Mar 14, 2007

Challenges to Capital, Challenges for the Left

The text of a talk given at the National Conference on Organized Resistance, entitled "Challenges to Capital, Challenges for the Left: Anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, and the Three Way Fight."

"The nineteenth century Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin famously remarked that “freedom without socialism is privilege and injustice, but socialism without freedom is slavery and brutality.” Something similar is at work here: anti-fascism without revolution (the Euston position) guarantees capitalism’s continuing misery and devastation, while revolution without anti-fascism (the Left Turn position) all but ensures that the insurgent right will ace out the insurgent left. We need both anti-fascism and revolution."

Read the entire talk here.

Mar 6, 2007

National Conference on Organized Resistance

Co-curated by the Institute for Anarchist Studies and the Free Society Collective --- For the first time, the National Conference on Organized Resistance (NCOR, http://www.organizedresistance.org) held in Washington, DC, is offering a Radical Theory Track -- a selection of ten talks and presentations explicitly aimed at activists who wish to explore how social theory both informs and is born out of our political work. Radicals have long acknowledged the importance of guiding thoughts in our work to transform the world. We also understand the need to develop and critically evaluate our own theories in a world rife with exploitation, oppression, and hegemonic thinking. Thus, the Radical Theory Track aims to provide a space at NCOR in which to engage in theoretical discussion and debate as political practice--a forum in which theoretical discussion is not divorced from movement concerns and experience, or bound up in abstraction, but in which careful and original analysis of dynamic concepts that are key to radical Left theory and strategy can be articulated, shared, critiqued, extended, and proliferated.