Who you gonna call? One another!

Direct action tactics in trying times.

From the July/August 2009 issue of Intersections, the newsletter of Common Action

Your boss won’t pay you for hours you worked. The landlord won’t fix your backed-up toilet. Your friend was detained by Immigration Customs Enforcement, and now she’s facing deportation. Who you gonna call? You might call a lawyer, or a social worker, or you might file an appeal that may or may not receive a reply. But in an economy where these problems are becoming all too common, these solutions just aren’t cutting it anymore – they can be too slow, too expensive, and too isolating. Instead, many groups are turning towards a different solution: direct action.

“Direct action involves bringing people together to confront the person responsible for a problem, in order to demand a swift solution,” explains Emily, a member of Seattle Solidarity Network (SeaSol for short), an all-volunteer organization that supports workers and tenants. Through fliers on telephone poles and bus stops, a website on the Internet, and good old fashioned word-of-mouth, SeaSol encourages people who have a a problem with a boss or landlord to contact the group for support. Together, they write a demand letter and mobilize a crowd of people to deliver it to the boss or landlord’s house or workplace. If the boss or landlord fails to fix the problem by a stated deadline, SeaSol takes further collective action. Using these tactics, SeaSol has enjoyed a string of victories: winning relocation assistance for tenants and, back pay for workers; forcing employers to drop frivolous lawsuits; and more.

While SeaSol focuses on workplace and housing concerns, many organizations around the world have applied a similar approach to a range of issues. Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (OCAP), a Canadian group widely recognized as one of the first to develop the direct action model, targets government assistance offices that illegally withhold support from people. Another Canadian group, No One is Illegal, uses similar tactics on immigration and detention issues. In British Columbia the group has occuped the offices of Canadian Border Services Agency (CBSA) and has prevented CBSA officers from carrying out deportation orders by blocking access. In one instance, more than 1,500 people were mobilized to directly prevent the deportation of a Punjabi refugee at an airport. “Direct action is not always involved in our supportwork, and many migrants have been able to win residency without recourse to it,” explains NOII member Usman Majeed. “However, when petitions, letters to politicians, press conferences, rallies, and legal avenues are all rejected by the state, we have little choice but to use our own bodies to protect and defend members of our community.”

As times get tougher, many people are beginning to question the ability of social services and the legal system to effectively put an end to injustices committed by bosses, landlords and the government. An important book called The Revolution Will Not Be Funded, edited by the group INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence, calls this problem “the Non-Profit Industrial Complex.” The book discusses how non-profit organizations’ dependence paid staff and funding from the government or private foundations like the Rockefeller Foundation severely limits what they can accomplish. By mobilizing groups of people rather than relying solely on experts, direct action groups build something that goes beyond solving individual grievances. Direct action groups demonstrate that peoples’ issues aren’t isolated, but represent a much larger system of disempowerment.

Over time, direct action organizations can help empower a community to stand up to this system. As No One is Illegal states, “it is imperative to concretely offer support to those at the front lines of repressive immigration policies and to build our communities’ own capacity for resistance and self-organization.” Each fight is a learning experience for everyone involved, and as lessons are applied, communities win demands more and more often. At a time when we stand to lose so much, we all benefit from the empowering effect of real victory.

Big Money, Bad Baseball

From the December/January 2008-2009 issue of Intersections, the newsletter of Common Action

In 2008, the Seattle Mariners set a new record for losing, becoming the first team in baseball history to lose 100 games with a $100 million-plus player payroll. Meanwhile, the Tampa Bay Rays, one of the lowest paid teams in baseball, went on to the World Series. In the same year that also saw the departure of the Sonics to Oklahoma City, Seattle sports fans are once again left dealing with the cold, hard reality that big money makes for bad, bad sports.

CLR James would have made the perfect Seattle sports fan – he loved sports and hated big money. James was an unorthodox communist who rallied against both the United States and the Soviet Union in his passion for direct democracy – once authoring an essay called “Every Cook Can Govern.” He also wrote Beyond a Boundary, a book about his life as a professional cricket player in Trinidad. In it, James demanded that sports be considered an art form, akin to writing or painting.

Anyone who ever saw the young Ken Griffey Jr.’s sweet home-run swing would have a hard time disagreeing with James that sports are an art form. But there’s a case for James the communist as well. The history of Seattle baseball is rife with examples of the gaping contradiction between the beauty of baseball and the ugliness of capitalism and the State.

