El anarquismo como perspectiva revolucionaria mantiene su vigencia frente al actual orden de cosas y va renovando sus ataques y posiciones frente al autoritarismo. Las eclosiones sociales y las realidades (en cuanto política y manejo de poder) de las distintas regiones de Latinoamérica implican una constante re-actualización del anarquismo para poder enfrentar al Estado y al Capital. Queda confirmada esta cita de carácter libertario los días miércoles 12, jueves 13, viernes 14 y sábado 15 de noviembre en Lima para armar todxs juntxs (colectivos e individualidades anarquistas de Latinoamérica y el resto del mundo) una serie de temas y dinámicas a desarrollar con la espera de propuestas y temáticas para tener en cuenta y para programarlas.
¿Por qué un Encuentro?
Pues, para potenciar los colectivos, e iniciativas ácratas con el cruce de propuestas e intercambio de información y experiencias. Las latitudes y distintas coyunturas geográficas hacen que el anarquismo y las resistencias sociales se den a partir de distintos prismas rebeldes: estrategia y táctica frente al capitalismo y el Estado en sus distintas formas. Entonces, ¿qué mejor que resolver las condiciones actuales de lo que se conoce como “guerra social” conjuntamente? Lima, geográficamente, viene a ser un punto estratégico en Latinoamérica y lo que se conoce como “Perú”, en general, como una conjunción de las historias de las culturas del mismo continente.
Creemos que es el momento de establecer unas redes firmes de organización y revuelta entre nosotrxs mismxs, compas de Lima, y otrxs compas de otros lares con la organización de un Encuentro Anarquista de carácter internacional. Y esta propuesta de extensión de redes, ampliarla para todxs, para conocernos más entre ácratas de Latinoamérica y el resto del mundo. Una especie de globalización de la resistencia. Seguramente habrá conclusiones relevantes en estas jornadas del Encuentro, en este sentido. La idea, también, es que nos involucremos todxs (en principio por voluntad y afinidad), pues lxs que organizamos somos TODXS lxs que estaremos.
Las actividades se llevarán a cabo los días miércoles 12, jueves 13, viernes 14 y sábado 15 de noviembre, en un lugar específico en las afueras de Lima, terminando las actividades en el centro de Lima con una tocada el mismo 15. Se esperan también propuestas de talleres y expresividad (como teatro, música, etc.) para confraternizar los días del encuentro. Para la tocada del día 15 las bandas “internacionales” deben confirmar su participación. Serán, en todo caso, cuatro días de jornadas de convivencia, por lo cual se sugiere llevar carpas y/o bolsas de dormir.
Miércoles 12
o 4 pm: Pre-concentración para ir al lugar del Encuentro (sitio por definir).
o 6 pm: Llegada.
o 8 pm: Cena.
o 9 pm: Confraternidad (algunas fogatas, organización de carpas y espacios, etc). (more…)
AK Press author Daniel Cassidy succumbed to cancer last weekend. AK Press’s deepest sympathies go out to his family and friends. Below, we reprint an obituary written by one of those friends, Alexander Cockburn.
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Farewell To Daniel Cassidy
By Alexander Cockburn
Daniel Cassidy died over this last weekend in San Francisco, taken by cancer in his early sixties. We knew for a few months he was facing desperate odds, but the news still comes hard. Since 2005 he was a vivid presence in my life and in that of all of us here at CounterPunch. We’re very proud that one big legacy Danny left behind comes in the form of How The Irish Invented Slang: The Secret Language of the Crossroads, which CounterPunch Books/AK Press published two years ago. I look at the book here on my desk and think, Thank God he got that out of his head and on to the printed page and the world will have that part of him always.
Dan came out of the slums of Brooklyn. He was a city kid. Not for him the repose of nature’s temple. I’d ask him and his wife Clare up to Petrolia once in a while, mostly just to enjoy the tremor of alarm I’d catch down the phone that his feet might have to quit pavement. He was highly educated and well read, but also truly street smart. A jazz guitarist, screenwriter, union organizer, teacher, historian, man of words, Irish Republican, he sometimes reminded one of those bustling, fiery dogs the lads would take to the rabbit warrens when I was growing up in outside Youghal in county Cork. In would fly the dog and after a commotion out would streak the rabbit. He’d mix it up. His bright blue eyes would shine as we’d argue sometimes. His manic energy would boil up and over, like the hound rushing into the thorns. (more…)
We love it when people review AK books! In fact, we even love it when people are critical, because that shows that they are really reading them and wrestling with the ideas that they contain. That’s exactly what we want!
Iain McKay wrote the following review of Social Ecology and Communalism, which first appeared in Black Flag, the UK’s preeminent anarchist periodical. We post it here with permission. (For a different take on the same book, readers may wish to check out Karl Hardy’s review)
This collection of four essays contains the last works of Murray Bookchin. As such, it is of interest to all greens and radicals. Eirik Eiglad, the editor of the journal Communalism, provides an introduction and end piece to the book. Of the four essays, the first three were written when Bookchin was still considered himself an anarchist.
The first, “What is Social Ecology?” is a good introduction to Bookchin’s ideas and is useful for those unaware of his important contribution to libertarian ideas and ecological politics. The second and third are okay, although the third does present (I think) a psychological clue of why he broke with anarchism.
The second essay (“Radical Politics in an Era of Advanced Capitalism”) is unremarkable, although Bookchin makes the important point that cities can be “politically decentralized institutionally . . . despite their large structural size and their internal interdependence. Indeed, how well they can function if they do not decentralize structurally is an ecological issue of paramount importance, as problems of air pollution, adequate water supply, crime, the quality of life, and transportation suggest.” The third, entitled “The Role of Social Ecology in a Period of Reaction,” ends with the apocalyptic conclusion that “should the darkness of capitalist barbarism thicken to the point where this enterprise [social ecology] is no longer possible, history . . . will indeed reach its definitive end.” Given that few anarchists were remotely convinced by Bookchin’s “libertarian municipalism,” it does not take much of a jump to conclude that anarchism itself is contributing to this “darkness.” As such, anarchism itself must be denounced, otherwise the worse will happen. However, disagreeing with Bookchin need not contribute to this darkness in the slightest…
It is the last (and longest) essay, “The Communalist Project,” is of most interest to anarchists. The last article he wrote, it explains why he rejected anarchism and explains his alternative (what he terms “communalism”). As the introduction notes, Bookchin publicly broke with anarchism in 1999 and, subsequent works were increasingly marred by petty and inaccurate attacks on anarchism and queasy attempts rewrite his own history. Both of which are reflected in this final work. Thus we find him noting that “I myself once used this political label, but further thought has obliged me to conclude that, its often-refreshing aphorisms and insights notwithstanding, it is simply not a social theory.” Given that he was an anarchist for most of five decades, it took him an uncharacteristically long time to have “further thought” on such a key aspects of his politics! (more…)
Over the course of the past decade, there has been a marked increase in skepticism toward current models for public and private schools, and a renewed interest in alternative models for education. Why? The simple answer is that many of our educational institutions fail to offer kids the skills they need to be healthy, self-directed life-learners. They stifle creativity, and encourage conformity of thought. They utilize draconian disciplinary measures and a one-size-fits-all approach to learning. Government control of, and corporate intrusion into, education has been a further disaster for communities concerned with the welfare of their youngsters.
It’s no wonder that popular engagement in homeschooling, unschooling, deschooling, and alternative schools is gaining momentum. The project of “deschooling” our youth (and ourselves) requires thinking about new self-directed learning strategies for children, helping kids to build critical thinking for active engagement and democratic self-governance while alleviating the negative psychological effects of traditional schooling methods.
That’s why AK Press published Matt Hern’s Everywhere All the Time: A New Deschooling Reader. It’s a collection of essays and excerpts designed to educate, inform, and explore a variety of different models for alternative education. The book includes classic and contemporary writing by Ivan Illich, Emma Goldman, Leo Tolstoy, John Taylor Gatto, Grace Llewellyn, and many more.
Matt recently delivered a keynote address for the Alternative Education Resource Organization, a non-profit organization founded in 1989 to advance learner-centered approaches to education. Below you can check out a ten-minute snippet of his talk (and can get the rest at AERO’s website).
