May 17: "Anarchist Panther" Ashanti Alston

Saturday, May 17 at 7:00pm to 6:47pm
Thomas Merton Center at 5125 Penn Ave

The third presentation in Pittsburgh Organizing Group's Anarchist Speaker Series will feature "Anarchist Panther" Ashanti Alston Omowali, a New York-based anarchist activist, speaker, and writer.

He will be speaking on his history as a member of the Black Panther Party and the Black Liberation Army, what led him to anarchism, and how we might continue to collectively struggle for a new society.

Having spent more than a decade in prison for his participation in revolutionary movements, Ashanti will also touch on how prison abolition work fits into the fight for freedom and a better world.

Ashanti is a former northeast coordinator for Critical Resistance, currently co-chair of the National Jericho Movement (to free U.S. political prisoners), a member of pro-Zapatista people-of-color U.S.-based Estación Libre, and a board member of the Institute for Anarchist Studies.

Anarchism, in advocating a free society of free individuals, is perhaps the only political tradition that has consistently rooted out domination in its many forms, while also attempting to theorize and practice utopian alternatives. With its emphasis on an ethical prefigurative politics, anarchism holds out a directly democratic, egalitarian replacement for the hegemony of representative democracy and capitalism. It has thus contributed to diverse experiments in horizontal organization and nonhierarchical social relations, alongside or in solidarity with a variety of anti-authoritarian movements worldwide.

And for the first time in its own history, anarchism is all that much more relevant and even workable in this era, variously labeled the network society, the information age, or simply globalization. Yet in its very openness, this political philosophy and its praxis often defy any semblance of a definition, thereby linking widely disparate views and projects that conflict with and/or even contradict each other. Pittsburgh Organizing Group's anarchist speaker series exists to explore the question, what is anarchism? And how does it fit into the fight for freedom, dignity, and a better world?

For more information:
www.organizepittsburgh.org
pog@mutualaid.org

Pittsburgh Organizing Group
Anarchist Speaker Series
pog@mutualaid.org
www.organizepittsburgh.org/anarchospeakers