In 1972, Seattle officials broke ground on the Kingdome – home to the Mariners until 1999 – and a crowd of Asian American activists were there to protest them. The stadium threatened to displace Seattle’s International District, long home to Asian immigrant communities. The dome was built, but activists succeeded in directing city resources to maintain the neighborhood’s livelihood.

The Kingdome housed local sports, but was good for little else. Capitalism only knows short-cuts, so shoddy construction and garish aesthetics ensured the dome lasted only as long as it took the Mariners to win their first dramatic division title in 1995 – perhaps the most memorable sports season Seattle has ever seen. Owners, emboldened by fans’ new found love for baseball, threatened to move the team. Despite a public vote against subsidy of a new stadium, politicians led by Slade Gorton – not coincidentally, Washington’s longtime Native American-hating Republican senator – built it anyway, at a cost of $380 million in public dollars.

For all that money, the Mariners are back to losing and low attendance. Of course, if Seattle sports fans truly craved top performance, more would attend Storm games, but generations of institutionalized sexism prevents women’s professional basketball from being valued equally to men’s. While the New York Mets once proved a team can be major losers and still sustain a rabid fan base, Mets fans were part of an urban community, whereas Seattle baseball remains at the whim of an economy hewn to suburbanites, tourists and international investors – not city dwellers, suggesting that baseball will never be truly appreciated as the art it is until fans truly feel ownership over their local team, until every fan can govern.

New Morning, Changing Weather

“No matter who wins the elections – All you community organizers, you’re going to wake up on November 5th and do the same work you’ve always been doing.”

That’s what spoken-word artist Walidah Imarisha (Bad Sista of duo Good Sista/Bad Sista) told a crowd in Seattle on Saturday night. She’s right, of course – the work of grassroots organizing is the same, and can’t be changed by the election of any politician.

Still, there is a new atmosphere this morning, I’m just not sure how to describe it. I went to sleep last night to fire works in the streets, neighbors talking and horns honking, and woke up to hear a political buzz like I’ve never heard – on the bus, in the hallways on campus, and, of course, in e-mails and on blogs. Someone calling me on the phone about other business immediately asked, “So what’d you think about last night?”

How to capture this? I don’t know. Here I don’t want to outline my own opinions. I only want to share selections – like Imarisha’s statement – that resonated with me. Some of them might contradict – if they do, that’s good. Those are tensions we need to work through.

• Selections from discussions among anarchists:

“Too often, anarchists are reflexively dismissive of electoral politics (something I’ve also been guilty of in the past), ignoring the implications of the mainstream political landscape and how it can shape organizing strategies on the ground. Despite Obama’s long list of corporate sponsors, hawkish foreign policy team, weak domestic policies, and overall centrist outlook, it is clear that his campaign has made a significant mark on the country and we should have a serious conversation about how to engage with Obama hysteria without compromising our principles.I have no illusions about Obama’s hope and change rhetoric, but as a community organizer and person of color who works with latino/a immigrants and lives in a prodominately black neighborhood, I think change is palpable already. If nothing else, it seems clear to me that his administration will have a considerable impact on race relations in the U.S., on a level we can’t possibley measure. I imagine the dominant conversation will take the shamefully shallow “post-racial society’ track, but amongst working-class people of color I think there’s a potential opportunity for a stronger black-brown alliance, particularly around labor issues–an arena where anarchist people of color can make inroads.”

I think U.S.-based anarchists, particularly of the white-male-middle-class variety–who seem to be the majority–tend to overlook the significance of Obama’s victory for working-class people of color. I don’t think Obama genuinely has the latters interests at heart, but I think his voice and image has legitimized the notion that real change comes from the bottom, and that we should seize the opportunity to remind people that he’s absolutely right and begin mobilizing folks–particularly around prison issues, labor, health care, and institutional racism.

I think it’s worth reading Obama’s memoirs. He is a great writer, no doubt about it. He’s also a grass roots activist and has been since his 20s. He also spent 5 years of his youth in Indonesia right after the coup and knows what despotism and poverty look like from the street up, rather than from the dizzy heights of power down. He’s also lived through a degree of structural persecution I will never understand and he spent most of his life trying to understand it.

He’s certainly middle class, and he’s certainly not a revolutionary, but he’s a damn site better than anything else on offer (not that you said otherwise of course). He’s also charged by ideals that many of us share even if we don’t think he’ll be able to realise them through the instruments of the state and capitalism. He’s also made his way through the political upheavals of the 60s in his own way and seems to have fairly standard Marxist views about history and power – at least that’s what he wrote 13 years ago.

