There's a reason they call it struggle
You know it as well as we do: it's difficult to keep up the fight. The brutal system we live under attacks us daily – especially as workers, women, people of colour, queers and other oppressed people. Even the planet itself is under assault by capitalism and related hierarchical systems.
So what do we do?
We keep on struggling! For the sake of people and planet, we keep on resisting the forces that oppress us, and we keep on building grassroots alternatives in our workplaces and in our communities.
For over 40 years, Jura has been keeping up the fight. We open the space and invite people in for conversations and events. We distribute books and other radical material via our bookshop, library and stalls. We operate as a volunteer-run, self-managed anarchist collective – seeking to demonstrate the politics we stand for.
But we can't do it without you. Jura relies on both a small dedicated collective of volunteers, and a wider group of supporters. We ask supporters to engage with our material, to spread the word about anarchist ideas, and to participate in Jura events. Occasionally, we also ask you to contribute financially. We haven't made a call for donations in over a year, but now is a time that we need your donations. Please help us to keep doing what we do – make a donation now.
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What has Jura been up to recently?
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It was great to have a Jura stall at the May Day union family fun day, after marching with 5,000 others in support of workers’ power. We marched with the (small but vocal) left-libertarian contingent, sold books and had great conversations!
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We're proud to host fundraisers such as the recent gig for Grandmothers Against Removals, which raised over $700 and featured the amazing Aboriginal poet Lizzy Jarrett – sovereign warrior woman from the Gumbaynggirr, Bundjalung, Dunghutti clans (pictured).
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In a city where it's increasingly difficult for live music to thrive, we are happy to be able to host gigs by young, independent, folk, punk and alternative musicians. We try to provide a non-corporate, safer space for an artistic community.
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Key to the Jura project is to provide space for talks, meetings and workshops which facilitate political organising. In recent times we have welcomed regular meetings of the Sydney IWW, and the anarcha-feminist reading group.
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Jura is open 4 days every week – which is quite an achievement when you consider that we're all volunteers! Every time we open, people come in and engage with radical, anti-capitalist, anarchist politics and ideas.
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What do we need money for anyway?
As a general principle, we believe that social change is made by participants not donors. We don't have paid political organisers like many organisations, from Greenpeace to mainstream trade unions. We all need to be involved!
And if you think that Jura is making loads of money selling books, we're sorry to disappoint you but it's not the case! We don't make much money from selling books – we keep our markup low so they are affordable. Most of the money from book sales goes back in to buying new stock – that's how we've managed to maintain and expand our great selection of books over the years.
But we still need money! In order to survive as a radical project existing in the cracks of capitalist society, there are certain bills that need to get paid. Our biggest expenses each year are council rates, water and electricity (reduced thanks to solar power bought by previous donations) and insurance.
Our insurance policy is our largest single expenditure: over $5,000. it's a legal necessity (we wouldn't be able to operate our shop without it). It's also an asset to the Jura community, because it enables us to hold events and gives us (some) protection if an accident or fire occurs. Our insurance has also been used in the past to enable the Sydney Anarchist Bookfair to hire a venue.
Please make a donation now
Help us to keep doing what we do – make a donation today. If everyone reading this contributed $100, we'd easily meet our expenses for another year. Any amount, large or small, is greatly appreciated. The best way to donate is via direct transfer into our bank account (details below) because then fees are minimised. Alternatively you can use PayPal or credit card on our website.
- Bank name: Bank Australia (formerly mecu)
- BSB: 313 140
- Account name: Jura Donations
- Account number: 12081783
Get rewarded!
If you take your support one step further and become a regular donor, you will receive a 20% discount on books and merchandise in the shop. Regular donors commit to making a donation every month of $10 (regular) or $20 (passionate). Use the PayPal buttons on our website or set up a regular deposit through your own internet banking into the account above and email us to let us know.
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Upcoming events and actions
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Sydney IWW meeting
Sydney members of the IWW will be meeting to discuss workplace organising. All members are welcome and encouraged to come along, as well as anyone who is interested in joining. 2pm Saturday 7 July, at Jura. Facebook event
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Five years too long: Evacuate Manus and Nauru!
This July marks five years on Manus and Nauru for refugees dumped there by the Australian government. The situation remains urgent. On 15 June, Fariborz became the 12th person to die as a result of offshore detention.
Rally: 1pm Saturday 21 July, Town Hall. Facebook event
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Melbourne Anarchist Bookfair
The Melbourne Anarchist Bookfair is on again! It will have workshops that address different areas of anarchist politics, as well as stalls from a variety of anarchist groups and organisations, selling literature, zines, t-shirts and the like. It's a great event and it's a space to meet other anarchists and start working together to build a better world. Jura will be there - come and say hi! Facebook
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Recently published articles and more
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Podcast: #metoo, feminism and the struggle against gendered sexual violence
Tanya Serisier and Dave Eden
Living the Dream is an excellent, wide-ranging, radical podcast by comrades in Brisbane. In two recent episodes, host Dave Eden interviews feminist scholar and activist Tanya Serisier about #metoo, feminism and the struggle against gendered and sexual violence.
