SUMMER 2013 • www.bolobolo.co.za/it • ISSUE #2 • PRICE: R10 - R20 according to means INCENDIARY TIMES THE ANARCHIST PIN IN YOUR RED BALLOON in·cen·di·ar·y: (a device or attack) designed to cause fires, e.g., ‘incendiary grenades’ / tending to arouse strife, sedition, etc., e.g., ‘an incendiary speech’ / tending to inflame the senses, e.g., ‘an incendiary extravaganza of music and dance.’

editorial | the two pens millions of dollars? I occupy a place of the president grasp me to authorize honor in mahogany and cedar writing laws that command slavery and the Dear readers, The Two Pens desks. In palaces, the elegant writer signs torments of the humble, nor to order his articles with me. Using me, the minister criminal wars, nor to humiliating Thank you! The inaugural from Anastasya, Shachaf and Behind the window of a display case, authorizes important documents for the peace treaties. But when the thinker issue of Incendiary Times Siobhan; humour; some excerpts the gold pen and the steel pen waited entire nation. The president endorses his takes me between his creative fingers, was so well received from classic anarchist essays; a for someone to buy them. The gold pen decrees with a signature which only I shall when the poet and the sage touches delineate. War is not declared unless an me with his fecund, anarchist that it encouraged us to bolo'bolo event guide and also some rested indolently in a rich jewel case august hand takes me in its fingers, and hands, making me engrave in blank dive straight into putting that increased its glamour; the steel pen information about the upcoming has me fix its sovereign signature on paper. notebooks his bright meditations like together the second issue. 2013 Cape Town Anarchist confirmed its modesty at the base of a cardboard casket. Pedestrians, poor and Peace cannot be agreed upon with mangy the idea of class struggle, I feel my Bookfair (happening on Saturday rich, old and young, passed again and steel pens: they must be golden. With a molecules tremble with emotion, an While we're not going to the 7th of December – we're super again by the display case, casting greedy gold pen, the young aristocrat composes his emotion that is pure, strong, sound. commit to a release schedule excited!) glances towards the gold pen; nobody verses of love to the genteel lady.” This is my pleasure, because, as I yet, it currently looks as though looked at the steel one. The sun crashed am humble, I move in the world of you can expect our irregular Quite accidentally, a theme its rays upon the gold pen, which Patience has its limits for a steel pen. talent, sincerity, and honor. My power publication to come out roughly emerged during the editing of gleamed with sparkles like glowing Thus, the modest pen, from the base is immense, my influence is gigantic. four times a year. this issue: a critical but hopefully embers in its chenille cushion; but it of its cardboard casket, raised its clear, When the proletarian writer takes also compassionate engagement was unable to impress even a dim tone sincere voice, and, as it was sincere, it me in his hands, the tyrant trembles, was also handsome and grand, to say: the priest is terrified, the capitalist with modern liberalism and a call of beauty upon the dark proletarian In this issue: turns pale; but liberty smiles with the to move beyond some of its more pen. Regarding its poor brother with Within the slender yet pity, the rich pen said: “Above all things, the pen is grand because smile of the dawn; the downtrodden substantial pages of this problematic assumptions while it makes it possible for a great mind to free dream of a better world, and the issue you'll find a thought- acknowledging that it shares at least “Poor mangy thing! Learn to be admired.” itself from the prison of its skull, to go out valiant hand nervously caresses the provoking article on pacifism some of its ethos with . and shake other minds that sleep caged in firearm of vengeance and redemption. by Johannesburg-based We hope our discussion will generate Accustomed to great struggles for the other skulls. It makes them welcome the In my cardboard casket, I feel grand anarchist artist Anastasya reflection and debates and welcome highest ideals, the proletarian pen great mind with hospitality, granting it and noble. As humble as I may seem Eliseeva; an anonymous prose any and all feedback. deemed it unworthy to answer that entrance. Doors should be opened and to you, I stir people. I knock down piece on ecological collapse foolishness. Emboldened by the silence accommodations should be furnished for thrones, I upset cathedrals, I humble all who bring light, hope, valor... But gods. I am light for the darkness of the and resistance; a short story Equally accidentally, we stumbled of the humble pen, the bourgeois pen across a gorgeous reflection on the said: you, vain pen, you are the disgrace of our mind. I am the bugle that calls the on anarchist parenting; a species. I would rather break my tips than humble to arms, and converts them power of radical writing. Originally demonstration of the power lend myself to sketching the signature that to magnificence. I resound for the published in the November “Why don’t you try, you squalid thing, to relations embedded in official look like me, to be a gold pen?” endorses a bank order for thousands of revolutionary militia, gathering the 3rd, 1915 issue of the anarchist And it dictionaries; an interview with shone in its chenille like a star in the millions of dollars. An order like this is brave in the trench and summoning newspaper Regeneración, The Two anarchist writer, permaculture satin of the sky. the result of a pact made between bandits. the men to the barricades. You serve to activist and witch, Starhawk, Pens was written by legendary My place is not on a mahogany writing endorse the decrees of the tyrant; I to author of the utopian classic Mexican anarchist Ricardo Flores The proletarian pen could not repress desk. I prefer a pine table, upon which the endorse the proclamations of the rebel. The Fifth Sacred Thing; a handy Magón; we hope it gives some sense a smile, which angered the bourgeois people’s scribe outlines the robust phrases You oppress, I liberate.” guide to green living by the of what we hope to achieve with pen, making it break out in nonsense that announce to the world an era of bolo'bolo collective; a fictional Incendiary Times. like this: liberty and justice. I am the pen of the The crash of a car motor, which people, and like them, I am strong and broke through the front of the shop, debate between a liberal and a sincere. The minister does not touch me prevented the rest of the proletarian radical by Aragorn; a bunch of “Your smile is a smile of impotence. It fills me with pity. Could you be used, like I to underwrite documents that sanction pen’s engaging discourse from being zine and book reviews; some May your inkwells never run dry, The bolo’bolo collective am, to sign bank notes for millions and exploitation and tyranny. Neither does heard. poems; loads of awesome art

Printed by the bolo’bolo anarchist collective • we fight and play for a world beyond measure Page 1 “It has been said that ‘today it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism’ (Turbulence 2008: 3). We have reached a stage where it is easier to think of the total anni- hilation of humanity than to imagine a change in the organisation of a manifestly unjust and destructive society, What can we do?” - John Holloway, Crack Capitalism

and assume that this is the full range Words in of possibilities. As these pathways become more regulated, we define structures and systems and regulato- revolt. ry mechanisms, and to support them This issue’s definition ghosts we construct abstractions – complex from the CrimethInc philosophies and tortuous justifi- Contradictionary*. This poetic anonymous piece about ecological destruction and cations; finally, in our artifice and resistance was first published online in 2012. confusion, we cede our power to all these. The singular capacities we each have to create, to change, are subli- hen we look out at the in space. Ghost acreage – millions of mated into an acquiescence to the sys·tem·at·ic (adj) sky at night, we’re also years of accumulated decayed matter power held over us by abstractions. looking back into the transformed into fossil fuel along By Capitalism. By the State. By very individual and situation is unique, but it can be useful past.W The light from distant stars with millions of acres of still-fertile progress. By the dominator myth to look for common threads. Consistently refusing to do so takes so long to reach us that we land in the poor but resource-rich of a homogeneous humanity ruling Emay indicate that one is avoiding coming to terms with an cannot really be sure that, in reality, areas of the world – has given us an over the natural world. inconvenient state of affairs, such as oppression at the hands of they’re still there. entirely false sense of the sustenance As we learn to become subservient bloodthirsty tyrants. Without an analysis of the dynamics that Although the myriad things that available to us. And so there is a to power, as through discipline and give rise to such situations, it can be hard to keep oneself out of surround us on Earth – rocks and phantom carrying capacity that control we become its loyal subjects, them (see The Forest for the Trees—or don’t, as the case may be). rose bushes and panda bears and haunts us too – a vast, amorphous we also reproduce our relation to it grapevines and pigeons and people emptiness that we seem almost com- in our engagements with everything Some, upon hearing a critique of the social role of police officers and rivers and grass and grasshop- pelled to try to fill, not recognizing and everyone around us. Wherever and politicians, protest that it may apply to most of them, but they pers and bluebottles – are each much that it expands in direct relation to there is a field of difference between know some who are really good people: “Sure, we have to abol- closer to us than the stars, there is our hubris. Like a housing bubble. us we turn it on its side to form hier- ish governments and all that, but here in [liberal oasis] there are also a sense that, in catching sight And the bubble continues to expand, archies – between genders, between such nice folks on the town council! I feel we should treat them of them, we are seeing them as they past fundamental planetary bound- races, between species – and we are with respect, even if that means calling everything off.” were, not how they really are. There aries: stratospheric ozone, land forced by the structures we form is a sense in which we are surround- use change, freshwater use, ocean part of into yet more hierarchies: of This brings to mind the story of the man who, tormented by fleas, ed by ghosts. acidification, aerosol loading and class, of ability, of belonging. managed to catch one between his fingers. He scrutinized it for A ghost species is one that, while chemical pollution, climate change, But what if these structures, even a long time before placing it back at the spot on his neck where its members might seem plentiful biological diversity and nitrogen and these highly elaborate, seemingly had he caught it, to the shock of his companions. His friends, con- today, has already accumulated an phosphorus inputs to the biosphere infinitely extended loci of power, founded, inquired why on earth he would do such a thing. “That extinction debt. Extinction debt is and oceans. We have already over- were themselves little more than wasn’t the one that was biting me,” he explained. a term ecologists use to describe the stepped the last three, and all the particularly enduring hallucinations? unavoidable future demise of a spe- boundaries are deeply connected. Perhaps there is always an outside, cies – or a large percentage thereof There is also one other thing that always an excess of creative power – due to events in the past. So we are haunts us. Something that gives and power cannot help but produce haunted, by the ghosts of orang- rise to all these other ghosts. We are its own resistance, its own lines of For more definitions, visit www.crimethinc. utans, black rhino, Rufous-head- haunted by possibility. flight away from the overcoding ed hornbills, blunt chaff flowers, In some ways this is the curse our and axiomatizing of the whole of *com/books/contra.html , or pick up a copy of candelabra trees and a million other species carries: to be aware of not society and towards the open field of the Contradictionary from bolo’bolo for R170. species we do not yet even know. only the immediacy of the materi- possibility. Even other animals resist. May never know. al world around us but also of the Even gorillas have taken up rocks Even if the struggle to preserve intensive flows and processes un- against encroaching humans. Even these species was not massively derlying this world; of the possible elephants have liberated captured impeded by corporate and state he- connections we might make between buck under cover of night. Every gemony over the natural world, even things in order to create something history of power and control is dou- if we could shut down all the frack- new; of the infinite becomings we bled by a history of resistance. In these histories, some still un- told, resistance has taken countless forms and delineated routes of es- “If we cannot tell ghost from living cape across all scales: mass uprisings against the injustices of the current being then how many other species order, personal refusal, utopian poet- ry, the carving out of small niches of might be haunting us. Are butterflies temporary autonomy, the creation of unprecedented artforms, the still real? African elephants? mapping of subterranean liberatory networks, struggles for recognition Bonobo chimps? Us?” by those cast lower down on abstract hierarchies, the pulling up of genet- ically modified crops, the smashing – Jesús Sepúlveda, ing and logging trucks and feedlots can set in motion. As human beings, of automated looms and the torch- and coal-fired power plants and tar then, we see not just the actual ing of bulldozers by the elves in the sands operations tomorrow, even if world but also an intensive world of forest. Occupy and occupations. The Garden of every single car was removed from lava flows and climactic variations Yes, we also resist. We are eclectic the road, these accumulated debts and social unfoldings and extinc- in nature: in age, race, class, gender must still be paid. For many species, tion debts, and also a virtual world, and opinion. We undermine every- Peculiarities countless billions of living beings, it consisting in the real possibilities day notions of what ought to consti- is simply too late already. embedded within each thing, each tute affinity with our prefigurative, To fully comprehend this is to be being, each connection. leaderless ethic that emerges so struck by a profound sense of hope- It can be exhilarating to think of the naturally from our everyday interac- lessness, coupled with dread. If we world in this way – to be imbued tions. We remain a conundrum for cannot tell ghost from living being with this creative power of affect. anyone who insists on describing us then how many other species might Lately, however, we have largely in the language of left or right, social be haunting us. Are butterflies still forgotten how to be affected. We democratic or neoliberal, socialist or real? African elephants? Bonobo have learned to change the world capitalist, reformist or revolutionary. chimps? Us? without in turn being changed by We are a fundamental challenge to it. And when we stop being changed the hegemony – the very reality – of The night sky suddenly seems a by the world our creative capacities these a priori terms and categories, a whole lot darker. are stifled and stratified. We begin call to extend the range of social and to entrench one set of pathways of (anti-)political possibilities beyond We also harvest ghosts, in time and change between us and the world / continued on page 3

