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Renewing the Anarchist
Tradition
Archive: Summer Conference 2001 ...
page 1
go to page two ... Saturday & Sunday
Thursday, August 23rd
- 4-10 p.m.: Conference registration
- 8 p.m.: Radical films &
documentaries in the Sunroom
Friday, August 24th
- 8:30-9:15 a.m.: Breakfast
& Late Registration
- 9:30 - 10:45 a.m.: Morning
Presentations
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... sunroom
Understanding Biotechnology Systematically:
Neo-Marxist, Anarchist, & Social Ecological Contributions
Brian Tokar
This session will begin by reviewing
recent scientific and political developments in biotechnology,
and then examine the ways that a variety of analytic frameworks
can help uncover what biotechnology tells us about the social
and political context within which it has been developed. These
include progressive economic analysis of the biotech industry
and its relationship to global institutions such as the WTO;
neo-Marxist approaches to commodification and the rise of a "post-Fordist,"
"information" economy; anarchist insights about capital
and the state, and biotechnology's threat to a cooperative ethic
of local self-reliance; and social ecology's dialectical outlook
on the evolution of technology in society, questioning of humanity's
place in nature, and demand for the radical democratization of
technological and social choices.
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... tent
Globalizing Terror
Michael Dorsey
This talk will trace some of the
dominant trends in state/capital responses to twenty-first-century
anarchists. It will explore: how state security agencies, like
the FBI for example, that have had a traditionally domestic outlook
and mandate are too globalizing themselves; how increasingly,
military infrastructure and resources are being used against
nationals engaged in the growing number of anti-globalization
protests; how and what are the overarching motivations that compel
conglomerations of capitalists to lock-out dissent(ers) through
the use of various technological and infrastructural means; and
how and why basic civil laws and protections as well as human
rights provisions are suspended by state governments to facilitate
the interest of firms and multilateral agencies. This presentation
will conclude with a host of de jure and de facto responses for
the aforementioned state/capital developments.
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... library
Anarchism & the Academy: Theorists
of Revolt or Revolting Theorists
Andrea Schmidt &
Blake McGreevy
Two general questions will provide
the framework for this presentation: "What does it mean
to do 'scholarly work' as an anarchist?" and "Can anarchist
theory be pursued in the academy?"? These questions will
be explored with reference to models of anarchist intellectual
activity presented in the "classical" European anarchist
canon. Such models will be used to inform a discussion of the
contemporary North American model of the academic. Experimenting
with postcolonial and critical theory (for example, Gramsci's
distinction between traditional and organic intellectuals), the
presenters will engage in a critique of both paradigms as they
examine the questions: Where does knowledge come from? Where
and how is theory produced? How much of the process of theory-
and knowledge-production does one want to accept as legitimate?
By what means can one "take theory seriously" while
calling into question the conditions of its production?
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- 11:00 a.m.-12:15 p.m.: Morning
Presentations, Second Round
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...tent
When Fucking the System Isn't Enough
Ramsey Kanaan
This talk will focus on Ramsey's
experiences as an anarchist organizer in Scotland with the Edinburgh
anarchist group, Community Resistance. It will look at the various
activities, both propaganda and more important, activist, that
the Community Resistance group was involved in - culminating
in their five-year anti-poll tax organizing campaign - and the
conclusions that can be drawn in terms of anarchist organizing,
anarchist groups, and vanguards.
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...sunroom
Institutionalized Practice & Anarchy
Mark Lance
Anarchists are keenly interested
in social institutions and institutionalized practices. This
talk will explore what it is for a practice, activity, etc. to
be institutionalized, with the claim that this notion is essential
to a proper understanding of what anarchism should see itself
as opposed to. This presentation will assert that the target
of anarchist critique should be the institutionalization of coercive
authority, and that it makes all the difference politically and
practically whether the coercive authority is institutionalized.
Thus, we will consider the question of what institutionalization
is with an eye to explaining why it is the proper target of anarchist
politics.
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...library
Everyday Resistance as Strategy: Under
Slavery, in Peasant Societies, and on the Factory Floor - Toward
a Revolutionary Strategy for Today
Kevin Van Meter
This presentation will explore
the notion of everyday resistance, in which members of an oppressed
populace resist the system outside the realm of established unions
or organizations. We will look at the forms, content, strategies,
and relationship of everyday resistance to overt rebellion. This
talk will also discuss the effects that everyday resistance has
had on the disciplinary order, the state, and capital, as well
as its potentialities. Building on the works of Peter Kropotkin,
George Rawick, Herbert Apthecker, James Scott, Stuart B. Schwartz,
Pierre Clastres, Ann Lucas de Rouffignac, the Midnight Notes
Collective, Toni Negri, C. L. R. James, Paulo Friere, and others,
this discussion will call for a different approach to revolution:
one that is already being scrutinized, and one that is challenging
the present order.
