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Anarchist Practice
| This morning a man stormed the discovery channel headquarters and has a list of demands online. His website is down but the google cached version is below:
The Discovery Channel MUST broadcast to the world their commitment to save the planet and to do the following IMMEDIATELY:
1. The Discovery Channel and it's affiliate channels MUST have daily television programs at prime time slots based on Daniel Quinn's "My Ishmael" pages 207-212 where solutions to save the planet would be done in the same way as the Industrial Revolution was done, by people building on each other's inventive ideas. Focus must be given on how people can live WITHOUT giving birth to more filthy human children since those new additions continue pollution and are pollution. A game show format contest would be in order. Perhaps also forums of leading scientists who understand and agree with the Malthus-Darwin science and the problem of human overpopulation. Do both. Do all until something WORKS and the natural world starts improving and human civilization building STOPS and is reversed! MAKE IT INTERESTING SO PEOPLE WATCH AND APPLY SOLUTIONS!!!!
2. All programs on Discovery Health-TLC must stop encouraging the birth of any more parasitic human infants and the false heroics behind those actions. In those programs' places, programs encouraging human sterilization and infertility must be pushed. All former pro-birth programs must now push in the direction of stopping human birth, not encouraging it. |
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| From Sarah Mirk
I wandered through the hordes last night at Last Thursday in search of the "lemonade revolt": donation-only lemonade stands set up in protest of county health inspectors shutting down a little girls' lemonade stand at the event last month. I only saw six stands, but I did run into Michael Franklin, the guy who started the lemonade revolt Facebook page that's attracted nearly 1,000 members. He says the story has gone international ("I had a Brazilian news crew at my house this morning") and are setting up "lemonade revolts" (formerly known as "lemonade stands") as far away as Leeds, England. "I think it gives people a chance to use dissent. It's obvious that there is something profoundly wrong with this sick society, with the absurdity of the state shutting down lemonade stands," says Franklin. Enjoy! |
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| A few notes on language: many of the terms used herein are vague, subjective, loaded, or otherwise ambiguous. For purposes of clarity, when “accountability processes” are referenced, this will be a specific reference to sexual assault accountability processes, as distinct from any other such process, the basic model of which can of course be applied to any number of issues and situations. In discussing “anarchists” or “anarchist men”, I am rather loosely defining the subjects as members of an existing anarchist milieu, or social structure of and among many anarchists and those who identify similarly - this is not in any way to suggest that anarchism itself is somehow the exclusive domain or property of said milieu, only to use self-identification as a reference point.
Additionally, mentions of gender are inherently problematic. When discussing “men” assaulting or raping “women”, the intent is not to oversimplify the issue of gender constructions, but rather to use a shorthand in reference to people socialized male, on the one hand, and people socialized female on the other. Obviously, however, perpetrators of sexual assault are not always male (though, unfortunately, most are) and, conversely, survivors are sometimes male. These dynamics, when interrogated, are in no way limited to male-female relations, or gender-normative relations at all. However, the act of sexual violence perpetrated by males against females occupies, in many ways, its own specific social and historical context. This constitutes the fundamental circumstance of patriarchy. In this, some passages here deal more generally with our attitudes towards any perpetrator of sexual assault, and some directly with said specific phenomenon. The behavior of patriarchy outside gender normativity, as a basic social relationship of domination, is an issue which goes largely unexplored here. That being said, an analysis of sexual assault and capitalist gender oppression is relevant to anyone in these communities, anyone being confronted with these situations. |
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| From Anarchist Survey
Foreword
There were several reasons why we undertook this survey. Primarily, however, it sprung from disagreements between the two of us - partners as well as anarchists of subtly different persuasions - around strategies, tactics, analysis and so forth. In many cases these disagreements hinged on speculations which we wanted to verify or disprove with some reasonably robust data: are anarchists really mostly white, male and middle-class? What are the correlations between anarchism and various lifestyle choices like veganism or communal living? What do anarcho-primitivists really think and how many people identify with this tendency within the 'broad river' of anarchism? What do we think of violence as a revolutionary tactic? How optimistic are we? A survey was the obvious choice.
