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Smash the Class, Episode 8: Tourism and Apps - A Discussion on Language
December 16, 2023 Reading time: 2 minutes

In a twist from the format of usual episodes, our friend Carl reached out to us to talk to us about a topic that he had written about. This topic was about the ways in which we learn languages and how we engage with doing so, especially via apps like Duolingo.

You can listen to the episode here!

Much of the conversation revolves around a number of topics. This includes a discussion around translation and its place within our movement, which includes how we translate things and how people perceive that information. Other aspects of the conversation discuss the issue of monolingualism, particularly with regard to English-speakers, and the recognition that plurilingualism is something we should more widely support.

We even discuss elements of constructed auxilliary languages! So there is a small conversation around things like Esperanto.

We had a lot of fun doing this, and we were absolutely happy that Carl reached out. If you also want to reach out, please feel free to contact us!

Resources mentioned in the podcast episode:

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The APC Stands in Solidarity with the People of Palestine
November 19, 2023 Reading time: 12 minutes

Thousands of Palestinians have been killed by the state of Israel, and almost half of those people are children simply because they make up roughly half the population of Palestine. It's difficult to point to a specific number of people who have been murdered because of how much it is constantly increasing due to the unyielding attacks by the state of Israel, a state who has chosen to punish the many for the acts of the few. In terms of the rhetoric used by both the state of Israel and their allies, they are merely pretending to the fact that they're not indiscriminately attacking civilians in Gaza. In reality, they are committing a genocide.

We cannot ignore this, and we cannot (and should not) remain silent about it.

More people—those who are still with us, anyway—have lost so much. Safety was already tenuous and difficult to come by, but it's clear that there is nowhere that's safe for the millions of people in Gaza. They have lost their families, and they have watched as their homes have been destroyed and made entirely unlivable by the munitions Israel has used against them. It is impossible to describe the actions taken by the state of Israel as anything other than genocidal in nature, and it is abhorrent that its allies continue to support and provide aid to further endanger the Palestinian people. What has happened and what is being done is the culmination of decades of actions that have othered, displaced, and targeted the Palestinian people.

The rhetoric used by both the politicians of Israel and those of allied nations indicate that there is little desire to do anything that would prevent this, with many governments choosing to silence and arrest protesters who demand a ceasefire and support Palestine. In Germany, a government that has repeatedly failed to fight their own internal antisemitism on many levels has decided to propose legislation that would harm any migrant for whatever acts they define as antisemitic, which can include punishing someone who voices any form of support for Palestine or engages in any action that can be seen as "against" Israel. So many people who oppose the actions of the Israeli state are being censored through official policies in countries outside of it, though this isn't new for any of us. It's already been happening for decades to many who have openly supported movements such as BDS (Boycott, Divest, and Sanctions), and the silencing and policing of people for demonstrating—the most mundane of political action—is a natural extension of it.

We stand in solidarity with the people of Palestine in their struggle against the ongoing genocide perpetrated against them by the state of Israel. This occupation has lasted for over 70 years, and it would be irresponsible to ignore the many historical events that led to the present situation. It would be irresponsible of us to ignore how nations like the UK and the US have supported both the creation and ongoing expansion of the state of Israel to varying degrees. It would be absurd to not recognise the irony of nations in the UN debating resolutions for "humanitarian pauses," even as they themselves are committing the same crimes against people in other regions.

Further still, it is absurd that many of these governments and their officials openly continue supporting Israel's assault on Gaza and provide justification for it even while they continue to provide resources and support via the UNRWA (UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East). Many of those who they claim to be their own colleagues have been murdered in the attacks on Gaza, and there have been many words said and written about how sad and angry they are that it's happened. Yet, the most they're willing to do is continue to debate something as weak as a "call" for a "humanitarian pause?" It's beyond grotesque and a further example of why statehood will continue to fail everyone.