Printed by the bolo’bolo anarchist collective • we fight and play for a world beyond measure Page 2 “Washing one’s hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral.” - Paulo Freire

ghosts To challenge the assumption that / continued from page 2 what currently exists should necessar- ily exist. It is to subvert the paradigm arbitrarily imposed limitations. of capitalist social relations, of A famous old radical once ob- forced participation in our own op- served that “the smart way to keep pression. To question the legitimacy people passive and obedient is to of the institutions that stand in for strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable us. To deny their hegemony. To no opinion, but allow very lively debate longer countenance the injustice of within that spectrum – even encourage representation. the more critical and dissident views. At our very best, when we are That gives people the sense that there’s aimed in the direction of what could free thinking going on, while all the be instead of pandering to what time the presuppositions of the system is, our individual and collective are being reinforced by the limits put resistances turn hierarchies back on on the range of the debate,” and so their side in order to acknowledge our resistance does not to fall in the productive differences between line with a party line. We do not to us; to see what emerges from their have ideological unity. We are not intersection. Our resistance allows just subcultural. We are not born of us to explore the creative tensions privilege. Our identity, our lines, our between what is and what could be. subcultures, issue from resistance Our resistance is solidarity. Mutual itself. Resistance to the life that has aid. Voluntary relations. Equality. been set out before us, resistance to Freedom. A reclamation of our the dull alienation of the spectacle, personal power. . resistance to this culture of separa- ...And so we come together, more tion, specialisation, compartmen- of us every day, to recreate the real talisation, domestication. And in community we have all but lost, to resisting we enter, however tentative- remind each other of our shared be- ly, into the field of possibilities that ing, our togetherness on this fragile for some of us haunts our waking planet. We come together to answer moments more and more. the call, to join in a vital conversa- Our resistance is a defiant act of tion about where we – as individu- togetherness. It is not based on the als, as communities, as a species and logic of calculation and acquisitive- as one small but highly consequen- ness. It does not share the ends of tial part of a once-thriving, now the dominator culture but instead severely threatened bio-community locates and expands the countless – should go from here. cracks within it. It is not an act of Or, as the Chilean poet Jesús he garden of peculiarities is a project of humanity. Its visu- submission. It is solidarity. It is an Sepúlveda says, to plant the first alization consists of realizing the peculiarity of nature. If invocation of the intensive flows and seeds in our cultivation of a garden T the original consciousness grew as a result of the recogni- processes underlying the actual, a of peculiarities. Whatever grows* out * tion of its own death, liberating consciousness will grow as a re- destabilization of the current regime, of our coming together, whatever sult of the recognition of its own peculiarity. Life as we conceive a shift away from equilibrium new forms of resistance arise, we of it today will not be erased from the planet as long as we don’t through which we might catch sight should all heed this call to cultiva- give respite to the empire of “sameness.” The point is to learn to of the virtual. tion, whether we choose to plant in live in the planetary garden without control or authority. And if To resist, then, is to confront the full light of day or illuminated life is a voyage, it is necessary to let ourselves be carried along headlong the crisis of imagination only by the ancient light of distant with the river’s current without imposing a control to stop it. The between what is and what could be. stars. current of the river is the current of nature. The social current, standardizing and “mediocratic,” is the electricity of control. To continue in this vein is to die of stress, alienation, anxiety, insan- ity, hunger, exploitation, repression, and misery. In order to run the rapids it is necessary to learn to live.

When one follows the silvery movement of each tumultuous and savage drop of water, one is creating contact with the rhythm of the natural world. To follow this cadence, avoiding the rocks is a wise act. To fall from the raft is evidence of discomfort. This discomfort is the incompatibility between control and life. Con- trol engenders fear and impedes life. It unleashes paranoia. Life, on the other hand, offers beauty and ingenuity as its native fruits. It depends on us to bite the apple and to learn to dream. The voyage to the garden of peculiarities is one without return. To – Jesús Sepúlveda, listen to the murmuring of civilization, once on the correct path, is to fall into the trap of fear. It means losing one’s way, because the only exit is the escape hatch to the highway that leads to The Garden of the asphalt of standardization. And while every creature needs a dwelling, it need not be made of concrete. The true human lair can be a cabin in the forest that together with other cabins forms Peculiarities a community of peculiarities. Or it can be a neighborhood that tears up the pavement of idiocy and isolation while leaving one The Garden of Peculiarities is available from or two routes among other neighborhoods. Each constellation bolo’bolo in zine format for R20. of peculiarities will be a kind of that guarantees the horizontal autonomy of each community. Only in this way can { hierarchy be abolished. And as social practice between social beings, ritual festivities and community celebration will be an integral part of the strategy to combat accumulation. In this way, all surplus that will eventually be created will be enjoyed as a part of the collective carnival.

The garden of peculiarities is a wager made for the conservation of the environment and the survival of the human race. There intuition should light the way. Not being sidetracked depends on us. There is only one path that leads to the heart of life.

Printed by the bolo’bolo anarchist collective • we fight and play for a world beyond measure Page 3 “The old world is collapsing under the weight of its own crimes, and is itself lighting the fuse of the bomb that will blast it all away. This bomb will be all the more terrible because it will contain neither gunpowder nor dynamite. It’ll contain compassion and an idea; two forces against which nothing can be done.” - Octave Mirbeau LOVE is not PACIFISM Anastasya Eliseeva unsettles commonly-held liberal notions of pacifism, posing challenging moral questions and asking us what really is sufficient given the contemporary situation we find ourselves in.

I spend a lot of time on social me- vide it – they came to be as a result dia. I think it’s a great way of pro- of bloodshed, as the strong claimed moting causes and ideas, connecting the land from the weak. People get with like-minded people and getting rich from natural resources that they world news and views directly from have taken by force from others. the source. For me it’s worth it, even Those with the financial power place if I have to put up with endless pic- their mark on things that shouldn’t tures of Miley Cyrus and people’s belong to anyone – the land, for ex- lunches. ample. It’s kind of strange for me to look at a piece of land, so much old- Being an anarchist, I get friended on- er than humanity itself, and think; line by a lot of new-age, hippie-type this belongs to someone. A person. people. We often have a lot in com- A name is on it, a name placed there mon, like veganism and a deep love with their money. If you want a piece of nature. Everything goes really well of this land, you have to pay the per- until I share something about a pro- son whose name is on it. And how test or some impressive action by the do they keep us paying? Through Earth Liberation Front, and then all threats of violence: if you decide to hell breaks loose. “This is wrong,” live somewhere without paying you’ll they say, “this is VIOLENCE!” be removed violently. In a sense, ev- the word ‘terrorist’. Imagine there is a ery time you pay your rent it’s kind terrorist group that enters your coun- I’m not saying spreading information “I’ve gone my whole life Violence. The very word fills people of like paying off the Mafia so they try and starts doing really horrible is not important – during apartheid without violence and with fear and disgust. No empathetic don’t come kick your head in. I know stuff – polluting the rivers, poisoning some wrote letters to let the world this is how much I’ve being should be comfortable with the that sounds extreme, but it’s not so the crops, chopping down the forests know what was happening – but achieved.” notion of another being getting hurt. much more extreme than the idea and killing all the wildlife. We’d be some people also took to the streets So surely these guys advocating their of land ownership when you really infuriated! The media would go mad. or went underground as part of the What a wonderfully middle-class loving ways have the right idea repri- think about it. People would take arms and defend anti-apartheid struggle. Do you thing to say. The fact is, you’ve prob- manding me. Or do they? our land from these evil monsters. think apartheid would have ended ably gone your whole life not paying The violence of our world doesn’t isn’t Yet, strangely enough, when capital- simply because a whole lot of people attention to the indirect violence I’d like to share my thoughts on just limited to humans, of course. ists and governments does the same sent loving energy to the government your life is filled with. Your sweat- violence by challenging some of the Capitalist civilization is ever grow- thing we’re okay with it and point convincing them to love their broth- shop clothes come from violence, but popular notions held by pacifists as ing, with an ever-increasing hunger. fingers at those who try to oppose ers and sisters? bear no stains. Your house is built on well as some of the arguments I’ve To feed itself it destroys, with no them. a land that used to be someone else’s, been hearing a lot recently. sense of empathy and with a com- (Interestingly, I recently read that but you don’t have to see them. Your plete lack of foresight. The very idea In March 2001 the Federal Bureau of an attempted assassination of Hen- bottled water is not polluted by cor- “We need to act out of that an ever-growing entity feeds off Investigation listed The Earth Libera- drik Verwoerd, ex-prime minister of porations and your children aren’t Love, not Hate. And natural resources is obscene, since it’s tion Front as the top domestic terror- South Africa, was greeted by an edi- dead from drinking it. Violence is hate.” obvious it will run out soon enough. ist threat in the United States. Why? torial in long-running UK anarchist Yet we watch our forests shrink, our Because they commit acts of arson newspaper Freedom titled ‘too bad he As radical environmentalist Derrick rivers run dry, our seas becoming and destruction of property, carried missed’. This sparked criticism from In the words of George Orwell Jensen says in his seminal book, End- polluted and we don’t seem nearly out against facilities and companies pacifists in the anarchist movement (speaking about WWII), “the idea game, “love does not imply pacifism.” alarmed enough. involved in logging, genetic engineer- and a lengthy discussion of the role that you can somehow remain aloof ing, GMO crops, deforestation and a of violence in anarchist thought and from and superior to the struggle, while If you think about it, it’s true. Think I remember how broken-hearted I wide variety of other activities that practice. There are many reasons why living on food which British sailors of the people you care most deeply used to get every time I saw a species environmentalists argue are destroy- assassination is not the optimal way have to risk their lives to bring you, is about. Your lover. Children. Friends. go extinct. I used to think to myself: ing the Earth and its inhabitants. I’m to go but frankly, if I think for even a a bourgeois illusion bred of money and Now picture them being attacked I inherited a world with Japanese sure many of you agree that these are moment about what Verwoerd stood security.” by a violent psychopath, bent on de- river dolphins. How am I going to the kinds of things we should be op- for, I share the sentiment.) stroying them. Will you stand by and explain to the next generation that, posing. The government and corpo- If that’s how you choose to live, you watch, unwilling to take part in the sorry guys, you don’t get one...we rations are the terrorists here so why Just a while back, Huntingdon Life must at least then accept that the rest violence? I don’t think you’d feel like killed it. are we not defending ourselves? Sciences started failing financially. of the world was never offered the a very good person. They were the best-known vivisec- privilege of a violence free life – those By now so many species have van- Do I support terrorism? If I’m using tor in the UK, supported by huge in power took it away from them and “In all times and in all places, whatever ished that when I look at my baby my definition, no. If we’re using the amounts of money, and they seemed it is with violence that they are occa- may be the name that the government nephew I really don’t know how I’m usual government definition, hell yes! untouchable. So what was it that sionally forced to try to claim it back. takes, whatever has been its origin, or going to explain the mess we made to shook this giant? Was it the endless its organization, its essential function is him. Sometimes I want to ask him to “Violence achieves petitions that went around? Or the “Innocent people may always that of oppressing and exploiting fix it all, because he is the future. But nothing” force of all the middle-class people die. No one can justify the masses, and of defending the oppres- I’m sure that once he can speak he shaking their heads at how bad they that.” sors and exploiters. Its principal charac- will ask me: why didn’t you stop it? Yeah, okay. And signing petitions no are? No. The protests, people sabo- teristic and indispensable instruments one ever sees does? Or maybe click- taging their property and other forms First of all, if you’re going into a pro- are the bailiff and the tax collector, “So you support ing ‘like’ on a page will stop global of did. They got hurt in test or starting an action wanting the soldier and the prison. And to these terrorism?” warming? Writing letters to the pres- the only place they feel it: their pock- innocent people to die there is some- are necessarily added the time-serving ident is surely JUST the thing that ets. Plus, no bank or insurance or se- thing wrong with you. As I men- priest or teacher, as the case may be, That depends. I don’t ever want to see will make him go: wait a minute, I curity company wanted to deal with tioned before, I support activism that supported and protected by the govern- innocent people die. I’m a supporter shouldn’t invade this country! I feel them anymore. It just wasn’t profit- tries to steer away from causing harm ment, to render the spirit of the people of the kind of activism that adheres like our middle class activism has able. (Mind you, it is actually ques- to living beings. servile and make them docile under the to the first rule of the Animal Lib- become what a friend calls ‘slacktiv- tionable whether damage to property yoke.” – Errico Malatesta, Anarchy eration Front: no animal, human or ism’ – we sit in our chairs and click can be considered violence at all since Yes, innocent people occasionally die otherwise, must get hurt. on things and pat ourselves on the property does not feel. Compare this and I mourn every one of them, just We live in a violent world. Borders, backs for being good people, but to the violence that was inflicted on as I mourn the countless victims of imposed through violent means, di- But let’s look a little more deeply at nothing ever actually has to happen. the animals inside and suddenly it the daily actions of corporations and seems a very fair retaliation.) / continued on page 5

Printed by the bolo’bolo anarchist collective • we fight and play for a world beyond measure Page 4 "People may shake their heads wisely today over us and call us dreamers, and say that we had no sense of the reality of history. They fail to see that dreams are also a part of the reality of life, that life without dreams would be unbearable. No change in our way of life would be possible without dreams and dreamers. The only people who are never disappointed are those who never hope and never try to realize their hopes." - Rudolf Rocker

knows, is harp music. When he concealed it would be decorated strums the harp, it seems like with pictures of cars and hous- they are not swimming but flying es, and the guy running it would around their little plastic castle, play the banjo. like fairies or angels. God knows how long sea-monkeys live. But Inside our little apartment, as it they lead really fabulous lives would be revealed when the cur- that we can’t even begin to un- tains are pulled back, we would derstand, and their concept of be cooking, or playing cards, or time is nothing like ours. If they talking about things. And the die, for example, they can be res- creatures watching from out- On anarchist urrected. We call it reconstitut- side, whoever they might be, ed – but it’s the same thing as far could read our lips and our ex- parenting, as they are concerned. pressions. They would say: That one’s the mother, and that one’s the sea Out in front of the coffee place the kid. See how she’s laughing those girls will be climbing trees. when he stands up and does that monkey They’ll be wearing candy neck- thing? laces, and their heart-shaped theatre fake tattoos will be a little fad- They would say: It seems like by Cara Hoffman ed. You can climb while I order they are dancing to that twangy our caps, but I won’t put sugar music, they way they move their f you wait until ten o’clock in yours because I don’t want to arms around. And they would I’ll take you to the cof- ruin the steamed-milk picture say: Who knows how long they Ifee place where they pour on top. I’ll put your cup next live, but they lead really fabu- steamed milk on your cappuc- to me on the bench while you lous lives that we can’t begin to cino in the shape of hearts and climb until you feel like coming understand. When they die, for trees. If you don’t want to wait down. And I’ll drink my coffee example, they can’t be reconsti- you can go play, or if you want and smoke and read. Those girls tuted, so every beautiful thing to go now, we can go now. I can in the tree have learned how to that happens gets added to the just stop writing this and we can curse in several languages and next until it has a weight – see go. also how to hang upside-down how the weight holds them to by their knees. If you want to the floor of their castle so they Down the sidewalk outside our practice those things yourself, don’t drift off? It’s the same place will be that guy who made I’ll spot you, or cover my ears. weight that makes them laugh the sea-monkey theatre. He’ll like that. draw back the blue curtains dec- If we get hungry later, we can orated with crowns and castles, eat. And if we get tired, we can At ten o’clock, we can go and and reveal the aquarium set up go home. And if we get bored, do all that stuff, but if you don’t on a little metal table behind it. we can make up some jokes. If want to you can go play, or stay Then he’ll play the sea-monkeys’ our apartment was a sea-mon- here. I can stop writing and we favourite music, which everyone key theatre, the curtains that can just stay right here.

