Audio – Media panel on Manufacturing Consent at DABF 2014

Just how good are the mass media at keeping the rabble in line? This audio I edited for the panel from the 2014 Dublin Anarchist Bookfair explores the media’s complicity with the rich and powerful and what we can do about it.

 

 

A Media panel on Manufacturing Consent at the Dublin Anarchist Bookfair 2014 by Workers Solidarity on Mixcloud

 

Audio – Radical Cooperatives: homes without landlords, workers without bosses – DABF2014

Another presentation I recorded and edited from the 2014 Dublin anarchist bookfair.  This time on the role of radical co-operatives in social change, based on the experience of Radical Routes in the UK. 

Defeating Fracking – setting limits to growth? – Dublin Anarchist Bookfair audio

Another recording I made and edited from the Dublin Anachist bookfair – Climate change has reached a point where scientists are now saying that direct actions against resource extraction is the only strategy likely to prevent ecological collapse and ensure our environment’s survival. This panel considered what needs to be done and who is going to do it.

My Life in Activism : Women speak at 2014 Dublin Anarchist Bookfair – Audio

This audio which I edited from the 2014 Dublin anarchist bookfair "hosted a panel of women activists who informed us about how they became involved in the movement, what drew them into this life of campaigning for social justice, rights and attempting to change the world in which we live. They inform us of how they remain motivated, inspired and sustained in active political life."

My faith is to spend the day of the bookfair running around setting up audi & video equipment and recording and then the weeks afterwards processing that for the WSM Mixcloud and Youtube accounts.  I’ll be posting these over the next couple of weeks a few days after I complete each one.

 

My Life in Activism : Women speak at 2014 Dublin Anarchist Bookfair – Audio by Workers Solidarity on Mixcloud

 

“Direct Struggle Against Capital: A Peter Kropotkin Anthology” now published

First, the good news: Direct Struggle Against Capital: A Peter Kropotkin Anthology is now published and has arrived at both AK Press in Scotland and America. If you do decide to buy it (and I do think it is worth buying!) then please do so via AK Press or a radical bookshop.

Details of the 2014 Dublin anarchist book fair

It’s that time of year again and I’ve been busy, busy, busy with the online promotion of the 2014 Dublin anarchist bookfair.  I’ve included the details below so that any of you in Dublin are sure to get to it and if I’ve the time post bookfair I’ll write up some of the lessons in terms of both promotion and engagement learned from it this time around.  Its going to be a blast, if you will be in Dublin you don’t want to miss this!


There will be discussions, speakers from movements engaged in struggle, home and abroad.  There will be books and stalls and much more.  If you’ve been to one, then you know what I’m talking about, if you haven’t make sure you keep the date set aside, and we’ll be seeing you on the 12th of April.

Please mark your attendence on the main Facebook event for the bookfair and invite any friends you think should be interested.  Publicity is one of the big costs of hosting it every year so you contribution in that way really helps.

 

Late addition: We are pleased to announce that Selma James is taking part in this years Dublin Anarchist Bookfair.

 

Before and during the bookfair we encourage you to tweet to #dabf

About the Networked Revolution tag and where I’m going with it

Swans, ducks & seagulls in Hyde Park - photo by Andrew FloodRegular readers may have noticed I’ve recently starting tagging articles & blogs with Networked Revolution some of which  don’t appear to have a direct connection to the revolutionary implications of social media. This is because I’m using this tag as a catch all for the blogs & articles I’m publishing questioning how we traditionally understand revolutionary organisation in the new conditions of today.

I’ve expanded this beyond simply being about the technology to the behaviors this new technology makes possible and also the conflicts it is creating. One aspect of this is the material looking as the arguments around what is often called ‘intersectionality’ although in terms of left practice the term micropolitics may be more useful.  In meat space I’ve had a few people asking me what I’m up to, surprised I suspect that I’ve been quite sympathetic to this set of ideas and methods while most on the left (particularly those over a certain age) are unrelenting in their hostility. Someone even told me I’m ‘playing a clever game’ so I thought it might be a good idea to clarify that this is a genuine exploration and explain some of what has prompted it.

An Anarchist FAQ version 15.0 released (18/03/2014)

An Anarchist FAQ is now at version 15.0. This release is a revision of the appendix replying to David McNally’s attack on anarchism and defend of Leninism:

Kropotkin Anthology Questions and Answers

A short update. Suffice to say, I’m been very busy of late. I decided to get back to revising An Anarchist FAQ, namely its appendices – starting with the critique of David McNally’s terrible “Socialism from Below” pamphlet. It has taken more time than I had anticipated – mostly due to how bad it is.

Micropolitics and the Left

Sema dancing Sufi in gas mask at Gezi Park demonstrations in Turkey

This article is an attempt to investigate certain problems of the left via the lens of micropolitics and macropolitics, terms first introduced by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (henceforth D&G). Faced with the challenging nature of texts from post-structuralist thinkers like D&G or Foucault, many people make the assumption that they are really motivated by an elitist desire to confuse, intimidate and befuddle the masses and divert theory into useless abstractions, far removed from the concerns of ordinary people for social transformation and liberation from oppression and exploitation. However a careful reading of D&G’s Micropolitics and Segmentarity chapter in “A Thousand Plateaus” (ATP) reveals they have two main objects in their theorising there – to make sense of the experience of fascism in the 1930s and 1940s and the (then) more recent uprisings of Paris May ‘68. We will try to extend that to looking at more recent problems, passing via the Poll Tax riots of 1990 to looking at today’s current controversies around intersectionality

 

IMAGE: By Azirlazarus (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons