12th September (Wednesday); 13th September (Thursday); 14th September (Friday)
Decolonising Together
Anarchist Disregard and the Politics of Indigeneity and Sovereignty in Settler Colonial Context J. Kēhaulani Kauanui
Looking at the United States as an example, in settler colonial context, this paper distinguishes a diversity of anarchist practices to clarify common misunderstandings about indigenous nationalism often held by non-Indigenous people, and to offer some initial thoughts on bringing together an indigenous sovereignty politic in relation to anarchist philosophy and activism. I aim to grapple with anarchist political frameworks vis-à-vis assertions of indigenous critique and indigenous sovereignty. Too often, non-Indigenous understandings of indigenous sovereignty claims denounce them as forms of retrograde “ethnic nationalism,” or otherwise dismissing assertions of indigeneity as a problematic form of identity politics. This fraught terrain begs for decolonial anarchist approaches that both challenge settler colonialism and engage with non-statist/non-Western form of indigenous sovereignty.
Intersections of theory and practice: Anarchism, Settler Colonialism and Indigenous Resistance Adam Lewis Settler colonialism, as well as other resource extractive forms, has been fundamentally connected to the rise and continuance of both capitalism and the state. This paper argues that the colonial histories that the state and capital are founded upon are crucial for consideration by anarchists, and how we approach resistance in context. In this paper I consider the insights of bringing settler colonial theory, anarchist theory and practice, as well as Indigenous resistance and resurgence, together. I argue that this allows for a greater and more detailed discussion of the context in which anarchists resist, but also prompts important discussions of the future. What does anarchism look like on contested territory? What does it mean to take up prefigurative politics in the here and now on land that is stolen? And how does building a future society intersect with other grassroots political projects that are attempting to do the same? I bring some reflections from the context of so-called ‘Canada’ in hopes that these considerations might find resonance and be further developed in a broader range of contexts of resistance.
Ikariam: approach to anarchism in the Yanomami from a decolonizing perspective Rodolfo Montes De Oca
The Yanomami are the oldest and late contact people of Venezuela, since time immemorial this cross-border town has developed an anti-authoritarian practice regardless of the development of Western civilization; approaching that its still effective practice of horizontal, anticapitalist and federative conducts. This forum will focus on the development of this town from its organization as a family-band (shapono), its economic system of collection and based on the gift of gift, until the coalition and rupture of its funerary, sexual and protective practices that collide and challenge the legal systems of Brazil and Venezuela. This forum will also talk about the policy of Brazil and Venezuela in the extraction of gold in Yanomami territory, as well as the damage suffered by this indigenous people due to the process of rapprochement of European anthropologists who perverted their practices. Ikariaia will change the Eurocentric vision of anarchism.
Individual and Community in Anarchist Thought
Freedom, needs and relationships Carissa Honeywell
The idea that resources should be distributed, without conditions, according to need has remained stable throughout the history of anarchism. What may not be so immediately visible to observers of anarchist practices is the importance of collaboration, solidarity and commensality in the meeting of needs for the very realisation of individual freedom. Twentieth century anarchists such as Colin Ward and Paul Goodman placed great emphasis on the emancipatory possibilities of the quotidian sphere of necessity, need, care, and practices of commensality. Anarchist writers working within the field of crime and criminology such as Larry Tifft and David Sullivan, and Randall Amster have emphasised the social, interpersonal and informal, as opposed to individualised and de-personalised, foundations of effective and healing justice. More recent authors such as Todd May increasingly emphasise relations of commensality, friendship, and care as forms of resistance against capitalism and as grounds for the development of new political forms. These emphases blur the distinction between the flourishing of the collective and the freedom of the individual, and reflect the relational quality of anarchist politics. This paper will focus on anarchist practices that directly address needs in order to make wider points about the anarchist approach to needs, freedom and relationships.
Individuals and Community: The Crisis of the Political. Benjamin Franks
One of the central questions of traditional political philosophy has been on how to reconcile the freedom of the individual with their responsibilities to others. From Aristotle to analytic philosopher such as Dudley Knowles and the liberal political tradition, the state is central to developing the just relationships between different social characters. For the latter the task is finding the right norms, giving the correct balance of rights and duties to harmonise a society. For anarchist theorists such assumptions about the pertinence and necessity of the state are put under question. In recent years, liberal assumptions are, increasingly, under question and institutions and ideologies based on this conceptual arrangement between individuals mediated by different state arrangements have faltered. The response to this crisis has been to shore up the fracturing conceptual arrangement but appeals to secondary metaphysical attributes (for instance nationalism or providence) or an, albeit faltering, pragmatism. This paper explores this crisis in liberalism and examines what this crisis means for anarchist theory and practice. It identifies and assesses not only different anarchist methods for reconceptualising the question of individual-to-community, demonstrating that some are predicated on the same ontological assumptions as liberalism and posits an alternative consistent with the main strands of anarchist thought.
The Anarchist Ideal of Communal Individuality Laurence Davis
Scholars of political ideology commonly allege that anarchism is not a coherent ideology because of the coexistence within it of irreconcilably opposed individualist and communalist strands. This paper argues, to the contrary, that the coexistence within anarchism of well-developed and very different individualist and communalist strands is a primary source of its ideological coherence, distinction and political strength. It argues, moreover, that the sometimes competing demands of individuality and community can never be perfectly reconciled, even in an ‘ideal anarchy’, and that this seeming limitation of anarchism is actually one of its greatest strengths. These points are illustrated with reference to anarchist debates about and expressions of so-called ‘lifestyle’ politics, radical democracy, and literary utopianism.
‘Lifestylism’ versus ‘workerism’ through a punk lens or ‘False dichotomy? Smash it up!’ J. Donaghey
Detractors from outside the movement might criticise anarchism for its underlying (and unresolved) tension between ‘individualism’ and ‘communalism’. But debate also rages within anarchism: ‘lifestylism’ versus ‘workerism’ is a supposed dichotomy which continues to animate acrimonious debate within the contemporary anarchist milieu – and like the ‘individual’ versus ‘community’ schism, this is framed as a binary opposition. On closer inspection, however, the terms ‘lifestylist’ and ‘workerist’ are not much more than pejorative slurs which fail to fully or accurately reflect any substantially existing anarchist perspective. Their only usefulness is in conjuring straw figures for polemical attack. Punk’s relationship with anarchism is one area where the ‘lifestylist’ versus ‘workerist’ dichotomy has been most rancorously debated – but the example of contemporary punk-engaged anarchism highlights the woeful inadequacy of this binary dichotomous understanding. This paper will lay out the terms of the false dichotomy between ‘workerism’ and ‘lifestylism’, especially in terms of where punk is placed across it, before revealing the baselessness of the dichotomy (and the terms) through examination of ethnographic research in contemporary punk scenes and anarchist movements in the UK, Poland and Indonesia (2012-2015), including discussion of activisms such as DIY cultural production, animal liberation, squatting, grassroots trade union organising, anti-fascism. Antinomy is proposed as an anarchistic theoretical approach which is able to encompass the complexities of the lived experiences of anarchist activism and organising, which form a dynamic and intersecting spectrum of perspectives (which no dichotomy or dialectic could possibly contain).
Anarchism and Marxism
Mikhail Bakunin and the Marx-Bakunin debate: Ideology and the Russian revolution Saptadeepa Banerjee
The founding of the First International of Workingmen’s Association in 1864 was a significant step taken towards the organisation of the international working class movement in the second half of the nineteenth century. Associated with working class politics within the First International were Karl Marx and Mikhail Bakunin who eventually engaged in a polemical conflict centering on the strategy to be adopted in the conduct of the ‘social revolution’. Branding Marx’s ideology as an ‘authoritarian’ form of Communism, Bakunin vociferously asserted that Marx’s insistence on the establishment of the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ was an indication of his advocacy of a Volkstaat or a People’s State that needed to be created in the transitory phase of the revolution. The Russian Revolution of 1917 that ushered in a new era of global politics with the creation of a Socialist government and the developments of the Cold War period generated a renewed interest in the Marx-Bakunin ideological debate in the twentieth century. Ramifications of Soviet rule necessitated not only a questioning of the ideological foundations of Bolshevism but also an engagement with Bakunin’s ‘libertarian’ ideas. Bakunin’s interpretation of Marxist ideology in many ways facilitated a comprehensive understanding of the trajectory of developments in the Soviet Union in the twentieth century. Did Bakunin’s ‘libertarian’ ideas encapsulated in his Anarchist thought constitute an alternate path to the development of Socialism as opposed to the Marxist path? Did the differences between Marxism and Anarchism underscored by Bakunin acquire greater significance against the backdrop of Cold War politics? These are questions that the paper will seek to answer through a study of the debate and the manner in which this debate has been dealt with in historical scholarship.
