Download or read book Anarchism and Its Aspirations written by Cindy Milstein and published by AK Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 155 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An accessible and thorough overview of anarchist figures and tendencies in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Download or read book Anarchism and Its Aspirations written by Cindy Milstein and published by ReadHowYouWant.com. This book was released on 2010-09-08 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From nineteenth-century newspaper publishers to the participants in the ''battle of Seattle'' and the recent Greek uprising, anarchists have been inspired by the ideal of a free society of free individuals-a world without hierarchy or domination. But what exactly would that look like, and how can we get there? Anarchism and Its Aspirations provides an accessible overview of an often-misunderstood political philosophy, highlighting its principles and practices as well as its reconstructive vision of a liberatory society.
Download or read book Paths toward Utopia written by Cindy Milstein and published by PM Press. This book was released on 2012-10-05 with total page 126 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Consisting of ten collaborative picture-essays that weave Cindy Milstein’s poetic words within Erik Ruin’s intricate yet bold paper-cut and scratch-board images, Paths toward Utopia suggests some of the here-and-now practices that prefigure, however imperfectly, the self-organization that would be commonplace in an egalitarian society. The book mines what we do in our daily lives for the already-existent gems of a freer future—premised on anarchistic ethics like cooperation and direct democracy. Its pages depict everything from seemingly ordinary activities like using parks as our commons to grandiose occupations of public space that construct do-it-ourselves communities, if only temporarily, including pieces such as “The Gift,” “Borrowing from the Library,” “Solidarity Is a Pizza,” and “Waking to Revolution.” The aim is to supply hints of what it routinely would be like to live, every day, in a world created from below, where coercion and hierarchy are largely vestiges of the past. Paths toward Utopia is not a rosy-eyed stroll, though. The book retains the tensions in present-day attempts to “model” horizontal institutions and relationships of mutual aid under increasingly vertical, exploitative, and alienated conditions. It tries to walk the line between potholes and potential. Yet if anarchist and other autonomist efforts are to serve as a clarion call to action, they must illuminate how people qualitatively, consensually, and ecologically shape their needs as well as desires. They must offer stepping-stones toward emancipation. This can only happen through experimentation, by us all, with diverse forms of self-determination and self-governance, even if riddled with contradictions in this contemporary moment. As the title piece to this book steadfastly asserts, “The precarious passage itself is our road map to a liberatory society.”
Download or read book There is Nothing So Whole as a Broken Heart written by Cindy Milstein and published by AK Press. This book was released on 2021-03-23 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Through stories at once poetic and poignant, There Is Nothing So Whole as a Broken Heart offers a powerful elixir for all who rebel against systemic violence and injustice. The contemporary renewal of Jewish anarchism draws on a history of suffering, ranging from enslavement and displacement to white nationalism and genocide. Yet it also pulls from ancestral resistance, strength, imagination, and humor—all qualities, and wisdom, sorely needed today. These essays, many written from feminist and queer perspectives, journey into ancestral and contemporary trauma in ways that are humanizing and healing. They build bridges from bittersweet grief to rebellion and joy. Through concrete illustrations of how Jewish anarchists imaginatively create their own ritual, cultural, and political practices, they clearly illuminate the path toward mending ourselves and the world.
Download or read book Oppose and Propose written by Andrew Cornell and published by AK Press. This book was released on 2019-02-06 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Where do the tactics, strategies, and lifestyles of today's activists come from? Many ways of doing radical politics pioneered by Movement for a New Society in the 1970s and 1980s have become central to anti-authoritarian social movements: consensus decision making, spokescouncils, communal living, unlearning oppressive behavior, and co-operatively owned businesses. Andrew Cornell's important contribution to US political history uses this story to raise crucial questions for activists today. Oppose and Propose is an engaging and accessible study, every page offers new insights. Andrew Cornell's work appears in Letters from Young Activists and The University Against Itself. He helps produce the quarterly anti-capitalist magazine Left Turn.
Download or read book Two Cheers for Anarchism written by James C. Scott and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2014-03-10 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A spirited defense of the anarchist approach to life James Scott taught us what's wrong with seeing like a state. Now, in his most accessible and personal book to date, the acclaimed social scientist makes the case for seeing like an anarchist. Inspired by the core anarchist faith in the possibilities of voluntary cooperation without hierarchy, Two Cheers for Anarchism is an engaging, high-spirited, and often very funny defense of an anarchist way of seeing—one that provides a unique and powerful perspective on everything from everyday social and political interactions to mass protests and revolutions. Through a wide-ranging series of memorable anecdotes and examples, the book describes an anarchist sensibility that celebrates the local knowledge, common sense, and creativity of ordinary people. The result is a kind of handbook on constructive anarchism that challenges us to radically reconsider the value of hierarchy in public and private life, from schools and workplaces to retirement homes and government itself. Beginning with what Scott calls "the law of anarchist calisthenics," an argument for law-breaking inspired by an East German pedestrian crossing, each chapter opens with a story that captures an essential anarchist truth. In the course of telling these stories, Scott touches on a wide variety of subjects: public disorder and riots, desertion, poaching, vernacular knowledge, assembly-line production, globalization, the petty bourgeoisie, school testing, playgrounds, and the practice of historical explanation. Far from a dogmatic manifesto, Two Cheers for Anarchism celebrates the anarchist confidence in the inventiveness and judgment of people who are free to exercise their creative and moral capacities.
