separate memorials for Chinese and Korean victims in the corners of the Peace Memorial Park, and ceremonies for them are held separately. There is also a separate museum that exhibits not only information about the bombing victims but also the crimes of the Japanese army in the Asia-Pacific region before and during the war.

As a Japanese person who grew up in downtown Tokyo in the 1980s, I did not learn these facts in school. I hope that the standard Japanese education curriculum will teach them, so that we can truly regret what must be regretted, instead of trying to forget.


​​In light of this selective remembrance, how do you think we can build genuine solidarity today? Not just symbolically, but in material or political terms? For example, how should solidarity with Palestinians be demonstrated beyond words or gestures?

Sailor Kannako: To me, solidarity means to empathize with others and to keep acting in ways that complement each other’s shortcomings. To do this, I think it’s necessary to face our own experiences and continue to speak in our own words, with our own feelings, so that emotions such as regret and anger—the triggers of empathy—don’t fade away. I have seen the suffering of the Palestinian people ignored and misunderstood by the international community for many years.

In Japan, when women experience sexual violence, their complaints are often not believed, and it’s often said the victim was at fault. I’ve had a similar experience, and I imagined that Palestinians have felt a similar deep regret and anger. That feeling made it impossible for me not to take action. If the world that once hurt me is now hurting someone else, my wounds will never heal.

People in Gaza are now asking, “What crime have we committed?” I think those who were burned by the atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki must have been filled with that same regret and anger. My experience may be insignificant compared to their pain, but it’s connected. I believe that only by trusting our own feelings and summoning the courage to speak about Gaza in our own words can we build strong bonds of empathy and create lasting, enormous solidarity.

What do you wish people outside Japan understood about Japan’s relationship to Palestine, or about protest in Japan in general?

R: Protest in Japan is usually considered a nuisance, laughable, something done by irrational people. The Japanese public is also generally unaware of the reality of what is happening in Palestine and Gaza. Therefore, the people who are taking the risk to speak up, often against the wishes of their families, workplaces, and communities, are actually pushing up against massive societal and cultural pressure.

No one is a hero, the genocide is still ongoing, and I still think we could do much more from Japan—but the people who have fought bravely for Palestine in Japan against their own set of constraints do work very hard. Everyone tells us about the one guy in Tokyo who stands alone every day on the street yelling about the genocide. Yes, he’s awesome, but the story is misleading because he’s not alone! In Tokyo, there is a strong solidarity movement led by Palestinians, and there is an extensive network throughout Japan, even in very rural areas, that is cross-cultural, intergenerational, and interfaith, trying its best to be intersectional and inclusive.

Every movement has its internal struggles, but we are proud to be part of a truly unique moment in history. The movement for Palestine in Japan did not start on Oct. 7, there have been decades of researchers, artists, students, and activists who have supported and engaged with Palestinians and I feel grateful to be part of this lineage. We are standing with the Palestinian people and the entire world against domination, fascism, and up against a lot of our own ghosts. But we continue to fight in the tradition of many of our ancestors, from the anti-war and anti-nuclear movements, the student, women’s, queer, and environmental movements, and other decolonial peoples’ struggles for dignity, equality, justice and liberation.

Finally, are there any ways people can support your groups?

Follow us on Instagram @hiroshima_palestine_vigil and @nagasakiforpalestine

Buy the zines written by young people in Gaza that we have translated into Japanese:
Gazagazagaza.base.shop

Make a donation to one of the projects we have been supporting:
@GazaSoupKitchen
Challenge Classes
Eman Al-haj Ali GoFundMe

Never stop talking about Palestine!

“Boiler Room you a punk ass bitch!”—Notes from the insurgency in rave culture

Anticolonial insurgency within rave culture bolsters a vibrant effort to boycott Zionist, colonial and capitalist institutions.


20/08/2025

On a warm evening in July, cars unloaded partygoers outside Under the K Bridge, the venue hosting Boiler Room’s NYC party. They were greeted by a crowd of activists, ravers and Indigenous Land Defenders, bearing placards reading “Fuck a pro-genocide pipeline party” and “KKR colonizes, KKR kills”, referring to the hedge fund which now owns Boiler Room, along with 85+ music festivals. A TikTok records the moment an incoming ticketholder sees the protesters and learns in real time about Boiler Room’s new owner. “Don’t drop us off here!” she tells the taxi driver, amid panicked laughter.