/ continued from page 4 makes the enemy stronger. governments. The massacre at Mari- LOVE kana, for instance, where as with so In conclusion, as the famous saying many protests against injustice, those is not goes, activism is the rent I pay to live rising up were violently, brutally op- on this planet. If your landlord comes pressed by a police force whose pri- PACIFISM to your door demanding rent do you mary duty is to protect not people think he will accept letters of com- but money. It’s this system we must passion or a wave of loving kindness fight in order to save more lives like Here’s my personal favor- instead? Will you hold a healing cir- these. Or do we just stand by and let ite: “Fighting for peace is cle to make him happy? No. So when these crimes continue? like fucking for virginity” life, the real landlord (and not just some human that hijacked the piece “Violence makes us just I’m not even going to challenge that of planet), comes by and wants rent, like the enemy” one. I’m just putting it here because you should pay up. And if the rent it’s stupid. And, if you think about life wants is for you to do something Only if attacking a man trying to it for any longer than a second, it about the assholes that are attacking rape a woman makes us a rapist. In makes no sense at all. Sorry, but com- it, do something! Pay up in whatever each instance, we need to look at ing up with a catchy saying, and put- way you can. And get your friends to motivation and outcome. Those in ting a sexual reference in it doesn’t pay up too, so you don’t have to pay power use violence for selfish gain: count as an argument. If I come up extra. to accumulate assets, money, more with a cute saying, say, ‘being a paci- power. If we respond by using vio- fist is just being passive.’ Okay, it’s not Further reading: lence to protect our way of life from very good, but at least it makes sense. their crimes, to protect our world Sense is good. Use it. • - How Nonvio- from their avarice, we are nothing lence Protects the State like them. “Are you saying that if • Peter Gelderloos - The Failure of I don’t want to do some- Nonviolence • Ward Churchill - Pacifism as As George Orwell wrote in 1942: thing illegal or danger- Pathology “Pacifism is objectively pro-fascist. This ous then I can’t make a • Derrick Jensen - Endgame is elementary common sense. If you difference?” • Ashen Ruins - Against the Corpse hamper the war effort of one side you Machine: Defining A Post-Leftist automatically help out that of the oth- No, that’s not at all what I’m saying. Anarchist Critique of Violence er. Nor is there any real way of remain- Many people don’t want to end up • Craig Rosebraugh - The Logic ing outside such a war as the present in jail – I sure don’t... Asking what Of Political Violence: Lessons In Reform And one. In practice, he that is not with me the vegan options are is going to be • Vernon Richards (ed) - Violence is against me.” fun! I’m also sure that many people And Anarchism aren’t in the position to risk their • Alfredo Bonanno - Errico Malates- If we remain passive, we are do- lives. There’s still plenty they can do ta and Revolutionary Violence ing those in power a big favor; they to help bring about change. Plant a • Alfredo Bonanno - Revolution, would love a world full of people who garden. Cook for the hungry. Edu- Violence, Anti-Authoritarianism, A don’t fight back, letting them destroy Few Notes cate children. In fact, just use what- • Leslie James Pickering - The Earth everything they want. ever existing skills you have. Paint Liberation Front 1997-2002 a picture. Write. Do whatever you • Craig Rosebraugh - Burning Rage can. Just don’t take a fundamental- of a Dying Planet: Speaking for the ist pacifist stand and try to prevent Earth Liberation Front others from doing their bit. That only

Printed by the bolo’bolo anarchist collective • we fight and play for a world beyond measure Page 5 "If voting changed anything, they’d make it illegal." - Emma Goldman

Direct back-translations: 1) oproermaker = rioter, rebel insurgent; Direct back-translations: 1) 2) anargis = anarchist. Well, yes, referingsloosheid = without sometimes we are rioters, rebels and Assignment 1: government; 2) anargie = anarchy. Hey, insurgents because direct action is they got it right! (I don’t think they one of our primary ways of causing What does anarchism/ { change. OMG, does this mean we’re opposed to a government? I mean, South Africa 1932: a new coat of arms really? People can’t lead themselves. anarchist/anarchy mean? is approved, Athol Fugard and Mimi { Look at the mess we’ve created with Coertse are born, Daisy de Melker is the world. Well, true, but perhaps Juta se woordebook/Juta’s Dictionary 1932 (p.353) hanged for murder, James Barry Munnik the mess is the result of structural anarchist: oproermaker, anargis. Hertzog is Prime Minister and replaces arrangements and relations which anarchy: regeringsloosheid, anargie. Dutch with Afrikaans as official language create hierarchical power distribution. { and Dutch as second official language. What if we were all equal from Day 1? The Family Word Finder (Reader’s Digest) 1975 (p.41) He also removed Black voters from the anarchist n. Anarchists burned down the palace: rebel, revolutionary, common voters roll. If by ‘lawlessness’ you mean without insurgent, terrorist, mutineer; syndicalist, nihilist. government, without the military, All of these lumped together? Anarchist does not equal terrorist. Government Ant. loyalist, tory, conservative; disciplinarian. without the police or any other equals terrorist. Oh, but censorship was asserted quite heavy-handed during anarchy n. 1 Any form of government is better than anarchy: absence disciplinary institution, then yes, us this period still, so of course nobody could tell the truth. Old Jacobus Johannes of government, disorder, lawlessness, chaos. 2 Anarchists dream of an { anarchists are lawless indeed. Fouché is the second President of South Africa at this time and a member of ideal state of anarchy in which people will be completely free: utopia, the millennium. the National Party. He’s about to be followed B.J. Vorster. Happy times ahead! {(NOT!) Ant. order, discipline, authority, government, organization, control; regimentation, subjection. Now who the fuck thought this one up? The Word Power Dictionary (Reader’s Digest) 1996 (p.41) { anarchy anarchist; anarchic, anarchism lawlessness, disorder, especially from an absence or lack of government; If by ‘complete absence of control’ Ahem, this certainly didn’t work out for complete absence of control. you mean we decide about how we us, did it? would like our lives to look collectively, Examples: { allowing ourselves freedom to govern The revolt led to anarchy (n) in the country. our own lives without impeding on The bomb was thrown by an anarchist (n). the freedom of others, yes, indeed, Yes, but they never had an idyllic There was an anarchic (aj) state of affairs after the coup. then this is correct. And by now we’ve utopia in mind. Go read their Anarchism (n) is the theory that all forms of government should be { entered the post-Apartheid years with histories and you might get abolished. Nelson Mandela keeping us starry- some idea of what they were up against. Oh dear, the dictionaries Direct back-translations: 1) eyed about governments. As indeed he English/Afrikaans Dictionary (Reader’s Digest) 1996 (p.677) have gotten lost in fantasy fic- wetteloosheid = lawlessness (see still does, come to think of it. anarch oproerleier. anarchical anargisme, wetteloosheid, anargisties. tion. But also not. Perhaps they above); 2) ordeloosheid = disorderly; 3) anarchist n. anargis, voorstander van regereringloosheid. anarchist should read 1984 or Do androids wanorde = disorderly. Thanks for the a. anargisties. anarchy regeringsloosheid, anargie; wetteloosheid, dream of electric sheep? or The repetition there – us anarchists didn’t ordeloosheid, wanorde. dispossessed. But then again, if get it the first time because we’re all Well, now we’re getting somewhere. they keep using the word ‘utopia’ about causing chaos! (Well, chaos for The New Fontana Dictionary of Modern Thought 1999 (p.30) However, this short history of enough times, people might real- governments certainly! But no, we’re anarchism. A political movement advocating the abolition of the state and { anarchism doesn’t even begin to ise that anarchism is completely actually very organised. That’s why we { the replacement of all forms of governmental authority by free association describe it. And for your information, unrealistic. I mean, what the get things done while the rest get lost and voluntary cooperation of groups and individuals. Anarchists disagree anarchocapitalist is an oxymoron, fuck would we do without other in red tape.) about what specific relationships the future society is to be based on, and { moron. people telling us what to do and about how it is to be achieved. Contemporary libertarian writers describe how to live our lives and what themselves as ‘anarchocapitalists’ and base their hostility to the State on jobs are good and where we the inviolability of each individual’s ownership of himself and his property. should live? (Well, I can think of Historically anarchists have been hostile to private property as ordinarily Yes, we still are! Give the land back many things and I promise you understood. The first English anarchist, (1756-1836), was you rich bastards out there! they don’t involve shopping malls uninterested in political action and wished the ‘euthanasia of government’ or golfing!) to result from individual moral reformation; more commonly, anarchists { have advocated some form of direct action. Their Marxist critics have complained that this is inimical to good organization and effective tactics. Proudhon (1809-65) and Blanqui (1805-81) divided the allegiances of the Another word politicians love as much Well, sometimes, when it’s needed, 19th-century anarchists in France, the former wanting peaceful change, the as ‘chaos’ and ‘utopia’ when asked like when the Animal Liberation Front latter and advocate of spontaneous insurrection. Bakunin ledthe anarchist about anarchism. burns down laboratories that test on wing of the First International; his quarrels with Marx and Engels destroyed { animals in cruel and inhumane ways the organization in 1876. Bakunin’s enthusiasm for insurrection and because of some arbitrary hierarchy spontaneity degenerated into a romantic and suicidal craze for ‘propaganda that supposes we (also animals, just by the deed’ which swept Europe and America at the turn of the century. with opposable thumbs and Theory of Johann Moser’s obsession with creative possibilities of dynamite was Thank fuck, they got it right! Mind), have the right to subject other characteristic of the period, but even Malatesta, Kropotkin and Emma Goldman were tempted by the thought that assassinating the rich and the { animals to whatever we like, including { eating them. Eat the rich is what I say! powerful would lead to a workers’ revolt and thence to the anarchist utopia. Yes! (That includes governments in case After 1900, anarchism ceased to make much impact on the politics of you were wondering – think how many developed countries. In revolutionary Russia, however, Makhno defied the people we’d be able to feed and give { homes to.) Bolshevik armies for most of the Civil War, while anarchists held power in Catalonia during the . In France, the hold of anarchist ideas on the left has never quite died out; anarcho- was a Yay, we have a clear definition of powerful force in trade union circles until World War I, and in the ‘events’ anarchism/anarchist/anarchy! Thank of May 1968 anarchism rather than orthodox ruled the day. The you crimethInc; we really do love you! terrorism which the far left practiced during the 1970s was based on an orthodox hatred of capitalist society, but the expectation of insurrection was And there you have it folks, none of anarchist. Of much greater intellectual interest has been the continuing us are proper anarchists, but we try, revival of individualist American anarchism associated with writers such every day, to make political and ethical as Murray Rothbard and Robert Nozick. For further reading: G. Woodcock, choices which bring us closer to Anarchism and Anarchists: Essays (1992). anarchism and allow for more people to have access to power and choices Collins Concise Dictionary 2004 (pp.49-50) regarding their lives. Occasionally, anarchism n. 1) Political theory. a doctrine advocating the abolition of we’re even known for not throwing government. 2) the principles or practice of anarchists. bombs and give away free food to anarchist n. 1) a person who advocates a society based on voluntary people. For more info, see the bolo’bolo cooperation and the abolition of government. 2) a person who causes website for events {if you are keen to do something disorder or upheaval. anarchy n. 1) general lawlessness and disorder, esp. when thought to result that will actively bring you closer to in the absence or failure of government. 2) the absence of government. 3) the anarchism. YES! YES! OH GOD, YES! absence of any guiding or uniting principle; chaos. 4) political anarchism. And no, this assignment shall not be Contradictionary: a bestiary of words in revolt 2013 (pp.19-20) { given a mark as we don’t rate people to Anarchist – In theory, an anarchist is a person who believes that all show that some are better than others. coercive hierarchy should be abolished in order that everyone might Oh dear, evolution hasn’t done Instead, we recognise that everyone practice complete self-determination. In practice, it matters little what much for general ignorance. brings something to the table and that a person believes should occur, as even the most rapacious executives if we can work together, we can make entertain idle notions about how things ought to be – couched in hymns { the changes we want to see. about “peace on earth and goodwill towards men,” for example. Ideally, therefore, an anarchist would be a person who seized her destiny in her hands in such a way that others gained control of their destinies as well. It follows that no one is properly an anarchist, but that we all aspire to anarchism. {HANDED IN BY SHAN’T TELL

