Download or read book Anarchist Critique of Radical Democracy written by Markus Lundström and published by Palgrave MacMillan. This book was released on 2018 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The very best and most fruitful interrogations of political life often come from a deep and scrupulous plunge into a single event. So it is with Markus Lundström's brilliant analysis of the battle in the streets of Husby in 2013. The result is a subtle, philosophically informed and original understanding of the possibilities for enacting the promise of anarchism." -Professor James C. Scott, Yale University, USA "This is movement-based theorizing at its best. Lundström offers a compelling genealogy that details how anarchism might radicalize democracy, or might have to move entirely beyond it. This is an important book for those wondering what comes next, after alterglobalization, after Occupy, for activists in Europe and North America." -Associate Professor Richard Day, Queen's University, Canada "This book takes seriously tensions within anarchism between making democracy more participatory vs making a more radical arrangement beyond democracy. Lundström exemplifies these tensions, and appeals to a variety of anarchist writers for the theoretical tools to think this tension productively." -Professor Kathy E. Ferguson, University of Hawai'i, USA "Advancing on the anarchist tradition, Lundström's argument is timely, compelling, and deeply grounded in the collective experience of radical democratic contestation. This book deserves wide attention from scholars and activists alike." -Assistant Professor Uri Gordon, University of Nottingham, UK This book addresses the conflictual nature of radical democracy. By analyzing democratic conflict in Husby, a marginalized Stockholm city district, it exposes democracy's core division - between governors and governed - as theorized by Jacques Rancière. Tracing the genealogy of that critique, the book interrogates a historical tradition generically adverse to every form of governance, namely anarchism. By outlining the divergent and discontinuous relationship between democracy and anarchy - within the history of anarchist thought - the author adds to democratic theory 'The Impossible Argument': a compound anarchist critique of radical democracy.
Download or read book Anarchist Critique of Radical Democracy written by Markus Lundström and published by PM Press. This book was released on 2023-01-24 with total page 129 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In spring of 2013, a wave of urban riots swept across Sweden after police shot an elderly man in his own home. When community residents from his marginalized city-district demanded an official apology, they were ignored. The anti-police insurgences that followed addressed deep problems of the Swedish welfare state, and the official responses revealed glitches built into democracy itself. In this updated edition of Anarchist Critique of Radical Democracy: The Impossible Argument, sociologist and historian Markus Lundström explores the boundaries of Swedish democracy. He probes in-depth interviews with community residents to explain how the 2013 riots intensified a profound, democratic conflict: the social divide between the governors and the governed. Resistance to this divide is then traced through the defiance of governance and approaches to democracy in the history of anarchist thought. This book offers an original introduction to anarchism. It relates the diversity of anarchist thought to anti-police riots and the radicalization of democracy.
Download or read book Anarchist Critique of Radical Democracy written by Markus Lundström and published by . This book was released on 2023-01-17 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In spring of 2013, a wave of urban riots swept across Sweden after police shot an elderly man in his own home. When community residents from his marginalized city-district demanded an official apology, they were ignored. The anti-police insurgences that followed addressed deep problems of the Swedish welfare state, and the official responses revealed glitches built into democracy itself. In this updated edition of Anarchist Critique of Radical Democracy: The Impossible Argument, sociologist and historian Markus Lundström explores the boundaries of Swedish democracy. He probes in-depth interviews with community residents to explain how the 2013 riots intensified a profound, democratic conflict: the social divide between the governors and the governed. Resistance to this divide is then traced through the defiance of governance and approaches to democracy in the history of anarchist thought. This book offers an original introduction to anarchism. It relates the diversity of anarchist thought to anti-police riots and the radicalization of democracy.
Download or read book The Anarchist Roots of Geography written by Simon Springer and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2016-08-01 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Anarchist Roots of Geography sets the stage for a radical politics of possibility and freedom through a discussion of the insurrectionary geographies that suffuse our daily experiences. By embracing anarchist geographies as kaleidoscopic spatialities that allow for nonhierarchical connections between autonomous entities, Simon Springer configures a new political imagination. Experimentation in and through space is the story of humanity’s place on the planet, and the stasis and control that now supersede ongoing organizing experiments are an affront to our survival. Singular ontological modes that favor one particular way of doing things disavow geography by failing to understand the spatial as a mutable assemblage intimately bound to temporality. Even worse, such stagnant ideas often align to the parochial interests of an elite minority and thereby threaten to be our collective undoing. What is needed is the development of new relationships with our world and, crucially, with each other. By infusing our geographies with anarchism we unleash a spirit of rebellion that foregoes a politics of waiting for change to come at the behest of elected leaders and instead engages new possibilities of mutual aid through direct action now. We can no longer accept the decaying, archaic geographies of hierarchy that chain us to statism, capitalism, gender domination, racial oppression, and imperialism. We must reorient geographical thinking towards anarchist horizons of possibility. Geography must become beautiful, wherein the entirety of its embrace is aligned to emancipation.