Meanwhile, across NYC, designated counter-parties to Boiler Room at Mood Ring, Earthly Delights and Basement started opening their doors. A map of these parties had been circulated earlier on Instagram by the Boycott Room campaign, one of a rapidly expanding cluster of groups in nightlife driving the boycott of KKR-owned venues. At around 8PM, an actionist who had infiltrated Boiler Room jumped up on stage with a banner reading “Boiler Room + KKR fund genocide. Boycott now”.

“Actionists are just now recovering from the atrocious vibes of even a few minutes inside the genocide party,” Boycott Room reflected in a reel the next day. The aforementioned TikToker concurred. In an update story posted after the event, she expressed regret for entering it. “This shit high key felt like a different kind of hell. Anything related to pro genocide has an evil aura. We paid $400 for this shit. Boycott the Boiler Room.”

**

This is a snapshot of the global, anticolonial insurgency within rave culture. Autonomous direct action, mass refusal and withdrawal of labour. Expanding grassroots coalitions, growing DIY infrastructure. The humble, implacable and patient pulling at threads.

News of KKR’s acquisition of Superstruct Entertainment and its portfolio of venues had already been noted by the Flow Strike campaign in 2024. But the sale of Boiler Room to Superstruct in January 2025 brought the news to wider attention, through a virally circulated Instagram explainer by WAWOG Toronto and a direct action led by Wet’suwet’en people and Palestinians.

Six months later, the explainer and its diagram remain confronting. KKR, one of the world’s largest hedge funds, is almost comically evil. It has deep ties to the ”Israeli” colonial project—funding data, arms and land purchase companies in the entity, and the IOF itself via the ‘Friends of the IDF nonprofit. One of its Chairmen is David Petraeus, the architect of the US-led invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan and former head of the CIA. It is also the main investor in the Coastal GasLink pipeline poisoning and destroying First Nations lands in the west of Turtle Island (Canada)—making it a target of Wet’suwet’en direct action since 2020.

A few days after the post landed, three DJs—Princess Elf Bar, DJ Myna and Shannon From Admin—withdrew from a Boiler Room in Sheffield, UK. A week later, the community began reckoning with Superstruct’s ownership of festivals popular with queer and underground artists like Mighty Hoopla, Sonàr and Field Day.

In March, Boiler Room announced a merch collaboration with FC Palestina and the Sameer Project, a Palestinian led mutual aid initiative. Just hours later, after being apprised of KKR, the Sameer Project issued a statement of refusal, which remains a core moral and political compass for the movement:

“We will always say no to any kind of normalization or ties with organizations linked to zionism in any shape or form. No zionist money comes without an agenda. […] Tomorrow KKR will turn around and be on the defensive about investing in Israel by saying they donated to Gaza through one of their acquired companies. They will say this to wash away their complicity.”

From there, the revolt rapidly expanded and globalized. Seven DJs pulled out of Boiler Room Istanbul. DAYTIMERS, a British South Asian collective, withdrew from Superstruct-owned Mighty Hoopla and Lost Village. EYRA, Animistic Beliefs and dj g2g individually withdrew from Sonàr. Dozens of their peers shortly followed suit. Half the Field Day line up dropped out. KAALO, a queer/femme-led DIY collective in Nepal, publicly dropped their Boiler Room collab. The Bay Area Boiler Room was cancelled after local pressure. Around half of the stages booked at Milkshake, a queer-centred festival in the Netherlands, withdrew, with a clear material demand: “As long as a festival is owned by KKR, we will boycott. We will not accept offsets or compromises.”

New developments arrive daily. The poles and focal points of revolt are always shifting. But in recent weeks, Brazil and Puerto Rico have seen major flashpoints, with local actionists getting Boiler Room events in both Saô Paulo and San Juan cancelled. “A global event backed by a big Zionist corporation stepped back because the scene got organised” said the group in Brazil. 

“Black, Indigenous, peripheral, Palestinian and dissident people united for a greater cause.”

