Smelws LOWER SHAW FARM Autumn/Winter Programme of Weekends: 5 — 7 Oct: Rough'woodwork — Creative Carpentry
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Smelws LOWER SHAW FARM Autumn/Winter programme of weekends: 5 — 7 Oct: Rough'Woodwork — Creative Carpentry. 19 ~ 21 Oct: 34 Cowley Road, Oxford — - Walking Weekend. 7 9 Dec: Peace OX4iHZ — Tel: 0865-245301 Weekend. 4 6 Jan: Winter Cele— bration. £25 with concessions available. Wholefood meals. Send //M s.a.e to Lower Shaw Farm, Shaw, GREEN LINE is part of the \\\\\\ii‘l near Swindon, Wilts; or tel. international green movement. EWDEHOUSING CO—OP would like 0793 771080. It reflects the concerns of the to hear from people interested in alternative consensus which is living and working together in a COMMUNES NETWORK magazine is 'rejecting most of the norms of éhi rural setting near Oxford. All produced by and for people — capitalist industrial society ages welcome. For more informa— involved — or just interested as well as the established tion please write to us c/o in living and working collectively. 10 issues, 50p for 1, ideologies of right, left and Ferry House, Meadow Lane, Oxford Costs £5 per ‘ centre. The greens are far from OX4 4BJ or telephone 0865 249168: For further information send SAE exclusive: greenness is a per- to: Communes Network, c/o Some RESIDENTS WANTED for performing spective rather than an ideology. People in Leicester, 89 Evington arts/crafts community; goats, Anarchists, socialists, pagans, Road, Leicester LE2 10H. - poultry, large garden near Christians, feminists, gays, Swindon. Excellent environment RECON NEWSLETTER, contact magazine punks, hippies, vegans and so ‘ and fellow “wk.“ for children. vegetarian, non- for Buddhist ecologists on all rub shoulders. travellers. Two 1st class stamps il- smoking peace activists preferred. Contact Groundwell Farm, Swindon, to 45 Parsonage Road, Stockport Thanks , Richard! Wilts; phone (0793) 721111. SK4 4JW} PAMPIfiET: describes what the IN DOWNTOWN Gloucester, Greens are Green Line has benefitted for green rare. Frustrated, alone (adult— . objectives of an autonomous 2% years from the considerable group might be, and suggests how wise) green carpenter needing artistic talents of Richard Pro anarchism but no. .0 an Eco—branch might evolve gently contact. tt. It is difficult to 'over- into a green group. 19 pages. intellectual. Likes friendship, the state his contribution to Price: just 2 x 2nd class stamps. rapping, sounds, fayres, gather— magazine, particularly the Prom Mark.Kinzley, 7 Gaysham Ave., imfi. HEME,cm1mymmjmhfi covers he has designed for all t. Road, Gloucester. \\ .. Gants Hill, Ilford, Essex IG2 6TH. David, 9 Blenheim the issues to date. But with . 'Green Anarchist' making more R -‘.-_\\\w;-_-.u Predatory man is destroying he has tot demands on his time, the world and himself! 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PageZ Four articles from.different directions finding _ — _ m _ fl _ similar answers _ w ”IHIHHu't m _ _ _ m — _ m — _ _ — .— _ _ — _ — _ — CHANGE ‘1.-—-_."—:' THE SYSTEM I FOUND THIS very hard to write, but_have some very the electoral process. strong feelings and thoughts which I wanted to We, the people, don't need the state. It disempowers explore. I would like to stress that these are and divides us while maintaining those with economic only my personal feelings at the present time, and political power, and that power is derived from ’feelings that have been bounced around with other the competitive hierarchical view of the world. women and EEE' ‘Writing this has made me even.more wary of the isolating, one—sided nature of this For me, alternative politics is about your way of form of dialogue, but it did help somewhat in life — not party politics, which is a power game clarifying my thoughts. where people {usualLy.men) fight it out to have the For me, I feel there's a connection between veto over the direction of society. One can organise anarchism, feminism and the green movement, and politically without having to be a "party". It has that's in the way'we organise, whether it be to be a movement of and from the peeple, involving organising for effective political action or us in the process of empowerment. Energy needs to be organising our personal, domestic lives. Anyway, eroded and drained from the central bureaucracy, so the personal is political, isn't it? And for me, that decisions affecting the direction and quality. anarchism, that word and idea which conjures all of a person‘s life are made with their direct kinds of negative and fearful images, is liberating. involvement. This involves giving space to people to allow them to explore their own understanding of the It's the means and the ends argument. If we want world. It's an ecological process that understands to live in a world with a holistic, ecological the need for diversity and tolerance, through approach to our relationship with each other and COOperative and collective organising and decision— the natural environment, then surely the process of making. getting there should intimatehy refleCt that. Eberyone involved in working for social change is In a decentralised society with a federation of involved in different aspects of society, has come autonomous communities and tribes, there is no need from different social and political backgrounds for the tentacles of the state, and I don't feel withgdifferent ranges and depths of eXperience and of we‘ll get there unless the state and its power base education, formal and informal, but it's the way we withers away at the same time. relate to people in organising our daily lives that reflects what we are working towards. _I go by experience from a long time ago, but I do feel that delegated power corrupts. At the age of 9 I was put in a position of authority at school as It's the way we organise team leader, and stood in for the teacher while he'd gone out of the class. I took a point off a girl It seems we have to work out new'ways of organising for talking (as I was supposed to) which resulted in that will challenge the unquestioning belief in the her getting the cane.because at the end of the week necessity of the state and break its hold on our she had three minus points. She pleaded with me to hearts and minds, and for women to come into their forget that last point, but no, the rules had to be own. They should be the antithesis of hierarchical obeyed; and I felt even then how that position of methods because hierarchy and its intrinsic value power had separated me from the rest of the class in system is the very method that has put the world on some unconscious way. this road to disaster. And it’s the hierarchical, competitive system that supports the functions of the state which in turn perpetuates the hierarchical Delegated power corrupts system through the bureaucratic institutions of law, It deeply affected me, and I have never forgotten it. education, military and.government. That then gets I vowed at the time that Iwould never accept a legitimated every few years through the fallacy of prefectship if offered at the next school. When page 3 that occasion arose I was even more unshaken in my divisions created through hierarchy are being broken belief and watched in horror as my friends, now down over common ground. Connections have now been prefects, were unthinkingly dishing out discipline made to the whole of the nuclear fuel cycle with and enforcing the arbitrary rules in order for them attention increasingly focussed on the British to obtain their sixth—form privileges and respectaL multinational RTZ and its illegal apartheid bility for university — something they had moaned supporting uranium mining activities in Namibia; to , about in_their earlier years. They had changed racism; to supporting miners"wives; making . through their complianee. For me, that model of connections with women in prison and others who have unquestioning obedience to hierarchical authority at 7 come against the arbitrary powers of the police, and school was the rehearsal for fitting in with the with the movement for a nuclear—free and independent demands of the state-and the maintenance of the.