Filed under: update | Tags: anarchy, bandits, brazil, eberhardt press, France, freedom, hooliganism, never work, os congaceiros, situationist
A Crime Called Freedom by Os Congaceiros is now out of print seemingly with no second print run coming from Eberhardt Press. The highly anticipated second volume translated by Wolfi Landstreicher is canceled as well. As this was, in our opinion, one of the best books that Eberhard produced, it seems odd.
We have a just a few copies left…
From the description on the back of A Crime Called Freedom:
“Os Cangaceiros was a group of delinquents caught up in the spirit of the French insurrection of 1968 who refused to let that spirit die. With nothing but contempt for the self-sacrificial ideology practiced by “specialists in armed struggle”, this uncontrollable band of social rebels wreaked havoc on the French state — attacking infrastructures of oppression, supporting popular revolts, stealing and releasing secret blueprints for high-tech prisons, raiding the offices of corporate collaborators, and creating their lives in complete opposition to the world based on work. This volume, translated by Wolfi Landstreicher, is the first substantial collection of the writings of Os Cangaceiros in English.”
From the description of the second volume:
“The book was tentatively titled Millenarian Rebels during production, and the final working title was Outlaws of the Sertão. In this book, members of the French revolutionary group Os Cangaceiros write about their fierce Brazilian namesakes, as well as the millenarian groups of the dispossessed and the urban poor who joined together in movements of social reform at the dawn of the 20th century, only to find themselves in an apocalyptic struggle with the Brazilian state.”
However the contents of the first volume and some of the second are now available to download.
http://eberhardtpress.org/catalog/crimecalledfreedom.php
Filed under: Milwaukee area, update | Tags: 2pm, 732 e clarke st, anarchist, anarchy, anti-civ, CCC, civ, civilization, cream city collectives, desire, discussion, path, perlman, reading, what's the deal?, wisdom, wu ming
Filed under: war-machine | Tags: 32%, actions, activism, anarchy, california, comments, common, communism, issues, notes, NYC, occupy everything, pro-situ, situationist, solidarity, students, the individual
And some comments:
At some point a critique of some of this is in order, because these occupations are only interesting when they go outside of merely being “actions” that address a growing assemblage of issues regarding the management of capital. Certainly there are people within this who share a similar critique and are attempting to push these struggles past their allotted boundaries. Although what is at issue most importantly about the generalization of an antagonistic practice is the possibility that while in the process it deconstructs the separate categories of student, worker, individual, etc, rather than reifies them further. Do we dare flirt with student activism? Or is it something to hide within? Maybe a temporary invisibility cloak?
There are some people who want to only see activism and apply the traditional anti-political critique. It’s so easy. But what they miss is the student acting. And in this acting lies the possibility of their no longer being simply students.
On a tangential note, there is a tendency of much writings coming out of the recent student movement to appropriate situationist jargon, which then has an emptying relationship on the concepts themselves. As the SDS activist so often thinks to don the fatigues of the leftist guerrilla as did their 1960s predecessors whose image they have brought back from the dead to build the organization, the more sophisticated activist speaks in anti-activism and pro-situationist jargon. They read The Coming Insurrection in an attempt to use new words to give life to practices that will always be dead.
Maybe this is too harsh? There’s plenty of room for both excitement and suspicion. Could we be so naive to think of conflict not as a force developing, but of another tendency to critique? While at the same time it seems the only space left where anything interesting or new can happen is built within a healthy pessimism and hostility. Where there is nothing left for us but a shared total hostility to our conditions we can finally be constituting of something different.
If you have anything to add, please do.
Filed under: war-machine | Tags: california, capital, capitalism, occupations, students, tuition, UC santa Cruz
From Anti-Capital Projects:
“18 NOVEMBER 2009
The University of California is occupied. It is occupied as is the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, and the Technical Institute of Graz; as were the New School, Faculty of Humanities in Zagreb and the Athens Polytechnic. These are not the first; they will not be the last. Neither is this a student movement; echoing the factory occupations of Argentina and Chicago, immigrant workers occupy forty buildings in Paris, including the Centre Pompidou. There is still life inside capital’s museum.
We send our first greetings to each of these groups, in solidarity. We stand with everybody who finds themselves in a building today because they have chosen to be, because they have liberated it from its supposed owners — whether for the hint of freedom’s true taste, or out of desperate social and political necessity.