“We refuse to let our culture be used to whitewash genocide.”

**

The revolt is massive, global and popular. It is overwhelmingly comprised of global Majority, trans, queer and Indigenous people from the underground. Most are unpropertied and precarious. The fees they forego in the KKR boycott are often needed to pay rent.

It is militant. Its basic, entry level premises are an to end capitalism, uncompromising support for Palestinian resistance, the dismantlement of the ‘West’, pan-Indigenous liberation, death to all settler colonies, including those on Turtle Island (the ‘US’ and ‘Canada’). Deviations from Al Thawabit, the core principles of Palestinian liberation, are rare and attract immediate, organic rebuttal. It does not have leaders. Its core tactics are boycott, direct action, disruption, sabotage.

A revolt of this scale and militancy within electronic music culture was not inevitable. Clubland, particularly in Europe, has complex relationship affinities with the project of the West. The raver is often targeted for co-option into the imperial project—whether, in the West, as a symbol of freedom and disinhibition against a racialised Other; or, in the Global South, as potential conscripts into a comprador class. The Zionist entity has endlessly sought to position Tel Aviv as, per Nerdeen Kiswani, “a beacon of light—progressive, diverse and full of life…making apartheid look like a party”. Given the intersection of Operation Al-Aqsa Flood with a settler music festival, many of us braced ourselves for a grim tide of reactionary ‘PLUR’ and ‘both sides’ takes from ravers and DJs.

That this did not materialise—or, more accurately, was quickly staunched—attests, at least in part, to reservoirs of resistance and anticolonial militancy within nightlife. These have been activated by the genocide, alongside a visceral, ancestral ick at the commodification of underground culture, most grotesquely typified by the extractive, colonial dynamics of Boiler Room.

The structural position of the DJ/raver, despite efforts at recuperation, is still, it seems, generative of dissent. Like queers (also experiencing a re-radicalisation over Palestine), ravers are at once unbearably central to, yet askance of, the operations of imperial capital.

But besides these undergirding dynamics, can anything be drawn from how the movement has shaped itself—and created the conditions for the current, ongoing escalation? Why are boycotts in electronic music popping off like nowhere else in global culture?

**

No gods, no leaders

Nothing in the movement has been rolled out from above, or according to any central formulas or scripts. Decision-making is not abrogated to representative bodies. There are no intermediaries who treat or negotiate on behalf of a base. The boycott has been built through the organic accretion of autonomous acts of refusal. The energy and spirit of these refusals and actions is never workshopped or uniform. This means it avoids the overdetermined feel of NGO writing. The texts emerging are idiosyncratic, embodied, vernacular, playful, which makes them memorable and resonant—inspiring action where more top-down forms of political communication might not. The centrality of trans DJs to the movement informs this corpus: see Cultural Solidarity’s latest video, MC’d by Black trans artists on the sidelines of the NYC Boiler Room strike fundraiser:

“Boiler Room, you a punk ass bitch. You always and forever will be a punk ass bitch miss thing. You’re not tearing it, you’re not eating, your mama a bitch, your grandmama a bitch […]”

Statements learn from each other, reuse and cite text, and over time a loose, shared set of premises and parameters have developed. But there is no hegemon, no disciplinary body, no notion of copyright. This means that groups and coalitions can spring up rapidly and unceremoniously. Trust is established quickly, through action rather than deliberation, because there isn’t a strong sense (at least yet) of requisite turfs, tributes to be paid.

Holistic scope, imaginative coalitions

KKR is a universal antagonist to life—an entity which, like ‘Israel’ and ‘the US’, despoils across geographies and scales: funding the Palestinian genocide, destroying Indigenous lifeworlds, corporatising raves, privatising healthcare systems and housing. These multiple, intersecting scales lead any actionist on KKR ineluctably to an anti-capitalist, pan-Indigenous frame, providing a guard against recuperation into empire.

This is generating new coalitions which disturb the idea of the raver as a dissolute, implied White imperial subject. The revolt is not confined to the dancefloor. Remember: it was Wet’suwet’en people in Toronto who kicked off the revolt, and they continue to be heavily involved. There is no hermetic sense of the raver as distinct from other embodiments. See also the important contributions of groups like the Muslim Social Justice Initiative and Nijjormanush to the Boiler Room boycott.

