At the next Victoria Anarchist Reading Circle, we will take a look at structural violence, in the guise of bureaucracy, through a lively, accessible and interesting article by contemporary anarchist and anthropologist David Graeber. The experience of bureaucratic incompetence, confusion, and its ability to cause otherwise intelligent people to behave outright foolishly, opens up a series of questions about the nature of power.The unique qualities of violence as a form of action means that human relations ultimately founded on violence create lopsided structures of the imagination, where the responsibility to do the interpretive labour required to allow the powerful to operate oblivious to much of what is going on around them, falls on the powerless, who thus tend to empathize with the powerful far more than the powerful do with them.
Please find the article available for download at the top of the right-hand menu. It is also available through this link here: https://www.journals.uchicago.
As usual, we will be meeting at 2620 Quadra Street, on unceded Lekwungen territory. Doors will be open at 6:50pm, and discussion starts at 7pm.
Given the popularity of the Rojava readings, we’ve decided to read about another group of present-day revolutionaries: The Zapatistas. Specifically, we’ll be reading “To Those Who Work It: Ricardo Flores Magón and the EZLN” by Ian Campbell and “The Zapatistas, Anarchism, and Direct Democracy” by Andrew Flood. They are available here:
On Tuesday, November 19, we will continue our exploration of the living experiment in autonomous self-rule in the region of Rojava, northern Syria. Our reading this week is Chapter 9, “The New Justice System: Consensus in the Key,” in REVOLUTION IN ROJAVA: DEMOCRATIC AUTONOMY AND WOMEN’S LIBERATION IN SYRIAN KURDISTAN:
‘s Fifth Estate journal (Winter, 1984) and pivots on a recurring paradox embedded in State-based ‘national liberation’ struggles. Israel’s brutal invasion and occupation of southern Lebanon (1982-2000) formed the backdrop for Perlman’s reflections.
On Tuesday September 24th, we will be reading a classic pamphlet by Algerian-French militant, author, theorist and Nobel Prize awardee Albert Camus (November 7, 1913 – January 4, 1960) titled “Neither Victims nor Executioners” (1946). This essay was first serialized in 1946 in the French Resistance newspaper Combat (founded, 1941) and addresses the issue of violence. 
This week we are reading “Through Separation to Community” by German anarchist Gustav Landauer (1870-1919). Landauer is best known for arguing the State is “a condition, a certain relationship between human beings, a mode of human behaviour; we destroy it by contracting other relationships, by behaving differently.” Novelist, playwright, author of three theoretical works and editor of the anarchist newspaper, Der Sozialist (intermittently published between 1893-1899; 1909-1915), he endured frequent stints in prison before the outbreak of World War One. Landauer anticipated the war would lead to revolutionary uprisings and, in November 1918, when workers and soldiers rose up and overthrew the conservative government of Germany’s second largest state, Bavaria, he joined the effort. 
This week, the circle decided to read a chapter from the acclaimed anarcha-femininst and witch, Starhawk. Starhawk is founder of the Reclaiming Tradition of witchcraft, which combines magickal practices with social and ecological activism, communialism, as well as sustainable land-based reclaiming techniques, such as permaculture gardening, and so on.