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.
For our next reading we are delving into “Anarchist Method, Liberal Intention, Authoritarian Lesson: The Arab Spring between Three Enlightenments.”
Bamyeh was a participant in the uprising in Egypt and writes from firsthand experience. He has authored numerous books, notably Anarchy as Order (2009) and Lifeworlds of Islam: The Pragmatics of a Religion (2019).
As always, we will be meeting at Camas Books, 2620 Quadra street, unceded Lekwungen territory. The next session will take place on Sunday, March 31st at 6:30pm.
We were split down the middle between delving more into insurrectionary anarchist theory, and social, organizational anarchist theory. Therefore, we have decided to read both How to Start a Fire:
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.)
Our discussion following Social War on Stolen Native Land: Anarchist Contributions brought us to discuss the differences in social and individualist anarchism, which naturally brought us to “Through Separation to Community” by German anarchist Gustav Landauer (1870-1919). We visited this work previously, back in 2019. 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.