While ‘Victoria’ Anarchist Reading Circle is still on hiatus, we want to bring special attention to the Center for Especifismo Studies (CES), who for their free online Militant Kindergarten course, each Sunday 9AM PST from Jan 11 – April 19 2026 takes inspiration from the Anarchist Federation of Rio de Janeiro (FARJ, which we have studied before) and their Social Anarchism and Organisation (2008).
According to the CES:
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Militant Kindergarten is a 15-week seminar
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Combining radicalizing and radicalized people into a shared learning space
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Studying especifismo, a revolutionary current of anarchism coming from Latin America
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Reading Social Anarchism and Organisation by the FARJ (the Anarchist Federation of Rio de Janeiro) and the abridged CES version, “104 Steps to Recovery of the Social Vector”
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Refining and developing our understanding of anarchist theory, strategy, and militancy
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Discussing specific passages, concepts, and theories
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Aiming to create a dependably safe and welcoming environment for learning
*All the organizers have already attended this seminar at least once, and at the end, we’ll invite anyone interested to join us in organizing future Militant Kindergartens.
Click here to learn more about or sign up for CES’ Militant Kindergarten.
GET THE READING HERE:
For our next gathering, we will be discussing Come Hell or High Water: A Handbook on Collective Process Gone Awry (2009) by Richard Singer and Delfina Vannucci, published by AK Press. The authors share their insight about collective organizing experiences in this handbook. The handbook is useful for anarchist organizations, horizontal social or political groups, worker co-ops, or just for trying to incorporate egalitarian processes where they don’t already exist.
Our next reading will be the academic article Participatory Democracy in Action: Practices of the Zapatistas and the Movimento Sem Terra, which covers the Zapatistas’ and Movimento Sem Terra’s (Landless Movement-MST) methods of organizing through participatory democracy, which emphasizes obligation to participate in decision making and a shared concern for autonomy.