Announcing: FSC's Seminar Series

June and August seminars available. Registration open now!

The Free Society Collective’s (FSC) seminar series aims to provide an independent space for ongoing inquiries into social, political, cultural, economic, historical, and other fields of study from an anti-authoritarian left perspective. The seminar series draws on a variety of radical traditions, revolutionary histories, contemporary social movements, and social and political analyses, including anarchism, Western and autonomous marxisms, and other libertarian left tendencies. By exploring the past as well as the present, these weekend-long seminars are meant to deepen our understanding of dynamic social phenomena such as capitalism, statecraft, racism, gender, and the devastation of the natural world, to name a few. The seminars are also a way of reclaiming our own education and scholarship—by mentoring, learning from, and challenging each other in a highly participatory setting. And over time, it is the FSC’s hope that this seminar series will contribute to the development of public intellectuals, theoretical insights, and sophisticated forms of praxis as well as social organization in our struggle for a nonhierarchical, egalitarian society.

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Our Dreams Will Never Fit In Their Ballot Boxes

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Don't Just Vote, Get Political! -Free Society Collective

A few members of the Free Society Collective and friends have produced a pamphlet for the DNC/RNC malarky for 2004. You can download the complete pdf here. (304k) Here's an excerpt:

It’s election time again, and so-called politics has come to the forefront of public discourse. Liberals and radicals alike have squandered quite a bit of energy debating the old question of whether or not to vote; the answer, of course, is that it’s the wrong question. Liberals have been so fixated on elections as to ignore the issue of whether representation even equals democracy, and whether voting even equals politics. Anti-authoritarians, on the other hand, while claiming not to recognize the sovereignty of any officials, elected or not, have nonetheless developed their own mythology around voting, attributing to it the mystical power to “legitimize” authority figures thus elected. But voting is not what gives power to politicians, just as abstention cannot take it away from them; they have decisionmaking power because representative democracy intentionally places it in the hands of a few, and because we fail to take it away from them by deliberately applying it ourselves through horizontal forms of self-governance. Continue reading "Don't Just Vote, Get Political! -Free Society Collective"

People's Assembly Against the War -Free Society Collective

Saturday, April 5
2 to 4 p.m. at Barre's Old Labor Hall

On March 20, the day after the U.S. government
launched its preemptive strike against Iraq, millions
of people took to the streets worldwide in protest.
Here in Vermont, in addition to demonstrations, about
250 people gathered to reclaim some of their political
sovereignty at the People's Assembly for Peace,
passing resolutions for the immediate cessation of
war, the impeachment of G. W. Bush, and condemning the
trade embargo against the people of Iraq (see full
text of resolutions below). On April 5, we will build
on the work of the first People's Assembly by holding
an open forum on strategies for opposition to the war.
Spread the word, and come prepared with your energy
and ideas for participatory, creative, and diverse
noncompliance with the war against Iraq.

Agenda:
An open forum on the question of:
Where does resistance to the war go from here?

Where:
Old Labor Hall, 46 Granite Street, Barre
(heading south into Barre on Main Street,
Granite Street is on the right at Chittenden Bank)

Sponsored by the Free Society Collective
Endorsed by Peace Vermont

Disentangling the Antiwar Movement from the American Flag -Free Society Collective

Download this essay as a PDF

"Patriotism in its simplest, clearest, and most indubitable meaning is nothing but an instrument for the attainment of the government's ambitious and mercenary aims, and a renunciation of human dignity, common sense, and conscience by the governed, and a slavish submission to those who hold power. That is what is really preached wherever patriotism is championed. Patriotism is slavery."
    Leo Tolstoy

"Peace is the continuation of war by other means."
     Hannah Arendt

Since September 11, 2001, many antiwar activists in the United States have wrapped their dissent in the American flag. In an increasingly constrictive political climate, they are anxious to find ways to appear more legitimate. For some, carrying the flag celebrates the Bill of Rights, particularly the rights to free speech and public assembly. For others, it recalls foundational events for this country such as the Boston Tea Party and American Revolution that symbolize the struggle against the tyranny of colonial rule. People of conscience raise the stars and stripes to assert that "peace is patriotic," and that they are the real Americans. The U.S. government, by contrast, claims to be waging war in order to uphold America's core values, or as Bush puts it, precisely because "we are a peace-loving nation."

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Freedom Not Militarism -Free Society Collective

The call for peace in Iraq should mean more than the absence of a new U.S. invasion. For more than a decade, the Iraqi people have suffered under two oppressive regimes. Hussein's dictatorship has not only severely repressed political dissent but also pursued a murderous policy toward the Kurds. Even the recent amnesty for almost all prisoners, while freeing many who were unjustly incarcerated, underscores Hussein's brutality: it confirms the "disappearance" of numerous inmates and compels those newly released to trade their prison cells for Iraqi military barracks. The United States, in turn, has merely worsened the situation. The U.S. trade embargo and continuous air strikes have limited access to food, health care, and clean water in Iraq. As a result, more than five thousand people die every month. Continue reading "Freedom Not Militarism -Free Society Collective"