October 2017 – Anarres Project for Alternative Futures

Harassment is about Controlling Women’s Space

By Teka Lark (October 24, 2017)

Sexual harassment of women is about keeping women in their place as subordinates.
This can refer to physical space in public transit, public street or figurative space as in the workplace.
This is why what we wear, where we go, and our state of mind when we get there, is seriously looked at before any concern is addressed as real.

Only “good” girls can be harassed. If you are a WOC: you are automatically not good; so no matter what you say, you did something. If you are a white woman: if you ever have done anything that a religious text states is wrong, you are not good. 100% of women who leave the house according to institutional sexism and racism don’t really deserve any consideration anyway, because we aren’t supposed to leave the house, but to work for free as volunteers, or to go to a religious ceremony.

When I was carFREE in LA, not only was I harassed by just random dudes on the street, but also by COPS. I was stopped no less than 5 times for prostitution when I was going to work to teach special education preschool.

(Of course I could have made a complaint, but at the time, I was writing about public transit and didn’t believe in making me the story. In general, the personal anecdote-style journalism, they force POC to do makes me ill, and upholds institutional racism and sexism, because then only one demographic gets viewed as speaking objectively…you see how this is all connected, right?)

In LA, if you take public transit and want to get to work on time, you have to be on the street as early as 3:00 a.m. and you stand in the dark, especially if you work in education.

How are Black women going to stay safe when we’re automatically viewed as “asking for it” by the institution for being alive and being on the public street.
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Action: Complete Street design for all communites, so no one ever has to walk around in the dark with no witnesses to harassment by sleazy guys and the police.

Universities Should Not be Trojan Horses for Alt Right

By Alexander Reid Ross (October 23, 2017)

When it comes to shutting down minority protections in the interests of the 37 percent of the country that supports Trump, Republicans seem eager to support a “democratic mandate.” However, when the masses openly repudiate such a loathsome would-be cardboard tyrant as this, the fear of a “tyranny of the majority” is invoked by our benevolent rulers. Hypocrisy is the downfall of education.

The assumption that universities are forced by law to allow anybody who has the support of a small student group to speak under their auspices is both foul and false. Universities regularly reject speakers and have the right to do so based on any number of objections, whether right or wrong. There are engines driving the alt right—for instance, those that surfaced out of the quagmire of Breitbart and neo-reaction in the recent Buzzfeed article. Universities that allow Richard Spencer and his misogynist, racist, odious gang to step foot on their grounds is not only violating the very premises on which they were founded (eg, University of Florida’s mission statement “for economic, cultural and societal benefit”), they are putting their own students at risk of the extreme violence that their followers have carried out.

A state that would call a state of emergency to defend this obnoxious little spectacle only plays into the circus. Intentionality is of less concern in this case than the kind of unprincipled idiocy that it takes to make universities into trojan horses for fascist brutes rather than places of reason and learning. Whoever permits this “speaking tour” charade cosigns the murder of vulnerable people throughout the country.

Revolution: Past-Present-Future

(October 11, 2017)

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The Anarres Project for Alternative Futures announces a new series for Fall, marking the hundred year anniversary of revolutionary social change in Russia. We will be hosting several events that seeks to understand the dynamics of social upheaval and political transformation. We also want to know what we can learn today about revolutions from the past in order to imagine and build a more just and beautiful society in the future.

Guerrillas of Desire: A Conversation on Revolution, Organizing, and Everyday Resistance

Author Kevin Van Meter will join us to discuss his new book, Guerrillas of Desire (AK Press, 2017) on Friday, October 20, 2017 in MU 213 (Pan Afrikan Room) from 4-6pm.

About the book:
Behind the smiling faces of cashiers, wait staff, and workers of all sorts, a war is going on, usually without the knowledge of official political and labor organizations. Guerrillas of Desire begins with a provocation: The Left is wrong. It’s historical and current strategies are too-often based on the assumption that working and poor people are unorganized, acquiescent to systems of domination, or simply uninterested in building a new world. The fact is, as C.L.R. James has noted, they “are rebelling every day in ways of their own invention”: pilfering, sabotaging, faking illnesses, squatting, fleeing, and counter-strategizing. Kevin Van Meter maps these undercurrents, documenting the history of everyday resistance under slavery, in peasant life, and throughout modern capitalism, while showing that it remains an important factor in revolution and something radicals of all stripes must understand.

https://www.akpress.org/guerrillas-of-desire.html

Sponsored by: Coalition of Graduate Employees (CGE), Corvallis-Albany I.W.W., Anarres Project for Alternative Futures, Allied Students for Another Politics (ASAP).

2. American Revolutionary: The Grace Lee Boggs Story: Film and Discussion

Join us to view the documentary “American Revolutionary: The Evolution of Grace Lee Boggs”, with discussion on October 25, 2017 in Milam Hall 218 at 6pm.

“The documentary film, AMERICAN REVOLUTIONARY: THE EVOLUTION OF GRACE LEE BOGGS, plunges us into Boggs’s lifetime of vital thinking and action, traversing the major U.S. social movements of the last century; from labor to civil rights, to Black Power, feminism, the Asian American and environmental justice movements and beyond. Boggs’s constantly evolving strategy—her willingness to re-evaluate and change tactics in relation to the world shifting around her—drives the story forward. Angela Davis, Bill Moyers, Bill Ayers, Ruby Dee and Ossie Davis, Danny Glover, Boggs’s late husband James and a host of Detroit comrades across three generations help shape this uniquely American story. As she wrestles with a Detroit in ongoing transition, contradictions of violence and non-violence, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, the 1967 rebellions, and non-linear notions of time and history, Boggs emerges with an approach that is radical in its simplicity and clarity: revolution is not an act of aggression or merely a protest. Revolution, Boggs says, is about something deeper within the human experience — the ability to transform oneself to transform the world.”

