Angus will be speaking in the Daryll Forde Seminar Room, 2nd Floor of the Anthro building, with Matthew as discussant.
NB due to building work, you need to use the main entrance of the Archaeology Institute round the corner in Gordon Sq. Please plan to arrive between 6:15-6:30 if possible.
Can I recommend an important deleted view of #collonial#history ? This #book (or its factual contents) should be mandatory curriculum in all western schools. The second image is a podcast which nicely ties in the 3rd episode the #BostonTeaParty and the #American#Revolution to its real cause- fear of unrestrained colonial capitalism!
SESSION CLIPS: We are working on getting our 101 sessions broken into clips that are more easily digestible & referenceable. Accompanied by Chris Blankenhorn & @thegreengarret.
Today in Labor History February 10, 1794: The French revolutionist Jacques Roux (1752-1794) committed suicide on this date in his Paris prison cell after the Committee for Public Safety arrested him during the French Revolution. Also known as the "Red Priest," Roux denounced those monopolizing the revolution, the speculator, the merchant, government and the parliamentary state. Roux anticipated many of the themes that Karl Marx would later develop. Roux’s rhetoric inspired food riots during his day and discord in the Paris Commune, 80 years later.
Today, in honor of Black History Month, we remember Lovett Huey Fort-Whiteman (December 3, 1889 – January 13, 1939), an American political activist and functionary for the Communist International (Comintern). Time Magazine once called him “the reddest of the blacks.” As a young man, he lived in the Yucatan, during the Mexican Revolution, which radicalized him and introduced him to anarcho-syndicalist labor organizing. After this, he moved back to the U.S. and became a leading activist and speaker during the Harlem Renaissance. He also wrote two works of fiction during this period. In 1918, he met anarchist cartoonist Robert Minor, who inspired him to visit the Soviet Union. Soon after, they both joined the Communist Labor Party of America. In 1927, he moved to Moscow, where he worked as a teacher at an English-language school. However, in 1937, he was caught up in The Great Purge, and was sentenced to hard labor in a Siberian prison camp because of his Trotskyist affiliations. There, he died of malnutrition in 1939.
Aufruf an Alle die ein derzeitiges 'Weiter so' nicht mehr ertragen und grundlegende Veränderungen an der Wurzel mit gestalten wollen.
Lasst uns zusammen kommen, den Anarchismus und unsere Ideen wieder in die Offensive bringen. Wir wollen laut, bunt und präsent sein im Stadtbild.
Zeigt das wir mehr sind, als es aussieht und dass wir es ernst meinen.
Macht Infostände zu eurem Projekt, flyert, stickert und spült mit ab.
Macht Awareness(-Schichten), einen Vortrag oder singt ein Lied.
Besetzt, containert und klaut.
Habt Spass, lernt liebe Menschen kennen und vernetzt euch.
Hört euch Konzerte an, macht Straßentheater und vor allem, macht ganz viel Mobi bei Menschen, die das alles sicher auch machen wollen 📢
Hier gibt es immer mal wieder Neuigkeiten, Infos und Updates.
Ihr könnt uns hier auch kontaktieren und fragen stellen.
Und boostet das hier mal bitte, damit wir etwas Reichweite bekommen.
Danke euch jetzt schon mal 🖤
Webseite mit Programmübersicht kommt bald.
Kontakt bitte über E-Mail:
a-goettingen@riseup.net
Today in Labor History February 8, 1805: Louis-Auguste Blanqui was born. He was a French revolutionary and participant in the Paris Commune. Blanqui took an active role in most republican conspiracies of the early to mid-1800s, both in France, and in Italy with the Carbonari society, including the July Revolution of 1830. In 1840, the authorities condemned him to death for his role in a violent rebellion led by the Société des Saisons. However, they commuted it to life in prison and then ended up releasing him during the revolution of 1848. Needless to say, he promptly resumed his attacks. In 1849, they again imprisoned him, but he escaped and led two more armed uprisings. Just prior to the Paris Commune, they arrested him again. While in prison, the Communards elected him president of the commune. The Communards offered to release all of their prisoners if the government released Blanqui. In 1872, along with other leaders of the Commune, the authorities sentenced him to deportation. But because of poor health, they commuted his sentence to local imprisonment. He died in 1881.
