GET THE READING HERE: ZINE OR SCREEN, AUDIO, CAMAS BOOKS‘ FREE BOX, or EMMA’S FREE LIBRARIES AROUND TOWN
Facilitators should note the Facilitation Guide.
We will be discussing Jesse Cohn’s Demodernizing Anarchism (2022).
Dr. Cohn acknowledges the calls from some Indigenous scholars about the need to decolonize liberatory theory–that is, to locate and identify the ways in which our theories about collective liberation might be built on assumptions about settler colonialism as a way of life. He argues we need to go further and consider demodernizing anarchism: locating and identifying the ways in which anarchism is built on assumptions about science, progress, and revolution that might limit our thinking about what radical alternatives might look like. – The Anarres Project
As always, we meet at Camas Books, 2620 Quadra Street, on Lekwungen Territory. The next meeting is Sunday February 16th @ 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. They need help from volunteers.
Note: In line with 
Remembrance Day, in “Canadian” national mythology, signals the end of World War 1, an imperialist travesty where the ruling classes of France, Germany, England, Italy, Austria-Hungary and Russia fomented war fever against each other, which also distracted from and weakened working class uprisings in their countries, harnessing energy instead towards squabbles over imperial carve-out rivalries globally. As Canada’s then Prime Minister Robert Borden saw it, the fight in supporting the British, was “to put forth every effort and to make every sacrifice necessary to ensure the integrity and maintain the honour of our empire.”
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 early preparation for September’s upcoming Bi Visibility Week, we have chosen readings that centre the admirable bisexual freedom fighter Kuwasi Balagoon. While the two readings don’t place especial emphasis on Balagoon’s orientation, they do provide a thorough overview of his contributions to the struggle for Black liberation in the 70s and 80s. Both texts, Maroon: Kuwasi Balagoon and the Evolution of a Revolutionary New Afrikan Anarchism by Akinyele K. Umoja and Kuwasi at 60 by Kazembe Balagun, chronicle Balagoon’s daring acts of insurgency. Their scope includes Balagoon’s time before and after joining the Black Panther Party, his organizing in prison, and his later criticisms of the Black Panther Party from an anarchistic standpoint. These accessible historical accounts are sure to stoke more curiosity about the revolutionary figure and time period they illuminate.