What surprised me most about the campaign was that everyone tried so hard to keep race out of it, but as soon as he won it’s all anyone’s talked about. I think that’s inevitable, but I don’t think he’s inspiring because he’s half Kenyan (though it is also really inspiring); I think he’s inspiring because he’s a real person who’s really thought about politics and the people and has campaigned for most of his adult life on behalf of other people and against the odds and made it in the way he wanted to.

Bear in mind also that his memoirs were published 13 years ago, just after he got the presidency of the Harvard Law Review and well before he went into politics.

He’s an activist first and now he’s a politician. I think the worry for anarchists is how successful he’s been. I think the challenge for us is to hold him to account and to push the agenda without sacrificing our principles. “

“The two funniest moments of the coverage on the BBC last night were:
a) an interview with a poor-looking woman in some gawdawful dump in the midwest – she was asked whether she expected great change and she replied “well they’re politicians and politicians are politicians and the president doesn’t have that much power anyway, so I don’t expect much change”. It just completely stunned the presenter.

b) Ted Koppel being asked about the prospects for Obama’s presidency and responding about how this wouldn’t really affect the underlying racial problems and that Obama would have pretty much zero space to maneouver given the crisis and he would just be fire-fighting – he was interrupted by the presenter saying “er, this is no time for doom and gloom”.”

“It will be interesting to see how these people operate and see things now that the election’s over. The important thing is to engage and work alongside these people. We all know the underlying reality, and need for radical change, but there is no denying that this is a historic and significant moment in the US. Some elder comrades (people in their 60’s) have helped me understand that. I was at an eviction blockade in Mattapan (one of Boston’s majority Black working class neighborhoods). One of the organizers stated “we should be celebrating last night’s victory, but instead we are here, defending the home of a Black woman who continues to suffer. This is where we belong.”"

In the UK this evening they had Dizzee Rascal on for his thoughts, alongside Baroness Amos (a Government peer) and he scored pretty highly too.

“No, one person doesn’t make change, people together make things change”. Plus he was moving around enough to leave camera shot.

• Dead Prez offer their opinion (the only hiphop track I’ve heard yet critical of Obama… at least until Dizzee cuts a track, I guess): Dead Prez – PolitriKKKs

Anarchism and Elections

Two very timely topics, presented by anarchist writer and organizer Cindy Milstein at the 2008 NYC Anarchist bookfair (reposted here on my very untimely blog). Not very visual presentation, but the audio is great. Listen now before the historical moment passes and this talk becomes dated.

Nearly as early as Hillary or Obama, anarchists were hot on the campaign trail. Plans to resist the 2008 U.S. presidential elections and especially the conventions were afoot in 2006. The German Jewish anarchist Gustav Landauer once observed in relation to “anarchist assasination politics” that they “proceed from the intentions of a small group…following the example of the big political parties..What they are trying to say is: “We are also political.”…[Yet] these anarchists are not anarchic enough.” His comments apply to electoralism too: being political is the right impulse, but the tactics and indeed the focus are wrong. Certainly, in the United States, presidential elections represent rare instances when many people “participate.” But why the anarchist fascination with something that’s far from anything we’d recognize as politics? And why, if and when we choose to engage, do anarchists frequently use strategies that mirror statist and/or liberal forms, or are simply unimaginative? Perhaps, in zeroing in on presidential elections, we aren’t anarchic enough either. Or conversely, perhaps this electoral moment does indeed offer us a way to spotlight the best of anarchism as a replacement for statecraft.

Cindy is a co-organizer of the Renewing the Anarchist Tradition confrence, a board member of the institute for Anarchist Studies, and a collective member of both Free Society and Black Sheep Books in Monpelier, Vermont. She also taught at the “anarchist summer school” called the Institute for Social Ecology. Her essays appear in several anthologies, including “realizing the Impossible: Art Against Authority” and “Globalize Liberation,” and she does community organizing at home and public speaking/popular education anywhere else. This was filmed by David Buccola on April 13 at the Anarchist Bookfair in New York City.

The Grace of Inactivity

These past few weeks have seen me in limbo between Bellingham and Seattle as we scrambled to complete our video in daily marathon editing sessions. The video finally debuted on September 4th as Present In All That We Do (from the Baldwin quote about history). We have other prospective showings lined up in the coming months, but nothing to justify my lingering days in Bellingham extending any longer.

