The Dirigible a podcast about Solar Punk prompts In this episode we take the skies and travel between distant settlements with an anarchist crew on our beautiful balloon. https://podcast.tomasino.org/@SolarpunkPrompts/episodes/the-dirigible
The good news is that their narrative about where innovation comes from is a lie. Anarchists had more to do with the origins of Twitter than plutocrats like Musk. We can create new platforms, new points of departure for connection, new strategies for changing the world. We have to.
The Detroit Printing Co-op was the site of production for tens of thousands of leftist books, pamphlets, and posters from 1970 to 1980. There, the acts of writing about and debating politics were folded into the activities of page layout, typesetting, printing, binding, and trimming. It drew a wide range of people from across the city, most of whom were involved in movement politics, and printed some of the most important leftist literature of the 1970s—including the first English translation of Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle, the Black Star publication The Political Thought of James Forman, the poetry magazine riverrun, and five years’ worth of issues of Radical America, the journal of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). All books published by the radical left press Black & Red were printed at the Co-op while it was open.
What neither my mom nor I knew was that beneath the glittery surface of a song about getting fucking wasted and worrying your neighbors lay an album full of songs about the fruitlessness of capitalism, religion, and government. I grew up in a union household, my mom is a lifelong Democrat, but even in what I knew about labor struggle or the UAW, I’d never been exposed to anything like anarchism before listening to Tubthumper. While I’ve never met anybody who has said as much, my suspicion is that there’s a microgeneration of anarchists and communists my age to whom “Tubthumping” isn’t a one-hit wonder, but the sound of the door to class-consciousness opening.
....This is the true fringe of the “Radical Left”: ambitious in theory, practical in action and driven by a desire to prove that people don’t need a nation-state to support fulfilling lives. Usually, that means tackling non-violent tasks to help vulnerable Americans without the assistance or permission of the government, as with the work of groups that bring aid to neighborhoods damaged by natural disasters, create humane conditions for prisoners and increase wages for poor workers....
...Does anarchism provide a blueprint for a whole alternative system of governance? Ross doesn’t think so. After all, being an anarchist doesn’t necessarily mean dropping all reliance on government services, or not paying taxes, or not voting, Ross notes — that would be unrealistic given the power structure of nation-states, he says. What anarchism can do is provide a value system for anyone who wants to effect change in their community today, and in this sense, Ross admits anarchism feels to him more like a spiritual way of viewing the world than a strict political theory.
“What all anarchists have in common is a rejection of one person having power over another,” he says. “And that’s a profound and important idea for us to wrangle with.”...
One tall, thin figure of a woman stepped out alone, a good distance into the empty square, and when the police came down at her and the horse’s hooves beat over her head, she did not move, but stood with her shoulders slightly bowed, entirely still. The charge was repeated again and again, but she was not to be driven away. A man near me said in horror, suddenly recognizing her, “That’s Lola Ridge!” —Katherine Anne Porter, “The Never-Ending Wrong”
...All we have, we have taken from the earth; and, taking with ever-increasing speed and greed, we now return little but what is sterile or poisoned...
After a few hours' deliberation on July 14, 1921, the jury convicted Sacco and Vanzetti of first-degree murder and they were sentenced to death by the trial judge.