Tips for Radicals
To help you searching the blog, I use the following tags to categorise posts:
- theory - ways of structuring the world
- strategy - plans to achieve the theories
- tools - specific ways to (help) achieve the strategy
- tips - advice that could help you in your life and action
- examples and analysis of existing campaigns
For more info, see the about this blog page.
Please send in your own blog posts, links, comments, or article ideas either as a submission or an ask - always welcome.
"if you don't have a strategy, you're part of someone else's strategy."
– a. toffler
"What can we do today, so that tomorrow we can do what we are unable to do today?"
– Paulo Freire
I also run a more scatter-shot blog full of incoherent rants and tumblr arguments. Sorry about that.
“…Occupy is shedding its liberal accretions and rapidly turning into something with much deeper roots, creating alliances that promise to transform the very notion of revolutionary politics in America.
…
There is a traditional terms of alliance between liberals and radicals in American social movements: through civil disobedience and direct action, the radicals create a fire on the liberals’ left that makes them seem relevant as a moderate alternative; the liberals keep us out of jail. In this case, the liberals spectacularly failed.
Over the winter, rather than making an issue of the extraordinary illegal violence of the evictions, they chose, instead, to create an almost histrionic moral crisis over a few broken windows in Oakland months before. But when OWS re-emerged in the spring, the abandonment of the liberals, the drying-up of the money, have become an almost miraculous blessing. Activists have honed and polished their street tactics and democratic process. New alliances have been created, with community groups, immigrant rights organizations, and, increasingly, labor unions.
…
The words might be diplomatically chosen, but there’s no mistaking what tradition is being invoked here. In endorsing a vision of universal equality, of the dissolution of national borders, and democratic self-governing communities, nurses, bus drivers, and construction workers at the heart of America’s greatest capitalist metropolis are signing on to the vision, if not the tactics, of revolutionary anarchism.”
Seriously good article, as always.
(via danceforthatanarchy)
For Lovers and Fighters: on polyamory and radicalism
Bit long but definitely worth the read. Fuck yeah, relationships in all their forms!
Too many people have illusions in electoralism, and to be frank it’s one of the reasons that a mass direct action movement hasn’t taken off in the UK. The entire left pumps its money and resources into chasing votes because their focus is party-building, and that way lies new foot soldiers, more subs, more funding to pay full timers, and more paper sales. It also reinforces the illusions people have in voting, because whilst leftists in theory have a (slightly) more radical end than liberals, they advocate largely the same useless tactics.
I think there’s a difference between voting for the best candidate/voting for the lesser evil and attempting to change the system via voting. The latter simply won’t work, imo.
QFT. Voting takes shit-all time. Changing capitalism with voting would take fucking ever.
Slavoj Žižek, “A Permanent Economic Emergency” (via daveomitchell)
Never read any actual Žižek, but this is a rockin’ quote.