Download or read book Gramsci is Dead written by Richard J. F. Day and published by . This book was released on 2005 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Inspired to contribute to the symbiotic relationship between the academic and activist worlds, Day has decided to pick up the pen instead of the Molotov cocktail. The result is this brilliant book. Ann Hansen: Ann was sentenced to life imprisonment for blowing up a cruise-missile component factory, and is the author of Direct Action: The Memoirs of an Urban Guerilla. Gramsci and the concept of hegemony cast a long shadow over radical political theory. Yet how far has this theory got us? Is it still central to feminism, anti-capitalism, anti-racism, anarchism, and other radical social movements today? Unlike previous revolutionary movements, Day argues, most contemporary radical social movements do not strive to take control of the state. Instead, they attempt to develop new forms of self-organisation that can run in parallel with -- or as alternatives to -- existing forms of social, political, and economic organization. This is to say that they follow a logic of affinity rather than one of hegemony. This book draws together a variety of different strands in political theory to weave together aninnovative new approach to politics today. Rigorous and wide-ranging, Day introduces and interrogates key concepts. From Hegel's concept of recognition, through theories of hegemony and affinity to Hardt and Negri's reflections on Empire, Day maps academia's theoretical and philosophical concerns onto today's politics of the street. Ideal for all students of political theory, Day's fresh approach combines Marxist, Anarchist and 'Post-structuralist theory to shed new light on the politics and practice of contemporary social' movements.
Download or read book How Not to Be Governed written by Jimmy Casas Klausen and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2011-01-13 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How Not to Be Governed explores the contemporary debates and questions concerning anarchism in our own time. The authors address the political failures of earlier practices of anarchism, and the claim that anarchism is impracticable, by examining the anarchisms that have been theorized and practiced in the midst of these supposed failures. The authors revive the possibility of anarchism even as they examine it with a critical lens. Rather than breaking with prior anarchist practices, this volume reveals the central values and tactics of anarchism that remain with us, practiced even in the most unlikely and 'impossible' contexts.
Download or read book Civil Disobedience written by Elizabeth Schmermund and published by Greenhaven Publishing LLC. This book was released on 2017-07-15 with total page 146 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Civil disobedience, the refusal to obey certain laws, is a method of protest famously articulated by philosopher and writer Henry David Thoreau in his 1849 essay “Civil Disobedience.” Thoreau believed that protest became a moral obligation when laws collided with conscience. Since then, civil disobedience has been employed as a form of rebellion around the world. But is there a place for civil disobedience in democratic societies? When is civil disobedience justifiable? Is violence ever called for? Furthermore, how effective is civil disobedience?
Download or read book Political Uses of Utopia written by S. D. Chrostowska and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2017-03-21 with total page 403 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Utopia has long been banished from political theory, framed as an impossible—and possibly dangerous—political ideal, a flawed social blueprint, or a thought experiment without any practical import. Even the "realistic utopias" of liberal theory strike many as wishful thinking. Can politics think utopia otherwise? Can utopian thinking contribute to the renewal of politics? In Political Uses of Utopia, an international cast of leading and emerging theorists agree that the uses of utopia for politics are multiple and nuanced and lie somewhere between—or, better yet, beyond—the mainstream caution against it and the conviction that another, better world ought to be possible. Representing a range of perspectives on the grand tradition of Western utopianism, which extends back half a millennium and perhaps as far as Plato, these essays are united in their interest in the relevance of utopianism to specific historical and contemporary political contexts. Featuring contributions from Miguel Abensour, Étienne Balibar, Raymond Geuss, and Jacques Rancière, among others, Political Uses of Utopia reopens the question of whether and how utopianism can inform political thinking and action today.
Download or read book Strong Democracy written by Benjamin Barber and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "One of the chosen few: an enduring contribution to democratic thought."—Bruce Ackerman, Sterling Professor of Law and Political Science, Yale University
Download or read book Radical Democracy written by David Trend and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-09-13 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Radical Democracy addresses the loss of faith in conventional party politics and argues for new ways of thinking about diversity, liberty and civic responsibility. The cultural and social theorists in Radical Democracy broaden the discussion beyond the conventional and conservative rhetoric by investigating the applicability of radical democracy in the United States. Issues debated include whether democracy is primarily a form of decision making or an instrument of popular empowerment; and whether democracy constitutes an abstract ideal or an achievable goal.
