The Freedom Shop Aotearoa

Below is the Freedom Shop's position on the 'anti-mandate' protests. It’s easy to write off the ‘anti-mandate’ protests in Wellington and other towns. Given New Zealand has had few deaths and a smaller economic impact than most countries, the mandates may be one of the more justifiable of the many restrictions on freedom that the government has come up with and the politically clueless, erratic nature of the protest makes it easy to sneer at. However, judgement shouldn’t be made on the basis of the way the protest is being conducted – that’s a red herring. Sure, there seem to be a high proportion of nutters, and lots of counter-productive behaviour, but the real reason for opposing the protest is the awful politics. In terms of policy, the protests are a mess, not only are a hodge-podge of issues being raised, but no alternatives are being offered and a wide range of conspiracy theories are being promoted. Marty Verry, chief executive of timber and tourism company Red Stag,

If you are wanting something to read but can't make it to the shop, you can view our current stock on LibraryThing and download a copy of our catalogue here . Then send us an email saying what you want and we can let you know how much it will cost with postage. Both the books on LibraryThing and in the catalogue are listed in alphabetical order. Of course, you can also order zines, tee-shirts and badges - and we still have a handful of Pan B diaries for 2022.

No one knows what 2022 will bring, but for us it starts off with some new books from our comrades at AK Press. Here are some of the titles: Patriarchy of the wage . Notes on Marx, Gender, and Feminism by Silvia Federici         Border and Rule . Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism by Harsha Walia                    From Urbanization to Cities . The Politics of Democratic Municipalism by Murray Bookchin Wretched Of The Earth by Frantz Fanon. This classic handbook of revolutionary practice and social reorganization A Life for Anarchy - A Stuart Christie Reader, edited by the Kate Sharpley Library

If you've read aargh issue 13, you would have seen our interview with members of the Choclo collective, a group of Latin American political artists in Te Whanganui-A-Tara. Some of them have started a new project called Here & Out . It features the art of internationally renowned female street artists Gina Kiel, Xoë Hall, Miriama Grace-Smith, Janine Williams, Fluro (from New Zealand), Caratoes (Belgium/Hong Kong), Paula Tikay (Chile), Meki (Perú) and Gleo (Colombia) and will be part of Cuba Dupa 2022 - so keep an eye out!

Disrupt the “ imperialist-white-supremacist-capitalist-patriarchy ” power structure was what bell hooks said was needed, and that is what she did. She died this week but her words, her books, and her writings will continue to be part of the tools used to disrupt and dismantle. We need to keep reading and listening to those words, and discussing them - they are powerful. At the Freedom Shop we have two zines with bell hooks' writing: one is ' Understanding Patriarchy ' and the other is an anthology we created ourselves: " bell hooks - a sample of writings by bell hooks to entice... ' We put together the anthology several years ago to try and ensure more people become keen to sample bell hooks' writings. The zine includes three articles: ' Teaching to Transgress: Paulo Freire ', ' Killing Rage: Militant Resistance ' and ' Feminist Class Struggle '. Killing Rage opens with the wonderful sentence, ' I am writing this essay sitting besid