By Ben Barker / Deep Green Resistance Wisconsin If the political Left was what I thought it was growing up, I would want nothing to do with it. It’s not what I thought it was, however; at least not in its true form. A Left worth the name is less a sold-out party line and more a grassroots revolutionary force of the kind we’ve not seen for far too long. No matter what we want to call that force, now is the time to build it again. ...
By Vincent Kelley / One Struggle I recently saw an Aquafina® bottle sitting on a table at my workplace. Its label read: “New! ECO-FINA Bottle™, 50% less plastic (*on average vs. 2002 bottle).” To start, it is ridiculous that PepsiCo, the producer of the Aquafina® brand, would lay any claim to social consciousness by offering a “greener” choice than its competitors. Pepsi drains aquifers in India [1], knowingly includes carcinogenic coloring in its soft drinks [2], and adopts racist hiring practices [3], just to name a few of the corporation’s psychopathic behaviors. This psychopathology, of course, is not unique to Pepsi—it is the modus operandi of the corporation itself as a legal-economic entity. [4] ...
By Kourtney Mitchell / Deep Green Resistance The following speech was originally given at the Stop Porn Culture Conference at Wheelock College, Boston, in July 2013. Hello everyone, my name is Kourtney Mitchell and I am a political activist and a member of the group Deep Green Resistance. We are a radical organization dedicated to social, political and environmental justice. As an organization we ally ourselves with indigenous communities, women, people of color and the poor. Our aim is to stop the destruction of the planet and the oppression of people and animals. ...
By Lexy Garza and Rachel / Deep Green Resistance Humans are storytelling creatures, and our current strategy as a movement is a story, with a beginning, middle, and end. We need to ask whether that story matches up with reality, and with the way social change has happened throughout history. So here’s the story as it stands: By raising awareness about the issues, we will create a shift in consciousness. A shift in consciousness will spark a mass movement. A mass movement can successfully end the murder of the planet by using exclusively pacifist tactics. We all know this narrative, we hear it referenced all the time, and it resonates with a lot of people, but we need to examine it with a critical eye along with the historical narratives that are used to back it up. There are truths behind these ideas, but there is also the omission of truth, and we can decipher the interests of the historian by reading between the lines. Let’s take each piece of this narrative in turn to try and find out what’s been omitted and those interests that omission may be concealing. ...
By Taryn Fivek This article has been republished with permission from the author. Permission to republish does not necessarily imply endorsement of any positions made by DGR. What is postfeminism? Allegedly it is the space where we can move past feminism, where feminism no longer holds appeal to women and where it can even be harmful to women. As Melissa Gira Grant writes: The patriarchy’s figured out a way to outsource hatred of prostitution. They’re just going to have women do it for them. ...
By Delilah Campbell This article was originally published by Trouble & Strife, and is republished here with permission from the publisher. For a couple of weeks in early 2013, it seemed as if you couldn’t open a newspaper, or your Facebook newsfeed, without encountering some new contribution to a war of words that pitted transgender activists and their supporters against allegedly ‘transphobic’ feminists. It had started when the columnist Suzanne Moore wrote a piece that included a passing reference to ‘Brazilian transsexuals’. Moore began to receive abuse and threats on Twitter, which subsequently escalated to the point that she announced she was closing her account. Then Julie Burchill came to Moore’s defence with a column in the Sunday Observer newspaper, which attacked not only the Twitter trolls, but the trans community in general. Burchill’s contribution was intemperate in both its sentiments and its language—not exactly a surprise, since that’s essentially what editors go to her for. If what you want is balanced commentary on the issues of the day, you don’t commission Julie Burchill. Nevertheless, when the predictable deluge of protests arrived, the Observer decided to remove the piece from its website. The following week’s edition carried a lengthy apology for having published it in the first place. Senior staff, it promised, would be meeting representatives of the trans community for a full discussion of their concerns. ...
By Ben Barker / Deep Green Resistance Wisconsin What makes a radical a radical is a willingness to look honestly and critically at power; more specifically, imbalances of power. We ask: Why does one group have more power than another? Why can one group harm another with impunity? Why is one group free while another is not? These kinds of questions have long been used by radicals to identify oppression and take action against it. The process has seemed both straight-forward and effective—until applied to the oppression of women. ...
By Ben Barker / Deep Green Resistance Wisconsin Do you believe in a better world? Do you believe in one without the torture of poverty and slavery; without hierarchies based on dominance; without a dying planet? If you do believe in this world, what are you willing to do to help bring it about? I know many who yearn for justice, but far fewer with any kind of plan for achieving it. There’s no lack of morality in this equation, just of strategy and, perhaps, courage. ...
By Joshua Headley / Deep Green Resistance New York As a socially conscious person situated within the heart of global industrial civilization, I often experience, directly and indirectly, injustices on a daily basis. A week ago, the NYPD (via two plainclothes officers) murdered a 16-year-old boy, Kimani Gray, firing 11 shots – hitting him 7 times in total; 3 in the back, 4 in the front. Monday night a large crowd began a vigil that would kick-off a week full of protest in the neighborhood – the night culminated in trash being thrown into the streets to slow down the riot police, glass bottles being thrown at officers from rooftop buildings, and the NYPD entering numerous apartments without warrants. Following that night (and for every day since) the East Flatbush neighborhood has been under military-style occupation with no less than three riot police on every single corner for more than 30 blocks. By Wednesday, the NYPD had declared the neighborhood a “Frozen Zone,” essentially affirming martial law by limiting press access and arresting anyone who did not precisely follow police instructions. One week later, tensions are still as high as ever, and justice has yet to be served. ...
Environmentalists today have our work cut out for us. Caught between the urgency of the ecological crises and reactionary capitalist forces that continue to push (quite successfully) for ever more outrageous and egregious destruction, finding an effective and timely path forward is no easy task. There are a wide variety of strategies for change vying for our attention, broadcast to us by a diversity of folks with a diversity of motivations—some of which are mixed, others confused, and more that are dangerous. By and large, the strategies we’ve adopted for our movements go unchallenged and unquestioned. ...