Deceiving the Sky is a collectively produced book, resource, and study guide on strategic thinking. Emerging from collective inquiry, it includes a wide variety of historical and contemporary texts on strategy. While the word strategy often evokes hierarchy, centralization, and a satellite’s-eye view of the world that conceives of humans as chess pieces, we felt it important to strengthen our own strategic reflexes as radicals. Against the statist conception of strategy, we believe it can be a lens, an orientation to the world that understands existence as a shifting array of forces, capacities, and intentions. Strategy can be molecular as much as it can be grand. This book is an attempt to build a new language that we can share together, to build our own collective capacity for strategic thinking, to become more powerful together.
Deceiving the Sky is designed as a tool for use, with original texts, introductory material, discussion notes and questions, and activities for engagement. The point is not to get lost in abstract theory, but to discover what is useful, and to discard the rest. This book can be used to organize a study group, to reference as a strategic playbook, or if nothing else, to roll up and use as a bludgeon.
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Nanni Balestrini was born in 1935 and died on May 20, 2019. He was a poet, author, artist, and lifelong participant in autonomous struggles against capital and the state in Italy and worldwide. If there is any life after death, he is certainly storming heaven right now.
This edition of Carbonia was designed & printed in his memory on May, 2019, at 115 Legion in Olympia, WA
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No New Ideas Press is thrilled to team up with a brand new project, Emergent Goods, to increase our collective capacity in the Pacific Northwest. We’re excited to bring our many years of experience designing and printing zines, posters, and books to this project. We're also excited about the collective wisdom & expertise involved: from graphic design to writers, from screen-printing and letter-press to book-binding and web skills, and with a solid dose of computer security know-how mixed in, there are a lot of knowledgeable comrades with proven follow-through involved. We have many grand visions--bail funds & war chests, a print shop, long-term physical infrastructure, secure & private shared finances, etc.--but are starting small with zines, stickers, pins, and t-shirts.
If you’ve enjoyed the material that NNI has produced over the years, please share this post and spread the word about Emergent Goods, and consider donating to our fundraiser to get this project off the ground.
No New Ideas will continue to produce & publish important texts, original theory, and beautiful posters, all for free, right here, so don’t worry, we’re not going anywhere. However, we hope that this collaboration will increase our ability to produce and distribute beautiful physical versions on a larger scale.
Help Us Build Autonomous Infrastructure
Emergent Goods is a bunch of dedicated people who share the beautiful idea that our lives should be ours. We desire to express, share, and spread that idea. We will design and screen print apparel and tote bags as well as stickers and enamel pins. We will produce original theory, practical guides for the actualization of anarchist desires, and distribute neglected works. All of our materials will be available online as well as at events.
We feel excited about making things and distributing them to old friends and new comrades alike but our aim is much broader than the marketplace. We hope to establish long term infrastructure and resources to expand our production capabilities, make money to feed bail funds and solidarity networks, share ideas, make new friends, and support each other in projects we haven’t even imagined yet. By working to establish networks of resources, Emergent hopes to expand and share our power outside and against the state and capital.
At the moment we have the in-house capacity to produce beautiful zines, posters, and screen-printed goods. But our skills and capacities are much greater, and a little extra support will allow us to dramatically increase our output. We have a risograph duplicator that needs fixing, screen printing equipment that needs organizing, and a book binder that needs to be moved a thousand miles. Past these logistical obstacles we are beginning to see the project come together. Now we are looking for financial support toward start up costs and a first run of literature and apparel.
We're grateful and excited for any contributions to help get the ball rolling on this project. Raising $3,000 would allow us to set up fundamental infrastructure such as secure web hosting and financial logistics, and get a decent first run of lit and swag. Raising $4,000 would allow all that plus help get all of our readily available means of production up and running, meaning we could start chasing our more out there aspirations. $6,000 would shatter the ceiling of our current scope, give us staying power, and let us make serious steps towards becoming an autonomous distribution and production node.