The settler and military government of Israel is killing the Palestinian future and resistance systematically, and it is beyond clear that this is their intent. They also continue to dispossess more Palestinian people of their homes and their land, and they have been actively denying them access to necessary services such as water, food, fuel, and healthcare. That the state of Israel has outright denied access to services such as electricity has made it almost impossible for doctors to continue providing care to their patients, forcing many into extremely precarious and desperate situations that can and almost inevitably will lead to their deaths. The fact that fuel is still denied to them means that their water and sewage systems are not working, something that we know will lead to people getting sick.

And even when aid is allowed into Palestine, only the most paltry amounts are made available. They may receive some food, but it is nowhere near enough for the millions of people living there.

It must also be said, however, that it is entirely is possible to condemn the murders committed by Hamas on 7 October 2023 while also condemning both the previous and current settler and military attacks against the Palestinian population. It is possible to simultaneously recognise the murders that they committed while recognising the disproportionate punishment that Palestinians are now suffering. It is also necessary to recognise the murders of people who have been caught between both the attacks by Hamas and the exploitation of the Israeli state, such as the Thai workers who were killed in the October attack. In condemning the actions of Hamas, we should not conflate their organisation with the entirety of the Palestinian people because they are not the same.

At the same time that we stand in solidarity with the Palestinian people, it must be clear that we also stand strong against the rising antisemitism that Jewish people are experiencing around the world. Many Jewish people have been demonstrating their disdain for the Zionist project in Israel, stating that they do not want the state of Israel to commit acts of genocide in their name. Many have been demanding peaceful solutions, calling for an end both to this attack and to the ongoing occupation. Many do this at great risk to themselves and their own livelihoods, knowing that they will likely suffer both consequences for their support and also endure antisemitic attacks.

Furthermore, there have been increasing numbers of antisemitic attacks across Europe and North America from the far right. They have largely been utilising rhetoric that stems from the invasion, masking their antisemitic vitriol behind a supposed support for Palestine. It is sadly common that there are people who co-opt and weaponise the movement of support for Palestinians, as is possible in all other movements, to continue their bigoted attacks against Jewish people in their local communities.

But it is not only the far right who engages in antisemitism, as it is yet another bigotry that we all must continue to acknowledge and unlearn in our spaces. We cannot and should not allow these attitudes to infiltrate our movements, as it will only decrease our ability to stand in solidarity with each other and create further unnecessary divisions. These attitudes cannot be allowed to proliferate in our spaces, and we must remain vigilant to ensure that bigotries against either Palestinians or Jewish people remain firmly outside of our spaces. Though it should be obvious, bigoted sentiments must never receive our support.

Additionally, we feel that it is necessary to highlight the parallels between Israel and one of its closest allies: the United States. Since the establishment of the Israeli state, the US has provided them with billions of dollars in aid and additional military training and support. There have been close ties between the two nations, and it is unsurprising that some Palestinians and Jewish people of Arab descent have noticed similarities between both the colonial project in the US and that of Israel. Though some people have noticed the parallels between apartheid South Africa and the apartheid state of Israel and Palestine, we believe that it is necessary to look at the relationship between how Israel's colonial project has functioned and how the colonial projects of its biggest supporters have been enacted.

There are pertinent parallels between both the handling and neglect of treaties with Native American tribes in the US and the UN resolution for a two-state solution for Palestine and Israel. There are parallels in the ways in which westward expansion in the US has functioned and how the continued expansion of Israel into Palestinian territory has operated, including the development of communities along a 'frontier' that would become antagonistic toward the people who were already living there. In fact, it should also be necessary to recognise the colonialism of both the French and British in the region prior to the establishment of the state of Israel. All of these are influences in the ways in which colonialism built the modern state of Israel and continues to operate there today.

