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We Need a Theology of Liberation in the United States

By Mikasi Goodwin (June 22, 2018)

I was born and raised in Oregon, on colonized land, in a state founded specifically on systemic racism. I grew up poor. I grew up in a rural, conservative environment. I was very conservative for a long time. I am white, a trans woman, a lesbian, and a poor person. I say this to establish who is speaking, and what context I am speaking from.

When I was 13 I went to Bible Camp. Over a week away from home, our denomination’s pastors worked tirelessly to convert us. We were in church 3 times a day. Everything we did had a religious component, even when we went swimming or on hikes. By the end of the week, I felt sure that I was a sinner, that I was going to hell, and that I wanted to be saved. For the next few years I was a zealous believer in what I thought was the gospel, and what I thought was a lifesaving religious tradition.
I read the Bible fervently. I read commentaries, I studied & fasted. What I found wasn’t what I was taught to find. Time & time again I was getting a different message than my church. I was getting a message of liberation, of solidarity & of love from the gospel. Even immersed in conservatism like water, I couldn’t come to the same conclusions. This contradiction quickly led to a break with my church, and with Christianity in general. I spent a long time wandering & searching.

I didn’t find my way back to faith in a church service. It wasn’t reading the Bible that illuminated my own deeply held spiritual beliefs. God didn’t speak to me in the language of the church, in the scriptures & traditions of Christianity, or the acts of Christians I knew from my old church family. God spoke to me in the voices of people suffering under oppression, in prophetic voices unafraid to speak even the hardest truths. God spoke to me in the long struggle for liberation led by oppressed people. What did I find when I listened? I found that many oppressed peoples throughout the last 100 years have used a very specific tool to analyze their situation. That tool is called Marxism.

So, what is Marxism? That isn’t an easy question to answer. Marxism is about discovering the root of social problems, it is a radical way of analyzing the world. Marx says that ideas are the primary force that shapes our world but also that these ideas don’t come out of nowhere. These ideas are a product of human beings, of human societies, of our ‘material conditions’.
Marxism is about historical materialism. It says societies are divided into contradictory classes, slaves vs. slaveowners, lords vs. serfs, employers vs. employees. These are specific societal relationships that boil down to oppressor & oppressed. In my view, the goal of Marxist analysis is to find a way to transcend this relationship of oppressed & oppressor and create a liberated world.
The idea of creating a liberated world is by no means new. A reading of the New Testament illuminates many similar ideas about transcending class in early Christianity. The Apostle Paul said, “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus” These words weren’t just a pretty spiritual allegory. The early church was known for distributing their wealth equally. In the book of Acts, it says, “All who believed were together and had all things in common; they would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need.” Even Jesus said, “If you wish to be perfect, go, sell your possessions, and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me… …Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.” The call of the gospel sounds awfully similar to Marx’s famous slogan, “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs”.

Marxism & Christianity have often had an antagonistic relationship, but that antagonism is by no means universal. In Latin America in the 50’s & 60’s, an emergent group of Christian clergy members began to advocate for a fusion of Marxist analysis & Christian theology. The result? Liberation theology. Many of the concepts of liberation theology existed before its inception. Wherever the gospel was in the hands of the oppressed, especially in slave communities in the Americas, a type of theology of liberation sprang up. A theology that says to the oppressed, God is on your side. God is positioned as the liberator, the ultimate spiritual source of all struggles to free the slave & the captive. Liberation theology says to the Christian, you have a mission, a mission to establish the Kingdom of God on Earth, and that means nothing less than the unconditional liberation of all humankind. Jesus did not come to found a religion, but to spread the message of redemption, liberation and justice.

Liberation theology is a call to return to the historical mission of the Christian church & the gospel, abandoned by Christians as Christianity became co-opted and turned into a violent & oppressive institution. I am convinced this is the message modern Christianity needs. As young people leave the church in droves to wander the wilderness because they have been betrayed, abandoned & ignored by their faith communities, this theology calls them back in. This theology called me back in, a transgender lesbian who was completely abandoned by my faith community.