We love it when people review AK books! This one, written by Iain McKay, first appeared in Black Flag, the UK’s preeminent anarchist periodical. We post it here with permission.
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For Workers’ Power
by Maurice Brinton
David Goodway (Editor)
AK Press, ISBN: 1904859070, 2004
Maurice Brinton was the pseudonym under which Christopher Pallis (1923-2005) wrote and translated for the British libertarian socialist group Solidarity from 1960 until the early 1990s. He was its leading and most influential member, unsurprisingly given the quality and insightfulness of his work, and his ideas still influence many today across the world.
Brinton’s translations of libertarian socialist Cornelius Castoriadis work (under the pseudonym “Paul Cardan”) contributed immensely to enriching libertarian politics in the English speaking world. Indeed, many of his translations were used as the basis of the essential three volume collection of Castoriadis’ work entitled Political and Social Writings. However, Brinton’s own work was just as important (and in many ways, wider in scope) than Castoriadis’s as can be seen from this collection. The book has a diverse range of documents: as well as articles on numerous subjects, there are reviews, introductions to other people’s works and his own pamphlets. The latter include the classics “The Bolsheviks and Workers’ Control” and “The Irrational in Politics,” the former a ground-breaking account of the Russian Revolution and the latter a popular introduction into the ideas of revolutionary psychiatrist Wilheim Reich which explores the role of sexual repression and authoritarian conditioning in creating obedience to hierarchy and so the continuance of class society.
Especially noteworthy are his vivid eye-witness reports from upsurges of popular self-activity: the Belgian General Strike of 1960-61, France in May 1968, and Portugal in 1975 and 1976. These really are windows into what is possible once people start to shake off their chains and feel they have power over their own fates. Also of note is the short and clear summary of libertarian socialist ideas called “As We See It” and the subsequent commentary on that work required to combat some of the stranger interpretations it received (“As We Don’t See It”). To quote a classic paragraph from the former document shows why: (more…)
AK works closely with a global network of anarchist counter-institutions to spread anarchist ideas and build a movement! Among them is Baltimore’s very own (and very cool) Red Emma Bookstore and Coffeehouse.
We hope that you enjoy the following introduction to Red Emma by Nancy Johnston. The piece first appeared in the Baltimore Sun and we repost it here with the kind of permission of the author.
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On their Web site, Red Emma’s bills itself as a “collective, in which the real management of the company is carried out in a directly democratic and egalitarian manner.”
So I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised when they responded to my e-mail in a collective manner.
“Credit the text to Cullen Nawalkowsky, John Duda, and myself, members of the books coordinating committee at Red Emma’s,” Kate Khatib requested. And so, reflecting their democracy, all further quotes in this post are credited as such.
It’s pretty hard to miss Red Emma’s while strolling down or driving up Saint Paul Street. And if you haven’t had a chance to steal inside yet, you may be surprised at the breadth of material they offer for activist and capitalist alike.
“We are informed by anarchism, but we never had any desire to be an ‘anarchist bookstore,” the committee explains. “We are also informed by feminism, queer theory, Afrocentrism, Marxism, Dada and the avant-garde, literary modernism, and dozens of other traditions.”
A little background
The collective “inherited” the inventory from Black Planet Books, which failed under traditional ownership, and so the collective was formed.
“We … lacked the resources or credit to really establish relationships with major publishers or distributors. We relied primarily on the kindness of AK Press, one of the best radical publishing projects in the biz, who’s helped many a radical bookstore get up and off the ground over the years,” the committe says. “We made journeys to some friends in Philadelphia and Massachussetts who had good lines on remainder titles, and that helped sustain us for a long time. As the coffeeshop side of the business developed, we were able to establish more and more relationships with publishers and distributors, attend trade shows, etc.”
Clientele
While Red Emma’s boasts of a wide range of customers, they are very conscious of their mission to Baltimore radical and activist communities. (more…)
We love it when people review AK books! This one, written by Richard Alexander, first appeared in Black Flag, the UK’s preeminent anarchist paper. We post it here with permission.
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Durruti in the Spanish Revolution
Abel Paz
(trans Chuck Morse)
(afterword by Jose Luis Gutierrez Molina).
AK Press, Edinburgh, Scotland and Oakland CA, USA.
Pbk. Xiv, 795pp. Illus, maps, notes, index.
£20.00 / $29.95
ISBN 978-1904859505
First up, this is one big book, albeit slightly misleading in its title, as the section detailing Durruti’s involvement in the Revolution proper (from July 1936) takes up less than half the book—although one could equally argue that he spent his entire adult life fighting for the revolution in Spain (and elsewhere.)
The story of the various editions of this book is covered in detail in the book, but in summary it is based on the second Spanish edition of 1996. In it Paz, not an academic but both a self-taught historian and participant in some of the struggles described in the book, takes a straightforward chronological approach to Durruti’s life, assembling, as he goes, all the available relevant documentation and personal testimonies, into a single coherent narrative. As Molina’ s afterword explains, the book is not a work of hagiography, the desire is not to make Durruti into a superman or saint, rather his life is taken as exemplary of a whole generation (or two) of Spanish anarchists who lived their lives in the service of an ideal they felt was both realizable and realistic, and one which they were determined to make happen if the opportunity arose.
The first section of the book details Durruti’s early life, the first 35 years or so, starting with his family background in Leon, his involvement in the industrial struggles during the First World War which led to his first period of exile in France and his conscious adoption of anarchism. The period after the war saw Durruti in the thick of the struggle of the Spanish working class and in particular the CNT, fighting both intransigent employers and a succession of repressive governments as the struggle to deal with the chronic problems caused by recession, structural inadequacy, inequitable land-ownership, together with the struggles between the various political cliques, the monarchy, the military and the Catholic church, meant the class struggle was carried on at an intensity much greater than most of Europe. And equally the class struggle had to be equally intense to stop the working class being made the victims of economic mismanagement, political infighting, colonialist and economic deprivation, and social misery.
On the streets, this struggle took many forms besides the usual strikes and lock-outs, demonstrations, and so forth. In particular, the employers (aided and abetted by the police and the Church) used gangs of gunmen to shoot down union militants. In return, the CNT organized defense squads. And the right planned its seizure of power which saw Primo de Riviera impose his dictatorship in 1923. The socialists and their union, the UGT, decided to sit this one out. The CNT would not have the luxury and Durruti quickly made his way to France (again) where he was involved in more revolutionary activity. November 1924 saw an unsuccessful uprising against the dictatorship in Spain and the following month Durruti and Francisco Ascaso were on the move again, this time to Latin America, via New York and Cuba.
In Cuba they contacted local anarchists, became port workers, and were soon in the thick of things again. A move to the interior saw them working as cane-cutters, and again they were active organizing workers and causing trouble. Rather too much trouble as they were wanted for the murder of their sadistic employer and had to to make their excuses and hopped on a boat to Mexico (not that it was originally intending to go to Mexico, but Durruti could be very persuasive when necessary). In spring 1925, they were being as enterprising as ever, obtaining much needed financing for various local anarchist projects, including a Rationalist School. However, due to the unconventional methods used to obtain the cash, the pair were soon on the move again, together with Gregorio Jover and Alejandro Ascaso, arriving in Chile in June 1925. One bank robbery later and the group were off to Buenos Aires and later in the year Durruti had secured work as a port worker and was in touch with the local Argentinean anarchists. (more…)
Well, “new” might not be the right word, since this announcement first made the rounds last June. But, since the Bulletin of the Kate Sharpley Library is usually published every six months or so, we still have a few months before the next installment.
More importantly, this gives us the opportunity to plug an incredibly valuable anarchist institution. For those of you who are unfamiliar with it, the Kate Sharpley Library was founded in 1979 and reorganized in 1991. The library itself contains over 10,000 English-language books, pamphlets and periodicals on anarchism (and many in other languages as well). They also publish books and pamphlets of their own, shedding light on lesser known aspects of anarchist history. And their website is a treasure trove of information: it contains an archive of every Bulletin they’ve published since the early 1990s, as well as numerous other online documents. Check them out, but be forewarned: You might wind up spending hours in front of your computer reading!
