GET THE READING HERE: ZINE OR SCREEN, AUDIO (note multiple parts), CAMAS BOOKS‘ FREE BOX, or EMMA’S FREE LIBRARIES AROUND TOWN
Facilitators should note the Facilitation Guide.
Note that we have moved VARC to March 9th to accommodate the Anarchism Across the Arts Conference at University of ‘Victoria,’ which is free for everyone to attend. Next time, we will be meeting to discuss Community Control of the Poor Community: An Organising Manual for Community Activists (2008 edition) by Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin, a former Black Panther turned Black anarchist. This pamphlet is an extract out of the book called Anarchism and the Black Revolution and has been slightly edited to be more contextually relevant to the conditions of South Africa.
As always, we meet at Camas Books, 2620 Quadra Street, on Lekwungen Territory. Our meeting is Sunday March 9th @ 6:30PM.
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. They need help from volunteers.
For our next meeting, we are going to be discussing deference politics — the organizing tendency to defer to someone else’s judgment about what should be done in a given situation based solely on their perceived social location. We are going to dissect this tendency through “Being-in-the-Room Privilege: Elite Capture and Epistemic Deference” (2020) by Olúfémi O. Táíwò, and the local Ada’itsx “Fairy Creek” anarchist zine Creeker’s “Water Falling on Granite: Deference Politics, Indigenous Leadership, and Anarchist Relationality” (2023).
Next time, we will be discussing Sobre la violencia en una época de catástrofes AKA About violence in a time of catastrophes (2023). We will also be pairing it with an excerpt, Chapter 7: Trusting, from Worth Fighting For: Bringing the Rojava Revolution Home. (2023)
Spilling over from our last conversation on Turning Away from The State, we decided to revisit the classic Accomplices Not Allies: Abolishing the Ally Industrial Complex (2014) by Indigenous Action (now Indigenous Abolition), and to pair it with Peter Gelderloos’ Debunking the myths around nonviolent resistance (2020).
In solidarity with Palestinians, and our comrades on the frontlines at People’s Park and across Turtle Island, we will be reading Why the State Can’t Compromise with the Movement in Solidarity with Gaza from Crimethinc and Enclosures of Possibility: The University & The Encampment from UBC. We ask folks to read these pieces ahead of time.
