Perspectives offers this reflection on the IAS’ first twenty years from the current anarcha-feminisms issue, available here, by an IAS member who has been involved since the beginning. In order to assemble a growing history of the IAS that’s as rich and multi-vocal as possible, we are inviting additional reflections from those who have been involved as board members, authors, grantees, and readers, which we can post throughout the year.
From Lucha No Feik
On October 28, 1967 Huey Newton allegedly killed police officer John Frey. Up until that moment the Black Panther Party, barely a year old and only around one hundred members deep, had only engaged in police patrols, established community defense initiatives, planned rallies for Denzil Dowell who was shot dead by police in Richmond,CA, and enacted the spectacularized armed protest at the California State Assembly. October 28, 1967 marked a significant turning point in the tenor of the BPP and the broader Black Power movement. This singular action became both a moment of division and clarification that went on to set the tone for a future wave of struggles.
From Jacobian - by Damian White
Whatever their limits, Murray Bookchin’s ideas should be studied by today’s left.
Murray Bookchin spent fifty years articulating a new emancipatory project, one that would place ecology and the creative human subject at the center of a new vision of socialism.
Radicals around me from the far-Left, mainly anarchists, Marxists, and non-affiliated anti-fascists, since Obama was elected, have been up in arms about the looming potential of maybe losing their arms. After another example of mass death via the easy accessibility of mass-murdering weapons, Democratic politicians in the US are trying again to reform the legalize-faire laws on guns. People I know are saying guns=revolution, that they, as a small minority in arms, will have the ability to stop the neoliberal-State and/or fascist-State.
From Black Rose Anarchist Federation
The Black Rose Anarchist Federation sent a delegation to participate in AFem2014, an international anarchist feminist conference developed by a committee of anarchists organizing in the UK. The goals of AFem2014 were to challenge sexism and other forms of oppression within the anarchist movement and to create a “safer space” to start conversations around individual and collective experiences that could be translated into organizing work. The conference committee hoped that the energy generated by this event would reinvigorate anarchist feminism as a whole, and would be reproduced as an ongoing series of conferences with a global impact. When viewed from this perspective, AFem2014 was an important political development that highlights the growth of anarchism and the need to advance the theory and practice of feminism within it. However, the Black Rose delegation left AFem2014 with more questions than answers, the foremost being, “What is anarchist feminism?”
by El Errante
(Before you continue, know that this article is wholly my responsibility, that Hakim Bey has neither seen, read nor is aware of its existence. I take full responsibility for its content.)
After a bit of a break, I’m continuing with the installments from the “Anarchist Current,” the Afterword to Volume Three of my anthology of anarchist writings from ancient China to the present day, Anarchism: A Documentary History of Libertarian Ideas. This section discusses different anarchist approaches to economic organization.
Resistance to civilization has existed as long as civilization itself. There have always been those who reject this way of life. Critiques of technology, urban life, agriculture, domestication, and symbolic culture can be found in cultures all around the world and throughout history. As anarcho-primitivists searching for ways to understand the nature of civilization and wildness in the 21st century, I believe we can draw on the work of those critics of the past. There is perhaps no region on earth where civilization has been more entrenched for so long than China. Likewise I believe that there is no more potent critique of civilization from the ancient world than daoism.
I am unapologetically an anarchist, I have experienced mental illness in my life, and I do not own a firearm. I know the word ‘anarchist’ scares people, because the corporate media has done a damn good job of misrepresenting what the movement is all about. It’s not like they’ve ever done that before. Why would a corporate media owned by billionaires ever smear the beliefs of anti-capitalists? Really, we aren’t that scary though. We have never started a war, owned a slave or committed an act of genocide. We’re doing pretty well, I’d say.
