A-Infos (en) Call for contributing posts to a-infos

[Worker <a-infos-en@ainfos.ca>]

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      A - I N F O S  N E W S  S E R V I C E
    News about and of interest to anarchists
 http://ainfos.ca/ http://ainfos.ca/index24.html
 ________________________________________________

Dear comrade(s)
The A-Infos Collective maintains an international anarchist news service.
We distribute mainly news about the involvement of class-struggle social
anarchists in the various issues and articles of printed or electronic
journals of such collectives.
We do it mainly to provide the feeling of an international movement, something
which is very important to comrades who are in the periferies.
Please send us reports on the public activities of your collective -
including calls and leaflets, and articles of your journals and zines.

The addresses for sending posts differ according to language:

a-infos-en@ainfos.ca for English texts
a-infos-ca@ainfos.ca for Spanish/Castillian texts
a-infos-ct@ainfos.ca for Catalan texts
a-infos-fr@ainfos.ca for French texts
a-infos-it@ainfos.ca for Italian texts
a-infos-pt@ainfos.ca for Portuguese texts
a-infos-tr@ainfos.ca for Turkish texts
a-infos-nl@ainfos.ca for Dutch texts
a-infos-fi@ainfos.ca for Finnish texts
a-infos-sv@ainfos.ca for texts in Scandinavian languages

Please send all posts in plain e-mail text format - with no
HTML and no attachments.

Following is our updated policy of editorial guide lines and a-infos Vision

POLICY: EDITING GUIDELINES FOR A-INFOS
Updated November 2003
Guidelines for submitting news to A-Infos.

     These are the guidelines for news sent to A-Infos for distribution.
They will be flexibly applied by the A-Infos Collective members who
do the screening of posts.

     We encourage the submission of news, reports and articles,
including texts from printed or web-based publications of anarchist
organizations (and of anti-authoritarian equivalents), but please keep
all posts consistent with the purpose of A-Infos, which is to distribute
news "about and of interest to anarchists" **. This does not mean
only anarchists can submit news, but we do expect it to be consistent
with these guidelines.

     1) We welcome views which do not contradict a basic anarchist
position. We do not carry material which promotes discrimination and
suppression of people (ie. racists - Nazis, Zionists, etc. - or sexists -
male chauvinists, patriarchal or homophobic material). We do not
carry material which advocates electoral politics not posts which
advocate voting for state agencies or apparatus or building parties.
     We do not distribute posts which support authoritarian
"revolutionary" politics or any text that serves the propaganda of
vanguardists, leninists or any proponents of state capitalism. Neither
do we distribute posts which express support for people jailed
because they promoted authoritarian "revolutionary" politics,
vanguardism, leninism or any other form of state capitalism. We may
choose to distribute posts with such content when we believe that the
circulation of such material will damage the cause of those who
produced it.
     We do not distribute posts that advocate any sort of national
supremacy. Posts from nationalist organizations working in the
struggle against oppression may be distributed only if these
organizations make no claims of national superiority or ethnic
chauvinism and if the posts are "of interest to anarchists".
     If a post from an anarchist or an anarchist organization includes an
attack/criticism on another anarchist or anarchist collective, it may be
distributed only if it does not include name-calling, if it includes all the
relevant facts and if the facts have been verified by the editor.
     In any case where there is no clear precedent, where there is doubt
or where a post to be rejected/deleted was sent in the name of an
anarchist collective, the editor will send a copy of the post to the
a-infos-org list of the Collective.

     2) We try to provide a balanced anarchist news distribution service.
Thus, we are unlikely to accept more than 14 posts from any one
source or 20 posts about any one topic in a given week. Exceptions to
this will be made for news of particular importance Another exception
is made for articles from printed anarchist publications. All the
articles from any current issue of an anarchist publication can be sent
together. The editors will then send them to the lists at a rate of two
or three a day.

     3) We prefer news written by anarchists or by other people directly
involved in the struggle against all the various, interrelated forms of
dominance, exploitation and suppression (such as the system of class
society, capitalism, suppression and discrimination according to
gender, race, nationality, citizenship, sexual affiliation, age etc.).
     Most of all, we prefer news that refers to the interrelation of the
various struggles rather than articles which only criticize certain
oppressions while ignoring or even supporting others.
     Posts composed by individuals which are not mainly reports on
direct actions of anarchists or other direct struggles we are interested
in, and which do not contradict other guidelines, will be distributed in
the supplement list, a-infos-sup.
     Exceptions to this are texts that have already been distributed in
printed format by anarchist collectives or equivalents or when the
author is in the news, (like prisoners, etc.) or if the A-Infos Collective
considers the specific text to be of high importance.

     4) [EXCERPT]ing
     We treat posts submitted to A-Infos that include content which is
appropriate for distribution together with content which is not
appropriate as follows:
     If a post includes various items that each can stand alone, each
item is treated separately.
     If an item is not appropriate for any reason (because it contradicts
guidelines or is similar to a text already distributed, etc.), it will be cut
out and we will add [EXCERPT] to the subject and -snip- in the place
where the item was cut.
     If an item includes credit or links to authoritarians of the "left", the
offending sentence(s) will be cut.
     If the text as it is cannot be adjusted to meet our guidelines in the
above way, the editor will contact the sender with a request to edit the
post and adjust it to our guidelines.
     In marginal cases, an editor's note about reservations regarding the
text may be all that is needed.

