[PeDAGoG] The communitarian revolutionary subject, new forms of social transformation

[Ariel Salleh]

Living in hope for the day when Academic Reading Lists are 50:50 M/F - 
which presumably means more books by women are getting picked up and read!


On 30 Sep 2021, at 10:39 pm, Davis, Laurence <L.Davis at ucc.ie> wrote:

This is a very nice amination. Thank you for sharing it.

Some of the following videos may also be useful for teaching purposes:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yyqG-71zOi0 ('Accidental Anarchist - What is the Rojava Revolution?')

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NqlZOa7DMiU ('People Without Faces' - Documentary about the Zapatistas)

...and my personal favourite...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jPl_Y3Qdb7Y ('Living Utopia: The Anarchists and the Spanish Revolution')

I use all of them in my third-year Government and Politics undergraduate module, 'Contemporary Ecological and Anti-Capitalist Politics', which I have taught for many years here at University College Cork, Ireland.

The following readings on their module syllabus, useful for those new to the subject matter as well as more advanced readers, are also generally well received by the students:

John Clark, Between Earth and Empire (PM Press, 2019) and The Impossible Community (Bloomsbury, 2013)

Murray Bookchin, The Ecology of Freedom (AK Press, 2005)

David Graeber, The Democracy Project (Allen Lane, 2013)

Amadeo Bertolo, ‘Democracy and Beyond’, Democracy and Nature, Vol. 5, Issue 2, July 1999, also available at www.democracynature.org/vol5/bertolo_democracy.htm

William Morris, ‘Useful Work Versus Useless Toil’, in A.L. Morton (ed.), Political Writings of William Morris (Lawrence & Wishart, 1979)

William Morris, News from Nowhere (1891)

Michael Robertson, The Last Utopians: Four Late 19th Century Visionaries and Their Legacy (Princeton University Press, 2018)

Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia (Harper & Row, 1974)

Laurence Davis and Peter Stillman (eds.), The New Utopian Politics of Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed (Lexington Books, 2005)

Maria Mies and Vandana Shiva, Ecofeminism (Zed Books, 2014)

Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom Through Radical Resistance (University of Minnesota Press, 2017)

George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia (1938)

Martha Ackelsberg, Free Women of Spain: Anarchism and the Struggle for the Emancipation of Women (AK Press, 2004)

Sam Dolgoff (ed.), The Anarchist Collectives: Workers’ Self-Management in the Spanish Revolution 1936-1939 (Black Rose Books, 1974)

Valérie Fournier, ‘Utopianism and the cultivation of possibilities: grassroots movements of hope’, in Martin Parker (ed.), Utopia and Organization (Blackwell, 2002), 189-216

Dylan Fitzwater, Autonomy Is in Our Hearts: Zapatista Autonomous Government through the Lens of the Tsotsil Language (PM Press, 2019)

Ashish Kothari et. al. (eds.), Pluriverse: A Post-Development Dictionary (Tulika Books, 2019)

Laurence Davis, ‘Anarchism’, in Vincent Geoghegan and Rick Wilford (eds.), Political Ideologies: An Introduction (Routledge, 2014), ch. 9

Colin Ward, Anarchism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2004)

Solidarity,

Laurence


From: GTA-PeDAGoG <gta-pedagog-bounces at lists.ourproject.org> on behalf of Mofwoofoo <mofwoofoo at gmail.com>
Sent: 29 September 2021 22:15
To: Ted Trainer <tedtrainertsw at gmail.com>; Hari DK <hari.coding at gmail.com>; David Barkin <dpbarkin at gmail.com>; Ariel Salleh <arielsalleh7 at gmail.com>; Carlos Tornel <tornelc at gmail.com>; Tom Abeles <tabeles at gmail.com>; gta-pedagog at lists.ourproject.org <gta-pedagog at lists.ourproject.org>; to: Radical Ecological Democracy list <radical_ecological_democracy at googlegroups.com>
Subject: [PeDAGoG] The communitarian revolutionary subject, new forms of social transformation
 
[EXTERNAL] This email was sent from outside of UCC.
I am writing as a long time radical anarchist activist "on the ground". I am not a scholar, but I have read a lot over 55 years. While I view the article (The communitarian revolutionary subject, new forms of social transformation) worthwhile, it is nothing new at all. Anarchist literature and scholarship goes back to the 1860's when these same ideas were expressed. Anarchists have seen through the problem of hierarchies in gov't. and in general. I have submitted the 7 minute animation that I made in 2020 which explains a lot about organizing in a horizontal fashion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wywMhg604W8&t=5s. And how it might be the only way to eliminate once and for all corruption in governments.

Citizen participation a la transition towns initiatives, localization, collectivism, decentralization, deconsummerism, self-reliance, economies that promote the good of the whole, cooperation, respect for the environment, etc. are ideas whirling around throughout the internet and the world. And as I am sure it is clear to everyone in this group, that the current system of capitalism is the perfect recipe for suiciding the human race.

Meanwhile, as capitalism is collapsing or is being collapsed, there seems to be a rush to assert authoritarianism as soon as possible. And clearly the vaccine mandate and the pcr tests are ways to do this. But since the vaccine mandates will not go away no matter how hard the pushback is, they seem to have plan b ready to go: world-wide food shortages which would result in world-wide food riots and chaos, which will justify martial law and state of emergency declarations, which at least in the USA would empower FEMA to overstep the Constitution and do whatever they want due to the executive orders that give them total power. 

To avoid this from happening, people need to check on where their area's food sources are coming from and if they will be available or not. And in this way, using google or duck, duck, go one can ascertain what really is happening and what is going to happen in these regards. And if food shortages are indeed imminent, alert the citizenry to prepare by storing up on rice, beans, lentils, grains, tins, and storing food in preserves and salt for perhaps 6 months and setting up programs for those who don't have a few hundred dollars to spend to be able to be prepared as well.

Finally, I am the founder of a mostly latino, artist, eco-community in Ecuador (chambalabamba.org, under construction) since 2012, and believe me, this is not the solution for the world. It takes years to get it going, most communities fail for lack of funds or cohesion, it is not for everybody, and it is a false hope for those who believe that this is the way, imho.