Month: August 2014

Stephanie McMillan poster: Affirmations for Revolutionary Proletarian Militants

Support Stephanie McMillan’s work, and stay motivated to fight to change the world, with her new poster with 20 inspirational messages!

$19 — FREE shipping in US (international shipping is an ADDITIONAL amount; please add it from Stephanie McMillan’s shop)





Captions:

1. Contentment is for people in denial. I do not accept social injustice, exploitation, or ecocide.
2. My purpose is not for petty gains, but for radical social transformation.
3. I’m committed to the struggle for the long haul. It isn’t a game or hobby; it’s my life.
4. When I face a choice, I decide what to do based on the interests of the revolution.
5. I take every opportunity to help people understand the nature of the system and to join the struggle.
6. I don’t engage in self-destructive habits. I remain strong and alert for the struggle.
7. I am willing to listen to constructive criticism, so I can rectify my errors.
8. I avoid distractions and focus on my fundamental goal.
9. The problem is not me; it is the global capitalist/imperialist system.
10. I don’t blame individuals for social problems. Yet it is our responsibility for ending the system that causes them.
11. Everyone has a skill, talent, experience or insight that can contribute to the struggle.
12. I surround myself with sincere people who share common goals of ending exploitation and domination.
13. We will never be satisfied with reforms to the existing system. Our goal is nothing less than a classless and sustainable society.
14. Even when I’m alone, I stand up for what I understand to be true.
15. I do not avoid struggle; it is how people and history advance.
16. I don’t argue for argument’s sake. Instead I engage in political struggle so as to better understand reality.
17. Our nature is cooperative. If we work collectively, we can overcome the system that is crushing us.
18. I don’t jump to premature conclusions. Before making a judgment I investigate a matter fully.
19. I realize my loved ones are ideologically dominated, and have compassion for them as I struggle with them.
20. As I face each day, I determine my priorities, based on my long-term goal of proletarian revolution.

Videos recommended by Deep Green Resistance

We’ve compiled lists of videos we recommend to those learning about radical history and resistance, from presentations by DGR members to fictional films. We have two sets of lists. Enjoy!

Deep Green Resistance Youtube Channel features resistance videos with Derrick Jensen, Lierre Keith, Aric McBay, and other DGR members. You’ll also find non-DGR films and music videos with anti-civ analysis and themes of resistance.

  • Trailers for upcoming DGR films
  • DGR Workshop Presentations
  • DGR Presentations at PIELC (Public Interest Environmental Law Conference in Eugene, OR)
  • DGR Authors (Derrick Jensen, Lierre Keith, and Aric McBay) giving various presentations
  • Other DGR members on various speaking tours
  • Radical Feminism
  • Resistance & Anti-civilization Films
    • Resistance – Contemporary
    • Fictional Resistance & Anti-Civ
    • Resistance – Historical
    • Indigeneity
    • Civilization: The Problem
  • Resistance Radio: audio interviews by Derrick Jensen
  • Music videos

We also have a set of Deep Green Resistance IMDB lists. These don’t include any actual video clips, but do provide more information on the films, including reviews by other people.

  • The Problem of Civilization – Big Picture
  • The Problem of Civilization – Specific Issues
  • Resistance – Contemporary
  • Resistance – Historical
  • Resistance – World War II
  • Resistance – Fictional
  • Indigeneity
  • Feminism
  • Historical & Political Documentaries
  • Restoration & Nature Documentaries
  • Animal Rights
  • Fictional anti-civilization films

Zack de la Rouda: environmental/conscious hip-hop

Zack de la Rouda, a “Poet, singer, songwriter, rhapsodist, activist, rewilder, homesteader-in-training”, has released several albums plus miscellaneous tracks, full of rewilding and anti-civ sentiments with hip-hop beats. Explore his music, most downloadable for free, at Zack de la Rouda at Bandcamp.

To get you started, here’s “(Live Like) We’re Dying”, with a chorus advising:

we gotta start looking at the hands on the time we been given

if this is all we got then we gotta start thinking that

every second counts on a clock that’s ticking

we need to live like we’re dying

we only got 86,400 seconds in the day

to turn it all around or to throw it all away

gotta tell ’em that we love ’em while we got the chance to say

we need to live like we’re dying

Operation Ghetto Storm: police killings of blacks in the US

“Operation Ghetto Storm” details how every 28 hours someone inside the United States, employed or protected by the U.S. government, kills a Black child, woman or man. These state-sanctioned killings are the casualties of what the Committee calls “Operation Ghetto Storm”, a perpetual war to invade, occupy and pacify Black communities ― much like the U.S. invades and occupies the Middle East. This report clearly lays out a horrifying aspect of the domestic half of civilization, which anthropologist Stanley Diamond says “originates in conquest abroad and repression at home.”