Community and mutual aid

By freeing action from organizations, the endless potential of grassroots activism is revealed. Take the Bay Area. After concerted community pressure, an alliance of local collectives, operating under the moniker B.A.S.S. (Bay Area Solidarity Strike), caused so many artist withdrawals that Boiler Room San Francisco had to be cancelled. On the same day as the cancelled Boiler Room, their DIY counter-party raised over $9000, helping cover strike funds in the Bay Area and beyond as well as supporting mutual aid efforts in Gaza.

This bottom-up approach created lasting, meaningful bonds within and across communities in the Bay Area. But its impacts reverberated nonlocally, too. The B.A.S.S. initiative was rapidly reproduced in New York City (Big Apple Solidarity Strike), paving the way for their own strike fund and direct action. These precedents later informed the mass withdrawal of queer artists from Milkshake festival in the Netherlands, and the solidarity collective which emerged from it (R.U.I.S), which is based on similar DIY and anticapitalist values. In a sweet circular moment, the OG Bay Area boycotters ran a zine sale to support the Milkshake action.

These humble acts of community building, while often enacted through acts of refusal and boycott, are constructive in the most literal sense. While local, they are not parochial, creating material, transnational networks of solidarity and care.

Be reasonable, demand the impossible

The Superstruct-owned festival is uncanny and insidious. Its moniker is a dead, floating signifier, communicating vague affective hooks: queer, surfer, punk, underground. We are invited to get our monodirectional kicks in a grey strip mall of tailored experiences. The early, medieval festival, a precursor to the rave, was a space where “the world turned upside down”—one of sexual license, dissolved classes, kings becoming peasants for a day. The KKR festival is the world reaffirmed in its grim, implacable realities—a crushing acquiescence to capitalist realism.

It is precisely this realism that the movement rejects, in theory and deed. Drawing on the Wages for Housework movement of the seventies, theorist Kathi Weeks extols the power of the “utopian, unreasonable demand”—which, rather than a predestined route to narrow wins or achievable horizons—constitutes an ongoing insurgency, a “process of constituting a new subject with the desires for and the power to make new demands”.

The ambition, scope and unreasonableness of the demand—an anticapitalist rollback of the corporate takeover of rave culture—is what gives this movement potency. It also makes it effective and, yes, strategic. Consider: the news about KKR was only popularised in January. Just 7 months on, the corporate festival circuit is in ruins. DIY culture is reviving everywhere. And a system of rewards, which prioritised acquiescence, guild thinking, the collegiate co-facilitation of bag chasing, is being wrenched apart.

Abdaljawad Omar, writing on new circuits of rebellion in the refugee camps of the West Bank (The New York War Crimes, Nakba issue, 2025), writes:

“The current wave of resistance privileges the act itself—the moment of resistance—as a political assertion not necessarily embedded in a coherent project. It insists on action even in the absence of a clear horizon. This is not a failure of thought but an exposure of the limits of our inherited narratives. It answers the question “What is to be done?” simply: Act—and when you are unsure, act more.”

It is, he continues, “a form of struggle that reveals the exhaustion of inherited frameworks and insists on staying with the rupture”.

As fascism and anticolonialism recrudesce in parallel, who would bet on received patterns or lessons from the inert 2010s? No leaders have led this revolt; no strategists mapped it or predicted it, or prognosticated a pallid sequence of little wins and KPIs. Instead, by pulling at threads with humbleness, insistence and patience, a small community has brought many seemingly impregnable dynamics—commodification, competition, celebrity—to a tottering fragility. 

As the international liberal order reveals its true contours, its insinuations within club culture are also becoming apparent. The credo of capitalist realism, that things must always get worse, that we must take the despoilation of our rituals, our communities, of all that is sacred, is facing non-acceptance. The consolidation of rave culture is not inevitable. Parties and festivals do not need to grow, become brands. Boiler Room does not have a right to exist. Per DJ and journalist Arielle Lana: “These platforms, they don’t need to be like the holy grail. We can dismantle them and we’ll still survive.”

Ravers for Palestine is an anonymous collective working to foster solidarity and resistance within electronic music culture.