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Alternative Media
| From Letters Journal
On the heels of a week-long tour of the Midwest, we present the fourth issue of LETTERS , our anti-political communist journal. Issue four includes a beautifully illustrated journal as well as a literary supplement, both printed and bound by our friends at Eberhardt Press. The journal and the supplement are presented in a screen-printed envelope.
In the journal, we explore topics outside of the usual focus of communist analysis: fate, friendship, theology, and being. The supplement features original poetry and fiction, as well as literary discussion, a film script, and interviews with novelist Horacio Castellanos Moya and translator Tim Wilkinson. As with previous issues, we present installments from the novel The Unseen. |
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| From NC Piece Corps
Though less well known than more urban groups like the Black Panthers, the words and actions of Robert F. Williams and Monroe, NC’s militant NAACP chapter were tremendously influential on later organizations that advocated self-determination, autonomy, equality, and self-defense. To celebrate this piece of North Carolina history, the North Carolina Piece Corps is making available a publication which offers a brief biographical sketch of Williams along with several chapters excerpted from his famous 1962 book Negroes with Guns. Though Williams was not an anarchist perse, we hope that this publication can nevertheless further dialogue(s) around the themes of southern history, race, self-defense, and insurrection.
Titled "I Will Not Crawl: excerpts from Robert F. Williams on Black struggle and armed self-defense in Monroe, NC," you can download this zine at www.NCpiececorps.wordpress.com. To recieve a physical copy by mail for purposes of copying and distribution, email us at NCpiececorps@gmail.com. We are also in the process of adding more self-defense oriented resources to this site; if you have suggestions relevant to where you live, please let us know!
-in love and rage,
the North Carolina Piece Corps |
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| From MetaMute - By John Cunningham
Is there more to the refusal of identity than the romantic escape fantasies of certain anarchist cells or the necessary survival tactics of the ‘illegal'? John Cunningham takes up the case of clandestinity and resistance in the age of biopolitics
Closedness and Openness
Sometimes the detritus and trash of contemporary commodity capitalism can reveal more than is intended. A recent advert for the BMW mini-convertible, plastered on billboards throughout London, carries the slogan ‘Closedness Bad' alongside its dualistic correlative ‘Openness Good.' Below ‘closedness' is a sealed book bearing the Monty Python approved title ‘The Meaning of Life' and, below ‘openness', a gleaming mini-convertible that's completed underneath by the advertising pay-off, ‘Stay Open'. Where Benjamin glimpsed a utopian trace of the classless society in ‘a thousand configurations of life, from permanent buildings to ephemeral fashions', this advert gives us a glimpse, underneath the infantilising language, of a hidden dichotomy within the culture of contemporary capitalism.1 ‘Closedness' and ‘Openness' might be said to act as place-markers for the opaque and the transparent, clandestinity and identity, silence and communication. A trace of the clandestine emerges in the embodied dead labour and banal strap-lines of an advertising billboard, but where else might it be glimpsed?
Michele Sinapi, in an unpacking of the etymology of the term ‘clandestine', writes that whereas ‘a secret presupposes an almost absolute separation [...] what is clandestine is what is most [...] intimate.' She links the clandestine to ‘an interiority that cannot be appropriated, of a resistance to being seized.'2 Clandestinity is intimate to the body politic of contemporary capitalism and different forms of the clandestine drift into discourse only to recede again out of visibility. These forms are in no way homogeneous. Worlds of difference separate the economic and political clandestinity of ‘illegal' migrants from the tactical appropriation of anonymity by the black bloc, the everyday as a form of resistance, or the clandestine exodus of ‘phantom organisations' and the self-exile of individuals from political and artistic milieus. Yet all these forms of clandestinity are ‘intimate' in the sense of being the object of dispositifs of surveillance and discipline, and the diffuse apparatuses that (re)produce identity and subjectivity within contemporary biopolitical capitalism. Another intimacy they share is in being subject to an economic appropriation of every human capability - the body, generic communicability - within the regime of biopolitical capital. The latter, as theorised by Foucault, Agamben and Virno amongst others, can be loosely defined as the management of life as such within capitalism. The desperate clandestinity of exclusion for economic migrants, wherein clandestine existence is imposed by capital's need for a reserve army of labour, is paradoxically mirrored by the refusal of productive subjectivity advocated within more radical anti-capitalist circles (the Invisible Committee, et al). Might an examination of clandestinity illuminate the apparatuses of subjectification and appearance as well as the potential forms of de-subjectification that arise through an oppositional clandestinity? Or is such an attachment to the game of disappearance nothing but romanticising an impotent resistance that's unable to escape the instauration of capital as a social relation? |
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| From NC Piece Corps
We are excited to announce the NC Piece Corps publishing project now has a website! At www.NCpiececorps.wordpress.com, you can download printable zines on any number of topics, leave feedback and angry rants, or whatever you wish. Right now the site serves primarily this function, but soon we hope to add a news function relevant to topics of interest, things like southern radical history, race treason, critical dialgoues around insurrection and violence, and self-defense training.