We need a theology of liberation. A theology of revolution, justice and love. We need a theology that demands of us that we feed the hungry, house the houseless and put our bodies on the line for justice. We need a theology that says to the oppressed, you are worthy, your voice is important. We need a theology that humanizes, that encourages solidarity, not just charity. A theology that says, “I will give up all I own to raise up the oppressed and empower them”. A theology that spurs us to act tirelessly to free people from the bondage of oppressive systems.

To be clear, this is not about electoral campaigns. This is not about legislation. You can’t elect liberation. You can’t legislate liberation. It takes a spiritual, cultural, and deeply personal shift among all of us. It takes a revolution. It takes an Exodus from the bondage of the United States to find redemption in building a new world, one without borders and nations. This is a long struggle, one that people in the Americas have been waging for over 500 years. It is by no means impossible.

Liberation theology is an expression of this long struggle. Faith in ancestors, faith in God, faith in deliverance from bondage & oppression has carried this long struggle into today. Many on the left have lost hope that they will see liberation in their lifetime, and many in faith communities have lost sight of the vision of liberation. What we can gain from each other is a vision for a better world, and the hope that will sustain us to build that better world in our lifetimes.

When the Israelites were struggling for their liberation from Egypt every attempt to crush them was made. Even when Pharoah’s kingdom lay in ruins, he chased them until the bitter end. We will face the same kind of entrenched resistance every step of the way, but I know that together, we can overcome any obstacle that stands between us & freedom.

What No One Says About the New Portlandias: They are Also Very White

By Arun Gupta (April 24, 2018)

“Pittsburgh is the New Portland” has become a cliche. The meaning is it’s a medium-sized environmentally friendly city hospitable to young people who are creative, have an unorthodox lifestyle, or politics, and the city is low cost and close to nature, at least compared to cities like New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco.

What is usually left unsaid about très cool Portlandias is their whiteness. The culture, politics, and ideology of Portland is saturated with whiteness, but you never really notice it if you are white. Histories of violent ethnic cleansing, police brutality, disparity in housing, education, and employment are erased. Portlandias become blank spaces for play by the same homogenized social group.

Portland is often described as “the whitest big city in America.” Turns out that may not be true. Pittsburgh is the least diverse among the top 100 metropolitan areas: It’s 87% White, 8% Black, 2% Asian, and 1% Hispanic. I found this surprising given the city of Pittsburgh has had a significant African-American population for nearly a century. The numbers though are for the metropolitan area, which include much of Allegheny County.

There are a lot of complexities to this. As Pittsburgh deindustrialized in the seventies and eighties, the Black population increased and became poorer as whites and middle class Blacks moved to the suburbs. But as Pittsburgh started to acquire the cachet of a creative city, starting in the 2000s, it appears the Black population started to decline faster than the overall population decline in the city and surrounding Allegheny County.

I suspect what is going on is also extreme segregation. Austin, Texas is often lumped together with Portland. This article says it may be “the most segregated city in Texas,” which would be astonishing given the racial divisions there.

I have my own thoughts as to what is going on and what it all means. But I am interested in hearing yours.

Interview: Alexander Riccio

Alexander Riccio is a labor organizer based in Corvallis, Oregon. He co-hosts the podcast LabourWave Revolution Radio and is currently collaborating with the Common Space Collective on a project to revive the commons in the Willamette Valley.

What are the sorts of experiences that led you to become a union organizer?

I am asked this question, or a variation of it, a lot and I find it’s very difficult to answer. I think this is because when people ask, ‘how did you become an activist’ or ‘how did you become an organizer’ they seem to actually be asking ‘what is the secret to change people from being passive to active?’ At the risk of disappointing such earnestness, I do not think there is a secret formula we can learn that will magically turn people into activists or organizers. The process by which someone becomes who they are is one which covers an entire lifetime. While I believe there are cataclysmic moments, or events, that inevitably occur in a person’s life that will change the course of their personal trajectory, I think these are often less important occasions in a person’s development than we might like to believe. The experiences of everyday life are the ones that shape a person, and these often take on the appearance of monotony or lull, so much so that we tend to neglect how important such everyday life is for shaping a person’s perspective and steering them towards a life of passivity or action.

