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.
“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.”
Questions for Poets
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?
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Sick Woman Theory
“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.”
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.
Print 11x17 (tabloid) landscape, flip on short end. Or just print the single page document on regular 8.5x11!
REPRESSION BREEDS RESISTANCE
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.”