Posted on October 24th, 2011 in Uncategorized
Ryan Harvey isn’t an AK author (though I hope he will be someday!), but he’s a friend and a comrade, and he’s one of the few vets of the anti-globalization movement who’s managed to stay connected to contemporary organizing in a sustained and productive way–and managed to craft some of the more nuanced reflections on the current debates within organizing circles, frequently from an explicitly anarchist/anti-authoritarian perspective. This piece was written over a week ago for Baltimore’s Indypendent Reader, but I’ve found myself going back to it more than once in the last week since it first appeared, and wanted to share it with all of you. Enjoy!
“Globalization” Is Coming Home: With Eyes Focused On Wall Street, Major Protest Plans Grow In Europe
By Ryan Harvey
It’s almost bedtime here in London, but Facebook is up and at it. Almost every post that appears in my news feed is about #occupywallstreet, and old and new friends have been contacting me all week asking if I will be at my home town Baltimore’s own version, which began on Tuesday.
But I am still in Europe, finishing a two-month tour of 12 European countries, many of which are alive with talk about what’s happening in New York.
But I am still in Europe, finishing a two-month tour of 12 European countries, many of which are alive with talk about what’s happening in New York.
An old friend I haven’t spoken with in ten years has friend-requested me with a message wondering if I have any advice for her to “plug back in” to activism. Another friend has posted an update from a 1,000-strong “Occupy Philly” planning meeting in Philadelphia.
A friend from Sweden has asked what my thoughts are on the Wall Street protest, and a friend in Italy has messaged me to let me know about the October 15 call. “It’s spreading”, she says.
Indeed, with protest camps now growing across the United States, a major call for similar gatherings to take place starting October 15 is gaining strength across Europe and in other parts of the world.
The call, first initiated by the Indignados, the name adopted by the movement that arose in May 15 across Spain and brought hundreds of thousands of people out in the streets against austerity measures and budget cuts, is online at http://15october.net.
As the calls spreads, over a hundred Indignados have just arrived after a 2 1/2 month-long march from Spain to setup camp outside of the EU summit in Brussels.
“Anti-Globalization” Comes Home
Exactly ten years ago, a “European Summer” saw massive protests in Gothenburg, Barcelona, Salzburg, and Genoa, against “neoliberalism”, the corporate economic system behind what is commonly called “globalization.” Emphasizing the privatization of public services and resources and the removal of environmental and human rights regulations deemed “barriers to trade”, neoliberal globalization has been widely recognized for exacerbating the gulf between rich and poor on a global scale.
The 2001 protests were the largest and most brutal events in the Global North of what was dubbed by the media as the “anti-globalization” movement, which first caught the public’s eyes in the Global North in Seattle at the end of 1999 when the World Trade Organization’s summit was shut-down by 50,000 people.
The European Summer would see three protesters shot by the police in Gothenburg, and in Genoa, 21 year-old Carlo Giuliani would be shot twice in the face and then run over by a police truck, killing him instantly.
The echoes of these events can still be heard throughout Europe, especially among those who experienced the traumatic police repression or served jail time over their role in the events. A few weeks ago I saw a beautiful stencil memorial to Carlo in a hallway of one of Austria’s last political squats, just one reminder that the political memory of these uprisings is very much part of the fabric of the European autonomous left.
But there’s a much louder echo being heard in Europe right now, the echo of corporate-globalization itself. And like last decade, a rage that has built up over many years is beginning to emerge in the form of a mass, loosely coordinated social movement.
In Europe, young and old alike have been facing the dissolution of what have long been considered staples of western European countries; England’s health care system is on the privatization block; the right to squat abandoned houses is being stripped in England and The Netherlands; the International Monetary Fund has tightened its grip on Greece, Ireland, and Portugal with increasing austerity measures, and tuition rates for students across the continent are rising dramatically.