The International Anarchist Congress of 1881: a turning point in the history of anarchism? Axel Barenboim
Between July the 14th and July 19, 1881, forty-five delegates, representing “sixty federations and fifty-nine groups or section—that means at least 50,000 people” got together in a Congress in London in order to refound the International Working Men’s Association, officially dissolved in 1876, after the scission between Marxists and anarchists in 1872. The Congress is remembered in the history of anarchism for having united some important figures as Peter Kropotkin, Errico Malatesta and Louise Michel, and particularly for having theorized and proclaimed, in its final resolution, the need for political violence, presented as “propaganda by the deed” —and the victory of individualist anti-organization anarchism. This idea is often explained by quoting just a small phrase from the resolution, while little has been really analyzed after Max Nettlau’s first research on the subject (Nettlau, 1933–1934). This presentation is based on my doctoral research and uses Gustave Brocher’s Papers from the IISG in Amsterdam, anarchist press (Le Révolté) and police reports from French and Italian archives. Following the transnational turn that has profoundly renewed the study of the anarchist movement and its history by focusing on networks and the circulation of people, objects and ideas beyond national borders (Bantman & Altena, 2015), I will try to relocate the congress and its final resolutions in the context of 1881 anarchist movement: that means to analyze the background of the delegates—most of them trying to have a political activity in exile—, and finally to relativize the call for propaganda by the deed, which seems more of an attempt to have a common ground—even by accepting some contradictions—than a real theorization of political action shared by every delegate. Furthermore, if the Congress’s failure in building a long-lasting anarchist IWMA is often blamed on anarchist individualism, it might also be appropriate to point out the generalized repression of anarchist movements and activists after 1881 (i.e. Processes in Andalucia in 1882, Lyon 1883, Chicago 1886). The “turning point” of the Congress lies less in a radical change of the theoretical basis of anarchism or some new “anti-organizational” stubbornness—the rejection of a central committee being a part of the anti-authoritarian internationalist tradition—than in the inherent difficulties of trying to build a transnational movement with people from different backgrounds, without hierarchies and leaders and while being persecuted by state power all over the world.
The looks of Peter Kropotkin and some other Russian anarchists at the events of October 1917 in Russia Sergey Saytanov
Until now the Bolsheviks (and after them the communist ideologists in Russia and around the world) represent Peter Alekseevich Kropotkin as one of the main ideologists of the creation of the communist regime. And meanwhile as we noted earlier Peter Kropotkin did not accept the October overturn of 1917 in Russia. He believed that that revolution had gone “from the first steps along the wrong path”. And he declared that the Bolsheviks “were burying the Russian revolution”. The Bolsheviks, seizing power, strove to implement the idea of building a centralized state socialism in Russia. Peter Kropotkin did not deny the very idea of a social revolution and still maintained the prospect of building anarchy-communism in the future. Under these conditions the main hopes of Peter Kropotkin were directed at the workers’ movement and the federalism. He saw in the political federation of the State a transitional period of the emergence of an anarchic social order. Very close political views at the Bolshevik October revolution had an American anarchist of Russian origin Emma Goldman. She even came to the conclusion that the Bolsheviks had restored capitalism in Russia. This was expressed by many, for example the anarchist B. G. Sandomirsky. And another Russian anarchist Vsevolod Mikhailovich Eikhenbaum (Wolin) compared the victorious communism in Russia to Italian and German fascism.
Anarcha-Feminism
Sista Grrrls Riot: Phantom Power, Liminality and (Trans)locution to Resist Racism and Fascism Caroline K. Kaltefleiter
Girls of color have struggled to legitimize their place in subcultural and anarchist spaces (Nguyen, 2012). The phenomenology of women of color in and out of the AfroPunk, Chicana and Latino/a punk movement(s) illuminate ways they resist displacement in punk spaces. Drawing on the concept of liminality, girl punks who have been marginalized see threshold spaces to inhabit and to navigate through an embodied sense (Andrews and Roberts, 2012). Liminality is seen as not outside a social structure or on its edges, rather in the cracks within the social structure itself where the potentiality of ideas and relations may arise. Liminal spaces inhabit bodies, existential experiences and create openings for anarchist states of being. Girls of color transform subcultural (dis)location through (trans)locution and (re)cooperate experiences to create counter collectives to contemporary punk spaces. Using historical sources with attention to zines, lyrics, and interviews, this paper examines Sista Grrrl’s Riot in Los Angeles and Los Fantom in Argentina as transformative spaces that engage in active, dialogical and critical performance and education. This work advances my earlier work on girls and subcultures (Kaltefleiter 2009, and 2016). This project is grounded within liminality, anarcha-feminism, and intersectionality, and highlights collaborations inside/outside punk scenes by emphasizing how participants interrogate the spaces between to show how gender, sexuality, class and race interplay to shape the contours and contents of the public sphere and punk itself. The relative in/visibility of groups positioned at, or pushed to its margins is (re)contextualized through resistance and agency.
Waves of Anarchist Feminism: A Crooked Historiography of (Un)Timely Ideas and Actions Markus Lundström
This article explores an undercurrent informing feminist ideas and actions across history; it conveys the waves of anarchist feminism, in which anarchy expels patriarchy through a generic struggle against hierarchy. This lineage is identified to begin with anarchist-feminism’s nascent articulation in the late 19th century, which then revives through the 1970s anarcha-feminism, and now surfaces in contemporary theory. The article’s analytical entry point is an alleged, historical anomaly: feminist-motivated rejection of universal suffrage, in a time where most women lacked voting rights. A broad content analysis of the anarchist-feminist corpus indicates how anarchism’s emblematic anti-authoritarianism has become a guiding star for ensuing struggles, against and beyond male domination. By interrogating such a temporal dialogue – between past and future struggles – the article endorses a crooked historiography that consciously attunes assorted waves of feminist thought.
The Forgotten Pre-History of Intersectionality: The Anarcha-Feminism of He-Yin Zhen Oscar Addis
Discussions of anarcha-feminism in the early 20th century usually centre around white women such as Emma Goldman, Voltairine de Cleyre and Mercedes Comaposada, who was one of the founders of Mujeres Libres. The Chinese anarcha-feminist He-Yin Zhen, who wrote in 1907, has in comparison received almost no attention despite her work being translated into English for the first time in 2013. She is such an obscure figure that many historians of anarchism have not even heard of her. My paper shall begin to improve this situation by providing an overview of He-Yin’s distinctly anarchist version of feminism. I shall begin by outlining He-Yin’s analysis and history of patriarchy in China. I shall then argue that He-Yin foreshadowed modern intersectional feminism through her conceptualization of how the oppression of poor women is a product of patriarchy, capitalism and the state forming an interlocking system of domination. With this in place I shall end by showing how He-Yin used this framework to argue that liberal feminism cannot achieve the emancipation of most women. In so doing I shall demonstrate that He Yin’s anarcha-feminism remains relevant to contemporary debates within the feminist movement.
Current Theory 2
Embodying the learning of anti-discrimination: a bottom-up practice of non-oppressive interactions Lisa Buchter
This presentation explores ways to teach and learn non-oppressive and non-discriminatory interactions between individuals: how to uproot discriminatory bias toward religious and racial minorities, how to unlearn the distance created between people with and without disabilities, how to overcome at the individual level our sexist and heteronormative ways to interact (and which leads us to mis-gender people, to ask too many questions to people with different sexual orientation). I will connect the dots between numerous training tools designed to embody non-oppressive interactions, from cuddle parties to learn an embodied practice of consent, to cooperative housing to co-habitate with people different from us, to grassroots multicultural dialogue group, to disability simulation for raising awareness. These tools stress the role of going beyond theory and embodying non-discrimination in our interactions to truly overcome discriminatory behaviors (Praxis). This presentation will also tackle the fact that one challenge of setting up these learning experiences is to first acknowledge that we need practice. No one – and particularly people working for social justice – likes to think that they are not already aware of how to be non-discriminatory: people would like to think they know all about consent and how to avoid sexual harassment, and that they are open-minded about people from all walks of life. The framework of praxis helps us see how there is always more to learn and that this learning goes beyond theoretical knowledge, and indeed needs to be embodied and experienced.