For a list of KSL publications available from AK Press, go here.
Editor’s Introduction: The Spanish Civil War (1936–1936) was a pivotal moment in the history of anarchism and the twentieth century as a whole. It is also the subject of literally tens of thousands of studies, which can make it very difficult for someone interested in reading about the topic to know where to begin.
We asked Chris Ealham for some help. He is the author of Class, Culture and Conflict in Barcelona, 1898-1937 among many other works on revolutionary Spain. Specifically, we asked him to list some of the best books in English on Spain’s Civil War, especially works that touch on concerns of special interest to anarchists.
This is what he told us:
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Up to the present, Spain is the country where anarchist principles have been most extensively implemented. I refer, of course, to the “short summer of anarchy” at the start of the Spanish civil war in 1936, which saw the biggest experiment in workers’ self-management in world history, a genuine revolution from below spearheaded by grassroots supporters of the anarcho-syndicalist union, the CNT, and the anarchist FAI. The most detailed study of the collectivization process, which is based on many internal sources and eye-witness accounts, is José Peirats’s The CNT in the Spanish Revolution (Hastings: Christie Books, 2001, 2005, 2006; 3 vols.), which charts the rise and ebb of the revolutionary tide.
Spain is also notorious: the CNT-FAI “leadership” effectively turned its back on revolutionary goals in favor of an anti-fascist alliance that saw several prominent anarchists become government ministers. Peirats’s Anarchists in the Spanish Revolution (London: Freedom Press 1990) projects a sharper, more defined critique of this “democratic collaboration,” although the classic, most full-blooded critique is that of Vernon Richards (real name Vero Benvenuto Costantino Recchioni), whose Lessons of the Spanish Revolution (London: Freedom Press, 1983) lambastes the deficient ideological formation of the CNT-FAI leadership.
A more recent analysis of this process is provided by Agustín Guillamón’s The Friends of Durruti Group: 1937-1939 (Edinburgh/San Francisco, CA: AK Press, 1996), which analyzes the emergence of the group that most trenchantly confronted the CNT-FAI leaders. In a clear rejoinder to Richards, Guillamón argues that it was precisely because of certain anarchist principles—specifically the rejection of any armed revolutionary power—that the CNT-FAI hierarchy was incapable of responding to the challenges of the period. Guillamón locates the Friends of Durruti within the crisis of Spanish anarchist thought, against which their efforts to produce a coherent revolutionary theory and practice must be located.
The Friends drew part of their inspiration from Buenaventura Durruti, the inspirational activist and militia leader who most personifies the heroism and sacrifice of Spain’s anarchists. Fortunately we have a remarkable biography by Abel Paz, Durruti in the Spanish Revolution (Oakland, CA./Edinburgh: AK Press, 2006), a work that is also a history of a mass movement and its struggle for social transformation refracted through the life of its Nestor Makhno.
For those who wish to gain a sense of how organized anarchism fitted within the broader conflict of the 1930s, I recommend Ronald Fraser’s monumental oral history, The Blood of Spain: An Oral History of the Spanish Civil War (London: Pimlico, 1994), one of the masterpieces of civil war history. Based on some 300 interviews with protagonists, including several CNT-FAI militants and grassroots collectivizers, the book is critical of and yet sympathetic to the anarchists. Of special interest is one of the appendices that analyzes the orientation of the anarchist movement in the prelude to civil war.
One of the enduring strengths of Spain’s anarchists was their ability to transmit a culture of everyday resistance to oppression among the most downtrodden sectors of society. A wonderful local study of this process is Jerome Mintz’s The Anarchists of Casas Viejas (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), a village that acquired national attention in 1933 following the brutal repression of a short-lived insurrection. Based heavily on interviews with villagers, this work provides a compelling vision of the cultural universe of the landless braceros and how the anarchists among them sought to dignify the lot of one of the most desperate social groups in twentieth century Europe.
[To see the first part of Zach’s interview with Isaac Ontiveros, please go here]
Can you differentiate between prison abolition and prison reform?
