Anarchism

Unmasking Black Bloc

December 22, 2014 Devon Douglas-Bowers, www.occupy.com Educate! Anarchism

The Black Bloc: some love it, others hate it. Many condemn Black Blockers for engaging in property destruction and lack of central organization, yet others appreciate them and see their divisive actions as a positive, arguing for a diversity of tactics. However, what many are lacking is an understanding of the Black Bloc, it's history, the types of people who are in it, and the problems within. With regards to property damage, for black blockers, the target is the message. Targets are often chosen for their symbolic value. “On principle, Black Blocs do not strike community centers, public libraries, the offices of women's committees or even small independent businesses.” While this may be true generally, the use of property destruction by some black blockers can cause problems, such as can be seen in the recent Berkeley protests, where people were protesting the death of Eric Garner and individuals came and broke the windows of a number of banks.

Parecon: Envisioning A Life Beyond Capitalism

July 3, 2014 Joris Leverink, www.roarmag.org Educate! Anarchism, Capitalism, Finance and the Economy, Labor, Socialism

ROAR: In spite of having been around for eight years, I’m sure that there are still a number of our readers who are unfamiliar with your idea of ‘participatory economics’, or ‘parecon’, in short. Could you provide us with a brief introduction to this concept? Michael Albert: It is hard to be too brief trying to explain to someone totally unfamiliar with it, but I will try. Also, I wouldn’t call parecon my idea because it can convey a wrong impression. And this is not just because the initial presentations were by myself and also Robin Hahnel, and it is not just because since then, many others have taken up the effort. Even more relevant, parecon’s features owe to a long history of intellectual and activist efforts trying to advance human well-being in economic settings, including critiquing some past efforts for example, in the Soviet Union, and working hard on new ones. That said, parecon is a proposal or vision for how to accomplish economic functions consistent with classlessness, self-management, solidarity, equity, diversity, and ecological good sense. Parecon is not, however, a blueprint, but is rather a formulation of some critical attributes a few key aspects of economics need to have if we are to accomplish desirable aims.

Noam Chomsky: Ecology, Ethics, Anarchism

April 7, 2014 Javier Sethness, www.truth-out.org Educate! Anarchism, Chomsky, Environment, Inequality

There can be little doubt about the centrality and severity of the environmental crisis in the present day. Driven by the mindless "grow-or-die" imperative of capitalism, humanity's destruction of the biosphere has reached and even surpassed various critical thresholds, whether in terms of carbon emissions, biodiversity loss, ocean acidification, freshwater depletion, or chemical pollution. Extreme weather events can be seen pummeling the globe, from the Philippines - devastated by Typhoon Haiyan in November of last year - to California, which is presently suffering from the worst drought in centuries. As Nafeez Ahmed has shown, a recently published study funded in part by NASA warns of impending civilizational collapse without radical changes to address social inequality and overconsumption. Truthout's own Dahr Jamail has written a number of critical pieces lately that have documented the profundity of the current trajectory toward anthropogenic climate disruption (ACD) and global ecocide: In a telling metaphor, he likens the increasingly mad weather patterns brought about by ACD to an electrocardiogram of a "heart in defibrillation."

Beware Venezuela’s ‘False Anarchists’

March 31, 2014 George Ciccariello-Maher, www.roarmag.org Educate! Anarchism, Venezuela

Not everyone who calls themselves anarchists are worthy of the name. Before expressing our solidarity, we should be clear who it is we are supporting. When it comes to the Venezuelan protests of recent weeks and months, misinformation reigns supreme. Just as liberals and progressives have been misled by desperate hashtags like #SOSVenezuela and simplistic comparisons to Occupy, so too has the radical left been tempted by the some self-described Venezuelan anarchists, and El Libertario in particular. This is not a critique of anarchism in general or even of all Venezuelan anarchists (I will discuss others below). I have always been very close to the anarchist milieu and, while frustrated by certain anarchist blindspots, I am influenced by anarchism as a doctrine of revolutionary struggle that understands the inherent contradictions of the state.