Towards a political economy of anarchist intersectionality theory Janet Brown and Thomas Swann
Intersectionality theory has been mobilised in anarchist politics both as a rejection of liberal multiculturalism and identity politics, on the one hand, and of a reduction of struggle to class, on the other (e.g. Shannon and Rogue, 2009; Volcano and Rogue, 2012; Cudworth, 2015; Gordon, 2016). Anarchist intersectionality theory, in contrast to liberal account of intersectionality, suggests how political praxis can be grounded in an understanding of exploitation and domination as structural conditions that require the destruction of capitalism, patriarchy, colonialism and the state to be overcome. This presentation aims at building a historical and conceptual approach to anarchist intersectionality theory that grounds this understanding in an examination of the historical development of structures of exploitation and domination. It provides an overview of Marxist intersectional theory (e.g. Bannerji, 2005; Whitehead, 2017) and asks how an anarchist intersectionality theory can provide a more holistic approach to political economy, by taking into account the role of the state in constituting intersecting exploitations and dominations and by tracing the roots of these structures beyond the emergence of capitalism.
Doing Research in Punk Indonesia: a (re)consideration of insider/outsider perspectives in “other” places Jim Donaghey
Researching punk from an insider perspective throws up important challenges, and in the context of Indonesia these issues are further complicated and intensified. This paper draws on the Donaghey’s experience of, and reflections on, the process of researching ‘punk Indonesia’, augmented with reflective contributions from nine other social theorists, ethnographers and anthropologists, to suggest a research methodology that is dialogical and non-exploitative while remaining rigorous, analytical and critical. The academy’s relationship to punk has often been identified as intrusive and exploitative – and with good reason – but it is argued here that academic research into punk can be included within punk’s own tradition of self-critique, especially when that research emerges from insider perspectives. The lessons learned from insider perspectives may also be mapped effectively onto outsider approaches. A non-exploitative methodology is concerned with both research processes and research outputs, and these two aspects are closely entwined. Anarchist epistemological concerns are taken on board, along with engagements with Orientalism and Grounded Theory Method, to develop an approach that gives voice to the punks, involving them in a dialogical research process and creating research outputs that are useful to the scenes, cultures and movements that are being researched, while maintaining a high level of academic rigour, analysis and critique.
Anarchist Critiques
Towards a Transhumanist Fascism? Max Franz Johann Schnetker
A dogmatically reductionist world view in combination with an euphoric outlook on technological development gave rise to the transhumanist ideology, which at this time is breaking into the mainstream of academia and politics. On the surface it appears to be a technological radicalisation of liberal capitalist thought. However, since it`s inception the transhumanist movement has had undercurrents that openly embraced fascist thought. It is demonstratable that these are not mere aberrations, but that the core of transhumanist thought is build on ideas that stem from the scientific justification of colonialism and eugenics. Furthermore, it is redeveloping themes that were present in the conception of the Übermensch in late 19th century German philosophy as well as early 20th century Italian Futurism. Therefore, a tremendous fascist potentiality can be attributed to the current liberal-capitalist incarnation of Transhumanism. This becomes all the more pressing, as ideologems of Transhumanism are adopted by tech-entrepreneurs and state officials alike. It is very likely that we are witnessing the development of a new mythos of Power, that presents itself as radically new but exists in continuity with older forms of authoritarian mythology. In this talk I will propose an anarchist critique of these emerging mythologies of power, as well as possible modes of resistance.
An anarchistic critique of the Indigenous of the Republic in France. Towards an intersectional anarchism Philippe Corcuff
This paper will present a critical study of the speeches of the organizers of the Indigenous of the Republic (movement, then party) (Corcuff, 2015). It’s a marginal militant group in France, but it tends to polarize the debates on postcolonial antiracism, in the Left and in the anarchistic circles. I shall underline at first the contributions of this group in the introduction of the postcolonial and decolonial perspectives. But the main thing of my subject will consist in criticizing the simplifications, the manicheanism and the not thought of its analyses, from the point of view of an intersectional frame and of an anarchistic emancipator social criticism, in particular: – the temptation to make of the postcolonial oppression the main contradiction (as the Marxists with the contradiction capital/labour); – the implicit fascination for a politics marked by statism; – a marginalization of the question of individuality; – a tendency to an essentialism of the community; – or an ambiguous game with the borders of antisemitism. These analyses will lead in a vision of the convergence of the emancipators social movements in terms of an immanence with compass (immanence à boussole)
Clean or dirtied? The development of the anarchist and radical left scene in the Czech Republic Arnošt Novák and Ondřej Slačálek
The situation of anarchist and marxist groups in the countries of the former eastern bloc differs in comparison to the Western European situation in several fundamental ways: 1) the legacy of regimes that discredited certain radical left-wing aproaches and have institutional successors that in some cases have blocked the space available to radical left-wing actors; 2) a different chronology; the opening of a “window of opportunity“ during the 1990s led to considerable change in a society that was “returning to Europe“, “making up for lost time“ and “taking exams“ in democracy and capitalism. This period saw the recreation or the creation for the first time of political identities, including radical identities, that were negotiating a relationship to social change for themselves; 3) the path-dependency of this window of opportunity and the radical political identities that were created during it. Our paper will focus on what political identities were forged in the Czech Republic after 1989 in the radical Marxist (Trotskyist) and anarchist environment. We shall take as our starting point the thesis that their relative newness (compared to Western Europe) demonstrated itself in 1) a lack of a firm anchor (which also allowed the interconnection of approaches based on differing contexts and identities) and 2) in reaction to this, tendencies towards sectarianism and an ideological “political identity“. The 1990s thus saw the constitution of a strongly identity-orientated radical left-wing politics, above all in the anarcho-communist environment, which defined itself ideologically in relation to other opposition currents (Trotskyism, autonomism, “lifestyle anarchism“). We shall trace the way in which the path dependency of these identities made itself felt in the case of six key agendas: a) antifascism, b) environmentalism, c) alterglobalism, d) squatting, e) antimilitarism, f) (pro-)worker activism. Focusing on these agendas will allow us to see political identities in action, and also to compare the consequences of their functioning and their transformation in the individual agendas. The article is based on qualitative research methods.
Technologies of Anarchy
Anarchist technologies? Minor technologies and ‘Black Technopoetics’ Christoph Hubatschke
“Technology is therefore social before it is technical.” Gilles Deleuze: Foucault, 40 From biometric passports and weaponized borders to sabotage, from fully automated workshops to decentralized communication platforms, from surveillance to Hacktivism, technologies often are the target of anarchist critique but at the same time certain technologies are central to anarchist activism. This ambivalence of technology is not only a political urgent struggle but also a highly controversial question in anarchist theory. From Proudhon’s linking of the machine to “liberty” in the Philosophy of Misery or Kropotkin’s praise of “modern technics” to anarcho primitivism, technology is often seen as either liberating in principle but misused or as always already part of capitalist repression and exploitation. Uri Gordon therefore argued that most of anarchist accounts on technology can be categorized as either an “anticapitalist Promethean approach” or a “primitivist critique of civilization”. All too often these approaches follow a problematic and – even when criticizing it at the same time – “enlightenment” view on technology. Based on feminist technoscience studies and what Louis Chude-Sokei calls “Black Technopoetics” the paper will ask for the sexist and colonial history not only of certain technologies itself but all the more of the very thinking of these technologies and even the critique of technology in Marxist and anarchist thought. In this paper I want to propose a different, non-essentialist understanding of technology by drawing on the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Following their concept of “minor literature” I want to ask for the possibilities of critically reflecting on the colonial history of technologies and ask in which assemblages what kind of hegemonic technologies can become what I want to call “minor technologies” and how these minor technologies are related to political articulation, resistance and current political struggles.
Hacker pedagogy for conviviality Davide Fant, Carlo Milani, Vivien García and Agnese Trocchi
We live in Internet-connected environments in which personal and collective choices shift towards algorithmic-driven decision making. The organization of living systems (Maturana & Varela, 1991) has been increasingly delegated to corporate, gamified systems – a pervasive colonisation of everything. Politics is becoming a mere question of computation, called “technological governance”. The same happens to aesthetic, personal relationships and even for trivial decisions. The BigData promise is a totalitarian nightmare: where to go for dinner? Which book should I read? Which movie should I watch? There is no needs for rational evaluation. We just have to be transparent to the Performance Society. The final goal of new industrial technologies, i.e. “Technologies of Domination” (Ippolita, 2017), is to free ourselves from the burden of freedom by freeing us from the responsibility of choice. Yet, nothing is lost. We can still choose what kind of machines and algorithms we wants to live with in mestizos, ecological-driven systems. Drawing on the Ippolita’s indisciplinary collective work, we outline a methodology for overcoming the reaction phase against the Megamachines toxic devices (Mumford, 1967) that we call “hacker pedagogy”. Digital self-defense practices are a good starting point to transform personal/collective vulnerabilities into strengths. But they remains in the framework given by unlimited technological growth. Hacker pedagogy is an active attitude to change the behaviours promoting automatisms – thus restricting freedom of choice. It is not focused on technological devices – we know they rapidly changes – but on the effects, assumptions and practices of technical interactions. “Hacker pedagogy” trainings and workshops formulate a coherent set of tactics for de-colonisation of our personal/collective mindbodies.
