#Agenda

Zaterdag, 30 september: paneldiscussie “arbeidersstrijd en solidariteit”
https://www.doorbraak.eu/30-september-amsterdam-paneldiscussie-arbeidersstrijd-en-solidariteit/

Vanaf 15:00 uur
Eerste Schinkelstraat 14
#Amsterdam

#30September #AnarchistLibrary #Paneldiscussie
#Arbeidersstrijd #Kapitalisme #Solidariteit #Vakbond

Looking for some good #QueerAnarchist #Theory #Books specifically about #GenderFluidity. #LibGen, #AnarchistLibrary, and an #Ecosia search didn't return any helpful results.

Suggestions?

Bad day to lose reddit and twitter and rights, huh?
What can you do?
#EducateYourself
#EducateOthers
Great free resource is the #AnarchistLibrary
#BelieveSurvivors
#Listen to #Indigenous voices
#GoOutside
Take #DirectAction and support others who do.
#ArmYourself if you can
#Practice
Find or make your #AffinityGroup
#Resist

Or stay inside, stay asleep, and wonder why it keeps getting worse.

I want to write #Theory or at least an essay on some radical topics but fuck if I don't know what to write about.

#AnarchistLibrary #Anarchism

I just deployed my revamped #Gemini mirror of The Anarchist Library. It now has a search feature and is much faster and more reliable.

This rendition uses #dotnet7 and #mariadb

gemini://library.inu.red
https://portal.mozz.us/gemini/library.inu.red

#anarchistlibrary #anarchism

#anarchistlibrary #library #anarchistbook #book #books #radicalreads #radicalbooks #zwarteuil #degrotebroek #nijmegen #deklinkernijmegen #booklover #bookworm #read #reads #reading #radicalreads #bookstagrammer #booksofinstagram #bookstagram #bookshelf #bookaddict #bookstagrammer #bookphotography #booklover #bookaholic

There’s A Problem with Anarchist Media – by Nerd Teacher

“Perhaps it starts with the fact that these anarchist media organisations are often established as formal businesses and nonprofits (even if they call themselves worker-run collectives). Infuriating though it might be, they have to be established in some way because they’re aware that they have to exist within a capitalist system. If they sell things and generate any kind of revenue, they’re required to submit taxes so that they can continue to provide their products for our “intellectual self-defense,” a term that feels a bit holier-than-thou for what buying a book or listening to a podcast is.

And honestly, I’m not here to say that all of the work they publish and share is meaningless because it isn’t. I have found numerous texts that have shifted my own ideas or helped me build upon or articulate others, and I’ve listened to people who have improved my understanding of different topics or sent me down rabbit holes I never expected to follow.

But it is telling that, though they claim to hold anti-capitalist values, they persist in using capitalist strategies and fail to recognise how that impacts them, the way they organise, and their customers. And that third category is customers because it’s not really comradeship to sell stuff. It can be seen in the ways they talk about their work and what they do, and it can be understood in the gaps they create because they’re too focused on competing in a capitalist system against traditional media (whether they recognise it or not).

It’s a bit perplexing that we’ve bought into this model so thoroughly, they’ve actively chosen to use these strategies. They recognise that traditional media is their competition, but they’re choosing to compete with them using their tools.

Should we be there? Yes. Should it be our primary focus? I really don’t think so..”

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/nerd-teacher-there-s-a-problem-with-anarchist-media

#AnarchistLibrary #AnarchistMedia #Critique #NerdTeacher

The Black Flag Catalyst Revolt Guide – by The Black Flag Catalyst.

“The following resource is intended to be a guide for those who wish to carry out concerted political action and includes tactics for both militant and pacifistic direct action, organizing, creating assemblies, and even some introductory aspects of being a street medic. The goal of this guide is to compile the knowledge from the various insurrections across the planet and turn them into a single resource which can be given to anyone and to inform that person on their place in the broader schema.

For this reason, we will include both peaceful and non-peaceful tactics within this guide. If we are to learn from the successful movements of the past, we can see that all successful pressure has been the collusion of the peaceful and non-peaceful aspects of the movement, such that the peaceful party can lobby the state to concede, saying to them “now see? Wouldn’t you rather deal with me than them? Sit down and make some concessions to those suffering people.”

