blogging anarchy in the UK
We've made it through another revolution around the sun, so with a weary inevitability it's time for people to make resolutions about the next one. There's a couple of problems with doing that though. Number one, only the date really changes at midnight. And number two, they are normally so individualistic that they turn to dust when they clash with the reality of the world outside. That's not
Introducing the Anarchist ImaginationEveryone knows the world is a mess. There’s starvation and ecocide, racism and sexism. The rich get richer and the poor get dead, all while species go extinct and carbon warms up the air. It’s not surprising that so much of our fiction is as bleak as our future threatens to be.But we can imagine other worlds. We can imagine better ways to organize ourselves, better ways to treat one another, better ways to treat the earth. And specifically, we can imagine worlds without the authoritarianism of the state and capitalism. The question, then, is: what would those worlds look like?Combustion Books, a worker-run publisher of genre fiction, is looking to publish a new line of books: The Anarchist Imagination. We are looking for novella-length (15,000-40,000 words) anarchist utopias.Our intention is not, of course, to put down blueprints that must be followed line by line. We offer no prescription for future society. Instead, the utopia is a form we can use to explore our revolutionary desires, to showcase ideas we might put into practice, to give us glimpses of what we fight for.The utopia is a peculiar form of fiction to write, to be sure, and we’re looking for stories that balance the exposition of society with compelling narrative and character. The stories can be set in our own world–past, present, or future–or in fantasy. The politics can be anything anti-state, the economics anything that isn’t capitalism. As this series goes on, we hope to showcase just how wide this terrain can be.
Submissions can be sent to submissions@combustionbooks.org.
You can also view our regular submission guidelines.
If industrial civilization were to collapse any time soon–and its looking like it could happen any day now–it’d be in no small part due to the rather outrageous and tireless misadventures of a little known biocentric biped called Panagioti.
Though he has no formal education past 10th grade — “diploma-free and proud” as he’d say — you’d be hard pressed to find a smarter and more politically influential animal amongst the more radical environmental milieu, especially in the South. He’s also a real sweetheart, a soon-to-be-father, my best friend and all around nice guy and superhero.
The following is a repost from libcom.org: Members of the anarcho-syndicalist CNT union and CGT union have gone on indefinite strike and occupied their workplace at the IMESAPI lighting plant in Granollers, Catalunya, Spain, demanding an end to the redundancy plans which would see four of the 21 workers let go. The workers – now 23 days into their strike – are responsible for
I typed this just now in an argument with others who feel workers make what they deserve. There are typos, there are things that are not worded right, but it is from the heart...Right now I am in a state in the USA which is sooo anti-workers that it makes my heart weep! I feel that this is the sortof place where this sortof speech needs to be given. The workers who are making 7.00 working at factories which make millions are incredibly dangerous, this men need to know that they are worth more than minimum wage. Workers who are forced to be without their families on holidays and for the vast majority of the day and night deserve to know that they are worth more than money, they are priceless. Workers have lost their pride, their heart, their motive, their souls so to say. It would be easy to give a speech and wage a war in an area which already has a strong labor movement, but in a right to work state, which is really a right to fire state, these men need their muscle back. I will die for my fellow workers, I will gladly spend time in prison for my fellow worker, I will be poverty stricken if it means that I am doing it on my terms and not those of some shitty business, some call center, some factory, some fast food place, some warehouse. Tonight I decided that my years of travel and activism, that it would all mean nothing if I did not finally put MORE action to my words, and those actions and words are following in the footsteps of Eugene V Debs or Bill Haywood. Tonight I begin my steps toward real freedom.
"---- Yet it is not quite. Despite a few caveats about SolFed not being the be all and end all, this is a SolFed-centric vision. This is maybe most evident in the passage about the SolFed Local:Read the full review HERE:“At the heart of the anarcho-syndicalist union is the Local, which aims to be at the centre of community and workplace struggle in the surrounding area. But the role of the Local goes beyond that. It provides the physical space where a diverse range of groups, such as oppressed, cultural, and education groups can organise. The Local acts as the social, political, and economic centre for working class struggle in a given area. It is the physical embodiment of our beliefs and methods, the means by which workers become anarcho-syndicalist not just on the basis of ideas but activity.”Such bodies will need to exist. But if there is a particular reason why they should be part of – or mainly facilitated by – SolFed, it is not described within these pages. Thinking of Liverpool radical politics right now, I would love to be in such a group with the SolFed comrades, but I’d want AFed comrades there too, as well as the many unaligned comrades who make up the overwhelming majority of radical class struggle activists.----"
“Persons locked up behind bars stop living, they just survive in prison. Every one of them makes their own mold into which they’re supposed to fit, finding refuge in standardized behaviours and reactions (…) one becomes simply a number, another accusatory brief scattered on an iron bed, in a narrow prison cell. A number less, who cares. In any event, the punitive system thinks that inmates haven’t ever been born but just sprung up from somewhere, and they can just as easily be uprooted.” [excerpts from a comrade’s letter on prisons]
Monday, December 31st, 2012 by 23.30pm Solidarity gathering outside Koridallos women’s prisons
From Santiago to Montreal, and from Thessaloniki to Chania: 10, 100, 1000 solidarity gatherings outside prisons, juvenile detentions centres, immigration concentration camps
When all others celebrate, we remember those that others want to forget
—anarchists