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Posted on October 20th, 2011 in AK Authors!, Events, Happenings
Join us to celebrate the release of books written and edited by Chandan Reddy, Jafari S. Allen, Patricia Clough & Craig Willse, Fatima El-Tayeb, Eric Stanley, Jack Halberstam and Dean Spade. We’ll start with a reception at Red Emma’s from 8-10pm and then move on 3 blocks to drinks at Club Hippo, 1 West Eager Street.
About the books:
Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex, eds. Eric Stanley and Nat… Smith
http://www.akpress.org/2011/items/captivegenders
Beyond Biopolitics: Essays on the Governance of Life and Death, eds. Craig Willse and Patricia Clough
http://www.dukeupress.edu/Catalog/ViewProduct.php?productid=18289&viewby=title
Freedom with Violence: Race, Sexuality, and the US State, Chandan Reddy
http://www.dukeupress.edu/Catalog/ViewProduct.php?productid=48443&viewby=title
The Queer Art of Failure, Jack Halberstam
http://www.dukeupress.edu/Catalog/ViewProduct.php?productid=19523
Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, and the Limits of Law, Dean Spade
http://www.southendpress.org/2010/items/87965
We encourage people to support Red Emma’s and other local Baltimore spots. http://www.redemmas.org/
Posted on October 20th, 2011 in AK Authors!, Events, Happenings
AK author Dominque Stevenson (co-author of Marshall Law) along with our comrades and
distributed authors Dan Berger (The Hidden 1970s), James Tracy (Hillbilly
Nationalists, Urban Race Rebels, and Black Power), and Betty Robinson (All
Hands on the Freedom Plow). Saturday, 10/22 at 7pm. Liam’s is 22 W. North
Avenue, Baltimore.
Posted on October 20th, 2011 in AK Authors!, Events, Happenings
Join us for an amazing panel discussion on contemporary race theory and racial justice, including several AK authors and contributors:
- Andrea Smith
- Lisa Nakamura
- Ruth Gilmore
- Fred Moten
- Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
- David Roediger
- Dylan Rodríguez
- Scott Kurashige
Cosponsored by Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle. Donations at the door to fund the struggle against the Youth Jail; refreshments to be served (original plans for a full dinner have been scaled back).
About the panelists:
Andrea Smith (Cherokee) is a longtime anti-violence and Native American activist and scholar. She is co-founder of the Boarding School Healing Project and INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence, a national grassroots organization that utilizes direct action and critical dialogue. In addition to Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide, Smith authored Native Americans and The Christian Right: The Gendered Politics of Unlikely Alliances and helped edit INCITE!’s two anthologies, The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex and Color Of Violence.
Lisa Nakamura is the Director of the Asian American Studies Program, Professor in the Institute of Communication Research and Media and Cinema Studies Department and Professor of Asian American Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She is the author of Digitizing Race: Visual Cultures of the Internet (University of Minnesota Press, 2007), Cybertypes: Race, Ethnicity, and Identity on the Internet (Routledge, 2002) and a co-editor of Race in Cyberspace (Routledge, 2000) and Race After the Internet (Routledge, forthcoming 2011).
Ruth Wilson Gilmore teaches at the City University of New York Graduate Center. She is a member of the founding collective of Critical Resistance and author of Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California.
Fred Moten is the Helen L. Bevington Professor of Modern Poetry at Duke University, where he works at the intersection of black studies, performance studies, poetry and critical theory. He is author of In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (University of Minnesota Press, 2003), I ran from it but was still in it. (Cusp Books, 2007), Hughson’s Tavern (Leon Works, 2008) and B Jenkins (Duke University Press, 2010).
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz is a longtime activist, university professor, and writer. In addition to numerous scholarly books and articles she has published a trilogy of historical memoirs, Red Dirt: Growing Up Okie (Verso, 1997), Outlaw Woman: A Memoir of the War Years, 1960–1975 (City Lights, 2002), and Blood on the Border: a Memoir of the Contra War (South End Press, 2005).
