"This Month in NYMAA"

The New York Metro Alliance of Anarchists

A Bimonthly Bulletin, No. 1, June, 2007

Welcome to the first issue of This Month in NYMAA! This bulletin will be
coming out every two months or so, and we hope it will give the wider
anarchist movement a clearer picture of the types of projects that the New
York Metro Alliance of Anarchists is generating.

NYMAA was founded at our first General Assembly on March 4, 2006. We are
comprised of anarchists, antiauthoritarians, horizontalists, and
far-left-leaning individuals committed to changing the world through the
act of social revolution. Our ultimate aim is to eradicate all forms of
authoritarianism, hierarchy, and domination and build a genuinely
liberatory, self-managed, directly democratic society. To that end, our
immediate aim is to bring anarchists together on a common plane of
struggle for the purposes of growing and expanding the movement and
spreading our ideas.

The Habits of Freedom:

Legacies of Paul Goodman

The June Anarchist Forum

On Tuesday, June 12, at 7:30pm, the Libertarian Book Club's Anarchist
Forum
will present a panel discussing the life, work and legacy of Paul Goodman.

Goodman
who lived from 1911 to 1972, is considered to have been a pacifist,
anarchist, poet,
and author of novels and plays. He has been called one of the most
influential social critics of the 1960s. His famous book Growing Up
Absurd has been said to establish
him as “the philosopher of the New Left in the 1960s.”

He organized against
the
Vietnam War. His plans for organizing social structures included keeping
private cars
out of Manhattan. The panel will include Taylor Stoehr, who is Goodman’s
literary executor; Wayne Price; and Jonathan Lee, a filmmaker who will show a
preview of
his movie “Growing Up With Paul Goodman.”

After putting their ideas forward, the panel will answer questions
and respond to audience comments.

The event will take place at:
The Living Theatre
21 Clinton Street

Manhattan (just south of Houston St)
(212-792-8050).

Coming from uptown,
take the F or V train to "2nd Avenue" (exit front of train on 1st Ave, walk
east
along Houston and turn right on Clinton) or coming from downtown, take the
F, V, M or Z train to "Delancey–Essex" and walk east on Delancey 3 blocks
and turn left on Clinton for 2 and a half blocks.

Everybody is welcome and invited to come and to have their say. There is no
set fee for the presentation, but a contribution to aid the LBC is
suggested. If
you have questions, contact the LBC /Anarchist Forum
212-979-8353
or
e-mail: roberterler@erols.com

The Living Theatre and the LBC unite to let the Anarchist Voice be heard.

Two anarchist groups, that were begun in the 1940’s to get the word out on
what our society really is and how it can be healed if it switches to
anarchist principles, have united again to get our message heard. The
Living Theatre
has opened a New York show place again after years of wandering from site
to site. They have offered their new space to the LBC so that the Anarchist
Forum and other LBC events can have a home with our comrades.

Danger List writes:

"The Return of Danger"

Danger List

Saturday July Seventh (2007):

The Righteous & The Wicked : Danger Takes Manhattan

For your illicit pleasure we've taken over a massive new
venue within the city of dreams. Prepare yourself for the
Righteous & the Wicked — an all night explosion of fallen
angels, public scandal and performance perfected.
Featuring music, spectacle and seditious surprises
saturating a maze like complex of dark rooms and massive
sound. On this night the island of commerce rediscovers
its decadent soul. This is just a tease — full details
will be released soon.

The party above is a fundraiser for the event below.
(You've waited a year for this.)

Saturday July Fourteenth (2007):

One Night of Fire : The Return of the Renegade Parade

This is the story of the battle for Brooklyn.

Our city is slipping. We can feel it in our blood and in
the eyes of the once inspired. True moments of grandeur
are fading into pleasant memory. Even at our most
cynical, we still crave reckless explorations of the
anything-is-possible. Last year two thousand of you took
the Brooklyn Bridge, the trains and the boardwalk at Coney
Island and mashed into a lurid cabal of un-permitted bliss.
On July 14th expect much more.

IAS writes:

Institute for Anarchist Studies' Grant Application

The Institute for Anarchist Studies (IAS) would like to remind everyone that our Summer 2007 grant deadline is rapidly approaching: June 15.