#Activism#Left#MassProtests#Revolution: "The lessons that Bevins’s defeated protesters offer at the end of If We Burn bear repeating: plan for the day after; progress isn’t inevitable, and a better world doesn’t automatically emerge from protest; hierarchy isn’t an enemy; if you reject representation, someone else will represent you; cultural visibility and political power are separate things; power rushes to fill a void. Surprisingly, many of these interviewees are convinced that the past decade was just the beginning. That’s something the defeated often tell themselves, but in truth it’s hard to see world politics calming down. Some hanker after the old parties, but attempts to synthesise the best of both worlds – ‘networked Leninism’, in Rodrigo Nunes’s half-joking phrase – might be a better way."
Today, in honor of Black History Month, we celebrate the life of Hubert Henry Harrison (April 27, 1883 – December 17, 1927), a West Indian-American writer, speaker, educator, political activist based in Harlem, New York. He was described by union leader A. Philip Randolph as the father of Harlem radicalism and by John G. Jackson as "The Black Socrates." Harrison’s activism encouraged the development of class consciousness among workers, black pride, secular humanism, social progressivism, and free thought. He denounced the Bible as a slave master's book, and said that black Christians needed their heads examined. He refused to exalt a "lily white God " and "Jim Crow Jesus," and criticized Churches for pushing racism, superstition, ignorance and poverty. Religious extremists were known to riot at his lectures. At one of his events, he attacked and chased off an extremist who had attacked him with a crowbar.
In the early 1910s, Harrison became a full-time organizer with the Socialist Party of America. He lectured widely against capitalism, founded the Colored Socialist Club, and campaigned for Eugene V. Debs’s 1912 bid for president of the U.S. However, his politics moved further to the left than the mainstream of the Socialist Party, and he withdrew in 1914. He was also a big supporter of the IWW, speaking at the 1913 Paterson Silk Strike, and supporting the IWW’s advocacy of direct action and sabotage. In 1914, he began working with the anarchist-influenced Modern School movement (started by the martyred educator Francisco Ferrer). During World War I, he founded the Liberty League and the “Voice: A Newspaper for the New Negro,” as radical alternatives to the NAACP. The Liberty League advocated internationalism, class and race consciousness, full racial equality, federal anti-lynching legislation, enforcement of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, labor organizing, support for socialist and anti-imperialist causes, and armed self-defense.
Anarcha-feminists went on the offensive in the fight for reproductive freedom in the 1990s.
Women in the Love and Rage Revolutionary Anarchist Federation (1989–98), the leading US anarchist organization of the period, advanced sharp critiques of the liberal abortion strategy that had ceded so much ground to the Right.
Anarchists offered radical alternatives for women to take back control of their lives and bodies. Rather than petition the state for reforms, they mobilized to defend abortion clinics from the Far Right and taught themselves how to perform reproductive care at the grassroots level.
They maintained that abortion restrictions were a form of state violence, especially as they corresponded with the structural violence of white supremacy, patriarchy, and capitalism. Anarchists argued that feminists must oppose the state itself as the ultimate patriarchal institution and the source of much of the violence they faced.
Thus, rather than the slogan “We’re prochoice and we vote,” anarchists often marched behind a banner reading “We’re prochoice and we riot!”
In honor of Black History Month, a quote by C.L.R. James: The rich are only defeated when running for their lives.
James was a Trinidadian historian, journalist, activist and Marxist writer. He wrote the 1937 work "World Revolution" outlining the history of the Communist International, which stirred debate in Trotskyist circles, and in 1938 he wrote one of the greatest works on the Haitian Revolution, "The Black Jacobins."
I know publishing articles in It's Going Down is counterproductive to any academic career I want, but I am proud to publish with them. Unlike most academic publishing, their articles come out of (and promote) movement work and are meant to be directly useful in radical struggles.
I think that @igd_news has prompted me to produce some of my best writing:
“We’re Pro-Choice and We Riot!”: How Anarcha-Feminists Built Dual Power in Struggles for Reproductive Freedom
Podcast interview: Lessons From the Fight to Protect Abortion Clinics in the 1990s: A Discussion
"On this episode of the It’s Going Down podcast, we talk with both long-time anarchist organizer Suzy Subways and historian Spencer Beswick about how anarchists in the 1990s organized in the face of a deadly far-Right attack on abortion access across the so-called United States." https://itsgoingdown.org/clinic-defense-1990s-abortion/
Anyway, just thinking about how important movement-based institutions/infrastructure like It's Going Down are. I really appreciate the work they do. And I guess that's why they've been banned by the free-speech lovers at Twitter/Facebook/Instagram.