For me, I grew up primarily in a working-class house raised by a single-mother. My class background is complicated, because there were years where my mother re-married and her spouse slowly rose up the class ladder during their marriage. So I remember in one year I moved six times across three different states from apartment to apartment, and then we began moving less and our moves turned from one apartment to another to one condo to a rental house to a mortgaged home. There were years of stability, and then those years changed again to precarious living.

My experience as an adult has been one of precariousness to a slow and steady improvement in my class conditions (though not in a linear way) to where now I am modestly comfortable, but still very much a part of the working-class. All of this, which likely seems unremarkable, I think is tremendously important for the development of my political worldview.

I also grew up in a home where abuse at the hands of a former step-father was very common, which forced me to encounter the true ugliness of what some might refer to as “toxic masculinity.” I call it patriarchy. This was part of my everyday experience, and all of these things have shaped me and ultimately steered me toward organizing.

There were momentous events, as well, that directed me to organizing. Again, I don’t think on the whole these events were as important as the experiences of my everyday life, but they were still significant. The most significant single event, I believe, which guided me toward organizing was Occupy Wall Street. OWS sprang to life when I was twenty-three years old, working in a pizza restaurant where I made $8.50 an hour and had no healthcare (which was a particular challenge for me as I have chronic asthma). No one had to convince me that we live in a class society, but until OWS no one was saying things like “We are the 99%.” Once I heard that slogan it clicked for me that my material conditions as a wage-earner with no social safety net was a political relationship.

At the time of Occupy I was not yet ready to dive into activism and be a part of the movement, but I visited the encampments in Atlanta a couple of times and listened to people talk about a range of topics, from police brutality to the oppression of women to the dominance of the ruling class (the 1%), and then shortly after my visits the entire Occupy movement was brutally crushed by police. It was shocking to me at the time, and I realize in hindsight how naive I must have been to be shocked, but seeing the news for a week-straight of encampment after encampment being broken up by police and people getting the shit kicked out of them is something I’ll never forget. If you ever want to see me get ruffled, which I’m typically a pretty calm person, just tell me about how much “freedom” we have in the US to criticize our government.

I had to process what happened during Occupy for a while, I feel like at least a year, and then it became clear to me that I needed to get involved.

Who would you consider your organizing heroes and what did you learn from them that inspires you?

I’ve been very privileged in that I’ve had many great mentors who have helped guide me as an organizer. To sort of break the fourth wall here, two of my mentors who were quite honestly the biggest influences in my organizing are Tony Vogt and Joseph Orosco, the founders of the Anarres Project and two professors I had serve on my graduate school committee when I was a student. I also want to acknowledge Dr. Robert Thompson and Dr. Allison Hurst as great influences on me and my politics.

To me, there are two sides to the question of who are my “organizing heroes.” On the one side, there are those whose writings and political engagements have been inspiring and influential for me, and on the other side there are those who I have organized alongside that have inspired me and given me reason for hope. I feel that the latter are more foundational.

I’m impressed by the work of Jane McAlevey, Ursula le Guin, David Graeber, and many others. But, to sound a bit corny, my heroes are the ordinary people that I get to work alongside regularly. I’ve lived in Corvallis, Oregon now for over four years and I’ve been able to engage and work with so many people, and I continue to encounter new folks who are considerate and care about changing the world.

What inspires me the most is meeting someone and then getting to witness their own political development. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve met someone who is completely new to organizing, and maybe thinks politics is a matter of voting for either a Democrat or Republican, and then have witnessed them become radicalized and tremendous leaders. It happens all the time.

These experiences help recharge my energy, because it reminds me that there are potential radicals everywhere and people are capable of enormous personal growth. As well, the vast majority of people that I’ve engaged with in political conversations, even when at first they’ve seemed like a conservative or apologist for the status quo, have proven to be incredibly sensitive and compassionate. Nurturing those qualities of compassion and sensitivity is a primary task for organizers. If we approach organizing from a framework where we recognize people as dynamic and not static, that they’re politics are not fixed but always changing, then we can begin to start recognizing, as John Holloway puts it, “the rebellion in each and every one of us.”