Alternative Education
Frightened of Freedom: Reinventing Radical Education in the UK through Forest School Education Dave Cudworth
The progressive schooling movement in England at the beginning of the twentieth century marked a major shift in the thinking behind education and schooling. Progressive ideologies provided the catalyst that led to the later implementation of educational policy based on an egalitarian project and tool for educational social justice. Such thinking promoted the merits of holistic development and child-centred learning, as well as an appreciation of the outdoors as a learning environment. However, the publication of the ‘Black Papers’ between 1969 and 1977 signalled a backlash to these ideals of progressive education and laid the foundations for a discursive shift that led to a return to standardised learning. Since the 1988 Education Reform Act that introduced a National Curriculum, neo-liberal education policy has continued to suppress alternative narratives of education with a high stakes testing culture increasingly dominating much of what goes on in schools today. However, with the growth in popularity of Forest School Education in the UK over the past 20 years with its emphasis on using the woodland as a learning environment with no set timetable or curriculum and a focus on child-led learning, this article examines the extent to which Forest School could offer a ‘new’ vehicle for the re-establishment of the progressive ideals of the past. By referring to Foucault’s (1984) work on Heterotopias the article argues how Forest School as an alternative educational space, has the potential to challenge the monopoly of educational neo-liberalism and provide schools with the freedom to do things differently.
ONDE ESTA A ANARQUIA NO LIVRO DIDÁTICO: “POR DENTRO DA HISTÓRIA”? Adriel de Oliveira Dia
Sabemos que a educação, seja básica ou superior, não é neutra e busca formar um determinado tipo de mulheres e homens; desta forma, há uma seleção cultural do que é ensinado, como é ensinado e o que não é ensino, ou “esquecido”. Por meio deste artigo buscamos analisar a atenção dado aos anarquistas por parte de uma das principais ferramentas de ensino: o livro didático. Salientamos que o livro didático é um dos transmissores e propagadores de narrativa histórica, logo, de formação de concepções, além disso é uma mercadoria e produção cultural de determinada sociedade; dessa maneira é passível de análise. O livro selecionado para a análise foi adotado como ferramenta de ensino oficial pelo espaço educacional formal, o Colégio Estadual Amália Hermano Teixeira, localizado na periferia de Goiânia.
WHERE IS ANARCHY IN THE DIDACTIC BOOK: “POR DENTRO DA HISTÓRIA”?
We know that education, whether basic or superior, is not neutral and seeks to form a certain type of women and men; in this way there is a cultural selection of what is taught, how it is taught and what is not taught, or “forgotten”. Through this article, we seek to analyze the attention given to anarchists by one of the main teaching tools: teaching book. We emphasize that the didactic book is one of the transmitters and propagators of historical narrative, therefore, of formation of conceptions, in addition it is a commodity and cultural production of a certain society; in this way, it can be analyzed. The book selected for the analysis was adopted as an official teaching tool for the formal educational space, Amália Hermano Teixeira State College, located on the outskirts of Goiânia.
Thicker than Blood Izdehar Afyouni
Izdehar Afyouni is a Palestinian queer visual artist. Her practice is concerned with making the usually unpublicized workings of government public. In making the invisible everyday working of government she queered bodily subjectivity, the erotics of violence and the biosurveillant measures of weeding out genetic and undesirable threats to the state. But making the act of government “security” measures public is not just a counter to the propaganda agency of reporting government policy, it is about the act of making the public aware. In this talk she introduces her ongoing immersive exhibition series and curatorial project Thicker Than Blood, which extends the extractive form of governmental subjection and surveillance of the body to its non-necessary human form, namely, its test sample. To enter the exhibition, there is mandatory donation policy: a small sample of blood was taken from each guest upon their arrival. The sample was then tested immediately on-site. Access to the various performances was dependant on an individual’s test result which throughout the course of the event emerged as experiences within a constructed social system and hierarchy; these experiences were guided by each group’s privileges of access to the dynamics and functions of the exhibition and performances within the space. Unlimited access was granted only to the Kindred. The potential consequences of the production of race-differentiated data are explored via a reinterpretation of accumulating such data, and the weight ascribed to it.
Climate Change, Disasters, Community Response
Keeping Calm in Catastrophic Times: How Climate Change will not bring the End of Order Ole Sandberg
In ”Dark Tidings: Anarchist Politics in the age of collapse” Uri Gordon paints an ominous picture: ”industrial civilization is coming down” and anarchists ”are now required to project themselves into a future of growing instability.” While I am skeptical about the first claim, I want to discuss how we should do the latter. These are connected. Popular culture as well as subcultural political movements have been insaturated with the image of civilizational collapse in ways that are not conducive to anarchist practices. The image of catastrophe lends itself to romantization of survivalist individualism and a Hobbesian worldview. I argue that climate change and environmental destruction will not lead to a collapse of the current world-order. On the contrary, it is likely to reinforce that order. Capitalist colonialization will find new forms as states and corporations use local disasters to increase their domination. This is the likely future we must project ourselves into and find ways of resisting. This resistance cannot take the form of romantic self-dependence or of despair, spurred by the image of social collapse. Instead we must develop communities based on social connections, solidarity and trust – it is these features that have allowed communities to survive local disasters in the past and to resist those who try to exploit them. Rather than a sudden catastrophic event we must imagine climate change as merely intensifying such disasters and the power structures that exploit them. Staying calm and building community will be increasingly important in the age of growing instability.
Climate change and government by containment Nicholas Beuret
Government proceeds by crisis. From these crises come new policies and regulations, new political alliances as well as entirely new ways of managing populations, nations, economies and even life itself. The specific character of a crisis plays a significant role in shaping what form these politics take. Climate change is a terminal crisis. Not terminal as in ‘we’re all dead’, but terminal as in it can’t be fixed. Once we pass 2°C, there’s no going back in our lifetimes. It can’t be solved. There are only ‘less bad outcomes’ – all ‘we’ can do is figure out how to minimize or contain the damage. The politics of managing less bad outcomes is the model of governance emerging in response to climate change and the broader exhaustion of the biosphere. This political logic operates by containment. Containment is what happens when neoliberalism meets an exhausted world – ruined ecologies, chaotic climate, anxious and exhausted populations on the constant edge of withdrawal or revolt. Containment ensures the interests of the powerful are protected, and that the people and governments of the Global South don’t disrupt what’s left of the global economy. The aim of containment is to limit the damage that climate change will bring, to contain both the excesses of the atmosphere, the excessive ‘demands’ of the working class and the excesses of a growing global surplus population. This paper sets out to explore the contours of containment as a mode of government, its implications and the already emerging resistances and revolts to our containment.
Disaster anarchism & Occupy Sandy: Critiquing and resisting the de-politicisation and state exploitation of mutual aid Rhiannon Firth
Anarchist-inspired social movements have recently played an important role in disaster relief efforts, transforming the energy of immediate relief efforts into longer-term sustainable recovery and preparedness programmes. Occupy Sandy (OS) was organized to assist victims of Hurricane Sandy in 2012. OS is widely acknowledged to have organized relief more effectively than federal agencies or NGOs. Other instances include the provision of relief by Common Ground after Hurricane Katrina and the delivery of supplies by the Direct Action Bike Squad within Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria. Anarchist-inspired disaster relief is an emergent political phenomenon which has rarely been studied. This paper attempts to link interviews undertaken with OS activists in New York in 2015 with theorizations of anarchist beliefs and values and a systems analysis of the potential role played by anarchist disaster relief and recovery in global social change. Government agencies such as the US Department for Homeland Security have studied anarchist relief efforts to learn from them and facilitate such groups in the future (DHS 2013). However, such attempts are incompatible with the anti-hierarchical ethos of anarchist relief efforts. This paper argues that rather than simply offering short-term practical relief, the movement’s purpose is to critique mainstream ontologies of disasters as temporally isolated events and prefigure new social relations as an alternative to the structural inequalities at the heart of neoliberal capitalism.
