Vision of the New University
The first question that might present itself to anyone engaged in the current struggles at the university is this: is the university to be saved or destroyed?
To some, the answer seems obvious. Those who hope to salvage what may be no more than the university’s illusion of public service certainly are right to see higher education as a path towards improved opportunities, towards a more even distribution of economic promise, without regards to race, gender and class. Therefore, demanding that financial aid and work study programs, cultural events, and course offerings in more potentially progressive departments such as Women’s Studies, Chicano/a Studies and African American Studies stay... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
This is a copy of a leaflet given to all registering freshmen by the Orientation Committee at New York University.
Sept. 16, 1968
New York University Orientation Committee Introductory Packet
ORIENTATION: CRASHING DOWN TO BITTER REALITY
Welcome to NYU. From the prison of high school, it looked cool and inviting, full of new freedoms and the chance to learn something real for the first time. But as you get close to it, you’ll watch it disappear. The job of orientation is to let you in on what’s ahead, what will start when the sun rises on the first day of classes.
NYU is President Hester, dressed in the best suits that money can buy, threading his way through the bums in Washington Square Park on th... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
A net serves to capture and to immobilize life, to assassinate or to enthralled. The centralized electrical network is no different: the dependency that ‘progress’ and ‘freedom’ imposes on us is a disguised form of slavery, the production and consumption of energy bring about disease and death.
“Necessities” of electrical energy are not, perhaps, needs induced by the system? What are these famous benefits which we enjoy thanks to the electrical energy and to its omnipresent network?
The alarm that shortens the sleep and mutilates our dreams, announcing the sentence of another day of forced work?
The radio that indoctrinates our unconscious while we have breakfast quickly, shaken by th... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
I’ve never liked the part of the story when the mentor figure dies and the young heroes say they aren’t ready to go it alone, that they still need her. I’ve never liked it because it felt clichéd and because I want to see intergenerational struggle better represented in fiction.
Today I don’t like that part of the story because… I don’t feel ready.
Last week, I lived in the same world as Ursula Le Guin, a grandmaster of science fiction who accepted awards by decrying capitalism and seemed, with every breath, to speak of the better worlds we can create. On Monday, January 22, 2018, she passed away. She was 88 years old and she knew it was coming, and of course my sorrow is for myself ... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
On Wednesday, December 7th at Texas A & M University, as FBI agents monitored hundreds of protesters from the tops of roofs, heavily armed riot police clashed with demonstrators bent on disrupting and shutting down an event organized by Preston Wiginton, a 51 year old former student of the campus and long time white supremacist. The event featured a talk by Richard Spencer, a leading ideologue within the growing “Alt-Right,” which attempts to re-brand fascist, Neo-Nazi, and white nationalist ideas for the millennial generation in order to create an all-white fascist “ethno-state.”
The clashes that erupted on the campus are just the latest in a string of growing confrontations between autonomous revolutiona... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
I. Introduction
Anarcho-primitivists comprise a subculture and political movement that, generally, advocates hunting and gathering as the ideal human subsistence method (from the point of view of sustainable resource use) and the band as the ideal human social structure (for its features of egalitarianism). While the goal may seem improbable, a primitivist would contend that more modest goals are either undesirable or unachievable within the system. The past 10,000 years have after all been largely a history of “solutions” to the problems of an agricultural society. This critique of “civilization” inherently rejects less radical ideals and claims to go uniquely to the heart of all social discontent. It is mult... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
What is Going On in Kurdistan?
Thousands of Kurdish demonstrators have shaken more than 30 cities of the world, when Adullah Ocalan, president of PKK (Kurdish workers Party) was recently captured in Kenya d brought to Turkey thanks to an operation possibly organized by Turkey, US, Israel and Greece. Receiving an intensive coverage from local and international media, Ocalan’s arrest we rise not only to numerous rumors, but also new discussions over Kurdish question as well a campaign of bombed attacks which have overshadowed the intoxication of Turkish government. Yet these tragic events are only the u dated versions of a long-standing bloodshed that marked the Kurdish history.
