GET THE READING HERE: SCREEN, ZINE, AUDIO, CAMAS BOOKS’ FREE BOX, or EMMA’S FREE LIBRARIES AROUND TOWN.
Facilitators should note the Facilitation Guide.
We close our circle with a reflection of Thoughts on Commitment, Responsibility and Self-discipline (2014) by the Anarchist Federation of Rio de Janeiro (FARJ.) Commitment, Responsibility, and Self-discipline emphasizes the importance of continual self-discipline and sustained militancy for anarchists. Critiquing the authoritarian socialist understanding of discipline “from above” as a doctrine, it suggests anarchists must seriously make their positions viable and grounded with clear goals in mind. The text suggests the importance of anarchists to commit to their actions and have follow-through on tasks with procedural frameworks for mutual and self-reinforcement.
The piece reflects on historical conversations between, and the lessons learned by, anarchist revolutionaries Nestor Makhno, an anarchist-communist who helped organized the Ukrainian anarchist Makhnovschina which at its height saw a population of 7.5 million people, and Errico Malatesta, an insurrectionary-turned-syndicalist anarchist who breathed life into dozens of protests, general strikes, and uprisings. The piece aims at showing how these lessons can be applied to members of the FARJ and the wider anarchist tradition.
This is our last VARC for a while as the Circle goes into hiatus. Please write and bring notes. We meet at Camas Books, 2620 Quadra Street, on Lekwungen Territory. Our meeting is Sunday August 17 @ 6:30PM.
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PS: Our friends at the Anarchist Network of “Vancouver Island” have put together a list of anarchist and adjacent projects on the territory. If you are looking to involve yourself in anarchist activism, look at their trifold! Particularly, Food not Bombs serves free vegan food for revolution every Sunday 4-6PM at Spirit “Centennial” Square and have been facing increasing harassment tied to the gentrification of the Square. Come show up to eat! They also need help from volunteers.
GET THE READING PORTION HERE: 
For August 4th, our reading group will be focusing on two pieces about fascism and authoritarianism.
Join us for a discussion of Palestinian anarchist Mohammed Bamyeh’s article on the 2010-12 uprisings that swept through north Africa and the middle east, overthrowing dictatorships in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya.
We were so inspired by reading Andrew Cornell’s history of the Movement for a New Society that we decided to explore the conversations associated with the movement. Please read the following reflective sections regarding MNS theory and praxis for the next gathering. You can find the reading here:
Last week, we read Gustav Landuaer’s Through Separation to Community and decided to swing around to Murray Bookchin’s ideas of social ecology and revolutionary thought. Social ecology is based on the conviction that nearly all of our present ecological problems originate in deep- seated social problems, and is an approach to society that embraces an ecological, reconstructive, and communitarian view on society. Murray Bookchin (1921 – 2006) was an anti-capitalist and advocated for social decentralization along ecological and true democratic lines. His ideas have influenced social movements since the 1960s, including the New Left, the anti-nuclear movement, the anti-globalization movement, Occupy Wall Street, and more recently, the democratic confederalism of the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (Rojava.)
After our enthusiastic conversation about the Zapitistas’ model of Participatory Democracy, we wanted to delve more into Zapatista cosmovisión (worldview) and organization by reading Subcomandante Marcos’s “I Shit On All the Revolutionary Vanguards of this Planet,” which is a response to the Basque liberation movement Euskadi Ta Askatasuna’s (ETA) advocation of vanguardist politics. We also teased out the idea of future readings about Rojava in a continuation of our exploration of democratic centralism. Therefore, we decided in anticipation to also include the Feminist Anarchist Border Opposition’s Why Misogynists Make Great Informants, which tackles misogyny and gender violence in left-activist circles and movements.
Our next reading will be the academic article Participatory Democracy in Action: Practices of the Zapatistas and the Movimento Sem Terra, which covers the Zapatistas’ and Movimento Sem Terra’s (Landless Movement-MST) methods of organizing through participatory democracy, which emphasizes obligation to participate in decision making and a shared concern for autonomy.