[this is from 2006, an earlier draft of an article later published as:
Shantz, J. 2007. "Solidarity and the 6 Nation struggle for the land." North Eastern Anarchist #12 (January).  nefac.net/NEA12
* For more on the Iroquois Confederacy, see also in that issue "'Where License Reigns With All Impunity': An Anarchist Study of the Rotinonshón:ni Polity" by Stephen Arthur
* for a more recent news report on this particular reclamation, see: Windle, Jim. 2014. "The Kanonhstaton barricade is gone … kinda" Two Row Times (August 20). Six Nations: Garlow Media.]

On February 28, 2006, members of Six Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy reclaimed 40 hectares of lands belonging to their community. The land, which was under construction as part of a new residential subdivision, had been sold to a developer, Henco Industries, despite the fact that the government knew it was contested land when it allowed it to be sold. In addition, the government did not appropriately follow the specified procedures of its own “Grand River Notification Agreement” to properly inform Six Nations of actions, environmental and otherwise, undertaken within the area under question. Such has been the history of governments in Canada in disregarding indigenous land rights.

[Editorial of Radical Criminology, issue #5]

The present period has a certain premonitory feel about it. A sense of historic promise. There is a real air of change. The mood is one of resistance, of uprising.

[This is the introduction & appendix 4 ~"About Surrey" of "New Developments in Anarchist Studies", collected papers from the 5th annual NAASN conference, 2014, edited by Jeff Shantz & pj lilley, published 2015 via 'Thought|Crimes' press imprint of punctum books. Download the entire book as pdf here or as epub, or order in print.]

Anarchism is enjoying a rather remarkable renaissance, in theory and in practice, through the first decades of the twenty-first century. Notably this renaissance is taking place simultaneously in the streets and in the schools, in activism as well as in academia. The reasons for the resurgence of anarchism are varied but without question the primary impetus has been the community opposition to neoliberal capitalist globalism and associated regimes of austerity and repression along with the pressing fact of ecological crisis. Many are inspired to act by the enormity of current social and ecological harms and the growing realization among wider sectors of the population that these are not problems that can be resolved within the framework of state managed capitalist development. At the same time many among newer generations of activists, and some of the earlier generations, have seen or learned from the failures of previous frameworks of resistance politics, particularly the statist forms of the various Marxisms and social democracies. For many, anarchism stands as the most promising basis for analyzing and understanding contemporary capitalist societies and for informing an opposition to capitalist arrangements in such as way as to pose a realistic, positive, liberatory alternative.

[This is  the editor's preface to our newest book on THOUGHT|CRIMES press (imprint of punctum books).  It's called The Spectacle of the False Flag: Parapolitics from JFK to Watergate and it's by Eric Wilson.  Please download it free from our website, or order a print copy here.]

Criminology is a strange discipline. For an area of study focused overwhelmingly, obsessively even, on state activity, criminology has perhaps as much as any social science, outside of psychology, completely and utterly undertheorized the state. The character of the state is largely misunderstood or only slightly understood within criminology (even as the criminology of figures like Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Nicos Poulantzas, who wrote much on law and the state, remain mostly unread by criminologists). Too often the state is simply taken for granted without real critical analysis. It is accepted straightforwardly, unproblematically, as the legitimate social authority, the social arbitrator.

Where critical approaches to the state are pursued there has been a tendency toward instrumentality or uniformity in discussing and explaining state activities. That is, the state is typically portrayed as a rather direct expression of the repressive needs of capital as a whole. And this, again, is the case only in critical approaches in which the state is interrogated or even problematized at all, most criminology taking the state, its legitimacy if not its neutrality, for granted.

Much of contemporary criminology remains bound to concepts and perspectives developed and framed in relation to conditions of modernity (even the emergence of modernity) and the structures, institutions, and processes of modernism. Among these concepts are rationality (rational choice and rational calculation), progress, and enlightenment—deterrence and correctivity.

The modernist criminologies remain dependent on instituted authorities and their organizations—police, courts, correctional facilities, legislatures—for definitions and understandings of crime, criminality, and responses to crime. Processes associated with liberal democratic governance are viewed as proper (and privileged) means for adjudicating social norms and responses to violations of norms. Agencies of the police, courts, and corrections are viewed as the legitimate institutions for the pursuit of—the realization of—“criminal justice.”

[First published Fall 2014, for the blog, Simply Criminology.]

Realism is generally defined, in a broad sense, as a concern with or interest in the so-called actual or real rather than the abstract or speculative. It is a tendency to view affairs or events supposedly “as they are” rather than as we would like them to be. This is typically contrasted with idealist (or utopian or radical) that are accused of forgoing a focus on everyday life “as it is” and instead focusing on abstract visions of a world imagined or yet to come.

[by Jeff Shantz, Fall 2014, as appeared in the Simply Criminology blog]

[as appeared in the first issue of the Red Sparks Union newsletter: http://redsparks.org/newsletter1 ]

The apparently random killings of two Canadian Forces personnel, October 20 near Montreal and October 22 in Ottawa, have served, not surprisingly as great mechanisms for reactionary political opportunism. The ruling Conservative Party of Canada, and allied pundits in the corporate media, wasted no time in using the Ottawa shooting in particular as an opportunity to ratchet up social phobias and fear politics, focused once again on that malleable and opportune figure of “the terrorist/terrorism” as means to advance the repressive agendas that are always central to their political projects.

[From the fall/winter 2014 issue of The Fifth Estate (#392): http://www.fifthestate.org/archive/392-fallwinter-2014/logistical-anarch... ||  Available as an epub, and in different print formats via The Anarchist Library: http://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/jeff-shantz-logistical-anarchism ]

Social resistance has reached a certain impasse, a conundrum as nation states impose austerity as an extended regime of governance throughout social life.

Published November 28, 2014 by Zero Books!

a new book from Jeff Shantz & Jordon Tomblin