We’re always glad when the ideas in our books jump off their pages and morph into real-life (or online!) discussions, so we were pleased to see that one of the pieces from our recently published book Queering Anarchism has been making the rounds online lately. Jamie Heckert’s contribution, “Anarchy Without Opposition,” has just been excerpted on OccupyWallStreet.net. Here’s a taste:
“Anarchist politics are usually defined by their opposition to state, capitalism, patriarchy, and other hierarchies. My aim in this essay is to queer that notion of anarchism in a number of ways. To queer is to make strange, unfamiliar, weird; it comes from an old German word meaning to cross. What new possibilities arise when we learn to cross, to blur, to undermine, or overflow the hierarchical and binary oppositions we have been taught to believe in?
Hierarchy relies on separation. Or rather, the belief in hierarchy relies on the belief in separation. Neither is fundamentally true. Human beings are extrusions of the ecosystem—we are not separate, independent beings. We are interdependent bodies, embedded in a natural world itself embedded in a vast universe. Likewise, all the various social patterns we create and come to believe in are imaginary (albeit with real effects on our bodyminds). Their existence depends entirely on our belief, our obedience, our behavior. These in turn are shaped by imagined divisions. To realize that the intertwined hierarchical oppositions of hetero/homo, man/woman, whiteness/color, mind/body, rational/emotional, civilized/savage, social/natural, and more are all imaginary is perhaps a crucial step in letting go of them. How might we learn to cross the divide that does not really exist except in our embodied minds?
This, for me, is the point of queer: to learn to see the world through new eyes, to see not only what might be possible but also what already exists (despite the illusions of hierarchy). I write this essay as an invitation to perceive anarchism, to perceive life, differently. I’m neither interested in recruiting you, nor turning you queer. My anarchism is not better than your anarchism. Who am I to judge? Nor is my anarchism already queer. It is always becoming queer. How? By learning to keep queering, again and again, so that my perspective, my politics, and my presence can be fresh, alive.
Queering might allow recognition that life is never contained by the boxes and borders the mind invents. Taxonomies of species or sexualities, categories of race or citizenship, borders between nations or classes or types of politics—these are fictions. They are never necessary. To be sure, fictions have their uses. Perhaps in using them, we may learn to hold them lightly so that we, in turn, are not held by them.”
You can read the full excerpt here, and then check out the thoughtful response to “Anarchy Without Opposition” that was published recently on the “cultivating alternatives” blog. Here’s just a bit of it:
“At some points, Heckert calls for an anarchism with ‘no borders, no purity, no opposites,’ which seems a bit unrealistic in practice, since our lives are full of all kinds of borders and boundaries, some of which are desirable, and others that we can’t simply get rid of (refusing to ‘see’ the borders of private property will probably land you in jail). But I think his main point is that we don’t have to take these borders for granted; they can be queered, unsettled, and shifted. In this sense, this isn’t a call to get rid of all borders or divisions or oppositions, but to pay attention to what happens to them; to attend to them, to loosen them up, rather than assuming that they’re necessary or good or right…”
“…Furthermore, the really important and interesting stuff happens at the borders, not inside them. Heckert draws on permaculture’s insight that edges are the most productive and fertile parts of ecosystems, suggesting that anarchism would benefit from attending to the social edges, where people and communities permeate and connect: ‘The more that anarchism, a many branched river in our social ecosystem, mixes and mingles with swamp and stone, soil and soul, the more diverse forms of life will benefit’ (69).
