Free for All

The student encampments are coming up against a deadline: the end of the semester, and the choice it brings with it. Will they go home, and take a vacation from the struggle, or will they take root and push university organizing in a truly subversive direction? Will they cater to the copaganda of “outside agitators” and continue to ban or endanger non-students, or will more universities become sites for expansive solidarity? Will they even show—through strength of will—that universities do not belong to their administrations and investors, but to the neighborhoods (neighborhoods they are usually a blight on, a force for land grabbing and gentrification)?

Solidarity protesters at UCLA try to hold ground in the face of a police assault

We’ll be paying attention, and making whatever interventions we’re able. From this corner, as soon as I can I’ll be putting out a newsletter about the divestment movement against South Africa’s apartheid regime (a regime that provides an important inspiration and model for the Israeli ruling class), hopefully in the next couple days.

In the meantime, many of you may have noticed: the newsletter is free all this month!

I want all my stuff to be free. That’s why all the major essays on Surviving Leviathan are available to everyone. Only a few more personal notes and embarrassing rants have been behind a paywall.

I don’t like buying and selling things, and while I do have to pay for rent and food, I’ve always worked some kind of wage job (or crimed) to get it. I don’t like selling things I’m passionate about. So the subscription is just a form of support, a way to help me pay my rent and my gas, and if you can’t afford it you can still read my writing (of course support does not by any means fall proportionately on “those who can afford it” ; working class people tend to be more generous than middle class people, and let’s not even talk about the rich).

But in honor of May Day I’m not taking any money for the month of May. If you’ve got a little extra cash, there are plenty of people who need it. Don’t give it to NGOs!!!

I’m going to help support multiple fundraisers over the rest of the year, and the first will launch in about a week.

But if you’ve got a little change burning a hole in your pocket right now, buy this book! The Solutions Are Already Here: Strategies for Ecological Revolution from Below.

Why? I’ll get to the most personally inspiring reason in a moment, but first, we urgently need to break the stranglehold that the environmentalist NGOs, academics, and politicians—as well as their billionaire backers—have on the conversation about the ecological crisis, which is a much broader, more complex crisis than a simple question of carbon emissions and global heating.

They have controlled the movement and mainstream thinking from the beginning, they have gotten everyone to buy into the Paris Agreement, into industrial scale green energy as a supposed replacement for fossil fuels, into believing government promises and corporate commitments and harebrained schemes like carbon capture, and what has the result been? Exactly what everyone should have predicted: every year, investment in green energy and fossil fuel production have been increasing, hand in hand. This book provides the explanation for why that’s the only probable outcome, makes the argument that we need to look at the ecological crisis through an anticolonial lens, and interviews people and delves into struggles on five different continents, showing that real solutions are already being created, they just need more support.

The next reason: all the royalties for this book were intended to go to afro-anarchist and Indigenous sister projects in Brazil and to Dayak communities in Indonesia, in both cases fighting to defend or take back their land, and to build up systems of food autonomy, anti-repression capacities, and everything else they need for their liberation. But, right around the time the book came out, a Dayak anarchist comrade who provided a vital link to the autonomous communities in the most rural parts of Kalimantan got arrested and imprisoned.

So all that money has gone to the projects in Brazil, which is great, because these are inspiring communities that are taking on major corporations and the Brazilian government, and they need the support. But now, we’ve finally reestablished a good way to get money to projects who need it in Indonesia, despite the repression. However, sales for a book past its second year inevitably go down, which means fewer royalties and less money to send on.

You can help break the stranglehold of corporate interests on the environmental movement, and help anarchists and Dayak communities survive repression in Indonesia all at once, by starting reading groups, requesting your local libraries and bookstores stock it, or get copies for any progressive or mainstream friends and family members you have.

Or, send it to the support funds of the folks still in prison from the 2020 uprising. (This page is a good resource.) Or, if you have contacts to send money directly through people with family members in Gaza, do that. Do what you feel called to do! Just don’t give it to the big NGOs!

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This newsletter was a shorter one, are you still looking for more reading? This might be my most popular one, based on likes and views. It’s about landlords. Who knew that in a world based on private property and exploitation, so many people would dislike the people who own their homes?