–

Now I am in Seattle’s University District. Whereas Bellingham was a place whose history I could begin to understand, and maybe even began to grasp my own place in that history, given its small size as a city, I’m left floundering here, not knowing where to begin.

My father swears he once lived only a block or so away from where I do now, but he either can’t remember what his building looked like, or it has been torn down. Whether the building still stands or not, I think my father’s memory says something about this area: a young person’s presence here is fleeting, transient, leaving behind nothing to remember one by, and one leaves with nothing to remember about the place itself.

This is a place of impermanence, and so I’m thinking it will be a good introduction to the metropolis: no need for the knowledge of my neighborhood here. Instead I can concern myself with my new surroundings – find a job, get political. For now I’m left with nothing do but job hunt and generally laze, which explains the origins of this blog post, and the title too.

–

I have also been reading.

A roundabout connection to the above: George Woodcock, author of Anarchism: A History of Libertarian Ideas and Movements, once taught at the University of Washington (so says the back of the book; his Wikipedia entry says nothing about it). His book appeared in 1962, and the era permeated throughout Woodcock’s book, both in the style it is written and in its general pessimism about the prospects of anarchism in general. The book is generally concerned with what happened in anarchism’s history, not why, and given its breadth – basically all the European countries are covered – perhaps that’s all a book like this can do. Woodcock was an English professor, and it shows – he seems to dedicate an entire chapter to Leo Tolstoy simply because he was a novelist, and Woodcock is always interjecting little asides about the literary quality of the anarchists’ writings.

Overall it was an interesting read, but nothing I would ever recommend to someone looking for an introduction to anarchism – his subjects are all one hundred years or so in the past, and he remains centered completely on the anarchist men of Europe. Perhaps the only new insight I take away from it is the historical failure of anarchists to organize as anarchists. The success of anarchism, in my eyes, demands participation in larger social movements, those not organized around an idea but a practice. Groups of anarchists are important to me, but only as a circle (a circle A!) to share ideas and insights, which we then carry into our struggles elsewhere.

I also recently completed Benevolent Assimiliation: The American Conquest of the Philippines, 1899-1903 by Stuart Creighton Miller. Anna and I have plans to visit the Philippines in the next few years, so I’ve been looking to learn more about the history of the archipelago. I learned next to nothing about the Philippines in this book, though I learned a great deal about the early history of American imperialism overseas – often despite Miller’s soft-pedaling, moderate liberalism. The book is inordinately concerned with the debates, scandals and squabbles amongst the powerful – mostly US politicians and generals – during the early years of the US occupation of the country.

I generally couldn’t care less about the powerful, but several short – too short – passages in this book make the invaluable connection between US conquest of the North American continent, and imperialism overseas. A great many of the men sent to pacify Filipino revolutionaries had also been deeply involved in US campaigns against Native Americans, including the Wounded Knee massacre. The tactics of concentration camps, rape, and wholesale murder of Filipinos had been tried and tested on the American frontier.

One point that Miller does have the courage to make: the collective memory of the US is one of amnesia and eternal innocence, an innocence that insists we are always doing these things to help people. The justifications have always remained the same: bringing civilization and democracy to ungrateful savages. After reading a book like this, the historical trail leading from the US frontier, to the Philippines, to Vietnam, and eventually to Iraq become undeniable.

Conspiracies of 9/11: Left To The Right

I sat down to write about 9/11 conspiracies and came up with this rambling essay about 9/11; what happens when sentiments on the Right and Left converge; the Three Way Fight; and why Leftists, revolutionaries, anarchists, whatever, can’t afford to ally with the Right. What’s immediately obvious to me is that I write about political things in a very different way then I do about my personal life, or art, or history. Maybe someday I’ll learn to integrate those things together in my writing…

This dude Alex Jones has a documentary about U.S. government complicity in the 9/11 attacks called TerrorStorm. It’ll probably give you an idea of what I think about 9/11 conspiracy theories when I say “TerrorStorm” sounds to me like a freakin’ ride at 6 Flags, not an any coherent political theory. For a long time, that’s been my general attitude about the 9/11 conspiracy stuff (or the “9/11 Truth Movement,” if you’re feeling generous): that it’s worth a laugh and disdain from a distance, but little else.

