Talk by Joshua Stephens at the London Action Research Centre, online here (41 mins).
[Later: a follow-on interview by Indyreader about the themes in his talk is online here.]
Discusses the overlaps of
personal practices, political organising and ideas of social justice and
change. A participant writes "The talk wove together autobiography, (post)anarchist theory, Buddhist practice and grassroots organising. It was accompanied by blackbird song and the call to prayer from the East London Mosque."
From the blurb:
A Thai Buddhist teacher by the name of Ajahn Chah once wrote, "We human
beings are constantly in combat, at war to escape the fact of being so
limited. But instead of escaping, we continue to create more suffering,
waging war with good, waging war with evil, waging war with what is
small, waging war with what is big, waging war with what is short or
long or right or wrong, courageously carrying on the battle." At some
level, we know this, intuitively. It's reflected back to us by political
and economic institutions on a daily basis -- whether it's the language
(and execution) of xenophobia, racism, and coercive force, or the
promise of buying our way out of discomfort, insecurity, and pain. Those
of us committed to forms of social transformation anchored to direct
democracy have cause to take this quite seriously, as we effectively
aspire to an unmediated politics; a world directly reflective of who we
are. "The State is a condition, a set of social relationships," noted
German anarchist Gustav Landauer, "it is a mode of behavior." Perhaps
more ominously, French philosopher Michel Foucault famously declared,
"Politics is war, continued by other means."
While utterly necessary, the overthrow of intolerable institutions does
not magically equip us to build better ones. While complementary, the
two are distinct tasks. In this unprecedented moment of rapidly
unfolding, global social upheaval -- a moment that turns entirely on
what we bring to it, and how we meet each other -- can we afford modes
of behavior reproductive of war? Is there, perhaps, something deeply
political about forging a relationship with oneself that, itself, is an
act of refusal; a refusal of the impulse to control, dominate; a refusal
to be conducted by our anxieties and fears; an anti-authoritarian mode
of being?
*Joshua Stephens* is a board member with the Institute for Anarchist
Studies and has been active in anti-authoritarian movements for the last
two decades, drawing from mentors as diverse and dispersed as the
Ruckus Society and Murray Bookchin's Institute for Social Ecology in the
US, to Zapatistas in southern Mexico and the Popular Resistance
Committees in Palestine. His work has spanned coordinating and training
participants for direct action struggles around issues both local and
international, co-teaching a course on classical and contemporary
anarchist traditions at Georgetown University, and co-founding three
workers cooperatives. He lives in Brooklyn, NY where he's active with
the Occupy movement, and has spent the last two months traveling and
interviewing anarchists in the eastern Mediterranean.
