Rad Geek Speaks: a talk on Anarchism and its ideas TOMORROW, at the Las Vegas Anarchist Cafe. Las Vegas, 28 January 2009, 6:30pm
Here's a pretty old post from the blog archives of Geekery Today; it was written about 15 years ago, in 2009, on the World Wide Web.
The Vegas Anarchist Cafe is a meet-up for networking, building community, and doing some outreach for anarchists in Las Vegas, which Southern Nevada ALL has been organizing together with unaffiliated local anarchists for the past several months. The main idea is just to give anarchists, anti-statists, and anarchy-curious fellow travelers a place to meet up and talk in an informal setting at a local coffee-house. There isn’t a fixed business agenda; the idea is to give people a place to find each other. Once they’ve found each other, A-Cafe can serve as a springboard for the independent projects that they may want to start.
After some discussions with regular A-Cafers, we’ve decided to start putting on a series of talks, presentations, skill-shares and open mics — tentatively titled the Free Speech Soapbox Series. The idea is to take an hour of the A-Cafe time for ongoing programming — including introductory material that may interest non-anarchists as well as anarchists, talks about issues local anarchists care about, organizing pitches for projects they are working on, how-tos to share skills amongst ourselves, presentations of classic anarchist lectures, etc. etc. etc. Talks take place during the middle 60 minutes of the Anarchist cafe (6:30pm – 7:30pm), with the 30 minutes before and the 30 minutes after available for the usual informal meet-up and chat.
I’m happy to announce that our first Soapbox talk will be TOMORROW, Tuesday 29 January 2009. And I will be doing the talk:
At this week’s A-Cafe, Anarchist philosopher Charles Johnson will present a special lecture on the topic
What is Anarchism?presenting the ideas of Anarchism in theory and practice, and correcting common misconceptions. For anyone interested in the ideas of philosophical Anarchism, or interested in conversation.
The Anarchist Cafe meeting will begin at 6:00 PM. My talk will begin at 6:30 PM (and should run to about 7:30 PM, including time at the end for Q&A).
Here are the details on the event:
- WHAT: Talk by Charles Johnson of Southern Nevada ALL on the ideas of Anarchism, the main misunderstandings about anarchy, and replies to the main objections.
- WHEN: Wednesday, 28 January 2009, 6:30 PM.
- WHERE: Weekly Anarchist Cafe @ The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf, Running Rebel Plaza (across the street from UNLV). 4550 S. Maryland Parkway; we’ll be in the meeting room off to the left of the entrance.
If you’re in the Vegas area (or even if you’re not), it’d be great to see you there. If you know anyone around abouts who might be interested in a general talk about Anarchism, then please do forward the announcement on to them.
Future Soapbox events are already being scheduled; in particular, next week will feature Las Vegas ALLy Kelly Patterson giving a talk on the Industrial Workers of the World, We Need the Wobblies Now More Than Ever! A Brief History of the Industrial Workers of the World.
See the Vegas Anarchist Cafe website for more details.
More to come soon; watch this space.
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I’d love to be there, but I am aways from Neveda. Hope you got my last email. I won’t repeat content on here for the sake of your privacy.
Hi Charles,
Any chance that your talk and Q&A will be transcribed? Or recorded?
Richard G.
I, too, would like to put in a request that your talk be recorded (if possible). More generally, I think it would be great to see a ‘library’ developed of mp3s of left-libertarian/mutualist lectures that could then be used to supplement (and in some ways correct) that offered by the Mises Institute…
Thanks for the kind words, all.
I attempted to record the talk using an MP3 player with a note-taking function, clipped to my shirt pocket. I have no idea how well the recording came out, but if it’s comprehensible I will try to get it prepped to put online.
I don’t know how useful the talk will be for future reference — my approach was deliberately introductory and I didn’t spend much time digging into any specifically left-libertarian or mutualist themes. I did spend some time stressing the importance of anarchism’s D.I.Y. ethic, and several times suggested wildcat unionism and grassroots mutual aid as a reply to objections along the lines of Which I suppose is probably a different sort of focus than what you’d get if you were hearing a similarly introductory talk from Mises Institute types.
Great to see you made a go at recording the talk. Such a focus on willcat unionism and grassroots mutual aid is precisely what I think is lacking in many (rightwing) libertarian arguments against the state. These latter, while occasionally nodding in the direction of ‘civil society,’ voluntary cooperation of a non-profit sort, and intermediate institutions, rarely attach much importance to these things, taking a more passive “the market will [mechanically?] take care of it” approach. Thanks!