Meanwhile, the non-peaceful protesters escalate the aggression of their actions such as to put a clock on the state. Direct action should therefore not be seen as a chaotic by-product to be avoided. It should instead be seen as a necessity to extract outcomes for the movement. Ultimately, if the demands of the protests are not met, revolution should be the threat. In this way, we are to transform the state to our whims, not vice versa. And if it does not concede, we will have built the bodies of prefiguration that will be prepared to replace it..”

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/bfc-revolt-guide

#AnarchistLibrary #Anarchy #Introductory #Organizing #Protest #HowTo #StreetMedicine

Letters of Insurgents – by Fredy & Lorraine Perlman

“This change is reviving my interest in my surroundings, in my fellow beings, in myself, in you. If there is no change, if this is another illusion, if I’m not writing to Sophia but to a benevolent protector of the people’s real interests, a censor, then I’d rather be back in prison than “free.” There’s no joy in such freedom. Such a life is filled with dread and the only ones free of that dread are those already in prison. If the change taking place around me is an illusion or a trap, then I no longer care if I’m arrested again. Even in solitary confinement a prisoner tortured by dampness and rats is comforted by the thought that others survived it, that they weren’t crushed by moving walls or descending ceilings. But the policed “free citizen” can’t ever get rid of the fear that he may be dragged off at any time, wherever he is, whoever he’s with; that all his friendships and all his projects can suddenly end; that the front door of his house can crash open at midnight; that the ceiling of his bedroom might start descending on him while he’s asleep. In a context where any word or gesture can lead to the dreaded arrest there’s no freedom. In such a context, beings vibrant with the will to live are transformed into beings for whom death is no worse than a life marked by the dread of death. The prisons and camps don’t contain only those inside them but also those outside them. All human beings are transformed into prisoners and prison guards..”

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/sophia-nachalo-and-yarostan-vochek-letters-of-insurgents

#AnarchistLibrary #Fiction #Revolution #Love

Anarchy Not Anarchism – by Anarqxista Goldman.

“ANARCHY, I am coming to believe, matters a lot more than ANARCHISM. The latter all too often becomes a dogma or, worse, a party — which is the opposite of ANARCHY. ANARCHY is nothing to do with organisations, dogmas, parties, rules, or any of the far too many anarchist cops that exist in the world today. The danger of any ISM, in fact, is that it becomes dogma or doctrine or a measure of people’s purity or of their activity. These are anti-anarchistic endeavours I do not support and, in fact, condemn. Anarchism is NOT accountability, as some insist, because in a world of free association, which is very anarchist, you simply DISASSOCIATE from those you dislike or despise. [Graeber and Wengrow detail such realities anthropologically and historically, with apparent favour, in The Dawn of Everything, in fact, and refer to the ability to simply “leave town” as a freedom which puts the brakes on societies ever “getting stuck” to begin with.]

There is then no need for cops. You just avoid, or otherwise move away from, those to whom you do not give the privilege of your company or solidarity. There is also then no need for dogma or doctrine since all it would be policing is the freely given association of comrades or associates anyway. If you have the social, political and economic freedom not to “get stuck”, if you can just move away or go elsewhere without further consequence, then lots of things now thought necessary, such as police, punishments, prisons, etc., fall away as a result. We need to think anarchy through a lot more thoroughly than almost anybody actually does, it seems to me. Often this thinking is NOT done exactly because people are too busy conjuring up dogmatic forms of anarchism, new forms of coercion and control, by which to gerrymander the whole. No, my friends. We need a functioning anarchy not dogmatic anarchisms..”

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/anarqxista-goldman-anarchy-not-anarchism

#AnarchistLibrary #Anarchy #Anarchism #Insurrection #Illegalism #AnarqxistaGoldman

Anarchism and Other Essays – by Emma Goldman (1910)

“Property is robbery, said the great French Anarchist Proudhon. Yes, but without risk and danger to the robber. Monopolizing the accumulated efforts of man, property has robbed him of his birthright, and has turned him loose a pauper and an outcast. Property has not even the time-worn excuse that man does not create enough to satisfy all needs. The A B C student of economics knows that the productivity of labor within the last few decades far exceeds normal demand. But what are normal demands to an abnormal institution? The only demand that property recognizes is its own gluttonous appetite for greater wealth, because wealth means power; the power to subdue, to crush, to exploit, the power to enslave, to outrage, to degrade. America is particularly boastful of her great power, her enormous national wealth. Poor America, of what avail is all her wealth, if the individuals comprising the nation are wretchedly poor? If they live in squalor, in filth, in crime, with hope and joy gone, a homeless, soilless army of human prey..”