This declaration and this action begin with contempt for those who would use their powers to cordon off education, cordon off our shared world, those who would build “opportunity” on the backs of others who must inevitably be exploited. This is why it begins here in this building with its Capital Projects, its Real Estate Services, its obscenely named Office of Sustainability — it begins in the corridors of accumulation, the core of the logic that privileges buildings over people. But it also begins with love for those who would refuse such enclosures, who are committed to the deed rather than the petition, who are committed to deprivatization as an act. This antagonism cannot be negotiated out of existence. We make no demands but the most basic one: that our collective life shall admit no owner.
Whoever has watched the disease of privatization, precaritization, and financialization spread through the University of California will not fail to recognize it as the plague of neoliberalism insinuating itself into every corner of the globe, every minute of our lives. In the most recent revelation, we have discovered the obscene student fee increases are being used not for education but as collateral for credit operations and building projects. This is the Regents’ will. If bonds aren’t repaid, the fees — that is, our days and years of work, extending into an empty future — must be used for repayment.
There is a grotesque irony to this. Student fees are being securitized and repackaged exactly like the toxic assets that triggered the latest economic collapse. Four years ago it was subprime mortgages; now it is “subprime education,” as Ananya Roy says. The very strategies and schemes that bankrupted millions of lives, and that showed the bankruptcy of the economic sphere — it is to these that the university has turned for its salvation, even after such strategies failed spectacularly. The Regents reveal themselves not simply to be dishonest, venal, and indifferent; they are too stupid to learn the most basic lessons of recent history. Or perhaps this is their idea of solidarity: that all members of the university community (save them, of course) must join the nation and the world in its immiseration, must be battered equally by a nightmare economy built on real human lives. We say to them: if you summon forth such solidarity, do not be surprised when its power escapes you.
The arriving freshman is treated as a mortgage, and the fees are climbing. She is a future revenue stream, and the bills are growing. She is security for a debt she never chose, and the cost is staggering. Her works and days are already promised away to raise up buildings that may contribute nothing to her education, and that she may not be allowed to use — buildings in which others will work for less than a living wage, at peril of no wage at all. This is the truth of the lives of students, the lives of workers (often one and the same). This is the truth of the relation between them and the buildings of the university, in the eyes of the Regents and the Office of the President.
No building will be safe from occupation while this is the case. No capital project but the project to end capital. We call for further occupations, to pry our buildings and our lives from its grip. We call for a different university, and a different society in which this university is embedded. We call for a different relation between lives and buildings. We do so freely. We are the power.”
http://anticapitalprojects.wordpress.com/2009/11/19/no-capital-projects-but-the-end-of-capital/
Filed under: update | Tags: anarchy mag, critique, design, essentialism, identity politics, problemz, zine, zine library
Excerpt from the text: (posted previously on this site)
“Essentialism is the idea that there exists some detectable and objective core quality of particular groups of people that is inherent, eternal, and unalterable; groupings can be categorized according to these qualities of essence, which are based on such problematic criteria as gender, race, ethnicity, national origin, sexual orientation, and class. These external qualities are almost always marked by visual cues, making the categories more obvious and/or easier to notice. These qualities contain social and — more importantly from an antiauthoritarian perspective — hierarchical significance to those marking the cues and those marked by the cues: sexism, in the case of gender; racism in the case of skin tone; the unwanted attention of authorities in the case of any and all different looking/acting people. Racism, sexism, classism, and most other forms of historical oppression are ideologies and policies maintained and justified by essentialism.
For a person or group of people on the receiving end of racism and sexism (etc.), essentialism can appear to be a powerful defensive perspective and counter-narrative. Rather than promoting categories of denigration and subordination, the counter-essentialist discourse of Identity Politics attempts to invert the historical categories of oppression into categories of celebration. This is often initiated by appropriating insults and turning them into acceptable, even honorable, labels. What had once been intended to harm the Other thereby becomes a way to show pride in the Group Self. Keeping with the inversion process, the counter-essentialist often merely turns the categories of Otherness upside-down, making visually identifiable members of the Oppressor group into enemies. A sense of belonging either to a group that has oppressed or been oppressed is immaterial — essentialism is not the exclusive domain of oppressors.”
Filed under: war-machine | Tags: anarchy, Athens, detain, exarcheia, Greece, junta, police, riot
From Libcom:
“This is a first posting on the developing situation in Athens where the 36th anniversary of the Polytechnic Uprising against the colonels’ junta has been marked by long and sustained battles with the police during which hundreds of people have been detained.