130 Years Of Agony
Being one of the large... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
Bridging both time and work, the following is an article that was featured in one of Green Anarchy magazine’s “Back to Basics” primers. We see this as a starting point for further exploration and discussion. The topics covered are central to a green anarchist critique or perspective. This is not an exhaustive list, but rather the beginnings of what we hope will be an ongoing conversation – one to be further expanded, updated, and explored in subsequent issues of Black Seed.
This primer is not meant to be the “defining principles” for a green anarchist “movement”, nor an anti-civilization manifesto. It is a look at some of the basic ideas and concepts that collective members share with e... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
You’d do well, dear humans, to stop your ridiculous calls for war. Lower the vengeful looks you’re aiming at me. Extinguish the halo of terror in which you’ve enveloped my name. Since the bacterial genesis of the world, we viruses are the true continuum of life on Earth. Without us, you would never have seen the light of day, any more than the first cell would have come to exist.
We are your ancestors, just like the rocks and the seaweed, and much more than the apes. We are wherever you are and also where you aren’t. Too bad for you if you only see in the universe what is to your liking ! But above all, quit saying that it is I who am killing you. You will not die from my action upon your tissues but from the ... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
Chapter 1. Introduction by Endangered Phenix (Written in February 2005)
“In South Africa normal national or ruling-class behavior is rendered uniquely controversial by the color dimension.”
— Peregrine Worsthorne, right-wing assistant editor of the Sunday Telegraph, May 13, 1984
Quoted on the cover of a radical pamphlet in 1984, this seems particularly apt now that the “color dimension” has been ‘virtually’ eradicated from South African politics. The normal national ruling-class behavior of the ANC is, predictably, now every bit as horrific as its white predecessors.
However, clearly this was not predictable for some — which is indicative of some of the weak... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
Alienation is not a psychological disorder, an inability on the part of certain individuals to adjust to a basically healthy society. Alienation is an inherent part of the present social order, objectively verifiable. The present social reality is based on a hierarchy of power that requires a system of representation through which society can reproduce itself. To maintain this social system, it is necessary that the lives of individuals be made alien to them, not self-created, but defined in terms of roles and rules of protocol for the proper relationships between these roles. The healthiest individuals in this society are precisely those who most deeply feel the anguish of their alienation, who know that real life is not here and, therefor... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
Translator’s Introduction
There are many different ways of looking at the world in which we live. Most people tend to look upon the surrounding reality as a fate that falls upon them about which they can do nothing. Even many people who call themselves anarchists fall into this way of thinking, letting their lives slip away from them. In the face of increasingly harsh times and, more specifically, repression against all forms of conscious revolt, it is certainly easy to fall into this way of thinking. But this isn’t a useful way of examining our situation, because it provides us with nothing except an excuse to hide in our rooms, sacrificing our lives to the fears that our rulers use to control us.
If, instead of s... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
The living conditions, every day more unbearable, which are imposed on us, rely on fear. Fear of not having a job and of not making ends meet at the end of the month. Fear of the police, fear of prison. Because at its foundation, the baton and its acceptance are what guarantee social relations.
In this world upside down, terrorism is not forcing billions of human beings to survive under unacceptable conditions; it’s not poisoning the earth. It’s not continuing a scientific and technological research which everyday further subjugates our lives, penetrates our bodies and modifies nature in an irreversible way. It’s not imprisoning and deporting human beings because they don’t have an adequate little scrap of pap... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
A report published this year predicts nuclear war, megadroughts, famine, mass migrations and rioting around the world by 2020 as abrupt climate change causes massive disruption of the world’s food and water supplies.
By 2007 violent storms smash coastal barriers rendering large parts of the Netherlands uninhabitable. Cities like The Hague are abandoned. Levees in the Sacramento river delta are breached, disrupting the aqueducts transporting water south.
Between 2010 and 2020 Europe is hardest hit with an average annual temperature drop of 6°F. Britain becomes colder and drier as weather patterns begin to resemble Siberia. War and famine deaths run into the millions until the planet’s population is reduced by s... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
With all that’s goin’ on in the world, why do these feral fanatics, these rejects of anarchism, these off-the-deep-end ecologists, these granola-munchin’ harbingers of chaos need to spend so much time attacking civilization?
