How to defend yourself during a police interrogation

  • November 22, 2024 1:41 am

from Projet Evasions

PDF
“An interrogation is not a harmonious exchange between two individuals. It’s a conflict.
And in this conflict, our ignorance is our strength. Ignorance of the meaning of police work, ignorance of the manipulative techniques used, ignorance of the legal framework and, last but not least, ignorance of our means of defence.
In response to this observation, this book is intended as a tool for self-defense against police interrogation practices of interrogation.”

Preface to the English version

In summer 2022, 2000 copies of this book were printed in French and 2000 in German. The french version is now sold out, and the Publisher «Éditions du Commun» had now reissued the book.

The book was written with the intention of serving as a tool of self-defense against the manipulative interrogation strategies employed by the police. As stated in the introduction, “It addresses readers in various countries in which legislation may differ“. And indeed, we soon received feedback that the content conveyed by the book is equally applicable to countries such as Turkey, Morocco, Serbia, Italy, Denmark, and many more. And soon a number of supportive people were offering to translate the book into other languages. This is what happened with the English version, and we’d like to take this opportunity to warmly thank our translator and proofreader for their fine work.

As a consequence of imperialism and colonization, English is spoken today in contexts as diverse as Kenya, Australia and, of course UK and the USA. So many different places from which you may be reading these words, and where the contexts of repression are very different. Most of what is conveyed in the book applies to all these contexts, but, in case of doubts, it makes sense to keep an eye out for certain elements that differ and check them with your local legal team.

Our network lacks relays in the English-speaking world, so let us take this opportunity to pass on the message that we are looking for a publishing house or a collective that would be interested in printing and distributing the book in its geographical regions.

With these words, we wish you a pleasant reading.

Project-evasions – network of anarchist friendships

Abolish Rent: How Tenants Can End The Housing Crisis Book Launch and Conversation

  • November 17, 2024 1:11 am

from Making Worlds Books

How do we solve the housing crisis? Two L.A. Tenants Union co-founders wrote Abolish Rent to answer that question, guided by the expertise of LATU members, who are organizing to take back control of their housing, their neighborhoods, and their lives. At Making Worlds, we’ll bring together author Tracy Rosenthal and organizer and scholar Sterling Johnson to reflect on their struggles in their building and citywide, and talk about how our work right now shows us the future of the tenant movement, moderated by Max Fox and co-presented by Pinko Magazine.

Advance registration is appreciated.

SPEAKERS:
Tracy Rosenthal is a cofounder of the L.A. Tenants Union, a frequent contributor to the New Republic, and the author, with Leonardo Vilchis, of Abolish Rent, published by Haymarket Books. They organize with Writers Against the War on Gaza and are now on rent strike in New York City.
twitter & IG: @tracyrosenthal_
Max Fox is a writer, translator, and founding editor of Pinko Magazine.
Sterling Johnson is a doctoral candidate in Geography and Urban Studies at Temple University and organizes with Philadelphia Housing Action.

  • Sunday, November 24, 2024
  • 4:00 PM 6:00 PM
  • Making Worlds Bookstore & Social Center 210 South 45th Street Philadelphia, PA, 19104 United States (map)

Border Abolition Now: Book launch and discussion

  • October 27, 2024 1:48 am

from Making Worlds

Borders must be abolished. Borders produce and are produced by carceral, racist, classist, sexist, and xenophobic regimes. Border Abolition Now demands transformative politics to dismantle these systems of oppression.

Taking the key tenets of abolitionism and applying them to the debate around borders, join editor Brian Whitener and guests as they discuss and offer new tools for anyone working to defend freedom of movement for all.

Advance registration appreciated.

Brian Whitener is an Associate Professor of Spanish at the University at Buffalo and author of Crisis Cultures: The Rise of Finance in Mexico and Brazil. His other projects include The 90s; De gente común: Prácticas estéticas y rebeldía social, co-edited with Lorena Méndez and Fernando Fuentes; and the translation of Grupo de Arte Callejero’s Thoughts, Practices, and Actions with the Mareada Translation Collective.
Geo Maher is the Coordinator of the W.E.B. Du Bois Movement School for Abolition & Reconstruction in Philadelphia.

