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“The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex”
by INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence
2007 South End Press
This is a pretty wonderful collection of essays, put together by INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence, covering the rise of the Non-Profit Industrial Complex and it’s vampiric and co-opting effects on radical movements for social change. Some of the essays are more compelling than others, but I particularly found the historical background of the NPIC undercutting and distorting radical movements of the last 25 years revelatory. Plus the case-studies of groups that went for the 501(c)3 tax status and got the foundation grants, only to have it delegitimize and undermine their organizing, were extremely worth reading. Read the rest of this entry »
From March 17-21, 2008, Students for a Democratic Society led over 90 student actions across the country to mark the 5th Anniversary of the U.S. Invasion of Iraq! (See newsds.org/march20 for more details of the nationwide SDS actions)
One of the most exciting actions was in Washington DC. DC-SDS’ “Funk the War 3” dance party brought together 500+ youth and students to shut down K Street, where War Profiteers like Lockheed Martin and Bechtel are headquartered.
Those companies were shut down by the mobile antiwar dance party, which also hit up the Armed Forces Recruiting Center and spread the love there.
The action culminated in an SDS-organized blockade of Connecticut and K Sts., where 11 students chained themselves to school desks and demanded money for education, not for war. The intersection was held for over an hour by 200+ youth, despite pouring rain, until it was apparent that police were not willing or able to break up the blockade, and the students declared victory!
The SDS action was the largest and most energetic event of United for Peace and Justice’s “5 Years Too Many” events in DC on March 19th. The week of action brought major media attention to SDS, including 3 days straight of “The Return of Students for a Democratic Society” headlining the front page of MichaelMoore.com, an awesome article in The Nation, and a feature in the New York Times. It seems that SDS has gained a new prominence in the antiwar movement and is taking off right now!
See below for articles, video, audio and images from the 5th Anniversary Actions. Read the rest of this entry »
Part 1 of 9 – a brilliant and vivid look at Neoliberalism and those who struggle against it on all parts of the globe. bilingual (English/Spanish).
“The Culture of Make Believe”
by Derrick Jensen
2004 Chelsea Green
Derrick Jensen has a knack for compiling some of the most horrible atrocities ever committed and piecing them together within a compelling and provocative thread. This book is more “socially” focused than A Language Older Than Words (which was more ecological), so in that sense I got more out of it, but it’s probably not as well written as that earlier book.
The best parts here are about the KKK, IWW, J.P. Morgan and the turn of the century big capitalists and war profiteers, the Nazis, and slave labor in the US and around the world. as usual though, he covers about 100 topics in this 600+ page book.
The thing I struggle with when reading Jensen and other ‘anti-civ’ writers is that I agree 99% with their diagnosis of the problem (class society is inherently built on violence and must be dismantled – the industrial ‘economy’ is a machine designed to turn the living into the dead), but their solutions, or lack thereof, are difficult to accept. Instead of organizing for social change or revolution, Jensen advocates that we basically weep for the world we’ve lost, and perhaps engage in property damage…
Originally on the DC SDS Blog.
11 Students for a Democratic Society, including 9 members of DC SDS drove out to Annapolis Wednesday morning to participate in a rally and civil disobedience to bring attention to the neglect of students in Baltimore public schools.The Baltimore Algebra Project, a student-led inter-school coalition of inner city youths, called for a die-in at the State House in Maryland’s state capital of Annapolis. Chanting “No Education, No Life!” 25 members of the Baltimore Algebra Project and their supporters were arrested for presenting a coffin to Governor O’Malley in absentia, representing the social death (and, chillingly pointed out by the picture on the coffin of Zachariah Hallback, a Baltimore Algebra project member who was recently shot to death in a robbery, actual deaths) of students who are denied a proper education. No charges were filed on any of the participants. Students for a Democratic society were 7 of the 25 arrests.
DC Students for a Democratic society applauds the self-organization of students for student liberation and the democratization of education that the Baltimore Algebra Project organizes, and hopes to work with them again in the future. Read the rest of this entry »
“Red Emma Speaks: Selected Writings and Speeches”
Emma Goldman
1972 Random House
Probably the best of the three ‘anarchist’ books I’ve read recently, because Emma Goldman was an American and lived during the 20th century, so has the most relevant things to say about this stupid and messed-up society we live in. Her essays here range from feminism, to education, to sexuality, to prisons, to war, to violence, to revolution and counter-revolution.
My favorite pieces here are the Afterword to her wonderful anti-Bolshevik book “My Disillusionment in Russia” and her essay “There Is No Communism in Russia” – both on the subject of how dictatorship in the name of the people is in no way synonymous with freedom, nor capable of leading to it. Read the rest of this entry »
Reposted from Indymedia UK.
by David Graeber
The biggest problem facing direct action movements is that we don’t know how to handle victory.
This might seem an odd thing to say because of a lot of us haven’t been feeling particularly victorious of late. Most anarchists today feel the global justice movement was kind of a blip: inspiring, certainly, while it lasted, but not a movement that succeeded either in putting down lasting organizational roots or transforming the contours of power in the world. The anti-war movement was even more frustrating, since anarchists and anarchist tactics were largely marginalized. The war will end, of course, but that’s just because wars always do. No one is feeling they contributed much to it.
I want to suggest an alternative interpretation. Let me lay out three initial propositions here:
1) Odd though it may seem, the ruling classes live in fear of us. They appear to still be haunted by the possibility that, if average Americans really get wind of what they’re up to, they might all end up hanging from trees. It know it seems implausible but it’s hard to come up with any other explanation for the way they go into panic mode the moment there is any sign of mass mobilization, and especially mass direct action, and usually try to distract attention by starting some kind of war.
2) In a way this panic is justified. Mass direct action—especially when organized on democratic lines—is incredibly effective. Over the last thirty years in America, there have been only two instances of mass action of this sort: the anti-nuclear movement in the late ‘70s, and the so called “anti-globalization” movement from roughly 1999-2001. In each case, the movement’s main political goals were reached far more quickly than almost anyone involved imagined possible.
3) The real problem such movements face is that they always get taken by surprise by the speed of their initial success. We are never prepared for victory. It throws us into confusion. We start fighting each other. The ratcheting of repression and appeals to nationalism that inevitably accompanies some new round of war mobilization then plays into the hands of authoritarians on every side of the political spectrum. As a result, by the time the full impact of our initial victory becomes clear, we’re usually too busy feeling like failures to even notice it. Read the rest of this entry »
The End of Capitalism 
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