The following communiqué was found at the site of a recently disrupted secret meeting in Dover, Delaware, which was to facilitate a coalition between Chevron, Pepsi-CO, Microsoft, the Sierra Club, the Northern New Jersey Federation of Anarcho-Stalinists, Michael Albert, and the Institute for Social Ecology. This disruption seems to be evidence that insurrectionary green-anarchist and anarcho-primitivist actions and ideas are spreading!
Communique # 23
We are often told that our ... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
TO THE POINT
Our current system is like an abandoned parking lot. Asphalt was laid, killing life and turning everything into a homogenous blackness, a dead sameness. The levers of maintaining this have broken down. No one is coming to touch up the asphalt. In abandoned parking lots, cracks form and life grows from the cracks.
All these riots, environmental catastrophes, food crises, occupations of land by protesters, and various breakdowns in daily life are cracks in the asphalt. What will spring from the cracks depends on what seed is planted within them. Beautiful flowers could grow. Weeds could grow.
Modern rich nations have walled themselves in. Colonized India was a world apart from Britain. The United States exist... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
It’s not that I’m not touched, to suddenly be receiving hero worship for doing the job I always did before. A little impostor syndrome maybe, but touched nonetheless. The trouble is not the clapping. The trouble is that it’s being performed in place of the meaningful steps which would actually help me. Here’s a day in my life:
I wake up at 6, ready for what’s now going to be a very long commute on 3 different public transport vehicles because most of the stations and regular services are closed, make sure I have my ID to get onto the train at the station, my hand sanitizer and put on a headscarf that’s reminiscent of a culture I wasn’t raised in. I’ve already cut off my long hair, becau... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
“Rulers have always taken care to control the education of the people. They know their power is based almost entirely on the school and they insist on retaining their monopoly. The school is an instrument for domination in the hands of the ruling class.”
Francisco Ferrer, Anarchist proponent of the “Free School Movement”
Free public education is an important aspect of society which has the potential to both empower or enthralled us depending upon the intentions and ways in which education is offered or in our case compulsory. In countries like Spain, religious education was the only way to learn until the early 20th Century and it was unlawful for poor people or women to be educated. This is the cas... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
This brings home the crucial failure of the “organizing model” favored by Unite! and other unions. They are social democratic in nature and essentially believe capitalism can and should be managed better to benefit workers.
To do this they have to work with the bosses and get the Labor Party to provide a legislative framework. A top down model of union recognition, negotiation controlled by full time officials and a concentration on “headline” issues like the London Living Wage, not the real concerns of workers, are their objectives. Unite!’s relationship with Mitie was always more important to them than the interests of a small, troublesome group of workers.
Social democrats take the fact that cl... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
We would like to start this out by emphasizing that we have no desire to seek rivalry with the Northeastern Federation of Anarcho-Communists (NEFAC). In fact, we sympathize with the intentions of many of its members. As anarchists, we share two fundamental aims: the abolition of capitalism and the state. Such agreement on certain principles, however, does not render anarchist ideologies and organizations (such as NEFAC) immune to critique.
NEFAC, as defined by Northeastern Anarchist: The Magazine of the Northeastern Federation of Anarcho-Communists (see ‘contacts’ section of this zine), is an “organization of revolutionaries from the northeastern region of North America who identify with the communist tradition with... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
A Few Words: Thoughts on Alienation
Alienation is a concept frequently talked about in anarchist circles. Clearly, domination and exploitation can only develop in conjunction with alienation, so such discussion is important. But it is necessary to focus this discussion in order to make it useful to the anarchist project of destroying the present order and creating new ways of living.
I have always said that the revolt against the present order of things originates in the individual desire to create one’s life as one sees fit. This does not contradict the necessity for class struggle or the desire for communism, but rather provides a basis for clarifying the methods for carrying out this revolutionary project. In terms of... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
Migrants’ detention centers and immigration policies are being frequently debated in this period, especially through a rhetoric based on sensationalism: the picture of innocent and well integrated families, who work in this country and whose children go to school here, is being continuously presented, and it is also being said that to lock them up in detention centers is ignominy. This rhetoric is being used in order to provoke the citizens’ indignation, to shout against racism pretending to be resisters, to launch useless calls for the reform of the management of the deportation machinery, for the improvement of prison conditions and to distinguish the ‘good’ illegal migrants from the ‘bad’ ones.
... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
With a population of only 160,000 Bougainville has managed to close and keep closed one of the biggest copper mines in the world. Despite having to fight the Australian-armed Papua New Guinea (PNG) army, they have held their ground for twelve years with home made guns made out of water piping and planks, scavenged mine trucks and petrol made from coconuts.
In 1969 a RTZ plc copper mine was forcibly established. From the beginning the people resisted. News footage of women fighting with riot cops over survey pegs received international coverage. In Bougainville women are the traditional landholders; land is passed from woman to woman. On this occasion it was clear their land was not being passed on in the traditional manner.
Th... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
Doubts blew in with the clouds over the grassy hill and down by the willow tree where the child played in the afternoons. The witching hour had come, and the child was still awake, following those doubts past the rows of empty houses to the corner, where the bus comes in the mornings to take them all away.
A shadow came in the window and settled over the bed. The winds outside calmed, but a little breeze in the room itself seemed to tousle the child’s hair, and caress its cheeks. When the child fell asleep, the shadow bent over its ear and whispered a bedtime story:
Child, beneath this golden roof, you, of all people, know what it means to be homeless. It is the tragedy of some in this world to be uprooted, of others, to... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
“Walmapu Liberado
Con Tierra, Sin Estado”
The guards at the Temuco prison search us over, and lead us into a room off the main hallway. The four men come in a little later and begin telling us their stories. They choose their words solemnly, and take long pauses. Seventy days without eating has taken its toll. “Our bones hurt, we get dizzy, tired, we have to rest a lot, lay down a lot. It’s uncomfortable going so long without eating. But we’re going to go until the final consequences. We’re putting our bodies and health on the line for the Mapuche people.”
They start with what we already know: the reasons for the hungerstrike, the Chilean state’s use of the antiterrorist l... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
Dominant culture rarely interests itself in evidence other than that which shows willing and enthusiastic complicity from its subjects. Acts of refusal and revolt are effaced from the historical record when they expose the tenuous control of authority. Even when they do appear, presence, motives and behavior are all mediated through the lens of elite partiality which works to deny that we are capable of generating the ideas and means of our own liberation.
That much most of us recognize; it is the premise of class history developed in the 1960s by the likes of EP Thompson, Christopher Hill and Eric Hobsbawn. But theirs is also a particularist history, focused as it is on the same level of public appearance as that of the Establis... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
Without precedents. This is the characteristic of the times we are living through full of wonder, anxiety, dismay, hope. Not to say that in the past history has not known wars, insurrections or plunging economies. However, with the sense of the later and with the proper amount of security distance, it has always been easy to pick out the different sides in play, their reasons and the influence of the protagonists on the unfolding of a chain of events. The last two centuries have provided us with the knowledge from which to draw, have engraved our certainties and our doubts, have laid out the guide that we use in our daily acts. But the third millenium opened immediately on a very unpredictable note.
On the morning of September 11, up... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
President Clinton launched the 5 billion dollar funding for the “Violence Against Women Act” in 2000. He spoke of the 900,000 women beaten every year, “one every 12 seconds” and refused to mention that that figure was actually closer to the number of men beaten every year. [1] And he’s one that should know! Just a year before he was on tv sporting a nasty red welt on his head. Sources in the White House leaked that the injury was due to an attack from his wife and that secret service agents had to pull her off him the night before.
The fact that women are violent is not really that interesting. We’re civilized too, so what do you expect? But it’s the fact that so much of the evidence about vi... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
Chris Pollina asked that their name be changed to a pen name Curtis Brown
Issue 5
First World Problems and First World Revolution By Mike Andrew
Don’t be deceived
When they tell you
Things are better now
Even if there’s no poverty to be seen
Because the poverty’s been hidden
Even if you never had better wages
And you could afford to buy
More of these new and useless goods
Which these new industries foist on you
And even if it seems to you
That you never had so much
That is only the slogan of those
Who still have much more than you.
Don’t be taken in
When they pat you paternally on the shoulder
And say
There’s no inequality worth speaking of
And n... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)