David Roediger teaches history and African American Studies at University of Illinois. He has written on U.S. movements for a shorter working day, on labor and poetry, on the history of radicalism, and on the racial identities of white workers and of immigrants. His books include Our Own Time , The Wages of Whiteness, How Race Survived U.S. History, and Towards the Abolition of Whiteness, all from Verso, Colored White (California), and Working Towards Whiteness (Basic). The former chair of the editorial committee of the Charles H. Kerr Company, the world’s oldest radical publisher, he has been active in the surrealist movement, labor support and anti-racist organizing.
Dylan Rodríguez is professor and chair of the Department of Ethnic Studies at the University of California Riverside. Rodríguez’s political and intellectual work addresses the social logics of racial genocide as they operate through the changing systems of racist state violence, global white supremacy, and other forms of institutionalized dehumanization. His scholarly and pedagogical practices move across the fields of critical race and ethnic studies, radical social thought, and cultural studies. He is a founding member of Critical Resistance, and has worked closely with numerous organizations and scholarly collectives.
Rodríguez is the author of two books: Forced Passages: Imprisoned Radical Intellectuals and the U.S. Prison Regime (University of Minnesota Press, 2006) and Suspended Apocalypse: White Supremacy, Genocide, and the Filipino Condition (University of Minnesota Press, 2009).
Scott Kurashige is an associate professor of American culture and history, and director of the Asian/Pacific Islander American Studies Program at the University of Michigan. He is the author of The Shifting Grounds of Race: Black and Japanese Americans in the Making of Multiethnic Los Angeles (Princeton University Press, 2008), which received the American Historical Association’s 2008 Albert J. Beveridge Award “for the best book in English on the history of the United States, Latin America, or Canada from 1492 to the present.” He is also co-author of Grace Lee Boggs’ The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the Twenty-First Century (University of California Press, 2011) He has over twenty years of experience as a grassroots activist and is a board member of the James and Grace Lee Boggs Center to Nurture Community Leadership based in Detroit, Michigan.
Posted on October 20th, 2011 in AK Authors!, Events, Happenings
Come celebrate the release of Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex (AK Press)
A night of reading, discussion, and conspiring!
Pathologized, terrorized, and confined, trans/gender non-conforming and queer folks have always struggled against the enormity of the prison industrial complex. The first collection of its kind, Eric A. Stanley and Nat Smith bring together current and former prisoners, act…ivists, and academics to offer new ways for understanding how race, gender, ability, and sexuality are lived under the crushing weight of captivity. Through a politic of gender self-determination, this collection argues that trans/queer liberation and prison abolition must be grown together. From rioting against police violence and critiquing hate crimes legislation to prisoners demanding access to HIV medications, and far beyond, Captive Genders is a challenge for us all to join the struggle.
with:
Che Gossett is a black gender queer writer and activist, they are committed to struggles for prison abolition, gender self determination and trans liberation, black radical politics and AIDS activism.
Eric A. Stanley works at the intersections of radical trans/queer politics, theories of state violence, and visual culture. Eric co-edited Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex (AK Press, 2011) and along with Chris Vargas, directed the films Homotopia (2006) and Criminal Queers (2011).
Ralowe T. Ampu is the seductive fragrance wafting through milieus of unbridled danger and intrigue. Yes, whether it be outing gay Castro realtors as AIDS profiteers with ACT UP and GAY SHAME or trying to free the New Jersey 4, or prevent the non-profit management company in her SRO from killing her neighbors, Ralowe is there.
Toshio Meronek is on the editorial collective for The Abolitionist, Critical Resistance’s newspaper and runs whereslulu.com, a website on disability and popular culture.
Posted on October 20th, 2011 in AK Authors!, Events, Happenings
Come celebrate the release of: Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex!! This panel will highlight the connections between mass incarceration, trans/queer lives, and the politics of abolition!