Part 1 explores how #metoo can be understood in the history of feminist struggle against gendered sexual violence. Tanya discusses how complex these issues are: they evade easy answers and they bring up difficult questions about where such violence comes from and how struggle and speech against them sometimes breaks from the broader patterns of power and sometimes reinforces them.
Part 2 looks at the problems of the notion of consent as a solution to gendered and sexual violence, the continuing importance of the lessons of 70s feminism, including much-maligned lesbian separatism, how feminism has forced a rethink of what politics and power is and finishes with Tanya’s reflections on the recent UCU strike and what it shows us about radical and collective struggles.
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Prefigurative Politics, Catastrophe and Hope
Uri Gordon
"Anarchists such as David Graeber and Cindy Milstein have used the term 'prefigurative politics' to describe the anarchist principle that the ways we organize in the present should reflect the sort of society we hope to create in the future. Yet the concept of prefiguration is drawn from a Christian theology that presumes a future salvation so certain that it radiates backward through time, generating its own precursors. Many Marxists, too, see history as the inevitable unfolding of an ordained process – a sort of secular second coming of Christian millenarianism. Most anarchists, by contrast, take nothing for granted about the future, especially in today’s context of ecological collapse – so it may behoove us to revisit the concept of prefigurative politics to see whether it still serves our needs today. We are pleased to present the following text by Uri Gordon, in which he rigorously explores the origins of the concept of prefiguration and its emergence in anarchist discourse." Read more
There's no such thing as a revolutionary government
Crimethinc
A nice new article on a classic anarchist idea: the state is part of the problem, and will never be the solution. "The future may hold neoliberal immiseration, nationalist enclaves, totalitarian command economies, or the anarchist abolition of property itself – it will probably include all of those – but it will be increasingly difficult to preserve the illusion that any government could solve the problems of capitalism for any but a privileged few. Fascists and other nationalists are eager to capitalize on this disillusionment to promote their own brands of exclusionary socialism; we should not smooth the way for them by legitimizing the idea that the state could serve working people if only it were properly administered." Read more
Blair Cottrell and the problem of male aggression
Clementine Ford
"Cottrell et al are able to exercise their toxic masculinity and fascist ideologies so freely in public because the society we live in has decided these things are no longer frowned on. Think about that. It's no longer shameful to align yourself publicly with neo-Nazi politics (hell, in America you'll have the President even refer to you as 'good people'). Nor is it considered wrong to openly bully individuals in public while police officers laugh along and politely ask you to stop. One of the claims repeatedly made by Cottrell while harassing Dandyman was that 'there are kids here!' Let's be very clear - kids aren't harmed by seeing men joyously perform in pink leotards. They're harmed by witnessing racism, homophobia and transphobia. And they are let down by structures that fail to challenge all of those things, as Victoria Police did on Sunday at Federation Square." Read more
Employees who practice mindfulness meditation are less motivated, having realized the futility of their jobs
Boingboing
In the New York Times, a pair of behavioral scientists describe a forthcoming Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes article that studied the effect of mindfulness meditation (a trendy workplace moral-booster) on workers' motivation and performance. Turns out that people who meditate are less motivated: "Meditation was correlated with reduced thoughts about the future and greater feelings of calm and serenity -- states seemingly not conducive to wanting to tackle a work project. People who had meditated were more focused, but they didn't perform better than their less calm, more anxious colleagues, because their lower levels of motivation...seemed to cancel out that benefit"... Mindfulness might be unhelpful for dealing with difficult assignments at work, but it may be exactly what is called for in other contexts. There is no denying that mindfulness can be beneficial, bringing about calm and acceptance. Once you’ve reached a peak level of acceptance, however, you’re not going to be motivated to work harder. Read more
Forty-Five Things I Learned in the Gulag
By Varlam Shalamov
For fifteen years the writer Varlam Shalamov was imprisoned in the Gulag for participating in "counter-revolutionary Trotskyist activities." He endured six of those years enslaved in the gold mines of Kolyma, one of the coldest and most hostile places on earth. While he was awaiting sentencing, one of his short stories was published in a journal called Literary Contemporary. He was released in 1951, and from 1954 to 1973 he worked on Kolyma Stories, a masterpiece of Soviet dissident writing that has been newly translated into English and published by New York Review Books Classics this week. Shalamov claimed not to have learned anything in Kolyma, except how to wheel a loaded barrow. But one of his fragmentary writings, dated 1961, tells us more. Read more
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Thanks for reading! Now help us keep up the fight by making a donation!
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