However, it's also entirely necessary to look at how the refusal of Israel's biggest allies to deal with their own bigotries has helped, in their own eyes, to require the existence of Israel (with politicians like Joe Biden outright having stated that, if it did not exist, we should create it). A large part of why Zionist projects have received support of European governments is due to their own outright refusal to fight the antisemitism within their borders. The establishment of the state of Israel was seen as multiply beneficial to them, making it easier for them to cover up their own antisemitism while pretending they were actually supporting the Jewish people by 'helping' to relocate them to somewhere else. If we had actually learned the lessons that many governments, institutions, and individual people claim we learned from World War II, we would have done far more to combat antisemitism (among other bigotries) in our own societies. Instead, our minimal actions have perpetuated this abject hatred, which has further led to and fueled the events we're seeing unfold before our eyes.

What we are demanding is a total end to the attacks on Palestinians by the state of Israel. More than that, we want the Palestinian people to be free and for their land to be returned. The state of Israel and its allies must all be dismantled in order to bring peace and freedom to both the Palestinian and Israeli people alike. No one will be free or safe so long as they exist, and it is impossible to fight imperialism, colonialism, or fascism if we maintain adherence to any modern state. As anarchists, we will never see the formation of any states or nationalisms as a liberatory measure, as we strongly believe that both will work to maintain internal hierarchies and oppressions that are already present. However, we recognise that Palestinians will have to and should decide for themselves what is likely to be the best course of action. We only hope that whatever decisions they make continue them toward the path of total liberation for all of their people.

Finally, we want to emphasise that all of us must remember to reflect upon this genocide and the many factors that have enabled it. If we do not take time to pause and make serious considerations about how we are going to prevent this—to be able to truly say "never again"—we need to seriously consider how we are maintaining the systems that help enable genocidal actions. We need to better understand how to stop settler-colonialism and their corporation-states all together. And we need to reflect upon all genocides that have happened or are continuing to happen as we speak, as this is something that we have not adequately or genuinely done for any of them.

We cannot merely shrug our shoulders and go back to whatever state of 'normal' we existed in after each and every time this happens. Even as this is happening now and is (for the moment) dominating many media narratives, there are far more problems that are happening that we are not seeing because they are not receiving air time. We need to recognise the connections between them, and we need to recognise that these assaults on many people will continue to happen unless we all actively do something.

These assaults and forever wars need to end.

We only have each other. The sooner we recognise this, the easier it will be to fight all of this in our many different capacities and locations.

Keep each other safe,
The APC

Additional Resources:

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Smash the Class, Episode 7: The Tragedy in Our Unions
October 10, 2023 Reading time: 4 minutes

Notes:

  • Images in this episode's cover have been taken from posts made by Twitter user @anarcobergueda2.
  • A full transcript of this episode, complete with clickable sections, can be found here.
  • The podcast can be found here.

In July, CNT Barcelona made a handful of decisions that would lead to people calling for them to be defederated. The primary decision among these was that they decided to work with and willingly platform individuals from a supposed "feminist" organisation who openly question whether trans and gender nonconforming people event have the right to exist. Considering the place they often hold among anarchists as a result of their history, this was particularly jarring and disappointing for a lot of people who heard this news.

But it's not at all surprising that this would be happening, particularly considering the history of the CNT and its many changes. This is why we wanted to explore this topic by looking at their history and exploring the times that they did reinforce hierarchies that they should've work towards tearing down. And since July, more and more people have been speaking out against this. In fact, Houston's IWW branch put out a statement supporting the calls to defederate from them.

But there's something missing in this conversation. Anarcho-syndicalist unions have long been places that have promoted labour-focused pedagogy and engaged in labour education through many of their actions (though most people have almost entirely associated this purely to their seminars and workshops). If our unions are going to continue to promote themselves as educational spaces, we need to question what they're trying to promote and teach, especially if it's in line with the current ideology of fascist movements that many of us are struggling against.

We also wanted to talk with Mireia, who has been part of the CNT. As someone who endured one of the more recent membership purges from the CNT, she is in a unique position to explore many of the issues taking place there and to look at what we can do to improve our organisations (even if that improvement requires that we dismantle something entirely).