We Refugees, Again: Climate Migrants and the Politics of Disaster Relief Aaron Linas
Climate change generates a wave of migration challenging nation-state border policy and policies of international aid. The intensification of climate disaster it set to displace 200 million people by mid century. This population of migrants raises the question of how the human condition of transiency can be reflected in a world of restrictive borders. Irregular migration confronts the concept of state sovereignty and its ability to maintain border control while also upholding a humanitarian principle of care. As the deterioration of habitable land forces people to migrant, I seek to examine how the response of nation-states and international institutions are capable of maintaining moralist legitimacy for aid distribution. Historically I look at the rejection of Jewish refugees by western countries, as written by Hannah Arendt, to highlight the consistency of state policy in rejection of the other and how modern society creates a new classification of human being, the stateless migrant. The claim of states monopoly to violence was meant for self-preservation but also correlates with the ability to assist those in need. Climate migrants rupture this perception by dissolving the states exclusive right to determine who deserves assistance. They uproot the notion that relief aid is dependent upon state support and expose how state self-preservation functions to violently protect colonized society over a notion of global humanity. Anarchists have been on the forefront of assisting those in need where state institutions fail. The practices of disaster relief circumvent state politics in favor of direct mutual aid. I am interested in how these practices of mutual aid are capable of building informal networks that no longer depend and can hopefully upend colonized society.
Anarchism, from Proudhon to Deleuze?
Repetition-Singularity-Solidarity. An Addendum to Daniel Colson’s Petit lexique philosophique de l’anarchisme. Iwona Janicka
In his Petit lexique philosophique de l’anarchisme, Daniel Colson offers a rich philosophical resource for conceptualising contemporary anarchism. He shows that from the point of view of anarchism there are ‘secret affinities’ between such diverse philosophers as Gilbert Simondon, Gabriel Tarde, Gilles Deleuze, Alfred North Whitehead or Michel Foucault. Colson hints at the ways in which anarchism resonates in these philosophies and how these philosophies in turn can feed into anarchism. In this contribution, I would like to add a set of other contemporary philosophers that allow us to propose a useful theoretical framework for thinking about current anarchist movements: Judith Butler, René Girard and Peter Sloterdijk. By discussing Colson’s entries on ‘repetition’, ‘singularity’ and ‘solidarity’, I wish to offer a different philosophical framework for thinking contemporary anarchism in practice that aims at complementing Petit lexique de l’anarchisme.
Deleuze and the Anarchist Tradition Nathan Jun
The notion that Gilles Deleuze is an “anarchist” thinker – or, at the very least, that his thought may be interpreted in whole or in part as an expression of “anarchistic” sensibilities – is said to originate with Todd May’s formative volume The Political Philosophy of Poststructuralist Anarchism. Since that time, May’s thesis has become something of a truism among certain students of Deleuze, especially those who identify with the broad and loosely-defined movement known as “postanarchism,” and has inspired similar claims regarding Lacan, Derrida, Foucault, Lyotard, Levinas, Rancière, and other thinkers. One of the most oft-cited criticisms of this view is that the figures in question were not associated in any meaningful sense with the historical anarchist movement and did not identify themselves as anarchists. The underlying assumption here is that the term “anarchist” is anchored in a specific tradition characterized by a fixed set of principles, in which case it is incorrectly applied to Deleuze and other thinkers who at best express an affinity with some of these principles or else are interpreted as doing so. For some critics, at least, this further implies that the thinkers in question are completely unrelated to anarchism and, by extension, that it is altogether inappropriate to discuss them in this context. Drawing upon ideas from Michael Freeden’s theory of ideology, I contend that the anarchist tradition is better understood as a constellation of diffuse and evolving concepts than a fixed set of principles. This, in turn, invites a crucial distinction between what I call “anarchist” thought – i.e., thought that emerges within and in response to historical anarchist movements – and “anarchistic” thought – i.e., thought that emerges outside such movements but is conceptually proximate to core anarchist commitments. Inasmuch as the latter has often played a significant role in the historical development of the former, and vice versa, neither can be fully understood apart from the other. As I will argue, this is precisely how we ought to understand Deleuze in relation to the broad anarchist tradition.
The (post)anarchist, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon Teresa Xavier
The (post)anarchist, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon is the theme of this paper, which notes the close similarities between Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s classical anarchism and Saul Newman’s postanarchism. The study focuses on both Proudhon’s and Newman’s concepts of space and its subsidiary concepts: struggle, movement, necessity and consequently anarchy. In this article postanarchism is understood as the constitution of autonomous spaces. This comparative analysis gives a novel theoretical perspective of Proudhon’s nineteenth century anarchism and also of postanarchism. It shows that Proudhon, the first author who labelled himself an anarchist and the first to embrace anarchy positively, could be seen as a great influence on postanarchism, although the main postanarchist literature does not acknowledge him. The paper critically reviews this postanarchist stance, deconstructing the main postanarchist criticisms of Proudhon’s classical anarchism: his essentialism and humanism. The research shows that, for Proudhon, man is a group or a mutual set of relations or a space, as it is for Saul Newman. According to postanarchists, man is an openness to the other(s). The paper concludes that (i) Proudhon was a (post)anarchist in his time, and (ii) postanarchism has a Proudhonian genealogy. The notion of space is central in the paper, which is structured around three hypotheses: (i) postanarchism is space constitution; (ii) the constitution of space is a struggle; and (iii) to establish space is to survive. The sub-concepts are: movement, necessity, struggle, power, subject, body, sign, truth and utopia. The paper adopts a circular approach that enables us to better know who the Proudhonian and postanarchist activists are, highlighting the interrelation between content and the structure of the article.
Southern and Eastern Asia
M.P.T. Acharya: From Anti-Colonial Nationalist to International Anarchist, 1907-1954 Ole Birk Laursen
In late 1922, the Indian nationalist M.P.T. Acharya returned to Berlin, after a few tumultuous years in post-revolutionary Russia, and a few weeks later attended the founding meeting of the anarcho-syndicalist International Working Men’s Association (IWMA). Shortly after, he wrote to C.R. Das, editor of Forward, that his political belief was now ‘anarchism, pure and simple’. After falling out with the other Indian nationalists in the wake of the formation of the exiled Communist Party of India (CPI) in Tashkent, Russia, in October 1920, this Indian anarchist who was ‘striving on his own in the whole sub-continent to establish a movement’, as Albert Meltzer recalled, charted new territories as he straddled anti-colonial, Communist and anarchist circles in the first half of the twentieth century. Drawing on archival material from across Britain, India and Russia, this paper traces Acharya’s steps from militant anti-colonial nationalist to international anarchist. Discussing his place within the international anarchist movement, it fleshes out some of his key thoughts on anarchism, pacifism and the Indian independence struggle, and situates him in relation to larger debates around decolonizing anarchism.
ANARCHISM IN IMPERIAL JAPAN: COOPERATIST COMMUNITARIAN THOUGHT AND PRACTICE, c. 1920-1930 Robert Kramm,
Anarchism is a global phenomenon—and anarchist theory and practice have global aims of liberation. Yet, how does anarchism play out in an imperial formation, in which anarchists are in a double bind situation of being simultaneously subjugated to an imperial state and discriminated against by Western hegemony, but simultaneously positioned themselves within a non-white imperial center? This paper will address the issue by discussing cooperatist communitarian thought in 1920s/1930s imperial Japan, and analyze how Japanese anarchists mediated intellectual knowledge from abroad and transferred it to the East Asian context. It will demonstrate anarchists’ engagement in revolutionary theory and practice challenging the imperial state, but also the strong effects of a Western epistemological matrix in which European thought claims universality as the only point of reference to give authority to any kind of progressive, rational thinking. Such epistemic hierarchization was embedded into and correlated with racial hierarchies between the West and the non-Western world. Yet such hierarchies also existed within Asia and Japanese anarchists were confronted with the situation of colonialism, oppression and exploitation in the Japanese empire. Thus the tension between West and non-West that emerged in Japanese anarchists’ critical reading of Western theory, as well as Japanese anarchists strategies and their discussion of non-Western anarchist and other radical cooperatist communitarian concepts are at the center of this paper.
Critique of Civilisation
PARADIGMA CIVILIZACIONAL E COLONIALISMO José Augusto
Nesta exposição pretendemos demonstrar como as diferentes vertentes da colonização do «outro» persistem. Persistem por serem tão arcaicas como as estruturas do paradigma civilizacional, logo são uma necessidade que advém da sua filiação: a propriedade, o estado, as diferenças sociais e seus subprodutos como a guerra. Todos esses elementos da genética civilizacional continuam a estar entre nós, como um legado colonizador de espaços, recursos, vidas, culturas e mentalidades. Os estados políticos e seus modelos sócio-económicos colonizam dentro e fora das fronteiras sob diferentes formas: nacionalismos, imperialismo, neocolonialismo, populismo, mercados, … «globalização», termo geo-político como o arcaico «mundo» antigo, o qual trocamos por globalismo, pois projecta um modelo político e económico-financeiro único, um «ismo». Não é preciso grande profundidade de análise para perceber o que é evidente: tal como desde a Antiguidade, em função do domínio político-económico existem milhões de escravos e muito mais semi-escravos, existem milhões de dependentes, deserdados e desesperados. Ao momento o Brasil desceu a níveis de pobreza que rondam os 40 milhões de humanos. Produzem-se guerras e sustentam-se impérios em nome de «Deus», colonizam-se povos em nome da «História», da «Raça», das «Tradições» geográficas e ideológicas, sem respeito pelo «outro». E a colonização continua, quando as empresas multinacionais/globais destróiem rios, florestas, povos, tal como na génese da formação dos impérios da antiguidade. Mas, entre os povos há sementes práticas do viver com o outro e a natureza, há formas de pensar, filosofar e agir que podem estimular a nossa perspectiva por um mundo mais cooperante.