Out of Occupy, a New Populist Political Party Forms

March 13, 2014 Dennis Trainor Jr, www.PopularResistance.org Resistance Report Anarchism, Capitalism, Carl Gibson, Dennis Trainor Jr, Green party, Occupy, Socialism, Socialist alternative

Carl Gibson, co-founder of U.S. Uncut, is joining with other Occupy Wall Street organizers to launch a new populist political party. While more details (including the name of the party and the identities of other key organizers) will be available when the group launches on March 20, the party will be explicitly anti-capitalist. Says Gibson: “A new party that actively opposes capitalism and unites people around the basic ideas of meeting human needs would be widely respected and immediately acknowledged. This new party could stand apart from the two corporate-owned parties by refusing to take campaign donations from corporations, banks and developers, standing up for the rights of immigrants and indigenous people, calling for sustainable energy and development, making education for all a top priority, and believing in universal access to healthcare as a human right. While it would take time, focusing on building power first at the local and county level is the surest way to make lasting change.”

Ukraine: Autonomous Workers Union Update on Euromaidan

January 25, 2014 Autonomous Workers, www.revolution-news.com Educate! Anarchism, Ukraine

Anarchists ought to participate in demonstrations and pickets which are dedicated to defense of the rights and freedoms usurped by the laws of January 16th. It makes sense to take action at one’s workplace or neighborhood and to help sabotage the dictatorship’s decisions. There’s not much sense in participating in the activities in Grushevskogo street, which were meaningless from the very beginning. These activities only give the government pretty picture for television and enable it to identify radical elements by locating mobile phones and videotaping. In the case of the opposition’s victory, as well as in the case of the government’s victory we’ll have to wage long and hard war against any of those regimes. This should be understood. We need to gather forces in order to start dictating our own libertarian and proletarian agenda in Ukrainian politics.

The Unschooled Life: Astra Taylor’s Story

January 16, 2014 Astra Taylor, utne.com Educate! Anarchism, Education

We differed from homeschoolers in essential ways. We weren’t replicating school at home. We had no textbooks, class times, deadlines, tests, or curricula. Were we fascinated by primates? By rocks? By baseball cards or balloon animals? If so, it was our duty to investigate. My parents eschewed coercion and counted on our curiosity, which they understood to be a most basic human capacity. This is really what the whole debate over compulsory schooling is about. Do we trust people’s capacity to be curious or not?

Constructive Subversion: A Guide To Organizational Change

December 8, 2013 Liam Barrington-Bush, www.roarmag.org Strategize! Anarchism

Working inside a traditional nonprofit NGO is filled with contractions for anarchists and others who want a non-hierarchical system. What to do about it? "I think there’s an alternative. I call it ‘constructive subversion.’ It lies in our ability to ‘hack’ these hierarchical reformist organisations we spend our days in, weaving networks of subversion to undermine the bureaucracy, and ‘prefiguring’ radical pockets (creating microcosms of wider change) within and around the existing structures. In other words, we bring our wider politics into our workplaces and create spaces and relationships that can operate beyond organisational control. . . What I do believe – and have seen and experienced – is that pockets of autonomy can be carved out of hierarchy, and that more radical work can be done in those spaces, once liberated."

Autonomy In Brazil: Below And Behind The June Uprising

November 22, 2013 Raúl Zibechi, roarmag.org Strategize! Anarchism, Brazil, Transportation

The huge mobilizations in June 2013 in 353 cities and towns in Brazil came as much a surprise to the political system as to analysts and social bodies. Nobody expected so many demonstrations, so numerous, in so many cities and for so long. As happens in these cases, media analyses were quick off the mark. Initially they focused on the immediate problems highlighted by the actions: urban transport, rising fare prices and the poor quality of service for commuters. Slowly the analyses and perspectives expanded to include the day-to-day dissatisfaction felt by a large part of the population. While there was widespread acknowledgement that basic family income had risen during the last decade of economic growth, social commentators began to focus on economic inclusion through consumption as the root of the dissatisfaction, alongside the persistence of social inequality. In this analysis, I would like to address the new forms of protest, organization, and mobilization from a social movement perspective. These new forms emerged within small activist groups composed mainly of young people that began organizing in 2003, the year Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva took power. Unlike political parties, trade unions and other traditional organizations formed in the early eighties, the new social movements are key to the June mobilizations because of their ability to organize beyond their local scene, to involve the broadest sectors of society in the struggle and to employ forms of action and organization that sets them apart from the groups that went before them.