We are hoping to have some of the zines available soon in an online readable format, but that may take some time.
Also, to celebrate the momentous occasion of our joining the web, we are reprinting an old classic, "A Plea for Captain John Brown" by Henry David Thoreau. We had forgotten how good it was! You can download that at the site, along with our other new publication, Koukoulofori: Stories, Lessons, and Inspiration from the Greek Anarchist Movement, and many others. |
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| From Fifth Estate
now on the stands!!
FIFTH ESTATE #383 (Summer 2010)
Issue Theme: Why & What We Believe
www.fifthestate.org
Our essays in this issue don’t so much investigate beliefs themselves as much as belief systems, our cognitive constructions which determine our perception of reality. Beliefs can either chain us to repressive ideas or free us with visions that go beyond dominant paradigms. The entire modern era has been one of contestation as to which belief systems will rule in societies—ones that link us to submission and acquiescence to hierarchal authority, or those which rebel against them and eliminate the categories of rulers and ruled. |
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| From Modesto Anarcho
Have you been brutalized, assulted, harassed, or abused by the Modesto or other local police departments? Modesto Anarcho Crew (MAC) is currently looking for personal accounts of contact with the police for an upcoming (and hopefully recurring) segment in Modesto Anarcho, the Valley's Insurrectionary Journal of Class Struggle: "PIGPEN: Local Encounters with Police and Prisons."
It's simple enough: just a few short paragraphs (unless of course you'd like to write more) describing an encounter you've had with the police and how you feel about it (and them). Of course it goes without saying that these can (and probably should) be anonymous. We'll go through the stories we get, edit for length where we need to, and put the best of them in MA #15. If it works out well, it may become a recurring segment in MA, so please keep them coming! |
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| From Raging Pelican
Today, Louisiana radicals finished the first print run of the new, incredible paper that we hope will shift the local perspectives on the oil spill and catalyze a widespread new posture of resistance toward the state and capital.
The Raging Pelican is a 12-page broadsheet full of articles and art attacking the BP oil spill and the government that let it happen from an anti-authoritarian, anti-capitalist perspective.
There is a companion website, which has the full texts of all the articles, PDFs of the paper, our contact info, and everything you need to know, at:
Website
PDF
The paper is going to be distributed throughout the gulf coast, and especially in the areas most impacted by the recent oil spill. Our first print run was of 2,000 copies, though the printers liked it so much, they made a few more to hand out at their local bar. |
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| COME TO THE 5TH EVER PROVIDENCE ANARCHIST BOOKFAIR! FUN! BOOKS! MUSIC! DANCING! REVOLUTION IN THE STREETS!
August 14th from 1pm to 1am on Empire Street, Providence, Rhode Island we'll be throwing the 5th annual Anarchist Bookfair as part of local community art center AS220's Foo Fest, a one day bloc party downtown, celebrating their 25th anniversary. The festival this year has a $5 cover and is geared towards a family friendly focus! Bring the kids! In the evening local bands will be playing as the festival takes a street party atmosphere! |
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| To the Editors, East Bay Express,
It wasn’t enough to be faced with your cover editorial of July 7-13 implicitly equating (as “errors”) the killing of an unarmed and prone African-American man at the hands of a white BART cop who “lost his cool” with the breaking of business and automobile windows by protesters who “reacted in anger” to what has recently been deemed involuntary manslaughter. Let’s leave aside how precisely you believe people on the receiving end of routine police harassment are supposed to express their outrage at yet another in a seemingly endless series of extrajudicial—of course we mean accidental—murders.
No, that wasn’t bad enough. Now readers are treated to Robert Gammon’s “Seven Days” column of July 14-20, in which he repeats—almost verbatim from the discourse of OPD and the future bureaucrats of Youth Uprising—contemptuous red herrings as part of a wider de rigueur anti-anarchist frenzy being aided and promoted by mainstream and so-called alternative media. Perhaps anarchists should be grateful that at least you have finally dispensed with the cumbersome and paternalistic qualifier “self-described,” as if journalists who are thoroughly ignorant of the history and philosophy of anarchism could possibly be the arbiters of who authentic anarchists are and what we do. |
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Check out the monthly Anarchist News Digest.
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