Going beyond a compilation of raw statistics and details of killings from 2012-2013, the report, written by Arlene Eisen and with a preface by Kali Akuno, gives important background context and analysis of how racism manifests throughout US society.

Download the Operation Ghetto Storm report, or visit the report’s publisher, Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, for more information. Then participate in and support anti-racist organizing and trainings in your area.

Stephanie McMillan: Art Is a Weapon in the Battle of Ideas

Grassroots organizer Stephanie McMillan does important anti-capitalism work with One Struggle, and uses political cartoons as one vehicle towards social and environmental justice. You can watch a video of her from a recent event, in which she presents a very general overview and polemic about political art, the relationship of culture and politics, and the need for explicitly revolutionary art as a vital component of a revolutionary movement.

How does culture advance political aims? How do we use our art to challenge capitalism/imperialism? Why does the bourgeoisie love abstract expressionism?

These were some of the questions I addressed a couple weeks ago at a One Struggle event in Fort Lauderdale, in a slideshow presentation called “Art is a Weapon in the Battle of Ideas.”

Also see Stephanie McMillan’s upcoming events, including a presentation in Florida, conference calls, and this year’s Earth At Risk in San Francisco.

Deep Green Resistance book audio excerpts

We recently updated the Deep Green Resistance book page of our main website to link to audio excerpts read by DGR members. We have excerpts from the Preface and from Chapters 1, 4, 5, 12, 14, and 15: “The Problem”, “Culture of Resistance”, “Other Plans”, “Introduction to Strategy”, “Decisive Ecological Warfare” (entire chapter!), and “Our Best Hope.” Look for the audio icons next to some of the chapters in the table of contents.

(Originally broadcast in 2012 on RAGE Radio, a great podcast series.)

But I’m an anarchist! How can I be sexist?

“Going to Places That Scare Me: Personal Reflections on Challenging Male Supremacy”

Chris Crass, author of the book Towards Collective Liberation: Anti-Racist Organizing, Feminist Praxis, and Movement Building Strategy, devotes one chapter to detailing his personal experience becoming aware of his own sexism and that of his fellow male activists. After accepting the reality of his privilege, he began the lifelong process of uprooting blatant and subtle manifestations within himself, challenging it within male comrades as indivduals, and helping structure activist groups to counteract sexist defaults and biases.

This is an essay for other people raised male who identify as men and who, like me, are Left/anarchist organizers with privilege struggling to build movements for collective liberation. It is written for men in the movement who have been challenged on their sexism and male privilege and are looking for support. I’m focusing here on the emotional aspects of my own experience of dealing with issues of sexism and anti-sexism.

More and more, gender-privileged men in the movement are working to challenge male supremacy. Thousands of us recognize that patriarchy exists; that we have material and psychological privileges as a result; that sexism undermines movements; that women, transgender, and genderqueer people have explained it over and over again and said “you all need to talk with each other, challenge each other, and figure out what you’re all going to do.” However, a far greater number of men in the movement agree that sexism exists in society, perhaps even in the movement, but deny their personal participation in it.

Deep Green Resistance takes very seriously the need for those with any kind of privilege to examine and disarm it within their own lives and relationships, but more importantly to use it to dismantle the larger systemic institutions that uphold that privilege. Crass’ journey touches on many important aspects of anti-sexism work, and gives an excellent entry point for men with interest in facing the problems of patriarchy. He shares personal revelations that many of us might be ashamed to admit:

Learning in a community of largely women and people of color also deeply impacted because it was the first time that I’d ever been in situations where I was a numerical minority on the basis of race or gender. Suddenly, race and gender weren’t just other issues among many, but central aspects of how others experienced and understood the world. The question I sometimes thought silently to myself – “Why do you always have to talk about race and gender?” – was flipped on its head: “How can you not think about race and gender all the time?”

The whole piece is important for men to read, as undoing sexism is a process that requires work and has no easy answers. But it’s also valuable to keep in mind concrete steps men must take to challenge male supremacy, such as these laid out by a friend of the author:

“Gender-privileged people can offer to take notes in meetings, make phone calls, find meeting locations, do childcare, make copies and other less glamorous work. They can encourage women and gender oppressed people in a group to take on roles men often dominate (e.g. strategic leadership in actions, MCing an event, media spokespeople). You can ask specific women if they want to do it, and explain why you think they would be good, as oppose to tokenizing just to get a woman to do it. Pay attention to who you listen to and check yourself on power-tripping.”

Read the entire chapter by Chris Crass: Going to Places That Scare Me: Personal Reflections on Challenging Male Supremacy.

