Anews Podcast 241 – 12.17.21
From The Anews Podcast!
Welcome to the anews podcast. This podcast is on anarchist activity, ideas, and conversations from the previous week on anarchistnews.org.
From The Anews Podcast!
Welcome to the anews podcast. This podcast is on anarchist activity, ideas, and conversations from the previous week on anarchistnews.org.
from The case of Azat Miftakhov
Full title: An open letter of Russian mathematicians to IMU Executive Committee regarding mathematician and political prisoner Azat Miftakhov
101 Russian mathematicians sent the following letter to the International Mathematical Union Executive Committee, concerning the case of our colleague Azat Miftakhov.
from Athens Indymedia
Full title: International Campaign for Revolutionary Anarchism and Solidarity with Revolutionary Prisoners
With the capitalist destruction of earth and life continuing unhindered and the nearing prospects of an ecological collapse, there is, perhaps more than ever, a serious and immediate need for global revolutionary movements. Where do our movements here in Europe stand faced with the immense challenges and demands of our epoch? Can we retrace our revolutionary roots? Can we become the creative force that can effectively abolish the cannibalistic authority of the rich few over the many?
from Act for freedom now!
A letter from prison by Toby Shone (UK)
Act for free received by email 18.12.21
26/11/2021
Today I was taken from the cells of G-wing, Bristol prison to the City Hospital under a security escort. This was to detect any reoccurrence of cancer in my abdomen and pelvis. In the reception area of the prison, I had the usual strip search, and I was forced to change out of my own clothes into prison-issue clothes.
From The Art Newspaper, by Keith Miller, 13 September 2021
new book surveys the architecture of anarchist settlements
From geodesic domes in South Colorado to the Calais Jungle in Europe, this provocative work studies 60 structures that were built according to values of autonomy, voluntary association, mutual aid and self-organisation
From time to time, listeners submit what they have written to Immediatism for feedback or just conversation. The individualist anarchist author of the following three essays says that their pseudonym has taken a pseudonym -- Sir Josephine Deathscythe. Their writing is from a particularly personal point of view. "Individualism" is a discussion of Stirnerian egoism and specifically what motivates an egoist, as well as how an egoist will tend to differ from leftists and libertarians.
from Anarchist Agency
an Interview with Eric Laursen
Agency: Your recently published book The Operating System: An Anarchist Theory of the Modern State. Why the State? What inspired you to tackle such a monumental subject at this time? Eric Laursen: Mainly the fact that it hasn’t really been done before. I’ve identified as an anarchist for just about my entire adult life, and early on, I was struck by the fact that the so-called “classic” anarchists – Kropotkin, Bakunin, Goldman, etc – never analyzed in an extended way what the State was.
from Center for a Stateless Society by Emmi Bevensee
One of the strongest critiques of anarchism (or consequentialism) I’ve heard (often from former anarchists no less) is that it’s too hard. And maybe it is. Hard problems don’t have Solutions in pure form. They have scales of tradeoffs and inventiveness at the margins. Your best hope with hard collective action problems is usually that prosocial tactics and incentive structures proliferate rapidly in a cascade of concurrent action. But at the end of the day, if you try to change anything in this fucked world, you will have dirty hands.
From Futurism.com
"I don’t mean to suggest chaos, but rather that you’re not under anyone’s thumb."
Tesla CEO Elon Musk isn’t one to follow rules, particularly when he thinks they’re bogus.
from CrimethInc.
Burnt Down—But Not Out!
On December 15, 2021, the mail-order space of the CrimethInc. Ex-Workers Collective was destroyed in a catastrophic fire that reduced three large buildings to burned-out shells in downtown Olympia, Washington. Yes, that’s the fire in the photo above. Thousands of our books, posters, and stickers were entirely consumed, not to mention equipment and supplies. We lost everything that was in the space.
from Autonomies
bell hooks died this last December 15th, and for all that she contributed to critical theory, and beyond, as a writer, but also for what she engaged with as a witness to and “activist” against patriarchal, racist and capitalist violence, we celebrate her life and what will continue to resonate from it.
from Autonomies
If we may venture a claim about a central idea in the films Lina Wertmüller, it is that they express the impossibility of politics without love – such a politics would be reduced to the management of life and the extraction its energy –, and of love without politics – love is shaped and winnowed through the many layers of relations of power that mark everyday life. It is through this lens that Wertmüller reads political ideologies and human behaviour and agency, a lens that can only reveal and revel in tensions, incoherencies and contradictions. If her films defy ideological purity, to the dismay of her critics, she turns the accusation back on them – for those who are willing to see –, unmasking the demands for “purity” as the greatest form of violence, because it can tolerate no disorder, no wild life, no anarchy.
Timothy Morton has called themself an anarchist ontologist. Five of Morton's essays have now been read on Immediatism podcast, across the 17 episodes linked below. Perhaps of greatest interest to anarchy generalists would be the fifth of these, entitled "Things in Common" (episodes 719-723), which serves as the introduction to their book, "Humankind: Solidarity With Non-Human People" (Verso, 2017).