Author: Amy Obermeyer @ Barricade

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Mutual Aid: A Feel-Bad Story

by Amy Obermeyer

It is March 12, 2021, and I am riding home to Queens over the pockmarked industrial roads of eastern Mott Haven. I am crestfallen, having just had to tell a regular whom I bring food to that our mutual aid organization is running out of funds to keep up the grocery delivery system we’ve had going now for a year. For a year, we’ve been able to bring groceries and supplies to some of the members of our community most marginalized and most harmed by covid. I’ve been delivering to this individual nearly from the beginning. I always knew the funds would eventually dry up, that the initial outpouring of generosity last April would give way to ennui and normalization. It doesn’t make it any easier. I promise her that I will figure out something, that I will keep visiting and bringing any food I can scrounge up from local food banks and the like, but unfortunately, it won’t be quite as robust. Continue reading “Mutual Aid: A Feel-Bad Story”

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Calling All Activist Page Designers

Barricade Seeking  A Page Designer for Issue #4!

Barricade: A Journal of Antifascism and Translation is looking for a page designer to assist with laying out our print copy for the next issue. While it is not a paid position (no positions at Barricade are), we may be able to subsidize the subscription to InDesign for the duration of the project, and you will be recognized in both the online and print versions. The page designer will be responsible for laying out submissions following our established style guide (using templates from previous issues) and will work with our publisher to prepare the final copy for print publication. Candidates will need to have familiarity with InDesign and a strong commitment to antifascism.

This role will require you to be available to work 10 hours per week during May and early June 2021. Your working hours will be largely at your discretion.

Please email us at contact@barricadejournal.org and attach a CV if you’re interested.

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Local Activism/Global Fascism Call for Submissions

The climate change crisis demands of us a reevaluation of the connection between the local and the global. Meanwhile, the pandemic has given rise to a renaissance of mutual aid efforts around the globe. In India, response to laws targeting smaller farmers in favor of corporations ultimately brought about what may have been the largest general strike in the history of the world. 

Ramparts: A Barricade Forum is currently seeking contributions for our next themed series, “Local Activism/Global Fascism”. We are interested in submissions–whether textual, visual, or multimedia–that address the connection between local issues and larger-scale authoritarianisms from a variety of angles. From detailed descriptions of how day-to-day activism has been affected by large structural forces to commentaries on unexpected international parallels, we’re excited to use our platform to highlight relationships of scale.

Send your submissions and pitches to submissions@barricadejournal.org.

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election : peru 1990 / 1992

Illustration of ballot box in pink and white. Box says "election"
illustration by iggdeh

by Amy Obermeyer

In the lead-up to Peru’s presidential election in the spring of 1990, sitting president Alan García was deeply unpopular. García, who was ineligible for reelection, represented Peru’s center-left, social democratic Aprista party. Like much of the region, Peru was still in the grips of the Latin American debt crisis that first hit in 1982. Rampant inflation was everywhere. García’s populist government had initially managed to stave off the disaster, but by 1988, García’s measures were no longer succeeding and by 1989, inflation was at 2000%. Furthermore, as economic conditions worsened, the brutality of the Maoist insurrectionary group Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) increased, and so too did the brutality of the state’s response. In January 1989, García’s popular approval, once as high as 90%, had fallen to 9%. Among the electorate, distrust for political parties in general was at an all-time high, and the successive failures of two centrist governments—García’s and that of his predecessor, Fernando Belaúnde Terry—from the two major centrist parties, coupled with a voter preference for centrist policies, left a marked void in Peru’s political landscape. 

Continue reading “election : peru 1990 / 1992”

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#JusticeforGeorgeFloyd

The murder of George Floyd at the hands of the Minneapolis Police Department last week has galvanized the American public. What distinguishes this catalytic event from the long history of the racist murder of persons of color by the police is not that it is extraordinary, but that it has taken place during a pandemic and in the midst of public outcry surrounding the murders of Ahmaud Arbery and Breonna Taylor, and racist incidents in Central Park. These moments make horrifically clear the everydayness of white supremacy as well as the systemic and individual ways whiteness is used as a weapon against persons of color. Organizers and activists have been working for decades to theorize systemic racist violence and ways to dismantle the police and carceral state. Our direct and remote participation is required to abolish white supremacy.

We have gathered the accompanying list of links that address the exigencies of the present moment from a range of concrete and practical perspectives. You’ll find information here that will point you to forms of anti-racist response, including organizations to support, ways to promote local political reform, and resources for educating yourself and others. We further encourage you to engage with your local grassroots organizations and to get involved to best serve the needs of your own communities.     

 Continue reading “#JusticeforGeorgeFloyd”

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Ramparts: An Introduction

We believe that power functions in part by controlling the movement of information.

In a moment like the one we find ourselves in, when fascistic rhetoric and actions persist at the highest levels of governments around the world, the situation on the ground shifts rapidly. A print journal like Barricade, with both the care put into production and the material demands of publishing, is not always equipped to respond with the speed the moment demands of us.

A barricade is a makeshift form of opposition.

With that in mind, we offer you, our readers, another makeshift form, our new forum that we christen here as “Ramparts”. In this democratized form, we hope to bring you biweekly offerings taking a variety of shapes in a variety of registers, from book, film, and press reviews, to translations of blog posts and news articles, to interviews, editorials, antifascist playlists, and everything in between. This forum will allow us to further probe the sorts of questions the texts we publish raise, to give space to reflect on and respond to those texts, and to explore new developments in the sociopolitical landscape as they arise.

Ramparts is a forum for the publication of writing against fascism and authoritarianism and other forms of domination and control.

A forum is fundamentally a conversation. And ours is a conversation we invite you to join. We are interested in publishing reader contributions of any of the sorts of texts we’ve mentioned, as well as any others fitting our mission, but that we’ve not yet thought of or listed. To submit to the forum, email submissions@barricadejournal.org, and check our submissions page for further guidelines.

As with the journal, everything published on the blog falls under the Creative Commons license Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives, which means the texts may be shared, but only for non-commercial purposes and only with proper attribution to the author and translator.