PAA Rules of Cool!

[07/05/26 IG Repost]

After a long process of internal conversations, we now share PAA’s ‘RULES OF COOL’ for our wider community to use at shows & for prospective applicants to read through. This is our second post courtesy of the Accountability & Welfare Working Group in PAA, which members are free to apply to join (message us on the global chat or send us an e-mail)!

Many of these principles have been explicit or de facto policy since we started. Others have emerged out of organising conversations over time. So as PAA continues to grow and mature, we have decided to help orient ourselves & others by articulating these explicitly. We hope they can be used as a tool to support bands to build the kind of scene we want & need to win: militant, radical, and uplifting!

As with everything at PAA, our policies are always evolving. Should new needs arise down the line, we will always be open to discussing & voting on changes, clarifying items, or deciding what constitutes exceptional cases. But at the end of the day we are proud to have arrived at this point, a milestone in our collective’s history on our journey ‘from boycott to autonomy’!

Whatever we do next, rest assured that the name of the game will always be: debate, participation, & democratic consensus. If you like that, then why are you still organising alone? We’re more effective together! JOIN US!!!

FREE PALESTINE!

PAA RULES OF COOL Anti-oppression We reject ableism, ageism, classism, heterosexism, racism, zionism, religious discrimination, fatphobia, transphobia, and all other forms of oppression. music is political, and We work to promote inclusive, gender-affirming, anti-racist safe(r) spaces wherever we work. No room for discrimination in punk! Mutual Respect We are militant in fighting our enemies, but are respectful with each other. Assume best intentions! We come from a variety of personal/ideological backgrounds, and our collective work demands that we take the task of building together seriously. Solidarity is always our first response before open conflict. Transformative Justice PAA is developing a conflict resolution infrastructure based on transformative justice/abolitionist principles to help mediate conflict & support members. We refuse to treat anyone as ‘disposable’, and seek ways to help people take accountability and grow. We prioritise as much as possible community-based solutions to harm, and don’t rely on police, prisons, or other carceral structures to solve harm with further harm. Non-electoral Focus While individual members are free to support local political projects as they see fit, as a matter of principle PAA does not support, platform, or endorse political parties or individual candidates.
‘Autonomy in public’ We are a non-hierarchical, member-led collective. As such, it is not up to any one of us to police the lives, beliefs, or private behaviour of individual members. but we do have baseline Points of Unity, and we believe that ‘the personal is political’. When private behaviour crosses over into violations of our Points of Unity or ‘Rules of Cool’ and puts our collective work in jeopardy, we will pull from our global community to ‘call members in’. Interdependency While we focus mainly on Palestine solidarity, we recognise the interconnectedness of all struggles. We seek to ground our work and analysis in an internationalist, ‘interdependent’ frame that sees Palestinian liberation not just as a discrete case of social justice, but as a prism through which all oppressive systems are revealed, and through which all of our movements can be uplifted. We seek to collaborate with fellow anti-fascists, anti-capitalists, and other radicals wherever we can. Political Education We take political education seriously, and we encourage members to bring their personal and political experience/knowledge to share with the collective. All members can and should take advantage of PAA’s resources (and others’) to deepen their understanding of Palestinian liberation, and how it relates to their own community’s struggles, especially as they go out into the world to represent PAA publicly. This also applies to our broader anti-oppression values, which require us to be proactive and self-reflective as the oppressive systems around us worsen. Our enemies are not static--so neither are we.