Viktoria Zerda (she/her) is a Mexican-Tejana, abolitionist attorney and clinical law professor at Rutgers Law School. Viktoria is currently based in West Philadelphia, but is originally from San Antonio, Texas.

  • Sunday, November 3, 2024
  • 6:00 PM 7:30 PM
  • Making Worlds Bookstore & Social Center 210 South 45th Street Philadelphia, PA, 19104 United States (map)

Palestiniana Prisoner Letter Writing Night

  • October 3, 2024 1:29 am

from Making Worlds Books

ADVANCE REGISTRATION RECOMMENDED

Join us for a night of revolutionary education and communication as we learn about, and reach out to, some of the 10,000 Palestinian political prisoners held in Zionist dungeons. We’ll talk about conditions in the prison, prisoner organization and resistance and what we can do to get their voices outside of the prison walls. Organized by Philly WAWOG and Samidoun.

Laura Martin is a labor historian and a member of Philly WAWOG and the Bay Area Anti-Repression Committee, a bail fund and political education collective.

Abu Ali is a coordinator with the Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity network, an international organization that supports and uplifts Palestinian political prisoners

  • Thursday, October 10, 2024
  • 6:00 PM 7:30 PM

Making Worlds Bookstore & Social Center 210 South 45th Street Philadelphia, PA, 19104 United States 

Three Way Fight: Revolutionary Politics and Antifascism

  • September 15, 2024 1:22 am

from Making Worlds Books

ADVANCED REGISTRATION RECOMMENDED (CLICK HERE)

Three way fight politics argues that the far right grows out of an oppressive capitalist order but is also in conflict with it in real ways, and that radicals need to combat both. We’ll discuss the history of this perspective and how it can help us navigate today’s struggles, from anti-police riots to confronting the MAGA movement, drawing on the new collection of essays and interviews from PM Press and Kersplebedeb Publishing.

Matthew N. Lyons is the author of Insurgent Supremacists: The U.S. Far Right’s Challenge to State and Empire and coauthor with Chip Berlet of Right-Wing Populism in America. He has been a contributor to Three Way Fight since 2005, and his writings have also appeared in several other leftist and mainstream publications. Matthew is co-trustee of the Lorraine Hansberry Literary Trust, which stewards the literary legacy of the late playwright and activist Lorraine Hansberry.

Arturo Castillon is a writer and substitute teacher living in Philadelphia. With Shemon Salam, he is the coauthor of The Revolutionary Meaning of the George Floyd Uprising (Daraja Press, 2021) and has published work in The George Floyd Uprising (PM Press, 2023) as well as in Black Quantum Futurism: Space-Time Collapse II (The AfroFuturist Affair/House of Future Sciences Books, 2020).

Philip V. McHarris in Conversation with Hiram Rivera: A Book Launch for “Beyond Policing”

  • August 7, 2024 1:10 am

from Making Worlds

CLICK HERE TO REGISTER (RECOMMENDED)

Join us on August 14th at 6 PM for a compelling conversation between Philip V. McHarris and Hiram Rivera, Executive Director of Community Resource Hub for Safety and Accountability. They will discuss McHarris’s new book “Beyond Policing,” which reimagines a world without police and explores innovative community-based safety models. This event offers a transformative vision of safety, moving beyond policing towards a society where people have the resources to thrive.

Philip V. McHarris is an assistant professor in the Frederick Douglass Institute and Department of Black Studies at the University of Rochester. McHarris was a presidential postdoctoral research fellow at Princeton University in the Department of African American Studies and the Ida B. Wells Just Data Lab. He earned his PhD in sociology and African American studies at Yale University. He was named one of the Root 100s Most Influential African Americans in 2020. McHarris has appeared on MSNBC, CNN, and PBS and in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Guardian, and more.

Hiram Rivera is a longtime organizer and organizing trainer with 20 years experience professional experience. His work has been rooted in social justice movements, the struggle for Puerto Rican and New African independence, and campaigns to free political prisoners. He’s the former director of the Philadelphia Student Union and is the founding director of the Community Resource Hub, a national organization providing training, research and technical assistance to abolitionist organizations across the country. He is a co-founder of the organization Black Men Build and the Hub’s George Jackson School.