Well, my consideration of the matter has gotten a little deeper as of late, thanks to an interesting back and forth with a friend of mine over e-mail about this 9/11 Truth business. He’s a smart guy and an anarchist buddy, and we go way, way back, and I’ve got to say, I was a little surprised he was so into it. Essentially, he believes 9/11 Truth is a strategic opportunity for radicals that can’t be passed up. I heard him out on the issue a little and now its got me thinking.

Quickly I realized my dismissive attitude towards the 9/11 Truth Movement had nothing to do with 9/11 whatsoever. I have no clue what happened on 9/11 – maybe a few uninformed doubts here or there – and I’m left wandering why it really matters that I know. My friend argues that were 9/11 truth revealed (assuming government complicity), it 1) would sow disillusionment with the State, and 2) prevent the government from committing similar acts.

I’m all for sowing disillusionment with the State, but I’m still not sold on the importance of organizing around 9/11 truth. One reason is that the 9/11 theories are still just that – theories, meaning they’re not concrete enough to organize people together in the same ways that the facts of daily oppression (shitty work places, sexual assault and violence, prisons, etc.) are wholly concrete and simply proved through the experiences of every life. To paraphrase Ward Churchill, there’s no need to speak truth to power because power knows what its doing. Better to organize with oppressed people – build power – than over-emphasize the shady machinations of the powerful.

Another, more important reason, is that I don’t see those most effected by the Statist aftershocks of 9/11 (immigrants and people of color in particular) taking part in the “9/11 Truth Movement.” I’m not sure it really matters, in the long run, to folks on the ground whether Bush/the government/whoever was complicit in 9/11. Just as Malcolm X wasn’t leading the call to unearth the truth of the JFK assassination after it happened.

Art that fights back

For over two years now, I’ve been writing with anarchist prisoner Harold H. Thompson. He’s not just an anarchist – really though, who’s just an anarchist??-  but also a writer, a jailhouse lawyer, and a painter.

A few months back, his friend and supporter Josh put on an art auction of his work at the Dry River Collective space in Tucson, AZ. The benefits of the auction went to help pay Harold’s legal fees as he sues the Tennessee Department of Corrections for medical neglect (stemming from incidents you can read about here).

Of his paintings, here are a few of my favorites. Visit the Dry River site for more.

The last two are entitled “Bill” and “Hillary.”

My So-called Zines

“I actually published my thesis on zines and how zines can serve as kind of a way to radicalize kids from communities of privilege–you know, like young, white, middle-class kids thinking about race, class and gender issues.” So says Jason Kucsma, co-founder of the now defunct Clamor magazine. Without having read Kucsma’s thesis, I immediately know what he’s talking about – zines radicalized me in a lot of ways, particularly the act of making them myself.

I didn’t do a thesis on zines, but they played a big part in my extra-curricular undergraduate activities. When I was still a student, I found that the access to resources – internet access, software, printing privileges – conspired perfectly for making zines. I know I’m not the only one: I even know of one person (who shall remain nameless!) whose zine-making several years before I started school was partly responsible for the university’s student printing paper quota. S/he’d stay up all night printing them off – and that’s exactly what I did too (for academic purposes, of course!).

Here are a few highlights from my zine-making days – all of which I recently donated to the fantastic Zinelibrary.net, an on-line database out of Olympia, WA. Click on the titles to be directed to where you can download them.

Breaking the MANacles: An Anti-Patriarchy Reader by various authors

I compiled this anthology together as a final project for a class on Anarcha-Feminism taught by the estimable Toby Smith at Fairhaven College in Spring 2004. It focuses mainly on how patriarchy manifests itself (usually unconsciously) within activist circles, primarily from those of us socialized as men. The articles are mostly centered around debates in anarchist circles that proliferated in the early years of the anti-globalization movement, including works by Dan Spalding, Chris Crass, Traci Harris, and the Rock Bloc Collective. None of the articles are perfect, but that’s sort of the point – the zine is supposed to be an entry into discussions about patriarchy, not the final say on it. I hope you find the illustrations as funny as I do.

Looking for Color in the Anti-War Movement by Elizabeth ‘Betita’ Martinez

This an anti-war sequel to the seminal essay Martinez wrote following the WTO protests, “Where Was the Color in Seattle?“ It’s divided into two parts, the first addressed to white people and their historic ignorance of the imperialism in their own backyard; and the second addressed to folks of color concerning anti-war work. I made this into a zine when I worked at Western Washington University’s Peace Resource Center (now the Social Issues Resource Center), and I think we tried to use it in a discussion group that never came together.