Since we’re all potential agents of change, then we don’t really need to rely on the heroics of a few individual people to inspire us, and really we probably limit ourselves when we’re searching for those few famed heroes because likely the heroes we’re searching for are right in front of us all along.

What gives you hope for the future?

In addition to the things I’ve said about every person’s extraordinary capacity for change, what gives me hope is the fact that capitalism is not stable. Its power seems inescapable, but in fact the systems of domination we all live under are unstable and have many weaknesses.

I always make the following point when people slip into despair and fatalism, which is a particularly big problem for Leftist intellectuals (the ghost of Foucault perhaps): if capitalism were so absolutely powerful then why is it necessary to keep innovating techniques of surveillance and social control? In fact, why is it necessary for all the police and policing if the status quo were so total?

I make this point to highlight that capitalism is always having to conspire new ways of trying to control people because we are always rebelling against it, and as far back as written history one finds that there is a constant rebellion by ordinary people against any system of domination they live under. Silvia Federici points out that capitalism itself emerged as a counter-revolution to explosive liberation movements happening in the 16th and 17th centuries.

Maybe it’s just as plausible as any other claim about human nature to suggest that part of human nature is the refusal to be oppressed? The tendency latent in humans to refuse their subordination is something that continues to fuel my commitment to organizing, because while the future is not predetermined something we can reasonably assume as a given is that people will continue to fight against any forms of injustice we collectively encounter. Because of the human drive toward rebellion, capitalism is not stable. So that’s hope. The harder challenge is how to maximize such refusal into something at the scale we need to overturn this rotten system.

What do you think are the most significant obstacles to social/economic justice in the future?

I genuinely believe that the vast majority of people are capable of personal growth stimulated by their empathy for others, but what we encounter today is an incredibly isolating society where public space is steadily shrinking and the opportunities for people to connect with one another on a face-to-face basis are disappearing. When we are alienated in such a way, it becomes incredibly easy for people to dehumanize each other, because we don’t have to see each other’s lives and experiences as fundamentally human. In other words, attaining justice will require that we begin recognizing each other as human beings.

Part of how power is embodied is through the display of who gets to be considered human and who doesn’t. Within feminist theory there is the concept of “interpretative labor,” where what these thinkers have explored is how people who are oppressed are constantly in the position of having to identify the emotional needs of their oppressors. Oppressed people do this as a strategy for survival.

What this means is that we’re constantly looking through the gaze of the powerful in order to empathize with their so-called plight (consider here the despicable notion of the “white man’s burden” coined by Rudyard Kipling used as a pretext for invading foreign countries).

I remember one specific conversation I had in a classroom where I began talking about how difficult the labor and life of a farmworker is and how CEOs of big banks are not creating socially valuable goods that we can actually eat, and therefore we should be paying farmworkers more than CEOs when someone immediately said, “But those CEOs have hard jobs, and it can be really stressful to be a CEO.” What about the stress for the worker in the fields being paid poverty wages?

Coming back to my original point, I think these struggles to be recognized as human are really rooted in the structures of everyday life and the inability for people to have regular meaningful contact with one another. If we could start creating spaces where people can come together to relate to each other as humans, then I think we’ll begin making progress on these fronts.

Take up space.

Take it all.

I think one of our immediate tasks in fighting capitalism is to transfer as much private space as possible into public space, and as much public space as possible into the commons. And when we begin to start thinking about the commons, we can really enlarge our collective imagination about just what these spaces might look like and what they could mean. Common spaces could be seed exchanges and community gardens, open software programs and a collectively owned internet, they could be communes or cooperative workplaces, land trusts for sustainable farming or housing, and they could even be cooperatively owned laundry mats with free libraries and free educational classes.

The absence of shared spaces really fatigues our social movement energies, and I think if we begin to start creating spaces which can be for the purpose of organically reproducing our movement energies and relating to one another on a human level then we can shatter our collective alienation and really build a better world.