     5) We ask contributors to format their mail for A-Infos as follows:
     a) Give your mail a clear subject line starting with the correct
language code, such as (en) for English, (ca) for Castillian, (it) for
Italian. See FAQ for a complete list of language tags.
     b) Start your post with a paragraph summarizing what it is about.
This may be the first paragraph of the article but please move any
contact information, such as e-mail/postal addresses, URLs etc., to
some point after the first paragraph.
     c) Check that the item you're sending has not already been sent by
someone else.
     d) In order for people to be better informed about what they are
reading, we would request that people sending messages to A-Infos
include some or all of the following information, where appropriate:
       # i. Where the information comes from, an e-mail address and/or URL.
       # ii. If the message mentions collectives or organizations or is a
collective statement from a particular organisation, then add some
brief information about the aims and objectives of that organisation.
       # iii. If you are sending information from a source which many
anarchists would consider authoritarian, please say why it could still
be considered of interest to anarchists.
         Please note that incorrectly formatted mail will take longer to be
approved and may not be approved at all when we are busy.

         6) We will put all posts which are not included in the usual edited
versions of A-Infos lists and which are not SPAM, from clear enemies
or containing format problems, in a supplement list:
a-infos-sup@ainfos.ca
         The supplement list includes surplus posts as for content and
source, posts that editor(s) think are not so interesting to anarchists,
posts that a minority of editor(s) think should not be deleted, etc.
         Posts on a-infos-sup have their own web page archive, and are
included in the general archives of old posts.

         7) Editors are delegated by the A-Infos Collective to implement
the guidelines and are accountable to the A-Infos Collective and to
each member in it for each decision made. (The manner of
accountability is like that of all members of communist
libertarian/anarchist collectives delegated a task by the collective.
They are accountable to its internal direct democracy of recallable
delegates.)
         Editors will co-ordinate their decisions about problematic posts
through the a-infos-org list, which all members of the A-Infos
Collective are subscribed to.



** See below what kind of anarchism....

  A-INFOS VISION

The A-Infos Project is coordinated by an international collective of
revolutionary anti-authoritarian, anti-capitalist activists, involved with
class struggle and who regard it as a total social struggle.

These are people who conceive themselves as revolutionary class
struggle social anarchists, libertarian communists, syndicalists and
others who hold similar opinions but use other labels.

A-Infos is organized by people who feel anarchism is a social theory,
and that a revolution is necessary to bring about the new class-less
social order, and that this revolution can only be made by the vast
majority of the working people.

The specific kind of anarchism we talk about and promote is the
anarchism of the Haymarket martyrs and those expelled by Karl Marx
from the First International for criticizing his authoritarianism and the
elitist, vanguardist degradation of the masses of the working class...

We do not support the kind of anarchism proposed by some
pseudo-modernists and pseudo-"revolutionaries" who regard symbolic
activity as substitute to mass struggle, or the kind of anarchism of
"humanists" who hold other tasks as equal or more important than the
revolutionary struggle for abolishing the capitalist system.

A-Infos’ work is not inspired by egoistic and egocentric
individualism, primitivism, "free capitalism without a state" or even a
state without free capitalism - who oppose the present capitalist order
but do not offer instead a viable model of modern social order of
freedom, equality, and solidarity.

It is not enough for individuals and groups to use an anarchist label for
their texts to be distributed by A-Infos.

In the struggle for a free society, we distribute news and articles in
several languages, covering a wide range of areas of struggle. These
include workplace and environmental struggles as well as the fight
against racism, sexism and homophobia. A-Infos also distributes
news on indigenous people’s anti-colonialist fight against settlers,
occupation and marginalization, as well as anti-nationalist and
anti-regional separatist struggles, because workers have no country
but the world as a whole....

A-Infos is specialized press agency, in the service (as we see it best)
of the movement of revolutionary anti-capitalist activists who are
involved in the various social struggles against the capitalist class
and its social system.

A-Infos is not an open "liberal" service that distributes anything "we"
are sympathetic to -- it is not Indymedia. It is first of all a free
distribution tool for information from and about collectives of anarchist
(and other anti authoritarian revolutionaries) involved in the struggle.

A-Infos workers do not think we are the ones who should decide who,
on the social anarchist camp, is a "real" anarchist or not. However, as
resources are limited, we have the right and duty to (autonomously)
choose what we distribute what we feel is best among the
contributions and contributors. The freedom of association the A-Infos
collective is based on means nothing without the freedom not to
associate, if workers so choose.

A-Infos has a role to play in the world anarchist movement.
Information is strength. A-Infos helps to build a sense of an
international movement. A-Infos is, to a certain extent, one of the few
international organizational tools of the movement. But to keep this
role it must stay a tool in the service of the movement and not a
free-for-all information service.

A-Infos is not just an internal movement tool. Like the Anarchist
FAQ, it's also a means to present the movement to the wider audience
and to a new generation, and acquaint them with international aspects
of the movement.

A-Infos is an autonomous anarchist press agency that is not the
bullhorn of any "social" movement. Even when self-proclaimed
anarchists (or even if real ones) are involved is not a guarantee
A-Infos will distribute contributions. Even if we ourselves sympathize
with given movements is no guarantee articles will be posted.

Thus, A-Infos distributes the news and analysis its workers want to
share with the world non-authoritarian activists community -- mainly
posts from anti-authoritarian revolutionary collectives and reports
about direct action of social struggle both of activists and of common
people in their daily life.

Anyone who is not satisfied with the services we provide, is welcome
to use other services or build her/his own.

A-infos is both an organizational tool, a propaganda tool, and an
information tool of the movement -- and is not merely "news by, about
and of interest to anarchists."



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       ****** The A-Infos News Service ******
      News about and of interest to anarchists
                       ******
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