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/emma-goldman-anarchism-and-other-essays

#AnarchistLibrary #Anarchism #Introductory #Abolition #EmmaGoldman

Armed Joy – by Alfredo M. Bonanno

“This book has become topical again, but in a different way. Not as a critique of a heavy monopolising structure that no longer exists, but because it can point out the potent capabilities of the individual on his or her road, with joy, to the destruction of all that oppresses and regulates them.

Before ending I should mention that this book was ordered to be destroyed in Italy. The Italian Supreme Court ordered it to be burned. All the libraries that had a copy received a circular from the Home Ministry ordering its incineration. More than one librarian refused to burn the book, considering such a practice to be worthy of the Nazis or the Inquisition, but by law the volume cannot be consulted. For the same reason the book cannot be distributed legally in Italy and many comrades had copies confiscated during the vast wave of raids carried out for that purpose.

I was sentenced to eighteen months’ imprisonment for writing this book..”

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/alfredo-m-bonanno-armed-joy

#AnarchistLibrary #Anarchy #Insurrection #AntiWork #AlfredoMBonanno

Bang Up and Smash – by ASBO

“Many people have been sentenced or remanded recently for the Kill the Bill demos, and are currently in prison, or awaiting trial. There are many more to come. In the process of providing random information about prison to people facing custodial sentences, I have revisited some of the concepts that I outlined in Bang-Up. This has fuelled my desire for “perfect disorder”, and reminded me of the importance of asking difficult questions.

Things were bad for anyone interacting with the courts and prison system when I wrote Bang-Up. Even with my most cynical hat on, I never would have imagined how much worse stuff would get, and how quickly. The Coronavirus Act (2020) suspended even the most basic crumbs of ‘rights’ that prisoners had in the ‘United’ Kingdom; with an unprecedented roll out of techniques previously hidden, (but routinely used) by the state on its incarcerated population. I won’t go into that for now, but suffice to say, in relation to prisons, Covid-19 is a gift to all governments in terms of increasing repression, legitimising new techniques of control, and increasing bang-up..”

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/asbo-bang-up-and-smash-2nd-edition

#AnarchistLibrary #Anarchy #Repression #Prison #Abolition #PrisonerSupport

There Never Was a West – by David Graeber.

“What follows emerges largely from my own experience of the alternative globalization movement, where issues of democracy have been very much at the center of debate.

Anarchists in Europe or North America and indigenous organizations in the Global South have found themselves locked in remarkably similar arguments. Is “democracy” an inherently Western concept? Does it refer a form of governance (a mode of communal self-organization), or a form of govern ment (one particular way of organizing a state apparatus) ? Does democracy necessarily imply majority rule?

Is representative democracy really democracy at all? Is the word permanently tainted by its origins in Athens, a militaristic, slave-owning society founded on the systematic repression of women?

Or does what we now call “democracy” have any real historical connection to Athenian democracy in the first place? Is it possible for those trying to develop decentralized forms of consensus-based direct democracy to reclaim the word?

If so, how will we ever convince the majority of people in the world that “democracy” has nothing to do with electing representatives? If not, if we instead accept the standard definition and start calling direct democracy something else, how can we say we’re against democracy—a word with such universally positive associations?”

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/david-graeber-there-never-was-a-west

#AnarchistLibrary #Anarchism #Democracy #History #DavidGraeber

Tankies and the Left-Unity Scam.

“Lenin was an oppressor of the peasants and working classes, a despot, and, by 1918, the victorious enemy of the Russian revolution. A true counter-revolutionary. Which isn't too surprising, considering his bourgeois background and trade as a lawyer. He perfectly met the Marxist definition of a reactionary, yet tankies hold him up as the father of their "Marxist-Leninist" ideology and praise him as a great communist.

Lenin's acts later inspired further dictators in the 20th century who also misused the word "communism" to describe their brutal state-capitalist regimes. He effectively destroyed any chance humanity had to achieve communism in that century, and the damage he did to revolutionary action is still being felt today as the word "communism" has become synonymous with "totalitarian state" in the public consciousness..”

