Infoshop.io: Democracy

3 Positions Against Prisons

There are no political prisoners, only prisoners of war. There is no prison, only imprisonment. Prison cannot be abolished, only destroyed.

Topics: capitalism, democracy, prisons
Authors: August O'Clairre'
Publisher: NC Piece Corps
Sources: http://ncpiececorps.wordpress.com/

A Message to Troops, Would-Be Troops, and Other Youth

Know anyone in the military, or thinking about signing up soon? Pass this along to them. They may appreciate it, or not, but they deserve a heads up.

Topics: colonialism, democracy, militarism
Authors: Jeff Patterson
Publisher: Vietnam Veterans Against the War
Date: September 22, 2001
Sources: http://www.oz.net/~vvawai/

A New World

The text of this pamphlet is taken from the book Unfinished Business: the Politics of Class War by the Class War Federation.

Topics: capitalism, democracy
Authors: The Class War Federation
Publisher: Zabalaza Books
Sources: http://www.zabalaza.net/zababooks/, http://www.classwaruk.org/

Against Assemblies - Organization, Democracy, and the Left

We Don’t Want a Mass Organisation. Why not? Because we’re not a mass, and we don’t want anyone to organise us.

Topics: anarchism, colonialism, democracy, theory
Authors: Anonymous
Publisher: Fight For the Aylesbury
Sources: http://fightfortheaylesbury.wordpress.com/

Anti-Immigrant Hypocricy

Selections to Expose and Oppose Legislation, Law Enforcement, and Vigilantes

Topics: anarchism, colonialism, democracy, fascism, race
Authors: Sallydarity
Sources: http://deletetheborder.org/chaparral, http://deletetheborder.org, http://nooneisillegal.org, http://organiccollective.org/writing.html, http://www.immigrantsolidarity.org

Anti-Mass - Methods of Organizing for Collectives

An underground strategy without a revolution- ary form of organisation can only emerge as a new class society. To destroy the system of oppression is not enough. We must create the organisation of a free society. When the underground emerges, the collective will be that society.

Topics: anarchism, class, democracy, direct-action, theory
Authors: Anonymous

Basic Bakunin

The aim of this pamphlet is to do nothing more than present an outline of what the author thinks are the key features of Mikhail Bakunin's anarchist ideas. Bakunin was extremely influential in the 19th century socialist move- ment, yet his ideas for decades have been reviled, distorted or ignored. On reading this pamphlet, it will become apparent that Bakunin has a lot to offer and that his ideas are not at all confused (as some writers would have us think) but make up a full coherent and well argued body of thought.

Topics: anarchism, capitalism, class, democracy, history, theory
Authors: Anonymous
Publisher: Anarchist Federation
Date: 2007
Sources: http://www.afed.org.uk/

Confronting Empire

Analysis of contemporary capitalism and ways to fight it in the U.S.

Topics: anarchism, capitalism, democracy, direct-action
Authors: Anonymous
Sources: http://www.zinelibrary.net

Democracy means Borders

Democracy presumes a line between participants and outsiders, between legitimate and illegitimate. Only a fraction of the men could vote in ancient Athens; the Founding Fathers owned slaves. Citizenship still imposes a barrier between included and excluded, shutting over 10 million undocumented residents out of the decisions that shape their lives.

Topics: colonialism, democracy, posters
Authors: CrimethInc
Publisher: CrimethInc
Sources: http://www.crimethinc.com/vote

Democracy means Police

Democracy doesn’t just mean public participation in making decisions. It presumes that all power and legitimacy is vested in one decision-making structure, and it requires a way to impose those decisions. As long as anyone might defy them, there have to be armed personnel to regulate, to discipline, to control.

Topics: democracy, militarism, posters
Authors: CrimethInc
Publisher: CrimethInc
Sources: http://www.crimethinc.com/vote

Democracy means Prisons

Those who don’t accept the authority of the state must be isolated, lest their disobedience spread to the rest of the population. We’re told that prisons protect us, but the only constant since their invention has been that they protect the state from those who might threaten it. In practice, by breaking up communities and fostering antisocial tendencies, they only endanger us—even those of us who aren’t behind bars.