21:30 17 November 2009 At the time of writing all central Athens is off-bounds and cordoned off by thousands of police forces as battles between protesters and police are developing after the end of the 36th anniversary march for the Polytechnic 1973 uprising and massacre.
It was perhaps the most massive protest march commemorating the Polytechnic Uprising in the last 25 years. And despite guarantees from the government the presence of the police in the city of Athens was massive and provocative to the extend that the official organising bodies of the march refused to start their long way via the Parliament to the American Embassy (believed to be behind the 7 year fascist junta) if riot police forces did not withdraw. After 16:00 policemen arrested a young man claimed to be in possession of a molotov cocktail, while during the hours preceding the march a dozen of protesters en route to the Polytechneio were detained for carrying gas masks. Police blockades have sealed off large areas of the Athens centre and are all day conducting mass stop and search operations even in the remotest northern and western suburbs of the city.
The march started moving at 16:30, shortly stopped at Syntagma square to commemorate the police assassination of two protesters in the Polytechnic march of 1980, while with some tension built up uproad, at the junction of the Athens Hilton, at 18:15 when riot cops threw a tear gas in the midst of the march attempting to break away the anarchist block. The tension was quickly diffused. The first block of the march reached the American Embassy at around 18:00, where hundreds of riot policemen stood in line guarding the building. After the traditional long stop, the march started dispersing in large blocks. At that time, the anarchist block numbering between 2,500 and 4,000 people (still the numbers are unverified) decided to return to Exarcheia via Alexandras Avenue where the Athens Police Headquarters Tower and the Supreme Court are lined. Upon reaching the Police HQs, the big anarchist block was cut in two by riot police forces, leading the protesters to counterattack against the cops and the glass-n-iron symbol of repression with rocks and nautical flares. The clashes initially forced the police forces to retreat and continued until outside the Supreme Court, with smaller blocks breaking up in the side-streets.
Soon after 19:00, under unspecified circumstances, a 100 strong block of protesters was surrounded at the junction of Alexandras avenue and Spyrou Trikoupi street by large riot police forces that immobilised them and brutally detained them. There are reports of people seriously wounded, as well as of two journalists (one working for the French press, and one for the radio-station Kokkino) detained or arrested. The bourgeois media claim that the people detained were unrelated to violence against the police.
Meanwhile protesters that had managed to reach Exarcheia square engaged police blocking the way to the Polytechnic in battle with use of rocks and molotov cocktails, forming barricades. The area is surrounded by police forces and off bounds even for state and bourgeois journalists. At the same time Exarcheia locals have gathered in a demo demanding the immediate retreat of the police from their area. According to the locals the policemen are extremely violent and bear no insignia of identification.
Up to this moment the countdown is about 250 detentions which the persecuting authorities will decide if they are arrests within the next 24h, while protesters are gathering outside the Police HQ Tower demanding their release.
At the same time, the State Persecutor has published a law-suit against the rector and the three sub-rectors of the Athens Polytechnic for allowing athens.indymedia to use its server. The law-suit is considered an unprecedented violation of academic freedom.
In Salonica, three different protest marches in commemoration of the 1973 Uprising were marked again by massive participation. After the end of the march protesters attacked riot police forces outside the Aristotelian University building barricades across Egnatia street.
In the city of Irakleion, in Crete, the Polytechnic protest march starting at Freedom Square and soon attacked riot police forces surrounding it. During the clashes 5 people were detained, out of which 1 has been upgraded to an arrest. More than 100 protesters have occupied the city hall as a response to the repression, demanding the immediate release of the comrades and the retreat of the cops from the city centre.
The protest march in the city of Larissa was completed with no clashes, detentions or arrests.”
http://libcom.org/news/athens-siege-police-hq-attacked-hundreds-detained-many-wounded-17112009
Filed under: update | Tags: 2008, anarchy, december, Greece, insurrection, streets
From the Occupied London Blog:
“With only weeks to go before December 6th, the day marking one year from the assassination of Alexis Grigoropoulos, two new excellent publications on the uprising of 2008 have come out by comrades in the UK and the US. In London, the good people at the 56a Infoshop have released “Everyone To The Streets: Communiques and Texts from the Streets and Occupations”. The book is 150 pages long (!) and contains an introduction by the 56a collective, two chronologies from Athens and Thessaloniki, 15+ texts and communiques from the streets and occupations plus analysis from Greek group TPTG and afterword.
