New "Anarchist Smackdown" Discussion Board is Now Online!
 http://pub39.ezboard.com/ftotalliberationproject56425frm1

***

Keeping our promise to continue the work we began at the Total
Liberation Project lectures, debates and workshops at
Evergreen State College in late April 2002, the collective has
recently created a new discussion board to facilitate the ongoing
discussion of conversations, debates and new perspectives that
began to emerge on the campus at that time.We have made a
special "forum" for thorough, fair discussion of each of the
following tendencies in the antiauthoritarian / anarchist milieu:

Total Liberation Forum (about the TLP itself)     
Anarchafeminist Forum
Syndicalism Forum
Poststructuralism Forum
Primitivism Forum
Social Ecology Forum
Insurrectionist Forum
Noneuropean Anarchism Forum

This way no one will have to deal with the limited amount of time
that stifled debate in real life.Are there any suggestions for how
to make this project transgress the issues that held it back at
event on the Evergreen campus? What could the collective do
with this discussion board that would make this a relevant
project for you? Email us back with your suggestions or post
them on the discussion board...
 http://pub39.ezboard.com/ftotalliberationproject56425frm1

For those who are not familiar with the Total Liberation Project,
here is a basic overview: The Total Liberation Project was
organized by dozens of student groups and activists at the
Evergreen State College with the goal of exploring a wide range
of more holistic visions of resistance and liberation; visions that
do not privilege any particular type of oppression over any other,
yet which still successfully respect and further the autonomy of
all movements within a greater context of solidarity. For example,
we wanted to move beyond both the orthodox Marxist idea that
class society is the basis of all other oppression, as well as the
anarchist idea that it is the state that is the basis of all other
oppressions. Likewise we wanted to transcend the somewhat
newer ideas of first and second-wave feminism that gender is
the basis or the idea that racism is what is at the basis of all
other oppressions. Rather we want to conceptualize and put into
practice visions and theories that say that ALL of these types of
oppression are of central importance, and that these are really
just the beginning of an understanding of how our truly
multifaceted world really works.

So, the real difference between the diverse worldviews that have
motivated this ongoing project and those that would have driven
a more prototypical "activist conference" is that we think that all of
these things are truly intertwined and interrelated, they are all
"base" and they are all "superstructure," like the different fully
interconnected yet simultaneously autonomous parts of a
gigantic organism(s) of oppression. Many have recognized the
dramatic changes in worldviews that we are focusing on as a
type of "paradigm shift" that has come about in the past several
decades, for a whole host of reasons that are themselves very
interconnected. Amongst the most often cited ones are the many
atrocities of the 20th century, the globalization of the capitalist
economy, the fall of state socialism worldwide, the advent of new
understandings in the realm of physics, a marked quickening in
the pace of technological development and the wider and
quicker spread of information, amongst many other reasons
which we do not have the space to go into here. While this is
often understood as a relatively new understanding for many
people, it should also be recognized that for many indigenous
peoples around the world, the primacy of interconnectedness is
nothing new, but is in fact a very traditional worldview. The shift
for many of the non-indigenous worlds (which were all
"indigenous" at one point of course) has in the past several
decades lead theorists, activists, and others to rethink how
oppression actually works; as a result they have gone on to
rethink how to organize truly liberatory resistance movements
against it.

Amongst the wide swath of those influenced by this shift in
understanding are Postmodernists, Complimentary Holists,
Poststructuralists, Deep Ecologists, Postmarxists, Contingent
Holists, Anticivilizationists, Postfeminists, Social Ecologists and
others (and that's really just the beginning). With all of these
conceptions in mind, we are asking speakers to focus on how
the subject(s) that they focus on (be it racism, sexism, classism,
homophobia, environmental degradation, etc.) are directly
interrelated with other forms of oppression in our society, and
then we are asking that they offer some visions (either practical
or theoretical) of how people might cross boundaries for the
purpose of finding common ground, while still successfully
respecting and furthering the autonomous movements of all
groups striving for liberation. The theoretical lectures occurred
an average of twice a day over the time period between Friday,
April 19 and Friday, April 26, 2002. Immediately following this, a
debate between advocates of these widely varying perspectives
occurred on the evening of Friday, April 26. Then, on Saturday,
April 27 we had a series of workshops showing how to
practically apply these theories in both activism and everyday life.
All of this will be immediately followed on Wednesday, May 1 by
the annual Olympia Mayday street party which has consistently
been one of the largest in the Northwest.

Aside from the theoretical underpinnings of which we are
constituted, there are other major differences between the Total
Liberation Project and what one would normally think of as a
typical activist conference. One is that we intended this to be
more than just a conference bound by time constraints; we are
currently considering hos to most effectively carry this project out
beyond May 2002 through the proliferation of the website, the
addition of a discussion board, uploading digital audio from the
discussions and hopefully the publishing of a rather large
pamphlet by the same name. Both of these will serve as portals
to a wide range of radically holistic theories, and will include the
text from presenters' speeches and debates that occurred during
the month of April. Another major difference is in how we
organized it: the policy of Total Liberation was to do everything
we could to have an equal number of white women, women of
color, white men and men of color both presenting the
theoretical lectures as well as doing the practical workshops.
The reasons for this should be obvious: we wanted our means
to be in line with the ends we propose. At the same time, we fully
recognize that even this small effort is problematic as it does not
account for a balance between all the many types (possibly
thousands) of oppression. However, we feel that even by taking
this small step we are going far beyond what many conferences
that purport to be about "liberation" have done in the past.