Last September, I gifted my life-partner/co-conspirator a subscription to the anarchist journal, DOPE, a quarterly published by Dog Section Press. It’s an immensely satisfying journal to read, with great graphics to boot.
The current issue features a short essay by the ex-diplomat Carne Ross, called “Anarchy is Love.” We will be discussing this essay, which can be found on this posting by Dog Section, as well as reflecting upon the Ted Talk Ross gave three years ago called “The Accidental Anarchist.” 
Although we are no longer physically meeting as a group, we still operate on occupied, unceeded Lekwungen territory. Our next meeting will be held on our private Jitsi server on Tuesday, April 28th at 7pm PST. Jitsi is open-source software that is fully encrypted end-to-end, and which does not track your IP address. In the time when it seems like everyone’s falling for the most insecure communications platforms motivated solely to collect, sell and trade in your data, we created our own Jitsi instance as an infrastructural countermeasure.
If you are interested in participating in this week’s reading circle, please contact varc[at]victoriaanarchistreadingcircle.ca introducing yourself to confirm your place in the shadow-cabinet list and obtain access to the meeting.
See you there!
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. 
o Freeman this essay explores power relations within radical feminist collectives and was inspired by her time in the Women’s Liberation Movement of the 1960’s. Joreen reflected on the experiments of the feminist movement in resisting the idea of leaders and even discarding any structure or division of labor. Freeman described how “this apparent lack of structure too often disguised an informal, unacknowledged and unaccountable leadership that was all the more pernicious because its very existence was denied”. As a solution, Freeman suggests formalizing the existing hierarchies in the group and subjecting them to democratic control.
For the next anarchist reading circle, we will be discussing a selection from Barbara Ehrenreich’s Dancing in the Streets: A history of Collective Joy. A history of how the European peasantry was itself colonized and de-paganized by the Church (and particularly by the Reformation and Enlightenment values), pointing to a discussion of how people of European descent can ‘re-indigenize’.
For the next anarchist reading circle, we will be discussing Rebecca Solnit’s ‘A Paradise Built in Hell: The extraordinary communities that arise in disaster.’ During our last session we had a discussion about the whole ‘pessimistic/optimistic’ debate regarding human nature, whether or not our intrinsic sociability or orientation to help each other would arise in the event of system collapse (or if we even have such an orientation), etc.
For the next reading we are turning towards the matter of Anarchist Pedagogies with the opening chapter from the edited volume called, aptly enough, Anarchist Pedagogies: Collective Actions, Theories, and Critical Reflections on Education. The text is called “Anarchism, the State, and the Role of Education” by Justin Mueller. I am most intrigued by the section differentiating anarchist pedagogical thought from that of Paulo Friere’s. YOU can find a .pdf to download and read for your self on the right hand side of our website.