CIVILIZATIONAL PARADIGM AND COLONIALISM
In this presentation, we intend to demonstrate how the different aspects of the colonization of the «other» persist. They persist because they are as archaic as the structures of the civilizational paradigm, so they are a necessity that comes from their affiliation: property, state, social differences and their byproducts like war. All these elements of civilizational genetics continue to be among us, as a legacy colonizer of spaces, resources, lives, cultures and mentalities. Political states and their socio-economic models colonize inside and outside borders in different forms: nationalism, imperialism, neocolonialism, populism, markets, … «globalization», a geo-political term like the ancient archaic «world» which we exchange for globalism, because it projects a unique political and economic-financial model, an «ism». It does not take great depth of analysis to realize what is evident: as from antiquity, because of the political-economic realm, there are millions of slaves and many more semi-slaves, there are millions of dependents, disinherited and desperate. At the moment, Brazil has descended to levels of poverty that are around 40 million humans. Wars are waged and empires are sustained in the name of «God», people are colonized in the name of «History», «Race», geographic and ideological «Traditions», without respect for the «other». And colonization continues, when multinational / global corporations destroy rivers, forests, peoples, as in the genesis of the formation of empires of antiquity. But among peoples there are practical seeds of living with others and nature, there are ways of thinking, philosophizing and acting that can stimulate our perspective for a more cooperating world.
Decolonial and Anti-civilisation violence Julian Langer
The contemporary socio-political narrative and focus of discourse is centred around violence. This is regarding both institutional machanic violences and individualised person-to-person and/or group-to-group, its implementation, its effects and its moral standing. Within radical discourse, as well as liberal and conservative discourses, the subject of violence can be highly emotive. But violence continually remains the focus of discourse and production-narratives, often hidden behind a symbolic identity, constructing phantasms to mask its face. The role of violence, within decolonial and anti-colonial discourse, is one often explored through the gaze of a westernised Other, rendering much of it ideologically racist. Recent activities of post-Kaczynskian eco-extremists in Central and South America have rekindled anti-civ green-anarchist discussions around violence, particularly within the post-left anarchist tendency. Eco-extremist discourse also re-introduces the subject of metaphysics to anarchist discourse. This paper explores the role violence has within the decolonial struggle, as a means of both liberation and resistance, alongside exploring the ontological question regarding what violence is and what it isn’t. This is done through a broadly post-anarchist lexicon, drawing from arguments on interiorisation from Deleuze, Guattari, Agamben and Foucault as well as anarchist arguments. This is also done through analysing eco-extremists texts, as a work of discourse analysis, exploring the concept of violence within this anti-colonial movements discourse. This paper in no way intends to condemn or justify eco-extremism, but to locate violence within the context of a discourse of extreme relevance to anarchist conversation.
From liberated territory to world revolution: Making the case for an anarchist imperialism Peter Seyferth
The classical theory of revolution as formulated by Kropotkin has uncanny consequences. In this account, a certain territory has to be liberated by revolutionary activity, including disarming and chasing away police and military, as well as expropriations. This territory has to be defended against authoritarians of all stripes. So far, so good. But the defence of the territory against those of its inhabitants that do not want anarchy may demand a certain degree of organization. Moreover, if the territory is not the whole globe, it has states as neighbours. These states will see the anarchist territory as a fundamental threat to their existence (and rightly so). They will begin war. If the anarchists do not win this war immediately, they will have to enter diplomatic relations with them to negotiate about armed truce, exchange of hostages and prisoners, and other “international” questions. This means that the anarchists need diplomats with bargaining power; and this means that the anarchist territory needs structures to bind the diplomats to the anarchist’s will, and the anarchists to the results of the negotiations: an anarchist “state”. This is unbearable for both the anarchists and the surrounding states; peace is unstable. The revolutionary perspective is to get rid of the surrounding states by conquering and liberating their territory by all means necessary. This amounts to an anarchist imperialism. So far my provocative thought experiment. Please discuss and refute it.
ANARCHISM AND ANIMAL LIBERATION
The four Panels on Anarchism and Animal Liberation critically explore the ways in which anarchist praxes can be drawn on more fully to identify, understand, challenge, and overturn the speciesist geographies of violence that define the lived experiences of billions of non-human animals (Nibert, 2017; Nocella et.al, 2015). The first Panel brings together papers particularly focused around “Neoliberal capitalism: veganism and social justice”: the second “(De)colonialism: veganism and liberation”; the third “Envisioning intersectional, post-human communities at a time of crises”; and the fourth: “From state surveillance to interspecies solidarity”. An Open Discussion will conclude the Panel, reflecting on some of the key themes and questions that the Panels have drawn attention to, and inviting thoughts on how to continuing to develop the momentum and visibility of anarchism and animal liberation beyond the conference (e.g. publications, research).
Implementing an extinction accounting framework: An anarchist approach to emancipatory integrated reporting Mira Lieberman
Operating in a neoliberal capitalist system, accounting for extinction is a new emerging emancipatory framework that aims to transform the way in which multinational corporations report on biodiversity and species extinction. At the heart of the framework is a deep ecology approach that highlights the intrinsic value of all sentient beings. However, given the need for a pragmatic praxis to effectuate change, an anarchic approach will be the lens through which the framework is conceptualised. The purpose of this paper is to investigate an anarchist approach to integrated reporting which sees companies as seeking social legitimacy from various societal stakeholders, rather than setting the political and economic agenda. The methodology elaborated in the paper addresses the need to transform both ontology and epistemology in environmental accounting one that would promote social change asking: How can the extinction accounting framework be used in the current neocapitalist system to reconcile humanity’s ‘steadfast cupidity’ (Thorstein Velben, 1923, in McKay, 2017) and natural, inherent greed (Freud, 1930) with ‘an expansive egalitarian spirit of community (McKay, 2017: 183)? Finally, with the rapid species extinction and animal exploitation at the hand of human activity, this paper aims to discuss how “reintroducing anarchism as a legitimate radical philosophy [could be an important] […] socio-political mobilizer both within the academy and beyond” (White and Williams, 2012:2). While the extinction accounting framework attempts to work within the current economic, financial, and political systems, seeing corporate behavioural change through the lens of anarchism is far from utopian (Atkins et al., 2015), but rather strongly pragmatic.
Capitalizing veganism: The way to disable a social justice movement Carla Alicia Suárez Félix
When talking about social justice movements, intersectionality is a key concept. The patterns of dominance that can be found in sexism, racism, and speciesism overlap, creating systematic disadvantage. Social justice movements can be thought of as just insofar as they resist the exploitation to which both humans and non-humans are subjected. Veganism has emerged as a political resistance aimed at achieving animal liberation. But we have seen that there is not only one form of veganism. There is a form veganism that does not care about other forms of exploitation; it has been called white veganism. Our capitalist system has subverted this resistance to make it profitable. This has been done by creating expensive foods and fake meat products that can only be purchased by people on high incomes, which has led to the idea that veganism is exclusive and unreachable for most of us. Animal liberation would be impossible to achieve through white veganism. Mass awareness would be impossible, because the mechanisms of oppression are poorly understood. If one has a position of privilege, it is more difficult to understand the different forms of oppression. White veganism promotes the ‘taxation’ of ‘cruelty free’ food: if you want to have a clear conscience about animals, you have to pay extra. Political resistance is the essence of veganism. The way that leads us to animal liberation also leads to human liberation. We should not let our commitment to animal liberation be responsible for the oppression of humans. Neither humans nor non-humans should be exploited – and justice should not be taxed.
