Opinion

by Sarambi

The problem with notions of “radical sobriety” & “intoxication culture”

By Zoë Dodd & Alexander McClelland
From HIV HEPC Anarchist

By Tasos Sagris of VOID NETWORK, this text is part of a series exploring the anarchist analysis of democracy.

CrimethInc

I find myself in the courtyard of the School of Fine Arts in Athens, Greece. It’s May 25, 2011, a hot summer day. A five-day anarchist and anti-authoritarian festival starts in six hours and I am scrambling to prepare all the small details I have in mind. I’m working alone.

Freedom (U.K.)

With General Election 2016 upon us, why can't the 99% simply vote in a government that acts in our interests and not that of the 1%? At a simple level parliamentary elections sound like the ideal way for the mass of the ‘have nots’ to use their numbers to overcome the power and influences of the tiny number of have’s. Occupy talked about this division in the language of the 1% and 99%; a crude approximation that does reflect a reality where the number of wealthy decision makers is actually very tiny, indeed less than 1%

by Andrew Levine
CounterPunch
February 5, 2016

Nine times out of ten, or ninety-nine times out of a hundred, electoral politics at the national level these days does more to disable democracy than to enhance it.

Sometimes, though, elections can be good for something. This may be one of those times.

Until recently, it seemed that the 2016 Presidential election, a factor in American politics since at least 2014, would, as usual, deflect democratic impulses into useless electoral pursuits – and, as if that weren’t bad enough, that it would do so in a boring, unedifying way: by pitting two pro-corporate, interventionist-minded, military-industrial complex friendly political families, the Clintons and the Bushes, against one another.

It seemed that the only redeeming feature of the impending spectacle would be that one or the other of those god-awful families would finally be done in.

AndrewNFlood
Infoshop News (via Anarchist Writers)
February 1, 2016

Oxfam has just released a report that shows global inequality has escalated rapidly over the last 6 years.  The particular measure they used is a very important one.  First they calculated the wealth held by the poorest 50% of the planets population, which is about 3.6 billion people. And then they asked how many of the richest people held the same amount of wealth.

This is a write-up of my talk at the 2015 London Anarchist Bookfair. It is based on my notes and so will not be exactly the same as at the event but it will be close enough. The meeting summary initially submitted for the programme was:

Anarchists and anarchism have had a lot of nonsense written about them over the years. Whether it is proclaiming that we want chaos or see revolution as an easy process, the “conventional wisdom” is often at odds with reality. This applies to individual anarchists, with Proudhon painted as an advocate of “labour notes” or Kropotkin a gentle Prince of non-violence who had an idealistic vision of social revolution. This is not true. Anarchism and anarchists have a coherent and practical vision of both social change and a better (not perfect) society. Join Iain McKay (author of An Anarchist FAQ) as be explodes some of the common myths about anarchism and anarchists.

In an interview with Al Jazeera English’s flagship current affairs show, ‘UpFront’, MIT professor emeritus Noam Chomsky a long-standing critic of US foreign policy and overseas interventions, said he supported U.S. air strikes against ISIL.

“I’m not an absolute pacifist,” he said. “I think there are times when the use of military force defensively is legitimate.“

"Defending the Kurds against the ISIL attacks, yes, that’s legitimate,” he added, explaining that the "Kurdish areas of Syria” constitute a “fairly decent society” which “certainly merit support” from the US air force.

Chomsky condemned the Turkish President, Recep Tayyip Erdogan who in a public address criticised “so-called intellectuals” like Chomsky for supporting Kurdish separatists and invited the MIT professor to visit Turkey.