Sure. We want to abolish the PIC. We do not want to reform it. It is in the same way that slavery abolitionist saw the only solution to slavery was its complete dismantlement. There was no way to construct a humane slavery. There is no way to build a way to more humanely cage people, to police them, to exploit them, etc. It is not only analogous but instrumental to apply the same abolitionist analysis to such things as white supremacy and capitalism. Can you reform capitalism? Can you reform white supremacy?
What does this look like though? I think my friend and CR co-founder Rachel Herzing has a great way to struggle with the reform v. abolition question. She says, “We don’t want to build anything up that we’ll have to knock down later.” And this is truly challenging. As we talked about earlier, the PIC, like capitalism, like its capitalist element, is all about subsumption—it will gladly accommodate and incorporate all sorts of reforms. It will gladly use the language developed by abolitionist and abolitionist-related struggles. As we noted above, “gender-responsive” imprisonment and policing is just one case. We can see all kinds of rhetoric coming from the PIC around “family-friendly” jails and detention centers. On the uprise is the trend of the PIC incorporating the ideas of restorative justice. Now, you have police, in police uniforms, “working with the community” to find so-called alternative solutions to particular “crimes”—as if that armed and badged individual is not acting as a constant reminder of imprisonment and violence if the “alternative” doesn’t work out.
Another arena where the struggle around reform plays out is with the privatization of prisons. This is real tricky territory. Sure, it is obvious that the privatization of prisons (and the concomitant privatization of police and military) is a disgusting and terrible thing. Unfortunately, there is a very dangerous logic at play in the majority of the anti-privatization movement. It says that private prisons are bad because, like the privatization of oil or water, it takes something that is supposed to be a public resource and makes it a for-profit enterprise. But if we unpack this a bit, we have to ask ourselves what we’re asking for here. Are we saying that imprisonment should be a public resource? A public “good”? If we look at the numbers, we find that less that 10% of all prisons and jails are private. The rest are public. The vast majority of the millions of people locked in cages are in public facilities. The abolitionist politic says “no” to this thinking. We want to abolish the prison industrial complex not because it is a corrupted, malfunctioning, corporate enterprise; not because it is a system that is broken; but because it is a system that works—a system that works very, very well at what it sets out to do.
All this said, when we find ourselves doing work “on the ground,” we find ourselves, as abolitionists, engaging in all sorts of reform struggles, maybe engaging mostly in reform struggles. But this is the nature of the contradictory system in and under which we live and struggle. A good example of this is a campaign we are working on right now in Oakland called Ban the Box. CR, along with All of US or None (an organization made up of formerly incarcerated people who struggle for the civil rights of formerly incarcerated people and their families and communities; and struggle to get people back on their feet once they are back on the outside…), is part of a coalition called Plan for a Safer Oakland. Now this is a real basic coalition that has a real basic program that says: People getting out of jail and prison need support and resources and shouldn’t be further-criminalized; local resources should go to sustainable community programs like education and meaningful work instead of towards more and more police and jails; and that we must stop criminalizing young people. This is basic, no-brainer stuff. So of course getting the municipality to respond to these simple demands can feel like boxing a glacier. The Ban the Box campaign says that the box on city employment applications that must be checked if the person going for a job has been convicted of a crime is used to discriminate against formerly incarcerated people and therefore should be removed (this has been successful in San Francisco and Boston). Now, this is a reform struggle. We are petitioning the city government, asking the local sources of power for a concession. This is reform. But I think it is also abolitionist or at least it works toward abolition. If we can get a few more people some stable employment, some jobs, some food to eat, some breathing room, then those can be stronger people who can contribute towards pushing the struggle forward. If, within the framework of an issue-based campaign that speaks to the everyday needs of a large part of the community, we can build a movement, if we can assess and build our strength, if we can take the leadership of those most affected by this sort of oppression, if we can build momentum and claim some victories, we’ll be able to move forward, hopefully toward more revolutionary goals.
A crucial component of abolition is the construction of healthy, accountable, and safe communities. Tell us about the crossroads between anarchist approaches to these questions and the commitment of groups like CR to seek the same. (more…)
On their Web site, Red Emma’s bills itself as a “collective, in which the real management of the company is carried out in a directly democratic and egalitarian manner.”