Download or read book Anarchism and Syndicalism in the Colonial and Postcolonial World 1870 1940 written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2010-11-11 with total page 506 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Narratives of anarchist and syndicalist history during the era of the first globalization and imperialism (1870-1930) have overwhelmingly been constructed around a Western European tradition centered on discrete national cases. This parochial perspective typically ignores transnational connections and the contemporaneous existence of large and influential libertarian movements in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and Eastern Europe. Yet anarchism and syndicalism, from their very inception at the First International, were conceived and developed as international movements. By focusing on the neglected cases of the colonial and postcolonial world, this volume underscores the worldwide dimension of these movements and their centrality in anti-colonial and anti-imperialist struggles. Drawing on in-depth historical analyses of the ideology, structure, and praxis of anarchism/syndicalism, it also provides fresh perspectives and lessons for those interested in understanding their resurgence today. Contributors are Luigi Biondi, Arif Dirlik, Anthony Gorman, Steven Hirsch, Dongyoun Hwang, Geoffroy de Laforcade, Emmet O'Connor, Kirk Shaffer, Aleksandr Shubin, Edilene Toledo, and Lucien van der Walt. With a foreword by Benedict Anderson.
Download or read book Kropotkin The Conquest of Bread and Other Writings written by Petr Alekseevich Kropotkin and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1995-08-10 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin was the world's foremost spokesman of anarchism at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries. The Conquest of Bread is his most detailed description of the ideal society, embodying anarchist communism, and of the social revolution that was to achieve it. Marshall Shatz's introduction to this edition traces Kropotkin's evolution as an anarchist, from his origins in the Russian aristocracy to his disillusionment with the Russian Revolution, and the volume also includes a hitherto untranslated chapter from his classic Memoirs of a Revolutionist, which contains colourful character-sketches of some of his fellow anarchists, as well as an article he wrote summarising the history of anarchism, and some of his views on the Revolution.
Download or read book Anarchism A Very Short Introduction written by Colin Ward and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2004-10-21 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What do anarchists want? Can anarchy ever function effectively as a political force? Is anarchism more 'organized' and 'reasonable' than is currently perceived? Colin Ward explains what anarchism means and who anarchists are in this illuminating and accessible introduction to the subject.
Download or read book Anarchism written by Daniel Guerin and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 1970 with total page 186 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "One of the ablest leaders and writers of the French New Left describes the two realms of "anarchism"--Its intellectual substance, and its actual practice through the Bolshevik Revolution, the Spanish Civil War, the Italian Factory Councils, and finally its role in workers' self-management in modern Yugoslavia and Algeria. One sees in "anarchism" a close kinship to libertarianism of the right, with its horror of state bureaucracy and hostility toward bourgeois (liberal) democracy. Noam Chomsky, perhaps Guerin's American political counterpart, has written a concise and effective introduction which will add to the book's campus appeal. An important contemporary definition of New Left aims and their possible directions in the future." -- from back cover
Download or read book Deciding for Ourselves written by Cindy Milstein and published by AK Press. This book was released on 2020-04-21 with total page 169 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a time of social and ecological crises, people everywhere are looking for solutions. States and capitalism, rather than providing them, only make matters worse. There’s a growing sense that we’ll have to fix this mess on our own. But how? Deciding for Ourselves, in the spirit of the Zapatistas, demonstrates that “the impossible is possible.” A better world through self-determination and self-governance is not only achievable. It is already happening in urban and rural communities around the world—from Mexico to Rojava, Denmark to Greece—as an implicit or explicit replacement for nations, police, and other forms of hierarchical social control. This anthology explores this “sense of freedom in the air,” as one piece puts it, by looking at contemporary examples of autonomous, directly democratic spaces and the real-world dilemmas they experience, all the while underscoring the egalitarian ways of life that are collectively generated in them.
