Dear Anarchafeminists,<div><br></div><div>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 <a href="https://www.facebook.com/events/375563422497500/">https://www.facebook.com/events/375563422497500/</a> (London) & <a href="https://www.facebook.com/events/367851546605129/">https://www.facebook.com/events/367851546605129/</a> (Lancaster)</div>
<div><br></div><div>Love & anarchy,</div><div>Jamie<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">---------- <br><br><br><div style="text-align:center"><font color="#009900" size="4">Self & Determination: An Inward Look at Collective Liberation </font></div>
<div style="text-align:center"><font color="#009900" size="4">London Action Resource Centre</font></div>
<div style="text-align:center"><font color="#009900" size="4">Sunday 10th June, 12-3pm</font></div><div style="text-align:center"><br></div><div style="text-align:center">and</div><div style="text-align:center"><br></div>
<div style="text-align:center"><b>(Also, Thursday 14th June, Park Hotel, Lancaster, 7:30)</b></div><div style="text-align:center"><br></div>This is a very special opportunity to discuss together the overlaps of personal practices, political organising and ideas of social justice and change! <b>Joshua Stephens from the Institute for Anarchist Studies</b> 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.<br>
<br>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.<br><br><div style="text-align:center">
______________________________</div>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."<br>
<br>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? <br>
<br><div style="text-align:center">___________</div><div style="text-align:center"><br></div><b>Joshua Stephens</b> 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.
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