But we also want to make it clear that these things are continuously happening around us. This is not the first nor the last time we will see this, but we need to recognise these patterns. While readings aren't the only answer, there are a few that could help further this conversation and help outline noticeable patterns to look out for and struggle against. One such is a reflection that was published by members who split from Black Rose/Rosa Negra, highlighting the issue of patriarchy and the consistent refusal to deal with harmful and abusive behaviours. Another is a piece that was written by Adrienne Onday discussing the failure of apparently radical cishet men who often fail to step up in situations where they should.

Patriarchy is something that all people and organisations need to deal with, even when they believe otherwise.

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Where We Go Next
August 17, 2023 Reading time: 9 minutes

Not long ago, we concluded our second annual School Revolt festival, and with it being summer in the northern hemisphere, we decided to take a moment to reflect on what it is that we want to do along with the strategies that we want to engage with. We wanted to take our time to reflect upon the following: What have we done to further our collective work in creating anarchist communities that are based on radical and alternative educational processes? What has and hasn’t worked about what we’ve been doing? 

And what can we do from this point forward?

As we reflected on these questions and our own experiences, we noticed a trend that emerged in how activities play out within this collective and definitely among other spaces that we’re active in. This trend is something that we think is important to acknowledge, responding to it as productively as we can. This trend is something that we can call extractivism. In saying this, we mean that many of our activities—such as podcasts, texts, and events—are viewed more as products to be consumed while people extract information rather than using them as calls to build community spaces and grow potential solidarity actions. We recognise that people view our role primarily as producers of content that they can passively consume if they happen to be interested in anarchist pedagogies, and we understand that this is common behaviour throughout many spaces simply because this is how we’ve been taught to interact with the world around us. After all, when it comes to ‘online’ spaces, we’re not really looking at them as extensions of our world and communities.

However, that’s a far cry from what we ever intended, and it’s also quite far from our ethical and pedagogical commitment as anarchists. You see, the members of the organising group have always seen ourselves as a collective who was trying to open up space for others to join so that they could create, experiment, ask questions, practise mutual aid or share their experiences in order to build stronger movements together. We wanted to provide a space for solidarity that would support us in creating a variety of healthy environments that could promote so many possible educational strategies and tools.

For example, this is why we started Joyful Resistance. It was meant as a space where everyone involved in educational processes could find kindred spirits, seek support, or offer mutual aid and care. It was meant to be an active space where anyone who wanted to do so could schedule a meeting whenever they desired, enabling them to build solidarity across regions and hold support meetings with others whenever they felt was needed. Even though anyone is able to lead a conversation, we noticed that the overwhelming majority of people merely waited for us to schedule every single meeting and provide the topics. These meetings, when they did occur, often felt less like the conversations, support, and idea-sharing that were intended and more like expected presentations where everyone else had to remain in silence.

Prior to this past School Revolt, we had already recognised that more needed to be done to encourage others to join us, and this was something that we tried to do. We developed podcasts, wrote texts, and organised workshops and webinars to help further this goal, though we never wanted for those to be the only activities that we ever did. Our goals have never been to passively teach but to show that there is a possibility to do something together, that there can be space in which we all are able to create something meaningful that follows anarchist principles surrounding direct action. We have been careful to constantly use whatever platform we have to remind people that they have the opportunity to join us in any way that they felt they could.

We even thought that a more participatory event, like story writing, would boost interaction among people and help build connections between people within and across regions. But that didn’t seem to happen, and many of the open invitations we continue to extend have rarely been acted upon.

While these efforts have created some unique learning opportunities and have—we hope—been meaningful to everyone, we recognise that we continue to struggle with developing the kinds of connections and behaviours that we would all love to build upon within this collective. The Anarchist Pedagogies Collective was—and still is—meant to be a space where everyone is able to create whatever it is that they need together. Instead, in our past two years, we have felt as if some have treated this space as a place for late-stage capitalist consumption, where we are expected to act as experts who create content for others to simply consume, where we are expected to provide answers to questions that are entirely context dependent, and where nothing other than behaviours related to consumption actually seem to happen.

