Towards Collective Liberation

Towards Collective Liberation: Anti-Racist Organizing, Feminist Praxis, and Movement Building Strategy is for activists engaging with dynamic questions of how to create and support effective movements for visionary systemic change. Chris Crass’s collection of essays and interviews presents us with powerful lessons for transformative organizing through offering a firsthand look at the challenges and the opportunities of anti-racist work in white communities, feminist work with men, and bringing women of color feminism into the heart of social movements. Drawing on two decades of personal activist experience and case studies of anti-racist social justice organizations, Crass insightfully explores ways of transforming divisions of race, class, and gender into catalysts for powerful vision, strategy, and movement building in the United States today. Over the last two decades, activists in the United States have been experimenting with new politics and organizational approaches that stem from a fusion of radical political traditions and liberation struggles. Drawing inspiration from women of color feminism, justice struggles in communities of color, anarchist and socialist movements, the broad upsurges of the 1960s and 70s, and social movements in the Global South, a new generation of activists has sought to understand the past while building a movement for today’s world. Towards Collective Liberation contributes to this project by examining two primary dynamic trends in these efforts: the anarchist movement of the 1990s and 2000s, through which tens of thousands of activists were introduced to radical politics, direct action organizing, democratic decision making, and the profound challenges of taking on systems of oppression, privilege, and power in society at large and in the movement itself; and white anti-racist organizing efforts from the 2000s to the present as part of a larger strategy to build broad-based, effective multiracial movements in the United States. Crass’s collection begins with an overview of the anarchist tradition as it relates to contemporary activism and an in-depth look at Food Not Bombs, one of the leading anarchist groups in the revitalized radical Left in the 1990s. The second and third sections of the book combine stories and lessons from Crass’s experiences of working as an anti-racist and feminist organizer, combining insights from the Civil Rights Movement, women of color feminism, and anarchism to address questions of leadership, organization building, and revolutionary strategy. In section four, Crass discusses how contemporary organizations have responded to the need for white activists to lead anti-racist efforts in white communities and how these efforts have contributed to multiracial alliances in building a broad-based movement for collective liberation. Offering rich case studies of successful organizing, and grounded, thoughtful key lessons for movement building, Toward Collective Liberation is a must-read for anyone working for a better world.

Towards Collective Liberation is for activists engaging with dynamic questions of how to create and support effective movements for visionary systemic change, namely those who wish to ensure that all movements are both feminist and anti-racist in nature. Drawing on two decades of personal activist experience and case studies of anti-racist social justice organisations, Crass insightfully explores ways of transforming divisions of race, class and gender into catalysts for powerful vision, strategy and movement building in the world today.

Eight searching essays from one of the finest organisers in contemporary anarchism, working to bridge anarchist theory and practice with race, class and gender analysis of power. "The essays collected together in this pamphlet are intended to further debate and discussion about some of the challenges facing the contemporary anarchist/social justice movements. The challenge of developing a critical political analysis and organizing practice based in an understanding of how white supremacy, patriarchy, heterosexism, capitalism and the state interconnect." [from the introduction] "This collection of essays by a young anarchist probes the issues of white supremacy and sexism as he observes them not only in the society at large but also in our social justice movements and in himself. Rarely, do we find anyone dealing equally with race and gender from an anti-racist, feminist point of view, least of all a young, white male, but this is precisely what Chris Crass does." [Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz]. From shutting down the WTO to what anarchist organizers could (and should) learn from the Civil Rights Movement. Right on, right in your face, and right up there.

A revolutionary handbook to radical theory and history as well as an organizing model for how we get free."How can we get free? How can we free ourselves, our communities, our environments, our society? Our present is infused with incredible possibilities for realizing a free association of social individuals, sustainably regulating our relations within nature. Yet the material possibilities for the realization of this freedom remain trapped within a present that summons all available weapons of repression to contain and suppress it"The question of freedom is central to all revolutionary movements. It is at the root of everyday struggles to resist and overcome oppression. Often, the realities we face constrain how we understand this question, so we ask it in pieces. How do we provide for each other? How do we protect, nurture, care, love, create? These questions of survival and perseverance ask how we liberate ourselves from the hardships of enclosure, exploitation, and dependency that are imposed on our minds, bodies, communities, and environments."By laying bare the mechanisms of capitalism, imperialism, settler colonialism, climate catastrophe, heteropatriarchy, white supremacy, exploitation and dispossesion, and a range of other oppressive structures and countering them with a historical account of revolutionary movements from around the world, Organizing for Autonomynbsp; offers a brazen and determined articulation of a world that centers community, love, and justice.With an unparalleled breadth and by synthesizing innumerable sources of revolutionary thought and history, CounterPower presents the result of years of inquiry, struggle, and resistance. Bold, fearless, and radically original, Organizing for Autonomynbsp; imagines a decolonized, communist, alternative world order that is free from oppressive structures, state violence, and racial capitalism and helps us to get there.nbsp;nbsp;