An important problem with all this (and I wished he spent more time on this) is the fact that these ways of being aren’t just beliefs that we can change by thinking critically or declaring ourselves otherwise. As Heckert puts it: ‘declaring a politics to be nonhierarchical, anarchist, feminist, safe, or queer does not magically make this happen. It takes a different kind of magic: practice’ (70). Both the positive and negative ways of being are held in our bodies; they’re accumulated habits of relating to ourselves and to each other, and they’re often-unconscious attachments and investments. And working at being otherwise means working that through our bodies, and shifting our unconscious desires. How? I think Heckert’s suggestion is that we practice radical acceptance: of ourselves, of others, of the world, and of its hierarchies and borders (even if we want to tear them down): ‘there is no such thing as evil; there is nothing to oppose. Instead, we might learn to both empathize with the desires of others, and to express our own’ (71). This is a politics ‘that starts off accepting everything just as it is. From the basis of acceptance, we might then ask, what service can be offered? How can anarchy be nurtured, rather than demanded, forced?’ (71).”
And of course, if you haven’t already, we encourage you to check out Queering Anarchism to read “Anarchy Without Opposition” its entirety, as well as the many other thought-provoking pieces in the collection!
“We don’t see the prison-industrial complex as broken; we see it working very, very well at surveilling, policing, imprisoning, and killing exactly who it targets.”
Former AK Press collective member and current communications director of Critical Resistance, Isaac Ontiveros, gave a brilliant interview to Vice magazine recently. Read it and learn why abolition is the only real solution, not only to our twisted prison system, but to the whole interconnected and thoroughly racist network of surveillance, policing, the courts, and imprisonment. Support Critical Resistance, please…and read the book we co-published with them: Abolition Now! Ten Years of Strategy and Struggle against the Prison Industrial Complex.
Here’s an excerpt (you can read the whole thing on here):
VICE: What does it mean to be a “prison abolitionist”?
Isaac Ontiveros: What we mean is that we want to end the whole system of mutually reinforcing relationships between surveillance, policing, the courts, and imprisonment that fuel, maintain, and expand social and economic inequity and institutional racism. So, not just prisons.
By “abolition,” we mean that we are interested in doing away with the system rather than finding ways to make it work better or for it to be kinder and gentler. We don’t see the prison-industrial complex as broken; we see it working very, very well at surveilling, policing, imprisoning, and killing exactly who it targets. As abolitionists, we work to diminish the scope and power of the prison-industrial complex while simultaneously increasing the ability of those communities targeted by it to be stronger, healthier, and more self-determined.
Why do you think imprisonment came to be the dominant means of delivering “justice” in America?
The US government, along with state and local governments, has always been involved one way or another in enforcing racial inequities—whether through social codes, laws and statutes, policing policies and practices, encouragement of vigilante violence, or outright domestic warfare against certain segments of the population. And poor people of color have borne the brunt of this violence—and, importantly, they’ve also been at the forefront in fighting back.
Think about the incredible political repression that goes on in this country; think about the FBI’s Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO), unleashed against organizations like the Black Panther Party. Think of the massive cuts to social and health services, massive job loss, attacks on organized labor, and de facto permanent unemployment. Think of the war on drugs, the war on gangs, the war on terror. Think of the thousands of new offenses added to the criminal codes—the equivalent of one federal offense a week between 2000 and 2007. Think of the positively virulent anti-black racism that goes along with this. Think of the militarization of the US-Mexican border and immigrant detention. Think about even small towns having a SWAT team and zero-tolerance policing and of the largest prison-building project in world history in the state of California. Think about the disenfranchisement and dispossession of formerly imprisoned people. Think of the absolute pervasiveness of surveillance as well as media images that perpetuate some of the basest and most racist stereotypes imaginable of who is a criminal, or an undesirable, or a terrorist. And now think of the instability created by such violence and the need to control that instability—and the need to keep people from fighting back.
The US doesn’t actually imprison all that many violent people. Most of those behind bars committed nonviolent drug or property offenses. But what about the violent ones? Aren’t we better off having murderers and rapists off of the streets?