Definitely one of the best articles I’ve read about the anti-war movement, along with Kenyon Farrow’s “Not Showing Up.” Martinez’s essay was written a few years ago, and definitely demands to be re-read against all the momentum the anti-war movement has been building in the past few months. Perhaps the topic for a future blog post if I can get my act together…

The Student Movement of 1968 by George Katsiaficas

My first zine I ever completed at school. As a college freshman, I was absolutely obsessed with the student movements of the Sixties, especially in images. I poured every book I could get my hands on that had pictures of the era. After reading Katsiaficas’ excellent primer on the era, The Imagination of the New Left, I decided to put together a zine matching his chapter on international student movements with my favorite pictures. Per my preoccupations at the time, this resulted in lots of militant street scenes.

Naomi Jaffe on the Weather Underground

As my studies of the Sixties era matured, I became more and more enamored with the story of the Weather Undergound Organization. I don’t necessarily care for their tactics, but more with their ability to grow over the years in a way that mirrors my own feelings on their era: from romanticizing street confrontations (e.g. the Days of Rage) towards much more strategic discussions about white anti-racism and solidarity. This trajectory is captured beautifully by Dan Berger’s Outlaws of America, but it’s also summarized by former WUO member Naomi Jaffe in this small statement written after the release of the Weather Underground film by Sam Green and Bill (for the record, a film I really don’t care for). I made this zine (more like a pamphlet, really) to be passed out a screening of the film and presentation on the WUO that I did in Summer 2005 (which didn’t go all that well).

All The Anarchy That’s Fit To Print

Youssef Ishaghpour: To you words are enemies.

Jean-Luc Godard: No, only when they’re taken as orders, or thoughtless, or used malevolently as weapons.

- Cinema: the archaelogy of film and the memory of a century, p. 103.

Theory and practice. The word and the deed. “Writers don’t know what they’re talking about, men of action can’t express themselves. Look at Mao,” says a man in Jean-Luc Godard’s film Notre Musique.

What about women of action? Unfortunately, that’s Godard for you. As for Mao, well, I’m of a different generation – and temperament – than Godard, so Mao isn’t my frame of reference. But I’m just as fascinated with the separation between theory and practice, reflection and action. Godard has always been concerned with how words limit what we can express, and I think this is why he puts so much hope in the power of the image to communicate the uncertainties of life.

Like Jean-Luc Godard, I have a love/hate relationship with words. Part of what makes radical politics so exciting is its ability to think of the world in new ways – to employ theory. But theory, given that its mostly communicated through writing, also runs the danger of tripping over words. While some people guard their ideologies like a fortress – quick to denounce so-and-so as “not an Anarchist!” for instance – others are so hesitant they refuse to adopt any words to describe themselves, and may even go as far as to reject “theory” completely.

As I see it, neither approach is very useful. Ideologues’ allegiance to labels overlooks how struggle occurs independent of vocabulary: people can revolt without raising a flag. But if we refuse to engage with theory, we risk allowing the vocabulary of others’ to set the terms.

There’s got to be a happy medium that puts the written word to use without over-committing to ideology. This is why I love reading periodicals – monthlies, quarterlies, annuals, you name it. The periodical’s task, as I see it, is to bridge theory and practice; it’s frequent appearance allows quick response to events, both describing and theorizing. Unlike a book, a periodical never aspires to have the last word on a subject. Instead, it usually has the first word.

By this criteria, my favorite publication these days is Left Turn magazine. At its best, it is a forum for radical organizers’ to reflect on their work and to put it into the larger context of the organizing people are doing elsewhere, both in North America and globally. It strays away from ideological terms – like “socialist,” “marxist,” “anarchist” – and sticks to broader, more descriptive (but no less social movement-based) words like “anti-capitalist,” “anti-imperialist,” “anti-racist,” “radical feminist.” Left Turn is quartlerly, so it has a commitment to keep pace with events as they happen.

Another favorite is Perspectives on Anarchist Theory. Obviously, it comes from a particular ideological tradition – it’s the journal of the Institute of Anarchist Studies, an organization that funds radical writers with an interest in all things anarchist. But its my belief, anyway, that something sets anarchism apart from other political theories. Because anarchism throughout its history has been so action-oriented – stressing the deed over the word – its theories have a greater amount of openness. When anarchist theory is applied to a present day situation, what results aren’t rigid formulas, but important, probing insights.