What books or movies would you recommend people study to learn about organizing and social change?

There are so many great books to read, but I’ll share a few that have been particularly impactful for me. John Holloway’s In, Against, and Beyond Capitalism; Jane McAlevey’s No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power; adrienne maree brown’s Emergent Strategies; Our Word is Our Weapon a collection of works by the Zapatistas, David Graeber’s The Democracy Project; Andrew Cornell’s Oppose and Propose; Grace Lee Bogg’s The Next American Revolution; and for a great encyclopedia of key radical terms and ideas I love the collection Keywords for Radicals: The Contested Vocabulary of Late-Capitalist Struggle.

For movies, the series Trouble put out by sub.media is spectacular and I love the films, Tout Va Bien with Jane Fonda and Z directed by Costa-Gavras. I also really like movies like It and A Bug’s Life because they have very clear messages on inequality and the power of collective action— just think about it.

But for all the great books and films one can learn about social movements, nothing really beats the education you’ll receive by getting involved with a group, whether that means joining an existing group or creating a new one. So for folks that are looking to gain more insights and education on how social change happens, the best way is to put yourself out there and start forming relationships with people in your area that are passionate like you are. I know for many this is daunting because we can feel like we don’t know enough, we’re not educated on political matters, we don’t have anything to say or our own original ideas, and we don’t have the experience all of which may make one feel very insecure. But, speaking as an organizer, I can guarantee you that you’re not alone in this feeling and the people that present themselves as super confident, cool, and knowledgeable on every little thing often are full of shit because we’re all really trying to figure this out as we go. Like the Zapatistas say, “walking we ask questions.”

(Interview with Joseph Orosco, February 2018)

Remember Freedom’s Eve

By Teka Lark (January 2, 2018)

It was just the 155th Anniversary of Freedom’s Eve.

Freedom’s Eve began in 1862 on New Year’s Eve. It was the night before the Proclamation of Emancipation issued by President Lincoln.

People often think that slavery ended after that. It did not.

People weren’t freed automatically on January 1, 1863.

In order for people to become free they had to get away from their master and the Proclamation only applied to 3 million of the 4 million enslaved Black people.

“It authorized the Union armed forces to carry this into effect as they took control of areas of the Confederacy. When they received fleeing slaves, they were no longer to return them to their masters. The Proclamation also authorized the Union armies to recruit these freed slaves to fight.”

So on December 31, 1862 Free Black people and enslaved Black people gathered at Methodist and Baptist churches around the country and resolved to fight to make sure the order to outlaw the evil that was slavery enforced and to free Black people all around the US regardless of what that piece of paper said.

We are still fighting.

Octavia Butler and the Journey Toward Utopia in the New Star Trek Discovery Series

By Joseph Orosco (August 10, 2017)

Lots of people are noticing that our pop culture seems obsessed with apocalyptic and dystopia themes lately. Father of cyberpunk William Gibson thinks our narrative vision of the future is shrinking because we are focused on the end of the world tales. Brianna Rennix is concerned that the only people that seem to hold onto the dream of exploring space are right libertarians. In particular, she thinks we live at a time in which the picture of humanity as represented in something like Star Trek appears hokey and unduly optimistic. Hollywood actor and producer Seth MacFarland says he is fed up with the single-minded fascination with dystopia and his new TV sci fi space series intentionally harkens back to the old optimism of Star Trek from the 1960s.

This past year, the Anarres Project hosted a series to mark the 50^th anniversary of the network premiere of Star Trek: The Original Series. One of the events was called Star Trek and Black Lives Matter. We hosted a viewing of of one of my favorite episodes from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine “Far Beyond the Stars” in which Captain Sisko imagines himself living as a science fiction writer in the 1950s United States. The episode depicts the subtle bigotry, institutional racism, and state violence faced by Blacks in this era in a way that highlights the progress of racial justice into the 23^rd century. What is most striking about this episode–that came out almost 20 years ago–is that it dramatically crests with the police execution of a young Black man in a manner that is reminiscent of the all the shootings that have given rise to the Black Lives Matter movement. Watching that episode today demonstrates how some things have not changed in terms of racial progress—and why the future of Star Trek seems so distant.

