Good news in the IAS world! Perspectives on Anarchist Theory v.12 n.1 is out as a print edition. Additionally, the first book in our series Anarchism and its Aspirations by Cindy Milstein is out now! You can order both from AK Press.
Also, we'll be announcing the grant recipients from the winter round of grants within the next couple of weeks. This was easily the toughest round of grants in memory, with so many quality applications to choose from!
We have unfortunately been experiencing technical difficulties and are working towards more functionality with our website!
Finally, we'd like to be able to expand the amount of research and writing we can fund and publish, but we'll need your help. Please consider donating $1-10/month, or more, so we can fully realize the IAS’s potential! We also appreciate onetime donations too, and any amount small or large is welcome.
In 1971 a group of Philadelphia-based activists formed the Movement for a New Society, a network of collectives dedicated to radical pacifist, feminist, and libertarian socialist politics. Over the next 18 years the organization grew to a peak of approximately 300 members in more than a dozen U.S. cities and made important contributions to anti-nuclear, radical ecology, and gender and sexual liberation struggles. The Movement for a New Society (MNS) sought to combine organizing campaigns that utilized direct action tactics with a commitment by its members to “live the revolution now” by transforming themselves and their social relationships, as well as by living collectively and establishing alternative institutions such as food co-ops. Many movement norms and forms of activism that contemporary anti-authoritarians often take for granted—the consensus process, the use of spokescouncils, internal anti-oppression work, and a focus on prefiguring in daily life the world one hopes to win—were either pioneered or heavily promoted by MNS. In 1988 the group dissolved due to the inhospitable political climate and to conflicts and challenges that arose out of MNS’ own innovative group process and strategy. (Read an historical account of Movement for a New Society here.)
Though its experiences are directly relevant to challenges facing radical organizers today, MNS remains relatively unknown. In the summer of 2008 Andy Cornell and Andrew Willis-Garcés interviewed founding member George Lakey as part of an effort to begin evaluating the MNS experience and drawing out lessons for contemporary social justice struggles.
Everyone is an artist. This would seem a simple enough place to begin; with a statement connecting directly to Joseph Beuys, and more generally to the historic avant-garde’s aesthetic politics aiming to break down barriers between artistic production and everyday life. It invokes an artistic politics that runs through Dada to the Situationists, and meanders and dérives through various rivulets in the history of radical politics and social movement organizing. But let’s pause for a second. While seemingly simple, there is much more to this one statement than presents itself. It is a statement that contains within it two notions of time and the potentials of artistic and cultural production, albeit notions that are often conflated, mixed, or confused.By teasing out these two notions and creatively recombining them, perhaps there might be something to be gained in rethinking the antagonistic and movement-building potential of cultural production: to reconsider its compositional potential.
The first notion alludes to a kind of potentiality present but unrealized through artistic work; the creativity that everyone could exercise if they realized and developed potentials that have been held back and stunted by capital and unrealistic conceptions of artistic production through mystified notions of creative genius. Let’s call this the ‘not-yet’ potential of everyone becoming an artist through the horizontal sublation of art into daily life. The second understanding of the phrase forms around the argument that everyone already is an artist and embodies creative action and production within their life and being. Duchamp’s notion of the readymade gestures towards this as he proclaims art as the recombination of previously existing forms. The painter creates by recombining the pre-given readymades of paints and canvas; the baker creates by recombining the readymade elements of flour, yeast, etc. In other words, it is not that everyone will become an artist, but that everyone already is immersed in myriad forms of creative production, or artistic production, given a more general notion of art.
The transcript (which I’ve edited slightly for clarity) is below. If you’d like an audio recording of the interview, go here or here. For a higher quality recording of the entire show, go here.
And thanks to Richard and Ron, who have interviewed several AK authors and collective members on their show.
What I perhaps foreground least in my approach to the world is the influence I've drawn (for over half my life) from the Dhamma -- the teachings of the historical Buddha -- or what early western orientalists popularized as Buddhism. It circulates in what seem obvious ways for me, but due to its rather shallow (and increasingly commodified) depiction in mainstream, western environments (due in no small part to the role of rather visible western practitioners), I suppose its impact on me is not always altogether apparent. I'm not a Care Bear, I'm notoriously argumentative and critically-inclined, and demanding when it comes to principle -- all in ways that likely clash with the typical associations people have with the tradition. And to be totally honest, often enough, they clash with what I know well to be a more skillful life, myself. Hence, perhaps, the impulse to undertake this process in a rather visible medium, as a reminder to myself.
The Dhammapada is probably the most central and common collections of the Buddha's teachings. The name translates as a compound of Dhamma and Pada, the former referring (depending on who you ask) to everything from "experience", to "the world as it is", to "the teaching", to "the law", and the latter referring to a footpath. I personally like the idea of it referring to the path of what one learns from experience -- kind of a School of Hard Knocks handbook.
Why an anarchist reading of it? I don't terribly mind that my day to day practice is not altogether evident or visible, and I'm not undertaking this so as to assert my own identification with the tradition or stake my claim to what I think is its authentic "core". Rather, I was sort of piqued by the Dharmacore blog's series on the Dhammapada, re-reading it and elaborating on its contemporary relevance. Especially since, upon routine return to the text, I find it exceedingly pragmatic, and likely under-appreciated in its resonance with the liberatory praxis of my non-Dhamma peers.