Topics: democracy, posters, prisons
Authors: CrimethInc
Publisher: CrimethInc
Sources: http://www.crimethinc.com/vote

Democracy means Surveillance

Democracy presumes transparency: a marketplace of ideas, in which decisions are made in the open. Of course, in an unequal society, transparency puts some people at risk—the employee who could be fired for expressing the wrong opinion, the immigrant who fears deportation—while the powerful can feign transparency as they make back-room deals. In practice, political transparency simply equips intelligence agencies to monitor the populace, preparing reprisals for when dissidents get out of hand—and what government could maintain its authority without intelligence agencies?

Topics: democracy, posters, surveillance
Authors: CrimethInc
Publisher: CrimethInc
Sources: http://www.crimethinc.com/vote

Democracy means War

Democracy means constant competition. Just as corporations contend for resources in the marketplace, politicians and governments vie for power. When power is centralized, people have to attain domination over others in order to determine their own destinies. Those in power can only hold onto it by waging war perpetually against their own populations as well as foreign peoples: hence the National Guard troops brought back from Iraq to suppress domestic protests.

Topics: democracy, militarism, posters
Authors: CrimethInc
Publisher: CrimethInc
Sources: http://www.crimethinc.com/vote

Enemies We Know

Enemies unite experiences that generate the environment of terror that makes up daily life under Empire

Topics: anarchism, capitalism, democracy, feminism, police
Authors: Anonymous
Publisher: The Institute for Experimental Freedom

From Politics to Life - Ridding Anarchy of the Leftist Millstone

The struggle of the left does not grow out of the desires, needs, and dreams of the living individuals exploited, oppressed, dominated, and dispossessed by this society.

Topics: anarchism, capitalism, democracy, theory
Authors: Wolfi Landstreicher
Publisher: Venomous Butterfly Publications
Date: 2002
Sources: http://eighteeneightytwo.wordpress.net/

Government in the Future

Examining the role of the state in four constructions of present and future societies: classical liberal, libertarian socialist, state socialist, and state capitalist.

Topics: anarchism, capitalism, democracy, fascism, theory
Authors: Noam Chomsky
Publisher: Ceros Press
Date: 1970

Grand Juries - Tools of Repression

An examination of the grand jury system

Topics: anarchism, democracy, militarism
Authors: Craig Rosebrauch

Healthcare - A Crisis of Artificial Scarcity

In healthcare, subsidies to the most costly and high-tech forms of medicine crowd out cheaper and decentralized alternatives, so that cheaper forms of treatment--even when perfectly adequate from the consumer's standpoint--become less and less available. There are powerful institutional pressures for ever more radical monopoly. At the commanding heights of the centralized state and centralized corporate economy--so interlocked as to be barely distinguishable--problems are analyzed and solutions prescribed from the perspective of those who benefit from radical monopoly.

Topics: capitalism, democracy, health
Authors: Kevin Carson
Publisher: Center for a Stateless Society
Sources: http://www.c4ss.org/

Law and Authority

Topics: anarchism, democracy, history, police, theory
Authors: Peter Kropotkin
Publisher: Zabalaza Books
Sources: http://zabalaza.net/

McColonialism for Breakfast

Topics: capitalism, colonialism, democracy, posters
Authors: Anonymous

On Activism, Democracy, and Other Obstacles to Revolution

'What’s it all about, comrade?' outlines the general diference between the activist/voluntarist models of social revolution and historical materialist models. Here’s to making theory a threat again.

Topics: anarchism, democracy, direct-action, history, theory
Authors: Monsieur Dupont
Publisher: An Autonomous Committee
Date: January 2010
Sources: http://libcom.org/tags/monsieur-dupont/

Police are Enemies

They come expecting free coffee at my work. The same ones who detain and search my friends; the same ones who beat that girl back in the spring; the same ones who threaten us with prison one day for smoking weed and who will another day speed past us with because they don’t wish to wait for the light. They dress in our attire at a party, listening for important information; they wag their finger or their nightstick when we get out of hand; they help old ladies cross the street; they shoot dead someone who mouthed off to them—who conveniently had something shiny in his hand. They pave the concrete world in video cameras; they speak to me like they are my friend, they give me directions, and they discipline me anytime I stray from their directions. They are our enemy, the police.