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- 12:45 a.m. - 1:45 p.m.: lunch
lunch lunch
- 2:30-3:45 p.m.: Afternoon
Presentations
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...library
Anarchist Alternatives: Reconsidering
Statist Approaches to Civil Rights, Discrimination, and Justice
JT
How can anarchists offer alternatives
to statist anti-discrimination institutions - currently, the
primary place for most people to bring complaints of racism,
discrimination, sexism, racial profiling, homophobia, hate crimes,
and so on - while ensuring that those who have been victimized
by the discriminatory acts feel that they have been offered some
form of restitution and "justice"? While this presentation
will briefly describe the current institutions and their problems
as well as reforms that might allow them to operate more in line
with anarchist principles, the discuss will center around two
key questions. How would the issue of alternatives be addressed
if examined from the point of view of a transitional society,
utopian community, commune, or collective? And what kind of alternatives
can be created today, given that most people are looking for
financial compensation or criminal punishment?
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...tent
The "New" Anarchism: Tracing
Roots, Proposing Directions
Robert Krause
This presentation will ground
the history of the "new" anarchists in Paris 1968 through
the disillusionment of the postmodernists - doubt about the possibility
of change, and as a step both with and away from identity politics.
Drawing on Michel Foucault's discussions of biopower and his
argument that all future critique must be partial critique grounded
in specific times and places, the "new" anarchist method
that appears to lack the sort of global critiques that Marxist
and other revolutionaries of the past had is actually a specific
new method of critique that avoids the limitations of universality
of previous generations. This talk will also propose strategic
directions, including: understanding universal health care not
merely as a liberal end but as a means to radicalize society;
the importance of continuing to build a mass movement based on
economic and social justice, decentralization, anticapitalism,
antiauthoritarianism, a thought-out environmentalism, and globalism
"from below" in the form of a workers' international;
and the central function that developing independent media will
play.
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...sunroom
Neuroanarchy: From an Ecology of the
Mind to an Ecology of the Social
Harry Halpin
Anarchism calls for a decentralized,
nonhierarchical society composed of free individuals; recent
developments in cognitive science have shown that the mind itself
is a decentralized, non-hierarchical distributed system composed
of interconnected neurons. Combining some of the latest work
in cognitive psychology, artificial intelligence, and philosophy
of the mind, possible age-old questions that have recently been
debated in anarchist circles - like the function and origin of
symbolic thought, and the possibility for radical change of our
relations to both each other and the environment - can be reappraised
in a new light. A creative and revolutionary anarchist synthesis
of how we relate both to our mind and society can lead anarchism
in brave new directions.
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- 4-5:15 p.m.: Evening Presentations
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...library
Mortgaged Democracy and the Impossibility
of Individual Freedom
Roman Krznaric
Most capitalist states claim to
be "democracies." Rather than dismiss the claim outright,
this presentation will draw on anarchist ideas to argue that
they are democracies of a particular kind: "mortgaged democracies."
The mortgaged status of contemporary liberal democracies means
that they cannot be an expression of individual freedom. Liberal
democracies express two forms of mortgage relationship, which
are like exploitative agreements for a monetary loan with debtors
and creditors. On the one hand, states can be mortgaged to entities
such as large corporations or international financial institutions.
On the other, individuals mortgage their freedom to the state
and financial creditors. This talk will address a number of questions:
What is the nature of these mortgages? What is the form of interest?
What happens when the conditions of the loan are not fulfilled?
What alternatives to the mortgage are found in anarchist thinking
and activism?
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...sunroom
Paint It Black: Anarchism, Urban Uprising,
& the Mainstream Media
Jessica Lawless
This presentation - an overview
of a video project inspired by an "exclusive investigative
report" titled "Anarchists in LA," which aired
in June 2000 - will examine how the mainstream media coverage
of the protests against the WTO in Seattle served to agitate
public anxieties toward anarchists and anarchism through a reliance
on racialized and racist tropes. We will also address the purposeful
use of black by anarchists (say, black flags) to represent a
movement/politic/ideology striving for revolutionary social transformation
that is not rooted in or fundamentally connected to black liberation
movements. This talk is part of an attempt to find or construct
a conscious anarchist analysis of what it means for a mainly
- but not entirely - white revolutionary movement to represent
its ideology and politics through the color black in a country
where racial stratification and injustice continues to be one
of the most pervasive forms of social oppression. The discussion
will center on whether social constructionist theories of racialization
are or are not useful for the praxis of contemporary anarchism.
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...tent
What Might Liberatory Education Look
Like? Pedagogical, Curricular, Institutional, and Philosophical
Considerations
a facilitated discussion with Tamara
Myers
Despite widespread agreement that
education must be a fundamental part of creating the free societies
that anarchists envision, there seems to be a lack of substantive
dialogue about what that education should look like. We will
explore some of the theoretical underpinnings and practical applications
of liberatory education. Participants will be encouraged to draw
on their own educational backgrounds and practice (inside and
outside traditional educational settings) as we collectively
attempt to identify key concepts that support education for fundamental,
liberatory change, and think through their application in a variety
of settings. Two assumptions will underlie this: first, that
"education as schooling" ignores that education happens
in a variety of formal and informal contexts; and second, that
conceptualizing our theoretical work, activism, propaganda, and
explicit educational endeavors as educational and pedagogical
can help our work to be more purposeful and deliberate in our
efforts at social change.
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- 6-7 p.m.: dinner
- 8 p.m. - late: More radical
films in the sunroom, bonfire & discussion at frogpond, general
revelry...
Program schedule for
Saturday & Sunday
or, back to
the top of this page
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