GET THE READING HERE: SCREEN, ZINE, AUDIO, CAMAS BOOKS’ FREE BOX, or EMMA’S FREE LIBRARIES AROUND TOWN.
Facilitators should note the Facilitation Guide.
We close our circle with a reflection of Thoughts on Commitment, Responsibility and Self-discipline (2014) by the Anarchist Federation of Rio de Janeiro (FARJ.) Commitment, Responsibility, and Self-discipline emphasizes the importance of continual self-discipline and sustained militancy for anarchists. Critiquing the authoritarian socialist understanding of discipline “from above” as a doctrine, it suggests anarchists must seriously make their positions viable and grounded with clear goals in mind. The text suggests the importance of anarchists to commit to their actions and have follow-through on tasks with procedural frameworks for mutual and self-reinforcement.
The piece reflects on historical conversations between, and the lessons learned by, anarchist revolutionaries Nestor Makhno, an anarchist-communist who helped organized the Ukrainian anarchist Makhnovschina which at its height saw a population of 7.5 million people, and Errico Malatesta, an insurrectionary-turned-syndicalist anarchist who breathed life into dozens of protests, general strikes, and uprisings. The piece aims at showing how these lessons can be applied to members of the FARJ and the wider anarchist tradition.
This is our last VARC for a while as the Circle goes into hiatus. Please write and bring notes. We meet at Camas Books, 2620 Quadra Street, on Lekwungen Territory. Our meeting is Sunday August 17 @ 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 and have been facing increasing harassment tied to the gentrification of the Square. Come show up to eat! They also need help from volunteers.
The next reading we will be considering is a section from Andrew Cornell’s 2011 book Oppose and Propose! Lessons from Movement for a New Society (MNS). MNS spanned across the United States between 1971 and into the 1990s, but was concentrated largely in Philadelphia. As the name of the book implies, MNS was involved in both protest actions (to oppose) as well as in building alternative institutional frameworks (to propose). The section we chose to read outlines the early history of the movement, as well as an analysis of why it dissipated at its end.