mambabasa

When we pay attention to the amount of injustice in the world, we find ourselves wanting to do something about it. And we don’t want to do just anything. We want to participate in what can most strategically stop those injustices. We need to organize together to confront what is killing us and the planet.

If you go looking for others involved in this resistance work, you might stumble across some organizations that seem to have all the answers. They say they know exactly how to bring capitalism to its knees. And they’re often recruiting new members like you to take part in the Revolution.

But when organizations offer easy answers and tell you all you need to do is step in line with their orders, it should raise some red flags.

Before we get swept away by their revolutionary aesthetics, one-size-fits-all plans, and lefty lingo, we should talk about authoritarian and vanguard communist groups. They often search for young, enthusiastic people who haven’t been warned about them yet or don’t know the warning signs. All the major ones we know of have long histories of abuse. As anarchists, we understand that their embrace of authoritarianism is exactly what makes them so susceptible to being abusive.

This zine outlines red flags to look out for, provides some history of the most well-known authoritarian communist groups’ harmful behavior, and offers a few alternatives to joining them.

We believe that the most strategic way to fight systems of oppression is by fighting collectively. We don’t need to recreate the very power dynamics we’re struggling against to win. But we do need you in the fight.

Reinventing politics in Israel and Palestine means laying the groundwork now for a kind of Jewish-Palestinian Zapatismo, a grassroots movement to ‘reclaim the commons’ (Klein 2001; Esteva and Prakash 1998). This would mean moving towards direct democracy, participatory economy and genuine autonomy for the people; towards Martin Buber’s vision of “an organic commonwealth ... that is a community of communities” (1958: 136). We might call it the ‘no-state solution.’

In a revolt against techno-optimism and the real-world violence it upholds, members of radical research collective Lucy Parsons Labs (LPL) call for an empiricism rooted in technopolitical critique. Drawing from their own years of labor in the struggles against racial and surveillance capitalism, current work in HCI, and radical theorists like Alfredo M. Bonanano and Modibo Kadalie, LPL invites us to incorporate an ethics of rebellion and progress our tech practices into principled, anti-authoritarian praxis.

In a revolt against techno-optimism and the real-world violence it upholds, members of radical research collective Lucy Parsons Labs (LPL) call for an empiricism rooted in technopolitical critique. Drawing from their own years of labor in the struggles against racial and surveillance capitalism, current work in HCI, and radical theorists like Alfredo M. Bonanano and Modibo Kadalie, LPL invites us to incorporate an ethics of rebellion and progress our tech practices into principled, anti-authoritarian praxis.

Since 2014, West Jackson has been the home of a remarkable and inspiring project to build a solidarity economy, economic democracy, and Black self-determination called “Cooperation Jackson.” Co-founded and co-directed by the brilliant and charismatic Kali Akuno—who joins us for Utopia 2/13—Cooperation Jackson is a model of an alternative way of life that has already spawned other projects coast to coast, from Cooperation Vermont to Cooperation Humboldt in California.

What makes Cooperation Jackson such an important case study of concrete utopia is that it is so richly three-dimensional—along the axes of history, theory, and practice.

I am a degrowther, but people keep telling me it's hard to create media communications campaigns for degrowth and that advocating for it is "political suicide." As if endless cancerous growth isn't political suicide already. I'm told people want growth and we should use a different name for degrowth and that we should make it palatable to the public. But degrowth is quite literally a critique of growth. Without this critique, it's just liberal wishywashing for a better future. So I'm at an impasse here. How do we talk about meaningfully talk about degrowth without watering down the message?

I've recently tried mixing the used coffee grounds in baking soda, and I'm seeing a very visible chemical reaction. I haven't tried putting it in the ground yet though.

...other users had questioned whether the term 'Free Territory' had any basis in reliable sources. I was a little surprised. This was the term that I had used for years, one that was inextricably linked in my mind with the Makhnovists. This could not just be some random neologism coined by Wikipedia… right?

At first I could not let myself believe it. I looked through Makhno’s memoirs, as well as Volin’s and Arshinov’s histories, but I could not find the term anywhere. I even checked the Russian language originals, and peered through Viktor Bilash’s memoirs, which tragically remains untranslated. Again, I found no sign of a 'Free Territory'. I could not even find it in the memoirs of Victor Serge, the Bolshevik politician who coined the term 'Black Army' to refer to the Makhnovist insurgents.

From Organizational Questions of the Russian Social Democracy by Rosa Luxemburg

Inklusibo’s new manual on housing rights provides an in-depth narrative of the urban poor’s right to housing and livable spaces. This is the first free publication under the Housing and Living Spaces category.

I. Occupations are effective because they are disruptive. The April 1968 occupations shut down the entire university for over a week. This forced the administration to concede to their demands, even after the movement faced repression.

II. An occupation needs to spread in order to survive. New buildings need to be taken on campus, throughout the city, and across the country. Take the enemy by surprise. Strive for daily or even hourly successes, however small. At all costs, retain superior morale.

III. Every occupation is a commune. By shutting down the normal flows of capitalist society, they open up space for something new to emerge. These become a place to experiment with how we might live differently. Share everything. Inside the occupation, there is no private property. Break down barriers. Inside, social status and jobs are meaningless.

Communism seems a dim prospect today. The concept of surplus humanity has achieved a dreadful clarity in the present assault on Gaza. Yet, despite becoming a flashpoint for unprecedented waves of global solidarity actions, the situation in Gaza reveals not the unification of revolutionary activity, but its necessarily fragmented character. On many other shores, the popular blockade has returned in the form of protests by small farmers who seek to defend their livelihoods (and property) against the diminishing possibilities of social reproduction. This is in part conditioned by realities of climate change, and in part conditioned by state planning for a “green transition.”1 Ecological crisis is a harbinger of reaction and social disaster, rather than a unifying force of social upheaval.2 In the United States, in the long retreat from the George Floyd Rebellion, new ostensible unities present themselves in contestations over the future of humanity, over competing visions of crisis and disaster response that are entirely incompatible. The paradigmatic case remains the struggle to Stop Cop City (SCC) and Defend the Atlanta Forest (DFA). This is not simply because so many continue to constantly assert its paradigmatic status, but because it has become a real representation of strategic possibilities and outcomes in our era of uncertainty and utter bewilderment. This seems an unfair burden, given the rather specific character and conditions from which the initial movement spread. But as plans for “cop cities” are supposedly cropping up everywhere,3 and with them organizational forms that must confront the inheritance of SCC/DFA and its strategic offerings, it seems prescient to review the core elements, concepts, and presuppositions that have percolated through the messiness of struggle, repression, and polemics. To this end, we must abstract from SCC/DFA proper to examine what we believe has become the organizing principle of many “non-movements” today, particularly in periods of general reaction and degeneration: the problem of composition.