Twice yearly, the IAS funds radical writers and translators around the world for essay-length works. We want to see YOUR ideas in this round of proposals, so get to it!

Apply by going to our Web site, where you can also find more information including past grant recipients and other IAS projects: http://www.anarchiststudies.org.

Incendio

New Bilingual 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.

Lenin Reloaded: Toward a Politics of Truth

Edited by Sebastian Budgen, Stathis Kouvelakis, and Slavoj Žižek

Lenin Reloaded is a rallying call by some of the world’s leading
Marxist intellectuals for renewed attention to the significance of
Vladimir Lenin. The volume’s editors explain that it was Lenin who made
Karl Marx’s thought explicitly political, who extended it beyond the
confines of Europe, who put it into practice. They contend that a focus
on Lenin is urgently needed now, when global capitalism appears to be
the only game in town, the liberal-democratic system seems to have been
settled on as the optimal political organization of society, and it has
become easier to imagine the end of the world than a modest change in
the mode of production.

Lenin retooled Marx’s thought for specific
historical conditions in 1914, and Lenin Reloaded urges a reinvention
of the revolutionary project for the present. Such a project would be
Leninist in its commitment to action based on truth and its acceptance
of the consequences that follow from action.

Rev. David Kirk, 72, Crusader for New York City's Disenfranchised, Dies

Margalit Fox, New York Times

The Rev. David Kirk, an Eastern Orthodox priest who spent most of his adult life working with New York City's disenfranchised, died on May 23 at Emmaus House, the communal residence for the homeless that he founded in Harlem more than 40 years ago. He was 72.

Father Kirk, who had been in declining health with kidney trouble and other ailments, died in his sleep, said his nephew Kirk Barrell. At Father Kirk's request, he was buried near his longtime mentor, the Roman Catholic social reformer Dorothy Day, at Resurrection Cemetery in Staten Island.

Father Kirk, for decades a presence in the civil rights and antiwar movements, established Emmaus House in the mid-1960s on East 116th Street. It was conceived not as a shelter but as a community for the city's homeless men and women and was modeled on the Emmaus movement, begun in France after World War II to aid the poor.

Kevin Smith writes:

"The Carbon Neutral Myth:
Offset Indulgences for your Climate Sins"

Carbon Trade Watch

Carbon offsets are the modern day indulgences, sold to an increasingly carbon conscious public to absolve their climate sins. Scratch the surface, however, and a disturbing picture emerges, where creative accountancy and elaborate shell games cover up the impossibility of verifying genuine climate change benefits, and where communities in the South often have little choice as offset projects are inflicted on them.

This report from Carbon Trade Watch, a project of the Transnational Institute, argues that offsets place disproportionate emphasis on individual lifestyles and carbon footprints, distracting attention from the wider, systemic changes and collective political action that needs to be taken to tackle climate change. Promoting more effective and empowering approaches involves moving away from the marketing gimmicks, celebrity endorsements, technological quick fixes, and the North/South exploitation that the carbon offsets industry embodies.

Anonymous Comrade writes:

The Shacks Fight Back!
The Shack Dwellers Movement in South Africa

Three talks by Richard Pithouse of the South African shack dwellers movement, Abahlali baseMjondolo.

Abahlali have fought for the right of Durban's shack dwellers to basic amenities — housing, water, land. This democratic grassroots movement has confronted the lies and evasions of local government and aid agencies to show that real participatory democracy is possible: when it is organised by and for the dispossessed.

Richard Pithouse, an academic and journalist who has been active in the movement since its inception, will talk about the struggle, show some short videos, and answer questions.

Community activists from the East End and South London will be in attendance. We hope that the parallels between Abahlali's struggle and that of Londoners fighting the decay and privatisation of their services will provide inspiration and a chance to think.

Please come and join in the discussion!

Anonymous Comrade writes:

Voices of Resistance from Occupied London

Voices of Resistance from Occupied London is the city's newest anarchist journal. It is free (as in freedom!) and available in both paper and electronic form.

Issue One of our journal is finally out. It contains interviews with Mike Davis, Bill Brown (from the NYC Surveillance Camera Players), articles by another eight contributors, comic strips and call-outs for the forthcoming anti-G8 mobilisations in Germany. Everything is available on-line here.