Meanwhile, some good people on the other side of the Pond have also put out an excellent publication: “A day when Nothing is Certain” also contains a collection of texts and analyses from the December uprising. A hard copy of the booklet is making its way around the US – a .pdf version of it is available to download here – and here is a link to a print-ready version.”
http://www.occupiedlondon.org/blog/2009/11/15/123-two-new-publications-on-greeces-2008-revolt/
Filed under: Milwaukee area | Tags: 732, anarchist, anti-civ, CCC, commune-ism, communes, communism, discussion, french, IEF style, insurrectionary, italian, lines, milwaukee, money, the coming insurrection, winter
(This is a bit of a copy of the flier Liam made for the Social Justice or Social War event, but was made just to screw around with design)
Filed under: update | Tags: anarchy, anti-globalization era, egoism, insurrectionary, italian anarchists, practice, projectuality, venomous butterfly, willful disobedience, wolfi landstreicher
Ardent press is compiling texts from various issues of the influential insurrectionary anarchist journal Willful Disobedience edited by Wolfi Landstreicher which is to be published as a book. Wolfi’s writing has been very foundational for the development of insurrectionary ideas and practice within the US, by either introducing texts by Italians (who had been writing and thinking through these ideas since the 70s) and others that he translated through the Venomous Butterfly project or with his own personal egoist influenced writings which offered critique as a massive unshackling from the chains of vapid anti-corporatism and activist practices (among other things) that were dominant and a holdover from the anti-globalization era.
We’ll be ordering and getting them in as soon as their available.
Here’s the introduction from the first volume:
“Willful Disobedience is intended to express ideas that are part of my life projectuality. It is an explicitly anarchic project in the sense that it opposes to every form of authority with the self-determination of individuals who refuse all domination; it is insurrectionary in its recognition that authority must be attacked and destroyed as an essential part of the project of creating our lives for ourselves based upon our desires. That means that this project is not a forum for democratic dialogue in which all ideas are equal and therefore equally vapid … The understanding of anarchic insurgence underlying this project is as follows:
Within the present social context our lives as individuals have been made alien to us, because society creates interactions and activities for us which are not based on the singularity of our unconstrained dreams and desires, but only serve the continuing reproduction of society by channeling the energy of desire into that reproduction through a variety of institutions and systems which integrate to form civilized society: the state, capital, work, technology, religion, education, ideology, law … Opposition to this begins when we as individuals rise up in willful disobedience and recognize the necessity of attacking and destroying all institutions of domination, not as a cause, but for ourselves, because we want to create our own games…”
http://www.omnipresence.mahost.org/wd-v1.htm
Filed under: Uncategorized
From Seattle Local News:
“SEATTLE – A veteran Seattle police officer was fatally shot Saturday night as he and a rookie officer sat in their patrol car in the Central District.
The officer who was killed was identified as Tim Brenton, 39, a nine-year veteran of the Seattle Police Dept.
“Our community is in shock at this brutal and senseless crime,” Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels said at a news conference.
Nickels said this was the first intentional homicide of a Seattle police officer since 1994.
“The killing of someone who protects us, who protects our public safety, who protects our communities, is universally condemned, and our city is united in rejecting this violence and supporting the men and women in uniform,” said Nickels. “Let me be clear. We will not rest until the assailant is brought to justice.”
The shooting occurred shortly after 10 p.m. at 29th Avenue S. and E. Yesler Way.
Assistant Police Chief Jim Pugel said the two officers were sitting in a patrol car parked at the intersection, discussing a routine traffic stop. The rookie officer, Britt Sweeney, 33, was sitting in the driver’s seat; her trainer, Brenton, was in the passenger seat.
Pugel said a car pulled up alongside the patrol car and someone inside opened fire.
Sweeney ducked, and a bullet grazed her back. She called for help and returned fire, Pugel said.
Sweeney, who was grazed by a bullet, managed to return fire as the car backed away and fled the scene.
“From everything that we understand, the car literally pulled up alongside the parked patrol car and began shooting,” said Pugel. “So it was without warning and it was a deliberate homicide.”
Police say they do not have a good description of the suspect or the make of the car, other than to say it may be small, light-colored, possibly gray or silver.
Pugel said at the press conference that local state and federal agencies are working on the investigation.
“This is an assassination and every resource is being used to bring it to a conclusion,” he said.”
http://www.king5.com/news/local/Breaking-News-Seattle-police-officer-shot-and-killed-68182712.html
Burnt Bookmobile 