A conversation with Sam C. Tenorio, author of Jump: Black Anarchism and Antiblack Carcerality

  • May 6, 2024 1:15 am

from Making Worlds

ADVANCED REGISTRATION RECOMMENDED

Writing a new story of Black politics, Jump emerges from the practice of enslaved Africans jumping overboard off their slavers’ ships. Reading against the narrative that depoliticizes and denigrates the leaps of the enslaved as merely suicidal symptoms of chattel slavery and the Middle Passage, Sam C. Tenorio demonstrates how bringing these jumps to bear on the foundations of Black politics allows us to rethink a politics of refusal.

Sam C. Tenorio is Assistant Professor in the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and the Department of African American Studies at The Pennsylvania State University.

  • Saturday, May 18, 2024
  • 6:00 PM 7:15 PM
  • Making Worlds Bookstore & Social Center 210 South 45th Street Philadelphia, PA, 19104 United States (map)

Anarchist Popular Power: Dissident Labor and Armed Struggle in Uruguay, 1956-76 with Troy Araiza Kokinis

  • May 3, 2024 1:25 am

from Making Worlds Books

ADVANCED REGISTRATION RECOMMENDED

A study of Cold War-era Latin American anarchism in action.

Araiza Kokinis’s investigation of the Uruguayan Anarchist Federation (FAU) broadens our understanding of the Cold War-era political landscape beyond the capitalism-communism and Old Left-New Left binaries that dominate historiographies of the epoch.

Arguably the most impactful anarchist organization globally in the Cold War era, the FAU viewed everyday people as revolutionary protagonists and sought to develop a popular counter-subjectivity through accumulating experiences directly challenging the market and the state. The FAU argued that everyday people transformed into revolutionary subjects through the regular practice of collective direct action in labor unions, student organizations, and neighborhood councils. Their slogan: create popular power. FAU’s strategy and tactics, ones in which everyday people took on roles as historical protagonists, offered the largest threat to maintaining social order in Uruguay and thus spawned a military takeover of the state to repress what became a popular worker revolt.

With less than 80 militants, FAU played a key role both sparking and networking popular protagonism in workplaces, neighborhoods, and on campuses. This book tells the story and offers insights useful for militants and organizers today.

Troy Araiza Kokinis is a professor of Latin American Studies at UC San Diego and works on a hot line at a pizza joint on the weekends. He hand paints signs in the Argentine fileteado porteño style and loves Dodger baseball.

  • Friday, May 10, 2024
  • 6:00 PM 7:15 PM
  • Making Worlds Bookstore & Social Center 210 South 45th Street Philadelphia, PA, 19104 United States (map)

Graphic Liberation: Image Making and Political Movements with Josh MacPhee

  • April 14, 2024 1:52 am

from Making Worlds

ADVANCED REGISTRATION RECOMMENDED

From the fight against the AIDS crisis to the struggle for Black liberation and international solidarity, Graphic Liberation! digs deep into the history, present, and future of revolutionary political image making.

What is the role of image and aesthetics in radical change? In his most recent book, Josh MacPhee interviews some of the most accomplished international political graphics producers, and through these conversations charts the importance of revolutionary aesthetics as a through line connecting the Black Panthers to the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa to the AIDS organizing of ACT-UP to the Palestinian struggle to organizing against nuclear power and militarism. MacPhee argues that the culture produced by and within social movements is both central to their organizing strategies but also their sense of community and social identity.

Josh MacPhee has created a composite work life that merges elements of designer, artist, author, historian, and archivist. He is a founding member of the Justseeds Artists’ Cooperative (Justseeds.org), the author of An Encyclopedia of Political Record Labels, and coeditor of Signal: A Journal of International Political Graphics and Culture. He cofounded and helps run Interference Archive, a public collection of cultural materials produced by social movements (InterferenceArchive.org). He regularly works with community and social justice organizations building agit-prop and consulting on cultural strategy. work. In addition, MacPhee co-edits the publication Signal: A Journal of International Political Graphics and Culture, and this event will also be the release party of the newly published Signal:09.