Pathologized, terrorized, and confined, trans/gender non-conforming and queer folks have always struggled against the enormity of the prison industrial complex. The first collection of its kind, Eric A. Stanley… and Nat Smith bring together current and former prisoners, activists, and academics to offer new ways for understanding how race, gender, ability, and sexuality are lived under the crushing weight of captivity. Through a politic of gender self-determination, this collection argues that trans/queer liberation and prison abolition must be grown together. From rioting against police violence and critiquing hate crimes legislation to prisoners demanding access to HIV medications, and far beyond, Captive Genders is a challenge for us all to join the struggle.
This panel will offer the audience an overview of the major themes of the collection, including current and historical examples of the ways police and the prison produce the violence of gender normativity, and examples of past and current organizing against the prison industrial complex.
with:
Eric A. Stanley works at the intersections of radical trans/queer politics, theories of state violence, and visual culture. Eric co-edited Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex (AK Press, 2011) and along with Chris Vargas, directed the films Homotopia (2006) and Criminal Queers (2011).
Ralowe T. Ampu is the seductive fragrance wafting through milieus of unbridled danger and intrigue. Yes, whether it be outing gay Castro realtors as AIDS profiteers with ACT UP and GAY SHAME or trying to free the New Jersey 4, or prevent the non-profit management company in her SRO from killing her neighbors, Ralowe is there.
Toshio Meronek is on the editorial collective for The Abolitionist, Critical Resistance’s newspaper and runs whereslulu.com, a website on disability and popular culture.
Che Gossett is a black gender queer writer and activist, they are committed to struggles for prison abolition, gender self determination and trans liberation, black radical politics and AIDS activism.
Posted on October 19th, 2011 in AK Authors!, AK News, Anarchist Publishers, Events
D.D. Johnston, author of Peace, Love, and Petrol Bombs, will be discussing radical fiction and the funnier sides of anarchism at Housmans Bookshop on the eve of the anarchist bookfair. He’ll be asking why all the best writers are anarchists, what happens if you mispronounce chants in German, and why occupying a twelve-year-old girl’s slumber party is never, ever, an acceptable protest technique. The event starts at 7pm, on Friday 21st October, and the cost is £3, redeemable against any purchase.
http://www.housmans.com/events.php
http://ddjohnston.org
Posted on October 19th, 2011 in Uncategorized
This weekend is the London Anarchist Bookfair! If you’re in the UK, you should go there. If you’re in the US (like me), well, sucks to be us, I suppose. For you lucky ones, author DD Johnston, the sly wit behind our latest fiction release, Peace, Love, and Petrol Bombs, is doing a special pre-bookfair kickoff event on Friday, October 21 at London’s Housmans Bookshop. Be sure to check it out!
Pre-Anarchist Bookfair Special | London, Friday 21st October
D.D. Johnston, author of Peace, Love, and Petrol Bombs, will be discussing radical fiction and the funnier sides of anarchism at Housmans Bookshop on the eve of the anarchist bookfair. He’ll be asking why all the best writers are anarchists, what happens if you mispronounce chants in German, and why occupying a twelve-year-old girl’s slumber party is never, ever, an acceptable protest technique. The event starts at 7pm, on Friday 21st October, and the cost is £3, redeemable against any purchase.
