Deceiving the Sky: Collective Experiments in Strategic Thinking

  • November 27, 2019 1:24 pm

Submission

-book tour-

Emerging from a study group on strategy, Deceiving the Sky is a collectively produced book, resource and study guide. While the word “strategy” can evoke hierarchy, centralization and a satellite’s-eye view of the world, we feel it is necessary to strengthen our own strategic reflexes. We believe that strategy can be a lens, an orientation to the world that understands existence as a shifting array of forces, capacities and intentions. Deceiving the Sky is an attempt to build a new language that we can share, to develop our collective capacity for strategic thinking, to become more powerful together.

Dec. 4th at 7:30pm
Wooden Shoe Books
704 South St

State Violence and Crowd Control in France

  • November 11, 2019 11:54 pm

from Facebook

Presentation by the French collective Desarmons-les!

The collective “Let’s disarm them!” was founded in 2012 by anarchist activists who for several years faced state violence and were directly affected by the use of grenades and rubber bullets. Invested in major radical anti-capitalist and ecological struggles between 2011 and 2015 (anti-nuclear and against “useless big construction projects”), the collective met other groups opposed to police violence, street medics, but also many victims, mutilated or close to people killed by the police.

At the end of 2014, “Let’s disarm them!” participated in the building of a national network of mutilated people, the “Assembly of the Wounded”. The state of emergency decreed at the end of 2015 after the attacks of Charlie Hebdo and Bataclan fundamentally transformed the French society and the militarization of the public space accelerated between 2015 and 2018, together with a sharp rise of the far right. Members of the collectives were under house arrest and on numerous occasions prohibited from demonstrating, arrested and brought to justice. The revolts against the labor reform and those of the Yellow Vests between 2016 and 2019 were harshly repressed. Many people have been injured, mutilated and imprisoned.

A member of the collective is organizing an infotour on the East Coast of the United States in November 2019. He proposes to describe the workings of state violence and the evolution of policing in France, from a historical and radical perspective.

[November 18 7PM at 704 South St]

Black Anarchism and the Revolutionary Abolitionist Movement

  • September 6, 2019 12:33 pm

from Facebook

A discussion focusing on Black anarchism highlighting the work of Kuwasi Balagoon and Russell Maroon Shoatz. What does Black anarchism mean in the 21st century? Why is it important? Where does Black anarchism fit into our current movement work today? What is the connection between abolitionist politics and the politics of Black anarchy? How does the Revolutionary Abolitionist Movement fall into this?
[September 13th at 7 pm at Wooden Shoe 704 South St]

Trouble screening: Land and Freedom

  • August 26, 2019 9:53 pm

from Facebook

Trouble 21 looks at anti-colonial struggles in Turtle Island and Palestine

From the genocidal aftermath of Columbus’ accidental “discovery” of the New World, to the ever-deeper encroachments of Israeli settlements into the West Bank — five hundred years of European colonialism has cast a long shadow over this world. Colonization, in its supreme arrogance, carved up the globe according to the imperial logic of accumulation, imposing artificial borders on foreign lands and seeking to subjugate restive native populations through religious indoctrination and force of arms. But despite their military superiority, ideological warfare and constant recourse to savage brutality, colonial regimes have consistently failed to crush the will of colonized people to fight back. And the reason for this is simple. Occupation breeds resistance.

Anarchists, especially those of us who have never experienced the sharp edge of colonization, have much to learn from those waging this resistance. We also have a principled imperative to align ourselves with those facing acute forms of state violence and dispossession. To this end, this episode of Trouble draws on two examples of contemporary anti-colonial struggle – those waged by the Palestinians and the Mohawks of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy against their respective oppressors, the Israeli and Canadian settler-colonial states, in hopes of drawing out lessons and increasing our capacity for producing meaningful solidarity.