Perspectives has been around for quite awhile, and has gone through a lot of changes. It used to be a newsletter, then it was a magazine, now its a full-on 100-page paperback journal. It’s still dealing with growing pains – lots of pixelated, unclear images and more spelling errors than you’d find in an academic publication – but its new format is really promising. Each issue has a theme, allowing for a close and thorough look at a hot topic. The current issue is on “Borders and Migration,” and includes everything from etymologies of the words border and region, to thoughtful reports on anti-border organizing, to book reviews, interviews, and poetry. It’s also very international in scope, with maps of European detention centers and an analysis of Canadian immigration policies followed shortly after by an interview with a Bolivian anarcha-feminist.

This themed approach will be especially fruitful if Perspectives keeps its focus on current events and maintains such stylistically diverse content. One of the problems that’s befallen the publication in the past has been an overly academic bearing. I can’t think of too many specifics without the issues in front of me, but I can recall being uncomfortable with the prevalence of “professional” scholars in previous issues. It was my problem too, I suppose, since I contributed a book review that discussed in part my experiences as an undergraduate – and which I completed for college credit! The university isn’t inherently bad, but like all institutions it brings with it a certain vocabulary that’s insular, if not outright confusing.

As I see it, the vocabulary radicals use has to balance between references to the concepts of our traditions, and the more open – if more compromised – language of everyday life. For anarchism, I think this means engaging with the world as it is, participating in social movements rather than forsaking them for our own organizations. I don’t actually think there are many – if any – anarchists who want to shut off the rest of the world and resign , but our theory and practice can often have that effect. The best anarchist theory – and the best periodicals – can offer is honest and useful reflection on daily life and the struggles to change it for the better. The worst of it retreats into comfortable words and analysis that appeases a desire to critique this world, but has no commitment to making that critique transparent to others.

Illustrating both sides of the coin, in my opinion, is the latest issue of Fifth Estate, an anarchist magazine. It’s been published for over thirty years (quarterly, I believe), but my knowledge of the magazine only really begins with the current issue, having thrown down the $3 for it at my local newsstand essentially on a whim. On the cover of this issue of Fifth Estate is the image of a plane flying over a city; it’s an appropriate image, in my experience, because several articles in the magazine flew right over my head.

Several articles made very valuable arguments, but left me behind, as they seemed to address countercultures I didn’t even know existed (especially David Meester’s “Letter from Appalachia,” and to a lesser extent, Cookie Orlando’s “Gender Trouble at Burning Man). The most confusing of the lot, however, were two highly theoretical articles full of references to Guy Debord and Gilles Deleuze. If you haven’t any idea who Guy and Gilles are, well, I’m afraid you’re already left behind. The first piece, by Will Weikart, argues that radicals stop thinking dialectically, and start thinking in “immanence;” the other, by Jack Bratch, has some thoughts about the State and activism coded, in Bratch’s words, in a “Nietzschean/Debordian strategic evaluation.” Not the sort of easy reading you’d expect from a newsstand periodcal, I’m fine with that. It’s the relevance of the work that I find myself struggling to comprehend.

Despite my confusion, I’m really glad I picked this issue up, because it had two of the best pieces of anarchist analysis I’ve read in a long time. The first, “Anarchism and Disability” by Mitzi Waltz, explores practical ways to cope with the complex social dimensions of disabilities, both mental and physical. Waltz is a professional scholar, but you wouldn’t know it from reading her article, which reminded me of the best of Colin Ward’s writing in its accessibility and practicality. The other article I enjoyed was “Solidarity, Immigration, and Border Regimes,” by Onto, which discussed the author’s experiences as an anarchist struggling against murderous border policies in solidarity with those most affected by those policies, immigrant workers. Like Waltz’s article, it was wholly committed to engaging the world with anarchist principles.

I can’t finish up a blog post – of all things! – about print publications without acknowledging the fact that print publications are really struggling in the face of the internet to stay in operation – and to stay relevant. I think the journal route that Perspectives on Anarchist Theory is taking will probably prove most fruitful – a journal is published less frequently, and thus can be more in-depth than a magazine weighing reporting and analysis, like Left Turn or Fifth Estate. As much as I love magazines, up-to-date radical reporting – by the written word, anyways – is quickly becoming the domain of the internet. A lot of the most exciting writing and analysis is happening at the websites to the left – too many great things to mention now. Too many great things to mention – lets hope it stays that way!