Download or read book The World That Never Was written by Alex Butterworth and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2010-06-15 with total page 537 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A thrilling history of the rise of anarchism, told through the stories of a number of prominent revolutionaries and the agents of the secret police who pursued them. In the late nineteenth century, nations the world over were mired in economic recession and beset by social unrest, their leaders increasingly threatened by acts of terrorism and assassination from anarchist extremists. In this riveting history of that tumultuous period, Alex Butterworth follows the rise of these revolutionaries from the failed Paris Commune of 1871 to the 1905 Russian Revolution and beyond. Through the interwoven stories of several key anarchists and the secret police who tracked and manipulated them, Butterworth explores how the anarchists were led to increasingly desperate acts of terrorism and murder. Rich in anecdote and with a fascinating array of supporting characters, The World That Never Was is a masterly exploration of the strange twists and turns of history, taking readers on a journey that spans five continents, from the capitals of Europe to a South Pacific penal colony to the heartland of America. It tells the story of a generation that saw its utopian dreams crumble into dangerous desperation and offers a revelatory portrait of an era with uncanny echoes of our own.
Download or read book Anarchy in Action written by Colin Ward and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The argument of this book is that an anarchist society, a society which organises itself without authority, is always in existence. Through a wide-ranging analysis - drawing on examples from education, urban planning, welfare, housing, the environment, the workplace, and the family, to name but a few - Colin Ward demonstrates that the roots of anarchist practice are not so alien or quixotic as they might at first seem but lie precisely in the ways that people have always tended to organise themselves when left alone to do so.
Download or read book The Operating System written by Eric Laursen and published by AK Press. This book was released on 2021-05-04 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What do we mean when we talk about “the State”? Multiple polls show a growing disillusionment with the State and representative government as vehicles for progressive change, and particularly as means to tame capitalism, let alone as a basis for seeing beyond it. In a quick and readable format, Eric Laursen proposes thinking about the State in an entirely new way—not simply as government or legal institutions, but as humanity’s analog to a computer operating system—opening up a new interpretation of the system of governance that emerged in Europe five-hundred years ago and now drives almost every aspect of human society. He also demonstrates powerfully why humanity’s life-and-death challenges—including racism, climate change, and rising economic exploitation—cannot be addressed as long as the State continues to exercise dominion.
Download or read book The Anarchists written by and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In his new introduction to The Anarchists, Horowitz points out that anarchism is an ideology in search of a movement, and also a psychology in search of a polity. While this seems to be a paradox, the fact is that anarchism has more than one hundred thousand entries on electronic search engines, but one can search high and low for a society that embraces its essential anti-Statist vision. At the same time, anarchism continues to attract people to its premises, seemingly generation after generation. Despite similarities in values and goals, anarchism seems especially attractive to those for whom individualism rather than collectivism provides a way of life. In this, it stands at the opposite pole from Behemoth, from the gods of political order. The Anarchists is a rich collection of theories and practices in the words of those who have rebelled against the restrictive institutions and oppressive conditions imposed by state power upon the individual. Idealists and self-seekers, saints and assassins, they have often served as the conscience of the world and have expressed with eloquence and convictions, the deep-seated sense of anarchy that resides, to a greater or lesser degree, in most human beings.Anarchism is not simply a European import; it is deeply rooted in the American political experience. The volume gives strong representation to this side of the anarchist tradition. Thomas Paine wrote, "Government even in its best state is but a necessary evil. This was a sentiment echoed by Ralph Waldo Emerson, who said, "the less government we have the better." The Anarchists offers the most thoughtful and comprehensive selection of writings by and about those who protest against all rule by man over man, particularly that embodied in the State. As such, this anthology presents the history and philosophy of anarchism in the words of thirty-five of its greatest students, observers, and proponents."--Provided by publisher.
Download or read book Whither Anarchism written by Kristian Williams and published by A K Press. This book was released on 2018 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Can the contemporary anarchist scene investigate its short-comings and mark a path toward the total transformation of society and the creation of a more just world? As the title suggests, in this pamphlet Williams asks: "where is anarchism headed?" We begin with a succinct overview of what anarchism means as a political philosophy. From there, two recent histories are used as jumping off points to look at a gap in the make up and ideology of today's anarchists and that of their ancestors. The final essay ponders what cultural and structural prerequisites might be necessary to shrink that gap in order to align our highest ideals with the current "movement," such as it is. Whither Anarchism? is a challenge, a provocation, and it is real talk. "It is my hope that, despite everything, anarchism may someday transcend its present limitations and once again come to represent the highest ideals and aspirations of humanity, and that anarchists may make a distinctive contribution to the struggle for freedom and equality, and to the new world that the struggle seeks to create."
Download or read book Anarchists Against the Wall written by Uri Gordon and published by Anarchist Interventions. This book was released on 2013 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Part of a small but growing phenomenon in Israel since 2003, Anarchists Against the Wall have been boldly challenging the Segregation Barrier and generalised violence against occupied Palestine. The reflections herein offer a window into some of the most dynamic direct action activism today. Includes contributions from several well-respected journalists and political commentators, including: Bill Templer, Adar Grayevsky, Yanai Israeli, Kobi Snitz, Anat Guthmann, Anat Matar, Neve Gordon, Yossi Bartal, Sarah Assouline, Basel Mansour and the editors themselves.