During the discussion of the episode, one African American woman said that while she liked Star Trek a lot, she thought it was less inspiring than a lot of current science fiction. The future of humanity it portrayed was great, but it was so removed from our present that it seemed almost irrelevant or impossible to attain. I asked her what she did like and she responded that she felt Octavia Butler’s work, especially The Parable of the Sower, was much more appropriate to our world today.

Butler’s Sower series is interesting because it is set in a dystopian near future with societal collapse, not unlike something you see in current zombie stories such as The Walking Dead. But the story here is about a group driven by the hopeful vision of humanity travelling and extending to the stars–Earthseed. They are surrounded by death and danger, betrayal and isolation. Yet, what is inspiring in Butler’s universe is how the communities deal with these challenges and how the vision of Earthseed creates a kind of solidarity that can be experienced through such hope. Ultimately, it’s a story of how to cope and overcome dystopia with a rich sense of humanity and how take the steps toward utopia.

This current mood is why I think it makes sense that the new Star Trek: Discovery series to premiere later this Fall is one that is set in the timeline before Star Trek: The Original Series. Fans have been criticizing the choice to have a series in the early 23^rd century, a decade before Kirk and Spock; these fans want to see the future after the 24^th century in the timeline established by the series Star Trek: Voyager.

But we are in a dystopian and skeptical era. We’ve seen what humanity is like at its best already, exploring the farthest reaches of space and holding onto its best ethical principles–that’s what Star Trek Voyager was all about. We want a more Butlerian Star Trek now. What we crave is now is more guidance through adversity; we want to know how we get to the post-scarcity utopia represented by the Federation and Star Fleet. Mary Wiseman, an actor in the new series really captures this craving in her comments about Star Trek Discovery at this year’s San Diego Comic Con:

“’Star Trek’ is so idealist because it could feel like the end of the world right now, America feels extremely divided. People can’t hear each other people can’t have compassion for each other… What ‘Star Trek’ [asks is], ‘What qualities are we going to have to have, and what ways are we going to have to think to move forward to a better future? Not just survive in a dystopian one.’ And I think those qualities are compassion, openheartedness, open-mindedness, respect for difference, teamwork, rigor, strength.”

That is, we need sci-fi to assist us in reflecting on the hard challenges we face as human beings, what is it that we have to overcome about ourselves, in order to arrive at a world in which the need for a Black Lives Matter movement is unnecessary or unthinkable.

From Social Movement to Revolutionary Movement: Why We Need Both

By Hyung Kyu Nam (February 3, 2017

We should see ourselves in a long arc of change globally as we face a crisis with imperialism, capitalism, ecocide and both political and social oppression that are all interconnected: Zapatista, Seattle WTO, Tunisia, Egypt, Wisconsin, Spain, Greece, Occupy, BLM, Idle No More, Umbrella Movement. Ultimately, these crises require radical change.

To frame my comments, here are some definitions from The Social Movements Reader (edited by Goodwin and Jasper).

“A social movement is a collective, organized, sustained, and non-institutional challenge to authorities, powerholders, or cultural beliefs and practices.

A revolutionary movement is a social movement that seeks, at minimum, to overthrow the government or state, and perhaps to change the economy and key institutions of the entire society.”

There have been many social movements throughout history and in the present day, in US and globally; however, only a few combined resistance and creating alternative institutions with winning power and taking over the big institutions, for revolutionary change.

There are two notable examples of an evolution from movement of the squares to winning power; in Greece with solidarity networks and majority seats in parliament and Barcelona.

SYRIZA, a coalition of radical left parties, capitulated under the threat of global capital, while the Barcelona en Comu (in common) movement won power in a city and is governing in radically democratic ways, even in a country that has been in a similar crisis as Greece.