http://www.housmans.com/events.php
http://ddjohnston.org
Housmans Bookshop
5 Caledonian Road
King’s Cross
N19DX
Have we mentioned that the press in the UK is loving this book? It’s no wonder — we love it too! But it’s always nice when the press reaffirms our choice of publications! Here’s a sampling of recent accolades for the book:
“A well told and exceptionally well written ‘coming of age’ novel that draws the reader in to a life that will be alien to many: and spits you out again at the other end feeling entertained, informed, and more than a little curious to know what happens to Wayne next.” —Undiscovered Scotland
“Shot through with deadpan humour, it’s both hilarious and heart wrenching. It’s also unflinching in its honest depiction of Scottish working class life. A great debut novel.” —Culture Burn
“A modern Ragged Trousered Philanthropists meets Adrian Mole meets the Baader-Meinhof gang on the set of Trainspotting. I bunked off work and read it in a little over a day.”–Libcom.org
“Johnston’s use of Scottish brogue is great, as is his description of the gang of political working-class ner-do-wells and the officious tripe they encounter. (…) The winner of the Smackdown? Peace, Love and Petrol Bombs by a TKO for humour, dialect, politics and action.”–Mayday Books
We really can’t say this enough times: you gotta read this book! Grab a copy today at your local bookshop (it’s also available as an ebook on Kindle …) or order it from AK-US or AK-UK!
Posted on October 18th, 2011 in AK Authors!, Current Events
| The Chronicle of Higher Education printed the following, pretty interesting and pretty anarchist-friendly, article about the Occupy movement. It prominently features AK author David Graeber, who help plan the Occupy Wall Street actions. |
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Intellectual Roots of Wall St. Protest Lie in Academe
Movement’s principles arise from scholarship on anarchy
Occupy Wall Street protesters have been demonstrating in Zuccotti Park since mid-September. The movement has an academic heritage that spans political science, economics, and literature, but its organizing principles owe a debt to an ethnography of Madagascar.
By Dan Berrett
Academics have become frequent visitors to Zuccotti Park, the 33,000-square-foot pedestrian plaza in the heart of New York City’s financial district that is now the site of a nearly monthlong protest, Occupy Wall Street.
Famous scholars like Cornel West, Slavoj Zizek, and Frances Fox Piven have spoken to the crowd, with their remarks dispersed, word-for-word, from one cluster of people to the next through a “human megaphone.” Many others, such as Lawrence Lessig, have lent their support from farther away, as the demonstrations have spread to cities and college campuses nationwide.
The movement has repeatedly been described as too diffuse and decentralized to accomplish real change, and some observers have seen the appearances by academic luminaries as an attempt to lend the protest intellectual heft and direction. Certainly, its intellectual underpinnings and signature method of operating are easier to identify than its goals.
Economists whose recent works have decried income inequality have informed the movement’s critiques of capitalism. Critical theorists like Michael Hardt, professor of literature at Duke University, and Antonio Negri, former professor of political science at the University of Padua, have anticipated some of the central issues raised by the protests. Most recently, they linked the actions in New York and other American cities to previous demonstrations in Spain, Cairo’s Tahrir Square, and in Athens, among other places.
But Occupy Wall Street’s most defining characteristics—its decentralized nature and its intensive process of participatory, consensus-based decision-making—are rooted in other precincts of academe and activism: in the scholarship of anarchism and, specifically, in an ethnography of central Madagascar.
It was on this island nation off the coast of Africa that David Graeber, one of the movement’s early organizers, who has been called one of its main intellectual sources, spent 20 months between 1989 and 1991. He studied the people of Betafo, a community of descendants of nobles and of slaves, for his 2007 book, Lost People.
Betafo was “a place where the state picked up stakes and left,” says Mr. Graeber, an ethnographer, anarchist, and reader in anthropology at the University of London’s Goldsmiths campus.
In Betafo he observed what he called “consensus decision-making,” where residents made choices in a direct, decentralized way, not through the apparatus of the state. “Basically, people were managing their own affairs autonomously,” he says.
The process is what scholars of anarchism call “direct action.” For example, instead of petitioning the government to build a well, members of a community might simply build it themselves. It is an example of anarchism’s philosophy, or what Mr. Graeber describes as “democracy without a government.”
He transplanted the lessons he learned in Madagascar to the globalism protests in the late 1990s in which he participated, and which some scholars say are the clearest antecedent, in spirit, to Occupy Wall Street.
Soon after the magazine Adbusters published an appeal to set up a “peaceful barricade” on Wall Street, Mr. Graeber spent six weeks in New York helping to plan the demonstrations before an initial march by protesters on September 17, which culminated in the occupation.
