Bristol Anarchist Reading Group
BARG | 14.01.2011 16:22
This is a callout to start a Bristol Anarchist Reading Group (BARG)
To start with, the aim of this group will be to strip away strategies, tactics, and related struggles, to try and agree the basic AIMS of the 'Bristol Anarchism' that we are creating between us, here, today.
From there, the hope would be to build practical foundations that we all agree on, so that then it will be easier for us to accept and respect different strategies to our own, and still accept them as anarchist.
Only then will we be able to be truly constructive in our criticisms of them.
The direction, location and timing of future meetings will be decided by those who attend.
The first meeting will concentrate on the following proposal:
“One of the core values of Bristol Anarchism is anti-oppression. From this starting point grow the strategies of horizontal self-organisation, not participating in elections, safe spaces, fighting fascist groups, consensus decision making, ‘no leaders’, animal rights, multiculturalism, confrontation of patriarchy, racism and other bigotry.
All of the above list are therefore not core values of anarchism, they are strategies of anti-oppression. ."
The first meeting will take place at Kebele Social Centre, BS5 6JY, from 3 to 5pm, on Sunday 23rd January.
An online forum has been created to submit reading material, catch up with the ongoing discussions, plan future meetings, and create their own debates.
The site is on Crabgrass, and if you don't already have one, you will need to create a free account to join here:
https://we.riseup.net/account/signup
Once you're signed up, you can join the group here:
https://we.riseup.net/barg
We hope that more than ‘the usual suspects’ will feel comfortable in attending and making their voices heard, otherwise ultimately it will be a waste of time.
If people want to link to (or even better, write themselves) relevant texts, then they can put them up on the BARG site. Remember, shorter articles or extracts have much more chance of being read than long ones!
BARG
Original article on IMC Bristol:
http://bristol.indymedia.org/article/702849