Printed by the bolo’bolo anarchist collective • we fight and play for a world beyond measure Page 6 "At one time in the world there were woods that no one owned." - Cormac McCarthy

eing an anar- Scene: A diverse-looking group of vaguely Liberal: But why? The turnout was great. instantly. alternative people, most of them between the We really showed them! Bchist can be ages of 18 and 40-odd, are sitting around Liberal: But it makes perfect sense to me. pretty exhausting a small, overburdened table in a loud, Anarchist: Showed who, exactly? Two I don’t understand what you’re suggesting smoky bar somewhere in Observatory, Cape hundred of us walked down a street is wrong with any of this. sometimes. When we’re Town. It’s early evening and there’s cause for holding some placards and shouting a not fanning the flames of revolu- celebration: the group, most of whom don’t bunch of random slogans at passersby. Anarchist: Well, that’s one of the basic tionary change, desperately trying to really know each other well yet, spent the What exactly have we accomplished? assumptions of the Enlightenment maintain some tiny glimmer of light day at a well-attended and lively protest humanist tradition classic liberalism Liberal: amidst the growing darkness of a against evil GM corporation Monsanto. We spoke truth to Power. If more comes from: that society is just a bunch Placards waved and chants chanted, it’s people march and share the truth about of rational individuals who can choose planet gone mad, we’re often forced time to bask in the glow of victory. At the GM foods then Monsanto will have to to interact in any number of ways and in situations where we have to explain corner of the table closest to the window, a change their practices. We might even that education and informed debate and yet? our radical ideals to all manner of conversation strikes up between two of the force them to shut down altogether if sharing truths and better ideas are thus the well-meaning but occasionally deeply protestors; one of them, our hypothetical we can encourage enough people to buy best ways to change things. Not only does frustrating people who, like us, seek a anarchist, is a young, foreign-sounding organic! Why were you even there if you’re this completely miss out on the oppressive better world. Usually the most frus- woman with shoulder-length dreadlocked so pessimistic about the whole thing? material relations of power that structure trating of these people are not the hair and numerous tattoos wearing a t-shirt any given society, it also fails to recognise right wing fundamen- that reads “until all are free, nobody is free Anarchist: I don’t know really...sometimes how we’re all at least partly indoctrinated talists or the tinfoil hat brigade but, – Mikhail Bakunin.” Our imagined liberal, I tag along to these things because I also by these same structural relations. In other somewhat counter-intuitively, those who is about the same age, is dressed in feel strongly about the issues, but lately words, when we think about making jeans and a button-up shirt that look – not I’m increasingly demotivated by the fact change often we’re just reproducing the who describe themselves as ‘liberals’. obviously, but still perceptibly – carefully that it’s just a bunch of liberals doing logic of current arrangements of power. Perhaps this frustration stems partly matched, as though he shops for outfits some weekend tithing. from the fact that, at first glance, there instead of individual items of clothing. Liberal: Okay, you’ve lost me now... seems to be a considerable amount of overlap between the views held by an- Anarchist: It’s simple: what are the archists and the liberal ideals of free- embedded assumptions of the kinds dom, equality, tolerance and so forth. of activism we’ve been discussing, like After all, most liberals are, just like consumer boycotts, peaceful protests, us, uncomfortable with violations of speaking truth to Power and so on? autonomy; for the most part they’re For one, there’s this view that you can sensitive, compassionate folks who use market forces to create a kinder capitalism. However, this perpetuates the express a visceral discomfort with ex- idea that capitalism is the only option and ploitative social relations. Many lib- that market forces work in our favour. erals are passionate environmentalists Peaceful protests and sharing truths for and animal rights activists and some their part assume the existence of some edgier liberal-minded folks may even benevolent other – a state or a group of refer to themselves as ‘activists’ and compassionate shareholders or something support Occupy-style practices like – that exists in our interests and can be ‘’ and ‘consensus’. In Liberal: What beer is that you’re drinking? Liberal: Whoah, back up there! What’s changed through rational persuasion or practice, however, our ways quickly wrong with being a liberal? Are you saying ‘moral force’ or the invocation of abstract RIOT part, due mostly to the seemingly in- Anarchist: Some local micro-brewed IPA. you’re a conservative or something? ‘rights’. And, of course, this kind of Really hoppy, but good. What’s that, a activism also relies heavily on middle class commensurable assumptions each of talks his to imaginary friends liberal resistance, about prefiguration why and democracy magical and thinking.

Windhoek? Anarchist: Of course not. I’m an levels of material comfort: not everyone us hold about how oppressive social anarchist, which means I agree with a lot can choose what to buy and not everyone relations function and how best we Liberal: Windhoek? Fuck that! I would of liberal values; freedom and equality, is comfortable enough to have the daily can eradicate them. never support a huge corporation like for instance. I just have a very different negative effects of capitalism and the state For this and other reasons, Namibian Breweries. This is a locally understanding of what these terms mean hidden from them. Anyway, what I’m anarchists tend to dismiss liberals out brewed Belgian-style ale...I don’t know and how to obtain them. For starters, I trying to get at is that we need to critique of hand, often choosing not to par- why anyone ever drinks mass produced don’t think consumer activism is going and dismantle the structures themselves ticipate in liberal events like protests, beer when there’s so much better stuff to help very much, nor do I think instead of just trying to fix them from petitions and so on. Being slightly available. Don’t they realize what they’re polite protests where we ‘speak truth to within. I’m also arguing that, to some Aragorn Eloff more optimistic than this – or possi- supporting? Power’ are particularly effective, even if I extent anyway, the ways in which we bly hopelessly naïve – I like to think participate despite myself occasionally. think about changing things reflect the Anarchist: Well, mass produced beer extent to which we’ve internalized the that in the heart of at least some lib- doesn’t cost R30 a bottle. Some people Liberal: I don’t know much about values of society as it currently exists, kind erals there lives, even if deeply bur- don’t really have a choice: when they want anarchism, but doesn’t the anarchist of like how Stockholm Syndrome works. ied under decades of indoctrination, a beer they go for the cheapest option. spend most of his pessimism and apathy, an anarchist waiting to be set free. In the spirit of Liberal: That doesn’t make sense. We liberating these theoretical anarchists live in a democracy and we really do from their liberal shackles I’d like to have rights: they’re in the Constitution. indulge in something equally hypo- If we don’t like how it’s working right thetical: a fictitious conversation be- now we can just vote for someone else. tween a stereotypical representative Also, surely we can fix capitalism? It’s just messed up right now because some of each camp that, for all its cliché people got too greedy, like the banks and and binary oversimplification real- giant corporations. ly does sum up and reflect both the tone and the content of the innu- Anarchist: What is democracy? merable discussions – and heated ar- It’s supposed to be a transparently guments – I’ve had with real liberals functioning political system that upholds over the years. My hope is that even individual sovereignty and protects us where I’m at my most dismissive, this from harm but in practice it looks more discussion between imagined parties time speaking truth to Power? I don’t like a way of maintaining a class system. will still be of some small use to those Liberal: Well then they shouldn’t drink. understand what’s wrong with showing When you look at the Constitution, what of us seeking to dismantle hierarchy Everybody has a choice not to support people what’s really going on. you’ll mostly find are a bunch of negative corrupt corporations. freedoms – freedoms from various forms and domination as they really exist in Anarchist: For starters, Chomsky might of unnecessary imposition, coercion and the world we share. sometimes align himself with anarchism so on – and far fewer positive freedoms Anarchist: What, like the corrupt but he also tends to lapse into a kind or freedoms to...You know, principles To begin, let’s imagine an appropriate corporation that manufactured your car? of activist liberalism. What I mean is, of equality and mutual support that setting... he makes this assumption that if we would enable each of us to reach our full Liberal: It’s a hybrid! I’m voting with my can just show enough people the truth, potential. In fact when you explore it wallet for eco-friendly transport. like examples of non-transparency and more closely, you’ll find that the modern corruption within the US political political and legal systems in so-called Anarchist: (holds head between hands system, or how countries act in defiance democratic countries, with all their laissez and lets out an audible sigh.) of international law, or how a certain faire principles, function primarily to president said one thing and did another, pacify us while supporting the interests Liberal: What’s that supposed to mean? this will somehow magically change of a tiny capitalist class by protecting things. Whether it’s Chomsky doing this private property and the accumulation Anarchist: Sorry, I didn’t mean to or Naomi Klein or projects like Wikileaks of vast amounts of wealth. The state and appear cynical or judgmental. I guess or whatever, they all fall into the trap of capital participate in all sorts of collusive I’m just exhausted from today’s protest. thinking that society is changed through practices both straightforward and To be honest, I find these things really rational discourse: if we just all knew the byzantine in order to achieve this and if demotivating. truth, we’d opt out of the current system / continued on page 9 Liberals, can we

Printed by the bolo’bolo anarchist collective • we fight and play for a world beyond measure Page 7 "The real enemy is the totality of physical and mental constraints by which capital, or class society, or statism, or the society of the spectacle expropriates everyday life, the time of our lives." - Book zine reviews “Twenty volume folios will never make a revolution. It is the little pocket pamphlets that are to be feared.” – Voltaire

t’s been twenty years since I encountered my first zine, but I still remember it vividly. IIt wasn’t the content of Lolita17 that inspired me so much though; it was the idea that anyone with access to scissors, glue, a typewriter (or PC nowadays), a couple of pens and a photocopier (and many an office photocopier has served as clandestine midnight publisher) could make their voice heard. Not that anyone was necessarily listening, mind you, but that wasn’t important – the medium itself was liberating! It put media back in the hands of everyday folks so that they could express themselves in whatever way they saw fit and express ourselves we did. Upon encountering Lolita17, my gang and I quickly hacked together 20 copies of the first issue of Another Reason To Cut Off An Ear, a Refusing to wait: anarchism Mutual aid: An anarchist The Discreet Charm of the Capitalism, a very special teenage rant on anarchy (which we didn’t and intersectionality (Jen concept at work in Southern Bourgeoisie (CrimethInc) R5 delirium (Deleuze and understand too well back then, all things Rogue and Deric Shannon) R5 Africa (Stefanie Noire) R5 Guattari) R8 considered), industrial noise music, A typically humorous and biting critique the temple of psychick youth, chaos Too often, and not, it must be said, This is one of our best-selling zines, and for of the mundaneness and normativity of Zines are a great way to repackage essays, magick and psychedelics (with a strong, for no good reason, anarchists are seen good reason. Steffi, a one-time anarchist middle and upper class life by the enfant interviews and other materials that if unintended, subtext of angst, anomie by other radicals as mired in the worst anthropologist, explores Kropotkin’s terrible of North American anarchism, might not be as accessible as an author’s and alienation). More issues followed. kind of class reductionism, trying like idea of mutual aid, a radical reading of the CrimethInc ex-workers collective. main publications. In this undated We changed the name of our zine to good sectarian Marxists to force all other If the following is a diagnosis SMi2LE. We discovered the early ‘90s Darwin’s idea of the survival of the fittest interview the infamous poststructuralist of your particular malaise – and as usual, Joburg zine underground, populated by relations of hierarchy and oppression into and a touchstone for most anarchists. philosophers of deterritorialization, CrimethInc are right on the money the likes of Backstreet Abortions (a vegan a single critique of capitalist economic Looking at historical and contemporary schizoanalysis and flux explain their anarchist publishing/distro collective), relations. Fortunately, however, we also South Africa, Steffi finds many examples with their analysis – then never fear, analysis of capitalism with unprecedented Damn New Thing (a slick early rave have nuanced and non-dogmatic folks of mutual aid embedded in the practices a solution is provided in several of the clarity, applying Marxist theory and culture zine that echoed “Mondo2000” like Rogue and Deric on our team, of different indigenous cultures, from other CrimethInc training manuals we psychoanalysis in bold new ways in order in its techno-enthusiasm) and the encouraging us to instead think of the Bushmen right through to modern have available for purchase: to demonstrate the uniquely machinic unspeakably offensive, abominablyoppressive social relations like racism, day African traditions of ubuntu/hunhu. “Do you drift from one hobby to ways in which capitalism functions and poorly spelled comics of Yeoville crust sexism, heterosexism and so on as It is especially rewarding to have the another, fruitlessly seeking a meaningful how it doesn’t rely on any ideology at punk legend Alan Bomb. At some point, forming a web of intersecting forces often-abused notion of ubuntu presented way to spend the little “leisure time” you all. If you’re looking for an entry point of course, the magic died, the photocopier that needs to be addressed as a complex within an anarchist context, with the get off from work? Does your partner into the political philosophy of the 21st broke, the crowd split and we all moved system without reducing everything implicit suggestion that a real, full endlessly redecorate the house, going from century, this is just the text. on, going our separate ways. The sense to one central strand. In Refusing to practice of ubuntu would entail anarchist one room to the next until she can start over of possibility awakened by those early wait, they argue compellingly for the social relations. at the beginning again? Do you agonize forays into DIY counterculture, however, usefulness of the intersectionality model constantly over your future, as if there was has remained. for and, as a some kind of track laid out ahead you— secondary task, reverse the analysis and and the world would end if you turned off Although the role of a zine in an ask intersectionality theorists whether of it? If the answer to these questions is yes, internet-saturated society is in some or not they might perhaps benefit from it sounds like you’re in the clutches of the ways substantially diminished, there’s bourgeoisie, the last barbarians on earth.” another sense in which there’s simply no replacement for the cheap, tactile, easily reproducible stapled A4 foldovers that still populate the shelves of so Reserved many anarchist libraries and . Yesterday I came home bolo’bolo is no exception here; After journeying slowly continuing the proud tradition of DIY I arrived without a bang Oh Africa publication that goes back to at least A travel weary mother’s son alone. the punk scene of the mid-70s (and Oh Africa, my Africa as far back as Thomas Paine if Vicky In search of so many memories How I wish I could wipe away your tears Vale, author of the quintessential coffee Desperate to regain the scattered remains Eliminate your suffering Hungry for a visual reintegration with my roots table guide, Zines, is to be believed) - This land Return you to your former glory we’ve downloaded, copied, written and Here where the dust of my ancestors’ bones lie. Help you to reclaim your exalted place designed well over a hundred different Each day I listen to you and wonder how easily In the annals of this epoch. I knocked at the door zines, all lovingly bound in brightly your humanity is cast asunder. But no-one appeared coloured card covers and retailing in You claim that we get only what we deserve with We’ve defeated the colonial slave master I knocked again To be ruled by mindless martyrs our for between R5-R20 apiece thousands lying dormant and in reserve. Then a bouncer came.