Well, I think an interesting part of that question is that even as the US has managed to lock up more people than any other country in the world, and has built probably the most massive and repressive policing, legal, and imprisonment system in history, we still tend to be pretty terrified in this country. This is not to say that violence—including sexual violence and murder—isn’t a real thing or a real fear. But I think in order to build up any hope of moving beyond the bleak situation we are in… we have to ask a few tough questions, and we have to change quite a few things. How do we relate to violence in our communities vis-à-vis the terrible violence that is wrought by the US government on a global scale, or by the prison-industrial complex domestically on a daily basis? How do we understand violence in relationship to the devastation caused by racism and economic inequity? How do we relate to sexual violence when we are inundated with horrendously misogynistic, homophobic, and transphobic images? Our fears might be real, but our fears are also being produced and exploited. And then, of course, how do we think of anything else but prisons and police when we’ve be indoctrinated with this idea that all problems are solved by locking people up?
At the same time, violence is a very real concern, especially in the communities that are most impacted by the prison-industrial complex. I think we are better off if we can develop sustainable and transformative ways to confront, address, and intervene in situations of harm and violence. And the thing is, for the most part, especially in marginalized communities, people are already working to resolve conflict and address harm without using police or imprisonment all the time. And they are doing it around some egregious forms of harm, including murder and sexual violence. And sometimes some things work better than others. As an abolitionist, I am always interested in figuring out ways to address harm and violence that don’t rely on using the police.
As we happily announced yesterday, Marshall “Eddie” Conway was freed from prison after being framed and locked up for nearly 44 years. At the age of 24, he was torn from his family and friends and political work by federal agents intent of shutting him down and shutting him up.
As anyone who has read his memoir (Marshall Law: The Life and Times of a Baltimore Black Panther) knows, they failed. Eddie stayed just as active, creating mentoring programs and prison labor unions, organizing prison libraries where there had been none, and generally refusing to accept the conditions the state had relegated him to.
After less than 24 hours on the outside (and with zero sleep), Eddie gave an interview to Democracy Now! You should give the whole thing a listen. It shows just how undefeated this amazing man remains after enduring some of the worst shit the state can dish out. And how sharp and relevant his analysis remains. Below the video, we’ve pasted a bit of that analysis, specifically about the government infiltration and counterinsurgency tactics used to unjustly jail him and so many other (right up to today).
AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to Marshall “Eddie” Conway. He left prison yesterday after nearly 44 years there. You mentioned that you realized later it was a member of the National Security Agency who was involved in setting up the Black Panther Party chapter in Baltimore, Eddie?
MARSHALL “EDDIE” CONWAY: There was a—the defense captain named Warren Hart, he worked for the National Security Agency. He set up the Black Panther Party. I was instrumental in exposing him after a lengthy investigation, and he fled the country. He went to Canada. He infiltrated Stokely Carmichael’s organization, All-African People’s Revolutionary Party. He was exposed up there after engaging in some skulduggery with the FBI. He went to the Caribbeans, I believe the Bahamas, and he actually undermined some of the political movements down there and actually caused a death or two. And I’m not really sure that he didn’t cause a couple deaths in Maryland in the Black Panther Party, and which is a part of what caused me to actually start investigating him, because one of our members were actually killed as a result of something that he encouraged him to do.
But apparently, and as Bob said, there’s like political prisoners all across the country now from the Black Panther Party that has been victims of the COINTELPRO operation. It undermined a lot of people. It painted a picture that caused people not to get fair trials. It goaded people into responding to the violence that it was encouraging. It caused a lot of our members to get assassinated. It caused a lot of conflicts with other organizations that normally wouldn’t have occurred had they not been in the background manipulating different organizations with poison pen letters, etc.
As a result of the Church Committee hearings in ’75, I believe it was, they determined that that operation was created to perpetrate violence among black groups and among other groups, and that was illegal activity. And some of the agents that participated in it got pardoned by the president, got presidential pardons. But all the Black Panther members that were victims of it didn’t receive pardons. And they are still in prisons right now across the country. They are victims, primarily, because of the skulduggery, but also because of the climate that was created. And so, that’s the kind of operations that were going on then. Now they have kind of like legalized most of that stuff, in terms of spying and so on.
