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Renewing the Anarchist
Tradition
Archive:
Summer Conference 2006
Friday, September 29th
- 8:00 to 9:30 pm
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Lucy Parsons and
the Chicago Anarchist Movement
Jacob McKean
In the years
before Haymarket, Parsons helped launch
a grassroots anarchist movement in Chicago
unlike any other in the worldÑpioneering
for its experimentation with decentralized
networks of collectives, an emphasis on
individual and collective direct action,
and its successful grounding in immigrant
working-class communities. During this time,
Parsons authored an impressive and mostly
ignored array of writings. By grafting direct
action on to a rigorous class analysis,
bringing together a critique of imperialism
and civilization, and exemplifying effective
interpersonal organizing across common boundaries
(a U.S.-born, English-speaking woman of
color organizing among a largely male, German-speaking
immigrant population), Parsons provides
a framework for uniting various competing
threads within anarchism. This presentation
will provide a summary of her work and writing
in the years before Haymarket followed by
a discussion with an emphasis on their relevance.
Jacob
is a writer and troublemaker presently living
in New York City. He did his research on
Lucy Parsons while working on a thesis at
Columbia University.
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No Exit: Bringing
the World Home
Cara Hoffman
Our bodies
have become both metaphors for and physical
examples of overconsumption and environmental
degradation. This is a psychic as well as
physical condition, resulting in a reliance
on manufactured nutrients, and "cures"
allowing people to consume whatever they
want without consequences. Human breast
milk now contains high levels of PCBs, mercury,
and flame retardants, making it "safer"
to feed infants synthetic substitutes. We
are unable to escape the constituents of
our bodies. Regardless of geography, humans
now contain the physical evidence of psychic
failures and brutalities - nuclear blasts,
chemical manufacturing, and so on - for
which some seek help in the form of chemotherapies,
nuclear medicine, and so on. These paradoxes
result in humans who are embodying the world,
in all its toxicity, and being "thrown"
- in the Heideggerian sense. How do anarchists
create active strategies for "being
in the (contaminated) world," and turn
embodying toxins into embodying a revolutionary
acceptance and radical response to our position
as humans?
Cara
is an independent journalist and the author
of two books published by Factory School.
She has worked as a staff reporter for various
newspapers throughout central New York,
and currently works as a creative copywriter
for a consulting firm.
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Societal Movements:
Learning from Bolivia
Leila Martin
This discussion
will look at Bolivian social movements,
framing their struggle against neocolonialism
and global capitalism as the functioning
of the social immune system of the Bolivian
working class. We will look at the social
capacity for successful resistance in the
context of three interrelated spheres of
autonomy: cultural/psychological autonomy,
organizational autonomy, and material/economic
autonomy. The COB (Bolivian Worker's Central),
the CSUTCB (Single Syndical Confederation
of Peasant Workers of Bolivia), and the
Bloque Social (an unofficial confederation
of revolutionary syndicates, federations,
cooperatives, and associations) will be
examined. We will also look at problems
in the movement and the implications of
the election of Evo Morales.
Leila
lived in Santa Cruz, Bolivia, on a Rotary
exchange when she was sixteen, and went
back for ten months this year for a slightly
less-elite experience. She is an Institute
for Social Ecology graduate.
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continue on to Saturday
the 3oth / Sunday
the 1st
or, back to main
menu for Summer Conference 2006
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