About

Read & Revolt is a discussion group seeking to analyze this society and the potential for liberation from an anarchist perspective. We meet the first and third Tuesday of every month at Boxcar Books, from 7 – 9 PM, to discuss readings collectively decided upon beforehand. It has been going since September 2016. All ages are welcome.

A free printout of the text for each upcoming session is provided for free at Boxcar Books for two weeks prior.

 

Anarchist?

As stated by the Bloomington counter-information website Plain Words:

Anarchism is the idea that people should be free to shape the contents of their own lives. It asserts that rulers and systems that control an individual in their daily life are harmful regardless of who is in charge or what purpose the system serves. Lacking the ability to have direct control over the course of one’s life is the definition of powerlessness, and such a condition creates debased, repressed people with toxic relationships and alienated, damaging habits. From an anarchist perspective, a free and genuine human community would require relationships of power that are fluid, ones which lack the hierarchies of leaders and followers. Refusing hierarchical relations would create people who are experienced in taking self-initiative; have healthy methods of engaging in conflict with each other; are in touch with their own bodies; and are assertive in sticking up for themselves, their loved ones, and what they think is right.
Anarchists historically have been opposed primarily to capitalism and the state, as well as any form of oppression that privileges some to the detriment of others, and that coerces people into identities, roles, and expected behaviors they didn’t choose for themselves. Capitalism, in addition to unfairly furthering economic inequality, exploits and dominates all that it touches. It has colonized and commodified the entire world, exploiting one segment of the population who work jobs that are meaningless and exhausting, and excluding another, who are forced to find more precarious, often criminalized, means of survival. The state – meaning the police, courts, prisons, military, and government – is a tool of domination that empowers one group to exert control over the rest of the population. Whether it’s a capitalist ruling class or a communist ruling party, the state is there to manage the contradictions created by this toxic society, and to make sure that revolutionaries, such as anarchists, don’t successfully overturn existing social relations.
Anarchism is revolutionary, but it is also deeply personal. While Communists justify dictatorships and mass killings in the name of a pending “glorious revolution,” anarchists don’t separate ends from means. To live as an anarchist means to strive to embody one’s values in daily life: to not dominate others, to not allow yourself to be dominated, and to attack the causes of your misery now instead of waiting for a revolution. Anarchism doesn’t seek to crush the individual beneath the weight of social coercion and conformity, nor promote an exploitative selfishness that precludes the possibility of life shared in common. We desire a world in which individuals choose their associations freely, and where the means of life are given to each according to their need, from each according to their ability and desire.
Rather than a grand political theory that seeks to impose its vision upon all, anarchism is a tension: against domination, for freedom. How this plays out varies widely, depending on one’s context, desires, and dreams.
We have no party line, and we prefer it that way.