Manifesto of the living soul Susanne Karr
Speciesist, racist and sexist oppression mechanisms are comparable, using similar hierarchy-creating techniques. Their irrational basics rely on a simple idea of first come, first serve without realising how this attitude is destructive to any part of the system. To advance the intersectional deconstruction of these hierarchies, it can be useful to underline the coherence of all sorts of beings, triggered by introducing the idea of a connectedness of souls. It relies on the philosophical experiences of phenomenology. Being alive means having a soul. In this view, the constructions of distance which formulate dichotomies like male/female, civilised/uncivilised, human/animal can be shown to stabilize traditional patriarchal hierarchies. They are used to edge out „others“ to make them available for exploitation. Denying continuity between all living beings facilitates modes of production which refer to other lives as materials and objects, denying their intrinsic significance. Acknowledgement of subjectivity and personhood of nonhuman animals will necessarily cause an upheaval of traditional worldview. We need to turn away from economistic ideologies that pursue exploitation and devastation of the planet and all its varied life-forms, we need to solidarize with other living beings. The only way to survive will be in a shared, connected world.
PANEL 2: (DE)COLONIALISM: VEGANISM AND LIBERATION
Uplifting the human and dominating the animal: imperialism, violence and the ‘Civilizing Process’ Erika Cudworth
Norbert Elias’ influential work, The Civilizing Process (1939), traces the development of social attitudes in European modernity and the causes of these changes. Elias considers how post-medieval European mores on matters of sexuality, bodily functions, violence, table manners and speech were transformed over time through the internalization of self-restraint. Significant levels of structural and interpersonal violence are compatible with the increased salience of narratives of civilization, however, and conceptions and practices of ‘civilization’ are rooted in specific understandings of ‘the human’ and ‘the animal’. lias makes an important contribution to understanding the civilizing process as one of ‘taming’, training and subduing ‘the animal’ in the human. While sixteenth century European crowds might be entertained by spectacles of the burning, maiming, killing and fighting of non-human animals, many of these practices are now banned and widely regarded as ‘cruel’ and ‘inhumane’. Some sociologists have argued that the growth of animal welfare mores and a revulsion against the use of violence against both humans and other animals emerged with European industrialization and urbanization. A more detached attitude towards animals is accompanied by an increase in sentimentalized and romanticized relations and the development of non-human animals as subjects of moral concern. Consequently, the mass slaughter of animals for food had to be hidden out of sight, and cruel practices such as the public torture of animals for entertainment came to be questioned. This paper will argue that those who have applied Elias’ ideas have given insufficient attention to ‘decivilization’, and the extent to which mores and practices surrounding human animal relations have been ‘transformed’. In addition, those outside of civilization have been regarded as in some ways less than human. Those that assert membership of a higher civilization do so on the basis of the extent to which a particular grouping has been able to separate itself and become independent of nature. Such contentions reproduce the duality between the human and non-human nature in that the civilized are considered as separate/superior to the non-civilized, and on the grounds of that superiority have a right of dominion over them in ways that parallel human relations with non-human nature. Comparisons can be drawn between the processes of dealing with those outside of civilization (both historically and contemporarily) to the treatment of non-human animals. This leads to the conclusion that what must be resisted is not only the animalization of those others who are dominated, but the reproduction of an imperial human through the discourse of ‘civilization’.
Whose liberation? Reflections of indigenous subsistence fishing and species boundaries Paula Elise Schiefer
Based on my research on indigenous subsistence salmon fishing practices and conservation efforts in the State of Alaska, this paper shows how different ideas of care and accountability towards animals hinder processes of decolonisation. In my work with Yup’ik subsistence fishers and biologists in southwest Alaska approaches to conserve salmon and maintain human-salmon relationships were strongly connected to agency and personhood that people assigned to fish. The paper illustrates non-western ideas of reciprocal relationships with animals and ways in which they are expressed and amplified through subsistence practices. Currently, these relationships have to be negotiated within hegemonic discourses of conservation, as biologists of the State of Alaska and Federal U.S. institutions attempt to manage the decreasing king salmon stock in the area, and restrict subsistence fishing activities to ensure that enough salmon can reproduce future generations. In addition I want to debate conflicts and discrepancies in which (anarchist) researchers can find themselves when working on domination and a more-than-human approach. Vegan and animal liberation movements for example have and should be criticised for harming indigenous processes of self- determination. I therefore want to use the presentation of my research to discuss the need to critical reflection on anarchist ideas and practices within debates of animal liberation and decolonisation.
Veganism and racism. A view from the coloniality of power León Felipe Barrón Rosas
If veganism is a practice opposed to animal exploitation for the benefit of non human animals, then, it must be placed as an anticapitalist movement, since it is capitalism the one that inserts non human animals within the dynamics of goods. However, in most theoretical positions about veganism and animal exploitation, we can see that capitalism, as the key element of animal exploitation, is out of the discussion making the problem exclusively ethical or legal. This has a big impact within the animal liberation movement. First, because it leaves aside the main aspect that originates animal exploitation. Second, because it opens the possibility of the existence of a white veganism, that is racial, limiting the possibilities of animal liberation. White veganism is the result of the mutability of capitalism and two of its characteristics: the forms of exploitation and the creation of racial identities based on colonial ethnocentrism. White veganism is a capitalist veganism that intensifies the origin of animal exploitation, at the same time that limits the movement against animal exploitation to a dominant social class and leaves aside the possibilities that the animal struggle could have through other not hegemonic and anticapitalist rationalities.
PANEL 3: ENVISONING INTERSECTIONAL, POSTHUMAN COMMUNITIES AT A TIME OF CRISES
Credible comparisons: Animal and children boredom in captivity Karin Gunnarsson Dinker
In my thesis From Fable to Table (forthcoming) I suggest that the fate of animals and children intersect in many ways, not the least in that both groups are repressed and animalized by adults. An aspect that I have looked less into is that of the shared bordeom in places of captivity. This has been identified as a problem among animals (Wemelsfelder, 1985; 2008). What evidence is there of these geographies of boredom also among children in school, how are they interpreted and how can they be dealt with intersectionally? I draw both on my own thesis results and beyond.
Oppression of Gender and Species: An unavoidable intersection Carla Suárez
Speciesism and sexism exhibit the same patterns of domination. Very often, the feminist struggle fails to acknowledge that there are other movements, like the animal liberation movement, that aim to promote similar rights, and vice versa. Inside these movements, we regularly see speciesist feminists or sexist anti- speciesists. As a consequence of this, these two important causes fail to understand the common origins of the different forms of oppression. This weakens them, and leads to superficial solutions that do not solve problems they are designed to address. Some activists engage in sexist campaigns, using the female body as a hook. As Carol Adams explains, there are connections between male domination and the consumption of meat. The objectification of women and animals has the same origin in the capitalist and patriarchal domination system that we live in, so these issues must be addressed together. The anti-speciesist movement cannot succeed if it engages in the same domination that it aims to eradicate. The mistake in considering victims of the system only women or only animals is to forget that we are all animals. When these issues are treated separately, the patriarchal and speciesist system is strengthened, because it is sustained by this distinction. I propose an activism grounded in intersectionality to eradicate the oppression that affects both human and non-human animals. We must begin by understanding the intersectional nature of oppression, to combat it effectively without having multiple causes satisfying their own interests. The ideal cause would focus on both human and non-human animals’ interests.
For Terraism: multispecies community in a time of extinction Erika Cudworth
We humans and a multiplicity of other species create eco-systems and possibilities for life continually. These contexts of mutuality might be thought of as political in that they address the problem of what might be done in the face of the existential threat of climate change and mass extinction in the Anthropocene/Capitalocene. What is the possibility of fruitful futures in times of great precarity for vulnerable embodied critters? This paper sets out a ‘posthumanist manifesto’ which argues for a creaturely politics and promotes a strategy of terraism in which the flourishing of posthuman community might secure political change from the bottom up. This rejects a position of liberalism in which grand calls are made and demands placed on existing international institutions. Rather, critical approaches to life in and beyond the ‘Anthropocene’ are required. The paper draws on the recent call by Simon Springer (2016) to ‘Fuck Neoliberalism’. This involves expressing rage (through scholarship and protest); rejection (doing things differently); and prefigurative politics in which we learn to create new worlds. Similarly, Amy Allen’s (2016) notion of negativistic emancipation suggests the need for a combination of the critique of existing society with an examination of ‘heterotopic spaces’ as alternate though not utopian spaces, where practice challenges prevailing social structures. While the fucking-up of the Capitalocene is desperately needed, we also require prefiguration. Thus this paper will argue for a ‘creaturely politics’ which stresses the bodied nature of the human and our bedding in vital networks with others. This does not only imply a critical perspective on the human centred organisation of our economic organisation, our social practices and our ways of doing politics, it also requires a shrinking of the idea of ‘the human’ as we know it, and a transition to a more creaturely condition in which we humans share vulnerabilities with other creatures and living things. Second, following William Connolly’s call for “micro-experimentation on several fronts” (2013: 38) and Donna Haraway’s (2016: 5-7) invitation to stay “with the trouble” of our times through creative practices emergent in “actual encounters”, the paper argues for the development of ways of flourishing in our precarious times, in particular through ‘posthuman communities’. Employing a more critical version of companion species than we find in Haraway, two kinds of posthuman communities are considered: those found in the edgeland spaces where dogs and their people hang out in contemporary urban and rural Britain, and the rather more tense and fragile spaces of warfare, past and present.
