This spring and summer should (or could) bring a rising tide of protests against Obama's escalation of the US war in Afghanistan. Sending more US troops won't make anyone safer, won't help the Afghan people, and will needlessly risk the lives of US troops and Afghan civilians. The handful of Al-Qaeda militants, who were the original justification for the war, haven't been in Afghanistan for years. The escalation is a continued waste of money, just welfare for defense contractors and corrupt Afghan officials and gangsters. Bombing villages to prop up a corrupt US-supported regime (which rigged the last election) is just pouring gasoline on a fire -- its fueling more fighting and a society-wide resort to violence. Looked at from an Afghan perspective, what would you do if a foreign power invaded your country, tried to impose a particular segment of local thugs on your village, and flew drones over your fields night and day? The Afghan war is the greatest recruiting tool for suicide bombers and religious fanatics who offer an alternative to US hegemony, no matter how repressive and terrifying it may be.

Theory is another word for nothing left to lose. The Institute for Experimental Freedom is beyond masochistic with its bodies, murmurs and texts. We publish, print and distribute works foolishly against their future renditions. The typo or technical error pale in comparison to the shame we experience the moment our desire codified in digital mappings of vectors and typography brushes against the docile or eager appetite of whoever reads PDFs, blogs or printed zines. This shame, a sort of abjection, reverses onto us as it returns ten-fold in so many little confusions: a misinterpretation of a key term, a refusal to love our refusal to be governed by value in its textual form, an anxiety regarding one's own capacity to be acted on by the text, or feeling outside of the ironic horror we cannot help but know as a world we are attached to.

In the U.S., February is Black History Month. This is a good time to review the life of Malcolm X, one of the great leaders of the Black Liberation movement of the 60s. Anarchism, as an overall theory, is well-known to be rather loose and eclectic. Therefore anarchists have taken a great deal from other schools of thought, such as Marxism, feminism, Queer theory, ecology, radical psychoanalysis, post-modernism, etc. In my opinion, revolutionary anarchists also have much to learn from the life and thinking of Malcolm X.

For a long list of reasons, economic relations must change. Yet, it seems as though the most immediate reason involves ecological catastrophe; exponential profit margins are not compatible with finite ecosystems. Hence, the need for a plethora of ideas. I plan to offer such a vision.

A classic parable from the Infoshop archives.

Once upon a time there was a band of pirates. At least, they called themselves pirates, and they wore what they thought were pirate outfits -- black eyepatches, filthy bandanas and hats, worn-out parts of sailors' uniforms, and so on. They spoke in slang that they believed to be quite piratish: "Arr, matey! Shiver me timbers! Walk the plank!"

One of Marx's greatest contributions to a critical understanding of the logic of commodity capitalism was to start with a consideration of the dual aspect of the commodity.

My work forces me to drive more often than I would otherwise like, but one of the perks is that I get to listen to books on tape, something I enjoy and otherwise have little opportunity to do. The other day, I was listening to the book Planet Simpson by Chris Turner – before I go on, I would like to say that I don't recommend the book and turned it off at the end of the first CD. I was, however, struck by something Turner said.

On December 6th 2009, the one-year anniversary of the murder of Alexandros Grigoropoulos by Greek police, Greece once again erupted in riots. Students occupied hundreds of universities and high schools, and anarchists launched demonstrations all over the country, fighting with cops, torching cars and taking over radio stations to broadcast their message. Unlike last year, most of the rest of the country did not join the anarchists in the streets, but the anniversary clashes were a reminder that Greece is still a revolution waiting to happen.

Participatory Economics, or parecon for short, is a vision for how to conduct economics in a classless manner. It delivers to workers and consumers self managed say over their economic lives, a condition of solidarity with others, equitable incomes for their labors, diverse opportunities and options, and ecological balance

What follows is a response to an article written in Rolling Thunder issue number 8 entitled “Say You Want An Insurrection” (an unfortunate allusion to a '60s pop song written as a statement against the revolutionary situation in France in May of 1968). It is interesting that an article ostensibly critical not of “what insurrectionists say but of what they do” neglects to address actual campaigns and instead derides the statements of a handful of individuals, relying heavily on absurd notions (such as insinuating that insurrectionists really are “against everything”). Nowhere does the article mention the university occupations, rent strikes, social centers, gift economies, or legal defense networks in which people branded with the label “insurrectionist” participate.