May 2010: Month of Anarchy

Tired of this recession caused by the greedy capitalists and their broken system, sick of watching our communities fall deeper into poverty as failed bankers get rich off tax-money bail-outs while politicians cut our much needed social services, we call for a Month of Anarchy!

The Northeast Anarchist Network (NEAN) is encouraging anarchists, anti-authoritarians and other comrades to turn this May into a Month of Anarchy, throughout the Northeast and beyond. We aim to fill the entirety of May with great festivals, gift-based markets, meetings, actions, strikes, protests, picnics, performances, acts of solidarity, and other practical demonstrations of a great alternative to authoritarian capitalism: Anarchy! We want to reach out to our neighbors across the entire region and show them that anarchy is something entirely different than what they've heard, and something similar to how they may view a better future. And we need your help.

Groups affiliated with NEAN will be organizing a wide variety of events in our cities, but we are reaching out to all other like-minded groups and individuals to help with these, and more importantly, to participate with
your own initiatives.

NEAN has formed a May Month of Anarchy Coordinating Committee to help initiate planning for this month, to provide ideas and resources, where possible, to local organizers, and to keep track of and promote planned events.

*If you or your organization would like to get involved with the Coordinating Committee, endorse the May Month of Anarchy, or contribute by planning events or in other ways, please contact us at: monthofanarchy (a) neanarchist.net

Please send events in or add to the calendar by March 20th so that we can create calendars and literature connecting activities, so as to best publicize everyone's efforts.

Here is a list of ideas we generated at the 9th Assembly of NEAN this December (we would like to expand on this list, so please send your suggestions):

• Participate in local May Day marches and events, or organize them where they don't exist. Use these events to build relationships with migrant and other working communities and unions, and social movement groups. You may want to distribute literature or otherwise spread the word about the anarchists, May Day 1886 and the 8-hour day movement. Create “8-hour Day” half-sheets to leave at your work sites and in break rooms.
• We encourage warm up events leading up to May to build organizational momentum.
• Run radical kid's games at festivals, picnics, and other community events.
• Skillshares (for ideas: http://neanarchist.net/skillshares)
• Strive to build images and systems of anarchy in our cities and towns, such as participatory economics, community self-defense, open free spaces and markets, etc.
• Hold Assemblies (neighborhood, workplace, student, occupation, anarchist, revolutionary and otherwise)
• Organize Really Really Free Markets (RRFM). Consider reaching out before to learn what skills are already in your communities and what skills, items, and services are needed (to help bring in community participation as well as provide necessary services and items for free).
  Create/compile handouts and pamphlets on Gift Economics for distribution at the RRFM (may check “Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness” for materials, and we will also have our own up on the NEAN website), and make Clothing Tags with info about Gift Economics and the RRFM to pin to clothes, shoes etc. Try to encourage established charities to participate.
• Hold Haymarket events around May 4th (example: History of the 8-hour Day) to demystify and commemorate anarchist participation in winning the 8-hour day.
• Set up tables at street corners, parks and campuses and hand out information, or create a Bike Cart Zine Library.
• Provide Alternative medicine and contribute anarchist perspectives to the healthcare debate.
• Hold discussions and presentations on prison abolition and community-based alternatives to incarceration.
• Revive disused newspaper boxes to fill with anarchist literature.
• Organize or join in letter writing campaigns to prisoners and/or soldiers. Contact churches, ABCs, and community groups.
• Host panel discussions and speaking tours about local and national issues, or about anarchism. Speakers can hold talks on anarchism that dissolve into discussions (if you need help finding speakers, email us!)
• Make use of the current economic climate to make allies and articulate anarchist alternatives.
• Promote Climate Justice.
• Soap Box (stand on a box and speak your mind to passers-by!)
• Hold Pre-US Social Forum People's Movement Assemblies (as requested by the USSF)
• Acts of collective cultural production (i.e. plays)
• Guerilla Gardening.
• Check into Montreal Anarchist Bookfair folks (they do a similar month of events in May)
• Try and help bring community together to work on collective projects.