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Posted on October 18th, 2011 in About AK, AK Authors!, Current Events, Recommended Reading, Uncategorized
An essay from acclaimed situationist author and translator (and AK Press author/editor) Ken Knabb exploring #Occupy as the first signs of a new – and long-awaited – awakening in America.
The Awakening in America
Ken Knabb
A radical situation is a collective awakening. . . . In such situations people become much more open to new perspectives, readier to question previous assumptions, quicker to see through the usual cons. . . . People learn more about society in a week than in years of academic “social studies” or leftist “consciousness raising.” . . . Everything seems possible — and much more is possible. People can hardly believe what they used to put up with in “the old days.” . . . Passive consumption is replaced by active communication. Strangers strike up lively discussions on street corners. Debates continue round the clock, new arrivals constantly replacing those who depart for other activities or to try to catch a few hours of sleep, though they are usually too excited to sleep very long. While some people succumb to demagogues, others start making their own proposals and taking their own initiatives. Bystanders get drawn into the vortex, and go through astonishingly rapid changes. . . . Radical situations are the rare moments when qualitative change really becomes possible. Far from being abnormal, they reveal how abnormally repressed we usually are; they make our “normal” life seem like sleepwalking.
—Ken Knabb, The Joy of Revolution
The “Occupy” movement that has swept across the country over the last four weeks is already the most significant radical breakthrough in America since the 1960s. And it is just beginning.
It started on September 17, when some 2000 people came together in New York City to “Occupy Wall Street” in protest against the increasingly glaring domination of a tiny economic elite over the “other 99%.” The participants began an ongoing tent-city type occupation of a park near Wall Street (redubbed Liberty Plaza in a salute to the Tahrir Square occupation in Egypt) and formed a general assembly that has continued to meet every day. Though at first almost totally ignored by the mainstream media, this action rapidly began to inspire similar occupations in hundreds of cities across the country and many others around the world.
The ruling elite don’t know what’s hit them and have suddenly been thrown on the defensive, while the clueless media pundits try to dismiss the movement for failing to articulate a coherent program or list of demands. The participants have of course expressed numerous grievances, grievances that are obvious enough to anyone who has been paying attention to what’s been going on in the world. But they have wisely avoided limiting themselves to a single demand, or even just a few demands, because it has become increasingly clear that every aspect of the system is problematic and that all the problems are interrelated. Instead, recognizing that popular participation is itself an essential part of any real solution, they have come up with a disarmingly simple yet eminently subversive proposal, urging the people of the world to “Exercise your right to peaceably assemble; occupy public space; create a process to address the problems we face, and generate solutions accessible to everyone. . . . Join us and make your voices heard!” (Declaration of the Occupation of New York City).
Almost as clueless are those doctrinaire radicals who remain on the sidelines glumly predicting that the movement will be coopted or complaining that it hasn’t instantly adopted the most radical positions. They of all people should know that the dynamic of social movements is far more important than their ostensible ideological positions. Revolutions arise out of complex processes of social debate and interaction that happen to reach a critical mass and trigger a chain reaction — processes very much like what we are seeing at this moment. The “99%” slogan may not be a very precise “class analysis,” but it’s a close enough approximation for starters, an excellent meme to cut through a lot of traditional sociological jargon and make the point that the vast majority of people are subordinate to a system run by and for a tiny ruling elite. And it rightly puts the focus on the economic institutions rather than on the politicians who are merely their lackeys. The countless grievances may not constitute a coherent program, but taken as a whole they already imply a fundamental transformation of the system. The nature of that transformation will become clearer as the struggle develops. If the movement ends up forcing the system to come up with some sort of significant, New Deal-type reforms, so much the better — that will temporarily ease conditions so we can more easily push further. If the system proves incapable of implementing any significant reforms, that will force people to look into more radical alternatives.
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