Currently browsing author

K. Kersplebedeb

bw-sea-tide-shipwreck

Garbage Floats in with the Tide: For Autonomous Antifascism

In his “Notes on Trump,” Bromma posits that the election of Trump and the accompanying rise of the far right are not simple accidents of history, nor the result of some single failure on our side or success on theirs, but are conjoined expressions of a deep phase-shift within the global capitalist economy. Whereas the fact that a wacky reality tv star was the one who ushered this in, and that it happened in 2016 and not 2015 or 2017, might be a matter of contingency or chance, a lurch to the populist xenophobic right was predictable, perhaps unavoidable. This ...........READ MORE

torontoanarchistbookfair2016

Toronto Anarchist Bookfair, July 23-24!

The Toronto Anarchist Bookfair is only 9 days away! Join us for a weekend full of anti-authoritarian activities, workshops, books, zines, food, friends, and great conversations!

Saturday 23rd and Sunday 24th
10:30am – 6pm

Steelworkers’ Hall (25 Cecil Street) (click here for map)

 

There will be a great selection of workshops this year, with presentations on:

  • The Occupation of INAC (Indigenous and Northern Affairs Canada), before, after and now
  • Pinkwashing and Homonationalism
  • Deconstructing Intoxication Culture
  • Applying Anarchist Ideas to Current Cloud and Standalone Tech
  • Calling In: Doing Justice without Breaking Each Other
  • The Ontario Coalition Against Poverty
...........READ MORE
stick-man-thinking-9Tzz6kaTE

Quick Thoughts on Culture

“Culture” is a framework developed by people to describe patterns of social behaviour, expression, consciousness. A given culture will manifest in multiple ways, will have more than one characteristic. and will in the final analysis be defined by the practice of people, albeit refracted through a distorted view that they have of themselves.

Culture can change, but not according to anyone’s rulebook. It is the result of what large numbers of uncontrollable people will do, often without thinking about it. It is the result of not only what “members of” a culture will do, but also of what others not ...........READ MORE

Documents Related to NCP-LC Dissolution (2013-2016)

...........READ MORE
argument

When We Leftists are Criticized by the Right

They see in the population’s hostility towards the left only the hostility towards the left, not the hatred against those who are socially privileged. (Red Army Faction)

Tell no lies. Expose lies whenever they are told. Mask no difficulties, mistakes, failures. Claim no easy victories.  (Amilcar Cabral)

It happens, often. It may be a right-wing journalist, or it may be someone we know personally, a family member or someone at work … or a complete stranger on facebook. They make fun of or relativize/trivialize something our analysis has shown to be super important and that should be obvious to everyone.  ...........READ MORE

Settlers, Oppressed Nations, Indigeneity

A friend recently wrote me, asking me “after how many years/generations do new settlers become Indigenous to a land? So, for example, are the Boers descendants today in S. Africa, African?”

It’s a question i’ve had a number of conversations about, not because i’ve any kind of special standing on the issue, but i think because it’s a question undergirding a lot of ways things are talked about on the radical left and in anticolonial movements. Over the past years i have come to the conclusion that like so many other questions, there are multiple valid answers, and the point ...........READ MORE

Some interesting things i read in March

...........READ MORE
drugwarcapitalism

More New Books from AK Press and PM Press

At leftwingbooks.net we have received a number of books from AK Press and PM Press over the past few weeks — i thought some of you might be interested:

Anarchists Never Surrender:
Essays, Polemics, and Correspondence on Anarchism,
1908-1938 Anarchists Never Surrender provides a complete picture of Victor Serge’s relationship to anarchism. The volume contains writings going back to his teenage years in Brussels, where he became influenced by the doctrine of individualist anarchism. At the heart of the anthology are key articles written soon after his arrival in Paris in 1909, when he became editor of the newspaper l’anarchie. ...........READ MORE
frontcover_col

Learning from an Unimportant Minority:Race Politics Beyond the White/Black Paradigm

Race is all around us, as one of the main structures of capitalist society. Yet, how we talk about it and even how we think about it is tightly policed. Everything about race is artificially distorted as a white/Black paradigm. Instead, we need to understand the imposed racial reality from many different angles of radical vision. In this talk given at the 2014 Montreal Anarchist Bookfair, J. Sakai shares experiences from his own life as a revolutionary in the united states, exploring what it means to belong to an “unimportant minority.”

 

Quoting from the book:

Race is notoriously slippery, ...........READ MORE

octavias_brood

Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements

Whenever we envision a world without war, without prisons, without capitalism, we are producing speculative fiction. Organizers and activists envision, and try to create, such worlds all the time. Walidah Imarisha and adrienne maree brown have brought twenty of them together in the first anthology of short stories to explore the connections between radical speculative fiction and movements for social change. The visionary tales of Octavia’s Brood span genres—sci-fi, fantasy, horror, magical realism—but all are united by an attempt to inject a healthy dose of imagination and innovation into our political practice and to try on new ways of understanding ...........READ MORE