[August 28 from 7:00 PM – 8:30 PM at Wooden Shoe Books and Records 704 South St]

Wooden Shoe A Selection Of Upcoming Events

  • August 17, 2019 2:32 am

from Facebook

Sunday August 18th, 2-3 pm
Divest Philly from the War Machine Coalition meeting
https://www.facebook.com/events/349679095923272/

Tuesday August 27th, 7 pm
Them Fatale showcase & open mic
https://www.facebook.com/events/1121465428061819/

Wednesday September 4th, 7 pm
Heineken in Africa: A Multinational Unleashed
A book discussion with author Olivier van Beemen at the Wooden Shoe https://www.facebook.com/events/496410970929437/

*Followed by an after party at Tattooed Mom during their 10-11 pm happy hour ???? https://www.tattooedmomphilly.com/event/heineken-africa-wooden-shoe-party/

Friday September 13th, 7 pm
Discussion of Black Anarchism and the Revolutionary Abolitionist Movement
https://www.facebook.com/events/416005049014957/

Wednesday September 18th, 7 pm
The Battle for the Mountain of the Kurds: Self-Determination and Ethnic Cleansing in the Afrin Region of Rojava
Discussion with PM Press author Thomas Schmidinger
https://www.facebook.com/events/380651969300713/

Thursday September 19th, 8-9 pm
The Rhubarbs Present: The Never Ending Veggie Tale
https://www.facebook.com/events/348847092657536/

Saturday September 21st, 7 pm
One People’s Project Philly Fundraiser
Join the subject of the feature film “Skin” and the star of the documentary “Alt- Right Age of Rage” and One People’s Project founder Daryle Lamont Jenkins
https://www.facebook.com/events/558428338021870/

* * *

Anarchism and Education w/ Mark Bray & Rob Haworth

  • July 24, 2019 10:49 am

from Facebook

On October 13, 1909, Francisco Ferrer, the notorious Catalan anarchist educator and founder of the Modern School, was executed by firing squad. The Spanish government accused him of masterminding the Tragic Week rebellion, while the transnational movement that emerged in his defense argued that he was simply the founder of the groundbreaking Modern School of Barcelona. Was Ferrer a ferocious revolutionary, an ardently nonviolent pedagogue, or something else entirely?

Anarchist Education and the Modern School is the first historical reader to gather together Ferrer’s writings on rationalist education, revolutionary violence, and the general strike (most translated into English for the first time) and put them into conversation with the letters, speeches, and articles of his comrades, collaborators, and critics to show that the truth about the founder of the Modern School was far more complex than most of his friends or enemies realized. Francisco Ferrer navigated a tempestuous world of anarchist assassins, radical republican conspirators, anticlerical rioters, and freethinking educators to establish the legendary Escuela Moderna and the Modern School movement that his martyrdom propelled around the globe.

[July 31 from 7 PM – 9 PM at Wooden Shoe Books 704 South St]

Occult Features of Anarchism w/ author Erica Lagalisse

  • April 18, 2019 1:30 am

from Facebook

In the nineteenth century anarchists were accused of conspiracy by governments afraid of revolution, but in the current century various “conspiracy theories” suggest that anarchists are controlled by government itself. The Illuminati were a network of intellectuals who argued for self-government and against private property, yet the public is now often told that they were (and are) the very group that controls governments and defends private property around the world. Intervening in such misinformation, Lagalisse works with primary and secondary sources in multiple languages to set straight the history of the Left and illustrate the actual relationship between revolutionism, pantheistic occult philosophy, and the clandestine fraternity.

Exploring hidden correspondences between anarchism, Renaissance magic, and New Age movements, Lagalisse also advances critical scholarship regarding leftist attachments to secular politics. Inspired by anthropological fieldwork within today’s anarchist movements, her essay challenges anarchist atheism insofar as it poses practical challenges for coalition politics in today’s world.

Studying anarchism as a historical object, Occult Features of Anarchism also shows how the development of leftist theory and practice within clandestine masculine public spheres continues to inform contemporary anarchist understandings of the “political,” in which men’s oppression by the state becomes the prototype for power in general. Readers behold how gender and religion become privatized in radical counterculture, a historical process intimately linked to the privatization of gender and religion by the modern nation-state.

[April 25 at 7:00 PM – 9:00 PM at Wooden Shoe Books and Records 704 South St]

Screening of Quiet Storm: Technology & Social Control

  • March 28, 2019 12:49 am

from Instagram

We’ll be screening the latest Trouble episode from @sub.media Tuesday April 2nd at 8pm. It’s titled, “Quiet Storm: Technology & Social Control”

[Wooden Shoe Books 704 South St]

Liaisons presents: In the Name of the People

  • February 28, 2019 11:47 pm

from Facebook

Please join us for a discussion and presentation with Liaisons on their recent book “In the Name of the People”. Authors from Japan, Mexico, Montreal, and New York will be present to discuss the global populist surge.