And we want to make it very clear: We have no intent or desire to support the maintenance of any capitalist structures, and our overall goal is to dismantle them alongside the development of anarchist pedagogies.

Make no mistake! If we’ve done something that has helped you, nourished you, inspired you, or given you ideas for your contexts and spaces, that’s amazing and we’re truly happy to have been there for you! But we want to make it known that we don’t merely want to create a platform for passive consumption and that we want to do whatever we can to encourage active participation. We want it to be more than obvious that we have no desire to continue encouraging the many neocapitalist behaviours we see elsewhere and have experienced in our own past. As anarchists, we can do far more than continue to recreate the exact same structures we have been indoctrinated to believe are the only ones that mark ‘real learning’.

Importantly, we believe that it is necessary for everyone to recognise that this is not how anyone will ever bring about the liberation of everyone on this planet.

Revolutions cannot happen if we don’t work on it together. Change will never appear if we don’t do what we can to create it for ourselves through a wide range of actions. The world will never change if we sit around and wait for others to strive for it without our involvement. We can’t wait for others to do this work for us. We all must do the work now, and we very much need to band together.

No gods, no masters, but most certainly no leaders.

And so, with this, we’d like to outline how the APC will continue to operate. We’re planning to scale down our activities to things that those of us in the organising group can and want to do. We will continue to write, and we will continue to produce podcasts and videos that can help support and share whatever work we’re able to share across the regions we’re in. Perhaps, we might even throw in a live event or two when the feeling hits us or something interesting comes along. We’ll focus on doing the things that we believe we can do well and that bring us joy! If you like those things, feel free to engage with them however you want. 

On its own, this doesn’t seem like much of a change, right?

Well, here’s the major difference: We want to foster an environment where people work towards undoing the propaganda in their heads, particularly with regard to schools and academia. We want to support a space that will enable people to engage with a wider range of learning strategies. We want to build a space where people can experiment with developing those strategies.

If you contact us and express interest in any topic, doing any activity, or sharing an initiative, we will always respond in the same way: Do it. Just go ahead and do it. Tell us how we can help and what support you need, and we will do everything in our capabilities to help you. That is what we’ve always wanted to do because our core principles are mutual aid, mutual care, and mutual support through direct action.

Not sure how to go about doing the project or event you want to do? That’s fine! Let’s talk about it and maybe we can figure out how to get it done. We are here to support you in whatever ways we possibly can, and we always have been. We always will be. But everyone needs to also take responsibility to pull things together. If you want to see something done within this space, you will have our support to do it, but we expect that you will take initiative and be responsible for whatever it is that you want to do.

We’ll always have your back, we’ll always support you with whatever we have, but we will never do it for you. 

The coordinating group at the APC are excited about what people may come up with. We want to see more of you because we know that there are people out there doing amazing things, and we want to hear from more of you about whatever you’re doing! Seriously, feel free to share it with us!

We’re not experts, and we don’t seek to be experts with all that it entails. Nor do we expect for you to be experts, either. We are all here to learn and create together because that’s all we really can do as we build what we need to support the changes we seek.

You are always invited to join us and collaborate with us because this space is meant to be for every one of us. But that means doing things with us, rather than waiting for others to do anything for you.

(de)School Revolt 2023: Storytelling, Abolition, and Prefiguration
April 30, 2023 Reading time: ~1 minute

This year's School Revolt was a bit more difficult than the last, as it presented people with the opportunity to tell their own stories. This is something that can be quite time-consuming and harder to organise. There's a lot of work that goes into creating new worlds, even fictional ones. So we appreciate everyone who made an effort to build and create one!

We would like to present everyone with one of the submissions. It is a short story titled 'And we could grow together' by Sonia Muñoz Llort.

We'd also like to share the other submissions that can help guide us in our creativity, giving us things to think about as we develop these new worlds in fiction, which are available on both YouTube or on PeerTube.

Hopefully, we'll be able to do another storytelling event because there is such a need for it.