Download or read book Authentic Democracy written by DaN McKee and published by Tippermuir Books Limited. This book was released on 2020 with total page 145 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Show me what democracy looks like. This is what democracy looks like. In recent years, such chants - in the main aimed at democratically-elected governments by free citizens - have become common in anti-government protests across the world. Something is clearly amiss with democracy. In Authentic Democracy, this democratic deficit is exposed. By unpacking the underlying arguments and assumptions which justify the current political order, Authentic Democracy shows that the existing democracies are in fact highly undemocratic; and that anarchism is what authentic democracy looks like. "Dan McKee offers an engaging and accessible case for anarchism, deeply rooted in ethics and powerfully responding to conventional defences of authority. This book is an original and valuable contribution which deserves a wide audience." - Uri Gordon, author of Anarchy Alive!
Download or read book The Democracy Project written by David Graeber and published by Doubleday UK. This book was released on 2013 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores the idea of democracy, its current state of crisis, and its potential as a tool for change, sharing historical perspectives on the effectiveness of democratic uprisings in various times and cultures.
Download or read book Against the State written by Crispin Sartwell and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2014-02-07 with total page 138 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Irreverent and incisive critique of liberal theories of the state.
Download or read book Radical Democracy and Collective Movements Today written by Alexandros Kioupkiolis and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-04-08 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The 'Arab spring', the Spanish indignados, the Greek aganaktismenoi and the Occupy Wall Street movement all share a number of distinctive traits; they made extensive use of social networking and were committed to the direct democratic participation of all as they co-ordinated and conducted their actions. Leaderless and self-organized, they were socially and ideologically heterogeneous, dismissing fixed agendas or ideologies. Still, the assembled multitudes that animated these mobilizations often claimed to speak in the name of ’the people’, and they aspired to empowered forms of egalitarian self-government in common. Similar features have marked collective resistances from the Zapatistas and the Seattle protests onwards, giving rise to theoretical and practical debates over the importance of these ideological and political forms. By engaging with the controversy between the autonomous, biopolitical ’multitude’ of Hardt and Negri and the arguments in favour of the hegemony of ’the people’ advanced by J. Rancière, E. Laclau, C. Mouffe and S. Zizek the central aim of this book is to discuss these instances of collective mobilization, to probe the innovative practices and ideas they have developed and to debate their potential to reinvigorate democracy whilst seeking something better than ’disaster capitalism’.
Download or read book Anarchism and Social Revolution written by Brian Williams and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2023-09-30 with total page 425 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This monograph provides an update to anarchist philosophy, advocating for a paradigm shift beyond neoliberalism and liberal democracy. The book’s central thesis has two components. First, it is argued that the maximization of equal liberty requires historical progress beyond the sovereign state system. In contrast to Fukuyama’s (1992) argument that liberal democracy is the end of history, it is argued that liberalism contains two contradictions (socioeconomic inequality and the shortcoming in equal liberty inherent to state power) with the potential to propel history further. This book’s argument – libertarian social democracy – provides a framework to guide that final stage of history. Second, while anarchist philosophy offers a vision beyond the sovereign state, it can be rendered more suitable as an alternative paradigm. Specifically, it is argued that anarchism is hampered by its traditional adherence to prefigurative strategy, according to which the state cannot be used as a means to achieve a free and equal society. By contrast, libertarian social democracy incorporates a role for a democratic transitionary state (described here as gradualist anarchism) thus addressing mainstream “Hobbesian” concerns about bad anarchy (where decentralization yields a net loss in equal liberty). In so doing, the book reveals the full spectrum of anarchist strategy from prefigurative to gradualist.
Download or read book Encyclopaedia of Marxism and Education written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2022-02-14 with total page 704 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Encyclopaedia of Marxism and Education showcases the explanatory power of Marxist educational theory and practice.
Download or read book Translating Anarchy written by Mark Bray and published by John Hunt Publishing. This book was released on 2013-09-27 with total page 349 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Translating Anarchy tells the story of the anti-capitalist anti-authoritarians of Occupy Wall Street who strategically communicated their revolutionary politics to the public in a way that was both accessible and revolutionary. By “translating” their ideas into everyday concepts like community empowerment and collective needs, these anarchists sparked the most dynamic American social movement in decades. ,