The upheaval and polarizations caused by populist movements around the world indicates above all the urgency to develop global revolutionary perspectives, and to make the necessary connections to understand and act in the present. Liaisons is a collective of authors from America, France, Italy, Japan, Korea, Lebanon, Mexico, Quebec, Russia, and Spain.

More than a collective, less than a world, Liaisons is an inclination, a tangent, a crossroads of confrontations, links, and encounters. Liaisons does not study the movement of others as an external object (movement history), nor does it project principles of revolution in the context of pure theory (intellectual history). Instead, Liaisons assembles analyses and theorizations directly from the ongoing struggles of affiliated groups, based in different parts of the planet and seeking a common ground. Liaisons has formed through long-term friendships and, in ensemble, its discourses shed light on a horizon of living-in-struggle. The works of Liaisons are not embodiments of a shared doctrine, but rather research on the interconnectivity among singular problems and aspirations, to facilitate a planetary reverberation of militant autonomy. The works are to expand along with the permeation of the collective, and metamorphose amidst the fluctuating situation of the world.

http://www.commonnotions.org/liaisons
https://www.facebook.com/liaisonshq
https://twitter.com/liaisonshq
https://www.instagram.com/liaisons_hq/

[March 7 from 7:00PM to 9:00PM at Wooden Shoe Books 704 South St]

Silvia Federici book launch & discussion

  • December 5, 2018 1:47 pm

from Facebook

Join us for a book launch and discussion on Silvia Federici’s two new books Witches, Witch-Hunting, and Women & Re-enchanting the World

Witches, Witch-Hunting, and Women is feminist call to arms providing new ways of understanding the methods in which women resist victimization and offers a reminder that reconstructing the memory of the past is crucial for the struggles of the present.

Re-enchanting the World: Feminism and the Politics of the Commons centers on women and reproductive work as crucial to both economic survival and the construction of a world free from the hierarchies and divisions of capital.

Silvia Federici is a feminist writer, teacher, and militant. In 1972 she was cofounder of the International Feminist Collective that launched the Wages for Housework campaign internationally. Her previous books include Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation and Revolution at Point Zero. She is a professor emerita at Hofstra University, where she was a social science professor. She worked as a teacher in Nigeria for many years and was also the cofounder of the Committee for Academic Freedom for Africa. Her newest books are Witches, Witch-Hunting, and Women and Re-enchanting the World: Feminism and the Politics of the Commons, both published by PM Press in 2018.

[December 12 from 7PM to 9PM at Wooden Shoe Books and Records 704 South St]

Conspiracy To Riot film screening

  • November 5, 2018 12:59 pm

from Facebook

On January 20th, 2017, Donald Trump was sworn in as the 45th President of the United States of America. Following his inaugural address, as the upper echelons of the American political establishment mingled on the National Mall, several blocks away, a riot was breaking out. A black bloc several hundred strong was wreaking havoc on the streets. The bloc was part of the anti-capitalist and anti-fascist march, one component of a broader day of protests organized under the umbrella #DisruptJ20. Armed with spray paint, crowbars and rocks, this mob smashed windows, clashed with police and redecorated a limo that would eventually be put to the torch. The police repression was swift. Amidst the haze of pepper spray and flashbangs, over two hundred protesters were kettled, and arrested by DC’s Metro Police.

So began one of the most important political trials in recent history. In an effort to set a chilling precedent for anti-Trump resistance, the US Department of Justice charged over 200 people with eight separate felony charges, threatening them with upwards of 80 years in prison. In her crusade to paint the J20 black bloc as one giant conspiracy to riot, federal Prosecutor Jennifer Kerkhoff filed warrants to seize people’s digital data, and entered into an alliance with discredited far-right media outfits peddling doctored evidence. Faced with this repressive array of state power, J20 defendants responded with unflinching solidarity, setting a new standard for political defense in the age of Trump. This is their story.

More info at: https://sub.media/c/trouble/

[November 8 from 7:00 PM – 9:00 PM at Wooden Shoe Books and Records 704 South St]

Prison Strike Info Session: Prison Rebellion/Outside Complicity

  • July 18, 2018 12:58 pm

from Facebook

A presentation and discussion in the lead-up to the upcoming national prison strike beginning August 21st, 2018. We’ll cover a quick analysis of prisons and policing in the U.S., some history of prisoner resistance during the rise of mass incarceration, and emphasize organizing and rebellion inside over the past decade. We’ll also take a closer look at outside actions during the national prison strike in 2016 to try and glean lessons and inspiration to continue supporting those fighting inside while undermining and attacking prisons and policing beyond the prison walls themselves.

