Sunday, April 7th 2013 – 3:45PM
Clemente Soto Veléz Cultural & Educational Center
Room 202
107 Suffolk Street, New York, NY 10002

We invite all to participate in an open forum on our New York Police Department. We hope to hear some different analyses, reportbacks, and ideas, as we continue to strategize towards developing a stronger force against the police, and for communism.

We’ve invited a few comrades involved in ongoing anti-police organizing in the city, but hope to create an open space for discussion with all who attend.

Any so-called “self-identified anarchist” politics, analysis, or praxis has to engage critically and directly with the police as the most visible arm of the government’s repressive state apparatus. We hope to take this year’s anarchist book fair as an opportunity to figure out some next steps towards our collective overcoming of the police.

New York Year Zero is a front group that since its formation last June has focused on what to do about the police. From Kimani Gray in East Flatbush, to Christopher Dorner in Los Angeles, to Golden Dawn in Greece and Astoria, to looking at the history of tear gas use in the United States, to thinking critically about Copwatch programs in different cities around the country, to studying the history the 23rd Precinct in East Harlem, to Manuel Diaz in Anaheim, to Mark Duggan in London. In December we put out an open call for submissions to a publication we’re putting together on the police, which has turned into an ongoing project.

This forum will be a chance to discuss all of this together. And come say hi at our table.

http://anarchistbookfair.net/
http://csvcenter.org

A number of issues surrounding this year’s anarchist book fair have caused us to ask what it is we exactly want and need from such an event, to question its goals and potentials, and to consider the opportunities it presents: a time and place to sell, distribute, and share books and other physical media? to fundraise? set up information tables on various groups and projects? to host parallel workshops, skillshares, presentations, screenings, discussions, panels? a regional/(inter-)national convergence of revolutionaries in NYC? something self-consciously separate and distinct from the somewhat similar Left Forum and Historical Material conferences, which skew more towards the academic and institutional left? to simply spend time together? what could all of this look like, and how would it be organized? how have the 2013 and past anarchist book fairs in New York and elsewhere lived up to their potentials?

Our willingness and capacity to collectively face and answer these questions is at the same time a beginning to our above questions on how to self-organize against the police.