George Jackson: Specialize in something to help the war effort

George Jackson, imprisoned for years and radicalized by the experience, clearly saw the need to develop a black culture of resistance to white supremacy. He wrote early on that “I know now that the most damaging thing a people in a colonial situation can do is to allow their children to attend any educational facility organized by the dominant enemy culture.” Yet he recognized the need to grapple with, compromise with, and ultimately leverage the systems and institutions over which we have little individual power. He wrote to his younger brother Jonathan, giving advice applicable to any young person passionately motivated to fight civilization or any of its many problems:

I hope you are involved in the academic program at your school, but knowing what I know about this country’s schooling methods, they are not really directing you to any specialized line of study. They have not tried to ascertain what fits your character and disposition and to direct you accordingly. So you must do this yourself. Decide now what you would like to specialize in, one thing that you will drive at. Do you get it? Decide now. There are several things that we as a group, a revolutionary group, need badly: chemists, electronic engineers, surgeons, etc. Choose one and give it special attention at a certain time each day. Establish a certain time to give over to your specialty and let [our father] know indirectly what you are doing. Then it only remains for you to get your A’s on the little simple unnecessary subjects that the school requires. This is no real problem. It can be accomplished with just a little attention and study. But you must now start on your specialty, the thing that you plan to carry through this war of life. You must specialize in something. Just let it be something that will help the war effort.

From Soledad Brother, page 195

What are your interests? What’s your calling? What are your skills? What specialty can you develop? Decide now, give it special attention, and let it be something in service of the earth and social justice.

Active resistance: The Decision to Die, The Decision to Kill

In this new essay, Will Falk of DGR San Diego explores the extreme possibilities of violence: choosing to die, and choosing to kill. He asks how these decisions relate to the ongoing violence of civilization and asks what we need to do, and what we’re willing to do in response:

It is becoming increasingly clear the dominant culture must be stopped. The more effective we become at resisting, the more violence will be visited upon us. Will we be strong enough to decide to die for a better world? Will we be strong enough to decide to kill for a better world? If this sounds too extreme, then I ask you what decisions were faced by Tecumseh, Nat Turner, Crazy Horse, Denmark Vesey, and Padráic Pearse when they picked up rifles and hatchets to meet bullets and swords?

Falk grapples with the question of how to justify violent resistance to violent abusers, drawing on his participation recently in a group discussion of tree spiking:

When I imagine this logging operation and listen to people urging advocates of direct action tactics like tree spiking to think of the loggers that may be hurt or to disregard any option that involves violence, I cannot help but ask: What about the trees? What about the mycelia networks living in mutual relationship with tree roots? What about the chicks living in the treetops?

These are important questions for individuals and organizations to ask themselves and address. Violence is already happening all around us, for our immediate benefit but probably leading to our premature deaths. Will we face this honestly and make active decisions about whether to die, whether to kill?

Read the entire essay: Will Falk – The Decision to Die, the Decision to Kill.

Interview of Meghan Murphy

Ernesto Aguilar, a former DGR member, interviewed Meghan Murphy of Feminist Current for Women’s History Month in March 2013. Murphy presents a clear and articulate analysis of the current state of online feminism – strengths and weaknesses, successes and works in progress, allies and backlash. She spoke extensively on the destructive tendency of online discussions to turn into horizontal hostility, and the ongoing pattern of silencing women:

I don’t think that attacking and harassing feminists online counts as activism, or as supporting women, even if you kind of pretend you’re doing it on behalf of women. Regardless of how you frame it, it’s still about woman-hating, and it’s about anti-feminism, and that’s not progressive. If you’re a man and you’re harassing or silencing women, you can’t pretend to be a progressive person or a person who cares about liberty or human rights or women’s lives or the well being of women. That’s not what allies do.

Later in the interview, she gets specific about a prominent silencing mechanism:

There’s this thing that’s become popular in the feminist blogosphere, and that’s this overuse of the phobia language. I think that’s a big problem. It’s become common practice to label any [feminist] critique as a phobia. You hear things like “kink phobia”, or “whore phobia”, “transphobia”, on and on and on. And I’ve personally been accused of all of these things, and I don’t hate or fear prostituted women or trans people or kinky people.

What I want to have is conversations, and this is just another way to shut down conversation, and it’s a part of the bullying that goes on in some parts of online feminism. It’s about keeping people in line, and it’s about keeping conversations restricted within narrow boundaries. If you don’t like what someone says, you can call them some version of “phobic” and you can call someone a bigot and everyone shuts up. These are kind of the magic words that put fear in every feminist’s heart, because they know that if they’re called one of these things – some kind of “phobic” – that no one will stick up for them, because everyone else is afraid of being labeled by association. Everyone’s afraid to have real conversations, because they see what happens, and they see what happens to other feminists, and they don’t want that to happen to them.

Listen to the entire interview embedded below (originally posted at Feminist Current). And for elaboration on the tactic of shutting down feminist discourse by threatening to apply vague but powerful labels, see the latest article at Feminist Current: “How ‘TERF’ works”, by Sarah Ditum.

Download mp3