WORTHING Anarchists will be attending a two-day Gathering Against the Prison Society in Brighton on October 31 and November 1.

It is being staged at The Cowley Club at 12 London Road.

The discussions and presentations wille reflect the struggle for liberation, inside and outside of the prison walls and are organised by random anarchists and the Anarchist Black Cross.

As the economic crisis hits deeper and people get organised and angry, the state needs media diversions like the War on Terror, escalating political repression, paramilitary policing, new prisons & immigration detention centres, biometrics, surveillance, relentless imperialist incursions - all to maintain the class divisions that ensure continued economic exploitation. The UK State, leading others, is about to proceed on a major prison building project, whilst more and more our societies already resemble open prisons. It all has to go.

This is a call for debate and exchange, to reflect and agitate...

Provisional Timetable

Sat 31/Oct

9.30 Breakfast

10.30 Introduction of the event and of people.

11.20 Campaign Against Prison Slavery
Forced labour, long a feature of prisons around the globe, has many functions: as punishment, to extract reparations for the cost of imprisonment and even simply as a means of keeping prisoners physically exhausted so they are less likely to rebel. However, it is increasingly being used both as an integral component of prison control and discipline regimes and as a method of generating capital from a section of society that up till now has been held to have no intrinsic labour value.

- - --.--

Talk with the anarchist comrades from Portugal
"It doesn't seem realistic to us to talk about an anti-prison struggle in Portugal. There is an ongoing tension and struggle against this prison-society. We commit to fighting not just one repressive aspect of it. The problems are everywhere and our enemy is this whole system. With this we don't mean that we haven't targeted prisons or fought in solidarity with rebellious prisoners. It is quite clear for us that prisons are a fundamental pillar of the state's repressive system. They are a direct threat for all of us.
And so, we've had experiences of aiming our attack against the penitentiary system.. It is about these experiences and their context in a larger/global struggle that we would like to talk. We're interested in sharing the practice we had and the reflections that came from that practice so far. We want to debate the theory and the methods we choose, so that we determine the way we want this struggle to be. We're also interested in mentioning some specific cases because of their unexpected outcome- both positive and negative."

13.00 Lunch + Break

14.00 Feedback from Greece
Revolutionary solidarity in theory and in practice. An anarchist comrade from Athens speaking about the increasingly repressive aftermath of the December uprising and also about the outcome of the November 2008 prisoners hungerstrike. There will be an overview of the cases of bankrobbing anarchist prisoners Giannis Dimitrakis and Gorgos Voutsis-Vogiatzis, and details of the mass repressive measures taken against immigrants.

15.00 Presentation from anarchist comrades from Berlin, Germany
Some comrades from Berlin are going to give a brief overview about the situation there for what concerns the increasing of acts of attack against state and capital and the reaction to it by the agents of repression: one of the examples are the ongoing trials against several comrades and the widening of social control. Partly-privatization within german prisons and other developments within the prison world are going to be touched, as well as moments of resistance against it, both from the outside as on the inside.

16.00 Discussion

- - --.-- Close

20.30 Benefit Gig "All Cops Are Brothers" w/ Spanner, Crowzone & Jesus Bruiser. Donations entry.

- - --->

Sun 1/Nov

10.30 Breakfast

11.20 Open Session (...)



- - --.-- Lunch + Break

--.-- Open Session (...)

- - --.-- The Shape of Things to Come
Presentation by Tony Bunyan of StateWatch.org, about new European security architecture, biometrics & surveillance technologies and the open prison society.

- - --.-- Combating the open prison : Closing Discussion
Our modern consumer capitalist societies are becoming increasingly like open prisons, watched and spied on, monitored and databased, the average UK citizen is in a prison of monstrous proportions. We need a social and libertarian revolution for a world where we control the direction of our own lives.

Revolt on the streets of Europe

RESISTANCE is ramping up against the corrupt capitalist system all over Europe.

On October 6 and 7 riots broke out in Istanbul as angry protesters took to the streets to oppose the IMF meeting in the Turkish city.

And on Saturday October 10 it all kicked off in Poitiers, central France, at a protest against the transfer of prisons to a new prison built in the area (see photo).

Said a report on German Indymedia: "The demonstration was not the main action of the day and local officials had anticipated that only 80 people would participate in actions. But the authorities were surprised by the arrival of a group of 250 protesters determined to do battle. They not take the control of the demo they were the demo.

"The parade first took the direction of the prison before turning around and attacking police who tried to follow. The procession set off towards the city center, forming a sort of block two banners with reinforced front and rear.

"The militants attacked all banks, insurance agencies and a business run by Bouygues (builder of prisons). A trader who tried to intervene was slightly injured. A policeman was more seriously hurt after being hit by a hammer to the head. "

The report carried in the USA's Washington Post sounded like a return to Cold War rhetoric, with its talk of "ultra-leftists" out to destroy our (capitalist) way of life...

It wrote: "The wanton destruction, which lasted for about 90 minutes early Saturday evening, was a dramatic reminder that France and other European nations, below their surface of stability and wealth, harbor tiny bands of ultra-leftist activists who still want to combat the market economies and parliamentary democracies on which the continent's well-being is founded.

"The violence seemed to have been carefully planned, police said. They discovered caches of masks, hammers, batons and smoke bombs at several points in the city center, apparently hidden in advance for use during the riot. Once it broke out, police said, the protesters used canvas tarps to protect themselves from rubber anti-riot projectiles used by police. "

Tarps, eh? Useful tip.

Although this was a major media event in France, with the usual indignant questions being asked by the right-wing press about who on earth these upstarts were and how they could ever have impinged on their complacent reality, it seems to have been totally ignored by the UK media - even though it is not exactly very far away!

Perhaps that is the problem - France is close enough to us that a wave of insurrection could easily cross the Channel and kick off here as well.

Remember 1789? Well, not literally of course, but you may well have read about the way the French Revolution inspired a generation of English radicals and scared the shit out of the authorities.

Is another storm of revolt on the way to these shores?