And greedy, blood-thirsty bastards (there are also a bunch of free ones we Whose only desire is personal power managed to sneak from someone’s work Each day I look at you amazed how you remain so False smiles and epaulettes completely unfazed by the poverty and suffering Achieved through the murder of innocence when the boss wasn’t looking, anarchists I had to pay a tourists’ fee And callously maintained with armed intolerance.

beyond the electric fence that helps you to feel To set foot or lay a wary eye that we are). While we sell a lot of books less tense. at bolo’bolo, we’re just as enthusiastic On my natural heritage where these strangers reign. Where now are the people’s leaders? about these zines, viewing them as an Each day I wonder what goes through your mind Where are the revolutionary ideals? All of the breathtaking splendor Gone and buried in the blood-soaked hinterland accessible way to introduce people to new and ask myself are you really so blind? That they travel so far to see { ideas. Books, after all, can be unwieldy I try to fathom the depths of your uncaring heart Decaying beneath the greater corporate carnage Is mine, but no longer belongs to me Crushed to dust by the relentless grind and expensive, but a R5, eight or so page only to realize that you exist in a world apart. All of this that God bequeathed to me. As we all look on so helpless. – Three poems pamphlet on what anarchists think about climate change, who with even a passing Each day I pass by you on the street disdainfully I am the son of the native from Mikey looking at me from head to feet with an Stand tall sisters and brothers interest in the subject wouldn’t grab one? Slave and masters’ mistress Honour the memory of the father and mother Wentworth’s expression of suspicion distorting your face and Whore to my brothers’ sisters the fear you project makes my pulse race. Together we can stem the tide a love letter to As a little homage to zine culture, even A slave still, to all that I feel. Let the children live with pride the epoch in the reasonably vapid hipster form that United we will dream again What is it that you perceive; do you look forward But still I paid, I went and saw seems so common in Cape Town these to death’s reprieve; will your children be able to Free once more of poverty’s bane. Available from bolo’bolo No-one remembers anymore days, here are a couple of reviews of zines love mine after being exposed to your prejudice The rock beneath my soles for R80. we stock at bolo’bolo. If you have a zine for all this time. Once more to claim our place in the sun Didn’t even touch my feet. Without fear of persecution and harm – or even an idea for one – that’s relevant Each day I defeat your ignorance as I strive to Our voices must be raised as one to the bolo’bolo ethos, get in touch and Yesterday I came home Ubuntu! Uhuru! We will chorus freedom’s song we’ll add you to our rack. understand the nature of the bigoted arrogance And today I paid a cover-charge that has shaped this beautiful land. Now, now! Oh Africa, my Africa To look upon what God bequeathed to me Where the struggles carry on. All of this that was mine, but no longer belongs to me.

Printed by the bolo’bolo anarchist collective • we fight and play for a world beyond measure Page 8 “Where do you want to go, my heart?” “Anywhere - anywhere, out of this world.” - CrimethInc

/ continued from page 7 Liberals, can we there’s merit in what people like Chomsky apathy, resentment and resignation that example, you can let them hand over need to respond to them radically, even resist and we’re going to have to commit do then it’s to point out that this is not the goes along with being on the receiving their petition or memorandum, or hang if the specific niches of relative privilege to actively dismantling these oppressive exception but the rule: that the various end of hierarchical social relations. In a banner, or plant a symbolic tree) and some of us occupy within them don’t systems even if we would also do well to components of the state are, at least in fact, however, there’s very little class you’ll exhaust many people’s capacity for allow us to notice the full scope of what’s focus on building the new world in the part, the protection and enforcement migration in any capitalist, statist society, participating in activist movements while unfolding all around us. Finally, I think shell of the old at the same time. The branch of capitalism. Whoever you vote which is precisely why they make Disney simultaneously reinforcing the idea that some more moderate liberals also have autonomous Marxist John Holloway sums for – and let’s not even get into how movies when it does happen. It’s kind this is an effective or even sufficient way this assumption that things are they are this dual practice up well when he talks disempowering it is to choose a random of like playing the Lotto – the magical to produce meaningful change. Even as basically work fine except for a couple about building the new world as finding bunch of people to decide on the lives of thinking of ‘we can lift ourselves out of a way of making demands, which I don’t of glitches that can be ironed out...like, and multiplying the cracks in capitalism: you and your community behind closed poverty’ allows us to forget how messed think is a particularly good way to change capitalism would be fine if we could as he continually reminds us, we need to doors on your behalf – this collusion will up things are and how powerless we feel the world; peaceful protests fall kind just stop the bankers from being quite defend and enhance these cracks and they continue to take place. All that changes to change them. Also, even if people who of short. As the abolitionist Frederick so greedy. For anarchists, on the other need to form part of a doing-otherwise;

is the window dressing. You’d have to be were able to work really hard were able to Douglass said, power concedes nothing hand, things as they currently stand are we also need to promote their confluence RIOT desperately naïve to think that there’s a lift themselves out of poverty more often without a demand and I like to think fundamentally at odds with the interests as part of an explicitly anti-capitalist cry massive difference in this regard between, than is the case, it would be kind of like he meant a real demand backed by real of most people (and other animals, and of ‘enough is enough!’ say, the DA and the ANC, both of whom, hosting a race between ten people and force, not just the polite performance of the planet) and what we see as glitches

whatever their rhetoric, are explicitly then, leading up to the race, training one a demand by obedient citizens. Anyway, or crises in the system are in fact a part Liberal: I’m still uncomfortable with all yet? neoliberal and irremediably corrupt. As of them to function at peak performance that’s only in the context of a politics of of its functioning. That’s why we want to this resistance stuff. As a Buddhist and a for fixing capitalism, well, it seems to me and shooting the other nine in the demand; anarchists are far more interested dismantle it: it cannot be fixed any more pacifist I’ve come to realise that change that the situation we find ourselves in is kneecaps. Not really the kind of fairness in practicing politics – or more precisely than slavery could be ‘fixed’. starts within and that we can only ever what any capitalist economic system – liberals are supposed to value, is it? anti-politics – away from capitalism, the work on ourselves. any formal economy even – tends to lead By the way, I’m not saying that state and so on, in a way that subverts Liberal: I don’t know...sometimes I think to: the massive centralisation of wealth structure determines everything and that these structures and maintains the this is all so negative and oppositional. Anarchist: Firstly, what you’re suggesting and power and the ownership of all the we have no freedom. In fact I think it’s possibility of entering into open conflict Like the old saying goes, what you resist is more of an exoticised Buddhism-lite land and means of production people more like what the philosopher Michel with them along class and other lines. persists. Surely we’d be better off just than actual Buddhism. Check out the need to be able to live their lives. Even Foucault said: that these shitty power living our lives in different ways, away history of Buddhist through the centuries an idealistic free market economy would Liberal: But this makes it sound as though from capitalism and the government? and you’ll find that not only did Buddhists quickly lead to the formation of private “Sometimes there’s you don’t want to work within the system resist, they sometimes even fought on the security companies required to manage at all! Surely you’re just alienating yourself Anarchist: What, like let’s all buy a side of the oppressors, something they the inevitable class antagonisms that absolutely nothing you from everyone by being so extremist. It piece of land in the Karoo and build an did not feel was incompatible with their would arise and this would in turn result can do within the system. also sounds kind of unrealistic. If we’re eco-village and pay each other in talents spiritual views. In Mahayana Buddhism, in the evolution of a state (a ruthless neo- How would a social justice realistic we have to accept that this is how and bitcoins (small-scale alternative for instance, they say that the true feudal one most likely!) things currently are and work to slowly currencies)? Sure, it’s all fine and well to follower not the one who observes the five Anyway, for anarchists, these activist work within the reform them from within. prefigure different ways of living together precepts but the one who uses the sword, are all deep structural problems: we’re not North Korean system, for (even when they do limit themselves to bow, arrow and battle ax to protect the just concerned with the specific content instance? Stalinist Russia? Anarchist: The anarchist aversion to perpetuating the capitalist myth of homo monks who uphold the precepts and who that flows through them; we’re concerned reformism and working within the oeconomicus, all self-satisficing and are pure. In other words, and ignoring the with their form – with the structures Apartheid South Africa?”‘ system comes from hard-won experience. optimisation problems and bartering and dubious hierarchy this suggests, someone themselves! If we’re truly serious about the When effective reforms have taken place direct reciprocity) which is why anarchists still has to resist. Sometimes I think these liberal goals of freedom and equality we relations and oppressive structures are it’s been mostly as a necessary response are actually very keen on stuff like the appropriated, orientalist Eastern spiritual have to eradicate capitalism and the state everywhere but they actually rely on our to non-reformist politics, like when a really Really Free Market (a practices are actually kind of narcissistic. along with all the other hierarchical and freedom. In other words, they’re a way government changes a law to prevent a market), Food Not Bombs (a worldwide, They feel like a kind of disavowed oppressive social relations that intersect of filtering our free action – our personal revolutionary outbreak. The rest of the project that shares ‘excess’ or consumerism by people who express with them. If this isn’t making any sense, and collective power to do stuff – into time, reforms serve to safely divert the ‘waste’ food in the spirit of solidarity, not anti-materialist views but live in large think of it as a variation on that old ends that aren’t in our interests. In short, desire for change into reproducing – charity), anarchist free schools and so houses, drive fancy cars, eat expensive raw saying, power corrupts. That’s not to say we have agency but it doesn’t operate and even further legitimating – current on, but I don’t think this is even nearly food diets, pay charlatans for expensive that we can’t hold power together, but in a vacuum: we have to remember forms of hierarchy and domination. sufficient... In fact, it’s often just a form courses on achieving ‘enlightenment’ and that when one person or group has power to continually interrogate the ways in It’s like the difference between animal of middle class escapism that allows us to decorate their living environment with over others in whatever sphere of our lives which our sense of agency, how we think welfare and animal rights: welfarists are think we’re making change while allowing all sorts of overpriced paraphernalia. Oh, we’re considering, it changes them for the about ourselves and our real, material always criticising rights activists for being us to continue living the good life. Also, and then go on anti-GMO protests on worse. capacities are all informed by hierarchical too radical but all that welfare achieves, this kind of stuff only works until it gets Saturdays to shout their chants of ‘we are arrangements of power within our current with its slightly bigger cages and slightly all one; change the paradigm.’ Now that Liberal: Hmmm...I get that, but you keep society. ‘kinder’ forms of confinement and killing I think about it, one could even argue going on about these structures as though is to make people feel less upset about “we need to defend and that the average Western Buddhist is an everything is predetermined and we have Liberal: That’s all a bit complicated for the exploitation of other animals, which enhance these cracks and exemplary liberal capitalist citizen: they’ve no agency. That doesn’t sound right at all. me. Also, wasn’t Foucault just one of those in turn serves to further entrench the they need to form part disavowed their role in oppressive social I mean, if I was born poor I could choose postmodernist charlatans? There’s a book idea that there’s nothing fundamentally relations while continuing to consume to work hard at studying and then get a that debunks all those French relativists. ethically problematic about this practice. of a doing-otherwise; we appropriately and perpetuating the myth bursary to attend a good university and Also, I still don’t get what’s wrong with Also, sometimes there’s absolutely nothing also need to promote their of self-obsessed . get a decent job out of it. People are only protests. If what you’re saying in your you can do within the system. How confluence as part of an This is a far cry from even as free as they want to be. What we need roundabout way is simply that we can would a social justice activist work within some of the most liberal non-Western to be doing is raising consciousness! challenge capitalist brainwashing and the North Korean system, for instance? explicitly anti-capitalist Buddhists: did you know that the Dalai encourage people to use their agency then Stalinist Russia? Apartheid South Africa? cry of ‘enough is enough!’” Lama calls himself both a Marxist and a Anarchist: The liberal myth of the ‘boy surely a protest is a good way to do that? I’m not sure things are that different in so- communist? Incidentally, one shouldn’t made good,’ of the person who lifted called ‘democratic’ societies. ignore the uncomfortable fact that Taoism, themselves out of abject poverty by their Anarchist: Yes and no. On the one hand, As for whether or not anarchists big enough to pose a real threat: the Buddhism, Confucianism, Hinduism bootstraps, actually supports what I’ve sure, we can share some critical insights at are unrealistic, well, historically lots of bitcoin project is tiny and it’s already and so forth have been used throughout been saying about oppressive structures protests, or at least suggest that another sweeping social change has come about being shut down by governments in their history to maintain class, caste and and the power relations that flow through way of doing things is possible, which is through revolutionary ruptures whose various places. Eco-villages in the Karoo gender hierarchies and to encourage them. After all, if it was as simple as probably why, despite myself, I end up at proponents probably seemed wildly sound lovely, and I’m all for cob houses acceptance of unjust social relations; people working hard to better their lives so many marches on Saturday mornings. unrealistic before the fact. We also have and permaculture and undermining and even some of the most revered Buddhist then millions of people would be moving On the other hand, I sometimes feel to remember that it’s equally unrealistic figuring out how we can live if and when texts contain supportive references to out of the townships and into middle as though protests function – albeit to assume that the way social relations this insane civilization is dismantled or these kinds of hierarchies, along with class houses in the suburbs. One certainly perhaps only accidentally – as a pressure are currently structured can endure for comes crashing down, but what happens endorsements of war and rightful killing can’t argue that there’s not an incredible valve for social unrest: give the masses longer than another couple of decades, if they find natural gas under your eco- (of icchantikas [supposedly based and amount of hard work and perseverance a chance to vent their anger in a safe, at most, without causing complete social village? Do you think they’ll just let you self-deluded beings], for example). I displayed by some of the poorest people in patrolled environment and make them and ecological collapse. We live in wholly carry on living the idyllic hippie dream? don’t mean to lash out at all spiritual our society, even if there is also the obvious feel like they’ve achieved something (for unrealistic, immoderate times and we No. We’re going to have to / continued on page 10

Printed by the bolo’bolo anarchist collective • we fight and play for a world beyond measure Page 9 "Freedom will be possible when people understand and desire it — for man can only rule where others subserviently obey. Where none obey, none has power to rule." - George Nicholson