“August 2018 is going to be lit. By that we mean: massive,
transformative, world-changing.”

For the initial strike call, see:
http://sfbayview.com/2018/04/south-carolina-freedom-fighters-call-for-national-prisoners-strike-aug-21-sept-9-2018/

For more info, see:

https://fireinside.noblogs.org
https://incarceratedworkers.org
https://redistributethepain.wordpress.com
https://michiganabolition.org
https://itsgoingdown.org

For more additional information about the info night or if you have any questions please email delawarevalleyanti-prisonnetwork@protonmail.com

Anarchists, Communists, Socialists: Part 1 of Building a Revolutionary Coalition – RED & Comrades

  • July 13, 2018 6:11 pm

from Radical Education Department

“Anarchists, Communists, Socialists: Bridging the Divides in Philly”
Part 1 of RED’s series on “Building a Revolutionary Coalition in Philly”
With Activists from IWW, Philly Socialists, Food Not Bombs Solidarity, RED
Wooden Shoe Books, Philadelphia
July 11, 2018

Event Description:
In Philly, like in many other cities, radical groups often work separately. We come together for certain events, or anniversaries like May Day, but beyond these we can tend to stick to our own projects. How can we create more radical support for, and coordination with, each other? How can we build a radical, durable, and broad-based coalition in Philly?

This summer, the Radical Education Department (RED) is working with other radical groups in the city to coordinate a series of three discussions—building off of our Wooden Shoe discussion this past spring on “Antifascist Education.”

The overall theme for this summer series is “Building a Revolutionary Coalition in Philly.” The first talk, at the Wooden Shoe, will be around the theme “Anarchists, Communists, Socialists: Bridging the Divides in Philly.” One goal is to discuss ways to create more solidarity between groups in the city, exploring the deep history of radical coalitions—among anarchists, communists, and well beyond—along the way.

Download the flyer for the event here.

Building a Revolutionary Coalition in Philly

  • July 8, 2018 11:45 pm

from Facebook

Anarchists, Communists, Socialists: Bridging the Divides

Featuring a panel of individuals discussing their experiences from radical organizations, including:
*Philly Socialists
*Philly IWW
*Philly Food Not Bombs
*Radical Education Department

In Philly, like in many other cities, radical groups often work separately. We come together for certain events, or anniversaries like May Day, but beyond these we can tend to stick to our own projects. How can we create more radical support for, and coordination with, each other? How can we build a radical, durable, and broad-based coalition in Philly?

This summer, the Radical Education Department (RED) is working with other radical groups in the city to coordinate a series of three discussions—building off of our Wooden Shoe discussion this past spring on “Antifascist Education.” The overall theme for this summer series is “Building a Revolutionary Coalition in Philly.” The first talk, at the Wooden Shoe, will be around the theme “Anarchists, communists, socialists: Bridging the divides in Philly.” One goal is to discuss ways to create more solidarity between groups in the city, exploring the deep history of radical coalitions—among anarchists, communists, and well beyond—along the way.

https://radicaleducationdepartment.com

Insurgent SupremacistsThe US Far Right’s Challenge to State & Empire

  • May 9, 2018 3:00 pm

from Instagram

 

A major study of movements that strive to overthrow the U.S. government, that often claim to be anti-imperialist and sometimes even anti-capitalist yet also consciously promote inequality, hierarchy, and domination, generally along explicitly racist, sexist, and homophobic lines. Revolutionaries of the far right: insurgent supremacists.

In this book, Matthew N. Lyons takes readers on a tour of neonazis and Christian theocrats, by way of the patriot movement, the LaRouchites, and the alt-right. Supplementing this, thematic sections explore specific dimensions of far-right politics, regarding gender, decentralism, and anti-imperialism.

Intervening directly in debates within left and antifascist movements, Lyons examines both the widespread use and abuse of the term “fascism,” and the relationship between federal security forces and the paramilitary right. His final chapter offers a preliminary analysis of the Trump presidential administration relationship with far-right politics and the organized far right’s shifting responses to it.

Both for its analysis and as a guide to our opponents, Insurgent Supremacists promises to be a powerful tool in organizing to resist the forces at the cutting edge of reaction today.

[May 16 at 7PM at Wooden Shoe Books & Records 704 South Street]