Against the subjugation of life!
Towards the actualization of our autonomous potentialities!
“There are political entailments or implications to what I’m suggesting. In the first place, in our context here, taking and exercising power is not a goal we can associate with joy or happiness, since power is domination, a continual suppression of potentialities. This has to be the contrary of what revolutionaries desire, especially if they are envisioning a tiqqun, a redemption and repair.”
Is it a box of matches burning the museum that displays the art object that is the box of matches? Or is
it the box of matches in the hands of a child who knows he is hated in his police-filled school in his police-filled city? Is it the incendiary accident of that child? Is it
how can language set fire to that? Is it how to set fire to fire?
“Because, once we are all ill and confined to the bed, sharing our stories of therapies and comforts, forming support groups, bearing witness to each other’s tales of traume, prioritizing the care and love of our sick, pained, expensive, sensitive, fantastic bodies, and there is no one left to go to work, perhaps then, finally, capitalism will screech to its much-needed, long-overdue, and motherfucking glorious halt.”
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We’re back! After a long hiatus. More content coming soon, hopefully. We’ll try to get dead links fixed in the next week as well...
UPDATE October 1: first version was missing part of the text; this version contains the entire text. Sorry!
“The exit from economy has nothing to do with a “better economy”, like that of Tim Jackson, as soon as one understands that economy in all its forms, ecological in particular, is a regimentation, a specific political regime, although one that is not studied by the political scientists or understood by the “degrowth” promoters, paralyzed as they are by their “democratism”. It’s not a matter of “decolonizing the imaginary”, but rather of calling for a liberation struggle against despotism (recapturing the spirit of 1793, which is not mainly ecological!). The question is not that of good behaviors (that’s economy), but of new forms of non-economic life, indifferent to economy.”
Our second piece by Jacques Fradin, translated by Robert Hurley. First available here; original French article here.
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Print 11x17 (tabloid) landscape, flip on short end. Or just print the single page document on regular 8.5x11!
The Black Liberation Army and the Radical Legacy of the Black Panther Party
“the Black Liberation Army was not a centralized, organized group with a common leadership and chain of command. Instead there were various organizations and collectives working together out of various cities, and in some larger cities there were often several groups working independently of each other.”
This essay is excerpted from The Philosophy of the Encounter, a collection of Althusser’s last writings.We are excited to critically re-publish it here. His investigation of the clinamen, of aleatory materialism, of the encounter, has been deeply influential to us in understanding our own lives and politics, and contemporary and past philosophers and communist and anarchist theorists. It opens space for historical materialism without teleology, for understanding our current hell-world as always contingent and precarious, always on the verge of dissolution, and for thinking about the ways that chance encounters with friends and enemies affect us and our lives.The particles colliding in the swerve might be the historical conditions which just happen to coincide in such a way to allow the birth of capitalism—which means they just as well might not have, in a rejection of orthodox Marxist teleology—or they might simply be the encounters we have with friends from near and far, the creation of small worlds with each other, from which we can fight our enemies and care for each other, until our encounter dissolves and we move apart again. For us, the clinamen grants a certain freedom and lightness: if this world wasn’t predestined but simply happened to result from a certain combination of events, then it might also fall apart at any moment. If we look at the grand arc of human history with an eye for the aleatory, we realize that we are not locked in an eternal hell of capital and the state.While what comes next might be worse, it might also be better, or at least different.As Lucretius put it so many years ago:
So, then, time changes the nature of all the world,
And earth takes one condition, then another,
Can’t bear what it could, and can, what it could not bear.
The footnotes offered by the original editors of this text are reprinted here; our own explanatory asides are set into the margins.We hope that the asides provide more clarity and context for some of the more obscure references; they also reveal some of our own political position, the points at which we encounter Althusser, and the points at which we swer ve decidedly away. As readers, this is our contribution to a long conversation; we hope to continue this conversation with you, as well, should we encounter one another.