  • Sunday, April 21, 2024
  • 4:00 PM 5:30 PM
  • Making Worlds Bookstore & Social Center 210 South 45th Street Philadelphia, PA, 19104 United States (map)

Necropolitics Reading Group

  • February 24, 2024 1:37 am

from Making Worlds Books

Necropolitics Reading Group is a DIY reading group focused on examining the links between statehood, violence, and dehumanization.

Necropolitics Study Group Details, Reading List, & Community Agreements

Please RSVP here

Saturdays 2PM – 3:30 PM starting February 24th at Making Worlds Bookstore & Social Center

  • Making Worlds Bookstore & Social Center 210 South 45th Street Philadelphia, PA, 19104 United States (map)

Informality, Anarchy, and the Black Radical Tradition

  • February 15, 2024 1:15 am

from Making Worlds Books

The last couple years’ Black-centric revolts have been organized mostly informally. Informality is often overlooked when it comes to discussing Black liberation organizing, yet today’s cutting edge rebels are almost exclusively organized along these lines. We’ll be discussing informality, and anarchists’ strategies surrounding it, to better understand Black revolt and the Black left and to strategize destroying the civil society that has made Black liberation movements so necessary.

Advance registration appreciated.

This event will be a presentation followed by open discussion.

Atticus is a communist theorist and an anarchist in action. He’s been involved with anti-police struggle for the past 10 years of his life. His published writing is concerned with Black anarchism, the Black Radical Tradition, and small city organizing.

Cres is an anarchist living in Philadelphia. She’s participated in various struggles and uprisings over the last decade and a half. She’s interested in anarchy, incorrect and subversive uses of space and tools, and making memes.

  • Thursday, February 22, 2024
  • 5:00 PM 6:30 PM
  • Making Worlds Bookstore & Social Center 210 South 45th Street Philadelphia, PA, 19104 United States (map)

Beehive Design Collective Presents MesoAmerica Resiste! and The True Cost of Coal

  • February 4, 2024 1:12 am

from Making Worlds Books

Join Beehive Design Collective as they present their newly released 10 Year Anniversary edition of “MesoAmerica Resiste!”, their new book, “The True Cost of Coal”, and even a peek into their work-in-progress about California: “The Callegory”.

Advance registration strong recommended.

The Bees use their massive, collaboratively produced, and intricately detailed fabric murals to tell complex global stories of stories of resistance, resilience, and solidarity. Packed with nature metaphors, peoples histories, and teeming with biodiversity, these images offer the foundation for an event of participatory discussion, poetic storytelling, and popular education. “MesoAmerica Resiste!’ focuses on stories from Mexico to Colombia. A map drawn in old colonial style depicts the modern invasion of megaprojects planned for the region… and opens to reveal the view from below, where communities are organizing locally and across borders to defend land and traditions, protect cultural and ecological diversity, and build alternative economies.

“The True Cost of Coal” tells many stories from the frontlines of Southern Appallachia who fought mountaintop removal for coal extraction for decades. This graphics campaign reflects the complexity of the struggles for land, livelihood, and self-determination playing out in Appalachia, and was made with the intention of honoring the tremendous history of organized resistance and the courage of communities living in the shadow of Big Coal.

  • Sunday, February 11, 2024
  • 5:00 PM 6:00 PM
  • Making Worlds Bookstore & Social Center 210 South 45th Street Philadelphia, PA, 19104 United States (map)

Defying Displacement: Urban Recomposition and Social War — Author Andrew Lee with Keyssh from Decolonize Philly

  • February 2, 2024 1:14 am

from Making Worlds Books

Cities are in the midst of a profound transformation as the wealthy price out the remnants of the urban working class, especially people of color. Defying Displacement, focused on the US but informed by global examples, investigates gentrification from the perspective of the people fighting some of the most powerful institutions on the planet. As mass displacement alters the composition of gentrifying cities, the avenues available for social change become unsettled as well, forcing us to reimagine our strategies for building a better world. Author Andrew Lee will be in conversation with Keyssh Datts of Decolonize Philly.

“So often gentrification is a process understood in limited terms as a flow of people or the impersonal and inevitable flow of capital. In Defying Displacement, Andrew Lee analyzes both in tandem, illuminating how gentrification transforms not only housing markets, but the horizon of possibility for revolt. Regardless of where they are reading from, readers will be able to understand this subject with a fresh appreciation of how global struggles past, present, and future are linked by the making and unmaking of cities.” —Ayesha Siddiqi, editor in chief of The New Inquiry

Advance registration recommended and appreciated.