A narrative meditation on joint nonviolence, opening a window to the questions of power, multiple narratives, and imagination that touch on struggles for justice everywhere. As a Palestinian youth, Sulaiman Khatib encountered the occupation in his village and attempted to fight back, stabbing an Israeli. Imprisoned at the age of 14, he began a process of political and spiritual transformation still unfolding today. In a book he asked Penina Eilberg-Schwartz, an American Jew, to write, and based on years of conversation between them, Khatib shares how his activism became deeply rooted in the belief that we must ground all work—from dialogue to direct action to healing—in recognition of the history and humanity of the other. He reveals how he became convinced that Palestinian freedom can flourish alongside Jewish connection to the land where he was born. In language that is poetic and unflinchingly honest, Eilberg-Schwartz and Khatib chronicle what led him to dedicate his life to joint nonviolence. In his journey, he encountered the deep injustice of torture, witnessed the power of hunger strikes, and studied Jewish history. Ultimately, he came to realize mutual recognition, alongside a transformation of the systems that governed their lives, was necessary for both Palestinians and Israelis to move forward. Still, as he built friendships with Israelis and resisted the occupation alongside them, he could not lose sight of the great power imbalance in the relationship, of all the violence and erasure still present as they dreamt forward together. Intimate and political, In This Place Together opens us up to the dangers and hopes of working with others across vast differences in power and experience. And it opens a new space, shapes a third narrative, and finds another world that can exist—though it’s often hard to see—inside this one.

What does it mean to work towards our liberation?How can we center and make space for ourselves and others?How is nonhuman animal liberation part of our own fight for queer rights?With a focus on building bridges between movements and dismantling hierarchies between oppressed groups through consistent anti-oppression, Queer and Trans Voices: Achieving Liberation Through Consistent Anti-Oppression follows the concise and to-the-point style of resource activist and author Julia Feliz Brueck. In this volume, Feliz Brueck and queering activist-scholar Zoie (Zane) McNeill collaborate to raise the voices of LGBTQIA+ vegans across the world working to acknowledge the interconnections between social justice groups in order to consistently and effectively achieve liberation for all. Born and raised in Puerto Rico, Julia Feliz Brueck is a resource activist, writer, illustrator, and educator with a focus on consistent anti-oppression advocacy. Zoie (Zane) McNeill is a queer scholar, activist, and artist heralding from the hollers of West Virginia.

Fueled by hope and creativity, The Icarus Project has been artfully forging roads and making maps that define our journeys with mental health struggles in the context of a crookedly beautiful world. We're happy to bring to you Mad Maps: documents that we create for ourselves as reminders of our goals, what is important to us, our personal signs of struggle, and our strategies for self-determined well-being. Drawing from the input of hundreds of members of the Icarus Project community, this guide (the first of four), examines the intersections of oppression with mental health struggles and will take you step by step through the process of creating your own wellness documents.

This book is a rip-roaring manifesto that re-claims ways to think about and do ‘leadership’. Colliding mobilities, neuro-queering, the arts and culture, critical leadership studies, social justice, creative pedagogy, futurity and Daoist cosmology for the first time, the book proposes ‘neuro-futurism’ as a beyond-colonial, heuristic change-making tool-kit for individuals and institutions. Celebrating the Dangerous, Demeaning and Dirty labour of Deviant/Defiant culture-workers often side-lined in (leadership) scholarship across 26 break-neck chapters and 40 images, this book challenges white-supremacist-cis-het-neuro-normative-capitalist-patriarchal forms of power and knowledge. Punchy, punching up and pulling no punches, it is a call to arms, feet, sole-soul, to co-create tables/houses/worlds that profit (neuro-)divergent people, planet, poetry and play. The deadline is 2050, so we’re running out of time. Are you ready for an extra-ordinary adventure?