No New Ideas May 2016
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For best results, print 2-sided 11x17, flip on short end
“If necessary, an oxygen mask will drop from the ceiling,”
If necessary?
The Department of Homeland Security includes open windows or doors, curiousity about a building’s purpose, and extended loitering without explanation as behavior that could indicate terrorism or a terrorist-related crime
The anxiety of the state and capital whispers personal directives from a recording. A calm flight attendant dulcetly intones from nowhere. These whispers grow to a deafening drone. As the discourse and landscape of total institutions enclose around us, we listen to the ways they manage their anxiety.
Come closer, the structure is creaking.
I thank you for coming. I thank you, and I welcome you.
This story comes after hope or the goal of ‘winning’. Those who project themselves into a fictive communist future, solving population level problems, speak about ‘winning’. We leave this for the future administrators.
We have no hope of a final cream-filled peace. The struggle against power will not end in a new garden. So our ruthless questions will not look for a singular, final answer. This is a story of how to tear ravenously toward the present with no hope.
Let’s relish what we can, together, like dogs.
No New Ideas February 2016
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Incidentally, we’ll be tabling in absentia at the NAH FAIR in LA this Saturday, Feb 13. If you’re in the area swing by and pick up some hard copies of our stuff!
“The Human need to be liberated in the world is not the same as the Black need to be liberated from the world; which is why even their most radical cognitive maps draw borders between the living and the dead.”
The Vengeance of Vertigo: Aphasia and Abjection in the Political Trials of Black Insurgents
“The security paradigm implies that each dissension, each more or less violent attempt to overthrow its order, becomes an opportunity to govern them in a profitable direction”
“Havoc, then, is the other side of class, which itself meant—and means—both a division of people into classes for the purpose of extracting wealth (taxation) and a calling to arms. Havoc is held off by class and threatens to overwhelm it, the anarchic turn of stealing and laying waste that illuminates, negatively, this other relation, of legal theft and sanctioned destruction of lives and resources.”
An oldie but goodie--Evan Calder Williams with a devastating critique of liberal & leftist responses to the London riots of 2011. Still relevant, still cutting; makes a perfect stocking-stuffer for that condescending realist in your family who just shakes their head and sighs about all those “violent hoodlums”
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8.5 x 11 zine, print landscape, flip on short edge
“Counter-logistics is not simply a matter of blocking all flows, of stopping movement, of locking things in place where they are. It is a matter of blocking those flows that constitute the material and metaphysical tissue of this world, while simultaneously enhancing our own ethical connections, movement, and friendship. Helping migrants to cross borders and remain undetected, helping information to cross through and within prison walls, destroying surveillance cameras, defending the basis of new worlds seized in opposition to the old—these are as important as blocking rail lines and disrupting commerce.”
This book is a collection of critical texts focused on logistics, counter-logistics, and cybernetics. It attempts to combine some disparate groups and tendencies that have all taken a recent turn towards evaluating infrastructure and logistics as a crucial element in the perpetuation of capital and control, and as vulnerable points worthy of study, evaluation, and attack. Available as a web-readable PDF (below), a series of easy to print imposed zines (also below) for your own personal reading group, or as a pretty paperback book for $8 plus shipping. To purchase a book, email [email protected]
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Zine format (print double-sided landscape, flip on short edge)
PART ONE: INTRODUCTION and ZAD, COMMUNE, METROPOLIS
PART TWO: LOGISTICS, COUNTERLOGISTICS, AND THE COMMUNIST PROSPECT
PART THREE: COMMUNIST MEASURES IN NOTRE-DAME-DES-LANDES and THE CYBERNETIC HYPOTHESIS, PART IV
PART FOUR: COMMUNIST MEASURES
PART FIVE: DISASTER COMMUNISM
PART SIX: THE ANTHROPOCENE
PART SEVEN: CHOKE POINTS: MAPPING AN ANTI-CAPITALIST COUNTER-LOGISTICS IN CALIFORNIA