About the Speakers
Defying Displacement author Andrew Lee participated in a multi-year fight against the construction of a Google campus in San José, California that culminated in the creation of the first community land trust in the so-called Silicon Valley. He currently lives in Philadelphia and is a member of the No Arena in Chinatown Solidarity group opposing the planned 76ers arena. Lee supports grassroots social movements as managing editor for The ARD and his work has previously appeared in Yes! Magazine, The New Inquiry, Teen Vogue, and ROAR Magazine.

Keyssh Datts is a multimedia creator, community organizer, and founder of Decolonize Philly, a racial and environmental justice group using media and direct action to bring changemakers together to build towards a land revolution.

  • Friday, February 9, 2024
  • 6:00 PM 7:00 PM
  • Making Worlds Bookstore & Social Center 210 South 45th Street Philadelphia, PA, 19104 United States (map)

Informality, Anarchy, and the Black Radical Tradition

  • January 26, 2024 1:00 am

Submission


The last couple years’ Black-centric revolts have been organized mostly informally. Informality is often overlooked when it comes to discussing Black liberation organizing, yet today’s cutting edge rebels are almost exclusively organized along these lines. We’ll be discussing informality, and anarchists’ strategies surrounding it, to better understand Black revolt and the Black left and to strategize destroying the civil society that has made Black liberation movements so necessary.

Advance registration appreciated.

This event will be a presentation followed by open discussion.

Atticus is a communist theorist and an anarchist in action. He’s been involved with anti-police struggle for the past 10 years of his life. His published writing is concerned with Black anarchism, the Black Radical Tradition, and small city organizing.

Cres is an anarchist living in Philadelphia. She’s participated in various struggles and uprisings over the last decade and a half. She’s interested in anarchy, incorrect and subversive uses of space and tools, and making memes.

Thursday, February 22, 2024
5:00 PM 6:30 PM
Making Worlds Bookstore & Social Center
210 South 45th Street

Going Underground: Race, Space, and the Subterranean with Lara Langer Cohen, Daphne Brooks, and S.S. Sandhu

  • September 7, 2023 1:01 am

from Making Worlds Books

Advanced Registration Encouraged: Click here to RSVP

Lara Langer Cohen’s Going Underground offers a genealogy of “the underground” as a space of subversion, tracing its formulation in Black radical manifestos, anarchist periodicals, sensationalist exposés of the urban underworld, manuals for sex magic, and the initiation rites of secret societies. The author will discuss the book with Daphne Brooks and S.S. Sandhu

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS:
Lara Langer Cohen is the author of Going Underground: Race, Space, and the Subterranean in the Nineteenth-Century United States (Duke, 2023) and Associate Professor of English at Swarthmore College.

Daphne Brooks is the author of Liner Notes for the Revolution: The Intellectual Life of Black Feminist Sound (Harvard, 2021). She is William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of African American Studies, American Studies, Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and Music at Yale University.

S.S. Sandhu is the author of Night Haunts: A Journey Through The London Night (Verso, 2010) and Associate Professor of English and Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University.

ABOUT THE BOOK
First popularized by newspaper coverage of the Underground Railroad in the 1840s, the underground serves as a metaphor for subversive activity that remains central to our political vocabulary. In Going Underground, Lara Langer Cohen excavates the long history of this now familiar idea while seeking out versions of the underground that were left behind along the way. Outlining how the underground’s figurative sense first took shape through the associations of literal subterranean spaces with racialized Blackness, she examines a vibrant world of nineteenth-century US subterranean literature that includes Black radical manifestos, anarchist periodicals, sensationalist exposés of the urban underworld, manuals for sex magic, and the initiation rites of secret societies. Cohen finds that the undergrounds in this literature offer sites of political possibility that exceed the familiar framework of resistance, suggesting that nineteenth-century undergrounds can inspire new modes of world-making and world-breaking for a time when this world feels increasingly untenable.

[Thursday, September 14, 2023
6:00 PM 7:30 PM
Making Worlds Bookstore & Social Center 210 South 45th Street Philadelphia, PA, 19104 United States (map)]