The Intergalactic Week of Zad: August 17th-24th: Amazingly Occupied since 2010

from freedomnews.org. The quiet, wildlife-filled countryside just outside Notre-Dame-des-Landes, north of Nantes has been a point of massive contention between various French governments and the country’s environmental direct action movement since 2008, when permission was granted to build a €580 million airport serving as “the international gateway” to Western France.

If you’re a French-speaker, or want a video impression of the Zad movement, try this from 2012:

Squats and camps sprung up on fields due for the rumble of the bulldozer in the early 2010s, and it came to be known as the Zone to Defend (zone à défendre, or Zad), inspiring dozens of other similar camps which have in some cases banded together into “back to the land” networks.

Next month will see a major gathering for the Zads in the form of a week-long camp at Nantes, the Intergalactic Week of Zad, building resources and establishing links between the disparate groups.

Organisers said the programme would be relatively open with a few broad themes, and would offer ample opportunity to learn and work on DIY projects:

Mornings will be dedicated to collective working opportunities, including the building of Ambazada, the Intergalactic cabin as well as collective work on various sites of the Zad (e.g., barn construction, carpentry, helping with collective crops, fence maintenance, collecting wood for the bakery, basket making…). Participants are asked to bring a tent, sleeping bag and a leash if you have a dog.

Running from August 17th-24th, logistics for the week only allow for 300 or so people, so interested campers should contact exclaimthezad@riseup.net ahead of time. Continue reading “The Intergalactic Week of Zad: August 17th-24th: Amazingly Occupied since 2010”

Accidental Anarchist..(watch full docu) Ex diplomat on Why he Changed his Mind

Ten Steps To Anarchism

Carne Ross Former diplomat, anarchist.

I used to believe in “the system”: the political and economic structure of what we might call western democracy and capitalism. I worked for it: for many years, I was a diplomat for my country. I resigned from government over the Iraq war.

I began a political journey. I no longer believed in the system I represented. But what would work instead? To my great surprise, I came to think that anarchism is the answer. I never thought I would believe such radical ideas.

TRAILER..2 minutes

But now I think it’s the only political philosophy that makes sense for today’s world, and the crazy ones are those who think that the current system will save us.

Full Documentary 23 July 17.. 1 hour

But why, and what is anarchism? These 10 steps can explain:

1. No one feels they have control over the things that matter to them: locally or nationally, let alone internationally. This frustration helps explain Brexit and Trump and the divisiveness and volatility of politics today. Continue reading “Accidental Anarchist..(watch full docu) Ex diplomat on Why he Changed his Mind”

Errekaleor is Alive!, the Epic Struggle of a Self-managed and Anticapitalist neighborhood.

we share an interesting interview with Estitxu Villamor, by Adrián Almazán for 15-15-15.org/webzine/ on the situation of Errekaleor, neighborhood of Vitoria.

Let’s start with the history of the Errekaleor neighborhood. In what year was it built? What kind of population lived in it and what was its role in the struggles of the city?

Errekaleor is a working district that was built in 1959 to house the workers who came from the whole peninsula to the factories of Gasteiz. This is a time when there is a very strong industrialization in the city and many workers come with their families.

The city grew and this type of labor districts were created, away from the center of the city. This, in particular, is built by a cooperative of the bishopric, totally on the periphery, without any services (the neighborhood initially comprised of the houses and a church), so that the life of the workers was reduced to the work and did not have the possibility of organize themselves in the workers’ struggle.

Even so, because of their workmanship, neighbors were very close and organized from the outset. Very involved in the workers’ struggle and in the defense of their own neighborhood, they themselves built a cinema, a bar and a grocery store; Also through their struggle they got the city council to equip them with services such as the social center, nursery, … Continue reading “Errekaleor is Alive!, the Epic Struggle of a Self-managed and Anticapitalist neighborhood.”

Emma Goldman’s ‘Living My Life’..read and download here

Emma Goldman’s amazing autobiography ‘Living my Life’ has just been uploaded to The Anarchist Library for all of us to read and copy!

Title: Living My Life Author: Emma Goldman

Date: 1931 Topics: autobiographical, Russian Revolution

. Read and download HERE ..http://theanarchistlibrary.org…

In appreciation.. by Emma Goldman

”Suggestions that I write my memoirs came to me when I had barely begun to live, and continued all through the years. But I never paid heed to the proposal. I was living my life intensely — what need to write about it?

Another reason for my reluctance was the conviction I entertained that one should write about one’s life only when one had ceased to stand in the very torrent of it. “When one has reached a good philosophic age,” I used to tell my friends, “capable of viewing the tragedies and comedies of life impersonally and detachedly — particularly one’s own life — one is likely to create an autobiography worth while.”

Still feeling adolescently young in spite of advancing years, I did not consider myself competent to undertake such a task. Moreover, I always lacked the necessary leisure for concentrated writing.

My enforced European inactivity left me enough time to read a great deal, including biographies and autobiographies. I discovered, much to my discomfiture, that old age, far from ripening wisdom and mellowness, is too often fraught with senility, narrowness, and petty rancour. I would not risk such a calamity, and I began to think seriously about writing my life. Continue reading “Emma Goldman’s ‘Living My Life’..read and download here”

A world without police: Peter Gelderloos

“posted by Julius Gavroche As a continuation of the collection of accounts of police violence-intervention from our last post, we share an essay by Peter Gelderloos on the function of the police within modern, capitalist society.

No radical politics is possible except against the police, for they are an integral and fundamental instrument in the reproduction of capitalist social relations. This does not mean however they they should become the object of any open and exclusive counter-violence; but rather, that all should be done to create conditions in which the violence of the police is rendered pointless and they themselves cease to be necessary.

In the mass protests-occupations of spain’s cities in 2011, for example, the police were often simply marginalised by the sheer scale of the mobilisations, or pushed back in many smaller, but determined, protests. The creation and defense of spaces of autonomy is only viable not against the police, but against the society as whole to which they belong. In other words, autonomy lies beyond policed societies.

A world without police

by Peter Gelderloos (Originally published with Counterpunch)

In two previous essay, I discussed the role of the Left in protecting the police through cautious reformism, and the effectiveness of a pacified, falsified—in a word disarmed—history of the Civil Rights movement to prevent us from learning from previous struggles and achieving a meaningful change in society.

The police are a racist, authoritarian institution that exists to protect the powerful in an unequal system. Continue reading “A world without police: Peter Gelderloos”

Remembering our comrade Leah Feldman 1899 – 1993 .. A Rebel Spirit!

by kate Sharpley Library Leah Feldman was one of the ordinary men and women who rarely get into history books but have been the backbone of the anarchist movement.

Born in Warsaw in 1899, as a schoolgirl she became interested in anarchism. She said that her mother used to hide her shoes so that she could not attend meetings, which were then illegal in Poland. Finally she ran away to her sister in London where she earned her living at the sewing machine.

Leah’s photo album

Working in the sweatshops of the East End she became active in the Yiddish-speaking anarchist movement that flourished at that time. When the Russian revolution broke out in 1917 the overwhelming majority of Russian male Jewish anarchists returned home. Many of those women whose husbands and lovers died at the hands of the Tsarists or the Bolsheviks, remained in England.

Leah, however, had made her own way to Russia. Upon arrival she saw the reality of Bolshevik rule and was not impressed. As a working woman she could see the effects of their dictatorship in a way that visiting intellectuals could not. Continue reading “Remembering our comrade Leah Feldman 1899 – 1993 .. A Rebel Spirit!”