In the US, we have the Malcom X Grassroots Movement/Cooperation Jackson and the Richmond Progressive Alliance. Both theorists like Murray Bookchin and the European municipal movements call for creating confederations of mutual support networks.

For these revolutionary changes, we will need direct action that target power holders in order to negotiate with them as well as alternative mutual aid organizations, but we cannot stop there. We will also need to win power, in the city where it’s most accessible, with a new vision for radically inclusive and participatory democracy, where we negotiate with each other, over our communities, institutions, and commons and directly and democratically control and transform systems in our city, from policing and local economic development to infrastructure, transportation and water management, as well as city budgets, planning, and procurement. The magnitude of our political, ecological, social and economic crises need systemic transformation, which cannot happen without taking this next step to build the ‪#NextSystem.

We should focus on our city, not because rural places, the state and nation don’t matter, but because we are best positioned to make real democratic changes here, that then must become models for transformation to be adapted and spread horizontally and vertically, in what Gar Alperovitz calls a checker board strategy. This way, we can go beyond single issue reforms to create coherent systemic and revolutionary changes, because our crises are systemic and interconnected.

We face these crises and after this election, more people are recognizing that they can’t just continue their daily lives and that we need to mobilize and organize. The danger is that this is where things can fall apart, where we struggle to envision our future beyond resistance and struggle to build coalitions and agreed upon strategies and tactics towards common visions and goals.

To win, we will need to study, analyze and build inclusive and powerful coalitions around shared strategies to not only address our crises but, to take next step with strategic actions to create a real democracy. Let’s use this moment as a shock to the system, and make our way out of the underlying crises we’ve been facing even before this election. Let’s work together and build our skills to be effective change makers.

Finding Hope in Dystopia: Children of Men

By Joseph Orosco (January 27, 2017)

This academic term, the Anarres Project for Alternative Futures teamed up with the Allied Studies for Another Politics! and the Spring Creek Project to host a film and discussion series called “Finding Hope in Dystopia”. The idea behind the series was to create a space for discussion about how to find hope for transformative social change in times of social and political despair. We wanted to see how characters in dystopic films find the strength and motivation to resist and fight back against the all the different kinds of forces of oppression that can be imagined. We tried to choose films that present dystopias with worlds that extend trends in our present society to their utmost breaking point.

The first film we chose is Children of Men from 2006. There has been a lot written about this film lately and its relevance to our world today. I just wanted to highlight some of the points that came out from our discussion after the film.

Echoes of Today:

It captured very well the hostility to immigrants found in the US and in Europe and how easy it is to normalize their surveillance and imprisonment (the cages on sidewalks a metaphor for detention centers in urban areas)

The detachment of the upper middle classes to a declining world around them, sheltered from the reality of decay with nostalgic bits of high culture, escapist technology, and deadening drugs.

The infertility crisis as a metaphor for the effects of climate change; knowing that the world is dying and people still just going about their everyday lives, jobs, families, as if they still had a tomorrow to plan for. Denial as a coping strategy for despair that can get in the way of making transformative social change.

Sources for Hope:

The film suggested that its important not to put hope in organized vanguards offering salvation.

Change happens through the trust and cooperation of ordinary people.

It’s important to find and build places of refuge and sanctuary among friends, family, and comrades in the midst of dystopia–to share memories, stories, food, and music.

It appears that Strawberry Cough will soon make its appearance at dispensaries in the area.

How Do We Approach People Not Like Ourselves?

By Mark Rudd (November 18, 2016)

I went to the demonstration today. By my estimate there were about 1,000 people there. About half the crowd were older people, but the other half were young. Lots of Native Americans. Great spirit, “Save the Water, Save the Land!”

During the close, I noticed a young woman wearing a bandana. This is a particularly sticky subject with me, from past demos here in Albuquerque and elsewhere. After the demo was over, I noticed that she had let her bandana drop. I went over to her, a muy India latina, probably mexicana, and said, “You’re so beautiful! Why do you cover your face.”

“I’m a Zapatista, that’s why,” she said.

Then she looked at me, and asked, “You’re that guy who was a terrorist long time ago, aren’t you?” After I introduced myself she remembered when and where we had met–at our house, through a mutual friend.