/ continued from page 9 protests (without realising, of course, that the people we’ve been discussing really actual class position is. really find anarchist or radical ideas so practices, by the way. I’m an atheist in the original V, the protagonist was an buy into all this whacky stuff, but when unsettling. Bridge the gap by engaging but I have several anarchist friends who anarchist) or telling people how the banks you think about it this extreme example Liberal: All this stuff makes me feel really with and learning from other people who define themselves as Buddhists, Taoists, yet? are secretly speculating with our debt, as of misplaced hope reflects perfectly the uncomfortable, like you’re forcing me to experience hierarchy and domination pagans and so forth. There are even though that’s not something every first- deep psychological investment in the take sides. I don’t like aligning myself with differently from you: there’s a reason some Christian and Islamic anarchists. year economics student already knows. idea that change comes from elsewhere any -isms. most liberals are white and middle class. Anyway, my point is that even Buddhists It’s also a sad reproduction of the liberal that’s symptomatic of living within a Ask yourself what risks you’re prepared

RIOT recognise that conflict might be necessary. consumerist magical thinking I’ve been hierarchical, patriarchal, statist society. Anarchist: What, so you wouldn’t call to take. Speak to the people around Contemporary no-conflict, no-resistance criticising all along: that we can somehow yourself a supporter of anti-racism? Or you with honesty and integrity instead Buddhism is just disavowed capitalist create sufficient change through freely Liberal: You know, I keep thinking like say you believe in ? of trying to appease them or sound subjectivity projected onto a caricatured choosing to align ourselves ideologically you’re trying to make me feel guilty for You wouldn’t agree that you’re opposed moderate. We do not live in moderate and appropriated spiritual practice. It with some or other passively held set of being middle class. It’s not my fault, to sexism? We all buy into -isms, whether times. Get involved in grassroots projects. also often exudes paternalistic smugness, beliefs. I didn’t choose this life. What if I don’t explicitly or not, and anarchists and Get your hands dirty. Do things you’re another perennial hallmark of liberalism, The reason I think it’s sad is want to take sides? I don’t have any liberals actually have quite a few of uncertain about – you’ll learn as you go and it’s pretty suggestive that not many because it says so much about the anomie responsibility to. them in common. It’s just that we’ve along. Reflect on what pacifism really of these Western pseudo-Buddhists know and deep depoliticisation of otherwise chosen to sum up what we’re opposed to means in a structurally violent society and about the more egalitarian and collectively well-meaning people. We’ve really had it Anarchist: No, you don’t. Anarchists and what we’re for in a single term that why confrontation might sometimes be liberatory teachings of Buddhism, like the rough in terms of political education in aren’t moralists; we wouldn’t ever tell you encompasses the problems and solutions necessary (and remember that some white bodhisattva, for instance. South Africa, especially those of us who that you have to do something. However, at their roots while remaining adaptable folks in the civil rights movement in the grew up during Apartheid, and it’s left a what we can do is observe that, factually to many different situations. It’s funny US even ‘thought sit-ins’ at restaurant

Liberals, can we Liberal: Whew...Okay...that was kind lot of people completely confused about speaking, there is no such thing as a neutral how so many liberals are incredibly counters were too confrontational!) of a rant. Let’s move on from spiritual what’s going on in the world and how, position. Like it or not, you’re either on uncomfortable with what they perceive as Learn about the different stuff...What about more radical stuff like historically, people have been able to the side of the oppressor or the oppressed, rigid ideologies when they simultaneously ways in which people have interpreted the Freeman Movement? They seem to change it. Obviously this creates a whole even if you don’t feel as though you’re implicitly align themselves most of the and applied your spiritual path, if you be on the rise and they’ve found all these lot of anxiety and so, in the absence of any actively participating in either. As Howard ideologies, including capitalism, statism, have one. Read about how people have loopholes in the law which mean you real understanding of why things appear Zinn used to say, you can’t be neutral on heteronormativity and whiteness that organised historically to overthrow can opt out of paying taxes and obeying to be going to hell in a handbag, we can’t a moving train...you’re born into a world form part of all these current systems oppressive social relations: society is not corrupt government regulations. blame people for seeking meaning and and had a default position chosen for of hierarchy and domination. There’s a just made of individuals, it’s made of all false solace in conspiracy theories and you already. Also, lots of us who think reason some people refer to liberalism, sorts of social groupings and material Anarchist: Well, you can try. In practice, bizarrely internally contradictory utopias of ourselves as middle class have a kind with its anti-ism-ism, as the default forces and we’re in this together; we can’t the so-called ‘Freeman’ thing is based on (like the one where we trade in bitcoins of false view of our position in society. ideology of capitalism, you know. just rely on noble liberal heroes to save a bizarre layperson misinterpretation of in a free market but also somehow have Sociologists might tell us that there are all us. Change comes from movements, not common law and no Freeman has ever a ‘resource-based’ economy regulated these different social levels and that we’re Liberal: So what the fuck do you want Gandhis or Mandelas. Map the complex succeeded in winning a legal case. There’s by a benevolent bureaucratic class) that quite high up in the chain, but I think the me to do? and unique arrangement of privilege and a reason first year law students make resemble nothing so much as the hyper- Marxist view makes more sense: unless deprivation that informs your own life, jokes about the Freeman movement and individualistic narcissism that is the we’re a part of the capitalist class we’re Anarchist: Whatever you think is best. where it came from, how it differs from their obsession with misinterpreted Latin default identity fostered by capitalism. probably part of the broad working class Anarchists certainly don’t have all the and overlaps with others and how social clauses and capital letters. Apart from the The Farmville model of utopia, I call it. (which includes everyone from white- answers. Whatever you do though, at relations intersect with it. Think about usual liberal misunderstanding of the law Perhaps the most tragic collar workers to the unemployed), even least make a commitment, and make it how you can work with and through this as being something that operates through example of all this is the new age belief if we don’t want to admit it. Fuck, I’m a a real one, not a lazy, middle class, one- mapping instead of being disempowered reason instead of through force, I find the that all we have to do is visualize change. freelance job away from the street almost Saturday- morning-a-month kind of a by feelings of guilt or resentment. Think whole thing deeply suspicious, especially It’s kind of telling that the people who buy every month and even people who have commitment. The stakes are far too high deeply about the values you already hold when you trace it back to its origins in into this tend to come from quite wealthy decent white collar jobs are at the mercy for that to be defensible if you really do and what their full implications are – what conspiracy theories and new age quackery. backgrounds where they probably did of horrendous levels of accumulated debt hold the liberal values you purport to. Be a world that reflected them would really It’s just another way of selling middle class get whatever their hearts desired, if only and the idiosyncrasies of international honest about what you’re willing to give look like. And remember what Goethe people false hope and quick-fix solutions because their daddy bought it for them... finance. We are kind of in a unique up and also about the extent to which once said: ‘Whatever you can do or dream that don’t require too much investment What’s even sadder is that sometimes this position though: we can choose to serve you benefit from society as it is currently you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power of time or energy from them, like signing kind of magical thinking ends in a kind of the interests of hierarchical arrangements structured and the conflicting feelings and magic in it’. petitions, clicking Like on Facebook, pathological millenarianism, waiting for of power because they benefit us to some you thus experience around seeking to sharing Zeitgeist and Future By Design auspicious dates or planetary alignments extent or we can choose to be in solidarity fundamentally change things. Challenge Liberal: Another beer? DVDs with friends or buying V for or the intervention of wise beings from with those even more oppressed than we and exert yourself; see what you’re really Vendetta Anonymous masks to wear at other dimensions. Sure, not many of are because we recognise how similar our capable of doing. Think about why you Anarchist: Sure, why not.

Thanks for being so California. Diablo Canyon was very transformative, not just for Featured accommodating. Would you like a nuclear power plant being me but for everyone who took to say a little about who you are built on an earthquake fault. The part in it. Because, really, for interview: and what your work is? anti-nuclear movement of the a month we were living in this My name is Starhawk and I’m a ‘70s had shifted at that point into alternative society where every Starhawk writer, teacher and permaculture doing actual direct action and decision that was made, you practitioner, which is a whole so we organised a blockade and were part of. There was nobody (Northern system of ecological design that people went along and tried to telling you what to do, you didn’t teaches self-reliance and how we prevent them from putting the have to ask anyone’s permission can build systems that can meet plant live by shutting down the to do something, there was no Califor- our human needs and regenerate front gate and then by infiltrating central authority figure. You the environment around us. I’m the high security zone so that became your own authority. And nia) also a witch and long-time writer they couldn’t turn the plant on. for me, coming back from that I and thinker and teacher about That blockade was organised on realised that this was the kind of the revival of the old goddess- a model that we had taken from a world I wanted to live in and that based, Earth-based spiritualities couple of earlier nuclear actions those were the kinds of structures Anarchist, neo-pagan, ecofeminist, permaculture advocate and from Europe and the Middle East, in New Hampshire and they I wanted to build into my life. It and a long-time political activist. were organised by the Clamshell was a lived vision of a different the author of numerous books, including the classic of Earth-based Alliance with a lot of inspiration way to organise and structure the spirituality The Spiral Dance and the nuanced anarchic How did you first hear about and help from a group called world. anarchism? Movement for a New Society, The other part of utopian novel The Fifth Sacred Thing, Starhawk has been a I’m not sure how I first heard which was a Quaker-based group anarchism that has always about it. It was so long ago. I from Philadelphia that did a lot appealed to me is that anarchists teacher and radical political activist since the late ‘60s and was deeply would say probably back in of activist training. I think they are more fun to hang around involved in the grassroots anti-globalisation movement of the late ‘90s the ‘60s. I remember reading were the ones who introduced with! The anarchists are the bad Murray Bookchin and Kropotkin this model to the Clamshell of kids with the bad attitudes – they as a developer and facilitator of collective, non-hierarchical practices. and some of the other anarchist organising around affinity groups always have a sense of humour. Stefanie Noire and Aragorn Eloff visited her at her rural home in thinkers. For me being an and working by consensus, with The deeper appeal was the vision anarchist is probably more about an organisational structure of a society where everyone is Northern California, a rustic, off-grid cob house nestled deep in the a political culture than a political that was bottom-up rather than part of making decisions that philosophy: the attraction is in top-down. The affect them, where everyone is woods. She gave us a tour of the permaculture training and research the style of organising and the would send representatives to empowered and everyone is their projects she runs from this space before sitting down over a cup of kind of relationships we can a spokes-council that would own authority; that fit for me very tea for this interview, which we’ve edited slightly for publication but build, organising in ways that make all the decisions about well with my philosophy. are decentralised, horizontal the action. There was no central / continued on page 11 kept mostly verbatim to convey a sense of Starhawk’s simultaneously and directly democratic. The committee that made decisions first time we really organised or issued commands, it all came thoughtful yet light-hearted conversation style. effectively in that way, for me, from below. So we adopted that was in a blockade against model in the Alliance. I think the Diablo Canyon in 1981 in Central blockade at Diablo Canyon was

Printed by the bolo’bolo anarchist collective • we fight and play for a world beyond measure Page 10 " Laws: We know what they are, and what they are worth! They are spider webs for the rich and mighty, steel chains for the poor and weak, fishing nets in the hands of government." - Pierre Joseph Proudhon

