Tarantula Distribution writes

Now available from Tarantula Publications:

THE NEW STATE REPRESSION

“Today’s political repression differs fundamentally from the repression practiced here and around the world in the past. The most basic difference is on the level of strategy [...] the general approach of the state, the outlook of the ruling class.

“In the past, the rulers and their security forces believed that the normal condition of society was stability and calm, while insurgency was thought to be a quirk, an oddity, a pathology. [...] The difference today is their belief that insurgency is not an occasional, erratic idiosyncrasy of people who are exploited or oppressed, but a constant occurrence—permanent insurgency, which calls for a strategy that doesn’t simply rely on a police force and a national guard and an army that can be called out in an emergency, but rather a strategy of permanent repression as the full-time task of the security forces.”

—Ken Lawrence

“Our rulers need repression because they know how brittle their legitimacy really is, and how weak their grip on power. This sense of vulnerability always provides the premise for their plans, the motive for repressive action. ‘The New State Repression’ shows us this, often from the state’s perspective and largely through the words of its own strategists.

“We cannot afford to underestimate the state. But we should not fool ourselves into believing in its omnipotence, either. Ken Lawrence has offered a guard against each type of error.”

—Kristian Williams

Ken Lawrence’s classic essay on strategies of counter-insurgency has now been reprinted with a new introduction by Kristian Williams (author, Our Enemies in Blue and American Methods: Torture and the Logic of Domination).

Three dollars postpaid, or ask your local bookseller to place an order.

(Pamphlet, June 2006, 24 pages with silver/blue cover.)

Order online (U.S. / postpaid copy) here.

Please contact Tarantula Publications for bulk distribution rates, or for information on our other titles:

Tarantula / 818 SW 3rd Ave. PMB 1237 / Portland, OR 97204

www.socialwar.net

Promotional flyer (.pdf format) here. Spread the word—print and distribute!

The Commoner N. 11. Spring/Summer 2006
Re(in)fusing the Commons

After ten issues, The Commoner makes the first timid steps toward changing format and organisation, towards making more explicit and visible the practices of cyber commoning it is grounded on. Watch this space, we are slow, but things will happen. Meanwhile, enjoy the edition that our two guest editors, Nate Holdren and Stevphen Shukaitis, have put together, an edition in which the different contributions are traversed by the problematic of commoning.

Commoning, a term encountered by Peter Linebaugh in one of his frequent travels in the living history of commoners’ struggles, is about the (re)production of commons. To turn a noun into a verb is not a little step and requires some daring. Especially if in doing so we do not want to obscure the importance of the noun, but simply ground it on what is, after all, life flow: there are no commons without incessant activities of commoning, of (re)producing in common. But it is through (re)production in common that communities of producers decide for themselves the norms, values and measures of things. Let us put the “tragedy of the commons” to rest then, the basis of neoliberal argument for the privatisation: there is no commons without commoning, there are no commons without communities of producers and particular flows and modes of relations, an insight we have focused on in issue 6 of this journal, entitled “What Alternatives? Commons and Communities, Dignity and Freedom.” Hence, what lies behind the “tragedy of the commons” is really the tragedy of the destruction of commoning through all sorts of structural adjustments, whether militarised or not.

As the guest editors of this issue rightly point out, the question of commoning is linked to the question of “refusal of work,” that magic expression used in the 1970s to highlight the frontline clash of value practices. The term, however, is not meant as a refusal of doing, of commoning, of (re)producing in common, but on the contrary is an affirmation of all this in the only way possible when in the presence of a social force, capital, that aspires to couple its preservation to that of the commoners through the imposition of its measures of things. In these conditions, “refusal of work” as refusal of capital’s measures, and commoning as affirmation of other measures are the two sides of the same struggle. How can we refuse capital’s measure without participating in the constitution of other common measures? And how can we participate in this commonality without at the same time setting a limit, refusing capital’s measure? The setting of a limit to the beast and the constitution of an “outside” are two inescapable coordinates of struggle. It is through the problematic of this polarity that we could read the very diverse contributions of this issue of The Commoner.

Contents

Angela Mitropoulos, Autonomy, Recognition, Movement

Nick Dyer-Witheford, Species-Being and the New Commonism

Precarias a la Deriva, A Very Careful Strike - Four hypotheses

P.M., The golden globes of the planetary commons

George Ciccariello-Maher, Working-Class One-Sidedness from Sorel to Tronti

Silvia Federici, The Restructuring of Social Reproduction in the United States in the 1970s

Ida Dominijanni, Heiresses at Twilight. The End of Politics and the Politics of Difference

Colectivo Incendio, a new Latin American Anarchist Journal

Incendio Publicacion! - English and Espanol
New Bi-lingual Anarchist Journal focused on Latin America!

Incendio is...

An endeavor that some of us have taken up to increase communication with anarchists in Latin America, network, learn from their struggles, illuminate opportunities for solidarity actions, provide a forum for Latin American anarchists to share ideas and analysis, break down the language barrier, and make support efforts more possible.

Table of Contents for issue 1:

news
Venezuela: ASF (alternative social forum)
U.S. eco-resistance: arrests and repression

reviews
Disarmo #11
Aullidos Nocturnos #3

articles
Mexico (Sonora): the border at risk
Cuba: another Cuba is possible
Bolivia: Insurrection in Bolivia
Chile: The Unconquered Mapuche
Strangers Everywhere
Them or us

Anonymous Comrade writes

Renewing the Anarchist Tradition 2006
Call for Proposals

Call for Proposals (due July 15, 2006)

September 29 to October 1, 2006
at Goddard College, Plainfield, Vermont
http://www.homemadejam.org/renew

We are now accepting proposals for individual presentations and panels for the 2006 Renewing the Anarchist Tradition conference (RAT), sponsored by the Institute for Anarchist Studies. In particular, we encourage people of color, queer, transgender, and intersex people, women, people raising children, indigenous people, people with diverse abilities, working-class people, those outside academia, and others who are frequently underrepresented as speakers (for a variety of reasons) to send in proposals. Also, if you feel alienated when you look at the list of past RAT presentations on our Web site or think that important issues that should be considered through an anarchist lens are being left out, you probably have a presentation proposal to offer. Please get in touch. And please feel free to forward this e-mail to others who may be interested in participating in and/or attending this weekend.