| Editorial:
What is the Anticapitalist Community Forum? |
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The Anticapitalist Community Forum came together early in 2004, under the name “Vancouver Area Anticapitalist Convergence”, with the intention to create a community space wherein people could learn, discuss and debate about issues surrounding social justice in an explicitly anti-capitalist setting. Not only was the forum intended as a means of sharing skills, ideas and information among individuals, but the hope was that such a forum would allow for further interaction and better communication amongst groups and organizations already involved in struggle. Increased interaction, it was believed, would help facilitate the growth of larger projects and campaigns as well as the development of an anti-capitalist commons, a community. With this in mind, we held five community forums over the course of several months last year. We all spent many hours developing the basis of unity you will find at the back of this zine and discussing our plans. We received much in the way of encouragement from other groups, however, participation was less than had been hoped. We also had difficulty with incorporating an anti-oppression analysis into our practice; we learned that a bunch of students putting up posters and inviting people to attend an “anticapitalist” meeting is not the most effective way to organize the marginalized working class, the majority of whom are white women and women and men of colour. So we took a break and tried to figure out what could make the ACF more successful. What could we do to make such a community resource more useful to people? So we came up with this magazine, the idea being that it would act as a paper version of that physical space and reinforce those activities. We hope the magazine will be engaging for both activists as well as people beginning to develop their own political analysis of their experiences. This has been a difficult balance to try to achieve, but we think we have done our best. We would like to thank our members, contributors and supporters for their patience in seeing this magazine come to fruition. We would also like to thank the Simon Fraser Public Interest Research Group (SFPIRG) for their financial support. Our magazine will appear 4 times per year. Comments, criticisms, letters to the editor and submissions for our next issue can be sent electronically to acf-van@resist.ca or to our mailing address listed on the first page. The due date for our next issue is October 1st, 2005. In order to make the next issue happen, we would greatly appreciate donations, which can be sent to the address above. We would also appreciate your help with distribution of the zine. The zine itself as well as instructions for download can be found on our website which can be found at http://www.resist.ca/~acf-van ~The Anticapitalist Community Forum zine working group
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