Ending Colonial Legacies: INCITE! Southwest Regional Conference

Folks in the Rocky Mountain Region should know about INCITE!'s conference coming up in October!

From INCITE!'s website:

INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence, is a national activist organization of radical feminists of color advancing a movement to end violence against women of color and their communities through direct action, critical dialogue and grassroots organizing. Ending Colonial Legacies (ECL) is a Colorado based, women of color led initiative that has worked toward dismantling the legacy of colonialism & eventual abolishment of Columbus Day through non-violent resistance and political education.

Negri on the function of Multitudes

A brief quote from Antonio Negri's article in Constituent Imagination:

Today, democracy must be extedended into the relations between multitudes, and must construct new social relations and a new idea of rights in this way. We are not referring here to the abolition of rights, but rather to new juridical forms capable of establishing norms guided by the three principles described above (networks, the common, and freedom) There must be sanctions against those who wish to re-establish command and introduce criteria of property over or against the network, blocking its access or controlling its nodes. At the same time, there must also be sanctions against those who create technological and/or judicial tools to obstruct the circulation of knowledge and the great 'commonality' that can feed production and life.

Ontario Coalition Against Poverty

For you bad-ass direct action anti-poverty, social justice advocates--if you haven't gone to the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty's website to find out how our friends to the North do anti-poverty work, you are missing out big time!!! Go now!

If you happen to be in Ontario on September 26th, join OCAP in the streets! They do shit right!

SmartMeme

Yesterday I was talking to my friend Jessie who reminded me of the group SMARTMEME who helps activists and organizers learn to frame their struggles as compelling stories for the corporate media. If you are interested in this sort of thing, you should check them out!

Denver Zine Library

I spent the afternoon at a benefit BBQ for the Denver Zine Library, home of tons of great zines! Lots of fun to be had. For those who couldn't make it to the BBQ, you should still consider donating to this incredible, radical library project!!!

If you want, you can donate from here!

Dolores Huerta Comes to Denver

Exciting News! El Centro Humanitario is having its reopening celebration tomorrow night and low-wage labor activist Dolores Huerta will be speaking! If you're in Denver, come out!!!

Colorlines on Los Angeles Police Gentrifying Skid Row

Jessica Hoffmann's article in Colorlines called LAPD GENTRIFIES SKID ROW does a great job demonstrating how broken windows policing strategies, in LA called "Safer Cities Initiative," are working to criminalize poverty, push poor people away from social services, and wage campaigns of violence against black people and other people of color. According to Hoffmann, Skid Row now has a nearly constant presence of police on foot, horses, bikes, and cars.

As the state continues to escalate violence in poor neighborhoods by increasing police funding and presence, it simultaneously defunds social services. Taxes are spent waging violence against the poor, homeless, ill, and disenfranchised rather than helping people out. The barbarism of the state works to alienate people from each other and dissolve social unity.

Utopia is For Walking

For those of you getting frustrated with Utopian quests, don't forget Eduardo Galeano's beautiful quote, first shared with me by my friend Bettina at last year's Renewing the Anarchist Tradition and reappearing to me most recently in Constituent Imagination:

Utopia is on the horizon: I walk too steps, it takes two steps back. I walk ten steps and it is ten steps further away. What is utopia for? It is for this, for walking.

The strange thing about this quote is that it often floats around without an original source. It gets passed on like Emma Goldman's most famous quote, the one she never said:

If I can't dance, I don't want to be in your revolution.

Perhaps the best things people say are the things they never said. Perhaps, Galeano proves this point wrong. Either way, these two quotes work for me.

In the Beginning Was the Scream

The introduction to Constituent Imagination used one of my favorite quotes about revolution and theory from John Holloway. I've included it below.

In the beginning was the scream. When we talk or write, it is all too easy to forget that the beginning was not the word, but the scream. Faced with the destruction of human lives by capitalism, a scream of sadness, a scream of horror, above all a scream of anger, of refusal: NO. The starting point of theoretical reflection is opposition, negativity, struggle.

The role of theory is to elaborate that scream, to express its strength and to contribute to its power, to show how the scream resonates through society to contribute to that resonance.

Resistance as Democracy

Check out Resistance as Democracy, a video about grassroots struggles against global capitalism and for democracy in Post-War El Salvador!

Constituent Imagination: Militant Investigations Collective Theorization

I am happy to say, after reading the first few essays in AK Press' Constituent Imagination, that I am excited about many of the ideas presented about http://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gifdoing militant theory and research in a practical context. Kudos to Stevphen Shukaitis, David Graeber, and Erika Biddle for putting together such an inspiring and provocative compilation! AK Strikes Again!

La Commune

This past week I had the opportunity to watch Peter Watkins' revolutionary critique of media and rehashing of the Paris Commune, La Commune. This was one of the most emotionally inspiring, politically challenging, and intellectually stimulating films I've seen in my life. The running time of the film is 5 hours and 54 minutes. It uses the convention of "tv crews" on site at the Paris Commune, an event that took place in 1871 in response to the Franco-Prussian Wars. Using 2oo Parisian working class people, Watkins restages the commune and uses his film as a tool to engage these people in questions of revolution, historical reflection, and strategic thinking on contemporary globalization and class war. Issues ranging from immigration, the function of the mass media, the validity of violence in struggle, class and state repression, the trouble with nationalism, and women's rights are all foregrounded though the film. In many ways, this film is a perfect cinematic companion to Pierre Bourdieu's On Television, two lectures Bourdieu gave about the flaws of broadcast models based on ratings systems that fail to move forward smaller, more specialized intellectual, social, and cultural projects.