PANEL 4: FROM STATE SURVEILLANCE TO INTERSPECIES SOLIDARITY
The affective cost of transgressing speciesist geographies through expressions of inter-species solidarity and justice: some critical reflections from the Save Movement, UK. Alex Hinchcliffe, Richard J White
The Save Movement has spread rapidly across the UK, expanding from 1 group to over 60 in just 18 months. Focusing in particular on the affective cost of bearing witness to non-human animals in the final hours before their bodies will experience a hellish violence so extreme that it end in their death, this paper explores the complex experiences of activists from Sheffield Animal Save. Vigils held outside abattoirs operate in an highly contested environment, with slaughterhouse workers, security guards, police officers, members of the public and activists all motivated (for starkly different reasons) to come together to bear witness to the arrival of non-human animals. Activist diaries and in-depth interviews are drawn on to providing a first-hand perspective of those fighting for total liberation on the front lines.
Law and ordure: doggy DNA and the policing of public space. Delia Langstone Like human animals, nonhuman animals are increasingly finding themselves the objects of technologically mediated surveillance. In 2016 a pioneering DNA registration scheme was launched in London: PooprintsTM is designed to gather samples from offending dogs and to identify them, and therefore their owners, for punitive action. The scheme gave rise to mirth in the press, not least because of the location of the pilot. TV news and the press reported that there would be ‘Pugshots’ of the worst offenders’. The scheme has been hailed as a badge of considerate dog ownership yet, far from being a laughing matter also one that can be franchised to offer diverse income streams being described as advantageous in the age of austerity.
Recently,it has been reported that this schemeistoberolledoutinotherareas and is moving from being voluntary to being mandatory with the enforcement of Public Space Protection Orders (PSPOs) necessitating outlay from dog owners to be able to access protected ‘public’ spaces. PSPOs have been described as ‘geographically defined ASBOS’ that have come into force under the Anti- social behaviour and policing Act (2014); they often work to criminalise activities that were not previously considered illegal. Within surveillance studies, the surveillance of nonhuman animals has often been overlooked either focusing on epidemiology or being side-lined as being something on the periphery of human-animal behaviour. This paper argues that some forms of animal surveillance are subject to surveillance creep and result in social sorting and curtailment of freedoms of animals and their human animal companions. As Virginia Woolf’s canine creation observed ‘the dogs of London, Flush soon discovered, are strictly divided into different classes’. It investigates this phenomenon and considers the ramifications of animal surveillance, drawing on news media sources and on interviews with those involved in the scheme.
OPEN ROUNDTABLE DISCUSSION: Veganism, Anarchism and Animal Liberation
Anarchism and Religion
Anarchist ideas in the church based opposition of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) Maurice Schuhmann
During a protestant church congress in the 1980ies an alternative initiative called Kirche von Unten (= church from below) was founded. It became an important part of the opposition against oppression in the German Democratic Republic. Many of the founders of this group were also involved in the hippie and punk subculture. Together with some samizdat periodicals (underground publications) like the mOAning star (a parody of the English communist paper morning star) and the Umweltblätter, which were printed with the support of some, open minded protestant parishes, they fought for another, anarchist inspired socialist society. They discussed in their circles and publication f.ex. the ideas of the German anarchist Erich Mühsam and of Bakunin, but also anarchist approaches to Jesus Christ were discussed. Maurice Schuhmann who prepares a study about Anarchism in the opposition in the GDR will present some interim results about this chapter of the East-German opposition. He will focus on their activities and publications between 1986 and 1989.
Philadelphia Fires: Structural Racism and Colonialist Legacies as Sacred Rites 1818-2018. Anthony T. Fiscella
Pennsylvania in general and Philadelphia specifically are very peculiar historical developments being, as they were, founded by the Society of Friends, commonly known as Quakers. Typically perceived as progressive, peaceful, and gentle, colonial Quakers even rejected centralized government for a few years yet nonetheless laid down the foundations for a society that was no less brutal or racist in its colonialist occupation than other parts of the United States. This paper argues that sacred rites associated with domination rather than denomination have left little room for the ostensibly progressive values of the Quakers. If ìsacredî is understood as fundamental values to a society and ìritesî are understood as routine procedures, imperatives, or obligations engaged in by the members of that society then the walls of segregation, the long legacy of police brutality, and the fires of racist violence that have burned bright in Philadelphia in the 1800s, the 1900s, and the 2000s may be regarded as testimony to the faithfulness of white settler citizens. From the Abolitionists who built Pennsylvania Hall in 1838 only to see it burned down by a white mob upon inauguration to the bombing of the MOVE Organization in 1985, fires have marked Philadelphia history. Despite this consistent repression, from Harriet Tubman and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper in the mid-1800s to Father Divineís Peace Mission, Buckminster Fuller, and the Bawa Muhaiyaddeen Fellowship in the mid-1900s, Philadelphia has also been home to a large number of resisters, innovators, and opposition movements. Ideologies of anarchism, communism, liberalism, or conservatism may be, like denominations, less indicative of a groupís propensity toward social justice than a groupís ability to transcend the sacred rites of domination with sacred rites of justice and resistance.
Anarchy and Religion 2
Leo Tolstoy’s Influence on Dorothy Day Alexandre Christoyannopoulos and Erik Nelson
Religious Anarcho-Diasporism: Rabbi Aharon Shmuel Tamaret’s Contribution Hayyim Rothman
Most Jewish accounts of the diaspora represent it as a problem to be overcome; its meaning is exile, a tragedy subject to some sort of redemptive denouement. This is as true of traditional theological accounts as it is of the modern Zionist narrative. The prevailing alternative is the alliance of liberal Judaism and the liberal state, according to which the question of exile and diaspora is simply neutralized. A more interesting alternative has recently been identified by Anna Torres who, in “Any Minute Now the World’s Overflowing Its Border”: Anarchist Modernism and Yiddish Literature, coins the term “Anarchist diasporism” in order to describe “the anti-statism of stateless peoples.” Torres, however, attends mainly — though not exclusively — to the expression of this idea in the work of Yiddish-language poets such as Perets Markish. I propose to expand on her contribution by analyzing the work of a largely forgotten orthodox rabbi of Polish origin by the name of Aharon Shmuel Tamaret. Tracing his account of Jewish religious history from the period of Egyptian slavery, through the desert wandering, the conquest of Canaan, the rise of the ancient Hebrew commonwealth, its destruction, and the rise of diaspora Judaism, I demonstrate Tamaret’s understanding of the Jewish faith as essentially hostile to states and homelands and as best expressed by the diasporic experience. I show, furthermore, that Jewish chosenness, the Jewish mission to humanity on his interpretation of it, entails spreading precisely this idea by living example. In other words, I argue that Tamaret’s work is a shining example of anarcho-diasporism as articulated not only in a secular mode, by way of modernist Yiddish poetics, but by direct appeal to religious and theological experience in the the orthodox tradition.
Anarchy and Religion 2
‘“I’ll take a shit on your holy word”: punk anti-theism (and anarchism)’ Jim Donaghey
‘This bigoted crap is fuckin’ absurd, I’ll take a shit on your holy word’. (Oi Polloi, ‘Religious Con’, Fuaim Catha, (Mass Prod, 1999)) The vast majority of punk’s engagement with religion is vehemently oppositional. But, most of the scholarship about punk and religion is focussed on religiously-engaged punks. This disparity is understandable. Pious punks are walking contradictions, jarring our cultural expectations – they make fantastic study material. Irreligious punks merely confirm our expectations, their anti-theism is just one strand of a wide-ranging confrontational resistance – it hardly raises an eyebrow. This paper seeks to redress this perceived imbalance in scholarly attention toward religious punks, and analyse some of the core anti-theist tropes and activisms associated with punk culture. Selected lyrical expressions will serve as stepping-off points towards thematic discussions of what punk anti-theism looks like in various international contexts, drawing on ethnographic material from Northern Ireland, Britain, Poland and Indonesia. The paper will also interrogate the philosophical grounding of this punk anti-theism, especially in terms of its relationship to anarchism.
The Oracular Anarchia: An Anarchist Intervention into the Tarot K. Crosswell