"To be truly visionary we have to root our imagination in our concrete reality while simultaneously imagining possibilities beyond that reality." - bell hooks
MARS Mission Statement (as of 10/23/10):
We are a group of anti-authoritarian individuals creating a resource center for communities and movements, and a free and open space for meeting, networking, and socializing. We are united around the following goals:
* the destruction of all forms of oppression, exploitation, and domination.
* strengthening cultures of resistance and building relationships in our everyday lives that enhance mutual aid and voluntary cooperation.
And even more…:
We are committed to providing spaces, resources, and events that:
* enable radical movements to gain the capacities to self-reproduce without having to go through capitalist and statist institutions, so that they can transform the world and replace those institutions.
* build relationships of community with people living in the surrounding neighborhood, and develop an infrastructure for sharing resources and meeting communal needs
* create resources as commons for non-and-anti-capitalist ways of living, working, and learning, particularly around basic needs of food, health, housing, and transportation.
* allow members of different movements and communities to encounter each other in ways that build mutually supportive and voluntarily cooperative relationships.
* foster critical and constructive dialogues on the visions, goals, and strategies of different radical groups, so as to enable collaboration on interconnected struggles and to avoid dogmatism and sectarianism.
* promote processes of collaborative inquiry, research, and organizing that build the collective power of autonomous communities and movements to challenge oppression, exploitation, and domination.
* enable horizontal organizing that avoids marginalization and elitism in isolated subcultures.
* make a safer space where people can feel free to ask subversive questions.
* intertwine fun, joyous, creative, celebratory activities and culture with every aspect of radical movement and community work.
* get free from the factory-to-trash chain of production, consumption, and waste.
* take a proactive approach to fighting gentrification, reclaiming the streets, and taking back the land for supporting and strengthening anti-oppressive, self-determining communities.
* enable everyone to participate directly democratically in all decisions that affect us in our relationships, homes, neighborhoods, work, schools, and everywhere.
* build relationships of community-based security and education that resist and subvert the prison-industrial complex and the schools-to-jails pipeline.
* act effectively in solidarity with anti-oppressive struggles locally and around the world.
* build relationships in our everyday lives that enhance mutual aid and voluntary cooperation and that destroy all structures and systems of oppression, including patriarchy, white supremacy, heterosexism, ageism, classism, nationalism, ableism, among others.
* enable critical self-reflection and processing of how hierarchies can play out in our communities and movements.
* prefigure the world we would like to create through the ways in which we organize and relate with each other.
* resist and subvert the “non-profit industrial complex.”
community, skillshares, movement-building, celebratory cultures of resistance, anti-oppression, joy, a lending library, mutual aid, voluntary cooperation, DIY media, fun.
Reviews, get directions and information Minneapolis Autonomous Radical Space (MARS).