Today in Labor History January 29, 1911: The Mexican Liberal Party, led by the anarchist Magonistas, captured the Baja California border town of Mexicali, during their revolution in Baja California. Many members of the IWW participated in the revolution, which also conquered and held Tijuana and Ensenada for several days. Lowell Blaisdell writes about it in his now hard to find book, “The Desert Revolution,” (1962).
In the late 1980s, the Minneapolis-based Revolutionary Anarchist Bowling League (RABL) theorized and practiced what they called "revolutionary anarchism" and helped build an organized anarchist movement across North America.
In "Bowling for Beginners: An Anarchist Primer," RABL offers an initial definition of anarchism: "Anarchy is not chaos. Anarchy is the absence of imposed authority. Anarchy is a society that is built on the principles of respect, cooperation and solidarity Anarchy is wimmin controlling their own bodies, workers controlling their own workplaces, youth controlling their own education and the celebration of cultural difference."
In this piece, RABL gives a short history of anarchism from the 1886 Haymarket Affair to contemporary squatters movements in order to demonstrate that successful movements all share a common thread of people taking power into their own hands and collectively struggling for a new world. RABL rejected the need for a revolutionary vanguard, arguing that “only the masses, completely involved and in absolute control, can make a real revolution.” In the end, “anarchism is about people empowering themselves to take control and to lead their own lives.”
But since those in power will not give it up without a fight, revolution is necessary. The basic point of unity for RABL was an agreement on the necessity of revolutionary action to reach a classless, stateless society. RABL brought together the most pro-organization and anti-imperialist anarchists in the Twin Cities--and eventually across the US--to advocate a combination of direct action and revolutionary organization.
True to their name, the Revolutionary Anarchist Bowling League crew began referring to “going bowling” as a code for direct action, which could be anything from nighttime sabotage (gluing locks, spray painting, etc.) to acting as a militant bloc at a street demonstration.
Many anarchists at the time practiced this sort of small-scale militancy, which could be organized in small affinity groups of friends. RABL’s intervention was to pair this individual and small-group direct action with a vision for a broad anarchist federation. Anarchism could continue to exist forever on the margins of society in small groups, but if anarchists wanted to actually change the world, they needed to get organized and help build militant mass movements.
Despite their roots in a relatively small city, the Revolutionary Anarchist Bowling League played an outsized role in transforming US anarchism and organizing a national movement at the end of the 20th century.
Today in Labor History January 14, 1850: Anarchist Michael Bakunin was condemned to death by a Saxon tribunal while imprisoned in the Königstein fortress. In 1848, he had published his Appeal to the Slavs, arguing that Slav revolutionaries should unite with Hungarian, Italian and German revolutionaries to overthrow the Russian Empire, Austro-Hungarian Empire, and the Kingdom of Prussia. In 1849, he helped lead the May Uprising in Dresden. His Saxony sentence was later commuted and in 1851 he was handed over to the Russian authorities.
It is time for the public to take back control of the #Internet, a #technology that was created with public dollars, so it serves the people’s interests.
"If the #GreenParty is going to become a major party, it will have to enlist voters who don’t vote now because they are alienated from the process. The Green platform speaks to their needs. Greens have to learn how to organize in these communities."
Today in Labor History January 12, 1848: The Palermo rising began in Sicily. It was the first of many revolutions that occurred that year in Europe. Three times the people of Sicily rose up against Bourbon rule in the 1800s. This time they succeeded, creating an independent state that survived for 16 months. Their new constitution included a proposal to confederate the Italian states into a single nation. It set the stage for the final end of the Bourbon kingdom in 1860, initiated by Giuseppe Garibaldi. Three days prior to the Palermo rising, activists distributed posters and notices organizing the people for the revolt.
The Haitian Revolution - Documentary (2009) (www.youtube.com)
PBS Documentary Titled - Egalite for All: Toussaint Louverture & The Haitian Revolution