It wasn’t your fault; it was never your fault. You did nothing wrong. Hold this tight to your heart: it wasn’t your fault.
At night when you lay there and your mind fills with images and you wonder if only, if you had . . . if you hadn’t . . . . Remember: it wasn’t your fault.
Dear Sister shares the lessons, memories, and vision of over fifty artists, activists, mothers, writers, and students who share their stories of survival or what it means to be an advocate and ally to survivors. Written in an epistolary format, this multi-generational, multi-ethnic collection of letters and essays is a moving journey into the hearts and minds of the survivors of rape, incest, and other forms of sexual violence, written directly to and for other survivors.
Dear Sister goes far beyond traditional books about healing that use “experts” to explain the experience of survivors to the rest of the world. Here, we learn what the world looks like through the eyes of a survivor. From a professor in the Midwest to a poet in Belgium, an escapee from a child prostitution ring, an advocate in the Congo, and a sex worker in San Francisco, Dear Sister touches on issues of feminism, love, disability, gender, justice, identity, and spirituality.
Filipino Bakery and Cafe
2852 Main St
San Diego, CA 92113
It wasn’t your fault; it was never your fault. You did nothing wrong. Hold this tight to your heart: it wasn’t your fault.
At night when you lay there and your mind fills with images and you wonder if only, if you had . . . if you hadn’t . . . . Remember: it wasn’t your fault.
Dear Sister shares the lessons, memories, and vision of over fifty artists, activists, mothers, writers, and students who share their stories of survival or what it means to be an advocate and ally to survivors. Written in an epistolary format, this multi-generational, multi-ethnic collection of letters and essays is a moving journey into the hearts and minds of the survivors of rape, incest, and other forms of sexual violence, written directly to and for other survivors.
Dear Sister goes far beyond traditional books about healing that use “experts” to explain the experience of survivors to the rest of the world. Here, we learn what the world looks like through the eyes of a survivor. From a professor in the Midwest to a poet in Belgium, an escapee from a child prostitution ring, an advocate in the Congo, and a sex worker in San Francisco, Dear Sister touches on issues of feminism, love, disability, gender, justice, identity, and spirituality.
Modern Times Bookstore
2919 24th Street
San Francisco, CA 94110
Gabriel, Melissa, and Pablo—three Chilean comrades—brought their speaking tour to the bay area last weekend. The national tour was sponsored by the Workers’ Solidarity Alliance, the Black Rose Anarchist Federation, and the First of May Anarchist Alliance. Here in Oakland, AK Press teamed up with the Bay Area Public School and the Sudo Room to host the event.
Despite having spent five weeks giving dozens of talks and interviews in US cities on both coasts and across the Midwest, they delivered energetic and fascinating presentations on how revolutionary anarchist organizing happens in Chile, touching on student, labor, and feminist organizing, on the practice of “social insertion,” on the distinction between “activism” and “militancy,” on building alliances across political tendencies, and lots more.
Here is the audio (talks plus Q&A). It’s worth the 90-minute listen!
Melissa, Gabriel, and PabloPablo looking suspicious at the pre-talk potluck
Melissa serenading the masses at Lake Merritt.
[and thanks to Chuck Morse for the top picture xo)
It wasn’t your fault; it was never your fault. You did nothing wrong. Hold this tight to your heart: it wasn’t your fault.
At night when you lay there and your mind fills with images and you wonder if only, if you had . . . if you hadn’t . . . . Remember: it wasn’t your fault.
Dear Sister shares the lessons, memories, and vision of over fifty artists, activists, mothers, writers, and students who share their stories of survival or what it means to be an advocate and ally to survivors. Written in an epistolary format, this multi-generational, multi-ethnic collection of letters and essays is a moving journey into the hearts and minds of the survivors of rape, incest, and other forms of sexual violence, written directly to and for other survivors.
