[Anarchafeminists] Self & Determination: An Inward Look at Collective Liberation (London Action Resource Centre, Sunday 10th June)

[Jamie Heckert]

Dear Anarchafeminists,

You are warmly invited to join this discussion looking at the links between
the personal and the political, the inward and the outward, with a
anarcha-queer buddhist activist from the US. Please feel free to invite
others. Oh, and it's on facebook at
https://www.facebook.com/events/375563422497500/ (London) &
https://www.facebook.com/events/367851546605129/ (Lancaster)

Love & anarchy,
Jamie

----------


Self & Determination: An Inward Look at Collective Liberation
London Action Resource Centre
Sunday 10th June, 12-3pm

and

*(Also, Thursday 14th June, Park Hotel, Lancaster, 7:30)*

This is a very special opportunity to discuss together the overlaps of
personal practices, political organising and ideas of social justice and
change! *Joshua Stephens from the Institute for Anarchist Studies* in the
US will be visiting London for a short time. You are all warmly invited to
come hear his informal talk followed by shared vegetarian lunch and group
discussion.

If you can, please bring some food or drink to share with others. Donations
toward travel and building expenses are also warmly welcome from those who
feel good about giving them.

______________________________
A Thai Buddhist teacher by the name of Ajahn Chah once wrote, "We human
beings are constantly in combat, at war to escape the fact of being so
limited. But instead of escaping, we continue to create more suffering,
waging war with good, waging war with evil, waging war with what is small,
waging war with what is big, waging war with what is short or long or right
or wrong, courageously carrying on the battle." At some level, we know
this, intuitively. It's reflected back to us by political and economic
institutions on a daily basis -- whether it's the language (and execution)
of xenophobia, racism, and coercive force, or the promise of buying our way
out of discomfort, insecurity, and pain. Those of us committed to forms of
social transformation anchored to direct democracy have cause to take this
quite seriously, as we effectively aspire to an unmediated politics; a
world directly reflective of who we are. "The State is a condition, a set
of social relationships," noted German anarchist Gustav Landauer, "it is a
mode of behavior." Perhaps more ominously, French philosopher Michel
Foucault famously declared, "Politics is war, continued by other means."

While utterly necessary, the overthrow of intolerable institutions does not
magically equip us to build better ones. While complementary, the two are
distinct tasks. In this unprecedented moment of rapidly unfolding, global
social upheaval -- a moment that turns entirely on what we bring to it, and
how we meet each other -- can we afford modes of behavior reproductive of
war? Is there, perhaps, something deeply political about forging a
relationship with oneself that, itself, is an act of refusal; a refusal of
the impulse to control, dominate; a refusal to be conducted by our
anxieties and fears; an anti-authoritarian mode of being?

___________

*Joshua Stephens* is a board member with the Institute for Anarchist
Studies and has been active in anti-authoritarian movements for the last
two decades, drawing from mentors as diverse and dispersed as the Ruckus
Society and Murray Bookchin's Institute for Social Ecology in the US, to
Zapatistas in southern Mexico and the Popular Resistance Committees in
Palestine. His work has spanned coordinating and training participants for
direct action struggles around issues both local and international,
co-teaching a course on classical and contemporary anarchist traditions at
Georgetown University, and co-founding three workers cooperatives. He lives
in Brooklyn, NY where he's active with the Occupy movement, and has spent
the last two months traveling and interviewing anarchists in the eastern
Mediterranean.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.aktivix.org/pipermail/anarchafeminists/attachments/20120602/2e2442c9/attachment.html>