Topics: democracy, police, posters, prisons
Authors: Anonymous
Publisher: Politics is not a Banana
Sources: http://www.politicsisnotabanana.com/, http://325.nostate.net, http://www.prole.info/, http://caringlabor.wordpress.com/

Revolutions in Reverse

Essays on Politics, Violence, Art, and Imagination

Topics: anarchism, capitalsm, democracy, fascism, militarism, police, theory
Authors: David Graeber
Publisher: Autonomedia
Sources: http://www.autonomedia.org/

The Continuing Appeal of Nationalism

Nationalism was so perfectly suited to its double task, the domestication of workers and the despoliation of aliens, that it appealed to everyone - everyone, that is, who wielded or aspired to wield a portion of capital.

Topics: anarchism, capitalism, democracy, fascism
Authors: Freddy Perlman
Publisher: Prole.info
Date: 1984
Sources: http://prole.info/

The Democratic Mystification

The proletariat’s assault on the citadels of capital only has a chance of success on condition that the proletarian revolutionary movement finishes with democracy once and for all. Democracy is the last refuge of all disavowals and betrayals, because it is the first hope of those who believe in purifying and re-invigorating the current movement which is rotten to its core.

Topics: anarchism, capitalism, democracy, fascism, theort
Authors: Jacques Camatte
Publisher: Some Delinquents

The Party's Over - Beyond Democracy

The paths beyond democracy, fascism, socialism, and capitalism that lead to direct action, consensus, autonomy, and freedom

Topics: anarchism, capitalism, democracy, introduction
Authors: Anonymous
Publisher: CrimethInc
Sources: http://crimechinc.com/

The Pyramid of Capitalism

Topics: capitalism, democracy, militarism, police, posters
Authors: Anonymous

The Wandering of Humanity

Topics: anarchism, capitalism, democracy, theory
Authors: Jaques Camatte
Publisher: Wormwood Distro
Date: 2009

This is What Democracy Looks Like

An anarchist critique of democracy

Topics: anarchism, democracy, theory
Authors: Adonide, Dominique Misein, M. Sartin, Wolfi Landstreicher
Publisher: Venomous Butterfly Productions, Elephant Editions, Quiver Distro
Date: 2006
Sources: http://www.anti-politics.net/

Voting vs Direct Action

A short guide to direct actions that can have a great impact than those that leverage illusions of power through democracy and voting.

Topics: anarchism, democracy, direct-action, introduction
Authors: Anonymous
Publisher: CrimethInc
Date: 2004
Sources: http://crimethinc.com/

What Better Time than Now

Notes on Consciousness and Unity in US Cities and Prisons

Topics: democracy, police, prisons
Authors: Anonymous
Publisher: Chapel Hill Prison Books Collective
Sources: http://prisonbooks.info/

When Insurrections Die

The question is not: who has the guns? but rather: what do the people with the guns do? 10,000 or 100,000 proletarians armed to the teeth are nothing if they place their trust in anything beside their own power to change the world. Otherwise, the next day, the next month or the next year, the power whose authority they recognize will take away the guns which they failed to use against it.

Topics: anarchism, democracy, fascism, history, theory
Authors: Gilles Dauvé
Publisher: Prole.info
Date: 1979
Sources: http://prole.info

Which War

A one-shot publication of social reconnaissance

Topics: anarchism, capitalism, democracy, militarism
Authors: Wolfi Landstreicher
Publisher: Venomous Butterfly Publications
Date: Winter, 2003-2004

Work, Community, Politics, War

A comic discussing the intersections of capitalism, democracy, military, and social class

Topics: anarchism, capitalism, class, democracy, introduction, militarism
Authors: Anonymous
Publisher: prole.info
Sources: http://prole.info/

You Call This Freedom

In this pamphlet, Chaz Bufe looks closely at the common belief that the United States is a 'free country,' comparing rhetoric with reality. He considers common conceptions of freedom, why so few 'freedom loving Americans' actually have any understanding of freeom, and why so few have any respect for it. Bufe traces this lack of understanding and lack of respect to the various American institutions of the public. He concludes by examining the nature of freedom, especially aspects of it which are never mentioned in 'the miseducation system' or the corporate media.

Topics: anarchism, capitalism, democracy, media, surveillance, theory
Authors: Chaz Bufe
Publisher: See Sharp Press
Date: 2004