The following is an announcement for a surprise book AK Press is releasing in February. This Sunday marks an anniversary but this revolt and its continued fallout is not history. Things are heating up in Greece already as we post. Read on to be inspired, educated, and motivated by the comrades in Greece.
We Are an Image from the Future: The Greek Revolt of December 2008
edited by A.G. Schwarz, Tasos Sagris, and Void Network
In February 2010, AK Press will release a comprehensive book on the insurrection that occurred in Greece in December 2008 following the police assassination of 15-year-old Alexis Grigoropoulos, looking at its historical roots, its multiple forms and manifestations, and its continuing effects through the repression around the national elections in October, 2009. With dozens of photos, nearly forty original interviews with participants and observers of the revolt, and dozens of translated texts, articles, and communiqués from a variety of groups, We Are an Image from the Future explores the history of Greek social struggles and the anarchist space in particular, while trying to give multiple answers to the questions about where insurrections come from, what role do anarchists play, to what extent is the State able to repress them, what obstacles prevent insurrections from maturing into revolutions, and in what ways do they change society when they stop short of total revolution?
In commemoration of the one year anniversary of 6 December, in memory of Alexis and Tony and Mohamed and all the others, in memory of the prisoners of the struggle, we’re releasing several of the interviews from the book, so they can begin circulating now, before the book itself comes off the presses.
The only way to learn if we can swim is to jump in the water…
If we could keep something from last December this is the end of silence. The social explosion was not alone on the streets of Greece, but it came out together with the need for dialogue. The fact, which we are told for years now that “democracy” has no dead ends, was proven brutally to be a cheap lie of the authority. The dead ends are a lot. They materialize in the tenths of our day-to-day problems, in our society’s sickness.
During the last two months, the strategy of counterinsurgency developed by the greek state since December has passed to a new phase of totalisation. If we speak of counterinsurgency and not of repression it is because the former in contrast to the latter is not so much a military type intervention, as an integrated political and social technology producing consent, fear and defeatism. It aims not at the immediate annihilation of the insurgents, but at the removal of their living space: the conceptual, affective and cultural plane of the insurgency. This is a preventive strategy whose object is the wealth of possibilities that sprouted out of the insurrectionary event. It is a low intensity warfare, a politico-psychological warfare, in the sense that its goal is the corrosion of the political, social and psychological consistency of the insurgency. The basic principle of counterinsurgency is, on the one hand, to “win hearts and minds”, and, on the other hand, “not to take the fish out of the sea, but to dry the sea where the insurgents swim like fish”. And it does this by “separating and uniting”. Separating the insurgents from their possibilities, separating the insurgents from their political and social affinities, separating the insurgents from each other. And at the same time uniting social discontent with the call of reform, by representing the insurgency as a cause of backwardness, and uniting the forces of repression with wide segments of the population, by presenting the former in as both humane, pro-people and effective.
An Interview with Quentin Williams by Matthew Lyons
"Quentin Williams" is a community organizer who has been tracking the anti-tax, anti-Obama Tea Party protests for the past several months.
ML: Please give us a little background about your political work and how you got interested in understanding the Tea Party movement.
QW: I came up in the global justice movement that took shape during the mass mobilizations of Seattle and their after effects around the year 2000. Those movements had a strong critique of the state and capital as the engines behind the isms we face. It was a “we are the people” against “them” type fight. But when I moved to Cincinnati, the Klan (which wasn’t the government or big business) still had a public display on the town square every holiday season and still marched on rare occasion.
My early political foundation didn’t account for another set of “the people” that was further to the right than and also in opposition to the state and capital. Instead of viewing Klan activity or that like it as an active political element on the landscape, most of my northern and city-living friends discounted them as irrelevant stuck-in-the-pasts. But that didn’t sit right with me.
Last night during his CBS interview with Katie Couric, Glenn Beck said he may have voted for Hillary Clinton and that "John McCain would have been worse for the country than Barack Obama." This comment predictably spawned confusion among some liberals and anger among some conservatives. But even prior to that, there had been a palpable increase in the right-wing attacks on Beck -- some motivated by professional competition for the incredibly lucrative industry of right-wing opinion-making, some due to understandable discomfort with his crazed and irresponsible rhetoric, but much of it the result of Beck's growing deviation from GOP (and neoconservative) dogma. Increasingly, there is great difficulty in understanding not only Beck's political orientation but, even more so, the movement that has sprung up around him. Within that confusion lies several important observations about our political culture, particularly the inability to process anything that does not fall comfortably into the conventional "left-right" dichotomy through which everything is understood.
What I perhaps foreground least in my approach to the world is the influence I've drawn (for over half my life) from the Dhamma -- the teachings of the historical Buddha -- or what early western orientalists popularized as Buddhism. It circulates in what seem obvious ways for me, but due to its rather shallow (and increasingly commodified) depiction in mainstream, western environments (due in no small part to the role of rather visible western practitioners), I suppose its impact on me is not always altogether apparent. I'm not a Care Bear, I'm notoriously argumentative and critically-inclined, and demanding when it comes to principle -- all in ways that likely clash with the typical associations people have with the tradition. And to be totally honest, often enough, they clash with what I know well to be a more skillful life, myself. Hence, perhaps, the impulse to undertake this process in a rather visible medium, as a reminder to myself.