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/ziq-tankies-and-the-left-unity-scam

#AnarchistLibrary #LeftUnity #Tankies #Communism #Ziq

Blessed is the Flame – by Serafinski

“I began thinking about this text in Toronto, where my 93 year old grandmother lives on the seventh floor of a high-rise apartment overlooking Highway 401. Standing at the floor-to-ceiling windows in her kitchen, the horizon is swallowed by twelve lanes of concrete and an endless river of traffic, equal parts terrifying and hypnotic. How many gruesome stories are written into this one landscape? The concrete road tells the story of the colonization of Turtle Island, the commuter traffic tells the story of mass domestication under the rhythms of capitalism, the billowing smog tells a story of the future that’s almost too frightening to believe. Drinking tea quietly, my grandmother is clearly unfazed by this ominous procession — it is the world she now knows and accepts. In a previous chapter of her life she confronted and survived a very different infrastructure of death: as a young adult, the bunkers, factories, and crematorium of Auschwitz defined nearly a year of her life. Her experiences of the Nazi holocaust sit close with me as I look out over this glowing ribbon of death and wrestle with the ideas of nihilism…”

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/serafinski-blessed-is-the-flame

#AnarchistLibrary #Anarchy #Resistance #Nihilism

The Shock of Victory – by David Graeber

“The biggest problem facing direct action movements is that we don’t know how to handle victory.

This might seem an odd thing to say because of a lot of us haven’t been feeling particularly victorious of late. Most anarchists today feel the global justice movement was kind of a blip: inspiring, certainly, while it lasted, but not a movement that succeeded either in putting down lasting organizational roots or transforming the contours of power in the world. The anti-war movement was even more frustrating, since anarchists and anarchist tactics were largely marginalized. The war will end, of course, but that’s just because wars always do. No one is feeling they contributed much to it.

I want to suggest an alternative interpretation. Let me lay out three initial propositions here..”

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/david-graeber-the-shock-of-victory

#AnarchistLibrary #Anarchism #Democracy #History #DavidGraeber

Kill the Couple in Your Head.

“We propose a transversal approach that rejects this useless deadlock and intends to attack authority on all levels — from the intimate to the structural — understanding that it is in the interest of power to maintain the idea that how we are controlled and how we control one another are separate concerns. We want to address these phenomena — gender, Family, Couple, Sex — as forms or institutions that capture our desires and energies.

Our desire for companionship and commitment is sucked into the institution of the Couple and the Family. Our erotic energies are captured by the institution of Sex. Gender is reproduced through the violence of these institutions. We want to understand how the prison functions so that we can stage a breakout, without creating new subcultural moral standards for a superior anarchist subject. We have all been caught in the snares of these social forms and it’s not a question of purity..”

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/anonymous-kill-the-couple-in-your-head

#AnarchistLibrary #Anarchy #Negation #Sex #Love #Feminism

Anarchy – by Errico Malatesta

“The basic function of government everywhere in all times, whatever title it adopts and whatever its origin and organisation may be, is always that of oppressing and exploiting the masses, of defending the oppressors and the exploiters: and its principal, characteristic and indispensable, instruments are the police agent and the tax-collector, the soldier and the gaoler — to whom must be invariably added the trader in lies, be he priest or schoolmaster, remunerated or protected by the government to enslave minds and make them docilely accept the yoke..”

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/errico-malatesta-anarchy

#AnarchistLibrary #Anarchy #Introductory #ErricoMalatesta

Are You An Anarchist? The Answer May Surprise You! – by David Graeber

“At their very simplest, anarchist beliefs turn on to two elementary assumptions. The first is that human beings are, under ordinary circumstances, about as reasonable and decent as they are allowed to be, and can organize themselves and their communities without needing to be told how.
The second is that power corrupts. Most of all, anarchism is just a matter of having the courage to take the simple principles of common decency that we all live by, and to follow them through to their logical conclusions. Odd though this may seem, in most important ways you are probably already an anarchist — you just don’t realize it.
Let’s start by taking a few examples from everyday life..”
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/david-graeber-are-you-an-anarchist-the-answer-may-surprise-you

#AnarchistLibrary #Anarchism #Introductory #DavidGraeber