Dear Sister goes far beyond traditional books about healing that use “experts” to explain the experience of survivors to the rest of the world. Here, we learn what the world looks like through the eyes of a survivor. From a professor in the Midwest to a poet in Belgium, an escapee from a child prostitution ring, an advocate in the Congo, and a sex worker in San Francisco, Dear Sister touches on issues of feminism, love, disability, gender, justice, identity, and spirituality.
It wasn’t your fault; it was never your fault. You did nothing wrong. Hold this tight to your heart: it wasn’t your fault.
At night when you lay there and your mind fills with images and you wonder if only, if you had . . . if you hadn’t . . . . Remember: it wasn’t your fault.
Dear Sister shares the lessons, memories, and vision of over fifty artists, activists, mothers, writers, and students who share their stories of survival or what it means to be an advocate and ally to survivors. Written in an epistolary format, this multi-generational, multi-ethnic collection of letters and essays is a moving journey into the hearts and minds of the survivors of rape, incest, and other forms of sexual violence, written directly to and for other survivors.
Dear Sister goes far beyond traditional books about healing that use “experts” to explain the experience of survivors to the rest of the world. Here, we learn what the world looks like through the eyes of a survivor. From a professor in the Midwest to a poet in Belgium, an escapee from a child prostitution ring, an advocate in the Congo, and a sex worker in San Francisco, Dear Sister touches on issues of feminism, love, disability, gender, justice, identity, and spirituality.
In Other Words Bookstore
14 NE Killingsworth Street
Portland, OR 97211
It wasn’t your fault; it was never your fault. You did nothing wrong. Hold this tight to your heart: it wasn’t your fault.
At night when you lay there and your mind fills with images and you wonder if only, if you had . . . if you hadn’t . . . . Remember: it wasn’t your fault.
Dear Sister shares the lessons, memories, and vision of over fifty artists, activists, mothers, writers, and students who share their stories of survival or what it means to be an advocate and ally to survivors. Written in an epistolary format, this multi-generational, multi-ethnic collection of letters and essays is a moving journey into the hearts and minds of the survivors of rape, incest, and other forms of sexual violence, written directly to and for other survivors.
Dear Sister goes far beyond traditional books about healing that use “experts” to explain the experience of survivors to the rest of the world. Here, we learn what the world looks like through the eyes of a survivor. From a professor in the Midwest to a poet in Belgium, an escapee from a child prostitution ring, an advocate in the Congo, and a sex worker in San Francisco, Dear Sister touches on issues of feminism, love, disability, gender, justice, identity, and spirituality.
Portland State University
PSU Multicultural Center
SMSU 228
Portland, OR
It wasn’t your fault; it was never your fault. You did nothing wrong. Hold this tight to your heart: it wasn’t your fault.
At night when you lay there and your mind fills with images and you wonder if only, if you had . . . if you hadn’t . . . . Remember: it wasn’t your fault.
Dear Sister shares the lessons, memories, and vision of over fifty artists, activists, mothers, writers, and students who share their stories of survival or what it means to be an advocate and ally to survivors. Written in an epistolary format, this multi-generational, multi-ethnic collection of letters and essays is a moving journey into the hearts and minds of the survivors of rape, incest, and other forms of sexual violence, written directly to and for other survivors.
Dear Sister goes far beyond traditional books about healing that use “experts” to explain the experience of survivors to the rest of the world. Here, we learn what the world looks like through the eyes of a survivor. From a professor in the Midwest to a poet in Belgium, an escapee from a child prostitution ring, an advocate in the Congo, and a sex worker in San Francisco, Dear Sister touches on issues of feminism, love, disability, gender, justice, identity, and spirituality.
“Anarchist politics are usually defined by their opposition to state, capitalism, patriarchy, and other hierarchies. My aim in this essay is to queer that notion of anarchism in a number of ways. To queer is to make strange, unfamiliar, weird; it comes from an old German word meaning to cross. What new possibilities arise when we learn to cross, to blur, to undermine, or overflow the hierarchical and binary oppositions we have been taught to believe in?