Although this means that our original agenda was a deeply personal one, we still think that our survey results may be of value to different groups and individuals working within contemporary anarchism. There are, of course, many limitations to constructing and using surveys: from question design (with all its subjective inclusions and omissions) to the biases inherent in online distribution and the myriad possibilities for deriving (sometimes overwrought, sometimes contrived) conclusions from the data and the somewhat random sets of correlations we chose, we're the first to admit that there are some shortcomings, both in our personal approach and inherent in surveys as a whole. |
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| From Crac-Kebec - by Émilie Breton, Anna Kruzynski, Magaly Pirotte and Rachel Sarrasin
As members of the Research Group on Collective Autonomy, we join our voices to those who are speaking out against unprecedented State violence and police repression in the wake of the G20 Summit held in Toronto in June. This violence has affected our friends, our colleagues, our comrades, our partners, our communities. In the same vein, we wish to denounce the misinformed and sensationalist discourses that have been emerging in the media.
Repressive forces deliberately targeted those dressed in black. The media, also seemingly concerned with anarchist dress-codes, broadcast, over and over, images of supposed “young thugs” and focused their analyses on the now famous Black Bloc tactics. This kind of media coverage gives the impression that the acts in the streets of Toronto were void of political content and that anarchists are scary individuals who should be placed behind bars for the protection of all. |
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| From Anarchist Platform
Friends and comrades,
We would like to take this opportunity to announce the new Anarchist Platform Archive. The Anarchist Platform Archive is an archive of texts relating to the publishing of the Organisational Platform of the General Union of Anarchists (Draft) by the Group of Russian Anarchists Abroad (“Delo Truda” Group) in 1926.
Also, and maybe more importantly, we hope to archive texts that have added to, and expanded on, this tradition in the hope that this can play however small a part, in the development and continuing growth of the organised class-struggle anarchist-communist movement.
This site was inspired by the Anarchism and the Platformist Tradition page of our comrades from the Northeastern Federation of Anarchist Communists. |
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From Vice Magazine - Interview by Andy Capper,
and Why in 2010 They Are Going to Court Over Some Total Bullshit
If you pick up some crap book about the history of punk rock, chances are there will be about 90 pages dedicated to Joe Strummer’s jackets but only two sentences about Crass. This is despite them selling millions of records, singlehandedly creating the DIY punk blueprint, and maintaining their hard-line libertarian and anarchy principles even as they reach their mid-60s today.
A lot of you reading this will be aware of their logo and the fact that they were a punk band, but not a lot of people know their actual story. Because it’s so inspirational and so “anti-music” (in the sense that it was a total revolt against the established music industry of the time) we feel that everybody with even a passing interest in punk rock should hear it.
And so we interviewed founding members Penny Rimbaud and Steve Ignorant for a brief history of the group and to procure their ideas surrounding this issue’s theme. During the talks between myself and Penny that preceded this interview I discovered that the unthinkable has happened and that Crass, the most anti-authoritarian, anarchy-endorsing free spirits in the history of punk music, are on the verge of going to Crown Court to ask lawyers and judges to intervene in a huge row over some remastered CDs.
Despite our efforts to include all sides of the story here, a couple of former members of Crass declined to participate. |
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| Today a teapot was accidentally broken in an anarchist home. The teapot was a good friend to all and a comrade in the struggle.
Silent vigils will be held every night for the next 3 nights in Olympia. Come show your support. |
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| From Anarchist Writers - by Anarcho
A few years back, I published a few articles in Freedom on raising the demand for co-operatives in response to the economic crisis. These were ‘Bailouts or co-operatives?’ and ‘Co-operatives and conflicts!’ (although they appeared in Freedom slightly edited). The last was in reply to another article on this subject, which was replied to on-line. Somewhat belatedly, I now respond to the response.
The author, Joseph Kay, stresses “the importance of a comprehensive discussion of a libertarian communist response to the crisis is reaffirmed” and his reply had “the hope of clarifying some of his misunderstandings or misrepresentations of my position and contributing constructively to this necessary debate.”
First, he proclaims that his arguments are not contradictory, as I suggested. He argues that there “is no contradiction here, for two important reasons.” First, he “made clear in my article my objection to a strategy of co-operatives is twofold” as “anarchist demands for co-operatives are impotent, since we’re in no position at present to force them.” However, my point was that his position was contradictory because he argued that anarchists were in “no position to demand” anything yet that did not stop him raising “Communist demands” in the very same article.
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| From Mercury News
A county judge on Monday found Wes Modes, a past organizer of the unsanctioned Do It Yourself Parade, guilty of participating in an unpermitted event, an infraction that marks a significant victory for city officials fed up with the anarchist activist.
In lieu of a $250 fine, Judge Jeff Almquist sentenced Modes, who works in the library system at UC Santa Cruz, to 30 hours of community service to be completed within 60 days. Volunteering at the SubRosa Cafe, an anarchist coffee shop and reading room that Modes co-founded, does not count as community service, the judge clarified later Monday. |
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