I asked her, “Can I tell you a story?” She agreed.

“Back in 2003, the day the US started bombing Iraq, about 1,000 people more or less spontaneously gathered on Central across from UNM. The cops were pissed, because they liked the war, so they attacked the crowd with tear gas, beat people, and arrested a bunch. Several of their victims eventually sued the City and APD for violating their civil liberties, namely the right to assemble and free speech. After 8 long years the case came up to a jury. After a three-week trial, in which everyone testified, with photos and witnesses, that the police attacked, the jury found the defendants innocent. Why? Well, it seems that the defense attorneys showed the jury a giant wide-angle photo of about a block of demonstrators, easily 100 people. Then they zoomed in on three people wearing bandanas. The lawyers told the jury, ‘See, those are terrorists. The police had to attack because they knew (how?) that the terrorists were about to make trouble.’

“To many people a bandana means you have something to hide. But we have to win those people over. We can’t play into the government’s hands.”

I’m not sure whether she understood me. I actually asked whether she thought my point of view had any logic. She sort of nodded her head. Maybe.

What my Zapatista friend didn’t understand is that the goal is building a mass movement, involving many people unlike us, including some who don’t think like us. All mass movements are coalitions.

The demo today had lots of support from Indian organizations, 350.org, Sierra Club, and probably a lot more.

But it was still a fringe demo, showing very little sign that we had gone beyond likely suspects. It was great to see 500-1000 people rallying together, I was glad it happened and glad to have been there carrying a handmade sign that said, “We stand in solidarity!” that somebody handed me as I approached and they were leaving.

Still, the goal is to broaden out our movement for Native Rights, to stop global warming, to save the planet. It has to be bigger. How do we approach people not like ourselves?

NOT wearing bandanas.

In Chicago, this weekend several thousand young people marched in the Loop. One held a sign, “America Was Never Great!” Hmmm. Self expression or strategy? Which is more important?

Don’t Let Them Whitewash Dorothy Day and Thomas Merton

By Chris Crass (September 25, 2015)

Don’t let anyone sell you a pack of reactionary moderate whitewashing about who ‪#‎DorothyDay‬ and ‪#‎ThomasMerton‬ were, two of the Catholic leaders named by ‪#‎PopeFrancis‬. Day was an anarchist socialist founder of the Catholic Worker movement that both feeds the poor and actively opposes the capitalist system that creates poverty. Day was a member of the Industrial Workers of the World labor union, had an abortion before raising her daughter, and was a proponent of disruptive non-violent direct action. Her life’s work was dedicated to creating grassroots people’s movements to help build up a democratic and socialist society.

Thomas Merton opposed the U.S. imperialist war against Vietnam, supported the political and spiritual leadership of Thich Nhat Hanh in building international opposition to the war. Merton was a vocal white anti-racist who spoke out to the white faith community during the Civil Rights movement of the 60s and 70s, calling on white people of faith to challenge structural racism and racist violence against the Black community. He said that racism was a problem coming from the white community and white’s needed to take responsibility.

Merton, like Day, would today be speaking out for ‪#‎BlackLivesMatter‬, ‪#‎FightFor15‬ minimum wage increase, and galvanizing people of faith to understand and strive to practice the revolutionary values of Jesus Christ.

Jesus, the Palestinian Jewish migrant working class socialist who took direct action and was always on the side of poor, working class and oppressed people, and was killed by the ruling class of the Empire, who feared his ability to galvanize poor people into action.

Interview: Christina Allaback and Trek Theatre

Christina Allaback is the Artistic Director for Trek Theatre, a new theater company out of Eugene, Oregon that seeks to bring Star Trek: The Next Generation episodes to live public performances. Continue reading “Interview: Christina Allaback and Trek Theatre”

Political Explosions Versus Moral Harmony: Can anarchists imagine another sort of liberated radical?

By Christian Matheis (September 3, 2015)

Continue reading “Political Explosions Versus Moral Harmony: Can anarchists imagine another sort of liberated radical?”