tedious, but as people become ignore injustice and ignore the more skilled at it...you know destruction of nature. You have to Starhawk people always used to say voting be active, you have to be involved is more quick and more efficient, in doing something about it and bolo’bolo’s easy interview but in truth consensus that is that involvement itself is part / continued from page 10 well facilitated, with people that of your spiritual path, is your green living tips! understand the process, doesn’t discipline, is your learning. At the Are you explicit about anarchism in necessarily take a lot longer than same time, if you’re an activist, it * your work as a writer? voting on an issue when people are really helps to have some kind of In my work as a writer I think I actually willing to take time and a spiritual ground because what 1a) Smash capitalism, the state and all other forms of do work with anarchist ideas; in care to hear all the different sides. you get from that are the things hierarchy and domination opposed to the continuance of life. This is my novel the Fifth Sacred Thing that you can use to renew your the single most vital task we need to accomplish. If we cannot transition there’s a vision of a society that’s How do your anarchist views own energy and restore your faith to a sane society based on the principles of mutual aid, solidarity, liberty overlap with your spirituality? very much based on that kind of and get you through those times. in equality, voluntary social relations and gift economics, we’re screwed. anarchist direct democracy...on a For me my political views and You know, political activism can lot of the ideals that we hold and my spiritual views are deeply be very discouraging and very For much of human history most of us lived without these oppressive held. It was fun to write, to see connected. I guess I would say I hard sometimes and it really helps systems. Some of us still do. Let’s take our lives back from them. what would a society be like if came to Earth-based spirituality to have both, again, a sense of these ideals were actually played in some sense out of a political some larger connection that you’re 1b) Prefigure these principles in your everyday life – in how out in reality. Webs of Power: movement, out of . So we serving and part of, and also a you relate to other humans, other animals and the natural world. Notes From the Global Uprising I started looking at the question community of people who have wrote at a time when I was very of why were women oppressed? ways of supporting one another, deeply involved in some of the How did that oppression work? celebrating together, grieving 2) Eat, to the best of your abilities, with LOVE (Local, organising around global justice That led us to look at the question together, mourning together, Organic, Vegan, Ethical) firmly in mind. There is no ethical way – nor issues...some of that book is reports of religion and spirituality and organising together. is there any ecologically friendly way – to produce animal-based food that were originally out on the belief, and the way that patriarchal for the number of people now alive on the planet. We don’t need animal internet and some of it is shaping religion reinforced the idea, as Similarly, what’s the relation a kind of anarchist philosophy Mary Daly said, you know, when between your anarchist views and food: it’s one of the single largest causes of anthropogenic climate around certain specific issues and god is the father, when god is male your feminist views? change and it’s not even healthy for us. Cut it out. presenting that. Other times, like in then the male is god. As we started My anarchism and feminism the Fifth Sacred Thing, you know, exploring different options, this are deeply interrelated because 3) Say no to greenwashing. 98% of all products that there’s nobody waving a flag and was back in the late ‘60s early ‘70s, for me feminism is really claim to be ‘green’ or ‘sustainable’ or ‘eco-friendly’ are lying (see saying: this is anarchism in action, I encountered people who started about challenging the way because it’s fiction and it wasn’t talking about the ancient goddess that relationships of power the 2009 Terrachoice report, ‘The Seven Sins of Greenwashing’). appropriate. I’m writing a book religion of Western Europe and are constructed according to Green capitalism is an oxymoron: you can’t consume your way to now on group process and group the Middle East, that was based gender, but also more than that, sustainability. dynamics for collaborative groups on the idea that divinity...not so challenging the way that we use and I’m explicitly not making it much that divinity has genitals you any kind of difference as a way of 4) Say no to techno-fixes, or at least say no to techno-fixes as purely for anarchists, although I know, or skirts, but that the focus justifying structures of power-over. think it has great, great relevance was on that power bringing life So to really be a strong feminist the only useful solution. You can’t fix the ecological crisis by mining for anarchists because I feel like into the world, that this world itself means you have to be willing to for more metals and rare earths and besides, the elitist technotopians there’s a lot of groups that wouldn’t is what’s sacred, it’s not sort of a challenge all kinds of power, not confident touting solutions on all those TED talks sound very much necessarily identify as anarchist little testing ground to go to the real just around gender but also around like the people that helped get us into this mess in the first place. but who are facing the same kinds sacred place like heaven, but this class and race and all of those Cutting down massively on consumption levels is a far more effective of issues. When you remove the world is it, and that the processes other kinds of -isms that we find. centralised authority, you have a that sustain life and produce life And I think it’s deeply integral to approach. different kind of an animal than and bring forth life are themselves the anarchist movement, I think when you have a hierarchical sacred and should be honoured. that anarchism suffers when 5) Relocalize: learn how to live in dynamic harmony with group, and there hasn’t been very Our sexuality is sacred, it doesn’t look at those issues your bio-region, how to create new forms of local community, how to much written about how to make our nature is sacred, the life because it’s so easy to fall back grow plant-based foods using veganic permaculture and bio-intensive those groups and circles really support systems of the planet are into the old sort of patriarchal work. I wanted to be inclusive sacred. And again, sacred not in patterns and I’ve seen that happen farming and how to radically repurpose urban space. rather than exclusive, so I’m kind of the sense that we bow down and in circles of consensus around explicitly making it for groups that we never question that, but sacred actions. I’ve looked around and 6) Walk more, run more or get a bicycle. Try cycle as often as might be anything from anarchist in the sense that the word literally suddenly realised that you’ve got possible without getting squashed by crazy car drivers, taxis, buses, etc. collectives to church groups, means sacrifice; it comes from the 20 people in the centre who are Explore the place you live. Get to know it better. because I think we all face very same root. It’s what you make a spokes for their affinity groups similar issues around power and sacrifice for, what you would take and 19 of them are guys...only one authority and communication, and a stand for, what you don’t want to woman. And nobody is questioning 7) Inform yourself. Watch films, read books, go to workshops, just the sheer difficulty of getting see compromised, what you value a lot of the underlying assumptions speak to people. If you don’t have time for this, ask yourself where your along with other ornery, irritating beyond your personal comfort that lead to that. Maybe nobody is time is going and who it really benefits. human beings. or profit or convenience. And for consciously deciding let’s all pick me that fit so well with what I boys to represent us, but if nobody You work a lot with consensus. intuitively felt and believed that is looking at the unconscious 8) If you’re of reasonably sound mind and body, take an How would you explain it? when I encountered it I kind of went or less semi-conscious levels of entheogen in nature and reconnect yourself. If that’s not your thing, go Consensus decision making is a yes, this is it, this is what I already entitlement that lead us into that spend some time in nature anyway. form of making decisions that is know and understand. For me that then we fall back into them. I think certainly favoured by anarchists, goes very well with anarchism as a lot of the kind of adventurism and 9) Really get to grips with both the stakes and the odds so but it’s not limited to anarchism. It’s a philosophy because I think at its the focus on let’s do the smashy used everywhere from kids on the core what it’s saying is that we’re smashy, let’s fight the cops and that you don’t give up when the going gets hard. It is going to get hard: playground deciding what they’re each our own authority, just like stuff, without grounding sometimes the stakes are very high and the odds are not in our favour. gonna play to big corporations in the goddess tradition we are in how is this really strategic, who that work with the consensus each our own spiritual authority: is this really serving, how is this 10) Once you have made peace with the stakes and the odds, model. In the US we have a judicial we don’t have a pope or a queen really helping, are actually just make a commitment: to yourself, your family, your friends and your system that’s based on trial by of the witches or something that patriarchy. You know, they’re just jury, where you have 12 people tells you what to believe, you have the same old macho, strong guy community; to women; to people of colour; to poor and indigenous taken at random from the general to make those decisions yourself, with the fastest gun being the most and marginalised peoples nearby and in far off places who bear the population who decide if somebody you’re responsible for your own powerful and therefore the most brunt of our ecocide; to birds and bees and fish and pandas and sloths is innocent or guilty with again, a spiritual growth and development. sexy and the most desirable. If we and elephants and rhinos and snails and chickens and frogs and trees form of consensus. Consensus in its You can find teachers, you can find don’t look at that then again we and moss and jellyfish and chimpanzees and wild grass. Make the true form doesn’t necessarily mean guides, you can find mentors that tend to fall back into it, and that everyone just has to agree. For me you invest some of that authority in makes us less effective. commitment a real one, one that goes beyond clicking Like. it’s a creative thinking process in order to grow and learn from, but where instead of looking at the ultimately the authority comes back What are some of the problems 11) Start now. problem and saying we can either to you. we’re facing today? do this or we can do that, you say I also feel like anarchism I feel like right now we’re in a alright: you have these desires and has its focus on this world, it’s time where we’re facing some needs, you have these desires and about making this world better enormous challenges. This is needs, how do we think creatively and working together, learning like the point in the movie, right, about finding the best possible together, organising together where the heroine is tied to the solution that will meet them all and in ways that embody the world railway tracks and the train is that will address people’s concerns. that we want to see, and again thundering down and you don’t So, you know, you want carrots for that fits very well with a spiritual know if someone is going to untie dinner and I want potatoes; we philosophy that says this world is her in time and rescue her or not. don’t have to choose between them, where it’s at. We’re not in training This is like the climax, the crunch we can figure out a way to put them for some other world. For me time. Ecologically, we’re faced together and make a vegetable spirituality has always meant with the necessity of addressing stew. And when it’s done right I engagement with the political climate change, which means think it’s tremendously exciting questions and power struggles really rethinking just a few little and empowering for everybody of our times because, again, this things, like our energy systems, involved. When it’s not done right world is where it’s at. You can’t our technology, our economy, our it’s painful and laborious and just go off and meditate and / continued on page 14

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“We believe that the Anarchists are real enemies of Marxism. Accordingly, we also hold that a real struggle must be waged against real enemies.” - Joseph Stalin Anarchy101

Obviating the state In this regular column we answer all your gnawing questions about anarchism, anarchy and anarchists, either directly or by sharing classic anarchist texts. If you'd like to ask us something, simply drop a mail to by stating the [email protected] with the subject line anarchy101 and we'll get back to you. obvious This issue, we share two powerful texts on property.

Ricardo Flores Wolfi Landstreicher | Property: Magón | Reaping The Enclosing Fences of Capital

At the edge of the road, I find a man with weeping eyes and tossed Among the many great lies that maintains the rule of capital is the idea that property is freedom. The black hair, staring at the thistle at his feet. “Why are you crying?” I rising bourgeoisie made this claim as they partitioned the earth with fences of all sorts — physical ask, and he answers, “I cry because I did everything I could for my fences, legal fences, moral fences, social fences, military fences... whatever they found necessary to comrades. I sowed my parcel of land with hard work, as any man enclose the murdered wealth of the earth and to exclude the multitudes who were undesirable except who respects himself must do; but those for whom I did so much as labor power. good made me suffer, and in regard to my land, lacking water, that was snatched by the rich, only to produce those dry thistles you can Like so many lies of power, this one manages to deceive through sleight-of-hand. The multitudes see at my feet.” “unchained” from their land were free to choose between starving or selling the time of their lives to whatever master would buy them. “Free laborers” their masters called them, since unlike chattel Bad harvest, I say, the one that the good ones harvest, as I continue slaves, the masters had no need to take responsibility for their lives. It was merely their labor power my march. that the masters bought. Their lives were their own, they were told, though in fact these had been stolen away when the capitalist masters enclosed the land and drove these “free laborers” off to A little farther I come across an old man falling and getting up, search for survival. This process of expropriation, which allowed capitalism to develop, continues at hunchbacked, with a vague look of sadness. “Why are you so sad,” its margins today, but another sleight-of-hand maintains the bourgeois illusion at the center. I asked, and he responds, “I am sad because I have been working since I was seven years old. I was a dedicated person until the Property, we are told, is a thing and we purchase it with money. Thus, according to the lie, freedom morning my boss said ‘You are too old, Juan; there is no work for resides in the things that we can buy and increases with their accumulation. In pursuit of this freedom you to perform,’ and he slammed the door on my face.” that is never quite attained, people chain themselves to activities not of their choosing, giving up every vestige of real choice, in order to earn the money that is supposed to buy them freedom. And as What a harvest of years and more years of honest labor! He told me their lives are consumed in the service of projects that have never been their own, they spend their and I keep on walking. wages on toys and entertainment, on therapy and drugs, these anesthetics that guarantee they won’t see through the lie. Then a very young man missing a leg comes to my counter, hat in hand, asking “a bit of charity for the love of God” “Why are Property, in fact, is not the thing that is owned. It is the fences — the fences that keep us in, the fences you moaning?” I ask, and he answers, “Maduo promised we were that keep us out, all the enclosures through which our lives are stolen from us. Thus, property is, above going to be free and happy, with the condition to help him get the all, a restriction, a limit of such magnitude that it guarantees that no individual will be able to realize presidency of the Republic. All my brothers and my own father herself completely for as long as it exists. died in the war; I lost my leg and my health, leaving our families in poverty.” To fully understand this, we must look at property as a social relationship between things and people mediated by the state and the market. The institution of property could not exist without the state This is the reaping for we the ones who work to raise tyrants and that concentrates power into institutions of domination. Without the laws, the arms, the cops and the support the capitalist system, I say to myself, and keep on walking. courts, property would have no real basis, no force to support it. A few steps further, I encounter a group of tired men with sad steadfast looks, their arms dropped, dismay in their faces, and In fact, it could be said that the state is itself the instituting of property. What is the state if not a anguish, and anger. “What makes you so angry?” I question. “We network of institutions through which control over a particular territory and its resources is asserted came out of the factory,” they say, “and after working ten hours, we and maintained by force of arms? All property is ultimately state property since it exists only only make enough for a miserable bean dinner.” by permission and under the protection of the state. Dependent on the levels of real power, this permission and protection can be revoked at any time for any reason, and the property will revert These are not the ones who reap, I say, but their bosses do, so I back to the state. This is not to say the state is more powerful than capital, but rather that the two continue with my travel. are so thoroughly entwined as to constitute a single social order of domination and exploitation. And property is the institution through which this order asserts its power in our daily lives, compelling us It is nighttime already. Crickets sing their love songs in the to work and pay in order to reproduce it. crevices of the ground. My ear, attentive, perceives sounds of fiesta somewhere. I direct myself toward the place from where So property is actually the razor wire, the “No Trespassing” sign, the price tag, the cop and the those gay sounds come, and I see myself in front of a sumptuous security camera. The message that these all carry is the same: one cannot use or enjoy anything palace. “Who lives here?” I ask a lackey. “He is the lord-owner of without permission, and permission must be granted by the state and paid for in money somewhere these lands you see around here and owner also of the water which along the line. irrigates these lands.” It comes as no surprise then that the world of property, ruled by the market and the state, is an I understand I am in front of the residence of the thief who made impoverished world where lack, not satisfaction, permeates existence. The pursuit of individual the fields become dry with thistle, and showing a fist to the realization, blocked at every turn by yet another fence, is replaced by the homogenizing, atomizing beautiful structure of the palace, I think, “Your next harvest, competition to accumulate more things, because in this world the “individual” is measured only scoundrel bourgeois — you will have to reap it with your own in terms of the things that he owns. And the inhuman community of the price tag strives to bury hands; you know your slaves are waking up...” singularity beneath identities found in shop windows.

