RADICAL ROCK READER – BUILDING COMMUNITY
How do we experience community? Is community a liberating force, or a romanticized one that lures you in with the promise of liberation only to suffocate you if you fail to fit perfectly in? For whom does community get to be liberating? To whom is community denied, not just interpersonally, but systemically as part of the way this world is organized?
What role will community play when “we” organize against this world? How will “we” navigate the balance between welcoming those interested in organizing with us and rejecting those whose interests force us to compromise our basic goals? What about the comrades “we” have neglected to organize with because “we” think it doesn't serve “our” interests? At what points, if any, should “we” attempt to bridge the gap between each other in the name of solidarity, and if so, what might that solidarity look like?
Compiled for the 3rd Annual Weekend of Distroing Shit, a decentralized global anarchist bookfair, in a majority-white U.S. city with a strong liberal and white queer anarchist scene. Readings marked with a † were added after the event.
COMMUNITY HAS HURT ME AND I WANT TO BE SEEN
Writings on people being traumatized by so-called community spaces, especially in spaces supposedly aligned with radical and revolutionary politics.
Hot Allostatic Load Porpentine speaks from personal experience on the abusive dynamics of queer/trans/feminist communities towards transfeminine people.
For Friendship to Be Revolutionary Sever rages against the betrayals of so-called revolutionary communities while finding a way back to revolutionary interconnection.
There is another way Ana Lara offers a survivor's rights and responsibilities toolkit accompanied by discussion for organizers who have been abused.
Affinity Fraud and Exploitable Empathy Håkan Geijer outlines and criticizes how certain forms of counter-prejudice have reproduced rather than end hierarchy in radical circles.
I WANT TO UNDERSTAND WHAT STANDS IN THE WAY OF COMMUNITY
Writings that analyze how the world is structured in ways that are hostile to a life shared in common with others.
Against Innocence: Race, Gender, and the Politics of Safety Jackie Wang criticizes the politics of defending “innocent” empathizable subjects as a way of reifying who is and is not a legitimate target for violence.
⁂ Migrant as Chimera: Clandestine Time. Proscribed Space (Pt. 2) César Miguel Rivera Vega Magallón weaves his experiences of social and psychic disconnection as a migrant into an argument about the Border as a totalizing force that redefines the basic terms of reality in its own image.
The Anarchy of Colored Girls Assembled in a Riotous Manner Drawing from 20th Century historical and institutional documents, Sadiya Hartman illuminates how the state and capital work together to dismantle the social life of young Black women through the anarchic and anti-work resistance of Esther Brown, who was arrested and sentenced to serve time at Bedford Hills Correctional Facility for vagrancy.
The We of a Position Wendy Trevino explores the political process of how we construct our idea of “we,” and what kinds of social relations (or lack thereof) can lead to collective action.
I WANT TO END THIS WORLD AS WE KNOW IT
Writings that offer ways to think through and act against the socially destructive projects of this world, especially beyond the limits of one narrowly-defined political community.
Adrienne Cacatian questions the purpose behind the term “activist” when it's being weaponized to dismiss newcomers to organizing, and argues for the importance of generalizing political participation instead of creating exclusive political cliques who alone get to decide what is politically “enough.”
Speaking to conditions in 1969 that are still relevant today, Kwame Ture criticizes liberals and how their strategies of serving as peaceful and morally legitimate mediators between the oppressors and oppressed ultimately serves to keep oppressive systems in place.
Ungovernable: An Interview with Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin
William C. Anderson interviews former Black Panther and political prisoner Lorenzo Komboa Ervin on the political limits of the anti-police-violence uprisings circa 2021, on how to generalize ungovernability, and how Black anarchism might play a role in that generalization.
Unknowable: Against an Indigenous Anarchist Theory
Klee Benally argues against the modern leftist tendency to force people to assimilate and unite under one political banner, and challenges settlers to realize solidarity to Indigenous people on Indigenous people's terms.
No “End” In Sight: On Cultivating Conflict With a World of Pandemics†
An anonymous writer criticizes the normalization of COVID masking as an individual choice as social abandonment of disabled, poor, and racialized people, and calls on “us” to move beyond paternalistic politics of obligation and towards a politics of conflictuality with the totality of systems enabling mass death and debilitation to continue.
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