3. Revolution Matters: A Discussion on the Lessons from Comparative Revolutions.

Join us for a community discussion with Dr. Barbara Muraca, Dr. Joseph Orosco, Dr. Robert Thompson, and Dr. Tony Vogt about what we can learn from the Haitian Revolution, Mexican Revolution, Russian Revolution, and the German Sparticist Uprising of 1918 for making social change today.

Thursday, November 9, 2017, in MU 208 (La Raza Room) at 12 noon.

Co sponsored by: Anarres Project for Alternative Futures, Allied Students for Another Politics, and Students United for Palestinian Equality.

We Know the Truth: Milo and Breitbart are Platforms for Fascism

By Alexander Reid Ross (October 9, 2017)

A journalist who interviewed me recently asked if the recent revelations regarding Milo and Breitbart angered me. I find it difficult to imagine how I could be further angered by the present situation. Of course it’s maddening, but anyone who spent more than 60 seconds clicking into Breitbart for the past five years has taken a crash course in cold, hard rage. To be honest, I feel more vindicated than anything else.

I’ve been arguing for a while now that the supposed clear division between “Alt Light” and “Alt Right” is more of a porous membrane that provides political credibility to the former while bringing the latter access to power in a “creeping” process. Most anarchists have been arguing this, which is why we’ve seen so many out in the streets protesting the so-called “Alt Light” as hard as the “Alt Right.” Those people have been mercilessly ridiculed and wrung out through the press, as a number of scholars and reporters cultivated direct relationships with the Alt Right.

The BuzzFeed report is stunning but doesn’t show the extent of the phenomenon, just its most intense and obvious iterations. One might say, “we now understand that Bannon declared Breitbart ‘the platform for the alt-right,’ which was only true insofar as Breitbart became a nexus through which members of the alt-right could interface with the radical right and conservative movement on common ground…. [Milo asserted] a pro-alt-right position… Breitbart established not so much ‘the platform’ as a kind of porous populist membrane known as the ‘alt-lite’ through which fascism could creep in and out of mainstream discourse. In a sense, the white nationalist movement had been given a perfect medium.”

That’s actually what I wrote… in my book… last year. We had the facts, folks. We know the truth. What are we going to do about it?

“Terrorism” Is About Race in the US

By Teka Lark (October 4, 2017)

The problem with the conversation in regards to what is and what is not terrorism is that, in the US, people don’t get that our definition of terrorism has little to do with political ideology and has 100% to do with not being a white person born in the US.

Maybe in other parts of the world terrorist means something, but in the US–a country that murdered Native American men women and children because they wanted their land, and enslaved Africans for hundreds of years, and then spent another 100 years murdering them for sport–terrorism is a code word.

It is a code word like ghetto, urban, thug, slut…the term terrorist isn’t about terrorism in the US, it is about race.

The four little girls blown up in 1963 in Birmingham, Alabama? The people behind that, are they terrorists? No, that is different? How? Not different, just the victims are not white and the perpetrators were white.

This “let us wait and see what this guy really is” assumes that the label of terrorism is reasonable and objective.

It is not.

OK, you still doubt my assertion. You are going to continue to be reasonable in the era of Trump.

You need political motivation. OK, his political motivation was capitalism. Yes, capitalism; is that motivation enough for you?

Oh, but that is different.

The god of money, power and privilege isn’t political, even though my ancestors were brought here and enslaved because of it, and a whole way of life was murdered and attempted to be erased in the US because of it.

But you still say this is different.

Think about why you think this is different.

If he were brown, Muslim, born not in US, and was called a terrorist would you still think I was being unreasonable.

I live in a place that will put you in jail for a parking ticket and weed, and I am unreasonable, because I call a white American with a college degree who injured 506 people and murdered 56 with an automatic rifle a terrorist?

Trump Warns Puerto Ricans that Colonialism Will Continue

By Ana Castillo (October 3, 2017)

“We will not rest, however, until the people of Puerto Rico are safe. …and we will be there every day until that happens,” he said.

A few days later, the Narcissist blasted:

“… Such poor leadership ability by the Mayor of San Juan, and others in Puerto Rico, who are not able to get their workers to help. They want everything to be done for them when it should be a community effort.”

Then he went to spend the weekend golfing at one of his resorts.

Also from him:

“We’re literally starting from scratch. Ultimately, the government of Puerto Rico will have to work with us to determine how this massive rebuilding effort — will end up being one of the biggest ever — will be funded and organized, and what we will do with the tremendous amount of existing debt already on the island,” he said.

As the heir and benefactor of colonizers who have not only exploited North and South America and the Caribbean but general populations throughout the world, he reminds the Puerto Rican people that they will have to repay any rebuilding (a catastrophe arguably resulting from corporate exploitative abuse of the environment) on top of their federal debt.

It isn’t an expectation more than it is a degrading warning that Puerto Rican people have less expectation today than ever of gaining the right to self-determination.