And I keep my march, thinking, thinking, dreaming, dreaming. Attacking the things owned by the rulers of this world — smashing bank windows, burning police I think on the heroic resolution of those disinherited, who have cars, blowing up the employment office or breaking machinery — certainly has its worth. If nothing the courage to put in their hands the recovery of their lands that, else, one may get a bit of pleasure, and some actions of this sort may even hinder specific projects of according to the law, belong to the rich, and, according to justice the ruling order. But ultimately we must attack the institution of property, every physical, legal, moral and reason, belong to all. I dream about the happiness of the or social fence. This attack begins from the desire we each have to take back our life and determine humble homes after the expropriation; men and women feeling it on our own terms. Every moment and every space we steal back from this society of production and really human; children playing, laughing, happy, with their consumption provides us with a weapon for expanding this struggle. But, as one comrade wrote: “...this stomachs full with plenty of healthy food. struggle is widespread or it is nothing. Only when looting becomes a large-scale practice, when the gift arms itself against exchange value, when relationships are no longer mediated by commodities The rebels will give us the best of the harvests: Bread, Land, and individuals give their own value to things, only then does the destruction of the market and Freedom for all. of money — that’s all one with the demolition of the state and every hierarchy — become a real possibility”, and with it the destruction of property. The individual revolt against the world of property must expand into a that will break down every fence and open every possibility for Originally published in Regeneración issue individual realization. 69, December 23, 1911 Originally published in The Network of Domination, 2005

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world so that people can meet to New Orleans after hurricane of challenging corporate desire to change the world for the Starhawk their needs in ways that actually Katrina to do relief work and globalisation at big meetings has better and make a contribution to regenerate the systems around we went down with a group shifted; I think in Europe people are it, and, so...and ultimately I see the them rather than destroying them, called Common Ground that had still doing that around the climate systems that we have on the verge interview it’s a very locally based world organised...there was a guy down camps, but here in the US it seems of falling apart, so I am optimistic / continued from page 11 where people meet most of their there named Malik Rahim, who like the anarchist movement is kind that we can shift and change them. life needs locally rather than all was an old Black Panther, who of in a little bit of, I’d say, a resting I do think that it won’t necessarily food production systems...the whole of the globe, it’s a world where put down a call for people to come phase. You know it’s smaller, it’s be an easy, smooth, graceful shift, way we organise our world. We’re people are encouraged to create down to help people stay in one probably more hardcore people and that it will involve some kind of really challenged by the need art and beauty and pleasure and of the neighbourhoods that hadn’t less inclusive, and a lot of people level of conflict and loss and pain to shift from using fossil fuels to where those things are highly flooded, that was relatively intact, have gotten more into doing local and suffering, you know, and I different kinds of energy, and it’s valued, they’re not seen as some and they organised a clinic and organising, community organising. would rather avoid that. I’m old a challenge which we seem to be kind of little extra that you should they organised distribution, and For me right now my energy is enough now that I don’t seek a on some levels failing miserably give up either for the sake of the they had stuff up and running going into running this community romantic revolution, you know. If at and on other levels taking up revolution or for the sake of making and going before the Red Cross programme in Bayview, Hunters we could do it smoothly without and doing very energetically and more profit or for whatever; they’re got there, before the military, the Point, working with very poor anyone getting hurt and without too creatively. And it’s not at all clear seen as the reason we’re alive as whole government aid, and all the people and trying to bring some of much disruption I’d be happy, but yet what is going to happen from humans: to enjoy our life, to share big organisations were disastrous, these skills and understandings I don’t think that’s terribly likely at now. Along with that goes the big that enjoyment with one another, and this little Common Ground, into that community. And they’re this point. questions around social injustice to create beautiful things... and it’s you know, that was organised not anarchist and anarchist and economic injustice, which, you fun, a fun world, right? basically on grassroots activist principles don’t speak a lot to their What can each of us do? know, have always been present direct action principles was very way of looking at the world, which What I think each one of us can but are really I think in our face In the Fifth Sacred Thing you effective, and a lot of people who tends to actually be much more do is to really ask ourselves the now. Here in the US, you know, we undertake an incredibly nuanced went down to work with Common authoritarian; I mean I think those question: what do I most care have seen this process over the exploration of violence and self- Ground were people I knew from principles do ultimately speak to about? What’s sacred to me in the last few decades of our country defence. What are your thoughts globalisation movements and, so, them, but not in the way of saying sense that it’s something that I becoming more and more like a around the role of violence it was a great example of seeing hi, we’re anarchists, why don’t you want to most see happen, that’s third world country – the disparity and non-violence in creating anarchist ideals in action and do what we do, but more in being more important to me than my and wealth, the siphoning of the meaningful social change? seeing them work effectively, but it willing to be there, be of service, own comfort and my own personal money and wealth away from the Anarchism has again, many was also a real wakeup call for me ask what are the resources this benefit, and then how do I put my middle class and the poor and the different philosophies in approach to see the limit of what we could do. community needs to empower itself life force energies at the service of working class to very few extremely to the question of violence and What we could do was just a tiny and what are the ways I can be of that thing that I most deeply care wealthy individuals and groups what constitutes legitimate or drop in the bucket of what actually service to that. about. When we do that then we and corporations has just run amok, illegitimate violence. I come out needed to be done, and it made me mobilise tremendous energies in to the point where our social system of the non-violent way. For me, I guess also maybe more interested How optimistic are you these days? ourselves, and the moment we say and our financial system and a lot again, and let me go back to those in saying how do we scale these I tend to be optimistic by nature, how do I connect with other people of basic systems that we depend actions that we were organising things up so that we can really so, I am optimistic even if reality around me, how do we organise on are crashing down around us. around nuclear power and nuclear address the level of disasters that seems to be pretty grim, right? I around it, how do I find the other That’s another huge crisis and it’s weapons and militarism, we we’re facing and I don’t know, think optimism is a better place people who care so deeply about one that I think we can’t just say, were organising explicitly non- there’s something about after to organise from than despair this then we develop a force that’s well, you all go and let that system violent direct action. Not because being down there dealing with or pessimism or sheer outright really unstoppable, because we fall and we’ll live in our happy little I think violence is never justified this real overwhelming, complete rage and frustration, although I align ourselves with the great anarchist collective, because when but because we all felt first that collapse of everything that made it certainly visit all of those places creative compassionate powers of that system falls it tends to fall the it was the most effective way to harder to just go off and do another too, but I see a lot of positive the universe and when we do that, hardest on the people who have organise in our time and place mobilisation or organise something things happening, mostly at small I think we do have great hope for the fewest resources. To me these around those issues and secondly new. scale and local scale levels of changing the world. are two questions that are deeply because we felt it most embodied, I think in the last organising. I see a lot of young intertwined; you can’t address again, the kind of world that we few years that kind of culture people that really have a deep one really without addressing the wanted to create. It was the way other. And of course with climate that the means sort of prefigured change it’s not just climate change: or embodied the ends. So I as permaculturalists we say that think people sometimes think of climate change is a symptom anarchism as synonymous with of ecological dysfunction on a smashing windows, right? [laughs] deep level. All of our systems And there certainly are anarchists are creating this dysfunction: who smash windows, right, and toxins, development, destruction people have different philosophies of wilderness, destruction of and different rationales for that, wetlands... All of those things go but there also are anarchist together. philosophies that say it’s not about what you smash it’s about what you How do you define anarchism for want to create, what you want to people? build. I think there are many different In terms of this building, anarchisms, but I would say that at I love to see people trying out their its core, anarchism is the striving anarchist theories in real life in for people to organise themselves different ways however that is, you with the absence of coercion, in know. People who are , I ways that empower each individual say, more power to you! I’m too old and empower communities, and and I need my comforts too much to you know, that gives rise to a lot do that myself but I think it’s great Get involved in FOOD of different approaches, and a lot that young people do those things of different tweaks to that political and take those risks and explore NOT BOMBS Observa- philosophy, but its essence is a those different options: collective tory, or start your own world free from force and from living, , ecologically violence, where people organise sustainable lifestyles... chapter! themselves and one another by taking responsibility for their own What do you think about the actions and their own needs and contemporary anarchist We meet at the park oppo by understanding that we’re all movement? - interconnected and that for me What do I think about the site the community center to take responsibility for myself contemporary anarchist movement? once a month to share means I have to take responsibility I would say for me, I’ve been for making my contribution to the involved in one form of activism food, music and ideas whole and for taking care of others. or another since the ‘60s and when you’re in it that long your with people from all walks What would an anarchist world involvement kind of comes and of life. look like? goes and ebbs and flows into My picture of an anarchist world different channels and directions. is really very much like what I I went through a very intensive created in my novel The Fifth period for about seven years after If you’d like to get in Sacred Thing, at least in the North the big blockade against the WTO touch, come find us in the part of that, where they have a in Seattle in 1999, and that threw society that’s very diverse, very me into a level of activism and park or email us at: multi-cultural, where different involvement and training and traditions are respected, where going to actions all over the world foodnotbombs @ different races and genders and where I felt deeply immersed in bolobolo.co.za sexual orientations and all of the movement and the anarchist that is seen as resilience and movement. That started to shift strength rather than a source of for me in about 2005, really with problems. It’s a world that has hurricane Katrina. attained harmony with the natural A lot of us went down

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The 2013 Cape Town Anarchist Bookfair 7 December, Observatory

Dear anarchists and anarcho-friendly folks, It’s almost time for our third Cape Town bookfair and we’re looking for people to get involved. If you’d like to host a stall, present a talk or workshop, exhibit some art, sell some vegan food or contribute in any way to the bookfair, drop us a mail at [email protected]. Alternatively, keep checking Facebook and www.anarchistbookfair.co.za for the full event details.

Printed by the bolo’bolo anarchist collective • we fight and play for a world beyond measure Page 15 "The passion for destruction is also a creative passion." - Mikhail Bakunin

...and then music filled COMING UP SOON the air (76 Lower Main Rd, Observatory) AT BOLO'BOLO While our words and actions might still sound dissonant to Wed 27: Free screening: The but we’ll be opening up in the Wed 25: Apparently there’s some, full of rhetoric NOVEMBER and confusion and Wed 6: Free screening: Big Sellout | The impacts of evening for post-bookfair music some sort of religious holiday bearing the scars of Capitalism is the Crisis privatization and global trade, and conversation. Join us! on this day. We’ll probably be many thousands of | An explicitly anarchist as seen through the eyes of closed, ‘cos even anarchists years of hierarchy and oppression, borders exploration of capitalism and poor and working class people Wed 11: Free talk and need a break! in the developing world screening: Psychedelic and wars and the its fundamental problems that whole grey spectacle cannot be addressed through Medicine | What does of modern life, perhaps reform Date to be confirmed: contemporary science make if we listen closely Recycling workshop | learn to of substances like DMT, LSD, we can just about make out the subtle Wed 13: Free screening: make useful stuff from ‘waste’ psilocybin and ketamine? Come join in our talk / open harmonies and delicate Breaking out the Box | The melodic counterpoints, discussion on the therapeutic lives of black lesbians in South DECEMBER the shifting tempos and Africa potentials of these much complex rhythms and Wed 4: Free screening: The maligned substances; we’ll even, if we concentrate Burning Times | A classic just a little harder, the Wed 20: Free screening: We also screen some short films on documentary on the oppression very first and faintest feed the world | A troubling the subject of women as witches, featuring suggestion of a vast look at how food is produced crescendo. well-known anarchist and in the modern world, from Wed 18: Free screening: It is hard to pinpoint witch, Starhawk factory farms to toxic chemicals Live Nude Girls Unite! | A the exact beginning of this endlessly rising canon, but to wasteful packaging and provocative look at the world’s Sat 7: The Cape Town we know one thing for sure: inefficient modes of production first and only unionised radical Anarchist Bookfair afterparty! and distribution peep show! we are finding our voices. | We’ll be closed all day in order to join in the bookfair fun,

2: entered the Spanish Popular Front FROM HISTORY This month in government as Minister of Health in November of 1936, at the end of that glorious year in Spain where anarchism had reached its high TO LIFE anarchist history: water mark and large swathes of the country were running on anarchist principles, the songs of the free workers and the black and red flags When, from the vantage point of of the CNT-FAI filling the streets. The threat of fascism looming large, different continents and different 1917 & 1936 - our Montseny’s participation in the great unification against Franco - seen times, we read about these sad more favourably by the CNT inner clique than by the less compromising moments in anarchist history, anarchists in the liberated communities of Catalonia and Aragon - was there are two things we should mistakes harshly criticised by some of her comrades, among them Emma Goldman. always bear in mind:

1: In 1917, Russia was a hotbed of anarchism. In the buildup Montseny defended herself thus: “The anarchists have come into the First, that reality is infinitely to the October Revolution of that year some anarchists, Lenin’s Government in order to prevent the Revolution from deviating from its more complex than abstract revolutionary rhetoric of ‘all power to the soviets!’ rigning in course and in order to pursue it beyond the war, and also in order to principles and codes of conduct. oppose all possibility of dictatorial endeavours, wherever they should their ears and kindling false hopes of an imminent leaderless society None of us, I’m sure, no matter come from.” of free equals, elected to support the Bolsheviks. Impatient romantics how unwavering our anarchist that they were, those in and around Petrograd leapt straight into the Camillo Berneri, the great Italian anarchist who had come to Spain convictions, would envy the fray in mid-July, working with sailors and workers to reclaim people’s complicated position the power and establish a free soviet in the port city. Lenin, in typical to fight alongside his fellow revolutionaries, wrote a scathing letter to Montseny in April of the next year. In it he observes: “I believe that you Russian anarchists of 1917 found authoritarian fashion, ordered his ‘comrades’ to exercise discipline and themselves in, nor, unless we’re patience. Material conditions were not yet right. must pose yourself the problem of knowing if you are better defending the Revolution, if you are making a greater contribution to the struggle the worst kinds of armchair While some anarchists balked at this fraught coalition, not against Fascism by participating in the government, or if you would not sophists, would we trivialise least among them that fierce opponent of all Earthly and heavenly be infinitely more useful carrying the flame of your magnificent skill with the dififcult decision taken by authority Mikhail Bakunin, a strange submission took hold of the words among the combatants and to the rear.” Federica Montseny in 1936, even rest and they remained supportive of Lenin right up until the coup if in hindsight it might strike us in October. This starry-eyed alignment with authoritarian Marxism Three weeks after writing his letter, and shortly before his 40th birthday, that, in both instances, history did not, however, serve them well and things ended very much as Berneri was dragged from his home by Spanish Communist Party has failed to vindicate the Bakunin had always argued they would: after initially entertaining the members and executed. choices of our comrades. anarchists and their ‘infantile left ,’ Lenin grew tired of the theatrics and revealed the true nature of Bolshevik rule by placing the Second, having learned from free soviets under central control and, let us never forget this, ordering some of our more grievous the Cheka (secret police) to raid all the anarchist social centers and mistakes, let us try never to make disband the organised anarchist movement. The fearless anarchists them again. fought back bravely, but the iron fist came down with brutal force on that night of April 12, 1918: around 40 women and men were killed in pitched street battles and over 500 more were imprisoned. Some small flame of resistance remained, but for the most part the revolutionary fire of Russian anarchism had been extinguished. In the near future, instead, lay Stalin and the gulags.

Federica Montseny speaks at the commeration of Durruti

COLOPHON GENERAL Incendiary Times is typeset in INFORMATION Garamond 10/12 with asides in Akzidenz Grotesk; we've chosen Incendiary Times is published Memphis and its italic as our by the bolo'bolo anarchist primary display face, along with collective. You can find us at a few guest appearances by Mrs www.bolobolo.co.za. or on Eaves and her italic. Facebook or Twitter. If you’d like Our overwrought ramblings are to contribute to future issues or printed on Envirotext using two have anything else to say, email colour risography. [email protected]

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