At the next Victoria Anarchist Reading Circle, we are going to explore the Indigenous Perspective on Neoliberalism, beginning with Subcomandante Marcos’ 1997 speech, “The Fourth World War Has Begun” and supplemented with a text on the global Indigenization Resurgence excerpted from S.P. Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (1996).
Please download the reading from the lower right-hand side of our website.
As per usual, we will be meeting at Camas Books (2620 Quadra Street) on unceded Lekwungen Territory. The meeting is on Tuesday January 7th. Doors at 6:50; Discussion at 7:00pm.
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.
Camus’ anarchist orientation is well known: symptomatically, his major statement on anti-authoritarian ethics and social change, The Rebel (1951), was viciously attacked by French Communist Party ideologues such as Jean-Paul Sartre. The English-language version of Neither Victims nor Executioners first appeared in 1947 in the American anarchist journal, Politics (1944-1949). The pamphlet is an imprint of the pacifist-anarchist journal, Liberation (1956-1977).
The reading has been scanned and is available by scrolling down to the lower right side of this website.
As per usual, we are meeting at Camas Books and Infoshop, on unceded Lekwungen Territory, 2620 Quadra Street. The doors will be open at 6:50pm, with the discussion beginning at 7pm.
PS: I have always wanted to say “We are reading Camus at Camas!”
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.
Landauer’s writings were very influential and his advocacy of decentralized self-governance based on local councils had an impact. When a new Council-based government was declared by revolutionaries in Bavaria’s capital, Munich, on April 7, 1919, Landauer accepted the appointment of Minister of Culture and Education. The German army immediately mobilized militias of demobilized soldiers, who marched into Munich and took over. A wave of terrorism ensued as revolutionaries were rounded up and shot. Landauer was arrested, jailed and brutally killed by a gang of soldiers on May 2, 1919.
As per usual, we are meeting at Camas Books and Infoshop, on unceded Lekwungen Territory, 2620 Quadra Street. The doors will be open at 6:50pm, with the discussion beginning at 7pm.
Our last meeting sparked a lively discussion around art and it’s role in anarchism and resistance. For our next reading we will explore a chapter from Anarchy and Art written by local author, and all around good guy Allan Antliff. In this chapter Allan interviews one of “Anarchism’s better-known contemporary artists”, Susan Simensky and explores the intersection of art, anarchy, and activism. YOU can find a .pdf to download and read for your self on the right hand side of our website.
As always, we are meeting at Camas Books, 2620 Quadra Street on unceded Lekwungen Territory. That’s on Tuesday, May 21 @ 7pm (doors at 6:50). See you there!
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’.
As always, we are meeting on unceded Lekwungen terrritory, at Camas Books 2620 Quadra street at 7pm (doors at 6:50). The reading is available for download on the right hand side of our website.
Our next reading circle is scheduled for Tuesday, February 26th from 6:45 – 9pm; discussion starts at 7pm. As always, we meet on unceded Lekwungen territory at Camas Books and Infoshop (2620 Quadra Street).
In preparation for our discussion, we are reading two chapters from Revolution in Rojava: Democratic Autonomy and Women’s Liberation in Syrian Kurdistan. The text was written by Michael Knapp, Anja Flach, and Ercan Ayboĝa. It provides an excellent foregrounding on the history of the Kurdish Worker’s Party (PKK), and the theoretical turn towards anarchism by one of the Party’s co-founders, Abdullah Öcalan. We will also learn about the authoritarianism and geopolitical machinations of the colluding nation-States with interests in the region known as Rojava, located in Northern Syria. Any participants with knowledge of current affairs about Rojava are welcomed to share updates and any other pertinent information.
In Spring 2011, the Syrian Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD) of Northern Syria (Rojava) established a People’s Council of West Kurdistan around the concept of “democratic confederalism” wherein diverse peoples and political actors united under an autonomous anti-state structure of self-governance. Three regional “Cantons” formed a federated structure encompassing most of northern Syria. Rojava’s revolution was defended by two militias — the People’s Protection Units (YPG) and Women’s Protection Units (YPJ). The emergence of a secular, feminist, anti-authoritarian system of self-governance in the midst of Syria’s civil war was an extraordinary event and military victories against the Islamic State (notably the heroic rescue of minority Yezidi peoples besieged by Islamic State forces in the Sinjar Mountains) brought the Rojava revolution to world attention.
Join Professor Ozlem Goner to learn about the roots of the Rojava revolution, its ecological, feminist, and anarchic democratic vision, as well as current threats to Rojava poised by Turkish armed forces in alliance with Russia.
Two events are planned:
Monday, January 13th, 7:00pm, Room 129 MacPherson Library, University of Victoria (unceded WSÁNEC & Lekwungen (Songhees & Esquimalt) Territories).
Tuesday, January 14th, 7:00pm at Camas Books & Infoshop (unceded Lekwungen Territory)
Ozlem Goner is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, College of Staten Island, City University of New York. Goner has written on a range of issues, including memory and historicity; political economy and the environment; and outsider identities. In 2017 her book, Turkish National Identity and its Outsiders: Memories of State Violence in Dersim, was published by Routledge. She is a steering committee member of the US-based Emergency Committee for Rojava.