Anarchists In Egypt, Will The Real Black Bloc Please Stand Up?

November 4, 2013 Goos Hofstee, www.yourmiddleeast.com Resist! Anarchism, Egypt

Egypt's Black Bloc grew out of their struggle for liberation from an authoritarian system, only after non-violent civil efforts had failed. While the group’s tactics originated out of a plan to protect women revolutionaries by forming a protective human shield around them at protests, the violence of the police and armed forces against peaceful protesters meant that the Bloc soon began to fight against the Morsi regime. Their mission they declare in the video, is to “fight against the fascist regime of the Muslim Brotherhood and its armed militia” Since Morsi was ousted, the Bloc has been fighting the military regime. The bloc’s goal has evolved to the “defence of the Revolution” against any dictatorial regime, be it military or religious. The Bloc’s members claim to have no affiliation with existing political parties and maintain that they have nothing against state institutions per se, "but against control by a particular system, the supremacy of a certain group." They further contend that "the best thing is to hit the existing system and its economy by sabotaging the system's institutions and not ones belonging to the public.

On ‘Reforms,’ Good And Bad

October 29, 2013 Kevin Carson, www.c4ss.org Educate! Anarchism

A bad reform operates from the unstated – often unconscious – starting assumptions of the system. It takes the existing institutional framework of society for granted, never questioning its status as the only feasible way of doing things, given some unstated goals which are taken to be necessary – but seeks to make it operate more smoothly and fairly for everyone. It’s the kind of “reform” that can only be carried out within the existing institutional framework, by the kinds of people currently in power.

Anarchist Tactics Grow in Brazil Protests As Demonstrators Battle Police

October 23, 2013 Staff, www.AP.org Resist! Anarchism, Brazil

"It was the Black Bloc that protected me in that protest," Coelho, 47, said at the beginning of a march last week that again descended into fighting between anarchists and police. "The police came in firing tear gas, hitting us with clubs. A young Black Bloc stepped right in between me and the police. If it weren't for them, the police would have destroyed us." That sentiment has helped turn the anarchists in Brazil into a driving force behind protests in recent weeks. The demonstrations have lessened in size but not frequency since masses took to the streets in June, fed up with a litany of problems that mostly center on corruption, woeful public services, and big spending on the upcoming World Cup and 2016 Olympics. More protests erupted Monday as demonstrators railed against a government auction of a big offshore oil field, which petroleum unions think should remain completely in Brazilian hands, and the anarchists rallied in Rio's historic center to support the strike of the teachers and oil workers.

Prisoner Sent To Solitary For “Copious Amounts Of Anarchist Publications”

October 18, 2013 Will Potter, www.vice.com Educate! Anarchism, Criminal Justice and Prisons

An inmate in Illinois has been in solitary confinement since July for possessing "copious amounts of Anarchist publications" and "handwritten Anarchist related essays," according to prison documents. Mark "Migs" Neiweem is a prisoner at the maximum security Pontiac Correctional Center who, in addition to the publications and his writings about the prison industrial complex, was also found in possession of anarchist symbols including a "Circle A" and "Circle E" (the latter, which stands for equality, is described in prison reports as representing "class warfare, the 99%"). "I've been doing this work since 1979 and I can't think of another case where someone has gotten a disciplinary report for something so obviously political as this," said Alan Mills, who is Neiweem's lawyer and a professor at Northwestern University.

The Government Shutdown — An Anarchist Dream?

October 2, 2013 Nathan Schneider, www.wagingnonviolence.org Educate! Anarchism, Government

Many may be surprised, for example, that actual anarchists aren’t necessarily rejoicing over the U.S. government’s latest form of self-annihilation. What they see taking place is a transfer of power from one kind of oppression, by a government that at least pretends to be democratic, to another that has no such pretensions. They point out that the shutdown won’t stop the NSA from spying on us, or police from enforcing laws in discriminatory ways, or migrant workers and nonviolent drug users from being imprisoned at staggering rates. The parts of government that the shutdown strips away are among those that bring us closer to being a truly free, egalitarian society: food assistance to ensure that everyone can eat, health care that more people can afford, and even public parks, where some of our greatest natural treasures are held in common. Meanwhile, ever more power is being handed over to corporations that are responsible only to their wealthiest shareholders.

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